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The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville

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The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville e Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton e Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton A Dissertation Submitted to the University of Chicago’s Faculty of the Division of the Social Sciences in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy for the Committee on Social ought, Chaired by F. A. Hayek B R R Copyright © 2010 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute Published under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Ludwig von Mises Institute 518 West Magnolia Avenue Auburn, Alabama 36832 Ph: (334) 844-2500 Fax: (334) 844-2583 mises.org 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN: ###-#-######-##-# Contents Introduction iii 1 Benjamin Constant 1 2 Alexis de Tocqueville 57 3 Lord Acton 107 4 Conclusions 149 i Introduction Religion and liberty—few issues are more controversial among current-day libertarians. At least four positions can be distinguished. One well-known position holds that religion and liberty are separate spheres that are almost hermetically sealed from one another, while any historical point of contact is purely accidental or contingent. According to another wide-spread position, religion and liberty are outright antagonistic. ese advocates see in religion the most deadly foe of individual liberty, an even greater enemy of mankind than the state. A third position contends that religion and liberty are complementary: on the one hand, pious men facilitate the workings of a society with minimal or no government and, on the other hand, political liberty facilitates religious life as each one sees fit. Finally, some thinkers defend a fourth position, namely, that religion—and in particular the Christian faith—is fundamental for individual liberty, both as far as the historical record is concerned and on the conceptual level. In our thoroughly secularised culture, the third position is held to be daring and the fourth insolent. Yet today, I do believe that they are both true and that the third is a skin-deep statement of the truth, while the fourth goes to the root of the matter. Once a pagan interventionist, I first saw the truths of libertarian political theory, and eventually I started to realize that the light of these truths was but a reflection of the encompassing and eternal light that radiates from God through His Son and the Holy Spirit. is realisation has been a slow process and I could not say now when and where it will end. But I can pinpoint the circumstances of its beginnings. I can pinpoint the one writer who got this stone in me rolling. At the beginning of my academic career I had the good fortune and privilege to translate Ralph Raico’s magnificent essay on the history of iii iv CONSTANT, TOCQUEVILLE, AND LORD ACTON German liberalism into my mother tongue.1 is book brilliantly displays the virtues of its author: his scholarship, his wittiness, his righteousness, and his courage. For me it was an eye-opener. It set the record straight on the main protagonists. In particular, Friedrich Naumann, a man of undeserved libertarian fame, was thrown out of the pantheon of the champions of liberty, while Eugen Richter, today virtually unknown, was elevated to his rightful place as the foremost leader of the fin-de-siècle German party of liberty. Ralph Raico explained that the German liberals failed, not least of all, because at some point they started missing their target. Rather than opposing the state, they began to see the enemy in organised religion. ey endorsed Bismarck’s repressive laws designed to wage a culture war on the Catholic Church. A typical case in point was Rudolf Virchow, a surgeon, professor, and liberal party leader, who displayed the very same haughty and ignorant atti- tude toward organised religion that is also the intellectual plague of modern culture, and of modern libertarianism in particular. Ralph Raico’s book highlighted the lines of continuity between the Virchows of all times and the French Enlightenment. e thoroughly anti-clerical writings of Voltaire, Rousseau, Didérot, d’Alembert, Helvétius, and so many other apparent champions of individual liberty and opponents of oppression had created a continental European culture of liberalism in which the antagonism of faith and freedom was taken for granted. As a consequence, religious people have always been suspicious of this movement. It seemed as though one had to choose between religion and liberty. However, Professor Raico also stressed that there was another tradition within classical liberal thought, one that recognised the interdependence between religion and liberty. is tradition includes most notably the three great thinkers that Professor Raico has portrayed in his 1970 doctoral dis- sertation, which explains how the political thought of Benjamin Constant, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Lord Acton flowed from their religious convic- tions. is early work is here reprinted and made available for all people of good will. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has not lost its timeliness and importance as a tool for re-understanding the history of liberalism. I salute its publication and predict it will open many more eyes. Jörg Guido Hülsmann Angers, France June 2010 1See Ralph Raico, Die Partei der Freiheit. Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Liberalis- mus (Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius, 1999). CHAPTER 1 Benjamin Constant “He loved liberty as other men love power” was the judgment passed on Benjamin Constant by a nineteenth-century admirer. Constant’s great public concern, all throughout his adult life, was the attainment of a free society, especially for his adopted country, France. And if a by no means uncritical French commentator exaggerated in calling him the inventor of liberalism,1 it is nevertheless true that in the second and third decades of the last century, when liberalism was the spectre haunting Europe, Con- stant shared with Jeremy Bentham the honor of being the chief theo- retical champion of the creed. His influence—particularly because his involvement in French politics under the Restoration regime gave him a platform in the most attentively watched legislature on the continent— was widespread; he had important groups of followers in France, Italy, and south Germany, and disciples as far away as Russia.2 e comparison of Constant with Bentham is one worth making in detail, although this will not be attempted here. While each can be taken as representative of one of the great streams of early nineteenth-century liberal thought, their differences were almost as significant as their similarities. 1Émile Faguet, Politiques et moralistes du XIXe siècle, première série (Paris: Boiven, 1891), p. 255. 2William Holdheim, Benjamin Constant (New York: Hillary, 1961), p. 73. 1 2 CONSTANT, TOCQUEVILLE, AND LORD ACTON Bentham and his disciples refined the rationalist and utilitarian position of most of eighteenth-century French liberalism; Constant, on the other hand, occupied himself with breaking through this mold and attaching liberalism to the romantic and historic thought emerging into prominence in his day, especially in Germany. Associated with this is his effort, which was to be repeated in differing forms by Tocqueville and Acton, to end the centuries-old hostility between Christianity and liberal thought, and to turn religious faith to the advantage of the free society, now confronting new and peculiarly dangerous enemies. It is this endeavor on the part of these three writers which will comprise the substance of this paper. While we may pass over Constant’s generally erratic upbringing and the complex romantic life which has constituted the bulk of most bi- ographies of him, this does not imply that his personal experiences were irrelevant to his political and social thought.3 One phase of his biography in particular is of prime importance in understanding his thought and cannot be avoided: that is the fact that Constant began thinking on social problems under the sway of the ideas of the French Enlightenment, and that a good deal of his intellectual career consists of the struggle to free himself from this mental framework. Of key importance in the formation of his earlier views were his participation in the salon of Madame Suard, where he came into contact with La Harpe, Marmontel and other rem- nants of the pre-Revolutionary philosophical demimonde; his liaison with Madame de Charriere, herself a perfect Encyclopedist femme d’esprit in thought and sensibility;4 and his association with Talleyrand, Abbé Sieyès and others in the Cercle Constitutionnel, where he quickly became a young 3A recent interpreter has correctly stated of Constant: “Vièle seiner Ideen lassen sich ganz überhaupt nur verstehen aus seiner Biographie, aus den Einsichten, die er auf.seinem eigenene Lebensweg empfing.” Lothar Gall, Benjamin Constant; Seine Politische Ideenwelt und der deutsche Vormärz (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1963), pp. 1–2. Cf., Faguet, op. cit., pp. 212–213. 4Of Madame de Charrière, Constant himself relates (in Adolphe): “J’avais contracté dans mes conversations avec la femme qui la première avait développé mes idées, une insurmontable aversion pour toutes les maximes communes, et pour toutes les formules dogmatiques.” Œuvres, ed. by Alfred Roulin (Paris: Pléiade, 1957), p. 50. It was during a sojourn at her home that Constant first conceived and outlined his project for a great work on religion. Holdheim calls her, as Constant depicts her in the Cahier Rouge, “almost a symbol of the Age of Reason” and “the very personification of the hero’s great temptation to dissolve all the apparent solidity of the surrounding world in the test tube of the critical intellect.” Ibid., pp. 34–35. BENJAMIN CONSTANT 3 star and was made secretary.5 us, Constant commenced his intellectual career endowed with a store of conceptions and preconceptions on the great issues of social and political theory, especially on religion, ethics and the place of the individual in society.
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