On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth

by Bertrand de Jouvenel

Documenting the process by which government and controlling majorities have grown increasingly powerful and tyrannical, Bertrand de Jouvenel demonstrates how democracies have failed to limit the powers of government. This development Jouvenel traces all the way back to the days of royal absolutism, which established large administrative bureaucracies and thus laid the foundation of the modern omnipotent state.

On Power is an important work that Professor Angelo M. Petroni of the Luigi Einaudi Center for Research in Torino, Italy, has said is "simply a book that no serious scholar of political science or political philosophy can afford to ignore."
Bertrand de Jouvenel was born in Paris in 1903; he traveled widely, becoming an astute observer of British and American institutions. Later in life, he was an author and teacher, first publishing On Power in 1945. Jouvenel died in 1987. Among his other books, besides The Ethics of Redistribution, are Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good (1957) and The Pure Theory of Politics (1963).

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Political Science, Economics, Sociology

466 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1945

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

When Conservatives Had Minds

Bertrand de Jouvenel is an example of a species in decline - the thoughtful radical conservative. Like his North American fellow-thinker, William F Buckley, Jouvenel argued against the development of the post-war welfare state in France, not because he was racist, mean, lacked empathy, or was unprincipled but because he distrusted the the state power necessary to create it. The evangelical right and their single issue politics killed off this kind of intelligent argument by insisting that all power comes from God and therefore must be providential. We all suffer as a result.

“Power,” Jouvenel says, “possesses some mysterious force of attraction by which it can quickly bring to heel even the intellectual systems conceived to hurt it.” What more compelling practical example could there be of this maxim than the election of Donald Trump? His claim to ‘drain the swamp’ of the Washington power-elite has of course resulted in the establishment of a new, more powerful elite, with less political conscience and humanity than has ever been seen in the United States.

Jouvenel‘s target was power not the welfare state. This is what made him a conservative rather than a right-winger. He would have been just as concerned with a Republican Trump or Reagan as with a Democratic Obama or Roosevelt. It is a patent fact of political life that any significant governmental or social change demands a consolidation and concentration of additional political power in the hands of those managing the change. Once acquired such power is rarely relinquished short of a revolution. And power leads to many worse things than inequality - large-scale killing for example.

“The extension of power,” Jouvenel says, “is responsible for the extension of war.” No religion has ever asked for the sacrifices demanded by the modern nation-state. The creation of the nation-state itself required a degree of concentration of sovereign power such that these sacrifices could be enforced if they weren’t voluntarily forthcoming. This sacrifice is mitigated by the emotional bond of oppression that finds its most articulate expression in warfare, one of the now routine universal demands of the nation-state. “Savagery in act,” Jouvenel points out, “is sustained by savagery in feeling.” Patriotism is the pot in which such feeling is brought to the boil. The result of course is “total militarisation of whole societies.” And few think it odd.

The political implication is clear but difficult to digest in democratic society: if possible do not undertake any radical change without a way to de-concentrate power as quickly as possible after you’ve made it. The fact is, however, that power likes to hide in plain sight: “... masked in anonymity it claims to have no existence of its own and to be the impersonal and passionless instrument of the General Will.” We all therefore “have a wide complicity in the extension of power.” We want it, we get it, and we want to keep it. “Force alone can establish power, habit alone can keep it in being.” The Achilles heel of democratic societies.

Among medieval philosophers and theologians, the primary issue was how to control power. Contrast that with today in which the focus on what is necessary to compel obedience to power in corporate and political life. Jouvenel makes a profound observation, almost as an aside, that I find particularly enlightening. The medieval, and subsequently Calvinist, doctrine of predestination has always baffled me. Why would such a doctrine of arbitrary divine power be so attractive? It appears inhumane, heartless, even ruthless, and incompatible on the face of it with the ideals of Christian love and forgiveness.

The answer, Jouvenel suggests, is that predestination is in fact a condemnation and warning about the essential evil of power in the hands of human beings. Power will always be abused, the more powerful the person who wields it the more abuse will be inflicted. A sort of radicalisation of Lord Acton’s ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ In other words, there is no transcendent principle behind power that justifies its use. Power is not from God as the monarchists and even modern democrats hold. Power is only God’s and human beings should not presume on it. This is the motive and message of predestination according to Jouvenel.

I find this message attractive. Power is not something that flows out of some divine source, imaginary or not, and then cascades down a hierarchy, diminishing in strength as it goes. Power is created continuously, almost always selfishly, from below. It’s creation is obscured from view because we seem mesmerised by “the basic hypothesis that brought Sovereignty [of the nation-state] to birth: that men are the reality and society a convention.” Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher destroyed thoughtful conservatism by simply insisting on this hypothesis as a truth of existence. Trump is trying for total extinction.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally published in 1945, this remarkable book was possibly the clearest analysis of the nature of Power (always capitalized by De Jouvenel) since Machiavelli's account of the reality of politics in Renaissance Italy.

It is of its time. De Jouvenel was clearly stunned at the ability of post-dynastic state machines to mobilise national resources and populations for total war. The 'tyrannical' Louis XIV (there is a French cultural focus to the book) could not have dreamed of such power.

The thesis is a surprisingly simple one - that Power (meaning concentrated state power) strengthens itself through the revolutionary defeat of aristocratic republicanism and that its alliance with each rising class in turn strengthens its ability to command the resources of that class.

This is not quite the positive interpretation of successive revolutionary successes that the typical intellectual of the 1940s might have found easy to accept although it is perhaps easier to do so in the light of Communism. De Jouvenel has become a beacon for American libertarians.

But the message is not simply an implicitly anti-communist one. While Hitler and Stalin hover over the story, De Jouvenel's interest is really in the so-called liberal democratic States whose ability to enslave populations and thieve property has been no less than that of these tyrants.

His book is a paradigm-shifter, perhaps more so today, because what he is really saying is that every apparent rhetorical victory for the population in terms of rights, democracy and welfare has actually been a victory for ruling elites.

This is not to say that there have not been benefits - including the rule of law for everyone and welfare programmes - but that the 'deal' has been a dirty one with populations at large conscripted into death and slavery, even in Roosevelt's America, with scarcely a protest.

I part company with De Jouvenel (though I suggest that his analysis in itself is unanswerable) only on his conservative pessimism (which I might share about our species but not necessarily about all future social and political forms). When he moves from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’ he is less convincing.

