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Principles of Politics Applicable to a all Governments, trans. Dennis O’Keeffe, ed. Etienne Hofmann, Introduction by Nicholas Capaldi (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003).

Author: Benjamin Constant
Editor: Etienne Hofmann
Translator: Dennis O’Keeffe
Introduction: Nicholas Capaldi

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BOOK I

On Received Ideas About the Scope of Political Authority

Ch. 1. The purpose of this work. 3
Ch. 2. Rousseau’s first principle on the origin of political authority. 6
Ch. 3. Rousseau’s second principle on the scope of political authority. 8
Ch. 4. Rousseau’s arguments for boundless political authority. 15
Ch. 5. That Rousseau’s error comes from his wanting to distinguish the prerogatives of society from those of the government. 17
Ch. 6. The consequences of Rousseau’s theory. 19
Ch. 7. On Hobbes. 21
Ch. 8. Hobbes’s opinion reproduced. 23
Ch. 9. On the inconsistency with which Rousseau has been reproached. 24

chapter one

The Purpose of This Work

Research relating to the constitutional organization of government having been, since The Social Contract and The Spirit of the Laws, the favorite speculative focus of the most enlightened of our writers in France, is now very decidedly out of favor today. I am not examining here at all whether this disfavor is justified; but it is certainly quite understandable.1 In a few years we have tried some five or six constitutions2 and found ourselves the worse for it. No argument can prevail against such an experience.

Moreover, if despite the universal distaste today for all discussions of this type, one wished to give oneself over to reflecting on the nature of governments, and their forms, limits, and prerogatives, one would probably make the opposite mistake to the [20] current one, but one no less gross and deadly. When certain ideas are associated with certain words, one may repeatedly seek in vain to show that the association is false. The reproduction of the words will for ages summon up these same ideas.3 It was in the name of freedom that we got prisons, scaffolds, and endless multiplied persecution. Quite understandably, this name, which signals a thousand odious and tyrannical measures, can be pronounced today only in a mood of distrust or malevolence.

Extremes do not only touch but also follow each other. One exaggeration always produces a contrary one. This applies especially to a nation in which everyone’s aim is to show off, and as Voltaire said, everyone is more concerned to hit hard than accurately.4 The ambition of the writers of the day is at all times to seem more convinced than anyone else of the reigning opinion. They watch which way the crowd is rushing. Then they dash as fast as they can to overtake it. They think thereby to acquire glory for providing an inspiration they actually got from others. They hope we will take them for the inventors of what they imitate and that because they run panting in front of the crowd they have just overtaken, they will seem like the leaders of the band, though the latter do not even suspect they exist.5

[21] A man of horrible memory, whose name should not soil any writing, since death has justly settled his personal account, said, on examining the English constitution: “I see a king there, and recoil in horror. Royalty is against nature.”6 Some anonymous writer, in a recently published essay, likewise declares all republican government unnatural.7 It really is true that in certain eras you have to go round the whole circle of follies before coming back to reason.

Yet if it is proven that all research on constitutions, properly so called, must, after the upheavals we have suffered, necessarily be for some people a subject to go mad about, while for everyone else it is a matter of indifference, there are nevertheless principles of politics independent of all constitutions, and these seem to me still worth developing. Applicable under all forms of government, no threat to the basis of any social order, compatible with monarchy and republicanism alike, whatever versions either may take, these principles can be discussed frankly and freely. They are especially open to discussion in an Empire whose leader has just proclaimed, in the most unforgettable way, the freedom of the press, and declared independence of thought the first conquest of our century.

Among these principles one seems to me of the greatest importance. It has been overlooked by writers of all parties. Montesquieu was not concerned with it. Rousseau in his The Social Contract based his eloquent and absurd theory on subverting it. All the ills of the French Revolution come from this subversion. All the crimes with which our demagogues have appalled the world have been sanctioned by it. This book is about the reestablishment of this principle, and its developments and consequences, as well as [22] its application to all forms of government, whether monarchical or republican.

chapter two

Rousseau’s First Principle on the Origin of Political Authority

Rousseau begins by establishing that any authority which governs a nation must come from the general will.8 This is not a principle I claim to challenge. In our day people have tried to obfuscate it; and the evils which have been caused and the crimes committed on the pretext that this was to execute the general will, lend seeming support to the arguments of those who would like to locate the authority of government in another source.9 Nevertheless, all these arguments are powerless against the straightforward definition of the words we use. Short of reviving the doctrine of divine right, we ought to agree that the law must be the expression of the will of everybody or at least of a few people. Now, if it is the latter, what might be the source of the exclusive privilege conceded to this small number? If it is force, force belongs to anyone who can grab it. It does not constitute law, or if you recognize it as legitimate, this will be true whoever has seized it; and everyone will want to win it in turn. If you think that the power of this small group is sanctioned by everyone else, that power then becomes the general will.

This principle holds for all institutions. Theocracy, royalty, and aristocracy, when they command minds, are the general will. When they do not command minds, they cannot be anything else but force. In sum, the world knows only two kinds of power. [23] There is force, the illegitimate kind; and there is the legitimate kind, the general will.

The objections we may raise against this will, bear either on the difficulty of recognizing or expressing it, or on the degree of power granted to the authority emanating from it. One could claim, often justifiably, that what people call the general will is no such thing and that the things subjected to it should not be. In this case, however, it is no longer legitimacy that is being attacked but its rightful powers or the fidelity of its interpreters.

This principle does not deny the legitimacy of any form of government. In some circumstances society may want a monarchy and in others a republic. So these two institutions may therefore be equally legitimate and natural. Those who declare one or the other illegitimate or against nature are either party mouthpieces and do not say what they think, or else they are ideological dupes and do not know what they are saying.

There are only two forms of government, if we may even give them that title at all, which are essentially and eternally illegitimate, because no society could want them: anarchy and despotism. Moreover, I am not sure that the distinction which often favors the latter is not illusory. Despotism and anarchy are more alike than people think. In our era, people gave the name “anarchy,”10 meaning the absence of government, to a government which was the most despotic that has ever existed on earth: a committee of a few men, who endowed their functionaries with boundless power, with courts tolerating no appeal, with laws based on mere suspicions, with judgments without due process, with numberless incarcerations and a hundred judicial murders a day. This is to abuse terms and confound ideas, however. The Revolutionary government [24] was most certainly not an absence of government.

Government is the use of public force against individuals. When it is used to stop them hurting each other, it is a good government. When it is used to oppress them, it is a frightful government, but in no sense is it anarchic. The Committee of Public Safety was government; so was the Revolutionary Tribunal. The law of suspects embodied government too. This was detestable, but certainly not anarchic. It was not for lack of government that the French people were butchered by executioners. On the contrary, it happened only because executioners were doing the governing. Government was most certainly not absent. Rather, an atrocious and ubiquitous government was always present. This was absolutely not anarchy, but despotism.

