My blog reposts a couple of comments in which I present an interpretation of Maistre in response to a libertarian who (not surprisingly) is shocked and puzzled by the Count’s emphasis on violence.
The Orthosphere
Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists – Joseph de Maistre
Hello, James. The biggest difference between De Maistre and De Sade is that de Maistre was an anthropological realist and De Sade was a sociopath, but these distinctions tend to be lost on the purely secular mind. Coincidentally, I’ve been reading very closely Rene Girard’s two latest books and am simultaneously writing about them in an article. When it appears, I’ll make a note of it at the Orthosphere. It might interest you.
I think your anthropological realist/sociopath distinction is pretty similar to my political scientist/nonjudgmental libertarian distinction. And I agree on the secular mind. It lacks a higher perspective from which brute fact can be evaluated and put in its place, so the difference between Maistre and Sade becomes somewhat unreal.
My doctor-father, Eric Gans, likes to say that it belongs to liberal modernity to blind itself to all real distinctions while making up lots of fake ones.
“Maistre’s answer is that to establish order you need a state that is based on violence”
Dante would not agree with you that State is “based” upon violence. I do not see how your view can be reconciled with Christian or classical views of the State.
In fact, you start with conceding the point to the libertarians. For the “Lose the We” crowd, there is no difference between State and bandits or mafia. Both are based upon violence. You write
“but to limit state violence and organize it toward something other than still greater violence,..”
As if, the end of State is violence rather than justice as Aristotle puts it.
Maistre isn’t Dante. He deals with problems like Enlightenment thought that Dante wasn’t presented with. That means his exposition has to be different.
From the strictly secular point of view, the striking feature of actual this-worldly states is that they start in violence and the readiness to use deadly force is essential to their existence and functioning. That is what was meant by “based on violence.” That is also why as you note libertarians view the state as organized violence and nothing more.
The issue for a Christian thinker is then how to deal with that aspect of the world in such a way that the state can be something other than a band of murderers. The answer Maistre points to is to sacralize the state: to subordinate it to something more real than violence, which is God.
For someone like Dante, that procedure is quite artificial. God isn’t what you add on, He’s what you start with. That’s what it means to say that He is the most real being. Maistre wasn’t writing for Dante’s benefit though, he was writing for modern Enlightened man. So he had to start with realities like violence that the secular mind can recognize immediately and without argument and then point out what has to be added to them to get a complete view of things.
O Even secularly, the libertarian view is not the only one. Aristotle was no Christian. I wonder why Maistre does not start with him?.
YoI believe Aristotle does not link violence to State in an essential way. Justice is the final end of State and administration of Justice may require violence or rather coercion of recalcitrant wills. So violence is an accident of State.
To say that State is based upon violence is very modern and is like saying All killing is murder or equating killing of an animal with killing of a man. It fails to make essential discrimination.
A
I’d imagine Maistre didn’t start with Aristotle because the educated public he was writing for wasn’t Aristotelian.
One way to explain a position is to start with the assumptions the people you’re addressing already accept. So one way for a Catholic to make his pitch to moderns is to point out things that are true from the modern point of view but are also intolerable and evidently not the full story. Then you can introduce the additional principles, distinctions, dramatic turnarounds, etc. that get you home. Pascal does that sort of thing too. In effect it’s the argument that all roads lead to Rome, which is a strong form of argument.
I should add that my blog-comment presentation of Maistre is a simplified version designed to explain to a shocked modern why the Catholic Maistre emphasizes violence so much. If you start with the modern point of view it’s obviously central, which is why starting with that point of view you have to pull in other nonmodern principles.
I think the simpler explanation is that temperamentally the flamboyant Maistre is pretty much the opposite of Aristotle, even if they may agree on some things. Maistre owes more to someone like Hobbes than he does any of the pre-moderns even if partially reacting against him.
As usual TMWW prefers personal and psychological explanations for what people do to functional ones. My own preference is for the latter. Polemical literature is an intrinsically social pursuit, and it seems to me unlikely Maistre would have written as he did if Aristotelian thought had the place in the educated discussion of his time that enlightenment reason actually did.
Well, personality matters. Bruce Charlton is more apocalyptic than Jim Kalb. That doesn’t seem to have much to do with the current audience for ideas. Can you really imagine the outrageous Maistre using common sense Aristotelian arguments? Really?
More substantively, Maistre doesn’t seem to think much of man’s potential for developing internal virtue and hence his overwhelming emphasis on violence and coercion. Maistre seems to take a more than Hobbesian view of man as hell bent on violence and hence seems to view the state as primarily a bulwark against mutual predation. That’s certainly true to an extent, but I don’t think either Aristotle or Thomas would really view human beings or human society that way. Not that some of Maistre’s ideas can’t be synthesized with Aristotle, but they aren’t immediately compatible and it takes some work to fit them together.
I have to confess that what I first thought of when reading this discussion was Walter Kaufmann on Nietzsche. The Gentle Maistreans?
In other words, the reason Maistre didn’t start with Aristotle is that he wasn’t an Aristotelian. This is undoubtedly due to some interaction of the historical events he lived through, the intellectual climate he was writing in, and, yes, temperament.
Here is a good overview of Maistre’s deviations from Classical and Christian thought called “How Catholic a reaction?”:
http://www.umanitoba.ca/colleges/st_pauls/ccha/Back%20Issues/CCHA1967/Lebrun.html
In general, it seems like a lot Catholic thinkers, even conservative Catholic thinkers, of the past few centuries haven’t been all that influenced by the Aristotelian tradition. Pascal owes more to Montaigne than Aristotle and Newman is more influenced by the British Empiricists than by Thomas. Compare them to a genuine Thomist like Ed Feser and the differences are pretty stark. Same with Maistre.
Very good observation Thursday.