Human
nature to him was an embodiment of brute violence ever in need of
violent restraint. Rousseau, an optimist, saw nothing but good in
man's original nature: to the pessimist mind of Hobbes all was evil
there. Neither of them saw any natural adaptation to social life in
the human constitution. To live in society was, in both their views,
an artificial arrangement, an arbitrary convention. But Hobbes found
in the intolerable evils of a state of nature an excellent reason why
men should quit it for the unnatural condition of citizens. Rousseau
found no reason except, as he says, _quelque funeste hasard_. The
problem for Hobbes stood thus: how men, entering society, might be
"cribbed, cabined, and confined" to the utmost in order to keep down
their native badness. Rousseau's concern was, how one might so become
a citizen as yet to retain to the full the delightful liberty of a
tropical savage. Hobbes's solution is the _Leviathan_, Rousseau's the
_Social Contract_. The prize, we think, rests with the Englishman: but
the reader shall judge.
5. And first of the Social Contract. Rousseau proposes "to find a form
of association which shall defend and protect with all the strength of
the community the person and the goods of each associate, and whereby
each one, uniting himself to all, may nevertheless obey none but
himself and remain as free as before.
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