The observer … is able, by virtue of his own rationality, to retrace the steps which politics has taken in the past and to anticipate those it will take in the future. Knowing that behind these steps there is a rational mind like his own, the observer can put himself into the place of the statesman — past, present, or future — and think as he has thought or is likely to think.

But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers … should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which, since men had made it, men could come to know.