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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
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47 occurrences of Dictionary
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VI

The ideology of totalitarian fascism has been in
abeyance for a generation, and the resonance of the
total antifascism of the New Left remains uncertain.
Still, their extreme formulations of the idea of author-
ity, opposite in their evaluations but coincident in their
convictions about its pervasiveness in modern society
as the official mark of power, do seem to signify a
logical conclusion to the long development of the idea.
They represent the categorical extremes of prevalent
attitudes toward social authority which elide its origi-
nal tensions vis-à-vis the governmental powers and
view it simply as a stable form of control.

But there are indications that the present generation
may be attending at the birth of still a fifth stage in
the history of the idea of authority. The arena of this
fifth stage would be the individual himself, and author-
ity would be a quality of the internal relations among
his psychic elements. Certainly the hierarchical ranking
of the individual's faculties and the attribution of au-
thority to the higher over the lower have been promi-
nent features of Western thought at least back to the
ancient Greeks. But heretofore the internal polity of
the individual has been in concordance with the exter-
nal and conditioning structure of the outside world,
whether of nature, super-nature, politics, or society.
The best known of the recent discussions of authority
and the individual, indeed, have been those which have
internalized the social relations of authoritative power.
Some of our most familiar contemporary characters
are precisely such internalizations: the submissive ref-
ugee from freedom (in Fromm's Escape from Freedom,
1941); the “authoritarian personality,” “continuously
molded from above” to be both “jealous of his inde-
pendence and inclined to submit blindly to power and
authority” (in T. W. Adorno, et al., The Authoritarian
Personality
[1950], pp. ix, 976); the “inner-directed”
and “outer-directed” “character types,” equally and
successively programmed by society toward “conform-
ity” (in Riesman's Lonely Crowd, 1950). But if these
analyses are in the familiar mold of demonstrating the
continuity between the hierarchy of the cosmos and
the hierarchy of the psyche—just as the analyses of
Plato, Saint Augustine, and Descartes did in past
eras—such exercises in social psychology also contain
the possibility of a new departure by looking to a
revised psychic hierarchy as a crucial lever for the
dismantling or at least the scaling down of social hier-
archy.

The implication of such concluding unscientific
postscripts for a distinctive psychological idea of au-
thority has been obscured by their persistence in a
social context which makes any psychic assertion by
individuals against social repression an act of “auton-
omy.” But within the field of individual psychology
itself—and especially in the field of psychoanalytic
theory—recent doctrines point toward the transcend-
ence of social repression not through the mere permis-
sive freedom of individual desires but rather through
the substitution of uncoerced authority for repression
in the relationship of the elements within the psyche
and through the assertion of this authority, in its origi-
nal sense of moral direction, against the repressive
power of the society.

The incipient articulation of a psychological context
for authority is being most prominently undertaken by
neo-Freudians who have begun to develop in theory
a structure of harmonious authority within the psyche
with the mission of eradicating coercion from social
authority as the necessary condition of its own realiza-
tion. Where Freud himself could not get beyond the
dualistic and pessimistic mutual convertibility of
“ontogenic” and “phylogenic” repression—a limit di-
rectly related to the coercive idea of authority through
the paradigmatic figure of the “Primal Father” in both
the myth of the species and the fantasies of the indi-
vidual child—radical neo-Freudians like Marcuse and
Norman Brown have proposed the reversal of the
psychic hierarchy of super-ego, ego, and id to serve
as the ground for the reorganization of social relations.
The neo-Freudians insist, like the later Freud, on the
continuity of individuals and society, but whether in
the form of Marcuse's “idea of non-repressive sublima-
tion” (Eros and Civilization) or Brown's “construction
of a Dionysian ego” (Life against Death) the proper
ordering of the instincts (pleasure and reality, love and
death) and reason becomes a psychic model for the
whole society, creating “its own hierarchy” and re-
placing (in Marcuse's terminology) “irrational author-
ity” by “rational authority”—that is, replacing
an authority that is not compatible with freedom by
an authority that is (Eros, pp. 205-06).

In general, however, both psychoanalytic doctrine
and the common language of the age tend to charac-
terize such reversions to voluntary hierarchies, whether
of psychic factors or of individualized moral values as
conditions of freedom rather than as forms of pure


162

authority. In part this preference testifies to the tradi-
tional reference of authority to interpersonal rather than
to intrapersonal relations, but in part too it testifies
to the cumulative history of the idea of authority which
has led to the general acceptance of the meaning which
associates it indelibly with the exercise of coercive
power. But even if it is not literally identified with
the original idea of authority, the current commitment
to a normative psychic hierarchy which should serve
to direct the reorganization of society is an indication
that the recurrent pattern of a pure, uncoercive au-
thority remains viable. With whatever idea it will
henceforth be identified, the diffusion of cultural inno-
vation by men who have no access to the means of
power persists as a recurrent theme of the idea of
authority, balancing its more dubious contribution to
extending the range of compulsion in men's lives.