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Spontaneity and Moral Certainty in Benjamin Constant's Adolphe
- Nineteenth-Century French Studies
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 40, Number 3 & 4, Spring-Summer 2012
- pp. 222-238
- 10.1353/ncf.2012.0012
- Article
- Additional Information
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Is it possible to do harm out of an excess of morality? In his novel Adolphe, Benjamin Constant suggests that it is all too easy for moral individuals to do harm in a modern, pluralist society like post-revolutionary France. Better known as a politician and writer of essays, Constant resorted to literature to convey his fear that the freedom to determine one's own morality would lead to a dangerous ethical impasse. Adolphe's disastrous actions result not so much from a defect in character as from a principled effort to satisfy all potential demands of morality, those deriving from absolute principles and those pertaining to the foreseeable consequences of one's actions.