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The Social Contract

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Copyright © Jonathan Bennett 2017. All rights reserved

[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

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 govern- ment. 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.

subsistence: What is needed for survival—a minimum of food, drink, shelter etc.

wise: An inevitable translation of sage, but the meaning in French carries ideas of ‘learned’, ‘scholarly’, ‘intellectually

able’, rather more strongly than whatever it is that you and I mean by ‘wise’.

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?’).

The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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.

[Book I, Chapter 4].

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.

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.” [Book I, Chapter 6].

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! [Book I, Chapter 7].

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 compro- mise.] [Book II, Chapter 3].

So the public force needs an agent of its own. . . .to •set it to

work under the direction of the general will, to •put the state in

touch with the sovereign, •to do for the collective person

something like what the union of soul and body does for ·an

individual· man. Here we have what is, in the state, the

rationale of government; it’s quite wrong to identify it with the

sovereign—it serves the sovereign .

The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Then what is government? An intermediate body set up

between the subjects and the sovereign to enable them to

communicate with one another; it’s job is to apply the laws and

to maintain civil and political liberty. [Book III, Chapter 1].

It’s not enough for the assembled people to have

•fixed the state’s constitution on one occasion by giving its

assent to a body of laws; or to have

•set up a perpetual government, or to have

•provided once for all for the election of magistrates. There

must also be fixed periodical assemblies that can’t be cancelled

or postponed, so that on the proper day the populace is

legitimately called together by law, without any need for a

formal summoning. (This is additional to any special

assemblies that may be required in emergencies.) [Book III,

Chapter 13].

The moment the populace is legitimately assembled as a

sovereign body, the jurisdiction of the government wholly

lapses, the executive power is suspended, and the person of •a

citizen at the bottom of the social heap is as sacred and

inviolable as that of •the first magistrate; because

representatives no longer exist in the presence of whatever it

was they represented. Most of the tumults that arose in the

comitia in Rome were due to ignorance or neglect of this rule.

The consuls were in them merely the people’s chairmen; the

tribunes were mere speakers; the senate was nothing at all.

[Book III, Chapter 14].

The periodical assemblies that I spoke of earlier [page 47] are a

device for preventing or postponing this calamity. Their chance

of succeeding in that is greater if they don’t have to be formally

summoned, because then the prince can’t stop them without

openly declaring himself a law-breaker and an enemy of the

state.

These assemblies, whose sole object is the maintenance of the

social treaty, should open by the posing of two questions that

•must never be suppressed and •should be voted on separately:

(1) ‘Does it please the sovereign to preserve the present form

of government?’

(2) ‘Does it please the people to leave its administration in the

hands of those who are currently in charge of it?’

I’m assuming here something that I think I have shown,

namely that there is in the state no fundamental law that can’t

be revoked. Even the social compact itself can be revoked: if

all the citizens came together for the agreed purpose of

breaking the compact, there’s no doubt that this would very

legitimately break it. Grotius even thinks that each man can

renounce his membership of his own state, and recover his

natural liberty and his goods on leaving the country. It would

be absurd if all the citizens in assembly couldn’t do something

that each can do by himself. [Book III, Chapter 18].