Moral authority and reformation religion: On charisma and the origins of modernity

Abstract

From the late 17th and 18th centuries, much of modern western social and political thought has developed in terms of the contract tradition of govern? ment. Within this tradition, the locus of moral authority has been posited as rooted within society. Jean Jacques Rousseau and Emile Durkheim may be con? sidered two of the foremost expounders of this conception.1 The apotheosis of society in the writings of Durkheim is, in a certain sense, a reformulation of Rousseau's concept of sovereignty rooted in the general will. These assumptions on the source of moral authority are, furthermore, rooted in some of the major intellectual traditions of Western Christian civiliza? tion. We may think for example of Vico's immanent historicist conceptions of natural equity and universal jurisprudence or of the republican tradition of civic humanism, as among its intellectual antecedents.2 The existence of precursors notwithstanding, the notion of moral authority as rooted in society, as a strain of political thought in the Western tradition calls for some inquiry, for a number of reasons. First, this tradition continues to be but one of a number of political traditions which defined the locus of moral authority in very different spheres. In this context Burke's traditionalism or Hegel's World Spirit (or the marxian dialectic of history) exemplify alternative notions of the sources of moral ac? tion.3 Second, the conception of moral authority as resting in the community must be distinguished from the contract-tradition per se.4 That is, the very posit? ing of society in ethical terms adds a moral dimension to the notion of contract which was absent in the Utilitarian followers of David Hume. Third, this notion goes well beyond the concepts of natural law which ?in their various forms ?