Dominion, Chapter XII, 2

6 It is a common doctrine that faith and holiness are not acquired through study and natural reason, but are always supernaturally infused and inspired in human beings. If this were true, I do not understand why we should be commanded to give an account of our faith; why every true Christian should not be a prophet; or, finally, why each person should not judge what he ought to do and avoid by his own inspiration rather than by the precepts of his superiors or right reason. This would return us to private knowledge of good and evil, which cannot be allowed without destroying every government. The opinion has spread so widely throughout the Christian world that those who have abandoned natural reason have become almost innumerable. It arose from disordered minds that, having gathered a rich store of sacred words by frequently reading Scripture, habitually put them together in their preaching so that their sermons meant nothing at all, yet seemed most divine to the unlearned. For a man whose nonsense sounds like divine speech must seem to be inspired from above.

That individual subjects possess property or absolute dominion over their own goods is a seditious opinion.

7 The seventh doctrine opposed to government is that every subject has absolute dominion over the goods in his possession: that is, a property right excluding not only all his fellow subjects from those goods, but the magistrate himself. This is untrue: those who have a lord over them have no lordship themselves, as was proved in chap. viii. art. 5. Now by the constitution of government the magistrate is lord over all his subjects. Before the yoke of civil society was assumed, no one had a private right; everything was common to everyone. Tell me, then, how did you get this property except from the magistrate? How did the magistrate get it, except through every man's transfer of his right to him? You too, therefore, have surrendered your right to him. Your dominion and property extend only as far as he wills, and endure only as long as he pleases; just as in a family each son has private goods of the kind, and for the length of time, that his father sees fit. But most who profess an understanding of civil affairs reason differently. We are equal by nature, they say; there is no reason why another should have a better right to take my goods from me than I have to take his. We know that money is sometimes needed for the defense and maintenance of the public; but let those who ask for it show us the present necessity, and they shall have it. Those who speak thus do not know that what they demand was already done at the beginning, in the very constitution of government. Speaking as though they belonged to an ungoverned multitude in which government had not yet taken shape, they destroy its structure.

Failure to distinguish a people from a multitude prepares the way for sedition.

8 Lastly, a great obstacle to civil government, especially monarchy, is that people do not distinguish sufficiently between a people and a multitude. The people is a single entity, with one will, to which one action may be attributed; none of this can properly be said of a multitude. The people rules in every form of government. Even in monarchies the people commands, since the people wills through the will of one man; but the multitude consists of citizens, that is, subjects. In a democracy and an aristocracy, the citizens are the multitude, but the governing assembly is the people. In a monarchy, the subjects are the multitude and, however paradoxical it may seem, the king is the people. Ordinary people, and others who give these truths little thought, always speak of a great number of people as the people, that is, the city. They say that the city has rebelled against the king—which is impossible—and that the people wills or rejects whatever disgruntled and discontented subjects desire or oppose. Under the pretext of acting for the people, they stir up citizens against the city: the multitude against the people. These are nearly all the opinions that, once they infect subjects, readily drive them to riot. And since in every form of government majesty must be preserved by whoever holds supreme authority, the crimen læsæ majestatis—the crime against majesty—naturally attaches to these opinions.

An excessive tax on money, however just and necessary, inclines people to sedition.

9 Nothing afflicts the human mind more than poverty, or the lack of what is necessary to preserve life and honor. Though everyone knows that wealth is acquired by industry and kept by thrift, the poor commonly blame bad government, excusing their own idleness and extravagance, as though public levies, of all things, had squandered their private goods. But people must consider that those with no inheritance must labor not only to live but also fight so that they may labor. Each of the Jews who built Jerusalem's walls in Esdras’ time worked with one hand and held a sword in the other. In every government we must understand that the hand holding the sword belongs to the king or supreme council, and that it must be supported and sustained by the subjects’ care and industry no less than the hand with which each man makes his private fortune. Customs duties and taxes are nothing other than the reward of those who keep armed watch over us, so that the labors and endeavors of individuals may not be disrupted by enemy incursions. Those who blame public officials for their poverty complain no more justly than if they said that paying their debts had impoverished them. But most people consider none of this. They suffer what happens to those afflicted by the disease called an incubus: arising from gluttony, it makes them think a great weight has invaded, oppressed, and stifled them. Clearly, those who imagine themselves bearing the entire burden of the commonwealth are prone to sedition; those who dislike the present state of things favor change.

