Extravagant to excess and always needy, he converted everything into money, even his own rights, and, in the military order, in the civil order, in commerce and in industry, in the administration, in the judicature, and in the finances.

From one end of the territory to the other, he had sold innumerable offices, imposts, dignities, honors, monopolies, exemptions, survivorships, expectancies--in brief, privileges which, once conferred for a money consideration, became legal property,[2316] often hereditary and transmissible by the individual or the corporation which had paid for them.

In this way the King alienated a portion of his royalty for the benefit of the buyer.

Now, in 1789, he had alienated a great many of these portions; accordingly, his present authority was everywhere restricted by the use he had previously made of it .-- Sovereignty, thus, in his hands had suffered from the double effect of its historic origins and its historic exercise; the public power had not become, or had ceased to be, omnipotence.

On the one hand it had not reached its plenitude, and on the other hand it had deprived itself of a portion of its own completeness.
The philosophers wished to find a solution for this double weakness, innate and acquired They had therefore transported sovereignty out of history into the ideal and abstract world, with an imaginary city of mankind reduced to the minimum of a human being Here men, infinitely simplified, all alike, equal, separate from their surroundings and from their past, veritable puppets, were all lifting their hands in common rectangular motion to vote unanimously for the contrat social.