Reading Notes on Benjamin Constant
The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns
Editor’s note: These notes by Phocaean are a supplement to the class session we held on Constant. The notes are too long to view in your email.
I have numbered the paragraphs to the English edition of Benjamin Constant’s The Liberty of Ancients Compared With That of Moderns (1819). I’ll give brief comments to help the reader “unpack” the meaning of Political Liberty.
Outline: ¶¶1-6 (introduction); ¶¶7-25 (main argument); ¶¶ 26-33 (application of main augment to Revolutionary France); ¶¶ 34-40 (some general lessons drawn); ¶¶ 41-56 (soft despotism is also to be feared, a balance must be struck).
I wish to submit for your attention a few distinctions, still rather new, between two kinds of liberty: these differences have thus far remained unnoticed, or at least insufficiently remarked. The first is the liberty the exercise of which was so dear to the ancient peoples; the second the one the enjoyment of which is especially precious to the modern nations. If I am right, this investigation will prove interesting from two different angles.
Firstly, the confusion of these two kinds of liberty has been amongst us, in the all too famous days of our revolution, the cause of many an evil. France was exhausted by useless experiments, the authors of which, irritated by their poor success, sought to force her to enjoy the good she did not want, and denied her the good which she did want. Secondly, called as we are by our happy revolution (I call it happy, despite its excesses, because I concentrate my attention on its results) to enjoy the benefits of representative government, it is curious and interesting to discover why this form of government, the only one in the shelter of which we could find some freedom and peace today, was totally unknown to the free nations of antiquity.
Constant is going to blame the failures of the French Revolution on the attempt by leading revolutionaries to force ancient liberty onto modern political conditions. Throughout, he will flatter modern Frenchmen as he does here: the revolution was overall a good thing and modern liberty is completely new. Progress is real. What I’m going to bring out in my comments is the fact that Constant is deliberately misleading his listeners, because he doesn’t think modern liberty is “new” so much as a degraded form of liberty. If he were to speak candidly, he would argue that his times are degraded and therefore the ancient experience of liberty is not available to modern men. He would urge them to adopt a “second best” solution. He did not speak candidly because inspiring men is easier if what is new will also be what is best. Constant did not want Frenchmen demoralized by the idea that their times were such that the only available liberty was a degraded liberty.
I know that there are writers who have claimed to distinguish traces of it among some ancient peoples, in the Lacedaemonian republic for example, or amongst our ancestors the Gauls; but they are mistaken. The Lacedaemonian government was a monastic aristocracy, and in no way a representative government. The power of the kings was limited, but it was limited by the ephors, and not by men invested with a mission similar to that which election confers today on the defenders of our liberties. The ephors, no doubt, though originally created by the kings, were elected by the people. But there were only five of them. Their authority was as much religious as political; they even shared in the administration of government, that is, in the executive power. Thus their prerogative, like that of almost all popular magistrates in the ancient republics, far from being simply a barrier against tyranny became sometimes itself an insufferable tyranny.
Modern liberty is guaranteed by limited government, which is typically based on a representative model. The “representatives” in Sparta were not a limiting force. Constant calls them a tyrannical force. Their tyranny is based on their prerogative. What distinguishes ancient and modern regimes is the scope of the prerogative given to ancient rulers. When Constant writes “political and religious” you can read “public and private” insofar as religion becomes a private affair in modern politics. The distinction between the public and the private, or between state and society, is the typical foundation of modern liberty and it was “unknown” to the ancients.
The regime of the Gauls, which quite resembled the one that a certain party would like to restore to us, was at the same time theocratic and warlike. The priests enjoyed unlimited power. The military class or nobility had markedly insolent and oppressive privileges; the people had no rights and no safeguards.
I am not sure what period of Gallic history Constant is referencing, but it sounds pretty cool. His outright rejection of it follows the same line as his rejection of Spartan liberty: there are no “rights and safeguards” because there is a combination of political and religious power. Rights and safeguards are the boundaries set between the public and private in modern liberty.
In Rome the tribunes had, up to a point, a representative mission. They were the organs of those plebeians whom the oligarchy -- which is the same in all ages -- had submitted, in overthrowing the kings, to so harsh a slavery. The people, however, exercised a large part of the political rights directly. They met to vote on the laws and to judge the patricians against whom charges had been leveled: thus there were, in Rome, only feeble traces of a representative system.
Rome? Constant did not lead the reader to think he was going to discuss Rome. He mentioned Sparta and the Gauls in paragraph 3: the error made by writers was about those two, not Rome. Rome did not have a representative system and therefore it is like Sparta and the Gauls; however, its lack of representation is not due to the same causes. No mention is made of political and religious power. Instead we see that an oligarchy oppresses the plebeians and unlike the systems of Sparta and Gaul which are lost forever, oligarchy is the same in all ages. The Roman problem is not a peculiarly Roman problem in the way Spartan and Gallic problems were specific to those two nations.
This system is a discovery of the moderns, and you will see, Gentlemen, that the condition of the human race in antiquity did not allow for the introduction or establishment of an institution of this nature. The ancient peoples could neither feel the need for it, nor appreciate its advantages. Their social organization led them to desire an entirely different freedom from the one which this system grants to us. Tonight's lecture will be devoted to demonstrating this truth to you.
This paragraph concludes Constant’s introduction. We learn that the three terrible governments mentioned by Constant were not considered terrible by the Spartans, Gauls, and Romans. They did not feel the need for modern liberty nor did they desire the sorts of freedoms enjoyed by modern men.
First ask yourselves, Gentlemen, what an Englishman, a French-man, and a citizen of the United States of America understand today by the word 'liberty'. For each of them it is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practice it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone's right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interests, or to profess the religion which they and their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is most compatible with their inclinations or whims. Finally it is everyone's right to exercise some influence on the administration of the government, either by electing all or particular officials, or through representations, petitions, demands to which the authorities are more or less compelled to pay heed. Now compare this liberty with that of the ancients.
