The ancient Greeks and Romans developed their understanding of liberty in socially unified communities small in territory and population. To attain liberty and minimize its misuse, Constant argued, leaders and citizens must first see what makes us moderns different from the ancients. Delivered as a lecture to France’s Royal Athenaeum, “The Liberty of the Ancients” synthesized his reflections on the nature of liberty-reflections that would exert an historic influence on liberalism and that remain relevant for the United States today.

During the Hundred Days and the Bourbon Restoration, he became an advocate for liberal, constitutional monarchy. A witness to the best aspirations of the French Revolution and its worst crimes, Constant (1767-1830) emerged from the revolutionary era with a disgust for despotism. 'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title.Last year marked the 200th anniversary of the French-Swiss political writer Benjamin Constant’s essay, “ The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns.” Though nineteenth- and twentieth-century liberals, from John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville to Isaiah Berlin, held Constant in high esteem, his work has lost prominence today. This translation of Constant's political writings is replete with full editorial apparatus and bibliographic information that will enable anglophone students of liberal thought to engage at first hand with one of its most durable and influential exponents.

The novel Adolphe has hitherto been Constant's only work freely available outside France, emphasising his importance within European Romanticism and his centrality to French literary development in the nineteenth century. His writings are widely regarded as one of the classical formulations of modern liberal doctrine, and Constant's own closeness to the Anglo-Saxon political tradition renders their translation into English particularly appropriate. A Swiss protestant by birth, Constant was a prominent figure in French political life in the aftermath of the revolution of 1789, and a leading member of the liberal opposition to Napoleon and, subsequently, to the restored Bourbon monarchy. This is the first English translation of the major political works of Benjamin Constant, one of the most important of modern French political theorists and writers.

Constant political writings