The Social Contract / The First and Second Discourses

Rethinking

the

Western

Tradition

The volumes in this series

seek to address the present debate

over the Western tradition

by reprinting key works of

that tradition along with essays

that evaluate each text from

di√erent perspectives.

EDITORIAL

COMMITTEE FOR

Rethinking

the

Western

Tradition

David Bromwich

Yale University

Gerald Graff

University of Illinois at Chicago

Geoffrey Hartman

Yale University

Samuel Lipman

(deceased)

The New Criterion

Gary Saul Morson

Northwestern University

Jaroslav Pelikan

Yale University

Marjorie Perloff

Stanford University

Richard Rorty

Stanford University

Alan Ryan

New College, Oxford

Ian Shapiro

Yale University

Frank M. Turner

Yale University

Allen W. Wood

Stanford University

The Social

Contract and

The First and

Second

Discourses

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Edited and with an Introduction by Susan Dunn

with essays by

Gita May

Robert N. Bellah

David Bromwich

Conor Cruise O’Brien

Yale University Press

New Haven and London

Translations of The Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and

The Social Contract copyright ∫ 2002 by Susan Dunn.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part,

including illustrations, in any form (beyond that

copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S.

press), without written permission from the publishers.

Printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, New York.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778.

[Selections. English. 2002]

The social contract ; and, The ﬁrst and second discourses / Jean-Jacques Rousseau ;

edited and with an introduction by Susan Dunn ; with essays by Gita May...[et al.].

p. cm. — (Rethinking the Western tradition)

Includes bibliographical references.

isbn 0-300-09140-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 0-300-09141-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Political science—Early works to 1800. 2. Social contract—Early works to 1800.

3. Civilization—Early works to 1800. I. Dunn, Susan. II. May, Gita. III. Title. IV. Series.

jc179 .r7 2002

320%.01—dc21 2001046557

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines

for permanence and durability of the Committee on

Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the

Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contributors

Robert N. Bellah is Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the Univer-

sity of California at Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, includ-

ing Beyond Belief and The Broken Covenant, and is co-author of Habits of

the Heart and The Good Society.

David Bromwich is Housum Professor of English at Yale University. He is

the author of several books, including Politics by Other Means: Higher

Education and Group Thinking, Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Po-

etry, and A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke

to Robert Frost.

Susan Dunn is professor of French literature and the history of ideas at

Williams College. She is the author of The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide

and the French Political Imagination and Sister Revolutions: French Light-

ning, American Light, and is co-author with James MacGregor Burns of

The Three Roosevelts.

Gita May is professor of French literature at Columbia University. She is

the author of De Jean-Jacques Rousseau à Madame Roland: Essai sur la

sensibilité préromantique et révolutionnaire, Diderot et Baudelaire, cri-

tiques d’art, Madame Roland and the Age of Revolution, and Stendhal and

the Age of Napoleon.

Conor Cruise O’Brien is a statesman, diplomat, and political commentator

who lives in Dublin, Ireland. He is the author of many books including God

Land: Reﬂections on Religion and Nationalism, The Great Melody: A The-

matic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke, and The

Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800.

Contents

Susan Dunn: Introduction: Rousseau’s Political Triptych 1

Chronology of Rousseau’s Life 36

The First Discourse: Discourse on the Sciences and Arts 43

The Second Discourse: Discourse on the Origin and Foundations

of Inequality Among Mankind 69

The Social Contract 149

Rethinking The First and Second Discourses and The Social Contract

Gita May: Rousseau, Cultural Critic 257

Robert N. Bellah: Rousseau on Society and the Individual 266

David Bromwich: Rousseau and the Self without Property 288

Conor Cruise O’Brien: Rousseau, Robespierre, Burke, Jefferson,

and the French Revolution 301

Introduction:

Rousseau’s Political Triptych

SUSAN DUNN

Is there any deed more shocking, more hateful, more infamous than the

willful burning of a library? Is there any blow more devastating to the core

of human civilization? In the mid-eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rous-

seau startled—and excited—his readers by praising Caliph Omar, who in

the year 650 ordered the incineration of the glorious library in Alexandria.

∞

In his ﬁrst important work, The Discourse on the Sciences and Arts

(1750), also known as the First Discourse, Rousseau held that the search for

knowledge was so socially and morally destructive that book burning and

the subsequent return to ignorance, innocence, and poverty would be a step

forward rather than a step backward in the history of civilization. He was

convinced that only cultural and material regression could accompany the

movement of society toward morality. The entire rational enterprise of the

Enlightenment found itself unexpectedly under ﬁerce and principled attack.

When Rousseau burst upon the intellectual scene, the philosophers and

writers of eighteenth-century France had for decades been passionately

engaged in an audacious, innovative project: the questioning and disman-

tling of all the traditional underpinnings of their society. Their daring

charge entailed exposing to the light of reason all preconceived ideas,

supernatural dogmas and superstitious beliefs, all political and social as-

sumptions. Intellectuals were challenging the theological foundation of

monarchy, the privileges of the aristocracy, the doctrines of Catholicism.

Having wiped their intellectual slate as clean as they could, men of letters in

France embarked upon the bold plan of using human reason to address

people’s needs: how they should live, govern themselves, organize society,

and conceive morality. Their goal was a rational society dedicated to equal-

ity, freedom, and happiness. Life had become an intellectual adventure, and

people were optimistic that they could shape their own destinies.

Rousseau had once participated in this luminous and probing culture. He

too had wanted to embrace all knowledge; he too had known the joy of

intellectual curiosity, the bliss of creativity. Mingling and collaborating

with artists, musicians, philosophers, and writers—the great philosophe

2 Susan Dunn

Voltaire, the composer Rameau, the versatile man of letters Diderot, the

witty playwright Marivaux, the philosophe Fontenelle—he had reveled in

the aristocratic world of brilliant salons, where luxury, elegance, and genius

combined to make life a joy for the mind and the senses.

≤

But his fascination with the sophisticated world of the Enlightenment

was also colored by bitterness and resentment, the result of his humiliating

experience in 1743 working as the secretary for the French Ambassador in

Venice; by his disappointments in life, especially his dismay in 1745 at not

having received more recognition for his part in a musical collaboration

with Voltaire and Rameau; and by his own deep insecurities and demons,

his paranoid feeling that he was the target of various cabals conspiring to

undermine and discredit him. Suddenly his eyes bored into the heart of this

dazzling culture. He judged. He condemned. Behind the splendid façade, he

concluded, lay a world that was superﬁcial, corrupt, and cruel.

Astonishingly, Rousseau turned against the entire Enlightenment proj-

ect. He branded the daring intellectual, scientiﬁc, and artistic culture of

eighteenth-century France a lie, a vast devolution, a symptom of alarming

moral decline. Nothing more than a fake veneer, the century’s worldly

accomplishments were all the more perﬁdious because they masked so

effectively the deep corruption of a decadent, unequal society. The quest for

knowledge and intellectual advancement was a superﬁcial luxury that, in-

stead of serving society, reinforced its self-indulgence and decay. ‘‘We have

physicists, geometers, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, painters,’’

he remarked, adding tellingly that ‘‘we no longer have citizens.’’

People, Rousseau was convinced, had been deceived, seduced, and cor-

rupted by the radiance of the Enlightenment. And what was worse, they

cherished their corruption, for it seemed to mark the summit of progress and

civilization. Everywhere Rousseau saw educated individuals who resem-

bled ‘‘happy slaves,’’ preferring the glitter of high culture to true freedom

and happiness.

≥

The search for knowledge had merely taken on a life of its

own, divorced from the real needs of society and citizens.

Skepticism and vain inquiry attracted people more than a search for a

meaningful life. People believed that they knew everything, Rousseau re-

marked, but they did not know the meaning of the words magnanimity,

equity, temperance, humanity, courage, fatherland, and God. Overwhelmed

by pretension, affectation, and deceit, the values that create robust citi-

zens and a healthy society—self-sacriﬁce, sincere friendships, love of

country—had disappeared.

The principles of science and philosophy and the decadent values im-

plicit in the arts on the one hand and the requirements of a healthy society

Introduction 3

on the other, Rousseau insisted, are irremediably at odds with one another.

Whereas science searches for the truth by fostering doubt and undermining

faith and virtue, a vigorous, patriotic society, Rousseau contended, requires

assent to the principles of its foundation.

What then is the mission of the intellectual in society? The proper,

socially useful role of philosophers and men of letters, according to Rous-

seau, was not to spread mistrust, not to make piecemeal proposals for

incremental reform, not to seek fame and glory for themselves through their

intellectual acrobatics, but rather to offer, as he himself would, a radical

prescription for the complete social and political overhaul of the nation and

for the moral regeneration of its citizens.

∂

In his mind’s eye, he saw, in the place of a decadent culture that valued

superﬁcial luxury, prosperity, and free though vain inquiry, a muscular,

Spartan society that imposed rules and discipline and asked its citizens for

sacriﬁce. In such a polity, virtuous citizens would have no need for futile

intellectual pursuits. Indeed, Spartan virtue itself is anti-intellectual. De-

rived from the Latin word for ‘‘man,’’ vir, virtue implied not just moral

goodness, but rather strength, courage, and, above all, self-sacriﬁce and

self-discipline.

Even so, Rousseau was not suggesting that French men and women rush

out and torch the libraries of France—or copies of his own book. On the

contrary, in an already unhealthy, decadent society, science and philosophy

might, to some extent, be useful. Certain great individuals—such as Bacon,

Descartes, Newton—might serve as guides for humanity, and a few others

might be permitted to follow in their footsteps and even outdistance them.

In an already corrupt society, the arts and sciences, harmful for ‘‘average’’

people, could, in the hands of a few people of genius, perhaps bring some

true enlightenment to all.

∑

The Discourse on the Sciences and Arts won ﬁrst prize in the Dijon

Academy’s intellectual competition, a contest that had asked writers and

philosophers to respond to the question, ‘‘Has the revival of sciences and

arts contributed to improving morality?’’ With Rousseau’s friend Diderot

having arranged for the essay’s publication, the Discourse took Paris by

storm, becoming a best-seller. Were people merely captivated by Rous-

seau’s contrarian viewpoint and fascinated by harsh criticism of their radi-

ant and celebrated culture? Or were they intrigued by his surprising, anach-

ronistic resurrection of Spartan concepts of virtue, self-sacriﬁce, and duty?

Already in the seventeenth century, the shrewd aristocratic writer of

maxims, the duke de La Rochefoucauld, had criticized the high culture of

France, noting that ‘‘luxury and excessive politesse in states are a sure sign of

4 Susan Dunn

increasing decadence, because as all individuals become attached to their

private interests, they turn away from the public good.’’

∏

And in 1748, the

great political philosopher Montesquieu had also faulted the ‘‘manufactures,

commerce, ﬁnances, wealth, and luxury’’ of the modern world for displacing

civic and political virtue.

But Rousseau’s attack on modernity was far more

consistent and ambitious—and more psychologically acute—than that of

the other philosophes, and it is he alone who can be credited with composing

the jolting introduction to one of the most original, provocative, and far-

reaching challenges to Western society ever undertaken.

The ﬁrst seeds of a powerful, world-historical Revolution had been

planted. The ‘‘paradoxes’’ of the First Discourse exploded ‘‘like a bomb-

shell,’’ wrote the English economist and philosopher John Stuart Mill.

∫

‘‘Rousseau produced more effect with his pen,’’ Lord Acton said, ‘‘than

Aristotle, or Cicero, or St. Augustine, or St. Thomas Aquinas, or any other

man who ever lived.’’

Ω

Of all the great philosophes of the French Enlight-

enment—Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire—it was Rousseau who would

have the most profound and enduring impact on history, not only on the

Revolution in France but on almost all modern, democratic movements for

political liberation. He was the most radical political theorist of his times,

the most utopian. But it was also Rousseau who unwittingly set the stage for

the totalitarian states of the twentieth century, for ‘‘one-party democracy,’’

and for communitarianism gone haywire.

How can this paradox be explained?

rousseau’s

discourse on inequality

Three years after composing his First Discourse, Rousseau leaped at the

chance to add a further dimension to his political philosophy. The Dijon

Academy was proposing another intellectual competition. This time the

subject concerned the origins of inequality. Rousseau’s entry, his Discourse

on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind (1753), also

known as the Second Discourse, occupies a pivotal place in his thought. On

the one hand, it looks back to the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, giving

a historical and theoretical explanation for the decadence and corruption he

diagnosed in eighteenth-century French society. On the other hand, it looks

forward to his next great work, The Social Contract, by suggesting the

necessity of ﬁnding an alternate, healthier path along which society and

citizens can evolve.

Why had inequality become so rooted in society, Rousseau asked him-

Introduction 5

self. How had such a wide variety of people, poor as well as rich, come to

accept or proﬁt from outrageous social and economic disparities? How did

we arrive at our present condition?

In order to fathom the different causes of inequality and analyze the

successive stages in its development, Rousseau decided to play the role of

theoretical anthropologist, hypothesizing about the lives that people might

have led in the ‘‘state of nature,’’ before social relations and organized

society molded and corrupted human behavior. Rousseau admitted that the

‘‘state of nature’’ he imagined might never have existed. Still, such theoret-

ical conjecturing was necessary, he insisted, to ‘‘judge properly of our

present state.’’

∞≠

Rousseau tried to let his imagination go back in time as far as he could to

envision human beings stripped of even the most primitive social relations,

stripped even of language itself. In an act of impressive intellectual orig-

inality, he pared off all accretions, all the wants, needs, habits, skills, beliefs,

emotions, and values that one develops in society, revealing the ‘‘bare

bones’’ of the human being.

A century earlier, the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes had also

hypothesized about the ‘‘state of nature.’’ In one of the most famous sen-

tences of his classic text Leviathan (1651), Hobbes had maintained that

human life in the state of nature was ‘‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and

short.’’ Though people were free and equal, they were engaged in perpetual

warfare with one another.

Now it was Rousseau’s turn to sketch a portrait of life in the state of

nature, and he would present a very different picture of primitive human

beings. He envisioned the state of nature as a kind of dormancy period.

People were free and equal, he theorized, but they lived mostly solitary

lives, feeling little need for others. Though they had sexual relations with

one another, they formed no lasting bonds. There existed among them

neither cooperation nor conﬂict.

They lived entirely in the present, experiencing only spontaneous drives.

Still, they felt a harmony with the world because their desires never ex-

ceeded their needs and because they were able to satisfy both needs and

desires immediately. They were independent and devoid of aggression to-

ward one another. Were they happy? Perhaps. But their moral and rational

faculties remained largely asleep. Though they did have an ‘‘instinct’’ for

pity for the suffering of others along with a ‘‘survival instinct’’ of their own,

they were for the most part untouched by morality. Neither love nor friend-

ship nor family nor thought nor speech impinged upon their primitive soli-

tude. These early humans were all potential and virtuality.

6 Susan Dunn

The notion of a state of nature was a useful ﬁction. It furnished Rousseau

with theoretical ‘‘evidence’’ for claiming a radical dichotomy between our

present demeaning condition and the Eden we left behind. Here was an

original standard against which all future human dislocation could be

measured.

This vision of the state of nature, moreover, provided Rousseau with a

basis for his belief in human ‘‘perfectibility.’’ Now he could argue that if

modern individuals appeared corrupt, unequal, and enslaved, it is society—

not human nature—that is to blame. Thus a remedy to the situation might

be found. Because of people’s vast rational and ethical potential, it was pos-

sible and reasonable to propose an alternate route for their social, political,

and moral development. This was the challenge Rousseau accepted: he was

convinced that it was his mission to chart that course, not backward to the

state of nature, but forward toward a more rational, social, and moral Eden.

Given our equality and freedom in the state of nature, why did inequality

come to deﬁne the human condition in most societies? How would Rous-

seau explain entire civilizations under the spell of servitude and the yoke of

despotism?

Very early in human history, according to Rousseau’s hypothetical sce-

nario, people began to work and collaborate occasionally with one another.

