Viewing the Development of the Technocratic State through De Jouvenel
What we can learn about power from De Jouvenel's 'On Power'
Written by: Cousin Vinny
About a month ago, Joel Davis (unofficially) kicked off ‘Bertrand de Jouvenel Month’ for many of us here in our community. In fact, many of the nerds in the IAA Discord server (which is kind of a secretive place) were actually motivated enough by Davis’ Youtube series to go and read de Jouvenel’s 1945 masterpiece on political philosophy ourselves… And we certainly were not disappointed. In ‘On Power’, de Jouvenel gives a unique and well-sourced historical account of where power comes from, how it develops over time, and how it comes to grow continuously, and it actually becomes quite evident where many thinkers on the dissident-right today draw from his analysis.
And so, for those of us who’ve read de Jouvenel, we’ve now been invited to engage in a richer, more nuanced, discourse on power, and on our relationship to and with it… But for those of us who haven’t, here are perhaps some good insights from Davis’ three-part discussion to help get you started…
Insight #1: One nation’s ability to mobilize increasing portions of its population towards its war efforts eventually forces competing nations to follow suit, in an arms race towards who can become best equipped for ‘total war’… And total war leads to the total state…
“The enemy must be copied by the other side, who will otherwise fight at a disadvantage. Thus it comes about that just as duelists follow each others’ thrusts and faints, nations at war copy each others’ total methods.”
As far back as the Middle Ages, various segments of society have been mobilized by the state for the purpose of security (war). Any nation who didn’t do so would have fell behind. Except that in the Middle Ages, the kings were reduced to begging for help from the peasants in most of their war efforts. Then emerged absolutism, in which a centralized administration was able to force people in through nationalism.
Prior to the 16th century, the idea of a king or a sovereign power as ‘divinity incarnated’ would have also been seen as insane to the public, and they would have killed whoever dared to make such bold claims. It used to be that the prince was the servant of the servants of gods—not the master—and the church once had the ability to cripple these princes. As absolute monarchy came to prominence though, kings came to give man a ‘social nature’, which placed the sovereign above God, and thus undermined the church.
Furthermore, to have the individual be the one in power, and not the divine, required the concept of the nation to become the ‘personhood of power’. This led to an organic conception of society, where the nation would come to be seen as the living, breathing ‘social organism’, and “her” subjects would come to be seen as merely organs within that “body”. Power would then come to be seen as a function rather than a right; and ‘legitimacy’ would be replaced with the end of moral and material ‘cohesion’. In ensuring the success of a nation, enlightened technocrats could now rationalize social engineering on behalf of the nation’s “common good”. Power was thus permitted to sacrifice the rights of private citizens in the pursuit of “social justice”.
“Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” The total war machine was now complete…
We went from clans, where elders led the ways of their people, to kings who created administrative offices, bureaucracies, and systems, that would not lead but instead impose power’s will upon the subjects. Mass literacy had also liquidated sworn traditions, and ‘paper law’ overtaken customs that were once passed on by elders to youths. To some, paper law is seen to have its place, as it was designed to limit centralized power, but yet power is always able to get around it through the guise of the “greater good”. Like a contract, even morality can be now defined as a law. This ‘moral law’ is an extension of power that perpetuates itself through its diffusing. When we give each other the moral law, social ties collapse, and a managerial state is formed.
“Its naïve to think a good man would be a good ruler, for once he is a ruler, he has to think like a ruler.”
Modernity has led us to believe that a king’s rule was more authoritarian than any modern-day government. In reality, the ritualized brutalities of a king were sparse and limited. Today, there are psychological mind games, a surveillance state, and propaganda apparatuses, that invade the soul and are all-encompassing. It gets you at a level that physical brutality would have never reached.
Insight #2: Internal competitions for power lead to a race to the bottom; a society that idealizes ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘democracy’… The old “high-low vs. the middle”…
“The parasitic domination of a small society over a collection of other societies is everywhere. The mark of a big formation; the state. Eventually this capacity for domination overextends itself though, and those who dominate are forced by necessity to recruit from those they have subjugated to strengthen themselves.”
