The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Constant:

French liberal thought and the Revolution

The French Revolution embodied a paradox, namely it was a sort of Janus head: one side were the rights of Man, the private, individual self; the other was Robespierre’s Terror, the public self subsuming the individual. Benjamin Constant’s early political philosophy sought to represent one side of this Janus head, the Rights of Man (although it recognized the existence of the other side, the Terror). This private, individual self, drawing its inspiration from the Scottish Enlightenment, was placed outside of the reach of the public sphere and resulted in a conception that served as the basis for his political philosophy. Constant’s early political philosophy could not adequately account for the development of an anti-bourgeois revolution, the Terror, within a bourgeois revolution, the French Revolution of 1789. Nevertheless, Constant was the first major thinker to attempt to unify the French middle class in a political philosophy of liberalism. Constant’s later work, driven by the enigma of Napoleon, represents a concerted effort to move beyond the Janus head, to move beyond that which was considered to be too abstract and leading to despotism. Here one encounters the lacuna of Constant to nationalism which leaves his thought powerless to explain Napoleon’s popularity. Constant’s political philosophy is an embodiment of a liberal democratic tradition, and this philosophy of Constant’s contains some of the fundamental issues and problems of that tradition.

I suggest that Constant’s political philosophy strives to found a conception of the political self for Thermidorian and post-Thermidorian France, and later during the Napoleonic Empire. The result of Constant’s endeavors is a political self whose fundamental essence is private, a being who inhabits a world where the state is not synonymous with the interests of the individual will, and moreover may stand in opposition to that will. Thus for Constant the individual reigns supreme. I believe that this individualistic “ethos” is a key to understanding Constant in the liberal tradition.

In the early phase of Constant’s career, the Scottish Enlightenment is his main influence and may be seen in this individualistic emphasis on self and the antinomy of the State. Therefore for my purposes of examining Constant’s thought and its problems, I suggest that a fruitful method for grasping Constant’s importance may be gained by first looking at a thinker who posited a radically different conception of the self, namely Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract. This conception of the self vis-à-vis the general will was outlined by Rousseau in the following passage:

Si donc on écarte du pacte social ce qui n’est pas de son essence, on trouvera qu’il se réduit aux termes suivants: Chacun de nous met en commun sa personne et toute sa puissance sous la suprême direction de la volonté générale; et nous recevons en corps chaque membre comme partie indivisible du tout (TSC 192).

Moreover, the general will, as Rousseau described it, was the sole basis of sovereignty. But for Rousseau, this sovereginty cannot be represented. Hence any representation in a democratic republic is an apostasy to its own principles: “La souveraineté ne peut être représentée, par la même raison qu’elle ne peut être aliénée; elle consiste essentiellement dans la volonté générale, et la volonté ne se représente point” (TSC 307).

I would suggest that here Constant’s later work shared Rousseau’s view of representation in republican thought: For Constant felt that in the modern states “the mass of their inhabitants, whatever form of government they adopt, have no active part in it. They area called at most to exercise sovereignty through representation, that is to say in a fictitious manner” (PW 103–104).

Nevertheless, the early Constant, in distinction to Rousseau, affirmed representation as an intermediary principle to autonomy, as establishing a sort of juste milieu (De la Force du Gouvernement Actuel 73). Moreover, Constant here favors the idea of representation, but at the same time shuns the more radical aspect of Rousseau’s paradoxical model.

I would suggest that this model of the general will and representation built by Rousseau was, in part, created to overcome the dualistic self of John Locke’s political philosophy. For Locke, modern man was alienated, he was a dualism, a Entzweiung, of private and public selves combined into one person à la Hegel: The self strives for personal happiness, but part of it remains outside of civil society. Indeed as Constant remarks in his Principles of Politics: “There is, on the contrary, a part of human existence which by necessity remains individual and independent, and which is, by right, outside any social competence. overeignty has only a limited and relative existence” (PW 177). Thus Constant was to employ Locke’s dualistic philosophy of self and civil society. Hence in Constant’s political philosophy, this modern dualism is present and the sphere of the private self is privileged.

On the other hand, Rousseau did not accept Locke’s dualism, and built his model to counter it. Moreover, Rousseau grappled (albeit in a typically different fashion), with this problem of the modern dualism in The Social Contract. Rousseau found the problem to be a paradox: The private self must exist before the public self, but the private self presupposes that the public self actually exists. Indeed, as Rousseau remarked:

Pour qu’un peuple naissant pût goûter les saines maximes de la politique et suivre les règles fondamentales de la raison d’Etat, il faudrait que l’effet pût devenir la cause, que l’esprit social qui doit être l’ouvrage de l’institution présidât à l’institution même, et que les hommes fussent avant les lois ce qu’ils doivent devenir par elles (TSC 230).

