Anatomy of Eminence: French Liberalism and the Question of Elites 9783110680348, 9783110680263

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Daniel Rosenberg Anatomy of Eminence

The Politics of Historical Thinking

Edited by Brigitta Bernet, Lutz Raphael, and Benjamin Zachariah Advisory Board: Caroline Arni, University of Basel Amar Baadj, University of Bonn Berber Bevernage, University of Ghent Federico Finchelstein, New School for Social Research, New York Kavita Philip, University of California Irvine Ilaria Porciani, University of Bologna Dhruv Raina, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Jakob Tanner, University of Zürich

Volume 3

Daniel Rosenberg

Anatomy of Eminence French Liberalism and the Question of Elites

ISBN 978-3-11-068026-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-068034-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-068042-3 ISSN 2625-0055 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936240 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Bruxelles, congrès international (les congressistes dans un amphithéâtre), ca. 1914, Agence Rol. Agence photographique (commanditaire), Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, EST EI-13 (380), Référence bibliographique: Rol, 41619. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

The Politics of Historical Thinking Historical thinking has a politics that shapes its ends. While at least two generations of scholars have been guided into their working lives with this axiom as central to their profession, it is somewhat of a paradox that historiography is so often nowadays seen as a matter of intellectual choices operating outside the imperatives of quotidian politics, even if the higher realms of ideological inclinations or historiographical traditions can be seen to have played a role. The politics of historical thinking, if acknowledged at all, is seen to belong to the realms of nonprofessional ways of the instrumentalisation of the past. This series seeks to centre the politics inherent in historical thinking, professional and non-professional, promoted by states, political organisations, ‘nationalities’ or interest groups, and to explore the links between political (re-)education, historiography and mobilisation or (sectarian?) identity formation. We hope to bring into focus the politics inherent in historical thinking, professional, public or amateur, across the world today. Editorial Board: Brigitta Bernet, University of Trier Lutz Raphael, University of Trier Benjamin Zachariah, University of Trier Advisory Board: Caroline Arni, University of Basel Amar Baadj, University of Bonn Berber Bevernage, University of Ghent Federico Finchelstein, New School for Social Research, New York Kavita Philip, University of California Irvine Ilaria Porciani, University of Bologna Dhruv Raina, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Jakob Tanner, University of Zürich

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110680348-202

Contents Introduction 1 Setting, Goals, and State of Current Research Historiography of French Liberal Thought 8 Elites in the Political Science 13 Note on Methodology 16 1 1.1 1.2 1.2.1 1.2.2 1.3 1.3.1 1.3.2 1.4 1.4.1 1.4.2

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1.5

Early French Liberalism: Elites and Spontaneous Order Introduction 17 Benjamin Constant 24 Modern Liberty and the Relegation of Politics 25 Social Restraint on Political Power 29 François Guizot and the Doctrinaires 34 Property and Capacity 35 Modern Democracy and Rational Government 40 Alexis de Tocqueville 46 Self-Interest, Materialism, and Institutions 47 The Reconstruction of Leadership in a Democratic Society 53 Conclusion 58

2 2.1 2.2 2.2.1 2.2.2 2.3 2.3.1 2.3.2 2.4

French Liberalism after 1870: Spontaneity Amended 61 Introduction 61 Hippolyte Taine 67 The Breakdown of Spontaneous Institutions 68 Reform and Leadership 73 Ernest Renan 79 Science and Society 80 Education and National Elites 82 Conclusion 90

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Twentieth-Century French Liberal Thought: “The Political” Reinterpreted 94 Introduction 94 Bertrand de Jouvenel: Personal Leadership and Voluntary Associations 102 Introduction 102 Power and Democracy 106 Leadership and Personal Authority 114

3.1 3.2 3.2.1 3.2.2 3.2.3

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3.2.4 3.3 3.3.1 3.3.2 3.3.3 3.3.4 3.4 3.4.1 3.4.2 3.4.3 3.4.4 3.5

Contents

The Group-Association 122 Raymond Aron: Institutionalized Elites and Progress Introduction 127 Democracy and Industrial Society 130 Political Mediation and the Elites 135 Ideology and the Limits of Prudence 150 Julien Freund: Political Authority and Tradition 155 Introduction 155 The Essentialist View of Politics 157 Radical Democracy and Liberal Democracy 163 Moderate Authority and Tradition 177 Conclusion 183

Conclusion: Towards a French-Liberal Paradigm of Elites 187 Liberal Heritage in the Fifth Republic: From Gaullist Fusionism to Euro-Populism 187 Towards a Constructive Conception of Liberal Elites Bibliography Index

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Introduction As a form of political thought, French liberalism represents a provocative and even paradoxical combination of values and methods. On the one hand, the primacy of human liberty, of agency, and the appeal of individualism; on the other hand, a consistent tendency to formulate judgments around existing social facts and tendencies rather than purely moral meditations. The product of both Enlightenment thought and of the social sciences, the French liberal tradition aims to reconcile the basic tenets of liberal political philosophy with the variety of changing conditions in a modern, complex society. Many of the ideas of French liberal thinkers are delivered in terms of concrete analyses rather than normative judgments. More than any other form of liberal thought, French liberal theory represents a reaction to the rise of democracy, in its real and concrete manifestation, rather than its formulation as an idea or a creed. The thinkers of the French liberal tradition have formulated their theory largely in response to the different forms which European democracy has taken since its inauguration around the year 1800. The events of the French Revolution were also the birthing moment of liberalism in France, through its confrontation with Jacobin radicalism and later with Bonapartist cesarism. As an intellectual movement, however, French liberalism was forged in the drama of the 1790s, and especially in the impact it has left on civilization, as inaugurating (or signifying) the epochal transformation of European society. The development of French liberal thought, then, went hand in hand with the development of democracy as a political system and with its various aspects. The consistent theme which ties together the thinkers of the French liberal corpus is in the understanding of democracy first and foremost as a long-term social or “civilizational” phenomenon; while democracy is intrinsically tied with a set of institutional and legal forms (namely a representative system and some degree of popular suffrage), its essence lies elsewhere, in the cultural gradient of equality. In itself, equality is a necessary element in every society; it is in democracy, however, that equality becomes gradually more general and universal. Democratic equality is not only a constitutional or even political principle, but actually represents a way for human beings to conduct themselves and think about themselves. The notion of “social condition” [état social], which was formulated in the early part of the nineteenth century, is used by early social theory to explain the determinacy of human action and interaction by social, economic, and other forces. Accordingly, this notion is used by French liberals to designate the way in https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110680348-001

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which equality affects moral and political behavior and specifically the manner in which it develops in a direction which poses a risk to basic liberal principles. For all thinkers of the French liberal school consider democratic equality as leading, in its extreme form, to social and cultural homogeneity which undermines political stability and freedom; since the social condition is essentially a comprehensive social structure, democratic equality leads to a normative, institutional, and psychological homogeneity which undermines moral character and critical differences between individuals and categories; by eroding the social hierarchy necessary for salutary emulation, the expansion of democratization of the social condition results eventually in a culture of fatalism and uniformity. This cultural tendency is supported by a more concrete social one. By rendering moral values interchangeable and even trivial, the egalitarian condition undermines the ability of individuals to recognize inherent distinctions and differences within the social body. This process results in the demolishing of the intermediary institutions that are required for the preservation of a moderate regime. The role of those intermediary bodies was fulfilled in pre-democratic society by the traditional aristocracy, which, despite their privileged and ultimately inequitable nature, provided society with a stable foundation as well as with a benign form of elitism, which by virtue of its very existence produced positive fermentation and emulation. This social class also filled a crucial political role, by checking and to some degree preventing the overwhelming of society by centralized, usually monarchical power. The stakes for French liberal thought are thus markedly high. The thinkers of this tradition are concerned not with the elaboration of a constitutional geometry that would reduce violence and arbitrary rule, but with the retrieval of a correct social form that would endow society with a means to countermand or even reverse the cultural gradient of egalitarianism. What marks this project as a liberal one and distinguishes it from the simpler forms of traditionalism is the way in which it refuses to foreclose on the prospects of popular representation as the only viable political form in a democracy. Furthermore, it generally shuns any form of nostalgia to the ancien régime, and maintains a strong emphasis on the inevitable challenges of modernity. The distinctive theme in the political program of French liberalism, which sets it apart from most types of traditionalism as well as from mainstream liberal doctrines, is that of social elites. The thinkers of this school aim at the establishment of an intermediary class between political authority and general society, one which serves the purpose of social leadership and influence. This class would fill a double function: actively, it would contribute in the formation and articulation of a public spirit, the rallying of individuals and the creation of various loci of association and opposition; passively, it would keep at bay the

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process of uniformization that is endemic to democratic culture, and would promote social diversity and emulation, by virtue of being endowed with qualitatively different (superior) qualities. The notion of elites, then, in the French liberal corpus refers to a collection of individuals endowed with unique and definitive moral and personal characteristics, which come to the fore in the political process and serve as a leading and orientating social category. While all authors of the French liberal school agree with each other regarding the indispensible nature of elites in a democratic society, they differ with regard to the process of its emergence and assemblage (i.e., elite formation). While the specific qualities which distinguishes an elite from common individuals are very similar among the different accounts (especially in the nineteenth century), the forces which produce those qualities differ largely from one period to another. The nature of the process in which individuals enter and take part in a social elite, consciously or not, is the main focus of the French liberal corpus. Each thinker of the corpus identifies a certain set of institutions which depends upon the political, social, economic, and civilizational elements of his respective period. The historical metamorphosis of the concept of elite formation is the crux which signifies the transformation of French liberal canon throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The transformation in the conceptualization of elite formation pertains to the elites’ particular position vis-à-vis the state and society at large. The development described here is namely one of constant politicization and institutionalization. From the early nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, social elites are conceived as taking an ever more important place in the established political process and as characterized by a more formal status. The interpretation of the notion of the social elite gradually shifts from a free-floating and loose collection of individuals who share similar social status, and into social category that is much more cohesive within itself and exclusionary with respect to the rest of society. In a similar way, its proximity with the state institutions becomes ever greater and more intense: from independent and even opposed to the state, the elites become more firmly entrenched within the state apparatus, until transforming eventually into an integral part of the established political apparatus. This transformation is composed out of three distinct moments: The early nineteenth-century (or post-Revolutionary) moment regards the process of elite formation as centered on the process of spontaneous selection, especially in the economic sphere. In the early liberal doctrine, the emergence of elite groups arises through relations of exchange in a modern laissez faire economy; the accumulation of private property, under this view, acts as an indicator for personal eminence and for certain beneficial moral characteristics.

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In accordance with this view, the early liberal school considers the role of the state as a passive one with regards to society, and opts for its limitation by means of formal constitutional and legal mechanisms. The two thinkers that are most associated with this school are Benjamin Constant and François Guizot. Despite the differences in their respective propositions and political views, the two share a similar view with regard to the independent and spontaneous status of civil society and market economy with respect to the state. Consequently, both see the market as the main locus where elites are formed: while Constant opts for a semi-agrarian propertied class modeled on the traditional aristocracy, Guizot adopts a more modern view by vindicating commercial and mobile property. In addition, Guizot takes the view of the elites one step further in stressing not only the role of the social elites as a limit on the power of the state, but also as a rationalizing mechanism of administrative reform. Alexis de Tocqueville is discussed in the chapter as a transitional figure, whose importance in this respect lies in the critique of the propositions of the earlier liberal school while setting the foundations for the constructive theory of the Third Republic school. Tocqueville’s place in the French liberal canon is for the most part a deconstructive one, as he rejects the attempts to trace an elite class out of the economic interactions of the market sphere. Instead, Tocqueville proposes an overhaul of the process of elite formation, which accords a more active and important place to the attentive efforts of the state. The late nineteenth-century (or Third Republic) moment regards elite groups as cultivated intentionally by agencies of the state, especially in the domain of education. Social elites do not arise spontaneously but need to be intentionally assembled by state power, especially through the creation of pedagogic institutions; those scholarly institutions imbue prominent individuals with correct moral dispositions dictated by meticulously designed programs. In opposition to the earlier school, Third Republic thinkers regard the role of the state as an active one, as it tasks political authority with the creation of tutelary institutions and with the selection and promotion of individuals to elite positions. The affinity with liberalism is maintained through the emphasis of those thinkers on formal constitutionality and on the independence of individual and civic liberty. The two thinkers that are represented here are Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan. Here again a distinction is made: Taine regards education as a corrective measure that is used to furnish individuals with virtuous moral qualities, according to a certain pragmatic and practical set of principles. Renan, unlike him, is more committed to the idea of an education system as a means of integrating the national consciousness (albeit not in the way of coercive indoctrination). If Taine

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regards education as corrective to other social institutions, for Renan it largely displaces or subsumes those institutions, in order to produce a national mandarin class of scholars. The modern (or postwar) moment regards elite groups as created in the political process, through the active participation in the management of the power of the state. In the modern view, politics itself act as the instance which differentiates between groups and individuals, in a way that corresponds to the moral characteristics of the members of elite groups. Under this view, typical to much of the emerging political thought of the early 1900s, the state should be formed in such a way as to allow prominent individuals to achieve elite status through engagement with the adversarial and agonistic nature of the political sphere. As will be laid out in detail, the evolution of the three schools depends on both internal and external factors: on the immanent dynamic of ideas as well as on the effect of historical, political, social and other contexts. Certain theses about elite formation begin to lose their pertinence and explanatory power once a sufficient change in circumstances has occurred; similarly, many of the thinkers discussed here were also overtly inspired by their predecessors, in a positive as well as in a negative way. This double tendency is what forms French liberalism as a coherent canon, or body of thought. The three thinkers that are representative of this school are Bertrand de Jouvenel, Raymond Aron, and Julien Freund. All three, in their different ways, vindicate the notion of elite formation through politics. The main distinction between the three is with regards to the nature and degree of the affiliation with institutionalized politics, an affiliation that is characterized by ever greater intensity. Jouvenel views elite formation as taking place in the array of voluntary groups and associations, in a way that is intensely political, yet is entirely distinct and even actively opposed to the power of the state and its institutions. Aron adopts a much more optimistic view on the reconcilability of the social elites with the state, which takes place in the interstices of the relations between the economy and the state, namely in the administrative class. Freund promotes the most institutionalized option, as he regards the elite as integrated not in the administration but in the decision-making organs of the executive. Postwar liberalism, which composes the bulk of this study and is treated extensively, can be said to represent the three different tendencies that are present in modern-day political liberalism in France: the libertarian, the progressive, and the authoritarian. Those three tendencies are represented to various degrees in the political programs of the different political movements in the Fourth and Fifth Republics. Postwar French liberalism, which is all too often regarded as a non-entity, is shown here to be not only an intellectual movement

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Introduction

unparalleled in terms of its historical continuity, but also in terms of its heterogeneity and diversity.

Setting, Goals, and State of Current Research One of the most interesting phenomena in postwar French intellectual culture, that has also attracted the greatest amount of academic attention, has been the emergence of French liberal political thought. This reemergence is usually covered in scholarly writings in terms of a “liberal renaissance” or “reappearance,” in the sense of either a return to an original form and a shedding (to a limited extent at least) of various anti-liberal and illiberal notions. This development is apparent not only in terms of the adoption of liberal political programs on the part of Parisian intellectuals, the promotion of a market economy, personal liberty, and so on, but also of the development of a distinct vocabulary, one entirely different from structuralism and the Marxism of the 1960s and 1970s. The reappearance of French liberalism was perhaps first noticed by scholar and thinker Mark Lilla, in his seminal article of 1994 about “continental liberalism”.1 There, Lilla has put forward a thesis regarding the distinct development of postwar liberal doctrines in three different national cultures: the Italian, the German, and the French. All of these cultures, in Lilla’s view, generated liberal doctrines through a more or less unique and contingent set of factors, including the respective socio-political constellations which took shape in those countries. In many ways, Lilla claims, liberalism in France had incurred the most difficult labor pains of the three national cultures: despite not suffering a homegrown authoritarian revolution as in Germany and Italy, the French intelligentsia was more deeply committed to typically anti-liberal or at the very least non-liberal doctrines, from progressive republicanism to Marxism and various gauchismes. More detailed accounts of the so called “liberal moment” in postwar France (roughly beginning in the 1970s after a period of gestation) have similarly traced it to a number of historical circumstances. Iain Stewart for example does so by prioritizing the events of May 1968 and especially the intellectual reaction to them on the part of Raymond Aron and his companions,2 while Michael Christofferson

1 Mark Lilla, “The Other Velvet Revolution: Continental Liberalism and Its Discontents,” Daedalus 123, no. 2, Europe through a Glass Darkly (Spring 1994): 129–57. 2 Iain Stewart, “France’s Anti-68 Liberal Revival,” in France since the 1970s: History, Politics and Memory in an Age of Uncertainty, ed. Emile Chabal (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 199–224.

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argued that it was the political developments of the Cold War which brought antitotalitarian discourse to prominence and with it liberalism.3 The reappearance of liberalism in France, regardless of specific causes, was not a direct and uncomplicated outgrowth but a largely contingent development. This influential view, which is shared by both English-speaking and French commentators, greatly underplays the continuity which existed in the French liberal corpus. While it is hard to deny that the French intellectual culture underwent during the 1970s a “dramatic ideological reorientation” as two commentators put it, this reorientation is framed largely if not exclusively as the result of certain specific intricacies of postwar European, or even global, political developments.4 The possibility of this shift conforming to a given intellectual tradition is largely ignored if not outright discounted. While the current direction in the study of postwar French liberalism is useful in illuminating it as a cultural phenomenon, it also misses some it of its substance as a political idea. The objective of this dissertation, then, is an attempt to analyze and frame postwar liberal thought in its appropriate historical-intellectual setting. The postwar liberal emergence was neither a “virgin birth” nor strictly speaking a renaissance; rather, it was a reformulation of an existing, even mundane, intellectual tendency under new forms. While it is true that the postwar environment in its various intricacies has played a major role in the emergence of the school, this role was limited to an external trigger through which an immanent intellectual dynamic could be expressed. Through an appeal to historization it would thus be possible not only to evacuate some of the misconceptions regarding the radical novelty of the phenomenon, but also to come to terms with its coherence and originality as an intellectual movement. From a historiographical point of view, the thesis presented stresses the continuity in French liberal thought between 1800 and 1970. The argument certainly does not aim to present French liberalism in essentialist terms, but to draw attention to a consistent preoccupation which runs through the French liberal corpus and analyze its different modulations. Similarly, the research does not intend to present a comprehensive picture of French liberal thought,

3 Michael Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004). 4 “Introduction: New Perspectives on France’s “Liberal Moment”,” in In Search of the Liberal Moment, Democracy, Anti-totalitarianism, and Intellectual Politics in France since 1950, ed. Iain Stewart (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 2. It should be stated that the editors of this compendium state explicitly their uneasiness with the more simplistic versions of the “liberal explosion,” but instead of correcting it by placing it into context, they employ their contextualization in order to undermine the authenticity of 1970s liberalism itself.

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but to extract a discussion around the idea of elites. By doing so, the research aims to accomplish a double goal: on the one hand, the conceptual rehabilitation of the notion of elites, while offering an analytic discussion on a relatively ambiguous notion; on the other hand, to illustrate the singularity and distinctiveness of French liberal thought and one of its unique and consistent themes.

Historiography of French Liberal Thought Modern scholarship on the French liberal corpus focuses largely on the reassessment of European liberalism, and in particular of alternative models to the dominant Anglo-American form of liberal thought. The bulk of attention received by the French liberal thought has been directed in particular at the various sociological and historiographical models employed by the French school, in a way as to paint it as a more practical or business-minded alternative to the abstract normative formulations of “classical” liberalism. One of the most comprehensive efforts to vindicate the French liberal tradition was Mark Lilla’s compendium, which illustrates the way in which liberal democracy was defended in the French tradition, especially under a more typically “realist” approach to politics and society in general.5 The majority of the systemizing effort of French liberalism as a coherent intellectual tradition focuses on its earlier manifestation, that is, the form it has taken between the Revolution and the mid-nineteenth century.6 The early French liberal canon draws its raison d’être from the peculiar intellectual culture of the late French Enlightenment, as well as from the specific contingencies of post-Revolutionary political culture, namely the urgent necessity to reconcile the emerging popular democracy with the requirements of stability and moderation. This combination, according to the dominant narrative, is the force which imbued the liberalism of 1795 to (roughly) 1848 with unique vitality and responsibility.

5 Mark Lilla, New French Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 6 An illustrative example is the intellectual historian Jeremy Jennings, who in his magisterial work on French political thought from the Enlightenment to the Cold War reserves the treatment of liberalism to the period of Constant, Guizot, et al. (Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France Since the Eighteenth Century [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011]; liberalism is treated almost exclusively in chapter 4). Another work which advances a similar view – albeit under different methodology, much more focused on political developments than intellectual ones – is André Jardin’s classic Histoire du liberalism politique: De la crise de l’absolutisme à la constitution de 1875 (Paris: Hachette, 1985).

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This paradigmatic explanation is best exemplified in the classical and influential work of Lucien Jaume.7 In his monograph L’Individu Effacé [The Effaced Individual], which remains the most comprehensive work published on French liberalism to date, Jaume presents a synthetic and diachronic account on the development of French liberal thought since the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, while focusing on the formative period of the first part of the nineteenth century. The methodology adopted by Jaume in his study focuses on thinkers as opposed to themes, and considers each in light of the respective themes in his writings (for example, democracy, religion, political economy, constitutionalism, and so on). The argument presented by Jaume centers on the continuation between eighteenth-century political and social thought, especially managerial political economy, and the liberal intellectuals of the following century. These peculiar genealogies, as well as the practical and business-minded attitude of French liberalism (described as “government liberalism”), made it underplay certain important notions typically associated with the liberal tradition (namely the underplaying of individualism and personal liberty as per the title of the study, The Effaced Individual). Jaume’s work is inspired largely by the efforts of Pierre Rosanvallon, especially his book The Guizot Moment.8 Rosanvallon’s monograph, as its title suggests, is centered on François Guizot as an important crystallizing point for the French liberal tradition. Guizot, who is discussed by Rosanvallon as a neophysiocratic thinker concerned with the scientific management of society, was a crucial figure in distinguishing the French liberal corpus from its more conventional Anglo-Saxon inspiration. The French liberal tradition is thus characterized by both Jaume and Rosanvallon as beholden to “rationalist” trends to a degree which bring into question its very identity as a bona fide liberal school. Since the 1990s an alternative approach has emerged regarding the nature of French liberalism, especially in the English-speaking academic world. While similarly acknowledging the historically-embedded nature of French liberal thought, this school emphasized the pluralist sociology adopted by French liberal authors as opposed to its “managerial” rationalism. The original point of this interpretative tradition can be traced to Stephen Holmes’ early work on Benjamin Constant, which addresses Constant’s thought as a reconciliation of the values of personal liberty and constitutionalism with a sociological sensitivity regarding the existence of various social groups.9

7 Lucien Jaume, L’Individu effacé ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (Paris: Fayard, 1993). 8 Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). 9 Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Holmes’ work is also important in the way it aims to rescue Constant

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Like the “rationalist” school of Rosanvallon and Jaume, this interpretative tradition also points to a continuation between the eighteenth-century and later authors, but points to the inspiration of Montesquieu rather than managerial political economy. One important monograph of the pluralist school is Annelien de Dijn’s study on the pluralist aspect of French liberalism.10 In Dijn’s view, it is the influence of Montesquieu which proved to be crucial in the formation of the French liberalism of the nineteenth century, and especially in its emphasis of prominent social differences and distinctions between groups and individuals. Another work which belongs to the pluralist group is Aurelian Craiutu’s study on Guizot and the Doctrinaire school.11 Craiutu proposes an entirely different take on the subject matter from Jaume and Rosanvallon, as he considers the Doctrinaire groups as largely preoccupied with the overcoming of social differences by means of sophisticated social theories, while giving close attention to those differences and without undermining them. Alexis de Tocqueville is a sui generis case due to his enormous popularity in the English-speaking world, and as such remains by far the most researched author of the French liberal canon. In the context of the historiography of French liberalism, Tocqueville is similarly addressed often in terms of his commitment to social pluralism and associative freedom, which accords him the status of an antirationalist (in the sense described above) and even anti-modernist. It would suffice here to say that Tocqueville is usually placed in contradistinction to Guizot, either as an outright opposition to the Doctrinaire school or as its uneasy continuation.12

from the interpretation of the thinker as an unqualified individualist, then popular in the mostly French-dominated Constant scholarship. Holmes’s work can also be seen as a normative statement regarding the reconcilability of individualistic liberalism and “communitarian” values. The fact that much of the Constant resurgence in the English speaking world has been occurring in departments of political science as opposed to history or French studies has also meant that the Constantian corpus was subject to more analytic (and diverse) interpretations; on Constant reception see Helena Rosenblatt, “Why Constant? A Critical Overview of the Constant Revival,” CUNY Academic Works (2004). 10 Annelien de Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville: Liberty in a Leveled Society? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 11 Aurelian Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege: the Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (New York: Lexington Books, 2003). 12 Lucien Jaume, Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty (Princeton University Press, 2013). It is not without relevance that the bulk of the Tocqueville renaissance in the last half of the twentieth century was done in the context of the rearticulation of French liberal thought, partly tied with the emergence of a typically French “revisionist” school in the historiography of the French Revolution, of which Tocqueville is counted as an early methodologist (exemplified in François Furet’s essay on Tocqueville in Penser la Révolution). See also Samuel Moyn, “On the Intellectual Origins of François Furet’s Masterpiece.” Tocqueville Review 29, no. 2 (2008): 59–78.

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Compared to the treatment of early nineteenth-century liberalism, academic treatment of its late-nineteenth-century variant is more reserved. By considering the post-Revolutionary transformation of the French political system as a fait accompli, the scholarship on Third Republic thought regards it as marginal and trivial, or alternatively as hopelessly reactionary. Since the great political questions of 1789, 1815, and 1848 have been almost entirely resolved by the contingencies of 1871, it means that liberal political culture has been largely sapped of its vitality. Following this narrative, the academic writing on the liberal thought of post-1871 France is more careful in the categorization of those thinkers within the liberal canon, and more generally in their appreciation as systematic thinkers. Consequently, much of the writing on the late nineteenth-century French corpus regards it as ambivalently liberal or as liberal malgré eux; Edouard Richard’s study on Ernest Renan and Éric Gasparini’s work on Hippolyte Taine both regard their respective subject matters as lying in equal distance between traditionalism, positivism, and liberalism (three notions which remain ultimately distinct and separate).13 What is most problematic in the treatment of the late nineteenth century is the way in which it is seen through its progenitors, namely the twentieth-century authoritarian and traditionalist movements; Taine and Renan are not interpreted through their debt to post-Revolutionary thought, but through their influence on the ultraright of Maurras et al. This reading (which is in itself overly deterministic) severs Third Republic liberalism from the prior emergences of the liberal school, from Constant, Guizot, and Tocqueville, who are nevertheless present in a latent and explicit form in the writing of Third Republic thinkers.14

13 Éric Gasparini, La Pensée politique d’Hippolyte Taine: entre traditionalisme et liberalism (Marseille: Presses Universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 1993); Edouard Richard, Ernest Renan Penseur Traditionaliste? (Marseille: Presses Universitaires d’Aix-Marseille, 1996). 14 A concise version of this generic traditionalist interpretation can be summarized in one recent commentary: “Tocqueville managed to hold the philosophes in contempt without abandoning the Enlightenment or liberalism. Hippolyte Taine did reject the Enlightenment . . . with results that were devastating to his thought and for French liberalism in general: right-wing ideology spread through his books like a potent virus and, by the time the illness had run its course, very little of his initial liberalism remained intact” (Mark Hulliung, Citizens and Citoyens: Republicans and Liberals in America and France [Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002], 135). It should be stated that this tendency is not universal; Taine especially is considered as an ambivalent figure whose critique of government intervention has been insightful and very much enshrined in the liberal canon (see for example his inclusion in anthologies such as Robert Leroux, ed., French Liberalism in the 19th Century: An Anthology (New York: Routledge, 2012)). It should be important to note that this line of interpretation is diametrically opposed to the the one raised by William Logue in his classic From Philosophy to Sociology: The Evolution of French Liberalism, 1870–1914 (Chicago: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983). Logue focuses on a different group of thinkers,

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Introduction

In comparison with the liberalism of the Third Republic, twentieth-century French liberalism receives a notably significant amount of attention in recent scholarship. The postwar “liberal renaissance” in France begins to emerge as an academic theme since the beginning of the 2000s.15 The thinker whose name became synonymous with postwar liberalism is Raymond Aron. Recent monographs on Aron published in both French and North American academia demonstrate the way in which his liberal thought is intimately fused with a robust understanding of political action and the requirement for its prudent limitation.16 Recently Aron has also been the subject of a compendium integrating a number of essays and articles under a multifaceted approach to the Aronian corpus.17 Bertrand de Jouvenel is another thinker who, while not enjoying the same high profile as Aron, is gaining recognition in English-speaking academia. In addition to several smaller pieces and essays, the main contribution on Jouvenel’s work is Daniel Mahoney’s work on Bertrand de Jouvenel, which paints Jouvenel as a “conservative liberal,” whose vindication of politics is comparable to that of Aron.18 If Jouvenel’s status as a liberal thinker tails that of Aron, Freund can be said to be all but obscure. In the English-speaking world, attention to his writings has been virtually null (only a single work of his has been translated into English – a rather

one much more inclined toward the progressive Republicanism of Janet or Durkheim, but regards the positivist ethos as contributing rather than undermining those tendencies. 15 Some of the works which frame the phenomenon do so tangentially by approaching it via other themes. Serge Audier for example focuses on the emergence of “neo-liberalism” as an economic doctrine, which began to take shape in the 1930s and then exploded in the 1970s (Néo-libéralisme(s). Une archéologie intellectuelle [Paris: Grasset, 2012]). 16 Serge Audier, Raymond Aron, la démocratie conflictuelle (Paris: Michalon, 2004); Brian C. Anerdon, Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Reed Davis, A Politics of Understanding: The International Thought of Raymond Aron (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009); Stephen Launay, La Pensée politique de Raymond Aron (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995). The most definitive study on Aron’s liberalism to date is the unpublished doctoral thesis by Iain Stewart, Raymond Aron and the Roots of the French Liberal Renaissance (University of Manchester, 2011). The origins of the Aron renaissance can be traced largely to Nicholas Baverez’s hagiographic work Raymond Aron: Un moraliste au temps des ideologies (Paris: Flammarion, 1993). Baverez, a former student of Aron, is also a high-profile public intellectual and a political figure in France. 17 José Colen and Elisabeth Dutartre-Michaut, eds., The Companion to Raymond Aron (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). The treatment of Aron is also unique in the way he expressly associated Aron with prior liberal thought, especially with Tocqueville. 18 Daniel Mahoney, Bertrand De Jouvenel: Conservative Liberal and Illusions Of Modernity (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2005).

Setting, Goals, and State of Current Research

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brief textbook on Max Weber), while in the French-speaking world he is mostly known as either a sociology methodologist or a controversial and provocative intellectual, affiliated with the so called “New Right.” Works on Freund so far include a biographic essay,19 a thesis monograph,20 and a collection of colloquium essays focusing on his work on international relations.21 While references to “moderation” and even “liberalism” can be found in some of the published pieces about him, it would be fair to argue that interest in Freund’s work as a sociologist and commentator far eclipses the interest in his work as a normative political theorist. As this overview suggests, contemporary treatment of the French liberal corpus is incomplete on several counts. First, it suffers from certain asymmetry in its focus: by framing the vast majority of French liberal thought in the “Constant-Guizot-Tocqueville” moment of the early nineteenth century, it excludes the developments of the Third Republic, and by doing so severs the connection between the post-Revolutionary tradition and the twentieth century “renaissance.” By underplaying the continuation between the different liberal manifestations, this narrative also paints – erroneously – the emergence of liberal thought in the postwar era as either a “virgin birth” or alternatively as an almost accidental and contingent affair.

Elites in the Political Science Recent decades have seen the historiography of political thought shedding some of its negative predispositions with regards to the concept of elites and elitism. Earlier scholars who traced the concept of elites in political thought have adopted a critical and even scathing approach to the subject matter; inspired by Marxism and various postwar sociological tendencies, they have seen elitism as either the “childhood disorder” of early liberal thought or as a nefarious ideological trait that is endemic to bourgeois political thought.22

19 Pierre-André Taguieff, Julien Freund: Au coeur du politique (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2008). 20 Sebastian De la Touanne, Penseur “machiavélien” de la politique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). 21 Gil Delannoi, ed., Julien Freund et la dynamique des conflits (Alberta: Berg International, 2010). Interestingly, the language featured most prominently in secondary literature on Freund is Spanish, although at the moment it is entirely confined to shorter review pieces and essays. 22 For two highly representative items within this tradition see Walter Struve, Elites Against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany, 1890–1933 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973), and Kurt Klotzbach, Das Elitenproblem im politischen Liberalismus: Ein Beitrag zum Staats- und Gesellschaftsbild des 19. Jahrhundert (Köln: Westerdeutscher Verlag, 1966).

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Introduction

Some of the current attempts to revise this tradition have focused on the sociological and political nature of elites in modern societies and their unique position in a democracy. An important contribution is John P. McCormick’s Machiavellian Democracy, where the author, following the sixteenth-century thinker, proposes a democratic model of deliberation between elites (political as well as social and cultural) and the rest of society. While emphasizing the contestatory and participative character of this republican model, McCormick also considers the existence of intermediary classes such as elites as indispensable in a well-functioning democracy.23 Another study of this tendency which adopts a more intellectual-historical approach is Maurice A. Finocchiaro’s Beyond Right and Left: Democratic Elitism in Mosca and Gramsci. By discussing the ideas of those (seemingly opposed) Italian thinkers in a synthetic and complementary manner, the author offers a liberal vindication of the notions of elites and “hegemony.” Finocchiaro then pursues those concepts in order to buttress a more realistic conception of democratic governance in a less typically “republican” style but one that is more in tune with the social sciences and the considerations of pluralism.24 In accordance with this tendency, the work of John Higley stresses the institution of elites as indispensable to any democratic order.25 Higley’s study builds on a comparative analysis of different European regimes since the early modern period in order to demonstrate the way in which any functioning democracy coalesces around a vigorous and united elite class. The work refrains quite overtly from offering any grand theory of elites and opts for a methodology of case study and empirical examination; similarly, he does not address the distinctions between the underlying structural and functional differences among elite classes in various historical and other contexts. Despite those methodological differences, Higley’s work can be seen as sharing a prescriptive orientation with the other studies discussed here, by vindicating an elite view of democratic order.26 Some of the other prominent studies on the notion of elites have been using French nineteenth- century thought as a leverage point. Aurelian Craiutu’s study on the Doctrinaires (cited above), is a prime example of the potential of historical scholarship to reassess and reconstruct a concept of liberal elites in a way that

23 John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 24 Maurice A. Finocchiaro’s Beyond Right and Left: Democratic Elitism in Mosca and Gramsci (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 25 John Higley and Michael G. Burton, Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). 26 A similar argument is promoted by Murray Milner in his compact and useful essay Elites: a General Model (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015).

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challenges the entrenched ideas on democracy and political participation. Another study which hinges on the French is Olivia Leboyer’s Elite et libéralisme, which traces the concept of liberal elites starting in the writings of François Guizot and ending in the mid-late twentieth century (namely in the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and, interestingly, in those of John Rawls). Leboyer’s prescriptive work consists of combining interpretative and analytic effort in order to propose a way to form elites in different social contexts (especially in education).27 Another author whose work is important in this context is Pierre Rosanvallon. In addition to his important work on Guizot (cited above), Rosanvallon is also engaged in a more longue durée study of the cultural gradients of modern democracy. In his various works (especially in his trilogy on French political culture), Rosanvallon identifies two main tendencies in French and European democratic politics, which can be broadly termed the “elitist” tendency and the “populist” tendency. Rosanvallon understands the various forms of French constitutional and political arrangements since 1789 until the Fifth Republic essentially as articulations of those two tendencies.28 Although Rosanvallon’s analysis does not focus on political thinkers and authors as such but rather on institutional forms (his work on Guizot notwithstanding), his contribution to the revising and reinvigorating of the concept of liberal elites is invaluable. The novelty of this work lies in its reassessment of the notion of the elites and its place in liberal thought. It presents the idea of elites not as the result of post-Revolutionary anxiety or other various historical conjunctures. Similarly it rescues the notion of elites from the anti-democratic label often associated with it by showing the way in which it was often used to reconcile liberalism and popular democracy rather than to displace the latter. Drawing on the works cited above, the work solidified the place of the elites in modern political thought, and presents it as a coherent yet versatile intellectual category.

27 Olivia Leboyer, Élite et libéralisme (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2012). 28 Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Sacré du citoyen. Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque des histoires, 1992); idem, Le Peuple introuvable. Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque des histoires, 1998); idem, La Démocratie inachevée. Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque des histoires, 2000).

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Introduction

Note on Methodology This study traces an intellectual tendency in its various modulations across time. As such, the study belongs in the tradition of historical-intellectual syntheses of political ideas; its goal is not to give a comprehensive account of each thinker’s ideas and notions, but to address the corpus at large and analyze its different developments. The object of the study is not so much political thought as such but the contours of a given political culture, namely the French one, which is revealed through the examination of a particular political tendency. Due to the limited and specific ends of the study, the methodology utilized here is a focused one, and consists of the examination of the corpus through the writings of each respective member of the French liberal school. Historical context, both intellectual and concrete, is applied in places where absolutely necessary and often through the reference to high-profile secondary sources. Since this study is interested in those aspects of the French liberal corpus which make it into a peculiar and continuous tradition, comparisons and references to other intellectual traditions, either non-French or non-liberal, are generally kept to a minimum unless directly relevant to the texts. The large chronological scope of this thesis similarly required a stringent selection of the thinkers included in its frame. Among the names that were not included are thinkers whose status as liberal thinkers is canonical and indisputable, but were omitted for various reasons. Some were omitted due to redundancy (i.e., the virtual representation of their statements in other thinkers’ writings); others due to the absence of a systemized political theory; and others due the lack of “family resemblance” with the corpus as it is discussed here. The contribution of authors such as Germaine de Staël, Prosper de Barante, Max Leclerc, Élie Halévy, and François Furet to the liberal tradition, either in thought or in practice, is beyond doubt, and their omission is done only due to strict parsimony.

1 Early French Liberalism: Elites and Spontaneous Order 1.1 Introduction From all the political schools which took shape in the years following the French revolution, it was liberal political thought in France that had perhaps the most difficult birth. While both the consistent left and the consistent right in French politics had a more or less coherent intellectual tradition to rely on, one which begins respectively in the writings on the “social question” or in different Catholic and pro-monarchic thinkers, liberalism’s roots were much more muddy and less coherent. Politically, it has been noted that liberals were present on both major wings of the established ideological spectrum, either as reform-minded Republicans or as prudent Orléanists, which has indeed contributed to its ambiguity as a coherent partisan position. The ambiguity of early liberalism in France was, to a degree, the result of its highly programmatic nature. Beginning in the immediate post-Revolutionary years and taking more identifiable form under the Empire, French liberalism was perhaps the school most exposed to the convulsive and chaotic nature of French politics. Some of the authors of that period were first and foremost pamphleteers rather than thinkers in the full academic sense of the word; their ideas, often complex but sometimes inconsistent or non-elaborate, are the result of the tendency to respond à brûle-pourpoint to political developments, to vindicate positions, and to rally supporters. This strange status of French liberalism as a doctrine led some to argue that liberal political conceptions in nineteenth-century France tended to be “crude and underdeveloped.”1 This, as explained, arises from the fact that French society of that era was intensely political, and the discussions undertaken by political authors pertained to institutional arrangements that could viably function in a complex society rather than identifying the sources of positive or natural rights and political legitimacy, a tendency usually associated with “classical” liberalism in its general form.2

1 Roger Henry Soltau, French Political Thought in the 19th Century (New York: Russell and Russell, 1959), xxviii. 2 Interestingly enough, the preoccupation of French liberals with factual matters and their preference of the concrete over the abstract is exactly what led them according to some scholars to political contradictions and eventually relegated them to irrelevancy (cf. Jeremy Jennings, Revolution https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110680348-002

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Despite its blurry and difficult beginnings, the origins of the liberal doctrine in France can be traced to the high eighteenth century, and to writers of a “moderate” persuasion such as Montesquieu, Diderot, and others. Those writers, while not necessarily presenting anything like a unified prescription, do repeat certain basic themes: the over-encumbering power of the state is a recurring concern among all moderate writers of the period, as well as a certain suspicion of participatory democracy in its more blatant and unrefined form. Generally, however, their inspiration can be seen as lying in the more abstract domain of intellectual temperament: eighteenth-century moderate thought is somewhat allergic to the notion of fixed principles, either of political geometry or of natural rights; instead, those proto-liberals all referred to an operative idea of liberty in a complex society which prioritizes observation over reflection and sociological pragmatism over “first principles.” It is thus not by chance then that recent scholarship has identified the major attributes of early French liberalism as its prioritization of sociological analysis. In his magnum opus Politics and Vision, political theorist Sheldon Wolin identifies the French liberal tradition as founded on the attempt in western political thought to reconcile the findings of the ascendant sciences of sociology, economics, and politology with the political doctrines of seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury liberalism. The result of this merger, in Wolin’s view, was a political doctrine which is highly sensitive to concrete social condition, including communal, sentimental, and different “prejudices” of individuals.3 In such a way, the distinct feature of early French liberal thought was its constant search for a political organization which could correspond effectively to a meticulously-analyzed and circumscribed social reality. French liberalism has been described as insisting on a political theory “founded on a theory of social change,” and that “given certain economic and social conditions, then only certain political options were open.”4 The French liberal tradition puts major emphasis on the historically-contingent situation of European society, and on the transient nature of different political values, including individualism, to the point it has ostensibly been “suspicious of individualism and diversity,” in part

and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 192–93). 3 Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 260–61. 4 Larry Siedentop, “The Two Liberal Traditions,” in French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day, ed. Raf Greenens and Helena Rosenblatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 18.

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stemming from the tradition of authoritarianism and Jacobinism, viewing the state as the main instrument of guaranteeing liberty.5 The liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century embraced for the most part the idea of political democracy as a social fact introduced by the French Revolution. These thinkers were inclined to view the Revolution as the inevitable conclusion of a long process of centralization and leveling that had been taking place since the beginning of modern France, which in its turn led to the view of democracy as not merely a political system but as a social phenomenon. As a social phenomenon, democracy is characterized by a tendency to usurp or negate existing institutions, which indicates a danger or at the very least a challenge to social stability and freedom. The sociological sensitivity of French liberals can be seen in their reinterpretation of political concepts, such as that of political legitimacy and leadership. One of the most central – and original – sociological insights of French political theory and its liberal variant in particular has been in re-conceptualizing the idea of equality. This intense interpretative work, often assumed under the term of the leveling (nivellement), is an attempt to understand the idea of equality in its concrete social consequences; in particular, it addresses the way in which this idea extends from strictly political and constitutional spheres to all areas of social life, especially the cultural sphere. This process, which is accompanied by the destruction of intermediary bodies in society, usually traditional sources of authority, whether formal or informal, is accomplished in favor of centralized power, whether of the monarch or of democratic representative bodies. Put in theoretical terms, the theory of leveling implies “the transmutation of democracy from the political into the sociocultural” and the emergence of a distinctive mentality, “a strange type of consciousness expressive of two contradictory tendencies, a Cartesian individualism oddly coupled with Rousseauian homogeneity: a being at once selfcentered yet other-directed, a being eagerly attacking the world in search of opportunity and also retreating from it to seek sanctuary in private life.”6

5 Helena Rosenblatt, “On the Needs for a Protestant Reformation: Constant, Sismondi, Guizot and Laboulaye,” in Greenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 115. The idea about the French liberal corpus as neglecting or disregarding a coherent notion of individualism is the main thesis of Lucien Jaume in his seminal work (Jaume, L’Individu efface, 1993). Jaume, much like Rosanvallon but to a lesser degree and more indirectly, traces the origins of nineteenthcentury French liberalism not so much to Montesquieu but to a more corporative type of thinking about society and the state which was also propagated in the eighteenth century (exemplified especially by the Physiocrates). 6 Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds: the Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2003), 307–8.

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This notion of social leveling, which had been tied already with the names of eighteenth-century thinkers such as Montesquieu, exploded in the nineteenth century, partly credited to the emerging social sciences. This concept served as the cornerstone for the “aristocratic liberalism,” an intellectual tendency which flourished from the eighteenth century up to the foundation of the Third Republic. The main idea of the school can be summarized in the phrase of Charles Cottu: “un peoplé nivele est un people asservi” (“a leveled people is a subjugated people”).7 Since leveling is not limited to the strictly political sphere but extends from it, it destroys the sources of social vitality which are indispensible to every human society, democratic or otherwise. The emergence of democracy as a cultural form, even in its more stable, benign, and peaceful form, could still end up in that very same way by undermining the diversity that is essential for a dynamic and selective political system. It is this conceptual background that provides the background for the French liberal theory. Historically, the political theory of French liberalism contains a strong critical or oppositional element: the vicissitudes of Revolutionary France and the subsequent events (the Eighteenth Brumaire coup and the transformation of the Republic into the Empire) made it wary of the two political forms which social leveling can take in every democratic society, namely its collapse into dictatorial cesarism or its ossification under the weight of centralized bureaucracy. While discussions around either tendency are not particularly new (they form a major part of eighteenth-century political thought), the upheavals of post-1789 France ingrained them with a sense of urgency and practical necessity which characterize the nineteenth-century discussions on the topic. The great paradox of democracy can be put in the following way: while persons may become free as individuals, they are still subject to abstract or invisible forces which act on them at the social level. This opposition, between formal liberty and social determinism, is threatened either by the cesarist tendency, which means to demolish said abstract laws by means of collective voluntary action (by the intermediate of a dominant and charismatic leader), or by the bureaucratic tendency, which aims to wholly substitute the abstract law for individual discretion (by the intermediate of a wise and impartial official). Both forms, however, achieve the very same results, which are the destruction of individual liberty as well as that of the regularity of abstract rule. At both ends, society devolves into a calcified edifice and spontaneity is lost. While the cesarist tendency represents the dangers which lurk within every popular regime from ambitious individuals who could wreak

7 Quoted in de Dijn, French Political Thought from Montesquieu to Tocqueville, 59.

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havoc on formal and constitutional constraints, the bureaucratic tendency can be seen as the suppression of individuality through social uniformity promoted by administrative organs. Since this danger is traced not only (or not immediately) to political structure but primarily to culture, mores, and social relations, it originates not in the directly political sphere but rather in the larger social body, in particular in the segments that pertain to the production of social elites. Briefly put, the solution put forward by nineteenth-century French liberals centered on the idea that democracy requires a means of safeguarding an elite class that would be insulated from the more corrosive effects of social equality. Consequently, the overarching goal of the French liberal tradition was the maintenance of a political culture conductive to the fostering and promotion of capable and virtuous individuals into positions of leadership and eminence as an interactive group (that is, an elite class or category). While the specific characteristics of those individuals and social segments differ from thinker to another, they usually consist of notions such as prudence, moderation, and responsibility as well as more flexible notions of social intelligence. The main challenge of all early French liberals was in the retrieval, rehabilitation, or even acquisition, of institutions and procedures that could play the role of selection with respect to such individuals, and would allow and endorse their accession to political power. Finally, it is impossible to speak about the early liberal critique of democracy without speaking about its intellectual neighbor – the French illiberal critique, namely the ones that germinated on the French far right. The French counterrevolutionary tradition which emerged in the years after the Revolution included diverse and radically different authors like Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, René de Chateaubriand, and Félicité de Lamennais (in their early writings), as well as others. While those thinkers will not be discussed here at length, it will suffice to mention their radical critique of democracy, which proved to be a lasting influence on the liberal tradition, either by the inspiration it provided or the challenge it posed. Despite the significant differences between those authors, they all shared one important intellectual conviction, namely the appeal to enduring convention, to time and to tradition as the elements in which a political society must be constituted. Known for their pro-ecclesial and even “theocratic” tendency, they all tended to base their arguments on the concrete and solid aspects of actual human life, as brutal, unjust, and even outright malicious as those may be, as opposed to the fabricated dogmas of the French Revolution. One element which was shared by liberal and traditionalist thinkers was the emphasis on sociological reality as a determinant factor in the development of politics. The moral and intellectual agency of groups and individuals was regarded as

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dependent upon social variables, themselves often conceived as highly deterministic and derived from divine or metaphysical notions. The tendency to conceptually relativize and even subdue the individual in favor of large social forces and aggregates, which was taken to the extreme in the more reactionary circles, was also reflected in the formation of moderate political ideology. It would be this appeal to sociological variables and even to naturalistic arguments that would have an impact on the doctrines introduced by early French liberals. This approach was manifest in the almost complete rejection of any type of natural-right type of argumentation on their part, as well as in their utilization of the emerging social sciences not only in order to explain phenomena but also to vindicate them. Finally, their readiness to reevaluate the notion of social equality, which lies at the heart of the concept of social elites, is very much indebted to the critical work of traditionalists, either overtly or latently. The three thinkers treated in this chapter are Benjamin Constant, François Guizot, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Despite the substantial differences in their respective political views and immediate positions, a significant part of their agenda consisted of using the means of modern, commercial society to promote the emergence of a new elite class which would play a crucial political role. The formation of such political leadership represented for the three thinkers a necessary means of fending off the dangers of dictatorship and cesarism, while at the same time allowing for a degree of popular legitimacy; whereas the three thinkers differ on the specific quantitative proportions of franchise and on many constitutional issues, their approaches correspond with regard to their general social philosophies. Benjamin Constant can be seen as the thinker most indebted to the eighteenthcentury intellectual tradition. A belle-lettrist associated with the romantic school, Constant greatly stresses the subjective and irreducibly personal aspect of any human experience. The political ethos he espouses is that of radical skepticism with regards to the power of the state, particularly as a vehicle of influencing public opinion and achieving larger social goals. Constant’s analysis of the complicated issue of modern liberty touches on its ambiguous and indeterminate nature; modern society, by prioritizing the private over the public sphere, has rendered individuals more free, but also as vulnerable to the centralizing pressure of authority on the one hand, and to the charms of charismatic leaders on the other hand. In accordance with his presupposition, Constant introduces the notion of private property as a mechanism of personal cultivation which imbues individuals with the necessary qualities for political participation. François Guizot is temperamentally and intellectually almost diametrically opposed to Constant. Often seen as an example of “government liberalism” as

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opposed to Constant’s “opposition liberalism,”8 Guizot is more preoccupied with the factual and demonstrative aspects of mass psychology; his main concern is how to reconcile the driving and even transgressive aspects of modern society, which may pit individuals in the direction of support for political demagoguery and partisanship. Guizot, who is more confident in the modern social sciences than Constant, seeks to reform the state bureaucracy by integrating it with the dynamic of market society so it could trace and select naturallyendowed individuals; it is in administrative and bureaucratic means that Guizot finds the supplement and even substitute for political participation. The program of the early liberal school of Benjamin Constant and François Guizot is concerned with the formation of an elite class that could play an eminent role in society and politics. Those thinkers regard such elites as emerging from the order of the market and property accumulation. Ownership of private property represents for them the central indicator which marks superior qualities and moral character, and as such guides the process of the formation of an elite class. In accordance with this idea, the program of early French liberals calls for the institution of a private economic sphere according to laissez faire principles with minimal government intervention. But already within this tradition one can find some doubts. Tocqueville has led in his analysis of democracy to a starker conclusion: the logic of democratic egalitarianism has permeated society to such a degree that no spontaneous generation of elites is possible. A direct and even explicit critic of the two previous authors, Tocqueville introduces in his analysis of a mature democratic society (America) a strong amount of doubt regarding the idea of a political spontaneous order: since growing materialism and alienation have rendered social elites either inexistent, or inoperative, or simply too diverse and multiple to trace in a complex society, authority can no longer function as a mere passive mechanism of interpretation and validation of signs of personal merit; authority must take the initiative in promoting, conditioning, or even creating collective institutions that would imbue individuals with the necessary psychological prerequisites. Tocqueville, whose reflection is marked by a brooding and even pessimist tone, is largely skeptical of this process (and is in fact quite careful in his constructive propositions). Despite this, his ideas would prove to be a major influence on the authors of the later part of the nineteenth century.

