By JUDE DOUGHERTY
Some cultural historian of the future, some future Gibbon will record the decline and fall of a once great nation, how it lost contact with its founding documents and with the spiritual traditions which animated its growth and how it succumbed to the siren song of utopian leaders who led it to its dissolution in a visionary multicultural, borderless, universal democracy.
As our nation faces a questionable future, we may turn to the past to determine in its light what the future portents. Yet as some cynic with reason once put it, “The only thing we learn from the past is that nobody learns from the past.”
An often neglected cultural historian is Bertrand de Jouvenel. His work, On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1), remains timely although it was written more than seventy years ago. Penned during the dark days of the Nazi occupation of France, the book was published at first opportunity in 1945 and appeared in English translation five years later.
Up against the raw power of the German occupation, de Jouvenel, the philosopher and historian, was led to reflect on the nature of power in the abstract. He set out to examine the reasons why and the way in which Power grows in society. As he uses the word, “Power” is always capitalized; it may stand for authority, the ruler, or simply the drive for dominance.
The Community of the Free is the title of a work published by Yves R. Simon, a French contemporary of de Jouvenel, born in 1903, the same year as de Jouvenel (Simon in Cherbourg, de Jouvenel in the Champagne region).
Both were in their early thirties when they witnessed Hitler’s rise to power. At the outbreak of the war, Simon was a visiting professor in the United States. Remaining in America, he taught philosophy at the University of Notre Dame during the war years, and eventually became a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
From his vantage point in America, Simon, like de Jouvenel in France, surveyed the ruins of Europe and in his own way addressed the conditions that brought it about. (2)
On Power can be read at different levels: as history, as prophecy, as political theory. Pierre Manent speaks of de Jouvenel’s “melancholy liberalism.” Given de Jouvenel’s sweeping command of history, he can make a case for every judgment or argument he advances in the book by citing numerous historical examples in support, yet his personal experience of Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s cannot be discounted as a coloring factor.
The book is a plea for repeated stock taking, for a careful scrutiny of every postwar proposal that would redeem the past by extending the power of the state. Do not leap into the dark, he cautions his countrymen. Beware of letting “necessity,” the tyrant’s plea, have its way. Politics are primarily about Power he writes: “It is in the pursuit of Utopia that the aggrandizers of state power find their most effective ally. Only an immensely powerful apparatus can do all that the preachers of panacea government promise.” (3)
History shows that the acceptance of all-embracing state authority is largely due to the fatigue and despair brought about principally by economic disorder. The European may say that liberty is the most precious of all things, yet as the experience of France attests, it is not valued as such by people who lack bread and water. The will to be free in time of danger is easily extinguished. Liberty becomes a secondary need; the primary need is security.
One of the pitfalls of democracy is its lack of accountability. The popular will is easily manipulated. It recognizes no moral authority outside itself that possesses the strength to limit its excesses. The dethronement of the Old Faith to which the state was accountable left an aching void in the domain of beliefs and principles, allowing the state to impose its own. Without accountability, democracy because of its centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist drive, can easily become an incubator of tyranny.
The kings of old, the personification of power, were possessed of personality, possessed of passions good and bad. More often than not, their sense of responsibility led them to will “the good” for their people. Power within a democracy, by contrast, resides in a faceless and impersonal bureaucracy — the deep state, we call it now — that claims to have no existence of its own and becomes the anonymous, impersonal, passionless instrument of what an elite presumes to be the general will.
Writing in France when the Roosevelt administration was barely ten years old, de Jouvenel feared the long-range danger posed by the many regulatory commissions created by that administration. He saw that agencies possessing at once legislative, executive, and judicial control could operate largely outside of public control and become tyrannical.