This was the beginning of a long golden age that saw the appearance of

family units and patriarchal authority but not yet of private property. Hus-

bands and wives, parents and children dwelled together under one roof,

experiencing the ‘‘sweetest sentiments’’ known to human beings, ‘‘conjugal

and paternal love.’’ Each family resembled a ‘‘little society’’ in which mem-

bers were united by mutual affection and liberty. There was commerce

among the different families; human faculties, social rituals, and a sense of

morality evolved somewhat, all contributing to ‘‘the happiest and most

durable epoch’’ in human history, an interim period ‘‘between the indolence

of the primitive state and the petulant activity of egoism.’’

But then came the fall from tranquillity and the downward spiral into

history and corruption. This period began when people realized that, with

rational effort and work, they could transform the natural world. A new

intellectual energy was unleashed, destroying the simplicity and harmony

that had reigned in the state of nature between one’s needs and one’s de-

sires. The novel concept of the division of labor also took hold, robbing

people of their self-sufﬁciency. Now new technological advances, such as

agriculture and metallurgy, were introduced, accompanied by the notion of

‘‘private property.’’ People competed for property, increasing their wealth at

Introduction 7

the expense of others. Production started to surpass people’s needs, feeding

a new hunger for superﬂuous, ‘‘luxury’’ goods. Equality was vanquished by

ambition and greed.

Exacerbating economic inequality was a new insidious form of psycho-

logical inequality. As people started to acquire wealth and property, they

began to compare themselves to their neighbors, seeking to distinguish

themselves and assert their own superiority. Rousseau perceived that this

quest for esteem is, at bottom, a desire for inequality. In 1899 the Amer-

ican economic theorist Thorstein Veblen would label this syndrome ‘‘con-

spicuous consumption.’’

∞∞

Rousseau incisively remarked that the cost to

individuals of these new desires for prestige ( proestigium in Latin means

‘‘illusion’’) was alienation from themselves. For they viewed their accom-

plishments, their worth, and themselves through the appraising eyes of their

rivals, experiencing their lives through their judgmental gaze, belonging

less to themselves than to others. To earn the regard of others, it became

more important to appear than to be. One tried to satisfy one’s ego while

robbing oneself of authenticity and equality—as well as of the compassion

one had felt for others in the state of nature.

The disappearance of equality, social divisions resulting from the divi-

sion of labor, the unequal distribution of property, the isolation of the rich

from the poor, Rousseau contends, were followed by exploitation, violence,

and frightening disorder. ‘‘The usurpations of the rich, the pillagings of the

poor, the unbridled passions of all, by stiﬂing the cries of natural compas-

sion, and the still feeble voice of justice,’’ concluded Rousseau, ‘‘rendered

men avaricious, wicked and ambitious.’’

∞≤

At this point, Rousseau and

Hobbes merge. Human society has degenerated into a state of war of all

against all.

Now a rich and powerful individual, for whom violence and war are as

pernicious as they are for the weak members of society, makes the people an

offer they cannot refuse. He proposes that they all unite, enter into a ‘‘social

contract’’ and form a polity. The people would be assured order, security,

peace, and justice in exchange for their freedom. The rich man too desires

law and order, so that he may enjoy his possessions in tranquillity, un-

threatened by social unrest. Thus the weak assent to inequality and acquire

chains as the rich consolidate and institutionalize their power. Economic

expropriation has expanded to encompass political expropriation. The basis

of this social contract is deception and exploitation. Might makes right.

People are fully enslaved—by their promise of obedience to their ruler, by

their own ambition and vanity, their inauthentic desires for luxury as well as

their need for the admiration of others.

8 Susan Dunn

Finally, in a rapidly sketched nightmarish vision of the accelerated col-

lapse of society into chaos, Rousseau envisaged political intrigue, factions,

and civil strife leading to the complete disintegration of legitimate govern-

ment. Chosen leaders become hereditary leaders. The social fabric disinte-

grates, people’s natural pity for the suffering of others is extinguished. The

last degree of inequality has been reached. Now despotism raises its hid-

eous head. The political relationship is no longer merely between the

powerful and the weak but between master and slave. The vertiginous

descent into human degradation and corruption is complete.

Once again, people ﬁnd themselves solitary and atomized, as they were

in the state of nature. Ironically, they are also once again equal. The differ-

ence, Rousseau noted, is that now they are equal because they are all noth-

ing. The only law is the arbitrary will of the master. Life is now indeed nasty

and brutish. But whereas Hobbes had located such degradation in the ‘‘state

of nature,’’ Rousseau discovers it at the end of human social development.

Rousseau has taken us to the edge of the abyss. The Second Discourse

ends with a sanguinary vision of revolution. ‘‘The insurrection, which ends

in the death or deposition of a sultan,’’ concludes Rousseau, ‘‘is as juridical

an act as any by which the day before he disposed of the lives and fortunes

of his subjects. Force alone upheld him, force alone overturns him.’’ Per-

haps there is hope for radical change—through revolution.

∞≥

But change will be meaningless unless there is a profound rethinking of

the social contract, society, and social relations. Rousseau always believed

in the Enlightenment notion of human perfectibility. Human nature, he

suggested, is malleable; our moral and rational faculties can be nurtured,

educated, and guided so that our full humanity can blossom. Even if society

has made us unequal and unfree, even if it has made us the deluded toys of

our own psychological alienation from ourselves, the victims of our limit-

less desires for superﬁcial pleasures and superﬂuous knowledge, even if it

has reduced us to the abject slaves of powerful rulers, it is possible to

reconceive and restructure social relations and political institutions on a

radically different basis. Rousseau’s next work, The Social Contract, leads

us away from the catastrophic vision with which he concluded his Second

Discourse and toward a new utopian future.

In a sense, Rousseau’s whole project follows traditional Christian think-

ing. Like Christian theologians, Rousseau sees human development in

terms of three stages: Eden, the Fall, Redemption. For him, the Fall sig-

niﬁes, not a separation from God or an accusation against human beings,

but rather a ‘‘fall’’ from the benign state of nature into a long, devastating,

and totally negative period of corruption and degradation.

∞∂

Introduction 9

Redemption will occur, not through faith and grace, not through any-

thing supernatural or mystical, but on the contrary through a purely rational

and human prescription for political and social happiness: his revolu-

tionary—and troubling—Social Contract, his attempt to conceive a moral,

consensual polity that assures freedom and equality while nourishing sim-

ple Spartan virtue.

a new kind of social contract

A startling break with all traditional notions of government and society,

Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) comprised the ﬁnal part of his political

triptych. In this work, he presents a radical political vision, yet one that is

perfectly consistent with his attacks on corruption and inequality in his two

Discourses.

The ideal society he proposes in The Social Contract is, more than

anything else, a communitarian society in which the responsibilities and

duties of citizenship outweigh individual rights and freedoms. Selﬂessly,

citizens bind and commit themselves to the common good of all, willing to

make sacriﬁces for their political community. Their virtue is richly re-

warded. Through their devotion to their community, their self-discipline,

and patriotism, they thrive as human beings, thus realizing their full rational

and moral potential.

The citizens of this cohesive community have entered into a stunningly

original social pact, different from all previous notions of a social contract.

Other political thinkers, such as Hobbes, had also surmised that at the bases

of societies lay founding contracts. But for these theorists, the social pact

was always an act of submission. Hobbes, for example, contended that in

order to escape from the state of perpetual warfare that existed in the brutish

‘‘state of nature,’’ people entered into a pact, a contract, in which they

signed away their freedom and all their rights to a sovereign who would rule

over them, guaranteeing them life, security, and order. The ruler’s power

over them was absolute.

Rousseau brands these kinds of contracts null and void. Even though the

people may have voluntarily consented to the pact, he considered such

consent invalid.

∞∑

If one of the parties to a contract is degraded or harmed in

any way, the contract, he judged, is void. People may give up property, he

reasoned, but they may not consent to give up life or freedom, the essential

elements of their humanity. Consent is not sufﬁcient to create legitimate

authority.

10 Susan Dunn

More crucial than consent is the nature of the contract itself. For a

contract to be valid, all parties must proﬁt equally from its terms. Rous-

seau’s idea of a social contract is therefore not a pact between rulers and

ruled, powerful and weak, masters and slaves. On the contrary, the only

parties to the contract are the people themselves who consent only to rule

over themselves. (The opening words of the American constitutional con-

tract, written twenty-ﬁve years after Rousseau’s Social Contract, are ‘‘We

the People,’’ words more Rousseauian in spirit than Jefferson’s mention of

the ‘‘consent of the governed’’ in the Declaration of Independence.)

This kind of pact could hardly be more revolutionary. The only legiti-

mate social contract, according to Rousseau, is one in which the people

themselves are sovereign. Their sovereignty, like their freedom, is unalien-

able, and they may not transfer their sovereignty to anyone else or submit to

the will of any others.

∞∏

The originality of Rousseau’s social contract is that

the people bind themselves to a contract but do not subject themselves to

any authority except that of their own collective will—their ‘‘General

Will.’’ Indeed, towering above them, revered by all, looms the strange

concept of the people’s ‘‘General Will.’’

The General Will. This unusual notion is the key to Rousseau’s commu-

nitarian vision. What did he mean by the General Will?

Rousseau held that a democratic society possesses a General Will. This

‘‘will’’ reﬂects what enlightened people would want if they were able to

make decisions solely as social beings and citizens and not as private indi-

viduals. Individuals may possess private wills that express their particular

interests, but citizens must recognize and concur with the General Will that

mirrors the good of all. The General Will is not tantamount to the will of all

citizens. Nor is it the sum of all individual wills or the expression of a

compromise or consensus among them. Nor is it the equivalent of the will

of the majority, for even the majority can be corrupt or misguided. In other

words, it is a theoretical construct. The General Will is general, not because

a broad number of people subscribe to it but because its object is always the

common good of all.

Thus, hovering strangely above and beyond the wills of all, the General

Will is ‘‘always constant, unalterable, and pure,’’

∞π

always mirroring per-

fectly the common good of all members of the community. The ultimate

authority—and ultimate sovereignty—thus reside not really in the people,

who may err in their estimation of the General Will, unable to transcend

their private wills, but rather in the infallible General Will itself—the

power of Reason, the enlightened collective moral conscience.

∞∫

Introduction 11

True freedom, Rousseau maintains, consists in choosing to obey the

General Will. But how can freedom be equated with obedience?

Rousseau recognized two different types of freedom. The ﬁrst, enjoyed

by people in the state of nature, denoted their freedom to act as they wished,

in a variety of diverse ways. This was a negative form of freedom, freedom

from constraints. But there is another, higher form of freedom, according to

Rousseau, a positive freedom. This is not freedom from constraint, but

rather freedom for some higher good, for the enjoyment of the good, moral

life.

∞Ω

This kind of freedom, more heroic and ambitious than negative free-

dom, can belong to the citizen who is able to suppress his private will and

consciously choose the common good over his own desires and personal

beneﬁt. This individual has mastered himself, becoming a moral and hence

a truly free being. The originality of Rousseau’s vision resides in his con-

cept of freedom, not as the province of the autonomous individual but rather

as that of the self-sacriﬁcing citizen.

Indeed, the more that people identify with the community, the ‘‘freer’’

they are. Whereas primitive individuals in the state of nature were thor-

oughly indifferent and unattached to one another, in Rousseau’s utopia,

citizens are unreservedly involved with one another. The solitary indepen-

dence that people may have enjoyed in the state of nature is not something

that Rousseau aspired to recover. On the contrary, he wishes to see it trans-

formed into its opposite—voluntary dependence and interdependence,

happy obedience to the General Will.

We cannot recapture our original autonomy, but we can instead secure a

higher freedom, the freedom to govern ourselves as we collectively wish.

≤≠

Still, the primitive being and the socialized citizen have something in com-

mon, for both are innocent, genuine, unaffected—both are the polar op-

posite of the corrupt, decadent inhabitants of eighteenth-century Enlighten-

ment France.

Rousseau has taken us on a fantastic voyage—from radical indepen-

dence in the state of nature, to abject servitude in society, to complete social

involvement in his utopia. We have journeyed from animal freedom to

moral freedom.

≤∞

Does personal ‘‘happiness’’ ﬁt into Rousseau’s plan? In truth, he does

not promise happiness. People may have been happier, he admits, in their

solitary lives in the state of nature, knowing neither good nor evil, their

existences revolving around the immediate satisfaction of their physical

needs. But Rousseau was convinced that individuals, through their identi-

ﬁcation with the community, could attain something higher than private

12 Susan Dunn

happiness: meaningful lives. No longer drowning in infernal rat-races,

competing and striving to impress others, pursuing elusive, inauthentic

goals that never lead to real satisfaction, people by choosing to live as parts

of a whole and to share in the common happiness of all have a chance at real

fulﬁllment and peace of mind.

Here is Rousseau’s vision of a good society. Citizens are free and equal,

not because they own equal property or possess equal talents, but rather

because they share an equal measure of civic rights and responsibilities. By

renouncing their autonomy and participating in and obeying the General

Will, they assure that they will all be treated fairly and with equal consider-

ation and respect. The political community represents the one and only

channel through which human beings can live and act as fully aware moral

agents, accepting and carrying out the duties assigned to them by their own

human dignity.

Still, Rousseau’s utopian vision is oddly apolitical. He displayed no

interest in political struggles for power; he devoted no time to conceiving

political or parliamentary institutions. Nor was he concerned with eco-

nomic justice, advising only that the rich exercise moderation and that the

poor restrain their envy.

≤≤

Rather than reﬂect on parliamentary rules or an

economic bill of rights, he imagined instead a relatively small community

of citizens, living in ‘‘peace, union, and equality’’ without complex laws.

He rejected the idea of a representative democracy, for representatives

would rob citizens not only of their sovereignty but also of their civic

responsibilities.

Periodically all citizens simply and harmoniously come together to

ratify, not to debate, the General Will and the laws that emanate from it. In

these periodic acts of ‘‘direct democracy,’’ citizens attempt to discover the

General Will. They must deliberate alone and by themselves, never in

concert with others—for any kind of associations would lead them to iden-

tify with the ‘‘partial’’ interests of a faction, not the general interest of all.

≤≥

When citizens vote, their act of voting is conceived, not as a way for them to

express their individual wills or to forge a compromise among opposing

factions, but purely as a mechanism for ‘‘discovering’’ the General Will.

These assemblies, while engaging citizens in a referendum on the Gen-

eral Will, do not engage them in a participatory democracy. These are not

‘‘town-meetings,’’ for citizens neither govern nor make policies. Nor are

citizens free to assemble en masse when they wish; only assemblies con-

voked by the magistrates are lawful and valid.

≤∂

Rousseau’s goal was cohe-

sion, harmony, and peace, not self-government.

Politics, Rousseau taught, was a simple affair; the General Will was

Introduction 13

obvious; collective deliberation was not necessary; and decisions required

nothing more than common sense.

≤∑

The people obey only their own Gen-

eral Will which never imposes arbitrary or unnecessary obligations on them.

The laws that citizens ratify reﬂect their collective sense of the General

Will. When they obey their society’s laws, they ‘‘obey no one, but simply

their own will.’’

≤∏

While people must agree unanimously to the original

social contract, all other legislative decisions are made by a simple major-

ity.

≤π

Though these laws are supposed to affect all subjects collectively,

Rousseau, in a strange and disappointing retreat, oddly contradicts himself

by opening up the possibility that certain citizens may be denied rights or

privileges that are accorded to others.

≤∫

The law, Rousseau allows, ‘‘may

indeed decree that there shall be privileges, but cannot confer them on any

person by name.’’

≤Ω

The people possess the body of laws handed down to them by their

Founder, Rousseau’s mythical ‘‘Legislator,’’ a clairvoyant wise man who,

like Lycurgus in Sparta, Numa in Rome, and Moses for the Jewish nation,

has formulated laws tailored to his particular people, laws that give a

‘‘soul’’ to the nation and that conciliate pure justice and the particular

circumstances of the polity. After having established the legal code, which

is endowed with ‘‘divine authority’’ and the ‘‘prestige of the gods,’’ the

Legislator can withdraw, his task accomplished.

