II
Nature of societies, and the principle of enduring constitutions.
Apply the Social Contract, if you like, but apply it only to those
for whom it was drawn up. These were abstract beings, belonging
neither to a period nor to a country, perfect creatures hatched out
under the magic wand of a metaphysician. They had as a matter of
fact come into existence by removing all the characteristics which
distinguish one man from another,[9] a Frenchman from a Papuan, a
modern Englishman from a Briton in the time of Caesar, and by
retaining only the part which is common to all.[10] The essence thus
obtained is a prodigiously meager one, an infinitely curtailed
extract of human nature, that is, in the phraseology of the day,
"A BEING WITH A DESIRE TO BE HAPPY AND THE FACULTY OF REASONING,"
nothing more and nothing else. After this pattern several million
individuals, all precisely alike, have been prepared while, through
a second simplification, as extraordinary as the first one, they are
all supposed to be free and all equal, without a past, without
kindred, without responsibility, without traditions, without
customs, like so many mathematical units, all separable and all
equivalent, and then it is imagined that, assembled together for the
first time, these proceed to make their primitive bargain.
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