Archiving Bertrand de Jouvenel's 'On Power'
Our formal 'archaeology of ideas' begins in earnest.
Written by Bucklander
The following essay can be found in video format here. It is the first installment of a series of works which we will be summarizing for our dear readers. We have chosen to begin with Bertrand de Jouvenel, because of his influence on the current wave of dissident thought. From Curtis Yarvin, to Spandrell, and even to some of the libertarians from within the Mont Pelerin Society (which he was a member of), many right-wing thinkers have drawn their analysis of how Power operates from De Jouvenel. And so, with that, let us investigate for ourselves this account of Power and its history.
I. An Archaeology of Ideas
We are at the beginnings of a renaissance of right wing thought. The landscape has changed, and is continuing to change all the time. This might not be represented in politics, but the rather neat divide in political thought between Libertarians and Neo-Cons, if I can frame it in an America context, is gone. We now live in a rich patchwork of positions that can’t be depicted in anything less than multi-dimensional representations. This is not alt right. This is not the dissident right. This is the postmodern right. The extent to which this community of interests and positions can cooperate for meaningful goals is yet to be seen. As yet the ability to cooperate, successfully or not, seems limited to opposing what they perceive to be damaging legislation rather than the ability to create a positive vision. As soon as one does put forward a positive vision, the sniping and ostracisation begins from one's recently former allies.
One would be poorly served in trying to understand this if one limits oneself to what is taught in academia. There are too many thinkers that have conveniently been lost and resigned to the dark corners, ignored by academia. One of the great tasks before us is to engage in an archaeology of ideas outside of the roped off limits of academia. There are wonders buried in the hills if one is adventurous enough to go and start looking for them, but you’ll never find them if you only look where the professors tell you.
In these archives you will find many, if not all, of these thinkers profiled. It is a long and laborious task combing the archives though, and this is the first I have prepared for your consideration. And it is appropriate that we start with this thinker and this particular piece of work. I speak of course of Bertrand De Jouvenel and his book On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth.
II. The Frenchman Himself
De Jouvenel has no new history to tell us. Everything he does with his theory is done with accepted historical facts. What he does that is remarkable is offer a new way of understanding those historical facts in a new framework.
This theory is confronting. It can be, at first, hard to accept. But it is certainly compelling. And as time goes on, one finds it more and more able to accurately describe the course of events.
I provide here a summary of De Jouvenel. I will not here examine the ways in which other thinkers, like Chris Bond, have adapted him.
I shall not bother with much biographical information other than to say that De Jouvenel lived through the occupation of France. He advocated for Vichy France to cooperate with Germany. It does not seem he did this for any ideological reasons but rather out of a pragmatism. But this experience of living under Germany occupation and the prospect of a quick replacement with a new domination by a liberal American Hegemony and a French politics that would fall victim ever more to the levelling process that it brought with it seems to have prompted him to write “On Power”, the work we are concerned with here. Published in 1945 before the nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is a prescient piece of work, but there is some adaptation to make the theory work, but I will not deal with those issues until after I have provided a summary.
De Jouvenel uses “Power”, capitalised, to indicate the centralised controlling authority of the state. He is not providing us with a moral examination of Power and its uses, but rather its metaphysical nature: its essence and growth. He does touch on the morality of it in the last chapter, which will be dealt with separately.
It is important to keep in mind that De Jouvenel is approaching the problem as an Aristotelian. Perhaps the problem forced him, as he examined it, into becoming an Aristotelian. However he may very well have had an Aristotelian foundation laid in his education. In preparing this, I’ve not been able to find any information about his formal education, but it would be highly probable for him as the son of a French noble growing up in France before and during the First World War for him to have an education furnished for him by the Jesuits, or at least a branch of the Roman Catholic Church. This would have imparted on him a healthy amount of Aquinas. [I use Aristotelian broadly here. It seems as if De Jouvenel would be specifically a Thomist, but if one considers Thomism a subset of Aristotelianism, it's safer to describe as the latter.] While he departed from this in the interwar period during his flirtations with fascism and futurism, he seems to have found Aristotle a philosophical harbour during the storm of the Second World War, and all its implications for France and his particular beliefs. Regardless, the Second World War seems to have somehow pushed him well into an Aristotelian frame of mind.
The last thing to keep in mind is that this is an abstract description of historical development. There will be deviations from it in any society that successfully progresses beyond subsistence modes of life. De Jouvenel offers us a social science hypothesis. I refer the reader to the outline in the Archive of Carroll Quigley’s philosophy of social sciences, available here [hyperlink], as something to keep in mind while reading De Jouvenel.
