Enpiclopedists and their collaborators. supported well-known political popular principles, finding fertile ground in the general spirit of the philosophical views of the world; more carried away by the brilliant development of the natural-cosmological theories of their time, they consistently did not apply the established point of view on the relationship between morality and law to a specific political construct. And having said this, they still might not have noticed the contradiction, just as its author, the former antithesis not only of an enlightened monarch, but of any monarch in general: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with his natural religion obligatory for a citizen, did not notice.
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
-chy yes mine
We believe that judgments such as the one under consideration contain a historical and methodological error. The book of Henri Michel, a staunch defender of political individualism, reveals this in the best possible way. A well-known doctrine is created, for example, political individualism, which the author associates with the revolutionary doctrine. And then, so to speak, standing on the heights of this doctrine, the author looks back. If he does not see anything similar to his systems there, he criticizes the products of the past from the point of view of an already established doctrine, classifying their authors as belonging to the opposite direction. If he looked from the point of view of the growth of the elements of the doctrine, he could find not enemies, but allies where it seemed difficult to find them.
Before moving on to the pillars of the main political doctrine of the WFC, Montesquieu and Rousseau, considered by Michel to be true individualists, let us note that Holbach gives an outline of an extremely valuable concept, which is destined to be embedded in a new theory and one of the most important issues of public law: about fundamental laws.
This understanding was not new for political writers of the 16th and 17th centuries. Tyranomachy (eg: Otman YegapsosaSha) pointed to the preconditions of absolutism, established by the primordial customs of the country - the source of the liberties of the people. We are widfly; The concept of natural freedom, which they placed at the basis of the rights of a citizen, was no longer alien to them. They already connected the idea of these rights, limiting absolutism, with the treaty, by virtue of which the prerequisites for unlimited royal power were set and with the help of it, as with the help of a phrase, they gave the outline of the idea of the political