ABSTRACT
Political theory can never be entirely divorced from practical politics, and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s was much closer to realities than his critics are generally willing to allow. The only political relation recognized, the link binding the individual members of the state together, was the relation of government and subject. The explanation the philosophes offered for the absence of patriotic spirit was inadequate: ample evidence exists to prove that there is nothing essentially incompatible between patriotism and despotic government. Rousseau’s theory of nationality is based on an assertion of the reality of what the philosophes regarded as the ‘artificial’ distinctions between nations. Rousseau is to be regarded as the upholder of political freedom against the despotic monarchies of the eighteenth century. Rousseau was regarded as a dreamer because the facts from which he derived his political ideas were different from the facts as most of his contemporaries saw them.
