THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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is ‘ni bon ni méchant’; he is also only made the latter by an evil society, by the social arousal of selfishness, by the inequality of property, the separation of the classes. If
then, according to the ‘Contrat social’, man is neither good nor bad in himself, his articulation and organization in the volonté générale is nevertheless simply good.
Volonté générale cannot err (II, 3), it is the language of real justice (II, 6), it is reason itself. by which it is determined with the same necessity as the law of nature in the
physical world (II, 4). And the general will, otherwise directed towards a rough equality of private property, may possibly also know all about socialism, at least
according to ‘Emile’. Here the man who was otherwise the ideologist of private property almost touches on the basic communist motif of most utopias: ‘The sovereign
power (volonté générale) has no right to touch the property of one or several individuals. But it has every right to appropriate the property of all (in a simultaneous act
of general dispossession)’ (Emile V). This is admittedly, if not the only place, then one of the few places in which systems of Natural Right contain the idea of
expropriation. It was suggested to Rousseau by Morelly's ‘Code de la Nature’, 1755, besides Mably, the most important forerunner of utopian socialism, with
complete égalité in economic life. But the strength of classic Natural Right lay not in the fact that it rebelled economically but that it did so politically, in other words: that
it eroded the respect for authority. It built subjective public rights into the so­called basic rights of the individual, codified in the Droits de l'homme of the French
National Assembly. These Droits de l'homme (Liberté, propriété, sûreté, résistance à l'oppression)* are the postulate, in places also even the legal superstructure, of an
overdue bourgeoisie, of a breakthrough of the individual­capitalist mode of economy against guild barriers, a class society, and a controlled market. But this ideology in
fact shows a surplus which aroused enthusiasm; the ideal of freedom aroused this enthusiasm, in so far as it was not completely covered or discharged by mere freedom
of movement or by free competition. It committed itself in revolutionary Natural Right to the individual (and to the nation as an aggregate of individuals), only the
personal pathos employed was far older, derived from Christianity, from its metaphysical estimation of the individual soul. The Droits de l'homme themselves are also
just as influenced in historical and literary terms by the religious idealism of the young American states and their constitution as they are by Rousseau's Natural Right. All
this exploded the doctrine of the divine right of authority, in its own field; but it also
* ‘Freedom, property, security, resistance to oppression.’