Originally published in 1976 by Arlington House Publishers.
Published 1995 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 94-21409
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Molnar, Thomas Steven.
Authority and its enemies / Thomas Molnar ; with a new introduction by the author.
p. cm.
Originally published : New Rochelle, N.Y. : Arlington House, c1976.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-56000-777-7
1. Authority. 2. Liberty. I. Title.
JC571.M745 1994
303.36dc20
94-21409
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-1-56000-777-7 (pbk)
There appeared, soon after the Second World War, in 1945 in London, Austrian philosopher Karl Poppers work, The Open Society and Its Enemies. It was immediately and widely celebrated; it was also a kind of natural companion to another book, Horkheimers and Adornos The Authoritarian Personality, published in the United States. Both works were written by refugees from German-occupied Europe who were or would have been victims of the official anti-Semitic policies. No doubt that these circumstances had prompted the writing of both books. Their combined thesis proposed that totalitarian ideology and practices were the products of personal character traits tending toward a strong authoritarian behavior, and that this behavior was best deployed in regimes closed upon themselves ideologically, granting rights only to the tested and the loyal in the service of a severely structured society held up as an ideal. As a contrast, Horkheimer/Adorno suggested the freely accommodating and tolerant personality, and Popper the open society with democratic and liberal policies in the framework set by the rule of law.
It is hardly doubtful that the authors had been impressed, on the one hand, by the repression in totalitarian regimes from which they suffered exile, and, on the other hand, by the Anglo-Saxon regimes where they found refuge. But it is always risky for theses with a philosophical ambition to mix sentiments and arguments, at the latters expense. And to construct typologiesof individual character and political regimeson the basis of a historical moment, in the midst of events and with exacerbated passions. Exaggerations are never too far in such cases. Decades after the Horkheimer/Adorno book, Stanley Milgram at Yale University demonstrated very ingeniously that all of us are willing and eager to play the authoritarian personality vis--vis our fellow men (see the pertinent chapter in this book) and inflict pain amounting to torture on innocent people when so instructed. In Poppers case it was validly said by many of his critics that his biggest faux pas was to indict Plato as the prototype of fascist mentality and social planning. True, when Popper published his book, the Soviet Union, one of the victors in the war, was protected by Western public opinion, and thus the entire onus of totalitarianism was concentrated in the Nazi and fascist regimes. But as the Cold War provided ample proof of the totalitarian crimes of communism as well, Poppers thesis became increasingly shoddy in retrospect: Was Plato the overall creator of authoritarian and totalitarian mentality, a kind of super-accused at a super-Nrnberg trial? And also, could authoritarian and totalitarian regimes be so easily equated?
In reality, the issue is the problem of authority in general, not its possible excesses. When I undertook to write this book, I knew I would swim against the current, although my commentators emphasized the dispassionate approach I adopted. Only one letter to a magazine showed exasperation and informed the author and the approving reviewer that he, the correspondent, obeyed only such authority of which he approves. This statement, naive and silly as it was, nevertheless hit the nail on the head. First, it admitted implicitly that authority is not necessarily directed against people since the letter writer willingly obeyed at least some laws or orders. Second, he demonstrated, without being aware of it, that if each obeys only the authority of his choice, anarchy at once breaks out. In other words, even the self-declared enemy of authority acknowledges the latters validity when his own reasons, tastes, and interests tell him to do so. Multiply this individual choice by each member of society, you get a set of validated laws or customs.
You will now interject: an acceptable minimum of authority is of course unobjectionable, but I still refuse authoritarianism in other than legal relationships, in the family, in the classroom, among people in general. But whether informally or loosely constituted, groups (family, classroom, etc.) are not essentially different from society at large; they too have a common interest, a unified purpose, an identity to safeguard. The objective of one group is to teach, of another to bring up children, of yet another to defend a territory or secure material well-being. These groups are called school, family, army, and business enterprise, and their totality amounts, numerically and morally, to the whole society or nation. In short, at all levels human beings live in communities (which of course intersect), even, as the book points out, the hermit or the castaway who has learned the minimum of living conditions from other men and tries to rejoin them. Tarzan is no exception, nor Robinson Crusoe.
Authority is thus the cement that keeps people together and is the factor allowing them to rely on each other in the vast give-and-take of social, material, and cultural transactions. It is then a positive factor, invented by nature, that divides us according to our functions, responsibilities, aspirations in life, equalities, and inequalities. It is, indeed, the last item of this list, inequality, that creates the controversy about authority and engenders the opposition that the term meets in ages of egalitarian fervor. Why the inequality, asked some ancient sages, when the sun that shines upon us and the air we breathe are equally distributed? This book tries to answer the question, but since it does so through reasoned discourse, the very reference to reason seems to some as an authoritarian endeavor. The antiauthority attitude usually originates in emotions and instances of indignation, and in such cases reason itself sounds like a provocation. In a lecture on the subject at Davidson College some years ago, professors and students showed themselves extremely hostile, but when I later had opportunities to speak privately with some of them, it turned out that my interlocutors were quite in agreement. What had happened? Simply, that as a group (the class), those who thought I was right in my analysis of authority
