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The Mover and the Adjuster
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2024
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The influence of man on man is exercised sometimes to assemble a group of individuals moved toward common action, sometimes to remedy the antagonisms which naturally result from the conflict of human wills. These two situations give rise to two forms of authority which are seldom found in the same person, since one form is essentially exciting and the other essentially calming. The contrast between them can be illustrated by the two images of the bridge of Arcole and the oak of Vincennes.
The print which shows Bonaparte hurling himself at the enemy and urging his soldiers to follow sums up in a single scene all the influence toward action he had exercised on them since he had taken command. He had found troops low in morale and without any disposition to take the offensive; he breathed his own fire into them; his famous proclamation tended to imbue them with his own ambition, and united them as participants in his plan. By a remarkable feat of transference, impatient because he was without glory, he made them realize that they were without shoes, and he materialized for them his own vast dreams in the visible form of “the fertile plains of Lombardy.”
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- Copyright © 1955 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1. We mean by authority any moral influence capable of weighing as a cause on the actions of others. This influence may be inherent in the individual or drawn from the prestige of the institution he represents.
2. Our tendency to see perfection in the imperfect figures we are shown is well demon strated by Koffka. Cf. Kurt Koffka: Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New York, Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935).
3. Cf. R. B. Onians: The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate (Cambridge, University Press, 1951), pp. 454-462.
4. Temporal victory demands an excitement on the part of the fighter which must be made to disappear afterward, for fear of the effects it may exercise on domestic order. This idea is admirably developed in Horace et les Curiaces, by Georges Dumézil, to whom our debt is immense. See especially how the necessary cooling off is symbolized by the three tubs into which the Irish hero Cuchulainn is plunged after his victory and to the water of which he gives up his excess heat. Furthermore, we know through historic texts how attentive the Romans were to make victorious warriors come back to order: the example of Cincinnatus was emphasized deliberately.
5. See this note of Paulin Paris: "Bailli (the bailiff) is here the regent, the one who governs in the absence or during the minority of the natural ruler. From bajulus (stick), was derived bailli, the one who holds the scepter, the stick. The bail and the baillie are the government, the power." Paulin Paris: Les Romans de la Table ronde, T. IV, p. 361 note to p. 135. The note on the celebrated scholar is all the more interesting because here the man with the com mander's stick is clearly distinguished from the sovereign.
6. Aeneid IX, 327: cited and commented on by Dumézil in L'Héritage indoeuropéen à Rome (Paris, Gallimard, 1949), pp. 205-206.
7. Aristotle: The Constitution of Athens, chapter 57.
8. Constitution of Athens, chapter 56.
9. Fritz Kern: Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1948), pp. 12-27.
10. John Roscoe: The Baganda (London, 1911).
11. Du Contrat Social, Bk IV, ch. 4.
12. Notably in Mitra-Varuna, Essai sur Deux Représentations de la Souveraineté (Paris, Gallimard, 1940), a work of capital importance for political science, which has not yet incorpo rated or even measured the immense and valuable contribution of this master.
13. I Chronicles, XXII: "And David prepared iron in abundance…. Also cedar trees in abundance…."
14. I Chronicles, XXII.
15. Cf. II Samuel, XI: Uriah, recalled from the army, does not go to his own house but sleeps at the door of the king's house.
16. I Kings, I.
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