Book 3, Chapter 1 — Government in General

Rousseau opens Book 3 with an unusually explicit warning: this chapter requires careful reading. The distinction he is about to introduce — between sovereign and government — is the one that most readers miss and that most political theorists have blurred. Every free action requires two components: a will that decides (moral cause) and a force that executes (physical cause). The body politic has both. The will is the Sovereign's legislative power; the force is the executive power of government. Neither can function without the other, but they are not the same and must not be treated as the same.

Government is defined precisely: an intermediate body set up between subjects and Sovereign to ensure their mutual correspondence. It executes the laws and maintains liberty — both civil and political. It is the agent of the Sovereign, not the Sovereign itself, and this distinction matters absolutely. A Sovereign that has allowed its government to become its master has ceased to exist as a Sovereign. The government that mistakes itself for the political community has begun the process by which all states eventually die.

The internal mathematics of government follows. The government's total force is fixed — it is whatever force the state can deploy. This force is spent in two directions: on maintaining the government's own internal cohesion and authority (among the magistrates themselves) and on acting toward the people as a whole. The more members the government has, the more force is consumed in the first direction and the less remains for the second. Many magistrates = weak government. Few magistrates, or one = stronger government force toward the people, but with corresponding risks of its own. This ratio — the inverse relationship between the size of government and its effective force — is the analytical tool Rousseau will apply to democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy in the chapters that follow.