A look at the French text would be useful here but I don’t have that available–supposing the translation is accurate, it is interesting that there are Englishmen and Frenchmen but not Americans. The Americans seem less “tribal” in this sense. These modern peoples cherish a variety of lesser freedoms. Constant begins by describing freedom from suffering injustice. Next is the freedom to follow one’s own inclinations. Third is the freedom to act collectively with others for non-political purposes. Fourth is the freedom to have some mediated say in politics. The list of freedoms Constant produced is from the least impressive to the more impressive, with the most impressive reserved for that type of liberty enjoyed by the ancients.
The latter consisted in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace; in forming alliances with foreign governments; in voting laws, in pronouncing judgments; in examining the accounts, the acts, the stewardship of the magistrates; in calling them to appear in front of the assembled people, in accusing, condemning or absolving them. But if this was what the ancients called liberty, they admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community. You find among them almost none of the enjoyments which we have just seen form part of the liberty of the moderns. All private actions were submitted to a severe surveillance. No importance was given to individual independence, neither in relation to opinions, nor to labor, nor, above all, to religion. The right to choose one's own religious affiliation, a right which we regard as one of the most precious, would have seemed to the ancients a crime and a sacrilege. In the domains which seem to us the most useful, the authority of the social body interposed itself and obstructed the will of individuals. Among the Spartans, Therpandrus could not add a string to his lyre without causing offense to the ephors. In the most domestic of relations the public authority again intervened. The young Lacedaemonian could not visit his new bride freely. In Rome, the censors cast a searching eye over family life. The laws regulated customs, and as customs touch on everything, there was hardly anything that the laws did not regulate.
The ancients, and here Constant speaks of the Spartans and Romans, enjoyed actual power in the state. Constant mentions that this power was connected to a loss of “individual independence” but doesn’t say why these two things went together. Does exercising the sovereign power preclude individual independence?
Someone in modern times obviously has the liberty of the ancients: men still need to deliberate over war and peace, form alliances, pass laws, deliver judgments, and audit lesser magistrates. It is shocking to say that the difference between the ancient and modern conceptions of liberty is holding power, insofar as there is no getting rid of power. It is not shocking, we modern readers are quite used to it, to hear about our superiority on account of our individual freedoms.
Thus among the ancients the individual, almost always sovereign in public affairs, was a slave in all his private relations. As a citizen, he decided on peace and war; as a private individual, he was constrained, watched and repressed in all his movements; as a member of the collective body, he interrogated, dismissed, condemned, beggared, exiled, or sentenced to death his magistrates and superiors; as a subject of the collective body he could himself be deprived of his status, stripped of his privileges, banished, put to death, by the discretionary will of the whole to which he belonged. Among the moderns, on the contrary, the individual, independent in his private life, is, even in the freest of states, sovereign only in appearance. His sovereignty is restricted and almost always suspended. If, at fixed and rare intervals, in which he is again surrounded by precautions and obstacles, he exercises this sovereignty, it is always only to renounce it.
The ancient individual exercised sovereignty but was “in a sense” a slave. He was a slave “in his private relations.” Constant gives two examples of how this was so. As a private individual he was “constrained, watched and repressed in all his movements” and “could be deprived of his status, stripped of his privileges, banished, put to death.” If modern liberty differed “in kind” we might find that modern individuals are completely free in their movements and completely free from legal punishments, but not even under the most idealized modern theories are citizens free from punishment for breaking the law. Which is a way of saying modern man is a slave in his “private relations” as well, just less so. But if modern man is a slave, and the only categories are ancient and modern, then all men are, to varying degrees, slaves in their “private relations.” The private relations are not the realm of liberty. This of course is not what Constant wants the listener to conclude though I argue it could have been his meaning.
I must at this point, Gentlemen, pause for a moment to anticipate an objection which may be addressed to me. There was in antiquity a republic where the enslavement of individual existence to the collective body was not as complete as I have described it. This republic was the most famous of all: you will guess that I am speaking of Athens. I shall return to it later, and in subscribing to the truth of this fact, I shall also indicate its cause. We shall see why, of all the ancient states, Athens was the one which most resembles the modern ones. Everywhere else social jurisdiction was unlimited. The ancients, as Condorcet says, had no notion of individual rights. Men were, so to speak, merely machines, whose gears and cog-wheels were regulated by the law. The same subjection characterized the golden centuries of the Roman republic; the individual was in some way lost in the nation, the citizen in the city. We shall now trace this essential difference between the ancients and ourselves back to its source.
Constant denies that the Athenian regime provides grounds for rejecting his view. He says he will deal with this objection later, and does so in paragraphs 21 through 22. Now, having promised his reader that he can explain away the appearance of individual liberty in a place like Athens, Constant asks the reader to accept that the ancients were “merely machines” completely subjugated to law. This view of his, which he attributes to Condorcet, goes completely against the way he had described the ancients above in paragraph 8. Constant had said that the ancients were slaves in their private lives, but rulers publicly. This precludes them being machines and “cogs”--calling them machines and cogs actually brings out the absurdity of calling the men who make the laws “slaves” to those laws; slaves act according to the choice of a master, cogs and machines operate according to a maker; the ancients manifestly acted according to their own choice. I believe Constant probably understood this but be that as it may, what he’s going to do now is try to explain why the ancients were machines, how it was that men found this sort of life tolerable and even choiceworthy.
All ancient republics were restricted to a narrow territory. The most populous, the most powerful, the most substantial among them, was not equal in extension to the smallest of modern states. As an inevitable consequence of their narrow territory, the spirit of these republics was bellicose; each people incessantly attacked their neighbors or was attacked by them. Thus driven by necessity against one another, they fought or threatened each other constantly. Those who had no ambition to be conquerors, could still not lay down their weapons, lest they should themselves be conquered. All had to buy their security, their independence, their whole existence at the price of war. This was the constant interest, the almost habitual occupation of the free states of antiquity. Finally, by an equally necessary result of this way of being, all these states had slaves. The mechanical professions and even, among some nations, the industrial ones, were committed to people in chains.
