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 PRESENTED BY

RICHARD HUDSON
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY
1999-1911
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THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
OR

THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL

RIGHTS

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

TRANSLATED BY

ROSE M. HARRINGTON

WITH INTRODUCTION
AND NOTES BY

EDWARD L. WALTER
Wofess'or of the Romance Languages a d Literature
University of Michigan

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK LONDON
37 West Twenty-third Street 24 Bedford Street, Strand

1Ebe IKniclicrbocfeer press

1893
Benttey Historical
Library
itiWersitv of Michigan
 Copyright, 1893
by
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

Entered at Stationers' Hall, London

By G, P. Putnam's Sons

Electrotyped, Printed and Bound by

Ube Tknicherbocher press, IRew JSorft
G. P. Putnam's Sons
 CONTENTS.

PAGE
Preface iii
£ Introduction v

BOOK I.
CHAPTER
I. —Subject of the First Book ... 2
II. —The First Societies 3
III.—The Right of the Strongest ... 7
IV.—Slavery 9
V. —Returning to the First Agreement . 17
VI.— The Social Compact .... 19
VII. —The Sovereign 23
VIII.—The Civil State 26
IX.— Realty 23

BOOK II.
I.—Sovereignty is Inalienable . 34
II.— Sovereignty is Indivisible 36
III. —Whether the General Will can Err 40
IV.—The Limits of Sovereign Power 42
V. —Right of Life and Death 49
VI.—The Law 52

267
226-a
 Contents
CHAPTER PAGH
VII. —The Legislator 58
VIII.—The People 65
IX.—Continuation 68
X.—Continuation 72
XI.—Different Systems of Legislation . 77
XII. —Division of Laws 81

BOOK III.
I.—Government in General ... 84
II.—The Principle Which Constitutes the
Different Forms of Government . 94
III. —Division of Governments ... 98
IV.—Democracy 101
V. —Aristocracy 104
VI. — Monarchy 108
VII. —Mixed Governments . . . .119
VIII. —That All Forms of Government are
not Proper in Every Country . 121
IX.—Signs of a Good Government . . 130
X. —The Abuse of Government and its
Tendency to Degenerate . .132
XI.—The Death of the Political Body . 135
XII.—How Sovereign Authority is Main
tained 137
XIII.—Continuation 139
XIV. —Continuation 141
XV. —Deputies or Representatives . . 143
XVI. —The Establishment of the Govern
ment is not a Contract . . . 149
 Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
XVII. —The Establishment of the Govern
ment Ijj
XVIII. —Means of Preventing Usurpations of
Government 153 •

BOOK IV.

I.—The General Will is Indestructible 158

II. —Suffrage 162
III. —Elections 167
IV. —The Roman Assemblies 171
V. —The Tribunate 190
VI. —The Dictatorship . 193
VII. —The Censorship igg
VIII. —Civil Religion 202
IX. —Conclusion 222

Index 223
 PREFACE.

THIS short treatise is taken from a more

extensive work undertaken by me in other
days without having consulted my strength, and
long since abandoned. Of the different parts
which might be taken from what was com
pleted, this is the longest, and seems to me
the least unworthy to be offered to the public.
The rest is already no more.
J.- J. R.
 INTRODUCTION.

J^HE SOCIAL CONTRACT is the second

of the three books published by Rousseau
in 1761-62, each of which marks an important date
in the history of ideas. First came La Nouvelk
Hiloise, from which, it might almost be said,
starts the literary movement of the nineteenth
century. Then came The Social Contract, and
lastly IZmile, probably the most important
book on education ever published. Different
as these books appear, they are products of the
same fundamental ideas, working on different
subjects, and it needs no very great diligence to
discover in the loves of Saint-Preux and Julie,
and in the training given to Emile, the notions
which underlie The Social Confract, and gave
it such tremendous force in shaping the history
of the next fifty years.
The startling success of the thesis defended
in Rousseau's early discourses on the influence
 Ifntrofcuctlon

of the arts and sciences, and on the origin of

inequality, makes it easy to understand the uni
versal interest which was felt in what he should
say later. But this early success itself needs
explanation, and when this is done, it still re
mains to be considered what elements in these
books have given them so important a place in
the progress of history and of human thought.
When Rousseau came to Paris for the second
time in the spring of 1741, he speedily found
himself a member of a society in which the fer
ment of new ideas had already begun its work.
The austerities of the latter part of the reign of
Louis XIV. and the suffering of the country
under his oppressive and gloomy rule, the relief
and the debauchery of the Regency, the fury of
speculation which followed on Law's schemes
and the disasters which resulted from it, the
confused and confusing spectacle which the
politics of Europe offered in the first twenty-
four years of Louis XV's reign,—all this had not
passed without leaving its mark on literary and
artistic effort. Voltaire had been working for
twenty years at the task for which his defects as
well as his qualities fitted him ; insatiable in his
curiosity, with an extraordinary gift in expres
 fntroductlon

sion, fearless in his attacks when his personal

safety was not involved, ingenious in devices to
express his views without danger to himself
when he thought prudence necessary, he was
one of the most effective instruments in turning
men's minds towards new things. The particu
lar novelty in politics with which the century
ended would certainly have been abhorrent to
him ; as far as it is possible to discover what
his opinions were amid the numerous contra
dictions, intentional and unintentional, of his
writings, he was a believer in the divine right
of aristocracies to rule, always interpreting the
term so as to include himself. The contrast
between Voltaire and Rousseau was immense,
but in spite of this contrast, and perhaps par
tially because of it, the popular instinct which
later associated Voltaire and Rousseau in pro
foundly ignorant condemnation, and the revo
lutionary enthusiasm which bestowed upon them
an equally ignorant adoration, were justified.
If the direct contribution of Voltaire to the
general stock of ideas which brought about the
French Revolution was much more slender than
that of Rousseau, he did scarcely less than
Rousseau in preparing men to see all things
 Introductfon

called in question by his incessant activity

which left nothing untouched, and in disposing
men to believe that there might after all be
some remedy for what was unjust and oppressive
by his services in attacking abuses in admin
istration and in the judiciary.
In 1 741 Montesquieu had already published
his Persian Letters and his Considerations on the
Causes of the Greatness and Decline 0/ the Romans,
and was working on The Spirit of Laws. What
gave the earlier books their immediate historical
.importance was less their breadth of view, their
perfect temperance of judgment, their reflec
tions on liberty and law, which, as developed
later, were to make their author the first great
figure in modern historical science, than their
attacks, only thinly veiled, on religion, and their
undisguised admiration for the ancient Roman
Republic and abhorrence of the Empire which
followed. The early love for the supposed
early Roman virtues which Rousseau had drawn
from Plutarch must have been strengthened by
the influence of Montesquieu, who had even
less in common with Rousseau than Voltaire
himself. The Spirit of Laws was published in
1748, and though the consistent following out of
 flntroduction

its principles would have brought about reform

rather than revolution, there was enough upon
which the revolutionary spirit could seize to
make even this conservative book a factor of
some consequence in the intellectual movements
which were to be so luridly illustrated in the
years from 1789 to 1796. The very attempt to
discover what were the laws of various nations
was an indication that France too might have
her laws, which even kings were held to obey.
Turgot, Malesherbes, Necker, the leaders in the
moderate pre-revolutionary movement, in whom
lay the only chance, feeble though it may have
been, of saving France from the Reign of Terror,
owed much to him, but even their moderation
itself was a necessary preliminary to the putting
in practice of the more radical theories of
Rousseau and St. Just. If moderate measures
failed, though pushed by men so strong and
good as Turgot, nothing was left for the more
cautious speculators even than to take extreme
measures. Montesquieu's admiration for the
English constitution with its three separate
powers, his reflections on the influence of cli
mates and physical conditions generally on laws
and governments, his attempt to determine the
 IntroJmction

principles of every kind of government, his

emphatic condemnation of slavery and torture,
the lofty and generous spirit which breathed
throughout the book—all this and more, if far
from revolutionary in its essence, would readily
furnish weapons to any who were already
resolved to destroy.
Diderot was in 1741 a hack writer who earned
a scanty living by translating English books,
and was gaining the hearts of all who knew him
by the singular ardor with which he sympathized
with all suffering. If one famous story is true,
he was one of the most direct influences which
started Rousseau on the road which was to end
in the profoundest misery, when he advised the
obscure music teacher from Geneva to sustain
the negative of the question set by the Academy
at Dijon, whether the revival of the arts and
sciences had contributed to purify mankind.
Rousseau's own account is, to be sure, different,
but whether or not Diderot gave him the advice,
their acquaintance could scarcely fail to nourish
in him the seed of revolution which he had
brought with him to Paris. The other chiefs
of the philosophic movement had done little to
make themselves known as yet ; D'Alembert,
 "ffntroouctfon

Helvetius, D'Holbach, Raynal, Mably, Condor-

cet, and the others, whose importance in spread
ing the doctrines which were to be used in
justification of the excesses in theory and prac
tice of later years, was not to be compared to
that of the men already named, were only
known, some as successful bankers or rich
bourgeois, some as rising men of letters or
science, some as efficient administrators in the
complex system of French official life, and some
were not known at all, or only to their teachers
in school.
But books and the literary atmosphere are at
best only an indication of something more im
portant. Revolutionary theories, with however
great a flourish of trumpets put forth, will fall
dead on a country and a people where comfort
and content abound ; " a fowl in the pot " is a
better protection against too dangerous theories
on government than whole arsenals of powder
and shot. Now the years since 1700 were to
France little but a preparation for an inevitable
revolution, inevitable, that is to say, if the in
competence and corruption of Louis XV. and
of his ministers and mistresses were to continue
to direct affairs,
 Introouctlon

The evil began in the later years of Louis

XIV's reign, and it is not unlikely that if Louis
himself had had less confidence in his own
wisdom, or if the Duke of Burgundy could
have lived to the age of his grandfather, Rous
seau's preaching, if he had preached, would
have fallen on deaf ears. The glories of the
earlier years of Louis' reign had partially con
cealed the disastrous consequences of such
expensive and long-continued wars to the
economical situation. And in fact the country
was rich enough to make it possible for a wise
administration of affairs to recuperate its wasted
interests, even after the peace of Ryswick in
1697, itself the close of a war far inferior in
splendor to the wars that had preceded. But a
few years later broke out the war of the Spanish
Succession, in which was won neither glory nor
territory, and the new war was a strain on the
resources of the country which it was not able
to bear. The death of Colbert, the extrava
gance and ambition of Louvois, the determina
tion of Louis to be his own minister, as Saint-
Simon describes him, pretending to administer
the vast affairs of the kingdom with only clerks
to aid him, not with agents to relieve him—a
 "ffntroduction

task too great for any man, though he had been

Caesar or Napoleon,—the reckless expenditure
of the court and clergy, encouraged by Louis'
example, even by his precept—all this made an
additional burden to that left by the necessary
expenditures of the war, itself unnecessary and
conducted with unnecessary extravagance. Even
this might have been perhaps remedied, if Louis
had been willing to hear and comply with the
suggestions which came to him from various
quarters. But he would not believe that what
was said of the sufferings of his subjects could
be true, and he made those who dared to call
his attention to the distress of the peasants feel
the weight of his displeasure.
The last years of Racine's life were embittered
by the loss of his master's favor, and this perhaps
hastened his death, yet his offence was nothing
but a plea for some means to diminish the dis
tress of the people. In the early years of
the seventeenth century the celebrated military
engineer Vauban published a book in which he
exposed with plainness the unjust and extrava
gant methods of taxation, and the consequences
to the prosperity of the country, and he too lost
the favor of Louis for the short remainder of his
 Introductfon

life. Boisguillebert exposed even more clearly

and forcibly than Vauban the iniquities of the
system of taxation, and he would no doubt have
lost the favor of Louis also, if he had had it to
lose, or if Louis' attention had been drawn to it.
Fenelon, the gentle archbishop of Cambrai, the
friend of Mme. Guy on, the preceptor of the
Duke of Burgundy, was also moved by the
misery which an observing eye must see and a
sympathetic heart must pity. His remedy was
no doubt vague, as his conception of the cause
and extent of the misery he deplored was vague,
but his principle, that " kings were made for
subjects, not subjects for kings," if it had come
to the ears of Louis, would have lost him all
chance of regaining the favor which his attach
ment for Mme. Guyon had destroyed.
What the clearer vision of great men saw, the
commoner people felt. Nor did they forget
their suffering in admiration of splendors such
as had marked the beginning of the reign, nor
of the display of personal qualities such as those
of Louis' grandfather, which might have made
even tyranny endurable, or such as were seen in
the young Louis when he was the lover of La
Valliere and the ornament of every court circle.
 Untroductfon

But he had grown austere and religious, and if

the regular expenses of the court were about as
ever, they consisted rather in gifts to favorites
among the clergy and elsewhere, and in pious
foundations, the only effect of which was to in
crease the power of a clergy, already too power
ful. The courtiers were as dissatisfied as the
common people, and for directly opposite rea
sons ; the money spent was not for their amuse
ment, and benefited among them only those who
were feared and hated. Nor as far as the cour
tiers were concerned could they look forward to
a better state of things, when, after the death of
the son of Louis, the Duke of Burgundy became
heir apparent ; the pupil of Fenelon was not
likely to be too lavish with the property of those
whom he had been taught to consider as the
especial charge of kings. But the more en
lightened among them and the sufferers who
knew anything about him hoped from him some
reform which should put the country on a sound
economical basis and relieve the most pressing
necessities.
The death of the Duke at twenty-nine put a
stop to both fears and hopes, but when, in 17 14,
Louis died, to the great relief of everybody in
 Introductfon

France except a few personal friends and the

more bigoted among the clergy, hope revived
among the more liberal and intelligent observers.
The Regent was a man of great natural gifts,
and if they had been cultivated as they should
have been, France might have found in him her
salvation. But Louis had systematically kept
his nephew in the background in favor of his
illegitimate children, and all sense of moral
decency had been lost. Yet the instincts of the
new ruler seemed to bear him rather towards a
less oppressive rule, and any change from the
gloom of Louis and Mme. de Maintenon was
felt to be a relief. And in fact there were steps
taken which could serve as indications of a
wiser rule. The magistrates received greater
consideration, corrupt financiers were prose
cuted and severely punished, the Jesuits lost
something of their power, there was even found
in the edict excluding the bastards from the
succession the doctrine that to France alone
belonged the right to bestow the crown if the
legitimate heirs should fail.
But it could hardly be expected that a prince
of the character and history of the Regent
would remain in the way of reform, if any rea
 fntroductfon

sons of personal interest appeared to him to

make it advisable to desert it. One of the
legacies left by Louis was a controversy,
ostensibly over a matter of doctrine, in reality
over a question of influence as between Jesu
its and Jansenists. A bull had been issued by
Clement XI., through the influence of Louis'
Jesuit confessor, which required the faithful to
avoid as heretical and full of false doctrine a
book of devotion written by a priest of the
Oratory. This was the beginning of a quarrel
which lasted as long as the old monarchy,
which, at first purely religious, grew more and
more to assume a political character. Under
pretense of yielding obedience to the Pope, the
clergy demanded of all who wished to receive
absolution a certificate of soundness of doc
trine, so that prelates in the midst of the coarsest
debauchery, made possible by wealth which had
been secured by the most open corruption and
was untaxed, refused the sacraments to poor
dying women who had been stripped of what
they had to satisfy the lust and greed of their
oppressors. It is impossible that a ruler of the
intelligence of the Regent should have remained
blind to the evils sure to follow to Church as
 fntroductlon

well as to State from this condition of things,

but the clergy was strong, his most intimate
friend and adviser, Dubois, was looking towards
a cardinal's hat, he thought it necessary to con
ciliate the Jesuits, finding that they were con
spiring to drive him from the Regency in favor
of his cousin, the king of Spain, it was easier to
yield to pressure, from whatever side it came,
and it gave him more time to do what he best
liked to do, viz., share in the disgraceful orgies
of his friends and their mistresses, than to have
a consistent policy and adhere to it,—and the
promise of the early days of the Regency
vanished.
It is impossible here to trace all the steps by
which what was at first a religious, became
merged into a political question of the greatest
importance. But for the general distress of the
country, it is not probable that the quarrel would
ever have gone beyond the narrow bounds of
Jansenists and Jesuits, and certainly would not
have affected any outside of the clergy and the
magistracy. But they who suffer are seldom wil
ling to wait until a patient investigation has shown
where lies the ultimate cause of the suffering,
before fighting what they believe to be its proxi
 fntroductlon

mate causes. It is an almost irresistible impulse

of most men when they are unhappy to complain
and be discontented, and when the suffering is
great, to complain of all things and be discon
tented with all things. In the case of the suffer
ing in France in the eighteenth century, it was
a true instinct that made the sufferers take the
side of the enemies of the clergy in the struggle
that had its origin in the Pope's bull Unigenitus.
The actual oppression exercised by the higher
clergy was perhaps no greater than that exer
cised by the great nobles, but it was more of
fensive. The giving of spiritual consolation
was one of their chief functions and the setting
of a good example their duty, but who could
ask for consolation from those whose sole object
in life seemed to be the exercise of unlimited and
arbitrary power, and who could look to those
for a good example whose chief object in the
acquisition of power seemed to be greater
facility and security in the enjoyment of the
grossest debauchery and the coarsest luxury ?
The contrast between their position and their
actions made them more odious and justly so.
Thus the sympathies of the great mass of the
French people remained true to the Parliaments
 1Tntro5ucticm

in their struggle with the clergy, as long as it

was a struggle simply between the Parliaments
and the clergy.
But even if the great body of the clergy had
been as humble, devout, and pure as they were
arrogant, irreligious, and corrupt, even so the
clergy would have rightly become the object of
hatred to all liberal-minded men. The theory
of Catholicism itself, as expounded by its chief
representatives, could furnish no comfort to
those who longed for a better state of things.
It was a rigid body of doctrine which held to
absolutism in politics as well as in religion, the
spirit of which, as then interpreted, was shown
by the persecutions of Calas and the death of
Le Barre, which so roused the wrath of the aris
tocratic Voltaire. The clergy were perfectly
logical in opposing any infringement upon their
privileges ; they were divinely appointed to
direct all men in spiritual things, and could not
be subject to the vulgar persecutions of revenue
collectors and to the reprimands and punish
ments bestowed by the law upon vulgar male
factors. If they yielded at all, it was to force,
and could only be to force. Their contribu
tions were, or were supposed to be, voluntary,
 IFntroouctfon

and were made simply because the divinely

constituted civil authorities, whose agency was
needed to protect religion against the attacks of
irreligious men, needed more money to perform
its work than could be wrested from a poverty-
stricken people. So their protests against the
proposition to tax church property, while in the
great majority of cases the result of mere selfish
ness, were supported with perfect sincerity by
the few honest men among the higher clergy.
But what a spectacle to any man outside the
privileged orders that had intelligence and sensi
bilities ! The followers of Him who had not
where to lay His head, not only living in luxury
and debauchery, but fighting with acrimony any
attempt to take from them, in order to relieve
in some small measure the needs of the humbler
members of their flock, any portion of that
which had been entrusted to them, as they would
probably have argued, only to guard the interests
of the religion, one of whose chief duties was to
relieve these very needs ! No wonder that the
hatred of the reformers was directed against the
Church, which they frequently confounded with
religion, more than against any other one institu
tion.
 Introductfon

But if their greatest hatred was directed

against the clergy, the nobility could not secure
their love. The great lords had become little
more than ciphers in the state where the king
was all, and he was governed by mistresses and
ecclesiastics. It is curious to see how unimpor
tant a rdle was played by the great historic
houses during the long reign of Louis XV.
Their names occur often enough, but generally
in connection with social matters. The Riche-
lieus and Mazarins had given way to the Du
bois and Fleurys, and the Turennes and Luxem-
bourgs were represented by incapable generals
whose facility in losing battles was only equalled
by their eagerness in squandering the money
which was not theirs. The most fortunate gen
eral that France had was a German, the best
administrator belonged to the lower nobility,
and if any member of the great houses was con
spicuous by his talent, he either made it useless
by debauchery, like the Duke of Richelieu, who
was as wicked even as his friend and master
Louis, or it was made useless to him and to his
country by the necessity of paying attention to
the whims of a Chateauroux or a Pompadour, as
in the case of the Duke of Choiseul. The inter
 tfntroouctlon

est of most of the great nobles in public matters

began and ended with what immediately con
cerned their private fortunes, and they appar
ently did not see that even their private fortunes
were inseparably bound up with the welfare of
the state, and that the state could not flourish
while agriculture and commerce, religion and
education, were suffering from lack of order and
economy. It is somewhat surprising that such
quickness of perception as characterized the
French society of that time could fail to see and
feel the dangers that must surely assail a land
where, as one of the leaders of the encyclopedic
movement put it only twenty years after Rous
seau's first glorification of the state of nature,
" the state of society is a state of war of the sov
ereign against all, and of each of its members
against the other," where " the great and the
powerful crush with impunity the needy and the
unfortunate," a native land " which gives all to
some of her children, while others she strips of
all," where the many " are forced to labor, to
sweat, to water the earth with their tears, merely
to keep up the luxury, the extravagance, the
corruption, of a handful of fools, a few useless
creatures." Many of the nobles proved after
 "Introductfon

wards that they could endure privations as gayly

as they had shared in the pleasures of the dis
solute court of Louis XV. But adversity was
needed to bring out their virtues, and the citizen
who had no part in their privileges could see
only the frivolity and splendor, the corruption
and wickedness, and must be excused if he
denied the existence of anything better under
neath.
It must not be supposed that the great body
of sufferers had so clear a conception of the
causes of their sufferings as we,who live more than
a hundred years later ; their very suffering ren
dered them less able to know its cause, as is the
nature of such suffering to do. It was probably
in most cases a blind discontent, a dull impa
tience, which was unconsciously nourished by
the sight of the luxury of their oppressors, as
well as by the oppression itself. Rousseau as
cribes his first hatred of tyranny to what a peas
ant told him, who furnished him with food and
wine, when he was travelling on foot from Paris
to Savoy in his earlier vagabond years. The
bread was of the poorest, and the wine of the
sourest, until the host began to feel confi
dence in the honesty of his guest, when most
 tntrooucttott

excellent bread and wine were furnished. He

did not dare, he said to the young Rousseau, to
let it be known that he was not on the verge of
starvation, or he would be a ruined man. It is
a measure of the progress that has been made in
the liberty and security of the laboring man, that
such a state of things as so horrified the young
Rousseau is to-day impossible in any civilized
country, even in Russia. Where the laborer
suffers most, in the plains of Lombardy, in the
slums of the great cities, there is at least no
danger in enjoying such few and humble pleas
ures as are in his power. The fierce struggles
of competition may in some cases, as in the
" sweating system," result in as much suffering,
perhaps in even more, but as soon as the facts
become known, and such abuses are not likely
to remain unknown very long, there is not only
no defence of them from any quarter, but such
a storm of indignation is aroused as would
speedily sweep away the abuses, but for the
practical difficulties in the way. But in the France
of Louis XV., not only were such abuses pro
nounced inevitable in a civilized society by the
defenders of the existing constitution of things,
but it was denied that they were abuses. It was
 Introductfon

by the simple exercise of legitimate rights that

the peasants starved, and it was a reproach
against Providence itself to complain.
If such was the condition of the laboring
man, who did not and could not reflect, but
only suffer, the ordinary citizen—merchant,
tradesman, or small proprietor—was not much
better off. He too was taxed to the full extent
of his means, or beyond them, and if he ordi
narily had enough to eat and drink, the pleasures
or simple luxuries to which he attached so much
importance were not seldom beyond his reach
by reason of his involuntary contributions to the
government, and especially to the governors.
But he did not confine himself to feeling, he
reasoned, and if his logic was employed chiefly
in finding sufficient grounds for already formed
opinions, rather than as an aid in forming those
opinions, this is not so rare in more fortunate
times as to deserve very severe blame in the
unfortunate subjects of Louis XV.
The obstacles thrown in the way of the ordi
nary citizen who wished to learn a trade or enter
into business, and had no powerful protector
among the friends of the king's mistresses to
help him, were such as to seem incredible to us
 fntrobuctfon

who are accustomed to the freedom of to-day.

The worst charges brought against the trades
unions, knights of labor, and other similar
bodies, would seem mild by the side of the bare
facts concerning the conditions of labor then, as
established by the regulations of the various
jurandes. These bodies, taking their origin in
the desire to afford legitimate protection to the
interests of both buyer and seller, had become
little more than huge monopolies, giving poor
goods for high prices. This was made possible
by the system of extreme protection, which was
practically prohibitory, and this, not only be
tween France and other countries, but between
the several provinces of France itself. For all
purposes of commercial intercourse, Burgundy
and Artois were as distinct as France and Eng
land, except that smuggling was easier and more
frequent. A poor harvest in Provence did not
raise the price of wheat in Gascony, for with
duties so high that none but the nobles and
higher clergy could pay them, there was but
little increased sale for the Gascony wheat in
Provence, and the unfortunate inhabitants were
fain to do as the brutal governor of Dijon is said
to have told the peasants to do who complained
xxviii fntroouction

of hunger, to eat the grass which was beginning

to grow. Not only were high duties imposed
upon merchandise going from one province to
another, but the ordinary ways of transportation
were made so burdensome by impositions of
various kinds that even without the duties the
prices were raised beyond all reason. The dif
ferent watercourses demanded toll from all ves
sels which passed ; sometimes the same vessel
would pay toll a dozen times on the same river,
now in the interest of provincial governments,
now to swell the purse of some great noble or
some farmer-general who had purchased the
privilege of bleeding the inhabitants of one
district with money he had got by bleeding the
inhabitants of another.
For the peasant, bad harvests scarcely made
his condition worse, good harvests scarcely made
it better. In addition to the enormous taxes
which had to be paid almost exclusively by the
small proprietors and the tradesmen, the burden
of which, however, fell upon the peasant, as il
lustrated by Rousseau's story, who paid in the
lack of even the simplest comforts, the peasant
was subjected to the draft, in order to fill the
armies of the king, who were fighting in behalf
 tntroductfott

of no principle, and were led by wretchedly in

efficient generals. The great difficulties in re
cruiting good men as food for powder were met
by drafts, and these were executed with extra
ordinary rigor. The peasants did not always
submit without murmurs to the officers of the
king, and more than once the resistance reached
almost the proportions of a rebellion, where
those who fled to the woods had to be sought by
small armies, and were driven by force to yield
to the most grievous wrongs, when treachery did
not make force superfluous, for the most odious
means were resorted to to secure success.
Even in the collection of taxes, heavy as they
were, the manner of levying them was the most
offensive feature. The officers who received
the money from the taxpayers in the first in
stance were appointed from among them, with
no guaranty and with no instructions, except
that each commune was to furnish a certain
amount of money. It was left entirely to the
discretion of the officers to decide how the
money was to be levied, and the consequences
are easy to imagine. It was an invidious and
delicate thing to assess the taxes upon the prop
erty that was subject to them, and it was almost
 Introductfon

impossible to find volunteers to perform this

odious and necessary duty. Hence those upon
whom this doubtful honor was imposed were
compelled to serve under penalty of fine and
imprisonment. It was not in human nature that
officers thus appointed, who served but one
year and then gave way to others appointed in
the same manner, should not take advantage of
the situation to lessen as much as possible their
own burdens, to the disadvantage of their
friends and neighbors. Hence continual com
plaints, often legitimate, of the unfairness of the
incidence of the taxes, so that at times whole
districts were in commotion from the grossly
unjust manner of exacting what was in effect
tribute to the great farmers-general.
As if drafts and taxes were not enough, the
unfortunate peasant was subjected to the corvee,
by which was meant the forced employment of the
peasant in working to make the roads passable,
of course chiefly for the great nobles and eccle
siastics. The principle of the corvee was recog
nized by many even of the reformers as not
objectionable. Necker calls it " a good fiscal
notion," and Rousseau expressly commends it ;
indeed, the refusal to enforce it upon all is for him
 IFntroductlon

the beginning of the decay of the state. But here,

as everywhere else, it was the manner of enforcing
it that was the just cause of complaint. It was
only the peasant, who used the roads least, who
was compelled to work on them. He could be
summoned whenever it was most convenient for
his superior, even in the midst of the most
necessary labors, to the loss of crops or the
neglect of sowing and proper cultivation. He
could be sent far away from home,—so far that
he could not sleep there,—and wherever he was
he was compelled to provide for his own food
and that of his beasts, which he generally had
to take with him, and he received no pay.
Even a bad system can be so administered as to
minimize the evils that must result, and no
doubt there were officials who were anxious to
do as little harm as possible ; the most nota
ble example is Turgot, while governor of the
Limousin. But it would be contrary to the
tenor and spirit of official life in the France of
Louis XV. to care much for the sufferings or
the enjoyments of persons who existed merely
to swell the armies of the king and the purses
of the rich, and the word corvee became one of
the most odious in the vocabulary of liberal
 flntroouction

minded thinkers. It was one of the glories of

Turgot that during his short service as minister
he secured the abolition of the corvee.
It was into the midst of a society and state
such as this, with all sorts of discontent, politi
cal, religious, economical, social, that Rousseau
launched his famous discourses concerning the
corruption of arts and letters and concerning
the origin of inequality. The peasants, who
suffered most, could hardly be reached by this
or by any book, but Rousseau found admirers
and secured disciples in every rank of society.
The vague unrest which springs rather from
dissatisfaction with a great variety of things
than from a single cause of complaint, is gen
erally eager to accept any explanation and to
try any remedy. When misery is widespread
the few who do not suffer cannot escape the
influence of the misery of others. Some among
them are moved to sympathy and the best to
some form of action. Moreover, in a country
where esprit has always been so honored, it was
a good thing for Rousseau that nearly all the
esprit that was to be found in books and
pamphlets came from those who were dissatisfied
with the existing order of things. It had be
 flntroouctfon

come to a certain extent the fashion to declaim

against abuses, and if in most cases declamation
was all, that alone was enough to keep the sub
ject well in sight. Hence it is not strange that
even among the great nobles some were found
to welcome the voice which so eloquently
preached the return to simple nature, and
pointed out the simple virtues and the happi
ness of the savages who knew not civilization.
They either did not see the possible ultimate
consequences of the triumph of such views, as
was no doubt the case with most, or had no
care, so long as it came after them. There also
may have been some, though certainly the
number was very small, who saw the probable
outcome and rejoiced in it.
So it came about that in the interval between
the publication of the Discourses and The
Social Contract Rousseau counted among his
friends and protectors such persons as the
Prince of Conti, the Duke of Luxembourg, the
Countess of Crdquy, the Countess of Boufflers,
and others. His most constant friend during
most of this period, who furnished him a
house in which he wrote La Nouvelle He"loise,
and was kind to him in many ways besides, was
c
 Introductfon

Mme. d'Epinay, the wife of a farmer-general, of

a member of that class perhaps most interested
in preserving things as they were. In the
magistracy he counted Malesherbes, the upright
and courageous defender of Louis XVI. before
the Convention, and the Confessions are full of
complaints of the waste of time caused by the
constant invitations to the houses, not only of
the literary men themselves, but to those of
their protectors also, quite as often princes,
dukes, and marquises as rich bourgeois. The
relations of the melancholy and half insane
Rousseau with his literary friends had become
much closer also, and, as was an inevitable
consequence with a temperament like his, the
intimacy was but a preliminary to a quarrel.
Voltaire and Diderot, Grimm and D'Holbach
had been unable to put up with the unjust
suspicions and complaints of the hypersensitive
and unreasonable Rousseau, and even Male
sherbes was compelled to defend himself against
charges which only a diseased imagination
could have framed. But whatever the feelings
of men of letters toward the man Rousseau,
whatever fault some among them, Voltaire
above all, found with the details of his argu
 Introductfon

ment and even to some extent with his conclu

sions, it was impossible for them not to see that
the voice that was filling the world with its elo
quence was proclaiming a gospel in harmony
on the whole with what they cherished most.
Thus it resulted that rank, fashion, intelli
gence, esprit, those who suffered and those who
enjoyed, those who might be presumed to com
prehend and those who certainly could not
comprehend, were ready to welcome enthusias
tically a book like The Social Contract, which
fervently laid bare in their origin the evils
which some felt and all saw, and promised to
show a remedy. The form of the book also
was best adapted to the situation. The unrest
which on its literary side had owed more to
Voltaire than to any other agency, was not sat
isfied with wit and brilliancy, such as he had
given them in abundance, it needed and de
manded also sobriety and severity, order and
measure. This need was met admirably in The
Social Contract. We who know what was to
follow, who know the place that the name and
work of Rousseau were to hold in the imagina
tion and heart of the generation which followed,
are inclined to perceive more in The Social Con
 Introductfon

tract than was perceived by his contemporaries.