The extension of Power, which means its ability to control ever more completely a nation’s economy, is responsible for its ability to pursue ephemeral goals. De Jouvenel asks, “Can anyone doubt that a state which attempts to satisfy every need will be better placed to conscript all beneficiaries, and one day consign them to the dooms of war? The more departments of life that Power takes over, the greater will be its material resources for making war.” (4)
Even within a democracy the vast resources of the state are ripe for a dictator to seize. The bold, by discounting all risk, are positioned to seize all initiatives and become the rulers, while the timid run for cover and security. “The more complete the hold which the state gets on the resources of a nation, the higher, the more sudden, the more irresistible, will be the wave in which an armed community can break on a pacific one….It follows that, in the very act of handing more of ourselves to the state, we may be fostering tomorrow’s war.” (5)
Aristotle in the Politics reduced the variety of governmental structures that he had studied to three: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, recognizing that whatever shape a government takes, the essence of governing is Power.
Force may establish Power, but once established, habit alone can keep it in being. A standing center of power which is obeyed by habit has, in the case of the state, the means of physical compulsion and is kept in being partly by its perceived strength, partly by the faith that it rules by right, and partly by the hope of its beneficence. The natural tendency of Power is to grow. Power is authority, and authority enables the expansion of authority. (6)
Power, when dedicated to egalitarian pursuits, must always be at war with industrial authorities and ready to despoil the capitalists of their accumulated wealth. (7)
Its political objective consists in the demolition of a class that enjoys “independent means,” by seizing the assets of that class to bestow benefits on others. The result is a transfer of Power from productive individuals to an unproductive bureaucracy that becomes the new ruling class, displacing that which was economically productive.
The top state authorities, in alliance with the bottom (that is, the supposed oppressed), squeeze out the middle class and in doing so progressively penetrate ever deeper into the personal lives of citizens. The point of course has been made by others, notably by F.A. Hayek, who called attention to the fact that an assault on property rights is not always apparent because it is carried out in the name of the common good, an appealing but elastic concept defined by those whose interest it serves.
De Jouvenel subsequently makes the point that to achieve its objective, Power must first gain control of public education at its early stages. A state monopoly in education has the ability to condition minds in childhood for its later years, thereby preparing popular opinion for the seizure of even greater Power by the state. (8) De Jouvenel did not experience or speak to the issue of men of great wealth, such as Jeff Bezos and his purchase of The Washington Post, to advance a social agenda by controlling the flow of information.
Viewing the history of his country, de Jouvenel finds that France, disliking the minority rule of one person, deposed the Crown and subsequently organized itself in the light of mass interests only to discover that when the majority holds power over a minority, justice within a democracy can be as elusive as it is in a despotic regime.
What de Jouvenel thought as possible has in many ways come to pass as Brussels gains ever more power over the European economy, and as the United States experienced a charismatic community organizer with few credentials and little respect for the traditions of the country he became elected to serve.
We turn now to Yves Simon’s Community of the Free and the work of others who emphasize the role of private property in fostering independence of a powerful state. Simon was a student of Jacques Maritain at the Institute Catholic de Paris. The author of books entitled, A General Theory of Authority, Freedom and Community, he was influenced by Maritain but also by Pierre Joseph Proudhon’s forceful treatise, What Is Property?
Simon, like Proudhon, was fearful that democracy, far from excluding a totalitarian regime, would in time actually give way to one. Absent appropriate checks and balances, the legal processes of the democratic state may work in such a way as to allow the elimination of democracy. Of equal importance to whatever checks and balances may be prescribed by law or inscribed in a constitution, are those things that are in a sense external to the political structure, namely, private property and independent management of resources. “When people acquiesce to the removal of all checks on the conquering expansion of the state, the totalitarian regime is firmly established.”
Simon was convinced that an impersonal authority could not win such an irrational surrender but that a leader with charismatic talents could win approval. (9) We know from experience, he says, that where totalitarianism prevails, democracy has no chance, yet few men dare to voice the paradoxical consideration that democracy may become totalitarian. Totalitarian democracy, of course, would not be true democracy. (10) Proudhon maintains that the state, whether democratic or not, remains the state and of its very nature threatens all liberties and the very life of society.
Both Simon and de Jouvenel were concerned that in a democratic regime, the general interest as represented by Power may determine that no interest is legitimate that opposes the general interest. On this assumption, even local or particular interest must yield to the general interest, in de Jouvenel’s words, “bend its knee to Power.” Power, which is conceived as the incarnation of the general wish, cannot tolerate any group which embodies less general wishes and interests. (11)
Government Control
The distinguished American historian, the late Richard Pipes, a former director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center and a specialist in Russian history, reinforces de Jouvenel’s judgment that democratic procedures in electing government officials do not guarantee respect for individual rights.
