when the writer happens to be a professional reasoner like Condorcet,
but most frequently in a tangled, knotty style full of loose and
disconnected meshes when the spokesman happens to be an improvised
politician or a philosophic tyro like the ordinary deputies of the
Assembly and the speakers of the clubs. It is a pedantic scholasticism
set forth with fanatical rant. Its entire vocabulary consists of about
a hundred words, while all ideas are reduced to one, that of man in
himself: human units, all alike equal and independent, contracting
together for the first time. This is their concept of society. None
could be briefer, for, to arrive at it, man had to be reduced to a
minimum. Never were political brains so willfully dried up. For it is
the attempt to systematize and to simplify which causes their
impoverishment. In that respect they go by the methods of their time
and in the track of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: their outlook on life is
the classic view, which, already narrow in the late philosophers, has
now become even more narrow and hardened. The best representatives of
the type are Condorcet,[20] among the Girondins, and Robespierre,
among the Montagnards, both mere dogmatists and pure logicians, the
latter the most remarkable and with a perfection of intellectual
sterility never surpassed. -- Unquestionably, as far as the
formulation of durable laws is concerned, i.e. adapting the social
machinery to personalities, conditions, and circumstances; their
mentality is certainly the most impotent and harmful. It is
organically short-sighted, and by interposing their principles between
it and reality, they shut off the horizon. Beyond their crowd and the
club it distinguishes nothing, while in the vagueness and confusion of
the distance it erects the hollow idols of its own Utopia. -- But when
power is to be seized by assault, and a dictatorship arbitrarily
exercised, the mechanical inflexibility of such a mind is useful
rather than detrimental. It is not embarrassed or slowed down, like