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
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.
