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, Constant shared with Jeremy Bentham the honor of being the chief theoretical 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

The 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. 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 biographies 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 remnants 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 star and was made secretary.⁵ Thus, 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. In the words of Saltet, the influence which “le marque définitivement de son empreinte fut celle du XVIIIe siècle. Du XVIIIe siècle il a l’immoralité naïve, les moeurs dépavées, la corruption raffinée et élégante, et ce cynisme dont aucune autre époque n’a donné l’exemple . . . Du XVIIIe siècle il eut sans doute aussi l’irréligion.”⁶

As time went on, Constant battled with this heritage, but he was never able to shrug it off completely. As we shall see, his personal problems with religious faith may be taken as typical of his relationship with the ideas of the eighteenth century: after a good deal of struggle, he was able to come to a position discernibly different from that of the Enlightenment; nevertheless, the marks of the first world outlook he had accepted remained with him to the end.

The influences that contributed to diluting his earlier rationalism were those emanating from his close association with Madame de Staël; his interest and involvement in the German intellectual world of his time (especially his interest in the thought of Harder and Schleiermacher); and his own personal needs.⁷

This last deserves explanation. Constant, after awhile, began in a manner reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to link the eighteenth century with a whole style of life which excluded any authentic feeling and crushed all nobler sentiment by means of a shallow brilliance and wit. As early as 1805 he says of Voltaire’s La Pucelle:

C’est bien l’ouvrage d’un siècle qui a appris à se moquer de lui-même comme des autres, de ses opinions comme des opinions opposées; c’est une sorte de titillation d’esprit, résultat d’un grand épuisement et l’irritabilité qui accompagne un extrême épuisement.⁸

At times he raises this into an element of the French national character: “Principe français, qu’il faut juger la plaisanterie indépendamment de son objet, c’est-à-dire qu’il est égal qu’elle soit dirigée contre la vertu ou contre le crime.”⁹ At other times, Constant’s indictment of the “nihilism” of the eighteenth century reaches extreme depths of intensity and bitterness. He attributes to it a pathological, death-dealing quality. The following passage, for instance, recalls de Maistre:

Étrange philosophie que celle du XVIIIe siècle, se jouant d’elle-même et des autres, prenant à tâche de discréditer non seulement les préjugés reçus, non seulement les idées consolantes et morales—qu’on aurait pu séparer de ces préjugés,—mais se moquant de ses propres principes, trouvant du plaisir à ne rien laisser qui soit exempt de ridicule, à tout dégrader, à tout avilir.¹⁰

Here, again, we find Constant’s characteristic insistence on the strange decadence of the Enlightenment, at least in its final phase, when it was apparently propelled by a will to destruction so complete as to finally consume even its own principles and itself. Constant confesses that he felt himself “frappé de terreur” when reading Holbach’s Système de la nature: “Ce long acharnement d’un vieillard à fermer devant lui tout avenir, cette inexplicable soif de la destruction . . . me paraissaient un bizarre délire . . . [Holbach] me présentait avec triomphe le néant comme terme de moi-même et des objets de mes affections.”¹¹ In warring on this element of the spirit of the eighteenth century, Constant conceived of himself as combating a sort of intellectualist madness, which had proved itself to be disastrous for the moral life of France and, as we shall see, a great danger for European society in the future. But beyond that, it is of the utmost importance that Constant could not simply view the prevalence of this mode of thought in a detached manner, for he considered that he himself was cursed by it. The inability to feel emotions, or to be certain that one is authentically feeling them, was a characteristic he attributed to himself. Partly, it came from his family background;¹² but partly also, there is little doubt, he felt that it was reinforced and exaggerated by the times and society in which he lived. He was, over much of his life, in the unfortunate position of one who desires to desire. He felt that a too early and too thorough “sophistication” had robbed him of the possibility, and on one occasion he bursts out: “Revenez donc, passion que j’ai amorties, plaisirs simples et doux que j’ai repoussés, vertus obscures et journalières que je me suis fait un mérite de mépriser; sentiments d’amour, d’amitié, de bienveillance, heureuse crédulité qu’on m’a arrachée pour de précoces et fastueuses leçons, revenez!”¹³ The deep hostility on his part to many aspects of Enlightenment thought and sensibility, which we will observe again and again, is ultimately rooted in this preoccupation with his own complex problems. The fact that his psyche in this way mirrors cultural currents of great historical significance is surely one of the sources of the fascination it has exerted on French and other critics.

Constant’s lifelong public concern was, as has been indicated, the founding and maintenance of a liberal social and political order. This has misled a number of commentators into supposing that his sole end was “negative,” merely the emancipation of the individual from the bonds of political authority and, to a lesser extent, of tradition. Henri Michel, for instance, remarks that “Benjamin Constant a mérité le même reproche [as Édouard Laboulaye] pour . . . n’avoir vu dans l’individualisme qu’une sauvegarde contre l’abus de l’autorité.”¹⁴ Alfred Fabre-Luce goes so far as to state that Constant’s later marked sympathy for religion can be explained simply by the fact that he came to see it as a support for freedom, rather than, as had previously been the case, for authority.¹⁵ Both these writers ignore the clearly stated position of Constant, which is that there exists a higher moral goal than freedom itself and that freedom is best regarded as a means for the attainment of that goal. Of organized social life in general, Constant says, “Toutes les institutions sociales ne sont que des formes adoptées pour le même but, pour le plus grand perfectionnement de l’espèce humaine.”¹⁶ The high value attached to liberty is due to the fact that it is an aid in this evolution. “La liberté n’est d’un prix inestimable que parce qu’elle donne à notre esprit de la justesse; à notre caractère, de la force; à notre âme de l’élévation..¹⁷ Sometimes he states the connection between liberty and the true end of man in terms suggestive of the romanticism prevalent in his day:

Le combat que se livrent en lui [i.e., in the individual] le bien et le mal, ses tâtonnements, ses tentatives infructueuses, ses erreurs, et jusqu’à ses crimes . . . [c]es choses sont une portion de la lute qui est son partage, et cette lute est son moyen de perfectionnement.¹⁸

It is only through a trial and error process, then, that man can come across the best answers to the problems confronting him, and more importantly, forge himself into a virtuous and effective individual. It is useless to hope for the realization of these ends through authority. Constant allies himself here with his friend, Wilhelm von Humboldt, in equating coerced behavior with mechanical nonhuman activity and contrasting it with the freedom and spontaneity characteristic of truly human action:

Conduit vers ce but par on pouvoir qui asservirait sa volonté, il perdrait la qualité d’être libre; et réduit au rang de machine, sa perfection ne serait plus que du mécanisme. L’amélioration n’aurait plus rien de moral.¹⁹

The perfectioning of man can come about only through “ses propres efforts, par l’exercice de ses facultés, par l’énergie de son libre arbitre.”²⁰

Besides the value of liberty as the indispensable means for the attainment of the chief end of man, the moral perfectioning of the individual, there were other ends which liberty served, in Constant’s view. Probably the most important of these was the part it played in cultural evolution. Here Constant’s ideas show most clearly the influence of non-French— principally German and Scottish—models; this is one of the ways, too, in which his thought diverges most from the customary cut-and-dried path of utilitarian liberal thinking.

Constant himself attributes the core of the idea to the Germans:

Les Allemands ont le grand mérite . . . de reconnaître presque tous une vérité fondamentale . . . c’est que tout est progressif dans l’homme. Aucune de ses notions ne reste au même point; elles se développent malgré les résistances, se font jour à travers les obstacles; et, à la fin de chaque espace de temps un peu long, elles se trouvent avoir subi des modifications, reçu des améliorations essentielles . . . [This holds true for] les formes sociales, politiques, religieuses.²¹

One of the implications of this doctrine of the progressive evolution of social forms is that the human intellect itself is subject to historical evolution: as Constant puts it, “le développement de l’intelligence n’est lui-même que le résultat de la société.”²² Thus, the attention of political and social theory is shifted to the conditions for optimal social development.

This development, while progressive, must be understood as a very slow and gradual one. Constant expressed his differences from his friend, Charles de Villers, in this regard: “[C]omme il croit à l’influence des livres et à la possibilité d’améliorer les hommes ! Moi aussi je crois à la perfectibilité, mais ce n’est pas si individuellement. Les siècles l’amènent, mais chaque homme en particulier n’y contribue que d’une manière imperceptible.”²³ It is not individual Great Leaders, Great Teachers, Great Books, or anything of the kind that is responsible for advancement along the road to human perfection. Rather, the mechanism of social progress is to be sought in much broader and more profound social forces.

The basic conception of historical evolution which Constant holds is an idealistic one (as he puts it, an “idéalisme tel que je le conçois”). There exist, in each historical epoch, certain “idées,” the totality of which constitutes the spirit of the times. In every area of social life these ideas move toward their fulfillment and realization. In striving towards this end, however, they run up against established institutions. Such institutions had at one time served important functions: they answered human needs according to the best knowledge available at the time; they were, in fact, the result of the ideas of their own epoch. But new times had produced new needs and new knowledge embodied in the new ideas. A struggle therefore ensues, in which the antiquated institutions are gradually eroded and finally crumble. Institutions more appropriate to the changed spirits of the time then take their place. Then the process is repeated. As he states in De l’esprit de conquête:

Au moment où certaines institutions se sont établies, comme elles étaient proportionnées à l’état des lumières et des mœurs, elles avaient une utilité, une bonté relative. A mesure que l’esprit humain a fait des progrès, ces avantages ont diminué; les institutions se sont modifiées. Vouloir rétablir ces institutions dans ce qu’on nomma leur pureté primitive, serait alors une grande faute; car cette pureté se trouverait précisément la chose la plus opposée aux idées contemporaines, et la plus propre à faire du mal.²⁴

It will be seen that what Constant is positing here is a dialectical process, whereby the growth of enlightenment produces a state of the “social mind” different from that which had given rise to the present social institutions. This incompatibility results in strains in the existing social structure; in response, the social institutions begin to be modified.

Whether the change will be a peaceful or a revolutionary one depends on how the constituted social authorities treat the incipient change. The correct attitude is one of complete laissez-faire, avoiding the attempts both to preserve obsolete institutions and to substitute more theoretically perfect ones for those which naturally develop:

Le mal n’est jamais dans ce qui existe naturellement, mais dans ce qu’on prolonge ou dans ce qu’on rétablit par la ruse ou la force. Le véritable bien, c’est la proportion. La nature la maintient toujours quand on laisse la nature libre. Toute disproportion est pernicieuse. Ce qui est usé, ce qui est hâtif est également funeste.²⁵

It is on this social theory that Constant will take his stand and from which he will launch his condemnations both of the theocratic reactionaries of his own time and the Jacobin revolutionaries of few years before: “c’est la même erreur, différement appliquée. Ce sont toujours les droits de l’opinion qu ‘on dispute; les uns ne veulent pas l’atteindre; les autres ne veulent pas marcher avec elle.”²⁶ Constant’s advice on these questions is simple, even platitudinous sounding, but rests, as I have indicated, on a suggestive attempt at a general social theory:

restez fidèles à la justice, qui est de toutes les époques; respectez la liberté, qui prépare tous les biens; consentez à ce que beaucoup de choses se développent sans vous, et confiez au passé sa propre défense, à l’avenir son propre accomplissement.²⁷

What Constant conceived more specifically to be the mechanism whereby progress occurs in social institutions may be gathered from his attitude on the standardization of weights and measures, the introduction of the metric system, and other such reforms of the Revolution:

Si l’autorité peut, sans porter atteinte à la propriété particulière et aux droits individuels, ouvrir un chemin direct, elle fait bien. Mais qu’elle se borne à ouvrir un chemin . . . tôt ou tard l’intérêt sera vainqueur, et le changement que l’on désire, moins chèrement acheté, sera plus complet et plus irrévocable.²⁸

This is about as much of a lead as Constant affords us as to how, under a regime of laissez-faire, the ideas are supposed to modify received institutions gradually and peacefully. Nonetheless, his view that only such a regime will allow for the satisfactory fitting of the established social order to the ever progressive spirit of the age is unambiguous.

In a sense, however, the interpretation of Constant which makes liberty his ultimate goal, if mistaken, is understandable: his position in the history of political thought is, above all, that of a sophisticated, post-Revolutionary liberal. He was for years almost the personification of the liberal movement in France. As he wrote of himself, in the last years of his life:

J’ai défendu quarante ans le même principe, liberté en tout, en religion, en philosophie, en littérature, en industrie, en politique: et par liberté, j’entends le triomphe de l’individualité, tant sur l’autorité qui voudrait gouverner par le despotisme, que sur les masses qui réclament le droit d’asservir la minorité à la majorité.²⁹

Thus, while the development of human personality and the realization of the possibility of moral choice are the ultimate ends served by liberty, within the political realm, freedom assumes the status of an ultimate end and the value of highest priority; for, as he asserted in a letter to his uncle: “Je crois que ce qu’il faut aux hommes pour arriver à la perfection dans tout ce qui les intéresse, c’est la liberté, par conséquent l’absence de toute autorité exercitive.”³⁰ Wholly characteristic of the importance Constant attached to individual freedom is a statement such as the following: “sur elle [liberty] s’appuie la morale publique et privée, sur elle reposent les calculs de l’industrie. Sans elle il n’y a pour les hommes ni paix, ni dignité, ni bonheur.”³¹

As against his contemporary Bentham, however, Constant believed liberty to consist in the realization of the rights of man.³² There is nothing particularly original in Constant’s doctrine of rights, a judgment that holds also for a good deal of the rest of his strictly political thought: much of it is a repetition of what were well-known liberal principles (although, of course, not always adhered to) in France for perhaps three generations by Constant’s time.