His attachment to aristocratic republicanism, whether Roman or eighteenth century British, may represent more freedom for men who do not come under the gaze of the aristocrat than that offered by the State but petty oppressions, security and welfare do provide a reason for voluntary enslavement.

He is not insensitive to the fact that welfare needs and the bad conduct of aristocrats help drive the rise of State power even if it is clear that populations will die (perhaps in a state of ‘false consciousness’) to preserve this Faustian bargain – an improved degree of protection and security.

Of course, we are in different times now but what De Jouvenel might have noticed is that, as States weaken under the global market system, so protection for the population weakens and that the increase in ‘freedom’ since the 1980s is matched by an increase in insecurity.

Security for the masses in return for blind compliance (with even intellectuals submitting to the myth of the democratic State) has been replaced across much of the West with security for the State against the masses.

This seems to be a slow reversion to eighteenth century conditions. States cannot enforce their desired theft of assets or conscript labour yet are both engaged in expensive and perpetual small wars and trying to reduce their obligations to the population, since they get few services in return.

The population at large thinks that it owns the State (this heir to dynastic accretion of power at the expense of fellow criminal warlords) but it does not and never did. The State is an interest in itself concerned solely with its own survival and is now genuinely worried about that survival.

One survival strategy is to pool power with other threatened bureaucracies in unwieldy and fundamentally flawed imperial bureaucracies like the European Union in the hope that democracy might be attenuated by scale and discontent moderated by judicial legalism and spending.

Another survival strategy is to try and scare the population into compliance with State authority through constant security scares and to encourage passivity with populist policies (‘bread and circuses’).

Yet another is to disengage the bulk of the population by treating political parties and NGOs as partners in Power so detaching them from the population at large. Activists, under this now dominant system, get a slice of the action in return for collaboration.

All these policies, in cultures used to personal freedom, that have access to social media that can by-pass official channels and have a decreasing sense of locality and ideology to bind them together, require funds and funds are becoming harder to find as taxation is resisted.

Moreover, people not merely died for Italy and Germany, they volunteered to die for Italy and Germany. Who will volunteer to die for the European Union? People volunteered to die for communism. Who will volunteer to die for liberal capitalism? No-one who is not an idiot is the answer.

The world of today is very different from that of De Jouvenel. States still have an immense monopoly of force which could create workable tyrannies but such methods would thrust such societies back into unsustainable economic models that would ultimately undermine States themselves.

Our problem is the very opposite. States are now faced with a revived warlordism at the margins – the very basis of aristocratic republicanism and ‘freedom’. It is not stupid to consider Columbian and Mexican narco-gangsters or Al-Qaeda as the possible basis of functional states one day.

This book is highly recommended not so much for De Jouvenel’s implicit prescriptions – somewhat desperate appeals to a religious (in the Roman sense) basis for society and better behavior and self restraint by elites – as for his cold and cruelly apposite analysis of the situation.

Although the analysis is of the situation of the West in the 1940s, the book makes it clear that what he is writing about is something much more ‘eternal’ about Power and its drive for self-advancement. There is something intrinsic to State Power that drives it to tyranny over men.

Undoubtedly, this is a conservative book and probably a pessimistic one but it can be read with profit by those who are not conservative. Authoritarian socialists and other ideologues won’t give a damn and will continue to try to capture the State to enforce their ideology no matter what.

But libertarian Leftists would do well to understand that the State flips from solution to problem at a key point in the game and that the cost of socialist or Leftist policies becomes far too great at a certain cut-off point in key personal freedoms, including State enslavement of labour value.

This does not mean accepting De Jouvenel’s implied approval of the feudalism of Di Lampedusa’s Prince of Salina. It does suggest that a libertarian Left should distrust the people that the ‘Leopard’ distrusted, rising men in revolutionary situations, to which he was happy to adapt.

History is the story of the little guys being screwed over and finding it increasingly difficult to hide from the military boot, the police spy and the tax collector. The fact that some of the cash might return in benefits later is of little joy if your son returns from the front in a coffin.

Perhaps there is some way of creating an aristocratic republicanism where everyone is an aristocrat, jealous of freedoms, prepared to defend their land by force but not steal another’s, charitable, concerned with public order and egalitarian – admittedly a tall order given our species!

[Pedro Almeida Jorge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading for every libertarian/classical liberal.
Jouvenel will administer an overdose of reality and historical perspective into your political ideals - and this is not to say that he will change your mind. I count myself as a libertarian, and Jouvenel was one of the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society. But his more conservative perspective will certainly add much valuable texture to one's political vision.
Also very valuable for its treatment of Rousseau and other 18th century French philosophers.

[Rudyard L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunningly good. Truly a masterpiece

[JoséMaría BlancoWhite · Rating 4 out of 5]

Casi 500 páginas de intenso debate interno, de indagación, sobre el origen y evolución del Poder y, por extensión del gobierno, del Estado, de las sociedades humanas y, finalmente, de la libertad. El lector vivirá la historia de las comunidades humanas de una manera intensa y crítica, siempre haciéndose preguntas, siempre intentando entender las motivaciones o los impulsos que provocaron que nuestros ancestros, y ahora nosotros, delegaran sus reponsabilidades en otros seres o instituciones con el fin, supuesto, de proteger su vida, su seguridad, y en lo que cabe, conseguir una cierta calidad de vida. Y adoptar dichas decisiones a costa de su libertad. Dependiendo de cúanto valoren los individuos su libertad (parece un trasunto de Fausto vendiendo su alma a Mefistófeles) canjearán esta por la seguridad que puedan obtener a través de una relación siervo-señor feudal; amo-esclavo; o, como sucede hoy día en el moderno Estado Social Occidental: a través de un complicado entramado de dependencias sociales que equivalen en la práctica a un vasallaje a la antiguo usanza, y que impiden que el indiviudo -al menos el de carácter menos sanguíneo- pueda o quiera emanciparse de un Estado omnipotente que le acompaña desde la cuna a la tumba y que le regala los oídos al modo, repito, del mismo Mefistófeles.

El libro no es el ladrillo que uno podría esperar por el tema y el volumen. Cierto que uno se encuentra a menudo con casos de esos y que vuelven reacios a los lectores que luego reniegarán de volver a leer un libro en su vida que no sea pura ficción o demagogia electoral. Este libro es claro y a la vez intenso. Hace pensar continuamente. Cansa, pero porque no da respiro, no por aburrimiento. Las ideas no son fáciles de explicar, y Jouvenel lo consigue, sin llegar a la brillantez excelsa, pero sin decaer tampoco. Y son ideas, de lo que se habla. El protagonista es el Poder y, por implicación, la libertad individual.