Ambition inclines people to sedition:

10 Another harmful disease of mind afflicts those who have little occupation and lack honor and rank. All people naturally strive for honor and advancement, but especially those least troubled by the need to provide necessities. Their leisure draws them sometimes into disputing with one another about the commonwealth, sometimes into effortless reading of histories, works on politics, speeches, poems, and other agreeable books. As a result they suppose themselves adequately equipped with both wit and learning to administer affairs of the greatest consequence. But not everyone is what he imagines himself to be; and even if they were, the number of them would prevent all from receiving public office. Many must therefore be passed over. Feeling slighted, they desire nothing more than the failure of public deliberations, partly through envy of those preferred over them and partly in the hope of bringing those people down. Little wonder, then, that they eagerly seek opportunities for revolution.

So does hope of success.

11 Hope of victory must also be counted among the inclinations toward sedition. Let as many people as you please hold opinions contrary to peace and civil government; let as many as possible be stung and wounded by the insults and slanders of those in authority. Yet if they have no hope, or insufficient hope, of overcoming them, no sedition will follow. Each will conceal his thoughts and content himself with the present burden rather than risk a heavier one. Four things are essential to such hope: numbers, equipment, mutual trust, and commanders. Resistance to public magistrates without large numbers is not sedition but desperation. By the equipment of war I mean every kind of arms, ammunition, and other necessary supplies, without which numbers can do nothing. Arms too are useless without mutual trust, and all these are useless without unity under a commander whom the others willingly obey—not because their submission binds them to his command, for earlier in this very chapter we supposed that such people do not understand an obligation beyond what seems right and good in their own eyes, but because they esteem his courage or military skill or find his temperament like their own. If these four things are at hand for people aggrieved by present conditions, who measure the justice of their actions by their own judgments, only someone to stir and animate them is needed to plunge the realm into sedition and confusion.

Eloquence without wisdom is the one faculty needed to raise seditions.

12 Sallust describes Cataline, the greatest master of raising seditions, as having great eloquence and little wisdom. He separates wisdom from eloquence, assigning the latter to a man born for upheaval, the former to a teacher of peace and tranquility. Now there are two kinds of eloquence. One is an elegant and clear expression of the mind's ideas, arising partly from consideration of things themselves, partly from an understanding of words in their proper and definite meanings. The other arouses the mind's passions, such as hope, fear, anger, and pity, and springs from the metaphorical use of words fitted to those passions. The first forms speech from true principles; the second from opinions already held, whatever their nature. The art of the first is logic, of the second rhetoric; the aim of the first is truth, of the second victory. Each has its use: the first in deliberation, the second in exhortation; the first is never separated from wisdom, the second almost always is. That this powerful eloquence, divorced from true knowledge of things—that is, from wisdom—is the true mark of those who urge and stir up the people toward revolution can readily be seen from the work they have to do. They could not poison the people with absurd opinions opposed to peace and civil society unless they themselves held those opinions; and surely that is an ignorance scarcely possible in a wise man. For a person who does not know where laws, the standards of justice and injustice, honor and dishonor, good and evil, derive their force; what creates and preserves peace among people and what destroys it; what belongs to him and what to another; or, finally, what he would wish others to do to him so that he might do the same to them—such a person can hardly be called wise. But they can turn their listeners from fools into madmen, make matters appear worse to the ill-disposed and evil to the well-disposed, magnify their hopes and diminish their sense of danger beyond reason. This power comes not from the eloquence that explains things as they are, but from the other kind, which stirs minds and makes everything appear to match the notions those minds had already formed.

How the folly of ordinary people and the eloquence of ambitious men combine to destroy a commonwealth.

13 Many who are themselves well disposed toward civil society nevertheless, through ignorance, help prepare subjects’ minds for sedition when they teach young people doctrines conforming to the opinions just described in their schools, and the whole people from their pulpits. Those who wish to put this disposition into action direct all their efforts, first, to bringing the disaffected together into a faction and conspiracy, and next, to securing the greatest influence within that faction for themselves. They gather people into a faction by making themselves the reporters and interpreters of individuals’ plans and actions, and by naming the people and places where meetings shall be held to deliberate on reforms to the present government, according to what serves their interests best. But if they are to hold chief power in the faction, they must keep it a faction: that is, hold separate, secret meetings with a few, where they can decide what shall later be proposed at a general meeting, by whom, on what subject, and in what order each will speak, and how to win the most powerful and popular members of the faction to their side. Once they have built a faction large enough for their eloquence to rule, they urge it to take charge of public affairs. In this way they sometimes crush the commonwealth, when no rival faction opposes them; more often they tear it apart and bring on civil war. Folly and eloquence work together to overthrow government just as, according to the fable, the daughters of Pelias, king of Thessaly, once conspired with Medea against their father. Hoping to restore the decrepit old man to youth, they followed Medea's counsel, cut him into pieces, and put him on the fire to boil, vainly awaiting his return to life. So ordinary people, foolish as the daughters of Pelias, wishing to renew the ancient government and led astray by the eloquence of ambitious men as if by Medea's witchcraft, divide into factions and consume that government in flames instead of reforming it.

