Nation

Use in the book

The birth of a great thinker is paired with the birth of someone able to understand and admire the thought. Another maxim generalizes about national eloquence’s movement from oratorical to philosophical ostentation. The prosperity passage then opposes enriching peoples to legislating for them: virtue and poverty are preferred to wealth alone. The restriction “only” is crucial; the argument does not simply say every material improvement is wrong.

Places to read

1. I, p. 55, entry 2, ¶2A nation supplies receptive as well as creative intelligence.
2. I, p. 338, entry 2, ¶1Eloquence is described through successive kinds of ostentation.
3. II, p. 828, entry 7, ¶1Enrichment alone is rejected as the aim of legislation.

Translation in this edition

The English translation preserves peoples and nations as successive terms, and keeps merchant/philosopher and banker/legislator as distinct comparisons. In the preference sentence, “them” jointly refers to virtue and poverty, while the nearer singular poverty remains a grammatical alternative recorded in the note.

Patriotism

French: patriotisme.

Patriotisme can stifle love of humanity in the historical comparison, while the Alciphron note locates it in love of manners, temper, laws and customs rather than geography alone. The first leaf’s chronology is explicitly uncertain in Beaunier’s apparatus; the second’s page 320 belongs to the book cited, not the notebook’s own pagination.

Places to read: I, p. 50, entry begun p. 48, no. 2, ¶25; I, p. 255, entry 10, ¶1.