ABSTRACT
In traditional society authority is hardly recognized as having separate or even distinguishable identity. The entire weight of morality—which is typically the morality of duty and allegiance—makes authority an undifferentiated aspect of the social order, the government hardly more than a symbolic superstructure. The centrality of authority in Emile Durkheim's thought may be inferred from some words he wrote on the relation between discipline and personality. Despite important differences between Georg Simmel and Durkheim, there is striking resemblance between their conceptions of the function of authority in the social order and in the genesis and maintenance of personality. Georg Hegel was equally concerned with the protection of authority from the inroads of centralized, rationalistic power. Alexis Tocqueville's Democracy in America is the first systematic and empirical study of the effects of political power on modern society. Contrast between traditional and modern society forms, for Max Weber as for Tocqueville and Karl Marx, the essential background of his theory of power.
