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Quotes from On Power: Its Nature and the History of Its Growth — Bertrand de Jouvenel

1903–1987 France

← All quotes by Bertrand de Jouvenel

21 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)

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)

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)

Power thus expelled soon returns, however, under the spur of its requirements. The resources at his disposal are absurdly out of proportion to the area, which depends on it and to the population, which calls it the sovereign.

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

The history of the democratic doctrine furnishes a striking example... Born for the purpose of standing as a bulwark against Power, it ends by providing Power with the finest soil it has ever had in which to spread itself over the social field.

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.