Home

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

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.

Copyright information:

The copyright to this edition, in both print and electronic forms, is held by Liberty Fund, Inc.

Fair use statement:

This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Unless otherwise stated in the Copyright Information section above, this material may be used freely for educational and academic purposes. It may not be used in any way for profit.

BOOK XIV

On Government Action on Enlightenment

Ch. 1. Questions to be dealt with in this book. 297
Ch. 2. On the value attributed to errors. 298
Ch. 3. On government in support of truth. 301
Ch. 4. On government protection of enlightenment 304
Ch. 5. On the upholding of morality. 307
Ch. 6. On the contribution of government to education. 308
Ch. 7. On government duties vis-à-vis enlightenment. 315

chapter one

Questions to Be Dealt with in This Book

The relations between government and enlightenment are of a kind even more difficult and delicate to determine than those concerning only external and material things: actions, property, or production. Man’s orientation is to independence in the exercise of all his faculties, but he feels the need for it above all in the exercise of thought. The more he reflects, the more aware he becomes that all his thoughts form a whole, an indissoluble chain from which it is impossible to break off or remove arbitrarily a single link. Religion can dominate thought because it can become thought itself. Government cannot. These two things have between them no real point of contact.

The materialists often repeated against the doctrine of pure spirit an objection which lost its force only when a less daring philosophy made us recognize the impotence we suffer with respect to understanding anything regarding what we call matter or what we entitle spirit. Pure spirit cannot act on matter, they said. One could say, with greater reason and without losing oneself in subtle metaphysics, that where government is concerned, matter cannot act on spirit. Now government, qua government, never has anything but matter at its disposal. Government changes in nature when it wishes to employ reasoning, and rather than dominating the reflective mode, subjects its own reasoning to the latter. Seeking to win the argument, government recognizes the criteria of reflection. Consequently, we always find that after a few tries of this kind government realizes it is now out of its element, deprived of its habitual weapons; and when it wishes to reassume them, its struggle with thought begins anew.

To confer the management of enlightenment on government, one must [358] suppose either that men cannot from their own resources arrive at truths the knowledge of which is salutary to them, or that there are certain truths whose discovery would be dangerous and that consequently there are certain errors which it is useful to maintain. On the first supposition we charge government with the destruction of error, on the second with its protection.

This leads us back to a subject we have dealt with earlier.1 The means government has for the maintenance of error consist in large measure of restrictions imposed on the manifestation of thought. We will not come back to this issue, which I think has been sufficiently clarified. But the principle itself of the usefulness of errors seems worthy of some exploration. This often troubled issue has not yet in my view been considered as it ought to be. A few words will suffice to resolve it if it is considered properly, and we will show in these few words that the supporters of this policy have not gone deeply into their own opinion.

chapter two

On the Value Attributed to Errors

There is no doubt that the apparent consequence of an error can be very useful; that is, the effect which seems bound to result from it naturally can appear very advantageous. The real difficulty, however, is that nothing guarantees that the moral effect of an error will be such as one supposes or wishes. The supporters of useful errors fall into a misapprehension which we have pointed out elsewhere.2 They bring into their calculations only the purpose and do not consider the effect of the means used to secure it. They consider such error only as something established in isolation, forgetting the danger of giving man the habit of error. Reason is a faculty which improves or deteriorates. Imposing error on man causes the faculty to deteriorate. You break the connectedness of his thought. Who can guarantee it will not break again when it comes to the application of the error you [359] have inculcated in him? If it were given to man to invert, just once, the order of the seasons, whatever advantage he might derive from this privilege in a particular circumstance, he would nonetheless experience as a result an incalculable disadvantage, in that subsequently he would no longer be able to rely on the uniform sequence and unvarying regularity which serve as a base for his working activities. Moral nature is like physical nature. Any error distorts the mind, since to penetrate it, error must stop it moving according to its purpose, from principle to consequence. Whose assurance have you that this operation will not constantly repeat itself? Who can trace the path a mind which has abandoned reason’s path must follow? An error is an impetus, its direction incalculable. In creating that impetus and by the very operation you had to perform to create it, you have placed yourself outside the ability to control it. Therefore you must fear the thing seeming least likely to result from it. It is by a petitio principii that you say: such and such an error is favorable to morality. Not so, since in order for that error truly to be favorable to morality it would be necessary for the man who had falsely reasoned in adopting that error, to reason rightly in departing from that given point, and nothing is less certain. A mind you have got used to reasoning falsely on such and such an occasion, when the imperfection of his logic seemed convenient to you and fitted in with your views, will reason falsely on another such occasion and then the viciousness of his reasoning will run counter to your intentions. A particular man may adopt absurd ideas on the nature of a supreme being. He imagines Him incomprehensible, vindictive, jealous, capricious, and so on. If he nevertheless went on to reason well henceforth on the basis of these givens, despite their absurdity they could still regulate his behavior usefully. He would say to himself: “this all-powerful being, often bizarre, sometimes cruel, nevertheless wills the maintenance of human societies, and in our uncertainty as to his particular wishes, the surest way of pleasing him is justice, which satisfies his general will.” But instead of this kind of reasoning, this mind, sufficiently misled to have adopted an absurd initial premise, will probably go from supposition to supposition, from mystery to mystery, from absurdity to absurdity, until he has forged himself a morality utterly contrary to the kind we believed we had entrusted to the safekeeping of religion. Therefore it is not advantageous to deceive men, even when a momentary advantage can be gained from this expedient. The general who tells his troops that the thunderbolt’s roar presages victory, [360] risks seeing his soldiers take to flight if some more cunning deceiver persuades them that this terrible noise signifies the anger of the gods. Similarly, those enormous animals which barbarous peoples put in the vanguard of their armies to drive them onto their enemies would suddenly recoil, terror-struck or overcome with fury, and failing to recognize their masters’ voice, crush or scatter the very battalions which were expecting their salvation and triumph to come from them. But here is quite another difficulty. The errors you call useful necessitate a series of ideas different from the sequence for which nature intended us. Should chance uncover some truth for us, that false series is broken. What will you do then? Reestablish it by force? There you will be, carried back to prohibitive laws, whose impotence and danger we have demonstrated elsewhere.3

