Chapter 4 proposes answers to the problem facing the friends of liberty when Rousseau’s social contract succumbed beneath the Terror. First, Rousseau in Le Contrat social identifies liberty with citizens’ active participation in the polis or res publica. Jacobin discourse returns often to this definition. Second, as early as the Consulat, Constant opposes this ancient and public liberty, now discredited by the Terror, to the modern private liberty he celebrates: These “positive and negative” liberties have since become a touchstone of modern liberalism. As it happens, this distinction already appears in Staël’s neglected political treatises and broadsides written under the Convention and the Directoire, as shown here. Third, this “negative liberty” of classical liberalism, whose weaknesses we begin to underline today, presents a problem for Staël as a woman that was necessarily less crucial to her friend, a new problem to which her work again offers a solution.

It is important to differentiate between various kinds of appropriations of Herder’s ideas. Herder cannot rationally be seen as encouraging oppression of national minorities or aggressive foreign policies. Such instances of reception would have to be qualified as misappropriations, whilst there have been other, substantively more justified lines of political reception. Herder’s ideas resonated with post-revolutionary liberals outside Germany, pre-1848 radical republicans, representatives of smaller peoples and national minorities as well as some socialist thinkers with anarchist leanings. Herder inspired both those emphasising the need for a vibrant and culturally distinct public sphere in representative democracies as well as those opposing the top-down ‘nationalising’ attempts of ‘state-machines’. His ideas not only encouraged national liberation and awakening movements but also those for humanitarian cosmopolitanism. Important unifying elements for these different appropriations are a commitment to the ‘humanisation’ of states and to combining local attachments with humanitarian aspirations. Authors sympathetic to Herder have characteristically rejected power politics, putting forward the ideal of a culturally diverse and vibrant as well as peaceful and interconnected Europe.

The introduction argues for a relation between the Swiss myth, Romanticism, and the development of modern liberalism. I notably explain and define the terms used in the book, including negative versus positive liberty, republicanism versus liberalism, and Ancient versus Modern liberty. This brings me to a more detailed discussion of the concepts of liberty, popular sovereignty, and representation in the writings of liberal Swiss intellectuals Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Stäel, and, more briefly, Rousseau. His Letters Written from the Mountain, published half-a-century before Constant’s famous speech, already accepts the passing away of Ancient Liberty, and embraces a modern, representative system in which private virtues supersede public ones and not everyone can participate in the res publica. The Genevan Citizen’s demystification of his own native republic and of Swiss republicanism in general attests to the constructed, ideologically-marked nature of the representations that I explore in the rest of this book. The fact that readers and writers wanted to continue believing in Rousseau’s community of equals in the Alps long after he had stopped doing so speaks to the strength of this Romantic desire, and to the lasting power of the Swiss myth.