In 1945, a remarkable book was published under the title On Power: The Natural History of its Growth[i] which at the time appears to have been well-received. The author, Bertrand de Jouvenel, would go on to become a founding member of the Mount Pelerin society two years later. Since then, it has not fared well, which is surprising when considering the depth and insight of the book.
The political theory of Jouvenel presented in On Power is one which provides an interpretation of human society and the role of power (especially the dominant centralizing power which is termed “Power”) as following certain imperatives dependent on the relative position of the actors in question. This conception of power is one which recognizes both the social nature of power as well as the expansionary nature of power. As Jouvenel writes:
The duality is irreducible. And it is through the interplay of these two antithetical principles that the tendency of Power is towards occupying an ever larger place in society; the various conjunctures of events beckon it on at the same time that its appetite is driving it to fresh pastures. Thus there ensues a growth of Power to which there is no limit, a growth which is fostered by more and more altruistic externals, though the motive-spring is still as always the wish to dominate.[ii]
It is at this point that we can both thank Jouvenel for the model he provides and also reject his attempts to adapt this system of insights to a defense of mixed governance in book VI.[iii] While it is necessary to acknowledge the debt from Jouvenel, it is also just as important to explain exactly how and where further developments from Jouvenel depart from him in a manner which retains the coherence of his breakthrough while rejecting his adherence to a classical liberalism that in essence is a cultural artefact of the very same power conflict he uncovered.
The model, which we can adopt without the confusion provided by Jouvenel’s political affiliation, is one that shows that Power acts both for its own expansion and security, and also as a social process for the benefit of those who come under the purview of Power. With this rough basis, we can begin to view the development of governance in a more sophisticated manner and view a process which has been concealed by modern liberal theory; concealed by precisely those elements of modernity which demand that we view humans as self-interested agents working for primarily selfish means.
One only has to review the works of the liberal tradition, such as those of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, or Adam Smith to see that the human agent in the modern liberal tradition is one which operates on an individual basis within a moral framework that takes the human agent as an anti-social entity. It is no surprise, then, that all liberal theory takes governance as at best a necessary evil to be maintained to avoid all out conflict (Hobbes) or as something to be rejected entirely as an immoral entity (various anarchisms). All aspects of modernity are tied together by these very same shared ethical assumptions to which all their theories must accord. If, contrary to the modern liberal tradition, the human agent is not an anti-social agent acting from individually determined self-interest, but is instead a social one, then we should see the actions of the human agent being in accordance not only with the individual’s circumstance based interest, but also with the perceived interest of the society within which the individual resides. This would hold just as much for subjects as it would for rulers. The tyrannical ruler of the modern liberal mind, randomly acting out of cruelty because they are unrestrained by checks and balances, would then prove to be a fiction.
The extended model that can be derived from Jouvenel is both exceptionally simple, yet of devastating importance. It is simply that in any given political configuration if there are multiple centers of power, then conflict will occur as the centers of power seek to both secure their position and pursue expansion, which will be done with the ostensible purpose of the good of society in mind. The dominant power center will become the central Power. This dominant Power will enlarge its remit and power not by direct physical conflict (which would in effect spell outright civil war), but through means presented (and seen by both the actors in power and those who benefit) as being beneficial to society overall.
The example of the expansion of the remit of the monarchs of Europe and its transformation into the modern state is presented by Jouvenel to demonstrate this model, and the picture painted is stark and repeatedly supported by historical record. As Jouvenel makes plainly clear, “It is true, no doubt, that Power could not make this progress but for the very real services which it renders and under cover of the hopes aroused by its displays of the altruistic side of its nature.”[iv]
For example:
To raise contributions, Power must invoke the public interest. It was in this way that the Hundred Years’ War, by multiplying the occasions on which the monarchy was forced to request the cooperation of the people, accustomed them in the end, after a long succession of occasional levies, to a permanent tax, and outcome which outlived the reasons for it. It was in this way, too, that the Revolutionary Wars provided the justification for conscriptions, even though the files of 1789 disclosed a unanimous hostility to its feeble beginning under the monarchy. Conscription achieved fixation. And so it is that times of danger, when Power takes action for the general safety, are worth much to it in accretion to its armoury, and these, when the crisis has passed, it keeps.[v]
Of course, it is not only in times of public danger when Power proceeds under the name of public interest. The direction of the monarch’s competition was not only towards external power centers to which overt war was socially permissible, but also internal competitors in the form of barons and lords to whom overt war was not permissible (generally). To them, a process which can best be described as a coalition of the high and low in society was in action. As Jouvenel notes regarding Power:
The growth of its authority strikes private individuals as being not so much a continual encroachment on their liberty, as an attempt to put down various petty tyrannies to which they have been subject. It looks as though the advance of the state is a means to the advance of the individual.[vi]
Jouvenel further elaborates on this with the following: “the monarchy, through its lawyers, comes between the barons and their subjects; the purpose is to compel the former to limit themselves to the dues which are customary and to abstain from arbitrary taxation.”[vii]
The monarchy, then, engaged in this alliance with the common people due to the imperatives its relatively weak position foisted on it, and also as a means to ostensibly better govern. Monarchy was anything but a despotism which modern liberal propaganda post-enlightenment has presented it as, but rather a political structure under restraints which were genuine–a reality that we are blind to due to the shared assumptions provided by modernity, namely that we have passed from a period of darkness into the enlightenment of liberal governance. These assumptions were perpetuated by Power’s expansion.
It is here that we can move past Jouvenel and reflect further on the issue of personal liberty by refusing to be engaged in advocacy of classical liberalism, and by being aware of these assumptions of self-interest. We can then use his observation of this high-low alliance to make some startling assertions I believe are implicit in his work. The bases of these observations are provided by the following passage:
If the natural tendency of Power is to grow, and if it can extend its authority and increase its resources only at the expense of the notables, it follows that its ally for all times is the common people. The passion for absolutism is, inevitably, in conspiracy with the passion for equality.