The smouldering fire of which Mr. Morley
speaks is no doubt there, but to its first readers
it must have appeared very generally what it
was called by Mme. du Deffand, who was cer
tainly a good representative of the intelligence
of the day, whether or not she sympathized
with its aspirations, tiresome and obscure to
the last degree. But it was read, and it did its
work. Those who were eager to accept the
conclusions that they knew would be drawn, did
not for the most part examine whether the as
sumptions on which the article depends were
sound, whether the distinctions from which such
portentous results were obtained were anything
but verbal, whether the historical facts which
were to support and illustrate the argument were
facts, or, when they were, whether they did
support the argument.
The subject-matter of The Social Contract
—an inquiry into the foundations of civil gov
ernment—and the apparent severity of the
method in some parts of the book were enough
to interfere with an immediate popular success,
and the persecutions which fell upon the author
because of the slightly unorthodox form in
 fnttoductfott

which he clothed his sincerely religious spirit

in £mile tended still more to draw upon the
latter a disproportionate degree of attention ;
the authorities did not suspect how much more
dangerous to them and their pretensions were
the dry reasonings of The Social Contract than
the sentimental outpourings of the Savoyard
vicar. It is not easy to find anything in the
contemporary records which indicates any such
excitement over The Social Contract as was
felt all over Europe over his essays of a few
years before, or over his Nouvelle Hdoise. But
there are plenty of indications that the popular
success was not and could not be taken as a
test of the interest felt by those who might be
presumed to be the leaders in thought. There
is scarcely an allusion to The Social Contract
in the twenty volumes which Grimm and others
dedicated to informing the petty German princes
and the Empress of Russia of what was going
on in the literary world, but the little that is
said is enough to show that its importance was
felt, if not entirely, at least partially. If the
purveyors of literary information did not care
to go into details concerning a book which,
carried to its logical conclusion, would put on a
xxxvili Introduction

very unstable foundation the power of their

customers, they felt the boldness of the theories,
a thing which explains perhaps why the future
examination and report on it which they an
nounced was never given.
Voltaire tells one of his most faithful corre
spondents that the only thing remarkable in it
is some gross insult to kings and a few insipid
pages against the Christian religion. This
judgment is less noteworthy, as similar judg
ments are numerous concerning the Nouvelle
Hdo'ise and Emile. With all Voltaire's acute-
ness, partly by reason of it, he could not esti
mate the vast influence of even bad logic and
bad taste when directed against real abuses by
a man who felt them and was possessed of
literary gifts. But he felt where the sting of the
book lay, what it would be most likely to do if
it did anything. Nor were the authorities
utterly blind to the danger of the doctrine ad
vocated. The book was condemned to be burned
in Geneva, as was £mile, and it was openly
charged that the real reason for including the
two books in the same condemnation was politi
cal rather than religious, though the chief pre
text was the irreligious doctrine contained in
 fntroductlon

them. The reading of it was strictly forbidden

in France, several editions were confiscated,
and at least one unfortunate bookseller was
imprisoned and fined for having begun to print
it. Some even of those who sympathized with
the doctrine considered the book dangerous.
Bachaumont congratulates himself that the
author has enveloped himself in a scientific
obscurity which makes him unintelligible to the
ordinary reader ; " his arguments are only the
development of maxims which are in every
body's hearts, and feeble heads could easily be
turned."
The very defects of Rousseau's book brought
it into closer sympathy with the ideas that were
to bear such terrible fruit. Hardly anything is
more extraordinary to the modern student of
The Social Contract than the cavalier way in
which he treats history. His knowledge of
history was pretty wide, considering his training
and the state of historical science in his day,
especially wide in that region of history where
no precise knowledge was possible for him or
for any man, then or now or ever. But there is
not the slightest trace of criticism of his authori
ties, except in a few cases where his cause would
xi fntroouction

be hurt by a reported fact. Where the facts,

however, happen to be facts, or where he can
safely indulge in a priori reasoning without
being embarrassed by facts, his conclusions are
often admirable specimens of what close and
acute reasoning can do. Now all this was quite
in accord with the prevailing notions. Erudi
tion, the knowledge of authorities, the patient
investigation of facts, were not to be named by
the side of reason, which, even when, as in the
case of Descartes and his followers, it was pro
fessedly based upon the study of facts, must
follow the natural intelligence, les lumieres
naturelles. Science itself must not be too eager
to show the grounds of its conclusions. Mon
tesquieu, the father of modern historical science,
was compelled, says Taine, in order to have his
great book read (the phrase is untranslatable),
de faire de I 'esprit sur les lois, and one of his later
disciples, who died less than sixty years ago,
said of him, even so, that he stuck too slavishly
to historical facts. In order to be a successful
geometrician or chemist, it was necessary to be
epigrammatic and oratorical, where modern
scientific men content themselves with being
clear. The revolution which had begun in the
 ITntroDuctlon xii

world of science, no less important than that

which was to take place in the political world,
was but dimly discerned. Chemistry and geol
ogy, geometry and physics, were important
chiefly as furnishing a few data from which to
make sonorous deductions ; those audacious
speculators liked to have a starting-point to
jump out into space from. D'Alembert is said
to have been ashamed of his membership in the
Academy of Sciences, and so late as 1789 the
Abb6 Maury, since sunk into deserved oblivion,
declared that the members of the French Acad
emy looked upon the members of the Academy
of Sciences as their valets de chambre, and in this
he only expressed with more harshness what
most of his colleagues thought. Now among
these valets were such men as Lavoisier, Berthol-
let, Fourcroy, Laplace, Lagrange, Monge, Dau-
benton, Lamarck, Jussieu, Haiiy, etc.
It is easy to understand that a generation
whose leaders felt and talked thus would not be
repelled by Rousseau's eccentric statements of
historical matters, in which they attached so"
little importance to accuracy, indeed, rather
despised it. What they sought was there, an
apparently rigorous deduction from data which
xlii Introouctfon

they saw no reason to reject, an abundant supply

of far-reaching principles to start with, to guide
the reasoner through the perilous mazes of in
convenient facts, when such facts thrust them
selves too impudently forward, loud professions
of faith in the ability of the human reason to dis
cover the truth and of impartiality in the search
after it, a sincere belief that it could be found
in only one way, and that the traditional way,
which seemed to them new because, essentially
the same, it had been modified in some of its
unessential parts. Such qualities as these would
have secured attention then to any book on any
subject. But to this must be added in Rous
seau's case purely literary qualities of a very
high order. His style was not characterized by
the lightness of touch which made Voltaire so
exasperating an enemy, but was lacking in noth
ing else that could be asked for in prose argu
ment, combining to a very high degree those
things that most appeal to French minds, order,
lucidity, and passion.
But after all no amount of literary skill could
have availed to do more than make Rousseau a
subject of interest to students of literature, if he
had not made himself the mouthpiece of the
 ITntrOdUCtlOtl xliii

countless sufferers of his time and country, and,

as it seemed to them, the possible avenger of
their sufferings. He did not rest satisfied with
eloquent indictments against the abuses from
which the suffering sprang, he offered remedies,
and if they were mutually exclusive, there is no
reason to suppose that he or the greater part of
his followers knew it. The first remedy was a
return to nature. It is not easy for us to under
stand the immense influence of a formula so
vague as that, but precision was not so neces
sary then as we imagine it to be now. The
state of nature to which Rousseau in his earlier
essays would have us return was a curious mix
ture of refined simplicity, such as only ancient
civilizations can produce, and barbaric freedom,
such as was generally supposed to exist among
savages. Those were idyllic times, when every
body followed nature simply, and when nature,
strangely enough, urged no one to do anything
which was not generous and pure. In some cases
he specified what was natural, and fashionable
mothers began soon to give the breast to their
infants in their salons, and Louis XVI. became
a carpenter and Marie Antoinette a milkmaid.
But a remedy for abuses which is received with
xiiv fntroductfon

enthusiasm by those who profit most by the

abuses themselves might well have appeared
suspicious. The return to the primitive state of
innocence and purity was preached especially
by Rousseau in his earlier essays. By the time
The Social Contract appeared, it was plain
that the return to nature was insufficient, unless
the journey was undertaken under the guidance
of people who knew what nature was and how
it could be reached.
Now the road pointed out as most certain to
lead directly to nature apparently began by
turning resolutely away from nature. Ownership
of private property was the first step on the sad
way that led to the degradations of civilization ;
let every man own, not only his own, but every
body else's property. The boards which pre
vented the development of the brains of the
savages on the Oronoco preserved for them a
part of their imbecility and original happiness ;
let children be saved from imbecility and origi
nal happiness by the means expounded in £mile.
Man is by nature good and pure, it is to society
alone that his evident corruption is due ; let
society be so strongly organized that men shall
be restored to their primitive purity and good
 fntroouctfon xiv

ness. I am well aware that I have forced the

note a little in thus summarizing Rousseau's
contradictory remedies and setting them over
against each other, but the substance of the
contradiction remains. The later of the two is
so skilfully wrapped in argumentative develop
ments, so qualified and modified by innocent
and wary phraseology, that eager disciples were
sure to overlook the essential contradiction.
Rousseau never formally renounced the neces
sity of a return to nature, and taught it even in
his later books, wherever he was not embar
rassed by the need of defining it precisely, and
there is no reason to suppose that he was con
scious of any difficulty. " Nature was everything
that was good and noble," was an axiom to
every man of sense, and it followed by a very
common fallacy that everything that was good
and noble was nature. Satisfy yourselves that
any particular thing is good, and it will be
nature, and hence all honorable means to make
it prevail are demanded by common honesty,
and in practice all means are honorable to bring
about so honorable a result.
There was thus no difficulty for all who
thought and felt like Rousseau in employing all
xlvi Introouction

non-natural and unnatural devices to attain to

nature, especially when aided by another favo
rite dogma of the age, viz. : the perfectibility of
the human reason. This doctrine as expounded
by Condorcet was fitted rather to throw doubt
upon any particular solution than to give con
fidence in it. But theory, as applied to the
given state of things before them, left no great
doubt in the minds of the theorists as to what
must be done. Condorcet's faith in future per
fection was founded upon a careful study of the
past, as careful as his temper and that of the
time made possible. He showed that whatever
good we have now has been the result of a con
stant improvement in intelligence, and then,
with the spirit and method of Montesquieu,
how the natural order of things, as illustrated in
the past, would inevitably lead to several very
glorious things in the future, such as perfect
equality in fact as well as in theory, a universally
intelligible language, the extinction of disease,
etc. With him nature plays a great part also,
but it is especially the nature which is eternal,
unchangeable, which gives us confidence in the
immutability of physical and chemical laws,—in
short, a nature such as had been imagined by
 •ffntro&uction xlvii

the physiocrats before him, not the romantic

and sentimental nature of Rousseau. He, like
the physiocrats, presumed that social laws were
as fixed as physical laws, and if men could be
excused for not following them while they were
yet unknown, now that he and his teachers and
scholars had discovered them, there is no longer
any excuse. He assumed, as did all his masters,
that the departure from nature in imposing the
artificial restrictions of society was the prime
cause of all the miseries of men, and he deter
mined what these restrictions were with supreme
confidence. Here he approached Rousseau,
here was the point of contact, for the things to
be abolished were the same, Could not but be
the same, for any one who had eyes and a heart,
and was not too closely bound to the existing
order of things.
To those who had been stirred to the depths
by Rousseau's fervid eloquence, whose inaction
had been melted away by the smouldering fire
concealed under the dry deductions of his argu
ment, who did not look too curiously under the
surface, the appeal to nature, the confidence in
the future of humanity, were enough. If the
world was to see the glorious things predicted
xlviH introduction

by Condorcet, it could only be because man

was by nature good and noble, and hence could
and would brush away all that prevented him
from becoming what he was meant by nature to
be. Now The Social Contract showed to those
who were eager to be convinced that no power
was legitimate which was guilty of abuses. It
is no wonder that its author was buried in the
Pantheon with pompous procession, that the
framers of the new Constitution, Thouret and
Sieyes and La Fayette, did not forget and dared
not forget its doctrines, that it was the text
book and the delight of Camille Desmoulins and
Danton and St. Just, that Robespierre read it
through once every day. Though the Revolu
tion would certainly have taken place without
The Social Contract, it would have been on dif
ferent lines, and perhaps with different results.
With The Social Contract to draw from, it was
not, strictly speaking, a revolution for the leaders
in it, it was not an overthrow of power, it was a
resumption of power by those who had never
abandoned it, who, if they had wished, could
not have abandoned it permanently, as Rousseau
had proved to them.
It is difficult here, as always in such cases, to
 Introouctlon xiix

say how far the antecedent situation, in the

broadest sense of the term, produced the book,
and how far the book brought about the circum
stances which followed. The mathematics
which determines with precision the intricate
laws of action and reaction in moral and social
forces is vastly more complicated than the most
complicated problems in calculus, and has hardly
begun to be developed. But in any case the
circumstances favored the doctrine of the book
itself, and some of these circumstances I have
pointed out. The desperate condition of things
in the kingdom which made any change seem
an improvement, the eloquent pictures of a
golden age when all men were happy because
they followed nature, which was destroyed only
because they ceased to follow nature, the prom
ise of a glorious future when men should be
brought back to nature by beneficent violence,
the demonstration of the illegitimacy of all
power which had been guilty of abuses, all this
coming from a man of extraordinary literary
gifts, with faults of character which only served
to make him more interesting,—all these things
certainly do not explain what is inexplicable,
but they do serve somewhat to bring Rousseau
D
l tntroductton

and his work a little closer to the ordinary mys

tery which surrounds us on all sides.
The influence of The Social Contract on
strictly political speculation has not been so
great as that of the earlier Discourses, which
gave the impulse to much of the subsequent
political speculation of Kant and his followers.*
The central conception, that of the sovereignty
of the people, was hardly original with him,
and it is often hard to say whether any par
ticular manifestation of it in theory or in prac
tice was due to Rousseau or to Hobbes and
Locke, from whom Rousseau drew so largely.
The fathers of the American Revolution in par
ticular were not in my opinion so deeply influ
enced by Rousseau as is often thought. The
descendants of the men who beheaded Charles
I. and expelled James II. were not likely to wait
before declaring their independence until they
had found a theoretical basis for it which satis
fied them. Nor can the considerations touching
this subject drawn from the Declaration of In
dependence, from the Federalist, from the cor
respondence and other writings of Jefferson,
* See Fester, Rousseau und die deutschegeschichts Phi
losophie, Stuttgart, 1890.
 Introductfon

Hamilton, and Madison, be attributed with any

probability to Rousseau rather than to the tradi
tions of English politics, or to Hobbes and
Locke. The speculative importance of The
Social Contract is rather the result of its his
torical importance. The doctrine of the sover
eignty of the people secured general acceptance
outside of England only in consequence of
Rousseau's advocacy of it, and the attempt of
the French revolutionary leaders to put it into
practice. But since that time it has become an
axiom for all to whom the existing social and
political relations are an abomination. And in
proportion as Rousseau's justification of the
doctrine has seemed insufficient and his exposi
tion of it inaccurate, other and more satisfactory
demonstrations and definitions have been de
vised. The historical connection here sug
gested between the advanced doctrines of Marx
and his followers and the original theory of
Rousseau is of course of the slightest, and
would have to be established by more extended
investigations than I have been able to make,
but I believe it to be correct.
Aside from the doctrine of the sovereignty of
the people, there are many points of contact
in Introductfon

between the doctrines of Rousseau and later

theory and practice, and attention will be called
to some of them in the notes. But except in
some of the eccentric legislation of the French
revolutionary period, it is impossible to suppose
any direct connection with The Social Contract.
The one undeniable effect of Rousseau's teach
ing was to make convictions already formed more
fervid, and to furnish plausible reasons for doing
what passion and interest had already coun
selled, and here his influence was felt as widely
in America as in France, if not as deeply nor as
promptly. The phraseology of much of the more
ambitious and less precise writing of Jefferson
and Madison was plainly due to the influence,
direct or indirect, of Rousseau, though generally
the eloquent Frenchman is not named. Now
the immense influence of phrases in forming the
opinions even of reasonable men cannot be
doubted by any observant person. Their ac
tion is both direct and reflex, they fashion opin
ion directly by what they contain that is
eloquently vague and superficially profound,
they demand in those who distrust such easy
brilliancy more careful attention, more thorough
analysis, than would otherwise be given. From
this point of view alone Rousseau would be well
 Introduction Hii

worth special study ; probably there could be

found no better example in literature than he
furnishes of the power of phrases. The power
they exercised over himself can be seen on every
page ; so much the more interesting is it to see
that almost as frequently he was able to see
things as they were. Bits of political wisdom
could be selected from his works worthy of
Machiavel or Burke ; it is hard to believe at
first sight that the author of the Considerations
on the Government of Poland wrote the chapters
on " Government in General " and on " Civil
Religion " in The Social Contract.
For us the interest attaching to The Social
Contract must be chiefly historical : in the his
tory of events, for the large part it had in shap
ing the most tremendous convulsion of modern
times ; in the history of ideas, which are after
all important only as appearing in action after
a longer or shorter circuit, as containing the
most striking statement of a theory destined to
mould profoundly the history of nations, as be
ing even now the arsenal whence are drawn the
weapons which are first sharpened and polished
and then directed against the whole framework
of the modern state.
E. L. W.
>
 THE SOCIAL CONTRACT.

BOOK I.
1WISH to discover whether, in the existing
social order, there may not be some rule of
safe and legitimate administration, taking men
as they are, and laws as they might be. I shall
try to ally, in this research, that which the law
permits with that which interest prescribes, so
that justice and utility may not be divided.
I enter upon this discussion without proving
the importance of the subject. I shall be asked
if I am a prince or a legislator, that I write about
politics. I shall answer, No, —and that for this
reason I write about politics. If I were a prince
or a legislator, I should not lose time in telling
what ought to be done ; I should do it or be
silent.
a Zbe Social Contract [bk. i.

Born citizen of a free state* and member of

the sovereign people, however feeble the influ
ence of my voice in public affairs, the right to
vote upon them imposes upon me the duty of
instructing myself. Whenever I meditate upon
governments I am happy to find in my investi
gations new reasons for loving that of my own
country.

CHAPTER I.

SUBJECT OF THE FIRST BOOK.

MAN is born free, and he is everywhere in

chains. A man believes himself the
master of others, but is for all that more a slave
than they. How is this brought about ? I do
not know. What could make it legitimate ? I
think I can answer this question.
If I considered force alone and the effects
derived from it, I should say : As long as a peo
ple is compelled to obey and obeys, it does
well ; as soon as it can shake off the yoke, and
* Born in Geneva in 1712 ; lost his rights as citizen when
he embraced the Roman Catholic faith in 1728 ; restored
to his rights as citizen when he returned to the Protestant
faith in 1754.—Ed.
ch. ii.] Gbe jfirst Societies 3

shakes it off, it does better : for, recovering its

liberty by the same right by which it was taken
away, either a people is justified in recovering
its liberty, or there was no justification in taking
it away.
Social order is a sacred right which serves as
a basis for all others. But this right does not
come from nature ; it is founded upon conven
tions. We must know what these conventions
are ; but before reaching that point I must estab
lish what I have just asserted.

CHAPTER II.
THE FIRST SOCIETIES.

THE most ancient of all societies, and the

only natural one, is that of the family ;
yet children remain dependent upon the father
only as-long as they have need of him for self-
preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the
natural bond is dissolved. The children, ex
empt from the obedience which they owed to
the father ; the father, exempt from the care
which he owed to his children, become equally
independent. If they remain united it is no
4 Gbe Social Contract [bk. i.

longer naturally, it is voluntarily ; and the fam

ily itself is maintained only by agreement.
This common liberty is a consequence of the
nature of man. His first law is that of self-
preservation, his first cares are those which he
owes to himself ; and as soon as he has reached
years of discretion, he alone being judge of the
means necessary for his preservation, becomes
thereby his own master.
The family is, then, if you will, the first model
of political societies : the chief is the father,
the people are the children ; and all being born
equal and free, alienate their liberty only for
their benefit. All the difference is that, in the
family, the love of the father for his children
pays him for his care of them, and in the state
the pleasure of commanding makes up for the
love which the chief has not for his people.
Grotius * denies that all human power is estab
lished in favor of those who are governed : he
cites slavery as an example. His most ordinary
mode of reasoning is to establish right by

* Hugo de Groot, better known by the Latinized form

of the name, Grotius, Dutch statesman, jurist, and theo
logian, born 1583, died 1645. His treatise, De Jure Belli
el Pads, is usually considered the foundation of modern
international law. —Ed.
ch. ii.] Zbe jfirst Societies 5

fact.* A method might be employed which

would be more logical, but not more favorable
to tyrants.
It is doubtful then, according to Grotius,
whether mankind belongs to a hundred men, or
the hundred men belong to mankind ; and he
seems throughout his book to lean to the first
opinion ; it is also Hobbes' f opinion. So here
is the human species divided into herds, each
having a chief, who guards only to devour it.
As a herdsman is of a nature superior to his
herd, the pastors of men, who are their chiefs,
are also of a nature superior to their people.
The Emperor Caligula J reasoned thus, accord
ing to Philo, § concluding from this analogy
* ' ' Learned researches upon public rights are often only
the history of ancient abuses ; and it is lost labor to take
the trouble to study them too much. " ( Traits des InUrets
de la France avec ses Voisins, par M. Le Marquis d'Argen-
son, imprime chez Rey, a Amsterdam.) This is exactly
what Grotius does.
f Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, celebrated English
philosopher, the ablest defender in his day of absolute
governments, born 1588, died 1679. —Ed.
% Caligula, Emperor of Rome from A.d. 37 to 41, born
12. —Ed.
§ Philo, called Judaeus, a native of Alexandria, born
about 20 B.C. He came to Rome to intercede with Caligula
for his fellow Jews in 40 A.d. He left voluminous writings
on philosophical subjects.—Ed.
6 Gbe Social Contract [bk. i.

that kings are gods, or that the people are

brutes.
The reasoning of Caligula amounts to that of
Hobbes and Grotius. Aristotle said before any
of them that men were not naturally equal, but
that some were 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 all in their chains, even the desire to leave
them ; they love servitude as the companions of
Ulysses f loved brutishness. If then, there are
slaves by nature, it is because there have been
slaves contrary to nature. Force made the first
slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them.
I have said nothing of King Adam, nor of
Emperor Noah, father of three great monarchs
who shared the universe, as did the children of
Saturn, whom some think they recognize in
them. J I hope, I shall receive credit for this
moderation, for descending directly from one
* Aristotle, the celebrated Greek philosopher and pre
ceptor of Alexander, born B.C. 384, died 322. —Ed.
f See Odyssey, X.-XII.—Ed.
\ See Locke's Treatise on Government, Book I., Chapter
XI.—Ed.
ch. in.] Zbe "Kiebt of tbe Strongest 7

of these princes, and perhaps from the elder

branch, how do I know whether, by the verifi
cation of titles, I should not find myself the
legitimate king of mankind ? However that
may be, it cannot be denied that Adam was
sovereign of the world, as Robinson of his
island, as long as he was the only inhabitant,
and what was convenient in this empire was that
the monarch, safe upon his throne, had neither
rebellion, nor war, nor conspirators to fear.

CHAPTER III.

THE RIGHT OF THE STRONGEST.

THE strongest is never strong enough to be

always master, unless he transforms his
strength into right, and obedience to duty.
From this comes the right of the strongest ; a
right taken ironically in appearance, and estab
lished really in principle. Strength is physical
power ; I do not see what moral force could re
sult from its action. To yield to force is an act
of necessity, not of will ; it is at the most an
act of prudence. In what sense could it be a
duty?
8 Zbe Social Contract [bk. i.

Let us for a moment grant this pretended

right. I say that there would result from it
only an inexplicable muddle ; for as soon as it
is strength that makes right, the effect changes
with the cause : any force which overcomes first
succeeds to the right. As soon as disobedience
can be practised with impunity, it can be
practised legitimately ; and as the strongest is
always right, it is only necessary to arrange al
ways to be strongest. Now, what is a right
which perishes when strength ceases ? If obedi
ence must be rendered to strength, it is not
necessary to obey from duty ; and if obedience
is not exacted, it is not necessary to obey. It
may be seen then that the word right adds
nothing to strength ; it has no significance here.
Obey them that have the rule over you. If
that means, yield to force, the precept is good,
but superfluous : I answer for its never being
violated.
All power comes from God, I acknowledge
it ; but all sickness comes from Him too : does
that mean that it is forbidden to call a phy
sician ? If a brigand surprises me in a wood, I
am forced to give him my purse ; but if I could
conceal it, am I in conscience bound to give it
ch. iv.] Slavery g

up ? For the pistol which he carries in his hand

is a power.
Let us agree, then, that strength does not
make right, and that obedience only to legiti
mate power is obligatory. So my original ques
tion comes up again.

CHAPTER IV.

SINCE no man has natural authority over his

kind, and since strength does not make
right, there remains only agreement for the basis
of all legitimate authority among men.
If one individual, said Grotius, can alienate
his liberty and make himself the slave of a mas
ter, why cannot a whole people alienate its lib
erty, and make itself subject to a king? There
are many words there which require explana
tion, but let us take the word alienate. To alien
ate is to give or sell. Now a man who makes
himself the slave of another does not give him
self, he sells himself, at the least for his sub-

* Compare Locke, II., 4. —Ed.

 Gbe Social Contract [bk. i.

sistence ; but a people,—why should it sell itself ?

A king is far from furnishing his subjects their
subsistence, he draws his from them ; and, ac
cording to Rabelais,* a king does not live upon
little. Subjects, then, give their persons on
condition that their goods shall be taken also.
I do not see what they have left to preserve.
It will be said that the despot assures his sub
jects civil tranquillity ; so be it ; but what do
they gain by it, if the wars which his ambition
brings upon them, if his insatiable avidity, if
the vexations of his ministry, despoil them more
than their own dissensions ? What do they gain
by it, if this tranquillity is itself but a misfor
tune. Tranquillity of life can also be found in
a prison ; is that enough to bring contentment ?
The Greeks shut up in the Cyclops' f cave
lived there tranquilly, waiting their turn to be
devoured.
To say that a man gives himself gratuitously
is to say something absurd and inconceivable ;

* Francis Rabelais, French writer, born in the latter half

of the fifteenth century, died about 1550. For the allusion
in the text, see Book I. of his celebrated romance, Chap
ters VII. and VIII., the provision made for the child
Gargantua.—Ed.
f See Odyssey, IX.—Ed.
ch. iv.] Slavers n

such an act is illegitimate and null, for the rea

son alone that te who has Bone it is not in his
celeb ated. ro say Che same thing of a whole
people is to suppose a people of madmen,—
madness does not make right.
If each man could alienate himself he could
not alienate his children, they are born men and
free ; their liberty belongs to them, no one else
has a right to dispose of it. Before they have
reached years of discretion the father can,
in their name, stipulate conditions for their
preservation, for their welfare, but cannot give
them away irrevocably and without condition,
for such a gift is contrary to the ends of nature,
and exceeds the rights of paternity. It would
be necessary, then, in order that an arbitrary
government be legitimate, that in each genera
tion the people be at liberty to admit or reject
it, but then the government would no longer be
arbitrary.
To renounce liberty is to renounce the qual
ity of manhood, the rights of humanity, and
even its duties. There is no possible compen
sation for him who renounces everything. Such
a renunciation is incompatible with the nature
of man ; and it takes all moral force from his
12 Tlbe Social Contract [bk. i.

actions to take away all liberty from his will.

Finally, it is a vain and contradictory agree
ment to stipulate absolute authority on one side
and obedience without limit on the other. Is it
not clear that there is no obligation towards one
from whom you have the right to demand every
thing ? And does not this one condition with
out equivalent or exchange involve the nullity
of the act ? For what right would a slave have
against me, since all that he has belongs to me,
and his right being mine, to talk of my right
against myself is absurd.
Grotius and others find in war another origin
of the pretended right of slavery. The con
queror having, according to them, the right to
kill the conquered, the latter can buy back his
life at the expense of his liberty ; an agreement
the more legitimate as it turns to the profit of
both.
But it is clear that this pretended right to
kill the conquered, results in no way from the
state of war. From the fact alone, that men,
living in their primitive independence, have not
among themselves relations sufficiently perma
nent to constitute either the state of peace or
the state of war, they are not naturally enemies.
ch. iv.] Slavers 13

It is the relation of things and not of men that

constitutes war ; and as it is impossible for war
to arise from simple personal relations, but only
from property relations, private war or war be
tween man and man can exist neither in the
state of nature where there is no permanent
property, nor in the social state, where all is
under the authority of the laws.
Single combats, duels, and encounters are acts
which do not constitute a state of war ; and in
regard to private wars, authorized by the Estab
lishments'1' of Louis IX., King of France, and
suspended by the Peace of God, f they are
abuses of feudal government — an absurd
* The £tablissements of Louis IX., born in I2T5, King
of France from 1226 to 1270, is the collection of the legis
lative measures passed by the king during his long reign.
It is only by implication that Louis can be said to have
authorized private wars. By instituting in 1245 le Quaran
tine du A'oi, establishing a truce of forty days between the
families of the offender and the offended, counting from
the day of the offence, he may be said to have impliedly
authorized them at other times. But in 1257 he prohibited
all private wars on the lands subject to him, and in 1260
he forbade also the trial by combat. —Ed.
f The Peace of God, proclaimed by the council of
bishops of Gaul in 1035 > in 1041, the Truce of God, pro
claimed by the same bishops, commanding peace for all
Christians between Wednesday evening and Monday
morning.—Ed.
14 Gbe Social Contract [bk. i.

system, if ever there was one, contrary to the

principles of natural right and of all good
polity.
War, then, is not a relation between man and
man, but a relation between state and state, in
which individuals are enemies only by accident,
not as men, nor even as citizens,* but as soldiers ;
not as members of the country, but as its de
fenders. Finally, each state can have only
other states, not men, for enemies, because be
tween things of such different natures no real
relation can be fixed.
* The Romans, who understood and respected the rights
of war more than any other nation of the world, carried
their scruples in this regard so far that a citizen was not
permitted to serve as a volunteer, without engaging ex
pressly against the enemy, and by name against a certain
enemy. A legion, in which the younger Cato [See Cicero,
De Officiis, I., n, 36.—Ed.] took his first lessons in
arms under Popilius, having been re-formed, Cato, the
elder, wrote to Popilius that, if he wished his son to
continue to serve under him, he must have him take a
new military oath, because, the first being annulled, he
could no longer bear arms against the enemy. The same
Cato wrote to his son, to take care not to present himself
in the combat until he had taken the new oath. I know
that I may be met with the siege of Clusium [See Livy,
V., 35-37. —Ed.] and other special facts, but I cite laws
and usages. The Romans are the people who have least
frequently violated their laws, and are the only nation
whose laws have been so good.
ch. iv.] Slavery 15

This principle conforms to the maxims estab

lished in all times and by the constant practice
of all civilized nations. Declarations of war are
less notifications to the powers than to their
subjects. The foreigner, whether he be king or
individual or people, who steals, kills, or con
fines subjects, without declaring war to the
Prince, is not an enemy, but a brigand. Even
in open war a just prince seizes, perhaps, any
thing that belongs to the public, but he respects
the person and property of individuals ; he
respects rights upon which his own are founded.
The object of war being the destruction of the
enemies of the state, the conqueror has the right
to kill its defenders as long as they bear arms ;
but as soon as they yield their arms and give
themselves up, they become men simply, and
the conqueror has no further right over their
lives. Sometimes a state may be killed, without
killing a single one of its members : war gives
no rights which are not necessary to its object.
These principles are not those of Grotius ; they
are not founded upon the authority of poets ;
but they are derived from the nature of things,
and are founded upon reason.
In regard to the right of conquest it has no
i6 Zbe Social Contract tBK- *•

foundation except the law of the strongest. If

war does not give to the victor the right to mas
sacre the vanquished people, this right which
they have not cannot be the foundation of one
to enslave them. The victor has not the right to
kill the enemy except when he cannot enslave
him ; the right to enslave does not come, then,
from the right to kill ; it is then an unjust
exchange to make him buy with his liberty his
life, over which no one has any right. In estab
lishing the right of life and death upon that of
slavery, and the right of slavery upon the right
of life and death, is it not clear that we reason
in a circle ?
In supposing even this terrible right to kill
everybody, I say that a slave made in war, or a
conquered people, has no obligations with regard
to his master, except to obey him as long as he
is forced to do it. In taking an equivalent for
his life the victor has not spared it ; instead of
killing him without profit, he has killed him
profitably. He is far from having acquired any
authority over him except that of force ; the
state of war exists between them as before ;
their relation itself is the effect of it, and the
exercise of the right of war supposes no treaty
ch. v.] TReturnmg to tbe jflrst agreement 17

of peace. They have made an agreement,—so

be it ; but this agreement far from destroying
the state of war, supposes its continuity.
Thus, from whatever direction the subject is
regarded, the right of slavery is null ; not only
because it is illegitimate, but because it is ab
surd and signifies nothing. The words slave
and right are contradictory—they mutually ex
clude each other. Whether from man to man,
or from man to a people, this discourse will
always be alike senseless : " I make an agree
ment with you, entirely at your expense and to
my profit, which I will observe as long as I
please, and which you will observe as long as it
pleases me."

