In 1942, in the middle of the Second World War, Alexandre Kojève wrote a short treatise on authority. He defines it as the ability to act on someone without their reacting against you, even though they could.
Apply that definition to language models and one fact stands out: how often people stop arguing with them.
Someone acts on another person. Choose what happens next.
Kojève finds four pure types of authority. Each rests on a different relation to time and goes back to a different theory. Real authorities mix them. Choose a type, then put a language model on the diagram.
In Hegel’s story, which Kojève taught for six years in Paris, the Slave defers because he chose life over the fight. When we defer to a model, there was never a fight.
What is the authority of a thing that has never risked anything?
Kojève wrote La Notion de l’autorité in 1942. It was published in French only in 2004, and in English, as The Notion of Authority, in 2014. He traces the Father to scholastic theology, the Master to Hegel, the Leader to Aristotle, and the Judge to Plato.
For the four types applied to human leaders, see the Kojève visualizer at Millerman School.
Kojève’s best-known exchange is with Leo Strauss, over Xenophon’s dialogue on tyranny: whether the philosopher should advise rulers, and whether a universal and homogeneous state would complete history or put an end to philosophy. My course on Strauss’s On Tyranny reads Xenophon’s dialogue and Strauss’s commentary, where that exchange begins.