Joseph de Maistre was one of the most powerful, and by far the ablest, of the leaders of the neo-Catholic and anti-revolutionary movement. The most remarkable thing about his standpoint is that, layman as he was, it was entirely ecclesiastical. Unlike his contemporary Bonald, Joseph de Maistre regarded the temporal monarchy as an institution of altogether inferior importance to the spiritual primacy of the pope. He was by no means a political absolutist, except in so far as he regarded obedience as the first of political virtues, and he seldom loses an opportunity of stipulating for a tempered monarchy. But the pope's power is not to be tempered at all, either by councils or by the temporal power or by national churches, least of all by private judgment. The peculiarity of Joseph de Maistre is that he supports his conclusions, or if it be preferred his paradoxes, by the hardest and heaviest argument. Although a great master of rhetoric, he never makes rhetoric do duty for logic. Every now and then it is possible to detect fallacies in him, but for the most part he has succeeded in carrying matters back to those fundamental differences of opinion which hardly admit of argument, and on which men take sides in consequence chiefly of natural bent, and of predilection for one state of things rather than for another. The absolute necessity of order may be said to have been the first principle of this thinker, who, in more ways than one, will invite comparison with Hobbes. He could not conceive such order without a single visible authority, reference to which should settle all dispute. He saw that there could be no such temporal head, and in the pope he thought that he saw a spiritual substitute. The anarchic tendencies of the Revolution in politics and religion were what offended him. It ought to be added that he was profoundly and accurately learned in history and philosophy, and that the superficial blunders of the 18th-century _philosophes_ irritated him as much as their doctrines. To Voltaire in particular he shows no mercy. Of the two works named as his masterpieces, _Du Pape_ and the _Soirées de St Pétersbourg_, editions are extremely numerous. No complete edition of his works appeared till 1884-1887, when one was published at Lyons in 14 volumes. This had been preceded, and has been followed, by numerous biographies and discussions: C. Barthélemy, _L'Esprit de Joseph de Maistre_ (1859); R. de Sézeval, _Joseph de Maistre_ (1865), and J. C. Glaser, _Graf Joseph Maistre_ (same year); L. I. Moreau, _Joseph de Maistre_ (1879); F. Paulhan, _Joseph de Maistre et sa philosophie_ (1893); L. Cogordan, "Joseph de Maistre" in the _Grands écrivains français_ (1894); F. Descostes, _Joseph de Maistre avant la révolution_ (1896), and other works by the same writer; J. Mandoul, _Un Homme d'état italien: Joseph de Maistre et la politique de la maison de Savoie_ (1900); and E. Grasset, _Joseph de Maistre_ (1901). (G. Sa.)