I.1. The Twofold Aim of the Science of Government

The science of government proposes, or ought to propose, as its aim the happiness of men united in society. It seeks the means of assuring them the highest felicity compatible with their nature; it seeks at the same time the means of making the greatest possible number of individuals share in that felicity. In none of the political sciences should this twofold aim of the legislator’s efforts be lost from view. He must attend at once to the degree of happiness man can attain through social organisation, and to the equitable share of all in that happiness. He has not accomplished his task if, in order to assure equal enjoyments to all, he makes impossible the full development of a few distinguished individuals; if he allows none to rise above his fellows, and holds up none as a model to the human race and a guide in the discoveries that will turn to the advantage of all. Nor has he accomplished it if, aiming only at the formation of these privileged beings, he raises a small number above their fellow citizens at the price of the suffering and degradation of all the rest. The nation in which no one suffers, but in which no one enjoys enough leisure or enough comfort to feel keenly and to think deeply, is only half civilised, even though it should offer its lower classes a fair chance of happiness. The nation in which the great mass of the population is exposed to constant privations, to cruel anxieties about its existence, to everything that can bend its will, deprave its morals and wither its character, is enslaved, even though it should count in its upper classes men who have reached the highest degree of human felicity, men all of whose faculties are developed, all of whose rights are guaranteed, all of whose enjoyments are assured.

When, on the contrary, the legislator no more loses sight of the development of a few than of the happiness of all; when he succeeds in organising a society in which individuals can attain the highest distinction of mind and soul, and the most refined enjoyments, but in which at the same time all the members of the association are assured of finding protection, instruction, moral development and physical comfort, he has accomplished his task; and it is surely the finest that man can set himself on earth. It is in pursuing this noble aim that the science of legislation is the most sublime theory of beneficence. It cares for men both as a nation and as individuals; it protects those whom the imperfection of all our institutions leaves unable to protect themselves; and the inequality it maintains ceases to be an injustice, for if it favours some men, it is in order to prepare in them new benefactors for the whole species.

But nothing is more common in all the political sciences than to lose sight of one or the other side of this twofold aim. Some, passionate lovers of equality, revolt against every kind of distinction. To judge the prosperity of a nation they always compare the sum of its wealth, its rights and its enlightenment with each man’s share; and the distance they find between the powerful and the weak, the opulent and the poor, the idle and the labourer, the educated and the ignorant, leads them to conclude that the privations of the latter are monstrous vices in the political order. Others, always considering the aim of men’s efforts in the abstract, call it liberty when they find a guarantee for various rights and means of resistance, as in the republics of antiquity, even though that order is founded on the slavery of the lower classes. When they find ingenuity of mind, deep reflection, an inquiring philosophy and a brilliant literature among the distinguished men of a nation, as in France before the Revolution, they see in that social order a high degree of civilisation, even though four-fifths of the nation cannot read and every province is sunk in deep ignorance. When they find an immense accumulation of wealth, a perfected agriculture, a prosperous commerce, manufactures that ceaselessly multiply all the products of human industry, and a government with almost inexhaustible treasures at its disposal, as in England, they call the nation that possesses all these things opulent, without stopping to ask whether all those who work with their hands, all those who create this wealth, are not reduced to the barest necessities; whether a tenth of them do not have recourse to public charity every year; and whether three-fifths of the individuals of the nation they call rich are not exposed to more privations than an equal proportion of individuals in the nation they call poor.

The association of men in a body politic could not have come about in the past, and cannot maintain itself even today, except by reason of the common advantage they draw from it. No right can have been established among them unless it is founded on the confidence they have mutually granted one another as all tending to the same end. Order subsists because the immense majority of those who belong to the body politic see their security in order; and government exists only to procure, in the name of all, the common advantage that all expect from it.

Thus the various goods unequally distributed in society are guaranteed by it when the advantage of all results from their very inequality. The means of bringing some individuals to the highest possible distinction, the means of turning that individual distinction to the greatest advantage of all, the means of preserving all citizens equally from suffering and of preventing any of them from being crushed by the play of the passions or the pursuit of the interests of his fellow associates: all these various objects belong equally to the science of government, for all are equally essential to the development of national happiness.