In passing, by the way, we are curious to know the writer’s authority for what he calls the odd circumstance that the Jacobins generally borrowed their phrases from the legendary history of the early Roman Republic, while the Girondins preferred to take metaphors from the literature of Rousseau (p. 75).  There was plenty of nonsense talked about Brutus and Scaevola by both parties, and It Is not possible to draw the line with precision.  But the received view Is that the Girondins were Voltairean, and the Jacobins Rousseauite, while Danton was of the school of the Encyclopaedia, and Hebert and Chaumette were inspired by Holbach.

The author seems to us greatly to exaggerate the whole position of Rousseau, and even in a certain sense to mistake the nature of his influence.  That Jean-Jacques was a far-reaching and important voice the present writer is not at all likely to deny; but no estimate of his influence in the world is correct which does not treat him rather as moralist than publicist. Emilius went deeper into men’s minds in France and in Europe at large, and did more to quicken the democratic spirit, than the Social Contract Apart from this, Sir Henry Maine places Rousseau on an isolated eminence which does not really belong to him.  It did not fall within the limited scope of such an essay as Sir Henry Maine’s to trace the leading ideas of the Social Contract to the various sources from which they had come, but his account of these sources is, even for its scale, inadequate.  Portions of Rousseau’s ideas, he says truly, may be discovered in the speculations of older writers; and he mentions Hobbes and the French Economists.  But the most characteristic of all the elements in Rousseau’s speculation were drawn from Locke.  The theoretic basis of popular government Is to be found in more or less definite shape in various authors from Thomas Aquinas downwards.  But it was Locke’s philosophic vindication of the Revolution of 1688, in the famous essay on Civil Government, that directly taught Rousseau the lesson of the Sovereignty of the People.  Such originality as the Social Contract possesses is due to its remarkable union of the influence of the two antagonistic English Thinkers.  The differences between Hobbes and Rousseau were striking enough.  Rousseau looked on men as good, Hobbes looked on them as bad.  The one described the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a state of war.  The first believed that laws and institutions had depraved man, the second that they had improved him.  In spite of these differences the influence of Hobbes was important, but only important in combination.  “The total result is,” as I have said elsewhere, “a curious fusion between the premises and the temper of Hobbes, and the conclusions of Locke.  This fusion produced that popular absolutism of which the Social Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin supremacy the practical manifestation.  Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes the true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception of the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the two together he made the great image of the Sovereign People.  Strike the crowned head from that monstrous figure which is the frontispiece of the Leviathan, and you have a frontispiece that will do excellently well for the Social Contract."[1]