1

Jouvenel died in 1987. Although known in the United States primarily as an economist and a political philosopher, he was something of a Renaissance man. Indeed, it would be difficult to name another twentieth-century thinker who had as many strings to his bow. He was broadly educated in law, literature, the natural sciences, economics, finance, and philosophy. He had a vast historical acumen, and he was as likely to discuss an ethnography about the Baganda tribe or the history of gold as the dialectical basis of Marxism.Footnote ¹² Unlike many political philosophers, he also had practical experience in the things of the world. His father and uncle were well-known politicians, and he himself addressed the League of Nations as a young man. He was a founding member, alongside others such as Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek, of the Mont Pelerin Society. Czech independence was basically born in his mother's salon, and so from a young age he knew the men who would become the first two presidents of Czechoslovakia—Thomas Masaryk and Eduard Beneš—as well as the great Slovak statesman (and his “hero”) Milan Štefánik. Finally, Jouvenel was a war correspondent of some note who interviewed figures such as Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini, and even Adolf Hitler.

All of these things are well known by commentators. But Jouvenel's literary formation is less well known or at least less regularly discussed. He did not only meet Czech and Slovak politicians in his mother's salon. Aside from being a political hub, the salon was also a leading literary circle, and Jouvenel as a result received a first-rate literary education from its visitors. He regularly met Nobel Prize nominees such as H. G. Wells, Paul Claudel, and Paul Valéry (nominated four, six, and twelve times, respectively); Nobel laureates such as Anatole France and Henri Bergson; and others such as Gabriele D'Annunzio, who was often known simply as Il Vate (“The Poet”). Thus, while he would later study at prestigious schools such as the Sorbonne, Jouvenel's musical concerns began much earlier. He even had a childhood pen name, “Bertrand Degy.”Footnote ¹³

His mother's salon was not the only important influence. His stepmother was none other than the inimitable Colette—the first woman of letters to be given a state funeral in France and a versatile artist whom Glenway Wescott called “for all time, a kind of female Montaigne.”Footnote ¹⁴ Jouvenel and Colette had an intimate affair for five years. The scandal and salacity of the situation tends to obscure the other facets of their relationship, and the scholarly consequence is that her literary influence on him and on his philosophy has not been deeply explored. But I am convinced that it was enormous. Colette taught Jouvenel to write well (his style, even in translation, is suffused with wit and panache), and she also helped to polish and eventually publish some of his work. She included him in some of her stories (for example, in “The Watchman,” from which I drew the epigraph for this essay). She inculcated his lifelong admiration of Balzac. She introduced him to Proust (“a modern Balzac”), who was one of her friends. She taught him to love poetry, and in their final meeting before she died, she gave him a book of poetry: The Earthly Paradise by William Morris.Footnote ¹⁵

What does all of this mean? In short: before Jouvenel was anything else, he was a poet. I mean this first in the ancient, more general sense of a maker of art. Jouvenel wrote essays, treatises, dialogues, short stories, plays, memoirs, and novels—a remarkably diverse array of output for someone traditionally considered an economist and a political philosopher.Footnote ¹⁶ But I also mean “poet” in a more specific sense, for Jouvenel also wrote poems. He was particularly influenced by the Symbolists, such as Paul Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, Jehan Rictus, Tristan Corbière, Charles Baudelaire, and especially Saint-Pol-Roux.Footnote ¹⁷ When one knows what to look for, one can detect this influence even in his political writings. For example, Jouvenel does not offer a definition of the modern state. Instead, he gnomically refers to it as “the Minotaur.” It is the image with which he opens his most famous book, On Power, but no one to my knowledge has ever examined it specifically as a literary symbol. To give another example, he describes our initial encounter with alterity as “the Sphinx.”Footnote ¹⁸ The basic point is that when one is aware of his admiration of the Symbolists, these images become more accessible.

Indeed, general awareness of the literary and musical basis of Jouvenel's thought is one of the keys to understanding his project. When Jouvenel critiques modern society as lacking music; when he says that modern philosophy has led to an “Inferno”; when he says that it would take an Aeschylus, a Dante, or a Shakespeare to make sense of modern politics; when he says that it would take the “sensitivity of artists,” and perhaps even a Kafka or a Dostoyevsky, to make sense of modern alienation; when he laments the “outworn humanism” of his day; when he insists that a true humanistic education requires that the “formation of taste” and the “right cultivation” of our nature be “recognized as the most important part of education”; when he twice speaks of human being as la pianta uomo, the human plant, following the Italian poet AlfieriFootnote ¹⁹ —we must remember that these remarks are not ad hoc. Rather, they speak to the deep musical foundation of his philosophy. Let us now turn to that foundation, since, as I noted above, it is something that has not been explored as much as other aspects of Jouvenel's thought.

