ABSTRACT
People often complain of the collapse of authority and have done so in western societies for some considerable time. The quotation from De Tocqueville above might stand for many nineteenth-century discussions of the topic; traditional patterns of authority are being eroded by the new spirit of democracy and the spread of individualism. Desirable or otherwise, these changes leave a vacuum into which other forms of authority, despotic, arbitrary and even more unaccountable, may step. Similar concerns are raised in the twentieth century, even if the language, and many of the themes, are different; influential figures bemoan the loss of respect for authority, a decline in traditional institutions like the family, a consequent growth in crime, and a generalized sense of unease and disorder. The continuity of complaints about the erosion of proper authority over a long period raises a number of questions. It may well be that the complainants have
only a partial view of the matter and their worries are a kind of special pleading. Thus they may be exercised about the decline of authority only because it is the authority of a particular social group or class, of which they are members or spokesmen, that is in decline. They see in their own decline that of society as a whole. In contemporary society this may be particularly the case for older members. The middle-aged or elderly, who are beginning to lose their power and status, are particularly prone to see the young, who are beginning to gain theirs, as failing to respect authority, and simultaneously as constituting sources of disorder. Even if these diagnoses of the erosion of authority are correct, there are questions about the kind of explanation that is appropriate. Thus, these could be commentaries on a long-term change in patterns of authority-secular changes. Or, the complainants could simply be witnessing short-term adjustments in the kinds of social groups that hold authority without serious alteration to the structures of authority-cyclical changes. Perhaps more seriously, generalized claims about the collapse of authority-‘constituted powers…crumbling down on every side’—tend to obscure the way that everyday life is constituted by very many spheres of authority, perhaps overlapping, some of which may indeed be in decline, while others are hale and hearty.