El libro va desarrollando su argumento, planteando sus preguntas, aportando sus juicios e ilustraciones al hilo de la historia y de las ideas de pensadores que desde la Grecia clásica a la Revolución Inglesa y Francesa han afectado las vidas de los ciudadanos en relación al Estado. Al comienzo de la obra Jouvenel explica, y compartimos completamente, el motivo que le llevó a escribir este libro. Era 1945 cuando se publicó por primera vez. El autor no puede dejar de preguntarse cómo los individuos, la sociedad moderna de su tiempo, había podido llegar a tal extremo de indignidad moral, de degradación social, de servilismo con respecto al Poder. El Poder, en lo que había avanzado de siglo, eran los Totalitarismos: el Fascismo, El Nazismo, el Comunismo, y -como muy bien se veía ya en 1945 gracias a la estupidez de F.D. Roosevelt en América con su New Deal- el Welfare State: la firma que cierra el pacto final entre Mefistófeles y Fausto (estas alusiones literarias son mías).

Durante mi lectura he hecho muchos subrayados. Hay mucho en qué pararse y meditar. Y uno va entendiendo más y mejor la motivación y el asombro que llevó a Jouvenel a esribir este libro: ¿cómo es posible, por ejemplo, que un pueblo tan avanzado y culto como el alemán del primer tercio de siglo XX -quizás no haya habido nunca ni habrá otro tan culto en la historia- se haya dado a sí mismo un Estado Totalitario como el Nazi, un estado que si por algo se caracteriza es por su barbaridad, y no precisamente por su civilidad. No se trata de examinar la mente totalitaria o el Holocausto. No, este libro solo toma los totalitarismos modernos como referencia para adentrarse en la historia, para indagar en el alma humana y comprender qué hay en su naturaleza, desde su origen en una comunidad social primitiva hasta llegar a las sociedades políticas avanzadas de hoy día. Cómo han evolucionado esos Estados que se han dado las sociedades a sí mismas; cuáles eran las circunstancias por las que el hombre en unos momentos valoraba más su libertad que su seguridad y viceversa. La relación entre el Individuo y el Estado, ese es el tema de la obra: el indiviudo como sujeto pasivo de un Poder sobre el cual ha delegado parte (o el todo) de su responsabilidad; y ese Poder, el cual se arroba el derecho de decidir sobre la vida del Indiviudo y de exigirle a ese Individuo que obedezca en virtud del acuerdo pactado. Este pacto es prueba del desconocimiento del hombre de aquello que pacta, de que no sabe que en realidad ha firmado un papel en blanco. La tragedia -uno concluye tras la lectura del libro- es que el bienestar del hombre en los dos últimos siglos ha ido parejo al declive moral y espiritual que ha sufrido. Carente de referentes morales, de convicciones espirituales que le orienten a la hora de decidir qué es bueno y qué no lo es, el Estado se erige en la Iglesia moderna; el Estado asume ese puesto vacante. El hombre ha mirado a su alma, como Fausto lo hizo, y se ha preguntado ¿para qué me sirves? Ante el silencio como respuesta exterior el hombre no ha considerado necesario reservarse su alma, y todo juicio moral, toda la autoridad que antes había dejado en manos de un Ser de carácter Divino, ahora lo transfiere a uno llamado Estado, y que no es más que un conglomerado de intereses formado por hombres de carne y hueso como él. Su dejadez de responsabilidades ha provocado todos los males que le han aquejado a lo largo del siglo XX, desde el Holocausto al Gulag, al estabulamiento e idiocia de la juventud ni-ni actual. De Guttemberg a Twitter. Para acabar desaprendiendo a escribir nos podíamos ahorrar este viaje.

¿Es culpable el hombre o debemos echarle la culpa al Estado, que nos ha embaucado una vez más, a los intelectuales y filósofos, que con su labia y sus artes sofistas nos han encaminado por la senda del nihilismo y el materialismo? Jouvenel, como Rudolph von Ihering, a quien cita, lo tiene claro:

“Es cierto que el Romano es libre de hacer todo lo que quiera. Pero también lo es que tiene que soportar las consecuencias de sus actos […] no importa que se haya equivocado, que le hayan engañado, o incluso forzado: un hombre no se deja forzar: etiamsi coactus, attamen voluit. Es libre; pero si, distraído, imprudente o atontado, prometió pagar una determinada cantidad y no puede pagarla, se convierte en esclavo de su acreedor.”

Un hombre no se deja forzar. Ergo...

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly breathtaking narrative by an insightful and observant master of history. De Jouvenel wrote (in 1945) a thorough and carefully dissected biography of "Power," always identified as a proper noun, in its political form as that impersonal entity that irresistibly exists to feed and perpetuate itself.

The prose in much of the book is wonderful, making such a dense and somber topic very approachable:

“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.”

The conclusions he arrives at are as timeless, "Power changes its appearance but not its reality,” as they are terrifying:

“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.”

One of the most important books I've ever read and will likely give it a more thorough review after my second read.

[Doug Wardlow · Rating 5 out of 5]

This remarkable book explains how sovereign power tends to accumulate and centralize in the state as governments become increasingly democratic until, reaching modernity, power has clothed itself with the name of the people and usurped even the place of God, destroying the rule of law and trampling all moral impediments to the will of demagogues and tyrants. I have read this book several times since I was introduced to it in 1998 or 99 by the late Prof. George Carey of Georgetown, a brilliant conservative political philosopher. The book is dense with unique insights that become increasingly relevant with each passing year. If you value life, liberty and the rule of law--if you are concerned about the direction in which our country is moving with respect to the same--then please read this book.

[Colm Gillis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful book with a great foreword. One can literally taste the era in which it was released, when Europe was in the height of turmoil. De Jouvenal offers a searing analysis of the dangers of Statism. The book is very enjoyable to read and his style is consistent throughout. At times, I thought it was a little too cynical of power and a little ahistorical.

[Marion · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book that everyone that wants to understand today's society should read...

[Truls Ljungström · Rating 5 out of 5]

Detta är en av de bästa analyserna av makt och lag som samhälleliga och kontrasterande fenomen som jag har läst. Boken går från klarhet till klarhet, även om de sista 30 sidorna mest består av bitter klagan över att idédebatten förfallit så, efter världskrigen.