Here I would suggest that it is to Rousseau’s credit as a thinker that he articulated the problem in this way, and by so doing expressed a paradoxical conception of the modern self vis-à-vis sovereignty and representation. Although Rousseau’s thought here may be said to contain a fundamental contradiction: I would suggest that this is not a weakness. Instead Rousseau’s genius was to be able to articulate this problem as inherent to the democratic conception of individual, self, and sovereignty.

Thus for Rousseau, the individual in the democratic republic was to be conceived of as a being whose essence was concatenated to a larger social entity, an entity whose existence was much larger than the single private self of Constant: “…nous recevons en corps chaque membre comme partie indivisible du tout…” [TSC 192; emphasis mine]. The general will, encompassing and standing above the individual, private will, would exercise itself in the form of sovereignty.

In comparison, Constant saw Rousseau’s thesis here as fundamentally flawed in its conception of the general will’s relation to sovereignty. He accused Rousseau and his interpreters of replacing the sovereignty of the King with the sovereignty of the popular, thus continuing the same idea of the absolute sovereign in a different shape — the people were made into the king. “Theocracy, royalty, aristocracy, whenever they rule men’s minds are simply the general will” (PW 175). Constant drew the individual as sovereign perhaps, but this sovereign was a private self and thus constituted a distinctly different being than that of Rousseau’s model. Moreover, it is here where one may detect the resonance of the Scottish Enlightenment, especially Adam Smith. Again I would suggest that Constant’s insistence on the private conception of self is crucial in understanding his thought vis-à-vis The Social Contract.

Hence Constant’s political philosophy during these years is based on a private conception of man á la Smith, and ultimately exists in contradistinction to Rousseau’s conception of the general will and sovereignty. Moreover, the model of the modern dualism of the self informed Constant’s political philosophy via his deployment of the Smithian conception of man. Here we encounter the fundamental problem of Constant’s conception of the private self and its relation to the world. Namely, Constant wants to maintain a large part of modern life outside of the reach of the public self and the state: Who governs this part? Is it prior to society? Is it outside of Rousseau’s social pact? Constant never gives a complete answer to this question.

Constant’s lack of response here is important, and may be said to be a sort of lacuna. Nevertheless, this conception of the private self informs the very basis of his political philosophy, and represents an important and decisive, early step in the creation of a French liberal tradition of political thought. Moreover, this version of the individual self sketched by Constant, based on Locke’s modern dualism of private and public selves as well as the Scottish Enlightenment of Smith, is a key feature in his early thought of the Thermidorian period. It is to this specific historical context that I now wish to turn my attention.

The key concern of Constant’s early thought was the Terror and the Thermidorian response to the Terror: What went wrong? Why did we do what we did? What have we done? The question is imperative for Constant: It demands an answer because the very existence of the Republic depends upon it.

The task of the French Thermidorian Liberal Republicans, of whom Constant considered himself a part, is to regain the trust of the people in light of the transgressions of the Terror. Hence Constant tries to articulate a centrist position, albeit in a sort of mechanistic interpretation of action and reaction. Indeed Constant state in Des Reactions Poltiques that: “Lorsqu’une révolution, portée ainsi hors ses bornes, s’arrête, on la remet d’abord dans ses bornes….L’on rétrograde d’autant plus que l’on avait trop avancé” (96). I would suggest that, for Constant, the Girondists and the Jacobins are a sort of Janus head which entail the Revolution itself — the one of 1789 and the one of 1793. Hence for Constant the problem is of two revolutions, one liberal, the other despotic. Constant may not merely choose sides in this dispute, but must reintegrate the ex-Terrorists into the building of French Republican society.

Moreover Constant must articulate a unified discourse for the pro-revolutionary forces to stave off the threat from the Monarchist Counter-Revolutionaries and the corresponding threat of civil war. Constant strives to reconcile the various factions and divisions of the French Revolution and to thus prevent a fall back into civil war. An unsatisfactory answer won’t help save the Revolution and the new Republic from civil war. Hence Constant’s task in the early writings, with the memory of the Terror looming large in his mind, is to articulate a centrist position, and moreover to articulate a political conception of self (outlined above) in Thermidorian and post-Thermidorian France in light of the Terror. By doing so, Constant must build a basis of legitimacy and sovereignty for the fledgling Republic.

