This is the interview episode for Week 15 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776, "The Fork in the Road": Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Two Enlightenments. Tuesday's episode ended on the levy of February 1793 and the revolt in the Vendée: "they have killed our king, chased away our priests, and now they want to take our bodies."

This December, Selective Service registration becomes automatic. The duty to sign up moves from the man to the government, and the agency that has to run it withdrew its implementing rules in July without ever publishing them.

What is covered: the Calas affair and the four arguments of the Treatise on Tolerance; the general will versus the will of all; the real limits Rousseau set on his sovereign, and the question he did not clearly answer, which is who applies them; the "noble savage" phrase that is not his, and the famous Voltaire line that Voltaire never wrote; what Americans actually read of each man; how Robespierre invoked Rousseau, and why invocation is not derivation; how Edmund Burke and

This is the interview that closes Week 14 of Self-Evident: The Road to 1776. Saturday’s episode read Montesquieu’s chapter on England and followed his design into Madison’s hands. Tuesday’s watched the House of Representatives stop checking the executive. Today Jared takes the judicial side of the same question, and his answer is that the courts have been handing the executive power too.

This contemporary-application episode takes the question Episode 14 ended on — what happens to a constitutional design when the parts stop resisting each other — and puts it to the House of Representatives this month. In Federalist 51, Madison connected the interest of the man to the constitutional rights of the place. In his chapter on England, Montesquieu gave the legislature the means of examining how its laws are executed, and warned against a legislature a considerable t