Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments.

• Author: Davies, Christie
• Position: Book Review

Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments By Benjamin Constant, translated by Dennis O'Keeffe Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003 [1810, 1980].

Pp. 580. $22.00 cloth, $12.00 paperback.

Dennis O'Keeffe is to be congratulated on providing the English-speaking world with the first complete translation of Benjamin Constant's most substantial book Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments, published originally in 1810. He has given us a clear and detailed rendering into English of this classic French work that preserves the language structure of the original and, so far as I can tell, captures its meaning faithfully.

Constant was an unusual thinker for a Frenchman because he escaped the statism that pervades French economic and political thought and its utopianism that rapidly becomes totalitarianism. There is nothing here of the vacuousness and potential for violence of a Rousseau or a Sartre. Constant understood and appreciated the Anglo-Saxon view that liberty is not personal liberation from social obligations, that liberty is possible and liberation is not, and that liberation is the enemy of liberty because those who seek to be liberated, in their anger at failing to achieve the unattainable, turn against liberty and seek to destroy it. They blame the world's faults on those perverse people who use their liberty to make choices incompatible with their true and complete liberation from existing social constraints. Such people, it follows, must be deprived of their liberty.

Constant was an unusual French thinker perhaps because, although he became a French citizen, he was by origin a Swiss Protestant and spoke flawless English. He studied between 1783 and 1785 in Edinburgh, where he gained a thorough knowledge of the work of Adam Smith and David Hume, and later he came to know and appreciate Jeremy Bentham's writings.

Throughout Constant's work we find admonitions concerning politicians and officials that state elegantly and clearly principles that apply to all governments. Even though these principles often seem to be self-evident, they are never acted on. We need Constant to remind us of them, as when he writes:

The proliferation of the laws flatters the lawmaker in relation to two natural human inclinations: the need for him to act and the pleasure he gets from believing himself necessary. Anytime you give a man a special job to do he does more rather than less.... Those in government always want to be governing and when...