The terms “authority” and “power” will be used here extensively and with a particular meaning in mind. Authority is here meant to mean the right to decide, or the right to a will. In contemporary society governments have the authority to decide what laws the people must follow and the people have the authority to decide how they will act so long as they are in accordance with those laws. Power is here meant to mean the ability to force one's authority on others. Power therefore implies military power, or power of force more than power of persuasion or other less violent powers. Governments have power via their police force to enforce their laws such that the people follow them. Governments also have the power to force their authority on other nations via their military. The right to bear arms can be seen as a means of protecting the power of the people, so that they can defend themselves and rebel against a corrupt government, but it also gives them a means of forcing their authority on others.
Giving one entity both power and authority is dangerous. Such an entity will likely use its power to subvert the authority of other less powerful entities. Hobbes speaks of a state of nature in his famous work “The Leviathan”. It seems dubious to suggest that this is the true state of nature, rather the state of nature for humanity seems to give authority to tradition, to rights whether written or unwritten. War breaks out as a consequence of two empowered and conflicting traditions, or authorities, colliding. Hobbes' state of nature describes civil war or anarchy, in the contemporary sense not the philosophy of government. Each individual or group feels compelled by their own authority to use their power to subvert the conflicting authority of those around them, a war amongst all. Hobbes might say that a society is peaceful so long as authority and power are absolute in only one entity to ensure no competition and therefore a monopoly of violence. A common criticism of Hobbes is that this Leviathan seems to be a tyrannical body, a consequence of its power subverting the authority of the people. In natural gatherings of people it seems to be common for authority to belong to some higher power, either tradition, government, or elders, while power belongs to the individuals, to enforce the will of tradition, hopefully through reason but sometimes with punishment or force. As humans gather to form cultures and cities a power seems necessary to ensure that strangers can live peaceably, side-by-side, without the common authority of tradition to monitor their behavior. In this case the natural authority of the higher power, the tradition, begins to merge with the new power, needed to ensure peace amongst strangers of different traditions, following different authorities, and the risk of tyranny is born, the subversion of the will of the people becomes possible and perhaps inevitable.
Intellectuals, unhappy with the idea of a Leviathan, developed the concept of democracy. The ideal of democracy seems to be that ultimate authority should not belong to any higher body, but to the people themselves. Government should be a manifestation of that authority. The government should have the power to enforce the will of the people, to protect the aggregate authority of the people from being subverted by personal power. From this power is derived the tyranny of the majority. It becomes possible and perhaps inevitable that the power of the state backed by the authority of the majority will subvert the authority of the few. The government borrows its authority from the people, not from one ruler or a body of elite, so the authority of those are protected, but the power of the government can still be used to subvert the authority of those from which the authority of government is not drawn, those that voted for the wrong candidate, or the wrong law, or that have no right to vote at all. The only way to ensure that none are subverted is to recognize that the government has no authority, to recognize that the government's sole purpose is to monopolize power so that it cannot be used by one individual to subvert the authority of another individual, to ensure that strangers with diverse authorities can coexist without systemic war. If the ancient model was authority at the top, in the hands of tradition, and power to the bottom, in the hands of the warrior, then the modern model seems to be leading us to authority at the bottom, in the ands of the people, and power at the top, in the hands of the will-less leviathan. This seems to be a natural and inevitable consequence of cultural exchange, of globalization, if there is no common authority amongst a people then there must be a common power to protect the disparate authorities. The system must be inverted, not skewed to the bottom, as in anarchy, nor skewed to the top, as in totalitarianism.