The Social Contract

A General Survey of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Improbable Recipe for a Truly Free Republic.

Introduction

Every one of us was born into a legal and governmental structure we never explicitly agreed to. We are bound by laws we did not write and governed by people we did not choose, and most of us accept the arrangement without a second thought. We obey, and we assume that obeying is simply how things are. But this train of thought leads to a hard question: by what right does anyone govern anyone else at all? Why should a free person submit to any power on earth? It is one of the oldest questions there is, and how a society answers it shapes almost everything else about how it lives.

The man who pressed that question hardest was an unlikely candidate to reshape European political thought. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan watchmaker's son, largely self-taught, a restless wanderer who passed through tutoring, music copying, and a string of abandoned vocations before he found his subject. He arrived in Paris near the middle of the eighteenth century, at the peak of the Enlightenment, and fell in with the philosophers who were assembling the great Encyclopédie and teaching Europe to trust reason over inherited tradition. Where Voltaire and his circle celebrated civilization, progress, and the polish of cultivated society, Rousseau came to suspect that all of it had corrupted something essential in human beings, and he said so loudly enough to lose most of his friends. When he came to write The Social Contract, he was working against the current of his own age, an outsider even to the movement that had made him famous, in a France whose monarchy still looked permanent and whose collapse lay only a generation away.

Before Rousseau, the question of why anyone should obey a government had a handful of standard answers. Rulers governed by God’s appointment, or by the natural authority of fathers extended over a whole nation, or simply because they held the power to compel, and no one could stop them. Social contract theory broke with all of these. It proposed that legitimate authority rests on nothing grander than agreement: an imagined compact in which free people consent to be governed in exchange for something they want more than their freedom from government.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in 1762, argued that people themselves are sovereign and can never legitimately surrender that sovereignty to a king, a parliament, or anyone else. This view was immediately widely condemned, but within a generation, it had become something close to scripture for the French Revolution. The Social Contract remains one of the most influential and most misunderstood works in the history of political thought, and the misunderstanding begins with its first sentence.

Rousseau opens The Social Contract with the line everyone remembers, and almost everyone misreads: “Man is born free, he writes, and everywhere he is in chains.” The freedom describes the natural state of man, with complete autonomy and free will. The chains describe the government authority under which mankind now lives. Rousseau says in the next breath that he does not know how the chains came about, and does not much care; the question he means to answer is narrower and stranger. He wants to know what could make the chains legitimate. The book is not an argument for men being unbound, free of government control. It is an argument that they can be bound rightly, and a specification of the only terms on which that is possible.

Rousseau wants a form of association that protects each member with the whole strength of the community, yet under which each member, uniting with all the others, still obeys only himself and remains as free as before. Full protection that only government can provide requires submission to the whole; full unadulterated freedom requires submission to no one. The entire treatise is an attempt to reconcile those two requirements. Watching Rousseau try to keep it reveals, by the end, just how much legitimate authority actually costs.

The Problem: Chains That Might Be Made Legitimate

Before he could build, Rousseau had to clear the ground of rival accounts of where authority comes from, and he did it quickly.

Governance by force is the first to go.

A power that rests on strength alone binds no one, because the moment a stronger arm appears, the obligation transfers to it; might that has not been converted into right commands only as long as it can compel, which is to say it never commands at all in the moral sense. The strongest is never strong enough to rule for good unless he turns his strength into right and the obedience of others into duty, and force by itself cannot perform that conversion.

Nature is the second rival.

The family is the one society that grows from nature, but it dissolves the instant the children no longer need the parents; what holds it together afterward is agreement, not blood. So the patriarchal model that thinkers from Filmer to Grotius used to naturalize kingship collapses. There is no natural master and no natural slave. If legitimate authority exists, it is made, not found, and the only thing capable of making it is agreement. This is why the problem dichotomy matters so much. Once force and nature are disqualified, the social pact is not one option among several. It is the sole remaining candidate for grounding any rightful obligation at all.

The Pact: Total Surrender as the Price of Obeying No One

Rousseau’s solution is, on its face, the opposite of freedom. Each associate gives himself entirely, with all his rights, to the whole community. There is no holding back a private sphere, no reserved bundle of liberties kept out of the bargain. The surrender is total.

