1 ‘Pour qu’un peuple naissant pût gouter les saines maxims de la politique & suivre les regles fondamentales de la raison de l’état, il faudrai qu l’effet put devenir la cause; que l’esprit social, qui doit être l’ouvrage de l’institution, présidât à l’institution méme, & que les homes fussent, avant les lois, ce qu’ils doivent devenir par ells. Ainsi donc le législateur ne pouvant employer ni la orce ni la raisonnement; c’est une nécessité qu’il recourse à une autorité d’un autre ordre, qui puisse entraîner sans violence et persuader sans convaincre.’ Du Contrat Social, Liv.II. Chap. VIII.
Having frequently quoted Rousseau in the course of this work, it may be allowable to say one word of his general merits as a moral and political writer. He has been subjected to perpetual ridicule for the extravagance of the proposition with which he began his literary career; that the savage state was the genuine and proper condition of man. It is however by a very slight mistake that he missed the opposite opinion which it is the business of the present work to establish. It is sufficiently observable that, where he describes the enthusiastic influx of truth that first make him a moral and political writer (in his second letter to Malesherbes*), he does not so much as mention his fundamental error, but only the just principles that led him into it. He was the first to teach that the imperfections of government were the only permanent sources of the vices of mankind; and this principle was adopted from him by Helvetius and others. But he saw further than this, that government, however reformed, was little capable of affording solid benefit to mankind, which they did not. This principle has since (probably without any assistance from the writings of Rousseau) been expressed with great perspicuity and energy, but not developed by Mr. Thomas Paine in the first page of his Common Sense.
Rousseau, notwithstanding his great genius, was full of weakness and prejudice. His Emile is upon the whole to be regarded as the principal reservoir of philosophical truth as yet existing in the world, but with a perpetual mixture of absurdity and mistake. In his writings expressly political, Du Contrat Social and Considérations sur la Pologne, the unrivalled superiority of his genius appears to desert him. To his merits as a reasoner we should not to forget to add, that the term eloquence is more precisely descriptive of his mode of composition, than that of any other writer that has ever existed.
1 This argument is the great common place of Mr Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, of several successive productions of Mr Necker,* and of a multitude of other works upon the subject of government.