8 Cf. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 84–103.

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1.2 Benjamin Constant Benjamin Constant can be seen in many ways as the founding father of French liberal thought. Pamphleteer, parliamentarian, author, and scholar, Constant had been deeply engaged in political debates since first years of the nascent Republic up until his death in 1830 in the early months of the July Monarchy. Constant was known for his somewhat inconsistent position: a fervent supporter of the Revolution, he went on to become a more qualified adherent of a constitutional regime who constantly rebuked more radical Revolutionary claims in the name of realist caution. Following this realist perspective, Constant would later rally around Napoleon in the early period of his rule, only to break sharply with Bonaparte after his implementation of dictatorial measures. After Constant’s exile from France in 1803, he would be one of the more important opposition figures to the Imperial rule. During the notorious cent jours between Napoleon’s return to France and his ultimate exile, Constant would again rally to the Empire and draft its main constitutional document, and would again turn to a sensible defense of constitutional monarchy after the Restoration. Despite the dynamic and even frantic development of his political positions, Constant actually maintained a coherent and lucid political theory, one that displays his complex position against both the excesses of republicanism and cesarism. The problem of democratic society is, for Constant, a problem of social psychology: due to the loss of some of the traditional sources of guidance, modern individuals are left isolated, secluded, and opaque; by liberating individuals, the modern commercial order has also rendered them vulnerable to manipulation by charismatic leaders and by well-intentioned but overly paternalistic bureaucratic systems. The inability of modern democratic politics to replace tradition makes them turn to charisma or rational calculation as means of influence (this opinion, which is usually attributed to Tocqueville, has its origins in Constant’s early liberal critique). This critique of democracy as a social tendency leads Constant to formulate the idea of social leadership. Constant’s main intention in his proposition is to seek new social elites which could carry on the tasks previously held by traditional aristocracy, but without the danger of being usurped by charismatic leaders or centralized bureaucracies. Since politics are caught up in the process of modern atomism, it cannot, in Constant’s view, fill the role of elite formation which it had in premodern society. Constant finds the answer neither in democratic politics nor in traditional bodies, but in commercial society. In lieu of election or other political processes, Constant regards the accumulation private property as the mechanism which furnishes individuals with the personal capacities necessary for public prominence and leadership. Constant thus envisages

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the modern elite class in the form of a bourgeois middle class, rooted in the ownership of landed estates.

1.2.1 Modern Liberty and the Relegation of Politics Benjamin Constant is known primarily for his introduction of the notion of “modern liberty.” Modern liberty represents the primacy given in modern society to commercial and market behavior in lieu of public participation. As such, it involves a new kind of individualism, centered on the private and intimate sphere as opposed to the political one. While this new type of liberty allows individuals greater personal freedom, it also leaves them vulnerable to manipulation on the part of the administrative state as well as of ambitious Bonaparte-type demagogues. The distinction between modern and ancient liberty is presented in his famous 1819 lecture De la liberté des Anciens comparée à celle des Modernes [The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns], which is a summary of some of Constant’s earlier ideas. Constant’s classical argument can be summarized in the following way: human beings are essentially possessive creatures, interested in acquiring property. There are two ways of acquiring property, namely warfare and commerce. The declining profitability of war as a possessive enterprise (due to technological, demographic, and other changes) means that war is no longer the preferred means of acquiring property, and is gradually replaced by commerce as a means for property acquisition. The second part of Constant’s argument reflects on the way in which this change entailed a transformation of individual psychology. The movement from acquisition via war to acquisition via commerce is reflected in the consciousness of human beings; since commercial activity requires different social and psychological traits then war-making, it means that society began to prime different personality traits: more pacific and amicable and less bound in tradition and hierarchy. In Constant’s words, war is “impulse” while commerce is “calculation.”9 Liberty was

9 Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns,” in Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 313. This distinction showcases Constant’s very notable debt to eighteenth-century thought, in particular to proto-liberals such as Montesquieu and to Adam Smith. Like them, Constant “hail[s] the new era of trade and industry as one that would deliver mankind from ancient evils, such as abuses of power,” in Albert Hirschman’s important formula (The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977], 104).

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thus began to be seen as “peaceful enjoyment of individual independence” as opposed to taking part in public affairs.10 This “peaceful enjoyment of individual independence,” in Constant’s formula, also meant modern individuals would be less inclined to take active part in political affairs, and especially making appropriate sacrifices in order to achieve this. The new focus on private affairs which was introduced by modern liberty thus made individuals more suspicious toward political power, which was then perceived not as a salutary form for emancipation, but as, at best, a hindrance to commercial circulation. Political liberty still existed, but it was demoted to a secondary role, that of the guarantor of private enjoyment; indeed, “governments which emanate from a legitimate source have even less right than before to exercise an arbitrary supremacy over individuals.”11 What this transformation means in a political context is that public deliberation has become less open, and more filled with intrigue, speculation, and prejudice, since individuals live first and foremost in their respective private spheres and base their entire consciousness on private experience. For Constant this is not necessarily a negative thing. On the contrary, in the peculiar circumstances of modern societies prejudices should positively guide policy, as they are: the basis of institutions, they are found to be suitable to common life by habitual use: they are closely entwined in all parts of our existence; they have become an intimate matter; they have penetrated to all of our relationships; while human nature, which always builds upon what exists, has built out of prejudices, some kind of shelter, a type of social structure, more or less imperfect, but offering at least an asylum.12

The transformation from ancient and modern society, importantly, also manifested itself in the way in which individuals communicate and think. It introduced a degree of skepticism and alienation in the relations between individuals; Constant writes that [t]he ancients, like children, believed docilely, and listened with respect. They could accept without repugnance a whole ensemble of institutions made up of traditions, precepts, usages, and mysterious practices as much as from positive laws. The moderns have lost the ability to believe for a long time and without analysis. Doubt is endlessly at their shoulder. It weakens the force even of what they do take on.13

10 Ibid., 325. 11 Ibid., 324. 12 Benjamin Constant, Des réactions politiques (London: Goldsmiths, 1903), 67. 13 Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), 360–61.

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Any political program which does not take into account the reality of prejudices is doomed to futility at best or malfeasance at worse. Constant demonstrates very aptly the consequences of such attempts; abstract principles, when applied by political power, may only lead to further social uniformity and to the empowerment of a centralized, bureaucratic state apparatus in a way that undermines constitutional government. Writing under the Napoleonic Empire, Constant remarks in his large volume Principes de politique applicables à tous les gouvernements représentatifs et particulièrement à la Constitution actuelle de la France [Principles of Politics Applicable to all Governments and in Particular to the Current Constitution of France]14 on the results of the attempt to imbue government with the moral mission of implementing principles. The uniformity, partisanship, and discipline required for political action are excellent for purposes of repression and surveillance, for everything in the functions of government which is set, established, or precise. But carried over to the world of intelligence, opinion, enlightenment, or morality, they have about them something primitive, inflexible, and coarse, which goes against the aim of improvement or the perfecting of things one has in view.15

Furthermore, the attempt to use politics for moral ends may only lead to greater repression. In a chapter titled “On the Proliferation of Laws,” Constant describes the result of this attempt as the process of “falsifying individual morality”; since the legal mechanism in its essence is abstract and general, and since the circumstances to which morality ought to apply are contingent and extremely diverse, the necessary consequences of this would be the hypertrophy of laws and statutes. In Constant’s formulation: the legislator, tired of so many futile efforts, stops making precise laws, because experience has convinced him they are too easy to evade, however strict they may be. He makes vague laws and in this way the tyranny of men is in the final analysis the result of the proliferation of laws. It was in this way in our country that those claiming to be republicans began with hundreds of decrees – puerile, barbarous, and never carried out – against the clergy. They ended by giving five men the right to deport priests without trial.16

14 As opposed to the later, programmatic, edition of 1815, the more extensive 1810 version of Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments contains more extensive discussion on Constant’s social ideas and his notions of property and human faculties. 15 Ibid., 54. 16 Ibid., 65–66. One of the most recurrent themes in Constant’s argumentation, and the one which marks him distinctly as a thinker in the style of the eighteenth century, is his utilization of probabilistic notions and methodology. The process in which the general law becomes arbitrary is described as an exercise in approximate calculation, a “lottery”; in which “a single eventuality is enough to bring hazard into all calculations and therefore to destabilize them”

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The adoption of principles empowers the state in an unprecedented manner. If the monarch in a traditional society is bound by a large political, constitutional, and social edifice, the modern regime, which thinks of itself as a repository of the common good, is entirely boundless in the extent of its reach. This is especially the case in a democratic society, where the representatives of the people become invested with absolute moral prerogative; in Constant’s words: “the absolute, unlimited sovereignty of the people was transferred by the nation, or as is usual, at least in its name, by those who dominated it, to representative assemblies. These exercised an unparalleled despotism.”17 Constant’s main concern is not only the unlimited power of assembles but also cesarist usurpation. This new form of is analyzed by Constant in the context of the Napoleonic regime, which he does in his treatise De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation dans leur rapports avec la civilisation européenne [The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation in its Relation to European Civilization]. In his 1814 antiNapoleonic pamphlet, Constant does not simply put forward his most eloquent and extensive rebuke of cesarist policies, which are paradoxically facilitated by modern liberty. The intention of the work, then, is not only to condemn the emperor who has recently fallen from power, but also and primarily to shed light upon the possibilities of the new despotism inaugurated by modern society.18 The Napoleonic regime, according to Constant, is not the result of a revival of a chivalrous tradition or any kind of collective “ancient” institution, but actually represents a purely acquisitive “modern” drive. Conquest represents the regime as a form of unmitigated egoism; the new tyranny would revive the “warlike spirit” by combining it with “commercial self-interest,” while the modern army of conquest is eloquently portrayed as “four hundred thousand well-trained, well-armed egoists.”19 Napoleon, in Constant’s view, is not a traditional leader but a new type of modern individual, one characterized by reckless ambition.

(ibid., 252). He says the probability of the chance does not matter, since imagination trumps the calculation. Constant’s vocabulary, which is filled with mentions of “chance,” “lottery,” “gamble,” and so on, can and all too often conflate with the tradition of probabilistic thought which is a prominent part of the French intellectual canon, from Pascal to Condorcet. Constant, it should be emphasized, does not embrace this tradition but rather uses it in order to underscore the problems in the attempts of moral codification which he attributes to the revolutionaries. Probability, for Constant, remains almost without exception a problem rather than a solution for political problems. 17 Ibid., 399. 18 See Emeric Travers, Benjamin Constant les principes de l’histoire (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), 171–77, on the topic of the “depersonalization” of Constant’s rhetoric and analytical style. 19 Benjamin Constant, “The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation,” in Fontana, Political Writings, 76, 56.

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In accordance this idea, what allows for modern tyranny is precisely the conditions of modern liberty: by enclosing the individual in his or her own private sphere it also left individuals without the means of combating and fending off the destructive personal ambition of a Bonaparte. In opposition to eighteenth-century writers like Montesquieu, Constant does not believe that passion can balance passion and that interest can be used against interest to guarantee liberty. This is what Constant means when he invokes a “curious paradox” according to which “the more pacific the popular spirit, the easier would be the initial success of a state that sets itself to struggle against it.”20 The new cesarist tyranny of modern times is not a result of mere political gambit, personal fortune, or skill, but of the cultural tendency inaugurated in a modern commercial society. What makes the new tyranny fiercer is the fact that it is not moderated by any social institution or “prejudice”; this leaves individuals open to the exploitation of an unaccountable and dangerous political class, either through the growth of unhindered majority rule, or through the rampant seizure of a Bonaparte-type political opportunist. While both forms are different in their particular consequences, both arise from the same fundamental cause, that of modern liberty and the growing seclusion and indifference of individuals.

1.2.2 Social Restraint on Political Power In order to fend off the dangers of modern tyranny, Constant turns to the formation of elites that would act as a buffer between non-political or “civil” society and political authority. If the modern democratic society is characterized by excessive centralization and the destruction of local interests and identities, the social elites as Constant envisages them are the force that would reverse or mitigate this trend. Since Constant considers the commercial nature of modern society a fait accompli, he does not hope for the reestablishment of aristocracies or of an intense political participation, but rather seeks the new formation of elites in modern civil society and especially in the institution of private property. While Constant is an adherent of constitutional limits on the power of the state, he regards those as a necessary but insufficient means of moderating political power; “all written law is liable to evasion.”21 Constant had a keen eye for the prerogatives which governments seize to themselves in times of emergency and

20 Ibid., 70. 21 Constant, Principles, 86.

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dire need (especially war),22 and did not see in constitution and positive law the final instances to stop the rise of modern despotism (as seen in the last section, positive statute may even become instrumentalized by such tyranny). Since modern society is characterized by the primacy it gives to the private sphere, and since political action alone cannot moderate or stop this process, it is necessary to appeal to society itself in order to restrain political centralization. Constant thus turns to a social power that could act as a limit on the power of the state. Constant identifies this social force in a propertied middle class that could serve the interest of the majority of the citizens through its superior moral or intellectual capacities. Although in some of his constitutional schemes Constant toys with the idea of a popularly-elected parliament supplemented by a hereditary upper house modeled after the British House of Lords, he abandons this idea in favor of a universal representation determined by property qualifications. This idea is articulated most clearly and non-ambiguously in the 1815 edition of Principles of Politics: [I]n our modern societies, to be born in a country and to have come of age is not sufficient reason to grant those qualities required for the exercise of the rights of citizenship. Those who are kept in poverty in eternal dependence, and who are condemned by it to daily labour, are neither more knowledgeable than children about public affairs, nor more interested than foreigners in national prosperity, of whose elements they are unaware, and in whose advantages they share only indirectly . . . There must be a further condition in addition to those prescribed by the law of birth and age. This condition is the leisure indispensible for the acquisition of understanding and soundness of judgment. Property alone makes men capable of exercising political rights.23

There is another important aspect in Constant’s treatment of the topic of property, that of disinterestedness. Property can serve this qualifying role because, paradoxically, it is the only social factor attached to disinterestedness. Property provides the “leisure needed for developing an informed outlook and soundness of judgment”;24 as the members of the propertied class’ “point of departure is more advantageous, their outlook freer, their intelligence more schooled to enlightenment, their education more cultivated.”25

22 Cf. “When voluntary recruitment is insufficient, the government must indeed be given the right to resort to conscription. When it is not accorded this right, it will take it” (ibid., 351). 23 “Principles of Politics Applicable to all Representative Governments” in Political Writings, 214. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 174. Constant does not think self-interest can act as a viable basis for morality; in several places in his writings he posits not interest but actually its opposite, “sacrifice,” as a mechanism for social progress and personal amelioration. The indispensability of the notion of sacrifice as a human act is articulated in the following lines from De la Religion: “the idea of sacrifice is

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This suggestion might seem at odds with the way in which Constant, as seen in the last section, castigates unrestricted acquisitive drive as leading to chaos and tyranny. There is, however, a fundamental difference between ownership of property and acquisitive desire, a difference which is underlined by Constant’s utilization of the term “proprietal spirit.” Constant uses this term to mark legitimate ownership, one that is gained through a gradual process of property accumulation, and distinguishes it from ownership which is merely the result of sudden enrichment or usufruct.26 Constant illustrates this using the analogy of the peasants during the Swabian War who believed that by donning the armor of their masters they would acquire their virtues, but whose “insolence and vulgarity” were only increased by their pretension.27 Constant further uses this notion to distinguish between the different types of property and their respective social and psychological functions: he lists territorial (landed) property above business property, but also far above intellectual property (that of teachers, lawyers, and so on). Territorial property is unique in the way in which it binds men with time, as it gives the agricultural entrepreneur a strong sense of constancy and stability: the cultivator gives himself over to constant and ongoing occupations. Thus he contracts regularity of habit. Chance, which is a great source of immorality because it overturns all calculations and therefore those of morality, has absolutely no part in the life of the cultivator. All interruption harms him.28

inseparable from all religion. One could say that it is inseparable from every vivid, profound emotion. It is pleasing to love to sacrifice to its object everything it holds most dear” (Benjamin Constant, De la religion: considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements (Paris: Pichon, 1824, p. 130), 169–70). 26 This idea, which is heavily Burkeian, requires some elaboration. Constant, much like Edmund Burke, does not regard property accumulation as an end in itself. Burke, most famously, turned his critique to the crony and cliental nature of the Revolutionary figures who accumulated property by speculative means; Constant, in a similar (although less harsh) manner, criticized speculative financier capitalism as devoid of the virtues of other forms (namely landed) of property as it is “does not have that necessary element of slow and sure progression which gives man the habit and soon the need for uniformity” (Principles, 175). To pursue the comparison to Burke further, it should be noted Constant especially castigates the owners of what he terms “intellectual property,” those “writers, mathematicians, and chemists” who during the revolution indulged in theoretical and abstract fantasies and had separately “arrived by different routes at the same result, namely disdaining considerations drawn from facts, scorning the real sensible world, and reasoning like visionaries on the social condition, like geometers on our passions and like doctors on our human sorrows” (ibid., 178). 27 Ibid., 173. 28 Ibid., 175.

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Despite the unmistakable nostalgic temperament of Constant’s proposition, it is clear that his account of property as a moral instance pertains only to the conditions of modernity, i.e., to those characterized by the circulation of property as commodities. It is only under such conditions, where property becomes something more than “merely usufruct”,29 that property is endowed with the cultural and moral relevance Constant attributes to it. It is only ownership which endures the pressure of economic competition that becomes such a “reservoir of virtue,” since, as we have seen in the first section, ownership by means of conquest does not require the development of any faculties but force alone. What is at stake here, then, is not so much property in itself but rather property as a signifier of a certain relation to time, or duration. The “proprietal spirit” exists only in the instances in which property has been accumulated independently and through a significant period of time (that is, without recourse to institutionalized privileges or to governmental redistribution, but also to sudden windfall gain). It is only by virtue of tradition that property can be imbued with those benefits, since acquisition by any other means does not necessarily indicate personal virtue but rather pure chance, and therefore undermines rather than builds personal character.30 The meaning of property in Constant’s political theory is thus distinct from its material aspect. Constant rather uses property to demonstrate how social institutions can articulate not only different forms of association, but also different conceptions of time and duration; property represents not only an accumulation of objects and titles but also an accumulation of moral knowledge. It refers to what Constant, in his treatise about the perfectibility of the human race, calls the “communication between different generations,” who “enrich one another without a mutual acquaintance.”31 The way in which property modifies relations between men affects the way in which men perceive themselves and their environment: by extending their own sense of responsibility not only toward their peers but also toward past and future generations, private property extends one’s subjective perception of time and 29 Constant, “Liberty,” 325. 30 This point has been suggested in Jennings 2009, 79–80. It should be added that this symbolic consistency can also be compromised by the persistence of certain traditional institutions in modern society; Constant specifically mentions primogeniture as a custom whose maintenance in modern commercial societies “weakens the bonds within families, introduces division within them, weakens in children the natural feelings; and in creating among the brothers jealousy on one side and distrust of the other, generates hatred everywhere; it destroys the sweetest affections of the soul, the mutual affection of brothers and filial piety” (Constant 1840: 284). 31 Benjamin Constant, “On the Perfectibility of the Human Race,” in Philosophical Miscellanies, ed. George Ripley (Boston: Hilliard, Gray and Company, 1838), 347.

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duration, which effectively lessens the role of chance in their lives. It is thus the tradition-imbued property which acts as an intermediary layer that ties society with government. This function of property is not so much due to any particular economic position, but due to its ability to reflect a concrete authentic tradition and a particular relation with the past. Property, insofar as it has been acquired rightfully and over an extended period of time, preferable over numerous generations, represents a tangible reserve of social knowledge which is not available through any other means. Consistently with large parts of the early modern republican tradition, Constant suggests that acquisition of property (under conditions of free competition) does not imply the extension of private interest, but rather its opposite; that is, its suspension in favor of a moral and less directly-egoistic regard. In such a way, Constant identifies a “civic” institution like property, and primarily the very modern idea of market circulation, as a central means for the sustenance of political society. Property is able to fill this function not only because of its independent status vis-à-vis the state, but also because of its particular preservative position with respect to the social order; ownership, for Constant, distinguishes independent from non-independent individuals, and indicates, as a social institution, a unique predisposition which includes personal responsibility and patience as the two major traits that are indispensable for members of the social elites. Thus, Constant’s thought can be seen as the search for a secure base for the intermediary principles which he highlighted in his earlier writings. His project is focused on the designation of social institutions, namely elites that could hold off the dangers of modern despotism. Constant traces those elite institutions to a fundamental sociological and psychological mechanism which operates independently of politics; what he describes, in fact, is an idea which is very much in accord in the eighteenth-century notion of “spontaneous order,” or a system of social classification and evaluation which emerges without specific intervention and, for the most part inadvertently, “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design,” in Adam Ferguson’s seminal formula.32 Constant’s discussion of the nature of modern democracy and its various nefarious tendencies thus lead him to the search for modern elites. Those elite groups are crucial in fending off the pressures of political centralization and social alienation, by acting as an intermediary between civil society and the state. Social elites do not arise directly from the political process, but rather from the dynamic of civil society, which generates a differentiation between various social categories according to private property. In Constant’s scheme, property thus replaces political virtue as a means of differentiating elites and the rest of

32 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 5th ed. (London: T. Cadell, 1782), 205.

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society; as part of his liberal program, Constant relies on an enlightened and diligent bourgeois class to function as an important political component.33

1.3 François Guizot and the Doctrinaires François Guizot is considered as the central author of the Doctrinaire circle, an intellectual and political group which operated in France from the Restoration until the political debacles of 1848–1851. The political thought of the Doctrinaires can be seen as responding to a major dilemma: how to interpret the principles of equality and democratic legitimacy, which were introduced in the 1789 Revolution and which correspond to a concrete and unquestionable social reality in a way that would reconcile them with demands of authority, of a stable regime, and of social progress. Like Constant, he vindicates the notion of private property and the mechanisms of the market as the elements most capable of providing the spontaneous means for elite selection; the two writers, despite their major differences in rhetoric and politics, can as such be seen as complementing each other as representatives of the early nineteenth century liberal school. In many ways, the writings of the Doctrinaires can be seen as both a continuation and a refinement of some of the themes raised by Constant and postRevolutionary liberalism. If Constant had in mind the excesses of the immediate post-Revolution period, Guizot is a product of the Imperial period and the early constitutional monarchy. Whereas Constant is a critic and a perpetual member of the opposition, Guizot is a reformer who wishes to constructively integrate the emerging bourgeois society into the traditional political system. If Constant saw the political failures of his time as a product of the extravagant initiatives of a reckless political class, Guizot the historian takes a structural perspective and regards it as derived from the inherent instabilities of a new social paradigm, characterized by the rise of abstract social forces. Unlike Constant, for whom Bonapartism remains an aberration, Guizot belongs to the intellectual generation that began to trace a distinct correlation between popular participation and the dangers of plebiscitary democracy. It might not be possible, in the later thinker’s view, to construct a viable republican system

33 Despite some of his general inconsistency and the tentative nature of his program, Constant stands squarely in the program of organized post-Revolutionary liberalism, namely that of the so-called Orléanist party. Like most Orléanists, Constant thinks about the social elites in terms of a different version of the tradition aristocracy, as opposed to the more modernized and flexible idea of Guizot; cf. Annelin de Dijn, “Aristocratic Liberalism in PostRevolutionary France,” The Historical Journal 48, no. 3 (Sept. 2005): 661–81.

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under then-current conditions of civilization. This difference can be attributed largely to the differences of background and respective political programs of the two thinkers and their respective temperaments (Constant as a member of the legislative opposition, Guizot as a member of the dominant executive branch; Constant the romantic author, Guizot the shrewd statesman). Despite the differences, Guizot is in fact responding to the same tradition as Constant. Guizot and the Doctrinaires go further in their idea of elite formation through private property. Guizot regards the development of a market society as fundamental to the emergence of elite groups through the gradual division of property. Since this process is spontaneous and universal (qualities which Constant tends to underplay), it means that the free market is in position to institute distinctions between individuals and groups and to allow the more competent ones to rise to positions of prominence. Guizot thus elaborates on the role of property and its exchange in modern market economy and marks it as indispensable to the appearance of social elites. The new leading classes in Guizot’s view would not curtail the expansion of bureaucracy, as in Constant’s system, but rationalize it and help it to function in a more harmonious and correct way. While Constant’s reflections on property are marked by an unmistakable degree of nostalgia and appreciation for the stability of traditional institutions, Guizot regards the market sphere as a modernizing and innovative force. Guizot is less concerned with durable property, as it is not its stability but its innovative potential which he prioritizes. As such, Guizot is also much less allergic to the notion of utilitarian private interest, which he largely adopts in his scheme.

1.3.1 Property and Capacity Guizot’s political philosophy can be seen in many ways as a vindication of commercial bourgeois society, in a more direct and even blatant way than Constant. As will be seen in this section, Guizot pursues Constant’s proposition by adopting the idea of a propertied middle class as a social elite which would ward off the pressure towards uniformity within a democracy. Guizot analyzes the function of economic relations and especially the exchange relations of the free market as indispensable to the formation of an elite class; as such he offers an elaborate scheme which regards market relations as largely universal and spontaneous. Guizot refers to commercial activity as forming the paradigmatic case of spontaneous behavior in modern society. Guizot and the Doctrinaire’s account of the market mechanism, however, is somewhat different from that of Constant; as can

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be seen in the following paragraph, it stresses not only stability and regularity ushered in by property and transactions, but also the natural and unbiased character of the market mechanism: Ever since all professions have been made open to all, ever since labor has been made free and is administrated for all by the same laws, the number of men who, in liberal professions, amount to the first rank has not significantly increased . . . . It is those who are at the second order and the dark multitude which has multiplied: as if Providence did not allow human laws to influence, in the intellectual sphere, the extent and the magnificence of its gifts . . . . Therefore, throughout all of civil society, within the sphere of labor as in that of property, diversities and inequality of situations are reproduced and maintained.34

In order to explain the way in which property serves as an indicator for personal merit, Guizot introduces his notion of political capacity. Political capacity is the selective principle according to which electoral right had been awarded under the July Monarchy. The concept of capacity is discussed by Guizot in various places throughout his corpus; it can best be described as a set of objective qualities an individual possesses (consciously or not), which correspond to a kind of practical intelligence as well as an ethical predisposition toward responsibility, under given circumstances and social conditions. The most extensive definition of the concept provided by Guizot is: The capacity to act according to reason and justice, from whence power derives its right. The principle which, by the admission of all, and by virtue of its simple appeal to the common sense of the community, is applicable to ordinary life, and to the interest of individuals themselves.35

And elsewhere he elaborates: The capacity here meant is not merely intellectual development, or the possessions of this or that particular faculty; it is complex and profound fact, in which are comprised the spontaneous exercise of authority, the habitual position of man in society, the natural sense of the various interests which are to be settled – in a word, a certain ensemble of faculties, information, and acting powers, in which the whole man is comprehended, and

34 François Guizot, De la Démocratie en France (Bruxelles: Société typographique belge, 1849), 71–72. 35 François Guizot, The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), 61. It should be noted that the term “capacité” is similarily used by Guizot to refer not to any political or legal instance but actually to pedagogic competence. The 1833 Law Concerning Primary Education (commonly known as “Loi Guizot”) established a national test for teachers, the success in which would award the candidate a “brevet de capacité.”

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which determine his conduct and the use he will make of his power, much more safely than his mind alone could do.36

This definition, then, clearly does not mean an abstract measure of intelligence or an ability to perform intellectually under certain exercises and standard tests. Political capacity refers to a type of character, as a consistent way of conducting oneself in relation to others and in relation to society at large as well as a degree of adaptability; Guizot also does not believe that capacities are opposed to personal interests, but are often developed in the service of “egoist passions.”37 The reason why capacity is not a quantity that can be easily measured and quantified is because it does not exist in constant proportion across all social groups, societies, and historical periods; rather than a purely natural fact, capacity is then historically and socially determined, it is a “civilizational” rather than a natural trait.38 Being so, capacity cannot be measured in advance by any sort of test or exam, but is rather imputed to concrete and practical experience, to “the infinitely varied causes which influence the moral and intellectual development of men.”39 Accordingly, access to capacity “varies according to the relation of capacity and individuals with the affairs of society where they are exercised . . . its legitimate limit changes constantly due to material and moral development of society.”40 What is important for Guizot is not so much the particulars of personal character which is formed through the process of property accumulation, but rather its result at the aggregate level; it may very well be that “capacious” individuals would entirely lack it if separated from each other or transported to a different social context. As such, capacity cannot be separated by the specific role it fills under specific social conditions, and accordingly also cannot be learned or transmitted without tangible experience. The fact that capacity is disclosed in the process of practical experience is what allows for its application to the hugely diverse social conditions of modern society: the language of the 1831 suffrage bill stipulating the “adjunctions to capacity” confirms a long and diverse list of office holders,

36 François Guizot, Of Democracy in Modern Societies (London: Henry Hooper, 1838), 29. Pierre Rosanvallon notably defines Guizot’s concept of capacity as “social intelligence” (Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot, 103). 37 François Guizot, Soixante ans de l’histoire de France (Paris: Chez Ledoyen, 1849), 49. 38 François Guizot, General History of Civilization in Europe by François Pierre Guillaume Guizot (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1896), 14. 39 François Guizot, “Élections,” in Discours académiques: suivis des Discours prononcés pour la distribution des prix au concours général de l’université et devant diverses sociétés religieuses et de Trois essais de philosophie littéraire et politique (Paris: Didier, 1861), 107. 40 Ibid., 337.

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professional groups, property qualifications and other criteria, from military officers, lawyers, and physicians to wealthier individuals (in different proportions from one locality to the other).41 This attention to different population segments guaranteed not only a wider electoral base,42 but also a more significant representation of the variety of social interests and conditions. This position can also be seen in Guizot’s emphasis on property as an important qualifier for electoral right. In his theoretical system, property is not only an indicator of individual moral faculty but also indicates an individual’s ability to represent a diverse set of interests; property thus amounts to a signaling mechanism which is at once general and selective, flexible yet statistically valid.43 This is the reason why property became a principle which would guarantee a broad and diverse representation within the social elite. This is also the reason why Guizot’s attention to property as an indicator for elite formation is also a remedy for the other danger which lurks for representative government, that of excessive centralization. Despite being generally favorable in his view on the role of bureaucracy, Guizot was a critic of excessive and rampant administrative centralization, particularly in the way it was conducted under the French monarchy; in his historical works he draws analogies between the French and English cases, the latter of which is maintained as an example of pluralism and diversity and social systems as opposed to the French more monopolistic regime.44 As Guizot puts it in a letter to Charles de Rémusat, another important member of the Doctrinaire group, in the clearest words: It is useless to pretend to distribute political and moral life through a system of “administrative navigation” which originates solely from Paris. To trigger action, spontaneity, this is the condition of liberty. This is the only way to obtain the real influences that you need in order to govern. These influences exist here [in society] more than anywhere else; but they languish in obscurity and perish by inaction.45

Guizot and the Doctrinaires’ political program thus aims to remedy the problem of centralization by using the market as an agent of decentralization. Since property

41 Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot, 125–26. 42 The number of electors in the national population during the final years of the July Monarchy is estimated at around 240,000, not a trivial number in what was a nominal monarchy. It should also be stated that the Doctrinaire electoral scheme was far more inclusive than the bill that was eventually ratified. 43 Like it was for Benjamin Constant, the idea of probability was highly important for Guizot; cf. Rosanvallon, Le Moment Guizot, 122, esp. infra. 44 This is also discussed in Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege, 102–3. 45 François Guizot, Lettres de M. Guizot à sa famille et à ses amis, ed. Mme. de Witt (Paris: Hachette, 1884), 13. Translation from Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege, 165.

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in a modern capitalist economy is increasingly divided and distributed more equally, it means that access to property, and hence political right, could reach an almost universal point.46 The process of the division of property is what marks it as a dynamic and adaptable measure of personal merit; if Constant prioritizes durable landed property, Guizot’s model is centered on the accumulation of mobile and business property, and is generally very favorable to private interest as a source of motivation. This is apparent in his rhetoric and analytical style: in several places in his writings Guizot refers to property holders not only as an assortment of individuals but as a cohesive social force (he was one of the early adopters of the term “classe moyenne”).47 Guizot and the Doctrinaires thus regard the development of market society as much more fundamental to the emergence of social elites. Since the parcellation of property introduces a degree of differentiation between social categories (workers, investors, and so on), and since this process is spontaneous and (at least in grand historical perspective) universal, it means that it is the market society which institutes distinctions in the moral qualities of individuals. Guizot essentially reformulates Constant’s idea of a propertied gentry and rescues it from Constant’s nostalgic and somewhat ad hoc argumentation, thus creating a more coherent and systematic theory of a commercial elite. While Guizot and his group adopted much of the Constantian view on commercial society and its central part in the process of elite formation, Guizot also maintained a more positive assessment on the role of government vis-à-vis the emergence of elites. The propertied class, while emerging spontaneously and naturally from the operation of the market, requires the mediation of government in order to achieve political prominence. Similarly, a truly efficient modern government requires those classes in order to act rationally and efficiently. Guizot prescribes a long list of efforts to be undertaken by administrations in order to guarantee the efficient and frictionless functioning of society; Guizot indeed proposed a variety of means to promote this “scientific” authority, including, perhaps most prominently, the establishment of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques in 1832 which meant to promote the “union of the interests of the government with those of society.”48

46 Guizot, Democratie, 70. In one place in his Memoirs he remarks that “the doors of the spacious room occupied [by the bourgeoisie [in society are always wide open” (François Guizot. Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de mon temps, Vol. 6 [1858], 348–49). 47 Cf. François Guizot, Essai sur l’histoire et l’état actuel de l’Instruction publique en France (Bruxelles: Meline, 1846), 116. 48 François Guizot, “Ordonnance du Roi qui rétablit dans le sein de l’Institut royal de France l’ancienne Classe des sciences morales et politiques” (1832), in Académie des sciences morales

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Guizot, who is in general more wary of the danger of ambitious political agents, concludes by vindicating a form of government rationality and endorsing greater administrative centralization. The liberal theory Guizot – a thinker commonly seen as the main inspiration for the modern “government of minds [esprits],” – should also be seen as an attempt to rebut cesarism via a more robust form of rationalist bureaucracy.49 In such a way, Guizot proposes an extensive program which attributes a more elaborate place for the state in the development of commercial society, thus making the propertied elite a political and administrative objective.

1.3.2 Modern Democracy and Rational Government The novelty of Guizot’s program, and especially his elaboration on the role of the administrative state, can be attributed to the details of his underlying social theory. Guizot was one of the first thinkers to introduce and consistently apply the notion of the “social condition” (état social, at times translated as “social situation”), and he uses the concept to describe the way in which the material, social, and cultural circumstances affect individual minds and behavior during a given era.50 Guizot, who wrote in a different period than Constant and who

et politiques, Notices biographiques et bibliographiques (Paris, 1981), xv–xviii. A clear formulation of this idea can be found in Guizot’s Memoirs: “intelligence and science could never remain beyond the government of society. When we say government, we do not necessarily imply positiye and direct authority. Washington said, “influence is not government;” and in the sense of political order he was right. Influence there would not suffice. Direct and promptly effective action is necessary.” (Guizot, Memoirs to Illustrate, Vol. 3, 15–16). 49 A few words about Guizot as an educational reformer are in order here. Guizot, who served as an minister of public education in the 1830s, is responsible for one of the major educational overhauls up to that point, namely the Loi Guizot sur l’education of 1833, which instituted obligatory primary education throughout France. Guizot, in this law, anticipates the idea of elite cultivation through education (the theme of Third Republic liberalism), but does so in a way that remains staunchly within the context of early nineteenth-century liberal thought. Guizot’s educational thought, unlike Third Republic liberalism, does not generally see education as a means for assessing (or implanting) different qualities and virtues, but rather of implementing a general minimum of cognitive and intellectual capacity among the general population. For a relevant discussion see Maurice Gontard, “Guizot et l’education populaire,” in L’enseignement primaire en France:de la Révolution à la loi Guizot (1789–1833) (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1959), 40–62. 50 “Man is formed for society. Isolated and solitary, his reason would remain perfectly undeveloped. Against the total defeat of his destination for rational development God has provided by the domestic relations. Yet without a further extension of the social ties, man would still

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faced the immediate challenge of insurrectional popular democracy, identifies the novelty of the democratic regime, and especially its social and cultural ramifications. Democratic society, in Guizot’s view, is marked by a high degree of uniformity; democratic France in his view “resembles a great nation where people are found in a very similar legal condition . . . the classification of old societies has vanished.”51 As Guizot starkly notes, the domination of private interest in society in fact does not empower individuals but actually further exacerbates their subjection to rule of the masses. In his tract on capital punishment, Guizot advanced the view that our current era is marked by the complete and utter dominance of social forces, of society in general, over the individuals and institutions: Power has abandoned individuals, families; it has moved away from the homes it formerly occupied. It has spread throughout society: there it circulates rapidly, hardly visible in any specific place, but present everywhere. It attaches itself to public interests, ideas, feelings which no one person disposes of, which no one person even represents fully enough for their fate to depend for one moment on that of that person.52

The conclusion which Guizot draws from this analysis is clear: in the same way that the death penalty is rendered useless by the extension of universalization of power, so does the notion of personal agency loses its validity in the face of larger social aggregates. Although Guizot does go so far as to “efface” the individual from his system (a tendency that would be more prominent in the writings of Third Republic liberals), his rhetorical and analytical emphasis is on social and “environmental” circumstances rather than personal agency; this is what Guizot means when he writes about the “well-tried and freely accepted influences [which] constitute true and legitimate society among men.”53 “Influence” is the key term in Doctrinaire vocabulary which constitutes this notion.

remain comparatively rude and uncultivated – never emerging from barbarism. In proportion as the social relations are extended, regulated and perfected, man is softened, ameliorated, cultivated. To this improvement various social conditions combine; but as the political organization of society – the state – is that which first gives security and permanence to all the others, it holds the most important place.” (François Guizot, General History of Civilization in Europe by François Pierre Guillaume Guizot [New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1896], 4 infra). 51 Quoted in Rosanvallon, Moment Guizot, 78. 52 François Guizot, “De la peine de mort en matière politique,” in Mélanges politiques et historiques (1881), 11–12. 53 François Guizot, The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europ (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), 341.

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Before Tocqueville, and largely in agreement with Constant, Guizot thus viewed democracy not as any particular political regime but rather as a social system marked by uniformity and leveling: This common condition, this equality under the hand of God, is not the least powerful link uniting all individuals. It brings them toward one another and makes them one by experiencing the same feelings. It prevents them from isolating themselves . . . and constantly brings them together under similar laws and makes them feel that they are not very different and unlike each other . . . They are given the same laws and opportunities; common ideas, feelings, and interests gain ground, spread, and become stronger . . . Thus, on the one hand, many more individuals acquire a certain importance . . . ; on the other hand, all individuals are tightly intertwined.54

Like Constant, who sees the new social tie in modern society as one characterized by growing separation of individuals from political power, the relation between individuals and authorities is marked by “prodigious shifts which operate on it, restlessness which remains in it, the mobility of situations, the uncertainty of influences, the complexity of interests, the jealousy of despotism that wished to watch everything and to regulate everything”55 – all of those render the direct relation between political power and individuals difficult if not impossible. Guizot’s main problem, then, appears to be reformulation of the Constantian thesis of the alienation between individuals in the modern age. For Guizot, mass society does not only imply the primacy of the private sphere over the public, but also undermines the possibility of coordinated public action by individual political actors. This position is laid out further in a series of tracts concerning the “état d’esprits” in France. There Guizot characterizes the “new spirit of European nations” as a “spirit of ambition and inquietude”, a spirit which promotes flattery and appeal to the passions of the masses, instead of to public reason and the common good.56 It is by the need to arouse the emotions of the public by means of flattery that reasonable deliberation is eclipsed. It is in this context that Guizot’s proclamations against Napoleon should be viewed. Like Constant, Guizot was one of the most scathing critics of the Napoleonic regime; he described Bonaparte in the following words: “corrupt, he corrupted others; despotic, he subdued minds and debased consciences; all-powerful, he constantly made a bad use of his power. His glorious and

54 Guizot, Peine de mort, 26. Translation is taken from Craiutu, Liberalism under Siege, 107. 55 François Guizot, Des moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition dans l’état actuel de la France (Paris: L’advocat, 1821), 245. 56 François Guizot, “De la situation politique et de l’état des d’esprits en France en 1817,” in Mélanges politiques et historiques (1881), 89–90.

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bloodstained traces remained soiled not only by faults but by crimes.”57 If Constant portrays the Emperor, not without irony, as a deformed version of modern individualism, Guizot tends to take Bonaparte more seriously as a living emanation of an extremely fundamental drive in modern politics, that of the rule of the masses under conditions of equality. Guizot writes in his memoirs about the way in which Bonaparte was able to flatter or outright trick large masses of the French population through appealing to their imagination and to their strong, if vacuous and superficial, sense of tradition and belonging.58 Cesarism for Guizot is then not merely a result of personal ambition, a kind of bold and reckless adventurist drive, but actually arises from the new sociological dynamic of modernity itself, that of the crowd society. Guizot writes in his memoirs that “Napoleon was by far the most necessary for the times” in the way that he was in position to substitute order for anarchy and to control democratic passions.59 Guizot regards the Bonapartist spirit as casting a long shadow on French politics and society even after the disappearance of the Emperor. In his 1821 analysis of the political situation in France, he describes the way in which Bonaparte “made spectacle out of politics, and reduced us carefully to the simple role of spectators.”60 The Imperial system, which continues to persist in France, tends to prime the role of the masses in politics, in a way that destroys authentic virtue and places it with flattery and dissimulation; the masses, being incapable of genuine action “are never sufficient for themselves; their desires and designs must be represented by visible and important leaders, who march at their head and accept the responsibility of the means and end.”61 The phenomenon which the Napoleonic construction brings to the fore is the “sovereignty of the will,” the idea according to which “the will exists fully and entirely in everyone, and confers everyone an equal right.”62 Individual will is always arbitrary, frail, and inconsistent, and chronically exposed to external influences; the attempt to establish a political model on voluntary consent would necessarily lead to uninhibited mass society and to the ascendancy of cesarist individuals. Since modernity implies both equality and massification, it means 57 Translation from Sudhir Hazareesingh, “Napoleonic Memory in Nineteenth-Century France: The Making of a Liberal Legend,” MLN 120, no. 4, French Issue (Sept. 2005): 748. 58 Guizot writes, for example, about the way in which Napoleon was able to subdue the Revolutionary parties of Paris by invoking among them the “idea of forming themselves into a federation, as their fathers had done” (François Guizot, Memoirs to Illustrate the History of My Time, Vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1858), 70). 59 Ibid., 67. 60 Guizot, Des moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition (1821), 236. 61 Guizot, Memoirs, 228. 62 Quoted in Jaume, L’Individu effacé, 127.

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social selection fails to elevate truly eminent individuals, and instead produces political leaders prone to demagoguery and flattery. Guizot’s social theory thus considers a broad perspective on the transformation of democratic society: the appearance of the masses as a prominent social force under conditions of equality means that social action becomes more homogeneous, a development which itself implies a deterioration of political language and its inability to properly designate personal superiority. If formerly, in pre-democratic society, political tasks were awarded to the more capable, and ambition corresponded to merit, modern democratic equality has effectively undermined this and led to the appearance of mass individualism, and its matching authority figure, the daring but also despotic chef. Guizot’s proposition in terms of political program lies in the attempt to manage the new mass society according to rational ends, as opposed to the whims of individuals. The governmental scheme drawn by Guizot would replace the “sovereignty of will,” that is, of individuals and their discretionary power, with the “sovereignty of right,” that is, of abstract principles meant to monitor, select, and review population aggregates; the primacy of individualism is maintained, but is mostly used to indicate various social forces and conditions. This program is summed up in Guizot’s dictum about the nature of governing being the ability to “act on the masses and act through individuals.”63

63 Guizot, Des moyens de gouvernement et d’opposition (1821), 130. Charles de Rémusat, another member of the Doctrinaire circle, elaborated on the nature of democracy as a system of mœurs: “nowhere [than in places characterized by the democratic spirit] existence isn’t as facile, nowhere do mores have the same degree of uniformity: the deep division of opinions does not hold influence over private interactions . . . Persons extremely opposed to each other in terms of belief and party do not arrive at distinguishing themselves in terms of behavior and habits” (Charles de Rémusat, “Des Mœurs du temps,” in Passé et present, Vol. 1 [Paris: Libraire de Ladrange, 1847], 359). The sovereignty of the people is “a principle contrary, in the first place, to the fact of the inequality established by nature, between the powers and capacities of different individuals; secondly, to the fact of the inequality in capacity, occasioned by difference of position, a difference which exists everywhere, and which has its source in the natural inequality of men; thirdly, to the experience of the world, which has always seen the timid following the brave, the incompetent obeying the competent, – in one word, those who are naturally inferior recognising and submitting themselves to their natural superiors” (François Guizot, The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002], 61). The relation between equality and historical progress is quite ambiguous and is very different from that of Constant, which posits an increase in egalitarianism associated with social, technological, economic, etc., progress. Guizot’s idea of progress posits, generally, an increase in complexity and diversity, which may or may not be concomitant with equality.

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This perspective on modern society differs from that of Benjamin Constant not only in its conclusion but also in its nature. Guizot’s vision of society, as moved by large and abstract forces, is diametrically opposed to that of Constant, for whom the basic unit of society is always and everywhere the individual person, who is isolated but also distinctly autonomous. The fundamentally sociable nature of individuals means for Guizot that modern persons are highly susceptible to propaganda and demagoguery (especially at the aggregate level), a vulnerability which needs to be amended by a conscious and watchful government mechanism.64 Despite his ambitious program, his position as a political person and a reformist intellectual has largely been marked by failure and crisis. The Revolution in 1848 and especially the coup d’état of 1851 have been viewed in scholarship as related to or at least indirectly facilitated by the policies of Guizot under the July Monarchy, often seen as staunchly conservative and illegitimate. The merger of a commercial, bourgeois elite class with the exclusive managerial bureaucracy proved to be ill-suited in responding to the challenges of the mid-nineteenth century, especially the popular contestations which directly challenged the administrative state and transformed it into an agent of illiberal democracy. Guizot’s idea of liberal elites pursues that of Constant and extends on it in some important ways. Both thinkers regard the elites as automatically-forming units that emerge from society through a spontaneous process of differentiation, one that is rooted in the relations of property in a commercial society. Despite those fundamental similarities, Guizot’s idea of properties elites is more in vogue with the existing tendencies of modern capitalism: Constant’s perspective is influenced (and even limited) by the nostalgic appeal of a “replacement aristocracy,” characterized by the fixedness and stability granted by landed property. Guizot however maintains a more forward-looking approach, as his emphasis is on the dynamic and even disruptive nature of the rising professional and business class. This important distinction is joined by another one. Guizot regards the process of elite formation as much more embedded in the structures of the state; although Guizot does not go so far as to regard the state as actively involved in the process of elite formation (as would be the case under the Third Republic),

64 Guizot’s early pamphlet on conspiracies is highly telling in this respect. In Guizot’s view it is necessary to form a government body capable of infiltrating and dismantling (by judiciary means as well as by public discredit) any would-be subversive conspirator organizations. This is important not only for immediately practical reasons, but also to prevent the seeming of potential conspirational activity, that is, of secrecy (François Guizot, “Des conspirations et de la justice politique” (1821), in Mélanges politiques et historiques [Paris: Lévy frères., 1869], 131–71).

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the state is also not entirely absent from the process as it is in Constant’s account. While the intervention of political authority is still framed as reactive or “neutral” (to borrow Constant’s term), and consists largely of surveillance, data-collecting and so on, it is also not entirely passive, as per Constant’s proposition. Guizot’s main achievement in this context is the systematization and even modernization of the concept of the liberal elite and elite formation through property; Guizot reaffirms the notion of property accumulation as the central mechanism for the acquisition of personal capacity, while reinterpreting the notion of the elite as a sociologically coherent category which can be accurately traced and monitored. The emergence of the propertied elite is no longer a benign remnant of aristocratic mentality, but a central factor in the appearance of a dynamic market economy; its role is not so much to curtail personal ambition and suppress it in favor of virtuous sacrifice, but to manage ambition and to translate it into social progress and rationality.

1.4 Alexis de Tocqueville Like Benjamin Constant and François Guizot, Tocqueville was a high-profile political person: a member of the Chamber of Deputies under the July Monarchy, he devoted his life to discussing political issues and to identifying the potential ills of democratic society. Unlike both Constant and Guizot, whose writings he studied carefully, Tocqueville was a critic of democratic society in its mature and developed form, yet not in its rudimentary and unstable form. As such, he witnessed and carefully studied the effects of equality on both the collective and the individual spirit, and studied the way in which equality is not merely a formal legal principle or even a political principle, but directs the human mind in a more intimate and comprehensive manner. As a result, Tocqueville found mature democratic society to suffer from a fundamental inability to trace and locate individual virtue across social institutions, since normal social markers (including accumulation of wealth) cannot fill the same function of selection they do for Constant and for Guizot, and in fact may result in a plutocracy or oligarchy. In his major work La Démocratie en Amérique [Democracy in America] Tocqueville recognizes the fundamental ill of democratic society not as excessive individual ambition but actually as its opposite, excessive conformity. Tocqueville regarded the danger to a constitutional system not in its usurpation by prominent individuals, but in the rot of gradual centralization and in compliance on the part of the general population. A much more pessimistic writer than Constant and Guizot, Tocqueville did not lay out a complete program for the stabilization of democratic regimes, but rather pointed at the general direction which liberal

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thought should take; he proposed less reliance on the spontaneous social mechanisms of a self-governing society and more on the intentional design of institutions which would foster and cultivate personal virtue. Alexis de Tocqueville’s role in the history of French liberalism is thus a critical and even deconstructive one: as part of his discussion on the nature of democracy, he repudiated the idea of elite formation through economic institutions. Since economic competition in a mature democratic society no longer prizes personal virtue but rather enforces mediocrity, it means that the market and the accumulation of property can no longer support the elite formation. In order to amend this problem, Tocqueville suggests that it is up to government to actively pursue and maintain elite formation through support for various social institutions. Tocqueville’s thesis thus represents a revision of the early nineteenth-century idea of social elites in a way that introduces a larger degree of government intervention and warrants a more active public policy. In such a way, Tocqueville puts a spanner in the works of the aspiration to conduct liberal politics on a completely automatic basis, by purely constitutional or administrative means. The unique challenge of democratic egalitarianism, in Tocqueville’s view, cannot be subsumed under generic categories of faculties and capacities but requires a new language, which Tocqueville only rudimentarily sketches out. The author’s skeptical, even aporetic, conclusions mark him as a transitional figure in the intellectual history of French liberalism, who delivered the French liberal school from its “dogmatic slumber” by bracketing the role of spontaneous economic mechanisms and emphasizing that of political action in the formation of leadership.

1.4.1 Self-Interest, Materialism, and Institutions Due to the penetrating and insidious nature of equality in a mature democracy, social institutions lose their autonomous character and cease to fill the selective role they formerly did. Tocqueville describes the way in which certain institutions become permeated with the logic of equality to such a degree that they cannot serve for the purpose of elite formation. As emphasized by Tocqueville, economic competition loses its selective character, which means that private property no longer corresponds to various benign personal virtues in the way it did for previous liberal thinkers. Personal wealth, in other words, is no longer acquired through work ethic and diligence, but through various commercial skills that may or may not be attached to personal virtue. Both Constant and Guizot regarded commercial activity as somehow independent of the prevailing egalitarian tendency, as it is motivated by the ambition

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and private interest of individuals, thereby leading to the spontaneous differentiation of social and economic categories. Tocqueville in contrast attempts to demonstrate the way in which ambition itself is conditioned by the democratic spirit, in a manner which accordingly conditions all social institutions, including the economy, but also culture, arts, and education. As such, no independent social sphere can fill the role of selection and differentiation which earlier thinkers attribute to it. The mechanism which integrates individual desire and ambition into the egalitarian society is that of interest well understood. The idea of interest well understood, a somewhat tricky and ambiguous concept, articulates a type of moral behavior that is not directed at lofty goals, yet is sufficient in leading a man “toward the just and the honest.”65 Tocqueville refers to interest self understood often as a “doctrine,” or an axiomatic approach that finds expression in the common attitudes of life; in American democracy “it has been universally admitted; it has become popular; you find it at the bottom of all actions; it pokes through all discussions. You find it no less in the mouths of the poor than in those of the rich.”66 The doctrine of the interest well understood thus affects the desires of democratic individuals, in the way it attracts them to the “multitude of small enjoyments” as opposed to greater passions and ambitions.67 Those “charms of equality are felt at every moment, and they are within reach of all; the most noble hearts are not insensitive to them, and they are the delight of the most common souls. So the passion to which equality gives birth has to be at the very same time forceful and general.”68 What this form of morality begets is an extreme restraint in the faculties of imagination and the moderation of higher

65 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, A Bilingual French-English Edition (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010), 600. 66 Ibid., 920. This statement is followed by another one, not devoid of irony, in which Tocqueville remarks: “here I do not want to get into the details of their reasons [for the acceptance of the doctrine], which would take me away from my subject; it is enough for me to say that they have persuaded their fellow citizens” (ibid.). 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 876. Tocqueville describes at length the process in which individuals, despite not directly imitating each other (since no inherent value is to be found in any specific behavior), become more uniform and alike in their behavior and manners; he does so in one of his memorable phrases about how “travelers spread throughout a large forest in which all roads lead to the same point. If all see the central point at the same time and turn their steps in this direction, they come imperceptibly closer to one another, without seeking each other, without seeing each other, without knowing each other, and finally they will be surprised to see themselves gathered in the same place” (ibid., 1092).