What Constant emphasized, in distinction to certain liberals of the pre-Revolutionary period, was that government was a collection of standing threats to individual freedom: it was, he proclaimed, the “natural enemy of liberty”; governments will always look on war as “a means of increasing their authority”; ministers, of whatever party, are by nature “the eternal adversaries of freedom of the press.”³³ Thus, with Constant, the chief articulator of his generation’s liberal ideals, we see the clear emergence of classical liberalism’s “state hatred,” which, after the eighteenth century’s ambiguous attitude, marks its theory to the present day.³⁴

At the base of this suspicion of government is a marked skepticism concerning human nature when it disposes of great power. As he remarks on one occasion: “Chacun, pour juger du mal qu’occasionne le caprice sans bornes et le pouvoir sans frein, n’a qu’à descendre dans son propre CŒur.”³⁵ On this subject his model was Montesquieu, for whom he had a boundless admiration.³⁶ Constant’s posture of deep distrust towards the wielders of political power echoes the famous judgment of the eighteenth-century writer: “c’est une expérience éternelle que tout homme qui a du pouvoir est porté à en abuser; il va jusqu’à ce qu’il trouve des limites.” Moreover, his remedy for this problem is likewise in the tradition that Montesquieu represented when he added: “Pour qu’on ne puisse abuser du pouvoir, il faut que, par la disposition des choses, le pouvoir arrête le pouvoir.”³⁷

The system of checks and balances was in Constant’s thought, to operate at many different points in the governmental structure, and the general outlines are familiar enough. There was to be a bicameral legislature, including a House of Peers to be selected independently of democratic opinion (a demand of the Anglophiles in the National Assembly of 1789, whom Constant admires). Constant further divided power between the legislature and the judiciary, which was to consist of judges whose immovability from office was guaranteed. An additional limit on the power of the central government was implied in a system of departmental and municipal rights. The special place of the king in Constant’s conception, the “pouvoir neutre,” also contributed to this ultimate end.³⁸

In addition to the guarantee of individual rights built into the system of government itself, Constant looked to certain social institutions to provide further guarantees. One of the most important of these was the press. Freedom of the press, in this way, took on the double character: it was itself a precious right, and it acted as one of the most powerful extra-governmental guarantees of all rights as well. The function of the press as a tribune for those whose rights were violated was incessantly emphasized by Constant. During his career as deputy in the French legislature, he tirelessly fought all the various expedients which the government devised to interfere with this freedom, and was considered the liberals’ parliamentary expert on the subject.³⁹

But Constant’s originality begins to emerge in his looking beyond these traditional guarantees to other social institutions and forces. It is here that he grapples with one of the fundamental problems of nineteenth-century liberal, and particularly French liberal, thought. The Revolutionary period had witnessed constant experimentation with constitutional arrangements. Able political minds—Sieyès is merely the foremost example—devoted a large part of their energy to the construction of basically liberal state edifices; and it had all ended in a situation where the combined military forces of all the other powers were necessary to prise a military dictatorship from the reins of government in France. As Constant put it:

Toutes les constitutions qui ont été données à la France garantissaient également la liberté individuelle, et, sous l’empire de ces constitutions, la liberté individuelle a été violée sans cesse. C’est qu’une simple déclaration ne suffit pas.⁴⁰

Doubtless, the merely verbal commitment to maintain liberty must be reinforced by an arrangement of powers within the governmental structure such as has been outlined. Freedom of the press, too, has a role to play here. Ultimately, however, the defense of liberty must be vouchsafed to the public: the spirit and character of the people must be such that tyranny can be successfully resisted. It was for this reason that Constant supported the preservation, to whatever extent it was possible in the modern world, of the sentiment of regionalism. Total centralization of power and uniformity of legislation was one of the great—and unnecessary—evils of the contemporary world. Regionalism could well provide a counterweight to the drive for centralized control that was the essence of modern tyranny: “Les intérêts et les souvenirs qui naissent des habitudes locales contiennent un germe de résistance que l’autorité ne souffre qu’à regret, et qu’elle s’empresse de déraciner. Elle a meilleur marché des individus; elle roule sur eux sans efforts son poids énorme, comme sur du sable.”⁴¹

It is here—as part of the extra-constitutional bulwark of guarantees of freedom—that religion, too, takes its place in Constant’s thought. It must be emphasized that this was not the only, nor even perhaps the primary, basis for Constant’s sympathy with religious faith. Nevertheless, as will become apparent, Constant came increasingly to the conclusion as time went on that religious faith was a necessary condition for the continued existence of a free society.

In order to understand Constant’s position on religion and liberty, an appreciation of his reasons for rejecting the ethics of utility is indispensable. As with Acton and other anti-utilitarian liberals of the nineteenth century, Constant draws a sharp contrast between utility and duty, between hedonism and the willingness to sacrifice for an ideal. Again and again, throughout his mature period, he castigates hedonism and the morality of rightly understood self-interest as ethically invalid and politically dangerous, as well as objectionable on a number of other grounds. It has been well said of him that “Cet individualiste à outrance dévient presqu’un socialiste, quand il parle des funestes conséquences que doivent produire l”égoïsme et l’intérêt personnel érigés en maxime.”⁴²

In Benjamin Constant’s continuing dialogue with the French Enlightenment, his distaste for its typical ethical perspective is one of the recurrent notes. He always associated self-interest as the basis of ethics with the eighteenth century, and, for him, many of that era’s characteristic errors in politics, social theory, and, indeed, in its whole approach to life, are intimately connected with its mistaken ethical position. This is clear, for instance, from his diagnosis of M. de Maltigues, the cynical and malicious villain of Madame de Staël’s Corinne:

[Il] est le résultat d’un siècle où l’on a dit que la morale n’était qu’un calcul bien entendu, et qu’il fallait surtout jouir de la vie; où l’on a créé contre tous les genres d’enthousiasmes le mot puissant de “niaiserie.”⁴³

Although his manifold criticisms of this ethical view are scattered throughout his works, it is possible to arrange them so as to present a rather formidable attack on utilitarianism.

The most fundamental criticism Constant makes is that pleasure per se is not an ethically relevant value. This position is already suggested in his conception of the proper end of man: that end, as he reiterates, is the “moral perfectioning” of the individual. Constant, like Acton after him, maintains that the categories of hedonism have in the last analysis nothing to do with those of ethics. The enjoyment of pleasure is a morally neutral event; it may be said to pertain to the sphere of natural occurrences, comparable to the functioning of animals. In adopting the “morality” of hedonism:

vous ferez de l’homme de plus habile, le plus droit, le plus sagace des animaux; mais vous le placerez en vain au sommet de cette hiérarchie matérielle: il n’en restera pas moins au-dessous du dernier échelon de toute hiérarchie morale. Vous le jetterez dans une autre sphère que celle où vous croyez l’appeler.⁴⁴

In this, Constant was decisively influenced, after his youthful adherence to a fashionable philosophical hedonism, by the ethics of Kant. His conversion to this approach in ethics seems to date from 1794, when, after a sojourn in Brunswick, he came to the conclusion that German philosophy was to be preferred to French and English, and he declared to Madame de Charrière that he had been persuaded of the notion of “le devoir absolu et indépendant, et par là même simple,” in the sense of Kant.⁴⁵ Although he was later to have a fairly celebrated altercation in print with the latter over the question of whether the obligation to tell the truth is, in fact, unconditional, he never rejected the basic exclusion of pleasure from ethical philosophy, and his rejection of utilitarian-type ethical systems, even later, relies to some extent on certain Kantian ethics.

On the question of what effects would be incurred by the adoption of hedonism as a basis of morality, Constant’s opinion varied to some degree. At times he gave the appearance of merely asserting that an ethic openly proclaiming the maximization of utility or pleasure as the sole raison d’êtreof moral rules would tend to produce certain practical difficulties. On at least one occasion he suggests that his quarrel is not so much with the principle that what is useful is what ought to be sought after, but with the too limited conception of what might prove to be useful to man. Thus, he notes in the Journaux that it is a short-sighted view that holds that the pursuit of theology in past centuries was a complete waste of human energies, for this discipline, “quoique partant de principes faux,” developed certain valuable intellectual traits. From this he concludes: “Tout ce qui exerce l’esprit est bon, et il est même dangereux à quelques égards de trop rechercher si le but est utile. A force de ne vouloir que l’utilité, on élague mille choses dont on méconnaît l’utilité indirecte.”⁴⁶

The limits of Constant’s readiness to compromise with utilitarianism is reached in his statement concerning the ideas of “droit” and “utilité”: “Ce n’est qu’une différence de rédaction,” he writes, “mais elle est plus importante qu’on ne pense.”⁴⁷ Constant concedes that if the term “utility” is suitably defined, there is no doubt that a utilitarian ethic will generate the same moral rules as an ethic based on natural law and justice; it will always be found, on careful examination, that what is not just is also not useful. But, he adds:

Il n’en est pas moins vrai que le mot d’utilité, suivant l’acception vulgaire, rappelle une notion différente de celle de la justice ou du droit. Or, lorsque l’usage et la raison commune attachent à un mot une signification déterminée, il est dangereux de changer cette signification; on explique vainement ensuite ce qu’on a voulu dire; le mot reste, et l’explication s’oublie.⁴⁸

Here Constant seems to be foregoing any principled objection to utilitarianism, and appears to base the superiority of the natural law position on the supposition that, if moral rules are couched in those terms, it is more likely that they will be followed. His fundamental position, however, is much more radical: it is that any system based on a pleasure and pain calculus is thoroughly subversive of morality.

This view stems from the 1790s, when, as has been pointed out, Constant accepted the basic tenets of the Kantian critique on this issue. At that time, he summed up his objections as follows:

Si le bonheur général ou particulier est la pierre de touche du devoir, il est impossible de déterminer ce qu’est ce dernier. Non seulement le bonheur peut être variable en lui-même, mais il est nécessairement différent dans l’imagination de chaque individu. Le devoir est donc un être moulé au gré de chaque tête individuelle. Il y a plus: le devoir, devenant un calcul de bonheur, n’est plus un devoir. . . . Ainsi la morale fondée sur le bonheur n’a aucune base fixe. Le devoir ou le bien moral doit être absolument étranger aux circonstances et aux calculs. Ce doit être une idée isolée, indépendante et immuable ou ce n’est qu’un mot vide de sens et susceptible de tous les sens partiels que les passions, la courte vue ou l’exaltation peuvent lui donner.⁴⁹

At the time he went on to express his doubts that such an exalted conception of morality was fitting for men as history and experience shows them to be. But, while this last notion fell away with the fading of his youthful cynicism, we see a number of his basic objections to hedonistic ethics (both, we should note, egoistic and social utilitarianism), which will remain with him and form a crucial element in his social thought. The arguments contained in this lengthy passage were elaborated by Constant at other times.

Thus he asserts that utilitarianism does not provide sufficiently unambiguous rules to serve as guides for moral action. For example, in dealing with cases in which I violate my neighbor’s rights,

si je ne juge de cette violation que par son utilité, je puis me tromper dans mon calcul, trouver de l’utilité dans cette violation. Le principe de l’utilité est par conséquence bien plus vague que celui du droit naturel.⁵⁰

Here, it ought to be pointed out, Constant seems to have in mind the doctrine of act utilitarianism, for in classical utilitarianism of the Benthamite variety—a form of rule utilitarianism—one is not customarily in the position of having to pass judgment on the utility of violating someone else’s rights. The system of (legal) rights has been established, presumably in accordance with the principle of the maximization of utility, and the individual is called upon simply to identify the case as one involving certain rights.

But, in reality, Constant’s attack is on utilitarianism per se. A vital claim of his—although he does not use the terminology—is that there is a tendency for rule utilitarianism to degenerate into act utilitarianism:

Sans doute, il est utile pour les transactions générales des hommes entre eux qu’il existe entre les membres des rapports immuables; mais si l’on prétendait que ces rapports n’existent que parce qu’il est utile que cela soit ainsi, on ne manquerait pas d’occasions où l’on prouverait qu’il serait infiniment plus utile de faire plier ces rapports; on oublierait que leur utilité constante vient de leur immutabilité, et cessant d’être immuables, ils cesseraient d’être utiles.

From this he concludes, “Ce n’est que lorsque la règle est démontrée, qu’il est bon de faire ressortir l’utilité qu’elle peut avoir.”⁵¹ There is thus a tendency within utilitarianism to undermine its own foundation. This operates both on the level of private morality and of political morality (“il en est ainsi de la morale et du droit”). On the level of private morality, it may be pointed out that, human nature being what it is, it is likely that unless morality is established as deducible from an objective code, people are apt to decide moral questions in favor of their momentary desires: “l’évaluation d’un profit est arbitraire: c’est l’imagination qui en décide; mais ni ses erreurs, ni ses caprices ne sauraient changer la notion du devoir.”⁵² Utilitarianism runs the constant danger of seeing its moral code founder on the reef of human susceptibility to temptation. Moreover, it promotes this danger, for the term “utility” itself appeals to desire rather than to duty. The English utilitarians, Constant suggests, were not as perceptive as Helvétius in this regard; they overestimated the power of reason, even reason devoted to the calculation of one’s own self-interest, to inhibit present passions from recklessly seeking their satisfaction. Of Helvétius, Constant writes:

[Il] est beaucoup moins inconséquent que ses successeurs ne l’ont été. Admirateur des passions, il n’exhorte nulle part ses disciples à les vaincre. . . . Il donne l’intérêt pour mobile, mais il ne prétend pas le dénaturer par une épithète [i.e., “ bien entendu ”], et l’investir d’une sagesse, d’une prévoyance qu’il n’aura jamais.⁵³

The same tendency for utilitarian ethics to degenerate into moral chaos operated on the political level. Here Constant doubtless had in mind above all the Terror, which he had condemned even in his republican and rationalist period. Judicial forms (one type of moral rule on the political level) had been systematically violated by virtue of the maxim salus populi suprema lex esto. To take social utility as the supreme standard, therefore, is to invite the breaking of rules which, while they do not openly declare it, do tend to maximize social welfare. Constant sometimes takes the position, then, that while rule utilitarianism is abstractly an acceptable ethic, in practice it must give away to act utilitarianism, which ultimately destroys all moral rules. An ethical code based on natural law will in application prove far more effective than one derived from utility, for “en parlant du droit, vous présentez une idée indépendante de tout calcul; en parlant de l’utilité, vous semblez inviter à remettre la chose en question, en la soumettant à une vérification nouvelle.”⁵⁴

A somewhat more original objection to the hedonistic approach is contained in Constant’s idea that—contrary to the typical view of writers such as Helvétius and the Philosophical Radicals, among others—the search for pleasure does not in fact constitute the only, or even the chief, stimulus to action in man. Here Constant appears to be rejecting the psychological claims on which utilitarianism is customarily based, although unfortunately he does not provide an altogether clear or systematic attack.

The point in question is raised in the course of a passage in De l’esprit de conquête in which Constant sets forth the lethal consequences of arbitrary government for many lines of human activity. And it is not only in the arts and sciences that these consequences will be felt, he asserts. Commerce, too, will suffer:

Le commerce n’est pas à lui seul un mobile d’activité suffisant; l’on s’exagère l’influence de l’intérêt personnel; l’intérêt personnel a besoin pour agir de l’existence de l’opinion: l’homme dont l’opinion languit étouffée, n’est pas longtemps excité, même par son intérêt; une sorte de stupeur s’empare de lui. . . L’intérêt, séparé de l’opinion, est borné dans ses besoins, et facile à contenter dans ses jouissances: il travaille juste ce qu’il faut pour le présent, mais ne prépare rien pour l’avenir.⁵⁵

To this we may add a passage which occurs in a talk delivered to the Athénée Royal of Paris, in 1819, in which Constant stated:

D’ailleurs, Messieurs, est-il donc si vrai que le Bonheur de quelque genre qu’il puisse être soit le but unique de l’espèce humaine ? En ce cas, notre carrière serait bien étroite, et notre destination bien peu relevée. Il n’est pas un de nous qui, s’il voulait descendre, restreindre ses facultés morales, rabaisser ses désire, adjurer l’activité, la gloire, les émotions généreuses et profondes, ne pût s’abrutir et être heureux.

He adds, characteristically, that “ce n’est pas au Bonheur seul, c’est au perfectionnement que notre destin nous appelle.”⁵⁶

What Constant appears to be saying in these passages is that the reductive model of man set up by Helvétius and Bentham is fundamentally inadequate. It is not the case that, as Helvétius had asserted, “Corporeal sensibility is therefore [in the last analysis] the sole mover of men.”⁵⁷ Or as Bentham had proclaimed: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”⁵⁸If this were in fact true, then we should expect a world peopled by roués and bons vivants, who indulge in the most easily obtainable and obvious pleasures; or rather (since even for such persons much of their pleasure is attributable in the last analysis to some sort of social “opinion”), we should expect a world of self-made brutes. Moreover, it would be the aim of rational men to make themselves into such beings. But, in spite of this, there are many, and they are acknowledged to be the best, who choose instead lines of action that either promise little or no pleasure, or pleasure which is uncertain and not clearly greater than the probable pain. This fact, Constant believes, simply cannot be explained by the psychological model erected by hedonists of whatever school.

Constant’s view of the very limited effectiveness of pleasure seeking as a spur to (or an explanation of) action is reflected also in his description of a society organized and animated according to the principle of rightly understood self-interest. This would, he asserts, represent

un état de choses où rien ne dérange le calcul; où l’intérêt bien entendu, tranquille et sans effroi, sait toujours ce qu’il doit vouloir, et parvient toujours à se faire entendre. C’est le beau idéal d’une société gouvernée par cet intérêt bien entendu. Qu’a-t-elle de plus que les rassemblements industrieux des castors, ou les réunions bien ordonnées des abeilles?⁵⁹

Men are kept from this sort of fate, however, by the existence of a natural desire for and urge towards glory. As Constant puts it:

C’était une belle conception de la nature d’avoir placé la récompense de l’homme hors de lui, d’avoir allumé dans son cœur cette flamme indéfinissable de la gloire, qui, se nourrissant de nobles espérances, source de toutes les actions grandes, préservatif contre tous les vices, lien des générations entre elles et de l’homme avec l’univers, repousse les désirs grossiers, et dédaigne les plaisirs sordides.⁶⁰

We ought to note also that this passage clearly implies Constant’s rejection of the psychological model of man which endows his psyche with a minimal naturally-given content; this insistence on the existence of “innate” motives other than that of pleasure seeking will reappear in his concept of “le sentiment religieux.”⁶¹

For Constant, however, the most serious problem presented by hedonistic ethics is not their incapacity to prevent crime or their tenuous psychological foundation, but rather lies in the debasement of human character they would inevitably effect, once having become generally accepted. Recent historical experience furnished both an illustration of what he had in mind and a certain amount of evidence for this thesis: he seems to have assumed that hedonism “reigned without rival” for about the whole period from the fall of Robespierre to the fall of Napoleon. Its effects were not difficult to discern: “cette indifférence, cette servilité, cette persistance dans le calcul, cette versatilité dans les prétextes, qu’était-ce autre chose que l’intérêt bien entendu.”⁶²

This state of public opinion was not an accidental one. Psychologically speaking, nothing more was to be expected. The followers of Helvétius are faced with a dilemma: if enlightened self-interest is not a powerful enough force to overcome the often furious passions which lead to crime, then it does not perform the first function of an ethical code. But if it is powerful enough for that, then it will certainly find it an easy matter to suppress the more subtle promptings of pity, generosity, tenderness and other altruistic emotions. In fact, if self-interest were accepted universally, we could expect the eventual drying up of these motives. “Il n’y a pas un noble sentiment du Cœur contre lequel la logique de l’intérêt bien entendu ne puisse s’armer.”⁶³ Constants indignation in this connection goes so far as to touch even the doctrines of the classical economists, which otherwise he treated as demonstrated scientific truth. He attacks both excessively rigorous poor laws, aimed at making the acceptance of poor relief as unattractive as possible, and the crusade against early marriages and large families on the part of the poor:

on s’est interdit l’aumône qui vient de l’attendrissement et de la pitié; on a ravi au pauvre sa liberté en échange de sa subsistance; on s’est cru bienfaisant, quand sous des verroux on lui donnait du pain . . . on a reproché à l’indigent ses penchants naturels, et à ses enfants leur existence . . . on a transformé la vie en un parc, que ses propriétaires ont droit de clore du murs, et dont l’entrée n’est accordée que sous le bon plaisir de leur tolérance.⁶⁴

The stanching of benevolent feelings towards others, however, does not simply retard the full ethical development of the individual. It has, in addition, quite serious consequences in social and political life, consequences of the sort that necessarily aroused the deepest concern in Constant. For the doctrine of self-interest, in his view, directly endangered the maintenance of a free society.

Again, we are obligated to mention the existence of a certain ambivalence in his thought on this question. On one occasion, at least, Constant emphasizes the positive value for freedom in the attachment of individuals to their own pleasure. This occurs in the case of the English, of whom he states:

Le peuple le plus attaché à sa liberté, dans les temps modernes, est aussi le peuple le plus attaché à ses jouissances; et il tient à sa liberté surtout, parce qu’il est assez éclairé pour y apercevoir la garantie de ses jouissances.⁶⁵

This assertion implies that given a certain high degree of public enlightenment—sufficient to enable a very large number of individuals to comprehend the interconnectedness of a free political order and an abundant supply of enjoyments—the hedonistic approach would tend to provide a strong support for a free society. As will appear below, Tocqueville at one time expanded this argument into the position that most of the problems of a liberal order could be resolved through the enlightened self-interest of the citizens. But, as with Tocqueville, the main thrust of Constant’s thought is towards undermining the force of this concession.

The argument that hedonism works against the preservation of a liberal order is ultimately founded on the claim that naked self-interest is subversive of mutual concern among the members of society in general. In Constant’s words:

Il faut aux hommes, pour qu’ils s’associent réciproquement à leurs destinées, autre chose que l’intérêt. Il leur faut une opinion; il leur faut de la morale. L’intérêt tend à les isoler, parce qu’il offre à chacun la chance d’être seul plus heureux ou plus habile.⁶⁶

The ethic of self-interest, in fact, encourages each man to look upon himself as a pleasure machine, prudently husbanding his store of utility, and interested in others only to the extent that contact with them is likely to maximize his own pleasure. Such an attitude, if it were generally adopted, would result in insurmountable problems for the operation of the system of guarantees in the fact of governmental tyranny, for “ce n’est pas avec de tels éléments qu’un peuple l’obtient [i.e., liberty], la fonde ou la conserve.”⁶⁷ The natural effect of the doctrine of self-interest

est de faire que chaque individu soit son propre centre. Or, quand chacun est son propre centre, tous sont isolés. Quand tous sont isolés, il n’y a que de la poussière. Quand l’orage arrive, la poussière est de la fange.⁶⁸

A consequence of complete egoism (or of “individualism,” as Tocqueville was to call this tendency), Constant holds, is the emergence of an attitude of cold indifference to the fate of one’s fellows; his conception of the future army of conquest, bred in an atmosphere of egoism (for such is the spirit of the times), is illuminating here. In the case of defeat, for instance:

Chacun verrait, dans son camarade à l’agonie un dédommagement au pillage devenu impossible contre l’étranger. . . . L’infirme et le blessé paraîtraient à l’officier chargé de leur sort un poids importun dont il se débarrasserait à tout prix.⁶⁹

And if the commanding general finds himself in a situation which cannot be salvaged, he will simply leave his men in the lurch; it is of no importance to him that they put their lives into his hands, trusting to his words. Instead, he will think: “Instruments inutiles, ne faut-il pas qu’ils soient brisés?”⁷⁰ This rather overdrawn picture can perhaps best be understood not as a categorical prediction but as a depiction of the logical consequences of the doctrine of integral egoism.

As has been indicated, Constant held that he had concrete evidence for the social effects of egoism in the recent history of France; the period following Thermidor, when hedonism was the order of the day in France, and especially in Paris, was one in which people had “laissé tomber les têtes et garanti les propriétés . . . empêché le pillage et facilité le meurtre légal.”⁷¹

Given this perspective on hedonistic ethics, we can quite easily understand Constant’s passion to demolish it, particularly when we note his view of the main tendencies of modern society, the “ideas” which lay at the base of contemporary society. A certain danger point, he held, had been reached in the progress of Western civilization, one which is inevitably attained in every progressive culture. In a conversation in 1814 with James Mackintosh, Constant advanced the thesis that

every particular form of civilization, by multiplying the number of enjoyments which may be attained without reason or virtue, tends to its own destruction; that the mental qualities are destroyed, and the mechanical products only remain; that a foreign force is necessary to revive such a civilization—like the invasion of the barbarians, which supplied mental energy, while all the outward results of ancient civilization were preserved to be the instruments of that energy.⁷²

Although Constant does not, in his published works, present the argument in this particular form, the basic sentiment is one that recurs often. The trend is, he states, the natural result of civilization to render “les jouissances plus faciles, plus variées et l’habitude que l’homme contracte de ces jouissances lui en fait un besoin qui le détourne de toutes les pensées élevées et nobles.”⁷³ This is actually the undesirable reverse side of one which underlies the main argument of De l’esprit de conquête. There he argued that modern social and economic conditions have multiplied the sources of pleasure many fold, leading to a disinclination to engage in war (which was no longer materially profitable, and could only endanger and restrict the variety of possible pleasures):

comme ces jouissances et la facilité que l’homme trouve à les obtenir attachement chacun à la position qui les lui assure, il est évident que chacun éprouve plus de répugnance à risquer cette position, même quand le devoir l’y invite.⁷⁴

But this tendency towards civic passivity and pacifism brings with it at least two unfortunate consequences. The first is that it tends to lead to an overestimation of the value of order and stability in society, for the individual will hesitate to risk the desirable position he has attained:

Or, le bon ordre, chose utile, chose indispensable aux progrès et à la prospérité des sociétés, est plutôt un moyen qu’un but. Si, pour le maintenir, on sacrifie toutes les émotions généreuses, on réduit les hommes à un état peu différent de celui de certains animaux industrieux, dont les ruches bien ordonnés et les cases artistement construites ne sauraient pourtant être le beau idéal de l’espèce humaine.⁷⁵

Such an overvaluation of stability would thus produce a state of stagnation both of society and of the individual; its tendency is towards the brutalization of man, not so much in the sense that he will become overly aggressive or murderous, but in the opposite sense, that of, say, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Secondly, undue emphasis on order necessarily implies acquiescence in the coming to power of the strongest faction, the one best able to preserve order. For power is always able to promise that it will preserve social order, and this is usually enough for the principle of self-interest to rush to enlist itself on its side.⁷⁶ Moreover, the same love of ease and comfort that now makes it unlikely that men will go to war implies a decline in civic spirit and civic courage which is very dangerous from the viewpoint of liberty:

Le plus imminent de ces dangers [those resulting from the tendency of civilization] est une espèce de résignation fondée sur le calcul, et qui, balançant les inconvénients des résistances avec les inconvénients des transactions, nuit également et au maintien de la liberté contre le despotisme intérieur, et à la défense de l’indépendance contre les invasions étrangers.⁷⁷

Again, the period of Napoleonic tyranny provides Constant with evidence for his thesis. He points out that the two countries where Napoleon’s triumphal march was reversed, Spain and Russia, were countries quite backward materially. In addition, he finds it significant that in Spain it was the lower class (for whom material benefits were less accessible) who fought the invading French armies tooth and nail, while the upper classes were rather willing to yield.⁷⁸

For Constant, the modern frame of mind represented a grave peril indeed. From the perspective of his “state hatred” (or, at least, deep distrust of the state), it must be assumed that the holders of political power by and large will always be engaged in at least a cold war against the rights of man. Thus, resistance to governmental encroachments will often be required, and sometimes it will even be necessary for some, at least, to risk their lives in the struggle. But it will most often not be the case that the individual who rises to resist authority will thereby win for himself a position comfortable enough to compensate him for his pains. And as for the cases when one’s very life must be risked, it is hardly consistent with egoistic hedonism for the individual to seriously risk his life for anything whatsoever, particularly for an abstract cause. In consequence, on the basis of enlightened self-interest alone, the chances for the preservation of a free society are dim indeed.

