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This pierced shaving-dish was still to be seen in 1848, in the Rue du Contrat-Social, at the corner of the pillars of the market. This shot still betokened life. From that instant forth he encountered nothing more. The whole of this itinerary resembled a descent of black steps. Nevertheless, Marius pressed forward.
The Contrat-Social is a reaction in many things from the discourses, and Emile is almost an entire reaction, especially in the theory of education, from both. His central doctrine of popular sovereignty was taken from Locke.
Rousseau's Contrat-Social and the novel Emile were published in 1761. But almost three-quarters of a century before, in 1690, John Locke published his two treatises on government. Rousseau was familiar with them. Mr. By John Morley. He was, in fact, the most illogical of great men, and the most inconsistent even of geniuses.
Having obtained power, the Jacobin brings his fixed idea along with him; whether at the head of the government or in opposition to it, this idea is fruitful, and the all-powerful dogma projects over a new domain the innumerable links of its endless chain. II. A Communist State. The Jacobin concept of Society. The Contrat-Social. Total surrender of the Individual to the Community.
And this the French socialists, misled by a priori notions, attempted to do, on the theory of the Contrat-Social, as if they had a tabula rasa, without regarding the existing constituents of society, or traditions, or historical growths. Equality, as a phrase, having done duty as a dissolvent, was pressed into service as a constructor.
Let us trace this inward development and go back, along with the Jacobin, to first principles, to the original pact, to the first organization of society. There is but one just and sound society, the one founded on the "contrat-social," and
After the 9th of Thermidor, unless born blind, like Soubrany, Romme and Goujon, a fanatic whose intellectual organs are as rigid as the limbs of a fakir, nobody in the Convention can any longer believe in the Contrat-Social, in a despotic equalizing socialism, in the merits of Terror, in the divine right of the pure.
The opening sentence of the Contrat-Social is, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is a slave," a statement which it is difficult to reconcile with the fact that every human being is born helpless, dependent, and into conditions of subjection, conditions that we have no reason to suppose were ever absent from the race. But Rousseau never said, "All men are born equal."
Again, in this minority there are a good many who are lukewarm; with most men the distance is great between conviction and action; the interval is filled up with acquired habits, indolence, fear and egoism. One's belief in the abstractions of the "Contrat-social" is of little account; no one readily bestirs oneself for an abstract end.
And yet this Rousseau, as we say, with his passionate appeals to Mothers, with his contrat-social, with his celebrations of Nature, even of savage life in Nature, did once more touch upon Reality, struggle towards Reality; was doing the function of a Prophet to his Time. As he could, and as the Time could!
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