Ce que l'auteur entend par le mot liberté.

CHAP. 1: What the author means by the word liberty.

§ 1. Man, at first glance, presents himself to us as a being subject to needs, and provided with faculties to satisfy them. We all know that he needs to feed himself, to quench his thirst, to clothe himself, to shelter himself, etc. We also know that for this he has an intelligence, a will, and organs.

It has been much sought whether the motive force of his faculties is within himself or outside of him, in his power or outside of his power; whether he gives his attention, compares, judges, desires, deliberates, and determines himself because he wishes to and as he wishes to; or whether his faculties are put into play without him, in spite of him, by the influence of causes over which he has no dominion, and whether the result of their work is also independent of his will. Certain philosophers have claimed that he is equally master of their action and of the results of their action; and this supreme ascendancy which they attributed to him over them, they have called free will, or moral liberty. Others, on the contrary, have denied that he has such a power over them, and they have maintained that, the first impulse being given to them from without, all their movements, all their functions, all their acts are necessary consequences of this external shock. I do not have to occupy myself here with this debate. There is another investigation to be made.

Whether or not man has within himself the first motive force of his activity, it will at least be agreed that he does not always act with the same ease; it will doubtless be granted me that there can be within him, I mean in his infirmities, his inexperience, his vices, his dispositions to violence and injustice, causes very proper to prevent him from making use of his faculties; it will surely also be granted me that he succeeds, more or less, in freeing himself from these natural causes of weakness and servitude, and that as he succeeds in this, he enters into possession of a certain power, a certain facility of action that he did not feel in himself before. Finally, it will be recognized, I hope, that when he comes to unlearn what he had learned, to re-contract the vices and infirmities from which he had managed to rid himself, he loses little by little the power he had acquired, he passes back through all the degrees of powerlessness above which he had successively raised himself, and ends by falling back into his first state of imperfection and dependence.

What I call liberty, in this book, is this power that man acquires to use his forces more easily as he frees himself from the obstacles that originally hindered their exercise. I say that he is all the more free as he is more delivered from the causes that prevented him from making use of them, as he has further removed these causes from himself, as he has more enlarged and cleared the sphere of his action.

And it must not be said, as has been done, that when I use the word liberty in this way, I am diverting it from its ordinary acceptation; for on the contrary, I employ it in its most usual and familiar sense. Consult, in effect, the books of those writers who have most sought to put clarity and precision into their language; open Locke, Condillac, de Tracy; interrogate the Academy and its dictionary, and you will see that what is most commonly understood by liberty is power, it is the power we acquire to use our faculties as we remove the obstacles that oppose their exercise, of whatever nature these obstacles may be, whether their principle be in us or outside of us, in our own infirmities or in the injustice of other men. It is thus that one says a man has a free mind, that he enjoys a great liberty of mind, not only when his intelligence is troubled by no internal violence, but also when it is neither obscured by drunkenness, nor altered by illness, nor held in powerlessness by lack of exercise. It is also thus that one says a man has a free tongue and free hands, not only when he has been put in neither irons on his hands nor a gag in his mouth, but also when these organs are, in him, neither struck by paralysis, nor given over to a convulsive agitation, etc. The slightest reflection suffices to assure us that, in habitual language, one calls liberty the power we have acquired to use our forces, whatever the nature of the obstacle that opposed their exercise and from which we have succeeded in freeing them.

For the rest, without troubling myself further about the use that each may make of this word, I confine myself to repeating here how I understand it, and what meaning one must consent to attach to it if one has the desire to understand me. I therefore advise the reader, once again, that the word liberty corresponds, in my thought, to the idea of power, and that the phenomenon I wish to designate by it is that ever-increasing power to act which manifests itself in us as we succeed in ridding our faculties of some of the obstacles that prevented us from making use of them.

§ 2. Naturally, man, in the use of his faculties, can be prevented by several very general causes.

He is first circumscribed by the laws of his organization, which do not permit him to leave a certain sphere of activity. While in one sense he can develop and extend himself almost to infinity, in another aspect, he immediately touches the limits of the possible. All that implies a contradiction with his nature, he is under the most absolute impossibility of executing. It is in no way in his power, for example, to escape the general laws of gravity, to breathe in a place deprived of air, to see in the absence of all light. One must not, therefore, ask in what his liberty consists in this regard; for, an insurmountable obstacle here opposing his action, it is visible that in this, all liberty is refused him [^10] .

