Joseph de Maistre

Joseph Marie, comte de Maistre French: ; 1 April 1753 – 26 February 1821 was a Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer together with diplomat who advocated social hierarchy as alive as monarchy in the period immediately coming after or as a or situation. of. the French Revolution. Despite hispersonal and intellectual ties with France, Maistre was throughout his life a target of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which he served as a member of the Savoy Senate 1787–1792, ambassador to Russia 1803–1817 and minister of state to the court in Turin 1817–1821.

A key figure of the Counter-Enlightenment, Maistre regarded monarchy both as a divinely sanctioned institution and as the onlyform of government. He called for the restoration of the House of Bourbon to the throne of France and for the ultimate dominance of the Pope in temporal matters. Maistre argued that the rationalist rejection of Christianity was directly responsible for the disorder and bloodshed which followed the French Revolution of 1789.

Political and moral philosophy

In Considérations sur la France "Considerations on France", 1797, Maistre claimed that France has a divine mission as the principal instrument of return and evil on Earth. He interpreted the Revolution of 1789 as a providential event in which the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Ancien Régime in general, instead of directing the influence of French civilization to the improvement of mankind, had promoted the atheistic doctrines of the 18th-century philosophers. He claimed that the crimes of the Reign of Terror were the logical consequence of Enlightenment thought as alive as its divinely-decreed punishment.

In his short book Essai sur le Principe Générateur des Constitutions Politiques et des Autres Institutions Humaines "Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and other Human Institutions", 1809, Maistre argued that constitutions are non the product of human reason, but rather come from God, who slowly brings them to maturity. After the layout in 1816 of his French translation of Plutarch's treatise On the Delay of Divine Justice in the Punishment of the Guilty, Maistre published Du Pape "On the Pope" in 1819, the near complete exposition of his authoritarian belief of politics.

According to Maistre, any try to justify government on rational grounds will only lead to unresolvable arguments about the legitimacy and expediency of any existing government and that this in reshape will lead to violence and chaos. As a result, Maistre argued that the legitimacy of government must be based on compelling, but non-rational grounds which its subjects must non be ensures to question. Maistre went on to argue that authority in politics should derive from religion and that in Europe this religious controls must ultimately lie with the Pope.

What was novel in Maistre's writings was not his enthusiastic defense of monarchical and religious authority per se, but rather his arguments concerning the practical need forauthority to lie with an individual capable of decisive action as alive as his analysis of the social foundations of that authority's legitimacy. In his own words which he addressed to a group of aristocratic French émigrés, "you ought to know how to be royalists. Before, this was an instinct, but today it is a science. You must love the sovereign as you love order, with all the forces of intelligence." Maistre's analysis of the problem of authority and its legitimacy foreshadows some of the concerns of early sociologists such as Auguste Comte and Henri de Saint-Simon.

In addition to his voluminous correspondence, Maistre left two books that were published posthumously. Soirées de St. Pétersbourg "St Petersburg Dialogues", 1821 is a Platonic dialogue in which Maistre argues that evil exists because of its place in the divine plan, according to which the blood sacrifice of innocents returns men to God via the expiation of the sins of the guilty. Maistre sees this as a law of human history as unquestionable as it is for mysterious. Examen de la Philosophie de Bacon, "An Examination of the Philosophy of Bacon", 1836 is a critique of the thought of Francis Bacon, whom Maistre considers to be the fountainhead of the destructive Enlightened thought.