We are now decades into what scholars have called “the Constant revival,” a period of renewed interest in the political writings of the Swiss French liberal Benjamin Constant (1767–1830).Footnote 1 In fact, we seem to have come out on the other side. Constant's work is now accepted as part of political theory's canon, so much so that a survey of liberalism would be incomplete without some discussion of his thought. But in the midst of his revival, scholars have also asked why he was forgotten in the first place. Helena Rosenblatt, whose historical work contributed to renewed interest in Constant, offers several explanations for his “eclipse,” from anti-Protestant sentiment to the decline of his “individualist” style of liberalism.Footnote 2 Rosenblatt also speculates that Constant's obscurity was partly of his own making—the result of his silence on the social and economic questions, primarily poverty and class conflict, that would later become critical to nineteenth-century politics. What little he had to say about poverty or class, she argues, “gives him the appearance of having been relatively unaware of or unaffected by working-class misery and industrial unrest.”Footnote 3
There are several existing theories for Constant's historical neglect, ranging from political explanations about the status of liberalism in France to personal ones citing Constant's character.Footnote 4 Rosenblatt's economic suggestion is just one among them, and not necessarily representative of a scholarly consensus on this issue. Her claim is nonetheless important for what it reveals about Constant scholarship more broadly. For all of the attention to the political, religious, and sentimental dimensions of his thought, there has been relatively little discussion of Constant's views on political economy.Footnote 5 Her speculation offers one reason for this: though he is often discussed as a theorist of commercial society, he seems to have been indifferent to the major social and economic questions—poverty, working-class unrest, industrialization—that would come to occupy the French by mid-century.Footnote 6
Constant did remain relatively silent on these matters for most of his career under the Directory, Consulate, and empire, the period when he was developing his consistent liberal views.Footnote 7 He died a decade before the upsurge of industrialization in France in the early 1840s, when these issues became visible and urgent.Footnote 8 But in his Commentaire sur l'ouvrage de Filangieri (Commentary on Filangieri's Work) (1822–4), Constant addressed poverty and social class in England and France, along with the beginnings of industrialization as he saw them. This article focuses on Constant's response to what would later become known as “the social question”: the problem of poverty and the material, moral, and social status of the poor and working classes.Footnote 9 Constant's response to the social question, I argue, brings to light unexamined elements of his liberalism, particularly on the character of modern citizenship.
Constant addressed the social question through the language of “usurpation,” redirecting his original political concept to examine social phenomena, specifically to condemn the Elizabethan Poor Laws and England's commercial legislation. This approach distinguished his analysis of the social question from those of his contemporaries; he did not attribute poverty to the failures of economic development or share Malthusian worries about the “dependency” created by public relief. Rather, he denounced the Poor Laws as part of a cycle of class-led usurpation, finding the causes of increasing poverty in a “permanent conspiracy” of the propertied against the English poor. The English context informed his general critique of the supposed goodness of legislation, and his faith that constitutional institutions could temper the laws’ failures.
This approach to the social question highlights a neglected element of Constant's political liberalism: his worry about the growth of a politically “disinherited” impoverished class, and the corresponding need for a watchful, active citizenry amid modernity's privatism. Though he called for a limited suffrage based on property qualifications, his study of social and economic issues also showed him the dangers of permanently restricting political power to a class of the privileged few. He thus proposed policies that would enable the free circulation of property, aiming to foster and enfranchise a class of small landowners to guard against usurpation. Constant's analysis of the social question provides a fuller account of his vision of modern, active citizenship, the contours of which he outlined in his well-known 1819 Athénée lecture—an account of how poverty could undermine its practice and how property ownership could extend its benefits.
I begin by discussing the Commentary and its context, and introduce Constant's critique of Gaetano Filangieri's La scienza della legislazione (Science of Legislation) (1780–88). The article then turns to England, and to Constant's take on the Elizabethan Poor Laws and Corn Laws. I then examine his laissez-faire, laissez-passer proposal for property circulation, through which we can reconcile his defense of a limited franchise with his aim to avoid a “disinherited” citizenry. I conclude by situating Constant's thought alongside nineteenth-century responses to the social question, and suggest both the limits and the potentials of his particular liberal take on “the social.” Constant's attention to poverty, I argue, urges us to reconsider the history of liberalism and its contours in France, particularly on the question of class and the relationship between the social and the political.
CONSTANT'S COMMENTARY AND FILANGIERI'S SCIENCE
Most of Constant's discussion of social and economic questions appears in the Commentary, a work scholars have called “mature,” “complete,” and “impressive,” but have nonetheless hardly addressed when compared with his other major writings.Footnote 10 The text was out of print in French from 1824 to 2004, and the first English translation did not appear until 2015.Footnote 11 Of the fifteen essays in The Cambridge Companion to Constant, only three mention the Commentary, and only two discuss it in any sustained way.Footnote 12 The book has thus far been largely left out of Constant's revival.Footnote 13
A look at the work's subject and authorship might explain why. As its title suggests, the Commentary was written in response to Italian jurist Gaetano Filangieri's (1753–88) Science of Legislation, itself largely forgotten by history, despite its author's ambition to write the “general rules of legislative science” for all times and places.Footnote 14 Filangieri completed five volumes of a planned seven before his death in 1788, with an unfinished volume on religion published posthumously in 1791. The Science was read widely in Europe and America in over seventy translations and successive editions between 1780 and 1858.Footnote 15 It earned the attention and admiration of Benjamin Franklin, who translated the text into English and became Filangieri's frequent correspondent.Footnote 16 Following the publication of the first two volumes, the Italian cleric Monsignor Bernardo Della Torre summarized Filangieri's perceived place in Italy and in the pantheon of European philosophy: “if England has her Locke and France her Montesquieu, we can deservedly believe ourselves to be superior to them both, having united in the single body of one young man the qualities, enlightenment, and ideas of these two illustrious representatives of our century.”Footnote 17
The Science was a mirror of Enlightenment thought, and, as Alan Kahan notes, emblematic of its “commonplaces”: faith in human perfectibility and in legislation as a catalyst of moral progress.Footnote 18 Filangieri aimed to outline a legislative science akin to geometry (another Enlightenment commonplace), through which the laws would enable public security and happiness.Footnote 19 He had no doubt that legislation could do harm; for this, European history provided countless “awful spectacles” of the law's failure.Footnote 20 But this was precisely why a science was necessary. Only defined, general rules of legislation could prevent problems caused by feeble or unenlightened laws, for “legislation, like all other sciences ought to have its rules” since “its errors are the greatest scourges of a nation.”Footnote 21 Adherence to this legislative science would give hope to Europe, as its “present ministers . . . assisted by philosophy, enlightened by genius . . . will themselves see the necessity of reformation. The weakness of your legislative systems will then not only vanish, but will acquire the vigor of youth, the hopes of immortality.”Footnote 22
Constant authored his Commentary to accompany a forthcoming 1822 French edition of the Science, published at the height of the text's popularity. His contribution was invited alongside an introduction—literally, an éloge—to the new edition by Francesco Salfi, who regarded Filangieri as a master of republican thought.Footnote 23 But Filangieri's ideas, so resonant in the early part of the nineteenth century, would fall out of favor only decades later when interest in the Science declined. Writing in 1822, Constant captured one possible reason for the text's eventual obscurity. Separated by the Revolution, the Terror, and Napoleonic rule, he regarded Filangieri as a “mediocre” intellect, lacking “Montesquieu's genius,” whose thoughts served “his country and his century” but could not address modern post-Revolutionary societies.Footnote 24 Filangieri's thought, he wrote, “does not rise much above public opinion as it was forty years ago, and certainly the public opinion of that time was very much below the public opinion which thirty years of struggles, revolutions, and experience has educated.”Footnote 25 Enthusiasm for Filangieri, once declared Italy's John Locke, declined not long after Constant's writing.
