V
In the recent period of its history, the idea of au-
thority has been examined most intensively in its social
context
and the idea has been developed most reveal-
ingly in social science and social theory. As in the other
main
periods and contexts of its development, two
distinct stages must be
identified. From the late nine-
teenth
century to the 1920's changes in the approach
to authority were embodied
especially in the writings
of sociologists who took over from the preceding
pe-
riod the integral association of
authority and power
in politics but who sought to work out autonomous
roles for social authority as such, consonant with the
autonomy of the
social science which they were estab-
lishing. In its second stage the ideas of social authority
have been
reunited with political power both approv-
ingly in the ideology of fascist totalitarianism and
reprovingly in
the equally total revulsion of the
New—i.e.,
post-communist—Left from it.
1. Sociology of Authority.
Because they reflected
the new preeminence of industrial society as
the pri-
mary unit of human association and the
main arena
of collective activity, the great pioneers of sociology
assiduously recast authority into a social relation signi-
fying a voluntary or conventional interaction categor-
ically detached from its political
connection with
coercive power. But because this early age of the
industrial society was also a period of democratization
these founders of
sociology had also to take into ac-
count the
interpenetration of society and state. They
tended also to be political
sociologists who approached
politics as a special kind of social relation.
Hence they
sought to develop the idea of autonomous social au-
thorities which were independent of the
modern state
in their origins but were integrated into it, as a social
dimension of politics, in their contemporary effects.
They thus carried one
stage further the sociological
politics of the conservative positivists and
reversed
their priorities: where the positivists extended the state
into society and applied political criteria of coercion
to social
relations, the sociologists extended society into
the state and sought to
develop double-edged concepts
appropriate to the intersection.
The only pure—i.e., spontaneous and uncoercive—
social
authorities in the new sociology tended to be
dead authorities. Almost
invariably these authorities
were identified as prestigious individuals,
patriarchal
elders, hallowed traditions, or divinely anointed men
and
offices whose origins in and relevance to an earlier
stage of society were
emphatically acknowledged by
the sociologists. They also acknowledged the
persist-
ence of such authorities into
modern times, to be sure,
but only as atavisms. Thus the early
Émile Durkheim
(1893) assigned authority to the declining repressive
type of
society and equality to the progressing organic
type. “The
authority of the collective conscience is...
in large part composed of the
authority of tradition,”
and, in turn, “it is the
authority of age [the old people,
the unique intermediary between the
present and the
past] which gives tradition its authority.” Both
of these
associated authorities—of tradition and the
elders—
“necessarily diminish” along with
the archaic, seg-
mental type of society from
which they come
(Durkheim,
Division of Labor, pp.
291-93).
The sociologists' atavistic definition of social author-
ity received a precise terminological confirmation
from
Max Weber, divergent as his sociological assumptions
were from
Durkheim's in other respects. Weber care-
fully distinguished from the concept of
“power”
(Macht) the
“more precise sociological concept of 'au-
thority'” (Herrschaft),
defining power as “any proba-
bility of imposing one's will within a social relationship
even
against resistance” and authority as “the proba-
bility of securing obedience to
definite commands from
a relevant group of men” (Weber, Grundriss, pp.
28-29). Weber's general definition of
authority was
obviously designed to include within the sociological
concept the social dimension of political “commands”
which produced obedience without coercion, but, as
the connotation of Herrschaft—lordship or
dominion—
indicates, this general definition enclosed an
ambiguity
between the more or less compelling motives of obedi-
ence. Weber made no explicit distinctions
of principle
within authority as Herrschaft, since
he acknowledged
“the belief in legitimacy” to be the
indispensable basis
of all its forms, but in his elaboration of the three
main
types of authority a verbal distinction appeared which
reflected
a subtle differentiation within his idea of
authority. When analyzing the
concept of Herrschaft
in the context of the
“compliance,... the will to obey”
on the part of its
objects, Weber added the imported
term Autorität in apposition with Herrschaft,
and in
his analysis of the three legitimate bases of Herrschaft
he applied Autorität
to the charismatic and traditional
types of authority but only Herrschaft to the legal, or
bureaucratic, type
(ibid., p. 122; Weber, Religions-
soziologie, I, 268-73). Since Weber thought
of the
three types as successively dominant in the develop-
ment of society he was implying a distinctive connota-
tion of authority—Autorität—for the two types he
recognized frankly to be primarily representative of
“the
past” and to extend only “as survivals” into
the
present.
