Quiet Politics, Unquiet Mind: Benjamin Constant’s Critique of Political Quietism

• In Event: The History of Fiction and the Fiction of History

Abstract

This paper offers a political reading of Benjamin Constant’s novel Adolphe. Connecting the titular character's uncertainty and inaction with cognate concerns in Constant’s political and religious writings, I argue that Constant’s tale contains a dramatized critique of modern psychology as an ethos of ungrounded reflexivity. This reflexivity degraded the capacity for principled agency, resulting, for the post-French Revolutionary generation, in political ambivalence and inaction—as manifested, for example, by their collaboration with Napoleon. Moving beyond the classic liberal-republican critique of political quietism as myopic individualism, Constant emphasized how reflection and open-ended questioning—the supposed hallmarks of a liberal ethos—became, in extremis, alibis for avoiding commitment and eschewing action.

Author

• Jialin Liang, Yale University