The reasoning behind the apparent paradox is the hinge of the whole theory. Because each person gives himself to everyone, he gives himself to no one in particular. There is no individual or faction on the receiving end to whom he is now subject, because the recipient is the whole of which he is an equal part. He hands over everything and gets it all back, now secured by the common force rather than held at the mercy of whoever is stronger. The act of association creates a new entity, a moral and collective body, which Rousseau calls by several names: the sovereign when it acts, the state when it is acted upon, and the body politic considered as a whole. And it splits every member into a double role, author of the law as a member of the sovereign, bound by it as a subject of the state. The man who obeys the law obeys a will he shares in making. That is the sense in which he obeys only himself.

This is also where Rousseau quietly redefines the term his book is built on, a move worth flagging because the rest of the argument leans on it. Natural freedom, doing as one pleases within the limits of one’s strength, is exchanged for civil and moral freedom, living under a law one has given oneself. Once freedom means self-imposed law rather than the absence of constraint, submission to the general will ceases to compete with liberty and becomes its very form. The opening promise is kept, but partly by changing what the words in it mean.

Sovereignty: Inalienable, Indivisible, and Always Right

Rousseau then explains what a sovereign is and, more pointedly, what it cannot do. It cannot give itself away. The general will is the exercise of sovereignty, and a will cannot be transferred; the moment a people hands its authority to a ruler or a representative body, it ceases to be a people and dissolves back into a crowd with a master. Sovereignty is inalienable. It is also indivisible, which puts Rousseau directly at odds with the constitutional tradition that would carve sovereignty into separate powers. Those who divide it, he says, make a monster out of disjointed parts, mistaking the various functions of government for fragments of the sovereign itself. The sovereign is whole, or it is nothing.

At the center of the book sits the distinction that does the heaviest lifting and causes the most trouble: the general will against the will of all. The will of all is merely the sum of private wills, each pursuing its own interest; the general will is what remains when you set the private interests against one another and let the conflicting pluses and minuses cancel out, leaving only what the citizens hold in common. The general will, so understood, considers only the common good, and in that sense, it is always right. But Rousseau immediately admits the crack in his own foundation. The general will is always right, yet the judgment that guides the people is not always enlightened. The people will the good but do not always see it, and can be deceived into endorsing what is not in fact common to them. The will cannot err; the people expressing it can. Almost everything in his theory that follows is scaffolding erected to protect an infallible will from the fallible people who are supposed to embody it.

Law and the Legislator: A Founder Who Must Change Human Nature

Law, for Rousseau, is the form the general will takes. A law is an act of the whole people bearing on the whole people; it considers subjects as a body and actions in the abstract, never this man or that particular case. The instant a decree names an individual, it ceases to be a law and becomes an administrative act. This is why Rousseau can define a republic as any state governed by laws in this strict sense, whatever the shape of its government. Legitimacy lives in the generality of the law, not in the form of the regime.

The difficulty is that a people cannot write such laws for itself, at least not at the start. To will the common good wisely, a population would already need the virtue and insight that good laws are supposed to produce; the effect would have to precede its own cause. Rousseau’s answer is the most extraordinary figure in the book, the Legislator. This is a founder of almost superhuman stature who frames a people’s laws while holding no office and wielding no power, who must, in Rousseau’s startling phrase, feel capable of changing human nature itself, of taking independent individuals and remaking them into members of a greater whole. And because the people are not yet rational enough to grasp the laws meant to make them rational, the Legislator routinely resorts to a pious fraud, attributing his code to the gods so that divine authority can secure what argument cannot yet reach. Lycurgus, Moses, and Numa stand behind the type. Note what has happened to the opening promise here. A book about a people obeying only itself has had to import a founder who stands above the people, transforms them, and deceives them for their own good, because the self-ruling citizen Rousseau needs does not yet exist and has to be manufactured.

Government: The Agent That Always Betrays Its Trust

His theory then turns to the part of the system most people mistake for the whole of it, and Rousseau’s central move is to insist that government is not the sovereign and never can be. The sovereign is the people legislating; the government is a separate, smaller body charged only with applying the laws to particular cases and maintaining order. It is the executive, an intermediary between subjects and the sovereign, and crucially, it is not established by a contract. There is no compact between a people and its rulers, because a contract would put the rulers on equal footing with the sovereign, which is impossible. The institution of government is a commission, a trust, an act of the sovereign that the sovereign can revoke at will. Rulers are not parties to an agreement; they are employees.

