Commentary on Filangieri’s Work. Benjamin de Constant

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СКАЧАТЬ another by necessity, they constantly fought or threatened one another. Even those who did not wish to be conquerors could not lay down the sword, under pain of being conquered. All bought their security, their independence, their entire existence at the price of war.

      The world of today is in precisely the opposite situation from the ancient world. While each people formerly constituted an isolated family, the born enemy of other families, now a mass of men exists, under different names and various forms of social organization, but homogeneous by nature. This mass is strong enough to have nothing to fear from still barbarous hordes. It is civilized enough for war to be expensive. Its uniform tendency is toward peace.

      We have arrived at the period of commerce, a period which must necessarily replace that of war, just as war necessarily had to precede it. This is not the right moment to discuss all the consequences of this change which, as I have just said, gave man a new nature. I will come back to these consequences later. It is enough to have stated the principle.

      The period of war being over for modern peoples, clearly it is the duty of governments to abstain from it.

      Yet so that governments do not deviate from this duty, it is not in government that we should put our trust. For governments, war will always be a means of increasing their authority. For despots, it will be a distraction they throw to their slaves, so that they feel their slavery less. For the despot’s favorites, it will be a diversion they use to keep their master from understanding the details of their maladministration. For demagogues, it will be a way of

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      inflaming the multitude’s passions, and of leading it to extremes which favor their violent counsels and their partisan views. Thus, if one leaves governments—and under the name of governments I include all those who take power, demagogues as well as ministers—if, I say, one leaves governments free to start or prolong wars, the benefit peoples ought to receive from the progress of civilization will be lost, and wars will continue long after the time when they are no longer necessary.

      It is therefore by taking the question of war away from rulers’ arbitrary choice that we will succeed in preserving the governed from it. But how can we remove this question from rulers’ arbitrary choice? By a representative constitution, according to which the nation’s delegates have the right to deny the government the means of undertaking or continuing useless wars, and which subjects the holder of power who engages in such enterprises to a grave and inevitable responsibility.

      This prejudges nothing about the question of the right of making peace and war proper, such as it has been discussed in our assemblies and such as our present Charte2 decides. That in emergencies the constitutional monarch should have the prerogative of declaring war at the right time is a pure formality, provided that the funds necessary to sustain it can be denied to his ministers, and that these ministers are responsible for the declaration which they have suggested to the king.

      We already see in this question (and it will be the same for many others) that the solution to the difficulty depends on the establishment of constitutional guaranties. Filangieri only obscures the question by a misplaced epigram. If war is necessary, the government is right to “want to kill the greatest number of men in the shortest possible time.” As soon as war is unnecessary, it is criminal to undertake it. The number of dead and the instruments of destruction are irrelevant.

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       CHAPTER THREE On Encouragements for Agriculture

      We have not thought about rewarding the intelligent farmer.

      INTRODUCTION, P. 1.

      Here already we perceive a symptom of Filangieri’s mistaken system with regard to the influence of government protection. As he constantly comes back to it in his work, I am going to take the first opportunity to refute him here. But I must go back to the origin of his mistake, which was that of many enlightened men of the eighteenth century.

      When the philosophers of that period began to concern themselves with the chief questions of social organization, they were struck by the evils produced by government’s harmful interference and inept measures. But being novices in this science, they thought that a different use of that same authority would do as much good as its misuse had done harm. They did not recognize that the vice was in government intervention itself, and that rather than asking the government to act differently, one ought to have begged the government not to act at all. Thus you see them call the government to the aid of all the reforms they propose: agriculture, industry, commerce, education, religion, education, morality. They subject them all to the government, on condition that it act according to their views.

      The last century counts very few writers who did not succumb to this mistake. Turgot, Mirabeau, and Condorcet in France, Dohm and Mauvillon in Germany, Thomas Paine and Bentham in England, Franklin in America—this is just about the list of those who recognized that, for all kinds of progress as for all kinds of needs, for the prosperity of all classes as for the success of all speculations, for the quantity of production as for its balance, one needs

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      to trust to freedom and individual interest. One needs to trust the energy which inspires man to exercise his own faculties, and to the absence of all hindrances to it. The others preferred protection to independence, encouragements to guaranties, advantages to neutrality.

      For the most part, the economists themselves made this error.1 However, this was all the more inexcusable since their fundamental principle seems as if it ought to have preserved them from it. Laisser-faire et laisser-passer was their motto, but they applied it to hardly anything except prohibitions. Encouragements seduced them. They did not see that prohibitions and encouragements are but two branches of the same system, and that as long as you accept one, you are threatened by the other.

      Of all the professions, agriculture was the one the economists most wanted to raise up from the degraded state into which it had fallen. Their favorite axiom, that land is the sole source of wealth, made them attach extreme importance to the work which made it productive. They became justly and legitimately indignant when they saw the oppression of the class which, in their eyes, was the most indispensable and hardest working. Thus arose their chimerical projects to raise up this class, to give it prestige and even fame.

      The idea of giving rewards to the “intelligent farmer who, by his work or by new methods, had found means of increasing the public wealth” is therefore not Filangieri’s at all. He could borrow it from the economists, for example from the marquis de Mirabeau,2 author of L’Ami des hommes, but he seems to have been particularly attached to this idea. He comes back to it, more insistently and in more detail, in another part of his work (bk. 2, chap. 15). Trumping his original proposition, independent of monetary rewards, he wants to create a medal which would be worn by the sovereign himself, and with which the best farmers would be decorated.

      If one considers the period when Filangieri proposed these childish and bizarre expedients, one will understand their absurdity. It was a time when the agricultural class was subject to laws and paid taxes which no representative they had chosen discussed or consented to. A time when, without a voice with which to make requests, or means to defend themselves, they submitted

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      in silence to these biased laws and unequal taxes. A time when servitudes of all kinds weighed on them, interrupted their work, troubled their rest. A time when, finally, placed on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy, they bore all social burdens without appeal, for all СКАЧАТЬ