“The Organization Wouldn’t Like That”

These words are the most recent and common form of death sentence. They are words of perfect ideological neutrality. All “organizations”—whether in the Hollywood film noir, the Lubyanka, or the old-style Mediterranean mafia—are agreed on this blunt formulation.

Organization: the dread word that we encounter everywhere, at the bottom rung of the ladder as well as the top, is now a metaphysical word. Indeed, it is the word into which the whole of metaphysics seems to have migrated, like a family of aristocrats reduced to living in a three-room suburban apartment. And yet from their bleak point of observation, they seem to wield a power that has never been so extensive.

Societies have organized themselves for centuries, but—one might say—without being conscious of it. They used to speak, if at all, about something else—about order. And now a chasm has opened between order and organization. Organization is established when no trace of order can any longer be found—or when it exists as a will-o’-the-wisp. Organization is always based on itself, on nothing, on pure functional operation. Order is always based on another order, of which it is the image, the visible twin.

At the origin of organization: the conspiracy.

At the origin of the conspiracy: the secret society.

At the origin of the secret society: initiation.

At the origin of the initiation: origin.

The Italian Quattrocento, with its hemmed-in states, in perennial conflict, and therefore obliged to look for some other equilibrium, prefigures European history of later centuries, where Italy would no longer have a role, except as an instrument. Machiavelli is so much ahead of other Europeans for the very reason that he was born in the midst of that laboratory that was trying out a new notion of equilibrium. With the Reformation, and thus with the rejection of the hierarchical principle (Church and Empire), equilibrium—the equivalent of pax in a context of pure intrigue and alliance of powers—emerges as the only relevant residual criterion. Political theory in the seventeenth century would be devoted above all to absorbing so much brutal novelty behind such a noble euphemism: the equilibrium that might almost be presented as a secularization of harmonia mundi. Urged on by this secular fury, let us turn instead to the gentle Archbishop Fénelon for a calm and pitiless formulation of the reasons on which the need for equilibrium is based: “Neighboring states are obliged not just to deal with each other according to the rules of justice and good faith; but likewise, for their particular safety as well as the common interest, they must constitute a sort of society and general republic.

“It must be recognized that in the long term the largest power always prevails and overturns the others, unless the others join together to counterbalance it.⁶²⁹ People cannot hope that a superior power will keep within the bounds of an exact moderation and that it will desire, from a position of strength, only that which can be obtained from a position of weakness. Even if a prince were sufficiently perfect as to make such a wondrous use of his prosperity, such wonder would cease with his own reign. The natural ambition of sovereigns, the flattery of councilors, and the bias of whole nations make it impossible to believe that a nation capable of subjugating others will refrain from doing so for whole centuries. A kingdom with such an extraordinary display of justice would be a pearl of history and a miracle that we could never see again.” This is the sinuous European gloss on the words of Thucydides: “We believe by tradition in the case of the gods, and we see by experience in the case of men, that always through a necessity of nature, every being exercises all the power at his disposal.”⁶³⁰