Fragmenta Philosophica

Man's Lot

In the previous post I mentioned Bertrand De Jouvenel. The epigraph he stitches together for his work On Power:The Natural History of its Growth brilliantly captures the perennial precariousness of the political.

QUAERITUR:
Pone seram, cohibe. Sec quis custodiet ipso Custodes?
- Juvenal, VI, 347

RESPONDENDUM:
Nisi Dominus custodierit civitatem, frustra vigilat qui custodit eam.
- Solomon, Psalm 127:01

[THE QUESTION:
"Keep your wife under guard." Yes, but who will guard the guardians?
THE ANSWER:
Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain]

Plus Ca Change ...

In an interview with Reason magazine a few years ago, Hitchens stated,

"I threw in my lot with the left because on all manner of pressing topics -- the Vietnam atrocity, nuclear weapons, racism, oligarchy -- there didn’t seem to be any distinctive libertarian view. I must say that this still seems to me to be the case, at least where issues of internationalism are concerned. What is the libertarian take, for example, on Bosnia or Palestine?

"There’s also something faintly ahistorical about the libertarian worldview. When I became a socialist it was largely the outcome of a study of history, taking sides, so to speak, in the battles over industrialism and war and empire. I can’t -- and this may be a limit on my own imagination or education -- picture a libertarian analysis of 1848 or 1914."

While his point has merit, there is a scholarly, vital (and obscure) strain of "libertarian" history which flows in a rivulet distinct from the Whig, Marxist, and various Conservative traditions; yet which, interestingly, abuts them all at various points. Some of the distinguished names which come to mind - i.e., excluding American crackpots - are T.S. Ashton, Alexander Rustow, Roepke and Schumpeter (the latter two when not addressing more narrowly economic topics), and Bertrand de Jouvenel. (A good argument could be made to include Jakob Burckhardt and De Tocqueville as near spiritual kin - or at least forebears - of these more modern writers).

De Jouvenel was a formidable thinker and an incredibly learned man, as I am coming to appreciate more and more, as I wend my way through Volume I   of his tripartite series on power and sovereignty.

I was fortunate to have been given recently a first-edition of an obscure work by him, Problems of Socialist England, written on scene and in light of the heady days of the Labour party "landslide" in post-world-war-II Britain. The book takes a charitable but distinctly skeptical look at the then-regnant fever for nationalization, consolidation, and dirigisme which resulted in such institutions as the National Health Service (and which also resulted in massive loans at the time from the big, bad, U.S. - but we'll save that topic for a separate posting).

The book's epilogue was penned in 1948, and records some salient observations on British attitudes to the U.S., to its former colonial possessions, international decorum, and so on. 

"In 1946 Englad was, I found, sunk in the understandable feeling of well-being which comes from victory won at the price of admirable effort. The war was not long over, sandbags were still in the streets and women in uniform were still everywhere to be seen; the pall of war propaganda still hung low on the minds and the feelings excited by it still raged ... It was hard to realize that the Soviet power whose victories had been praised to the skies was an imperialism no less dangerous than the one just laid in ruins - more dangerous indeed by the greater range of its claims and the superior attractions of its principles, and because it was a tyranny advancing under the banner of charity. It was hard to grasp that, after so complete a victory, England should still be in the front line against a new enemy, without any covering force on the Continent and isolated as much by the annihilation of her enemy, Germany, as by the enfeeblement of her ally, France. It was, lastly, intolerable that, at a time of generous rejoicing over the withdrawal of British power from overseas possessions and the conferment of liberty on their peoples, account should have to be taken of the opportunities presented by this withdrawal to Soviet imperialism ...

"But it was cause for alarm that a section of the ministerial majority was in full cry against this politic necessity and sought, paradoxically enough, to hold the scales even between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A. ...

"It is deeply gratifying to be able to record, two years later, the collapse of this opposition. I should not have thought possible so complete an abandonment of an intellectual position held by so many. I had feared for the government's ability to get itself followed by its party. Moscow's ridiculous blunders have greatly helped it ...

"True it is not complete. And the ethical preconceptions which the English public imports into the country's international politics often give its opinions a strange twist. To this is due its siding with Asiatic nationalisms against European powers - but it is thought indelicate to call too pointed attention to the oppression of peoples in Eastern Europe by the Soviet government. Anger is expressed against the Dutch for having now, it seems, accomplished a civilising work in Indonesia; Soekarno is supported while General Bor, who, after having commanded the rising in Warsaw in 1944, is today the head of the Polish government in exile, is gladly forgotten. Peace being the supreme good, there must be ratification of all the injustices perpetrated by Soviet imperialism, and when he talks of liberating the oppressed Mr. Churchill gives occasion for scandal. But the peace which England brought to her lost empire is made of no account, and it is admitted in principle that the most fanatical Asiatic nationalism has a claim to respect which would not be allowed in the case of an Englishman who should proceed to the same passionate excess."