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LIBERAL DISPOSITIONS: RECENT SCHOLARSHIP ON FRENCH LIBERALISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2015

MICHAEL C. BEHRENT
MICHAEL C. BEHRENT*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Appalachian State University E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

The story of French liberalism is, we are often told, one of exceptions, eccentricities, and enigmas. Compared to their British counterparts, French liberals seem more reluctant to embrace individualism. Whereas liberals in the English-speaking world typically espouse what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty”—a sphere of private autonomy from which the state is legally excluded—French liberals have often proved highly accommodating towards “positive liberty”—that is, liberty insofar as it is tethered to collectively defined ends. Most crucially, rather than seeking to shield individuals and civil society from an intrusive state, French liberals—consistent with a broader trend in French political culture—are inclined to see the state as an essential and even emancipatory political tool. In this vein, Jean-Fabien Spitz writes in a recent collection entitled French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day,

Contemporary historians, political scientists, and philosophers all seem to share a simple idea: French political culture, marked as it is by legalism and statism, constitutes an exception to the main trend in modern political thought, which has been to discover and assert the principles of modern liberty.

In addition to departing from some of Anglo-American liberalism's main tenets, French liberalism exhibits other oddities: as Larry Siedentop argued in an important essay, its idiom has tended to be historical (rather than theoretical), institutional (as opposed to ethical) and sociological (not legal or political).2 This somewhat idiosyncratic variation on “normal” liberalism has led some scholars to characterize liberalism's French iteration as a “chaotic mixture.”3 Others have questioned the extent to which liberalism is really a significant French political tradition at all. France's Revolutionary culture has been described as ultimately “illiberal,” leading some historians to speak of a French Sonderweg,4 in which France's “special path” consists in the fact that it entered the modern age without having developed genuinely liberal institutions.

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Essays
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , August 2016 , pp. 447 - 477
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Spitz, Jean-Fabien, “The “Illiberalism’ of French Liberalism: The Individual and the State in the Thought of Blanc, Dupont-White and Durkheim,” trans. Michel Breslin, in Geenens, Raf and Rosenblatt, Helena, eds., French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day (Cambridge, 2012), 252–68, at 252CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Larry Siedentop, “Two Liberal Traditions,” first published in Ryan, Alan, ed., The Idea of Freedom (Oxford, 1979), 153–74Google Scholar. Siedentop's essay has been republished in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 15–35.

3 Guido de Ruggiero, quoted in Helena Rosenblatt, “On the Need for a Protestant Reformation: Constant, Sismondi, Guizot and Laboulaye,” in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, at 115.

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8 Earlier works on French liberalism include Martin, Kingsley, French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Political Ideas from Bayle to Condorcet (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; Jardin, André, Histoire du libéralisme politique: De la crise de l’absolutisme à la Constitution de 1875 (Paris, 1985)Google Scholar; and Kelly, George Armstrong, The Humane Comedy: Constant, Tocqueville, and French Liberalism (Cambridge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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18 Ibid., 2, 9.

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20 Spitz, “The ‘Illiberalism’ of French Liberalism,” 254.

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22 Helena Rosenblatt, “On the Need for a Protestant Reformation: Constant, Sismondi, Guizot and Laboulaye,” in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 115–33.

23 Cheryl B. Welch, “‘Anti-Benthamism’: Utilitarianism and the French Liberal Tradition,” in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 134–51.

24 William Logue, “The ‘Sociological Turn’ in French Liberal Thought,” in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 233–51.

25 Samuel Moyn, “The Politics of Individual Rights: Marcel Gauchet and Claude Lefort,” in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 291–310, at 309.

26 Alan S. Kahan, “Tocqueville: Liberalism and Imperialism,” in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 152–65, at 165.

27 Stephen Holmes, “Rethinking Liberalism and Terror,” in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 90–112.

28 Geenens and Rosenblatt, “French Liberalism,” 11.

29 Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds, 15.

30 Ibid., 16, 17–18.

31 Ibid., 19, original emphasis.

32 Ibid., 27.

33 Ibid., 30.

34 Ibid., 166.

35 Ibid., 168.

36 Ibid., 14–15.

37 Ibid., 3.

38 Ibid., 106.

39 Ibid., 1.

40 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, in Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1947), II:1–2, 331–2.

