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The Eve of the French Revolution by Edward J. (Edward Jackson) Lowell
page 306 of 421 (72%)
Continentals. It was seldom seen by Frenchmen in the eighteenth century.
This confusion of thought was a cause of many of the troubles of the
French Revolution. We shall see that Rousseau, who had been carried by
the love of liberty beyond the verge of the ridiculous in his
Discourses, was brought back, in his "Social Compact," by his love of
equality, so far as to become the advocate of an intolerable tyranny,
yet was quite unaware that he was inconsistent. He composed, in fact, a
description of liberty strangely compounded of truth and falsehood. He
reckoned that man to be free who was not under the control of any
person, but only of the law, and then he provided for the most arbitrary
and capricious kind of law-making.

The first task of Rousseau, after settling the conditions of his
compact, is to provide a sovereign power in the state. This he finds in
the association of the citizens united, as above described, in a body
politic. This sovereign cannot be bound by its own actions or resolves,
except in case of an agreement with strangers, for none can make a
contract with himself. By the original compact the action of the
individual citizens as independent agents was exhausted. They can act
henceforth only as parts of the whole. There is no contract possible
between one or several of them and the community of which they form a
part.[Footnote: In an epitome of the _Social Compact_, inserted by
Rousseau in the fifth book of _Emile_, he thus defines the terms of
that compact. "Each of us puts into a common stock his property, his
person, his life and all his power, under the supreme direction of the
general will, and we receive as a body each member as an indivisible
part of the whole." _Oeuvres_, v. 254.] The sovereign must not,
however, act directly on individuals, for in so doing it would represent
a part only of the community acting on another part, and it would thus
lose its moral right. It must act in general matters exclusively, by
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