{If we did not live under the auspices of Authority, and if that Authority, whoever or whatever it might be, did not enforce its rules by means of Power: then there would be no need for a Great Refusal or, indeed, for Refusal at all. The puzzle, though, is how these Authorities came to have Power in the first place, and why the rest of us so readily acquiesce.}
Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power
[It is remarkable that] so little thought has been given to the amazing faculty for obedience of groupings of men, whether numbering thousands or millions, which causes them to obey the rules and orders of a few.
It needs only an order for the tumultuous flood of vehicles which throughout a vast country kept to the left to change sides and keep to the right. It needs only an order for an entire people to quit their fields, their workshops, and their offices, and flock to barracks.
Discipline on such a scale as this must astound any man who is capable of reflection. This obedience on the part of a very large number to a very small one is a thing singular to observe and mysterious to think on.
Anyone who has ever started a small society for some special object knows well the propensity of its members, even though they have entered of their own accord into a voluntary engagement for a purpose to which they attach importance, to leave the society in the lurch. We may, then, well feel surprise at the docility of men in their dealings with a large society.
Someone says, “Come,” and come we do. Someone says, “Go,” and go we do. We give obedience to the tax-gatherer, to the policeman, and to the sergeant-major. As it is certain that it is not before them that we bow down, it must be before the men above them, even though, as often happens, we despise their characters and suspect their designs.
What, then, is the nature of their authority over us? Is it because they have at their disposal the means of physical coercion and are stronger than ourselves that we yield to them? It is true that we go in fear of the compulsion which they can apply to us. But to apply it they must have the help of a veritable army of underlings. We have still to explain where they get this army and what secures them their fidelity: in that aspect Power appears to us in the guise of a small society commanding a large.
Would it, then, be true to say that Power owes its efficaciousness to feelings, not of fear, but of partnership? That a group of human beings has a collective mind, a national genius, and a general will? And that its government is the personification of the group, the public expression of its mind, the embodiment of its genius, and the promulgation of its will? So that the mystery of obedience dissolves beneath the fact that we are in reality only obeying ourselves? That has been the explanation favored by our men of law; its vogue has been assisted both by the double meaning of the word “state” and by its conformity with certain usages of our day. The expression “state” comprises two very different meanings. First, it denotes any organized society with an autonomous government: in that sense we are all members of a state and we are the state. But the word also means the governmental machine in that society. In that sense the members of a state are those with a share of Power and they are the state. The proposition that the state, meaning thereby the governmental machine, rules a society is nothing more than a truism; but once inject surreptitiously its other meaning into the word “state,” and the proposition becomes the quite unproven one that the society is ruling itself.
What we have here is, clearly, a piece of unconscious self-deception: that in the society of our day the governmental machine is, or should be in principle, the expression of society, a mere conduit, in other words, by means of which society rules itself. Even if we choose to assume what in fact remains to be seen— that that is now the true position—it is clear that it has not been, always and everywhere, the true position in the past, but that authority has at times been exercised by Powers which were quite distinct entities from society and yet have received obedience.
Therefore, the rule of Power over society is not the work of force alone, because it is met with even where the force available is very small, nor is it the work of partnership alone, because it is met with even where society has absolutely no part in Power.
Obedience is, in truth, the outcome of various and very different feelings which have, as it were, the effect of seating Power on a multiple throne:
“Power exists, it has been said, only through the concurrence of all the properties which go to form its essence; it draws its inner strength and the material succor 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.”
This is a useful formula, so long as it is not regarded as a systematic and exhaustive catalogue. It stresses the ascendancy of the irrational factors— and it is far from being the case that obedience is mainly due either to a weighing of the risks of disobedience or to a conscious identification by the subject of his will with that of his governors. The essential reason for obedience is that it has become a habit of the species.
We find Power at the birth of social life, just as we find a father at the birth of physical life. Power is for us a fact of nature. From the earliest days of recorded history, it has always presided over human destinies, so its authority in our own time finds support in us from feelings drawn from very ancient times.
The one systematic approach which can be made to fulfil the fundamental condition of explaining every Power whatsoever is by way of “the Divine Will”; when St. Paul said, “There is no Power but of God. The Powers that be are ordained of God," he provided theologians with the explanation of Power which includes its every instance. All other metaphysical explanations of Power are useless for the purpose, if indeed they can be called metaphysics at all.
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Bertrand de Jouvenel - Wikipedia
M. de Jouvenel led an interesting life. As a teenager, he had an affair with the French author Colette, who happened to be his stepmother. He was accused of having been a Nazi collaborator in the 1940s when France was under German occupation; after the war, he helped establish the Mont Pelerin Society, a group dedicated to the economic theories of F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other opponents of the welfare state. In his later years, de Jouvenel’s political sympathies moved to the Left; he opposed America’s war in Vietnam, and he supported the 1968 student uprisings in Paris. On Power was published in 1945; it inevitably reflected the ideological battles of the 1930s and 1940s.
The young Bertrand de Jouvenel, alongside his lover/stepmother. It's a French thing, you wouldn't understand.
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