III. De Jouvenel’s Universal History
De Jouvenel develops an abstract or universal history of society. This abstraction means that it is to some degree or another applicable to every group that advances along the path of advanced civilisations. There will be deviations, but in some way, all advanced societies walk this path to some extent or other, and so represents a history of every society. It's important to note here that when he discusses history without reference to a specific country, he is referring to France. And the two countries he mentions most after France, particularly medieval France, are the Roman Empire of antiquity, and England/Britain which serves as a mirror for the developments seen in France and the mainland.
To describe this abstract historical process he introduces four categories that describe a society’s position.
The first is the Matriarchy/Patriarchy dichotomy. I expect this to be a fairly well known concept to the reader. Briefly, Matriarchy seeks a set of feminine values: consensus, care, peace etc. Patriarchy seeks an exclusive set of values: strength, pride, glory (resulting in conflict). I develop the impacts of Matriarchy to contemporary society towards the end of this summary.
The second column represents the form that government takes. Power is not concerned with anything other than its authority and its ability to dictate. It does this by an ever increasing process of centralisation of control into a single institution, Power. (One of the frustrations with Power in De Jouvenels usage is that it is rather amorphous, but I will address how to understand Power as the “Invisible Centre of Power” later.) It will, through a process of reforms, create systems that allow the increase of its control. De Jouvenel, multiple times, explains that we live in an age of confusion in which we think that monarchy implied absolutism and that we have now advanced to a new age of liberty where democracy has freed us. This couldn't be further from reality. So when one sees democracy as the final form in the diagram above, no hopes or optimism should be derived from that.
The third column represents the status of Law in a society. It originates as a unitary set of principles that have been given to us by the Divine. As history proceeds the need to legislate particular laws for particular transgressions arises. Behind these is not a reflection of the Divine’s will, but rather a pragmatic step forward in Power’s ability to control. These legislated laws eventually supplant all together the Divine Law, leaving a society with no coherent force of principles behind it.
The fourth column represents the source of Powers sovereignty or authority. Originally sovereignty is derived from the Divine via the Law, and therefore is strongly tied to the whims of the Divine. It then, with the discovery that laws can be made by man, descends to being sovereignty on behalf of the people. This is what launched the beginning of absolute monarchy. Eventually sovereignty comes to be seen as being not merely the right to govern the people in a wise autocracy, but that it is given by the people.
These four categories, particularly the 2nd, 3rd and 4th, interact in the state as society progresses and produce the various stages, of which we might tentatively say there are nine stages with potential for a tenth, but De Jouvenel does not lay them out in such formal stages.
IV. The Invariable Growth of Power
On Power is, in a single sentence, a book about how the system of control in the state, which De Jouvenel calls ‘Power,’ arises, eliminates its competitors, and centralises its control, all while being indifferent and opportunistic about the political systems it might use at various times, including Monarchy, Aristocracy, Democracy and any hybrids of these that arise.
Power, in De Jouvenel’s usage, is the central governmental authority in a state or community. It is best thought of as something akin to the “invisible hand of the economy.” It isn't the King. It is the amorphous capability of the central command behind whatever system is in control at the time.
It's also important to note here that Power isn't good or bad. De Jouvenel complained to Friedman that he thought the Mont Pelerin Society, which he founded with Hayek and Friedman, had fallen into a trap thinking that anything that was done by the state was bad and anything done by private industry was good. Power does do something very Good. It gives us Order. De Jouvenel did not write a book for anarchists, though a superficial reading of it might lead one to think that he had.
The problem that provoked De Jouvenel was “Why are the systems of the 1930s, Hitler’s National Socialist Germany, Stalin's Soviet Russia, FDR’s New Deal America, able to dominate and mobilise their populations to such an extent whilst simultaneously proclaiming that they are ‘FOR THE PEOPLE?’ They accomplished what no King ever could. Permanent taxes at high rates and the ability to conscript the entirety of the population in some way or another.”
History is, in large part, the story of the process of Power coming into society and growing its dominance over society to the point we now experience.
In 1415 at Agincourt, the French King could muster 15,000 men. A century later in 1515 at Marignan, he could muster 50,000. In 1709 at Malplaquet he had 200,000. During the Napoleonic wars there were 3,000,000 men in the Armies of the various countries involved. More than 3 times that number, nearly 10,000,000, soldiers, died in the First World War and about that many civilians killed, for a total of 20,000,000 dead, not including wounded. The second world war killed somewhere between 50-55 million in total. It doesn’t make sense to give some arbitrary number of how many were mobilised in the First and Second World Wars; entire empires were drafted and mobilised in both these wars.
