THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF AN EXCEPTION

For several decades, the paradigm of exceptionalism has dominated scholarship on French liberalism.Footnote ⁸ Scholars in this field fall into three rough categories: revisionists, who stress the elusive and imperfect character of French liberalism, which they generally attribute to the legacy of absolutism and the French Revolution; “complicators,” who contend that French liberalism has incorporated elements that in other national traditions would appear to be extraneous to it (such as republicanism or religion); and “skeptics,” who question the extent to which, given the way it informed the colonial mentality, French liberalism deserves to be called liberal at all. From each of these perspectives, the exceptional character of French liberalism assumes a somewhat different meaning.

Though François Furet's “revisionism” is most often associated with his critique of the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution, it can also be read as a contribution to the historiography of French liberalism. Furet became a key figure in launching the French liberal revival of the 1970s—notably with the publication of his 1978 essay “Penser la révolution française”—by arguing that France's modern political development was stunted by the 1789 Revolution's “latent illiberalism” (as Isser Woloch put it).Footnote ⁹ According to Furet, Revolutionary ideology, particularly in its commitment to the Rousseauian notion of an indivisible and sovereign “general will,” had perpetuated monarchical absolutism in the very act of overthrowing it. Emphasizing unity rather than pluralism, France failed to develop a liberal political culture in which conflict, the multiplicity of interests, and an autonomous civil society would be seen as inevitable and even positive features of a modern political order, rather than as obstacles to overcome.

Furet's revisionist history inspired a number of political philosophers and historians of political thought who were primarily interested in French liberalism, the most influential of which is Lucien Jaume. In his landmark study L’individu effacé (The Effaced Individual), Jaume offers a useful typology of French liberalism, focusing on the nineteenth century. First, there was a “liberalism of the subject,” associated with Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël, which was committed to the primacy of the individual. Second, a libéralisme notabiliaire (a “liberalism of notables”), embraced in politics by François Guizot and the Doctrinaires and in philosophy by Victor Cousin and the Eclectics, was preoccupied with rendering French society governable by ensuring the representation of civil society's most vibrant constituencies (specifically the bourgeoisie). Finally, liberal Catholicism, represented by Montalembert, advocated liberal rights mainly as a way of defending the interests of the Church—before evolving, later in the century, into a Catholic liberalism which opposed the papacy's increasingly authoritarian turn. Jaume ultimately uses this typology to endorse Furet's views regarding liberalism's fate in a state-centered political culture. In “the vast majority of cases,” Jaume argues, French liberalism has opted for “liberalism through the state, and not against the state.”Footnote ¹⁰

Another scholarly trend has been to complicate our understanding of liberal political thought by considering the ways in which, in its French iteration, it incorporated elements with which it is rarely associated in other national contexts, yet without making normative assumptions as to whether this constitutes a theoretical aberration. For instance, Annelien de Dijn has shown that an important strand of French liberalism sprang not from the rise of the bourgeoisie, as is customarily assumed, but from the French aristocracy's opposition to the centralizing and leveling force of the absolutist (and, later, post-Revolutionary) state.Footnote ¹¹ By focusing on thinkers such Montesquieu, Boulainvilliers, Charles Cottu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Prosper de Barante, de Dijn brings to light a liberal tradition less concerned with rights and constitutional architecture than with intermediary bodies and social elites capable of resisting the encroachments of a despotic state. Helena Rosenblatt seeks to confound our understanding of French liberalism in a different way, by emphasizing how, at least in the case of Constant, early liberalism was deeply rooted in religious concerns. It was Constant's religious preoccupations, and specifically his attraction to Protestantism, which, Rosenblatt argues, ultimately underpinned his core liberal convictions, particularly his belief that political power could never be absolute.Footnote ¹² For Andrew Jainchill, the complicating factor needed to grasp liberalism in the French context is classical republicanism. According to Jainchill, the key political thinkers of the Directory (1795–9), including Constant, de Staël, and the Abbé de Sieyès, as well as lesser known figures such as Charles-Guillaume Théremin and Pierre-Louis Roederer, “spoke two distinct, although sometimes intermingled, political languages: classical republicanism and liberalism.”Footnote ¹³ The result was a distinctive outlook that Jainchill calls “liberal republicanism,” characterized by a commitment to modern (i.e. commercial) liberty, the belief that political institutions should be rooted in social forces, a preference for representative government over democracy, and a faith in political participation. Finally, the historian and political theorist Pierre Rosanvallon has, despite his ties to Furet, challenged Jacobinism's centrality to France's political development, arguing that pluralism and the idea of an autonomous civil society have had a much deeper impact on French politics than revisionism has generally recognized. Without denying “the power of an illiberal political culture” in France, Rosanvallon maintains that “the political culture of generality” (a term he prefers to Jacobinism) has encountered considerable practical resistance, resulting in a political system that gives significant weight to intermediary bodies and associations and conceives of the state as a “network” rather than a unitary entity.Footnote ¹⁴ These scholars, by exploring the role played by landed aristocracies, religion, classical republicanism, and a pluralistic countertradition to Jacobinism in liberalism's development, show that this political philosophy is far less familiar to us than we commonly assume. In this way, they challenge the revisionist position that French history constitutes a departure from the liberal straight and narrow.

The burgeoning interest in the history of colonialism and imperialism has also influenced scholarship on liberalism. Whereas revisionists bemoan France's “latent illiberalism” precisely because they sympathize with liberalism, scholars who examine how liberalism has played out in colonial settings have adopted a more thoroughgoing skepticism, arising from the flagrant contradictions between the political criteria guiding liberal thinking in Europe and those that were applied in the colonies. How, as Uday Singh Mehta pithily puts it, “did ideas of equality, liberty, and fraternity lead to empire, liberticide, and fratricide?”Footnote ¹⁵ In her groundbreaking work, Jennifer Pitts argues that while the eighteenth-century forerunners to liberalism (such as the Abbé Raynal and Denis Diderot) undertook a robust critique of European expansion, mid-nineteenth-century liberals made a sharp “turn to empire,” as they justified the establishment of colonial rule despite their commitment to equality, individual rights, and representative government at home. Pitts demonstrates that liberal apologists for empire made arguments that were both integral and extraneous to liberal political philosophy, showing how these thinkers, even in their most brazen assertions of European superiority over colonized peoples, never completely renounced the core insights of liberal philosophy. This was particularly true of the key French liberal she considers, Alexis de Tocqueville. According to Pitts, Tocqueville's defense of French colonial policy in Algeria followed directly from his liberal commitments, particularly his belief that individualism and statism had severely weakened French civic life. Tocqueville believed that this trend could only be counteracted through great enterprises demanding sacrifice and promoting national grandeur—a project, he believed, to which colonial expansion in Algeria leant itself perfectly. Pitts writes, “The ruthlessness Tocqueville often displayed toward the conquered peoples of Algeria seems to have stemmed, in part, precisely from his deep-seated fear about the vulnerability of liberty in France.”Footnote ¹⁶ The relative ease with which prominent liberals became champions of imperialism—despite the availability of contrary arguments—invites, Pitts suggests, considerable skepticism about the ultimate goals and coherence of the liberal project as a whole.

