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First Things: A Journal of Religion and Public Life
The Problem of Power
Mark C. Henrie
Copyright (c) 1993 First Things 34 (June/July 1993): 49-51.
The Nature of Politics: Selected Essays of Bertrand de Jouvenel. Edited by Dennis
Hale and Marc Landy. Transaction. 306 pp. $21.95.
The only thing deader than dead politics must surely be dead political science. It is
thus remarkable to find that after several decades, these essays by Bertrand de
Jouvenel (1903-1987) remain surprisingly lively. This is ironic. For Jouvenel, writing
during the so-called behavioralist revolution, was an enthusiast of the idea of
political
science. Such science would be distinguished in part by its progress, rendering older
work obsolete, as opposed to political theory, a mere "collection of individual
theories
which stand side by side, each one more impervious to the impact of new
observations and to the advent of new theories." While political theory had been
merely normative, political science would be positive. Jouvenel seems to have
believed he was writing political science; it is our good fortune that in fact he was
doing political theory.
This new collection of essays from Transaction Publishers provides a good
introduction to a man the editors, Dennis Hale and Marc Landy, aptly call "the least
famous of the great political thinkers of the twentieth century." Jouvenel's
penetrating
view of political realities no doubt has something to do with his personal experience,
for he grew up in an intensely political environment. His father was the French
ambassador to the League of Nations and was elected to the French senate; his
mother presided over an important salon with a particular interest in France's
relations with Czechoslovakia. Jouvenel's life and work were centrally informed by
the rise of Hitler's National Socialist Party and the cataclysmic world war that
followed. In some sense, the hypertrophy of the power of the State, of which the
German episode is but one example, constitutes the political problem of our century,
a problem as yet unresolved. This was Jouvenel's theme. Writing two decades after
the conclusion of the Second World War, he would still note with concern that
"constitutions and parliaments have to a surprising degree become mere hulks," and
he would call on the liberal democracies to search for new institutional arrangements
to secure liberty.
Jouvenal's three major works are On Power, Sovereignty, and The Pure Theory of
Politics. (Only Sovereignty remains in print.) While Jouvenel is more a "fox" than a
"hedgehog," the one phenomenon that dominates his thoughts is social mobilization.
Elaborating on the critical reflections of such early-nineteenth-century thinkers as
Louis de Bonald and Alexis de Tocqueville, he seeks to understand the nature of
pouvoir, or power, at the heart of all politics. To Jouvenel, this "power" is a
universal
fact, a "thing"; its concrete expression in the modern world is the State, the
apparatus
which coalesced around monarchs in early-modern Europe. Jouvenel argues that the
nature of power is such that it must always grow; it cannot do otherwise.
Furthermore, power is jealous; it can only grow by eliminating competitors. If power
fails to grow, it succumbs to stronger powers. Jouvenel believes this is the central
dynamic of the modern world, the rise of the State to a position where it is not merely
powerfully authoritative but sovereign, claiming a "legitimate" monopoly of "coercion"
in a community. In its drive to sovereignty, the State has effectively disempowered
competing authorities-the Church, the guilds, the family-either directly or indirectly.
We are left without any significant intermediaries between the individual and the
State.
Such an account is perhaps excessively one-sided, and Jouvenel takes pains to be
balanced or "scientific" in his description of the phenomenon. Social power is, after
all, the result of a transaction. Individuals extend "credit" to a power; their
compliance
is "voluntary." To receive credit, a power must provide something in return. This
reciprocity, Jouvenel believes, has resulted in the welfare state. Only such massive
benefits could legitimize the demands that the State has made of its citizens in our
century. For as Angelo Codevilla has recently suggested, with taxation in European
countries standing at about 50 percent of income, the modern State's exaction of
tribute from its people is "comparable only to what the most rapacious empires of
antiquity exacted from slaves." It is because the State does so much for us that we
do not think ourselves enslaved. But Jouvenel draws our attention to the fact that in
these transactions, ultimately, someone commands and others obey. The more the
commanding voice becomes unitary, the farther we stray from the promise of limited,
constitutional government.
