During his lifetime, Benjamin Constant was known as a political theorist, a courageous defender of liberal causes and a notable historian of the religious experience of mankind. Through his journals, autobiographical works and correspondence--documents mostly unknown by his contemporaries--subsequent generations have discoverd in Constant a fascinating and highly complex personality. In recent decades, a number of private archives have become accessible to scholars for the first time, and this has brought to light important documents by and about Constant. Drawing on these sources, many unpublished, Dennis Wood offers a fresh assessment of the writer and the man. He closely relates the development of Constant's political thought and passionate interest in the history of religion to his work as a novelist and self-analyst.Benjamin Constantdraws together the considerable findings of modern scholarship, presenting a lively and sympathetic portrait of 'the most eloquent of alldefenders of freedom and privacy' (Sir Isaiah Berlin).