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14
THE ORIGINS AND FUNCTIONS OF ELITES *1
1899
We have seen that the true, basic sources of power are propagated discoveries or inventions. Now we
must ask if the conditions necessary for the creation of some social institution or its reform, for the
formation or transformation of a language, a religion, a science, a government, a law (un droit), an
industry, an art, a morality, are the same conditions as those required for the propagation of this new
thing? The answer is no. Modern Europe is well suited to the diffusion and rapid propagation of a
language but is incapable of creating one. . . .
Similarly, with the exception of a few scoffing or skeptical nations, our modern world is rather
favorable to the diffusion of an existing religion or at least to its preservation from father to son, but it
is clear that the world has passed the age of religious creation. The imperial civilization of Rome
was an excellent soil for the propagation of Christianity, but it could never have engendered that
religion; creation needed the intense fermentation of the Jewish people. The sixteenth century was the
last period in which this special creative force gave signs of life, and the Protestant sects which are
its products are far from equal in richness, imagination, and profundity to the great religions of the
past. In the same way Europe’s last linguistic creation, English, with its grammatical poverty, is very
far from attaining the original beauty of Greek or Sanscrit. A religion is only elaborated in the exalted
consciousness of a man whose exaltation inflames the small band of disciples and apostles among
whom he lives.
Likewise, in our own time, an ancient monarchical tree, such as the Hohenzollern dynasty or the
House of Savoy, can be favored in its expansion and in the external diffusion of its prestige and
system of government by those very democratic and equalizing revolutions which thereafter preclude
the creation of new, viable, and lively monarchical roots.
We produce many laws at each session of parliament, but are they true legal creations? A law
regarded as hereditary, held to be sacrosanct, and obeyed with a sort of loving fear, a national right,
does not emerge to the light of day like Venus from the foam of parliamentary waves. It is formed in
one of two ways: either little by little, mysteriously and through custom which is rooted first in a
narrow area, like the right of Quirites, *2 and then slowly extends its roots to cover a vast empire; or
else such a right develops ex abrupto but fostered by the prestigious glory which marks the
legislative work of a Lycurgus, a Solon, a Justinien, a Theodosius, a Napoleon, with the obvious seal
of superior wisdom. In times such as ours, when respect has been lost, what is there that can be
established as respectable? But though no longer capable of creating viable new legislation, we are
always able, in order to answer our need for civilizing assimilation, to use an established body of
law and even propagate it to the outside. However, we repeat, this is only true of truly national law,
which shares nothing but a name with those emphemeral laws voted into being by our legislatures.
Mr. Boutmy noted that the parliamentary and political institutions of which England is so proud
could not have been born in the democratized England of today. “Democracy was able to appropriate
the parliamentary regime and imitate it, with some difficulty, only after many perfect specimens of it
had been fashioned and fixed by other hands. Only an aristocracy could create it, form its customs,
and initiate its traditions.” These English institutions which have traveled all around the world arose
from a small nobility in the corner of an island. 1