Thus Constant raises the problem of modern “materialism,” of the effects of affluence, and especially of the proliferation of creature comforts, on the personality and character of man and on the prospects for a free society. Somehow an antidote to this tendency of civilization must be found:

Il est donc important de contre-balancer cet effet de la civilisation, en recueillant et en entretenant, le plus qu’il est possible, les sentiments nobles et désintéressés . . . tâchons de conserver au sein de la civilisation les idées nobles, les émotions généreuses que les jouissances tendent à étouffer.⁷⁹

In view, then, of the multitudinous difficulties inherent in hedonistic ethics, it was imperative that some sort of alternative be found. In Constant’s mind, it was clear what the alternative had to be. As he states in De la religion:

Tous les systèmes [morales] se réduisent à deux. L’un nous assigne l’intérêt pour guide, et le bien-être pour but. L’autre nous propose pour but le perfectionnement, et pour guide le sentiment intime, l’abnégation de nous-mêmes et la faculté de sacrifice.⁸⁰

The end, of course, as stated above, is the somewhat vague notion of the perfectioning of the individual. It must be pointed out, however, that the means to the discovery of which actions conduce to this ethical goal and which do not is stated to be not the intellect, as Constant elsewhere give cause to suppose, but some interior feeling. The contradiction this involves for Constant’s thought requires some explanation.

At times, particularly in his earlier work, Constant tended to the conception of ethics of writers such as Locke and Montesquieu (among others): of the Locke who maintained that “morality is capable of demonstration, as well as mathematics,”⁸¹ and of the Montesquieu who, also making use of the mathematical model, asserted, “Dire qu’il n’y a rien de juste ni d’injuste que ce qu’ordonnent ou défendent les lois positives, c’est dire qu’avant qu’on eût tracé de cercle, tous les rayons n’étaient pas égaux.”⁸² Occasionally, Constant also conceives of morality in such rationalistic terms, as a collection of rules or “laws” discoverable by reason. This seems clearly to be implied in the passages already quoted, which speak of “demonstrating” the ethical rule, and which attack making happiness the basis of ethics because in that case duty would vary with the individual imagination. His final and mature view, however, or at least that which is most unambiguously set forth in De la religion, appears to be an intuitionist one, rather than a rationalist one:

Non, la nature n’a point placé notre guide dans notre intérêt bien entendu, mais dans notre sentiment intime. Ce sentiment nous avertit de ce qui est mal ou de ce qui est bien. L’intérêt bien entendu ne nous fait connaître que ce qui est avantageux ou ce qui est nuisible.⁸³

Considering Constant’s lack of philosophical sophistication, it is not surprising that at times the two conceptions are even intermingled. In any case, it is not necessary for us to attempt to square these two notions. The rationalist one may perhaps best be regarded as an unexamined residue in his thinking, left over from an earlier period. The more important one, in respect to the question of the connection of religion to other social forces, is the intuitionist and romantic perspective on ethics.

Benjamin Constant occupied himself for about forty years with his work on religion,⁸⁴ and if it is too much to say, as does a recent commentator, that for Constant “die Religion den eigentlichen Schlüssel zum Verständnis der Menscheitsentwicklung bilde,”⁸⁵ it is nevertheless obvious that he considered religion of very great importance.

Constant’s own religious views underwent something of the same change during his life as his ideas on related subjects: that is, they manifest an evolution away from eighteenth-century rationalism towards a more romantic position. While in his early work, Des réactions politiques (1796), he could, in good Girondin style, treat of religion under the name of “fanaticism,”⁸⁶ in a few years he began demonstrating distaste for standard anti-religious thinking. As early as 1805 he states in his diary that “il y a dans l’irréligion quelque chose de grossier et d’usé qui me répugne.”⁸⁷ Significantly, by that date he was able to add: “D’ailleurs, j’ai mon coin de religion. Mais il est tout en sentiment, en émotions vagues: il ne peut se réduire en système.”⁸⁸ Constant was aware of the directions his thinking was taking. At one time he wrote to Claude Hochet: “Mon ouvrage est une singulière preuve de ce que dit Bacon, qu’un peu de science mène à l’athéisme, et plus de science à la religion.”⁸⁹ But although his religious feelings were urgent enough at times to lead him to toy with mysticism, and despite his profession of faith as a Protestant,⁹⁰ the degree to which he ever achieved real religious faith in any traditional sense is questionable.⁹¹ At best, it was the sort of liberal Protestantism which was coming to the fore in Germany that claimed his allegiance, and that he described in the following terms:

Chaque jour la religion protestante déviant en Allemagne plus une chose de sentiment qu’une institution: point de forme, point de symbole, rien d’obligatoire, presque point de cérémonie, rien que des idées douces et une morale sensible.⁹²

In a sense, Constant’s strong assertion of the indispensability of religion gains in interest in view of his own lack of traditional religious commitment.

One of the basic conclusions Constant had been led to in his study of religion was the impossibility of an atheistic society existing for any length of time. This motion is perhaps best understood as a reaction against the atheist worldview of a d’Holbach or a La Mettrie, the full implications of which had been glimpsed by Constant and which had filled him with horror. A race that accepted them would, he believed, confront a world drained of all traces of humanity: “L’univers est sans vie: des générations passagères, fortuites, isolées, y paraissent, souffrent, meurent: nul lien n’existe entre ces générations, dont le partage est ici la douleur, plus loin le néant.”⁹³ Even egregious error in religious beliefs, even superstition (the bête-noir of the philosophes) was preferable to atheism.⁹⁴ Moreover, it appeared to be a fact of human nature that the atheistic conception of the universe was so horrible as to be unacceptable in the long run for the great mass of mankind. Both historical experience and “psychology” (in the form of Constant’s concept of an innate religious sentiment) provide evidence on this point:

Historiquement, nous n’en voyons d’exemple nulle part [of the possibility of doing away with religion altogether]. Psychologiquement, l’existence du sentiment religieux nous semble y mettre obstacle. Les Romains se croyaient dans cette situation vers le premier siècle de notre ère. Trois cents ans plus tard, les convictions religieuses avaient pénétré de nouveau dans tous les esprits, la foi reconquis toutes les âmes.⁹⁵

Indeed, an indication of the indestructibility of religious feelings is given by the materialists themselves, by “cet enthousiasme pour la nature, pour le grant tout,” a sort of frantic adulation of the cosmos and its iron laws, which may be noted in certain of their writings. This, Constant declares, is nothing but “le sentiment religieux se reproduisant sous un autre nom au sein de l’athéisme lui-même.”⁹⁶ Thus, in view of the inevitability of religion, the question becomes rather in what form it will establish itself.⁹⁷

Turning to a consideration of the fundamental nature of religion, Constant begins by positioning a religious element in man which is innate and whose origin is subject to no further explanation. All beings exhibit certain distinctive modes of existence which constitute the nature of their species, modes which it would be fruitless to attempt to trace back to anterior causes, but which themselves are the starting point for any explanation of more specific phenomena associated with the species. In the case of man, among such fundamental conditions of his nature is the religious sentiment.⁹⁸ Constant holds that it is an error to try to trace the development of religious feeling to other causes, just as it is folly to seek for the origin of society or of language: all these are constituent elements of human nature, inherent in man.⁹⁹ It follows from this that those writers who have sought the first cause of religion in fear, ignorance, deceit, the urge to domination, etc., were mistaken. There is no more reason to have recourse to such explanations in this case than in the case of any other inherent human quality.¹⁰⁰

The precise nature of “le sentiment religieux” remains somewhat vague, perhaps necessarily so. Constant defines it at one point as “le besoin que l’homme éprouve de se mettre en communication avec la nature qui l’entoure, et les forces inconnues qui lui semblent animer cette nature.”¹⁰¹ Perhaps the best indication of what he had in mind is given by a passage from Lord Byron’s poem, “Island,” which Constant quotes in this connection because it furnishes “une définition tellement d’accord avec la nôtre.” The poem begins with the lines:

How often we forget all time, when lone,
Admiring nature’s universal throne,
Her woods, her wilds, her waters, the intense
Reply of hers to our intelligence!

And the last line quoted by Constant read: “Strip off this fond and false identity! / Who thinks of self, when gazing on the sky?”¹⁰² It is highly significant that for Constant self-abnegation was of the essence of religious belief: “Ce que le Sauvage fait pour lui-même n’est que de l’égoïsme: ce qu’il fait pour les morts qu’il a aimés est de la religion.”¹⁰³ This is one indication of the interconnection in his mind of religion and non-utilitarian ethics.

But if the religious sentiment is an expression of unchangeable human nature, this is not at all the case with the forms which it assumes. Here, Constant lays down a fruitful distinction, which will, as we shall see, assist him at critical points later on: while the religious sentiment is the need which man feels for communication with the transcendental realm, “la forme naît du besoin qu’il éprouve également de rendre réguliers et permanents les moyens de communication qu’il croit avoir découverts.”¹⁰⁴ The religious sentiment thus pertains to the unchangeable essence of man, while the religious forms pertain to history.

We have already spoken of Constant’s conception of the manner in which the interaction of newly emerging ideas and needs, on the one hand, and established institutions, on the other, produces first stresses and eventually modification in social institutions, serving to bring them into line with the contemporary Zeitgeist. This conception is most clearly articulated in his theory of the evolution of religious forms. As Constant expresses it, we find

à chaque époque l’établissement d’une forme positive [of religion], proportionnée à l’état de cette époque. Mais toute forme positive, quelque satisfaisante qu’elle soit pour le présent, contient un germe d’opposition aux progrès de l’avenir. . . . Le sentiment religieux se sépare alors de cette forme pour ainsi dire pétrifiée. Il en réclame une autre qui ne le blesse pas, et il s’agite jusqu’à ce qu’il l’ait trouvée.¹⁰⁵

The modifications in the social substructure which account for the changes in the religious superstructure comprise changes in thought, in moral awareness and, generally, in the state of development which society has so far reached. The dependence of religious forms on more fundamental social factors is an important part of Constant’s theory:

Nous avons établi, comme la vérité principale à démontrer dans notre ouvrage, que chaque révolution qui s’opère dans la situation de l’espèce humaine en produit une dans les idées religieuses.¹⁰⁶

Constant finds evidence for his theory, and an interesting illustration of it, in the differences in the character of the gods as depicted in the Iliad and in the Odyssey. He accepts the position which had been advanced by the German scholar F. A. Wolf, according to which the two poems were composed by different authors. In Constant’s view, a study of the social conditions which form the background of the two poems shows that they pertain to two different epochs. The Odyssey takes place in a social setting characterized by less war, the beginnings of legislation, the first attempts at commerce; in it, human relations manifest the partial replacement of force by reason and commerce, the germs of the conception of the rights of the citizen, and to some degree the pursuit of science.¹⁰⁷ This evolution in society led inevitably to a difference in the nature of the deities, a difference which may be noted in the two poems. In the earlier work, for instance, the gods are moved only by insults to their priests, by the neglect of the proper sacrifices to them, and by similar considerations, while in the Odyssey, the infraction of moral rules governing the relations of men among themselves is sometimes enough to bring down their wrath. As Constant puts it: “On dirait . . . que durant cet intervalle, leur [the gods’] éducation morale a fait des progrès.”¹⁰⁸

The changes in the other sectors of society lead, sooner or later, to changes in the forms of religious life. In Constant’s statement, man, after establishing a religious form, “cette première nécessité de sa nature,”

développe et perfectionne ses autres facultés. Mais ses succès mêmes rendent la forme qu’il avait donnée à ses idées religieuses disproportionnée avec ses facultés développées et perfectionnées. Dès ce moment, la destruction de cette forme est inévitable.¹⁰⁹

This transformation of one religious form into another may be affected in one of two ways: “soit par les corporations de prêtres chez les nations soumises au sacerdoce, soit par les progrès de l’esprit humain chez les peuples indépendants de la puissance sacerdotale.”¹¹⁰ Constant thus introduces a distinction which is of the greatest importance for his whole theory of the development of religion, and which has been termed “l’idée-mère et . . . la fin dernière” of his whole work.¹¹¹ As Constant himself asserts: “la distinction entre les religions soumises au sacerdoce et celles qui en sont indépendantes est la première condition requise pour concevoir des idées justes sur cette matière.”¹¹²

This distinction is one which had been fermenting in Constant’s mind for some time, and which can be traced back at least as far as the period in which his overall attitude towards religion began to become more sympathetic. Already in 1805 he noted in Journaux the importance of “la différence de la marche soumises aux prêtres et de celle des religions livrées à elles-mêmes.”¹¹³ Indeed, it may well be the case that it was the perception of this distinction that permitted Constant, the enemy of intolerance and persecution, to regard at least one category of religion with favor.

We need not follow Constant in his development of the theme of the capture and exploitation of religious feelings by the priestly castes for its own purposes. Theirs was a power based principally on a monopoly of knowledge of the sciences¹¹⁴ and associated, historically, with the worship of the stars and the elements.¹¹⁵ Having analyzed out of the history of religion this one element, Constant proceeds to try to demonstrate that it was the priestly corporation that was responsible for most of the crimes, oppressive institutions, etc., which freethinkers had been accustomed to ascribe to religion per se. The notion of original sin,¹¹⁶ the preservation of the caste system (which the passage of time would have dissolved),¹¹⁷ the concept of diabolical powers operating within the human personality,.¹¹⁸ and the promotion of secular despotism,¹¹⁹ are a few of the evils traceable to priestly power. The toll which this group of privileged individuals has taken through the ages is incalculable: “On peut difficilement aujourd’hui concevoir dans toute son étendue, le mal qu’a fait à l’homme le sacerdoce de l’antiquité.¹²⁰ The price of mankind’s abdication of intelligence to these holy despots has been for centuries slavery, falsehood and fear.¹²¹

Constant pursues his prosecution of hedonistic ethics into the analysis of the historical development of religion. The influence of the priest throughout this development has been closely bound up with selfishness, with that of the worshippers as well as of the priests themselves.