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aspirations; “before innovating, [the democratic mind] is forced to accept certain primary givens, and to subject its boldest conceptions to certain forms that retard and stop it.”69 Even works of literature in a democracy undergo a kind of regularization which makes it “regulated and coordinated in advance.”70 The main problem with which Tocqueville comes to terms, in light of the tradition hereby presented, is not just that of “atomization,” or even the dominance of private interest, but rather the incapacity to assess the moral qualities of individuals in order to form a distinction between them based on their respective personal merits; therefore, the market mechanism is rendered irrelevant for the purpose of elite formation. Tocqueville’s remarks on the way in which democratic society organizes its educational system is very illuminating in this respect, especially in the way it regards this incapacity as internalized by these individuals themselves: By hatred of privilege and by overabundance of choices, you come to the point of forcing all men, whatever their size, to pass through the same channel, and you subject them all without distinction to a multitude of small preliminary exercises, in the middle of which their youth is lost and their imagination grows dim; so that they despair of ever being able to enjoy fully the advantages that you offer to them; and when they are finally able to do extraordinary things, they have lost the taste for them.71

This is how Tocqueville understands the democratic condition: not only is equality a political, legal, or even social status, but also a mental and cultural one. It permeates the deep consciousness of individuals and makes them ignorant of objective differences in quality, in performance and in faculties.72 This notion is made most clear in Tocqueville’s treatment of how competition is seen

69 Ibid., 474. 70 Ibid., 807. 71 Ibid., 1122–23. It is also demonstrated in Tocqueville’s treatment of the business class in Democracy in America, which, while remaining rather rudimentary, presents a view different from anything hitherto seen. Tocqueville famously saw the rise of the “aristocracy of money” which is “close to the aristocracy of birth in that it confers great privileges on a small number of citizens” (ibid., 1236–37). The entrepreneurs of industry however “are very numerous,” and due to the fact that property ceases to contain a kernel of superiority, are highly diverse class as well; “their interests differ; . . . so they cannot easily agree among themselves and combine their efforts” (ibid., 1026–27). As such, they clearly cannot form the backbone of liberal society in the same way the propertied class did for Constant and Guizot; indeed in a redacted note in the manuscript he adds his doubts concerning the perpetuity of this social class (ibid., 1286 infra). 72 This distinction, which contains an unmistakable Pascalian echo, indeed can be traced to Tocqueville’s own intense interest in the seventeenth-century philosopher, as argued meticulously and convincingly by Lucien Jaume (Jaume, Tocqueville: The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty, 160–91).

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in democratic societies. Competition is a strange concept in a democratic society: while being intense, it is also limited and mitigated in a way that prevents it from being a true marker of superiority; since it only allows for competition between individuals who are by definition equal and to an increasing degree similar: [democratic citizens] destroyed the annoying privileges of a few of their fellows; they encounter the competition of all. The boundary marker has changed form rather than place. When men are more or less similar and follow the same road, it is very difficult for any one of them to march quickly and cut through the uniform crowd that surrounds and crushes him.73

This has direct bearing on the ability of institutions to act as instances of elite formation. Since democratic egalitarian culture “encloses desires within rather narrow limits,” in his words, it means that ambitions in democratic societies are less qualitatively distinct; ambition is “more ardent and continuous but it cannot habitually aim very high; and life ordinarily is spent there ardently coveting small objects that you see within your reach.”74 Because passion is no longer directed at glory, it leaves “aristocratic” behavior without its relevant object, which is the recognition of their grandeur and of their personal merit. Democratic people might very well be endowed with personal virtue, and in fact even with extraordinary capabilities,75 but their mental discipline is what prevents them from acknowledging this superiority, or even externalizing it. In Tocqueville’s words, the egalitarian culture severs the link between social ability and moral superiority; “having become more or less similar, all see each other at very close range; and, not noticing in any one of them the signs of incontestable greatness and

73 Ibid., 945. See also Pierre Manent’s insightful commentary: “Competition among everyone is the natural effect of equality of conditions, but it is intolerable. In effect, individuals have an equal right to participate in the race. But if one at the starting line is richer, better trained, then the competition is not equal. Whatever the level of equality we end up with, we can always say, without risk of being wrong, that the competition isn’t ‘really’ equal, and that it is therefore necessary, before giving the signal that starts the race, to bring everyone down to the point of real equality, which will allow us to consider the competition finally as really equal” (Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy [Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996], 63). 74 Tocqueville, Democracy, 1120–21. 75 At least in one place he remarks that in the “general excitement” of great events such the American Revolutionary War, “superior men courted the people and the people, embracing them, placed them at their head”; although he concedes that as “such events are rare; judgment must be based on the ordinary course of things” (ibid., 318). In several of some omitted notes he also remarks that “moral authority no matter what you do must be found somewhere in the moral world. Its place is variable, but a place is necessary for it” (ibid., 720 infra).

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superiority, they are constantly brought back to their own reason as the most visible and nearest source of truth.”76 This egalitarian pressure immunizes democratic society against the incursion of cesarism in the style of Bonaparte or similar ambitious demagogues (while making it more vulnerable to bureaucratic centralization). Ambition, Tocqueville wrote (as noted above), is in a democratic society “ardent and continuous, but it cannot habitually aim very high.”77 Generally, Tocqueville is not particularly concerned about the danger of charismatic leaders in a mature democracy, since the democratic masses are not prone to demagoguery; because they are dispersed and are constantly in motion, democratic individuals are harder to both impress and to attract.78 This presentation is indeed paradoxical, as Tocqueville mentions that Americans are in fact avid risk-takers in the sphere of business: “industry is for it like a vast lottery in which a small number of men lose every day, but in which the State wins constantly; so such a people must see boldness with favor and honor it in matters of industry . . . The Americans, who make commercial temerity into a kind of virtue, cannot, in any case whatsoever, stigmatize those who are daring.”79 The problem is not that democratic people are timid, but that they do not tend to translate risk-taking (and particularly success in risky endeavors) to anything like natural superiority; this can be seen as the opposite side of their tendency to show such “singular indulgence” for businessmen who suffers a bankruptcy.80 Tocqueville even describes the process in which self-interest degenerates into what he calls “materialism.” Materialism is distinct from mere self-seeking, or even from hedonism; Tocqueville defines it as a unique form of obsessions toward “material enjoyments,” nothing less than a “sickness of the human mind.” This is not only a psychological or temperamental perversity, but also an intellectual one, as it “disposes men to believe that everything is only matter.”81 This poses a problem to Tocqueville since materialism debases human existence by

76 Ibid., 700–1. 77 Ibid., 1121. 78 It should be noted that Tocqueville is much more positive in his assessment of Napoleon than other liberal thinkers. While condemning the Emperor’s policies, especially his domestic policies, Tocqueville also lauds him by calling him “the most extraordinary being . . . who has appeared in the world for many centuries” (quoted in Marinus Richard Ringo Ossewaarde, Tocqueville’s Moral and Political Thought: New Liberalism [New York: Routledge Press, 2004], 64). It is this truly atavistic nature of Napoleon that allows Tocqueville to fully appreciate him as a person. 79 Tocqueville, Democracy, 1104. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., 958.

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eliminating other-worldly considerations: “Once they become accustomed to no longer being concerned about what must come after their life, you see them fall easily back into that complete and brutal indifference about the future that is only too suited to certain instincts of the human species.”82 The materialist disposition, together with the advancement of industry, might lead to a new kind of social elite. There is something quite paradoxical about this new elite, since, as mentioned earlier, the economic competition does not give rise to moral or intellectual superiority. As a result, while the industrial elite increases its wealth, power, and influence, it does not translate to any qualitatively different moral values; “industrial property does not augment its rights with its importance” in Tocqueville’s words.83 Furthermore, such a social class does not mitigate materialism and self-interest but actually thrives off those values and in turn sustains them; the economic elite, in other words, is actually concomitant with equality. The economic sphere thus loses the selective quality which the two earlier thinkers have attributed to it. Instead of imbuing them with distinct psychological capacities, or even allowing them to assert natural superiority, it becomes a mere exercise in pecuniary skill or even luck. Any misattribution of inherent virtue to the chance of the market is furthermore dangerous, as it would result in what Tocqueville terms the “aristocracy of industry”; this oligarchic class is founded on pure commercial and financial skill, and as thus entirely devoid of the virtue of past aristocracies and also of their potency, it is at once “one of the harshest that has appeared on the earth” and the least dangerous (and effective) one.84 Tocqueville is especially concerned about the political consequences of this transformation. His famous depiction of the new despotism to which modern democratic societies can succumb centers on the new corporatist arrangement in which the state, in cohort with the industrial class, takes control over an evergrowing part of the national economy; it is the rampant materialism which makes the population docile, as its purely material needs are being supplied by the benefactor sovereign. As Tocqueville writes: “I am not afraid to assert that the manifest tendency of all the sovereigns of our time is to undertake alone the execution of such [industrial] enterprises; in that way, they enclose populations each day within a more narrow dependence.”85 While the danger of bureaucratic centralization had been described already by previous thinkers, no writer had put forward a comprehensive and convincing account of this phenomenon as did

82 83 84 85

Ibid., 966. Ibid., 1234. Ibid., 985. Ibid., 1236.

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Tocqueville. In a chapter dedicated to “What Type of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear” he prognosticates the appearance of an “immense and tutelary power that alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyment and of looking after their fate.”86 Tocqueville then proceeds to describe the danger which lurks within democratic society from the coalescence of industrial and political interests. As we saw, the establishment of a tyranny through the organized effort of an ambitious individual is out of the question in a mature democracy; what concerns the author of Democracy in America is quite the opposite: a non-organized and nonorchestrated gradual degeneration into a kind of “soft despotism.” In this process, the industrial elite plays an important – and negative – role; Tocqueville describes the way in which the capitalist class exacerbates the centralizing pressure by relying on public funds to one extent or another: the “manufacturing aristocracy of today, after impoverishing and brutalizing the men it uses, delivers them in times of crisis to public charity to be fed.”87 In such a way, the functioning of the commercial mechanism may lead, in Tocqueville’s view, not to the establishment of a responsible social elite, but of a plutocracy or an oligarchy. The industrial elite is not endowed with any particular personal characteristics, but is simply an extension and a result of small, pecuniary, and hedonist interests. As such, this new capitalist class cannot fill the role of moderation of the democratic state or its rationalization, but only exacerbates the process of centralization through the fusion of corporate and state power. Tocqueville’s idea of “soft despotism” is thus the final, powerful, argument Tocqueville makes against the idea of elite formation via property.

1.4.2 The Reconstruction of Leadership in a Democratic Society As discussed above, Tocqueville’s account of mature democracy emphasizes the way in which its egalitarian pressure can devolve into similarity between individuals, in a way that undermines that ability of institutions (including the economic market) to serve as signals of personal capacity and virtue. Since social institutions cannot fill the selective role that was ascribed to them by earlier thinkers, Tocqueville proposes a way to complement those institutions by means of intentional political action and to amend their egalitarian structure.

86 Ibid., 1250. 87 Ibid., 984. Tocqueville’s indictment of industrial interests can be seen in the context of his critique of any other organized interest group, including the military and other institutions.

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In his discussion on associations he demonstrates the way in which private interest can provide the backdrop for political virtue, if sustained and carefully employed by the political class. In essence, what Tocqueville describes in his positive proposition is a way for government to actively engage in the process of elite formation without resorting to direct intervention, but through its support for various social institutions. The locus of Tocqueville’s reconstruction of leadership is to be found in his study of the American town (la commune, “township” in some translations). The town is part and parcel of society to such an extent that it is “a part of nature,” that “wherever men are gathered together, a town takes shape by itself.”88 The town is not a unique social form for democracy; in fact, Tocqueville explicitly compares them to the French communes at least in one place.89 In contrast with how the town came to degenerate under the old regime, after succumbing to administrative centralization, the American town is a hub of vitality and activity: “it is in the town, at the center of the ordinary relations of life, that the desire for esteem, the need for real interests, the taste for power and notice are focused.”90 The town provides the material infrastructure for civic associations. Those associations are famously defined by Tocqueville as the central institution that allows for constant and intense popular participation. Tocqueville discusses American associations in terms of a mediating instance; rather than augmenting the power of individuals they replace them: if Europeans “consider association as a powerful means of action,” Americans “seem to see it as the only means they have to act.”91 In a way, the ability to associate to such a degree is one of the prominent faculties of the democratic individual; association is embedded in their instincts to an almost natural degree, as Tocqueville demonstrates in more than one place.92 Like the town, however, the association does not have its direct roots in the democratic social order; rather, they have their origins in premodern, namely aristocratic social order. In aristocratic society the main promoter of the association is the aristocrat who is “the head of a permanent and compulsory association that is composed of all those who are dependent on him and who are made to cooperate in the execution of his plans”; this unique status is what allows

88 Ibid., 101. 89 Ibid., 156 infra. 90 Ibid., 112. 91 Ibid., 897. 92 “Men who live in democratic centuries have more need than others to be allowed to do things by themselves, and more than others, they sometimes need things to be done for them. That depends on circumstances” (ibid., 901–2).

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him to “carry out great enterprises.”93 As Tocqueville makes clear, associations represent a universal phenomenon which encompasses the entirety of democratic society, and not only a certain active segment of the propertied classes.94 Associations are thus not regarded as selective bodies, but rather as educational and even transformative institutions. The strength of the associations lies in their ability to collect together individuals (like in aristocratic society), but also to bring about transformation in their individual mentalities, which they do by bestowing them with a sense of moral responsibility.95 The association, then, is a type of corporation, but one that differs from its old regime counterpart: instead of grouping together common people under the leadership of prominent individuals (aristocrats), it brings together non-powerful individuals, and does so without empowering any of them individually. Tocqueville puts it in the following words: “associations, among democratic peoples, must take the place of the powerful individuals that equality of conditions has made disappear.”96 It is similarly clear that while distinct from business enterprises, the association is not entirely opposed to personal interest; the very motivation of associations can be either “civil” or “political,” but usually very concrete and immediate: some men have by chance a common interest in a certain affair. It concerns a commercial enterprise to direct, an industrial operation to conclude; they meet together and unite; in this way they become familiar little by little with association and when it becomes necessary to associate for a political end, they feel more inclined to attempt it and more capable of succeeding in doing so.97

While individuals who cooperate in an association may be motivated by immediate material interest, the actual end of the association itself is distinct from the interest of each member. In fact, Tocqueville suggests, participation in association can be

93 Ibid., 898. 94 As part of his own public engagement Tocqueville indeed advocated the creation and even state support for worker self-help associations and organizations (cf. Roger Boesche, Tocqueville’s Road Map: Methodology, Liberalism, Revolution, and Despotism [Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006], 200–1). 95 At the same time, Tocqueville throughout his exegesis on associations toys with the idea that the association has something of the irrational in it. Assembly within an association, while being a distinctly personal affair, is also not reducible to an expression of thought or interest; it is enthusiasm, or rather the “imagination of the crowd”, which transforms thought into action. This type of language betrays Tocqueville’s debt to both Constant and Guizot. 96 Ibid., 901. 97 Ibid., 912. Some commentators even go so far as to identify in this idea a vindication of economic interest and entrepreneurship (cf. Cyrille, “L’idée d’association chez Alexis de Tocqueville,” Cahiers d’économie Politique / Papers in Political Economy 1, no. 46 (2004): 45–65).

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costly in terms of time, effort, and even money; most of all, however, associations require mastery of what the author calls “the art of association”; people “cannot take part for long in those associations without discovering how you maintain order among a great number of men, and by what process you succeed in making them march, in agreement and methodically, toward the same goal.” This is not only a practical art, but also a moral one: individuals in the association “learn to submit their will to that of all the others, and to subordinate their particular efforts to common action, all things that are no less necessary to know in civil associations than in political associations.”98 The difference between market institutions and associative institutions lies in the transformational nature of the association. While it may be motivated by self-interest to some degree, the operation of the association promotes a distinct form of intentionality, one that suppresses the materialist and uniformizing drive that is endemic to modern democracy. In order to replace the role of prominent individuals who carry out the task of forming associations, Tocqueville suggests that it is democratic government itself that should encourage this process, calling, in one of the earliest parts of Democracy in America, upon the statesmen: To instruct democracy, to revive its beliefs if possible, to purify its mores, to regulate its movements, to substitute little by little the science of public affairs for its inexperience, knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to times and places; to modify it according to circumstances and men; such is the first of duties imposed today on those who lead society.99

Tocqueville pursues this discussion in a chapter entitled “How, in Times of Equality and Doubt, It is Important to Push Back the Goal of Human Actions.”100 He delineates the goal of government as to pursue larger social goals, which would mitigate the nefarious effects of materialism and egoism. Tocqueville specifically regards this aspect under a particular psychological angle: “at all times it is important that those who govern nations conduct themselves with a view toward the future . . . Above all they must try hard to banish chance, as much as possible, from the political world.”101

98 Ibid., 913–14. This is also apparent in Tocqueville’s idea of association which binds the existence of civil associations with printed media. This link indicates that associations (at least of the more durable type) are motivated not only by interest but also by something like common opinion: as he says, “a newspaper not only has the effect of suggesting the same plan to a large number of men; it provides them with the means to carry out in common the plans that they would have conceived by themselves” (ibid., 907). 99 De Tocqueville, Democracy, 16. 100 Ibid., 965. 101 Ibid., 967.

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Tocqueville’s discussion on associations contains a chapter (unpublished in the 1840 edition) on “the Manner in Which American Governments Act toward Associations.” There he remarks on the innate difficulty of forming associations in democratic countries; that while “in aristocratic countries the State can rely on individuals and associations for everything. In democratic countries it cannot do the same.”102 The author then describes the stakes of government intervention in this domain: political authority must aim for the nourishment of associations; it should support them actively, by encouraging them and even by enlisting them for the undertaking of public works, but at the same time shouldn’t overstep its boundaries and suppress individual initiative. The challenge is described by Tocqueville in terms of a delicate balance between the materialism which largely leads economic and social life in democracy and the supplementary spiritual value that allows it to propose a degree of stability and continuity in political affairs. This proposition is formulated in terms of prudence and proportionality, as “the greatest art of government in democratic countries consists in clearly distinguishing the circumstances and acting according to how circumstances lead it.”103 Tocqueville’s suggestion can be summarized in the following way: government should find a way to tap into the latent sources of collaboration and noninterested behavior, as part of the “art of association.” The association, which has its roots in the natural community of the town, is bestowed with its valuable educational function by virtue of the careful and intentional intervention on the part of political authority.104 While Tocqueville is not very specific about the role he attributes to authority, it is clear that his effort is not reducible to mere political-economic maneuvers; it also consists of the production of social meaning and symbols, of reawakening the power of imagination that is dormant in the democratic social condition. In this sense, it supplements the inability of democratic society to govern itself, in the sense of consciously setting goals for itself, with appropriately-balanced and prudent political leadership.105 In essence, what Tocqueville describes is the penetration of the egalitarian logic into the

102 Ibid., 904. 103 Ibid.. 104 Pierre Manent, in his important commentary, suggests that this process can be understood as the constant and perpetual process in which the state of nature of nature is suspended by means of political action, cf. Manent, Tocqueville, 26–27. 105 One commentator, who follows closely Tocqueville’s memoirs, finds that his proposition to the statesman is centered on the mission to generate citizens who can “rely on themselves, be adventurous and adapted for unpremidated actions” (Ossewaarde, Tocqueville’s Moral and Political Thought, 65).

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sphere of economic exchange and competition. In order to generate a social category that would be endowed with political capacities it is necessary to create institutions that would be insulated from the materialist pressure and would lead individuals to acquire those characteristics in other ways.

1.5 Conclusion This chapter analyzed the ways in which the prominent thinkers of the early nineteenth century have treated the question of leadership in a democratic society. Benjamin Constant, François Guizot, and Alexis de Tocqueville, who worked during the “golden age” of French liberalism in the beginning of the nineteenth century, framed their critique of democracy in the context of its social and even cultural aspects. For all of these thinkers democracy is not only a political system, but also indicates a type of social structure involving a tendency towards atomism and uniformization; in accordance with their critique, their prescribed model involves not only constitutional and structural measures, but also a social doctrine which meant to mitigate those cultural influences. As part of their outlook, those thinkers analyzed the different political developments which marked the instabilities of post-Revolutionary France as corresponding with this cultural gradient; the two earlier thinkers, Constant and Guizot, tie their critique with the Napoleonic phenomenon and the collapse of parliamentary regime under the pressure of ambitious demagogues. In order to defend the moderate constitutional regime from this imminent danger, the two promoted the cultivation of a propertied middle class that would act as both formal and informal check upon the actions of government, and would mitigate the uniformizing influence of democratic culture. This elite class, composed of prominent individuals, would be recruited through the mechanism of economic exchange in a capitalist society; both programs stress the notion of the market as a selective instance which forms the elite category in a spontaneous manner, that is, without any interference on the part of government. The details of the respective programs of Constant and Guizot are somewhat different: Constant has a preference for durable landed property, while Guizot opts for mobile commercial and intellectual property. Furthermore, while Constant regards the propertied elite as largely an oppositional force opposed to government, Guizot aims for a more constructive integration of the middle class with the state, and invokes a government apparatus meant to guarantee the proper functioning of the market mechanism and to suppress nefarious influences in society. Despite those differences, however, the two are confident in their belief in the self-regulating process of the economy and

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the direct correlation between material and moral prominence. In both of these doctrines what is at stake is the tracing of the ambition and energy which may find their way to dangerous incitement, and its stabilization within a salutary social-economic activity. In terms of historical context, the propositions of both Constant and Guizot can be seen as inspired by the electoral model of the early Revolutionary period, which granted electoral powers to property-owning men. The model of censitary suffrage, advocated most famously by Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès and instituted in 1791 (and again in 1795), was founded on the understanding of electoral power as a “function” rather than as a right per se. In order to be truly universal, representation must be exercised by those endowed by nature with faculties of reason and deliberation, whose number would gradually increase due to the natural progress of civilization.106 The liberal thinkers of the post-Napoleonic period, who sought to amend rather than to reject the Revolutionary doctrine, adopted a similar conception of society as at once elitary and progressive. The number of eligible voters would indeed nearly triple within the 30 years of the constitutional monarchy: from 89,000 in the Restoration to about 241,000 in 1846, which encompassed about five per cent out of a total population. The promise of general (“quasiuniversal” in the contemporary term) suffrage was seen as achievable, even if slowly, by virtue of civilizational and economic development. Equality and liberty were to be attained by means of the triad property-representation-progress. This vision would begin to shift with Tocqueville. In Tocqueville’s analysis of mature democracy he would change the focus of the debate: it would no longer be the danger of ambitious and reckless individuals who require the stabilizing mechanism of the elites, but rather the chronic lack of ambition of mature democratic culture. The problem of such democratic systems is not their collapse due to rabid demagoguery, but rather the lethargic and hedonistic strands which may lead to the overwhelming growth of centralized bureaucracy. The economic mechanism, far from forming capable individuals, actually exacerbates the egalitarian tendency by replacing salutary emulation with consumerist indulgence, and the elite category with a moneyed oligarchy. Since the economic sphere can no longer act as an instance of elite formation, it is up to other institutions to pick up that function. Tocqueville is generally not very explicit about the way in which the egalitarian tendencies can be mitigated, but he does propose a few general comments about the institutions that could be used for this purpose. Tocqueville points to associations that are

106 See Rosanvallon, Le Sacré du citoyen, 45–69.

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bodies founded upon spontaneous as well as constructed elements, and which act as the locus of political formation. He invokes, in almost spiritual terms, the responsibility of statesmen to actively undertake the educational process and to combat the drift towards egalitarianism and atomism. Tocqueville’s contribution to liberal theory lies largely in the way in which he deconstructs that optimist vision of history. In his analysis of mature democracy he rejects the relation between the emerging egalitarian culture and the extension of enlightenment. Even if objective progress exists in a democracy, this does not reflect in the mode of operation of social institutions. In such a way, Tocqueville’s analysis of mature democracy demolishes the main creed of earlier thinkers, namely their belief in the redeeming qualities of spontaneous order. In place of economic spontaneity, Tocqueville introduces a measure of intentionality into the liberal order: since individuals can no longer incur virtue by means of economic and other forms of regular social behavior, the state must take it upon itself to lead individuals to virtue: not by transforming them or through moral education, but indirectly, by supporting institutions that could act as conductors of important civic traits. Legislators and officials, in Tocqueville’s proposition, should not trust blindly in self-regulating efforts of markets and other such institutions, but should direct their efforts at identifying the various ways in which social forces operate in society and by finding a way to ingrain a portion of individuals with political virtue. Despite the heterodox (and somewhat vague) nature of Tocqueville’s program, he would prove to be the link between the liberalism of the early nineteenth century and the later type which would emerge in the final third of the century, especially in the context of the Third Republic. Those later liberal thinkers would adopt Tocqueville’s rejection of the notion of the spontaneous emergence of elites, as well as his emphasis on intentional instruction of individuals (understood by them literally as a scholastic process), and would integrate it in their model, by advocating much larger and more intentional government intervention into the process of elite formation.

2 French Liberalism after 1870: Spontaneity Amended 2.1 Introduction The paradigm of French liberal ideas saw a shift during the final third of the nineteenth century. The political ideas, while repeating some of the basic critique regarding the nature of democracy and modern society, contain a more skeptical shade vis-à-vis the notion of public, universal reason which had characterized the thought of the authors of the earlier period. While the liberalism of the July Monarchy saw the democratic republic, for the most part, as an incomplete institution, whose faulty nature lay in its incompatibility with other institutions of society at large, the later thinkers expanded their critique to a castigation of the republican idea as such, as emanating from the excesses of the reckless philosophy of the Enlightenment and its political application. This more pessimistic tone can be read in the context of the political developments of the time. The defeat of the Franco-Prussian War shook the self-confidence of the French nation, and its faith in its institutions, from the political to the academic; it has been a widespread assumption that it was the “principles of ‘89” which led the country “to waste its forces, to neglect its proper conservation, to lose itself.”1 In Claude Digeon’s analysis in his classic work on the “German crisis of French thought” it was in particular the “generation of 1850” (those born in the 1820s who became involved in public matters around that decade) that expressed an anti-republican sentiment, identifying the instauration of the Third Republic with the military defeat with the revolutionary Commune; the sense of national defeat was channeled into an inspiration to a scientific and educational reform.2 The following section will analyze the ideas of two thinkers who were profoundly influenced by this spirit and who came to be associated with the liberal school (despite not using this label themselves). Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan, who were two of the most influential intellectuals of the final third of the nineteenth century, can be seen as marking the transition from earlier liberal thought to the more doctrinal and pessimistic thinkers of the twentieth

1 Claude Digeon, La Crise allemande de la pensée française: (1870–1914) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 537. 2 Ibid., 178–79. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110680348-003

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century.3 While Taine and Renan were not systematic political theorists (and were not as consistently engaged in political affairs as the earlier authors had been), they have left a substantial corpus of writings on the subject. For both Taine and Renan, the main question was how to provide a stable means of political leadership in a highly advanced modern society. Their respective solutions to this problem, while borrowing from different sources and ideals, share the same underlying concern: how to form a new social class endowed with a unique type of conscience and knowledge, which could face the challenges of modern politics. Both thinkers, who prioritized science and learning as the necessary faculties in the establishment of such a “new aristocracy,” borrowed a page from earlier thinkers, especially Tocqueville, in their treatment of society as essentially an object to be tamed and brought to heel. While their overall political position still lay within the liberal horizon (in terms of opposition to state-controlled education, for example), their theoretical stakes are significantly more cautious, and even outright cynical, with respect to the ability of society to govern itself consciously (true especially for Taine). Accordingly, for both thinkers, democracy represents a fundamental problem in the same way it did for Tocqueville. Similarly to Tocqueville, Taine and Renan downplay the danger which lurks for the democratic order from the direction of charismatic leaders such as Napoleon; what they address, rather, is the possibility of the bureaucratic incrustation of society at the hands of the state. Both thinkers, being proponents of functionalist and even determinist (especially in Taine’s case) doctrines of social action, tend to downplay the role of individual voluntary agency in favor of larger structures; accordingly, it is not Napoleonic incursion which poses the threat to stable political order as much as bureaucratic and legalistic hypertrophy. The constant paradox which they draw, following

3 Unlike the trio of Constant-Guizot-Tocqueville, whose place in the canon of liberal political thought is safe and sound, Renan and Taine’s designation as liberal is less consensual. Both Renan and Taine are seen at times as hopelessly authoritarian or traditionalist, and even as precursors of the traditionalist right wing of Charles Maurras and the Action française (an association which is not false, yet is highly exaggerated). Regardless of certain biographical and historical facts (Renan took to the podiums in 1869 and on as a candidate of the liberal opposition; Taine’s support of the nascent Sciences Po was seen as a similarly reformist move), both authors largely shared the same concerns as earlier thinkers, from the dominance of the state in civil life to the dilemmas of democratic representation. Two important works which try to square the various aspects of those thinkers’ respective thoughts are: Eric Gasparini, La Pensée politique d’Hippolyte Taine; Edouard Richard, Ernest Renan; see also Pierre Rosanvallon, “Renan, père fondateur de la République ?”; La lettre du Collège de France, 35.| décembre 2013 – a slightly different view on Renan’s political engagement which emphasizes its pro-Republican qualities.

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Tocqueville, is that even voluntary acts are in fact determined by social forces, and as such do nothing but exacerbate the bureaucratic tendency. This largely Tocquevillian analysis also reflects Taine’s and Renan’s propositions with regards to the means of moderating the democratic system. Unlike the thinkers of the early nineteenth century, the thinkers of the Third Republic do not trust the spontaneity of market to yield the personal traits relevant to elite formation. Instead, they opt for a more active approach on the part of government; both Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan’s respective political models support the deliberate reinforcement, encouragement, and even establishment of institutions which would be capable of producing individuals of merit and capacity. For those authors, the main locus of this process is not the economy but rather education; this point, which had been sketched previously by Tocqueville, is heavily modified and elaborated by Taine and Renan, and marks their originality and particular character as an intellectual tendency. Both thinkers endorse the establishment of a national education system which would play a decisive role in the formation of young people’s minds in order to integrate them into the new social elites.4 An important element in the liberal thought of the Third Republic is the highly structuralist and impersonal nature of their critique. Pursuing the same theoretical route as Guizot and Tocqueville, but to a much higher degree, they did not regard the problem of democratic culture as one of character, but as one of social structure. Intentionalist elements, be they reckless ambition à la Bonaparte or the shrewd prudence of the entrepreneur, are usually explained by them in terms of grand structures and complex influences: historical, social, and psychological. Practically, what this aggregate view entailed was the embrace of active administrative means to sustain, reform, and if needed, overhaul institutions for the purpose of liberal elite formation. This typically administrative view can be explained (at least partially) by the historical-intellectual context of the mid-late nineteenth century. The thinkers of the Third Republic discussed here were in many ways a product of the period following the events of 1848, and more so of the emerging Second Empire (1852). As opposed to the thinkers of the earlier generation, they did not reach intellectual maturity during the tumultuous Revolutionary Republic or the first Napoleonic Empire, but rather enjoyed the relative stability and technological, economic, and

4 An important emphasis on education has been featured in the writings of previous thinkers, especially François Guizot. While some influence is certainly attributed to Guizot (and to associated thinkers, such as Victor Cousin), the underlying notion of using education in order to influence elite formation directly is more typical of Third Republic thought, while for Guizot et al. the function of education was generally peripheral to the central edifice, that of commercial society and the spontaneous development of capacities.

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civilizational progress of the Second Empire. The experience of cesarism did not indicate for them wars of conquest and usurpation, but rather a more “normal” regime, one marked by social, economic, and urban reforms; the arbitrary nature of the executive was concealed, largely successfully, under the guise of the régime administratif.5 This trend largely continued after 1871. The Third Republic, while often viewed historically as representing the triumph of radical and anti-clerical principles, was also considered by many at the time to be the embodiment of a bureaucratic state; while the banner of modernization and administrative and economic efficacy was flying high, “the theme of decentralization disappeared almost entirely from public debate” during the first decades of the Third Republic.6 This was in contrast with the leading thought of the July Monarchy as well as that of the Second Empire, which made out of decentralization and regional autonomy “a vector of limitation of the power of administration.”7 The centralization of the early Third Republic – a “balanced democracy” as it came to be known – was notorious: it was only in 1901 when a law officially sanctioning associations was passed, finally marking the advance of civil society.8 At the intellectual level, the coexistence between the guarantees of political liberties – enshrined in the constitution of 1875 – with a centralized administration challenged and transformed one of the main creeds of early-century political thought, namely the opposition between large and active government and personal freedom. The French social and political thought of the era was marked by increasing rejection of the idea of individual autonomy and especially of that of a nominally independent “civil society” as a neutral sphere free of political and administrative influence. The relation between government and society was reconsidered, a development which was achieved to a large part by the development of the social sciences and the scientific methodology. In such a way, the political ideas of the Third Republic were filtered through the mature and developed social sciences and psychology, which emphasized

5 As has been noted by some historians, the social composition of the administration also indicated the growing integration of “new classes,” in particular the rising commercial bourgeoisie, in the state power, as well as the growth of a modern administrative elite, one characterized less by status and more by competence (cf. Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 79–83). 6 Pierre Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 227. 7 Pierre Rosanvallon, La Légitimité démocratique: Impartialité, réflexivité, proximité (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 79. 8 Pierre Rosanvallon, La Démocratie inachevée. Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 230–35.

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the rigid structures along which society operates, for the most part at the unconscious level. It was especially the historical and political role played by the ideas of Auguste Comte that had contributed to this tendency: the contribution of Comte’s doctrine, which has been interpreted in light of its impact on reactionary or counterrevolutionary doctrines,9 had been similarly influential on the development of liberal political thought in France, and especially on the thinking of Taine and Renan. The influence of Comte’s philosophy on liberal thinkers of the late nineteenth century was particularly strong in the way it affected their understanding of spontaneity, and in particular its relations with the formation of character. Comte’s view of spontaneity is complex: while he accords spontaneous behavior a crucial role in all of human development, he tends to identify it especially with the least complex form of human thought, which he associates with the theological stage, in which knowledge of the world is gathered more or less intuitively.10 The positive (or positivist) stage, being the highest stage of scientific knowledge, is characterized by a kind of qualified spontaneity, in which spontaneity is tamed and harnessed in favor of “the religion of humanity,” even if it is not suppressed in its interpersonal and emotive level. This is illustrated in Comte’s dictum: “love leads us first to faith, as long as the spontaneous growth continues. But when it becomes systematic, one builds faith to regulate love.”11 Borrowing some of the important positivist notions on historical development, the liberal thinkers of the Third Republic adopted a peculiar view on spontaneous social behavior, as an activity which is a response to given circumstances rather than irreducibly autonomous; it becomes synonymous with “instinct” or the “unconscious.” Spontaneity, in its most basic understanding as unpremeditated and unplanned activity, still exists (and in fact plays a more important analytic role12), but its relative and conditional nature means it can

9 Cf. John Laffey, “Auguste Comte: Prophet of Reconciliation and Reaction,” Science & Society 29, no. 1 (Winter, 1965): 44–65. 10 A general examination of Comte’s philosophy lies outside the scope of this study; it should be mentioned that Comte divided the historical progression of mankind into three dominant stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive. The historical dynamic he describes is not only a complexification of social relations, but also movement from coercive forms of social arrangement to a voluntary one, while simultaneously a movement from unitary conceptions of the universe to growing scientific diversification. 11 Auguste Comte, Catéchisme positiviste (Paris: Flammarion, 1966), 152. 12 Interestingly, the very term “spontaneous” is almost inexistent in the writings of early nineteenth-century political theorists, and becomes ever more present with the rise of positivism. The locution “ordre spontané” originates in Auguste Comte’s 1830 Cours de philosophie positive.

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no longer be the locus of human development and improvement. Spontaneous collective behavior, now explained under much more causal and deterministic terms (as opposed to the probabilism which characterized the thinkers of the early 1800s), can no longer be trusted to regulate itself. The positivist influence was even more prominent with regards to the propositions of post-1870 thinkers. Comte’s emphasis on education and on the hierarchical nature of scientific pedagogy was similarly received and adopted by the positivistinspired liberals, although not necessarily explicitly.13 In Comte’s view, the scientific stage is supported by a vast array of institutions, from the most “organic” ones such as families and the domestic sphere to the more “systematic” and “spiritual” institutions, including that of scientific pedagogy and learning; this however may not necessarily include academia is as it is currently (mid-nineteenth century) found in Europe, due to its confused and disorganized nature.14 This development was apparent in the impact it had left on ideas of policy, in particular educational policy. The Third Republic, more than any other political regime in France since 1789, is known for its extensive educational reforms, especially under the Ferry Laws of the early 1880s which instituted obligatory primary education throughout the Republic. The expansion of the education system is often regarded as the means for creating a national “mandarinate” to support and facilitate the policy goals, as well as the fundamental identity of the new republican regime.15 Science and education became instrumental to the formation of national consciousness and to the achievement of political and social stability. It is this intellectual background which influenced dramatically the appearance of liberal thought under the Third Republic, and is largely responsible to its unusual nuances. The emphasis by both Taine and Renan on education as a method for elite formation was no mere practical contingency, but was determined

13 See the following article on Taine’s very ambivalent, even lukewarm, reception of the relevant parts of Comte’s philosophy: Jean-Thomas Nordmann, “Taine et le positivism,” Romantisme 8, no. 21 (1978): 21–33. 14 Auguste Comte, Système de politique positive; ou, Traité de sociologie, instituant la religion de l’humanité (Paris, Carilian-Goeury, 1851); see especially the second part of Destination sociale du positivisme, 59–127. 15 A now-classical work detailing the role of education in the construction and dissemination of national identity, especially in concurrence with other formative institutions, is Mona Ozouf, L’École, l’Église et la République, 1871–1914 (Paris: Editions de Cana, 1982). For an account centered on how formal education came to be an indicator of merit in Third Republic France see Christophe Charle, Les élites de la République, 1880–1900 (Paris: Fayard, 1987), especially chapter II: “Sélection sociale et sélection scolaire”; for a more long-term view on the cultural nature of the project see Christophe Charle, La République des universitaires: 1870–1940 (Paris: Seuil, 1994).

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by the hugely influential ideas of Comte and other positivists regarding the primacy of science in society and its indispensable political role. Since science and education, as social institutions, are characterized by a sui generis hierarchical structure, they were seen to offer the best option for combating and abating the drift toward egalitarianism and materialism.

2.2 Hippolyte Taine Taine, a career academic and a “normalien,” who unlike the authors of the earlier period had never held public office, endorsed a much more extensive and analytic scientific methodology in the construction of his political thought. Taine’s central motivation was in reaction to the various developments of the Third Republic; he elaborated a comprehensive theory of human nature and the way it is intrinsically tied with the development of the modern democratic state. It is precisely through his insistence on a causal and highly deterministic view of human behavior that Taine came to recognize the faults in the spontaneous mechanism of society, which could be amended using deliberate policy in matters of education and administration. Taine inaugurated the post-Tocquevillian liberal school in France mainly by his revisionist thesis on the Old Regime and the Revolution. In his magisterial works on the origins of modern France he draws a picture of historical development that is highly deterministic: democratic society is the direct result of a huge and unceasing sprawl and advance of the modern bureaucratic state, a type of institution which even disruptive events such as revolutions and coup d’états serve to promote directly or inadvertently. Borrowing many aspects of Tocqueville’s analysis, he regarded the great threat to human freedom to be that of increasing uniformity and bureaucratization, which he saw as emanating from the particular social circumstances of democracy. Since this social process is marked by increasing uniformity in all domains of life, and since Taine, as part of his methodology, regarded individual behavior as unequivocally determined by social and environmental factors, spontaneous elite formation similarly would find itself at a crisis. To replace those spontaneous bodies, Taine proposed to amend them with constructed institutions, namely scholarly ones, which would substitute educational elite formation for the previously spontaneous ones. Taine’s commitment can thus be seen as a combination of the political and social aspects of the positivist doctrine with a certain version of the spontaneous order thesis, a synthesis in which both intellectual schools mitigate each other’s faults.

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2.2.1 The Breakdown of Spontaneous Institutions Taine’s fundamental critique of democracy can be seen as a reiteration and elaboration of the Tocquevillian theme of the egalitarian social condition. Armed with scientific methodology, Taine set out to analyze the way in which democracy affects social institutions. For Taine, the democratic transformation is an irreversible process which leads to the disappearance of elite institutions (primarily local and traditional ones). Devoid of those roles, society is led to greater political and administrative centralization which in itself is an irreversible process. Although Taine does not direct his critique overtly at the thinkers of the early nineteenth century and the idea of a commercial elite class, his analytic exegesis does undermine the bulk of their presuppositions and recommendation, and usher in a new stage in the development of liberal thought. The central characteristic of Taine’s thought is his attempt to found a social theory based on something approaching a purely materialist conception of man and society (which he developed as an explicit rebuttal of the spiritualism of Victor Cousin). In his earlier work, On Intelligence, Taine draws a complex and intricate portrait of the human mind and the human person in action; there, Taine takes a radically critical position regarding the essential components of the self, a mere “verbal entity and metaphysical phantom.”16 Taine thus dismantles the notion of the autonomously-constituted subject by reducing it to a series of environmental influences. Those external impressions are listed by Taine as his famous triangular notion of “race, milieu, moment,” which he introduces in his study on English literature, a tripartite distinction of factors which influence and largely determine human behavior in the social realm, including intellectual production.17 The details of Taine’s exact system are less of importance for the sake of this study; what matters here is the way in which Taine disqualifies the existence of any authentic moral capacity on the part of individuals. Since human behavior is almost naturally determined by those external factors, it renders ethics, for better or for worse, as nothing but a byproducts of functional processes; in his words: “vice and virtue are products just as much as vitriol and sugar.”18 Taine is thoroughly suspicious of most notions of spontaneous human improvement – political or otherwise. As part of his scientific methodology, he tends to regard the social condition as entirely determined, as a more or less

16 Hippolyte Taine, De l’Intelligence (Paris: Hachette, 1870), 378. 17 Hippolyte Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise, Vol. 1 (Paris: Hachette, 1866), xxiii. 18 Ibid., xv.

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fixed form in which human relations operate. While Taine makes use of a notion of human character and personality, this notion is largely hinged upon a large aggregate of social, environmental, and historical factors, some of which can be and are subject to manipulation by political power. Taine’s major political-historical work, his great pentalogy Origines de la France contemporaine [The Origins of Contemporary France], revolves around explaining the development of modern French society and politics, with emphasis on the eighteenth century and the Revolutionary period. Much like Tocqueville and Guizot, he finds the origins of 1789 in the structure of the ancien régime, and in particular in the social metamorphosis which took place in that era, that is, in the elimination of various corps intermédiaires by the power of the centralized state. Taine, however, supplements this view with a caustic analysis of the leading philosophy of the Revolution as well as the psychology of its dramatis personae. This analysis marks the new type of critique ushered in by Third Republic thinkers, which features a more structuralist and determinist understanding of democracy, which cannot be salvaged by spontaneous mechanisms. Taine’s Tocquevillianism is also apparent in those writings, which revolve around the fate of the ancient regime in France and its replacement by a republic and an empire. Like Tocqueville, he explains the transformation in terms of the decay of the old aristocracy, which lost its original position of leadership, lost its respective salutary traits, and soon fell from power. Taine is more positive in his assessment of the nobility, identifying it with the “powerful ties that nourish public spirit in them” and with the commitment to duty and service.19 The old aristocracy, at its best, was a body seen as a “benefactor, conservator at this time [a] capable of fighting, of defending others.”20 For him, the long process of centralization, beginning with the Bourbon monarchy (though it has its origins earlier) annihilated the basis which previously supported the formation of capable individuals as part of an institutionalized elite class. The aristocracy fulfilled a service role due to the immediate and direct relation it had with the common folk: [I]f the aristocrat governs it is through influence and not by virtue of a command. Proprietor and patron, he is held in respect. Lord-lieutenant, officer in the militia, administrator, justice, he is visibly useful . . . and, above all, he lives at home, from father to son; he belongs to the district. He is in hereditary and constant relation with the local public through his occupations and through his pleasures, through the chase and caring

19 Hippolyte Taine, The Origins of Contemporary France, Vol. 1: The Ancient Regime (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890), 1230. 20 Ibid., 1108.

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for the poor, through his farmers whom he admits at his table, and through his neighbors whom he meets in committee or in the vestry.21

As a social institution, the aristocracy was not only a political function but also played a profound role in the stabilization of society. It is by virtue of his role as a “captain in his district and a permanent gendarme” that privileges are bestowed upon him, as he becomes “the resident and beneficent proprietor, the voluntary promoter of useful undertakings, obligatory guardian of the poor, the gratuitous administrator and judge of the canton.”22 The proximity and even intimacy which characterized the aristocrat’s relation with his subjects modified the consciousness of his subject individuals. Accordingly, it was the neglect of this physical social context which destroyed the physical basis and thus the social status of the aristocracy; the very physical absence of the lords from their parishes and the detachment from their subjects transformed them into absentee seigniors. The nobility became an enclosed and separate caste: “everywhere, except in remote corners, the affection and unity of the two classes has disappeared; the shepherd is separated from his flock, and pastors of the people end in being considered its parasites.”23 Left without its “shepherds,” the common folk quickly degenerated into masses and lost their cohesive structure: “abandoned to itself and suddenly restored to a natural condition, the human flock is capable only of agitation, of mutual strife until pure force at length predominates.”24 The eventual result was the unraveling of the revolutionary events of 1789. Taine, generally speaking, tends to downplay the role of ideology, or the principles in the outbreak of the Revolution; Revolutionary maxims themselves were not the result of reflection or a political program, but rather of character, namely the “personality defects” Taine explicitly points to, which plagued the ever-more alienated aristocracy.25 The social structure which emerged from the dysfunctionalism of the old regime was that of crowd society. More than any other thinker, Taine offers a vivid and elaborate characterization of the riots which accompanied the Revolution from its early days (and in fact predated it as a regular phenomenon by two decades). Taine analyzes the Revolutionary riots as motivated not only, or even not

21 Ibid., 1302. 22 Ibid., 1230. Taine, who toys in several places with a biological and genetic explanation of social characteristics, does not go so far as to explain the position of the aristocratic classes in those terms. Rather, the hereditary privilege is a successful mode of selection because it represents a fixture of individuals and groups in the same environment. 23 Ibid., 1306. 24 Ibid., 1230. 25 Ibid., 2320–29.

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mainly, by material deprivation, but by a general neurosis, a frenzy accompanied by gratuitous violence; in Taine’s words: “take women that are hungry and men that have been drinking; place a thousand of these together, and let them excite each other with their cries, their anxieties, and the contagious reaction of their ever-deepening emotions; it will not be long before you find them a crowd of dangerous maniacs.”26 As he sums up the psychological angle: “no argument, no experience has any effect against the multiplying phantoms of an overexcited imagination.”27 This critique of the crowd mentality of the Revolution is not entirely original (it is largely a commonplace in the nineteenth-century historical accounts of the sans-culottes), but Taine does more than simply list the various excesses of the newfound republic. For him, the psychology of the mass is part and parcel with democratic society. Taine interprets radical democracy in terms of the destruction of established authority, which indicates also the undermining of spontaneous order and its institutions. This idea clearly puts political democracy on a very precarious ground. The Jacobins, who endorse a political form that relies on voluntary consent and not on compulsion, set an impossible task for themselves, since by reverting to the democratic state they rule out the basis for every viable authority. The results for this on the political apparatus were clear, as the French state lost its ability to govern: [I]n all sections of the nation, in every branch of the administration, in every report, we detect the confusion of authorities, the uncertainty of obedience, the dissolution of all restraints, the absence of all resources, the deplorable complication of enervated springs, without any of the means of real power, and, for their sole support, laws which, in supposing France to be peopled with men without vices or passions, abandon humanity to its primitive state of independence.28

This moral deficiency is demonstrated in Taine’s depiction of the Revolutionary leadership. For Taine, the Jacobin incarnated the dogma of popular sovereignty, understood under its most radical and purist terms. Robespierre for Taine is a hermit and a mediocre personality, incapable of political action; “Unlike the statesman, he hovers in the empty space among abstractions, still mounting the principles, unable to get off, and set foot in practice”;29 while Marat is diagnosed with suffering from “tetanus of the will,” from delusions of grandeur and excessive

26 27 28 29

Ibid., 3412. Hippolyte Taine, The French Revolution, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), 70. Ibid., 262. Hippolyte Taine, “Psychologie des chefs jacobins,” Revue des Deux Mondes 65 (1884): 345.

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intellectualization, among other traits.30 The only exception was Danton, with his “sane spirit,” “political aptitude,” and an “original and spontaneous genius.”31 The important matter about the Revolutionary leaders is their incapacity to rule; they represent the complementary aspect of the problem Taine identifies in democracy, in which authority is dissipated in favor of mob rule; the social structure of democracy thus undermines not only its institutional basis but also the basic autonomy of individuals, and with it any kind of voluntary political agency. Into this political vacuum enters the bureaucratic mentality. Taine follows up on yet another Tocquevillian theme, that of administrative centralization, and elaborates on the conditions which facilitate it. Society, without the rigid order which previously gave it form, remains an impoverished, inert, or languid social body, solely capable of intermittent spasms or of artificial rigidity according to order, an organism deprived of its secondary organs, simplified to excess, of an inferior or degraded kind, a people no longer anything but an arithmetical sum of separate, juxtaposed units, in brief, human dust or mud.32

The result was the expansion of the new state organization, one founded on “centralized despotism, . . . the worst of its species, at once formless and monstrous.”33 Taine goes into detail about the emergence of the bureaucratic state, from Napoleon onward, which he describes as an ever-expanding dumb mechanism. This is not Bonaparte the ambitious “usurper” or the proud dictator, but rather a minor manipulator who rose to prominence by taking advantage of political confusion, while his reforms were largely a historically necessity urged by the needs of a sprawling bureaucracy.34 Taine paints a dialectic picture regarding the relations between the emerging bureaucratic state and irrational and fantastical passions. In counterdistinction to the stale and dilapidated nature of the bureaucratic state, the fantasy which it works in the spiritual realm is one of dynamism and grandeur: “a revolution is going on in minds and the moral effect of the spectacle becomes greater and more lasting than the spectacle itself; souls have been stirred to their very depths; torpid passions and slumbering pretensions are aroused.”35

30 Ibid., 325–26. 31 Ibid., 335. 32 Hippolyte Taine, The Origins of Contemporary France: The Modern Regime, Vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890), 121. 33 Ibid., 94. 34 In one place he memorably refers to Napoleon as a haughty “condottiere,” a mercenary chief (Hippolyte Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine [New York: American Book Company, 1911], 157). 35 Taine, Origins, 1890, 2: 257.

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The administrative state, and especially its masthead Napoleon, were not a product of calculated rationality, but rather of passionate excess. In such a way, Taine goes further in his estimation of the corruptive effects of modernity on the nature of individuals and collectives. The thinkers of the early nineteenth century, despite their critical outlook, held to a distinction between the individual and the collective levels, one which prevents the complete deterioration of social resources; Taine, on the contrary, regards individuals as not only conditioned by society but as produced by their environment. Accordingly, the change in the social conditions which was generated by the modern condition elicited a major transformation not only in external conduct but also in interior personality. Taine, unlike earlier authors, does not put much confidence in the self-regulating mechanisms of civil society, since spontaneity without a redeeming measure of personal authority may only produce more atrophy and chaos, and indirectly lead to greater bureaucratic centralization.