The ancient polis existed for war. Constant does not say what connection this has to the slavery or machine-character of the ancients. Presumably it has to do with the rigorous discipline needed to be good soldiers. There is more: Constant mentions ancients’ use of slaves, who are slaves in a complete sense. What the ownership of slaves means is the citizens of the polis do not need the “freedom” to pursue a variety of crafts or professions; a free people focuses on perfecting the few arts needed for war and ruling and consider slavish the pursuit of other arts. A person without political power might wish to survey the options available to him, think about what he is best at, and pursue that path in the hopes of acquiring money and honor. The focus on the arts of political liberty (war, politics, farming, etc) and the possession of slaves result from the small size of the ancient republics.
The modern world offers us a completely opposing view. The smallest states of our day are incomparably larger than Sparta or than Rome was over five centuries. Even the division of Europe into several states is, thanks to the progress of enlightenment, more apparent than real. While each people, in the past, formed an isolated family, the born enemy of other families, a mass of human beings now exists, that under different names and under different forms of social organization are essentially homogeneous in their nature. This mass is strong enough to have nothing to fear from barbarian hordes. It is sufficiently civilized to find war a burden. Its uniform tendency is towards peace.
The massive size of European states make the Europeans impervious to barbarian attack. Therefore the softness of civilization could replace the trials of war without worrying about barbarians. There is a homogenizing and softening tendency at work in Europe. Constant does not say why this sort of tendency produces modern liberty just as he didn’t say why the war-like tendency of the ancients produced ancient liberty.
This difference leads to another one. War precedes commerce. War and commerce are only two different means of achieving the same end, that of getting what one wants. Commerce is simply a tribute paid to the strength of the possessor by the aspirant to possession. It is an attempt to conquer, by mutual agreement, what one can no longer hope to obtain through violence. A man who was always the stronger would never conceive the idea of commerce. It is experience, by proving to him that war, that is the use of his strength against the strength of others, exposes him to a variety of obstacles and defeats, that leads him to resort to commerce, that is to a milder and surer means of engaging the interest of others to agree to what suits his own. War is all impulse, commerce, calculation. Hence it follows that an age must come in which commerce replaces war. We have reached this age.
This is a typically liberal estimation of human motivation: rational actors will choose to forego war; fear is what keeps men from being rational; now that the causes of fear (superstition and poverty) are being removed, nations and even individuals will become rational and therefore will seek to avoid war. Rational actors will not seek to acquire wealth through war.
I do not mean that amongst the ancients there were no trading peoples. But these peoples were to some degree an exception to the general rule. The limits of this lecture do not allow me to illustrate all the obstacles which then opposed the progress of commerce; you know them as well as I do; I shall only mention one of them.
Their ignorance of the compass meant that the sailors of antiquity always had to keep close to the coast. To pass through the pillars of Hercules, that is, the straits of Gibraltar, was considered the most daring of enterprises. The Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, the most able of navigators, did not risk it until very late, and their example for long remained without imitators. In Athens, of which we shall talk soon, the interest on maritime enterprises was around 60%, while current interest was only 12%: that was how dangerous the idea of distant navigation seemed.
Moreover, if I could permit myself a digression which would unfortunately prove too long, I would show you, Gentlemen, through the details of the customs, habits, way of trading with others of the trading peoples of antiquity, that their commerce was itself impregnated by the spirit of the age, by the atmosphere of war and hostility which surrounded it. Commerce then was a lucky accident, today it is the normal state of things, the only aim, the universal tendency, the true life of nations. They want repose, and with repose comfort, and as a source of comfort, industry. Every day war becomes a more ineffective means of satisfying their wishes. Its hazards no longer offer to individuals benefits that match the results of peaceful work and regular exchanges.
Among the ancients, a successful war increased both private and public wealth in slaves, tributes and lands shared out. For the moderns, even a successful war costs infallibly more than it is worth. Finally, thanks to commerce, to religion, to the moral and intellectual progress of the human race, there are no longer slaves among the European nations. Free men must exercise all professions, provide for all the needs of society.
It’s not clear why war is not as profitable any longer, though the inability or unwillingness to profit through slavery is probably part of it.
Constant admits outright here that the jobs of slaves still need to be done and are now done by “free men.” What distinguishes the free man from a slave if they must do the same things? Unliked the slave, the free man is not called a slave and presumably has a choice in his profession and can speak his mind about the state and so on. It is shameful to be a slave and not shameful to be a free man and this makes a big difference. However, the modern free men seem less free when it comes to “the needs of society.” Free men have to take up all the crafts, buy and sell, clean, serve, and much else formerly reserved for slaves.
It is easy to see, Gentlemen, the inevitable outcome of these differences. Firstly, the size of a country causes a corresponding decrease of the political importance allotted to each individual. The most obscure republican of Sparta or Rome had power. The same is not true of the simple citizen of Britain or of the United States. His personal influence is an imperceptible part of the social will which impresses on the government its direction.
Citizenship means less today than it did then.
Secondly, the abolition of slavery has deprived the free population of all the leisure which resulted from the fact that slaves took care of most of the work. Without the slave population of Athens, 20,000 Athenians could never have spent every day at the public square in discussions. Thirdly, commerce does not, like war, leave in men's lives intervals of inactivity. The constant exercise of political rights, the daily discussion of the affairs of the state, disagreements, confabulations, the whole entourage and movement of factions, necessary agitations, the compulsory filling, if I may use the term, of the life of the peoples of antiquity, who, without this resource would have languished under the weight of painful inaction, would only cause trouble and fatigue to modern nations, where each individual, occupied with his speculations, his enterprises, the pleasures he obtains or hopes for, does not wish to be distracted from them other than momentarily, and as little as possible.
Constant speaks as if no group or class of men engages in politics any longer, which he knows is false insofar as he spent his own life in “daily discussion of the affairs of the state, disagreements, confabulations” and so on. There will still be men practicing politics. Constant willingly hides their relation to the other free men who “provide for all the needs of society.”
