Conservatism and the Medieval Mind
Spitz, David
If some of the more extravagant reviews of Bertrand de Jouvenel's Sovereignty* are to be believed, this book is nothing less than a classic. The London Times Literary Supplement proclaimed...
...I do not believe that Jouvenel's book merits these accolades, but I can think of at least three reasons to account for them...
...All of the numbers apply to income before taxes...
...and this is what is meant by the rule of public opinion...
...And who can read history without an awareness of the crimes and follies of passion...
...What Jouvenel must do, if his argument is to have relevance, is to demonstrate empirically that majorities are more prone than are minorities to invidious acts, that majorities but not minorities—at least, not the "right" minorities—pursue their private interests rather than the common good...
...And, fewer than one in five managed to make as much as $7,500...
...Because conservatives wish to conserve not all things, but only those things that are good, they require above all else what they do not now have—a rational principle or standard by which to distinguish the good from the bad and by which they can come seriously to grips with concrete problems...
...the innovator in becoming sovereign is able to use the political apparatus not merely to preserve but to produce desired changes in the existing order of things...
...In particular, he is distressed by the trust that modern democratic states have put in public opinion, in the rule of the majority...
...164...
...Only in this way, he believes, can the benefits of human cooperation be secured...
...Then justice is not to be found in the individual conscience, not in "reason" as the individual or the ruler may conceive it...
...Here Jouvenel offers conflicting an swers...
...But few students of political theory are likely to derive from this volume either a better understanding of sovereignty or a rational principle that will explain, let alone vindicate, the conservative idea...
...Jouvenel seems to argue, in keeping with the Socratic tradition, that right knowledge compels right action, and that the sovereign Will, because it knows what is right, should and will do what is right...
...and change, it is clear, may lead a society in the wrong as well as in the right direction...
...Even Denis Brogan, who seemed unwilling to go quite this far, asserted in the New York Times that "every page of this brilliant and successful effort . . . is loaded with ore...
...Then his quest is rather for the conditions that make possible the attainment and perpetuation of the political good...
...for however meritorious this moral stance may be, it offers no specific guides to right behavior in a particular situation...
...This standard, says Jouvenel, is the natural law...
...Jouvenel needs, then, a true conception of the right social order if he is to argue on other than arbitrary grounds that conservation is the first obligation of the public authorities...
...And this he does by returning to Rousseau's notion of a real will, and of a ruler who knows, even against the judgment of a majority of his people, what the people "really" want...
...But these are not always compatible standards...
...he must apply the socially accepted standards...
...It is the incorporation of these precepts in the edicts of the ruler that constitutes, for Jouvenel, the sovereign Will, and gives a ruler a legitimate claim to be called sovereign...
...Majority rule, after all, is in one sense a necessary reply to the tyranny of the minority, a tyranny which has governed mankind far longer, and with more disastrous results, than any alleged tyrant of the majority...
...204-5, 209-10...
...ate rulers, whether they be kings or self-styled aristocracies...
...This leads, then, to the obvious alternative: namely, that the sovereign Will knows and desires the public good precisely because it is the sovereign Will...
...1 Let us start with the stated purpose of Jouvenel's book...
...He seeks to stabilize, not to initiate...
...And this is what he ultimately does...
...But it is the mark of a democratic state—and Jouvenel professes not to oppose democracy—that classes or groups or parties are free to compete for the control of the public authority...
...For Jouvenel is rent between the realities of power and the mystique of justice, and his answers to these questions reflect his underlying uncertainties...
...he should uphold society's conventions...
...A number of questions, however, quickly come to the fore...
...Such a conception, however, he tells us, is a utopian dream...
...Whether conservatives will, on reflection, gain solace from this massive pastiche, I cannot say...
...But what must be noted is that such a definition is alien to the ordinary use of the term in Western societies, a usage that may be epitomized by Mill's Representative Government and that is articulated in our own day in the writings of such men as A. D. Lindsay, Ernest Barker, and R. M. Maclver...
...Now democracy is a word that historically is neither clear nor unambiguous, and if Jouvenel means to use it as he does he has literal license to do so...
...But who apart from him who is called sovereign is to say whether the sovereign has willed what he should not will...
...This, he tells us, is to inquire into the political good...
...Thus, Jouvenel concludes that the sovereign should be no more than a sort of umpire, adjudicating and adjusting the initiatives that stem from the innovators...
...and this assumption Jouvenel cannot—for reasons I will discuss later —readily accept...
...But this, too, is a circular and therefore unconvincing argument...
...From Plato through Madison and Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill to theorists of our own day, much emphasis has been placed, and properly so, on the dangers ensuing from the "tyranny of the majority" and the "passions" of the multitude...
...But to argue for social cohesion without regard to the principles on which that cohesion rests, is to vindicate even authoritarian government, which Jouvenel rejects...
...I think we can do so only if we view it as the work of a man overcome by nostalgia...
...But what if the existing equilibrium is un just...
...To admit some changes, Jouvenel requires a standard other than the equilibrium itself...
...he insists that the sov ereign's duty is above all else to main tain the existing equilibrium...
...matter on which I will have something to say a little later...
...But it is not really so...
...University of Chicago Press...
...They ought rather to resign themselves to the buffetings of a pointless fate...
...But Jouvenel's standard, as we have seen, is nature...
...In both cases what is clearly required is the application of reason to human affairs—not only to comprehend irrational behavior but to channel, even if but in limited degree, the forces that constitute our history...
...On the one hand, we cannot know that the sovereign Will both knows and desires the public good, for we, since we are outside the sovereign and thus of the mass, are incompetent precisely by our exclusion to know these things...
...He holds instead that the sovereign—who in this connection he labels rex—should limit himself to maintaining the social framework, the rules of the game...
...But what if the "right" initiative is not forthcoming...
...300...
...Moreover, if democracy is to be defined by the results of the acts of the public authorities, there is no way to distinguish democratic from oligarchic states...
...it is impossible to establish a just social order" (p...
...for in Jouvenel's view (as in Burke and in Michael Oakeshott) rationalismi...
...He indicts democratic theory for looking to public opinion—which in this tradition is identified with the inferior judgments of average, and therefore inferior, men —instead of trusting to the wisdom of superior men, of those who know what is good and how best to achieve it...
...In one place, in fact, he follows Burke rather than the classical political philosophers in arguing to the contrary that reason can enable us to discover but not to bring about the political good...
...and this Jouvenel explicitly accepts when he argues repeatedly for the imperative of equilibrium, for the primacy of stability...
...here the pursuit of one's private good is of necessity a quest for the common good as well...
...I do not see that this furthers our understanding, or helps us locate the sovereign Will...
...This, I am forced to say, is bad political theory and bad history...
...And to what ends...
...We move rather in devious ways to the ghostlike notion of a sovereign Willa will divorced from all reality and even, in Jouvenel's terms, from all clear purpose...
...and on this basis certain totalitarian dictatorships have ventured precisely this claim...
...e., the notion that planned action can produce the good—is nothing less than utopian...
...And in the other case, unless men are to be thrust into a common mold, they must be free to pursue some different, even dividing, interests...
...The New Republic, Oct...
...In the first place, who or what embodies this sovereign Will, and how do we recognize it...
...The real test, of course, turns on the question, who is to determine the needs as distinct from the desires of the people...
...But, as his own qualifications suggest, most Americans are far from being affluent...
...and this, curiously, Jouvenel in one place concedes to be a natural rather than a monstrous phenomenon (p...
...Now, To DECRY the rule of public opinion is an old if still fashionable preoccupation...
...The innovator alone must remain the driving force toward some positive goal...
...He reads the story of power as a retrogression from the rule of Christian monarchs, in which able men governed a natural community of unequals, to the rule of secular democracies, in which public opinion based on the artificial doctrine of equality governs despotically...
...Jouvenel's book is important, therefore, as a sophisticated effort to provide such a principle...
...And if not all cooperation promotes the common good, we must look once again for a standard by which we can distinguish good from bad forms of cooperation...
...but he also says that the ruler is not free to apply the conclusions of his speculative reasoning...
...Or that the pursuit of one's private good is evil...
...A second reason for the reception given Jouvenel's book is that it is one of the few attempts at a systematic treatise in the conservative mood...
...But an open society is a society in flux, an equilibrium (if it is an equi librium) in constant process of adjust ment...
...he should not himself seek to initiate right action...
...The second is an appeal to subjective experience, to what communities have done and believed...
