Your web browser is out of date. Update your browser for more security, speed and the best experience on this site.

Update your browser

Authority, Power, and the Economy

Edward Hadas

For much of the last century, it has been common knowledge among thinking men that the great beast known as the Modern Economy was both out of control and in total control. Out of control: unconstrained by governments, social norms, traditions, soldiers, priests, or anyone or anything else. In total control: not only of much of people’s lives, but also of political and social power structures, ethical and aesthetic judgments, developments in science and technology, religious and philosophical beliefs, and even emotional and psychological tendencies. This conventional wisdom is not wrong.

Continue Reading
An Australian Soldier with His Son (1916), Australian War Memorial Collection

The Law of Our Fathers: On the Familial Origins of Legal Authority

D. C. Schindler

Read Full Article
Current Issue

Power: Issue One

Authority and Power

"The eclipse of the idea of authority is an essential characteristic of today’s world; in fact, it is the most immediately observable characteristic” (Del Noce). Yet freedom has not become more luminous in the absence of authority. On the contrary, it has been eclipsed together with authority by ever-more absolute forms of arbitrary power: totalitarianisms which aim precisely at authority. Authority is in the service of freedom; for it is the power to make things grow in accord with the given order to which the authority is first subject. It is best represented by a father who bears witness to that order, received from above, as he hands himself over to the mother and together with her brings a child into being.

View Issue

Past Issues

Humanum is about the human: what makes us human, what keeps us human, and what does not. We are driven by the central questions of human existence: nature, freedom, sexual difference and the fundamental figures to which it gives rise, man, woman, and child. We probe these in the context of marriage, family, education, work, medicine and bioethics, science and technology, political and ecclesial life. We sift through the many competing ideas of our age so that we might “hold fast to what is good” and let go of what is not. In addition to articles, witness pieces, and book reviews ArteFact: Film & Fiction searches out the human in the literary and cinematic arts.

Humanum is published as a free service by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.