Book Five - The Legislator’S Laws Must be Relative to The Principle of The Government

Summary

Chapter 1: Idea of This Book

We see now that laws of education must be relative to the principle of each government. Those which the legislator gives the whole society are in the same case. This relationship of the laws to that principle aligns every spring of the government, and from this that principle receives, in its turn, a new strength. Thus it is, as in physical movements, action is always followed by a reaction.

We are going to examine this relationship in each government, and we will begin with the republican state, which has virtue for principle.

Chapter 2: What Virtue Is in the Political State

Virtue in a republic is a very simple thing: it is the love of the republic; it is a feeling, not a sequence of understandings. The least man of the state may have this feeling, like the first. Once the people possess good maxims, they hold onto them for a longer time than them one calls honest folk. It is rare that corruption originates with the people. Often they derive from the mediocrity of their lights a stronger attachment for what is established.

Love of the fatherland leads to goodness of morals, and goodness of morals leads to love of the fatherland. The less we are able to satisfy our individual passions, the more we give ourselves to the general. Why do monks so much love their order? It is precisely by reason of that which makes it unbearable for them. Their regulation deprives them of everything upon which ordinary passion might alight. There remains, therefore, that passion for the very regulation which afflicts them. That is to say, the more austere it is, the more it undercuts their inclinations, the greater strength it imparts to those inclinations which it permits.

Chapter 3: What Love of the Republic Is in Democracy

The love of the republic in a democracy is love of the democracy; the love of democracy is love of equality.

The love of democracy, further, is love of frugality. Everyone there having to have the same happiness and the same advantages, they must taste the same pleasures and form the same aspirations. This is something one might only expect from a general frugality.

The love of equality in democracy limits ambition to the sole desire, the sole happiness, of offering one's fatherland greater services than the other citizens.