2.2.2 Reform and Leadership In order to amend the faults in the democratic order and the reinstitute the political mores which characterized the old ruling classes, Taine envisions a remodeling of selective institutions along carefully designed lines. The model which Taine proposes for elite formation consists of a layered system which combines both spontaneous and constructed elements: on the one end is the selection of local delegates according to their ability to influence and attract the public, and on the other, the mental refinement of those elites in a meticulously-designed educational system. This process of education was to be conducted according to a detailed pedagogic programme which would furnish the would-be elites with the personal characteristics necessary for positions of leadership. This model thus indicates a break with the tendency of early-century thinkers as it introduced a significant degree of planning into the process of elite formation. Yet Taine, who thought in the context of a robust democratic reality, understood that this planning should be reconciled with democracy. Despite his critique of democracy as a social system, Taine’s more immediate political writings are marked by a reconciliatory attitude towards the representative system; the motive of reconciling democracy with social hierarchy which characterized earlier thinkers is shared by Taine, perhaps even in a greater degree. This is achieved by Taine

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through a combination of spontaneous and local elements with more novel forms of elite formation, namely through national education.36 Taine’s methodology is centered on the distinction between the state, as a constructed and scientifically-constituted apparatus, and the natural or spontaneous order. He names the first – the state – the “first estate,” and the second – the spontaneous order – the “second estate.” The first is an “artificial association”; as such, it embraces only the institutions encompassed in majoritarian vote and positive statute.37 The “second estate,” in opposition, is composed of “natural associations” and is founded upon a “tacit wills, tendencies, desires, of which express will is but its result.”38 The project of the statesman, in Taine’s view, is to encourage, preserve, and even simulate the “natural” estate. In one illuminating paragraph he defines the role of the legislator as the constant interpretation of the “natural” order: In every work or enterprise of public utility, if the legislator is the external promoter, social instinct is the internal promoter; and on the lower spring becoming weak or breaking, the impulsion from above remains without effect. Hence it is that, if the legislator would accomplish anything, otherwise than on paper, he must, before any other object or interest, concern himself with the social instinct; preserve it, therefore, and humor it; find room for it and its usefulness; let it have full play; derive from it all the service it is capable of rendering, and especially not slacken it or misguide it.39

As Taine’s formulas clearly indicate, he does not think about spontaneous order in the same way as did early-century thinkers, but rather regards it as a more objective and stable phenomenon that can be decoded by scientific mechanisms. This scientific spirit marks Taine’s idea of the transmission between the two social “estates,” as carried out in his specific recommendations for an electoral model, one he had drafted as part of his public engagement in the newly-founded Third Republic. Taine was a prominent supporter of a two-tiered electoral system based on local election, the type of which had been proposed by liberals or traditionalist thinkers since the days of the Revolution, a model in which the general citizenry elects a smaller group of electors, who themselves vote for the parliamentary

36 As stated earlier, the function of national education exists among previous thinkers, especially those of the July Monarchy. For Taine (and much more so for Renan, as will be seen), education is a qualitatively independent instance, capable not only of contributing to issues like civilizational progress, social order, etc., but also of forming personal character and creating cohesive social categories based on scholarly and intellectual affiliation. 37 Hippolyte Taine, “Notes Préparatoires pour les Origines de la France contemporaine,” in H. Taine, Taine, sa vie et sa correspondance. Vol. 4: L’historien (Paris: Hachette, 1904–1907), 327. 38 Ibid., 237–38. 39 Taine, Modern Regime, 287.

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delegates. Taine proposed an elaborate argument in favor of such a system, rooted largely in the advantages of local political intelligence. For Taine, the average French citizen cannot and should not be tasked with informing themselves about each and every national matter; as he anecdotally puts it: fifteen miles from Paris, a small farmer and property owner do not know the meaning of a budget; when I told him that the money paid to the official goes into a fund in Paris in order to pay for the army, the judges and the rest of it, and that we hold registers for all revenues and expenditures, he opened his eyes; he seemed to make a discovery.40

Thus, in order to organize the electoral system in France, a country which “does not have a public life,” and in which “the farmer, the bourgeois, the aristocrat, all remain at their own and communicate solely among themselves,”41 electoral capacity must be properly translated to those social conditions. In Taine’s view, the role of the two-tier system is to make the electors more accessible to the general population; this is done by allowing voters to select a name from a list of local personalities with which they are acquainted. The voter: has seen at work the magistrate, the doctor, the notary, the priest, the mayor, the wealthy farmer, the factory owner, the owner; he knows if the priest is ambitious and meddlesome, if the magistrate decides fairly, if the doctor overly charges customers, if the mayor takes to heart the interests of the municipality, if the manufacturer is diligent, if the owner or the farmer are hardworking and strict, if this or that man is able, active, secure in his affairs.42

40 Hippolyte Taine, Du Suffrage universel et de la manière de voter (Paris: Hachette, 1872), 17. Some contextual elaboration is helpful here. The first legislative election in the Third Republic took place in February 1871, immediately following Adolphe Thiers’ proclamation of the Republic. The results were highly polarized, with a significant royalist majority and a strong socialist opposition, with the rural areas largely supporting the Right and Paris inclining leftward. This strong difference (described by Victor Hugo by “the two Frances”: one which has Paris as its capital and one which has Papal Rome) made deputies wary of the city: the assembly, for example, was convened in Boudreaux and later in Versailles. The by-election of summer 1871 changed this tendency by empowering the Left, without dispelling much of the concerns among both sides. Taine’s suggestion meant not only to reform the representative system but also to strike a reconciliation between the capital and the province in a way that would guarantee national representation while curbing in some way the power of the province vis-à-vis the city. For a highly informative synthesis on the political situation in the early Third Republic see Dominique Lejeune, La France des débuts de la IIIe République: 1870–1896 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011); for a focused (and vivid) study of the political culture of the period and, in particular, the dissonance between city and province see James Lehning, To be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), especially chapters 1 and 3. 41 Taine, Du suffrage, 28. 42 Ibid., 42.

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This spontaneous order is what Taine relies on in his electoral proposition. However, it is not the spontaneous and naturalist mechanism itself which generates the local elites, but rather the electoral process itself; it is in the political meeting “à l’anglaise ou à l’américaine” that public consciousness is formed among the electors and the general public.43 One of Taine’s central goals is the vindication of scientific administration, a highly refined and sophisticated regulative corporation which requires intermediary bodies in order to function properly and to reach every level of the population. Taine’s intention is thus summed up as “organizing political life in a hierarchy of legal, natural and spontaneous of information and intelligence, and using the advantages of clubs without having their inconveniences.”44 It would be a mistake to view Taine’s model as an unqualified return to the federalism and decentralization of early liberal thinkers. The local system which he endorses is only one element of the elite forming process, as it marks only those practical qualities necessary for the elite class (charisma) but not the interior qualities. The way in which Taine describes those leaders is largely provincial in character; an upright mason or even a smart lawyer or physician would not necessarily be endowed with the moral fortitude and social intelligence required of a member of the national elite. While the local system is important for the achievement of legitimacy and stability, it does not necessarily endow the local leaders with any special psychological or other qualities. The question Taine is involved with is how to furnish those local leaders with the correct set of epistemic and ethical personal traits that would allow them to navigate the waters of public opinion. Taine’s solution is based on the vindication of education as the important disciplinary measure to affect and form individual personalities among capable members of society. Education forms a crucial part of Taine’s general as well as social philosophy; education is important not only in the concrete information it transmits, but even more so in the way in which it is the central (and possibly only) means of influencing the mind by means of external conditioning. He writes that in the matter of morality, words serve no purpose; by themselves they are only a sound more or less disagreeable. It is the prior education which gives them strength and meaning; if it had put in the young head two or three pieces of sound ideas, they would speak with reason; if not, it would be as if one would strike a log to fire sparks.45

43 Ibid., 53–54. 44 Ibid., 56. 45 Hippolyte Taine, Notes sur Paris: vie et opinions de Frédéric-Thomas Graindorge (Paris: Hachette, 1867), 285.

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Of all types of education it is actually higher education and not the primary one which is the most crucial in forming the individual mind; as he writes: Higher instruction remains the most important of all; for, in this third and last stage of education, the minds and opinions of young people from eighteen to twenty-four years of age are fully formed; it is then that, already free and nearly ripe, these future occupants of busy careers, just entering into practical life, shape their first general ideas, their still hazy and half-poetic views of things, their premature and foregone conclusions respecting man, nature, society and the great interests of humanity.46

Those comments also explain why Taine made education the centerpiece of his social critique as well as of his reform program. Education, especially higher education, can form the individual mind in a much clearer and more intentional way than any other form of interaction; education is a means to suppress the more chaotic aspects of instinct while taming its more productive aspects and harnessing them in favor of a given moral model. As Taine’s words suggest, education, as an institution, also involves a distinct (possibly unique) form of discipline, of the regularity and routine previously attributed to the economic sphere without any of the competitive pressure of the economic sphere that may contaminate the formative process with crude self-interest.47 One of the persistent problems in French classical education in Taine’s view was that it is overly abstract and devoid of practicality; the French education system is “almost always . . . overly theoretical and too prolonged, disqualifying young people for real life.”48 This abstract character is part and parcel with the uniformity of French education system, which is compared by him at one point to “a garden [that] is planned entirely for cabbages and carrots,” that is, for the most general needs and requirements, which also tend to be the most basic and uniform.49 In another illustrative statement he remarks sardonically that “under the second Empire, a minister, drawing out his watch, could exclaim

46 Hippolyte Taine, The Origins of Contemporary France: The Modern Regime, Vol 2, trans. John Durand (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1894), 176. 47 “[The student] must have no other object in view for three years, no rank to obtain, no examination to undergo, no competition for which to make preparations, no outward pressure, no collateral preoccupation, no positive, urgent and personal interest to interfere with, turn aside or stifle pure curiosity.” (ibid., 177). 48 Hippolyte Taine, “correspondance avec Madame Françis Ponsot,” in H. Taine, H. Taine, sa vie et sa correspondance, Vol 4: L’historien (suite). Les dernières années, 1876–1893 (Paris: Hachette, 1904–1907), 208. 49 Hippolyte Taine, Journeys through France being Impressions of the Provinces (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1897), 31.

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with satisfaction, “At this very time, in such a class, all the scholars of the Empire are studying a certain page in Virgil.”50 As an alternative to making education uniform, Taine supported and participated in the foundation of the École libre des Sciences Politiques (which would later be known colloquially as Sciences Po). The École libre, founded in 1872, played an integral role in the elite formation of the Third Republic as well as in the propagation of the social sciences in France of the period. The enterprise included prominent intellectuals like Taine and Renan but also Émile Boutmy, Albert Sorel, and others, and was seen as an alternative to the centralized education system of the French universities and the Revolutionary Grandes Écoles.51 The way in which Taine envisaged the institution in his programmatic text from 1871 was diametrically opposed to the national Republican model in all its characteristics: it was dispersed throughout France instead of being located in Paris alone, it was selective, and its pedagogic style was occupied primarily with concrete political, historical, and other facts, with heavy focus on the reading of primary materials and the evaluation of hard cases.52 This style of teaching was chosen not only for academic reasons but also for educational ones, as it represents an integral part in the formation of political character; every discipline, from law to political economy to history serves a part in this process, as long as it is conducted in a rigorous way and with as few abstractions as possible: if the professor saw the machine at its work, he will see that it is nothing but an organ of a living body [and] that one should not approach an organism without infinite reflections and precautions; here, like in all social matters, science generates prudence and the

50 Taine, Origins, Vol. 2, 162. Indeed national education was in Taine’s view one of the main elements, perhaps the central one, which marked the continuity between the different regimes, from the Revolutionary period up to the 1870s through to the Restoration and the Second Empire; cf. Taine, Modern Regime, Vol. 2, 210–13. 51 On the cultural and social significance of the foundation see Dominique Damamme, “Genèse sociale d’une institution scolaire: L’Ecole libre des sciences politiques,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 70, no. 1 (1987): 31–46. On Boutmy’s agenda see Jaap van Ginneken, Crowds, Psychology, and Politics, 1871–1899 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 45–47. 52 Hippolyte Taine, “De la Fondation d’une faculté libres en sciences politiques en 1871,” Commentaire No. 63 (1993/3): 600. Interestingly, despite Taine’s Anglophilia, he did not mean the institution to become something like a French Oxford or Cambridge. In his “Notes on England” [Notes sur l’Anglettere], he ascribes to the English education system some of the faults he identifies in the French one, namely its lack of relevance to broader social life and its rigidity. The spirit of pragmatism and practicality he lauds in the English mind is not a result of formal education, but rather of its culture of leisure, namely literature and fine arts (Hippolyte Taine, Notes on England [New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1885], 314–15).

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detailed study diminishes the number of revolutionaries by diminishing the number of theoreticians.53

In addition to purely academic pursuits, Taine also emphasizes the way in which extracurricular experience, marked by leisure and by a separation from immediate political attachment, allows for greater development of such character.54 In such a way, Taine introduces education as the complementary aspect of the formation of local leadership and transforms it into an elite class that would be truly national, as it would be recruited from across the country, and liberal. In many ways, education fills here the equivalent role to that of property in early nineteenth-century liberalism: like property it is meant to tie personal capacity with certain formal indicators while at the same time allowing for (theoretically) universal access. The two-faceted program proposed by Taine regards the spontaneous social mechanism (the local communes) as a means to achieve higher social cohesion and legitimacy; at the same time, he regards the more deliberate and designed mechanism, that of education, to achieve the actual formation of virtuous personal character. Education, as an elite-forming institution, fulfills an important political role in Taine’s system: it provides individuals of eminence and influence with personal qualities and with the faculties required of social leaders. The model proposed by Taine has an unmistakable practical aspect in the way it emphasizes empirical, largely multi-disciplinary education that carries important relevance to social and political life. In some ways it is meant not so much to form character but to prevent those individuals from turning towards transgressive or abstract ideologies and doctrines. Importantly, Taine, despite his commitment to positivism as a scientific system, integrates it rather selectively in his model of elite formation, which is still characterized by the importance of spontaneous (namely local) institutions.

2.3 Ernest Renan Ernest Renan is the most enigmatic and impenetrable thinker discussed here. Much less involved directly in political affairs throughout his life, Renan is known primarily as a philologist and religious historian. While Renan’s thought can be seen in many ways as complementary to that of Hippolyte Taine, it is

53 Taine, “De la Fondation,” 604. 54 Ibid.

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much less systematic and more elusive. While Taine was a proponent of the positivist school of Auguste Comte, Renan adopted some positivist ideas and fused them with a large dose of idealism and even a certain mystical spirit which mitigated and conditioned his scientific confidence. While Taine directed his efforts at psychology and the study of literature, Renan focused on the study of religion, particularly early Christianity and ancient oriental religions. Renan’s philosophy represents an idiosyncratic combination of modernism and archaism, trust in scientific progress, and a sense of structural continuity between ancient and modern intellectual paradigms. Like Taine, it was following the defeat of 1871 that he came to formulate certain ideas concerning the functioning of modern society, shedding some of his early pro-democratic inclinations in favor of a more conservative approach. Renan proceeds along Taine’s propositions by extending its main novelty, that of elite formation through government policy, crafting a comprehensive reform program centered on government programs. Like Taine, Renan also focuses on education, but sheds some of its informal elements in favor of a more centralized approach. Renan ascribes to government a prominent role, envisioning an education system which includes both primary and higher schooling, in order to form a leadership class and to cultivate it along the lines of a particular culture. Elites in Renan’s view are formed under the direct observation of tutelary bodies and a scrupulous scientific authority which would deliver individuals to positions of eminence and influence.

2.3.1 Science and Society Renan’s critique largely complements that of Taine. If Taine focused on the social and political processes which resulted in the modern centralized state, Renan, a humanistic scholar, emphasized the role of cultural mores in the contamination of elite culture and institutions. For Renan, the commercialization of science and culture leads to those being transformed into the instruments of political power of private interests; a highly problematic notion which leads to the adoption of materialist ideas on the part of elites. Taking a more long-term view in his analysis, Renan’s critique of democracy emphasized the complete impossibility of an elite-formation process centered on any spontaneous institutions. Renan’s critique of democratic society is centered in large part on the loss of a sense of responsibility among the elites. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Renan thoroughly castigates the “dryness, the formalism, the smallness of

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spirit [which] have never been, in modern times, taken further in France at the end of the last century and in the beginning of this century.”55 In his important 1848 essay on “the future of science,” Renan presents in bleak terms his view of modern society. Renan identifies the two contending principles which he sees in action in European societies: the democratic and the aristocratic. Democratic principles mistakenly appeal to the masses – “blind and deficient in intelligence,” while the aristocratic principle claims that the elite is totally independent yet lacks any sense of responsibility, and thus in itself constitutes an “odious monopoly.”56 Renan castigates especially those intellectuals who attempt to redeem a type of new elite class based on property, the “moneyed aristocracy,” as a type of thinking characterized by a misguided trust in instinct at its most crude level.57 He considers that one of the results of democratic culture is that it has made science the slave of pecuniary interest: “the revolution which has transformed literature into journalism and periodical writing, which has reduced every work of the intellect to a work ‘of actuality’ that will be forgotten in a short time naturally compels us to look at it from this standpoint”. In this way the work of intellect ceases to be an independent institution and becomes an instrument to exert pressure on the public, “a lever of opinion.”58 As such, the expansion of commercial, democratic culture leads directly to the growth in the centralized power of the state; a purely materialist culture renders literary and scientific production to the purely “inoffensive,” essentially a form of subsidized mass entertainment.59 Renan is even more skeptical than Taine with regard to the place of spontaneous bodies in the process of elite formation. Like property, performance in the field of institutionalized party-politics also cannot provide the conditions necessary for a rehabilitation of modern elites. Renan criticizes the “administrative aristocracy” as a futile attempt to reconstruct the aristocracy on instrumental and formalistic basis. Likely as a dig at Guizot and the Doctrinaire school, he castigates the attempts of the “liberal school of 1830” to found a “republican royalty” which ended in augmenting rather than reducing the power of the state and the monarchy.60 Renan in

55 Ernest Renan, “M. de Sacy et l’école libérale,” in Essais de morale et de critique (Paris: M. Lévy Frères, 1860), 60. 56 Ernest Renan, The Future of Science (London: Chapman and Hall, 1891), 316–17. 57 Ibid., 26–27. In different places he adds that fortune is often not a correct indicator of personal qualities; cf. ibid., 373, 376. 58 Ibid., 211. 59 Ibid., 6. 60 Ernest Renan, Questions Contemporaines (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868), 59–60.

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general is highly derisive of the statesmen of his day, as well as of political rulership in general; politics, he says “has furnished all that it could furnish; as of today it is an arid, emptied field, a struggle of passions and intrigues, highly indifferent to humanity, interesting only to those who take part in it.”61 A far cry from the positivism of Comte and even from the mild optimism with regard to the rational agencies of the state of Guizot, Renan is highly skeptical of the ability of the political class to inspire or to understand the public spirit. This notion is regularly associated in his writings with the spirit of Napoleonic centralization which continued to plague France even in the second half of the century.

2.3.2 Education and National Elites Since the faults of modern democracy for Renan lie in the cultural or “spiritual” domain, the necessary measures which need to be taken to abate this tendency are also spiritual. Renan radicalizes Taine’s propositions by crafting a total and comprehensive program of social reform centered on the cultivation of elites. Like Taine, Renan also focuses on education in his proposition, but unlike Taine, he sheds most of its spontaneous elements. Renan thus ascribes to education an even more prominent role than Taine, and accordingly aspires toward a well-designed and constructed system of elite formation. In Renan’s scheme, individuals are not recruited from the ranks of provincial politics, but are groomed by educational and scientific institutions which fulfill the entirety of the formative process. Renan considers science not as a reformative but transformative force, one that is capable of constituting an elite category by itself without interference from other social elements; education does not support social power, but encompasses and largely replaces it.62 Since the rehabilitation of modern elites cannot be done under qualifiers such as property or politics, Renan’s looks for science itself as the principle of social differentiation. In his 1848 work Renan envisions a society permeated with a vast network of scholarly institutions, which act as its central spiritual core. The purpose of education for Renan is to provide a nation with a solid moral base on which to stand; science for Renan is not merely an instrument, but rather it is a “religion,” as “science alone will henceforth make the creeds, science

61 Ibid., 322. 62 ““Knowledge is power” is the finest word ever pronounced,” he wrote (Ernest Renan, Dialogues et fragments philosophiques [Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1876], 442).

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alone can solve for men the eternal problems, the solution of which his nature imperatively demands.”63 The work of sciences and “men of spirit” is not a merely academic matter for Renan, but actually represents an important edifice which curbs the power of the state: “the administrative action of the government has found more resistance in the individuals than in the different orders of the State. People of mind [les gens d’esprit] are the true nobility of our history.”64 Renan, furthermore, is careful to distinguish between the vocation of science as the meticulous acquisition of positive knowledge and his own conception, which is ethical and even existential: “to take up science as merely interesting and curious is to humiliate it. In that case Christian asceticism would be perfectly right in its opposition. The sole legitimate means of making one’s self the apologist of science is to look upon it as the essential element to human perfection.”65 As such, this goal is achieved not only in the purely scholarly realm, but also in the way science is institutionalized in a system of educational institutions; Renan has a strong critique on the national education system of his day, under which he suggests a truly aristocratic institution dedicated to purely creative endeavor: “the temples of this doctrine will be not schools like those of to-day, childish, cramped, scholastic, but resorts of leisure as in ancient times (scholé) where men foregather to partake together of the food provided for supra-sensible minds.”66 The way in which Renan understands the schools is distinctly nonfunctional and non-mechanical; he distinguishes for example “education” from the mere formal training of “discipline” – while discipline is important, it does not carry the same salutary value as education.67 The reason why science holds this eminent position in Renan’s social thought is because of its prominent epistemic position. Scientific inquiry, in the particular way Renan understands it, allows one to grasp not only the truths of nature but also those of society. Renan looks to science for “the study of all the products within the sphere of its activity, above all of its spontaneous activity.”68 As such, he has in mind particularly the fields of comparative philology and the study of religions, which has for their object the development of human beings and the study of behavior at its most basic and instinctual form.69

63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Renan, Future, 97. Renan, “l’école libérale,” 3. Ibid., 115–16. Ibid., 94. Renan, Questions, 287. Renan, Future, 248. Ibid., 258–59.

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In his scientific and philosophical works Renan developed an idea of human behavior which stresses the place of spontaneity and immediate expression in social relations, up to even the most complex structures. The paradigmatic example for Renan is in the origin of human language: the formation of language is the result of the “creation of human faculties acting spontaneously and together.”70 In its immediate and impersonal nature, it is a form of collective generation, almost mystical in its nature; “that which occurs in spontaneity is the deed of God rather than the deed of man, and there is less danger in attributing it to a universal cause than to a particular action.”71 Like Taine, but even more radically, Renan regards the role of individual consciousness in this process as marginal at best; he views all important human actions as almost devoid of reflexivity and egoism, as inspired by a kind of vital drive: “everything is summed up in an act of faith in the instincts that possess us, without convincing us, towards obedience to a language coming from the infinite, a language perfectly clear in what it commands us and obscure in that it promises.”72 The difference between Renan and Taine is that Renan does not conceive of spontaneous activity as determined by a set of concrete and material variables such as environment, race, etc., but rather by a set of final causes, all of which are ideal and lie beyond the grasp of human consciousness.73 Individuals thus cooperate and are embedded in society to a very high degree, but the actual ends of their actions perpetually elude them. It is then the spontaneous nature of collective action which means that it requires the intentional effort of prominent individuals in order to coordinate and direct it. In Renan’s words, “spontaneous work is the work of the mass [foule], since the sentiments of all are expressed in it; but those sentiments had an individual to interpret them.”74 This individual is tasked with the rationalization

70 Ernest Renan, De l’Origines du langage (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1864), 88. At a more mature point Renan revises this skepticism and gives it a more positive form, one which is much more compatible with his larger project: “now more than ever, the effort of politics should not be to solve questions, but to wait for them to wear themselves out” (Renan, “Monarchie,” 125). 71 Renan, De l’Origines du langage, 82. 72 Ernest Renan, Dialogues Philosophiques, suivis de l’Examen de conscience philosophique (Paris: Claude Aveline, Éditeur, 1925), 191. 73 The following exclamation exemplifies Renan’s anti-materialism: “There is no building without stones; there is no music without strings or brass; there is no thought without a nervous system; but the stones are not the edifice; violins are not music; the brain is not thought; these are the conditions without which there would be no edifice, no music, no thought” (ibid., 75–76). 74 Renan, De l’Origines du langage, 22. “Science,” he writes elsewhere, “is of value only in as far as it can investigate what revelation professes to teach” (Renan, Future, 32).

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and systemization of popular, spontaneous sentiments; it is not exactly the individual as a founder or innovator, but rather as a codifier; a kind of mouthpiece of popular consciousness. The most archetypical case for individual codification of popular action is that of early Church history: the Gospels are the expression of popular sentiment; they were “the first revolutionary triumph, the victory of popular feeling, the advent of the simple in heart, the inauguration of the beautiful as understood by the people.”75It was only with later authors, primarily the Apostles and various Greek scholars, that Christianity came to the fore as a dogma as well as a theory: it is only there that Christianity became a “true philosophy.”76 While the spontaneous principle is admirable and necessary, it is primitive and often crude, and as such requires the learned hand of the interpreter to systematize and formulate it.77 While in premodern and aristocratic society this process was marked by a high degree of spontaneity and automaticity, modern society requires intentionally crafted institutions that would guarantee its insulation from egalitarian mores. In his later writings, in particular La Réforme intellectuelle et morale [Intellectual and Moral Reform], written in the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, Renan lays out a more elaborate view of the way in which education, especially higher education, functions as an elite enterprise. The universities in particular are chosen by him due to their unique role; they are an almost vestigial relic of a pre-modern society, where they functioned as one autonomous corporation among others.78

75 Ernest Renan, Renan’s Life of Jesus (London: W. Scott, 1897), 276. 76 Ernest Renan, Marc Aurèle ou La fin du monde antique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1882), 107–8. Renan’s idea concerning the origins of Christianity is difficult and requires extensive elaboration; it would suffice here to say that Renan generally sees the emergence of Christianity as the gradual but decisive Hellenization of Jesus’ teaching, namely of its Semitic elements. This process was tantamount to the transformation of Christianity from a gospel to a more rigid intellectual doctrine; a move that can also be seen as the gradual “aristocratization,” in Renan’s sense of the term. 77 In several places Renan depicts the role of the systemizer as essentially a passive one: “[I]t is not exactly to interpret or to translate the meaning of this order, but to transmit it truthfully: One must not intervene in this spontaneous work; in the face of internal modifications in our intellectual retina, we must remain passive. Not that the result of unconscious evolution would be indifferent to us or that it should not lead to serious consequences; but we do not have the right to retain desire when reason speaks; we have to listen, nothing more . . . The production of truth is an objective phenomenon, foreign to ourselves, happens in us without us, a kind of chemical precipitate that we must be content to watch with curiosity” (Ernest Renan, “Examen de la conscience philosophique,” Revue des Deux Mondes 94 [1889]: 721). 78 Ibid., 86. Renan clearly distinguishes the universities from other institutions of higher education of scientific knowledge such as the Collegè, the Academie, or the later Grandes écoles;

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The fact that the universities are characterized by premodern and nondemocratic hierarchy is precisely what makes their role vital in Renan’s idea of elite formation. Institutions of higher education, modeled after German universities,79 are envisioned by him as a “nursery of the aristocracy” in which the youth, “filled with rightful pride,” would acquire a vocation with which to distinguish themselves from the “superficial thoughts of the masses.”80 In the university system, education and knowledge becomes a privilege; for the member of the academia, “science is as a title of nobility, one which he would not renounce easily and would defend with some asperity.”81 Science fills this role not only because of its epistemic function, but also because of the way in which the process of long and rigorous studying transforms individuals: “[in opposition to pure speculation] it is neither the breadth, nor the depth, nor intellectual curiosity which makes the honest man [but] the systemic abstinence [which] is the condition of practical wisdom and its safest fundament.”82 Every element of the university institution is meant to fill the function of elite formation. Academic freedom, for example, has besides its purely scholarly role another functional reason, as it allows for the member of the academic elite to disavow the participation in the “propaganda among the common people.”83 In other words, academic freedom reinforces the role of the universities as a selective institution distinct from society at large. In distinction to Taine, Renan regards elite formation as existing not in seamless transmission with the rest of society, but as a largely secluded process. The student would detach himself completely from the egalitarian order of democracy and enter the strict meritocratic hierarchy of the institute in order to become part of the elite, as “intellectual and moral superiority” is nothing but a “germ which flourishes under certain favorable conditions.”84 The specific status Renan attributes to the universities is complex. On the one hand, as mentioned above, the universities enjoy an almost absolute

all of which are creations of the state in one form or another, and as such cannot serve the same independent purpose. 79 References to the German university as the archetypical institution of elite education exist sporadically in Taine’s writings, but are much more systematic in Renan’s post-1871 writings. More than any nineteenth-century French liberal Renan is attuned to the intellectual milieu of the outré-Rhine, and after the debacle looks to it as a model to be emulated rather than as a hostile adversary. 80 Renan, La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1875), 104. 81 Ibid. 82 Renan, “l’école libérale,” 11. 83 Renan, La Réforme, 100. 84 Ibid., 49.

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liberty in terms of research and teaching; on the other hand, they are organs of the state and enjoy a significant, if not complete, financial backing on its part.85 He describes this relation in a somewhat idealized way: “the University is the pomerium [lice], the pomerium of the human mind; the state must own this pomerium, regulating its external police”; here again, intellectual considerations are part and parcel of political ones: institutions supported privately or directly by the students introduce an unhealthy dose of democracy into the academic process.86 This composite character of education is also what places it squarely within the French liberal tradition. The “spiritual” nature of education means it is not generally involved in technical questions of government or socio-economic programs; science is “unproductive.”87 While this educational model is staunchly hierarchical, it is limited in the extent of the questions which it treats. This leaves popular, elementary education almost entirely free from any type of government intervention; while academia is reserved for the elites and is largely formed and supported by political authority, instruction for younger people remains popular, universal, and decentralized.88 Early education, however, is somewhat different from the most common understanding of pedagogy. Since the elite system requires collaboration and transmission on the part of the popular classes, as a free and spontaneous exchange, it is important to keep basic education proximate as much as possible to society and its various segments. In contrast with his view of universities, that are largely state-sanctioned, Renan castigates those who wish to adopt a state monopoly on popular education; he criticizes a centralized and uniform system of education as a miserable misunderstanding and anachronism; such a system “wishes to form soldiers rather than men.”89 Instead, he opts for the integration of corporate, communal, and “biological” orders in the process of education: it is up to “family, town or city, township, county or province, state, church or religious association whatever it is, that groups which I call natural in the sense that each of us belongs there at birth, participates in their benefits and partakes in their loads.”90 85 Renan explains it very concretely when he writes: “The State . . . owes [to support science with] observatories, libraries, scientific institutions. Individuals cannot by themselves undertake and publish certain works. The State owes them subsidies. Certain branches of science (and the most important [ones]) cannot provide those that cultivate them with the necessaries of life” (Renan, Future, 235). 86 Ibid., 521–22. 87 Renan, Questions, 77. 88 Ernest Renan, “La part de la famille et de l’Etat dans l’éducation,” in Réforme, 314. 89 Ibid., 311. 90 Renan carefully distinguishes between two types, or methods, of pedagogy: on the one hand, instruction, which is “the acquisition of a certain degree of positive knowledge, which

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In two ways popular education complements the university system. First, it furnishes the populace with a minimal ethical content, which ought to raise them above the “heavy, rough, dominated by the most superficial view of interest” towards which Renan claims the popular classes are sliding.91 Second, and more immediately relevant to the political status of the universities, popular education fulfills an important stabilizing role; the role of popular education is not to directly furnish students with knowledge and with science – Renan himself was somewhat reticent of scientific or technical education in earlier stages of formation.92 What primary education promotes, rather, is a kind of social stability which relies upon the intimacy of the community and the domestic unit by decrying the “fatal separation of the mother from the child” through which “was inflicted upon our mores their cruelest wound.”93 The process of elite formation through education is thus bifurcated: it consists of both spontaneous elements (at the level of the general population), and constructed elements at the level of more specific and exclusive scientific instruction. The entirety of this process is meant not only to promulgate scientific knowledge, but also to achieve authentic national consciousness: Renan conceptualizes the new scientific elites as a modern iteration of the old nobility, as the great force which interprets and transmits the public spirit in a way other political institutions, especially democratic ones, are unable to do.94 If in the past the nation as whole was represented by an ancient aristocratic class, in a democratic society this role is fulfilled by the scholarly elite, one composed largely of philologists and historians, who are dedicated to transmitting (or even creating) national heritage and memory. This notion is exemplified further in his Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? [What is a Nation?] delivered in 1882, where Renan famously defines the nation as a “soul,

is diverse according to the vocations and aptitudes of man”; on the other hand there is “education,” which is a more ethical and moral form of transmission, necessary in order to create “a gallant man, an honest man, a well-mannered man” (ibid., 326). Interestingly, it is the latter, more universal type, which requires the decentralization of education in order to avoid excessive uniformity. 91 Renan, Réforme, 18. 92 “I have a profound antipathy for popular science, because it cannot be the true science. Over the portals of an ancient school were inscribed the words: ‘Let no man enter here unless he knows geometry.’ The modern philosophical school should have for [its] motto: ‘Let no man enter here unless he knows the human mind, history, literature, etc.’ Science loses all its dignity when it lowers itself to these childish formulae and to a language which is not its own” (Renan, Future, 386). 93 Renan, “La Part de la famille,” 333–34. 94 Renan, “Monarchie,” 236–37.

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a spiritual principle.”95 The nation is an agglomeration of social facts whose legs lay “one in the past, one in the present.” While denouncing the reduction of national consciousness to merely ethnographic or economic variables, Renan describes it as a “daily plebiscite, just as an individual’s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life.”96 In the text, which can be read also as programmatic or performative, Renan calls upon historians and scholars to participate in the process of “forgetting” and “erring” that is essential for the formation of national spirit, which is not only an object of study but also of action and interpretation. It is precisely this ongoing interpretation which is the task of the national elites that are formed through the meticulous educational process. Renan’s achievement can thus be seen as a consistent application of the idea of science as a generative force with respect to the process of elite formation. In contrast with Hippolyte Taine, Renan’s focus is not on empirical social sciences (of which he is somewhat critical and skeptical) but on the sciences which have as their object human beings as collectives and civilizations. The scientific knowledge Renan holds in esteem is thus less focused on the gathering of facts and on comparative examination, but on the long-term development of civilization and especially its “spontaneous,” that is, its instinctual, mythological and unconscious aspects. Renan thus regards the social elites as not only an organizing function (like Taine), but also a tacit representative one; the “epistemic aristocracy” creates the national unit by virtue of it embodying the national culture.97 Renan’s idea of scientific elites, which is more cohesive and uniform that that of Taine, is in many ways more refined and cohesive than Taine’s somewhat conjunctural statements on the subject. Renan had no qualms about accepting the idea of universal suffrage, which Taine attempted to mitigate using the two-tiered electoral system. The university, as Renan envisions it, is much more staunchly hierarchical than Taine’s decentralized school system (modeled to some degree after the Oxbridgian college), yet represents a truly distinct sphere of human existence which is separated (and even opposed) to the 95 Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation? ,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Baba (London: Routledge, 1990), 19. 96 Ibid. 97 This receives an eloquent illustration in some of Renan’s literary works, in particular in his dramatic plays which serve as a follow-up of sorts to Shakespeare’s Tempest. The arc spanning Caliban and L’Eau de Jouvence depicts the titular savage becoming reconciled with the wizard Prospero. Caliban, representing the people, comes under the yoke of his master only once the latter recognizes the inherent worth of Caliban and his immediate connection with history: “Sans Caliban, point d’histoire.” Even the groans of Caliban in a way embody the “principle of movement of humanity” (Ernest Renan, L’eau de jouvence: suite de Caliban [Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1881], 433).

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democratic order. The supposed existence of an authoritarian “spiritual” sphere is what allows Renan to embrace the egalitarian “earthly” sphere. The political thought of Ernest Renan thus pursues some of the important major elements of the French liberal thought of the nineteenth century and combines them with a somewhat idiosyncratic understanding of science and its role of in society.98 Renan accomplishes this by instituting an education system that forms young people from very early on and is meticulously designed and conceived. Renan’s political program, which remains a liberal one, introduces the significant centralization into the process of elite formation; since the stakes of his critique are much higher than those of Taine (or of any author seen thus far), his elites are tasked not only with the stabilization of a democratic state but also with the salvaging of national culture.

2.4 Conclusion The limited liberal renaissance which took place in the France during the final third of the 1800s should be seen as the continuation and resolution of earlier trends, while at the same time leading to a different, more interventionist set of policy recommendations. Some of the considerations which brought the liberal thinkers of the late nineteenth century to reassess the earlier view of elite formation were practical in nature: the universal male suffrage instituted by the system of the Third Republic (even before being formally enshrined in the constitution of 1885) excluded ipso facto property qualifications. Similarly, the fragile monarchist majority in the Assembly and its refusal to compromise similarly rebuked the idea of a constitutional monarchy, in the vein of Constant and Guizot. The more essential basis for the new liberal program, however, was largely a shift in the fundamental aspects of its social theory. To begin with, the thinkers of the Third Republic reproached modern individualism not for being overly ambitious and transgressive, but rather for its 98 As a meta-historical remark, it would be interesting to note that Renan was the first author in the French liberal corpus not to have been an express Anglophile. Instead, he affiliated himself with German thought, especially with the philology and historiography of David Friedirch Strauss and Theodor Mommsen. In this way he reminds an earlier liberal thinker, Madame de Staël, who also represented a Germanophile and generally continental tendency within the French liberal corpus. Despite working in completely different periods and being committed to different causes, both Staël and Renan share a certain unmistakable similarity in the way they downplay the role of explicit and “rational” forms of communication in favor of implicit, sentimental, and often aesthetic experience. Additionally, both are rightly considered as prominent figures in putting forward and disseminating a modern idea of the nation.

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compliant and subservient nature. Whereas Constant and Guizot warned against the excesses of revolutionary movements, while appreciating its dynamic and progressive elements, both Taine and Renan (especially the former) saw these as futile and anarchic, as symptoms rather than mobiles. The primacy of environmental, social, and other external factors over individual personality, which is prominent in the political science of the post-Comtian school, led them to relativize and even disregard the role of spontaneous development and learning in the cultivation of personal faculties. This different set of presupposition was accompanied by a sharp difference in temperament between the earlier and later schools. If both Constant and Guizot appear to be vindicating a certain version – qualified and finite, but nevertheless committed – of Enlightenment philosophy and a degree of providential historical optimism, the thinkers of the Third Republic are much less confident in the innate rationality of society. Instead of an ever-enriching, ever-more educated collective, they point to the ambivalent or even calamitous results of a social order left with “no human design.” Under the inspiration of Tocqueville, they regard the captivity of political authority in the hands of materialist interests as the grave consequence of a commercial society left entirely unattended, itself a prelude and a facilitating factor to bureaucratic centralization. This shift is also apparent in those thinkers’ propositions regarding the place of the elites in society. In order to contain the materialist and bureaucratic tendencies, the liberals of the Third Republic have appealed to science as a salutary measure. Science would reform, rather than curtail, bureaucratic administration, by introducing a new type of social differentiation in human affairs, one which would be directly encouraged by institutions and the organs of political authority. Science would not only be an epistemic or even educational principle, but rather a selective one; it would be another means of assessing and deciphering personal qualities, as a replacement to the domain of the market, now viewed under the terms of opacity and alienation. The social pessimism of Tocqueville was redeemed by the scientific optimism of Comte. In accordance with this idea, late nineteenth-century liberalism saw a shift in the role of the elites in society. The focus on elites as a unique segment of society endowed, contingently or not, with higher capacities, moved from a mere measure necessary for the stabilization of a constitutional order to a crucial and congenital instance, serving in an active tutelary and guiding position with respect to the rest of society. If the status of the elites for Benjamin Constant and François Guizot was a rather instrumental one – required under given circumstances, but nevertheless peripheral and possibly vestigial – the later thinkers of the nineteenth century canon regarded the existence of elite groups as essential to any set of circumstances and to any social order, past,

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present, and future. Similarly, elites were no longer thought to be naturally or spontaneously emerging from the sphere of voluntary economic transactions, but should be an object of perpetual cultivation and construction; taking Tocqueville’s recommendation to the statesmen to “educate democracy,” the role of the state administration was conceived as much more active and interventionist. By relating their ideas with the educational philosophy of the time, the liberal thinkers of the Third Republic succeeded in instituting their programme in a more assertive manner than the earlier liberals. Émile Boutmy’s words about the “University of Berlin” vanquishing the French at the 1866 Battle of Sadowa framed the need to reform national education as a national mission.99 The cultivation of a liberal elite – Boutmy’s “classes libérales” – was seen not only as a necessary means of social stabilization but also of national revitalization. These liberal elites were not meant merely to take part in electoral politics, but were also sought as a leadership category. The metamorphosis of the category of the elites from a passive and largely subordinate position to a central and dominant one was accompanied by an increasing concern for the educational aspects of the elites. This growing interest in the elites as national category also overlapped with their increasing scholarization under the Third Republic.100 The thinkers of the post-1870 period began to increasingly suspend their confidence in the emergence of a spontaneous order in a neutral or a non-political civil society, and in particular in the ability of such spontaneous order to guarantee optimal results without deliberate intervention. Authors like Taine and Renan accordingly have described – and worked to implement – different mechanisms which aim to promote and foster individuals, making them competent of holding elite positions. Those mechanisms are not merely reactive but also constructive and even transformative with respect to the nature of society. In such a way, the French liberal thought of the late nineteenth century showcases at once the cynical and pessimistic attitude toward the civilizational trajectory and the trust in the salutary character of a scientifically-conducted policy that would be able to influence and even redeem society. Late-century thinkers’ approach to the problem of the social differentiation was to suspend or bypass spontaneity by means of deliberate and prudent administration; by doing so, they have invested politics with a unique position vis-à-vis society

99 Émile Boutmy and Ernest Vinet, Quelques idées sur la création d’une faculté libre d’enseignement supérieur (Paris: Laine, 1871), 6 100 See Charles, Les Elites, 36–40.

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which confers it with an epistemic prerogative, a “spiritual power” to use Comte’s term. Politics, as a form of activity, is no longer relegated to the domains of oppression or administration, but requires an employment of creative faculties and constant attention to societal contingencies. It would be in the middle of the twentieth century when this tendency picks up yet again and forms a different iteration of the French liberal school.

3 Twentieth-Century French Liberal Thought: “The Political” Reinterpreted 3.1 Introduction The last chapters have shown the formulation of the notion of democracy in late eighteenth to mid-late nineteenth century French liberal thought, along with an assessment of its problems and their corresponding remedies, centered on elite formation. Like other nineteenth-century traditions in political thought, French liberalism introduced a critique of democracy which emphasized its novelty as a historical state. This school largely viewed democracy not as a political system per se but as a social tendency, a unique “social condition” which pertains to a certain stage of human civilization, and as such operates on many (virtually all) domains of human behavior. As a social situation, democracy is characterized by the promotion of equality in different social spheres; it is not limited to equality before the state via a constitutional mechanism, but expands on the loci of human interaction. The notion of elites appears as the main theme which distinguishes the Post-Revolutionary school from its Third Republic counterpart: while the earlier thinkers have regarded civil society as an independent sphere capable of creating distinctions between social groups, the later school appealed to the intervention of political authority in order to create and sustain those distinctions. Generally speaking, the relation between democracy and equality is drawn in a way that emphasizes the latter’s psychological and sociological traits. The egalitarian tendency in democracy refers not to an institutional arrangement, but first and foremost to a type of human relations which implies indistinctness and essential similarity. This tendency, furthermore, is often not considered as a result of any specific human design, political or otherwise: it is a historical “given” which arises from changes in economic, technological, cultural, religious, civilizational, and other factors. While the egalitarian trend may be demonstrated through the usage of specific historical names, intellectual movements, or political persons (the figures of the 1789 Revolutionaries, of Napoleon, of “American” or “modern” regimes and so on), this generally can be seen as a type of rhetorical devices. To recapitulate: what emerges in the writings of the French liberal thinkers then, without exception (especially in those writing after the year 1830), is a certain view of society, which identifies democracy as an independent variable which influences (and at times constructs) social relations in their entirety. The https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110680348-004

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important stress is on democracy as an entirely novel or at least largely unprecedented social system: it is not a mere repetition of the ancient republican model, an insertion of popular participation into the political edifice, or even a certain class constellation. While all those elements are present in the French liberals’ profile of democracy, it follows the idea which argues that modern democracy proposes a new model characterized by its own “laws of motion.” In such a way we find the expressions of democratic social condition in the uniformity in the areas of culture, the economy, religion, customs, and so on. This process, while leading to such benign results as the elimination of established legal and other privileges, also leads to the erasure of distinctions between social categories, occupations, localities, and different ways of life. Some writers defined this as social “leveling,” a centrifugal force that ends with the gradual loss of human identity, autonomy, and even the possibility of moral conduct, which is shed in favor of boundless crude egoism. While the authors of this school differ in their prospects of this condition, they all share a certain pessimistic notion of social disintegration that this process would involve if left unchecked. Again, while the accounts tend to differ greatly, the notion of democratic society as essentially “moved” or “determined” by various historical circumstances is shared by all the thinkers discussed in this study. Since democracy represents a psychological, cultural or “mental” tendency, it does not always necessarily change the conduct of political bodies and social institutions, but rather shifts their stakes: it is not so much the ways in which authorities operate, but rather the motivations of individuals, and their internal patterns of thought and behavior, that undergo the democratic transformation. The novelty of democracy manifests itself in the radically different patterns of communication it involves. Democracy as a social tendency, unlike democracy as a purely political system, leads to a more immediate contact between persons, while at the same time paradoxically undermining their ability to adjudicate as individual agents. It destroys the old distinctions through the emphasis it puts on the primacy of the individual, but at the same time it terminates the possibility for individuality by promoting a traitless, common, and “general” individualism (this is put forward most eloquently in the writings of late-nineteenth century authors and their utilization of certain elements of crowd psychology). Those authors, most importantly, regarded the homogenization of society as being closely related to the development of a democratic society in its various economic, cultural, and political aspects. It may arise even (or especially) as a political and legal system which guarantees and protects basic individual rights. It is in fact under a constitutional and representative system that this

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problem of homogenization becomes more acute, as the central mechanism of such a system consists of appealing to the private sentiments, interests, and desires of individuals; it is the identity of society and the state, underwritten into the principles of universal equality and representation, which drives uniformity further and gives it a political dimension. In its most nefarious version, the democratic tendency to uniformity can transform into two different political forms: cesarist dictatorship and bureaucratic centralization. Those forms represent the underlying cultural and psychological tendencies that are inherent in the democratic condition: on the one hand, reckless ambition, which could endanger the basic constitutional form, the separation of powers, and basic liberties; on the other hand, a calculating and rationalizing inclination, which seeks to institute equality and improvement by means of incessant uniformization. While those two forms are opposed to each other, they are also complementary in many ways, as each arises from the same egalitarian and atomizing force in its various manifestations. The remedy to this condition was found in the designation of elites as a new locus of social and symbolic leadership. In essence, the notion of the elites is not primarily a political one, but a cultural one. The very existence of a distinct elite category is what breaks or at least mitigates the egalitarian pressure which leads to uniformity. What allows for such differentiation is a set of attributes which exist among all members of the elite category: this may involve a set of personal characteristics and high moral virtues; although more often they consist only in something like psychological and sociological habits that are ingrained in the individual through external circumstances. It is by priming the interaction of the elites with political authorities that the drive toward equality and uniformity is mitigated and even transformed into more benign forms. For the authors of the earlier part of the nineteenth century, those elites were to be found in the spontaneous mechanism of what came to be known as the civil society and the market economy. Property, either landed or mobile, was the central indicator which distinguished individuals from the undifferentiated masses and was sought as a viable sign of certain moral and personal traits. Those virtues were sought as an alternative to both the boundless ambition of cesarism and the rationalizing drive of bureaucratic centralization. While the specific characteristics of those traits differ from one thinker to the other, the notion that individual moral personality was formed through in the economic domain, through peaceful exchange, was the consistent and extremely important thematic. It was Alexis de Tocqueville who introduced the spirit of doubt into this intellectual status-quo. Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy as a social condition marked ambition as largely a relativized and trivialized drive; a “passionless

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pursuit.” Since ambition was relegated to the mostly harmless sphere of consumerist satisfaction, it meant that it could not act as a viable mechanism of social differentiation; by defanging ambition, commercial democracy has also neutered it in a way that disqualified it from being a measure of personal excellence and virtue. By defending democratic people from cesarism and the tyranny of the individual, commercial society has greatly empowered the bureaucratic tendency. It would be up to the thinkers of the latter part of the nineteenth century to pick up the challenge posed by Tocqueville’s skeptical and pessimist prognosis, and to propose a different mechanism that could sustain social elites under conditions of equality. In their propositions, elites would no longer emerge spontaneously from the order of the market, but would be intentionally formed by various organs, especially the educational system, with at least a degree of political intervention on the part of the authorities. Excellence would no longer be found and traced, but would essentially be cultivated and even produced as a complementary measure to the faulty spontaneous mechanism. The twentieth century brought another shift in the reflections of French liberal intellectuals. The early twentieth century was marked by the ongoing marginalization of liberal politics. The literary historian Émile Faguet’s 1903 essay, entitled simply Le Libéralisme, was marked by an unmistakable pessimistic style, and sought to explain “pourquoi les Français ne sont pas libéraux” as the title of one of its chapters.1 Faguet saw French liberalism as fatally encircled by its enemies: socialism, monarchism, and even parliamentarism, all of which threaten individual rights and freedoms. Another work which painted a similarly pessimistic, albeit more nuanced, image was the historian Élie Halévy’s 1938 work L’Ére des tyrannies.2 Halévy, a teacher in the École libre, related the decline of liberalism with the social, economic, and intellectual developments of the era, in particular the crisis of the First World War. Unlike the transition between early and Third Republic liberalism, the transition between Third Republic and Postwar liberalism was not marked by a landmark figure in the style of Tocqueville. It was not so much concrete ideas and arguments which ushered in this development, but a more general and gradual transformation in the intellectual atmosphere between the late nineteenth century to 1944. One important cause of this transformation can be found in the immediate historical circumstances of the era, namely that of the end of the Second World War and Vichy France. Despite the staunchly non-democratic nature of

1 Émile Faguet, Le Libéralisme (Paris: Société française d’imprimerie et de librairie, 1903). 2 Élie Halévy, L’ère des tyrannies: études sur le socialisme et la guerre, Preface by Célestin Bougié (Paris: Gallimard, 1938).

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the collaborationist regime, a degree of continuity can be traced from the Third Republic to the state of 1940–1944, especially with respect to its overarching political culture. The “National Revolution” of Pétain involved seamless continuity in the domains of bureaucracy, administration, and various scientific forms of social and economic planning,3 while the nature of the Vichy regime as a kind of “depoliticized” dictatorship has been furthermore discussed by researchers and historians since the immediate postwar period.4 The crises of the 1930s and the Occupation thus had grave consequence on French political tradition in general: the early postwar period in France was characterized with strong ambivalence with respect to the Third Republic and its political heritage, ambivalence which reflected in the indictment of unbridled “parliamentarism” of the Interwar years.5 Confidence in the institutions of the Republic was replaced by either adherence to the creed of Marxism-Leninism in its variant promoted by the Parti Communiste Français or by general disillusionment and cynicism. One of the immediate results of this development on the liberal tradition was the relative marginalization of the reformist tendency of the 1860s and 1870s, once hailed as the pride of the national intelligentsia (as ironized in Léon Daudet’s coronation of Renan as “le dieu de la troisième République” [the god of the Third Republic]). These social and political developments were also effective in discrediting the institutions which were hitherto prioritized by liberal reformers. The French economy, which was subject to intense planification in the 1930s (as analyzed in Halévy’s essay, among many others), could no longer serve for the purpose of spontaneous elite selection. The educational sphere as well was undergoing transformation: the École libre, which was distinguished from the etatist Grandes écoles by virtue of being private and independent, was subject to a nationalization attempt on the part of the Front Populaire government in 1936. Since that attempt, the school was coming under increasing technocratic pressure, until its nationalization in 1945.6

3 This transition is one of the key theses of Robert Paxton’s famous and controversial 1972 work (Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940–1944 [New York: Columbia University Press, 2001]). For a more recent treatment see Debbie Lackerstein, National Regeneration in Vichy France: Ideas and Policies, 1930–1944 (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 79–102. 4 Cf. Stanley Hoffmann, “Aspects du régime de Vichy,” Revue française de science politique 6, no. 1 (1956): 44–69. 5 Cf. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1992), 26–45. 6 Christophe Charle, “Savoir durer: La nationalisation de l’Ecole libre des sciences politiques, 1936–1945”, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 86–87, mars 1991, Éducation et sociétés, 99–105.