History is one continuous proof of this; sometimes, however, as if to clarify this secular process, she concentrates it into a one-act play, such as that of the Doge Marino Falieri. So independent of the Doge were the Venetian nobility that Michel Steno could insult the Doge’s wife and escape punishment which was so derisory as to double the insult. Indeed, so far above the people’s heads was this nobility that Bertuccio Ixarello, a plebeian, was unable, in spite of his naval exploits, to obtain satisfaction for a box on the ear given by Giovanni Dandalo. According to the accepted story, Bertuccio came to the Doge and showed him the wound in his cheek from the patrician’s ring; shaming the Doge out of his inactivity, he said to him: “Let us join forces to destroy this aristocratic authority which thus perpetuates the abasement of my people and limits so narrowly your power.” The annihilation of the nobility would give to each what he wanted—to the common people equality, to Power absolutism. The attempt of Marino Falieri failed and he was put to death.
A like fate befell Jan van Barneveldt, whose case was the exact converse. In the history of the Netherlands we come across this same conflict between a prince wishing to increase his authority, in this case the Stadtholder of the House of Orange, and social authorities standing in his way, in this case the rich merchants and ship owners of Holland. William, commander-in-chief throughout thirty difficult and glorious years, was nearing the crown and had already refused it once, as did Caesar and Cromwell, when he was struck down by the hand of the assassin. Prince Maurice inherited his father’s prestige, added to it by victories of his own, and seemed about to reach the goal, when Barneveldt, having organised secretly a patrician opposition, put an end to Maurice’s ambitions by putting an end , through the conclusion of peace, to victories which were proving dangerous to the Republic. What did Maurice do then? He allied himself with the most ignorant of the preachers, who were, through fierce intolerance, the aptest to excite the passions of the lower orders: thanks to their efforts, he unleashed the mob at Barneveldt and cut off his head. This intervention by the common people enabled Maurice to execute the leader of the opposition to his own increasing power. That he did not gain the authority he sought was not due to any mistake in his choice of means, as was shown when one of his successors, William III, made himself at last master of the country by means of a popular rising, in which Jean de Witt, the Barneveldt of this period, had his throat cut.[viii]
It is a position without controversy to trace the origins of liberalism, classical liberalism, and modernity in general to Protestantism and the Reformation. If what Jouvenel outlines in the above passage and in the rest of On Power is correct, then it seems quite evident that the origins of Protestantism and its success is a result of these very same conflicts between these various power centers—something Jouvenel points to with his reference to equality being the ally of Power. It would seem that really equality and liberty are both in conspiracy with Power, for just what was the subsequent intellectual descendant of these “most ignorant preachers” but the liberal tradition proper? So, we have a conundrum. Jouvenel is writing in defense of a liberal political position which he is clearly demonstrating was propagated and favored by power actors in conflict with other power actors. The question we can ask ourselves at this juncture is: how does this accord with the accepted narrative of the development of liberalism? Because the radical implications presented by Jouvenel’s model are that this entire political and social paradigm was favored and propelled forward not by reasoned discourse and collective enlightenment, but in actuality as a result of its suitability and beneficial character in relation to the expansion of Power.
In asking such a question, the focus of our attention must therefore shift from popular considerations of liberalism as a rational discourse conducted over many centuries to which the assent of reasonable and rational agents was won, to instead a consideration of it as being the result of institutional actions. In effect, we go from the Whig theory of history, Progress etc. to one which identifies modernity as the cultural result of institutional conflict.
Luckily, a great deal of work on this new interpretation of the historical development of liberalism has actually already been done, but the authors in question, like Jouvenel, have not fully understood the implications of their observations. Some of the more striking recent examples have included William T Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence[ix] and Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual[x] which both deal with the events leading up to the development of modern liberalism and beyond. Cavanaugh in particular is quite forceful in drawing the reader’s attention to the manner in which institutional conflict preceded the development of liberalism and the Reformation and Jouvenel beckons us to go deeper into this.
Citing the examples of Baruch Spinoza,Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke,[xi] who presented religious division as the cause of the conflicts of the Thirty Years War that led to liberalism, Cavanaugh notes that this narrative is without historical basis. More modern liberal thinkers have subsequently traced the birth of liberalism to the so-called religious conflicts of this period, with Cavanaugh citing Quintin Skinner, Jeffrey Stout, Judith Shklar and John Rawls as exemplifying it.[xii] The problem, as Cavanaugh takes pains to point out, is that the institutional changes which were supposed to have been ushered in as a result of the religious conflicts actually presaged them and caused them. To make matters worse, there is no clear division line between the denominations in the conflict. To bolster his argument, he provides ample examples of conflict occurring between states with the same denominations, as well as collaboration between differing denominations (including Catholic and Protestant states). The most trenchant observation is provided by the example of the conflict between Charles V and the Papacy:
As Richard Dunn points out, “Charles V’s soldiers sacked Rome, not Wittenberg, in 1527, and when the papacy belatedly sponsored a reform program, both the Habsburgs and the Valois refused to endorse much of it, rejecting especially those Trentine decrees which encroached on their sovereign authority.” The wars of the 1520s were part of the ongoing struggle between the pope and the emperor for control over Italy and over the church in German territories.[xiii]
Cavanaugh even manages to find a wonderful quote from Pope Julius III complaining of Henry II of France’s actions: “in the end, you are more than Pope in your kingdoms…I know no reason why you should wish to become schismatic.”[xiv] Clearly, those in positions of power had no problem seeing schism as a power play.