Finally, commerce inspires in men a vivid love of individual independence. Commerce supplies their needs, satisfies their desires, without the intervention of the authorities. This intervention is almost always -- and I do not know why I say almost -- this intervention is indeed always a trouble and an embarrassment. Every time collective power wishes to meddle with private speculations, it harasses the speculators. Every time governments pretend to do our own business, they do it more incompetently and expensively than we would.
Constant’s genetic account of modern liberty terminates here, and goes like this: large states → preference for peace → commerce → love of individual independence.
I said, Gentlemen, that I would return to Athens, whose example might be opposed to some of my assertions, but which will in fact confirm all of them. Athens, as I have already pointed out, was of all the Greek republics the most closely engaged in trade, thus it allowed to its citizens an infinitely greater individual liberty than Sparta or Rome. If I could enter into historical details, I would show you that, among the Athenians, commerce had removed several of the differences which distinguished the ancient from the modern peoples. The spirit of the Athenian merchants was similar to that of the merchants of our days. Xenophon tells us that during the Peloponesian war, they moved their capitals from the continent of Attica to place them on the islands of the archipelago. Commerce had created among them the circulation of money. In Isocrates there are signs that bills of exchange were used. Observe how their customs resemble our own. In their relations with women, you will see, again I cite Xenophon, husbands, satisfied when peace and a decorous friendship reigned in their households, make allowances for the wife who is too vulnerable before the tyranny of nature, close their eyes to the irresistible power of passions, forgive the first weakness and forget the second. In their relations with strangers, we shall see them extending the rights of citizenship to whoever would, by moving among them with his family, establish some trade or industry.
Finally, we shall be struck by their excessive love of individual independence. In Sparta, says a philosopher, the citizens quicken their step when they are called by a magistrate; but an Athenian would be desperate if he were thought to be dependent on a magistrate. However, as several of the other circumstances which determined the character of ancient nations existed in Athens as well; as there was a slave population and the territory was very restricted; we find there too the traces of the liberty proper to the ancients. The people made the laws, examined the behavior of the magistrates, called Pericles to account for his conduct, sentenced to death the generals who had commanded the battle of the Arginusae. Similarly ostracism, that legal arbitrariness, extolled by all the legislators of the age; ostracism, which appears to us, and rightly so, a revolting iniquity, proves that the individual was much more subservient to the supremacy of the social body in Athens, than he is in any of the free states of Europe today.
Constant claims that his account of Athens proves his thesis that a small republic will have ancient liberties while a large will have modern liberties. So, while modern men may still look back at Athens and see many similarities, these are due to the commercial nature of that people. But the restricted size of the Athenian polis still gave it all the fascistic pride of the ancient city-states: slavery, citizens controlling lawmaking, and an imperial-militaristic outlook. Constant takes this to prove that the similarities seen are not significant, or rather, not grounds for seeking ancient liberty. The nation state will not become small again and for some reason slavery does not exist any longer. There are a variety of non-moral explanations for why slavery dies out in large states; it’s possible that a class of masters must also be sovereign in the state but in massive states the rulers are too numerous and power too diffuse for any group of men to be able to justify the title.
It follows from what I have just indicated that we can no longer enjoy the liberty of the ancients, which consisted in an active and constant participation in collective power. Our freedom must consist of peaceful enjoyment and private independence. The share which in antiquity everyone held in national sovereignty was by no means an abstract presumption as it is in our own day. The will of each individual had real influence: the exercise of this will was a vivid and repeated pleasure. Consequently the ancients were ready to make many a sacrifice to preserve their political rights and their share in the administration of the state. Everybody, feeling with pride all that his suffrage was worth, found in this awareness of his personal importance a great compensation.
It’s impossible to read this without also seeing it is the more choiceworthy freedom, that modern liberty is a mere approximation of this liberty and that furthermore, there really is no avoiding the fact that someone or some people still possess this liberty insofar as there still exists political power.
This compensation no longer exists for us today. Lost in the multitude, the individual can almost never perceive the influence he exercises. Never does his will impress itself upon the whole; nothing confirms in his eyes his own cooperation. The exercise of political rights, therefore, offers us but a part of the pleasures that the ancients found in it, while at the same time the progress of civilization, the commercial tendency of the age, the communication amongst peoples, have infinitely multiplied and varied the means of personal happiness.
The apparently new “means of personal happiness” always existed, as Constant showed by discussion of Athens, but they were always considered inferior to the exercise of political rights. They still are inferior, but it's the best possible outcome for the vast majority of men.
It follows that we must be far more attached than the ancients to our individual independence. For the ancients when they sacrificed that independence to their political rights, sacrificed less to obtain more; while in making the same sacrifice we would give more to obtain less. The aim of the ancients was the sharing of social power among the citizens of the same fatherland: this is what they called liberty. The aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures; and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures.
This is the main thing Constant wants to drive home: the citizens are not vicious (perverse) or weak for refusing to act like thorough patriots. Sensible men do not “role-play” or give up real goods for imaginary goods. The nations cannot offer them meaningful participation in the direction of affairs so the rulers, who are really the nations, should learn to content themselves with skimming a little off the top in the form of taxes for the maintenance of peace and themselves.
In the following paragraphs (26 through 33) Constant discusses Rousseau and some of the revolutionary disciples of Rousseau in order to prove that the excesses of the French Revolution were the result of forcing ancient duties onto modern citizens. My comments pass over this section.
I said at the beginning that, through their failure to perceive these differences, otherwise well-intentioned men caused infinite evils during our long and stormy revolution. God forbid that I should reproach them too harshly. Their error itself was excusable. One could not read the beautiful pages of antiquity, one could not recall the actions of its great men, without feeling an indefinable and special emotion, which nothing modern can possibly arouse. The old elements of a nature, one could almost say, earlier than our own, seem to awaken in us in the face of these memories. It is difficult not to regret the time when the faculties of man developed along an already trodden path, but in so wide a career, so strong in their own powers, with such a feeling of energy and dignity. Once we abandon ourselves to this regret, it is impossible not to wish to imitate what we regret. This impression was very deep, especially when we lived under vicious governments, which, without being strong, were repressive in their effects; absurd in their principles; wretched in action; governments which had as their strength arbitrary power; for their purpose the belittling of mankind; and which some individuals still dare to praise to us today, as if we could ever forget that we have been the witnesses and the victims of their obstinacy, of their impotence and of their overthrow. The aim of our reformers was noble and generous. Who among us did not feel his heart beat with hope at the outset of the course which they seemed to open up? And shame, even today, on whoever does not feel the need to declare that acknowledging a few errors committed by our first guides does not mean blighting their memory or disowning the opinions which the friends of mankind have professed throughout the ages.
