ABSTRACT
Juridico-economic determinants are suppressed and remain only abstractions, conforming to the aspirations of people who have read J.J. Rousseau at length. "Natural man" is a Roman transported to the eighteenth century, who lives happily in his little farm, always quick to defend his rights and to take up arms to rush to the defense of the fatherland. The eighteenth-century economists often repeated that labor is the main form of property; indeed it is the first material manifestation of human force, the first individual characteristic imprinted on things, the first extension of the self. Psychology knows only states of consciousness and does not understand that one limits the extension of the self because of conditions that depend on economic forces and the development of production. In the eighteenth century several observers were impressed with the lifestyle of the peasants in certain parts of Switzerland, where some lands were enjoyed in common.