2

Jouvenel says that wherever he looks in society, he finds “the self-same process at work: the rallying of individuals at the call of some person who has suggested a goal to be achieved in common.”Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, “nothing is more inherent in human nature” than the activity of “men moving men” through speech.Footnote ²¹ The critical place of this rhetorical activity in Jouvenel's philosophy cannot be overstated, as his language frequently attests; he variously describes this activity as “fundamental,” “basic,” and “elementary.”Footnote ²² And he variously calls it “authority,” “vis politica,” “instigation-response,” “bidding-compliance,” “pure politics,” “political enterprise,” and “political entrepreneurship.”Footnote ²³ Although his terms vary over time, depending on his focus, the fact that he repeatedly revisits this topic speaks to its importance. One might even say that this interaction between interlocutors is the keystone of his thought.

Owing to the central place of speech in human life, one might surmise that Jouvenel's consequent understanding of politics would be Aristotelian.Footnote ²⁴ One might surmise that his political philosophy would be similar to that of Hannah Arendt, for instance. There are resonances between his thought and that of someone like Arendt, but for Jouvenel politics is not necessarily oriented toward human flourishing; it can be directed to all sorts of ends, often nefarious ones. It is thus probably more accurate to see the roots of his understanding of speech in his lifelong admiration of Balzac. Jouvenel says that Balzac is “foremost” among those novelists who discuss the successful movement of individuals in society and that the “great theme” which Balzac “paints” is the “politics of personal relationships.” Jouvenel understood at least some of his own thought as “extending Balzac's vision,” and, although it is beyond my scope to fully explore Jouvenel's use of Balzac, this connection could be seen as one piece of evidence for a poetic or musical basis to Jouvenel's thought.Footnote ²⁵ It also helps to explain Jouvenel's claim that politics is primarily concerned not with excellence but with “conflict.”Footnote ²⁶

We shall return to the idea of politics as conflict below. But for now I want to examine Jouvenel's privileging of the imagination and his insistence that it plays a prominent role in moral and political life. For Jouvenel, we are fundamentally imaginative beings. It is not that reason has no place in moral and political life but that the basis of our judgments lies not in reason but rather in the imagination. This is partly why one of Jouvenel's terms for the rhetorical relationship between interlocutors is “authority.” Jouvenel says that the prestige of any moral or political proposal “sways me only because it exists for me, because it is a subjective phenomenon within my imagination.”Footnote ²⁷ Therefore, political philosophy for Jouvenel is more akin to a phenomenological science than to a legal science. It is not a science of detached, disinterested assessments. Rather, it is a science of “subjective appraisal[s].”Footnote ²⁸ This understanding of political philosophy leads to interesting insights concerning moral phenomena—and not only concerning relationships which depend in obvious ways on the imagination (like sympathy) but concerning relationships that do so much less obviously. To give only one example, authority for Jouvenel looks less like a relationship based on power than one based on perception and on the opinion of right. In other words, it depends crucially on the imagination of what Jouvenel calls the “respondent” and not merely on the power wielded by the “instigator” or authority figure. And in fact Jouvenel insists that the ultimate power in such a relationship resides in the respondent.Footnote ²⁹ Jouvenel's focus on the imagination thus leads to interesting and perhaps counterintuitive results.

Another way to understand this focus is to consider Jouvenel's remarks on metaphor. According to Umberto Eco, there are really only two ways of viewing metaphor. Either one sees language by nature and in its origin as metaphorical or one sees metaphor as something of a disruption, a breakdown in a linguistic system.Footnote ³⁰ A philosopher like Hobbes belongs to the second camp; in Leviathan, for instance (and ironically enough, given its title), Hobbes repeatedly derides metaphor as an abuse of language.Footnote ³¹ Jouvenel by contrast belongs to the first camp. His view has certain interesting consequences here as well. Because metaphor is the foundation of language, it is also the foundation of the mind; Jouvenel says metaphor is “the way the mind works.”Footnote ³² At the most basic level, we think not discursively but rather by “models” and “pictures.” For “our mind craves pictures,” and even thought of the “most abstract kind” depends greatly on the imagination; “so natural to man is thinking by pictures” that scientists had difficulty constructing the modern theory of light because it seemed to be composed of two different pictures.Footnote ³³ This is why Jouvenel says that myth is “the primitive form of political philosophy.” It is also why, belying his Symbolist influences, he says that the symbol is “older far than discursive thought” and was “guide long before it was illustration.”Footnote ³⁴

Philosophy, in short, begins in poetry; metaphysics begins in myth. Musical education is the forerunner of philosophical education, and philosophy is the culmination of poetry.Footnote ³⁵ On this point Jouvenel is a critic of the “barbarous rationality” of a great swath of modern philosophy, especially modern political philosophy.Footnote ³⁶ His reasoning is basically as follows. Owing to its “pride” in its own self-consciousness, modern philosophy tends toward a disavowal of its mythopoetic roots. In other words, because of its certainty about its own rectitude, it disavows that the imagination is the basis of reasoning. It thus also disavows the importance of liberal or musical arts such as rhetoric and poetry, since they are the arts that speak to the imagination. Here Jouvenel is thinking of the way that philosophers like Hobbes and Descartes prioritize mathematics over the liberal arts. Though Hobbes and Descartes differ in many ways that Jouvenel acknowledges, they are alike in that each of them is deeply suspicious of the role that the liberal arts play in moral and political life. Since metaphor is the way the mind works, however, modern philosophy, especially insofar as it takes its bearings from Hobbes and Descartes, falls into “complete error” regarding the mind. Jouvenel variously calls the modern error “rationalist,” “positivist,” and a “laborious and late refinement” which has been “systematically robbed of the pictures necessary to the progress of the mind.” To look down on the mythological expression of reality with “our own clear and distinct vision,” Jouvenel says, is “no great achievement.”Footnote ³⁷ It is instead an egregious error.

