Authority and lts Enemies
Levy, David
more profitable. It is a measure of Chief Justice Earl Warren's success in stripping the law-abiding of the law's protection that his successor, Warren Burger, greets night-time visitors at his...
...Since that time I have read many of his books and nes;er without interest or profit...
...There is growing awareness within the legal system that punishment might not cure the criminal but it does protect society and discourage crime, which is the first consideration...
...Even when the reader is forced to register disagreement, Molnar always gives him a strongly argued case to answer without fear of stating unfashionable and unpopular views...
...Whether or not prisons rehabilitate, the comforting fact is that a hood cannot mug people while he is locked up...
...But then, Thomas Molnar is never less than provocative...
...In a book, Le soaialisme sans visage, published earlier in 1976 in France and unfortunately not yet available in English, Molnar argued that the widespread demand for "socialism" through the world is best understood as a protest against this state of social disintegration...
...Whether a thug wants to rob a drugstore is unimportant as long as he doesn't...
...As the certainty of adequate punishment increases, the crime rate drops...
...We can summarize Professor Molnar's position, though hardly do justice to the power of his argument and the wealth of his illustration, by saying that he holds that man is such that he only fulfills the demands of his nature through participation in social groups, that such groups have structural needs which must be satisfied if they are to accomplish their particular purposes (educational, economic, religious, etc...
...34 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977...
...In his latest work too, he points out that the socialism of those who answer this demand is "not the hypothetical socialism which...wears a human face, but a faceless one which dissolves what remains of protective institutions, abolishes the political space in which the citizens used to move freely, and imposes a monolithic structure, a regimented existence...
...If the state should be "a philosophy in action," then the state to which Thomas Molnar looks is one sure of its own legitimacy, as rooted in the necessities of human existence, and aware of its limitations both in what in can accomplish and what it is entitled to demand of its citizens...
...Once more Professor Molnar displays the clearheadedness and prescience we have come to expect from him as an analyst of the cultural and political plight of the Western world today...
...If the Augustan restoration fails, then the alternative is less a continuation of the status quo--since we do not have a status quo, we have a rapid degeneration--than the spread and victory of despotic ideology and method...
...It is a measure of Chief Justice Earl Warren's success in stripping the law-abiding of the law's protection that his successor, Warren Burger, greets night-time visitors at his door with a sixshooter...
...It is obvious from reading the criminal cases in The Vietims that judicial obsession with rehabilitation contributes directly to an increase in crime...
...Author Frank Carrington would agree...
...Before the reader comfortingly rejects a choice between such alternatives in the name of liberty and democracy, he should read Authority and Its Enemies...
...The individual analyses are of differing lengths and, in the respectful view of this reviewer, depths of perception...
...In particular, While I think that the examination of state authority could scarcely be bettered, the discussion of the interplay of censorship and the creative artist seems to me to raise more problems than it answers...
...Psychologists like Stanley Milgram and social philosophers like Theodore Adorno have taught us to believe that the exercise and acceptance of authority is an individual but socially induced sickness from which the enlightened social scientist, educator, or revolutionary is duty-bound to "liberate" us...
...Man as we know him, the man you and I are, is so free of instincts that with almost every step he threatens the very community without which he could not exist and survive as a human being...
...Among others, the NAACP's departing leader Roy Wilkins says that, "Negro communities need to speak out and act against Negro criminals...
...The liberal-democratic system wanted to do good by all, its initiators and theoreticians did not imagine that their system, too, would produce marginal people, discontented strata, rational opponents...
...This is the powerful view to which I have not yet heard a convincing answer...
...In turn, Thomas Molnar examines the crisis of authority as it affects the family, school, church, courts of law, literature and art, the army and the state...
...In Brian Crozier's terms, the restoration required is authoritarian without being totalitarian...
...There is every indication that the public realizes the failure of rehabilitation...
...Entertaining utopian hopes about conquering mankind's future destiny once and for all, the system promoted its own desacralization...it dismantled its institutions in the name of the mature individual who could take care of his own interests and knew what was best for him, it scorned patriotism, the nation's symbols, the need for authority...
...and that authority, confidently exercised and readily accepted, is the necessary cement of all such vehicles of DavidLevy teaches sociology at Middlesex Polytechnic, in England...
...It is Molnar's view that we are suffering from a crisis of authority resulting from the typically modern distrust of limiting institutions and mores...
...Carrington quotes Negro leaders who have been reading the opinion polls and feeling the pulse of their followers...
...Too many judges simply deny the obvious truth that punishment reduces crime, a fact criminal behavior validates...
...Authority and Its Enemies is no exception...
...In brief, the liberal-democratic system allowed itself to turn into a nonsystem, a nonnation, a dis-society...
...Behavior, says James Q. Wilson in T/sinking About Crime, is easier to change than attitude...
...Molnar's own preferred solution lies in the possibility of what he calls an "Augustan" as opposed to a despotic restoration of authority...
...Having denounced law and order the past 10 years as a euphemism for racism, liberal politicians are suddenly aware that crime in the streets most endangers their traditional constituencies: blacks and bluecollar ethnics...
...ID40go0DQQQQOIo~Q00oQQ6Q0DQmi00O94tOI~mmiQQQ0OgoQQi~QQ~Qqgg00o6O0QBQgOO~DDI0OmI4Q0~0Q~e000m0BDQQ0QOQ~0D0Iq0Qge0DQ6QO0O~QQ0 Q0~0~t00OQQqQoi0~Q0m~QI BOOK REVIEW Authority and lts Enemies Thomas Molnar / Arlington House / $7.95 David Levy Six years ago I was introduced to the name and work of Thomas Molnar by a FinnishAmerican fellow student of mine at the London School of Economics...
...our humanity...
...By confusing pathological abuse of power with the salutary function of authority in society such men lead us to forget that, "Authority ...is...the natural price that the individual pays for membership in society, without which he would not be an individual, let alone a protected and integrated one...
...Thus authority--and this is its first function--mediates between man's two basic needs: to be free and to be integrated with the group, and it mediates rationally because it is rational for man to live in the community of other men...
...Unfashionable, unpopular but, I believe, profoundly true is Molnar's view that the crisis of authority in the liberal democratic states of the West can only be resolved outside the ideological, though not necessarily the institutional, framework of the present system...
Vol. 10 • February 1977 • No. 5
