Liberalism and the Rhetorical Vision of Politics

Bryan Garsten

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 73, Number 1, January 2012,

pp. 83-93 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: 10.1353/jhi.2012.0004

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jhi/summary/v073/73.1.garsten.html

Access provided by University of Regina (2 May 2013 15:14 GMT)

 Liberalism and the Rhetorical Vision of Politics

Bryan Garsten

I. A RHETORICAL VISION OF POLITICS

Visions of Politics, Quentin Skinner’s impressive three-volume collection of

essays, does not offer a systematic defense of any particular theory of poli-
tics. In fact one lesson to be learned from the essays taken all together is
that it takes a certain sort of historical and philosophical naiveté to offer
any grand systematic theory with a straight face. Political theories, we
learn, are generally put forward to do something that the author thinks
needs doing at a certain time and place, and so they are polemical as well
as philosophical, and the polemical aspect of them points to their contin-
gency. So long as human circumstances change, so too will political theory;
there will be no final universally acceptable vision of politics to be achieved
by political scientists or philosophers, but only further ideological battles
and innovations. The title of Skinner’s volumes accents the point by speak-
ing of visions of politics, in the plural.
To point out that there is, in fact, one particular vision of politics
behind this emphasis on the plurality of visions is not to identify an internal
contradiction in Professor Skinner’s approach. There is no reason that he
as author should be exempt from the polemical processes that he describes
so well. What is Skinner’s vision? A quietly revealing moment occurs in the
last essay of the first volume, where the author allows himself to indicate
an answer. It comes at the end of a passage describing a particular belief
that he attributes to Nietzsche and Weber:
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Like Nietzsche, Weber believed that our concepts not only alter
over time, but are incapable of providing us with anything more
than a series of changing perspectives on the world in which we
live and have our being. Our concepts form part of what we bring
to the world in our efforts to make sense of it. The shifting concep-
tualizations to which this process gives rise constitute the very stuff
of ideological debate, so that it makes no more sense to regret than
to deny that such conceptual changes continually take place.
If we endorse this vision of politics, as I do, we place a
question-mark against all those neo-Kantian projects of our time
in which we encounter an aspiration to halt the flux of politics by
trying definitively to fix the analysis of key moral terms.1

Later in the same essay he remarks that efforts to insist upon a certain
meaning of a moral term ‘‘always reflect a wish to impose a particular
moral vision on the workings of the social world.’’2 The language of imposi-
tion suggests a threat to freedom, and so it is implied that the activity of
politics, understood partly as an activity of ideological debate, is an inevita-
ble (and perhaps even a worthwhile?) part of human life in which we
express and explore our freedom. From this perspective it is clear why
Thomas Hobbes, who aimed above all to end such debate and provide for
a final arbiter of the meaning of moral terms, is so often the villain in Skin-
ner’s telling of intellectual history. The vision of politics that emphasizes
the centrality and inescapability of political debate also provides the pri-
mary motive behind Skinner’s effort to re-discover the neo-Roman or
republican understanding of liberty. His motive in that project was not, in
the first place, to promote the republican view of freedom, but to reveal
the extent to which our debates about liberty have been unnecessarily and
unhealthily constrained by the dominance of the liberal view. Skinner’s goal
seems to be to free us from this constraint and thereby to restart ‘‘the flux of
politics’’ that Hobbes’s ideological innovations interrupted. I do not know
whether deep down he believes, with Aristotle and Arendt, that such politi-
cal debate and contestation fulfills our nature. He may instead simply chafe
at the confines of the sort of pseudo-scientific or pseudo-philosophic rea-
soning that hides its power-wielding under the pretense of objectivity. In
any case, it seems fair to say that the vision of politics motivating his pro-

1
Quentin Skinner, ‘‘Retrospect: Studying Rhetoric and Conceptual Change,’’ in Visions
of Politics I: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 176–77.
2
Ibid., 182.