Despotism resembles anarchy in that it destroys public safeguards and tramples on due process. It differs from anarchy only in that it then demands for itself the due process it has destroyed and enslaves its victims in order to sacrifice them.

It is not true that despotism protects us against anarchy. We think it does only because for a long time our Europe has not seen a real despotism. But let us turn our gaze on the Roman empire after Constantine. We find that the legions were endlessly in revolt, with generals proclaiming themselves emperors and nineteen pretenders to the crown simultaneously raising the flag of rebellion. Without going back to ancient history, let us look at the sort of spectacle presented by the territories ruled by the sultan.11

Anarchy and despotism bring back the savage state into the social state. [25] But while anarchy puts all men there, despotism puts itself there on its own and beats its slaves, pinioned as they are, with the chains it has cast off.

Whatever may remain unexamined in this comparison, one thing is certain: this comparison will not suffice to tip the balance in favor of either of the two things concerned. So mankind cannot want either anarchy or despotism. Any other form of government can be useful, any other can be good, any other can be what a society desires and, as a consequence, can be legitimate.

chapter three

Rousseau’s Second Principle on the Scope of Political Authority

If Rousseau’s first principle is an incontestable truth, this is not so of a second axiom, which he lays down and develops with all the prestigious force of his eloquence. “The clauses of the social contract,” he says, “boil down to just one, namely the total surrendering of each member along with all his rights to the community.”12 The implication is that the general will must exercise unlimited authority over individual existence.

Political writers before and after Jean-Jacques Rousseau have mostly expressed the same view.13 None has rejected it formally.14

“In all government there must be an absolute authority,” says the author of Natural Politics. “Wherever that authority resides, [26] it must employ as it chooses all the powers of the society” and work out what all the particular political orientations are in order to oblige them to fall in with the overall view. However the sovereign power is distributed, the overall quantum is unlimited.15

Mably says it is an axiom accepted everywhere on earth that legislative power, that which declares and realizes the general will, must not be limited by anything.16

The supporters of despotism have in this respect come close to Rousseau’s theory. “For a society to subsist,” says M. Ferrand (The Spirit of History, I, 134), “it is necessary that there exist somewhere a power greater than any obstacle,17 which directs individual wills and suppresses factionalist passions.”18

Some writers,19 of whom Montesquieu is one, [27] have placed certain apparent restrictions on this doctrine. These have always been too vague, however, to serve to define fixed limits to political authority. To say that justice existed before the laws (The Spirit of the Laws, Livre I)20 is indeed to imply that the laws, and therefore the general will, of which the laws are only the expression, must be subordinate to justice. But what a set of developments this truth in turn demands if it is to be applied! In the absence of such developments, what follows from this assertion by Montesquieu? That the holders of power have often set off from the principle that justice precedes the laws in order to subject individuals to retrospective laws or deprive them of the benefits of existing ones, in this way hiding the most revolting iniquities behind a sham respect for justice. How crucial it is in matters of this sort to be wary of undefined axioms!

M. de Montesquieu, moreover, in his definition of liberty, misconstrues all the limits of political authority. Liberty, he says, is the right to do anything the law permits.21 Doubtless there is no liberty at all when the citizens cannot do everything the law does not forbid. But so many things could be made illegal that there would still be no liberty.

M. de Montesquieu, like most political writers, seems to me to confuse two things: freedom and constitutional security. Freedom consists in individual rights; social rights, on the other hand, provide constitutional security.22

[28] The axiom of the people’s sovereignty has been thought of as a principle of freedom. It is in fact a principle of constitutional guarantee. It aims to prevent any individual from seizing the authority which belongs only to the political society as a whole. It determines nothing, however, about the nature of this authority itself. It in no way adds to the sum of individual liberties, therefore, and if we do not turn to other principles for determining the extent of this sovereignty, freedom could be lost, despite the principle of the sovereignty of the people, or even because of it.

M. de Montesquieu’s maxim, that individuals have the right to do everything the law permits, is similarly a principle of guarantee. It means that no one has the right to stop someone else doing what the law does not forbid. It does not explain, however, what the law is or is not justified in forbidding. Now, it seems to me that this is exactly where freedom resides. It consists only in what individuals have the right to do and society has no right to prevent.

Since the time of M. de Montesquieu some well-known men have protested against Rousseau’s maxim. Beccaria, in his treatise On Offenses and Punishments,23 and Condorcet, in Commentaries on Public Education,24 have reasoned from opposite principles. Franklin produced a pamphlet seeking to show that we should have the smallest extent of government possible.25 Paine defined [29] government authority as a necessary evil.26 Siéyès, finally, in an opinion delivered in Parliament, declared that political authority was not boundless.27 It does not seem, however, that the arguments of these writers have made much impression. People still speak endlessly of a power without limits residing in the people or its leaders, as of a thing beyond doubt; and the author of certain essays on morality and politics has recently reproduced, in support of absolute power, all the arguments of Rousseau on sovereignty.28

The Constituent Assembly, at the start, seemed to recognize individual rights, independent of society. Such was the origin of the Declaration of Rights. The Assembly, however, soon deviated from this principle. It set the example by pursuing individual existence into its most intimate retreats. It was imitated and surpassed by the governments which replaced it.

The party men, however pure their intentions, are bound to detest the limitation of political authority. They see themselves as its presumptive heirs and tend to look after their future property even when it is in the hands of their enemies. They distrust this or that kind of government, or such and such a class of governing politicians, but just let them organize government in their own way, [30] allow them to entrust it to the representatives they want, and they will not think they can extend it far enough.

So we can regard Rousseau’s theory that political power is unlimited as the only one adopted to date. This is the theory which seems to me false and dangerous. In my view, this is the theory we must hold responsible for most of the difficulties the establishment of freedom has encountered among various nations, for most of the abuses which worm their way into all governments of whatever type, and indeed for most of the crimes which civil strife and political upheaval drag in their wake. It was just this theory which inspired our Revolution and those horrors for which liberty for all was at once the pretext and the victim. I do not mean that the countless iniquities we witnessed and suffered were not usually caused in the immediate sense by the factional interests of the men who had seized power. But these men had managed to get the machinery of public enforcement into their guilty hands only by veiling the interests which controlled them, by laying claim to seemingly disinterested principles and opinions which served them as a banner. Now, all their principles and opinions rested on the theory this chapter has related, rested, that is, on the supposition that society may exercise over its members an unlimited authority and that everything the general will ordains, is rendered legitimate by that alone.

