The Social Contract

“The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty.”

Much of The Social Contract is written in response to philosophers like Niccolò Machiavelli whose “might makes right” doctrine suggests that a monarch’s legitimacy is secured by virtue of their strength and absolute power. Rousseau rejects this notion, arguing that obedience to strength is mere self-preservation, not an expression of will, morality, or duty.

“All power comes from God, I admit; but so does all sickness: does that mean that we are forbidden to call in the doctor?” 

Rousseau further interrogates the idea that power and strength, in and of themselves, must be yielded to as a matter of moral duty. It matters little, he adds, that monarchical power—like all power—stems from God, given that pain and sickness also come from God. Rousseau likens monarchical strength to the strength of a robber who holds a person up at gunpoint; the victim may yield to the robber to protect their life, but they do not do so out of conscience or duty.

“It will be said that the despot assures his subjects civil tranquillity. Granted; but what do they gain, if the wars his ambition brings down upon them, his insatiable avidity, and the vexations conduct of his ministers press harder on them than their own dissensions would have done?” 

Having established the illegitimacy of monarchies on philosophical grounds, Rousseau goes on to criticize them on practical grounds. The supposed tradeoff found in absolute monarchies—in which the people trade their freedom in return for a stable and civil society—is exposed as a farce. To Rousseau, the frivolous wars and predatory ministers that plague European monarchies show that there is little gained by the people when ruled by despots.

“War then is a relation, not between man and man, but between State and State, and individuals are enemies only accidentally, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of their country, but as its defenders.” 

Rousseau counters two assumptions made by his predecessors. The first is the Hobbesian notion that humanity’s natural condition is a condition of total war; on the contrary, individuals are pitted against one another when the leaders of one state see fit to invade another state, with little regard to whether this expresses the community’s general will. The second is Grotius’s contention that slavery may fit into a framework of natural rights in the case of a conqueror who enslaves prisoners-of-war. Again, Rousseau argues that there is nothing natural about war and therefore it should not be used to develop precepts about liberty and society.

“The words slave and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. It will always be equally foolish for a man to say to a man or to a people: ‘I make with you a convention wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I shall keep it as long as I like, and you will keep it as long as I like.’” 

Rousseau’s antipathy toward slavery is one of the defining qualities of his philosophical body of work. Nothing could be more inimical to his notions of liberties and burdens shared equally within a community than slavery. At the same time, it is worth pointing out that Rousseau tended to discuss slavery in the abstract, as he characterizes the condition of subjects in monarchies as “slaves.” Much less is said about the literal enslavement of Africans kidnapped to the Americas, hundreds of thousands of whom labored under French colonial rule in Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) at the time of Rousseau’s writing.

“There will always be a great difference between subduing a multitude and ruling a society.” 

In Rousseau’s view, subjugation and rule are very different concepts. Under subjugation, a people sell their liberties because they are powerless to preserve themselves through any other mechanism. They do so to an individual master whose power is rooted solely in force and is therefore vulnerable to even greater shows of force. By contrast, a society ruled justly within the framework of a social contract is an expression of power rooted in a general will, not the particular will of a despot.

“The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.” 

Rousseau articulates the fundamental challenge his book seeks to address. In all societies, there is a tension between individual liberty and the needs of the community. Rousseau hopes to resolve this tension by ensuring that everyone gives up the same rights, takes on the same burdens, and does so in the service of the “general will”—which he characterizes as a far superior form of sovereignty than an absolute monarch.

“What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses.”

The distinction between natural liberty and civil liberty is enormously important to Rousseau. Natural liberty is the freedom to do literally whatever is within that person’s physical and intellectual capabilities, with no regard to anyone else. Civil liberty—which Rousseau sometimes refers to as “moral liberty”—is a set of freedoms that, while restricted by the general will, are also more protected by the strength of belonging to a community.

“[I]nstead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequalities as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right.” 

