Wherever on the po- litical spectrum this generation has landed, it has brought its suspicion of authority with it. The suspicion of institutional authority and the enshrinement of indi- vidual choice are everywhere in the American society of the 1990s. They extend beyond the routines of our individual lives into the debates we con- duct on topics as diverse as school reform and corporate management. Many things may be said for and against the concept of school choice, but one point is clear enough in education, as in virtually every other social enterprise, individual choice is the antithesis of authority. It is a replacement for it.
Some corporations still operate that way, but they are regarded as dinosaurs.
Corporate hierarchies are out of fashion. The literature is all about constructing management out of webs rather than pyramids, about decentralizing the decision process, empowering people at all levels of the organization. As they are, more broadly, in economic thinking. Now, vir- tually all of us know what it means. It is the definition of a society that fails because it attempts to make economic decisions by hierarchy rather than by the free choice of its individual citizens.