Next, even within the sphere that has been opened to his activity, man can naturally be prevented from acting, on the one hand by ignorance, which holds all his faculties in inertia, and on the other hand by passion, which gives them a disordered activity, which excites him to use them in a manner prejudicial to himself or to others, and which thus perpetually tends to weaken and to hinder their use.

Man, by the invincible laws of his nature, can therefore use his forces without impediment, or with liberty, only in the space where he has been given to act; and, even in this space, for him to be able to dispose of them freely, it is necessary,

First, that he has developed them;

Second, that he has learned to use them in such a way as not to harm himself;

Third, that he has contracted the habit of confining their use within the bounds of what cannot harm other men.

§ 3. I say first that he must have developed them. And in effect, who does not see that he does not have the liberty to use them so long as he has not learned to make use of them. Place the keyboard of a piano under the fingers of a man who, in his life, has handled only the spade or the plow: will he be free to perform a sonata? Our organs, before we have trained them, are for us as if they did not exist; we are in no way the masters of using them. It is indeed generally in our power to learn what we are ignorant of; but we are masters of doing it only after having learned it: ignorance has for us all the effects of an insurmountable impediment, and the most violent despotism would not put us in a more absolute powerlessness to act than does the lack of exercise and experience.

In the second place, I say that, to be free to use our faculties, we must know how to confine the use of them within the bounds of what cannot harm us. It is clear, in effect, that we cannot use them in such a way as to do ourselves harm without diminishing, by that very fact, the power we have to make use of them. We are indeed the masters, up to a certain point, of executing actions that are prejudicial to us; but we are not the masters, in executing such actions, of losing nothing of our liberty. It is a matter of universal experience that what depraves, enervates, and debases our faculties, takes from us the liberty of using them; and of all pretensions the most absurd and contradictory would doubtless be to wish at once to abuse them and to keep them sound, to live in debauchery and not harm one's health, to squander one's forces and lose none of them, etc.Finally, I say, and this third proposition is no less evident than the first two, that to dispose freely of our forces, we must use them in such a way as not to harm our fellow men. We do indeed have, to a certain extent, the power to commit crime; but we do not have the power to do so without proportionally diminishing our liberty to act. Every man who employs his faculties to do evil, thereby compromises their use: it is in some manner to kill oneself to make an attempt on the life of another; it is to compromise one's fortune to encroach upon that of others. It is surely not impossible that some men may escape the consequences, or at least some of the consequences, of a malevolent life; but the exceptions, if there are any real ones, do not invalidate the principle. The inevitable effect of injustice and violence is to expose the unjust and violent man to hatreds, vengeances, and reprisals, to deprive him of security and repose, to oblige him to be continually on his guard—all things which evidently diminish his liberty. "If you wish," said Sully to Henri IV, "to subject the majority of your subjects by force of arms, you would have to endure a thousand difficulties, fatigues, pains, vexations, perils, and labors; to have your backside always in the saddle, a hauberk on your back, a helmet on your head, a pistol in your fist, and a sword in your hand [^11] ." It is not in any man's power to remain free by putting himself at war with his species. It was, it has been said, a commonplace remark of Bonaparte's that there is nothing one cannot do with a strong army. "Well then! I will go to Madrid, I will go to Vienna with an army of five hundred thousand men; one can do what one wants." With an army of five hundred thousand men, one can go to die, captive and forsaken, on a desert rock in the middle of the Atlantic. The most powerful despot cannot be powerful enough to always remain the master. And what I say of an individual can be said of the vastest assemblies of men. We have seen many parties, we have seen many peoples seek liberty in domination; we have not seen one whom domination, through many agitations, perils, and provisional misfortunes, has not led sooner or later to definitive ruin.

Hobbes says that in the state of nature it is permissible for each to do as he pleases [^12] . There is no doubt that in any state whatsoever, a man has the physical power to commit a certain number of violent acts. But is there any state, according to Hobbes, where one can be unjust and wicked with impunity? Is it not equally true in all times and in all situations that injury provokes hatred, that murder exposes the life of the murderer? What, then, does it mean to say that in the state of nature it is permitted for each to do as he pleases? It is, in every state, imperiously commanded of him who does not wish to suffer insults, that he not commit any. I know well that, in the first ages of society, each man exercises more violence; but each also endures much more. Resistance is naturally proportioned to the attack, and reaction to the action. It is by this that the species maintains itself: only that which resists endures.

