INTRODUCTION

§ 1. We can escape the state of weakness and dependence in which nature has placed us only through our conquests over things and our victories over ourselves: we become free only by becoming industrious and moral. Such is the fundamental truth that will be developed in this book. I do not wish to write a treatise on morality, nor a treatise on industry; I wish, as my epigraph announces, to show the influence of these two things upon the exercise of our faculties; my design is to show how they give birth to human liberty [^1] .

§ 2. Let one consider society in all its modes of action, in all the orders of functions and labors that its preservation and development demand, and one will see that, from the simplest to the most elevated, from tillage to politics, there is not one which, in order to be exercised with facility, with power, with liberty, does not demand of men two things: practical skill and moral conduct, morality and industry.

§ 3. I know not whether I am mistaken; but it seems to me that in our efforts to extend and facilitate the exercise of our powers, that in our tendency toward liberty, we are committing grievous misapprehensions.

The first, and in my view the most fundamental, is that of not seeing difficulties where they truly lie, of perceiving them only in governments. As, in effect, it is ordinarily there that the greatest obstacles appear, one supposes that it is there that they exist, and it is there alone that one strives to attack them. Men are unwilling to look to the nations that stand behind. They refuse to see that nations are the very material from which governments are made; that it is from their bosom that governments emerge, and from within their bosom that they are recruited and renewed; consequently, when governments are bad, it must be that the nations themselves are not excellent. They refuse to see that all the evil which governments then commit has its true causes either in the corruption of the public that provokes it, or in its ignorance that approves it, or in its pusillanimity that tolerates it, even when reason and conscience condemn it. Men wish to see only the government: it is against the government that all complaints and all censures are directed; it is upon the government that all projects of reformation are brought to bear. The only question is of reforming the government; there is no question of society amending itself. It does not seem to be admitted that society has any need of it. We are told often enough that we are victims of the excesses of power; no one ventures to tell us that we are culpable for them, and this, which is no less true, would yet be a rather more essential lesson for us to learn [^2] .

This is not all. While refusing to see obstacles where they are, men wish to perceive only a part of these obstacles; they wish to consider only those which arise from the vices of government, or, as it would be more exact and more just to put it, those which result from the imperfection of our ideas and our political habits. Yet it is surely most possible that we are not imperfect only in this part of our means of action. It is possible that we are ignorant of most of the arts and sciences; it is possible that we have many personal vices; it is possible that we fall, one toward another, into a great number of particular injustices and acts of violence. Now, most certainly, this private ignorance and these private disorders, if they do not affect liberty to the same degree as a lack of political instruction and morality, are nonetheless exceedingly pernicious to it. It is wrong, therefore, not to include them among the causes that prevent us from being free.

A third, widely held error, and one that is perhaps no less grave, is, at the same time that we are unwilling to take heed of all our defects, nor even in general to take account of our defects, to believe that certain of our advances are harmful to us—to claim, for example, that industry, affluence, and enlightenment are obstacles to liberty. There is surely no one among us who has not frequently heard it said that we are too civilized, too rich, too happy to be free. It is a universally received expression, which wits, and sometimes even good minds, use just as the common people do [^3] . One of our most justly renowned publicists, M. B. de Constant, in his work On Religions, believes that Europe is marching with great strides toward a state similar to that of China, which he represents as being at once highly civilized and highly enslaved. M. de Châteaubriand, in a short work in favor of the septennial term, expressly teaches that the more enlightened men are, the less capable they are of being free. So that, according to these writers, the human species would seem to be reduced to the sad alternative of remaining barbarous or becoming enslaved, and that it must necessarily choose between civilization and liberty.

