As regular readers know I think it’s a mistake to treat Locke as the founder of liberalism. To do so, however, is to devalue toleration as originating and intrinsic to liberalism. I have started to promote Adam Smith (alongside William Robertson) as the first to use ‘liberal’ in a modern sense and this allows one to emphasize liberalism as an ameliorative response to warlike and imperial, mercantile capitalism (and to celebrate federalism, moral equality, rule of law, commerce, etc.) Very sophisticated scholars scoff at this hunt for fathers and starting points, of course.
A certain knowingness surrounds the idea that Benjamin Constant is the first liberal. My own view is that there is a huge amount of Smith in Constant, but let’s leave that aside. If Constant is the first liberal, then liberalism starts — and this is the important bit — not as a response to religious warfare, not as a revolt against mercantile imperialism, but against Bonapartism in (1814) The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation.
Crucially for my purposes, for Constant Bonaparte wasn’t the first Bonapartist—that was Cromwell, avant la lettre. (More on that below.) We may define Bonapartism as the form of despotism that “appropriates the very [democratic] forms it violates.” (p. 131; part II, chapter 14, in the Fontana translation).* To name this appropriation, Constant uses Locke’s understanding of the idea of usurpation.
Usurpation as Bonapartism uses it is, thus, a kind of (violent) play-acting: “individuals are forced to pretend that they are acting solely for the advantage and the good of the people” (p. 100) because of the predominance of democratic ideas. In Bonapartism, the freedom of the press is parodied, and it forces authors to lie to their conscience. (pp. 96-7, II.3)
There is a great passage that captures the as-if nature, the repetitive “counterfeiting of liberty” (II.3, p. 95) that is so characteristic of Bonapartism: “The people will elect their magistrates, but if they fail to elect them in the way prescribed in advance, their choices will be declared null. Opinions will be free, but any opinion in opposition not only to the general system, but even to trifling circumstantial measures, will be punished as treasonable.” (p. 111; part II.8)
Now, as I hinted above, The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation tells us of two Bonapartists, who usurp through democracy. This is made explicit in the context when Constant describes legitimacy: “Of the two kinds of legitimacy which I admit, the one which derives from election is more seductive in theory, but it has the inconvenience that it can be counterfeited: as it was in England by Cromwell and in France by Bonaparte.” (p. 159). That Cromwell is the first Bonapartist matters because he takes power in a propertied democracy. Constant is not so naïve as to think that it can only occur in mass democracy.
There is an important contrast between the two Bonapartists: Napoleon has ‘the need for war to maintain usurpation.” (p. 163) Cromwell did not need this. Constant ascribes this difference to the effect of the rise of modern communication. (Radio, TV, Film, Internet, AI, they follow in a long line of revolutionary communication breakthroughs that purportedly change politics.) On Constant’s account, on the British Isles Cromwell could maintain England as a communicative echo-chamber without attacking nearby countries to prevent propaganda against him from spreading. (“Communications between peoples were neither as frequent nor as easy.” (p. 164)+
Some other time I want to explore the details of Constant’s analysis of the rise of Bonapartism and also his remarkably optimistic take on its lack of durability. But here I want to close on the crucial point: the analysis of how (propertied) democracy is potentially self-undermining originates within liberalism. And from within liberalism 18 Brumaire is a completely predictable event.
While there is much to learn from non-liberals like Marx and Burnham (and ambivalent liberals like Weber), liberals have not ignored the rise of Bonapartism. In fact, if you think liberalism starts with Constant then liberalism has to be understood as an effort to block (recall) the ‘road to Bonapartism.’ (See also Cyril Hédoin’s recent piece.) It’s not my take, but it is not a silly one. To be continued.
*I mean by despotism a government in which the will of the master is the only law; where political bodies, if they exist, are simply his instruments; where the master regards himself as the exclusive owner of his empire and considers his subjects merely as usufructuaries; where liberty can be taken away from the citizens without the authorities deigning to explain their motives, and without the citizens having any right to know them; where the courts are subjected to the whims of power; where their sentences can be annulled; where those who are acquitted are dragged in front of new judges, instructed, by the example of their predecessors, that they are there only to condemn. (II.9, p. 114)+
+Constant also notices linguistic barriers. In Cromwell’s age the lingua franca was Latin, in Napoleon’s age it was French.