Chapter 6 Necessary Inequalities

Nature goes forward with actions of authority and inequality, contradicting at a right angle,

the odd liberal and democratic hypothesis.

Charles Maras

Let us carry on with the analysis of the principle of liberalism.

It is contrary to nature, says Cardinal B.O.

In that it pretends that everything should give way to the good of individual liberty, that social necessities have multiplied the obstacles to this

liberty, and that the ideal regime for man is that in which the law of pure and perfect

individualism would reign. This individualism

is absolutely contrary to human nature. You will have recognized the individualistic liberalism

of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which we find again at the bottom of all present-day political thought.

According to Rousseau, men are born free, that is to say, subjected to no restraint, by nature

a-social, created to live alone in the jungle where they are happy. The origin of their misfortunes

and of inequality resides in the introduction of private property, which engendered rivalries,

a state of war of all against all. If men group themselves then in society, it is in no way out of a necessity of their nature,

but is by the sole decision of their free will, as an emergency exit from the state where

man is a wolf towards other men. Society has nothing natural. It is purely conventional

in its historical origin and in its constitution.

This convention is the social contract. This whole theory is refuted in advance, first by St. Thomas

Aquinas, who demonstrates the social nature of man, by bringing into evidence the fact that man is the

animal most devoid of natural means of subsisting in an autonomous manner when he comes into the world,

and this other fact that men at the adult age cannot satisfy all their needs alone, therefore they have to help one another.

...