6 A common teaching says that faith and holiness do not come from study and natural reason. Instead, they are always placed in people by supernatural inspiration. If this were true, I do not understand why we would be told to give an account of our faith. Nor do I understand why every true Christian would not be a prophet. And why should everyone not decide what to do and what to avoid by personal inspiration, rather than by the commands of superiors or sound reason? We would therefore have to return to each person's private judgment of good and evil. No government could survive that. This opinion has spread so far throughout the Christian world that the number of people who have abandoned natural reason has become almost endless. It began with muddleheaded men who picked up a large supply of holy words by reading Scripture often. In their preaching, they usually put those words together in a way that meant nothing at all, yet seemed deeply divine to people without learning. If someone's nonsense sounds like divine speech, people will naturally think he has been inspired from above.

The opinion that individual subjects have absolute ownership of their goods encourages sedition.

7 The seventh teaching that opposes government says that each subject has absolute control over the goods in his possession. That means ownership that excludes not only every other subject's claim to those goods, but even the magistrate's claim. This is false. As shown in chapter viii, article 5, those who have a lord over them do not themselves have lordship. Under the constitution of government, the magistrate is lord over all his subjects. Before people took on the obligations of civil society, no one had any exclusive right to anything. Everything was common to everyone. So tell me: where did you get this ownership, if not from the magistrate? And where did the magistrate get it, if not from everyone transferring their rights to him? You too have given your right to him. Your control and ownership therefore extend only as far as he permits, and last only as long as he pleases. Likewise, in a family each son has only those goods, for only as long, as the father thinks right. But most people who claim to understand public affairs reason differently. "We are equal by nature," they say. "There is no reason why another man should have a better right to take my goods than I have to take his. We know that money is sometimes needed to defend and maintain the public. But let those who ask for it show us the immediate need, and they will receive it." People who speak this way do not realize that what they demand was already settled at the outset, in the establishment of government itself. They speak as if they still lived in an unorganized crowd, before government had been formed, and so they tear its structure apart.

Failure to distinguish a people from a multitude prepares the way for sedition.

8 Finally, civil government, especially monarchy, is greatly hindered when people do not properly distinguish a people from a multitude. A people is a single entity. It has one will, and a single action can be attributed to it. None of this properly applies to a multitude. The people rules in every kind of government. Even in a monarchy the people commands, because the people expresses its will through the will of one man. The multitude, by contrast, consists of citizens, that is, subjects. In a democracy or aristocracy, the citizens are the multitude, but the governing assembly is the people. In a monarchy, the subjects are the multitude and, strange as it sounds, the king is the people. Ordinary people, and others who give these truths little thought, always speak of a large group of men as if it were the people—that is, the commonwealth. They say that the commonwealth has rebelled against the king, which is impossible. They also claim that the people wants or rejects whatever dissatisfied, complaining subjects want or reject. Claiming to act for the people, they turn citizens against the commonwealth. That is, they turn the multitude against the people. These are nearly all the opinions that make subjects ready to riot when they take hold of them. Since in every form of government the person or people holding supreme authority must preserve its sovereign authority, these opinions naturally amount to the crime of injuring that authority.

An excessively large tax, even if entirely fair and necessary, makes people inclined to sedition.

9 Nothing troubles a person's mind more than poverty or a lack of the things needed to preserve life and honor. Everyone knows that wealth is earned through hard work and kept through thrift. Yet poor people commonly blame bad government, excusing their own laziness and extravagance, as if public demands for money had somehow used up their private goods. But people must remember that those without inherited property must work in order to live and also fight in order to be able to work. Every Jew who built Jerusalem's walls in the time of Esdras worked with one hand and held a sword in the other. In any government, we should understand that the hand holding the sword is the king or supreme council. The subjects must support that hand through their care and labor just as surely as they support the hand with which each of them earns a private living. Customs duties and taxes are simply payment to those who keep armed watch over us, so that enemy attacks do not disrupt each person's work and efforts. People who blame public officials for their poverty have no more reason to complain than if they claimed that paying their debts made them poor. But most people give none of this any thought. They suffer something like the condition called an incubus: it comes from overeating but makes people believe a huge weight is attacking, pressing down, and suffocating them. Clearly, those who think they carry the entire weight of the commonwealth are likely to rebel. People dissatisfied with the present state of things welcome change.

