Examining the Concept of Authority in Different Historical Periods from the Perspective of Public Law with Emphasis on Three Periods: Medieval, Modern and Postmodern

The main function of public law is to explain how to apply the concept of authority and determine its relationship with other concepts, including fundamental rights and freedoms. Therefore, how it is used in society is very important and therefore it is closely related to concepts such as acceptability and legitimacy. The best manifestation of authority is the exercise of sovereignty to guarantee their rights, which is somehow related to the characteristics of management and leadership of the political community. This leadership has revealed various faces of authority over time. In other words, the meaning of authority has undergone a conceptual change in different historical periods, i.e. the medieval, modern and postmodern periods. In the medieval period, authority meant the tyranny and absolute power of the king. The result of the reflections on the retrieval of the concept of absolute power by legal thinkers was the presentation of a new reading of sovereignty under the title of conditional sovereignty. In this new concept of sovereignty, any total and centralized individual authority was denied, and instead, the sovereignty of the people (people sovereignty) and their representatives (national sovereignty) were introduced in the form of law (rule of law). This development itself has been so effective that the historical course of sovereignty from the medieval period to the postmodern era goes back to the perception of public authority and its legitimacy. Today, with the emergence of the idea of globalization and Post-Regulatory State that have led to the expansion of social relations and communications at the national and transnational levels, various political, economic, cultural and social powers have emerged, some of which are outside the scope of state power and have emerged as spontaneous, popular and non-governmental powers in society.