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For the last three or four decades, a deep-seated transformation of the types of authority that govern social interaction has been taking place. Following on from Tocqueville, who saw this as the effect of the equalization of social conditions due to the modernization of society, Caplow identifies the decline of mechanisms of social control while at the same time personal authority has become more relaxed. The loss of religious authority, state authority, the authority of the father figure in families, and the questioning of the authority of teachers all indicate a state of crisis for authority, if not the prediction of its complete disappearance.