Liberty Fund has published an elegant, faithfully translated edition of the first (1810) and longest version of Constant’s Principles of Politics Applicable to All Modern Governments (the shorter 1815 edition is available in English in the edition of Constant’s Political Writings published by Cambridge University Press). [1] The 1810 version is considerably more discursive than the pithy and carefully crafted work of the same name published in 1815. This makes reading it something of an effort. But the 1815 version has limitations. It was to some extent a livre de circonstance. By it, Constant aimed, at least in part, to justify the “Benjamine,” the framework for constitutional monarchy that he penned at Napoleon’s request during the so-called “Hundred Days” between the Emperor’s escape from Elba and his final defeat at Waterloo (Constant’s brief reconciliation with Napoleon would be a continuing source of embarrassment for this ardent opponent of despotism). The earlier, unexpurgated text, even if it lacks the finished quality of some of his later masterpieces, thus allows us to confront Constant’s political theory unalloyed. But Constant is a pleasure to read in any form. He is a stylist of the first order. His consistently wise observations about politics and human nature are presented in an epigrammatic fashion that it is impossible to imitate and that one cannot help but admire.

Constant’s work is a relatively recent addition to the canon of political theory, having been largely forgotten during the long period of radical republican and Marxist ascendancy in French intellectual life. The late French political theorist Bertrand de Jouvenel once remarked that the historical experience of Jacobin and Napoleonic despotism “turned the entire world of [French] letters to ‘constitutionalism.’” Constant was the most eloquent and thoughtful of these “constitutionalists.” His writings provide a unique resource for the effort, still much needed, to make sense of totalitarianism in our time and to craft a morally serious constitutionalist vision for the twenty-first century.

The 1810 edition of Principles of Politics begins with a particularly forceful dissection of “received ideas about the scope of political authority.” It is followed by an equally powerful delineation of the true “principles” that ought to replace them. It is in these opening discussions that the reader confronts the originality and humanity of Constantian liberalism. His is a liberalism equidistant from modern doctrines of absolute sovereignty and from any hint of conservative nostalgia for the European old regime. Against those revolutionary doctrinaires who asserted that republics are the only legitimate form of government, Constant recurs to those enduring “principles of politics [that are] independent of all constitutions” and are at the foundation of moderate politics in all its forms. He takes particular aim at the “false metaphysics” that confused human liberty with the unfettered will of the people and which mistook the popular sources of authority for a guarantee of justice and the common good. Without in any way rejecting majority rule as an ordering principle for a free society, Constant renews an older wisdom that affirmed that “there are things too heavy for human hands.” He set out to rescue liberalism from that revolutionary inebriation that refused to bow before any sacred limits or restraints.

For Constant, the French revolutionary terror revealed the monstrous consequences of the doctrine of absolute popular sovereignty. The belief that there are no inherent limits on what the sovereign people can do is both profoundly impious and remarkably blind to the tragic possibilities inherent in political life. First and foremost, it ignores that natural justice which is independent of the wills of individuals or peoples. Constant never stopped repeating that “there is a part of human existence which remains individual and independent, and by right beyond all political jurisdiction.” But the modern doctrine of popular sovereignty is also based on the fatal delusion that the people in their collective capacity are somehow capable of directly governing themselves. It ignores the necessarily “representative” character of all modern political institutions. Outside of the austere constraints of the classical city, people never govern themselves directly, they are never simply “in charge.” The sophistry that equates or masks the dictatorial measures of the few with the “will of the people” reinforces the power of unscrupulous demagogues who will not hesitate to proceed with “the slaughter of the people piecemeal.”