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Another significant aspect of the postwar period which contributed directly to the shift in liberal tendencies was the contention of the notion of democracy at the level of general discourse, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. The introduction of “real democracy” (as opposed to “formal democracy”) into the political vocabulary by Marxist or Marxist-inspired theoreticians, for example, led to increasing destabilization of the term. It was the period in which Claude Lefort began his long engagement with the concept of democracy in a 1965 lecture (published the following year) under the title “Towards a Sociology of Democracy.”7 These were also the years in which the autogestion (self-management, particularly workers’ self-management of industrial plants) movement began to take its first steps in France, from the famous occupation of the LIP factory during the events of 1968 to the publication of Ernst Mandel’s anthology on the topic in 1970,8 and Pierre Rosanvallon’s The Age of Autogestion in 1976.9 It was this tendency which in Rosanvallon’s own words “contributed to the introduction into the era of a new understanding of the democratic imperative, implying both its deinstitutionalization and its enlargement.”10 Democracy was moving from the “political” to the “economic,” and gradually to the “educational” as well. It was in the context of the opposition to this generalization of the “democratic” form that politics themselves have been reinterpreted as a separate and distinct category. This was done often through the turn toward the nominalized adjective of “the political”, which stands as an autonomous human activity. The central source of inspiration came from certain parts of German intellectual culture of the early part of the twentieth century (especially the interwar period), and in particular the works of Max Weber and Carl Schmitt, references to whom permeate the entire corpus of postwar French liberalism (especially in the writings of Aron and Freund – Weber in those of the former, Schmitt in those of the latter). The main contribution of German thought in this respect was the analysis of politics as characterized not only with distinct “rules of motion,” but also with its own unique form of intentionality, which shapes and modifies the consciousness of the individuals who take part in it.11

7 Claude Lefort, “Pour une sociologie de la démocratie,” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 21, no. 4 (1966): 750–68. 8 Ernest Mandel, Controle ouvrier, conseils ouvrier, autogestion (Paris: Maspero, 1973). 9 Pierre Rosanvallon, L’Âge de l’autogestion (Paris: Seuil, 1976). 10 Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty, 211. 11 Regardless of the direct influence of Weber et al., the idea of the autonomy of the political forms a major part in the zeitgeist of the French intellectual culture of the early twentieth century. It appears in sources as diverse as in jurist Maurice Hauriou’s writing on the state

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It is in large respect the appearance of politics as a category that allowed postwar liberals to critique the efforts of Third Republic liberalism – namely, the attempt to design a social elite by means of state administration – while substituting for it their own scheme of elite formation. The notion of elite formation through political action, as opposed to the design of a state-managed educational agency, requires the analytical separation of political behavior from its organized institutional basis, i.e., the state. This is what allowed those thinkers to distinguish between the bureaucratic and centralizing aspects of the democratic state, which they rejected; and the salutary power of political action, especially its more selective and hierarchical aspects, which they embraced. This critique of the Third Republic tendency was complemented by another important factor, which is the resurgence of a distinctly non-liberal conception of democracy in the postwar period. As opposed to early nineteenth century liberalism, which saw itself in dialogue with the illiberal counter-revolutionary right, the postwar tendency was entangled in a constant debate with the illiberal left (including its Marxist and its 1968 New Left varieties). This is reflected especially in the works of Fifth Republic liberals such as Aron and Freund, who maintain a highly “agonistic” style in their argumentation, constantly tracing their arguments to their opposition to the radical tendencies of their day. Those different factors led twentieth century liberal tendency to introduce another variation on the theory of elite formation. By criticizing the ability of the state to intentionally cultivate elite institutions, the postwar liberal tendency would reject the possibility of elite formation through spontaneous economic activity as well as from deliberate state intervention. Rather, elites in their view should arise through direct engagement with the political process. The political process itself, as a salutary mechanism for creating elite distinctions in society, would be interpreted in an increasingly institutionalized manner: by the end of the process, established authority, i.e., the state, would be seen as actively contributing to the process of elite formation via politics. The following chapters analyze three different modes through which this type of elite formation is being discussed and analyzed in the writings of three

administration of the early 1920s, and in Paul Valery’s reflections of 1931. A testament to the permeation of this theme can also be found in the writings of intellectuals who rebutted it, namely in seminal pamphlets such as Julien Benda’s 1927 La Trahison des clercs [Treason of the Intellectuals] and in Paul Nizan’s Les Chiens de garde [The Watchdogs] of 1932. Both of those texts trace the “moral treason” of public intellectuals to the idea of the separation of morality from politics and the primacy which the “traitors” place on the latter (Benda in particular attributes this tendency to the influence of “German thought,” especially Nietzsche).

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important French thinkers of the twentieth century: Bertrand de Jouvenel, Raymond Aron, and Julien Freund. These three produced their writings during the same period, from the immediate postwar era to the 1970s; as such they have responded largely to the same concerns and issues, and can be grouped under the same intellectual tradition. While the personal dialogue they conducted with each other was not always cohesive and constant, sharing somewhat different milieus, their ideas can be seen as a successive dialogue in which each has critiqued, reevaluated, and even completed the former’s arguments. At the more general historical-intellectual level, the analytic dialogue presented here represents not only the development of French liberal thought, but also the gradual acceptance of a permanent centralized bureaucracy as part of the postwar status quo. The following thinkers of the twentieth century, in their affirmation of the place of politics in the foundation of a liberal order, are at once an organic continuation and a paradoxical reversal of the major trends of the liberalism of the nineteenth century. The older school, which moved by the end of the nineteenth century towards a vindication of limited state intervention, had done so primarily through the promotion of scientific and even technocratic procedures. In the twentieth century, however, it is not science and expertise which are emphasized, but rather the voluntary, intentional, and even obscure qualities of political action. Somewhat paradoxically, the critique of the twentieth century revives the idea of individual agency which had been largely trivialized or dismissed in the thought of the Third Republic. The political sphere, unlike centralized education, vindicates and even necessitates a type of unique human creativity which cannot be entirely subsumed or reproduced by administrative measures. The way it reflects on the idea of elite formation is by stressing the personal elements in any political system, which also suggests a more assertive, robust, and indeed authoritarian idea of politics. Politics involves a certain, ineffaceable type of individual discretion, which cannot be relegated to other mechanisms, and which charges the acting agent with a high degree of responsibility. The elite category becomes a part of the normal functioning of formal politics, rather than an extrinsic category which checks or balances it. The first section of the chapter will discuss Bertrand de Jouvenel’s notion of personal authority. Jouvenel’s thought, which is by far the most oppositional and critical of the three, can also be seen as the one which continues the nineteenth century liberal tradition to the highest degree. Jouvenel emphasizes the way in which the state ceases to play a tutelary role vis-à-vis society and instead becomes co-opted by various interest groups in order to pursue rather than attenuate equality. In order to remedy this condition, Jouvenel developed

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a concept of the elite which emerges from the most fundamental act of the political order, that of the formation of social associations. Associations serve as a means for elite formation by acting as the vehicles for charismatic and influential individuals, which form a large number of hubs of political authority. Since associations are always voluntary and informal in their nature, they function entirely independently of the state and its bureaucracy. The second section will discuss Raymond Aron’s concept of the political actor. Aron is much more conciliatory with respect to the modern state than Jouvenel, as he locates the process of elite formation not in voluntary groups but within the political administration and permanent bureaucracy. Elites emerge from the interaction between organized social and economic interests and the various organs of the state; they represent an intermediary class of officials, advisors, and so on who are tasked with the reconciliation of those various interests and their translation into a coherent public policy. This concept of elite formation is more staunchly institutionalized than that of Jouvenel, and accordingly maintains a much more optimistic disposition with regards to the place of the state in a democratic society. The third section will discuss Julien Freund’s notion of the elites and political action. Freund’s concept of the elites is by far the most institutionalized of the three, as it locates the process of elite formation not in informal groups or in the intermediate bureaucracy, but in the executive offices. For Freund politics are not a form of deliberation and reconciliation of values, but a means of achieving social order. As such, he views the role of the elite, which is entirely embedded in the political system, as that of implementing social order while at the same time guaranteeing social stability. Freund’s proposition grants an especially extensive role to tradition and social ethoses as a means of cultivating these social elites and endowing them with the traits necessary for prudent leadership.

3.2 Bertrand de Jouvenel: Personal Leadership and Voluntary Associations 3.2.1 Introduction Bertrand de Jouvenel plays a unique role in the canon of twentieth-century French political philosophy. He has been recognized at once as a liberal, a conservative, and a political ecologist thinker, while his writings touch on various topics such apolitical philosophy, history, political economy, and

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even environmentalism.12 At the same time, he enjoys a reputation as a libertarian or a “classical liberal” author, mainly due to his affiliation with the Mont Pelerin Society. The scattered, sometimes frenetic nature of Jouvenel’s writings makes it difficult to define him: it has been said that Jouvenel “has variously been accused of aristocratic leanings, a liberal infatuation with progress, Hobbesian tendencies, conservative bias, a romantic yearning for the past, and a behavioral oversimplification of politics.”13 Despite the heterogeneity of his ideas and positions, a comprehensive reading of Jouvenel’s corpus places him squarely in the tradition of French liberalism, including, as will be seen, in his preoccupation of the theme of elites. Among the trio of thinkers to be discussed in this part of the study, Jouvenel is perhaps the one most in line with the general European liberal school of the mid-twentieth century. Jouvenel’s entire political-theoretical corpus from the 1940s onward is indeed directly inspired by the main currents of liberal thought, in its continental as well as Anglo-Saxon variants. It is mainly his critique of socialism and the welfare state which paint him as intellectually committed to the doctrine of the free market and laissez-faire capitalism. In such a way, Jouvenel can be seen as more immediately committed to the nineteenth-century corpus of thought than Aron or Freund. To this extent, he can be seen in many ways as a transitional figure, a kind of classical liberal at the heart of the twentieth century.14 As such, Jouvenel’s emphasis on individual initiative in the context of social and non-political institutions can be seen to a large extent as remnant of the nineteenth-century thematic of spontaneous order (although qualified and very differently articulated).15 Conversely, while certain aspects of his thought, in particular its forays into political economy, lend credit to this label, he is far from being an entirely

12 For the conservative interpretation see Brian Anderson, “Bertrand de Jouvenel’s melancholy liberalism”. For the libertarian interpretation see David Boaz, “Redistributing Power: Bertrand de Jouvenel,” in The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao Tzu to Milton Friedman (New York: Free Press, 2010). For the ecological interpretation see Olivier Dard, “Bertrand de Jouvenel et l’écologie,” Ecologie & politique 44, no. 1 (2012): 43–54. 13 Michael Dillon, “The Sensitive Citizen: Modernity and Authority in Bertrand de Jouvenel,” Political Science Reviewer 5 (1975): 3. 1–46. 14 This can also be seen in the more explicit Anglophilia of Jouvenel, as opposed to the continental bent of Aron and Freund (especially the latter). 15 Ironically, one of the other grounds for Jouvenel’s uniquely insightful analysis can be attributed to the staunchly non-liberal nature of his youthful political affiliation during the interwar period. A member of the radical socialist party and later of Jacques Doriot’s Parti populaire français, Jouvenel experienced at first-hand – sometimes as an instigator – European authoritarianism at a unique level of intimacy.

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unambiguous representative of this school. His political philosophy has been described at times as “melancholy liberalism” (liberalisme triste), because of his awareness of the “profound weakness” of liberal democratic civilization being “the erosion of moral and spiritual life, the hollowing out of civil society and the ‘joyless quest for joy,’ as Leo Strauss once put it, of a society dedicated chiefly to commercial pursuits.”16 He is often seen as an ambivalent and somewhat somber liberal or a “conservative liberal par excellence,”17 despite not being placed by other scholars in the tradition of liberalism but in that of authoritarian sociology.18 Jouvenel’s thought, particularly in its emphasis on decentralization and social differentiation, has also been placed in the tradition of French “aristocratic liberalism,” which began with Montesquieu.19 Jouvenel was of course also condemned as a right-wing radical by some historians, most famously by Zeev Sternhell, who presents Jouvenel’s interwar ideas as fascistic and even pro-totalitarian.20 In previous chapters we have seen how the nineteenth-century canon of French liberal thought began to take a more staunchly authoritarian direction toward the final third of the century. The late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century faith in the self-regulating nature of civil society (especially in the economic sphere) gradually receded in favor of a more managerial type of liberalism, which emphasized the indispensable role of designed, as opposed to spontaneous, institutions in sustaining the liberal order and society at large. Jouvenel’s political thought both supports and challenges this idea, as it retains many of its elements but processes them differently. For Jouvenel, as will be seen, it is the salutary nature of politics itself, especially in its more immediate and personal elements, which furnishes individuals with the characteristics crucial for the stabilization of the social order. Taking a page from early twentieth-century social theory, namely that of Max Weber, Jouvenel adopts the notion of charismatic authority and employs it as part of his theory of personal authority, the cornerstone of his concept of elites.

16 Brian Anderson, “Bertrand de Jouvenel’s melancholy liberalism,” Public Interest 143 (2001): 88. 17 Mahoney, Bertrand De Jouvenel, 2. 18 Gabriele Ciampini, “The Elitism of Bertrand de Jouvenel. A Reinterpretation of Jouvenel’s Political Theory Through the Elite theory,” Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 2, no. 11 (2013): 448. 19 Annelin de Dijn, “Bertrand de Jouvenel and the Revolt against the State in Post-War America,” Ethical Perspectives 17, no. 3 (2010): 372. 20 Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 256 and passim.

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Jouvenel’s critique of democracy is marked by a strong suspicion and even pessimism with regards to modernity, as he associates it with a distinct cultural tendency towards egoism and moral vacuity, which he defines as “nominalism.” This modern tendency cannot be rebutted or mitigated by means of institutions, political or otherwise, due to the expansive and appropriate nature of nominalism. Rather than expressing the unique nature or individuals – or transforming it – the institutions affected by nominalism thus devolve into a vehicle for the articulation of basic private interests, in a way that only exacerbates uniformity and the hold of centralized power over society. Following this critique, Jouvenel suggests the reestablishment of social elites through the instance of personal authority. Authority is entirely distinct from centralized power, in the way that it is carried not as part of a function and means to an end, but rather through a non-functional moral drive. Authority is not fixed in institutions but rather in individuals: it is inseparable from personal charisma and from a kind of immediate attraction which forms the core of human associations. This type of authority, in contrast with centralized power, is driven by voluntary and informal rather than formal consent, and as such cannot be entirely “usurped.” While some of the characteristics Jouvenel attributes to the nature of authority are indeed innate in the authoritative person, as a semi-obscure individual faculty, the way it is practiced and executed is always part and parcel of the process of command and obedience, that is, of politics itself. The bulk of Jouvenel’s political theory represents an effort of demonstrating the way in which this idiosyncratic form of authority can act as the cornerstone of civil society in a way that would act as limitation and moderating of centralized power. Personal authority, despite its charismatic and ephemeral origins, can be institutionalized through the creation of social groups which by virtue of their very existence decentralize the power of the state and buttress the fabric of civil society. Those groups, who in themselves are not “selective” in the sense of enjoying better inherent qualities, intellectual capacities, and such, nevertheless form something very akin to a social elite by holding more substantive influence on social and political processes. As such, Jouvenel proposes here a thorough reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century idea of spontaneous elites in the way that combines that school’s general and functional focus with a new type of intentionality that can be found only in the political process itself. Thus, Bertrand de Jouvenel understands the process of elite formation as embedded in the dynamics of political process itself, namely in the creation of voluntary associations, rather than in established political institutions. Associations, which are formed through the personal power of attractive and capable individuals, act as a vehicle for elite formation by differentiating

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between eminent individuals and the rest of society and sustaining the influence of the former over the latter. Jouvenel’s idea of elite formation is, in other words, highly informal: voluntary associations, despite their political and hierarchical nature, are not embedded in the state and cannot be subsumed under its administrative and bureaucratic organs. In this way, Jouvenel’s theory of elite formation is a bridging point between the nineteenth-century schools – which he criticizes – and the mid-twentieth century school, for which he lays the foundations.

3.2.2 Power and Democracy The bulk of Jouvenel’s critique of democratic equality and the crux of his political theory appear in his 1945 treatise Du Pouvoir: Histoire naturelle de sa croissance [On Power, its Nature and the History of its Growth]. This work, an immediate reaction to the events of the Second World War and the rise of totalitarianism, is an indictment of the modern state, especially in its populardemocratic form. Jouvenel, whose critique implicates the majority of contemporary philosophy and social science in the decay of liberty on the continent, harks back to earlier periods in the inspiration for his analytical ideas and schemes, especially to the earlier liberal tradition. In essence, Jouvenel’s argument in the work is to point to a paradoxical aspect in the development of modern democracy: political power becomes greater, more nefarious and centralized, not by suppressing individualism but by empowering it. The democratic state, by emancipating individuals, has also contributed to the decay of the social ties and left society defenseless in the face of the trend towards uniformity and leveling. Since this tendency is first and foremost cultural and psychological, it cannot be moderated or contained by means of institutions, either spontaneous or constructed. Accordingly, Jouvenel’s critique of democracy largely builds on the critique of the latter part of the nineteenth century. In typically pessimistic thinking, Jouvenel analyzes democratic society as a force which envelopes culture and institutions. Democracy generates what he regards as a self-seeking materialist impetus which either disposes of independent social institutions or corrupts them by transforming them into appendages of centralized power. Jouvenel rejects the possibility of an institutional reform in the vein of late nineteenthcentury thinkers. Jouvenel held that the basic form of democracy is a manifestation of the modern drive towards social and political centralization and leveling. As a political and institutional system this form is expressed in the constitutional

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arrangement and the vindication of the idea of human rights on the one hand and the interests on the people on the other. This arrangement, while not entirely devoid of its own internal checks and balances, is in the final instance nothing but the “replacement of royal sovereignty by popular sovereignty, which means the unhindered authority of momentous representatives of the ‘general will.’”21 The democratic individual tends to conflate (or overall confuse) freedom with power; freedom as capacity to act, which “wears the air of a relationship between what I can (numerator) and what I want (denominator).”22 This idea of freedom essentially tears down the boundaries between the political and the non-political spheres, since it relies on (or rather implies) the perpetual participation in public affairs on the part of the individual, in a way that transmits the individual interest unto the larger social and political domains. This relation is what Jouvenel defines as “power.” Power, understood at the most abstract level, is synonymous with capacity: it represents an ability to act, to influence or to move oneself. Jouvenel’s model of power is essentially that of a single acting agent, an ego, as he puts it, which extends itself in order to increase its own capacity. In the political context, power is first and foremost as a type of social relation; as he tells us: we find Power at the birth of social life, just as we find a father at the birth of physical life. This simile has constantly given rise in the past to comparisons between them, and will no doubt, even in the teeth of the most conclusive objections, continue to give rise to them.23

Since it is not an institution in the strict sense, power is not understood by Jouvenel as a matter of authority or hierarchy tout court, but rather as a relation of formal consent which is articulated primarily in the form of the bureaucratic state. Power, however, cannot be effectively contained in particular institutions: rather than being used by institutions, it actually manifests in them; Jouvenel describes power as a type of “credit” which the individual bestows upon agencies to act in his or her interest, a clientalist relationship in which one delegates power unto another.24 Since power is inseparable from what

21 Bertrand de Jouvenel, “Quelle Démocratie?,” in Itinéraire (1928–1976) (Paris: Plon, 1993), 356. 22 Bertrand de Jouvenel, Sovereignty: an Inquiry into the Political Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 249. 23 Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power, Its Nature and the History of its Growth (New York: Viking Press, 1949), 22. 24 “[Power] had to remain largely invisible, and not to let alarm arise at its becoming an ever larger creditor for obedience and services. But that raises a further mystery. Why is it not clear

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individuals and social groups delegate it to do in their name, it has a vested interest, so to speak, in servicing those claims and provoking their multiplication and expansion; in his words: “being ambitious, each separate authority tends to grow; being egoistical, to consult only its own immediate interest; being jealous, to pare down the role of the other authorities.”25 The key notion for Jouvenel is obedience, in which individuals become increasingly dependent on the state administration. In Jouvenel’s words, Power exists, . . . only through the concurrence of all the properties which go to form its essence; it draws its inner strength and the material succour which it receives, both from the continuously helping hand of habit and also from the imagination; it must possess both a reasonable authority and a magical influence; it must operate like nature herself, both by visible means and by hidden influence.26

The basic dynamic of the institutionalization of political power is thus described in terms of automatic and seemingly unconscious expansion and centralization: “by its own inner logic the same impulse embarks Power on two courses – the diminution of social inequality, and the raising and centralizing of public authority.”27 This account relies heavily on the nineteenth-century conception, especially that of Tocqueville: it regards democracy as a pure social form, without any political agency whatsoever. The substitution of monarchical by democratic rule implies a dialectical process in which the will of the monarch is not entirely abolished but is replaced by an abstract and vague entity: “that in the end the king disappears in a political revolution makes no difference; for his work remains, that of a society formed about an apparatus which is society’s master, never to be discarded.”28 The cultural tendency of democracy (termed by Jouvenel as “nominalism”, as noted above), suggests the notion that “society consists only of associated men, whose disassociation is always possible.”29 Centralized power, especially

as crystal to everyone that the private citizen is falling ever more deeply into the public authority’s debt for those commodities? And what is the explanation of the fact that, right down to our own time, the movement of history has in general been interpreted as a progressive liberation of the individual?” (Ibid., 158). 25 Ibid., 130. 26 Ibid., 21–22. There is, throughout Jouvenel’s analysis of power and especially its democratic form, a certain assumption concerning the contractual nature of power. All established power relies on consent; this consent is usually formulated in terms of approval and a relation of reciprocal obligation, which may be tacit or explicit. 27 Ibid., 85. 28 Ibid., 90. 29 Ibid., 45.

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once it is democratized, may grow only in accordance with the growing subjective claims of society which mandate their fulfillment; “this [power’s] egoism, even if given full rein, could desire for the future only what the needs of society demanded.”30 Jouvenel’s point, in other words, is that mental uniformity precedes and determines political and administrative uniformity; he qualifies the role of personal ambition in modern politics and regards it as a mere form democratic pathology, one that in its turn leads to greater centralization. The relation between personal freedom (quam interest) and administrative and unaccountable power is dialectical and mutually reinforcing: in the sense of individualist social philosophy it is the rule of the Rights of Man; in a political philosophy divorced from social individualism it is the absolutism of a government which draws its title from the masses.31

Jouvenel’s critique of democracy is not directed solely at individuals and subjectivism, the sense of policies which reflect individual choices and values, but also as related to a high degree of administrative indiscretion and arbitrariness. That fact that individual choices, views, tastes, opinions, and preferences are in a constant state of “flux” or change is reflected in the constantlyevolving structure of power. Jouvenel claims that “The various classes and social groupings are in continuous change as regards both their composition and their relative strengths. And the phrase really means that law must adapt itself to these changes.”32 While this constant change, in itself, is not insidious or tyrannical, it is highly at odds with the principles of constitutional stability, which in turn may lead to an ever-growing and ever-expanding centralization and arbitrariness. The nominalist principle, which lies in the heart of modern democracy, should similarly not be understood as mere usufruct of privileges; rather, what it stands for is a shift in the legitimacy principle of the state. The state becomes identified with personal interest and motivation, which in turn implies an ever growing increase in the measure of centralized power, in order to answer the growing demand for liberty, happiness, and above all security: “[I]n an individualist society in which no family or social group exists, every public duty is performed exclusively by the State. First among them is that of assuring external security.”33

30 Ibid., 123. 31 Ibid., 47. 32 Ibid., 315 33 Ibid., 173.

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Again, the ubiquitous nature of power is primarily a mental or psychological tie. Security is not a specific institution, an apparatus, or even a function, but rather a type of attitude; everything under power becomes a matter of security, as apparent in the emergence of such concepts as “social security.”34 The notion of security plays an important explanatory role for Jouvenel, since it is what distinguishes the somewhat crude and voluntaristic character of the early form of power, with its more developed, democratic form: the need for security is in no way an objective or a constant need of civilization. It emerges, or rather increases, when no other mediating instances are to be found. Jouvenel, who conceives of human liberty primarily in epistemic terms, as security of knowledge (this will be discussed in further depth in the next section), regards modern democratic society as unable to provide those epistemic mechanisms; in lieu of seeking regular and predictable norms in intermediary bodies or in each other, individuals turn to the centralized state to furnish such laws. Since the democratic state, which is essentially a stockpile of interests, is unable to provide such laws, this development is futile; Jouvenel describes this in the following words: It goes without saying that, thanks to the ingrained habit of legality, the interventions on which Power now embarks take on at first the form of laws. But these [regulations of power] are but counterfeit laws, concerned only to provide for the situations of the moment, owning the imperious sway of current passions and requirements. Under the cloak of objective legislation, every subjective desire enjoys a saturnalia, as is shown both by the rapidity and the inconsistency with which these so-called laws multiply. Principle and certitude are things of the past; the desires of the moment become “your only lawgiver,” no respecters these of the notions of moral good and natural necessity, which they confound with that of utility in its most transitory shape.35

Jouvenel uses many definitions and concepts to illustrate this process, but his most effective metaphor is that of entropy. Jouvenel uses this physical analogy to designate a situation in which individuals and institutions tend to “depart from their predictable behavior.”36 This analogy is useful because it describes

34 “The essential psychological characteristic of our age is the predominance of fear over selfconfidence. The worker is afraid of unemployment and of having nothing saved for old age. His demand is for what is nowadays called “social security . . . .” President Franklin Roosevelt came out as the perfect psychologist when he laid down as “the new rights of men” the right of the worker to be regularly employed at a regular salary, the right of the producer to sell stable quantities of goods at a stable price, and so on” (ibid., 349–50). 35 Ibid., 362. 36 Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Pure Theory of Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 62.

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the way in which democracy involves a certain secular trend toward increasing instability, even without regard to the individuals’ respective attitudes or personal judgments; the mere emergence of a disagreement, which arises in a myriad of contexts in a free society, is enough to necessitate the emergence of a mediating agency. The radical character of Jouvenel’s critique appears especially in the way in which he considers the primacy of individual rights themselves as a symptom of the emergence of centralized power; while many of the thinkers of the French liberal school were suspicious of the notion of unhinged and atomistic individualism, none of them went so far as to describe in terms of a mere social effect of the centralizing tendency. This process of individuation, which is discussed by Jouvenel at length, is part of the method of operation of power: “if the human atom which contains this energy is confined in a social molecule, then Power must break down that molecule.”37 One of the mechanisms which have been historically used by centralized power was that of property; it was in the abolition of collective forms of property, the ecclesial, professional, and communal property, which facilitated the emergence of an “acquisitive” individual.38 The newly-founded power, however, was not entirely devoid of symbolic content. There has never been a centralized power, democratic or otherwise, which did not imagine itself as drawn from a kind of conventional or traditional origin. This ideological or imagined quality may be inauthentic and even outright fraudulent, but is important for the sake of the justification of power. Jouvenel characterizes the process in the following sentences: constituted public authority is the crown of the social edifice. As in its case continuity is particularly important, it is the recipient par excellence of borrowed prestiges. It sits on a throne, it wears a crown; the danger that its proposals will not be unanimously accepted has been met by their conversion into commands, to which the subject learns the duty of obedience.39

This combination of the “borrowed prestiges” and the internal coercive and rationalized structure is what allows centralized power to expand itself legitimately, primarily by neutralizing its more limiting and moderating elements; “we glimpse dimly at [arbitrary power] usurping this place of honour; what he

37 Jouvenel, Power, 159. 38 Bertrand de Jouvenel, Les Débuts de l’État modern, une histoire des idées politiques au XIXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1976), 126–28. 39 Jouvenel, Sovereignty, 72–73.

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takes of it, however, are the prestige-advantages which the position carries – not its shackles.”40 What Jouvenel describes here, in fact, is the progression of the modern democracy element which takes over traditional roles and either discards them or tries to use them as rationalized and instrumental social institutions.41 This notion is demonstrated in Jouvenel’s critique of modern capitalism, which focuses on the deterioration of the capitalist elite. The industrial capitalist system denotes for Jouvenel the ascension of a new ruling class, that of financial capitalists. Merchant capitalists, a social class which enjoys relative independence vis-à-vis the state, developed into a more autonomous unit in the beginning of the industrial period. Those new conglomerates built “a vast structure and impose[d] on the ever growing number of its subjects an authority which is ever plainer to the view.”42 This new aristocracy, however, lacked the sense of responsibility and paternalist concern which characterized the traditional aristocracy. The mentality of the industrial class was captivated by the fiction of economic laws as well as the idea of equality, both of which made the industrialist not “the lord, protector, and guardian of those who are to work in his service, but only a man who contracts on equal terms with equals.”43 It was

40 Jouvenel, Power, 84. 41 This point requires some elaboration regarding the epistemological foundations of Jouvenel’s political thought. Jouvenel generally considers two social arrangements, one that is rooted in “order” and one that is rooted in “organization” (Bertrand de Jouvenel, “Order versus Organization,” in Economics and the Good Life: Essays on Political Economy [New York: Transaction Publishers, 1999], 65–75). While order emerged from a process of habitual usage through an extended period of time (“a process of action”), organization is rooted in conformity with an external principle (“process of thought”). While the first emerges mostly unintentionally, from the mere cumulative usage on the part of different persons, the second is always a result of an intentional act. It would be wrong to assume, however, that the former is devoid of reason; order represents a type of rationality that characterizes the actors themselves, while organization represents the rationality of an external evaluation on the part of a third party. Jouvenel brings up the example of an owner of a library, who, while out on vacation, has his library alphabetically rearranged by his daughter; the old, useful order was destroyed in favor of a more or less abstract principle. What Jouvenel describes is, in fact, two types of knowledge; one that directs the thought of the “organizer,” and one that is implicit in the process of action itself. From this idea of knowledge we can infer to the former point regarding tradition: what Jouvenel demonstrates there is that by “usurping” social traditions and existing institutions power does not act out of necessarily a malicious intent, but rather introduces a different type of “organizational” knowledge into a spontaneously-emerging pattern, thereby rendering it politically barren. 42 Jouvenel, Power, 170. 43 Ibid., 373.

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An aristocracy indeed! But without the honour that belongs to aristocracy and directs its actions in well-ordered channels; one which was careful to divorce from the command, which it exercised, the responsibility, which it rejected, and the risks, which it palmed off on to the shareholders.44

This mentality in its turn served the expansion of Power, which fought against the relative institutional autonomy of the capitalist class through the social and economic policies of President Roosevelt; Jouvenel goes on at length about the way in which the New Deal programs made Power the owner of all “great castles of the economic feudal System,” industrial concerns, facilities, infrastructure, financial companies and so on.45 Jouvenel, then, follows here the Tocquevillian route by equating commercial society not with spontaneous order but with rampant materialism. This materialism, or “nominalism”, leads to a rapid and cumulative increase in the power of the state: centralized power never recedes in the face of growing democratic claims but only expands; while the opposing and even directly contradictory claims never result in the effacing of one in the favor of another, but in the erection of additional authorities meant to contend with the growing entropy. The end result of the hypertrophy of centralized power is not depicted as direct oppression or intimidation, but rather alienation and perpetual “anomie.” Jouvenel then paints in the somewhat more cultural or “civilizational” terms that we have seen in previous accounts. To illustrate the erosion of mutual trust in favor of administrative measures, Jouvenel alludes to Kafka and Dostoyevsky, and those authors’ depictions of the loneliness and anxiety brought about by individuals permanently residing in “Otherdom.”46 The narrative put forward in On Power, a work written in Swiss exile during the latter half of the Second World War, clearly echoes the political situation of Europe at the time. Jouvenel was one of the first authors to offer a comprehensive history or “genealogy” of totalitarianism as a unique phenomenon, not as a break with democratic traditions but as their more or less direct and organic conclusion.47 Jouvenel’s account, which is even bleaker than other (bleak in themselves) works in this vein, such as Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom or

44 Ibid., 318. 45 Ibid., 171. 46 Jouvenel, Pure Theory, 61. 47 Note Jouvenel’s provocative words from the very first pages of the work: “It is, alas, no longer possible for us to believe that by smashing Hitler and his regime we are striking at the root of the evil. Even while we do it, we are already making plans for after the war, which will make the state the arbiter of every individual destiny and will place, inevitably, in Power’s hands means adequate to the vastness of its task” (On Power, 12).

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Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, traces the decay of liberty on the continent not only to specific faulty economic or social arrangements, but to the very attempt to rationalize the political order. Jouvenel’s critique of modern political culture marks his revision of some of the managerial trends of the late nineteenth century in a more scathing and pessimistic sense. Since the state is largely demoted to an aggregate of subjective or “nominalist” interests, it cannot properly serve a constructive role in the establishment of tutelary institutions to promote social elites. Not only that, but its interference may in fact be detrimental to such process, as it may undermine the authenticity of the selected and formed elite groups. Since the process of bureaucratization which characterizes the rise of the modern state is accompanied by an appropriation of traditional institutions, it effectively means that groups and individuals who previously served in traditional leadership positions may still retain some of their external characteristics but without any of its innate merits.

3.2.3 Leadership and Personal Authority 3.2.3.1 The Origins of Leadership Due to the corrosive effect of individualism at the general cultural level, Jouvenel rejects the propositions of the type which characterized nineteenthcentury authors, namely of the formation of elites in commercial society or by administrative and pedagogical means. Instead, he opts for a more directly political view of elite formation, in which elites emerge through the formation of independent social associations under the guidance of a charismatic individual (leader). Under this view, a social elite represents a locus of informal leadership which actively and (often) intentionally works to curb the power of the state. While those elites may arise in a variety of contexts, they are characterized by a type of motivation which is distinct from all other social activities and hence cannot be reduced to merely instrumental bodies. The problems raised by Jouvenel are more difficult and pervasive than those raised by the older school. His formulation of the problem of democracy, as a system tending towards inevitable leveling and centralization, which operates by a cultural as well as administrative gradient, excludes the two former programs: social elites selected through spontaneous social institutions, or those cultivated by the state. Jouvenel thus looks for a different instance which would act as a reliable mechanism for elite formation, an instance which could not be demolished or appropriated by the democratic logic, while at the same time leaving some leeway for personal agency. This instance, as would be discussed here, is the informal group headed by a charismatic individual.

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In Jouvenel’s depiction of the social elite there is a strong personal element. The elite individual, the leader, is characterized by having a uniquely attractive personality; he is “the man of the project” who “summons and recruits among those who are receptive of it; he waves it like a flag and rallies forces to it.”48 This person in charge of the group (always an individual person) plays a unique social role, which is to transmit and expand moral values; an act of leadership is defined largely by its intentions: it does not arise out of a certain manifest need, material or other, but out of a sense of moral obligation. Such a form of individuality is associated with a certain type of personality, which Jouvenel explains as the concrete sovereignty of man over himself, the thing which allows and compels him to unfold his personality, gives him mastery over and responsibility for his destiny, and makes him accountable for his acts both to his neighbour, dowered with an equal right claiming his respect – this is where justice comes in – and to God, whose purposes he either fulfils or flouts.49

Personal leadership, in such a way, is entirely distinct from coercion. It is also entirely distinct from the established power of the state, of that of bureaucracy, or of that of any official legal body. Rather, Jouvenel uses this concept to designate a specific process in which a certain individual social actor takes the initiative to make others follow him or her. Personal leadership, different from centralized power, is not established by means of any general institution but by personal agency. It remains embedded in a certain time and place, and most of all in the individual in whom the power of leadership is vested. Jouvenel defines the auctor as “the man whose advice is followed, to whom the actions of others must in reality be tracked back; he instigates, he promotes.”50 We have seen already that the main tendency of nineteenth-century French thought was the ever-increasing emphasis on large aggregates and social categories as sociological factors for elite formation. For Jouvenel however elite membership has a much more personal quality: this is not only because of the extent or function of leadership, but rather because of its unique intentional nature. This can be effectively distinguished from how Jouvenel understands the more institutionalized forms of power: bureaucratic power, as seen in the previous section, has a certain transactional nature: it guarantees security, material benefit or comfort in exchange for coercion. Since power always relates to

48 Ibid., 65. 49 Jouvenel, Power, 317–18. 50 Jouvenel, Sovereignty, 30.

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a certain insufficiency, to a certain concrete need or claim the individual articulates, it remains invisible and purely functional; when obeying power, the subject individual essentially obeys him or herself. Authoritative leadership, in contrast, is manifest in assertive social relations: it exists wherever one person commands another, without regard, necessarily, to the latter’s express claims. Personal leadership is thus distinct from centralized power since it arises from a different political form, that of personal charisma and leadership which is not established by decree or by law or any other institutional mechanism. When leadership is invoked, there is nothing to guarantee its success other than the effectiveness and charisma of its founder. Unlike power that relies on professional expertise or function, an economic or judicial one, there is no prior institutionalized set of rules which determine the obligation of a person towards the social leader; accordingly, there is also no easy possibility to alienate or transfer the power of leadership from the auctor to a third party. Accordingly, leadership cannot be established by formal agreement between members, since this agreement implies an anterior function that needs to be served. In a few sentences Jouvenel explains the idea of leadership (“authority” in his vocabulary): [W]hile the term [authority] has a great variety of meanings, the simplest is that which is closely linked with the word “authorship”: a statement is authoritative by virtue of the credit afforded to its particular author. Should I state that there can be a speed no greater than that of light, I should provoke laughter; but should Professor Heisenberg say so, his authority would command world-wide attention.51

A good way of understanding Jouvenel’s notion leadership is by identifying it with agency. It is no coincidence, Jouvenel tells us, that the term “authority,” foundation (auctoritas) and authorship are semantically related, as all denote personal responsibility that is essentially irreducible and inalienable.52 Authority, quam personal leadership, emerges in a natural, informal, and voluntary way; Jouvenel even emphasizes the way in which the foundation of leadership begins not strictly, or even primarily, from the intentional action of its holder, but from that of his or her followers; as Jouvenel describes the process of foundation: the promoter is a working man respected by his fellows: he broaches his project to those who are closest to him, and as they are persuaded, his status rises in their eyes. In turn, they spread the idea, and as it becomes clear that they cluster around him, this makes him more important in the eyes of those who are successively approached.53

51 Ibid., 92. 52 Ibid., 20–22. 53 Jouvenel, Pure Theory, 102.

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Since the leader is not designated by another instance, obligations towards him or her similarly cannot also be derived from an existing principle. We have seen already that for Jouvenel formal obedience is not that mark of authority, but of power. The individual who commits his or herself to the informal leader does it not out of utilitarian grounds, even existential ones, but out of internal accord: leadership begins for an imperative that is grounded in “the prestige, personal or institutional, of the man speaking – a prestige linked to the guarantee furnished by the exalted character recognized in him.”54 Leadership, then, does not begin at the moment the command (or “imperative”) is given; rather, it begins the moment that individual is recognized by his or her would-be subject. The initiator of this process is not the holder of the position of leadership but actually its recipient, who by his or her own personal choices “delegates” this power upon the other agent of his or her choice.55 Despite the fact that the specific content of the command of leadership might pertain to some instrumental – economic or other – interest, its form is by definition non-instrumental: let us . . . suppose that combination is no longer a means employed to achieve a given end but is looked on as an end in itself, that the promoter of the particular grouping is no longer concerned with a certain task for which he requires the energies of the group but makes the existence of the group his end.56

Since it is inherently non-instrumental, or in Jouvenel’s words, since the “action [of leadership] can never be merely additive,”57 this means that its main drive, or “efficient cause,” cannot be transferred or delegated to an established bureaucratic body. Jouvenel describes the process in which leadership is consolidated into an institutional form as contradictory and dangerous with respect to the essence of leadership; Jouvenel illustrates it: “[personal] authority is institutionalized; artifice prolongs the effects of nature, just as a weak voice is strengthened by such helpful devices as the rostrum and the loud speaker . . . . [W]hen majesty goes out, the police comes in.”58 54 Jouvenel, Sovereignty, 75. In another place Jouvenel describes the ethical function of the imperative in a vivid literary style. He paints a narrative of a town bishop who educates the son of the barbarian king, not with physical power but rather with words: “you cannot do this” and “that is what is done” (ibid., 35). Those imperatives have the power of persuasion precisely because of their indicative form – they imply no actual sanction of any kind, “moral prohibition therefore has to be made in [the] imagination a hard, concrete obstacle” (ibid.). 55 Ibid., 92. 56 Jouvenel, Sovereignty, 19. 57 Ibid., 20. 58 Ibid., 72–73.

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Jouvenel’s idea of personal leadership can be seen as the fusion of the classical notion of individual merit, in the way it is discussed in the nineteenthcentury liberal school, with a modern notion of charisma. Charisma, unlike the type of merit discussed by earlier thinkers, is not hinged upon any objective combination of variables or even on a strict set of personality traits; rather, it represents an irreducible and largely inexplicable type of magnetic force.59 As such, it cannot be manipulated in the same way as elite qualities in the nineteenth-century corpus – it is neither an object which can be traced by neutral selective mechanisms nor a faculty which can be deliberately formed by the state. Rather, it emerges through the collective experience of influence and attraction, one which is unique to the political process as a relation of indispensible personal authority and influence. 3.2.3.2 Leadership as Personal Influence In accordance with this view, the selective process which generates those elite groups is fierce, and depends on the activism of individuals endowed with unique political and associative capacities, broadly understood as charisma or personal influence. This type of charisma is not a mere charm or attraction, but a persuasive force which creates or amends social cohesion in a way that most established political institutions cannot. The moral force which is inseparable from the individual leader is what keeps the social elite from becoming appropriated by centralized power. Jouvenel’s fundamental view of social action draws an identity between knowledge of one’s action, its consequences and its requirements, and the ability to execute it. In other words, before one does anything, he or she must have a clear idea of the results and consequences of their action, from the most elementary personal activity to grand social designs. In Jouvenel’s definition: [T]here is nothing of which we are more aware, whatever philosophers may say, than our ability to bring about certain situations by our choice served by our efforts. I can, if I

59 A recapitulation of the famous Weberian definition is in order: “The term ‘charisma’ [represents] a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader . . . . How the quality in question would be ultimately judged from an ethical, aesthetic, or other such point of view is naturally indifferent for the purpose of definition.” Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 241.

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want to, raise this glass to my lips. When I raise it, I am aware that I am “causing” its new position. But, to speak more accurately, the very notion of “cause,” common to all men, is a product of such experiences.60

The more complex the intended action, the more extensive the knowledge it requires of the various social preconditions which support it; thus, in a more complex political context acquiring this knowledge also requires a good degree of intuition and ability to prognosticate, oftentimes even with respect to other parties’ future actions and decisions. This type of reflexive conjecture is part and parcel with the execution of any complex social action; to demonstrate this idea Jouvenel brings the example of a Syracuse envoy tasked with delivering a peace proposal to Athens: our first duty is to plead with the Athenians, seeking to dissuade them from attacking our City; but surely that is not our only duty: we must also guess what the decision will in fact be. On our return to Syracuse, we shall be accused of a disservice to our City if we have failed to convey advance information that the Athenian decision was going to be war. It will then be a quite inadequate defence to argue that we could not know what the Athenians would decide as long as the decision was open: though it is strictly true that we could not have certain knowledge, we should have formed a true opinion of the future event.61

Such knowledge, clearly, cannot be transmitted or learned via formal mechanisms. Jouvenel emphasizes its tacit, personal and, in fact, fragile nature of such knowledge; he points to the “dynamic relations” held in the mind, according to which “because of certain past events, people of certain dispositions will prove responsive to a certain call and act in a certain way”; he then adds “the chain of conjectures may be very weak in itself and it may be perceived only faintly by the speaker, but none the less it exists in his mind.”62 It is clear that

60 Jouvenel, Pure Theory, 6. 61 Ibid., 5. This point illustrates the high compatibility of Jouvenel’s thought with a particular brand of twentieth-century liberal thought, namely that of F.A. Hayek (and to a different degree, Michael Polanyi). While calling Jouvenel a Hayekian thinker would make for a biographical mistake (Jouvenel scarcely cites Hayek and was not meaningfully indebted to the Austrian thinker’s writings, many of which were published around the same time as Jouvenel’s main works), it is undoubted that the historical-intellectual inspirations of the two thinkers, namely eighteenth-century Scottish and Continental Enlightenment, nineteenth century liberalism and early twentieth-century sociology, largely overlapped. Jouvenel remains quite idiosyncratic in the way he belongs at once to the French intellectual tradition while at the same time being one of the rare French representatives of the (neo-)liberal revival which took place from the 1940s to the 1970s. On the latter point, see Serge Audier, Néo-libéralisme(s). Une archéologie intellectuelle (Paris: Grasset, coll. Mondes vécus, 2012), especially chapter II. 62 Ibid., 6.

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any attempt to lay out such a “chain of conjectures” in a more explicit way may undermine it, and as such not only debase the analyst’s confidence but also deprive general society at large from a valuable means of estimation and assessment.63 Leadership, then, is the capacity of supplying individuals with knowledge essential to their actions: to their unique undertakings as well as to their regular comings and goings. Generally, what makes a social leader a reliable guarantor of such knowledge is his or her individual character, which is what supports leadership and distinguishes it from personal “nominalist” interest; as Jouvenel notes: “a man’s character is what reconciles his freedom with the predictability of his actions by others. A man who acts according to his character surely acts freely; but also his action can be foreseen by another party who knows his character.”64 The equation drawn by Jouvenel between charisma, reliability, and authority also explains why it cannot be instituted indefinitely: a person who is moved by social, legal or other external forces is not reliable in the strict sense, even if those forces are relatively stable. That notion of character as the prerequisite for personal leadership marks not only the irreducible nature of authority into established structures, but also the objective function which it fills. Character, which involves a kind of regularity and behavioral consistency structured only according to the subject’s autonomy, fills an important function, that of epistemic tutelage. This element is what creates the regularity that is essential to social conduct in every way, and particularly in a non-coercive and adaptive manner. This is what Jouvenel regards as a most fundamental requirement of social life; “the regular and foreseeable behavior of . . . others and the possibility of anticipating their reactions with the smallest margin of error are the pillars on which every individual calculation rests.”65 Jouvenel insists on the point that it is not the intention of the political actor which creates this function, but rather the objective requirements that are involved in the process of bringing people together. The leader finds him or

63 Jouvenel is the first French liberal thinker since Benjamin Constant to stress the value of tacit knowledge in the process of sociability, which again showcases the way in which his thought goes largely against the grain. 64 Jouvenel, Sovereignty, 87. 65 Ibid., 115–16. This epistemic opaqueness is in fact the result of life in a diverse and complex society. In another place Jouvenel explains that “man finds himself similarly in a maze when he enters a profession, is recruited into a firm, is received in a military body, takes up a situation, is admitted to a club or into a circle. The new member of parliament is in no very different situation from the new boy at school” (Jouvenel, Pure Theory of Politics, 56).

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herself assuming an already-established role; Jouvenel uses here the metaphor of the crown, a symbol of authority as well as of conservation, not only of the social but also of the traditional and even metaphysical order: “a circumference suggests irresistibility of the idea of order, equilibrium, perfect arrangement.”66 He also notes that authority, in this instance, designates a type of social regularity, the preservation “not only of the social order but also of the cosmic order which has not been distinguished from the social order.”67 It is clear that the quality furnished by personal leadership cannot be substituted by any established mechanism, especially statutory law. While the object of the legal mechanism is order, this type of order is very different from the one created by the virtue of the personality of the authoritative agent; the legal order, says Jouvenel, is not the creator of the social order but its product; it merely accompanies the way in which a community is formed and conducts its affairs: the Rule of Law is a natural phenomenon. Men are inhibited from doing certain things, and offended when such things are done, by reason of shared feelings as to what is right and proper. Upon those feelings, the content of which changes over time but the nature of which is unchanging rests the possibility of social cooperation.68

Jouvenel’s analysis also suggests that the only authentic trait of leadership consists in an impetus which is distinct and even opposed to personal interest, at least to a certain extent. There is something in private interests which contaminates the genuine personality of the leader; Jouvenel refers to this idea when speaking about the position of the authoritative person as a trustworthy individual: “an authentication of the promise which affords it the backing of the public authority is an additional surety; but the promise by itself is a bond.”69 That is not to say authority is completely distinct from interest and should be isolated from it, but that authority contains a further element which cannot be reduced to interest alone. Law cannot substitute leadership primarily because it is not geared to contend with the excessively quick and constant change in society and the emergence of contingencies; policymaking “requires much more than common sense, it calls for a great deal of information and careful assessment, for want of which legislators may pass laws which seem to do some present good and

66 67 68 69

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 298. Jouvenel, Pure Theory, 79.

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prepare great future harm (e.g., the French rent control acts).”70 We have seen already that the attempt to cover an increasing number of contingent cases is what leads to the extension of bureaucratic and administrative measures. Despite Jouvenel’s somewhat obscure language, the function of leadership is actually very clear and non-ambiguous. What the function of leadership or personal authority does is imbue its holder with a kind of complex informal legitimacy; he becomes at once an exceptional object of attraction and a guarantee of social order and continuity.71 Jouvenel’s view of elite formation is much more individualistic than earlier versions of the idea, as it begins not from institutions (economic or pedagogic ones as was the case in nineteenth-century thought), but from the individual person, his imitative, and his immanent and inalienable moral characteristics.

3.2.4 The Group-Association Despite highly personalized origin of the elite in Jouvenel’s view, it is not entirely distinct from durable institutions. The process which he describes is the one in which personal leadership begets informal institutions, or associations which the leader-type supports by means of charisma as well as personal organizational skill. Those associations, which are maintained largely through the personal tie between their members, are not subject to the nefarious influence of centralized bureaucracy, and hence maintain their independence. The existence of a wide array of informal associations throughout society works to limits centralized power and provides an outlet to various interests and values which is concurrent with the established democratic institutions.

70 Bertrand de Jouvenel, “On the Evolution of Forms of Government,” in The Nature of Politics, Selected Essays of Bertrand de Jouvenel (New York: Shocken Books, 1987), 129. Jouvenel published an insightful and in-depth analysis of the French housing policy. While Jouvenel’s views on political economy is not the topic of discussion, it may be relevant to point to the way in which he uses the residential subsidy policy to demonstrate his theory of the expansion of power through captive interests; it was not a single plan which dictated housing policy, but an accumulation of measures meant to contend with the changing circumstances since the 1930s (Bertrand de Jouvenel, “France: No Vacancies,” in Economics and the Good Life, Essays on Political Economy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1999), 157–63). 71 In several places Jouvenel addresses the relation between the leader, the holder of personal authority, and its subject as that of “friendship.” This definition is helpful, since it denotes the relative autonomy of the relation itself over the particular qualities of its members (Sovereignty, 128–30).

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Since the rules of conduct can only be transmitted in a particular social context, they depend on the mediation of at least a partially institutional collective unit; this is what Jouvenel means when he remarks that “man is not born free but dependent. He does not renounce rights when entering into society but he owes his very existence and the features of his developed being to the fostering group.”72 Since this type of association is not founded upon private interest, the entry into the group does not actually entail a compromise between the individual and the community but a type of more or less harmonic reconciliation; the individual does not concede rights or liberties, but actually gains a reliable social and psychological footing. In Jouvenel’s nomenclature there is thus a clear distinction between an authority founded on private interest and the machinations of central agency, and the one founded upon moral values. Jouvenel puts this difference in terms of a distinction between “Babylon” and “Icaria,” or a society which is large, complex, and morally diverse as opposed to a small and relatively uniform society.73 In the former, order is achieved primarily through the direct repression of authority, which itself is defined in “nominalist” terms of separation between morality and action – “[the individual] abstains from the actions which are forbidden to him not because he thinks them bad but because they are forbidden, and he executed the actions which are commanded him not because he things them good, but because they are commanded.”74 Icaria, on the other hand, is characterized by the identity of the values and action: there “the unity of principles and the spontaneous harmony of behaviors hold the field.”75 Jouvenel uses this analogy to illustrate his underlying point: since “Babylonian” society contains a multitude of views, opinions, and ways of life, and since the type of knowledge required to conduct any kind of complex social action entails uniquely intimate knowledge of social processes and reactions, it means that the individual can never achieve the predictability which can supplement the legal order. Accordingly, a true moral order can never be wholly reconstructed in such a society: any attempt to create an “Icaria” in “Babylon” would result in the institution of tyranny, as uniformity cannot be reproduced by means of institutionalized decrees (this process is what is analyzed in the first section here).

72 Ibid., 44. 73 This distinction closely approximates the Hayekian distinction between a “simple” and a “complex” order (cf. Friedrich Hayek, Kinds of Orders in Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2013)). 74 Jouvenel, Sovereignty, 272. 75 Ibid., 273.

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We have further seen that what Jouvenel designates as the counterweight to centralization, namely, authority cannot be institutionalized to any meaningful degree. Since it emerges in quite an unpredictable manner, and since it relies on an irreducible type of personal experience, it cannot effectively be delegated to other agency. Jouvenel solves this issue by turning to another instance, which is that of an informal social bond, an association which Jouvenel calls a “team” or a “group.” While groups of all sorts may very well have an external goal, the existence of the group is not reducible to this goal. We have already seen that the function of charisma is to disseminate predictability and regularity by means of personal character; likewise in the case of the groups founded by authority, all of which play this role to a varying degree.76 A group, importantly, is not an egalitarian structure; it operates both on a horizontal axis, in a relationship of egalitarian peerage between the members of the group, and a vertical axis that operates between the members and the leader of the group with the “guarantee” of the personal leader that vouches for the success of the group, which may otherwise simply dissolve.77 That is not to say, however, that a group is completely centralized: there is a delicate dynamic in which every member of the group acts as an “agent” of the original leader and creator of the group and as its subject: every formation “gets into gear through the initiative of a single man, who sows among others the seed of his purpose; some of them, in whom it rises, turn into a small group of apostles for the scheme, and these form the nucleus that preaches and recruits.”78 The group, in such a way, is used by Jouvenel to balance the requirements of a large and diverse human society with those of ethical and epistemic reliability; to transpose, in other words, “Icarias,” in the plural into “Babylon.” This solution is not entirely distinct from those we have seen in the previous two chapters, in the way it uses a unique type of ethical conduct to institute social order and to restrain the excesses of democracy; however, Jouvenel’s idea is highly idiosyncratic in the way it fuses authority with the ethical bond by means of the social group; what the group introduces, in Jouvenel’s imaginative language, is “the formation of friendships [which] is like the surging-up of hospitable islands in the open sea of Otherdom”.79 It is this vertical structure that prevents the association from becoming a merely utilitarian combination of interests. Jouvenel analyzes the relations of the group members with its leader or founder in terms of an ethical relation,

76 77 78 79

Ibid., 56–59. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 28. Jouvenel, Pure Theory, 64.