French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day, edited by Raf Geenens and Helena Rosenblatt, is a valuable compendium of these three historiographical trends. In their introduction, Geenens and Rosenblatt single out a number of French liberalism's recurring features—a common ancestry going back to Montesquieu, a “liberal–republican conception of freedom,” an “unwavering attention to . . . social situatedness,” a belief that rights exist through the state rather than against the state, and an “ingenious understanding of the relation between individuals and institutions.”Footnote ¹⁷ Yet they ultimately conclude that despite its “richness, variety and longevity,” French liberalism remains an “ambiguous” phenomenon, as “many key figures in France's ‘liberal’ tradition actually hold a subtle and somewhat reticent attitude towards what are traditionally—from an Anglo-American perspective—seen as core liberal values,” particularly individual rights.Footnote ¹⁸ Representing revisionism, Lucien Jaume reiterates his thesis regarding French liberalism's three schools, while emphasizing his claim that the monarchy's alliance with the bourgeoisie during the Ancien Régime fostered the view, even among liberals, that the state was an emancipatory force.Footnote ¹⁹ Jean-Fabien Spitz accepts revisionism's characterization of French liberalism, but gives it a positive spin: liberal republicanism endorses a political system which, “generated by law, must be measured not according to the range of choices available to the individual but according to the vigor with which choices could be made independently of the arbitrary will of third persons.”Footnote ²⁰ Spitz thus blends into his view of liberalism a republican current that Anglo-American political philosophers (most prominently Philip PettitFootnote ²¹) have tended to see as a distinct alternative to liberalism.

Other contributors to the volume are “complicators,” who single out French liberalism's distinctive and esoteric traits. Returning to the theme of religion as a neglected element in the French liberal tradition, Helena Rosenblatt analyzes the proposition, advanced by Constant, Sismondi, and Edouard Laboulaye, that France would become liberal only by undergoing a Protestant reformation. In this way, France's distinctive theological–political problem—the fact that it experienced a political revolution without a corresponding religious revolution—becomes an additional piece of the puzzle that is French illiberalism.Footnote ²² Cheryl B. Welch identifies hostility to utilitarianism or “anti-Bethamism” as an important feature of French liberalism as it coalesced in the mid-nineteenth century. French liberals abhorred utilitarianism's consequentialist ethics, materialism, emphasis on economics, and association with Britain. Against the grain of this marginalization of utilitarianism, Welch offers a fascinating analysis of the alternative interpretations of utilitarianism's role in American and British public life by Alexis de Tocqueville and Elie Halévy: both frustrated the expectations of their French interlocutors by showing that utilitarian political cultures did not necessarily have noxious effects, not in order to whitewash utilitarianism, but to encourage their compatriots to reconsider their own dogmatic assumptions in ways that might foster political moderation.Footnote ²³ Turning to later periods, William Logue and Samuel Moyn examine another of French liberalism's complicating traits: its grounding in a thick conception of society rather than an atomistic theory of individualism. Logue shows that by the Third Republic it had become clear that philosophy was incapable of providing liberalism with a basis for moral obligation. The emerging field of sociology stepped in to fill this gap, as thinkers like Alfred Espinas, Alfred Fouillée, Emile Durkheim, and Célestin Bouglé showed that individualism was fully compatible with an expansive conception of the individual's obligation to society (precisely because the individual was a product of society), thus providing a sociological underpinning to liberal politics.Footnote ²⁴ Samuel Moyn persuasively demonstrates that two of the key figures associated with the so-called liberal revival of the 1970s, political philosophers Claude Lefort and Marcel Gauchet, never rallied to an Anglo-American conception of liberalism, but justified liberalism on the basis of a “phenomenological account of human sociality” that drew deeply from Marxism and postmodernism.Footnote ²⁵

The “skeptical” perspective is represented in the volume by Alan S. Kahan, in a chapter on the increasingly debated question of the relationship between Tocqueville's liberalism and his support for empire. Kahan lays out the paradoxical nature of Tocqueville's analysis of European imperialism: though he abhorred racism and recognized with sober lucidity the violence and ultimate futility of colonial rule, Tocqueville, when analyzing colonial subjects, ceased to make the maximization of freedom his primary concern. Kahan writes, “In France, freedom trumps power. Tocqueville will never praise the power wielded by Louis XIV or Napoleon as an adequate substitute for freedom. But elsewhere, the maintenance of national power—that of England in Ireland and India, that of France in Algeria—takes precedence.”Footnote ²⁶

French Liberalism offers a few intriguing clues as to how this apparently exceptional phenomenon might inform the preoccupations of mainstream liberal thought. Stephen Holmes analyzes Constant's critique of the arguments used during the Terror to justify the suspension of normal legal procedures, highlighting Constant's insight that extra-constitutional measures do not so much provide the state additional strength to face challenges during national emergencies as corrupt its judgment and increase the likelihood that violence will spin out of control. His not-so-subtle implication is that Constant's analysis of the Terror, far from being parochially French, is particularly relevant to thinking about rights in an age of a seemingly endless and boundless War on Terror.Footnote ²⁷ Jean-Fabien Spitz, in defending liberal republicanism, contends that an active democracy and a capable state remain the necessary conditions for the preservation of personal liberties in the contemporary age. Finally, Geenens and Rosenblatt note that French liberalism offers a useful corrective to current debates about liberalism, which tend to dwell overwhelmingly on individualism: rather than “blindly opposing individual and state, the ‘sociological sophistication’ of French liberals” offers an “awareness of the extent to which individual liberty is interwoven with its social and political basis.”Footnote ²⁸

A FRENCH TRADITION OF POLITICAL MODERATION

Yet while these insights are evocative, reflections on the significance of French liberalism, political culture, and historical experience for liberal thought tout court assume center stage in the work of several recent historians of political thought. Though it examines major thinkers in the French liberal tradition—Montesquieu, the monarchiens, de Staël, and Constant—Aurelian Craiutu's latest book claims not to be about liberalism as such. Rather, it is a history of moderation in French political thought from 1748 to 1830. The book's title—A Virtue for Courageous Minds—leaves little doubt as to the author's assessment of this tradition. Craiutu has written what the French call a livre-programme: a study of political moderation, to be sure, but also a brazen apology for it. This is necessary, he maintains, because moderation's defenders are too few. “How,” he asks, “can one be enthusiastic about something that lacks charisma, carries the connotation of small-mindedness and philistine dullness, and promotes what Nietzsche once denounced as bland or soft moralism?”Footnote ²⁹ Moderation, moreover, tends to be associated with “docility, indecision, pettiness, and submissiveness, traits of the weak or the meek,” in addition to standing accused of being a cover for antidemocratic and antiegalitarian sentiments.Footnote ³⁰ Yet while Craiutu acknowledges the case against moderation, his own defense of it is surprisingly oblique. He points out that radicalism is not always what it seems: it can, in certain circumstances, be an indirect way of achieving moderate reforms (the porous and paradoxical relationship between moderation and extremism is one of the book's recurrent themes). More importantly, he responds to moderation's critics by asserting that moderation is not a walk in the park: “Appearances notwithstanding, moderation is, in fact, a difficult virtue for courageous minds.”Footnote ³¹ Yet the criticisms that Craiutu invokes do not primarily reproach moderates for their lack of moral stamina. To accuse moderates of being docile, opportunistic, or antidemocratic is to blame their political judgment, not their will—to question their excessive deference to the order of things and the compromises this requires at times when more compelling moral or political ends demand consideration.

