4th July
My work so far has revolved around the enigmatical Voice of the Protocols. On the surface, Jewish, but underneath the surface a fusion of Machiavelli’s advocatus diaboli (or rather an omnipresent trickster) and a lovestruck loyalist.
By equipping him with the outer skin of a Jew, the character is associated with the perennial depiction of Jews as unbound by duty and honour. This association actually assists him in his trickster role.
The Voice shares certain properties with Maxwell’s Demon. It is all-knowing and omnipresent, and it can inject itself between every contact point in society. It is a political thought experiment.
The Voice is akin to the little angel and the little devil standing on the shoulder of Donald Duck, each whispering contradicting messages in his left and right ear until he goes insane. But behind his back, they share the same body. That is the nature of the Voice, a unification of compassionate and sadistic urges.
The will of the people.
When Rousseau formulated his political philosophy and based it on the Will of the People, he invented a hypostatisation that he linked to everything that mattered: Laws, constitution and legitimacy of the resident ruler.
Recently I noticed how Maurice Joly in his Dialogue in Hell let Montesquieu mention how it was the Law that stood as a barrier between the act of ruling and the capriciousness of either a despot or a ruling body, even one elected by the people.
Rousseau’s general will sounds very much like what Joly has in mind.
More explicitly, volonté générale exists and has reality like gravity exists and is real. It cannot be observed directly, but must be made concrete in the law, which is why the legislative process becomes immensely important.
If we inherited this line of thinking, we must never forget that the law is as close to a living thing as it can come.
Joly’s Montesquieu argues for a similar abstraction turned real.
5th July
Montesquieu resorts to a rather nebulous entity dubbed the principle of a society.
I had to read halfway through the fifth Dialogue before it came up, but I will quote it first as it explains his idea.
Societies cannot have other forms of government than those that are related to their principlesand it is against this absolute law that you go when you believe that despotism is compatible with modern civilization.
That is all we need from this entire Dialogue. The following traits stand out:
- A society is always referred to as a whole. Gone is the illusion that only a small class of people have preferences that matter.
- Its essence is expressed in the law.
- A government’s policy cannot deviate from the principle of the society. At least not successfully.
- Over the centuries this will can change as education, political rights and philosophy evolves the people.
Dialogue 5
● Societies and their development must be understood from their internal principles. ● As customs and expectations change, the chance of dominating a people can diminish. ● “Principles” instead of “general will”.
Montesquieu uses this idea to show that what was possible in Machiavelli’s time is no longer possible. The principle has changed.
| Dialogue 5 (Montesquieu speaking) | Subtext |
|---|---|
| Montesquieu: Thus, it is France that you would like to speak? | |
| Machiavelli: Yes, indeed. | |
Montesquieu: You are right to do so, because it is there that the somber doctrines of materialism have penetrated the least. It is France that has remained the home for the great ideas and the great passions, the source of which you believe to be drained, and it is from France that travel the great principles of public rights, for which you make no place in the government of the States. |
Farthest removed from utilitarianism and Wealth of Nations. |
Machiavelli: You can add that it is the field for experimentation in political theory. |
The Protocols has it in for theory as formulated by gullible simpletons (like Rousseau and Montesquieu) |
| Until now, I have only known two European States that are completely deprived of liberal institutions, that have kept the pure monarchical element on all sides: Turkey and Russia, and […] perhaps you will find there [Russia] the symptoms of an imminent transformation. | Prediction that Russia would destabilise under the weight of despotism. |
The setup: Machiavelli claims that the people, drunken with freedom, will experiment with liberalism, but the ensuing political infighting will make them give up on it all and turn to a powerful despot.
Montesquieu claims that it may have been true once, but exactly because of the changing shared consensus, which is cultivated slowly by many hands, the populace as a body can no longer accept despotism.
| Montesquieu: In how much time will this take place? | |
| Machiavelli: Within a century. | |
Montesquieu: You are a fortune-teller; a century: this is a long time. But let me tell you why your prediction will not come true. Modern societies no longer need be envisioned with the eyes of the past. Their customs, habits and needs have all changed. |
Modernity is a threshold over which despotism could not tread. |
Montesquieu ventures into a bit of epistemological unsafe ground next. He is disconcerted over Machiavelli’s attempt to create a historical law, when he says that all societies in trouble turn to a dictator.
