Benjamin Constant’s famous lecture comparing ancient and modern liberty can be better understood if it is read alongside a set of unpublished lectures on ancient religion that he delivered one year earlier. Those lectures suggest that Constant’s commitment to modern liberty was based in part on his deep anxieties about religious freedom, and that he valued religious freedom because he thought the “religious sentiment” was an important manifestation of a natural human capacity for self-development. In putting religion and self-development at the heart of his vision, he tried to show that modern liberty could have a positive moral or spiritual purpose beyond merely assuring people freedom from interference in the pursuit of their interests.
Benjamin Constant, "Fragment de la copie des lectures à l’Athénée Royal sur la religion (unpublished manuscript)," in Les fonds Constant, le département des manuscrits (Lausanne, Switzerland: Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, 1818). All translations of these lectures are original, completed in consultation with valuable suggestions from my research assistant David Belanich. Page numbers in subsequent citations refer to pages of the original manuscript. Space limitations do not allow the inclusion of the original French, but interested readers can obtain a digital image of the manuscript from the author on request.
2.
Benjamin Constant, "The Liberty of the Ancients Compared With That of the Moderns," in Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 311.
3.
For background information on the Athénée and its place in the political culture of the time, see Martin Staum, "Physiognomy and Phrenology at the Paris Athénée," Journal of the History of Ideas56, no. 3. Barbara Haines, "The Athénée de Paris and the Bourbon Restoration," History and Technology5, no. 2 (1988).
4.
The first two lectures are incomplete, with sections crossed out, but the third lecture seems to be complete. For a brief description of the manuscript see Etienne Hofmann, Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre manuscrite de Benjamin Constant, Travaux et recherches de l’Institut Benjamin Constant-1 ( Genève: Slatkine, 1992), 96. See also Patrice Thompson, Pierre Deguise, and Boris Anelli, Les écrits de Benjamin Constant sur la religion: essai de liste chronologique, Travaux et recherches de l’Institut Benjamin Constant-4 ( Paris: H. Champion, 1998), 108-09. For a few biographical details relating to the lectures see Dennis Wood, Benjamin Constant: A Biography (London and New York : Routledge, 1993), 225. Cf. Helena Rosenblatt, Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chap. 5. Paoletti devotes one sentence to the lectures. Giovanni Paoletti, Benjamin Constant et les anciens: politique, religion, histoire, trans. Marie-France Merger (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2006), 92.
5.
Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 60n3; Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997), 18, 27, 50, 271.
6.
Phillippe Buonarroti , "Conspiration pour l’égalité dite de Babeuf suivie du procès auquel elle donna lieu, et des pièces justificatives," La Libraire romantique, http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/MOME?af=RN&ae=U107906164&srchtp=a&ste=14&locID=29002 (online book). For a provocative consideration of Buonarroti’s dichotomy, see John Dunn, Democracy: A History ( New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), 124-25.
7.
Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker ( New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 595.
8.
Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1969). The lecture was given in 1958. That same year, Iggers published a book explicitly linking French postrevolutionary thinkers and totalitarianism: Georg G. Iggers, The Cult of Authority-The Political Philosophy of the Saint-Simonians: A Chapter in the Intellectual History of Totalitarianism (The Hague: M. Nijhoff , 1958).
9.
The following important works informed my analysis, but none integrates religion into Constant’s political outlook in the way that this article does, and none treats the lectures on religion. Guy Howard Dodge, Benjamin Constant’s Philosophy of Liberalism: A Study in Politics and Religion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Biancamaria Fontana, Benjamin Constant and the Post-revolutionary Mind (New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 1991); Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, "‘We Are Modern Men’: Benjamin Constant and the Discovery of an Immanent Liberalism,"Constellations6, no. 4 (1999); George Armstrong Kelly, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism ( Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Alan Pitt, "The Religion of the Moderns: Freedom and Authenticity in Constant’s De la religion,"History of Political Thought21 (2000). Nancy L. Rosenblum, Another Liberalism: Romanticism and the Reconstruction of Liberal Thought ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Jerrold E. Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2005 ).
10.
Helena Rosenblatt , "Commerce et religion dans le libéralisme de Benjamin Constant," Commentaire102 (2003); Helena Rosenblatt, "French Liberalism and the Question of Society," History of European Ideas30, no. 1 (2004); Rosenblatt, Liberal Values; Helena Rosenblatt, "Re-evaluating Benjamin Constant’s Liberalism: Industrialism, Saint-Simonianism, and the Restoration Years,"History of European Ideas30 (2004); Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749-1762-Ideas in Context #46 (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Other important articles and historical monographs on his religious writings do exist, some of them documenting painstakingly detailed investigation of Constant’s manuscripts, though few link directly to politics. Patrice Thompson, La religion de Benjamin Constant: les pouvoirs de l’image, Critica E Storia Letteraria-2 (Pisa: Pacini , 1978); Thompson , Deguise, and Anelli, Les écrits de Benjamin Constant sur la religion; Tzvetan Todorov, A Passion for Democracy: Benjamin Constant (New York: Algora, 1999). None of these works treats the lectures on religion except to mention that they exist.
