They reject the King's proposals, the limited reforms, the gradual transformations.

According to them, it is their right and their duty to re-make society from top to bottom.

Such is the command of pure reason, which has discovered the Rights of Man and the conditions of the Social Contract.
II--Nature of societies, and the principle of enduring constitutions.
Apply the Social Contract, if you like, but apply it only to those for whom it was drawn up.

These were abstract beings, belonging neither to a period nor to a country, perfect creatures hatched out under the magic wand of a metaphysician.

They had as a matter of fact come into existence by removing all the characteristics which distinguish one man from another,[2209] a Frenchman from a Papuan, a modern Englishman from a Briton in the time of Caesar, and by retaining only the part which is common to all.[2210] The essence thus obtained is a prodigiously meager one, an infinitely curtailed extract of human nature, that is, in the phraseology of the day, "A BEING WITH A DESIRE TO BE HAPPY AND THE FACULTY OF REASONING," nothing more and nothing else.