Craiutu's admirably erudite examination of the history of the moderate political tradition suggests another reason, besides moral courage, why moderation can be so appealing in certain contexts. While moderation may simply be the natural inclination of particular institutions and personality types, it seems to matter at times when politics is dominated by passion. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Craiutu notes, moderation was conceived as an “antidote to (political and religious) zealotry, fanaticism, and extremism.”Footnote ³² An example of such moderation can be found in Montaigne, known for his skeptical willingness to suspend judgment on all absolute claims to truth, particularly with regard to the fanatical theological positions that had recently torn apart French society. Similarly, in the eighteenth century, the target of moderation was, once again, fanaticism: Voltaire, Smith, and Hume, Craiutu writes, “put forward a trenchant critique of fanaticism as a dangerous form of immoderation, one that they all equated with intolerance, corruption of the mind, and ignorance.”Footnote ³³ With the exception of Montesquieu, most of the figures Craiutu analyzes in detail—the monarchiens (the “radical moderates” in the Constitutional Assembly of 1789–91), Jacques Necker, de Staël, and Constant—grappled with the passions unleashed by the French Revolution. If these thinkers should be considered moderates—a claim for which Craiutu builds a persuasive case—it was because they were acutely sensitive to and troubled by the ways in which Revolutionary upheaval became a breeding ground for unruly political emotions. Thus in her writings of the Revolutionary period, de Staël proposed what Craiutu calls an “anatomy of political fanaticism.” In particular, she maintained that of “all the political passions . . . it was fanaticism and the passion for equality, ‘the subterranean volcano of France,’ that came to dominate and transform the French political scene in the second half of 1792.”Footnote ³⁴ Though she readily admitted that passions could play a salutary role in politics, de Staël's moderation was premised on a sophisticated understanding of the dangers that fanaticism as a particular breed of political passion posed to a society, as Craiutu eloquently explains: “Fanatics [according to de Staël] demand unconditional obedience and uniformity of thought . . . They tend to reduce every political and moral issue to one single problem (or dimension) on which they focus blindly.”Footnote ³⁵Thus at least at moments when it was self-consciously articulated as a political discourse, moderation presented itself as a response to a very specific political problem: the (perceived) disruption and instability which consuming political passions inflict upon society. If France has a moderate tradition, it would seem to be symbiotically bound to the country's tumultuous post-Revolutionary history.

While Craiutu skillfully situates the emergence of political moderation at a specific historical juncture, his argument is not primarily contextual. Indeed, he does not fully exploit his intriguing insight that moderation feeds contextually off a perception that politics has entered into a state of passionate excess. Instead, he wants to make the case for a kind of éternelle modération that exists as a permanent political option. Craiutu does not simply argue for moderation's past and present relevance; upping the ante, he claims that moderation is a coherent ideology in its own right. For Craiutu, political moderation consists of three “basic attitudes”: a commitment to the pluralism of “ideas, interests, and social forces,” which can be played off one another in order to mitigate political and social tension; a preference for gradual reform and compromise over revolution and dogmatism; and a tolerant disposition that eschews a Manichean vision of the world.Footnote ³⁶ He further argues that the development of moderation has followed four major “meta-narratives”: “moderation,” a term that initially referred to a personal virtue, became a “set of institutional arrangements calculated to uphold and protect individual liberty”; it has a deep affinity with “institutional/constitutional complexity”; its project consists in “‘trimming’ between extremes” in order to keep “the ship of state on an even keel”; and finally, it is by nature eclectic, drawing from a wide range of political vocabularies.Footnote ³⁷ Yet most of these meta-narratives are in fact definitions. Craiutu is less interested in conceptualizing the specific circumstances that elicit moderate solutions than in identifying situations in which moderates could ultimately say “I told you so.” For instance, when discussing the defeat of the monarchiens, he writes, “it is tempting to ask if France might have avoided the tragic Terror of 1793 had the ideas of Mounier and his colleagues carried the day early on,” adding that perhaps “it was not the monarchiens who espoused unrealistic plans, but their opponents on both the left and the right, who refused to address the real long-term interests and needs of the French nation, and defended anachronistic agendas.”Footnote ³⁸ Thus despite its close chronological focus on a relatively brief period in French history, Craiutu's book has an oddly ahistorical ring. Its story is one of how the proponents of a coherent ideology always “get it right,” rather than of the way in which complex and uncertain circumstances informed distinctly moderate exercises in political judgment.

Craiutu's argument is premised on the notion that moderation can be reified—specifically, as an identifiable political ideology. True, he opens the book by stating that moderation is a “virtue”—indeed, “the quintessential political virtue.”Footnote ³⁹ Virtues, Aristotle reminds us, are habits, forming “states of character” that are realized in human action.Footnote ⁴⁰ Virtues, that is, are dispositions to behave in a particular way. Yet, in Craiutu's argument, a slippage occurs, which he fully acknowledges: over time, moderation as a disposition becomes political moderation—that is, an ideology or belief system. “One of the conclusions of the present book,” he writes, “is that moderation does have substantive political orientations and values of its own.”Footnote ⁴¹ While it lacks “well-defined boundaries” and is far from monolithic, it has recognizable “values, ideas, principles, institutions, and political strategies.”Footnote ⁴² In many ways, Craiutu's argument hinges on whether one accepts his conflation of this disposition with this ideology.

Yet much of what Craiutu finds appealing about moderation as a political ideology seems to refer more appropriately to the moderate disposition. A disposition shapes action in particular contexts; it informs one's judgment; it determines how one solves problems, not merely what one is trying to achieve. Craiutu shows this moderate disposition at work in the support of the monarchiens, during the Constitutional Assembly's debates in the summer of 1789, for a brief Declaration of Rights that would be published simultaneously with the new Constitution, lest the former's abstract language inspire far-fetched political demands;Footnote ⁴³ in Jacques Necker's attempts, as the Estates General met at Versailles, to strike a compromise between the king and the Third Estate; and in Constant's appeal to defend the Directory, even if it meant resorting to extralegal means, against its enemies. In this way, Craiutu does convincingly demonstrate that this period gave rise to a distinctive moderate disposition, characterized by an aversion to abstract principles, distaste for political passions, and an affinity for compromise. The problem is that Craiutu treats this disposition as a political program with its own internal logic, rather than as a temperament informing a particular set of political positions. Thus Mounier, a key monarchien, staunchly defended before the Constitutional Assembly the aristocracy's crucial role in the affairs of the realm. According to Craiutu, Mounier

Clearly Mounier's belief in the moderating role of independent social elites and intermediary bodies in general informed his defense of aristocratic prerogative, yet his remarks remain a defense of aristocratic prerogative all the same. Consequently, it seems something of an understatement to characterize an outspoken apology for the aristocracy at the very moment when the old regime was on the brink of collapse as simply “moderate.” Could not Mounier be better described as an example of one of de Dijn's “aristocratic liberals?” In short, what Craiutu calls moderation's “substantive political orientation,” as opposed to moderation as a disposition or form of political judgment, frequently assumes an elitist, antidemocratic, and conservative shading which he is reluctant to acknowledge.

