mishima, proust, vermeer, and authority

I wrote about the nature of authority for The New English Review:

We misunderstand authority because we mischaracterize it as something else. Each and every one of the insipid cliches which our society attributes to authority qua authority—injustice, tyranny, etc.—could more accurately be defined as failed authority. Sociologist Richard Sennett, after decades in public, remains the most cogent thinker about authority on the American scene. His brief definition in Authority is as good as any: “Of authority it may be said in the most general way that it is an attempt to interpret the conditions of power, to give the conditions of control, and influence a meaning by defining an image of strength.” Succinct, but nuanced. Notice that Sennett doesn’t claim that authority is power, control, and strength, but instead an interpretation, a setting of conditions, and the definition of an image. Authority is often confused for power and control, but it’s quite different. As Sennett tells us, authority is instead the very context by which power, control, and strength are granted coherence. The example that Sennett gives is the character Bergotte gazing upon Vermeer’s View of Delft at the end of Remembrance of Things Past and being overwhelmed by its timelessness and integrity. The gold of the petit pan de mur jaune instructs the dying author in the self-transcendent mode as only true authority can. His final thoughts as we’re given them convey the grateful awe we feel towards authority: “Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter.”

Here.