But those men had derived several of their theories from the works of two philosophers who had themselves failed to recognize the changes brought by two thousand years in the dispositions of mankind. I shall perhaps at some point examine the system of the most illustrious of these philosophers, of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and I shall show that, by transposing into our modern age an extent of social power, of collective sovereignty, which belonged to other centuries, this sublime genius, animated by the purest love of liberty, has nevertheless furnished deadly pretexts for more than one kind of tyranny. No doubt, in pointing out what I regard as a misunderstanding which it is important to uncover, I shall be careful in my refutation, and respectful in my criticism. I shall certainly refrain from joining myself to the detractors of a great man. When chance has it that I find myself apparently in agreement with them on some one particular point, I suspect myself; and to console myself for appearing for a moment in agreement with them on a single partial question, I need to disown and denounce with all my energies these pretended allies.
Nevertheless, the interests of truth must prevail over considerations which make the glory of a prodigious talent and the authority of an immense reputation so powerful. Moreover, as we shall see, it is not to Rousseau that we must chiefly attribute the error against which I am going to argue; this is to be imputed much more to one of his successors, less eloquent but no less austere and a hundred times more exaggerated. The latter, the abbe de Mably, can be regarded as the representative of the system which, according to the maxims of ancient liberty, demands that the citizens should be entirely subjected in order for the nation to be sovereign, and that the individual should be enslaved for the people to be free.
The abbe de Mably, like Rousseau and many others, had mistaken, just as the ancients did, the authority of the social body for liberty; and to him any means seemed good if it extended his area of authority over that recalcitrant part of human existence whose independence he deplored. The regret he expresses everywhere in his works is that the law can only cover actions. He would have liked it to cover the most fleeting thoughts and impressions; to pursue man relentlessly, leaving him no refuge in which he might escape from its power. No sooner did he learn, among no matter what people, of some oppressive measure, than he thought he had made a discovery and proposed it as a model. He detested individual liberty like a personal enemy; and whenever in history he came across a nation totally deprived of it, even if it had no political liberty, he could not help admiring it. He went into ecstasies over the Egyptians, because, as he said, among them everything was prescribed by the law, down to relaxations and needs: everything was subjected to the empire of the legislator. Every moment of the day was filled by some duty; love itself was the object of this respected intervention, and it was the law that in turn opened and closed the curtains of the nuptial bed.
Sparta, which combined republican forms with the same enslavement of individuals, aroused in the spirit of that philosopher an even more vivid enthusiasm. That vast monastic barracks to him seemed the ideal of a perfect republic. He had a profound contempt for Athens, and would gladly have said of this nation, the first of Greece, what an academician and great nobleman said of the French Academy: What an appalling despotism! Everyone does what he likes there. I must add that this great nobleman was talking of the Academy as it was thirty years ago.
Montesquieu, who had a less excitable and therefore more observant mind, did not fall into quite the same errors. He was struck by the differences which I have related; but he did not discover their true cause. The Greek politicians who lived under the popular government did not recognize, he argues, any other power but virtue. Politicians of today talk only of manufactures, of commerce, of finances, of wealth and even of luxury. He attributes this difference to the republic and the monarchy. It ought instead to be attributed to the opposed spirit of ancient and modern times. Citizens of republics, subjects of monarchies, all want pleasures, and indeed no-one, in the present condition of societies can help wanting them. The people most attached to their liberty in our own days, before the emancipation of France, was also the most attached to all the pleasures of life; and it valued its liberty especially because it saw in this the guarantee of the pleasures which it cherished. In the past, where there was liberty, people could bear hardship. Now, wherever there is hardship, despotism is necessary for people to resign themselves to it. It would be easier today to make Spartans of an enslaved people than to turn free men into Spartans.
The men who were brought by events to the head of our revolution were, by a necessary consequence of the education they had received, steeped in ancient views which are no longer valid, which the philosophers whom I mentioned above had made fashionable. The metaphysics of Rousseau, in the midst of which flashed the occasional sublime thought and passages of stirring eloquence; the austerity of Mably, his intolerance, his hatred of all human passions, his eagerness to enslave them all, his exaggerated principles on the competence of the law, the difference between what he recommended and what had ever previously existed, his declamations against wealth and even against property; all these things were bound to charm men heated by their recent victory, and who, having won power over the law, were only too keen to extend this power to all things. It was a source of invaluable support that two disinterested writers anathematizing human despotism, should have drawn up the text of the law in axioms. They wished to exercise public power as they had learnt from their guides it had once been exercised in the free states. They believed that everything should give way before collective will, and that all restrictions on individual rights would be amply compensated by participation in social power.
We all know, Gentlemen, what has come of it. Free institutions, resting upon the knowledge of the spirit of the age, could have survived. The restored edifice of the ancients collapsed, notwithstanding many efforts and many heroic acts which call for our admiration. The fact is that social power injured individual independence in every possible war, without destroying the need for it. The nation did not find that an ideal share in an abstract sovereignty was worth the sacrifices required from her. She was vainly assured, on Rousseau's authority, that the laws of liberty are a thousand times more austere than the yoke of tyrants. She had no desire for those austere laws, and believed sometimes that the yoke of tyrants would be preferable to them. Experience has come to undeceive her. She has seen that the arbitrary power of men was even worse than the worst of laws. But laws too must have their limits.
Having discussed the impact of Rousseau on the abbe de Mably and the Revolution generally, Constant lays out his principles of modern liberty–the limits of what can be asked of the “citizens.”