As such, we can see clearly the role of Jouvenel’s mechanism of power employing dissenting sects in the process of power expansion. The employment of schismatic sects and the promotion of what Jouvenel called “the most ignorant of the preachers”[xv] becomes an obvious means of extending the power of the power centers in question. This observation is supported by the thesis presented by Cavanaugh that the Reformation failed in those states that were advanced in the state’s absorption of ecclesiastical power:
It is unarguably the case that the reinforcement of ecclesiastical difference in early modern Europe was largely a project of state-building elites. As G. R. Elton bluntly puts it, “The Reformation maintained itself wherever the lay power (prince or magistrates) favoured it; it could not survive wherever the authorities decided to suppress it.”[xvi]
In contrast:
Where the Reformation succeeded was in England, Scandinavia, and many German principalities, where breaking with the Catholic Church meant that the church could be used to augment the power of the civil authorities. To cite one example, King Gustav Vasa welcomed the Reformation to Sweden in 1524 by transferring the receipt of tithes from the church to the Crown. Three years later, he appropriated the entire property of the church. As William Maltby notes, accepting Lutheranism both gave princes an ideological basis for resisting the centralizing efforts of the emperor and gave them the chance to extract considerable wealth from confiscated church properties.[xvii]
As for Larry Siedentop, his work on the history of the individual constantly gropes at outlining the mechanism Jouvenel provides, which is arguably the cause of the invention of the individual that he traces. There is no reason to assume that the mechanism of using the rhetoric of individualism and equality as a means to undermine competing power centers began with the Reformation, and Siedentop confirms it did not. It appears to be a constant of human political structure. Siedentop provides a point by point history of the process of the development of the concept of the individual as being a moral development driven by Church authorities and then by secular authorities (at which point we have liberalism). Siedentop does this by continually employing an understanding of early Christian European society as being essentially corporatist, with the Church engaging in a process of breaking down this feudal structure using fundamentally anarchist conceptions of society based on the invention of the individual. Siedentop’s account is essentially Jouvenelian without realizing it. We can even catch him making the Jouvenelian observation on ancient developments leading up to the invention of the individual:
The long period of aristocratic ascendancy in Greek and Italian cities, founded on the family and its worship, had already reduced kingship to a religious role, stripping kings of political authority. The reason for this is clear enough. Kings had frequently made common cause with the lower classes. They had formed alliances with clients and the plebs, directed against the power of the aristocracy. Challenged both from without (by a class which had no family worship or gods) and from within (by clients questioning the traditional ordering of the family), the aristocracy of the cities carried through a political revolution to avoid a social revolution.[xviii]
As with Jouvenel, we can see the process of centralization and individualization as a political structure-driven phenomena without the ideological adherence to liberalism; we are not making any moral claims here, merely noting an obvious systemic mechanism. Siedentop himself goes close to doing so himself as, for example, when he notes of early Christian Rome:
However, by the end of the third century one section of the urban elites embarked on a different course for dealing with the emperor and provincial governors, a course which drew on their Christian beliefs and enabled them to become the spokesmen of the lower classes. A new rhetoric served their bid for urban leadership. It was a rhetoric founded on ‘love of the poor’. Drawing on features of the Christian self-image—the church’s social inclusiveness, the simplicity of its message, its distrust of traditional culture and its welfare role—‘love of the poor’ made possible, Brown argues, a regrouping within the urban elites. It was a rhetoric that reflected and served an alliance between upper-class Christians and the bishops of cities, who were themselves often men of culture or paideia.
This new rhetoric was put to use ‘in the never ending task of exercising control within the city and representing its needs to the outside world.[xix]
Siedentop shows that the Bishop of the European cities promoted individualism contra the secular authorities, and that this was then taken forward with what he calls the Papal Revolution. The Papacy began a series of centralizing policies resulting in the creation of a bureaucracy around the papal office, which Siedentop claims was copied by secular authorities. This process brought the Papacy into a conflict with secular authorities that would ultimately lead to the Reformation, and Siedentop himself identifies that it was driven to a large degree by the dynamics of the Church’s position within the power centers of Western Europe:
The second half of the eleventh century saw dramatic change. Determined to define and defend the church as a distinct body within Christendom, and to protect its independence, popes began to make far more ambitious claims. They began to claim legal supremacy for the papacy within the church, what within a few decades would be described as the pope’s plenitude potestatis, his plenitude of power.[xx]
The significance of all of this is made clear by the following passage which brings us back to Cavanaugh:
By the mid-fifteenth century the papacy had – relying on the centralized administration that had been created since the twelfth century – regained control over the Church. The project of reform which the church had failed to carry through did not die, however. The cause of church reform was almost immediately taken up by secular rulers who drew their own conclusions from the series of frustrated general councils and the resurgence of papal pretensions. The French king, in the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges (1438), and the German empire, at the Diet of Mayence in 1439, introduced greater autonomy and more collegiate government into national churches. But even these national reforms championed by secular rulers were soon abandoned as a result of papal pressure and diplomacy, returning the situation in the church, at least in appearance, to one of papal absolutism.
But it was only an appearance. For the project of reform, which had eluded both the leaders of the church and secular rulers, had now taken root among the people.
Was it mere chance that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw such widespread popular agitation within the church, with Pietist movements in the Netherlands and Germany fostering a distrust of clerical authority, while the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Prague openly criticized the established church hierarchy, especially the papacy? In the eyes of John Wycliffe, leader of the Lollards, the church had lost its way, preoccupied with legal supremacy and the accumulation of wealth rather than the care of souls, its proper role. Wycliffe spoke for many across Europe when he called for translation of the scriptures into popular languages, so that they could be widely read and properly understood, giving people a basis for judging the claims of the clerical establishment. The understanding of ‘authority’ was taking a dramatic turn, away from aristocracy towards democracy.[xxi]
It clearly wasn’t mere chance that this popular agitation occurred; it was clearly encouraged and allowed space by the secular rulers. It was the result of competing power centers wresting control from one another. The tool of individualizing was taken from the Church’s hands and used against it. Jouvenel implies that these preachers would have had institutional support. And in the case of John Wycliffe, he had the powerful sponsorship of John of Gaunt, the de facto king of England. This has puzzled historians greatly, but it does not puzzle us. As for Jan Hus, we have the Archbishop of Prague Zbyněk Zajíc and then King Wenceslaus IV. It seems to be a general law that all of these anti-clerical reformists were also pro-secular government and under the protection of patrons in the process of centralizing power and in chronic conflict with ecclesiastical authorities. They all ended in confiscation of Church property. Both Martin Luther and William of Ockham provide excellent additional examples.
The startling issue we now must face is that not only does Jouvenel indicate that the role of power in undermining other power centers by encouraging equality and individualism continues back in history, but it also continues forward to the present. Can it be that the history of the West and the history of liberalism is the ever increasing growth of centralizing power and not simply a moral development following reason? Was the later secularizing of this Christian project of ‘individualizing’ that is embodied in the Enlightenment successful in providing a ground from which to account for the ethical value of this development? Or is it largely a rather mindless result of power conflicts with secular authorities selecting the nearest theories, in order to provide a sheen of legitimacy for their actions?
