ABSTRACT
Discourse about liberalism and authority suffers distracting embarrassments. If the discourse aspires to contemporaneity it may well be accused of necromancy or even necrophilia; liberalism and authority are dead. Nor can it easily take refuge in historicality; one set of eminent authorities avers that liberalism has existed nowhere outside the pages of hopelessly unhistorical “histories” of political thought, another that authority has enjoyed but a fleeting presence in one or two times and places.1 Should one be so heedless as to persevere with the discourse, the choices would appear to be unattractive: unmasking one’s supposed subject matter or perpetuating mythologies. The bold categoricality of these contentions arouses suspicion of lurking essentialisms. If “liberalism” is dead and “authority” is gone-sans phrase as it were-the least we must say is that each of “them” must have lived and been among us in forms pretty definite and well understood. Medical examiners need bodies to pronounce over. Even the proposition that liberalism is a figment would seem to betray certitude about what “it” has been thought to be and confidence that the supposititious entity will elude our most assiduous researches. The Exorcisor needs to know what the ghost was thought to be like and where it was said to lurk. Uncomfortable with such convenient but almost certainly oversimplifying assumptions, I hope for nothing so dramatic as confirmation or refutation of the sweeping empirical contentions I have mentioned. As suggested, however, the very presuppositions of those contentions encourage the thought that there are subject matters-if only at the level of ideas-available for examination and reflection. Equally important, the uncommon fervor with which the contentions are commonly advanced engenders the suspicion that examining these subject matters may tell us something about our political estate. I will use the terms liberal and authority without further apology, but I will not make a concerted effort to define liberalism or to document the past or present reality of authority. I will be examining a number of ideas that are familiar and, I think, commonly associated with these terms. Insofar as I have a theme it is also familiar, namely, that the deep tension between liberalism and authority, the deep ambivalence of liberals concerning authority, could hardly be otherwise. I hope also to suggest that this is no bad thing; that our political estate is the better for it.
