Arthur Ghins

The People's Two Powers revisits the emergence of democracy during the French Revolution and examines how French liberalism evolved in response. By focusing on two concepts often studied separately – public opinion and popular sovereignty – Arthur Ghins uncovers a significant historical shift in the understanding of democracy. Initially tied to the direct exercise of popular sovereignty by Rousseau, Condorcet, the Montagnards, and Bonapartist theorists, democracy was first rejected, then redefined by liberals as rule by public opinion throughout the nineteenth century. This redefinition culminated in the invention of the term 'liberal democracy' in France in the 1860s. Originally conceived in opposition to 'Caesarism' during the Second Empire, the term has an ongoing and important legacy, and was later redeployed by French liberals against shifting adversaries – 'totalitarianism' from the 1930s onward, and 'populism' since the 1980s.

Democratic theorists often associate public opinion with democracy and associate public opinion with popular sovereignty. They usually trace these two associations to the French Revolution. In this article, I reconsider them by returning to French Revolution–era debates on extraelectoral participation. For Condorcet, the Montagnards, and the liberal theorist Germaine de Staël, I argue, public opinion and popular sovereignty provide two distinct ways of conceptualizing political participation beyond election. Condorcet and the Montagnards defended the direct exercise of popular sovereignty beyond election as constitutive of democratic politics. Staël rejected that exercise and offered public opinion instead as the best and exclusive way of conceptualizing extraelectoral participation. This controversy reveals that public opinion has no timeless connection with democracy. Rather, government by opinion was conceived of in reaction to early advocacies of representative democracy.

According to a dominant narrative, the concept of popular sovereignty was joined to the notion of public opinion during the French Revolution to form the blueprint of a liberal constitutional state. This article shows how, after the Revolution, Benjamin Constant, who is now recognized as a founding figure of “liberalism,” used public opinion as a substitute for popular sovereignty to theorize political legitimacy and constitution making. I show why and when Constant discussed popular sovereignty, namely to dismiss it as an unhelpful and dangerous fiction in answer to factions invoking the concept to revolutionize the political order, or rulers such as Napoleon using it to claim absolute power. In parallel, I explain how Constant designed his alternative, opinion-based theory of legitimacy in the 1790s, before pragmatically adapting it over the course of his career as political regimes changed in France. Constant's substitution of public opinion for popular sovereignty, I contend, reveals distinct views on what makes a political regime legitimate and the meaning of constitutional changes. I conclude with a discussion of how Constant's views, thus interpreted, throw light on debates about sovereignty and public opinion in modern political thought.

It has become commonplace to argue that Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville form a distinct French liberal tradition going back to Montesquieu. Yet Tocqueville showed little interest in Constant, and early nineteenth-century French liberals did not recognize Montesquieu as the father of French liberalism. Based on these observations, this essay demonstrates that the French liberal tradition is a belated construction and explains how, when, and why it was invented. Exhuming the origins of the French liberal tradition, I argue, is important for our understanding of the history of liberalism and the mechanisms behind ideology formation.

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that public opinion was a centerpiece of nineteenth-century political liberalism in Britain and France. This paper contributes to this strand of research by focusing on a little-explored distinction between two types of public opinion in the writings of Madame de Staël, now recognized as a major French liberal thinker. Staël distinguished between public opinion about policies and public opinion about the abilities and conduct of individuals, especially elected representatives. This paper focuses on this second type of public opinion, which Staël often called l’estime publique. I interpret Staël’s views as emerging from a critical dialogue with Rousseau about whether public esteem could identify capable candidates for political office and control elected representatives in large commercial states. I then turn to the possible distortions that, according to Staël, public esteem could undergo under modern representative government: “party spirit” could produce a divided public, while “military glory” could produce a united but mesmerized public. In the conclusion, I reflect on how this interpretation of Staël’s arguments about public esteem can enrich our understanding of the history and theory of representative government and invite us to reconsider the roles and possible distortions of public opinion within it.

