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political thought the idea of love has seldom been invoked as the
basis of authority, and what Machiavelli had discredited as a
dangerous conceit Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche buried as sentimental
nonsense. It is thus fitting that Sennett concludes his study with a
sensitive discussion of the ambiguities of Dostoyevsky's "The Grand
Inquisitor," in which "miracle, mystery, and authority" represent the
chains which bind man to the illusion that he would like to be free
but could not bear the burdens of freedom, and hence craves to
submit himself to some superior power he could worship. But
Dostoyevsky's famous parable may not offer the last word.
"Who has convinced whom?" asked Sennett of the Inquisitor's
confrontation with Christ. "Has God's love triumphed over
repression, or has the spokesman of the Devil finally made God face
the facts?" Whatever the answer, we may better appreciate the
difficulties of drawing upon the Christian idea of love to develop a
social philosophy of authority by considering the writings of Henry
Adams. Here we encounter love informing authority not so much as
a system of commands but as a sensibility of compassion. Here we
may also discover why love ought to inspire our obligations to obey
(
authority but, with the impact of modernity, cannot.
Henry Adams could not turn to classical virtue, as did his
ancestors, or to nature, as did the Transcendentalists, or to modern
science, as did the Pragmatists, for an answer to the problem of
authority. Nor could this anguished intellect follow Tocqueville to
the opinions of society or Machiavelli to the artistry of politics and
statecraft. "Society has no unity; one wandered about it like a
maggot in cheese," observed Adams, and politics could be little more
than "the systematic organization of hatreds." An admirer of Marx's
sense of force and conflict in human affairs, he saw that corporate
capitalism had escaped the checks and balances of the Constitution.
The spectre that haunted him was the alienation of economic power
from political authority, the tendency of power to become an
independent force, severed from the very institutional restraints
The
Federalist
had devised to prevent society's domination by "an alien
will." Adams first sought in history an answer to the problem of
alienation, but, unlike Marx, he did not find it. His nine-volume
masterpiece on the Jefferson and Madison administrations led him
to the conclusion that history remained impervious to truth,
revealing only a succession of events brought about by force.
Without the consolations of Hegel and the visions of Marx, Adams's
