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Bertrand de Jouvenel Quotes

1903–1987 France

Bertrand de Jouvenel des Ursins (31 October 1903 – 1 March 1987), a late French aristocrat, was a philosopher, political economist, and futurist. Among other places, he taught at Oxford, the Cambridge, Yale and Berkeley.

France
Economists
Novelists
Philosophers
Political authors

Also known as: On Power

Random Bertrand de Jouvenel quote

26 quotes

A people among whom custom is altogether sovereign endures the despotism of the dead.

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

The leveling process need find no place in Power's programme: it is embedded in its destiny.

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

It is not hard to discover behind this juridical concept a metaphysical one.

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

"Monarchy and feudal aristocracy are two lions born on the same day."

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

Resistance is, therefore, the business of aristocracies.

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

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

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

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

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

"Must we say that liberty is possible only on a basis of slavery? Perhaps we must.”

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

Royalty exalted plebeians just because it aimed at becoming absolute; it became absolute because it had exalted plebeians.

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

What a sight it is, the rise of the clerks, this swarming of busy bees who gradually devour the feudal splendour and leave it with nothing but its pomp and titles!

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

Marx was wrong to deny the creative quality of the spirit, but Hegel misunderstood the way in which the mechanism of politics works.

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

Now masked in anonymity, it claims to have no existence of its own, and to be but the impersonal and passionless instrument of the general will.

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

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

Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good (1957)

Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: We are our own Huns.

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

Follow an idea through from its birth to its triumph, and it becomes clear that it came to power only at the price of an astounding degradation of itself.

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

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

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

Power changes its appearance but not its reality. Politics are about power; we cannot evade that truth or its consequences. We dream of a better world but it is in Utopia – that is, nowhere.

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

At whose expense? The aristocrats’.

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

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

Sovereignty: An Inquiry into the Political Good (1957)

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

On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth (1949)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Bertrand de Jouvenel (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.