"Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man"
About this Quote
A diplomat who watched the French Revolution chew through its own ideals, Joseph de Maistre writes like someone who has seen “the people” up close and come away unimpressed. The first move is deliberately humiliating: power hunger isn’t framed as a tragic flaw or a noble ambition but as childish appetite. “Infantile in his desires” shrinks Enlightenment man - rational, self-governing, improving - into a fidgety kid staring at the next toy. The psychology is blunt because the political point is blunt: if you think tyranny is mainly a problem of bad rulers, you’ve misdiagnosed the disease.
The line that lands is the inversion: stop complaining about princes; start complaining about man. That pivot is not just contrarian flair. It’s a counterrevolutionary argument smuggled in as moral anthropology. Despotism, for de Maistre, is less a regime type than a human constant: envy, restlessness, and the compulsion to dominate don’t vanish when you depose a king; they metastasize. The crowd can be as absolutist as a crown, and sometimes more volatile because it believes itself virtuous.
Context sharpens the cynicism. Writing in the aftermath of revolutionary terror and Napoleonic consolidation, de Maistre is essentially saying: you can swap symbols - scepter for ballot, throne for “the nation” - and still reproduce coercion, because the raw material is unchanged. The subtext flatters order, hierarchy, and restraint, not because they are beautiful, but because he doubts humans can be trusted with unlimited moral credit. His real target is political innocence: the comforting story that liberation automatically reforms the liberator.
The line that lands is the inversion: stop complaining about princes; start complaining about man. That pivot is not just contrarian flair. It’s a counterrevolutionary argument smuggled in as moral anthropology. Despotism, for de Maistre, is less a regime type than a human constant: envy, restlessness, and the compulsion to dominate don’t vanish when you depose a king; they metastasize. The crowd can be as absolutist as a crown, and sometimes more volatile because it believes itself virtuous.
Context sharpens the cynicism. Writing in the aftermath of revolutionary terror and Napoleonic consolidation, de Maistre is essentially saying: you can swap symbols - scepter for ballot, throne for “the nation” - and still reproduce coercion, because the raw material is unchanged. The subtext flatters order, hierarchy, and restraint, not because they are beautiful, but because he doubts humans can be trusted with unlimited moral credit. His real target is political innocence: the comforting story that liberation automatically reforms the liberator.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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