John Patrick Diggins
WHERE DOES AUTHORITY COME FROM
Authority demands our respect; it also arouses our
suspicion, leaving us wondering whether it is really a vital social
imperative or merely an impossible pretension. Every writer who
expounds an idea of authority thinks it reasonable and requisite.
Those less confident may feel that the main purpose of intellectual
history is to reveal its futility, to display writers in the past struggling
with an issue whose resolution eluded their grasp.
When considering present writers, it may also be necessary to
see how easy answers collapse into harder questions. For today,
American intellectuals are arguing for the restoration of authority in
a country that has no traditional authority to restore. The argument
would have amused Walter Lippmann, who once defined modern
liberalism as the overthrow of authority and the endless search for its
substitute, a quest he wisely abandoned. Yet many contemporary
writers seem convinced that authority can be reconstituted simply
because society cannot exist without it. The idea of authority is thus
legitimated by the necessity of authority itself, as though its truth
were an absolute precondition of the possibility of organized and
coherent existence. This conviction, as we shall see, is implicit in the
post-Marxist functionalist assumptions of contemporary social
science-one is tempted to call it "Parson's wager."
In recent years several books and statements have appeared
addressing the causes of our present "national malaise." Among
them were Robert Bellah's "Human Condition for a Good Society,"
Daniel Bell's
The Cultural Contradictions oj Capitalism,
and Christopher
Lasch's
The Culture oj Narcissism.
The anxiety permeating these
documents seemed to confirm that legitimate authority had eroded
in America - the "crisis of confidence" announced by former Presi–
dent Carter. Bell has explored the fate of the Protestant work ethic
under the impact of cultural modernism; Bellah has tried to establish
the basis for American "civil religion"; and Lasch has focused on the
loss of patriarchal authority and its implications for the future of the
modern family.
