Colonize Your Bookshelf, Part II
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.
Surely it does not come from “all.” He put that one to bed in his earlier Study on Sovereignty, a critique of all things Rousseau, where he states up front: “They say that the people are sovereign; but over whom? Over themselves, apparently. The people are, therefore, subject.”[2] Despite having already undone Rousseau’s life’s work, he continues the essay beyond these few sentences, but they are enough for our purposes here. Between this and Filmer, we may put popular sovereignty to one side, and follow Maistre as he treads even more interesting ground.
Now, this does not mean that we cannot or should not have a constitution. Maistre is a great admirer of constitutions; just not the one in Paine’s pocket. But his main point about constitutions is that they are enduring to the degree they are short. Wittgenstein begins his Tractatus with the quote “…and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words,”[3] which he surely later regretted, as it made the whole Tractatus into an anticlimax. And Maistre is making the same point: the less one writes, the stronger the constitution, and the strongest constitution of all is unwritten. Let us note that Lycurgus refused to write down the laws of Sparta because any man who could only learn of his duty by reading about it should be made a public example. Maistre’s time saw a profusion of men writing constitutions; as he says, the 18th century man of letters basically had to turn in his doctorate unless he could pull out of his pocket a constitution he wrote himself.
But it gets worse for our 18th century doctor. Not only should any constitution worth the paper it is not written on live only in the hearts of a people; it cannot even be actively generated by human will. Human will is not the agent, but the tool shaping a constitution. As a simple example, nobody ever sat down and through some transcendental deduction arrived at the English constitution, its body of law, its practices and conventions. And yet this constitution has endured so long that nobody can even be sure just how old it is. Compare this with the French constitution. Which one, you ask? Good question—there have been 15 of them since the French Revolution. The English constitution, towering over these bug constitutions, was not the work of 18th century doctors LARPing at statecraft, but was, in Maistre’s words, “the work of circumstances.” Maybe we want to call this “the march of history,” or “God,” or, like Hegel, “the march of God in the world,” but a rose by any other name… Maistre mines a classical analogy:
“If there is anything familiar, it is Cicero’s analogy of the Epicurean system, which wished to build a world with atoms falling at random in a void. One would rather believe, said the great orator, that letters thrown into the air could, on falling, have arranged themselves in such a manner as to form a poem.”[4]
He clearly does not think that the sort of perfection attained by the unwritten English constitution is an accident. Men do not act, but are acted upon; they are the instruments wielded in shaping a constitution, because a constitution is a divine work. The Romans had a word for this: fas. And here it is worth a brief detour to flesh out this idea.
Fas is usually translated as “divine law.” It is an ancient Aryan concept akin to the Vedic ṛta. Cognate to our “rite,” ṛta is in Vedic cosmology the essential normative, governing principle of reality, meaning something like “what has moved in a fitting manner.” Fas takes up a similar role, but the semantic sense of the Latin term is revealing. The Indo-European root of fas, viz. *bhā-, designates speech, but speech as something independent of the speaker, an utterance sufficient in itself, related etymologically to “fate” and to “fame.” Maistre did not use the term fas, but as a Christian would surely have appreciated the idea of a Word which is itself whole and entire, the speaker and speech act identical. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”[5, emphasis added] Maistre is among the more interesting Christians, and while he is no heretic, he is in some ways a spiritual cousin to the classical writers, and has internalized some of their conceptual framework. He expresses fas in so many words:
“Crescit occulto velut arbor aevo [“it grows like a tree with the silent lapse of time”]; this is the eternal motto of every great institution; hence the fact that every false institution writes much because it feels its weakness, and seeks for support. From the truth just stated follows the unswerving consequence that no great and real institution can be founded on a written law, since the men themselves, the successive instruments of its establishment, do not know what it is to become, and since imperceptible growth is the true sign of durability in all possible orders of things.”[6]
Maistre’s love of the organic state, grown up through time immemorial, unwritten, the work of no man, prior to all deliberation, bearing the stamp of the deity, is set in contrast to the ideal revolutionary state, even with every parameter fine tuned to its advantage—the France of the Revolution. Her confidence? Limitless. Her ancient government? Extinguished. Her every enemy? Paralyzed. Her affairs? Undisturbed. Now, let this perfectly tuned revolutionary state run its course, and what does one get? The Reign of Terror, in very short order. Maistre was, mercifully, not around to witness the fruit of the American experiment, but if he had been, no doubt he would have understood it in the same terms. Let a country with every imaginable advantage play out as it may, only make it intentional, make it manufactured, make it liberal: within two centuries it will be immolated by its own hand.
The “generative principle” of Maistre’s title is not the will of particular men. This is not at all incompatible with Filmer, as particular men can be sovereign, can wield the tradition or the constitution as a tool, but Maistre’s point is that the sovereign is himself a tool of Providence. Social orders cannot be constituted by deliberation and active human will; they can only be constituted by Providence, which works itself through a divine lawgiver. The lawgiver, much less the man engaged in statecraft, cannot create alone. But when the lawgiver is the spokesman of Providence he is not alone, but has the universal wind blowing through the whole cosmos at his back. The lawgiver is not the creator, he is a circumstance; thus any law he pronounces, any name he invokes, is invoked through him. The real namer is of course for Maistre, God, and in the essay he introduces a theory of names that is a marriage between Confucius and Plato’s Cratylus—the name must carve reality at the joints, but must also be relative to function and not arbitrary; even naming ultimately belongs to God alone.
We need not feel belittled by this. Man may not be able to name things, but if his creation is great, the name will be ennobled by it—“the thing always dignifies the name.” For example, take one of the most elevated expressions man has ever produced: tragedy. The word conjures such titanic figures as Sophocles and Shakespeare, but springs from a root meaning “goat song.” A thing can have humble origins—in fact, must have humble origins—and yet still endure. Here we are back to the English constitution. In fact, the more mysterious, the more obscure; in a word, the more divine a thing’s basis, the more enduring it will be. Greatness cannot be planned, deliberated, calculated, and willed into reality, at least not by men. The law, the constitution of a people, must be the “work of circumstances,” the impersonal “vox populi, vox dei.” By this we do not mean anything like popular sovereignty: it is not vox dei because vox populi, but the reverse. So great a thing as a constitution must be sanctioned by the gods because it is the work of the gods, with man only the instrument. And now we have an answer to our original question “whence comes the authority of the piece of paper in Paine’s pocket?”—the authority comes from fas, the divine law.
The Generative Principle is classic Maistre, but the reader will gain only a vague impression of the true darkness of his thought. His belief that any social order’s foundation must necessarily be so dark, so mysterious, so forbidding that one dare not approach it,[7] does not quite come through here. But in Part III we shall turn, against his advice, to gaze on our own foundation (or rather, anti-foundation). We shall turn to a different expression of vox populi vox dei, from fas to the fascis. We next move into the darkness.
References
- 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.
- Maistre, Joseph de (1794), Richard Lebrun, ed. (1996). Against Rousseau. McGill-Queen’s University Press. p. 45.
- Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922). Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (Tractatus Logicao-Philosophicus). Routledge, 2010. p. 1.
- Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions, p. 45
- John 1:1 (KJV)
- Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions, p. 73.
- 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.
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