Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of talking politics. This is number three in our series, history of ideas.

In it, David discusses Benjamin Constan's idea of liberty in the modern world.

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That's L.r.

me forward slash ideas. The two authors I've talked about so far might be surprised to discover that they're mainly remembered now as political thinkers.

Hobbs in his own mind was what used to be called a natural philosopher or what we would now call

a scientist. He actually thought that the main business of his intellectual life wasn't constructing the artificial world of the state and establishing order there.

It was trying to understand the order in the natural world. That's what he went back to doing

after he'd finished Leviathan, but Leviathan is what we remember him for. Mary Wausdencraft would probably have

described herself as an educator and actually there's much more

about education in a vindication of the rights of women than there is about what we would call

politics but it's remembered as a book about politics, not so much about education. The same is true of the author I'm talking about today, Benjamin Constant.

He is probably still known for his political thinking, but in his own lifetime he did so much more than just think about politics and he was probably at various points much more interested in the other stuff.

He wrote about art, he wrote about religion, he wrote about culture, he wrote about law,

...