Of course we may object that in democratic regimes where "the people rule" we obey
no one but ourselves, and thus we are free. Jouvenel, however, strongly objects to
this notion of popular sovereignty. He states boldly, "To identify those who govern
with the people is to confuse the issue, and no regime exists in which such an
identification is possible. . . . Those who govern are neither the people nor the
majority: they are the governors." This is especially true of the modern State, with
its
standing army of civil servants-in Jouvenel's coinage, "the Agentry"-in no direct way
responsible to the people. The achievement of constitutional government was not to
establish popular sovereignty; rather, it was to delegate representatives of the
people, a parliament, to resist the power of the king. For Jouvenel, the parliamentary
function is a negative one, best exemplified in the Roman Tribunate, which could
only arrest the action of the Senate and the Consuls, in the name of the people: what
was essential was that "the people were defended by those who did not aspire to
become masters."
In modern parliamentary systems, however, there is no longer a salutary struggle
between the king and parliament. Indeed, what Americans would call the executive
power is now exercised by the members of the representative chamber themselves.
Here, the parliament serves as no resistance to power, but rather acts to mobilize the
public behind the commands of these governors. Jouvenel's ominous example of the
structural failure of parliamentary systems to offer resistance is the National
Socialist
Party's control of the Reichstag. He concludes that governors and representatives
must be understood to play different roles. "Government cannot, without dereliction
of duty, be itself representative; it is only the regime [as a whole], not the
government, which can be representative." The way to undermine constitutional
government, then, is not "to deny representation, which the people would defend; it is
to absorb representation in[to] government," into power. This has occurred in the
Western democracies in this century. In thus "achieving" popular sovereignty,
Jouvenel believes we have eliminated any place to stand in order to resist power.
To Americans it may seem that the U.S. Constitution, which divides the powers of
government among separately chosen branches, avoids Jouvenel's critique. There is
something to this, and Jouvenel himself nicely observes that L'Enfant designed the
city of Washington in such a way as to locate the White House and the Capitol on
rival hilltops, signifying the healthy rivalry between our "king" and our "parliament."
Yet America has not wholly avoided the dangers that exercise Jouvenel. For one of
our greatest bulwarks against a monopoly of power at the center has been entirely
eliminated: namely, the competing power of the sovereign states of the union. And
the idea of refashioning the American regime into a disciplined parliamentary
system-because we need to "get things done"- has been the goal of political
scientists in the progressive tradition at least since Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, the
notion that "divided government" (when one party controls the Presidency while the
other controls Congress) constitutes a "problem" nicely demonstrates our
misunderstanding of the preconditions of freedom in a constitutional republic.
While Jouvenal's personal political loyalties are difficult to categorize, his works
when
originally published were most warmly received by conservatives. Today his essays
present a particular challenge for that promising group of thinkers called
communitarians. The communitarians share Jouvenel's concern about the erosion of
intermediate associations in the liberal State. Conversely, Jouvenel focuses on the
utility of civic friendship as a basis for resistance to State power. But Jouvenel
finds it
necessary to embrace measures that most communitarians seem to wish to avoid.
The communitarians have sought to position themselves between "libertarians" and
"authoritarians." Libertarians are those who want to pursue their individual economic
activities or "lifestyle" choices without any political or social constraints. Jouvenel
would argue that, to some extent, it is by its responsiveness to the libertarian
impulse
that the State achieved its sovereignty at the expense of other social groups.
Authoritarians, it seems, are those who would like to revivify not simply the fellow-
feeling of concrete associations, but indeed, the power or the authority of those
communities. Such talk of authority most communitarians find distasteful. But in
Jouvenel's political science, a community exists only if a power resides within it;
this
is an inescapable social fact. Furthermore, as we have seen, only power can oppose
power, only an authority can compete with the state's monopoly of authority. To
lament the growing totalism of the liberal State while refusing to countenance the
resuscitation of intermediate powers represents the current communitarian evasion
of responsibility.
Thus, Jouvenel argues, friends of liberty today have only two options open to them.
They can acquiesce in the ever-growing power of the State, and attempt to structure
it so that it cannot become an instrument of domination. This, however, is a difficult
project, perhaps a futile one. Consider, for example, the attempt to formulate school
voucher legislation that will foreclose the possibility of eventual State control of
private and parochial schools. Nothing has yet eluded the control that comes with
federal "help." Jouvenel's more practical alternative, therefore, is "to combat to the
utmost the extension of state power." This is best effected by "defend[ing] in
principle
every form of private power, whatever it may be . . . as a refuge. Whatever the vices
of 'the other Power,' it has the virtue of being 'other.'" Until the communitarians are
willing to broach the question of the power or authority of social groups, they will
not
really have addressed the true nature of politics.
Mark C. Henrie is a doctoral candidate in political theory at Harvard University.
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