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The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau Copyright ©2010–2015 All rights reserved. Jonathan Bennett [Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations, are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported between brackets in normal-sized type. First launched: December 2010 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau Contents BOOK 1 1. The subject of the first book . . . . . . . . . . 2. The first societies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. The right of the strongest . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Slavery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. We must always go back to a first agreement 6. The social compact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7. The sovereign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8. The civil state . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9. Real estate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BOOK 2 1. Sovereignty is inalienable . . . . . . . . . . 2. Sovereignty is indivisible . . . . . . . . . . 3. Can the general will be wrong? . . . . . . . 4. The limits of the sovereign power . . . . . 5. The right of life and death . . . . . . . . . . 6. The law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7. The law-maker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8. The people . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9. The people (continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . 10. The people (further continued) . . . . . . 11. Differences among systems of legislation 12. Classifying laws . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BOOK 3 1. Government in general . . . . . . . . . . 2. The source of the variety among forms of 3. Classifying governments . . . . . . . . . 4. Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Aristocracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Monarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 . . . . . . . . . 1 . . . . . . . . . 1 . . . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . 3 . . . . . . . . 6 . . . . . . . . 6 . . . . . . . . 8 . . . . . . . . 9 . . . . . . . . 10 12 12 12 14 14 17 18 20 22 23 24 26 27 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 . 29 . . 31 . 33 . . 34 . 35 . 36 . . . . . The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 7. Mixed governments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8. No one form of government suits all countries . . . . . . 9. The signs of a good government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10. How government is abused. Its tendency to degenerate 11. The death of the body politic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12. How the sovereign authority is maintained . . . . . . . 13. How the sovereign authority is maintained (continued) 14. How the sovereign authority is maintained (continued) 15. Deputies or representatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16. What establishes government isn’t a contract . . . . . 17. What does establish government . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18. How to protect the government from being taken over Book 4 1. The general will is indestructible 2. Voting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Elections . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. The comitia in ancient Rome . . 5. Tribunes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. Dictatorship . . . . . . . . . . . . 7. Censorship . . . . . . . . . . . . 8. Civic religion . . . . . . . . . . . 9. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 . . 54 . 55 . . 57 . 58 . 63 . 65 . 66 . . 67 . 73 . . . . 39 40 43 44 46 46 47 48 49 51 51 52 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau Glossary agreement: The item that Rousseau calls a convention is an event, whereas what we call ‘conventions’ (setting aside the irrelevant ‘convention’ = ‘professional get-together’) are not events but enduring states of affairs like the conventions governing the meanings of words, the standards of politeness, etc. So ‘convention’ is a wrong translation; and ‘agreement’ is right. alienate: To alienate something that you own is to bring it about that you no longer own it; in brief, to give it away or sell it, arbitrary: It means ‘brought into existence by the decision of some person(s)’. It’s no part of the meaning here (as it is today) that the decision was frivolous or groundless. censorship: This translates Rousseau’s censure. It doesn’t refer to censorship as we know it today; censure didn’t have that meaning until the 19th century. Rousseau’s topic is a role that certain officials had in some periods of the Roman republic, namely as guardians of, and spokesmen for, the people’s mœurs (see below). They could be thought of as an institutionalising of the ‘court of public opinion’. On page 67 we see him stretching the original sense. compact, contract: These translate Rousseau’s pacte and contrat respectively. He seems to mean them as synonyms. constitution: In this work a thing’s ‘constitution’ is the sum of facts about how something is constituted, how its parts hang together and work together (so the constitution of a state is nothing like a document). Items credited with ‘constitutions’ are organisms and political entities; the mention on page 66 of the constitution of a people seems aberrant. magistrate: In this work, as in general in early modern times, a ‘magistrate’ is anyone with an official role in government. The magistracy is the set of all such officials, thought of as a single body. mœurs: The mœurs of a people include their morality, their basic customs, their attitudes and expectations about how people will behave, their ideas about what is decent. . . and so on. This word—rhyming approximately with ‘worse’—is left untranslated because there’s no good English equivalent to it. English speakers sometimes use it, for the sort of reason they have for sometimes using Schadenfreude. moral person: Something that isn’t literally person but is being regarded as one for some theoretical purpose. See for example pages 9 and 36. populace: Rousseau repeatedly speaks of a ‘people’ in the singular, and we can do that in English (‘The English—what a strange people!’); but it many cases this way of using ‘people’ sounds strained and peculiar, and this version takes refuge in ‘populace’. On page 4, for instance, that saves us from ‘In every generation the people was the master. . . ’. prince: As was common in his day, Rousseau uses ‘prince’ to stand for the chief of the government. This needn’t be a person with the rank of Prince; it needn’t be a person at all, because it could be a committee. sovereign: This translates souverain. As Rousseau makes clear on page 7, he uses this term as a label for the person or group of persons holding supreme power in a state. In a democracy, the whole people constitute a sovereign, and individual citizens are members of the sovereign. In Books 3 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau and 4 ‘sovereign’ is used for the legislator (or legislature) as distinct from the government = the executive. able’, rather more strongly than whatever it is that you and I mean by ‘wise’. subsistence: What is needed for survival—a minimum of food, drink, shelter etc. you, we: When this version has Rousseau speaking of what ‘you’ or ‘we’ may do, he has spoken of what ‘one’ may do. It is normal idiomatic French to use on = ‘one’ much oftener than we can use ‘one’ in English without sounding stilted (Fats Waller: ‘One never knows, do one?’). wise: An inevitable translation of sage, but the meaning in French carries ideas of ‘learned’, ‘scholarly’, ‘intellectually The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1 2. The first societies BOOK 1 This little treatise is salvaged from a much longer work that I abandoned long ago, having started it without thinking about whether I was capable of pulling it off. Of various bits that might be rescued from what I had written of that longer work, what I offer here is the most substantial and, it seems to me, the least unworthy of being published. None of the rest of it is. I plan to address this question: With men as they are and with laws as they could be, can there be in the civil order any sure and legitimate rule of administration? In tackling this I shall try always to unite •what right allows with •what interest demands, so that •justice and •utility don’t at any stage part company. I start on this without showing that the subject is important. You may want to challenge me: ‘So you want to write on politics—are you then a prince [see Glossary] or a legislator?’ I answer that I am neither, and that is why I write on politics. If I were a prince or a legislator I wouldn’t waste my time saying what should be done; I would do it, or keep quiet. As I was born a citizen of a free state, and am a member of its sovereign [see Glossary], my right to vote makes it my duty to study public affairs, however little influence my voice can have on them. Happily, when I think about governments I always find that my inquiries give me new reasons for loving the government of my own country! If I took into account nothing but force and what can be done by force, I would say: ‘As long as a people is constrained to obey, it does well to obey; as soon as it can shake off the yoke, it does even better to shake it off. ·If its right to do so is challenged, it can answer that·: it gets its liberty back by the same ‘right’—·namely, force·—that took it away in the first place. Any justification for taking it away equally justifies taking it back; and if there was no justification for its being taken away ·no justification for taking it back is called for·.’ But the social order ·isn’t to be understood in terms of force; it· is a sacred right on which all other rights are based. But it doesn’t come from nature, so it must be based on agreements. Before coming to that, though, I have to establish the truth of what I have been saying. 1. The subject of the first book The most ancient of all societies, and the only natural one, is the society of the family. Yet the children remain attached to the father only for as long as they need him for their preservation; as soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, this is something they do not •naturally but 2. The first societies Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Here’s one who thinks he is the master of others, yet he is more enslaved than they are. How did this change come about? I don’t know. What can make it legitimate? That’s a question that I think I can answer. 