Revolution and the Republic
Page 27
dent minds.’54 Elsewhere he was to refer to Rousseau as ‘one of the great geniuses
of the eighteenth century’.55
Where Constant found himself in agreement with Rousseau was in an accep-
tance that ‘there are only two sorts of power in the world: one, illegitimate, is force;
the other, legitimate, is the general will’.56 All authority, Constant argued, whether
it be a monarchy or a republic, should rest upon the latter principle. Where he
diverged from Rousseau, however, was in his understanding of the precise nature
and extent of the sovereignty that was to embody that will. As perceived by
Rousseau, the general will was translated into the unlimited sovereignty of the
51 Benjamin Constant, ‘De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation’, in De la liberté chez les Modernes
(1980), 186.
52 Benjamin Constant, Commentaire sur l’ouvrage de Filangieri (1822), 51.
53 Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique, applicables à tous les gouvernements (version 1806–1810)
(1st publ. 1980), 44.
54 This statement appears twice in Constant’s writings, as a footnote in ‘De l’esprit de conquête et
de l’usurpation’ and as part of the text to the unpubl. version of Principes de politique.
55 Benjamin Constant, De la Doctrine politique qui peut réunir les parties en France (1816), 37.
56 The following discussion of Rousseau’s ideas is found in two locations: Principes de politique,
applicables à tous les gouvernements (1806–10), 33–49 and ‘Principes de politique, applicables à tous les
gouvernements représentatifs et particulièrement à la constitution actuelle de la France’ (1815), in De
la liberté chez les modernes, 269–78.
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people and for Constant it was precisely the absence of limits upon that sovereignty
that posed the gravest threat to liberty. ‘When’, he wrote, ‘you establish that the
sovereignty of the people is unlimited, you create and you toss at random into
society a degree of power which is too large in itself, and which is bound to
constitute an evil, in whatever hands it is placed.’ Constant, like John Stuart Mill
after him, was eager to establish that there was a part of human existence that ‘by
necessity remains individual and independent’ and that therefore should properly
remain beyond social control. Rousseau, he remarked, had ‘overlooked this truth’,
thus providing ‘the most fearsome support for despotism’.
This was the very heart of the problem, for what Rousseau had forgot or
had misunderstood was that, as soon as the sovereign sought to make use of his
power, as soon as the practical organization of authority was begun, the sover-
eign had to delegate power, thus destroying the very qualities the sovereign was
said to embody. Whether we liked it or not, we were, in other words, submitting
ourselves to those who acted in the name of all. We were not entering into a
condition equal for all but one in which certain individuals derived exclusive
advantage and were above the common condition. Not everyone would gain
the equivalent of what they would lose because the result of the contract was
‘the establishment of a power which takes away from them whatever they
have’. If there was a parallel to be drawn it was with what Constant described
as ‘Hobbes’s whole dreadful system’. The absolute character of the contract
envisaged was such as to ensure the continuous violation of individual liberty
irrespective of whether sovereignty was exercised in the name of the monarch or
of democracy. What no tyrant would do in his own name, he could easily do in
the name of the authority granted him through the unlimited power of the
general will.
Rousseau, Constant wrote, was appalled by the consequences of his own argu-
ment and by the ‘monstrous force’ he had created. So appalled, in fact, that he set
out a series of conditions that effectively destroyed the principle he had just
proclaimed. By announcing that sovereignty could be neither delegated, alienated,
nor represented he was, in other words, declaring that it could not be exercised at
all. Constant’s own answer was to argue that no authority, not even that exercised
in the name of the people, should be unlimited and then to recommend a set of
political institutions drawing heavily upon the English model so despised by
Rousseau. Of even greater consequence (as we shall see in the next chapter) was
his attempt to outline a conception of liberty thought to be appropriate to the
modern age. Here Rousseau was cast irredeemably amongst the advocates of
ancient liberty.
What the latter point indicates is that Constant’s discussion of Rousseau figured
at the core of his thinking. Indeed, it should be noted that both versions of the
Principes de politiques commenced with an analysis of the ideas contained in Du
Contrat social. The same is also to an extent true of another dominant representative
of liberal opinion during the period of the Restoration: François Guizot. He too
sought to restore political stability to post-revolutionary France but in contrast to
Constant he focused less upon formulating what Lucien Jaume has termed a
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
125
‘libéralisme du sujet’ than upon establishing the bases of a system of representative
government appropriate to the new conditions in which France now found herself.
