More by Bertrand de Jouvenel
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)
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