So far as the mechanism of government is concerned, Diderot writes much as Montesquieu had done.  Under the head of Representants he proclaims the advantages, not exactly of government by a representative assembly, but of assisting and advising the royal government by means of such an assembly.  There is no thought of universal suffrage. “It is property that makes the citizen; every man who has possessions in the state is interested in the state, and whatever be the rank that particular conventions may assign to him, it is always as a proprietor; it is by reason of his possessions that he ought to speak, and that he acquires the right of having himself represented.”  Yet this very definite statement does not save him from the standing difficulty of a democratic philosophy of politics.  Nor can it be reconciled in point of logic with other propositions to which Diderot commits himself in the same article.  For instance, he says that “no order of citizens is capable of stipulating for all; if one order had the right, it would very soon come to stipulate only for itself; each class ought to be represented by men who know its condition and its needs; these needs are only well known to those who actually feel them.”  But then, in that case, the poorest classes are those who have most need of direct representation; they are the most numerous, their needs are sharpest, they are the classes to which war, consumption of national capital and way of expending national income, equal laws, judicial administration, and the other concerns of a legislative assembly, come most close.  The problem is to reconcile the sore interests of the multitude with the ignorance and the temper imputed in Diderot’s own description of them.

An interesting study might be made, if the limits of our subject permitted such a digression, on the new political ideas which a century’s experience in England, France, Germany, the American Union, has added to the publicist’s stock.  Diderot’s article on the Legislator is a curious mixture of views which political thinkers have left behind, with views which the most enlightened statesmen have taken up.  There is much talk after the fashion of Jean Jacques Rousseau about the admirable legislation of Lycurgus at Sparta, the philosophical government of the great empire of China, and the fine spirit of the institutions of Peru.  We perceive that the same influences which made Rousseau’s political sentimentalism so popular also brought even strong heads like Diderot to believe in the unbounded power of a government to mould men at its will, and to impose institutions at discretion.  The idea that it is the main function of a government to make its people virtuous, is generally as strong in Diderot as it was in Rousseau, and as it became in Robespierre.  He admires the emperors of China, because their edicts are as the exhortation of a father to his children.  All edicts, he says, ought to instruct and to exhort as much as they command.  Yet two years after the Encyclopaedia was finished (1774), when Turgot prefaced his reforming edicts by elaborate and reasoned statements of the grounds for them, it was found that his prefaces caused greater provocation than the very laws that they introduced.