11.
Rosenblatt, Liberal Values.
12.
Wood, Benjamin Constant , 61-62.
13.
Benjamin Constant, De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements, ed. Tzvetan Todorov and Etienne Hofmann ( Arles, France: Actes Sud, 1999).
14.
Todorov’s introduction to Constant, De la religion.
15.
(Henri-Marie Beyle) Stendhal, "Review of Benjamin Constant, De la religion, vol. 1," in Chroniques pour l’Angleterre: Contributions a la presse britannique (Grenoble, France: 1985), 210. (Originally in London Magazine, November 1824.)
16.
According to Patrice Higonnet, Marx’s notes on De la religion comprise twenty-three pages in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), Berlin Est, Dietz, 1975-, IV/1, 345ff. Patrice Higonnet, "Marx, disciple de Constant?" Annales Benjamin Constant6 (1986): 11-16.
17.
Wood, Benjamin Constant, 269n20, citing Benjamin Constant, Œuvres, ed. Alfred Raulin (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 289.
18.
See Thompson, Deguise, and Anelli ,Les écrits de Benjamin Constant sur la religion, 109.
19.
Wood, Benjamin Constant , 225.
20.
Constant, "Les lectures sur la religion," first lecture, pp. 1, 3.
21.
Ibid., first lecture, pp. 3-4.
22.
Ibid., first lecture, pp. 12-13. The passage appeared largely intact in Constant, De la religion, 94.
23.
Constant, "Les lectures sur la religion," third lecture, p. 44. An earlier use of the term fetish to describe ancient religion can be found in Charles de Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétiches ou Parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie (Paris: 1760), microform.
24.
Constant, "Les lectures sur la religion," second lecture, pp. 37-38.
25.
Benjamin Constant , "The Progressive Development of Religious Ideas ," in Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, ed. George Ripley (Boston: Hilliard, Gray and Company, 1838), 314. Cf. Constant , "Les lectures sur la religion," second lecture, p. 39.
26.
Constant, "Les lectures sur la religion," third lecture, p. 60.
27.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, part 1, chap. 1, section 4:
28.
In order . . . to find an analogy [applicable to commodities], we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands.
29.
In this way everything that, in Fetishism seems to us the most opposed to our ideas, comes together, under traits softened to the more advanced epochs of religion, and in the same way, that which is more profound, more ingenious and more sublime in proportioned religion realizes itself as a seed in Fetishism. So to this extent the beautiful doctrine of religious perfectibility is true, a new demonstration and necessary complement of the consoling system of perfectibility.
30.
Constant, "Les lectures sur la religion," second lecture, p. 42.
31.
Ibid, third lecture, p. 53.
32.
Ibid., third lecture, pp. 85-89. Cf. Benjamin Constant, The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation, in Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, trans. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 125.
33.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "The Social Contract" in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), book 4, chap. 8.
34.
Constant, "Principles of Politics Applicable to All Representative Governments," in Political Writings, trans. Fontana, 276, 81.
35.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. J. M. Cohen, (Harmondsworth, UK and New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 365-66.
36.
Gabriel Bonnot de Mably ( 1709-1785). Constant, "The Liberty of the Ancients,"318.
37.
Constant mentioned De la legislation by name in a note to the 1806 manuscript edition of Principles of Politics, calling it "the most complete code of despotism imaginable," citing various restraints on religious liberty. Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments (1806), ed. Etienne Hofmann, trans. Dennis O’Keeffe (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2003), 376-78nX.
38.
See Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 210-11.
39.
Constant, Principles of Politics, 367.
40.
Ibid, 367-68. Constant identified two of the "new apologists of Egypt": Louis-Mathieu Molé, Essais de morale et de politique and Antoine Ferrand, L’Esprit de l’histoire.
41.
Jean-Paul Rabaut , in Chronique de Paris 8 (January, 1793), as quoted in Peter Friedmann, "Introduction" in Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Sur la théorie du pouvoir politique (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1975), 12. Cf. Paoletti , BenjaminConstant et les anciens, 33-35.
42.
Jean-Paul Rabaut, Projet d’éducation nationale (Paris, 1792), as quoted in David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 3.
43.
Ibid. Cf. Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1969), 271-72.
44.
Constant, Principles of Politics, 369.
45.
Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 100-10.
46.
Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France, 162-63. Cf. p. 201.
47.
Benjamin Constant, Journal intime, précédé du Cahier rouge et d’Adolphe , ed. Jean Mistler ( Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1945), 183. See Rawson, The Spartan Tradition , 295.
48.
For this point I am indebted to Rosenblatt, Liberal Values; Rosenblatt, "Re-evaluating Benjamin Constant’s Liberalism"
49.
Benjamin Constant , "Coup-d’oeil sur la tendance générale des esprits dans le dixneuvième siècle," Revue encyclopédique28 (1825).
50.
Rosenblatt, "Re-evaluating Benjamin Constant’s Liberalism," 35.