Given this framework in mind, the fundamental issue is: at what point does this process become harmful and outright suicidal? Moreover, now being aware of this process, may we not look on the events currently occurring in our society and not identify which current iterations of this ‘individualizing’ are symptomatic of raw unnecessary conflict? Which are clearly without any reason?
We can then see that this Jouvenelian mechanism raises far-ranging and profound questions. It is neither Marxist, nor liberal, but instead concentrates on the role of power centers, or competing authorities, as being the drivers of cultural developments under their purview. The relations, imperatives, and motives of these centers then become key and from this we can begin to build a whole new political theory which is unlike any currently in existence.
It has profound applications.
Citations:
[i]Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth, (USA: Beacon Press Boston, 1962).
[ii]Ibid.,119.
[iii]Ibid.,283.
[iv]Ibid.,128.
[v]Ibid.,129.
[vi]Ibid.,130.
[vii]Ibid.,167.
[viii]Ibid.,178-79.
[ix]William T. Cavanaugh,The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
[x]Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge: Belknap Harvard University Press, 2014).
[xi]Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 124-27.
[xii]Ibid.,130.
[xiii]Ibid.,143.
[xiv]Ibid.,167.
[xv]Jouvenel, On Power, 179.
[xvi] Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, 168.
[xvii]Ibid.,167.
[xviii]Ibid., 29.
[xix]Siedentop, Inventing the Individual, 82.
[xx]Ibid.,201.
[xxi]Ibid.,330.
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Ronald Beiner is a Canadian Jewish political theorist who teaches at the University of Toronto. I’ve been reading his work since the early 1990s, starting with What’s the Matter with Liberalism? (1992). I have always admired Beiner’s clear and lively writing and his ability to see straight through jargon and cant to hone in on the flaws of the positions he examines. He is also refreshingly free of Left-wing sectarianism and willing to engage with political theorists of the Right, like Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Michael Oakeshott, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Thus, although I was delighted that a theorist of his caliber had decided to write a book on the contemporary far Right, I was also worried that he might, after a typically open and searching engagement with our outlook, discover some fatal flaw.
Beiner doesn’t offer a very clear account of why Nietzsche thinks liberalism undermines human nobility. The short answer is that it is simply the political application of the slave revolt in morals, in which the aristocratic virtues of the ancients were transmuted into Christian and eventually liberal vices, and the vices of the enslaved and downtrodden were transmuted into virtues.
In Heidegger’s later terminology, Nietzsche and National Socialism were both “humanistic,” premised on the idea that the human mind creates culture, whereas in fact culture creates the human mind. No genuine belief can be chosen. It has to seize us. This is one of the senses of Heidegger’s later concept of Ereignis, often translated “the event of appropriation”: the beginning of a new historical epoch seizes and enthralls us. This is the meaning of Heidegger’s later claim that “Only a god can save us now” — as opposed to a philosopher-dictator.
Beiner is even more blatant in his advocacy of self-censorship in Heidegger’s case:
Wagner was born in 1813, two centuries ago last year; he died in 1883, more than one hundred and thirty years ago. Wells was born in 1866; he died in 1946, nearly seventy years ago. To most college students, dates such as 1813, 1883, 1866, and 1946 are so many meaningless references, number-conglomerations about as significant from their perspective as the number-designations before the course-descriptions in the college catalogue. I was born in 1954. I can report accurately that I first read Wells, his War of the Worlds, in 1965, when I was a fourth-grader at Toland Way Elementary in Highland Park, California. I believe it was my brother, sixteen years my elder from my father’s first marriage, who recommended it. My father needed to check out the Wells omnibus from the Colorado Street branch of the Los Angeles Public Library because the institution shelved it in the adult section and I held borrowing privileges only in the children’s section. I first heard music by Wagner in 1970 or 71, when a quirky, German-born English teacher at Santa Monica High School, who went by the name of Gary Johnston, decided to enliven his summer “Myth and Folklore” course, or lighten the burden of his instruction, by providing us with mimeographed sheets of the libretto and playing for us on a portable stereo in the classroom excerpts from The Ring of the Nibelung.
A good deal of contemporary education at all levels resembles just what Arendt describes, as 
Whereas Arendt expresses concern for the direction that education takes in a world, that of the late 1950s, dominated by technocratic convictions, Weaver frankly condemns “the progressive movement in education” for being a type of “apostasy,” and its advocates and practitioners for being “attackers and saboteurs” of actual education. Beginning with the same conception of education, Weaver departs from Arendt in his diagnosis of existing educational arrangements. Among their important traits, these progressives are epistemological nihilists who “do not have faith in the existence of knowledge” and whose real aim is “the educationally illicit one of conditioning the young for political purposes.” The revolutionary educational regime is also, in Weaver’s scrutiny of it, utopian and therefore totalitarian. It proposes “to substitute a subjective wishfulness for an historical reality.” Weaver omits to quote directly from the prescriptions of the radical educators, preferring to distill them in the form of his own summary. It is easy, however, to find textual support for that summary. In 
Chez ces deux auteurs, politique et religion sont mises ensemble, dans un même camp, dans une lutte opposant le bien au mal, même si ce qui représente le bien chez l’un représente le mal chez l’autre. Pour Schmitt, dans ce combat, le bourgeois est celui qui ne pense qu’à sa sécurité et qui veut retarder le plus possible son engagement dans ce combat entre bien et mal. Ce que le bourgeois considère comme le plus important, c’est sa sécurité, sécurité physique, sécurité de ses biens, comme de ses actions, «protection contre toute ce qui pourrait perturber l’accumulation et la jouissance de ses possessions» (p22). Il relègue ainsi dans la sphère privée la religion, et se centre ainsi sur lui-même. Or contre cette illusoire sécurité, Schmitt, et c’est là une thèse importante défendue par l’auteur, met au centre de l’existence la certitude de la foi («Seule une certitude qui réduit à néant toutes les sécurités humaines peut satisfaire le besoin de sécurité de Schmitt; seule la certitude d’un pouvoir qui surpasse radicalement tous les pouvoirs dont dispose l’homme peut garantir le centre de gravité morale sans lequel on ne peut mettre un terme à l’arbitraire: la certitude du Dieu qui exige l’obéissance, qui gouverne sans restriction et qui juge en accord avec son propre droit. (…) La source unique à laquelle s’alimentent l’indignation et la polémique de Schmitt est sa résolution à défendre le sérieux de la décision morale. Pour Schmitt, cette résolution est la conséquence et l’expression de sa théologie politique» (p24).). Et c’est dans cette foi que s’origine l’exigence d’obéissance et de décision morale. Schmitt croit aussi, comme il l’affirme dans sa Théologie politique, que «la négation du péché originel détruit tout ordre social».
