🗿 Introduction: the abandonment of the natural order and the genesis of the idol
The profound radiography of the state monstrosity undertaken by Bertrand de Jouvenel in Du Pouvoir finds one of its culminating points in the analysis of the philosophical revolution of the 19th century. Starting in Book One, Chapter III ("The organic Theories of Power"), the author demonstrates how the subversion of the Catholic and medieval order - which saw society as a community of souls under the immutable law of God - paved the way for the idolatry of the Nation. In this context of apostasy and denial of Christian metaphysics, the figure of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel emerges. From the traditionalist perspective, Jouvenel's work reveals that Hegel is not merely a philosopher, but the high priest of a political pantheism. He provided the unchained Minotaur with its definitive theoretical justification: the divinization of the State as the march of the Absolute on Earth, obliterating the dignity of the human person and legitimizing the totalitarianisms that would bloody the coming centuries.
✝️ From the Christian society to the hypostasis of the nation
Jouvenel notes that, before the French Revolution and the advent of philosophical romanticism, Western thought conceived society in a "nominalist" way. The people were seen as an aggregate of real men, holders of natural rights and duties, subordinated to a transcendent end. However, the Revolution brought about a profound psychological commotion: "The throne was not overthrown, but the Whole, the persona Nation, ascended to the throne" (p. 92). The Nation transformed into a "hypostatized We" (p. 92), a supreme Being that transcends and absorbs the parts.
It is in the midst of this Germanic nationalist fervor that Hegel, according to Jouvenel, "formulates the first coherent doctrine of the new phenomenon and grants the Nation a diploma of philosophical existence" (p. 93). The tragedy of Hegelian thought, denounced by Jouvenel's observation, lies in the artificial and perverse dichotomy that the German philosopher establishes between "civil society" and the "State". "Civil society" is relegated to the realm of particular and transitory interests. The "State", on the contrary, becomes the incarnation of Reason and objective Morality. For Hegel, man only reaches his true destiny when he begins to "consciously integrate his activity into the general activity, to find his satisfaction in the realization of Society, to take it finally as a goal" (p. 93-94).
For the traditional Catholic, such a postulate is the basest of idolatries. The ultimate end of man is not Society or the State, but eternal Blessedness in God. By transferring the eschatological end to the immanence of the Hegelian State, the individual loses his absolute value as a creature made in the image and likeness of the Creator, becoming a mere sacrificial cog on the altar of the "collectivity".
📈 The perversion of the common good and the justification of state growth
Hegel's philosophy irretrievably destroys the Thomistic and medieval conception of the Common Good. Jouvenel teaches that, in the Middle Ages, the end of Power was Justice (jus suum cuique tribuere), guided by a fixed Law and by Objective Right, which made the king's activity "essentially conservatory" and put a brake on the development of Power (p. 94).
With the "realist conception of Society" of the Hegelian kind, "the notion of the Common Good receives a completely different content" (p. 94). The objective is no longer to protect the right of the individual, but to "seek a much less defined Social Good" and to realize an "increasingly higher Morality that must be realized in Society" (p. 94-95). The consequence of this lack of definition is lethal: "As the agent of this realization, and by reason of this objective, Power will be able to justify no matter what growth in its extension" (p. 95). Hegelian theory offers the State a blank check. If the end of the State is the realization of the Spirit, no moral, customary, or religious barrier can oppose its expansionist hunger.
👁️ Political gnosticism and the tyranny of the "conscious"
The most devastating aspect of Jouvenel's analysis of Hegel is found in the dissection of the "General Will". While Rousseau linked the general will to the consensus of particular wills (albeit in a confused and flawed way), Hegel emancipates it entirely from the real people. For Hegel, the General Will is that which "tends towards the objective... towards the realization of the highest collective life" (p. 96). It is what "must be realized, with or without the assent of the individuals who are not conscious of the objective" (p. 96).