The obvious point of this historical approach to
social authority was to
indicate as sociological fact
what had for some three centuries been
proposed as
anthropological principle: that the religious and natu-
ral hierarchies, such as the church and the
family,
which had traditionally anchored the social roots of
authority
were now declining institutions, supported
rather by the inertia of past
social relations than by
relevance to contemporary society. But this
empirical
confirmation was not the main function of the social
analysis. Its main function was rather to set in relief
the separate
identity of the principle of authority
which was relevant to the
contemporary industrial
society. This modern principle of authority had to
be
defined both in terms of the new dependence upon
the rational
calculations of coercive power which dis-
tinguished it from the outmoded autonomous social
authorities of
the past, and in terms of its inheritance
from these social authorities of
the past. Hence the
sociologists analyzed the relationship of the old
and
new authorities as both a difference of type and a
succession of
stages for the purposes of demonstrating
the political categories
dominating modern ideas of
authority and examining the modern role of the
ata-
vistic social authorities. The
results of these inquiries
indicated, in general, the actual role of modern
ideas
of authority to be the social buttressing of political
hierarchy, but their normative role to be the
rational
organization of the highly integrated modern industrial
society. For an example of the first kind of analysis
we may refer to
Pareto's revealing categories. For an
example of the second we may refer to
the collabo-
rative sociological study by
Max Horkheimer's Institute
for Social Research on “authority and
family.”
Although Pareto, in The Mind and Society,
distin-
guished formally between
“a governing, political elite”
and “a
non-governing, non-political elite” within the
generic elite
class and defined membership in this
generic elite by a superior capacity
in any social activ-
ity whatsoever, he
proceeded to work out the authority
of this elite in terms of its relations
with political
power. It became, in the context of its authority over
the nonelite, simply “the higher stratum of society,
which
usually contains the rulers”; their superior
capacities were
epitomized into what was suitable for
“keeping them in
power” and “exercising the functions
of
government” and what kept them “willing enough
to use
force” (Pareto, #2041-57). The circulation of
elites, moreover,
is a process which is effected primar-
ily in
the lower-class nonelite's moving into the gov-
erning elite and in elitists' dropping out of the govern-
ing class through a process which
demonstrates the
inevitable triumph of superior political capacity,
wherever it may be found, over social “label.” Thus
Pareto's theory of the elite served both to blur the lines
between social
and political dominant classes in favor
of the latter and to subordinate authority, as a tool
of social
persuasion, to the ever-changing possessors
of political power.
In their monumental Studien über Autorität
und
Familie (Studies of Authority and the
Family) of 1936,
the team of democratic socialists associated
with
Horkheimer in the Institute for Social Research (Insti-
tut für
Sozialforschung) faced squarely the decisive
problem raised
by the sociological approach to author-
ity:
that social authority was a characteristic product
of the declining,
pre-industrial stage of Western civili-
zation and yet that authority in some form remained
a prominent
feature of the industrial age. Alerted by
the recent rise of fascist
totalitarianism—in Hork-
heimer's words, by “the transition to so-called authori-
tative forms of state in the
present period”—the Insti-
tute team, which included Erich Fromm and Herbert
Marcuse, saw
authority, in the general sense of the
“affirmed
dependence” of “the larger part of men”
upon “the smaller,” as a central category of
“all forms
of society,” both archaic and modern, and
they con-
ceived their mission to be the
understanding of the
changing forms of authority which corresponded to
the
changing forms of society (Studien, pp. 22-25).
The most striking theoretical contribution of the
project was embodied in
the convergent demonstration
(by Horkheimer, Fromm, and Marcuse from their
re-
spective sociological,
socio-psychological, and socio-
philosophical approaches) of the underlying authori-
tarianism in the apparently
anti-authoritarian attitudes
of the modern, liberal.
