Modern era

The Modern era is examined as a condition of contradictory progress: states enlarge their reach and cultivate learning, refinement, and wealth, yet these apparent gains can loosen political bonds, distort education, and erode the virtues that sustain collective freedom. The account links the problem of modernity to political scale and institutional change as well as to the cultural polish that can make subjection seem agreeable.

Scale, Population, and Political Form

A state has limits beyond which added size becomes a liability. As its social ties stretch, they relax; long distances make administration harder, while successive layers of local, provincial, and supreme authority impose costs on the people. These expenses do not necessarily bring better government: they can drain the resources needed to meet emergencies, leaving the state near destruction when a crisis arrives. Some states, moreover, are constituted in such a way that they must keep conquering simply to maintain themselves. Their seemingly fortunate capacity for expansion thus signals both the boundary of their greatness and the approach of their fall.

Territorial size alone cannot measure a state’s strength. The land should sustain its inhabitants, and the population should be proportionate to the land’s capacity. Too much territory is difficult to defend and cultivate, may produce more than is needed, and can bring wars of defence; too little leaves a state dependent on its neighbours and vulnerable to wars of offence. A people forced to choose between commerce and war remains dependent on circumstances: it must either conquer and change its position or be conquered. The proper balance cannot be fixed by a universal ratio, since fertility, climate, products, habits, and the prospects for population all differ. Political judgment must look beyond present numbers to what a country and its institutions may naturally sustain.

The same concern with proportion shapes the account of government. In general, democratic government suits small states, aristocratic government states of middle size, and monarchy great ones, because the number of supreme magistrates bears an inverse relation to the number of citizens. This is a rule of suitability, not an exceptionless formula: circumstances can alter its application. Political arrangements cannot be judged apart from the scale and conditions in which they operate.

Government and the Erosion of Sovereignty

The Modern era’s political danger is not simply that states become large, but that executive power presses against the people’s sovereign authority. The particular will of government continually acts against the general will; as that pressure grows, the constitution changes. With no other corporate will able to balance the prince, government tends eventually to suppress the Sovereign and break the social treaty. The tendency is inherent in the body politic from its beginning, like the ageing and death that overtake a human body.

Government’s contraction follows a one-way progression from the many to the few: democracy gives way to aristocracy, and aristocracy to royalty. This is described as its natural propensity, not as a reversible cycle. The account therefore treats political decline as a structural danger: institutions may begin under a shared sovereignty yet develop toward a narrower concentration of authority.

Rome offers a concrete example of institutional design responding to social change. After its foundation, the republic consisted of the founder’s army, made up of Albans, Sabines, and foreigners. It was divided into three tribes, each into ten curiae, and each curia into decuriae under their respective leaders. Each tribe also supplied a hundred Equites, or Knights, in a century, an arrangement indicating the divisions’ original military purpose. As the foreign population grew, its tribe, the Luceres, surpassed the Alban and Sabine tribes in strength. Servius replaced the racial division with four tribes organized by the quarters of the city, named for Rome’s hills, and barred inhabitants from moving between quarters. The reform addressed an immediate imbalance while attempting to prevent the races from mixing. The episode shows how a political system’s inherited divisions can become unstable as its population changes.

Refinement, Arts, and Moral Dependence

Cultural refinement is not presented as unqualified emancipation. When government and law secure people’s common life, the arts, literature, and sciences can cast garlands over the chains that weigh them down. Their influence may be less openly despotic than political force, yet powerful enough to dull the sense of original liberty and teach people to love their own subjection. A society may consequently appear civilized while its members have become more accepting of dependence.

The argument treats this as a recurring historical relation, not merely a complaint about one age. As the arts and sciences rise, virtue is said to take flight; the moral condition of a people changes with their progress. Egypt, once associated with fertility and the rise of philosophy and the fine arts, was successively conquered. Greece’s learning and cultural achievement likewise did not restore its independence: the progress of the sciences is associated with dissoluteness and the Macedonian yoke, after which the country experienced repeated changes of masters. These examples make cultural achievement and political freedom distinct measures of a society’s condition.

The contrast between appearance and possession sharpens the critique. Polished manners, agreeable conversation, public professions of benevolence, and the outward air of philosophy can create a persuasive image of virtue without making conduct virtuous. The issue is not simply hypocrisy in individuals; it is the possibility that a society mistakes the social ease produced by refinement for moral health. Its accomplishments can mask, rather than answer, the question of whether its members retain genuine independence and civic character.

Luxury, Education, and the Measure of Progress

Luxury accompanies the arts and sciences and is linked to indolence and vanity. Even if it increases wealth, wealth acquired at any cost cannot establish a state’s moral strength. The account contrasts modern calculations of human worth in terms of sale or consumption with the older political emphasis on morals and virtue. Its comparisons challenge the assumption that riches make a people powerful: poor peoples have resisted wealthy rulers, and Rome, after absorbing the riches of the world, fell to peoples who knew little of wealth. Material abundance and political endurance are not interchangeable.

Education reveals the same misdirection. Expensive institutions may teach everything except the duties students will need as adults: foreign languages rather than command of their own, verse they cannot understand, and arguments that obscure rather than distinguish truth from error. Meanwhile, magnanimity, equity, temperance, humanity, and courage remain words without practical meaning. The dear name of country may never reach the students’ ears, and religious instruction may produce fear rather than understanding. Against this ornamental curriculum, the proposed standard is practical: children should learn what they will practise when they become adults.

The account thus refuses to equate modernization with moral or political improvement. Enlarged administration can exhaust the people who sustain it; government can contract away from popular sovereignty; and learning, luxury, and elaborate education can polish social life while weakening independence and public virtue. The decisive question is not how much a society produces or how sophisticated it appears, but whether its institutions and habits preserve the conditions of collective freedom.