CHAPTER V.

RETURNING TO THE FIRST AGREEMENT.

SHOULD I accord all that I have refuted up

to this time, the abettors of despotism
would be no further advanced. There will
always be a great difference between subduing
a multitude and governing a society.
If scattered individuals are successively en
slaved by a single man, in whatever number* it
2
18 Gbe social Contract [bk. i.

may be, I see in it only a master and slaves, I

do not see a people and its chief : it is, if you
will, an aggregation but not an association ;
there is neither public property nor political
body. This man, had he enslaved half the
world would still be but an individual ; his in
terest, separated from that of others, is always a
private interest. Should tnis man die, his em
pire would remain after him, scattered and
without union, as an oak dissolves and falls in a
heap of cinders after having been consumed by
fire.
" A people," says Grotius, " can give itself to
a king." According to Grotius, a people is a
people before giving itself to a king. This gift
is a civil act, it supposes public deliberation.
Before examining, then, the act by which a
people chooses a king, it would be well to ex
amine the act by which a people becomes a
people ; for this act, necessarily preceding the
other, is the true foundation of society.
In fact, if there were no previous agreement,
where would be—unless the election were
unanimous—the obligation of the minority to
submit to the majority ? and how would a hun
dred who desire a master have the right to vote
ch. vi.] z\)C Social Compact 19

for ten who do not desire it ? The law of

plurality of suffrages is itself established by
agreement, and supposes unanimity at least in
the beginning.

CHAPTER VI.

I SUPPOSE man arrived at a point where

obstacles, which prejudice his preservation
in the state of nature, outweigh, by their resis
tance, the force which each individual can em
ploy to maintain himself in this condition.
Then the primitive state can no longer exist ;
and mankind would perish did it not change its
way of life.
Now, as men cannot engender new forces,
but can only unite and direct those which exist,
they have no other means of preservation than
to form by aggregation a sum of forces which
could prevail against resistance, and to put them
in play by a single motive and make them act
in concert.
* Compare Hobbes, Leviathan, Chaps. XVII. and
XVIII. ; Locke, Treatise, II., 7 and 8.—Ed.
20 tTbe Social Contract [bk. i.

This sum of forces can be established only by

the concurrence of many ; but the strength and
liberty of each man being the primary instru
ments of his preservation, how can he pledge
them without injury to himself and without
neglecting the care which he owes to himself?
This difficulty as related to my subject may be
stated as follows :
"To find a form of association which shall
defend and protect with the public force the
person and property of each associate, and by
means of which each, uniting with all, shall
obey however only himself, and remain as free
as before." Such is the fundamental problem
of which the Social Contract gives the solution.
The clauses of this contract are so determined
by the nature of the act, that the least modifica
tion would render them vain and of no effect ;
so that, although they may, perhaps, never have
been formally enunciated, they are everywhere
the same, everywhere tacitly admitted and
recognized until, the social compact being vio
lated, each enters again into his first rights and
resumes his natural liberty,—thereby losing the
conventional liberty for which he renounced it.
These clauses, clearly understood, may be
ch. vi.] tEhe Social Compact 21

reduced to one : that is, the total alienation of

each associate with all his rights to the entire
community,—for, first, each giving himself en
tirely, the condition is the same for all ; and
the conditions being the same for all, no one
has an interest in making it onerous for the
others.
Further, the alienation being without reserve,
the union is as complete as it can be, and no
associate has anything to claim : for, if some
rights remained to individuals, as there would
be no common superior who could decide be
tween them and the public, each, being in some
points his own judge, would soon profess to be
so in everything ; the state of nature would
subsist, and the association would necessarily
become tyrannical and useless.
Finally, each giving himself to all, gives him
self to none ; and as there is not an associate
over whom he does not acquire the same right as
is ceded, an equivalent is gained for all that is
lost, and more force to keep what he has.
If, then, we remove from the social contract all
that is not of its essence, it will be reduced to
the following terms : " Each of us gives in
common his person and all his force under the
22 Gbe Social Contract [bk. i.

supreme direction of the general will ; and we

receive each member as an indivisible part of
the whole."
Immediately, instead 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 being, its life and its will. This public
personage, thus formed by the union of all the
others, formerly took the name of city, and now
takes that of republic or body politic. This is
called the state by its members when it is passive ;
the sovereign when it is active ; and a power
when comparing it to its equals. With regard
to the associates, they take collectively the name
people, and call themselves individually citizens,
as participating in the sovereign authority, and
subjects, as submitted to the laws of the state.
But these terms are often confounded and are
taken one for the other. It is enough to know
how to distinguish them when they are employed
with all precision.
ch. vii.] Zhe Sovereign 23

CHAPTER VII.

THE SOVEREIGN.

WE see by this formula that the act of

association includes a reciprocal en
gagement between the public and individuals,
and that each individual contracting, so to
speak, with himself, finds himself engaged under
a double relation : i. e., as member of the sover
eign to the individuals, and as member of the
state to the sovereign. But the maxim of civil
law, that no one is bound by engagements made
with himself, cannot be applied here, for there
is a great difference between an obligation to
one's self and to a whole, of which the individual
forms a part.
It should be observed, too, that public de
liberation,—which may bind all subjects to the
sovereign, on account of the two different rela
tions under which each of them is considered,—
cannot for the contrary reason bind the sover
eign towards himself, and that consequently it
is against the nature of the body politic that the
sovereign impose upon himself a law which he
cannot infringe. Being unable to consider him
self except under the one relation, he is then in
24 Gbe Social Contract [bk. i.

the position of an individual contracting with

himself ; whereby it is evident that there is not
and cannot be any sort of obligatory funda
mental law for the body of the people, not
even the social contract. This does not mean
that the body cannot engage itself perfectly
towards others, in that which is not derogatory
to this contract ; for with regard to the foreigner,
he becomes a simple being, an individual.
But the body politic or the sovereign, deriving
its existence only from the sanctity of the con
tract, can never bind itself even towards others,
to anything which is derogatory to this first act,
—as to alienate some part of itself, or to sub
mit to another sovereign. To violate the act by
which it exists would be self-annihilation ; and
that which is nothing produces nothing.
As soon as this multitude is thus united into
a body, one of the members cannot be injured
without attacking the body, and still less can
the body be injured without the members feel
ing its effects. Thus duty and interest alike
oblige the two contracting parties to mutually
aid each other ; and the same men should seek
to unite under this double relation, all the ad
vantages which may be derived from it.
ch. vii.] Gbe Sovereign 25

Now the sovereign, being formed only of the

individuals comprising it, neither has nor could
have interests contrary to theirs ; consequently
the sovereign power has no need of guaranty
towards the subjects, for it is impossible for the
body to seek to injure all its members ; and it
will be seen hereafter that it can injure no one
in particular.
The sovereign by the fact alone that it is, is
always what it must be.
But this is not true of subjects towards a
sovereign, to whom in spite of common inter
ests, nothing binds them to their engagements
unless means are taken to assure their fidelity.
In fact each individual can, as man, have an in
dividual will contrary to or different from the
general will which he has as a citizen : his indi
vidual interest may speak quite differently from
the common interest ; his absolute and naturally
independent existence may make him consider
what he owes to the common cause as a gratui
tous contribution, the loss of which would be
less injurious to others than the payment of
it would be onerous to him ; and regarding the
moral entity which constitutes the state as a
legal fiction, because it is not a man, he would
26 Zbe Social Contract [bk. i.

like to enjoy the rights of a citizen, without be

ing willing to fulfil the duties of a subject ; an
injustice, the progress of which would cause the
ruin of the body politic.
In order then that the social compact may
not be an idle formula, it includes tacitly this
engagement, which alone can give force to the
others, that whoever shall refuse to obey the
general will, shall be compelled to it by the
whole body, which signifies nothing if not that
he will be forced to be free ; for it is this con
dition which, giving each citizen to the country,
guarantees him from all personal dependence, a
condition which forms the device and working
of the political machine, and alone renders civil
engagements legitimate, which without that
would be absurd, tyrannical, and subject to great
abuse.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CIVIL STATE.

THE passage from the state of nature to the

civil state produces in man a very re
markable change, by substituting in his conduct
ch. viii.] XLbe Civil State 27

justice for interest, and giving to his actions a

moral force which they lacked before. Then
only does the voice of duty succeed to physical
impulse, and law to appetite, and man who until
then had thought only of himself, sees himself
forced to act upon other principles, and to con
sult his reason before listening to his desires.
Although he deprives himself in this state of
several advantages which he holds from nature,
he gains other advantages so great—his faculties
exercise and develop, his ideas expand, his
sentiments become ennobled, his whole spirit is
elevated to such a point that, if the abuse of
this new condition did not often degrade him
below that from which he came, he ought to
bless without ceasing the happy moment which
took him from it forever, and which has made
of a dull, stupid animal, an intelligent being—a
man.
Let us reduce all this account to terms which
may be easily compared : What man loses by
the social contract is his natural liberty and an
unlimited right to anything that tempts him,
which he can obtain ; what he gains is civil
liberty and the ownership of all that he possesses.
Not to be deceived in these compensations, we
28 Zbe Social Contract [bk. i.

must distinguish the natural liberty, which has

no limits but the strength of the individual, from
civil liberty, which is limited by the general will ;
and possession, which is only the effect of the
force or right of the first occupant, from the
ownership which is founded only upon a posi
tive title.
After what precedes, there ought to be added
to the credit side of the civil state, that of
moral liberty, which alone renders man master
of himself ; for the impulse of one appetite is
slavery, and obedience to self-prescribed law is
liberty. But I have already said too much
about this. The philosophical meaning of the
word liberty is not a part of my subject here.

CHAPTER IX.

REALTY.

EACH member of the community gives

himself to it, as soon as it is formed, such
as he then is, himself and all his force of which
his property forms a part. It is not that, by
this act, the possession changes its nature in
changing hands, and becomes property in the
ch. ix.] iRealtE 29

hands of the sovereign ; but as the strength of

the city is incomparably greater than that of
an individual, the public possession is also, in
fact stronger and more irrevocable, without being
more legitimate, at least as regards foreigners ;
for the state, in regard to its members, is master
of all their property by the social contract,
which, in the state, serves as the basis of all
rights, but the state is not master with regard to
other powers, except by the right of the first oc
cupant which it holds from individuals.
The right of the first occupant, although more
real than that of the strongest, does not become
a true right until after the establishment of that
of ownership. Every man has naturally a right
to everything that is necessary to him ; but the
positive act which makes him proprietor of cer
tain property excludes him from the rest. His
part being taken he must limit himself to it,
and has no further right to the community.
This is why the right of the first occupant,—
so weak in a state of nature,—is respected by
every man in civil life. Under this law, that
which belongs to others is less respected than
that which is not one's own.
In general, to authorize the right of the first
30 TJbe Social Contract [bk. i.

occupant upon any territory, the following con

ditions are necessary : first, that the land shall
never have been occupied ; second, that only
such a quantity be occupied as will be necessary
for subsistence ; third, that it be taken posses
sion of not by an empty ceremony but by labor
and cultivation,—the only sign of ownership
which, in default of legal title, should be re
spected by others.
In fact, in according to necessity and labor
the right of the first occupant, is it not going
as far as would be justifiable ? Can the limits
of this right be defined ? Would it suffice to
set foot upon common territory, and to profess
immediately to be its master ? Would it be
enough to have the force to remove other people
for a moment, in order to take from them
the right ever to return ? How can a man or a
people seize upon an immense territory, and
deprive all the rest of mankind of it, otherwise
than by punishable usurpation, for they take
from other men the dwelling-place and food
which nature gives them in common ?
When Nunez Balboa * took, upon the shore,
* Vasco Nunez de Balboa, born 1475, died 1517, Span
ish adventurer, discovered the Pacific Ocean from a moun
tain in the Isthmus of Panama in September, 1513.—Ed.
ch. ix.] IRealtg 31

possession of the South Seas and all South

America, in the name of the Crown of Castile,
was that enough to dispossess all the inhabitants,
and to exclude from it all the princes of the
world ? Upon such a footing these ceremonies
multiplied uselessly ; and the Catholic king had
only suddenly to take possession of the whole
universe, cutting off only from his empire what
had previously been possessed by other princes.
It may be conceived how the lands of indi
viduals united and contiguous become public
territory, and how the right of sovereignty, ex
tending from the subjects to the lands which
they occupy, becomes at the same time real and
personal ; which places the possessors in a state
of greater dependence, and makes of their force
itself a guaranty of their fidelity ; an advantage
which seems not to have been appreciated by
monarchs of former times, who called them
selves kings of the Persians, of the Scythians,
of the Macedonians, seeming to regard them
selves as chiefs of men rather than masters of
the country. Those of to-day call themselves
more clearly kings * of France, Spain, England.
* The ruler of the present German Empire is entitled, by
express agreement among the German states, Deutscher
Kaiser, and not Kaiser Deutschlands. —Ed.
3« Wbe Social Contract [bk. i.

In thus holding the territory, they are quite

sure of holding the inhabitants.
What is singular in this alienation is that, far
from despoiling the individual in accepting his
property, the community assures him of its
legitimate possession ; it changes usurpation
into a veritable right, and enjoyment into
ownership.
The owners now being considered as deposi
tories of the public property, their rights being
respected by all the members of the state and
maintained with all their force against the
stranger,—by a transfer which is advantageous
to the public and more so to themselves, they
have, so to speak, acquired all that they have
given : a paradox easily explained by the dis
tinction of rights which the sovereign and the
proprietor have over the same property, as will
be seen later.
It might happen, too, that men began to unite
together before possessing anything, and that
taking possession of a territory sufficient for all,
they enjoy it in common, or divide it among
themselves either equally or in the proportions
established by the sovereign. In whatever way
the acquisition is made, the right which each
ch. ix.] "RealtB 33

individual has over his own property is subordi

nate to the right which the community has over
all ; without this there would be neither solidity
in the social tie, nor real force in the exercise
of sovereignty.
I will finish this chapter and this book by a
statement, which must serve as the basis of all
social systems ; it is that, instead of destroying
natural equality, the fundamental compact sub
stitutes, on the contrary, a moral and legitimate
equality for that which nature may have given
of physical inequality among men ; and while
they may be unequal in strength or genius, they
become equal by agreement and right. *
* Under bad governments this equality is only apparent
and illusory ; it serves only to maintain the poor in his
misery and the rich in his usurpation. In fact laws are
always useful to those who possess, and injurious to those
who have nothing ; from which it follows that the social
stateMs advantageous to man only when he has some prop
erty, and that no one has too much.
3
 BOOK II.

CHAPTER I.

SOVEREIGNTY IS INALIENABLE.*

THE first and most important consequence

of the principles just established is, that
only the general will can direct the forces of
the state according to the object of its establish
ment, which is the common good ; for if the
opposition of individual interests has rendered
the establishment of societies necessary, it is
the accord of these same interests which has
rendered it possible. It is what is common in
these different interests which forms the social
tie ; and if there were not some point, upon which
all interests were in accord, no society could
exist. Now it is solely through this common
interest that society should be governed.
* See Hobbes, Leviathan, Chap. XVIII.
34
ch. i.] SovereigntB is Unalienable 35

I say then that sovereignty, being only the

exercise of the general will, can never alienate
itself, and that the sovereign, who is not a col
lective being, can be represented only by him
self ; power can transmit itself, but not will.
In fact, if it is not impossible that an indi
vidual will should accord in some points with
the general will, it is at least impossible that
this accord be unchangeable and permanent ;
for the individual will tends by its nature to
preferences, and the general will to equality. It
is still more impossible to have a guaranty of
this accord ; even should it always exist, it
would be not the result of art but of chance.
The sovereign may say : " I desire now what
such a man desires, or at least what he says he
desires " ; but he cannot say : " What this man
will desire to-morrow I shall still desire," for it
is absurd to bind the will for the future, and no
will can consent to anything contrary to the
good of the person who wills. If then the people
promises simply to obey, it dissolves by that act,
it loses its quality as a people ; the moment
there is a master, there is no longer a sovereign,
and from that time the body politic is destroyed.
This is not saying that the orders of chiefs
36 Sbe Social Contract [bk. n.

may not pass for the general will, as long as the

sovereign, free to oppose them, does not do so.
In such a case, from universal silence, the con
sent of the people is presumed. This will be
explained more at length.

CHAPTER II.

SOVEREIGNTY IS INDIVISIBLE.

FOR the same reason that sovereignty is in

alienable, it is indivisible ; for the will is
general * or it is not ; it is the will of the body
of the people, or of only a part of it. In the
first case this declared will is an act of sov
ereignty and makes law ; in the second it is
only an individual will, or an act of magistracy ;
it is, at the most, a decree.
But our political writers, not being able to
divide the sovereignty in its principle, divide it
in its object ; they divide it into force and will,
into legislative power and executive power ; into
rights of impost, of justice and war ; into in-
* For a will to be general it need not necessarily be
unanimous, but it is necessary that all votes be counted,
and formal exclusion destroys unanimity.
ch. n.] Sovereignty is IFnoivisible 37

terior administration and into power to treat

with foreign countries ; sometimes they con
found all these parts and sometimes they sepa
rate them. They make of the sovereign a
fantastic creature, formed of separate parts ; it
is as if they should compose a man with differ
ent bodies of which one would have the eyes,
another the arms, another the feet, and nothing
more. It is is said that charlatans in Japan
dismember a living child before the eyes of the
spectators ; then throwing all its members into
the air, one after another, they make the child
come down alive and whole again. This is very
like the juggling of our political writers ; after
having dismembered the social body by an
illusion worthy of a juggler, the scattered
pieces are collected, nobody knows how.
This error arises from not having precise con
ceptions of the sovereign authority, and from
having taken for parts of this authority what is
only an emanation from it. Thus, for example,
the acts declaring war and concluding peace
are regarded as acts of sovereignty. This is not
true, because each of the acts is not a law, but
the application of a law, an individual act which
determines the matter of the law, as will be seen
38 Woe Social Contract [bk. h.

when the idea attached to the word law becomes

fixed.
In following in the same way the other di
visions, it will be found that whenever the sov
ereignty is supposed to be divided, it is a
mistake ; that the rights which are taken as
parts of this sovereignty are all subordinated to
it, and always suppose a supreme will of which
these rights give only the execution.
No one can tell how much obscurity this fault
of inaccuracy has thrown over the decisions of
authors on questions of political rights, when
they have tried to judge the respective rights of
kings and people upon principles which they
had established. Any one can see in the third
and fourth chapters of Grotius' first book, how
this learned man and his translator Barbeyrac *
entangled themselves and became embarrassed-
in their sophisms, for fear of saying too much
* Barbeyrac, French writer on history and international
law, born in France in 1674 of Protestant parents ; he was
taken to Switzerland at the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes, was professor of law in Switzerland and Holland,
and died in Prussia in 1744. As Protestant, he dedicated
his translation of Grotius, Le Droit de la Guerre et de la
Paix, to George I., born 1660, King of England 1714 to
1727. Barbeyrac's translation was published in Amster
dam in 1724, in two volumes. —Ed.
ch. ii.] SovereigntB \s flnoivteible 39

or not enough according to their views, and of

making clash the interests which they needed
to conciliate. Grotius, having taken refuge in
France, dissatisfied with his own country, wish
ing to pay court to Louis XIII.,* to whom his
book is dedicated, spares no pains to despoil the
people of their rights, and to invest the king
with them with all the art possible. This would
have been also Barbeyrac's plan ; he dedicated
his translation to George I., King of England.
But unfortunately the expulsion of James II. ,f
which he calls an abdication, forced him to be
on his guard, to shift and tergiversate in order
not to make out William a usurper.
Had these two writers adopted the true prin
ciple, all difficulties would have been removed ;
they would have been logical in their methods,
but, having told the truth, would have paid

* Grotius was condemned to imprisonment for life at the

same time that Barneveldt was condemned to death, and
on similar charges. He escaped from prison by the aid of
his wife, and fled to France, where he received a pension
of 3000 livres, until he lost Richelieu's favor. Louis XIII.,
born 1601, King of France 1610 to 1643. —Ed.
f James II., born 1633, King of England from 1685 to
1688, when he was expelled by William, Prince of Orange,
his son-in-law, born 1650, King of England from 1688 to
his death in 1702. James died in 1701.—Ed.
40 Zbe Social Contract [bk. ii.

court only to the people. Now truth does not

lead to fortune, and the people give neither
embassies, nor church preferments, nor pen
sions.

CHAPTER III.

WHETHER THE GENERAL WILL CAN ERR.

IT follows from the preceding that the general

will is always right, and always tends
towards public utility ; but it does not follow
that the deliberations of the people always have
the same rectitude. The people wishes its own
good always, but it does not always see it ; the
people is never corrupted, but it is often de
ceived, and it is then only that it seems to desire
what is evil.
There is often a great difference between the
will of all and the general will : one regards the
common interest only ; the other regards private
interests, and is only the sum of individual
wills ; but take from these same wills the plus
and the minus, which destroy each other,* and
* " Each interest," said the Marquis D'Argenson,
[D'Argenson, French statesman and writer, born 1694,
died 1757. The passage in the text is taken from the
Considerations sur le Gouvernetnent de la France, Chap. 2. —
ch. in.] "ambetber tbe General TUMI Can Err 41

there will remain for the sum of the differences

the general will.
If the people being sufficiently informed,
deliberates, and citizens have no communica
tion with each other,—from a great number of
small differences will result the general will,
and the conclusion will always be good. But
when they divide into factions and partial
associations at the expense of the whole, the
will of each of these associations becomes
general with regard to its members, and indi
vidual with regard to the state ; it may then be
said that there are not as many voters as men,
but only as many as there are associations. The
differences become less numerous and give a
less general result. Finally, when one of these
associations is so large as to surpass all the
others, you no longer have the sum of small dif
ferences, but a single difference ; then there is
no longer a general will, and the opinion which
prevails is only an individual opinion.
Ed.] " has different principles, the accord of two individual
interests is formed by opposition to that of a third." He
might have added that the accord of all interests is formed
by opposition to that of each. If there were no different
interests the common interest would scarcely be felt, and
would never find an obstacle ; everything would go of it
self, and politics would cease to be an art.
42 Hbe Social Contract [bk. n.

It is necessary, then, in order to have an ex

pression of the general will that there be no
partial society in the state, and that each citizen
vote only in accordance with his own views ;
such was the one, sublime establishment of the
great Lycurgus. * If there are partial societies,
their number must be increased and their in
equality provided for, as did Solon, Numa, and
Servius. These precautions are the only ones
which insure that the general will will always
be enlightened, and that the people will not be
deceived.

CHAPTER IV.

THE LIMITS OF SOVEREIGN POWER.

IF the state or city is but a moral entity,

whose life consists in the union of its
members, and if the most important of its cares
is that of its own preservation, a universal and
compulsory force is necessary to move and dis-
* Lycurgus, Solon, Numa, Servius, famous Greek and
Roman lawgivers, the details of whose legislation, as given
by Plutarch and Livy, were accepted as in the main his
torically correct by Rousseau and most of his contempo
raries. —Ed.
ch. iv.] XTbe ILimit of Sovereign power 43

pose each part in the manner most convenient

for all. As nature gives to man absolute power
over his members, the social compact gives to the
body politic absolute power over its members ;
and it is this same power which, directed by the
general will, bears, as I have said, the name of
sovereignty.
But in addition to the public person, we have
to consider the private persons comprising it,
whose life and liberty are independent of it.
It is necessary then to distinguish the respect
ive rights of the citizen and the sovereign, and
the duties which the former is to fulfil in his
quality of subject, from the natural rights which
he ought to enjoy in his quality of man.
It is agreed that anything of power or prop
erty or liberty which is alienated by the social
compact, is only a part of all the use of which
is of importance to the community ; but it must
also be agreed that the sovereign alone is judge
of its importance.
Any service that a citizen can render the
state is due from him whenever the sovereign
demands it ; but the sovereign, for his part,
cannot place any burden upon his subjects
which will not be useful to the community ; he
44 Gbe Social Contract [bk. n.

cannot even desire to do so, for, under the law

of reason as under the law of nature, there is
nothing done without a purpose.
The engagements which link us to the social
body are obligatory only because they are
mutual, and their nature is such that in fulfilling
them the individual cannot labor for others with
out working also for himself. Why is the general
will always right, and why do all desire con
stantly the happiness of each, unless it is be
cause there is no person who does not appro
priate to himself the word each, and who does
not think of himself while voting for all ? Which
proves that equality of rights, and the notion of
justice produced by it, come from the prefer
ence which each gives to himself, and conse
quently from the nature of man ; that the
general will, to be really such, must be so in its
object as well as in its essence ; that it must
start from all in order to apply to all ; and that
it loses its natural rectitude when it tends tow
ard some individual and determined object,
for then, judging of what is foreign to us, we
have no true principle of equity to guide us.
In fact, as soon as there is question of a fact
or of an individual right upon some point which
ch. iv.] Gbe Ximit of Sovereign power 45

has not been previously regulated by a general

agreement, the affair becomes a subject of dis
pute ; it is a suit in which the interested indi
viduals are one of the parties and the public
the other, but in which I see neither law to be
followed nor judge to pronounce upon it. It
would be ridiculous then to wish to rely
upon an express decision of the general will,
which can only be the conclusion of one of the
parties, and which consequently is for the other
only an individual foreign will, carried to in
justice on this occasion and subject to error.
So as an individual will cannot represent the
general will, the general will in its turn changes
its nature having an individual object, and can
not as a general will pronounce upon a man or
a fact.
When the people of Athens, for example,
elected their chiefs or reduced them to the
ranks, awarding honors to one, and imposing
punishments upon the other, and by a multitude
of special decrees, exercised without distinction
all the prerogatives of government, the people
then had no longer a general will properly
speaking ; it acted no longer as sovereign, but
as magistrate. This will appear contrary to the
46 Gbe Social Contract [bk. n.

ordinary idea ; but give me time before judging

it to present my own.
It might be thought from this that what
generalizes the will is not so much the number
of votes, as it is the common interest which
unites them ; for in this establishment each sub
mits necessarily to the conditions which he
imposes upon others ; admirable accord of in
terest and justice, which gives to common de
liberations a character of equity. This vanishes
in the discussion of any individual affair, for
want of a common interest, which would unite
and identify the ruling of the judge with that
of the party.
By whatever path we return to the principle,
we always reach the same conclusion ; that the
social compact establishes among citizens such
an equality that they all engage under the same
conditions, and should enjoy the same rights.
Thus by the nature of the agreement, an act of
sovereignty, that is, any authentic act of the
general will, obliges or favors equally all citi
zens ; so that the sovereign knows only the body
of the nation and distinguishes no one of
those composing it. What, then, is an act of
sovereignty, properly speaking ? It is not an
ch. iv.] Zbe Ximlt of Sovereign power 47

agreement between a superior and an inferior,

but an agreement of a body with each of its
members,—a legitimate agreement, because it
has the social contract for its basis ; it is equitable
because it is common to all ; useful, because it
can have no other object than the general good ;
and solid, because it has for guaranty the public
force and the supreme power. As long as
subjects submit only to such agreements, they
obey nobody but their own wills : and to ask
just how far the respective rights of sovereigns
and citizens extend, is to ask to what point
citizens can make engagements with themselves
each with all, and all with each.
It will be seen from this that sovereign power,
absolute, sacred, and inviolable as it. is, does
not overstep and cannot overstep the limits of
general agreement, and that any man can dis
pose fully of what is left him of goods and
liberty by these agreements ; so that the sover
eign never has the right to demand of one
subject more than of another, because, then, the
affair becoming individual, the sovereign power
is no longer competent.
These distinctions once admitted, it is false
that in the social contract there is any real re
48 Gbe Social Contract [bk. u.

nunciation on the part of the individual,—so

false that, on the contrary, their situation is,
from the effect of this contract, really preferable
to what it was before, and that instead of an
alienation, they have made an advantageous ex
change of a mode of life which was uncertain
and precarious for another, better and more
sure,—of natural independence for liberty,
of power to injure others for security, and of
force which might be overcome by others, for
a right which social union makes invincible.
Even their lives which have been devoted to
the state are continually protected by it ; and
when these are exposed for its defence, what do
they more than return what they have received
from it ? What do they then more than they
do frequently and with more danger in the state
of nature ? When engaging in inevitable com
bats, they would defend at the peril of life that
which serves to preserve it for them.
All have to fight at the call of the nation, it
is true ; but no one needs to fight for himself.
Is it not a gain, to incur for that which makes
our safety, a part of the risks which we would
have to incur for ourselves were it taken from
us?
ch. v.] "Ricibt of %ite ano Deatb 49

CHAPTER V.
RIGHT OF LIFE AND DEATH.*

IT is asked how individuals, having no right to

dispose of their own lives, can transmit to
the sovereign this right which they have not.
This question seems difficult to answer only
when it is badly put. Every man has a right
to risk his own life to preserve it. Has any
one ever said : that he who throws himself from
a window to escape from fire, was guilty of
suicide ? Has this crime ever been imputed
to him who perishes in a storm of the danger of
which he was not ignorant when he embarked ?
The social treaty has for its object the preser
vation of the contracting parties. Whoever
desires this object desires also the means (of
accomplishing it), and these means are insepa
rable from some risks, even losses.
Whoever desires to preserve his life at the
expense of others, must give his life to them
when necessary. Now the citizen is no longer
judge of the peril to which the law wills that he
expose himself ; and when the prince says to
him : " It is expedient for the state that you
* See Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter XXVIII.—Ed.
4
50 Gibe Social Contract [bk. n.

die," he should die ; for it is only upon this

condition that he has lived until then in safety,
and his life is no longer solely a gift from
nature, but a conditional gift to the state.
The punishment of death inflicted upon crimi
nals may be regarded from nearly the same
point of view : it is for the sake of not being
killed by an assassin that we consent to be
killed, if we become assassins. In this treaty,
far from disposing of his own life, the individual
thinks only of guaranteeing it, and it is not to
be presumed that any of the contracting parties
premeditate getting themselves hanged.
Besides, every malefactor by attacking social
rights becomes by his crimes rebel and traitor
to the country ; he ceases to be a member in
violating its laws, he even makes war against it.
Then the preservation of the state is incompati
ble with his preservation ; one of the two must
perish ; and when the criminal is put to death,
it is less as a citizen than as an enemy. The
proceedings, the judgment, are proofs and dec
laration that he has broken the social treaty,
and consequently that he is no longer a member
of the state. Now, as he had acknowledged
himself as such, at least by his residence, he
ch. v.] IRigbt of ILife ano ©eatb 51

should be removed from it by exile, as an in

fractor of the compact, or by death as a public
enemy ; for such an enemy is not a moral entity,
it is a man : and it is the right of war to kill the
vanquished.
But, it will be said, the condemnation of a
criminal is an individual act. Agreed : then
condemnation does not belong to the sovereign,
it is a right which he can confer, without power
to exercise it himself.
However, the frequency of punishments is
always a sign of weakness or carelessness in the
government. There are no bad people who could
not be made of some use.
It is not right to kill, even for the example,
except those who cannot be preserved without
danger.
In regard to the right of pardon, or of the
exemption of the culprit from the punishment
awarded by the judge, this right belongs only to
him who is above judge and law,—that is to the
sovereign. Again, the right of the sovereign in
this is no longer clear, and the cases for using it
are rare. In a well governed state there are few
punishments, not because many are pardoned,
but because there are few criminals : a multi
52 Zbe Social Contract [bk. n.

tude of crimes assures impunity when the state

degenerates. Under the Roman republics
neither senate nor consuls attempted to grant
pardons ; even the people granted none, al
though they sometimes revoked their own judg
ments. Frequent pardons announce that soon
crimes will need no pardon, and every one sees
where that would lead. But let us leave the
discussion of these questions to the just man
who has not sinned, and who has never needed
pardon.

