History does not appear to vindicate the belief that Authority has always been the guardian of social peace. On the contrary, it has often been a source of conflict, inequality, and widespread violence. The real question, therefore, is not whether human beings can exist without authority, but whether they can build forms of collective organization grounded more in solidarity, mutual recognition, and voluntary cooperation than in fear, coercion, and imposed obedience.
It is widely accepted and historically verified that members of small communities exhibit milder and less frequent delinquent behavior than those living in vast, impersonal societies where individuals become “lost,” lacking identity and mutual recognizability. In small communities there exists an invisible thread that binds their members together, and everyone can sense when its resilience is being strained. This is precisely what does not occur in mass societies, in societies of strangers.
Modern and earlier anthropological and sociological studies, foremost among them Ancient Society by the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan—one of the strongest intellectual influences on Marxism—demonstrate that the notion of an original purity and innocence at the beginning of humanity’s historical journey is not a myth. Early human communities were small-scale, classless, and “anarchic,” characterized by either absent or loosely structured authority. Their principles and “laws” were unwritten; they were rooted in natural law. History also accepts that for a very long period—perhaps the longest period of human existence thus far—humanity lived without written laws.
And if this new form of “justice,” at least judging from historical references to ancient Athens, with the harsh laws of the bloodthirsty Draco and the “Seisachtheia” reforms of the wise Solon, served anyone then—as it has always done—it was the interest of the stronger. Power secured this interest through the enforcement of its laws by means of WEAPONS. Indeed, among the first rights removed by the “legitimate armed order” from the rest of society was the right to bear arms.
Therefore, if authoritarian societies have served anyone exclusively, they have served the holders of power. Authority itself has always and unfailingly propagated the value of its own necessity. “For there is no authority except from God,” wrote the Apostle Paul during the Christian era. This doctrine of authority exercised “by the grace of God” appears to have been the strongest argument of rulers in every age, right up to the present day.
Today, however, power is exercised by the Democratic State, supposedly “by the grace of the people,” from whom it is said to derive and in whose name its government exercises it. It is now presented under the more pleasant term “governance” rather than the harsher notion of authority imposed by popular mandate. Yet this remains a nebulous concept, not far removed from the divine origin once attributed to sovereign legitimacy: namely, the belief that state authority is an indispensable necessity for preventing chaos and preserving order among society’s members and subjects.
Nevertheless, the historical conclusion—and this is the central issue in our examination of the value and necessity of authority—is the following: the cost of obedience to the State through armed or other forms of coercion and violence has been horrific. It is incomparable to the corresponding cost within anti-authoritarian societies. This cost begins with the penetration of authority into everyday life and its constant supervision, and extends to the treatment of human life itself as a disposable commodity. Human beings have repeatedly been reduced to expendable material in the endless conflicts among fragmented centers of power, each competing to exercise authority exclusively and effectively, in order to gain complete control over both the lives of their subjects and their wealth.