What must government do then? Stay out of it. The division of labor must limit and maintain itself spontaneously. When any division of labor is advantageous, it establishes itself naturally. When men in specialized jobs revert to combining two types of work, it is because this combination suits them better.

This example shows that government can do harm not only by acting in a certain way but also by acting in the opposite way. There are numerous circumstances when it can do good only by not acting at all.

chapter ten : Conclusions from the Above Reflections

As I said at the start of the foregoing reflections, I am absolutely not presenting a complete case for the very least interference by government in economic activity. A thousand arguments and facts crowd around me, all tending to supply ever stronger evidence for this principle. I am putting them aside, because I feel it is impossible to expound them on a satisfactory scale. Each fact in isolation may furnish an exception and it would require verification, that is, giving oneself over to local investigations, historical, geographical, and even political, to show either that the exception is not upheld or that it does not weaken the principle. In this treatise I cannot take on this workload. I think I have said enough, nevertheless, to show that the effect of government intervention in matters of production, though sometimes necessary perhaps, is never positively advantageous. We can resign ourselves to it as an inevitable ill; but we should always strive to limit this ill as closely as possible.

My views will probably encounter many opponents. This will not make me think them any less correct. In a country where the government hands out assistance and compensation, many hopes are awakened. Until such time as they have been disappointed, men are bound to be unhappy with a system which replaces favoritism only by freedom. Freedom creates, so to speak, a negative good, although a gradual and general one. Favoritism brings positive, immediate, personal advantages. Selfishness and short-term views will always be against freedom and for favoritism.

chapter eleven : On Government Measures in Relation to Population

If governments have wanted to influence economic activity, they have similarly wanted to influence population and—who would believe it?—they have passed coercive laws to force man to satisfy the sweetest penchant of his nature.

They thought they had an obvious interest in interfering with population. It constitutes their most concrete force. They did not know that their very bringing their power to bear on it could only harm it.

They were not short of a pretext. Domestic affections are the best guarantee of morality.

Celibacy favors disorder and selfishness. Marriage inspires in man more need for stability. What good reasons for coming down hard on celibacy and encouraging marriage!

It is a pity that a number of governments, in proscribing celibacy by law, reduce marriage to sterility by way of harassment and poverty.

Two kinds of causes can impede the population’s growth and make it smaller. Some influence population directly. These include epidemics, floods, earthquakes, emigrations, and lastly war, considered, not in its political aspect, but in terms of its immediate effect of devastating part of a country’s population. Others exert a mediate influence, institutional vices and government harassment being examples. The former destroy living people. The latter prevent the birth of those who would be born.

The marquis de Mirabeau, one of the most original minds of the last century, who in a singular mixture brought together very philanthropic ideas with a very despotic character, and a very sincere love of freedom with all the prejudices of the nobility and even of feudalism, showed very clearly in The Friend of Men that direct causes have a brief effect only, on population. “They say,” he says, with astonishment, “that after a time of trouble or calamity, a state is just as populous as it was before, while the buildings and roads, in a word, everything which indicates apparent prosperity, shrinks visibly because of the interruption to order and justice.” 63 Indirect causes, seemingly less harmful, have much more extensive and lasting effects. This is because they attack the population at its very root, that is to say, its means of subsistence. The peasant labors, builds, and gets married on fields turned topsy-turvy by earthquakes, after an epidemic or in the wake of an army which has ransacked his property, because he hopes the earthquake will not return, he sees that the epidemic has ceased, and because peace having been made, he thinks he is sure the ravaging army has moved away forever. But he works, builds, or marries only with anxiety under an oppressive government, which snatches from him the means of subsistence necessary to feed and raise his family.

Man very quickly gets over calamities which seem temporary to him. The dead leave the living better off and put more means of subsistence at their disposal. The latter multiply on account of the vacant places and the resources they find for living. Nature has placed the remedy alongside all the ills which come from her. She has endowed man with a faculty which seems like carelessness or improvidence but in reality is rational. He senses that natural misfortunes recur only at periods very distant from each other, while those born of the whims of fellow men weigh on him at every moment.

The vices of government prolong some causes of depopulation which, absent these vices, would be only short-lived. These causes should therefore be considered under two aspects, as harming the population directly and then harming them again insofar as they are multiplied by government errors. For example, the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors contributed to the depopulation of Spain only because that expulsion resulted from an oppressive and persecutory administrative system. For the same reason, the settlers who left that country for the New World have never been replaced, while a free nation can send numerous settlers abroad without its depopulating. In a free nation, everything which brings about a social vacuum, at the same time encourages all those who remain to fill it. The direct ill which causes war is soon corrected. When a government, however, can restart or prolong the war at will, this supposes a despotic will in this government, one which is a quite separate scourge from the war itself, one which, bearing down on the means of subsistence, prevents the population from growing and from filling the gaps which the war has occasioned.

It is the same with celibacy. If some individuals do not marry and reproduce, there are others who will. But when celibacy results either from poverty or the absurdity of institutions, the evil is irreparable in a totally different sense. I will cite the marquis de Mirabeau again. He shows clearly that clerical celibacy in itself is in no way harmful to population. 64 On the contrary, whenever a certain number of individuals manage by coming together to live from the product of a smaller section of land than would be needed for the subsistence of the same number of individuals in isolation, this coming together is favorable to the numerical growth of the species. The individuals who come together draw closer voluntarily and leave more space to others. It is never the population which is lacking, but space, that is, land, and above all the means of subsistence. Priestly celibacy, however, implies a more superstitious state of things, and therefore worse government. Such influences spread to everything. It is not because priests do not marry that the country becomes depopulated but because a government which consecrates priestly celibacy is an ignorant government. Now, ignorant government is always oppressive. It harasses men who marry, takes away their means of subsistence, pushes them into despondency, thereby prevents them from multiplying or, if they do multiply, causes their children to die from destitution or want.

The more populous and flourishing condition of the Protestant countries is attributed to the suppression of the celibate orders. It should have been attributed to the diminution of prejudices and the growth of civil freedom which the Reformation introduced into these countries.

It is not because a certain number of individuals have married that a population has increased, but rather that there have been a few more possibilities for scrutiny and a bit more enlightenment, first on one question and then, since all ideas are linked, on all the others. There follows a more just regime, less oppression, less poverty, and better subsistence. This leads me to regard as truly wretched the calculation by some governments which, not content with declaring the celibacy of priests purely voluntary, have sought to force into marriage men who thought themselves bound by conscience and the holiest of oaths to abstain from it. As if the marriage of a few religious would have been a truly efficacious means of population growth, and as if the birth of a few more children were preferable to the refinements of honor and the virtues of scruple, which, whether rightly or wrongly founded, is still a virtue, in a word, as if man were an ignoble and pliant creature, cast on this earth only to obey and propagate.

When men have the wherewithal for subsistence, for them and their children, population increases. When they do not, either they do not marry or they have fewer children, or if they have children, most of these die young. The population always reaches the level of subsistence. In America the population doubles in twenty or twenty-five years. This is because work is so well paid that a large family, instead of being a burden, is a source of opulence and prosperity. “A young widow with four or five children” would hardly find a second husband in Europe “in the middle or lower classes.” In America, “this is a person sought after like a kind of treasure.” Smith, Book I, ch. 8. 65 Writers have long talked the most bizarre nonsense about population. They have noticed isolated truths which they have not known how to reconcile nor to define clearly, and on the basis of a single inaccurate observation, they have aimed at constructing a set of laws. Governments which cannot have other than superficial ideas on anything, because they do not have time to check it out for themselves, have adopted now this set of laws, now that one, always on trust, which is a sure way of deriving no advantage, even from the truth.

It has been recognized that in a certain way poverty favored population growth. Beggars have many children. But the distinction between two kinds of poverty, that of the beggars and that of the laboring classes, has not been made. Vagabonds with absolutely nothing have many children, says Montesquieu. “It costs the father nothing to teach his art to his children, who are even, in being born, instruments of that art.” 66 The people who are poor, however, only because they live under a harsh government, have few children. They do not have enough food for themselves. How could they dream of sharing it? If they live on little, this is not because they need little, but because they do not have what they need. Just as the little bit they need favors population growth among the beggars, so the little which the working classes possess goes against growth in their numbers. Writers and governments have seen on the backs of beggar women, or round their huts, a crowd of wretched children. They have not lifted their gaze a year beyond, a time before which three-quarters of that unhappy generation were cut off by hunger. They have thus envisaged only half the question, and yet on the question considered in this way, the most inhuman system has been based.

The poorer people are, it has been said, the larger families are. A sophism, exclaims Montesquieu, “which has always ruined kingdoms and always will.” 67 Population growth born of poverty has an evident limit, namely the death of that population because of this selfsame poverty which seemed at first to favor it. From another viewpoint it was clear that affluence favored population growth. It was thought that the luxury of the rich classes was a cause of affluence for the poor classes. There were two errors in this way of reasoning, however. First, the affluence which luxury produces is very uncertain and artificial. Luxury doubles consumption expenditures, soon rendering them disproportionate with the population. Neither the rich nor the poor multiply: the rich because they fear the privations a large family entails; the poor because of the suffering they undergo. Secondly, even true affluence favors population growth only to a certain degree. On the one hand, it makes numbers grow more, on the other it makes consumption expenditures grow. Now, the more consumption expenditures a country has, the less it can feed its inhabitants. To get the sums right, one would have to be able simultaneously to add to the means of subsistence and prevent the people from consuming more of them: an impossible task. An author who in recent years has been ridiculously mistaken about the principles of population is Sir Francis d’Ivernois in his Historical and Political Survey of the Losses Sustained by the French Nation . He has put the loss of life caused by the revolution at two million souls. 68 And since according to Buffon’s calculations, 69 a marriage must produce six children to get two of them to the normal age of a man in replacement of father and mother, you therefore have, according to him, twelve million people less for the next generation. It is a pity, as Garnier observes, 70 that he stopped after such a good start and did not push this learned reckoning one or two generations further. If he had, he would have found, from the second generation, a loss for France of seventy-two million inhabitants. Governments have no direct measure to take in relation to population. They must respect the natural course of things. Let people be happy, that is, let everyone be free to seek his own happiness, without hurting other people’s, and the population will be adequate.

All detailed legislation, the prohibition on celibacy, the stigmatizing, the penalties, the rewards for getting married—none of these artificial means ever achieves the purpose envisaged, and insofar as such means interfere with freedom, they are far removed from it. The laws enforcing marriage cannot enforce population growth. Since the law of Papia Poppaea 71 forbade those who were not married to receive anything from strangers, either by the institution of inheritance or bequest, and those who being married had no children to receive more than half a legacy or bequest, the Romans contrived to repudiate their wives or make them abort after having a single child. Let us add that most of the governments which make laws against celibacy are like the Chinese scholars and mandarins who make long sermons exhorting people to engage in farming, but who let their nails grow to preserve them from the very suspicion of being farmers.

What misleads superficial observers is that we sometimes see a flourishing of population in certain countries and simultaneously positive laws which encouraged the unmarried to wed. It was certainly not because of these positive laws, however, that the population flourished, but on account of other circumstances, all of which can be expressed in one word: freedom. What proves this is that in the same countries, these circumstances having changed, the population fell, although the laws remained the same or became even more severe. Consider the time of Augustus and the vain efforts of that emperor. When the vices of government do not put obstacles in the way of population, laws are superfluous. When they do, laws are bootless. The basis of population growth is growth in the means of subsistence. The basis of growth in the means of subsistence is security and calm. The basis of security and calm is justice and freedom.

chapter one : From What Point of View War Can Be Considered As Having Advantages

We will not repeat here the endless denunciations of war. A number of philosophers, inspired by a love of humanity, in praiseworthy exaggeration, have seen it only from its adverse perspectives. I am happy to acknowledge its advantages.

War itself is not an evil. It is in man’s nature. It favors the development of his finest and greatest faculties. It opens up to him a store of exquisite pleasures. He is indebted to it as the protector of cherished objects of his affections. He cheerfully places himself between these and danger. He acquires largeness of spirit, skill, coolness, courage, scorn for death—without which he cannot be sure he will not commit all the dastardliness demanded of him. War teaches him heroic devotion. It makes him form sublime friendships. It joins him in the tightest of bonds with his companions in arms. It renders his fatherland real so that he will defend it. It brings in turn elevated endeavor and elevated leisure. Overlong periods of peace degrade nations and make them ready for servitude.

All these advantages of war, however, are subject to an indispensable condition, namely that it results naturally from the situation and character of nations. When war results only from the ambition of governments, from their greed, their policies and calculations, then war can bring only ill.

Nations of warlike character are usually free nations, because the same qualities which inspire love of war fill them with a love of freedom. Governments which are warlike against the national grain, however, are never anything but oppressive ones.

War is like all things human. They are all, in their day, good and useful. Outside it, they are all fatal. Likewise, when it is desired to uphold religion against the spirit of the age, it becomes a kind of mixture of mockery and hypocrisy. When, ignoring the peaceful character of peoples, one wishes to perpetuate war, it will consist only in oppression and massacre.

The Roman Republic, lacking commerce, letters, or art, its only domestic occupation farming, its only territory too confined for its population, surrounded by barbarian peoples, always menaced or menacing, followed its destiny in committing itself to nonstop military undertakings. A modern government which let itself be carried away by a rage for conquest, by an unquenchable thirst for domination, by endless projects of aggrandizement, and which believed it could imitate the Roman Republic, would face precisely this difference, that going against the tide of its nation and its era, it would be forced to resort to such extreme means, to such oppressive measures, to such scandalous lies, to such a multiplication of injustices, that the conquerors of its empire would be as wretched as the conquered. A people thus governed would be the Roman people, but without the freedom and the national commitment which make all sacrifices easy, without the hope every individual had of a share in the land, in short, without all the circumstances which in Roman eyes embellished this hazardous and stormy way of life.

The situation today prevents nations from being warlike in character. “The risks and fortunes of war,” says an estimable writer, 1 “will never be able to offer a prospect comparable to that which today presents itself to the working man, in all countries, where work is paid the wages due to it.” The new mode of combat, the changes in weaponry, artillery: these have deprived military life of what used to be most attractive about it. There is no longer a struggle against danger; there is fatality. Courage today is no longer a passion; it is indifference. One no longer tastes therein that joy in will and vitality, in the development of physical strength and the moral faculties, which made hand-to-hand combat so beloved of the heroes of antiquity and the knights of the Middle Ages. War has lost its greatest charms. Thus the time it could be loved has passed. We must not let ourselves be deceived by our memories, but envisage it in a new light, the only true one in our day, as a necessity to be endured.

Considered in this way, modern war is now only a scourge. In the case of commercial, industrious, and civilized nations, with lands sufficiently extensive for their needs, with links whose interruption becomes a disaster, with no prosperity or increase in affluence to be expected from conquest, war unsettles, without compensation, every kind of social guarantee. The domestic controls it seems to authorize put individual freedom at risk. It brings a destructive acceleration to legal processes both in terms of their sanctity and their purpose. It tends to represent all the adversaries of government, all those it regards with ill will, as accomplices of the foreign enemy. Finally, troubling the security of all, war also presses on the general wealth, through the pecuniary sacrifices to which all citizens are condemned. War’s very successes throw conquering nations into exhaustion. They lead only to the creation of States without bounds, whose governance demands limitless power and which, after having been during their span of life a cause of tyranny, are brought to collapse in the midst of crime, by countless disasters.

chapter two : On the Pretexts for War

Governments themselves have been forced to recognize these truths for some time, at least in theory. They no longer claim that the nations are there to establish, at the price of their blood and their poverty, the disastrous fame of some of their leaders. However despotic a modern leader, I think he would scarcely dare to present his subjects with his personal glory as compensation for their peace and their lives. Only Charles XII misconstrued his century thus. 2 But since that revolution in ideas, governments have invented so many pretexts for war that the peace of nations and the rights of individuals are still far from guaranteed.

We will examine only very much in passing these various pretexts. National independence, national honor, the need to make our influence respected abroad, the rounding off of our frontiers, commercial interests. What else can I say? The fact is that this vocabulary of hypocrisy and injustice is inexhaustible.