It is worth refuting this theory, therefore. It is useful in general to correct opinions, however metaphysical or abstract they seem to us, because vested interests seek their weapons in opinions.

Interests and opinions differ, first of all, in that the former are hidden and the latter displayed, necessarily, since the latter divide while the former unite. Secondly, interests vary for each individual according to his situation, his tastes, or his circumstances, while opinions are the same, or seem so, as between all people who act together. Finally, each individual can direct only himself in the reckoning of his interests. When he wants other people to support him, he has to present them with opinions which mislead them as to his real views. If you expose the falsity of the opinion he advances, you deprive him of his main support. You annihilate his means of influencing those around him, [31] you destroy the flag, and the army vanishes.

I know that today we have given up refuting ideas we want to fight, professing a general aversion for all theories, of whatever sort. People say all metaphysics is unworthy of our attention. But the antimetaphysical stance has always seemed to me unworthy of thinking people. Its declamations are doubly dangerous. They are as forceful against truth as against error. They tend to make reason wither, to hold our intellectual faculties up to ridicule and to discredit what is noblest in us. Secondly, they do not even possess the advantage commonly supposed. Averting ideas you think dangerous by scorning them or suppressing them violently, is to suspend their present consequences only very briefly, and to double their influence to come. We should not be misled by silence nor take it for agreement. For as long as reason is not convinced, error is ready to reappear at the first event which unleashes it. It then takes advantage of the very oppression it has experienced. Our efforts will be in vain. Thought alone can do battle with thought. Reasoning alone can correct mistakes of reasoning. When power repulses reason it does not fail only against the truth; it also fails against error. To disarm error you have to refute it. Anything else is rank charlatanism, renewed century after century, to the profit of a few, and the misfortune and shame of the rest.

Indeed, if contempt for the intellectual life had been able to preserve men from its dangerous deviations, they would long ago have reaped the benefits of this much-praised protection. There is nothing new about contempt for the mind. It is not novel always to appeal to force against thought, nor to set up a small number of privileged persons to the detriment of all other people, the latter’s mental activity being treated as superfluous, and their reflection considered idle and dangerous. From the time of the Goths till today we have seen this mental outlook reproduce itself. From their day till this people have denounced metaphysics and theorizing; yet the theories have always made their reappearance. Before us, people said equality was only a chimera, a vain abstraction, a [32] meaningless theory. Men who wanted to define equality properly in order to separate it from the exaggerations which disfigured it, were treated as dreamers and troublemakers, and an ill-defined equality has never stopped returning to the attack. The Jacquerie, the Levelers, and the revolutionaries of our time have abused this theory, precisely because it had been forbidden rather than put right: incontestable proof of the inadequacy of the measures, taken by the opponents of abstract ideas, first to ward off their attacks, and secondly, so they said, to keep such ideas away from the blind and stupid species they so condescendingly governed. The effect of such measures is never more than temporary. When false theories have misled people, they are ready to listen to commonplaces against theory in general, some through exhaustion, others out of vested interest, but most by way of imitation. But when they have recovered from their weariness or been freed from their fears, they remember that theory is not a bad thing in itself, that everything has its theoretical side, that theory is no more than practice systematized into rules according to experience, and practice only theory applied. They feel that nature did not give them reason just so it could be mute or sterile. They blush at having abdicated the very core of their dignity as human beings. They adopt theories again. If these have not been corrected, if they have been mere objects of disdain, they take them up anew with all their vices intact and are once again entrapped by them in all the errors which led them to reject them before. To hold that because false theories bring grave dangers we must renounce all theories, is to take from men the surest remedy for precisely such dangers. It is to hold that because error has dire consequences, we should refuse ever to search for truth.

So I have tried to fight faulty arguments with ones which seem just to me. I have tried to oppose false metaphysics with metaphysics which I believe to be true. If I have succeeded, I will flatter myself that I have been more helpful than those who demand silence. Their legacy to the future is a set of unresolved issues. In their narrow-minded and suspicious caution they compound the ill effects of wrong ideas by the very fact that they do not allow such ideas to be examined. [33]

chapter four

Rousseau’s Arguments for Boundless Political Authority

Rousseau defines the social contract as involving the unconditional surrender of each individual, along with all his rights, to society as a whole (Constant’s emphasis).29 To reassure us as to the consequences of this total handing over of every aspect of our lives to the advantage of an abstract entity, he says that the sovereign, that is, the social body as a whole, cannot harm either the collectivity of all its members, or any one of those members individually; that every person makes a total surrender, so that the condition is the same for all members and none has an interest in making it onerous for others; that each person, giving himself to everyone else, gives himself to no one; that everyone acquires over all other members the same rights he cedes to them, and gains the equivalent of all he loses, along with more strength to protect what is his own.30 But he forgets that all the life-preserving properties which he confers on the abstract being he calls sovereignty, are born in the fact that this being is made up of all the separate individuals without exception. Now, as soon as the sovereign body has to use the force it possesses, that is to say, as soon as it is necessary to establish political authority, since the sovereign body cannot exercise this itself, it delegates and all its properties disappear. The action carried out in the name of all, being necessarily willy-nilly in the hands of one individual or a few people, it follows that in handing yourself over to everyone else, it is certainly not true that you are giving yourself to no one. On the contrary, it is to surrender yourself to those who act in the name [34] of all. It follows that in handing yourself over entirely, you do not enter a universally equal condition, since some people profit exclusively from the sacrifice of the rest. It is not true that no one has an interest in making things hard for other people, since some members are not in the common situation. It is not true that all members acquire the same rights they give up. They do not all regain the equivalent of what they lose, and the outcome of what they sacrifice is or may be the setting up of a power which takes away from them what they do have.

How is it that these obvious considerations did not convince Rousseau of the error and dangers of his theory? It is because he let himself be misled by an oversubtle distinction. A double hazard is to be feared when we examine important questions. Men go wrong, sometimes because they misconstrue the distinctions between two ideas and sometimes because they base on a simple idea distinctions which do not apply.

chapter five

That Rousseau’s Error Comes from His Wanting to Distinguish the Prerogatives of Society from Those of the Government