I will also add that if, to be free, it is necessary to abstain from evil, it is just as indispensable not to endure it; for it is by the energy one puts into not enduring it that one gives others an interest in not doing it. So long as one is willing to bend to an injustice, one can count on it being committed. Nothing is more corrupting than weakness: by consenting to suffer everything, one gives others an interest in daring everything. Alceste makes an equal division of his hatred between malicious men and complaisant men. I do not know if they have an equal right to it. Evil comes perhaps less from the malice of unjust men than from the weakness of pusillanimous men. It is the latter who spoil the others. It is the great number that depraves the small by submitting too easily to its caprices. We all have need of a check, and all the more so as we dispose of more forces. If individuals must be contained by power, power has an even greater need to be contained by society. It is for society to furnish it with motives for good conduct; it is for society to attach so much disgust and so much peril to the abuse of power that the most audacious despots, that the most unbridled factions, feel the need to contain themselves. If one wishes to know how much we need to be restrained so as not to fall into injustice, and to what point a legitimate resistance is necessary to liberty, one need only see how the strong everywhere treat the weak; one need only see how our race, which calls itself Christian and civilized, treats those which are not capable of resisting its violence: the Europeans still carry on the trade in negroes, and have, according to M. de Humboldt, more than five million slaves in the colonies! [^13]

For the rest, viewing things in a somewhat broad manner, one can say that humanity has not failed itself, and that if there has been in the world a frightening mass of unjust aggressions, there have been even more just and honorable acts of resistance. This is proven by the sole fact that the human race has not perished, that the just cause, that the actions which conserve the species, have more and more prevailed. It must be, therefore, that the unjust cause has been repressed, that the wicked have been punished; and, to return to my preceding proposition, it remains constant that the unjust man loses the free use of his forces in the practice of violence and iniquity.

Thus man, by the very nature of things, can have liberty (in the space where he has been permitted to exercise his forces) only in proportion to his industry, his instruction, and the good habits he has formed with regard to himself and toward his fellow men. He can be free to do only what he knows; and he can do with security only that which harms neither himself nor others. His liberty depends at once on the development of his faculties, and on their development in a suitable direction.

§ 4. If, to be free, we need to develop our faculties, it follows that the more we have developed them, the more extended and varied is the use we can make of them, and the more liberty we also have. Thus we are all the freer as we have more strength, activity, industry, knowledge; as we are more able to satisfy all our needs; as we are less in dependence on things: each step of progress extends our power to act, each new faculty is a new liberty. All this is self-evident. Rousseau may well place the liberty of the savage man above that of the civilized man; his eloquence will not make it so that he whose faculties are barely formed can dispose of them as freely as he who has developed, fortified, and perfected them by culture.

If, to be free, we need to abstain, in the exercise of our faculties, from all that could harm us, it follows that the better we know how to regulate their use with respect to ourselves, the more we have learned to make an enlightened, prudent, and moderate use of them, the freer we also are. Place a man who has good moral habits next to a man incapable of regulating any of his sentiments, of satisfying with measure any of his appetites, and you will see which one, in any circumstance, will better preserve the free disposition of his forces.

If, finally, to be free, we must refrain, in the use of our faculties, from any act prejudicial to others, it follows that the better we know how to make use of them without doing harm, the more we have learned to give them a direction useful for ourselves without being offensive to others, the more liberty we have also acquired. This proposition has all the certainty of the preceding ones. Compare the state of peoples who prosper by peaceful means to the state of peoples who have founded their prosperity on domination; compare the warlike nations of antiquity to the industrious nations of modern ages; compare Europe, where so many men still seek their fortune in power, to those United States of America where the universality of citizens aspires to become rich only through labor, and you will soon discover where there is the most true liberty.

Men are therefore slaves only because they have not developed their faculties and learned to regulate their use. They are free only because they have developed and regulated them. It is true to say, literally, that they never suffer any other oppression than that of their ignorance and their bad morals; just as it is true to say that they never have any liberty but that which the extent of their instruction and the goodness of their habits permit. The more uncultivated they are, the less they can act; the more cultivated they are, the freer they are: the true measure of liberty is civilization.

