Helena Rosenblatt

Re-evaluating Benjamin Constant's liberalism: industrialism, Saint-Simonianism and the Restoration years

This essay contests the notion that there was a necessary and fundamental opposition between republicanism and liberalism during the post-Revolutionary period in France. Constants writings of the Restoration years show his abiding interest in both the construction of viable political institutions and the promotion of a vibrant political life. Worried about what he saw as growing authoritarian trends within the liberal camp, Constant wrote about the need to keep political liberty alive in commercial republics. His refutations of Auguste Comte and the Saint-Simonians, and his writings on religion, should be seen as offering pointed lessons to fellow liberals about the crucial importance of both politics and the moral values promoted by religious freedom.

Rousseau, the anticosmopolitan?

Rousseau has rightly been called “the great wrecker of theories and categories.”1 This description is particularly 1⁄2tting when it comes to cosmopolitanism, an ideal and a constellation of values that he repeatedly denounced. On this issue, as on so many others, Rousseau was both a philosophe and an antiphilosophe; his was a critique of the Enlightenment from within.2 Rousseau attacked cosmopolitanism not because he did not espouse the humanitarian principles it was supposed to promote, but because he thought it was a sham. Setting himself up as the moral conscience of his age, Rousseau reminded his readers that manners and morals are not the same thing. Curiosity or ‘openness’ toward others, the willingness to do business with them, and even the eagerness to socialize with them should not be confused with accepting them as one’s social and political equals. As Rousseau pointed out, cosmopolitanism could, and did, easily coexist with, and lend support to, unjust political and social regimes. In rejecting cosmopolitanism, Rousseau held up a mirror to the elites of his time. He denounced what he thought were their super1⁄2cial and selfcongratulatory attitudes. He revealed how unnatural, vain, and even corrupting their ‘civilized’ values were. With all their celebrated hospitality toward strangers and inquisitiveness about foreigners, cosmopolitan philosophes were neglecting a simple moral imperative: “The essential thing is to be good to the people with whom one lives.”3

French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day: French liberalism, an overlooked tradition?

There is an enduring assumption that the French have never been, and never will be, liberal. As with all clichés, this one contains a grain of truth, but it also overlooks a school of thought that has been a significant presence in French intellectual and political culture for nearly three centuries: French political liberalism. This new collection of essays, authored by a distinguished group of scholars from diverse fields, explores this rich and largely untapped tradition in French political thought. The past decade has witnessed a revival of interest in authors like Montesquieu, Constant, and Tocqueville, both in the United States and Europe. New translations have appeared and intellectual historians have significantly advanced our understanding of the political conflicts through which many ‘French liberal’ ideas were originally developed. Normative philosophers have also begun to employ these arguments in contemporary debates. Yet whether there exists a distinct and internally consistent paradigm underlying this tradition of thought is rarely discussed. Moreover, many influential and interesting members of the tradition, including a large number of political economists, have by and large remained out of sight. One of the core aims of this book is to provide a picture of French liberalism that is at once more comprehensive and more nuanced. Despite the rich variety of thinkers that can be brought together under the heading of ‘French liberalism’, they do have one common ancestor in Montesquieu. The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu’s massive, almost encyclopaedic effort to rethink the normative foundations of law in a more empirical manner, set the tone for generations to come. His sharp insights into the relationship between freedom and its social and political preconditions became a major source of inspiration for those who, after the trauma of the French Revolution, tried to strike a balance between revolutionary ideals and a more conservative concern for political order. It is at this juncture that we meet the most prominent examples of the French liberal tradition, such as François Guizot, Mme de Staël,

French liberalism and the question of society

Recent years have seen a revived interest in liberalism as a political and social doctrine. As part of this rediscovery, Benjamin Constant, Fran@ois Guizot and Alexis de Tocqueville have emerged as exceptionally insightful and profound thinkers, well worth renewed attention from modern scholars. Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, they sought first of all to understand this momentous political event which they held to be of supreme importance and historical significance. Secondly, they wished to defend and legitimize the Revolution’s fundamental ideals and accomplishments while at the same time distancing themselves from some of its notable failures and regrettable excesses. It was in order to accomplish this dual goal that they turned to the realm of ‘‘the social’’, that is, to the underlying factors and causes of the Revolution. In so doing, they triggered what Aurelian Craiutu rightly calls ‘‘a golden age of political thought’’. Increasingly sensitive to the profound social transformations taking place all around them, these early liberals came to see both France’s present state and the French Revolution as the product of long-term and irreversible social forces. To them, the political turbulence and violent upheavals of the Revolutionary period only served to confirm their belief that politics alone could neither create nor sustain a stable and liberal political order. The social sphere was crucial. This was, of course, the sphere of economics; but it was equally the sphere of sociability, of manners and morals. Indeed, for liberals like Constant, Guizot and Tocqueville, the French Revolution made it patently clear that a healthy relationship between social mores and politics was crucially important to the survival of a just polity. It was with the goal of discussing the liberal view of the relationship between the social and the political that the authors whose articles are presented here met at the Society for French Historical Studies conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in April 2003. The papers presented at the conference have since been slightly revised for publication. Two of them focus on Benjamin Constant. They share the aim of bringing to light the richness, depth and multifaceted nature of Constant’s liberalism, which has often been described rather simplistically. Steven Vincent highlights the importance Constant attributed to morals and character as a foundation of a viable liberal polity. Basing his research in part on Constant’s little known early writings, Vincent shows that Constant worried about the nefarious effects the Revolution had had on Frenchmen’s character traits. It had strengthened bad passions like fanaticism and self-interest, both of which undermined a stable and ARTICLE IN PRESS

