The Right to Command

Authority and Its Enemies By Thomas Molnar Arlington House, 142 pp., $7.95 “Who wants society, wants authority.” This truth, argues Thomas Molnar, is self-evident. Society is “constituted” by authority, and requires not only fellowship but purpose, and the appointment of persons and institutions to realize its purposes. Those who make the organizational decisions exert authority. If nobody decides, there is no organization, no social order, no society.

The common objection to authority is that it denies the autonomy of the individual. Robert Paul Wolff, the anarchist philosopher, argues along Kantian lines that to submit to authority is to abdicate one’s rationality, and hence to behave in a subhuman way. The upshot of this is that no authority can ever be legitimate: there can be neither a right to command nor a duty to obey. No man can be subordinate to another without his own consent.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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Authority and Its Enemies By Thomas Molnar Arlington House, 142 pp., $7.95 “Who wants society, wants authority.” This truth, argues Thomas Molnar, is self-evident. Society is “constituted” by authority, and requires not only fellowship but purpose, and the appointment of persons and institutions to realize its purposes. Those who make the organizational decisions exert authority. If nobody decides, there is no organization, no social order, no society.

The common objection to authority is that it denies the autonomy of the individual. Robert Paul Wolff, the anarchist philosopher, argues along Kantian lines that to submit to authority is to abdicate one’s rationality, and hence to behave in a subhuman way. The upshot of this is that no authority can ever be legitimate: there can be neither a right to command nor a duty to obey. No man can be subordinate to another without his own consent.