Huvudargumentet är att makt som sådan strävar efter förmåga att förändra, och att den bara kan stoppas av andra grupper med makt; men också att sådana, svagare, grupper bara överlever genom att bli beskyddare av Lagen (dvs. den upptäckta lagen, i motsats till den skrivna lagen).

Jag är väldigt glad över att jag satte mig med texten - jag upptäckte den i en referens om Hayeks samtida tänkare och samarbetspartners, och det förvånar mig att man valt att låta de Jouvenel förfalla. Hans kritik av naiv idealism, dvs. sönderslagande av de institutioner som kan dela makten med makthavarna, är extremt vass, och sätter fingret på ett av de stora problemen med den liberala idédebatten idag (vilken, menar jag, fortfarande är den enda värd namnet), nämligen oförmågan att hålla flera olika nivåer av en konversation eller en konsekvensanalys i huvudet samtidigt. En fråga kan vara miljömässig, ekonomisk, legal, etisk, logistisk, säkerhetsmässig och samhällskoherensbaserad samtidigt, och därutöver estetisk, för att ta CEMENTA-situationen som exempel, och kan inte dessa tankar ges utrymme samtidigt, så blir alla responser snubblanden från den ena katastrofen till den nästa.

Problemet är, att den typen av samtal, kräver tröghetsfaktorer - grupper som bryr sig tillräckligt, och har tillräckligt med egenintresse, för att stoppa processerna. Enligt Jouvenel kommer dessa grupper bara vara aktiva, effektiva och beständiga, om de är samlade kring effektiva samhällskrafter. På det sättet är hans argument agonistiskt - det är bara i det ständiga upprepandet av konflikter vi kan se balans och frånvaro av (förment oavsedda) övergrepp. Det är också det europeiska, korporativa, svaret på Mancur Olsons järnlag.

Den libertarianism som de Jouvenel ger uttryck för, är fundamentalt baserad på konkurrerande men samarbetande sektoriella eller lokala eliter. Jag kan inte sticka under stol med att den känns socialt och ideologiskt naturligare att hantera än väldigt många andra liknande idéer, och att jag är tacksam för en tänkare som rakt ut konstaterar att makt både är ett samhällshot, och en samhällsnödvändighet. Utan den ärligheten kan inte samtal föras, och det är definitivt så att all makt verkligen kan korrumpera, men att dess frånvaro innebär hopplöshet inför mer maktmissbruk - om inte annat från naturen själv, som har haft fräckheten att utrusta oss med magar som måste fyllas, och sömn som måste vara i plusgrader för att vi skall ha god möjlighet att vakna från den.

Mitt problem med den, är ett som de Jouvenel själv tar upp: alla idéer som blir ideologiserade, tenderar att bli reducerade till slagord, baserat på deras mest mystiska koncept, eftersom just detta koncept är som mest fantasieggande, och lättast att missbruka för att manipulera de arga eller desperata. Jag ser utan svårighet att Jouvenels beskrivning av den ideala korporativa friheten, en frihet under lagar, men genom gruppers svartsjuka behov av att bevara det sina, kommer att leda till en situation med motstridiga lagar, som i tyskromerska riket, eller till en brutalisering, som i comuneros-upproren. Den debattstrukturen är otvivelaktigt mer nyanserad, men också obekvämare, och slår lätt över styr.

Ja, som synes är det en bok som får en läsare att tänka. Jag rekommenderar den varmt för alla som bryr sig om sitt samhälle, och ser politisk platonism som ett hot.

[Shawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Table of Contents

The Minotaur Presented
1. The proximate cause
2. The growth of war
3. Kings in search of armies
4. Power extended, war extended
5. The men whom war takes
6. Absolute Power is not dead
7. The Minotaur masked
8. The Minotaur unmasked
9. Ubiquity of the Minotaur

BOOK I: Metaphysics of Power

I. Of Civil Obedience
1. The mystery of civil obedience
2. The historical character of obedience
3. Statics and dynamics of obedience
4. Obedience linked to credit

II. Theories of Sovereignty
1. Diving sovereignty
2. Popular sovereignty
3. Democratic popular sovereignty
4. A dynamic of Power
5. How sovereignty can control Power
6. The theories of sovereignty considered in their efforts

III. The Organic Theories of Power
1. The Nominalist conception of society
2. The Realist conception of society
3. Logical consequences of the Realist conception
4. The division of labour and organicism
5. Society, a living organism
6. The problem of Power’s extent in the organicist theory
7. Water for Power’s mill

BOOK II. ORIGINS OF POWER

IV. The Magical Origins of Power
1. The classical conception: political authority the child of paternal authority
2. The Iroquois period: the negation of the patriarchate
3. The Australian period: the magical authority
4. Frazer’s theory: the sacrificial king
5. The invisible government
6. The rule of magician-elders
7. The conservative character of magical Power

V. The Coming of the Warrior
1. Social consequences of the warlike spirit
2. War gives birth to the patriarchate
3. The warrior aristocracy is also a plutocracy
4. The government
5. The king
6. The state or public thing
7. Kingship becomes monarchy
8. The public thing without state apparatus
9. Ancient republics
10. Government by folkways
11. Monarchial heritage of the modern state

BOOK III. OF THE NATURE OF POWER

VI. The Dialectic of Command
1. Power in its pure state
2. Reconstruction of the phenomenon by synthesis
3. Command as cause
4. Command as it first looked
5. Command for its sake
6. Pure Power forswears itself
7. Establishment of monarchy
8. From parasitism to symbiosis
9. Formation of the nation in the person of the king
10. The City of Command
11. Overthrow of Power
12. The two ways.
13. The natural evolution of every apparatus or rule
14. The governmental ego
15. The essential duality of Power
16. Of the egoism of Power
17. The noble forms of governmental egoism

VII. The Expansionist Character of Power
1. Egoism is a necessary part of Power
2. From egoism to idealism
3. The egotistical stimulus of growth
4. The social justifications for Power’s growth
5. Power as the repository of human hopes
6. Thought and Power the philosopher and the tyrant

VIII. Of Political Rivalry
1. Is war alien to modern times?
2. A self-militarizing civilization
3. The law of political rivalry
4. Advance of Power, advance of war. Advance of war, advance of Power
5. From the feudal army to the royal army
6. War, midwife of absolute monarchy
7. Power in international rivalry
8. Conscription
9. The era of cannon fodder
10. Total war


