Efforts of this kind have served only to prove one thing, and it is not unimportant—namely, that in our days the man is not always a prophet who wishes to be one. In vain he proclaims himself a god; he is believed by no one; neither by the public, nor by his compeers, nor by himself.
Since I have spoken of Rousseau, I may be permitted to make here some observations on that manufacturer of systems, inasmuch as they will serve to point out the distinctions between artificial and natural organization. This digression, besides, is not out of place, as the Contrat Social has again for some time been held forth as the oracle of the future.
Rousseau was convinced that isolation was man’s natural state, and, consequently, that society was a human invention. “The social order,” he says in the outset, “comes not from nature, and is therefore founded on convention.”
This philosopher, although a passionate lover of liberty, had a very low opinion of men. He believed them to be quite incapable of forming for themselves good institutions. The intervention of a founder, a legislator, a father of nations, was therefore indispensable.
“A people subjected to laws,” says he, “should be the authors of them. It belongs alone to those who associate to adjust the conditions of their association; but how are they to regulate them? By common consent, or by sudden inspiration? How should a blind multitude, who frequently know not what they want, because they rarely know what is good for them, accomplish of themselves an enterprise so great and so difficult as the formation of a system [p058] of laws? . . . Individuals perceive what is good, and reject it—the public wishes for what is good, but cannot discover it:—all are equally in want of guides. . . . Hence the necessity of a legislator.”
That legislator, as we have already seen, “not being able to employ force or reason, is under the necessity of having recourse to an authority of another kind;” that is to say, in plain terms, to deception.
It is impossible to give an idea of the immense height at which Rousseau places his legislator above other men:
“Gods would be necessary in order to give laws to men. . . . He who dares to found a nation must feel himself in a condition to change human nature, so to speak, . . . to alter the constitution of man in order to strengthen it. . . . He must take from man his own force, in order to give him that which is foreign to him. . . . The lawgiver is in all respects an extraordinary man in the state, . . . his employment is a peculiar and superior function which has nothing in common with ordinary government. . . . If it be true that a great prince is a rare character, what must a great lawgiver be? The first has only to follow the model which the other is to propose to him. The one is the mechanician who invents the machine—the other merely puts it together and sets it in motion.”
And what is the part assigned to human nature in all this? It is but the base material of which the machine is composed.
In sober reality, is this anything else than pride elevated to madness? Men are the materials of a machine, which the prince, the ruling power, sets in motion. The lawgiver proposes the model. The philosopher governs the lawgiver, placing himself thus at an immeasurable distance above the vulgar herd, above the ruler, above the lawgiver himself. He soars far above the human race, actuates it, transforms it, moulds it, or rather he teaches the Fathers of nations how they are to do all this.