This engenders a gnostic heresy applied to politics: the idea that there is an enlightened "universal class" (p. 96), holder of the true consciousness of the meaning of History. Only the will of this minority coincides with the "rational in itself and for itself" (p. 97). Jouvenel points out that this philosophical justification legitimizes violence against the social body. The "conscious part" does not do violence to the Whole by forcing it, just as "a midwife does not do violence, even if she employs force" to precipitate the birth of what must be (p. 96-97).
The historical consequences of this doctrine are catastrophic, and Jouvenel makes a point of naming Hegel's theoretical offspring:
The Prussian Administration (Beamtenstaat), the arrogant bureaucracy that believes its will is not a whim, but "knowledge of what must be" (p. 97).
The scientific Socialism of Marx, where the "conscious part of the Proletariat" speaks and wills in the name of the Whole, forcing the inert mass towards utopia (p. 97).
The Fascist Party, which acts as the "conscious part of the Nation, wills for the Nation, and wills the Nation as it must be" (p. 97).
All these totalitarian abominations, which drowned the Christian order in rivers of blood, "come directly from Hegelianism" (p. 97). Hegel's doctrine consecrates the right of an oligarchy of the enlightened - be they intellectuals, bureaucrats, or party leaders - to guide the majority by force, destroying natural liberty under the pretext of realizing "Destiny". "It seems that Hegel did not want to construct an authoritarian theory. But it is judged by its fruits," Jouvenel implacably sentences (p. 98).
🧠 The dialectic of egoism and the moral blindness of speculative thought
Further on in the work (Book Three, Chapter VII), when dealing with the expansionist character of Power, Jouvenel indirectly resumes the problem of the Hegelian justification of Evil in history. Power is essentially egoistic, but the great conquerors and idealists intoxicated with themselves tend to merge their egoism with a supposed historical altruism (the cunning of Reason).
Jouvenel warns that speculative thought (of which Hegel is the apex) despises the complex, Christian, and organic order. Passionate about rational unity, the intellect divorced from Faith seeks to simplify and standardize the world. "Whenever the intellectual imagines a simple order, he serves the growth of Power" (p. 223). Hegelian philosophy, by postulating a continuous evolution in which the modern State permits social differentiation only to "bring back an ever-growing diversity to an increasingly richer unity" (p. 99), provides the framework for the crushing of local and familial autonomies (the legitimate social authorities).
By attempting to found perfect altruism in the State, philosophy produces absolute tyranny. For, as the author warns, the most terrible political failures derive from arbitrary visions of the "rational" that ignore common sense and moral instinct (p. 213-214). The Hegelian justification that the particular passions and egoisms of rulers end up serving inexorable social ends (p. 202) is the definitive capitulation of morality before the brutality of the consummated Fact.
☠️ Conclusion: the idealist poison and the rise of the political antichrist
The analysis of Hegel's ideas through the masterful pen of Bertrand de Jouvenel leaves no doubt as to the intrinsically perverse nature of state pantheism. Under the lens of traditional Catholic doctrine, the Hegelian State reveals itself as the diabolical reverse of the Holy Church: it demands for itself the adoration, unconditional obedience, and sacrifice that belong solely to God.
By substituting the transcendent Creator and the Eternal Law with the "earthly God" marching in history; by trading the objective Common Good (Justice) for the mutable abstraction of the "realization of collective life"; and, above all, by arming gnostic "elects" with the moral duty to bend the ignorant by force, Hegel built the intellectual cathedral of Totalitarianism. His ideas destroyed the moral defenses of the individual and of intermediary societies (the family, the Church, the municipality). Without God above Power, man was left naked before the modern Leviathan, confirming Jouvenel's thesis that, far from Tradition, every philosophy of the State is, at bottom, an apology for universal slavery.
📚 References
JOUVENEL, Bertrand de. Du Pouvoir: Histoire naturelle de sa croissance. New ed. Paris: Hachette, 1972.