De Juvenal uses the word "Power" to refer to centralized authority. In the Middle Ages it was the king. From On Power, p. 267:
"What the old constitution had guaranteed was that no proposition made by Power in the name of he public interest could become law without having obtained the assent of the various interests included in the nation. It would have been illogical for these various interests as such to have proposed laws since the purpose of laws was to serve the public interest. The assembly could become, as it did, the propounder of laws only in virtue of the quite novel idea that it was representative of the nation, considered as a whole and in its general interest; this was the role that had formerly belonged to the king. The change, which affected the very essence of the assembly's nature, was marked by a new-found freedom of action on the part of the representatives in regard to their constituents, a freedom which the doctrinaires of the new system especially emphasized. They were careless of the fact that Parliament, once it had been unified, emancipated, and made supreme as being the main, and tending to be the sole author of law, could not possibly maintain the same dispositions as had characterized it when it was disparate, bound down and without authority proper to itself.
"Parliament was now the king's successor as the representative of the whole: it had taken over his mission and his requirements. Unlike him, however, it no longer had representatives of diversity to deal with, mandatories of particular interests, which it must take into account.
"In the ancient constitution the interest of the nation was represented in two ways, as a whole and as a collection of parts, the former disposed to ask and the latter to refuse. One of them now disappeared. It was not as might have been expected, the king, for the legislative Power representing the public interest is merely his successor. No, what has disappeared has been the representation of various interests included in the nation. What had been a body for the protection of private citizens is now one for the advancement of the public interest, and has been clothed with the formidable power of legislation.
"In its new form Power had a much wider scope than its old. The sovereign, when he was king, was tied down by a higher code, which religion validated and of which the Church stood guardian; he was restrained as well by the various customary rules which being rooted in popular sentiment acted as makeweights to himself. But this code and those rules are of no avail against Power turned lawgiver, whose recognized right and duty it is now to be itself the source of codes and rules. 'The English Parliament,' it has been said by some wit 'can do anything except change a man into a woman.
"It is quite certain that nothing of this sort entered philosophical heads. All of them were deeply convinced of the existence of a natural and necessary order, and the function of the lawgiver as they saw it, was to disentangle the outlines of this order..."
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Robespierre on Progressivism and the Living Constitution
"what do we care for devices devised to balance the authority of tyrants? It is tyranny that must be extirpated: the aim of the people should be, not to find in the quarrels of their masters short breathing spaces for themselves, but to make their own right arms the guarantee of their rights."*
De Jouvenal adds:
"In other words, when the Power was held by others, we favoured limiting it; now that we hold it ourselves, it cannot be too big."
*Robespierre's speech at the sitting of May 10, 1793. Quoted in de Jouvenal, On Power, p. 250.
De Jouvenal adds:
"In other words, when the Power was held by others, we favoured limiting it; now that we hold it ourselves, it cannot be too big."
*Robespierre's speech at the sitting of May 10, 1793. Quoted in de Jouvenal, On Power, p. 250.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Bertrand de Jouvenal on the Bush-Obama Bailouts
De Juvenal takes a quote from Rostovtzev's "Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire" (quoted on p. 190 of "On Power"). He may as well be talking about the bailouts, Wall Street and America's special interest economy, courtesy of Democrats and Republicans:
"The reforms of Diocletian and Constantine, by implementing a policy of systematic spoliation to the profit of the State, made all productive activity impossible. The reason is, not that there were no more large fortunes: on the countrary, their build-up was made easier. But the foundation of their build-up was now no longer creative energy, or the discovery and bringing into use new sources of wealth, or the improvement and development of husbandry, industry and commerce. It was, on the contrary, the cunning exploitation of a privileged position in the State, used to despoil peole and State alike. The officials, great and small, got rich by way of fraud and corruption."
De Juvenal remarks:
"All that can be said is that contemporaries get the feeling of progress right through the period in which the state is building up, a feeling comparable to the sense of well-being, which in an economic cycle accompanies the period of high prices. When the process nears its apogee, the more sensitive spirits are assailed by feelings of doubt and dizziness...
"Then the question is heard again whether the egalitarian society, which is the handiwork of the despotic state, is more or less advantageous to the mass of workers than a society of independent authorities..."
The irony about the United States is that in the 1880s and 1890s, before the establishment of the "Progressive" state, immigrants were flocking here at a rate of between 100,000 and over 500,000 per year, real wages were rising at more than 2% per year, and living standards of the common man had doubled in 40 years, between 1849 and 1889. More liberty was enjoyed than anywhere else in history and the savings rate of the average person was increasing rapidly.
In its place, led by the "Progressives" Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank, Americans established a system whereby, since 1970, real wages have declined. In the past 10 years the number of years that the average person has needed to work to pay for a house with 100% of his untaxed wages has doubled from 3.6 years to 7.2 years. America went from a federal income tax of 10% in 1950 to a situation now where tax rates are so punitive that saving is all but impossible, where massive amounts of money are transferred to wealthy clients of the Democrats and Republicans via the Federal Reserve Bank's inflation (which subsidizes the stock and real estate markets at the expense of real wages), and the New York Times tells us that the only problem facing America is that taxes aren't high enough.
