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legitimations, which provide the defenses against its despisers. But the
legitimation of the culture, as I have argued, is the quest for self–
gratification and the expression of "personality."
It
attacks established
orthodoxy in the name of personal autonomy and heterodoxy. Yet
what modern culture has failed to understand is that orthodoxy is not
the guardian of an existent order, but is itself a judgment on the
adequacy and moral character of beliefs, from the standpoint of "right
reason ." The paradox is that "heterodoxy" itself has become conform–
ist in liberal circles and exercises that conformity under the banner of
an antinomian flag. It is a prescription, in its confusions, for the
dissolution of a shared moral order.
Does power still lie in the economic realm, and largely in the
hands of the giant corporations? To a considerable extent this is still so
in Western society, yet such an argument misreads the nature of
societal change today. A capitalist order had historical strength when it
fused property with power through a set of ruling families to maintain
the continuity of the system. The first deep, internal structural change
in capitalism was the divorce of family and property from managerial
power and the loss of continuity through the chain of elites. Economic
power today lies in institutions whose chiefs cannot pass along their
power to their heirs and who, increasingly-since property is not
private (but corporate), and technical skill, not property is the basis of
managerial positions-no longer have the traditional natural rights,
justifications, and legitimacy in the exercise of that power, and feel it
keenly. The larger fact is that a modern society multiplies the number
of constituencies and given the increasing interdependence of eco–
nomic and social effects, the political order becomes the place where
power is wielded in order to manage the systemic problems arising out
of that interdependence and the increasing competition of other, state–
directed economies. The major consequence is the expansion of State
power, and the fact that the State budget, not the division of profits
within the enterprise, becomes the major arbiter of economic decisions
(including the formation of capital), and that competition not between
capitalist and workers, but between the multiple constituencies (where
corporations still exercise a large degree of influence) is the mode of
allocating power in the society.
VII
A final word on religion, which for me is the fulcrum of my book.
I do not
(pace
Durkheim) see religion as a "functional necessity" for
