Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion

Ideas in Context

by Helena Rosenblatt

Professor Rosenblatt presents a study of Benjamin Constant's intellectual development into a founding father of modern liberalism, through a careful analysis of his evolving views on religion. Constant's life spanned the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Napoleon's rise and rule, and the Bourbon Restoration. Rosenblatt analyzes Constant's key role in many of this era's heated debates over the role of religion in politics, and in doing so, exposes and addresses many misconceptions that have long reigned about Constant and his period. In particular, Rosenblatt sheds light on Constant's major, yet much-neglected work, De La Religion. Given that the role of religion is, once again, center-stage in our political, philosophical and historical arenas, Liberal Values constitutes a major revision of our understanding of the origins of modern liberalism.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics

300 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2008

About the author

Helena Rosenblatt serves as executive officer of the Ph.D. Program in History. Her specialty is eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European intellectual history. She is the author of Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract 1749–1762 (1997) and Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion (2008). She is also the editor of Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (2010) and the Cambridge Companion to Constant (2009); and coeditor, with Raf Geenens, of French Liberalism from Montesquieu to the Present Day (2012).

Rosenblatt’s numerous articles have appeared in such journals as Modern Intellectual History, French Historical Studies, History of European Ideas, French Politics, Society and Culture, and Daedalus. A member of the editorial board of Modern Intellectual History, she has also been a fellow at the National Humanities Center. She is currently working on a history of liberalism. Rosenblatt earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Columbia University.