Rousseau distinguished the prerogatives of society from those of government.31 This distinction is admissible only when the word “government” is understood in a very restricted sense. Rousseau, however, took it in its widest sense, as the bringing together, not only of all properly constituted powers but of all the constitutional ways individuals have for contributing among themselves, in expressing their individual wills, to the formation of the general will.32 According to these stipulations, any citizen [35] who, in England, elects his representatives, or any Frenchman who, under the Republic, voted in a primary assembly, should be regarded as involved in government. Once the word “government” is taken in this way, any distinction between its prerogatives and those of society itself is rendered illusory and can become in practice an incalculable danger. Society cannot itself exercise the prerogatives bestowed on it by its members. Therefore it delegates them. It sets up what we call a government. From then on any distinction between society’s prerogatives and those of government is an abstraction, a chimera. For on the one hand, if society had a legitimate authority greater than the one it delegated, the part it did not delegate would, by reason of its not being exercisable, be effectively void. A right one cannot exercise oneself, nor delegate to others, is a right which does not exist. On the other hand, the recognition of such rights would inevitably entail the disadvantage that those in whom the delegated part had been invested would inexorably contrive to have the rest delegated to them too. An example will clarify my point. I assume that we recognize—it has often been done—that society has a right to expel a minority part of itself which has given it deep offense. No one attributes this terrible prerogative to the government, but when the latter wants to grab it, what does it do? It identifies the unfortunate minority, at once outlawed and feared, with all life’s difficulties and dangers. It then appeals to the nation. It is not as its prerogative that it seeks to persecute, on mere suspicion, wholly innocent individuals. But it quotes the imprescribable prerogative of the whole society, of the all-powerful majority, of the sovereign nation whose well-being is the highest law. The government can do nothing, it says, but the nation can do everything. And soon the nation speaks. By this I mean that a few men, either low types or madmen, or hirelings, or men consumed with remorse, or terror-struck, set themselves up as its instruments at the same time as they silence it, and proclaim its omnipotence at the same time as they menace it. In this way, by an easy and swift maneuver, the government seizes the real and terrible power previously regarded as the abstract right of the whole society.

There really is a prerogative—when we are speaking abstractly—that the society does possess and does not delegate to the government, namely the right to change the organization of the government itself. To delegate this right would set up a vicious circle, since the government could use it [36] to transform itself into a tyranny. But this very exception confirms the rule. If society does not delegate this prerogative, neither does it exercise it itself. Just as it would be absurd to delegate it, so it is impossible to exercise it and dangerous to proclaim it.

The people, Rousseau observes, are sovereign in one respect and subject in another.33 In practice, however, the two cases are confused. It is easy for powerful men to oppress the people as their subjects, to force them to manifest in their sovereign role the will which these powerful men are dictating. To achieve this, all that is needed is that the individual members of society be terror-struck and then that a hypocritical homage be rendered to the society en masse.

Thus one can recognize as society’s only those rights which the government can exercise without their becoming dangerous. Sovereignty being an abstract thing and the real thing, the exercise of sovereignty, that is to say, the government, being necessarily delegated to beings of a quite different nature from the sovereign, since they are not abstract beings, we need to take precautionary measures against the sovereign power, because of the nature of those who exercise it, as we would take them in the case of an excessively powerful weapon which might fall into unreliable hands.

chapter six

The Consequences of Rousseau’s Theory

When you have affirmed on principle the view that the prerogatives of society always become, finally, those of government, you understand immediately how necessary it is that political power be limited. If it is not, individual existence is on the one hand subjected without qualification to the general will, while on the other, the general will finds itself represented without appeal by the will of the governors. These representatives of the general will have [37] powers all the more formidable in that they call themselves mere pliant instruments of this alleged will and possess the means of enforcement or enticement necessary to ensure that it is manifested in ways which suit them. What no tyrant would dare to do in his own name, the latter legitimate by the unlimited extension of boundless political authority. They seek the enlargement of the powers they need, from the very owner of political authority, that is, the people, whose omnipotence is there only to justify their encroachments. The most unjust laws and oppressive institutions are obligatory, as the expression of the general will. For individuals, says Rousseau, having alienated their all to the benefit of the collectivity, can have no will other than that general will. Obeying this, they obey only themselves, and are all the freer the more implicitly they obey.34

Such are the consequences of this theoretical system as we see them appear in all eras of history. Their most frightening scope, however, was the one they developed during our Revolution, when revered principles were made into wounds, perhaps incurably. The more popular the government it was intended to give France, the worse were these wounds. When no limit to political authority is acknowledged, the people’s leaders, in a popular government, are not defenders of freedom, but aspiring tyrants, aiming not to break, but rather to assume the boundless power which presses on the citizens. When it has a representative constitution, a nation is free only when its delegates are held in check. It would be easy to show, by means of countless examples, that the grossest sophisms of the most ardent apostles of the Terror, in the most revolting circumstances, were only perfectly consistent [38] consequences of Rousseau’s principles.35 The omnipotent nation is as dangerous as a tyrant, indeed more dangerous. Tyranny is not constituted by there being few governors. Nor does a large number of governors guarantee freedom. The degree of political power alone, in whatever hands it is placed, makes a constitution free or a government oppressive; and once tyranny subsists, it is all the more frightful if the tyrannical group is large.

Doubtless, the overextension of political power does not always have equally dire consequences. The nature of things and people’s dispositions may sometimes soften the excesses; but such a political system always has serious drawbacks nevertheless. This doctrine creates and then carelessly casts into our human arrangements a degree of power which is too great to be manageable and one which is an evil whatever hands you place it in. Entrust it to one person, to several, to all, you will still find it an evil. You lay the blame on the power-holders and depending on the circumstances, you will have to indict in turn monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, mixed constitutions, and representative government. And you will be wrong. The condemnation must be of the extent of the power and not of those in whom it is vested. It is against the weapon and not the person wielding it we need to rail. There are things too heavy for human hands.

[39] Look at the fruitless efforts of different peoples to remedy the evils of the unlimited power with which they think society invested. They do not know to whom to entrust it. The Carthaginians created in succession the Suffetes to rein in the aristocracy of the Senate, the Tribunal of the Hundred to suppress the Suffetes, the Tribunal of the Five to control the Hundred. Condillac says they wanted to put a brake on one authority, and they established a counterforce which was equally in need of restraining, thus always leaving the abuses to which they thought they brought a remedy to carry on.36

The mistake of Rousseau and of writers who are the greatest friends of freedom, when they grant society a boundless power, comes from the way their ideas on politics were formed. They have seen in history a small number of men, or even one alone, in possession of immense power, which did a lot of harm. But their wrath has been directed against the wielders of power and not the power itself. Instead of destroying it, they have dreamed only of relocating it. It was a plague; but they took it as something to be conquered; and they endowed the whole society with it. Inevitably it moved from there to the majority and from the majority into a few hands. It has done just as much harm as before, and hostility to all political institutions has accumulated in the form of examples, objections, arguments, and evidence.

