Read "The Social Contract" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The question "What absolutely is the best government? " is unanswerable as well as indeterminate; or rather, there are as many good answers as there are possible combinations in the absolute and relative situations of all nations.
But if it is asked by what sign we may know that a given people is well or ill governed, that is another matter, and the question, being one of fact, admits of an answer.