This page has been validated.
20
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
government of large ones to occasional insurrection and to violent corporate expressions of opinion which shall readjust the relations between the governor and the governed.
All this is true: but such a criticism of the theory in political morals which lay behind the Revolution, the theory that the community is sovereign, is no contradiction. It only tells us that pure right cannot act untrammelled in human affairs and that it acts in some conditions more laboriously than in others: it gives not a jot of authority to any alternative thesis.[1]
Such is the general theory of the Revolution to which the command of Jean Jacques Rousseau over the French tongue gave imperishable
- ↑ We need not waste any time upon those who talk about such and such a form of government being good because “it works.” The use of such language connotes that the user of it is fatigued by the effort of thought. For what is “working,” i.e. successful action, in any sphere? The attainment of certain ends in that sphere. What are those ends in a State? If material well-being, then there is an end to talk of patriotism, the nation, public opinion and the rest of it which, as we all very well know, men always have regarded and always will regard as the supreme matters of public interest. If the end is not material well-being, but a sense of political freedom and of the power of the citizen to react upon the State, then to say that an institution “works” though apparently not democratic, is simply to say that under such and such conditions that institution achieves the ends of democracy most nearly. In other words, to contrast the good “working” of an institution superficially undemocratic with democratic theory is meaningless. The institution “works” in proportion as it satisfies that political sense which perfect democracy would, were it attainable, completely satisfy.