If I have succeeded, Gentlemen, in making you share the persuasion which in my opinion these facts must produce, you will acknowledge with me the truth of the following principles. Individual independence is the first need of the moderns: consequently one must never require from them any sacrifices to establish political liberty. It follows that none of the numerous and too highly praised institutions which in the ancient republics hindered individual liberty is any longer admissible in the modern times.
The general principle he has been arguing for. Paragraphs 35 through 38 are on ostracism and censorship; paragraph 39 is on education; paragraph 40 is on religious liberty.
You may, in the first place, think, Gentlemen, that it is superfluous to establish this truth. Several governments of our days do not seem in the least inclined to imitate the republics of antiquity. However, little as they may like republican institutions, there are certain republican usages for which they feel a certain affection. It is disturbing that they should be precisely those which allow them to banish, to exile, or to despoil. I remember that in 1802, they slipped into the law on special tribunals an article which introduced into France Greek ostracism; and God knows how many eloquent speakers, in order to have this article approved, talked to us about the freedom of Athens and all the sacrifices that individuals must make to preserve this freedom! Similarly, in much more recent times, when fearful authorities attempted, with a timid hand, to rig the elections, a journal which can hardly be suspected of republicanism proposed to revive Roman censorship to eliminate all dangerous candidates.
Exile and ostracism are too ancient. Control over which candidates stand for office is too Roman.
I do not think therefore that I am engaging in a useless discussion if, to support my assertion, I say a few words about these two much vaunted institutions. Ostracism in Athens rested upon the assumption that society had complete authority over its members. On this assumption it could be justified; and in a small state, where the influence of a single individual, strong in his credit, his clients, his glory, often balanced the power of the mass, ostracism may appear useful. But amongst us individuals have rights which society must respect, and individual interests are, as I have already observed, so lost in a multitude of equal or superior influences, that any oppression motivated by the need to diminish this influence is useless and consequently unjust. No one has the right to exile a citizen, if he is not condemned by a regular tribunal, according to a formal law which attaches the penalty of exile to the action of which he is guilty. No one has the right to tear the citizen from his country, the owner away from his possessions, the merchant away from his trade, the husband from his wife, the father from his children, the writer from his studious meditations, the old man from his accustomed way of life. All political exile is a political abuse. All exile pronounced by an assembly for alleged reasons of public safety is a crime which the assembly itself commits against public safety, which resides only in respect for the laws, in the observance of forms, and in the maintenance of safeguards.
Constant elaborates what he means by ostracism, specifically, “political” or “lawless” exile where men are removed not because they have broken a law but because they are too influential.
Roman censorship implied, like ostracism, a discretionary power. In a republic where all the citizens, kept by poverty to an extremely simple moral code, lived in the same town, exercised no profession which might distract their attention from the affairs of the state, and thus constantly found themselves the spectators and judges of the usage of public power, censorship could on the one hand have greater influence: while on the other, the arbitrary power of the censors was restrained by a kind of moral surveillance exercised over them. But as soon as the size of the republic, the complexity of social relations and the refinements of civilization deprived this institution of what at the same time served as its basis and its limit, censorship degenerated even in Rome. It was not censorship which had created good morals; it was the simplicity of those morals which constituted the power and efficacy of censorship.
Rome is once again, for the first time since Constant’s introduction, considered separately and it is once again an ancient republic that doesn’t fit the mold of the Greeks because “the size of the republic” changed and along with this the morals of the people changed.
In France, an institution as arbitrary as censorship would be at once ineffective and intolerable. In the present conditions of society, morals are formed by subtle, fluctuating, elusive nuances, which would be distorted in a thousand ways if one attempted to define them more precisely. Public opinion alone can reach them; public opinion alone can judge them, because it is of the same nature. It would rebel against any positive authority which wanted to give it greater precision. If the government of a modern people wanted, like the censors in Rome, to censure a citizen arbitrarily, the entire nation would protest against this arrest by refusing to ratify the decisions of the authority.
What I have just said of the revival of censorship in modern times applies also to many other aspects of social organization, in relation to which antiquity is cited even more frequently and with greater emphasis. As for example, education; what do we not hear of the need to allow the government to take possession of new generations to shape them to its pleasure, and how many erudite quotations are employed to support this theory! The Persians, the Egyptians, Gaul, Greece and Italy are one after another set before us. Yet, Gentlemen, we are neither Persians subjected to a despot, nor Egyptians subjugated by priests, nor Gauls who can be sacrificed by their druids, nor, finally, Greeks or Romans, whose share in social authority consoled them for their private enslavement. We are modern men, who wish each to enjoy our own rights, each to develop our own faculties as we like best, without harming anyone; to watch over the development of these faculties in the children whom nature entrusts to our affection, the more enlightened as it is more vivid; and needing the authorities only to give us the general means of instruction which they can supply, as travelers accept from them the main roads without being told by them which route to take.
Religion is also exposed to these memories of bygone ages. Some brave defenders of the unity of doctrine cite the laws of the ancients against foreign gods, and sustain the rights of the Catholic church by the example of the Athenians, who killed Socrates for having undermined polytheism, and that of Augustus, who wanted the people to remain faithful to the cult of their fathers; with the result, shortly afterwards, that the first Christians were delivered to the lions. Let us mistrust, Gentlemen, this admiration for certain ancient memories. Since we live in modern times, I want a liberty suited to modern times; and since we live under monarchies, I humbly beg these monarchies not to borrow from the ancient republics the means to oppress us.
Paragraphs 35 through 40 covered some ineradicable liberties all moderns enjoy on account of their circumstances. There are still 16 paragraphs left in the essay.
Individual liberty, I repeat, is the true modern liberty. Political liberty is its guarantee, consequently political liberty is indispensable. But to ask the peoples of our day to sacrifice, like those of the past, the whole of their individual liberty to political liberty, is the surest means of detaching them from the former and, once this result has been achieved, it would be only too easy to deprive them of the latter.