From the fact that despotism has occurred several times in history, as a consequence of social disturbances, does it follow that it must be taken as a rule of government? From the fact that it has served as a transition in the past, should I conclude that it is the proper way to resolve the crises of modern epochs? |
Old remedies will not work on new illnesses |
However, he unflinchingly proposes this universal laws next:
An invariable law of society is that it tends towards perfection, towards progress; eternal wisdom – if I can say so – has condemned it to progress; eternal wisdom has refused movement in the opposite direction. This progress: it is necessary that society attains it. |
Progress as a historical law. Who invented that? |
| […] | |
| from the feudal system to the monarchical system to the constitutional regime. This progressive development, the unity of which is so imposing, has nothing fortuitous about it; it has occurred as the necessary consequence of the movement that is operative in ideas before being rendered into deeds. | A progression of ideas has resulted in a progression of political systems. |
Time for the crux of the matter: Rousseau’s general will returning in a refined version.
Societies cannot have other forms of government than those that are related to their principles and it is against this absolute law that you go when you believe that despotism is compatible with modern civilization. |
|
| To the extent people have regarded sovereignty as a pure emanation of the divine will, they have submitted to absolute power without complaint; | Why despotism used to work: A cover for divine will. |
But from the day that their rights were recognized and solemnly declared; from the day that more fecund institutions determined all the functions of the social body through liberty, the politics at the disposal of the princes has fallen from its heights; |
People learned to think along lines of right. It stuck. |
| the art of government became an administrative affair. |
Joly posits the two points of view against each other without a clear winner. Machiavelli presses the point about the eruption of violence under the French Revolution as a proof that left to themselves, the people will turn monsters. Montesquieu rejects this and all other such comparisons: Despotism will have to be the explanation. Liberty cannot corrupt morals.
Since when does liberty debase souls and degrade character? These are not the lessons of history, because they attest instead in strokes of fire that the greatest peoples have been the freest. |
Machiavelli’s appraised despots (Leon X, Jules II, Philippe II, Barbarossa, Louis XIV, and Napoleon) were great, but not the most worthy of admiration. Free people were when they defied suppression. |
If morals have deteriorated [...] it is because despotism has taken control there; because liberty has been extinguished; thus it is necessary to maintain liberty where it exists and reestablish it where it exists no longer. |
Liberty cannot possibly be the reason for moral decline |
Myself? I fail to see why the freest people are the greatest. Circular argumentation aside, there is an air of young political movement about this attitude. It bursts with optimism and enlightened confidence. That special eagerness with which we deem some things obvious and others not.
Time will tell if Montesquieu is a star guest on Joly’s show or not. So far he acts as an excuse to let Machiavelli talk. And since the aim is to comment on Napoleon III’s political regime, best to let him indict himself through proxy-spoken careless words.
What makes us human?
Everything in this battle has to do with voices gaining political power to express their own yearnings.
Everything in the battle between Machiavelli and Montesquieu has to do with the liberty of a voice. We become human by gaining a political voice.
That at least seems to be the unspoken premise.
The autocratic argument is that people are already human. They don’t need a political voice for that, which they can only use to wreak havoc. They need food and an ordered society. The damage they render by reaching into the domain of the ruling class destroys the freedom to be human.
In the end it is a class struggle.
The bourgeois dream of political participation. The 1800s physiocratic observance of human instinct to improve, develop, invent and grow their business could be seen either as a display of human creativity or of profit hunting. Is human creativity tied to the expectance of reward? And is that reward of a suspicious nature? Did things change when the world shifted from catholic ethics to a protestant ethics?
In an autocratic society, is the owner of a workshop not just as free to develop his craft into a technically superior one?
I miss the greater point here.
What is laissez faire as a doctrine? “Leave us alone” … it means the ruling classes should stay out of the bourgeois sphere of commerce. “Us” refers to the inhabitants of this particular culture. They have a consensus on how the world should be governed. It ties in with personal interest, but it is probably closer to the guild as an interest group. It is a consensus group.
When industrialisation upended the power structures of the world, the bourgeoisie realised they ought to have political power as well. “Leave us alone” became “we will not leave anybody alone because we are involved in everything”.
