St Petersburg Dialogues
1821 book by Joseph de Maistre
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Related on Lably
Through Dialogue and Sovereignty
Summary
In a series of dialogues, three characters, called the Count, the Senator and the Chevalier, meet in Saint Petersburg and explore a range of subjects related to theodicy, punishment and epistemology. The book argues that the continuous blood sacrifice of men is a constant and fundamental law in all of human life and society.
A passage in the first dialogue attempts to explain the foundations of society by comparing executioners to the conventionally more honoured soldiers, maintaining that all society needs the final form of sovereignty that is provided by the executioner and which stops men ripping each other to pieces.
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Reception
St Petersburg Dialogues is Maistre's most famous and influential work. The scholar Mark Wegierski writes that it is "extraordinary" in its wide range, which includes "pointed criticisms of Locke and Voltaire, the beginnings of a logothetic linguistic theory, as well as such controversial passages as those in praise of the executioner, and on the divinity of war".
According to the Maistre scholar Carolina Armenteros, the essayistic style of the dialogues expresses an "organicism … opposed to the mechanistic rationalism of the Enlightenment," offering "a pre-romantic and imaginative ideal of the search for truth that springs from respect for variation and particularity … an ideal rooted in awe." Isaiah Berlin called the part about the executioner "the most famous passage in the whole of Maistre’s works".