Authority

...It must be visible in the sense that, if subjects are to sense the limits of authority and acquire the ability to negotiate with it as less than omnipotent, authorities must be clear about what they can and cannot promise and do...

...The trick in the second half of the book is to make the translation from private to public life without expecting the latter to mirror the former...

...There are few, however, who will dispute the principles he advances, that authority be "visible" and "legible...

...Or, the mote in authority'seye cannot be removed till we unfix the beam in our own...

...I suppose this may be his call to the consciousness movement to take more seriously, that is, politically, its findings...

...Neither Freudian nor Weberian analysis shows the process whereby authority, malign or benign, is "felt into being," nor why there are such variances from one person to another in the experience of it...

...The only answer to the Grand Inquisitor," he insists, "is imagining a respouse outside his terms...

...Sennett wants to understand how and why the interpretation of authoritychanges,undergoes transfiguration--and finally, how, by dealing at close quarters with power, men and women incorporate the strength with which they deal...

...The gen"eralinterest reader is not put offby social science jargon, but invited to reflect, as Sennett reflects, on a series of illuminating examples of how people--in the home, factory, and office--become hamstrung by, or free from, a negating fear of authority...

...he offers us various "norms," ways of being, to choose from...

...Rather, he claims, it is the work of imagination to see through the pretense of authority to omnipotence and ii to subscribe to COMMONWEAL...

...One such honest and courageous intellectual of this stamp is surely Richard Sennett...

...So we are treated to Madeleine Gide "purging" herself of her brilliant husband's spell, or Franz Kafka reversing roles with his father and thus reimagining the relationship of father-son...

...The essay is an appeal for the use of imagination in politics, and itself an exemplary exercise in that use...

...Employees of such an impersonal order defend themselves against shameful weakness by declaring their masters illegitimate...

...According to Sennett's reading, this"culture of negation" is the fall-out of the modern market economy, which like Mother Nature is perilous to touch and when it fails no one is responsible...

...DavidToolan AFTERFREUD,it has become harder to believe Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor was entirely wrong in his estimate of humankind...

...For in that previous work, Sennett had given a good drubbing to the selfaggrandizing politics of the consciousness movement...

...Our world is transfigurable, and we must work hard at it--but no, no lasting city here...

...Freud would just smile knowingly--infantile and aggressive wishes...

...His point is to see whether some of that movement can be transferred--at least indirectly-into the more static, inflexible world of public institutions...

...Sennett's specific proposals, intended to make these priliciples operational, seem to me an initial, very unfinished illustration of the fruitfulness of his method of approach rather than a statement of political program...

...His latest book, the first of four projected on "the emotional bonds of modern society," was inspired, he tells us, by meditating on the ambiguities of Dostoevsky's parable...

...simply complete tlds coupon or send a facsimile to COMMONWEAL 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...

...Some of them, like suggesting open discussion of the range and latitude within commands, are as obvious as they are rare in modern organizations...

...But negation, the reactive posture of rejection, lies within those terms...

...With examples from the psychiatric couch, the Pullman strike of 1894, "unhappy conseiousness" in the accountant's office and the anti-war movement, he exposes the social pathologies offered as freedom by the politics of negation...

...And though he offers little comfort to 'Harvard Business School, his hardest sayings are reserved for the central delusion of Enlightenment and revolutionary legacies: that disbelief in authority will bring freedom...

...Part One of Sennett's book practices a "hermeneutics of suspicion" (Ricoeur) on the revolutionary tradition...

...Freud's analysis leaves the reasonable rebel in the lurch, nor does he explain the magnetism of authority forthe mature...

...Others, like the use of the active voice in orders (as opposed to the impersonal "it has been decided . . .") and open discussion of the need for nurturance, are disarmingly simple--and unlikely to charm ITT or GM...

...Oursocialcementiscollective disaffection--and little over a year ago Jimmy Carter thought that was more serious than OPEC...

...10016 [] One year, $20 [] Two "years,$35 [] Il-issue trial, $7.50 Name Address City, State, Zip 9/26/110infallibility--and to demand of the socially constructed world that,power be nurturing and restrained...

...Sennett's idea is that relations to authority within the private familial world exhibit movement-growth, decay, transcendence...

...So much for method...

...The hard truth is we cannot disbelieve in authority without at the same time discrediting our own strength and the will to demonstrate it...

...Perhaps, after all, any political program, socialist or whatever, smacks too much to him of the utopian illusion, the promise of a lasting city "solid like the stones of a church"--some 'thing' to replace the ongoing struggle to be free...

...I began to wonder how the rhythms of authority in intimate life might serve as a response to the illusions of authority and their negation in public life...

...He is not afflicted with galloping Gallup pollism...

...Sennett's reflections, his wit, matter...

...Authority in the eye I AUTHORITY Richard Sennett Knopf, $10, 206 pp...

...For Senr~tt, the possibility of changing malignant forms of institutionalized authority--say those forms which dominate modem life, the "false love" of paternalism ("Submit, and I will take care of you...

...or the "without love" autonomy of bureaucratic experts ("You need me, I don't need you")--lies in the fact that authority dwells, to a degree, in the eye of the beholder...

...As Sennett sees it, the contemporary legitimacy crisis, at least in the industrialized West, lies less with malign authority than with the malignancy in our relation to authority...

...Commonweal:542...

...Part Two is constructive, a "hermeneutic of restoration," wherein Sennett helps us understand how legitimate bonds to authority come to be...

...As much as his method 26 September 1980:541 will delight and inform the general reader, it will disturb those professional peers of his who keep telling us, with the aid of survey data digested by infallible computers, what we mostly already know--and who inform us of impersonal trends, not one whit about what matters...

...The dilemma of authority in ourof the beholder time," he writes, "the peculiar fear it inspires, is that we feel attracted to strong figures we do not believe legitimate...

...Max Weber, the sociologist's authority on authority, would be puzzled--for he assumed legitimacy was necessary for voluntary obedience...

...Sennett's own application of these findings to the public order, recorded in his final chapter, are salted with a closeof anarchism...

...And legible--subjects must be able to read, make sense of, what power means...

...But perhaps that's a lack of imagination on my part...

...For the author of The Fall of Public Man, this last section of the book represents something of a course correction...

...The "preferen-tial option" for the poor, the "victim as hero" idea, gets a good shaking here...

...Does that sound familiar...

...The section on Kafka ought to be mandatory reading for all partisans of Liberation Theology...

...And that beam is a fixated imagination, typically stuck on a frozen, disillusioning metaphor like paterualism's false fusion of boss and father...

...Sennett's originality here is that he does not believe, as both tough-minded conservatives and revolutionaries often do, that the problem is solved by abandoning poetic imagination...

...Sennett's method of reflection on telling examples lies in the great humanist tradition...

...Since psychoanalytic revelation, moreover, it has been the mark of honesty and courage among intellectuals of the Left when they take seriously the old cardinal's thesis that men willingly welcome unfreedom...

...Sennett intends his book to fill a gap here...

...But here he is in the current book plundering the territory of California lotus-eaters with close study of the (at first) inner work by which social relations are redefined in intimate life--a work of imagination...