And yet all grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner; he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears.

Name	Joseph Marie de Maistre
Life	1753 - 1821
Country	Savoy
Category	Realism
Wikipedia	>>

The most notoriously exaggerated of all cruel social philosophers is Joseph de Maistre. He drives conservative realism into what many consider "absurdum". Is it so? The world often moves "dialectically" from extreme to extreme. de Maistre's near worship of the public executioner is a reaction to the mob horrors of the French Revolution. He himself had been exiled to Aosta, to Geneva, to Lausanne, to Turin, to Venice and to Cagliari on Sardinia. There he was made the ambassador of king Victor Emmanuel I, king of Sardinia, from 1803-1817, to a Russia in which the members of the arrogant upper class discussed how to keep some order in the potentially revolutionary masses. "I don't hate anything but hate", is also a saying of de Maistre. He did not hate the masses. He thought the executioner was most unfortunate, but unavoidable if order was to be maintained. Already a generation earlier, the great Italian jurist, Cesare Beccaria, had published a book on the death penalty. This inhuman punishment, he had shown, had surprisingly little effect in preventing crime. de Maistre and his circle evidently did not believe in it. Considering the brutal aspects of the human condition and the horrors of the past revolution, they put their trust for a stable society in the public executioner. Does such brutality help? Or does it simply continue jus talionis, the Jewish law of retaliation, in eternity? A few years after Joseph de Maistre's Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, Nicholas I came to power in Russia. He might have been educated with the content of these evening talks. He became the Stalin of the 19th century, cruelly preparing Russia's next dialectical step, Lenin's coup d'état of 1917. In spite of the fact that a democratic

majority in several West European nations would vote for capital punishment, our legislators have abolished it. We consider that to be a most important part of the West European civilization. Europe, however, still rests upon the power of the United States. The United States is a rather new nation. It was built upon the killing of the red Indians and on the Negro slavery. It admits about one million new immigrants per year into its "melting pot". It is a violent nation; some 25.000 are shot to death every year. To keep down violence and to prevent hate from turning into group violence and revolutionary parties, punishments are harsh; some two million citizens are imprisoned. And the capital punishment remains. Might that what is true for individuals also be true for states? A leading American defense expert can, for instance, in the context of atomic missiles and related gadgets, write the following words: "America should deter all means of delivery by making clear that those using such weapons would be obliterated." If the United States cannot maintain internal order without the death penalty, if Europe cannot keep down dictators of various sorts without the help of the United States, and if world order largely rests upon the American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as it surely does, can we really say that de Maistre is wrong when he would believe that if the USA got rid of its executioner our Western social order would give way to chaos? Is order maintained by executing individuals and "obliterating" societies? However hateful the question is: does the world order rest upon the American executioner?