La confrontation politique apparaît comme constitutive de notre identité. A ce titre, elle ne peut pas être seulement spirituelle ou symbolique. Cette confrontation politique trouve son origine dans la foi, qui nous appelle à la décision («La foi selon laquelle le maître de l’histoire nous a assigné notre place historique et notre tâche historique, et selon laquelle nous participons à une histoire providentielle que nos seules forces humaines ne peuvent pas sonder, une telle foi confère à chacun en particulier un poids qui ne lui est accordé dans aucun autre système: l’affirmation ou la réalisation du «propre» est en elle-même élevée au rang d’une mission métaphysique. Etant donné que le plus important est «toujours déjà accompli» et ancré dans le «propre», nous nous insérons dans la totalité compréhensive qui transcende le Je précisément dans la mesure où nous retournons au «propre» et y persévérons. Nous nous souvenons de l’appel qui nous est lancé lorsque nous nous souvenons de «notre propre question»; nous nous montrons prêts à faire notre part lorsque nous engageons ma confrontation avec «l’autre, l’étranger» sur «le même plan que nous» et ce «pour conquérir notre propre mesure, notre propre limite, notre propre forme.»« (p77-78).).
D’une part, Schmitt reproche à Hobbes d’artificialiser l’Etat, d’en faire un Léviathan, un dieu mortel à partir de postulats individualistes. En effet, ce qui donne la force au Léviathan de Hobbes, c’est une somme d’individualités, ce n’est pas quelque chose de transcendant, ou plus précisément, transcendant d’un point de vue juridique, mais pas métaphysique. A cette critique, il faut ajouter que, créé par l’homme, l’Etat n’a aucune caution divine: créateur et créature sont de même nature, ce sont des hommes. Or ces hommes, véritables individus prométhéens, font croire à l’illusion d’un nouveau dieu, né des hommes, et mortels, dont l’engendrement provient du contrat social. Et cette création à partir d’individus et non d’une communauté au sein d’un ordre voulu par Dieu, comme c’était, selon Hobbes, le cas au moyen-âge, perd par là-même sa légitimité aux yeux d’une théologie politique ( C. Schmitt écrit ainsi que: «ce contrat ne s’applique pas à une communauté déjà existante, créée par Dieu, à un ordre préexistant et naturel, comme le veut la conception médiévale, mais que l’Etat, comme ordre et communauté, est le résultat de l’intelligence humaine et de son pouvoir créateur, et qu’il ne peut naître que par le contrat en général.»).
The Law of Civilization and Decay was published in 1896; that is, several decades prior to Spengler’s Decline of the West. Like Spengler, Adams traces through the analogous epochs of Civilizations the impact these epochs have upon the Culture in its entirety, from architecture to politics, focusing on the economic influences. He shows, like Spengler, that Civilizations proceed through organic cycles. Spengler used the names of seasons to illustrate the organic character of culture-life, going through the stages of birth (Spring; Culture), youthful vigor (Summer, High Culture), maturity (Autumn, Civilization), old age and senility (Winter), with an intervening era of revival – a dramatic final bow on the world stage – ending in death due to the primacy of money over spirit.
Adams’ theory of energy seems akin to C. G. Jung on the ‘canalisation’ of psychical energy (libido);
At this level, all Civilisations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile, at the last. Only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the Fellah type.
Where there were slaves imported from the subject peoples, long since etiolated, filling an Italy whose population was being denuded, there is today an analogous process in an analogous epoch: that of immigration from the ‘third world’ into the Western states whose populations are ageing. Oligarchy constituted the core of the Empire. Nobility became defined by wealth.
En 2014, dans le sillage de la « Manif pour Tous », Gaultier Bès se faisait connaître par Nos limites. Pour une écologie radicale, un essai co-écrit avec Marianne Durano et Axel Nørgaard Rokvam. Le succès de cet ouvrage lui permit de lancer en compagnie de la journaliste du groupe Le Figaro, Eugénie Bastié, et de Paul Piccarreta, la revue trimestrielle d’écologie intégrale d’expression chrétienne Limite.
Dans sa préface, Jean-Pierre Raffin estime quant à lui que la radicalité « est une notion noble qui fait appel aux fondements, aux racines de notre être, de notre vie en société puisque l’être humain est un être social qui, dépourvu de liens, disparaît ou sombre dans la démence (p. 7) ». Gaultier Bès prévient aussi que « sans la profondeur de l’enracinement, la radicalité se condamne à n’agir qu’en surface et se dégrade en extrémisme. Sans la vigueur de la radicalité, l’enracinement n’est qu’un racornissement, qui, faute de lumière, conduit à l’atrophie (p. 16) ». Il se réfère beaucoup à la philosophe Simone Weil malgré une erreur sur l’année de son décès, 1943 et non 1944, en particulier à son célèbre essai sur l’Enracinement.
