THE TWILIGHT OF AUTHORITY 3

The
twilight
of
authority
ROBERT A. NISBET

T HE most striking fact in the

present period of revolutionary change is the quickened erosion of
the traditional institutional authorities that for nearly a millennium
have been Western man's principal sources of order and liberty. I
am referring to the manifest decline of influence of the legal system,
the church, family, local community, and, most recently and per-
haps most ominously, of school and the university.
There are some who see in the accelerating erosion of these au-
thorities the beginning of a new and higher freedom of the indi-
vidual. The fetters of constraint, it is said, are being struck off,
leaving creative imagination free, as it has never been free before,
to build a truly legitimate society. Far greater, however, is the
number of those persons who see in this erosion, not the new
shape of freedom, but the specters of social anarchy and moral chaos.
I would be happy if I could join either of these groups in their
perceptions. But I cannot. Nothing in history suggests to me the
likelihood of either creative liberty or destructive license for very
long in a population witnessing the dissolution of the social and
moral authorities it has been accustomed to. I should say, rather,
that what is inevitable in such circumstances is the rise of power:
power that invades the vacuum left by receding social authority;
power that tends to usurp even those areas of traditional authority
that have been left inviolate; power that becomes indistinguishable
4 THE PUBLIC INTEREST

in an short time from organized and violent forces, whether of the

police, the military, or the para-military.
The human mind cannot support moral chaos for very long. As
more and more of the traditional authorities seem to come crashing
down, or to be sapped and subverted, it begins to seek the security
of organized power. The ordinary dependence on order becomes
transformed into a relentless demand for order. And it is power,
however ugly its occasional manifestations, that then takes over,
that comes to seem to more and more persons the only refuge from
anxiety and apprehension and perpetual disorder.
So was it in ancient Athens when, after the brilliant fifth century
had ended in the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars, when intimations
of dissolution were rife, the Athenians turned to despots, generals,
and tyrants who could, it was thought, restore the fabric of authority.
So was it in Rome after the deadly civil conflicts of the first century.
So was it in Western Europe after the French Revolution had
mobilized itself into the Terror--the better, it was thought by
Jacobins and others, to destroy the final remnants of corrupt, tra-
ditional authority, thus freeing forever the natural virtue in man.
What France got, as we know, was neither freedom nor virtue, but
the police state of Napoleon; and what Western Europe got was an
age of political reaction in which governments took on powers over
human life never dreamed of by absolute monarchs of earlier cen-
turies. And so was it in the Germany of a generation ago when, after
a decade of spiritual, cultural, and material debauchery, of more and
more aggressive assaults on the civil order by the political left,
Germany got Nazism and Hitler; got these to the open satisfaction
at the time of a large part of the German people, the secret satis-
faction of many others, and, in due course, very close to the total
satisfaction of all.

Authority vs. power

To see the eruption of organized power and violence as the con-

sequence of a diminishing desire for liberty is easy. What requires
more intelligence or knowledge or wisdom is to see such power as
the consequence of loss of authority in a social order. Authority and
power: are these not the same, or but variations of the same thing?
They are not, and no greater mistake could be made than to sup-
pose they are. Throughout human history, when the traditional
authorities have been in dissolution, or have seemed to be, it is
power--in the sense of naked coercion--that has sprung up. What
Aristotle called stasis, perpetual civil strife, is at bottom no more
than the fragmentation of authority in society. It is stasis, warned
Aristotle, that democratic societies have to fear above all else. It
is the fateful prelude to despotism.
THE TWILIGHT OF AUTHORITY 5

Authority, unlike power, is not rooted in force alone, whether

latent or actual. It is built into the very fabric of human association.
Civil society is a tissue of authorities. Authority has no reality save
in the memberships and allegiances of the members of an organiza-
tion, be this the family, a political association, the church, or the
university. Authority, function, membership: these form a seamless
web in traditional society. The authority of the family follows from
its indispensable function. So does that of the church, the guild, the
local community, and the school. When the function has become dis-
placed or weakened, when allegiances have been transferred to
other entities, there can be no other consequence but a decline of
authority.
Culture too, as Matthew Arnold wrote memorably a century ago,
is inseparable from authority. There is the authority of learning and
taste; of syntax and grammar in language; of scholarship, of science,
and of the arts. In traditional culture there is an authority attaching
to the names of Shakespeare, Montaigne, Newton, and Fasteur in
just as sure a sense of the word as though we were speaking of the
law. There is the authority of logic, reason, and of genius. Above all,
there is the residual authority of the core of values around which
Western culture has been formed. This core of values--justice,
reason, equity, liberty, charity--was brought into being through the
union of the Greek and Judaic traditions 2,000 years ago. Until the
present age, it has managed to withstand all assaults upon it. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, conservatives, liberals, and
radicals, however passionately they may have fought each other,
nevertheless recognized, all of them, the authority of such values.
It was culture and its authority, not their destruction, on which
minds as diverse as Newman, Spencer, Marx, and even Proudhon
rested their causes. Proudhon, let us emphasize immediately, was an
anarchist, and is today the subject of youthful lip service. But no one
could have surpassed Proudhon in his recognition of the necessity
of authority in the social order; the authority of the family, the com-
munity, the guild; above all the authority of morality that he, as a
member of the European community, recognized as the indispens-
able framework of culture and of social justice.
The most dangerous intellectual aspect of the contemporary scene
is the widespread refusal of thinking men to distinguish between
authority and power. They see the one as being as much a threat to
liberty as the other. But this way lies madness--and the ultimate
sovereignty of powerl To contrast freedom and power is necessary.
To contrast freedom and authority is folly. There can be no possible
freedom in society apart from authority. "Men are qualified for civil
liberty," wrote Burke, "in exact proportion to their disposition to put
moral chains upon their own appetites." It is out of this disposition
toward fruitful self-discipline that authority emerges, and its legiti-
6 THE PUBLIC INTEREST

