"I made history and therefore did not find time to write it."
"The conservative principles are applicable to the most diverse situations; their worship is not enclosed within narrow bounds; they are enemies of anarchy, moral and material."
"For the Napoleonic system he substituted a system of his own. He announced himself the friend of all absolute monarchs, and he declared that no country had any other hope of salvation than in a benevolent despotism. His aim and purpose was to check the growth of representative government wherever it threatened an appearance. Europe was at peace, and he still shaped his policy as though Napoleon were leading to victory an army of Jacobins." — Charles Whibley, English journalist
In his rambling substack, the British "leaver" politologist and general demagogue Dominic Cummings actually manages to extract an interesting bit of characterization. When the famous diplomat and stateman Metternich (1773-1859) arrived in an unfamiliar city, he would climb the highest point he could find, and map the terrain spread out below him — fixing the streets into a single ordered picture he could hold in his mind. His statecraft was the identical gesture performed on Europe. He stood above the continent and took in the whole constellation of powers as one structured system.
If the world is a structure in equilibrium, then the supreme political good is stability — the balance preserved, the whole defended against anything that would disturb its symmetry. Metternich was, in the plainest terms, an enemy of change. He devoted his life to freezing the European order and resisting the two great "destabilizers" of his age — revolution and nationalism — wherever they appeared, from the streets of Vienna to the Italian provinces. All this is quite typical of LSI drive to maintain the structure, guarding it against any source of instability by suppressing it. His task, as he viewed it, was to keep it from coming apart. He managed this by the use of government censorship, vast networks of secret police, and the infamous Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, which limited freedom of the press and dealt with radicalism at German universities.
What distinguishes this from a merely pragmatic conservatism is the static character of the end. Certainly, Metternich was an extremely flexible man when it came to the wheeling-and-dealing means by which he achieved things. However, all that was done to accomplish a very unyielding goal. Where a dynamic realist, more LIE-ish politician, uses the present moment to build toward something new, Metternich used every strategy to ensure the new does not come. That subordination of all cleverness to a fixed, static order is what makes him the structural order-keeper, and not an enterprising opportunist.
Metternich and his arch-rival Napoleon
In Metternich's memoirs, he reduces the whole of high politics to a contest between his own principled conscience and the corruption or folly of others, invokes his "immovable strength of character," and recounts it all, as one cataloguer dryly noted, with the clarity and arrogance for which he was famous. This is the LSI's characteristic conviction of being correct, of standing on settled and rational principle while the world's chaos breaks against it. And the certainty coexisted, with no apparent strain, alongside a reputation for systematic lying that even the likes of Talleyrand (probably intermediate SEI/SEE) noted. For him, deception was simply one of the instruments by which the righteous order was maintained.
LSI's can vary in what socionical terminology calls "emotivism" — general emotional flexibility and the ability to emotionally adapt to others, despite formally belonging to the emotivist pole. Metternich's "emotivism" was increased in relation to the type standard: he was, by wide contemporary agreement, a pleasant man to talk to, charming, even witty, deliberately and effortlessly courteous even to men he was working to destroy. The structure of his aims was fixed, while the surface of his manner was quite flexible. This ability to easily adapt to an interlocutor is also a contributor to general mendacity, in which the LSI type as a whole scores average. He fit the "flexible ethics, rigid logics" assignment of LSI functions better than many other LSI's — a rigid conserver of the European order who was also a very agreeable company in person. His patronage of many famous composers, including Rossini, can be explained through other means than "suggestive Fe", but is perfectly compatible with it.
Liberalism and nationalism — in his day barely distinguishable, two faces of the single revolutionary force dissolving the old dynastic order — went on to win the future and to write the history which cast him as the arch-reactionary and the cynical gravedigger of freedom. While this picture is not really incorrect, modern historiography is a touch kinder to him, stressing constraints he operated under. Other reactionary statesmen, like emperor Francis himself, often went too far despite Metternich's own warnings that limited concessions can stabilize the system, not destroy it. Historians point out the genuine fragility of the Austrian Empire, a sprawling multi-national state that nationalism would (and eventually did) tear apart, so that his resistance to it was not mere reaction but the defense of a real and threatened structure — and they credit his general vision for a peaceful, united Europe. In any case, the apparatus he built to govern was the whole machinery of surveillance and suppression turned to the single end of keeping the system still. The "Age of Metternich" is named so, because for a generation he very nearly succeeded in stopping history, freezing Europe into the shape he had mapped from his vantage point. That it could not last is the tragedy of a "political" LSI.
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