ALL ANARCHISTS NOWADAYS

Authority has got a bad name. Ferdinand Mount explores the paradox by which the destruc- tion of authority leads to totali- THE paradox is by now so familiar that we take it for granted. The 'decay of authority' — or even the 'twilight of authority' — is a commonplace. Everyone mourns it or re- joices in it. Yet never has this country been so overflowing with authorities: local au- thorities, education authorities, health au- thorities, water authorities, broadcasting authorities, police authorities, transport authorities, aviation and airport author- ities. The body politic seems to be over- stuffed with authority. Recent name changes introduced by Whitehall have tended to dispense with any such suffix, as though this huge pile of claims to authority had become a little embarrassing. We now have simply 'British Coal', 'London Re- gional Transport', 'London Electricity'. Yet authorities they undeniably remain, just as a vicar without a dog-collar is still a vicar. They still have statutory monopolies, legal powers and privileges, often their own police forces and inspectors too.

Even this government and its supporters — supposedly so 'authoritarian' — seem reluctant to use the word. They prefer to talk of 'allowing managers to manage' or about 'parent power in schools', or about `giving the trade unions back to their members' — although these are all clearly projects for the restoration of legitimate authority in one way or another.

It will, I think, become clear in retro- spect to most people — is perhaps already clear — that Britain's history over the last two decades or so has been one of accelerating erosion of proper authority, culminating in near-collapse in the annul terribilis of 1974, then gradual and painful recovery of authority over the past ten years, at a quickening pace over the past five. This fall-and-rise of authority is most spectacularly visible in the coal industry and other industries such as steel, news- papers and the motor industry, but is beginning to become evident elsewhere, in schools and hospitals, for example, and also inside the Labour Party and the trade unions. How far this recovery of authority is the work of government giving a lead to managers and other professionals, and how far it is a collective revulsion against anarchy, of which Mrs Thatcher is as much the beneficiary as the initiator is not my theme here. The fascinating thing is that nobody much cares to talk about it, or not in quite those explicit terms.

The most fearless journalist would pre- fer to tackle almost any other subject incest or sodomy certainly, perhaps even the Incarnation — rather than authority. One may refer to the dread topic, of course, in a sardonic spirit as Authority with a capital A or pejoratively by the epithet 'authoritarian'. But seriously to explore the nature of proper authority and the characteristics of authoritativeness, well, that is a risky undertaking. One cannot safely take the noun for a stroll without ostentatiously attaching a 'proper' to it. How handy it would be to have up one's sleeve a special word — 'prauth', say, or even a Welshified version 'prawdd', in order to indicate that we are dealing with an ancient and robust idea, something far wider than the mere consideration of who is to give the orders, wider even than the idea of law.

In fact, it is this shrivelled order-giving interpretation of authority which both cor- rupts authority-holders and helps to discre- dit the whole notion of authority, itself already weighed down by its battered and stained historical luggage. So much prauth is based on customs and habits which need involve giving no orders and which may have only a remote and ultimate connec- tion with law in the modern, positive, statute-minded sense. The authority of a football referee, of a doctor, of a porcelain expert, of a priest, of an electrician, a schoolteacher, a policeman or a politician may or may not be, partly or wholly, set out in laws or regulations; he may or may not have powers to enforce some or all of his authority; that authority may or may not be backed by certificates of qualifica- tion. But the authority he exercises always has the same general character: that he is a proper person to carry out certain func- tions, a person whose authority must be respected in his field, because he is recog- nised by the appropriate body in that field, and so willy-nilly by the rest of us, as possessing that authority. We are not compelled to admire or to like or to listen to or even to obey such a person. All we are expected to do is to acknowledge that he is a proper person. As Michael Oakeshott points out in On Human Con- duct, this authority may have little or nothing to do with justice or democracy or logic. It is conferred simply by virtue of our daily acceptance of it and of the rules and customs which define and limit its exercise.