Once it is admitted that a state can be captured by a particular interest in order to dominate and exploit society, power requires an explanation which reflects this non-identity with society as such. The essence of power is not society or nation, but is essentially the ability to command and be obeyed. The fusion of so-called ‘natural societies’ (tribes and clans) into ‘nations’ does not come from an instinct of association, but rather from domination. A new king takes over a people and then makes them a part of the state in order to grow the empire. Once they have assimilated into the new nation, a king will then give the new serfs power, and have them act out against the old aristocratic middle class in order to consolidate his own legitimacy. The high and low versus the middle.
“Command which is its own end thus in time comes to care of the common good. The monarch is not in the least a creature of his people set up to satisfy their wants. He is rather a parasitic and dominating growth which has detached itself from the dominating group of parasitic conquerors. But the need to establish his authority, to maintain it, and to keep it supplied, binds him to a course of conduct which profits the mass majority of his subjects.”
Monarchy, for de Jouvenel, owes its existence to a two-fold triumph. Firstly, a military one of conquerors over subjects, and then a political one of king over (the other) conquerors. King builds a state apparatus out of the conquered to overpower the conquerors. However, the king is a victim of his own success. As the high empowers the low, the low realizes that it doesn’t need the high, and eventually overthrows him in favor of a democracy. The middle then returns to form an oligarchy which then sits at the top.
The power of an oligarchy strengthens itself under the “will” of the common good and under the pretext of social justice. To manage a large society, they must bring in the role of the intellectual to legitimize the sovereign with ‘expertise’. If an intellectual says it’s for the greater good then who are the plebs to disagree? Which brings us to where we are today in modern politics.
From aristocracy to monarchy to democracy to managerialism, the driving force of all power is rivalry. The galaxy is a system of power rivalries between groups trying to gain power. In warring nations, one must utilize centralize power in order to prevent themselves from being taken over by other nations, as in 1870, when France lost to Prussia because it didn’t impose conscription. However, by the 20th century, we no longer had arms races, we had totalitarianism races; races to mobilize entire populations (men, women, and children) into state war apparatuses. It wasn’t formal monarchies who won these races, but rather self-styled ‘republics’ of increasingly bureaucratic (managerial) natures.
“The passion for absolutism is inevitably in conspiracy with the passion for equality.”
As power seeks to perpetuate its own growth, it will also take on the form of industrialization. Whenever you industrialize a population rapidly, a lot of people will get left behind. However, this mass that gets left behind is still useful as a group to the goals of power. Droves of people now have no option but to assimilate into the rules of power, and give it significance in the new society that has formed. The masses become entirely dependent on state power to give them relevance and status. Thus, power lusts for nothing more than to massify the lower classes into the apparatus of industrialization, so that the lower classes become entirely dependent on the state.
“The march of absolutism, who subdued the diversity of customs to the uniformity of laws.”
There was once a time when the aristocrats opposed taxation and the arming of the peasants. Aristocrats wanted to be of value as the best warriors and the most noble class. It was a way of elevating their status, but there was also a sense of honor and duty that came with that elevation. The emergence of a king was the beginning of the ‘statocratic’; a champion among the aristocrats who takes on a role to lead. However, no king wants to answer to his aristocratic peers. Therefore, once he utilizes the masses, he weakens the aristocrats and replaces them with bugmen who have no taste for power.
However, de Jouvenel argues that a kingship at least has more compassion for the people than a democracy. In the modern state democracy, politicians know that their status isn’t permanent. There is no prestige, or a reason to care. In contrast, once a king establishes a hereditary kingship, he begins to take pride in his kingdom. A robber who breaks in has no care for his house, but a house owner, on the other hand, will take pride in maintaining it.
Insight #3: Democratic ‘grey goo’ ends up dismantling tradition and centralizing power, rather than empowering a people and their right to self-determination… “Heh, ironic”, as Emperor Palpatine would say…
“The passion for absolutism in conspiracy with the passion for equality. This is a key point that, in a pre-liberal context, the monarchy strengthens itself against the oligarchy, which is aristocratic in nature at this time by the people. The political and economic elite therefor possess a natural antagonism that plays itself out in history time and time again. A conscious distinction to the popular concept that these groups customarily entered into alliance against the commoner.”