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which involves a sense of common values and participation of a common lifestyle. As Jouvenel formulates this appeal: “join up behind my white cockade” is imperative in form, and this imperative is explained by what follows, “you will find it always following the path of honour.” “Here there is also something implied: assuming that men such as you are, or want to be, are determined to take the path of honour, and that I for my part am embarked on it, then my cockade is the sign that teaches you the path which you should logically follow.”80 At the heart of the expansion of the group, then, is a process of imitation or “contagion” through which charisma, and accordingly forms of behavior, are disseminated. Groups in their very nature tend to be closed to outsiders; in Jouvenel’s term, they are “esoteric.”81 What this means is that forms of behavior can never truly be generalized, since such generalization would entail losing their source and thus their legitimacy. There is thus a very strict limit on the institutionalization of authority, whose extent is more or less equal to the ability of the individual to communicate naturally and without the mediation of third parties or institutionalized agencies; this is what Jouvenel means when he remarks that “the more distant that an authority is, the more it needs a halo, or, if no halo is available, the more policemen is needed.”82 What the group promotes, then, is not necessarily an external cause as much as an internal, immanent cause, which is inherent in its own existence and its manner of operation. Individuals who take part in such a group do not necessarily feel that they are protected or that their interests are served in the strict or immediate sense; rather, they feel a kind of “epistemic security,” a sense of reliability and predictability that Jouvenel defines as a way of life, or “common bonds, which assure that they are naturally drawn together . . . a natural community which, in turn, inspires individual conduct.”83 This, rather than any expression of interest, is the “efficient cause” of the group. The broader political benefit of the group as an elite structure is the way it helps curb the power of centralized authority. Since the group creates its own sense of security, it means that individuals would not need to turn to the state in order to achieve the same type of predictability and regularity. Jouvenel defines the relations between the group and organized power as a zero-sum game, in which one may only grow on account of the other:

80 Ibid., 74. 81 Ibid., 122. 82 Ibid., 77. 83 Bertrand de Jouvenel, “A Better Life in an Affluent Society,” in Economics and the Good Life, 112.

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as the degree of such departure increases, the conditions of purposeful behaviour by Ego are impaired. Therefore the more individuals may depart from predicted behaviour, the more necessary it is that “negentropic” agencies, some moral, some concrete, should be at work, to maintain the reliability of Ego’s environment.84

The weaker the social tie, the more pertinent the need for centralized enforcement agencies. Jouvenel’s formulation of the notion of the group-association is used by him to reconcile the creation of elite groups with the egalitarian pressure of democracy by forming politics outside of the state and its sphere of established institutions. In general, Jouvenel does not think the elite category plays any direct role in the established democratic process, in the sense of parliamentary or other deliberative activity; we have seen already that democracy is perceived by Jouvenel basically as an outgrowth (or rather, a facilitator) of the process of political centralization and bureaucratization, which obfuscates personal initiative and renders it as a form of interest-clientalism. This does not mean, however, that democracy leads by definition to a completely expansive or totalitarian system; as Jouvenel makes clear, the impact and extent of power is in direct proportion with the trust and “credit” individuals put into it. As such, what Jouvenel describes is the emergence of a non-institutional (but not non-political, in the broad sense) sphere of activity that would encompass the variety of social groups and the interactions between them; it is not by means of participation or by opposition that Jouvenel hopes for the limitation of democracy, but by designating a sphere of trust and social predictability that is entirely independent of the institutions of the state. As a form of social elite, Jouvenel’s notion of personal authority is quite distinct. As emerging from this analysis, the merit associated with personal leadership does not arise through any institutional mechanisms, either spontaneous or more constructed ones; Jouvenel certainly does not have confidence in the power of governments to construct proper elite-promoting institutions, while at the same time he is skeptical about the redeeming selective capacities of the economic sphere. To revolve this dilemma, Jouvenel puts forward a process of selection and adaptation which emerges from the political sphere itself and from the mechanism of influence and positioning that is inherent in any meaningful social undertaking. As such, the transmission process described by Jouvenel is largely spontaneous: it operates by virtue of charisma and personal prestige that are

84 Ibid., 62. Jouvenel’s jargon is somewhat idiosyncratic here; to clear up: “negentropic” stands for the opposite of “entropic,” i.e., movement-negating or eliminating. “Ego” is the term Jouvenel uses to designate the individual experience in his work Pure Theory of Politics.

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impossible to construct or emulate. The action of personal authority is what creates harmony and coordination; since each personal authority institutes a degree of consistency and regularity with respect to its own limited and designated social domain (the group), the myriad of authorities that act throughout society embody and promote a decentralized and stable social order. At the same time, it should be important to note that personal authority is also embedded in the operative structure of politics: the group is not a neutral association but one that retains the power and influence of the individual leader. As such, it cannot be conflated or reduced to any other type of social association with a designated function; its political nature is essentially non-transmutable and cannot be transmitted into any formal institution. As demonstrated here, this position arises from Jouvenel’s basic idea of (salutary) politics, as tied with the immediate and even intimate relation between a charismatic individual, or leader, and members of the group-association. Jouvenel’s notion of the elite is then somewhat paradoxical: on the one hand it retains the authority of an influential individual, in a way that is not altogether unsimilar from the old formulations of Bonapartist charisma; on the other hand this authority is entirely uninstitutionalized and is devoid of any mechanism of enforcement. While the vocabulary and details of Jouvenel’s statement are rather different, even idiosyncratic, its basic outline is also a rather straightforward variation of the French liberal argument. Jouvenel traces the drift toward uniformity and equality in the heart of modern democracy, as well as their institutional counterpart, namely bureaucratic centralization. Accordingly, he also seeks to contain this trend by turning to a designated social category whose members would assume positions of social eminence. The novelty he introduces is in the nature of the elite, which is highly informal and irregular in its character as social category, while at the same time also highly intense and demanding. Jouvenel is most particular with respect to the selective instances which he identifies, which is a highly unique social and political instance. By delimiting politics as the center of elite formation Jouvenel shifts the locus of the French liberal discussion and ushers in the twentieth-century iteration of this tradition.

3.3 Raymond Aron: Institutionalized Elites and Progress 3.3.1 Introduction Raymond Aron (1905–1983) is considered one of the most important names in the postwar revival of liberal political philosophy in France. It has become commonplace to situate his writings in the context of the awakening of French-speaking

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liberal thought, either through his reappraisal and promotion of the liberal idea in the French intellectual sphere, or through his thorough critique and rebuff of nonliberal political thought, particularly Marxism. The centrality of Aron to French liberalism according to some has been for the most part posthumous and even retroactively attributed, as he was rarely acknowledged as a political thinker in his lifetime. Aron, for example, never gained the status of a “philosopher,” but was usually referred to in the French milieu as a “sociologist.” Aron’s rehabilitation as political thinker, however, goes hand in hand with the revival of liberal thought in France of the 1970s onwards. Situating Aron’s political ideas properly within the literature has been a contested issue. While it has been said that Aron is “unanimously considered as one of the most eminent representatives of liberal thought,”85 the question regarding the specific nature and characteristics of his liberal thought remains open. On the one hand, Aron has been regarded as a “conservative” liberal, cautious and rather critical about the nature of democracy, which he views as a paradoxical regime in need of virtues such as tolerance and moderation.86 On the other hand, Aron has also been defined as adhering to a type of “conflictual” democracy, in the tradition of Machiavelli, emphasizing the contestational and dynamic nature of the democratic system.87 In order to understand Aron’s concept of the liberal elite, then, it is necessary to address Aron’s general philosophical ideas, his methodology and his conceptual discussion on fundamental social and political notions. This examination is necessary in order to understand the peculiar nature of Aron’s social and political ideas, which rely on a pessimistic and even tragic conception of human nature in order to buttress – not without ambivalence – the legitimacy of liberal democracy. Aron’s famous sense of responsibility or prudence is understood most clearly in his theory of understanding, which laid the groundwork for the formulation of his more immediate political considerations. The elite theory of Raymond Aron can be seen as a continuation of the postwar tendency put forward in the last chapter. Aron’s critique of democracy picks up some of the themes developed already in nineteenth-century thought and by Bertrand de Jouvenel. Like them, he regards the drift toward egalitarianism as largely embedded, if not predetermined in the secular trend of democracy; and like them, he traced the solution, or at least the possibility of mitigation of this process, in the existence of an elite social segment consisting of distinctly-endowed

85 Pierre Manent, Les libéraux (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 790. 86 Brian C. Anerdon, Raymond Aron: The Recovery of the Political (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 177. 87 Serge Audier, Raymond Aron, la démocratie conflictuelle (Paris: Michalon, 2004).

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individuals. Like Jouvenel, he has little confidence in the ability of automatic and spontaneous mechanisms of the market to generate this type of class, and instead opts for a different approach: the social elite is produced through the political process itself, in the interplay of industrial, administrative and other elites and their interaction with the established political class. The model outlined by Aron emphasizes the pluralist nature of modern society and the way in which this pluralism contributes to the formation of politically-conscious social segments. Differently from Jouvenel, it is not the powerful personal attraction and charisma which form the qualities of the elite individual, but rather a much more low-key sense of prudence and of tacit moral judgment. Aron’s thought is marked by a tension between his methodological sources and his political ideals: his sociology and epistemology are widely regarded as inspired by the ideas of thinkers such as Max Weber and even Carl Schmitt, as they indeed returns to concepts such as “the political” and the value of indeterminateness which characterizes the German sociology of the early twentieth century.88 However, with respect to the content of Aron’s ideas he is more committed to the notions of liberty and pluralism as they emerged in the French liberal tradition. While this characterization of the political sphere exists already in Jouvenel’s work, Aron lays it out much more overtly in the way he describes the political experience as uniquely substantial and formative. This analysis of the political phenomenon is crucial with respect to Aron’s idea of elite formation. Aron pursued Jouvenel’s notion of political elites by locating their origin not in informal associations but in the bureaucracy of the state. The elites, in Aron’s view, emerge from the interaction between economic groups and the political class; as such, Aron’s view of the process of elite formation is a much more institutionalized one, as it accords an important role to industrial and other organized interests and especially to their negotiation with the state. In such a way, it is the mediation between different social and economic claims which forms the mental capacities required of members of the elite, namely a moderate and practical disposition towards politics and society.

88 For a recent contribution demonstrating the Weberian undertones in Aron’s thought see Scott Nelson and José Colen, “Statesmanship and Ethics: Aron, Max Weber, and Politics as a Vocation,” in The Companion to Raymond Aron, ed. José Colen and Elisabeth Dutartre-Michaut (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 205–16. For a more historical (and quite polemic) article showing the affinities between Aron and Schmitt see Philippe Raynaud, “Raymond Aron lecteur de Carl Schmitt,” Commentaire no. 148 (2014/4): 813–18.

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3.3.2 Democracy and Industrial Society At the heart of Aron’s critique of democracy lies his concept of industrial society. Unlike Jouvenel, Aron does not hold that modern society is characterized by the hypertrophy of centralized power. Rather, he identifies a series of alternative decision-making powers, dispersed throughout society in a more or less spontaneous manner. Since the modern industrial economy involves in itself complex relations of authority and command, it can provide the platform for the process of elite selection. Thus, Aron can be seen as responding to Jouvenel’s thesis by revising its main variables: in lieu of a network of voluntary associations, he introduces the structure of the western market economy. Aron breaks with the pessimism of Jouvenel (and of late nineteenth-century thought) by insisting that the increasingly complex and rationalized society does not lead to uniformity, but in fact results in a large and unprecedented degree of complexity and diversity. In his words, “industrial society – whether of the capitalist or the soviet variety – is differentiated and stratified.”89 The division of labor that is common in modern societies, which results in the “multiplication of occupations that accompanies the multiplication of products,” means that western societies have managed to fend off, or at least mitigate, this tendency towards centralization.90 In many ways, the process described by Aron complements Jouvenel’s idea of the network of voluntary associations, but articulates it in a much less oppositional way, as emerging from the modern economic structure. in competition over political power.91 Aron describes the way in which specific elite institutions emerge directly from the spontaneous process of the division of labor:

89 Raymond Aron, Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics of Modern Society (London: Pall Mall P, 1968), 33. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid., 125. The unique nature of Aron’s intermediary layer can be seen in his explanation about why the nationalization of private firms does not compromise the internal dynamic of the enterprise. The reason Aron points to is precisely that the state-appointed managers, when involved with the private business sector, do not keep their political or bureaucratic mentality but adopt that of the private sector. As Aron writes with respect to Renault, which was nationalized in 1945: “Once an enterprise has been nationalized, it is administered by someone who is appointed in a different way from the directors of great business concerns, but afterwards his activities are of the same kind as those of a head of a private concern. The directorial board of Renault is subject to the same considerations, and submits to the same laws as that of Citroën [a private company],” (ibid., 128).

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life in society implies the coordination of individual activities. In turn, this coordination requires rules, that is, the distinction between what is authorised and what is forbidden. It also requires a hierarchy of authority in no-matter-what collective enterprise, economic or military.92

Borrowing (expressly) a page from “neo-Machiavellian” authors like Vilfredo Pareto, he explains that what characterizes modern societies is not the disappearance of authority but its redistribution; he criticizes both Marxist and the modern variants of Saint-Simonism when he remarks that “industrialists have not become rulers, and public administration has not eliminated politics.”93 Aron’s idea of the political, or directing classes is in fact a direct adaptation of the Paretian notion of the social elite, which he cites affirmatively as a pluralistic alternative to the Marxian notion of economic class: by elite we mean the small number of individuals who, in each sphere of activity, have succeeded and have arrived to a higher echelon in the professional hierarchy . . . [D]o not look for a profound metaphysical or moral meaning for the notion of elite; we are dealing with an objectively observable social category.94

This description is telling especially by what it lacks or discards: namely the notion of elite as a category endowed with unique and quasi-obscure personal influence. Similarly, it does not involve any given social function: elites may emerge in a myriad of social contexts and through a myriad of groups; they may rise, fall, or “circulate” in Pareto’s term regardless of their quality or contribution. As such, belonging to a given elite does not, in itself, involve any given moral or “ideological” (in the broad sense) conviction.95 Aron’s idea of elites in a free society is repeatedly contrasted with the place (or absence) of elites in totalitarian countries, namely the Soviet Union. While the two systems – the Soviet and the democratic – share the same type of elitist

92 Raymond Aron, “The Liberal Definition of Liberty: Concerning F. A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty,” in In Defense of Political Reason, ed. Daniel Mahoney (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), 75. 93 Aron, Progress, 59. One commentator traces Aron’s theory of elites to his encounters with totalitarianism in its various forms during the 1930s, from which he derives his “moderate Machiavellianism” (Diogo Pires Aurélio, ““Moderate Machiavellianism”: Aron, Machiavelli, and the Modern Machiavellians,” in Companion to Raymond Aron, 231–43). 94 Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, Vol. 2: Durkheim, Pareto, Weber (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1999), 179. 95 To expand on this particular point: Pareto distinguishes between two types of elites – “lions” and “foxes.” While the “lions” attempt to preserve a more traditional type of legitimacy, the “foxes” are endowed with flexibility and ability to adapt to new situations. It is clear that Aron’s attention is drawn toward the latter type.

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society with respect to the hierarchical nature of the social arrangement, the major difference pertains to the place of this political “subsystem” with respect to other social fields. Under communism, political leadership assumes a not merely tutelary but also a spiritual role: the fact that all arts and culture are the matter of the state imply that all “ultimate value judgments are made by the ideologists who are also the leaders of the masses, the men who head the party apparatus.”96 Such a system does not allow for any autonomy of the intermediary classes: a [Soviet] bureaucrat, in its sociological use, is not someone in a government office. He is the representative of an anonymous order. He does not act as a person, but as an individual defined by his function, with a set place in the hierarchy. Each has a specific role and all must obey the rules.97

Democratic society, in contrast, is characterized by “dissociation,” where even the ruling classes lack homogeneity and continuity; the common purpose is never imposed but emerges through a “continuous dialogue among interest groups, political parties, and ideologies to further the establishment of an effective authority.”98 This is what Aron means when he indicates that it is the “observable relations between directing social categories [catégories dirigeantes]” which mark “the proper nature of each type of regime.”99 While Aron lists also business leaders and intellectuals, his main focus is on persons of the political class, mass leaders in Aron’s terminology, as they are the ones who hold direct authority over political and social affairs. This intermediary layer represents a stable element with respect to larger society and a dynamic element with respect to itself, as its different components are constantly engaged in competition over political power.100 While the western “mass leader” is endowed with a strong (but definitely not absolute) institutional and personal autonomy, the totalitarian system effaces this responsibility in its effort to turn everything into what amounts to an administrative process. The constitution of this type as an independent and accountable type of authority has important sociological elements in Aron’s view. Aron rejects attempts to locate an aristocracy in the classical sense in contemporary society; and yet he

96 Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 61. 97 Ibid., 235. 98 Ibid., 65. 99 Raymond Aron, “Catégories dirigeantes ou classe dirigeante?,” Revue française de science politique 15, no.1 (1965): 17. 100 Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism, 125.

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points nevertheless to an emerging intermediary class which exists due to the internal dynamic of modern industrial society. This class corresponds with the thick layer of essentially professional political persons: “secretaries of the trade unions or leaders of political parties, parliamentarians, professional politicians or elected functionaries.”101 The generative fact of the elite category is the interstitial relations between the diverse economic categories and the political sphere. What characterizes western societies is specifically the heterogeneity of the elite class; the “differentiation of ruling hierarchies.”102 It should be stressed that what legitimizes them in Aron’s eyes is not an external principle of justice or merit, but the fact that each of those hierarchies corresponds to a given social domain; this is largely opposed to the ideological system in which all social classes are in the final instance answerable to the same ideologues or “theologians.”103 As will be seen in the following section, it is this differentiation which provides the fundament for Aron’s idea of the limitation of democracy by means of pluralism. The way in which Aron understands the intermediary elite is not as an oligarchy (although he does not shy from using this specific term). What the intermediary class represents is the myriad of perspectives and positions, or “interpretations” in society, which is reflected in the plurality of economic and social interests and parties. Aron rejects quite explicitly the view of the democratic state as a direct manifestation of the popular will, while at the same time he insists on the legitimacy of this type of mediated representation: “there is no government of the people by the people. Nor has it been demonstrated, however, that the desires or wishes of the greatest number have no effect on the conduct of those of govern.”104 The point about legitimate rule does not revolve around the authenticity of representation of the popular will, but its correspondence with social reality, that of pluralism. Authority thus indicates a very unique type of functional relation for Aron. It is not, unlike Freund (whose ideas will be discussed in the next chapter), an existential relation of command and obedience; rather, it is a relation in which the individual accepts the authority of the social body in order to articulate his or her individual claims and values. Aron thus regards power in a somewhat

101 Aron, Progress, 124–25. 102 Ibid., 58. 103 Ibid., 61. 104 Raymond Aron, “Social Class, Political Class, Ruling Class,” in History, Truth and Liberty: Selected Writings of Raymond Aron (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 245.

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instrumental and proportional manner, as an instance undergoing perpetual transformation and adaptation: by maximizing the instrument of the means of power does not amount to power itself. Being a relationship between men or groups, power does not lend itself to quantification as readily as goods or things: relative, not absolute, power, extends over some men or groups and not others; it controls some behavior, not all.105

Despite their relative autonomy (especially in comparison to Soviet bureaucracy), those associative authorities are not entirely independent from the established authority of the democratic state. Due to their political nature, they are constantly in relation with the state, to which they raise demands and with which they are involved in a myriad of affairs; they form part of what Aron calls the “directing class,” that is composed of an ensemble of superiors of different categories, with political [state] personnel in the center (who are attached to each other directly by the principle of legitimacy), subject to the temporary influence of numbers (trade unions), of money (directors of banks and industry) and of the armed forces (generals).106

The point about those mediating bodies is thus not that they, in their inner structure, answer to some type of democratic principle. What is important is not their accountability or even their ability to represent the interests vested in them a truthful manner; what matters is that they are multiple, and it is this fact which allows them to represent various segments of society. It is the fact of social plurality that prevents society from being subsumed by a “technocratic illusion” and which allows the recognition of a “truly permanent political power . . . a contested, arbitral power, exercised by few in the name of all.”107 While Aron does not exclude the role of individual agency in the formation of social authority, he views it as highly dependent upon structures; there is a delicate balance between authority as a functional social body and the behavior of the individual who heads it. As Aron seems to suggest regarding the behavior of authority under normal circumstances, it may take some type of intentional agency in order to facilitate its functioning under difficult conditions. Since authority is always partial and limited in its extent, it does not exercise universal

105 Raymond Aron, “Macht, Power, Puissance: Democratic Prose or Demoniac Poetry?,” in Politics and History (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 109. 106 Raymond Aron, Les Désillusions du Progrès: essai sur la dialectique de la modernité (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1969), 58 (The English translation of the work omits this sentence). 107 Aron, Progress, 75.

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control over all of social affairs (nor should it aspire to such control), which means it faces inevitable contingencies at least to some degree. In Aron’s words: the individual in power (of a stabilized, institutional, legitimate sort) sometimes has no other authority than that attached to his function. But authority also embraces the quality thanks to which one personality impresses itself upon others and obtains acceptance, fidelity, and obedience not by the threat of sanctions but by the very spell cast by his will. The merging of legitimate authority and personal authority lies at the beginning of great destinies, those who feed dreams of glory and memories of horror.108

The way in which Aron understands democratic legitimacy is closely intertwined with his notion of social pluralism. It is not the mere fact of the representation of the aggregative majority which creates legitimacy, but rather the affiliation between society and the state by means of intermediary institutions: it is the combination of technological and economic modernization and the splintering of the directing groups, “the dissociation of the ruling minorities” which creates the unique character of moderate political democracy.109 The following section will discuss the specific form which this idea takes in the life of a modern democratic republic, and specifically the importance of the notion of prudence in facilitating this process.

3.3.3 Political Mediation and the Elites 3.3.3.1 Politics and Human Action Aron’s sociological analysis of modern economy similarly leads him to formulate a different theory of political action: while politics represents a form of social control and redistribution, it is, in fact, a fundamental aspect of human society, a unique way of mediating and communicating varying claims and values. As such, politics for Aron are not opposed to rationalized bureaucracy and calculation, but can take part in it under correct social arrangements. Aron, then, posits

108 Aron, “Macht, Power, Puissance,” 119. Aron’s analysis of Clausewitz’s role of the commander in his important essay on the Prussian thinker is very telling in this respect: “understanding alone will not ensure just decisions on the part of the commander in the midst of speeding bullets and dying men. The general (or statesman) has no need of erudition and never attains his high rank by intellectual qualities alone. A balanced character, sang-froid, a sharp eye, presence of mind in the face of crisis or uncertainty – such are the virtues that cannot be reduced to understanding.” Raymond Aron and Susan Tenenbaum, “Reason, Passion, and Power in the Thought of Clausewitz,” Social Research 39, no. 4 (Winter 1972): 615. 109 Aron, Progress, 69.

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politics as an important instance which can affect human behavior in a meaningful way, even under its more administrative and bureaucratic form. Throughout his postwar work Aron emphasized the increasingly important part which politics plays in society and in human life in general. Politics, in simple terms, represents a way of reconciling specific values and preferences of the individual agent with larger social conditions, including time, place, and context – a form of deliberative decision-making. In Aron’s words: even if we assumed that there were principles of law superior to the course of history, . . . political choice would still remain inseparable from particular circumstances, sometimes rational but never finally proved and never of the same nature as scientific truths or moral imperatives.110

Aron’s basic concept of society, then, includes a view of the political as the main instigator of social phenomena;111 in his words, “influenced by all other systems, the political subsystem has its proper laws of functioning and of development, and, in its turn, it influences all other systems because it is through it that decisions are made that concern the collectivity in its entirety.”112 To be sure, Aron is not discarding the influence of factors such as the economy and technology, but his interest lies primarily in the way in which changes in those spheres are translated to wider society. The political is unique in the way that it

110 Raymond Aron, Opium of the Intellectuals (New York: Transaction Publishers, 2011), 158. 111 The invocation of the notion of the primacy of the political led some commentators to associate Aron with Schmitt. Aron’s personal as well as intellectual relationship with Carl Schmitt, the person and his ideas, remains a complicated affair. While Aron’s magnum opus on international relations, Paix et guerre entre les nations (1962), is heaped with references to Schmitt’s various works, his other writings are sparser in this respect. References to Schmitt appear usually through indirect references and personal letters, and are largely marked by a very ambiguous attitude towards Schmitt’s Nazi past (cf. Zeev Sternhell, “Entre le tragique et l’imposture: Raymond Aron, Carl Schmitt et Alfred Fabre-Luce,” Temps Modernes 667 [2012]). This influence can also be attributable to Aron’s relations with Julien Freund, a colleague and “protegé” of Schmitt, with whom Aron was collaborating at the time over Freund’s doctoral thesis, as well as the French edition of Weber’s Vocation essays. See Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, “Why did Raymond Aron write that Carl Schmitt was not a Nazi? An Alternative Genealogy of French Liberalism,” Modern Intellectual History 11, no. 3 (2014): 549–74; Pierre André Taguieff, Julien Freund: Au cœur du politique (Paris: Le Table ronde, 2008), 25–55. It should also be noted that some accounts of the relationship of Aron and Schmitt describe Aron’s development of the concept of the political and its autonomy as an alternative and even an opposition to Schmitt’s conception (Jean-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003], 98–102). 112 Raymond Aron, Etudes politiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 285.

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combines both personal agency and wider social influence; it allows individuals to disclose their own interests, opinions and values, and to do so knowing those claims may be interpreted and processed by larger social systems. In such a way, Aron proposes a shift in the locus of political action away from Jouvenel’s informal association. For Aron, political action cannot be effectively separated from the social context in which it is embedded, one which involves a high degree of organization and even bureaucratic mediation, very differently from Jouvenel’s account of the voluntary association as characterized by a direct and even intimate connection through charisma. This can be seen not only in the internal dynamic of political action but also in its relationship with the institutionalized sphere of established politics. One of the central virtues of politics as such is that it does not have any predetermined goal; rather, it is a mode of consideration, or disclosure of values: the determination of values is essential to the understanding of human conduct, because the latter is never strictly utilitarian. The rational calculations of speculators represent an activity, more or less widespread in different civilizations, which is always limited by a conception of the good life.113

This is what Aron means when he says that “political thought can be neither independent nor a slave of reality.”114 The judgments of political actors, unlike, for example, scientists (a distinction which is underscored in Aron’s writings on Weber), do not enjoy the same kind of universality; the meaning of political enunciations is part and parcel with the mode of its expression, which is tied with a myriad of social factors and limitations. Even though some of Aron’s remarks may lead to the belief that he is attributing to the political a primacy in the sense of an absolute causal force, the same as the Marxist view of the economic relations as the infrastructure of society, his conception is in fact more complex than that.115 The political in Aron’s system functions as an important variable for the understanding of the state of things in any given society; it provides a source of meaning for the community, which reveals to us “the human or inhuman character of the whole community.”116 Politics as a unique sphere of action is able to disclose human action and intentionality in a way other spheres do not:

113 Aron, Opium, 137. 114 Raymond Aron, Polémiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 174. 115 See, for example: “it is not the state of productive forces but the state of political, even military, forces which is the predominant cause, the cause of the proper character of each type of society, the cause of the rise or of the fall of a certain type of society or another” (Aron, Classe Sociale, Classe Politique, 276). 116 Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism, 12.

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in relation to man, politics [le politique]117 is more important than economics [l’économique], by definition, since politics is concerned more directly with the very meaning of existence. The philosophers have always thought that human life is made up of human relationships. To live as a human being is to live with other men. The relationship between men is the fundamental feature of every community. But, then, the constitution of authority affects more directly ways of life than every other aspect of society.118

It is important to mention, however, that Aron never conceded his pluralist worldview in favor of an ultimate primacy of the political. Whereas he stresses the autonomy of the political, he does not see other social spheres as a priori conditioned to it. For the most part, the political regime remains for Aron the “mode of the organization of power,” in the same way as the economic regime is the “mode of the organization of production and distribution.”119 Both represent consistent ways of viewing society which are homogenous among themselves and cannot be reduced to one another. While Aron identifies economic reductionism with certain Marxist outlooks, he criticizes political reductionism as well by attributing it to a “Machiavellian philosophy” which entails the elimination of every reference to universal values. As such, this reductionism involves not only a false reading of the political (Aron describes it as “false realism”), but also, in its cynicism, fails to comprehend the plurality of political objectives and regimes.120 There are important theoretical reasons why Aron considers politics to be an indispensable form of mediation. As part of his theory of knowledge and communication, Aron rejected the possibility of abstract and immediate knowledge about society, including the articulation of values. Instead, he favored an intersubjective model under which one arrives at a consciousness of society through constant dialogue with other members. In its turn, knowledge of others requires an extensive interpretation of the other’s state of mind, which for the most part remains unintelligible; consciousness of the other, their feelings or

117 As arising from this account, politics for Aron are clearly not a matter of function or end. As such, it should definitely not be confused with the Schmittian idea of the political. In many ways he approaches an Arendtian view of politics as the disclosure of the plurality of human actions. It is clear that Aron also relates to politics a type of ethical predisposition; politics might not be involved in every aspect of human life, but they are the object for a myriad of moral and ideological inclinations. It may be of course located in a set of institutions, but as a social instance it reflects the human community in an unmediated and direct manner. 118 Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism, 11. 119 Aron, Les désillusions, 11. 120 The political for Aron could has been helpfully interpreted as a “partial sector,” and as one whose “repercussions on the entirety are immediately visible” (Jacques Rollet, “Raymond Aron et la théorie du politique”, Pouvoirs 73 – La démocratie municipale (Apr. 1995): 169).

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thoughts will never “become an object” for the observer.121 Achieving understanding of the other is a dialectical process: it is based on an extrapolation from one’s own experience of oneself, which in its turn is “linked with what others know of me, or with what I know of others.”122 The possibility of communication passes through the formation of what Aron calls “objective mind,”123 a shared common experience, which binds the individual into the community in such a way that will allow him or her to experience reality in a “disindividualized, rationalized, at times even systemized” way.124 The creation of this common meaning is done primarily through the participation in public affairs; it is “thanks to the participation in the two collective works, the state which makes a citizen out of every individual, culture which makes accessible common achievements to everyone, that man can realize his vocation: the conciliation of humanity and nature, of essence and existence.”125 As such, the political represents a unique type of social agency. Aron opposes the “political” approach to history (which he identifies with ancient historians, particularly Thucydides) to the “economic” one (namely positivist-sociological and Marxist); while the economic interpretation of history is for the most part a collective history, one which ignores, or attempts to reduce, unique events and actions to long-term processes until they become depersonalized, it is “relatively indifferent to the event.”126 Political interpretation of history, on the other hand, relates to history as a series of human decisions, it is “personalized and competitive.”127 If politics, or the political sphere in the more abstract sense, is what allows the articulation of different values and the possibility of intersubjective communication, it is clear why its undermining by means of ideology leads by definition to the effacement of pluralism and in its turn to the destruction of human agency. Since the political sphere is defined by its primacy and indispensability

121 Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire. Essai sur les limites de l’objectivité historique (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 62. 122 Ibid., 69. 123 “Objective Mind” is a concept used to Wilhelm Dilthey (following Hegel) to designate the ability of shared inter-subjective experience and interpretation. It is also the term used by the French translators and commentators on Weber and George Simmel (l’esprit objectif) in conjuncture with both “Geist” and “Kultur.” 124 Ibid., 74. 125 Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire. Essai sur les limites de l’objectivité historique (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 429. 126 Raymond Aron, Dimensions de la conscience historique (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1963), 130. 127 Ibid., 134.

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to social and ethical pluralism, it takes part, by definition, in every human society. The specific way in which the political sphere facilitates pluralism is by the establishment of intermediary institutions which transmit individual values and translate them into political language. We have already seen how the French liberal tradition regards the absence of mediating bodies as resulting in a uniform society. Aron uses the same theme, but relates it to his more general view of the human condition. 3.3.3.2 Pluralism and the Elites The designation of politics as the main instance which allows for contingent decision-making in a complex society is reflected in Aron’s view of the role of the elites. While emerging from various economic and social processes, their important social role arises from their distinctly political role, which places them in an effective position to mediate between different parties and interests. We have seen that for Aron social pluralism, as it is articulated in various social institutions, is part and parcel with the foundation of a modern stable democracy; this pluralism is mediated by the existence of strong yet flexible and informal elites that act as intermediary structures between the individual and the state. The pluralistic arrangement of elites, which can be termed the institutional aspect of modern democracy, is joined by its ethical aspect. Aron, as discussed above, begins with the fact of plurality of values, which is inherent in the human condition: the plurality of meanings which we ascribe to an act reveals not our incapacity but the limits of our knowledge and the complexity of reality. Only when we recognise that the world is essentially equivocal have we any chance of reaching the truth. Our understanding is not incomplete because we lack omniscience, but because the plurality of meanings is implicit in the object of our understanding.128

This system of value pluralism follows closely that of institutional pluralism, since it is what determines and enforces it; humans do not only act differently, but think and judge according to different standards, and it is from the interplay of those values that a political dynamic arises. However, Aron understands that it is not in the nature of those values themselves to be accepting or even tolerant in any necessary way: it is necessary, not that none of the groups would pretend to hold ultimate truths, but at least that none would have enough power to impose by force the obedience to the truths

128 Aron, Opium, 157.

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which it holds as ultimate . . . Dialogue ceases the moment in which one man or one group has the capacity to make obligatory to all its own particular version of truth.129

There is thus no real possibility, and in fact no reason, to hope for mutual understanding between different positions; Aron brings up the example of private property over the means of production as a clear issue which may be contested sharply by Marxists and non-Marxists – the point is that there is no real compromise between the two: private property cannot simultaneously exists and not exist – the two doxas have to be reconciled via the mediation of politics.130 Since no compromise is possible using the internal logic of the opposing political views, Aron explains the coexistence of various value systems in the same regime as facilitated by a process of institutional coalescence, mediated by political elites. Aron’s explanation begins by juxtaposing different types of answers regarding a certain political question, namely, that of liberty in a modern society; he contrasts primarily “formal” and “real” liberty, the former corresponding to the traditional notion of personal or “negative” freedom and the latter corresponding to the Marxian one (or “liberty as capacity”). There is no middle way between the socialist position on freedom and the liberal one, as both arise from differing assumptions about morality and human behavior, namely liberty to act without institutional hindrance versus the material condition for the achievement of said liberty.131 What is important about Aron’s definition is that it is inseparable from the institutional mechanisms which each respective view promotes. In such a way, Aron brings up the possibility of the coalescence of two value systems in modern democratic regimes, which happens particularly through the adoption of certain social and economic measures on the part of governments without conceding the system of rule of law and constitutional freedom. The particular mechanism through which this can take place is defined as “partisan representation.” This concept is not limited to a parliamentary party system, but rather encompasses a more general idea. Its basis, first of all is “that man is not only a producer or consumer but also a citizen, which means a member of a singular community, with its own values that can exist as such among other collectivities.” Second,

129 Raymond Aron, La Lutte des classes (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 366. 130 Aron, Progress, 267. Note that Aron does not refer to this specific position as ideological one; ideology, it should be remembered, is a form of thought, not a particular position. 131 Aron uses primarily Friedrich Hayek as a paradigmatic “liberal-libertarian” thinker, and criticizes some of his ideas in his critical essay “The Liberal Definition of Liberty” (note 315 above).

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partisan representation should serve as mediation between professional groups and the state. Different parties have links more or less tight with this or that interest. None is allowed to confuse them with an exclusive interest, as each has the pretense of incarnating an idea of the country, an interpretation of the common good, even a mission, be it national or even universal.132

What marks the distinction between ideological and non-ideological opinions, as radical as those may be, is not anything internal to them but rather lies in their ability to be articulated in institutional terms in the context of a political process.133 This articulation is what allows the different political actors to recognize each other and their respective claims, even while adhering to completely opposite viewpoints. As stressed before, it is mediation through a “higher third” which allows for the existence of pluralism; this is what Aron means when he indicates that the societies that we have defined as liberal-democratic, without achieving a reconciliation, which always remains imperfect, between political rights that are liberties and social rights that are capacities, show the way to the edge of which this reconciliation is painted in the horizon.134

One illuminating paragraph about the political conjunctures of Third Republic France demonstrates this idea perfectly: democracy was reconciled with parliamentarianism; the principle was finally established that all authority derives from the people, and, this time, universal suffrage encouraged the safeguarding of liberties and not the accession of a tyrant. Liberals and egalitarians, moderates and extremists, no longer had any motive for exterminating one another; the

132 Raymond Aron, Essai sur les libertés (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1965), 181. 133 Aron’s stance regarding the May 1968 events is highly instructive in this regard. His criticism of the students’ movement pertained only to their methods of operation, i.e., their “iconoclastic” anti-authoritarianism (Serge Audier, La pensée anti-68: essai sur une restauration intellectuelle (Paris: Découverte, 2008), 54–59). It has also been claimed that many of Aron’s remarks can be seen as legitimately positive as they recognize the powerful nature of the movement and its historical importance (as well as criticizing the Gaullist regime for its heavy handed response) (Aurelian Craiutu, “Thinking Politically: Raymond Aron and the Revolution of 1968 in France,” in Promises of 1968: Crisis, Illusion, and Utopia, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011), 115–17). Aron himself had already remarked on the necessity of a university reform in France a few years before the outbreak of the events, calling for the strengthening of the faculty as an intermediary structure as a way to contend with the “democratic ideal” (Raymond Aron, Mémoires, [Paris: Julliard, 1983]: 471). Aron would later remark “on the university question, I had always been rather revolutionary” (Raymond Aron, “Faut-il manifester pour l’Université?,” Commentaire No. 80 (1997/4)). 134 Aron, Essai, 218.

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aims which the various parties had assigned themselves were all, at last, simultaneously achieved.135

The important aspect of Aron’s version of the idea of value pluralism is the way in which it is not tied with something like an economic or legal formula, but requires sensitive and even creative effort on the part of political agents. The process of mediating between different values and interests is tied not with simple power arithmetic and cannot be answered by any pre-given formula. Different values and viewpoints do not simply coexist, but actually undergo a kind of synthesis. Consider for example this account of non-ideological politics according to Aron: private property versus public ownership, anarchy of the market versus planned economy, capitalist exploitation versus equality . . . have lost a great deal of their force. Whether the issue is the status of property, planning, or the equalization of income, henceforth it is not so much a question of choosing between two alternatives than of combining two complementary methods of deciding how far one should go in a given direction.136

What is emphasized by Aron is the manner in which values are transformed in a certain way when they enter into political discourse: claims of groups and individuals, despite being mutually exclusive and even opposite, gain a certain consistency when they are articulated in the political sphere. 3.3.3.3 Elites and Prudence According to Aron, the role of the elites is to translate pluralism into functioning cooperation between different parties in society. This is achieved due to the

135 Aron, Opium, 8. It is not without relevance to compare this vindication of pluralism with Aron’s dismissal of a somewhat similar attempt at reconciling two types of rights, as part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. In an important conference paper Aron delivered in 1967, he castigates the attempt to found a universal concept of human rights which draws on both the western liberal tradition and the Soviet version of Marxism. Rather than hailing the initiative as a process of pluralist reconciliation, Aron criticizes it for its ambiguity and its overly ambitious nature. It is clear that what is lacking in the case of the 1948 Declaration is the kind of firm political mediation and arbitration which happened to exist in the Third Republic. Without such instances, the mere fact of appealing to multiple moral value systems does not lead to reconciliation and stabilization, but to a confused document which is at once too soft and too rigid (Raymond Aron, “Philosophy and Sociology of Human Rights,” in Ethics and Social Justice, ed. Howard E. Kiefer and Milton K. Munitz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970), 282–99). 136 Raymond Aron, World Technology and Human Destiny (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1963), 6.

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salutary mental disposition of the elites, namely political prudence, which is the central characteristic Aron identifies in the workings of the political elites. The political model delineated by Aron is two-tiered: on the first level, we find individual agents, citizens, workers, members of associations, etc. combining under the guidance of an intermediary body. This intermediary (the elite body), in turn, proceeds by translating the interests of groups and individuals (as those intermediary persons perceive them) into a political language which is characterized by a high degree of discretion (“autonomy and responsibility” in Aron’s words137). It is this balance between representation, pluralism and general stability which is what characterizes liberal democratic societies (as opposed to the domination of specific values such as individual liberty or equality). What follows from this position is the primacy of what can be defined as “political art,” itself an indispensable measure for every free society: all power includes some element of the government of men by men; liberty is not adequately defined by sole reference to the rule of law: the manner in which those who hold this power are chosen, as well as the way in which they exercise it, are felt in our day as integral parts of liberty.138

What we find here, then, is that the possibility of conciliation of different values can take place only thanks to the existence of the political process itself and especially the existence of an elite intermediary body that reconciles those values. Aron does not claim that politics or engagement in politics is salutary or therapeutic, but rather that politics, including the existence of political individuals, is what allows for the adoption of a certain frame of mind by its participating agents, and that frame of mind is prudence, or political judgment.139 Aron lists the generic attributes of prudence as follows: One must consider (1) the plurality of goals, from short-term to distant, from tactics to strategy; (2) the actor’s knowledge of the situation, as well as the relative effectiveness of means; [. . .] (3) the nature, lawful or unlawful, praiseworthy or not, of the end or means in relation to religious, mythological, or traditional beliefs; and (4) the duly psychological

137 Aron, Progress, 154. 138 Aron, “Liberal Definition,” 85. 139 Aron uses several different terms to designate prudential behavior in politics: “political judgment,” “political wisdom,” and so on. Those differences are largely semantic as they basically refer to the same concept.

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motivations of the act, which is sometimes appropriate but sometimes apparently irrational with respect to the actor’s objective.140

At another point he even remarks openly about the “conservative” nature of “positive politics” characterized by prudence, but points out that every type of such politics “implies the acceptance of certain institutions, prejudices, traditions, not as conforming to the idea of human society, but as inseparable with existing society, in its given structure.”141 If modern ideologies of progress induce a unique and binding moral and political obligation from a deterministic idea of social and historical progress, prudence denies this determinism in favor of an open-ended sense of social development, which itself leads to a more free and discretionary possibility of choice between different values (which themselves may be radical and even revolutionary). In Aron’s words, the correct progressive attitude “refuses to exclusively assert either the end or the permanence of history, and admits that there are transformations, irregular but undefined, which lead towards an end situated at the horizon, itself justified by abstract principles.”142 Similarly, Aron defines the prudent political person as the one who acts in accordance with the particular situation and the concrete data, and not in accordance with some system or out of obedience to some pseudo norm; it is to prefer the limitation of violence to the punishment of the presumably guilty party by so-called absolute justice; it is to establish concrete accessible objectives conforming to the secular law of international relations and not to limitless and perhaps meaningless objectives, such as a world safe for democracy or a world from which power politics have disappeared.143

140 Raymond Aron, Politics and History: Selected Essays (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 61; see also Daniel J. Mahoney, “Raymond Aron and the Morality of Prudence: A Reconsideration,” Modern Age 43 (2001): 243–52. 141 Raymond Aron, “Note sur les rapports de l’histoire et de la politique,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 54, nos. 3/4, Les Problèmes de l’histoire (July-Oct. 1949): 406. 142 Aron, Polémiques, 178. This particular idea of prudence as a reversal of the abstract tendencies of politics is very much apparent in Aron’s writings on issues of war and peace. In his study of Clausewitz, Aron asks: “is politics, as such, historically a principle of moderation or, only in the abstract analysis, of the escalation to extremes?” His answer is as follows: “politics becomes a principle of moderation when we deal with abstract analysis; it is one of the possible brakes on an escalation to extremes; on the plane of historical determinism, politics moderates or increases violence according to the case; war, limited or unlimited, resembles the politics from which it emanates. Because policy goals are defined in terms of the tendency towards equilibrium, they discourage military adventurism by confronting the perpetrator with a coalition of states jealous of their dignity and independence” (“Reason, Passion, and Power in the Thought of Clausewitz,” 613–14). 143 Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (New York: Transaction Publishers, 2003), 585.

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Prudence, importantly, does not consist of a compatibility of one’s attitude with any external principles, as one can be prudent and completely radical or irrational; the one thing the prudent actor cannot be is “fanatical”: it is precisely “the criticism of historical fanaticism” which “should encourage us to choose in terms of extremely varied circumstances, according to probability and experience.”144 What Aron’s definition suggests is a certain inner consistency, together with sensitivity to changing conditions and contingencies. Similarly, prudence does not necessarily imply morality or justice, only the recognition of the possibility of different interpretations and values, and thus of pluralism. Aron’s notion of prudence should be understood in light of his general philosophy of meaning; as he points out, achieving understanding of the other is a dialectical process: it is based on an extrapolation from one’s own experience of oneself, which in its turn is “linked with what others know of me, or with what I know of others.”145 Aron, then, rejects the “communicative ideal” which presupposed a possibility for a clear and unmitigated mutual understanding. It is the opacity of the individual person and his experience which problematizes communication. In accordance with this conception, Aron defines the process of achieving social knowledge as approaching a certain consciousness which exists within oneself, which is necessary for an intimate connection with one’s own community: “society is present in the individual even while he thinks he is solely responsible for himself.”146 The study of history and politics thus implies knowledge of the self, of the others and of the community; this makes the social science “inseparable from human life” and represents a reflection beginning in present life.147 Since historical knowledge is then grounded in the present moment in a given perspective, there lies the danger of rendering it partially or “inadequately.” Aron responds to this difficulty by addressing the purpose of historical knowledge, which according to him lies in the discovery of “personalities . . . through ideas, . . . ideas which come from us and which [the historian] substitutes for the actual experiences in order to make them more intelligible.”148 The function of prudent consciousness, then, lies for Aron, not in the gathering of facts and truth, but in the attempt to reconstruct a picture of societies through

144 Aron, Opium, 57. 145 Aron, Introduction, 69. 146 Ibid., 75. 147 Ibid., 77. Aron would often use the term “committed observer [spectateur engagé]” to designate his own relationship with public life. This approach represents the analytic counterpart of the practical attitude he finds in prudence. 148 Aron, Introduction, 78.

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the different perspectives manifest in it; as he says, to “think life, by showing and reconstructing the rationality inherent in it.”149 Since this notion is inseparable from social existence, it is imbued with its characteristics, among them, first and foremost for Aron, the fact of pluralism. In other words, for Aron, “total coincidence in understanding is never realized, but the search for such coincidence retains its significance on the methodological level.”150 One can thus understand Aron’s concept of prudence in light of his remarks on the diverse nature of modern industrial society. In many ways it can be seen as the mental habit which is most compatible to such society: it does not posit any predetermined values, historical or other ones, and it refrains from applying existing values unto different social and epistemic domains. Being entirely formal in nature, it can lead to completely different and in fact opposite political conclusions. The important fact about prudential political behavior is that it accepts and internalizes an original set of variables and the conventional type of political mediation; this acceptance, in itself, does not have to (and in fact, ought not) rely on the acceptance of deep metaphysical truths but only of certain contingent factors; as Aron words it: “[prudential politics] is a type of politics which is sufficient to itself, as long as it is deployed in a stable society which is conscious of its singularity or which does not question it.”151 The notion of prudent behavior can be defined as a self-imposed restriction on one’s freedom of action. Since the prudent individual recognizes and to a certain degree also internalizes the fact of plurality in social life, he is obliged – not out of external necessity but by his own ethical commitment – to think and act in accordance with such pluralism.152 Prudence, in this context, can be defined a type of intentionality which arises from sensitivity and attention with respect to the endemic plurality of social conditions, values and views. Naturally, this constraint cannot be placed upon the acting individual by any external agency, but must be internalized by the individual himself using his very own faculties. It is an interesting type of dialectic in which true freedom also implies its own limitation, which clearly cannot be produced by an external force of some kind.

149 Ibid., 79. 150 Anderson, Raymond Aron, 35. 151 Aron, “Note,” 406. 152 This point has been insightfully illustrated by a commentator on Aron’s work: “the very asking of the question ‘what would I do in the minister’s place?’ is admittance that reasonable action is possible, that human freedom is possible. To place oneself in the Prince’s or the citizen’s place, however, is to recognize that freedom is also constrained, that the number of choice or options available to the political actor is not unlimited” (Anderson, Raymond Aron, 11).

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This idea of prudence leads Aron to a reformulation of his concept of liberal democracy. Very generally, Aron defines a liberal, or moderate, democracy as a regime featuring three traits: “the choice of governors and the exercise of authority in conformity with a constitution; free competition among parties and individuals in election to office; and respect for personal, intellectual and public freedoms on the part of the temporary winners in such competition.”153 According to this definition, a liberal democracy does not necessarily consist of the fulfillment of any specific need, of a certain social ideal; it is not a political system committed to any goal outside of the free determination of values. Such a democracy would not be committed to any a priori values, even when they seem obvious and intuitive in the case of a liberal system; he attacks, for example, a libertarian view by insisting that “the greatest error of liberals . . . is in believing that political liberalism and economic liberalism go hand in hand.”154 Since a truly liberal regime is one that relies on prudence as its guiding principle, and since prudence is primarily a formal idea, it means that a liberal democracy would concentrate on the procedural aspect, leaving the different political actors to formulate their own views. In Aron’s words, it is “a permanent dialogue in which the interlocutors retain different definitions of liberty or liberties.”155 Aron’s notion of prudence as a type of political behavior can be seen as an internal disposition which Aron attributes to the politically active individual and his or her very persona. If for Jouvenel the locus of political behavior is the initiator individual who builds and animates associations through the power of personality and charisma, Aron ascribes to individuals a different role, which does not assume assertive charisma and entrepreneurial spirit but rather innate sensitivity. The prudent individual, as opposed to the charismatic individual, has a mediative rather than instigating position in the political process: the political actor does not start associations, but rather conciliates between different associations, parties and positions. As such, his main trait does not lie in the ability to attract individuals, but rather in the reflexive ability to grasp different viewpoints and to creatively merge them into a coherent policy.156

153 Raymond Aron, “The Situation of Democracy: Western Political Institutions in the Twentieth Century”, Daedalus 90, no. 2, Ethnic Groups in American Life (Spring 1961): 353. 154 Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie politique: Démocratie et révolution (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1997), 127. 155 Aron, Progress, 236. 156 The underlying idea of prudence promoted by Aron is in many ways a vindication of Weber’s notion of rational leadership as legitimacy which is embedded in the operation of bureaucratic institutions (Weber, Economy, 217–22). Unlike Weber however, Aron emphasizes not

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This idea of the prudent individual denotes a qualification of the role of individuals in politics. The movement from the instigating to the mediating individual implies not only a transformation in the type of behavior which forms the backbone of liberal moderation, but also a change in the way those two thinkers regard its underlying condition – namely a more consolidated and institutionalized political process. For Aron, the fact of the increasing bureaucratization of politics is not a malignant feature of modern society, but actually forms a new way for the production and formation of elite groups, through the continuity of the category of “the political.” To follow up on Jouvenel’s illustrative terminology, it might be said that Aron opts not for a political “entrepreneur,” but for a political “manager,” one devoted to a more advisory and technical form of tasks, and whose role is in monitoring the neat operation of existing political systems rather than in the bold initiation of new groups.157 Aron’s notion of liberal elites introduces a kind of progressive historical dynamic which goes not only against the grain of Jouvenel’s analysis, but also breaks radically with the pessimistic trend of French liberal theory since the Third Republic, pessimism that extends to the 1940s in Jouvenel’s work. In many ways Aron’s outlook can be seen as the reflection of the social order which characterized France under the Fourth Republic, especially since the creation of the Commissariat général au Plan in 1946 and other bodies tasked with the modernization of the French economy through corporative and technocratic means. Aron’s position in the debate between the supporters of economic planning and its ideological critics (represented here by Jouvenel), was in interpreting this development in light of the liberal critique, while insisting on the stabilizing nature of the new administrative class. According to Aron’s view, if democratic society and the bureaucratic state rather than suppressing individual merit actually supports it via the maintenance of political pluralism, then this means that modern democratic politics provide in their own way the solutions to the problem of social uniformity. Under this view, bureaucratization is seen as less of a nefarious process and

the normative and legal aspect of administrative officials, but rather its opposite, the indispensible discretion and prudential decision-making which characterize the political aspect of the position. 157 This would explain Raymond Aron’s insight that Jouvenel’s model of politics is “microscopic and dynamic.” According to Aron, Jouvenel’s theory is well suited for establishing the different types of political actors, but fails to account for the broader aspects of political actions and the nature of political regimes (Raymond Aron, Etudes Politiques [Paris: Gallimard, 1972], 153–54).

