University of Chicago - Cap and Gown Yearbook (Chicago, IL)

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cm ex-Choncellor returns and 1e, e; gives 0 speech POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY by ROBERT M. HUTCHINS Delivered November 18, 1959 as part of the Sec- ond Dedicatory Conference of the new Jaw build- ings. On being invited to address this distinguished audience on the subject of Power and Responsibility, I turned first, of course, to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I found that there was no article on Responsibility and that the one on Power begins. :The word power: as used by the engineer. . . 3i Eager, as always, to stretch my mind, I took up the Syntopicoe, only to discover that neither Power nor Responsibiiity is one of the Great Ideas. Since the Encyclopaedia Britannica is described on the title page, which bears the imprimatur of this Uni- versity, as a New Survey of Universal Knowledge, we must conclude that nothing is known of Power or Re- sponsibility. Since the Syntopicon is the Social Register of ideas, we must conclude that Power and Responsibil- ity have not yet iiarrivedf! How is it possible to have a symposium about matters of which we are totally ignorant, which may not exist, and which, if they do exist! have a low or insignificant status? If you ask why I accepted this invitation when I had been assured 0n the highest authority that the subject was trivial or irrelevant, the answer is that my motive 27

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The new low buildings are opened- A highiight of the year was the opening of the new law buildings de- signed by Eero Saarinen. An impressive array of prominent people took part in the seven dedicatory conferences and lectures; among them: Earl Warren, Dag Hammarskjold, Richard Nixon, Nelson Rock- efeller, seven Nobel Peace Prizewinners. and Mr. Huichins.

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was unworthy. I wanted to bask in the reflected glory of my old friends, the Dean and Faculty of this Law school. They include my teachers, my fellow students, and my colleagues at the Yale Law school, and my stu- dents and colleagues here. I am bound to them by ties of obligation and affection that run back in some cases forty years. I knew them in their days of poverty and struggle. I am happy to saiute them as they enter upon a new era of Gracious Living. In order not to be altogether derelict on this occasion I must build up the subject you have selected into one that is worthy of your attention. I was relieved to hnd, through further research, that Britannica and the 53m- topiccm were entirely right. Neither of the ideas in the title of this symposium is very interesting in itself. Re- sponsibility cannot exist without power. And power, by itself, is simply an inconvenient fact of life. A. A. Berle, Jr., in his new book, Power Without Property, observes that almost nothing has been written about power. And 28 Professor McKeon, in his authoritative paper, makes the same remark about responsibility, adding that it is a comparative parvenu, born in 1787. These two ideas, or words, impress us only in com- bination. In combination they lead us into all the major legal and political problems of the West. The legal and political history of the West may be seen as the effort to make power responsible. The problem of pnwer and responsibility is identical with that of a free and just society. Freedom implies power of some kind, and jus- tice implies responsibility. The American tradition is the tradition of dispersing power and trusting to luck, or to the Invisible Hand, to produce responsibility. From James Madison to Rein- hold Niebuhr the modem has been that salvation lies in having many contending centers of power. The Feder- alist am tinds safety from factions in having a great many of them, fighting over a large territory, In the latest pamphlet published by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Mr. Niebuhr, referring to the corporation and the labor unionJ said, HWhat health we haVe is due to the fact that these dubious sovereign- ties balance one another. Mr. Niebuhr went on to deal with the function of government as follows: HIt is only the purpose of government to see to it that the over-all purposes are fulfilled within the terms of the spon- taneous desires, motives, etc. of all the centers of power. This is the new liberalism as against the old liberalism. The old liberalism assumed that spontaneity, free enter- prise, free market, all contributed to the general welfare. We know that is not true. We know there must be Checks and balances. The government, if it finds one center of power is too strong, must raise up another cen- ter of power in the interest of justice. There is something unsatisfactory in the notion that the whole matter of power and responsibility, freedom and justice, is going to be solved because the centers of power will balance one another and that the role of government is simply to see to it that the supply of such centers is adequate. In order to have any confidence that if enough centers of power contend they will make one another responsible and give us a just society, we must attribute to Provi- dence a greater interest in the welfare of the American peeple than either our history or our merits would seem to justify. My purpose this morning is to suggest the pos sibility that we as a people, as a community learning together, might learn how to assume conscious control of our destiny. In considering this possibility, one of the grossest errors we can make is to assume that we have exhausted our intelligence and imagination, that is, our capacity for learning. The fact is that we have hardly ever