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chapter three: Rousseau’s Second Principle on the Scope of Political Authority - Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments [1815]

Edition used:

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

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


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]

[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.

[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

[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

[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.