Moreover, this would be a great inconsistency on your part. Having asserted on principle that man is not up to being governed by truth and that error, by subjugating the mind, absolves us from forcible means, straightaway you are going to use them to uphold the very same error whose advantage ought to be that it makes them superfluous. To maintain public order you have recourse to what you call illusions, and you are lost in admiration of this expedient, so much gentler according to you, and no less efficacious, than penal laws. Doubt is cast, however, on your tutelary illusions. You cannot defend them by ideas of like nature: the sanction itself is attacked. Will you call the law to your aid? That severity which in the name of public peace you recently boasted of not employing, will you now invoke it in support of the errors you believe necessary to that peace? You might as well have saved yourself this long detour, it seems to me, and merely been harsh on the crime, which would have spared you the odium of persecuting thought. Your task would have been easier, for thought will escape you a thousand times more readily than actions would have. Finally, one objection to the usefulness of errors presents itself, one we have already given an account of in this book4 and will for that reason make do with a sketch of. The discredit which attaches to proven error also comes back, by way of blind fanaticism and clumsy reasoning, on the [361] truth associated with that error. “Men of good will,” says Bentham,5 “think one should never remove from morality any one of its props, even when it is out of true. . . . But when a man of depraved mind has triumphed by means of a false argument, he always thinks he has triumphed over morality itself.” Errors are always fatal, both because of the effect they produce on the mind itself and because of the means indispensable, to put it succinctly, to secure their durability. The errors which seem most salutary to you are only scourges in disguise. You want a government maintained. You thrust aside the truths opposed to the principles on which this government rests. You encourage the errors contrary to these truths. But a government can be overthrown by a thousand unpredictable causes. Then, the more the errors you have encouraged have put down deep roots, the more the truths you have rebuffed will be unknown. The less men are prepared for what will have to be put in place of that which no longer exists, the more violence, misfortune, and disorder there will be in the overthrow and its consequences.

It can be affirmed with confidence that whenever people believe they have observed an abuse attributable to enlightenment, in fact enlightenment has been in short supply. Always when truth is accused of wrongdoing, this evil has been the effect not of truth but of error. Providence has numbered among men’s needs the search for truth. To say truth can be dangerous is to proffer a terrible accusation against providence. This hypothesis sees providence as having marked out for the human race a route it is condemned to follow by irresistible impulsion, a route which finishes in an abyss.

Moreover, truth is unitary and errors countless.6 What are your means for choosing among the host of errors? Error is to truth as Machiavellianism is to morality. If you abandon truth in order to plunge into the cunning schemes of Machiavellianism, you are never sure of having chosen the best among these schemes. If you renounce the search for truth, you are never certain of having chosen the most useful error.

[362] Truth is not just good to know; it is good to search for. Even when we go wrong in that search, we are happier than in renouncing it. The idea of truth is peace for the spirit, as the idea of morality is for the heart.

