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The first lesson of their own experience of power was the need for its limitation by the instructed judgment of free minds. No man was more deeply hostile to the early politics of the romantic movement, to the Contrat Social of Rousseau and the Political Justice of Godwin, than was Burke; yet, on the whole, it is with the romantics that Burke's fundamental influence remains.
He knew the Contrat Social, and the Nouvelle Heloise by heart, and all those philosophical books which prepared in advance the overthrow of our old usages, prejudices, superannuated laws and imbecile morality. "It seems that he loved my mother, and she loved him, but their liaison was carried on so secretly that no one guessed at its existence.
You are rather strong on political economy, I see. Alfred Marshall does very well. Nothing much in philosophy. The Contrat Social absurd." "Do you care for these?" asked Nicolovius, pointing to a row of well-worn works of Bible criticism. "Of course the Germans are far in the lead in this field, and I am unhappily compelled to rely on translations. Still I have " "Here! Look here!
The "Contrat Social," and the rest of their doctrines, moral and metaphysical, will always have their admirers on earth, as long as that variety of the human species exists for whose especial behoof Theodorus held that laws were made; and the whole form of thought met with great approbation in after years at Rome, where Epicurus carried it to its highest perfection.
Just married Sir Percy Blakeney one fine day, just like that, without any warning to her friends, without a SOIREE DE CONTRAT or DINER DE FIANCAILLES or other appurtenances of a fashionable French wedding.
Once stated, the French mind with its intense lucidity and logicality saw the line of cleavage between old and new divine right: or sovereignty of the people and bade all men choose where they would stand. The Contrat Social with its consuming passion for social justice, its ideal of a state founded on the sovereignty of the people, became the gospel of the time.
The origin of government in the Contrat Social supposes the nation to be a purely personal affair. It gives the government no territorial status, and clothes it with no territorial rights or jurisdiction. The government that could so originate would be, if any thing, a barbaric, not a republican government.
Locke followed Hobbes, and asserted virtually the same theory, but asserted it in the interests of liberty, as Hobbes had asserted it in the interests of power. Rousseau, a citizen of Geneva, followed in the next century with his Contrat Social, the text-book of the French revolutionists almost their Bible and put the finishing stroke to the theory.
Rousseau was writing his Contrat Social , the Encyclopedie was leavening Gallic thought. There was a particular proneness to accept fresh ideas; a new sense of national consciousness was awakening. The effect of the President's work was almost immediate. The world is perhaps too little inclined to accord to him who promulgates an idea the praise readily bestowed upon those who realise it.
Her doctrine, disruptive and creative, was widely misunderstood at the time, and is much misunderstood still, despite the splendid clarity of style in which it was stated by Rousseau in the "Contrat Social," and by Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence.
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