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gram to reveal the polemical side of political theorizing is one that regards
polemical struggles as an inescapable feature of human social life, a feature
that it is only sensible to acknowledge openly. For reasons that will become
clear, this is what I refer to as a ‘‘rhetorical’’ vision of politics.
In this brief comment I do not want to criticize this fundamental vision
of politics, which I myself find congenial in many ways. Instead I would
like to spend time thinking about its political implications. In particular, I
hope to suggest that we can acknowledge and even endorse the centrality
of rhetorical contestation in political life without accepting the view that
liberalism is an unhealthy Hobbesian or neo-Kantian project to ‘‘halt the
flux of politics.’’ In fact an important strand of liberalism was motivated
by a desire to save republicanism from those who would use its language
against its essence—those who would use republican rhetoric to stifle the
sort of contestation important to republican politics.

II. THE LIBERALISM OF CONTESTATION

What sorts of political systems should be attractive to someone with a rhe-

torical vision of politics? In particular, should this vision necessarily lead us
to be suspicious of liberalism? We can ask the question more specifically
by considering liberalism’s relation to Hobbes: Hobbes’s aspiration to give
politics the certainty and stability of geometrical science seems to threaten
any vision of politics in which controversy is central. Can liberalism be
seen as a Hobbesian project in this sense, as (for example) Sheldon Wolin
sometimes suggests?3
This criticism of liberalism seems strongest to me when deployed
against the view of constitutions found in one strand of recent liberal the-
ory. The Rawlsian notion of ‘‘public reason’’ is sometimes used as a func-
tional equivalent to the ‘‘publique reason’’ of the sovereign in Hobbes’s
Leviathan. There is also, however, an older and more interesting sort of
liberalism that is best viewed as an ally of the rhetorical or controversial
vision of politics—as an ally of republican politics—rather than as its
enemy.4 To shine light on this sort of liberalism it will be necessary to
amend the story told by Skinner about the history of political thought since

3
Sheldon S. Wolin, ‘‘Norm and Form: The Constitutionalizing of Democracy,’’ in Athen-
ian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American Democracy, ed. John Wallach,
Peter Euben, and Josiah Ober (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).
4
Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the
Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2012

Hobbes, to interrupt the purported continuity between Hobbes and liber-

als. In the rest of this paper I will question this story at just one of its
moments by looking at the thought of Benjamin Constant. My excuse for
focusing in such detail on Constant is that Skinner names him as emblem-
atic of the liberalism that came from Hobbes, saying that he, along with
Isaiah Berlin, were the two ‘‘most celebrated restatements’’ of the individu-
alist and Hobbesian understanding of liberty that supplanted the neo-
Roman view.5
Skinner is surely right that Constant must be counted a liberal. But it
would be equally accurate to label Constant a ‘‘republican’’ thinker. Here I
do not mean to introduce any debate about the meaning of republicanism.
Even if we accept precisely the description of republican or neo-Roman
liberty given by Skinner in his various writings, we can easily classify Con-
stant as fitting under that description. Constant fits into the neo-Roman or
republican tradition described by Skinner on at least two counts. First, the
structure of his theory about freedom is precisely the one that Skinner attri-
butes to the neo-Roman theorists, the view that ‘‘it is only possible to be
free in a free state.’’6 According to Skinner’s interpretation of both Machia-
velli’s Discourses and the later thinkers who adopted his neo-Roman the-
ory, the collective liberty of the city was valuable because it was the best
means of protecting every individual’s (negative) liberty to do as he
pleased.7 But Constant made the same point, and even put the point into
the title of an essay: ‘‘La liberté politique, essentielle a la liberté civile.’’8
And, more famously, the argument near the end of his lecture on ancient
and modern liberty was that his audience should not forget about republi-
can or ‘‘political’’ liberty because it was necessary to secure the modern
liberties.9