A related problem is that Craiutu never provides an entirely satisfactory explanation of why, in his exploration of moderation, he has chosen to focus exclusively on liberals. He points out that “many of the monarchiens’ ideas ultimately prevailed in the works and initiatives of like-minded liberals such as Boissy d’Anglas, whose liberalism, while socially and economically conservative, stood for a strong but limited state.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He writes that Jacques Necker “affirmed a set of values and principles belonging to the pantheon of classical liberalism—individualism, liberty, pluralism, and limited power (constitutionalism)—which he shared with the other members of the Coppet group.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Moreover, not only the individuals, but also many of the ideas Craiutu describes as “moderate,” are commonly associated with liberalism. In particular, he argues that moderates favor “institutional complexity” because complex institutions temper and filter partisan passions, thus providing individuals with some assurance that they will not be oppressed by ideologically extreme leaders. Craiutu acknowledges that moderation can be found in other political traditions besides liberalism. He notes, for instance, that the Feuillants were moderate republicans. He mentions Swedish social democracy, Poland's Solidarity movement, and Tony Blair's “Third Way” as examples of political moderation that do not strictly belong in the liberal camp (though exactly how far they stray from it is debatable). In practice, however, Craiutu's study of political moderation is really a defense of liberalism, albeit one in which moderation is held to be liberalism's cardinal virtue.

The problem with treating moderation as a coherent political ideology is that it fails to acknowledge moderation's essentially transitive character. One never simply “moderates”; one can only moderate something or someone. It follows that describing a person as “moderate” provides us too little information. Moderation is a way of approaching the political questions of the day. Alternatively, it is particular disposition existing within an ideology or belief system (it is not quite absurd, for instance, to speak of moderate communists or fascists). Yet it seems mistaken to suggest that this attitude is a coherent political philosophy. In the United States, a moderate is someone who “trims” between favoring “big government” and the free market. In Iran, moderates “trim” between the view that Islam should permeate all realms of social life and a more secularist and pluralistic outlook. To treat moderation as a tradition of political thought that exists independently of concrete alternatives existing in particular times and places is misleading. What Craiutu is really addressing in his book is the emergence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France of a liberal outlook that sought to moderate the destructive passions released by French Revolution. But this does not necessarily mean that there exists a self-standing, autonomous tradition of political moderation as such, at least not one that is distinct from liberalism. In focusing on the idea of political moderation, Craiutu has indeed addressed an important and often overlooked idea in the history of political thought (at least in France and Europe), and his analyses of how it functions are excellent. Perhaps in the work's second volume (devoted to moderation in the twentieth century, of which a foretaste can be found in his chapter on Raymond Aron in French Liberalism Footnote ⁴⁷) these problems relating to the conceptualization of moderation and its relation to liberalism will be clarified.

LIBERALISM AS SENTIMENT

Though it is not its stated goal, K. Steven Vincent's latest book can, in many respects, be read as an exploration of the same tradition of political moderation which Craiutu has analyzed—a point to which we shall return. Vincent assigns himself the seemingly modest task of reconstructing “what self-proclaimed ‘liberal’ thinkers meant when they first used the term ‘liberal’ to refer to a political stance.”Footnote ⁴⁸ His focus is Benjamin Constant, who, in recent years, has become the object of something approaching a cult among intellectual historians and historians of political thought.Footnote ⁴⁹ Vincent's justification for studying Constant, as well as Germaine de Staël (who appears in a supporting role) is that they “were the first to use the term ‘liberal’ to refer to their political stance.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In this “densely contextualized intellectual biography,” Vincent makes five interrelated claims concerning the nature of French liberalism.Footnote ⁵¹ First, while French liberalism did not coalesce into a doctrine until the empire, it first emerged as a critical reaction to the Terror that was initially articulated in the new political circumstances offered by the Thermidorian Convention and the Directory. Second, French liberalism was, at its outset, primarily concerned with civil and political issues; economic concerns were relegated to the margins. Third, while it certainly embraced constitutional measures to ensure liberty, French liberalism stands out for the crucial role it attributed to habits and customs (moeurs) in preserving a free polity. Fourth, French liberals were “pluralists,” who saw “political sovereignty as inherently dangerous and politics as ongoing negotiation among divergent groups and interests.”Footnote ⁵² Fifth, French liberals were essentially conservative in their social outlook, and felt no need to apologize for the fact that their movement was one of “well-to-do elites who had, at best, little concern for the plight of the underclass.”Footnote ⁵³

Arguably, however, the book's most intriguing insight is that a sustained reflection on human passions and their political significance was critical to liberalism's inception and early theorization. To begin with, liberalism was, Vincent demonstrates, the upshot of Constant's sentimental education. He describes Constant's cosmopolitan upbringing in Switzerland, Scotland, Brunswick, and Paris, placing particular emphasis on his bleak outlook and troubled character—his promiscuity, emotional neediness, “fear of ending relationships,” and “inability to sustain them.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus in 1790, the young Constant wrote, “I feel more than ever the nothingness of all things.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Though Vincent claims that his biography is primarily political, his efforts to capture Constant's personality and private life are particularly insightful.

Vincent implies that Constant's sensitivity and lifelong preoccupation with emotion may have played a crucial role in the development of his distinctive form of liberalism. This is particularly evident in his reaction to the Terror. In Vincent's reading, the political problem of the Terror lay not, as revisionism holds, in the totalitarian implications of the Jacobin conception of indivisible sovereignty, but rather in the way the Terror gave free reign to the most destructive human passions. Revolutions are dangerous, Constant concluded, because they draw out the worst in human nature. Desires and instincts that social inhibitions usually rein in suddenly run amok, feeding off and emboldening each another in a vicious emotional circle. In addition to stoking fanaticism, the Terror also spawned a culture of fear and resignation and, most troublingly, cultivated a French propensity towards self-interest—clearing the consciences, as Constant put it, of “those egoistic and timid souls who demand only rest, and who do not feel, in their senseless calculations, that repose under despotism is only helplessness in despair.”Footnote ⁵⁶ In short, Vincent shows that the analysis of the Terror which informed Constant's fledgling liberalism was psychological and moral, grounded in an understanding of the dynamics of human emotion, rather than narrowly political. The originality of Vincent's argument lies in his claim that the liberal impulse arose (at least in France) less from a commitment to specific constitutional or institutional arrangements, or even to an ethical end, than from a particular understanding of the social consequences of humanity's passionate nature.

This insight, Vincent believes, should also inform our understanding of the liberal politics Constant came to advocate. If human beings are essentially passionate creatures, whose emotions grow dangerously overheated during such tumultuous events as revolutions, then the goal of politics must be to intervene directly in these emotions, either by reining them in or by offsetting them with sentiments that tighten social bonds. Liberalism is thus the political philosophy which acknowledges that human beings are creatures of passion, yet still maintains that they can be free. Though constitutional arrangements—such as limiting the state's capacity to inflict damage should it be taken over by fanatics—remained central to this project, he also demanded social spaces in which positive human emotions (i.e. contributing to society's well-being) could be nurtured. De Staël, Vincent argues, believed that salons (of the kind she famously hosted) provided a model of how individuals, in conditions of relative equality, might openly disagree with one another without causing rancor. Constant, for his part, feared that salons might inflame fanaticism rather than stamp it out. As an alternative, he proposed active engagement in civic life, but in a way that differed considerably from the Jacobin conception of political participation. For Jacobins, political participation consisted in fusing one's individual will into the general will; for Constant, it was a way of counteracting the self's egotistical passions while also satisfying its emotional needs. Constant concluded, Vincent maintains, that in the Terror's aftermath, “the Republic was being undermined by the moeurs that had characterized the old regime monarchy.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Specifically, he worried about the aimless and corrosive selfishness which manifested itself as ennui: “Disgraceful ennui,” he wrote, “marks with its seal all that which is not either degraded by servitude, distracted by ignoble pleasures, or preserved from contagion by study and isolation.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Yet Constant rejected the classical republican's and Jacobin's antidote of choice: virtue. He believed that modern societies could never accept a complete renunciation of the individual's needs and interests. Instead, Constant proposed “‘interest’ stimulated by ‘enthusiasm’”Footnote ⁵⁹ (a sentiment whose merits de Staël had praised at length). Enthusiasm pulls us out of ourselves, yet at the same time it provides the modern self with the gratification it craves, a sense of purpose and the experience of being “electrified by the recognition of equals”Footnote ⁶⁰ which rescues the self from the corrosive narcissism of ennui. In this way, Vincent offers a highly original and persuasive account of Constant's political thought that simultaneously sheds light on the state of mind in which the liberal disposition was cultivated. Neither the need to protect the individual from politics (and, by extension, the state), nor the commercial character of modern liberty appears, in this account, as the cornerstone of Constant's liberalism: rather, it is his account of the political impact of emotions. Constant, Vincent writes, “believed that moral judgments and political decisions relied on sentiments.”Footnote ⁶¹

