The Legislator

A superior intelligence beholding all the passions of men, without experiencing any of them, is needed to discover the rules of society best suited to nations.

This intelligence would have to be wholly unrelated to our nature, while knowing it through and through;

its happiness would have to be independent of us, and yet ready to occupy itself with ours; and lastly, it would have, in the march of time, to look forward to a distant glory, and, working in one century, to be able to enjoy in the next.[1] It would take gods to give men laws.

What Caligula argued from the facts, Plato, in the dialogue called the Politicus, argued in defining the civil or kingly man, on the basis of right.

Great princes are rare. They only follow the pattern laid down by great legislators, which are rarer.

The legislator is the engineer who invents the machine.

The prince is merely the mechanic who sets it up and makes it go.

Montesquieu says “At the birth of societies, the rulers of Republics establish institutions, and afterwards the institutions mould the rulers."[2]

A creator of a people’s institutions should feel capable of:

• changing human nature
• transforming each individual into a part of a greater whole
• altering man’s constitution to strengthen it
• substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence nature has conferred on us all.

He must take away from man his own resources and give to those alien to him.

Legislation is perfect when:

• each citizen is nothing and can do nothing without the rest
• the resources acquired by the whole are more than the invidual resources added up
• the more completely these [individual] natural resources are annihilated in favor of the aggregate

[Separation of Powers]

The commander of men should not write the laws and vice versa.

Otherwise, his laws would:

• be the ministers of his passions
• perpetuate his injustices

His private aims would inevitably mar the sanctity of his work.

When Lycurgus gave laws to his country, he began by resigning the throne.

It was the custom of most Greek towns to entrust the establishment of their laws to foreigners. The Republics of modern Italy in many cases followed this example.

Geneva did the same and profited by it.[3]

Rome, when it was most prosperous, suffered all the crimes of tyranny because it put the legislative authority and the sovereign power into the same hands.

The people submit to the laws of the State as to those of nature.

The legislator when unable to appeal to either force or reason, must have recourse to a divine authority.

They credit the gods with their own wisdom so that the people might obey freely, and bear with docility the yoke of the public happiness.

But not everybody who can get himself believed to be speaking for God.

The Judaic law still subsists. The Arabs for 10 centuries have ruled half the world.

We should not, with Warburton, conclude from this that politics and religion have among us a common object, but that, in the first periods of nations, the one is used as an instrument for the other.