Here we have the first of those anachronisms that needs to be thought about by those engaging with Deejay. We will make a list and address these later.
Now what’s distressing about this growth of Power as seen in the growth of state’s abilities to put men into the field is that the greatest strides have been taken under the justification of the People. In fact, what is more disturbing, by employing the idea of the People Power has made its greatest advances. How did this happen?
We need to understand one last thing before we look at De Jouvenel’s abstract history and that is the paradox of obedience. All men, with unlimited strength and wealth, would have themselves be totally free. This being the case, mass obedience is a paradox that must be accounted for. From the account that he develops of obedience, De Jouvenel begins his account of Power.
All men chafe at any governmental yoke placed on them. They moan and complain about it. But in the great scheme of things they are remarkable in the degree to which they obey it.
It might be thought that Power operates as a “small society commanding a larger [society].” Though a quick reference shows that this isn't the case in the Roman Republic which is the late stage of a clan based system. The Power of the Roman Republic was remarkably adept at asserting itself.
Returning to the comparison to Smith’s “Invisible Hand of the Economy”, we can begin here to properly think of De Jouvenel’s “Invisible Centre of Power”. This Invisible Centre of Power is derived from the society itself.
V. Power and the Invisible Hand
We must make a detour into metaphysics here to properly understand De Jouvenel’s theory. When a collection of objects possesses a property which none of them alone has on a smaller scale, we call this an “emergent property.” That is, the property emerges when a sufficient number of constituent parts is present.
In order for something like “traffic” to exist, there must be a sufficient number of vehicles present to clog up the road system. In this way one could get stuck in traffic. The potential for traffic is then an emergent property of a sufficient number of vehicles present on the road. Now one can get delayed without traffic, but if one were to be delayed because one got a flat tire, the cause of that delay could not be attributed to traffic.
The “economy” is, as we understand it, an emergent property of society, that is the collection of man living together. (It is worth noting that as an Aristotelian De Jouvenel thinks this state of “society” is natural, and while he refers constantly to Rousseau and Rousseau’s criticism of Power, he differs from him fundamentally in this way.) While one might dispute the doctrines of capitalism, the free market seems an irrefutable fact about exchange. Everything exists in a free market, the only question is whether it exists in white, grey or black markets. Centralised efforts can distort prices both up and down, but this only further testimony to the system of prices and incentives that exist as an emergent property of men, with different strengths and weaknesses, living together. As the situation in the economy changes due to the environment, or the absence or presence to greater degrees of capital and labour, prices adjust. And no centralised authority is required to determine the fluctuations in these prices. There is less rainfall one year, and the production of wheat declines, the scarcity of wheat increases and the price goes up to match that scarcity. No one needed to have thought about price in order for the price to go up. The farmer requires the same amount of resources as he did the year before and so he seeks more in exchange per unit of wheat than he did the year before. (You might say the farmer here IS thinking in terms of prices, but in a very informal way.)
Now if the lack of rain was localised to his farm, he would be in a very difficult position. He would require a greater rate of exchange to maintain his status quo, but other farmers would be able to sell at a lower rate of exchange. They might slightly edge up their prices, noticing that wheat is slightly more in demand due to a reduction in supply than the year before due their peer’s difficulties, taking advantage of the situation.
If the drought was more widespread then all the farmers will need to adjust the rate of exchange for wheat in order to maintain the position they had in previous years. This will drive up the price of wheat more substantially than if a single source of wheat was impacted. This higher price of wheat will have run on effects throughout the entire economy. If people prioritise the consumption of bread over meat, then they might consume less meat, and devote a higher proportion of their income to wheat than they had in the past. There would be too much meat on the market and supply would exceed demand. Meat suppliers would drop their prices to recapture market share. Or perhaps people will decide that wheat is too expensive and more demand will be made for meat, driving up the price of meat. The results in the rest of the economy based on the rise in price of something like wheat reflect the preferences of that population, and those preferences are not universal to all populations in the particulars, but generally there are pretty universal preferences that take priority: food, water, shelter, heat.