This article reconstructs the intellectual and political origins of Bernard Manin’s Principles of Representative Government, published in French in 1997. I trace those origins to Manin’s engagement with French antitotalitarianism, particularly the work of François Furet and Claude Lefort, as well as to his early effort to conceptualize social democracy as a normative horizon for the French Left. I highlight how the concept of audience democracy emerged from late-1980s French debates on populism, representation, and liberalism, and examine when and why Manin introduced the contrast between elections and sortition. Principles of Representative Government is typically interpreted either as an objective analysis or as a radical democratic critique of the “aristocratic” dimension of representation. This article shows that it is neither. It reveals that his masterpiece was the product of a more than two-decade-long defense of representative government against alternative conceptions of democracy.

In recent decades, political theorists have drawn on historical thinkers to explore how political elites can be held accountable. Rousseau, however, is often dismissed as reducing accountability to elections and participation to occasional ratification referenda. This article challenges that view. While Rousseau expected an elective aristocracy to execute laws ratified by the people, he also identified two mechanisms—scrutiny and recall—through which citizens could control these representatives. After reconstructing Rousseau’s account, I consider how these mechanisms could be adapted to contemporary democracies. Focused on executive accountability, the model is particularly suited to presidential systems with directly elected presidents. It combines a national jury—a citizens’ assembly chosen by lot and tasked with examining presidential actions—with the possibility of a recall referendum. By uniting deliberative scrutiny with the power to remove the head of state, this approach offers an underexplored complement to recent anti-oligarchic institutional innovations based on sortition.

How is public opinion formed, and how should it influence representatives? This article examines these questions through the lens of the French Revolution—a pivotal moment for democratic theory—where competing visions of public opinion emerged. It reconstructs Abbé Sieyès’s distinctive theory of public opinion, centered on reading and writing, and contrasts it with Robespierre’s vocal public and Bonaparte’s mesmerized audience. Sieyès envisioned elected expert bodies as a “fixed point in public opinion” interacting with “the reading nation” through printed materials. He argued that the invention of printing facilitated a new kind of politics, enabling citizens to form political judgments without the need for physical assembly. This literary conception of public opinion provided an alternative to Robespierre’s club-based conception, where citizens voiced their collective opinions as an assembled public. It also served as a counterpoint to Bonaparte’s public, which curtailed citizen assembly and communication to foster blind admiration for the leader. By examining these competing conceptions—each emphasizing different modes of participation (voice, reading, passive admiration) and settings (assemblies or private spaces)—the essay introduces the concept of a “shapeshifting public,” which expresses itself differently depending on whether it is assembled or dispersed.

This paper makes a claim about Constant’s intellectual sources in order to throw additional light on the nature of his liberalism. It assesses Constant’s views against the background of a tradition of political rationalism. Constant both criticized and inherited that tradition. This paper shows how this process of critical re-appropriation occurred principally with two figures that had a particular significance for Constant: the very Francophile William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet. Constant resisted these authors’ desire to replace a consent-based decision-making model by a truth-based decision-making model, and condemned their tendency to enrol individual judgment at the service of a politics of truth. At the same time, Constant did not renounce completely to their dream of bringing certainty into politics. As this double-move shows, it is not clear to what extent Constant succeeded in distancing himself from this tradition of political rationalism in order to establish what I call a rationalist liberalism. This problematic intellectual lineage not only challenges received interpretations of Constant’s liberalism either in terms of ‘scepticism’ or ‘pluralism.’ It should also invite us to reconsider the widespread idea according to which the French liberal tradition had a common and exclusive source in Montesquieu.

Who were the first theorists of liberal democracy? Since the mid-20th century, scholars have attributed this title to figures like Locke, Montesquieu, Kant, Madison, Constant, Tocqueville, Mill, and Lincoln. Yet none of these thinkers used the term “liberal democracy.” Rather than retroactively applying this label, this essay adopts an actor's categories methodology to examine what “liberal democracy” meant to those who first used it. The term originated in 1860s France, coined by liberals opposing Napoleon III. This article argues that liberal democracy was conceived as a polemical concept, designed to counter rival definitions of democracy. It also explores one of its foundational meanings: rule by public opinion. The essay concludes by showing how this polemical character and emphasis on public opinion continue to shape liberal-democratic theory in France and beyond.