Jouvenelian vs. the Liberal Model of Human Order

Discussion

Adam Katz:

"The “Jouvenelian model” Bond is referring to, and which his book is opposing to the liberal model, starts from the assumption that “there is in every society a centre of control” (24). What Bond aims to show in his book is that political reality is generated by the struggle of final power centers against intermediate power centers which interfere with the governing imperatives as determined by the final center. Familiar examples would be a medieval king contending with the nobility as he attempts to levy taxes to prosecute a war or some other project; or mid-20th century attempts on the part of America’s federal government to assimilate the recalcitrant Southern states into a fully modern, liberal order. Bond is using mimetic theory to challenge liberal individualism: for liberalism, the individual precedes society, which means that society must be explained as separate individuals joining together voluntarily. Bond, in the passage quoted here, is pointing out that, while the history of power that Bertrand de Jouvenel advanced, in particular in his On Power, according to which the power center (the monarch and then the state in modernity) increases its power relative to the “middle” by mobilizing the lower members of society against that middle, presupposes an non-individualist anthropology, Jouvenel himself continues to rely upon an individualist anthropology. Bond, in refining and strengthening the model he adopts from Jouvenel, finds it necessary to follow Jouvenel back to his own account of (“magical”) social origins and challenge that (still residually liberal) account with a more powerful one. That more powerful account is the originary hypothesis, which enables us to see how we could never think of human orders apart from some center." (http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2501/2501katz/?)

Source: book review of:

• Nemesis: The Jouvenelian vs. the Liberal Model of Human Orders, by C.A. Bond