≥≠

A small group of men, or

still better, one man, a monarch, constitutes the people’s ‘‘executive,’’ exist-

ing only as the servant of the people’s will, but nevertheless constituting the

polity’s active government.

Rousseau has conceived a radically original society, geared not to indi-

viduals obsessed with maximizing their own private interests,

≥∞

but instead

to citizens who possess a strong moral sense of their responsibilities and

duties toward one another and toward the community. The polity fosters

their equality and enhances their freedom to lead meaningful lives and

realize their most profound human aspirations. The blossoming of their

humanity is inseparable from their citizenship and their conformity to the

State’s prescription for the ‘‘good life.’’ Rousseau has restored to us, one

scholar wrote, the ‘‘fundamental sweetness of life.’’

≥≤

democracy without pluralism

Do you hear the piercing wail of sirens, warning of danger?

The General Will—arbitrary, coercive, and ultimately illusory—has

come to dominate all of society and its laws. Every citizen must submit to

its infallible, unlimited authority. What king ever ruled so absolutely?

14 Susan Dunn

It must now be clear that Rousseau has conceived a utopian, ethical,

democratic polity that includes no channels for the expression of dissent or

opposition. Having deﬁned the General Will as infallible and sovereign,

Rousseau could not logically imagine any legitimate opposition to it. Politi-

cal ‘‘freedom’’ in such a solidary, uniﬁed society requires submission and

obedience to the General Will.

And yet, at the dawn of the twenty-ﬁrst century, we know that the

determining features of democracy are the legitimacy of opposition and

political parties. How can there be political freedom without the right to

oppose those who govern?

≥≥

But in Rousseau’s utopia, those who disagree with the General Will are

simply in error, expressing selﬁsh, ‘‘particular’’ interests that perversely

thwart the common good of all. Even the majority of citizens can be in

error, for Rousseau explicitly wrote that often there can be a great differ-

ence between the will of all and the General Will

≥∂

(though, wanting it both

ways, he also stated that ‘‘all the characteristics of the General Will’’ are

found in the will of the plurality).

≥∑

In any case, there can be no role for

minority opinion. Neither dissenting individuals nor groups, political par-

ties, or factions can be tolerated by the cohesive whole. To persist in ques-

tioning or opposing the General Will is to abdicate one’s membership in the

polity, to give up one’s political rights, and ultimately to be executed, ‘‘less

as a citizen than as an enemy.’’

≥∏

But before putting ‘‘rebels’’ and ‘‘traitors’’

to death, the sovereign people must attempt to make those who have difﬁ-

culty recognizing the General Will see the light. ‘‘Whoever refuses to obey

the general will,’’ Rousseau decreed, ‘‘shall be constrained to do so by

the whole body: which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to

be free.’’

≥π

Forced to be free? These paradoxical words shock us, and rightly so, for

they cast their dark shadow on some of the grimmest periods of the twen-

tieth century. Yet Rousseau’s goal was freedom, community, and morality,

not mass repression. Rousseau would contend that if society constrains

people to be free, socializes them to suppress their animal instincts and

selﬁsh desires, and educates them to choose the General Will over their

private wills, it is in the name of their own human dignity.

Socialization and education or mind-control? The health of the society

and the willingness of citizens to obey the General Will, Rousseau ac-

knowledges, depend on citizens’ belief in a civil religion that binds their

hearts to the State and makes them delight in their civic duties.

≥∫

So essential is this religion to the well-being of the polity that non-

believers must be banished—not because they are impious, Rousseau ex-

Introduction 15

plains, but rather because they are ‘‘unsociable.’’ And if heretics must be put

to death, it is in the name of the sanctity of the law. ‘‘If any one, after publicly

acknowledging these dogmas [of the civil religion],’’ Rousseau wrote, ‘‘be-

haves like an unbeliever in them, he should be punished with death; he has

committed the greatest of crimes, he has lied before the laws.’’

≥Ω

Buttressing the civil religion, a ‘‘board of censors’’ guides and molds

people’s judgment and then ‘‘declares’’ the nature of public opinion.

∂≠

Though Rousseau asserts that this censorial tribunal merely preserves mo-

rality by preventing the corruption of public opinion, he admits that this

board will ‘‘ﬁx’’ opinions when they are not yet determined. This seems to

mean that instead of a continuous and open national debate on the common

good, the government would control the equivalent of editorial and op-ed

pages and shape public attitudes. One of Rousseau’s critics contends that

the ‘‘Censorship’’ would inevitably come to supervise not only the press but

also art, theater, and all other means of communication.

∂∞

Individual wills shattered by the power of the General Will. Self-interest

supplanted by sacriﬁce and sharing. Conﬂict and opposition banned in the

name of unity and consensus. Public opinion shaped by a censorial Big

Brother. Rousseau’s ideal political community, through the sheer force of

its coercive and unitary communitarian spirit, comes to dominate every

aspect of human life—intellectual life, social life, moral life. This is the

very deﬁnition of modern totalitarianism—as well as of the militaristic

Spartan society that Rousseau ﬁrst lauded in his Discourse on the Sciences

and Arts, a society in which man’s entire being is absorbed by his role as

citizen.

∂≤

Ironically though not surprisingly, Rousseau admitted toward the end of

his life that he himself would never have chosen or been able to be part of

such a solidary community. ‘‘I was never really suited to civil society, with

all its burdens, obligations and duties,’’ he confessed. His ‘‘independent

nature’’ refused the submissions and compromises necessary in communal

life. ‘‘As soon as I sense a yoke, . . . I become rebellious . . . . When I am

supposed to do the opposite of what I want to do, I refuse to do it, no matter

what happens.’’

∂≥

What then motivated Rousseau to conceive a society in which dissent

and conﬂict are outlawed and submission to the General Will the only

legitimate form of political behavior? Why was the notion of a dynamic,

competitive political arena, one that tolerates conﬂict and rewards self-

conﬁdent individuals and vociferous interest groups, alien to his imagina-

tion? Was it his own anti-social personality and need for solitude, his fear

16 Susan Dunn

that others were always trying to injure him, his long pattern of living under

the paternalistic or maternalistic protection of wealthy patrons?

In Rousseau’s ideal society, every person, he wrote, is ‘‘perfectly inde-

pendent of all the rest, and in absolute dependence on the State.’’

∂∂

This, in

fact, corresponds perfectly to the penetrating deﬁnition of ‘‘democratic

despotism’’ that the great political sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville offered

in 1856. Tocqueville described a society in which isolated, atomized indi-

viduals—though equal—are barred from group action and cooperation as

well as from meaningful political participation on a variety of levels—

local, county, state, national—spread throughout society. Instead of par-

ticipating in self-government and receiving this kind of hands-on education

in citizenship, they are ruled over by a central government, the sole locus of

political power.

∂∑

But for his part, Rousseau was more disposed to the

notion of obedience to the General Will than to the notion of a participatory

government; he was more comfortable with the idea of the atomization of

citizens than with the idea of citizens joining and working together to make

demands and claims upon the state.

Did Rousseau articulate the principles of a revolutionary democratic,

moral community, tapping deep human yearnings for belonging, solidarity,

and sharing? Or did he unwittingly create the enduring blueprint for horriﬁc

totalitarian regimes that repress their people in the name of ‘‘one-party

democracy’’? Does his Social Contract offer redemption and salvation after

the Fall—or a disguised inferno?

Is his legacy the kibbutz or the Gulag?

rousseau in the age of revolution

Rousseau admired Niccolò Machiavelli. He called the early sixteenth-

century political theorist a ‘‘profound politician’’ and lover of liberty.

∂∏

Machiavelli would not have returned the compliment.

Machiavelli’s most gleaming political insight was that a republic is

energized by conﬂict: without conﬂict there are no politics and no freedom.

Tumult, he wrote in 1513, was ‘‘the guardian of Roman liberties’’ and

‘‘deserved the highest praise.’’ When tumult is absent, when everyone in a

state is tranquil, he noted, ‘‘we can be sure that it is not a republic.’’ The

Florentine perceived that conﬂict is the foundation of freedom and politics.

When the Roman people demonstrated and clamored for their rights, he

remarked, their demands, far from being harmful, eventually produced ‘‘all

laws favorable to liberty.’’ Machiavelli understood that the very nature of

Introduction 17

politics is conﬂictual and that only tolerance for opposition and conﬂict can

guarantee the survival of political freedom.

∂π

Nearly three hundred years later, James Madison not only revived Ma-

chiavelli’s ideas but acted upon them, making the people’s right to form

factions and engage in non-violent political conﬂict the foundation of his

plan for republican government. Thomas Jefferson went even further, es-

tablishing the crucial principle of the legitimacy of opposition by fostering

and exploiting a system of political parties that enabled Americans to orga-

nize and oppose the politicians in power.

The American Revolution had proceeded from stage to stage, accom-

plishing its goals: the war of the 1770s had brought independence. The

Philadelphia Convention of 1787 created stable democratic institutions and

a venerated Constitution, to which the founders added a Bill of Rights in

1791, and the watershed election of 1800 established the precedent of a

defeated incumbent party peacefully turning over power to the opposition.

But while Madison and Jefferson emphasized tumult, factions, and par-

ties, on the other side of the Atlantic the leaders of the French Revolution—

Sieyès, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and others—were mesmerized by Rous-

seau’s dream of harmony and unanimity. Their Revolution that began with

the storming of the Bastille and the idealistic ‘‘Declaration of the Rights of

Man and Citizen’’ plunged into a downward spiral, descending into Terror

and the hideous reign of the guillotine, devouring its adversaries and its

followers as well as its leaders. Finally, ten years later, in a plebiscite in

1799, an exhausted people voted for the Constitution that guaranteed the

autocracy of Napoleon. The vote was 3,011,007 to 1,562. In the nineteenth

century, the word ‘‘republic’’ had become a smear-word; France would not

know republican government until 1871. ‘‘He was a madman, your Rous-

seau,’’ commented Napoleon. ‘‘It was he who led us into our present

predicament.’’

∂∫

the french revolution

When Rousseau’s remains were installed in the Pantheon in Paris in 1794,

Joseph Lakanal, who had been one of the members of the revolutionary leg-

islative Convention, remarked, ‘‘It is not the Social Contract that brought

about the Revolution. Rather, it is the Revolution that explained to us the

Social Contract.’’

∂Ω

Indeed, revolutionaries in France had not always heeded Rousseau’s

advice as they designed their blueprint for the new institutions of France.

18 Susan Dunn

They created, for example, a representative democracy—not the ‘‘direct

democracy’’ that Rousseau had advocated. But if the Revolution’s institu-

tions were not inspired by his work, if they were, on the contrary, inﬂuenced

in some respects more by centuries of monarchical absolutism, the Revolu-

tion’s spirit certainly belonged to Rousseau.

∑≠

Or, as one scholar recently

observed, Rousseau may not have ‘‘caused’’ the French Revolution, but ‘‘he

provided the terms in which the logic of events could be interpreted.’’

∑∞

A harmonious, communitarian society à la Rousseau would be the Rev-

olution’s antidote to centuries of injustice and class stratiﬁcation. Just as

Rousseau saw his utopian society as a form of redemption after the degra-

dation of the fall, the leaders of 1789 similarly believed, as the historian

François Furet notes, that a unitary, unanimous polity, committed to the

General Will, would ‘‘regenerate’’ humanity after the degradation of the

ancien régime.

∑≤

On the eve of the French Revolution, one of Rousseau’s most inﬂuential

disciples, Emmanuel Sieyès, authored the incendiary political pamphlet,

‘‘What Is the Third Estate?’’

∑≥

During that winter of 1788–1789, as France

stood at the brink of ﬁnancial collapse, King Louis XVI decided to convene

the Estates General, hoping that they could resolve the crisis. Following the

centuries-old formula, representatives of the three orders— the nobility, the

clergy, and the Third Estate—would meet, each order deliberating sepa-

rately. The nobility and the clergy together consisted of about 200,000

members; the Third Estate, that is, the rest of the population, 25 million.

Even before the meeting took place, spokesmen for the Third Estate were

objecting to this antiquated structure and demanding that the Third Estate

be accorded representation equal to the two other orders combined.

But in his pamphlet Sieyès went even further, making a far more radical

demand. Bitterly denouncing the entire anachronistic institution of the Es-

tates General, he declared that there should be a single National Assembly

comprised solely of representatives of the Third Estate. The nation and the

Third Estate, he argued, were one and the same.

∑∂

‘‘What is the Third Estate?’’ Sieyès demanded in his lapidary style.

‘‘Everything. What has it been in the political order up to now? Nothing.

What is it asking for? To become something.’’ Instantaneously Sieyès ex-

cluded the two privileged orders from membership in the nation. Without

them, France would be more, not less. Separate, privileged orders were like

malignant ﬂuids attacking a sick body and had to be ‘‘neutralized.’’

∑∑

‘‘There cannot be one will as long as we permit three orders,’’ he patiently

explained, as if echoing Rousseau. ‘‘At best, the three orders might agree.

Introduction 19

But they will never constitute one nation, one representation and one com-

mon will.’’

∑∏

When the Estates General convened in the spring of 1789, Sieyès au-

daciously proposed that the Third Estate declare itself the National Assem-

bly. His profoundly revolutionary motion passed by an overwhelming ma-

jority. The ‘‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,’’ composed in

August 1789, decreed that the nation—the Third Estate—was sovereign.

Just eight months after the publication of his ideas, Sieyès’s theoretical

blueprint for France had become the new reality.

The key to Sieyès’s vision of a new France—and the concept that

shaped the Revolution’s politics and became its mantra—was unity. The

salvation of France and the success of the Revolution appeared to hinge on

the unanimity and indivisibility of the nation. Sieyès conceived the Third

Estate not as a diverse population of heterogeneous individuals each acting

in his own self-interest, but rather as a homogeneous mass. Following

Rousseau, he envisioned members of the nation not only as equal but also as

like-minded, sharing the same opinions, ideals, and revolutionary goals.

Individuals might differ from one another in their private lives, Sieyès

allowed, but those differences occur ‘‘beyond the sphere of citizenship.’’

∑π

Citizens’ rights and freedoms derived from their status as equal and concur-

ring members of society, from their submission to the General Will. Any

individual who ‘‘exits from the common quality of citizen’’ cannot ‘‘partici-

pate in political rights.’’

∑∫

For Sieyès, as for Rousseau before him, there could be no legitimate role

for dissenting individuals or minority factions to play in self-government.

∑Ω

Sieyès contended that all citizens, by virtue of having accepted and entered

into their society’s social contract, agree to be bound by the will of the

majority. A citizen is obliged to ‘‘view the common will as his own.’’

Should he refuse to yield to the majority, his only alternative is to leave the

polity. Thus the sole solution envisaged by Sieyès to the problem of possi-

ble political conﬂict between an individual and the group was expatriation.

Similarly, a minority faction has no right to oppose the majority, since the

majority could be assumed to speak for the General Will.

∏≠

Freedom meant the Rousseauian ‘‘freedom’’ to obey the General Will,

not the freedom to pursue one’s own private interests and happiness. ‘‘Ev-

eryone must forget his own interest and pride,’’ instructed the twenty-six

year old Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just, the Revolution’s most radical ide-

ologue. ‘‘Private happiness and interest are a violence against the social

order. . . . Your interest demands that you forget your interest; the only

salvation is through the public good.’’

∏∞

20 Susan Dunn

Factions and parties were anathema. What justiﬁcation could there be

for bodies that represent ‘‘partial’’ and private interests in a nation of equal

and self-sacriﬁcing citizens, all committed to the ‘‘common good’’? Danton

expressed the party line: ‘‘You must absorb this truth: factions cannot exist

in a republic.’’

∏≤

Making no attempt to disguise the Jacobins’ refusal to

tolerate opposition, Saint-Just proclaimed in February 1794 that ‘‘what

constitutes a republic is the total destruction of everything that stands in

opposition to it.’’