chapter seven

On Hobbes

The man who reduced despotism to a theoretical system most cleverly, Hobbes, was quick to support unlimited political power, in order to declare thereby in favor of the legitimacy of absolute government by a single person. The sovereign, he says (and by this word he understands the general will), is irreprehensible in his actions. All individuals [40] must obey, and they cannot call upon him to account for his measures. Sovereignty is absolute, a truth which has always been recognized, even by those who have stirred up rebellions, or instigated civil wars. Their motive was not the annihilation of sovereignty; but rather to move its exercise elsewhere. Democracy is an absolute sovereignty placed in the hands of everyone; aristocracy is absolute sovereignty in the hands of a few; and monarchy is absolute sovereignty in the hands of one person. The people were able to give up this absolute sovereignty in favor of a monarch, who then became its legitimate possessor.37

We can clearly see that the absolute character with which Hobbes endows political authority is the basis of his entire system. This word “absolute” changes the very nature of the question and involves us in a novel chain of consequences. This is the point where the writer leaves the road of truth in order to stride off by way of sophism to the conclusion he set for himself from the start. He shows that men’s conventions being insufficient to secure obedience, there has to be a coercive force to compel this, that given that a society must defend itself against foreign aggression, there has to be a common force to arm for the common defense; that the existence of conflicting claims among men means there must be laws to establish their rights. He concludes from the first point that the sovereign has an absolute right to punish, from the second that he has an absolute right to wage war, and from the third that he is absolute in legislative power. Nothing could be more false than these conclusions. The sovereign does have the right to punish, but only for culpable actions. He does have the right to wage war, but only when society is attacked. He does have the right [41] to make laws, but only when they are necessary and insofar as they are just. There is, therefore, nothing “absolute,” nothing arbitrary in these prerogatives. Democracy is power in the hands of all, but power only in such measure as is needed for the security of the society. Aristocracy is this same authority entrusted to a few; and monarchy is the same thing brought together in one person. The people can divest themselves of this authority in favor of a single man or of a small number, but their power remains limited, like that of the people who vested it in them. With this cutting out of a single word, one Hobbes had inserted gratuitously into the construction of a sentence, his whole frightful system collapses. On the contrary, with the word “absolute,” neither liberty, nor, as we will see subsequently, peace, nor happiness, is possible under any institutional arrangements. Popular government is only a convulsive tyranny; monarchical government only a more morose and taciturn despotism.

When we see a distinguished author arrive by way of specious arguments at manifestly absurd results, it will prove instructive in itself and aid greatly in the refutation of error if, by way of research, we retrace the line of this writer’s thoughts, so to speak, to try and pinpoint where he started to deviate from the truth. Almost all writers start off from some true principle. Once this principle has been posited, however, all it takes to vitiate their whole theory is an invalid distinction, or an ill-defined term, or a superfluous word. In Helvétius, for example, it is an ill-defined term. His starting point is incontestable: all our ideas reach us through our senses. He concludes from this that sensation is everything. To think is to feel, he says, and therefore to feel is to think.38 This is where he goes wrong. The error stems from an ill-defined term, in this case “to feel” or “sensation.” To think is to feel; but to feel is not to think. In Rousseau, as we saw, the mistake came from an invalid distinction. He sets out from a truth, namely that the general will must make the law; but he distinguishes the prerogatives of society from those of government. He believes that society must possess boundless political power, and from there he goes astray. It is clear that in Hobbes a superfluous word is the cause of the trouble. He too has a correct starting point, namely that we need a coercive force in order [42] to govern human societies. But he slips into his sentence a single unnecessary epithet, the word “absolute,” and his whole argument becomes a tissue of errors.

chapter eight

Hobbes’s Opinion Reproduced

A contemporary writer, the author of Essays on Morality and Politics, has revived Hobbes’s system, only with much less profundity and much weaker inspiration and logic. Like Hobbes, he sets off from the principle of unlimited sovereignty. He has assumed political authority to be absolute and transferred from society to a man he defines as the species personified, the individualized collectivity. Just as Rousseau had said that the social body cannot hurt either the collectivity of members nor any individual member,39 this writer says that the depository of power, the man become society itself, cannot harm society, because all the ill he could do to it, he would experience precisely himself, insofar as he is society itself.40 Just as Rousseau says that the individual cannot resist society because he has handed over all his rights to it, without reserve,41 this man claims that the authority of the [43] depository of power is absolute, because no member of the collectivity can struggle against the collectivity as a whole. He also claims that there can be no responsibility on the part of the depository of power, since no individual can be in dispute with the body of which he is a part, and that the latter can respond only by making him return to the order he should never have left. He then adds, so that we should in no way be fearful of tyranny: now, here is the reason his authority (that of the depository of power) was not arbitrary. “This was no longer a man. This was a people.”42 What a marvelous guarantee this switch in reasoning provides!

chapter nine

On the Inconsistency with Which Rousseau Has Been Reproached

Because he had not felt that political power had to be limited, Rousseau was drawn into a quandary he was able to escape only by undoing with one hand what he had built with the other. He declared that sovereignty could be neither given away,43 nor delegated, nor represented, which was to declare, less roundly, that it could not be exercised. This destroyed in fact the principle he had just proclaimed. Those seeking to explain his [44] theory have accused him of inconsistency.44 On the contrary, his reasoning was very consistent. Terror-struck at the spectacle of the immense political power he had just created, he had no idea in whose hands to place so monstrous a power and had thought of no defense against the danger inseparable from sovereignty as he had conceived it, save an expedient which made the exercise of that sovereignty impossible. It was only those who adopted his principle, separating it from what made it less disastrous, who were bad reasoners and guilty politicians. It is the principle which needs rejecting, since so long as it does not produce despotism, it is only an inapplicable theory, since it leads to despotism as soon as people do try to apply it.

So it is not inconsistency of which Rousseau must be accused. The reproach he deserves is that he set off from an invalid hypothesis and went astray in superfluous subtleties.

I do not side at all with his detractors. A rabble of inferior minds, who see their brief success as consisting in calling into doubt every redoubtable truth, is excitedly anxious to take away his greatness. This is just one more reason to render him our homage. He was the first writer to popularize the sense of our rights. His was a voice to stir generous hearts and independent spirits. But what he felt so powerfully, he did not know how to define precisely. Several chapters of The Social Contract are worthy of the scholastic writers of the sixteenth century. What is meant by rights which one enjoys all the more for having given them away completely? Just what is a freedom in virtue of which one is all the more free the more unquestioningly one does what runs counter to one’s own wishes?45 These are deadly [45] theological sophisms such as give weapons to all tyrannies, to the tyranny of one man, to that of a few people, to the legally constituted kind, and to the kind dominated by popular fury! Jean-Jacques’s errors have seduced many friends of freedom, because they were established to counter other, more degrading mistakes. Even so, we cannot refute them strongly enough, because they put insuperable obstacles in the way of any free or moderate constitution, and they supply a banal pretext for all manner of political outrages.

