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In his effort to detach the indispensable notion of the common good from its historical identification with the more closed, homogeneous, and static societies of the premodern past, the French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-87) pointed the way towards a viable conservative liberalism. So argues Daniel J. Mahoney in this compelling introduction to the life and work of Jouvenel, one of twentieth-century France's most profound philosophers and political essayists. Although he vigorously defended the historical achievement of liberal society against its totalitarian critics, Jouvenel also challenged the modern conceit that man is an autonomous being beholden neither to the moral law nor to the humanizing inheritance of the past. Mahoney's study focuses on Jouvenel's three masterworks On Power (1945), Sovereignty (1955), and The Pure Theory of Politics (1963) and on his broader effort to defend civility and social friendship against rationalist individualism and its logical fruit, collectivist politics. Mahoney explores Jouvenel's affinities with and debts to Aristotle, Burke, Rousseau, and Tocqueville, and he contrasts Jouvenel's signal theoretical achievements with the twists and turns manifested in his (sometimes questionable) practical political engagements from the 1930s until his death. Mahoney's characteristically engaging appraisal of this important political philosopher, the fifth entry in the Library of Modern Thinkers series, is the first book on Jouvenel to appear in the English language.

Bertrand de Jouvenel examines the relationship between the distribution of power and the creation of an ethical society.

The Ethics of Redistribution was originally delivered as a Boutwood Lecture at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in the autumn of 1949. The Baron Bertrand de Jouvenel was then an already internationally regarded philosopher whose learned style was a calculated blend of moral. historical and political considerations. In this essay, split between discussions of the socialist ideal and state expenditure, he presents the fraught economic, societal and ethical implications attendant upon the question of income redistribution.

In this concluding volume in the trilogy that begins with On Power and moves to Sovereignty, Bertrand de Jouvenel proposes to remedy a serious deficiency in political science, namely: the lack of agreement on first principles, or 'elements'. The author's concern is with political processes as they actually exist, not as they are conjectured to be in hypothetical models.

This book is a critical inquiry into sovereignty and argues that the meaning and functions performed by this concept have changed significantly during the past decades, with profound implications for the ontological status of the state and the modus operandi of the international system as a whole. Although we have grown accustomed to regarding sovereignty as a defining characteristic of the modern state and as a constitutive principle of the international system, Sovereignty as Symbolic Form argues that recent changes indicate that sovereignty has been turned into something granted, contingent upon its responsible exercise in accordance with the norms and values of an imagined international community. Hence we need a new understanding of sovereignty in order to clarify the logic of its current usage in theory and practice alike, and its connection to broader concerns of social ontology: what kind of world do we inhabit, and of what kind of entities is this world composed? This book will be of interest to students of International Relations, Critical Security and International Politics.

In The Nature of Politics de Jouvenel's refreshing freedom from ideological blinders makes him worthy of comparison to Orwell, but his ambition stretches beyond the novelistic in that he attempts to develop a theory of the good state resting upon a clear-sighted understanding of the true nature of political behavior. Graced with a brilliant introduction by Dennis Hale and Marc Landy, this volume serves as an ideal introduction to de Jouvenel's thought.