The problem of authority is not merely a political problem or even simply a problem of faith. It instead requires a gathering up of the whole of life, indeed the world in all of its rich multitude of aspects, in relation to its meaning-granting center.

Anxious about trends he was witnessing in the ’60s and ’70s, Russell Kirk attempted to recover the “roots of American order” by drawing on the cultural heritage that informed the Founding.[1] He enthusiastically affirmed Simone Weil’s statement, which she wrote in the ruins of postwar Europe, that “[o]rder is the first need of all,” saying that it remained true in all circumstances, not just the ones she faced: “Our own society, like that of any other people, is held together by what is called an ‘order.’ ”[2] If he is right to expand her statement (and he is), then, at a moment in which it is no longer clear whether our society is actually “held together,” the question of the roots of American order demands to be revisited.

According to the classical mind, the ultimate root of social order is authority. To know what this means, we should explain the various words. “Order” is a unified multiplicity, a whole in which the many and diverse parts are all related to each other because they are related to a common principle that transcends them. In this respect, there cannot be an order without a source of unity that transcends what it unifies; every order has a principle, just as every principle implies an order. In a social order, or in other words in a society that is not simply a set of self-contained and unrelated individuals who just happen to occupy the same geographical space (Aristotle compares such a “society” to cows feeding at the same trough), there must therefore be some unifying principle that is able to bind the individuals together in a genuine whole. This unifying principle must be, on the one hand, transcendent of the individual members of the whole, and indeed of the whole itself, in order to bring it about as a unity, but on the other hand it has to be a reality immanent within the whole in order for its unifying power to be effectively communicated. This is the role, in a social order, of authority, which represents the originating principle in the community as one of its members, and at the same time as distinguished from the members of the community through office. The word “authority” denotes an asymmetrical bond between human beings that arises through (as opposed to “merely” symbolic) representation of a transcendent principle of order by one person to another. This transcendent principle—the “auctor,” originator, appealed to in auctoritas—unites the holder of office and those that are subject to the office within a more basic order: since they are both originated by it.

In an age in which the ontological roots of trust have broken down and we cannot hear the word “authority” without some experience of suspicion, fear, and resentment, it is especially important to recall, also, that the word “auctoritas” derives its meaning even more originally from the verb “augere,” meaning “to augment” or “to give growth.” The transcendent principle, then, is essentially generous, in an ontological sense of communicating its power and so bringing about the flourishing of its recipients. As ontologically generative, and so generous, the principle of authority, which the representative bears witness to and communicates, is essentially good, and the bonds effected by authority are of their nature life-giving. This quality is objective, and in that sense independent of the personal character of the representative who bears authority; but precisely because of the objectivity of the authoritative office, one can expect that having authority will tend to form and expand the character of the representative, habitually opening his field of concern to the larger order he is meant to help realize.

In a traditional culture, there are literally countless expressions of the “Golden Thread,”[3] the literal “life-line”—in other words, the ontological bond that saves because it gives life—of authority, and, because of its essentially generous nature, every expression is also in turn a source, a recapitulation of the original principle that diffuses it, multiplying that authority beyond itself in reciprocally reinforcing concentric circles all the way up and down the social scale. It is common to describe the premodern cosmos as a “great chain of being” in which all things are connected, all things have a proper place and role, within an evident order. In such a cosmos, custom is a vehicle of authority as much as is the political ruler and established law; authoritative wisdom “collects” in the person of those who represent inherited tradition and knowledge—the priests, teachers, parents, and elders; there is authority in remembered deeds and great works of art, which Heidegger insightfully interpreted as opening up a world.[4] Nature itself is a source of authority, to the extent that it is recognized as a reflection of the wisdom and love, indeed of the very being, of the Creator. If the phrase “natural law” still makes any sense to us, it is only to the degree that we continue to recognize nature and so as a source of authority.[5] Not only statesmen but also doctors and scientists have generally been regarded as figures of authority precisely because of the witness they have borne to this source and its abiding truth. Authority runs so deep in a traditional culture that it takes flesh, as it were, in space and time: the differentiation of space in buildings, lands, and cities that constitutes a location as , together with the literal “playing out” of human activity according to seasons, feasts and fasts, day and night, is a participation in the ontological hierarchy, which is to say, in the concrete reality of authority. These numberless sources, which are taken for granted in the various senses of the phrase because of their properly foundational character, give genuine substance to common human life.

