Note 237 — LECTURE XV. PRIVATE AND PUBLIC ETHICS.

On the danger of seeking at first the origin of human knowledge, see 1st Series, vol. iii., lecture on Hobbes, p. 261: "Hobbes is not the only one who took the question of the origin of societies as the starting-point of political science. Nearly all the publicists of the eighteenth century, Montesquieu excepted, proceed in the same manner. Rousseau imagines at first a primitive state in which man being no longer savage without being yet civilized, lived happy and free under the dominion of the laws of nature. This golden age of humanity disappearing carries with it all the rights of the individual, who enters naked and disarmed into what we call the social state. But order cannot reign in a state without laws, and since natural laws perished in the shipwreck of primitive manners, new ones must be created. Society is formed by aid of a contract whose principle is the abandonment by each and all of their individual force and rights to the profit of the community, of the state, the instrument of all forces, the depository of all rights. The state, for Hobbes, will be a man, a monarch, a king; for Rousseau, the state is the collection itself of citizens, who by turns are considered as subjects and governors, so that instead of the despotism of one over all, we have the despotism of all over each. Law is not the more or less happy, more or less faithful expression of natural justice; it is the expression of the general will. This general will is alone free; particular wills are not free. The general will has all rights, and particular wills have only the rights that it confers on them, or rather lends them. Force, in The Citizen is the foundation of society, of order, of laws, of the rights and duties which laws alone institute. In the Contrat Social, the general will plays the same part, fulfils the same function. Moreover, the general will scarcely differs in itself from force. In fact, the general will is number, that is to say, force still. Thus, on both sides, tyranny under different forms. One may here observe the power of method. If Hobbes, if Rousseau especially had at first studied the idea of right in itself, with the certain characters without which we are not able to conceive it, they would have infallibly recognized that if there are rights derived from positive laws, and particularly from conventions and contracts, there are rights derived from no contract, since contracts take them for principles and rules; from no convention, since they serve as the foundation to all conventions in order that these conventions may be reputed just;—rights that society consecrates and develops, but does not make,—rights not subject to the caprices of general or particular will, belonging essentially to human nature, and like it, inviolable and sacred."