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more as a facilitation of a different kind of spontaneous order, one which relies less on the market and more on the various interactions of economic, social and other industrial actors with the state; political capital replaces property as an indicator of virtue. It would thus not be a mistake to claim that what emerges in Aron’s political thought is a vindication of the socio-political order of postwar Western Europe; if Jouvenel’s anti-authoritarianism is a product of the extremism of 1930s, Aron, despite the biographical similarities, belongs squarely in the political theory of the Cold War era.

3.3.4 Ideology and the Limits of Prudence Aron’s optimism with regard to the self-sustaining nature of modern democracy was hampered by the student revolt of 1968, which represented for him a direct challenge to the organization of society around intermediary elites. The events of 1968 made him reassess the role of ideology in politics: as a revolt directed primarily against institutions themselves, it runs the risk of dismantling the liberal order altogether. Aron’s reaction to the events and his subsequent writings mark the limitations of the model of social and economic functionaries as an intermediary elite, and well as its underlying idea of politics as an integrative social force. Aron formulated much of his critique of modern ideology in the context of the Parisian intellectual environment of the postwar period. At the immediate biographical level, his writings from the late 1940s and early 1950s mark his distancing from the brand of existentialism championed by Jean-Paul Sartre and other thinkers of that milieu. While Aron’s general philosophy, which he developed earlier (in particular in his work on the German philosophy of meaning), draws largely on the same sources, i.e., early existentialism and phenomenology, Aron rejected the tendency of those French authors to combine it with radical politics, especially Marxism. Aron viewed those attempts as informed by “ethical radicalism combined with ignorance of social structures,”158 which is philosophically inconsistent as well as politically dangerous.159

158 Raymond Aron, Opium, 80. 159 Aron’s intellectual development can also be read as his own emancipation as a thinker from the political idealism of thinkers like the philosopher Alain, who inspired Aron in the earlier stage of his intellectual development and in general from an abstract type of intellectual engagement. This paragraph from Aron’s memoir is telling in this respect: “one day, on the banks of the Rhine, I began to decide for myself . . . Generally, what the illusion or the naivety triggered me to try and discover, was the historical condition of the citizens and of the

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Following the discussion here, Aron defines ideology as the mental disposition which is opposed to prudence. He describes the ideological true believer in terms of complete and unconditional acceptance of positive reality as well as its ethical ramifications. Using several relevant examples, he points to “the intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything [and which] is not satisfied with opinions merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The Revolution provides him with his opium.”160 The tendency of ideological intellectuals and political agents is to consider what would otherwise be conceived as largely neutral or objective (or at least consensual) under the prism of their respective ideology. In such a way, ideological criticism does not recognize social facts or common interpretations, but rather constantly tries to undermine their habitual explanations in order to expose some hidden “truth,” which it does by destroying the phenomena which it regards. An ideological “explanation” which attributes proletarian unrest solely to their exploitation would remove, for example, every difference between the modern proletariat and the slaves in Spartacus’ era.161 As such, ideology is starkly opposed to any kind of value plurality, be it political, economic, or cultural, which it actively tries to undermine. Human action is characterized by variety and of meanings and ends: there is also a plurality within each of these human dimensions: the placing of events is an essential step towards historical understanding, but neither the elements nor the whole provide any defined limits within which it can operate. The meaning, therefore, is ambiguous, elusive and different according to the “whole” which one is considering.162

Ideological forms of thought, in explicit opposition, are typically and violently reductionist in their nature; in his early work on epistemology and hermeneutics Aron has already castigated “uniquely causal social science.”163 He buttresses this point when addressing the frame of thought of modern ideological intellectuals: “the schema of the class struggle is transformed into an ideology

individual man in itself. How could I, being a Frenchman, a Jew, situated in a given moment of my temporality [devenir], recognize the entirety of which I am but an atom, one among hundreds of millions? How could I seize the entirety otherwise than through a certain point of view, one among an infinite number? . . . To what point I am capable of recognizing history and my own time objectively?” (Mémoires, 22). 160 Ibid., 257. 161 Raymond Aron, “L’idéologie,” Revue européenne des sciences sociales 16, no. 43 (1978): 39. 162 Opium, 139. 163 Raymond Aron, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: an Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 271.

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once one looks to find it in all circumstances, instead of utilizing it to demonstrate the insufficiencies and to combine it and to return, when discarding it, to the complexity of fact.”164 If Aron formulates the fundamental characteristics of ideology already in his postwar work, it is largely in the context of the 1968 student revolt that he returns to the concept of ideology and begins to regard it as a more imminent threat to political prudence, and as a result to the liberal-democratic arrangement. It is in his diatribe against the revolting students of May 1968 that he locates the germ of the general contestation against intermediary powers, namely in the form of the university institutions. In this essay Aron famously castigated the ’68 events as “psychodrama” and “carnival” with regards to their superficial anarchistic character, which appeared under the “joyous sentiment of violating taboos or to knock the idols over.”165 His derisive attitude towards the 1968 “pseudo-movement” relies in a large part on the fact that despite its provocative and “intoxicating” character, it failed to bring about concrete change “to the government or the regime.”166 It is precisely because it attempted to abnegate the mediation of institutional authorities that the student movement was mired in such futile radicalism and ideological excesses. Despite their obvious enormous differences, those two ideological phenomena – Soviet centralization and west-European radicalism – arise from the same faults, namely the absence of political mediation and excessive social centralization. Specifically, Aron views the 1968 revolt as the “counterparty of the hierarchical and authoritarian repression.”167 Aron sees the students’ obsession with demands for participation as undermining the institutional autonomy of the university by debasing the structures of authority and hierarchy: the pedagogical relation, which in its nature relies on a certain inequality; the authority of the

164 Aron, “L’idéologie,” 46. 165 Raymond Aron, La Révolution introuvable: réflexions sur les événements de Mai (Paris: Fayard, 1968), 114. 166 Ibid., 44. The consequences of the 1968 revolt on the level of the discourse were especially felt during the aftermath of the events, when the legislative elections that followed in June 1968 saw the power of the center-right increase by about four per cent and the Gaullist, George Pompidou, was swept into the office of prime minister. This sharpened the difference between the “direct democracy” which had reigned in the streets just a month earlier, and the traditional “indirect democracy,” presented at times as a betrayal, a “piège à cons” in the words of the ‘68 slogan. The second kind was especially identified with procedural democracy and universal suffrage (Évelyne Cohen, “L’ombre portée de Mai 68 en politique,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 98 (2008/2): 20–24). 167 Aron, Révolution, 97.

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professor, which arises from their function, is a necessity.168 The deep politicization introduced by the student assemblies is defined by Aron as a “war machine to destroy the university as a place of education.”169 It was by constituting themselves as a pouvoir étudiante that the students were promoting the politicization of the university system and, by doing so, effacing its nature as an autonomous (as well as “conservative”) institution.170 The fact that the unraveling of the French elites began at the universities also plays an important role in Aron’s analysis. The universities are not an essential part in the economic-bureaucratic arrangement he envisions in his idea of elite formation (in fact he rejects this idea in several places).171 Nevertheless they are important in the way they sustain part of the social edifice of postwar Europe. Aron in his post-1968 writings makes it clear that universities are instrumental in the buttressing of elites, due to the way in which they apply rigid selectivity in acceptance and grading standards in the process of teaching.172 The way in which Aron introduces (or rather, re-introduces) the progressive political moment into his political thought also marks its inherent fragility, which marks his shift toward “pessimistic” type of politics after 1968.173 In his

168 Ibid., 65. 169 Ibid., 67. 170 Ibid., 62. In many ways Aron’s description of the radical democratic aspirations of the student movement appears in his remarks à propos Tocqueville quoted earlier; as well as his later remarks on the “eruptions” of religious exaltations; this “eruptive spiritualism” is contrasted with “habitual materialism,” both of which constitute “the essence of a democratic society” (ibid., 224). 171 In one place in his memoirs he criticizes those who remain in universities “during their entire lives”, saying “the university world has something too soft [doux] in it” (Raymond Aron, Le Spectateur Engagé [Paris: Éditions de Fallois, 2004], 33). 172 Cf. Raymond Aron, “L’Université de la médiocrité,” Commentaire 152 (2015/4) : 843–47. 173 Cf. Gwendal Châton, “De l’optimisme au pessimisme? Réflexions sur l’évolution tardive du libéralisme de R. Aron,” in Raymond Aron, la philosophie et l’histoire. Armer la sagesse, ed. Serge Audier, Marc-Olivier Baruch, Perrine Simon-Nahum (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 2008). Another clear indication of Aron’s intellectual transformation with respect to the definition of liberalism is to be found in the postface of the 1976 edition of the Essai sur les libertés, in which Aron states: “in 1965, it was important to me to show that the Liberal today accepts the criticism that will be called either sociological or Marxist. It is not enough that the law grants rights, but it is also necessary for the individual to have the means to exercise them. Today it is the reconsideration of this thesis I would put in the foreground. Freedom as non-prohibition itself causes equality to the extent that freedom-capacity excludes equality” (Aron, Essai sur les libertés (Paris: Hachette littératures, 1998), 222). In the same text Aron also castigates the trade unions as putting into question the sovereignty of the Republic as a parliamentary democracy, and as even leading to “mediocrity and decadence,” while contrasting this statement with his earlier, most accepting position (ibid., 231).

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analysis of the events he not only castigates the demonstrating students, but also criticizes political authorities for their incompetence (and possibly inability) to rein in the upheaval and curb the social movement.174 He even imputes the spirit of contestation which plagues French society since time immemorial, and which has only been exacerbated by De Gaulle’s persona.175 His eventual recognition of the radical nature of the May ‘68 revolt should be seen as Aron’s coming to terms with the failure of a central part of the social edifice, of the political, social, and educational mechanisms, which accordingly made him reassess his model of elite formation. This was not so much as a direct result of the events of May (as opposed to his student Julien Freund, Aron was never a fervent anti-soixant-huitard), but rather of what he came to understand as the gradual unraveling of the postwar order, in terms of the selfconfidence of European political culture.176 Aron’s later writings, which generally do not hold the comprehensiveness and coherence of his works from the 1950s and 1960s, generally echo the idea according to which the transmission between society, economy, and the state has ceased to fulfill its salutary function. This is buttressed by his critique which identifies in European society the dominance of a certain materialist and “productivist” state of mind, which further compromises the functioning of the political mechanism.177 While this transformation can be seen as the result of certain contingent developments in the European and global political arena, it is also attributable to the fundamental fragility of Aron’s political thought and his propositions. Aron posits a highly delicate balance between politics and other social spheres, which allows the political process to function as a means of transmission of opinions and interests without suppressing them; once this balance is disturbed, due to radical claims on the part of one social group of another, or due to recklessly authoritarian measures, the salutary character of politics is endangered. The sophisticated model put forward by Aron presupposes the continual

174 In one of his more curious statements, Aron draws a certain symmetry between the fatalistic attitude of some of the official intellectuals of the Gaullist government (namely André Malraux) in the face of the événements, and the revolutionary determinism of the student movement itself (Aron, Révolution, 87). 175 Ibid., 90. 176 At least in one point Aron attributes this transformation not to 1968 but to the economic crisis of 1973, which did more to disillusion Europeans regarding their social-economic mode (Raymond Aron, In Defense of Decadent Europe (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 169). 177 Cf. Aron, Révolution, 115–16.

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normalcy and regularity, and emerged as somewhat ill-equipped to respond to the challenges of the emergency.

3.4 Julien Freund: Political Authority and Tradition 3.4.1 Introduction Julien Freund was an Alsatian philosopher and sociologist, who worked and published from the early 1960s until his death in 1993. As a professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg, Freund maintained continuous contact with important intellectual figures in France and elsewhere; his doctoral dissertation was written under the guidance of Raymond Aron, and throughout his career he upheld a long correspondence with the German legal and political thinker Carl Schmitt.178 In addition to Freund’s writings on (or in collaboration with) his two mentors Aron and Schmitt, Freund’s corpus consists largely of syntheses and interpretations of other important social and political thinkers, especially from the early twentieth century, such as Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto, Georg Simmel, and many others. He also translated into French several works by Max Weber, whose writings had seldom appeared previously in the French language, as well as several tracts by Schmitt. In his political persuasions and affiliations, Freund shares the ambiguity of Jouvenel: a socialist résistant during the Second World War, Freund had a short political career on the left, which he terminated shortly after the liberation. His mature positions were never very precise: refraining from explicitly supporting any political cause, he reserved his public contributions to active intellectual critique, first of established Marxism and later and much more consistently of the radical student movement. Despite publishing in a myriad of platforms (his prolific written corpus includes well over a hundred items), he became loosely associated with the nascent European New Right.,179 and 178 Unlike Aron, whose relationship with Schmitt was ambivalent and somewhat subdued, Freund held a long and extensive correspondence with Schmitt, published several important pieces about him and translated into French some of his works. Freund’s name is often mentioned alongside that of Schmitt, as a transmitter of Schmittian ideas into France (David Cumin, “Freund et Schmitt compares,” in Julien Freund et la dynamique des conflits, ed. Gil Delannoi et al. (Paris: La Procure, 2011), 204–5); it has been also said “when one evokes the name of Freund, that of Schmitt comes immediately to mind” (Sebastian de la Touanne, Penseur “machiavélien” de la politique, 67). 179 Cf. Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, “Between two rights: Julien Freund and the origins of political realism in France,” Patterns of Prejudice 48, no. 3 (2014).

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more generally with the intellectual reaction against the “gauchisme” of post1968 political culture.180 A student of Raymond Aron, Julien Freund developed a concept of leadership that relies on pluralism as its central critical notion. Freund’s concept of pluralism, however, differs from that of Aron; whereas Aron understands pluralism as the coalescence of different human values, Freund views it as a combination of different sets of social activities (“essences”) which determine its behavior for the most part without the specific will of its agents. Politics, in this system, is first and foremost a social form with its own determined functions, namely the establishment and securing of public order and the guaranteeing of internal peace; as such, the political instance is by definition characterized by assertive and dominant authority that is indispensable for its social function. Freund’s conception of democracy is informed by his idea of politics. While Aron sees democratic politics as a form of value articulation in a pluralist context, Freund sees in it an undermining of the political essence, whose function is by definition predetermined, and pertains to the establishment authority for the purpose of guaranteeing social order. In accordance with this idea, democracy cannot be limited by the political instance itself, since the political instance is by definition centralized and unique in a way that does not allow it to be pluralized in the same way Aron suggests. Freund’s idea of democracy paints a double version of the democratic regime, that could either devolve into chaos and the complete politicization of society or reestablish itself in a more centralized and assertive way so as to correspond to the political essence, i.e., to an authoritarian version of limited democracy which he calls “mesocracy.” The latter type is preferred, since it allows for more stability than the social form of democracy. The heart of Freund’s normative theory, however, lies in his emphasis on the concept of morality and tradition as socially-stabilizing elements. Tradition, in his view, is a unique social force which lies beyond the reach of political machinations; tradition does not influence political decisions but rather provides politics with its salutary and limited form and distinguishes it from other domains. The force of tradition, which is compatible with political prudence, is what maintains the democratic order and gives it its consistent political form. Tradition should be understood as a set of positive social and cultural conventions that are

180 Pierre-André Taguieff, Julien Freund: Au coeur du politique, 131–32 ; see also Pierre-André Taguieff, “Julien Freund: Political Thinker”, Telos 125 (Fall 2002): 37–68. Freund himself would define his own views under the somewhat conflicting combination of “French, Gaullist, European, Regionalist” (Julien Freund, L’Aventure du politique: Entretiens avec Charles Blanchet (Paris: Critérion, 1991), 68).

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internalized by active agents as part of their political undertaking, a notion which differs from Aron’s idea of prudence as the mediation of conflicting political claims. This view, as will be discussed in the last section, leads Freund to a much more politicized and institutionalized idea of the social elite, as it regards it as much more embedded in the order of the state than does either Jouvenel or Aron. In such a way, Julien Freund’s idea of elites should be seen as a revision of the theory of his teacher Aron, one which takes it in a more authoritarian direction. Freund locates the social elites in the bureaucratic administration of the state, but amidst its centralized executive offices. Instead of the interaction between the economy and politics, Freund identifies elite formation with the holding of executive political offices, including ministerial and high administrative positions. The process of executing political authority, in Freund’s view, is a unique dynamic which requires the assertion of responsibility, character, and skill. What distinguishes the political elites as Freund depicts them is not personal and informal influence, as in Jouvenel’s account, or a sense of prudence and practical wisdom, as in Aron’s account, but adherence to an entrenched moral tradition, which furnishes elite members with the moral discipline necessary for leadership.

3.4.2 The Essentialist View of Politics Julien Freund adopted Aron’s view of politics as a central part of the social edifice, although with significant variations. In Freund’s view, politics consists not only of an alternative manner of communication, but also and especially of a teleological activity with its own end and function. As such, politics are not an integrative instance in the way it is for Aron, but a means of achieving and maintaining social order in its concrete sense, and is inseparable from the application of authoritarian measures. Freund’s social thought begins from an entirely different point than that of Raymond Aron. Whereas Aron constructs his system of social interpretation from a continual interaction of individuals and other social elements, Freund begins from a certain metaphysical substratum which he posits as a pre-given interpretative instance; human action depends on an understanding of society, which itself is determined by constitutive social relations. The main problem begins not from the existence of the individual as an isolated social unit, as Aron suggests, but from society as a holistic system which determines human action, from the “actualization within history of diverse human activities: scientific, political, juridical, artistic et cetera,” which is “the object of

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diverse human sciences, understood in the large sense of a phenomenological anthropology.”181 For Aron, knowledge of society is not achieved directly, but through an intricate process of subjective and inter-subjective disclosure. Freund, in contrast, envisions a much more direct process, one that is mediated not by the agents’ respective values and perspectives but by the common intentionalities of certain activities. Freund’s idea is thus centered on the notion of society as a set of distinct epistemological domains, each concerned with a different set of human relations, which has almost the same degree of objectivity as that of the natural sciences: The constructed village “is” just like the river, the priest “is” just like the sea, the theorem “is” just like the star. The moment when I pose the question: what is a storm? What is a tree? What is light? I pose the similarly legitimate question: what is power? What is exchange? What is a rite?182

In this sense, there is hardly any fundamental difference between physical reality and social reality; both share the same perceived objective nature. The different activities are thus objectified into a series of instances which Freund terms “essences,” which frame and address any given human behavior. As an epistemological topos, a given essence cannot be reduced to another, nor to its historical and empirical actualization; an essence corresponds with a certain social regularity which is trans-historical and trans-subjective, which precedes and for the most part even determines individual behavior.183 Each essence is characterized by its own goal, or telos, as well as presuppositions which are unique to it. Those presuppositions are formulated as dyads: the relation between the ugly and the beautiful presupposes the essence of the aesthetic, that of the sacred and the profane, that of the religious, and so on: [essence] defines one of the orientations and vital activities of human existence, without which the human being would no longer be itself. Every essence in this sense has in its fundament one of the given facts [donneés] of human nature; for example there is politics because man is immediately a social being that lives in a collectivity that constitutes for the most part its reason and its destiny.184

181 Julien Freund, Philosophie Philosophique (Paris: La Découverte, 1990), 105. For the sake of convenience and to alleviate semantic confusion, this section will address Freund’s concept of epistemic pluralism under the title of pluralism, while Aron’s notion of social and value pluralism will be rendered as “diversity.” 182 Ibid., 105–6. 183 Ibid., 105–8. 184 Julien Freund, Essence du Politique (Paris: Droz, 1965), 5.

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Since human experience is determined by a fixed and more or less stable series of categories (“essences”), it is impossible to disentangle individual action from the particular presuppositions of a given essence. This idea frames Freund’s idea of politics in particular: politics is not determined by the content of political activity but by the manner in which it is discussed or conducted. In his words, “politics is not defined by the objects to which political activity is applied, but by the polemical aspect that is given to them.”185 In another similarity, Freund also regards politics as inseparable from human society and as enjoying a certain primacy or even superiority with respect to other domains; politics is a “given fact of human nature,”186 which stands among other “essences” such as economics, religion, morality, science, and art (Freund also invokes three “dialectics,” or intermediaries between the different essences: law, the social question, and education). This treatment of the essence of the political regards it as a basic fact of human nature, a tendency embedded in every human society and as such is a-historical and eternal in its nature; as he puts it, politics as an activity is “permanent, specific, natural and in some sense ‘internal’ to man.”187 Despite its indispensable nature, politics is merely one field of social action among many. It should not be confused with other spheres such as economics, morality, aesthetics, and so on. Freund insists, for example, that politics cannot fulfill any pedagogical role, a function which is reserved for the fields of education and morality.188 Blurring the boundaries between different kinds of social activities is considered by Freund to be a source of danger, as he associates it with a totalitarian desire to “accomplish an end. . . which surpasses every human activity: forging a new human being: the total man.”189 The place of politics vis-à-vis society is related to Freund’s analysis of the universal aim [but] of political activity. Freund discusses those aims, while distinguishing them from the specific ends [fins] that this activity carries. The aim of politics is related to its nature as a sui generis activity, and is necessarily shared by every form of social activity which can be regarded as political. The aim of the political is defined by Freund at the most general level as “organizing of the city or the collectivity in the midst of which a group of men chose to

185 186 187 188 189

Ibid., 22. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 755–56. Ibid., 300.

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live together and protecting the members against interior and exterior violence, consequently instituting order and maintaining security.”190 As a functional activity, politics is characterized by its own inherent structure. Unlike Aron, who views politics as a sphere in which different social values come to manifest themselves freely (albeit under specific institutional circumstances), for Freund the political is characterized by a hierarchy of values. The political is thus at once a “thinner” aspect of human society than it is in Aron’s theory, and a “thicker” one: it covers a much smaller social territory, since it occupies itself with only a very limited number of functions, and yet is more omnipresent in its effect, since it guarantees the physical survival of the community. Freund emphasizes the aspect of order-generating qualities in his chapters elaborating on the presuppositions of the political. Each type of relation of the above-mentioned three has a corresponding social order which it establishes and maintains. Whether it is the constitutional and political order in the case of command and obedience, the economic and legal order in the case of the public and the private, or the international order and the guarantee against revolution and civil war in the case of friend and enemy relations, no serious aspect of social relations is devoid of the effects of the political. Understood in such a way, it is clear that the political instance is in its nature authoritarian and centralized: “monarchical in the literal sense of the word.”191 It should be emphasized that as a system of authority, politics is not subject to the discretion of the acting agents. Unlike Aron, for whom any type of determinism is relegated to the sphere of “probabilism,” Freund sees human activity as embedded within an already-existing social context, which not only discloses it, but also regularizes it and supposedly also limits one’s agency. Freund’s sentiment, it should be mentioned, is firmly rooted in premodern and “objective” conception of essentialism; unlike Aron, who begins his inquiry in an existentialist rejection of fixity and the vindication of absolute freedom, Freund begins in the general rule of conduct from which he deduces the particular. Authority in society relies, according to Freund, not on the plurality of social values, as it does for Aron, but rather on the preexisting type of social relation, namely the relation of command and obedience. This is one of the important aspects in Freund’s theory which gives it its unique character: for Aron, we saw,

190 Julien Freund, Utopie et Violence (Paris: Editions Marcel Rivière, 1978), 141–42. Specifically, Freund defines three major distinctions, or “presuppositions” on which the political essence is founded: the relation of obedience and command, of friend and enemy, and the public and the private. 191 Freund, Essence, 215.

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the problem of command does not arise in any meaningful way, since established power in a democratic society is always legitimized by legal or other explicit means, while social bodies do not have any power to coerce but rather only to mediate interests and values. Freund, contrarily, understands public order in a much more substantive way, as the result of authority which is impossible to mediate or reconcile with other social bodies. As such, the role of established power necessitates a much fiercer and more dominant type of authority, since the contingencies with which it has to contend with are much more urgent. This idea leads him to an extensive discussion on the nature of political authority and its role in human society. No society, he says, can exist in an organized manner without such a relation; “the command appears the moment in which, in the midst of a crowd or a gathering of people appears a velleity of internal coherence.”192 The emergence of authority is spontaneous, but only to a certain degree: authority always refers to a certain limitation and regulation that is introduced by the will of one or multiple persons. While authority may be established using external norms, tradition, respect, or even charisma, commanding authority relies ultimately on one thing, which is the presupposition “that the leader or the director is animated by the instinct of domination, of will to power.”193 This idea of personal authority is quite different from anything discussed here. In some ways, it introduces a kind of dominant personality that has previously been associated with Bonapartist or cesarist individuals. It is not by prudent deliberation or even by charisma that one achieves a dominant position, but rather by one’s ability to command. “Command,” says Freund, “is discourse, but a type of discourse that does not attempt to convince or to demonstrate, nor is it a theory. In short, it does not aim to explain.”194 This notion showcases the way in which Freund primes the Weberian or Schmittian idea of authority as a final discretionary and even arbitrary instance. It is precisely this arbitrary nature of authority that allows it to act according to its presupposed function. The “unicity [unicité]” of the leader and the fact that he or she is tied to no prior norms allows him or her to act as the instance of final decision, which is necessary for the maintenance of public order and to suppress the infinite emergence of contingencies that, while not being necessarily existential in nature, are always dictated by circumstances and unpredictability. It is the flexible nature of the political art, which relies not on

192 Ibid., 108. 193 Ibid., 114. 194 Ibid.

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rules but on decisions, which also makes it a reliable means of addressing contingencies. The decisions of political actors are the circumstantial consigns of daily politics [that] are meant to regulate cases of urgent nature. These are the injunctions, dictated by concrete situations, that are particular and variable in the economic, social and other domains: they require promptitude, coup d’œil, and a sense of opportunity.195

In such a way, it is due to its spontaneous and even arbitrary nature that authority is able to play its stabilizing role; unlike Aron’s idea of authority which relies on a certain institutional consistency and integration within the legal structure. In many ways, Freund considers the most paradigmatic appearance of authority as that of absolute monarchy. While the political essence in no ways can be delimited historically to early modern Europe, it was definitely the establishment of “a supreme, solid and uncontested authority” that represented the political essence in its most undiluted form.196 Specifically, it was this type of authority that brought to the fore its functional aspect as an order-generating instance; it introduced the notion that “the means of regulating a political problem must first and foremost be of the political kind.”197 The politically right [politiquement juste] was thought of as what corresponds to the establishment of civil law, and passed through the exclusion of other considerations (primarily religious, but also legal-constitutional in the strict sense) from the political process. Both the establishment of extra-legal sovereignty and secularization contributed to and facilitated this process. The most distinctive feature of Freund’s definition of authority is its teleology, which distinguishes it fundamentally from Aron’s view. For Aron, political authority is a mode of communication and interpretation which is used to designate human action, which itself is open and indeterminate in the most radical sense. For Freund, however, it is a preexisting set of functional variables which determines human action and its substance. Authority, in this sense, is not an expression of a choice of values or of liberty (individual discretion is never equated in Freund’s writings to freedom), but in fact a type of duty which is imposed on individual actors. In such a way, Freund’s notion of authority is both more deterministic and fluid: it allows for a large degree of discretion on

195 Ibid., 217. 196 Julien Freund, “Guerre civile et absolutisme: contribution historique a une sociologie de la politique,” European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie/Europäisches Archiv für Soziologie 9, no. 2, Zur Problematik der Modernisierung (1968): 310. 197 Ibid.

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the part of commanding individuals, but this discretion is always and everywhere meant to secure its fundamental goal, that of public order. An important question can be raised regarding the relation of political authority to the intermediary structures in society. We have seen that for Aron, authority fills an intermediary role: it mediates between the individual and the different social groups to which he or she belongs, and the power of the state. For Freund, however, authority by definition cannot be separate from the power of the state: authority is an order-generating instance and as such cannot be limited by any particular social powers. Freund then separates very strictly between political authority and the various social intermediary bodies: while he does acknowledge the autonomy of certain social institutions, with each corresponding to a given “essence” (see the example of the university in the following section), those bodies are essentially non-political as they remain firmly entrenched in their respective functionality. This view of society is more authoritarian than that of Aron, while at the same time it also allows for a larger degree of institutional autonomy: for Aron, no social instances are a priori non-political as they all can take part in different ways in the political process, understood as the formation of policy. Freund posits the existence of a radical separateness between social essences and between political and other structures: the formation of policy is subject to the functional requirements of public order, which itself is under the exclusive jurisdiction of the political. In other words, while Aron might consider all ruling elites, i.e., professional politicians, business managers, educational functionaries, and so on, as taking part in the political process one way or another, Freund drives a stiff wedge between “the political,” “the economic,” “the educational,” and so on and so forth.

3.4.3 Radical Democracy and Liberal Democracy As seen in the previous section, Freund’s idea of society presents a much stronger and more substantive structure, which does not depend on the diversity of values but rather on the existence of objective social instances. As such, it is not susceptible to the same type of ideological influence which Aron describes: since politics do not proceed by the coalescence of different values but rather through the maintenance of order, it is indifferent to the attitudes of the individual actors which take part in it. Politics do not involve the suspension of prior truths but only of behaviors that are deemed harmful to the community at large. Notwithstanding this tolerant approach, Freund maintains that democracy remains a vital problem in political society. Since modern democracy involves

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not only the institutions of certain values but also the attempt to transform the political structure itself, it may be at odds with the objective presuppositions of political authority. This danger is not posed due to its affirmation of any substantive truths (of which Aron was highly suspicious), but rather due to its opposite – its radical indeterminacy and the way in which it denies any concrete ends in favor of a constantly shifting and unstable view of political and social life. Freund’s analysis of democracy consists of a double notion, as democracy can manifest in two forms: a social/radical one and political/moderate one. The two forms refer generally to the political nature of democracy: while the first, the ideological or radical one, considers democracy as an abstract and general principle which tends to manifest itself in various social spheres, the second, moderate, one is limited to the “classical” political functions. As will be seen, Freund repeats to some extent Aron’s critique of ideological democracy, especially the anti-institutional and “leveling” nature of this system, but extends this critique and modifies it according to his own political perspective (generally by emphasizing its indeterminate goals which leads to perpetual politicization). Democracy differs from other political articulations in the sense that it also represents a social and ideological tendency, with its own specific presuppositions and ends. The specific presupposition of democracy is freedom, which it perceives under its own particular terms, as a unified and general sense; in this view, democracy takes an “invariable and a-historical character.”198 Democratic freedom refers to the “possibility accorded to the citizens of participating in the life of the power of the city, under the form of elections for example”, as well as to the “legal or other conditions which favor liberty of press, of assembly, of conscience, etc.”199 Freund defines liberty under democracy as the “right to error” and as private freedom which is inassimilable to political independence or to any other institutional form; liberty “cannot be constitutionalized or institutionalized, it escapes right [droit].”200 Similarly, the specific end of all types of democracy is equality, in the specific interpretations those notions acquire under radical democracy. This equality, which remains an abstract and indeterminate concept, is aimed to be realized in different spheres of society: economic, juridical, cultural, and others; equality is the “the properly political concept of democracy, since it is the object of the

198 Freund, Le Novel age, 38. 199 Ibid. 200 Ibid., 38–39.

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political conquest in this regime, whose life it animates, as far as it transcends the struggle between the parties, the rivalry of opinions or that it leads to compromises.”201 Unlike liberty, which is assumed as a given and as prior to the political, equality exists in a process of perpetual establishment and definition: “equality will always have [in democracy] a conditional character.”202 Despite that, true equality can never be achieved under democracy, since it means the regime will lose its raison d’être; it remains an ideal, or a passion, of the democratic system. Equality, which is defined by Freund as “the fact of similarity of several objects under a determined conditions”203 is a highly undetermined concept: one can achieve equality in terms of politics, law, economics, and multiple other domains. This being the case, “equality will always have a conditional character.”204 Thus, equality may take different forms: it can be either be expressed in terms of the expansion of political domination across social spheres, as in the case of radical democracy, or it can be contained within the political sphere and help to support a delicate institutional balance. The ultimate objects of democracy, in its radical or moderate form, are always and everywhere liberty and equality, under those two rather broad definitions. Both liberty and democracy suffer from severe under-determination: they can be understood either in a political or a non-political sense; freedom can be understood either in utterly private or public sense, while equality can be reduced to the strictly political and legal sphere or expanded towards other social domains. The question regarding the specific interpretations of those two concepts is what distinguishes moderate from radical democracy. 3.4.3.1 Radical or Ideological Democracy The first type of democracy is discussed by Freund in terms of a constantlyexpanding social force, which is associated with the uniformization and leveling of society. Freund’s notion implies the infusion of the political essence with certain extra-political values, in a way that necessarily undermines the autonomy of the former. Since politics are not an integrative force but rather a way of achieving social order by means of authority, it means that such a process leads to ever-increasing intensification of political and administrative measures.

201 Ibid., 39. 202 Ibid., 40. 203 Julien Freund, “Justice et égalité,” Les Études philosophiques, no. 2, Le Problème de justice, Actes du Colloque international de Royaumont, 1972 (Apr.–June 1973): 166. 204 Freund, Essence, 40.

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Radical democracy can in many ways be seen as a modern variant of the old Jacobin idea of a rule by public deliberation, the principle claiming that “the only solid and legitimate government is the one which relies on public opinion, the people are seen fit to decide what is appropriate to the common interest.”205 However, this type of democracy represents a novel development in the western political scene, since it relies on radically new assumptions and leads to different political resolutions than the classical Jacobin model. Like Aron, Freund is also inspired in his critique of democratic radicalism by the events of 1968, as well as by the growing indeterminacy in the concepts of democracy. The late 1960s saw increasing discussion of the concept of democracy in French intellectual life: it was, of course, the period in which Raymond Aron published his important treatises on the topic (Essay on Liberties and Democracy and Totalitarianism both were published in 1965). Furthermore, it was the period in which Claude Lefort began his long engagement with the concept of democracy in a 1965 lecture (published the following year) under the title “Towards a Sociology of Democracy.”206 These were also the years in which the autogestion (self-management, particularly workers’ self-management of industrial plants) movement began to take its first steps in France, from the famous occupation of the LIP factory during the events of 1968 to the publication of Ernst Mandel’s anthology on the topic in 1970,207 and Pierre Rosanvallon’s The Age of Autogestion in 1976.208 It was this tendency which in Rosanvallon’s own words “contributed to the introduction into the era of a new understanding of the democratic imperative, implying both its de-institutionalization and its enlargement.”209 Democracy was moving from the “political” to the “economic,” and gradually to the “educational” as well. Like Aron, Freund ties the underlying idea of radical democracy with a certain mental or “ideological” structure, namely that of alienation. He criticizes the notion of alienation on the basis of its political effect, as leading to an artificial and malleable view of society. Freund defines the thesis of alienation as follows:

205 Ibid., 400. 206 Claude Lefort, “Pour une sociologie de la démocratie,” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 21, no. 4 (1966): 750–68. 207 Ernest Mandel, Controle ouvrier, conseils ouvrier, autogestion (Paris: Maspero, 1973). 208 Pierre Rosanvallon, L’Âge de l’autogestion (Paris: Seuil, 1976). 209 Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty, 211.

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man has become different throughout history, like a stranger to himself, he has lost his “generic essence” under the effect of the violence exercised over him by the domination of man by man as well as by the exploitation of man by man, this violence in itself being the reflection of contradictions and conflicts which have provoked a schism within his being. Those contradictions have stood at the basis of the formation of religions, or of juridical institutions, whose role has been to perpetuate political and economic violence. Furthermore, since violence has transformed man, it has cut him from himself, it is necessary to treat it in order to resituate him unto himself, to un-alienate [désaliéner] him and to permit him to find his essence again.210

Since it regards human relations as determined by a single source, that of oppression and exploitation, the alienation thesis compromises epistemic pluralism: it attacks the autonomy of social essences, of “politics, religion, right, morality and even art and science,” which it regards as “absolute alienations.”211 In such a way, the radical-democratic conception of freedom undermines the limited nature of politics, which it seeks to overturn by associating democracy with other elements such as peace, right, social justice, or progress.212 First and foremost, Freund tells us, democracy as an abstract social creed has nothing to do with a form of government; “it cannot be understood as a republic or with a monarchy or an aristocracy, since it does not depend on the constitutional organization of authority.”213 Under the name “democratization” Freund sees “the effort of democracy [which is initiated] in order to realize a specific end,” notably the achievement of equality and social justice. 214 What this idea implies, naturally, indicates for Freund non-political or antipolitical claims; since the claims of all political activity are, in the final instance, physical preservation and public order, those radical claims represent utter confusion. Paradoxically, it is this very attempt to institutionalize this non-political form of democracy which leads by definition to the expansion of the political apparatus; the demand for equality, as it is understood outside the strictly political sphere, translates to what Freund regards as the “imperialism of the political.”215 He remarks in different places on the catastrophic consequences of

210 Freund, “La Violence de suralimentés”, Zeitschrift für Politik NEUE FOLGE, Vol. 19, No. 3 (1972), 194. 211 Ibid., 195. 212 Freund, Le Nouvel age (Paris, Editions Marcel Rivière, 1973): 54. 213 Julien Freund, “Die Demokratie und das Politische,” Der Staat 1, No. 3 (1962): 270. 214 Freund, Nouvel age, 60. 215 Ibid., 70.

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such development, at one point going so far as to explain totalitarianism of the Communist kind as a manifestation of “the form of popular democracy.”216 Rather than an “ideological” aberration, the totalitarian specter is actually present in the democratic ethos itself. Freund frames much of his critique of democracy in terms of the specific case of university reform. Freund mainly targets the idea of extending institutional democracy to the field of education, as in the pedagogic process itself. Freund, like the thinkers of the Third Republic, regards education as absolutely formative with regard to politics; unlike the thinkers of Comtian inspiration however, his assessment of the role of education is different. Education is central not because of the transmission of any particular content (although this content is certainly important), but rather because it represents a microscopic exemplar of the experience of hierarchy; the pedagogical relation is almost unique in the way it forms the individuality of the student through relations of command and obedience.217 The educational process, especially in elite schools, is based on the “participation of the professor and the student in a common pedagogical task,” which in turn is based on the existence of a certain hierarchy, or at least a strict division of labor, expressed in the notion of guidance and tutorship.218 Democratization, in this case, “signifies not only the growth and reinforcement of egalitarian relations within democracy, but also the subordination to the goal [but] of other human activities, economic, artistic, religious, to the socalled democratic equality.”219 Freund regards the expansion of mass education

216 Ibid., 129. 217 Julien Freund, “Etat et éducation,” in Politique et Impolitique (Paris: Editions Sirey, 1987), 249–50. 218 Freund, Nouvel Age, 80. Freund’s ideas on university democratization reflects the spirit of the main educational reform of the post-1968 period, the law named after the minister of education Edgar Faure that was passed in November 1968 and was aimed not only at reinforcing the institutional autonomy of French universities, but also promoting “participation” within the universities, by establishing the National Council of Higher Education and Research (French acronym: CNESER), whose members are elected by students as well as by faculty members; the law also brought an end to the collegial functioning of the universities in some aspects, marking a break from the French tradition of education as a highly professional system (Christine Musselin, The Long March of French Universities [New York: Routledge, 2004], 71). This could be seen as a clear move toward the “democratization” of the academic institution in the Freundian sense. 219 Freund, Nouvel Age, 83. In his 1969 text about the student movement, Freund makes the claim that it is not only the established state and ruling political forces that the anarchist students are rebelling against, but rather against the idea of “every institution having a permanent character” (Julien Freund, “La philosophie ‘politiciste’ de Herbert Marcuse,” Revue d’Allemagne 1, no. 2 (Apr.–June 1969): 218). He refers to the classical anarchist thinker Bakunin and attributes

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as the result of democratic tendency which undermines the autonomy of education; he associates this process with the new pedagogical philosophy which explicitly objects to the very notion of authority in education in favor of vaguely defined “spontaneous education.”220 Furthermore, democratization of the pedagogical domain represents for Freund “the negation of every will, but also of every qualitative distinction and finally of every value.”221 Freund specifically uses the expression “ideology of leveling [nivellement],” evoking the nineteenth-century term to denote the democratic obsession with equality in all spheres of life (ibid.). This excessive democracy represents a threat to societal pluralism, as it refuses to acknowledge the differences between various domains and activities, under the aegis of “everyone can be everything.”222 This is illustrated in Freund’s example of the disastrous situation brought about by a “politicized” academia, in the teaching of “Lenin, Trotsky and Mao” in a Greek lesson rather than Homer, Sophocles and Xenophon.223 Paradoxically, this process leads eventually to the abolition of political democracy, as it rejects the distinction between majority and minority, and eventually causes the destruction of freedom in the plural: “it would be the state of a human race without passions, without caprices, without desires and without dreams, devoted to the arbitrary of the mechanism of power. Equality would be achieved in the flat and boring uniformity through the negation of all liberty.”224

to him the idea according to which “the enemy, it is the right (droit)” (ibid.). Here, Freund castigates not so much the actual political demands of the anarchists, but rather their organizational behavior, which seems to him an insistent refraining from making unavoidable decisions, while wallowing in perpetual debates and deliberations. It perhaps will not be exaggerated to say that Freund sees in this movement an example of a distinctively non-political or even anti-political kind of politics. 220 Freund, “Etat et éducation,” 255. 221 Freund, Nouvel Age, 86. 222 Ibid., 87. 223 Julien Freund, “Le syndicalisme dans l’Université,” Contrepoint 2, no. 4–5 (1971): 157. Freund’s significantly harsher treatment of the 1968 social movement than Aron might arise in part from the different “case studies” of the two thinkers: while Aron’s main preoccupation was the ideologically confused and inconsistent Parisian event which broke out in May 1968, Freund’s reflection was done in the context of the earlier events which broke out in Frankfurt. The German protest wave did not break out as abruptly as the French one but was rather orchestrated by an existing movement (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund – SDS) whose clear intentions regarding radical democracy were never hidden. 224 Ibid., 69.

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As discussed above, the main instigator of radical democracy is its conception of equality, which is interpreted in non-political and extra-political terms as a universal and overly determined principle. Equality, as Freund views it, is part of a larger question, that of justice, or right. Justice is “the virtue that presides over partitions, over distributions and over repartitions. It is the response to the question ‘what is right [juste]?’”225 Egalitarian democracy, in fact, answers to the natural question which is asked by every member of society, regarding “the needs for justice, not for himself, but because of the existence of divisions, of particularities, of differences, and of alterities which introduce the heterogeneity within the social tissue and gain revendications in the name of the respective right of each person.”226 Equality, however, does not provide a satisfying answer to the question of justice. As has been discussed above, equality, like liberty, always has a relative and contingent nature in society; democracy, however, posits it as an absolute ethical and judicial principle, as the “unconditional criterion of every partition.”227 This essentially leads to a strong relativistic streak, to the negation of every will, but also of every distinction by the quality and finally of every value. Life does not have any value over death; even human dignity founded on specific identity of all men is abandoned to scorn. Liberty becomes the equivalent of oppression, violence becomes identical to right.228

3.4.3.2 Moderate or Elite Democracy In opposition to radical democracy, Freund discusses a concept of moderate democracy, or “mesocracy” (from mesos – middle). Mesocracy is the “regime of the juste milieu, of mediocrity, since it shuns both too much power as well as not enough power.”229 This type of regime “takes the political for what it is: one human activity among others, having like every other activity its own end which it aims to accomplish concurrently with the end of the economy, of science, of art, of morality and of religion.” As such, mesocracy allocates its own sphere of activity, without either allowing it to overpower other ones or wishing to do away with it, since “liberty and constraint are both indispensible.”230 As a political regime, this type of democracy is dependent upon the nature of the

225 226 227 228 229 230

Ibid., 85. Ibid. Ibid., 86. Ibid. Ibid., 133. Ibid., 133–34.

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political, and as such is nothing but one of its specific articulations; “democratic form remains contingent: nothing prevents society from changing its regime in a given moment in its history.”231 In addition to being a strictly political arrangement, moderate democracy is also the social form which provides the backdrop for the formation of social elites. Since the elites in Freund’s system emerge directly from the political process, especially high executive offices, the hierarchical nature of moderate democracy is what allows for their formation. Freund views moderate democracy as a specific articulation of the political essence; as such, it does not indicate value diversity or deliberation but a structure of authority which conditions and determines personal agency. The leading elites in a moderate democracy are chosen largely according to their direct political competence; that is, namely, to their ability to distinguish the political sphere from other domains and to stick to the respective rules of politics. The social elites in a properly functioning democracy are then placed in high political offices, especially executive ones, to stabilize the democratic system by means of political skill and effectiveness. More than Aron, Freund emphasizes the primacy of political action with respect to democratic society. Freund states that any democratic system is possible “only because political society is already given [donnée].”232 Thus, it should not be seen as a different political form, but rather as a specific manifestation of the political, which means that as such it corresponds to the presuppositions of the political and its authoritarian structure; as Freund puts it: “[moderate] democracy only modifies the concrete aspects of the political; it is not the condition of its existence.”233 A moderate democratic system, then, is one that does not shy away from a degree of authoritarianism in order to secure its functioning. Essentially, this type of regime is the one most compatible with a pluralistic society: it does not wish to surmount the “contradiction inherent in the human condition” which stems from the “concurrent multiplicity of human activities,” each one with its own proper end and goal.234 As such, it is a regime which is best suited to a pluralistic society, since it “finds stability in the instability of interests and of opinions.”235 This type of regime does not exceed itself by politicizing other domains: “in a mesocracy power imposes limits upon itself, either by accepting the recourse against a decision which can appear unjust, or by

231 232 233 234 235

Freund, Essence, 85. Ibid. Ibid. Freund, Nouvel Age, 135. Ibid., 68.

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recognizing equilibrium between separate powers, or by supporting the right to free critique.”236 This compatibility is achieved by the removal of every teleological element from democracy: if radical democracy purposes a certain finality, that of the elimination of alienation, of inequalities, of human suffering, and so on, moderate democracy is devoid of any such finality. Moderate democracy does not consecrate, in Freund’s terminology, “the democratic idea” as an “imperishable” ideal, but rather the “eternal recurrence” which represents “the truth of the political and of man.”237 Thus, democracy here appears for the most part as a doubling of the political, as a principle that is meant to regulate the emergence of conflicting values and no more. In a similar way to the political, democracy here is seen as inherently devoid of a specific end, or telos. It cannot satisfy specific needs or promote specific values particularly because it is a formal idea for the most part; it aims at establishing and maintaining institutions and offering a minimum of institutional reliability, but once transmitted to the more ethically-challenging discourse of democracy it proposes nothing but mere balance and equilibrium without positive content. Freund’s conception of democratic “mesocracy” should be seen as a vindication of political form over values: it implies a rejection not only of utopian and radical aspirations, but rather of implementation of any social value as such. Since Freund also rejects (in the Essence) the idea of a political regime directed by public opinion, it leaves the mesocratic arrangement as merely a system of authority, one that is for the most part reactive vis-à-vis the popular will of the majority, but does not represent it, nor does it, since it rejects the idea of a unified value system, take upon itself to interpret it and transform it into a coherent normative statement. The main idea for Freund is that democracy cannot serve as an objective of political action, but rather a means. It is wrong to view democracy as a system which creates rights or justice, but rather as a reasonable way to maintain the political. Freund, while not embracing the ancient model directly, does consider it an alternative model to ideological democracy; interestingly, it is in the ancient conception of democracy that there is to be found a conception of democracy as a truly political system, characterized by its very own complex mechanisms. This ancient system appears as less prone to extremism due to its understanding of democracy as a politically relative system, destined like any other to decline and eventually to expire (essentially the Polybian model). The

236 Ibid., 136–37. 237 Ibid., 69.

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“archaism” which characterizes Freund’s democratic ideal, which itself is not typical of French liberal thought, is an inverse position from the classical reading of Athenian democracy as essentially a crude, liberticidal system painted by lack of distinctions and a tendency towards social totalizing.238 The notion of mesocracy suggests the “purification” of the political form of democracy from any possible ideological or ethical content it could carry; “not only must [moderate, political] democracy confront its enemies and constitutional enemies, but it also allows its enemies to operate within its own order, by means of the competition and rivalries of political parties.”239 This internal competition, paradoxically, is actually a means of centralization and further legitimizing the political regime, by transposing political opposition to the public realm and making it visible, and also by depersonalizing the political opposition, securing the physical life and safety of the rulers.240 Moderate democracy can be said to correspond to a merely formal principle; Freund castigates the very idea of considering the moderate democratic system as belonging on the same scale as the revolutionary or radical one. Freund insists on this point when discussing the “realist” parliamentarism versus the “radical” direct democracy: the parliamentary system is nothing but the expression of the impossibility of exercising direct democracy; in this parliamentary system, it is not the people who make political decisions . . . but rather merely a minority of the governors of deputies decides.241

Freund designates the people, le peuple, as an important instance in politics: there he analyzes the concept in terms of a “counter-power” of sorts, that is, as a purely negative instance which is represented yet does not take part in the apparatus of power itself; despite this, the people are a crucial part of politics in that that their existence is what constitutes the public sphere.242 Thus, Freund attributes an important role to the people, which, while not entirely independent vis-à-vis the political relation, is at least compatible with its

238 For an examination of ancient democratic institutions see “Préface” in Chantal MillonDelsol, Essai sur le pouvoir occidental: Démocratie et despotisme dans l’Antiquité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985), 5–13. This peculiar approach can be explained by Freund’s declinist historicism and the sense of decadence which marks many of his writings from the 1970s onwards. Freund is definitely the first thinker of the French liberal canon who embraces the vindication of antiquity to such a degree. 239 Freund, “Die Demokratie,” 275. 240 Ibid. 241 Julien Freund, “La Crise du politique,” Revue française de science politique 1, no. 4 (Oct.– Dec. 1951): 590. 242 Freund, Essence, 360–64.

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assumptions. This, however, should not be confused with constant and active participation in political institutions. The presupposition of the relation of command and obedience is reflected in its authoritarian aspect, which a moderate democratic regime has to include in a certain hierarchical structure. This structure might take the form of the head of state, as in the case of a president or a head of a cabinet, elected directly and supported by a numerical majority of the citizenry. This leader, according to Freund, enjoys “enormous discretionary power in order to check the demagogic temptations which inevitably shake an assembly like that of the Commons.”243 This executive organ corresponds with the “natural authority” which is proper to the democratic system. Freund’s conception of democratic “mesocracy”, then, implies a rejection, or at least significant downplaying of the role of the representative people in politics in favor of an elite class. This notion corresponds to what he defined as a system erected in order to be “a political system proposed by the aristocracy in order to accommodate order and liberty with popular claims.”244 This political elite, or “aristocracy” in his wording, is the notion which lies at the heart of Freund’s treatment of the democratic system. To a very large degree, Freund’s idea of leadership reflects here the constitutional philosophy which stood at the basis of the Gaullist reform of 1958–1959, in which the President of the Republic is posited as a more direct, and in some ways a superior, representation of the popular interest.245 Freund, quite unlike Aron, embraced General De Gaulle’s position and integrated it into his philosophical corpus.246 Much like Michel Debré, De Gaulle’s advisor and “crown intellectual” (who served as Prime Minister in the Fifth Republic), Freund identifies the relation between the personal nature of authority and societal liberty as a

243 Ibid., 44. 244 Freund, “Préface,” 9. 245 Some of the contemporary on the 1958 reform speak about it in very similar terms, as a form of representation which transcends the daily rough and tumble of parliamentary politics (cf. Georges Burdeau, “La conception du pouvoir selon la Constitution du 4 octobre 1958,” Revue française de science politique 9, no. 1 (1959): 87–100). This is corroborated from the General’s own reflections, in which he maintained that “it is necessary that the state have a head, that is, a leader, in whom the nation can see, beyond everyday fluctuations, the man who is in charge of the essentials and who is the guarantor of its destiny” (Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre – Le Salut: 1944–1946 (tome III) (Paris: Plon, 1959), 240; translation is from John Girling, France: Political and Social Change (Londron: Routledge, 2002), 27). 246 Cf. the parts where Freund discusses De Gaulle’s idea of authority as a vindication of popular sovereignty in Freund, Essence, 129, 376–77.

