Progress pill
Apogee and Decline: From the 19th to the 20th Century

The Liberty of the Moderns

A Philosophical History of Freedom

The Liberty of the Moderns

  • Liberty in Private Life
  • The Rousseauist Confusion
  • Political Freedom and Economic Freedom
According to Benjamin Constant, liberty in modern societies can no longer be understood in the manner of ancient cultures, as direct participation in the city's affairs.

Liberty in Private Life

In ancient times, individuals were sovereign in public affairs but enslaved in all their private relations. The use of political rights compensated for the sacrifice of individual freedom: the right to directly exercise various aspects of sovereignty, to deliberate in the public square, to vote on laws, to pronounce judgments, and to evaluate and judge magistrates. It is a political and collective freedom:
The freedom of the Ancients consisted of active and constant participation in collective power. Our freedom, on the other hand, must consist of the peaceful enjoyment of private independence; it follows that we must be much more attached than the ancients to our independence. (On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns (1819))
Modern freedom encompasses civil liberties, which include economic freedom and are grounded in the right to privacy. It is the right not to be subjected to any arbitrariness, the right to expression, assembly, movement, worship, and industry. There is no freedom without the possibility of choosing one's lifestyle and values; thus, there is no freedom without the possibility of withdrawing from the community, and consequently, no liberty without a limitation of the State to allow the existence of this private space. It is a freedom that corresponds to what Americans refer to as civil rights.
This definition of freedom is found in John Stuart Mill:
The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our good in our way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs or impede their efforts to obtain it. (...) Humanity gains more by letting each person live as they see fit than by compelling them to live as others deem good. (On Liberty, 1859)
Mill outlines the limits of state sovereignty: it stops where the sovereignty of the individual begins. If an individual action has no harmful consequences for others, then the individual is completely free to perform it. The State must regulate interindividual relations, but it cannot go further by interfering in the private lives of individuals. If the individual harms themselves, the State can do nothing but "remonstrate" or try to "reason" or "persuade" them: it cannot coerce or punish. For Mill adds: "The only legitimate reason for which a state may use force against one of its members, against their will, is to prevent harm from being done to others."
The political power corresponding to the freedom of the Moderns is therefore limited: "Let the authority limit itself to being just, we will take care of our happiness," proclaims Benjamin Constant. It is not up to the State to tell us how to be happy.

The Rousseauist Confusion

According to Constant, "the confusion of these two types of freedoms has been, among us, during too famous epochs of our revolution, the cause of much evil." Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by conceiving freedom solely as the collective participation of citizens in political action, encouraged Robespierre to constrain citizens through terror. The missteps of the Revolution are thus the result of the modern application of political principles valid among the ancients.
However, this does not mean sacrificing political freedom or participation in power. Constant specifies that if modern freedom differs from ancient freedom, it is threatened by a danger of a different kind. The danger of the ancients' freedom was arbitrariness. The threat to the freedom of the Moderns would be to renounce the political guarantees of this freedom through a sort of indifference to the public good. In other words, it is up to the citizens to exercise permanent vigilance over their representatives.
Indeed, in his Principles of Politics, Benjamin Constant asserts:
The sovereignty of the people is not unlimited; it is circumscribed within the bounds traced by justice and the rights of individuals. The will of an entire people cannot make just what is unjust.
This is a new critique of Rousseau and the Social Contract: even a general will is subject to limits, and it cannot change what falls under natural law. There exists a right anterior and superior to political authority: it is natural law. This right sets the bounds of political power and limits individual freedoms.
To say that all legitimate power must be founded on the general will does not mean that everything the general will decides is legitimate. Thus, Constant aligns himself with the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, Article II, which stipulates that the State is instituted only to preserve natural rights, namely, freedom, responsibility, and property. There are therefore areas in which political power has no influence: morality and religion, but also the sciences, which fall under the authority of knowledge and finally industry, adds Constant.

Political Freedom and Economic Freedom

Political freedom without other freedoms is merely an illusion, according to Benjamin Constant. Political freedom is the liberty to participate in the exercise of power. However, the power of the people or the masses can be destructive of freedoms because it grants the voting majority the right to impose its will on the whole society, including its whims or its ideology of the moment: confiscatory taxes without compensation, enforcement of a single thought, censorship, repression, and intellectual terrorism. That's why there can be no true freedom without civil liberties, including religious freedom and economic freedom. Benjamin Constant does not separate political liberalism from economic liberalism:
For forty years, I have defended the same principle, freedom in everything, in religion, in philosophy, in literature, in industry, in politics: and by freedom, I mean the triumph of individuality, both over the authority that would govern by despotism and over the masses that claim the right to enslave the minority to the majority. Despotism has no right. The majority has the right to compel the minority to respect order: but everything that does not disturb the order, everything that is only internal, like opinion; everything that, in the expression of opinion, does not harm others, either by provoking material violence or by opposing a contrary expression; everything that, in terms of industry, allows rival sector to operate freely, is individual, and cannot be legitimately subjected to social power.
In other words, in a free society, it is necessary to establish a strict boundary between the public sphere and the private sphere. The principle underlying this boundary is based on not harming others, specifically not infringing on their property rights.
Quiz
Quiz1/5
What is Constant's critique of Rousseau and his concept of freedom?