What would one say of an individual who held his honor and independence compromised as long as other individuals possessed some honor and independence, and thought himself safe only when surrounded by slaves and trembling victims? Aside from the insolence and immorality of such a reckoning, this individual would be headed for destruction, precisely and solely because hatred would unite against him those whom his skill and daring had momentarily surprised and subdued. It is the same with a State. The independence of peoples rests on equity as much as force. The kind of force necessary to hold all the other peoples in subjugation is a situation against nature. A nation which places the guarantee of its independence, or to put it more accurately, its despotism, in such force, is in greater danger than the feeblest of nations, for all public opinion, all wishes, all hatred menace it. Sooner or later this hatred, this public opinion, these wishes, will break out and envelop it. Doubtless there is something unjust about these sentiments. A people is never guilty of the excesses its government makes it commit. It is the government which leads it astray, or more often dominates it without leading it astray. But the nations which are victims of its deplorable obedience cannot take into account the hidden sentiments to which its behavior gives the lie. They blame the instruments for the excesses of the hand which directs them. The whole of France suffered from Louis XIV’s ambition and detested it; but Europe accused France of that ambition, and Sweden paid the penalty for the madness of Charles XII.

As for influence abroad, without our examining whether the excessive extent of that influence is not frequently a misfortune for a nation rather than an advantage, we have to consider the instability of all headstrong and disordered influence. Even when acceding to its momentary ascendancy, the world does not believe in its lasting character. Everyone in such a period, at such a given moment, will perhaps obey the dominant government. But nobody identifies its reckonings with his own. It is seen as a transient calamity. People wait until the torrent ceases to roll its waves along, sure it will perish one day in the arid sand and that they will sooner or later trample dry-footed on the earth its course has furrowed.

If the talk is of rounding off our frontiers, we will reply that guided by this pretext, the human species could never enjoy an instant of peace. No monarch to my knowledge has ever sacrificed a portion of his territory to give his lands a greater geometric regularity. So it is always outside that peoples wish to do their rounding off. This, then, is a dispensation whose basis moves to destruction of its own accord. It is one whose elements are at war and whose operation can rest only on the spoliation of the weakest, one which inexorably renders illegitimate the possessions of the strongest. International law could thereby be nothing more than a code of expropriation and barbarism. All the ideas of justice which the enlightened scholars of several centuries have brought into international relations, as into those between individuals, would be repelled and banished anew by this dispensation. The human race would step back toward those times of devastation and invasion which used to seem to us the opprobrium of history. The only difference now would be the hypocrisy, a hypocrisy all the more scandalous and corrupting in that no one would believe it. All words would lose their sense. That of moderation would presage violence, that of justice would announce iniquity. There is a theory of rounding off of frontiers which resembles, save for the good faith of those who profess it, ideal theories of the perfection of constitutions. This perfection is never attained, but every day it serves to motivate some new upheaval.

Were someone to put forward the interests of commerce, I would ask whether people believed in good faith that we serve commerce by depopulating a country of its most thriving young men, uprooting the labor most necessary to agriculture, manufacturing, and other production, by raising between other peoples and oneself barriers sprinkled with blood? “War costs more than its expenses,” a wise writer has said; “it costs everything it stops from being earned.” 3 Commerce rests on a good understanding of nations between themselves. It is sustained only by justice. It rests on equality. It prospers in peace. Yet it is for the sake of commerce that a nation is to be kept in nonstop wars, that universal hatred is to be heaped on its head, that the march is to be from one injustice to another, that every day credit is to be disrupted by violence, and that equals are absolutely not to be tolerated.

During the French Revolution a pretext for war hitherto unknown was invented, that of delivering nations from the yoke of their governments, which we took to be illegitimate and tyrannical. Under this pretext death and devastation were brought into places where men either lived peacefully under faulty institutions, ones nevertheless softened by time and habit, or had enjoyed for several centuries all the benefits of freedom. A period forever shameful, in which we saw a perfidious government inscribe sacred words on its guilty standards, to trouble the peace, violate the independence, destroy the prosperity of its innocent neighbors, adding to the scandal of Europe by lying protestations of respect for the rights of man and of zeal for humanity. The worst conquest is the hypocritical type, says Machiavelli, as if he had predicted our history. Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy. 4

To give a people freedom in spite of itself is only to give it slavery. Conquered nations can contract neither free spirits nor habits. Every society must repossess for itself rights which have been invaded, if it is worthy of owning them. Masters cannot impose freedom. For nations which enjoy political freedom, conquests have furthermore, beyond anything else we might hypothesize, this most clearly insane feature, that if these nations stay faithful to their principles, their triumphs cannot help but lead to their depriving themselves of a portion of their rights in order to communicate them to the conquered.

When a nation of ten million people governed by its representatives adds to its territory a province in which a million more live, what it gains is the loss of a tenth of its representation, since it transfers this tenth to its new fellow citizens.

One is forced to believe that the absurdity of the politics of conquest in conjunction with a representative constitution, somehow eluded the republican government of France. Ancient habits have so great an empire over men, however, that they act in virtue of these habits, even when they have solemnly abjured them. Under the Directory, by dint of victories and territorial mergers, France came close to being represented in the main by foreigners. Every new success was for the French one less French representative.

chapter three : The Effect of the Politics of War on the Domestic Condition of Nations

After our examination of the most specious pretexts of war on the part of modern governments, let us dwell on one of their effects, one in my view insufficiently remarked on hitherto. This politics of war casts into society a mass of men whose outlook is different from that of the nation and whose habits form a dangerous contrast with the patterns of civil life, with the institutions of justice, with respect for the rights of all, with those principles of peaceful and ordered freedom which must be equally inviolable under all forms of government.

Over the last sixteen years there has been much talk about armies composed of citizens. To be sure, we do not wish to visit insults on those who so gloriously defended our national independence, on those who by so many immortal exploits founded the French Republic. When enemies dare to attack a people on its territory, the citizens become soldiers to repulse them. They were citizens, they were the leading citizens, those who freed our soil from the profaning foreigner. In dealing with a general question, however, we must set aside remembrance of glory, which surrounds and dazzles us, seductive and captivating feelings of gratitude. In the present state of European societies the words “citizen” and “soldier” imply a contradiction. A citizen army is possible only when a people is virtually confined to a single city-state. Then the soldiers of that nation can rationally justify obedience. When they are in the bosom of their native land, between governors and governed whom they know, their understanding can count for something in their submission. A very large country, however, whether monarchy or republic, renders that supposition absolutely chimerical. A very large country requires from soldiers a mechanistic subordination and makes them passive, unreflective, and docile agents. As soon as they are displaced, they lose all the prior information capable of illuminating their judgment. The size of the country permitting those in charge of the armed forces to dispatch the natives of one province to another distant one, these men, subject to a discipline which isolates them from the local natives, are only strangers to the latter, although they are nominally their compatriots. They see only their commanders, know only them, obey their orders alone. Citizens in their birthplace, everywhere else they are soldiers. Once an army is among strangers, however it is organized, it is only a physical force, a pure instrument. The experience of the Revolution demonstrated only too well the truth of what I am affirming. We were told it was important for soldiers to be citizens, so they would never turn their arms against the people, and yet we have seen the unfortunate conscripts taken away from their ploughs, not only to contribute to the seige of Lyon, which could not be other than an act of civil war, but also to make themselves instruments of torture of the Lyonnais, disarmed prisoners, which was an act of implicit obedience and discipline, of precisely that discipline and that obedience from which we had believed that the citizen soldiers would always be able to protect themselves.

A large army, whatever its basic elements, contracts, involuntarily, an esprit de corps. Such a spirit always seizes hold of organizations assembled for a single purpose, sooner or later. The only lasting thing men have in common is their interest. In all countries, in all centuries, a confederation of priests has formed, within the State, a State apart. In all centuries and countries, men associated together in the army for long periods have separated themselves from the nation. The very soldiers of freedom, in fighting for such, conceive a kind of respect for the use of force, regardless of its purpose. Without knowing it they contract thereby morals, ideas, and habits which are subversive of the cause they defend. The measures which ensure the triumph of war prepare the collapse of the law. The military spirit is haughty, swift, swaggering. Law must be calm, often slow, and always protective. The military spirit detests the thinking faculties as incipient indiscipline. All legitimate government rests on enlightenment and conviction. So in the annals of nations we often see armed force driving enemies from the territory; but we also see it no less often handing the fatherland over to its chiefs. It carries the glory of nations to the highest level; but it also adds their rights to the tally of their conquests, to be ceremoniously deposited at the feet of the Triumpher. We see the Roman legions, composed at least in part of citizens of a Republic illustrious from six centuries of victories, men born under freedom, surrounded by monuments raised by twenty generations of heroes to that tutelary deity, trample underfoot the ashes of Cincinnatus and the Camilli and march to the orders of a usurper, to profane the tombs of their ancestors and enslave the eternal city. 5 We see the English legions who, with their own hands, had broken the throne of kings and shed their blood for twenty years to establish a republic spring into action with Cromwell against that nascent republic and impose on the people a tyranny more shameful than the chains from which their valor had delivered it.

The idea of citizen soldiers is singularly dangerous. When armed men are directed against unarmed governments or peaceful individuals, it is said that citizens are being opposed to citizens. The Directory had the soldiers deliberate beneath their banners, and when it ordered a political opinion from them as if it were a drill, it said that citizen soldiers, far from having less right than the others, had more, since they had fought for the fatherland. Thus did the military spirit emerge in the Republic. It was claimed that for freedom as for victory, nothing was more appropriate than swift movements. Opinions were seen as like troops, to enroll or to fight, representative assemblies as agencies of command, opposition to them as acts of indiscipline, law courts as camps, judges as warriors, the accused as enemies, trials as battles. So it is not immaterial that there be created in a country, systematically, by way of war prolonged or constantly renewed under various pretexts, a mass of men imbued exclusively with the military spirit. The severest despotism becomes inevitable, if only to contain these men. And this is itself a great evil, that there should be a large minority of people containable only by the severest discipline. But these men, against whom despotism is called for, are at the same time despotism’s instruments against the rest of the nation. It is hard for soldiers, whose first duty is obedience to the slightest signal, not to persuade themselves effortlessly that all citizens are subject to this duty.

Detailed safeguards against this danger, the most terrible which can menace a nation, are not enough. Rome had taken strong ones. No army could come near the capital. No soldier under arms could exercise citizen rights. It is always easy, however, for a government to evade these precautions. In vain we may give the legislative power the right to move the troops away, to fix their numbers, to block those of their movements whose hostile intentions seem apparent—and finally power to disband them. These means are at once extreme and impotent. Executive power must have de jure, and always has de facto, control of the armed forces. Charged with watching over public security, it can make trouble break out to justify the arrival of a group of regiments. It can make them come in secret, and when they are gathered it can extract from the legislative power the appearance of agreement. All the safeguards which require the legislature to deliberate subsequently on the danger which threatens it turn in a vicious circle. The legislature has power to act only at the moment when the peril is displayed, that is to say, when the harm is done, and when the harm is done the legislative power can no longer act.

The military spirit, however, wherever it exists, is stronger than the written laws. It is this spirit which must be restrained. Only a national spirit focused on another purpose can do this. The national spirit communicates itself from the nation to the army, whatever the composition of the latter. When this national spirit does not exist, the soldiers, though formerly citizens, adopt the military spirit nonetheless. When this national spirit exists, the military spirit, even among soldiers who are not citizens, is checked by this, and tyranny itself is softened. “Those who corrupted the Greek republics,” says Montesquieu, 6 “did not always become tyrants. That is because they were more attached to eloquence than the art of war.”

Under whatever point of view we consider this terrible question of war, we have to be convinced that any enterprise of this kind which does not have a defensive purpose is the worst outrage a government can commit, because it brings together the disastrous effects of all the outrages of government. It endangers all kinds of freedom, harms every interest, tramples underfoot all rights, combines and authorizes all the forms of domestic and foreign tyranny, depraves the rising generations, divides the nation into two parts, of which one scorns the other and passes readily from scorn to injustice, prepares future destructions by way of past ones, and purchases with the misfortunes of the present those of the future.

These truths are not new, and I do not offer them as such, but truths which seem recognized often need repetition. 7 For government, while calling them commonplaces, in its haughty disdain constantly treats them like paradoxes. It is, furthermore, a rather remarkable thing, that while our government, in all its public speeches, in all its communication with the people, professes the love of peace and a desire to give the world tranquillity, men who claim to be devoted to that government write daily that the French nation being essentially warlike, military glory is the only kind worthy of her and that France must win renown by her military brilliance. These men ought to tell us how military glory can be acquired other than through war and how the purpose they are proposing to the French people alone fits in with the peace of the whole world. I might well add that these authors themselves may never have thought about it. Happy to speak in flowery language, sometimes on one subject, sometimes on another, following the fashion of the moment, they rely, rightly, on forgetfulness to cover up their inconsistency. 8 I have sometimes thought that this doctrine, wherever it dared to present itself, deserved rebuffing, and that it was worthwhile discomfitting writers who, when they deal with future government, recommend despotism, because they hope never to be other than its agents and, when dealing with international relations, see nothing so glorious as war, as if from the depths of their obscure study, they were the distributors of all the scourges which can weigh on the human race.

chapter four : On Safeguards against the War Mania of Governments

We ought now to indicate some safeguards against the unjust or pointless wars which governments may undertake, since, in the present state of society, those undertakings which are great evils in themselves also lead to all the other ills. But general maxims would be inadequate and reflections on constitutional limits which can be assigned to government would take us beyond the boundaries of this work.

Nothing is easier to judge in the light of reason than the measures of government in relation to war. Public opinion is always accurate enough in this matter because the interest of one and all speaks out loud and clear on this question. Everyone thinks war is a fatal thing. Everyone also feels that cowardly patience when foreigners hurt or insult us, inviting them to become doubly vainglorious and unfair, sooner or later brings the war we wanted to avoid, and that once hostilities have begun, arms cannot be put down until we have acquired solid safeguards for the future, since a shameful peace is only a cause of new wars with less favorable prospects. But just as public opinion is infallible on this question, so it is impossible to prescribe or determine anything in advance.

To say we must confine ourselves to defensive wars is to say nothing. It is easy for governments to insult or menace their neighbors to such an extent that they feel bound to attack, and in this case the guilty party is not the aggressor, but the one who, joining treachery to violence, forced the other to aggression. Thus defense can sometimes be only adroit hypocrisy while attack may become a legitimate defensive precaution. One can affirm that any war which national feeling disapproves of is unjust; but no means exist for ascertaining this national feeling. Governments alone have the floor. They can seize the press exclusively, and their creatures and writers, speaking in the name of a silent, repressed people, form a concert of artificial agreement which prevents real public opinion from making itself heard.

As for the nations which enjoy political freedom, we would probably find in the public discussions of political assemblies, in the consent to taxes or their refusal, in ministerial responsibility, means of checking abuses relating to war, in a way which, if not satisfactory, is at least generally useful and such as to prevent the worst excesses. Furthermore, we would find, on close inspection, that these guarantees are too often illusory, that it is always easy for the executive power to start a war, that the legislative power is then forced to support it against foreigners the executive has provoked, that if, in propping up that executive, the legislature engages in censure, the enemy will be encouraged by this disagreement between the branches of government, that the armed forces will be less ardent in a war disapproved of by the nation’s representatives, that the people will cooperate less by way of pecuniary sacrifices, that the government, feeling itself accused, will bring to its operations less decisiveness, less certainty, less speed, that the hostile claims will get larger, that peace will become more difficult to conclude, simply because the war will have fallen under public disapprobation. I do not mean that there is no remedy for these drawbacks. On the contrary, I think it would be possible to indicate one, the seed of which is present in several nations, though it does not yet exist completely in any single one. We could not examine this issue here, however, without distorting this book totally. We have kept separate from it everything concerning political freedom, and we would find ourselves drawn by it into all the discussions about constitutions. For all questions of this sort hold tightly together. For a constitution to work in one respect, it has to do so for all the others.

You may believe that a representative assembly can stop the executive power in its military undertakings. For a representative assembly to impose its will on the executive power, however, it must derive its commission from a legitimate source, it must be armed with prerogatives and encircled with guarantees which put its independence beyond all danger. If it is armed with extensive prerogatives, it must also at the same time be contained in its acts and checked in its excesses, since an unrestrained assembly is more dangerous than the most absolute despot. Thus from whatever part of the circle you start, you will be forced to go around it entirely before arriving at a satisfactory result.

