Radical Moderates

In 1702 an anonymous author in England published The Case Fairly Stated: In a Dialogue between Moderation and Constitution. As the title suggests, the dialogue pits a pleader for religious dissent named “Moderation” against “Constitution,” a High Church defender of ecclesiastical authority. Early on in their discussion, Moderation defends his namesake virtue as a remedy for religious strife: “I love Extremities of no side; healing Principles and Moderation would do best, and . . . prove the safest course.” Constitution is utterly unmoved by this. “He that can sail with all Winds” will “never be at a loss,” he responds accusingly. For although Constitution is prepared to acknowledge that “Betwixt two Factions, . . . Moderation might have place,” he suspects that moderates will ultimately “approve or blame” opposing sides in any dispute “as shall serve” their own interest, making them even more damnable than those who would subvert authority in accordance with some sincerely adhered to political principle. Stiffening his tone still further, Constitution concludes that most of what is celebrated as moderation is in reality mere “Dissimulation” and “Falseness.”¹

Constitution’s attack on Moderation in the above exchange rehearses many of the charges still leveled at moderates to this day: changeableness, hypocrisy, opportunism, and excessive flexibility on matters of principle. Aurelian Craiutu’s chief aim in A Virtue for Courageous Minds is to rescue the moderate from these and a litany of other accusations. In so doing, he paints a beguiling portrait of the moderate as not only capable of sincere, even radical, political passion, but also as the champion of a distinct political program favoring institutional complexity, safeguards for individual liberty, and resistance to doctrinaire politics of every form. Moderation, then, under Craiutu’s treatment, is no mere insipid fondness for the midpoint between extremes; instead, it represents a potentially combative style of politics committed to realizing a particular kind of constitutional order, one that prizes the intellectual and moral pluralism that more putatively radical doctrines, such as popular sovereignty, often wish to do away with in the name of a specious unity.

To begin this unenviable task of vindicating moderation from its detractors, Craiutu looks primarily to Revolutionary France and its aftermath, arguably the historical moment in which moderation was most urgently needed and yet most widely denigrated. It is very easy to lose sight of the moderates of the French Revolution, a group encompassing Ancien Régime reformers like Jacques Necker, monarchien members of the National Assembly such as Pierre Victor Malouet and Jean-Joseph Mounier, and liberals in the vein of Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël. Having suffered an early political defeat in 1789, they struggled to regain their footing and exert real influence on French politics throughout the 1790s and early 1800s. In Craiutu’s view, however, this political failure makes their story all the more worth telling. For although they had “not initially wanted a revolution,” Craiutu’s moderates understood better than anybody else the necessity of bringing the Revolution to a successful conclusion and establishing its gains on a “new and stable foundation” (70). Assailed from the left as “aristocrats of the new regime,” and from the right as “serpents hiding in the grass” that were a “thousand times more dangerous than the Jacobins,” they pushed to no avail for a settlement that would preserve a constitutional role for the monarchy (or other strong executive) while accommodating demands for wider political representation (77–78). Craiutu’s (justified) hope is that in surveying these various proposals to steer the Revolution to a close by giving it an appropriate institutional home, we can better appreciate what it is that makes moderation the “quintessential political virtue” (1).

It may seem odd that a book about a virtue would devote most of its pages to constitutional debates over the relative merits of bicameral versus unicameral legislatures or the exact scope of executive veto power. However, Craiutu’s focus proves justified, especially when we consider that the French moderates he has studied sought first and foremost to give their...