1 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1 3. The right of the strongest •voluntarily, and the family itself is then maintained only by agreement. This common liberty is an upshot of the nature of man. His first law is to provide for his own preservation, his first cares are those he owes to himself; and as soon as he can think for himself he is the sole judge of the right way to take care of himself, which makes him his own master. You could call the family the prime model of political societies: the ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the children; and all of them—·ruler, people, father, children·—because they were born free and equal don’t give up their liberty without getting something in return. The whole difference is that •in the family the father’s care for his children is repaid by his love for them, whereas •in the state the ruler’s care for the people under him is repaid not by love for them (which he doesn’t have!) but by the pleasure of being in charge. Grotius denies that all human power is established in favour of the governed, and cites slavery as a counterexample. His usual method of reasoning is to establish •right by •fact [meaning: . . . ‘to draw conclusions about what should be the case from premises about what is the case’]. Not the most logical of argument-patterns, but it’s one that is very favourable to tyrants. . . . .Throughout his book, Grotius seems to favour—as does Hobbes—the thesis that the human species is divided into so many herds of cattle, each with a ruler who keeps guard over them for the purpose of devouring them. Philo tells us that the Emperor Caligula reasoned thus: As a shepherd has a higher nature than his flock does, so also the shepherds of men, i.e. their rulers, have a higher nature than do the peoples under them; from which he inferred, reasonably enough, that either kings were gods or men were beasts. This reasoning of Caligula’s is on a par with that of Hobbes and Grotius. Aristotle, before any of them, had said that men are not naturally equal because some are born for slavery and others for command. Aristotle was right; but he mistook the effect for the cause. Every man born in slavery is born for slavery—nothing is more certain than that. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire to escape from them: they love their servitude, as Ulysses’ comrades loved their brutish condition ·when the goddess Circe turned them into pigs·. So if there are slaves by nature, that’s because there have been slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves, and their cowardice kept them as slaves. I have said nothing about King Adam; or about Emperor Noah, the father of three great monarchs who shared out the universe (like Saturn’s children, whom some scholars have recognised in them). [In Genesis 9 it is said that after the flood Noah’s three sons ruled the world.] I hope to be given credit for my moderation: as a direct descendant of one of these princes—perhaps of the eldest branch—I don’t know that a verification of titles wouldn’t show me to be the legitimate king of the human race! Anyway, Adam was undeniably sovereign of the world, as Robinson Crusoe was of his island, as long as he was its only inhabitant; and this empire had the advantage that the monarch, safe on his throne, had nothing to fear from rebellions, wars, or conspirators. 3. The right of the strongest The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master unless he transforms •strength into •right, and •obedience into •duty. Hence ‘the right of the strongest’—a phrase that one might think is meant ironically, but is actually laid down 2 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1 4. Slavery 4. Slavery as a basic truth. But will no-one ever explain this phrase? Force is a physical power; I don’t see what moral effect it can have. Giving way to force is something you have to do, not something you choose to do; ·or if you insist that choice comes into it·, it is at most an act of •prudence. In what sense can it be a •duty? Since no man has a •natural authority over his fellow, and •force creates no right, we are left with •agreements [see Glossary] as the basis for all legitimate authority among men. Grotius says: If an individual can alienate [see Glossary] his liberty and make himself the slave of a master, why couldn’t a whole people alienate its liberty and make itself subject to a king? This contains several ambiguous words that need to be explained, but let us confine ourselves to ‘alienate’. To alienate something is to give or sell it. Now, a man who becomes the slave of another does not give himself—he sells himself at the rock-bottom price of his subsistence [see Glossary]. But when a people sells itself what price is paid? ·Not their subsistence:· Far from providing his subjects with their subsistence, a king gets his own subsistence only from them. . . . Do subjects then give their persons on condition that the king takes their goods also? I fail to see what they have left to preserve. ‘The despot guarantees civic peace in the state’, you may say. Granted; but what do the people gain if •the wars his ambition brings down on them, •his insatiable greed, and •harassments by his ministers bring them more misery than they’d have suffered from their own dissensions ·if no monarchy had been established·? What do they gain if this peace is one of their miseries? You can live peacefully in a dungeon, but does that make it a good life? The Greeks imprisoned in the cave of the Cyclops lived there peacefully while waiting for their turn to be eaten. To say that a man gives himself ·to someone else, i.e. hands himself over· free, is to say something absurd and Suppose for a moment that this so-called ‘right ·of the strongest·’ exists. I maintain that we’ll get out of this nothing but a mass of inexplicable nonsense. If force makes right, then if you change the force you change the right (effects change when causes change!), so that when one force overcomes another, there’s a corresponding change in what is right. The moment it becomes possible to disobey •with impunity it becomes possible to disobey •legitimately. And because the strongest are always in the right, the only thing that matters is to work to become the strongest. Now, what sort of right is it that perishes when force fails? If force makes us obey, we can’t be morally obliged to obey; and if force doesn’t make us obey, then ·on the theory we are examining· we are under no obligation to do so. Clearly, the word ‘right’ adds nothing to force: in this context it doesn’t stand for anything. ‘Obey the powers that be.’ If this means submit to force, it is a good precept, but superfluous: I guarantee that it will never be violated! All power comes from God, I admit; but so does all sickness—are we then forbidden to send for the doctor? A robber confronts me at the edge of a wood: I am compelled to hand over my money, but is it the case that even if I could hold onto it I am morally obliged to hand it over? After all, the pistol he holds is also a power. Then let us agree that force doesn’t create right, and that legitimate powers are the only ones we are obliged to obey. Which brings us back to my original question. 3 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau inconceivable; such an act is null and illegitimate, simply because the man who does it is out of his mind. To say the same of a whole people is to suppose a people of madmen; and madness doesn’t create any right. Slavery mine; and it doesn’t make sense to speak of my right against myself. Grotius and company cite war as another source for the so-called right of slavery. The winner having (they say) the right to kill the loser, the latter can buy back his life at the price of his freedom; and this agreement is all the more legitimate in being to the advantage of both parties. Even if each man could alienate himself, he couldn’t alienate his children: they are born men, and born free; their liberty belongs to them, and no-one else has the right to dispose of it. While they are too young to decide for themselves, their father can, in their name, lay down conditions for their preservation and well-being; but he can’t make an irrevocable and unconditional gift of them; such a gift is contrary to the ends of nature, and exceeds the rights of paternity. So an arbitrary [see Glossary] government couldn’t be legitimate unless in every generation the populace [see Glossary] was the master who was in a position to accept or reject it; but then the government would no longer be arbitrary! But this supposed right to kill the loser is clearly not an upshot of the state of war. Men are not naturally one anothers’ enemies. [The next sentence is expanded in ways that the ·small dots· convention can’t easily handle.] Any natural relations amongst them must exist when they are living in their primitive independence without any government or social structure; but at that time they have no inter-relations that are stable enough to constitute either the state of peace or the state of war. War is constituted by a relation between things, not between persons; and because the state of war can’t arise out of simple personal relations but only out of thing-relations, there can’t be a private war (a war of man against man) in the state of nature, where there is no ownership, or in the state of society, where everything is under the authority of the laws. To renounce your liberty is to renounce •your status as a man, •your rights as a human being, and even •your duties as a human being. There can’t be any way of compensating someone who gives up everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all freedom from his will is to remove all morality from his actions. Finally, an ‘agreement’ to have absolute authority on one side and unlimited obedience on the other—what an empty and contradictory agreement that would have to be! Isn’t it clear that if we are entitled to take anything and everything from a person, we can’t be under any obligation to him? And isn’t that fact alone—the fact that there is no equivalence, nothing to be exchanged, between the two sides—enough to nullify the ‘agreement’? What right can my slave have against me? Everything that he has is mine; his right is 1 1 4. Individual combats, duels and encounters are acts that can’t constitute a state. As for the private wars that were authorised by Louis IX of France. . . ., they were abuses of feudal government, which was itself an absurd system if ever there was one—contrary to the principles of natural right and to all good government. So war is a relation not between man and man but between state and state, and individuals are enemies only accidentally, not as •men nor even as •citizens but as •soldiers; not as belonging to their country but as defenders of it.1 And The Romans, who understood and respected the right of war more than any other nation on earth were so scrupulous about this that a citizen wasn’t 4 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau the only enemies a state can have are other states; not men, because there can’t be a real settled relation between things as radically different as states and men. 1 4. Slavery kill an enemy except when he can’t make him a slave, so the right to enslave him can’t be derived from the right to kill him: it’s not fair dealing to make him spend his freedom so as to keep his life, over which the victor holds no right. Isn’t it clear that there’s a vicious circle in basing the right of life and death on the right of slavery, and the right of slavery on the right of life and death? Even if we assume this terrible right to kill everybody, I maintain that someone enslaved in war isn’t committed to do anything for his master except what he is compelled to do; and the same goes for a conquered people. [Rousseau’s point This principle squares with the established rules of all times and the constant practice of all civilised peoples. Declarations of war don’t give notice to •powers as much as to •their subjects. A foreigner—whether king, individual, or whole people—who robs, kills or detains the subjects ·of a country· without first declaring war on their prince is not an enemy but a bandit. When a full-scale war is going on, a prince is entitled to help himself to anything in the enemy country that belongs to the public, but if he is just he will respect the lives and goods of individuals—he will respect rights on which his own are based. The purpose of the war is to destroy the enemy state, so we [see Glossary] have a right to kill its defenders while they are bearing arms; but as soon as they lay down their weapons and