The Social Contract — themes & analysis

The general will, volonté générale, is the concept on which the entire book turns. Rousseau is careful with a distinction that his readers often miss: the will of all is what each citizen happens to want, including what he wants for himself in opposition to others; it is the unprocessed aggregate of particular desires. The general will is what each citizen wills as a member of the community, considering the common good — what remains when the contradictory particular wills cancel each other out. Rousseau's claim is that this general will is, by its nature, always directed at what is genuinely common, always right in tendency even when the people are deceived about the means.

From this distinction comes the doctrine that has unsettled every reader since. If a citizen's particular will diverges from the general will, Rousseau says, the community may legitimately compel him to obey the law he himself, as a citizen, willed — since in doing so it is only forcing him to be free. This is the most chilling phrase in the book. Rousseau means it less menacingly than it sounds: he is not endorsing coercion in the name of ideology, but insisting that civil freedom is freedom under self-given law. A citizen who breaks the law of the community he himself constituted has broken his own constitution. The moral force of the argument depends entirely on whether the general will is genuinely available, whether actual institutions can produce that identification of the common good rather than disguise some faction's will as general.

The history of attempts to apply the doctrine has not been reassuring. Robespierre read the Social Contract closely and kept Rousseau's portrait on his wall; the Committee of Public Safety spoke in the name of the general will when it sent people to the guillotine. Burke and Constant attacked the general will as a blank check for tyranny. Later theorists — from Hegel to Rawls — built their theories of the common good partly in response to the problems Rousseau's formulation raised. The concept has never been domesticated. Every generation has to work out, again, whether there is a sense in which a community can have a will that is genuinely common and genuinely authoritative, or whether Rousseau's most original idea is also an illusion.

Where to follow it: Ch 6 (the social compact), Ch 10 (sovereignty inalienable), Ch 12 (general will and fallibility), Ch 40 (general will indestructible).

Book 2 opens with the argument the rest of the book depends on. Sovereignty — the will of the people as the source of all legitimate law — cannot be alienated, cannot be represented, cannot be divided. It cannot be alienated because the people who compose the sovereign are also the subjects of the law; to transfer the sovereign power to another person would be to enslave oneself, which Rousseau has already shown is impossible by voluntary act. It cannot be represented because the act of legislating is the act of willing, and no one can will for another. It cannot be divided because the general will is either the will of the whole community, or it is the will of some part of it — and any division turns sovereignty into mere administration.

The famous sharpness about England follows from this. The English, Rousseau says, think they are free because they elect members of parliament; they are free for one day — the day of the election — and slaves the rest of the time. The critique is not of elections as such but of the idea that electing representatives constitutes popular sovereignty. For Rousseau, representation is at best a convenient substitute for the real thing and at worst a device by which the wealthy minority governs in the name of the people. The doctrine is strikingly close to modern anti-representative criticism: the suspicion that democracy-as-representation is a compromise of something the people would do better to keep directly in their own hands.

Rousseau is explicit that his theory works only in small states where the citizens can actually assemble — Geneva is the approximate example, the Roman Republic another. He does not pretend it applies to France or England in 1762. The doctrine is a counterfactual standard, not a programme: it tests every actual government against an ideal and finds them all, to varying degrees, deficient. Whether that makes the argument less practical or more honest depends on whether one thinks the purpose of political theory is to describe existing institutions or to measure them against a standard they cannot fully meet.

Where to follow it: Ch 10 (inalienable), Ch 11 (indivisible), Ch 36 (representatives), Ch 41 (voting).

Book 2, Chapter 7 introduces a figure who does not fit the book's democratic framework and who Rousseau introduces precisely because of that fact. The Lawgiver is not the sovereign, not the government, and holds no legitimate authority of any kind. He is the extraordinary individual who appears at the founding of a polity, drafts its laws, and then withdraws — leaving the laws to be accepted or rejected by the people themselves. Lycurgus of Sparta, Numa of Rome, Calvin of Geneva: these are Rousseau's examples. What unites them is not ideology but function. They each appeared when a people was not yet capable of giving itself good law, drafted the law, and arranged for its ratification.

