Posted on by Bonald

Inequality is not a first principle of the Right, despite the way some on the Alt Right speak of it. Conservatives, by and large, are happy to pass over the underperformance of certain groups in discreet silence. It was only because the liberals use these facts as an indictment of the West that we have been forced to voice the alternate hypotheses. Regardless, inequality of intellect, self-control, or any other quality is a mere truth of the empirical order. It does nothing to establish the Right’s true first principle: authority, the legitimate rule of one over another. As Louis de Bonald writes

Thus the reason for public power is in divine power, and can be found nowhere else. Man naturally has no dominion over man, man owes nothing to man; all power constituted on natural or divine laws comes from God, omnis potestas ex Deo, and this passage has never been understood otherwise…Thus, once legitimate power comes from God, authority is justified and obedience ennobled, and man must fear to command and be honored to obey. — from On Divorce

Why should one man rule over another? Because he is smarter or more virtuous? But then, as Pascal pointed out, this is just an invitation to fight over who is smartest and most virtuous. The best arrangement, he concluded, is for rule to base itself on a public, easily verifiable fact, one that makes no pretense to determine overall personal value, such as being the previous king’s eldest legitimate son. Anyway, that another man is smarter than me may make it prudent for me to follow his advice, but it cannot create an obligation to obey.

Some, even at the Orthosphere, think authority can be understood in terms of ownership, as in the king “owning” his kingdom. In fact, ownership (and indeed “private” property) just is a type of authority, so statements of ownership bring us no deeper. In fact, one cannot go deeper, because authority is the primordial fact of the state.

There is no authority-granting quality inhering in individuals that could precede the actual existence of an authoritative institution like the state. Nor is it true that the nation precedes its ruler. This is the error that conservatism arose to contest, the idea that the nation can be conceived as existing without constitutional order, intrinsically possessing rightful mastery of itself which it then alienates onto its government but may repossess at any time. In fact, imagining a nation not ruled by its government according to the norms of legitimacy established by its unwritten constitution is like imagining my body not being ruled by my brain, which would not really be imagining my body at all. Get rid of authority, and the related markers of citizenship and territory also lose meaning. There would be no way for the nation to reconstitute its government that could command obedience, no way even to establish in a definite way the limits of the “we” who would be instituting a government.

Julius Evola writes

In the world of Tradition the most important foundation of the authority and the right (ius) of kings and chiefs, and the reason they why they were obeyed, feared, and venerated, was essentially their transcendent and nonhuman quality. This quality was not artificial, but a powerful reality to be feared. The more people acknowledged the ontological rank of what was prior and superior to the visible and temporal dimension, the more such beings were invested with a natural and absolute sovereign power. Traditional civilizations, unlike those of decadent and later times, completely ignored the merely political dimension of supreme authority as well as the idea that the roots of authority law in mere strength, violence, or natural and secular qualities such as intelligence, wisdom, physical courage, and a minute concern for the collective material well-being. The roots of authority, on the contrary, always had a metaphysical character. Likewise, the idea that the power to govern is conferred on the chief by those whom he rules and that his authority is and expression of the community and therefore subject to its decrees, was foreign to tradition. — from Revolt against the Modern World

Evola makes it clear that Traditional orders do not fall into the opposite error, already discussed, of making kingship precede the kingdom, as if a private person might possess a numinous halo of royal majesty without having yet acquired a kingdom to rule. In fact, traditional thought does not imagine that one can find in the nation a more primordial social reality behind authority, behind the dyadic structure of ruler and subject. The only reality of any kind behind it is God Himself.

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