“bourgeois” era. Liberals, in
this view, created a
new form of authority by stressing
the voluntary submission of putatively
free individuals
to natural, metaphysical, or psychic constraints
which
were actually reified forms of authoritarian control by
a
dominant social group. The Institute team acknowl-
edged, from this historical analysis, that authority had
both
progressive (innovative) and reactionary (repres-
sive) functions for society. But they stopped short of
applying
their models of authority to the mature in-
dustrial society of their own day. The signs of dissolu-
tion in the characteristically bourgeois forms of
authority—the forms of economic exploitation—were
both obviously perceptible and theoretically account-
able, but contemporary forms of authority to
replace
them were not. For there was a profound difference
between the
team's theoretical expectation of a “ra-
tional authority,” freely accepted by “the
executors”
from “the directors” of joint
social enterprises in the
common interest of both, and their actual
perception
of the “total-authoritarian state” which
made impossi-
ble “the hierarchy
of authorities” in society necessary
for any “system
of authority” (ibid., pp. 48, 134-35,
219-22).
Nor was the problem posed by the gulf between the
normative and actual
tendencies of modern authority
resolved by the Institute's empirical
inquiry into the
structure of the contemporary family, which was ap-
proached not as an archaic locus of
authority but rather
as a social microcosm of all authority. The
empirical
section of the Studien was a progress
report, stipulating
the completeness of the method and the
incompleteness
of the result. Only the tentative indication of a
social
split between a peasantry still involved in the patriar-
chal family, an urban working class
inclined toward
the matriarchal family, and a lower middle class
(Mittelstand) caught indecisively between both tend-
encies, furnished a substantive
confirmation of the crisis
of divided social authorities which was throwing
the
social “education for authority” into the hands
of the
totalitarian state (ibid., pp. 75, 304-18, 905).
2. Totalitarian Authority.
Even the furthest socio-
logical
advance toward the definition of a modern
principle of social authority
fell short of the reality
of contemporary society and remained an
essentially
historical definition. The further development of the
idea
of authority lay with the political totalitarians and
with the radical
antitotalitarians who have reacted
constructively against them. Both groups
acknowledge
that the contemporary vacuum of social authority is
being
filled with political instruments of social control.
Both the totalitarians
and the radical antitotalitarians
of the twentieth century have thus gone a
crucial step
beyond the conservatives and liberals of the nineteenth:
where nineteenth-century political thinkers had de-
fended the superiority of authority or liberty respec-
tively but admitted the autonomy and
subordinate
validity of the opposite principle, their twentieth-
century socio-political
successors asserted the exclusive
validity of authority or liberty
respectively, and cate-
gorically worked
out the entire absorption or denial
of the opposite principle.
The development of a distinctive totalitarian idea
of authority has been
largely the work of fascists, for
however authoritarian in practice the
structure and
policies of communist parties and regimes may be, they
correspond to no viable idea of authority. Soviet ideol-
ogy has tended to exacerbate the special ambiguity
of
authority which arose when Lenin specified Marx's
innovative
dictatorship of the majority to be in the
charge of a centralized and
disciplined professional
vanguard who would use violence and terror to
initiate
the regime of freedom—the ambiguity, that is, of
stressing power and liberty to the detriment of any
intermediary concept of
authority. Thus the occasional
ideological concessions, during the Stalin
period, to the
factual conversion of the revolutionary vanguard into
a
long-term political and bureaucratic elite—conces-
sions manifest in such concepts of authority as
“the
vocation of leadership” and the
“monolithic Party”—
remained theoretically
isolated, alternating with the
more frequent endorsement of democratic
controls
from below and excluded from the dominant theory
which
justifies present political power in terms of fu-
ture freedom from politics (Moore, passim).
Despite the actual penetration of state and party
into the society,
moreover, communists distinguish in
principle between the political power
which withers
away and the social organization which remains, a
distinction which again obscures the idea of authority.
For it remains
uncertain, in doctrine, whether the
replacement of the government of men by
the admin-
istration of things is making
for a rational society with
an uncoercive guiding authority or for a free
society
with a functionally differentiated collaboration among
equals.
For the fascists, on the contrary, the idea of authority
was so central to
both their programs and their policies
as to escape the problems of
interpretation which the
professed instrumentalism of their doctrine and
the
glaring inconsistencies of their theory and practice
raise for so
many of their other ideas. Certain of these
problems,
indeed—like the relations between the con-
servative and revolutionary facets of
fascism—are illu-
minated by the
clarity of their approach to authority.