Now that Constant has made his case against the men who sought to force ancient liberties onto modern conditions, he concludes by declaring fidelity to political liberty. The rest of the essay will be spent defending against those men who would appear to agree with him but whose plans will lead to a different form of despotism because they dishonor all political liberty, whether it be in its full ancient form or its modern approximation.
As you see, Gentlemen, my observations do not in the least tend to diminish the value of political liberty. I do not draw from the evidence I have put before your eyes the same conclusions that some others have. From the fact that the ancients were free, and that we cannot any longer be free like them, they conclude that we are destined to be slaves. They would like to reconstitute the new social state with a small number of elements which, they say, are alone appropriate to the situation of the world today. These elements are prejudices to frighten men, egoism to corrupt them, frivolity to stupefy them, gross pleasures to degrade them, despotism to lead them; and, indispensably, constructive knowledge and exact sciences to serve despotism the more adroitly. It would be odd indeed if this were the outcome of forty centuries during which mankind has acquired greater moral and physical means: I cannot believe it. I derive from the differences which distinguish us from antiquity totally different conclusions. It is not security which we must weaken; it is enjoyment which we must extend. It is not political liberty which I wish to renounce; it is civil liberty which I claim, along with other forms of political liberty. Governments, no more than they did before, have the right to arrogate to themselves an illegitimate power.
Constant attacks a threat which sounds a great deal like Tocqueville’s “soft despotism.” There will be politicians and citizens who, seeing that sovereign power doesn’t exist for the people in any significant degree, seeks to strip them of it entirely and accustom them to degraded habits and tastes. To confront this new threat to liberty, Constant begins to speak of “civil liberty” for the very first time this essay. Political liberty was enjoyed by the ancients; individual liberty is enjoyed by the moderns; political liberty is, though, the support or foundation of individual liberty. A new liberty must be fashioned that is like political liberty but isn’t. Constant doesn’t say whether it is really something different or just another approximation to political liberty.
But the governments which emanate from a legitimate source have even less right than before to exercise an arbitrary supremacy over individuals. We still possess today the rights we have always had, those eternal rights to assent to the laws, to deliberate on our interests, to be an integral part of the social body of which we are members. But governments have new duties; the progress of civilization, the changes brought by the centuries require from the authorities greater respect for customs, for affections, for the independence of individuals. They must handle all these issues with a lighter and more prudent hand.
Civil liberty looks like it is tied to “eternal rights”--basically the right of all men at all times to take and hold power. For most of this essay, Constant has been trying to get rulers to realize that the modern men who don’t wield power or direct political affairs cannot be asked to sacrifice as if they do. Now he has to get rulers to realize that just because men cannot be asked to sacrifice does not mean the illusion of citizen-control can be discarded and the citizenry debased. Governments cannot forget that good men have self-respect but that no one who is powerless can keep his self-respect for long.
This reserve on the part of authority, which is one of its strictest duties, equally represents its well-conceived interest; since, if the liberty that suits the moderns is different from that which suited the ancients, the despotism which was possible amongst the ancients is no longer possible amongst the moderns. Because we are often less concerned with political liberty than they could be, and in ordinary circumstances less passionate about it, it may follow that we neglect, sometimes too much and always wrongly, the guarantees which this assures us. But at the same time, as we are much more preoccupied with individual liberty than the ancients, we shall defend it, if it is attacked, with much more skill and persistence; and we have means to defend it which the ancients did not.
Modern governments should respect the represented-class even if that class seems detestable for its lack of political liberty. Why? Because even though the represented-class lacks political liberty, it has other sources of self-respect. It can push back in other ways and will be skillful in doing so. – – I take this to be a bit of a noble lie for the rulers on the part of Constant. Political liberty is the only form of liberty. Having some rights and so on are merely approximations of possessing power in the state. Consent through representatives is an image of sovereignty. The people are more contemptible than ever; it’s a bunch of men doing the work of slaves running around calling themselves free men, rulers of the world. So many weaklings putting on airs it’s nearly intolerable. On the other hand, federalism and the sanctity of property really did make it possible for hundreds of years for there to be states comprising millions of souls where, while only a few ran the states, fewer still were truly contemptible.
Commerce makes the action of arbitrary power over our existence more oppressive than in the past, because, as our speculations are more varied, arbitrary power must multiply itself to reach them. But commerce also makes the action of arbitrary power easier to elude, because it changes the nature of property, which becomes, in virtue of this change, almost impossible to seize.
Governments should respect the represented-class because of commerce. Commerce may not be as important as politics, but it is necessary to the life of large nations. It produces the needed wealth. Commercial men cannot be successfully “oppressed.” If a large nation is going to be strong it will need to be wealthy; if it is going to be wealthy it will need to be commercial; if it is going to be commercial despotic government will not work. Therefore it is in the interest of political rulers to behave.
Commerce confers a new quality on property, circulation. Without circulation, property is merely a usufruct; political authority can always affect usufruct, because it can prevent its enjoyment; but circulation creates an invisible and invincible obstacle to the actions of social power.
The effects of commerce extend even further: not only does it emancipate individuals, but, by creating credit, it places authority itself in a position of dependence. Money, says a French writer, 'is the most dangerous weapon of despotism; yet it is at the same time its most powerful restraint; credit is subject to opinion; force is useless; money hides itself or flees; all the operations of the state are suspended'. Credit did not have the same influence amongst the ancients; their governments were stronger than individuals, while in our time individuals are stronger than the political powers. Wealth is a power which is more readily available in all circumstances, more readily applicable to all interests, and consequently more real and better obeyed. Power threatens; wealth rewards: one eludes power by deceiving it; to obtain the favors of wealth one must serve it: the latter is therefore bound to win.
Modern governments, so far from being despotic, will probably prove to be dependent on commerce—which is to say, Constant thinks there will be an oligarchy.
