The Social Contract

Rousseau opens with a famous image of chains, then asks a plain question: in the civil order, can any rule of administration be sure and legitimate?

Born Free, Yet in Chains

Rousseau begins with a flat claim: man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One man thinks himself the master of others and remains a greater slave than they.

What can make it legitimate? That question, he thinks, he can answer. The social order, he says, is a sacred right and the basis of all other rights. Yet this right does not come from nature, so it must be founded on conventions.

The Family and Its Limits

For Rousseau the family is the only natural society, and even it is natural only while children need their father to survive. Once that need ends, the bond dissolves, and any continued union is voluntary, held by convention.

Man's first law is to provide for his own preservation. Once he reaches years of discretion he alone judges the means of preserving himself, and so becomes his own master.

One difference remains. A father is repaid by love for his children, while in the State the pleasure of commanding takes the place of the love a chief cannot feel for his peoples.

Why Might Never Makes Right

Rousseau turns to the right of the strongest, which, though it seems meant ironically, is really laid down as a fundamental principle. The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty.

His reasoning runs in plain steps: force is a physical power, and he fails to see what moral effect it can have. Yielding to it is an act of necessity, at most of prudence, never of duty.

If force creates right, the effect changes with the cause: every greater force succeeds to its right. As soon as it is possible to disobey with impunity, disobedience is legitimate. The strongest being always in the right, the only thing that matters is to act so as to become the strongest.

A right that perishes when force fails is no right at all. In this connection, he concludes, the word "right" adds nothing to force and means absolutely nothing.

Picture a brigand at the edge of a wood, pistol in hand. Rousseau grants that I must give up my purse under compulsion, but denies that I am in conscience bound to. The pistol is also a power, and power alone creates no duty.

Having admitted that force creates no right and that only legitimate powers bind us, Rousseau notes that his original question recurs. Since no man has natural authority over his fellow, conventions form the basis of all legitimate authority.

The Case Against Grotius, Hobbes and Aristotle

Rousseau charges Grotius with establishing right by fact, a method he calls the most favourable to tyrants. On Grotius's showing, he says, it is doubtful whether mankind belongs to a hundred men or the hundred to mankind, and Hobbes inclines the same way.

• On Grotius's showing, the human species is divided into herds of cattle, each with a ruler who keeps guard over them for the purpose of devouring them.
• Philo tells us the Emperor Caligula reasoned in this way. He concluded equally well either that kings were gods, or that men were beasts.
• Aristotle, before any of them, had said that men are by no means equal naturally. Some, he held, are born for slavery, and others for dominion.

Rousseau says Aristotle was right, but took the effect for the cause. Nothing is more certain than that every man born in slavery is born for slavery. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.

He adds a wry aside on King Adam and Emperor Noah. As a possible descendant of the eldest branch, he jokes, he might turn out to be the legitimate king of the human race, and he asks thanks for his moderation.

Why Liberty Cannot Be Sold

For Rousseau, to renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, with its rights and even its duties. No indemnity is possible for someone who renounces everything. Removing all liberty from the will removes all morality from the acts.

Rousseau calls it an empty and contradictory convention that sets up absolute authority on one side and unlimited obedience on the other. Can we be under any obligation to a person from whom we have the right to exact everything?

What right can my slave have against me, when all that he has belongs to me? His right being mine, this right of mine against myself is a phrase devoid of meaning.

The Right of War Does Not Make Slaves

Against those who hold that the victor may kill the vanquished, Rousseau argues that this supposed right is by no means deducible from the state of war.

Men in their primitive independence have no mutual relations stable enough to constitute peace or war, so they cannot be naturally enemies. War is constituted by a relation between things, not between persons.

1. 1War is a relation of things: It arises only out of real relations, so private war can exist neither in the state of nature, where there is no constant property, nor in the social state, under the authority of the laws.
2. 2Its object is the State: The object being the destruction of the hostile State, the other side may kill its defenders while they bear arms.
3. 3Surrender ends enmity: Once they lay down arms and surrender, they cease to be enemies and become merely men, whose life no one has any right to take.
4. 4The right is limited: Sometimes it is possible to kill the State without killing a single one of its members, and war gives no right which is not necessary to the gaining of its object.

Even granting the terrible right to kill everybody, Rousseau holds that a conquered man owes his master nothing beyond obedience as far as he is compelled. The victor has not done him a favour: he has killed him usefully instead of without profit.

So the state of war continues to subsist between them. Their mutual relation is its effect, and the usage of the right of war does not imply a treaty of peace. A convention has been made, but so far from destroying the state of war, it presupposes its continuance.

Rousseau says the Romans, who respected the right of war more than any other nation, were so scrupulous that a citizen could not serve as a volunteer without engaging himself against the enemy by name.

Cato wrote that his son, after his legion was reconstructed, needed a new military oath. Rousseau cites laws and customs here, not isolated events like the siege of Clusium.

A Master and Slaves Are Not a People

Rousseau adds that even if he granted all he has been refuting, the friends of despotism would be no better off. There will always be a great difference between subduing a multitude and ruling a society.

Even if scattered individuals were successively enslaved by one man, however numerous, Rousseau still sees no more than a master and his slaves.

It is an aggregation, not an association: there is neither public good nor body politic. The man, even if he has enslaved half the world, is still only an individual, and his interest is a purely private interest.

When he dies, his empire is left scattered without unity, as an oak dissolves into ashes once the fire has consumed it.

Without a prior convention, he asks, where would the minority's obligation to submit to the majority come from, unless the election were unanimous? Majority voting is itself established by convention and presupposes unanimity on one occasion at least.