41 Craiutu, A Virtue for Courageous Minds, 5, original emphasis.

42 Ibid., 238.

43 Ibid., 85–91.

44 Ibid., 76.

45 Ibid., 108–9.

46 Ibid., 146.

47 Craiutu, “Raymond Aron and the Tradition of Political Moderation in France,” in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 271–90.

48 Vincent, Benjamin Constant, 1–2.

49 The explosion of the Constant literature began with such pioneering works as Hoffman, Etienne, Les “Principes de politique” de Benjamin Constant, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1980)Google Scholar; Gauchet, Marcel, “Benjamin Constant: L’illusion lucide du libéralisme,” in Benjamin Constant, Ecrits politiques (Paris, 1980)Google Scholar, 11–110; Holmes, Stephen, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven, 1984)Google Scholar; and Fontana, Biancamaria, Constant and the Post-Revolutionary Mind (New Haven, 1991)Google Scholar. See, too, Rosenblatt, Helena, “Why Constant? A Critical Overview of the Constant Revival,” Modern Intellectual History, 1/3 (2004), 439–53Google Scholar.

50 Vincent, Benjamin Constant, 5.

51 Ibid., 3.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid., 25.

55 Quoted in ibid., 23.

56 Quoted in ibid., 61.

57 Ibid., 145.

58 Quoted in ibid., 144.

59 Ibid., 145.

60 Quoted in ibid., 147.

61 Ibid., 162.

62 Ibid., 55.

63 Ibid., 52.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid., 87.

66 Ibid., 214–15.

67 Ibid., 148.

68 Ibid., 208.

69 Ibid., 210.

70 Ibid., 77.

71 Paulet-Grandguillot, Libéralisme et démocratie, 26, 26–7.

72 Quoted in ibid., 81.

73 Ibid., 101.

74 Ibid., 107.

75 Ibid., 340.

76 Ibid., 401.

77 Ibid., 404.

78 Bobbio, Norberto, “Liberals and Democrats in the Nineteenth Century,” in Bobbio, , Liberalism and Democracy, trans. Martin Ryle and Kate Soper (London and New York, 2005), 45–50, at 48–9Google Scholar.

79 On the “neo-republican” trend in French thought see Chabal, Emile's forthcoming study, A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France (Cambridge, 2014)Google Scholar.

80 Spitz, “The “Illiberalism’ of French Liberalism,” 268.

81 Pettit, Republicanism; Habermas, Jürgen, “Three Normative Models of Democracy,” in Habermas, , The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory (Cambridge, 1998), 239–52Google Scholar.

82 Breyer, Stephen, Active Liberty: Interpreting our Democratic Constitution (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.

83 A key project driven by this insight is the work of Pierre Rosanvallon. An important figure in the liberal revival of the 1970s, Rosanvallon, having written a three-volume history of French democracy, has recently completed a second trilogy that addresses democracy's contemporary evolution: La contre-démocratie: La politique à l’âge de la défiance (Paris, 2005); La légitimité démocratique: Impartialité, réflexivité, proximité (Paris, 2008); and La société des égaux (Paris, 2011).

84 Philippe Steiner, “Competition and Knowledge: French Political Economy as a Science of Government,” in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 192–207.

85 Serge Audier, “Is There a French Neoliberalism?”, in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 208–29. See, too, Audier's, Néo-libéralisme(s). Une archéologie intellectuelle (Paris, 2012)Google Scholar.

86 Richard Whatmore, “War, Trade and Empire: The Dilemmas of French Political Economy, 1780–1816,” in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 169–91. See, too, Whatmore's, Republicanism and the French Revolution: An Intellectual History of Jean-Baptiste Say's Political Economy (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar.

87 On this topic see Boudon, Raymond's provocative study, Pourquoi les intellectuels n’aiment pas le libéralisme (Paris, 2004)Google Scholar.

88 Céline Spector, “Was Montesquieu Liberal? The Spirit of Laws in the History of Liberalism,” in Geenens and Rosenblatt, French Liberalism, 57–72, at 65; Rosenblatt, “On the Need for a Protestant Reformation,” 122, Rosenblatt’s emphasis.

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