The Cartesian language of “clear and distinct” here is suggestive. Disavowing liberal arts like poetry and rhetoric (as Descartes for example does in part 1 of the Discourse on Method) does not lead to philosophical self-knowledge. Rather, according to Jouvenel, it leads to something like delusion. It leads us, for example, to mistakenly believe that moral and political problems have solutions in the way that mathematical problems do. This is what Jouvenel calls “the myth of the solution.”Footnote ³⁸ It is a myth not simply because it is false but because it generates philosophical misunderstanding. Political problems never have solutions in the strict, mathematical sense. There is only the prudential and temporary settlement of conflicting, even intractable positions.

But the problem here runs deeper than deficient thinking. What is worse, we act differently according to the images that we hold in our minds. Jouvenel regularly criticizes this moral and political fallout throughout his corpus. He says that the “imagination, properly cultivated, imparts a magic prestige” and that the loss of this prestige is a “public disaster.”Footnote ³⁹ He says that images are morally “essential” and that they “contribute to form men's character,” which helps them to “withstand circumstances.”Footnote ⁴⁰ He says that “men are in fact ruled much less by laws than by compulsive internal images of what they should do.”Footnote ⁴¹ He says that the philosopher must inculcate virtue in the prince in two ways: by helping to instill “a noble image” of ruling, and by making “moral prohibition” into a “hard, concrete obstacle” in his “imagination.”Footnote ⁴² Perhaps most strikingly, he says that political thought is “altogether governed” by the imagination.Footnote ⁴³ The adverb “altogether” in this claim is worth notice. Insofar as modern political philosophy has failed to recognize that its subject matter is completely governed by the imagination, it has failed—perhaps completely—to understand its subject matter. This unacknowledged ignorance is a key component of modern amousia.

3

What happens when philosophy forgets its reliance on the image? Here it is useful to have a case study, and so I will turn to Jouvenel's understanding of social contract theory and in particular its reliance on the solitary man in the state of nature. It would be uncontroversial to say that this image has been the dominant one of modern political philosophy. It persists even today—for example, in the strain of political philosophy that descends from John Rawls. But this dominance is precisely the problem—the dominance of an image promulgated by those who denied the power of the image in the first place. For Jouvenel, it is another key component of modern amousia.

Throughout his corpus, Jouvenel regularly speaks of Rousseau with admiration; he even goes so far as to say that Rousseau is his “favorite author” and the thinker from whom he has learned the most.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, he is not a dogmatic disciple of Rousseau, and furthermore sees Hobbes as the more foundational philosopher in at least one crucial respect. Jouvenel says that we are not actually born to a freedom that is condemned to be fettered by the shackles of convention. In fact, Jouvenel says the “famous battle-cry” of natural freedom is “the greatest nonsense if it is taken literally as a declaration of original and natural independence.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Jouvenel does recognize important differences among various contract theorists.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, he sees this idiom of literal independence as common to many if not all of them. And it is Hobbes who is largely responsible for this idiom; Jouvenel implies both that Hobbes is the “father” of this strand of political philosophy and that he is “the master.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Rousseau by contrast is derivative in this regard and takes his bearings from Hobbes's account even as he tries to refute it; Jouvenel says that Rousseau “subscribed to the Hobbesian picture” when he used his memorable “metaphor of chains” at the beginning of the Social Contract.Footnote ⁴⁸ I emphasize that Rousseau not only employed a metaphor but that he subscribed to the Hobbesian picture—the “picture of individuals living each man for himself,” the picture which undergirds social contract theory as such.Footnote ⁴⁹

And this is the crux of the matter. The problem is not that Hobbes offers an incorrect discursive account; it is rather that he offers a misleading picture or image which suggests that we are originally independent beings. Hobbes's picture suggests, even recommends, autonomy—that great moral absolute of modern philosophy. But this portrayal, while visceral and fetching, is misleading; it generates moral and political illusion and a kind of false consciousness. It affords autonomy a pride of place that it does not deserve. Jouvenel does not specify whether Hobbes is intentionally misleading or whether his mistake is an honest one which comes about through a misunderstanding of the imagination. (He does suggestively remark that Hobbes employs not only “brutal” brashness but also philosophical “camouflage.”)Footnote ⁵⁰ In a way, Hobbes's intention does not matter; what matters is what has happened as a consequence of this image. And so Jouvenel reserves some of the strongest language in all of his writing for this type of philosophical error. He says that social contract theory is a “fantasy,” “an intellectual monstrosity,” a view which “assumes away the conditions of [our] production,” and a “picture of society which seem[s] to assume a club of celibates.”Footnote ⁵¹