Just as Rousseau draws a distinction between natural liberty and civil liberty, he also distinguishes between natural inequality and civil inequality. He grants that not all individuals are born with equal intellectual and physical capacities. Yet they are all human beings, and therefore societies have a moral obligation to treat everyone equally under the law. Societies should not build civil hierarchies around these inequalities, in which individuals are rewarded for the circumstances of their birth. Instead, Rousseau advocates for social contracts, in which both the burdens and the rewards associated with maintaining the community are shared equally.

“There are indeed times in the history of States when, just as some kinds of illness turn men's heads and make them forget the past, periods of violence and revolutions do to peoples what these crises do to individuals: horror of the past takes the place of forgetfulness, and the State, set on fire by civil wars, is born again, so to speak, from its ashes, and takes on anew, fresh from the jaws of death, the vigour of youth.” 

This quote is highly prescient, given that just 25 years after the publication of The Social Contract, France would be transformed by the violence of the French Revolution. Yet while many revolutionaries used Rousseau’s work to justify the worst excesses of the French Revolution, Rousseau would have likely been extremely uncomfortable with the atrocities committed during the Reign of Terror. Moreover, the blood spilled during the Revolution did not lead to the sort of government Rousseau championed. Instead of rebuilding itself with “the vigour of youth,” the people of France embraced a dictator in Napoleon and, later, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.

“Free peoples, be mindful of this maxim: ‘Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered.’” 

According to Rousseau, a society living under tyranny may win its freedom. However, a free society, once it gives itself up to a tyrant, can never be free again. This reflects Rousseau’s belief that liberty is not appropriate for all peoples—particularly not those who have gone through multiple cycles of revolution and tyranny. To the author, these societies need “a master, not a liberator.”

“If we ask in what precisely consists the greatest good of all, which should be the end of every system of legislation, we shall find it reduce itself to two main objects, liberty and equality—liberty, because all particular dependence means so much force taken from the body of the state and equality, because liberty cannot exist without it.” 

The notion that liberty cannot exist without equality is one of Rousseau’s most important points. Given that a measure of natural liberties is always sacrificed to the general will in a state, the only way to preserve other liberties is to ensure that those sacrifices are made equally from one individual to the next. The twin pursuits of liberty and equality would be the pillars on which numerous anti-monarchical revolutions would be built, to varying degrees of success. 

“[B]y equality, we should understand, not that the degrees of power and riches are to be absolutely identical for everybody; but that power shall never be great enough for violence, and shall always be exercised by virtue of rank and law; and that, in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.” 

Rousseau also defined civil equality as something designed to replace natural inequality by ensuring equal treatment of the law. Here, he takes the definition a step further by decrying severe levels of wealth inequality. Although he grants that some disparity is unavoidable, Rousseau is aware of the dangers posed to liberty by enormous gaps in wealth.

“The general will is always ready to sacrifice the government to the people, and never to sacrifice the people to the government.” 

Rousseau is careful to distinguish sovereignty, or “the general will,” from the government which serves as sovereignty’s agent, executing and enforcing the state’s laws. Within the hierarchy of the social contract, the government must remain subjugate to sovereignty and the people, who at any time may disband the government if doing so will extend the life of the state. This concept, in which the executive branch is subordinate to the sovereign “law,” is a departure from the system of checks and balances between coequal branches of government that the United states and other republics would embrace.

“There has been at all times much dispute concerning the best form of government, without consideration of the fact that each is in some cases the best, and in others the worst.” 

Rousseau is adamant in his belief that there is no single best form of government. He writes at length about how the size of a territory, the age of a state, and the temperament of the people are all key factors in determining the most suitable form of government. For example, he believes that democracies are best suited for very small countries and, despite his antipathy toward royalty, that monarchies are the only workable form of government for very large countries.

“Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men.” 

Under all but a few circumstances, Rousseau is very skeptical of pure democracies, in which every citizen is empowered to participate directly in politics. It is always important to remember that the definition of democracy in the 18th century was very different than its 21st century definition. Today, individuals tend to use democracy to describe republics with various forms of direct and indirect participation from the people.