CHAPTER VI.
THE LAW.*

BY the social compact we have given existence

and life to the body politic ; it must now
be given motion and will by means of legisla
tion. For the primitive act by which the body
is formed and united determines nothing of
what it is necessary to do to preserve it.
That which is good and conformed to order,
is so by the nature of things and independently
of human conventions. All justice comes from
God, he alone is the source of justice ; but if
we were able to receive it from on high we should
* See Hobbes, Leviathan, Chap. XXVI.
ch. vi.] Zbe Xaw 53

have no need of government or laws. There is

without doubt a universal justice emanating from
reason alone, but justice to be admitted among
us should be reciprocal.
Considering things humanly, for want of
natural sanction, the laws of justice are useless
among men ; they do good to the wicked and
ill to the just, for the just man observes them
towards all the world, and no one observes them
towards him. Arguments and laws are necessary
to unite rights and duties and bring justice to
its object.
In the state of nature, where all is common,
I owe nothing to those to whom I have promised
nothing. I recognize as belonging to others
only what is not useful to me. This is not the
case in the civil state where all rights are fixed
by law.
What then is a law ? As long as we content
ourselves with attaching only metaphysical ideas
to this word, we shall continue to reason without
coming to an understanding ; and when we have
learned what a law of nature is, we know no
better what a law of the state is.
I have already said that there is no general
will upon an individual object. In fact this in
54 ttbe Social Contract [bk. h.

dividual object is either within the state or out

side the state. If it is outside, a will which is
foreign to it cannot be general in relation to the
state, and if the object is within, it becomes a
part of the state : then there is formed between
the whole and its parts a relation made by two
separate beings, of which the part is one, and
the whole, less that part, is the other. But the
whole less a part is not the whole ; and as long
as the relation exists there is no whole, but two
unequal parts : from which it follows that the
will of the one is no longer a general will with
relation to the other.
But when a whole people legislates concerning
a whole people, it thinks only of itself ; and if
there is then formed a relation, it is between the
whole object from one point of view and the
whole object from another point of view without
any division at all. Then the matter about which
enactments are made is general like the will
which enacts them.* It is this enactment which
I call a law.
When I say that the object of laws is always
general, I mean that the law considers subjects
* See Art. 6 of the Declarations des Droits de VHomme et
du Citoyen, passed by the Constituent Assembly in 1789.
ch. vi.] ttbe Xaw 55

in a body and actions as abstract : a man is

never considered as an individual nor an action
as an individual action.
The law may order that there shall be privi
leges but it cannot grant them to any one indi
vidually. The law may make several classes of
citizens, and even state the qualities which will
give a right to these classes, but it cannot name
such or such ones to be admitted to them ; it
can establish a royal government and an hered
itary succession, but it cannot elect a king, or
name a royal family : in a word any function
relating to an individual object does not pertain
to legislative power.
With this idea in view, we must no longer ask
whose business it is to make laws, for they are
acts of the general will ; nor if the prince is
above the law, for he is a member of the state ;
nor if laws are unjust, for no one is unjust to
himself ; nor how it is that a subject is free and
still subjected to laws—for they are but the
records of our wills.
Again, it is clear that—the law uniting the
universality of the will and that of the object—
the commands of a man whoever he may be, on
his own account are not laws ; the commands of
56 ttbe Social Contract [bk. n.

a sovereign concerning an individual object are

also not laws but decrees ; not an act of sover
eignty but of magistracy.
I call any state governed by laws, under what
ever form of administration it may be, a repub
lic ; for then only the public interest governs,
and the public affairs themselves count for
something. Any legitimate government is re
publican.* I will explain hereafter what gov
ernment is.
Laws are properly but conditions of civil as
sociation. The people, which is subject to laws,
should be their author ; it belongs only to those
associated, to regulate the conditions of society.
But how will they regulate them ? Will it be by
common accord, by a sudden inspiration ? Has
the body politic an organ for the enunciation of
its will ! Who will give it the foresight neces
sary to formulate its acts, and publish them in
advance ? or how will they be promulgated when
they are needed ? How will a blind multitude,
* By this word republican I do not mean an aristocracy
or a democracy only, but in a general way any government
guided by the general will, which is the law. To be
legitimate, the government should not be confused with the
sovereign, but should be its minister ; then a monarchy
itself is a republic. This will be explained in the next
book.
ch. vi.] ttbe Xaw 57

which often does not know its own wishes, be

cause it rarely knows what is good for it, execute
of itself an enterprise so great and difficult as
a system of legislation ? Of itself the people
always desires the good, but of itself it does not
always see what is good. The general will is
always right, but the judgment guiding it is not
always enlightened. It must be made to see
objects as they are, and sometimes as they ought
to appear ; it must be shown the right path which
it seeks ; it must be guaranteed from the se
ductions of individual wills ; there must be
brought together before its eyes places and
times, the attractions of present, appreciable
advantages must be balanced by the danger of
remote, hidden evils. Individuals see the good
which they reject, but the public desires the good
which it cannot see. All have the same need of
guidance. Individuals must be made to con
form will to reason ; the public must be taught
to know what it wants. From this public en
lightenment will result the union of judgment
and will in the social body ; and therefrom the
exact concurrence of parts, and finally the
greatest strength of the whole.
Herein lies the necessity of a legislator.
58 Zbe Social Contract [bk. n.

CHAPTER VII.
THE LEGISLATOR.

TO discover the rules of social government

best suited for nations, requires a superior
intelligence ; it requires one which sees all the
passions of mankind and experiences none of
them ; which has no relations with our nature
but knows it thoroughly ; its welfare should be
independent of us, and yet it should interest
itself in our happiness : finally one which in the
lapse of time lays up glory for itself in the future,
and works in one century and enjoys in another.*
We should have gods to make laws for men.
The same reasoning that Caligula f made
use of with reference to facts, Plato f made use
of with reference to right, in defining the man,—
citizen or king,—whom he describes in his book
Du Regne (Politicus).
* A nation does not become celebrated until its legislation
begins to decline. We know not how many centuries the
institutions of Lycurgus had made the Spartans happy be
fore the rest of Greece knew anything about them.
f See Book I., Chap. II.—Ed.
% Plato, celebrated Greek philosopher, born in the latter
half of the fifth century B. c, died about 350. The
reasoning here attributed to him is found throughout the
dialogue called in Jowett's translation Statesman, rather
than in any single passage. —Ed.
ch. vii.] zbe legislator 59

But if it is true that a great prince is a rare man,

what would a legislator be ?
The former has but to follow the model pro
posed by the latter. One is the machinist who
invents the machine, the other is the workman
who sets it up and makes it go. " In the formation
of societies," said Montesquieu,* " it is the
chiefs of republics who make the establishment,
and then it is the establishment which makes the
chiefs of republics."
He who ventures to undertake to give in
stitutions to a people, should feel himself in
condition to change, so to speak, human nature,
—to transform the individual, who by himself
is a complete solitary whole, into a part of a
greater whole, from which this individual re
ceives, in a way, his life and being ; to change
the constitution of mankind by strengthening it ;
to substitute a partial and moral existence for
the physical and independent existence which
he has received from nature. In a word it is
necessary to take from man his own force, to
give him a force outside of himself which he

* Montesquieu, French writer, born 1689, died 1755.

The quotation in the text is taken from Grandeur et De
cadence des Romains, Chap. I. —Ed.
60 Zbe Social Contract [bk. n.

cannot use without the help of others. The more

surely these natural forces are dead and an
nihilated, the greater and more desirable are the
acquired ones, and the more solid and durable
the establishment ; so that when the citizen is
nothing and can do nothing save by help of all
the others, and the force acquired by the whole is
equal or superior to the sum of the natural forces
of all the individuals, it may be said that legis
lation has reached the highest point of perfection
to which it can attain.
The legislator is in all respects an extraordi
nary man in the state. If he is so by his genius,
he is no less so by his office. It is not magis
tracy ; it is not sovereignty. This occupation
which constitutes the republic, does not enter into
its constitution ; it is a special, superior function
which has nothing in common with human em
pire ; for if he who rules men ought not to rule
the laws, he who rules the laws ought not to rule
men ; otherwise the laws, ministers of his pas
sions, would often only perpetuate his injustice ;
he could never prevent individual claims from
interfering with the sacred character of his
work.
When Lycurgus gave laws to his country, he
ch. vii.] XTbe legislator 61

began by abdicating his royal power. It was

the custom of most Greek cities to confide the
framing of their laws to strangers. The modern
republics of Italy have often imitated this cus
tom ; that of Geneva did the same and was the
better for it. Rome, in her best days, saw all
the crimes of tyranny revive in her bosom, and
herself ready to perish, because she had united
legislative authority and sovereign power in the
same persons.
Notwithstanding this, the decemvirs never
arrogated to themselves the right to pass a law
upon their authority alone.
" Nothing of what we propose to you," said
they to the people, " can become law without
your consent. Romans, be yourselves the
authors of laws which will make you happy."
He who frames the laws has no legislative rights
and should have none, and the people itself, even
should it desire so to do, could not despoil itself
of this incommunicable right, because, according
to the fundamental compact, it is only the general
will which is obligatory upon individuals, and it
is never certain that an individual will will con
form to the general will, until after it has been
submitted to the free suffrages of the people ;
62 zbe Social Contract [bk. ii.

this has already been stated, but it may not be

useless to repeat it.
We find then two things at once in the work
of legislation which seem incompatible : an
enterprise beyond human strength, and an
authority to execute it which amounts to nothing.
There is another difficulty which merits our
attention. The sages who desire to speak to
the vulgar in their own language, instead of the
language of the vulgar, will not be listened to.
There are a thousand ideas which it is impos
sible to translate into the language of the people.
Views which are too general, and objects too
far removed are equally beyond its reach ; each
individual, knowing no form of government
other than that which relates to his individual
interest, perceives with difficulty the advantages
which he may receive through the continual
privations imposed by good laws. In order that
a rising people might enjoy the sound maxims
of politics and follow the fundamental rules of
state policy, it would be necessary that the effect
should become the cause ; that the social spirit,
which must be the work of the enactment of
laws, should preside at the enactment itself, and
that men should become before the institution
ch. vii.] TTbe legislator 63

of laws what they ought to become by means of

them. Then since legislators are unable to em
ploy either force or reasoning, they must have
recourse to the authority of another order, which
will lead without violence, and persuade without
convincing.
This state of things has always forced the
fathers of nations to have recourse to the inter
vention of heaven, and to give honor to the
gods, for their own wisdom, so that the people,
submitting to the laws of the state as they sub
mit to the laws of nature, and recognizing the
same power in the creation of man and in the
formation of a city, obey freely, and bear the
yoke of public welfare, with docility.
This sublime intelligence, which rises above
the grasp of the masses, is that whose de
cisions are placed by the legislator in the
mouth of the immortals, to lead by divine
authority those who could not be moved by
human considerations. But it is not given to
every man to make the gods speak, nor to be
accredited to them when he announces himself
as their interpreter. The great soul of the legis
lator is the true miracle which must prove his
mission.
64 XTbe Soclal Contract [bk. n.

Any man can engrave tablets of stones, or buy

an oracle, or feign secret communication with
some divinity, or train a bird to speak in his ear,
or find other gross means to impose upon the
people.
He who can do but these things may perhaps
assemble a troop of madmen, but he will never
found an empire, and his extravagant perform
ance will soon perish with him. Vain pretentions
form but a passing tie ; wisdom alone makes
permanent ones.
The Jewish law, still in force, and that of the
children of Ishmael which for ten centuries
ruled half the world, bear witness even to-day
of the great men who dictated them ; and while
proud philosophy or blind party spirit sees in
them only successful impostors, true publicists
admire in their institutions the great and power
ful genius which presides over permanent estab
lishments.
From all this we must not conclude, like
Warburton,* that politics and religion have
a common object among us, but that, in the
* Warburton, English prelate and theological writer, born
1698, died 1779. The opinion here attributed to him is
taken from his most celebrated work, The Divine Legation
ofMoses. —Ed.
ch. viii.] cbe people 65

origin of nations, one serves as the instrument

of the other.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE PEOPLE.

THE architect before erecting a great build

ing examines and sounds the soil to see if
it will bear its weight, so the wise lawgiver will
not begin by making good laws, but he will
first see whether the people for whom they are
destined is ready to bear them. It was for this
reason that Plato * refused to give laws to the
Arcadians and the Cyrenians, knowing that
these two nations were rich and would not en
dure equality.
The reason that in Crete there were good laws
and bad men was because Minos f had given
laws to a people loaded with vices.
Thousands of nations have flourished upon
earth which could never have endured good

* It is probable that Rousseau had in mind the invitation

said to have been extended to Plato by the inhabitants of
Cyrene, which had recently become a republic, and by
those of Megalopolis, which had been recently founded.
See Plutarch and Aelian. —Ed.
f Minos, the fabled lawgiver of Crete. —Ed.
5
66 Gbe Social Contract [bk. n.

laws, and those which could have borne them

had but a short existence.
Most nations, like most men, are docile only
in youth ; they become incorrigible as they grow
old. When customs are once established and
prejudices rooted, it is a dangerous and useless
enterprise to try to reform them ; the people
will not permit their misfortunes to be touched
upon, even for their instruction,—like the
stupid and cowardly sick who shudder at sight
of a physician.
It is not that,—as some maladies upset a
man's head and make him forget the past,—
there may not be in the existence of states,
violent epochs when revolutions produce upon
nations the effect that certain crises produce
upon individuals, when horror of the past takes
the place of forgetfulness, and when the state,
destroyed by civil wars, rises from its ashes and
takes on the vigor of youth.
Such was Sparta in the time of Lycurgus,
such was Rome after the Tarquins, and such
have been among us Holland and Switzerland
after the expulsion of tyrants.
But these events are rare ; they are exceptions
and their cause is always found in the particular
ch. vin.] Zbe people 67

constitution of the exceptional state. They

cannot even take place twice with the same
nation, for a nation can make itself free as long
as it is barbarous, but it can do so no more
when its civil energy is exhausted. Troubles may
then destroy, without its being possible for rev
olutions to re-establish it : as soon as its chains
are broken it falls apart and exists no longer,
needing thereafter a master, not a liberator.
Let free nations remember this truth : " Lib
erty may be acquired, but never recovered."
Youth is not infancy. There is a time of
youth for nations as well as man,—or, if you will,
of maturity,—which must be waited for before
subjecting them to laws : but the maturity of a
people is not always easy to recognize ; and if
begun too early the labor is lost. Certain peoples
may be disciplined from their earliest existence,
others cannot be disciplined at the end of ten
centuries.
The Russians will never be truly civilized,
because they were taken in hand too early.
Peter* had the genius of imitation, he had not
the true genius which creates all from nothing.
* Peter I. of Russia, called the Great, the true founder
of the modern Empire, born 1672, died 1725. —Ed.
68 ttbe Social Contract [bk. n.

Some things which he did were good, most of

them were ill-timed. He saw that his was a
barbarous people ; he did not see that it was
not ripe for civilization ; he tried to civilize it
when he should have accustomed it to war. He
tried at first to make Germans or English, when
he should have begun by making Russians : he
prevented his subjects from ever becoming what
they might have been, by persuading them that
they were what they were not.
It is thus that a French preceptor teaches his
pupil to shine in his infancy, and then to amount
to nothing afterward. The empire of Russia
will desire to subjugate Europe, and will itself
be subjugated. The Tartars, its subjects or
neighbors, will become its masters and ours :
this revolution seems to me inevitable. All the
kings of Europe are working together to accele
rate it.

CHAPTER IX.
CONTINUATION.

NATURE has fixed a limit to the stature of

a well-formed man, and when this limit is
passed there are only giants and dwarfs ; it is
the same with regard to the best constitution of
ch. ix.] Continuation 69

a state ; there are limits to the extent of terri

tory which it can have, so that it will not be too
large to be well governed or too small to main
tain itself. There is in every political body a
maximum of force which it cannot pass, and
from which it often recedes after having en
larged itself too much. The farther the social
cord is stretched, the more relaxed it becomes ;
and in general a small state is proportionally
stronger than a large one.
A thousand reasons demonstrate this maxim :
First, the administration becomes more difficult
at great distances, as a weight becomes heavier
at the end of a long lever. It also becomes
more onerous in proportion as degrees are multi
plied : for each city has its own government,
which is paid for by the people ; each district
has its own, paid for by the people ; then each
province, then the great governments, satrapies,
vice-royalties, which must always be paid dearer
as they rise in the scale, and always at the ex
pense of the unfortunate people ; finally comes
the supreme government which overwhelms all
the rest. All this expense drains the subjects
continually : far from being better governed by
all these different orders, they are much less so
70 Zbe Social Contract [bk. ii.

than if there were but one above them. There

remains scarcely sufficient resources for extra
ordinary cases ; and when it becomes necessary
to draw upon them, the state is upon the verge
of ruin.
This is not all : the government has less vigor
and celerity in enforcing the laws, in preventing
vexations, correcting abuses, foreseeing seditious
enterprises which might arise in remote places ;
and the people has less affection for a chief
whom it never sees,—for the country, which to
him is as the rest of the world,—for his fellow-
citizens, who are generally strangers to him.
The same laws cannot apply to different
provinces, having different manners and climates
and being unable to endure the same form of
government.
Different laws engender only trouble and con
fusion among peoples who, living under the same
chiefs, in continual communication with each
other, pass from one people to another or inter
marry and, being subjected to different customs,
never know whether their patrimony is really
their own.
Talents are hidden, wishes not recognized,
and vices unpunished in this multitude of men,
ch. ix.] Continuatfon 71

unknown to each other, whom the seat of supreme

administration assembles in the same place.
Chiefs burdened with affairs see nothing for
themselves ; clerks govern the state. Measures
which must be taken to maintain the general
authority, which some distant officers wish to
evade or impose upon, absorb all the public at
tention, there is none left for the welfare of the
people, and scarcely enough for its defence if
needful ; and so it is thus that a body too large
for its constitution becomes worn out, and per
ishes under its own weight.
On the other hand the state should give itself
a certain basis for the sake of solidity, to resist
the shocks which it will not fail to experience,
and the efforts which it will be obliged to make
to sustain itself: for every nation has a sort of
centrifugal force, by means of which they act
continually one against the other, and tend to
enlarge themselves at the expense of their neigh
bors, like the vortices of Descartes. The weak
risk being soon swallowed up ; and none can be
preserved, except by placing themselves in
equilibrium with the others, which equalizes the
pressure.
We see from this that there are reasons for
72 Zbe Social Contract [bk. n.

extensions, and reasons for contractions ; and it

is not the least talent of the politician to find
between them the proportions most advantageous
to the preservation of the state. It may be said,
in general, that the first being only exterior and
relative should be subordinated to the others,
which are internal and absolute.
A strong, healthy constitution is the first thing
to be sought for ; and more stress should be
given to the vigor which arises from a good gov
ernment than to the resources furnished by a
large territory.
However, there have been states so constituted
that the necessity of conquest entered into their
constitution itself, and to maintain themselves
they were obliged to enlarge continually. Per
haps they felicitated themselves upon this
fortunate necessity, which showed them however,
with the limits of their grandeur, the inevitable
moment of their fall.

CHAPTER X.
CONTINUATION.

APOLITICAL body may be measured in

two ways, viz. : by its extent of territory,
and by its number of people; and there is be
ch. x.] Continuatfon 73

tween these measurements a relation which

should give to the state its true dimensions.
Man makes the state, and the land supports
man; this relation is, then, that the land should
suffice to nourish its inhabitants, and that there
should be as many inhabitants as the land can
sustain.
It is in this proportion that the maximum
force of a given number of people is found ;
for if there is too much land, the care of it is
onerous, the culture is insufficient, and its pro
duction is superfluous ; it is the principal cause
of defensive wars : if there is not enough the
state finds itself at the mercy of its neighbors
for the rest ; this is the principal cause of
offensive wars.
Any nation which has by its position only the
alternative between commerce or war is weak
in itself ; it depends upon its neighbors, and
upon circumstances, and has but a short and
uncertain existence. It subjugates and so
changes the situation, or is subjugated and is
nothing. It can keep its freedom only by reason
of its smallness or its greatness.
A fixed relation between the extent of land
and the number of men sufficient for it cannot
74 Gbe Social Contract [bk. n.

be estimated, as much on account of the differ

ence in the qualities of land, in the degrees of
fertility, in the nature of the productions, and
in the influence of climate, as of the difference
in the temperaments of the people inhabiting
them, of whom some consume but little in a fer
tile country, and others consume much on a
sterile soil.
Attention should also be given to the degree
of fecundity of the women as to whether a coun
try is more or less favorable to population, and
to the number whose co-operation the legislator
may hope for in his establishments, so that he
need base his judgment not upon what he sees,
but upon what he foresees, nor stop at the actual
state of the population but at what it ought
naturally to become.
There are a thousand occasions when the
peculiar conditions of the place require or per
mit the acquisition of more land than seems
necessary. In a mountainous country more
territory is occupied ; there the natural produc
tions of wood and pasture demand less labor,
and experience teaches that women are more
prolific than on the plains ; there the great
stretch of sloping land gives but a small hori
ch. x.] Continuatfon 75

zontal base, which is all that can be counted

upon for vegetation.
On the contrary upon the seacoast the territory
should be diminished, even among the almost
barren rocks and sands, because here fishing
takes the place of agriculture, and the inhabitants
should be more concentrated, to resist pirates,
and besides there is a better opportunity of dis
posing of the surplus population by colonization.
To these conditions for establishing a people
should be added one which can take the place
of no other, but without which all others are
useless : it is the enjoyment of peace and abun
dance ; the time of formation of a state is like
that of a battalion, it is then least capable of
resistance and most easy to destroy. Resistance
is easier in a state of absolute anarchy than in a
moment of fermentation when each is occupied
with himself and not with his peril. If war,
famine, or sedition supervenes at this crisis the
state will be inevitably overturned.
Many governments have been established dur
ing these storms ; but the governments have
destroyed the state.
Usurpers bring about or choose these times of
trouble to cause destructive laws to be passed
76 Gbe Social Contract [bk. n.

during the public agitation, which would never

have been adopted in cold blood. The choice
of the moment of establishment is one of the
surest distinctions between the work of a legis
lator and that of a tyrant.
What people, then, is ready for legislation.
A people which finds itself united by some tie
of origin or interest or convention and has never
yet borne the real yoke of the law ; one which
has neither customs nor well-rooted supersti
tions and does not fear being crushed by a
sudden invasion ; which without entering into
the quarrels of its neighbors, can resist any one
of them alone, or assisted by one can repulse
the others ; one in which each member may be
known by all the others, and where no man is
forced to carry a load greater than he can bear ;
one which can survive without other nations
and which all others can do without * ; one that
* If of two neighboring peoples one cannot get along
without the other, it would be a hard situation for the
first, and a dangerous one for the second. Any wise people,
in such a case, would force itself quickly to deliver the
other from its dependence. The Republic of Thlascala,
inclosed within the Mexican Empire, preferred to do with
out salt rather than to buy it of the Mexicans, or to accept
it gratuitously. The wise Thlascalans saw the trap con
cealed under this liberality. They preserved their freedom,
and this little state, inclosed within the great empire, was
finally the instrument of its ruin.
ch. xi.] different Sgstems of Xcgislatlon 77

is neither rich nor poor and suffices for itself ;

finally one that unites the stability of an estab
lished people with the docility of a new one.
What renders the work of legislation difficult
is not so much what is to be established as what
must be destroyed ; and what renders success so
rare is the impossibility of finding the simplicity
of nature joined to the requirements of society.
All these conditions, it is true, are brought to
gether with difficulty, and it is also true that few
states are well constituted.
There is still one country in Europe which is
capable of legislation : the island of Corsica.
The courage and constancy with which this
brave people has recovered and defended its
liberty, merits that some wise man should teach
it how to preserve it.
I have a presentiment that some day this
little island will astonish Europe.

CHAPTER XI.

DIFFERENT SYSTEMS OF LEGISLATION.

IF we seek to find in what the greatest good

of all consists,—which should be the object
of all systems of legislation,—it will be found
that it is reduced to two principal things : liberty
78 Gbe Social Contract [bk. h.

and equality : liberty because all individual de

pendence is so much force taken from the body
of the state : equality, because liberty cannot
exist without it.
I have already denned civil liberty : as to
equality it should not mean that the degrees of
power and riches are absolutely the same ; but
that, as concerns power, it be above all violence,
and be never exercised except in virtue of rank
and law ; and as to riches, no citizen should be
opulent enough to be able to purchase another,
and none poor enough to be obliged to sell him
self * : which supposes, on the part of the great,
moderation of riches and credit ; and on the
part of the poor, moderation of avarice and
covetousness.
It is said that equality is a speculative chimera
which cannot exist in practice. But if abuse is
inevitable, does it follow that it should not at
least be regulated ? It is precisely because the
force of events tends always to destroy equality
* If you would give stability to the state, bring the ex
tremes as near together as possible ; allow neither rich nor
poor. These two conditions, naturally inseparable, are
equally dangerous to the common good ; from one come
the abettors of tyranny, and from the other, —tyrants ; be
tween them the traffic in public liberty is carried on : one
buys, the other sells.
ch. xi.] Different Ssstems of legislation 79

that the power of legislation should always tend

to maintain it.
But these general objects of all good estab
lishments should be modified in each country
by the relations arising as much from the local
situation as from the character of the inhab
itants ; and it is on account of these relations
that a particular system of establishments should
be assigned to each people, which shall be the
best, perhaps not in itself, but for the state for
which it is designed. For example, if the soil
is ungrateful and sterile, or the country too
small for its inhabitants, turn to the industries
and arts, whose products can be exchanged for
the produce which is wanting.
On the contrary, if the country consists of
rich plains and fertile slopes ; if in a good
country inhabitants are lacking : give attention
to agriculture which multiplies the population,
and discourage the arts which depopulate the
country—by attracting to certain points in the
territory the few inhabitants. * If you occupy
* "Any outside branch of commerce," said M. d'Argen-
son, "is of false utility for the country in general : it may
enrich a few individuals, even a few cities ; but the nation
as a whole gains nothing, and the people is no better for
it."
80 Zbe Social Contract [bk. ii.

extensive and commodious coasts, cover the sea

with your vessels, cultivate commerce and navi
gation, your existence will be brilliant and short.
If upon your coasts the sea washes only inacces
sible rocks, remain barbarians and fish-eaters ;
you will live more tranquilly,—perhaps better,
and certainly more happily. In a word, aside
from the maxims common to every state, each
people contains within itself some cause which
commends a certain mode of life, and makes its
legislation suitable for it alone. Formerly the
Hebrews, and more recently the Arabs, made
religion their chief object in life ; the Athenians,
letters ; Carthage and Tyre, commerce ; Rhodes,
navigation ; Sparta, war ; and Rome, virtue.
The author * of L'Esprit des Lois has shown
in numerous examples with what art the legis
lator directs his legislation towards each of
these objects.
What renders the constitution of a state really
solid and durable is such an observance of
social relations that natural relations and laws
always agree upon the same points, and that the
latter only assures, accompanies, and rectifies
the others. But if the legislator, deceiving him-
* Montesquieu. —Ed.
ch. xii.] ©Mslon or Xaws 81

self as to his object, adopts a principle different

from that which arises from the nature of things ;
if one tends to servitude and the other to liberty,
one to riches and the other to population, one
to peace and the other to conquest : the laws
will insensibly weaken, the constitution will
change, and the state will be in continual agita
tion until it is destroyed or altered, and invincible
nature will have resumed her empire.

CHAPTER XII.
DIVISION OF LAWS.

TO regulate or give the best form possible to

public matters, there are various relations
to be considered. First, the action of the body
entire, upon itself ; that is to say, the relation of
all to all, or of the sovereign to the state ; and
this relation is composed of that of intermediate
terms, as will be seen later.
The laws which regulate this relation bear the
name of political laws, and are also called
fundamental laws, not without reason, if they
are wise ; for, if there is in each state but one
good way of ordering its affairs, the people
6
82 Gbe Social Contract [bk. n.

which has found that way should retain it : but

if the established order is bad, why take for
fundamental laws those which prevent people
from being good ? Besides, in any case, the
people is always master, and can change its
laws,—even the best ; for if it pleases to do evil
to itself, who has a right to prevent it ?
The second relation is that of members be
tween themselves, or with the whole body ; and
this relation should be as slight with regard to
the first, and as great with regard to the second,
as possible ; so that each citizen may be inde
pendent of all the others, and in a state of
excessive dependence upon the state : this is al
ways accomplished by the same means ; for it is
the strength of the state only which makes the
liberty of its members. Civil laws have their
origin in this second relation.
A third relation might be considered between
man and the law : that of disobedience and
punishment, and this gives rise to the establish
ment of criminal law, which is really less a par
ticular kind of law than the sanction of all
others.
To these three kinds of laws may be added a
fourth, the most important of all, which is graven
ch. xn] ©Mslon of Xaws 83

neither upon marble nor brass, but in the hearts

of the citizens ; it makes the true constitution
of the state ; it gathers new strength every day ;
when other laws grow old and pass away, it an
imates or replaces them ; it keeps a people in
sympathy with the spirit of its establishments,
and insensibly substitutes force of habit for
authority. I speak of manners, customs, and
above all of public opinion ; a law unknown to
our politicians, but upon it depends the success
of all the others. It occupies the secret atten
tion of the great legislator, while he seems to
limit himself to particular regulations which are
but the arches of the vault, of which the cus
toms of a country, slower of development, finally
form the steadfast key.
Among these different classes, political laws,
which constitute the form of the government,
are the only ones relative to my subject.
Sap. 3.

BOOK III.

BEFORE considering the different forms of

government, we will try to fix upon the
precise meaning of the word, which has never
yet been satisfactorily defined.

CHAPTER I.

GOVERNMENT IN GENERAL.

I WARN the reader that this chapter must be

read with deliberation, for I am unacquainted
with the art of being clear to those who are not
attentive.
Every free act has two causes which co-oper
ate in its production ; one moral—the will
which determines the act ; the other physical—
the power to execute it. When I walk towards
an object, I mast first will to go there ; and, in
the second place, my feet must carry me there.
If a paralytic wills to run, or an active man wills
not to run, both remain in the same place. The
84
ch. i.] Government m ©eneral 85

body politic has the same motive powers ; we

can distinguish in it force and will ; the one
under the name of legislative power, the other
under the name of executive power. Nothing
is done or should be done, without their con
currence.
We have seen that legislative power belongs
to the people, and can belong only to it. It is
easy to see, on the contrary, from the principles
previously established that executive power can
not belong to the generality, as legislative or
sovereign, because this power consists only in
individual acts which are not within the juris
diction of the law, nor consequently within that
of the sovereign, all whose acts can be but laws.
There must be, then, for the public force a
suitable agent to unite and set it to work in ac
cordance with the direction of the general will ;
to serve as a means of communication be
tween the state and the sovereign ; in some
sort, to be in the public entity what the union
of soul and body is in man. This is, in the
state, the proper office of the government, often
confused, unfortunately, with the sovereign of
whom it is but a minister.
What, then, is the government ? An inter
86 Gbe Social Contract [bk. m.

mediate body established between subjects and

sovereign for their mutual intercourse, charged
with the execution of the laws and the mainte
nance of liberty—civil as well as political.
The members of this body are called magis
trates or kings, that is, governors ; and the
entire body is called the Prince. So those who
contend that the act by which a people submits
to chiefs is not a contract, are quite right. It
is absolutely only a commission, in which, as
simple officers of the sovereign, they exercise in
his name the power of which he has made them
the depository, and which he can limit, modify,
and take away when he wishes. The alienation
of such a right, being incompatible with the
nature of the social body, is contrary to the
object of the association.
The government or supreme administration
is the legitimate exercise of executive power, and
the prince or magistrate is the man or body
charged with this administration.
In the government are found the intermediate
forces, whose relations compose those of all to
all—of the sovereign to the state. This last re
lation may be represented by the extremes of a
continuous proportion, of which the mean pro
ch. i.] Government in ©eneral 87

portional is the government. The government

receives from the sovereign the orders which it
gives to the people ; and in order that the state
may be in perfect equilibrium there must be an
equality between the product or power of the
government taken in itself, and the product or
power of the citizens, who are sovereign on the
one hand, and subjects on the other.
Further, none of these three terms can be
altered without immediately destroying the pro
portion. If the sovereign desires to govern, or
if the magistrate wishes to give laws, or if the
subjects refuse to obey, disorder succeeds to
order, force and will no longer act together, and
the state falls either into despotism or anarchy.
Finally, as there is but one mean proportional
in each relation, there is but one good govern
ment possible in a state; but as a thousand events
may occur to change the relations of a people
not only may different governments be good for
different peoples, but for the same people at
different times.
To give an idea of the different relations
which may exist between the two extremes, I
will take, as an example, the number of people
as the relation most easy to express.
 ss Gbe Social Contract [bk. m.