chapter three

On Government in Support of Truth

Very well, someone will say, since error is always fatal, government must keep men from it and lead them to truth. But what means has government for finding it? We demonstrated at the start of this work that those who govern are as prone to error as the governed.7 Moreover, the objections we have leveled against so-called useful errors, apply almost equally to the truths the government might wish to inculcate and have brought in on its authority. Government support, even for truth, turns into a source of error. Truth’s natural support is obvious rightness. The natural road to truth is via reasoning, comparison, analysis. To persuade man that the obviousness, or what seems such to him, is not the only reason which must determine his opinions, that reasoning is not the only road he must follow, is to pervert his intellectual faculties. It is to establish a false relationship between the opinion he is presented with and the instrument with which he must judge it. It is no longer according to the intrinsic worth of the opinion he must decide, but according to alien considerations, which pervert his intelligence as soon as it follows in that direction. Let us suppose the government infallible in arrogating to itself the right to say what truth is. In this matter it will still use diverse means, it will still disfigure both the truth it proclaims and the intelligence whose own abnegation it ordains. M. de Montesquieu rightly says8 that a man condemned to death by laws he has consented to is politically freer than he who lives peacefully under [363] laws instituted without the agreement of his will. It would be equally right to say that the adoption of an error on our own accord, because it seems true to us, is an operation more favorable to the perfectioning of the mind than the adoption of a truth on the say-so of any government whatever. In the former case, analysis is formative. If this analysis in the particular circumstance does not lead us to happy results, we are on the right track even so. Persevering in our scrupulous, independent investigation, we will get there sooner or later. Under the latter supposition we are reduced to a plaything of the government before which we have humbled our own judgment. Not only will this result in our adopting errors if the dominating government gets things wrong or finds it useful to deceive us, but we will not even know how to derive from such truths as this government has given us the consequences which must flow from them. The abnegation of our intelligence will have rendered us wretchedly passive creatures. Our mental resilience will be broken. Such vigor as we have left will serve only to mislead us. A writer gifted with remarkable insight9 observes on this subject that a miracle enacted to demonstrate a truth would entirely fail to convince the spectators. It would instead spoil their judgment, since between a truth and a miracle there is no natural link. A miracle is not proof of an assertion. A miracle is proof of power. To ask someone to accept an opinion on account of a miracle is to demand that people accord to power what should be accorded only to facts; it is to reverse the order of ideas and want an effect to be produced by something which could not be its cause.

We have pointed out elsewhere10 that morality is only a linked sequence of causes and effects. In the same way, knowledge of the truth is composed only of a linked sequence of principles and consequences. Anytime you interrupt this sequence, you destroy either morality or truth.

Everything imposed on opinion by government turns out to be not only useless but harmful, truth as much as error. In this case truth is not [364] harmful qua truth, but harmful for not having penetrated human intelligence by the natural route.

There is a class, however, whose opinions can be only prejudices, a class which, lacking time for reflection, can learn only what it is taught, a class which has to believe what it is told, a class which, lastly, not being able to devote itself to analysis, has no interest in intellectual independence. Perhaps people will want the government, leaving the educated part of the society completely free, to oversee the views of the ignorant part. But a government which arrogates itself this exclusive prerogative will necessarily demand it be upheld. It will not want any individuals, whoever they may be, acting in a sense different from its own. I agree that initially it will hide this will with sweet and tolerant formalities. From then on, however, some restrictions will appear. They will always keep on growing. A religion professed by government entails the persecution, more or less disguised, of all others. It is the same with opinions of any kind. From preferential treatment of an opinion to disfavor for the contrary opinion, there is a gap which it is impossible not to cross.

This first disadvantage is the cause of a second. Educated men do not delay in separating themselves from a government which hurts them. This is in the nature of the human spirit, above all when it is strengthened by meditation and cultivated by study. Government action, even the best intended, is in some ways rude and gross and ruffles a thousand delicate sensibilities which suffer and rebel.

It is to be feared therefore that if government is endowed with the prerogative of managing the opinion of the uneducated, even if this were toward truth, separating that management from any action taken with regard to the educated class, this latter class, which regards opinion as belonging to its domain, will put itself at odds with the government. A thousand ills then result. Hatred for a government which intervenes in what is not its province can grow so much that when it acts in favor of enlightenment, the friends of enlightenment line up on the side of prejudice. We saw this bizarre spectacle at several periods of our Revolution. A government founded on the clearest principles and professing the sanest opinions, but which, by the nature of the means it uses, alienates the educated class, becomes, infallibly, either the most degraded or the most oppressive of governments. Often it actually combines these two seemingly exlusive things.

[365] The French Revolution was directed against errors of any kind, that is to say that its purpose was to remove the support of government from these errors. The revolutionary leaders wanted to go further. They wanted to employ government itself in the destruction of these errors. Straightaway national movement came to a halt. Opinion was astonished at the weird impulsion some people desired to impress on it, and it recoiled before its new allies. A subtle and swift instinct warned it that the cause had changed although the banner was the same, and it abandoned the banner. What had they actually wanted, this mass of educated men, of honest mind, who during the last half of the eighteenth century had supported the philosophers against the court and the clergy? Independence of opinion, freedom of thought. As soon as the government put itself on the philosophers’ side, however, and exerted itself in supporting it, opinion was no longer independent, thought no longer free.

We must distinguish the influence of the enlightened class, insofar as it is enlightened, from that of a section of the enlightened class, insofar as it is vested in government. No one wants the influence of enlightenment more than I. But precisely because I want it, because I prefer it to any means of another kind, and because I do not want it distorted. It is to conserve in all its force the domain of the enlightened class that I feel repugnance at its subordination to a tiny fraction of itself, necessarily less impartial and probably less enlightened than the rest. The free, gradual, and peaceful action of all would be retarded and often even arrested by this privilege accorded to a few.

