388Chapter 20and aristocratic checks upon his power; and a despo-
tism, in which the monarch holds unchecked, absolute
power. Montesquieu contended that none of these was
a perfect, universal form of government because gov-
ernments should be appropriate to local conditions. He
proposed features of the ideal government, however,
such as “liberty,” which he carefully defined: “Liberty
does not consist in an unlimited freedom.... Liberty is
a right of doing whatever the laws permit.”
This line of reasoning led Montesquieu to state two
of the most famous political theories of the eighteenth
century: (1) the theory of the separation of powers and
(2) the theory of checks and balances. Montesquieu
first argued that the centers of power within the state—
the executive, the legislative, and the judicial powers—
should not be held by the same person or institution.
“When the legislative and executive powers are united
in the same person... there can be no liberty.” He then
added that these separated centers of power should
check and balance each other: “Power should be a
check to power.” Such ideas had many dramatic impli-
cations for the eighteenth century. They meant, for ex-
ample, that powerful institutions controlled by the
aristocracy, such as the French parlements, must check
the potential despotism of a king.
By the late eighteenth century, the Enlightenment
produced even more radical political arguments. Tom
Paine, the son of a quiet English Quaker family who
became an active participant in both the American and
the French revolutions, wrote passionate pamphlets and
carefully reasoned multivolume works of political the-
ory. One of his pamphlets, Common Sense(1776), at-
tacked monarchical government and advocated a
republic—arguments aimed at the British colonies in
America. His Rights of Man(1791–92) defended the leg-
islation of the French Revolution, attacked monarchical
government, and called on the English to overthrow
George III. The government of Britain indicted him for
treason.
Jeremy Bentham took Enlightenment political and
social thought in yet another direction. Bentham was a
lawyer with a comfortable inherited income that al-
lowed him to pursue his writing, which he deeply im-
bued with Enlightenment attitudes. He saw his writings
as “an attempt to extend the experimental method of
reasoning from the physical branch (sciences) to the
moral.” His Principles of Morals and Legislation(1789) called
for rationalist legislation, favoring the least possible leg-
islation and the least possible government. “Every law,”
Bentham believed, “is an evil, for every law is an infrac-
tion of liberty.” This reasoning contained the germ of
one of the dominant political gospels of the nineteenth
century, classical liberalism.
Perhaps the most radical political theorist of the
Enlightenment was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Franco-
Swiss philosophe who never experienced the comfort-
able life that Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Bentham
knew. Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker and a pas-
tor’s daughter. He was born in austere, Calvinist
Geneva where stern laws regulated behavior. His
mother died in the week of his birth, and his father de-
serted him as a child, fleeing imprisonment for dueling.
Rousseau was raised by his mother’s strict religious fam-
ily and apprenticed to an engraver, but he ran away
from Geneva at sixteen. During the remainder of his
youth, Rousseau wandered as a vagabond. He survived
as a beggar, domestic servant, tutor, music teacher, and
the kept lover of an older woman. When he settled in
Paris in 1744, he had a hatred of the rich but gave no
signs of converting this into literary fame. Some of
Rousseau’s revolutionary anger showed in an early es-
say, the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality(1755). His
concern was not “natural” inequality among individuals,
but “moral or political inequality, because it depends on... the consent of mankind.” The discourse went on to
demand nothing less than the complete reorganization
of society to eliminate inequalities based upon factors
such as rank or race. Before the Discoursewas finished,
Rousseau attacked the concept of private property,
which he considered “the worst of our institutions.”
The first man who, after fencing in a piece of ground,
took it into his head to say: This is mine,and found people
simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of
civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how
many miseries and horrors would not have been spared
the human race by him who, pulling up the stakes or fill-
ing in the ditch, had cried out to his fellow men: Take
care not to listen to this impostor; you are lost if you for-
get that the fruits belong to all and the earth
to none.
The same passion characterized Rousseau’s more
complex masterpiece, The Social Contract(1762). It
opened with one of the most famous sentences of the
Enlightenment: “Man is born free, but is everywhere in
chains.” The great human emancipation that Rousseau
desired led him to propose an ideal government that
mixed democracy and authoritarianism. Rousseau, the
enemy of kings, admired democracy and stimulated its
growth in Europe with sentences such as: “No man has
a natural authority over his fellow men.” This reasoning
led Rousseau to state the right of people to use force to
resist forced obedience to authority: “As soon as [a peo-
ple] can throw off its yoke, and does throw it off, it
does better; for a people may certainly use, for the re-
covery of their liberty, the same right that was em-
ployed to deprive them of it.” Rousseau also believed,