[Benjamin] Constant’s discussion of the ancient polis, or city-state, is celebrated. Max Weber took what he called “the brilliant Constant hypothesis” to be a perfect example of the concept of “ideal-type.” Briefly, according to Constant, Ancient Liberty was the ideal of the classical republics of Greece and Rome, and, in the modern time, of writers like Rousseau and Mably. It held that freedom consists in the citizens’ exercise of political power. It is a collective notion of freedom, and it is compatible with—even demands—the total subordination of the individual to the community. While each citizen would be subordinate to the whole, he would have his share in the exercise of total power over the community’s members.
Ancient Liberty had its roots in the society of those times, a society of slaves and incessant warfare. The idea of Modern Liberty, too, has its roots in its own distinctive society, one based on free labor and peaceful commerce. . . .
The fatal error of Rousseau and the Jacobins was to attempt to resurrect the ancient ideal in the modern world. Since the modern world has produced an entirely different sort of human personality—what we know as “the individual,” in a sense unknown to the ancients—the result could only be catastrophe.
But the Jacobin project did not end in 1794. In fact, the essence of the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century was the goal of realizing a collective freedom and creating a uniform and collective type of human being (Soviet Man, National Socialist Man, etc.). As the philosopher of an irreducible pluralism, Constant was the great critic of all such totalitarian pretensions avant la lettre.
—Ralph Raico, “The Centrality of French Liberalism,” in Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), 222-224.
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