For the fascists, the political
model of authority—the
recognition of legitimacy in the organs
which actually
exercise the collective power of the society—was
the
model of authority as such, and the conservative reten-
tion or the revolutionary dismantling of the
existing
social authorities varied with the requirements of the
political model.
The political definition of social authority was ex-
plicit in La dottrina del Fascismo,
published under
Mussolini's name but written by Giovanni Gentile,
philosopher of Italian Fascism: “The State not only is
authority
which governs and molds individual wills
with laws and values of spiritual
life, but it is also
power which makes its will prevail abroad.... For
the Fascist, everything is within the State and...
neither individuals or
groups are outside the State....
For Fascism the State is an absolute,
before which
individuals and groups are only relative”
(Mussolini,
pp. 12-16, 33). The Fascist model of political authority
thus extended through the social structure and the
external spheres of
private rights to implant the rule
of coercive power within the innermost
spirit of the
individual. “The Fascist State... is the form
and
internal norm of the whole person.... Fascism aims
at discipline,
and at an authority which penetrates the
soul and rules there
incontestably” (ibid., pp. 17-18).
For, as Gentile would explain
in his own name, there
is no essential distinction between “the two terms
'State' and 'individual': far from being “a limit to his
liberty,” the State “is the universal aspect of the indi-
vidual,... the concrete actuality of his
will” (Gentile,
pp. 124-31).
Like fascists in general, the German National So-
cialists used the idea of authority in a political context
to
link the public power with an original principle
detached from any roots in
and responsibility to social
tradition or democratic rights. In Mein Kampf Hitler
almost invariably referred to
authority as “state au-
thority” (Staatsautorität) and
he repeatedly charac-
terized the Nazi
conception of authority as one “which
knows only an authority
which proceeds downward
from the top and a responsibility which proceeds
up-
ward from the bottom” (Speeches, I, 180, 201, 502).
But unlike the Italian
Fascists, the Nazis denied the
cultural primacy of the State and hence
undermined
the ultimacy of its authority as the valid source of
political power. For Hitler, the belief that the very
existence of the
State is the ground of its sanctity and
requires “the dog-like
veneration of the so-called state
authority” was a
“legitimist” absurdity which distorted
a means into
an end-in-itself. Actually, the State is “a
means to the end of
maintaining and promoting the
racial nation (Volkstum),” and the State authority is
“the
sovereign incorporation of a racial nation's in-
stinct and common will for self-preservation” (Mein
Kampf, pp. 426, 433, 440). For the Nazis,
then, politi-
cal authority was explicitly
instrumental, and they
referred it, for its own legitimacy, to the
suprapolitical
good of the race whose instrument it was. Here was
the
basis in Nazi doctrine for the later claim, to be
made by Nazis and
anti-Nazis alike, that National
Socialism neither espoused nor realized the
totalitarian
state, since political institutions composed but one of
its several lines of control. But it was precisely because
it was deemed a
political instrument that the principle
of authority became crucial in the
Nazi scheme, for
it became the transferable means of applying the po-
litical model of power to all the lines of
fascist control—
Party, corporate, and personal—and
made possible a
plural totalitarianism transcending the traditional
organs of state.
The idea of authority was the point at which the
traditional principle of
hierarchy and the modern
principle of national sovereignty were joined to
be-
come compatible means of power for all
social orga-
nizations whatsoever. Hitler,
for example, endorsed
two ideas of authority which were reminiscent of
its
original meanings, but he now linked them closely to
the exercise
of coercive power: first, “the authority of
personality,” which cannot brook control by “any ma-
jority”; secondly, the authority
of leadership in the
sense of initiation, which is a power conferred by the
community, is “a high responsibility to the commu-
nity,” and makes the fundamental natural
relationship
between “initiation” (
Führung) and “execution” (
Aus-
führung) the
justification of the power relationship be-
tween “domination” (
Überordnung) and “subordina-
tion” (
Unterordnung) (Hitler,
Tischgespräche, p.
171).
Thus Hitler, and the fascists in general, took the
distinctive ideas of
authority out of their original per-
sonal and
social contexts, applied them to the justifica-
tion of coercive power, and in this politicized form,
reapplied
them to the organization of man's social and
personal activities and to the
molding of his ideas about
them. Since, indeed, the idea of authority laid
particu-
lar stress upon the voluntary
component in the submis-
sion to power, it
was particularly appropriate to total-
itarian use for thought-control.