Of particular interest is Jouvenel's antidote, since it requires no complicated philosophical apparatus. Basically, the way to dispel the illusion of contract theory is simply to attend to our experience. A textual example helps to explain this point. Near the beginning of the Social Contract, Rousseau sets forth the “metaphor of chains” in one of his most famous sentences: “Man is born free and yet everywhere he is in chains.” Jouvenel surely has this sentence in mind when he contrasts the “nonsense” of natural freedom with the empirical reality of the human condition: “Man appears, a screaming bundle of flesh, the outcome of mating. He is utterly helpless, his existence hangs upon the nursing he receives.”Footnote ⁵² We begin our lives, in other words, in a profoundly dependent manner. That is our reality as opposed to the speculatively generated world of philosophical theory. And it is a reality that rescues us from the illusion of autonomy. Jouvenel says that many of our “intellectual delusions” dissolve if we cling to the “simple truth that we begin our lives as infants.”Footnote ⁵³ And he dryly notes that the “great authors” of the past, in order to overlook our fundamental dependence, must have been “childless men” who also “forgot their own childhood.”Footnote ⁵⁴

It would be missing the point for a critic to respond that social contract theories are only meant as regulative ideals and not as realistic depictions of human political order. Jouvenel recognizes that Hobbes is not interested in whether society actually emerges according to a social contract.Footnote ⁵⁵ The problem is that holding the wrong image in our mind generates delusion, even when we hold it as a mere model. The proper picture of our origins is not “Individual Man striding about in Nature and deciding deliberately to come to terms with his fellows.” Such an image suggests our natural independence—but we are not in fact born free. The brute fact of our existence and the “basic datum of political science” is that we are born into an already “humanized cosmos,” which is to say that from our first moment we are in debt to a world not of our making.Footnote ⁵⁶

The recognition not only that we have this debt but that it is of a special variety is a key aspect of Jouvenel's thought. We are not thrown or hurled in a Heideggerian sense. Rather, we are welcomed, for our mother is the primary power of this humanized cosmos, as Jouvenel frequently insists.Footnote ⁵⁷ This is the true image of the human condition for Jouvenel: a mother holding her child. It is true not simply because it corresponds to reality but because it does not generate nonsense. Mothers and children are real things that we can and do encounter.Footnote ⁵⁸ By contrast, Jouvenel asks rhetorically: “Who has ever come across the solitary man?”Footnote ⁵⁹ The man in the state of nature is not only an “intellectual abstraction” but a “misleading metaphor.”Footnote ⁶⁰ One might say that the image is misleading as a metaphor precisely because it is abstract, precisely because it has been ripped from the context which gives it meaning.Footnote ⁶¹ The partial character of such an image generates philosophical misunderstanding in that it takes the outline for the whole.Footnote ⁶² It spiritualizes an aspect of human experience—freedom—into an ultimate account. But this is a song composed of a single note, and it is thus a song that is amusical and even discordant. The image of the mother and child, by contrast, gestures to the true and complex origin of human beings—an origin which always involves another and which thus always allows for the possibility of harmony.

4

I turn now to the moral and political consequences of the above analysis of modern amousia. Jouvenel says that it is “our great task to know who we are, what we will become, and what we are capable of.”Footnote ⁶³ And it is only by “personal speculation” and “by thinking for oneself” that we gain this education.Footnote ⁶⁴ But when we “look inside ourselves” and sift through “the evidence furnished by self-examination,” we actually see that we are “not merely, or even mainly, a thinking machine.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Instead, we see that we are “sensitive organism[s]” with “affective nature[s]” whose “passions are the very data of Politics.”Footnote ⁶⁶

This is a distinction that has been drawn by other philosophers, such as Hume, and at least one scholar has identified points of contact between Jouvenel's thought and that of Hume.Footnote ⁶⁷ But Jouvenel's claim here is stronger than Hume's; it is not simply that we have a sensitive side to our nature to which we must pay heed when we discuss moral issues. On Jouvenel's account, it is given priority: our response to speech is always at first emotional, not rational.Footnote ⁶⁸ In this way, the moral bond is akin to the philosophical bond; what constitutes both a “true tribe” and a true “circle of philosophers” is that the relation between individuals is as “lovers.”Footnote ⁶⁹

This is true in the sense of philia; Jouvenel, like Aristotle and Montaigne, treats friendship as an important moral phenomenon.Footnote ⁷⁰ But it is also true in the sense of eros. Love is a distorting force; the love of one's own people or country, for instance, might stain and color our judgments about such things to the extent that there can be no rational accounting of them. This is not necessarily a problem for Jouvenel; as I discussed above, the recognition of such subjective assessments is a key part of his understanding of moral and political philosophy. The real problem is not that we have an erotic nature but that it is often disregarded. Jouvenel says that it is “profoundly unsafe to assume that men act rationally in Politics.”Footnote ⁷¹ The danger resides not in the fact that we act on the basis of passion but in the denial that the passions should be involved in political reasoning or at least in the misunderstanding of which passions tend to be operative in political reasoning.

