Maistre, Joseph de

Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821) was one of the founders of French conservative thought, a powerful critic of Enlightenment rationalism, of democracy, and of the French Revolution in particular. At the same time, however, as a highly sophisticated theorist of social violence and political authority, he was one of the originators of French sociology. Maistre, that is to say, was a philosophical conservative: his defense of order against disorder entailed a powerful effort to theorize social and political disorder and in that way to find order within human excess itself.

Maistre's greatest importance for the development of social theory is found in his sociology of religion or religious sociology: his sociological account of religious practices, especially in their more extreme forms, which insists that religion, understood in the broadest sense, is the defining foundation of all social organization. The force of his analysis is manifest in its significant influence on such major figures in the sociological tradition as Auguste Comte, Georges Bataille, Carl Schmitt, and René Girard—all of them, like Maistre, working on the blurred and often equivocal borders of religious, social, and political questions. At the same time, Maistre's occasionally exorbitant defense of royal sovereignty and papal infallibility has inspired French reactionary thinkers from monarchists like the young Félicité de Lamennais to fascist sympathizers like Charles Maurras, who have often found in his words justification for discarding his in fact quite moderate practical politics. For perhaps what most defines Maistre's theoretical style is the veritably classical calm with which he responded to the most excessive forms of human behavior. He was a theorist of barbarity, not its advocate.

Maistre was born on April 1, 1753, in Chambéry, the capital of Savoy, a French-speaking province of Piedmontsardinia. His family was granted noble status in 1778 for the work of his father, François Xavier, a senator in the Savoy Parlement, in revising the royal constitution. Maistre's youth presaged a conventional provincial life: membership in local religious confraternities followed by legal training in Turin. From 1772 to 1792, he served in the Savoy Parlement, rising to the rank of senator in 1788. Two engagements, however, qualified this outwardly traditional life: Masonry and the Enlightenment. Maistre's personal library was among the largest in Savoy, featuring an unusually high proportion of Enlightenment works alongside a [Page 465]much smaller number of professional and pious literature; thus, before becoming one of the Enlightenment's staunchest critics, he had been one of its most avid followers. Maistre, moreover, was closely engaged with Masonry between 1772 and 1792. His later dismissal of this involvement as a mere social game seems belied by his initiation into a highly esoteric lodge in 1778, in which he rose to the highest grades. Thus, alongside a professional and religious trajectory squarely located within the ancien régime, Maistre took part in some of the most forward-looking intellectual and social movements of his day. This balance was ruptured in 1792, when French revolutionary armies invaded Savoy, broke the traditional framework within which Maistre had lived, and turned him against the enlightened views of his youth.

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