17

The other democratic theory went from Hobbes through Rousseau into the French Constitution, where it asserted the Absolute Sovereignty of the people, and created a system of Legislative Supremacy. Probably my classification of Hobbes as a fore-runner of Rousseau is open to criticism. But in their emphasis on the absolute Sovereignty of the Sovereign they were identical. And if one substitutes a Democracy as Hobbes' sovereign which Hobbes dislikes, but does not rule out one will be very close indeed to Rousseau's position.

But Hobbes - again through Rousseau - also fathered another philosophy; the theory of the absolute supremacy of the State with the corollary of an absolute insignificance of the individual. A logical development of the concept that there is one, and only one, true Reason it leads to such paradoxes as Rousseau's "Force people to be free" and communism, "dictatorship of the proletariat to educate for democracy."

For if there is an Absolute Truth discoverable by all men of Good-will it follows that only men of Ill-Will disagree and must be liquidated. The Fascism of the 1930's and Communism to-day offer examples of this type of thinking.

This, then, is the doctrine, the history and the development of Natural Law. With all its logical inconsistencies, with all the diverse implications resulting, it still seems to express a basic human void; the search for universals, the quest for certainty in an uncertain world, the desire for understanding the incomprehensible. Few centuries have produced as many men who thought so deeply or who have come closer to solving the problem of Man's relation to Man.