Why have I given you this brief overview of economics? Because the point needs to be emphasised that while no individual and independent part of the system is able to control the price in the system, the system is able to control itself. It is able to set a price equilibrium without the need for any centralised decision on wheat prices. (I do not consider here cases of price floors and ceilings or production quotas for the sake of the comparison, although the system does respond to these incentives.) This is what Smith termed “The Invisible Hand of the Economy.” It exists nowhere, with no one sitting at the controls, but it moves and adjusts markets and prices on a global scale.
This analogy also provides us with another insight in that economics and prices are never static except in the thought experiments of philosophers and economists. Likewise, there will always be a pushing towards and pulling away from the centralisation process of Power.
We can see from the example above that there is such a thing as an emergent metaphysical property in one area of society, economics. So we must allow the possibility that, what I have termed, the “Invisible Centre of Power” exists, though it need not exist localised in space in the form of a person or group that controls society. The system of the early Roman Republic reflects this, with Power not existing centralised in any institution but rather by the deliberative process of the Patricians. With this possibility established we can now return to our discussion.
VI. The Invisible Centre
With this groundwork laid we can see the potential for the Invisible Centre of Power to restrain an individual from acting freely and that the source of its strength was “what it drew from the community as a whole.”
De Jouvenel develops this idea beyond this idea. He begins his history of Power by claiming that initially Power did not even exist in the society (though it still drew its strength from the community). Shaman-chiefs read the signs of nature as to what the Divine desired. Their role was not to decide, but decipher the intent. The flights of birds, storm clouds on the horizon, and other naturally occurring phenomena represented the will of the Divine. And those who were adept at the interpretation of those signs were far from free. In many ways they lacked freedom and agency more than the rest of the group, as they were often kept prisoners in temples. And should they fail in their interpretation it demonstrated a fall from grace with the Divine, resulting in their deaths as a propitiation to the Divine. Thus no one made decisions about the course of the group as those decisions were made for them outside the group. The Invisible Centre of Power acted on the group before it was ever internalised into the group. It provided commands and those commands were inherently divine. De Jouvenel says that this is the magical basis of Power. And while we have stripped away all conscious notions of the magical and divine from the systems of sovereignty and law that we use, there is still a deep subconscious and anthropological reverence for Power’s commands as something divine. This produces the easily observed resentment when someone dares break a bad law or custom. “I’ve followed the bad law” the one who resents says to himself, “you ought to too.” However, once enough have flaunted that particular bad law then it is revealed that it is not just error that is embodied in the law, but the regime has lost an essential component of its rule. All regime changes are predicated on the population realising “The Magic is gone, the gods have abandoned them”, even today in the 21st century.
The result of this, while the regime is charged with divine sovereignty, is an obedience that exceeds what we would expect merely from fear of physical retribution from the regime. Rather it embodies a fear of the divine. And it still continues today in the subconscious of the population at large, however much atheism and agnosticism have swept through it, however much any aspect of the four areas I outlined above change.
In this basis of magical obedience and the idea that the source of sovereignty, and with it decision making, is from the Divine, can we begin to see the metaphysical nature of Power. Obedience is owed to the Divine because it is a brute fact that it has the right to rule and command. This right is what we call sovereignty. From this sovereign Divine we were given the Law.
The Law that we were given was not a set of laws about what can or can't be done in specific situations. Rather it was a general and unitary Law that proscribed the behaviour and spirit of the community. And those who ruled were tasked with the application of this Law. Very often there was little to no latitude in its application.
Adherence to this Law wasn’t questioned. The modern observer might look to such a situation and think it represents some divine tyranny. This couldn't be further from how the people who lived under such systems would characterise their experience. Rather than limiting or constraining Man, it guided him. De Jouvenel uses the analogy of a path through a bog. Why would you step off the path, forged by the spirits and ancients, into the bog? To do so would be to abandon one’s senses and self to madness.
We can see the divine basis of the Law in other ways. Many tribal laws don’t have punishments attached to them. They merely censure the violator. And where they do have punishments they are for the propitiation of the Gods, not the satisfaction of the violated, whether the violated is the community as a whole, or an individual or subset of individuals.
VII. The History of Power
We can now finally begin to look at the development of history according to De Jouvenel.
In our model village we have a chieftain. Despite this, the community is structured around women in a primitive matriarchy. An indefinite amount of time elapses in this state. The primary reason for this is that the people do not yet have a proper grasp of reproduction. This can be seen quite simply in that it's easy to determine who the mother of a child is. But in primitive societies that might lack the concept of wives being committed to their husbands, if they have husbands at all, determining fatherhood can be almost impossible unless the child bears some striking resemblance.
