Bertrand de Jouvenel > Quotes

“There is a tyranny in the womb of every Utopia.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel

“A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.”
― Bertrand de Jouvenel

“Power changes its appearance but not its reality.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“As every advance of Power is useful for war, so war is useful for the advance of power; war is like a sheep-dog harrying the laggard Powers to catch up their smarter fellows in the totalitarian race.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius for construction, which are part of man's natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“Power is linked with war, and a society wishing to limit war's ravages can find no other way than by limiting the scope of Power.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“Where will it all end? In the destruction of all other command for the benefit of one alone - that of the state. In each man's absolute freedom from every family and social authority, a freedom the price of which is complete submission to the state. In the complete equality as between themselves of all citizens, paid for by their equal abasement before the power of their absolute master - the state. In the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in the denial of every pre-eminence which is not approved by the state. In a word, it ends in the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state. The extremes of individualism and socialism meet: that was their predestined course.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“Ransack the history of revolutions, and it will be found that every fall of a regime has been presaged by a defiance which went unpunished. It is as true today as it was ten thousand years ago that a Power from which the magic virtue has gone out, falls.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“It is passing strange that our philosophers of the Revolutionary period should have formed their conception of a free society by reference to societies where everyone was not free - where, in fact, the vast majority were not free. It is no less strange that they never stopped to ask whether perhaps the characters which they so much admired were not made possible by the existence of a class which was not free. Rousseau, in whose philosophy were many things, was fully conscious of this difficulty: "Must we say that liberty is possible only on a basis of slavery? Perhaps we must.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“It is as futile and dangerous to aim at making of society one large family, as sentimental socialism seeks to do, as to aim at making of it one large team, as positivist socialism seeks to do.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good

“No century has been more concerned than ours to do away with war: it has proved signally unsuccessful. All too little attention has been given to the phenomenon that internal politics have become increasingly more warlike.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel

“Historians of the sentimental school have sometimes regretted that royalty became absolute, while at the same time rejoicing that it installed plebeians in office. They deceive themselves. Royalty exalted plebeians just because it aimed at becoming absolute; it became absolute because it had exalted plebeians.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“The modern absolutism, which we find the most natural thing in the world, would have been quite beyond the dreams of the most absolute of kings.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good

“En el socialismo, el espíritu de solidaridad propuesto tiene como ingrediente necesario la desconfianza y el odio hacia otra sociedad o una parte de otra sociedad. Así, la solidaridad conseguida no es, como se pretendía, una solidaridad en la caridad, sino, al menos parcialmente, una solidaridad en la lucha.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel

“The idea so commonly found that scepticism leads to toleration arises from considering the effects of scepticism in the intellectual who takes no active part - not its effects in the man of action. In the man of action, moral relativism and scepticism as to the absolute and universal value of his priunciples are no obstacle to a fanatical belief in their immediate value as his own clan at the actual moment; they do not weaken in the least his will to impose his principles. How should he glimpse a soul of truth in the principles of others, entitling them to respect, when he does not believe in noble origins of this kind even for his own principles?”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good

“It is true that ideas are queens by birth: but they only gain favour when they enter the service of interests and instincts. Follow an idea through 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. A reasoned structure of arguments, setting in motion a whole stream of logical correspondences between defined terms, does not as such make its way into the social consciousness: rather it has undergone pressures which have destroyed its internal architecture, and left in its place only a confused babel of concepts, the most
magical of which wins credit for the others.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power. Its Nature and the History of Its Growth

“The leveling process need find no place in Power's programme: it is embedded in its destiny. From the moment that it seeks to lay hands on the resources latent in the community, it finds itself impelled to put down the mighty by its natural tendency as that which causes a bear in search of honey to break the cells of the hive.

How will the common people, the dependents and the laborers, welcome Power's secular work of destruction? With joy, inevitably. Its work is that of demolishing feudal castles; ambition motivates it, but the former victims rejoice in their liberation. Its work is that of breaking the shell of petty private tyrannies so as to draw out the hoarded energy within; greed motivates it but the exploited rejoice in the downfall of their exploiters.

The final result of this stupendous work of aggression, does not disclose itself till late. Visible, no doubt, is the displacement of many private dominions by one general dominion, of many aristocracies by one "statocracy." But at first, the common people can but applaud: the more capable among them are, in a continuous stream, enrolled in Power's army - the administration - there to become the masters of their former social superiors.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“As we shall see, theories like those of Divine Right and Popular Sovereignty, which pass for opposites, stem in reality from the same trunk, the idea of sovereignty—the idea, that is, that somewhere there is a right to which all other rights must yield. It is not hard to discover behind this juridical concept a metaphysical one.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“The entire stock of relationships which suited in war—militiae—was regarded as inadmissible and improper in peace—domi. We have the measure of how right the Romans were in this respect in the experience of the intellectual and moral impoverishment brought about by total mobilisation.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good

“No state can remain indifferent to another state's wresting from its people more of their rights. It must make a corresponding draft on its own people's rights, or else pay dearly for its neglect to put itself on a level...