What ancient political philosophers like Plato realized was that love could be channeled and directed through the image. Indeed, love could be edified and elevated by the image. One need only recall Socrates's attempt in the Alcibiades to inspire Alcibiades with images such as the mirror and the queen of Sparta; his attempt to shame Callicles in the Gorgias with images such as the perforated jar and the catamitic aesthete; or his attempt to enlighten Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Republic with images such as the three waves, the sun, the divided line, and the cave.Footnote ⁷² The wide variety and frequency of such images in the dialogues suggests that one of the aims of Platonic pedagogy is to direct us to something beyond ourselves and to elevate in our imagination certain noble possibilities over other, baser ones. This notion that love, either in the sense of philia or eros, should be the basis of political philosophy—and that it should be nurtured not only through argument but through the image—is a large part of what the “music” of Platonic education must include.Footnote ⁷³ And it is a large part of Jouvenel's understanding of education, as well; Jouvenel on occasion even resorts to the provocatively Platonic language of philosophers as “guardians.”Footnote ⁷⁴

By contrast, the amousia of modern philosophy is evident not only in its disavowal of the power of the image but also in its prioritization of fear over love. Fear is the most important political passion for modern philosophy. Machiavelli asserted this claim early in the modern period (and perhaps at its foundation): cruelty and fear are more reliable than mercy and love. Fear is reliable precisely because it clarifies political action to the point of survival, both for peoples and for princes.Footnote ⁷⁵ And in general it is not unusual for modern philosophers to suggest that fear leads to a type of clarity and reliability, speaking to a connection between the modern desire for epistemological certainty and the modern desire for political stability.

Jouvenel has a different sense of things. For Jouvenel, fear does not lead to clarity and distinctness; it does not lead to reliability. Rather, fear, like love, distorts and occludes our apprehension of the moral world. Fear clouds our judgment; this is something easily found in one's own experience, and for Jouvenel it is thus more than a little surprising that fear is seen as the secure foundation on which liberal order should be constructed. Indeed, as Jouvenel catalogues at great length, it has in fact proved to be quite unstable, if by “stability” is meant a lack of conflict. Love can be admittedly problematic; things “rooted in love” can bear “fruits of terror,” as the Greek city-states well knew.Footnote ⁷⁶ But Jouvenel says that “what most easily moves men to destructive conduct” is not love but rather “the unpleasant emotion of fear.”Footnote ⁷⁷

For Jouvenel, Hobbes stands against Plato on this point. The impetus of Hobbesian pedagogy—and the impetus of modern philosophy's pedagogy by extension—is decidedly not to direct us to something beyond ourselves. It does not elevate us; rather, it deflates us and returns us to ourselves as individuals. Jouvenel suggests that it is “psychologically necessary” that “Hobbesian man feels himself most vividly as a whole.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Hobbesian philosophy does not point us to possibilities beyond ourselves; it returns us to ourselves and makes us think principally of the safety of our own skin. And it does this, according to Jouvenel, by appealing to the imagination with fear.Footnote ⁷⁹ Even as modern philosophy gestures with its right hand to dismiss the music of ancient philosophy, it employs the selfsame techniques via the legerdemain of its left.

In the modern world, fear has become weaponized, and it has led not to peace but rather to violence. It has led not to intellectual clarity but rather to muddled thinking, not to a politics with “manners” but rather to frenzy and lashing out.Footnote ⁸⁰ I noted above that Jouvenel was a prominent war correspondent and that he interviewed vicious (to put it mildly) politicians such as Adolf Hitler.Footnote ⁸¹ Furthermore, he saw the political consequences of the rhetoric of Hitler; Jouvenel lamented the Munich Pact and the dismantling of Czechoslovakia. But he also suffered in a way that was much closer to home: Jouvenel was imprisoned and interrogated for thirty hours by the Gestapo, during which time he recalls that he was completely “certain” of being shot.Footnote ⁸² These are the types of experiences that are often overlooked by uncharitable interpreters, who tend to focus on other episodes, such as his temporary membership in Jacques Doriot's Parti populaire française. Daniel J. Mahoney has rightly written that this myopia has led to many “calumnies” and to a “ludicrous distortion” of Jouvenel's thought.Footnote ⁸³ For the truth is always a complicated thing, and the truth is that, whatever his youthful choices, Jouvenel was profoundly chastened and marked by his wartime experiences. One sees his concern with catastrophe echoed throughout his writings; like many twentieth-century artists and philosophers, Jouvenel lamented the dissolution of civilization brought about by the World Wars. “The barbarians are coming,” Jouvenel says, “big men with a cruel laughter, who use the conquered as playthings, dishonored and tossed about.”Footnote ⁸⁴ He fears the rise of the “ogres of discord,” warns of the “people floating in outer darkness,” says that “the decisive trait of twentieth-century politics” is a “small group of men who dedicate themselves to the overthrow of the existing order,” and highlights the “effectiveness of a dedicated group of activists” whose “intensity of will” is a “projectile which can easily penetrate the soft body of society.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The theologian René Girard says that violence is a contagion.Footnote ⁸⁶ Similarly, Jouvenel says that violence is “poison to the body politic, which, once introduced, spreads and leads to convulsions. It must never begin.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Violence thrives on “faint-hearted attempts to suppress it.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Furthermore, violence begets violence—it spreads throughout society like a contagion, like a poison. But where does it come from? How do we prevent its introduction? Jouvenel says that “there is some radiance in hope which does not tend to inspire the inflicting of harm.”Footnote ⁸⁹ What moves us to “destructive conduct” is typically not hope, typically not love. Rather, it is fear. Violence comes from fear.Footnote ⁹⁰ Jouvenel suggests that modern societies are founded on fear and that violence flows of necessity from that fear. But in this sense his account is not necessarily novel. What is more intriguing about it, and what brings us full circle, is that the violence of fear has been principally brought about by the power of the image. The poetic, in other words, returns with a vengeance to the world from which philosophy banished it. And this is the final topic that I shall address: the aesthetic appeal, and even promotion, of violence as part of the amousia of the modern world.

