ChapterTwoBookOne44

I. For a state to be rich, the definition (168) of wealth that I gave in the first chapter must be applicable to it, and the prince and the people must easily enjoy necessary, convenient, and superfluous goods. Since this wealth and this temporal happiness are the common object of the desires and wishes of all men together, they are also the object for those who make up the state, from the Prince to the least of the poor, for the same reason. All their desire and all their care aim at the same goal and only want the same thing, which they believed to reach more easily by unifying their wills as closely as possible under human law and force majeure, which must stop and remove all the obstacles that may (169) prevent their progress. These include violent transports of passions, flaws in the knowledge of one’s true interests, and others that I noted in the preceding chapter. The people have entrusted a prince, a king, an emperor, or a senate with the care of fighting against these obstacles by laws, force majeure, their example, and their wise conduct; they have given the one who governs them the prerogative of being the foremost wealthy[^1] man of the state and of profiting from all the increases in wealth that he obtains for his people. They want to contribute to all his needs on condition that he does the same for them; in a word, they want to be part of the same family, (170) to get rich mutually, and to have only one same good, one same wealth. This is what the explicit or tacit agreements between all the people in the world and their sovereigns amount to. And these agreements only contain one thing at heart: a will and a unanimous intention to increase the number of contributors[^2] to their mutual needs.

I showed in the preceding chapter that in proportion to this number, we have necessities, conveniences, and superfluities, and that, consequently, every man’s common desire to push opulence to these three degrees is strictly speaking only a desire for this number to grow and to make us live more comfortably and more agreeably. (171) If the wealth of each individual, as I have shown above, cannot begin or make any progress without this number, if everything that is commonly called goods or wealth only gets its value and its price from it, and if, finally, man is only made for society, we must conclude that all the wealth of a state is only contained in the number of people and that their quantity makes its principal, or rather, its only good. The greater this number, the richer the state, and the more it flourishes. Its wealth can only grow by increasing this number; all the other goods are nothing compared to this, because they only have virtue or value in proportion to this number.