Marquis de Mirabeau

This chapter presents Jean-Jacques Rousseau's letter to Marquis de Mirabeau on July 26, 1767. In this letter, Rousseau critiques the book that Marquis de Mirabeau sent him: Pierre-Paul Lemercier de La Rivière's Natural and Essential Order of Political Societies . He says that he has never been able to understand very well the manifest evidence which serves as a basis for legal despotism. Rousseau then talks about human understanding and how “the natural and political laws can never constitute evidence, except by considering them in the abstract.” He also discusses the science of government, the theory of natural laws, and the vices of elective despotism and hereditary despotism. Rousseau declares that the author “treats the different forms of government a little lightly, and elections above all very lightly.”