《旧制度与大革命·卷二·第十五章·何以法国人先求改革后求自由》第3节
The sole guarantee invented by them against the abuse of power was public education; for, as Quesnay elsewhere observes, ‘despotism is impossible when the nation is enlightened.’ ‘Struck by the evils arising from abuses of authority,’ said another of his disciples, ‘men have invented a thousand totally useless means of resistance, whilst they have neglected the only means which are truly efficacious, namely, public, general, and continual instruction in the principles of essential justice and natural order.’ This literary nonsense was, according to these thinkers, to supply the place of all political securities. Letronne, who so bitterly deplored the forlorn condition in which the Government had left the rural districts, who described them as without roads, without employment, and without information, never conceived that their concerns might be more successfully carried on if the inhabitants themselves were entrusted with the management of them. Turgot himself, who deserves to rank far above all the rest for the elevation of his character and the singular merits of his genius, had not much more taste than the other economists for political liberty, or, at least, that taste came to him later, and when it was forced upon him by public opinion. To him, as well as to all the others, the chief political security seemed to be a certain kind of public instruction, given by the State, on a particular system and with a particular tendency. His confidence in this sort of intellectual drug, or, as one of his contemporaries expressed it, ‘in the mechanism of an education regulated by principles,’ was boundless. ‘I venture to assure your Majesty,’ said he, in a report to the King, proposing a plan of this nature, ‘that in ten years your people will have changed out of knowledge; and that by their attainments, by their morality, and by their enlightened zeal for your service and for that of the country, France will be raised far above all other nations. Children who are now ten years of age will then have grown up as men prepared for the public service, attached to their country, submissive, not through fear but through reason, to authority, humane to their fellow-citizens, accustomed to recognise and to respect the administration of justice.’
注释摘要
托克维尔在这一段里集中剖开了一个令人不安的思想现象：重农学派和杜尔哥这些人在政治制度的设计上几乎是空白的。他们对抗权力滥用的唯一保障，不是分权，不是地方自治，不是代议机构，而是公共教育。魁奈的原话口气极大——只要国民受到启蒙，专制就不可能存在。他的追随者说得更直白：人们折腾了上千种无用的抵抗手段，偏偏忘了唯一真正有效的，那就是在根本正义和自然秩序的原则上对…