Children, therefore, belong to the family of their mothers. Most often their uncles play the role of father. Nothing is inherited via the male line. Rather property is possessed, inherited, and controlled collectively by the women of the family. This system is not the basis for anything other than the most subsistence based existence. No progress, societal or technological, can be expected from such a situation. The first step on the road to civilisation, which De Jouvenel does not provide a strong definition of (one has to look to more Anglo-American/Analytical approaches to get rigorous definitions, De Jouvenel is providing more of a spiritual sense of these things), is when the men of the group realise the potential of their physical strength and break the matriarchal chains keeping Man bound to the ground.
A people either has the will to power (NB: my usage here is power, not Power) or it doesn't. This must be treated almost axiomatically. But a quick diversion might begin to satisfy our curiosity about this conundrum of destiny amongst peoples.
Carroll Quigley, who shadows much of what De Jouvenel has to say (and I suspect must have been familiar with De Jouvenel, although these issues were being widely discussed in the 1939-1968 period and it could merely be overlap), argues for environmental factors contributing to this. A pastoral people, like those who spread north of the caucuses, are mobile and hunt. This is a natural venue for males to dominate society as providers of game.
Settled and agrarian people, like those who settled in the hill country of the middle east, turn to farming. In early stages of human societies, farming was the domain of women. It produces a powerless and indolent male.
With this environmental dichotomy a feedback cycle begins. A religious view arises in each group that further encourages and reflects their respective bellicose and pacific attitudes. The pastoral herders, living in a boring repetitive geography, look to the heavens and the stars. They centre their belief around a Sky-Father. The agrarian people look to the earth, which they are very attached to a specific place in a way the herders are not, that provides for them and centre their beliefs around an Earth-Mother.
I merely offer this brief insight so that the reader, viewer, listener, might begin to think about what causes certain tribes to arise from a primitive state and others remain happy in their circumstances.
However it comes to be possessed, or not, by those who lack this will to overcome their lot are doomed to accept their fate. Nature pushes them around. It is with those who find in themselves the will to overcome, to conquer nature, that create civilisation. It might surprise the reader when I say that, Civilisation is the product of what we might call barbarians rather than peaceful and noble savages.
De Jouvenel says that the story of history proper begins with the “Coming of the Warrior.” If the reader will allow me the liberty, I’d rephrase this as “The Warrior’s Awakening.” The potential of the warrior has always existed in the group. He doesn't arrive, so much as Man realises his strength. The young men, their natural hungers frustrated by the matriarchy, break these shackles. They go forth and capture for themselves wealth. And by this, at this early stage of society, only one thing is meant: women. In a lightly populated primitive world, labour is more valuable than land or food which can be had fairly easily. These women are not shared. They are each warriors alone. Their offspring are his. He now has heirs. The bravest and strongest are recognised and set apart as being successful in their exertions. When a man has all the wives he can handle, he now goes forth seeking slaves. From this emerges an aristocracy and a state that can and will grow.
The state begins when a tribe, dominated by a warrior aristocracy, conquers other new people. This doesn't mean their enslavement. Rather they are brought into the system. The paradigmatic example of this is the Romans and the Sabines. The Romans steal from the Sabines Sabine women for wives. The Sabines retaliate. Though the story has it that the Sabine women intervene to prevent their brothers and fathers on one side fighting with their new husbands on the other, the result is that the Romans effectively subjugate the Sabines. Two groups of warrior clans now exist side by side in a single system. These clans formed by the families of great warriors. De Jouvenel points out a common form of myth, the warrior with a hundred sons. With several wives, and time and persistence, a warrior can easily make for himself a company of sons, each raised in the now forming tradition of strength. These fathers become patriarchs. Power is now brought into society by these patriarchs, in a confederation, governing, rather than being beholden to the accidents of nature. The great issues of the administration of the state are decided by a senate of the patriarchs.
We shall return to this internalisation briefly, but there is another element remaining.
Those weak individuals unable to meet the challenges in this new system get left outside of the clans. They were either unwilling or unable to take advantage of the emerging form of warrior oriented society. This could be from a number of reasons. They were unable to throw off the matriarchal domination in their own families, they lacked physical strength, they lacked intelligence, they lacked foresight, or they were unwilling to take the risks involved. The list can go on. What is important to say is that these become the plebs. There is a social geography of aristocratic clans that act like pyramids, with an internal hierarchy and with a patriarch at the top. The patriarchs work out consensus amongst themselves. Their clans live under their dictatorship. They have absolute authority. Wealth and privilege are doled out internally according to their wills. Despite this tyranny, it is still a higher position to be in one of these clans, than to be outside where there are no rights to be had, and one is exposed to the will of the clans, not merely the will of one patriarch. The families that fail to become warrior clans get ground to dust by the clans' growth, and become more a set of individuals than members of a clan. (There is an interesting insight De Jouvenel gives us, perhaps unwittingly, that being family oriented is an aristocratic disposition.) But they are still dependent on the clans and the order and security they provide. They are like the sand that gathers around the base of the pyramids. These plebeians will factor into the story later.
