names only are
different, and are taken from the vocabulary of Rationalism, instead
of from that of religious mythology. Instead of divine rights men
spoke now of the everlasting and unalterable rights of man; instead of
Paradise, of a happy state of nature, in which there is, however, an
exact resemblance to Ovid's golden age, the transition into the
present form of society was represented to be due to a social contract
or agreement, occasioned, however, by a certain moral degeneracy in
mankind, only differing in name from the "Fall." In this case, also,
Anarchy is regarded as underlying society as the ideal state of
nature; every form of society is only the consequence of the
degeneration of mankind, a _pis aller_, or, at any rate, only a
voluntary renunciation of the original, inalienable, and unalterable
rights of man and nature, the chief of which is Freedom.

In the further development of this main idea the believers in the
_contrat social_ have been divided. While some, foremost among whom is
Hobbes, declared the contract thus formed once and for all as
permanent and unbreakable, and hence that the authority of the
sovereign was irrevocable and without appeal, and thus arrived at
Monarchism pure and simple; others, and these the great majority,
regarded the contract merely as provisional, and the powers of the
sovereign as therefore limited. In this case everyone is not only free
to annul the contract at any time and place himself outside the
limits of society,[8] but the contract is also regarded as broken if
the sovereign--whether a person or a body corporate--oversteps his
authority. Here the return to the primeval state of Anarchy not only
shines, as it were, afar off as a future ideal, but appears as the
permanently normal state of mankind, only occasionally disturbed by
some transitory form of social life. This idea cannot be more clearly
expressed than in the words which the poet Schiller--certainly not an
advocate of bombs--puts into the mouth of Stauffacher in _William
Tell_:

"When the oppressed . . .
. . . makes appeal to Heaven
And thence brings down his everlasting rights,
Which there abide, inalienably his,
And indestructible as are the stars,
Nature's primeval state returns again,
Where man stands hostile to his fellow-man."

How nearly the doctrine of the "social contract" corresponds to the
idea of Anarchy is shown by the circumstance that one of the first
(and what is more,