Commentary on Filangieri’s Work

Commentary on Filangieri’s Work addresses the principal political and social questions that Benjamin Constant, one of the most important liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century, ever discussed. This translation will help give the work its deserved importance in political theory.

Commentary is founded on the view that government should maintain a strictly limited role in society; “The functions of government are purely negative. It should repress disorder, eliminate obstacles, in a word, prevent evil from arising. Thereafter one can leave it to individuals to find the good.”

Benjamin Constant (1767–1830), born in Switzerland, became one of France’s leading writers, as well as a journalist, philosopher, and politician.

Alan S. Kahan is Professor of British Civilization at the Université de Versailles/St. Quentin-en-Yvelines in France.

Benjamin Constant (1767-1830) was a French-Swiss po-litical writer and novelist. He combined a lively political career with a fertile literary output, while entertaining a series of liaisons with some of Frances most prominent women. Constant was an able parliamentarian, a cham-pion of liberalism and the author of The History of Reli-gion. Posterity, however, remembers him as the man who bared the anatomy of a destructive passion in the story of Adolphe (1816).

Alan Kahan currently teaches at the Euro-American campus of Sciences Po in Reims, France. Previously he was professor of history at Florida International University. He is the author of numerous articles and books including Alexis de Tocqueville, Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe, and Aristocratic Liberalism.