5
Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), 60n.
6
Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 60.
7
Quentin Skinner, ‘‘The Idea of Negative Liberty: Machiavellian and Modern Perspec-
tives,’’ in Visions of Politics II: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).
8
Benjamin Constant, ‘‘La liberté politique, essentielle a la liberté civile,’’ in Recueil d’Ar-
ticles: 1795–1817, ed. Éphraı̈m Harpaz (Geneva: Droz, 1978 [1815]). This essay
appeared in the Mercure de France, no. 3, Oct. 1815. It was not signed, but Harpaz
argues with A. Roulin that it is by Constant because, from 258n1: ‘‘Le 19 octobre 1815,
Benjamin Constant note: ‘Fait l’article pour le Mercure. S’il est bon, c’est un tour de
force. 12 grandes pages en 5 heures.’ On peut penser avec A. Roulin, qu’il s’agit de
l’article reproduit ici et qui a paru dans le 3e numéro du Mercure, au mois d’octubre
1815.’’
9
Benjamin Constant, ‘‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Mod-

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 Garsten ✦ Symposium: On Quentin Skinner, from Method to Politics

The second theoretical way in which Constant’s approach fits neatly

into the account of republicanism given by Skinner is that Constant often
oriented his political thought around an opposition to arbitrary rule.
According to Skinner, the crux of the neo-Roman argument, the point that
‘‘divides the neo-roman from the liberal understanding of freedom,’’ was
the view that to be subject to arbitrary rule was itself a constraint on one’s
freedom, even if the ruler was not actually making use of his power in an
interfering way.10 In Hobbes and Republican Liberty Skinner points to the
powerful passages in which writers such as Tacitus and Milton depict the
danger of falling into servility when kept subject to arbitrary rule, and also
to the way in which Harrington described the peculiar anxiety that comes
with being in that position of dependence.11 But Constant had the same
sorts of concerns; he wrote with special urgency about the plight of people
living under arbitrary rule. Indeed, the account of the psychological, moral,
and social effects of living in that situation fill his work on Napoleon, The
Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation, and they are among the most powerful
treatments of the issue in all of political thought, with whole chapters
devoted to topics such as ‘‘The effects of arbitrary power upon the different
aspects of human existence,’’ ‘‘The effects of arbitrary power on intellectual
progress,’’ and ‘‘Men’s inability to resign themselves voluntarily to arbi-
trary power in any form.’’12 He defined despotism as ‘‘a government in
which the will of the master is the only law’’ and he protested against the
‘‘sophism’’ that justified such despotism by arguing that ‘‘arbitrary power
concentrated in the hands of a single individual is not as dangerous as it is
when contended for by factions.’’ He began chapter eleven with the single-
sentence paragraph, ‘‘Arbitrary power, whether exercised in the name of
one man or of all, will not let man be, even in his moments of rest and joy,’’
a sentence that clearly encompasses the point that arbitrary power impinges
upon freedom even when it does not pose an active impediment to action.13
Constant was a ‘‘republican’’ thinker in the sense in which Skinner uses
that word: he opposed being subject to arbitrary power and he viewed
political liberty as a crucial means to securing the freedom to pursue one’s
own ends.

erns,’’ in Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1988), 309–28.
10
Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 84–96.
11
Quentin Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), xiii, 213–15.
12
Benjamin Constant, ‘‘The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation,’’ in Political Writings,
43–167.
13
Ibid., 114–15, 18.

