In this concluding volume in the trilogy that begins with On Power and moves to Sovereignty, Bertrand de Jouvenel proposes to remedy a serious deficiency in political science, namely: the lack of agreement on first principles, or 'elements'. The author's concern is with political processes as they actually exist, not as they are conjectured to be in hypothetical models.
Who decides? Who is the Sovereign? What is a good act? In quest of answers to these vitally important questions, Bertrand de Jouvenel examines successively the nature and history of authority, the political good, the sovereign, and liberty. His concern is with “the prospects for individual liberty in democratic societies in which sovereignty purportedly resides in the whole people of the body politic.” His objective is a definition and understanding of “the canons of conduct for the public authority of a dynamic society.” Daniel J. Mahoney is Associate Professor of Politics at Assumption College. David DesRosiers is Executive Vice President at the Manhattan Institute.
Documenting the process by which government and controlling majorities have grown increasingly powerful and tyrannical, Bertrand de Jouvenel demonstrates how democracies have failed to limit the powers of government. Jouvenel traces this development to the days of royal absolutism, which established large administrative bureaucracies and thus laid the foundation of the modern omnipotent state. Bertrand de Jouvenel was an author and teacher, first publishing On Power in 1945.
In this concise and elegant work, first published in 1952, Bertrand de Jouvenel purposely ignores the economic evidence that redistributional efforts sap incentives and are economically destructive. Rather, he stresses the commonly disregarded ethical arguments showing that redistribution is ethically indefensible for, and practically unworkable in, a complex society.A new introduction relates Jouvenel's arguments to current discussions about the redistributionist state and draws out many of the points of affinity with the works of Buchanan, Hayek, Rawls, and others.