Abstract

As a study of Hobbes and Rousseau which shows that the seeds of totalitarianism are ingredient in their individualism, this book is a success. Hobbes proceeds from individual natural rights of men to the primacy of sovereign political will with all its concomitant dangers of the total subordination of the individual to the power of the sovereign. Rousseau, unlike Hobbes, attempts to preserve man’s liberty in society. By the social contract man exchanges his natural liberty for civil liberty. But the state then becomes an absolute, ‘universally compulsive power’; the General Will is always right and so potentially totalitarian. The author does well to point up these sometimes overlooked facets of Hobbes and Rousseau, and he argues well that in their systems totalitarianism can spring up in the garden of individualism.