The idea of authority has, it seems, always been pretty much like this: in Latin, in Old French, in Middle English, in more modern jurisprudence. Men have always used the same word to describe both legitimate power, him who wields it and 4 Mussolini was quite happy to explain the tricks of his trade in private the source from where he derives it (the source being animal, vegetable, mineral or abstract, depending on the circumstances). A man can be an authority or have authority or give authority. By using the same word, we show that what we are talking about is a continuous process of acceptance and acknowledgment, not a once-for-all contract, or Act of Parliament or passport stamp.

Another abiding feature: 'authority' still contains within it — though less obviously so in the naked, reductive terms of modern debate — the idea of augmentation or increase, like the cognate word 'author'. A person given authority is not simply licensed; he is added to, enriched, and so is the relationship between him and those who accept his authority; they have a new source of guidance, advice, instruction, justice — all of which imposes on him corresponding obligations and restraints, often codified, always fairly well under- stood by both sides even where neglected in practice. It is these relationships starting with the acknowledgment of parental authority — which teach us or ought to teach us how to exercise authority ourselves, how to recognise it in others, when to challenge its excessive or illegiti- mate use.

Now to the Left all this sounds both pernicious and sentimental. For it is this network of authority-relationships which go to make up 'The System' that the Left must smash. This is the common aim of Trotskyist, communist, fascist, anarchist and revolutionary-feminist alike: first, to reduce authority to 'nothing but' the giving of commands, by de-mystifying it and shearing it of all its props, whether divine, or traditional, or professional, or electoral; to reduce all authority to Lenin's question `Who? — Whom?' — who is exercising power on whom; then to demonstrate the harsh or illogical or unfair or vulnerable or contradictory aspects of those commands and the personal incompetence or callous- ness or corruption of those giving the commands; so to 'raise the consciousness' of people that they no longer take the old customs and practices for granted and thus to 'disorient' them so that, having no fixed standards of judgment, they may be brought to accept almost anything.

Mussolini was the first and most transpa- rent master of this disorienting. In his innocently boastful way, he was quite happy to explain the tricks of his trade in private. The public must not be allowed to settle, they must be kept on the hop; there must be 'a permanent revolution' (his phrase 30 years before Mao popularised it). Therefore, while showing the necessary brutality to frighten opponents and being quite willing to make use of any traditional means to power, the Duce must never let legitimacy accrue to any established organ of authority. The legends of 'the March on Rome' by 300,000 fascists and of '3,000 fascist martyrs' (in fact, there were only a fraction of that number involved in his accession to power and, much to his regret, only a dozen people were killed in the street fighting) were necessary to hide the fact that Mussolini had merely been asked to form a government by the King, for if the Fascist Revolution was brought into being by the King's authority, why then, it could be brought to an end in the same way — as it was, but, alas, not until 21 years had passed.

In just the same way, the Bolshevik regime and all its heirs and imitators have used systems of government and codes of law as hollow shells, called into being solely in order to dupe or entice Wester- ners. The only legitimate living political organism is the party, that lawless, anar- chic impulse to power. 'All power to the Soviets' means precisely what it says. By reserving the monopoly of power for a `democratic-centralist' party, communist leaders ensure not only that all power remains in their hands but also that no independent centres of authority are built up and thus that no political life as we know it in the West can emerge — that is, no transactions between independent in- stitutions and individuals within a framework of known rules and conventions which may not be arbitrarily altered. This free play of ordinary life is at the heart of our liberties. By the same token, it is a fatal threat to the survival of any totalita- rian regime.

Thus the 'long march through the institu- tions', as urged by Mussolini's victim, Antonio Gramsci, is not simply a means of building up revolutionary power bases in every significant institution, such as the TUC or the BBC or the BMA. It is also a means of eroding the independent exist- ence of such institutions, of gradually squeezing the life out of them until their scrawny necks can be wrung with a single flick of the wrist. In this process, it may be necessary to mimic the language of 'demo- cracy' and 'accountability' in order to show up existing practices as antiquated, oligar- chic and irresponsible. This mimicry is calculated to deepen the confusion in the minds of existing authority-holders as to how and whence their authority is derived. All idea of proper authority as a bulwark against tyranny, fraud and brutality begins to be erased from their minds as well as from the minds of the general public.

