A collection of speeches and essays by Louis de Bonald, a contemporary opponent of the French Revolution, emphasizing sociopolitical gaps created by jettisoning monarchical order including the Catholic Church. Bonald identified three sea changes in the 18th century: in morals, doctrines, and laws whereby aristocrats sacrificed Christian values for rationalism (e.g., physical sciences replacing religious virtue).
A proto-capitalist society in which all depends on individuated agreement and nothing on established order is inherently unstable, and unstructured. Society depends on dedication to higher elements (beyond self-interest); families perform the alchemy of such realization. Bonald echoes Burke in affirming a statesman is capable of improvement and inclined to preservation.
Economic growth, beyond a certain point, entails diminishing returns to public spirit and resources. The wealth of nations is not measured in taxes, which are needs not a product; excess of needs is a sign of distress. Morals and laws are the true wealth of society, family, and nations.
Urban industry enslaves mankind. Man should find subsistence in the family. Government cannot fill the bap because it operates on appropriation.
Marriage is devalued by severing the religious from the civil. Its goal is children; its responsibility is care of the child’s education. To recover the state, Bonald quotes Montesquieu in observing one must regain the family from women and children. Modernity, seeking to evenly distribute power so as to affirm equality, cannot hide from tyranny of authority, that is the role of private interests in the public sphere. It succumbs to weakening of the natural and thus rise of tyranny.
• Men do not invent truths but derive new consequence from those long known.
• One should never obsess with abuses that a part and parcel of good things, nor the advantages of poor things.
• Abstractions are generalizations applying to nothing; morals are generalities pertaining to everything.
As with many, Bonald’s views will sometimes seem anachronistic, but read carefully, they contain true-to-from (i.e., era) answers to age-old problems.