This article constitutes an examination of the ideas exposed by Bertrand de Jouvenel in his magnum opus, Du Pouvoir: Histoire naturelle de sa croissance (1972 edition, covering from the threshold of the work to Book Four, Chapter X). The original text, conceived in exile during the scourge of the Second World War, presents a sociological and historical anatomy of the monstrosity of the modern State. Jouvenel's work transcends mere political science to reveal itself as a complete and tragic realization of the apostasy of nations. By rejecting the sweet yoke of Christ and the limiting tutelage of Holy Church, modernity did not achieve the promised freedom, but spawned a merciless Leviathan, culminating in total conscription, wars of extermination, and the dissolution of the natural hierarchies that once protected human dignity.
⚔️ The Awakening of the Minotaur and the Tragedy of Total War
Jouvenel's inaugural thesis destroys the foundational myth of the Enlightenment and liberal democracies: the illusion that the fall of traditional monarchies limited power. On the contrary, the author notes, under the Dantean spectacle of the Second World War, that modernity produced the most atrocious war in the history of the West, where the "entire population was requisitioned to provide the most effective instruments of death" (p. 21). This phenomenon of total regimentation of civilian life would be absolutely unthinkable under medieval Christendom or even under classical monarchies.
The progress of war is inseparable from the progress of power. In the traditional order, the feudal king had only the contingents of his vassals at his disposal for forty days and did not possess the right to tax. "War then is very small: because power is small" (p. 25). However, democratic and revolutionary subversion freed the State from its bonds. Universal military conscription and permanent taxation, once seen as intolerable tyrannies under a Christian monarch, became unquestionable demands when disguised under the veil of the "general will." As the author aptly quotes relying on Taine, conscription and universal suffrage are twin brothers that operate as "blind and formidable conductors or regulators of future history," promising massacres and regression "to selfish and brutal instincts" (p. 30). The democratic State is nothing but the incubator of totalitarianism, allowing the Minotaur to assume "the amplitude of which an unprecedented despotism and war in Europe have given us the measure" (p. 37).
👑 The Metaphysics of Power and the Subversion of Divine Right
In investigating the mystery of civil obedience, Jouvenel delves into the theories of sovereignty, revealing the modern perversion of sound doctrine. The author demystifies the fallacy that the theory of divine right was the cause of absolutism. In truth, during the Middle Ages, the concept that power comes from God operated exactly to contain it. "The sacred king of the Middle Ages presents us with the least free, least arbitrary power we can imagine" (p. 62). He was subjected to divine law and to the law of custom (lex terrae). Holy Church, in the person of its pontiffs and bishops, exercised moral control over the monarch, admonishing him that he was "the protector and not the owner of his people" (p. 63).
The genesis of absolutism, paradoxically but historically proven by Jouvenel, stems from the theory of popular sovereignty, first weaponized by heretical legists like Marsilius of Padua to free the emperor from papal tutelage. The Protestant revolution was the coup de grâce. With Luther, the secular censorship of the Church is broken, and the reformed princes appropriate sovereign right free from spiritual oversight (pp. 64-65). Without the Church to impose the law of God, the ground was prepared for theorists like Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau to postulate a total alienation of individual rights into the hands of an impersonal sovereign.
Rousseau, with his Social Contract, elevates the principle of sovereignty to a limitless imperium. Instead of Hobbes who hands this power over to a monarch, Rousseau hands it to the "general will," creating a collective tyranny where "the injured subject must consider himself the very author of the unjust act" (p. 70). It is the secular deification of the State, where parliamentary control fails miserably, for representation tends to usurp sovereignty for itself. As Rousseau himself foresaw with horror regarding feudal representation, "the English people think they are free: they are greatly mistaken; they are free only during the election of members of parliament; as soon as they are elected, they are slaves, they are nothing" (p. 81). Popular sovereignty is thus revealed to be much more arbitrary and lethal than royalty submissive to God.
👥 The Organicist Fallacy and the Absorption of the Individual
The 19th century attempted to replace the efficient cause of power (its origin) with the final cause (its purpose), relying on dangerous philosophies originating from idealism and positivism. The French Revolution created the hypostasis of the "nation," an autonomous and deified being. Hegel provided its metaphysical basis, in which the State is the supreme realization of society, and higher morality demands the submission of the parts to the whole. This political pantheism endows a "conscious class" (the Prussian bureaucracy, the fascist party, or the Marxist vanguard) with the supposed right to guide the unconscious (pp. 96-97).
Coupled with this, the organicist theories of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer (undue borrowings from Darwinian biology) began to conceive society no longer as a community of families before God, but as a physiological body where the State is the regulating nervous system. Jouvenel demonstrates that this view was adopted to justify the "indefinite growth of the functions and apparatus of government" (p. 110), transforming human beings into mere disposable cells and crushing the eternal value of the human person in the name of the forced social solidarity of theorists like Durkheim, who blasphemously stated that, under the name of God, we worship only society (p. 111).
