Bertrand de Jouvenel's melancholy liberalism

Public Interest, Spring, 2001 by Brian C. Anderson

The upshot: The classical goods of complete harmony and thick community that the modern world has undermined--and there is no doubt that they are goods--are incompatible with other goods that we cannot imagine living without. Too many armchair communitarians, on the left and the right, simply fail to see this.

If Jouvenel rejects any return to Greece as destructive of our modern freedoms, however, he does not turn around and embrace the libertarianism that, say, Charles Murray serves up in What It Means to Be a Libertarian. In Murray's view, government should do next to nothing, refusing to make judgments about citizens' moral choices and giving the market and the institutions of civil society free reign, except when monopolists or thieves or murderers mess things up.

This thin understanding of the political, Jouvenel contends, is not an adequate governing philosophy for a modern liberal democracy. Indeed, to the extent that government, basing itself on the self-sovereignty of man, refuses to discriminate between moral and immoral choices, it surrenders to the relativism that already disturbs liberal societies. As On Power showed, such relativism beckons the state to restore the order it destroys and to fill the emptiness it creates in the soul.

For Jouvenel, the modern democratic state has a much richer moral task. It is to create the conditions that let "social friendship"--a common good compatible with the goods and freedoms of modernity--blossom. Jouvenel describes this modern common good as resting "in the strength of the social tie, the warmth of the friendship felt by one citizen for another and the assurance each has of predictability in another's conduct." To nurture this mutual trust is the essence of the art of politics.

Daniel J. Mahoney and David DesRosiers, in their illuminating introduction to the Liberty Fund edition of Sovereignty, correctly observe that the book "contains one of the richest accounts of the permanent requirements of statesmanship written in this century." Among the tasks of the liberal statesman are the following (this is by no means an exhaustive list): First, the statesman must prudentially balance innovation and conservation. Modern societies, severed from the past, are open, mobile, and constantly transforming. Government needs to respond to the constant flux with policies that attenuate some of its worst effects. For contrary to what "dynamists" like Reason magazine's Virginia Postrel think, human beings cannot live in a world that is always changing: Such a condition is profoundly alienating. Thus Jouvenel would be willing to use government funds to retrain workers displaced by a new technology.

One way of pursuing this balance is to anticipate future trends as much as possible in order to cushion their impact. Hence Jouvenel's extensive research in "future studies," given its fullest theoretical treatment in a fascinating but sadly out-of-print 1968 book, The Art of Conjecture (here again he shakes us from what I would call, if you can forgive the somewhat barbarous neologism, our presentism). The "art" in the title is a tip-off. In Jouvenel's view, there is no science of the future, only reasoned inferences from existing trends.