THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1762
Trans. G. D. H. Cole
BOOK ONE
1. SUBJECT OF THE FIRST BOOK
MAN is born free; and everywhere
he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change
come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I
can answer.
If I took into account only force, and
the effects derived from it, I should 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 still better; for, regaining its liberty by
the same right as took it away, either it is justified in resuming it, or there
was no justification for those who took it away." But the social order is
a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights. Nevertheless, this right
does not come from nature, and must therefore be founded on conventions. Before
coming to that, I have to prove what I have just
asserted.
4. SLAVERY
SINCE no
man has a natural authority over his fellow, and force creates no right, we
must conclude that conventions form 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 do the same and make itself subject
to a king? There are in this passage plenty of ambiguous words which would need
explaining; but let us confine ourselves to the word alienate. To
alienate is to give or to sell. Now, a man who becomes the slave of another
does not give himself; he sells himself, at the least for his subsistence: but
for what does a people sell itself? A king is so far from furnishing his
subjects with their subsistence that he gets his own only from them; and,
according to Rabelais, kings do not live on nothing. Do subjects then give their
persons on condition that the king takes their goods also? I fail to see what
they have left to preserve.
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 vexatious conduct of his ministers press harder
on them than their own dissensions would have done? What do they gain, if the
very tranquillity they enjoy is one of their
miseries? Tranquillity is found also in dungeons; but
is that enough to make them desirable places to live in? The Greeks imprisoned
in the cave of the Cyclops lived there very tranquilly, while they were
awaiting their turn to be devoured.
To say that a
man gives himself gratuitously, is to say what is absurd and inconceivable;
such an act is null and illegitimate, from the mere fact that he who does it is
out of his mind. To say the same of a whole people is to suppose a people of
madmen; and madness creates no right.
Even if each
man could alienate himself, he could not alienate his children: they are born
men and free; their liberty belongs to them, and no one but they has the right to dispose of it. Before they come to years of
discretion, the father can, in their name, lay down conditions for their
preservation and well-being, but he cannot give them irrevocably and without
conditions: such a gift is contrary to the ends of nature, and exceeds the
rights of paternity. It would therefore be necessary, in order to legitimise an arbitrary government, that in every
generation the people should be in a position to
accept or reject it; but, were this so, the government would be no longer
arbitrary.
To renounce
liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and
even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible.
Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty
from his will is to remove all morality from his acts. Finally, it is an empty
and contradictory convention that sets up, on the one side, absolute authority,
and, on the other, unlimited obedience. Is it not clear that we can be under no
obligation to a person from whom we have the right to exact everything? Does
not this condition alone, in the absence of equivalence or exchange, in itself involve the nullity of the act? For what right can
my slave have against me, when all that he has belongs to me, and, his right
being mine, this right of mine against myself is a phrase devoid of meaning? .
. .
6. THE SOCIAL COMPACT
I SUPPOSE men to have reached
the point at which the obstacles in the way of their preservation in the state
of nature show their power of resistance to be greater than the resources at
the disposal of each individual for his maintenance in that state. That
primitive condition can then subsist no longer; and the human
race would perish unless it changed its manner of existence.
But, as men cannot engender new forces,
but only unite and direct existing ones, they have no other means of preserving
themselves than the formation, by aggregation, of a sum of forces great enough
to overcome the resistance. These they have to bring
into play by means of a single motive power, and cause to act in concert.
This sum of forces can arise only where
several persons come together: but, as the force and liberty of each man are
the chief instruments of his self-preservation, how can he pledge them without
harming his own interests, and neglecting the care he owes to himself? This
difficulty, in its bearing on my present subject, may be stated in the
following terms:
"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." This is the fundamental problem
of which the Social Contract provides the solution.
The clauses of this contract are so
determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would make
them vain and ineffective; so that, although they have perhaps never been
formally set forth, they are everywhere the same and everywhere tacitly
admitted and recognised, until, on the violation of
the social compact, each regains his original rights and resumes his natural
liberty, while losing the conventional liberty in favour
of which he renounced it.
These clauses, properly understood, may
be reduced to one — the total alienation of each associate, together with all
his rights, to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each gives
himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no
one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.
Moreover, the alienation being without
reserve, the union is as perfect as it can be, and no associate has anything
more to demand: for, if the individuals retained certain rights, as there would
be no common superior to decide between them and the public, each, being on one
point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature would thus
continue, and the association would necessarily become inoperative or
tyrannical.
Finally, each man, in giving himself to
all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over whom he does
not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an
equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the
preservation of what he has.
If then we discard from the social
compact what is not of its essence, we shall find that it reduces itself to the
following terms:
"Each of us puts his person and
all his power in common 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
personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral
and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly contains
votes, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life and
its will. This public person, so formed by the union of all other persons
formerly took the name of city,4 and
now takes that of Republic or body politic; it is
called by its members State when passive. Sovereign when
active, and Power when compared with others like itself. Those
who are associated in it take collectively the name of people, and
severally are called citizens, as sharing in the sovereign power,
and subjects, as being under the laws of the State. But these terms
are often confused and taken one for another: it is enough to know how to
distinguish them when they are being used with precision.
4 The
real meaning of this word has been almost wholly lost in modern times; most
people mistake a town for a city, and a townsman for a citizen. They do not
know that houses make a town, but citizens a city. The same mistake long ago
cost the Carthaginians dear. I have never read of the title of citizens being
given to the subjects of any prince, not even the ancient Macedonians or the
English of to-day, though they are nearer liberty than any one else. The French alone everywhere familiarly
adopt the name of citizens, because, as can be seen from their dictionaries,
they have no idea of its meaning; otherwise they would be guilty in usurping
it, of the crime of lèse-majesté: among them, the name expresses a
virtue, and not a right. When Bodin spoke of our citizens
and townsmen, he fell into a bad blunder in taking the one class for the other.
M. d'Alembert has avoided the error, and, in his
article on Geneva, has clearly distinguished the four orders of men (or even
five, counting mere foreigners) who dwell in our town, of which two only
compose the Republic. No other French writer, to my knowledge, has understood
the real meaning of the word citizen.