There are two sorts of motives connected with religion on the part of the worshipper, Constant maintains. One, the religious sentiment properly so-called, we have already discussed: its essence is forgetfulness of self and concentration of the ego on others and on the cosmos. The other sort of motive, however, is “égoiste, ardent, mercenaire,” desiring to take advantage of religion for personal advancement. It is this drive which creates a need for priests, as the specialist in the arcane lore by which the gods are brought to serve human wants.¹²² In their turn, the priests surrender to the desire for personal power. Any authentic religious feeling is destroyed within the priestly class, and at the core of the doctrine which the priests share only among themselves we find a religious void.¹²³

From the point of view of the evolution of religion towards higher and more perfect forms, the priest plays the same role in Constant’s conception as does the meddling political authority in the economic realm: by interfering with the free play of social forces, he prevents the equilibrium which nature would have brought about, and produces a host of evils as by-products:

Au lieu de se développer et de s’épurer, le sentiment religieux, s’agitant sous des entraves contre nature, serait devenu désordonné, faute de progression; délirant, faute de liberté. . . . Le polythéisme sacerdotal . . . conserve à ses idoles toutes leurs difformités et tous leurs vices.¹²⁴

In view of all this, Constant finds it difficult to overestimate the benefits for mankind from the circumstances that the Greeks did not permit the priestly caste to come to power.¹²⁵ The condition of laissez-faire obtaining in their religious life enabled them to benefit from the natural progress of science and morality to purify their religion; the latter was one “marchant d’un pas égal avec la morale, et s’épurant à mesure que l’intelligence de l’homme s’éclaire.”¹²⁶

The ultimate grounds for Constant’s profound hostility to the priest —a distinguishing mark of his work among contemporary attempts to cast religious belief in a new light—are to be found in his basically anti-authoritarian orientation, which led him to distrust and resent hierarchy and organization per se, in the residue of the eighteenth-century philosophy and particularly in his fear of the consequences of the Catholic revival of the early nineteenth century.¹²⁷ In connection with this last point, at one time he thought he could even discern a sort of conspiracy at work:

Il y a un plan bien suivi pour rétablir dans les sciences, dans les lettres, dans les comédies, dans les romans, la disposition d’esprit étroite et soumise qui favorise le catholicisme. . . . C’est un pari de certains hommes contre l’esprit humain. Je doute qu’ils le gagnent.¹²⁸

This suspension of the political role of the Christian priest is reflected in Constant’s work. Although he was at pains to distinguish the Christian clergy from the priestly castes of pagan religions, he noted also that “le judaïsme et le christianisme [had been] souvent défigurés par l’esprit sacerdotal,”¹²⁹ and attributed the fact that the priests of modern religions pose less of a danger to civilization due to strict limits set to their power.¹³⁰

Thus, Constant’s work on religion, with its conception of the role of the religious sentiment and of the priest, manifests the same tendency as much of his other writings: a path is conceptually hewn between the dangers of rationalism, radicalism, and the ideas of the philosophes, on the one hand, and the thought of the reactionary conservatives on the other. His conception of the proper policy on religion is much the same as his attitude towards other social institutions: “Laissons-la à Dieu et à ellemême. Toujours proportionnée, elle marchera avec les idées, s’éclairera avec la raison, s’épurera avec la morale, et à chaque époque, elle sanctionnera ce qu’il y aura de meilleur.”¹³¹

In regard to the question of the connection between religion and morality, Constant maintained that they were logically and historically distinct: “il est très-possible pour le raisonnement de concevoir la religion séparée de la morale. Les relations des hommes avec les dieux constituent la religion. Les relations des hommes avec les hommes constituent la morale. Ces deux choses n’ont aucun rapport nécessaire entre elles.”¹³² Historically, a fusion between religion and morality occurred at a certain stage of social evolution. Here, Constant maintains, the role of the priest was again crucial, and societies divide in the manner in which and the stage at which the fusion occurs, according as they are dominated by the priestly caste or are free in their religious development.

In religions under priestly influence, moral ideas very quickly become associated with religion; Constant attributes this to the priests’ unquenchable thirst for power.¹³³ This has two very serious consequences for morality. In the first place, the moral code comes to be regarded as promulgated by the gods, not simply sanctioned by them. An element of arbitrariness is thus introduced into the very foundations of ethics: acts are no longer evil by their nature, but by the inscrutable will of a god.¹³⁴ Significantly, Constant attacks the Mosaic religion—which elsewhere he finds praiseworthy on a number of counts—precisely because of this:

ces mots qui précédent et qui suivent presque toutes les lois: “Je suis l’Éternel, votre dieu, gardez mes commandements,” ne peuvent se traduire que par cette paraphrase despotique: “Ces commandements peuvent vous paraître futiles ou contraire à vos idées du bien et du mal; mais qu’il vous suffise que j’en sois l’auteur, moi, votre maître.¹³⁵

The second major mischief which the priestly influence on morality accomplishes is to create a great body of bogus moral rules, whose purpose is either to solidify the priests’ power or to further some other goal with no connection with any authentic ethical end, or, indeed, in direct contradiction to it. Here the priests debase the very idea and name of morality, and although the history of priests is a nasty one, this is perhaps the worst of their acts.¹³⁶ Moreover, the approach to morality which makes it a simple function of the will of the gods has the added danger of involving moral rules too intimately in the fate of organized religion. Thus, in the middle of the eighteenth century in France, Constant asserts: “Comme on avait donné pour base à la morale une religion positive, la chute de cette religion favorisait la licence.”¹³⁷

Constant does not deny, of course, that morality becomes associated naturally with religion in the course of social evolution, or that it is right and proper that this occur. What he insists on, however, is the superiority of the manner in which religion and morality become linked in those religions not under the direction of priests. Here, morality has acquired an independent recognition, has become intertwined with all sorts of other attitudes and institutions, and thus is not susceptible of being made the instrument of priestly power. On the contrary, what we witness at the earliest stage of the connection of the two in this type of society is a purification of religion. As Constant puts it (his favorite example of this sort of evolution is the Greeks): “Les héros d’Homère sont encore supérieurs à leurs dieux.” With the introduction of moral ideas into the religious concepts of the Greeks, the gods undergo a “moral education,” and soon are imagined to be morally superior to men.¹³⁸ The beneficent influence of morality on religion is summed up by Constant: “Les dieux, comme les humains, se soumettent aux lois éternelles, et la conscience inviolable et respectée prononcé sur les volontés des uns, comme sur la conduite des autres.”¹³⁹

Parallel to the progress in religious ideas produced by morality, there is the influence which is exercised on morality by religion. Here Constant is at pains to emphasize, as part of his ongoing campaign against utilitarianism, that the utility of religion ought never to occupy first place in our considerations,¹⁴⁰ and that religion is not a penal code.¹⁴¹ Nevertheless, he also states that although in the ideal case the gods are not conceived of as decreeing the moral code, they act as its guarantors.¹⁴² Particularly in the case of oath taking, Constant finds the religious sanction indispensable. He depicts the terrible consequences of the disappearance of respect for oaths: “Alors tous les liens sont brisés; le droit n’existe plus; le devoir disparaît avec le droit; la force est déchaînée; le parjure fait de la société un état permanent de guerre et de fraude.”¹⁴³ From the very beginning of society, it is religion which preserves men from these evils, by acting as a guarantor of oaths.¹⁴⁴

Since Constant asserts both that religion acts as a guarantee of moral rules and that it ought not to be looked on as a supplement to the penal codes, it is difficult to know whether he believed that morality could be effectively enforced in the absence of religion. On the whole, his judgment seems to incline towards seeing a minimal sort of morality as possible even in the absence of religious sanctions. As he states: “Pour prévenir les attentats grossiers en les punissant, les lois et les châtiments suffisent.” He sees the role of religious feelings in this sphere as pertaining more to the elevation of character by encouraging the higher virtues: “C’est pour changer l’intérieure de l’homme, au lieu d’arrêter seulement son bras, que le sentiment religieux est indispensable.”¹⁴⁵ Constant’s expression of his idea is at times vague and confusing; thus, he states, “la religion laisse aux lois leur juridiction sur les effets [of human action]: elle se borne à améliorer la cause.”¹⁴⁶ Nevertheless, it seems tolerably certain that what he had in mind was something close to the attitude represented by John Stuart Mill about a generation later, in his essay, “On the Utility of Religion.” The argument for religion based on its value “as a supplement to human laws, a more cunning sort of police, an auxiliary to the thief-catcher and the hangmen,” was one he set out to demolish. Mill found much more plausible, however, the notion that “supernatural beliefs are . . . necessary to the perfection of the individual character,” although he went on to argue that traditional religions might be rendered superfluous by the introduction of a “religion of humanity.”¹⁴⁷ Constant’s view, then, may be summarized by saying that the most important consequence of an independent and advanced religion in regard to human conduct is not that it prevents crime, but it so acts on the mind of the believer that he becomes not only a person incapable of crime, but one inspired by noble and generous sentiments, and thus approaches the moral perfectioning that is the highest ethical goal.

The final element of the association of religion and morality which appears in Constant’s thought is a psychological one. “La morale est un sentiment,” he asserts, “Elle s’associe au sentiment religieux, parce que tous les sentiments se tiennent.”¹⁴⁸ At another time he writes: “Il n’y a pas dans le cœur un bon sentiment qui ne perde à être séparé de la religion; et s’il fallait choisir d’un peuple athée ou d’un peuple superstitieux, il n’y aurait pas à hésiter pour ce dernier.”¹⁴⁹ This seems to imply that any attitude, such as that of the eighteenth-century materialists, which attacks the religious feeling, will tend also to weaken the ethical sentiment and is to be rejected on this ground as well.

Constant’s strongest and most systematic statements on the necessity of religion to a free society are contained in the preface and the first chapters of his De la religion considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements, published in 1824. Here he maintains, quite explicitly, that religion is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the creation and preservation of a free society:

Des peuples religieux ont pu être esclaves; aucun peuple irréligieux n’est demeuré libre. La liberté ne peut s’établir, ne peut se conserver, que par le désintéressement, et toute morale étrangère au sentiment religieux ne saurait se fonder que sur le calcul. Pour défendre la liberté, on doit savoir immoler la vie, et qu’y a-t-il de plus que la vie pour qui ne voit au-delà que le néant?¹⁵⁰

We should note that this passage opens with what appears to be a historical generalization, but is not really that (as will be observed, Constant is often rather cavalier in citing “history” to support his conclusions on this subject). By his own statement, the sort of liberty he is concerned to preserve is an altogether modern thing, to be sharply distinguished from that of the classical republics.¹⁵¹ There is therefore no obvious reason for supposing that the conditions for preserving what the moderns call “liberty” will be the same as those needed to maintain what went by that name among the ancients. Thus, it is not clear why, for instance, the history of the decline of settled faith among the Romans and their surrender to hedonism should enter into the question.¹⁵² Moreover, as far as the modern nations are concerned, with one possible exception, Constant does not really have at his disposal the historical experience of any people which, having become irreligious, then lost its liberty. (The possible exception is that of France from 1792 to the fall of Napoleon.) Thus, it is not so much on historical evidence as on insight into human psychology that Constant must rest his case.

As Constant continues, it becomes clear that the major argument for the claim that religion is a necessary condition for the creation and preservation of a free society is the one mentioned towards the end of the passage quoted above and which has been touched on before: in the nature of political affairs, he claims, liberty will often require the individual to make some sacrifice for it. It is not enough, as he reiterates, to set up paper constitutions, with all sorts of paper guarantees: “Les institutions sont de vaines formes, lorsque nul ne veut se sacrifier pour les institutions.”¹⁵³ And, as we have seen, he holds that non-compensated self-sacrifice is very difficult to justify on any hedonistic basis.

Once more the full implications of the materialistic and atheistic view of the universe and of man—the vision that had so alarmed him in reading d’Holbach—are exhibited and their supposed necessary effects on human conduct pointed up: “Si la vie n’est, au fond, qu’une apparition bizarre, sans avenir, comme sans passé, et tellement courte qu’on la croirait à peine réelle, à quoi bon s’immoler à des principes dont l’application est au moins éloignée ?”¹⁵⁴ The complete hedonist must accept the logical conclusion of his creed: “L’intérêt bien entendu n’est . . . vu la certitude de la mort, autre chose que la jouissance, combinée, vu la possibilité d’une vie plus ou moins longue, avec la prudence qui donne aux jouissances une certaine durée.” ¹⁵⁵ Sacrifice for the sake of liberty, Constant is saying, is one form of that ethic of disinterested pursuit of virtue and of ethical perfection that the doctrine of self-interest makes impossible.

Admitting that there have been, historically, strong partisans of liberty who were non- or even anti-religious, Constant attributes their hostility (as will Tocqueville after him) to the fact that religion had been associated with tyrannical governments and that innumerable crimes had been committed in its name.¹⁵⁶ But by virtue of the definition Constant has given to the “sentiment religieux,” no incompatibility between it and the love of liberty is really possible. The connection of religion and despotism which had been manifested so frequently through history must have its source elsewhere, and Constant’s theoretical framework has already provided it: “La plupart des reproches qu’on adresse à la religion ne sont mérités que par quelques-uns de ses ministres.”¹⁵⁷ While the religious sentiment and love of liberty are perfectly compatible (indeed, as we shall see, he holds that they are more than that), “un élément de nature opposé se glisse quelquefois dans les forms religieuses,”¹⁵⁸ due to the actions of priests. Moreover, Constant even attempts the tour de force of applying the historical crimes of religious groups and organizations against the Enlightenment philosophy he is attacking, by linking these crimes to the principle of self-interest and to the lack of true religious feeling on the part of the priests. Thus, the opposition to religion of many previous liberals is seen as based on a superficial analysis of the composite nature of religion as it shows itself historically.

The demonstrated willingness of certain anti-religious liberals to sacrifice for their beliefs presents a problem for Constant; the example of the Girondins is one which must have occurred to him in this connection. Constant deals with such cases by asserting that the lovers of liberty were here exhibiting a mode of living on the ethical capital of the past: “leurs vertus mêmes sont des souvenirs d’une autre doctrine. C’est dans leur système une noble inconséquence, c’est un héritage du sentiment religieux. Ils doivent à cet héritage leur force intérieure.”¹⁵⁹ The status of this argument is, of course, impossible to assess, since its disproof would require the commission of acts of self-sacrifice on behalf of liberty by men who had been raised in an environment hermetically sealed against inherited religious ideas. In all other cases, the argument of “souvenirs d’une autre doctrine” would be available to Constant as an explanation of their actions.

