So, are you thinking now that a major crisis at the most central permanent centre is going to be necessary to transcend liberalism, or do you still have hope in slowly turning marginal centres one at a time so that the final occupation of the largest permanent centre is more denouement than total crisis? Can a necessary crisis be only a "minor" crisis? I'm also wondering how useful you think it would be to speculate in depth about the course future crises might take, say in a once advanced country failing to maintain even a minimally viable demographic, economic, i.e., medical, educational, engineering, transport, infrastructure leading to challenges to control and transform the national centres by interested corporate parties?
I don't think we can speculate too much on this. I think the old Trotskyist idea of a "transitional program" is actually a good approach. For them, the point was to make demands that made sense within the existing order, but that the ruling class could nevertheless not fulfill--in that way, perfectly legal, reformist demands become revolutionary if pushed at the right time and place. Here, the the approach is to demand (request?) sovereignty, and therefore criticize anything that interferes with the exercise of sovereignty. In the end, democracy ad liberalism are incompatible with sovereignty. You're asking about (to revert again to Marxist terms) the "objective" conditions and I respond by speaking about the "subjective" ones. That's because the objective conditions get revealed by way of the subjective. NRx is opposed to activism, but I'm not sure we have a choice: pretty soon, writing the blog, or discussing alternatives to democracy on twitter might become activism by default--i.e., they attract the attention of Power and therefore become "resistance." Of course, that might also mean it becomes possible to attract the attention of potential patrons. It's interesting that the more RF speaks about power and the core of everything, the more it becomes clear that the power we ultimately need lies in the thinking that we do, thinking that withstands the fluxes generated by power. Marx again: at a certain point, theory becomes a material force. In that case, we'll know where the crisis is by seeing where the thinking of sovereignty becomes essential to those who simply want to survive. And by that point, we should make sure that the thinking is solid.
Yes, i suppose it is a basic point but we can't have absolutism unless it is widely desired, otherwise we just get another form of divided power. The demand for sovereignty has a fairly significant history here in Canada since the anglo canadians were founded in good part by refugees from what became the US, the francos just wanted to survive as a people when faced with immigrant waves of "anti-Papist" Ulster sovereigntists, and the theme became explicit when Canada left the British imperial orbit and became Americanized after WWII. Sovereignty was the cry of leftist and conservative nationalists who lost out to (American) liberalism and globalism even as the Liberal party which first took the lead in Americanization later had an anti-American leader in Trudeau the elder for fifteen years. Maybe we can now learn that his leftism only served the empire. And now an American populist and commander of the imperial forces is the nominal standard bearer for national sovereignty, so yes
How widely desired it has to be is an interesting point. The more widely, the better, but there's no reason to assume anywhere near majority support (measured how, exactly?) to effect a turnaround. An effective absolutist state will have the support it needs. It's probably best to think in terms of developing a "spine": i.e., a top-down structure that is very unified morally and intellectually and could hold an otherwise disorderly social together and reorganize it. The spine can be a small minority, if it's positioned right, and draws upon cohorts in strategic positions.
An excellent post. Some thoughts. 1: Our recent post (European Minotaur of War I) delves into Jouvenel in depth and addresses some of the questions and distinctions you raise. 2: You write: "Power, as de Jouvenel says, is credit, which suggests that the origin of power is in the ceding of the decision to one person, or at least a single will, when all have to adhere to the same decision." Not quite sure what you mean by credit. Power is command and control, command especially is the essence according to Jouvenel. Perhaps, what you mean is that X does action A and B (during a hunt or as part of a defence) and Y and Z "cede" or "credit" X with command. 3: Jouvenel speculates earlier on that the origins of Power lie in war-making among young men (gangs) who go on the hunt for women. 4: You write: " But is this because Power was “insecure” or because Power insatiably seeks to grow and extend itself? If Power is insatiable, that implies that there is always something outside of Pow
2) Command and control may be what power does, but it's not what power is--power is this person rather than another in the command and control position.
3) Its origins must lie in some collective project--and most projects in very primitive societies are collective. The question is who emerges with power, and why.
4) Yes, opposing centralizing power is a problem, but we can distinguish between different kinds of centralizing power. I tried to do this in my "The Modernity of Absolutism" post. The fantasy of republicans is the militia rather than the standing army, and I don't think this fantasy should be indulged in any longer. The state is always preparing for war, but it's not any less sovereign for avoiding it.
5) There may be forms of power that don't seek constant expansion--I don't want to define them out of sight. Indeed, in a well ordered international system, external expansion will be extremely limited for most, if not all states; and internal expansion reaches the point of diminishing returns and even counter-productivity fairly soon. The purpose of power, ultimately, is for civilization to flourish. There's no reason to object to well-ordered, peaceful little monarchies where the arts and sciences are supported.
6) The unique terms come from the "originary hypothesis" and subsequent reflection thereupon by Eric Gans and a few others (myself included). If you're interested, it might be best to begin with this very accessible introduction to originary thinking or "generative anthropology": http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/gaintro/. That should clarify "originary analysis" and "sacred center," at least--"permanent center" is a concept I use for the first time here, as I am working on drawing out the absolutist implications of Gans's hypothesis.
> Command and control may be what power does, but it's not what power is--power is this person rather than another in the command and control position. So this is a "verb" and "noun" distinction then? 3: Agreed. Jouvenel thinks it is war. We agree. It should also be said that war and hunting are very similar. The warriors of old were always hunting when they were not fighting. 4: Agreed. We are not against power or authority. Our project is partially about looking the beast in the face. 5: That is a good point. So "Power" refers to the power of States. Do you mean "civilization" in the normative or descriptive sense? In any case, we agree. Tilly, whose work we look at next, argues that war produced civilization or had a "civilizing" effect. 6: Thank you for that.
A noun vs verb issue--maybe! You're starting with the assumption that someone has power, and then you say, this is what he does with it. I'm asking what the social relation of power is. Maybe it's a being vs. having distinction. But I want to emphasize that power, originally, relies on credibility, and being credible means being able to defer conflicts within the group first of all.
I certainly never mistook you for being against power or authority! But I will say that it seems you take de Jouvenel more as a permanent model, even, it seems at times, as a how to manual, whereas I think he wants to find some way to resist what he describes. Whatever the case with de Jouvenel, I'm interested in constraining not so much power as power hunger.
Civilization in both senses.
"But I want to emphasize that power, originally, relies on credibility, and being credible means being able to defer conflicts within the group first of all." Could you do some "case studies" of actual power-holders, chiefs, leaders, rulers etc to flesh this out? "But I will say that it seems you take de Jouvenel more as a permanent model, even, it seems at times, as a how to manual, whereas I think he wants to find some way to resist what he describes. Whatever the case with de Jouvenel, I'm interested in constraining not so much power as power hunger. Civilization in both senses." Yes, quite. Wait and see.
I am very unlikely to do any case studies, and whether they would bear out one or another hypothesis depends upon how the study is framed. For me, it's a question of what language is, and therefore what human beings are. There's no case study that can settle those questions--just more or less powerful hypotheses that account for what we know language to be. My starting assumption is that humans are mimetic beings: we learn everything we learn by imitation. Imitation leads to rivalry; rivalry leads to conflict; conflict needs to be minimized; humans don't have a natural pecking order like animals, so our "method" for keeping conflicts manageable has been language, ritual, and then later cultural institutions. No one could ever have seen all that happen the first time, but there is no other way to account for things like rituals and language itself. I draw out the implications of all this for politics, and absolutist politics in particular, and I'm content to let others make what they want of it.
I'm patient. I will wait.