I will make one reflection only on political constitutions, because I am not aware that any such reflection has ever been made. Some modern writers claim that the institutions which limit and separate the powers are only misleading formalities which governments skillfully elude. Even if this were true, these formalities would still be useful. Governments obliged to elude them have less time to devote to foreign undertakings. They are too busy at home to be looking outside for some meretricious occupation. Despots keep their subjects in far-off wars to distract them from domestic matters. People who want to enjoy some peace must give government something to do at home, so as not to be precipitated by its idleness and ambition into the calamities of war.

I will add that I am far from agreeing that the institutions protecting freedom are only worthless formalities. They give citizens a great feeling of their importance, a great enjoyment of this feeling, and a lively interest in the prosperity of the State. In this way, independently of their direct advantages, they are advantageous in creating and maintaining public spirit. This public spirit is the only effective guarantee. It is based in public opinion; it penetrates the offices of ministers; it modifies or stops their projects without their knowing. But take good note that this public spirit comes much more from the organization of government than from its actions. An absolute government under a virtuous despot can be very gentle without creating any public spirit. A limited government may, under a bad prince, be very vexatious despite its limits, yet for all that the public spirit will not be destroyed. But, I repeat: all these things are foreign to our topic.

chapter five : On the Mode of Forming and Maintaining Armies

The aversion of modern nations to the hazards of war, which have ceased to be pleasures, makes the question of recruitment very difficult. When the spirit of the human race was warlike, men ran to combat. Today they have to be dragged to it.

The rights of government in regard to recruitment very much need to be fixed. If it is invested in this respect with boundless power, it is as if it had unlimited sway over everything. What does it matter if it cannot arrest citizens at home and keep them indefinitely in dungeons, if it can send them, them or their children, to die on faraway shores, if it can have this threat hover above the heads of loved ones and bring despair into every home at will, by the exercise of bogus right?

There are two modes of recruitment, which subdivide again, but to one or the other of which one can relate all the different ways adopted in all countries.

The first consists in imposing on all citizens of a given age the duty of bearing arms for a certain number of years; the other is free and voluntary recruitment.

The drawbacks of the first mode are incontestable.

In certain periods of human life, interruptions to the exercise of intellectual or working faculties are never made good. The dangerous, careless, and coarse ways of soldiering, the sudden rupture of all family dealings, mechanical thralldom to minute duties when the enemy is not around, complete independence of moral ties at the age when the passions are most actively in ferment, these are not immaterial things in terms of morality and education. Condemning to a life in camps and barracks the younger sons of the affluent classes, in which reside, in short, education, refinement, and right thinking, as well as that tradition of gentleness, nobility, and elegance which alone distinguishes us from barbarians, this is to do the whole nation an ill uncompensated either by worthless success or the profitless terror she inspires. To commit to the soldier’s life the merchant’s son, or the artist’s, the magistrate’s, the young man devoted to letters, to science, to the exercise of some difficult and complicated activity, is to rob him of the fruit of all his previous education. This education itself will be affected in advance by the prospect of an inevitable interruption. Parental zeal will be discouraged. The young man’s imagination will be struck for good or ill by what lies in store. However his imagination may react to all this, his application can only be the worse. If he is intoxicated by brilliant dreams of military glory, he will scorn peaceful study, sedentary occupations, work of application contrary to his fancies, and the changeableness of his nascent faculties. If he thinks of himself sorrowfully as being dragged away from home, if he works out how much the sacrifice of several years will retard his progress, he will despair of himself. He will not want to exhaust himself in efforts whose fruits an iron hand will steal from him. He will tell himself that since his country contends with him for the time necessary to acquire his learning, perfect the art he cultivates or the work he has embraced, it is pointless to struggle against power; he will resign himself, lazily, to what lies in store.

If, transforming in some way the obligation to bear arms into a tax on the rich, you restrict it in reality to the working-class poor, although this inequality seems to have something more revolting about it, then probably it will be less dire in its results than so-called equality, which weighs on all classes. An unskilled laborer or a day laborer suffers less from the interruption of his routine job than men committed to jobs demanding experience, assiduity, watchfulness, and thought. Plucking a farmer’s son away from his plough, you do not render him incapable of resuming his first job on his return. Other drawbacks are apparent, however, ones of no less importance. You will see parents punished for the faults of their children, with children’s interests separated from those of their fathers as a result, with families reduced either to uniting to resist the law, or to division so that one part can constrain the other to obedience, fatherly love treated like a crime, the filial tenderness which does not wish to abandon a father to old age and isolation turned into revolt and struck down harshly, spying and informing, those eternal resources of government once it has created bogus crimes, encouraged and rewarded, odious duties imposed on lesser magistrates, with men unleashed like ferocious mastiffs, in town and country, to pursue and lock up fugitives, innocent in the light of morality and nature. And perhaps all these vexations take place, not for legitimate defense but in order to facilitate the invasion and devastation of faraway regions whose possession adds nothing to the national prosperity, unless one calls the worthless renown of a few men and their fatal celebrity, national prosperity. 9

The arguments pleaded in favor of institutions which force all citizens to bear arms resemble in some respects those of the enemies of property, which, under the pretext of a primitive equality, wish to divide manual labor without distinction between all men, not reflecting that the work split thus will not only be less useful, since it will be badly done, but that moreover it would block all continuity, all specialized work, all the good effects of habit and concentration of effort, and thereby all progress, all perfectioning. Similarly, military life, seizing all the generations in turn during their youth, would infallibly cast a nation into brutishness and ignorance.

The only drawback of the second mode, I mean free and voluntary recruitment, is possible insufficiency.

I think this insufficiency is much exaggerated. The obstacles to recruitment the government finds always pertain to the futility of the war. Once a just war is involved, these obstacles diminish. Public opinion speaks, everyone’s interest makes itself heard. Everybody is drawn by this interest and this opinion. Each soul comes to life. Each offers himself to march to battle, aware of the cause. National movement exists, which the government has no need to create by orders and threats. It has only to direct it.

One can affirm this fearlessly. If governments undertook only just wars, if at home too they took justice as their standard, they would find very few obstacles to the composition of armies. In the present condition of Europe we do not at all dispute their right to maintain a standing military force even in time of peace, and to impose on citizens certain duties for the formation and maintenance of this force. But on the assumption that the government would undertake only legitimate wars, that is, motivated by the need for defense, although circumstances might render them offensive, how much less numerous on this assumption, we repeat, would the indispensable military force be, and how much simpler would it be for the citizens to fulfill these duties! Do not be distrustful then of their zeal. They are not slow to run to take up arms for their fatherland, when they have one. They spring to the maintenance of their independence abroad when they possess security at home. When they remain motionless and have to be constrained, it is because they have nothing to lose, and whose fault is that?

It might be objected perhaps that this unanimous movement cannot take place in a very large polity, that men run to the defense of their frontiers only when those frontiers are near their homes and that a war occasioned by entry of an enemy in a faraway province will not produce in the center or at the opposite end of the country either indignation or zeal to repel it. First of all, this assertion is much more contestable than one might think. Suppose a great free people, happy in its freedom, attached by the feeling of good fortune to its government. It will contract wider and more generous ideas than those people who base their power on the degradation of the human race like to believe. Just as men used to freedom see in the oppression of a single citizen, however unknown he may be to them, a punishable assault against the whole of civil society, so also a nation which has a fatherland sees in the invasion of a part of its territory an insult made to the whole of that fatherland. The enjoyment of freedom creates a feeling of national pride so refined and easily offended that government has more often to restrain than arouse it. Doubtless this truth has limits. What follows from it, though, is simply that large countries must have it too. When a country is so extensive that no national link can exist between its different provinces, I can scarcely conceive the argument for this excessive extent.

A nation refuses to defend itself against an enemy which menaces it or to contribute in sufficient proportion to the establishment necessary for the security of the country it inhabits, only when its government by its injustices has detached it from its interests, or when this government’s frenzied ambition, wishing to set up everywhere at the expense of its subjects a tyrannical domination, demands efforts and sacrifices which neither the security nor the prosperity of this nation requires. This government is then reduced to dragging its slaves to war in irons.

Nevertheless, that voluntary recruitment be supposed insufficient suffices to oblige us to indicate the remedy for this insufficiency. It has been said that if a government were not good enough to inspire in its subjects the desire to defend it, then it must bear the penalty for its vices. This is true. But no government will resign itself to that. It is pointless proposing principles whose nature is such that they will not be observed.

When voluntary recruitment is insufficient, the government must indeed be given the right to resort to conscription. When it is not accorded this right, it will take it. To combine this prerogative, however, with a degree of freedom and individual security, we have to revert to political freedom, for as we said at the start, if the right to conscription is not strictly limited, there are no longer any limits to despotism. Everything leads us back therefore, in spite of ourselves and by every route, to political freedom.

The representatives of the nation must determine how, in what numbers, in what conditions, and for what end the citizens must be obliged to march to the defense of their country. This determination by the nation’s representatives must not be permanent, but it must happen each time circumstances demand it, and it must cease, by law, when the circumstances have changed. And this forces us to repeat what we said above, about all the prerogatives to be granted to the representative assemblies in order for them to attain their goal. 10 For if they are weak and dependent, they will vote for everything the executive power wishes.

chapter one : Questions to Be Dealt with in This Book

The relations between government and enlightenment are of a kind even more difficult and delicate to determine than those concerning only external and material things: actions, property, or production. Man’s orientation is to independence in the exercise of all his faculties, but he feels the need for it above all in the exercise of thought. The more he reflects, the more aware he becomes that all his thoughts form a whole, an indissoluble chain from which it is impossible to break off or remove arbitrarily a single link. Religion can dominate thought because it can become thought itself. Government cannot. These two things have between them no real point of contact.

The materialists often repeated against the doctrine of pure spirit an objection which lost its force only when a less daring philosophy made us recognize the impotence we suffer with respect to understanding anything regarding what we call matter or what we entitle spirit. Pure spirit cannot act on matter, they said. One could say, with greater reason and without losing oneself in subtle metaphysics, that where government is concerned, matter cannot act on spirit. Now government, qua government, never has anything but matter at its disposal. Government changes in nature when it wishes to employ reasoning, and rather than dominating the reflective mode, subjects its own reasoning to the latter. Seeking to win the argument, government recognizes the criteria of reflection. Consequently, we always find that after a few tries of this kind government realizes it is now out of its element, deprived of its habitual weapons; and when it wishes to reassume them, its struggle with thought begins anew.

To confer the management of enlightenment on government, one must suppose either that men cannot from their own resources arrive at truths the knowledge of which is salutary to them, or that there are certain truths whose discovery would be dangerous and that consequently there are certain errors which it is useful to maintain. On the first supposition we charge government with the destruction of error, on the second with its protection.

This leads us back to a subject we have dealt with earlier. 1 The means government has for the maintenance of error consist in large measure of restrictions imposed on the manifestation of thought. We will not come back to this issue, which I think has been sufficiently clarified. But the principle itself of the usefulness of errors seems worthy of some exploration. This often troubled issue has not yet in my view been considered as it ought to be. A few words will suffice to resolve it if it is considered properly, and we will show in these few words that the supporters of this policy have not gone deeply into their own opinion.

chapter two : On the Value Attributed to Errors

There is no doubt that the apparent consequence of an error can be very useful; that is, the effect which seems bound to result from it naturally can appear very advantageous. The real difficulty, however, is that nothing guarantees that the moral effect of an error will be such as one supposes or wishes. The supporters of useful errors fall into a misapprehension which we have pointed out elsewhere. 2 They bring into their calculations only the purpose and do not consider the effect of the means used to secure it. They consider such error only as something established in isolation, forgetting the danger of giving man the habit of error. Reason is a faculty which improves or deteriorates. Imposing error on man causes the faculty to deteriorate. You break the connectedness of his thought. Who can guarantee it will not break again when it comes to the application of the error you have inculcated in him? If it were given to man to invert, just once, the order of the seasons, whatever advantage he might derive from this privilege in a particular circumstance, he would nonetheless experience as a result an incalculable disadvantage, in that subsequently he would no longer be able to rely on the uniform sequence and unvarying regularity which serve as a base for his working activities. Moral nature is like physical nature. Any error distorts the mind, since to penetrate it, error must stop it moving according to its purpose, from principle to consequence. Whose assurance have you that this operation will not constantly repeat itself? Who can trace the path a mind which has abandoned reason’s path must follow? An error is an impetus, its direction incalculable. In creating that impetus and by the very operation you had to perform to create it, you have placed yourself outside the ability to control it. Therefore you must fear the thing seeming least likely to result from it. It is by a petitio principii that you say: such and such an error is favorable to morality. Not so, since in order for that error truly to be favorable to morality it would be necessary for the man who had falsely reasoned in adopting that error, to reason rightly in departing from that given point, and nothing is less certain. A mind you have got used to reasoning falsely on such and such an occasion, when the imperfection of his logic seemed convenient to you and fitted in with your views, will reason falsely on another such occasion and then the viciousness of his reasoning will run counter to your intentions. A particular man may adopt absurd ideas on the nature of a supreme being. He imagines Him incomprehensible, vindictive, jealous, capricious, and so on. If he nevertheless went on to reason well henceforth on the basis of these givens, despite their absurdity they could still regulate his behavior usefully. He would say to himself: “this all-powerful being, often bizarre, sometimes cruel, nevertheless wills the maintenance of human societies, and in our uncertainty as to his particular wishes, the surest way of pleasing him is justice, which satisfies his general will.” But instead of this kind of reasoning, this mind, sufficiently misled to have adopted an absurd initial premise, will probably go from supposition to supposition, from mystery to mystery, from absurdity to absurdity, until he has forged himself a morality utterly contrary to the kind we believed we had entrusted to the safekeeping of religion. Therefore it is not advantageous to deceive men, even when a momentary advantage can be gained from this expedient. The general who tells his troops that the thunderbolt’s roar presages victory, risks seeing his soldiers take to flight if some more cunning deceiver persuades them that this terrible noise signifies the anger of the gods. Similarly, those enormous animals which barbarous peoples put in the vanguard of their armies to drive them onto their enemies would suddenly recoil, terror-struck or overcome with fury, and failing to recognize their masters’ voice, crush or scatter the very battalions which were expecting their salvation and triumph to come from them. But here is quite another difficulty. The errors you call useful necessitate a series of ideas different from the sequence for which nature intended us. Should chance uncover some truth for us, that false series is broken. What will you do then? Reestablish it by force? There you will be, carried back to prohibitive laws, whose impotence and danger we have demonstrated elsewhere. 3

Moreover, this would be a great inconsistency on your part. Having asserted on principle that man is not up to being governed by truth and that error, by subjugating the mind, absolves us from forcible means, straightaway you are going to use them to uphold the very same error whose advantage ought to be that it makes them superfluous. To maintain public order you have recourse to what you call illusions, and you are lost in admiration of this expedient, so much gentler according to you, and no less efficacious, than penal laws. Doubt is cast, however, on your tutelary illusions. You cannot defend them by ideas of like nature: the sanction itself is attacked. Will you call the law to your aid? That severity which in the name of public peace you recently boasted of not employing, will you now invoke it in support of the errors you believe necessary to that peace? You might as well have saved yourself this long detour, it seems to me, and merely been harsh on the crime, which would have spared you the odium of persecuting thought. Your task would have been easier, for thought will escape you a thousand times more readily than actions would have. Finally, one objection to the usefulness of errors presents itself, one we have already given an account of in this book 4 and will for that reason make do with a sketch of. The discredit which attaches to proven error also comes back, by way of blind fanaticism and clumsy reasoning, on the truth associated with that error. “Men of good will,” says Bentham, 5 “think one should never remove from morality any one of its props, even when it is out of true. . . . But when a man of depraved mind has triumphed by means of a false argument, he always thinks he has triumphed over morality itself.” Errors are always fatal, both because of the effect they produce on the mind itself and because of the means indispensable, to put it succinctly, to secure their durability. The errors which seem most salutary to you are only scourges in disguise. You want a government maintained. You thrust aside the truths opposed to the principles on which this government rests. You encourage the errors contrary to these truths. But a government can be overthrown by a thousand unpredictable causes. Then, the more the errors you have encouraged have put down deep roots, the more the truths you have rebuffed will be unknown. The less men are prepared for what will have to be put in place of that which no longer exists, the more violence, misfortune, and disorder there will be in the overthrow and its consequences.