The distinction between religious sentiment and its institutional forms (often manipulated by priests) serves to generate still another line of argument. Not only does it explain why religion has appeared at times to favor tyranny, but once we have distinguished sentiment from form, we see that the former is consistently favorable to freedom.

To some degree, Constant had been anticipated in this connection by David Hume. In his essay, “Of Superstition and Enthusiasm,” Hume distinguishes two “corruptions” of “true religion.” The first, superstition, he finds to work in favor of the increase of priestly power. (Interestingly, he here reverses the usual order of causality in eighteenth-century thought, and makes the priestly caste out to be “an invention of a timorous and abject superstition, which, ever diffident of itself, dares not offer up its own devotions.”)¹⁶⁰

More to the point of our concerns, Hume sets forth the proposition that “superstition is an enemy to civil liberty, and enthusiasm a friend to it.” The first part of this claim he tries to demonstrate from the fact that superstition is linked to priestly oppression historically; superstition, thus, for Hume, plays a part which writers like d’Holbach ascribed to religion as a whole, in that it “renders men tame and abject, and fits them for slavery.”¹⁶¹ Similarly, he is in agreement with Constant in tying the degenerate form of religion associated with ignorance and despotism to the rule of the priestly caste.

By enthusiasm, on the other hand, Hume seems to mean the sort of direct, often mystical religious experience fostered by groups such as the Anabaptists, Quakers, etc. His description, moreover, shows that his religious “enthusiasm” is not far removed from Constant’s “sentiment religieux”:

the imagination swells with great, but confused conceptions, to which no sublunary beauties or enjoyments can correspond. Every thing mortal and perishable vanishes as unworthy of attention; and a full range is given to the fancy in the invisible regions, or world of Spirits, where the soul is at liberty to indulge itself in every imagination which may best suit its present taste and disposition. Hence, arise raptures, transports, and surprising flights of fancy.¹⁶²

Hume associated this form of religious feeling with “bold and ambitious tempers,” because of the sense of being God’s instrument which private and direct religious experience presumably gives. He notes, historically, the close connection between the sects in England and the Whigs, and between the Tories and the Roman Catholics. The same principle is shown at work in the recent history of France, where “the Jansenists are enthusiasts, and zealous promoters of passionate devotion, and of the inward life . . . and [they] preserve alive the small sparks of the love of liberty which are found in the French nation.”¹⁶³

Although the germ of this idea thus appears in the writings of Hume, Constant’s analysis differs in a number of respects. In the first place, of course, Constant, unlike Hume, does not view the feeling he is describing as pathological, but as of the very essence of religion (an interesting illustration of the difference in temperament between the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries). In addition, for him the relation between unspoiled religious emotion and liberty appears to have two aspects. In the first place, the idea of equality tends to follow from the concept which the religious sentiment naturally develops of the relationship between God and men: “Des créatures qui sortent des mains d’un dieu dont la bonté dirige la puissance, étant soumises à la même destinée physique, étant douées des mêmes facultés morales, doivent jouir des mêmes droits.”¹⁶⁴

We may observe this characteristic of religious feeling at work often throughout history. Thus, Constant asserts, at times when the religious sentiment inherent in man bursts through the ossified forms of previous institutionalized religions and founds a new creed, it has been accompanied by a renewed thirst for liberty.¹⁶⁵ Indeed, if we were to take literally the ethical precepts of the major religions, we would find them “toujours d’accord avec les principes de liberté les plus étendus, on pourrait dire, avec des principes de liberté tellement étendus, que jusqu’à ce jour, l’application en a paru impossible dans nos associations politiques.”¹⁶⁶ Constant furnishes some examples as historical evidence for the association of liberty and nascent religions (and hence of religious forms when they have emerged fresh from the womb of the religious sentiment):

les premiers chrétiens ressuscitèrent les nobles doctrines de l’égalité et de la fraternité entre tous les hommes. Rien n’était plus indépendant, nous dirions volontiers plus démocratique, que les Arabes, tant que l’islamisme fut dans sa ferveur. Le protestantisme a préservé l’Allemagne, sous Charles-Quint, de la monarchie universelle. L’Angleterre actuelle lui doit sa constitution.¹⁶⁷

These historical instances, however, can hardly be said to furnish strong cases in which the early stages of religions promoted liberty. The equality and fraternity preached by the early Christians was irrelevant, at least directly, to politics: there is no question of opposing slavery or the lack of individual freedom in the ancient world. Constant himself, in discussing the political situaion in antiquity (in connection with the question of the Liberty of the Ancients and of the Moderns), does not think enough of the role of Christianity even to mention it. The equivocation involved in his citation of the Arabs scarcely needs to be made explicit: it is not “independence” or even “democracy” that Constant is discussing, but liberty, and he fails to indicate why he believes the early Arab invaders to have been animated by a love of freedom. The role of Lutheranism in preventing the rise of the sort of monarchy in Germany that the Habsburgs erected in Spain is probably to be ascribed more to its nationalistic bent than to a thirst for liberty on the part of Luther and his followers. Finally, the tendentious quality of Constant’s position here is evident from the neglect of any real analysis of the relation of “Protestantism” to the English constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century (Laud was surely as much a Protestant as Pym). In addition, here again, as in the example of Lutheranism and Germany, Constant marks himself as a polemicist by implying that a result favorable to freedom is attributable to the intention to promote freedom on the part of certain religious groups and leaders. It would have to be shown that in all these examples, the furtherance of liberty was the aim of the movements mentioned, for Constant is using these examples to suggest that early religions manifest a love of liberty, not simply that, due to circumstances, they often work in favor of liberty.

Besides implying the notion of equality, the religious emotion is associated with liberty in another way in Constant’s mind:

le sentiment religieux est une émotion du même genre que toutes nos émotions naturelles; il est, en conséquence, toujours d’accord avec elles. Il est toujours d’accord avec la sympathie, la pitié, la justice, en un mot, avec toutes les vertus.¹⁶⁸

The fact that the religious sentiment is an emotion and that sentiments such as justice, sympathy and enthusiasm are (as discussed above) often necessary for the defense of liberty should suggest to the liberal a certain respect for it. With the destructive eighteenth-century rationalists once again in mind, he writes:

Vous ne pouvez porter la cognée à aucune des branches de l’arbre qu’aussitôt le tronc ne soit frappé de mort. Si vous traitez de chimère l’émotion indéfinissable qui semble nous révéler un être infini . . . votre dialectique ira plus loin, à votre insu et malgré vous-mêmes. Tout ce qui se passe au fond de notre âme est inexplicable; et si vous exigez toujours des démonstrations mathématiques, vous n’obtiendrez jamais que des négations. Si le sentiment religieux est une folie, parce que la preuve n’est pas à côté, l’amour est une folie, l’enthousiasme un délire, la sympathie une faiblesse, le dévouement un acte insensé.¹⁶⁹

The problems with this line of argument appear to be many. In the first place, whether the religious sentiment is in harmony with other “natural emotions” such as sympathy and justice cannot be deduced merely from the fact that all belong to that category (assuming that they do), for there are surely such emotions which conflict: pity and hatred, for instance. Another objection, of which Constant does not even take cognizance, is that love and sympathy differ from the religious sentiment in vital ways: for example, they are not used to establish the existence of a transcendental realm, not available for examination empirically. Thus, one who attacked the religious sentiment from a rationalist point of view would not necessarily be led to attack the sentiments which go to build up the sort of fellow feeling often needed for concerted resistance to tyranny.

There is another way in which religious faith is useful to the preservation of freedom. In this respect, too, Constant anticipates an argument which will be elaborated later by Tocqueville, when he writes: “La philosophie livrée à elle-même, est également sans force: elle conduit au doute, et le doute brise l’énergie de l’âme. Le sentiment religieux peut seul nous sauver.”¹⁷⁰ Reason and philosophy in the field of the ultimate questions of meaning and purpose are capable of producing nothing but doubt.¹⁷¹ But effective action in any field requires a basis of firm conviction. This function of religion is clearly of political significance, for the Hamlet posture is hardly a suitable one in the face of ever-threatening state power. It is not the skeptical attitude, criticizing every position value to shreds, which can best meet the challenge of the men of power, who know quite well what they are about.

A final service which religious faith performs for liberty would seem to have particular relevance for an age of totalitarianism. Religious belief, Constant asserts, provides a refuge and asylum for those who, true to the ideals of freedom, find themselves for this reason out of tune with their time. A classical example of this is Seneca, living under the despotism of Nero: “pressé par la tyrannie, il se réfugiait où la tyrannie ne pouvait l’atteindre,” namely, in the study and cultivation of religious belief.¹⁷² The position of liberty-loving men who find themselves in historical circumstances in which a tyrant has not only gained absolute power, but appears to be supported by virtually everyone, was one which was familiar to Constant: he and Madame de Staël, with a few others, had made her residence at Coppet into a center of anti-Bonapartism in a continent dominated by Napoleon. That such a situation might well again return was a conclusion easy enough for Constant to reach. It is from this viewpoint that we are to understand passages such as the following:

Lorsque nous voyons s’évanouir nos illusions les plus chéries, la justice, la liberté, la patrie, nous nous flattons qu’il existe quelque part un être qui nous saura gré d’avoir été fidèles, malgré notre siècle, à la justice, à la liberté, à la patrie.¹⁷³

Thus, for Constant, liberty had need of religion above all because the most morally elevated type of individual—the man who will resist tyranny generously when it is directed against others, with firmness and determination when it is directed against himself, and in spite of the moral weakness of the rest of his age—is best nurtured by a religiously-tinged ethic. Religion is not necessary in order for him to discover what his duty is: this is known to him through examination of his own enlightened conscience. But religious faith organizes his ethical life: it provides courage for him to pursue his duty, hope that his activities will bear fruit, and the impulse to go ever further on the road to moral perfection.

Before concluding our examination of Constant’s thought, there is a final topic that ought to be discussed: his interpretation of the differences between the “Liberty of the Ancients and of the Moderns.”

For nineteenth-century liberalism, the question of the nature of the political organization of classical antiquity had at least two important aspects. In the first place, the Jacobin and Napoleonic periods, by their free use of the rhetoric and of some of the outward political forms of antiquity, had suggested that classical republicanism might be connected with anti-liberal movements. In the second place, for any liberal exploring the connection between freedom and Christianity, the thought and practice of ancient politics becomes immediately relevant, as representing the state of affairs in the Western world before the introduction of Christianity. Particularly, for this second reason, and for the interesting and somewhat unexpected conclusions to which he comes, Constant’s ideas on the subject merit examination.

It was by no means due to mere antiquarianism, then, that a number of important liberals in the course of the century turned to the analysis of the ancient republics. Édouard Laboulaye and Fustel de Coulanges in France, the German–American Francis Lieber, Jacob Burckhardt and Lord Acton, all emphasized the essentially illiberal character of the classical republics. The first writer to elaborate the theme in detail, however, is Constant. As will be indicated, the idea underwent important—indeed, for our purposes, crucial—modifications in the thought of the later writers, but the significance of the question was first realized by him.

To become fully aware of what Constant was reacting against, we must turn back to the Enlightenment. That the eighteenth century witnessed something like a renewal of the Renaissance’s intense admiration of classical antiquity is widely acknowledged by historians. While in the Germany of Winckelmann, Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt, this took the form of devotion to Roman, and especially Greek, models in art and literature, in France particular attention was paid to the ideals and forms of classical politics. If few went the lengths of the oversensitive Madame de Roland, who as a girl wept for not having been born a Roman or a Spartan, the picture of the typical citizen of the ancient republics as austerely virtuous and “natural” was widely accepted by educated persons. Many were led to wonder whether the institutions which had produced this presumably ideal human being could not be reproduced in France with similar beneficent results. This attitude was characteristic even of some who are famous in the history of liberalism; thus J.-B. Say, in his utopian sketch Olbie (1799), argued for the reintroduction of the Roman republican institution of the censor.

The place of this image of antiquity in the rhetoric and actions of the Revolutionary period is well known. As a recent historian of the intellectual background of Jacobinism has said: “The strongest influence on the fathers of totalitarian democracy was that of antiquity, interpreted in their own way.”¹⁷⁴ What was of particular concern to the post-Revolutionary liberal was that many had accepted the incessant protestations of love of liberty on the part of the leaders of the Mountain at face value; this in turn had led to a rejection of liberty by all those who were disgusted by the course of French political developments after about 1792. Many people were tempted to conclude that the tyrannical acts of Jacobins and other revolutionary groups were somehow connected with an “excess” of liberty, and resolved that in the future Jacobin tyranny would be avoided by a ruthless suppression of all liberal demands.

Thus the question of the true meaning of ancient liberty was of direct political consequence in Constant’s own time. He goes further, however, than merely rectifying a confusion caused by the use of the same term to cover phenomena from two different cultural contexts. He makes it, among other things, the basis of his attack on Rousseau and other thinkers associated with the totalitarian democratic movement of the later eighteenth century.

In his discussion, Constant first poses the question of the meaning of “liberty” to an Englishman, a Frenchman or an American, and finds it in a series of rights: not to be subject to the arbitrary will of an individual or a group of individuals; to speak one’s opinion; to choose one’s occupation and follow it; to associate with others in the pursuit of common interests; finally, to influence the conduct of government, directly or indirectly. In short, the core of the concept is the existence of a sphere of action reserved for the judgment and will of the individual. Liberty, for the moderns, is an assertion of the individual’s private life as against his public one.