Constant’s answer to the Thermidorian question thus avoids repeating the divisive style of Jacobin-era type politics and as a result indirectly encouraging the Counter-Revolutionaries who are waiting in the wings (at least in Constant’s mind, if not in reality). In his key response to the problem of sovereignty in the Thermidorian period, Constant becomes, indirectly, the first major thinker to attempt to unify the French middle class. Indeed the Revolution was, for Constant, a means to an end, an end which was liberal democracy and its citizenry — the middle class. “La République est un but, la révolution fut une route” (De La Force de Gouvernement Actuel 47).

If the French Revolution was a defining event of the Modern era, ushering in a new conception of man, society and the political, then how do we understand the Terror? Generally, social history, and especially Marxist historiography, have drawn the Terror as a means by which the popular classes acquire rights. The Terror makes the people a new people: a people for whom politics and society are a new mode of orientation and customs. In this perspective every regime is founded by brigands and an emphasis is placed on the political expediency of violent means. Hence the Terror becomes a fundamental step in the process of popular revolution.

In response, I would suggest that this emphasis on the popular nature of the French Revolution ignores certain discrepancies within the Terror itself, viz. the bureaucratic terror and the terror from below. The bureaucratic terror of Robespierre lasted for four months from April to July 1794 and, in a certain sense, was removed from the terror from below of the popular classes. Even more importantly, the Terror was a fundamentally anti-bourgeois revolution within a bourgeois one. If this two-fold nature of the Terror is thus taken into account, neither Marx nor Constant can adequately account for this development, viz. the anti-bourgeois revolution within a bourgeois revolution. Moreover, neither thinker can adequately account for the appearance of Napoleon: “Simultaneously bourgeois and nonbourgeois, what did Robespierre represent, and what does Napoleon represent [to Marx]?” (MFR 30).

The question which presents itself to Constant is fundamental: What is the source of power for Napoleon? Is it a sovereign power? If not, then why is he so popular? In The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation, Constant signals a key change in his thought: namely, Constant wants to draw a connection, between 1789, 1792/93, and Napoleon.

For Constant, Napoleon always remains the despot, the usurper par excellence. Indeed, Constant sketches Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812 as follows: “The aggressor advances, all is silent. He threatens, nothing yields. He plants the flag on the tower of the capital and the answer he receives is that the same capital reduced to ashes” (PW 147). Moreover, I would suggest that Constant may be perceived as a David to this Goliath of Bonaparte.

Hence Constant’s later work struggles with the puzzling figure of Bonaparte, the despot — the bête noire of Constant during this period. Constant’s explanation to the enigma of Napoleon is instructive: Constant states that the natural forces of patriotism have dried up and been replaced by abstract idea. The abstract French Revolution eventually lead to the despotism of Napoleon. As Constant remarks in the very Burkean chapter entitled “On Uniformity” in The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation: “It is somewhat remarkable that uniformity should never have encountered greater favour than in a revolution made in the name of the rights and the liberty of men” (PW 73). Constant’s anti-abstract, Burkean answer for the enigma of Napoleon is thus a lacuna in regard to the nationalistic source of Napoleon’s popularity, and as such Constant cannot attempt to adequately explain Napoleon.

Thus Constant’s move to this anti-abstractionist position thus places him squarely in the realm of Edmund Burke, in obvious contradistinction to the earlier expressed views of Des Principes Politiques. Placing himself in the company of Burke, Constant also changes his conception of society and its relation to uniformity. By so doing, Constant increases the problems of his political philosophy in regard to social and historical change. How can Constant account for social change without abstract reasoning, without the abstract equality and freedom of the Rights of Man? Constant’s response is fundamentally flawed: Namely, one must wait for the ripeness of public opinion. Indeed as Constant states in The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation: “Any amelioration, any reform, the abolition of any abuse, all these are beneficial only when they second the wish of the nation. When they precede it they become nefarious….Unless public opinion has marked them [parts of the social edifice] out already, you will, by attacking them, destroy the entire edifice” (PW 150).

Here I would suggest that Constant’s strange response to the issue of social change is rooted in the enigma of Napoleon and moreover in the pitfalls of the anti-abstract position. Namely, Constant’s later thought was motivated by the need to explain Napoleon as part of a historical chain beginning with the “abstract” Revolution of 1789 and connected to 1793. But by so doing Constant committed himself to a too anti-abstract conception, and hence he was limited to explaining social change in terms of waiting for “ripeness of public opinion.” In addition, this anti-abstract shift lead Constant into direct contradiction to another concept: the spirit of commerce.