The right to property, he holds in his book entitled, Property and Freedom (12), may be more important than the right to vote. Property of itself does not guarantee civil rights and liberties, but, historically speaking, it has been the most effective device for ensuring both. Property has the effect of creating an autonomous sphere on which, by mutual consent, neither the state nor society can encroach. In drawing a line between the public and the private sphere, it makes its owner, as it were, co-sovereign with the state.
Even so, once “the elimination of poverty” becomes a state objective, the state is bound to treat property not as a fundamental right that it has an obligation to protect but as an obstacle to “social justice.” (13) Even in the most advanced democracies, the main threat to liberty may come not from tyranny but from the pursuit of socialist objectives.
Liberty by its very nature, Pipes reminds us, is in-egalitarian. Men differ in strength, intelligence, ambition, courage, perseverance, and all else that makes for success. There is no method to make men both free and equal. In the pursuit of equality, property rights may be subtly undermined through taxation and government interference with business contracts as the state pursues its egalitarian objectives.
Insofar as poor voters always and everywhere outnumber rich ones, in theory there are no limits to the democratic state’s drive to promote equality and to run roughshod over the rights of private property. “The rights to ownership,” (14) Pipes argues, “need to be restored to their proper place instead of being sacrificed to the unattainable ideal of social equality and all-embracing economic security. . . . The balance between ‘civil’ and ‘property’ rights has to be readdressed if we care about freedom.”
He continues, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the government no license to set quotas for hiring personnel by private enterprise or admitting students to institutions of higher learning, and yet the federal bureaucracy acts as if it had.” (15)
Some fear that the drive for “social justice” will inevitably lead to the destruction of democracy, yet Pipes is not drawn to that pessimistic conclusion. He reasons that encroachments on property cannot advance relentlessly to their logical conclusion, the abolition of private property, because the most affluent are twice as likely to vote as the weakest.
If he were addressing the subject today, nearly two decades later, he may not be so sanguine. The prospect of government control of all aspects of the electoral process looms as the present Democratic Party, aided by a leftist media, is now positioned to mobilize the vote through redistricting and by taking direct control of the census. Not to be discounted is the distorting effect of a monolithic media able to advance its own political agenda in concert with officials who share its objectives.
De Jouvenel addressed this issue when speaking of the ability of popular newspapers to awaken emotion, building or destroying concepts of right conduct. “From the day the first ha’penny paper was launched until now, the big circulation newspapers have never built up an ethic.” (16)
In concluding paragraphs of his study, de Jouvenel writes, “It is impossible to condemn totalitarian regimes without also condemning the destructive metaphysics which made their happening a certainty.” (17) Rhetorically he asks, “What would the individualists and free thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries say if they could but see what idols a man must now worship: Would not the superstition they fought seem to be the very acme of enlightenment, compared to the superstitions which have taken its place?” (18)
No wonder Pierre Manent called him a “melancholy liberal.”
FOOTNOTES
1. Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth, with a preface by D.W. Brogan; trans. by J. F. Huntington (New York: The Viking Press, 1949).
2. Yves R. Simon, The Community of the Free, trans. from the original French by Willard R. Trask (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984).
3. Paraphrased by D.W. Brogan in his preface, pp. xvi-xvii.
4. Ibid., p. 12.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 157.
7. Ibid., p. 171.
8. Ibid., p. 11.
9. Simon, op. cit., p. 149.
10. “The real question is whether democracy can lead to totalitarianism, whether a democratic regime can develop into a totalitarian regime, whether the democratic state may happen to work in such a way as to bring about the elimination of democracy and the establishment of totalitarianism” (Simon, p. 150).
11. de Jouvenel, op. cit., p. 261.
12. Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).
13. Pipes, op. cit., p. 229.
14. Ibid., p. 287.
15. Ibid., p. 288.
16. de Jouvenel, op. cit., p. 373.
17. Ibid., p. 377.
18. Ibid.
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