ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud himself lent power and credence to anti-institutional sentiment. Some followers of Freud, meanwhile, have taken the utopian view that the goal of human striving is the creation of a “non-repressive” society. When enlightened persons in the West think about freedom and coercion they commonly line up freedom with the individual and coercion with society. Talcott Parsons, the great American sociologist, argued throughout a lifetime of reflection that “society is a religiously-based moral order.” Humans live in institutions as their natural habitat; hence, their capacity to endure. In some ways, institutions are more sacred than individuals: they represent the enduring good of the many. Social innovations, merely because they are innovations, have no special claim to represent an advance in the possibilities of freedom. Some analysts argue that the real sense of reality, stories, and symbols in American life are secular, even though the “official” or “rhetorical” ones are religious.
