Liberalism under Siege: The Political Thought of the French Doctrinaires (original) (raw)
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French liberalism, an overlooked tradition?
Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2012
There is an enduring assumption that the French have never been, and never will be, liberal. As with all clichés, this one contains a grain of truth, but it also overlooks a school of thought that has been a significant presence in French intellectual and political culture for nearly three centuries: French political liberalism. This new collection of essays, authored by a distinguished group of scholars from diverse fields, explores this rich and largely untapped tradition in French political thought. The past decade has witnessed a revival of interest in authors like Montesquieu, Constant, and Tocqueville, both in the United States and Europe. New translations have appeared and intellectual historians have significantly advanced our understanding of the political conflicts through which many 'French liberal' ideas were originally developed. Normative philosophers have also begun to employ these arguments in contemporary debates. Yet whether there exists a distinct and internally consistent paradigm underlying this tradition of thought is rarely discussed. Moreover, many influential and interesting members of the tradition, including a large number of political economists, have by and large remained out of sight. One of the core aims of this book is to provide a picture of French liberalism that is at once more comprehensive and more nuanced. Despite the rich variety of thinkers that can be brought together under the heading of 'French liberalism', they do have one common ancestor in Montesquieu. The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu's massive, almost encyclopaedic effort to rethink the normative foundations of law in a more empirical manner, set the tone for generations to come. His sharp insights into the relationship between freedom and its social and political preconditions became a major source of inspiration for those who, after the trauma of the French Revolution, tried to strike a balance between revolutionary ideals and a more conservative concern for political order. It is at this juncture that we meet the most prominent examples of the French liberal tradition, such as François Guizot, Mme de Staël,
MICHAEL BEHRENT, LIBERAL DISPOSITIONS: RECENT SCHOLARSHIP ON FRENCH LIBERALISM
Modern Intellectual History, 2015
The story of French liberalism is, we are often told, one of exceptions, eccentricities, and enigmas. Compared to their British counterparts, French liberals seem more reluctant to embrace individualism. Whereas liberals in the English-speaking world typically espouse what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty”—a sphere of private autonomy from which the state is legally excluded—French liberals have often proved highly accommodating towards “positive liberty”—that is, liberty insofar as it is tethered to collectively defined ends. A new wave of scholarship seems, however, to be emerging, in which the paradigm of exceptionalism takes a back seat to considerations that, at first glance, would seem to be more conventional and less polemical in their approach to the history of French liberal thought.
Political Studies, 2022
It has become commonplace to argue that Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville form a distinct French liberal tradition going back to Montesquieu. Yet Tocqueville showed little interest in Constant, and early nineteenth-century French liberals did not recognize Montesquieu as the father of French liberalism. Based on these observations, this essay demonstrates that the French liberal tradition is a belated construction and explains how, when, and why it was invented. Exhuming the origins of the French liberal tradition, I argue, is important for our understanding of the history of liberalism and the mechanisms behind ideology formation.