From the point of a Golovinski, one can see how the gravity pull from a dark hole of capitalism sucked their conception of the world in. As an outgoing and dying ruling class, they fought against this shift in balance with all the ideological weapons they could muster.
Sadly, an even greater group of nationalists surpassed both bourgeoisie and aristocracy and snatched the baton out of the hands of Golovinski, putting all their creativity to the task of exterminating an entire people based on cargo cult ideas transformed out of recognition.
Who committed the murder?
Events conspired and momentum got out of control.
That is no answer, but for now it is the best I have. Certainly better than the self righteous preaching of today.
6th July
The crux of the matter for today: Nationalism, or the danger of a ruling idea instead of a people of rulers. This is Rousseau’s popular sovereignty. Since Dialogue 4, I have not much to add on the matter.
| Dialogue 5 (Machiavelli speaking) | Subtext |
|---|---|
Generalities are a great aid in discussions; but I confess that I am very impatient to know how the grave Montesquieu will navigate the principle of popular sovereignty. At this moment, I no longer know if it is or is not a part of your system. Do you or do you not allow a place for it? |
Montesquieu smells a rat: Machiavelli is trying to pin the horrors of the French Revolution on his back.
| Dialogue 5 (Montesquieu speaking) | Subtext |
|---|---|
Born in a century of intellectual effervescence, on the eve of a revolution that would – in my country – carry off the old forms of monarchical government, I can say that none of the immediate consequences of the movement that grew in these ideas escaped my view. I cannot ignore the fact that the system of the division of power would one day necessarily displace the seat of sovereignty. This principle -- badly understood, badly defined, and badly applied, especially - could engender terrible uncertainties and upset French society from the bottom to the top. |
|
While imprudent innovators [...] prepared a formidable catastrophe without realizing it, I uniquely applied myself to the study of the forms of free government, to extract the principles, properly speaking, that preside over their establishment. |
Social catastrophe is not inherent in the idea of division of power. |
Nevertheless, God forbid that I try to make for myself a purer merit at the expense of those who, like me, sought the truth in good faith! We have all committed mistakes, but each has the responsibility for his own works. |
Nobody is responsible for the totality. [Unlike the despot]. |
Remember what Machiavelli said in Dialogue 4: “popular sovereignty engenders demagoguery, demagoguery engenders anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism.”
This Machiavelli proposed as the escalatory ladder the liberal societies rose through.
Montesquieu must answer that claim. There are two moral axes here: Religion and liberty. In a surprising move, Montesquieu condemns political revolution driven by atheist impulses.
| First of all, I do not allow a designation that seems to exclude from sovereignty the most enlightened classes of society. This distinction is fundamental, because it will make a State either a pure democracy or a representative State. | Unlike French Revolution which aimed at ousting the aristocracy, real democracy entails a role for the aristocracy. |
| If sovereignty resides anywhere, it resides in the entire nation; thus I would call it national sovereignty. | Unlike pure democracy, Joly/Montesquieu resort to the general will. |
I need to accustom myself to a discussion where “sovereignty” is moved about from abstract to abstract. Who has unimpeded power to decide how to legislate? The “people” (the hypothetical midpoint of many opinions)? Their “will” (entailing they want the same)? The monarch (a person), the monarch’s job description (an abstract role)? A discernible majority as expressed by a popular vote?
Today we are well aware that the invention “general will” is susceptible to manipulation, honestly from both above and below. Anybody stealing the baton on the right to define the people’s will, has won, even in democracies. Votes can be shifted through narratives. Legislation as an expression of this abstract will is driven by understanding, which again is in the hands of narratives.
But the idea of this sovereignty is not an absolute truth: it is only relative. The sovereignty of human power corresponds to a profoundly subversive idea, namely, the sovereignty of human rights; it was this materialist and atheist doctrine that precipitated the French Revolution in the blood and inflicted on it the opprobrium of despotism after the delirium of independence. |
I have a hard time figuring out what this sovereignty of human power/rights should refer to. Perhaps it refers to the preceding enlightenment ideal of individualism and individual rights.
Contrast that with …
it is inexact to say that the nations are the absolute masters of their respective destinies, because their sovereign master is God himself and they are never outside His power. |
Frankly it is too early to say what Joly’s plan here is. Probably he merely lets Montesquieu write as Montesquieu would have written. The Spirit of the Law is still unknown territory to me, but people say that he referred to religion as a stabilising factor.
