Berlin’s essay on Maistre

 Of the essays in Isaiah Berlin’s Freedom and Its Betrayal, the one on Joseph de Maistre was the least satisfying.

I’d have said that after first reading. But I’ve found myself thinking about Maistre, especially whenever I read about U.S. Reps. Mary Miller of Illinois, Louie Gomert of Texas, Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia and other outspoken supporters of Donald Trump.

If you’re bewildered by Trumpism — and I am — Maistre offers clues.

In Berlin’s account, Maistre, a minister of the Kingdom of Piedmont and Sardinia, was a mild reformer until the French Revolution descended into a reign of terror. Maistre was so revolted that he wanted to exterminate all traces of the liberal thinking that prevailed through the 18^th century.

Enlightenment thinkers saw human beings as naturally good, or at least neutral. Maistre saw human beings as corrupt and vicious. The only way to manage them was to subjugate them, and nothing works like violence and terror.

The assumption of Enlightenment thinkers was that humans are rational. Maistre ridiculed the idea. We operate on instinct, not by reason, he said.

In Berlin’s summary, Maistre’s whole program was to show “rationalist notions do not work.” Reason certainly doesn’t rule. That’s obvious in our institutions. Maistre contended that institutions that last, such as marriage, are the least rational. The institutions that fail quickest are based on reason.

Where the Enlightenment thinkers saw so much that humanity could improve, Maistre saw the possibility of a politics of false optimism. When expectations for continuous progress were dashed, ordinary people felt resentment. Maistre saw that those grievances could be exploited.

He showed how the state could always have enemies — journalists, Jews, Protestants, lawyers, immigrants, American revolutionaries and especially scientists, extremely rational thinkers who are never to be trusted — and that the general population could be kept in constant subservience simply by being on the lookout against them. If you have trained the irrational public to distrust those who reason, they’ll focus their grievances on them, rather than on the tyrannical rulers.

• Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and Its Betrayal; Princeton University Press, 2002.