John Dunn

As with the sword or the bow and arrow, making up one’s mind responsibly about the Bomb is not an easy task. For anarchists or pacifists the exercise of violence by state powers throughout history has been intrinsically regrettable. But any style of political assessment which weights consequences more heavily than these do must recognise practical connections (sometimes of a surprising kind) between the history of civilised social life and that of repressive force. Exponents of most modern political theories do, it is true, at least affect to believe that the dependence of civilised social life upon physical repression has diminished, and is diminishing; and some even suppose that it can reasonably be expected in due course to vanish painlessly away. There is perhaps some inductive support in recent historical experience for the judgment that it has diminished, but little, if any, for the judgment that it is still diminishing. Grounds offered for the conviction that it might in future vanish silently away must necessarily be more sparely theoretical and the best that can be said for them is that, thus far, they have been intellectually perfunctory.

Is there or is there not good reason to believe that the experience of being alive is still on the whole improving for the majority of human beings? And if there is, is there good reason to expect this improvement to persist into the reasonably near, the imaginatively accessible, future? The idea of progress involves the adoption of at least two very different perspectives. The first, plainly, is a vision backwards in time, broadly flattering the past for its prowess in having generated the way we live now. The backward face of progress is a logical correlate of the complacencies of the present. We felicitate the past for its having brought us about. No such vision is likely to be utterly unambivalent, regret being as intrinsic to the human condition as is hope. But even in the stark circumstances of this country now, it would be a wholly implausible claim to make about the consciousness of the majority of its population that they see life here as on balance less good than they believe it to have been half a century ago. There is no doubt that the practical preconditions for these attitudes are under very active menace. But, in contrast with the experienced past at least, there are also many excellent reasons why the attitudes should nonetheless prevail. Any past with which the present life of this society as a whole could be negatively contrasted would have to be recollected in a sentimental and heavily selective manner. The vision backwards from the present can, of course, readily be misjudged. But there is nothing inherently murkier or more bemusing about it than there is to any ambitious interpretation of human experience. The second constitutive perspective of the idea of progress, the vision forwards into the future, is necessarily more venturesome. Human experience encourages the making of predictions, discreet and indiscreet. But insofar as the idea of progress prescribes what the main significance of their lives will be for human beings far into the future, it involves predictions that are of a degree of indiscretion for which human experience offers no rational encouragement whatsoever. As for guessing the existential significance of the distant future of the species as a whole we are, and we will always remain, some way out of our cognitive depth.

Robert Nozick begins his clever and implausible study Anarchy, State and Utopia with a confident pronouncement: ‘Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).’ Among Americans it is a claim which only a committed utilitarian is likely to wish to dispute. Americans suppose themselves to have many individual rights and, after their respective ideological fashions, take rights extremely seriously. At the level of pure hypocrisy their allegiance is far from distinctive in the modern world. Every member state of the United Nations, for example, is a signatory to a Declaration of Human Rights. But in many countries today (Kampuchea, Burundi, Paraguay, Haiti, Ethiopia) it is hard to imagine either government or people expressing themselves spontaneously quite in Nozick’s terms. The question therefore arises whether Nozick is indeed correct or whether he is simply American. If individuals just do have rights, what gives them these entitlements, or, if this is thought a tendentious way of putting the matter, what makes the claim that they possess them true? In the Declaration of Independence, the most famous and eloquent expression of the American theory of rights, what endows human individuals with such rights is, intractably enough, their Creator. All human beings are created equal and it is because they are created equal that it is correct for them to regard themselves and each other as endowed with certain inalienable rights. Not merely is this true: it is self-evidently true (and you cannot readily get truer than that). Nozick himself keeps his cards close to his chest on the matter of what (if anything) does make his initial claim true. But it is a safe inference that his views on the question diverge from those of Thomas Jefferson.

To be truly a Master is to have authority. To claim to be a Master is to claim to possess authority. We can be confident that more persons claim to have authority than do truly have it. What is less easy to determine is who in fact does possess it. The place of authority in human life is both centrally important and irretrievably contentious. The personnel of the ‘Modern Masters’ series may simply map the credal disorder of our days, the fitful intellectual allegiances of a society of masterless persons. Past Masters, however, are, or at any rate ought to be, figures of historically proven authority. It is easiest to see historically proven authority as essentially the authority of continuing traditions. One question, therefore, which Keith Thomas’s series must confront at the start is simply whether for us as moderns any continuing traditions do (or even could) retain their authority. (An entire school of sociologists, for example, seeks to define modernity as a categorical denial of authority to tradition in its entirety.) What, then, is authority? And more particularly, how far is it genuinely open to us to think of authority as something which can be incarnated, realised in the historical persons of individual human beings?