Ambition makes people inclined to sedition:

10 Another harmful condition of the mind affects people who have little work to do and lack honor and status. Everyone naturally seeks honor and promotion, but especially those who have few worries about meeting their basic needs. With time on their hands, they sometimes debate public affairs among themselves. At other times they casually read histories, political writings, speeches, poems, and other enjoyable books. They then come to believe they have enough intelligence and learning to manage the most important affairs. But not everyone is as capable as he thinks. Even if they were, there are too many of them for all to hold public office. Many must therefore be passed over. Feeling insulted, they want public decisions to fail. They partly envy those chosen ahead of them, and partly hope to bring them down. It is no surprise that they eagerly look for chances to bring about change.

So does the hope of success.

11 The hope of victory must also be counted among the things that encourage sedition. Suppose any number of people hold views opposed to peace and civil government. Suppose as many as possible have been deeply hurt by insults and slanders from people in power. Even so, if they see no adequate hope of defeating them, there will be no rebellion. Each will hide his thoughts and accept his present burden rather than risk a heavier one. Such hope requires four things: numbers, equipment, mutual trust, and commanders. Resisting public magistrates without large numbers is not sedition but desperation. By equipment for war I mean every kind of weapon, ammunition, and other necessary supplies. Without them, numbers accomplish nothing. Weapons also accomplish nothing without mutual trust. And none of these is enough unless the people unite under a commander whom they willingly obey. They do not obey because submitting to him has bound them to his orders. As we already supposed in this very chapter, people of this sort do not understand an obligation that goes beyond what seems right and good to them personally. Instead, they obey because they believe in his character or military skill, or because his temperament resembles theirs. If people angry at the present situation, who judge their actions by their own standards, have these four things ready, all that is needed for rebellion and turmoil throughout the realm is someone to stir them into action.

Eloquence without wisdom is the only skill needed to start rebellions.

12 Sallust describes Cataline, a man unequaled in stirring up rebellion, as having great eloquence and little wisdom. He separates wisdom from eloquence. He treats eloquence as necessary for a man made for turmoil, but wisdom as a teacher of peace and quiet. There are two kinds of eloquence. One expresses thoughts clearly and well. It comes partly from examining things themselves and partly from understanding words in their proper, precise meanings. The other stirs up feelings such as hope, fear, anger, and pity. It comes from using figurative language suited to those feelings. The first builds an argument from true principles. The second builds on opinions already accepted, whatever those opinions may be. Logic is the art of the first, rhetoric of the second. The first aims at truth, the second at victory. Each has its use: the first in deliberation, the second in urging people to act. The first is never separated from wisdom, while the second almost always is. It is easy to see from the work of those who urge the people to make changes that their defining skill is powerful eloquence without true knowledge of things—that is, without wisdom. They could not infect the people with absurd views opposed to peace and civil society unless they believed those views themselves. Such ignorance could hardly belong to a wise person. A person is hardly wise if he does not know where laws, the standards of justice and injustice, right and wrong, good and evil, get their authority; what creates and preserves peace among people and what destroys it; what belongs to him and what belongs to another; and, finally, how to do to others what he would want done to himself. But these speakers can turn foolish listeners into mad ones. They can make things seem worse to the discontented, and make things seem bad to those who were content. They can inflate hopes and play down dangers beyond all reason. They do this through the kind of eloquence that does not explain things as they are. Instead, it stirs people's minds and makes everything appear to match the ideas those minds already held.

How the foolishness of ordinary people and the eloquence of ambitious men work together to destroy a commonwealth.

13 Many people who themselves sincerely support civil society nevertheless help prepare subjects for sedition through lack of knowledge. In schools they teach young people doctrines that agree with the opinions described above, and from pulpits they teach the public the same things. Those who want to turn this readiness into action focus all their efforts on two goals. First, they bring together the discontented into a faction and conspiracy. Next, they seek the greatest influence within that faction. They form a faction by making themselves the reporters and interpreters of what particular people plan and do. They name the people and places for meetings to discuss how to reform the present government in a way that best serves their interests. To take the lead in the faction, they must then keep a faction within the faction. That is, they hold separate secret meetings with a few people to decide what will later be proposed at a general meeting, who will propose it, who will speak on each subject and in what order, and how to win over the faction's most powerful and popular members. Once the faction is large enough for them to rule through eloquence, they urge it to take charge of public affairs. Sometimes they thereby crush the commonwealth, when no other faction opposes them. More often they tear it apart and bring on civil war. Foolishness and eloquence combine to overturn government much as the daughters of Pelias, king of Thessaly, once conspired with Medea against their father in the fable. They wanted to restore the old, feeble man to youth. On Medea's advice, they cut him into pieces and put him on the fire to boil, vainly expecting him to come back to life. In the same way, ordinary people foolishly want to renew the old government, like Pelias's daughters. Ambitious men's eloquence draws them away, like Medea's witchcraft. Split into factions, they burn up the government instead of reforming it.