CONSTANT’S NOTES

[1. ]The bibliographical researches of André Monglond, La France révolutionnaire et impériale. Annales de bibliographies méthodiques et descriptions des livres illustrés, Grenoble, B. Arthaud; Paris, Impr. nat., 1930 (1789)–1963 (1812), 9 vol., let us confirm Constant’s claim. From the time of the Consulate and above all the Empire, constitutional writings do indeed become rarer. The disfavor indicated, however, is much more a question of censorship than of any natural cause. See Henri Welschinger, La censure sous le Premier Empire, Paris, Perrin, 1887. We find in the work of Sismondi, Recherches sur les constitutions des peuples libres, edited and with an introduction by Marco Minerbi, Geneva, Droz, 1965, p. 82, a similar reflection to Constant’s but much earlier. “The French, surrounded with revolutions which have taught them all too well to mistrust political theories, have grown weary with an important branch of inquiry to which their new duties really summon them. Maybe I will strive in vain to persuade them that the subject has not been exhausted by all the writings which have so wearied them, that we have made scarcely any advance on the maîtres who wrote before the Revolution, and that lots of important questions still demand debate, lots of findings need verification, and lots of new ideas need an airing. They will find a great number of these new ideas in the book with which I am presenting them, and if they do not accept them, at least they will find rejecting them stimulating. Perhaps, they might even during the course of their criticism, encounter the lessons they do not want to take from me.”

[2. ]Since this text dates from 1806, we are citing in effect the constitutions of 1791, 1793, an III, an VIII, an X, and an XII.

[3. ]Constant had already enunciated his conception of the power of words on men and ideas in De la force du gouvernement, pp. 84–85. See Etienne Hofmann, Les “Principes de politique” de Benjamin Constant, Droz, 1980, Tome I, Première Partie, Ch. 2, pp. 119–120. (Hereafter this work is referred to as Hofmann’s thesis.)

[4. ]Hofmann failed to track down this quotation from Voltaire. Neither the analytic tables of the subject matter which accompany the Oeuvres complètes (the one by Chantreau, Paris, 1801, and the one by Miger, Paris, 1840), though detailed, nor the compilation by Adrien Lefort and Paul Buquet, Les mots de Voltaire, Paris, Librairie illustrée (1887), includes it. Hofmann says this witticism may have been handed down only by oral tradition. The saying turns up again in Constant’s De la religion considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements, Paris, Bossange, 1824, I, 6, p. 112.

[5. ]Alfred de Musset was to say in 1832 in his dedication to A. Tattet of La coupe et les lèvres (the cup and the lips):

- C’est un triste métier que de suivre la foule,
- Et de vouloir crier plus fort que les meneurs,
- Pendant qu’on se raccroche au manteau des traineurs.
- (It’s a sad life following the crowd,
- And wanting to shout louder than the ringleaders,
- When you’re clinging on to the stragglers’ coattails.)

Alfred de Musset, Poésies complètes. Text edited and annotated by Maurice Allem, Paris, Gallimard, 1957, p. 135 (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade).

[6. ]This “man of horrible memory” is Georges Couthon, who, in his Discours prononcé à la séance des Jacobins du Ier pluviôse an II de la République (speech delivered at the session of the Jacobins on 20 January 1794) Paris, Impr. des 86 départements, s.d., declares in fact: “I see in this constitution a king. A king! I recoil in horror. A king! It is a monster which nature disclaims, a master she does not recognise, a tyrant she detests” (pp. 3–4; BN, Lb40 777).

[7. ][Louis-Matthieu Molé], Essais de morale et de politique, Paris, H. Nicolle, 1806, VIII-254 p. This work had already appeared in December 1805; Constant speaks about it twice in his correspondence with Hochet. See Hofmann’s thesis, Première Partie, Ch. 3, p. 233 and n. 145. The whole second part of Molé’s collection of essays seeks to show that monarchical government is natural.

[8. ]Du contrat social, Livre II, Ch. 1: “The first and most important consequence of the principles previously established is that only the general will can direct the power of the State according to the purpose for which it has been set up, which is the common good.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, published under the direction of Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Reymond, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, t. III, p. 368 (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade).

[9. ]Constant is perhaps thinking of Joseph de Maistre, whose Considérations sur la France, written in 1796, was a reply to De la force du gouvernement; and to Louis Amboise de Bonald, whose Théorie de pouvoir politique et religieux also came out in 1796. Let us note, however, that Constant never quotes them by name either in his formal corpus nor in his letters.

[10. ]It is hard to know to whom Constant is referring. Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900, t. IX, La révolution et l’Empire, Partie 2e: Les événements, les institutions et la langue, Paris, A. Colon, 1937, p. 828, gives the example of the Ami des lois of 16 brumaire an V (6 November 1796), defining as anarchists those “who see the republic as booty devolving upon them alone, who demand institutions which perpetuate their tyranny and leave them total mastery of government decision making and the framing of the law.” F. Brunot shows very effectively how among the Thermidorians the term “anarchy” took on the meaning of “despotism” or “tyranny” in order to designate the Terror as just such a régime.

[11. ]A reference to Sultan Selim III, who ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1798 to 1807. His reign was marked by disastrous wars against the European powers and internal revolts in the provinces under his jurisdiction.

[12. ]Du contrat social, Livre I, Ch. 6, éd. cit., p. 360. Constant’s quotes are rarely a model of precision and accuracy, but Hofmann’s editing does not restore the original text unless the very meaning of a passage has been falsified by Constant or he has failed to indicate an important omission.

[13. ]In the paragraphs which follow, Constant gives examples only of writers contemporary to Rousseau, or later than he: d’Holbach, Mably, Ferrand, and Molé. When he claims that these writers had the same view as Rousseau, he does not refer to the theory of the surrender of individual rights, which he has just quoted, but to the boundless authority of the general will over the individual.

[14. ]See Constant’s Note A at the end of Book I.

[15. ]Paul Henri Dietrich, baron d’Holbach, La politique naturelle ou discours sur les vrais principes du gouvernement, London, 1773, t. I, p. 72. Constant is abridging radically and the last sentence is more a summary than a proper quote. Here is the beginning of the paragraph which Holbach entitled On Absolute Authority (French original De l’autorité absolue): “In all government there must be an absolute authority. Wherever that authority resides it must employ as it chooses all the powers of society. To this end it must not only make laws, but also possess power extensive enough to make them effective, or to overcome the resistances which individual passions may put in their way. These aims would not be fulfilled if the public authorities did not also have enough power to make those who belong within the jurisdiction of the state contribute to its flourishing, its preservation and security. It also has to decide what policy directions are most appropriate to securing these. In sum, this central power is constituted to work out what the particular orientations are and be strong enough to force them to fall in with its overall view. If such power had limits, there could be no vitality or vigor in government. The vices of individual citizens would endlessly vitiate, as pointless or dangerous, any association with no object other than the general flourishing of all. This truth has been felt by societies which are most jealous of their liberties. Surrounded by the most cruel factions, they have often found themselves obliged to submit, at least for a limited period, to a boundless authority. Such was the case with the Roman dictatorship.”

