Social Contract

Jean Jacques Rousseau

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780028511504
• eBook ISBN: 9781451602227
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourses on the Origin of Inequality, he outlines his own history of the development of human society. He explains in general terms how the differences between social and economic classes arose alongside the formation of modern states. He also explores the means by which these inequalities were actually built into and perpetuated by the foundational notions of modern society and government.Rather than endorse a return to the peaceful ways of pre-modern human beings, Rousseau addresses these inequalities in his seminal work, The Social Contract. Rousseau does not see government as an inherently corrupting influence, and he makes very clear and precise recommendations about how the state can and should protect the equality and character of its citizens.

BOOK III

Before I speak of the different forms of government, I shall endeavour to fix the precise sense of this word, which has not hitherto been very well explained.

CHAPTER I OF GOVERNMENT IN GENERAL

I WARN the reader that this chapter requires to be read very seriously, and that I am unacquainted with any art which can make the subject clear to those who will not bestow on it their serious attention.

Every free act must be produced by the concurrence of two causes: the one moral, that is to say, the will which must resolve upon the act, the other physical, that is to say, the power which must execute it. When I go towards an object, it is necessary, in the first place, that I should will to go; and, secondly, that my feet should bear me. If a paralytic person should will to go, and an active man should not will, both would remain where they were. The body politic has the same moving forces: and we find equally in it, as in the natural body, both force and will; the latter distinguished by the name of “legislative power,” and the former by that of “executive power.” Nothing is or should be done without their concurrence.

We have seen that the legislative power belongs to the people, and can belong to that body only. It is easy to see, on the contrary, by the principles already established, that the executive power cannot belong to the generality as legislator or Sovereign, because that power consists only in individual acts, which are not to be performed by the law, and consequently neither by the Sovereign, all whose acts must be laws.

It is therefore necessary that the public force should have an agent of its own which shall unite and apply that force according to the direction of the general will, to serve as the means of communication between the State and the Sovereign, and to form a sort of public person, in which, as in a man, the union of mind and body should be found. This is the reason why the government in a State is generally, and very improperly, confounded with the Sovereign, of which it is but the minister.

What then is that government? An intermediate body established between the subjects and the Sovereign, for their mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws, and the maintenance of both civil and political liberty.

The members of this body are denominated “magistrates” or “kings,” that is to say, “governors”; and the body collectively takes the name of “prince.”¹ Thus those who think that the act by which a people submit themselves to their chiefs is not a contract have good foundation for their opinion. That act is certainly no more than a commission, an employment, under which, simply as officers of the Sovereign, the members of government exercise in the name of the Sovereign the power delegated to them, and which may be limited, modified, or recalled at the pleasure of the Sovereign, the alienation of such a right being incompatible with the nature of the social body, and contrary to the end of association.

I therefore give the name of “government” or “supreme administration” to the justifiable exercise of the executive power; and “prince” or “magistrate” to the man or body charged with that administration.

It is in government that those intermediate powers are found whose connections constitute that of the whole with the whole, or of the Sovereign with the State. One can represent this last relation as that between the extreme terms of a continuous proportion of which the mean proportional is government. The government receives from the Sovereign the orders which it transmits to the people; and, to hold the State in proper balance, it is necessary, when everything is considered, to keep upon an equality the power of the government, taken in itself, and the power of the citizens, who are sovereigns in one view and subjects in another.

Further, not one of these three states can be altered without instantly destroying the proportion. If the Sovereign wants to govern, or if the magistrate wants to make laws, or if the subjects refuse to obey, disorder succeeds regularity; and, as force and will can then no longer act in concert, the State is dissolved, and must of course fall into despotism or anarchy. Finally, as there can be but one mean proportional between each relation, there cannot possibly be more than one good government in a State. But, as a thousand events may change the relations of a people, not only may different systems of government be good for different peoples, but for the same people at different periods.

In order to give an idea of the different relations which one extreme bears to another, I shall take as an example the number of a people, which is a relation most easy to express.

We will suppose that the State is composed of ten thousand citizens. The Sovereign must be taken collectively and as a body; but each member, in his quality of a subject, must be regarded as an individual. Thus the Sovereign is to the subject as ten thousand are to one; that is, each member of the State has but a ten-thousandth part of the sovereign authority, though he is entirely subjected to it. When the people amount to one hundred thousand, the situation of the subject does not change, but each is equally under the entire authority of the laws, while his vote is reduced to the hundred-thousandth part, and has ten times less influence in the institution of the laws. Thus, as the subject remains always one, the Sovereign’s proportional power increases according to the increased number of citizens. From whence it follows that liberty is diminished by the enlargement of the State.

When I speak of the relation increasing, I mean that it removes further from equality. Thus the greater the proportion is in the acceptation of geometricians, the less proportion there is according to the common idea: for in the first instance it is estimated by its quantity, and is measured by the quotient; and in the second, considered according to its identity, it is estimated by similarity.

The less the private wills are related to the general will, that is, manners and morals to laws, the more the restraining power should be augmented. Therefore, the government, that it may be adequate to the duty required from it, should be made strong in proportion to the number of the people.

On the other hand, as the increasing size of the State presents to the depositaries of the public authority greater temptation and opportunity to abuse their power, the greater force it is necessary to give the government for the purpose of controlling the people, the more should the power of the Sovereign be augmented, that it may control the government. I do not speak here of absolute force, but of force as it relates to the different parts of the State.

