On April 11, 1804, when Benjamin Constant was thirty-six, he confided
to his diary: “I have excellent qualities … but I am not quite a
real being. Inside me there are two people, one the observer of the
other.” It might have been the voice of the self-analytical
Adolphe, the destructive and self-destructive anti-hero of Constant’s
celebrated autobiographical novel. Part womanizing Valmont and part
sensitive Werther (the author of Adolphe met the
creators of both, Laclos and Goethe),
Constant was a skeptic rationalist and
a self-tormenting introvert, a man fascinated by suicide and obsessed
with death. To a confidante of his youth he seemed “a true
chameleon.” He was also one of the founding fathers of French
political liberalism (a word used here throughout in its European
sense). It was he who shaped a diverse mass of liberal notions into
a clear and coherent practical political doctrine. Strange that a
man with such a strong sense of nothingness (commonly an attribute of
those inclined to the political extreme) should strive for so hopeful
and positive an aim as the freedom of the individual in a society
governed by just laws.

Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) has been called the “most eloquent of
all defenders of freedom and privacy.” That was the view of Isaiah
Berlin in his influential essay “Two Concepts of Liberty.” “No one
saw the conflict between the two types of liberty better, or
expressed it more clearly, than Benjamin Constant,” observed
Berlin. Constant took his stand on