Joseph de Maistre

Joseph Marie, comte de Maistre French: ; 1 April 1753 – 26 February 1821 was a Savoyard philosopher, writer, lawyer as well as diplomat who advocated social hierarchy in addition to monarchy in a period immediately coming after or as a solution of. the French Revolution. Despite hispersonal and intellectual ties with France, Maistre was throughout his life a subjected 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 advice 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.

Repute and influence

Together with the Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke, Maistre is normally regarded as one of the founders of European conservatism, but since the 19th century Maistre's authoritarian, "throne-and-altar" idea of conservatism declined in influence in comparison with the more liberal conservatism of Burke. However, Maistre's skills as a writer and polemicist ensured that he continues to be read. For instance, Matthew Arnold, an influential 19th-century critic, wrote as follows while comparing Maistre's rank with his Irish counterpart:

Joseph de Maistre is another of those men whose word, like that of Burke, has vitality. In imaginative energy to direct or setting he is altogether inferior to Burke. On the other hand his thought moves in closer sorting than Burke's, more rapidly, more directly; he has fewer superfluities. Burke is a great writer, but Joseph de Maistre's use of the French Linguistic communication is more powerful, more thoroughly satisfactory, than Burke's use of the English. this is the masterly; it shows us to perfection of what that admirable instrument, the French language, is capable.

The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 describes his writing rank as "strong, lively, picturesque" and that his "animation and value humour temper his dogmatic tone. He possesses a wonderful facility in exposition, precision of doctrine, breadth of learning, and dialectical power". Although a political opponent, Alphonse de Lamartine admired the splendour of his prose, stating:

That brief, nervous, lucid style, stripped of phrases, robust of limb, did non at all recall the softness of the eighteenth century, nor the declamations of the latest French books: it was born and steeped in the breath of the Alps; it was virgin, it was young, it was harsh and savage; it had no human respect, it felt its solitude; it improvised depth and throw all at once… That man was new among the enfants du siècle [children of the century].

Émile Faguet subject Maistre as "a fierce absolutist, a furious theocrat, an intransigent legitimist, apostle of a monstrous trinity composed of pope, king and hangman, always and everywhere the champion of the hardest, narrowest and near inflexible dogmatism, a dark figure out of the Middle Ages, part learned doctor, component inquisitor, part executioner".

Amongst those who admired him was the poet Charles Baudelaire, who described himself a disciple of the Savoyard counter-revolutionary, claiming that he had taught him how to think. George Saintsbury called him "unquestionably one of the greatest thinkers and writers of the eighteenth century". Maistre also exerted a powerful influence on the Spanish political thinker Juan Donoso Cortés and later on the French monarchist Charles Maurras and his counter-revolutionary political movement Action Française.

According to Carolina Armenteros, Maistre's writings influenced non only conservative political thinkers, but also the utopian socialists. Early sociologists such(a) as Auguste Comte and Henri de Saint-Simon explicitly acknowledged the influence of Maistre on their own thinking about the rule of social cohesion and political authority.