Political Philosophy Questions

"When in the mine of man, apptetites, aversions, hopes, fears, concerning and diver good and evil cosneqeuecnes of doing thing. The whole sum of the desires, hopes, aversions, is deliberation

such revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty, will be born by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people

No such finis ultinus(utmost aim) nor summum bonum(greates good) as is spoken. Nor can a man live, whose desires are at and end. Felicity is an continual progress of desire. One objec to another

Governments cannot be supported without great charge(money). If must be with his own consent to pay out of his estate his propoortion. The consent of majority must come from themselves, or representatives

for though in a commonwealth the members of it are distinct persons still in reference to one another, and as such as governed by the laws of the society; yet in reference to the rest of mankind, they make one body, which is, as every member of it before was, still in the state of nature with the rest of mankind.

it is very easy to conceive, without any difficulty, how labour could at first begin a title of property in the common things of nature, and how the spending it upon our uses bounded it. So that there could then be no reason of quarrelling about title, nor any doubt about the largeness of possession it gave. Right and conveniency went together; for as a man had a right to all he could employ his labour upon, so he had no temptation to labour for more than he could make use of. This left no room for controversy about the title, nor for encroachment on the right of others; what portion a man carved to himself, was easily seen; and it was useless, as well as dishonest, to carve himself too much,

there only is political society, where every one of the members hath quitted this natural power, resigned it up into the hands of the community in all cases that exclude him not from appealing for protection to the law established by it.

Hence it is evident, that absolute monarchy, which by some men is counted the only government in the world, is indeed inconsistent with civil society, and so can be no form of civil-government at all: for the end of civil society, being to avoid, and remedy those inconveniencies of the state of nature, which necessarily follow from every man's being judge in his own case, by setting up a known authority, to which every one of that society may appeal upon any injury received, or controversy that may arise, and which every one of the society ought to obey;* where-ever any persons are, who have not such an authority to appeal to, for the decision of any difference between them, there those persons are still in the state of nature; and so is every absolute prince, in respect of those who are under his dominion.

Because it may be too great a temptation, for same persons t have power of making laws also to execute them...a power to make laws which they have done'''care that the y make them for public good

"Defenders of absolute monarchy must think men are so foolish that they care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by polecats or faces, but are content to be devoured by lions(308)

nature alone operates in all the operations of the beast, whereas man, as a free agent, has a share in his. One chooses by instinct; the other by an act of liberty; for which reason the beast cannot deviate from the rules that have been prescribed to it, even in cases where such deviation might be useful, and man often deviates from the rules laid down for him to his prejudice.

For a populace that is just coming into being ·as a body· to be able to relish sound principles of political theory and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause! The social spirit that is to be created by these institutions would have to preside over their very foundation; and men would have to be, •in advance of the laws, what they should become •by means of the laws. So the law-maker, being unable to appeal either to •force or to •reason, must resort to an authority of a different order that can •constrain without violence and That's what has down the centuries compelled •the fathers of the nations to appeal to divine intervention and credit the gods with •their own wisdom, in order that the peoples— submitting to the laws of the state as to the laws of nature, and recognising the power that formed the city as the very one that formed mankind—might obey freely, and bear with docility the yoke of the public happiness.

Though men when they enter into society give up equality, liberty, and executive power they had in nature to the society. SO be disposed by the legislative as the good requires. Yet is beijing only with an intention everyone the better to preserve himself his liberty and property...never be supposed to extend further than common good

In this respect the Caribbean [savages] of Venezuela, among others, live in the most absolute security and without the slightest inconvenience. Although they are almost naked, says Francisco Coreal, they are not afraid of exposing themselves in the forest armed only with bows and arrows, but nobody has ever heard of any of them being eaten by animals.

The legislative, or supreme authority, cannot assume to its self a power to rule by extemporary arbitrary decrees, but is bound to dispense justice, and decide the rights of the subject by promulgated standing laws, and known authorized judges:* for the law of nature being unwritten, and so no where to be found but in the minds of men, they who through passion or interest shall miscite, or misapply it, cannot so easily be convinced of their mistake where there is no established judge:

The community comes to be umpire, settled standing rules, men having authority from sxecutin of those rules. Decides all differences between members, punishes offenses against society, using penalties the law has established

I have received, sir, your new book against the human race, and I thank you for it. You will please people by your manner of telling them the truth about themselves, but you will not alter them. The horrors of that human society--from which in our feebleness and ignorance we expect so many consolations--have never been painted in more striking colors: no one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes: to read your book makes one long to go about all fours. Since, however, it is now some sixty years since I gave up the practice, I feel that it is unfortunately impossible for me to resume it:

I conceive two species of inequality among men; one which I call natural, or physical inequality, because it is established by nature, and consists in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind, or of the soul; the other which may be termed moral, or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention, and is established, or at least authorized, by the common consent of mankind. This species of inequality consists in the different privileges, which some men enjoy, to the prejudice of others, such as that of being richer, more honoured, more powerful, and even that of exacting obedience from them.

t, there is another very specific quality that distinguishes them, and a quality which will admit of no dispute; this is the faculty of improvement; a faculty which, as circumstances offer, successively unfolds all the other faculties, and resides among us not only in the species, but in the individuals that compose it; whereas a beast is, at the end of some months, all he ever will be during the rest of his life; and his species, at the end of a thousand years, precisely what it was the first year of that long period. Why is man alone subject to dotage? Is it not, because he thus returns to his primitive condition? And because, while the beast, which has acquired nothing and has likewise nothing to lose, continues always in possession of his instinct, man, losing by old age, or by accident, all the acquisitions he had made in consequence of his perfectibility, thus falls back even lower than beasts themselves? It would be a melancholy necessity for us to be obliged to allow, that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all man's misfortunes; that it is this faculty, which, though by slow degrees, draws them out of their original condition, in which his days would

The philosophers, who have examined the foundations of society, have, every one of them, perceived the necessity of tracing it back to a state of nature, but not one of them has ever arrived there. Some of them have not scrupled to attribute to man in that state the ideas of justice and injustice, without troubling their heads to prove, that he really must have had such ideas, or even that such ideas were useful to him: others have spoken of the natural right of every man to keep what belongs to him, without letting us know what they meant by the word belong; others, without further ceremony ascribing to the strongest an authority over the weakest, have immediately struck out government, without thinking of the time requisite for men to form any notion of the things signified by the words authority and government. All of them, in fine, constantly harping on wants, avidity, oppression, desires and pride, have transferred to the state of nature ideas picked up in the bosom of society. In speaking of savages they described citizens.