LOUIS-GABRIEL-ABROISE, VICOMTE DE BONALD
Biography
Introduction
Theory of Government
It is a fertile source of error, when treating a question relative to society, to consider it by itself, with no relationship to other questions, because society itself is only a group of relationships. In the social body as in every organized body--that is to say, one in which the parts are arranged in certain relationships to each other relative to a given end--the cessation of vital functions does not come from the annihilation of the parts, but from their displacement and the disturbance of the relationships.
How, indeed, can one treat divorce, which disunites the father, mother, and child, without speaking of society, which unites them? How can one treat society's domestic state, or the family, without considering its public or political state, which intervenes at the family's formation in order to guarantee its stability and ensure its effects? But the reason for domestic power, which unites men in the family, the reason for public power, which unites families in State bodies, lies at bottom neither in man nor in the family; for man by himself is independent of every other man, and the family of every other family. It is therefore necessary to return to the universal supreme power over all beings; that is, to the knowledge of a being superior to man, existing before human society, whose will, conservative of created beings, manifests itself in a given order of relationships, which, expressed by laws, constitute human power, and therefore society; to the universal power of God over man, and the duties of man toward God, which together explain the inexplicable power of man over man, and the duties which flow from it; to divine power, the knowledge and worship of which are the object of religion or the society which unites, which binds, from religare, because it is the bond and reason for the other societies.
To Bonald, man is a social creature. The first man had been placed in a society, and man had continued in society ever since. In Bonald's theory of government, the first principle is that of power or authority (pouvoir). The power originated in God, the originator of human society, but God then transmitted that authority throughout the society. The authority is expressed through the various relations in society. As Klinck wrote:
In traditional society significance lay not with individuals but with the socially constructed arrangements of relations or relationships in which they were involved....Like the post-modern self the traditional self was distinguished by having, not a unique identity, but multiple identities determined by the social relations of which it was a part.
Regarding relationships, Bonald believed that a triad of relationships is the natural, always-occurring, order of the universe. The triad consists of a power, the minister of that power, and the subject. Bonald accepted as natural that French society on the macro-level should be ordered according to this triad, with the king (as power) ruling via the aristocracy (as ministers) over the subjects (the third estate). Such a society was the opposite of the atomistic liberal society which Bonald saw as a necessary result of the principles of the French Revolution. A rightly-ordered society would be both healthy and well-functioning.
A healthy society for Bonald meant a society in which power was not only resident in the king, however, but was also spread through a variety of social relations. Such institutions in society would include the family, the Church, and organizations such as guilds. These institutions would check the acquisition of power by the king. They thus serve as intermediary institutions, protecting the individual from a too-powerful centralized government. Democracy could not claim such beneficial effects. By concentrating only on the individual and the state, it effectively eliminates any intermediary institution. As a result, the individual stands alone before a Leviathan state, which has no checks to keep it from accumulating even more power. This argument, it should be noted, was also described quite clearly in Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Bonald's critique of modern liberal democracy, while grounded in a medieval view of the state, still offers an important contribution to thinking about political society, one which the conservative movement in America appropriated.
Bonald also worked to apply his theories in the real world. In the realm of French politics, he opposed the French Revolution. Once the monarchy was reestablished, he supported it and attempted to use it to reestablish a rightly-ordered political system in France. Another practical application of his ideas was his work against divorce. He both wrote against it (in On Divorce, his most famous political tract) and worked in the national legislature to end the practice. To Bonald, the family represents a rightly-ordered miniature society: the father possesses the power, which was to be administered through the mother, to rule over the subject children. Divorce means a fragmentation of such a society, the ripping apart of a harmonious, organic whole. The wife/mother would be set adrift, separated from her proper position; the husband/father would lose his means of ruling; and the children would not be properly governed. The destruction of the smallest society would have consequences throughout the larger society, as well. Hence government had a political duty to insure that such destruction would not take place. To conclude this story, Bonald was successful in abolishing legal divorce in France, and the practice was not reinstituted until the Third Republic in 1884.
Theory of Language
This being, author of man, and therefore superior to him, as the cause is to the effect, is called God, and it is even an absurdity to say that man invented God; for to invent a being would be to create it, and man can no more create beings than he can destroy them. He develops their relationships, he alters their forms: these are the limits of his invention and action; and one can defy all the philosophers together to invent something of which men had no previous idea, as to draw a figure which does not lie inside already known dimensions.
In God is thus the reason for creation; in God is the reason for conservation, which is a continued creation.
If God made man, then there is in God, as in man, intelligence which willed, action which executed. There is thus similarity, and man is made in his image and likeness. There are thus relationships, a society; and I see, throughout the universe, religion as soon as the family, and the society of man and God as soon as the society of man and man; this primitive religion is called natural or domestic.