As a result, individual existence is less absorbed in political existence. Individuals carry their treasures far away; they take with them all the enjoyments of private life. Commerce has brought nations closer, it has given them customs and habits which are almost identical; the heads of states may be enemies: the peoples are compatriots. Let power therefore resign itself: we must have liberty and we shall have it. But since the liberty we need is different from that of the ancients, it needs a different organization from the one which would suit ancient liberty. In the latter, the more time and energy man dedicated to the exercise of his political rights, the freer he thought himself; on the other hand, in the kind of liberty of which we are capable, the more the exercise of political rights leaves us the time for our private interests, the more precious will liberty be to us.
Hence, Sirs, the need for the representative system. The representative system is nothing but an organization by means of which a nation charges a few individuals to do what it cannot or does not wish to do herself. Poor men look after their own business; rich men hire stewards. This is the history of ancient and modern nations. The representative system is a proxy given to a certain number of men by the mass of the people who wish their interests to be defended and who nevertheless do not have the time to defend them themselves. But, unless they are idiots, rich men who employ stewards keep a close watch on whether these stewards are doing their duty, lest they should prove negligent, corruptible, or incapable; and, in order to judge the management of these proxies, the landowners, if they are prudent, keep themselves well-informed about affairs, the management of which they entrust to them. Similarly, the people who, in order to enjoy the liberty which suits them, resort to the representative system, must exercise an active and constant surveillance over their representatives, and reserve for themselves, at times which should not be separated by too lengthy intervals, the right to discard them if they betray their trust, and to revoke the powers which they might have abused.
Governments will be the tools of wealthy society for the protection and administration of wealth. This is what raises the average citizen up from being completely non-political. Instead of being someone who directs the State, average citizens will represent a locus of wealth. These bearers of wealth will vote for representatives and then spend some of their free time caring about what those representatives do. This will be necessary to stave off the despotism discussed in paragraph 42.
For from the fact that modern liberty differs from ancient liberty, it follows that it is also threatened by a different sort of danger. The danger of ancient liberty was that men, exclusively concerned with securing their share of social power, might attach too little value to individual rights and enjoyments.
The danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily. The holders of authority are only too anxious to encourage us to do so. They are so ready to spare us all sort of troubles, except those of obeying and paying! They will say to us: what, in the end, is the aim of your efforts, the motive of your labors, the object of all your hopes? Is it not happiness? Well, leave this happiness to us and we shall give it to you. No, Sirs, we must not leave it to them. No matter how touching such a tender commitment may be, let us ask the authorities to keep within their limits. Let them confine themselves to being just. We shall assume the responsibility of being happy for ourselves.
The danger of modern times is not what happened during the revolution, which was a fluke caused by philosophy. To reiterate: Constant began the essay, and spent most of it, arguing that modern governments should not expect men to have the patriotic zeal and willingness to sacrifice of the ancients. He is ending the essay saying that this is not the real danger; he doesn’t expect modern governments to spend their time attempting to discipline and inspire the citizenry to great deeds. He expects modern governments to degrade the citizens by encouraging them to give up all thoughts of great deeds.
Moreover, Gentlemen, is it so evident that happiness, of whatever kind, is the only aim of mankind? If it were so, our course would be narrow indeed, and our destination far from elevated. There is not one single one of us who, if he wished to abase himself, restrain his moral faculties, lower his desires, abjure activity, glory, deep and generous emotions, could not demean himself and be happy. No, Sirs, I bear witness to the better part of our nature, that noble disquiet which pursues and torments us, that desire to broaden our knowledge and develop our faculties. It is not to happiness alone, it is to self-development that our destiny calls us; and political liberty is the most powerful, the most effective means of self-development that heaven has given us.
Modern governments will offer men a trade: they can abase themselves before the government and the government will make them “happy.” Constant gives happiness a very definite meaning of based contentment. The ancients were better than this.
Political liberty, by submitting to all the citizens, without exception, the care and assessment of their most sacred interests, enlarges their spirit, ennobles their thoughts, and establishes among them a kind of intellectual equality which forms the glory and power of a people.
Modern political liberty is representative political liberty. Men living in a mass society would be utterly degraded if they were told they had nothing to do with the direction of the state. Representative government elevates them to a degree. It’s better than nothing in other words.
Thus, see how a nation grows with the first institution which restores to her the regular exercise of political liberty. See our countrymen of all classes, of all professions, emerge from the sphere of their usual labors and private industry, find themselves suddenly at the level of important functions which the constitutions confers upon them, choose with discernment, resist with energy-, brave threats, nobly withstand seduction. See a pure, deep and sincere patriotism triumph in our towns, revive even our smallest villages, permeate our workshops, enliven our countryside, penetrate the just and honest spirits of the useful farmer and the industrious tradesman with a sense of our rights and the need for safeguards; they, learned in the history of the evils they have suffered, and no less enlightened as to the remedies which these evils demand, take in with a glance the whole of France and, bestowing a national gratitude, repay with their suffrage, after thirty years, the fidelity to principles embodied in the most illustrious of the defenders of liberty.
Therefore, Sirs, far from renouncing either of the two sorts of freedom which I have described to you, it is necessary, as I have shown, to learn to combine the two together. Institutions, says the famous author of the history of the republics in the Middle Ages, must accomplish the destiny of the human race; they can best achieve their aim if they elevate the largest possible number of citizens to the highest moral position.
The work of the legislator is not complete when he has simply brought peace to the people. Even when the people are satisfied, there is much left to do. Institutions must achieve the moral education of the citizens. By respecting their individual rights, securing their independence, refraining from troubling their work, they must nevertheless consecrate their influence over public affairs, call them to contribute by their votes to the exercise of power, grant them a right of control and supervision by expressing their opinions; and, by forming them through practice for these elevated functions, give them both the desire and the right to discharge these.
I think the last few paragraphs show conclusively that Constant is aiming, intentionally aiming, at an approximation of ancient liberty not at an altogether new liberty. The liberty of the ancients cannot be forsaken without degrading men; since it cannot be exercised by the vast majority of men today a second-best option, representation, is necessary. Modern governments should not pretend that represented citizens are willing and able to sacrifice everything for the state. On the other hand, modern governments should not seek to degrade their citizens to a status even lower than they now inhabit.