[16. ]Hofmann searched in vain for this quote from Mably in two of his works referred to elsewhere by Constant: De la législation ou principes des lois and the Entretiens de Phocion sur les rapports de la morale avec la politique.

[17. ]See Constant’s Note B at the end of Book I.

[18. ]Antoine Ferrand, L’esprit de l’histoire ou lettres politiques et morales d’un père à son fils, sur la manière d’étudier l’histoire en général et particulièrement l’histoire de France, Paris, Vve Nyon, 1802, pp. 134–135.

[19. ]One would have expected Constant to cite Locke before Montesquieu. Perhaps he is assumed to number among this group. Constant’s silence on the English writer is at the very least strange. On this question, see Hofmann’s thesis, Seconde Partie, Ch. 2, pp. 329–332.

[20. ]De l’esprit des lois, Livre I, Ch. 1: “Before there were laws, relations touching on justice were possible. To say nothing can be just or unjust unless it is required or forbidden by positive laws, is like saying that before we could draw circles their radii were not equal. We must therefore admit to relationships of justice prior to the positive laws which reestablish them.” Montesquieu, Oeuvres complètes, presentation and notes by Daniel Oster, Paris, E. du Seuil, 1964, p. 530 (L’Intégrale).

[21. ]Ibid., Livre XI, Ch. 3, éd. cit., p. 586.

[22. ]Constant returns to this distinction when he opposes “civil freedom” to “political freedom” in Book XVI, Ch. 7 and in Book XVII, Ch. 3 of this treatise.

[23. ]Cesare Beccaria’s little book, Dei delitti e delle pene (on offences and punishments), published in 1764, which swiftly became a great success, was in no sense a refutation of Rousseau. The latter had exerted on the contrary a “deep influence” on Beccaria, as Franco Venturi shows in the introduction to the French translation of the work—Des délits et des peines, trans. by Maurice Chevallier, Geneva, Droz, 1965, p. xiv. All the same, speaking of the pact at the origin of human society, Beccaria maintains, contrary to Rousseau: “Necessity constrained men to cede part of their freedom. Now, it is clear that each person wants to hand over to the community only the smallest portion possible consistent with the commitment of everybody to the collective defence.” Ed. cit., p. 10, Hofmann’s italics. This is in opposition to the handover of all individual rights as envisaged by the Contrat social, and Constant’s view, though insufficiently nuanced, is upheld.

[24. ]The Mémoires sur l’instruction publique of the marquis de Condorcet had appeared in the Bibliothèque de l’homme public, 2e année, t. I, Paris, Buisson, 1791. Constant’s references (pp. 53, 316, 317, and 372 of this treatise) are to this edition and not to t. IX of the Oeuvres complètes, edited by Garat and Cabanis, Brunswick, Vieweg; Paris, Heinrichs, 1804.

[25. ]Constant is probably referring to two articles which came out in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1 April and 8 April 1736, under the title On Government and for a long time attributed to Benjamin Franklin. These texts are reproduced in The Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin, compiled and edited by John Bigelow, New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1887, vol. 1, pp. 425–431. In fact, these articles are by John Webbe, as the latter admits in The Pennsylvania Gazette of 28 July 1737. See in this regard The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1960, vol. 2, pp. 145–146. Whoever was their author, these articles certainly condemned excessive government. Thus, right at the start: “Government is aptly compared to architecture; if the superstructure is too heavy for the foundation, the building totters, though assisted by outward props of art.”

[26. ]Thomas Paine, Common Sense, first edition, Philadelphia, R. Bell, 1776. At the beginning of the first chapter, entitled On the origin and design of government in general, Paine declares in fact: “Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary; in its worst state an intolerable one.” The Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. by Moncure Daniel Conway, New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894, vol. 1, p. 69 (photomech. reprod. New York, AMS Press, 1967).

[27. ]See Constant’s Note C at the end of Book I.

[28. ]In Ch. 2 of the Second Part of his Essais (op. cit., p. 134), Molé writes, for example: “It was necessary to give meaning to this moral being [society] whose existence had been recognized. It was urgent that it be given all-seeing eyes and a sword to make itself obeyed.” As to whether Constant was right to identify traces of Rousseau’s influence in Molé’s work, see Hofmann’s thesis, Seconde Partie, Ch. 2, Section 2.

[29. ]Constant is quoting from memory. The exact text is: “the total surrender of each member with all his rights to the whole community.” Du contrat social, Livre I, Ch. 6, éd. cit., p. 360.

[30. ]Here is the complete passage to which the author is referring: “For first of all, each person giving himself entirely, the condition is the same for everyone, and this being so, no one has an interest in making it burdensome to others. Moreover, the alienation taking place unreservedly, the association is as perfect as could be and no member has any longer anything to demand: For, if certain individuals retained some rights, since there would be no superior common authority which could judge between them and the public, each person being in some respect his own judge, would soon claim to be so in everything, the state of nature would continue and the society would necessarily become tyrannical or futile. Thus, each person giving himself to everyone, in fact gives himself to no one, and since there is no fellow member over whom one does not gain only the same rights one also cedes to him over oneself, one acquires the equivalent of everything one has lost with additional force for preserving what one has.” Ibid., pp. 360–361.

[31. ]This criticism could be leveled also at Thomas Paine, who, in Common Sense, says: “Some writers have so confounded society with government as to leave no distinction between them.” Ed. cit., p. 69.

[32. ]It is hard to see to which passage Constant is referring, since in Du contrat social, Livre III, Ch. 1 (éd. cit., p. 396), Rousseau defines government as: “an intermediate body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual dealings, charged with the execution of the laws, with the maintenance of liberty, both civil and political [. . .] I therefore call the legitimate exercise of executive power Government or supreme administration and the man or body charged with carrying out that administration the Prince or magistrate.” See Hoffman’s thesis, Seconde Partie, Ch. 2, pp. 322–323 and n. 53.

[33. ]“. . . each individual, contracting, so to speak, with himself, finds himself involved in a double relationship; namely as a member of the sovereign in relation to private individuals, and as a member of the society in relation to the sovereign.” Du contrat social, Livre I, Ch. 7, éd. cit., p. 362.

[34. ]It seems Constant has condensed two passages: first: “The constant will of all members of the State is the general will; it is through this that they are citizens and free,” Du contrat social, Livre IV, Ch. 2, éd. cit., p. 440, and second: “So long as the citizens are subjected only to such conventions, they obey no one else but only their own will,” ibid., Livre II, Ch. 4, éd. cit., p. 375.

