The Social Contract
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Du contrat social, ou Principes du droit politique
Assigned by 6 of the 9 reading lists
- Written
- 1762
- Form
- Political theory
- Language
- French
- Length
- Short · 110 ppunder 120 pages
- Difficulty
- Demanding3 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendThe Basic Political Writings, translated by Donald A. CressHackett, 2011The Social Contract together with the Discourses it answers, in a clear translation with the key French terms flagged.
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Rousseau's short treatise on what could make political authority legitimate, opening with the observation that man is born free and is everywhere in chains. Force creates no right and no one can contract himself into slavery, so the only rightful state is one in which each person hands himself entirely to the whole community and, obeying the general will, obeys a will that is partly his own. Sovereignty on this account cannot be represented, divided or given away; government is only its hired agent. The four books treat the contract, the nature of sovereignty and law, the forms and diseases of government, and the institutions, ending with civil religion, that keep a republic from dying.
Why it's on the list
Every modern claim that a government's authority comes from the people rather than from God, conquest or custom runs through this book. It supplied the vocabulary of the French Revolution, the theory behind popular sovereignty and referendums, and the standing objection to purely representative government: Rousseau says a people that elects deputies has already sold its freedom. It also supplied the most disputed sentence in political philosophy, the one about forcing a man to be free, which critics from Constant to Berlin read as the blueprint for totalitarian democracy and defenders read as a description of what any law does. Programs assign it as the third point of the triangle with Hobbes and Locke, and because it makes the reader decide what a people is before deciding what it may do.
Key themes
- Liberty and rights
- Rousseau distinguishes natural, civil and moral freedom, and claims the last one, obedience to a law you helped make, is the only kind available to people who live together.
- Power and authority
- Sovereignty belongs to the assembled people and cannot be delegated. What we call the government is an employee that can be dismissed, and usually the thing that kills the state.
- Society and the state
- The general will is not a majority vote but what the citizens will insofar as they will the common good, which leaves open the awkward question of who can tell the difference.
- Justice
- Law must be general in both its source and its object. A decree aimed at a particular person is not a law at all, whatever assembly passed it.
- God and faith
- The closing chapter on civil religion proposes a minimal state creed and the banishment of anyone who will not profess it, which is where many readers stop being sympathetic.
Overview
Rousseau published Du contrat social in 1762, the same year as Emile, and both were promptly banned. Paris burned the books and Geneva, his own city, burned them too and issued a warrant for his arrest. He spent much of the rest of his life moving.
The work is short, about a hundred pages, in four books of brief chapters with headings that tell you exactly what each does. It is also, unlike the Second Discourse, dry in stretches. Rousseau is doing constitutional theory here, and chapters on voting procedures, on the Roman comitia and on the censor read like a technical manual. The famous sentences are almost all in books 1 and 2.
The book answers a question the Second Discourse left standing. If society corrupted us and there is no going back, is there any arrangement under which people could live together without being ruled by force or fraud? Rousseau’s answer is that there is one, that it is extremely demanding, and that it has almost never existed. He is not describing a state. He is stating the conditions any state would have to meet to have a right to your obedience, and then noting, with something between rigour and gloom, how few could.
The argument
Book 1 clears away the alternatives. Might makes no right: if force obliges me, then obedience is prudence and not duty, and as soon as I can disobey safely I may. Nor can legitimate authority come from the family, from Aristotle’s natural hierarchy, or from a contract of submission, since a man who gives away his freedom gives away the very thing that makes his promises binding. Slavery and right are contradictory terms.
What remains is an association, not a subjection. Rousseau’s formula is that each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and receives back each member as an indivisible part of the whole. The act is total, which is what makes it equal: since everyone gives everything, nobody has a private claim against anybody. Out of it comes a collective body with a will, which he calls the sovereign when it acts and the state when it is acted upon, and its members are citizens as participants in sovereignty and subjects as bound by law.