§ 5. There are few things that have been understood more diversely than liberty, and of which, in general, more imperfect ideas are held. It is rather rare, at least in books of politics and morals, that it is considered as a result of our development. Far from thinking that it follows the progress of our faculties, many people imagine that it decreases as they are perfected, and that the uncultivated man, the savage man, was freer than the civilized man is. Above all, there is no idea that all our progress, of whatever nature it may be, contributes immediately to extending it. One might perhaps say that men become freer by becoming more just, by all confining themselves more exactly within the bounds of equity; but one will not say, although the thing is just as certain, that they become freer by becoming more sober, more temperate, by learning to make better use of their faculties with respect to themselves. Nor will one say that they become freer for the sole reason that they become more industrious, richer, more instructed, although this is an equally incontestable truth. Let us succinctly examine some of the ideas that are held of liberty. We shall thereby finish clarifying and confirming the idea that, in our view, one ought to have of it.

Men are born and remain free, said the Constituent Assembly [^14] . These few words would make me doubt that this illustrious assembly had a very just idea of liberty. Liberty is not something fixed and absolute, as this declaration would seem to suggest. It is susceptible of more and less; it is proportioned to the degree of culture. Furthermore, it is not something one brings at birth. It is not true, in fact, that men are born free; they are born with the aptitude to become so; but the moment of their birth is assuredly that when they are least so. If they are not born free, one cannot say that they remain so; but one can say that they become so, and what must be said is that they become all the more so as they learn to make a more extended, more moral, and more reasonable use of their faculties.

The Constituent Assembly defined liberty as the power to do whatever does not harm others [^15] . This definition was at least incomplete. One of the conditions of liberty is doubtless that men reciprocally abstain from harming one another; but this essential condition is not the only condition. It would not suffice for us, to be free, to know how to respect one another; it is also necessary that each of us know how to respect himself. Nor would it suffice for us to be moral; we must also be skillful. Liberty depends on all these conditions and not on a single one; it is all the greater as they are all more fully accomplished.

A celebrated English jurist has severely criticized the definition of the Constituent Assembly. It is not true, according to him, that liberty consists in being able to do what does not cause harm. "It consists," he says, "in being able to do what one wants, evil as well as good; and it is for this very reason that laws are necessary to restrict it to acts that are not harmful [^16] ." One is not a little surprised to see a philosopher as eminently judicious as Bentham thus place full liberty in license, and find that laws restrict it by forbidding us to do evil. Nothing, assuredly, is less exact than this proposition. It is not true that we would be freer if the laws did not forbid us to do violence to one another; it is manifest, on the contrary, that we would be much less so; we would enjoy no security; we would live in continual alarm; almost all our faculties would be paralyzed. The laws therefore increase our power to act, far from restricting it by forbidding us certain actions; and instead of saying, as Bentham does, "that one cannot prevent men from harming one another except by taking away from their liberty [^17] ," it must be said that one of the best means of extending their liberty is to prevent them from harming one another.

Moreover, the error I point out here is not particular to Bentham. It is a prejudice of most publicists that men enjoy a more extended liberty in the savage state, in what they call the state of nature, than in the bosom of perfected society. "In the state of nature," they say, "men enjoy an unlimited liberty, whereas in the state of society they are obliged to sacrifice a portion of their liberty to preserve the other." All this seems to me very inexact. Let us first observe that there does not exist, in fact, a state of nature different from the state of society. Society is the natural state of man. Man is in a state of society in the savage life, in the nomadic life, in the agricultural and sedentary life. He is equally in a state of nature in all these states, that is to say, all these states are natural to him, or it is in his nature to pass through them all. If, in the infinite diversity of those he traverses to arrive at his full development, there were one which deserved the name of state of nature by preference, it would be that in which he most closely approaches his destination, the state of perfected society, and certainly not the imperfect state that has been designated by the name of savage state. Next, if the savage state is not that which best deserves the name of state of nature, neither is it that in which man enjoys the most extended liberty. Liberty, far from being unlimited there, is much more circumscribed there than in any other state. I have said enough to make this understood, and I will not insist on this truth which will, moreover, be developed in another chapter. Finally, it is not true that in the state of perfected society man enjoys liberty only by sacrificing a part of it. What is true is that in all possible states man can be free only by making the sacrifice of his ignorance and his vices, of his violence and his weaknesses. But in making this sacrifice to liberty, it is not liberty that he sacrifices, but that which destroys it or prevents it from being born. He does not limit his power by forbidding himself theft, murder, debauchery, by taking from himself the sad faculty of being unreasonable and of misbehaving; it is visible, on the contrary, that he extends it, and it is even only by enchaining himself in this way that he can give himself more latitude to act, and acquire all the liberty to which his nature permits him to aspire.