It can be affirmed with confidence that whenever people believe they have observed an abuse attributable to enlightenment, in fact enlightenment has been in short supply. Always when truth is accused of wrongdoing, this evil has been the effect not of truth but of error. Providence has numbered among men’s needs the search for truth. To say truth can be dangerous is to proffer a terrible accusation against providence. This hypothesis sees providence as having marked out for the human race a route it is condemned to follow by irresistible impulsion, a route which finishes in an abyss.

Moreover, truth is unitary and errors countless. 6 What are your means for choosing among the host of errors? Error is to truth as Machiavellianism is to morality. If you abandon truth in order to plunge into the cunning schemes of Machiavellianism, you are never sure of having chosen the best among these schemes. If you renounce the search for truth, you are never certain of having chosen the most useful error.

Truth is not just good to know; it is good to search for. Even when we go wrong in that search, we are happier than in renouncing it. The idea of truth is peace for the spirit, as the idea of morality is for the heart.

chapter three : On Government in Support of Truth

Very well, someone will say, since error is always fatal, government must keep men from it and lead them to truth. But what means has government for finding it? We demonstrated at the start of this work that those who govern are as prone to error as the governed. 7 Moreover, the objections we have leveled against so-called useful errors, apply almost equally to the truths the government might wish to inculcate and have brought in on its authority. Government support, even for truth, turns into a source of error. Truth’s natural support is obvious rightness. The natural road to truth is via reasoning, comparison, analysis. To persuade man that the obviousness, or what seems such to him, is not the only reason which must determine his opinions, that reasoning is not the only road he must follow, is to pervert his intellectual faculties. It is to establish a false relationship between the opinion he is presented with and the instrument with which he must judge it. It is no longer according to the intrinsic worth of the opinion he must decide, but according to alien considerations, which pervert his intelligence as soon as it follows in that direction. Let us suppose the government infallible in arrogating to itself the right to say what truth is. In this matter it will still use diverse means, it will still disfigure both the truth it proclaims and the intelligence whose own abnegation it ordains. M. de Montesquieu rightly says 8 that a man condemned to death by laws he has consented to is politically freer than he who lives peacefully under laws instituted without the agreement of his will. It would be equally right to say that the adoption of an error on our own accord, because it seems true to us, is an operation more favorable to the perfectioning of the mind than the adoption of a truth on the say-so of any government whatever. In the former case, analysis is formative. If this analysis in the particular circumstance does not lead us to happy results, we are on the right track even so. Persevering in our scrupulous, independent investigation, we will get there sooner or later. Under the latter supposition we are reduced to a plaything of the government before which we have humbled our own judgment. Not only will this result in our adopting errors if the dominating government gets things wrong or finds it useful to deceive us, but we will not even know how to derive from such truths as this government has given us the consequences which must flow from them. The abnegation of our intelligence will have rendered us wretchedly passive creatures. Our mental resilience will be broken. Such vigor as we have left will serve only to mislead us. A writer gifted with remarkable insight 9 observes on this subject that a miracle enacted to demonstrate a truth would entirely fail to convince the spectators. It would instead spoil their judgment, since between a truth and a miracle there is no natural link. A miracle is not proof of an assertion. A miracle is proof of power. To ask someone to accept an opinion on account of a miracle is to demand that people accord to power what should be accorded only to facts; it is to reverse the order of ideas and want an effect to be produced by something which could not be its cause.

We have pointed out elsewhere 10 that morality is only a linked sequence of causes and effects. In the same way, knowledge of the truth is composed only of a linked sequence of principles and consequences. Anytime you interrupt this sequence, you destroy either morality or truth.

Everything imposed on opinion by government turns out to be not only useless but harmful, truth as much as error. In this case truth is not harmful qua truth, but harmful for not having penetrated human intelligence by the natural route.

There is a class, however, whose opinions can be only prejudices, a class which, lacking time for reflection, can learn only what it is taught, a class which has to believe what it is told, a class which, lastly, not being able to devote itself to analysis, has no interest in intellectual independence. Perhaps people will want the government, leaving the educated part of the society completely free, to oversee the views of the ignorant part. But a government which arrogates itself this exclusive prerogative will necessarily demand it be upheld. It will not want any individuals, whoever they may be, acting in a sense different from its own. I agree that initially it will hide this will with sweet and tolerant formalities. From then on, however, some restrictions will appear. They will always keep on growing. A religion professed by government entails the persecution, more or less disguised, of all others. It is the same with opinions of any kind. From preferential treatment of an opinion to disfavor for the contrary opinion, there is a gap which it is impossible not to cross.

This first disadvantage is the cause of a second. Educated men do not delay in separating themselves from a government which hurts them. This is in the nature of the human spirit, above all when it is strengthened by meditation and cultivated by study. Government action, even the best intended, is in some ways rude and gross and ruffles a thousand delicate sensibilities which suffer and rebel.

It is to be feared therefore that if government is endowed with the prerogative of managing the opinion of the uneducated, even if this were toward truth, separating that management from any action taken with regard to the educated class, this latter class, which regards opinion as belonging to its domain, will put itself at odds with the government. A thousand ills then result. Hatred for a government which intervenes in what is not its province can grow so much that when it acts in favor of enlightenment, the friends of enlightenment line up on the side of prejudice. We saw this bizarre spectacle at several periods of our Revolution. A government founded on the clearest principles and professing the sanest opinions, but which, by the nature of the means it uses, alienates the educated class, becomes, infallibly, either the most degraded or the most oppressive of governments. Often it actually combines these two seemingly exlusive things.

The French Revolution was directed against errors of any kind, that is to say that its purpose was to remove the support of government from these errors. The revolutionary leaders wanted to go further. They wanted to employ government itself in the destruction of these errors. Straightaway national movement came to a halt. Opinion was astonished at the weird impulsion some people desired to impress on it, and it recoiled before its new allies. A subtle and swift instinct warned it that the cause had changed although the banner was the same, and it abandoned the banner. What had they actually wanted, this mass of educated men, of honest mind, who during the last half of the eighteenth century had supported the philosophers against the court and the clergy? Independence of opinion, freedom of thought. As soon as the government put itself on the philosophers’ side, however, and exerted itself in supporting it, opinion was no longer independent, thought no longer free.

We must distinguish the influence of the enlightened class, insofar as it is enlightened, from that of a section of the enlightened class, insofar as it is vested in government. No one wants the influence of enlightenment more than I. But precisely because I want it, because I prefer it to any means of another kind, and because I do not want it distorted. It is to conserve in all its force the domain of the enlightened class that I feel repugnance at its subordination to a tiny fraction of itself, necessarily less impartial and probably less enlightened than the rest. The free, gradual, and peaceful action of all would be retarded and often even arrested by this privilege accorded to a few.

chapter four : On Government Protection of Enlightenment

Do you restrict yourself to demanding that government favor with all its might the indefinite growth of enlightenment? In charging government with this function, however, are you quite sure you are not imposing on it a duty directly opposed to its interest? We need to distinguish between the sciences proper and enlightenment in the widest sense of that word. We have said, and we think we have shown, 11 that the sciences always gained from the progress of enlightenment and lost from its decay. But the material of science is nevertheless liable to become isolated in many respects from the interests most dear to the happiness and dignity of the human race. Mathematics or physics in the hands of d’Alembert, Condorcet, Biot, or Cabanis are means for the perfectioning of intelligence and rationality and thereby of morality. These sciences can also become separated, however, from the wider purpose of thought; they become then a form of work of a kind more difficult and of more extensive utility than the work of the majority of men, but no less foreign to what we understand specifically by philosophy. All governments have an interest in encouraging sciences thus circumscribed and consequently almost all encourage them. They make a bargain with them whereby the sciences agree not to step outside the agreed sphere. A famous author ingeniously observed that government sought to divide man’s faculties, as it divides citizens among themselves, in order to keep them the more easily in slavery. 12 It is not thus, however, with enlightened activities. Such a bargain is contrary to their nature. The personal interest of those in power is therefore by no means to protect them frankly and to the utmost.

The interest of the governors as such is for the governed to be sufficiently enlightened to be skillful economically, with no loss of their docility and without their in any way harming or worrying the government. Government, of any kind, however legitimate or moderate you suppose it, is keen on surveillance. Now, the more enlightened nations are, the more redoubtable surveillance is. The growth of the intellectual powers of the governed is the creation of a rival power to that of the governors. The consciousness of each individual of the cultivated class constitutes an inflexible tribunal, which judges the acts of government. The governors, therefore, as governors, have an interest not in an indefinite progress of enlightenment, but in a relative and limited one.

As individuals, it is more obvious still that their immediate interest in relation to enlightenment is not the same as that of the governed. It would be too simpleminded of us to stop here and show that it is more agreeable for the holders of power, however well-intentioned they may be, for ministers, however pure they want to be, to be surrounded by men less educated than they and from whom they can easily command admiration and obedience, the implication being that even when the ostensible purpose of the government is to encourage enlightenment, its secret desire is still to keep it dependent and therefore to limit it. This desire would not exist in the holders of power, however, if the objects of their protection were not inclined to take it for granted. From this derives some kind of constraint, some eternal obstacle to all free movement, all strict logic, all precise research, all impartial reasoning. Government protection hurts enlightenment even when the government, sincere and disinterested in all its views, repudiates all ulterior motive and all idea of domination. Compare the respective progress of French literature and German literature in Berlin under Frederick II. No sovereign was in better faith than Frederick in his zeal for the development of the human spirit. He invited his academy to prove that error could never be useful. 13 His country’s literature seeming to him still in its infancy, he showered his favors on all the French men of letters who gathered around him. He overwhelmed them with distinctions and wealth. He allowed them that familiarity with the great which is said to throw almost all men into such a sweet intoxication. The French writings published at his court, however, were never more than inferior and superficial productions. Frederick’s genius could not efface the autonomous character of government. It is true that his protégés repeated philosophical ideas, because these ideas were the watchword; but truths themselves are sterile when they are produced to order. They wrote audacious things, only with a trembling hand, uncertain about the conclusions it was prudent to come to therein and endlessly and anxiously returning to consult officialdom. Voltaire made a short appearance in this literary circle, warmed by royal protection; but since Voltaire was not one of protection’s creatures and was himself a power, the two potentates could not live together, and Voltaire soon left the monarch to protect his humble littérateurs at his leisure.

The German writers scorned by Frederick had no portion of his encouragement or favor. They worked only for the public and themselves. It is to their writings, however, that Germany owes the high degree of enlightenment she has reached; and their writings owe their merit to the government’s neglect. If one had to choose between persecution and protection, persecution is the more valuable to intellectual life. 14

There is among the resources nature has given man a resilience which reacts in the hand which oppresses it, but relaxes or bends when that hand, become more adroit, has managed to seize hold. It was in terror of being accused of sorcery by the government that Roger Bacon outstripped his century. Galileo was to discover the movement of the earth under the Inquisition’s yoke. It was far from his country, whence tyranny had banished him, that Locke analyzed man’s faculties. It is too often concluded, since a cause has produced an effect, that differently employed it would produce an opposite effect. Governments can sometimes succeed in stopping the march of human intelligence for a while. One would be wrong to infer, however, that they succeed in encouraging it. Ignorance can at their behest prolong itself on earth. Enlightenment shines only at the behest of freedom.

chapter five : On the Upholding of Morality

There are the same drawbacks in the upholding of morality by government as in the protection it affords enlightenment. There is even a further danger. These supports have the effect of adding a motive of material interest to the natural motives which bring man to virtue. Some philosophers, following this basic idea, have feared even the intervention of divine omnipotence by way of punishment or reward, as threatening impartiality. Each man bringing together in the idea of God all the perfections, however, he is at least sure that the decisions of eternally infallible providence will never be in opposition to the justice which must direct men’s actions. It is not the same with governments, though, since they are exposed to error, liable to bias, and capable of injustice. You are not subordinating the morality of man only to a more powerful being, itself already a drawback, but to beings like himself, and perhaps ones less worthwhile than he. You thereby familiarize him with the idea of making what seems to him his duty, bend the knee before their power, from no calculation save interest. Even were the protection of the government never granted save to virtue, I would still hold that virtue would be better off independent. The protection of government being grantable, however, to the vice which deceives or serves it, it seems to me we should reject an intervention which in principle harms the purity of our sensibilities and in application often lacks the special advantage attributed to it.

It is, moreover, far less necessary than people think that government, in a legal way, should encourage men to be moral, kindly, and generous. Provided society prevents its members from hurting each other, they will find enough reasons for mutual service. A positive personal interest engages men in rendering one another reciprocal services, in order to receive them in their turn, while only negative interest gets them to abstain from harmful actions. Their activity, which is one of their natural penchants, brings them to do good to one another; but this same activity can also bring them to do ill. Each man has only two ways of getting his fellows to collaborate with what he wishes: force and persuasion. He must either constrain them or lead them to his purpose by gaining their goodwill. If the law cuts off the first way, individuals will invariably take the second. If they lose all hope of success through violence, they will wish to achieve such success by deserving recognition and affection. Government has nothing to do save to see that men do not hurt each other. If they do not hurt, they will serve each other.

chapter six : On the Contribution of Government to Education

Education can be considered under two headings. We can see it in the first place as a means of transmitting to the nascent generation the knowledge of all kinds gained by previous generations. In this respect it is entirely within the jurisdiction of government. The conservation and growth of all knowledge is a positive good. The government must guarantee us the enjoyment of these.

We can also see education, however, as the means of seizing men’s opinions, in order to shape them to the adoption of a certain number of ideas, whether religious, moral, philosophical, or political; and it is above all as leading to this end that writers in all centuries heap their eulogies on it.

We might first of all, without calling into question the facts which serve as the basis of this theory, deny that these facts could apply to modern societies. The domain of education, in the all-powerful sense attributed to it, and if one admitted that all-powerful sense as demonstrated in antiquity, might with us even be thought a reminiscence rather than an existing fact. People fail to recognize times, nations, and epochs and apply to modern societies what was practicable only in a different era of the human spirit.

Among peoples who, as Condorcet 15 says, had no notion of personal freedom and where men were only machines, whose springs the law regulated and whose movements it directed, government action could have a more efficacious effect on education because nothing resisted that constant and uniform action. But today the whole society would revolt against government pressure; and individual independence, which men have regained, would react forcefully in the case of children’s education. That second education, worldly and circumstantial, would very soon undo the work of the first. 16

It might be the case, moreover, that we mistake for historical facts the romancing of some philosophers imbued with the same prejudices as those who in our time have adopted their principles. Then instead of formerly at least having been a practical truth, this conceit would be only a perennial error.

Where in effect do we see this marvelous power of education? Is it in Athens? But there the public education sanctioned by government was confined to subaltern schools restricted to simple instruction. Furthermore, there was complete freedom of teaching. Is it in Sparta? The uniform and monkish spirit of the Spartans depended on a whole group of institutions of which education was only one part, and in my view the ensemble would be neither easy nor desirable for us to set up anew. Is it in Crete? But the Cretans were the most ferocious, troubled, and corrupted people in Greece. The institutions are separated from their effects and they are admired on the basis of what they were intended to produce, without consideration of what in reality they did produce.

People cite the Persians and Egyptians. We know them very imperfectly, however. Greek writers made Persia and Egypt the theater of their speculations the way Tacitus did with the Germans. They put into action among these far-off people what they would have liked to see established in their fatherland. Their dissertations on Egyptian and Persian institutions are sometimes proven false by the simple, manifest impossibility of the facts they contain and almost always rendered doubtful by irreconcilable contradictions. What we know beyond question is that the Persians and Egyptians were despotically governed and that cowardice, corruption, and degradation, those eternal consequences of despotism, were the portion of these wretched peoples. Our philosophers acknowledge this in the very pages where they propose them as exemplary, for example in matters educational. A bizarre weakness of the human mind, which, noticing only objects in detail, lets itself be so dominated by a cherished idea that the most decisive effects do not enlighten it as to the impotence of causes, whose power it is disposed to proclaim. Most historical proofs resemble those which M. de Montesquieu advances in support of gymnastics. The practice of wrestling enabled the Thebans to win the battle of Leuctra. But against whom did they win this battle? Against the Spartans, who had practiced gymnastics for four hundred years. 17

The argument which entrusts education to government rests on two or three cases of petitio principii.

The first supposition is that the government will be a desirable one. People think of it as always an ally, without reflecting that it can often become an enemy. They are unaware that sacrifices imposed on individuals may not result in advantage to such institutions as they believe to be perfect but to that of any institution whatsoever.

