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redeeming "feminine" qualities which offer the only alternatives to a
"masculine" world of force and conquest. Everyman's "sin," lamented
Adams in "A Prayer to the Virgin," originated in the abandonment
of the "majesty of grace and love" of the mother in order "to claim the
father's empire for my own ." In identifying solely with the father,
man merely reveals the power drive within himself that culminates
in the worship of "the Dynamo." In both Freud and Weber, the
cunning of expediency gives power a logical priority over moral
authority. Freud's superego adapts conveniently to whatever is, and
Weber's "rational-legal" authority simply illuminates how man
submits to forces legitimated by the very act of submission. Both
Freudianism and Weberianism promise the overcoming of
alienation through identification with power and reconciliation to
the "reality principle."
Whether or not all authority is legitimized force, as Weber
insisted, or is founded in the instinctual values of lust and
aggression, as Freud contended, it is removed from the human
realm of truth, reason, and freedom. Both schemes juxtapose the
determinism of history and nature to the disorders of modern culture
in order to ground authority in a realm beyond rational control, and
even the appearance of individual "charismatic authority," the spark
of freedom and spontaneity that may momentarily shatter the "iron
cage" of bureaucratic institutions, occurs independently of people's
collective will.
Inevitably the quarrel with authority is, as Dostoevsky and
Melville demonstrated, the quarrel with God and nature. God did
not ask man whether he would accept the torment of sin in order
better to overcome it; nature did not consult man about the wisdom
of a permanent Oedipal implant.
If
the irony of history turns man's
spiritual
angst
into productive efforl and sublimates his lusts and
vices into sources of social order, what part is played by man's own
motives, purposes, choices, and why shou ld he submit to that which
he has not willed? Are there not other reasons for accepting
authority, reasons that derive from the preference for freedom rather
than from the presumption of necessity? In the eighteenth century,
man's voluntary allegiance to authority was a confirmation of his
"liberty" and "virtue." Give me liberty or give me Durkheim.
Emile Durkheim, the patron saint of modern sociology,
believed that society itself constitutes a "sacred" universe of rites and
rituals through which man unconsciously affirms his need for moral
community. But the idea that culture requires religion may be an