"The reforms of Diocletian and Constantine, by implementing a policy of systematic spoliation to the profit of the State, made all productive activity impossible. The reason is, not that there were no more large fortunes: on the countrary, their build-up was made easier. But the foundation of their build-up was now no longer creative energy, or the discovery and bringing into use new sources of wealth, or the improvement and development of husbandry, industry and commerce. It was, on the contrary, the cunning exploitation of a privileged position in the State, used to despoil peole and State alike. The officials, great and small, got rich by way of fraud and corruption."
De Juvenal remarks:
"All that can be said is that contemporaries get the feeling of progress right through the period in which the state is building up, a feeling comparable to the sense of well-being, which in an economic cycle accompanies the period of high prices. When the process nears its apogee, the more sensitive spirits are assailed by feelings of doubt and dizziness...
"Then the question is heard again whether the egalitarian society, which is the handiwork of the despotic state, is more or less advantageous to the mass of workers than a society of independent authorities..."
The irony about the United States is that in the 1880s and 1890s, before the establishment of the "Progressive" state, immigrants were flocking here at a rate of between 100,000 and over 500,000 per year, real wages were rising at more than 2% per year, and living standards of the common man had doubled in 40 years, between 1849 and 1889. More liberty was enjoyed than anywhere else in history and the savings rate of the average person was increasing rapidly.
In its place, led by the "Progressives" Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank, Americans established a system whereby, since 1970, real wages have declined. In the past 10 years the number of years that the average person has needed to work to pay for a house with 100% of his untaxed wages has doubled from 3.6 years to 7.2 years. America went from a federal income tax of 10% in 1950 to a situation now where tax rates are so punitive that saving is all but impossible, where massive amounts of money are transferred to wealthy clients of the Democrats and Republicans via the Federal Reserve Bank's inflation (which subsidizes the stock and real estate markets at the expense of real wages), and the New York Times tells us that the only problem facing America is that taxes aren't high enough.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
How Universities Systemically Expand State Power
Bertrand de Jouvenal's argument concerning the relentless expansion of the state since the Middle Ages is based on the unfolding of monarchy from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. In the nineteenth century monarchy changed its form of sovereignty from the divine right of kings to popular sovereignty, and the realization of sovereignty from the monarch in flesh to a reified "national will" that, of course, becomes the property of elites. De Juvenal points out that Philip Augustus, the king of France from 1180 to 1223, had to live off his own resources. His only army was a small bodyguard. He had no officials. He depended on Church resources for all official business. But by the reign of Louis XIV, the French king's army was 200,000 men. "He gives out laws and sets his dragoons at those who do not worship God in what he considers the right way; an enormous army of officials animates and directs the nation." (p. 141, On Power).
The expansion of the state continued unabated until World War II. Hitler, in 1939, could command the entire German nation to destroy itself and to murder entire ethnic groups. Since then, there has been further growth in state power in many parts of the world. In terms of relative size, the Soviet- and National-Socialist states could not push power further because those societies were 100% socialized. But in terms of absolute size, the creation of technology in the non-socialist states has been used to increase the state's size. In the United States, the process of monarchization of the nation has proceeded unabated. Government today is far larger than ever before.
One of the concomitants of increasing governmental size is political correctness or mono-thought across a large swathe of the population. The famous argument in Davud Riesmann's Lonely Crowd is that a psychological change occurred from inner to other-directedness. But this may be most characteristic of America, where monarchical power in the name of popular will replaced Lockean liberalism, not monarchy. Likely, other-directedness always had been characteristic of aristocratic Venice, London and Paris.
De Jouvenal makes a crucial point--that there is a direct relationship among social theories, mass movements and state expansion. That is, the groupthink of other-directed political movements that generate widespread unison of thought by its own nature generates state expansion. Moreover, universities that advocate simplistic ideological cure-alls for society such as Keynesian economics, social work, government regulation and the like are inevitably generative of state expansion. This is so because of the combination of the egos of government officials, who derive gratification from imposing their ideas and their will on society; and the simplicity of the ideological solutions that universities propose and seldom if ever work. Big egos need simplistic solutions in order to feel good about themselves.
One of the ramifications of this is the derivation of ego-gratification by mass followers of Power. The majority of the population does not have a crack at implementing its own ideas and experiencing the ego-enhancement that power brings to the powerful. Rather, it is through psychological displacement that large numbers of people identify with one or other of the ego-elements in society--Barack Obama or George Bush--and gain ego-fulfillment by identification with a stronger element, father figure or the like. By parroting the half-baked claims of Harvard economists, members of mass society gain ego fulfillment by feeling that they are identified with the media or intellectual elite. For Democrats and RINO Republicans this is the role that the New York Times plays. For Republicans this is the role that Rush Limbaugh and other talk radio announcers play.
