Authority of the bootmaker
Authority of the bootmaker, sometimes called epistemic authority, is a concept in anarchist philosophy describing a type of temporary, fully voluntary authority that an individual allows another to have over them in order to gain knowledge or experience. The term comes from Mikhail Bakunin's unpublished manuscript God and the State, in which Bakunin uses the example of an understudy to a bootmaker accepting the bootmaker's authority in order to improve their skills.