macy is recognized. Abolish the disposition and you equally abolish

the capacity for liberty.
There are those, chiefly political romantics and sentimentalists,
who think these "moral chains" are a part of man's own nature and
that there is consequently no need to worry about their dissolution.
But the horrors of our century should have taught us, if nothing else
could have, the precariousness of the virtue that romantics think
to lie in man's germ plasm. In truth, man's virtue is inseparable from
--is as precarious as--his culture.

The importance of being bored

Boredom is one of the most dangerous accompaniments of the loss

of authority in a social order. Between boredom and brute violence
there is as close an aflanity historically as there is between boredom
and inanity, boredom and cruelty, boredom and nihilism. Yet bore-
dom is one of the least understood, least appreciated forces in human
history. A few years ago, the scientist Harlow Shapley listed boredom
as third among the five principal possibilities of world destruction.
Today it might seriously be considered first.
Nothing so engenders boredom in the human species as the sense
of material fulfillment, of goals accomplished, of affluence possessed.
It is such a boredom, born of what Eric Hoffer has called the effluvia
of affluence, that goes furthest, I think, to explain the peculiar char-
acter of the contemporary New Left. I do not deny that youth brings
idealism in some degree to this movement, that disenchantment with
the more corrupt manifestations of middle class society plays its
part. Youth is beyond question idealistic. But in our present society,
youth is also bored. And it is from boredom, more than from ideal-
ism, that so much of the intellectual character of radical political
action today is derived. I should more accurately say, nonintellectual
character, for it is the consecration of the act, the cold contempt
for philosophy and program, and the increasingly ruthless behavior
toward even the most intellectual parts of traditional culture that
give to the New Left its most distinctive character at the present time.
It is not idealism but boredom boredom born of natural authority
dissolved, of too long exposure to the void; boredom inherited from
parents uneasy in their middle class affluence and who mistake
failure of parental nerve for liberality of rearing; boredom acquired
from university teachers grown intellectually impotent and con-
temptuous of calling--that explains the mindless, purposeless dep-
redations today by the young on that most precious and distinctive
of Western institutions: the university.
We do well to take seriously the university and what happens to
its authority in our culture. For among its prime functions tradition-
ally has been that of serving as arbiter to that age group that has, at
THETWILIGHT
OF AUTHORITY 7

least temporarily, outgrown the authorities of family, church, and

neighborhood. Potentially, this age group is the most revolutionary
of all groups in society, far more revolutionary than, say, the work-
ers, the unemployed, the impoverished. High in intelligence, emo-
tionally buoyant, at full physical tide, this is the age group that is
channeled by the university into the several areas of the professions,
that provides the intellectual leaders of society. In the university
is acquired lasting motivations toward learning, toward profession,
toward high culture, toward membership in the social order. But, by
the same token, it is this age group in the university that has largely
furnished the West with its steady supply of revolutionaries. Not
out of slavery, the peasantry, or from the sweatshop have our revolu-
tionaries come, for the most part. They have, especially during the
past century and a half, been bred by the university. Who is to say
that our society does not require its occasional infusion of revolution-
aries? But in the present age the revolutionaries have turned on the
university itself, and this is not only destructive but totally self-
destructive.
The university is the institution that is, by its delicate balance of
function, authority, and liberty, and its normal absence of power,
the least able of all institutions to withstand the fury of revolutionary
force and violence. Through some kind of perverted historical wis-
dom the nihilism of the New Left has correctly understood the stra-
tegic position of the university in modern culture and also its
constitutional fragility. Normally there are no walls, no locked gates
and doors, no guards to repulse attacks on classroom, office, and
academic study. Who, before the present age, would have thought
it necessary to protect precious manuscripts from the hands of
revolutionary marauders? Above the din of the New Left's incessant
and juvenile cry for immediate amnesty can be heard Voltaire's
Ecrasez l'infdme, directed, however, not at a corrupt feudalism, but
at the freest, most liberal, and humane of all Western institutions.
II dit tout ce qu'il veut--so runs the harsh indictment in the last
century of a French critie---ma/s malheureusement il n'a riend dire.
Neither does the New Left, and this is perhaps its most vivid mark of
distinction from all previous lefts in Western society. It is free to say
all that it wishes, but it has nothing to say. Its program is the act
of destruction, its philosophy is the obscene word or gesture, its
objective the academic rubble. One need but read the recently pub-
lished book by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, present philosopher-hero of the
New Left, to see the truth of this. Nowhere in its two hundred and
fifty pages is there to be found so much as a paragraph that a Robes-
pierre, a Marx, a Proudhon, even--save the mark--an American
Communist would not have thrown in the wastebasket as juvenile
and inane.
It does not matter. A philosophy and program are not needed.
8 THE PUBLIC INTEREST