What was understood by “liberty” in the ancient republics is a totally different thing. There, political liberty—a relatively minor part of what is meant by “liberty” in the modern world—formed the core and virtually the whole content of the concept. “Liberty” to the ancients

consistait à exercer collectivement, mais directement, plusieurs parties de la Souveraineté tout entière, à délibérer, sur la place publique, de la guerre et de la paix, à conclure avec les étrangers des traités d’alliance, à voter les lois, à prononcer les jugements, à examiner les comptes, les actes, la gestion des magistrats, à les faire comparaître devant tout le peuple, à les mettre en accusation, à les condamner où à les absoudre.¹⁷⁵

As far as the sort of liberty dear to the moderns was concerned, however, the ancients ignored it by and large; they considered “comme compatible avec cette liberté collective, l’assujettissement complet de l’individu à l’autorité de l’ensemble.”¹⁷⁶ Liberty for them pertained to the public life of the individual, not, as with us, primarily to his private life: “chez les anciens, l’individu, souverain presque habituellement dans les affaires publiques, est esclave dans tous ses rapports privés.”¹⁷⁷ In fact, what Constant is describing is the realization of the state presented by Rousseau in the Contrat social: “l’aliénation totale de chaque associé avec tous ses droits à toute la communauté . . . la condition est égale pour tous . . . il n’y a pas un associé sur lequel on n’acquière le même droit qu’on lui cède sur soi.”¹⁷⁸ The classical polity, so vaunted by certain modern writers, was, in Constant’s view, a completely totalitarian state by modern standards.¹⁷⁹

Constant goes on to outline the reasons for the prevalence of a different sort of liberty in classical times. These are to be found in the fundamental conditions of social life in antiquity. First, the ancient republics were all of small territorial extent. “[P]ar une suite inévitable” of this fact, they are militaristic societies, Constant maintains: they were part of a world where it was constantly a question of conquer or be conquered. Furthermore, such a military way of life necessarily brought with it a society founded on slave labor.¹⁸⁰

Constant then applies the model of social evolution later to be employed by Comte and especially Herbert Spencer, of the necessary transition from a “military” to a “commercial” society.¹⁸¹ The period of human history when plunder was the accepted method of obtaining the goods of foreigners gives way to that in which trade gains a grudging recognition: “il doit venir une époque où le commerce remplace la guerre.”¹⁸² This has now occurred, and the implications of the fact are of enormous scope.

There were, Constant admits, commercial people in antiquity, but “le commerce était alors un accident heureux: c’est aujourd’hui l’état ordinaire, le but unique, la tendance universelle, la vie véritable des nations.”¹⁸³ Because of commerce, as well as the progress of knowledge, morals and religion, slavery has disappeared.

Constant then specifies the changes brought about in political life by three basic social changes. In the first place, the large extent of nations today diminishes the importance of each elector. “Le républicain le plus obscure de Rome et de Sparte était une puissance,” while this can hardly be said of the citizen of the United States or Great Britain. In modern democracies, the individual citizen can exercise sovereignty only through representatives, which Constant qualifies as sovereignty “d’une manière fictive.”¹⁸⁴

Secondly, the abolition of slavery has eliminated leisure as a way of life for the citizen, and thus removed a necessary condition for the sort of direct democracy prevalent in ancient times. Today, involvement in business affairs requires unceasing attention.

Finally, the commercial way of life tends to create a personality type which values individual independence highly, by demonstrating to people their capacity to fend for themselves, without the need for government supervision and control.¹⁸⁵

If all these social conditions have made ancient liberty inappropriate to our times, this fact reveals itself in the vast diminution of pleasure which modern man would suffer were he to attempt to live according to the political norms of antiquity. It is highly interesting that Constant puts the issue between ancient and modern liberty in the form of a hedonistic calculation. For the ancients, “l’exercice des droits de cité constituait l’occupation, et pour ainsi dire, l’amusement de tous . . . la volonté de chacun avait une influence réelle; l’exercice de cette volonté [était] un plaisir vif et répété.” This is the sort of pleasure with which the enjoyment generated by participation in elections for legislative representatives cannot compare. In fact, given slavery, unless the citizen did apply himself to politics, he would suffer perpetual boredom, since due to the stage of social development achieved, other pleasures were quite scarce. But today the commercial spirit has enormously increased the possibilities of enjoyment outside of public life, and personal independence today is the chief precondition for happiness. Constant poses a hedonistic calculus in these terms:

Les anciens trouvaient plus de jouissances dans leur existence publique, et ils en trouvaient moins dans leur existence privée: en conséquence, lorsqu’ils sacrifiaient la liberté individuelle à la liberté politique, ils sacrifiaient moins pour obtenir plus . . . En imitant les anciens, les modernes sacrifieraient donc plus pour obtenir moins.¹⁸⁶

It was this fundamental fact, traceable to greatly changed social conditions, that the leaders of the Jacobin party refused to see. They had been taught by Rousseau and Mably to strive for liberty as the austere and virtuous citizens of Sparta and Rome understood the term. They found that French society as a whole resisted; they were forced to use extraordinary means to impose their Republic of Virtue: terror as an acknowledged, even glorified instrument of government, was the result. Like their teachers, Robespierre and Saint-Just took not the slightest notice of the alterations in character and personality produced by two thousand years of social evolution. It was in vain that they denounced and blamed dark conspiracies and the machinations of English spies: what they were combating was the Zeitgeist, and of necessity they went down to defeat.

Of great interest in Constant’s discussion of this theme, both in De l’esprit de conquête and in his talk to the Athénée Royal in 1819, is the fact that it is completely wertfrei. In neither case does he ever criticize the ancients for their political arrangements, which, from his liberal point of view, had to seem totalitarian.¹⁸⁷ Indeed, he goes out of his way to emphasize his great admiration for the quality of mind and character produced by the ancient commonwealths: it is with a certain sadness that he notes that they seem almost to be of a different nature from our own, “tellement forts de leurs propres forces, avec un tel sentiment d’énergie et de dignité.” Modern republics, such as Switzerland and Holland, are in contrast “moins brillantes et plus paisibles,” and have favored commerce at the expense of the virtues cultivated in older days.¹⁸⁸ In fact, in the first version of the theme, in 1813, Constant takes the opportunity to express his idea of the inferiority of men under advanced civilization, with their lack of enthusiasm and strong convictions, their morbid penchant for self-observation, etc.¹⁸⁹ His refusal to condemn the ancients for their political organization is manifested particularly in the fact that he never questions that the term “liberty” may validly be used to refer to their conception: indeed, the initial purpose of his lecture was to illustrate the differences in meaning between the term in different cultural contexts, and he does this in as perfectly a detached spirit as any cultural relativist could wish. But dear as the classical republic must seem to any person who values a highly developed form of humanity, there is no hope that it can be resurrected. The ancients lived under a given social system, which necessarily preceded ours, and “leur organisation sociale les conduisait à désirer une liberté toute différente” from the modern variety; while, in the present day, “citoyens des républiques, sujets des monarchies, tous veulent des jouissances, et nul ne peut, dans l’état actuel des sociétés, ne pas en vouloir.”¹⁹⁰ For Constant, it is not a question of choice between the older and newer conceptions of freedom:

nous ne pouvons plus jouir de la liberté des anciens. . . . Notre liberté, à nous, doit se composer de la jouissance paisible de l’indépendance privée. . . . Puisque nous vivons dans les temps modernes, je veux la liberté convenable aux temps modernes.¹⁹¹

What is most interesting from our point of view, however, is what Constant omits from his analysis: nowhere in his discussion of the problem of the liberty of the ancients versus that of the moderns does he so much as mention Christianity, and he makes no references to it as being involved in the changeover from the classical to the modern concepts. Although elsewhere he speaks of “l’Évangile, doctrine céleste qui a rendu à l’homme sa liberté légitime et sa dignité première,”¹⁹² there is no attempt at all to develop an analysis showing how the Gospels might have been influential in creating modern liberty. Thus, the following statement by one of Constant’s recent interpreters is difficult to understand:

Suchte Constant das Wesen der modernen Freiheit mit Hilfe des Vergleiches mit dem antiken Freiheitsbegriffzu charakterisieren, so stellte sich ihm damit zugleich die Frage, worauf denn der tiefgreifende Wandel des Verhältnisses des Einzelnen zum Staat seit der Antike letztlich zurückzuführen sei. Es war dies für ihn die Leistung der christlichen Religion. Diese habe gleichsam den Ring aufgesprengt, mit dem der antike Staat den Einzelnen in den Bereich seiner eigenen Ziele einschnürte, indem sie die menschliche Existenz im Transzendenten begründete und dem einzelnen neben der Bindung an das Gemeinwesen eine Bindung an ewige Normen, an die Gesetze einer göttlichen Weltordnung erlegte.¹⁹³

The only problem with this is that it bears no resemblance at all to anything Constant wrote in comparing the liberty of the ancients and the moderns.¹⁹⁴

A number of the liberal writers who followed him, however, did place Christianity in the forefront of the sources of the modern conception of freedom.¹⁹⁵ We may take as an example of this tendency Constant’s disciple, Édouard Laboulaye, who, in an essay written in 1863, takes up the theme Constant had dealt with.¹⁹⁶ He follows his master in his description of both ancient and modern liberty, but when he turns to discussing the reasons for the transformation of the first into the second, he departs from Constant completely. There is no mention of underlying social condition. Instead, he asserts:

Si Jésus-Christ n’avait point paru sur la terre, j’ignore comment le monde aurait résisté à ce despotisme qui l’étouffait. . . en politique, aussi bien qu’en morale et philosophie, l’évangile a renouvelé les âmes.¹⁹⁷

Laboulaye concedes that at first glance the teachings of Jesus appear to ignore politics entirely, having reference to a different order of concerns. But, as with Lord Acton in dealing with the same question, supreme importance is attributed to the passage in which Jesus declares: “Render unto God the things that are God’s.” Of this, Laboulaye asserts:

il proclame un principe nouveau en contradiction avec toutes les idées antiques. . . . Proclamer que Dieu a des droits, c’est déchirer l’unité du despotisme. Là est le germe de la révolution qui sépare le monde ancien du monde moderne.¹⁹⁸

He points out that Rousseau well understood the role that Christianity had played in this connection, and had regretted it bitterly.¹⁹⁹

How Laboulaye conceives this process to have taken place is very roughly sketched. From the fact that one is enjoined to respect the rights of God, it follows that the individual now had duties independent of the state. But a duty to perform a certain action implies the moral right to perform that action: “il y a des devoirs, et par conséquent des droits pour l’âme immortelle, droits et devoirs indépendants de l’État, sur lesquels le prince n’a point d’autorité. La conscience est affranchie, l’individu existe.”²⁰⁰ Furthermore, Christianity includes an ethic touching on every part of life; thus, all interpersonal relations are brought under the heading of “things that are God’s,” and freed from state control. Laboulaye even asserts that included in this pristine Christian conception is the reduction of “le rôle de l’État à une mission de justice et de paix”—in other words, the nineteenth-century liberal Nachtwächterstaat!²⁰¹

Basically, Laboulaye treats the question of historical causation here in a journalistic rather than a philosophical manner. For him, it is sufficient to draw from a Biblical passage a certain conclusion to have adequately demonstrated why certain political norms prevailed at one time and not at another. The closest he comes to explaining how the idea allegedly contained in Jesus’s admonition was translated into social reality is in discussing the early Christian martyrs: “C’est à cette sainteté que nous devons la liberté moderne. Il y a là des souvenirs que rien ne peut effacer. . . . Quand une idée est vraie, elle s’empare des âmes, et finit toujours par triompher.”²⁰² The difference between this sort of analysis and that offered by Constant (and, as we shall see, by Acton) hardly requires underscoring.

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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.

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.

⁵Eugene Asse, “Benjamin Constant et le Directoire,” Revue de la Révolution 16 (August 1889), p. 437.

⁶Mathieu Saltet, Benjamin Constant: Historien de la Religion (Geneva: Société Général d’Imprimerie, 1905), p. 15.

⁷Gall, op. cit., p. 22; Saltet, op. cit., p. 27.

⁸In the Journaux Intimes, in Benjamin Constant, Œuvres, ed. by Alfred Roulin (Paris: Pléiade, 1957), p. 479.

⁹ Ibid., p. 476.

¹⁰Quoted in Saltet, op. cit., pp. 31–32. Constant adds: Quand on lit avec attention les ouvages de cette époque, on n’estétonné ni de ce qui a suivi, ni de ce qui en résulte à présent.”

¹¹De la religion considérée dans sa source, ses formes, et ses développements (Paris: Leroux, 1924), vo1. 1, p. 11.

¹²Gall, op. cit., p. 5.

¹³Ibid.

¹⁴ Henri Michel, L’Idée de l tat (Paris: Hachette, 1896), p. 315.

¹⁵Alfred Fabre-Luce, Benjamin Constant (Paris: Fayard, 1939), pp. 202–203.

¹⁶Œuvres, p. 1610.

¹⁷Ibid., p. 1054.

¹⁸De la religion, vol. 2, pp. 212–213.

¹⁹Ibid., p. 213.

²⁰Ibid., p. 212. It is interesting to note that Constant claimed for his approach the merit of being able to solve the traditional central problem of theodicy. Of the problem of evil he states, “si nous concevons l’être suprême comme ayant marqué pour but à sa créature, non le bonheur, mais l’amélioration, tout s’explique. Un nouvel horizon se découvre. Nous nous élevons à une hauteur nouvelle. Le bonheur et le malheur ne sont que des moyens: Dieu n’est point injuste en les employant. Toute autre solution de l’existence du mal est insuffisante, et ne repose que sur des sophismes.” De la religion, vol. 4, pp. 142–143, n.

²¹Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 124–125.

²²Ibid., p. 154.

²³Œuvres, p. 454.

²⁴Ibid., p. 1613.

²⁵De la religion, vol. 1, p. 363.

²⁶Œuvres, pp. 1612–1613.

²⁷Ibid., p. 1614.

²⁸Ibid., p. 1610.

²⁹Ibid., p. 835.

³⁰Quoted in Gall, op. cit., p. 151.

³¹Quoted ibid., p. 303.

³²Michel’s remark that tandis que Rousseau . . . proclame les droits de l’homme, Benjamin Constant se borne à proclamer ceux du citoyen Français,” is incomprehensible, given Constants reiteration of his belief in natural rights. Michel, op. cit., p. 303. (Italics in original.)

³³Cours de politique constitutionnelle, ed. by Édouard Laboulaye (Paris: Guillaume, 1872), vol. 1, pp. xix–xx.

³⁴Michel, op. cit., p. 309.

³⁵De la religion, vol. 3, pp. 343–335.

³⁶Cf., for instance, his comment in the Journaux Intimes (1804): Tout ce qu’il a dit, jusque dans les plus petites choses, se vérifie tous les jours.” Œuvres, p. 261.

