Benjamin Constant, political power, and democracy

Abstract

ABSTRACT For several decades now, a steady flow of scholarly contributions from both intellectual history and political theory has been reasserting Benjamin Constant as a theorist of liberal democracy. Constant’s visionary understanding of liberal democracy is usually conflated with his understanding of limited popular sovereignty. In this article, I reconstruct Constant’s positive conception of popular sovereignty, i.e. his conception of what popular sovereignty means within its limits and take it as the starting point of an analysis of Constant’s understanding of democracy. I argue that Constant’s understanding of popular sovereignty as ‘the assent of all’ leads to a distinction between ‘governmental authority’ and ‘sovereign power’. The latter is exercised by the individual members of the political community and has features that align with contemporary aggregative and contestatory approaches to democracy. Even though according to this analysis, Constant’s conception of democracy allows for both pluralism and dynamism, those are operative against the background of a more fundamental conservatism: Constant’s understanding of sovereign power is predicated on an institutional status quo.