About this item
Highlights
- Documenting the process by which government and controlling majorities have grown increasingly powerful and tyrannical, Bertrand de Jouvenel demonstrates how democracies have failed to limit the powers of government.
- Author(s): Bertrand De Jouvenel
- 466 Pages
- Social Science, General
Description
Book Synopsis
Documenting the process by which government and controlling majorities have grown increasingly powerful and tyrannical, Bertrand de Jouvenel demonstrates how democracies have failed to limit the powers of government. Jouvenel traces this development to the days of royal absolutism, which established large administrative bureaucracies and thus laid the foundation of the modern omnipotent state.
Bertrand de Jouvenel was an author and teacher, first publishing On Power in 1945.
Review Quotes
"This is one of the classics of political philosophy. Bertrand de Jouvenel provides us with an analytical and historical account of all of the factors that have helped and continue to help expand the power of the state and of the ways in which state power is inevitably abused. Jouvenel has done for the twentieth century what Tocqueville did for the nineteenth." -- Dr. Nicholas Capaldi, McFarlin Professor of Philosophy, University of Tulsa