Because authority is the effective communication, the making present, of a principle of order, it can exist only in the concrete. In other words, authority can be realized only through real persons and the actual patterns of existence. A formal process or an impersonal regulatory system, for example, might work to impose and protect a certain way of directing external behavior, but it cannot exercise authority in the deep sense. It cannot communicate growth in reality. Such abstract mechanisms are, instead, a substitute for authority, since they attempt to serve the same function—namely, of instilling order—but without the dangers of the potential “human error” and the limitations of nature, the particularities of finitude, that come with authority and its generally organic expressions. The moral, political, economic, and technological contrivances we devise to protect us from the vulnerabilities and limitations inevitably entailed in creaturely existence—and that come to the fore in bodily existence—have the deep and longer-term effect of cutting off primordial sources of authority. Such sources cannot communicate without concrete mediation, through an ordered set of relationships, and this means that there is no authority without a real hierarchy of some sort and without the natural bonds it implies.

It is essential to recollect the pervasiveness of authority in a traditional culture to be able to appreciate the depth of the crisis that faces us as we begin to approach the middle decades of the 21st century. Hannah Arendt observed that the rejection of authority is one of the most defining features of modernity. The observation has a different sort of resonance if we understand authority to reside not just in legal institutions but in all the fundamental realities of human life—if we see that what is at stake is not just the external regulation of public behavior but the ontological life-line, so to speak, of human community, which attaches people not only to each other but to reality, to the earth, and to history. Authority is not only a source of order, but for that reason also a source of cohesion and identity.

Americans have always been in a uniquely precarious position with respect to the question of authority, because the nation was established arguably as an effort to start an order of existence as much as possible “from scratch,” based on the best ideas received from previous civilizations but in relative freedom from the natural bonds that normally accompany them. (Edmund Burke famously said that Americans embodied the protestantism of the Protestant religion and the dissidence of dissent.[6]) It is precisely what is known as the “genius” of America that presents our rather unique difficulty: the system of checks and balances that constitutes American government is devised to protect the people from the ever-present temptation that  rulers have to abuse power—good governance, our genius says, ought not to depend on the always-unreliable goodness of individual governors. But this impersonal mechanism achieves such a protection (to the extent that it does) as the ultimate source of authority. But this raises an increasingly urgent question: by “people,” do we mean a collection of separate individuals taken as individuals, or is there something that gathers them into a whole? Is it possible even to speak of “the people” without a reference to some higher principle?

It has been said that one of the things that distinguishes America from other nations is the novel source of its unity: what originally makes Americans American is not an ethnicity, or bloodline, not a common culture or common faith, not an inherited tradition, not even (at least in principle) a common language, but finally an idea. Whether one interprets that idea as fundamental freedom, as the essential dignity of the individual, or as “equal opportunity,” it is this idea that has given America its admired openness and universality: a Ukrainian could move to Germany and live there seven years so as to become a naturalized citizen, but this would not mean he would be recognized as a German, while the American identity, precisely because it is not rooted in something traditionally or naturally given, is more readily transferable. We have Ukrainian-Americans just as we have German-Americans and African-Americans. In a sense, what unites all Americans is that we are all “x-Americans.”

But can an idea unify a people in fact? Can an idea convey effective authority in the manner described above? A proper answer to this question would of course depend in part on the nature of the idea, as well as on its source or how it came about. In the American case, the idea, in its positive face, is the equality of all people, regardless of what we today call “race, color, or creed,” which concretely means that any person has a chance to succeed, “no matter where he comes from.” But this positive formulation has a shadow-side, which cannot be separated from it. It means that one’s origin ought not to matter. This is an essentially revolutionary idea, the very content of which is the severing in principle of all the traditional sources of authority. As Gordon Wood has shown in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history,[7] the American revolution was perhaps less bloody than other revolutions in early modern Europe, because—if we set aside the enormous question raised by the driving of the indigenous peoples from their ancestral home, which was not so much a revolution as a violent conquest—it did not have to displace its own long-established and deeply-rooted civilization, but only had to repel, once and for all, the meddling of a civilization literally an ocean away. There were no monastic lands that needed to be confiscated or altars that had to be stripped. From the perspective of the European colonists, if not from that of the Native Americans, the land “started out” as secular, which is to say that it started out as innocent of any tradition of authority to which the new inhabitants would experience themselves as already bound. (To conjure up in the imagination a primordial “state of nature,” John Locke began, “In the beginning all the world was America.”[8])

Precisely because of its at-the-time imputed originality, the culture produced in the New World was far more radical than people often think with respect to the older civilization. Conservative scholars, such as Kirk, often insist that America, at least in its early history, embraced the best of the preceding tradition; even they would have to admit, however, that these ideas were not received in a traditional way but posited on other grounds. What has distinguished America from Europe, and indeed from all other world cultures, is not so much the tradition it inherited as the fact that it affirmed this tradition, or select parts of it, anyway, on its own authority. But this is a contradiction in terms. In a certain respect, America is an experiment in the political organization of existence without traditional authority. According to Wood, this simple fact entailed a “momentous upheaval” that essentially “transform[ed] … the relationships that bound people to each other.”[9] Although the French Revolution, for example, introduced a wholly novel form into French civilization, their revolution has remained an event within a history that preceded it and outlives it, a history that relativizes the novelty and the ideas the Revolution championed. America, by contrast, effectively begins with its Revolution, and is thus defined by that event in an incomparable way, since it brings to a global-political—a definitively public—expression the spirit that had animated the people from the start.

