Book 2, Chapter 5 — The Right of Life and Death

The problem of life-and-death authority over citizens is often posed as a paradox: if individuals have no right to dispose of their own lives, how can they transfer that right to the Sovereign? Rousseau dissolves the paradox by questioning its premise. The right being discussed is not the right to suicide but the right to risk life for self-preservation — which every person exercises constantly. Anyone who boards a ship knowing the danger, anyone who runs from a burning building, has risked death for life's sake. The social compact extends exactly this logic: members accept that the community may require them to risk or sacrifice their lives in exchange for the security the compact provides.

The death penalty follows by the same logic. In agreeing to the social contract, each person implicitly agrees to be put to death if they commit murder — because this is the insurance premium that makes life under the compact preferable to life without it. The wrongdoer who attacks social rights becomes, by that act, a rebel and a traitor: they have broken the compact that made them a member of the community, and the community can treat them as an enemy. Trial and judgment establish this — they are the proof that the offender has, in effect, resigned from the political community. The State then has the right of war against the vanquished.

The chapter closes with an observation that limits the preceding argument: frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or laziness in government. A state that executes regularly has failed to prevent the conditions that produce crime. The right to execute exists; the right exercise of it is restrained. No state has the right to kill someone it could safely leave alive. Rousseau has established the principle — life and death authority is legitimate within the terms of the compact — while insisting that it is an extreme remedy for extreme cases, not a routine instrument of governance.