Gaultier Bès fait finalement trop confiance aux racines. Il a beau distinguer « l’image végétale des “ racines [à] celle, toute minérale, des “ sources ” (p. 25) », il se méprend puisque l’essence bioculturelle de l’homme procède à la fois aux racines, aux sources et aux origines. Ces dernières sont les grandes oubliées de son propos. Ce n’est toutefois qu’en prenant acte de cette tridimensionnalité que l’enracinement sera complet. Pourtant, il prend soin de préciser que « le global n’est pas l’universel, c’est l’extension d’un local hégémonique (p. 76) ». L’avertissement fait penser à l’opuscule du Comité invisible, À nos amis. Le local « est une contraction du global (4) ». « Il y a tout à perdre à revendiquer le local contre le global, estime le Comité invisible. Le local n’est pas la rassurante alternative à la globalisation, mais son produit universel : avant que le ne soit globalisé, le lieu où j’habite était seulement mon territoire familier, je ne le connaissais pas comme “ local ”. Le local n’est que l’envers du global, son résidu, sa sécrétion, et non ce qui peut le faire éclater (5). » Outre le collectif d’ultra-gauche, Guillaume Faye s’interrogeait sur l’ambivalence du concept. « L’enracinement doit […] se vivre comme point de départ, la patrie comme base pour l’action extérieure et non comme “ logés ” à aménager. Il faut se garder de vivre l’enracinement sous sa forme “ domestique ”, qui tend aujourd’hui à prévaloir : chaque peuple “ chez soi ” pacifiquement enfermé dans ses frontières; tous folkloriquement “ enracinés ” selon une ordonnance universelle. Ce type d’enracinement convient parfaitement aux idéologues mondialistes. Il autorise la construction d’une superstructure planétaire où s’intégreraient, privés de leur sens, normés selon le même modèle, les nouveaux “ enracinés ” (6). »
Très tôt, le mot « habit » est associé dans notre langue à l’idée de « maintien » de « tenue », au sens de « tenir sa place et son rang ».
A l’inverse, toute manifestation de démesure (ὕϐρις), chez les hommes comme chez les dieux, entraîne une catastrophe. Nous sommes ici aux antipodes de ce que le philosophe Heidegger décèle dans la modernité occidentale, à savoir la « métaphysique de l’illimité » — l’appétit du « toujours plus », auquel nous devons opposer la logique du « toujours mieux ».
A l’époque moderne, la figure du gentilhomme représente la synthèse et l’aboutissement de ces divers héritages, à travers l’équilibre entre les talents de l’homme d’épée et de l’homme d’esprit, alliant élégance morale, distinction, courage et maîtrise de soi. Tel est l’idéal, largement partagé à travers toute l’Europe, que s’efforcent d’atteindre le Junker prussien et le gentleman britannique.
A toutes ces formes d’abandon de soi-même, il faut précisément opposer la notion de « tenue ». Celle-ci constitue une ascèse — ce qui n’implique pas nécessairement une vie « ascétique » : au-delà de son acception religieuse, passée dans le vocabulaire chrétien par l’intermédiaire du latin chrétien asceta, le mot est apparenté au grec ἄσκησις (« exercice »), qui désigne à l’origine divers types d’activités artistiques ou physiques, en particulier l’
Tout le monde a oublié Henri Lefebvre et je pensais que finalement il vaut mieux être diabolisé, dans ce pays de Javert, de flics de la pensée, qu’oublié. Tous les bons penseurs, de gauche ou marxistes, sont oubliés quand les réactionnaires, fascistes, antisémites, nazis sont constamment rappelés à notre bonne vindicte. Se rappeler comment on parle de Céline, Barrès, Maurras ces jours-ci… même quand ils disent la même chose qu’Henri Lefebvre ou Karl Marx (oui je sais, cent millions de morts communistes, ce n’est pas comme le capitalisme, les démocraties ou les Américains qui n’ont jamais tué personne, Dresde et Hiroshima étant transmuées en couveuses par la doxa historique).
C’est dans l’ère des masses. On peut rajouter ce peu affriolant passage :
Les pays comme la Chine qui ont renoncé au marxisme orthodoxe aujourd’hui avec un milliard de masques sur la gueule, de l’eau polluée pour 200 millions de personnes et des tours à n’en plus finir à vingt mille du mètre. Cherchez alors le progrès depuis Marco Polo…
« La révolution… crée le genre d’homme qui lui sont nécessaires, elle développe cette race nouvelle, la nourrit d'abord en secret dans son sein, puis la produit au grand jour à mesure qu'elle prend des forces, la pousse, la case, la protège, lui assure la victoire sur tous les autres types sociaux. L'homme impersonnel, l’homme en soi, dont rêvaient les idéologues de 1789, est venu au monde : il se multiplie sous nos yeux, il n'y en aura bientôt plus d’autre ; c'est le rond-de-cuir incolore, juste assez instruit pour être « philosophe », juste assez actif pour être intrigant, bon à tout, parce que partout on peut obéir à un mot d'ordre, toucher un traitement et ne rien faire – fonctionnaire du gouvernement officiel - ou mieux, esclave du gouvernement officieux, de cette immense administration secrète qui a peut-être plus d'agents et noircit plus de paperasses que l'autre. »
In his Parmenides, Martin Heidegger contributed an interesting remark in regards to the Greek term “polis”, which once again confirms the importance and necessity of serious etymological analysis. By virtue of its profundity, we shall reproduce this quote in full:
L'homme est au centre de l'univers selon Charbonneau, qui ouvre son texte de bien belle façon en affirmant qu'avant «l'acte divin, avant la pensée, il n'y a ni temps, ni espace : comme ils disparaîtront quand l'homme aura disparu dans le néant, ou en Dieu» (1). Si l'homme se trouve au centre d'une dramaturgie unissant l'espace et le temps, c'est qu'il a donc le pouvoir non seulement d'organiser ces derniers mais aussi, bien évidemment, de les déstructurer, comme l'illustre l'accélération du temps et le rapetissement de l'espace dont est victime notre époque car, «si nous savons faire silence en nous, nous pouvons sentir le sol qui nous a jusqu'ici portés vibrer sous le galop accéléré d'un temps qui se précipite», et comprendre que nous nous condamnons à vivre entassés dans un «univers concentrationnaire surpeuplé et surorganisé» (le terme concentrationnaire est de nouveau employé à la page 31, puis à la page 50), où l'espace à l'évidence mais aussi le temps nous manqueront, alors que nous nous disperserons «dans un vide illimité, dépourvu de bornes matérielles, autant que spirituelles». 
Hélas, l'homme moderne ne semble avoir de goût, comme le pensait Max Picard, que pour la fuite et, fuyant sans cesse, il semble précipiter la création entière dans sa propre vitesse s'accroissant davantage, la fuite appelant la fuite, bien qu'il ne faille pas confondre cette accélération avec le «rythme d'une existence humaine [qui] est celui d'une tragédie dont le dénouement se précipite». Ainsi, la «nuit d'amour dont l'aube semblait ne jamais devoir se lever n'est plus qu'un bref instant de rêve entre le jour et le jour; du printemps au printemps, les saisons sont plus courtes que ne l'étaient les heures. Vient même un âge qui réalise la disparition du présent, qui ne peut plus dire : je vis, mais : j'ai vécu; où rien n'est sûr, sinon que tout est déjà fini» (p. 22).