For this very reason, history has had a unique importance for America. In the spring of 1861, on the brink of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln famously appealed, not to some common belief, but to the “mystic chords of memory” in his desperate effort to hold the still-young country together. Speaking generally, it is in the end not enough to say, as we suggested above, that America is an idea rather than a culture, ethnicity, or faith, and that such an idea has sufficed to make America a real political community. An abstract idea could never effectively bind people to one another, at least not in the long run. This incapacity is even more evident if the very content of the idea is that community is only a result of, and never presupposed by, individual agency. We note that Lincoln did not try to gather the nation together around the distinctively American sense of liberty. One might seek unification in the shared institutions of American society, but, as the great legal historian Harold Berman convincingly argued,[10] juridical institutions exercise authority only insofar as they are received as bearers of hallowed tradition and expressions of ultimate meaning. American political institutions are not, and cannot be, instances of authority precisely to the extent that they claim to be “neutral,” in the sense of not representing a real transcendent principle.

Instead of an idea or shared institutions, it is arguably the history of America that has thus far played the role of conveying authority. Revolutionaries have always divinized their founding deeds; this historically demonstrable fact serves as evidence for our argument that authority is nothing if it is not the effective channeling, so to speak, of a transcendent origin and that a cohering community is not possible without authority. If a revolution eliminates the given sources of authority, it has to magnify itself (as Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed) to fill the hole. Such a need is especially urgent when there are no other, deeper sources to draw on, as is the case in America. It is thus natural that the theme of “civil religion” should be so prominent in studies of early American culture, and that we as a people should have become so accustomed, from the very beginning (as Catherine L. Albanese, for example, documented decades ago[11]), to treat the Founding Fathers as something like saints and the symbols and instruments of the American Founding as something like sacraments. This spontaneous theopoiesis is a testimony to the place authority necessarily has in a society, and to the sacred origin that inevitably constitutes it.

This fact can help us begin to make sense of our current situation, in which we experience a new and radical kind of lawlessness—coincident with the incessant production of new and more invasive laws and the accumulation of technologies of surveillance and coercive force. It is not just that we are starting to see that “the center cannot hold,” as the poet said, but we are discovering that there was never a center there to begin with. The growing movements that are poisoning the well of our history, generally under the banner of “critical race theory,” threaten the American identity and the social fabric that holds us together far more than something comparable in another nation. The French, for example, can weather the discrediting of Robespierre and Napoleon rather easily, because they have Louis IX, and Clovis, and on and on; indeed, because of the Catholic roots of France, discrediting Napoleon, who had sought to co-opt the Church’s authority, arguably deepens and strengthens French identity. But can America survive the discrediting of her Founders? We do not have the Catholic Church at our roots; we have, instead, little more than the “idea” of freedom and equality, regardless of “race, color, and creed,” the idea that one’s origin does not matter, which means it does not matter whether one belongs to the great Western tradition, at the very center of which is the Catholic Church, or whether one has chosen some other faith option. This “unifying” idea does not strengthen the life-line of authority but “cancels” it.

What we are witnessing is something more fundamental than a failure of the mechanisms of control, an increasing tendency for individuals to violate an otherwise given order in one instance or another. Instead, our crisis betrays something apparently new in the history of the world, namely, a kind of de-naturing of authority itself, an internal collapse that coincides with a transformation of the essence—both the meaning and the substance—of the matter. As a mere mechanism, the system of checks and balances, which was meant to divide power, and so limit it, without appeal to a more fundamental principle of authority, cannot but become an institutionalized disorder, one aspect of which is captured in the word “bureaucracy.” Lacking real substance, the various powers of government cannot help but impose themselves in a purely extrinsic manner, and cannot help but transgress in practice their artificially secured space: judges are making laws, law-givers are making judges, and executors are just making, without any more deference to the other branches of government than those have for each other.

But the crisis runs much deeper than just a practical disorder: authority is what holds things together all the way up and all the way down the social sphere. When it is “de-natured,” the effect is felt in every one of our relationships. Plato described a polis without an effective principle of unity as one in which the superiors are compelled to flatter their inferiors. He could have been describing our school system, not to mention our families and households, in which those who are meant to lead and bring order feel compelled to please and subject themselves to the judgment of the ones for whom they are responsible. We find it increasingly difficult to recognize our relationships as constituted by a reality that precedes us, a genuinely common good that we communicate to one another according to an order that reflects that goodness: hierarchy, “sacred order” (hier-archy).