This consideration applies with equal force to the holders of all viewpoints. You regard absolute government as the supreme good, for the order it maintains, the peace you see it as demonstrating. If government claims the right to control education, however, it will not claim it only in the calm of despotism, but in the midst of factional violence and rage. Then the result will be quite different from what you expect. Surrendered to government, education will no longer inspire in nascent generations those peaceful habits, those principles of obedience, that respect for religion, that submission to visible and invisible powers you regard as the basis of happiness and social tranquillity. Once education is their instrument, factions will make it serve to spread in the minds of the young exaggerated views, wild maxims, pitiless axioms, contempt for religious ideas which will seem to them like hostile doctrines, bloodlust, hatred of pity. Is this not what the Revolutionary government would have done if it had lasted longer, and was not the Revolutionary government a government too?

This reasoning would be just as forceful if we put it to the friends of wise and moderate freedom. You wish, we will say to them, for government to control education in a republic, in order to school the children at the youngest possible age in the knowledge and maintenance of their rights, to teach them to defy despotism, to resist unjust government, to defend innocence against oppression. But despotism will use education to put its docile slaves under the yoke, to break every noble and courageous sentiment in our hearts, to overturn every notion of justice, to mantle with obscurity the most obvious truths, to push into the darkness or sully with ridicule everything which connects with the most sacred and inviolable rights of the human race. Is this not what they would do today, if they had power, these ardent enemies of all light, these calumniators of any noble idea, who, finding the career of crime cleaned out, compensate for this, at least amply, with careers in baseness?

One could think the Directory was intended to give us some memorable lessons on all objects of this nature. We saw it for four years, seeking to direct education, harassing the teachers, reprimanding them, displacing them, degrading them in their pupils’ eyes, submitting them to the inquisition of its most inferior agents and men of the least enlightenment, hindering individual teaching, and worrying state education with endless and puerile actions. Was not the Directory a government? I would like to know the mysterious guarantee people have received, that the future will never be like the past.

In all these hypothetical cases, what people want the government to do for the better, it may do for the worse. Thus hopes can be disappointed and the government which has been indefinitely extended on the basis of unfounded suppositions can march in the opposite direction from the purpose for which it was created.

Education supplied by the government ought to be limited to simple instruction. Government can multiply the channels and resources of instruction, but it must not manage it. Let it ensure that the citizens have equal means, let it make sure that the various occupations get taught real knowledge which facilitates their practices, let it clear the way for individuals freely to get access to all proven factual truths 18 and to reach the point where their intelligence can spontaneously dash forward to new discoveries, let it bring together for the use of all inquiring minds, the major works of all opinions, all the inventions of all the centuries, the discoveries of all methods, let it, finally, organize instruction in such a way that each person can devote to it the time appropriate to his interest or desire and perfect himself in the occupation, the art or science to which his tastes or his lot call him. Let it not appoint teachers; let it only pay them a salary which, assuring them the necessaries of life, nevertheless makes it desirable for them to have lots of pupils, let it provide for their needs when age or illness has put an end to their active careers, let it never sack them without grave cause and without the agreement of men independent of it. 19

Teachers subject to the government will be at once negligent and servile. Their servility will serve to excuse their negligence. Subject only to public opinion, they would be both active and independent. 20

In managing education, government is claiming the right and assuming the duty to maintain a body of doctrine. The word itself tells you the means of which it is obliged to make use. If we allow that it might choose the gentlest ones at first, it is still at least certain that it will not permit the teaching in its schools of any save its preferred opinions. 21 There will therefore be rivalry between state education and private education. State education will be salaried; there will therefore be opinions invested with privilege. But if this privilege is not enough to secure dominance for the favored opinions, do you believe that government, jealous by nature, will not resort to other means? Do you not see as the final outcome persecution, more or less disguised, but the constant companion of all unnecessary activity by government?

We see governments, which seem not to trouble individual education in anything, nevertheless favoring always the establishments they have founded, by demanding of all candidates for appointments in the state schools, a kind of apprenticeship in these establishments. Thus the talent which has followed the independent route, and which by solitary work has perhaps assembled as much knowledge and probably more originality than it would have done under classroom routine, finds its natural career, the one in which it can communicate and reproduce itself, suddenly closed before it. 22

It is not that, all things being equal, I do not prefer public education to private education. The former makes the rising generation undergo a novitiate of human life, more useful than all the lessons of pure theory, which never replace reality and experience save imperfectly. Public education is salutary above all in free societies. Men brought together at any age and above all in their youth, naturally contract from their reciprocal dealings a sense of justice and habits of equality, which prepare them to become courageous citizens and enemies of despotism. We saw, even under the despotism, schools dependent on the government, reproducing in spite of it seeds of freedom which it strove vainly to stifle.

I think, however, that this advantage can be obtained without constraint. The good never needs privileges, and privileges always disfigure the good. It is important, furthermore, that if the educational system the government favors is vicious, or seems so to some people, they can seek refuge in private study or in schools with no government connections. Society must respect individual rights, including parents’ rights over their children. 23 If its actions harm them, a resistance will grow which will render government tyrannical and corrupt individuals by obliging them to elude it. There may be objections perhaps to this respect we demand from government for parents’ rights, that the lower classes, reduced by their poverty into making use of their children, once the latter are capable of helping them in their labors, will not have them instructed in the most basic knowledge, even if the instruction were free, if the government is not authorized to constrain them to this. This objection rests, however, on the hypothesis of such poverty among the people that no good can exist alongside it. What is needed is for this poverty not to exist. Once the people enjoy the affluence due to them, far from retaining their children in ignorance, they will hasten to get them schooled. Their vanity will play a part. They will sense the interest in it. The most natural inclination of parents is to raise their children to a higher status. We see this in England, and it is what we saw in France during the Revolution. During that period, though it was disturbed and the people had to suffer a lot from their government, nevertheless simply because there was more affluence, education made astonishing progress among that class. Everywhere the education of the people is proportionate to its affluence.

We said at the beginning of this chapter that the Athenians subjected only workaday schools to official inspection. Schools of philosophy remained always absolutely independent, and this enlightened nation has left us a memorable example on this subject. Sophocles the demagogue having proposed the subordination of philosophy teaching to the authority of the Senate, all these men, who, despite their numerous mistakes, ought to serve forever as models, both for love of truth and for respect for tolerance, resigned their positions. The whole nation solemnly declared them exempt from inspections and condemned their absurd opponent to a fine of five talents. 24

You will answer, however, that if there were set up an educational establishment resting on immoral principles, you would fight for the right of the government to check that abuse. This is to forget that for such an establishment to form and survive, it needs students, and parents who place them there, and putting aside, which is not at all reasonable, actually, the parents’ morality, it will never be in their interests to leave those with whom they have the most important and intimate relationships of their whole lives, to be misled in judgment and perverted in their hearts. The practice of injustice and perversity may be useful fleetingly, in a particular situation, but the principle can never have any prerogative. The principle will never be professed save by fools whom a hostile general opinion will repudiate, without government getting involved. There will never be a need to suppress educational establishments where lessons in vice and crime are given, because there will never be such establishments, and if there were, they would hardly be dangerous, because the teachers would remain on their own. For lack of plausible objections, however, people lean on absurd suppositions, and the calculation is not without guile, since there is a danger of leaving suppositions unanswered, and it appears in a sense foolish to refute them.

I hope for much more, for the perfecting of the human race, from private educational establishments, than from the best-organized public instruction by government.

Who can limit the development of the passion for enlightenment in a free country? You attribute governments with a love of learning. Without examining here the extent to which this tendency is in their interest, I would simply ask you why you assume a lesser love in cultivated individuals, in clear minds and generous spirits. Everywhere government does not weigh on men, everywhere it does not corrupt wealth, conspiring with it against justice, then letters, study, science, the growth and exercise of the intellect will be the favorite pastimes of the opulent classes in society. Look how they carry on in England, forming coalitions, rushing eagerly from all sides. Think of those museums and libraries, those independent learned societies devoted solely to the pursuit of truth, those travelers braving every danger to take human knowledge a step further.

In education as elsewhere, government should be watchful and protective, but always neutral. Let it remove obstacles and make smooth the roads. We can leave it to individuals to walk them successfully.

chapter seven : On Government Duties vis-à-vis Enlightenment

The duties of government vis-à-vis enlightenment are simple and easy. They are of quite another nature, however, from the direction they too often claim. Each generation adds to the resources, physical or moral, of the human race. Sometimes new methods are discovered, at other times machines invented, sometimes communication is perfected, at others facts are clarified. All these things are in some degree the acquisition of new faculties. They are worth preserving independently of the incidental purpose for which they can be used. Doubtless all man’s faculties, from those nature has given him to those which time reveals to him or his efforts invent, have drawbacks as well as advantages. But the drawbacks of any faculty are not in the faculty itself but in the use made of it. Consequently, as long as government applies itself only to conserving the resources, the discoveries, the new abilities man has won, without giving them an aim or directing their use, it fulfills a salutary function, its action neither equivocal nor complicated. It does only unequivocal and harmless good.

chapter one : The Outcome of the Preceding Discussion

We have surveyed almost all the matters on which government, exceeding the limits of strict necessity, can take action on grounds of alleged utility. We found that in all these, had people been left to themselves, less bad and more good would have resulted. “When the controls of empires are rooted in good principles,” says Mirabeau, 1 “there will be only two concerns, that of maintaining external peace by a good system of defenses, and that of conserving domestic order by the exact, impartial, and inflexible administration of justice. Everything else will be left to individual effort, whose irresistible influence effecting a larger total of satisfactions for each citizen, will infallibly produce a larger amount of public happiness. A sovereign or minister cannot know the affairs even of a thousand men, while each individual in general knows his own very well.”

The governing class create duties for themselves to extend their prerogatives. Overobliging agents of the nation, they constantly assault its freedom, that is to say, the means of happiness nature has given it, and they do this in the name of rendering it happy. They want to control enlightenment, when only experience can guide it. They want to stop crimes, when only the spectacle of punishment stops them surely and without despotism. They want to encourage production, when only individual interest gives it life. They want to establish institutions; habit alone forms them. Governments must watch out that nothing trammels our diverse faculties, but must not permit themselves to take a hand therein. What would the inhabitants of a house say if the guards they had placed at the gates to stop any strangers from intruding and to calm down any domestic disturbance, gave themselves the right to control the actions of those inhabitants and to prescribe them a way of life, under the pretext of preventing these intrusions and disturbances, or under the even more absurd one that their way of life would be sweeter following these changes? The governors are these guards, put in place by individuals who come together precisely so that nothing shall trouble their peace of mind or upset their doings. If the governors go further, they become themselves a source of trouble and upset.

The use of penal laws then becomes the most culpable abuse of the right to punish. Rather than extend this terrible right, we should strive to restrain it. Instead of multiplying the number of crimes, we should reduce it. It is not a crime in man to mistake his own interest, always supposing he does so; it is not a crime in man to want to manage himself by his own lights, even when government finds them imperfect. It is a crime in government, however, to punish individuals because they do not adopt as their interest what seems so to other men or because they do not rank their own judgments of enlightenment beneath those of others, when, after all, each person is the judge in the last resort. To subordinate individual wishes to the general will, without absolute necessity, is gratuitously to set up obstacles to all our progress. Individual interest is always more enlightened on what concerns it than collective power, whose fault is the sacrificing to its purposes, without care or scruple, of everything which opposes it. It needs to be checked and not to be encouraged.

To increase the force of collective authority is never other than giving more power to some individuals. If the wickedness of men is an argument against freedom, it is an even stronger one against power. For despotism is only the freedom of one or a few against the rest. Burke says that freedom is power. 2 One can likewise say that power is freedom.

chapter two : On Three Pernicious Ideas

Three ideas are particularly dangerous when they take hold of the minds of the governing group; these are the ideas of uniformity, ideas of stability, and the ill-considered desire for premature improvement.

chapter three : On Ideas of Uniformity

M. de Montesquieu, who in his admirable work grasped almost everything, in a short chapter condemns the ideas of uniformity, but in few words, without enlargement and more by way of drawing the reader’s attention to the subject rather than himself analyzing and exploring it more deeply.

“There are,” he says, 3 “certain ideas of uniformity which sometimes lay hold of great minds, witness their appeal to Charlemagne, but infallibly enthuse small ones. These find in them a type of perfection they recognize, because it is impossible not to detect it in them: the same concentration on public order, the same measures in commerce, the same laws in the State, the same religion throughout. Is this always to the good, however, without exception? Is the evil of change always less than the evil of having to endure? Might not the greatness of genius consist in knowing in which cases uniformity is needed and in which cases differences?”

If the author of The Spirit of the Laws had appealed to history, he would easily have shown that absolute uniformity is in several circumstances contrary to the nature both of men and things.

It is clear that different portions of the same people, placed in circumstances, brought up in customs, living in places, which are all dissimilar, cannot be led to absolutely the same manners, usages, practices, and laws, without a coercion which would cost them more than it is worth. The small advantage of offering a smooth surface over which the lofty eye of government can freely stray, without encountering any inequality which offends it or obstructs its view, is only a puny compensation for the sacrifice of a host of sentiments, memories, local tastes, out of which individual happiness, that is to say, the only real happiness, is composed. The chance which submits to the same government diverse local peoples does not in any way alter the inner mentality of each member of these. The series of ideas, from which their moral being has gradually been formed since their infancy, cannot be modified by a purely nominal, external arrangement, most of the time independent of their will, which has nothing in common with their ways, the private and real source of their griefs and pleasures.

It is by sacrificing everything to exaggerated ideas of uniformity that large States have become a scourge for humanity. To renounce that idealist perfection would be to retain for the large States many of the advantages of small ones and combine these with the advantages deriving from greater size.

For morality, justice, peace, a certain kind of happiness, and all natural affections, small States are preferable to large ones. For external security, which is the guarantee of private happiness, for national independence, without which a State is the plaything or victim of its neighbors, for the enlightenment which is the strongest barrier against oppression, large States have huge advantages over small ones. The mix of economic and political organization being much more varied in these adds greatly to everyday experience. Prejudice dies sooner. The kind of abuse which is reformed swiftly and almost spontaneously in a large State can be kept going forever in a country enclosed within narrow limits. It is because the Roman empire had conquered three-quarters of the world that slavery was destroyed. If that empire had been divided into a multitude of independent States, none would have given the lead with the abolition of slavery, since the immediate advantage to its own detriment this would have given its neighbors would have struck each one of them. 4 There are acts of justice capable of enactment only simultaneously and which therefore never happen, because if they happen partially, the most generous become temporarily victims of their generosity.

In recognizing the advantages of large States, however, one must not underestimate their multiple and terrible drawbacks. Their size requires an activism and force at the heart of government which is difficult to contain and degenerates into despotism. The laws come from a point so far from those to whom they are supposed to apply that the inevitable effect of such distance is serious and frequent error. Local injustices never reach the heart of government. Placed in the capital, it takes the views of its surrounding area or at the very most of its place of residence for those of the whole State. A local or passing circumstance thus becomes the reason for a general law, and the inhabitants of the most distant provinces are suddenly surprised by unexpected innovations, unmerited severity, vexatious regulations, undermining the basis of all their calculations, and all the safeguards of their interests, because two hundred leagues away men who are total strangers to them had some inkling of agitation, divined certain needs, or perceived certain dangers.

I am not even sure whether in terms of prestige, that noble motive of human action, large countries are not fatal. Today small States are scorned as too restrictive a field of action. But a very populous society puts an almost insurmountable barrier in the way of personal distinction. To win the admiration of one’s fellow citizens one must uplift the mass of the people. The larger the country, the heavier that mass. Therefore we see in overlarge countries a small State forming at the center. That small State is the capital. All ambitions go there to vent themselves. Everywhere else is immobile, inert, becalmed.

One could guard against most of these drawbacks by abjuring ideas of conformity or at least by restricting them to a very few objects. The government of a large country must always partake somewhat of the nature of federalism. The rules in this respect are very simple and all start from the principle which is the basis of this book. The management of the affairs of everybody belongs to everybody, that is, to the government instituted by everybody. What touches only a minority should be decided by that minority. What relates only to the individual must be referred only to the individual. It cannot be said too often that the general will is no more worthy than the individual one, when it steps outside its jurisdiction. Suppose a nation of twenty million souls, split between a number of communes. In each commune, each individual will have interests which concern only him and which should consequently not fall under the jurisdiction of the commune. Others will concern, as well as him, all the people in the commune, and his other interests will be within the communal jurisdiction. These communes, in their turn, will have interests which are their internal business only and other interests which concern the whole society. I appreciate that I am jumping the intermediary stages. The first will be within the competence of the communal legislation, the latter of the general. Uniformity is admissible only for the latter.

Notice that under the idea of interests I include habits. Nothing is more absurd than to claim one can violate men’s habits on the pretext of better directing them in terms of their interests. Their prime interest is happiness, and habits form an essential part of their happiness.

If governments observed these rules, large States would be a better solution in several respects and would cease to be an evil in several others. The capital would cease to be a unique center, destructive of any other centers. It would become a link between diverse centers. Patriotism would be reborn, the patriotism which cannot exist save by attachment to local interests, mores, and customs. Just as man’s nature struggles obstinately, though almost always unsuccessfully, against the no less obstinate errors of government, so one sees this kind of patriotism, the only real kind, reborn from its ashes, once the government stays its hand for an instant. The magistrates of the smallest communes will be delighted to embellish them; their inhabitants will find pleasure in everything which gives them even the deceptive sense of corporate identity and of being brought together by individual links. One feels that if they were not stopped in the development of this innocent inclination, there would soon form in them a kind of communal pride, so to speak, pride in the town and province; and this sentiment would be singularly favorable to morality. It would also be singularly favorable to the love of the metropolis itself, which would seem the protector and tutelary deity of all the little fatherlands living in the shelter of its power, instead of what it is today, their implacable adversary and ever threatening enemy. How bizarre that those who called themselves ardent friends of freedom have worked relentlessly to destroy the natural basis of patriotism, to replace it with a false passion for an abstract being, for a general idea deprived of everything which strikes the imagination and speaks to memory! How bizarre that to build an edifice, they have begun by crushing and reducing to powder all the materials they needed to use. They almost designated by numbers the different parts of the empire they claimed to be regenerating, as they did so designate the legions intended to defend it, so greatly did they seem to fear that some moral idea might manage to link itself to what they were instituting and upset the uniformity which seemed to them so beautiful and desirable. This strangeness is explained, however, when we reflect that these men were drunk with power. Local interests and memories contain a principle of resistance which government allows only with regret and which it is keen to uproot. It makes even shorter work of individuals. It rolls its immense mass effortlessly over them, as over sand. These individuals furthermore, detached from their native soil, with no contact with the past, living only in a swift-moving present and thrown like atoms on a monotonous plain, take no interest in a fatherland they nowhere perceive and whose totality becomes indifferent to them, because their affection cannot rest on any of its parts. In these large countries where local interests, customs, and habits, treated with contempt, are constantly sacrificed to what are called general considerations, “patriotism,” as M. de Pauw says, “would be a figment of the imagination even if these states were not governed in so despotic a way that no interest could be known there save that of the despot himself.” 5

chapter four : Application of This Principle to the Composition of Representative Assemblies

The mania for leveling a country by uniform institutions, the hatred of local interests, the desire to make them disappear, have today led to a singular approach to the composition of representative assemblies. Montesquieu seems to have had a presentiment of this approach and to have wanted to refute it in advance. “One knows much better the needs of one’s own town,” he says, “than those of other towns. And one judges better as to the capacity of one’s neighbors than that of one’s other compatriots. Therefore the members of the legislative body should not be drawn in general from the body of the nation. It is more fitting that in each principal place the inhabitants choose themselves a representative.” 6 In recent years precisely the opposite has been said. When a large population, spread over a vast area, it was asserted, appoints its representatives, without any intermediary, this operation forces it to divide itself into sections. These are set at distances which do not allow communication or mutual agreement. The result is sectional choices. Unity in elections must be sought in the unity of the electoral body. 7 “The choices must not flow from below, where they will always necessarily be done badly, but from above, where they will always necessarily be done well.” The electoral body should be placed “not at the base but at the summit of the political establishment.” 8 Only a body thus placed can really know the object or the general purpose of all legislation. This reasoning rests on a very exaggerated idea of the general interest, of the general purpose, of all the things to which this phrase applies; but what is this general interest save the dealings which operate between all individual interests? What is general representation but the representation of all the partial interests which must negotiate on matters common to them? The general interest is doubtless distinct from particular ones. But it is not contrary to them. The talk is always as if it gains from their losing. It is only the outcome of these combined interests. It differs from them only as a body differs from its parts. Individual interests are what most interest individuals. Sectional interests, to use the word devised to wither them, are what interest sections the most. Now, it is these individuals and sections which make up the body politic. It is therefore the interests of these individuals and these sections which must be protected. If one protects all of them, one will thereby remove from each whatever it contains which might harm the others. Only thus can the true public interest be reached. Public interest is only individual interests prevented from harming each other. The principle on which rests the need for the unity of the electoral body is therefore completely erroneous. A hundred deputies elected by a hundred different parts of the country bring individual interests and the local preferences of their constituents inside the assembly. This base is useful to them. Forced to debate together, they soon notice respective sacrifices which are indispensable. They strive to keep these at a minimum, and this is one of the great advantages of this type of appointment. Necessity always ends by uniting them in common negotiation, and the more sectional the choices have been, the more the representation achieves its general purpose. If you reverse the natural progression, if you put the electoral body at the top of the structure, those it appoints find themselves called to pronounce on a public interest with whose elements they are unfamiliar. You charge them with negotiating for sections or regions they do not know or whose interests and reciprocal needs they scorn. I want the representative of a section of the country to be its instrument, abandoning none of its real or imaginary rights, such that having defended them, he will be biased in favor of the section whose mandatory he is, because if each one supports his constituency, the bias of each will in union have all the advantages of the impartiality of all. Assemblies, however sectional their composition, tend all too often to contract an esprit de corps which isolates them from the nation. Placed in the capital, far from the section of the nation which elected them, representatives lose sight of the usages, needs, and way of life of their constituents. They lend themselves to general ideas of leveling, symmetry, uniformity, mass changes, and universal recasting, bringing upset, disorder, and confusion to distant regions. It is this disposition we must combat, because it is on particular memories, habits, and regional laws that the happiness and peace of a province rest. National assemblies are scornful and careless with these things. How would things fare if these instruments of the public will had no connection save with a body placed at the top of the social edifice? The larger a State is, the less admissible is a single electoral body. The stronger the central government, the more necessary is it that choices start from below rather than above. Otherwise you will have corporate bodies vacantly deliberating and inferring from their indifference to individual interests that they are devoted to the general interest.

chapter five : Further Thoughts on the Preceding Chapter

I have let myself get drawn into looking at a question which I confess interests me greatly, and although it breaks out of the precise limits of this work in some respects, I cannot refrain from adding a few further thoughts here on the drawbacks of the appointment of representative assemblies by a single body and on the advantages of the opposite system.

Whatever discredit one heaps on intrigue, on efforts to captivate a fickle and emotional multitude, these things are a hundred times less corrupting than the circuitous endeavors one needs to win over a small number of men in power. Intrigue is dangerous in a senate, dangerous in an aristocratic parliament, but not in the context of the nation, whose nature it is to act from emotion. The misfortune of a republic is when there is no intrigue. 9 Nothing vile is pleasing to the people as a whole. But powerful individuals are only too prone to enjoying the humility of prayers and the baseness of adulation. What has to be done to carry a large meeting has to be done in broad daylight, and modesty moderates public actions. But when people cringe before a few men whom they are imploring individually, they grovel in the shadows, and servility knows no limits. If election by the people sometimes entails culpable seduction, most often it demands honorable and useful means, kindness, benevolence, justice, and protection. When the election depends upon an electoral college, another route is mapped out. It is certainly not toward the countryman’s dwelling but toward the palace of the electoral college that the candidates direct their steps. They are dependent not on the people but on the government, and if dependence on inferiors makes citizens, dependence on superiors makes slaves. It is a sad education for the people’s mandatories which imposes on them an apprenticeship in dissimulation and hypocrisy, condemning them to humiliating supplication, to obsequious salutation, to adroitness, genuflection, and flattery, doubtless to prepare them for the unbending courage which has to check despotism and plead the cause of the weak against the strong. There are eras when anything at all resembling energy is feared, when gentleness, flexibility, and hidden gifts and private virtues are vaunted. Then are dreamed up modes of election best suited to reward these precious gifts. These, however, are eras of degradation. Let sweetness and flexibility find favor with courts, and let hidden talents declare themselves; let private virtues find their reward in domestic happiness. The choice of the people belongs to men who command attention, who attract respect, who have acquired the right to esteem, confidence, and popular recognition. And these more energetic men will also be more moderate. People always take mediocrity as peaceful. It is peaceful only when it is locked up. When chance invests it with power, it is a thousand times more incalculable in its motion, more envious, more obstinate, more immoderate, and more convulsive than talent, even when emotions lead the latter astray. Education calms the emotions, softens egotism, and soothes vanity.

One of the greatest advantages of representative government is to establish frequent relations between the diverse classes of society. Sectional election requires on the part of the powerful classes sustained consideration for the lower classes. It forces wealth to conceal its arrogance, power to moderate its action by placing in the people’s votes a reward for justice and kindness and punishment for oppression. This advantage disappears when you entrust elections to the choice of a great electoral college.

Perhaps it will be objected that in granting political rights only to property owners, I am lessening this advantage of the representative system. But under modern social conditions there is no line of demarcation between small owners and nonowners such that the rich can win over the former by oppressing the latter. Nonproprietors, artisans in the small towns and villages, day laborers in the hamlets are all relations of small owners. They would make common cause against the oppressor. So to get the votes of those who have the vote, you will have to treat them all considerately. This everyday device for happiness and harmony must not be lightly renounced, nor should we disdain this motive for benevolence, which may start as a mere calculation but soon becomes a habitual virtue.

The complaint is that wealth is concentrated in the capital and the countryside drained by the continual taxation it bears, which never returns to it. Popular election pushes owners back to the properties from which they distance themselves. When they could not care less about popular suffrage, their reckoning is confined to getting out of their property the greatest possible revenue. Popular election suggests they adopt a nobler reckoning, much more useful to those who live under their domination. Without popular election they need only credit, and this need groups them together around the central government. Under election by the people they have to be popular. Bringing them back toward the source of their popularity, it roots their political existence in their possessions. The benefits of feudalism have sometimes been praised for keeping the lord in the midst of his vassels and sharing out the opulence equally between all the parts of the territory. Popular election has the same desirable effect without entailing the same abuses. People constantly talk of encouraging agriculture and honoring work. They try awarding prizes, capriciously doled out, and medals which public opinion wrangles over. It would be simpler to give the farming classes a degree of importance. But this importance cannot be created by decree or edict. Its basis must be grounded in the interests all hopes have in its being recognized and all ambitions in treating it carefully. In replacing artificial devices, which they try out and change, with respect for the principles of freedom, governments would attain more swiftly and surely the purpose they must have in mind. In letting men enjoy the rights which belong to them, you free them from having to have recourse to uncertain resources and complex improvisations with no durable effect, because their stability depends not on the nature of things but on the arrangements of a few individuals. In sum, only sectional election by the people can invest national representation with real force, and give it deep roots in public opinion. You will never surmount or render silent the feeling which cries out to us that the man we have not elected is not our representative. And should calumny pursue him, or government menace him personally, against these attacks will he know to whom to run? To whom will he say: I have faithfully fulfilled the mission with which you entrusted me; I am persecuted for having protected you? Where will he find a voice which recognizes his own and which replies to him? What fraction of the people will believe itself bound up with him in his courage and danger? The whole nation? But the whole nation is nothing. Can a nation spread across an immense territory manifest a view or experience a spontaneous impulse? Only in always speaking of the entire nation, in destroying all fractions, in intercepting all communication between them and those who defend them, in recognizing their mandatories as mere representatives of an abstract being, who never has positive existence, only thus does despotism become impregnable in its lair. When assemblies which call themselves representative are not selected by the people, they are helpless before the executive power. If they put up some resistance to it, it demands to know by what right. What is your authority? How can you be the representatives of the people? Did they appoint you? If public opinion disapproves a law or protests against some arbitrary act, then the government cries: what are these seditious claims? Has not the national representative chamber discussed, deliberated, consented? Or perhaps, has its silence not sanctioned things? Only the legitimate institutions of the nation can express its sovereign will. The executive power is protected from all blame, since the people’s delegates approve it. Thus by turns the unfortunate nation and its so-called mandatories are treated like a game. Thus the semblance of representation never constitutes any barriers, but serves as an apologia for all excesses. It would be an error, as M. Necker observes, to believe that the part given to the people in the election of lawmakers has no purpose save ensuring further the suitability of those chosen. 10 Six hundred fifty men drawn by lot from the rich and cultivated class which supplies the membership of the English House of Commons would form in my view a body as enlightened as the one which results today from the British elections. All the advantages we have just described, however, would vanish. There would be no more consideration for inferiors, no more inviolable credentials for opposing the government, and no more of this salutary movement spreading life, strength, and health through all the parts of the body politic. Citizens are interested in their institutions only when they are called to participate in them with their votes. Now, this interest is indispensable in the formation of a public spirit, that power without which no freedom lasts, that guarantee against all the perils, always invoked in certain countries without its ever being created. Public spirit, based on popular election, has sustained Great Britain, in the midst of the most expensive and desperate war. It is through popular election that press freedom, under very easily offended ministers, has survived every crisis. Without popular election, a country’s citizens never have this sense of their importance which makes them see the glory and freedom of their country as the most important part of their individual patrimony. I know that lately some among us have conceived many prejudices against popular elections. Nevertheless, until our times all experience testifies in their favor. The people of Athens, free in their choice, says Xenophon, whom one would never suspect of overfondness for democracy and its storms, have never asked for positions touching on their city’s safety or honor to be given to men unworthy to fill them. 11 Livy shows us the outcomes of the Roman Comitia, proving always that the spirit of the people was different depending on whether they were demanding the right to control the high positions in the Republic or whether, the combat over, the victory won, they were pronouncing calmly, according to conscience and reason. Despite the efforts of their tribunes and the interests of their class, their choices were constantly directed toward the most virtuous and the most illustrious. 12 Since 1688 the elections in England have brought no one into the House of Commons save enlightened property owners. One could scarcely cite a man of distinguished political talent whom that election has not honored, when he has sought it. The profound peace of America, the firm moderation she has deployed in difficult circumstances, the speeches and acts of Jefferson, the choice of such a man by representatives elected by the people, constitute a justification of its franchise which nothing can weaken, because it cannot be attributed to inaccurate or exaggerated accounts. If, in the history of the ten years which have just passed by, certain facts seem unfavorable to popular election, special causes explain this. First of all, we have never really had popular election. From the introduction of representation in our political institutions, the intervention of the people has been feared. Electoral colleges have been created, and these have distorted the effects of the election. Popular governments would be the triumph of mediocrity, were it not for a sort of moral electricity with which nature has endowed men, as though to ensure the dominance of genius. The larger the assemblies are, the more powerful is this electricity, and since, when it is a question of election, it is useful that this electricity directs the choices, the assemblies charged with the appointment of the people’s representatives must be as numerous as is compatible with good order. In England, the candidates harangue the electors who surround them from the height of a rostrum, in the middle of a public place or an open space full of people. In our electoral colleges, numbers were restricted and proceedings severe. A rigorous silence was prescribed, and no question was put such as might agitate minds or subjugate, for an instant, individual ambition or local egoism. Now, uneducated men are fair only when they are carried along. They are carried along only when, brought together in a crowd, they act and react on each other almost boisterously. You cannot attract the attention of several thousand citizens without great wealth or far-reaching reputation. In a gathering of two or three hundred, a few domestic connections can seize a majority. To be selected by the people, you need supporters beyond their purview and the positive advantages this brings. To be chosen by a few electors, it is enough to have no enemies. The advantage lies entirely with negative qualities, and luck even favors the untalented. As regards many issues, the national representatives in France have been less advanced than public opinion. I am not speaking of party questions. During civil turmoil, education has no effect on these. I am speaking of matters of political economy. It is just that our electoral assemblies, with the obstacles they put in the way of all personal influence and their encouragement of calumny, made election a lottery with the dice often falling on mediocre or unknown men. In this first respect, we cannot judge popular election in France because it has simply not existed. Secondly, for election to be popular, it must be essentially free, which it never was at any point during the Revolution. Who is not aware that the first moves of an institution may be accompanied by troubles alien to it? The overthrow of what has been, the passions stirred in opposite directions, all these things are ordinarily contemporary with great political changes among peoples of advanced civilization, but derive in no way from the principles or nature of what one wishes to establish. To decide against popular election on the basis of the happenings of the French Revolution, is to judge national assemblies by comparison with Cromwell’s Parliament or royalty by comparison with Charles VI’s demented reign. Finally, during the ascendancy of our assemblies, no constitution placed real limits on legislative power. Now, when legislative power is quite limitless, when the nation’s representatives think themselves invested with boundless sovereignty, when no counterweight exists to their decrees either in executive or judiciary power, the tyranny of those elected by the people is as disastrous as any other, whatever name it bears. The absolute, unlimited sovereignty of the people was transferred by the nation, or as is usual, at least in its name, by those who dominated it, to representative assemblies. These exercised an unparalleled despotism. This had to be, as we have sufficiently demonstrated earlier. The constitution 13 which first put an end to this period of despotism and madness still did not sufficiently limit the legislative power. It established no counterweight to its excesses. It did not enshrine either the indispensable veto of the executive power or the equally indispensable possibility of the dissolution of the representative assemblies. It did not even guarantee, as do some American constitutions, the most sacred rights of individuals against the encroachments of legislators. 14

