which seem entirely unnatural and irrational to analytical reasoning. This reasoning always puts the questions: What is it good for? Does it conduce to the welfare of those whom it pretends to bind or to rule? Is it in consonance with right reason that men should impose upon themselves the despotism of those laws and of the beliefs sanctioning them? The classical answer has been given in a startling fashion by one whom Comte called the father of revolutionary philosophy. There is, says Thomas Hobbes, a realm of darkness and misery, founded upon superstition and false philosophy, which is the church; and there is, or there might be, a realm of light and of happiness, founded upon the knowledge of what is right and wrong; that is to say, of the laws of nature, dictated by reason and by experience, to check hostile and warlike individual impulses by a collective will and power; this realm is the true state, that is to say, the idea and model of its purely rational structure, whether it may exist anywhere as yet or not. Hobbesianism is the most elaborate and most consistent system of the doctrine commonly known as that of “natural law” (Naturrecht), including, as it always did, a theory of the state. As a matter of fact, this doctrine has been abandoned almost entirely, especially in Germany, where it had been exerting a very considerable influence in the century which preceded the French Revolution, when even kings and absolutist statesmen were among its open adherents. It has been controverted and abandoned ever since the first quarter of the nineteenth century—a fact which stands in manifest connection with the great reaction and restoration in the political field following the storms of that revolution and of Bonapartist rule in Europe. There is hardly a liberal school left now which dares openly profess that muchderided theory of a “social compact.” This, I believe, is somewhat different in the United States. As far as my knowledge goes, this theory—that is to say, an individualistic construction of society and of the state—is still the ordinary method employed in this country for a deduction of the normal relations between state or society, on the one hand, and individuals, on the other; for, as needs no emphasis, it is not the opinion of an original contract in the historical sense that is to be held in any way as a