Porque a fines del siglo XX España podía presumir de poseer su propia tradición filosófica. Y no lo queríamos ver. Desde sus aulas de Oviedo yo tuve el privilegio de aprender de don Gustavo Bueno que la lengua castellana era tan buena como la que más, buena para el cultivo de la filosofía. De mi maestro aprendí que había que rebajar ínfulas al predominio editorial y académico del inglés, del francés o del alemán. 
En el caso de Trías, y su "filosofía del límite" también contamos con una expresión del quehacer filosófico español de gran calidad, de enorme altura, aunque muy distinta de la obra buenista en formato, lenguaje y preocupaciones si la comparamos con la obra de Bueno. Triunfa el Arte y la Metáfora como recursos y temas en el pensador barcelonés, mientras que la Lógica y la Ciencia son ineludibles en el ovetense. Pero, como no hay espacio ni ocasión para analizar a estos dos gigantes, no quiero cerrar mi reflexión, sin conducir la mirada del lector hacia el tercer sistema filosófico que ahora, muy acallado por los medios, viene lanzando a la palestra hispana el profesor Fernández Lorenzo. 
Acheter 
Évidemment, tout, absolument tout étant lié, surtout lorsqu'il s'agit des affinités électives existant entre les grands esprits qui appréhendent le monde en établissant des arches, parfois fragiles mais stupéfiantes de hardiesse, entre des réalités qu'en apparence rien ne relie (cf. p. 38), je ne pouvais, poursuivant la lecture de cet excellent petit livre qui m'a fait découvrir le fulgurant (et, apparemment, horripilant) Jacob Taubes, que finalement tomber sur le nom qui, selon ce dernier, reliait Maritain à Schmitt, qualifié de «profond penseur catholique» : Léon Bloy, autrement dit le porteur, le garnt ou, pourquoi pas, le «signe secret» (p. 96) lui-même. Après Kafka saluant le génie de l'imprécation bloyenne, c'est au tour du surprenant Taubes, au détour de quelques mots laissés sans la moindre explication, comme l'une de ces saillies propres aux interventions orales, qui stupéfièrent ou scandalisèrent et pourquoi pas stupéfièrent et scandalisèrent) celles et ceux qui, dans le public, écoutèrent ces maîtres de la parole que furent Taubes et Kojève (cf. p. 47). Il n'aura évidemment échappé à personne que l'un et l'autre, Kafka et le grand commentateur de la Lettre aux Romains de l'apôtre Paul, sont juifs, Jacob Taubes se déclarant même «Erzjude» «archijuif», traduction préférable à celle de «juif au plus profond» (p. 67) que donne notre petit livre : «l'ombre de l'antisémitisme actif se profilait sur notre relation, fragile comme toujours» (p. 47), écrit ainsi l'auteur en évoquant la figure de Carl Schmitt qui, comme Martin Heidegger mais aussi Adolf Hitler, est un «catholique éventé» dont le «génie du ressentiment» lui a permis de lire «les sources à neuf» (p. 112).
C'est l'importance, capitale, de cette thématique que Jacob Taubes évoque lorsqu'il affirme que les écailles lui sont tombées des yeux quand il a lu «la courbe tracée par Löwith de Hegel à Nietzsche en passant par Marx et Kierkegaard» (p. 27), auteurs (Hegel, Marx et Kierkegaard) qu'il ne manquera pas d'évoquer dans son Eschatologie occidentale (Nietzsche l'étant dans sa Théologie politique de Paul) en expliquant leur philosophie par l'apocalyptique souterraine qui n'a à vrai dire jamais cessé d'irriguer le monde (4) dans ses multiples transformations, et paraît même s'être orientée, avec le régime nazi, vers une furie de destruction du peuple juif, soit ce peuple élu jalousé par le catholiques (et même les chrétiens) conséquents. Lisons l'explication de Taubes, qui pourra paraître une réduction aux yeux de ses adversaires ou une fulgurance dans l'esprit de ses admirateurs : «Carl Schmitt était membre du Reich allemand avec ses prétentions au Salut», tandis que lui, Taubes, était «fils du peuple véritablement élu par Dieu, suscitant donc l'envie des nations apocalyptiques, une envie qui donne naissance à des fantasmagories et conteste le droit de vivre au peuple réellement élu» (pp. 48-9, le passage plus haut cité suit immédiatement ces lignes). 
Cette complexité se retrouve dans le jugement de Jacob Taubes sur Carl Schmitt qui, ce point au moins est évident, avait une réelle importance intellectuelle à ses yeux, était peut-être même l'un des seuls contemporains pour lequel il témoigna de l'estime, au-delà même du fossé qui les séparait : «On vous fait réciter un alphabet démocratique, et tout privat-docent en politologie est évidemment obligé, dans sa leçon inaugurale, de flanquer un coup de pied au cul à Carl Schmitt en disant que la catégorie ami / ennemi n'est pas la bonne. Toute une science s'est édifiée là pour étouffer le problème» (p. 115), problème qui seul compte, et qui, toujours selon Jacob Taubes, a été correctement posé par le seul Carl Schmitt, problème qui n'est autre que l'existence d'une «guerre civile en cours à l'échelle mondiale» (p. 109). Dans sa belle préface, Elettra Stimilli a du reste parfaitement raison de rapprocher, de façon intime, les pensées de Schmitt et de Taubes, écrivant : «Révolution et contre-révolution ont toujours évolué sur le plan linéaire du temps, l'une du point de vue du progrès, l'autre de celui de la tradition. Toutes deux sont liées par l'idée d'un commencement qui, depuis l'époque romaine, est essentiellement une «fondation». Si du côté de la tradition cela ne peut qu'être évident, étant donné que déjà le noyau central de la politique romaine est la foi dans la sacralité de la fondation, entendue comme ce qui maintient un lien entre toutes les générations futures et doit pour cette raison être transmise, par ailleurs, nous ne parviendrons pas à comprendre les révolutions de l'Occident moderne dans leur grandeur et leur tragédie si, comme le dit Hannah Arendt, nous ne le concevons pas comme «autant d'efforts titanesques accomplis pour reconstruire les bases, renouer le fil interrompu de la tradition et restaurer, avec la fondation de nouveaux systèmes politiques, ce qui pendant tant de siècles a conféré dignité et grandeur aux affaires humaines» (pp. 15-6).
