Why did the French and American revolutions, inspired by similar ideals, end up having such different outcomes? In The Constitution of Liberty, Friedrich Hayek, contrasts two competing traditions of liberalism: the Anglo-American tradition of evolved liberty and the French tradition of rationalist constructivism. He argues that while the US placed constitutional limits on state power, the French revolutionaries, influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argued that sovereignty resided solely in the people. To them, liberty meant participating in democracy, and no limits should be set on what government could be asked to do. Indeed, any institutional constraint could be viewed as treason. The revolutionaries therefore drafted a positive constitution, empowering the state to enact the “will of the people.” By contrast, the American Founding Fathers saw democracy primarily as a means to the peaceful transition of power. The preservation of liberty depended not on the changing will of the majority, but on a so-called negative constitutional order that limited what any majority could ask the government to do.
Hayek argues that the strongest justification for freedom is acknowledging the fundamental limitations of individual human knowledge. If human reason was supreme, government could indeed design society in accordance with the will of the people. But because individual human knowledge is incomplete, society must rely on a spontaneous order of individuals acting on their unique, localized knowledge, protected from arbitrary changes to the rules of the game by a constitution.
While Hayek expressed deep admiration for the spirit of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights, he was critical of the subsequent watering down of the principles through the addition and interpretation of clauses such as the Commerce and Welfare Clauses. A constitution, he argued, should be strictly negative, meant only to shackle the state and protect individual spheres of freedom.