Vincent's insight into the undergirding of Constant's political thought in a theory of emotions allows him to address the question implicitly posed in Craiutu's book: what is the relationship between liberalism and political moderation? Vincent argues in effect that liberalism emerged as a distinctive political outlook in France during the Directory because of the need to moderate the passions that the Revolution had unleashed and the Terror had whipped into a frenzy. Vincent can make the case for Constant's moderation because he recognizes its transitive character: what needed moderating were the emotions that the Terror had thrived upon: idealism, fear, vengeance—basic human dispositions whose delicate integration into the individual's emotional balance was knocked off-kilter by traumatic political upheaval. Such thinking, Vincent claims, “indicates that Constant was a moderate.”Footnote ⁶² Constant's moderation thus consisted less in a set of constitutional principles designed to moderate extreme views than in a highly contextualized exercise of political judgment, in which the goal was to carefully avoid rocking the ship of state in way that would once again upset the balance of political emotions. Vincent claims that Constant was a “proponent of the Republic that the revolution had created, but recognized that it required not only a constitutional structure to prevent new excesses, but also a careful nurturing to prevent passions of the moment from tearing it asunder.”Footnote ⁶³

Vincent's view of Constant as a moderate is tied to another crucial claim he makes about his liberalism: that he came to embrace a fundamentally pragmatic view of politics, founded on the rejection of absolute principles as a basis for pursuing political goals. Vincent argues that, contrary to those who have criticized him for his “inconstancy” and opportunism, Constant remained committed, from 1795 on, to a moderate republic founded on popular sovereignty and individual rights. His assessment, however, of the conditions required for the stability of such a regime fluctuated with this period's tumultuous ebb and flow. In 1795, Constant had initially opposed the Two-Thirds Law, which reserved two-thirds of the seats in the legislative assemblies created by the Constitution of 1795 for the outgoing members of the Post-Thermidorian Convention. Yet after the royalist uprising of Vendémaire 1795—with whose views Constant found himself associated—Constant flip-flopped: while using the law to reserve legislative seats for a particular faction was not an ideal political principle, it was one way to ensure the Republic's survival —and, perhaps, just as importantly, the tenuous stability that post-Themidorian politics promised—against the return of destructive political passions. Of this decision, Vincent writes, “This is an early example of one of the important dimensions of Constant's ‘liberal’ stance: the refusal to embrace any principle absolutely. He would always consider the impact on principles of the surrounding context.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Constant even went so far as to accept the suspension of the rule of law—a surprising position for a liberal, to say the least—as when he supported the Directory's 18 Fructidor coup of 1797. Yet he did so only because he believed that such extraordinary measures were, as Vincent puts it, the “least menacing” course for protecting liberalism and constitutionalism and that the coup itself was “moderate and pragmatic,” a necessary measure at a time when monarchical moeurs were still widespread.Footnote ⁶⁵ But when the Directory showed signs of becoming too comfortable with the regular abuse of authority—as with the purge of Floréal 1798—Constant opposed it. His commitment to a moderate regime within a republican framework was entirely consistent, Vincent argues; what changed was Constant's assessment of the situation in which France found itself.

Constant's navigation of the choppy waters of post-Thermidorian politics thus perfectly instantiates what Craiutu calls “trimming,” though in ways that challenge what many would hold to be core liberal values: Constant was prepared to support a legally baseless extension of state power if (and only if) his best judgment told him that doing so would ultimately lead to a moderate regime. What makes Vincent's interpretation fascinating is his willingness to view this very pragmatism—more than any particular substantive commitments—as the core of Constant's liberalism. Constant, Vincent suggests, offers no definitive teaching on the question of the relative priority that should be given to individual rights and popular sovereignty, sociocultural cohesion and self-interest, and the rule of law and democracy's right to protect itself. “One of the things that characterized the pluralistic liberalism of Constant,” Vincent writes, “was recognition that these are difficult issues, and that any hard-and-fast choice of either side of these various political conundrums will cause problems.”Footnote ⁶⁶

In this way, the picture Vincent presents to us of Constant's political philosophy differs distinctly from the interpretation offered by Helena Rosenblatt. The Vincent–Rosenblatt debate may well shape Constant scholarship in upcoming years. Rosenblatt argues that Constant, as a result of his exposure to the Scottish and German Enlightenment, as well as the influence of the Coppet group, was deeply marked by Protestant theology, in a way that gave his entire political thought a staunchly moral tenor. Constant's belief that the key political problem was not the constitutional form of the state, but the amount of power that the state is allowed to wield, was rooted in the deep sense of individuality that was fostered by his attraction to Protestantism, as was his belief that morality and moral sentiments, rather than self-interest, were individualism's wellsprings. If Constant's own personal religious beliefs were always ambivalent, his sympathy for religious sentiments (as opposed to the religious forms in which they became alienated) formed, Rosenblatt argues, the bedrock of his liberal values.

Vincent, however, questions the extent to which Constant's most deeply held beliefs were based in religion. “[T]o fold [Constant’s] liberalism into this religious dimension,” Vincent argues, “is overly reductive”: his views on religion were no more central to his liberalism than other moral and intellectual commitments.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet Vincent does more than simply unmoor Constant's liberalism from its purportedly religious basis; he challenges the notion that Constant's main contribution to political thought is about “values” at all. Vincent does not deny that Constant had values, and largely agrees with Rosenblatt as to which ones mattered most to him (i.e. an aversion to an overweening state and sympathy for modern liberty, to name the most obvious). But what interests Vincent about Constant is the way in which his liberalism depends—at least under certain circumstances—on a kind of willing suspension of disbelief in political values as such. Vincent writes, “Liberals like Constant and Staël believed that political contestation was an inescapable dimension of the modern human condition. There always would be conflicting interests and divergent ideals, and there always would be persistent political divisions.”Footnote ⁶⁸ To be a liberal, in a sense, is to accept politics as a space in which no value ultimately triumphs, in which each value is condemned to be relativized. Politics leads to no “rational truth.” Rather, there were, for Constant, only “incommensurable positions that reflected the different interests and perspectives of different groups and regions. Politics, as a consequence, was the hard work of concrete negotiation and compromise.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Rosenblatt's Constant is nearer to John Stuart Mill, in the way that deep individuality and a concomitant suspicion of organized power become the touchstone for his political outlook. Vincent's Constant, however, anticipates the liberalism of Isaiah Berlin and Reinhold Niebuhr: its distinguishing characteristics are a willingness to engage in the murky business of politics without appealing to transcendent, totalizing dogmas, which, whatever their allure, may ultimately prove disastrous.

