Earlier this evening the launch was held at the Institute of Economic Affairs of Dennis O’Keeffe’s translation of Benjamin Constant’s Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments, which is published by Liberty Fund Inc. Dennis is to be congratulated for this mighty undertaking, which is bound to reverberate through the Anglosphere in the months and years to come.
At the IEA, Dennis spoke only briefly. Rather than regale us at length with his own views of Benjamin Constant, he let the man speak to us for himself. We were offered the following few Constant quotations. Dennis commented hardly at all other than to note how much sense they still made of the people and events of our own time:
How bizarre that those who called themselves ardent friends of freedom have worked so relentlessly to destroy the natural basis of patriotism, to replace it with a false passion for an abstract being, for a general idea deprived of everything which strikes the imagination or speaks to memory. (p.326)
People always take mediocrity as peaceful. It is peaceful only when it is locked up. When chance invests it with power, it is a thousand times more incalculable in its motion, more envious, more obstinate, more immoderate, and more convulsive than talent,… (pp. 329-40)
This next one, said Dennis, could – its extreme eloquence aside – have as easily been said by the most committed twenty first century libertarian:
… society has no right to be unjust to a single one of its members, … the whole society minus one, is not authorised to obstruct the latter in his opinions, nor in those actions which are not harmful, in the use of his property or the exercise of his labour, save in those cases where that use or that exercise would obstruct another individual possessing the same rights. (p. 384)
The final one, said Dennis, he could not supply a page number for, despite a lot of searching. It had just stuck in his mind.
If human nature is a good argument against freedom, it is an even better one against despotism.
I am ashamed to admit that until now, for me, Benjamin Constant has only been a name. Not any more. I bought the book, and I recommend you do too if you are at all interested in the history of liberty and of the idea of liberty.
UPDATE: Here is what Benjamin Constant looked like.
Dear Brian
I am glad you so enjoyed the evening. I am very grateful for your publicising the book. I hope you and I are right that Constant’s reputation will grow now that the text of his most important book is available in English.
See you soon,
Dennis
It’s one of the tragic ironies of history that the ultra-statist French produced in Constant one of the greatest of modern liberal thinkers, and proceeded to totally ignore him. Though Toqueville was not exactly a liberal, a similar observation could be made about him. A prophet is not without honor save in his own country…
If you have ever tried to have a book published particularly if you have not been published before, it is as hard as having all your teeth removed without an anisthetic. Bravo to Benjamin Constant, too bad publishers are only interested in writers that have already been published with a track record of being financially productive, otherwise more good books would be made available to the reading public.