Finally, while some would have it that liberty is diminished by certain forms of progress, it would seem, from the indifference shown for improvements of a higher order, that these improvements are regarded as useless. We labor with all our strength for the growth of that industry, of that affluence, which are fatal, we say, to liberty, and, at the same time, we show no zeal for developing our moral faculties, which could be so favorable to it. We make marvelous applications of mechanics, chemistry, and the other natural sciences to the arts, and we give no thought to applying the science of morals to them, which could so greatly add to their power [^4] . We refuse to see how imperfect those peoples still are who are merely skillful, and how much more skillful those peoples show themselves to be who are also moral. We do not feel sufficiently, moreover, that it is not only a question of skill, but also of dignity, of honor, of power, of liberty; and that if liberty is born of industry, it is born above all of good habits, both private and public.

§ 4. On these fundamental points, I shall depart from the ideas that appear to be the most generally received.

First, I shall not speak of governments, or at least what I might say of them will not be distinct from what I have to say of populations. I shall direct my gaze only upon the masses; their industry and their morality will be the subject of all my observations, the material of all my experiments. It is in fact there that all the means of liberty are to be found, and also all the obstacles it may encounter, even those that arise from government—an order of labors or functions which, like all others, is never, in truth, anything but what the state of the peoples wills it to be. I shall find the obstacles in the lack of industry, of knowledge, of capital, of good private and political habits. The means will emerge from the progress of all these things [^5] .

I shall consider this progress in the masses, because it is there that it must occur to be of any effect, and also because it is really there that its motive force lies and its development is accomplished. Nations live a life of their own. They have, in all things, the initiative for improvements. It is the farmers who perfect agriculture; the arts are advanced by artists, the sciences by scholars, politics and morality by moralists and political thinkers. There is only, between those things which are the particular affair of each individual and those which are the affair of everyone, this difference: that in the former, improvements are immediately applicable by him who invents them, whereas in the latter, namely in politics, applications can only take place when the thought of the publicist has become the common thought of the public, or at least of a very considerable portion of the public. Until then, one can make only powerless attempts to realize them. It is possible that a power of good will might undertake to establish them; but it will not create a work that endures. It is possible that the thing be attempted, in spite of the ruling power, by a party that overthrows and replaces it; but the most successful insurrections will have no more effect than the most benevolent concessions. The thing will only be established over the very long term, as it passes into the ideas and habits of the great number. From which one sees that this last order of improvements, which some would reserve exclusively for certain powers or certain men, is, more than any other, the affair of society; since no improvement of this kind is practicable until society gives its consent, and none becomes effective until society has truly adopted it.

Once again, therefore, I shall consider only society; I shall seek the means of liberty only in the progress of society.

Next, I shall take great care not to consider only a part of this progress: I shall take account of it all. I shall take great care not to say that certain kinds are harmful to liberty, or to appear to believe that others are useless to it: I shall say that all are favorable and necessary to it, industrial progress as well as moral progress, moral as well as industrial. Such is the idea I have of both, that it would be most difficult for me to say which serves it better, and which men work more to make themselves free: those who acquire industry, those who form good personal habits, or those who train themselves in good civil habits. This man is an experienced pilot: he will not be troubled in guiding a boat and crossing a river; that one has conquered his penchant for intemperance: drunkenness will no longer make him stumble against his will; those men mutually renounce all unjust pretensions: they will by that very fact cease to hinder one another in the inoffensive use of their faculties. Thus we see that our progress of every kind contributes equally to making us free: some deliver us from dependence on things, others from dependence on ourselves, others from dependence on our fellow men.