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positive and constructive one, as it draws certain limits to the expansion of power.247 With this in mind Freund develops his notion of the elite class in modern democracy. Freund agrees with the adherents of democracy regarding its participatory potential, but accords it a very limited place, which lies outside of direct policymaking. We have seen that for Freund authority originates, or is institutionalized through, a personal relation: while its function is general, its form depends on the specific person of the leader or a small decision-making body capable of addressing the contingencies of public life. As such, the public at large can never be definitely integrated into the decision-making process: “the public is of the incapacity to act concretely to the extent it forms the entirety of the collectivity.”248 Following on this idea, Freund regards the process of election in a moderate democracy not as a process of direct manifestation of the public interest or of the popular will, but as a procedure of selection of individuals by the majority; it amounts to “selecting the best, meaning, to the extent that the government and the parliament represent the public, one admits implicitly that those who compose it are the most capable, the most dignified and the most deserving.”249 Despite its plebiscitary character, this process of selection should not be confused with simple majoritarian legitimacy, but rather as an indicator of political competence.250 While Freund’s notion of moderate democracy adopts many of the institutional arrangements of a democratic order, its main goal is not to represent a popular will or to be a setting for deliberation but to buttress an elite category which is roughly identical to the holders of executive power. Freund emphasizes this idea when he writes that moderate democracy materially translates opinions in terms of order, and precisely the order they would like to see established. In other words, it is only by the institution [of authority] that opinion politically manifests in reality that it ceases to be merely an opinion to become a source of effective action.251

Thus, despite the similarity in its origins, it would be a mistake to see the notion of mesocracy as a repetition of the Aronian appeal to a political “middle

247 Michel Debré, Refaire une démocratie, un État, un pouvoir (Paris: Plon, 1958), 42–43. 248 Freund, Essence, 328. 249 Ibid., 329. 250 Ibid., 260–61. 251 Julien Freund, “Régime et classification des institutions,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 159 (1969): 340.

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class” of functionaries and administrative personnel. Since in Freund’s view the political elite is not meant to balance various interests or partisan claims, but to competently execute a unique will under the different limitations of political life, it means that the elite category is much more selective and exclusive, as well as more homogenous in its character. For Aron, the qualities of the elite arise largely from the diverse nature of industrial society and from the a priori existence of competing ideologies, while for Freund the nature of the “mesocratic” elite emanates from the general qualities of the political domain. What frames Freund’s idea of elite formation is that, in opposition to both Jouvenel and Aron, he views society as incapable of self-management to any meaningful degree. Freund employs here a conception of the crowd adopted already by earlier thinkers – that civil society is entirely incapable of producing its own elites. As he writes: the appearance of the crowd [masse] which has transformed the enterprise of mass communication, democratic structures and the role of the economy, at the same time has rerouted public opinion from its primitive meaning: it ceases to be a factor of criticism and of monitoring and has become a force of political demonstration and of acclamation.252

As such, it necessarily means that different social groups cannot participate in the formation of modern elites, since the articulation of various claims may always run the risk of détournement on the part of political forces. Accordingly, this type of political elite is much less conciliatory and much more regulative and even assertive with respect to society at large. The idea of mesocracy as a restrictive measure is heavily emphasized by Freund; its role lies in “stabilizing and regularizing public opinion; it is used as a safeguard.”253 Public policy, in a democracy, does not express the plurality of opinions and values (pace Aron), but rather represents their “ordering” [ordre]; ordering is a process similar to Aron’s institutionalization of value in terms of policy, but is more selective and consists also of the elimination and weeding out of one value among several: the best opinion on the subject of education reform is nothing but a pure way of thought if it does not inspire an institution. Regardless, every opinion believes itself, in general, of being the best one and only the test of institutionalization can decide its practical value, its fitness [convenance] and fertility or its unfitness and sterility.254

252 Julien Freund, “Le Concept de public et de l’opinion,” European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie / Europäisches Archiv für Soziologi. 5, no. 2: Tocqueville, Marx, Weber (1964): 256. 253 Julien Freund, “Régime et classification”, 340. 254 Ibid.

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While mesocracy, or moderate democracy, determines the positive content of politics and prevents the egalitarian content of democracy from permeating society, it does not, in itself, shield society from the nefarious effects of authoritarian politics. The function of leadership requires the recognition of higher social forms in order to be truly effective in securing social pluralism. Freund’s idea of the elites thus contains another aspect, less directly institutional, which involves the recognition of embedded tradition as a form of social stability.

3.4.4 Moderate Authority and Tradition In accordance with Freund’s notion of moderate democracy, his idea of the prudence which characterizes political elites holds more content than that of Aron. Prudence does not rely on the recognition of different perspectives, but on a psychological disposition which implies the internalization of the inherent limitations of the political field and the relative autonomy of other human activities. The involvement in political affairs does not, however, endow the social elites with the formative characteristics of an elite category. The fact that one holds a high political office does not, in itself, mean that one is capable of operating with clear judgment. In Freund’s view, the central way of achieving such salutary traits is through the positive validation of tradition. This social form which provides political leadership with its significant ethical and personal traits is thus found in tradition. Tradition represents a collection of conventions, rules, and guidelines that lie beyond the deliberation or the decision of persons and institutions. Freund often refers to this instance as “right,” as it encompasses the entirety of normative presuppositions in a given society. The notions of right and tradition are featured prominently in Freund’s writings from the 1970s and 1980s, and aim to amend the insufficiency of “purely” political concepts as moderating instances upon society. Freund defines right in the following way: the rules of right weave all kinds of relations between members of a given society, obliging them to respect each other at least externally, harmonizing as much as possible diverse associations and groupings and determining their zones of rivalry, thereby guaranteeing that the relations within the collectivity will not be those of simple coexistence, but of a common regime [régime commune] and sometimes of a hierarchical system recognized as valuable for all.255

255 Freund, Essence, 335–36.

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As such, right is articulated in an “ensemble of conventions, of customs and of rules” which creates a sense of common justice and equity.256 Freund’s essential idea is that right does not emerge through legal codification or through any form of deliberation, but through a process akin to intuitive recognition, one that emerges through the pre-existing structures and precedents that Freund refers to under the notion of right. Right, as such, has not only a judicial aspect but also a psychological aspect, internalized by members of society. As he puts it: “there is friendship in right.”257 Furthermore, Freund remarks that without such “accommodation” generated by the existence of an equitable order, society withdraws to “simple coexistence,” a condition which he identifies with the Hobbesian state of nature, including its pessimistic consequences.258 Freund similarly distinguishes and separates between objective and subjective natural right, with the latter amounting to modern individualism and atomism.259 It is the traditional element which allows right to function as such, since tradition is the only major social fact which is not dictated or reproduced by any specific actor; it is a “morphological and primordial element . . . an archetypical form of a community which recognizes the diversity of its members without letting these particularities lead to the dissolution of the unit.”260 Most importantly, traditional right does not act directly upon members of society, but rather works indirectly through its support for other social instances such as politics. Right is concerned not with direct redistribution but with proportions; it represents “a hub of correlations and of dialectical exchanges between different essences.”261 Understood as such, it would be wrong to think about right as a kind of supreme moral norm; rather, it is a matter of proportions and practical reason which allows political actors to know their own limits. Freund’s point, however, is that as a principle of prudence it is not embedded in political action itself, or in the subjective approach of political actors, but in a wholly separate social instance. As such, it would be appropriate to speak about right in terms of social mediation, a “higher third” [“le tiers”] which stands between the rulers and the ruled and among individuals; politics or hierarchy cannot be substituted for

256 Julien Freund, “Pouvoir Et Personne,” Revue européenne des sciences sociales 13, no. 34 (1975): 60. 257 Freund, Essence, 332. 258 Ibid., 336. 259 See especially the preface to Julien Freund, Le Droit d’aujourd’hui (Paris: PUF, 1972). 260 Julien Freund, “La Puissance indestructible de la tradition,” in Politique et Impolitique, 110. 261 Freund, Essence, 732.

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right, and it is indeed necessary to establish a stable political order.262 Without such legitimacy, political life within a given social body degenerates to naked subjugation and violence. Freund argues against a merely formalistic understanding of right, recurrent in the positivistic school, which insists on regarding right as a collection of facts and looks to it as an enumeration of legal items. This approach is not only based upon a conceptual error, as it is based upon a purely descriptive analysis, but also involves a mistake regarding the essence of right, as a purely formal instrument.263 Positive right in fact fails to understand the dialectic between right and the political, as it reduces the former to the direct command, to nothing but sovereign will.264 Freund defines right as a “dialectical relation between the political and the ethical.”265 He attaches right to the existence of politics; according to him “right appears the instant in which a society organizes itself into a political or civil society.”266 It represents a part of the given context in which the political formation appears; this political will always appears in a certain given context, under a certain “general ethos,” without which the political will lose all coherence and cohesion, and will remain a “discontinued succession of more or less arbitrary decisions.”267 While it is not completely detached from political life, which continuously draws on it, it does not directly manifest in political life: right “does not possess in itself the force to impose or to make its prescriptions respected. Its force of constraint comes from outside; it is political and hierarchical according to the case necessary.”268 It would be best to understand Freund’s notion of right as a type of social tradition or convention which, without necessarily appealing to any metaphysical or transcendental notions, brings together members of a given society and facilitates social cooperation among them. Right does not have to be highly

262 The term “higher third” or “tiers” is a rendition of the concept of the term Dritte as it is employed in Simmelian philosophy. Freund introduces it in a highly elaborate way in his essay on George Simmel where he discusses it as a mediating form between different social units, the only form which can attenuate social conflicts and dissonances. Julien Freund, “Der Dritte in Simmels Soziologie,” in Ästhetik und Soziologie um der Jahrhundertwende: Georg Simmel, edited by H. Böhringer and K. Gründer (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976), 90–101. 263 Ibid., 334–35; 723–24. 264 Ibid., 728–29. 265 Julien Freund, “Droit et politique: essai de définition du droit,” in Politique et Impolitique, 285. 266 Ibid., 287. 267 Ibid., 290. 268 Freund, Le Droit d’aujourd’hui, 9.

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substantive or particular in its content; all it has to do is to introduce certain “homogeneity” which is itself understood not as “intrinsic uniformization among members of society” but as “exterior regularity, that is, a rationalization of the relations between individuals and their relations with the necessary organs of political collectivity, taking into account its history as well as that it considers to be its destiny.”269 While traditional right lies essentially outside the grasp of direct political action, it is not mute regarding political forms and may indeed encompass political forms (Freund brings up the example of the French tradition of political centralization as opposed to the German federalism270). The important aspect of right is that unlike other social institutions, especially political ones, it does not arise from any individual will or capacity, but rather represents a given social fact, and is therefore irreducible to deliberative reason or to interest. The main role of tradition/right is thus to remain solid and formally consistent, despite various changes in society and its contingent dynamic; it is precisely its non-political nature which allows to it remain above the fray of different individual and other social interests. Freund explains that “tradition does not only create authority, but it is an authority, due to the good and undisputable reason that it is one of the sociologically essential elements for the regulation of social life.”271 Through its essence as a given objective instance, with its own proportions and rules, which are recognized by all members of society, traditional right mediates neutrally between all. When Freund discusses right, he explains how the idea of “having the right to something [avoir le droit de],” implies also a sense of negativity, or a certain boundary which is inferred in the very idea of judicial capacity; right “implies a distinction between permission and prohibition, since if everything were permitted, there would no longer be right just like if everything were prohibited.”272 While the prohibitions of right exist in a very strict and defined way, they are also devoid of any concrete means of enforcement; traditional right is never affected by political power, but by a type of conviction that is shared by all individuals in society: “my claim has no sense unless it is recognized as effective on the part of others, by a class, an association, or every other kind of social group.”273

269 Freund, Essence, 332. 270 Freund, “Le Pouvoir indestructible”, 116. 271 Ibid., 111–12. 272 Julien Freund, “Sur le droit,” Krisis, 26: Droit et non-droit (Feb. 2005): 104. 273 Ibid. Freund’s definition of traditional right or legitimacy is a highly Weberian one, as it regards tradition as an instance which lies over and above written law, is universally recognized,

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The idea of right allows for a better understanding of Freund’s notion of elites and its place in democracy. The political elites are characterized by a degree of practical reason, or prudence. In opposition to Aron’s view, this prudence does not involve the mediation and reconciliation of different ideological views and political claims, but rather does something more substantial; prudence in Freund’s view “corrects the rigidity and the rigor of positive right by prudence, taken into consideration by the experience as well as the traditions and aspirations of society.”274 Freund’s reference to right as the central mental element which characterizes the political elites distinguishes it from any other discussion on the subject. Freund explicitly defines the political elite in terms of an “aristocracy” in the way they inhabit the social category which combines ethical and political superiority in the more traditional sense, or “moral dignity” with “material superiority.”275 There is a bilateral relation between those elites, which are recognized as such through the ethical standards which allow for social differences and hierarchy, and the positive role of the elites which safeguard and cultivate those ethical standards by means of defending right and tradition. Freund defines this positive practice as a “creative conservation,” in the way it allows existing mores and habits to inform the formulation of new policies, supporting and sustaining them while at the same time limiting them.276 The position of the directing elites vis-à-vis society is that of constant correction and amendment: the role of command, Freund writes, is to make necessary transformations, in the sense of prevision and of the calculation of consequences, in order to adapt constantly the forms . . . to innovations and to modifications which multiplicity and diversity of human activities operate in all the domains and all the sectors of human activity, each according to its own laws of development.277

In the end, what emerges from Freund’s view of the elites is not so much an appeal to the will to power of a strong leader but rather to an intelligent and sensitive guide who is able to identify the different centrifugal forces in society

and is similarly used to regulate politics by distinguishing its domain from others (religion for example) (Weber, Economy, 226–30). 274 Freund, “Droit et politique,” 295. 275 Julien Freund, “Plaidoyer pour l’aristocratie,” in Des Elites pour quoi faire?, Actes du 10ème colloque (Paris: GRECE, 1976), 32. 276 Freund discusses here the example of the creation of a European community, which implies the conservation of traditional values while merging them with new elite structures (this was written in 1985) (Freund, “Le Pouvoir indestructible,” 116). 277 Freund, Essence, 221.

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in and to harness them in favor of innovation by integrating them into an existing moral structure.278 What lies at the heart of Freund’s idea of prudence is thus not charisma or practical prudence (although those traits may certainly be involved in the process of elite formation) but rather responsibility. Responsibility is the motive which places the political actor in charge of the “reign of ends” [le règne des fins], so as to stabilize and maintain their plural form. Freund designates the particular attitude he appeals to as “humor” [humeur], in the sense of a mental state or mood; humor is generally defined as the combination of the voluntary and involuntary, the calm or virulent relations between our interiority and our exteriority, the rigidity of our principles and the plasticity of our emotions and reactions, the secrets of our conscience [“for intérieur”] and the changes of its outward projection [“for extérieur”].279

Humor, arising from the continual experience of probabilities, is what allows one to transcend the contingencies of everyday life and to conceive of larger social and moral objects; the “humorous” man is “endowed with liberty since, through experience, he can imagine possibilities and therefore to break with routine or mechanical repetition.”280 The function of humor, is to allow individuals to acknowledge the pluralism of experience and of society and reconciling this diversity with the singularity of each and every individual; it relates the “being of everyday life” with the “indefinite variations, with the alterations of agitations and relaxations, with the whim of circumstances, the preoccupations or the interactions of individuals with each other.”281 The virtue of properly constituted humor lies in allowing individuals to act in accordance with social rules and functions (including those comprised in the order of politics), while at the same time acknowledging the relativity of those functions in the face of larger social morality and tradition. Humor, then, is the central psychological trait which Freund attributes to members of the political elite. Differing from the Aronian notion of prudence, humor does not imply exactly empathy of inter-subjective reflexivity, but rather an emotional disposition which creates the personality of the individual and

278 In an analysis inspired by Pareto Freund remarks that “every elite has every interest in remaining open, not by laxism, but in order to recuperate the innovative force from the creative elements of the ensemble of society” (Freund, “Plaidoyer,” 39). 279 Freund, Philosophie Philosophique, 256. 280 Ibid., 285. 281 Ibid., 309.

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allows him or her to withstand the corruptive passions of politics by attaching oneself to fixed and stable principles. Freund’s example, interestingly, is taken from the field of art: the playwright Henrik Ibsen was able to delimit his nationalist and feminist political engagement from intruding upon his literary production only by virtue of him “taking with another humor the themes of ancient tragedy, sublimated by modern drama.”282 This notion of humor is explicitly opposed by Freund to rationality as a merely instrumental or professional capacity; “a scientist devoted to experimentation would become a limited mind if he would suffocate in himself the sensibility which rustles in art or in religion.”283 Unlike that of other personal traits discussed here as part of the twentiethcentury corpus (charisma and prudence respectively), humor is thus largely non-political in its nature. It can be seen as a type of temperament which stresses proportionality and measure, itself a very classical notion (Freund himself traces it to antiquity), as opposed to the more practical sense of prudence which Aron endorses. Freund’s notion of prudence is not only more demanding and penetrating than that of Aron, but also more fixed and stable; its objective is not necessarily to reconcile the perspectives of different actors, but to combine them into an existing epistemic structure of tradition, which is plural and diverse yet highly rigid and consistent. The point about the moderating qualities of tradition conditions Freund’s entire view of politics and democracy. Freund, who is often deemed a “Machiavellian” thinker in the way he endorses the a-moral qualities of political behavior, traces the ultimate means of moderation not only to the “indestructible power of tradition” as he calls it, but more particularly to the force of character of the leader who is able to appreciate, consolidate, and rally to it in cases where it may be necessary. By raising the stakes of political action and the place of the elite category as part of it, Freund also raises the stakes of individual responsibility.

3.5 Conclusion The trajectory outlined above can be seen as an increasing institutionalization of the concept of the elites in French twentieth-century liberal thought: from Jouvenel’s idea of informal and semi-institutional authority invested in unique individuals to Aron’s notion of political elites as mediating between social

282 Ibid., 284. 283 Ibid.

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interests, to Freund’s idea about political leadership as a highly hierarchical social form. From an elite which emerges irregularly, through the formation of voluntary associations that represent a counterweight to centralized authority (Jouvenel), to an elite arising through a process of interaction and negotiation between economic and political collective agencies (Aron), to one which is essentially part and parcel with the power of established authority, especially its executive or “decisionistic” instances (Freund). In the context of the historical trend of French liberalism, those thinkers can be seen as at once a break and in continuity with the direction taken by nineteenth-century thinkers. While highly qualifying or outright shedding the more constructivist approach which characterized the authors of the Third Republic, the modern school retains their evaluation of the political sphere as extremely important in the process of elite formation. Largely inspired by modern trends in sociology and philosophy, as well as by different historicalpolitical developments, the thinkers of the twentieth century regard the active involvement of individuals in the political sphere itself (as opposed to being passively tutored by the state) as the process which contributes, in different ways, to the formation of a social elite. Another legitimate way to view this process is as a gradual recognition of the indispensible and even salutary qualities of institutionalized authority, a movement which begins in skepticism and concludes through embrace of the state institutions. Bertrand de Jouvenel, in a very libertarian spirit, is wary of the growing part of the state in human affairs, and especially in economic and other social matters directly related to the corruption of personal character. This view, which is somewhat reminiscent of other anti-authoritarian authors of the interwar period (such as the philosopher Alain), represents in many ways a return to the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century tendency in French liberalism, one that shuns state intervention in the name of spontaneous order. Jouvenel, however, fuses this spirit with a large dose of a new, distinctly contemporary idea regarding the unique and irreducible status of politics in society: despite his overt anti-statism, it is not authority as such he rebuffs, but rather the bureaucratic and centralizing tendencies that emerge in its absence. In order to stabilize the democratic system and to rebut the bureaucratic tendency, Jouvenel introduces a modicum of cesarism into it; his appeal to charismatic individuals who form voluntary groups by their mere moral personality and powerful character is not unlike what has been seen in the early sections, where Bonaparte is discussed in terms of a creator ex nihilio of institutions. Jouvenel, whose account of democracy revolves around the way in which it corrupts the independent nature of institutions, suggests instead a new type of institution, whose hierarchical – yet non-coercive – nature would inoculate it against

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the egalitarian pressure. Jouvenel’s critique of regimentation appears to have sent him in the opposite direction, that of the vindication of the irrational, imaginative, and even disruptive qualities of a certain genre of individuals. This provocative and somewhat atavistic view is complemented by that of Raymond Aron, one much more reconciliatory and confident with respect to modernity. Aron drives his assessment of the uniqueness of the political category further than Jouvenel. A student of German sociology and phenomenology, he adheres to a view of politics as a transformative experience, which delivers the actor from the common incidents and considerations and allows him or her to view social life in a more comprehensive way. Aron’s critique of democracy, as such, is more qualified and careful: he directs his efforts not at castigating the democratic system as such but rather its dangerous “ideological” excesses, including but not limited to revolutionary Marxist doctrines. Since this type of critique also implies an acceptance of the operative principles of democracy, it is this position which marks Aron’s notion of liberal elites. Aron’s discussion on the elite category paints it not as an external or transgressive political factor, as in Jouvenel, but rather as part and parcel of the process of democratic deliberation, including especially its more bureaucratic elements. Whereas Jouvenel regards the clientalism of the modern welfare state as a form of the interest-captivity which is endemic to democracy, Aron views is as a beneficial and in fact indispensible mechanism for the universalization of the political domain. As such, his notion of the elite individual is that of the political intermediary, the skilful and experienced official who is able to reconcile contradicting claims on the part of interest and ideological groups and to translate those into a cohesive policy. Aron’s careful yet firm optimism was rendered increasingly murky by the events of the late 1960s and what he perceived as the ailing self-confidence of the west and the failure of transmission between the social and the political spheres. Aron’s qualified embrace of optimist progressivism, which underlies his embrace of institutionalized politics, is modified by his student Julien Freund, for whom politics is at once a more crucial social domain and a less salutary one. Freund, who maintains a disillusioned view of politics, as it were, regards it as much more staunchly authoritarian and a less participative social form; this view is buttressed by Freund’s experience of the students’ revolts of 1968, which represents a much more formative event for his thought than it is for Aron, and which largely exacerbates his skeptical view of democracy while at the same time strengthening his position on the necessity of centralized political institutions. Freund’s idea of elites is accordingly more exclusive and hierarchical. The locus of the elites in this proposed system is situated within the executive, as

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part of the strict relationship of obedience and command; not only do elites not emerge as part of any spontaneous process, but also the entire procedure of elite selection is subjected to the logic of the political relation itself – the political elite is that which rules, no less and no more. In order to sustain the position of the social elites as a moderating and restraining factor with respect to the democratic order (as a “mesocratic” instance, in Freund’s vocabulary), one does not need to seek the traits required of the elite individual in politics, but rather in the more fundamental notion of right and tradition; whereas both Jouvenel and Aron established the relation between the salutary traits of individuals and those individuals’ mastery over the political field itself (in charisma and practical prudence), Freund regards it as emanating elsewhere, from one’s intimate familiarity with general social mores, and of her ability to harmonize them with the larger diversity that is embedded in society, thereby solidifying the role of political authority in the process of elite formation. The third iteration of liberalism in France is different from its predecessors also due to its more explicit rapprochement with more conservative and traditionalist elements in French politics. Both Bertrand de Jouvenel and Julien Freund have been recuperated by the renascent French far-right, including the movement known as “Nouvelle Droite” (Aron was never “appropriated” to a similar extent, a fact which should be credited to his different temperament and style, as well as to his own repudiation of the far right on a number of occasions; Aron’s self-conscious Jewish descent might have also played a part). While it is undeniable that there exists mutual migration of ideas between liberal thought and the far-right, this type of interaction has been in place since the early days of the liberal project in France (as shown in previous chapters). Furthermore, specific elements which characterized post-1944 French liberalism, such as the stress on the autonomy of the political, were never integrated into the programme of the New Right, and are in fact starkly opposed to the traditionalist doctrine which stresses the organic unity of civilizational or racial groups.

Conclusion: Towards a French-Liberal Paradigm of Elites The intellectual corpus of French liberalism is characterized by a high degree of indeterminacy. The respective analyses of French liberal thinkers are limited in their extent but ambitious in their goals: what they aim at is a recalibration of social institutions in a way that would minimize the deleterious effects of modern democracy on society. What they propose is a specific program consisting of the cultivation of social categories (elites) which would restrain the leveling pressure of democratic culture, in the political, social, educational, and other domains. The majority of the energy of the French liberal thinkers was expended in laying out the general blueprint for the social elite, which they have done in a self-consciously circumstantial style and with deep attention to the demands of the moment. The result of this preoccupation is a uniquely continuous and critical elaboration on the place of elites in a democratic society. The narrative put forward in this study provides a reading of the French liberal school on a double axis: the synchronic and diachronic one. At the synchronic level, the liberal thinkers reacted to some degree to the events of their time, and produced theoretical systems in which they analyzed the contours of European democracy. At the diachronic level, those ideas take part in a larger intellectual tradition which reacted to itself in a cumulative manner. Accordingly, the conclusive statement of this study is divided into two parts, a historical one and an analytical one. The first concentrates on French liberalism in light of the historical development of French political culture of the postwar era, while the second regards it analytically as an independent political-theoretical canon with its own set of normative challenges and assessments.

Liberal Heritage in the Fifth Republic: From Gaullist Fusionism to Euro-Populism In order to frame the discussion on contemporary liberalism in France, a short exegesis on the situation of French political culture, and especially of the rightwing movement, is in order. The intellectual development analyzed here corresponds to the political transformation which occurred on the French right and center-right since the 1970s, a transformation which has received a notable amount of attention. In his 2007 work Les Droites aujoudhui [The Right-wing today], an addendum to his classical Les Droites en France [The Right-wings in France], historian René Rémond explains the separation between the early and https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110680348-005

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postwar French right in terms of a radical break. In his earlier work Rémond identified three distinct tendencies in the political culture of the French rightwing: the Legitimist (traditionalist), the Bonapartist (authoritarian), and the Orléanist (gentry liberal). This triple partition, which dominated the institutionalized right-wing between 1815 and the early postwar period, came to an end during the consolidation of the Fifth Republic and the great Gaullist reshuffle of the 1960s.1 By the year 1981, Rémond claims, the classical division found itself undermined by the force of events; the triple partition had been largely reduced, with the old monarchist principle losing its force of attraction and the prominence of laissez faire economics, and had transformed into a more fervent schism between liberalism and authoritarianism. This obsolescence of the traditionalist principle has rendered the right as torn between the moderate “juste milieu” of the post-Gaullist UDR/RPR and their descendants and the vehement authoritarianism of the Front National.2 Michel Winock, another prominent political historian, proposed a different perspective on the development of the French right by decrying it as a new type of extremism.3 Like Rémond, Winock also describes this development in terms of the disappearance of a traditionalist tendency amidst the French “rights,” but whereas Rémond’s work, published in 2005, essentially covers the period between 1981 to 2004, Winock’s work covers the period between the formation of the Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP) in 2004 up to the unraveling of the Sarkozy presidency in 2012. The UMP, a conglomerate center-right party, attempted a fusion of the various strands of the French right, from former Gaullists to market liberals; the author describes the result as the end of the Rémondian tri-factionalism, which was concluded in a general drift in the direction of populism and “identitarian” nationalism which transcends formal party barriers. It was especially the figure of Sarkozy which embodied authoritarian rhetoric, a concern for public order, and an appeal to identity politics.4 Winock analyzes the way in which the revisionist, authoritarian tendency has actually “infected” the moderate center to a very large degree.5

1 René Rémond, Les Droites en France (Paris: Aubier, 1982), 350–56. 2 René Rémond, Les Droites aujourd’hui (Paris: L. Audibert, 2005). 3 Michel Winock, La droite hier et aujourd’hui (Paris: Perrin, 2012). 4 Rémond himself confessed in an interview that the “Sarkozy phenomenon” remains somewhat difficult to explain using his classical nomenclature (Stéphane Sahuc, “La pluralité de la droite reste d’actualité,” L’Humanité, 3 Nov. 2005). 5 This approach is complemented by the various institutional reforms introduced during the quinquennat of Sarkozy, including the constitutional revision of 2007–2008 which cements the primacy of the President of the Republic. The original report, penned by former Prime Minister

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This authoritarian development is paradoxically intertwined with the process of the “liberalization” of French politics which has taken place on both the right and the left since the early 1970s. This could be seen in the adoption of a much more market-oriented economic agenda, as well as in the promotion of various statutes pertaining to individual liberty and associative freedom (recognition of a “fundamental right” to association in 1971, legalization of abortion in 1975, etc.). This ballast of liberal policies was also complemented by an increasing interest in liberalism as a doctrine in the 1980s.6 This ambiguous process is very often understood in terms of a contingent or negative development, of an “instrumentalization” of liberal rhetoric,7 or alternatively as part of a more genuine but ultimately futile attempt at a non-Gaullist conservative-liberal synthesis (rallied around the figure of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing).8 This paradigm often relies on an analysis of political-intellectual mediators (François Furet is an important name in this context), in order to support the interpretation of the liberal turn as somehow non-indigenous or artificial to French political culture; the underlying idea here is the indeterminacy or vacuity of the very notion of liberalism, which is malleable and a politically “neutral” strategy.9 Instead of applying negative definitions to the liberal turn, it may be more appropriate to see it as a positive attempt to articulate an aspect of French political life. The fact that the French liberal idea has appeared in highly varied modulations and with attention to political conjunctures does not imply that it was inauthentic or incoherent, but rather takes part in the established intellectual tradition of French liberalism. In such a way, it would be possible to regard the transformation of the right not as a collapse of categories but as the adoption of different, liberal, categories, themselves flexible and contingent but nevertheless coherent and decisive. In lieu of the partition into distinct political doctrines (in the image of the old Rémondian thesis), it would be possible to see the different strands of the French right as coalescing into an overarching liberal discourse and the various thematics it entails. Édouard Balladur, even proposed to include the language of “state of emergency” with regard to the presidential exceptional powers. 6 See Thomas L. Pangle, “Political theory in contemporary France: Towards a renaissance of liberal political philosophy?,” International Political Science 20 (Autumn 1987): 999–1004. 7 Cf. Emile Chabal, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge: Cambrige University Press, 2015), 246. 8 Jean-Marie Donegani and Marc Sadoun, La Ve République. Naissance et mort (Paris: CalmannLévy, 1998), 265–309. 9 Michel Foucault’s discussions from the late 1970s about liberalism as a “strategy” or “governmental practice” are very much symptomatic in this respect (cf. Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978–1979 [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008], 63–64).

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The adoption of liberal discourse was not at odds with the search for a distinct “third way” beyond both socialism and “classical liberalism.”10 While those pronouncements certainly did not imply a rejection of laissez-faire principles (but in fact their extension), it meant those principles would be framed under a robust conception of authority under which market relations would be conducted.11 By the mid-1980s, the liberal social and economic agenda would affect, to varying degrees, most of the discourse of the political right: this includes not only the post-Gaullist right and the ever elusive centre, but also the gradually-reforming extreme-right of the Front National, especially under the influence of various figures such as Jean-Yves Le Gallou and Bruno Mégret.12 The process of the “liberalization” of politics coincided with another significant development of French public life, the discrediting of elite institutions, especially in the domain of education. Since the 1960s, there emerged a significant tendency in sociology dedicated to the denunciation of elite Parisian universities (especially the Grandes écoles) as institutions which promote inequality, privilege, and unfair social advantage. This development, to a great extent, was not directly rebutted by the new party liberal tendency, which largely sought to reconcile this critique and even recognize it (largely encompassed in Giscard’s various educational measures, including the symbolic but non-trivial removal of the adjective “nationale” from the title of “Ministre de l’Éducation nationale” in 1974). Party liberals, with few exceptions, pursued and implemented reforms meant to abandon or at least dilute the elite nature of higher education institutions.13 The brand of liberalism adopted by the French right thus seems paradoxical and even contradictory: on the one hand, the promotion of equality and

10 Cf. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Démocratie française (Paris: Fayard, 1976), 39. 11 In what is possibly a large overstatement, the turn toward a more free market-oriented program is often isolated as the determinant and even singular cause for the recent transformation of the French center-right (cf. Serge Audier’s Néo-libéralisme(s). Une archéologie intellectuelle; as well as many of the contributions in Olivier Dard and Gilles Richard, eds., Les droites et l’économie en France au XXe siècle (Paris: Riveneuve Éditions, 2011)). 12 The FN of that period has been one of the most dynamic and evolving segments of French political life. The interactions between various think tanks including the high-brow Club de l’Horloge and various traditionalist, liberal, and New Right tendencies has transformed the party from a rag-tag organization of old guard revisionists and monarchists to a more coherent platform of reaction (for a brief and conscience exegesis see Chabal, Divided Republic, 249–54). 13 As a recent example it may be mentioned that it was the government of François Fillon, who served as Prime Minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, that instituted Grandes écoles admission quotas from the ZEPs (Zones d’éducation prioritaire) (mainly high-poverty areas). Fillon’s more recent educational reform suggest minimal involvement of the state and a higher degree of private and local imitative in the management of higher education, another aspect which entirely contradicts the vision of pedagogical elite formation.

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“nivellement” in the pedagogic domain; and on the other hand, the persistence of the authoritarian trends of French politics (albeit under less personalistic terms than the Gaullist experience). If brought under the context of the historical development of French liberal thought, this emergence could be analyzed in terms of a reconciliation of French liberalism with politics, reconciliation which does not entail the rebuke of the notion of elitism as such but rather its metamorphosis: the liberalization of various social domains does not contradict but rather plays into the notion of politics as an instance of authority and distinction. What has been at stake in the various ideological iterations of the French center right in the postwar era, and especially since the late 1960s, has been an attempt to use the vindication of politics as a substitute for unraveling institutions. This intellectual backdrop which came to facilitate this praxis has been the reemergence of liberal thought in France since 1944. Since the 2010s in particular, French politics seem to be embracing to the liberal moniker in a more overt manner, seen with Les Républicains, the formation which began in 2014 as an attempt to tie together Gaullist and liberal factions of the center-right. François Fillon, chosen to helm the party in the 2017 Presidential elections, embodies this liberal-national synthesis in his promotion of free market reforms while espousing conservative views on moral issues such as abortion (generally not part of the traditional Gaullist platform). Despite Fillon’s defeat in the first round of the 2017 elections, the LR project was instrumental in creating a liberal ideological milieu, providing an opening for a large number of politicians associated with these views. Among these political newcomers, the most distinctive example of a modern French liberal is François-Xavier Bellamy. Elected in 2019 to the European Parliament at the head of the LR list, Bellamy represents a more conservative version of insurgent liberalism in France, espousing a positive (albeit not enthusiastic) evaluation of market economy, while appealing to more traditional notions such as national sovereignty and cultural identity. A philosophy professor and normalien, Bellamy is also sensitive to the issue of education and elite formation, treated in his writings under the theme of “inheritance”, where he also exhibits his critique of pedagogic reforms in France and calls for the refoundation of educational meritocracy.14 These developments also provide the backdrop for the Presidency of Emmanuel Macron. While in many ways a sui generis candidate and politician,

14 François Xavier Bellamy, Les Déshérités ou l’urgence de transmettre (Paris: Plon, 2014). The title is of course an ironic play on Pierre Bourdieu’s 1964 philippic against the elite schools, Les Héritiers.

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Macron’s ascension in 2017 benefited in no small measure from the pro-liberal shift in French political culture. Macron’s style and policies have often been defined as a kind of liberalized version of Gaullism, a paradoxical unity of opposites.15 There is certainly novelty in Macron’s style, especially when compared to direct political forerunners such as the centrist François Bayrou, who is known for his technocratic and everyday demeanor. This novelty, however, could be seen as a more concrete application of the French liberal programme rather than a break with convention. Macron’s educational policies in particular harp on the familiar liberal theme of scholarly elite selection. This is apparent in Macron’s emphasis on the institutional autonomy of pedagogic institutions vis-à-vis the state, as well as his pronouncements concerning the abolishing of the École nationale d’administration, the very symbol of the French administrative class. Macron’s endorsement of a pronounced form of liberal elitism is also apparent in his unapologetic appeal to the urban higher-middle classes, not only as the source of the nation’s wealth or its stability, but also as a kind of a moral category. This rhetoric, which helped to frame Macron as the ultimate embodiment of neo-liberal capitalism, lies squarely in fact in the liberal tradition described above: indeed, it has drawn some comparisons with Guizot in European media (and, like in the case of the Restoration politician, it roused the indignation of “la France d’en bas”). The originality of “Macronism” as a liberal project lies not so much in its specific policies, but rather in its conception of politics. As an insurgent force in French politics, beholden to neither of the existing parties, Macron’s movement aspired to form a type of mass political party which has not existed in the French political center in decades. This direct and highly personalized form of appeal sought to reconcile a liberal and reform-minded programme with a type of political branding characterized by vivid anti-establishment colors (Macron’s success in snatching the slogan “ni droite ni gauche” from the Front National in 2017 is a notable illustration). The other aspect of this quasi-populist turn of French liberalism is in its Europeanist policy. It is hard to find another European leader who has tied his political project more closely with the consolidation of Europe as an independent power. Macron’s vision of the European Union as a federal power underlies his endorsement of increasing political centralization, as well as the reshuffling the institutions of the European Union to the benefit of the executive power, namely

15 See for example Sudhir Hazareesingh, “France’s immobile and immutable soul Sudhir Hazareesingh on the intellectual vision of Emmanuel Macron”, Times Literary Supplement, March 15, 2017.

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the European Commission. This was the aim, for example, of Christophe Castaner’s rejection of the “Spiztenkandidat” procedure to the Commission Presidency, which was meant to decouple the nomination process to the Commission from the parliamentary majority. The autonomy of the executive, a long cherished Gaullist creed, thus assumes a central role in the new Europeanist programme. This style of politics conjured by Emmanuel Macron, which has gained various monikers, from “neoliberal authoritarianism” to “Euro-populism”, are buttressed by Macron’s own declarations on the subject. It is possible to trace the emergence of this singular style, as has been suggested by Luc Rouban, to the historical contingencies of twenty-first century France, namely to the instillation of right-wing populism as an element of political discourse and to the institutional vacuum of a post-1968 era.16 If this backdrop was crucial in the ascension of “Macronisme”, it is the specific contours of the liberal tradition in France which facilitated this unique merger of liberalism, populism, and Europeanism.

Towards a Constructive Conception of Liberal Elites The underlying intention of this study was to rescue the notion of elites from its entanglement in anti-liberal and anti-democratic discourse. The notion of elites has been subject to significant instrumentalization and politicization, especially since the turn of the millennium, and finds itself implicated in certain forms of political discourse which relegate it to a kind of ad hoc denunciation. The perspective outlined here, by contrast, regards elites in terms of its larger context, as a social category which is indispensible for moderation and stability. At the same time, the elite is depicted as a highly versatile category, whose relations with political authority can consist of different modes: the elites may be part of civil society, they may be cultivated by the state, or they may form a part of the political class itself. What this critical theory aims at, then, is the recuperation of the notion of elites as reformist and prescriptive. Liberal elites are analyzed not in terms of a product of power and domination, but as a result of a process of differentiation and selection, one that occurs (either spontaneously or not) despite the operations of democracy and not as one of its effects. It is in fact this qualitatively different nature which distinguishes the benign form of liberal elites from other versions of social eminence; the way in which elites introduce a degree of alterity into society allows them to function as ballast against the leveling pressures of equality. While this preoccupation is far from new to political thought, the level

16 Luc Rouban, Le paradoxe du macronisme (Paris: Presse de Sciences Po, 2018).

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of resolution and detail which characterize the French liberal efforts is unique in its extent. The corpus which has been laid out in this study can be seen as articulating a theory regarding the liberal elites, their formation, development, and role in society. The process of liberal elite formation is sustained by two different vectors: The personal vector Liberal elites are formed by individuals, primarily individuals endowed or ones which are thought to be endowed with certain superior personality traits. Those individuals, who are often tasked with certain functional responsibilities, formal or otherwise, are in position to carry out those tasks; however, the personality traits of the elite individuals cannot be reduced to those functional assets. An elite individual is a successful administrator or elector only insofar that he or she is charismatic, prudent or possesses some other trait of personal eminence. Accordingly, elite individuals fill a second, indirect role – that of encouraging social emulation and cultural differentiation. The organizational vector Liberal elites are formed in tandem with a set of institutions, organizations, and various collective bodies which give it a cohesive form and define it as a cohesive social category. Those institutions generate the elite category either by assembling elite individuals or by imbuing them with the necessary qualifications and personal traits. The important thing is that institutions never form elites individually but only collectively, as a group, by applying general and uniform standards (so that a family, for example, cannot be a formative institution in that sense). Consequently, formative institutions do not operate on the basis of personal traits as such but only on the basis of indirect signs and qualifications; either because those traits cannot be directly implanted or because they cannot be directly assessed. The interplay of these two vectors plays out in every liberal theory of elite formation. While the general historical-intellectual tendency described here is towards a greater dominance of the institutional aspect, it is absolutely crucial to maintain that even in the most developed institutional forms there still lies a degree of personal agency and influence; similarly, even the most rudimentary and personal forms of elite formation which emphasize the place of personality in the process cannot do away with institutions. It will be correct to assume that every liberal theory of elite formation requires a combination of both aspects: a theory of elites which grants no place to personality is not a liberal one, while an institution-free liberal idea of eminent personality cannot be called a theory of elites.

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Since liberal elites are neither individuals nor institutions, but individuals in institutions, it is impossible to disentangle the two in practice. The psychical or moral aspects of the elite individual cannot be meaningfully analyzed in isolation from the institutions through which they are articulated; traits such as moral fortitude, prudence, and so on have no validity as status qualities outside of elite-forming institutions. Similarly, elite-forming institutions are constantly in danger of degeneration or irrelevance, as soon as they cease fulfilling the role of transmitting elite status and marking eminent individuals. Since the notion of a social elite is historically and socially determined, it means that the notion of elite formation is similarly contingent upon a large number of shifting factors. As a political term, the notion of liberal elites eludes many of the classical formulations of rulership and legitimacy; it is at once “charismatic” and “bureaucratic,” and combines elements of formal and informal leadership. Elites in their liberal form, even when imbedded in the state to a very high extent, still retain a large degree of independence of autonomy; the mediatory role of liberal elites is not discarded even in positions of political eminence and authority. There is, in fact, nothing in the concept of elites as such which necessitates political or any other form of neutrality; social elites, even in their least institutionalized form, form a continuum with political power rather than being entirely insulated or independent from it. What the above analysis suggests is that despite the similarities, a theory of liberal elites is not a theory of civil society in the simple understanding of this term, as an object detached from the obligations of politics, of power and domination. The elite category, under this view, is not separate from political power; by acting as the interstitial link between the infrastructure and the commanding heights of the social order, it is in fact decisive in its shaping and adaptation to a modern, complex society. In fact, as the theory here suggests, it is also the affinity between elites and political power which renders the latter more restrained and the former more sensible. Politics are institutionalized and routinized, but not to a degree which they efface substantive individuality; they may be functional and even “utilitarian,” but this utility is accompanied by an implicit character formation which itself leads to an effective social distinction. It is primarily in the modern iteration of liberal elite theory that elite categories are regarded as entangled with political authority: not only is politics not detrimental to liberty, but it is actually conducive to the expression of superior faculties. This view, which entails a reconsideration of the role of politics, also suggests a more complex view of the requirements of human freedom in a complex society. It is the exercise of political authority, in its different domains and modes of action, which is revealed as salutary to the creation of elites, as it denotes a unique form of responsibility and a domain of distinct moral behavior.

196

Conclusion: Towards a French-Liberal Paradigm of Elites

Politics is deemed as such not due to its radical alterity, but actually because of the organic way in which it emanates from the creases and pleats of general society. Politics as art and science consists of the perpetual adaptation and integration of authority into the larger social body. A reformulation of a theory of liberal elites is particularly urgent in light of the emergence of anti-elite discourse in western politics in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The stigmatization of the term “elites” relies in large part on a fallacy which considers every elite as a foreign element entangled with political and economic power, as a kind of “technocracy” or “deep state”. This type of discourse often ignores or overlooks the selective mechanism which is an inherent part of any process of elite formation, and which legitimizes it explicitly or implicitly. As a consequence, this discourse tends to acquire an ahistorical and even anti-historical bent, as it regards the elites as a fixed and sedimented category, rather than as a category which could be reformed and replenished. At the same time, one should not discredit or undervalue the productive potential of the populist critique. As has been alluded to by a growing number of scholars, the programmatic issues raised by populist movements often help in illuminating or underscoring silenced or marginalized issues.17 Furthermore, the populist critique may also serve a productive end in the way of elite formation, by offering the organization base upon which a new elite is formed or by its absorption into an existing elite. Indeed, the political and intellectual history of liberalism in France demonstrates the way in which the transformation of the liberal elites proceeds by the incorporation of distinctly non-liberal elements and their integration. The thesis presented here sketches a rudimentary discussion on the concept of liberal elites, which it does by delineating their basic anatomy and by distinguishing them from other forms of elitary rule. It allows for further discussion exploring the particular relationship between liberal elites and the rest of society and the internal dynamic within themselves. The following are some of the questions which may arise from the discussions: are liberal elites by their nature heterogeneous? Are they agonistic? Can non-liberal elites be “liberalized”, or vice versa? Do liberal elites emerge in a national context, or can they be “globalized”? These are issues which could be addressed using the vocabulary offered here.

17 On this, see the brief but extremely prescient essay by Pierre-André Taguieff, Le Nouveau national-populisme (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2012).

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Index Académie des Sciences morales et politiques 39, 40 Administration See bureaucracy America 23, 46, 53, 56 Aristocracy 2, 4, 24, 45, 52, 53, 62, 69, 70, 81, 86, 89, 112, 132, 167, 174, 181 Aron, Raymond 5, 6, 100, 101, 102, 154, 155, 156, 157, 160, 163, 166, 171, 177, 181, 183, 185, 186 Association 2, 5, 32, 54, 55, 57, 59, 74, 87, 102, 137, 144, 148, 180, 189 – Voluntary associations (Tocqueville) 127, 130, 184 Authority – arbitrary authority 161, 162 – as social influence 137 – decree 116, 123 – legal authority 121 – personal authority 73 Autonomy – of human activities 99 – of social institutions 47 – of the political 99 Benda, Julien 100 Bonald, Louis de 21 Bourgeoisie/bourgeois See class Boutmy, Émile 78, 92 Bureaucracy – as related to centralization 20, 59, 101, 122 – scientific administration of society 76 Capacity (Guizot) 40 Centralization 19, 29, 30, 33, 38, 40, 46, 52, 54, 64, 68, 69, 72, 73, 82, 90, 91, 96, 106, 108, 109, 114, 124, 126, 127, 130, 152, 173, 180 Character 2, 14, 23, 32, 36, 37, 47, 63, 65, 70, 76, 77, 78, 79, 87, 92, 110, 111, 117, 120, 127, 135, 152, 154, 157, 164, 165, 175, 183, 184, 195 Charisma 24, 76, 105, 116, 118, 120, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 137, 148, 161, 182, 186

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110680348-007

Chateaubriand, René de 21 Civil society 4, 29, 33, 64, 73, 92, 94, 96, 104, 105, 176, 179, 193, 195 Class – middle class 25, 30, 35, 58, 176 – popular classes 88 – ruling class 73, 112, 132 Cold War 7, 150 Communism 132 Comte, Auguste 65, 66, 80, 91, 93 Constant, Benjamin 4, 9, 22, 23, 34, 45, 46, 58, 91 Constitution 27, 30, 64, 90, 132, 138 – Constitutional order 91 Cottu, Charles 20 Debré, Michel 174 Democracy – as a social tendency 24, 94, 95 – as majority rule 29 – Liberal democracy 8, 128, 148, 163 – Radical democracy 71, 163, 164, 165, 166, 170, 172 Democracy and Totalitarianism (Aron) 166 Democracy in America (Tocqueville) 46, 53, 56 Digeon, Claude 61 Doctrinaires 10, 15, 34, 35, 38, 39, 41, 81 École libre des Sciences Politiques 78 Economy – as distinct from politics 32 – Economic activity 59, 100 – Market economy 4, 6, 35, 46, 96, 130, 191 Education – as elite formation 3 – Higher education; Educational reform 77, 85, 86, 190 Empire – Napoleonic Empire 27, 63 – Second Empire 63, 64 England 78 Enlightenment 1, 8, 30, 60, 61, 91

208

Index

Equality 1, 2, 19, 21, 22, 34, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52, 55, 56, 59, 94, 96, 97, 101, 106, 112, 127, 164, 165, 167, 169, 170, 193 Essay on Liberties (Aron) 166 Essence of the Political (Freund) 159 European Union 192 Executive power 175, 192 Faguet, Émile 97 Fillon, François 191 France – French Monarchy 38 – French Revolution 1, 17, 19, 21 Freund, Julien 5, 13, 100, 102, 103, 133, 154, 196 Future of Science (Renan) 81 Gaulle, Charles de 154, 174 Gaullism 192 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 189 Government See Executive power Group See association Guizot, François 4, 9, 10, 11, 15, 22, 60, 63, 69, 90, 91, 192 Halévy, Élie 16, 97, 98 Ideology 22, 70, 139, 150, 151, 152, 169 Individualism 1, 9, 18, 19, 25, 43, 44, 90, 95, 106, 111, 114, 178 – as atomism 178 Intellectual and Moral Reform (Renan) 85 Intermediary bodies 2, 19, 76, 110, 163 Jacobinism 19 Jouvenel, Bertrand de 101, 102, 127, 128, 129, 130, 137, 149, 157, 183, 184, 185, 186 Law 20, 27, 29, 64, 78, 95, 109, 112, 121, 136, 145 Legitimism (political tendency) 188 Leveling 19, 20, 42, 95, 106, 114, 165, 187, 193

Liberalism – in France 1, 5, 6, 7, 17, 186, 187, 191, 196 – In the English-speaking world 13 Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns (Constant) 25 Liberty – Individual liberty 20 – Political liberty 26 Macron, Emmanuel 191, 192, 193 Maistre, Joseph de 21 Majority See democracy Mandel, Ernest 99, 166 Market See economy Marxism See communism Materialism 23, 47, 51, 52, 56, 57, 67, 113 Monarchy – Constitutional monarchy 24, 34, 59, 90 – July Monarchy 24, 36, 45, 46, 61, 64 Napoleon 24, 28, 42, 43, 62, 72, 73, 94 New Right (Nouvelle droite) 13, 155, 186 On Power, its Nature and the History of its Growth (Jouvenel) 106 Origins of Contemporary France (Taine) 69 Orleanism (political tendency) 16 Pareto, Vilfredo 131, 155 Parliament See Representation Parties 119, 125, 132, 133, 140, 143, 148, 165, 173, 192 Personality See character Pluralism – Institutional pluralism 140 – Social pluralism 10, 135, 140, 177 – Value pluralism 140, 143 Politics – as a domain of human activity 99 – as means of elite formation 100 Positivism 11, 79, 82 President See Executive power Principles of Politics (Constant) 27, 30

Index

Property 3, 23, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 39, 46, 58, 81, 111, 141, 150 – Industrial property 52 – Landed property 39 Public opinion 22, 76, 166, 172, 176 Public sphere See public opinion Remond, René 188 Renan, Ernest 4, 11, 61, 63, 66, 90, 91, 92, 98 Representation 2, 16, 38, 59, 96, 133, 135, 141, 144, 174 Republic – Second Republic 63 – Third Republic 4, 11, 12, 13, 20, 41, 45, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 69, 74, 78, 90, 91, 92, 94, 97, 98, 100, 101, 142, 149, 168, 184 Revolution – of 1789 34, 70, 94 – of 1848 45 – the 1968 student revolt 150, 152 Right (Freund) 13, 178, 179, 181 Rosanvallon, Pierre 9, 10, 15, 99, 166 Schmitt, Carl 99, 129, 155 Selection – Education as a means for 40 – Politics as 21 – Property as 3 – Selective institutions 73, 86 Social condition (état social) 2, 68, 95, 96 Socialism 97, 103, 190 Sociology 9, 13, 18, 99, 104, 129, 155, 166, 184, 185, 190 Sovereignty 28, 43, 44, 71, 107, 162, 191 – Sovereignty of right (Guizot) 44

209

Sovereignty: an Inquiry into the Political Good (Jouvenel) 107 Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation in its Relation to European Civilization (Constant) 28 Spontaneous order 23, 33, 60, 67, 71, 74, 76, 92, 103, 113, 150, 184 State 29, 33, 45, 53, 60, 71, 74, 82, 87, 92, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 109, 114, 126, 134, 149, 163, 178, 184, 193, 196 Sternhell, Zeev 104 Suffrage 1, 37, 59, 89, 90 Syndicates See trade unions Taine, Hippolyte 4, 11, 61, 63, 79, 89 Tocqueville, Alexis de 4, 10, 22, 58, 96 Totalitarianism 106, 113, 114, 168 Trade unions 133 Tradition 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 24, 28, 35, 87, 101, 103, 104, 113, 127, 128, 140, 145, 183, 186, 187, 189, 192, 193 Uniformity 2, 21, 27, 35, 42, 67, 77, 95, 96, 105, 106, 109, 123, 130, 149, 169 Virtue 2, 3, 31, 32, 33, 43, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 53, 57, 60, 68, 70, 89, 96, 98, 121, 126, 137, 150, 170, 182 – Prudence as 144, 148 Weber, Max 13, 99, 104, 129, 137, 155 What is a Nation? (Renan) 88, 89 Winock, Michel 188 Xavier Bellamy, François 191