Then the difficult chapter. Because the contract only works if everyone is in it, a member who pursues his private interest against the general will is a free rider, and the body may compel him. Rousseau writes that this amounts to forcing him to be free, since the general will is his own will insofar as he is a citizen. Sympathetic readers point out that this is just the logic of law: the drunk driver is not less free for being stopped. Hostile readers point out that it lets anyone in charge of defining the general will define a person’s real wishes for him.
Book 2 works out sovereignty. It is inalienable, since a will cannot be transferred. It is indivisible, which cuts against separation of powers. It is infallible about the common good but not about the means, since the people can be deceived. Rousseau distinguishes the general will from the will of all, the mere sum of private interests, and warns that factions and associations within the state distort it. Law must be general in both directions. And since a people cannot legislate well before it has the character good laws produce, he introduces the legislator, an extraordinary figure who frames institutions for a people he does not rule, with examples from Lycurgus, Numa and Calvin’s Geneva.
Book 3 is about government, which is the executive and is never sovereign. Democracy in his strict sense, where the whole people administers as well as legislates, is fit for gods and not for men. Monarchy is efficient and tends to produce bad kings. His preference is elective aristocracy. He argues that every government tends to usurp sovereignty and that this is how states die, that the sovereign must therefore assemble regularly, and that representation is a forfeiture: a people that lets deputies will for it is only free on election day.
Book 4 covers maintenance: voting, elections, the Roman assemblies, the dictatorship as an emergency office, the censorship as a guardian of opinion, and civil religion. Rousseau argues Christianity makes poor citizens because it turns attention to another world, and proposes a short civic creed which citizens must profess or be banished. It is the most illiberal chapter in a book about freedom, and it is not an afterthought.
How to read it
Read book 1 and book 2 closely, skim book 3 apart from chapters 15 to 18, and read book 4 chapter 8 carefully. If you have time for only fifteen pages, take book 1 chapters 1 to 8 and book 2 chapters 1 to 6.
Keep the vocabulary straight, since most confusion about this book is lexical. Volonté générale is not the majority. Souverain is the assembled people, not a monarch. Gouvernement is administration only. Démocratie for Rousseau means direct administration by everyone, which is why he can reject democracy while founding popular sovereignty. Cress and the Cambridge edition both flag these.
Read it after the Second Discourse if you can. The contract is the answer to a problem the earlier book diagnosed, and read alone it can look like a scheme rather than a response.
Come to the compulsion passage with a real question rather than a verdict. The charge that Rousseau fathered modern tyranny is old, serious and worth taking on its evidence, and the best way to test it is to see how much work the general will has to do without any procedure for identifying it.
Questions it raises
- How does a citizen tell the general will from a majority that is confident and wrong?
- If sovereignty cannot be represented, can any large modern state be legitimate on Rousseau’s terms?
- The legislator frames laws for a people not yet capable of framing them. Where does his authority come from?
- Is being compelled to obey a law you helped make a kind of freedom, or a redefinition of the word?
- Rousseau bans no religion but banishes those who reject the civic creed. Can his republic be free and require that?
- He takes Sparta and republican Rome as models. What does his theory owe to societies that were small, warlike and built on slavery?
Highlights
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
L'homme est ne libre, et partout il est dans les fers. The next sentence is the important one: he says he does not know how this happened, but he can say what makes it legitimate.
Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body; which means nothing other than that he will be forced to be free.
The sentence the whole later argument about Rousseau turns on. Read the paragraph around it before deciding what it means.
Find a form of association that defends each member with the whole common force, and in which each, uniting with all, still obeys only himself and remains as free as before.
Paraphrase of his statement of the problem the contract is meant to solve. Everything after it is the proposed solution.
The English people believes itself free; it is gravely mistaken. It is free only during the election of members of parliament, and is a slave as soon as they are chosen.
Paraphrase. His objection to representation is the part of the book that modern democracies least like to quote.
There is no religion so false that it contains nothing true, and no state was ever founded without religion serving as its base.
Paraphrase of the argument leading to the civil profession of faith, the chapter that got the book burned in Geneva.