It is hardly surprising that the legislative power has continued to do harm. People have laid the blame on popular election. This was a profound mistake. It was absolutely not the mode of appointment of the legislators which needed blaming but the nature of their power. The fault was not in the choices made by those represented but in the unchecked powers of their representatives. The ill would not have been less had the mandatories of the nation appointed themselves or had they been appointed by a corporate body however constituted. There was no counterweight, no suppression, no check to their will, decorated though it was with the name of the law. That was the source of the ill. When legislative authority covers everything, it can do only ill, no matter how it is appointed. If you restrict it to things in its jurisdiction, if it is asked to pronounce only on punishments for crimes in the future, on what proportion of individual property must be assigned to public use, on the means of defense to be directed against foreign enemies; if, far from being able to conspire against freedom, its only power is to guarantee and defend it, do not fear to leave to the people the choice of holders of that tutelary power. It will do only good things. For it to do so, however, it must emanate from its true source. The representatives of the nation, proud of their national mission, must place their hope and find their reward only in the votes of those they represent. I will close this digression with two considerations all the more important in their touching on power as much as freedom. The appointment of representative assemblies by an electoral college creates an authority which is neither that of the government nor of the people. And if that authority develops a feeling of hatred for the government, it is in vain that the latter may be surrounded with public affection, in vain that it deserves it. The people who do not have right of election can change nothing in the makeup of the assemblies which speak in their name. It would be in vain too if the government had the right to dissolve them. Dissolution is nothing without popular election, for there is no longer any recourse to the wishes of the people. If the electoral college agrees with the government, the nation will be faced, without being able to make itself heard, with the removal of its most faithful mandatories, the true representatives of its will. If the electoral college is hostile to the government, it will be in vain that the people surround the latter with their love and confidence. Government and nation will see seditious representatives reelected, without any constitutionally legitimate opposition possible, whom the unanimous disavowal of their constituents will not be able to deprive of their position as their deputies. A remarkable era in the annals of the British Parliament brings out the importance of this consideration. In 1783 the English king dismissed his ministers. Almost the entire Parliament belonged to their party. The English people thought differently. The king having appealed to the people in this, via a dissolution of the House of Commons, an immense majority gave its support to the new government. Now, suppose popular election replaced by the authority of an electoral college, if the majority of that college had leaned toward a party which had neither the assent of the governors nor the governed, this party would have had control of affairs, despite the unanimous manifestation of the national will. So true is it that you do not increase the real and legitimate force of government by attacking the people’s rights and that it is impossible to create a stable organization if you budge from the principles on which freedom rests. If it were claimed that with a bit of skill or lots of force the government will always dominate the electoral body, I would reply first of all that this hypothesis of a representative assembly which is only the instrument of one or a few men is a terrible one. It would be a thousand times better to have no assemblies at all. Oppression is never so terrible in the name of one man as when it borrows the appearances of freedom. One man would never dare to wish on his own what he orders his agents to will, when they call themselves organs of an independent authority. Think of the Senate of Tiberius or Henry VIII’s Parliament. But I would next say that a disorderly agency can react against the hand which employs it. A government which makes use of an assembly which it dominates always courts the risk of seeing it suddenly turn against it. The most enslaved corporate bodies are also the most violent when some unforeseen event occurs which breaks their fetters. They wish to break the opprobrium of their long servitude. The same senators who had voted public holidays to celebrate the death of Agrippina and to congratulate Nero for the murder of his mother condemned him to be beaten with rods and thrown in the Tiber.

I know that people want to frighten souls with exaggerated pictures of the tumults of popular elections. More than once a witness of the apparent disorders which accompany contested elections in England, I have seen how unreliable the descriptions made of them are. Unquestionably, I have seen elections accompanied by uproar, brawls, violent disputes, insults often of the grossest sort, everything which characterizes the class which physical labor deprives of any culture or elegance, any refined occupation. But election did not bear any less on men of notable talent or wealth. And once this operation was over, everything returned to the customary order. Artisans and workmen, recently obstinate and turbulent, became hardworking, docile, even respectful again. Satisfied with having exercised their rights, they complied all the more readily with social superiorities and conventions, in that they were aware, behaving thus, that they were obeying only the independent calculation of rational interest. The morning after an election there was never the least trace of last night’s disturbances. The people resumed their work, but they had become convinced of their political importance, and public awareness had received the necessary shaking to bring it alive again. Elections are like almost everything else relating to public order. It is by dint of troublesome precautionary measures that people effect them and nurture them. In France our spectacles and fairs are ringed with guards and bayonets. You might well think three French citizens incapable of meeting without two soldiers to separate them. In England twenty thousand men assemble. Not a single soldier appears among them. The security of each one is entrusted to the reason and interest of each. The crowd, feeling itself the depositary of public order and individual security, guards this duty scrupulously. I will go further. Everything which people invent about the English elections could be proved without my changing my opinion. I would tell myself that for the sense of freedom to penetrate the heart of the nation, it is perhaps necessary sometimes that freedom clothe itself in forms, popular, stormy, boisterous ones, within its understanding. I would rather see a few unforeseen accidents as a result of this, than see the nation becoming indifferent and discouraged because of the absence of these forms. When the nation takes no interest in its rights, power will break out of its confines. Then it undertakes insane wars and allows itself to engage in illegal vexation. And if your counterargument concerns a few individual misfortunes, a few men dead through suffocation by the crowd or in unexpected brawls, I will ask you whether those who are deported to far, distant shores do not perish, or those whom a worthless whim send beyond the seas on murderous expeditions, or those who are locked up in prisons. If these things are prevented only by freely elected representation, anyone who reflects will willingly run the very improbable risk of some fatal mischance to obtain that unique safeguard against the suspicions of tyranny and the madness of ambition.

chapter six : On Ideas of Stability

It is the same with ideas on stability as it is with those on uniformity. They are the source of the greatest and most troublesome mistakes.

There is no doubt that a certain degree of institutional stability may be desirable. There are advantages which develop only with time. Like freedom, habit is a natural need of man. Now, where all stability is lacking, habits cannot take birth. A man who lived fifty years in an inn, forever thinking he was due to leave next day, would learn only the habit of having none. The idea of the future is an element in habit, no less necessary than the past. A nation which perpetually devoted all its strength to seeking political improvements would neglect all the improvements, individual, moral, and philosophical, which are obtained only through peace, and would sacrifice the end to the means. But for the very reason that institutions are means, they must naturally adapt to the times.

By a common enough misunderstanding, when an institution or a law no longer produces the good it once did, it is thought that to restore its former utility it must be established in what is called its old purity. But when an institution is useful, it is so because it chimes with contemporary ideas and enlightenment. When it degenerates or falls into disuse, it is because it chimes no longer. Its usefulness then ceases. The more you reestablish it in its original purity, the more you render it disproportionate with the rest of things.

The vagueness of words always misleads us. It has often been said that governments must conserve, but what they should conserve has not been said. People have not grasped that it should conserve only guarantees of freedom, of the independence of individual faculties and, to that end, of individual physical safety. The result is that governments have believed, or pretended to, that they must use the authority entrusted to them to conserve a certain body of opinions and practices, sometimes as they found them established, sometimes as people said they had once been. The trend of government has habitually in this sense been in the opposite direction to the nature and ends of the human race. The human race being progressive, everything opposing that progress is dangerous, whether or not the opposition is successful.

When opposition is effective, there is stagnation in human faculties, degradation, prejudice, ignorance, error, and consequently crime and suffering.

If on the contrary the static principle is not decidedly the stronger, there is struggle, violence, convulsions, and disasters.

Upheavals are rightly feared; but people go to the opposite extreme with exaggerated ideas of stability, and these ideas, opposing the progress of things, occasion a reaction which produces upheavals. The best way of avoiding them is to fall in with the imperceptible changes inevitable in moral as in physical nature.

The exaggerated idea of stability comes from the desire to govern men by prejudices, to inspire in them just on one’s say-so an admiration for ancient things. I much esteem ancient things. I have said so more than once in this book. I esteem them because all interests share in them. Whenever an institution has lasted a long time, unless it has always been maintained by violence, there has been transaction between this institution and the interests having to coexist with it. This transaction itself has, however, modified the institution. This modification is precisely what makes it useful and applicable. To oppose this modification on the grounds of keeping the institution more intact is to take from what is old its most useful character and most precious advantage. The thinking of some writers in this respect is incomprehensible. “When it is impossible for an ancient law to achieve its purpose,” says one of them, 15 “this is a clear indication . . . that the moral order contradicts this law too blatantly and, in this case, it is not the law, but mores which must be changed.” Who would not have believed that this author was going to say that the law should be changed? How, moreover, does one change mores?

The French Revolution filled many wise men and all peaceful ones with a great respect for and love of stability. The leaders of that Revolution had begun by declaring that everything must be destroyed, changed, re-created. Their successors had thought themselves no less mandated to proceed with arbitrary destructions and reconstructions. This constantly renewed operation must have led an unhappy, weary nation to want above all any kind of lasting State at all. Hence the admiration for certain peoples seemingly with no purpose save the imposition on the future of eternal institutions and the blocking of all change. This admiration has not always been thoughtful. Historians have sometimes been appreciative of these peoples for their intentions without examining whether they succeeded.

Nothing is more laughable in this respect than an article on China, by a writer I have already cited. 16 Having recognized that there has scarcely been a century without that empire undergoing civil wars, invasions, dismemberments, and conquests, and having admitted that these terrible crises exterminated entire generations each time, “honor,” he exclaims, “to the wise legislators and profound moralists” . . . who have kept all dangerous novelty away from China. And what would novelty have produced more unfortunate? It is true that he adds that these legislators had principles in mind more than people. This is just as Robespierre said: “let the colonies perish, rather than a principle.”

Men are inclined to enthusiasm, or to get drunk on certain words. Provided they repeat these words, the reality matters little to them. Two years of horrible and bloody servitude did not stop the French from dating their acts from the fourth year of liberty. A revolution, a change of dynasty, and two hundred thousand men massacred every hundred years do not discourage the panegyrists of China from vaunting the stability of that empire. This stability does not exist for the governed, since they are periodically slaughtered in huge numbers each time a usurper founds a dynasty. It does not exist for the governing class, since the throne is rarely in the same family for several generations. It does exist for institutions, however, and that is what our political writers admire. It is as if institutional stability were the sole end in view, regardless of human happiness, and the human race here on earth only as a means to this.

chapter seven : On Premature Ameliorations

If government acts badly when it stops the natural progress of the human race, and guided by false ideas of stability, opposes the imperceptible changes brought into institutions by the progress of ideas, it does no less harm when it encroaches on the proper dictates of the time and devotes itself to thoughtless projects of improvement or reform.

We will have to deal in detail with this subject when we talk about revolutions, which are usually, in their intentions or at least in the language of their authors, only vast reforms or general improvements. Here we have to consider only the endeavors of proper and stable governments, less hazardous endeavors than popular revolutions, but which have nevertheless more than once been pernicious enough.

When government says to public opinion as Séide does to Mahomet, “I acted in advance of your order,” public opinion replies, as did Mahomet to Séide, “It should have been waited for,” 17 and when government refuses to wait, public opinion invariably takes its revenge.

The eighteenth century was fertile in examples of this kind.

Chance brings a man of genius to the government of Portugal. He finds that country plunged into ignorance and bent under the yoke of priesthood. He fails to work out that to break this yoke and dispel this deep night he needs a base of support in the national outlook. By a mistake common to those in power, he seeks this base in authority. He thinks by striking a rock he will make a spring flow from it. 18 But his imprudent haste turns against him the few independent minds fit to support him. They oppose a vexatious government whose unjust means render its purposes at least doubtful. The influence of the priests grows with the very persecution of which they are victims. The marquis de Pombal wishes in vain to turn against them the powerful weapons they hold. Censorship, aimed at condemning works favorable to the Jesuits, itself falls victim to condemnation. The nobles rise. The prisons fill. Frightful punishments bring consternation everywhere. The minister becomes an object of horror to all classes. After twenty years of tyrannical administration, he is robbed of his protector by the king’s death. He barely escapes the scaffold, and the nation blesses the moment when an apathetic and superstitious government replaces the government claiming to be reformist. 19

In Austria, Joseph II succeeds Maria Theresa. He observes sadly that the education of his subjects is inferior to that of all neighboring peoples.

Impatient to eliminate an inequality which offends him, he calls to his aid all the means with which his power provides him. He does not neglect even those promised by freedom. He establishes it for the press. He encourages writers to uncover all abuses and thinks he is helping them marvelously by lending them the support of power. What results from this unnatural alliance? That obscure monks and ignorant nobles struggle successfully against the projects of the philosopher, because the philosopher was emperor. His authority is drained in the redoubling of effort. Resistance makes him cruel. His administration becomes odious through excessive severity and iniquitous spoliation. The regrets which go with sterile good intentions, the sadness of being misunderstood, perhaps also the grief of wounded vanity, drive Joseph to his grave. His last words are a confession of his impotence and misfortune; 20 and since the end of his reign, every day we see some of the abuses he thought he had destroyed breaking out and rising anew.

Of all monarchs who have arrogated to themselves the difficult function of speeding up their peoples’ progress toward civilization, those of Russia are certainly the most excusable. One cannot deny that from the time of Peter I, 21 the monarchs of that vast empire have been much more enlightened than their subjects. With the exception of a few bizarre things inseparable from any plan spontaneously constructed in the minds of powerful men, the reforms planned and executed by the autocrats of Russia were incontestably real improvements. But the great adopted them only by calculation or imitation, without being able to convince themselves, on their own account, of their intrinsic merit, and regarding philosophy and education, just as luxury and the arts, as adornments necessary to a nation wishing to become European; the people submitted to these changes only by constraint, after numberless persecutions. None of these sound ideas, perceived by government, took root. None of the institutions it commanded became habitual. Morality suffered from the abolition of ancient usages which had always served as its base. Enlightenment made little progress, because such progress depends on a series of ideas powerless until the series is complete and which cannot be introduced by an absolutist government. Peter I’s efforts to advance reason remained fruitless because they were in principle vicious. Reason is no longer itself when it lacks freedom. In Russia there is a show of things French at the court and among the nobles, of things Prussian in the army and English in the navy, but the mass of the people in its opinions, customs, and outlook, even down to its clothes, is still an Asiatic nation.

It is only since the beginning of the reign of Alexander that Russia has some chance of enlightenment. This young prince seeks not at all to reform the people but to moderate the government. He does not direct thought; rather he restrains government. 22 Now, thought is strengthened when redundant activity is removed from government. For a people to progress, it suffices that government does not shackle them. Progress is in human nature. The government which leaves it alone favors it enough. May Alexander persevere in this at once prudent and generous way and protect himself against the mistrust which seeks to interrupt and the impatience which wants to push ahead.