51.
Constant, "The Liberty of the Ancients," 311 (emphasis added).
52.
Ibid, 309, 19.
53.
Ibid, 323.
54.
Ibid, 310.
55.
Ibid, 309.
56.
Joseph Maistre , "On the Sovereignty of the People," in Against Rousseau, ed. Richard Lebrun (McGill-Queen’s Press, 1995 ), 79.
57.
Constant, "The Liberty of the Ancients," 323.
58.
Constant, "Principles of Politics," 177. Kalyvas and Katznelson argue, plausibly, that rights did not play an important role in Constant’s political theory before the 1806 Principes. Kalyvas and Katznelson, "‘We Are Modern Men,’" 522.
59.
Constant, "The Liberty of the Ancients"
60.
Kalyvas and Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings; Kalyvas and Katznelson, " ‘We Are Modern Men. ’"
61.
Constant, "The Liberty of the Ancients," 317.
62.
When Kelly describes Constant’s principles as "explicitly normative and sociological at once" he implicitly raises this question, but he does not answer it. Kelly, The Humane Comedy, 57.
63.
Pierre Manent , for example, detects a shifty movement between nature and history as standard in Constant’s thought, which he suggests produces "instability" in Constant’s analysis of the revolution. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism: New French Thought (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1994 ), 85.
64.
Constant, "The Liberty of the Ancients," 314.
65.
Constant, "Les lectures sur la religion," second lecture, pp. 42, 63.
66.
Benjamin Constant, "On the Perfectibility of the Human Race," in Ripley, ed. Specimens of Foreign Literature, 347.
67.
Ibid, 351.
68.
Ibid, 351-52.
69.
Ibid, 355.
70.
Constant, "The Progressive Development of Religious Ideas," 314.
71.
Constant, De la religion, 34.
72.
Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, book 20, chap. 5; book 21 chap. 20. See Pierre Manent, The City of Man, trans. Marc A. LePain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 39-46.
73.
Constant, "The Liberty of the Ancients," 324-25.
74.
Manent, The City of Man , 45-46.
75.
Dunoyer, in Le Censeur européen ( Paris: Renaudière, 1817), t. 2, pp. 1, 102, as quoted in Rosenblatt, Liberal Values, chap. 5.
76.
Constant, "The Liberty of the Ancients," 327. See also Constant’s review of Dunoyer’s work: Benjamin Constant, "De M. Dunoyer et de quelques-uns de ses ouvrages," in Ecrits politiques , ed. Marcel Gauchet ( Paris: 1997), 663.
77.
Constantin François de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney, Leçons d’histoire (March 23, 1795), in Volney, Œuvres (Paris: Fayard, 1989), discussed in Paoletti, Benjamin Constant et les anciens, 58-65. Cf. Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought, 288-89.
78.
Constant had identified and criticized the overemphasis on self-interest in some of his earliest writings. See, for example, Benjamin Constant, De la force du gouvernement actuel de la France et de la nécessité de s’y rallier [1796]; in Oeuvres complètes, I; Ecrits de jeunesse (1774-1799) (Tubingen, Verlag, 1998), 367-68. Cf. K. Steven Vincent, "Benjamin Constant, the French Revolution, and the Problem of Modern Character," History of European Ideas30, no. 1 (2004): 14.
79.
Constant, "Les lectures sur la religion," first lecture, p. 3.
80.
Ibid, third lecture, p. 44.
81.
For this criticism, see Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism and Kelly, The Humane Comedy, 1-2.
82.
"But most characteristic of the new liberalism was a respiritualization of its philosophical base-a movement away from the ‘Idéologie’ of Destutt de Tracey toward a more idealized and voluntaristic version of human freedom," Kelly, The Humane Comedy, 2. Cf. Rosenblum, Another Liberalism.
83.
See Vincent, "Benjamin Constant," 18. "We know that Constant and Isabelle de Charrière discussed Kantian ideas with Louis-Ferdinand Huber in Neuchatel, and that Constant was a friend of Charles de Villers, who was instrumental in introducing Kant into France " Cf. Pierre Deguise, Benjamin Constant méconnu: le livre "De la religion" avec des documents inédits ( Geneve: Droz, 1966), 82-86.
84.
Germaine de Staël, On Germany.
85.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press , 1991), section 270. For reflections on the relation between Hegel and Constant’s friend and associate Royer-Collard, see George Armstrong Kelly, Hegel’s Retreat from Eleusis : Studies in Political Thought ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 145-48.
86.
On this theme more broadly, see Vincent, "Benjamin Constant"; Rosenblum, Another Liberalism; George Kateb, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
87.
George Ripley presented English translations of three essays by Constant: "On the Human Causes Which Have Contributed to the Establishment of Christianity," "On the Perfectibility of the Human Race," and "The Progressive Religious Development of Human Ideas." Ripley, ed., Specimens of Foreign Literature.
88.
Ibid, 290.
89.
This is one of Mark Lilla’s powerful complaints against "liberal theology." Mark Lilla , The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007).
