Quotes from Bertrand de Jouvenel

Sooner or later, a society of sheep must create a government of wolves.

Democracy, then, in the centralizing, pattern-making, absolutist shape which we have given to it is, it is clear, the time of tyranny's incubation.

There is a tyranny in the womb of every Utopia.

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.

Power changes its appearance but not its reality.

We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns.

As every advance of Power is useful for war, so war is useful for the advance of power; war is like a sheep-dog harrying the laggard Powers to catch up their smarter fellows in the totalitarian race.

Ransack the history of revolutions, and it will be found that every fall of a regime has been presaged by a defiance which went unpunished. It is as true today as it was ten thousand years ago that a Power from which the magic virtue has gone out, falls.

Power is linked with war, and a society wishing to limit war's ravages can find no other way than by limiting the scope of Power.

No century has been more concerned than ours to do away with war: it has proved signally unsuccessful. All too little attention has been given to the phenomenon that internal politics have become increasingly more warlike.

It is as futile and dangerous to aim at making of society one large family, as sentimental socialism seeks to do, as to aim at making of it one large team, as positivist socialism seeks to do.

Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius for construction, which are part of man's natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him.

Historians of the sentimental school have sometimes regretted that royalty became absolute, while at the same time rejoicing that it installed plebeians in office. They deceive themselves. Royalty exalted plebeians just because it aimed at becoming absolute; it became absolute because it had exalted plebeians.

the social scientist who lacks a mathematical mind and regards a mathematical formula as a magic recipe, rather than as the formulation of a supposition, does not hold forth much promise. A mathematical formula is never more than a precise statement. […] The chief merit of mathematization is that it compels us to become conscious of what we are assuming.

En el socialismo, el espíritu de solidaridad propuesto tiene como ingrediente necesario la desconfianza y el odio hacia otra sociedad o una parte de otra sociedad. Así, la solidaridad conseguida no es, como se pretendía, una solidaridad en la caridad, sino, al menos parcialmente, una solidaridad en la lucha.

The modern absolutism, which we find the most natural thing in the world, would have been quite beyond the dreams of the most absolute of kings.

No state can remain indifferent to another state's wresting from its people more of their rights. It must make a corresponding draft on its own people's rights, or else pay dearly for its neglect to put itself on a level... A Power which interferes with its people only in certain respects cannot increase its warlike potential beyond certain limits. To pass them, it must revolutionize those respects and give itself fresh prerogatives.

As we shall see, theories like those of Divine Right and Popular Sovereignty, which pass for opposites, stem in reality from the same trunk, the idea of sovereignty—the idea, that is, that somewhere there is a right to which all other rights must yield. It is not hard to discover behind this juridical concept a metaphysical one.

The entire stock of relationships which suited in war—militiae—was regarded as inadmissible and improper in peace—domi. We have the measure of how right the Romans were in this respect in the experience of the intellectual and moral impoverishment brought about by total mobilisation.

Rejoicing in his absolute authority, the single egoist will exploit it methodically, whereas a mêlée of egoists will bring about a ruinous disorder and a disastrous cleavage, because the contrariety of the appetites to be satisfied will prevent the satisfaction of any single one. Clearly, then, the effect of the pursuit of private ends under cover of the public good will be worse if there are many with a hand in power than if there is only one.

The High School of our species, curiosity, requires the unusual for its awakening. Just as it took prodigies, eclipses, or comets, to start our distant ancestors inquiring into the structure of the universe, so in our time crises have been needed for the birth of an economic science, and thirty millions of unemployed for it to become widespread.

The law of all modern states takes account of associations, whose members, in theory, pursue the common end with equal zeal. The experience of all associations proves, however, that this is not the case, and that a lively, constant and vigorous awareness of the end is found only in a minority of the associates; an association is really rather like a comet—a large tail of docile followers dragged along by a small dynamic head.

Bad tactics and the suicide of the French aristocracy: For France the 18th century was a period of aristocratic reaction, so badly handled, however, that instead of resulting in the limitation of the monarchial Power, it ended by destroying monarchy and aristocracy alike, and by exalting a Power which was far more absolute than that of the "Great King" had ever been.

Of all the simplifications to which the human spirit naturally inclines, unable to reconcile itself to the complexity of the real, there is none more dangerous than the attempt to integrate the whole of society in one vast, permanent action group.