The political interest always wants to centralize more power and more authority and more dependency into itself, therefore its enemy is always the economic interest who has the means and the ability to mobilize against political authority. As in the French and Russian revolutions, the overthrowing of a current power ends up creating a power vacuum.
New power then establishes itself with the breaking of custom and the previously established sense of moral and spiritual legitimacy. Because power can’t initially do what it wants due to the existing culture scheme and norms of the society, it will utilize the plebs to break free from these constraints under the guise of ‘liberation’. In doing so, law is transformed from natural to artificial through the people, and the law of authority takes over the law of the divine, dismantling the traditional custom.
“The great period of rationalism is also that of enlightened and free-thinking despots. All assured of the conventional character of institutions, or persuaded that they both could and should overturn the customs of their peoples to make them conformable, to reason all extending prodigiously their bureaucracies for the furtherance of their designs.”
Revolutions have always portrayed themselves against power but they always end up radically expanding power. From Napoleon to Stalin, the master of those who rise up against “tyranny” become the tyrants of the people who they fought so hard to overthrow. In most cases, successful revolutions are never against the most tyrannical kings, but against the most weakened and good-natured kings. A soft power, however good its intentions, is always the enemy of the people because it cannot stop authority from grabbing wealth and making heavier its social yoke.
“Follow an idea from its birth to its triumph and it becomes clear that it came to power only at the price of an astounding degradation of itself.”
Democracy eventually shapes into totalitarianism, as it burns through the residual law which is kept out of legislative hands by the separation of powers. Parties form into these machines that have prepackaged ideologies that are bureaucratized, and then marketed out to donors. It is a perversion of the social contract. Since the laws are the only source of ‘the law’, there can be no remedy against accepting it, and all challenges against power are merely an illusion.
The paradox of the juridically free society is that laws which were theoretically granted for our freedoms have made us more oppressed than before. Magistrates and legislators are still just as abusive as tyrants, but now they have this cover of ‘the rule of law’ to propose this egalitarianism fantasy. This harmonization of thought, where we all have to think the same way, has taken an obedient, credulous, and laborious form that is given to a power that is distant to the people itself. This is where the modern, half-free man differs from the old serfs of the feudal days. A tyrannical society can kill your body, but the modern liberal society can kill your soul.
The paradox of giving power to the people to create a better society has ironically been used to sustain a form of high-minded ignorance. Democracy can work on a communal level, but once it hits the masses of millions, you end up seeing a centralized body which oversees everything that is antagonistic to the formation of smaller societies within society. Mass democracy frames itself as the true ‘will of the people’, and any small group that doesn’t agree with it is hence treated as a virus; democracy will destroy actual existing people groups in the name of a fictional ‘mass’ and ‘general will’. In the social justice ideals of today, you see identitarian minority groups who gain the upper hand, promote their lifestyles as the ‘new normal’ for everyone, and antagonize anyone who disagrees with them… So much for ‘will of the people’. Everything also then gets reduced to a binary issue. Our side or not. Vax or anti-vax.
As the world turns into a matriarchy, people who have assumed power have lost their conquering ways and nobility in their pursuit of ‘democratic’ power. Our drive to conquer, be individuals, and find a life of nobility worth living, is traded away for a piece of the pie that the current power structure offers to those who become subservient to it. Everyone becomes a child as they turn to the state in order to preserve what power is given to them. In the end, most of us like to believe that we have power, and those in power would be more than happy to preserve that illusion.
These few insights merely scratch the surface on what de Jouvenel has to offer in ‘On Power’. In the coming weeks, Some of the aforementioned ‘nerds’ on our Discord server may also have some thoughts to share—perhaps in another series of discussions on Youtube, this time on the Iron Age Archive channel. Until then, it is highly recommended that you pick up a copy of De Jouvenel for yourself. Rumor has it that there’s a link to a free PDF version of it just sitting in a video description somewhere…
How can I join the discord server?