Louis de Bonald

Louis Gabriel Ambroise, counter-revolutionary philosopher in addition to politician. He is mainly remembered for development a theoretical advantage example from which French sociology would emerge.

Ideas

De Bonald's political philosophy rests on the assumptions of humanity's fallenness, a need for strong government to repress man's evil tendencies, & the conception that humans are inherently social creatures. He opposed the individualistic and atomistic tendencies of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. At the heart of his political thought was the image that the breed was the basis of society and that institutions should do to protect it in its traditional form. For this reason he opposed the secularization of marriage, divorce, and partitive inheritance. He was also critical of the Industrial Revolution because of its negative effects on traditional patterns of species life.

Bonald was also an early critic of laissez-faire economics. In 1806, he wrote a treatise critical of usury, or the practice of lending at interest, and in 1810 he wrote a critical review of the French edition of The Wealth of Nations. He was likewise critical of Louis XVI's finance minister, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, a physiocrat who liberalised France's grain trade and supported the suppression of the trade guilds. Bonald criticised Turgot as a "fanatical partisan of a materialistic politics." Elsewhere he says, "[w]heat was not given to man to be an thing of commerce, but to nourish him." Shaped by Tacitus and his condemnations of Roman decadence, Bonald felt that economic liberalism and unrestrained wealth would undermine the Christian quotation of the French people, and would lead men to become less generous and more self-centered.

Bonald was one of the main writers of the theocratic or traditionalist school, which planned de Maistre, Lamennais, Ballanche and baron Ferdinand d'Eckstein. The traditionalist school, in reaction to the rationalists, believed that human reason was incapable of even arriving at natural religion, and that tradition, the or situation. of a primitive revelation, was necessary to know both natural religion as well as the truths of supernatural revelation. De Bonald believed that the principles of service governance could be deduced from history and sacred scripture. His political thought is closely tied to his theory of the divine origin of language. Since man learns to speak through imitation, he believed that the first man must develope learned to speak from God, who announced all moral principles to this number one man. In his own words, "L'homme pense sa parole avant de parler sa pensée" man thinks his speech ago saying his thought; the first language contained the essence of all truth. These moral truths were then codified in Holy Scripture. From this he deduces the existence of God, the divine origin and consequent supreme predominance of the Holy Scriptures, and the infallibility of the Catholic Church.

While this thought lies at the root of all his speculations, there is a formula of fixed application. All relations may be stated as the triad of cause, means and effect, which he sees repeated throughout nature and society. Thus, in the universe, he finds the First Cause as mover, movement as the means, and bodies as the result; in the state, power to direct or determine as the cause, ministers as the means, and subjects as the effects; in the family, the same representation is exemplified by father, mother and children; and in political society, the monarch as cause, ministers/nobility as means, and the subjects as effect. These three terms bear specific relations to one another; the first is to theas theto the third. Thus, in the great triad of the religious world—God, the Mediator, and Man—God is to the God-Man as the God-Man is to Man. On this basis, he constructed a system of political absolutism. The sharing of power, as in a democracy, seemed ludicrous to de Bonald, and the doctrine of the separation of powers tended towards anarchy. The monarch rules for the good of society and thus represents the general will, contrary to Rousseau; whereas a multitude of individual wills, even when united in purpose, do not represent the general will.

The ideas of the traditionalist school would be condemned by the Catholic Church in papal encyclicals such(a) as Mirari vos and Singulari Nos. The conception of revelation contemporary by the traditionalists would also be rejected at the First Vatican Council in the dogmatic constitution Dei Filius.