Let us suppose that the state is composed of

ten thousand citizens. The sovereign can be
considered only collectively and as a body ; but
each individual in his quality of subject is con
sidered as an individual, then the sovereign is
to the subject as ten thousand is to one ;
that is to say, each member of the state has, for
his share, only the ten-thousandth part of the
sovereign authority, although he is completely
subjected to it.
If the people is composed of a hundred thou
sand men the condition of the subject is not
changed, and each bears the whole weight of
the laws, but as his suffrage is reduced to a
hundred thousandth, he has ten times less in
fluence in their formation. Then the subject
being still but one person, the relation of the
sovereign as sovereign increases in the ratio of
the number of citizens. From which it follows
that the larger the state becomes the less liberty
there is.
When I say that the relation of sovereign to
people increases, I mean that it is farther re
moved from equality. So the greater the ratio
in the acceptation of geometricians, the less it is
in the common acceptance : in the first, the
ch. i.] Government in General 89

relation considered as to quantity is measured

by an exponent, and in the other case, con
sidered as to identity—it is estimated by
similarity.
Now, the less the individual wills relate to the
general will, that is to say, the customs to the
laws, the more the restraining force should in
crease. Then the government, to be a good
one, should be relatively stronger in proportion
as the people is more numerous.
On the other hand, the aggrandizement of the
state, giving to the depositories of public author
ity, more temptations and means of abusing
their power, the more strength the government
should have to restrain the people, the more the
sovereign should have, in his turn, to restrain
the government. I do not speak now of abso
lute force, but of the relative force of the dif
ferent parts of the state.
It follows from this double relation that the
continuous proportion between the sovereign,
the prince, and the people is not an arbitrary
idea, but a necessary consequence of the nature
of the political body.
It also follows that one of the extremes, that
is, the people as subjects, being fixed and repre
90 Zbe Social Contract [bk. m.

sented by unity, whenever the double ratio in

creases or diminishes, the simple ratio increases
or diminishes similarly, and consequently the
mean term is changed. Which makes it evident
that there is no single, absolute government
constitution, but there may be as many govern
ments, different in nature, as there are states
differing in size.
If, in ridicule of this system, it be said that
to find this mean proportional, and to form the
body of the government, it is only necessary,
according to my ideas, to extract the square
root of the number of people ; I should reply
that I take this number only as an example ;
that the relations which I have mentioned are
not measured alone by the number of men,
but in general by the amount of action which
combines with them from a multitude of causes ;
besides, if, to express myself in fewer words, I
borrow for a moment some geometrical terms, I
am not therefore ignorant that the precision of
geometry has no place in moral quantities.
The government is in a small way, what the
political body, which includes it, is in a greater
degree.
ch. i.] ©overnment In ©eneral 91

It is a moral entity endowed with certain

faculties,—active as the sovereign, passive as
the state, and which may be resolved into other
similar relations from which arises a new pro
portion, and still another within this according
to the order of tribunals, until an indivisible
mean term is reached, that is, one chief or
supreme magistrate which may be imagined in
the midst of this progression, like unity between
the series of fractions and numbers.
Without embarrassing ourselves in this multi
plicity of terms, let us be content with consider
ing the government as a new body in the state,
distinct from the people and the sovereign, and
intermediate between them.
There is this essential difference between
these two bodies, that the state exists by itself
and the government exists only by the sovereign.
So the dominant will of the prince is and should
be only the general will or the law ; its strength
is only the public force concentrated in it ; as
soon as the prince seeks to perform some abso
lute, independent act, the union of the whole
begins to relax. If it happens that the prince
has an individual will more active than that of the
92 Gbe Social Contract [bk. m.

sovereign, and that it uses, to enforce this indi

vidual will, the public force which is in its
hands, in such a way that there would be, so to
speak, two sovereigns, one de jure and the other
de facto, the civil union vanishes at once and
the political body will be dissolved.
However, in order that the body of the
government may have an existence, a real life
to distinguish it from the body of the state ; in
order that all its members may act in concert,
and respond to the purpose for which it was
instituted, there must be a personality, a sensi
bility common to its members, a force and a
will which tends to its preservation.
This individual existence supposes assemblies,
councils, power to deliberate, to resolve,—
rights, titles, and privileges which belong ex
clusively to the prince, and which make the
condition of the magistrate more honorable in
proportion as it is difficult.
The difficulties are in the manner of arrang
ing the subordinate whole within the whole in
such a way that the general constitution may
not be altered in strengthening his own ; that
he will always distinguish his individual force,
ch. i.] ©overnment in ©eneral 93

destined for his own preservation, from the

public force destined for the conservation of the
state, and in a word that he be always ready to
sacrifice the government to the people, and not
the people to the government.
On the other hand, although the artificial
body of the government is the work of another
artificial body, and has, as it were, but a bor
rowed, subordinate life, this does not prevent
its ability to act with more or less vigor and
celerity, and to enjoy a more or less robust
health. Finally, without receding directly
from the purpose of its institution, it can recede
from it more or less according to its constitu
tion.
It is from all these differences that arise the
various relations which the government should
have with the body of the state, according to
the accidental, individual relations by which
this same state is modified. For often the
government which is best in itself becomes the
most vicious, if its relations are not changed in
accordance with the faults of the political body
to which it belongs.
94 Gbe Social Contract [bk. m.

CHAPTER II.
THE PRINCIPLE WHICH CONSTITUTES THE DIF
FERENT FORMS OF GOVERNMENT.

TO show the general cause of these differ

ences, we must distinguish here the prince
from the government, as I have previously dis
tinguished the state from the sovereign.
The body of the magistrate may be composed
of a greater or less number of members. We
have said that the relation of the sovereign to
the subjects was greater in proportion as the
people was numerous ; and by an evident
analogy we can say the same of the government
with regard to the magistrates.
Now the total force of the government, being
always that of the state, does not vary ; from
which it follows that the more this force is used
upon its own members, the less remains to act
upon the whole people.
Then, the more numerous the magistrates the
weaker the government. As this maxim is fun
damental let us take pains to make it clear.
We can distinguish in the person of the
magistrate three essentially different wills : first,
the will of the individual, which tends only to
ch. ii.] Hbe principle of ©overnment qs

his particular advantage ; second, the common

will of the magistrates which relates solely to
the advantage of the prince, and which may be
called the will of the body, which is general as
relating to the government and particular as
relating to the state of which the government is
a part ; in the third place, the will of the people
or the will of the sovereign, which is general, as
much by its relation to the state considered as
a whole, as by its relation to the government
considered as a part of the whole.
In a perfect legislation the particular or indi
vidual will should be null ; the will of the body
of the government, quite subordinate ; and con
sequently the general or sovereign will is domi
nant, and the only rule for all the others.
According to the natural order, on the con
trary, the different wills will become active in
proportion as they concentrate. Thus the
general will is always weakest, the will of the
body of the government has the second rank
and the individual will is the first of all : so
that, in the government, each member is first
himself, then magistrate, then citizen ; a grada
tion directly opposed to that required by social
order.
96 Zbe Social Contract [bk. m.

If it be established that the whole government

shall be in the hands of one man, the individual
will and the will of the body of the government
will be perfectly united, and consequently the
latter will be at its highest degree of intensity.
Now as the use of force depends upon the will,
and as the absolute force of the government
does not vary, it follows that the most active
government is that of one person.
On the contrary, let us unite the government
to the legislative authority ; make the prince
the sovereign, and of the citizens as many
magistrates : then the will of the body of the
government, confused with the general will, will
have no more activity than it has, and will leave
the individual will in all its force. So the gov
ernment with the same absolute force will be at
its minimum of relative force or activity.
These relations are incontestable, and other
considerations serve to confirm them. It is
plain, for example, that each magistrate is more
active in his position, than each citizen in his,
and consequently that the individual will has
much more influence in acts of government than
in those of the sovereign, for each magistrate is
nearly always charged with some function of the
ch. n.] Gbe principle of Government 97

government, whereas each citizen taken singly

has no function of sovereignty. Moreover, the
more the state extends, the more its real force
increases, although it does not increase in pro
portion to its extent : but the state remaining
the same, it is useless for the magistrates to
multiply their number, the government does not
acquire a greater real force on account of it ;
because this force is that of the state, whose
measure is always the same ; so the relative
strength or activity of the government dimin
ishes, without an increase in its real or absolute
force.
It is certain, that the progress of affairs be
comes slower in proportion as the number of
people engaged in them becomes greater ; that
in giving too much to prudence, not enough is
given to fortune ; that the opportunity is al
lowed to escape, and while deliberating the fruit
of deliberation is often lost.
I have just shown that the government relaxes
as the magistrates become numerous ; and I
have previously shown that the more numerous
the people, the greater should be the restraining
force. From which it follows that the relation
of the magistrates to the government should be
7
98 TJbe Social Contract [bk. m.

inverse to the relation of the subjects to the

sovereign ; that is to say, that the larger the
state becomes, the more restricted should the
government be ; so that the number of chiefs
should diminish in the ratio of the increase of
the people.
I speak of the relative force only of the
government, and not of its integrity ; for, on
the contrary, the more numerous the magistrates,
the more the will of the body of the government
approaches the general will ; whereas, under a
single magistrate this same will of the body is
only, as I have said, an individual will. So we
lose on one side what is gained on the other,
and the art of the legislator is to know how to
fix the point where the force and will of the
government, which are always in reciprocal
proportions, combine in the relation most ad
vantageous to the state.

CHAPTER III.

DIVISION OF GOVERNMENTS.

IT has been seen in the preceding chapter why

the different forms of government are dis
tinguished by the number of members compos-
ch. in.] Divisfon of Governments 99

ing them ; it remains to be seen in this chapter

how the division is made.
The sovereign can in the first place commit
the care of the government to the whole people
or to the greater part of the people, in such a
way that there will be more citizen magistrates
than simple, individual citizens. This form of
government is called a democracy.
Or the sovereign may restrict the government
into the hands of a small number, so that there
will be more ordinary citizens than magistrates ;
this form is called an aristocracy.
Finally the sovereign may concentrate the
government in the hands of a single magistrate,
from whom all others derive their power. This
third form is called a monarchy or royal govern
ment.
Let us observe that all these forms, or at least
the first two are susceptible of much or little,
and have sufficient latitude ; for the democracy
may embrace all the people or limit itself to
half of them.
An aristocracy, in its turn, may limit itself
from half the people to an indefinitely small
number. Even royalty is susceptible of di
vision. Sparta had always two kings by its
ioo Gbe Social Contract [bk. in.

constitution ; and in the Roman Empire there

have been as many as eight emperors at a time,
without it having been possible to say that the
empire was divided. There is a point then at
which each form of government blends with the
following, and it is plain that under these sepa
rate denominations the government is really
susceptible of as many different forms as the
state has citizens.
Further, this government being able in cer
tain regards to subdivide itself into other parts,
—one administered in one way, and another in
another way,—from these combined forms may
result a multitude of mixed forms, of which
each may be multiplied by all the simple forms.
In all times people have disputed about the
best forms of government, without considering
that each of them is best in some cases and
worst in others.
If in the different states the number of su
preme magistrates ought to be in an inverse ratio
to the number of citizens, it follows that, in
general, the democratic government suits small
states, the aristocratic form the medium ones,
and the monarchic the great states. This rule
is deduced directly from the principle. But
ch. iv.] Democracg

how can the multitude of circumstances be

estimated, which might furnish exceptions ?

CHAPTER IV.

DEMOCRACY.

HE who makes a law knows better than any

one else how it should be executed and
interpreted. It seems then that there could not
be a better constitution than that in which the
executive power is joined to the legislative : but
that is the very thing which makes such a gov
ernment insufficient in certain respects, because
the things which ought to be distinct from each
other are not so, and the prince and the sover
eign, being but the same person, form, so to
speak, a government without government.
It is not wise for him who makes the laws to
execute them ; nor for the body of the people
to turn its attention from general views to par
ticular objects. Nothing is more dangerous
than the influence of private interests in public
affairs, and the abuse of the law by the govern
ment is a lesser evil than the corruption of the
legislator, the inevitable result of individual in
io4 ttbe Social Contract [bk. hi.

terests. Then, the state being changed in its

substance, all reform becomes impossible. A
people that would never take advantage of the
government would never abuse independence ;
a people that could always govern well would
have no need of being governed.
To use the term in a rigorous acceptation, a
true democracy has never existed, and will
never exist. It is against the natural order of
things that the majority should govern and the
minority be governed.
We cannot imagine a whole people remaining
continually assembled to watch over public
affairs, and it will be easily seen that commis
sions could not be organized for the purpose
without changing the form of administration.
In fact, I think I can formulate the principle
that, when the functions of government are
divided between several tribunals, the less
numerous acquires sooner or later the greatest
authority, if only on account of facility in
expediting the affairs which bring them to
gether.
In addition to this, what difficult things to
unite does not such a government pre-suppose !
First, a very small state, where it will be easy
ch. iv.] Democracy 103

for the people to assemble, and where each citi

zen can easily know all the others. Second, a
great simplicity of manners which prevents a
multiplicity of affairs and unpleasant discus
sions ; then equality of rank and fortune, with
out which equality would not exist long in
respect to rights and authority ; finally, little or
no luxury, for either luxury is the effect of
riches or makes them necessary ; it corrupts
rich and poor at the same time, one by posses
sion and the other by covetousness ; it gives
the country over to ease and vanity ; it takes
from the state its citizens to enslave them to
each other, and all of them to public opinion.
This is why a celebrated author gave virtue
as the principle of a republic,* for all these
conditions cannot exist without virtue ; but for
want of having made necessary distinctions this
genius has often lacked in precision and some
times lucidity, and has not seen that the sove
reign authority being everywhere the same, the
same principle should have a place in every well
constituted state,—more or less, it is true, ac
cording to the form of government.
Let us add that there is no government so
* Esprit des Lois, Liv. III., Chap. III.
io4 Gbe Social Contract [bk. m.

subject to civil wars and internal agitations as

the democratic or popular government, because
there is no other which tends so strongly and so
continuously to change its form, nor which
demands more vigilance and courage to main
tain it in its own form. In this constitution,
above all others, should the citizen arm himself
with strength and constancy, and say each day
of his life what a virtuous Palatine * said in the
diet of Poland : Malopericulosam libertatem quam
quietum servitium. \
If there were a people of gods, its government
would be democratic. So perfect a government
is not suitable for men.

CHAPTER V.

ARISTOCRACY.

HERE we have two distinct moral entities ;

to wit, the government and the sovereign ;
and consequently two general wills, one relating
to all the citizens, the other relating only to the
administration. So while the government may
* The Palatine of Posnania, father of the King of Po
land, Duke of Lorraine.
f Better perilous liberty than peaceful slavery.
ch. v.] Hristocracg 105

regulate its internal policy as it pleases, it can

never speak to the people except in the name of
the sovereign ; that is to say, in the name of the
people itself ; this should never be forgotten.
The first societies governed themselves aristo
cratically. The chiefs of families deliberated
among themselves concerning public affairs.
Young people yielded without difficulty to the
authority of experience. From this we have
the names priests, elders, senate, and gerontes.
The savages of North America still govern
themselves thus in our day, and are well gov
erned.
But in proportion as the inequality of estab
lishment is greater than the natural inequality,
wealth and power * will be preferred to age,
and the aristocracy will become elective.
Finally, power transmitted with property from
father to children, making families patrician,
will render the government hereditary, and
senators of twenty years of age will be seen.
There are three kinds of aristocracy : natural,
elective, and hereditary. The first is suitable
only for a simple people ; the third is the worst
* It is evident that the word optimates, among the
ancients, does not mean the best, but the most powerful.
106 dbe Social Contract [bk. m.

of all governments. The second is the best ; it

is an aristocracy in the true sense of the word.
Aside from the advantage of a distinction of
the two powers, it has that of the choice of its
members ; for in the popular government all
citizens are born magistrates ; but this govern
ment limits them to a small number, and they
become magistrates only by election ; by which
means probity, enlightenment, experience, and
all the other reasons for preference and public
esteem are so many guaranties that the govern
ment will be wisely administered.
Further, assemblies convene more easily,
affairs are discussed more fully, and are de
spatched with more order and diligence ; the
credit of the state is better sustained among
strangers by venerable senators than by a
multitude of unknown or despised persons.
In one word, it is the best and most natural
order that the wisest govern the multitude, if it
is certain that the government will be for the
benefit of the people, and not for those who
govern. We must not multiply jurisdictions nor
have twenty thousand men to do what a hun
dred chosen ones could do better.
But it may be observed that here the interest
ch. v.] Bristocracg 107

of the whole begins to direct the public force

less upon the rule of the general will, and that
an inevitable tendency takes from the law a part
of the executive power. With regard to indi
vidual expediency, a state must be neither so
small nor a people so simple and upright that
the execution of the laws follows immediately
upon the public will, as in a good democracy.
Neither is a nation desirable which is so large
that the chiefs widely separated can play the
sovereign each in his own province, and begin
to be independent and finally become masters.
But if an aristocracy demands a few virtues
less than the popular government, it demands
others which are peculiar to it, as moderation
in the rich, and contentment in the poor ; for a
rigorous equality seems out of place there ; it
was not observed even in Sparta.
In addition to this, if this form allows a cer
tain inequality of fortune, it is in order that in
general the administration of public affairs may
be confided to those who can best give all their
time to it, and not, as Aristotle* asserts, that the

* Rousseau has apparently misunderstood a passage in the

Politics, Bk. IV. , Chap. XI . , in which Aristotle does say that
the rich are more likely to possess the necessary knowledge,
108 Gbe Social Contract [bk. in.

rich may always have the preference. On the

contrary, it is necessary that an opposite choice
sometimes teach the people that there are, in
the merits of men, reasons for preference which
are more important than riches.

CHAPTER VI.

MONARCHY.

UP to this time we have considered the prince

as a moral and collective entity, united
by force of the laws, and the depository of the
executive power in the state. We have now to
consider this power in the hands of a person, of
a real man, who alone has the right to dispose
of it according to law. This person is called a
monarch or king.
Quite contrary to the other kinds of adminis
tration where a collective being represents an
individual, in this one an individual represents
a collective being ; in such a way that the moral
unity which constitutes the prince is at the same
time a physical unity in which all the faculties
and are less likely to be corrupted. But he expressly says,
Bk. III., Chap. XIII., that the right founded on riches is
a doubtful one.—Ed.
ch. vi.] dftonarcbB iog

which the law unites in the others with so much

effort are united naturally.
Thus the will of the people and the will of
the prince, the public force of the state and the
individual force of the government, all respond
to the same motive power, all the springs of the
machine are in the same hand, all work for the
same end ; there are no opposing movements
which destroy each other, and no sort of con
stitution can be imagined in which a slight effort
produces greater action.
Archimedes,* seated tranquilly upon the shore
and setting in motion without difficulty a large
vessel upon the waters, represents to me a skil
ful monarch, governing from his cabinet his
vast states, and making everything move while
seeming himself immovable.
But if there is no government which has more
vigor, there is none where the individual will
has more authority and dominates others more
easily ; all move towards the same end, it is
true, but this end is not that of public happiness,
* Archimedes, celebrated Greek mathematician and en
gineer, born early in the third century B.C., killed at the
capture of Syracuse by Marcellus in 212. The allusion in
the text is probably a vague reminiscence of the device by
which he launched a large ship he had built for Hiero. —Ed.
no Gbe Social Contract [bk. in.

and even the force of the administration turns

always to the prejudice of the state.
Kings desire to be absolute, and they are told
that the best means of becoming so is to make
themselves beloved by their people.
This is a very fine maxim and is quite true in
some respects ; unfortunately it will always be
ridiculed at court. The power which comes
from the love of the people is undoubtedly
great ; but it will always be precarious and con
ditional ; princes will never be satisfied with it.
The best of kings wish to be wicked if it
pleases them to be so, without ceasing to be
masters. A political sermonizer might tell them
in vain that, the force of the people being their
strength, their greatest interest lies in the pros
perity of the people, and in its number and
bravery ; they know well that it is not true.
Their personal interest demands first, that the
people be weak, miserable, and never able to
resist them. I acknowledge that, supposing
the subject under perfect submission, the in
terest of the prince will always be to have the
people powerful, for this power being his own
will render him redoubtable to his neighbors ;
but as this interest is only secondary and sub
ch. vi.] dBonarcbg

ordinate, and the two suppositions are incom

patible, it is natural that princes should always
give the preference to maxims which are the
most immediately useful to them. This is
what Samuel * represented strongly to the
Hebrews ; it is what Machiavelli proved clearly.
While feigning to give lessons to kings, he gives
great ones to the people. The Prince of Ma
chiavelli is the book of republicans.!
We have found that in general relations the
monarchy is suitable only for great states ; and
we find it still true in examining it in itself. The

* See I Samuel, viii., 11-18. —Ed.

f Machiavelli was an honest man and a good citizen ;
but being attached to the House of the Medici, he was
forced by the oppression of his country to disguise his love
of liberty ; the choice alone of his execrable hero, shows
his secret intention ; and the opposition of the principles
in his book The Prince, and those of his Discourse on Livy,
and of his History of Florence, shows that this profound
political speculator has had up to this time only superficial
or corrupt readers. The court of Rome condemned the
book severely ; I believe it ; it was the court of Rome
which was most clearly described. [Machiavelli, Italian
writer and statesman, born 1469, died 1527. Rousseau
was the first in modern times to take up the defence of this
"profound political speculator," and the battle has been
raging ever since. The "execrable hero" was Cesar
Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI., died 1507, thirty-two
years old. —Ed.]
na Zbe Social Contract [bk. m.

more numerous the public administration the

more the relation of prince to subjects dimin
ishes and approaches equality ; so that this rela
tion is one or equal in the democracy. This
relation increases in proportion as the govern
ment is limited in number, and it is at its
maximum when the government is in the hands
of a single person. Then there is too great a
distance between the prince and the people and
the state lacks unity. To produce this, there
must be intermediate orders, and princes and
nobles to supply them. Now nothing of all this
is suitable for a small state, which would be
ruined by all these degrees.
If it is difficult for a large state to be well
governed, it is much more difficult for it to be
well governed by one man ; every one knows
what happens when kings give themselves sub
stitutes.
An essential and inevitable fault, which will
always place a monarchical government below
the republican, is that in the latter the public
voice seldom raises to high places any but
enlightened and capable men, who fill them
with honor, whereas those who fill them under
monarchs are often but blunderers, rascals, and
ch. vi.] flionarcbs «3

intriguers whose small talents, which at court

help them to high places, serve only to show
their unfitness as soon as they have reached
them. The people is less liable to be deceived
in a choice than the prince ; and a man of real
merit is almost as rare in a ministry as is a fool
at the head of a republican government. So,
when by some happy accident, one of these
men,* born to govern, takes the helm of affairs
in a monarchy almost ruined by incapable
stewards, it is surprising what resources he will
find, it makes an epoch in the history of a
country.
In order that a monarchical state may be well
governed it would be necessary that its size or
extent be in proportion to the capabilities of its
ruler. It is easier to conquer than to reign.
With a sufficient lever, the earth might be
shaken with a finger ; but the shoulders of
Hercules would be needed to sustain it. What
ever the size of the state, the prince is almost
always too small. When, on the contrary, it
happens that a state is too small for its chief,

* It is supposed that Rousseau here refers to the Due de

Choiseul, born 1719, died 1785, the ablest minister that
Louis XV. had during his long reign. —Ed.
8
H4 Zbe Social Contract [bk. m.

which is very rare, it is still badly governed

because its chief, following out his own large
views, forgets the interests of the people, and
makes them no less unhappy by the abuse of
the talents which he has in excess, than would
another by the lack of those talents which he
has not. It would be necessary that a kingdom
extend or close up its borders at each new reign
according to the capacity of the prince ; whereas
the talents of a senate being of a more definite
proportion, the state may have permanent limits,
and the administration go on no less well.
The greatest inconvenience in the govern
ment of one person is the lack of that continu
ous succession which in the other two forms an
uninterrupted connection. One king being
dead, there must be another ; elections leave
dangerous intervals ; they are stormy ; and
unless the citizens are of a disinterestedness
and integrity which accords ill with this form of
government, intrigue and corruption will arise.
It is unusual if he to whom the state has sold
itself, does not sell it in his turn, and indemnify
himself upon the weak for the money extorted
from him by the strong. Sooner or later every
thing becomes venal under such an administra
ch. vi.] rtlionarcbB 115

tion, and peace thus enjoyed under the kings is

worse than the disorders of an interregnum.
What has been done to prevent such evils ?
Crowns have been made hereditary in certain
families ; and an order of succession has been
established which prevents all dispute at the
death of a king—that is to say, by substituting
the inconvenience of a regency for that of an
election, an apparent tranquillity is preferred
to a wise administration, and the risk of having
a child, a monster, or an imbecile for chief has
been preferred to a contest over the choice of a
good king.
The fact that, in exposing the nation to the
risks of the alternative, nearly all the chances
are against it, is not taken into consideration.
The reply of the younger Dionysius to his
father * when reproached by him for some shame
ful action was very sensible : " Have I given
you such an example ?" said the father. "Ah ! "
replied the son, " your father was not a king." f
Everything combines to deprive a man who
* The two Dionysiuses, father and son, tyrants of Syracuse
from about the end of the fifth century B.C. to the middle
of the fourth.—Ed.
f Plutarque, Diets Notables des Roys et des Grands Capi-
taines. —Ed.
n6 ttbe Social Contract [bk. in.

is raised to command others, of justice and

reason. It is said that much trouble is taken to
teach young princes the art of reigning ; it does
not appear that this education is profitable to
them. It would be better to begin by teaching
them the art of obedience. The greatest kings
celebrated in history were not brought up to
reign ; it is a science which is never possessed
to a less degree than after it has been learned,
and it is learned better in obeying than in com
manding. " Nam utilissimus idem ac brevissi-
mus bonarum malarumque rerum delectus, cogi-
tare quid aut nolueris sub alio principe, aut
volueris." (Tacitus.)*
A result of this lack of cohesion is the incon
stancy of the royal government, which, regu
lating itself, now upon one plan and now upon
another, according to the prince who reigns, or
those who reign for him, cannot have for any
length of time a fixed purpose, or a logical course
of conduct ; a variation which keeps the state
wavering from principle to principle and from
project to project. This does not take place in
* " For the safest and at the same time the easiest way
of choosing between good and bad is to think what you
would like, or what you would not like, if some one else
were emperor."
ch. vi.] flionatcbB 117

other governments where the prince is always

the same. So we see that, in general, if there is
more stratagem in a court there is more wisdom
in a senate, and that republics gain their ends
by methods which are more constant and better
carried out. But each revolution in the ministry
causes one in the state, the maxim common to
all ministers and to nearly all kings being to
take a contrary position upon all questions from
that occupied by their predecessors.
From this incoherence may be drawn the
solution of a sophism very familiar to political
writers who defend royalty. This is not only a
comparison between civil government and do
mestic government, and the prince and the
father of a family, an error already refuted, but
to give liberally to this magistrate all the virtues
which he will need, and to suppose always that
the prince is what he ought to be. By the help
of this supposition the royal government is evi
dently preferable to any other because it is in-
contestably the strongest, and because, to be
also the best, it requires only that the will of the
body of the government be more conformed to
the general will. But if, according to Plato,* a
* See Bk. II., Chapter VII., note.—Ed.
n8 ttbe Social Contract [bk. m.

king by nature is so rare a personage, how often

will nature and fortune concur in crowning
him ? And if a royal education necessarily cor
rupts those who receive it, what can be expected
of a succession of men educated to reign. It is
wilful self-deception to confound royal govern
ment with that of a good king. To see what
this government really is in itself it must be
considered under incapable or wicked princes ;
for such reach the throne, or the throne makes
them such.
These difficulties have not escaped our
authors, but they have not embarrassed them
selves with them. The remedy is, they say, to
obey without murmuring. God gives bad kings
in anger, and they must be endured as punish
ments from heaven.
This talk is doubtless edifying, but I do not
know whether it would not be better in the pul
pit than in a book of politics. What can be
said of a physician who promises miracles, and
whose whole art lies in exhorting sufferers to be
patient. We know that we must endure a bad
government if we have it ; the question is to
find a good one.
ch. vti.] diMjefc ©overnments ng

CHAPTER VII.
MIXED GOVERNMENTS.

PROPERLY speaking, there is no simple

government. A single chief must have
subordinate magistrates ; a popular government
must have a chief. So in the division of execu
tive power there is always a gradation from the
greater number to the lesser, with this differ
ence, that now the large number depends upon
the small, and now the small upon the large.
Sometimes there is an equal division, either
when the constituent parts are in a mutual de
pendence, as in the government of England, or
when the authority of each part is independent
but imperfect, as in Poland. This last form is
bad because there is no unity in the govern
ment, and the state lacks cohesion.
Which is better—a simple government or a
mixed government ? This question is much
agitated among politicians, and to it the same
response should be made as I have given before
as to any form of government.*
The simple government is best in itself for
* That each is the best in certain cases and the worst in
others. —Tr.
120 ttbe Social Contract [bk. m.

the very reason that it is simple. But when the

executive power does not depend enough upon
the legislative—that is to say, when there is a
closer relation between the prince and the sov
ereign than between the people and the prince,
this fault of proportion should be remedied in
dividing the government, for then all its parts
have no less authority over the subjects, and
their division renders them when united less
strong against the sovereign.
The same inconvenience is provided against
in establishing intermediate magistrates, which,
leaving the government in its entirety, serves
only to balance the two powers and to maintain
their respective rights. Then the government
is not mixed, it is moderated.
By similar means the opposite trouble might
be remedied, and when the government is too
lax, tribunals should be instituted for its con
centration ; this is practised in all democracies.
In the first case, the government is divided in
order to weaken it ; and in the second, to re
inforce it ; for the maximum of force and of
weakness is found in simple governments,
whereas the mixed forms give a medium of
force.
ch. viii.] an jforms mot proper 121

CHAPTER VIII.
THAT ALL FORMS OF GOVERNMENT ARE NOT
PROPER IN EVERY COUNTRY.