5

One of the essential aspects of Jouvenel's thought is his critique of the alienating character of modern society. Jouvenel did write regularly about this problem from an economic angle, especially with respect to what he called “amenity.”Footnote ⁹¹ It would thus be tempting to compare him to someone like Marx. Although he can be charitable toward Marx's thought at times, Jouvenel decries the “mental enslavement to the Marxian model” and denies that history can be interpreted sensibly as class struggle.Footnote ⁹² My sense is that this comparison is thus ultimately incorrect.

Fundamentally, Jouvenel's understanding of alienation is not economic. It is much closer to the account of Eric Voegelin, who thought highly of Jouvenel's work and who saw “substantial agreement” between it and his own account.Footnote ⁹³ Voegelin sees the root of alienation in an inability to see life as ordered in a rational manner; and he detects the same alienation at work in ancient and modern factions.Footnote ⁹⁴ Each of these claims is also operative in Jouvenel's philosophy.

For Jouvenel, alienation occurs when we become mired in “Otherdom” as opposed to feeling at “Home.” Home is principally symbolized by the mother and child image that I discussed above. Otherdom is principally symbolized by the Sphinx—it is dangerous and, at least at first, inscrutable. In the normal course of events, what is strange becomes familiar over time; we come to see what is different with respect rather than with fear. We begin to feel at Home with what was once Other. Such a tolerance and respect lies at the very heart of civil society. But, as Jouvenel notes, the writings of Kafka and Dostoyevsky stand as testament to the occasions when the strange never becomes familiar, when it remains rooted in discomfort and terror.Footnote ⁹⁵ When the Sphinx cannot be conquered—when the world appears as intractably and radically Other—there is no rapprochement possible. We then feel that the world is profoundly foreign to us and find no place for ourselves within it. Such alienation leads to ominous results, as we will see below.

The second similarity with Voegelin concerns ancient and modern alienation. In his discussion of “national idolatry,” Jouvenel draws parallels between modern nationalism and the ancient national religions of Sumer and Assyria, and he notes that this idolatry is particularly liable to “sectarian dissension.”Footnote ⁹⁶ This connection to ancient cultures is all the more striking given that Jouvenel's key image for modern society is the ancient city of Babylon. One might say that the primary political problem is that human beings “never resign themselves to Babylon being Babylon”—even, and perhaps especially, when they are afraid. Factional leaders will paint “pretty pictures” of a “dream of Icaria” in the midst of Babylon; of a “paradise of liberty”; of an “Arcadian dream.” It is the rare citizen who accepts Babylon as Home, who accepts the modern world as it is given to him. The more common experience is to decry the terrifying injustice of the world, to demand that things comport to a nobler, more enlightened template; and as a result, to pay heed to the factional leaders who promise a brighter tomorrow.

The problem is that there is “a tyranny in the womb of every Utopia,” such that attempted realizations of utopias are “always abominable.” This point is worth explication. Near the end of the previous section, we saw Jouvenel's warnings regarding the rise of small yet dangerous groups. According to Jouvenel, the “dialectic” of these “tyrannical sects” is to ascribe a “transcendent” or “absolute” value to their beliefs, such that dissidents are to be seen as confused at best and willfully recalcitrant at worst.Footnote ⁹⁷ The notion of “absolute” value here is suggestive; these tyrannical sects represent the limit case of the myth of the solution. In other words, their understanding of morals and politics is mathematical. They are completely certain of their own rectitude. Furthermore, such sects regard themselves as “perfect societies whose mission it is to remold the large society in their own image.” Their self-interpretation is enveloped in the loftiest of ideals. But even the “fairest vision of a good to be sought” may in the end “poison hearts with hatred against those who are deemed an obstacle to its achievement.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The use of “poison” here is also suggestive, especially given our discussion of violence above; the good that can heal us is the good that can corrupt us.

