ABSTRACT
On Power’s subtitle announces that de Jouvenel sought to write a natural history of Pouvoir or Power, a word he nearly always capitalized to denote “l’ensemble des elements gouvernementaux”. The English word “government” in its colloquial sense, as when people speak of the government doing this or that, approximates Power and may be substituted for it subject to one qualification. According to Bertrand de Jouvenel “The extremes of individualism and socialism meet: that was their predestined course.” This statement, its Jansenist tone notwithstanding, is logically and historically correct. A more precise way of making de Jouvenel’s point about “one underlying government” taking on “continuous accretions” is to say that the political history of any civilization is the history of the distension of government through a sequence of regimes, the scope and intensity of Power increases. Although occasional and fleeting reversals occur, the process continues until its ambient civilization collapses.