The crucial factor here was Guizot’s conviction that power should reside in the
hands of those who had the ‘capacity’ to govern properly.57 ‘Capacity’, he wrote, ‘is
nothing else than the ability to act according to reason . . . It is the sole principle in
virtue of which the limitation of electoral rights can be properly designated.’58
It was after the restoration of the monarchy in 1814 that Guizot set out to
elucidate the principles upon which such a system would rest. He opposed equally
those who wished to continue the revolution and those who, as he put it, wished ‘to
begin the counter-revolution’. Like Constant, therefore, he was preoccupied with
the question of the definition and practice of sovereignty, rejecting the claims of
both popular and divine sovereignty on the grounds that each, being absolute,
would lead inevitably and necessarily to tyranny. ‘The true theory of sovereignty’,
Guizot explained, founded upon ‘the radical illegitimacy of all absolute power,
whatever may be its name and place, is the principle of representative govern-
ment.’59 It is at this point that Rousseau, the adversary of representation, came to
occupy a central place in Guizot’s argument.60
Guizot began by denying that a contract of the kind envisaged by Rousseau
was the bond of human association. ‘Society and government’, he wrote, ‘are born
together and coexist necessarily.’ Society commenced therefore at the moment
when the relations between men ceased to be determined by force, when men
came, in Guizot’s words, to recognize the ‘law of reason’. ‘The contract which binds
men to the laws of justice and of truth’, Guizot thus believed, ‘is no more their work
than are the laws themselves.’ Moreover, it was not within the power of men e
ither
to break this contract or to forget it with impunity. Next, Guizot had to challenge
the most fundamental of Rousseau’s assumptions: namely, that the will of the
individual was the source of the sovereign’s legitimacy and power.
This was done in two stages. The first was to recognize that, for Rousseau, all
representation was ‘delusive and impossible’ and therefore that all forms of repre-
sentative government were illegitimate. On this view, representation of the will was
simply an impossibility and all power founded upon such representation was
tyrannical. The logical conclusion, which Guizot granted had been acknowledged
by Rousseau, was that all ‘great States’ were illegitimate and therefore that ‘it was
necessary to divide society into small republics in order that, once at least, the will
57 It is in this context that Pierre Rosanvallon has spoken of the desire of Guizot and his fellow
doctrinaires to establish ‘l’ordre capacitaire’: see La Démocratie inachevée: Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (2000), 93–126.
58 François Guizot, Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif en Europe (1851), ii. 230. This
text is based upon lectures given in Paris between 1820 and 1822. In English tr. see The History of the
Origins of Representative Government in Europe (Indianapolis, 2002).
59 Guizot, Histoire des origines, 13.
60 In addition to the argument contained in lecture 10 of vol. ii of Histoire des origines, Guizot’s
critique of Rousseau is to be found in the pages of Philosophie politique: de la souveraineté. Written
during the early 1820s and never completed, it was first publ. in full only recently: see Guizot, Histoire
de la civilisation en Europe (1985), 305–89.
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Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
of each citizen might give its consent to the law’. This, as we know, had been a
solution that had appealed to many republicans in the early 1790s but Guizot
wanted to push the argument further, arguing that even if this could be done, ‘the
problem would be far from being resolved’. ‘What does it matter’, Guizot pointed
out, ‘if a law should have emanated from my will yesterday if today my will has
changed? Can I only will once? Does my will exhaust its rights in one single act?’
Seen in this light it was impossible for the individual to contract into any obligation
that determined his future conduct. What an individual no longer wills, Guizot
remarked with devastating accuracy, ‘has no more right over him than the will of
a stranger’. Pushed to this extreme conclusion, it was therefore not just large states,
but all states, all constitutions, and all laws that were illegitimate. Men could not
contract into any obligations whatsoever. The result would be the dissolution of
society itself.
However, the principal error, according to Guizot, lay not in the practical
implications of Rousseau’s theories, which were palpably ridiculous, but in the
principle itself. Rousseau had simply misunderstood the proper nature of represen-
tation. This was the second strand of Guizot’s argument. ‘It is not true’, Guizot
proclaimed, ‘that man should be absolute master over himself, that his will should
be his legitimate sovereign, that at no time and by no right does anyone have power
over him if he does not consent.’ Beyond and distinct from the will of the
individual, Guizot wanted to argue, lay a ‘law which is called either reason,
morality, or truth’ and unless it was followed the use we made of our liberty was
either absurd or criminal. Thus man had no right to act arbitrarily or according to
the dictates of his ‘solitary will’ and no one, therefore, had the right to impose a
law because he willed it nor oppose a law because it was against his will. Rather,
the legitimacy of power rested not in the will of the person who exercised it but
‘in the conformity of its laws with eternal reason’. Reason alone, Guizot confirmed,
is the ‘sole source of legitimate power’.