chapter four

On Government Protection of Enlightenment

Do you restrict yourself to demanding that government favor with all its might the indefinite growth of enlightenment? In charging government with this function, however, are you quite sure you are not imposing on it a duty directly opposed to its interest? We need to distinguish between the sciences proper and enlightenment in the widest sense of that word. We have said, and [366] we think we have shown,11 that the sciences always gained from the progress of enlightenment and lost from its decay. But the material of science is nevertheless liable to become isolated in many respects from the interests most dear to the happiness and dignity of the human race. Mathematics or physics in the hands of d’Alembert, Condorcet, Biot, or Cabanis are means for the perfectioning of intelligence and rationality and thereby of morality. These sciences can also become separated, however, from the wider purpose of thought; they become then a form of work of a kind more difficult and of more extensive utility than the work of the majority of men, but no less foreign to what we understand specifically by philosophy. All governments have an interest in encouraging sciences thus circumscribed and consequently almost all encourage them. They make a bargain with them whereby the sciences agree not to step outside the agreed sphere. A famous author ingeniously observed that government sought to divide man’s faculties, as it divides citizens among themselves, in order to keep them the more easily in slavery.12 It is not thus, however, with enlightened activities. Such a bargain is contrary to their nature. The personal interest of those in power is therefore by no means to protect them frankly and to the utmost.

The interest of the governors as such is for the governed to be sufficiently enlightened to be skillful economically, with no loss of their docility and without their in any way harming or worrying the government. Government, of any kind, however legitimate or moderate you suppose it, is keen on surveillance. Now, the more enlightened nations are, the more redoubtable surveillance is. The growth of the intellectual powers of the governed is the creation of a rival power to that of the governors. The consciousness of each individual of the cultivated class constitutes an inflexible tribunal, which judges the acts of government. The governors, therefore, as governors, have an interest not in an indefinite progress of enlightenment, but in a relative and limited one.

As individuals, it is more obvious still that their immediate interest in relation to enlightenment is not the same as that of the governed. It would be too simpleminded of us to stop here and show that it is [367] more agreeable for the holders of power, however well-intentioned they may be, for ministers, however pure they want to be, to be surrounded by men less educated than they and from whom they can easily command admiration and obedience, the implication being that even when the ostensible purpose of the government is to encourage enlightenment, its secret desire is still to keep it dependent and therefore to limit it. This desire would not exist in the holders of power, however, if the objects of their protection were not inclined to take it for granted. From this derives some kind of constraint, some eternal obstacle to all free movement, all strict logic, all precise research, all impartial reasoning. Government protection hurts enlightenment even when the government, sincere and disinterested in all its views, repudiates all ulterior motive and all idea of domination. Compare the respective progress of French literature and German literature in Berlin under Frederick II. No sovereign was in better faith than Frederick in his zeal for the development of the human spirit. He invited his academy to prove that error could never be useful.13 His country’s literature seeming to him still in its infancy, he showered his favors on all the French men of letters who gathered around him. He overwhelmed them with distinctions and wealth. He allowed them that familiarity with the great which is said to throw almost all men into such a sweet intoxication. The French writings published at his court, however, were never more than inferior and superficial productions. Frederick’s genius could not efface the autonomous character of government. It is true that his protégés repeated philosophical ideas, because these ideas were the watchword; but truths themselves are sterile when they are produced to order. They wrote audacious things, only with a trembling hand, uncertain about the conclusions it was prudent to come to therein and endlessly and anxiously returning to consult officialdom. Voltaire made a short appearance in this literary circle, warmed by royal protection; but since Voltaire was not one of protection’s creatures and was himself a power, the two potentates could not live together, and Voltaire soon left the monarch to protect his humble littérateurs at his leisure.

The German writers scorned by Frederick had no [368] portion of his encouragement or favor. They worked only for the public and themselves. It is to their writings, however, that Germany owes the high degree of enlightenment she has reached; and their writings owe their merit to the government’s neglect. If one had to choose between persecution and protection, persecution is the more valuable to intellectual life.14

There is among the resources nature has given man a resilience which reacts in the hand which oppresses it, but relaxes or bends when that hand, become more adroit, has managed to seize hold. It was in terror of being accused of sorcery by the government that Roger Bacon outstripped his century. Galileo was to discover the movement of the earth under the Inquisition’s yoke. It was far from his country, whence tyranny had banished him, that Locke analyzed man’s faculties. It is too often concluded, since a cause has produced an effect, that differently employed it would produce an opposite effect. Governments can sometimes succeed in stopping the march of human intelligence for a while. One would be wrong to infer, however, that they succeed in encouraging it. Ignorance can at their behest prolong itself on earth. Enlightenment shines only at the behest of freedom.

chapter five

On the Upholding of Morality

There are the same drawbacks in the upholding of morality by government as in the protection it affords enlightenment. There is even a further danger. These supports have the effect of adding a motive of material interest to the natural motives which bring man to virtue. Some philosophers, following this basic idea, have feared even the intervention of divine omnipotence by way of punishment or reward, as threatening impartiality. Each man bringing together in [369] the idea of God all the perfections, however, he is at least sure that the decisions of eternally infallible providence will never be in opposition to the justice which must direct men’s actions. It is not the same with governments, though, since they are exposed to error, liable to bias, and capable of injustice. You are not subordinating the morality of man only to a more powerful being, itself already a drawback, but to beings like himself, and perhaps ones less worthwhile than he. You thereby familiarize him with the idea of making what seems to him his duty, bend the knee before their power, from no calculation save interest. Even were the protection of the government never granted save to virtue, I would still hold that virtue would be better off independent. The protection of government being grantable, however, to the vice which deceives or serves it, it seems to me we should reject an intervention which in principle harms the purity of our sensibilities and in application often lacks the special advantage attributed to it.

