Constant, Benjamin (1767–1830)

Benjamin Constant was a Swiss-born French political theorist, novelist, intellectual, and politician from the later stages of the French Revolution through the Napoleonic era and the Restoration. He made major contributions to the coalescence of liberal theory and indeed is sometimes thought of as the first liberal theorist; after Alexis de Tocqueville he is the probably the most important French liberal thinker. Best known in political theory today for his contrast between the liberty of the ancients (the right to participate in public life) and that of the moderns (individual freedom in the private sphere), he was a longtime defender of freedom of speech, critic of slavery, and supporter of responsible parliamentary-ministerial government.

Constant entered French political life in the mid-1790s, after university educations in Germany and Scotland and service in minor diplomatic posts. He joined a circle of moderate republicans centered around Germaine de Staël, a fellow Protestant from Switzerland and the daughter of the former French finance minister Jacques Necker; Constant and de Staël had a long and stormy romantic relationship for more than a decade. He wrote some minor political pamphlets and rose to office; he and de Staël provided support to Napoleon Bonaparte as a moderate force but broke with him as he revealed his absolutist plans. They went into exile, sometimes traveling through Europe and sometimes living at her estate in Switzerland.

During those years of exile, both before and after he broke with de Staël in 1808, Constant began serious intellectual writing on politics and religion. Many of his later published writings derive from two large texts written circa 1806–1810, one on “the possibility of a republican government in a large country,” which is about political institution and procedures, and one on “principles of politics,” which lays out substantive arguments for individual liberty. In 1814–1815 he published the first important adaptation of these works, the anti-Napoleonic “On the Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation.” After Napoleon's fall he returned to France and French politics. During Napoleon's return during the Hundred Days, Constant collaborated with him on the drafting of a constitutional-monarchical constitution, at a serious cost to his reputation.

Constant's political career resumed in 1819; he spent the rest of his life as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, as a member of the liberal independent opposition.

His most famous contribution to political theory was a lecture titled “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared With That of the Moderns” (1819). Constant maintained that in the ancient world, freedom meant the freedom to take part in civic life, whereas the material, intellectual, and moral conditions of modernity demanded an individual liberty of private life and private pursuits. As a result, the republican liberty of collective civic life associated with the Jacobin stages of the French Revolution and with Rousseau's Social Contract was anachronistic.

The crucial changes between the ancient and modern world included the growth in state size that diminished the effectiveness of any individual's vote or political participation; the abolition of slavery, which had previously allowed free citizens to devote their time to public business; economic growth, which had resulted in a greater worth of private life and a greater opportunity cost to the devotion to public affairs; and profound religious transformations. To the ancients, worship was civic, as the gods were gods of the city. Christianity introduced a noncivic emphasis on individual salvation, an emphasis that Protestantism increased; the moderns could not trust their salvation to the happenstances of politics.

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