[35. ]See Constant’s Note D at the end of Book I.

[36. ]Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Histoire ancienne, Livre VII, Ch. 7. In the edition published under the title: Cours d’étude pour l’instruction du prince de Parme, Geneva, Du Villard et Nouffer, 1780, t. V, pp. 473–474, we find: “They wanted to put a brake on one authority and doing this established another, which needed containing. They therefore left the abuses they thought they were remedying to continue.”

[37. ]Constant is not quoting Hobbes, but summarizing his thought as one finds it in Leviathan, Ch. XVII and following.

[38. ]Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De l’esprit, Paris, Durand, 1758, Premier Discours, Ch. 1, pp. 18–31. Helvétius is more precise in his definition. “To judge [not to think] is to feel.”

[39. ]“As soon as the multitude is brought together thus in a single body, any offense to a member is an offense to the whole. Still less could one offend the whole body without its membership feeling the effects. Thus duty and interest alike compel the two contracting parties to support each other, and the same men must seek to bring together under this double relationship all the benefits which depend on it. Now, the sovereign power, being formed only by the individuals who compose it, neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs. It follows that the sovereign power has no need to issue guarantees to its subjects, because it is impossible that the body should wish to harm all its parts, and we will later see that it cannot harm any individual one of them.” Du contrat social, Livre I, Ch. 7, éd. cit., p. 363.

[40. ]In Ch. 3 of his Essais (op. cit., p. 140), Molé declares in effect: “The government could not be arbitrary; men were afraid to depend on the fancy or the whims of him who exercised it. So man was not told to do what he thought right for the well-being of society. Rather, given that he was endowed with the force of society itself, he was mandated to conserve the conditions which constituted his existence. He punished outrages, he proceeded with the reparation of civil wrongs, and in all these ways he consecrated this first moral fact, that we should do nothing to others we would not wish done to ourselves.”

[41. ]“In order, therefore, that the social contract is no worthless formulary, it tacitly includes the only undertaking which can give force to other people, namely that whoever refuses to obey the general will, will be constrained thereto by the whole society. This means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free.” Du contrat social, Livre 1, Ch. 7, éd. cit., p. 364. Cf. also Livre II, Ch. 4, pp. 372–375.

[42. ]Constant summarizes here the longer passages of the original, whose corresponding text is as follows: “The authority therefore had to be absolute. An individual in danger runs away without consultation or permission. Often he owes his safe delivery only to secrecy and promptness. The authority, moreover, could not be counterbalanced without someone resisting it, and such resistance was absurd. It could never be legitimate. How could some parts of the association have struggled against it? There could exist no responsibility on the part of the depository of power. Under what right could a member enter into dispute with the being of which he is a part? The latter could not respond to him save by making him return to the order he should never have left” (op. cit., pp. 139–140). And later, Molé says again: “But understand his position and why his power is not arbitrary. This was no longer a man but a people” (op. cit., p. 141).

[43. ]Du contrat social, Livre II, Ch. 1, éd. cit., pp. 368–369.

[44. ]It is hard to know to whom Constant is referring, given that Rousseau’s critics are so numerous (see, for example: Robert Dérathé, “Les réfutations du Contrat social au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau, t. XXXII, 1950–1952, pp. 7–54). We do, however, find in Cornelius de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs, Berlin, G.-J. Decker, 1788, t. II, p. 167, this reflection: “Rousseau, the most inconsistent writer ever to appear.” Now, Constant had read this work and even borrowed some passages from it. He could also therefore have made a note of this criticism.

[45. ]Constant is undoubtedly referring to the paradoxes of Rousseau Hofmann has cited already: the first: “whoever refuses to obey the general will will be made to by the whole social body: this means only that he will be forced to be free,” Du contrat social, Livre I, Ch. 7, éd. cit., p. 364; the second: “So when the view opposite to mine carries the day, this proves only that I was wrong, and that what I thought was the general will, was not. If my individual opinion had carried the day, I would have done something other than I had wished. This is when I would not have been free,” ibid., Livre IV, Ch. 2, éd. cit., p. 441.

[A. [Refers to page 9.]]Condorcet is an exception. He has very precisely established the limits of political power. See his Notes on Public Education. Nor is it in general true that the idea is new. It occurs in Franklin, Payne, Beccaria, and others. No one, however, has drawn out all the consequences flowing from it.

[B. [Refers to page 10.]]Even those contrary to morality, such as for example a power which can condemn the innocent? Is this what M. Ferrand means?

[C. [Refers to page 12.]]“Unlimited powers are a political monster and a great error on the part of the French nation. It will not make the same mistake again in the future. You will be spelling out again to the people this great truth, all too misunderstood in this country. Namely that the nation does not itself have these powers, these unlimited prerogatives which its flatterers have attributed to it. When a political association forms, one does not communalize all the rights every individual has in society, the whole power of the entire mass of individuals. In political life one communalizes in the name of public power, as little as possible and only what is necessary for maintaining each person in his rights and duties. Power on this scale is far short of the exaggerated ideas with which people have [46] blithely invested what they call sovereignty. Notice that I am speaking of the sovereignty of the people, because if there is such a thing as sovereignty, that is where it is. This word is so vastly inflated in the popular understanding, only because the French mind, still full of royal superstitions, has thought itself bound to endow it with the whole historical baggage of solemn pomposity and absolute powers which have glamorized unlawful sovereignty. We have even seen public feeling, in its vast magnanimity, enraged again for not giving it more. People seemed to be saying to themselves with a sort of patriotic pride, that if the sovereignty of great kings is so powerful, so terrible, the sovereignty of a great nation should be something more remarkable still. What I say is that to the extent that we enlighten ourselves, and distance ourselves from the days when we thought we knew what was what, and were really doing no more than idle wishing, the power of sovereignty will be brought back within its proper limits. Once again let it be said: the power of the people is not unlimited.” Siéyès, Opinion dans le Moniteur.46

[D. [Refers to page 20.]]When people wanted to condemn the King to death, they said that the will of the people made the law, that insurrection, demonstrating the will of the people, was a living law, and that Louis XVI was condemned by that law.

[46]Moniteur universel, 7–8 thermidor an III (25–26 July 1795), pp. 1236–1239, reproducing the speech Siéyès delivered on 2 thermidor an III (20 July 1795) in the Convention. The text is republished by Paul Bastid, Les discours de Siéyès dans les débats constitutionnels de l’an III (2 et 18 thermidor). This is a critical edition with an introduction and notes. Paris, Hachette, 1939, pp. 13–30. The passage quoted by Constant is on pp. 17–18.