A Power which interferes with its people only in certain respects cannot increase its warlike potential beyond certain limits. To pass them, it must revolutionize those respects and give itself fresh prerogatives.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“The law of all modern states takes account of associations, whose members, in theory, pursue the common end with equal zeal. The experience of all associations proves, however, that this is not the case, and that a lively, constant and vigorous awareness of the end is found only in a minority of the associates; an association is really rather like a comet—a large tail of docile followers dragged along by a small dynamic head.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good

“These observations bring out the fact that, whenever liberty is regarded merely as the power to do something which it is desired to do, the tyrant need only base himself on the desires of the masses to suppress the liberties cherished by a few. But can anyone fail to see that the very concrete problem here posed is the problem of the sation of satisfactions, and not the problem of liberty at all? How, then, has it come about that we have drifted away from what we were discussing? This is the very definition of liberty which we allowed as our starting-point. Its development makes it clear that the thing discussed does not merit the fair name of liberty.
It is certain that every man desires addition to his power and chafes at the obstacles which stand in his way; it is also certain that the quest for a power which is wider binds him to a growing dependence on other men; it is certain, lastly, that this dependence creates a growing tendency to quarrel about distribution. All that is important, but it is the story not of liberty but of human imperialism. And whoever thinks to see the essence of liberty in the power of man is is utterly lacking in any true feeling for liberty.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good

“The more routine that systematised activities are, the more nearly they are of the monotonous character seen in the habits of social animals and the less necessary are master builders; the more novel actions are, the more necessary are master builders. Dislike of the leader and the promoter, though linked emotionally to progressivism, is linked logically to total conservatism. Conversely, an authoritarian approach, natural enough in the instigator of new activities, is unjustified in the mere overseer of routines.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good

“... the social scientist who lacks a mathematical mind and regards a mathematical formula as a magic recipe, rather than as the formulation of a supposition, does not hold forth much promise. A mathematical formula is never more than a precise statement. […] The chief merit of mathematization is that it compels us to become conscious of what we are assuming.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel

“The English aristocracy knew better how to work together; the reason perhaps being that, whereas in France the parliament passed into the hands of the lawyers and so became an instrument of the crown, in England it remained an organ of the social authorities and a rallying-point for their opposition. So well did it understand the art of giving to its resistance a plausible show of public advantage that the Magna Carta, to take one instance, though in reality nothing more than a capitulation of the king to vested interests acting in their own defence, contained phrases about law and liberty which are valid for all time.

Whereas the French nobles got themselves known to the people as petty tyrants, often more unruly and exacting than a great one would be, the English nobles managed to convey to the yeoman class of free proprietors the feeling that they too were aristocrats on a small scale, with interests to defend in common with the nobles.

This island English aristocracy achieved its master-stroke in 1689. With Harrington rather than John Locke for inspiration, it riveted on the Power given the king whom it had brought from overseas limits so cleverly contrived that they were to last a long time.

The essential instrument of Power is the army. An article of the Bill of Rights made standing armies illegal, and the Mutiny Act sanctioned courts martial and imposed military discipline for the space of only a year; in this way, the government was compelled to summon Parliament every year to bring the army to life again, as it were, when it was on the verge of legal dissolution. Hence the fact that, even today, there are the “Royal” Navy and the “Royal” Air Force, but not the “Royal” Army. In this way, the tradition of the Army's dependence on Parliament is preserved.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“In later times, Power's growth has continued at an accelerated pace, and its extension has brought a corresponding extension of war. And now we no longer understand the process. We no longer protest, we no longer react. The quiescence of ours is a new thing for which Power has to thank the smokescreen in which it has wrapped itself. Formally, it could be seen manifest in the person of the king, who did not disclaim being the matter he was, and in whom human passions were discernible. Now masked in anonymity, it claims to have no existence of its own, and to be but the impersonal and passionless instrument of the general will.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

“Rejoicing in his absolute authority, the single egoist will exploit it methodically, whereas a mêlée of egoists will bring about a ruinous disorder and a disastrous cleavage, because the contrariety of the appetites to be satisfied will prevent the satisfaction of any single one. Clearly, then, the effect of the pursuit of private ends under cover of the public good will be worse if there are many with a hand in power than if there is only one.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good

“The man who has dedicated himself to the success of the protect, the master builder, no longer has any freedom: his conduct is now determined altogether by the constraining force of the end. Logically, therefore, he is bound to require at every moment from his companions whatever will best serve that end, and he demands of them imperiously whatever he thinks is of that nature. This imperiousness, though to immediate view that of the master, springs ultimately from the project itself, for it is the project which is in command. In the eyes of those under him, however, it is the master who hustles them, and they think him inhuman by reason of his disregard of their moods and personalities and his inability to see them other than as servants of the project (like himself).”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good

“Of all the simplifications to which the human spirit naturally inclines, unable to reconcile itself to the complexity of the real, there is none more dangerous than the attempt to integrate the whole of society in one vast, permanent action group.”
― Bertrand De Jouvenel, Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good