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It is true that the contrast Constant made between ancient and modern
liberty is often read as an argument that republicanism is not viable in mod-
ern social and economic conditions. But we must be clear about what he
was rejecting in that lecture: he rejected calls for Spartan virtue and self-
sacrifice, for the theocratic power of self-appointed guardians of civic reli-
gion, and for the required communal endorsement of a thick substantive
view about the best life that allowed no room for private projects of self-
development.14 None of these characteristics of ancient republicanism is a
necessary part of the neo-Roman or republican liberty described by Skinner.
In fact Skinner goes out of his way to show that republican thought offers a
way of linking individual liberty to public duties without a thick teleology.15
Skinner’s understanding of ‘‘republican’’ liberty is already ‘‘modern’’ in
Constant’s sense.
All of this would be beside the point, however, if Constant’s republi-
canism were somehow hostile to the give and take of polemical argument
that is important to the rhetorical vision of politics. But it is quite clear that
Constant opposed the Hobbesian project of avoiding, settling or minimiz-
ing controversy. Constant’s defense of liberal representative governments
does not fit into Wolin’s understanding of liberal constitutionalism as an
elaborated Hobbesian State. Constant is much more easily viewed as some-
one protesting against the understanding of the State as a locus of unified
sovereignty, and therefore against Hobbes’s project.
During the decade after the Revolution, many writers supporting
Napoleon argued in pamphlets and journals that allowing a multitude
of private opinions would threaten social peace and order and produce
factionalism. Louis de Bonald, for example, presented ‘‘the diversity of
religious and political opinions’’ as ‘‘the principal cause of the French
Revolution.’’16 Constant, however, always opposed these Hobbesian writ-
ers who allowed their desire for stability to stifle ideological diversity and
polemical debate. In the first and more complete version of his Principles
of Politics he turned directly to Hobbes when looking to find the root of
the argument he wanted to challenge. He devoted one full chapter of book
one to refuting Hobbes’s notion of absolute sovereignty, and another to

14
Bryan Garsten, ‘‘Religion and the Case against Ancient Liberty: Benjamin Constant’s
Other Lectures,’’ Political Theory 38 (2010): 4–33.
15
Skinner, ‘‘The Idea of Negative Liberty: Machiavellian and Modern Perspectives,’’ in
Visions of Politics II: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 186–212.
16
de Bonald, Mercure de France 257 (June 21, 1806): 533–54, as quoted by Hoffman in
Constant, Principes de politique, 133, n. 18.

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showing how a recent case for unified sovereignty put forth by Louis-
Matthieu Molé was nothing but (in the words of Constant’s dismissive
chapter heading) ‘‘opinion de Hobbes reproduite.’’17
Against Hobbes, Bonald, and the general consensus of many on both
the left and the right, Constant argued in favor of allowing a multitude of
different religious sects to flourish, even going so far as to suggest state
support for every sect that had established itself as any sort of social force
in society.18 He steadfastly supported freedom of the press and the prolifera-
tion of opinions that it produced. His model was the practice of parliamen-
tary opposition that he had seen in England. He insisted on protecting a
role for opposition, and indeed always preferred to be in the opposition
himself. At the very end of his life, when the revolution of 1830 brought
liberals into power, he enraged his political ally Guizot by refusing to join
the ruling party; he preferred to remain free to oppose and criticize. In
general, his vision of politics was one in which polemical debate was cen-
tral, one in which any claim about the content of our rights and duties as
citizens had to open itself to contestation. It is true, of course, that Constant
was allied with de Staël in a project to ‘‘terminer la révolution.’’ But only if
we were to adopt the dubious and dangerous proposition that revolution-
ary activities are the only truly political activities could we conclude that
their liberal project was inherently anti-political. Constant endorsed and
helped to define a liberalism of contestation that is better understood as an
effort to oppose Hobbes’s project than as a continuation of it.19

III. LIBERALISM AND THE RHETORIC

OF REPUBLICANISM

Like Professor Skinner, Benjamin Constant thought polemical contestation,

republicanism, and even a large degree of ‘‘flux’’ were central to politics.