BOOK IV. THE STATE AS PERMANENT REVOLUTION

IX. Power, Assailant of the Social Order
1. Power’s conflict with aristocracy and alliance with the common people
2. Is Power a social conservative or a social revolutionary?
3. The troughs I nthe statocratic waves
4. Power and the cell of the clan
5. Power and the baronial cell
6. Power and the capitalistic cell
7. Zenith and dismemberment of the state
8. The dynamism of politics

X. Power and the Common People
1. The feudal commonwealth
2. Power asserts itself
3. The place of the common man in the state
4. Plebian absolutism
5. The aristocratic reaction
6. Bad tactics and suicide of the French aristocracy

XI. Power and beliefs
1. Power restrained by beliefs
2. The divine law
3. The law’s solemnity
4. The law and the laws
5. The two sources of law
6. The law and custom
7. The development of the legislative authority
8. The rationalist crisis and the political consequences of Protagorism

BOOK V: THE FACE OF POWER CHANGES BUT NOT ITS NATURE

XII. Of Revolutions
1. Revolutions liquidate weakness and bring forth strength
2. Three revolutions
3. Revolution and tyranny
4. Identity of the democratic state with the monarchical state
5. Continuity of Power
6. Disparate character of the authority of the ancient regime
7. Weakening of Power. Aristocratic coalition
8. The Third Estate restored the monarchy without the king
9. Napoleon’s prefect, the child of the Revolution
10. The Revolution and individual rights
11. Justice stands disarmed before Power
12. The state and the Russian Revolutions

XIII. Imperium and Democracy
1. On the fate of ideas
2. The principle of liberty and the principle of law
3. The sovereignty of the law results in parliamentary sovereignty
4. The people, judge of the law
5. Law as the people’s “good pleasure”
6. The appetite for the imperium
7. Of parliamentary sovereignty
8. From the sovereignty of the law to the sovereignty of the people’s

XIV. Totalitarian democracy
1. Sovereignty and liberty
2. The idea of the whole advances
3. The attack on centrifugal tendencies
4. The authoritarian spirity in democracy
5. The generatl interest and its monopoly
6. Self-defence of the interests
7. Of the formation of Power
8. Of parties
9. Of the political machine
10. From the citizen to the campaigner: the competition for Power takes military formation
11. Towards the plebiscitary regime
12. The competition of “mechanized” parties ends in the dictatorship of one party
13. The degradation of the regime is linked to the degradation of the idea of law

BOOK VI: LIMITED POWER OR UNLIMITED POWER?
XV. Limited Power
1. Limited Power
2. Of internal checks
3. Of makeweights
4. The makeweights crushed and law subordinated
5. Unlimited Power is equally dangerous whatever its source and wherever it rests
6. Thought swings back to limited Power. Lessons drawn from England
7. The formal separation of powers

XVI. Power and Law
1. Is law a mere body of rules issued by authority?
2. Of unlimited legislative authority
3. The mistake of the hedonist and the utilitarian
4. Law above Power
5. A period of ambulatory law
6. Remedies against laws
7. When the judge checks the agent of Power
8. Of the authority of the judge
9. Does the movement of ideas affect the fundamentals of law?
10. The way in which law becomes jungle

XVII. Liberry’s Aristocratic Roots
1. Of liberty
2. The distant origins of liberty
3. The system of liberty
4. Liberty is a system based on class
5. The free, the unfree, the half-free
6. Incorporation and differential assimilation
7. The advance of Caesarism
8. The conditions of liberty
9. The two possible directions of people’s parties
10. The problem is still with us
11. Of the historical formation of national characteristics
12. Why democracy extends Power’s rights and weakens the individual’s safeguards

XVIII. Liberty and security
1. The price of liberty
2. Ruunt in servitutum
3. Of the architecture of society
4. Power and social promotion
5. The middle class and liberty
6. One level of liberty or several levels
7. A securitarian aristocracy
8. Disppearance of the libertarian element
9. The pactum subjectionis
10. Social security and state omnipotence
11. The social protectorate; its justification and purpose
12. Theocracies and wars of religion

XIX. Order or Social Protectorate
1. The Liberal negation
2. The “legalitarian” criticism
3. The modern problem and its absurd solution
4. The miracle of confidence
5. Concepts of right conduct
6. On the regulation of society
7. New functions necessitate new constraining concepts
8. Social authorities without ethical codes
9. Consequences of a false conception of society
10. From chaos to totalitarianism
11. The fruits of individualist rationalism

[Kaberoi Rua · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent research on the rise and growth of power!

De Jouvenel shows that the aim of modern democracies was to limit the powers of government and the ‘special interests’ who control it. But historically as the author displays, both government and controlling majorities have grown increasingly powerful and tyrannical. De Jouvenel traces this development back to the days of royal absolutism, which “laid the foundations of state power: standing administrative bureaucracies and taxes.”

[Alejandro Ferrés Bruyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una lectura muy enriquecedora para comprender sobre los efectos del poder que no sólo se limita a lo estatal. Llama la atención que el autor sea liberal y que hable de un tema que apenas se limita a su negación dentro de la propaganda liberal.

[Victor · Rating 2 out of 5]

1 chapitre excellent, le reste trop dur

[Charles Haywood · Rating 5 out of 5]

For years, I put off reading On Power, despite seeing frequent references to it. The book seemed, as filtered through online discourse (my first mistake), to be merely another tedious libertarian manifesto. Moreover, dimwits on the internet often falsely cite this book for the supposed irrelevance of popular discontent to regime change, a very stupid claim, so that also colored my view of On Power. I did myself no favors by delaying, however, because this book is among the top ten, maybe top five, books on political theory I have read, and I have read quite a few. Bertrand de Jouvenel’s thought even rivals Carl Schmitt. So today we will finally dive in, and a deep dive it is.

On Power is immensely erudite, and parses much of the history of mankind with a surgeon’s scalpel, offering innumerable insights along the way. It is, if anything, the opposite of a libertarian screed, nor does it offer any support for libertarianism’s dubious cousin, “classical liberalism.” Its essence is one long cry that only one type of political system can reliably offer freedom from tyranny—namely, an aristocracy risen from a largely homogenous population, which aristocracy is governed by rigid religious precepts universally recognized. Such a system naturally tends to produce ordered liberty for all. Only such a system has any chance of resisting the eternal pull of centralized power and consequent loss of liberty, meaning freedom from arbitrary, unconstrained power. Many of the systems of medieval Europe were like this, but those are long gone, and we, their descendants who have far less liberty than anyone in those societies, are headed rapidly into “democratic totalitarianism.”

