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THE HARD BIRTH OF FRENCH LIBERALISM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2009
Extract
Last year, Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson published a brief, bold book on a topic from which historians of political thought have tended to shy away, curiously enough—the relations between republicanism and liberalism as political ideologies in the age of the American and French Revolutions. Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns is relentlessly polemical, blaming this neglect on the historians and theorists responsible for resurrecting the early modern republican tradition over the last few decades. Pocock, Skinner, Wood, Petit, and more are assailed for having indulged in what Kalyvas and Katznelson call “republican nostalgia”—that is, for having wrongly presented republicanism as an alternative to modern liberalism, rather than its parent and precursor. Instead, the authors of Liberal Beginnings set out to show the ways in which republicanism evolved into liberalism, in and through the works of a set of leading thinkers—Smith, Ferguson, Paine, Madison, Staël, and Constant. Their story has a happy ending. Whatever was valuable and actual in republicanism was smoothly incorporated into early liberalism, for which they turn the dictionary inside out in search of approbative adjectives—“situated,” “thick,” “sturdy,” “confident,” “open,” “immanent,” “heterogeneous,” and “syncretic.” How persuasive is their account? Not a few readers will detect a hint of protesting too much in this kind of cheerleading. “Thick,” “sturdy,” and “confident” are surely not the first terms to spring to mind in regard to this gallery of thinkers, Staël and Constant least of all. It also seems clear that Kalyvas's and Katznelson's coverage of French thought, confined almost entirely to that pair, is too cursory to sustain their case. At one end, Montesquieu and Rousseau, the titans who together defined republicanism for the revolutionary generation, make only the most fleeting of appearances in Liberal Beginnings. At the other, Tocqueville, acknowledged on all sides as the master thinker of French liberalism, is missing altogether. Nevertheless, the attempt at treating anglophone and French thinkers within a single interpretative framework is in itself a virtually unprecedented feat, for which Kalyvas and Katznelson should be congratulated. For who could doubt that they are on exactly the right path in chasing their prey onto French soil?
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References
1 Kalyvas, Andreas and Katznelson, Ira, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Baker, Keith Michael, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Thought in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sonenscher, Michael, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and idem, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Neither Baker nor Sonenscher are ordinary Cambridge practitioners, of course; the former's theoretical range includes stretches from Furet to Foucault; the latter discards many conventional assumptions about the “languages” under scrutiny. But the basic theoretical orientation of both still points in the direction of Cambridge.
3 Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
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