O Insurgente: Benjamim Constant

Constant was an unusual thinker for a Frenchman because he escaped the statism that pervades French economic and political thought and its utopianism that rapidly becomes totalitarianism. There is nothing here of the vacuousness and potential for violence of a Rousseau or a Sartre. Constant understood and appreciated the Anglo-Saxon view that liberty is not personal liberation from social obligations, that liberty is possible and liberation is not, and that liberation is the enemy of liberty because those who seek to be liberated, in their anger at failing to achieve the unattainable, turn against liberty and seek to destroy it. They blame the world’s faults on those perverse people who use their liberty to make choices incompatible with their true and complete liberation from existing social constraints. Such people, it follows, must be deprived of their liberty.

(...)

Throughout Constant’s work we find admonitions concerning politicians and officials that state elegantly and clearly principles that apply to all governments. Even though these principles often seem to be self-evident, they are never acted on. We need Constant to remind us of them, as when he writes:

"The proliferation of the laws flatters the lawmaker in relation to two natural human inclinations: the need for him to act and the pleasure he gets from believing himself necessary. Anytime you give a man a special job to do he does more rather than less.... Those in government always want to be governing and when because of the division of powers, a group of them are told to make laws they cannot imagine they could possibly make too many. ... Lawmakers parcel out human existence by right of conquest, like Alexander’s generals sharing the world. "(p. 63)

Here we have not merely an anticipation of our modern notions of rent seeking, but an observation of the psychology and behavior of those whose professional life consists of regulating. Only the rare and memorable individual can step outside this life—it virtually sums up, for example, the management of the European Union. The wretches who command that monstrosity would also benefit from Constant’s observations (much influenced by Montesquieu) “on ideas of uniformity”:

"It is clear that different portions of the same people, placed in circumstances, brought up in customs, living in places, which are all dissimilar cannot be led to absolutely the same manners, usages, practices and laws without a coercion which would cost them more than it is worth. The small advantage of offering a smooth surface over which the lofty eye of government can freely stray, without encountering any inequality which offends it or obstructs its view, is only a puny compensation for the sacrifice of a host of sentiments, memories, local tastes, out of which individual happiness, that is to say, the only real happiness is composed." (p. 323)

Independent ReviewConstant was an unusual thinker for a Frenchman because he escaped the statism that pervades French economic and political thought and its utopianism that rapidly becomes totalitarianism. There is nothing here of the vacuousness and potential for violence of a Rousseau or a Sartre. Constant understood and appreciated the Anglo-Saxon view that liberty is not personal liberation from social obligations, that liberty is possible and liberation is not, and that liberation is the enemy of liberty because those who seek to be liberated, in their anger at failing to achieve the unattainable, turn against liberty and seek to destroy it. They blame the world’s faults on those perverse people who use their liberty to make choices incompatible with their true and complete liberation from existing social constraints. Such people, it follows, must be deprived of their liberty.

(...)

Throughout Constant’s work we find admonitions concerning politicians and officials that state elegantly and clearly principles that apply to all governments. Even though these principles often seem to be self-evident, they are never acted on. We need Constant to remind us of them, as when he writes:

"The proliferation of the laws flatters the lawmaker in relation to two natural human inclinations: the need for him to act and the pleasure he gets from believing himself necessary. Anytime you give a man a special job to do he does more rather than less.... Those in government always want to be governing and when because of the division of powers, a group of them are told to make laws they cannot imagine they could possibly make too many. ... Lawmakers parcel out human existence by right of conquest, like Alexander’s generals sharing the world. "(p. 63)

Here we have not merely an anticipation of our modern notions of rent seeking, but an observation of the psychology and behavior of those whose professional life consists of regulating. Only the rare and memorable individual can step outside this life—it virtually sums up, for example, the management of the European Union. The wretches who command that monstrosity would also benefit from Constant’s observations (much influenced by Montesquieu) “on ideas of uniformity”:

"It is clear that different portions of the same people, placed in circumstances, brought up in customs, living in places, which are all dissimilar cannot be led to absolutely the same manners, usages, practices and laws without a coercion which would cost them more than it is worth. The small advantage of offering a smooth surface over which the lofty eye of government can freely stray, without encountering any inequality which offends it or obstructs its view, is only a puny compensation for the sacrifice of a host of sentiments, memories, local tastes, out of which individual happiness, that is to say, the only real happiness is composed." (p. 323)

O Insurgente

12.4.05

Benjamim Constant

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