Yet the distance, temporal and philosophical, between Constant's age and Filangieri's was meant to be insightful.Footnote 26 Constant responded to the Science because of its popularity, but also because of its limitations. “Filangieri's mediocrity,” he wrote, “is in my view the chief advantage of [his] work for us. We find in [it] the means of assuring ourselves of the progress of the human species in legislation and politics over the past half-century.”Footnote 27 In its “mediocrity,” the text revealed just how far political philosophy had come.
This initial description of the “mediocre” Science framed Constant's two approaches to the text. At times, he treated it as a historical artifact, and by comparing the present to the past, found evidence of intellectual progress. But he also used it as a cautionary example, worried by the continued appeal of Filangieri's thought—the “retrograde impulse” to seek progress through the state, a model of politics patterned on ancient republics rather than modern nations.Footnote 28 Constant challenged Filangieri's guiding assumption that both the decline and the progress of civilizations stemmed from the design of their laws, with legislation responsible for either evil or good depending on its conformity with a universal science. This was the main source of their disagreement, summarized by Constant: “what Filangieri wanted to obtain from government in defense of freedom, I want a constitution to impose on government, everywhere he calls for protection, I demand freedom.”Footnote 29
There is some debate about whether Constant got Filangieri right; that is, whether he accurately represented the philosophe’s aims and situated his arguments faithfully in the context of Italian legal debates.Footnote 30 This debate is secondary to our purposes here. Even if Constant mischaracterized Filangieri (an issue on which more work is still to be done), he nonetheless saw him as a representative of a particular view of law and government—a flawed Enlightenment view, to be sure, but one that might be easily revived in France.Footnote 31 Constant's response to this view, whether Filangieri's or otherwise, provided insight into his political aims under the Restoration and his wider views on the purpose and limits of legislation.
Constant had plausible reason to worry about Filangieri's influence, given the ideological and political challenges to Restoration liberalism. The 1822 edition of the Science appeared during a particularly difficult political period for liberals, who came under attack from both right and left.Footnote 32 Ultraroyalists played on fears of anarchy and fanaticism following the 1820 assassination of the Duc de Berry. Portrayed as anarchists and conspirators by the ultra Villèle, many liberals, Constant included, lost their seats in the Chamber in the 1822 elections.Footnote 33 Other challenges came from self-professed left liberals like Charles Comte, Charles Dunoyer, and Saint-Simon, who by the 1820s had scorned constitutionalism—what they called a preoccupation with “forms” of government—in favor of managerial administration that prioritized order over liberty.Footnote 34 These advocates of industrie shared royalist rhetoric about anarchy and disorganization, and criticized constitutionalists for failing to provide true organization for France. What was needed, they urged, was a government designed not by philosophers or jurists committed to constitutionalism, but by “industrialist” experts devoted to economic expansion and the stability it would bring.
Given Constant's political battles under the Restoration, we ought not to think of his work as simply a commentary on an eighteenth-century text. The occasion for its authorship coincided with a critical time for liberalism's future, and its substance reflects as much. As Kurt Kloocke and Antonio Trampus conclude, the text had a “double aspect”: a critique of the “spirit of the Enlightenment” and a defense of constitutionalism.Footnote 35 Specifically, Constant used his response to the Science to intervene in the political and related commercial battles of his own time, offering constitutional correctives to failed law. Filangieri was an interlocutor, whose work allowed Constant to respond to his contemporary French opponents at both ends of the political spectrum.Footnote 36
Despite its broader purposes, the Commentary sticks closely to Filangieri's text in organization. Kahan notes that Constant followed Filangieri's order, but “without ever giving an overview of the topics Filangieri discussed, and indeed skipping most of them.”Footnote 37 This makes the text challenging for present-day readers who are unfamiliar with the Science. Each chapter begins with a quote from the Science, without much insight into the relationship between chapters. On its face, the Commentary is less orderly and less accessible than his Principles of Politics (1806–10) or On Religion (1824).
But in the text's second part, Constant did offer his readers a guidepost. He claimed that he would “leave the field of politics” in the sections on “population, commerce, and taxes” to follow.Footnote 38 In those sections, he intended to look at society—specifically, society at its so-called “lowest”—to see the actual rather than the intended consequences of legislation. A study of English poverty allowed him to critique Enlightenment thinkers like Filangieri who wished to promote moral progress through legislative wisdom, and his political opponents (right and left, royalist and industrialist) who endorsed state-imposed order through law. It also enabled him to develop a general critique of legislation, and to look with skepticism at state-led attempts to solve poverty and promote material prosperity through law.
