Social Bond and Authority: Everyone is the Same in Front of the Law of Difference

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others are.” This quote from Orwell could very well function as an epitaph of our times. Indeed, from a naive point of view, in Western society, we seem to have realized the ideals of the French Revolution, “Egalité, Fraternité, Liberté” (equality, fraternity, liberty). Woman equals man, black equals white, and children's rights are more and more being taken care of.

Closer study reveals that this equality between different animals concerns two elements: social bond and authority. Both these can be understood through Freud's study of the primal horde. The element “social bond” goes back to the fraternity, and this implies a horizontal type of relationship between equals. According to Freud, this fraternity is based on the murder of the primal father—at least in his 1913 version of Totem and Taboo. In Freud's lesser-known but more important later version in Moses and Monotheism , the son will ground the fraternity on the installation of the symbolic father figure. This brings us to the second element, authority. From Freud's two versions of the myth, it is clear that authority is based on difference—more particularly, on the difference between the group of equals and the one who does not belong to this group and who, by his particular position of outsider, functions as a kind of guarantee for this group. Obviously for Freud, this position is the one taken by the father, hence his link between the primal horde and the oedipal complex.

If it is true that we are living in the era in which “all animals are equal,” this necessarily implies the obliteration of difference. In view of the fact that authority is based on difference, the implication is that authority goes down the drain as well. Unfortunately for us, the hoped-for consequences—“égalité et liberté”—fail to be realized, and we are confronted instead, at least in Europe, with an ever-increasing corporatism, racism, and nationalism. Instead of the authority of yes