What Is Liberalism

In a pathbreaking essay published in 1994, the American intellectual historian Mark Lilla argued that a ‘sea-change’ in French intellectual politics had occurred in the 1980s. ‘In the space of a few years,’ Lilla wrote, France’s ‘long tradition of political liberalism’ fell out of favor and liberal ideas were ‘revived.’ In one way or another, all the essays in In Search of the Liberal Moment engage with Lilla’s arguments and challenge them from various perspectives. We learn, for example, that the thinkers involved with this supposed liberal revival were perhaps not so liberal after all. Some retained a Marxist perspective (Lefort and Gauchet, according to Rosenblum); others were quite conservative (Furet, according to Christofferson); Raymond Aron, perhaps the best known thinker in the movement, apparently drew inspiration from Carl Schmitt (according to Steinmetz-Jenkins); and Foucault’s embrace of liberalism was ambiguous at best (according to Behrent). These thinkers, we discover, were also dissimilar to each other in their particular interests and concerns. Some were critical of capitalism; and some were more interested in democracy than liberalism or totalitarianism. Perhaps it is not so surprising, then, that many of the participants in this ‘liberal moment’ avoided the ‘liberal’ label (according to Châton). The volume also leads us to question how sudden and transformative this purported revival actually was, and indeed, if it was a revival at all. Did the French ‘liberal moment’ really emerge out of the blue? If French political culture was so illiberal, how could it have happened? JeanFabien Spitz forcefully refutes the notion that the French political tradition was endemically illiberal and Stephen Sawyer notes that the French have, since the eighteenth century, displayed a sustained interest in liberalism; what happened in the 1980s was therefore not a ‘rediscovery.’ This dismantling of Lilla’s thesis certainly produces a deeper and more thorough understanding of what the editors call France’s ‘rich and varied liberal legacy’ (p. 3). We are given a better sense of the complexities, nuances and even contradictions of this period in French intellectual history. We learn new things—sometimes disturbing things—about influential public intellectuals, for example, that Raymond Aron played an important role legitimizing Schmitt’s thought in France. In this regard, the essays are most interesting, clarifying and important. And yet there is a way in which the contributors unknowingly perpetuate a certain vagueness and even confusion, a confusion that is actually widespread in the current scholarship on liberalism. It regards the contributors’ casual and unproblematized use of the words ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism.’ The words ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ are employed repeatedly throughout the volume, but with no clear definition of what they mean, as if we all know what we are talking about

Tocqueville. The Aristocratic Sources of Liberty

detached from a republican context. For Berry, eighteenth-century Scots shared a vision of the historical development of commercial society (he refers to Smith, Hume, Robertson and Millar in particular, and also Ferguson, whereas characters like Blair are used selectively and Monboddo is dismissed as ‘perverse’). Berry does well to emphasise that four-stage theory, contrary to popular belief, was rarely used by eighteenth-century Scots and should rather be seen as one modification of the natural history of society. At the same time, the exact relationship between the historical development of civil society and the stadial theory of progress of society does not become altogether clear. That relationship, however, is important for the argument about the ‘normativity’ of commercial society. If there is no real alternative for commercial society, or, if most Scots are not framing the question in these terms, then there is considerably less normativity involved in discussions about it. At times, Berry’s desire to emphasise unity simplifies some of the complex questions regarding commercial society and politics, in particular. The deep and interesting comparison between Hume and Wallace for example is not really developed beyond the population debate. This may reflect the fact that many of Wallace’s essays remain unpublished and are thus outside the book’s scope. But even based on Berry’s sources one could give quite a different account of the role of the ‘political’ in relation to commerce, as viewed by some of the Scots. If, however, the emphasis is on the interpretation of Adam Smith’s idea of ‘everyman as a merchant’ in its wider Scottish context, then one should accept that some differences in tone regarding the nature of commercial society are lost (the relevance of hierarchy and the nature of ‘civilised monarchies’ spring to mind). In one sense, Berry’s account of commercial society in the Scottish Enlightenment reads as an apology for the Scots (in contrast, to some extent, to John Robertson’s Case for the Enlightenment). It is of particular significance for Berry that the Scots were the ones who discovered the idea of commercial society as defined in this book. Berry’s fine interpretation deserves to be widely read, although the cover price of this book (£65) makes it hard for students especially to buy a copy of their own. Hopefully a paperback edition will be available soon.