Boredom suffices to win the New Left its constant flow of recruits.
Credo quia absurdum could be their motto. "Alienation" is the
popular and prestigious word to explain the behavior of the New
Left. But the word is as ill-fitting as would be a surplice or academic
hood on the shoulders of a clown. Alienation is a noble state of the
human spirit, one compounded of idealism and suffering and rejec-
tion. Alienation compares with boredom as tragedy does with farce.
There is no real alienation in the New Left, only the boredom that
is itself the result of erosion of cultural authority, of failure of nerve
in middle-class society, and of adult fear of youth.

Toward a new social contract

It would all be a transitory charade, a tale told by an idiot, were

it not for one thing: the fears aroused in this same middle-class
society that has lost its anchoring in natural authority. Fear of the
void is for human beings a terrible fear, one that will not long be
contained. That state of nature that Thomas Hobbes described as
one of "continual fear, and danger of violent death," with "the life
of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" seems always to the
anxious and apprehensive to be about to break through the social
order, even as it seemed to Hobbes. And in this state of mind, it is
only power that can seem redemptive, however stained with blood
and violence it may be.
The modern media, and especially television, have the capacity
for widening and deepening apprehensions beyond anything known
before. We are told that a majority of the French people did not
know about the storming of the Bastille for months. The entire
country watched last summer's confrontation between New Left and
police in Chicago. It was violent, ugly, and could only have aroused
the chill of fear in those who had chanced to see the rise of Nazism,
in Germany, the burning of the Reichstag, and the beginnings of a
police system that was in time to enclothe German society like a
straitjacket. But I know of no national poll or study that has shown
other than approval of police actions by a large majority. The size
of this majority will grow. People, we say should know better, should
not let civilized restraint be undermined by demons of fear. But, as
the great Bishop Butler wrote, "Things and actions are what they
are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why,
then, should we desire to be deceived?"
Human beings, I repeat, will tolerate almost anything but the
threatened loss of authority in the social order: the authority of law,
of custom, of convention. The void does not have to be great, or
seem great, for the fears it arouses to become sweeping, for sanity in
politics to disintegrate. We are told by the polls that a large number
of people watching their television screens that night in Chicago
THE TWILIGHT OF AUTHORITY 9

found even the berserk actions of police and pseudo-police gratify-

ing, reassuring, healing to the sense of security. Let us not forget
too that there is a strong upswell of boredom in affluent middle-class
society too. And power, as history tells us, is as often the antidote
to boredom in society as to anxiety.
We need, as Max Lerner recently wrote in a thoughtful and
moving column, a new social contract in our society, one that will
do for our violence-torn social order what the doctrine of the social
contract in the seventeenth century sought to do in that age, fresh
as it was from the horrors of the religious wars. But the task will
be far more difficult. The institutions of Western society are less solid
and encompassing than they were then. Two centuries of convulsive
social change and of remorseless increase in centralized political
and economic power have seen to that. We are plagued even by our
achievements, for material progress has inevitably taken toll of
traditional culture.
There are, as the recent flight of Apollo 8 m: de clear, great events
taking place in our society. But they are events of the technological,
not the social, order. If the life of society is to be saved from
boredom relieved only by great technological events--if it is to be
saved from armed power, from depredations on traditional culture,
from mass movements in which exhilaration produced by power is
man's substitute for accustomed libertiesmways must be found, and
found shortly, of restoring the sense of initiative in the social as well as
the technological order. Above all, at this moment, we need a liberal-
ism that is able to distinguish between legitimate authority--the au-
thority resident in university, church, local community, family, and
in language and culture---and mere power. Failure to make this
distinction between authority and power can only result in the ever-
wider replacement of the former by the latter. If our liberalism can
see no profound difference between the authority of an academic
dean, however fallible this may sometimes be, and the power of the
police riot squad, we shall find ourselves getting ever greater dosages
of the latter. History, surely, is unmistakable in its testimony on this
point.
At the present time, the nearest to a philosophy and program that
exists in the political Left is its incantatory phrases about the Estab-
lishment, bureaucracy, and technology. But with every fresh assault
on the traditional authorities of the social order, the day of what
Burckhardt called the "terrible simplifiers," the new men of power
drawn precisely from technology in the service of armed force,
comes nearer. The impulse to liberty can survive everything but the
destruction of its contexts; and these are contexts of authority--a
legitimate authority that is inseparable from institutions.