508
PARTISAN REVIEW
that in public and political life authority either plays no role at all–
for the violence and terror exercised by the totalitarian countries has,
of course, nothing to do with authority- or at most plays a highly
contested role. This, however, simply means, in essence, that people
do not wish to require of anyone or to entrust to anyone the assump–
tion of responsibility for everything else, for wherever true authority
existed it was joined with responsibility for the course of things
in
the world.
If
we remove authority from political and public life, it
may mean that from now on an equal responsibility for the course
of the world is to be required of everyone. But it may also mean that
the claims of the world and the requirements of order in it are being
consciously or unconsciously repudiated, all responsibility for the
world is being rejected-the responsibility for giving orders no
l~
than for obeying them. There is no doubt that in the modern loss of
authority both intentions playa part and have often been simultane–
ously and inextricably at work together.
In education, on the contrary, there can be no such ambiguity
in regard to the present-day loss of authority. Children cannot throw
off educational authority, for that would mean they were playing
the role of the oppressed-though even this absurdity of treating
children as an oppressed minority in need of liberation has actually
been tried out in modern educational practice. Authority has been
discarded by the adults, and this can mean only one thing: that the
adults refuse to assume responsibility for the world into which they
have brought the children.
And yet there is of course a connection between the loss of
authority in public and political life and in the private pre-political
realms of the family and the school. The more radical the distrust
of authority becomes in the public sphere, the greater the probability
naturally becomes that the private sphere will not remain inviolate.
There is this additional fact, and it is very likely the decisive one,
that from time out of mind we have been accustomed in our tradition
of political thought to regard the authority of parents over children,
of teachers over pupils, as the model by which to understand political
authority. It is just this model, which can be found as early as Plato
and Aristotle, that makes the concept of authority in politics so
extraordinarily ambiguous. It is based, first of all, on an absolute
superiority such as can never exist among adults and which, from
the point of view of human dignity, must never exist. In the second