The paradox Rousseau identifies is one that every theorist of democratic founding has had to confront: a people unaccustomed to law cannot, as a body, recognise good law when it sees it. The capacity for political judgment that good law requires is itself the product of good law. The generation that escaped Egypt had to wander for forty years before it was fit for the Promised Land. The Lawgiver fills this gap — but he can fill it legitimately only if he holds no authority over the people whose laws he writes. He must know what they need, be untainted by their existing factions, and be satisfied that the laws are accepted on their own merits.

Often, Rousseau notes with characteristic drily, the Lawgiver has had to invoke the gods. Philosophy alone could not have moved the early Romans or Spartans to accept the laws they needed; divine sanction was necessary. This is not, in his telling, a fraud: it is an observation about how all foundational law has actually been made, and about the limits of pure reason in founding a polity. The figure has been read as a piece of romantic myth-making, as a dangerous opening for charismatic dictatorship, and as a sober description of what every actual founding has required. It is probably all three, depending on which Lawgiver one has in mind.

Where to follow it: Ch 16 (the Legislator), Ch 17 (the people), Ch 38 (institution of government).

The most load-bearing distinction in the Social Contract is the one Book 3 opens with and that most readers, trained on English-speaking political theory, slide past. Sovereignty is the people in their lawmaking capacity; government is the body the sovereign appoints to administer and enforce the laws. The forms of government — democracy, aristocracy, monarchy — are not forms of sovereignty but forms of administration. Rousseau's preferred form is not what his admirers in 1789 expected.

Pure democracy — government in which the people both legislate and execute — is, he argues, impossible for human beings as they are. It would require gods. The most stable form for most actual republics is elective aristocracy: a small body chosen by the people to administer the laws, responsible to the sovereign and removable by it. Monarchy is suitable only for very large states where republican bonds are too weak to sustain smaller institutions, and even there it tends to corrupt. Each form is to be judged not by abstract preference but by fitness to the size, climate, customs, and stage of development of the state.

The bleakest part of Book 3 is also its most honest. Chapter 11 — "The Death of the Body Politic" — says simply that all states die. The political body has a lifespan, as the human body does; the question is only how, and at what pace, its institutions outlive the spirit that animated them. Government always tends to usurp sovereignty, to act in the name of the state rather than as its servant. When that happens the contract has begun to dissolve. Rousseau offers prescriptions — frequent assembly, checking the government's power — but he does not pretend they will work forever. The Social Contract is also a meditation on the fragility of the thing it describes.

Where to follow it: Ch 22 (government in general), Ch 25 (democracy), Ch 31 (abuse of government), Ch 32 (death of the body politic).

The last substantial chapter of Book 4 is the one that placed the Social Contract on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1762 and had it burned in Paris and Geneva the same year. Rousseau argues that a healthy republic requires a civil religion: a set of basic articles of faith held in common by all citizens, not because of their theological truth but because of their political function. The articles are minimal — belief in a beneficent and powerful deity, belief in an afterlife with rewards and punishments, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws, and tolerance for all religions that themselves practice tolerance. He is not asking much of theology. He is asking everything of civic loyalty.

The argument against Christianity, in this chapter, is both careful and radical. Christianity, Rousseau says, directs its loyalties beyond any earthly state; it preaches submission to earthly power on the grounds that the true kingdom is elsewhere; it separates religious and civil life in a way that makes full citizenship, in the ancient sense, impossible. Ancient paganism was a civic religion — every state had its gods, and worshipping them was an act of citizenship. Christianity abolished that unity and has never replaced it. This is the reason, on Rousseau's account, that ancient republics were capable of the civic self-sacrifice that modern ones are not.

The enforcement clause is the passage that has shocked readers most consistently. Anyone who refuses to subscribe to the articles of civil religion, he says flatly, may be banished from the state — not for impiety, but for being antisocial, for being incapable of sincerely loving the laws and justice. Anyone who, having subscribed, behaves as though he did not believe, may be put to death: he has committed the greatest of crimes, lying before the law. The combination — minimal articles, maximal enforcement — has been read as authoritarianism dressed in republican language, as a logical consequence of the doctrine of the general will pushed to its limit, and as an honest acknowledgment that every republic makes demands on its citizens that liberal individualism cannot accommodate. It is probably all three.

Where to follow it: Ch 40 (indestructible will), Ch 46 (the censorship), Ch 47 (civil religion), Ch 48 (conclusion).