Nothing is more ordinary than to see liberty presented as something opposed to order, to reason, to wisdom. One speaks continually of a reasonable liberty, of a wise liberty in opposition to liberty simply so called, which by itself appears neither reasonable enough nor wise enough. One also says that liberty is precious, but that order is more precious still, and every day one comes to demand, in the interest of order, the sacrifice of liberty. Do I need to say that there is not between these things the opposition that one affects to place there? In what do wisdom and reason consist, if not in the most perfect use of all our faculties? and how can we enjoy liberty, if not precisely by using our faculties as reason and wisdom demand? Where do we see the truest order reign? is it not where each abstains from all aggression, from all injustice? And what does liberty demand? is it not, among other things, that each forbid himself violence and iniquity? There is therefore, under the words order, wisdom, reason, no idea that the word liberty does not embrace; and he who demands the sacrifice of liberty in the interest of order is just as much an enemy of order as an enemy of liberty.A prejudice little different from the one I have just combated is that which presents liberty as an element of turmoil, and despotism as a guarantee of peace. This is the meaning of that political adage, so well known and so frequently cited: Malo periculosum libertatem quam quietum servitium: I prefer the storms of liberty to the peace of servitude. It is insensate to thus ally the ideas of order and security with despotism, and those of agitation and peril with liberty. If despotism were, more than liberty, favorable to the repose of men, it would have to be preferred, that is indubitable. But it is not so: what troubles the world, on the contrary, is despotism; what pacifies it is liberty; and that is precisely why liberty is preferable to despotism. It is liberty that is tranquil, it is despotism that is turbulent. Wherever some men wish to oppress others, there is violence, disorder, and cause for disorders; wherever none affects dominating pretensions, wherever there is liberty, there is repose and a guarantee of repose. One need only open one's eyes to be convinced of it. Compare the countries where there is the most tyranny to those where there is the least, and say whether the freest are not also the most peaceful? What is more horribly convulsive than Turkish despotism! what more profoundly peaceful than Anglo-American liberty!

Certain persons place, in their esteem, liberty far below security; others esteem it less than property; others, less than equality, and all believe they must distinguish it from these things. This distinction seems to me to have little foundation. There is here more difference in the words than in the ideas they express; and whoever holds to his security, whoever regards property and equality as important things, must, by that very fact, attach the greatest price to liberty. All these things, in effect, can exist only in places where liberty reigns. There is security where no man thinks of doing violence to any other. There is property where no man prevents any other from disposing as he pleases, in all that does not harm others, of his person, of his faculties, and of the product of his faculties. There is equality not where everyone possesses the same degree of virtue, of capacity, of fortune, of importance, for such an equality can exist nowhere; but where none possesses any importance but that which is proper to him, where each can acquire all that he is legitimately capable of having. Equality, property, security thus result, if not from all the causes that concur in the production of liberty, at least from one of those which contribute most to producing it, that is to say, from the absence of all unjust pretension, of all violent enterprise. These things are liberty itself, considered from a certain point of view. Security is specially that liberty to dispose of one's person, property that liberty to dispose of one's fortune, equality that liberty to rise in proportion to one's means, which manifest themselves where each keeps himself within the bounds of moderation and justice.

§ 6. Among the errors into which one falls on the subject of liberty, there is one that is particularly vexing, and which, for that reason, I must consider separately. It is wished that liberty result not from the state of society, but from the will of the government. It is said that there is liberty to do a thing when the government permits it; it is said that there is in a country just as much liberty as the government grants; and by government is meant a thing distinct from society, and existing in some way outside of it.

This is, I believe, a very inexact and very incomplete way of viewing the thing.

