Book One: The Social Pact (Chapters 1–9)

— foederis aequas Dicamus leges. Let us lay down equal terms for the treaty. — Virgil, Aeneid XI

Foreword

This little treatise is extracted from a longer work, undertaken long ago without consulting my strength, and since abandoned. Of the various pieces that could be taken from what was done, this is the most considerable, and seemed to me the least unworthy of being offered to the public. The rest no longer exists.

I mean to inquire whether, in the civil order, there can be any legitimate and sure rule of administration, taking men as they are and laws as they can be. I shall try always to unite in this inquiry what right permits with what interest prescribes, so that justice and utility may not be divided.

I enter upon my subject without proving its importance. I shall be asked whether I am a prince or a legislator, to write on politics. I answer that I am neither, and that is why I write on politics. If I were a prince or a legislator, I would not waste my time saying what must be done; I would do it, or hold my peace.

Born a citizen of a free state, and a member of the sovereign, however feeble the influence my voice can have on public affairs, the right to vote on them is enough to impose on me the duty of instructing myself about them; and I am happy, every time I reflect on governments, always to find in my researches new reasons for loving that of my country.

Chapter 1. Subject of This First Book

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One who believes himself the master of others is nonetheless a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I believe I can answer.

If I considered only force, and the effects derived from it, I would say: as long as a people is compelled to obey, and obeys, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke, and shakes it off, it does better still; for, recovering its liberty by the same right by which it was taken away, either it is entitled to take it back, or there was no right to take it away. But the social order is a sacred right which serves as the basis of all others. Yet this right does not come from nature; it is therefore founded on conventions. We must know what these conventions are.

Chapter 2. The First Societies

The most ancient of all societies, and the only natural one, is that of the family. Yet the children remain bound to the father only as long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved; and if they remain united, it is no longer naturally but voluntarily, and the family itself is maintained only by convention. The family is, then, if you like, the first model of political societies: the ruler is the image of the father, the people of the children; with this difference, that in the family the love of the father for his children repays him for the care he gives them, while in the state the pleasure of commanding takes the place of this love, which the ruler does not have for his peoples.

Grotius denies that all human power is established for the benefit of the governed; he gives slavery as an example. His most constant manner of reasoning is always to establish right by fact. One could employ a more consistent method, but not one more favourable to tyrants. It is doubtful, then, according to Grotius, whether the human race belongs to a hundred men, or whether those hundred men belong to the human race; and throughout his book he seems to incline to the first opinion; this is also the view of Hobbes. So here is the human species divided into herds of cattle, each with its keeper, who guards it only to devour it.

Aristotle, too, had said that men are not naturally equal, but that some are born for slavery and others for domination. Aristotle was right; but he took the effect for the cause. Every man born in slavery is born for slavery; nothing is more certain. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire to escape from them; they love their servitude as the companions of Ulysses loved their brutishness. If there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves; their cowardice perpetuated them.

Chapter 3. The Right of the Strongest

The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the strongest — a right taken ironically in appearance, and really established in principle. But will no one ever explain this word to us? Force is a physical power; I do not see what morality can result from its effects. To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; at most, an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty?

Suppose for a moment this so-called right. I say that the only result is an inexplicable nonsense. For if force makes right, the effect changes with the cause; every force that overcomes the first succeeds to its right. As soon as one can disobey with impunity, one can do so legitimately; and since the strongest is always right, it is only a matter of making oneself the strongest. What kind of right is it that perishes when force ceases? If one must obey by force, there is no need to obey by duty; and if one is no longer forced to obey, one is no longer obliged to. Clearly, then, the word "right" adds nothing to force; it means nothing here at all.

Obey the powers that be. If this means "yield to force," the precept is good, but superfluous; I answer for it that it will never be violated. All power comes from God, I admit; but so does all disease. Does that mean that one is forbidden to call the doctor? If a brigand surprises me in the corner of a wood, I must give up my purse by force; but if I could hide it, am I in conscience obliged to give it up? After all, the pistol he holds is also a power.

Let us agree, then, that force does not make right, and that one is obliged to obey only legitimate powers.

Chapter 4. Slavery

Since no man has any natural authority over his fellow, and since force produces no right, there remain only conventions as the basis of all legitimate authority among men. If an individual, says Grotius, can alienate his liberty and make himself the slave of a master, why could not a whole people alienate its liberty and make itself subject to a king? To alienate is to give or to sell. A man who makes himself another's slave does not give himself; he sells himself, at least for his subsistence. But a people — for what does it sell itself? A king, far from furnishing his subjects with their subsistence, draws his own from them. Do the subjects, then, give their persons on condition that their goods also are taken?

To renounce one's liberty is to renounce one's quality as a man, the rights of humanity, and even its duties. There is no possible compensation for one who renounces everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man; and to take away all liberty from his will is to take away all morality from his acts. Finally, it is an empty and contradictory convention that stipulates absolute authority on one side and unlimited obedience on the other.