THE POOR LAWS AND THE CORN LAWS: USURPATION IN ENGLAND
With his Commentary, Constant joined other theorists and political economists who were drawn to England's present out of concern for France's future. His friend J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi's recent Nouveaux principes d’économie politique (1819) contained an account of the startling living conditions of the English laboring classes, who were “deprived of all pleasures which give savor to life” and whose cries for subsistence caused the author to “shudder.”Footnote 39 Inspired by his visits to England in the early part of the century, Jean-Baptiste Say would later claim that the term “pauperism” was created to describe the country's extensive and unforeseen problem of poverty.Footnote 40
Though Constant praised Say's writings on political economy and many of Sismondi's “philanthropic and ingenious views,” he challenged his contemporaries for lacking “sympathy” on issues relating to poor relief, and for recommending inhumane remedies to solve poverty's perceived social problems.Footnote 41 In his discussions of Malthus, Sismondi argued that poor relief would augment problems of population, since “public charity can be considered as an encouragement society gives to a population it cannot sustain.”Footnote 42 He recommended the prohibition of marriages among the poor to discourage the birth of children in need of relief and halt the cycle of poverty and population.
Constant criticized Sismondi on the subject of population, and the substance of his critique reflected his more general arguments against the Elizabethan Poor Laws. For Constant, many theorists who addressed English poverty (Sismondi among them) had neither rightly considered nor condemned the severity of the laws, “for one cannot open the English statute book without seeing harsh punishments, tortures, and death for actions which it is impossible to consider crimes.”Footnote 43 So long as poverty was framed as a “crime,” its so-called solutions would be little more than punishments. Sismondi's “solution” to poverty—the prohibition of marriage—was simply another punishment.
In his Principles of Politics, Constant denounced the “revolting” laws for appearing benevolent while actually promoting the “persecution” and “harassment” of the poor. His claims were distinct from both Malthusian complaints about the social and moral degradation created by a system of public relief, and from Sismondi's description of relief as “encouragement” of population. Instead, Constant targeted the restrictive character of the laws and their effect on the personal liberty and mobility of the poor. Since relief was provided by local parishes, the poor man had to seek consent in the form of settlement rights to move from his home parish to another to another in search of work, consent that “he never obtains.” What began from the promise of legal charity actually led to the “demoralizing” of the poor, confining the pauper to the place of his birth and limiting his opportunity to escape poverty through labor.Footnote 44 Malthusian-style proposals to increase the hardships of relief in the hope of discouraging poverty would only compound the difficulties the laws had created.
In his Principles, Constant also gestured at the causes of English poverty—“bad decisions by governments,” their “prodigality” and “error” manifested in bad law.Footnote 45 These themes reappear in the Commentary, in passages contrasting the celebrated freedom of the English people with the circumscribed life of the poor:
where every inhabitant boasts of being able to wander in freedom, the indigent man needs the consent of the parish where he intends to live in order to move from one parish to another . . . the pregnant woman, the old man, and the orphan thus meet at every step artificial barriers which transcribe their country into an inhospitable land where poverty is proscribed.Footnote 46
By restricting the poor individual's right to trade, to enter apprenticeships, even to relocate, the laws barred all means of escape from conditions of poverty.Footnote 47 They held individuals in an ongoing cycle of poverty and punishment, blurring the line between poverty and criminality and rendering “their sufferings eternal.”Footnote 48
But in the Commentary, Constant concluded that these punishments were not simply the unintended outcomes of bad decisions. By 1822, he speculated that their origins were more pernicious. For this, he used the structure of Filangieri's Science to address a more current problem. Filangieri had lamented the “weakness” of English law, citing the treatment of her American colonies in matters of commerce and trade and attributing eventual revolution to ill-designed law.Footnote 49 Constant updated Filangieri's discussion of England's commercial errors, still appealing to the Science as the source of his insight. English legislation, he warned, “in everything that relates to industry, to manufactures, to fixing the price of daily wages, in a word, to the existence of man reduced to living from his labor, resembles a permanent conspiracy by the class of the powerful against the poor and laboring class.”Footnote 50 England's failures were not merely the result of legislative missteps, as Filangieri wrote in his sections on colonialism and Constant himself suggested in the Principles. Instead, they were signs of a “conspiracy” designed to insulate the ruling classes from potential instability from below.
We can find reasons for Constant's shift—from his concern with government prodigality in the Principles to charges of “permanent conspiracy” over a decade later—in his reactions to developments in political economy and trade legislation, specifically the passage of the Corn Laws in Britain in 1815 and France in 1819 and 1821. Appealing to the British example and to fears surrounding global trade, French ultras proposed a series of customs laws and trade restrictions, including a sliding scale of import duties on grain.Footnote 51 Villèle defended the restrictions by fueling fears about lost French wealth and encroaching foreign powers, all of which appealed to his allies on the right. Liberals in the Chamber of Deputies were divided on the laws’ merits.Footnote 52 Jacques-Antoine Manuel endorsed the laws for protecting French agriculture against the so-called “liberty” of commerce;Footnote 53 François-Bernard de Chauvelin defended the “pure intentions” motivating the restrictions, and maintained that they would actually benefit the laboring classes, since wages would rise alongside the price of grain.Footnote 54
Constant was among the most forceful, vocal critics from the left. He denounced the laws as a self-serving scheme on the part of the deputies, many of whom were large landowners. It was no secret, he claimed, that those who “gain the most from the increase of commodities” were also “most interested in raising the price of grain,” and that those same individuals occupied many seats in the Chamber. Against Villèle, he advised France to consider the disastrous consequences of England's Corn Laws, where “the high price of grain, aristocratic elections and guilds” increased the number of the poor and necessitated a tax to fund relief.Footnote 55
In the passage of the Corn Laws and related trade legislation, Constant recognized the beginnings of the “conspiracy” of the propertied against the poor he would later identify in the Commentary, his worries about government error now framed as accusations against an entrenched property-owning class as bearers of legislative power. He likened the actions of French landowners to those of Roman patricians, and questioned whether the consequences of such economic self-interest—increased commodity prices and an increased poor population—were to blame for the fall of the republic and for all failed states throughout history, a suggestion that drew “violent murmurs” from deputies on the right.Footnote 56
For all of Constant's forceful rhetoric in the Chamber, he went still further in the pages of the Commentary. There, he defined this subjection of the poor by the propertied as an instance of “usurpation,” a specific form of rule he elsewhere contrasted with monarchy and also with despotism.Footnote 57 While monarchy is a “regular government,” usurpation is a “force that nothing modifies or softens . . . stamped with the individuality of the usurper,” but distinct from despotism in its means.Footnote 58 Despotism rules by silence; usurpation “condemns [man] to speak, it pursues him into the most intimate sanctuary of his thoughts, and, by forcing him to lie to his own conscience, deprives the oppressed of his last remaining consolation.”Footnote 59 In De l'esprit de conquête et de l'usurpation (The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation) (1814), Constant identified Napoleon as the usurper, who appropriated liberty to impose conformity, to mold an entire nation in his image, and to make individuals complicit in their own domination. Napoleon introduced usurpation into the modern world, displacing constitutional government with an individualized form of tyranny.Footnote 60
Constant's use of usurpation in the 1822 English context initially seems strange, given the individuality associated with Napoleonic usurpation. But in the Commentary he specified that the propertied class retained the “ferocity” of usurpation, presumably without its individualized character. Like Napoleonic usurpation, the subjection of the English poor was an instance of arbitrary power, though distinct from the compelled, violently obtained obedience to despots. Rather, it aimed to debase entire populations through law to avoid rivalry and encourage complacency, employing a distinct kind of “ferocity.” Constant's account of corn legislation fit this model. The laws protected the economic interests of large landowners while impoverishing much of the nation, all under the promise of achieving national prosperity.
