Benjamin Constant

It came from a certain context, but when you just, when you try to rip those principles out of their context and apply them to the world today as this universalist and transcendent political principle, um, you transform th- the function of liberalism from a, uh, you know, a, a culturally contextual, um, function into basically a world revolutionary project.

When Benjamin Constant and François Guizou, Guizot argued for a political juste milieu in the 1820s in the form of constitutional monarchy, they were not simply advocating moderation or an Aristotelian golden mean.

They were looking at the educated haut, haut bourgeoisie as a natural leadership class that could maneuver between the equally disastrous shoals of absolute monarchy and democracy.

Guizot identified that class with the modern nation state.

So let's take the sort of like, you know, 19th century liberalism.

You think of people like Benjamin Constant and like John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, and their idea of the individual really is this sort of, I think it's unfair to call them atomized, but there's something a little bit cold about the idea, which is it's grounded in the freedom of the individual.

All of the thoughts are therefore about the freedom of the individual.

I mean, you know, Mill would talk about a liberal form of nationalism, but you're not really particularly concerned with people's sense of identity except insofar as it can be a useful mechanism for achieving liberal aims.

Yeah.

And it, and just isn't that fussed by it.

Benjamin Constant, the liberal philosopher who preceded Mill, that I spoke about before, is the same.

Like he, he's traveling all over Europe, and it's fascinating.

She could not understand that the law, whatever it may be, which governs circumstances, makes no account of individuals.

She believed that by causing Mathieu de Montmorency and Tolérant to be recalled from exile, and inspiring Benjamin Constant with the loftiest ideals, she could obliterate the bloodstained past and reverse the logic of events.

When everybody, everybody that is whom she cared about, should have been restored to peace, prosperity, and the era of France, she conceived that the study of metaphysical systems and the cultivation of the affections would alone be needed to remodel and perfect humanity.

With this in view, she toiled and plotted unceasingly, clasping the hands of regicides like Barras, rubbing skirts with such women as Talion, and sacrificing her own pet ideal of womanly duty, which consisted, as she repeatedly proclaimed, in loving and being loved, and leaving the jarring strife of politics to men.

As it was, she was kept in a condition of restless activity which, while sterile of intellectual results, brought her into disrepute as a conspirator.

The time was now rapidly approaching when Bonaparte was to cross her path and, as she chose to conceive it, to spoil her existence.

The instrument of destiny in this instance was Benjamin Constant.

Immediately after the fall of Robespierre he arrived, a young old man, world-weary, full of unsteady force, and warmed by an inner flame of passion that sometimes smouldered but never died down.

So a man of Lumot, a druggist's son, in Madame de Bargeton's house, was nothing less than a little revolution.

Who was responsible for it? Lamartine and Victor Hugo, Casimir Delavigne and Canalis, Béranger and Chateaubriand, Bovigny, Benjamin Constant and Lamennais, Cousin and Michaud, all the old and young illustrious names in literature, in short, liberals and royalists alike must divide the blame among them.

Madame de Bargeton loved art and letters, eccentric taste on her part, a craze deeply deplored in Angoulême.

In justice to the lady, it is necessary to give a sketch of the previous history of a woman born to shine and left by unlucky circumstances in the shade, a woman whose influence decided Lucien's career.

It's not simply a matter of removing obstacles, but it's a particular positive vision of how being a life of a free man ought to be.

Benjamin Constant, a French theorist, distinguished between ancient and modern liberty.

For ancient Greeks, liberty meant Participation in a political system.

A free man was somebody who exercised some degree of sovereignty or some degree of control by participating in the public democratic institutions of Athens or whatever other city he might be in.

Sure.

Big picture question would be an essay that I went to re-read for this interview was Benjamin Constant's on The Liberty of the Ancients and the Moderns.

And he makes the point that liberty for the ancients involved the sharing of social power among citizens of the same country or homeland.

That's what they define as liberty.