Liberal Pluralism in the Early Nineteenth Century: Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël

Modern French pluralism crystallized out of an enormously complex historical inheritance, with elements extending back through early modern political thought to the ancients. Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius, for example, referred to the importance of separate branches of government. Medieval thinkers not infrequently argued that royal power should be subjected to feudal and popular restraints. British political writers during the stormy seventeenth century argued over the significance of a ‘mixed government’, the ‘separation of powers’, and a ‘balanced constitution’. Finally, American constitutionalists and revolutionaries stressed the importance of federalism and ‘checks and balances’. All of these influenced French thinkers of the early nineteenth century, though in ways difficult to trace with any precision.