The Poor Laws were similarly deceptive. Though some parts of the laws were obviously harsh, Constant was more concerned by those that cloaked harshness in comfort. The English poor tax to fund relief was among the most damaging in its subtlety, the strongest of the “sweeteners and palliatives” intended to contain the lower classes through promises of legal charity. The tax gave the appearance of benevolence, in which society took responsibility for the well-being of the poor. Yet it was actually little more than “restitution consented to by monopolists in favor of those whom they deprive of their rights” to fund relief that, though itself prohibitive, “keeps up the poor man's hopes, and thus calms his irritation.”Footnote 61 In the Chamber, Constant also framed the tax as the result of usurpation, a fiscal necessity given the legislative actions of English “monopolists” to increase the price of grain, secure their economic interests, and retain their aristocratic hold over political power.Footnote 62
The laws’ treatment of the poor exemplified the quiet “ferocities” of usurpation, originally a political phenomenon now observed in the class divide between England's poor and propertied. Usurpation, he claimed, strikes twice: first to stifle true opinion, then to force its subjects to adopt the appropriate one. In England, punishments for so-called “rebels” (wandering beggars) served as one series of overt “strikes” against the poor, while the ostensibly “soft” remedies associated with poor relief (the poor tax included) further debased entire classes.Footnote 63 The poor, both fearful of penalties and reliant on promised relief, would pose little challenge to the authority of the existing system. With its combination of punishment and palliative, English legislation intended to keep the poor class comforted and confined by elusive promises of subsistence.Footnote 64
Through his study of England's commercial and Poor Laws, Constant constructed a general critique of the so-called liberating, humanizing results of legislation. If the laws could be so used against the pursuit of universal progress, to entrench class division and shelter the few against the many, one had to question both Filangieri's faith in government as the source of freedom and Restoration defenses of trade legislation as a force for national prosperity. He shared Filangieri's assessment that “aristocratic inequality is a curse,” but departed from the philosophe in his solution, concluding that “it is not from those who profit from it that I expect deliverance.”Footnote 65 The usurpation of English law reinforced Constant's view of the aristocratic “curse.” It was an instance of control over the poor by the propertied through commercial restrictions and accompanying poor legislation. As he asserted in the Chamber, English law was a cautionary case for Restoration France, not a model for progress.Footnote 66 In the Commentary, it also became a general example of the laws’ limits. Legislation, a potential tool of aristocratic power, could not be expected to undo the inequality it helped to maintain.Footnote 67 And the laws, especially those cloaked in the language of benevolence, material comfort, or progress, should be subject to skepticism.
At the same time, however, Constant consistently praised some elements of the English system. The nation revealed the strength, purpose, and above all necessity of constitutional government. Its law was a case of usurpation, to be sure. But England also revealed how constitutional institutions could counteract damaging legislation, or how a nation “could be threatened without being harmed.”Footnote 68
Filangieri had predicted rapid decline and revolution for England in 1780, and speculation about the country's impending downfall persisted into the nineteenth century. Say anticipated that England would collapse due to its mounting debt, a burden made heavier by imperial ambitions and a growing class in need of public relief.Footnote 69 Sismondi also wrote of England's commercial crisis, finding its source in overproduction that led to unemployment and a displaced “proletarian” class.Footnote 70 With his discussion of commercial legislation and the Poor Laws, Constant also entered the conversation over England's stability.Footnote 71 And despite his assessment of usurpation and aristocratic inequality, he was actually more optimistic than his contemporaries. Though the country suffered from debt and widespread poverty, though her commercial laws were as “absurd as they [were] atrocious,” he noted that England did not experience either the lower-class revolution or the abrupt decline that Filangieri had predicted in 1780. Nor would it, he maintained, at least not directly for the reasons either Say or Sismondi offered. Constant attributed England's surprising stability to its constitutional institutions, which “preserve [the rulers] from the consequences of their industrial and commercial mistakes.”Footnote 72 These institutions included “open parliamentary discussions,” a free press, an impartial judiciary, and a well-informed public, encouraged in their “participation in the administration of public affairs.”Footnote 73
He documented a particular mechanism by which these institutions preserved England from revolution and decline. He had elsewhere praised the country for its divided system, which set “neutral power” against “active power” to ensure that authority was always checked.Footnote 74 The Commentary highlighted another, less familiar virtue of the English system and of Constant's vision of constitutional government. England's constitutional institutions created a general condition where “persons and properties have nothing to fear from arbitrary power,” and where the people, comforted by this secure condition, would “form a coalition in favor of the established order as soon as anarchy presents itself.”Footnote 75 In England, the people’s taste for freedom and the assured security of their property prove self-perpetuating. These guarantees encourage the majority, a group of “all who possess something,” to support the status quo against threats of revolution. By protecting the individual in his person and property, the existing order ensures its own longevity.Footnote 76
The problems of English law and the counteracting strength of its constitution returned Constant to one of the guiding themes of his thought: protection against arbitrary power, that “corrupting vice of all institutions.”Footnote 77 This was the animating concern of his Principles of Politics, intensified by his experiences under the Bonapartist regime and by his later attempts to guide Restoration France in more liberal directions.Footnote 78 The Commentary contextualized those themes in terms of his resistance to Enlightenment dogma and his own commercial and political battles. The status of the English poor represented a tangible, concrete instance of how legislation could perpetuate servitude, his counterexample to Filangieri. Still, the vitality of its constitution also underscored its necessity, challenging Constant's industrialist opponents (Comte and Dunoyer among them), who dismissed constitutionalism generally and the English design specifically, and who wished to adopt England's “prohibitive” commercial model without its politics.Footnote 79 The English case captured the Commentary’s “double aspect.” Because of its commercial errors and its treatment of the poor, England was an observable example about holding suspicion for legislative wisdom. Because of its longevity, it offered hope in constitutional guarantees.