“It is easier to conquer than to rule. With a long enough lever, the world could be moved with a single finger; to sustain it needs the shoulders of Hercules.”

This is one of the many reasons Rousseau distrusts the viability of monarchies. While there are plenty of monarchs throughout history who have conquered vast territories in the name of their throne, very few have guided large states through sustained periods of peace and prosperity. In these territories, even ingenious and virtuous monarchs will struggle to rule if they do not have capable governors and other subordinates to administer the government.

“If Sparta and Rome perished, what State can hope to endure for ever? If we would set up a long-lived form of government, let us not even dream of making it eternal. If we are to succeed, we must not attempt the impossible, or flatter ourselves that we are endowing the work of man with a stability of which human conditions do not permit.” 

In a fatalistic aside, Rousseau admits that governments are as impermanent as the human body. This will be borne out by French history, as the hundred years following Rousseau’s death saw France vacillate, often violently, between monarchical, republican, and dictatorial rule. The quote is also a sobering reminder for some 21st century readers who take the present form of their nation’s government for granted.

“As soon as any man says of the affairs of the state What does it matter to me? the state may be given up for lost.” 

Rousseau warns against the dangers of a populace consumed by private matters, as opposed to public affairs. That’s because private matters pertain to individual or “particular” wills, not the general will which is the lifeblood of the social contract. To Rousseau, one of the most insidious expressions of this phenomenon is representative government, in which representatives are paid to handle public affairs on behalf of citizens—the very form of government that would be embraced by some of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world, including the United States and France.

“Is liberty maintained only by the help of slavery? It may be so. Extremes meet. Everything that is not in the course of nature has its disadvantages, civil society most of all. There are some unhappy circumstances in which we can only keep our liberty at others' expense, and where the citizen can be perfectly free only when the slave is most a slave. Such was the case with Sparta.” 

Given all of Rousseau’s talk of the evils of slavery—both here and in other treatises—his attitude with respect to the slavery in Sparta and other republics is puzzling. It is, however, consistent with the author’s tendency to deplore slavery primarily in the abstract, without addressing concrete historical and contemporary examples. This attitude is regrettably similar to those held by many of the U.S. Founding Fathers, who loved liberty and equality but took few steps to ensure liberty and equality for Americans who were not white, male landowners. 

“The tribunate is not a constituent part of the city, and should have no share in either legislative or executive power; but this very fact makes its own power the greater: for, while it can do nothing, it can prevent anything from being done.” 

Rousseau’s conception of the judiciary has proved very durable in the centuries following The Social Contract. The idea of a court or tribunal which operates predominantly as a passive check on power, rather than an active participant in state affairs, is shared by the framers of the U.S. Constitution in their thinking about the Supreme Court. Yet while few early Americans expected the Supreme Court to grow into such an influential body, Rousseau understands that negative power is as formidable as positive power.

“Of all Christian writers, the philosopher Hobbes alone has seen the evil and how to remedy it, and has dared to propose the reunion of the two heads of the eagle, and the restoration throughout of political unity, without which no state or government will ever be rightly constituted.” 

Although Rousseau and Hobbes disagree on numerous points, they agree that state and religious sovereignty cannot coexist separately. This is because, as Hobbes puts it, “no man can serve two masters.” Where they differ is that Hobbes believes sovereignty is most effective and beneficent when invested in an individual monarch, while Rousseau considers monarchies to be the most deplorable form of government, in most cases.

“Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that it always profits by such a régime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes.” 

This is one of the most scandalous passages of the book, and it played a significant role in the banning of the treatise in Paris and Geneva. Although Rousseau does not offer a complete indictment of Christianity, he considers “true” Christianity to be a poor fit for a civil society. He suggests that Jesus’s establishment of a Kingdom of God on Earth is damaging to civil solidarity.