Jean-Jacques Rousseau

These feelings were not unreal though coloured, under the influence of Rousseau, with too much of rhetoric to suit the taste of the twentieth century, and were connected with speculative doctrines which, in common with modern collectivism, combine some important truths with some at least equally important delusions.

If, however, he is guided by some idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility, he may, like Rousseau, popularise ideas which kindle a revolution, but he will hardly become a systematic law reformer.

The Jacobins or Terrorists, some of whom were still living, had been apostles of the social contract, but the Jacobins were to Englishmen objects of horror—Robespierre was the confutation of Rousseau.

Now, in all the speculations of Rousseau, the central figure, whether arrayed in an English dress as the signatary of a social compact, or simply stripped naked of all historical qualities, is uniformly Man, in a supposed state of nature.

But though the philosophy founded on the hypothesis of a state of nature has fallen low in general esteem, in so far as it is looked upon under its coarser and more palpable aspect, it does not follow that in its subtler disguises it has lost plausibility, popularity, or power.

Rousseau adopted both the judicial and the popular error.

[viii] all the attractiveness of works like Pilgrim’s Progress or Gulliver’s Travels, combined with a philosophy and political insight that give them a double claim to be considered Classics.

This section embraces such names as Grotius, Plato, Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Adam Smith, Hamilton, Madison, Jay, Walter Batgehot, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Machiavelli, as well as those builders of Ideal Governments, More, Bacon, Campanella and Rousseau.

Many wise and good men, however, alarmed by the illusions of Rousseau and Godwin, and the atrocities of the French revolution, honestly believe that these principles have teeth and claws, which it is expedient to draw and pare, however constitutional they may be;

Surely it is the absence of all these a priori vapourings, common to Locke, Rousseau;

Locke's pretence that the individual citizens reserved certain liberties when the State was formed is of course the merest allegory, without any more foundation, in fact, than Rousseau's Contrat Social.