∏≥

And yet the radical Jacobins, who would ultimately control the Revolu-

tion and govern France during the reign of Terror, were themselves a dis-

tinct minority. They prevailed in their quest to dominate the Convention by

successfully presenting their radical party ideology as the General Will.

The people, the Jacobins announced, wanted what the Jacobins wanted, and

the Jacobins knew and expressed the General Will, capitalizing on this most

falsiﬁable of concepts. Their strategy was to denounce and remove duly

elected representatives for nothing more than their minority views and to

eliminate all dissent in the name of unanimity and unity.

But unity divides. Unity excludes. Unity polarizes. The corollary of the

nation’s unity is the elimination of any individuals or groups that disrupt

that unity. People who do not concur with the nation’s interests and goals,

who persist in voicing their own private interests, who threaten the nation’s

unanimity are considered enemies to be banished or punished. Thus, the

Rousseauian yearning for cohesion, solidarity, and oneness imposes the

psychology of the purge.

∏∂

Indeed, during the Terror of 1793–1794, the revolutionary Convention

in France would mandate the death penalty for any attempt to threaten the

unity of the Republic. A revolutionary Tribunal was established in March

1793 to ferret out domestic enemies, all the ‘‘traitors’’ and ‘‘conspirators’’

who threatened the nation’s unity. Just as Rousseau had recommended, if

citizens could not be ‘‘forced to be free,’’ those who persisted in betraying

the civil religion of harmony and sociability could be put to death.

Of course, unity never reigned in France. During the tumultuous years of

the French Revolution, the mesmerizing cult of unity was a veil behind

which seethed dissension and discord. Politicians, journalists, philosophers,

and economists disagreed on all the major issues of the day, as rational

people in any country would.

Numerous factions—monarchiens, Brissotins, Feuillantistes, Montag-

nards, Girondins, Jacobins, sansculottes, chouans, enragés, Dantonistes,

Hébertistes, Robespierristes, Thermidoreans—dotted the political land-

scape, not only making the study of the French Revolution extremely com-

Introduction 21

plicated but also making the simple schism in America between Federalists

and Republicans seem, in comparison, downright unimaginative. But so

enchanted were the French with the rhetoric of unity and so cynical were

political leaders who used the Rousseauian myth of unity to isolate and

defeat their adversaries and consolidate their own power, that even when

people disagreed passionately with one another, they continued to condemn

factions and parties as well as the very idea of organized opposition. Even

when it was apparent that nothing existed but dissension and conﬂict, revo-

lutionary leaders in France were self-destructively blind and intellectually

opposed to the idea of an inclusive polity in which a variety of political

visions could be tolerated.

Ironically, the revolutionary cult of unity that rejected dissent, factions,

and non-violent political conﬂict led the French Revolution to the most

extreme form of conﬂict: violence and murder. And this catastrophic failure

of democracy can be traced directly to Rousseau’s dream of harmony and

consensus, to his vision of a fraternal people bound together in political

unity, all happily acknowledging and obeying the truth of the sovereign,

infallible General Will, and to his exclusion of dissent and opposition. ‘‘The

contradiction inherent in the abstract attempt to constrain modern man to

subordinate everything to the public good,’’ judges the historian Furet cate-

gorically, ‘‘led to the Terror.’’

∏∑

Before it all began, in 1778, Maximilien Robespierre, who would be-

come the mastermind of the Terror, met the legendary philosopher Jean-

Jacques Rousseau. ‘‘I saw you in your last days,’’ he recalled, ‘‘and this

memory is a source of proud joy for me.’’ According to Robespierre, Rous-

seau commented that he had prepared the ﬁeld and sowed the seeds for the

immense change that was about to take place in France, but, like Moses, he

would not live to see the promised land. The young lawyer pledged to his

master that he would be ‘‘constantly faithful to the inspiration’’ that he had

drawn from Rousseau’s writings.

∏∏

Decades later, Alexis de Tocqueville, shortly before his death, was

working on a sequel to his study of the French Revolution, The Old Regime

and the Revolution. In his notes he prophetically discussed the violence that

can be produced by abstract ideas such as the General Will. The leaders of

the French Revolution, Tocqueville contended, formed a new international

‘‘turbulent and destructive race, always ready to strike down and incapable

of setting up, that stipulates that there are no individual rights, indeed that

there are no individuals, but only a mass which may stop at nothing to attain

its ends.’’ Their revolutionary religion was ‘‘one of the most singular, the

most active and the most contagious diseases of the human mind.’’

∏π

22 Susan Dunn

the madisonian vision

Just twenty-ﬁve years after Rousseau wrote his Social Contract—and two

years before revolutionary leaders in France decided on their plan for

the new government of France—James Madison composed Federalist No.

10. His brilliant political formula for constitutional government turns Rous-

seau’s vision of a political community upside down.

∏∫

Underlying Madison’s political thought is his modest, commonsensical

conviction that citizens are all individuals and that as individuals, they are

all different. People simply will never agree unanimously on anything. A

vast variety of ‘‘unavoidable’’ factors—wealth and property, social class,

religion, geography, political ideas, etc.—would always divide people into

different interest groups and factions. Indeed, the principle of diversity

seemed embedded in human nature, that is, in human rationality. Madison

argued that rational people view issues in different ways because reason is

essentially imperfect. ‘‘As long as the reason of man continues fallible,’’ h e

maintained, ‘‘and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will

be formed.’’

∏Ω

Could differences and factions be removed from society, Madison asked.

Could conﬂict be eliminated so that the kind of consensus Rousseau had

emphasized could be achieved? Well, unity and unanimity could certainly

be achieved by summarily outlawing factions, Madison allowed, but such

an option was completely unsatisfactory and unacceptable, because its cost

would be freedom itself, that is, people’s freedom to act without constraint

and express their own interests. People would be forced to sacriﬁce the very

liberty that was ‘‘essential to political life.’’ Thus the remedy would be

worse than the disease. ‘‘Liberty is to faction,’’ Madison wrote in a superb

simile, ‘‘what air is to ﬁre. . . . But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty,

which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would

be to wish the annihilation of air.’’

Was there any other way to achieve unity? No. The dream of unity, he

noted with disdain, was a theoretical fantasy. In the ‘‘civilized commu-

nities’’ of real life, no such ‘‘perfect homogeneousness of interests, opin-

ions & feelings’’ would ever be found.

π≠

Whereas Rousseau was convinced

that human beings could be guided and enlightened if not forced to prefer

the common good to their own private interests, Madison believed that self-

interest would always dominate human affairs. Signiﬁcantly, he had already

criticized in 1787 the leap that Sieyès—following Rousseau—made in

1789, that is, the leap from the idea of citizens’ equality before the law to

the idea of citizens’ similarity in everything else. ‘‘Theoretic politicians,’’

Introduction 23

he wrote in Federalist No. 10, ‘‘have erroneously supposed that by reducing

mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would at the same

time be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opin-

ions, and their passions.’’

π∞

And he was thoroughly uninterested in ‘‘re-

generating’’ human beings to suit utopian political blueprints. ‘‘What is

government itself,’’ he wrote, ‘‘but the greatest of all reﬂections on human

nature. If men were angels, no government would be necessary.’’

π≤

Did Madison believe in such a thing as the public or common good?

Though he does refer in passing to ‘‘the permanent and aggregate interests

of the community,’’

π≥

he nevertheless does not posit the existence of a single

common good or General Will in society (that is, other than ‘‘life, liberty,

and the pursuit of happiness’’). Although Alexander Hamilton always

stressed his belief in the existence of ‘‘the public interest’’ and has even

been called the ‘‘Rousseau of the Right’’

π∂

by some American historians,

Madison’s concept of government recognizes the multiple interests and

wills of diverse citizens and factions, all competing for inﬂuence and

power.

Indeed, the Virginian explicitly rejected the idea that there could be a

‘‘neutral’’ agency in government that voiced the public good. Madison was

convinced that every participant in government represented some interest

or faction. ‘‘What are the different classes of legislators,’’ he asked, ‘‘but

advocates and parties to the causes which they determine?’’

π∑

He confessed

that it would be highly desirable to have some kind of ‘‘dispassionate

umpire in disputes between different passions & interests in the State,’’ but

he knew that hopes for such a neutral referee were vain.

π∏

‘‘Enlightened

statesmen,’’ who subordinate clashing interests to the public good, could

not be expected to ‘‘be at the helm.’’

ππ

Factions did not exist in opposition to

government: they constitute government. Conﬂict among different factions

was not merely tolerated by government: conﬂict was government.

Madison’s vision of the ‘‘good society’’ could hardly have been more

different from Rousseau’s. In contrast to Rousseau’s vision of a harmonious

community, Madison sought to balance conﬂicting private interest groups,

all feverishly pursuing a host of competing notions of the private and

public good.

Ultimately, Madison counted on factions to perform a task of paramount

importance: resistance to any concentration of power. More than anything

else Madison feared the power of an ‘‘overbearing’’ majority. Therefore, the

more diverse the society, the more it was broken down into ‘‘so many parts,

interests and classes,’’ the more likely it would be that any majority would

become broad and hence moderate in its goals. And the less likely it would

24 Susan Dunn

be that the rights of individuals would be threatened by ‘‘the combinations

of the majority.’’

π∫

This notion of division also underlay Madison’s plan for checks and

balances. The government would be divided against itself, institutionally

split ‘‘between different bodies of men, who might watch and check each

other.’’

πΩ

Madison purposefully designed the government so that people and

interest groups would collide rather than concur. Adding to institutional

division and collision, moreover, were the ideological divisions of the polit-

ical parties—Federalists and Republicans—that crystallized in the 1790s.

Henceforth two rival parties would compete for power and alternately gov-

ern, strengthening the young nation by according legitimacy to opposition.

If there was ‘‘oneness’’ in America, it was the fundamental constitu-

tional consensus: a commitment to a government dedicated to the values of

life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and, as for everything else, an

agreement to disagree.

But in France, Rousseau’s revolutionary disciples were insisting that the

republic be ‘‘one and indivisible,’’ that it possess one roaring voice and one

indomitable will. Although in retrospect one can imagine that revolution-

aries in France, scarred if not traumatized by centuries of monarchical

absolutism, might also have sought to divide and fragment power, in fact

the opposite was the case. The French were demanding, above all, change,

impact, action—they clamored for energetic, majoritarian government,

not the stability, inertia, or deadlock that results from the fragmentation

of power.

Is there a political model that can wed the potent, populist leadership and

majoritarian government that French revolutionaries craved with an adver-

sarial two-party system, while also protecting individual rights and avoid-

ing governmental gridlock?

Yes. The wedding has already taken place. In Great Britain.

majority rule without checks and balances

‘‘Whether we speak of differences in opinion or differences in interest,’’

remarked Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, in 1701, ‘‘we must

own we are the most divided, quarrelsome nation under the sun.’’

∫≠

Great

Britain’s afﬁnity for political quarrels has produced the longest-lasting and

arguably most vital democracy on the planet.

∫∞

While Rousseau was theorizing about political unity and harmony, the

British were engaged in developing a theory of political parties. Edmund

Introduction 25

Burke, a leader of the opposition Whig party, found it inconceivable that

representative government could exist without political parties. Why, he

wondered in 1770, would like-minded politicians, who want to see their

ideas and principles translated into practice, not associate and cooperate

with one another? The thought that men would choose not to act in concert

with others struck Burke as ‘‘utterly incomprehensible.’’ ‘‘Of what sort

of materials must that man be made,’’ he mused in disbelief, ‘‘who can

sit whole years in Parliament, with ﬁve hundred and ﬁfty of his fellow-

citizens, . . . in the agitation of such mighty questions . . . without seeing any

one sort of men, whose character, conduct, or disposition, would lead him

to associate himself with them?’’

∫≤

The dominant features of the modern British model of parliamentary

democracy are, as Burke had advocated, two distinct, competitive parties

that alternate in power, a strong elected executive, and—as far as the ex-

ecutive and legislature are concerned—no marked constitutional separa-

tion of powers. After a political party in Great Britain wins a national

election, the party leader becomes the country’s Prime Minister. There are

no formal limits to the power of the Prime Minister’s government, as long

as it retains its parliamentary majority. The party is free to enact all of its

policies and programs, thus assuring clear majoritarian rule.

Still, the losing party does not disappear from the scene, for the opposi-

tion constitutes an integral, essential part of the constitutional system. ‘‘Her

Majesty’s Opposition’’ has the duty to criticize the party in power and is as

much a part of the polity as the administration itself. Its prime responsibility

is not to fell the government in power but rather to offer an alternative

government and to present positive—not just oppositional—policies. In

addition to these responsibilities, the opposition has rights too—for exam-

ple, it selects topics of parliamentary debate. A forceful and effective op-

position constantly reminds leaders and citizens of a clear alternative to the

majority government’s policies, yet the majority may continue to enact its

policies unimpeded.

∫≥

Together ‘‘Her Majesty’s Government’’ and ‘‘Her

Majesty’s Opposition’’ make up the two halves of the constitutional system.

Paradoxically, adversarial party politics requires consensus— some-

times a high level of consensus, sometimes a minimal level. First of all,

there must exist a fundamental consensus in the nation as to the constitu-

tional system itself as well as to citizens’ rights and freedoms. Second,

though the system depends on ideological conﬂict, there must not be too

much conﬂict—or too little. If criticism of government is too severe, if the

different parties are too polarized, and if conﬂict is so intense as to eliminate

the ‘‘mediating center,’’ the social fabric of the society may suffer.

∫∂

Still,

26 Susan Dunn

too little conﬂict means that the government is immune from healthy crit-

icism and that signiﬁcant alternative policies are not being offered. A deli-

cate balancing act is required to produce, in the words of political scientist

Robert Dahl, ‘‘a society where dissent is low enough to encourage a rela-

tively calm and objective appraisal of alternatives, and yet sufﬁcient to

make sure that radical alternatives will not be ignored or suppressed.’’

∫∑

For the past two centuries, British and American democracies have

accepted the principle of conﬂict and learned to exploit it. They have inte-

grated conﬂict into their institutions; they have normalized it and ritualized

it and thus tamed it; and they have created rules and procedures for defang-

ing and resolving it. And not only have both political systems thrived on

conﬂict, they have also been remarkably able to weather a variety of other

storms—from horriﬁc world wars to violent social upheaval.

Indeed, the United States and England (and her Canadian and Australian

offspring) are virtually alone among nations in having been able to with-

stand all the catastrophes of the twentieth century—two world wars, fas-

cism, Stalinism, a devastating economic depression. Those governments

remained stable and intact throughout the century, persevering in their care-

ful, orderly ways while the rest of the world reeled. Is that resilience due—

at least in part—to their ability to tolerate, defang, and absorb conﬂict?

conflict and community

Yet, at the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century, some American sociolo-

gists, political scientists, and philosophers, troubled by a society they see as

ever more fractured and disunited, voice a longing for a greater sense of

social cohesion. Not content with a rational commitment to pluralism and

diversity, feeling an emotional yearning for solidarity and belonging, they

accuse James Madison of having effectively thwarted the dream of oneness.

They feel that Madison’s undeviating emphasis on factions, conﬂict, and

individual rights forever undermines a sense of national community. One

historian describes Madison’s view of society as an ‘‘agglomeration of

hostile individuals coming together for their mutual beneﬁt.’’

∫∏

But are conﬂict and community really irreconcilable? This question is

a crucial one. For if the American (and British) models of government

do indeed preclude the possibility of community, then it would be under-

standable that revolutionary leaders in France dismissed the American ex-

perience and attempted to follow Rousseau’s formula for fraternity and

community.

Introduction 27

In defense of Madisonian government, one can argue, ﬁrst of all, that

there exists in America an unusually rich, diversiﬁed, and inclusive politi-

cal community. Especially since the vote was extended to non-property

holders, to African-Americans, and to women, the political arena has been

able to encompass new interest groups and accommodate a vast number of

voluntary associations, assuring most citizens and most emerging groups

membership and representation in the national community.