Perhaps a religious ethics is simply package and parcel with freedom to fill out the holes.
Montesquieu isn’t exactly lacking in options to kick back at Machiavelli.
| Dialogue 5 (Montesquieu speaking) | Subtext |
|---|---|
But the principle of the divine right [of kings], with the meaning that is communally attached to it, is not a less fatal principle, because it condemns the people to obscurantism, to the arbitrary, to nothingness; it logically reconstitutes the regime of castes; it makes the people into a herd of slaves |
Spiritual vs material suppression. Being “well fed” may not be enough. |
| […] | |
| If the sovereign is the envoy of God, if he is the very representative of the Divinity on earth, he has complete power over the human creatures submitted to his control, and this power could only be braked in accordance with the general rules of equity, which would always be easy to break. | Narrative of God’s representative is in itself dangerous. |
It is on this field (that separates these two extreme opinions) that the furious battles of partisanship are fought: one side cries "No divine authority!" while the other cries "No human authority!" |
Middle ground tactics. That is what he argues. Neither despotism nor complete rejection of outside law will do.
| Dialogue 5 (Montesquieu speaking) | Subtext |
|---|---|
Between the divine right that excludes mankind and the human right that excludes God, there is the truth, Machiavelli; the nations, like individuals, are free in the hands of God. They have all the rights, all the powers, on the condition that they are used according to the rules of eternal justice. Sovereignty is human in the sense that it is given by men and that it is men who exercise it; it is divine in the sense that it is instituted by God and that it can only be exercised according to the precepts that He has established. |
7th July
Yesterday I looked at the setup, the Dialogue that Golovinski clearly is reading step by step. He twists and twirls all he can to tilt the argument against despotism back on itself.
Protocol 4
● An invisible and illegal despotism takes over after a revolution. ● Power vacuum invites a secret society of manipulators on top. ● Liberty with a submissive face is workable. ● Rousseau’s general will / Montesquieu’s underlying principle of society will erode back to a primal state again.
The contrast is stark between the two. Golovinski hammers his fist into the Dialogue’s very positive stance that people evolve towards perfection. He starkly contrasts it with a much more Machiavellian cynicism.
In the following section, one can almost feel the two different ladders and how they evolve in completely opposite directions. One ends at the pinnacle of societal evolvement, the other in the deepest travesty seen with liberal eyes.
| Protocol 4 | Subtext | Dialogue 5 |
|---|---|---|
Every republic passes through various stages. The first stage is the first days raging of the blind, sweeping and destroying right and left. |
An invariable law of society is that it tends towards perfection, towards progress; | |
The second, the reign of the demagogue, bringing forth anarchy and entailing despotism. This despotism is not officially legal, and, therefore, irresponsible; it is concealed and invisible, but, all the same, lets itself be felt. |
Despotism with or without responsibility. | peoples of Europe have passed, through successive transformations, from the feudal system to the monarchical system to the constitutional regime. This progressive development, the unity of which is so imposing, has nothing fortuitous about it; it has occurred as the necessary consequence of the movement that is operative in ideas before being rendered into deeds. |
It is generally controlled by some secret organisation, which acts behind the back of some agent, and will, therefore, be the more unscrupulous and daring. This secret power will not mind changing its agents who mask it. The changes will even help the organisation, which will thus be able to rid itself of old servants, to whom it would have been necessary to pay larger bonuses for long service. |
Note “generally”: This is a political theory, not targeted at Jews. | But from the day that their rights were recognized and solemnly declared […] the politics at the disposal of the princes has fallen from its heights; […; the art of government became an administrative affair. |
Who or what can dethrone an invisible power? Now this is just what our government is. The masonic lodge throughout the world unconsciously acts as a mask for our purpose. But the use that we are going to make of this power in our plan of action, and even our headquarters, remain perpetually unknown to the world at large. |
“Masonic” or “jewish” lodge = the power manipulations performed in secrecy. |
As I have already seen on numerous occasions, one should not pay too much attention to the calling out of Masons or Jews. At the time of writing, they were easy to use as innocent scapegoats.
What does matter is those mechanisms that he puts his finger on could actually exist in society.
