According to Nietzsche, State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters.
The purpose of Philippe Ségur’s essay is to demonstrate why political power is a monster by going back to the roots of western political power, i.e. the Ancient Roman era, the period prior to and following the foundation of Rome. Looking at Roman mythology and the dominant features of the Roman republic, the author proposes a reflection on the universal nature of power and what it represents, both yesterday and today.
Wise, moderate power; safe, reasonable political management and the idea of a simple, modest citizen-leader have never existed, or only as an accident of history. On the contrary, excess and the need to flaunt itself are the most characteristic features of power. In that sense, it is a monster, a phenomenon that has to be spectacular. And if it is, isn’t it to conceal something else, to distract attention and hide the essential?
The essential being domination, the confiscation of autonomy, a small group’s capacity to decide for and profit from the hoi polloi. Thus democracy, the sovereignty of the people and the judicial system are all just sophisticated disguises for this monstrosity, nothing more than special effects aimed at impressing and distracting the crowd. There’s nothing new about this subterfuge: the Ancients thought of it well before we did. With its decline in values, our era is just underscoring its profound nihilism.
Above and beyond this observation, the author tries to understand the root of this universal necessity, this omnipresence of monstrous power: he finds it in the very nature of the human psyche, which is shaped by what it lacks: by separation, by vacuums needing to be filled, by the finiteness of an existence limited by death. Power responds through action that incarnates a remedy for the vacuum, through creating the impression of an inflated reality, and through the illusion it procures of a return to unity and to a kind of eternity through the celebration of social totality. Thus monstrous power is a mirror image, an inversion, of human nature: too much as a response to not enough.