If we attributed the poor results of so many reforms and innovations attempted in vain by government to the nature of the administrations which presided over these attempts, and if we claimed that, resting on improper bases and always fearful of disturbing them, they were incapable of doing lasting good, because they could want such good only half-heartedly, if we thought that less mistaken governments, ones which had not forced themselves to tread carefully when remedying abuses, would have progressed more crisply, destroyed without difficulty everything in need of destruction, established painlessly everything desirable, experience would soon come and overturn that chimerical supposition.

Doubtless the governments we have cited as examples were in a particularly difficult situation. Pulled by the spirit of the age, they aimed at honoring philosophy, but they did not dare frankly to renounce the support of prejudice. They accepted a few of the most evident rights of the human race, but from their high rank they believed they could represent this acceptance as a gracious one. They thought they owed it to themselves to keep in reserve the right to do all the harm they did not do, not that, to do them justice, they made use of it, but in disclaiming for ordinary purposes the practice of despotism, they retained the theory as part of their beloved decorative pomp. They felt strongly, nevertheless, that security alone could merit gratitude, and they strove, by way of conditional sentences and preambles full of restrictions, to produce security without giving constitutional guarantee. This inherently self-destructive double task contributed greatly, I like to believe, to their faults and reverses. But have we not seen in our country, during the first years of the Revolution, a government free of all oppositional intent finding itself first of all forsaken, then attacked by public opinion, solely for having pushed forward and precipitately carried out improvements which that very opinion had long seemed to be demanding? The government had taken a few stray and as yet uncertain inclinations and still partial reflections for a general will.

But, someone will ask, how can you know precisely what the state of public opinion is? You cannot count votes. It is only after some particular measure has been taken that opposition appears. Then it is often too late to withdraw. To say that we should not run ahead of public opinion is therefore to say nothing.

I reply first of all that if you allow opinion the right of expression, you will know it readily. Do not provoke it, nor excite hopes by indicating the direction in which you want it to pronounce, for then, to please government, flattery will assume the shape of opinion. Put an irreligious monarch at the head of a devout people and the most flexible of his courtiers will be precisely the most unbelieving. As soon as a government declares for some philosophy, a phalanx forms around it, all the more clamorous in the favored opinion in having none at all itself; and government readily takes the supine surrounding agreement for universal feeling. If government stays neutral, however, letting people debate, opinions join combat and enlightenment is born of their clash. A national outlook forms, and the truth brings together such agreement that it is no longer possible to fail to recognize it.

Secondly, thinking tends to modify gradually laws and institutions which clash with it. Let it do this work. It has the double advantage of softening the execution of defective laws which persist and preparing their abrogation.

When you want to destroy an institution which seems improper to you, let people break free of it, but do not require them to. Allowing this, you call to your aid all educated forces. Requiring it, you arm many interests against you. I will use an example to make myself clear. There are two ways to do away with monasteries. One is to open their doors, the other to drive away their inhabitants. The former does good, without doing bad. It breaks chains but does not violate sanctuary. The latter overturns all the expectations based on public faith. It insults old age, which it drags, listless and defenseless, into an unknown world. It undermines an incontestable right of individuals, namely to choose their way of life, to hold their property in common, and to come together to profess the same doctrine, to attend the same rituals, to enjoy the same prosperity, and to savor the same relaxation. And this injustice turns against reform the very outlook which only recently seemed to uphold it.

In short, any improvement, any amelioration contrary to the habits of a large section of the nation, must as far as possible be adjourned till the time is right. This spares the present generation and prepares the one which must follow. Youth, innovation’s collaborator, progresses. Old age has no interest in declaring hostilities, and the change anticipated in this way becomes almost a habit before it is affected.

Time, says Bacon, is the great reformer. 23 Do not refuse its help. Let it go before you, so it can smooth the way. If it has not prepared what you set up, your orders will be in vain. Your institution, however good in theory, is only a mechanism and not part of your administration. It will not be more difficult to rescind your laws than you found it to rescind other ones; and all that will be left of your rescinded ones will be the harm they have done.

chapter eight : On a False Way of Reasoning

An error slides constantly into the arguments used to support the indefinite latitude allowed to govenment action. From negative facts positive theories are derived. When, for example, people rave about the power of the law, about the influence of the guidance government gives to the intellectual faculties of man, they cite the corruption of Italy, fruit of superstition, the apathy and degradation of the Turks, a product of political and religious despotism, French frivolity, the result of a despotic government resting on vanity. From government’s ability to do great harm it is concluded that it can do much good. These two questions are very different.

If the English example is pleaded to us, far be it from us to lessen our praise for more than a century of public spirit and freedom. But again two things are being confused, the organization of government in the English constitution and the intervention of that government in individual relations. The latter is being seen as causing the effects of the former. England has political institutions which guarantee freedom. It has institutions of production which hinder it. It is because of the former and despite the latter that England flourishes. 24 We are far from denying freedom’s benefits. We recognize them joyfully and desire them ardently; but freedom is precisely the opposite of what is being proposed to us.

chapter one : Why among the Ancients Political Authority Could Be More Extensive Than in Modern Times

Before finishing this work I believe I must resolve a difficulty which perhaps has already struck more than one of my readers. The principles I represent as the basis of all possible freedom today are directly opposed to the principles formerly adopted for political organization by most of the free nations of antiquity. If we except Athens, all the Greek republics submitted individuals to an almost boundless political jurisdiction. It was the same in the great centuries of the Roman Republic. The individual was entirely sacrificed to the collectivity. The ancients, as Condorcet remarks, 1 had no notion of individual rights. Men were so to speak just machines, their springs regulated and all their movements directed by the law. Yet it is the ancients who offer us the noblest examples of political freedom history brings down to us. We find among them the model of all the virtues which the enjoyment of that freedom produces and which it needs for its persistence.

One cannot reread, even today, the beautiful annals of antiquity, one cannot retrace the actions of its great men, without feeling some emotion or other of a profound and special type, which nothing modern makes one experience. The old elements of a nature so to speak earlier than ours seem to reawaken in us at these memories. It is hard not to regret these times, when human faculties were developing in a premapped direction, but on a vast scale, so strong in their own powers, and with such a sense of energy and dignity. When we give in to these regrets, it is impossible not to tend to imitate what we regret. As a result, those who since the Renaissance have striven to draw the human race out of the degradation into which those two linked scourges of superstition and conquest had plunged it, have for the most part believed they had to draw from the ancients the maxims, the institutions, and the practices favorable to freedom. But they failed to recognize many of the differences which, in distinguishing us in essence from the ancients, make almost all their institutions inapplicable to our times. Since this misjudgment contributed more than people think to the misfortunes of the Revolution which signaled the end of the last century, I think I must devote several chapters to bringing out these differences.

chapter two : The First Difference between the Social State of the Ancients and That of Modern Times

It has often been observed that the ancient republics were confined within narrow limits. From this truth has been drawn a consequence which it is not within our brief to examine here, namely that a republic is impossible in a large State. 2 But another consequence which has not been drawn seems to me to flow much more naturally from it. This is that States much larger than the ancient republics had to modify in quite different ways the duties of citizens, and that the degree of individual freedom could not be the same in both cases.

Each citizen in the ancient republics, circumscribed by the smallness of their territory, had great personal importance politically. The exercise of political rights there was everybody’s constant enjoyment and occupation. For example, in Athens the whole people took part in trials. Their share of sovereignty was not as in our time an abstract supposition. Their will was a real influence and not susceptible to mendacious falsification and corrupted representation. If political power was oppressive, each citizen consoled himself with the hope of exercising it. Today the mass of citizens is called to exercise sovereignty only in illusory fashion. The people can only be slaves or free; but they are never in charge.

The happiness of the majority no longer rests in the enjoyment of power but in individual freedom. Among the ancients the extension of political power constituted the prerogative of each citizen. In modern times it consists in the sacrifices individuals make.

In the ancient republics, while the exercise of political authority was a right for all, at the same time submission to that fearsome power was also a necessity for all. The people engaged in sovereign debate in the public place. Every citizen was visible and de facto subject to that sovereignty. Today the great States have created a new guarantee, obscurity. This guarantee reduces the dependence of individuals on the nation. Now it is clear, absolutely clear, that a dependence which on the one hand gives less enjoyment and on the other can be avoided more easily is one which cannot last.

chapter three : The Second Difference

A second difference between the ancients and the moderns stems from the very different condition of the human race in these two periods. Formerly small peoples, almost without reciprocal relations, joined battle over a limited territory. These peoples pushed by necessity one against another, fought or threatened each other endlessly. Those who did not want to be conquerors could not put down the sword for fear of being conquered. They bought their security, independence, their lives at the price of war. Though history presents us alongside these small nations with some large trading or peaceful nations, such nations are much less well known than the warlike ones. We see Egypt only through the mendacious accounts of its priests, distorted further by the exaggerations of Greek credulity. On the Phoenicians we possess only a few geographical data. We follow their sea journeys on the map. We speculate which shores they touched upon. We know almost nothing, however, about their institutions, mores, or internal life. The Athenians are the only people of antiquity who are not exclusively warlike and about whom history nevertheless bequeaths us some precise details. Moreover, Athens differed much less from today’s societies than did other small peoples of the same period. By a remarkable singularity, however, those who offer us antiquity as a model choose by preference exclusively bellicose peoples like the Spartans and the Romans. This is because only these nations lend support to their theoretical view-point, only they brought together great political freedom and an almost total absence of individual freedom. 3

Our world is precisely the opposite of the ancient one. Everything in antiquity related to war. Today everything is reckoned in terms of peace. In former times each people was an isolated family, born hostile to other families. Now a mass of people lives under different names and divers modes of social organization, but homogenous by nature. It is civilized enough to find war burdensome; it is strong enough not to need to fear invasion by still barbarian hordes, relegated to the very ends of its territory. Its tendency is uniformly toward peace. The warlike tradition, a legacy of remote times, plus crimes and mistakes by governments, born of violence, retarded the effects of this tendency. It makes more progress every day, however. People still fight today. Powerful men usually learn social enlightenment more slowly than those they govern. They twist their governance to favor their prejudices. Governments sometimes have a passion for war; the governed no longer do. Even governments seek justification for it. They no longer profess love of conquest, nor hope of personal glory by feats of arms. We made this point before. 4 No Alexander would dare to propose to his subjects, straightforwardly, the invasion of the world, and Pyrrhus’s speech to Cyneas 5 would seem to us the height of insolence and folly. Today a government which spoke of military glory as an end would be failing to recognize and scorning the spirit both of nations and our era. It would be wrong by a thousand years, and even if it were successful at first, it would be curious to see which would win this strange wager between our century and this government. War no longer exists as a purpose but only as a means. Peace and with peace affluence and to gain affluence production: such are the sole purposes to which the human race now aspires. Civilized peoples battle only because wrong views and false reckoning make them see rivals where they should see only emulators and also persuade them that to weaken their competitors is to strengthen themselves while to ruin them is to enrich themselves. This mistake changes nothing, however, deep down in their character. To the degree the character of the ancients was warlike, ours is pacific. For them a successful war was an infallible source of wealth for individuals. For us a successful war always costs more than it is worth. The outcomes of wars are no longer the same. There is no longer any question of invading entire countries in order to reduce their inhabitants to slavery and to divide up their lands.

In ordinary wars, the frontiers of large States or their distant colonies can fall to the power of the enemy. The center stays intact and apart from some pecuniary sacrifices it continues to enjoy the advantages of peace. Even when extraordinary circumstances and motives which stir up all the abysses of the human heart make hatred more inveterate and hostility more violent, as for example during the French Revolution, the fate of conquered countries is still in no way comparable to what it was in antiquity. Now the restrictions on political power are necessarily different in a habitual state of war.

War demands more extensive public force than peace does and force of a different order. The public force necessary for peace is entirely negative, namely public safeguards. War needs active force. The discipline it brings in informs all other institutions. To succeed war needs common action. In peace each man needs only his work, efforts, and individual resources. It is as a collective being that a people profits from the fruits of war. Each man enjoys separately those of peace and enjoys them in a way all the more complete in its being more independent. The purpose of war is fixed: victory, conquest. This purpose is always manifest to interested parties. It joins them, enchains them, makes of their efforts, plans, and wills an indivisible whole. Peace presents no precise purpose. It is a condition in which each person freely forms projects, meditates on his means, gives play to his personal plans. Warrior peoples must consequently bear the pressure of political power more readily than pacific peoples. The purpose of the free institutions of the former is to prevent usurpers from seizing political power, the property of the whole mass. The latter wish in addition to limit power in itself, so that it does not bother either their economic reckonings or their rights. The former say to governments, lead us to victory, and to assure it to us, subject us to severe disciplinary laws. The latter tell them, guarantee us against violence and do not interfere with us.

chapter four : The Third Difference

In the third place, none of the republics people have wanted us to imitate was commercial. The limits of this work prevent us from citing all the causes which constituted obstacles to the progress of commerce among the ancients. Ignorance of the compass forced them not to lose sight of the coast during their navigations more than was absolutely necessary. To go beyond the columns of Hercules, that is, pass through the Strait of Gibraltar, was considered the most audacious venture. The Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the most skillful navigators among the ancients, did not dare to till very late and for long had no imitators. In Athens, which as we will say below was the most commercial republic of antiquity, the maritime rate of interest was about 60 percent, while the ordinary rate was only 12 percent, so much did the idea of long-distance navigation imply danger.

Religious prejudices were opposed to maritime trade among several peoples of antiquity. For example, there was the horror of the sea among the Egyptians, as still today among the Indians, whereby sacred rites forbade the lighting of fire on the ocean, thus preventing all long-range navigation, because food cannot be cooked. Independently of these factual proofs, simple reasoning suffices to show that war must have come before trade. The one and the other are only different means of reaching the same end, which must forever be man’s end, that is, to assure oneself the possession of what seems desirable. Trade is only homage made to the power of him who has what we would like to seize. It is the desire to get by mutual agreement what we no longer hope to take away forcibly. A man who was always the strongest would never have the idea of trade. It is experience, which, proving to man that war, that is, the use of force against the force of other people, is exposed to divers opposing checks and failures, brings him to resort to trade, that is, to a gentler and surer way of engaging the interest of others so that they consent to what suits one’s interest. War is therefore older than trade. The one is an impulsion, the other a calculation. The spirit of modern peoples is essentially commercial. Trade makes a large extension of political power at once more harassing and easier to evade: more harassing, since trade casts greater variety into men’s economic dealings, and government has to multiply its activities to get at these dealings in all their manifestations; easier to elude because trade, changing the nature of property, makes this part of human existence, a part which soon becomes its most important one, almost untouchable by government. Trade gives to property the new quality of mobility. Without mobility property is only a usufruct. Government can always exert an influence on a usufruct, since it can take away one’s right of possession. Mobility, however, puts an invisible and invincible block on this boundless power of government. The effects of trade extend further still. Not only does it free individuals from the tyranny of communal government, but by creating credit it subjects communal government in some respects to individuals. It has very often been remarked that money is despotism’s main weapon but also its most powerful brake. Credit subjected to public opinion makes those who govern dependent on the governed. Force is pointless. Money hides or flees. All the State’s operations are suspended. In antiquity credit did not have the same influence. 6 A deficit of sixty million made the French Revolution. A deficit of six hundred million under Vespasian did not shake the empire in the least. 7

Thus governments in antiquity were necessarily stronger than individuals. Individuals are today stronger than their governments. 8

Trade has another effect. In antiquity each citizen saw not only his affections but his interests and his fate bound up in his country’s lot. His patrimony was ravaged if the enemy won a battle. A public reversal removed him from the rank of free man, condemning him to slavery. No one had the means of moving his wealth. In modern nations, thanks to trade, individuals shape their own futures, despite events. They move their assets far away; governments cannot penetrate their transactions; they take along with them all the comforts of private life. Moreover, in antiquity war isolated nations. Their mores were different, their dispositions savage, and expatriation almost impossible. 9 Trade has brought nations together, giving them almost the same mores and habits. Their leaders may be enemies, but the peoples are compatriots. Trade has modified even the nature of war. Trading nations were in the past always subjugated by warrior peoples. Now they resist the latter successfully. 10 Carthage struggling against Rome in antiquity was bound to fail; the weight of things was against her. If the struggle between Rome and Carthage happened today, however, Carthage would enjoy the best wishes of all the peoples. She would have for allies the outlook and the mores of the century. Just as war, as we have already shown, favors a vast extension of political power, so trade is favorable to individual freedom. 11