surrender, they stop being enemies or instruments of the enemy and resume their status as simply men, and no-one has any right to take their lives. Sometimes it is possible to kill a state without killing any of its members; and a war doesn’t give any right that isn’t needed for the war to gain its objective. These principles are not those of Grotius: they aren’t based on the authority of poets, but are derived from the nature of things and are based on reason. here is that the enslaved individual or the conquered people doesn’t owe By taking an equivalent for his life, the winner hasn’t done him a favour; instead of killing him without profit, he has killed him usefully. He is indeed so far from getting any •authority over the slave in addition to his •power over him, that the two are still in a state of war towards one another: their master/slave relation comes from that, and this enforcement of a right of war doesn’t imply that there has been a peace-treaty! They have reached an agreement; but this agreement, far from ending the state of war, presupposes its continuance. Whatever angle we look at it from, therefore, the ‘right of slavery’ is null and void—not only as illegitimate but also as absurd and meaningless. The words ‘slave’ and ‘right’ contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. It will always be crazy to say to a man, or to a people: ‘I make an agreement with you wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I shall keep it as long as I like, and you will keep it as long as I like.’ the conqueror anything.] What about the ‘right of conquest’? The only basis for that is ‘the law of the strongest’! If war doesn’t give the winner the right to massacre the conquered peoples, you can’t cite that right—a ‘right’ that doesn’t exist—as a basis for a right to enslave those peoples. No-one has a right to allowed to serve as a volunteer without explicitly agreeing to serve against such-and-such a named enemy. [Rousseau throws in an anecdote about a soldier whose military oath had to be renewed because etc. He continues:] I know that the siege of Clusium and other isolated events can be cited against me; but I’m talking ·not about individual episodes, but· about laws and customs. The Romans obeyed their laws more than any other people, and they had better laws than any other people. 5 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 5. We must always go back to a first agreement 1 6. The social compact 6. The social compact Let us take it that men have reached the point at which the obstacles to their survival in the state of nature overpower each individual’s resources for maintaining himself in that state. So this primitive condition can’t go on; the human race will perish unless it changes its manner of existence. Now, men can’t create new forces; they can only •bring together ones that already exist, and •steer them. So their only way to preserve themselves is to unite a number of forces so that they are jointly powerful enough to deal with the obstacles. They have to bring these forces into play in such a way that they act together in a single thrust. For forces to add up in this way, many people have to work together. But each man’s force and liberty are what he chiefly needs for his own survival; so how can he put them into this collective effort without harming his own interests and neglecting the care he owes to himself? This difficulty, in the version of it that arises for my present subject, can be put like this: Find a form of association that will bring the whole common force to bear on defending and protecting each associate’s person and goods, doing this in such a way that each of them, while uniting himself with all, still obeys only himself and remains as free as before.’ There’s the basic problem that is solved by the social contract. [For ‘agreement’ see Glossary.] Even if I granted everything that I have refuted up to here, the supporters of despotism would be no better off. Ruling a society will always be a quite different thing from subduing a multitude. If any number of scattered individuals were successively enslaved by one man, all I can see there is a master and his slaves, and certainly not a people and its ruler. It’s a •cluster, if you will, but not an •association; there’s no public good there, and no body politic. This man may have enslaved half the world but he is still only an individual; his interest, apart from that of others, is never anything but a purely private interest. When this man dies, the empire he leaves behind him will remains scattered and without unity, like an oak that falls into a fire and dissolves into a heap of ashes when the fire has consumed it. A people, says Grotius, can give itself to a king; so he must hold that a people is a people before it gives itself to a king. This gift is itself a civic act, which has to arise from public deliberation. Before we examine (2) the act by which a people gives itself to a king, let’s examine (1) the act by which the people became a people; for (1) must occur before (2), so that (1) is the true foundation of society. [This is the work’s first occurrence of that phrase.] Indeed, if there were no prior agreement, what would give the minority any obligation to submit to the choice of the majority (unless the election was unanimous)? A hundred men want to have a master; what gives them the right to vote on behalf of ten who don’t? The law of majority voting is itself something established by agreement, and it presupposes that on at least one occasion there was a unanimous vote. The clauses of this contract are so settled by the nature of the act that the slightest change would make them null and void; so that although they may never have been explicitly stated, they are everywhere the same and everywhere tacitly accepted and recognised, until the social compact [see Glossary] is violated and each individual regains his •original 6 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau rights and resumes his •natural liberty, while losing the liberty-by-agreement which had been his reason for renouncing •them. Properly understood, these clauses come down to one— the total alienation [see Glossary] of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community. ·This may seem drastic, but three features of it make it reasonable·. (i) Because each individual gives himself entirely, what is happening here for any one individual is the same as what is happening for each of the others, and, because this is so, no-one has any interest in making things tougher for everyone but himself. (ii) Because the alienation is made without reserve, ·i.e. without anything being held back·, the union is as complete as it can be, and no associate has anything more to demand. ·To see why the association has to be done in this way, consider· what the situation would be if the individuals retained certain rights. In the absence of any superior to decide issues about this, each individual would be his own judge in the first case that came up, and this would lead him to ask to be his own judge across the board; this would continue the state of nature, and the association would necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical. (iii) Each man in giving himself to everyone gives himself to no-one; and •the right over himself that the others get is matched by •the right that he gets over each of them. So he gains as much as he loses, and also gains extra force for the 2 1 6. The social compact preservation of what he has. Filtering out the inessentials, we’ll find that the social compact comes down to this: ’Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.’ [This is the first occurrence in this work of the phrase ‘the general will’.] This act of association instantly replaces •the individualperson status of each contracting party by •a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly has voix [= ‘voices’ or ‘votes’]; and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life and its will. This public person that is formed by the union of all the other persons used to be called a ‘city’,2 and these days is called a ‘republic’ or a ‘body politic’. Its members call it •a ‘state’ when thinking of it as passive, •a ‘sovereign’ when thinking of it as active, and •a ‘power’ when setting it alongside others of the same kind. Those who are associated in it are collectively called ‘a people’, and are separately called ‘citizens’ (as sharing in the sovereign power) and ‘subjects’ (as being under the state’s laws. But these terms are often muddled and confused with one another: it is enough to know how to distinguish them when they are being used with precision. The real meaning of ‘city’ has been almost wholly lost in modern times; most people mistake a town for a city, and a townsman for a citizen. They don’t know that houses make a town, but citizens a city. . . . I have never read of the title ‘citizens’ being given to the subjects of any prince, not even the ancient Macedonians or the English of today, though they are nearer liberty than anyone else. Only the French casually adopt the label ‘citizens’; that’s because they have no idea of its real meaning (you can see that from their dictionaries!). . . . They think of the name as expressing •a virtue rather than •a right. When Bodin was trying to talk about our citizens and our townsmen, he blundered badly by confusing these two classes with one another. M. d’Alembert avoided that error in his article on Geneva, clearly distinguishing the four orders of men (or even five, counting mere foreigners) who dwell in our town, of which only two make up the republic. I don’t know of any other French writer who has understood the real meaning of the word ‘citizen’. 7 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 7. The sovereign 1 7. The sovereign But the body politic, i.e. the sovereign, owes its very existence to the sanctity of •the contract; so it can never commit itself, even to another state, to do anything that conflicts with •that original act—e.g. to alienate any part of itself, or to submit to another sovereign. ·I’m saying not that the sovereign ought not to do such a thing, but that it can’t do so·: violation of the act ·of contract-making· by which it exists would be self-annihilation; and nothing can be created by something that has gone out of existence! As soon as this multitude is united into one body in this way, any offence against one of the members is an attack on the body, and any offence against the body will be resented by the members. Thus, the two contracting parties—the individual member and the body politic—are obliged by duty and by self-interest to give each other help. . . . Now, because the sovereign is made out of nothing but its constituent individuals, it doesn’t and can’t have any interest contrary to theirs; so there’s no need for it to provide its subjects with guarantee ·of treating them well·, because •the body can’t possibly wish to hurt all its members, and—as we’ll see later on—•it can’t hurt any individual one of them either. The sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, is always what it ought to be. But the situation is different with respect to the relation of the subjects to the sovereign: despite their common interest, the sovereign would have no security that the subjects would behave as they have committed themselves to behaving unless it found some way to be assured of their fidelity. The fact is that each individual •as a man can have a particular will that doesn’t fit, and even conflicts with, the general will that he has •as a citizen. His individual self-interest may speak to him quite differently from how the common