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chapter one: Preliminary Observation - 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 one

Preliminary Observation

In the enumeration of inalienable individual rights at the beginning of this work,1 I did not include the freedom of economic activity. The most enlightened philosophers of the last century, however, have shown the whole evidential case against the injustice of the restrictions experienced by this freedom in almost all countries. They likewise showed, just as clearly in my view, that these restrictions were as pointless and misconceived as they were unfair.

This last point nevertheless still seems doubtful to many people. One would need volumes to clarify the case in a way that would seem satisfactory to them. The principles of economic freedom rest on a multitude of facts, and each fact which seems contrary to it demands, in order to give way to its correct perspective, a long and detailed discussion.2 Freedom of commerce is useful only when it is scrupulously observed. A single violation, spreading uncertainty through the whole system, destroys all its benefits, and governments then turn their very faults to advantage in order to justify their intervention. They argue from the imperfect, sometimes dire results of precarious and restricted freedom, against the invariably salutary results of full and well-established freedom. Consequently, I did not wish, although all questions of this kind are interlinked, to put commercial freedom and civil freedom at the same level, for fear that the men who would disagree about [276] the former might be just as likely to dispute the important principles on which the felicity of civil society and the security of citizens are based. Nevertheless, certain moral considerations struck me which return to the subject of this work and which in moral terms decide the issue in favor of freedom, as well as yet further observations and facts which also decide in the same way in the case of economic activity. I thought I ought not to hold these back. But I beg the reader not to forget, though, that this section is not a treatise in commercial economy and contains just some general reflections which I expressly separate from the rest of my research, so that my mistakes, if I have made any, or the disagreement my opinions in this matter might encounter, will not bear on the other questions I have discussed. I could be wrong in my claims about freedom of production and trade without my principles of religious, intellectual, and personal freedom being weakened by this.

[1. ]In Book II, Ch. 6 On Individual Rights When Political Authority Is Thus Restricted.

[2. ]See Constant’s Note A at the end of Book XII.

[A. [Refers to page 227.]]The judicious Say observes that “a particular fact is not enough to destroy a general one, since we cannot be sure that some unknown circumstance has not produced the difference we see between the results of the one or the other. . . . How few particular facts are completely established! How few are observed in all their circumstances.” Economie politique. Preface.72

[A. [Refers to page 227.]]The judicious Say observes that “a particular fact is not enough to destroy a general one, since we cannot be sure that some unknown circumstance has not produced the difference we see between the results of the one or the other. . . . How few particular facts are completely established! How few are observed in all their circumstances.” Economie politique. Preface.72

[72]Jean-Baptiste Say, op. cit., t. I, Discours préliminaire, pp. viii–ix.