Book 1, Chapter 7 — The Sovereign

The social compact creates a mutual undertaking between each individual and the public. Each person appears in two roles: as a member of the Sovereign, bound to individuals; as a member of the State, bound to the Sovereign. This double capacity prevents the ordinary rule — that no one is bound by undertakings made to himself — from applying here. The Sovereign is not the individual; it is the collective person of which the individual is one member. A duty to the Sovereign is not a duty to oneself in the ordinary sense.

Rousseau draws a further consequence for the Sovereign's relation to itself. Public deliberation can bind subjects to the Sovereign but cannot bind the Sovereign to itself — the Sovereign can regard itself in only one capacity, like an individual contracting with himself, which is no contract at all. No fundamental law is absolutely binding on the body of the people, including the social contract. This is not license for capricious change; it is the logical consequence of the fact that the Sovereign is the source of all legitimate law and therefore cannot be bound by a law anterior to itself.

The chapter's central claim is that the Sovereign's interest is structurally incapable of conflicting with its members' interests, because it is composed of them. It cannot harm all of them; as we will see later, it cannot harm any individual in particular either. The Sovereign, simply by virtue of what it is, is always what it should be. The subjects, however, have no symmetrical guarantee of reliability — which is why the Sovereign must have coercive power. Private persons can conflict with the general will; the Sovereign by definition cannot.