chapter two: On Civil Intolerance - Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments [1815]
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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).
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chapter two
On Civil Intolerance
Today, when intellectual progress is opposed to religious intolerance properly so called, that is to say, to that kind whose purpose is to enforce opinions, a number of governments take refuge behind the need for a certain civil intolerance. Rousseau, who cherished all the ideas of liberty and furnished pretexts for all the claims of tyranny, is still cited in favor of this way of thinking.
“There is,” he says, “a purely civil profession of faith, whose articles it belongs to the sovereign power to fix, not precisely, like religious dogma, but in terms of the feeling of sociability. Without being able to enforce any belief in these dogmas, it can banish from the state anyone who does not believe them, not for being impious but for being unsociable.” What is this business of the state deciding which feelings one should adopt? What does it matter to me that the sovereign power does not force me to believe such and such, if it punishes me for what I do not believe? What does it matter that it does not attack me for impiety, if it attacks me as unsociable? What do I care that government eschews theological niceties if it loses its way [164] in a hypothetical morality, no less nice and no less foreign to natural justice?
I know of no system of servitude which has sanctified more fatal errors than the eternal metaphysics of the Social Contract.
Civil intolerance is just as dangerous, more absurd, and above all more unjust than religious intolerance. It is just as dangerous, since it has the same results under a different pretext. It is more absurd, since it is not motivated by conviction. It is more unjust, since the evil it causes is not from duty but a mere calculation.
Civil intolerance borrows a thousand forms and takes refuge behind one administrative pretext after another as it hides away from reason. Defeated on the principle, it disputes the application. We have seen men persecuted for close to thirty centuries, telling the government which released them from their long proscription that if it were necessary for there to be several religions accepted in a State, it was no less necessary for the tolerated sects to be prevented from producing new ones, by way of subdivision. But is not each tolerated sect itself a subdivision of some former one? On what grounds can it refuse future generations the same rights claimed by itself from past generations?
It has been proposed, in a country which prides itself on freedom of religion, that none of the recognized churches be able to change its dogmas without government permission. If by chance, however, these dogmas came to be rejected by most of the religious community, could government enforce that majority to profess them? Now, in matters of opinion, the rights of the majority and minority are the same.
One understands intolerance when it imposes on everybody one and the same profession of faith. It is at least consistent. Maybe it thinks it holds men in the sanctuary of truth. But when just two opinions are allowed, since one of the two must necessarily be false, to authorize government to force individuals in one or the other to stay attached to the opinions of their sect, or the sects never to change their opinions, is to authorize government, formally, to lend assistance to error. [165]
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