Guizot sought to prove this argument by referring to the fact that both children
and imbeciles were denied the right to exercise their will without supervision.
What was true of them, he commented, is ‘true of man in general: the right to
power is derived from reason, never from will’. It was what Guizot took the political
consequences of this to be that were pregnant with significance. The sum total of
reason was dispersed unequally between those individuals who made up society and
thus the principal concern needed to be that of bringing these ‘fragments’ together
so as to constitute a government and to realize ‘public reason and public morality’.
‘What we call representation’, Guizot concluded, ‘is nothing else than a means to
arrive at this result.’
We will later examine Guizot’s theory of representative government in more
detail but, to summarize, the intended force of his argument against Rousseau was
that the sovereignty of reason was to be contrasted with that of the sovereignty
of ‘number’ and with this that the claims of democracy and of universal suffrage
were to be rejected in favour of a limited franchise which would assure the
predominance of ‘capacity’. It was the attempt to secure that end which was to
dominate the thinking of liberals in France in the period before 1848.
Sovereignty, Social Contract, and Luxury
127
Yet, paradoxically, Guizot’s position was closer to that of Rousseau’s than he
realized, for had not the latter explicitly refused to equate the general will with the
will of the majority and had he not also argued that it existed independently from
the selfish and private wills of all? To that extent, Rousseau’s general will was not far
removed from Guizot’s concept of ‘public reason’, as both were meant to embody
the common good. Nevertheless, in the process of developing his argument, Guizot
had hit upon a criticism of Rousseau that was to be taken up by people with far
more radical intentions: any form of contract which bound our will in the future
was a restriction of our individual liberty. In England this objection had first been
voiced by William Godwin in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice;61 in France it
was taken up by the first self-proclaimed anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.62
Proudhon was not a man known for being moderate towards those he disagreed
with and his attitude towards Rousseau was no exception to this rule. First of all,
Proudhon was in no doubt that Rousseau was directly responsible for what he
described as ‘the great deviation of “93”’ and for the society of ‘frightful chaos and
demoralization’ that it had produced. Rousseau, in brief, was unambiguously identi-
fied with a tradition that, in Proudhon’s eyes, had been ‘bewitched by politics’:
Jacobinism. Further, it was within this tradition that Rousseau’s concept of social
contract was to be located. Rousseau, Proudhon argued, understood ‘nothing of the
social contract’ and because this was so he had articulated ‘an offensive and defensive
alliance of those who possess against those who do not possess’. It was ‘a contract
of hatred’, a ‘monument of incurable misanthropy’, a ‘coalition of
the barons
of property, commerce, and industry against the disinherited proletariat’, an ‘oath of
war’. Less excitedly he remarked: ‘tyranny, claiming divine right, having become
odious, [Rousseau] reorganizes it and makes it respectable, or so he says, by making
it proceed from the people’. The fundamental error, as Proudhon saw it, was to see
only the political relations that existed between men and therefore to see the contract
as an agreement between citizen and government. In such an agreement there was
‘necessarily alienation of a part of the liberty and of the wealth of the citizen . . . it is an
act of appointment of arbiters, chosen by the citizens without any preliminary
agreement . . . the said arbiters being clothed with sufficient force to put their decisions
into practice and to collect their salaries’.
The import of Proudhon’s argument, therefore, was that Rousseau had provided
a spurious, if brilliantly oratorical, defence of the domination of the state, in this
case the one and indivisible Jacobin Republic. Yet Proudhon, unlike other critics of
Rousseau, did not want to abandon the idea of contract altogether. Far from it, in
fact: it was precisely the idea of what Proudhon termed ‘free contract’ that would
lead to the dissolution and ultimate disappearance of the State. The key argument
here was what Proudhon saw as the transition from distributive justice, defined as
the reign of law and as feudal, governmental, and military rule, to commutative
justice, the dominance of the economic and industrial system. It was by moving
61 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Harmondsworth, 1976), 212–16.
Godwin’s text was first publ. in 1798.
62 See Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Idée générale de la Révolution au XIXe siècle (1851).
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away from politics to economics that his preferred model of decentralized and
pluralistic self-government––mutualism––would come into existence.
A proper contract, Proudhon argued, was not one between those governed
and those governing (as Rousseau believed) but excluded government and was
one between individuals as individuals. What characterized this contract was that it
was an agreement for equal exchange, in which several individuals organized