“In the destruction of all other command for the benefit of one alone–that of the state. In each man’s absolute freedom from every family and social authority, a freedom the price of which is complete submission to the state. In the complete equality as between themselves of all citizens, paid for by their equal abasement before the power of their absolute master–the state. In the disappearance of every constraint which does not emanate from the state, and in the denial of every pre-eminence which is not approved by the state. In a word, it ends in the atomization of society, and in the rupture of every private tie linking man and man, whose only bond is now their common bondage to the state. The extremes of individualism and socialism meet: that was their predestined course.”
de jouvenel
Reading de Jouvenel under martial law in Canada /
A poignant and illuminating experience. The trenchant prose shines with wisdom.
Man, in love with himself and made for action, rises in his own esteem with every extension of his personality and multiplication of his faculties. The leader of any group of men whatsoever thereby feels an almost physical enlargement of himself. His nature changes with his stature. … He is the man of destiny.
Command is a mountain top. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius of construction, which are part of man’s natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him.
Are the ends which he sets before himself for the weal of society? Possibly. Are they in conformity with his desires? Often. And so the leader easily convinces himself that his one ambition is to serve the whole, and forgets that his real motive-spring is the enjoyment of action and expansion.