The French Exception: Constant, Tocqueville and the Religious Underpinnings of Liberalism

In his seminal paper “Two Liberal Traditions”, Larry Siedentop argues that one of the main traits that sets the French liberal tradition apart from its mainstream Anglo-American equivalent is its original understanding of the concept of liberty. French liberals, he argues, did not restrict modern liberty to non-interference or the absence of impediment, but always insisted on the importance of political liberty as a complement to civil liberty. French liberals, he adds, praised political participation because of the moralizing impact it could have on citizens. I contend that this distinctive trait acquires a particular significance when one looks at how each tradition has defined the role religion could play in modern liberal societies. In Anglo-American liberalism, state neutrality has been envisaged as a way to bolster the moral autonomy of individuals in religious matters. As a beneficial way of accommodating religious differences, state neutrality sanctifies non-interference in the cultivation of personal beliefs. The latter, however, are considered to be a private matter that is ultimately politically irrelevant. But for figures like Constant or Tocqueville, state neutrality was always conceived as a precondition for the promotion of a liberal form of religiosity, which was seen as an indispensable support for political liberty. They endowed religion with a positive, moralizing role, namely to encourage citizens to engage in political action. Drawing attention to these different treatments of religion in the two liberal traditions allows us to perceive, I conclude, how the standard correlation between liberalism and indifference to religion originates to a great extent in the mainstream Anglo-American tradition, and neglects French liberalism. For Constant and Tocqueville, state neutrality in religious matters did not imply that liberalism as a political theory had to be impervious to religion. Quite the contrary: French liberalism, because it relied on religion for the preservation of liberty, was conceived as a political project with deeply religious ramifications.