Nor can slavery be founded on the right of war. War is not a relation between man and man, but between state and state, in which individuals are enemies only by accident, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers. The purpose of war being the destruction of the enemy state, one has the right to kill its defenders only while they bear arms; as soon as they lay them down and surrender, they cease to be enemies, and become simply men once more, and one no longer has any right over their lives. So, from whatever point of view we regard things, the right of slavery is null, not only because it is illegitimate, but because it is absurd and meaningless. The words slavery and right contradict each other; they are mutually exclusive.

Chapter 5. That We Must Always Go Back to a First Convention

There will always be a great difference between subduing a multitude and ruling a society. If scattered men are successively enslaved to one man, however numerous they may be, I see there only a master and slaves; I do not see a people and its leader. It is an aggregation, if you will, but not an association; there is neither public good nor body politic. A people, says Grotius, can give itself to a king. Then, according to Grotius, a people is a people before giving itself to a king. This very gift is a civil act; it presupposes a public deliberation. Before examining the act by which a people elects a king, therefore, it would be well to examine the act by which a people is a people; for that act, being necessarily prior to the other, is the true foundation of society.

Chapter 6. The Social Pact

I suppose men to have reached the point at which the obstacles that endanger their preservation in the state of nature prevail, by their resistance, over the forces each individual can use to maintain himself in that state. Then that primitive state can no longer subsist; and the human race would perish if it did not change its manner of existence.

Now, since men cannot create new forces, but only unite and direct those which exist, they have no other means of preserving themselves than to form, by aggregation, a sum of forces that can prevail over the resistance, set them in motion by a single motive, and make them act in concert. But since the force and liberty of each man are the chief instruments of his preservation, how can he engage them without harming himself, and without neglecting the care he owes to himself? This difficulty, applied to my subject, can be stated in these terms:

"To find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and by which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey only himself, and remain as free as before." This is the fundamental problem to which the social contract gives the solution.

The clauses of this contract are so determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would make them null and void; so that, although they have perhaps never been formally stated, they are everywhere the same, everywhere tacitly admitted and recognised. These clauses, properly understood, all reduce to one: the total alienation of each associate, with all his rights, to the whole community. For, in the first place, since each gives himself entirely, the condition is equal for all; and, the condition being equal for all, no one has any interest in making it burdensome for the others. Moreover, the alienation being without reserve, the union is as perfect as it can be, and no associate has anything more to claim. Finally, each, giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over whom one does not acquire the same right as one grants him over oneself, one gains the equivalent of all that one loses, and more force to keep what one has.

If, then, we set aside from the social pact what is not of its essence, we shall find that it reduces itself to the following terms: "Each of us puts in common his person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and in our corporate capacity we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole."

At once, in place of the individual person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly has votes, which receives from this same act its unity, its common self, its life and its will. This public person, so formed by the union of all the others, was once called the city, and is now called the republic or body politic; it is called by its members the state when passive, the sovereign when active, and a power when compared with others like itself. As for the associates, they take collectively the name of people, and are called individually citizens, as sharing in the sovereign authority, and subjects, as subject to the laws of the state.

Chapter 7. The Sovereign

The sovereign, being formed only of the individuals who compose it, neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs. But it is not the same with the subjects towards the sovereign: each individual, as a man, may have a particular will contrary to, or different from, the general will he has as a citizen. His particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest. In order, then, that the social pact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes this engagement, which alone can give force to the others: that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing other than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, giving each citizen to his country, guarantees him against all personal dependence.

Chapter 8. The Civil State

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they lacked before. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulse and right that of appetite, does man, who until then had considered only himself, find himself forced to act on other principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although in this state he deprives himself of several advantages he had from nature, he gains such great ones in return — his faculties are so exercised and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, his whole soul so elevated — that, if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the one he has left, he ought to bless unceasingly the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and which, from a stupid and limited animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.

Let us reduce this whole balance to terms easy to compare. What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything that tempts him and that he can get; what he gains is civil liberty and the ownership of all he possesses. We might add to the gains of the civil state moral liberty, which alone makes man truly master of himself; for the impulse of appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is liberty.

Chapter 9. Real Property

Each member of the community gives himself to it at the moment it is formed, just as he actually is — himself and all his forces, of which the goods he possesses form part. The right of the first occupant becomes a true right only after the establishment of property; and to authorise it over a piece of ground, three conditions are needed: that the land be not yet inhabited; that one occupy only as much as one needs to subsist; and that one take possession of it, not by an empty ceremony, but by labour and cultivation. When Núñez Balboa, standing on the shore, took possession of the South Sea and the whole of South America in the name of the crown of Castile, was that enough to dispossess all its inhabitants and exclude from it all the princes of the world?

I shall end this book with a remark which should serve as the basis of the whole social system: that instead of destroying natural equality, the fundamental pact substitutes, on the contrary, a moral and legitimate equality for whatever physical inequality nature may have placed between men; and that, unequal in strength or genius, they all become equal by convention and by right.

Rousseau adds in a note: under bad governments this equality is only apparent and illusory; it serves only to keep the poor in their misery and the rich in their usurpation. In fact, laws are always useful to those who possess and harmful to those who have nothing; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all have something and none has too much.