The revival of a true philosophical meaning {13} within the abstract terms of juristic tradition was the work of the eighteenth century as a whole. For the sake of clearness, and with as much historical justice as ever attaches to an attribution of the kind, we may connect it with the name of a single man--Jean Jacques Rousseau. For it is Rousseau who stands midway between Hobbes and Locke on the one hand, and Kant and Hegel on the other, and in whose writings the actual revival of the full idea of human nature may be watched from paragraph to paragraph as it struggles to throw off the husk of an effete tradition. Between Locke and Rousseau the genius of Vico and of Montesquieu had given a new meaning to the dry formulae of law by showing the sap of society circulating within them. Moreover the revived experience of the Greeks came in the nick of time. It was influential with Rousseau himself, and little as he grasped the political possibilities of a modern society, in matters of sheer principle this influence led him on the whole in the right direction. His insight was just, when it showed him that every political whole presented the same problem which had been presented by the Greek City-state, and involved the same principles. And he bequeathed to his successors the task of substituting for the mere words and fictions of contract, nature, and original freedom, the idea of the common life of an essentially social being, expressing and sustaining the human will at its best. According to the view here indicated, the resurrection of true political philosophy out of the dead body of juristic abstractions was inaugurated by {14} Vico and Montesquieu, and decisively declared itself in Jean Jacques Rousseau. The idea which most of us have formed of “the new Evangel of a _Contrat Social_” is not in harmony with this representation of the matter. Was it, we may be asked, a genuine political philosophy which inspired the leaders of the French Revolution? And the question cannot be evaded by denying all connection between the theory and the practice of that age. The phraseology of the revolutionary declarations [1]--which will strike the reader accustomed to nineteenth century socialism as exceedingly moderate and even conservative in tone--is undoubtedly to a great extent borrowed from Rousseau’s writings. [1] See the very interesting collection of documents in the Appendix to Professor Ritchie’s _Natural Rights_.