Friedrich August von Hayek, The Tragedy of Organised Humanity: de Jouvenel on Power

First published in 1948 and republished in the supplied 2013 version, Hayek’s review examines Bertrand de Jouvenel’s Power: The Natural History of its Growth. Its central concern is the abandonment of restraints on political authority once that authority claims a popular origin. Hayek moves from this historical diagnosis to an assessment of de Jouvenel’s method, then considers his account of rationalism, democracy, and the rule of law. The review closes with a qualified disagreement: admiration for de Jouvenel’s analysis of power does not entail accepting the full pessimism of his conclusions.

Hayek opens by contrasting accumulated political wisdom about checks and barriers with the belief that democratic legitimacy makes such restrictions unnecessary. The mistake is to confuse the source of power with the conditions governing its exercise. Popular authorization does not remove the tendency toward expansion:

But power has an inherent tendency to expand and where there are no effective limitations it will grow without bounds, whether it is exercised in the name of the people or in the name of a few.

The warning goes beyond identifying a danger common to all governments. Hayek suggests that unlimited power exercised in the people’s name may expand further and become more destructive than power held by a few. Democracy therefore cannot substitute for constitutional restraint. The tragedy announced in the title arises from a political achievement being treated as permission to dispense with the safeguards that made freedom possible.

Hayek situates de Jouvenel alongside Friedrich von Wieser, Guglielmo Ferrero, and Bertrand Russell, whose studies indicate the increasing urgency of understanding power. He does not present these works as a single intellectual lineage: later authors apparently did not know their predecessors’ treatments, and the subject admits radically different approaches. De Jouvenel’s particular achievement is breadth without a rigid theoretical system. His argument works through the cumulative force of historical details and observations, making power intelligible through its varied manifestations rather than reducing it to a formula.

As it should be, his picture of one of the great historical forces is a work of art at least as much, if not more, than a scientific treatise.

This praise includes a reservation. Elaborate particulars and brilliant formulations can obscure the larger outline, while a reviewer’s selection of striking sayings could misrepresent the sustained argument. Hayek values the book’s literary construction because it brings a complex process into view, not because its aphorisms can stand independently. His assessment thus connects method and subject: understanding power requires attending to particulars that an excessively tidy theory might exclude.

That methodological choice also expresses de Jouvenel’s distrust of rationalism. Hayek endorses his criticism of thinkers who impose a simple scheme on institutions whose ordering functions they only partly understand. In the extended passage reproduced in the review, de Jouvenel argues that existing order depends on numerous supports—authorities, sentiments, and adjustments. When speculative thought dismisses these dispersed supports, a stronger central power must perform their work:

So soon as the intellectual imagines a simple order of things he is serving the growth of Power.

The claim is not merely that intellectuals sometimes endorse authoritarian rulers. Their demand for systematic reconstruction can enlarge authority even when they attack existing authorities. If many sources of order are displaced by one organizing principle, enforcing that principle requires concentrated power. Disillusionment does not necessarily interrupt the process: philosophers may respond to failed implementation by demanding a more thorough application of their principles, thereby calling for still greater capacity at the centre.

Hayek reads this as an account of an impersonal mechanism, not the biography of a political monster. Although de Jouvenel sometimes personifies Power, its growth results from collaboration and from ordinary human appetites, desires, and beliefs, many of them innocent. The book’s disturbing realism lies in explaining how familiar motives can produce an engulfing political order without requiring uniquely malevolent actors. Its relevance to contemporary events follows from this account of recurrent processes rather than from a catalogue of exceptional abuses.

Within that broad achievement, Hayek particularly recommends chapter 13, on “Imperium et Democratie,” and its discussion of Rousseau and the rule of law. De Jouvenel’s interpretation overturns Hayek’s expectations:

It has convinced me that Rousseau understood the meaning of the rule of law better than any other writer known to me.

The review does not reconstruct that interpretation in detail. Its significance here is the strength of Hayek’s endorsement and the distinction it reinforces between democratic power and legally constrained authority.

The closing reservation concerns the explanatory weight assigned to opinion. De Jouvenel’s reaction against over-rationalism leads him to emphasize the external mechanisms of power and, in Hayek’s judgment, to understate the role of ideas and beliefs. What appears an abstract difference of emphasis has major political consequences. Closely similar starting points can lead either toward an older liberalism retaining some optimism or toward a deeply pessimistic conservatism. Hayek thinks de Jouvenel’s skepticism makes him accept more political evils as inevitable than his love of liberty warrants. Yet he concedes that students of power commonly reach comparable conclusions. The review therefore combines a powerful warning against unchecked popular authority with a guarded refusal to treat the expansion of power as wholly beyond the influence of opinion.