« Tout le monde redoute d’être contrôlé et épié ; les grands le sont jusque dans leurs comportements et leurs pensées, le peuple estimant avoir le droit d’en juger et intérêt à le faire. »
Matthew Crawford is a new but powerful intellectual. His debut in the public sphere began in 2009 with his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, which was affectionately dubbed “Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by 
Such a design philosophy does not make people more free. By placing their “free will” beyond the reach of their material environment, we make room for all sorts of impositions on people’s ability to act in their own interests, and we may even make them vulnerable to exploitation. In the casino, this can include exploitation “to extinction.”
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- 4 - Là était la beauté de l'ancien ordre aristocratique : chacun était pleinement respecté dans son caractère spécifique, à son rang reconnu, et chacun se comportait sincèrement selon ce rang, de sorte qu'il ne pouvait y avoir de conflits nés de la jalousie ou de l'envie.
- 11 - Pour moi, dès ma prime jeunesse, je n'étais jamais tombé amoureux ; en tout cas je ne m'étais jamais avoué qu'un amour germait en moi, car mon inconscient très puritain n'admettait pas la simple possibilité d'une chute dans la sensualité, condamnée comme une faiblesse. En outre la conscience des hommes baltes de ma génération qui furent plus ou moins mes contemporains, était encore entièrement déterminée par la tension : sanctuaire inviolable - vice […] ce qui les conduisait d'une part à idéaliser démesurément la femme dite "comme il faut", d'autre part à traîner dans la boue, avec autant d'exagération, toute femme qui menait une vie contraire à l'idéal, ce qui excluait une vie amoureuse libre sous la forme de la beauté.
Dans une enquête de grande ampleur, qui évoque notamment le radicalisme chrétien d’Orestes Brownson (1803-1876), le transcendantalisme de Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), le mouvement de résistance non violente de Martin Luther King (1929-1968), en passant par le socialisme de guilde de George Douglas Howard Cole (1889-1959), Lasch met en évidence tout un gisement de valeurs relatives à l’humanisme civique, dont les Etats-Unis et plus largement le monde anglo-saxon ont été porteurs en résistance à l’idéologie libérale du progrès. Il retrouve, par-delà les divergences entre ces œuvres, certains constances : l’habitude de la responsabilité associée à la possession de la propriété ; l’oubli volontaire de soi dans un travail astreignant ; l’idéal de la vie bonne, enracinée dans une communauté d’appartenance, face à la promesse de l’abondance matérielle ; l’idée que le bonheur réside avant tout dans la reconnaissance que les hommes ne sont pas faits pour le bonheur. Le regard historique de Lasch, en revenant vers cette tradition, n’incite pas à la nostalgie passéiste pour un temps révolu. A la nostalgie, Lasch va ainsi opposer la mémoire. La nostalgie n’est que l’autre face de l’idéologie progressiste, vers laquelle on se tourne lorsque cette dernière n’assure plus ses promesses. La mémoire quant à elle vivifie le lien entre le passé et le présent en préparant à faire face avec courage à ce qui arrive. Au terme du parcours qu’il raconte dans Le Seul et Vrai Paradis, le lecteur garde donc en mémoire le fait historique suivant : il a existé un courant radical très fortement opposé à l’aliénation capitaliste, au délabrement des conditions de travail, ainsi qu’à l’idée selon laquelle la productivité doit augmenter à la mesure des désirs potentiellement illimités de la nature humaine, mais pourtant tout aussi méfiant à l’égard de la conception marxiste du progrès historique. Volontiers raillée par la doxa marxiste pour sa défense « petite bourgeoise » de la petite propriété, tenue pour un bastion de l’indépendance et du contrôle sur le travail et les conditions de vie, la pensée populiste visait surtout l’idole commune des libéraux et des marxistes, révélant par là même l’obsolescence du clivage droite/gauche : le progrès technique et économique, ainsi que l’optimisme historique qu’il recommande. Selon Lasch qui, dans le débat entre Marx et Proudhon, opte pour les analyses du second, l’éthique populiste des petits producteurs était « anticapitaliste, mais ni socialiste, ni social-démocrate, à la fois radicale, révolutionnaire même, et profondément conservatrice ». 
However, the Frankfurt School suggested a different road to the communist paradise than that chosen by Lenin and Stalin in Soviet Russia. The direct intellectual precursors of the Frankfurt School, the Italian Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937) and the Hungarian Georg Lukács (1885 – 1971) (photo), had recognized that further west in Europe there was an obstacle on this path which could not be eliminated by physical violence and terror: the private, middle class, classical liberal bourgeois culture based on Christian values. These, they concluded, needed to be destroyed by infiltration of the institutions. Their followers have succeeded in doing so. The sorcerer's apprentices of the Frankfurt School conjured up an army of hobgoblins who empty their buckets over us every day. Instead of water, the buckets are filled with what Lukács had approvingly labelled ‘cultural terrorism.’
The sorcerer's apprentices of the Frankfurt School dreamt of a communist paradise on earth. Initially, among the hard left they were the only ones aware of the fact that this brutal path to paradise would fail. With the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, however, this failure was obvious to all. This was the New Left’s moment. It was only then that they got any traction and noticeable response. At least in Western Europe. In the US, this moment of truth may have come a little later. Gary North contends in his book ‘Unholy Spirits’ that John F. Kennedy’s death was “the death rattle of the older rationalism.” A few weeks later, Beatlemania came to America. However, the appearance of the book ‘Silent Spring’ by Rachel Carson in September 1962, which heralded the start of environmentalism, points to the Berlin Wall as the more fundamental game changer in the West. A few years later, the spellbound hobgoblins began their long march through the institutions.