It is not that Jouvenel, a French journalist and political theorist who published this book in 1948, sees any realistic way back to a desirable, balanced, system. Rather, he aspires to chronicle and explain our inevitable descent to tyranny. Every political current over the past thousand years, most of all so-called democracy, has inexorably trended towards the increase of despotic power. We have marched ourselves into a box canyon, loading ourselves with more chains at every step, while we are lied to, and lie to ourselves, that we are more free than any peoples in history. On Power is analysis, not a call to action, because Jouvenel sees no practical path that will reverse this process within the societies of the West. But at least you will know where you are, and why.

Among this book’s stellar characteristics is that, unlike other contemporaneous books still read today, such as James Burnham’s The Managerial Society, it could have been written yesterday. To take only one startling example, towards the end of the book, as he describes the oppression under which we are all laboring in the West (an oppression in his day vastly less than that of 2025), Jouvenel says “The business is one of setting up an immense patriarchy, or, if anyone prefers the word, a matriarchy, since we are now told that collective authority should be animated by maternal instincts.” That is to say, nearly eighty years ago, long before the massive destruction wrought by odious feminism, when nobody at all was complaining about hyper-feminization of political and social life, he identified the Longhouse, often thought of as an insight of the past decade.

Where to begin? I suppose with the word Power, by which the author means central government authority. And with his word Minotaur, by which he means the modern manifestation of Power, an enormous devouring beast which savagely consumes entire societies of men and women to feed its growth, breaking all the shields and weapons citizens had in the past created to defend themselves from Power. World War II “presented the Minotaur,” through the unprecedented militarization of whole societies, seizing control of all the resources, men and treasure, of our societies to feed the war machine. Such events would have been incomprehensible to a man of 1700; the supposedly absolute monarchs of the early modern period were completely unable to field giant armies, because any attempt to extend their power was fiercely opposed by other organized groups who had no, and wanted no, path to a share of the monarchy, who were content with their intermediate position in society. But in the modern age, when every man falsely believes he may obtain a share of Power, each of us has abandoned our opposition, and thereby submitted himself to extraordinary exactions, while telling himself, falsely, that he is more free than a medieval, peasant or lord.

Jouvenel then steps back from this presentation, or summation, and spends the next four hundred pages demonstrating every aspect of how this came about. His goal is not to discuss “what is the best form of Power,” but rather “what is the essence of Power,” to “construct a political metaphysic.” He wants to answer two questions, in all times and in all places. Why do men obey Power, whatever precise form that Power may take in their societies? And why has the percentage of every society’s resources disposed of by Power increased from almost nothing to almost everything? All societies have always had some form of Power, so it must be in some way natural to man, but too often we focus on bogus distractions, such as supposed legitimacy, alleged beneficence, and apparent inherent strength, or force. We must look deeper.

The author begins by dissecting various theories of sovereignty, attempts to explain from first principles how Power arises. One core theory is that sovereignty is “an emanation of [a] supreme sovereign,” “either the ‘Divine Will’ or the ‘general will.’ ” As to divine sovereignty, Jouvenel heaps contempt on facile modern conceptions of how this view manifested in the past. “The idea that Power is of God is buttressed, so it is said, a monarchy that was both arbitrary and unlimited right through the Dark Ages. This grossly inaccurate conception of the Middle Ages is deeply embedded in the unlettered, whom it serves as a convenient starting-point from which to unroll the history of a political evolution to the winning-post, which is liberty. There is not a word of truth in all this.” Rather, divine sovereignty was an extreme limitation on all medieval monarchy, which was further limited by the immutable, or treated as immutable, customs of each nation. Men “repeated St. Paul’s formula, ‘all Power is of God,’ but less with a view to inducing subjects to obey Power than to inducing Power to obey—God. . . . The consecrated king of the Middle Ages was a Power as tied down and as little arbitrary as we can conceive.”

What eroded this first conception, of divine sovereignty being the fount and limit of temporal sovereignty, was political theorists, from Marsilius of Padua to Thomas Hobbes to John Locke, who instead substituted the idea of popular sovereignty. When this is accepted, that sovereignty comes, by some path, from the people as a whole, rather than from God, it opens a broad road to despotism, because whoever receives that sovereignty is now exempted from limits, due to that all men have been deemed to surrender all their rights to a sovereign, and there is no objective, permanent limit outside that sovereign. Power, when it recognized God as its superior, could not contradict God, or even, short of divine law, go against “a community’s laws [which] admit of no modification whatsoever,” the type of laws the early Romans recognized. But when those barriers fail, there are no fallback barriers to any action of Power whatsoever.

To be sure, the process was not immediate, but it had been set in motion, and soon enough men such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau were removing all earlier self-imposed limitations and demanding total submission to the General Will—as embodied in an all-powerful, unquestionable legislature. This process was reified in the French Revolution, and ever since, in practice, either an all-powerful executive or all-powerful legislature, the supposed embodiment of the nation but not checked by any intermediate bodies representing the actual interests of different actual groups in the nation, has been deemed to embody sovereignty. And while Power is said to be subordinate to the “real” sovereignty, of the people, this proves over time to be an illusion, as Power seeks to destroy any and all checks created to limit it, making this subordination wholly illusory. The result is that Power becomes absolute, and absolutely arbitrary, tyrannical, and works tirelessly to accrete and centralize itself.

But which individuals actually control this Power? Jouvenel again steps back, very far back, for a historical survey, from the earliest societies to the present. Not for him the idea that all primitive societies are alike; rather, each is very different and the form of those differences determines its ultimate success. A patriarchal, warlike society creates a strong, expanding society. In every early society, however, law, and therefore authority, comes from religious belief, which is why (shades of Fustel de Coulanges in The Ancient City, which Jouvenel cites) the earliest kings were priests, who either then took power beyond that of intermediating with the gods, or had their power sharply confined by a warrior aristocracy. This conflict between a single central Power and groups of prominent men limiting that Power is the entire political history of the West, with different results at different times and places—but always with a balance that resulted in some distribution of power among many groups, where the assent of all those who mattered was necessary for any important action, most of all war, and the central state lacked any significant apparatus of coercion, because “imposing the public will on all the citizens” was an impossibility, a contradiction in terms. Taxation, war, all the actions we associate with Power, were fundamentally voluntary, in the sense that intermediary groups were required, at their option, to agree with and participate with the central Power, and thus a successful state required “moral cohesion and the inter-availability of private citizens for public office.” Yet in some societies, the most monarchical societies, the skeleton had been created for further accretion of Power in the hands of one or a very few.

