Speculations on Authoritarianism and Narcissism as Political Concepts

At the outset I must distinguish between pre-feudal societies (what Max Weber calls patrimonial societies), where social loyalties evolved out of the extended family, and feudal societies, which started as larger social groupings where loyalties were based on (and in some ways substituted for) familial loyalties - e.g. “the king is father to his people.” Feudal societies, in contrast to preceding patrimonial societies, contain bureaucratic elements (e.g. tax collecting) and loom ever greater over time. Post-feudal societies limit the range of influence of bureaucratic ways of structuring society, and use bureaucratic techniques reflexively to limit the sway of social hierarchy, as an institutionalization of checks and balances in society. While post-feudal societies are more bureaucratic in that they rely on the formality of law rather than the informality of custom, they also limit authority procedurally by holding elections. Limits to bureaucratic domination over society is built into the constitutional framework of government in order to preserve a modicum of democratic liberty.

Mixed cases - most modern societies contain aspects of all 3 types - can be viewed as transitional in a social evolutionary sense. There obviously are modern societies where traditions of family loyalties continue to influence an increasingly complex polity, and there are post-feudal societies where loyalty to, and identification with, leaders (an authoritarian way to reduce anxiety) are stronger than the value of rational self-interest. Such self-interest (sometimes taking the form of social class loyalties) also can wax stronger than moral values of the civic republican sort, which tend to fade as a source of social values as a society becomes more diverse and anonymous. At this high point in technological development, and with growing population, it becomes clear that no such society can remain cohesive through reliance on personal relationships and networks alone.

Modern (post-feudal) s