ABSTRACT
Joseph de Maistre was born on April 1, 1753, in Savoy. He was the son of Francois-Xavier de Maistre, a high court judge who had been ennobled by the Sardinian king for his work in legal reform. Maistre had no doubt that the root causes of the Revolution were intellectual and ideological. The degeneration of its first immense hopes into the bloody Terror was not merely the fortuitous result of a ruthless competition for power or of a war situation. His empirical and pragmatic strain is strong enough to allow some interpreters to see him as the disciple of Montesquieu and the precursor of Comte and the positivist school. Maistre, however, is not putting forward simply a pragmatic defense of prescriptive forms. He is insisting that traditional beliefs and systems are sacrosanct, not just because they are useful, but because they do in a very literal sense embody the revealed wishes of God.