∫π

Second, in the 1950s, the brilliant political theorist Louis Hartz argued

that in America there indeed exists ‘‘a peculiar sense of community,’’

∫∫

something more than atomized and self-interested individuals. What holds

people together, Hartz maintained, is not the sense that they were different

parts of a corporate whole, but rather ‘‘the knowledge that they were similar

participants in a uniform way of life.’’ At the core of American society

stands a glacier resting on ‘‘miles of submerged conviction.’’ This shared

conviction is the American creed of individualism and freedom—so pow-

erful and self-evident that people do not even realize that they are con-

forming to an ideology at all. This powerful ‘‘common standard,’’ Hartz

believed, produces a very real kind of social cohesion among citizens com-

mitted to the same common good: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

That fundamental democratic consensus, in England and America, is the

glue that binds people together.

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831, he en-

countered an active, kinetic society. Coming from lethargic Restoration

France, he was astonished by the frenetic activity taking place at all levels

of society. ‘‘As soon as you step onto American soil,’’ he wrote, ‘‘you ﬁnd

yourself in the middle of a kind of tumult.’’ Wherever he looked, people

were attending meetings! One group was debating whether to build a new

church; another wondering whom to elect as representative; still another

considering what kinds of improvements to make in their township.

∫Ω

In-

volvement in the nation’s public life had become people’s entertainment

and pleasure. Meetings seemed to have taken the place of theater!

When citizens join with others to promote their private interests,

Tocqueville noted, they discover that their own interests are inseparable

from those of other citizens. Through their involvement in civic associa-

tions, self-government, and the jury system, these Americans rise above

their own narrow self-interest and identify more deeply with the commu-

nity. Tocqueville termed this ‘‘self-interest rightly understood’’ or enlight-

ened self-interest.

Though such people would be puzzled if one congratulated them on

28 Susan Dunn

their commitment to a life of ‘‘virtue,’’ they nevertheless ﬁnd fulﬁllment

in helping others and in making sacriﬁces of their time and wealth for

the community. These Americans, Tocqueville observed, tolerate no con-

straints on their self-interest or their autonomy and would dismiss any lofty

moral interpretations of their conduct, yet they seemed to have mastered

themselves, to have chosen to lead disciplined, moderate, and consider-

ate lives.

Virtue, if not their calling or their goal, nevertheless colors the habits of

their everyday lives. Few Americans, Tocqueville noted, will attain the

heady sphere of absolute virtue, but the vast majority of citizens will have

made reasonable progress in living decent lives. The key to the vital demo-

cratic and moral community they have created? Not a commitment to obey

the General Will. But rather a commitment to exercise freedom and partici-

pate in self-government and act out of an expansive, enlightened notion of

self-interest.

As if nodding simultaneously to both Madison and Rousseau, Tocque-

ville suggested a modern marriage of self-interest and devotion to the com-

mon good, a synthesis of individual freedom and community, an awareness

of self as well as a moral and spiritual desire to transcend the self.

Madisonian individualism or Rousseauian community? Maximization

of self-interest or sacriﬁce for the common good? Political conﬂict or a

quest for consensus? Rights conceived as protection for individuals and

minorities or rights conceived for the community as a whole? Education as

individual self-enhancement or education as the inculcation of civic re-

sponsibility and public spirit? These are not just abstract choices—on the

contrary, they color our everyday lives as well as the front pages of our

newspapers.

When we decry ‘‘politics as usual’’ and wish that Democrats and Re-

publicans would sit down and work out their differences and act only for the

‘‘common good’’ of the country, we are echoing Rousseau; and like him, we

believe that we are uttering noble, selﬂess, ‘‘holistic’’ ideas. When we wish

that politics was based not on the struggle among competing interest groups

but rather on a shared moral vision of all citizens’ interdependence, or when

we assert that the rights of the community should precede the rights of a few

‘‘selﬁsh’’ individuals, we are voicing themes that Rousseau articulated

more profoundly than any other thinker.

At key moments in American history, the mantra of ‘‘rugged individual-

ism’’ and free competition was interrupted by powerful, welcome re-

minders of Rousseau’s moral, communitarian vision. When the reform-

Introduction 29

minded President Theodore Roosevelt settled the great anthracite coal

strike in 1902, announcing that the interests of both the coal operators and

the workers must be ‘‘subordinated to the fundamental permanent interests

of the whole community,’’

Ω≠

and a few years later, when, advocating a

steeply graduated tax on estates, he declared, ‘‘If ever our people become so

sordid as to feel that all that counts is moneyed prosperity, ignoble well-

being, effortless ease and comfort, then this nation shall perish, as it will

deserve to perish, from the earth,’’

Ω∞

he was enunciating key Rousseauian

themes. And when John F. Kennedy electriﬁed a generation by declaring in

his inaugural address in 1961, ‘‘Ask not what your country can do for you,

ask what you can do for your country,’’ Rousseau was speaking to us

again— with a Boston accent.

Though some of Rousseau’s ideas—about the General Will, unanimity,

and dissent—have proven disruptive and counterproductive in established

democracies and disastrous in developing democracies, his other ideas—

his concept of positive freedom, ‘‘freedom for,’’ and his notion of a commu-

nity dedicated to the common good of all—still inspire and galvanize peo-

ple who seek a deeper, richer, shared communal life in which self-interest is

exchanged for interdependence and in which full participation permits an

ethical life as well as personal happiness.

Ω≤

As we continue our ongoing experiments in democracy, Rousseau’s

writings, along with those of Niccolò Machiavelli, James Madison, Thomas

Jefferson, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others, inspire, puz-

zle, and energize us, nourishing our imaginations, sharpening our critical

faculties, helping to strengthen our commitment to self-government, plural-

ism, community, and freedom.

notes

1. See Rousseau’s last footnote in his Discourse on the Sciences and

Arts. I wish to thank James MacGregor Burns, Francis C. Oakley, and

Richard Miller for reviewing this essay and generously giving me their

constructive suggestions.

2. See Jean Guéhenno, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. John and Doreen

Weightman, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 1:128ff.

3. On the subject of glittering high culture, Thomas Jefferson might

have agreed with Rousseau. ‘‘I view great cities as pestilential to the mor-

als, the health and the liberties of man,’’ Jefferson wrote in 1800. ‘‘True,

they nourish some of the elegant arts, but the useful ones can thrive else-

where, and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue & free-

30 Susan Dunn

dom, would be my choice.’’ Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 23 September

1800, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New

York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), 7:459.

4. At the end of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, he

speciﬁcally counsels the marriage of philosophy and political power, advis-

ing kings to welcome into their courts philosophes who might help make

policies that contribute to human happiness.

5. See Leo Strauss, ‘‘On the Intention of Rousseau,’’ in Hobbes and

Rousseau: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Cranston and

Richard Peters (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1972), 261–265 and

281–282.

6. François Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, suivies des Réﬂexions

diverses (Paris: Garnier, 1967), Maxim 629, my translation.

7. Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois, Bk. 3, ch. 3 in Oeuvres complètes,

ed. Roger Caillois (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 2:252, my translation.

8. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty [1859], ed. Currin V. Shields (New York:

Macmillan, 1985), 57.

9. Lord Acton, Letters to Mary Gladstone (New York: Macmillan,

1904), quotation spoken to Herbert Paul, quoted in Henri Peyre, ‘‘The

Inﬂuence of Eighteenth-Century Ideas on the French Revolution,’’ in The

Making of Modern Europe, ed. Herman Ausubel, 2 vols. (New York: Dry-

den Press, 1951), vol. 1.

10. Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, Preface.

11. See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York:

Modern Library, 1934).

12. Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, Second Part.

13. Rousseau’s feelings about violent revolution are ambivalent, for he

also writes, in the Dedication to the Discourse on Inequality: ‘‘A people

once accustomed to masters are not able to live without them. If they

attempt at any time to shake off their yoke, they lose still more freedom . . .

they generally become greater slaves to some impostor, who loads them

with fresh chains.’’

14. Paul Bénichou, ‘‘L’idée de nature chez Rousseau,’’ in Pensée de

Rousseau, ed. P. Bénichou, E. Cassirer, et al. (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 128–129.

15. See Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 1, ch. 4.

16. See Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 1, ch. 6.

17. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 4, ch. 1.

18. See The Social Contract, Bk. 2, ch. 1–4.

19. See Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press, 1969).

Introduction 31

20. See Bénichou, ‘‘L’Idée de nature chez Rousseau,’’ 133.

21. See Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk 1, ch. 8.

22. The Social Contract, Bk. 2, ch. 11.

23. The Social Contract, Bk. 2, ch. 3. Although ‘‘associations’’ may not

share in the making of the General Will, Rousseau does not totally exclude

them from society, admitting that ‘‘if there are partial associations, it is

necessary to multiply their number and prevent inequality, as Solon, Numa,

and Servius did.’’ See The Social Contract, Bk. 2, ch. 3. Still, political

philosophers such as Edmund Burke, who recognize the inevitability of

ideological conﬂict and struggles for political power, take a far more posi-

tive view of political parties. Burke, a leader of the opposition Whig party,

found it inconceivable that representative government could exist without

political parties. Why would like-minded politicians, who want to see their

ideas and principles translated into practice, not associate and cooperate

with one another? He was convinced that ‘‘no men could act with effect,

who did not act in concert . . . who were not bound together by com-

mon opinions, common affections and common interests.’’ See Burke,

‘‘Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents’’ in The Writings and

Speeches of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (Boston: Little Brown,

Beaconsﬁeld Edition, 1901), 1:529.

24. The Social Contract, Bk. 3, ch. 13.

25. See Bernard Manin, ‘‘La délibération politique,’’ Le Débat, January

1985, 80.

26. The Social Contract, Bk. 2, ch. 4.

27. The Social Contract, Bk. 4, ch. 2.

28. Charles Eisenmann, ‘‘La Cité de Rousseau,’’ in Bénichou et al., eds.,

La Pensée de Rousseau, 106.

29. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 2, ch. 6.

30. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 2, ch. 7.

31. François Furet, ‘‘Rousseau and the French Revolution,’’ in The

Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 1997), 181.

32. Allan Bloom, ‘‘Rousseau’s Critique of Liberal Constitutionalism,’’

in The Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Orwin and Tarcov, 166.

33. See Robert A. Dahl, ed., ‘‘Preface,’’ Political Oppositions in West-

ern Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), xviii.

34. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 2, ch. 3.

35. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 4. ch. 2. In 1794, John Adams

attacked Rousseau’s notion of the General Will writing, ‘‘If the majority is

51 and the minority is 49, is it certainly the voice of God? If tomorrow one

32 Susan Dunn

should change to 50 vs. 50, where is the voice of God? If two and the

minority should become the majority, is the voice of God changed?’’ See

Zoltan Hasaszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1952), 93.

36. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 2, ch. 5.

37. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 1, ch. 7, emphasis added.

38. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 4, ch. 8.

39. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 4, ch. 8, emphasis added.

40. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 4, ch. 7.

41. Lester Crocker, Introduction, in Rousseau, The Social Contract and

Discourse on Inequality, ed. and trans. Lester Crocker (New York: Wash-

ington Square Press, 1967), xxi.

42. See Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s

Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 12ff.

43. Rousseau, Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Paris: Garnier,

1960), 6th Promenade, my translation.

44. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 2, ch. 12.

45. See Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, ed.

J.-P. Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1952) Book 3, chapter 8, my translation.

46. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Bk. 3, ch. 6, text and note. Also, in

Bk. 3, ch. 9 of The Social Contract, in Rousseau’s second note to that

chapter, he paraphrases Machiavelli, writing that ‘‘a little agitation gives

energy to men’s minds, and what makes the race truly prosperous is not so

much peace as liberty.’’

47. See Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio,

ed. Piero Gallardo (Milano: Club del Libro, 1966), Bk. I, ch. 4, 5, 6, my

translation.

48. Quotation of Napoleon, 1800, in Bernard Manin, ‘‘Rousseau,’’ in A

Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona

Ozouf, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 1989), 830.

49. François Furet, ‘‘Rousseau and the French Revolution,’’ in The

Legacy of Rousseau, ed. Orwin and Tarcov, 181.

50. Furet, ‘‘Rousseau and the French Revolution,’’ 178.

51. James Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of

the First Authors of the Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

2000), x.

52. Furet, ‘‘Rousseau and the French Revolution,’’ 179.

53. On Sieyès, see Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions: French Lightning,

American Light (New York: Faber & Faber, 1999), 58ff.

Introduction 33

54. Sieyès, speech of 20–21 July 1789 in Orateurs de la Révolution

française, ed. François Furet and Ran Halévi (Paris: Gallimard, 1989),

1:1015.

55. Emmanuel Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état?, ed. Roberto Zapperi

(Geneva: Droz, 1950), ch. 6, 194; ch. 1, 124; ch. 6, 217–218.

56. Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état?, ed. Zapperi, ch. 6, 198–199, my

translation.

57. Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état?, ed. Zapperi, ch. 6, 208.

58. Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le tiers état?, ed. Zapperi, ch. 6, 211.

59. Sieyès, Vues sur les moyens d’exécution dont les représentans de la

France pourront disposer, quoted in Qu’est-ce que le tiers état?, ed. Zap-

peri, 76.

60. See Introduction, in Qu’est-ce que le tiers état?, ed. Zapperi, 75.

61. Saint-Just, Speech of 28 January 1793, in Oeuvres complètes, ed.

Michèle Duval (Paris: Lebovici, 1984), 408.

62. Danton, Speech of 29 October 1792 in H. Morse Stephens, Orators

of the French Revolution, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 2:180.

63. Saint-Just, Rapport du comité de salut public, 8 ventôse Year II, in

Saint-Just, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Michèle Duval (Paris: Lebovici, 1984),

700.

64. R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1973), 324.

65. Furet, ‘‘Rousseau and the French Revolution,’’ 181.

66. Maximilien de Robespierre, Mémoires, 2 vols. (Paris: Moreau-

Rosier, 1830), 1:166–167 and 209–210. One recent French historian ob-

jects strongly to American critics, such as Jacob Talmon, Lester Crocker,

and Carol Blum, who trace the totalitarian mentality back to Rousseau. He

argues that the subordination of one’s private interests to the General Will is

simply a patriotic mode of behavior. See Jean-Louis Lecercle, ‘‘Jean-

Jacques terroriste,’’ in Rousseau and the Eighteenth Century: Essays in

Memory of R. A. Leigh, ed. Marian Hobson, J. T. A. Leigh, and Robert

Wokler (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1992), 429.

67. Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, Fragments et Notes

inédites sur la Revolution, ed. André Jardin, vol. 2, pt. 2, of Tocqueville,

Oeuvres complètes, ed. J.-P. Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 2:255, 337,

228.

68. On Madison and Federalist No. 10, see Susan Dunn, Sister Revolu-

tions: French Lightning, American Light, 55ff.

69. Madison, Federalist No. 10 (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 55,

emphasis added.

34 Susan Dunn

70. Madison, 1833, draft of a letter on majority governments, in The

Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison,

ed. Marvin Meyers (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1981),

415.

71. Madison, Federalist No. 10, 58–59.

72. Madison, Federalist No. 51, 337.

73. Madison, Federalist No. 10, 54.

74. Cecelia Kenyon, ‘‘Alexander Hamilton: Rousseau of the Right,’’

Political Science Quarterly, June 1958, vol. 72. Although Hamilton be-

lieved in the ‘‘public good,’’ he felt that it would best be deﬁned by the

Federalist ruling elite and not by the people at large. Like Rousseau, Hamil-

ton believed that unity in government and society should prevail. Although

he allowed for differences of opinion in the legislature, ultimately all repre-

sentatives would have to agree. ‘‘When a resolution is once taken, the oppo-

sition must be at an end,’’ he wrote in Federalist 70, adding with a Rous-

seauian ﬂourish, ‘‘that resolution is a law, and resistance to it punishable.’’