In practice, however, monarchs very soon bump up against other inherent limits to power accretion and centralization. If a monarch accedes to apparently near-absolute power, it is for his own ends, but soon enough all monarchs come to care for the common good. “Those same tyrants who left behind them in the shape of the Pyramids the proof of a horrifying egoism, also regulated the course of the Nile and fertilized the fellah’s fields.” Naturally, much of this is self-interest, but “the need to establish his authority, to maintain it and keep it supplied, binds him to a course of conduct which profits the vast majority of his subjects. . . . The king, who is but one solitary individual, stands far more in need of the general support of society than any other form of government. . . . Power has, by a wholly natural transition, moved from parasitism to symbiosis.” However, this symbiosis is always unstable; the nature of command means it must be exercised through delegates, who soon enough form a new self-interested class which begins to desire to protect their own interests through the exercise of power, for such is the nature of man. The result is that a monarchical Power always falls far short of absolutism.

As long as Power is concentrated in a central single ego, it therefore paradoxically tends to the common good. True, Power can destructively adopt a false conception of the common good, drawn from outside the ego, such that the nation suffers. This happened with Louis XIV, when under religious pressure, he revoked the Edict of Nantes (which had protected Protestants in France). Or, for a more modern example, Adolf Hitler. “A healthy egoism would, in the absence of other motives, have dissuaded an ambitious Power from racial persecutions which were bound, as it knew, to excite universal indignation, and which, as it admitted itself, helped to throw into the scale of its enemies the immense weight of a nation which disposed of unlimited resources.”

Nonetheless, even with this symbiotic semi-equilibrium, an egoistic, monarchical Power is always desirous of more power, as is demonstrated in the ever-increasing strength over the centuries of Western monarchies. Phillip Augustus, in the thirteenth century, was dependent on voluntary donations from the lords and could raise only small numbers of troops who would only serve for a short time; Louis XIV, four hundred years later, could maintain at his own expense a standing army of two hundred thousand men. The primary immediate mechanism for this expansion of Power is claims on the nation by the monarch that he is advancing the public interest, mostly meaning defending it against danger from other nations, for “war is the midwife of absolute monarchy” (though today Jouvenel would no doubt adduce the Wuhan Plague to the same point).

But just as important, if not more important, and what ultimately causes the singularity of Power that we see today, is that the very many other groups with smaller shares of power turn to the king in order to escape “various petty tyrannies to which they have been subjected.” They fail to see that in doing so, Power increases inexorably, and they merely trade one tyranny for another. “Here is the main reason for the endless complicity of subjects in the designs of Power.” And for good measure, Jouvenel bitch slaps philosophers, from Plato to Thomas More to Tomaso Campanella (author of The City of the Sun), who look to the king to impose their abstract designs, all of which tend towards tyranny as a result. “Authority can never be too despotic for the speculative man, so long as he deludes himself that its arbitrary force will further his plans.”

Thus we have been brought to our modern pass, Power complete, exemplified most by Jouvenel’s favorite example, entire nations in arms, a phenomenon first seen in revolutionary France. To achieve this completion, Power destroys the most important intermediary powers, by which Jouvenel primarily means the militarized high aristocracy. When Power can identify itself as, and is identified by the people as, the nation itself, without limitation, rather than merely one power among many, “the people are left in consequence without a champion,” and so are fed into the fire, most obviously in war but also in every other aspect of their lives, such as taxation and regulation.

Power cannot abide the aristocracy, and seeks always and everywhere a type of levelling. “By ‘aristocrat’ I mean a man who is in his own right leader of a group in society with authority which does not come to him from the state. . . . I place in opposition ‘statocrat,’ being a man who derives his authority only from the position which he holds and the office which he performs in the service of the state.” Jouvenel’s is a broad definition of aristocracy, including not merely dukes and earls, but any man of substance, financial, physical, or moral, together with his fellows with common interest. It can include everything from smaller landholders, to guilds, to owners of big and small manufacturing enterprises, to priests, to union leaders. For example, “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.” Aristocracy in most places, therefore, was not a closed small group, and over time many new entrants arrived, such as, in England, men made rich by the East India Company.

Kings struggle endlessly against aristocrats. Early kings had to break the power of the gens. Later kings strove to break baronial power. And while at a certain point today’s Power makes allies of the new mercantile elites, the captains of industry, in the end it strives to break them too. Yes, there arise new prominent men—but they are wholly creatures of the state, statocrats, which controls them and can make and destroy them. Thus, their only aim is to serve the state, though they form a new type of pseudo-aristocracy, and strive mightily to use Power to their own personal ends.

“Where will it 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 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.”

An inevitable consequence of this process is the sweeping of the common people into becoming participants in the creation of absolute Power . . . . [Review continues as first comment.]

[Yasser Otmani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Une vraie référence en matière d'étude sur la nature du pouvoir: son histoire, son utilisation au cours du temps. L'auteur montre notamment comment les guerres de pouvoir sont passés historiquement de la querelle de voisinage à des batailles entrainant des nations entières derrière elles. Bref, à lire absolument si vous désirez mieux comprendre la nature du pouvoir.

[Alex Zakharov · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is viewed by many as a seminal inquiry into metaphysics of Power, and it is. But, metaphysics aside, de Jouvenel’s actual pragmatic message is that Power is like a Muller’s ratchet – its accretion is inevitable, irreversible and undesirable. “On Power” is a harsh, deep journey through political philosophy, European history, and human nature. While Robert Frosts of the world may contemplate the roads not taken, de Jouvenel shows the road that is unavoidable.

The book is too rich to attempt a summary, so I will merely comment on a couple of themes.

De Jouvenel’s central premise is that individual liberty can survive only in political systems where Power is subject to the Law and the Law is stable. A Divine Law is a good candidate of course. Man-made law is trickier – Cicero is terrified of government “subject to the power of the multitude” , Montesquieu laments that “Power of the people has been confused with liberty of the people” , and Rousseau bends over backwards to devise a version of popular sovereignty with primary goal of maintaining sovereignty of the law, but is fearful that "instead of enthroning laws, as you imagine, you are really enthroning men".