LIBERTY is not a fruit of all climates, and

is therefore not within the reach of all
peoples. The more we meditate upon this
principle established by Montesquieu, the more
we feel its truth ; the more it is contested, the
more occasion there is to establish it by new
proofs.
In all the governments of the world the pub
lic personality consumes,—but produces noth
ing. Whence comes to it the substance which
it consumes ? From the labor of its members.
The superfluity of the individual produces
necessaries for the sovereign. From which it
follows that the civil state can exist only as
long as the labor of man returns more than
enough for his needs.
Now, this surplus is not the same in all coun
tries of the world. In several it is considerable,
in others little, in still others nothing, in others
less than nothing. This relation depends upon
the salubrity of the climate, upon the sort of
labor required by the soil, upon the nature of
 Gbe Social Contract [bk. m.

its productions, upon the strength of its inhabi

tants, upon the greater or less amount necessary
for their subsistence, and upon several other
similar relations of which it is composed.
On the other hand, all governments are not
of the same nature ; they are more or less
grasping, and the differences are founded upon
that other principle, that the farther public
contributions are removed from their source,
the more onerous they become. This burden
cannot be measured by the amount of the im
posts, but by the road which they have to travel
to return into the hands from which they came.
When this circulation is prompt and well estab
lished, it makes no difference whether the in
dividual pays much or little, the people is always
rich, and the finances are always in good con
dition. On the contrary, however little the
people gives, when this little does not come back
again, in giving always it soon becomes, ex
hausted : the state is never rich and the people
is always poor.
It follows from this that the more the distance
between government and people increases, the
more onerous become the tributes ; in a democ
racy, the people is lightly taxed ; in an aristoc
ch. viii.] ail jforms "Wot proper 123

racy the tax is heavier ; in a monarchy it is the

heaviest of all. A monarchy is suited, then,
only to opulent nations ; an aristocracy to the
medium in wealth as in magnificence ; a democ
racy to small, poor states.
In fact, the more we reflect upon it the greater
seems the difference in this regard between free
states and monarchies. In the first, everything
is used for the common good ; in the other, the
public and individual forces are reciprocal ; and
one increases by the weakening of the other.
Finally, instead of governing the subjects to
make them happy, despotism makes the people
miserable in order to govern it.
In each climate, then, there are natural causes
from which may be designated the form of gov
ernment towards which the force of the climate
inclines it, and from which we can tell even
what kind of inhabitants it ought to have.
Ungrateful, sterile soils, where the product is
not worth the labor, should remain uncultivated
and desert, or be peopled only by savages ;
places where the labor of man returns only the
necessities of life should be inhabited by bar
barians—polity would be impossible there ; the
places where the excess of production over labor
i24 Gbe Social Contract [bk. hi.

is mediocre should belong to free peoples ; those

where the soil, fertile and abundant, gives a
large production for little labor should be gov
erned by a monarchy, to consume by the luxury
of the prince the superfluity of the subjects ; for
it is better that this excess should be absorbed
by the government than dissipated by indi
viduals. There are exceptions I know : but
these exceptions themselves confirm the rule, in
that they produce sooner or later revolutions
which bring things back to the order of nature.
Let us distinguish always general laws from
individual causes which may modify the effect
of them. Though the whole south were covered
with republics, and the north with despotic
states, it would be no less true that by the effects
of climate the despotism belongs to the warm
countries, and barbarism to the cold, and good
polity to the intermediate regions.
I see too that while acknowledging the prin
ciple, its application might be disputed ; it
might be said that there are very fertile cold
countries and sterile southern ones. But this
difficulty is such only for those who do not ex
amine the matter in all its relations. We must,
as I have already said, consider the relations of
labor, strength, and consuming capacity.
ch. vm.] ail jforms mot proper 125

Let us suppose that of two equal territories

one yields five and the other ten. If the inhabi
tants of the first consume four and those of the
latter nine, the excess of production in the first
would be one fifth and in the second one tenth.
The relation of these two surpluses, then, is
inverse to that of the production, the territory
which yields only five gives a surplus double
that of the territory which produces ten.
But it is not a question of double production,
and I do not believe any one would dare in gen
eral to place the fertility of cold countries in
equality with that of warm countries. However,
let us suppose this equality ; let us, if you please,
put England and Sicily in the balance, or Poland
and Egypt ; then in the south we have Africa
and India ; then in the north we have nothing
more. For this equality of production, what a
difference in the cultivation ? In Sicily, the
earth needs only to be scratched ; in England,
what toil for the laborer ! Now, where more
strength is needed to give the same yield, the
surplus must necessarily be less.
Consider, aside from that, that the same
number of men consume much less in a warm
country. The climate demands sobriety for the
sake of health. Europeans who wish to live
 i26 Zbe Social Contract fBK- '».

there as at home perish of dysentery and indi

gestion. " We are," said Chardin,* " carnivorous
beasts compared to the Asiatics. Some attribute
the temperance of the Persians to the fact that
their country is little cultivated. I, on the con
trary, believe that their country produces little
because the inhabitants require little. If their
frugality," continues he, " was an effect of the
poverty of the country, the poor alone would
eat little, whereas generally it is everybody ; and
there would be more or less eaten in each prov
ince, according to the fertility of the country,
whereas the same sobriety is found throughout
the kingdom. They pride themselves upon their
manner of life, saying that it is necessary only
to look at their complexions to recognize how
much better it is than that of Christians. In
fact, the complexion of the Persian is smooth ;
their skin is beautiful, fine, and polished, whereas
the complexion of the Armenians, their subjects,
who live like Europeans, is rough and red and
their bodies are coarse and heavy."
The nearer we approach the equator the more

* Chardin, French traveller, born 1643, died 1713. His

travels in Persia were the great authority on that country
during the last century, and are still highly esteemed. —Ed.
ch. vm.] SU jforms "Mot proper 127

abstemious are the people. They eat almost

no meat ; rice, maize, cuz-cuz, millet, and cassava
are their ordinary foods. In India there are
millions of men whose nourishment does not
cost a sou per day. Even in Europe we see
sensible differences in appetite between the
people of the north and those of the south. A
Spaniard could live eight days on a German's
dinner. In the countries where men are more
voracious luxury takes the direction of high
living ; in England it shows itself upon a table
loaded with viands ; in Italy you are regaled
with sugar and flowers.
There are similar differences in luxury of
dress. In climates where the changes of seasons
are prompt and violent, clothing is more sub
stantial and simple ; in those countries where
dress is simply an ornament, effect is considered
more than utility ; dress itself is there a luxury.
In Naples may be seen any day men promenad
ing on the Posilippo with embroidered vests, and
no hose. It is the same with buildings, everything
goes to magnificence when there is nothing to
fear from atmospheric injuries. In Paris and
London one wishes to be warmly and conven
iently lodged : in Madrid there are superb draw
i28 Ube Social Contract [bk. m-

ing-rooms, but no windows which can be closed,

and one sleeps there in rats' nests.
Food is much more substantial and succulent
in warm countries ; this is a third difference
which cannot but influence the second. Why
are so many vegetables eaten in Italy ? Because
they are good, nourishing, and of excellent
flavor.
In France, where vegetables are nourished
only with water, they are not nourishing, and
count for little as an article of diet ; they occupy
as much land, and require at least as much
labor in their cultivation. Experiment has
proven that the grains of Barbary, otherwise in
ferior to those of France, yield much more
flour, those of France, in turn, yield more than
the grains of the north. From which it may be in
ferred that a similar gradation may be generally
observed in the same direction, from the equator
to the pole. Now is it not a visible disadvantage
to have, in like products, a less quantity of
food ?
To these different considerations I can add
one which is derived from them and strengthens
them : it is that warm countries have less need
of inhabitants than cold ones, and could sustain
ch.viii.] an fforms Hot proper 129

a greater number ; which produces a double

surplus always to the advantage of despotism.
The greater the territory occupied by the same
number of inhabitants, the more difficult revolts
become, for concerted action can be neither
prompt nor secret, and it is always easy for the
government to discover signs of these projects
and to cut off all communication. But the
nearer a numerous people live to each other the
less can a government usurp the power of the
sovereign : chiefs deliberate as safely in their
chambers as the prince in his council, and crowds
assemble as quickly in the public square as
troops in their quarters. The advantage of a
tyrannical government is in its ability to act at
long distances.
By the aid of the points of support which it
has, its force increases with distance, like that
of a lever.
The force of the people, on the contrary, is
greatest when concentrated : it evaporates and
is lost in spreading over any great territory, as
powder when scattered upon the ground takes
fire grain by grain. Countries which are sparsely
populated are therefore best adapted to tyranny;
ferocious beasts reign only in the desert.
9
130 ttbe Social Contract [bk. m.

CHAPTER IX.
SIGNS OF A GOOD GOVERNMENT.

w HEN it is asked positively which is the

best government, a question is asked
which is as unanswerable as it is indeterminate ;
or, if you will, it has as many good answers as
there are combinations possible in the absolute
and relative positions of peoples.
But if it be asked by what sign it may be
known whether a given people is well or ill
governed, it would be another thing, and the
question of fact could be answered.
However, it is not answered because each
wishes to answer it in his own way. Subjects
vaunt public tranquillity ; citizens, individual
liberty ; one prefers the safety of property, and
the other that of the person ; one thinks that
the best government is the most severe, the
other maintains that it is the most gentle ; this
one wishes that crimes be punished, and that
one that they be prevented; one finds it delight
ful to be feared by his neighbors, another pre
fers to be unknown to them ; one is content
when money circulates, another requires that
the people have bread. Even were an agree
ment reached upon these and similar points,
ch. ix.] Signs of a (Booo Government 131

would an advance be made ? Moral qualities

lacking exact measurements,—if an agreement
were reached as to the sign, how could it be
reached as to the estimate to be put upon them ?
As for me, I am always astonished that so
simple a sign fails to be recognized, or that such
bad faith prevails that it is not acknowledged.
What is the object of political association ? The
preservation and prosperity of its members.
And what is the surest sign that they are pre
served and prospered ? It is their number and
population. Do not look elsewhere for this
much disputed sign. Other things being equal,
the government under which—without outside
means, without naturalization, without colonies
—the citizens increase and multiply most, is in
variably the best. That under which a people
diminishes and perishes is the worst. Statisti
cians, it is now your affair ; count, measure,
compare.*
* The centuries which merit preference for the prosperity
of the human race should be judged upon the same princi
ple. Those in which letters and the arts have flourished
have been too much admired, without penetrating the
secret object of their culture ; without considering their
evil effects : ' ' and that among the superficial was called
civilization, when in reality it was a form of slavery."
(Tacitus, Agric, xxi.)
133 Cbe Social Contract [bk. m.

CHAPTER X.
THE ABUSE OF GOVERNMENT AND ITS TEND
ENCY TO DEGENERATE.
AS the individual will acts constantly against
the general will, so the government makes
a continual effort against sovereignty. The
more this effort increases, the more the constitu
tion is changed ; and as there is here no other
will of the body politic which, resisting that of
the prince, produces an equilibrium with it, it
must happen sooner or later that the prince
oppresses the sovereign and breaks the social
contract. This is the inherent and inevitable
vice, which, from the birth of the political body,
tends without ceasing to destroy it ; as age and
death finally destroy the body of man.
There are two general ways by which a
government degenerates : to wit, when it con
tracts itself or when the state dissolves.
The government contracts when it passes
from a great to a small number, that is to say,
from a democracy to an aristocracy, and from
an aristocracy to a royalty. That is its natural
inclination. If it retrograded from the small
number to the great, it might be said that it
relaxes, but this inverse progress is impossible.
ch. x.] Gbe Sbuse of (Bovernment 133

In fact a government never changes its form

except when its worn-out spring leaves it too
weak to hold its own. Now, if it slackens again
in stretching its force will become null, and its
existence will be still shorter. The spring re
quires winding up, and should be contracted as
it yields : otherwise the state sustained by it
will fall to ruin.
The dissolution of the state may occur in two
ways.
First : When the prince no longer administers
the state in accordance with the law, and when
he usurps the sovereign power. Then a remark
able change takes place ; the state—not the
government—contracts : I mean that the great
state dies, and within it is formed another, com
posed only of the members of the government,
which is nothing to the rest of the people but
its master and tyrant. So that, the instant the
government usurps sovereignty, the social com
pact is broken ; and all the simple citizens re
gaining by right their natural liberty, are forced
to obey, but are under no obligations to do so.
The same thing occurs also when the mem
bers of the government usurp separately the
power which they should exercise only as a
i34 Gbe Social Contract [bk. tu.

body ; which is no less an infraction of the laws,

and produces a still greater disorder. Then
there are, so to speak, as many princes as magis
trates ; and the state, no less divided than the
government, perishes or changes its form.
When the state dissolves, the abuse of the
government, whatever it is, takes the common
name of anarchy. The democracy degenerates
into an ochlocracy, and the aristocracy into an
oligarchy ; I would add that royalty degen
erates into tyranny ; but the last word is equivo
cal and requires an explanation.
In the vulgar sense, a tyrant is a king who
governs with violence and without regard to
justice and the law. In the precise sense a
tyrant is an individual who arrogates royal
authority without having a right to it. It is in
this sense that the Greeks used the word tyrant ;
they gave it indifferently to good or bad princes
whose authority was not legitimate. So tyrant
and usurper are perfectly synonymous words.
To give different names to different things, I
call tyrant the usurper of royal authority, and
despot the usurper of sovereign power. The
tyrant is he who creeps in against the law to
govern according to it ; the despot is he who
ch. xi.] Zbe ©eatb of tbe ftoUticat JSSoog t35

places himself above the law even. The tyrant

may not be a despot, but the despot is always a
tyrant.

CHAPTER XI.

THE DEATH OF THE POLITICAL BODY.

SUCH is the natural and inevitable decline

of the best constituted governments. If
Sparta and Rome have perished, what state can
hope to endure forever ? If we would form a
durable establishment, let us not think of
making it eternal. To succeed we must not
attempt the impossible, nor flatter ourselves that
we can give to the work of man a solidity which
does not belong to human things.
The body politic like the body of man begins
to die from its birth, and carries within itself
the causes of its destruction. Both may have
more or less robust constitutions which may
preserve them for a longer or shorter period.
The constitution of man is the work of nature ;
that of the state is the work of art. It does not
depend upon man to prolong his life, but it de
pends upon him to prolong the life of the state
136 Ebe Social Contract [bk. iii.

as long as possible, in giving it the best constitu

tion. The best constituted state will come to
an end, but later than another, unless some un
foreseen accident causes its loss before its time.
The principle of political life is in sovereign
authority. Legislative power is the heart of the
state ; the executive power is its brain, which
gives motion to all parts. The brain may be
paralyzed and the individual still live. A man
may be imbecile and live ; but as soon as the
heart ceases its functions, the animal is dead.
The state does not exist by its laws, but by
legislative power. The law of yesterday does
not oblige to-day ; but tacit consent is presumed
from silence, and the sovereign virtually con
firms laws which he, having the power, does not
abrogate. Anything that he wills once he wills
always unless he revokes it.
Why, then, are old laws so much respected ?
For this very reason. We must believe that it
is only their excellence which has preserved
them so long ; if the sovereign had not recog
nized them as salutary, they would have been
revoked. This is why, far from weakening,
laws acquire new force continually in a well
constituted state : the prejudice in favor of
ch. xii.] 1bow autboritg Is rtfcaintalned 137

antiquity makes them more venerable every

day ; whereas wherever laws weaken as they
grow old, it proves that there is no longer a
legislative power, and that the state is dead.

CHAPTER XII.

HOW SOVEREIGN AUTHORITY IS MAINTAINED.

THE sovereign, having no other force than

legislative power, acts only through the
laws ; and laws being but authentic acts of the
general will, the sovereign cannot act except
when the people is assembled.
The people assembled,—what a chimera ! It
is a chimera to-day ; but it was not so two
thousand years ago. Has mankind changed its
nature ?
The bounds of the possible in moral things
are less narrow than we think ; it is our weak
nesses, our vices, our prejudices, which contract
them. Base minds do not believe in great men ;
vile slaves smile with a mocking air at the word
liberty.
From what has been done let us consider
what can be done. I will not speak of the
ancient republics of Greece ; but the Roman
138 Zbe Social Contract [bk. ni.

republic was, it seems to me, a great state, and

the city of Rome a great city. The last census
gave in Rome four hundred thousand citizens
bearing arms, and the last enumeration of the
empire more than four million citizens, without
counting the subjects, foreigners, women, chil
dren, and slaves.*
What difficulties might not be imagined in
assembling frequently the immense populace of
this capital and its environs ! However, few
weeks passed that the Roman people was not
assembled,—several times even. Not only did
it exercise the rights of sovereignty, but a part
of those of the government. It treated certain
affairs, judged others, and the whole people was,
upon the public square, almost as frequently
magistrate as citizen.
In going back to the time of the first nations,
it will be found that most ancient governments
* An instance of Rousseau's method in dealing with
history. The difficulties in determining the population of
Rome were as well understood in his day as now, but he
took some figures found in the first convenient place and
used them. It is rather as an instance of his general
method than as impairing the force of his argument here
that attention is called to it ; in any case, the population
was large enough to serve him, assuming, as he seems to
have done as a matter of course, that they all assembled in
the Forum or Campus Martius.—Ed.
ch. xm.] Continuatfon 139

even monarchical ones, such as those of the

Macedonians and the Franks, had similar
councils. However that may be, this one in
contestable fact answers all difficulties. From
the existing to the possible the sequence seems
to me good.

CHAPTER XIII.
CONTINUATION.

T is not enough that the assembled people

I should have once established the constitu
tion of the state in giving sanction to a body of
laws ; it is not enough that it should have estab
lished a perpetual government, or that it should
have once for all elected magistrates : aside from
the extraordinary assemblages which unex
pected cases might require, there must be fixed
periodical ones which nothing can abolish or
prorogue, so that upon the appointed day the
people be legitimately convoked by the law,
without need of other formal convocation.
But, aside from these legal assemblies by date
alone, all assemblies of the people which were
not convoked by the magistrates appointed for
that purpose, should be held as illegitimate, and
everything done by them as null, because even
i4o Gbe Social Contract [bk. ra

the order to assemble should emanate from the

law.
As to the more or less frequent occurrence of
legitimate assemblies, they depend upon so
many considerations that no one can give pre
cise rules concerning them. Only it may be
said in general that the more force the govern
ment has the more frequently should the sov
ereign be visible.
This, it may be said, might be good for a sin
gle city ; but what can be done if the state
comprises several ? Shall the sovereign author
ity be divided ? or shall it be concentrated in a
single city and make all the rest subject to it ?
I answer that neither should be done. First,
the sovereign authority is simple and one, and
it cannot be divided without destroying it. ■ In
the second place, no city, more than a nation,
can be legitimately subject to another, because
the essence of the body politic is in the accord
of obedience and liberty, and the words subject
and sovereign are identical correlations of which
the idea is expressed in the one word citizen.
It is always a misfortune to unite several cities
into a single cite', and if this union be brought
about it need not be supposed that the natural
inconvenience can be avoided. Jt is useless to
cm. xiv.] Continuatfon 141

raise objections to the abuses of great states to

him who desires only small ones. But how can
small states be given enough force to resist great
ones ? as in other days Greek cities resisted
the great king, and as more recently Holland
and Switzerland resisted the House of Austria.
If the state cannot be reduced to proper
limits, there remains always one resource ; it is
to have no capital city, but to change the seat of
government alternately to each city, and to as
semble there in turn the states of the country.
People the territory equally, extend every
where the same rights, carry everywhere abun
dance and life ; it is thus that a state will become
at the same time the strongest and the best
governed possible. Remember that the walls of
cities are formed from the ruins of country
dwellings. For each palace that I see erected
in the capital, I seem to see a whole country in
ruins.

CHAPTER XIV.
CONTINUATION.

THE instant that the people is legitimately

assembled in a sovereign body, all juris
diction of government ceases, executive power
is suspended, and the person of the last citizen
i42 ttbe Social Contract [bk. m.

is as sacred and inviolable as that of the first

magistrate, for when the represented appears,
there is no further need of a representative.
Most of the tumult which arose in Rome during
the assemblies came from not having known or
from having neglected this rule. Consuls were
then but presidents of the people ; tribunes
were simple orators ; the senate was nothing.
These intervals of suspension during which
the prince recognized or should recognize an
actual superior, have always been dreaded by
him ; and these assemblies of the people, which
are the shield of the political body and the curb
of the government, have always been the horror
of chiefs ; they spare neither care nor objec
tions, nor difficulties, nor promises to deprive the
citizens of them. When citizens are avaricious,
cowardly, pusillanimous, loving repose rather
than liberty, they do not hold out long against
the redoubled efforts of the government ; thus
the resisting force increasing incessantly, the
sovereign authority finally vanishes, and most
cities fall and perish before their time.
But between the sovereign authority and the
arbitrary government a mean power is sometimes
introduced which must be mentioned.
ch. xv.] deputies or Hepteeentativea Hi

CHAPTER XV.
DEPUTIES OR REPRESENTATIVES.

AS soon as the public service ceases to be

the principal business of citizens, and they
prefer to serve with their purses rather than their
persons, the state is already near its ruin. Must
they march to combat,—they pay the troops
and remain at home ; must they go to the
council,—they appoint deputies and stay at
home. By force of indolence and money they
have at last soldiers to serve the country and
representatives to sell it.
It is commerce and the arts, it is the eager
pursuit of gain, it is luxury and the love of ease,
which exchanges personal service for money ;
men yield a part of their profits to increase their
comfort. Give money and you will soon have
chains. This word Jinance is a slave's word, it
is unknown among citizens. In a truly free
country, citizens do everything with their hands
and nothing with money ; far from paying to be
exempt from their duties they would pay to be
allowed to fulfil them. I am far from agreeing
with the prevailing ideas. I believe compulsory
labor to be less contrary to liberty than taxes.
144 tlbe Social Contract [bk. hi.

The better a state is constituted, the more

public affairs outweigh private affairs in the
minds of the citizens. There are even fewer
private affairs because the sum of common
happiness furnishing a larger portion to each
individual, there remains less for him to seek by
individual effort. In a well conducted state
each citizen flies to the assemblies ; under a
bad government no one desires to take a step
towards going, because no one is interested in
what is done there, they foresee that the general
will will not prevail, and finally domestic cares
absorb their attention. Good laws make better
ones, bad laws those that are still worse. As
soon as any one says of the affairs of state :
What is that to me ? the state may be counted
as lost.
The decline of the love of country, the activity
of private interests, the immensity of states, con
quests, abuses of government, have created the
system of deputies or representatives of the
people in the assemblies of the nation. It is
this that in certain countries has been called
the third estate. Thus the individual interests
of two orders are placed in the first and second
rank ; the public interest is only the third.
ch. xv.] Deputies or "Representatives 145

Sovereignty cannot be represented, for the

same reason that it cannot be alienated ; it con
sists essentially of the general will, and the will
cannot be represented ; it is the same or it is
different ; there is no mean. The deputies of
the people then are not, and cannot be its repre
sentatives, they are only its commissioners ; they
can conclude nothing definitely. Any law
which the people in person has not ratified is
null ; it is not a law. The English people
think they are free, they deceive themselves ;
they are free only during the election of the
members of Parliament ; as soon as they are
elected, the people is enslaved and has no
power. The use made of these short moments
of freedom, proves that the people deserves to
lose its liberty.
The idea of representatives is modern ; it
comes to us from the feudal governments, from
that iniquitous and absurd government under
which the human race was degraded, and where
the name of man was a dishonor. In the
ancient republics, and even in monarchies the
people never had representatives, the very word
was unknown. It is singular that at Rome,
where the tribunes were so sacred, it was never
19
146 Gbe Social Contract [bk. m.

imagined even that they could usurp the func

tions of the people, and that in the midst of so
great a multitude they never tried to pass of
themselves a single plebiscite. Judge of the
embarrassment which was sometimes occasioned
by the crowd from what happened in the time
of the Gracchi, when a part of the citizens gave
their suffrages from the roofs.
Where right and liberty are everything, incon
veniences are nothing. Among this wise people
everything was estimated at its true measure :
it allowed its lictors to do what the tribunes
would not have dared to do ; it did not fear
that they wished to represent it.
To explain, however, how the tribunes repre
sented it at times, it suffices to conceive how
the government represents the sovereign. The
law being only a declaration of the general will ;
it is clear that in legislative power the people
cannot be represented ; but it can and should
be represented in the executive power, which is
only force applied to law. This shows that
upon careful examination few nations can be
said to have laws. However this may be, it is
certain that the tribunes, having no part in the
executive power, could never represent the
ch. xv.] Deputies or "Representatives 147

Roman people by right of their office, but only

by usurping that of the senate.
Among the Greeks, all that the people had to
do, it did it of its own accord : it was constantly
assembled in the public square's. It lived in a
mild climate ; it was not avaricious ; slaves per
formed its manual labor ; its principal business
was its liberty. Not having these advantages,
how can the same rights be preserved ? Your
more rigorous climates give you more needs ;
six months of the year the public square is
not habitable ; your indistinct voices cannot
be heard in the open air ; you care more for
gain than for liberty, and you fear slavery less
than misery.
What ! liberty can be maintained only by the
support of slavery ? Perhaps the two extremes
touch. All that is not of nature has its incon
veniences, and civil society more than all the
rest. There are certain unhappy positions
where liberty cannot be preserved save at the
expense of that of others, and where the citizen
cannot be perfectly free unless the slave is very
much a slave. Such was the position of Spar
ta. As for you modern peoples, you have no
slaves, but you are slaves yourselves ; you pay
148 Zbe Social Contract [bk. in.

for their liberty with your own. You may

vaunt this preference ; but I find in it more
cowardice than humanity.
I do not mean by that that it is necessary to
hav; slaves, nor that the right of slavery is
legitimate, for I have proven the contrary. I am
only telling the reasons why modern peoples,
who believe themselves free, have represen
tatives, and why ancient peoples had none.
However that may be, the moment that a people
gives itself representatives, it is no longer free ;
it is no more.
Everything being carefully examined, I do
not see how it will hereafter be possible for the
sovereign to preserve among us the exercise of
his rights, unless the state is very small. But
if it is very small, it will be subjugated? No.
Later I shall show * how the external power of
a great people may be united with the easy
government and good order of a small state.

* According to a note at the end of a pamphlet of the

Comte d'Antraigues, member of the Constituent Assembly,
published in 1790, Rousseau had sketched the plan of the
work here alluded to, and the Count asserts that he had
had it in his possession, given to him by Rousseau himself.
It was a manuscript of thirty-two pages, and the Count was
authorized to make such use of it as he thought wise. The
ch. xvi.] (government Hot a Contract 149

CHAPTER XVI.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT IS
NOT A CONTRACT.

THE legislative power once established, it

becomes a question of establishing also the
executive power ; for this last, which operates
only by particular acts, and is not of the essence
of legislative power, is naturally separated from
it. If it were possible for the sovereign as such
to have the executive power, the right and the
fact would be so confused, that it would be im
possible to tell what is law and what is not law ;
and the body politic, thus distorted, would soon
be a prey to the violence against which it was
established.
The citizens being equal by the social con
tract, what all should do, all may prescribe, but
nobody has a right to require of another what
he does not do himself. Now it is properly this

troubles of the Revolution, and particularly the use made

of Rousseau's principles by the Terrorists, convinced him
that he ought not to publish it, and he hints that he had
destroyed it. It is certainly a misfortune, if the story is
true, that the manuscript had fallen into the hands of so
timid an adorer. Such a scheme, from the author of the
Considerations on the Government of Poland, could hardly
have failed to be valuable, as well as curious. —Ed,
150 ttbe Social Contract rBK- in-

right, indispensable in making the political body

live and move, that the sovereign gives to the
prince in establishing the government.
Many have claimed that the act of this estab
lishment was a contract between the people and
the chiefs, which it gives itself,—a contract by
which it stipulated between the two parties the
conditions under which one obliges himself to
command and the other to obey. It will be
agreed, I am sure, that this is a strange way of
making a contract. But let us see if this opin
ion can be maintained.
Firstly, the supreme authority can no more
modify itself than it can alienate itself ; to limit
it is to destroy it. It is absurd and contradic
tory that the sovereign should give himself a
superior ; to oblige himself to obey a master is
to put himself in full liberty again.
Further it is evident that this contract of the
people with such or such persons would be an
individual act ; from which it follows that this
contract could not be a law nor an act of sov
ereignty, and that consequently it would be
illegitimate.
We see again that the contracting parties
would be among themselves under the sole law
ch. xvii.] Establishment of Government 151

of nature and without any guaranty of their

reciprocal engagements, which is contrary in
every way to the civil state ; he who has the
force in hand being always master of the execu
tion, as well might the name contract be given
to the act of a man who says to another : " I
give you all my possessions on condition that
you give back to me what you please."
There is but one contract in the state, it is
that of association ; that alone excludes all
others. No public contract could be imagined
which would not be a violation of the first.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE GOVERNMENT.

UNDER what form, then, should the act by

which the government is organized be
conceived ? I will first remark that this act is
complex, or composed of two others : the es
tablishment of the law and the execution of the
law.
By the first the sovereign enacts that there
shall be a government established under such or
such forms ; and it is plain that this act is a law.
152 ttbe Social Contract [bk. m.

By the second, the people names chiefs who

will be charged with the established government.
Now this nomination, being an individual act, is
not a second law, but only a result of the first
and a function of the government.
The difficulty is to understand how there can
be an act of government before the government
exists, and how the people, which is only sov
ereign or subject, can become prince or magis
trate under certain circumstances. There is
manifest here one of those astonishing attributes
of the body politic, by means of which opera
tions which are in appearance contradictory
are reconciled ; for this is done by a sudden
conversion of a sovereignty to a democracy, so
that, without any sensible change, and by only
a new relation of all to all, the citizens—become
magistrates—pass from general acts to particu
lar ones, and from the law to the execution of it.
This change of relation is not a subtlety of
speculation without example in practice : it
takes place every day in the English parliament,
where the lower house, on certain occasions,
resolves itself into a committee of the whole to
discuss affairs to better advantage, and thus be
comes a simple commission instead of the sove
ch. xvm.] fcteventing ^Usurpatfons 153

reign court, which it was the preceding moment ;

it then makes a report to itself as a House of
Commons of that which it had just done as a
committee of the whole, and deliberates anew
under one title what it had already decided
under another.
Such is the advantage peculiar to a demo
cratic government, to be able to be established
in fact by a simple act of the general will.
After which this provisional government remains
in possession, if this is the form adopted, or
establishes in the name of the sovereign the
government prescribed by law ; and everything
is thus in order. It is not possible to institute
a government in any other legitimate manner
without renouncing the principles before es
tablished.

CHAPTER XVIII.
MEANS OF PREVENTING USURPATIONS OF
GOVERNMENT.

FROM these explanations it follows, in con

firmation of Chapter XVI., that the act
which institutes the government is not a con
tract, but a law ; that the depositories of execu
i54 ttbe Social Contract Ok. iii.

tive power are not masters of the people, but

its officers ; that it may establish them and
dispense with them when it pleases ; that it is
not a question of contract for them, but of
obedience ; and that in assuming the func
tions imposed upon them by the state, they
perform only their duty as citizens without
having in any way the right to dispute the
conditions.
When it happens, then, that the people insti
tutes an hereditary government, whether it be
monarchical in a family, or aristocratic in an
order of citizens, it is not an engagement that
it makes ; it is a provisional form which it gives
to the administration, until it pleases to order
otherwise.
It is true that these changes are always
dangerous, and that the established govern
ment should never be touched except when it
becomes incompatible with the public ^ood ;
but this circumspection is a principle of poli
tics and not a rule of law ; and the state is
no more bound to leave the civil authority to
its chiefs, than the military authority to its
generals.
It is true also that in such a case one cannot
ch. xvni.] preventing Tflsurpatfons 155

observe with too much care all the formalities

required to distinguish a regular and legitimate
act from a seditious tumult, and the will of a
whole people from the clamors of a faction. It
is especially true of any case in point, that only
such privileges should be given as cannot be
refused under a rigorous interpretation of the
law ; from this obligation the prince derives a
great advantage in preserving his power in spite
of the people, without it being possible for them
to say that he had usurped it ; for, in seeming
to exercise only his rights, it is easy for him to
extend them, and prevent, under pretext of the
public peace, the assemblies destined to re
establish good order : he takes advantage of a
silence which he prevents being broken, and of
irregularities which he has had committed, to
assume that the wishes of those whom fear keeps
silent are in his favor, and to punish those who
dare to speak. The decemvirs, in like manner,
having been first elected for a year, tried to
retain their power in perpetuity, by not allowing
the meetings of the people, and by these easy
means any government of the world, being once
clothed with the public force, sooner or later
usurps the sovereign authority.
156 Cbe Social Contract [bk. in.

Periodical assemblies, of which I have spoken,

are useful in preventing or deferring this mis
fortune, especially when they have no need of
formal convocation ; for then the prince cannot
prevent them without declaring himself openly
a breaker of the law and an enemy of the
state.
These assemblies, which have for object only
the maintenance of the social treaty, should
always be opened with two propositions which
can never be suppressed, and which pass sepa
rately by suffrage.
First :—If it pleases the sovereign to preserve
the present form of government.
Second :— If it pleases the people to leave the
administration of it to those who have it actually
in charge.
I suppose here, what I think I have already
demonstrated, that there is no fundamental law
in the state which cannot be revoked, not even
the social compact ; for if all the citizens as
semble to break this compact with a common
accord, no one can doubt that it is legitimately
broken.
Grotius thinks even that each can renounce
the state of which he is a member, and take
ch. xviii.] preventing ^Usurpatfons 157

again his natural liberty and his possessions

upon leaving the country.* Now it would be
absurd, if all the citizens united could not do
what each could do separately.
* With the understanding, of course, that he does not
leave to evade his duty and to avoid serving his country at
the time of need. The flight would then be criminal and
punishable ; it would no longer be retreat, but desertion.
 BOOK IV.

CHAPTER I.

THE GENERAL WILL IS INDESTRUCTIBLE.

