Book 3, Chapter 4 — Democracy

Rousseau opens with the apparent logic for pure democracy: who better to execute the laws than the people who made them? But he immediately turns the argument. Merging legislative and executive power in the same hands means the sovereign and the prince are one — which produces, paradoxically, a government without government. The people cannot both make general law and attend to particular acts without losing the general standpoint that gives law its authority.

The chapter's famous verdict follows: there has never been a real democracy, and there never will be. It is contrary to natural order for the many to govern and the few to be governed. Rousseau lists the preconditions that would be necessary — a very small state, great simplicity of manners, rough equality of rank and fortune, and an absence of luxury — and notes that wherever these conditions exist, democratic government would barely be necessary in the first place. The requirements for democracy are also the conditions that make the problems democracy is meant to solve less acute.

The chapter closes with a moral observation drawn from Montesquieu: virtue is the principle of republics, and none of democracy's preconditions can exist without it. A people virtuous enough to govern itself directly would scarcely need government. This circularity is not a flaw in the argument but its point: democratic self-government is an ideal by which all actual governments are measured, not a programme any real community can enact. Rousseau ends with his driest line — 'Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men.'