One could look at just about any ordered company in our society or any of our basic institutions as evidence of this corruption of authority. (And notice that I am using that phrase in a way radically different from the typical one, which sees it as synonymous with the abuse of power and so has already conceded the loss of authority qua authority). An especially telling example now is the status of science. In principle, as mentioned above, a scientist ought to be a figure of authority, not principally because of his “expertise” in the modern sense critiqued by Alasdair McIntyre, but because he represents nature, which has authority because of its ultimate source in the goodness of God. Once we bracket out a transcendent principle of order, we cannot but hear the statements of scientists as personal opinion uttered for some ulterior purpose, or in other words as mere forms of political manipulation. And so they often are. Indeed, if the public sphere is the place wherein we think, speak, decide, and take action as a people, and if the absence of authority means that there is no longer any such thing, ontologically speaking, as “a people,” then to enter into the public sphere through our speech and action is to enter into a realm of unreality, in which—to cite Plato again—mere appearance holds sway. The eclipse of authority empties our own words, which are nothing if their social nature is removed, of substance, and this implies a radical self-alienation. This particular effect of the eclipse of authority is, as we all experience, powerfully reinforced by the social technologies that increasingly mediate all of our interactions, not only with others but also with ourselves. As psychologists have observed with growing concern, we are unable to keep from reinterpreting ourselves according to the images we have artificially projected to others. Social technologies, which are meant to connect us to one another, have instead quite evidently become principles of alienation, over which we have little control. They make our words and images automatically public while at the same time isolating us from any common space.

The danger we run in such circumstances, when authority has been so weakened as to be unable to bind us even to ourselves, is a reactionary appeal to power and to God. Power, after all, is the substitute for authority when the transcendent source is eclipsed. The ultimate source of authority is, of course, God. But that authority is essentially communicative and has its reality in the various channels of nature and culture we described at the outset. To bypass such channels, such mediators, is to transform authority into mere power. This is the temptation of integralism, whether in its 19th-century and early-20th-century European version in which it bound itself to fascist political movements, or in its 21st-century American version, in which it has circumscribed itself almost entirely inside the ambit of the internet, which is simultaneously invincibly powerful and utterly impotent. One tries to correct a secularized disorder by imposing more forcefully upon it a supernatural order. The imposition of sovereignty in such a way, however, is not a recovery of authority but a sure sign of its absence.

We cannot recover authority without recognizing that the Author of every order is inevitably mediated, in one way or another, in all of the fundamental realities that constitute our existence. The problem of authority, in other words, is not merely a political problem or even simply a problem of faith. It instead requires a gathering up of the whole of life, indeed the world in all of its rich multitude of aspects, in relation to its meaning-granting center. We tend not to see that there is an essential connection between, say, ugly churches, suburban sprawl, violent polarization in politics and the proliferation of fringe groups on both the left and right, the sentimentalizing of friendships and familial relations, 24-hour convenience stores, the ideologizing of the sciences, the concentration of almost inconceivable amounts of capital in individuals with no established social responsibility, the systematic impoverishment of topsoil, poisoning of water and pollution of seas, the domination of culture by “entertainment,” … and the loss of authority. But we need to see the connection if we are to be able to assess the depth of the crisis that confronts us. The task of recovering authority is inevitably something radical, comprehensive, and concrete: it cannot occur without a retapping of all the sources, a reappropriation of all the fundamental dimensions of our culture from the ground up, from their deepest roots, by regrafting them onto the Vine that originally generated Western civilization.

Republished with gracious permission from New Polity. We recommend you subscribe for all their best essays.

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Notes:

[1] Russel Kirk, The Roots of American Order (Malibu, CA: Pepperdine University Press, 1974).

[2] Ibid., 3.

[3] Adopting the Homeric image of the cosmos hanging from the hand of Zeus by a golden thread, Plato describes the “leading-string, which is golden and holy, [as being] that of our reasoning, and is referred to as the common law of the city” (Laws 645a). It is helpful to think of authority, linked both to God and to reason, as this “Golden Thread,” and as the source of both order and freedom. For a larger discussion of this point, see my Freedom from Reality: The Dialbolical Character of Modern Liberty (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 295-322.

[4] See Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008), 143-212.

[5] Even though the Greeks and Romans lacked a doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, they nevertheless had a profound sense of the world as created, in the sense I mean here: an understanding of all things in reality somehow being due to God and bearing traces of the divine.

[6] Edmund Burke, “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies,” in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 1 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), 464-71.

[7] Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

[8] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 301.

[9] Wood, Radicalism, 5.

[10] See Harold Berman’s “Introduction” to his Faith and Order: The Reconciliation of Law and Religion (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), 1-20. See also his two magisterial volumes, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), and Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

[11] Catherine L. Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976).

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