LIBERALISM’S DEMOCRATIC LINING

One of the main concerns of post-Thermidorian liberals was that of the relative importance that popular sovereignty should be assigned in relation to individual rights. Vincent maintains that French liberals of this period were “pragmatic” in that they were “centrally concerned with negotiating the tension between popular sovereignty and civil liberties.”Footnote ⁷⁰ For Vincent, striking the right balance between these alternatives was essentially an exercise in political judgment—one of the “difficult issues” that liberals like Constant were honest enough to acknowledge as such. This dilemma is the theme of Emmanuelle Paulet-Grandguillot's book, notably as it relates to Constant and Jean Charles Léonard Sismondi, a crucial (if often overlooked) figure of the Coppet group. Paulet-Grandguillot does not, however, believe that the proper balance between sovereignty and rights can be determined by a situational judgment call: she sees it as a theoretical question, one with which both Sismondi and Constant wrestled in their effort to propose an adequate constitutional framework in the wake of the Terror. Like many other historians, Paulet-Grandguillot presents French liberalism as a reaction to the Terror, particularly to a political system that (so it was believed) was philosophically grounded in Rousseau's Social Contract. The novelty of her argument lies in the dialectical relationship she discerns between Rousseau and liberals such as Sismondi and Constant. Without denying that the critique of Rousseau was the theoretical sine qua non for liberalism's emergence, she also demonstrates that French liberals not only continued to struggle with Rousseau, but also remained deeply immersed in his system, even as they tried to extricate themselves from it or to correct its most problematic assertions.

Drawing on this insight, Paulet-Grandguillot advances two claims. The first is a point about intellectual influence: in asserting that Sismondi was the major source for Constant's critique of the Social Contract, she challenges the conventional wisdom that Constant's greatest influence, at least in the Coppet circle, was Germaine de Staël. The second, more theoretical, argument is that French liberalism, in part as a result of its dialogue with Rousseau, was deeply preoccupied with the distinct but related question of democracy (i.e. popular sovereignty). To be sure, French liberals, in defending limited government and individual rights, pushed back against the absolutist and infallibilistic claims about popular sovereignty made during the Terror, but they also saw liberal freedom as, for better or worse, inextricably bound to popular government—an insight that perhaps constitutes one of their distinctive traits.

Focusing on Sismondi's manuscript Recherches sur les constitutions des peuples libres, Paulet-Grandguillot reconstructs the genesis of his political philosophy, assigning a central place to his engagement with the Social Contract. Sismondi's contribution to political thought is certainly known; Craiutu and Vincent note his influence, as have scholars before them. Few, however, have explored its inner logic as meticulously as Paulet-Grandguillot—a task that, along the way, also leads to a particularly sophisticated reading of the Social Contract. Her main contention is that Sismondi's political philosophy—and by extension, an important stand of liberal thought—was triggered by the need to come to terms with the complex way in which Rousseau tied individual freedom to collective freedom through his concept of the general will. For Rousseau, only when everyone had alienated their natural freedom to the collectivity could the collectivity establish a legitimate polity that guarantees the freedom of each individual (since each has voluntarily alienated an equal amount of freedom) and incorporates them into the political order (or “sovereign”). In other words, the guarantee of one's freedom as an individual is inextricably tied to one's participation in the political order, which requires particular interests to be subsumed under the general will. Paulet-Grandguillot argues that for thinkers like Sismondi, the experience of the Terror discredited Rousseau, since it showed that Rousseau's ideas could be manipulated by radical factions and that Rousseau's notion of absolute political sovereignty (resulting from the equally absolute alienation of individual freedom) proved extremely difficult to translate into a functioning political system. However, despite this nod to contextualism, the main thrust of Paulet-Grandguillot's argument is theoretical. The lesson that Sismondi and Constant learned from the Terror, she argues, is that “liberty is not reducible to sovereignty and that its foundation must be found somewhere other than in popular power.” Yet at the same time she believes that both thinkers intuited that Rousseau's insight that political freedom could not be severed from inclusive political participation was largely sound. Consequently, she maintains, “these authors’ liberalism is simultaneously constructed against and with the Contract.”Footnote ⁷¹

This position informs Paulet-Grandguillot's reconstruction of Sismondi's thought. At every turn, she detects traces of Rousseau. Sismondi's Recherches can be read as an attempt to “fix” Rousseau's Social Contract by injecting into it some of what Craiutu calls institutional complexity: where Rousseau founds his legitimate polity on a single social contract (strictly speaking, for Rousseau, there can only be one) and one form of liberty (civil), Sismondi posits the existence of two contracts and several kinds of liberty. The insecurity of liberty in the state of nature is overcome, for Sismondi as for Rousseau, through a social compact which, in one fell swoop, founds the collective sovereign (le souverain collectif) and civil liberty. Yet Sismondi specifically rejected Rousseau's notion that such a compact rested on the total alienation of the individual's natural freedom. Sismondi saw it as based, rather, “only [on] each associate’s alienation of a part of his rights, and even of the smallest part possible.”Footnote ⁷² Whereas, for Rousseau, civil liberty is created ex nihilo, as it were, through the very act of forming the social compact, for Sismondi civil liberty refers to a condition in which one (1) retains liberties possessed in the state of nature and (2) receives from the collective sovereign recognition and protection, which become, in turn, a new set of rights. Thus in Sismondi's conception of the social contract, the contracting parties always retain “reserves”—bundles of rights and freedoms that they do not (and perhaps could not) renounce upon entering it.

Because the collective sovereign—which really refers to all contractors agreeing to follow a set of rules—cannot, as such, effectively tend to its members’ well-being, a second contract is necessary, which Sismondi calls the constitutional pact. This contract is formed between the collective sovereign and the government. This contract, too, has its characteristic “reserve”: the people retain all the powers they have not explicitly delegated to the government. Sismondi calls this “democratic liberty,” as it is by exercising its sovereignty that the people maintain their freedom vis-à-vis the government. Finally, a third form of liberty, which Sismondi calls “political,” refers to the division of sovereignty into several distinct powers in such a way that the government cannot easily violate the other two forms of liberty. In this way, political liberty would seem not so much to be a specific “reserve” of rights, as a systemic effect of a particular constitutional architecture.

