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A Critical Overview of the Constant Revival City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research CUNY Graduate Center 2004 Why Constant? A Critical Overview of the Constant Revival Helena Rosenblatt CUNY Graduate Center How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_pubs/222 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] 1 Why Constant? (A Critical Overview of the Constant Revival) Helena Rosenblatt Hunter College and the Graduate Center City University of New York Recent years have seen a remarkable renewal of interest in the thought of Benjamin Constant (1767-1830). For long recognized mainly as the author of the literary masterpiece Adolphe, it is now Constant’s political writings that are increasingly the focus of attention. Paperback editions of his major works are presently available in both French and English, helping to establish his growing reputation as a founding father of modern liberalism. As a seminal liberal thinker, it is certain that Constant’s stature has benefited from the recent climate of opinion in the western world and, in particular, from the return to fashion of liberalism as a social and political doctrine. Paradoxically, however, this political climate has also led to some problems, since presentist concerns have left an undeniable imprint on the image we have of Constant. Philosophers and political theorists, rather than historians, have dominated the Constant revival. By and large, moreover, these high-profile Constant scholars have been a rather gloomy lot. Disillusioned with modern politics and anxious about democracy, they have read Constant as a prophet of all their own doubts and fears. The Constant they admire is someone who criticizes, denounces and lays bare the many problems confronting modernity. Thus Constant has served as a useful tool to theorists and social 2 commentators with polemical and mainly contemporary purposes in mind. This is why Constant scholarship often seems to say more about the modern scholars who study him than it does about Constant. Like all great thinkers, Constant spoke in terms that would transcend his immediate historical context. Deeply convinced that he was living on the threshold of a new age, he deliberately addressed himself to the “modern” men and “friends of liberty” he hoped to sway, often using very general, even universalizing, language. Blessed not only with a keen eye for detail, but an uncommon capacity for analytical thinking, he consistently sought to identify and articulate the “big picture,” or what he thought were the broader sociological and political patterns in history. In so doing, he became one of the first to advocate many of the liberal values we still cherish today, from “small government” to individual rights and liberties. All of this, along with his obvious literary talents, help to explain why Constant’s writings seem so accessible to us today. He strikes a chord with modern readers, who often marvel at his uncanny ability to speak directly to them. It is said, for example, that Constant’s world is one that is very “familiar” to us.1 So “close” is Constant’s thought that sometimes we even have trouble “seeing” it.2 Interestingly, it is when Constant is being critical and diagnostic that his writings seem to have the greatest resonance. For example, what Plamenatz admired most about Constant was the way he identified things that “moved him to fear or disgust.” Moreover, Constant described these fearful things in a way that was “larger than life,” which is why he was able to speak to us across the 1 John Plamenatz, “Introduction” in Readings from Liberal Writers, New York, Barnes & Noble, 1965, p. 30. 2 Tzvetan Todorov, A Passion for Democracy. The Life, the Women He Loved and the Thought of Benjamin Constant, New York: Algora Publishing, 1999, p. 6 . 3 centuries. Thus, to Plamenatz, as to many others like him, Constant’s value lies not so much in what he has to say about his own times, but in the way “he seems to prophesy rather than describe.” When reading Constant, “we think of our own times rather than his.” To Plamenatz, it often sounded as if Constant were speaking of Hitler’s Germany.3 Undoubtedly, it is anti-totalitarianism that has been the most powerful magnet drawing political theorists to Constant. Isaiah Berlin is just one among a prominent and growing group of liberals who worry about the “excesses of democratic politics” and the totalitarian potential lurking within. In his famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,”4 Berlin warned that the connection between democracy and individual liberty was more tenuous than many of his contemporaries believed. He showcased Constant as one of the first thinkers to realize this and who therefore wisely endorsed a “negative,” rather than “positive” conception of freedom. In contrast to theorists like Rousseau, to whom freedom meant the possession of a share in the public power, Constant viewed freedom as “non-interference” or lack of coercion. Having witnessed the French Revolution, and the infernal dynamics that led to the Terror, Constant understood that liberty in the Rousseauean, “positive” sense could easily end up destroying many of the “negative” liberties that both he and Berlin held sacred. Berlin’s interpretation of Rousseau was strongly influenced by the theories of Jacob Talmon.5 Both Talmon and Berlin understood Rousseau’s theory of democracy to be proto-totalitarian. In contrast, Constant knew that one should not automatically equate liberty with democratic participation. Through his own life experiences he had imbibed 3 J. Plamenatz, Readings, p. 30. 4 Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. 5 See in particular Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, New York: Praeger, 1960. 4 the important lesson that “democracy can still crush individuals as mercilessly as any previous ruler.”6 Crucially, Constant realized that freedom meant drawing a frontier between the area of a person’s private life and that of public authority. This is what made him a much- admired founder of modern liberalism and, indeed, “the most eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy.”7 Berlin’s essay obviously had a polemical purpose. He himself admitted that his emphasis on negative liberty was due to his fear of twentieth century dictatorships, in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere in the world. By the time he wrote his essay, the main danger was undoubtedly Soviet-style communism; and his goal in writing it was to defend a liberal conception of freedom against contemporary communist thought. With this aim in mind, Berlin focused on those aspects of Constant’s argument that could shore up his own. He used Constant to warn of the tendencies modern democratic movements have to become totalitarian. Discerning readers have noted that Berlin’s essay “updates,” 8 rather than elucidates, Constant’s argument. For it is an obvious fact that Constant knew nothing of Nazism or Stalinism when he wrote his famous essay on the liberty of the moderns, so admired by Berlin. Constant of course had Napoleon in mind and not Hitler, Stalin or Marxism. Indeed, treatments of Constant more attentive to his historical context and intended message have shown that he wrote this piece not to denounce positive liberty and political participation, but to warn against their decline. 9 They point, in particular, to the end of the essay, where Constant alerts his contemporaries to the tendency modern 6 I. Berlin, Four Essays, pp. 163-4. 7 Ibid., p. 126. 8 Claude Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin’s Liberalism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, pp. 10 & 140? 9 James Mitchell Lee, “Doux Commerce, Social Organization, and Modern Liberty in the Thought of Benjamin Constant,” Annales Benjamin Constant 25, 2002. 5 men have “to surrender too easily” their right of participating in political power. In this part of the essay, Constant speaks glowingly of liberty in the positive sense as “the most powerful, the most effective means of self-development that heaven has given us.” 10 Furthermore, readers interested in uncovering Constant’s intended meaning have shown that his lifelong aim was not so much to distinguish positive from negative liberty, but to find ways of reconciling and sustaining them both. Counter-posing Rousseau to Constant is therefore an exercise of dubious value for understanding the latter’s thought. Several scholars have noted how indebted to Rousseau Constant actually was and have determined that his purpose was never to reject Rousseau, but rather to harmonize his thought with that of Montesquieu. 11 But Berlin’s purposes led him to ignore such inconvenient aspects of Constant’s thought. Anticipating a scholarly trend, Berlin also emphasized Constant’s oppositional and critical side while downplaying his more positive contributions to political and social theory, such as his constitutional thought and his lifelong work on religion. Had Berlin acknowledged these more constructive aspects of Constant’s oeuvre, he might have uncovered a more optimistic Constant, a man who believed in progress and human “perfectibility,” and who valued both self- 10 Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns,” in Political Writings, p. 327. This does not prevent some fans of republicanism from continuing to caricature Constant’s liberalism as the epitome of the “negative,” laissez-faire type. See, for example, Alain Boyer, “De l’actualité des Anciens Républicains,” in Libéralisme et républicanisme, Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2000, pp. 37-38; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 17-18; Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp.
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