The war against authority

In The War against Authority, his most provocative work to date, Nicholas N. Kittrie explores the causes of escalating worldwide racial, cultural, political, and social discontent. He goes beyond facile and traditional explanations such as population explosion, environmental abuse, ancient rivalries, or the clash of civilizations. Instead, Kittrie points to a long-predicted "crisis of legitimacy," a force that erodes the underpinnings of society and public confidence in its institutions.

With dramatic historical sweep and unblinking contemporary focus, Kittrie highlights the quest by those out of power to share in society's benefits, and by rulers to gain and maintain the acquiescence of their underlings. The cast of players in Kittrie's book is as diverse as history itself: Socrates and Brutus, Robert E. Lee and John Brown, Martin Luther King and Susan B. Anthony, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Tse-tung, Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan.

Their means and causes are just as varied: abolition and slavery, public order and individual conscience, abortion and the right to life, communal conciliation and terrorism, fundamentalism and heresy, conformity and civil disobedience, tribalism and multiculturalism.

Kittrie sheds light on such recent phenomena as the Tokyo subway's sarin nerve gas attacks and Oklahoma City's federal courthouse bombing. He also shows how the recent scramble between the Republican "Contract with America" and the Democratic "New Covenant" is simply an attempt to reclaim political legitimacyoffering different and contrasting approaches to recapture the essence of the "American Dream.".

The War against Authority is not another fin de siecle documentation of chaos and the world's woes. It offers workable solutions, useful methods for governments and individuals to redefine their identities and restore the legitimacy of authority. Kittrie proposes creative, responsive, and pluralistic systems of power-sharing and justice.

He calls for a new national and world order, committed to the richness of human diversity, the power of the person over government, and the ultimate accountability of all power. As Kittrie reiterates: "Perhaps history is nothing more than the struggle between different concepts of authority."