ABSTRACT
Laws are the means by which independent and isolated individuals, tired of living in a continuous state of war and of enjoying a liberty made useless by the uncertainty of having constantly to defend it, are united into a society. Individuals sacrifice a part of their liberty in order to enjoy the rest of it in peace and safety. The sum of all these individual portions of liberty sacrificed for the good of all constitutes the sovereignty of a nation, of which the sovereign is the legitimate owner and administrator. The universal principle of dissolution observed in both the physical and moral worlds can only be avoided, in the case of society, by the use of punishments that directly strike the senses and lodge themselves in the mind to neutralize the individual passions that are the enemy of the common good.
