Civil Authority

Civil Authority is the moral power of command, supported (when need be) by physical coercion, which the State exercises over its members. We shall consider here the nature, sources, limits, divisions, origin, and the true and false theories of authority. Authority is as great a necessity to mankind as sobriety, and as natural. By "natural" here is meant, not what accrues to man without any effort of his own (teeth, for example), but what man must secure, even with an effort, because without it he cannot well be man. It is natural to man to live in civil society; and where there is civil society, there must be authority. Anarchy is the disruption of society. Speaking generally, we may say no man loves isolation, solitude, loneliness, the life of a hermit; on the other hand, while many dislike the authority under which they live, no man wishes for Anarchy. What malcontents aim at is a change of government, to get authority into their own hands and govern those who now govern them. Even the professed anarchist regards Anarchy as a temporary expedient, a preparation for his own Advent to power. Authority, then, in the abstract, every man loves and cherishes; and rightly so, for it is his nature to live in society, and society is kept together by authority. The model of hermits was St. Simeon Stylites, so called from his living on the top of a style, or pillar. That was his special vocation; he was no ordinary man. But the political philosopher considers man as man ordinarily and normally is. Two things would strike a stranger from Mars looking down upon this planet: how men on earth love herding together, and how they love moving about. Ordinary man can no more afford to be solitary than he can afford to be stationary, though Simeon Stylites was both. Solitary confinement is the severest of punishments, next to death. It is hard to say whether the solitude or the confinement, proves the more irksome. This simple point, that man cannot live alone, must be insisted upon, for all errors in the theory of authority are rooted in the assumption that man's living in society, and thereby coming to be governed by social authority, is something purely optional and conventional, a fashion which man could very well discard if he would, as he might discard the wearing of green clothes. Men who would make society a conventional arrangement, and authority a fashion of the hour, have appealed to the noble savage as the standard of humanity proper, forgetting that the savage is no solitary, but a member of a horde, to separate from which would be death, and to ignore the control of which would be death also. Man must live in society, and, in point of historical fact, men have always lived in society; every human development is a social progress. It is natural to man to live in society, to submit to authority, and to be governed by that custom of society which crystallizes into law. +