...It is also, I fear, bad theology...
...Finally, Jouvenel's Sovereignty stands in that tradition of political philosophy which is concerned, as he puts it, with the uses rather than the sources of power...
...Translated by J. F. Huntington...
...and since we are not of the sovereign Will, we cannot know them...
...while democracy, as I understand it, assigns to the sovereign— who from this standpoint, I repeat, is the innovator in power—not merely the preservation but the promotion of the common good, as it gives to the innovator not merely an opportunity to improve the common good but an obligation to preserve the system which makes it possible for him both to survive and to seek in turn to become the sovereign...
...Finally, should it act on the basis of such knowledge...
...We are back, once again, to a disembodied, even mystical, sovereign Will...
...What is crucial, in his view, is not the way in which power is gained, nor the principle of consent as a legitimate source of power, but the ends for which power is employed, the idea of justice or the public good...
...This he regards as both unwarranted and as a perversion of democracy: unwarranted because the masses of the people are customarily driven by their private passions rather than by a concern for the good of the whole...
...Then any equilibrium, any form of human cooperation, including a totalitarian one, must be good in itself...
...If he were to initiate, especially if he were to claim a monopoly of the power to initiate, he would impose an authoritarianism that would destroy liberty and stifle initiative...
...For he would have the sovereign limit himself to the preservation of the existing equilibrium, and the innovator to its change...
...And here, I suggest, Jouvenel, who talks much of history, ignores history...
...But such a quest is intelligible only if we assume that knowledge of such conditions can lead to the improvement of deficient socities...
...The second of these propositions implies, I take it an appeal to custom rather than to natural law...
...This is the meaning of Jouvenel's insistence that the sovereign can only will what is just and reasonable...
...Hence the sovereign, who is all-powerful, is paradoxically enjoined by his powerlessness from comitting wrong...
...The sovereign is not someone distinct from the innovator...
...It will not do, Jouvenel insists, to say that the ruler will act rationally...
...What democracy does, then, from this standpoint, is to create the conditions under which the various innovators can most freely compete for the conquest of political power, to make it possible for a particular innovator or coalition of innovators to rule—to become the sovereign—and at the same time to protect the innovators out of power from being annihilated so that they in turn may someday move to the control of the public authority...
...He contents himself instead with assertions to the contrary...
...If reason cannot do this much at least, it serves no useful purpose for men to reflect on the troubles of their world...
...for he is convinced that they have indulged, by and large, in the wrong things...
...But if the public good is equated with the maintenance of the existing equilibrium, then all novelty must be scorned...
...Not only is it impossible to judge future consequences, there is no such thing as a just social order...
...On the contrary, he must be guided and controlled by existing conventions...
...If it is the ruler, then all states can claim to be democratic...
...Further, what assurance have we that it will act in conformity with this knowledge...
...in a particular situation they may even stand in direct opposition to each other...
...But if it is the people themselves, then not the result but the source of political action is decisive...
...Unsimulated poverty is still the lot of many...
...It is also, he adds, the established customs...
...For men possessed of power, it is clear, tend to pursue their private good as they conceive it...
...Does it follow, however, that such men are oblivious to the common or public good...
...a perversion because true democracy requires action exercised in accordance with the needs, not the desires, of the people...
...It serves no real purpose, for example, to agree that we must do good and avoid evil...
...But whose reason...
...Whatever tends to destroy sovereignty is beyond the competence of the sovereign...
...Under such circumstances, the state may properly be regarded as the medium through which various innovators battle, so that a particular innovator may become sovereign...
...Now, there is a sense in which the public authority may be said to be inherently opposed to change, and this is clearly the case where that authority is the representative of a stable or traditional ruling class...
...Jouvenel tells us that this standard is to be found not in will but in justice...
...But Jouvenel does not really believe this either...
...for if he wills otherwise he must be deemed not to have willed it (pp...
...from which it must follow that what is natural is right, not wrong...
...So great a blessing is moral harmony," he writes, "that whatever tends to weaken it must be dangerous and bad" (p...
...And if all this is true, as I believe it is for a genuinely democratic state, then not only Jouvenel's distinction but also his prescribed policy becomes meaningless or irrelevant...
...Instead he would leave these initiatives to men out of power, hoping that those in power will adopt such initiatives as will permit improvement along with stability...
