In the middle of the twentieth century, the political theorist Hannah Arendt made a disconcerting announcement. “Authority has vanished from the modern world,” Arendt declared. “Practically as well as theoretically, we are no longer in a position to know what authority really is.” And she added that “the moment we begin to talk and think about authority, it is as though we were caught in a maze of abstractions, metaphors, and figures of speech in which everything can be taken and mistaken for something else, because we have no reality, either in history or in everyday experience, to which we can unanimously appeal.”
Suppose for a moment that Arendt was correct: would her surprising news be cause for lamentation, or rather for jubilation? Typically, the invocation of “authority” does not prompt spontaneous rejoicing; it may instead evoke images of arrogant, pretentious people who think they have the right to boss us around. So, if authority has indeed “vanished,” perhaps we should celebrate? “Free at last! Thank God, we are free at last!”
Arendt thought otherwise, though. She suggested, ominously if obscurely, that the disappearance of authority amounted to some kind of catastrophe for humanity. The “loss [of authority],” Arendt observed gravely, “is tantamount to the loss of the groundwork of the world.”
It is an intriguing metaphor—and a disturbing one. “The loss of the groundwork of the world.” What is “the groundwork of the world”? What would it mean to lose that groundwork? The image elicits an unsettling vision of people with nothing firm to stand on—people lurching and staggering and reeling as they vainly try to plant themselves on some liquid or lava-like surface that shifts and disintegrates beneath their steps. Like children in one of those amusement park exhibits—or maybe “The Flopper” in a famous Cardozo decision—in which the floor is constantly moving, everything is off-kilter, and everyone keeps tumbling down. Except that this time the victims would be not children but all of us, and the spectacle would be grim, not amusing. Modern civilization—lost in the funhouse?
Coming from one of the most respected political thinkers of the last century, these are sobering if cryptic words—words deserving of examination, and reflection. Because if Arendt was right, understanding how authority somehow “vanished” from the modern world, and how that disappearance amounts to the “loss of the groundwork of the world,” might offer us a valuable insight into our times, with their distinctive frustrations and dysfunctions.
But was Arendt right?
Surely there is cause for skepticism. After all, isn’t “authority”—as a word, as a concept, and as an operative reality—a perfectly familiar feature of modern life? Don’t we have authority, or authorities (plural), all around us? Primarily, perhaps, we attribute “authority” to governments, and to government officials—and to the laws that such governments and their officials promulgate. And government officials with their teeming hosts of laws and regulations and requirements have hardly vanished; on the contrary, they swarm about us on every side. It might be a huge relief if they would vanish, or at least back off a bit: No such luck! In addition, there are plenty of other non-governmental figures to whom we ascribe “authority.” Bosses, school principals, parents. Teachers. Coaches.
In short, far from having disappeared, authority seems virtually ubiquitous.
Beyond its prima facie implausibility, Arendt’s claim also seems paradoxical—because if the claim were correct, we might think, it would be one that she could hardly make, and that we could hardly respond to. If it were actually true that “we no longer have any idea what ‘authority’ is,” as Arendt contended, then saying as much would be like saying “We have no idea what ‘glumph’ is.” To which we might respond, “That’s correct. What on earth is ‘glumph’? What are you even talking about?” But Arendt’s declaration doesn’t seem like that; it seems like a statement that we can understand, discuss, agree or disagree with. How is this possible unless we do have some conception of what authority is?
Still, it would be rash to dismiss the considered statements of a respected political theorist too quickly (or after just two or three paragraphs of skeptical reflection). Moreover, Arendt was not alone; other thinkers have sometimes made similar observations. R. B. Friedman reported that the claim “that the very concept of authority has been corrupted or even lost in the modern world” is “an opinion frequently expressed in some of the most well-known discussions of authority in recent years.” In our own century, the philosopher Michael White has remarked that “[a]n enduring problem concerning authority for us post-Enlightenment moderns, it seems to me, is that natural authority has largely disappeared from our most common world-views.” Going back in time, the Christian existentialist Soren Kierkegaard lamented that “the concept of authority has been entirely forgotten in our confused age.” So the claim that authority has disappeared, with confounding or even catastrophic consequences for us, deserves our attention, and our investigation.