Today it sounds suspiciously antisemitic when Jews are mentioned as sources of depravity. But to the era, those sentences could come across as saying little more than “those that want to unravel our society with political theory”.
If anybody has ever had any doubt that real Jews are not and never were the voice of the Protocols, the remaining paragraphs should kill that proposition.
What follows is a surprise schema for a political system that they believe could be both liberal (with limitations) and still retain a degree of stability.
For two seconds the good angel of Golovinski’s Jew takes over and stretches out a hand to his political contemporaries: They can even have their impossible liberalism if they are willing to make concessions.
| Protocol 4 | Subtext | |
|---|---|---|
Liberty could be harmless and exist in governments and countries without being detrimental to the welfare of the people, if it were based on religion and fear of God, on human fraternity, free from ideas of equality, which are in direct contradiction to the laws of creation, and which have ordained submission. |
Only a religious philosopher would propose submission. | |
Governed by such a faith as this, the people would be ruled under the guardianship of their parishes, and would exist quietly and humbly under the guidance of the spiritual pastor, and submit to God’s disposition on earth. |
Theocracy is also a liberal society |
This is indeed a strange paragraph. It has traits of Montesquieu’s surprising turn to religion as a way to salvage the unruly aspect of democracy. It usurps Joly’s recipe for modesty and returns to the golden theme: Only religious submission can provide basis for a strong society.
Two minutes is a long time for the Jew’s good angel to shine and for sure, the dark angel whose message invariably is the complementary aspect of the exact same position, takes his place.
| Protocol 4 | Subtext | Dialogue 5 |
|---|---|---|
That is why we must extract the very conception of God from the minds of the Christians and replace it by arithmetical calculations and material needs. |
Montesquieu: You are right to do so, because it is there [France] that the somber doctrines of materialism have penetrated the least. It is France that has remained the home for the great ideas and the great passions |
|
| In order to divert the minds of the Christians from our policy, it is essential that we should keep them occupied with trade and commerce. Thus all nations will be striving for their own profits, and in this universal struggle will not notice their common enemy. | ||
But, so that liberty should entirely dislocate and ruin the social life of the Gentiles, we must put commerce on a speculative basis. The result of this will be, that the riches of the land extracted by production will not remain in the hands of the Gentiles, but will pass through speculation into our coffers, |
Capitalism as the corruptor of the world. Private ownership is worthless as a concept. |
Golovinski can see a bridge to Machiavelli (who favours inequality) and Montesquieu (who favours religion), but not to liberalism.
| Protocol 4 | Subtext | Dialogue 5 |
|---|---|---|
The struggle for superiority and continuous speculations in the business world will create a demoralised, selfish and heartless society. This society will become completely indifferent and even disgusted by religion and politics. Lust of gold will be their only guide. And this society will strive after this gold, making a veritable cult of the materialistic pleasures with which it can keep them supplied. |
Cf. the forward thrust of the general will. | Since when does liberty debase souls and degrade character? […]. If morals have deteriorated […] it is because despotism has taken control there; |
Then the lower classes will join us against our competitors — the privileged Gentiles — with no pretence to a noble motive, or even for the sake of riches, but out of pure hatred towards the upper classes. |
Jews = evil version of nobility. Shared trait: Deeper understanding of society. |
Compare the Protocol’s “realist” mass psychology with Joly’s “faith-in-humans” mass psychology. They are irreconcilable.
Both are religious, and both see lack of religious duty as the dissolution of society.
Joly’s principle of a society, the very structured essence that makes it impossible to bend a society into a mould invented by a despot, this principle has been completely appropriated by Golovinski’s dissolutive powers that he is giving a Jewish voice (or, with the parlance of the 19th century, an atheist, speculative voice).
Rousseau’s general will is not a dispersed entity. Rather it is a very real orchestrated masterplan by a player preying on liberal democracy’s worst aspect: Its unwavering faith in the good of man.
A society can lose what they have gained earlier in awareness. They can fall from grace.
8th July
There is illness in the family.
I will have to put aside my studies for tonight. My notes will be brought with me on the trip I now have to embark on. I must proofread them on the ferry.
There is a sense of grief hanging over the ocean around my island like a fog.
Beauty is hanging in a thin thread.
What good is freedom, if we lost beauty on the road to liberty, equality and fraternity?
PARADISE LOST