units, all alike equal and independent, contracting
together for the first time. This is their concept of society. None
could be briefer, for, to arrive at it, man had to be reduced to a
minimum. Never were political brains so willfully dried up. For it
is the attempt to systematize and to simplify which causes their
impoverishment. In that respect they go by the methods of their time
and in the track of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: their outlook on life is the
classic view, which, already narrow in the late philosophers, has now
become even more narrow and hardened. The best representatives of the
type are Condorcet,[1120] among the Girondins, and Robespierre, among
the Montagnards, both mere dogmatists and pure logicians, the latter the
most remarkable and with a perfection of intellectual sterility never
surpassed.--Unquestionably, as far as the formulation of durable laws
is concerned, i.e. adapting the social machinery to personalities,
conditions, and circumstances; their mentality is certainly the
most impotent and harmful. It is organically short-sighted, and by
interposing their principles between it and reality, they shut off the
horizon. Beyond their crowd and the club it distinguishes nothing, while
in the vagueness and confusion of the distance it erects the hollow
idols of its own Utopia.--But when power is to be seized by assault, and
a dictatorship arbitrarily exercised, the mechanical inflexibility of
such a mind is useful rather than detrimental. It is not embarrassed
or slowed down, like that of a statesman, by the obligation to make
inquiries, to respect precedents, of looking into statistics, of
calculating and tracing beforehand in different directions the near and
remote consequences of its work as this affects the interests,
habits, and passions of diverse classes. All this is now obsolete
and superfluous: the Jacobin knows on the spot the correct form of
government and the good laws. For both construction as well as for
destruction, his rectilinear method is the quickest and most vigorous.
For, if calm reflection is required to get at what suits twenty-six
millions of living Frenchmen, a mere glance suffices to understand the
desires of the abstract men of their theory. Indeed, according to the
theory, men are all shaped to one pattern, nothing being left to them
but an elementary will; thus defined, the philosophic robot demands
liberty, equality and popular sovereignty, the maintenance of the rights