75. Madison, Federalist No. 10, 56.

76. Madison, Letter of 16 April 1787, in Robert A. Rutland et al., eds.,

The Papers of James Madison (Charlottesville: University Press of Vir-

ginia, 1983), 9:384.

77. Madison, Federalist No. 10, 57.

78. Madison, Federalist No. 51, 339.

79. Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions

on the Adoption of the Federalist Constitution (Philadelphia: Lippincott,

1937), 5:242.

80. Daniel Defoe, quoted by Lawrence Stone, ‘‘The Results of the En-

glish Revolutions of the Seventeenth Century,’’ in J. G. A. Pocock, ed.,

Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton: Princeton Univer-

sity Press, 1980), 75.

81. On English parliamentary democracy, see Susan Dunn, Sister Revo-

lutions: French Lightning, American Light, 203ff.

82. Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents

[1770] in The Writings and Speeches of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

(Boston: Little Brown, Beaconsﬁeld Edition, 1901), 1:529 and 533–34.

83. On English parliamentary democracy, see Allen Potter, ‘‘Great Brit-

ain: Opposition with a Capital ‘O’,’’ in Dahl, ed., Political Oppositions in

Western Democracies, 6–8.

84. Robert Alan Dahl, ‘‘The American Oppositions,’’ in Dahl, ed., Polit-

ical Oppositions in Western Democracies, 65.

Introduction 35

85. Dahl, ‘‘Epilogue,’’ in Dahl, ed., Political Oppositions in Western

Democracies, 392.

86. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American

History and Culture, 1969), 607.

87. James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Englewood

Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 22.

88. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of

American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt,

Brace & World, 1955), 55.

89. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, ed. J.-P.

Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), Vol. 1, Part 2, ch. 6, my translation.

90. Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan,

1913), 513.

91. Theodore Roosevelt, Speech of 21 October 1907, in The Roosevelt

Policy: Speeches, Letters and State Papers, ed. William Grifﬁth (New

York: Current Literature Publishing Company, 1919), 2: 634.

92. See Robert N. Bellah et al., The Good Society (New York: Knopf,

1991).

Chronology of Rousseau’s Life

1712 Rousseau is born in Geneva in a Protestant family of French

origin. His mother dies in childbirth. As a child, Rousseau

loves to read serious books.

1722 Rousseau’s father is forced to leave Geneva, and the young

Jean-Jacques is raised by a Protestant minister, Lambercier.

He spends two happy years with Lambercier.

1727 Rousseau begins work as an apprentice to an engraver.

1728 Rousseau ﬂees Geneva. In Annecy, France, he meets

twenty-nine-year old Madame de Warens, a new convert to

Catholicism. She takes in the sixteen-year old young man.

Years later he credits her with changing his life. With her

encouragement, he converts from Protestantism to

Catholicism. He works as a servant for Madame de

Vercellis and for the Count de Gouvon. Guilty of a petty

theft, Rousseau accuses an innocent maid of the crime, an

experience that will haunt him with shame.

1729 He returns to Madame de Warens, whom he calls from then

on his ‘‘Mommy.’’ He spends several months at a Catholic

seminary in Annecy but discovers in himself no vocation

for religion.

1730–1732 He spends a year hiking from place to place in Switzerland;

during the winter months, he lives in Neufchatel, where

he gives music lessons and composes. He goes to Paris for

the ﬁrst time. Though he wants to ﬁnd work as a tutor,

the only position he is offered is that of a servant. In

Lyon in 1731, he earns money by transcribing musical

scores, work he will perform and enjoy for the rest of his

life.

1732 Rousseau returns to Madame de Warens, ﬁrst in Chambéry,

then at her estate outside of Chambéry, Les Charmettes.

Chronology 37

1732–1736 These are happy years for Rousseau; he writes, composes,

gives music lessons, and studies. In 1734, he and Madame

de Warens become lovers.

1737 Rousseau goes to Geneva to claim his maternal inheritance,

then travels to Montpellier. When he returns to Madame de

Warens, he ﬁnds himself displaced by another young man,

Wintzenried. Rousseau remains at Les Charmettes.

1740 He ﬁnds work in Lyon as the tutor for the children of

Monsieur de Mably. Unhappy, he returns a ﬁnal time to

Madame de Warens at Les Charmettes.

1742 Up to this point, Rousseau’s life has been relatively carefree

and haphazard. The next part of his life will be marked by

ambition to succeed in a competitive, elite society and by

the prodigious output of masterpieces in a variety of

different ﬁelds, from opera to political theory. Rousseau

goes to Paris. He presents a proposal for a new method of

musical notation, for which he receives encouragement

rather than the ﬁnancial success he had hoped for. He

becomes acquainted with many of the famous men of letters

of Paris, such as Marivaux, Fontenelle, Diderot, and others;

he frequents fashionable, aristocratic salons.

1743 Looking for other upper-class women to protect and help

him, he ﬁnds work as tutor in the family of Madame Dupin.

He tries his hand at writing plays and an opera. Another

woman, Madame de Broglie, ﬁnds him a position in Venice.

1743–44 Rousseau works in Venice as secretary to Monsieur de

Montaigu, the French Ambassador. He is treated more as a

servant than as a gentleman. He insults Monsieur de

Montaigu, who forces him to leave Venice. From his

experience in Italy he gains a love of Italian music and a

bitter loathing for social inequality.

1744–1745 Rousseau returns to Paris; he moves among some of the

fashionable salons of the day, but feels ill at ease and

insecure. He begins his lifelong relationship with Thérèse

Lavasseur, an indigent, uneducated servant. In 1745 he

sends their ﬁrst child off to a foundling home. He and

Thérèse will send their next four children too to the

Foundling Home. His excuse: his poverty, the customs of

the times, the ability of the State to teach the children a

38 Chronology

trade. Also in 1745, Rousseau is asked to work on revising

Voltaire’s and Rameau’s comedy-ballet, ‘‘Les Fêtes de

Ramire’’; the opera is a success but Rousseau receives no

credit for his work. He feels persecuted. Once again he

works for Madame Dupin as her secretary. A friend of

Diderot since 1742, Rousseau contributes essays on music

to Diderot’s great project of the Encyclopedia.

1746–1748 Rousseau accompanies the Dupin family, as their secretary,

to their château of Chenonceaux in the Loire Valley, where

he enjoys the aristocratic life. He composes music and

writes poems and plays. Dupin writes a book about

Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des lois, which had just been

published. Rousseau thus becomes steeped in political

theory. He is asked to be mentor to the Dupins’ nineteen-

year-old son, an experience that will resonate in his work on

education, Emile.

1749 One day, while meditating on the question of a new

intellectual competition, ‘‘Has the revival of the sciences

and the arts contributed to improving morality?’’ Rousseau

decides to answer the question by attacking the

Enlightenment. The course of his life and his ideas is

forever changed.

1750 Rousseau wins the competition for his Discourse on the

Sciences and Arts and becomes a celebrity in Paris. He ends

his work for the Dupin family and earns his living by

copying music and other material.

1751 The ﬁrst volume of the Encyclopedia is published.

1752 Rousseau composes Le Devin du village (The Village

Soothsayer), a comic opera. The opera is very well

received, and Rousseau is informed that the king, Louis XV,

would like to meet him and might even offer him a pension.

But paralyzed by insecurity and fear, he declines.

1753 The success of Le Devin du village provides Rousseau with

an income and with fame. He publishes ‘‘Letter on French

Music’’ in which he praises Italian music and disparages

French music.

1754 Rousseau writes his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.

He then returns to Geneva, converts back to Calvinism and

reclaims the status of ‘‘Citizen of the free state of Geneva.’’

1755 Rousseau publishes his Second Discourse, The Discourse

Chronology 39

on the Origins of Inequality, which Voltaire attacks in a

letter to Rousseau. Rousseau’s article, Discourse on

Political Economy, is published in the Encyclopedia. He

returns to France. His moody temperament propels him to

break up with most of his friends.

1756–1757 At the invitation of Madame d’Epinay, Rousseau moves to

her estate, the Hermitage, north of Paris, where he delights

in the beautiful surroundings. This is a very creative period

for him, during which he works on his Dictionary of Music.

In response to Voltaire’s pessimistic ‘‘Poem about the

Disaster in Lisbon’’ (an earthquake that killed thousands)

Rousseau writes his Letter to Voltaire on Providence

(1756), expressing his belief in benevolent Providence. He

works on Emile, his reﬂections on an ideal education.

Rousseau also begins writing The Social Contract. The

other Encyclopedists attack him for his withdrawal from

society.

1757 Rousseau falls in love with a countess, Madame

d’Houdetot, the sister-in-law of Madame d’Epinay, though

boasting of their chasteness. She becomes a model for the

heroine of his epistolary novel, Julie, or the New Héloïse.

Rousseau breaks off with Madame d’Epinay. He moves to

the estate of the Maréchal of Luxembourg in Montmorency.

He breaks ties with his friends Grimm and Diderot. He

quarrels also with the philosophe and Encyclopedist

d’Alembert.

1758–1762 This is a relatively calm period in Rousseau’s life, during

which he lives in Montmorency. In 1758 he publishes his

‘‘Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre’’ (‘‘Lettre sur les

spectacles’’) in which he condemns the ‘‘immorality’’ of

theater. The ‘‘Lettre’’ provokes a huge outcry. In 1760,

Rousseau breaks off deﬁnitively with Voltaire, writing to

him, ‘‘I hate you.’’

1759 Voltaire publishes Candide, or Optimism, a darkly

pessimistic work, contradicting Rousseau’s faith in a

beneﬁcent Providence.

1761 Rousseau publishes his ‘‘pre-Romantic’’ novel about

sublimated passion, Julie, or The New Héloïse. The novel

also depicts Rousseau’s ideal society, a small, self-sufﬁcient

community.

40 Chronology

1762 Rousseau publishes The Social Contract and Emile: or, On

Education. He publishes his Profession of Faith of a

Savoyard Vicar, in which he discusses Deism. This book, as

well as Emile, disturb both the Parliament and the Church in

France, an order for his arrest is issued, and he ﬂees to

Switzerland.

1762–1770 Rousseau travels from place to place, hoping to ﬁnd

asylum, still preoccupied with grievances against his

friends. The city of Geneva refuses him asylum because of

his political and religious ideas. In 1762 he moves to

Môtiers near Neufchatel, territory of the King of Prussia.

For a year and a half his life is relatively calm. The order for

his arrest is almost rescinded when Voltaire intervenes

against him.

1764 He publishes Letters Written from the Mountain, attacking

Voltaire.

1765 Voltaire calls for Rousseau’s death. Rousseau’s house in

Môtiers is stoned, and he ﬂees. He spends a few happy

weeks on the island of Saint-Pierre in the Bienne Lake. He

goes to Strasbourg, then to Paris. He suffers from a variety

of psychological ailments. Rousseau writes his Project for a

Constitution for Corsica.

1766 Rousseau accepts the invitation of the English political

philosopher David Hume to stay in England. Voltaire

continues to denounce Rousseau in the English press.

Rousseau breaks off with Hume. He moves to the estate of

Richard Davenport in Derbyshire where he spends a year.

He enjoys studying botany while completing the ﬁrst part of

his Confessions.

1767–1769 Rousseau returns to France; he wanders clandestinely from

place to place, ﬁnally spending a year in the village of

Monquin. He publishes his Musical Dictionary; he works

on his Confessions, and he studies botany.

1770–1771 After eight years of wandering, Rousseau moves to Paris,

where he lives in poverty. He ﬁnishes writing his

groundbreaking Confessions. He composes his Letters on

Botany and writes his Considerations on Government in

Poland.

1772 Dissatisﬁed with his Confessions and preoccupied with

justifying and explaining himself, he begins writing

Chronology 41

Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques. He devotes

himself to music and botany. Rousseau is saddened in 1774

by news of the death of Louis XV. The hatred of mankind,

he explains, had been divided between Louis XV and

himself; now he would have to bear the entire burden

himself.

1776–1778 He works on his Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Rêveries

du promeneur solitaire), a poignant, introspective work. In

1777 Rousseau tends the ill Thérèse. He makes a public

plea for ﬁnancial help.

1778 At the invitation of the Marquis de Girardin, Rousseau

moves to Ermenonville, outside of Paris. He is shaken by

news of the death of Voltaire. ‘‘My existence was bound up

with his,’’ he says. He dies on 2 July 1778, ﬁve days after

his sixty-sixth birthday.

1794 Rousseau’s ashes are moved to the Pantheon in Paris.

A Note on the Translations

The translation of The Discourse on the Sciences and Arts is a new transla-

tion by Susan Dunn. The translation of The Discourse on the Origin and

Foundations of Inequality Among Mankind is Lester Crocker’s reworking

of an anonymous translation from 1761. The translation of The Social

Contract is Susan Dunn’s reworking of an 1895 translation by Henry J.

Tozer.

The First Discourse:

Discourse on the Sciences

and Arts

A DISCOURSE

That won First Prize

at the Academy of Dijon.

In the Year 1750.

On the following question proposed by the Academy:

Has the revival of the Sciences and Arts

contributed to improving morality?

By a Citizen of Geneva

Barbarus hic ego sum qui non intelligor illis.

(People consider me a barbarian because they do not

understand me.)—Ovid.

Preface

Here is one of the greatest and grandest questions ever debated. This

Discourse is not concerned with those metaphysical subtleties that have

come to dominate all aspects of literature and from which the Announce-

ments of Academic Competitions are not always exempt; rather it is con-

cerned with those truths that pertain to human happiness.

I foresee that I shall not readily be forgiven for the position I have dared

to take. Setting myself up against all that is most admired today, I expect no

less than a universal outcry against me; nor is the approval of a few wise

men enough to let me count on that of the public. But I have taken my stand,

and I do not care about pleasing cultured or fashionable people. There will

always be people enslaved by the opinions of their times, their country,

their society. A man who today plays the freethinker and the philosopher

would, for the same reason, have been only a fanatic during the time of the

League.

∞

No author, who wishes to live on beyond his own epoch, should

write for such readers.

One more word, and I am done. Not expecting the honor conferred on me,

I have, since submitting my Discourse, so altered and expanded it as to make

it almost a new work; but today I felt bound to publish it just as it was when it

received the prize. I have only added a few notes and left two easily recog-

nizable additions, of which the Academy might not have approved. Equity,

respect, and gratitude seemed to me to demand this acknowledgment.

Discourse

Decipimur specie recti.

We are deceived by the appearance of good.

—Horace.

‘‘Has the revival of the sciences and the arts contributed to improving or

corrupting morality?’’ This is the issue to be examined. Which side should I

take in this question? The one, Gentlemen, that becomes a respectable man,

who knows nothing and thinks himself none the worse for it.

I sense that it will be difﬁcult to adapt what I have to say for this

Tribunal. How can I presume to criticize the sciences before one of the most

learned assemblies in Europe, to praise ignorance before a famous Acad-

emy and reconcile my contempt for study with the respect due to truly

learned scholars? I was aware of these inconsistencies, but not discouraged

by them. It is not science, I said to myself, that I am attacking; it is virtue

that I am defending before virtuous men. Integrity is even more precious to

good people than erudition is to scholars. What then do I have to fear? The

enlightenment of the assembly that listens to me? That, I acknowledge, is to

be feared, but in relation to the construction of the discourse, not to the

views I hold. Equitable sovereigns have never hesitated to decide against

themselves in doubtful cases; and indeed the most advantageous situation

in which a just claim can be made is that of being defended before a fair and

enlightened arbitrator, who is judge in his own case.

This reasoning, which reassures me, merges with another inducement

that helped me make up my mind: that is, after championing the cause of

truth, as I intuitively see it, whatever success I have, there is one reward that

cannot fail me; I shall ﬁnd it within my own heart.

48 The First Discourse

part one

It is a great and beautiful spectacle to see man emerge from nothingness

through his own efforts, dissipating, by the light of his reason, the dark-

ness in which nature had enveloped him; rising above himself, soaring

intellectually to celestial heights, striding like the sun across the vastness of

the universe, and, what is grander still and more difﬁcult, retreating back

into himself, there to study man and come to know his nature, his duties,

and his destiny. All these marvels we have seen revived within the past few

generations.