After that, it will be seen that these diverse developments, far from contradicting one another, as some would have it, support and aid each other reciprocally, and contribute to the extension of one another, just as they all contribute to the growth of liberty. We do not make one kind of progress that does not provoke several other kinds. We cannot develop one part of our means without thereby working for the development of all. The improvement of morals adds to the powers of industry; the progress of industry brings about that of morality. It is not true that in acquiring more well-being we become less sensitive to esteem. I will not admit that the inhabitants of Paris have less honor today than they had in the time of the League or in more remote and hence more barbarous eras. I cannot imagine that by paving and lighting their streets, by purifying and adorning their dwellings, by procuring for themselves better clothes and better food, by pulling themselves out of filth and misery through labor, they should have had to lose their dignity. It is true that in rising in a great number of respects we seem to have declined in some others. One may rightly observe, for example, that many cities today have less municipal power than they possessed in the 13th and 14th centuries; but it would be neither reasonable nor historically true to say that this is the fault of industry. It was, on the contrary, to industry that these cities owed those powers, which they were later unable to defend against the encroachments of royal authority. It was industry, in the middle ages, that had freed the communes from the tyranny of the lords; it will be industry, sooner or later, that will deliver them from the more concentrated despotism of the courts and the domination of the capitals. Industry prepares peoples for collective activity as for all kinds of activity necessary for the development and preservation of the species. One need only open one's eyes to see that, in our time, the most industrious and most cultivated populations are also those which have the most political life and capacity. The Spaniards of the coast, more laborious and more affluent than those of the center, have defended the protective institutions that a part of the nation had wished to establish much better. We see in Greece the rich and enlightened men being the very first to give the example of heroic devotions. Finally, is it not in France the commercial and manufacturing cities that use their political rights with the most intelligence, moderation, and firmness?

It is not true, therefore, that the development of our moral faculties is incompatible with that of our industrial faculties. But what is true, and what I shall be careful to recognize, is that certain dispositions of our soul can place great impediments to the progress of both. This is what is done, notably, by the passion for ostentation and that excessive sensuality to which, from age to age, peoples are accused of allowing themselves to be drawn. One must not believe what is said of these vices, that they are a fruit of civilization, that they are particular to nations that industry has made very opulent. One will see, quite on the contrary, that these nations, all things being in proportion, allow themselves to be carried away by them infinitely less than barbarous peoples, and that civilization, which distances us from so many excesses, also tends to turn us away from that one. But in the end it could be true to say that we still give way to it far too much; and that, to the degree they dominate, they continue to oppose great obstacles to the progress of industry, and especially to that of morals. Certainly, if we were to consecrate to the advancement of our labors what we give in excess to the satisfaction of our pleasures, wealth, and the arts which are its creators, would see much more rapid growth. Certainly, too, if we were as sensitive to honor as to voluptuousness; if we took as much care of our moral dignity as of our physical well-being, morals would not remain so far behind industry. It is, without a doubt, to our too-exclusive love for sensual enjoyments, it is to the universal preference they obtain over nobler and more elevated pleasures that we must attribute that shocking disproportion one remarks between the perfection of the arts and that of habits, between industrial capacity and political capacity, between the greatness of fortunes and the small importance of persons. I shall therefore endeavor to make felt how important it is for us not to let ourselves be absorbed by the care for our physical well-being, how much we need to cultivate our moral faculties, and to what point the progress of the latter, so necessary to that of the others, is particularly indispensable to liberty.

§ 5. I shall begin by saying what I mean by this word.

I shall then seek successively:

If all varieties of the human species are equally apt to become free;

If they can equally become free in all latitudes and in all situations;

If liberty can be the same at all degrees of culture;

What degree of liberty is compatible with the way of life of savage peoples;

With that of nomadic peoples;

With that of sedentary peoples who have themselves maintained by slaves;

With that of peoples among whom domestic servitude has been replaced by serfdom;

With that of peoples among whom serfdom has been replaced by privilege;

With that of peoples among whom all privilege is abolished, but where a considerable portion of society is carried away toward the seeking of offices;

Finally, with that of peoples where universal activity is directed toward industry; where one no longer sees masters, nor slaves, nor the privileged, nor office-seekers; where there is nothing but labor and exchange, and where the government itself is but a labor performed by a small portion of society in the name and for the account of society as a whole [^6] .

Having arrived at the industrial life, which is the highest term it seems possible to attain, at least from the point society has now reached, I shall pause for a few moments to point out the obstacles that liberty still finds there, and the inevitable bounds that it appears to encounter in the nature of things.

