On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth by Bertrand De Jouvenel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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.

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