CLASS, PROPERTY, AND INDUSTRY
Despite faith in its constitution, Constant still shared many of his contemporaries’ worries about a growing poor class in England. Even if its institutions were capable of preventing decline and revolution, the “conspiracy” behind its vicious Poor Laws and their consequences could not be dismissed forever. “I do not know at what social state we have arrived,” he wrote, “but when population is a danger because there is not sufficient subsistence . . . must there not be something wrong with this social state?”Footnote 80
In fact, if any cause were to shake England's foundations in the long term, Constant believed that it would be social: the widening divide between its aristocracy—a class now “without clientele and, thus, without utility”—and its growing number of proletarians.Footnote 81 England had thus far survived because it balanced bad law against institutions that assured the people's attachment to the existing order. But recent legislation had tipped this balance. The Corn Laws, the design of a “monopolist” class, was evidence of a changing relationship between the English aristocracy and the people. And the law also spurred and supported those same changes, both a sign and a cause of social division. The aristocracy once held “the dependent class's affection in every way” through patronage obligations; now, the laws had “created a disproportion between the wealth of the great and the needs of those who depended on them.”Footnote 82
The selfish motives behind England's Corn Laws had economic implications for the nation, as Constant recounted to the deputies during France's trade debates. They also had notable social consequences, altering class relations and threatening England's legal–constitutional equilibrium. With a growing class of poor individuals, those whom the laws had excluded from the security, freedom, and protection of its constitution, there was little guarantee that what would eventually become England's “new” majority would possess the necessary attachment to the established order to guard against revolution. The poor were, after all, increasingly separated from the aristocracy, former supporters turned “adversaries.”Footnote 83 England was once unshakeable because “its institutions were in accord with interests and opinions which were still in accord with the interests of the mass.” But with a self-interested aristocracy and a growing poor class, Constant witnessed and feared a reversal of English fortunes. “Today,” he warned, “these institutions are in direct opposition with those interests, and it is difficult for them to resist . . . Here is the cause of a possible and perhaps approaching revolution.”Footnote 84
Constant was not the first to lament this disproportion between poor and propertied. The emergence of the increasingly urban, industrial poor in the early nineteenth century, their existence contrasted with the wealth of English landowners, forced his countryman Sismondi to revive the ancient term “proletarian” to describe a class yet unseen in the modern world.Footnote 85 But as Sismondi attributed the rise of this class to the economists’ “principle of unlimited competition,” Constant found its origins in usurpation; that is, in the harmful laws that both reflected and perpetuated the subservience of the poor by the propertied.Footnote 86
Nor did he entirely disagree with Say on the threats to England. Both thinkers were attentive to the plight of the poor classes and the financial burden of providing relief; both at times cautioned the French to avoid what the English had done. But Constant identified a distinct mechanism for the country's possible decline. Say approached the subject of England through the lens of political economy: if England's weaknesses were economic, its massive public debt and expenditures, then the country's strengths had been its wealth and credit.Footnote 87 Constant instead linked the country's vitality to its constitutional guarantees, accordingly finding other sources of its weakness. Though England's commercial errors would play a part in its decline, the nation's changing, fracturing social foundations would be the more direct source of its undoing, since these changes would undermine the stability of the English system. Constant presented an image of England's possible future: a nation divided sharply along class lines, these divisions reinforced by law, where members of an impoverished majority set their collective strength against existing institutions.Footnote 88
These warnings for England framed Constant's concerns for France and all of Europe, where “the number of proletarians is doubled, and in the end society contains a cause of fermentation and disorder.”Footnote 89 He attributed the growth of the impoverished classes partly to the concentration of land and the monopolists it supported, a point of departure he shared with Filangieri and that he confessed was “not very new” but still “very reasonable.” Though separated by fifty years and the Revolution, both thinkers worried about the disparity between owners and non-owners, perpetuated by law and responsible for an increase in poverty.Footnote 90 Recent commercial laws had reinforced Constant's perception of this disparity. But he condemned Filangieri's solution to the problem of concentrated land, as it depended on new law to fix the problems that old law had created. He criticized the philosophe for “vaunting the wisdom of Agrarian laws,” which divided existing land into equal shares but led to “popular convulsions” by promising unattainable “illusory benefits.”Footnote 91 Enchanted by the wisdom of legislative science, Filangieri overlooked the true consequences of legislation, even when history offered sufficient examples of the laws’ failures.
Filangieri's ahistorical, anachronistic approach to legislation underscored Constant's insistence about the danger of importing ancient ideals into modern nations. If the failures of law stemmed, in part, from historical ignorance and anachronism, then the solution must be to define modern liberty and the conditions for its protection. For Constant, the right to private property, conventional yet sacred and inviolable, was among the constitutive elements of that modern liberty.Footnote 92 Any legislative attempt to interfere with that right, whether malicious or benevolent in its expressed intent, would more often tend toward ruin over prosperity, poverty over progress. His solution to the problem of poverty illustrated his central point of disagreement with Filangieri and with his own Restoration opponents, ultra, industrialist, even liberal: government should do no more than “repress evil, and let the good come into being by itself.”Footnote 93
This solution extended to the chapters on landed property in the Commentary. Constant condemned English entail, Napoleonic inheritance laws, and any “abolition of the right to bequeath property as one wishes.” As with much of the text, these arguments had a dual purpose, responses to Filangieri and to Restoration politics. Villèle attempted to halt the fragmentation of large estates and reinstitute the power of the aristocracy throughout the 1820s, going so far as to attempt to revive primogeniture.Footnote 94 Against royalist maneuvers to protect large estates, Constant championed the natural division of land:
When the disposition of property is free, it tends to division. Laws alone can stop this; even then, their attempts to do so are often in vain. Prodigality limiting individuals’ existence to the needs of the moment, the spirit of enterprise leaving reality behind for the sake of hope, the love of gain erasing memories—these and a thousand other causes of the same kind must sooner or later produce the division of properties. Let them act: what need is there of coming to their aid?Footnote 95
He defended this position by likening freely alienable property, bequeathed by choice rather than law, to the economic mobility of modern industry, a comparison that might initially strike the present-day reader as myopic. Under free industry, Constant argued, classes would be far more mobile and mutable than under aristocracy. One could identify a class of the “newly wealthy,” a category that would have been inconceivable under the Ancien Régime.Footnote 96 Absent the barriers of aristocracy, the industrial laborer observed a new social position and economic status that could one day be his. This perspective was unavailable to the agricultural laborer, who saw only the long-standing barriers between himself and the landowner.