After which I shall consider this social state in the diverse orders of labors and functions that it embraces, beginning with the industries that act upon things, such as:

Agriculture;

Manufacturing;

Commerce;

And continuing with the arts that are exercised upon men, such as:

Those which concern themselves with the perfection of our physical nature;

Those which take charge of the education of our intelligence;

Those which have more specially for their object the culture of our imagination;

Those, finally, which work for the perfection of our moral habits.

I shall show the place that each of these professions occupies in society, the nature of the functions it exercises there, the importance of the role it plays there, and the sum of the means to which its power is tied.

I shall speak, lastly, of certain functions or certain acts which are not properly industries, but which are common to all classes of industrious people, which enter by necessity into the social economy, which are indispensable to the movement, the life, the development of society; such as:

Associations;

Exchanges;The gratuitous transmission of goods, whether between the living or by reason of death;

And just as I will have first sought how we become free in the practice of all the arts that industrial society embraces, so too will I seek how we become free in these latter modes of activity, and what influence their liberty exercises upon that of all the rest.

§ 6. It seems to me that by thus reducing myself to simple investigations into orders of facts that are assuredly most susceptible to observation; by confining myself to asking what results, for liberty, from a certain way of life, from certain knowledge, certain talents, certain artifices, the possession of certain instruments, the practice of certain virtues, I need not fear being led astray by the spirit of system. What have I sought to prove? Nothing. I was seeking something; I desired to know how this way of being, to which I give the name of liberty, is produced. It appeared to me that it is born from the progress of industry and of morality, from all that extends our faculties, and from all that rectifies their use. I wished to set forth how this comes about. I may surely have been mistaken in my explanations; but surely, too, it was not the fault of my method. I may have been mistaken as I might have been in making a calculation, without arithmetic on that account being put on trial. My errors, moreover, are easy to rectify: in giving the result of my observations, I have exposed their material; so that if I have been mistaken, it is very easy to see it; anyone can repeat my experiments.

It will doubtless be remarked how much this method differs from that of those dogmatic philosophers who speak only of rights and duties; of what governments have the duty to do, of what nations have the right to demand: everyone must be master of his own property; everyone must be able to speak his mind; everyone should participate in public life—such is their accustomed language. I do not express myself in this way; I do not say sententiously: men have the right to be free; I confine myself to asking: how does it come to be that they are so? under what conditions can they be so? by what combination of knowledge and good moral habits do they succeed in freely exercising a given private industry? how do they raise themselves to political activity? There is here, as one can see, nothing imperious, nothing that compels. I do not say it is necessary that such a thing be; I show how it is possible. Everyone can doubtless see whether it is worth our acquiring the qualities necessary to enjoy it; but I impose nothing, I do not even propose anything: I set forth.

Not only does this method not tend to take minds by surprise or by force; but it is the only one proper to enlighten them. It is the one followed in all the observational sciences; it is by this method that, for a quarter of a century, these sciences have made such remarkable progress. One does not speak in physics or mathematics of what ought to be; one simply seeks what is, or how it comes to be that a thing is. The geometer remarks in what circumstances two lines form an angle; but he does not say that two lines have the right to form an angle. The chemist observes that water subjected to the action of fire passes into a state of vapor; but he does not say that one of the rights of water is to be transformed into gas. The publicist can likewise observe in what circumstances man attains liberty; but he must not say, if he wishes to speak scientifically, that man has a right to be free. What, in effect, would this language teach us, and what is meant by saying here that man has a right? Does one mean that it is in order, that it is right, that it is desirable for him to become free? But to express wishes is not to explain truths. Does one mean that liberty is a property of his nature? But that is true only under certain conditions. Two straight lines have the property of forming an angle; but it is only when they meet at a point. Water has the property of being compressible; but it is so to a high degree only when it is reduced to the state of gas. Liberty is a property of human nature, but only when that nature is cultivated. You may well say a priori that man is a free force, yet so long as he retains his ignorance and his vices, he remains in effect very dependent. Instead, therefore, of telling us dogmatically that liberty is his law, teach us how it becomes his way of being. It is truly only thus that you can enlighten us [^7] .

