Benjamin Constant's Republican Liberalism Between Reaction and Terror

Abstract

The article focuses on the general analysis of the evolution of Benjamin Constant's political views and contains an overview of its reception in the last decades. This reexamination resulted in the reevaluation of the impact of his political philosophy on European thought. For European and especially for Russian readers Constant had remained a “forgotten classic”, whose historical importance was recognized, although its influence on the political tradition of liberalism had been underestimated. On the example of his important early work “On political reactions” (1797) translated into Russian for the first time, the article analyzes the genesis of the French political liberalism as a possible “third way” between Jacobin terror and the ideology of restoration of the Old Regime. It also scrutinizes Constant's attempt to understand the relation between the political institutions and the “dominant ideas” in a given society in order to establish the firm status of the “public opinion” that is supposed to become the leading force in the democratic societies.