This new social order, Constant wrote, contributed to “a sort of equality, or rather a sort of homogeneity, between the rich industrialist and the simple laborer.” He compared the social ties that would be created by industry to a new Great Chain, “a seamless chain extended from the poorest day laborer up to the millionaire manufacturer . . . a homogenous body, all its parts support and aid each other, because all in their different classes have something to defend.”Footnote 97 In his estimation, industry would remove the barriers to individual progress and unite the previously divided worlds of owners and nonowners.
On this point, we might wish to fault Constant for naivety. He failed to recognize that structural limits could immobilize a permanent working class. This would, of course, become a recurring theme for social theorists later in the century. But given the timing of the Commentary, Constant was likely unaware of the more restraining, alienating features of industrialization because he had not yet seen their full effects. His major point of contrast was aristocracy, against which industry seemed to have the mobility and freedom he ascribed to it. As Marcel Gauchet has noted, Constant's claim was about the dissolution of “symbolic inequality” characteristic of aristocracy and now possibly overcome in an industrializing society. Aristocracy emphasized hierarchy and difference; industry brought the opposite—a “homogeneity” of interests, which allowed individuals to see shared ends rather than the barriers that would separate them.Footnote 98
This does not mean, however, that Constant was simply an apologist for industrial progress, though many of his industrialist contemporaries tried to claim Constant for their cause, nor that he failed to see any of its dangers.Footnote 99 While Comte and Dunoyer associated industry with order and development, Constant warned of impermanence and uncertainty. For all of industrialization's potential benefits, he recognized that it had “less order, more artificiality, and less fixity than landed property.” He worried about the variable of “chance” in modern industry, which left human beings subject to the instability of business and markets. And he was anxious about the “whims, passions, pride, and luxury” inherent in industrialization, even if he failed to see how those features might disproportionally threaten workers.Footnote 100
Despite these worries, he maintained hope that industry would bring mobility, in contrast to the closed system of large estates. The same mobility could be achieved by the natural division of land, and informed his immediate proposal for counteracting poverty. When land and its benefits were concentrated in the hands of a few, the barriers between classes were well known and insurmountable. This is also why a “monopolist” class of legislators was so objectionable, as the benefits of prosperity would fall to the landed few and exclude the impoverished many. But in a system of divided property, “when the poor man can acquire even one field, class no longer exists, every proletarian hopes by his labor to arrive at the same point, and wealth becomes, in land as in industry, a question of work and effort.”Footnote 101 This reconfiguration of land had social advantages, since “one could establish relationships between the poor and the rich, give the former an interest in and, as a result, the desire to protect the latter.”Footnote 102 Freely alienable property and smallholdings could limit the size of the poor class, while fostering mutual interests across classes.
Constant's arguments on the relationship between property, poverty, and class highlight an underappreciated dimension of his thought. Just as modern liberty required constitutional guarantees like divided powers and institutional safeguards, it also required a vigilant, engaged citizenry that would see to its protection. It was not enough to trust, as Filangieri did, that government would control itself, or that European legislators would be so enlightened as to adhere to a wise, unfailing legislative science. In Constant's terms, modern liberty needed to be guarded by something ancient, by the “constant and active surveillance” of citizens.Footnote 103 The examples of harmful legislation from the Commentary were evidence of this need, enabling Constant to advise his readers that “when governments offer legislative improvements to peoples, peoples ought to respond by asking for constitutional institutions.”Footnote 104 Those institutions could limit government, but a people had to demand that they do so. The Commentary was not simply a defense of laissez-faire, laissez-passer; it was also a call for public vigilance to sustain the liberal project.
POVERTY AND THE PRACTICE OF CITIZENSHIP
We have to specify what Constant meant by the “active surveillance” of citizens and its relationship to constitutional institutions. He mentioned this phrase in his 1819 speech at the Athénée royal in Paris, when he cautioned against attempts to revive ancient freedom as a modern goal, but emphasized the place for both kinds of liberty in the post-Revolutionary age. To counteract the fear that modern, private individuals would surrender their “right to share in political power too easily,” he urged “far from renouncing either of the two sorts of freedom which I have described to you, it is necessary, as I have shown, to learn to combine the two together.”Footnote 105 He encouraged the exercise of political liberty, by which citizens “emerge from the sphere of their usual labours and private industry” and “find themselves suddenly at the level of important functions which the constitution confers upon them, choose with discernment, resist with energy, brave threats, nobly withstand seduction.”Footnote 106 Authored three years after his Athénée lecture, the Commentary offered particular examples of the “seduction” of legislation, but also of the “important functions” of a citizenry and the urgency of exercising them. Through the study of poverty and commercial legislation, it showed how legislative promises of comfort and benevolence could threaten national prosperity and rise to the level of usurpation, unless checked by a watchful public committed to preserving its own freedom.