The form of government that a government should take depends, Rousseau argues, mostly on scale. Democracy, in which the people administer as well as legislate, suits only the smallest and simplest states, and he concedes with deliberate bluntness that a government so perfect is fit for gods rather than men. Aristocracy serves middling states, monarchy the largest, and each carries its own pathologies, monarchy most of all, since kings are drawn toward absolute power and the court rewards the cunning rather than the able. But the deeper claim is that every government, whatever its form, carries the seed of its own death. The government has its own corporate will, distinct from the general will, and that particular will presses ceaselessly against the sovereign that created it. The body politic begins to die from the moment of its birth. The remedy is vigilance that never relaxes: the people must assemble at fixed intervals, and at every such assembly put two standing questions, whether they wish to keep the present form of government, and whether they wish to leave power in the hands of those who currently hold it. The sovereign that stops asking has already begun to disappear.

This is also where Rousseau delivers his most-quoted insult, aimed at the very system that the rest of Europe was learning to admire. The English think themselves free, he says, but they are free only on election day; the moment their representatives are chosen, the people are enslaved again and count for nothing. Sovereignty cannot be represented any more than it can be alienated. A delegate can carry out instructions but cannot will in another’s place, and a people that lets others will for it has given itself away.

Civil Religion: Binding the Belief the State Cannot Command

By the end of his book, Rousseau’s machinery is nearly complete, and Rousseau turns to the last thing his republic needs and cannot quite produce on demand. He has shown that the general will is, in principle, indestructible, never extinguished, even when a corrupt people stop consulting it. But will and law are not enough to hold citizens to the whole when private interest pulls the other way. What is needed, finally, is belief.

Hence, the chapter on civil religion is the most revealing in the book. Rousseau wants a public faith of a few simple articles that every citizen must profess: a powerful and benevolent deity, a life to come in which the just are rewarded and the wicked punished, and above all, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. The content is thin by design, because its purpose is civic rather than theological; it exists to make citizens love their duties and fear betraying them. To this short creed he adds a single prohibition, the only dogma stated negatively, a ban on intolerance, since a faith that damns outsiders cannot live at peace inside a shared state. And he turns, remarkably, against Christianity, or at least against the otherworldly Christianity of the gospel, on the ground that it makes poor citizens. A religion that fixes its believers’ hopes on heaven detaches them from the earthly community and leaves them indifferent to its survival. Rousseau wants a religion that binds men to the republic, not one that lifts their eyes past it. Here, the demand the whole book has been building toward stands fully exposed: legitimate authority requires not just that citizens obey, and not just that they help make the laws they obey, but that they hold the right beliefs about the state they belong to. The republic needs to reach into the soul.

The Cost of Obeying Only Yourself

The rest of Rousseau’s book answers the question asked in the very beginning, and the shape of that answer is the lesson. Rousseau promised an association in which a man unites with all and yet obeys only himself, and he spends the rest of the treatise assembling the conditions under which that promise can hold. The striking thing is how many of those conditions the people cannot supply from within. They need a founder who stands above them and remakes their nature. They need an unrelenting vigilance against a government fated to betray them. They need a civil religion to bind beliefs that law alone cannot reach. At every load-bearing point, the self-ruling people require something they cannot generate on their own, and the architecture grows more demanding with each chapter that tries to secure the first’s freedom.

This is the irony the book keeps circling without quite naming. A treatise devoted to reconciling liberty with authority succeeds in large part by redefining liberty as a kind of authority, the law one imposes on oneself, so that the reconciliation is achieved partly by changing the terms. And the conditions that remain after the redefinition are so stringent, the lawgiver so rare, the vigilance so total, the civic faith so delicate, that the book reads as much as a measurement of how seldom legitimate self-rule is possible as a recipe for bringing it about. Isaiah Berlin and J. L. Talmon later read the general will as the headwater of a coercion that speaks the language of freedom, and the text gives them real purchase, because once the collective decides what a citizen truly wills, it can override what he says he wills and call the overruling liberty.

That danger does not make Rousseau wrong, and it is worth resisting the temptation to close the book as either a blueprint or a warning, because it is honestly both. His opening sentence is a diagnosis, not a slogan. The chains are real, and so is the possibility of making them legitimate. But the prescription he writes for that legitimacy is so exacting that it doubles as a confession of how improbable the cure must be. Rousseau did not dissolve the ancient tension between freedom and authority. He drove it inward, into the will of the citizen and the meaning of the word free, and the republic he built to resolve it stands or falls on whether a people can become the kind of people such a republic requires. The promise of obeying only oneself turns out to be the most expensive promise in political philosophy, and the whole of The Social Contract is the bill.