Finally, while this method is more proper to instruct, it is also more proper to make men act well. When one says to men: You have the right to be free, justice ordains that you be so; one speaks keenly to their imagination, one inspires in them the desire for liberty, but without communicating to them any of what gives it; and it is possible that one pushes them, in order to conquer it, to violent resolutions, which will cause them great evils, without perhaps leaving behind them any good result. But if one says to them: "the more skillful, ingenious, and enlightened you are, the better you will dispose of your forces; the more moderation, equity, and courage you have, the more liberty you will have;" one surely has nothing of the sort to fear. It may be that this language touches few; but if it excites to action, it will be in a useful way. What it recommends, in effect, is to become instructed, to become stronger, to make oneself better; it excites one to liberty only by exhorting one to acquire the qualities that procure it. It can never be dangerous to inspire in men the love of a useful art or of any virtue whatsoever, and one is sure, in pushing them along the paths of industry and morality, to set them on the true road to liberty [^8] .

I will therefore take care to remain faithful to the object of this work, which is to show liberty in its causes. Instead of considering it as a dogma, I will present it as a result; instead of making it the attribute of man, I will make it the attribute of his civilization; instead of confining myself, as has almost always been done, to imagining forms of government proper to establish it, which no form of government is, by itself, capable of doing, I will set forth to the best of my ability how it is born of all our progress [^9] .

§ 7. Would that I possessed all the talent and positive knowledge that such a work would demand to be suitably executed! I would believe myself assured of rendering a real service to politics. I would also believe I could contribute effectively to spreading among us the seeds of order and peace. It is true that this book has for its object only to explain a single word; but what things this word contains, and how many discords a good definition of liberty could bring to an end! Who among us has not sometimes seen all that a luminous and true explanation of the thing debated can do in the midst of the most animated disputes?

But is this subject a matter for experiments, like others? Is it of a nature, for example, to be as clearly, as categorically explained as those upon which the true observational sciences are exercised? I have no doubt of it. There are no more effects without a cause in politics than in chemistry. The chain of causes to effects is no more impossible to perceive in the first of these sciences than in the second. I find it hard to believe, for example, that the moral phenomenon to which I give the name of liberty resists analysis more than heat, light, electricity, and several other sensible phenomena. It appears to me very possible to explain well how liberty is born, extends, contracts, and is modified. I do not flatter myself, however, that I can bring to this exposition the degree of certainty and precision found in good books on chemistry and physics; but this, I must confess, will stem less from the difficulty of the subject than from the insufficiency of the author. While being convinced of the imperfection of my work, I firmly believe in the possibility of doing it well, and perhaps what I attempt, others will succeed in executing. If, in this work, I were to do no more than open a new path for political studies, than impart to them a slightly surer direction, than show a little more clearly the goal that must be reached and the means we have of attaining it, I would be far from having wasted my time. But even this is an immense task, and I would not dare to say that I have taken up my pen with the hope of fulfilling it.

 