...And since, in the modern state, significant changes are most commonly possible only, or most effectively, through state action, the dichotomy that Jouvenel postulates between innovator and sovereign breaks down...
...He even asserts, in Rousseau-like fashion, that such action, because it accords with the needs rather than with the desires of the people, is democratic...
...This implies that rulers can both know and act in accordance with the political good, and Jouvenel makes it abundantly clear that he wants them to do so, even, let it be emphasized, against the wishes of a majority of the people...
...For, in the one case, there are many things—e.g., education, religion, the maintenance of a peaceful social order, etc.—which men can customarily enjoy only in common...
...he is the innovator in power...
...The London Times Literary Supplement proclaimed it "a remarkable achievement . . . a great work in political philosophy...
...Not since the savage assault on sovereignty in the early books of Harold Laski has anyone working within the liberal tradition attempted to make constructive use of this concept...
...Secondly, how do we know that it both knows and desires the public good...
...The first is that the concept of sovereignty has for a good many years been relegated to the backwater of political theory...
...while if it is the sovereign himself, there can be no appeal to a force outside of him...
...for Jouvenel believes that some novelty is good, and that to govern justly the sovereign must alter the existing equilibrium by adopting such changes as will promote the public good...
...What Marx and Freud and totalitarianism have taught us of the irrationality of man, of the role of economic forces in history, of mass political parties and the uses of terror—these and other things go unnoticed here...
...It is thus reduced to submission to convention...
...they are conclusions to be derived from the evidence...
...he needs an external norm by which he can judge which of many proposed changes are desirable, which of alternative orders or equilibriums are valuable...
...He falls back on the precepts of the "natural law," as these (in his interpretation) derive from God...
...And this he does not show...
...I do not think so...
...He argues instead for the equilibrium of an open society...
...And it is here that he builds most directly on his distinction between sovereign (or rex) and innovator (or dux...
...And if there is anything that Jouvenel intends, it is to make prescription rather than description the object of political science...
...But what communities have done and believed is precisely what disturbs Jouvenel and has motivated him to write his book...
...Then the sovereign is not the enemy but the instrument of initiative...
...As a man who loves order and respects customary usages, he wants "an au thority aimed at keeping things in place" (p...
...he cannot do what ill accords with his own end...
...To argue otherwise, Jouvenel must appeal not to nature but to a standard outside of nature, say, to convention or God...
...And there is no force (in Jouvenel's theory) outside this sovereign Will to tell us whether the sovereign Will has really acted in the real interests of the people, or to protect us from this sovereign Will if it has not in fact done so...
...For the first—natural law—is an appeal to principle, to an allegedly objective criterion independent of group or national practice...
...hence Jouvenel must turn to God...
...The lowest 10 percent subsisted on a mere one percent of the nation's gross income, the fortunate top tenth enjoyed 29 percent of all income produced, and the least fortunate 30 percent made do on 8 percent of the national income...
...4.50...
...for if men can only understand but not control their history, his own book—which is avowedly a manual for statesmen—becomes a senseless enterprise...
...This, if I understand Jouvenel correctly, is of no great moment...
...This, however, will not do...
...13, 1958...
...How are we to understand this book...
...What Jouvenel proposes instead is a reliance on the sovereign Will, which both desires and knows the public good...
...The forms making for stability," he writes (and stability, for Jouvenel, is the crux of the political good), "partake of necessity, not will" (p...
...To have the concept explored anew, and by a man working within what he at least conceives to be the liberal or democratic tradition, is an almost startling event...
...He would restore Christian justice, but he knows too well that men in power are prone to define justice in ways counter to his own...
...it is rather to be sought in the agreements of a social order...
...he has no power to do evil...
...He must repair the insecurities caused by initiatives...
...Such initiative should be left rather to private individuals—the duces...
...J. K. Galbraith in his excellent Affluent Society identified the tendency of this country to grow richer and richer...
...Such an inference, however, would be disputed by none other than Jouvenel himself...
...Since Jouvenel regards himself as a Christian, one can, I suppose, point to the inconvenient doctrine of sin, which would seem to suggest that no human power will always act rightly even if it always knows what is right...
...for while the sovereign should encourage initiatives which make for change, his essential function is "to ensure the reliability of the individual's environment...
