Benjamin Constant Quotes on Freedom
Benjamin Constant’s lecture “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns” (1819) gave nineteenth-century French liberal political philosophy its founding statement of the distinctively modern conception of freedom. The central thesis is that ancient liberty consisted in active participation in collective sovereignty within a small homogeneous political community, while modern liberty consists in the secure enjoyment of private rights and personal independence within a large commercial society — and the great political mistake of the French Revolutionary Jacobins was the attempt to impose ancient liberty on modern conditions to which it had become unsuited. The framework, integrating the British liberal tradition with the French Idéologue inheritance, shaped subsequent liberal political philosophy through Tocqueville, Mill, and Isaiah Berlin’s twentieth-century formulation of negative and positive liberty.
Quotes
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Attributed to Benjamin Constant:
“The liberty of the ancients was the active sharing in collective sovereignty; the liberty of the moderns is the security of private enjoyments.”
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Attributed to Benjamin Constant:
“Modern man can no longer be a citizen in the ancient sense.”
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Attributed to Benjamin Constant:
“Government has no right except for the maintenance of order.”
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Attributed to Benjamin Constant:
“The variety of opinion is at least as necessary as the variety of bread.”
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“The aim of the ancients was the sharing of social power among the citizens of the same fatherland: this is what they called liberty. The aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of liberty in private pleasures, and they call “liberty” the guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures.”
The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns " (1819) -
“The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns " (1819)”
The aim of the ancients was the sharing of social power among the citizens of the same fatherland: this is what they called liberty. The aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of liberty in private pleasures, and they call “liberty” the guarantees accorded by institutions to these pleasures.