The interesting idea lurking behind Paulet-Grandguillot's exhaustive presentation of Sismondi's constitutional thought is her suggestion that French liberals of the post-Thermidor generation could, as it were, live neither with Rousseau nor without him. Sismondi's framework incorporates mechanisms that are specifically designed to fix the kinks that the Terror had revealed in the Social Contract. First, the notion of a total alienation of natural liberty as the paradoxical foundation of civic liberty is flat-out rejected: “civil liberty,” she writes, “cannot be the residue of alienation: it must be the social contract's purpose.”Footnote ⁷³ Second, and by extension, civil liberty (which is primarily concerned with individual rights) is dissociated from democratic liberty, as both are founded on different contracts. Rousseau's circular conflation of the two (there can be no individual rights that are not protected by the collective exercise of sovereignty, and sovereignty cannot be collectively exercised without free individuals) is interrupted. And third, a Montesquieuian conception of separate powers is injected into a social-contract arrangement. Yet Paulet-Grandguillot refuses to see Sismondi's manuscript as a categorical rejection of the the Social Contract. Rousseauian residues permeate the Recherches. Though Sismondi does not believe that civil liberty emanates from democratic liberty, he does imply that the former is unlikely to survive if the latter degenerates. Paulet-Grandguillot thus concludes that the “social pact as partial alienation simultaneously but undeniably institutes a law-producing sovereign and a rights-bearing individual.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Yet in order to accommodate democracy within a liberal framework, Sismondi had to sever democratic liberty from the concept which, in Rousseau's system, had completely underwritten in it. The general will is the linchpin of Rousseau's system of popular rule in the Social Contract. It is the mechanism which ensures that the sovereign always meets with de jure, if not de facto, consent: because every member of the social compact participates in and is subject to the general will, and because its purview is exclusively matters of general interest, the general will, for Rousseau, can only ever be what each individual truly wants. Sismondi, however, rejects the assumption that the individual will is ultimately identical with the general will, and he does so in a way that proves central to his political philosophy. Having argued that individuals who have entered the social compact retain a “reserve” of rights that are not alienated to the collective sovereign, Sismondi does not—or has no need to—see the general will as the infallible verdict of a unitary and indivisible community. Rather, he sees the general will as a fractious, messy accommodation of individual interests. Considered negatively, Sismondi's general will acknowledges that it does not reflect the desires of each member of the compact. Signing on to the social contract entails sacrifice, at least of one's own immediate interests. Considered positively, his general will is the result of a compromise between discordant social interests.

Thus for Sismondi the general will lacks the Cartesian self-evidence it has for Rousseau; it is the outcome of deliberation and negotiation. Moreover, contra Rousseau, Sismondi not only believes that the general will can be represented, but suggests that it only exists insofar as it is represented: the general will is the a posteriori synthesis that can only be achieved through deliberations between delegates that a nation's constitutive groups have expressly chosen to bargain on their behalf. If democratic liberty is the tool through which individuals and their social groups ensure that the general will approximates (though it can rarely equate to) their personal interests, then the cornerstone of Sismondi's constitutional edifice is political liberty, i.e. the provisions which guarantee that no one branch of government can dominate the others. This variation on the tradition of mixed government, to which Sismondi adheres, creates a political system which ensures that a nation's social groups remain in dialogue with one another, turning their shifting kaleidoscope of interests into a form of social consensus (i.e. the general will). While civil liberty is the polity's ultimate goal, political liberty, with some help from democratic liberty, is the tool through which it is preserved. Thus while he continued to speak of a general will, Sismondi assigned it values that were diametrically opposed to the attributes bestowed upon it in the Social Contract: it is fragmented, rather than indivisible; representable, instead of inalienable; not absolute, but limited. Sismondi, Paulet-Grandguillot shows, takes Rousseau's pithy a priori formula and dismantles it, loosening the screws that Rousseau had so tightly joined together. In this way, Sismondi posits a political system based on a notion of consensus that is considerably looser than that of la volonté générale, with all its axiomatic purity.

Yet the ultimate goal of Paulet-Grandguillot's exhaustive analysis of Sismondi is to demonstrate his influence on Constant. While acknowledging the importance of Germaine de Staël's Circonstances and William Godwin's Enquiry to Constant's thinking, Paulet-Grandguillot asserts that of these influences, Sismondi “occupies by far the most important place.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Specifically, she argues that reading the manuscript of Sismondi's Recherches helped Constant to formulate his critique of Rousseau's Social Contract. The refutation of the total alienation of individual rights to the sovereign (and the political absolutism this implies), the view that unrepresentative governments can use the general will for tyrannical ends, and the dangerous distinction between the rights of society and the rights of government are all found in Constant's Principes, but first appeared in Sismondi's Recherches.

Constant's refutation of the Social Contract, however, was ultimately more complete than Sismondi's because of the theoretical importance he gives to a concept that eluded Rousseau as well as Sismondi: the individual. While Constant learned much from Sismondi's manuscript, he concluded that it left too many problems unresolved. In particular, was there not a danger that society itself (i.e. the sovereign that ultimately commands the government) could become tyrannical, particularly since Sismondi allowed it to define the scope of individual liberty? Paulet-Grandguillot concludes that “one can see in the Constantian refusal to distinguish the rights of society from the rights of government an implicit critique of the Sismondian definition of sovereignty.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Unlike Sismondi, Constant

As a result, Constant completely dispenses with any hint of contractualism (at least in terms of an initial social pact), conflating the sovereign people and the government itself into a single concept, that of l’autorité sociale. At the same time, he conceives of the individual as an ontologically independent being, rather than as an escape clause or “reserve” in an otherwise supervening contract. While Sismondi helped Constant to conceptualize a state that was limited by individual liberty, Constant nonetheless went well beyond his friend's somewhat convoluted and aporetic analysis in founding a liberal political philosophy that made individualism the key to dispelling the abuses to which Rousseau's theoretical constructs had given rise.

Paulet-Grandguillot demonstrates that the exchange between Sismondi and Constant on the relationship between individual rights and popular sovereignty was a definitive moment in the formation of French liberal thought. Yet the conclusions of her study are a little more predictable than one would expect. Do we really need a long detour through Sismondi to grasp that Constant's main intellectual achievement was to reject the Social Contract as despotic and to posit individual liberty as the primary political good? Her argument about the centrality of Sismondi to Constant's intellectual development seems both overstated and too literal. She persuasively identifies the common interests and concerns the two thinkers shared, thus rounding out our understanding of the Coppet mindset. But it is not clear why Sismondi's rather elaborate theories should be seen as more decisive to Constant's distinctive liberalism than, say, his ongoing engagement with religious thought, as Rosenblatt has explored, or his attempts to make sense of his political commitments, as Vincent argues. The most interesting chapters of the book are those in which she suggests that French liberals like Sismondi sought to fix Rousseau rather than discard him, by organizing popular sovereignty in a way that would pose no threat to individual freedom. For Paulet-Grandguillot, French liberalism resembles, in relation to the Social Contract, one of Michelangelo's slaves: it seeks to extricate itself from the very substance out of which it is formed. Yet Paulet-Grandguillot's final assessment is that Sismondi and Constant were, in fact, liberals rather than democrats, the former due to his interest in limiting sovereignty through the separation of powers, the latter because he believed that individual liberty was absolute and could never derive from a social convention. It is a shame that only a few inconclusive pages are devoted to the passages in Constant's essay on ancient and modern liberty, where he suggests that individual rights do in fact depend on popular sovereignty. Her conclusion is similarly hesitant, confining itself to saying that democracy and liberalism ultimately need each other. Her own reading of Sismondi and Constant suggests otherwise: they ultimately represent a choice for liberalism over the democratic (if at times illiberal) option embodied by Rousseau.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS: DEMOCRACY, ECONOMICS, EMOTIONS

The books under discussion in this essay suggest a number of questions that future scholarship might productively consider. The point of these books is, for the most part, not to disclose previously overlooked material, but to probe some of the constitutive dilemmas of liberal thought from a historically informed perspective. The following questions are posed in this spirit. Like the books themselves, these questions contain a healthy dose of presentism, since liberalism continues to belong to the normative horizon of our time. As Craiutu, Vincent, and Paulet-Grandguillot suggest, the history of French liberalism, in part because of its apparent exceptionalism, can help us to clarify some of the problems that still afflict contemporary liberal societies.