Authority, as properly and traditionally understood, is in fact rather more than a guarantor of justice and fair dealing in social life. Again, the left-wing discreditors like to depict authority as, at best, a kind of dreary and grim headmaster who confines the flow of existence within the parameters of the status quo. But this cannot be a complete picture of the reality. Far from authority being the unswerving enemy of all change, it is scarcely possible to con- ceive of a society which is effectively open to change and which is not at the same time saturated in the understanding of author- ity. The discussion and testing of rival theories and devices — scientific, political, technical — demand a framework of rules and governing bodies for carrying out the tests, for judging their results, for agreeing and implementing change. A society lack- ing such arrangements must have its gov- erning ideas dictated by force and fraud.

We have, of course, all experienced and read of many authorities which have be- come set in their ways and utterly resistant 4 The discrediting of authority remains the most usable legacy of Marx's brilliant rhetoric to reform or innovation. But this fossilisa- tion is a perversion of proper authority, not its fulfilment, and is likely in the end to generate a refusal of consent and so to destroy the authority. Long-lasting author- ity is characterised by a willingness to respond, cautiously and appropriately, to changing circumstances, without succumb- ing to the paralysing fear that any change must be fatal. Yet here too the Left still manages to caricature as 'hidebound' or `sclerotic' such constantly evolving and indeed sometimes over-flexible institutions as the British Constitution and the Papacy.

This discrediting of authority remains the most enduring achievement of the Left in the West, the most usable legacy of Marx's brilliant rhetoric. But the discredit- ing goes a great deal further than was consciously intended by the founding fathers of fascism and communism. Having shattered proper authority, they then utterly destroyed in the eyes of posterity the improper authority to which they laid claim. The disgusting consquences of their grand revolutionary projects have left suc- ceeding generations, in the West at any rate, with a distaste for all authority and hence also for all efforts to distinguish the proper from the improper. Both legitimate authority in its traditional forms and its hideous parody in the form of totalitarian dictatorship are to be regarded with un- Yielding suspicion. Under the skin, we are all anarchists nowadays. As a result, the Western media and most Western political scientists are to this day still estranged from the old conceptions of proper authority and remain quite easy to bamboozle or to inject with facile and often destructive enthusiasms.

They can, for example, be made to demand that every type of authority should be made subject to the methods of par- liamentary democracy, when it is obvious that the politicising of scholarly or scien- tific institutions is almost invariably dis- astrous to their work. They can be made to swallow the constitutional fiction, so agree- able to MPs themselves, that `Parliament can do anything' and that a simple majority has the authority to exercise unfettered power in all circumstances. In reality, there is a huge range of possible government actions which we would all agree that Parliament had no authority to sanction or demand, ranging from the slaying of the first-born to the sacking of any porcelain expert who had voted SDP. I am not concerned here with whether such res- traints are to be described as 'moral' or `constitutional', or whether they are to be justified by appeals to common law, to equity or to natural or divine law. They exist.

The intoxicating sense of omnipotence which has overcome Parliament has spread, with far less justification, to those Labour local authorities which appear to believe that any action which is not specifi- cally forbidden to them by Parliament as ultra vires is fair game. Trade unions in hospitals and schools and elsewhere also came in the later 1970s to see their quest for justice as legitimising a limitless range of actions, regardless of the harm done to the public. The consequences of this breakdown of proper authority became painfully famil- iar: hospitals in which crucial clinical deci- sions were made by the porters, schools in which the head teacher was buffeted be- tween the NUT and the LEA and it was the caretaker who decided whether or not the school should open, newspapers run primarily to suit the printers. As some of these lunacies have collapsed, partly under the weight of their impracticality and partly as a result of remedial legislation, it is tempting to imagine that proper authority has thereby been restored. But in many instances, though not in all (the Wapping revolution is clearly irreversible, for exam- ple), the restoration is no more secure than that of the Bourbons in 1814. The preten- sions of Labour local authorities remain only temporarily held in check by rate- capping. Until we are clear about what went wrong, about how and why proper authority collapsed, we shall be powerless to resist fresh demands which would lead to exactly the same thing happening again. Present Labour Party policy is crammed with such demands — all described as urgent priorities on grounds of social jus- tice, industrial regeneration or local demo- cracy.

