TWILIGHT OF AUTHORITY A, Robert Nisbet New York OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1975 Copyright © igyy by Robert Nisbet Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 75-7357 Printed in the United States of America PREFACE Periodically in Western history twilight ages make their appear¬ ance. Processes of decline and erosion of institutions are more evi¬ dent than those of genesis and development. Something like a vac¬ uum obtains in the moral order for large numbers of people. Human loyalties, uprooted from accustomed soil, can be seen tum¬ bling across the landscape with no scheme of larger purpose to fix them. Individualism reveals itself less as achievement and en¬ terprise than as egoism and mere performance. Retreat from the major to the minor, from the noble to the trivial, the communal to the personal, and from the objective to the subjective is com¬ monplace. There is a widely expressed sense of degradation of val¬ ues and of corruption of culture. The sense of estrangement from community is strong. Accompanying the decline of institutions and the decay of values in such ages is the cultivation of power that becomes increasingly military, or paramilitary, in shape. Such power exists in almost exact proportion to the decline of traditional social and moral au¬ thority. Representative and liberal institutions of government slip into patterns ever more imperial in character. Military symbols and constraints loom where civil values reigned before. The central¬ ization and, increasingly, individualization of power is matched in the social and cultural spheres by a combined hedonism and egali¬ tarianism, each in its way a reflection of the destructive impact of power on the hierarchy that is native to the social bond. Over everything hangs the specter of war. Such war may be civil VI Preface or foreign or both. War invariably has its expressed political, diplo¬ matic, or economic objects, but no one can miss the degree to which it becomes increasingly an anodyne for internal torments and frustrations. As the way out of economic crisis, political divi¬ sion, and intolerable social disintegration, war, despite its con¬ secration of force and violence, its raw disciplines, and its heavy blanket of regimentation upon a social order, becomes attractive to enlarging numbers. A number of major twilight ages can be seen in the two and a half millennia of Western history. The post-Peloponnesian Athens in which the young Plato grew up is one; so is the period in the Greek world which just precedes the rise of Christianity; and Rome of the first century b.c. and again in the age of St. Augustine surely qualifies. In modern European history the period so inaccu¬ rately and widely referred to as the Renaissance—one so much bet¬ ter described, it seems to me, by Huizinga’s phrase “the waning of the Middle Ages”—is surely one of the West’s notable twilight epochs. All of the major stigmata—cultural and social decay, cele¬ bration of war and power, and intense, often morbid, subjec¬ tivism—are present in the Italy so brilliantly described by Burck- hardt and a few of his greater successors. So, I believe, is the twentieth century in the West a twilight age. That is largely what this book is about. It is not a study in compar¬ ative history, though I do not hesitate to draw from other ages in occasional stress of a point. My objective is that of seeking to light up the present, chiefly the American present, in the historical per¬ spective of twilight. It is hard to think of any other useful perspec¬ tive in which to set the combined phenomena of sense of cultural decay, erosion of institutions, progressive inflation of values in all spheres, economic included, and constantly increasing central¬ ization—and militarization—of power. If there were no other in¬ dicator, the impact of war and of the military on the West, espe¬ cially since about 1940, would be sufficient—that and the cognate spread of the kind of social equalitarianism which is bred less by Preface Vll the moral value of equality than by centralized power’s leveling ef¬ fects upon the natural hierarchies of all social institutions. In the final chapter I seek to identify the essential social elements of an alternative to the twilight age we live in now. It is possible, as I suggest, that certain countervailing forces are already in evidence, leading at once to diminution of the state’s power and to a greater degree of vitality in our social organization. What is clear is that the two processes, whenever and wherever they are to be found, are indissolubly linked. I know of no principle in history more often validated than that which tells us that social health and political power are inversely related. If, as this book suggests, social anemia is the necessary consequence of political hypertrophy, it is evident that renewal of strength in the social order demands a fundamental change in present uses of political power. R.N. New York May ipys ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Parts of this book have appeared, in very different forms and con¬ texts, during the past half-dozen years in The Public Interest, Com¬ mentary, Encounter, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Change, The New York Times, and The Montreal Star. Needless to say, I am grateful to these journals for the opportunities provided for earliest formula¬ tion of some of the book’s ideas. It is a pleasure to record here my gratitude to Joseph Epstein, editor of The American Scholar, for orig¬ inal encouragement to develop these ideas into a book. To Sheldon Meyer, vice president of Oxford University Press and friend of many years, I gladly acknowledge not only needed personal sup¬ port but suggestions of content and style which have added greatly to whatever merit may lie in the book. Stephanie Golden, assistant editor at Oxford University Press, has provided detailed, often nec¬ essarily critical, invariably helpful advice that is embodied in liter¬ ally every page. I thank her most warmly. Finally, to my wife Caroline I express loving appreciation of all that she has once again managed to do to make a book possible. CONTENTS THE POLITICAL COMMUNITY AT BAY 3 THE CRUMBLING WALLS OL POLITICS 75 THE LURE OL MILITARY SOCIETY 146 THE NEW SCIENCE OL DESPOTISM 1 94 THE RESTORATION OF AUTHORITY 230 TWILIGHT OF AUTHORITY 1 <%> THE POLITICAL COMMUNITY AT BAY I believe the single most remarkable fact at the present time in the West is neither technological nor economic, but political: the waning of the historic political community, the widening sense of the obsolescence of politics as a civilized pursuit, even as a habit of mind. By political community I mean more than the legal state. I have in mind the whole fabric of rights, liberties, participations, and protections that has been, even above industrialism, I think, the dominant element of modernity in the West. To an astonishing degree modern Western society has been political society, and this has been made possible only by the growing sense of the state in modern times as being more than a structure of power, as being a cherished form of community. In a very real sense the political community in the West has been the successor, certainly since the eighteenth century, of the church as the major arena of man’s hopes, devotions, and aspirations. One would have to go to religion to find anything comparable to mod¬ ern Western man’s willingness to make sacrifices, of property and Twilight of Authority 4 life when necessary, in the name of political patriotism. Patriotism through most of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth exercised every bit of the hold upon man’s relation to state that piety for so long had to church. Looking back, and re¬ flecting on the innumerable centuries earlier when political govern¬ ment was the object of fear and distrust in so many areas, symbo¬ lized in popular consciousness by the policeman, soldier, or tax collector, it is one of history’s miracles that from the end of the eighteenth century on in the West populations were willing to en¬ trust so much of their economic, social, and moral life to the super¬ vision of the political sphere. Without question, the political— meaning not merely government and state but a whole way of life, participation, and thought—has had man’s trust to a degree no other institution in modern times has had. It no longer has. A variety of evidences, most of them by now obvious to the layman, suggest that confidence and trust have been replaced by opposite sentiments, that government, from being the protector of the lives of its citizens, has become the greatest single source of exploitation in the minds of a growing number of people. Once political government in the United States signified some de¬ gree of austerity of life, of commitment to the public weal, of a willingness to forego most of life’s luxuries in the name of service that was for a long time closely akin to what one found in the ranks of clergy and teachers. Today, as scores of surveys and polls re¬ veal, government is perceived by large numbers of citizens as the domain of economic luxury, great personal power, high social sta¬ tus, all symbolized perfectly by the pomp and grandeur of public architecture. It is also perceived, we learn from the same surveys and polls, as being possessed of a degree of arrogance that no cor¬ poration could today get away with in the business world, that was once regarded as the privilege of hereditary aristocracy. A clerisy of power exists that in size and complexity is without precedent since the height of the Roman Empire. This clerisy has deep roots in modern European history, but never before, not even