AS long as men united together look upon

themselves as a single body, they have but
one will relating to the common preservation
and general welfare. Then all the energies of
the state are vigorous and simple ; its maxims
are clear and luminous ; there are no mixed,
contradictory interests ; the common prosperity
shows itself everywhere, and requires only good
sense to be appreciated. Peace, union, and
equality are enemies of political subtleties. Up
right, honest men are difficult to deceive, be
cause of their simplicity ; decoys and pretexts
do not impose upon them, they are not cunning
enough to be dupes. When we see among the
happiest people in the world troops of peasants
158
ch. i.] Gbe ©eneral TOIl Is fndtetructible 159

regulating the affairs of state under an oak, and

conducting themselves wisely, can we help de
spising the refinements of other nations, who
make themselves illustrious and miserable with
so much art and mystery ?
A state thus governed has need of few laws ;
and, in proportion as it becomes necessary to
promulgate new ones this necessity will be uni
versally recognized. The first to propose them
will say only what all have already felt,—and it
requires neither intrigues nor eloquence to
cause to become laws what each has already
resolved upon, as soon as he can be sure that
others will do likewise.
What deceives reasoners is that, seeing only
those states which are badly constituted from
their origin, they are struck with the impossi
bility of maintaining such a policy : they smile
to think of the foolish things which the people
of London or Paris might be persuaded to do
by an adroit, insinuating rogue. They do not
know that Cromwell * would have been put in
irons by the people of Berne, and that the Duke

* Cromwell, Lord Protector of England from 1653 to

his death, born 1599, died 1658. , . ,, ..
160 XZbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

of Beaufort * would have been disciplined by the

Genevese.
But when the social knot begins to relax, and
the state to weaken, when individual interests
commence to be felt, and small societies to in
fluence the great, the common interest changes
and finds opponents : unanimity no longer rules
in the suffrages ; the general will is no longer
the will of all ; contradictions and debates arise,
and the best counsel does not prevail without
dispute.
Finally, when the state, near its fall, exists
only by a vain and illusory form ; when the so
cial tie is broken in all hearts ; when the vilest
interests flaunt boldly in the sacred name of the
public welfare, then the general will becomes
silent ; all being guided by secret motives think
no more like citizens than if the state had never
existed. Iniquitous decrees are passed falsely
under the name of law, which have for object
individual interests only.
Does it follow that the general will is annihi-

* Beaufort, grandson of Henry IV., born 1616, killed at

the defence of Candia in 1669. He received the name of
Roi der Halles during the Fronde, from his great popularity
with ihe matket women.
ch. i.] ttbe ©eneral TWUll 1Ts Unofstructible 161

lated or corrupted ? No ; it is always constant,

inalterable, and pure ; but it is subordinated to
others which overbalance it. Each in detach
ing his interest from the common interest, sees
that he cannot separate it entirely ; but his part
of the public misfortune seems nothing to him
compared to the exclusive good which he thinks
he has appropriated to himself. This particular
good excepted, he desires the general well-being
for his own interest as strongly as any other.
Even in selling his vote for money he has not
extinguished in himself the general will—he
eludes it. The fault which he commits is in
evading the question and answering something
which has not been asked him ; instead of say
ing by his vote, " It is advantageous to the
state," he says, " It is advantageous to such a
man or party that such or such counsel pre
vails." The law of public order in assemblies
is not so much to maintain the general will
there, as to see that it is always interrogated
and always answers.
I should have here many reflections to make
upon the simple right to vote upon each act of
sovereignty, a right which nothing can take
from citizens, and upon the right to think, to
162 ttbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

propose, to divide, to discuss, which the govern

ment has always taken great care to allow only
to its members ; but this important matter will
require a separate treatise, and I cannot con
sider it fully here.

CHAPTER II.

SUFFRAGE.

IT may be seen by the preceding chapter that

the manner in which general affairs are
treated may give a sufficiently sure indication
of the actual state of the morals and health of
the political body. The more unanimous the
opinion, the more dominant is the general will ;
but long debates, dissensions, and tumults an
nounce the ascendency of individual interests
and the decline of the state.
This appears less evident when two or several
orders enter into the constitution, as at Rome the
patricians and plebeians, whose quarrels often
troubled the assemblies, even in the best days
of the republic ; but this exception is more ap
parent than real, for then, by the inherent vice
of the body politic, there were, so to speak, two
ch. ii.] Suffrage 163

states in one ; what is not true of the two to

gether is true of each one separately. And, in
fact, in the most stormy times, the plebiscites of
the people, when the senate did not interfere,
always passed quietly and with a large plurality
of votes—the citizens having but one interest,
the people had but one will.
At the other extremity of the circle unanimity
returns ; it is when citizens, fallen into slavery,
have neither liberty nor will. Then fear and
flattery change votes into acclamations. Then
citizens do not deliberate ; they adore or curse.
Such was the vile method of the senate under
the emperors. Sometimes this was done with
ridiculous precautions. Tacitus* observes that
under Otho f the senators, overwhelming Vitel-
lius with execrations, affected to make a terrible
noise at the same time, so that, if by chance he
became master, he could not know what each of
them had said.
* Tacitus, celebrated Roman historian, born about the
middle of the first century a.D., died about 120. The pas
sage in the text is taken from the Histories, Book I.,
Chap. LV.—Ed.
f Otho und Vitellius, Roman emperors, both in the year
69 a.D., Otho about three months, Vitellius about eleven,
counting from his original proclamation, ten days before
Otho's.—Ed.
164 Gbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

From these different considerations originated

the maxims upon which should be regulated the
manner of counting the votes and of comparing
opinions, according as the general will is more
or less easy to recognize, and the state more or
less degenerate.
There is but one law which, from its nature,
requires unanimous consent ; it is the social
compact ; for civil association is the most vol
untary act in the world ; every man being born
free and master of himself, no one can, under
any pretext whatever, enslave him without his
consent. To decide that the son of a slave is
born a slave is to decide that he is not born a man.
If, then, at the time of the social compact,
there are opposers to it, their opposition does
not invalidate the contract ; it only prevents
them from being included in it ; they are for
eigners among the citizens. When the state is
established consent is in residence ; to dwell in
a territory is to submit to its government.*

* This should be understood as meaning a free state ;

for otherwise family ties, property, lack of refuge, neces
sity, or violence might keep a person in a country in spite
of himself ; and then his residence alone supposes no
longer his consent to the contract or to the violation of the
contract.
ch. ii.] Suffrage 165

Aside from the first contract, the voice of the

greatest number always obliges all the others ;
it is a consequence of the contract itself. But,
it is asked, how can a man be free and forced
to conform to wishes which are not his own ?
How are the opponents free, and subject to
laws to which they have not consented ?
I reply that the question is badly put. The
citizen consents to all the laws, even to those
which are passed in spite of him, and even to
those which punish him when he dares to vio
late one of them.
The constant will of all the members of the
state is the general will ; it is by it that they are
citizens and free. * When a law is proposed in
an assembly of the people, what is asked of
them is not exactly whether they approve of
the proposition or whether they reject it, but
whether or not it conforms to the general will,
which is theirs ; each one in giving his vote
gives his opinion upon it, and from the counting
* At Genoa, may be seen in front of the prisons and
upon the irons of the galley slaves the word Libertas.
This application of the device is just. In fact it is only
the malefactors of all states who prevent the citizens from
being free. In a country where all such people are in the
galleys, one might enjoy the most perfect liberty.
 166 Ttbc Social Contract [bk. iv.

of the votes is deduced the declaration of the

general will. When, however, the opinion con
trary to mine prevails, it shows only that I was
mistaken, and that what I had supposed to be
the general will was not general. If my indi
vidual opinion had prevailed, I should have
done something other than I had intended, and
then I should not have been free.
This supposes, it is true, that all the character
istics of the general will are still in the plurality ;
when they cease to be so, whatever side one
takes, is not that of liberty.
In showing how individual wills may be sub
stituted for the general will in public delibera
tions, I have sufficiently indicated the means
practicable for preventing this abuse ; I shall
speak of it farther hereafter. In regard to the
proportional number of votes necessary to de
clare this will, I have also given the principles
upon which it may be determined. The differ
ence of a single vote breaks equality ; a single
opposer breaks unanimity ; but between una
nimity and equality there are several unequal
divisions, for each of which this number may be
fixed according to the condition and needs of
the political body.

~\
ch. m.] Electfons 167

Two general maxims may serve to regulate

these relations : one, that the more important
and grave the deliberation, the more should
the prevailing opinion approach unanimity ; the
other, that the greater the necessity for celerity
in the affair in hand, the more restricted should
be the prescribed difference in the division of
opinions ; in deliberations which must be ter
minated immediately, the excess of a single vote
should suffice. The first of these maxims seems
most suitable for laws, and the second for busi
ness. However this may be, it is upon their
combination that the best means which can be
given the plurality to declare itself, are estab
lished.

CHAPTER III.

ELECTIONS.

WITH regard to the elections of the prince

and of magistrates, which are, as I have
said, complex acts, there are two ways of pro
ceeding, to wit,—choice and chance. Both are
employed in different republics, and there may
even now be seen a very complicated mix-
168 Zbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

ture of the two in the election of the Doge of

Venice.
"Selection by lot," said Montesquieu,* "is
of the nature of the democracy." I admit it,
but how is this true ? " Selection by lot," con
tinues he, " is a manner of election, which
grieves no one : it leaves to each citizen a
reasonable hope of serving his country." These
are not reasons.
If it be observed that the election of chiefs is
a function of the government, and not of sov
ereignty, it will be seen why the mode of elect
ing by lot is more in the nature of the democracy,
where the administration is as much better as its
acts are less complex.
In all true democracies the magistracy is not
an advantage, but an onerous duty which can
not be imposed upon one individual more than
another. The law alone can impose this burden
upon the one to whom the lot falls. For then,
the condition being equal for all, and the choice
depending upon no human will, there is no par
ticular application which changes the universality
of the law.
In an aristocracy the prince chooses the
* Esprit des Lois, Book II., Chap. II.
ch. in.] Electfons . i6g

prince, the government is preserved by itself,

and there votes are well placed.
The example of the election of the Doge of
Venice confirms this distinction, far from
destroying it : this mixed form is suited to a
mixed government. For it is a mistake to take
the government of Venice for a true aristocracy.
If the people has no part in the government, the
nobility itself is the people. A multitude of poor
Barnabotes * never approached a magistracy,
and has for its nobility only the empty title of
excellency and the right of being present at the
great council. This great council is as numer
ous as our general council at Geneva, and its
illustrious members have no more privileges
than our simple citizens. It is certain that aside
from the great disparity between the two repub
lics, the middle class of Geneva represents
exactly the Venetian patriciate ; our native
population and inhabitants represent the towns
people and populace of Venice ; our peasants
represent the subjects on terra firma ; finally, in
whatever way this republic is considered, aside
from its grandeur, its government is no more
* A term applied to the poor nobility of the Venetian
republic.—Ed.
 i7o ttbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

aristocratic than ours. All the difference is,

having no chief for life, we have not the same
need of resorting to elections by lot.
Elections by lot would present few incon
veniences in a true democracy, where all being
equal as well by customs and talents as by
opinion and fortune, the choice would be almost
indifferent. But I have already said that there
is no real democracy. When choice and lot are
both used, the first should fill the places which
demand natural talents, such as military em
ployments ; the second will suffice for those
where good sense, justice, and integrity are
necessary, as in the judicature, because in a well
constituted state these qualities are common to
all the citizens.
Neither lot nor elections have any place in
monarchical governments. The monarch being
by right sole prince and only magistrate, the
choice of his lieutenants belongs to him alone.
When the Abbe de St. Pierre * proposed to mul
tiply the councils of the king of France and to
elect its members by ballot, he did not perceive

* Abbe de Saint-Pierre, French writer, born 1658, died

1743. He was the author of the Projet de Paix Perpe'tu-
elle, of which Rousseau has left a criticism. —Ed.

\
ch. iv.] Gbe "Roman assemblies 171

that he proposed to change the form of govern

ment.
It remains for me to speak of the manner of
giving and collecting the votes in an assembly
of the people, but perhaps the history of the
Roman policy in this regard will explain more
clearly the truths which I wish to establish. It
is not unworthy of judicious readers to know a
little in detail how public and individual affairs
are treated in a council of two hundred thousand
men.

CHAPTER IV.

WE have no well authenticated monuments

of the early days of Rome ; there is even
great reason to believe that most of the things

* It is hardly worth while to consider in detail the four

chapters which deal with the various Roman magistracies.
The epoch-making labors of Niebuhr were fifty years in the
future, and Rousseau naturally accepts in the main what he
had learned from Plutarch and Livy, as did also most of
his contemporaries, even the cautious Montesquieu. It
was impossible not to see serious contradictions and diffi
172 Gbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

which are told about it are fables.* and in gen

eral the most instructive part of the annals of a
people, which is the history of its establishment,
is what we lack most. Experience teaches
us every day from what causes revolutions of
empires arise : but, as no more peoples are
founded, we can only conjecture just how they
were formed.
Customs which are found established prove
at least that they had an origin. Of the tradi
tions which go back to this time, those which
are supported by the best authorities, and which
the strongest reasons confirm, should pass for
the most certain. These are the maxims which
I have tried to follow in seeking how the freest

culties, but that did not prevent unquestioned belief in the

legislation of Romulus, Numa, and Servius Tullius, as
related in the ancient historians. Moreover, Rousseau's
argument is hardly affected by his errors or his imperfect
knowledge. What would have justified the Romans, if
they had so shaped their institutions, would justify any
similarly situated state in doing the same thing, and it was
not hard for Rousseau's disciples to discover similarly situ
ated states.—Ed.
* The name Rome, which it is pretended comes from
Romulus, is Greek, and signifies force ; the name Numa is
also Greek, and signifies law. What probability is there
that the first two kings of this city bore in advance the
names relating so well to what they did ?
ch. iv.] Zbe Ifiomau assemblies 173

and most powerful people of the earth exer

cised its supreme power.
After the foundation of Rome, the rising re
public, that is to say, the army of the founder,
composed of Albans, of Sabines, and of for
eigners was divided into three classes, which
from this division took the name of tribes. Each
of these tribes was subdivided into ten curias,
and each curia into decurise, at the head of
which were placed chiefs called curions or
decurions.
Aside from this, from each tribe was taken a
corps of a hundred cavaliers or chevaliers called
centuries, by which we see that these divisions,
scarcely necessary in a town, were at first only
military. But it seems that an instinct of great
ness impelled the small city of Rome to give
itself in advance a policy suitable to the capital
of the world.
From this first division soon resulted an unex
pected effect ; it was that the tribe of the Albans
and that of the Sabines always remained in the
same condition, while that of the foreigners grew
constantly by the influx from outside of the
city, and soon surpassed the other two. The
remedy which Servius found for this dangerous
i74 ttbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

abuse was to change the division, and for that

of race which he abolished he substituted an
other, drawn from the part of the city occupied
by each tribe. Instead of three tribes he made
four, each of which occupied one of the hills of
Rome and bore its name. Thus remedying the
present inequality, he prevented its occurrence
in the future ; and in order that this division
might not be of place entirely, but of men, he
forbade the inhabitants of one quarter to pass
into another, which prevented the races from
being confounded.
He doubled also the three former centuries
of horse, and added a dozen others, but still
under the old names ; a simple and judicious
means by which he distinguished the corps of
knights from that of the people without causing
discontent among the latter.
To these four urban tribes Servius added fif
teen others called rustic tribes, because they
were formed from the inhabitants of the coun
try, divided in as many cantons. Afterwards as
many others were formed ; and the Roman
people was finally divided into thirty-five tribes,
a number which remained fixed until the end of
the republic.
ch. iv.] Zbe IRoman assemblies 175

From this distinction of tribes of the city and

tribes of the country resulted an effect worthy
to be observed, because there are no other ex
amples of it, and to it Rome owed at the same
time the preservation of its customs and the
growth of its empire. One might believe that
the urban tribes would soon arrogate to them
selves power and honors, and would not be long
in swallowing up the rustic tribes : it was quite
the contrary. The love of the early Romans
for a country life is well known. This love
was aroused in them by that wise teacher, who
united rustic and military labors with liberty ;
and who relegated, so to speak, the arts, the
professions, intrigues, fortunes, and slavery to
the city.
So all of the most illustrious citizens of Rome
lived in the country and cultivated their lands,
and there only were the supporters of the repub
lic sought. This state, being that of the most
worthy patricians, was honored by everybody ;
the simple and laborious life of the villager
was preferred to the indolent, cowardly life of
the Roman middle class ; one of the wretched
proletarians of the city would have become a
respected citizen as a laborer in the fields.
176 Ube Social Contract [bk. iv.

" It is not without reason," said Varro, " that

our magnanimous ancestors established in vil
lages the nursery of the robust and valiant men
who defended them in time of war, and nour
ished them in time of peace." Pliny said
positively that the tribes of the country were
honored because of the men composing them ;
whereas the cowards that were to be degraded
were transferred ignominiously into the tribes
of the city. The Sabine, Appius Claudius,
having come to establish himself in Rome, was
there overwhelmed with honors and inscribed
in a rustic tribe, which took eventually the
name of his family. Finally the freedmen all
entered into the urban tribes, never into the
rural ones ; and there is not, during the repub
lic, a single example of a freedman rising to any
magistracy, although he had become a citizen.
This maxim was excellent ; but it was carried
so far that a change, and certainly an abuse of
policy resulted from it.
First, the censors, after having arrogated to
themselves for a long time the right to transfer
arbitrarily the citizens of one tribe to another,
permitted most of them to enroll in whatever
tribe pleased them ; a permission which cer
ch. iv.] abe "Roman assemblies 177

tainly served no good purpose and took away

one of the great sources of power of the censor
ship. Further, the great and powerful having
enrolled themselves in the tribes of the country,
and the freedmen having become citizens and
remaining with the populace in the urban tribes,
—the tribes in general had neither place nor
territory, but found themselves so mixed that
they could no longer tell the members of each
without the registers ; so that the meaning of
the word tribe passed from the real to the per
sonal, and became almost a chimera.
It also happened that the urban tribes, being
nearer, were often in the majority in the assem
blies, and they sold the state to those who
deigned to buy votes of the rabble composing
them.
With regard to the curiae, the founder having
made ten of them in each tribe, the whole
Roman people then enclosed in the walls of the
city was composed of thirty curias, of whom
each had its temples, its gods, its officers, its
priests, and its festivals, called compitalia, simi
lar to the paganalia which the rustic tribes
afterward had.
At the time of the new division made by Ser
178 XTbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

vius, as this number thirty was not equally di

visible between the four tribes, he did not wish to
touch them ; and the curia, independent of the
tribes, became another division of the inhabi
tants of Rome ; but it was not a question of
curiae, either in the rustic tribes or in the peo
ple composing them ; because the tribes having
become a purely civil establishment, and another
policy having been introduced for the raising of
troops, the military divisions of Romulus be
came superfluous. Thus, although all citizens
were enrolled in tribes, they lacked much of
being all inscribed in curiae.
Servius made a third division still, which had
no relation to the two preceding, and became
by its effects the most important of all.
He distributed all the Roman people into
six classes, on the formation of which he made
a distinction based upon ratable property in
land, so that the first classes were filled by the
rich, the last by the poor, and the middle classes
by those who enjoyed moderate fortunes.
These six classes were subdivided into 193
other corps, called centuries, and these corps
were so distributed that the first class alone
comprised more than half of them, and the
ch. iv.] Gbe IRotnan assemblies 179

last was formed of one alone. Thus it was

found that the class which was the least numer
ous in men was the most numerous in centuries,
and that the last class entire counted only as
one subdivision, although it contained alone
more than half the inhabitants of Rome.
In order that the Roman people might not
see the consequences of this last division, Ser-
vius affected to give it a military appearance ;
he added to the second class two centuries of
armorers, and two of instruments of war to the
fourth ; in every class except the last he distin
guished between the young and the old ; that
is, those who were obliged to carry arms and
those whom their age exempted by the law ; a
distinction which, more than that of property,
made it necessary to take the census frequently.
Finally he provided that the assembly should be
held on the Champs de Mars, and that all those
who were of age to serve should come there
with their arms.
The reason that this division of young and
old was not followed in the last class was be
cause the honor of bearing arms was not ac
corded the populace comprising it ; one must
have a fireside in order to have a right to defend
180 ttbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

it ; and of the innumerable beggars who orna

ment the armies of kings to-day there is perhaps
not one who would not have been driven out
with disdain from a Roman cohort, when soldiers
were defenders of liberty.
There was, however, a distinction in the last
class between the proletarians and the capite
censi. The first, not quite reduced to nothing,
at least gave citizens to the state, and sometimes
soldiers in time of pressing need. As for those
who had nothing and who could be counted
only by the head, they were regarded as null,
and Marius was the first who deigned to enroll
them.
Without deciding here whether this third
enumeration was good or bad in itself, I think I
can affirm that it was only the simple manners
of the early Romans, their disinterestedness,
their taste for agriculture, their disdain of com
merce and the love of gain which rendered it
practicable. Where is the modern people, with
whom devouring greed, an unquiet spirit, in
trigue, continual changes, and the perpetual
revolution of fortunes would permit such an
establishment to last twenty years without over
turning the state ? We must observe that the
ch. iv.] Gbe "Roman Sssemblies 181

customs and the censors were stronger than the

establishment, and corrected its defects in
Rome, and that certain rich men found them
selves relegated to the class of the poor, for
having displayed their riches too freely.
From all this it may be easily understood why
only five classes are usually mentioned when
there were really six. The sixth, furnishing
neither soldiers to the army nor voters on the
Champs de Mars,* and being of almost no use
in the republic, and rarely counted for anything.
Such were the different divisions of the
Roman people. Let us see now the effect pro
duced by them in the assemblies. These assem
blies legitimately convoked were called comitia j
they were ordinarily held in the public square
of Rome, or on the Champs de Mars, and were
distinguished as comitia by curiae, comitia by
centuries, and comitia by tribes,—according to
which of these forms they were convoked under.
The comitia by curiae were of the establish
ment of Romulus ; those by centuries, of Ser-
* I say Champs de Mars, because it was there that the
assemblies came together by centuries ; in the two other
forms the people assembled in the forum or some other
place ; and there the capile censi had as much influence as
the first citizens.
 182 Gbe Social Contract [tsk. rv.

vius ; those by tribes of the tribunes of the

people. No law received sanction, no magistrate
was elected except in the comitia ; and as there
was no citizen who was not enrolled in a curia,
in a century, or in a tribe, it follows that no
citizen was excluded from the right of suffrage,
and that the Roman people was really sovereign
de jure and de facto.
In order that the comitia might be legitimately
assembled, and that whatever was done there
might have force in law, three conditions were
necessary : first, that the body or magistrate
which convoked them be invested with the
necessary authority ; second, that the assembly
be convoked upon one of the days permitted
by law ; third, that the auguries be favorable.
The reason of the first rule needs no explana
tion ; the second is an affair of policy. It was
not permissible to hold the comitia upon holidays
or market days, when country people coming to
attend to their affairs would have no time to
pass the day upon the public square. By the
third, the senate held in check a proud restless
people, and regulated the ardor of the seditious
tribunes ; but the latter found more than one
means of escaping this annoyance.

\
ch. iv.] Zbe IRoman assemblies 183

The laws and the election of chiefs were not

the only points submitted to the judgment
of the comitia ; the Roman people having
usurped the most important functions of the
government, it might be said that the fate of
Europe was regulated in these assemblies. This
variety of objects gave rise to the diverse forms
assumed by these assemblies, according to the
matters which they had to pronounce upon.
To judge of these different forms, it suffices
to compare them. Romulus, in establishing the
curiae, had in view the repression of the senate
by the people and the people by the senate, with
himself dominating over all. He gave to the
people, by this form, all the authority of num
bers to balance that of power and riches which
he left to the patricians. But in accordance
with the spirit of the monarchy, he left greater
advantage to the patricians by the influence
of their clients upon the plurality of suf
frages. This admirable institution of patrons
and clients was a masterpiece of politics and of
humanity without which the patriciate, so con
trary to the spirit of the republic, would not
have existed. Rome alone had the honor of
giving to the world this fine example, from which
184 Ube Social Contract [bk. iv.

abuse never resulted, but which notwithstanding

this has never been followed.
This same form of the curiae having existed
under the kings until Servius, and the reign of
the last Tarquin being counted as illegitimate,—
the royal laws were generally distinguished for
this reason as leges curiata. Under the republic
the curias, always limited to the four urban
tribes, and containing at this time only the
populace of Rome, could not affiliate either
with the Senate, which was at the head of the
patricians, or with the tribunes, who, although
plebeians, were at the head of the middle class
of citizens. They fell into discredit ; their
degradation was such that their thirty lictors
assembled did what the comitia curiata should
have done.
The division by centuries was so favorable to
the aristocracy that it is difficult to see at first
why the Senate did not always prevail in the
comitia which bore the name, and through
which were elected the consuls, censors, and
the other curule magistrates. In fact, of one
hundred and ninety-three centuries which
formed the six classes of the whole Roman
people, the first class comprised ninety-eight,
ch. iv.] ftbe Irtoman Sesemblies 185

and as the votes were counted only by centuries,

this single first class surpassed all the others in
the number of votes. When all three centuries
were in accord, even the votes were no longer
taken ; that which was decided upon by the
smallest number passed for a decision of the
multitude, and it may be said that in the comitia
centuriata affairs were regulated by plurality of
dollars rather than by plurality of votes.
But this extreme authority was tempered in
two ways ; first, the tribunes for the most part,
and always a great number of plebeians, being in
the class of the rich, balanced the credit of the
patricians in this first class.
The second means consisted in this : that in
stead of voting the centuries according to their
order, which would have resulted in beginning
always with the first in rank, one was chosen by
lot and that one * proceeded alone to the elec
tion : after which all the centuries called an
other day, according to their rank, repeated the
same election, and ordinarily confirmed it. The
authority of precedent was thus taken from rank

* This century, so chosen by lot, was called prcerogativa,

because it was the first whose suffrage was asked ; and from
that has come the word prerogative.
186 Zbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

and given to chance, in accordance with the

principles of democracy. From this custom
another advantage resulted—i. e., the citizens
had time between the two elections to inform
themselves as to the character of the candidate
who was provisionally chosen, so that they gave
their votes only after deliberation. But, under
pretext of saving time, this custom was finally
abolished, and the two elections took place on
the same day.
The comitia tributa were properly the council
of the Roman people. They were convoked
only by the tribunes ; the tribunes were there
elected and there passed their plebiscites. Not
only had the Senate no rank there, it had not
even the right to be present ; and by force of
obedience to laws upon which they could not
vote, the senators were in this regard less free
than the last citizen. This injustice was the re
sult of bad management, and alone sufficed to
invalidate the decrees of a body where all its
members were not admitted. Though the
patricians had assisted at these comitia accord
ing to their rights as citizens, having then be
come simple individuals, they could have little
influence upon a form of suffrage which was
ch. iv.] Gbe "Roman Sssemblies 187

counted by the head, and where the least of the

poor could do as much as the prince of the
Senate. Aside then from the order which re
sulted from these different arrangements for the
collection of the votes of so great a people, these
arrangements were not reduced to forms in
different in themselves, but each had effects
relative to the views which gave them the
preference.
Without entering into details concerning it,
the preceding explanation shows that the comitia
tributa were more favorable to the popular gov
ernment, and the comitia centuriata to the aris
tocracy. With regard to the comitia curiata,
where the populace of Rome alone formed the
plurality, as they favored only tyranny and evil
designs, they were bound to fall into disfavor ;
even the seditious abstained from using a means
which disclosed too much of their plans. It is
certain that all the majesty of the Roman people
was found in the comitia centuriata, which alone
were complete ; the comitia curiata lacked the
rustic tribes and the comitia tributa lacked the
senate and the patricians. As to the method of
collecting votes among the early Romans it was
as simple as their customs, although still less
 1 88 ttbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

simple than in Sparta. Each gave his vote

aloud, and a registrar at once inscribed it ;
plurality of votes among the tribes determined
the suffrage of the people ; the same was true of
the curia; and of the centuries. This custom
was good as long as honesty reigned among citi
zens, and each was ashamed to give publicly his
vote for an unjust measure or an unworthy
cause ; but when the people became corrupt
and votes were bought, it became expedient to
give them in secret in order to restrain buyers
by distrust, and to furnish rogues with means
not to be traitors.
I know that Cicero disapproved this change,
and attributed to it, in part, the ruin of the re
public. But although I feel the weight which
Cicero's authority should have here, I cannot
agree with him ; I think, on the contrary, that by
not having made more similar changes, the ruin of
the state was accelerated. As the regime of a
healthy person is not suited to invalids, so a cor
rupt people cannot be governed by the laws
which are suited to a good people. Nothingproves
this truth better than the duration of the republic
of Venice of which the shadow still exists, solely
because its laws were suited only to bad men.

N
ch. iv.] Gbe "Roman Bssemblies 189

Tablets were distributed to the citizens by

means of which each could vote without any
one else knowing how he had voted ; new for
malities were established for the collection of
the tablets, the counting of votes, the com
parison of numbers, etc.; which did not prevent
the honesty of the officers charged with these
functions from being called in question.
Finally, to prevent intrigue and the traffic in
votes, edicts bearing upon this point were issued,
whose number proved their uselessness.
Towards the last days, most extraordinary
expedients were resorted to, to supply the insuf
ficiency of the laws ; sometimes prodigies were
invented ; but this means, which might impose
on the people, did not impose upon those who
governed it ; again an assembly was suddenly
convoked before the candidates had time to
arrange their intrigues ; at another time a whole
session was consumed in talking, when it was
seen that the people had been won over to the
wrong side. But ambition eluded everything,
and what is most incredible is that in the midst
of so much abuse, this immense people, under
cover of its old regulations, did not cease elect
ing magistrates, making laws, judging causes,
igo ttbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

and transacting private and public business,

with almost as much facility as would the Senate
itself.

CHAPTER V.
THE TRIBUNATE.

WHEN an exact proportion cannot be

established between the parts consti
tuting the state, or when fixed causes change
those relations constantly, then a special magis
tracy is established, which does not combine
with the others, which replaces each term in
its true relation, and which makes a connection
or a mean term, either between prince and
people, or between prince and sovereign, or both
at the same time on both sides, if it is necessary.
This body, which I shall call the tribunate, is the
conservator of the laws and of legislative power.
It serves sometimes to protect the sovereign
against the government, as in Rome the tri
bunes of the people ; sometimes to sustain the
government against the people, as is now done
in Venice by the Council of Ten ; and some
times to maintain the equilibrium on one side
or the other, as did the ephors of Sparta.
ch. v.] rjbe Gribunate 191

The tribunate is not a constituent part of

the state, and should have no portion of the
legislative power nor of the executive power ;
but it is in this that its own power is greatest ;
for, not being able to do anything it can prevent
everything. It is more sacred and more rever
enced, as a defender of the laws, than the prince
who executes them and the sovereign who gives
them. This was clearly seen in Rome, where
the proud patricians, who always despised the
people, were forced to give way before a
simple officer of the people, who had neither
auspices nor jurisdiction over them.
The tribunate, wisely regulated, is the firmest
support of a good constitution ; but if it has too
much force, however slight the excess may be,
that little destroys its usefulness ; it is not in its
nature to be weak, and provided it has some
influence, it is never less than it should be.
It degenerates into tyranny when it usurps
the executive power, of which it is but the
moderator, and when it tries to make laws,
which it should simply protect. The enormous
power of the ephors, which was without danger as
long as Sparta preserved its customs, accelerated
its corruption when it began to degenerate.
ig2 Gbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

The blood of Agis shed by these tyrants was

avenged by his successor ; the crime and the
punishment of the ephors alike hastened the
death of the republic ; after Cleomene Sparta
was no longer of any account as a nation.
Rome perished in the same way ; and the exces
sive power of the tribunes, which they had
usurped by degree, served finally—under laws
framed for liberty—as a safeguard for the em
perors who destroyed it. As to the Council of
Ten, in Venice, it is a tribunal of blood, horrible
alike to patricians and to people, which, far from
protecting the laws, serves only since their deg
radation to strike in darkness the blows which
must not be seen.
The tribunate becomes weakened, like the
government, by the multiplication of its mem
bers. When the tribunes of the Roman people,
at first to the number of two, then of five, wished
to double that number, the Senate permitted it,
sure of restraining the one by the other, which
did not fail to happen.
The best means of preventing the usurpations
of so redoubtable a body—means of which no
government has yet availed itself—would be
not to render this body permanent, but to regu
ch. vi.] tube SMctatorabip 193

late the intervals during which it could be sup

pressed. These intervals, which should not be
great enough to leave abuses time to ripen,
might be fixed by law in such a way that it would
be easy to abridge them at need by extraordinary
commissions.
This means seems to me to be without
disadvantages because, as I have said, the
tribunate does not form a part of the con
stitution and may be removed without injuring
it ; and it seems to me efficacious because a
magistrate newly installed does not begin with
the power which his predecessor had, but with
that which the law gives him.

