"There is one great institution that has never had any hereditary element, namely, the Catholic Church. We may expect the dictatorships, if they survive, to develop gradually a form of government analogous to that of the Church. This has already happened in the case of the great corporations in America, which have, or had until Pearl Harbor, powers almost equal to those of the government." (p. 622)
from Bertrand Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy"
This interlude occurs in his discussion of John Locke's Political Philosophy shortly after he relates how Locke himself had discounted the hereditary basis of power in monarchy established in the Patriarcha, written by Sir Robert Filmer. Filmer forwarded that this hereditary basis of power was established in the Bible throught he lineage of Adam. Locke's retort was that IF his era could find the hereditary linkages between the existing monarchs of Europe that only one would stand to inherit this power and the crown due to the laws of primogeniture. He's suspect that through this very mechanism that other monarchs would concede authority to the one monarch found to be most directly descended from Adam. Locke asks rhetorically (by way of Russell's paraphrase), "[w]ould ... all existing monarchs ... lay their crowns at his feet" (p. 621)?