Meanwhile, the warrior clans pivot from Earth-Mother to Sky-Father. There is no significant society that does not have the concept of the celestial God-King. This means that Power is not the product of feminine whims, as the primitive tribes hold, with the fluctuations of nature representing the goddess’s desire. The Sky-Father acts more logically and judiciously. One need not look at the flights of birds, one can now think and apply. This allows Power to be brought into the society. The other aspect that goes with this is the realisation that an egoistic exercise of strength does in fact work, far from what the old women let the young men in their families think in the matriarchy. This is the realisation that Power can be used. This simultaneously brings Power into the society and begins the egoistic drive to use and accumulate Power for one’s self.
The senate of patriarchs functions as a republic. But there is still a king. One shouldn’t get too hung up on strict definitions with De Jouvenel. The king does not have any meaningful power. The position of shaman-chieftan has transformed into this new position of king. We can see from this that for most of history kings have been of a more religious nature than political. The relationship of the chieftain being most beholden to the Law continues under the king. In addition to this king, we have amongst our clans a particularly strong one. The patriarch of this Clan also becomes a King. This dual king system can be found in many primitive cultures. Sparta embodied this dual monarchy for most of its history. But at some point one of the individuals becomes the sole king, and the religious and warrior roles are merged into a single individual. In doing so the king has become “sacred.” Thus kingship is, in its origins, profoundly more religious than political.
De Jouvenel doesn’t say so, but we might have here the second great turning point in Power. It is first internalised into society, and under the sole monarch who embodies both the religious and martial, it starts to take on a unitary nature in its expression.
VIII. The Changing Nature of the Law
The Law, the unitary and general guiding principles of the society continues to exist. But friction starts to emerge. The patriarch of the clan is absolute in his rule over his clan. When a violation of the Law happens within his clan he is responsible for rectifying it, as beholden to the Law in a similar, if lesser, way to the king. But this means another momentous event in this historical narrative. The new members, the Sabines for example, who have been conquered show us that there is more than one Law. This gives Power the permission it needs to do something entirely new. The process of legislation. Prior to this the Law is received from the Divine and applied. There is no process of creating laws. But some way is needed for deciding conflicts between clans. The King is first amongst equals. The confederation of clans is not like some clan of clans. There is a measure of independence retained by them. And when a member of one clan wrongs a member of another clan, it is also on some level one clan wronging another clan. Individual laws need to be created to prevent a process of retaliation that could mount into civil war from happening. While murder of clan member by another is still handled internally by the patriarch, Power is now responsible for justice being served when the murder of someone is committed by someone else outside of the first persons clan. So a body of legislated laws begins to form.
Previously the punishments associated with the Law were about re-establishing a cosmic order, a propitiation of the god’s anger. It was not primarily concerned with being punitive. The laws (I use Law, upper case, to refer to the divinely given, and law, lower case to refer to the legislated body) are punitive as a way of assuaging other clans' hurt honour.
There now exists two laws in our society. Divine Law and the laws of men. This situation opens pandora's box. In many ways, social decay has already begun. Many things are done out of habit, culture, and education with regards to the Law. But as the Law starts to slip in relevance in favour of laws so do these things start to slip as well.
This process begins the inversion of the stream of Sovereignty feeding into Law feeding into Power.
IX. The ‘Will of the People’
At this point Power is weak. The King is not a dictator. As he tries to strengthen his position he is constantly compromising. He has to work with the patriarchs. This is where the concept of “The Crown in Parliament” originates. The height of the king's sovereign authority was when he made proclamations that had the consent of the patriarchs. In some ways parliament functions as a civil war simulator. The king goes to the patriarchs and asks them what measures they would rebel at. At this point he also lacks a permanence in the application of his will; taxes aren’t permanent, the levies can only be called up for a certain amount of time.