CHAPTER VI *

THE DICTATORSHIP.

THE inflexibility of laws which prevents them

from bending to circumstances may in
certain cases render them pernicious and cause
the ruin of the state in a crisis. The following
* A dictator was demanded by the Terrorists several
times during the Revolution, notably by Murat during the
struggle against the Girondins, and on the grounds devel
194 Gbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

of a certain order and the delays of forms de

mand a length of time which circumstances
sometimes make impossible. A thousand cases
might present themselves for which the legisla
tor had not provided, and it is a very necessary
foresightedness to realize that one cannot foresee
everything.
Political establishments should not be allowed
to become rigid to such a point that their effects
cannot be suspended. Sparta itself permitted
its laws to sleep. But only the greatest danger
can outweigh that of changing the public order,
and the sacred power of the law should never
be interfered with except when it is a question
of the welfare of the country. In these rare
and manifest cases the public surety is provided
for by special act which places the burden upon
the most worthy. This commission may be
given in two ways, according to the kind of dan
ger. If to remedy it, it suffices to increase the
activity of the government, it may be concen
trated in one or two of its members : thus it is
not the authority of the laws which is changed

oped in this chapter. Indeed, the Great Committee of

Public Safety itself was a body wielding the powers of a
dictator.—Ed.
ch. vi.] Gbe Dictatorship 195

but only the form of their administration. But

if the peril is such that the formalities of the
law is an obstacle to providing against it, then a
supreme chief is named who silences all laws
and suspends for a moment the sovereign au
thority. In such a case the general will is not
doubtful, and it is evident that the first desire
of the people is that the state should not perish.
According to this the suspension of legislative
authority does not mean its abolition : the
magistrate who silences it can make it speak ;
he dominates it without having the power to
represent it. He can do everything except
make laws.
The first method was employed by the Roman
Senate, when it charged the consuls by a sacred
formula to provide for the welfare of the repub
lic. The second was used when one of the two
consuls nominated a dictator * ; a custom for
which Alba gave Rome the example. In the
beginning of the republic, recourse was often
had to the dictatorship because the state was
not sufficiently firm to be able to maintain itself
by the force of its institutions alone.
* This nomination was made at night and in secret, as if
they were ashamed to place a man above the law.
196 tlbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

The customs of the time rendering superfluous

many precautions which would have been neces
sary in other times, there was no fear that a
dictator would abuse his authority or seek to
retain it beyond his term of office. It seemed,
on the contrary, that such great power was a
burden to the person invested with it so great
was their haste to divest themselves of it, as if it
were too arduous and perilous a post to take the
place of the law.
So it is not the danger of abuse but that of
degradation which makes me disapprove the in
discriminate use of this supreme office in early
days ; it was used constantly at elections and
dedications and for purely formal occasions. It
is much to be feared that it became less re
doubtable in time of need, and that people be
came accustomed to regard it as a vain title
which was used only at idle ceremonies.
Towards the end of the republic the Romans,
having become more circumspect, were sparing
of appointing dictators, with as little reason as
they had been prodigal of them before. It was
easy to see that their fear was unfounded and
that the weakness of the capital was its security
against the magistrates which it contained ; that a
ch. vi.] ttbe Dictatorship 197

dictator could in certain cases defend the public

liberty without ever being able to make an attack
upon it ; and that the chains of Rome would
not be forged in Rome itself, but in its armies.
The slight resistance made by Marius to Sylla,
and Pompey to Caesar, showed plainly what
might be expected from authority within against
force without.
This was the cause of serious mistakes : such,
for example, as in not naming a dictator at
the time of Catiline's conspiracy. It involved
the city alone or at the most a few provinces of
Italy, and with the unlimited authority which
the law gave to a dictator the conspiracy
might easily have been checked, but it was
defeated only by a combination of fortunate
circumstances which human prudence could
never have foreseen.
The Senate gave all its power into the hands
of consuls, and Cicero, to act effectively, was
constrained to pass beyond this power in one
important point.
The first transports of joy approved this con
duct, but it was only justice that in the end he
was obliged to render account of the blood of
these citizens,—shed contrary to law ; a re
198 fcbe Social Contract [bk. rv.

proach which could not have been made against

a dictator. But the eloquence of the consul
prevailed ; and he himself, although a Roman,
loved his own glory better than his country, and
did not try so much to find the most legitimate
and the surest way to save the state, as to gain
for himself all the honor of the affair.* So he
was honored justly as the liberator of Rome,
and was justly punished as an infractor of the
laws. However brilliant his recall may have
been, it was certainly an act of pardon.
In whatever manner this important commis
sion be conferred, it is necessary to limit its
duration to a very short term, which can never
be prolonged. In the crises which cause its
establishment, the state is soon either destroyed
or saved : and the present need being past, the
dictatorship becomes useless and tyrannical.
At Rome the dictators held office but six months,
and most of them abdicated before that time.
Had the term been longer, perhaps they might
have been tempted to prolong it, as did the
decemvirs the term of a year.

* In proposing a dictator he dared not name himself,

and could not assure himself that his colleagues would
nominate him.
ch. vii.] ttbe Censorship 199

The dictator had time only to provide for the

need which had caused his election : he had no
time to think of other projects.

CHAPTER VII.

AS the declaration of the general will is made

by law, the declaration of the public
judgment is made by the censor. Public
opinion is the kind of law of which the censor
is the minister, and which he applies only to
individual cases, after the example of the prince.
The censorial tribunal, far from being the
arbiter of the opinion of the people, is only its
proclaimer, and as soon as it deviates from that
duty its decisions are idle and of no effect.
It is useless to distinguish the customs of a
country from the objects of its esteem ; for all

* A curious trace of the influence of this chapter is found

in a Constitution proposed for the Republic of Naples in
1799, by Pagano, one of the most upright and influential
of the Neapolitan jurists. This provided for a censor with
powers similar to those of the old Roman censor. Un
fortunately the Constitution remained a project merely.
—Ed.
 aoo ttbe Social Contract Ok. iv.

these depend upon the same principle and are

necessarily confounded. Among all the peoples
of the world it is not nature, but opinion, which
decides the choice of their pleasures.
Elevate the opinions of mankind and their
manners and customs will refine themselves.
Everybody loves the beautiful, or what seems to
him so, but one is liable to be deceived in his
judgment, and judgment itself should be regu
lated. He who judges of character judges of
honor, and he who judges of honor takes his
law from opinion.
The opinions of a people arise from the
nature of its constitution. Although the law
does not regulate morals, legislation has given
rise to them. When legislation weakens, morals
degenerate ; but the judgment of the censors
will not do what could not be done by force of
law.
It follows from this that the censor may be
useful in preserving the customs, but never in
re-establishing them. Establish censors while
the laws are vigorous ; as soon as they become
weakened everything is past hope ; nothing
legitimate has force when the laws have none.
The censor maintains the standard of morals

X
ch. vii.] Zbe Gensorsbip 201

by preventing the corruption of opinions, by

preserving their rectitude through wise applica
tions, sometimes even by fixing them when they
are uncertain. The custom of having seconds
in duels, which was carried to extremes in the
kingdom of France, was abolished by just these
words in an edict of the king : " As to those
who are cowardly enough to call seconds."
This judgment, anticipating that of the public,
determined it suddenly. But when the same
edict pronounced that it was also a coward
ice to fight in a duel, the public laughed at a
decision upon which its judgment was already
formed.
I have stated in another place * that as public
opinion is not submitted to constraint, there
should be no vestige of constraint in the tribunal
established to represent it. One cannot admire
too much the art with which this motive—quite
lost among moderns—was set to work among
the Romans, and still better among the Lacedae
monians.
A man of bad principles, having proposed a
good measure in the council of Sparta, the
* I only indicate here what I have treated more at length
in the Lettre a M. d 'Alembert.
 aoa ttbe Social Conttact [bk. iv.

ephors, without noticing it, had the same meas

ure proposed by a good citizen. * What an
honor for one, what a disgrace for the other,
without a word of praise or blame for either !
Certain drunkards of Samos defiled the tribunal
of the ephors : the next day, by public edict,
Samians were permitted to be villains. A
real punishment would have been less severe
than such impunity. When Sparta has pro
nounced upon what is or is not honest, Greece
does not appeal from its judgments.

CHAPTER VIII. f

CIVIL RELIGION.

MEN had at first no kings but the gods, and

no government but a theocratic one.
They reasoned like Caligula, and reasoned
justly. A long time is needed to so change
sentiments and ideas that one can resolve to
take one's equal for a master, and to flatter him
self that he likes it.
* Plutarch, Diets Notables des Lace'de'moniens, § 69. —Ed.
\ Compare the Lettres de la Montagne, Part I., Letter 1,
where he repeats and develops anew the fundamental idea
of this chapter. —Ed.

X
ch. viii.] Civil "Religfon 203

From the fact alone that God was placed at

the head of each political society, it follows that
there were as many gods as peoples. Two
peoples, strangers to each other, and almost
always enemies, could not for any length of
time recognize the same master : two armies
giving battle to each other could not obey the
same chief.
From national divisions arose polytheism, and
from this theological and civil intolerance, which
are naturally the same, as will be explained
hereafter. The belief of the Greeks that they
would find their own gods among the barbarians
arose from their feeling that they were the
natural sovereigns of these peoples. In our day
it is a ridiculous * learning which depends upon
the identity of the gods of various nations ; as
if Moloch, Saturn, and Chronos could be the
same god ! As if Baal of the Phoenicians, Zeus
of the Greeks, and Jupiter of the Romans could
be same ! As if there could be anything in
common among chimerical beings bearing
different names !
* Rousseau can hardly be blamed for not foreseeing the
results of modern comparative philology, proving the iden
tity of different divinities from the various resemblances of
name and function and legend.—Ed,
 204 Gbe 5ocial Contract [bk. rv.

If it be asked why it is that in paganism,

where each state has its religion and its gods,
there were no religious wars, I should answer
that it was because each state, having its own
religion as well as its own government, did not
make a distinction between its gods and its laws.
Political war was also theological war ; the
provinces of the gods were fixed, so to speak,
by the boundaries of a nation.
The god of a people has no rights over other
peoples. The gods of the pagans were not
jealous gods ; they divided among themselves
the empire of the world ; even Moses and the
Hebrews sometimes lent themselves to this idea
in speaking of the God of Israel. They looked
upon the gods of the Canaanites as worthless, it is
true, and their peoples as proscribed, given over
to destruction, whose place they were to occupy ;
but see how they regarded the divinities of the
neighboring peoples whom they were forbidden
to attack : " Is not that which belongs to your
god Chamos legitimately yours," said Jephthah
to the Ammonites. " We possess by the same
title the lands which our victorious god has
acquired." It seems to me that there was a
recognized parity between the rights of Chamos
and those of the God of Israel.
~\
ch. vin.l Civil IRelfgion 205

But when the Jews having submitted to the

kings of Babylon, and afterward to the kings
of Syria, refused to recognize any god but their
own, this refusal was regarded as rebellion
against the victor, and attracted towards them
the persecutions of which we read in their his
tory, and of which not another example was
known before Christianity.*
Each religion being attached solely to the
laws of the state which prescribed it, there was
no way of converting a people except to enslave
it, nor were there other missionaries than the
conquerors ; the obligation to change the religion
was a law of the vanquished, and it was neces
sary to conquer before speaking of conversion.
Men were not fighting for their gods ; it was,
as in Homer, the gods who fought for man ;
each asked his own gods for victory and paid
for it with new altars.
The Romans before taking a city summoned
its gods to abandon it. When they left to the
Tarentins their offended gods, they regarded
them as having submitted to the Roman gods,
and as being forced to do them homage. They

* It is undeniably proved that the war of the Phocians,

called the sacred war, was not a war of religion ; it was
to punish sacrilege.
206 Gbc Social Contract [bk. IV-

left their gods to the vanquished as they left

them Pheir laws. A crown to Jupiter Capitolinus
was often the only tribute imposed.
Finally the Romans, having extended their
religion and their gods with their empire, them
selves often adopted those of the vanquished,
and accorded to both civic rights. The peoples
of this vast empire found insensibly that they
possessed a multitude of gods and religions,
nearly the same everywhere, and this is how
paganism came to be known in the world as a
single religion.
It was under these circumstances that Jesus
came to establish a spiritual kingdom upon
earth. This separated the system of theology
from the state and caused those internal dissen
sions which have never ceased to agitate Christian
peoples. Now this idea of a kingdom of the other
world had never entered the minds of the heathen.
They regarded Christians as real rebels, who
under a hypocritical submission sought only the
proper moment to make themselves independent
and masters, and to usurp adroitly the authority
which they-feigned to respect in their weakness.
This was the cause of persecutions.
What the heathen feared came to pass. Then
ch. vm.] Civil IReligfon 207

everything changed its appearance ; the humble

Christians changed their language, and soon this
pretended kingdom of the other world became
under a visible chief the most violent despotism
of this.
However, as there has always been a prince
and civil laws, from this double power has re
sulted a perpetual conflict of jurisdiction, which
has rendered all good polity impossible in Chris
tian states ; and it has never been clearly known
whether one was obliged to obey master or
priest.
Several peoples, however, in Europe or its
vicinity have tried to preserve or reintroduce
the ancient system, but without success. The
spirit of Christianity has been completely suc
cessful. The sacred religion has always re
mained or become independent of the sovereign,
and without necessary connection with the body
of the state. Mahomet had very sound views,
he connected his political system well ; and, as
long as the form of his government existed un
der the caliphs, his successors, this government
was united, and in that was good. But the
Arabs became flourishing, cultured, polished,
indolent, and cowardly, and were subjugated by
208 ttbe Social Contract [bk. IV-

the barbarians : then the division between the

two powers began again. Although this is less
apparent among Mahometans than among Chris
tians it is still there, especially in the sect of
Ali ; there are states, like Persia, where this is
always to be seen.
Among us the kings of England established
themselves as heads of the Church ; the czars
did likewise, but by adopting this title they have
made themselves less its masters than its minis
ters ; they have acquired not so much the right
to change it as to maintain it ; they are not its
legislators, they are only princes. Wherever the
clergy has formed a body,* it is master and
legislator in that country. There are two
powers, two sovereigns, in England and in
Russia, as everywhere.
Of all Christian authors the philosopher

* It should be observed that it is not so much formal as

semblies, like those of France, which bind the clergy in a
body as the communion of the churches. Communion and
excommunication are the social compact of the clergy, a
compact by means of which they will always be masters
of peoples and kings. All the priests who communicate
together are citizens if they were at the two ends of the
world. This invention is a masterpiece in politics. There
never was anything like it among the heathen priests, and
they never formed a body of clergy.
ch. vni.] Civil IRelicilon 209

Hobbes is the only one who has seen the evil

and the remedy, and who has dared to propose
uniting the two heads of the eagle, and so bring
everything into political union, without which
neither state nor government will ever be well
constituted. But he must have seen that the
dominating spirit of Christianity was incompati
ble with his system, and that the interest of the
priesthood would always be greater than that of
the state.
It is not so much what is horrible and false in
its politics, as what there is that is just and true,
that has made it odious.*
I believe that in developing historical facts
from this point of view, the opposed opinions of
Bayle f and Warburton would be quickly refuted.
One of them believed that no religion was useful
to the body politic, and the other maintained
that Christianity was its firmest support.
It would be proved to the first that no state

* See, among others, in a letter of Grotius to his brother,

April 29, 1643, what this learned man approves and what
he blames in Hobbes' De Cive. It is true that, inclined
to indulgence, he seems to pardon the good in the author
because of the bad ; but not everybody is so merciful.
f Bayle, French writer, author of the famous Historical
and Critical Dictionary, born 1647, died I7°0,—Er>,
 210 Ube Social Contract [bk. iv.

was ever founded without religion for its basis ;

and to the second, that the Christian law is, at
bottom, more injurious than useful to the strong
constitution of the state. To succeed in mak
ing myself understood, I have only to give a
little more precision to the too vague ideas of
religion relative to my subject.
Religion considered in its relation to society,
which is either general or individual, may also
be divided into two kinds : the religion of the
man and that of the citizen. The first, without
temples, altars, or rites,—limited to the purely
mental worship of the Supreme God and to the
eternal duties of correct living, is the pure and
simple religion of the Gospel, the true theism,
and it might be said to be established by natural
divine right. The other being established in
any country gives it its gods, and its own patron
and tutelary deities. It has its dogmas, its
rights, its external worship prescribed by law :
outside of the one nation which follows this
worship, all are infidels, strangers, and bar
barians ; it extends the duties and rights of
man no farther than the altar. Such were all
the religions of the first peoples, which could be
said to be of divine right,—civil or positive.

,x
ch. vni.l Civil IReligion

There is a third kind of religion, which is

more bizarre ; it gives to man two legislations,
two chiefs, and two countries ; it submits him to
contradictory duties, and prevents him from
being devout and at the same time a citizen.
Such is the religion of the Lamas, of the Japan
ese, and of Romish Christianity. This might
be called the religion of the priest. There
results from it a mixed and unsocial right which
has no name. Considering these three sorts
of religion politically, they all have their faults.
The first is so evidently bad that it is a loss of
time to try to demonstrate it. Anything that
destroys social unity is worthless. Any estab
lishment which places man in contradiction with
himself is without value.
The second is good in that it unites divine
worship with love of the law ; it makes the
fatherland the object of the adoration of the
citizens ; it teaches them that to serve the state
is to serve its tutelary god. It is a kind of
theocracy, in which there should be no pontiff
but the prince, no priests but the magistrates.
In those days to die for one's country was to
become a martyr ; to violate the laws was im
pious ; and to submit a guilty man to public
2i2 Zbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

execration was to devote him to the wrath of

the gods : sacer esto.
But it is bad in that it is founded upon error
and falsehood ; it deceives man, renders him
credulous and superstitious, changes the true
worship of divinity into an idle ceremony. It
is bad also, when becoming exclusive and tyran
nical, it makes people sanguinary and intolerant,
so that they breathe murder and massacre, and
believe they are doing a holy action in killing
all who do not worship their gods. This places
such a people in a natural state of war with all
the others, which is very injurious to its own
safety.
There remains only the religion of man or
Christianity,—not that of to-day, but that of the
Gospel, which is quite different. By this holy,
sublime, and true religion mankind, as children
of the same God, own each other for brothers,
and the social bond which unites them is not
dissolved even by death.
But this religion, having no especial relation
with the political body, leaves to the laws the
force which they have in themselves, without
adding to them ; and thereby one of the great
bonds of social life remains without effect. Far
ch. vin.] civil IRelfrjfon 213

from attaching the hearts of citizens to the

state, it detaches them from all earthly things.
I know nothing more contrary to the social
spirit.
It is said that a people of true Christians
would form the most perfect society imaginable.
I see but one great difficulty in this supposition :
it is that a society of true Christians would not
be a society of men.
I should say even that this supposed society
would not be with all its perfection either the
strongest or the most durable ; by force of be
ing perfect it would lack cohesion ; its distin
guishing vice would be its very perfection. Each
would do his duty; the people would be sub
missive to laws ; the chiefs would be just and
moderate ; the magistrates would be upright
and incorruptible ; soldiers would despise death ;
there would be neither vanity nor luxury : all
that is very good, but let us look farther.
Christianity is a purely spiritual religion, oc
cupied solely with heavenly things ; the country
of a Christian is not of this world. He does
his duty, it is true, but he does it with a pro
found indifference as to the good or ill success
of his care. Provided he has nothing to re
9t4 Gbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

proach himself with, it matters little to him

whether things go well or ill here below. If the
state is flourishing, he scarcely dares enjoy the
public felicity ; he fears to become proud of the
glory of his country ; if the state degenerates,
he blesses the hand of God which lies heavy
upon his people.
That such a society might be peaceable and
harmonious it would be necessary that all citi
zens without exception be equally good Chris
tians ; but if unfortunately there should be one
ambitious man or an hypocrite, a Catiline,* for
example, or a Cromwell, he would certainly
have the advantage of his pious compatriots.
Christian charity does not permit one to think
ill of his neighbors. From the time that he
shall have found, by whatever means, the art of
imposing upon them and seizing a part of the
public authority, behold a man invested with
dignity ; God wills that he be respected : soon,
behold a power ; God wills that it be obeyed.
Should the depository of this power abuse it,
it is the rod with which God punishes his chil-

* Catiline, Roman politician, conspired against the

republic, was defeated and killed by Cicero, 62 B.C.—
Ed.
ch. vra.] Civil IReligfon 215

dren. People would have scruples about driving

out the usurper : it would be necessary to dis
turb the public repose, to use violence, to shed
blood ; all this accords ill with the gentleness
of the Christian, and, after all, what matters it
whether one is a slave or free in this vale of
misery ? The essential thing is to go to para
dise, and resignation is but one more means to
accomplish it.
Should some foreign war supervene, the citi
zens march to combat without difficulty ; none
among them think of flying ; they do their duty,
but without passion for victory ; they know
better how to die than to win.
Whether they are victors or vanquished, what
matters it ? Does not Providence know better
than they what they need ?
Imagine what advantage a fiery, impetuous,
passionate enemy would get from their stoicism!
Place opposite them a generous people, devoured
by an ardent love of glory and of country.
Suppose your Christian republic fighting Sparta
or Rome : the pious Christians will be beaten,
crushed, destroyed, before having had time to
recognize each other, or will owe their safety to
the scorn with which they are regarded by the
2i6 ttbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

enemy. The soldiers of Fabius took an oath

to my liking ; they did not swear to conquer or
die, they swore to return victorious, and they
kept their vow.* No Christian would ever have
made such a vow ; he would believe that he
tempted God.
But I am in error in speaking of a Christian
republic ; each of these words excludes the
other. Christianity preaches only servitude and
dependence. Its spirit is too favorable to
tyranny not to be taken advantage of by it.
True Christians are made to be slaves, they
know it and do not care ; this short life has too
little value in their eyes.
Christian troops are said to be excellent. I
deny it : let such be shown to me. As for me,
I know no Christian troops. The crusades will
be cited. Without disputing over the valor of
the crusaders, I will remark that, far from being
Christians, they were soldiers of priests, they
were citizens of the Church : they fought for a
spiritual country, which they had made temporal,
nobody knows how.
Considering it fairly, this religion should be
come paganism again ; as the Gospel established
*See Livy, Bk. II., Chap. 45.
ch. vm.] Civil iftetlgiott 217

no national religion, sacred war was impossible

among Christians.
Under the pagan emperors, the Christian sol
diers were brave ; all authors assert it, and I
believe it : it was an honorable emulation
against the heathen troops. From the time
the emperors became Christians, this emulation
existed no more ; and when the cross drove out
the eagle, all Roman valor disappeared.
But, leaving aside political associations, let
us return to rights, and fix the principles con
cerning this important point. The right which
the social contract gives to the sovereign over
the subjects does not overstep, as I have said,
the limits of public utility. * The subjects do
not owe an account to the sovereign of their
opinions, unless their opinions are of interest
to the community. Now it is important to the

* "In a republic," said the Marquis d'Argenson, "each

one is perfectly free in everything that does not injure
others." That is the invariable limit ; it cannot be placed
more exactly. I have been unable to refuse myself the
pleasure of quoting from this manuscript sometimes, al
though unknown to the public, to give honor to the
memory of an illustrious and respectable man, who had
preserved even in the ministry the heart of the true citizen,
and upright, healthy views upon the government of his
country.
2i8 tTbe Social Contract [bk. iv.

state that each citizen have a religion which

will make him love his duties ; but the dogmas
of that religion are of no interest to the state
nor to its members, except as these dogmas per
tain to morals and to the duties which he who
professes it is bound to fulfil towards others.
Each can have, moreover, such opinions as
please him without it being necessary for the
sovereign to know them : for, since he has no
jurisdiction in the next world, whatever the fate
of the subjects in the next world may be, it is
not his affair, provided they are good citizens
in this.
There is, however, a profession of faith purely
civil, of which it is the sovereign's duty to de
cide upon the articles, not precisely as dogmas
of religion, but as sentiments of sociality with
out which it is impossible to be a good citizen
or a faithful subject.* Without being able to
oblige any one to believe them he can banish
from the state whoever does not believe them ;

* Caesar, pleading for Catiline, tried to establish the

dogma of the mortality of the soul ; Cato and Cicero, to
refute him, did not amuse themselves with philosophizing
[Perhaps by the help of a little ingenuity and a strong
imagination, it is possible to infer that Cicero and Cato
held it to be unpatriotic to support the mortality of the
ch. vni.] Civil "(Religfon 2ig

he can banish him, not as impious, but as un

social, as incapable of loving law and justice
sincerely, and of immolating, at need, his life
to his duty. If any one, having publicly ac
knowledged these dogmas, conducts himself as
if he did not acknowledge them, he should
be punished with death ; he has committed
the greatest of crimes, he has lied before the
law.
The dogmas of civil religion should be sim
ple, few in number, announced with precision,
without explanation or commentary. The ex
istence of a powerful, intelligent, benevolent,
prescient, and provident Divinity, the life to
come, the happiness of the just, the punishment
of the wicked, the sacredness of the social
contract and the law : these are the positive
dogmas. As to the negative dogmas, I limit
them to one, intolerance ; it enters into the
religions which we have excluded. Those who
make a distinction between civil intolerance and

soul ; otherwise it is hard to discover it either in Sallust or

Cicero, Cicero in the Catiline orations seems rather even to
approve it. —Ed.] ; they showed that Caesar was talking
like a bad citizen, and had advanced a doctrine pernicious
to the state. In fact that was what the Roman Senate had
to judge, and not a question of theology.
 420 ttbe Social Contract [bk. IV-

theological intolerance deceive themselves, to

my mind. These two intolerances are insepara
ble. It is impossible to live in peace with peo
ple whom one believes to be damned ; to love
them is to hate God who punishes them ; they
must be redeemed or else tortured. Wherever
theological intolerance is admitted, it must have
some civil effects * ; and as soon as it has

* Marriage, for example, being a civil contract, has

civil effects, without which it would be impossible for
society to exist. Let us suppose that a clergy attributed
to itself alone the right to perform this act, a right which
it would necessarily usurp in all intolerant religions, then
is it not clear that in enforcing in this regard the authority
of the Church it would nullify that of the prince, who
would have no subjects except those which the clergy
would kindly give him ? As master to marry or not marry
people according as they had or had not certain doctrines,
according as they accepted or rejected certain formulas,
according as they were more or less devout,—if they con
ducted themselves prudently and held their position with
firmness, is it not clear that the clergy would alone dispose
of heritages, of offices, of citizens, of the state even, which
could no longer exist, as it would be composed of bastards ?
But, it will be said, this would be appealed from as an abuse,
the clergy would be summoned, there would be decrees, and
the temporal power would be seized. What a pity ! The
clergy would let it go and pass on their way ; they tran
quilly allow appeals, summons, decrees, and seizures, and
end by remaining master of the situation. It is not, it
seems to me, a great sacrifice to abandon a part when one
is sure of grasping everything.

~X
ch. vin.] Civil 'Keligfon

them the sovereign is no more a sovereign, even

in temporal matters. From that time priests
are the true masters, kings are but their
officers.
Now that there is no exclusive national reli
gion and can be none, all should be tolerated
which tolerate others, as long as their dogmas
have nothing contrary to the duties of the citi
zen. But whoever dares say : Outside the church
there is no salvation, should be driven from the
state, unless the state is the church, and the
prince is the pontiff. Such a dogma is good
only in a theocratic government ; in any other
it is pernicious. The reasons given, for Henry
Fourth's profession of the Roman religion should
cause every honest man to leave it, and espe
cially all princes who can reason.*
* An historian says that the king had a conference held in
his presence between the two churches, and seeing that one
minister agreed that one might be saved in the Catholic re
ligion, his majesty said : " What ! do you agree that one
can be saved by the religion of those gentlemen?" The
minister replied that he had no doubt of it, provided one
lived rightly in it. The king replied, judiciously : " Pru
dence requires me to be of their religion and not of yours,
because being of theirs I can be saved according to both of
you, and being of yours I can be saved according to you,
but not according to them. Now prudence requires that I
follow the most assured."
22s Gbe social Contract [bk. iv.

CHAPTER IX.

CONCLUSION.

AFTER having given the true principles of

political rights, and having tried to found
a state upon its basis, it must still be supported
by external relations, which comprise rights
of the people, of commerce, of war and con
quest, of public rights, leagues, negotiations and
treaties.
But all this forms a new subject, too vast for
my limited range of vision. I ought always to
have fixed it nearer to me.
 INDEX.

Aristocracy, 99, 104

Assemblies of the people, 156
Assemblies, Roman, 171

Body politic, The, 22, 24, 85

Caligula, 5, 58
Censorship, The, 199
Christianity, 205
Citizens, Rights of, 43
Citizen, The, 22
City, A, 22
Civilization in Russia, 67
Climate as a factor in government, 123, 124
Compact, The social, 164
Conquest, Right of, 15
Conspiracy, Catiline's, 197
Constitution of a state, 69
Corsica, 77
Council of Ten in Venice, 192
Customs of a country, 199
223
224 fnoer.

Democracy, 99, 101

Deputies, 143
Dictatorship, The, 193
Dictatorship, Duration of a, 198

Election of the Doge of Venice, 169

Elections, 167
Equality, 6, 33, 78
Establishments of Louis IX., 13

Family—The most ancient of societies, 3

Fecundity, 74

Government, Advantages of a democratic, 153

Government, Different forms of, 94
Government, Establishment of the, 149, 151
Government in general, 84
Government, Means of preventing usurpation
of, 153
Governments, Division of, 98
Government, Signs of a good, 130
Governments, Mixed, 119
Governments proper for different countries, 121
Government, The, 86, 94
Government, The abuse of, 132
Grotius, 4, 9, 38, 39, 156

Hobbes, Thomas, 5

Land, 73
 Unbet 225

Law, Civil, 82
Law, Criminal, 82
Law, Jewish, 64
Laws, Division of, 81
Laws, Framing of, 61
Laws, Political, 81
Law, The, 52
Leges curiata, 184
Legislation, Different systems of, 76, 77
Legislation, Perfect, 95
Legislative authority, Suspension of, 195
Legislator, The, 58
Liberty, 4, n, 78
Liberty, Natural versus civil, 28
Lycurgus, 42, 60

Machiavelli, in
Magistracy, The, 168
Magistrates, 94
Marriage a civil contract, 220
Monarchy, A, 99, 108
Montesquieu, 59

Nature, The state of, 53

Paganism, 204
Pardon, Right of, 51
People, Assembly of the, 141, 146, 147
People, Divisions of the Roman, 177, 178
People, The, 22, 65
226 IFn&ej

Peter the Great, 67

Political body, A, 72
Political body, Death of the, 135
Polytheism, Origin of, 203
Power, A, 22
Power, Executive, 85, 149
Power, Legislative, 85
Power, Limits of sovereign, 42
Princes, The education of, 116
Prince, The, 86, 94
Public opinion, 83

Realty, 28
Religion, 210
Religion, Civil, 202
Representatives, 143
Republic, A, 22, 56
Republics,- Roman, 138
Right of life and death, 49
Right of the first occupant, 29
Right of the strongest, 7
Rights, Social and individual, 21
Rousseau, Biographic note, 2

Slavery, 9
Slavery, its origin and perpetuity, 6
Social compact, The, 20
Societies, The first, 3
Sovereign, 22, 23, 88
Sovereign authority, how maintained, 137
 fln&ej 227

Sovereignty is inalienable, 34
Sovereignty is indivisible, 36
State, The, 22, 88
State, The civil, 26
State, The dissolution of the, 133
State, The fall of the, 160
State, The size of the, 87, 88
Suffrage, 162
Subject, The, 22, 25

Thlascala, 76
Tribes, Rustic (Roman), 175
Tribes, Urban (Roman), 175
Tribunate, The, 190
Tribunate, The, not a constituent part of the
state, 191

Voting, 164, 166

Voting among early Romans, 187

.War, 12, 14
Will, General versus individual, 35, 36
Will, The general, 44, 161, 164
Will, The general will is indestructible, 158
Will, The individual, 166
Will, Whether the general will can err, 40
"N
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