Benjamin Constant Waged an Intellectual War Against Theocratic Conservatives and Socialists

Constant was the first great liberal thinker who was compelled to wage an intellectual battle on two fronts, a situation that became typical of liberalism in the nineteenth century and into our own time. His enemies were the Jacobin and socialist descendants (for the most part) of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the one side, and, on the other, the theocratic conservatives such as de Maistre and de Bonald.

As against the egalitarians and socialists who aimed to overthrow tradition, especially in religion, Constant appreciated the importance of voluntary traditions, those generated by the free activity of society itself. In this respect, Constant was much superior to John Stuart Mill, whose distaste for all of the inherited ways of mankind has misled Anglo-American liberalism in highly unfortunate directions. Constant emphasized the value of these old ways in the struggle against state power. Having lived through the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic dictatorship, he was one of the first to understand the power of the modern state. Any element of social life that might act as a barrier to it was welcome in his eyes. Anticipating Tocqueville, and, in our century, thinkers like Bertrand de Jouvenel and Robert Nisbet, Constant wrote:

The interests and memories which are born of local customs contain a germ of resistance which authority suffers only with regret, and which it hastens to eradicate. With individuals it has its way more easily; it rolls its enormous weight over them effortlessly, as over sand.

As for the conservatives, they attempted to erect the Christian notion of Original Sin into the theoretical underpinning for a system of oppression, arguing for a strong state to keep a firm check on natural man. Constant was willing to grant some plausibility to the notion of the natural corruption of human nature. But how could this be turned into a warrant for an authoritarian state? Were the politicians born of an Immaculate Conception? As Constant wrote:

[There is a] bizarre notion according to which it is claimed that because men are corrupt, it is necessary to give certain of them all the more power . . . on the contrary, they must be given less power, that is, one must skillfully combine institutions and place within them certain counterweights against the vices and weaknesses of men.

—Ralph Raico, “The Centrality of French Liberalism,” in Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), 224-225.

Society Is Purely and Solely a Continual Series of Exchanges; the Two Contracting Parties Always Both Gain; Society Is an Uninterrupted Succession of Advantages

Liberal class conflict theory emerged in a polished form in France, in the period of the Bourbon Restoration, following the defeat and final exile of Napoleon. From 1817 to 1819, two young liberals, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, edited the journal Le Censeur Européen; beginning with the second volume (issue), another young liberal, Augustin Thierry, collaborated closely with them. The Censeur Européen  developed and disseminated a radical version of liberalism, one that continued to influence liberal thought up to the time of Herbert Spencer and beyond. It can be viewed as a core-constituent—and thus one of the historically defining elements—of authentic liberalism (see “Liberalism, True and False,” in the present work). In this sense, a consideration of the world-view of the Censeur group  is of great importance in helping to give shape and content to the protean concept of liberalism. Moreover, through Henri de Saint-Simon and his followers and other channels, it had an impact on socialist thought as well. Comte and Dunoyer called their doctrine Industrialisme, Industrialism.

There were several major sources of Industrialism. One was Antoine Destutt de Tracy, the last and most famous of the Idéologue school of French liberals, whose friend, Thomas Jefferson, arranged for the translation and publication of his Treatise on Political Economy in the United States before it appeared in France. Destutt de Tracy’s definition of society was crucial:

Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. It is never anything else, in any epoch of its duration, from its commencement the most unformed to its greatest perfection. And this is the greatest eulogy we can give to it, for exchange is an admirable transaction, in which the two contracting parties always both gain; consequently, society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members.

Destutt de Tracy’s position was that “commerce is society itself. . . . It is an attribute of man. . . . It is the source of all human good . . .” Commerce was a “panacea,” in the words of a student of his thought, “the world’s civilizing, rationalizing, and pacifying force.”

—Ralph Raico, “The Conflict of Classes: Liberal vs. Marxist Theories,” in Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), 189-190.

F.A. Hayek Introduced an Element of Great Confusion into the Study of French Liberalism

Unfortunately, an element of great confusion has been introduced into the study of French liberalism through some of the writings of F.A. Hayek, principally his influential essay, “Individualism: True and False.” In this rather baffling work, Hayek attempts to distinguish two traditions of individualism (or liberalism). The first, basically a British and empirical line of thought, represents genuine liberalism; the second, French (and Continental), is a no true liberal tradition, but rather a rationalistic deviation that leads “inevitably” to collectivism. This follows from the contrasting social theories underlying the two approaches. Where the first appreciated the truth regarding social institutions, that they originated and developed “spontaneously,” the second held them to be the product of deliberate human “contrivance or design.”

--Ralph Raico, "The Centrality of French Liberalism," in Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), 220.

Vilfredo Pareto and the Liberal Doctrine of Class Conflict

Few economists are as often and as highly celebrated for their knowledge of modern intellectual history as Albert O. Hirschman. Yet Hirschman is obviously at a total loss when confronted with a clear statement of the liberal doctrine of class conflict, in Vilfredo Pareto’s Cours d’économie politique (1896–97). Here Pareto speaks of the struggle to appropriate the wealth produced by others as “the great fact that dominates the whole history of humanity.” To Hirschman’s ear this “sounds at first curiously—perhaps consciously—like the Communist Manifesto.” But Pareto quickly “distances himself from Marxism” by using the term “spoliation,” and by ascribing spoliation, or plunder, to the dominant class’s control of the state machine. Evidently, Hirschman has not the slightest inkling that Pareto was presenting, in the customary terminology, a generations-old liberal analysis that goes back at least to the first decades of the nineteenth century.

--Ralph Raico, "The Conflict of Classes: Liberal vs. Marxist Theories," in Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), 185.