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4 - Constant’s Idea of Modern Liberty

from Part I - The Political Thinker and Actor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Helena Rosenblatt
Affiliation:
Hunter College, City University of New York
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Summary

The modern revival of interest in republicanism (most notably associated with the names of Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit) has unambiguously placed Benjamin Constant among the defenders of negative liberty. This is hardly surprising. In his famous lecture on the “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Isaiah Berlin, placing Constant along with John Stuart Mill among “the fathers of liberalism,” contended that “no one saw the conflict between the two types of liberty, or expressed it more clearly, than Benjamin Constant.” In a later introduction to his Four Essays on Liberty Berlin further asserted that Constant “prized negative liberty beyond any modern writer.” On this view, Constant demanded “a maximum degree of non-interference compatible with the minimum demands of social life.” Recent scholarship on Constant (echoing Berlin’s own claim that his attachment to negative liberty had been misunderstood) has sought to provide a more nuanced description of Constant’s understanding of liberty. Laurence Jacobs, for example, has forcefully argued that we are wrong to believe that Constant’s rejection of popular participation led him “to advocate privacy and a conception of freedom as freedom from politics.”

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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