But eventually a smart King realises something. He has a pool of willing allies outside the clan structure in the form of the plebs. And the smartest of these get brought into the burgeoning system of administration. These are mainly Lawyers and Priests with a few Merchants. And they start to displace the warrior aristocracy. Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's great assistant, is a perfect example of this. The bureaucratic (modern) state has started to emerge, administered by capable men, who fund and fuel it by dismantling the great institutions that lie outside of Power, thus ever more increasing the centralisation of Power into the state. What happens to the Church is a good example of this and not solely in terms of money but also in cultural influence.
Now the King’s purpose is to oversee the legislation of new laws for the people at large, and not the clans. He has successfully displaced the patriarchs. He is more or less an absolute King. And with absolute kings comes a new concept of sovereignty. The emphasis is now no longer on his divine right from above, but over the people. The people are now the source of sovereignty.
Power began as an overly egoist endeavour for whoever controlled it at the time. There were clear benefits to whoever possessed it. But slowly idealism has crept in. They have started to talk about the good they do for the people and conveniently forget the benefits to themselves. And it seems like they start to believe this themselves. Here is one of the great lessons of De Jouvenel: Power is not egoist or idealist, but both. And now, with this ideal popularist position, it has given itself even more justification for its growth. Had it’s egoism been on display or acknowledged, the growth in Power would have been much harder to justify.
But at a certain point a King makes a mistake. He pushes too far. He asks too much. And the revolution begins. There never was a revolution against a true tyrant, De Jouvenel claims. The people didn’t rise up against Henry VIII or Louis XIV or Stalin. They take the abuses and oppressions of true tyrants. Rather, the plebs, now emboldened by their growth in status, sees a weakness and pounces. They never would have dared attack it while it displayed true strength.
And for all the utopian promises they parrot to each other and tell to those outside the process, they get a regime that is far more dominating and demanding of them than any King ever was. Louis XIV could only imagine the power that the French Republic and Empire could muster.
The people are now sovereign. The law is now only a set of statutes, with no over guiding principle. All concept of the Law is gone because the role of the Divine in Power is gone. And Power is as absolute as it has ever been.
X. And Here We Are…
And here is history. As was said, this is an abstract analysis of the evolution of Power as embodied in France, which is more representative of its course than how it has unfolded in the English speaking world.
De Jouvenel speculated about where we might be heading. He suggests that the stage he was witnessing in 1945 was the reassertion of the matriarchy. The organisation of society around a matriarchal principle would result in an avoidance of conflict and risk, for a desire of consensus seeking, and for a deep commitment to care.
How could these three things be objectionable? They are, at first glance, quite admirable goals. But they result in disastrous outcomes. The avoidance of conflict and risk means that exposure to damage is minimised, but it also means that the greatness is denied. Great acts are inherently risky manoeuvres. A man faces a desperate situation and rather than taking the lowest risk course, decides to go for the best possible outcome despite the risk to himself and others. This is an unacceptable proposition in which the community owns him and his labour or where it's liable for the provision of his welfare should he injure himself.
Consensus seeking means appealing to the weakest, stupidest, laziest and most cowardly in society. Universal enfranchisement has been one of the most detrimental reforms to aristocratic leaning democracies as it fundamentally undermines the aristocratic element. And we would be well to remember that the aristocracy is not there by accident. Those families have earned those places by daring. But there should also be a system in place which prevents a crystallisation of those families in their place. Families should be prone to rising and falling within the system in order to keep it fresh and alive.
The commitment to care is similar to the avoidance of risk. Men need fathers to push them out the door and to go and face the challenges of the world. The matriarchal principle would keep them at home and develops men that are far too comfortable settling for what they’re given. Any society, in order to prosper, needs hungry men.
All this and more would be disastrous and undermine all real freedom. De Jouvenel does not develop this in much depth, so I shall leave it here. There might be signs now, 80 years later, that the next stage is a return to shamanism as well. But that is speculative and not something I think de Jouvenel anticipated and besides is outside the purposes of this essay.
XI. Hope in Aristocracy?
What comfort can be had from De Jouvenel? I don’t think it's an unreasonable question. But there are a few dead ends he warns us about that we shouldn't take hope in.
In this narrative there is in some sense a cheap freedom for the people to be had. They find it during the jockeying between aristocrats and the King. And they are told that they are free since they can now go to the ballot box but all this does is bring in a system that dominates their lives more than any King or Senate of Patriarchs ever could. This isn't really freedom. This is democracy, and the great lie that's been perpetrated against us is in Power misrepresenting freedom and democracy as the same thing.