The general outline of a programme for the restoration and maintenance of prauth is not obscure. First, authority must reside

The essential components of effective authority are that it should be direct, immediate, tangible, visible,

and be seen to reside where it is, in theory, supposed to reside. A headmaster should be allowed to act like one. A manager should be left to get on with managing. Trade union general secretaries should carry out the will of their members and be subject to periodic election by them. Secondly, authority should be clearly limited to the purposes for which it is appropriate. An education authority's function is to maintain or improve stan- dards of education in its area; it is not an agency for socialisation or indoctrination. A brush company's purpose in life is to make brushes; an institution of learning's task is to uphold and advance scholarship; neither body is to be hijacked into serving as a getaway car for political or social causes. These limits on proper authority are in part a matter of self-limitation — of a true understanding of their calling by the members of the body in question — but also of precise and specific wording in statutes and other authority-defining rules. It is part of the burden of Lord Chief Justice Hewart's The New Despotism (1929) that Parliament was aiding and abetting 'the pretensions and encroach- ments of bureaucracy' by thoughtlessly granting ministers and statutory bodies such sweeping powers.

What we can see, 50 years later, is the curious result of having failed to heed Hewart's warning. We have got things back to front. These corporate authorities, governing water, coal, education and so on, have attracted such wide and vague powers as to offer a standing temptation to impose political foibles as public policy; they increasingly act like infantile, capri- cious persons. By contrast, the individual wielder of authority at coalface or chalk- face — colliery manager, headmaster, hos- pital administrator — has had his powers so hedged and clipped that his authority seemed to dwindle in the most visible and humiliating fashion. He became little more than a cog in a much bigger machine, almost less than a person.

The essential components of effective authority are that it should be direct, immediate, tangible, visible (`hands-on' management, in the modern jargon). The essential limitations on authority — to minimise overflow into domineering or exploitative relationships, to keep its harsher necessities consonant with our sense of justice — are that its exercise should be clearly defined and subordinate to both the letter and the spirit of imper- sonal forces such as law and custom, and that it should acknowledge the existence of higher authorities overarching its own sphere of activity. It is this dovetailing of the personal and the impersonal which makes for stability and continuity and hence for institutional strength and inde- pendence.

Can we see here the beginnings of an explanation of the authority paradox? The wider the powers entrusted to the corpo- rate authority, the more it will attract to membership ambitious, politically-minded people, and the more capricious and trend- blown its edicts are likely to become. The practice of its authority will become erratic and hubristic and so will begin to under- mine itself. After all, customary accept- ance is the foundation of all authority, whether backed by statute or not, and it is hard to accustom oneself to practices which seem to change every five minutes whether they be approved methods of policing or approved methods of child- birth.

By adding this further trait — that proper authority ought to be slow to change its practices — we are not saying that all such change should be resisted to the last ditch. Many authority-bearing pro- fessions and institutions are ossified or extortionate or both (the two qualities are closely linked). But proposed changes ought to be carefully tested, debated and phased before being irrevocably adopted. The case against overnight introduction of the obstetrics of Dr Wendy Savage or panda cars or the ordination of women is not that these things are necessarily wrong in themselves but that their instant univer- sal adoption suggests a light-hearted aban- donment of serious standards — and often hence an abandonment of loyal congrega- tions and colleagues who are accustomed to a different tradition of guidance and service. Proper authority must expect now and then to be denounced as 'stuffy' or `sclerotic' or 'hidebound' or 'Establish- mentarian'. Such accusations may only be signs that it is doing its job. To paraphrase Conquest's Law, most people are stuffy about things they know about.