Bertrand de Jouvenel's melancholy liberalism

Public Interest, Spring, 2001 by Brian C. Anderson

Jouvenel pointed out that relativism calls forth Power a second way. The loss of objective standards is existentially unbearable, opening "an aching void in the room of beliefs and principles." The secular religions of communism and National Socialism would draw nourishment from this crisis of meaning, building up Power to truly monstrous proportions. In Jouvenel's stark account, totalitarianism is born of the modern world's moral confusion.

Finally, Power grows in the democratic age because of the erosion of civil society. Democratic regimes base themselves on the individual, and individualism tends to hollow out or utterly destroy civil society. The modern state wages a relentless attack on the "social authorities"--in today's policy jargon, the mediating structures of families, churches, businesses, and other associations that stand between the state and the individual and that constitute extra-individual sources of authority and meaning. The attack can he blunt and brutal, as in the totalitarian regimes' total repression of civil society. Or it can take a softer form, as when the bureaucratic and inefficient welfare state takes over from families the responsibility for rearing children. In either case, though on very different scales, one finds state Power vastly increased and individual liberties menaced or obliterated. In a social field in which there are but two actors--Power and the individual--humans cannot flourish.

Jouvenel does not have much good to say about the liberal democratic West in On Power. He does suggest the possibility of sustaining the flickering light of political and human liberty by supporting moral and religious belief in a "higher code" that would restrain human willfulness, and by educating leaders and citizens to be vigilant of Power, like their medieval predecessors. But he views the separation-of-powers doctrine advocated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal constitutionalists as a weak reed against Power's tank-like advance. Since all modern constitutions base themselves on the people's will, they will not long deter Power's advance.

In fact, Jouvenel's argument in On Power risks becoming a kind of reverse Marxism, in which history ends not in bliss but in the concentration camp. The gigantic state is "the culmination of the history of the West," he observes in the book's grim closing paragraphs, implying that there is not a lot we can do about it. Thankfully, the evolution of the democracies in the years since Jouvenel wrote the book does not bear out its gloomiest warnings.

Despite its excessive pessimism, On Power stands as a permanent warning to the citizens and statesmen of liberal democratic regimes that their freedom is difficult to sustain, for reasons inseparable from the logic of their own principles. And in Jouvenel's ensuing work, most evocatively in Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good, he develops a more constructive political science, one which looks more positively upon liberal constitutionalism.