a legislator,” he said, “I descend into the abysses of my heart, I study my sentiments.”  He opposed the Economists, the other school that was feeling its way imperfectly enough to a positive method.  “As soon as I see landed property established,” he wrote, “then I see unequal fortunes; and from these unequal fortunes must there not necessarily result different and opposed interests, all the vices of riches, all the vices of poverty, the brutalisation of intelligence, the corruption of civil manners?” and so forth.[196] In his most important work, published in 1776, we see Rousseau’s notions developed, with a logic from which their first author shrunk, either from fear, or more probably from want of firmness and consistency as a reasoner.  “It is to equality that nature has attached the preservation of our social faculties and happiness:  and from this I conclude that legislation will only be taking useless trouble, unless all its attention is first of all directed to the establishment of equality in the fortune and condition of citizens."[197] That is to say not only political equality, but economic communism.  “What miserable folly, that persons who pass for philosophers should go on repeating after one another that without property there can be no society.  Let us leave illusion.  It is property that divides us into two classes, rich and poor; the first will alway prefer their fortune to that of the state, while the second will never love a government or laws that leave them in misery."[198] This was the kind of opinion for which Rousseau’s diffuse and rhetorical exposition of social necessity had prepared France some twenty years before.  After powerfully helping the process of general dissolution, it produced the first fruits specifically after its own kind some twenty years later in the system of Baboeuf.[199]

The unflinching application of principles is seldom achieved by the men who first launch them.  The labour of the preliminary task seems to exhaust one man’s stock of mental force.  Rousseau never thought of the subversion of society or its reorganisation on a communistic basis.  Within a few months of his profession of profound lament that the first man who made a claim to property had not been instantly unmasked as the arch foe of the race, he speaks most respectfully of property as the pledge of the engagements of citizens and the foundation of the social pact, while the first condition of that pact is that every one should be maintained in peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him.[200] We need not impute the apparent discrepancy to insincerity.  Rousseau was always apt to think in a slipshod manner.  He sensibly though illogically accepted wholesome practical maxims, as if they flowed from theoretical premisses that were in truth utterly incompatible with them.

FOOTNOTES: 

[151] Delandine’s Couronnes Academiques, ou Recueil de prix proposes par les Societes Savantes. (Paris, 2 vols., 1787.)