Confronted with an unprecedented form of despotism, one seemingly justified by modern philosophical principles, Constant reaffirmed the limits that are at the heart of all decent politics. In marked contradistinction to Hobbes and Rousseau, Constant denies that any government or society has the right to exercise absolute sovereignty of any sort. In Principles of Politics as well as in his other major political writings, Constant articulated a liberalism that had learned from the debacle of popular revolution gone awry, a liberalism that would never forget that “sovereignty exists only in a limited or relative way”. Like Burke or the French counterrevolutionaries such as Joseph de Maistre, Constant attacks the pretensions of modern philosophy and affirms a spiritual realm or space above the human will. But the ultimate source of these limits upon the human will are ill-defined, to say the least. As Book VIII (“On Religious Freedom”) of Principles of Politics makes particularly clear, Constant is not a believer in any conventional sense. Ever the romantic, he evokes religion as a reminder of the sublime and as a symbol of the ineffable, a consolation amid misery and a source of generous feelings and noble action. In the end, though, one cannot help but draw the conclusion that, for Constant, religion is something of an illusion, a salutary consolation in a world bereft of sure foundations. Constant saw the need for something like natural law without ever really being able to define its content or to vouch for its reality. He is finally more clear about what he rejects—absolute sovereignty or unlimited willfulness—than he is about what he affirms. In this he is the forerunner of certain anti-totalitarian currents of thought that would become influential in the twentieth century. Faced with the deadly consequences of the totalitarian denial of a natural moral order, a series of prominent philosophers and political thinkers invoked the need for something like the natural law without being able to say very much about its content. Constant is the first modern thinker to limn this “negative” argument for an order of things above the human will. Like many twentieth-century anti-totalitarian thinkers, he is too sophisticated simply or wholly to believe in the old verities and far too decent to dispense with them all together.

It was Constant’s fate to be despised by the partisans of the French Revolution while being alien to the obsessions of counter-revolutionary thought. While Constant opposed modern sophistries about unlimited human will, he remained faithful to the principles of 1789 properly understood. That is, he opposed the excesses of modern philosophical rationalism but never rejected a rational articulation of political principles as the French reactionaries were prone to do. In Constant’s judgment, there was an underlying, unacknowledged complicity between the most radical of modern revolutionaries and the most determined of their opponents. Both the fanatical friends and the fevered critics of the French Revolution tended to confuse the sophisms that justified revolutionary terror with the principles that are at the foundation of free or moderate politics. Constant adamantly refused this identification. His noble book can best be understood as a vindication of modern liberty against both its false friends and its intransigent enemies. Its false friends defended freedom severed from natural justice and thus provided powerful intellectual support for terror and tyranny. Its reactionary enemies confused the murderous excesses of the French revolution with the true nature of freedom in modern times. Constant understood himself to be the political philosopher of the principled center, the scourge of those who have resigned themselves to despotism in the name of either a glorious past or a glorious future.

More broadly, throughout Principles of Politics, Constant defends a conception of robust, constitutional government against the twin evils of anarchy and despotism. Constant’s political liberalism appreciates that there can be no guarantee for individual liberties without a strong and effective state that is truly able and willing to govern. Weak governments are ultimately incompatible with political freedom since they invite those in positions of responsibility to usurp those necessary powers that are constitutionally denied to them. Constant, however, directs the full might of his fury at those revolutionary ideologues who justified all sorts of “arbitrary measures” to protect society against real or imagined enemies. To be sure, he in no way denies that a free society has the obligation to defend itself against foreign threats and internal subversion. But in the course of the French Revolution a series of arbitrary and cruel measures were directed against faithful Catholics, members of suspect social groups, those deemed to be potential enemies, and finally those decent souls who refused to identify freedom or patriotism with revolutionary terror. In the guise of protecting “public safety” the various French revolutionary regimes pursued “individual existence into its most intimate retreats.” This unjustified resort to emergency measures corrupts political life; it is subversive of those habits that are at the foundation of a peaceful and law-abiding society.