Europe had relapsed into the barbarism of the earliest ages. The inhabi-

tants of this part of the world, which is at present so enlightened, were living,

a few centuries ago, in a state worse than ignorance. A kind of scientiﬁc

jargon, more contemptible than mere ignorance, had usurped the name of

knowledge, setting up an almost invincible obstacle to its return. A revolu-

tion was needed to bring people back to common sense; it came at last from

the place from which it was least expected. It was the stupid Moslem, the

eternal scourge of Letters, who was responsible for their rebirth. The fall of

the throne of Constantine

≤

brought to Italy the debris of ancient Greece.

With these precious spoils, France in turn was enriched. The sciences soon

followed literature; the art of writing was joined by the art of thinking, an

order that might seem strange, but is perhaps only too natural. People began

to perceive the principal advantage of communication with the Muses, that

of making people more sociable by inspiring them with the desire to please

one another with works worthy of their mutual regard.

The mind has its needs, as does the body. The needs of the body con-

stitute the foundation of society, those of the mind its ornamentation. While

government and law provide for the security and well-being of people in

their collective life, the sciences, letters, and arts—less despotic though

perhaps more powerful—wrap garlands of ﬂowers around the chains that

weigh people down. They stiﬂe the sense of freedom that people once had

and for which they sensed that they were born, making them love their own

servitude, and turning them into what is called a civilized people. Need

erected thrones; the sciences and arts consolidated them. Let the Powers

that rule the earth cherish all talents and protect those who practice them!*

*Princes always like to see among their subjects the proliferation of an appreciation

for enjoyable arts and luxury that do not result in the exporting of wealth. For they very

well know that, in addition to nourishing the pettiness of soul that lends itself to servitude,

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts 49

Civilized peoples, cultivate your talents! Happy slaves, you are indebted to

them for the delicate, exquisite tastes you are so proud of, that sweetness of

disposition and urbanity of manners that make social relations so easy and

pleasant—in short, the appearance of all the virtues without the possession

of a single one.

Through this kind of civility, all the more captivating because so unas-

suming, Athens and Rome once distinguished themselves during the cele-

brated days of their splendor and magniﬁcence: through the same kind of

civility our own century and our nation will undoubtedly surpass all other

epochs and peoples. The tone of philosophy without pedantry, manners that

are natural yet courteous, as distant from Teutonic rusticity as from Italian

pantomime: these are the fruits of the taste acquired through liberal studies

and perfected through social relations.

How delightful it would be for those who live among us if our external

appearance were always a true mirror of our hearts, if good manners were

also virtue, if the maxims we spout were truly the rules of our conduct, if

true philosophy were inseparable from the title of a philosopher! But so

many good qualities seldom go together, and virtue rarely walks amidst

such pomp and state. Richness of attire may herald a man of wealth, and

elegance a man of taste; but the healthy, robust man is recognized by other

signs. It is beneath the rustic clothes of the farmer, and not beneath the gilt

of the courtier, that we should look for strength and vigor of body. External

apparel is no less foreign to virtue than strength and vigor are to the soul. A

good man is an athlete who likes to wrestle in the nude. He scorns all those

vile trappings that inhibit his strength and that, for the most part, were

invented only to conceal some deformity.

Before Art had molded our manners and taught our passions to speak an

artiﬁcial language, our morals were rough-hewn but natural, and differ-

ences in behavior immediately announced differences in character. In truth,

human nature was no better than now, but people found security in the ease

with which they could see through one another, and this advantage, of

which we no longer appreciate the value, saved them from many vices.

the artiﬁcial wants that a people imposes on itself only enslaves them more. Alexander,

wishing to keep the Ichthyophagi in a state of dependence, compelled them to give up

ﬁshing and subsist on the same food as that of other peoples. The primitive people of

America, who go naked and live off what they hunt, have never been conquered. Indeed,

what kind of yoke could be imposed on people who are in need of nothing?

50 The First Discourse

Today, as more subtle study and more reﬁned taste have reduced the art

of pleasing to a system, there prevails in our manners a loathsome and

deceptive conformity: all minds seem to have been cast in the same mold.

Incessantly politeness makes demands, decorum issues orders. Incessantly

we obey rituals, never our own intuition. We no longer dare to appear as we

really are, and under this perpetual restraint, people who form the herd

known as society, ﬁnding themselves in these same circumstances, will all

behave in exactly the same ways, unless more powerful motives prevent

them from doing so. We never know therefore with whom we are dealing:

in order to know one’s friend, one must wait for some critical occasion, that

is, wait until it is too late, for it is precisely on those occasions that knowl-

edge of that friend would have been essential.

What a parade of ills accompany this uncertainty! No more sincere

friendships, no more real regard for another, no more deep trust. Suspi-

cions, resentments, fears, coldness, reserve, hatred, and betrayal habitually

hide under that uniform and perﬁdious veil of politeness, under that lauded

sophistication which we owe to the enlightenment of our century. Instead of

profaning the name of the Master of the Universe by swearing, we will

insult Him with blasphemies, though our scrupulous ears will take no of-

fense. We might not brag about our own worth, but we will disparage that of

others. We might not outrageously insult our enemy, but we will slander

him with ﬁnesse. Our hatred of other nations may diminish, but our own

patriotism will die along with it. Lamentable ignorance will be superseded

by dangerous skepticism. Certain excesses will be condemned, certain

vices abhorred, but others will be honored in the name of virtue, and people

will be obliged either to have them or to pretend to have them. Whoever

wishes to praise the sobriety of our wise men may do so, but as for me, I see

nothing there but a reﬁnement of intemperance as unworthy of my praise as

their duplicitous simplicity.*

This is the kind of purity that our morals have acquired. This is how we

have become worthy people. Let literature, the sciences, and the arts claim

their fair share of this salutary work. I shall add but one thought: suppose

that someone who lives in a faraway land should want to understand our

European morals on the basis of the present state of the sciences in our

society, on the basis of the perfection of the arts, the propriety of our public

*‘‘I love,’’ said Montaigne, ‘‘to debate and discuss, but only with very few people, and

that for my own gratiﬁcation. For to serve as a spectacle for the Great and show off one’s

wit and talents is, in my opinion, a trade very ill-becoming a man of honor.’’ It is the trade

of all our intellectuals, save one.

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts 51

entertainments, the politeness of our manners, the affability of our conver-

sation, our constant protestations of goodwill, and those tumultuous gather-

ings of people of all ages and ranks, who seem, from dawn to dusk, eager

only to please one another; this foreigner, I maintain, would guess that our

morals are exactly the opposite of what they are.

Where there is no effect, it is pointless to look for a cause: but here the

effect is certain and the depravity real, and our souls have been corrupted to

the extent that our sciences and our arts have advanced toward perfection.

Will it be said that this is a misfortune peculiar to the present age? No,

Gentlemen; the evils caused by our vain curiosity are as old as the world.

The daily ebb and ﬂow of the tides are not more regularly inﬂuenced by the

moon that lights the nighttime sky than the fate of our morality and integrity

by the advancement of the sciences and the arts. We have seen virtue

gradually ﬂee as their light dawned above the horizon, and the same phe-

nomenon has been observed in all times and in all places.

Behold Egypt, that ﬁrst school of the Universe, that fertile climate under

an imperturbable sky, that famous land from which Sesostris once set out to

conquer the world. Egypt became the mother of philosophy and the ﬁne

arts, and soon afterward she became the conquest of Cambyses

≥

and then

that of the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, and ﬁnally the Turks.

Behold Greece, once peopled by heroes, who twice vanquished Asia,

once in Troy and once on their own soil. Nascent literature had not yet

brought corruption into the hearts of its inhabitants; but progress in the arts,

the dissipation of morals, and the Macedonian yoke

∂

followed one upon the

other. And Greece, always learned, always sensual, always a slave, no

longer derived anything from its cycles other than a change of masters. All

the eloquence of Demosthenes

∑

could not breathe life back into a body

depleted by luxury and the arts.

It is in the time of Ennius and Terence

∏

that Rome, founded by a shep-

herd and made famous by farmers, begins to degenerate. But after the

appearance of an Ovid, a Catullus, a Martial, and that gang of obscene

authors, whose names alone make decency blush, Rome, once the Temple

of Virtue, becomes the Theater of Crime, the shame of nations, and the

plaything of barbarians. This capital of the world ultimately falls under the

same yoke it had imposed on so many other nations, and the day of her fall

was the eve of the day when one of her citizens was awarded the title of

Arbiter of Good Taste.

What shall I say about that Metropolis of the Eastern Empire, which, by

its position, seemed destined to be the capital of the entire world, about that

refuge for the sciences and arts at a time when they were banned from the

52 The First Discourse

rest of Europe, though perhaps more out of wisdom than barbarity? The

most shameful debauchery and corruption, treason, blackhearted assassina-

tions and poisonings, the most atrocious crimes all put together, this is what

constitutes the fabric of the history of Constantinople. Here we have the

mouth of the river from which the Enlightenment of our century has ﬂowed,

the Enlightenment in which we bask.

But why bother to seek in ancient times proof of a fact for which we have

sufﬁcient evidence before our very eyes? There is in Asia an immense land

where rewards for learning lead to the highest ofﬁces of the State. If the

sciences improved morality, if they taught men how to shed their blood for

their country, if they inspired them with courage, then perhaps the Chinese

would be wise, free, and invincible. But if there is no vice that does not

reign over them, no crime with which they are not familiar, if neither the

enlightenment of government ofﬁcials nor the supposed wisdom of the law,

nor the huge population of this vast Empire could not save them from the

yoke of the illiterate and brutish Tartar, then what good were all their

scholars? What beneﬁt came from the honors bestowed upon them? Per-

haps a population of slaves and felons?

Contrast these portraits with a picture of the morals of that small number

of peoples that, safe from the contagion of vain knowledge, have by dint of

their virtue created their own happiness, making themselves an example for

other nations. Such were the ﬁrst inhabitants of Persia—an unusual nation

where people learned virtue just as we learn science; with ease they con-

quered Asia and earned the glory of having the history of their political

institutions pass for a philosophical novel.

∫

Such were the Scythians, about

whom magniﬁcent songs of praise have come down to us. Such were the

Germans, whose simplicity, innocence, and virtue gave respite to a writer

Ω

weary of detailing the crimes and heinous deeds of an enlightened, wealthy,

and lewd nation. Such indeed had been Rome in the days of its poverty and

unenlightenment. And such even today is that rough-hewn nation cele-

brated for its courage, that not even adversity could vanquish and whose

ﬁdelity not even bad examples could corrupt.*

It is hardly because of stupidity that virtuous nations have preferred

*I dare not speak about those happy nations who did not even know the name of the

vices we struggle to suppress, about the primitive people of America, whose simple and

natural mode of government Montaigne [‘‘Of Cannibals,’’ in Essays] instinctively pre-

ferred not only to the laws of Plato, but even to the most idealistic visions of government

that philosophy can conjure. He cites innumerable examples that are impressive for those

who can appreciate them. But my word! he says, they don’t even wear knickers!

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts 53

other activities to those of the mind. They realized that in other lands idle

men whiled away their time debating the ultimate good, vice and virtue, and

that presumptuous logicians, extolling none other but themselves, con-

temptuously branded all other nations barbarians. But these virtuous na-

tions evaluated their morals and learned to dismiss their ideas.*

How could I forget that, in the very heart of Greece, there arose a city as

famous for the happy unenlightenment of its inhabitants as for the wisdom

of its laws, that republic of demigods rather than of men, so superior did

their virtues seem to those of mere humanity? O Sparta! you outshine

forever a vain doctrine! While the ﬁne arts ushered vice into Athens, while a

tyrant was carefully collecting the works of the prince of poets,

∞≠

you drove

from your walls the arts and artists, the sciences and scholars!

The difference was clear in the outcome. Athens became the home of

civility and good taste, the land of orators and philosophers. The elegance

of her buildings equaled that of her language; wherever one looked one saw

marble and canvas brought to life by the hands of the most skilled masters.

It is Athens that gave us those astonishing works that will serve as models

for every corrupt epoch. The picture of Lacedaemon is less dazzling. There,

the neighboring nations used to say, men are born virtuous, the very air they

breathe seems to inspire them with virtue. But nothing remains of them

except the memory of their heroic deeds. But should we value such monu-

ments less than the curious statues that Athens passed down to us?

Certain wise men, one must admit, were able to withstand the sweeping

torrent and preserved their integrity as they dwelt with the Muses. But listen

to the opinion expressed by the foremost and most unhappy among them,

∞∞

concerning the scholars and artists of his day.

‘‘I have considered the poets,’’ he says, ‘‘and I view them as people who

dupe themselves as much as others, who act like wise men and are taken for

such, but who are not that at all.

‘‘From poets,’’ continues Socrates, ‘‘I turned to artists. No one knew less

about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed great

secrets. Yet I realized that they were really no better off than the poets;

*I would truly like someone to tell me what the Athenians themselves thought about

eloquence, when they were so very careful to banish declamation from that upright

tribunal, against whose judgments even the Gods did not appeal. What did the Romans

think of medicine when they banished it from their Republic? And when a shred of human

feeling induced the Spanish to prevent their lawyers from entering America, what must

they have thought of their own jurisprudence? Could one say that they hoped, by this

deed, to make up for all suffering they had caused those unfortunate Indians?

54 The First Discourse

indeed both artists and poets suffer from the same misapprehension. Be-

cause the most skillful among them perform well in their specialty, they

take themselves for the wisest of men. Their presumption irremediably

diminished their knowledge in my eyes. Indeed, putting myself in the place

of the Oracle and asking myself who I would rather be, what I am or what

they are, and asking myself what I would like to know, what they have

learned or the knowledge that I know nothing, I was able to respond truth-

fully to myself and to God: I want to remain what I am.

‘‘None of us—neither the sophists, poets, orators, artists, nor I— know

what is truth, goodness, and beauty. But the difference between us is this:

though these people know nothing, they all believe that they know some-

thing; whereas for my part, if I know nothing, I have no doubt about my

ignorance. So that all this superiority of wisdom conferred on me by the

Oracle contracts into my clear understanding that I am ignorant of what I do

not know.’’

Here we have the wisest of men, in the opinion of the gods, the most

learned of Athenians in the opinion of all of Greece, Socrates extolling

ignorance! If he came back to life today, would he be persuaded by our

learned men and artists to change his mind? No, Gentlemen, this fair-

minded man would still hold our vain sciences in contempt. He would not

help enlarge that pile of books that engulfs us from all sides; and the only

rule he would bequeath, as he did before, to his disciples and to our chil-

dren would be the example and the memory of his virtue. This is a noble

education.

What Socrates had begun at Athens, Cato the Elder continued in Rome,

inveighing against those artful and deceptive Greeks who corrupted the

virtue and undermined the courage of his fellow citizens. But the sciences,

arts, and dialectic reasoning prevailed once more: Rome overﬂowed with

philosophers and orators, military discipline was neglected, agriculture was

scorned, people embraced new cults and forgot their Fatherland. The sacred

names of freedom, disinterestedness, and obedience to the law were dis-

placed by those of Epicurus, Zeno, and Arcesilaus. Since scholars have

begun to appear among us, their own philosophers used to say, good people

have been eclipsed. Until then, the Romans had been happy to cultivate

virtue; all was lost when they began to study it.

O Fabricius!