3. Post-totalitarian Ideas of Authority.
The con-
temporary intellectual
opposition to fascism tended to
defend familiar liberal ideas, including
those of the
democratic limits upon and accountability of authority.
The intellectually significant response to totalitarianism
has been a
post-fascist phenomenon. The change from
the liberal view of authority to a
radical attack on
authority was developed after World War II by the
movements of the New Left, which sees in fascism not
a case of the
political abuse of authority but a key
to the ubiquity of oppressive
authoritative power
throughout society.
This conviction of the New Left has taken two forms,
depending on whether
the oppression in the power-
authority
syndrome is seen to come primarily from the
power or from the authority.
The first of these alterna-
tives has been
developed by those in the New Left
who represent a connection with the old:
for them
social authority, in the sense of the force for voluntary
submission in men's primary relation, is the charac-
teristic means of power produced by advanced indus-
trial society; it is essentially a
pre-coercive power
which controls men's will by determining their
needs
and as such it is continuous with the coercive political
power
which is merely its extension. “Contemporary
industrial
society,” in the formulation of Herbert
Marcuse, a prominent
spokesman for this group, is
“one-dimensional.” It
“tends to be totalitarian. For
'totalitarian' is not only a
terroristic political coordi-
nation of
society, but also a non-terroristic economic-
technical coordination which operates through
the
manipulation of needs by vested interests.... Under
the rule of a
repressive whole, liberty can be made
into a powerful instrument of
domination” (Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man, pp. 3, 7).
But this strand of the New Left has not gone the
whole way to the rejection
of authority. It condemns
every real form of authority because of its unvarying
association with repressive power rather than the idea
of authority as
such. Marcuse, for example, asserts the
desirability of “the
combination of centralized author-
ity and
direct democracy” and implies the authority
of Reason in the
shape of the “dialectical concept”
and
“the critical theory of society”—forms of
authority
devoid of social or political power. The categorical
rejection of authority is the result rather of other
spokesmen of the New
Left whose deliberately formless
attitudes are most clearly grasped in the
glosses they
have contributed to anarchism. The most obvious shift
of
emphasis in the new anarchism has been from the
concentration on political
authority characteristic of
“historical
anarchism”—i.e., the anarchism of Godwin,
Proudhon,
Bakunin, and Kropotkin—to “the rejection
of authority
as such, whatever its form or field”
(Heintz, pp. 9-12).
But this shift has been more than one of scope, for
along with the expansion
of the anarchist target from
all political forms to all social forms of
authority has
come a shift from the denial of authority as the source
of compulsive power to the denial of the very elements
which have always
distinguished the idea of authority
from the idea of power. First, where
the historical
anarchists denied the validity of any natural hierarchy
or scale of moral values or conferral of rights which
could serve as the
basis of the legal authority of some
individuals
over others, the neo-anarchists insist upon
the natural, moral, social,
intellectual, and personal
equality of all individuals and upon the
consequent
illegitimacy of any relationship based on the pretended
superiority of some individuals over others, whether
innate, ethical,
conventional, or contracted. Second,
neo-anarchism condemns all
institutions—that is, en-
during
arrangements—not only because of their inevi-
table tendency toward bureaucratization (as in histori-
cal anarchism) but more fundamentally
because as such
they inevitably entail the authority of the past over
the present. Finally, the neo-anarchists insist on the
spontaneity, the
open-endedness, and the planlessness
of their enterprises because the
definition of universal
ends and the elaboration of programmatic designs
to-
ward those ends entail the authority of
the future over
the present.
In this set of rejections the New Left clearly denies
the whole set of
original, unperverted meanings of
authority. It denies the personal
authority of natural
capacity and acquired merit; it denies the creation
of
authority by transfer or delegation of rights; it denies
the
authority of age and experience, whether in fami-
lies or traditions; and it denies the authority of the
author, both
in terms of a special regard for founders
and their foundations and in
terms of the viability of
designs which require the execution by some of what
is
initiated by others. And all these authentic kinds of
authority are denied,
moreover, not because they have
been corrupted by their association with
power but
because they are in themselves illegitimate exercises
of
power and because the functions of personal respect,
social continuity, and
communicated creation which
these authorities purport to serve are better
served by
the untrammeled interaction of absolutely free and
equal
individuals.
