Daniel J. Mahoney: Bertrand de Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal and the Illusions of Modernity. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2005.
Originally published in Perspectives on Political Science, Volume 35, Number 2, Spring 2006.
Academic political theorists often act as if they aspire to nothing so much as a regular column on the op-ed page of the New York Times. They long for influence, if not for themselves then for their concepts. Bertrand de Jouvenel took the more sensible path: that from journalism—the observation of men and their actions—to the professoriate. He saw the real things first. And the real thing he saw was worth thinking about: Europe, torn between weak republics and powerful tyrannies, descending into its second cataclysmic war in twenty-five years.
In this succinct essay, Daniel J. Mahoney continues his ever-widening exploration of the religio-political question in modernity. To his previous studies of Raymond Aron, the secularized Jews, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Orthodox believer, and Charles de Gaulle—who perhaps was thinking of himself when he spoke to Malraux of men “whose Christian faith was dim but who were, nonetheless, not Voltaireans”—Mahoney now adds a firm and (mostly) judicious Roman Catholic.
By “conservative liberal,” Mahoney means a thinker sensitive to the merits of economic and political freedom in the world of statist power and democratized peoples, a thinker who nonetheless recalls the virtues of the old aristocracies and considers how those virtues might be preserved, not only for their own sake but for the sake of pulling ‘moderns’ back from their own excesses. Thus, Aron, among Jouvenel’s contemporaries; Constant, Tocqueville, and Guizot from the previous century; Rousseau and Montesquieu from the century before that; and Aquinas and Aristotle more distantly, were Jouvenel’s philosophic companions.
To prepare himself to learn from such men, Jouvenel had to think himself out of the progressivism of his youth, with its attempt to replace statesmanlike prudence with secular prophecy and moral and political authority with power. Witnessing two decades of “totalizing” politics followed by half a decade of “total war” brought Jouvenel to “a profound appreciation of the ‘givenness’ of things,” to a preference for the gardener over the engineer.
“All of Jouvenel’s work returns to this central question: Can the indispensable notion of the common good be freed from those corollaries (i.e., smallness, homogeneity, resistance to innovation and foreign ideas, insistence on the community’s immutability in order to maintain its harmony) in which classical political philosophy enframed it?” Like Constant, Jouvenel criticized attempts to make the big states of modernity too much like the small, closed societies of antiquity; unlike Constant, Jouvenel rested his critique finally on spiritual grounds, on “his Christian recognition of the essential quality of persons as children of God and his personal adherence to the universal human community that is the Roman Catholic Church.” Modern rationalists—even the libertarians among them—”do not appreciate” that “human liberty depends on an acceptance of regulative principles beyond the power of the human will to alter,” principles to which “the wise man [in Jouvenel’s words] knows himself for debtor.” Under modern conditions, more than any others, men in political communities need to orient themselves toward things bigger and higher than the states they have made for themselves. Without such an orientation, men not only “immanentize the eschaton,” they eschatonize the imminent—both moves landing them in quite the mess.
In this book, as before, Mahoney shows himself unmatched among his generation of political scientists in his ability to introduce a thinker to new readers while illuminating him for old readers. Having suffered neglect for decades, Jouvenel reappears as one of those rare, sober spirits who can watch politics and think at the same time.
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