BOOKS
623
expressive writing and to aim in the romantic manner at a sonorous
style decorated and enriched by bold and pregnant tropes; at other
times, he stretches out a hand to the Age of Reason and tries to sim–
plify and classicize his prose so that everything shall be cool, precise,
and elegant.
In
neither vein does he achieve success, but each has its
own peculiar contribution to make to the unreadability of the whole:
from the romantic manner come a sequence of over-ambitious images
(The Bridge of Arcola and the Oak at Vincennes, the state as "the
great Sergeant-Major") and a heavy monotony of rhythm; from the
classical manner come a few evasive epigrams ("The man of the project
is a lover") and some lengthy similes drawn from the mathematical
sciences which lack any clear and systematic interpretation.
Again, Jouvenel's manner of exposition serves him no better than
his style. Evident in many small ways, this unclarity of intention infects
even the general theme of the book. For at the outset the author dis–
tinguishes two questions that in his view have been the main concern of
traditional European political philosophy-the question, who are the
rightful rulers in the community and the question, what ought they to do.
Re then goes on to say that for certain historical and theoretical reasons
the first question has received excessive attention in the corpus of Euro–
pean thinking, and that it is his aim to restore the balance by concentrat–
ing on "What?" to the exclusion of "Who?" Yet if one then looks at the
pages that follow, a third to a half of them are devoted to matters that
fall naturally, indeed incontrovertibly, on the "Who?" side-topics like
sovereignty, and the various kinds of authority, and the classification of
value. All that can be urged in the author's favor on this score-though
this scarcely is what he can have meant-is that everything he has to say
about these topics"is quite worthless, consisting as it does on the one hand
of a very pretentious sociology of kingship, and on the other hand of a
retelling of the well-known history of sovereignty, and that if the book
contains anything that is both true and original, this must
be
elsewhere.
Let us then take Jouvenel's characterization of his own book seri–
ously and see it as an investigation into the proper aim and intentions
of rulers or, as the subtitle has it, an "inquiry into the political good."
Now it might be objected straightaway that such an inquiry, so far
from making a pleasant and agreeable change from the usual preoccu–
pations of political philosophy, makes no sense whatsoever in modern
conditions. For we live, for better or for worse, in a democratic age
when the aims and intentions of government are determined by the
wishes of the people, and accordingly any abstract ideas about the
political good can
be
of no practical relevance whatsoever-unless of