interest does. He looks at the situation in this way: This formula shows us that •the act of association involves a two-way commitment between the public and the individuals ·belonging to it·, and •that each individual, in making a contract with himself (so to speak), acquires two commitments: (a) as a member of the state he has a commitment to the sovereign, and (b) as a member of the sovereign [see Glossary] he has a commitment to each of the individuals, he being one of them. There is a maxim of civil law that no-one is bound by undertakings he has made to himself, but that doesn’t apply here, because the present topic is incurring an obligation to •a whole of which one is a part, and that is very different from incurring an obligation to •oneself. The proceeding I have been describing can’t give the sovereign a commitment to itself. As I have just pointed out, an individual subject can have a commitment to himself in this sense: as an individual he has a commitment to the sovereign, and as a member of the sovereign he has a commitment to himself. But the sovereign can’t have a commitment to itself; it doesn’t have two distinct roles ·such that a commitment could go from it in one role and towards it in the other·. For the sovereign to have a commitment to itself would be like an individual person having a commitment to himself; it just isn’t possible. And so it is against the nature of the body politic for the sovereign to impose on itself a law that it can’t infringe: there isn’t and can’t be any kind of basic law that is binding on the body of the people—even the social contract itself can’t do that. This doesn’t mean that the body politic can’t enter into commitments with others [i.e. with other states]. . . . It can do that, because in relation to what is external to it—·i.e. in relation to other states or sovereigns·—the sovereign is just a simple being, an individual. 8 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1 8. The civil state that they formerly lacked. The voice of duty has taken over from physical impulses and ·a sense of what is· right has take over from appetite; and now—only now—the man who has until now considered only himself finds himself forced to act on different principles and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. In this ·civil· state he is deprived of many advantages that he got from nature, but he gets enormous benefits in return—his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas are extended, his feelings ennobled, and his whole soul uplifted. All this happens to such an extent that if the abuses of this new condition didn’t often pull him down to something lower than he was in •the state of nature, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment that took him from •it for ever, and out of a dull and limited animal made a thinking being, a man. Let us get a statement of profit and loss in terms that make it easy to compare the two sides. What man loses by the social contract is •his natural liberty and •an unrestricted right to anything he wants and can get. What he gains •civil liberty and •the ownership of everything he possesses. If we’re to weigh these up accurately, we must distinguish •natural liberty, which is limited only by the individual’s powers, from •civil liberty, which is limited by the general will. And we must distinguish •possession, which is merely the effect of force or the principle of ‘first come, first served’, from •property, which can only be based on a positive title. We could add on the ‘profit’ side the fact that in the civil state a man acquires moral liberty, which alone makes him truly ’I have an absolute and naturally independent existence; ·I’m not something that exists only because certain items have come together in an association·. So what I am said to ‘owe’ to the common cause—·i.e. to the body politic or sovereign whose existence is in that way dependent on the conduct of its members·— is really a gift, a hand-out; if I withhold it, that won’t harm anyone else as much as it will benefit me. As for the ‘moral person’ that constitutes the state, that’s not a man but a mere mental construct.’ So he may wish to enjoy the rights of citizenship without being ready to fulfill the duties of a subject; and if that went on for long enough it would destroy the body politic. To protect the social compact from being a mere empty formula, therefore, it silently includes the undertaking that anyone who refuses to obey the general will is to be compelled to do so by the whole body. This single item in the compact can give power to all the other items. It means nothing less than that each individual will be forced to be free. ·It’s obvious how forcing comes into this, but. . . to be free? Yes·, because this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence, ·i.e. secures him against being taken by anyone or anything else·. This is the key to the working of the political machine; it alone legitimises civil commitments which would otherwise be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to frightful abuses. 8. The civil state This passage from •the state of nature to •the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man: the role that instinct used to play in his conduct is now taken over by ·a sense of· justice, and his actions now have a moral aspect 9 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau master of himself; for the drive of sheer appetite is •slavery, while obedience to a law that we prescribe to ourselves is •liberty. But I have said too much about this in other places; and the philosophical meaning of the word ‘liberty’ doesn’t concern us here. 1 9. Real estate something his property excludes him from everything else. Having acquired share, he ought to limit himself to that, and can’t have any further claim on the community. That’s why the first-occupier right, which is so weak in the state of nature, claims the respect of every man in civil society. What a man respects in this right is not so much •what belongs to someone else as •what doesn’t belong to him. In general, to authorize a first occupier’s right over any bit of ground three conditions must be satisfied: •the ground wasn’t already occupied by someone else; •he occupies only as much as he needs for his subsistence; •he takes possession of this ground not by an empty ceremony but by labour and cultivation. His work on the land is the only sign of ownership that others should respect if he doesn’t have a legal title. In allowing the right of first occupancy on condition that the land was needed and was worked on, aren’t we stretching that right as far as it can go? Could such a right be left with no limits or restrictions? To claim to be the master of a plot of common ground will it be enough merely to set foot on it? If a man has the strength to expel others for a moment, does that deprive them of any right to return? If a man or a people seize an immense territory and shut out the rest of the world, won’t this be merely a grab that ought to be punished? ·The answer is surely ‘yes’·, because such an act steals from others the living-space and means of subsistence that nature gave them in common. When Balboa stood on the sea-shore and took possession of the south seas and the whole of South America in the name of the Spanish crown, was that enough to dispossess all their actual inhabitants and to shut out from those territories all the princes of the world? If so, there’s no need for all these ceremonies; the Catholic King can take possession of the whole universe all 9. Real estate At the moment when the community comes into existence, each of its members gives himself to it—himself just as he is, with any powers that he has, including all his possessions. It is not the case that this transfer of all his goods changes them from being •possessions in his hands to being •property in the hands of the sovereign; but because the city’s powers are incomparably greater than any individual’s, public possession is stronger and more irrevocable, without being any more legitimate. [The rest of this paragraph is expanded in ways that the ·small dots· convention can’t easily signify.] Actually, from the point of view of the members of this state its possession of each member’s goods [is legitimate, because the state is the master of all their goods by the social contract which is the basis of all rights within the state. But it’s not legitimate from the point of view of a foreigner, because from that point of view this state has its possessions only through the ‘first come, first served’ principle as applied to its members and then passed on from them to the state. Of the two ways of getting a right to something in the state of nature, namely (i) being the first occupier of it, and (ii) being the strongest, (i) provides a right—‘·first come, first served·’—that is more real than (ii) does; but it doesn’t become a true right until property-rights are established. Every man has naturally a right to everything he needs; but the positive act that makes 10 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau Real estate public good has been entrusted, and •having their rights respected by all the state’s members and maintained against foreign aggression by all its forces, have made a transfer that benefits both the public and still more themselves, thereby acquiring (as it were) everything that they gave up. This paradox is easily explained by distinguishing the sovereign’s right from the owner’s rights over the same estate—as we shall see later on. at once, tacking on a rider excluding from his claim any territories that were already possessed by other princes! We can imagine •how adjacent pieces of land belonging to individuals become, when they are combined, public territory, and •how the right of sovereignty over the subjects comes to be extended to being a right over their real estate. This makes the land-owners even more dependent ·on the sovereign·; ·they have more to lose if things go wrong between them and the sovereign; and· this is a guarantee of their fidelity. The advantage of this apparently wasn’t felt by ancient monarchs, who called themselves kings of the Persians, the Scythians, or the Macedonians, apparently regarding themselves as rulers of men rather than as masters of a country. Today’s kings are cleverer: they call themselves kings of France, of Spain, of England and so on. Holding the land in this way, they are quite confident of holding the inhabitants. This alienation in which individuals transfer their goods to the community has a special feature, namely that far from •depriving the individuals of their goods it •assures them of legitimate possession, changing •‘I have taken possession of this (somehow)’ into ‘I have a genuine right to this’, and •’I have the enjoyment of this’ into ‘I own this’. Thus the possessors, •in their role as those to whom the 3 1 9. It can also happen that men •begin to unite before they possess anything, •subsequently occupy a tract of land that is enough for them all, and then •enjoy it in common, or share it out among themselves (either equally or in proportions fixed by the sovereign). But however the acquisition is made, each individual’s right to his own estate is always subordinate to the community’s right over everyone’s estate; without this, the social tie would be fragile and the exercise of sovereignty would be feeble. To bring this chapter and this book to an end, I’ll remark on a fact that should be the basis for any social system, namely: The basic compact doesn’t destroy natural inequality; rather, it replaces •such physical inequalities as nature may have set up between men by •an equality that is