t between hereditary monarchy and republic meant little in comparison with the need to establish constitutional guarantees for individual freedom. He was among the first to articulate the postrevolutionary liberal critique of the French Revolution: he saw that the transfer of a formally unlimited sovereignty from king to people offered little guarantee of individual freedom. The principle that all legitimate power must belong to the body of citizens does not imply that they may use that power however they wish, for oppression is not made legitimate by the size of the majority that commits it. Here Constant anticipated nineteenth-century liberalism's quest to limit the scope of the public authority.
Constant's most enduring contribution to political theory was his distinction between the liberty of the ancients and the liberty of the moderns. This was expounded in a speech of 1819, but he and Staël had first formulated the essential distinction as early as 1798. Constant argued that ancient liberty consisted in active participation in the public affairs of the state, whereas the distinctive characteristic of the modern concept of liberty was its emphasis on negative rights against the state. However, he was no straightforward advocate of a negative concept of liberty. His central point was the historical one that it was impossible for the moderns to recapture the ancient concept of liberty in its integrity, for the growth in the size of modern states, the growth of commerce, and the demise of slavery had combined to undermine the social foundations of ancient liberty. Even so, Constant did not give up on political participation. When he first formulated his ideas on liberty in 1798, he was preoccupied with the dangers of the pursuit of civic virtue untrammelled by any regard for privacy. But by 1819 the Napoleonic experience had demonstrated the converse dangers of a retreat to the private sphere, and the threat from the intransigent Ultras on the right revived Constant's older republican enthusiasm. He now felt profoundly that there was something noble about active citizenship, and self-development mattered as much as the maximization of happiness.
Constant, Benjamin. Political Writings. Edited and translated by Biancamaria Fontana. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1988.
Holmes, Stephen. Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism. New Haven, Conn., 1984.
Pitt, Alan. "The Religion of the Moderns: Freedom and
Authenticity in Constant's De la Religion." History of Political Thought 21 (2000): 67–87.
Wood, Dennis. Benjamin Constant: A Biography. London and New York, 1993.
H. S. Jones