It is, moreover, far less necessary than people think that government, in a legal way, should encourage men to be moral, kindly, and generous. Provided society prevents its members from hurting each other, they will find enough reasons for mutual service. A positive personal interest engages men in rendering one another reciprocal services, in order to receive them in their turn, while only negative interest gets them to abstain from harmful actions. Their activity, which is one of their natural penchants, brings them to do good to one another; but this same activity can also bring them to do ill. Each man has only two ways of getting his fellows to collaborate with what he wishes: force and persuasion. He must either constrain them or lead them to his purpose by gaining their goodwill. If the law cuts off the first way, individuals will invariably take the second. If they lose all hope of success through violence, they will wish to achieve such success by deserving recognition and affection. Government has nothing to do save to see that men do not hurt each other. If they do not hurt, they will serve each other. [370]

chapter six

On the Contribution of Government to Education

Education can be considered under two headings. We can see it in the first place as a means of transmitting to the nascent generation the knowledge of all kinds gained by previous generations. In this respect it is entirely within the jurisdiction of government. The conservation and growth of all knowledge is a positive good. The government must guarantee us the enjoyment of these.

We can also see education, however, as the means of seizing men’s opinions, in order to shape them to the adoption of a certain number of ideas, whether religious, moral, philosophical, or political; and it is above all as leading to this end that writers in all centuries heap their eulogies on it.

We might first of all, without calling into question the facts which serve as the basis of this theory, deny that these facts could apply to modern societies. The domain of education, in the all-powerful sense attributed to it, and if one admitted that all-powerful sense as demonstrated in antiquity, might with us even be thought a reminiscence rather than an existing fact. People fail to recognize times, nations, and epochs and apply to modern societies what was practicable only in a different era of the human spirit.

Among peoples who, as Condorcet15 says, had no notion of personal freedom and where men were only machines, whose springs the law regulated and whose movements it directed, government action could have a more efficacious effect on education because nothing resisted that constant and uniform action. But today the whole society would revolt against government pressure; and individual independence, which men have regained, would react forcefully in the case of children’s education. That second education, worldly and circumstantial, would very soon undo the work of the first.16

It might be the case, moreover, that we mistake for historical facts the romancing of some philosophers imbued with the same prejudices as those who in our time have adopted their principles. Then instead of formerly at least having been a practical truth, this conceit would be only a perennial error.

[371] Where in effect do we see this marvelous power of education? Is it in Athens? But there the public education sanctioned by government was confined to subaltern schools restricted to simple instruction. Furthermore, there was complete freedom of teaching. Is it in Sparta? The uniform and monkish spirit of the Spartans depended on a whole group of institutions of which education was only one part, and in my view the ensemble would be neither easy nor desirable for us to set up anew. Is it in Crete? But the Cretans were the most ferocious, troubled, and corrupted people in Greece. The institutions are separated from their effects and they are admired on the basis of what they were intended to produce, without consideration of what in reality they did produce.

People cite the Persians and Egyptians. We know them very imperfectly, however. Greek writers made Persia and Egypt the theater of their speculations the way Tacitus did with the Germans. They put into action among these far-off people what they would have liked to see established in their fatherland. Their dissertations on Egyptian and Persian institutions are sometimes proven false by the simple, manifest impossibility of the facts they contain and almost always rendered doubtful by irreconcilable contradictions. What we know beyond question is that the Persians and Egyptians were despotically governed and that cowardice, corruption, and degradation, those eternal consequences of despotism, were the portion of these wretched peoples. Our philosophers acknowledge this in the very pages where they propose them as exemplary, for example in matters educational. A bizarre weakness of the human mind, which, noticing only objects in detail, lets itself be so dominated by a cherished idea that the most decisive effects do not enlighten it as to the impotence of causes, whose power it is disposed to proclaim. Most historical proofs resemble those which M. de Montesquieu advances in support of gymnastics. The practice of wrestling enabled the Thebans to win the battle of Leuctra. But against whom did they win this battle? Against the Spartans, who had practiced gymnastics for four hundred years.17

[372] The argument which entrusts education to government rests on two or three cases of petitio principii.

The first supposition is that the government will be a desirable one. People think of it as always an ally, without reflecting that it can often become an enemy. They are unaware that sacrifices imposed on individuals may not result in advantage to such institutions as they believe to be perfect but to that of any institution whatsoever.