moral and legitimate, so that men who may be unequal in strength or intelligence become equal by agreement and legal right.3 Under bad governments, this equality is only apparent and illusory: all it does is to keep the pauper in his poverty and the rich man in the position he has usurped. Laws in fact are always useful to those who have possessions and harmful to those who don’t; from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when everyone has something and no-one has too much. 11 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 2 2. Sovereignty is indivisible BOOK 2 1. Sovereignty is inalienable because it’s absurd for the will to bind itself for the future, and no will is obliged to consent to anything that isn’t for the good of the being whose will it is. If then the populace promises simply to obey, by that very act it dissolves itself and loses what makes it a people; the moment a master exists, there is no longer a sovereign, and from that moment the body politic has ceased to exist. This isn’t to deny that rulers’ commands can count as general wills, if the sovereign is free to oppose them and doesn’t do so. In such a case, universal silence should be taken to show the people’s consent. I’ll explain this fully later on. The first and most important consequence of the principles I have laid down is that the directing of the state in the light of the object for which it was instituted, i.e. the common good, must be done by the general will. The •clashing of particular interests made it •necessary to establish a society, and the •agreement of those same interests made it •possible to do so. It’s the common element in these different interests that forms the social tie; and if there were there nothing that they all had in common, no society could exist. It is solely by this common interest that every society should be governed. I hold then that sovereignty, being nothing less than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated [see Glossary], and that the sovereign, which is nothing but a collective being, can’t be represented except by itself: the power indeed may be transmitted, but not the will. Perhaps a particular will could agree on some point with the general will, but at least it’s impossible for such an agreement to be lasting and constant. Why? Because it’s of the very nature of a particular will to tend towards •favouritism, be •partial [i.e. to favour some people over others], whereas the general will tends towards •equality. It is even more impossible to have any guarantee of this agreement; for even if it did always exist that would be the effect not of skill but of chance. The sovereign may indeed say: ‘Right now I will what that man wills (or at least what he says he wills)’, but it can’t say ’What that man wills tomorrow, I too shall will’, 4 2. Sovereignty is indivisible For the same reason that makes it inalienable, sovereignty is indivisible. Here is why. Either will (a) is general4 or it (b) isn’t; it is the will either of (a) the body of the people or of (b) only a part of it. When it is declared, then, either (a) it is an act of sovereignty and constitutes law, or (b) it is merely a particular will or the rest of the sentence: un acte de magistrature ; c’est un décret tout au plus. which literally means: an act of magistracy—at the most a decree. what Rousseau was getting at: regulations laid down by high-level bureaucrats, not basic laws issuing from the legislature, the sovereign. [Re ‘magistracy’, see Glossary.] But our political theorists, unable to divide sovereignty on To be general, a will need not always be unanimous; but every vote must be counted: any exclusion is a breach of generality. 12 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau the basis of its •source, divide it according to its •object. They divide it into •force and will, •legislative power and executive power, •rights of taxation, justice and war, •internal affairs and foreign relations. Sometimes they run these sections together and sometimes they separate them; they turn the sovereign into a fantastic being composed of several connected pieces: it is as if they were making man of several bodies, one with eyes, one with arms, another with feet, and each with nothing else! We’re told that the jugglers of Japan dismember a child before the eyes of the spectators; then they throw the pieces into the air one after another, and the child falls down alive and whole. The conjuring tricks of our political theorists are pretty much like that: having dismembered the body politic by a huckster’s trick they then re-asssemble it. . . somehow! This error comes from a failure to think precisely about the sovereign authority, regarding as different •parts of it what are really just different •emanations from it. 2 2. Sovereignty is indivisible If we track the other divisions in the same way, we would find that whenever anyone takes sovereignty to be divided there is a mistake: the rights that are taken as being part of sovereignty are really all subordinate, and always presuppose the existence of supreme wills that they are merely applying. This lack of exactness has thrown a cloud of obscurity over the conclusions of writers on political right who have laid down principles on the basis of which to pass judgment on the respective rights of kings and peoples. When I try to say how much obscurity, words fail me! Everyone can see in Grotius’s work (Book 1 chapters 3 and 4) how the learned man and his translator, Barbeyrac, entangle and confuse themselves with in their own sophistries, for fear of saying too little or too much of what they think, and so offending the interests they have to placate. Grotius, a refugee in France, discontented with his own country [Holland], and wanting to pay court to Louis XIII, to whom his book is dedicated, will go to any lengths to strip the peoples of all their rights and clothe kings in them with every conceivable decoration. This would also have been much to the taste of Barbeyrac, who dedicated his translation to George I of England. But unfortunately ·for him· the expulsion of James II, which Barbeyrac called his ‘abdication’, compelled him to be on his guard, to shuffle and switch positions, in order to avoid making William ·of Orange, who succeeded James on the throne· a usurper. If these two writers had adopted the true principles, all ·their· difficulties would have been removed, and they would have been always consistent; but they’d have told the truth sadly, and they wouldn’t have been paying court to anyone except the people. Well, the truth is no road to fortune, and the populace doesn’t give out ambassadorships, university chairs, or pensions. [Rousseau seems to mean that they are just different actions that are performed under the authority of the sovereign. In distinguishing (a) parts of the sovereign authority from (b) actions performed not by the sovereign authority but by subordinate governmental agencies, he may be distinguishing parts of x from actions of x, or distinguishing the sovereign’s actions from those of subordinate agencies. In fact he seems to be thinking only of the second of these distinctions. Thus, for example, the acts of declaring war and making peace have been regarded as acts of sovereignty, but they aren’t. None of them are laws; each of them simply applies a law to a particular case, involving a decision ·not about what the law is to be, but only· about how the law applies in this case. This will be clear when the idea attached to the word ‘law’ has been fixed. Read on.] 13 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 3. Can the general will be wrong? 2 4. The limits of the sovereign power general will of its members—is still a particular [particulière] will so far as the state is concerned; so that it can then be said that as many votes as there are men is replaced by as many votes as there are associations. The particular wills become less numerous and give a less general result. And when one of these associations is so great as to prevail over all the rest, the result is no longer a sum of small particular wills but a single particular will; and then there is no longer a general will, and the opinion that prevails is purely particular [particulier ]. If the general will is to emerge clearly it’s important that there should be no partial society within the state, and that each citizen should think only his own thoughts:6 which was indeed the sublime and unique system established by the great Lycurgus. And if there are partial societies, it’s best to have as many as possible and to prevent them from becoming unequal, as was done by Solon, Numa and Servius. These precautions are the only ones that can ensure that the general will is always enlightened and that the populace is never in error. It follows from all this that the general will is always in the right and always works for the public good; but it doesn’t follow that the people’s deliberations are always equally correct. Our will is always for our own good, but we don’t always see what that is; the populace is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and then—but only then—it seems to will something bad. [The French for Rousseau’s endorsement of the general will is toujours droite, which has been translated as ‘always right’ and also as ‘always within its rights’; the matter is controversial. The rendering ‘in the right’—here and twice more—is a cowardly compromise.] The •will of all is very different from the •general will; the latter looks only to the common interest, while the former looks to private interest and is no more than a sum of particular wills: but remove from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel one another5 and what is left of the particular wills adds up to constitute the general will. [In that sentence, and four times in the next paragraph, ‘particular will(s)’ translates Rousseau’s différence(s)’, which in this one context he uses in an oddly non-relational way.] 4. The limits of the sovereign power If the populace held its deliberations (on the basis of adequate information) without the citizens communicating with one another, what emerged from all the little particular wills would always be the general will, and the decision would always be good. But when plots and deals lead to the formation of •partial associations at the expense of •the big association, the will of each of these associations—the 5 6 If the state or city is nothing but a moral person whose life consists in the union of its parts, and if its most important concern is for its own preservation, it must have a universal force to move and place each part in the way that is most advantageous to the whole. Just as nature gives each man absolute power over all his members, the social compact ‘Every interest’, says the Marquis d’Argenson, ‘has different principles. What brings two particular interests into agreement is their ·shared· opposition to a third.’ He could have added that what brings all interests into agreement is their ·shared· opposition to each. If individual interests didn’t differ from one another, the common interest would have nothing to bump up against, and so it would hardly be felt. . . . ‘In fact,’ says Machiavelli, ‘some divisions are harmful to a republic and some are advantageous. Those that stir up sects and parties are harmful; those attended by neither are advantageous. So, since the founder of a Republic can’t help enmities arising, he ought at least to prevent them from growing into sects’ (History of Florence, Book 7). 