First, there is no way to distinguish the government from society. The government is in society; it is intrinsically a part of it; it is society itself considered in one of its principal modes of action, namely the repression of violence, the maintenance of order and security. The forms according to which it exercises this action, and the more or less enlightened and more or less moral manner in which it exercises it, depend essentially on the will of society. It is, in all times, the exact expression of the political ideas and habits that predominate in its midst, or in the countries by which it is surrounded and to whose influence it is more or less subject [^18] . The more these ideas and habits are imperfect, the more the government is imperfect. It is all the better as they are better themselves. There is not a defective institution, there is not a vicious act of power of which one cannot show in detail all the causes in the state of society. Instead, therefore, of saying that liberty depends solely on that collection of individuals and constituted bodies to which one gives the name of government, it would be necessary to say first that it depends on the goodness of the political ideas and habits that predominate among peoples.

Next, this expression, though more exact, would still have the defect of not giving a complete idea of the sources of liberty. Liberty, in effect, does not depend solely on the goodness of our political ideas and habits; it depends on the goodness of all our ideas and all our habits; that is to say, we are all the freer as we know how to make, in all respects, a better use of our faculties. It is true that the knowledge and virtues proper to constitute the good citizen may lead one to suppose a great number of others, and that when a people has reached a point of culture high enough to conduct itself well politically, there is reason to believe that it has made considerable progress in the other parts of civilization, and that it enjoys, in all respects, a very extended liberty. But from the fact that political capacity ordinarily leads one to suppose a great number of others, one must not conclude that liberty comes solely from that one; it comes from that one and from the others; it flows generally from them all; it grows by the progress of all our means. I do not see the least reason to say that we become free by training ourselves in public justice and not in training ourselves in private justice, by becoming skillful in government and not by becoming skillful in agriculture, commerce, or any other special mode of activity. Our progress, in effect, all equally has for its result to remove some of the obstacles that oppose the exercise of our forces: they all therefore have for their result to contribute immediately to the extension of our liberty.

Not only does liberty not lie entirely in what we have of political virtue and skill, but our other developments do not even necessarily depend on that one. We begin to make progress in intelligence, in industry, in morality, long before having politically emerged from barbarism. It is true that political barbarism at first makes this progress excessively slow; but experience demonstrates that it does not make it absolutely impossible. It suffices, to be convinced of this, to consider through what series of wars, of violences, and of public disorders of every kind civilization has managed to break through.

Once again, it is therefore not true that all liberty is contained in what we have of political capacity, nor even that our other progress necessarily depends on that which we have made in this respect. Political capacity is ordinarily the last that a people acquires [^19] . To conduct oneself well politically is the last thing of which it becomes capable. This last progress crowns liberty; but it is not liberty entire. It renders, as it is accomplished, other progress easier; but it is surely not the condition of all progress. A people can enjoy an immense liberty before having raised itself to self-government, and especially before having learned to govern itself reasonably. There can be in it much knowledge, industry, capital, good personal and relative habits. Now it is visible that it cannot have acquired all this without having procured for itself, by that very fact, a great power, without having given itself much facility and latitude for acting. One must not, without a doubt, exclude the highest of capacities, political capacity, from the idea of liberty; but one must not include it there alone. To define it with exactitude, it would be necessary to make an inventory of all that humanity possesses of real knowledge and true virtues. It is equal for each people to the progress it has made in all the branches of civilization; it is composed of all its practical skill and moral conduct: that is its true definition.

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Notes

[^10]: The word liberty never expresses anything but a relative quantity. There is no absolute liberty. Every created being is subject to laws and can act only within fixed and precise limits. The expression, free as the air, which is sometimes used as if to designate a boundless liberty, expresses only a very limited liberty: the atmosphere is invincibly linked to the earth; the winds are subject to irrefutable laws: the air is therefore not indefinitely free. No material body is. Animate beings are no more so, and man is no more so than the rest of creation. Man, like animals, like all the forces spread throughout nature, is susceptible only of a certain kind and a certain extent of action. [^11]: Royal Economies. [^12]: Philosophical Elements of the Citizen. [^13]: See the Revue protestante, first issue. [^14]: Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, art. 1. [^15]: Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, art. 4. [^16]: Bentham, Tactique des assemblées représentatives, vol. II, p. 343, 1822 edition. [^17]: Tactique des assemblées représentatives, vol. II, p. 285. [^18]: See chap. IV, at the end. [^19]: I say ordinarily, because this rule is not without exception. In the United States, for example, the development of political capacity preceded that of the other capacities. We know to what circumstances this was due.