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Parsons, draw upon the theoretical "systems" of Weber and Freud.
Whether they offer the Protestant ethic to help us overcome
hedonism or the Oedipal instinct to help us overcome narcissism,
both look to social psychology for answers that at one time had been
found in moral philosophy.
For Weber, the incentive to obey derives not only from an inner
spiritual justification but from fear of divine wrath and hope for
eternal salvation; for Freud, authority derives from the superego's
identification with the father as a means of overcoming the
libidinous desires for the mother. For both, authority exists only so
long as people believe that it does by virtue of their not questioning
long-standing convictions and taboos rooted in the sacred and the
supernatural. But Weber and Freud recognized that belief in
authority could very well give way to the "disenchantment of the
world" as modern science erodes the "illusions" on which it rested.
The problem confronting contemporary social science is how to
reintroduce ideas whose disappearance is itself part of the crisis of
authority - the idea of God and the reality of guilt. Can the
intellectual endow the illusions of belief with a content that would
make possible once again the belief in illusions?
In the Weberian and Freudian schemes, the rationality of
authority depends upon man's ceasing to ask authority to be
reasonable. Whether we are dependent upon the inscrutability of
God's will or upon the arbitrariness of the father's power, we have no
choice but to accept their authority . The term "evil" has been
changed, not the threat, for the difficulties of sanity remain as
perilous as those of salvation, and in Freud and Weber man is not
safely endowed with the rational faculties to assure him of either.
Freud's hostility to religion and Weber's existential agnosticism did
not entirely free them to conceive authority as secular. Authority still
has a bad origin in that it continues to trail the legacy of "sin,"
whether manifested as the human desire for erotic pleasure or that
for material happiness. Different though their methods were, Freud
and Weber arrived at the same conclusion: authority results not
from realizing desires but from disciplining them.
Yet ultimately Freud and Weber propose not so much authority
as power, the promise of future gratification in return for deferring
immediate urges in order to realize desires through a life of relentless
striving. As Henry Adams observed almost a century ago, to follow
the Oedipal solution and identify with the authority of the father was
to identify with power and domination and to forsake those