Constant establishes that arbitrary government is a moral blight of the first order. Furthermore, he has a second objection: it is also finally incapable of giving rise to anything permanent or great. It leaves disorder and violence in its wake and more often than not “devours its own children.” Constant contrasts the remarkable solidity and vigor of “English freedom” with the divisions, conspiracies, and repression that marked French revolutionary despotism. He points out that political freedom is not merely “a barrier to government” but one of its most powerful supports “guiding it on its way, sustaining it in its efforts, moderating it in its onsets of madness, and encouraging it in its moments of apathy.” Constant persuasively argues that only free political life is ultimately capable of combining political legitimacy with political effectiveness. Only a regime of political freedom can give rise to responsible citizens who are truly worthy of their freedom and a government worthy of them.

For Constant, however, freedom is not a unitary thing. Constant famously argued in his 1819 essay on “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to the Moderns” that freedom means something quite different for modern Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Americans than it did for the warrior citizens of the great republics of classical antiquity. This distinction is the subject of the lengthy sixteenth book (“On Political Authority in the Ancient World”) of Principles of Politics. The broad themes of Constant’s discussion are probably familiar enough to contemporary readers: the ancients “brought together great political freedom and an almost total absence of individual freedom” while the moderns prefer peace, individual freedom, and commercial prosperity to the public liberty which was the glory of the ancient world. These differences are not merely one of “life-style preferences” or of “culture differences” as we like to say today. Constant’s distinction depends upon a philosophy of history that distinguishes between two great historical dispensations, the old and the new, the ancient and the modern. The ancients are the youth of the human species. We moderns are free to admire the vigor, nobility, energy, and dignity of our ancient forebears. But we must not allow admiration to turn into a deadly, because impossible, form of imitation. “The ancients were right in the youth of moral life. The moderns are in its maturity or perhaps its old age.” In keeping with the last ambiguity, we moderns, Constant maintains, are incapable of affirming anything with full conviction. We are the children of skepticism and doubt and therefore cannot return to the noble simplicity of the ancient city. The “modern imitators of antiquity” such as Rousseau were not wrong to admire the greatness of the ancients but their writings provided support for an intolerable despotism because they never came to terms with the anachronistic character of ancient liberty in modern times. Constant does not deny that the ancients provide enduring models for that virtue necessary to preserve even a modern society. He writes eloquently about the ongoing real if subordinate role of citizen participation in sustaining a free society. But political freedom in the modern world must be based on respect for individual independence and freedom of thought more than the deliberate and self-conscious cultivation of civic virtue. There is no place for a Numa or Lycurgus in the modern City. When the French revolutionaries attempted to emulate the virtues of antiquity, they not surprisingly inaugurated a new reign of terror. We must read our Plutarch but not attempt to recover some mythical republican treasure. Like Montesquieu, Constant appeals to what Pierre Manent has called the “imaginary” or “aesthetic” authority of ancient virtue. That authority becomes directly political only at our own peril.

The reader of this remarkable work, therefore, is left in something of a quandary. Constant eloquently articulates the permanent principles of free or moderate government but at the same time highlights the inability of modern man to affirm principle with anything resembling conviction. The great French political theorist condemns revolutionary tyranny both for violating natural right and for being an historical anachronism. He defends a natural moral order applicable to man as man and then divides human beings into two seemingly unbridgeable historical dispensations. At various times he appeals to the authority of history and to those verities that transcend all historical change. His writings provide powerful support both for those who condemn modern tyranny as an aberration and those who argue that it is a logical development of certain unwise modern principles. He takes Hobbes, Bentham, and Rousseau to task for providing theoretical support for new forms of despotism and yet characterizes each as a philosopher “friendly to humanity.” Constant’s thought abounds in paradoxes and more. But it would be a terrible mistake to dismiss Constant as a confused or contradictory thinker. His contradictions are, in truth, the contradictions of all conservative-minded liberals who are wary of thorough-going modernity but know no real alternative to the historical adventure which is “modern liberty.” Constant is a necessary companion for every thoughtful person who tries to steer a principled middle path between reactionary nostalgia and progressive illusions. His measured, humane liberalism is superior to nearly everything that goes by that name in the contemporary academic and political worlds.

Notes
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1. Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments, by Benjamin Constant, translated by Dennis O’Keeffe; Liberty Fund, 558 pages, $22. Go back to the text.