democratic conclusion. Time was needed for their full
expansion in this sense, but the result could only have been avoided
by a suppression of the Reformation, and we therefore count it
inevitable. Bodin (1577) had defined sovereignty as residing in the
supreme legislative authority, without further inquiry as to the
source or seat of that authority, though he admits the vague position
which even Lewis XIV. did not deny, that the object of political
society is the greatest good of every citizen or the whole state. In
1603 a Protestant professor of law in Germany, Althusen by name,
published a treatise of Politics, in which the doctrine of the
sovereignty of peoples was clearly formulated, to the profound
indignation both of Jesuits and of Protestant jurists.[214] Rousseau
mentions his name;[215] it does not appear that he read Althusen's
rather uncommon treatise, but its teaching would probably have a place
in the traditions of political theorising current at Geneva, to the
spirit of whose government it was so congenial. Hooker, vindicating
episcopacy against the democratic principles of the Puritans, had
still been led, apparently by way of the ever dominant idea of a law
natural, to base civil government on the assent of the governed, and
had laid down such propositions as these: "Laws they are not, which
public approbation hath not made so. Laws therefore human, of what
kind soever, are available by consent," and so on.[216] The views of
the Ecclesiastical Polity were adopted by Locke, and became the
foundation of the famous essay on Civil Government, from which popular
leaders in our own country drew all their weapons down to the outbreak
of the French Revolution. Grotius (1625) starting from the principle
that the law of nature enjoins that we should stand by our agreements,
then proceeded to assume either an express, or at any rate a tacit and
implied, promise on the part of all who become members of a community,
to obey the majority of the body, or a majority of those to whom
authority has been delegated.[217] This is a unilateral view of the
social contract, and omits the element of reciprocity which in
Rousseau's idea was cardinal.

Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed
himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's
principles. Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly
as Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics. There was the important
difference that