Modernity's Wager: Authority, the Self, and Transcendence

Introduction
FROM ANCIENT Babylon to contemporary Indonesia, from China to Canada, and from the Inuit to the Parisian, all peoples and societies have experienced power and its differential distribution. Defined by Max Weber as "the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance," power has been a fact of social life from time out of mind.1 Like people everywhere and in all ages, most members of modern societies readily understand the workings of power. Power and power differentials are everywhere. We are schooled in its uses and abuses. We ascertain its trappings. We know who wields it and who does not. We are, in this country anyway, concerned about spreading it around more fairly, as can be seen by the pervasive rhetoric of empowerment.
One thing that sets modern society apart from most other peoples and places, however, is the difficulty its members have in appreciating and fully understanding one of power's cognate terms: authority. This book is about authority and the need to sensitize ourselves to its resonances despite our impulses to the contrary. It sets out and develops four major claims about authority and its relation to self-identities, as follows:
1. Modernity, whether in the form of liberal politics, capitalist exchange, or the epistemologies of the social sciences, is inherently hostile to the idea and experience of authority and as a result has difficulty understanding its persistence.
2. Despite this aversion of modern politics and society to authority, any account of the self that does not include an account of authority will ultimately fail to explain human action and experience in the world.
3. We ignore the phenomenon of authority at our peril, for by so doing we fail to recognize the import of the reemergence of ethnic, religious, and primordial identities in today's global culture.
4. By establishing the necessary connection of authority to ideas of selfhood through such phenomena as community and the sacred, this book hopes to resensitize us to this ineliminable aspect of our existence while at the same time maintaining commitments to democracy, pluralism, and tolerance.
The remainder of the introduction is devoted to a preliminary clarification of the above points.
The idea of authority is traditionally defined as legitimate power, that is, as power which is seen as fairly exercised or justly wielded. Authority, then, with its attendant association of legitimacy, stands in contradistinction to power simpliciter. It was Max Weber who offered a succinct and powerful formulation of the two possible foundations of legitimacy.
The first he terms subjective and the second external. Weber posits the three possible bases of the subjective as follows: "1) affectual: resulting from emotional surrender; or 2) value-rational: determined by the belief in the absolute validity of the order as the expression of ultimate values of an ethical or esthetic or of any other type; or 3) religious: determined by the belief that salvation depends upon obedience to the order." The external bases of legitimacy he defines as "guaranteed by the expectation of specific external effects, that is, by interest situations."2 To a great extent, modern, liberal societies have come to base their legitimacy on the second, external source, upon a politics of interest, as delineated in the writings of Hobbes and Hume. As a result, people living in these societies find it difficult to understand and empathize with the motives and motivations of people for whom the other set of justifying practices--those rooted in ultimate and more usually in sacred values--provides the foundations of legitimacy and hence of authority.
Motives and motivations are central here. For authority to exist, as opposed to power, the legitimacy of its actions must be registered in the subjective experience and consciousness of the actors. Whereas power rests solely on the coercion of the will, authority rests on what Weber has called the "inner justification" of dominion.3 This inner, subjective experience is at the heart of the phenomenon of authority. In fact, if we can grasp the relevance of Weber's two modes of legitimacy in terms of this subjective experience, we are at least on the way to understanding why most secular liberal members of modern societies have such difficulty understanding authority in other social settings.
We in modern societies accept the existence of power differentials, accept the need to coerce our will, in order to fulfill certain needs or attain certain goals. In the language of social choice theory, we rein in our wills in order to maximize certain utilities.