🗡️ The Origins of Power: Magic, Sword, and Corruption
In search of the factual origins of command, Jouvenel rejects the Enlightenment presumption of the free and inherently good natural man. In primitive societies, marked by the terror of evil spirits, original power was of a magical nature, managed by a ritualistic gerontocracy that maintained strict observance of custom through fear to appease divine wrath (pp. 130-136). This suffocating and conservative gerontocracy gave way to the warrior. War forced the transformation of hierarchies: physical strength and heroism replaced pure mysticism, giving rise to patriarchies, aristocracies, and the first wealth generated by plunder and slavery (pp. 149-152).
The figure of the king is born, historically, from a symbiosis between the military leader (dux) and the religious intercessor (rex). But the essential point is to understand that power carries with it, indelibly, the superstitious reverence of its ancestral origin, which explains the almost pathological passivity with which modern peoples accept State oppression. The idolatry of today's rulers is an irrational remnant of tribal fear in the face of the wielders of occult forces (pp. 140-141).
🐉 The Dialectic of Command and the Egoism of the Leviathan
The core of Jouvenel's thesis destroys the naive and liberal conception that the State is a mere passive "instrument" serving the common good. Power, taken in its pure state, is an end in itself, generated not by a rational consent of the masses, but by the egoistic instinct of domination (p. 173). Great nations were not born of "collective wills," but were forged by the coercive force of conquering hordes and militarized bands—the embryos of the modern State.
The State machinery was erected aiming at the taxation and submission of the people. However, as the author warns, power transitions from "parasitism to symbiosis" (p. 183). To guarantee its duration, it pretends (and sometimes believes) to act out of love for the people. It distributes justice, roads, and order to legitimize its constant assault on natural liberty. There is an ineradicable dualistic nature in power: on the one hand, it provides undeniable services; on the other, it is driven by an insatiable expansionist egoism. The more "socialist" the State claims to be to justify its intrusion, the more its egoistic core grows. "No power is maintained when it has lost its magical virtue" (p. 141), but none survives without incessantly feeding its own majesty, multiplying taxes and bureaucrats. The ideologue philosopher who dreams of utopian republics is, therefore, the tyrant's greatest ally, as he "furnishes power with the most effective justification for its growth" (p. 228).
🌪️ The State as a Permanent Revolution Against the Natural Order
Perhaps the most somber and traditionalist realization of the work is the role of the State as the perpetual aggressor of the social order. Jouvenel thoroughly demonstrates that political power views any and all organic authority—be it the father of the family, the feudal lord, the Church, or the employer's leadership—as an odious obstacle to its own expansion (pp. 260-261).
To concentrate all energies, obediences, and tributes within itself, the State acts as a subversive and revolutionary force against traditional hierarchy. Historically, it stealthily allies itself with the "plebs" and the discontented to dismantle intermediary bodies. By leveling the classes and crushing the aristocracy or the patriarchy, the State sells the illusion of democratic liberation, when, in reality, it is merely eliminating competition for dominion over men. The State is essentially a leveler "because it is the State" (p. 261).
The king in conflict with the people, the monarchy undermining feudalism to collect financial aids (p. 272), and the republic swallowing the patriarchal family and capitalist/employer authority—all are part of the same crushing advance. As a logical result, the final limit is reached: "social atomization," where no private bonds of dependence and charity remain among men, but only isolated and defenseless individuals under the yoke of the sole remaining suzerain, "state omnipotence" (pp. 280-281). When the State, exhausted and overflowing, finally collapses, it is dismembered by a new statocracy (its own bureaucracy), which inaugurates a new feudalism, until the infernal wheel of the thirst for power turns again.
📌 Conclusion
The analysis exposed in Du Pouvoir, when distilled to its ultimate historical and philosophical consequences, echoes a desperate outcry in the face of the bankruptcy of anthropocentric modernity. Bertrand de Jouvenel leaves us no room for sweet Rousseauian illusions. It becomes evident that the replacement of divine right—and, consequently, of the moral subjection of the State to the Church and to the natural order instituted by the Creator—with the demonic general will generated not an earthly paradise, but the ravenous Minotaur. Bureaucratization, mass enlistment, total war, and the revolutionary leveling of the family and the aristocracy prove that, by renouncing the wisdom and restraints of the Christian organic order, society plunged into the most absolute and unscrupulous tyranny ever recorded in the annals of civilization.
📚 References
JOUVENEL, Bertrand de. Du Pouvoir: Histoire naturelle de sa croissance. New ed. Paris: Hachette, 1972.
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