14 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives the body politic absolute power over all its members; and I repeat that it is this power which, under the direction of the general will, is called ‘sovereignty’. But as well as the public person, we have to consider the private persons who compose it, and whose life and liberty are naturally independent of it. So now there’s the matter of clearly distinguishing •the citizens’ rights from the sovereign’s,7 and •the citizens’ duties as subjects from their natural rights as men. Agreed: each man alienates by the social compact only the part of his powers, goods and liberty that it is important for the community to control. But something else should also be agreed: the sovereign is sole judge of what is important. Any service a citizen can give to the state should be performed as soon as the sovereign demands it; but the sovereign on its side can’t impose upon its subjects any fetters that are useless to the community. Indeed it can’t even want to do so, because ·there’s no reason for it to want to, and· ‘Nothing can happen without a cause’ applies under the law of reason as much as it does under the law of nature. The undertakings that bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they go both ways; and their nature is such that in fulfilling them we can’t work for others without working for ourselves. Why is the general will always in the right, and why do •all continually will the happiness of •each? It can only be because there’s not a man who doesn’t think of ‘each’ as meaning him, and considers himself in voting for all? This shows that equality of rights, and the idea of justice arising from it, originate in •the preference each man gives to himself, and accordingly •in human nature. It shows •that the general will, to be really general, must be 7 2 4. The limits of the sovereign power general in its object as well as its essence; i.e. must come from all and apply to all; and •that when it is directed to some particular and determinate object it loses its natural rightness, because in such a case we—·the joint owners of the general will·—are judging of something foreign to us, so that we don’t have any genuine standards to guide us. Indeed, as soon as a question of particular fact or right arises in some context that hasn’t already been regulated by a general agreement, the matter becomes contentious. It is a case—·like a trial in a court of law·—where the individuals concerned are on one side and the public are on the other; but I can’t see what law should be followed or what judge should decide. Couldn’t we ask the general will for an explicit decision on this matter? That is an absurd proposal: the deliverance of the general will can only be the conclusion of one of the sides and will therefore be seen by the other as merely an external and particular will that is subject to error and has on this occasion fallen into injustice. Thus, just as a particular will can’t represent the general will, the general will. . . .—just because it is general—can’t pronounce on a particular man or fact. When for instance the Athenian populace nominated or displaced its rulers, decreeing honours for one and penalties for another, and by hosts of particular decrees exercised all the functions of government indiscriminately, it no longer had a general will in the strict sense; it was acting no longer as sovereign, but as magistrate [see Glossary]. This will seem contrary to current views; but you should give me time to expound my own. So you can see that what makes the will general is less the number of voices than the common interest uniting them; for under this system each person necessarily submits to Attentive readers, please don’t rush in with the charge that I am contradicting myself. The poverty of the language has forced this on me; but wait and see. 15 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau the conditions he imposes on others; and this admirable alignment of •interest with •justice gives to the common deliberations a quality of fairness, evenness of balance, which is visibly absent from the discussion of any particular issue, in the absence of a common interest that would bring unity. . . . From whatever direction we approach our principle, we always reach the same conclusion: the social compact creates an equality among the citizens so that they all commit themselves to observe the same conditions and should all have the same rights. Thus, from the very nature of the compact, every act of sovereignty—i.e. every authentic act of the general will—obliges or favours all the citizens equally; so that the sovereign recognises only the body of the nation and doesn’t distinguish among the individuals of whom it is made up. Then what strictly speaking is an act of sovereignty? It’s not an agreement between a superior and an inferior, but an agreement between the body and each of its members—an agreement that is •legitimate, because it is based on the social contract, •equitable, because everyone takes part in it, •useful, because the only object it can have is the general good, and • stable, because guaranteed by the public force and the supreme power. So long as the subjects have to submit only to agreements of this sort, they don’t obey anyone—only their own will; and to ask how far the respective rights of the sovereign and the citizens extend is to ask ·not two questions but only one, namely·: Up to what point can the citizens make commitments to themselves, each to all and all to each? This shows •that the sovereign power—utterly absolute, sacred and inviolable as it is—doesn’t and can’t cross the boundaries set by general agreements, and •that every man 2 4. The limits of the sovereign power can do what he likes with any goods and liberty that these agreements leave him; so that it is never right for the sovereign to burden one subject more heavily than another, because that involves a particular decision and ·therefore· isn’t within the range of the sovereign’s legitimate activity. Once these distinctions are admitted, it is ·seen to be· false that the social contract involves any real renunciation on the part of the individuals; so false that the situation that the contract puts them into is really preferable to the one they were in before. Instead of an alienation [see Glossary], they have made an advantageous exchange, trading in •an uncertain and precarious way of living for •one that is better and more secure; •natural independence for •liberty, •the power to harm others for •security for themselves, and •their strength, which others might overcome, for •a right that social union makes invincible. Even their life, which they have dedicated to the state, is constantly protected by it; and when they risk it in the state’s defence, aren’t they just giving back what they have received from it? What are they doing that they wouldn’t do oftener and more dangerously in the state of nature, in which they would inevitably have to risk their lives in battles in defence of their means of survival? Everyone does indeed have to fight when his country needs him; but then no-one ever has to fight for himself. We may have to run certain risks on behalf of the source of our security; the alternative is to lose our security and run greater risks on behalf of ourselves; haven’t we profited by this exchange? 16 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 5. The right of life and death 2 5. The right of life and death survival is inconsistent with his survival, and one of the two must die; when we put the guilty to death, we’re doing this not so much to a citizen as to an enemy. He has broken the social treaty—the investigation and trial show this, and the judgment declares it—so he is no longer a member of the state. But he has recognised himself as a member if only by living there; so he must be lopped off by exile, as a violator of the compact, or by death, as a public enemy. Such an enemy isn’t a •moral person [see Glossary], he’s a •man; and in such a case the right of war is to kill the vanquished. You’ll say ‘But the condemnation of a criminal is a particular act ·and is therefore, according to your chapter 4 of this Part, not something that the sovereign can do·. Right! But this condemnation is not something the sovereign does; it’s a right the sovereign that can confer without being able itself to exert it. All my ideas hang together, but I can’t expound them all at once. We may add that frequent punishments [supplices = ‘punishments involving death or torture’] are always a sign that the government is weak or lazy. Every wrong-doer could be turned to some good. There’s no right to put to death, even for the sake of making an example, anyone who could safely be left alive. The right of pardoning a guilty man, or letting him off from a penalty imposed by the law and pronounced by the judge, belongs only to the authority that is above the judge and the law, i.e. the sovereign; and even its right in this matter is far from clear, and it’s hardly ever called for. A well-governed state has few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare: it’s easier to get away with crimes when there are a great many of them and the state is terminally ill. In the Roman republic This question has been raised: ‘Given that individuals have no right to dispose of their own lives, how can they give that right to the sovereign, transferring something that they don’t possess?’ This looks hard to answer only because it is wrongly stated. Every man has a right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. A man who jumps from a high window to escape from a fire—is he ever said to be guilty of suicide? Has that crime been alleged against anyone perishes in a storm that he knew, when he went on board, had some probability of occurring? The social treaty aims for the preservation of the contracting parties. He who wills •the end also wills •the means, and the means must involve some risks, and even some losses. Someone who is willing to save •his life at others’ expense should also be ready to give •it up for their sake, when there is a need for this. Now, the citizen is no longer the judge of the risks that the law wants him to run, and when the prince says to him: ‘It is expedient for the state that you should die’, he ought to die. Why? Because his life is no longer merely a natural good, but is a gift made conditionally by the state; ·it is conditional on his always meeting the state’s demands, and· it’s only on that condition that he has been living in security up to the present. The death-penalty for criminals can be seen in much the same light: it is in order to save ourselves from assassins that we consent to die if we become assassins. In this treaty—·this social contract·—so far from disposing of our own lives, we think only of securing them; and it isn’t to be assumed that any of the parties then expects to get himself hanged! Every criminal by attacking social rights becomes a rebel and a traitor to his country; by violating its laws he stops being a member of it—he even makes war on it. The state’s 17 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau neither the senate nor the consuls ever offered to pardon ·anyone·; nor did the populace, though it sometimes revoked its own decision. Frequent pardons are an announcement that before long crime will pay, and anyone can see where that leads. But I feel my heart protesting and restraining my pen; let us leave these questions to the just man who has never offended and would himself never stand in need of pardon! 