Nemesis: The Jouvenelian vs. the Liberal Model of Human Orders
Book Notes #19
Nemesis. If you didn’t get a copy of it from Imperium Press, it’s still available at Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/nemesis-ca-bond/1133931153.
C.A. Bond outlines Jouvenel’s model in his own terms. He writes that human “orders” are invariably centralized, and divided into three categories: the center, the subsidiaries, and the periphery. The center can be something incorporeal or an institution, and is the central Power of a human order. The subsidiaries act on behalf of the center through delegated power, but the subsidiaries exist in constant tension and competition with the center for power, at varying levels of intensity. The periphery is not in power and is only irrelevant insofar as the center or subsidiaries ally with the periphery to attack one another. The periphery tends to align with the center, since the subsidiaries are closer to the periphery and directly exercise unwanted authority over the periphery. Because of this, the periphery views the center, when it acts in their interests, not as power, but as liberation.
Bond gives us a brief refresher on the development of centralized power, starting with the post-Roman Germanic kingdoms. In short, the development of coinage allowed for permanent, centralized power through a universal and easily transferable vessel of taxation, which in turn allowed for the creation of standing armies by centralized powers. This reduced the centralized powers’ dependence on layered aristocracies. These armies were built from the periphery rather than from the people under the command of individual lords. The centralization of law also “freed” the commoners from their lords, but it freed them from local authority only. They joined with the King’s bureaucracy, built from commoners and foreign elements, bypassing the nobility and the church.
Bond then explains how Jouvenel’s anthropology is inconsistent with his own political model of centrality. Jouvenel follows the standard model of human societal development, in which humans banded together and formed a society. This is rooted in methodological individualism, which presupposes a spontaneous order arising out of individual choices to form society, rather than the society-first anthropology required by Jouvenel’s model of power.
Bond explains the development of “divine right kingship,” which developed first from the Papacy in the 11th century. Popes once claimed divine authority over kings and emperors, and it was a transfer of this claim from Popes to kings and emperors that instantiated the divine right of monarchs. However, this was not a conflict between church and state, as all of these parties viewed themselves as part of the same Christian order. There was no “outside” Christianity.
Augustine’s “The City of God” marked a major transfer of governance from the Church to monarchs, and its philosophy was used by secular powers in sponsorship of reformers like Wycliffe and Luther to grow their own power. By the 16th century, having accumulated vast amounts of power, other theories of divine right began to be advanced in justification. This is where the theories of “popular consent” began to arise, which were rooted in the idea than man was free except only to his Creator, and thus sovereignty began with the individual. The confusion in political battles from the 17th century onward that produced the theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes was a result of the simultaneous and divergent struggle to both undermine the central authority of the king and replace him with a new central authority. Social contract theories built to justify this inextricably linked sovereignty with political legitimacy. Sovereignty was only an association of individuals who could be dissociated at any time. Sovereignty following centralization and individualization required several elements. First, a clear center body independent from all others in a specific geographical area, a monopoly of law from this center, with the law coming only from the Law of God, interpreted by the center and not the Church.
Bond illustrates the malleability of the individualistic model of sovereignty and the alliance of the center with the periphery to overcome the subsidiaries by way of reference to the founding of the United States.
“The original binding document of the United States of America was the Articles of Confederation of 1781 which was considered an international treaty between the original thirteen states that had rebelled. In Article II, it asserted that:
Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.
This understanding of sovereignty undergoes a drastic change by the time we get to the Constitution of 1787 by which point the Federalists were seeking an increased centralization of the federal structure. Theory followed political need, and as a result, the solution that was hit upon is very obvious from a Jouvenelian angle: an appeal to the people was made at the expense of the intermediary states, and James Madison invented a “sovereign American people” to overcome the “sovereign states.” The Constitution, which replaced the Articles of Confederation, then contained no mention of state sovereignty, and instead opens with the famous phrase “We the People of the United States,” which is in stark contrast to the “we, the undersigned Delegates of the States” of the Articles of Confederation. As Grimm notes:
“We the People of the United States” was revolutionary in a dual sense: “We the People” rather than “We the Government,” and “We the People” rather than “We the States.””
Divine right was passed from the papacy, to the king, and then to the masses themselves. During this process, the actions of institutions involved fit within the Jouvenelian model. Parliament in 17th century England, the subsidiary of power, as the representatives of the people, as the periphery, attacked the central power to usurp its position. The incumbent theory necessary was provided by Hobbes and Locke. Victories, individuals now support the centralized power that “liberated” them from the monarchs, who in the first place had used them in a similar fashion against the aristocracy.