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chapter ten: Conclusions from the Above Reflections - 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 ten

Conclusions from the Above Reflections

As I said at the start of the foregoing reflections, I am absolutely not presenting a complete case for the very least interference by government in economic activity. A thousand arguments and facts crowd around me, all tending to supply ever stronger evidence for this principle. I am putting them aside, because I feel it is impossible to expound them on a satisfactory scale. Each fact in isolation may furnish an exception and it would require verification, that is, giving oneself over to local investigations, historical, geographical, and even political, to show either that the exception is not upheld or that it does not weaken the principle. In this treatise I cannot take on this workload. I think I have said enough, nevertheless, to show that the effect of government intervention in matters of production, though sometimes necessary perhaps, is never positively advantageous. We can resign ourselves to it as an inevitable ill; but we should always strive to limit this ill as closely as possible.

My views will probably encounter many opponents. This will not make me think them any less correct. In a country where the government hands out assistance and compensation, many hopes are awakened. Until such time as they have been disappointed, men are bound to be unhappy with a system which replaces favoritism only by freedom. Freedom creates, so to speak, a negative good, although a gradual and general one. Favoritism brings positive, immediate, personal advantages. Selfishness and short-term views will always be against freedom and for favoritism.