2 6. The law someone tells us what a law of nature is, that won’t bring us any nearer to knowing what a law of the state is. I have already said [page 15] that there is no general will directed to a particular object. [Rousseau’s proof of that, which follows, is severely compressed. The present version eases it out in ways that the ·small dots· convention can’t easily signify.] We are to suppose that the general will of populace x dictates that (for example) individual person y is to be given a pension. Either y is a member of x or he isn’t. (i) If he isn’t, then x’s will doesn’t count as a general will in relation to him—it may have absolutely nothing to do with y’s own will. (ii) If y is a member of x, i.e. a part of x, then x’s will that y receive a pension is a relation between whole and part that makes them two separate beings, •x-without-y and •y. But x-without-y isn’t the whole; and while this relation persists it’s a relation between two unequal parts; and it follows that the will of one is no longer in any respect general in relation to the other. But when the whole people decrees for the whole people, it is ·not looking outside itself, but· considering only itself; and if a relation is then formed, it is ·not between two separate objects, but only· between two aspects of a single entire object, with no need to split it into two parts. In that case the matter about which the decree is made is, like the decreeing will, general. This act is what I call a law. When I say that the object of laws is always general, I mean that law considers subjects collectively and considers kinds or actions, never a particular person or action. Thus the law can decree that there shall be privileges, but it can’t name anyone who is to get them. It can set up different classes of citizens, and even stipulate the qualifications for belonging to each of these classes, but it can’t pick out any individuals as belonging to this or that class. It can establish a monarchy with hereditary succession, but it can’t choose 6. The law By the social compact we have given the body politic •existence and •life; now it is up to legislation to give it •movement and •will. The basic act that forms the body and pulls it together does nothing to settle what it must do in order to survive. It’s the nature of things that makes an item good and in conformity with order—human agreements don’t come into it. All justice comes from God, who is its sole source; but if we knew how to draw it from that high source we wouldn’t need government or laws! No doubt there is a universal justice emanating from reason alone, but this justice can be admitted among us only if it is mutual. In the absence of natural sanctions. . . .the laws of justice are ineffective among men. . . . Agreements and laws are needed to join rights to duties and relate justice to its object. In the state of nature where everything is common, I don’t owe anything to someone to whom I haven’t promised anything; I recognise as belonging to others only what is of no use to me. It’s not like that in the state of society, where all rights are fixed by law. But what, when we come down to it, is a law? As long as we settle for attaching only metaphysical ideas to the word, we’ll go on arguing without understanding one another. If 18 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau a king or name a royal family. In short, any action that has an individual object falls outside the scope of the legislative power. We see at once that on this account of things certain questions can be laid aside. ‘Whose business it is to make laws?’ (They are acts of the general will.) ‘Is the prince is above the law? (·No·, because he is a member of the state.) ‘Can the law be unjust?’ (·No·, because nothing is unjust towards itself.) ‘How can we be both •free and •subject to the laws? (·There’s no problem about this·, because the laws are nothing but records of our volitions.) We see further that because the law unites universality of will with universality of object, nothing that a man—any man—commands on his own initiative can be a law. That holds even for the sovereign: what he or it commands with regard to a particular matter is not a law but a decree, an act not of sovereignty but of magistracy. So I give the name ‘republic’ to any state governed by laws, whatever form its administration takes; for only when the laws govern does the public interest govern, and the public thing is something real. [Rousseau expected his readers to recognize The law foresight to formulate and announce its acts in advance? or how is it to announce them in the hour of need? How can a blind multitude, which often doesn’t know what it wills because it rarely knows what is good for it, carry out for itself such a great and difficult enterprise as a system of legislation? The populace left to itself always wills the good, but left to itself it doesn’t always see what that is. The general will is always in the right, but the judgment that guides it isn’t always enlightened. It ought to be •made to see objects as they are, and sometimes as they ought to appear to it; •shown the good road it is in search of, •secured from the seductive influences of individual wills, •taught to look carefully at other places and times, and •made to weigh the attractions of present and sensible advantages against the danger of distant and hidden evils. Individuals see the good that they reject; the public wills the good that it doesn’t see. Both need guidance. Individuals must be made to bring their wills into line with their reason; the populace must be taught to know what it wills. If that is done, public enlightenment leads to the union of understanding and will in the social body: the parts are made to work exactly together, and the whole is raised to its highest power. For this there has to be a law-maker. that chose publique (= ‘public thing’) is in Latin res publica, which is the Every legitimate government is what government is I will explain later on. Laws are really only the conditions of civil association. Because the populace is subject to the laws, it ought to be their author: the conditions of •the society ought to be regulated solely by those who come together to form •it. But how will they do this? By a common agreement? By a sudden inspiration? Does the body politic have an organ—·like vocal cords and a tongue·—to declare its will? Who can give it the origin of république (= ‘republic’).] republican;8 8 2 6. I apply this word not merely to aristocracies and democracies but quite generally to any government directed by the general will, which is the law. To be legitimate, the government must be not identical with the sovereign, but its minister; so even a monarchy can be a republic. I’ll clarify this in Book 3. 19 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 7. The law-maker 10 The law-maker [In the French, as in this version, it’s clear that Rousseau is presenting these not as three tasks but as three ways of looking at one task.] In short, he must deprive man of •his own resources, replacing them by •new ones that are alien to him and that he What would be needed to discover the best rules of society. . . .is a superior intelligence that could see all men’s passions without having any of them. This intelligence would have to meet these conditions: •it is wholly unrelated to our nature, while knowing it through and through; •its happiness is doesn’t depend on us, yet it concerns itself with our happiness; and lastly •it can take the long view, working in one century for something to be enjoyed in the next.9 It would take gods to give men laws!. . . . But if a great prince is a rare kind of man, what will a great legislator be? All the prince has to do is to follow the pattern that the law-giver has to lay down in the first place. The law-giver is the engineer who invents the machine; the prince is merely the mechanic who sets it up and makes it go. ‘At the birth of societies,’ says Montesquieu, ‘the rulers of republics establish institutions, and then the institutions mould the rulers’ (The Greatness and Decadence of the Romans, ch. 1.) Someone who ventures to tackle the task of making a people needs to have a sense of being able •to change human nature, so to speak—to transform each individual, who on his own is a complete and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from which he in a way receives his life and his being; •to alter man’s constitution in order to strengthen it; •to replace the physical and independent existence that nature gave us by a partial and moral existence. 9 2 7. can’t employ without help from others. The more completely those natural resources are annihilated, the greater and more lasting are the new ones that he acquires, and the more stable and perfect are the new institutions. ·If you find that last statement extravagant, consider·: If each citizen is nothing and can do nothing without all the others, and if the resources acquired by the whole are equal or superior to the natural forces of all the individuals put together, it can be said that legislation is at the highest point of perfection. The law-giver is an extraordinary man in the state. If his intellectual abilities make him so, his office [here = ‘job’] does also. It’s not magistracy or sovereignty. This work that •constitutes the republic isn’t part of its •constitution; it is an individual and superior role that has nothing in common with human power; for if anyone who commands men oughtn’t to have command over the laws, then anyone who has command over the laws oughtn’t to have it over men; for if he did, his laws would be the servants of his passions and would often merely perpetuate his injustices; his private aims would inevitably mar the sanctity of his work. When Lycurgus gave laws to his country, he began by abdicating as king. It was the custom of most Greek towns to have foreigners establish their laws. The republics of modern Italy in many cases followed this example; Geneva did the same and profited by it.10 Rome was at its most prosperous A people becomes famous only when its legislation begins to decline. We don’t know for how many centuries the system of Lycurgus made the Spartans happy before the rest of Greece took any notice of it. Those who know Calvin only as a theologian much under-estimate the extent of his genius. The codification of our wise edicts, in which he played a large part, does him great honour. . . . Whatever revolution time may bring in our religion, so long as the spirit of patriotism and liberty still lives among us the memory of this great man will be for ever blessed. 20 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau when it suffered a revival of all the crimes of tyranny and came close to death, because it put the legislative authority and the sovereign power into the same hands. 2 7. The law-maker the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause! The social spirit that is to be created by these institutions would have to preside over their very foundation; and men would have to be, •in advance of the laws, what they should become •by means of the laws. So the law-maker, being unable to appeal either to •force or to •reason, must resort to an authority of a different order that can •constrain without violence and [In the next sentence, Decemviri = ‘ten men’, referring to the men who in the 5th century BCE were delegated to draw up a code of laws for Nevertheless, the Decemviri themselves never claimed the right to pass any law merely on their own authority. ‘Nothing we propose to you’, they said to the people, ‘can pass into law without your consent. Romans, be yourselves the authors of the laws that are to make you happy.’ So he who draws up the laws doesn’t or shouldn’t have any right to legislate; and the populace can’t deprive itself of this non-transferable right, even if it wants to, because according to the basic compact the only thing that can bind individuals is the general will, and the only way to be sure that a particular will is in conformity with the general will is to put it to a free vote of the people. I have already said this, but it’s worth repeating it. Thus in the task of law-giving we find two things together that seem incompatible: an enterprise that surpasses human powers, and for its execution an authority that isn’t anything! Another difficulty deserves attention. Wise [see Glossary] men who try to speak in their language to the common herd, instead speaking as the herd does, have no chance of being understood. There are countless kinds of ideas that can’t possibly be translated into •the language of the people. Views that are too broad and objects that are too distant are equally out of •its range: each individual, having no taste for any plan of government that doesn’t suit his particular interests, can’t easily see the advantages he would get as payback for the continual privations that good laws impose on him. For a populace that is just coming into being ·as a body· to be able to relish sound principles of political theory and follow the Roman republic.] Rousseau’s next three words: persuader sans convaincre. flatly translated: persuade without convincing. probable meaning: get people on-side without giving them reasons for this. That’s what has down the centuries compelled •the fathers of the nations to appeal to divine intervention and credit the gods with •their own wisdom, in order that the peoples— submitting to the laws of the state as to the laws of nature, and recognising the power that formed the city as the very one that formed mankind—might obey freely, and bear with docility the yoke of the public happiness. What the legislator puts into the mouth of the immortals are decisions based on a high-flying reason that is far above the range of the common herd, the aim being to constrain by divine authority those who can’t be moved by human prudence. But it’s not just anyone who can make the gods speak, or be believed when he claims to be their interpreter. The only miracle that can prove a legislator’s mission is his great soul. Any man can •engrave words on tablets of stone, or •purchase the services of an oracle, or •fake secret communication with some god, or •train a bird to whisper in his ear, or find other crude devices for imposing on the people. Someone who can’t do better than that may perhaps gather round 21 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau him a band of fools; but he’ll never found an empire, and whatever crazy thing he does found will die soon after he does. Idle tricks create a temporary bond; only wisdom can make it permanent. The Judaic law, which still survives, and Islamic law that has ruled half the world for ten centuries, still today proclaim the great men who laid them down; and while •proud philosophy and •the blind spirit of political partisanship sees those men as nothing but lucky impostors, the true political theorist admires in the institutions they set up the great and powerful genius that presides over durable political structures. The right conclusion to draw from all this is not. . . .that among us politics and religion have a common object, but that when nations are first starting up religion is used as an instrument for politics. 2 8. The people populace can’t stand having anyone touch its faults, even to remedy them; it’s like the foolish and cowardly patients who tremble at sight of the doctor. I’m not denying that there are times in the history of states when. . . .violence and revolutions jolt the populace into remembering the past, so that the state, set on fire by civil wars, is so to speak born again from its ashes, and with a renewed vigour of youth springs from the jaws of death. Examples: Sparta at the time of Lycurgus, Rome after the Tarquins, and in our own day Holland and Switzerland after the expulsion of the tyrants. But such events are rare; they are exceptions, always to be explained in terms of the particular constitution [see Glossary] of the exceptional state. They can’t even happen twice to the same people, for a populace can make itself free as long as it is merely uncivilized, but not when the civic spring has wound down. Then disturbances can destroy it, but revolutions can’t rebuild it: it needs a master, not a liberator. Free peoples, remember this maxim: ‘Liberty can be gained, but it can never be recovered.’ Youth is not infancy. For nations, as for men, there is a period of young adulthood—we may call it ‘maturity’—before which a nation shouldn’t be made subject to laws; but it isn’t always easy to recognise a people’s maturity, and if political developments are set going before that, the developments will fail. One people is amenable to discipline from the beginning; another, not after ten centuries. The Russians will never be really civilised, because they were ‘civilised’ too soon. Peter ·the Great· had a genius for imitation, but he didn’t have the true creative genius that makes everything from nothing. Some of the things he did were good, but most of them were wrong for that time and place. He saw that his populace was barbarous, but didn’t see that it was not ripe for civilisation: he wanted to civilise it when all it needed was to be prepared 8. The people Before putting up a large building, the architect surveys and tests the ground to see if it can support the weight; and in the same way the wise legislator doesn’t start by laying down his good laws but by investigating whether the populace they are intended for is in a condition to receive them. Plato refused to legislate for the Arcadians and the Cyreniens because he knew that both peoples were rich and couldn’t put up with equality; and Crete had good laws and bad men because all Minos had done was to impose discipline on a people already burdened with vice. A thousand nations that shone around the earth couldn’t endure good laws for long, and most couldn’t have endured them at all. Most peoples, like most men, are teachable only in youth; as they grow old they become impossible to correct. Once customs have become established and prejudices are dug in, trying to reform them is dangerous and useless; the 22 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau for war. At first he wanted to make Germans, Englishmen, when he ought to have started by making Russians; he blocked his subjects from ever becoming what they could have been, by persuading them that they were what they are not. This was like a French teacher who shapes his pupil to be an infant prodigy, and for the rest of his life to be nothing. The empire of Russia will try to conquer Europe, and will itself be conquered. The Tatars, its subjects or neighbours, will become its masters and ours, by a revolution that seems to me inevitable. Indeed, all the kings of Europe are working together to speed it along. 2 9. The people (continued) you go, and always at the expense of the unfortunate people! Last of all comes the supreme administration, which swamps all the rest. These costs are a continual drain on the subjects; and far from being better governed by all these different levels of government they’re much worse governed than they would be if they had only a single authority over them. And with all this going on, there are hardly any resources remaining to meet emergencies; and whenever these are needed the state is on the brink of destruction. (2) ·The effectiveness of government:· When part of a nation is far distant from the seat of government, this has bad effects on both sides. On the one hand, the government is weaker and slower •in law-enforcement there, •in preventing people from ill-treating one another there, •in correcting abuses there, • guarding against seditious undertakings begun there; and on the other hand the populace of that region has less affection for •its rulers, whom it never sees, •its country, which to its eyes seems like the world, and •its fellow-citizens, most of whom are unknown to it. The same laws can’t suit so many diverse provinces with different mœurs [see Glossary] and utterly different climates, differing also in what kind of government they can put up with. ‘·Well, then, let the government have different laws for different provinces.’ No, because· different laws lead only to trouble and confusion among populations which—living under the same rulers and in constant communication with one another—intermingle and intermarry, and when they come under the sway of new customs don’t know whether they can call their family fortune their own. Among such 9. The people (continued) Just as nature has set limits to the size of a well-made man, and outside those limits makes only giants and dwarfs, so also for the constitution of a state to be at its best, there are upper and lower bounds to the size of the state if it isn’t to be too large for good government or too small for self-maintenance. Every body politic has a maximum strength that it can’t exceed, and that it won’t even reach that maximum if it becomes too large. Every extension of the social tie slackens it; and generally speaking a small state is stronger in proportion than a great one. There are countless reasons why this is so. ·I shall present one of them, and then a cluster of others·. (1) ·The burden of government:· Long distances make administration more difficult, just as a weight becomes heavier at the end of a longer lever. The further up the hierarchy you go, the more burdensome the administrations is. First, each •city has its own ·government·, which is paid for by the people; so does each •district, still paid for by the people; then each •province, then the •great governments. . . .and so on, always costing more the higher 23 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau a multitude of men who don’t know one another, crammed together at the seat of the central administration, talent is buried, virtue unknown and vice unpunished. The leaders, overwhelmed with business, don’t see anything for themselves; the state is governed by bureaucrats. Finally, the measures that have to be taken to maintain the general authority, which all these distant officials wish to evade or abuse, absorb all the governmental energy, so that there’s none left for the happiness of the people, and barely enough to defend it when need arises. That’s what happens when a body is too big for its constitution: it cracks, and falls crushed under its own weight. On the other hand, ·it’s bad for a state to be too small·. A state needs a secure base if it is to be stable—not shaken to pieces by •the shocks that are bound to come its way or by •the efforts it will be forced to make to maintain itself. All populations have a kind of centrifugal force by which they •continually act against one another, and •tend to enlarge themselves at their neighbours’ expense—like Descartes’s vortices! Thus the weak run the risk of being soon swallowed up; and it is almost impossible for any one ·state· to survive except by putting itself in a sort of equilibrium with all ·the others· so that the pressure on all sides is about equal. So you can see that there are reasons for contraction and reasons for expansion; and it’s no small part of the statesman’s skill to balance out the two sides in the way that is best for the preservation of the state. It can be said that the reasons for expansion, being merely external and relative, should be subordinate to the reasons for contraction, which are internal and absolute. A strong and healthy constitution is the first thing to look for; and it is better to count on the v...
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