The leitmotif of Constant’s concatenation of the Terror and Napoleon is anachronism. Despotism is always anachronistic for Constant: Robespierre, via Rousseau and Mably, strives to re-create Sparta and thus paves the way for the Napoleonic empire: “They [Rousseau and Mably] wished to exercise public power as they had learnt from their guides [the Ancients] it had once been exercised in the free states” (PW 320). Here we enter into Constant’s later historical conception in which history is developing towards universal spirit of commercial society and peace. Clearly in the later work, Constant refers to the spirit of commerce as the telos of his age, one which posits the individual over the state and its administration: “Commerce has brought nations closer together and has given them virtually identical customs and habits; monarchs may still be enemies, but peoples are compatriots” (PW 141). But note that the telos of Constant, the spirit of universal commerce, is in direct contradiction with his stated opposition to the spirit of uniformity. Hence isn’t the spirit of uniformity nothing other than the spirit of universal commerce governed by the abstraction of money? If so, then Constant’s own thought was rooted in the abstract: In Constant’s haste to oppose the Napoleonic Empire, he contradicts his previous position.

In this haste, Constant also ignores that Napoleon is not only a despot, he is a modernizer. As an example of which one may look at the creation of the Napoleonic Code. Furthermore, Napoleon has a popular messianic nature that is also overlooked by Constant: Napoleon “provided, extorted or paid for acclamation which sounded like the national voice” (PW 163). On the contrary, Napoleon was wildly popular with the popular classes and represented the forces of nation and nationalism as well as those of modernity and progress in France (although not necessarily to the same people).

Marx even recognized the two-fold nature of Napoleon: “He [Napoleon] was no terrorist with his head in the clouds” (MFR 139). Nevertheless, Marx was puzzled by the figure of Louis Napoleon. Marx saw that Louis was popular with sectors of the “lower classes,” including the peasantry, of Marx’s time due to the posthumous influence of his uncle: “The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant” (“The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” in The Marx-Engels Reader [MER] 609).

In summary, if Constant sketched a society based on economic self-interest à la Smith, moving toward the commercial society as the universal state, then Constant offers no adequate explanation of the social cohesion effected by nationalism Conversely, if from an anti-abstractionist perspective, the universal realm of commerce was really the spirit of uniformity, then where is the basis for the Rights of Man and hence the basis of a democratic Republic?

Finally, I believe that it may be fruitful to compare Constant’s ontology of the private self to Marx’s conception of society. For Marx clearly regrets the political liberty that Constant celebrates: Thermidor is, for Marx, the period of the consolidation of bourgeois power. For Marx, private interests were not conducive to society: The bourgeois notion of the rights of man were the “ruling ideas of the epoch” (“The German Ideology” in MER 172–173). Constant uses this selfsame private “bourgeois” conception of the individual, the private self, that Marx so vehemently thundered against. Marx sought explanations in the broad structural elements of society and so doing he did not concern himself with Constant’s private individual. Rather for Marx, the individual was merely an ideological production of the bourgeois forces of production.

It has been remarked, albeit in a somewhat different context, in a similar vein that: “L’homme est une invention dont l’archéologie de notre pensée montre aisément la date récente. Et peut-être la fin prochaine.” (Michel Foucault Les mots et les choses 398) Hence one may say that Marx “invented” the proletariat to reconcile the split between the private and public self, that is between civil society and the state. In his own characteristic way, Marx answered the paradox posed by The Social Contract of the general will, the individual, and representation.

Therefore, if The Social Contract clearly articulated this paradox; then the French Revolution was to embody it. For the Revolution could be said, to use my earlier metaphor, to be a Janus head: that is the Rights of Man and Robespierre’s Terror. Benjamin Constant’s shifting political philosophy at times sought to represent one side, the Rights of Man, while recognizing the existence of the other side, the Terror. The later work, in my opinion, represents a concerted effort to move beyond the Janus head, to move beyond that which was considered too abstract and leading to despotism. More problematically, Constant could not adequately account for the development of an anti-bourgeois revolution within a bourgeois revolution; although he was the first major thinker to attempt to articulate a unity of the French middle class. Constant’s positing of a problematic private self (originating in the Scottish Enlightenment) outside of the reach of the public sphere resulted in a conception that made up the very basis of his political philosophy, and informed subsequent generations in the French liberal tradition of political thought. Moreover, I would suggest that Constant’s political philosophy is an embodiment of a liberal democratic tradition whose influence has played a decisive role in our intellectual history: The issues and problems addressed by Benjamin Constant’s work are still with us today and hence bespeak his continued importance.

Bibliography:

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— -. Marx and the French Revolution. 1986. Trans. Deborah Kan Furet. Ed. Lucien Calvié. With Selections from Karl Marx. Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1988.

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— -. The Social Contract. 1762. Trans. Christopher Betts. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.