Colonize Your Bookshelf, Part II

By Edward Maxwell III

Filmer is a great starting point for colonizing our bookshelf, but we can throw a bone to those who would prefer something a bit more modern. After all, his writing not only predated liberalism, it predated its first great conflict: the English Civil War. He certainly never lived to see the French Revolution. Let us now turn to someone who did—in fact, its greatest critic.

Joseph de Maistre: Essai sur le Principe Générateur des Constitutions Politiques (Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions) (1809)

Maistre's reputation does not fare much better than Filmer's outside of reactionary circles. His ideal state is characterized by Nigel Harris in International Socialism No. 28 (whose board interestingly included one Alasdair MacIntyre—small world): “the organic and hierarchic society, governed with strict authority through one Church or one nationalist ideology in the hands of an accepted ruling class, uninhibited in its righteous use of violence, its superiority founded upon blood or birth,” and this paints Maistre as a cartoon Catholic doing little more than pointing to scripture and saying “see, nothing at all in here about human rights, democracy, equality, separation of powers, etc,” but this sells Maistre tremendously short. Upon examination, he is in fact extremely radical by the standards both of his time and of ours—his brand of politics is highly inflammatory even today.

Filmer has mortally wounded liberalism, but do we really have to bring in the executioner? We understand that the sovereign cannot be bound by law; perhaps, with Hoppe, we even understand the superiority of monarchy over democracy, but could we at least have constitutional monarchy? Burke is not going to be pleased with the answer given in Maistre's Generative Principle of Political Constitutions.

Right off the bat, Maistre recommends himself to us moderns: in the preface, he admits that hereditary monarchy is manifestly stupid; yet he urges us to actually look at the facts of history, and the fact is that against all reason: hereditary monarchy works. That is, Maistre declares himself to be a sort of empiricist, a man not altogether out of step with our own thinking. He calls history “experimental politics,” and as we shall see, a great deal is packed into this phrase. Whatever we might think of hereditary monarchy as an idea, its track record of achievement is second to none. Our task is to explain why.

His opening salvo sets the tone for the essay:

“One of the grand errors of an age that professed them all was to believe that a political constitution could be written and created a priori, while reason and experience meet in establishing that a constitution is a divine work, and that precisely what is most fundamental and most essentially constitutional in the laws of a nation cannot be written.”[1]

Thomas Paine (he keeps coming up, doesn't he?) once said that a constitution does not exist until he can put it in his pocket. Maistre begs to differ. Constitutionalism is not a difficult statue to topple, and Maistre topples it right away: a constitution is just a law, and a law cannot be immutable unless guaranteed by a superior authority. He might as well have torn a page straight out of Patriarcha—we are back to the old “men are ruled by men, not paper” chestnut. But Maistre is just warming up. He wants to ask “whence comes the authority behind our piece of paper?” and in this he goes much further than Filmer.

Read the entire article at ZerothPosition.com

References

1. Maistre, Joseph de (1809). Essai sur le Principe Générateur des Constitutions Politiques (Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions). Little and Brown tr., 1847. p. 25.
2. Maistre, Joseph de (1794), Richard Lebrun, ed. (1996). Against Rousseau. McGill-Queen's University Press. p. 45.
3. Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922). Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (Tractatus Logicao-Philosophicus). Routledge, 2010. p. 1.
4. Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions, p. 45
5. John 1:1 (KJV)
6. Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions, p. 73.
7. cf. Étude sur la Souveraineté (Study on Sovereignty), ch. 10; Considérations sur la France (Considerations on France), ch. 3 in Richard Lebrun, ed. Works of Joseph de Maistre. McGill-Queen's University Press, 1974; St. Petersburg Dialogues, vols. 1 & 7. in Richard Lebrun, ed. Works of Joseph de Maistre. McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993.