First, what does the history of French liberalism tell us about the connection between liberalism and democracy (in the sense of popular sovereignty)? Norberto Bobbio once argued that this relationship admits three possible combinations: a relation of possibility (liberalism and democracy are compatible, but each can exist independently of the other); a relation of impossibility (liberalism is incompatible with democracy and vice versa); and a relation of necessity (neither liberalism nor democracy can exist without the other).Footnote ⁷⁸ The books discussed in this essay tend to support Bobbio's first combination, the relation of possibility. They lend credence to the view that liberalism's pedigree is largely independent of democracy’s—or, to the extent that they are related, liberalism must be seen as a reaction to the problems democracy raises. The thinkers Craiutu examines see democracy as a regime that requires moderating (though others do too), which generally leads them to prefer a mixed constitution over a purely democratic system. Though Paulet-Grandguillot is interested in Sismondi's and Constant's views on popular sovereignty, she, too, emphasizes the restrictions they would impose on it. Of the three, Vincent is most taken by Constant's occasional flirtation with republicanism and popular sovereignty (thus building and expanding on Andrew Jainchill's interpretation). Yet Vincent often casts Constant's conception of the relationship between popular sovereignty and individual rights in decisionistic terms: choosing one or the other is an existential choice made in a political fog. It is one of the “difficult issues” that liberals inevitably confront. Yet, arguably, one of the most interesting French contributions to liberal political thought has been the attention given to Bobbio's third possibility: the relation of necessity.Footnote ⁷⁹ This is precisely Jean-Fabien Spitz's point when he asserts that

This idea has received considerable attention in contemporary political philosophy, notably in the work of Philip Pettit and Jürgen Habermas.Footnote ⁸¹ As Geenens and Rosenblatt note, US Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer has drawn on Constant to advance a version of this argument: specifically, that private liberty can never be divorced from democratic participation.Footnote ⁸² This claim seems particularly topical at a time when supranational organizations (such as the European Union) promote liberal rights very selectively, without devoting similar efforts to expanding popular sovereignty; in which corporations hold liberal property rights to be sacrosanct even as they brazenly subvert democratic processes; and in which populations across the globe grow increasingly skeptical about the capacity of liberal democracies to represent them (witness the “Occupy” movement, Spain's Indignados, anti-corruption movements in Brazil and India, and so on). The insight that lies at the heart of Paulet-Granguillot's book—that liberalism has a democratic lining—seems more politically and intellectually relevant than ever.Footnote ⁸³

Second, how have the French conceived of the relationship between the political and economic forms of liberalism? Scholarship has, for the most part, kept these issues at arm's length. Craiutu and Paulet-Grandguillot do not really address economic issues. They also take a backseat in Vincent's study, though he does offer a brief, if intriguing, analysis of Constant's Commentaire sur l’ouvrage de Filangieri. Constant, Vincent makes clear, views state interference in the economy with the same suspicion in which he holds sovereign power in general. Yet at the same time, Constant's belief in human perfectibility and his anti-utilitarianism prevented him from ever viewing human beings as primarily motivated by self-interest or profit maximization. Ambivalence towards the very notion of homo oeconomicus seems to characterize French economic liberalism; consequently, an economic illiberalism appears to dovetail with its political counterpart. This point is reinforced by the excellent essays devoted to this topic in French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day. Philippe Steiner argues that French liberal economists from Jean-Baptiste Say to Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, by way of Charles Dunoyer and Frédéric Bastiat, were actually less concerned with theorizing market interactions than with thinking about how economic ideas (including, but not limited to, self-interest) could inform a modern science of governance.Footnote ⁸⁴ Serge Audier explains (as he now has in several major books) that, in France, the term “neoliberalism” has often referred to efforts to correct the shortcomings of classical, “Manchesterian” economic liberalism through state intervention and Keynesianism. Only in the 1970s did it become associated with radical free-market-thinking and privatization à outrance.Footnote ⁸⁵ Economic liberalism in France would thus seem to share a number of characteristics with French political liberalism: anti-utilitarianism, an institutional rather than an individualistic basis, and an (often) far less hostile attitude towards the state than one finds in Anglo-American (or Austrian) traditions. Of further interest is the question of how the republican strand in French liberalism impacts its conception of the economy. In his fascinating contribution to the Geenens and Rosenblatt volume, Richard Whatmore breaks with the trend of emphasizing French liberalism's Anglophilia by showing how, during the revolution, liberal republicans (mainly Girondins) boldly contrasted French republican liberty with a British imperial system rooted in the capitalist pursuit of profit.Footnote ⁸⁶ The republican belief that non-domination requires a public sphere that frees individuals from private servitude—including servitude to economic entities (a point also emphasized by Spitz)—stands in sharp contrast to a liberal tradition that usually gives property rights the benefit of the doubt. Further elucidation on the intellectual relationship between French economic and political liberalism could also shed light on the phenomenon of “antiliberalism” which frequently pervades French political discourse.Footnote ⁸⁷

Finally, can the history of French liberalism—and liberalism tout court—be approached as a history of emotions, sentiments, and passions? One of the most original insights of the books discussed here is that liberalism in France has often been conceived as a sentiment, or at least a political philosophy that depends heavily on its capacity to elicit emotions. In different ways, Craiutu and Vincent both show how the program of French liberalism was to moderate the unruly Revolutionary passions which, it was believed, were threatening political stability and liberty. This claim is also endorsed by other recent scholars. Céline Spector, in an essay in French Liberalism, observes that Montesquieu's conception of liberty is tied to his view of “man as a being of beliefs and passions,” while Helena Rosenblatt's argument about the centrality of religion to Constant's liberalism is premised on his view of religion as “an indestructible ‘emotion,’ or what he also described as a ‘sentiment inherent to man.’”Footnote ⁸⁸ In a similar vein, Lucien Jaume's recent study of Tocqueville sheds light on the thinker's fascination with political passions—most famously, the “passion for equality”—by examining its origins in Jansenism.Footnote ⁸⁹ In addition, Lynn Hunt has recently argued that the emergence of human rights were contingent on the rise of a new emotional culture, as well as corresponding social practices, which, beginning in eighteenth-century Europe, made it increasingly possible for humans to feel sympathy towards one another.Footnote ⁹⁰ Some forty years ago, Theodore Zeldin published his five-volume History of French Passions, one section of which was devoted to politics (with little to say about liberalism, however)—though its resonance was slight, at least among intellectual historians.Footnote ⁹¹ It would seem, however, that the problem of emotions, having already impacted cultural history—thanks in particular to William Reddy's pioneering workFootnote ⁹²—may now be emerging as a productive framework in the history of political thought. The question of emotions is, moreover, particularly relevant to liberalism, precisely because, compared, say, to socialism or conservatism, it is usually regarded as relatively dispassionate. Indeed, Martha Nussbaum recently published a book defending the importance of “public emotions” to political life in which she observes, “Liberal political philosophy . . . has, on the whole, said little about the topic.”Footnote ⁹³ Yet while she mentions (in order to critique) Rousseau's idea of a civil religion and Comte's “religion of humanity,” the French thinkers discussed by the books discussed in this essay—Constant, de Staël, Montesquieu, Tocqueville—are mentioned not at all or only in passing. One of the crucial contributions that this recent scholarship has to offer liberal political philosophy more broadly is precisely its unique insight into French liberalism's conceptualization of emotions as a political problem—and its reminder that the liberal preference for moderation and compromise is not merely an intellectual position, but an emotional disposition in its own right.