This is pretty grim, but convincing. But then de Jouvenel himself has to bend over backwards to show that Divine Law which had to have co-evolved with custom, is both supreme and not man-made. It is a delicate balancing act – he relies on a mix of Burkean traditions embedded in societal institutions and on what today Joe Henrich calls opaque accumulated cultural knowledge.

Still, for my money, there is no escape – humans evolve, science & technology improve, societies transition from status to contract (h/t Henry Maine) straight into Durkheim’s “organic solidarity”, and the recognition of the man-made nature of Divine Law is a matter of time.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is another troubling outcome that stability of the law (man-made or otherwise) would require – universality. For a Law to be objective, stable and trustworthy it has to be universal.

In practice though, de Jouvenel’s expectations of universality are as utopian as modernity’s expectations that ever-expanding democratic franchise will not subvert individual liberty. I agree with Taleb that the only hope for the future is antifragile localism (e.g. Swiss). De Jouvenel’s universal Law seems to be the opposite of that.

Nonetheless, while some of de Jouvenel’s prescriptions are questionable, his diagnosis is devastating.

[IMPERIVM · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first fourth and third fourth of the book are quite interesting, touching on advanced questions of power and history, respectively.

Jouvenel asks why ideological systems intent on limiting power inevitably end up serving power, without going into great detail attempting to answer, which I found disappointing and hoped the book would mostly be about. Were the book to do that, I'd not only give it five stars, I'd consider it one of the best evolutionary/institutional books I've ever read. I'll continue my search for what works will explore that evolutionary/power/information problem, and inevitably write my own take.

In the third fourth of the book, Jouvenel describes the divergence of English and French culture, which helps explain the English and French revolutions, as well as the rise of the Anglosphere, and the two cultures' Roman parallels. It is a useful introductory exposition for newcomers, but not heavy on details as a history treatise would be.

The rest of the book Jouvenel spends talking about Power (which presently manifests as an administrative state), the Individual, and the breakdown of social institutions that used to intermediate the two, which is the characteristic feature of Modernity and the cause of the immense power the administrative state has. It is interesting to see how America is presently in the Gracchus phase of Rome.

These other parts of the book I'm sure are interesting and useful to newer reactionaries, but nothing super informative for veterans. I would consider the first fourth and third fourth parts of the book the reason to read this work, but even there they do not make this work very technically advanced. It'll be interesting when I find the appropriate reactionary political economy texts (or write them myself).

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

"On Power" is a book by French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel, first published in 1945. The book is considered one of the most important works of political theory in the 20th century and has had a significant influence on the study of power and politics.

Jouvenel's central argument in "On Power" is that power is a pervasive force in society, which shapes and influences every aspect of human life. He contends that power is not only held by government and other formal institutions, but is also exercised by individuals and groups in a variety of social and cultural contexts.

Jouvenel distinguishes between two types of power: "power over" and "power to." "Power over" refers to the ability of one person or group to control the actions of others, while "power to" refers to the ability of individuals to act and make choices for themselves.

Jouvenel also explores the relationship between power and freedom, arguing that power is always a threat to individual freedom and that the exercise of power must be limited and constrained by law and democratic institutions.

"On Power" has been influential in the fields of political philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies, and has sparked ongoing debates about the nature of power and its role in society. Critics have praised Jouvenel's nuanced and insightful analysis of power, while others have criticized his elitist and conservative views on democracy and social change.

GPT

[Zumzaa]

This is perhaps the most brilliant history I’ve read. In part due to the perceptive insight combined with the breadth of knowledge the author presumes of himself but in larger part due to its radical subversion of popular thought and yet still managing to assert a more confident and sensical argument that I’ve ever heard anywhere else.

[Andreia · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a fascinating mix of history sociology philosophy and dialectic analysis. All intelligent citizens should read and reflect on the ideas that Jouvenel challenges us with.

[Dyare]

information on power by de jovvnel

[Abu Dhabi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good. Not easy to read, but filled with insight on the nature of government and systems of authority.

[Vikas Erraballi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth alone 10 of the others books I've read this year

[Geff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The translation by J. F. Huntington leaves much to be desired. Reading this book in its English translation felt like wading through thick mud with a ball and chain.

[Oolalaa · Rating 4 out of 5]

16/20

[Chris Niessl · Rating 3 out of 5]

De Jouvenel writes well and utilizes a lot of historical reference to illustrate the evolution of the French State and draws on counterexamples from the evolution of the US and UK to illustrate how the State becomes a nexus for power.

However, I think De Jouvenel's 'pessimism' for lack of a better description, in democracy checking power is not adequately defended in his book. He does not explore or insufficiently describes the sortition methods used from ancient Greece through the Italian merchant Republics to modern American juries that serve as an important barrier to the 'Democratic Tyranny' he describes. He also overstates the importance of the church in checking older forms of monarchy, and understates some of the tyranny associated with that organization.

In addition, writing this book after World War II meant he had access to greater scientific knowledge than earlier writers/philosophers such as Burke or De Maistre. An appeal to materialism, vis-a-vis insights from Pavlov or Dunbar could illustrate the limitations of human organization and add urgency to his message besides the recent devastation from the war.

[David McGrogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this back to back with de Jasay's 'The State' as a kind of libertarian Francophone duet. This has the more literary merit and a historian's flair for narrative; de Jasay's work is the analytical work of an economist. Both set out to do something similar (in essence, to account for what de Jouvenel calls 'the greatest modern phenomenon' - the growth of the State), and both come to similar depressing conclusions: it's only going to get worse. What is perhaps also significant is that these men were prophets of a kind; they had actually seen the finales which they predicted would descend on the free societies of the West - de Jouvenel in Vichy France, de Jasay in Communist Hungary. The pair should be required reading, whatever your political stripe.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

A paradigm-obliterating tour de force of all that is Power. Forget Foucault, forget Hardt and Gramsci, this is your one stop shop. CA Bond is correct when he says “Jouvenel contains all the Machiavellians, but not all the Machiavellians contain Jouvenel.” His analysis calls into question every Revolution, every call for Liberty and Equality, every ideology, revealing their essence - the expansion of Power. His answers are also rooted in deeply theological and traditionalist understandings of Law and Man, and how their abandonment (secularization) has led to the most tyrannical regimes to ever rule, whose power extends far beyond that of any Monarch or previous institution. Not a single dull page. Worth a reread!

[Emanuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite detailed description of power as a concept and extremely knowledgeable understanding of its history. Just at a few times it was a bit too philosophical. However, I really enjoyed that everything was presented from an unbiased viewpoint.

Definitely recommend it.