Trading the future Book

Originally published in 1945, this remarkable book was possibly the clearest analysis of the nature of Power (always capitalized by De Jouvenel) since Machiavelli's account of the reality of politics in Renaissance Italy.

It is of its time. De Jouvenel was clearly stunned at the ability of post-dynastic state machines to mobilise national resources and populations for total war. The 'tyrannical' Louis XIV (there is a French cultural focus to the book) could not have dreamed of such power.

The thesis is a surprisingly simple one - that Power (meaning concentrated state power) strengthens itself through the revolutionary defeat of aristocratic republicanism and that its alliance with each rising class in turn strengthens its ability to command the resources of that class.

This is not quite the positive interpretation of successive revolutionary successes that the typical intellectual of the 1940s might have found easy to accept although it is perhaps easier to do so in the light of Communism. De Jouvenel has become a beacon for American libertarians.

But the message is not simply an implicitly anti-communist one. While Hitler and Stalin hover over the story, De Jouvenel's interest is really in the so-called liberal democratic States whose ability to enslave populations and thieve property has been no less than that of these tyrants.

His book is a paradigm-shifter, perhaps more so today, because what he is really saying is that every apparent rhetorical victory for the population in terms of rights, democracy and welfare has actually been a victory for ruling elites.

This is not to say that there have not been benefits - including the rule of law for everyone and welfare programmes - but that the 'deal' has been a dirty one with populations at large conscripted into death and slavery, even in Roosevelt's America, with scarcely a protest.

I part company with De Jouvenel (though I suggest that his analysis in itself is unanswerable) only on his conservative pessimism (which I might share about our species but not necessarily about all future social and political forms). When he moves from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’ he is less convincing.

His attachment to aristocratic republicanism, whether Roman or eighteenth century British, may represent more freedom for men who do not come under the gaze of the aristocrat than that offered by the State but petty oppressions, security and welfare do provide a reason for voluntary enslavement.

He is not insensitive to the fact that welfare needs and the bad conduct of aristocrats help drive the rise of State power even if it is clear that populations will die (perhaps in a state of ‘false consciousness’) to preserve this Faustian bargain – an improved degree of protection and security.

Of course, we are in different times now but what De Jouvenel might have noticed is that, as States weaken under the global market system, so protection for the population weakens and that the increase in ‘freedom’ since the 1980s is matched by an increase in insecurity.

Security for the masses in return for blind compliance (with even intellectuals submitting to the myth of the democratic State) has been replaced across much of the West with security for the State against the masses.

This seems to be a slow reversion to eighteenth century conditions. States cannot enforce their desired theft of assets or conscript labour yet are both engaged in expensive and perpetual small wars and trying to reduce their obligations to the population, since they get few services in return.

The population at large thinks that it owns the State (this heir to dynastic accretion of power at the expense of fellow criminal warlords) but it does not and never did. The State is an interest in itself concerned solely with its own survival and is now genuinely worried about that survival.

One survival strategy is to pool power with other threatened bureaucracies in unwieldy and fundamentally flawed imperial bureaucracies like the European Union in the hope that democracy might be attenuated by scale and discontent moderated by judicial legalism and spending.

Another survival strategy is to try and scare the population into compliance with State authority through constant security scares and to encourage passivity with populist policies (‘bread and circuses’).

Yet another is to disengage the bulk of the population by treating political parties and NGOs as partners in Power so detaching them from the population at large. Activists, under this now dominant system, get a slice of the action in return for collaboration.

All these policies, in cultures used to personal freedom, that have access to social media that can by-pass official channels and have a decreasing sense of locality and ideology to bind them together, require funds and funds are becoming harder to find as taxation is resisted.

Moreover, people not merely died for Italy and Germany, they volunteered to die for Italy and Germany. Who will volunteer to die for the European Union? People volunteered to die for communism. Who will volunteer to die for liberal capitalism? No-one who is not an idiot is the answer.

The world of today is very different from that of De Jouvenel. States still have an immense monopoly of force which could create workable tyrannies but such methods would thrust such societies back into unsustainable economic models that would ultimately undermine States themselves.

Our problem is the very opposite. States are now faced with a revived warlordism at the margins – the very basis of aristocratic republicanism and ‘freedom’. It is not stupid to consider Columbian and Mexican narco-gangsters or Al-Qaeda as the possible basis of functional states one day.

This book is highly recommended not so much for De Jouvenel’s implicit prescriptions – somewhat desperate appeals to a religious (in the Roman sense) basis for society and better behavior and self restraint by elites – as for his cold and cruelly apposite analysis of the situation.

Although the analysis is of the situation of the West in the 1940s, the book makes it clear that what he is writing about is something much more ‘eternal’ about Power and its drive for self-advancement. There is something intrinsic to State Power that drives it to tyranny over men.

Undoubtedly, this is a conservative book and probably a pessimistic one but it can be read with profit by those who are not conservative. Authoritarian socialists and other ideologues won’t give a damn and will continue to try to capture the State to enforce their ideology no matter what.

But libertarian Leftists would do well to understand that the State flips from solution to problem at a key point in the game and that the cost of socialist or Leftist policies becomes far too great at a certain cut-off point in key personal freedoms, including State enslavement of labour value.

This does not mean accepting De Jouvenel’s implied approval of the feudalism of Di Lampedusa’s Prince of Salina. It does suggest that a libertarian Left should distrust the people that the ‘Leopard’ distrusted, rising men in revolutionary situations, to which he was happy to adapt.

History is the story of the little guys being screwed over and finding it increasingly difficult to hide from the military boot, the police spy and the tax collector. The fact that some of the cash might return in benefits later is of little joy if your son returns from the front in a coffin.

Perhaps there is some way of creating an aristocratic republicanism where everyone is an aristocrat, jealous of freedoms, prepared to defend their land by force but not steal another’s, charitable, concerned with public order and egalitarian – admittedly a tall order given our species!