When the word ‘authority’ in its original Latin form was used as a form of self-description by Augustus, the Emperor of Rome, his aim was to communicate the possession of something far more important than mere military or political power. His self-conscious reference to his unique auctoritas sought to draw attention to a far more compelling attribute, which was a dignified moral authority. Augustus's implied distinction between power and auctoritas spoke to a world that had begun to understand that something more than force was needed to maintain order and cohesion.

Since Augustus's time there have been continual attempts to claim the possession of something more than power. Yet time and again, societies have found it difficult to find an adequate way of conceptualising this. In England at least, it was not until the seventeenth century that a new language was created to respond the unsettled political realities sought to distinguish conceptually between authority and power. One pamphleteer in 1642 drew attention to the distinction between the two terms which, he claimed, were ‘commonly confounded and obscure the whole business’. However, the absence of a language to contrast power and authority does not mean that the distinction itself was absent from Western political culture. The historian Leonard Krieger has argued that what was significant and distinct about ‘the Christian dimension of authority’ was its independence from political power: while ‘medieval men’ would use the terms ‘interchangeably in many contexts’, a ‘context was established for the separation of authority from power’. And certainly, the distinction between authority and power has been an integral component to Western political theory for well over two millennia. ‘The most fundamental of all distinctions in political thought is the distinction between ‘force’ or ‘violence’ and ‘authority’; between potential, which is physical, and potestas or auctoritas, which is mental; between ‘might’ and ‘right’’, argues the political theorist, Michael Oakeshott.