Book 1, Chapter 2 — The First Societies

Rousseau's opening move is to grant the family as the one genuinely natural society, then show how little follows from it. Children remain bound to the father only as long as they need him for survival. Once that need ends, the natural bond dissolves; if the family continues, it does so by choice, not necessity. The family is therefore not a model for political authority but a limit case: the only association that is ever natural, and even that one becomes conventional the moment its members are capable of independence.

From this Rousseau turns on the classical argument that rulers stand to peoples as fathers to children — or, in Grotius's more disturbing version, as shepherds to flocks. He traces the logic to Caligula, who concluded from the shepherd analogy either that kings were gods or that men were beasts. The argument, presented as a compliment to monarchy, is in fact its reductio: if the shepherd guards the flock in order to eat it, the analogy admits rather more than its users intend. Hobbes and Grotius, who divided humanity into herds with rulers, have made political philosophy the servant of tyrants.

The deeper problem is Grotius's method: he establishes right from fact. Whatever exists, he treats as legitimate. Rousseau calls this flattering to tyrants but logically reversed — the existence of slavery does not make slavery just. The chapter plants the methodological demand that will run through the whole book: start from right, not from power; ask what authority could be legitimate, not what authority happens to exist.