The men who rule in our system are the product of a plebian mindset. Men who never had strength and sought to protect themselves. They are what De Jouvenel calls Securitarians. They look to Power to protect them from all adverse things. Our aristocracy is the capitalist, who De Jouvenel has said have failed in their responsibilities like no other aristocracy in history has. And they too are eager for the state to protect them. And they hide behind the facade of democracy parading as freedom. Men who too willingly turn to an ever increasingly matriarchal view of how society should be organised, what some have come to term “the Longhouse”.
And so where does true freedom lie? Freedom for the patricians was the ability to choose to participate in the desires of Power. If some clans decided to go raid, the ones that didn't want to could stay at home. The revenue of the state was voluntarily given by great families, not a permanent universal tax. Liberty, in its truest form, allows for the choice to participate or not, not have participation forced on you by Power.
This is the uncomfortable implication of De Jouvenel for the 21st century liberal.. That true liberty, freed from the shackles of matriarchy and securitarianism, is an aristocratic desire and can only truly be had by an aristocracy; Men who commit themselves to strength, but not just strength. Education. Education in the Law, that is the old Law, the culture and guiding principles of the system. And, again, that liberty allows for the choice to participate or not, not have participation mandated on you by Power.
Liberty is not the anarchic egoistic pursuit we’re told it is.
Anarchy would be men acting like beasts, unconstrained, totally abandoned to their passions. This is not what De Jouvenel desires. He is an Aristotelean and this can be seen most strongly here. Man is a social animal. He ought to live in a society that allows and encourages him to pursue what is good. The Law acts as his guide as to what is good and how it should be pursued. The Law should positively guide his action rather than the laws negatively guiding his actions. Had De Jouvenel lived to see the 21st century he might have said that we have adopted a tyranny of the state while adopting an anarchy of the good, ethics, and morality. Man must be guided by sacred principles in a society in order to achieve his highest good, whatever we might want to say that is, and Power is a necessary trade off for that, and anarchy is antithetical to it.
A true and functioning Liberty is when men can do anything they want but are so constrained by a moral code that they can't imagine doing anything other than what that Law prescribes. That Law is Divine. And with a resurgent Aristocracy must and will come a resurgence in spiritual institutions like the Church and other institutions that had an independence before Power got into them. An aristocratic, responsible, and free group, such as the clans, is the only possible check or balance there can be to Power. And it is prima facie absurd to think that Power, internally dividing itself into some sort of check on itself, will produce any meaningful limitations on itself. Power will do as Power wants, in the justification of the People. Whether such a counter-weight to Power, outside of Power, will emerge is yet to be seen, decades after De Jouvenel wrote.
XII. The Next Stage…
Power is starting to crumble, so De Jouvenel says. The totalitarian liberal democracies will fall to their securitarian tendencies that prevent true strength and growth. And there will be an opportunity for a new Aristocracy to rise. That was in 1945. There is work to be done in evaluating De Jouvenel’s theory in the light of the last 80 years.
For example, if De Jouvenel’s growth of armies was right, we would not have militaries in the hundreds of millions. But China, the nation with the most number of men under arms, has a military of only 2 million. The response I would offer to this problem is rather than thinking in terms of soldiers or army size, to think in terms of the overall mobilisation of the population. And to think of mobilisation in terms of being in the ranks of the military is limiting. In many ways the Second World War never ended. Militaries were reduced in terms of manpower, but their technological capabilities have grown exponentially. The populations remained taxed at wartime rates. This is partly to fund the military and partly to buy the loyalty of the mass of individuals with welfare, with all other sources of welfare relegated by Power as competitors for that loyalty.
A closing lesson: we must not think that Power will not be gotten away with. It will be there, constantly trying to grow itself. There is no getting rid of Power. It isn't evil. But it must be harnessed and controlled. It is here where De Jouvenel praises the Anglo-Saxons. Our systems have effectively limited the ability of Power to assert itself due to the Aristocracy. An Aristocracy that has been able to assimilate new members. But the Lords losing the veto was a disaster, De Jouvenel tells us. What would he make of the events since 1997?
The English speaking peoples are currently the group on earth most familiar with the concept of liberty. Can a new aristocracy emerge from them? Can it emerge anywhere? Or is it the fate of the world to end up with some Orwellian Matriarchy? Denying all expression of strength and greatness while levelling all society down via hyper-individualism? This remains to be seen.
What De Jouvenel implies is that it would be better for all, patriarchs and plebs, to have a strong aristocracy. Because this aristocracy would still provide a better existence for the plebs than will Power if it goes unopposed.