Free The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics by Iain McLean Page A

have proposals and so forth accepted without introducing persuasion, bargaining, or force. A referee, for example, may possess authority under the rules of the game, but in fact be challenged or ignored by the players. A distinction is therefore drawn between de jure authority—in which a right to behave in particular ways may be appealed to—and de facto authority—in which there is practical success. A different distinction is drawn between a person who is in authority as an office-bearer and a person who is an authority on a subject. The latter typically has special knowledge or special access to information not available to those who accept the person's status as an authority. Sometimes the two forms are found together: for example, the Speaker of the Commons possesses authority (to regulate the business of the House, under its rules of procedure), and is also an authority (on its rules of procedure). Attempts have been made to find common features between these two usages. These focus primarily on the ‘internal’ relationship between the authority-holder and the authority-subject, the process of recognition of the status involved, and on the willingness of the authority-subject to adopt the judgement of the authority-holder (instead of his or her own, or in the absence of the ability to formulate one).
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    autogestion
    See industrial democracy .
     
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    autonomous republic
    Soviet federalism designated a hierarchy of subunits from the centre: republics, given the ethnic name of the titular majority and with the official right to secede; autonomous republics, mainly in the Russian Federation, with an ethnic identity but without the right to secede; and autonomous regions, with some geographical or historical identity but without an ethnic basis.
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    autonomy
    Self-government. The term may be applied both to the individual person and to a group or an institution. An autonomous person is, fundamentally, one able to act according to his or her own direction—the prerequisite for rational human action, according to Kant . An autonomous institution is one able to regulate its own affairs. The relation between the self-government of a group and individual autonomy is complicated by the need to distinguish between the collective self-government of a group and the self-direction of an individual member of that group, as Rousseau's writings illustrate. Ideas about individual autonomy are closely linked to conceptions of freedom . For example, to act according to my own direction may (on some views of freedom) require access to resources I presently lack, in which case to provide me with them would enhance both my liberty and my autonomy. Further, this problem is connected to notions of the constitution of the self. For example, it may be held that I am not truly ‘self’-governing if my action is driven by powerful phobias ‘I’ cannot regulate, any more than if my actions are determined by external circumstances beyond my control.
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    AV
    See alternative vote .
     
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    Averroës , Ibn Rushd (Abu-l-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad , 1126–98)
    Better known in Europe as Averroës, he was the last and most famous of the Andalusian philosophers. Born in Cordova, he came from a prominent family of jurists. He studied theology, jurisprudence, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy. His lasting fame is due to his philosophical writings and his commentaries on the works of Aristotle , of which there are thirty-eight.
His translations of Aristotle into Arabic with accompanying commentaries were themselves first translated into Latin in Toledo, then a centre for such translation. They facilitated the interaction between the ideas of Aristotle and Church doctrine in the intellectual renaissance associated with thirteenth-century scholastic philosophy ( see also