This consideration applies with equal force to the holders of all viewpoints. You regard absolute government as the supreme good, for the order it maintains, the peace you see it as demonstrating. If government claims the right to control education, however, it will not claim it only in the calm of despotism, but in the midst of factional violence and rage. Then the result will be quite different from what you expect. Surrendered to government, education will no longer inspire in nascent generations those peaceful habits, those principles of obedience, that respect for religion, that submission to visible and invisible powers you regard as the basis of happiness and social tranquillity. Once education is their instrument, factions will make it serve to spread in the minds of the young exaggerated views, wild maxims, pitiless axioms, contempt for religious ideas which will seem to them like hostile doctrines, bloodlust, hatred of pity. Is this not what the Revolutionary government would have done if it had lasted longer, and was not the Revolutionary government a government too?

This reasoning would be just as forceful if we put it to the friends of wise and moderate freedom. You wish, we will say to them, for government to control education in a republic, in order to school the children at the youngest possible age in the knowledge and maintenance of their rights, to teach them to defy despotism, to resist unjust government, to defend innocence against oppression. But despotism will use education to put its docile slaves under the yoke, to break every noble and courageous sentiment in our hearts, to overturn every notion of [373] justice, to mantle with obscurity the most obvious truths, to push into the darkness or sully with ridicule everything which connects with the most sacred and inviolable rights of the human race. Is this not what they would do today, if they had power, these ardent enemies of all light, these calumniators of any noble idea, who, finding the career of crime cleaned out, compensate for this, at least amply, with careers in baseness?

One could think the Directory was intended to give us some memorable lessons on all objects of this nature. We saw it for four years, seeking to direct education, harassing the teachers, reprimanding them, displacing them, degrading them in their pupils’ eyes, submitting them to the inquisition of its most inferior agents and men of the least enlightenment, hindering individual teaching, and worrying state education with endless and puerile actions. Was not the Directory a government? I would like to know the mysterious guarantee people have received, that the future will never be like the past.

In all these hypothetical cases, what people want the government to do for the better, it may do for the worse. Thus hopes can be disappointed and the government which has been indefinitely extended on the basis of unfounded suppositions can march in the opposite direction from the purpose for which it was created.

Education supplied by the government ought to be limited to simple instruction. Government can multiply the channels and resources of instruction, but it must not manage it. Let it ensure that the citizens have equal means, let it make sure that the various occupations get taught real knowledge which facilitates their practices, let it clear the way for individuals freely to get access to all proven factual truths18 and to reach the point where their intelligence can spontaneously dash forward to new discoveries, let it bring together for the use of all inquiring minds, the major works of all opinions, all the [374] inventions of all the centuries, the discoveries of all methods, let it, finally, organize instruction in such a way that each person can devote to it the time appropriate to his interest or desire and perfect himself in the occupation, the art or science to which his tastes or his lot call him. Let it not appoint teachers; let it only pay them a salary which, assuring them the necessaries of life, nevertheless makes it desirable for them to have lots of pupils, let it provide for their needs when age or illness has put an end to their active careers, let it never sack them without grave cause and without the agreement of men independent of it.19

Teachers subject to the government will be at once negligent and servile. Their servility will serve to excuse their negligence. Subject only to public opinion, they would be both active and independent.20

In managing education, government is claiming the right and assuming the duty to maintain a body of doctrine. The word itself tells you the means of which it is obliged to make use. If we allow that it might choose the gentlest ones at first, it is still at least certain that it will not permit the teaching in its schools of any save its preferred opinions.21 There will therefore be rivalry between state education and private education. State education will be salaried; there will therefore be opinions invested with privilege. But if this privilege is not enough to secure dominance for the favored opinions, do you believe that government, jealous by nature, will not resort to other means? Do you not see as the final outcome persecution, more or less disguised, but the constant companion of all unnecessary activity by government?

We see governments, which seem not to trouble individual education in anything, nevertheless favoring always the establishments they have founded, by demanding of all candidates for appointments in the state schools, a kind of apprenticeship in these establishments. Thus the talent which has followed the independent route, and which by solitary work has perhaps assembled as much knowledge and probably more originality than it would have done under classroom routine, finds its natural career, the one in which it can communicate and reproduce itself, suddenly closed before it.22

[375] It is not that, all things being equal, I do not prefer public education to private education. The former makes the rising generation undergo a novitiate of human life, more useful than all the lessons of pure theory, which never replace reality and experience save imperfectly. Public education is salutary above all in free societies. Men brought together at any age and above all in their youth, naturally contract from their reciprocal dealings a sense of justice and habits of equality, which prepare them to become courageous citizens and enemies of despotism. We saw, even under the despotism, schools dependent on the government, reproducing in spite of it seeds of freedom which it strove vainly to stifle.

I think, however, that this advantage can be obtained without constraint. The good never needs privileges, and privileges always disfigure the good. It is important, furthermore, that if the educational system the government favors is vicious, or seems so to some people, they can seek refuge in private study or in schools with no government connections. Society must respect individual rights, including parents’ rights over their children.23 If its actions harm them, a resistance will grow which will render government tyrannical and corrupt individuals by obliging them to elude it. There may be objections perhaps to this respect we demand from government for parents’ rights, that the lower classes, reduced by their poverty into making use of their children, once the latter are capable of helping them in their labors, will not have them instructed in the most basic knowledge, even if the instruction were free, if the government is not authorized to constrain them to this. This objection rests, however, on the hypothesis of such poverty among the people that no good can exist alongside it. What is needed is for this poverty not to exist. Once the people enjoy the affluence due to them, far from retaining their children in ignorance, they will hasten to get them schooled. Their vanity will play a part. They will sense the interest in it. The most natural inclination of parents is to raise their children to a higher status. We see this in England, and it is what we saw in France during the Revolution. During that period, though it was disturbed and the people had to suffer a lot from their government, nevertheless simply because there was more affluence, education made astonishing progress [376] among that class. Everywhere the education of the people is proportionate to its affluence.

