Taming the Minotaur: Bertrand de Jouvenel on Liberty and Authority

Bertrand de Jouvenel remains one of the most original and elusive thinkers of twentieth-century France. Known for the most part as a “conservative liberal,” his ideas represent a merger of political liberalism with a strong emphasis on communal and public association as means of expressing and sustaining individual freedom. Jouvenel's work is also characterized by a complex treatment of the question of political authority: he is wary of the notion of authority as a means of organizing and planning society, while at the same time he opposes its reduction to a merely technical legal instance. As this article argues, Jouvenel's complex ideas on freedom and authority remain entrenched in the tradition of French liberalism, which since the early nineteenth century advanced the conception of the dual nature of power and politics.