My new essay "Authority and Power" is now complete and I will be posting it shortly.  Dr. Robert Nisbet, who I reference in the first paragraph, wrote that "Authority is, along with property, one of the two central concepts in conservative philosophy". (Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality, p. 49).  From his first book, The Quest for Community, to the end of his life, Dr. Nisbet argued for a plurality of social authorities against the concentration of authority and power in the hands of the centralized, bureaucratic, administrative state.  Those libertarians whose starting point is their fanciful notion of the sovereignty of the individual might object.  If they are consistent with their absurd worldview, they would have to argue that the difference between a parent telling his kid to eat his vegetables and the state telling us what we can and cannot do in our own homes is a difference of degree rather than of kind.  Dr. Nisbet believed, however, that the plurality of social authorities, was the best guarantee of personal liberty against the abuses of concentrated power.  In this, I believe he was absolutely correct.