We said at the beginning of this chapter that the Athenians subjected only workaday schools to official inspection. Schools of philosophy remained always absolutely independent, and this enlightened nation has left us a memorable example on this subject. Sophocles the demagogue having proposed the subordination of philosophy teaching to the authority of the Senate, all these men, who, despite their numerous mistakes, ought to serve forever as models, both for love of truth and for respect for tolerance, resigned their positions. The whole nation solemnly declared them exempt from inspections and condemned their absurd opponent to a fine of five talents.24

You will answer, however, that if there were set up an educational establishment resting on immoral principles, you would fight for the right of the government to check that abuse. This is to forget that for such an establishment to form and survive, it needs students, and parents who place them there, and putting aside, which is not at all reasonable, actually, the parents’ morality, it will never be in their interests to leave those with whom they have the most important and intimate relationships of their whole lives, to be misled in judgment and perverted in their hearts. The practice of injustice and perversity may be useful fleetingly, in a particular situation, but the principle can never have any prerogative. The principle will never be professed save by fools whom a hostile general opinion will repudiate, without government getting involved. There will never be a need to suppress educational establishments where lessons in vice and crime are given, because there will never be such establishments, and if there were, they would hardly be dangerous, because the teachers would remain on their own. For lack of plausible objections, however, people lean on absurd suppositions, and the calculation is not without guile, since there is a danger of leaving suppositions unanswered, and it appears in a sense foolish to refute them.

I hope for much more, for the perfecting of the human race, [377] from private educational establishments, than from the best-organized public instruction by government.

Who can limit the development of the passion for enlightenment in a free country? You attribute governments with a love of learning. Without examining here the extent to which this tendency is in their interest, I would simply ask you why you assume a lesser love in cultivated individuals, in clear minds and generous spirits. Everywhere government does not weigh on men, everywhere it does not corrupt wealth, conspiring with it against justice, then letters, study, science, the growth and exercise of the intellect will be the favorite pastimes of the opulent classes in society. Look how they carry on in England, forming coalitions, rushing eagerly from all sides. Think of those museums and libraries, those independent learned societies devoted solely to the pursuit of truth, those travelers braving every danger to take human knowledge a step further.

In education as elsewhere, government should be watchful and protective, but always neutral. Let it remove obstacles and make smooth the roads. We can leave it to individuals to walk them successfully.

chapter seven

On Government Duties vis-à-vis Enlightenment

The duties of government vis-à-vis enlightenment are simple and easy. They are of quite another nature, however, from the direction they too often claim. Each generation adds to the resources, physical or moral, of the human race. Sometimes new methods are discovered, at other times machines invented, sometimes communication is perfected, at others facts are clarified. All these things are in some degree the acquisition of new faculties. They are worth preserving independently of the incidental purpose for which they can be used. Doubtless all man’s faculties, from those nature [378] has given him to those which time reveals to him or his efforts invent, have drawbacks as well as advantages. But the drawbacks of any faculty are not in the faculty itself but in the use made of it. Consequently, as long as government applies itself only to conserving the resources, the discoveries, the new abilities man has won, without giving them an aim or directing their use, it fulfills a salutary function, its action neither equivocal nor complicated. It does only unequivocal and harmless good.

CONSTANT’S NOTES

[1. ]In Book VIII.

[2. ]In Book III, Ch. 5.

[3. ]In Book XII, Ch. 4.

[4. ]In Book I, Ch. 3: “For as long as reason is not convinced, error is ready to reappear at the first event which unleashes it.”

[5. ]See Constant’s Note A at the end of Book XIV.

[6. ]See De la force du gouvernement, Ch. 7, p. 94, note: “Truth is one, but error is multiform.”

[7. ]In Book III, Ch. 3.

[8. ]See Constant’s Note B at the end of Book XIV.

[9. ]See Constant’s Note C at the end of Book XIV.

[10. ]For example, Book XII, Ch. 7.

[11. ]In Book VII, Ch. 5.

[12. ]Hofmann does not know who this author is.

[13. ]Hofmann was unable to verify this.

[14. ]In an article in the Moniteur of 9 fructidor an IV (26 August 1796), De la restitution des droits politiques aux descendants des religionnaires fugitifs, Constant had already said: “The late king of Prussia, by his blind contempt for everything which appeared in German, has rendered the progress of enlightenment the only service which government could, that of leaving it alone.” From the text published in Béatrice Jasinski, L’engagement de Benjamin Constant. Amour et politique (1794–1796), Paris, Minard, 1971, p. 255.