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Volume I

Notes

[^1]: One can see by the title of this work, one has already seen in the preface, and one will see better, further on, chap. I, what I mean here, and throughout the course of this book, by the word liberty. [^2]: This censure has been the object of a grave reproach: “Do not discourage,” I have been told, “the positive minds and energetic characters who stand in the way of the torrent of evil to slow its course.” (Rev. encyclop., Jan. 1825.) One cannot esteem positive minds too much, nor honor energetic characters too much; but if the evil comes from the public, is it positive that one can stop it by making war on proper names? and if that is not positive, is it making good use of one's energy to combat it in this way? I would surely not wish to discourage the men who devote themselves to preventing evil; but I would wish that such a fine devotion not be purely in vain; I would wish that one add to the price of the sacrifice, by making it as fruitful as it is susceptible of becoming. Now, does one sacrifice oneself as usefully as it would be possible to do? This question is important enough to deserve to be examined with care. I will return to it at the end of this work, in responding to the various objections that have been raised against the doctrines it contains, and notably against the one stated in this paragraph. [^3]: This remark, for some time now, has lost a part of its truth: it is a change in ideas to which the publication of this book has not been, I dare flatter myself, completely useless. [^4]: There would be something very new and eminently useful to do under the title of Morality applied to the arts. I do not know if anything similar is taught in the schools of arts and trades in the departments; but I know well that no course of this kind is given in Paris in any public establishment, and that is surely very regrettable. I do not think there is any teaching more demanded by the needs of industry and the industrious classes. [^5]: It has been said that, by this way of viewing things, “I was transporting political theory out of the overly controversial sphere of institutions, to bring it back into the much more positive terms of the moral and industrial improvement of man.” (Rev. encyclop., Jan. 1825.) It is very true that I make the perfection of society depend on the perfection of the arts and that of morals. However, one should not infer from this that I take no account of institutions, and that I exclude government from the considerations of politics. I only avoid separating government from society; but I consider society in its political activity as in all its other modes of activity. I will even consider it in that one with more care than in any other; because there is none in which it is more important for it to act well, and I will show that it is all the more free as it deploys more art and morality in this regard. I will make on this order of facts the same reasonings as on all the others. See, volume III, chapter 21, what I say of the political industries, and of the influence that these industries, the most elevated of all, exercise on society. [^6]: One will easily sense, without my saying so, that in reviewing these diverse ages of society, it is not properly a history of civilization that I intend to write. My sole design is to examine, in their natural order, a series of social states, of more or less determined ways of being through which it seems to me to be in the nature of our species to pass, as it develops, and to seek what is the degree of liberty that each of these general modes of existence allows. This is fully sufficient for the object of my work, which is to show how the human species becomes freer as its faculties become more perfect and more powerful, as it acquires more morality and industry. [^7]: Men have the right to be free! I would as soon say that they have the right to be intelligent, active, instructed, prudent, just, firm, in a word that they have the right to unite all the conditions on which we know the more or less free exercise of their faculties depends. Men surely have the right to be free... if they can; but the essential thing is to know under what conditions this is possible for them. The Abbé Raynal said that before all social laws man had the right to live. He could have, Malthus judiciously observes, said with just as much truth that before the establishment of social laws every man had the right to live a hundred years. He had this right without a doubt, adds Malthus, and he still has it; he has the right to live a thousand years, if he can, etc.” (Essay on the Principle of Pop., bk. 4, ch. 4.) But what means does he have to ensure, to prolong his existence? That is what he should be taught, and of which Raynal says not a word. It is true that this is less easy than to emphatically proclaim the right he has to live, a right that is not contested, or that he should never suppose is contested. [^8]: Every effect, in a word, derives from its cause, and that which is obtained by declamations is ordinarily no better than the declamations that produce it. One succeeds doubtless by this means in exciting the passions of men against an unjust domination, in inspiring in them the courage necessary to overthrow it; but courage has good effects only when it is born of enlightenment, and the only truly useful way to make injustice hated is to enlighten people on its effects. [^9]: To say that I will not limit myself to speaking of the forms of government is surely not to say that I will not speak of these forms. The manner in which society organizes itself to act is not indifferent in any order of actions, and especially it is not so in this one. I know what a good organization of public power can do; but I also know what is insufficient and deceptive in the theories that make all liberty come from there. It is much, doubtless, that the public powers be well constituted; but it is not enough for them to act in an enlightened and moral manner. Then, when a nation would be capable at once of well organizing its government and of making it act well, that alone would not make it free. Its liberty, in effect, does not come solely from its political capacity, it comes from all its capacities. It is not enough, therefore, to consider it in a single one of its modes of action; one must, to judge to what point it is free, examine what it deploys in all of them of intelligence and morality.