Rethinking Liberalism and Terror
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Description
Throughout his protean career, Benjamin Constant never wavered in his denunciation of two blood-stained instruments of arbitrary rule: courts that strip ordinary procedural rights from individuals being tried for particularly heinous offences and the demand that penal sanctions be used not only to punish convicted criminals but also to prevent prospective criminals from committing future crimes. Both irregular courts and preventive police actions were rationalized during his lifetime by declarations of national emergency and appeals to public safety. What strikes the contemporary reader of his hostile commentary on these matters is the label he attached, as a matter of course, to the two policies under scrutiny. He described them, in a way that was uncontroversial at the time, as central pillars of the Reign of Terror. The label is disconcerting today because the very policies that he singled out for opprobrium have now come to be widely seen as central pillars of the War on Terror. Putting aside for the moment the deaths of innocent civilians in foreign wars, the level of lawless governmental violence was unquestionably greater in 1790s France than in the United States during the first decade of the twenty-first century. It would make no sense, therefore, to compare the Reign of Terror with the War on Terror as domestic political nightmares. What does make sense is to compare, at least indirectly and by implication, the reasons given for deviating from ordinary legal rules in the two cases. That these justifications might not be all that dissimilar is already suggested by Constant’s observation that ‘during the whole course of our Revolution our governments claimed they had the right to violate the constitution in order to save it’. Writing after the most virulently illiberal phase of the Revolution was concluded, Constant advanced several persuasive criticisms of the revolutionary attempt to revive, in modern times, a renowned institution of ancient republicanism, namely dictatorship for the sake of public safety. Resurrecting the anachronistic Roman idea that threats to public safety justify the government’s temporary abandonment of legality, the perpetrators of the Terror set the stage for their own gruesome downfall. Not only did their out-of-place revival of a classical model suggest a fatal disconnect from reality, but their dismantling of procedural rights in criminal cases, during what they considered a national emergency, proved not only ‘unreasonable’ but certifiably ‘insane’.
Source Publication
French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day
Source Editors/Authors
Raf Geenens, Helena Rosenblatt
Publication Date
2012
Recommended Citation
Holmes, Stephen, "Rethinking Liberalism and Terror" (2012). Faculty Chapters. 794.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/794