Despite their rhetoric of peace and openness, such sects or factions do not tolerate difference. They do not tolerate dissent; they do not tolerate discussion. (This is something painfully familiar to even the most casual observer of contemporary politics.) Rather, emboldened in the perceived certainty of their ideas, they embark on a “conquest” of society, “reducing to moral slavery those whose beliefs differ from their own.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Although such an impulse can occur in any time and place, Jouvenel says that this “conquest” is particularly pointed in modern conditions, where in the general absence of the liberal and civilizing arts we see “thoughtless brutality.” Jouvenel also describes this condition as a “savagery,” a “transformation of men's natures,” a “total distortion of their normal modes of doing,” and the “apex of the libido in all its forms.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It is amousia in the broadest sense possible—a thoroughgoing existential inversion, even disintegration. It is the literal undermining of the civil order. “Barbarian invasions would be superfluous,” Jouvenel says. “We are our own Huns.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Jouvenel does not outline the necessary and sufficient conditions for modern amousia. However, throughout this essay I have set forth several components of that condition, which taken together suggest its character. His examples of the “consequences” are similarly instructive and help to flesh out the overall account. What he calls the “modern pattern” involves “the complete abolition of the moral sense.”Footnote ¹⁰² To pursue an idea “at all costs”; to engage in the “most immoral of all beliefs,” that is, the suspension of all moral beliefs for the sake of passion; to combine “the manners of gangsters with the moral benefits of martyrdom”; to disdain the “vulgar opinion” of right and wrong; to pull off “the most difficult and truly sinful feat” of disregarding one's conscience; to see “cruelty as heroic virtue”; to delight in the “heretical taint” of extreme violence; to refuse to “submit to reality”—these are the marks of the truly alienated individual who cannot see Babylon except through a veil of flames.Footnote ¹⁰³ And Jouvenel says that “this evil attitude is far more harmful than any false ideas, and it is fostered not by intellectual error but by aesthetic suggestions,” by an education which elevates violence in the imagination.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The “total distortion” of the everyday world of customary morality has only been possible owing to a transformation, even transvaluation, of the myths and images that we deem heroic and through which we think. Here the poetic returns with a vengeance. We saw above that insofar as modern philosophy disavows the metaphorical and imagistic structure of thought, it misunderstands the mind. One political consequence of this misunderstanding is that it is no longer able to diagnose the malady of amousia when it arises (if, indeed, it is not deliberately generating that malady). Another is that citizens lack the humanistic education required to combat the grosser variants of imaginative appeals.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Thus, the modern era has witnessed not only the unchecked proliferation of fear but also “the sanctification of political violence.” In what I take to be one of the most important claims in his corpus, Jouvenel says that “no deep understanding of the twentieth century is possible… unless we grasp that violence has received psychological promotion.” This has been one of the legacies of radical upheavals such as the French Revolution; whatever its boons, whatever its gains in terms of freedom, it also “hallowed violence” as an end and not just a means.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

But the problem is not simply that violence has been hallowed by the French Revolution and by events like it. Jouvenel's word choice in his various discussions of these matters implies that the promotion of violence has come in the form of poetry. I have already mentioned the myth of the solution. Jouvenel also discusses the “Jacobinic myth of sanctified terror”; “the Napoleonic myth of messianic despotism” and “political messianism” in general; the “image of the sacred battalion” cleansing the land of abominations; and in particular the “myths” of George Sorel, whom Jouvenel picks out as the “herald” of operatic, twentieth-century violence.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Jouvenel says that Nietzsche, Sorel, and Chesterton had all foreseen the promotion of violence, especially through the embrace of the idea of the “youth revolt.” But Sorel is the one who most embraced it in the realm of ideas, just as the men who most embraced it in the realm of action were Lenin, Kemal Atatürk, Mussolini, and Hitler.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ All of them, according to Jouvenel, recognized that “the grand phenomenon of the time” was the prevalence of youth groups who were animated by an antibourgeois spirit. All of them, in short, recognized the importance of directing the passions of the youth. And all of them also recognized that this direction required the proper use of the image and the construction of something like a political theology or new set of myths. For Jouvenel, the work which Hobbes began thus reaches its culmination in the twentieth century. Violence receives psychological promotion in the form of the image and works its magic particularly on the passions of the young. (On this point, and given the subject of this essay, it is worth remembering Leo Strauss's offhand remark that modern philosophy itself was “that greatest of all youth movements.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ )

To sum up: Jouvenel believes that the narrow amousia of the modern world has led to the broad version. The imagination, once denied, now runs rampant. For the mind is metaphorical, and returns to itself whether philosophy likes it or not. And in the absence of nobler images, those of violence attain prominence and even ascendancy, as Sorel, Hitler, and others well knew. In 1963, Jouvenel succinctly puts the point: “This is the century of the terrorist technique.”Footnote ¹¹⁰

6

What remains is a conclusion. In the introduction, I suggested that what has been missing from previous scholarly accounts of Jouvenel's philosophy—despite the merits relative to each—has been an attention to the literary basis of his thought and to his musical understanding of the human mind and the human condition. I have tried to focus on that aspect from the perspective of his use of the Greek term “amousia” and to set forth Jouvenel's account of modern amousia both in the narrow and broad senses of the term. In other words, I have tried to show that the deliberate disavowal of the liberal arts that speak to the imagination—rhetoric, poetry, philosophy, and the like—has led to a functional illiteracy on the intellectual level, similar to what Voegelin calls “radical stupidity.”Footnote ¹¹¹ And the result has been something like an existential disintegration with certain pernicious political consequences. For example, amousia has proved to be a particularly fertile ground for the emergence of tyrannical sects.