Reading his Commentary alongside the Athénée lecture, we can recognize the relationship between watchful citizenship and constitutionalism. The idea of watchful, active citizenship, what Stephen Holmes calls “the strikingly democratic conclusion” to the 1819 lecture, might seem at odds with the principle of constitutionalism, understood in part as a restraint on majoritarian power or the excesses of popular sovereignty.Footnote 107 At the very least, the compatibility between formal constitutional guarantees and popular participation is far from obvious, when considered either historically or theoretically. This tension was, after all, the subject of Revolutionary debates over the possible convergence of constitutionalism with popular representation and widespread suffrage.Footnote 108
Yet the Commentary suggests how the civic-mindedness characteristic of ancient liberty might strengthen modern constitutional institutions rather than undermine them. When Constant praised England, he extolled its free press and parliamentary institutions that balanced one kind of power against another. Alongside these features, he cited “its inhabitants’ energy of character . . . maintained because they were not disinherited from their participation in the administration of public affairs. This participation, even if it was almost imaginary, gave citizens a feeling of their own importance which kept up their activity.”Footnote 109 Constitutional institutions and energetic participation were not only complementary but equally necessary to English prosperity. England's institutional stability thus supported his call for renewed public spirit from the 1819 lecture. Whether inspired by England alone or educated by the experiences of Napoleonic usurpation, the Constant of the Restoration years seemed confident that, as Holmes summarizes, “enhanced participation might advance liberal causes while keeping the ultras in check.”Footnote 110
Still, the recurring image of a proletarian class throughout the Commentary stands in obvious contrast to the ideal of active, energetic citizens sharing in the administration of public affairs. Constant quoted Sismondi's description of the poor, “that most numerous part of the nation. They say that they are the most useful, and feel themselves disinherited. This multitude . . . has suffered much and has been kept in ignorance by poverty.”Footnote 111 Constant's appeal to this passage of Nouveaux principes is telling. The image of a disinherited poor class could be juxtaposed with the Commentary’s praise of the English people, who had thus far not been “disinherited” from their public roles and remained energetic defenders of the public order. It also mirrors his own description from the Principles: “those whom poverty holds in endless dependence . . . are neither more informed than children as to public affairs, nor have a greater stake than foreigners in national prosperity, with whose elements they are not familiar and whose benefits they share only indirectly.”Footnote 112
Throughout his writings, Constant described the dangers of a disinherited, slumbering population, from the depiction of subjects under usurpation in The Spirit of Conquest to his account of a “weak, degraded” Spain in the Commentary, its subjects “paralyzed and apathetic” who “became resigned and fell asleep.”Footnote 113 A passive people was less informed, less engaged, less watchful of its freedom and less protective of the institutions that would safeguard it. Across nineteenth-century Europe, the reality of a growing impoverished class—the result of entail, inheritance laws, commercial blunders, and other legislative attempts to regulate property while punishing poverty—was of great concern. Say noted these realities in his predictions for England's eventual economic collapse. Informed by his distinct perspective on England and her constitution, Constant highlighted a different kind of outcome. The problem of poverty threatened to foster an increasingly disengaged, disinherited population, lacking the requisite independence, knowledge, and interest in public affairs to avoid despotism, even usurpation, and preserve strong institutions.
Propertyless and disengaged from public life, the poor lacked what Constant praised as the requisite qualities for political participation, the “leisure needed for developing an informed outlook and soundness of judgment.”Footnote 114 For him, the task of active surveillance was for the able; that is, for the propertied, whose social and economic standing granted both the leisure to cultivate political judgment and “love of order, justice, and conservation” to protect public interest against arbitrary power.Footnote 115 He maintained that a leisured, stable propertied class would not be easily swayed by the unfounded promises of legislators or the momentary passions of revolution. But a displaced, non-propertied class lacked the intellectual, material, and moral standing to preserve society against despotism and stand above revolution. In his Principles and in arguments before the Chamber, Constant repeatedly endorsed a limited suffrage with property qualifications, restricting citizenship to those who could discharge the “important functions” of surveillance from his 1819 speech.Footnote 116
On this subject of the poor and political engagement, at least two elements of Constant's thought seem at odds. As he worried about a disengaged population, he also held fast to property qualifications for suffrage, believing the poor to be too detached from public life to exercise the franchise. These two claims are difficult to reconcile. We might expect that a politically disenfranchised population would always remain “disinherited,” and that a restricted franchise would further isolate those classes who were already excluded from politics.
We can, however, reconcile these arguments by framing Constant's claims in light of his reflections on social and economic issues in the Commentary. In the first place, he wished to preserve the “influence of landed property”; that is, the proprietor's leisure and his interest in public affairs, qualities that would be necessary to safeguard a constitutional order.Footnote 117 This desire informed his recommended property requirements for suffrage. But he had to balance this influence with the aim to encourage civic involvement, and to avoid the creation of an impoverished majority that would remain apart from public life, a concern he presented in the Commentary’s sections on England and a “disinherited” Spain. To reconcile these two commitments, he championed a system of freely circulating, freely alienable property in which the barriers between classes were mutable and the advantages of property ownership—material, social, and political—could extend beyond the privileged few.Footnote 118 Property ownership would grant individuals some experience in public affairs:
Property alone established uniform ties between men. It puts them on guard against the imprudent sacrifice of the happiness and peace of others by enveloping within this sacrifice their own well-being . . . it establishes between them and other members of society numerous complicated relations and common interests. Let it not be thought, though, that this safeguard is useful only for maintaining order. It is no less so for maintaining freedom.Footnote 119
To defend this claim, Constant contrasted the property owner with the “scholar.” The owner is always “on guard” and “bothered by power” because of its potential intrusion on his property, while the scholar is “indifferent and servile” to despotism, because he has no active, personal interest in property and cares little for its protection.Footnote 120 By taking a share in private property and a personal stake in its security, the proprietor establishes connections with his fellows who share similar interests, while remaining skeptical of political power. Like the energetic inhabitants of England, comforted by their freedom and the security of their possessions, the landowner is willing to safeguard his freedom and the institutions that maintain it, while resisting legislative encroachments on what is his own.
This argument informed Constant's proposal in the Commentary for a system of ownership defined by freedom rather than entail. This system would allow for the natural circularity of property and the existence of a mutable propertied class that would share in material progress and thus in public life. His argument required trust in what he called the “natural” circulation of property, and in the assertion that “since the birth of commerce, proprietors have no longer formed a distinct class, separated from the rest of men by lasting prerogatives. The membership of this class renews itself constantly. Some people leave, others enter it.”Footnote 121 A legislative scheme that preserved existing accumulation and denied advancement to the poor classes (of the kind that Villèle would propose throughout the 1820s) would only bolster existing social divisions, preserving a small permanent class of the materially and politically privileged, set against a growing number of the poor. As in England, a permanent political class of large landowners aroused Constant's suspicion about arbitrary power, aristocratic conspiracy, even usurpation. Just as he feared the monopolist class and its commercial influence, he saw the idea of a permanent, closed political class as a pre-Revolutionary remnant that would offer few benefits but numerous risks. Limiting politics to a fixed class of large landowners could perpetuate poverty, hinder the formation of an engaged public, and undermine the long-term capacity of a society to control its government.
