Bertrand de Jouvenel's melancholy liberalism

Public Interest, Spring, 2001 by Brian C. Anderson

These two explanations, true as far as they go, still do not explain why Power started to expand when it did nor why that expansion intensified dramatically after the seventeenth century. For that, Jouvenel shows, greater attention to the logic of Western history is necessary. On Power exemplifies what I think is one of the great virtues of Jouvenel's political thought: In order to expand our perspective on the events affecting us, it shifts our attention from the immediacy of the present, which can be blind, to the past and, as we will see, to the future. In this book, Jouvenel breaks with the popular Enlightenment story--"pure fantasy," he deems it--of monarchs "to whose exactions there are no bounds" and modern democratic governments "whose resources are proportionate to their authority." The true picture, we learn from history, is much more ambiguous.

Consider the Middle Ages. Far from crushing men with arbitrary force, the medieval king inhabited a spiritual, moral, and institutional world that kept him tightly bound. The divine law, as the Catholic Church taught it, limited the king's authority, indeed all human authority, from above. The king was God's servant, with a sacred duty to preserve God's created order. That hierarchical order, among other things, made the king not master of, but simply first among, nobles--each a rival authority with land and forces of his own. To get anything done the king had to go, hat in hand, to his fellow nobles to beg for men and funds, all the while making sure the Church did not disapprove too strongly. In turn, the common law, a human artifact written within the framework of the divine law and borrowing some of its luster, limited Power from below with innumerable precedents and customs. Jouvenel remarks, "The consecrated king of the Middle Ages was a Power as tied down and as little arbitrary as we can conceive." G od was sovereign, not men; there was no absolute or uncontrolled human authority.

Some might accuse the Catholic Jouvenel of romanticizing medieval life. I think this is to mistake his point. Of course, kings often rudely violated the law, as Jouvenel admits, and the medieval mindset failed to extend to every man and woman full recognition of the dignity that is their due. But the law wove a religious and customary web around Power that prevented it from completely breaking loose and becoming absolute. Recall, Jouvenel says, that the Catholic Church's sanctions "brought the Emperor Henry IV to fall on his knees before Gregory VII in the snow of Canossa." In such a universe, Power could expand only slowly.

This complex web began to unravel when European kings, keen to boost their authority, threw their lot in with the people to heat down the nobles who kept Power in check. The people looked to the kings to free them from the petty and sometimes not-so-petty oppressions of the aristocrats, whom the kings, in top Machiavellian form, had successfully encouraged to ditch their age-old responsibilities to the plebs. From this alliance between kings and the masses arose, beginning in the fifteenth century and lasting until the eighteenth, Europe's absolute monarchies. The absolute monarchs, driving the aristocracy into the ground, centralized and modernized Power and wielded resources far greater than medieval kings. The Protestant Reformation also helped tear apart the medieval web and amplify monarchical Power by giving reformed princes leeway to redefine the meaning of divine laws and to disregard custom; Catholic princes, to keep up, began to skirt the Church's rules themselves. The Minotaur grew.