Hornblower And The Hotspur Analysis

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Benjamin Constant's Idea of Liberty
and
C. S. Forester's
Hornblower and the “Hotspur”


A 19th Century ship of the ship of the Royal Navy shows the differing ideas of liberty that Constant explains is his essay. However, the extremely ridged form of government on board ship, if it can even be called a government, it will allow us to examine the ideas from a very different viewpoint. There are captains who have great power to make decisions about their ship but are yet constrained in there choices by rules of the Navy, honor, and tradition. There are mid ranking sailors that have a foot in both worlds. There are your every day seamen that have both little control and few decisions to make. C. S. Forester even gives us a glimpse of early …show more content…

However, all of the characters have some control over how these laws are used to their advantage. Within this very ridged framework the individuals have the ability to choose if they will step forward to a challenge, or ignore the chance to advance. At first glance this looks very much like Constant's second description of liberty. The laws and decisions of how the larger group, of the ship, Navy or even Great Britain behave were made far away from and with little input from each of the lower layers of individuals. With some stretch, we could see that Hornblower can suggest some changes to the Captain of the Fleet or even an Admiral. However, the examples we see of this, Hornblower suggesting missions for boat. Bush did have some suggestions of courses of actions and things like how to intemperate things like a ship on the horizon when conversing with Hornblower but they were limited and could have been dismissed without another thought. This to me seems very much like the removed or representative form of government that Constant would suggest for modern liberty. Where then is the personal freedoms that the individuals should be taking great joy in. These are more or less apparent at different ranks within the Navy. Cornwallis certainly has great personal freedoms in the decisions on how to manage an entire fleet of boats. …show more content…

It would seem that this may be what Constant attempts to warn us about in this quote on (Fuller p. 119) “The danger of modern liberty is that absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily.” Although Constant doesn't quite get there as he finishes describing the downfalls of being to far removed from our government. I believe the next step could be tyranny. This is the lack of any liberty. Tyranny could describe the lives the lowest ranking sailors on Hotspur. They have given up all of their input into their government and the government is now controlling their public or group lives as well as their complete personal lives as well. This is a small leap from Constant's descriptions we are given on Fuller page 119 it seems to fit the over all idea of the

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