...He must achieve stability in the face of change (p...
...Because he loathes totalitarian government, he cannot and does not approve any equilibrium, any form of human cooperation...
...The third and fourth questions must be taken together...
...123...
...The sovereign Will, he says, embodies these precepts because it is through the embodiment of these precepts that it becomes the sovereign Will...
...But he provides no way of identifying and securing the adoption of the right changes, or of removing a sovereign who institutes the wrong changes, or indeed of establishing the "right" equi librium to begin with...
...If we could know them, we would be part of the sovereign Will...
...Whether in point of fact Jouvenel contributes to our understanding of sovereingty, whether he advances his own political theory through its use, is a * Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good, by Bertrand de Jouvenel...
...For, while he follows Socrates in holding that justice consists in rendering to each man his due, he does not believe that the proper function of the sovereign Will is to render justice or, more grandly, to initiate policies designed to promote the common good...
...To the second question there are two sorts of answers...
...What if it is a totalitarian order...
...For the sovereign, as Jouvenel conceives him, "is the natural enemy of widespread initiative" (p...
...Reason, then, can and should govern the behavior of states...
...301...
...In this way, Jouvenel believes, the sovereign can secure both stability and change...
...Unfortunately, this is not the case...
...Accordingly, he criticizes democratic theory for relying on the process through which power-holders are chosen rather than on the intrinsic qualities and purposes of the powerholders themselves...
...But a more interesting question arises when we ask Jouvenel whether he really means that the sovereign should act for the common good...
...What democratic theorists in replying need contend, however, is not that these dangers do not exist but that they are universal...
...But diversity and change, Jouvenel argues, must be allowed...
...If, moreover, it is "natural," as Jouvenel contends, for men to use their power for their particular ends, it is only on the basis of some "unnatural" or artificial standard that such natural action can be condemned...
...If it is someone other than the sovereign, this other is in fact the sovereign...
...and if so, all change is evil...
...Hence he would restrict men in power from effecting such alterations in the existing equilibrium as they might desire...
...It would appear from his teaching that the only possible answer is an affirmative one, for why should we seek a ruler who knows and desires the public good unless we mean him to act in its interest...
...But asssertions are not evidence...
...A browser through the September, 1958, Federal Reserve Bulletin mightbe a little shocked to learn that in 1957, 8 percent of all families received total incomes of $1,000 or less and that nearly a third earned under $3,000...
...In these respects Jouvenel's book appeals to an important, though not controlling, portion of the intellectual community...
...consequently the effort to improve society through rational thought is likely to produce the very tyranny it seeks to escape...
...11 To all these questions Jouvenel offers contradictory or circular answers...
...LET Us LOOK more closely at the argument, for what Jouvenel now seems to be affirming is (a) that the sovereign should not initiate acts to advance the common good but should content himself with preserving the existing order of things, allowing, to be sure, a modicum of change, and (b) that the sovereign in maintaining the existing equilibrium is in fact promoting the common good...
...He begins, simply enough, by as serting the superior claim of stability...
...But convention, as we have noted, is a subjective and shifting and therefore improper criterion...
...What Jouvenel has written, then, is a medieval tract for medieval man, conscious of place and order and of the inspirations of a Christian god but unconscious both of his romantic image of medieval justice and of the grim experiences of our own time...
...Jouvenel, however, because he dislikes and distrusts public opinion yet professes to respect democracy, must somehow detach democracy from public opinion...
...Here we come to the heart of Jouvenel's argument, and it would be pleasant to record that at this juncture Jouvenel is unmistakably coherent and clear...
...He would seek to play God, but not being God he would rule imperfectly, and hence at times unjustly...
...Since conservatism is more a mood than a doctrine —since, that is to say, most conservatives do not seriously reflect on these things—it is probable that they will...
...If some of the more extravagant reviews of Bertrand de Jouvenel's Sovereignty* are to be believed, this book is nothing less than a classic...
...for even a dictatorship, it is clear, may on occasion serve the needs of its people...
...Then the argument is circular or tautologous, for it asserts only that the sovereign wills what he ought to will, for if he does not will what he ought to will he is not sovereign...
...for to inquire into the political good presupposes at the outset that the political good is already known, else one cannot know what he seeks or recognize it when it appears...
Vol. 6 • July 1959 • No. 3