Let me end by suggesting four possible complications to the account I have given. First, I am sympathetic to critiques that Jouvenel's use of terms like “modern” is underdetermined. Seen in a certain light, what Jouvenel offers is a stylized, rather than a scientific, account. But seen in another, the account is scientific or causal in that it is diagnostic. If Jouvenel is right that the architects of modern philosophy, and by extension the modern world, are philosophers like Hobbes, then the image's power to edify the soul lies buried beneath the ruins of ancient and medieval philosophy. The image is now used only to evoke fear. Thus, what Jouvenel offers is a causal account insofar as it addresses the root causes of the modern condition. And, unlike many other philosophers, Jouvenel suggests that those causes are not principally economic or political ones.

Second, a reader intimately familiar with the thought of Hobbes might find Jouvenel's account of Hobbes flat-footed, even disingenuous. Is Hobbes really responsible for the violence of the twentieth century? I can only say that space precludes a detailed account of any substantive answer. Jouvenel is the author of an elegant and insightful introduction to Hobbes's translation of Thucydides. He also says that Leo Strauss and Michael Oakeshott are his peers who understand Hobbes the best.Footnote ¹¹² This admiration for Strauss and Oakeshott gives one a sense of the way that he himself reads Hobbes, which is to say with nuance. As a gesture toward a fuller answer, here I will only note that Jouvenel sees Hobbes as the high priest of “divergence,” which is one of two postulates that undergird modern philosophy. An engagement with this deep and provocative thesis about the nature of modern philosophy is an entire essay in itself. Nonetheless, once it is eventually given, I believe that it will be cognate with the abbreviated account that I have set forth above. Jouvenel was a keen and penetrating reader of Hobbes.

Third, one might wonder about violence's connection to fear on the one hand and its connection to tyrannical dreams on the other. Are these accounts in tension? Was Hitler really motivated by fear? I think it is probably more accurate to say that Hitler used fear in order to try to bring about his tyrannical utopia. Fear indeed often motivates violence. But fear can also be a technique or tool deployed to bring about a new state of affairs. People who are alienated and afraid are particularly drawn to dreams of brighter tomorrows. It is thus in the interest of the founders of tyrannical utopias to bring about enmity. In this way, they stand as perversions of the founders of states, who constitute a people by bringing about amity.Footnote ¹¹³

Finally, I think it is necessary to address an issue about Jouvenel's project as a whole. I have suggested throughout that there is an ancient, musical basis to Jouvenel's philosophy which is conveyed by his use of amousia. There is other evidence for this interpretation that one could offer. For example, Jouvenel says that many modern woes “could have been foreseen by anyone with a Christian background or a classical education.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ He advises all modern intellectuals to study logic; he calls for a new, modified trivium; he favors educational attempts such as the Great Books curriculum; and he urges a revival of the study of Latin, “the clearest of all languages.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ Jouvenel believes, in short, that amousia in the broad sense is predicated on amousia in the narrow sense. In a way, the real problem with modern civilization flows from the problem of modern education, from the gradual erosion of emphasis on the liberal arts and on a philosophy that is poetic.

But should we really take ancient philosophy as the model for liberal learning? Karl Popper famously suggests in The Open Society and Its Enemies that Platonic philosophy, rather than Hobbesian philosophy, is incompatible with the civil association of the open, liberal society. Perhaps this is simply a misunderstanding of Plato's position. But perhaps it is not. In his interpretation of the Republic, for example, Stanley Rosen suggests that “modern enemies of Plato's thought,” including Popper, are correct to note what we might call the Republic’s singlemindedness. In other words, there are no non-Platonic philosophers in the beautiful city of the Republic. Rosen's intimation is that Plato, however unintentionally, lays the groundwork for the modern corruption of philosophy into dogmatism and ideology, into tyrannical sectarianism, into the love of one's own truth.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Now, I mention Popper because Jouvenel knew him through the Mont Pelerin Society; and because Jouvenel admired his “fine book,” even going so far as to call it a work of “vast erudition and great intellectual vigor.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ How to reconcile this praise with Jouvenel's characterization of philosophy as “musical” and of philosophers as “guardians?”

I think Jouvenel understood the task of philosophy in the ancient sense. But he understood, too, that the content—in terms of answers to concrete moral and political problems—must always be discovered and rediscovered by each generation. As Wilson Carey McWilliams put it, Jouvenel desired to bring “the old gods to a new city.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ If there is a content to Platonic philosophy beyond the lionization of the examined life, then importing it into modern society without modification may lead to the problems that Popper catalogues. Jouvenel teaches us to look beyond the conditions of the small-scale, socially homogenous polis. He teaches us how to escape this “prison” in order to find our way in the new city.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But he also teaches us that we find our way in this new city by remembering that the gods are old. In this way, Jouvenel's philosophy is more ancient than modern.Footnote ¹²⁰ And it especially shares the Platonic impulse to employ the image in the pursuit of wisdom. As Jouvenel says, “let us in any case cherish the simple terms which are capable of moving the hearts of all men.”Footnote ¹²¹ For he knew, no less than Plato did, that political activity is “dangerous” and “not highly sensitive to the teaching of wisdom.”Footnote ¹²² And he also knew that the heart is not always moved (if indeed it ever is) by argument alone.