CONSTANT'S LIBERALISM AND “THE SOCIAL”
Though Constant's work has been rediscovered in the fields of political theory and intellectual history, his attention to economic and social issues is still largely forgotten. A turn toward the economic and social side of his thought in the Commentary suggests that there might still be more to say within the Constant “revival,” and still more to recover if we are to explain the whole of his thought, especially his responses to royalist and also liberal challenges of the Restoration years. I have argued that Constant's concern with the social question highlighted certain still “eclipsed” dimensions of his liberalism, most notably his defense of a limited franchise and his parallel support for a watchful, active citizenry in the modern age, a citizenry to be fostered by a system of freely circulating property.
Though Constant was neither unaware of nor unaffected by the social and economic realities of nineteenth-century Europe, the question remains whether he ever truly “left the field of politics,” as he claimed to do in the Commentary’s second part. Did Constant actually confront and theorize “the social”? Or was he unable to consider social and economic questions apart from political ones, even as he wrote about class, poverty, and the beginnings of industrialization? Can Constant's analysis of the social add to our understanding of early nineteenth-century liberalism?
These questions urge us first to define and evaluate “the social.” Jacques Donzelot located l'invention du social after 1848, when social protections arose in response to revolution. For Donzelot, these responses departed from the contractarian solutions of liberal politics; they began from social facts that could not be reduced to matters of political organization, and took the form of welfare provisions and the socialization of marginalized classes, at a time when liberal principles proved ill-suited to address society.Footnote 122
Constant's recommendations for poverty alleviation stop short of Donzelot's description of the social. Indeed, his solutions to the social question were consistent with his politics: limit arbitrary power, endorse personal freedom over legislated action, allow the nation and the poor to prosper. He did not carve out a unique set of policies to address the social or its problems, framing the social and material condition of the poor as an instance of “usurpation” to be addressed by constitutional institutions. In this respect, Constant's unique starting point on the social question—his reliance on the language and lens of usurpation—ultimately limited his ability to theorize distinctly social solutions to social problems. While he claimed to “leave the field of politics” in the Commentary, his attention to the social question in fact brought him full circle: from a broad praise of constitutionalism, to a study of poverty and its causes in England, and finally to an endorsement of constitutional institutions to remedy the problems of the Poor Laws.
But Donzelot's is not the only definition of the social to emerge from studies of nineteenth-century France, and thus not the only ideal against which to situate Constant's social and economic thought. Attention to Constant's social thought allows us to reevaluate the French liberal tradition and its relation to questions of poverty and class. Since Larry Siedentop's “Two Liberal Traditions,” scholars have pointed to the idiosyncrasies of French liberalism when compared to its British counterpart, especially on the primacy of the historical and social over the philosophical and political. As Siedentop argued, post-Revolutionary French liberals “began to insist that political theory be founded on a theory of social change.”Footnote 123 Accordingly, many liberals endorsed what Cheryl Welch has called the “analytical weight the social exerted on the political,” the assumption that society established constraints within which political institutions had to operate.Footnote 124
This assumption took various forms in the early nineteenth century: the Doctrinaires’ vision of l’état social démocratique;Footnote 125 the social economy of Destutt de Tracy, J. B. Say, and later advocates of industrie;Footnote 126 Tocqueville's definition of a democratic social state.Footnote 127 Despite this diversity, the liberal use of “the social” is often still tied to a particular image of the tradition in its relation to class. K. Steven Vincent articulated one version of this view: “early French liberalism was a movement of well-to-do elites who had, at best, little concern for the plight of the underclass. They did not take seriously enough the issue of class and the related problem of access to political power and economic achievement.”Footnote 128 Scholars have recently challenged similar claims by highlighting later liberals’ responses to issues of social reform.Footnote 129 Nonetheless, this interpretation of the tradition—a tradition that failed to “take seriously enough” the problems of poverty and class—persists. On this view, the liberal approach to the social excluded entire elements of society itself.
Constant's discussions of the Poor Laws, property, and poverty in the Commentary complicate this image. His initial complaints against the Poor Laws were motivated by the plight of the underclass, by the lack of “sympathy” that his contemporaries displayed for the European poor, and by the “ferocity” of laws that confined the poor individual to the place of his birth and compounded poverty with punishment. It was, in fact, the problem of class in England that forced Constant to extend the reach of the concept of “usurpation”; that is, to show that the threat of arbitrary, abusive power did not rest only with monarchs and despots but could be used within society as well. His Commentary exposed the problem of class power, in its ability to suppress individual freedom and perpetuate aristocratic inequality through legislation. More importantly for our purposes, it exposed the problem of class power as a problem for liberalism. In juxtaposing an impoverished population with a disinherited one, in identifying a link between class and constitution in England, Constant pointed to a fundamental relationship between the underlying social order and the achievement of liberal ends. What he presented was not only the suggestion that the social exerted some analytical weight on the political. His claims offer a stronger conclusion: that a social state with a growing impoverished class, held in poverty by bad law and oligarchic interests, could in fact undermine the ability of a modern constitution to limit government power and preserve national stability.
When compared with Donzelot's post-1848 conception of the social, we can see the limits of Constant's Restoration-era analysis of the social question, as his focus on usurpation narrowed the scope of his recommendations for poverty alleviation. But his Commentary also suggested that poverty and class could not and should not remain afterthoughts for nineteenth-century liberals, as issues that ought to elicit “sympathy” for the poor and skepticism for the law. Whether Constant's liberal successors recognized this imperative is another question. But just as our interpretation of Constant's Commentary prompts us to contribute further to his academic revival and to revisit certain elements of his thought, it ought to encourage us to do the same for discussions of France's early liberal tradition. It should, at the very least, nuance the image of a purely elitist liberalism, “unconcerned” with the poorer classes and their access to social standing or political power. And it should urge us to examine the liberal discussion of “the social” that emerges, as a concept that captures the political implications of wealth and poverty.