But if man today receives speech as he receives being; if he speaks only insofar as he hears speech, and speaks only the language he hears spoken; if it is even physically impossible for man to invent speech by himself, as it is impossible for him to invent being by himself (which can be shown by considering the operations of thought and those of the vocal organ), then it is necessary that man in the beginning received speech and being together. Now this truth, which would be an even physical demonstration of the existence of a first being, though combatted, or rather misunderstood, by the sophists, is little by little establishing itself in society; and already Jean-Jacques Rousseau had said: "Overwhelmed by the difficulties which present themselves" (in the discussion of Condillac's novel on the invention of language), "and convinced of the nearly proven impossibility that languages could have arisen and established themselves by purely human means, I leave the discussion of this difficult problem to anyone who cares to undertake the task . . . and I believe that speech was very necessary to invent speech."
It is, in effect, these last words which present the reason for the impossibility of language by men: for to invent is to think, and to think is to speak inside oneself. Signs are required for thought, because they are required for speech; and one can say, to summarize, that man thinks his speech before speaking his thought, and expresses his thought for himself before expressing it for others.
Human reason is in divine speech, as the child's reason is in the father's speech. That is why speech and reason are expressed in Greek by the same word, logos; and man could not have reasoned by himself; and if I do not understand the incomprehensible mystery of human speech, why should I seek to penetrate the mystery of divine speech?
In writing about language, Bonald again begins with God (Whom he calls the "Verbe Eternel"), the originator of language. Such a divine origin is the only possible means for language to start, since language needs thought and thought needs language (thought being but internal conversation). W. Jay Reedy wrote, "Viewed thus, science is le fond and letters la forme; thought and expression are inextricably joined and complementary." Moreover, language is a social phenomenon. A solitary human being could not create it by himself. Rather, man began in a society consisting of himself and God and shortly entered the society of the first family. In such conditions, language use could be received and transmitted (through families primarily, but also through society in general), thus beginning the continuing human process of language transmission. To complement this view, Bonald developed a theory of the functioning of language. To him, words serve as verbal signs which interact and act on the brain.
From this general theory, Bonald then discussed specific languages by examining (perhaps unexpectedly) their grammar. Words, phrases, and their interaction, for Bonald, reveal natural truths:
Language, an expression of social man, began with man and has perfected itself along with society. The difference between the sexes is expressed in substantives; the distinction between persons, in verbs; the type of domestic or public society, in singular or plural numbers, I, thou, or we; of which the former are reserved for the speech of the family, the latter for public power; and the very constitution of society, formed by a power, a subject, and a minister, each the bond of the other, is found revealed in the construction of the sentence, formed by a governor, and governed, and a binding-word, either verb or copula, which unites them to each other; relationships which are all the more remarkable in that the order of these three parts of all human discourse, called syntax, is natural or analagous in societies which are naturally constituted, and inverted or transpositive in societies which are not. I shall stop here: this theory of discourse, considered as an expression of social man, would carry me too far from the subject at hand; I reserve for other occasions its developments, which concern the most important social and even literary truths.
Although the original language had been perfect and perfectly descriptive of the world, sin and the course of time led to its degeneration. Languages thus exist in various states of health. They can be judged, however, according to how well they reflect natural order. One important part of the natural order is (again) the relation of power, minister, and subject. Further, societies who were naturally ordered used and promulgated languages in harmony with nature. Those societies which were farther from reflecting natural truths had less-natural (inverted or transpositive) languages. As might be expected, Bonald believed that French during the era of Louis XIV most-accurately reflected the natural order (as Bourbon authority ordered society), just as pre-revolutionary French society had most-accurately conformed to the natural order. By contrast, the French Revolution was also a linguistic event, whereby a disordered view of the world produced (and was furthered by) a distorted use of language.
Such views have important implications. One implication which Bonald wrote about is in literature. If thought and language are intimately connected, then the language a person uses will affect their thought. Hence a certain nationality of people might be expected to produce a certain type of literature. Bonald believed that the French should continue writing their particular variety of literature, which he believed would be ennobling (reflecting the natural order). Bonald's example is French literature at its height--the literature of "Racine, La Fontaine, La Bruyère, and Fénelon, literature which combined beauty, thought, and order. Such a view, however, runs the risk of depersonalizing the authors, of reducing them to only the mouthpiece of the nation. A second implication thus involved questions of consciousness. Could the individual thinker actually think for himself? Some, like Klinck, have argued that Bonald's theory of language destroyed such a possibility:
With the aid of sensationalism and physiology Bonald had decentred the subject, relocating it in the world of language. In Bonald's thinking the knowing, self-constituting Cartesian subject had ceased to exist. The individual's consciousness was now determined by language.
Such a radical determinism, however, does not need to be the only interpretation. Whether Bonald himself would have accepted such a radical position is doubtful. But, if we grant the position, would not even Bonald then be merely reacting in ways determined by his language?
Connections
Questions