17
Constant, Principes de politique, Book I, ch. 8, 42. The defense of monarchy that Con-
stant attacked here was Louis-Matthieu Molé’s Essais de morale et de politique (Paris: H.
Nicole, 1806).
18
Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to All Representative Govern-
ments, in Constant, Political Writings, 170–307 at 285–89. Constant offered the same
arguments in the earlier draft, suggesting that the multiplicity of sects was a consistent
and central part of his position. See Benjamin Constant, Principes de politique applicables
à tous les gouvernements, tome II, ed. Etienne Hofmann (Geneva: Droz, 1980), book
VIII, ch. 3, 165.
19
Bryan Garsten, ‘‘Representative Government and Popular Sovereignty,’’ in Representa-
tion and Popular Rule, ed. Ian Shapiro, Susan Stokes, and Elisabeth Wood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2012

Why, then, did he feel compelled to introduce the institutional innovations

that marked him as a liberal? One key reason was that political contestation
was being threatened—and it was being threatened by the rhetoric of
republicanism itself. In a curious but by now familiar twist of intellectual
history, the Hobbesian position against controversy was taken up in post-
revolutionary debates not exclusively by the counter-revolutionaries, but
also by some of the republicans. It was Sieyès, after all, who had insisted
that the National Assembly be the sole authorized spokesman for the
Nation, and that the people could speak only in one voice through the
Nation. And while Robespierre might have resisted for a time, once in
power he was drawn into the same sort of usurpation, claiming to find in
his own voice the final representation of the people.20 (‘‘They are always
you, these representatives’’ Jacques Necker wrote to him, ‘‘and you with a
perfect exactitude. Their interest and their will is yours. . . . And it is always
the word ‘representative’ that allows such a blind confidence!’’21) The arti-
ficial person of the State, the invention of which Skinner has so penetrat-
ingly described, manifested itself on the republican side of these debates
with as much strength as it did among the monarchists.
Constant focused especially on the pernicious way in which various
writers and politicians had used the language of liberty to justify despotism.
His real venom was directed not at republics, but at the misuse of republi-
can language. Rousseau’s Social Contract had been used to ‘‘supply weap-
ons and pretexts to all kinds of tyranny’’ and Napoleon’s talk and practice
of freedom had been the ‘‘counterfeiting of liberty.’’22 In describing the time
of the Terror, Constant noticed that ordinary parts of life had been re-
described as occasions for suspicion: ‘‘Inaction appeared a crime, domestic
affections neglect of the fatherland, happiness a suspicious desire. . . .’’ And
elsewhere, again about Napoleon: ‘‘There is no limit to the tyranny that
seeks to exact the signs of consent. The quiet are persecuted as indifferent,
the energetic as dangerous. . . .’’ If we read these passages with the notion
of rhetorical re-description that Professor Skinner has written about in
mind, we hear in Constant’s words a protest against the idea that the range
of possible descriptors for actions is unlimited, an argument about the

20
See Istvan Hont, ‘‘The Permanent Crisis of a Divided Mankind: ‘Contemporary Crisis
of the Nation State’ in Historical Perspective,’’ Political Studies 42 (1994): 166–231.
21
See Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, ed. Samuel Moyn (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2006), 264, n. 47.
22
Constant, ‘‘The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation,’’ in Political Writings, 95, 106–07.
On ‘‘pretexts’’ in Constant’s thought, see Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the
Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984).

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essential implausibility of certain efforts to re-describe, for example, silence