³⁷Baron Charles Secondat de Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (Paris: Garnier, 1961), bk. 11, chap. 4.

³⁸Georges de Lauris, Benjamin Constant et les droits individuels (Paris: Rousseau, 1903), passim.

³⁹Ibid., pp. 114—191.

⁴⁰Œuvres, p. 1232.

⁴¹Ibid., p. 1015.

⁴²Saltet, op. cit., pp. 36–37.

⁴³Benjamin Constant, Mélanges de littérature et de politique (Paris: Pichon et Didier, 1829), pp. 185–196.

⁴⁴De la religion, vol. 1, p. xxxix. (Italics added.)

⁴⁵ B. Muntaneo, “Episodes Kantiens en Suisse et en France, Revue de Littérature Comparée 25 (1935), p. 444.

⁴⁶Œuvres, p. 424. An analogous idea is presented in one of the later volumes of De la religion: “useless” rules enjoined by a religion have the merit of habituating man to “ne pas se proposer dans tout ce qu’il fait un but ignoble et rapproché. Il est utile que l’homme se prescrive quelquefois des devoirs inutile.” De la religion, vol. 4, pp. 487–488. (Italics added.)

⁴⁷On this point we may compare Dicey: The privileges . . . of the nobles under the Ancient Régime were in 1789 palpably opposed to the welfare of the French people. Bentham would have said that they were opposed to the principle of utility. A French reformer would have alleged that they were opposed to the law of nature. But this difference of language was at bottom little more than a different way of describing one and the same fact, viz., that the welfare of France required the establishing of equal civil rights among Frenchmen. Towards the close, indeed, of the eighteenth century, appeals to the doctrine of utility, and appeals to the law of nature were often in reality, though not in words, appeals to one and the same principle.” A. V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1905), pp. 143–144.

⁴⁸Mélanges, pp. 143–144.

⁴⁹Muntaneo, loc. cit., p. 444.

⁵⁰Mélanges, p. 142. (Italics added.)

⁵¹Ibid., pp. 142–143. (Italics added.)

⁵²Ibid., p. 144.

⁵³De la religion, vol. 1, p. xxxi, n.

⁵⁴Mélanges, p. 145.

⁵⁵Œuvres, p. 1067.

⁵⁶Cours de politique constitutionnelle, vol. 1, p. 559.

⁵⁷Cited in Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (London: Burns and Oates, 1960), vol. 6, p. 36.

⁵⁸Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner, 1965), p. 1.

⁵⁹De la religion, vol. 1, pp. xxxvi–xxxvii. As we shall see, this was the same kind of nightmare vision of the world of the future—conditioned solely by hedonistic motives— that so alarmed Tocqueville.

⁶⁰Œuvres, pp. 1071–1072.

⁶¹This is in accord with Constant’s general rejection of the tabula rasa view; cf., Mélanges, pp. 213–214.

⁶²De la religion, vol. 1, p. xxx.

⁶³Cf., Constant remarks concerning the ruthlessness of the modern army of conquest, animated solely by self-interest: “Le calcul aurait tué dans leur âme toutes les émotions naturelles, excepté celles qui naissent de la sensualité.” Œuvres, vol. 1, pp. xxiv–xxv.

⁶⁴De la religion, vol. 1, pp. xxiv–xxv.

⁶⁵Œuvres, p. 1048.

⁶⁶Œuvres, p. 998.

⁶⁷De la religion, vol. 1, p. xxxvii.

⁶⁸Ibid.

⁶⁹Œuvres, p. 998.

⁷⁰Ibid.

⁷¹Quoted in Fabre-Luce, op. cit., p. 203

⁷²James Macintosh, Memoirs (Boston: Little, Brown, 1853), vol. 2, p. 327. This is a rather extreme form of the idea under discussion. That an advanced civilization requires something like the barbarian invasions to revivify it was probably a notion that Constant toyed with at the time, and was willing to defend for the sake of argument; it does not constitute part of his general system of thought. On the contrary, see his essay, “De la perfectabilité de l’espèce humaine,” in Mélanges, pp. 387–415.

⁷³De la religion, vol. 1, p. xli, n.

⁷⁴Mélanges, p. 134.

⁷⁵Ibid., p. 135.

⁷⁶De la religion, vol. 1, pp. xxxi–xxxii.

⁷⁷Mélanges, p. 135.

⁷⁸Ibid., p. 139.

⁷⁹Ibid., p. 135.

⁸⁰De la religion, vol. 1, pp. xxxviii–xxxix.

⁸¹Cited in Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 160.

⁸²Montesquieu, op. cit., bk. 1, chap. 1.

⁸³De la religion, vol. 1, pp. xxvi–xxvii.

⁸⁴ Saltet, op. cit., p. 11.

⁸⁵ Gall, op. cit., p. 118.

⁸⁶ Asse, loc. cit., pp. 354–355.

⁸⁷Œuvres, p. 469.

⁸⁸ Ibid.

⁸⁹ Cited in Gall, op. cit., p. 118.

⁹⁰ At one point he speaks of le protestantisme que nous proessions. De la religion, vol. 1, p. 16, n.

⁹¹Saltet, op. cit., p. 68; Gall, op. cit., pp. 119–120. Faguet goes too far in calling Constant “un homme sans aucun sentiment religieux, qui a écrit toute sa vie un livre sur la religion.” Op. cit., p. 187.

⁹²Œuvres, p. 264.

⁹³Quoted in Gall, op. cit., p. 119.

⁹⁴De la religion, vol. 1, p. xvi; vol. 2, p. 277.

⁹⁵Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 167–168.

⁹⁶Ibid., vol. 1, p. 49.

⁹⁷Ibid, vol. 5, p. 173

⁹⁸Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 2–3.

⁹⁹Ibid., vol. 1, p. 23.

¹⁰⁰Ibid., vol. 1, p. 6.

¹⁰¹Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 219–220.

¹⁰²Ibid., vol. 1, p. 142, n.

¹⁰³Ibid., vol. 1, p. 93.

¹⁰⁴Ibid., vol. 1, p. 40.

¹⁰⁵Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 41–42.

¹⁰⁶Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 345–346. Cf., his statement: “Aussitôt qu’une révolution s’opère dans l’état de la race humaine, la religion subit un changement analogue.” Ibid., vol. 2, p. 2.

¹⁰⁷Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 416–418.

¹⁰⁸Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 409–413.

¹⁰⁹Ibid., vol. 1, p. 144.

¹¹⁰Ibid., vol. 1, p. 211.

¹¹¹Saltet, op. cit., p. 61.

¹¹²De la religion, vol. 1, p. 210.

¹¹³Œuvres, p. 509.

¹¹⁴De la religion, vol. 2, p. 112.

¹¹⁵Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 285–286.

¹¹⁶Ibid., vol. 4, p. 166.

¹¹⁷Ibid., vol. 2, p. 66.

¹¹⁸Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 159–161. Interestingly, Constant complains that this idea had led to a stopping up of spontaneous and natural emotions: “L’homme ne sait jamais si les mouvements de son Cœur, les élans de son âme, l’activité de son esprit ne sont pas les suggestions d’un pouvoir malin.”

¹¹⁹Ibid., vol. 5, p. 194.

¹²⁰Ibid., vol. 2, p. 465.

¹²¹Ibid., vol. 4, p. 42.

¹²²Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 343–344.

¹²³Ibid., vol. 3, p. 21.

¹²⁴Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 461–462

¹²⁵Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 467–468.

¹²⁶Ibid., vol. 3, p. 302.

¹²⁷Saltet, op. cit., pp. 61–62.

¹²⁸Œuvres., pp. 264–265.

¹²⁹De la religion, vol. 4, p. 494.

¹³⁰Ibid., vol. 1, pp. xi–xii.

¹³¹Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 206–207.

¹³²Ibid., vol. 1, p. 273.

¹³³Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 101–102.

¹³⁴Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 481–482.

¹³⁵Ibid., vol. 4, p. 485, n.

¹³⁶Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 102–103, 499–500.

¹³⁷Ibid., vol. 5, p. 169.

¹³⁸Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 403–404.

¹³⁹Ibid., vol. 5, p. 180.

¹⁴⁰For example, ibid., vol. 2, p. 274.

¹⁴¹Ibid., vol. 4, p. 503.

¹⁴²Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 356–358, 474–475.

¹⁴³Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 275–276.

¹⁴⁴Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 276–278.

¹⁴⁵Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 501–502.

¹⁴⁶Ibid., vol. 4, p. 505.

¹⁴⁷John Stuart Mill, Nature and the Utility of Religion (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), pp. 62, 65–66.

¹⁴⁸De la religion, vol. 1, p. 282.

¹⁴⁹Cited in Gall, op. cit., pp. 118–119.

¹⁵⁰De la religion, vol. 1, p. 89.

¹⁵¹This point will be discussed in the following section.

¹⁵²Ibid., vol. 1, pp. xl–xliv.

¹⁵³Ibid., vol. 1, p. xl.

¹⁵⁴Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 88–89.

¹⁵⁵Œuvres, p. 1618.

¹⁵⁶De la religion, vol. 1, p. xx.

¹⁵⁷Ibid., vol. 1, p. 212.

¹⁵⁸Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 93–94.

¹⁵⁹Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 91–92.

¹⁶⁰David Hume, On Religion, ed. by Richard Wollheim (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian, 1964), pp. 246–248.

¹⁶¹Ibid., p. 250.

¹⁶²Ibid., pp. 246–247.

¹⁶³Ibid., pp. 250–251.

¹⁶⁴De la religion, vol. 1, pp. 86–87.

¹⁶⁵In these passages, Constant does not distinguish between religion’s promotion of liberty and of equality, for its proclamation of the essential equality of all men before God he thinks implies (in the manner of Locke’s Second Treatise) the equality of rights.

¹⁶⁶De la religion, vol. 1, p. 84.

¹⁶⁷Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 87–88.

¹⁶⁸Ibid., vol. 1, p. 65.

¹⁶⁹Ibid., vol. 1, pp. xxvii–xxviii.

¹⁷⁰De la religion, vol. 2, p. 484. As early as 1805, he had written in his Journaux of “le sentiment religieux, qui est nécessaire . . . peut-être à toute espèce de talent.” Œuvres, p. 476.

¹⁷¹De la religion, vol. 1, p. 8.

¹⁷²Ibid., vol. 1, p. 46, n.

¹⁷³Ibid., vol. 1, p. 9.

¹⁷⁴J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Mercury, 1961), p. 11.

¹⁷⁵Cours de politiques constitutionnelle, vol. 2, p. 541.

¹⁷⁶Ibid.

¹⁷⁷Ibid., p. 542. Montesquieu had made basically the same point about democracies in general (while refusing to use the term “liberty” to describe them): “Comme dans les démocraties le peuple paraît faire à peu près ce qu’il veut, on a mis la liberté dans ces sortes de gouvernements, et on a confondu le pouvoir du peuple avec la liberté du peuple.” Esprit des lois, bk. 11, chap. 2.

¹⁷⁸Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (Paris: Garnier, n.d.), bk. 1, chap. 6.

¹⁷⁹Constant makes a partial exception of Athens, which, in his view, combined both certain totalitarian features (the right of ostracism, for instance) with the most liberal political organization of antiquity. Œuvres, pp. 1045–1046.

¹⁸⁰Cours de politiques constitutionnelle, vol. 2, p. 543.

¹⁸¹He thus places himself in the ranks of all the social thinkers of the nineteenth century — including Saint-Simon, Durkheim, Spencer, Maine, Tönnies, etc.—who conceived of a dichotomous division of social evolution.

¹⁸²Cours de politiques constitutionnelle, vol. 2, p. 544.

¹⁸³Ibid.

¹⁸⁴Œuvres, p. 1046.

¹⁸⁵Cours de politiques constitutionnelle, vol. 2, p. 546.

¹⁸⁶Œuvres, pp. 1046–1047. Michel’s remark on this is worth noting: Observation subtile et profonde, mais qui fait reposer, en dernière analyse, l’individualisme sur un calcul d’intérêt.” Op. cit., p. 312.

¹⁸⁷In a similar vein, Tocqueville, at the end of the second volume of Democracy, asserts that it is ultimately impossible to pass judgment on the relative merits of aristocratic and democratic man. Democracy in America, trans. by Henry Reeve (New York: Vintage, 1954), vol. 2, p. 351. This is only one noteworthy example of the impact on two such prominent liberals as Constant and Tocqueville of the historicist movement.

¹⁸⁸Œuvres, pp. 1027–1028.

¹⁸⁹Ibid., p. 1047.

¹⁹⁰Ibid., p. 1047, n.

¹⁹¹Cours de politique constitutionnelle, vol. 2, p. 547.

¹⁹²De la religion, vol. 3, p. 233.

¹⁹³Gall, op. cit., p. 117. (Italics added.)

¹⁹⁴Despite the thoroughness of Gall’s book, and despite many interesting insights of his, this is only one example where he has overemphasized the religious background and orientation of Constant’s thought. On the point at issue here, a writer such as Michel adheres to the clear meaning of the text in contrasting Constant’s silence on the role of Christianity with Laboulaye’s, placing it at the center of his discussion. Michel, op. cit., p. 313.

¹⁹⁵Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (New York: Anchor, 1956), pp. 389–396; Francis Lieber, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1859), pp. 50–51.

¹⁹⁶“La liberté antique et la liberté moderne,” in L’état et ses limites (Paris: Charpentier, 1865), pp. 103–137.

¹⁹⁷Ibid., p. 109.

¹⁹⁸Ibid., p. 110.

¹⁹⁹“Ibid. Rousseau states: Jésus vint établir sur la terre un royaume spirituel: ce qui, séparant le système théologique du système politique, fit que l’État cessa d’être un, et causa les divisions intestines qui n’ont jamais cessé d’agiter les peuples chrétiens.” Du contrat social, bk. 4, chap. 8.

²⁰⁰Laboulaye, op. cit., pp. 110–111. This, as will later become apparent, resembles to a certain extent Lord Acton’s own rationale for liberty, but not his conception of the historical development by which liberty had to some extent been realized.

²⁰¹Ibid., p. 111.

²⁰²Ibid., p. 115.