Of course, the theories of both Democrats and Republicans are wrong. Simple theories do not generally do well when confronted with reality. Rush Limbaugh claims to be for smaller government, but when his candidates are elected they expand government to a much greater degree than the candidates he opposes. Barack Obama claims to be for the middle class and poor, but when the opportunity arises to hand several trillion dollars to the very wealthy at the expense of the middle class and poor, he leaps at it like a terrier leaps at a Porterhouse steak.
Universities generate not solutions but ideologies. The powerful pick up on the simpletons' ideologies that universities generate and use state power to enhance their egos. Universities benefit from the support that power confers on them.
De Juvenal writes (p. 144, On Power):
"In the realm of nature there is nothing else to satisfy the human spirit's primitive passions. In love with his own experiments, with the simple relationships and direct causations his brain can grasp, and with the artless plans which he is wise enough to construct, man wishes that the whole created world may show itself built not only with the same instruments as he possesses but also by the same turns of skill as he has mastered. Rejoicing as he does in all that can be brought to uniformity, he is forever being disconcerted by the infinite variety which nature herself seems to prefer, as instanced by the chemical structure of organic bodies.
"It is an agreeable game, imagining how man, if he had the power, would reconstruct the universe--the simple and uniform lines on which he would do it. He has not that power, but he has, or thinks he has, the power of reconstructing the social order. This is a sphere in which he reckons that the laws of nature do not run for him, and there he tries to plant the simplicity which is his ruling passion and which he mistakes for perfection."
The expansion of the state continued unabated until World War II. Hitler, in 1939, could command the entire German nation to destroy itself and to murder entire ethnic groups. Since then, there has been further growth in state power in many parts of the world. In terms of relative size, the Soviet- and National-Socialist states could not push power further because those societies were 100% socialized. But in terms of absolute size, the creation of technology in the non-socialist states has been used to increase the state's size. In the United States, the process of monarchization of the nation has proceeded unabated. Government today is far larger than ever before.
One of the concomitants of increasing governmental size is political correctness or mono-thought across a large swathe of the population. The famous argument in Davud Riesmann's Lonely Crowd is that a psychological change occurred from inner to other-directedness. But this may be most characteristic of America, where monarchical power in the name of popular will replaced Lockean liberalism, not monarchy. Likely, other-directedness always had been characteristic of aristocratic Venice, London and Paris.
De Jouvenal makes a crucial point--that there is a direct relationship among social theories, mass movements and state expansion. That is, the groupthink of other-directed political movements that generate widespread unison of thought by its own nature generates state expansion. Moreover, universities that advocate simplistic ideological cure-alls for society such as Keynesian economics, social work, government regulation and the like are inevitably generative of state expansion. This is so because of the combination of the egos of government officials, who derive gratification from imposing their ideas and their will on society; and the simplicity of the ideological solutions that universities propose and seldom if ever work. Big egos need simplistic solutions in order to feel good about themselves.
One of the ramifications of this is the derivation of ego-gratification by mass followers of Power. The majority of the population does not have a crack at implementing its own ideas and experiencing the ego-enhancement that power brings to the powerful. Rather, it is through psychological displacement that large numbers of people identify with one or other of the ego-elements in society--Barack Obama or George Bush--and gain ego-fulfillment by identification with a stronger element, father figure or the like. By parroting the half-baked claims of Harvard economists, members of mass society gain ego fulfillment by feeling that they are identified with the media or intellectual elite. For Democrats and RINO Republicans this is the role that the New York Times plays. For Republicans this is the role that Rush Limbaugh and other talk radio announcers play.
Of course, the theories of both Democrats and Republicans are wrong. Simple theories do not generally do well when confronted with reality. Rush Limbaugh claims to be for smaller government, but when his candidates are elected they expand government to a much greater degree than the candidates he opposes. Barack Obama claims to be for the middle class and poor, but when the opportunity arises to hand several trillion dollars to the very wealthy at the expense of the middle class and poor, he leaps at it like a terrier leaps at a Porterhouse steak.
Universities generate not solutions but ideologies. The powerful pick up on the simpletons' ideologies that universities generate and use state power to enhance their egos. Universities benefit from the support that power confers on them.
De Juvenal writes (p. 144, On Power):
"In the realm of nature there is nothing else to satisfy the human spirit's primitive passions. In love with his own experiments, with the simple relationships and direct causations his brain can grasp, and with the artless plans which he is wise enough to construct, man wishes that the whole created world may show itself built not only with the same instruments as he possesses but also by the same turns of skill as he has mastered. Rejoicing as he does in all that can be brought to uniformity, he is forever being disconcerted by the infinite variety which nature herself seems to prefer, as instanced by the chemical structure of organic bodies.
"It is an agreeable game, imagining how man, if he had the power, would reconstruct the universe--the simple and uniform lines on which he would do it. He has not that power, but he has, or thinks he has, the power of reconstructing the social order. This is a sphere in which he reckons that the laws of nature do not run for him, and there he tries to plant the simplicity which is his ruling passion and which he mistakes for perfection."
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