ABSTRACT
The Soviet system of domination has inherited an important political tradition of Western Europe. The exercise of private authority is adumbrated by ideologies whenever reliance is not placed exclusively on the strength of the few. But for the exercise of private authority in many Western societies it is significant that the managerial theory of a self-dependent laboring class helped to neutralize and transform the ancient distrust with which ruling groups have regarded the masses of the people. The task is to analyze the resulting structure of private and public authority in order to characterize the novelty of this historical phenomenon more specifically. Somewhat analogous considerations apply to the exercise of public authority. This chapter concerns the organizational consequences of normative instability in the exercise of public authority. The significance and the timing of this Western European background are appreciated best by considering the contrast with the development in Tsarist and Soviet Russia.