It follows from this double relation that the continued proportion which ought to subsist between the Sovereign, the prince, and the people, is not an arbitrary idea, but a necessary consequence of the nature of the body politic. It also follows that one of the extremes — the people in their capacity of subjects — being fixed and represented by unity, the simple proportion must, whenever the duplicate proportion is increased or diminished, increase or diminish accordingly, and the mean term consequently changes. It is evident from this that one unique and absolute arrangement of government would not be proper for every State, but that there can be as many governments different in nature as there are States of degrees of greatness.

Those who wish to turn this system into ridicule will probably tell me that in order to find this mean proportional and establish a body of government, there is nothing to be done, according to my account, but to take the square root of the number of people. I reply that I only made use of a given number by way of example, and that the proportion I speak of cannot be ascertained so much by the number of men as, in general, by the degree of activity, which depends on a multitude of causes; and that, though I employed the terms of geometry in order to express my meaning in fewer words, I am not ignorant that geometrical precision has no place in moral quantities.

Government is on a small scale what the body politic is on an enlarged one. It is a moral person endowed with certain faculties, active like the Sovereign, passive like the State, and which may be analyzed into other similar relations. From this consequently is born a new proportion, and still another within it, according to the arrangement of the tribunals, and so on to that indivisible term, a single chief, or supreme magistrate, which can be represented, in the midst of this progression, as the unity between the fractional and the ordinal series.

But, without embarrassing ourselves with this multiplication of terms, let us be content to consider government as a new body in the State, distinct from the people and the Sovereign, and forming an intermediate link to connect them.

There is this essential difference between the State and the government: the former is self-existent, and the existence of the latter depends entirely on the Sovereign. Thus the ruling will of the prince neither is nor ought to be anything more than the general will or the law; his force is only the public force concentrated in his hands: if he attempts to execute on his own authority any absolute and independent act, the chain which combines the whole relaxes immediately. And if at last the private will of the prince is more active than the will of the Sovereign, and the public force in his hands is employed to enforce obedience to this private will, so that there are in effect two sovereigns, the one by right, and the other in fact, at that moment the social union ceases, and the body politic is dissolved.

It is, however, necessary that the government should so far have a real existence and life as to be distinguishable from the body of the State; in order that all its members should be able to act in concert and work for the end for which it was instituted, it must have a particular self, a sensibility common to its members, and a force and will sufficient for its preservation. This distinct existence supposes assemblies and councils, a power to deliberate and resolve, rights, titles, and privileges which belong to the prince alone, and which render the situation of a magistrate more honourable in proportion as it is more laborious. The great difficulty of forming a body of government lies in ordering this subaltern whole within the whole in such a manner that the general constitution may not be altered by giving too much strength to this part; that the particular force necessary for preserving itself may be kept distinct from the public force which is necessary to preserve the State; and, in fine, that on every occasion the government may be sacrificed to the people, and not the people to the government.

Further, though government is an artificial body, formed by, and dependent on, another body, likewise artificial, and though in some degree its existence is borrowed and inferior, yet it can act with more or less strength and activity, and it may be said to enjoy a greater or less degree of robustness and health. Finally, without swerving entirely from those ends for which it was instituted, it may deviate from it more or less, in accordance with the manner in which it is constituted.

It is in consequence of all these differences that the various relations between the government and the body of the State arise, in accordance with the accidental and particular relations by which the State itself is changed. For often the very best government in itself will become the worst, if the relations in which it stands have changed in accordance with the faults of the body politic to which it belongs.

¹. At Venice they apply to the College [of government] the title of “Most Serene Prince,” even when the Doge is not present.

CHAPTER II OF THE PRINCIPLES WHICH CONSTITUTE THE DIFFERENT FORMS OF GOVERNMENT

TO EXPLAIN the general cause of these differences, it is necessary to distinguish the principle from the government, as I have already distinguished the State from the Sovereign.

The body of the magistracy may be composed of a greater or less number of members. We have said that the relation which the Sovereign has to the subjects is increased by an increase of population; and, by an obvious analogy, we can say that the relation of government to the magistrates is the same.

But the total force of the government, being always the force of the State, cannot vary: from whence it follows that the more of this force it employs on its own members, the less there will remain to expend on the whole people.

Therefore, the more numerous the body of magistrates is, the weaker the government must be. As this is a fundamental maxim, it will be proper to explain it clearly.

There are in the person of a magistrate three essentially different wills: first, his private will as an individual, which points only to his own interest; secondly, his will as a magistrate, which he has in common with the other magistrates, which regards only the interest of the prince, and may be properly called the will of the whole body of which he is a member,¹ and which is general with respect to government, but private with respect to the State of which the government makes a part; his third will is the will of the people, or the sovereign will, which is general, both in regard to the State as the whole and to the government considered as part of the whole.

In perfect legislation, the private or individual will should be null, the will of the body of the government very subordinate, and consequently the general or sovereign will always predominant over all and solely directing all the rest.

According to the natural order, however, these different wills become more active in proportion as they are concentrated. Thus, the general will is always weakest, that of the magistracy stronger, and the private will the strongest of all: so that, in the government, each member is first himself, then a magistrate, and then a citizen — a direct inversion of that order of things which the social order requires.

But let us suppose the government in the hands of one man: then the private will and the group-will are perfectly united, and the latter consequently enjoys the highest degree of power it is capable of possessing. But since it is on the degree reached by the will that the use of force depends, and since the absolute force of the government does not vary, it must follow that the most active government is that of one man.

But if we were to unite the government to the legislative authority, make the Sovereign the prince, and all the citizens magistrates, then the group-will, confounded with the general will, would lose its own activity, yet leave the private will in all its force. Thus the government, tho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Introduction
• Note on the Translation
• Foreword
• Book I
• Book II
• Book III
• Book IV
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright