{"id":98349,"date":"2017-09-11T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2017-09-11T11:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=98349"},"modified":"2017-09-09T14:54:56","modified_gmt":"2017-09-09T13:54:56","slug":"denis-de-rougemont-8-sep-1906-6-dec-1985-the-future-is-within-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/09\/denis-de-rougemont-8-sep-1906-6-dec-1985-the-future-is-within-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Denis de Rougemont (8 Sep 1906 \u2013 6 Dec 1985): The Future Is within Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cSelf-government will be, first of all, the art of getting people to meddle in things which concern them.\u00a0 It will soon call for the skill of challenging once again, decisions which concern them, and which have been taken without them\u2026Self-government specifically consists in finding one\u2019s own way along uncharted paths.\u201d<\/em>
\n— Denis de Rougemont<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Denis de Rougemon was an intellectual leader among world citizens often walking on uncharted paths.\u00a0 A French-speaking Swiss, after his studies of literature at the University of Geneva, at 25, he moved to Paris where he quickly became part of a group of young, unorthodox thinkers who were developing a \u201cPersonalist\u201d philosophy.\u00a0 The Personalists around Emmanuel Mounier, Alexandre Marc, Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu were trying to develop an approach based on the \u2018Person\u2019 to counter the strong intellectual currents of communism and fascism then at their height in European society. (1)\u00a0 De Rougemont was one of the writers of the 1931 Manifesto of the New Order <\/em>with its emphasis on developing a new cultural base for society.<\/p>\n

For de Rougemont, revolutionaries attempting to seize power, even from the most repressive regimes, invariably fall into the power structures they hoped to eliminate.\u00a0 Only the power we have over ourselves is synonymous with freedom.\u00a0 For the first time, the person has not only the need but also the power and ability to choose his future.<\/p>\n

He wrote \u201cThe powers of the State are in direct proportion to the inertia of the citizens.\u00a0 The State will be tempted to abuse them as soon as it thinks there are signs that the citizens are secretly tempted to let themselves slide back into the conditions of subjects\u2026Dictatorship requires no imagination: all we have to do is to allow ourselves to slide.\u00a0 But the survival of mankind in an atmosphere we can breath presupposes the glimpsed vision of happiness to be achieved, a ridge to be crossed, a horizon.<\/p>\n

\u201c The model of society which Napoleon established by a stroke of genius with a view to war and nothing else, is the permanent state of emergency<\/em> which was to be the formula of the totalitarian states from 1930 onward. Everything is militarized, that is, capable of being mobilized at any time, spirit, body and goods.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>In 1935, de Rougemont lived in Germany as a university lecturer in Frankfurt.\u00a0 There he was able to see the Nazi movement at first hand and had seen Hitler speaking to crowds. He later wrote of this experience. \u201cThe greatest theologian of our time, Karl Barth, wrote \u2018A prophet has no biography; he rises and falls with his mission.\u2019 This may be said of Hitler, the anti-prophet of our time, the prophet of an empty power, of a dead past, of a total catastrophe whose agent he was to become.\u00a0 Hitler, better than orthodox\u00a0 Communists, Fascists, Falangists and Maoists; answered the basic question of the century (which is religious in the primary sociological sense of rebinding) by offering a comradeship, a togetherness, rituals, from the beat of drums by night, and by day to the sacred ceremonies of Nuremberg.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of de Rougemont\u2019s early essays was \u201cPrincipes d\u2019une politique de pessimisme active\u201d. He and those around him saw the dangers and the opportunities but were unable to draw together a large enough group of people to change the course of events.\u00a0 As he wrote \u201cFrom the early thirties of this century, young people who were awakened, but without \u2018resources\u2019 were laying the foundations of the personalist movement.\u00a0 They knew that the totalitarians were going to win \u2014 at least for a tragic season \u2014 and tried to put into words the reasons for their refusal, in the face of this short-lived triumph.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1939, he published his most widely read book Love in the Western World (L\u2019Amour et l\u2019Occident) <\/em>where he traced the idea of romantic love from the Manichaeins, through the Bogomiles, to the Cathari to the poetry of the troubadours.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>During the war years, he lived in the USA writing and broadcasting on the French section of the Voice of America. In 1946 he returned to Europe, living most of the rest of his life near Geneva.\u00a0 There he became highly active in the movement for European federalism, but he was critical of the concepts of a European Union as integration of existing States. He remained loyal to the position he set out in the mid-1930s. \u201cMan is not made on the scale of the huge conglomerates which one tries to foist on him as \u2018his fatherland\u2019; they are far too large or too little for him.\u00a0 Too little, if one seeks to confine his spiritual horizons to the frontiers of the Nation-State; too large if one tries to make them the locus of this direct contact with the flesh and with the earth which is necessary to Man\u201d.<\/p>\n

He put an emphasis on culture stressing a common European civilization but with great respect for the contributions of different European regions.\u00a0 His idea of federalism was to build on existing regions, especially trans-frontier regions.\u00a0 He was an active defender of ecological causes, seeing in the destruction of nature one of the marks of the over-centralization of State power.\u00a0 Thus he was stringing against the nuclear power industry which he saw as leading to State centralism.\u00a0 As he wrote \u201cStarting afresh means building a new parallel society, a society whose formulae will not be imposed on us from above, will not come down to us from a capital city, but will on the contrary be improvised and invented on the plane of everyday decision-making and will be ordered in accordance with the desire for liberty which alone unites us when it is the objective of each and all.\u201d<\/p>\n