as consent, tyranny as freedom and ordinary life as mutinous. In particular,
no amount of verbal acrobatics, Constant insisted, could turn despotism
into liberty—the two were not ‘‘neighbors’’ in the way that certain virtues
and vices were; they were simply opposites.
The implausibility of certain re-descriptions led Constant to think that
a serious campaign to combat arbitrariness could be helped by the idea of
non-interference. (For instance: ‘‘There is . . . a part of human existence
which by necessity remains individual and independent, and which is, by
right, outside any social competence.’’23) The reason that he was not satis-
fied with the usual republican strategies for minimizing arbitrariness—
fidelity to the popular will, elections, and revolution—was that they had all
failed. Moreover, on reflection it seemed that any conceivable strategy for
eliminating arbitrariness altogether would be necessarily insufficient.
Because no system of rule would eliminate government entirely, people
would always be ruled by a will other than their own. Constant opposed
arbitrary power, as we saw, but he also seemed to recognize that there
would always be an element of arbitrariness in even the most duly-
constituted government. That is why he—and liberals more generally—did
not believe that it was sufficient to justify or authorize rulers, and why they
focused also on the project of limiting their action.
The liberal project of limited government—and the rhetoric of non-
interference that comes along with it—is an acknowledgment that arbitrari-
ness cannot be wholly eliminated from rule. It is also an acknowledgment
that the arguments by which a politician or a theorist may seek to eliminate
the appearance of arbitrariness—arguments about the representativeness
of a certain policy, or the sufficiency of the contestation to which it was
subject—are as polemical as any other arguments in politics, and that they
are often used to close off political contestation. A survey of the uses to
which the republican language of popular sovereignty has been put, and is
still put today, would (I am confident) reveal that one of its most common
functions is to insulate rulers from criticism. (Recall Napoleon’s words to
the Corps Legislatif in 1814: ‘‘Are you representatives of the people? I am:
four times I have been called by the nation and four times I have received
the votes of five million citizens. I have a title and you do not.’’ Or consider
Aleksander Lukashenko after being elected president of Belarus in 1994,
opposing checks and balances in the constitution: ‘‘There will be no dicta-

23
Constant, ‘‘Principles of Politics Applicable to All Representative Governments,’’ in
Political Writings, 177.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2012

torship. I am of the people, and I am going to be for the people.’’) The

liberal innovations we today describe as ‘‘representative government’’ did
not aim to close off such rhetoric, but they did create institutional structures
to multiply these claims to represent the people and set them against one
another, allowing none to go unchallenged. The effect of this sort of institu-
tional design was to keep the partial arbitrariness of all rule always before
our eyes, front and center, so that we could watch what the government
was doing and act against it when necessary. When liberals demanded non-
interference, they were demanding that the government refrain from inter-
fering with whatever gives us as citizens the independence to stand apart
and watch over the government in this way.
In Hobbes, non-interference may have been a clever definition of lib-
erty that served mainly to allow him to call subjects of a near-absolute
sovereign ‘‘free.’’ In later liberals, however, non-interference was an effort
to protect the preconditions of political opposition and contestation against
arbitrary rule. Professor Skinner, more than anyone, is familiar with the
way that concepts can be redeployed for purposes very different from the
ones for which they were invented. The use of non-interference as an under-
standing of liberty among post-revolutionary liberals is, it seems to me,
an interesting example of just this sort of conceptual innovation. Liberals
deployed a concept related to Hobbes’s notion of liberty to shore up their
argument against the Hobbesian tendencies in the republican politics of
their day. Liberalism, or an interesting strand of it anyway, was a response
to a particular misuse of republican rhetoric. It was an effort to find a way
to unleash the revolutionary, freedom-promoting power of republican ideas
while at the same time making it difficult to enlist those ideas into a justifi-
cation of authorities whose non-arbitrariness could never be guaranteed.
Liberalism was a post-revolutionary phenomenon, but it was not
therefore a counter-revolutionary one. At least one prominent strand of
liberalism should be seen instead as having arisen out of a sense of disap-
pointment with the way that democratic revolutions ended—with the
cycles of usurpation that they unleashed, in which even seemingly sincere
popular leaders like Cromwell and Robespierre found themselves substi-
tuting their own voices for that of the people. The liberalism that spawned
our modern systems of representative government was an effort to pro-
tect polemical, rhetorical politics against such concentrations of power.
Liberals of this kind were flexible about what precisely should fall into the
protected sphere of rights, but they were not infinitely flexible. They
insisted that there were limits to what could plausibly be described as free-

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 Garsten ✦ Symposium: On Quentin Skinner, from Method to Politics

dom. They protested especially fiercely against a particular rhetorical re-

description that republicanism too often abuses, the one most often used
to make rule seem less arbitrary—the re-description of the government’s
actions as our own.

Yale University.

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