[15. ]See Constant’s Note D at the end of Book XIV.

[16. ]See Constant’s Note E at the end of Book XIV.

[17. ]Constant has drawn the example of this so-called error of Montesquieu from Cornelius de Pauw, op. cit., t. I, pp. 150–151: “M. de Montesquieu says that the practice of wrestling caused the Thebans to win the battle of Leuctra; but he has forgotten that this battle was joined in the 102d olympiad; such that it was then four hundred years that the Spartans had also practiced wrestling, which did not, however, save them from a total defeat.” De Pauw gives no reference, and it seems probable that Montesquieu never alluded to this anecdote.

[18. ]See Constant’s Note F at the end of Book XIV.

[19. ]See Constant’s Note G at the end of Book XIV.

[20. ]See Constant’s Note H at the end of Book XIV.

[21. ]See Constant’s Note I at the end of Book XIV.

[22. ]See Constant’s Note J at the end of Book XIV.

[23. ]See Constant’s Note K at the end of Book XIV.

[24. ]See Constant’s Note L at the end of Book XIV.

[A. [Refers to page 300.]]Principes de législation publiés par Dumont, Tome II, p. 211.

[B. [Refers to page 302.]]Esprit des lois, XII, 2.25

[C. [Refers to page 302.]]Godwin.26

[D. [Refers to page 308.]]Mémoires sur l’instruction publique.27

[[379] E. [Refers to page 309.]]Helvétius, De l’homme.28

[F. [Refers to page 311.]]One can teach the facts parrot fashion, but never the arguments.

[G. [Refers to page 312.]]For the details of the organization of state education which are not within the scope of this work, I refer the reader to the Mémoires of Condorcet, where all the questions relating to this matter are examined and resolved and to whose views I doubt whether anything could be added.29

[H. [Refers to page 312.]]Smith, Richesse des nations.30

[I. [Refers to page 312.]]Condorcet, 1er Mémoire, p. 55.31

[J. [Refers to page 312.]]“Everything which obliges or engages a certain number of students to remain at a college or university, independently of the merit or reputation of the masters, such as on the one hand the necessity of [380] taking certain degrees which can be conferred only in certain places and on the other hand the scholarships and grants given to poor scholars, has the effect of slowing down the zeal and rendering less necessary the knowledge of the masters privileged thus under any system at all.”32

[K. [Refers to page 313.]]Condorcet, 1er Mémoire, p. 44.33

[L. [Refers to page 313.]]Diogenes Laertius, Vie de Theophraste.34

[B. [Refers to page 302.]]Esprit des lois, XII, 2.25

[C. [Refers to page 302.]]Godwin.26

[D. [Refers to page 308.]]Mémoires sur l’instruction publique.27

[[379] E. [Refers to page 309.]]Helvétius, De l’homme.28

[H. [Refers to page 312.]]Smith, Richesse des nations.30

[I. [Refers to page 312.]]Condorcet, 1er Mémoire, p. 55.31

[K. [Refers to page 313.]]Condorcet, 1er Mémoire, p. 44.33

[L. [Refers to page 313.]]Diogenes Laertius, Vie de Theophraste.34

[25]It is in Ch. 2 of Book XII that Montesquieu writes: “A man who was tried and was to be hanged the next morning, would be freer than a Pasha is in Turkey.” Ed. cit., p. 509.

[26]William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, London, 1793, vol. 1, p. 124. Constant translated this work. See Benjamin Constant, De la justice politique, unpublished translation of the work of William Godwin, edited by Burton R. Pollin, Quebec, University of Laval Press, 1972.

[27]In the Bibliothèque de l’homme public, op. cit., p. 47: “The ancients had no notion of this kind of liberty; they seemed indeed to have no purpose in their institutions save to annihilate it. They would have liked to allow men only ideas and feelings found in the legislator’s provision. For them nature had created only machines, whose springs law alone must regulate, whose actions law alone direct.”

[28]Claude-Adrien Helvétius, De l’homme, de ses facultés intellectuelles et de son education, London, 1776. Constant refers the reader above all to the first section of the work, entitled: Que l’éducation nécessairement différente des différents hommes est peut-être la cause de l’inégalité des esprits, jusqu’à présent attribuée à l’inégale perfection de leurs organes.

[29]Constant is evidently referring to Mémoires sur l’instruction publique in Bibliothèque de l’homme public, t. I, Paris, Buisson, 1791.

[30]Adam Smith, op. cit., Book V, Ch. 1, t. IV, pp. 143–145.

[31]Condorcet, op. cit. Condorcet says here: “It is much more important that the government does not dictate the common doctrine of the moment as eternal truth, lest it make of education a tool for consecrating prejudices it finds useful, and an instrument of power out of that which should be the most certain barrier against all unjust power.”

[32]Adam Smith, op. cit., t. IV, p. 146.

[33]Condorcet, op. cit., p. 44.

[34]The anecdote of the demagogue Sophocles and the reference to Diogenes Laertius are in Cornelius de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs, op. cit., t. I, pp. 232–233.

Home

The Forum

Econlib

The Library

Other Sites