∞≤

What would your noble soul have thought if, unhappily

for you, called back to life, you had seen the pompous visage of Rome, the

city saved by your valor and on which your name bestowed more glory than

all her conquests? ‘‘My Gods!’’ you would have said, ‘‘what has become of

those thatched roofs and rustic hearths where moderation and virtue once

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts 55

dwelled? What fatal splendor has displaced Roman simplicity? What is this

strange tongue? What are these effeminate manners? What is the meaning

of all these statues, paintings, and buildings? Madmen, what have you

done? Have you, the Masters of all Nations, become the slaves of the

shallow men you conquered? Are these rhetoricians who govern you? Was

it only to enrich architects, painters, sculptors, and actors that you shed your

blood in Greece and Asia? Are the spoils of Carthage the prize of a ﬂute

player? Romans! lose no time! demolish those amphitheaters, smash those

statues, burn those paintings, drive out those slaves who subjugate you and

whose fatal arts corrupt you. Let other hands win fame with such vain

talents; the only talent worthy of Rome is that of conquering the world and

making virtue its ruler. When Cyneas took our Senate for an Assembly of

Kings, he was blind to vain pomp and affected elegance. He was deaf to that

superﬁcial eloquence, the occupation and the delight of futile men. What

then was the majesty that Cyneas beheld? O Citizens, the sight he saw could

never be produced by all your wealth and culture; the most noble sight ever

glimpsed beneath the heavens, the Assembly of two hundred virtuous men,

worthy of ruling Rome and governing the earth.’’

But let us sail through time and space and see what has been happening

in our own lands and beneath our very eyes. Or better still, let us cast aside

the loathsome tableaus that offend our feelings, thus sparing ourselves the

task of repeating the same things with different words. It was not in vain

that I invoked the specter of Fabricius. Indeed, what words did I put in the

mouth of that great man that I could not have put in the mouth of a Louis XII

or a Henry IV? Among us, in truth, Socrates would not have drunk the

hemlock, but he would have drunk from an even more bitter chalice the

insults of mockery and scorn a hundred times worse than death.

Now we see how luxury, licentiousness, and slavery have always been

the punishment for the presumptuous efforts man has made to escape from

blissful ignorance in which eternal Wisdom had placed us. That opaque veil

with which Wisdom cloaked her actions should have warned us that we

were not destined for a vain quest for knowledge. Is there a single one of her

lessons from which we have proﬁted or which we have neglected with

impunity? Let all nations once and for all realize that nature wanted to

protect us from knowledge, just as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon

from the hands of her child. Let them know that all the secrets she hides

from us are so many ills from which she protects us and that the very

difﬁculty they encounter in searching for knowledge is not the least of her

kindnesses. Men are perverse; but they would be far worse if they had had

the misfortune to be born learned.

56 The First Discourse

How humiliating these reﬂections are for humanity! How mortiﬁed by

them our pride must be! What! Could probity be the daughter of ignorance?

Could knowledge and virtue be incompatible? Is virtue inconsistent with

learning? What conclusions might not be drawn from such suppositions?

But to reconcile these apparent contradictions, we need only examine in

detail the vanity and vacuity of those pretentious titles that dazzle us and

that we bestow so liberally on human learning. Let us, therefore, consider

the sciences and the arts in themselves. Let us see just what comes out of

their progress, and let us not hesitate to recognize the truth of those points

where our own reasoning conﬁrms historical inductions.

part two

There was an ancient tradition that spread from Egypt to Greece that a God

hostile to human tranquillity was the inventor of the sciences.* What must

the Egyptians, in whose country the sciences were born, have thought of

them? Indeed, they were able to behold the fountainhead from which they

sprang. In fact, whether we leaf through the annals of the world or supple-

ment uncertain chronicles with philosophical research, we will not ﬁnd a

wellspring of human knowledge that corresponds to our idealized vision.

Astronomy was born from superstition; eloquence from ambition, hatred,

ﬂattery, and falsehood; geometry from avarice; physics from vain curiosity;

all of them, even moral philosophy, stem from human pride. Thus the

sciences and arts owe their birth to our vices; we would be less in doubt as

to their beneﬁts, if they owed their birth to our virtues.

The defect of their origin is all too clear in the objects of their pursuit.

What would we do with the arts, without the luxury that nourishes them?

Without human injustice, what use would we have of jurisprudence? What

would become of History, if there were neither tyrants, wars, nor conspira-

*It is easy to understand the meaning in the Prometheus fable: it does not seem that

the Greeks, who chained Prometheus to the Caucasus, were any better disposed to him

than the Egyptians to their god Theutus. ‘‘The satyr, according to an ancient fable, wanted

to kiss and embrace ﬁre, the ﬁrst time he saw it; but Prometheus cried out to him, Satyr,

you will mourn the beard on your chin, for it burns when you touch it.’’ This is the subject

of the frontispiece. [Rousseau does not provide the rest of the quotation from Plutarch

about Prometheus. Prometheus adds: ‘‘It burns when one touches it, but it gives light and

warmth, and is an implement serving all crafts providing one knows how to use it well.’’

See Havens, 209.]

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts 57

tors? In short, who would want to spend a life in barren speculations, if each

person, sensitive only to the duties of man and the needs of nature, had time

only for his country, his friends, and the suffering of others? Were we

created so that we would die staring into the well from which truth has ﬂed?

This thought alone should be sufﬁcient to repel immediately any person

who would seriously endeavor to ﬁnd enlightenment in philosophy.

So many dangers surround us! so many false paths in scientiﬁc research!

How many errors, a thousand times more dangerous than the truth is useful,

must one overcome to arrive at the truth? The hurdles are clear, for human

error is liable to an inﬁnite number of combinations, whereas truth has only

one manner of being. Besides, who seeks it sincerely? By what signs can

even the most committed person be sure to recognize it? In the throng of

diverse opinions, what criterion will we use to judge the truth correctly?*

And what is the most problematic: if we are so lucky as to ﬁnally discover

it, who among us will know how to use it wisely?

If our sciences are vain in the objects they pursue, they are even more

dangerous in the effects they produce. Born in idleness, they nourish it in

turn, and an irreparable waste of time is the ﬁrst harm they inevitably inﬂict

on society. In the political world as well as in the moral world, it is bad not

to do good, and every useless citizen can be regarded as a pernicious man.

Explain to me, then, you celebrated philosophers, who taught us what are

the ratios in which bodies attract one another in a vacuum, what are, in the

revolutions of the planets, the relations of spaces traversed at equal inter-

vals; what curves have conjugate points, points of inﬂection, and cusps;

how man sees everything in God; how the soul and body correspond like

two clocks, without communicating; what stars may be inhabited; and

which insects reproduce in extraordinary ways. Explain to me, then, I say,

you who have given us so much sublime knowledge. If you had never

taught us anything, would there be fewer of us, would we be less well

governed, less fearsome, less ﬂourishing or more perverse? Think again

about the importance of your accomplishments; if the works of the most

enlightened of our scholars and our best citizens procure for us so little of

use, tell us what we should think of that crowd of obscure writers and idle

men of letters who pointlessly devour the very substance of the State.

*The less we know, the more we think we know. Did the Peripatetics harbor any

doubts? Did not Descartes construct the universe with cubes and vortices? And in Europe

today is there a single lightweight physicist who does not purport to explain boldly

the profound mystery of electricity, which will perhaps be forever the despair of true

philosophers?

58 The First Discourse

Did I say idle? How I wish they only were! Our morals would be

healthier and society more peaceful. But these vain and futile declaimers go

forth on all sides, armed with their lethal paradoxes, subverting the founda-

tions of our faith, and annihilating virtue. They scornfully snicker at old-

fashioned words like Patriotism and Religion, devoting their talents and

philosophy to the destruction and defamation of all that people hold sacred.

Not that they in truth despise virtue or our dogmas; they are the enemies of

public opinion; to bring them back to church it might sufﬁce to exile them to

live among atheists. O passion for prestige, do you stop at nothing?

The misuse of time is a great evil. Even greater evils accompany litera-

ture and the arts. One is luxury, produced like them by indolence and men’s

vanity. Luxury rarely appears without the sciences and arts, and they never

appear without it. I realize that our philosophy, always rich in bizarre

maxims, maintains, contrary to the lessons of history, that luxury creates the

splendor of States; but after denying the importance of luxury taxes, will

Philosophy also deny that good morals are essential for the survival of

Empires and that luxury is diametrically opposed to good morals? Let us

admit that luxury is an accurate sign of wealth; let us even admit, if you like,

that it serves to increase wealth. What conclusion should we draw from this

paradox so worthy of our epoch, and what will become of virtue when no

price is too high to pay for wealth? The political philosophers of the ancient

world talked incessantly about morality and virtue; today they speak only

about business and money. One will inform you that in a given country a

man is worth the price he will sell for in Algiers; another, thinking along

similar lines, will point to some countries where people are worth nothing

and to others where they are worth less than nothing. They gauge the value

of human beings in terms of livestock. According to them, a man is worth

no more to the State than the value of his consumption. Thus one Sybarite

would have been worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians. Guess, then, which

one of the two republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was conquered by a handful of

peasants and which one made Asia tremble.

The monarchy of Cyrus was conquered by thirty thousand men, led by a

prince poorer than the lowest Persian Satrap, and the Scythians, the most

destitute of all nations, were able to resist the most powerful monarchs of

the universe. Two renowned republics competed for world empire; one was

very rich, the other had nothing, and it was the latter that destroyed the

former. The Roman Empire in its turn, after having engulfed all the wealth

of the universe, fell prey to people who did not even know what wealth was.

The Franks conquered the Gauls, and the Saxons England, their only trea-

sures their bravery and their poverty. A bunch of poor mountain people,

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts 59

whose greed focused only on a few sheepskins, after breaking Austrian

pride, crushed the opulent and mighty House of Burgundy, feared by all the

potentates of Europe. Lastly, all the power and all the wisdom of the heir of

Charles V, buttressed by all the treasures of the Indies, were decimated by a

handful of herring ﬁshermen. Let our political philosophers deign to sus-

pend their calculations and reﬂect on these examples, and let them learn

once and for all that with money we have everything, except morality and

citizens.

What is really at stake in this question of luxury? To know which is more

crucial for Empires, to be brilliant and ﬂeeting or virtuous and enduring. I

say brilliant, but with what kind of radiance? A taste for luxury and a taste

for probity do not cohabit in the same souls. No, it is not possible that minds

degraded by a multiplicity of trivial concerns could ever rise to any great-

ness, and even if they had the might, they would not have the courage.

Every artist loves applause. The praise of his contemporaries is the most

precious part of his reward. What will he do to obtain praise, if he has

the misfortune of being born in a nation and at a time when fashionable

scholars let superﬁcial youth set the tone, where people sacriﬁce their taste

to the tyrants of their freedom,* where masterpieces of dramatic poetry and

marvels of harmony are abandoned because one sex dares approve only

what beﬁts the pusillanimity of the other? What will he do, Gentlemen? He

will lower his genius to the level of his times and will prefer to compose

ordinary works that will be appreciated during his lifetime, instead of mar-

vels that would be valued only long after his death. Tell us, exalted Voltaire,

how many virile and strong works of beauty you gave up for our false

delicacy, and how much of what is great and noble did that mentality of

gallantry, which delights in what is shallow and petty, cost you?

Thus the dissolution of morality, the necessary consequence of luxury,

results in turn in the corruption of taste. If by chance there can be found

among extraordinarily talented men a single one who has strength of char-

acter and who refuses to bow to the mentality of his century and disgrace

*I am far from thinking that this ascendancy of women is an evil in itself. It is a gift

nature gave them for the good of humankind. Better guided, it could produce as much

good as today it does harm. We do not sufﬁciently realize what beneﬁts society would

gain from giving a better education to the half of the human race that rules the other. Men

will always be what is pleasing to women. So if you wish them to be great and virtuous,

teach women what nobility and virtue are. Meditations on this subject, which long ago

attracted Plato, deserve to be expanded upon by a pen worthy of following in the wake of

such a master and defending such a noble cause.

60 The First Discourse

himself with puerile works, woe unto him! He will die in indigence and

oblivion. I wish that this were only a prediction and not a fact conﬁrmed by

experience! Carle, Pierre,

∞≥

the time has come when your brushes, destined

to embellish the majesty of our temples with sublime and sacred images,

will drop from your hands or else be prostituted to adorn the panels of a

coach with lewd paintings. And you, inimitable Pigalle,

∞∂

rival of Praxiteles

and Phidias, you whose chisel the ancients would have employed to carve

them gods worthy of idolatry, at least in our own eyes; Pigalle, even your

hand must stoop to scraping the belly of a pasha or else remain idle.

We cannot reﬂect on morality without fondly looking back on that pic-

ture of simplicity of long ago. A lovely shore, adorned only by the hands of

nature, toward which our eyes are constantly turned and from which we

turn away only with regret. When innocent and virtuous people were happy

to have the gods witness their deeds, they dwelt together with them in the

same huts; but soon they became wicked and wearied of such inconvenient

intruders, relegating them to magniﬁcent Temples. But then they drove their

deities out of the Temples and moved into them themselves; in any case, the

Temples of the gods were no longer very different from the houses of the

citizens. This was the zenith of depravity, and immorality never reached

greater heights than when it was seen supported, as it were, at the entryways

of the palaces of the mighty by marble columns, sculpted on Corinthian

capitals.

As the comforts of life increase, as arts are brought to perfection and as

luxury spreads, true courage ﬂags, military virtues fade, and this too is the

work of the sciences and all those arts that are practiced in the privacy of

one’s home. When the Goths sacked Greece, all the libraries were saved

from burning only by an idea suggested by one of them, that it would be

wise to leave for their enemies a few things standing so as to distract them

from military training and keep them diverted with indolent and sedentary

hobbies. Charles VIII found himself master of Tuscany and the kingdom of

Naples, virtually without having drawn his sword, and all the members of

his court attributed this stunning ease to the fact that the defeated princes

and nobles of Italy took far greater enjoyment in pursuing the subtleties of

knowledge than in practicing the martial arts. Thus, says the sensible man

who relates these two points, a multiplicity of examples teaches us that in

military matters and in everything related to them, the pursuit of science,

instead of strengthening and invigorating virile courage, tends to under-

mine and feminize it.

The Romans admitted that military virtue died in their land when they

began to appreciate paintings, engravings, jeweled and enameled objects

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts 61

and to cultivate the ﬁne arts. And as if that nation were destined to serve

unceasingly as an example for others, the rise of the Medicis and the revival

of Letters once more destroyed, perhaps for ever, the military reputation

that Italy seemed to have recovered a few centuries earlier.

The ancient republics of Greece, with that wisdom that radiated from

most of their institutions, forbade their citizens to pursue all those tranquil

and sedentary occupations, which while enervating and corrupting the body

soon also undermine the vigor of the soul. How can men cope with hunger,

thirst, fatigue, danger, and death, if they are overwhelmed by the smallest

need and discouraged by the slightest difﬁculty? With how much courage

will soldiers tolerate overwork when they are entirely unaccustomed to it?

With how much enthusiasm will they go on forced marches under ofﬁcers

who do not even have the strength to journey on horseback? Will someone

now insist on defending the renowned merit of these scientiﬁcally trained

modern warriors? We hear much praise of their valor during a battle that

lasts but a day, but we do not hear about how they bear overwork, how they

stand the rigor of the seasons and the inclemency of the weather. Nothing

but a little sun or snow or the absence of a few superﬂuities is enough to

dissolve and destroy one of our best armies in a few days. Intrepid warriors!

Listen for once to the truth you so seldom hear. You are good soldiers, I

know. You would have triumphed along with Hannibal at Cannae and at

Trasimene: with you Caesar would have crossed the Rubicon and enslaved

his country; but it is not with you that the former would have crossed the

Alps and not with you that the latter would have conquered your ancestors.

Fighting does not always determine the successful outcome of a war; as

far as Generals are concerned, there is an art that is superior to that of

winning battles. A man who runs bravely into the line of ﬁre might nev-

ertheless be a very poor ofﬁcer. Even in the common soldier, a little more

strength and vigor might be more necessary than a lot of bravery, which is

no protection from death. And what does it matter to the State whether its

troops perish by sickness or frozen winter or the enemy’s sword?

If studying the sciences is harmful to military qualities, it is even more

harmful to moral qualities. From early childhood an absurd system of edu-

cation enhances our mind and corrupts our judgment. I see everywhere

immense institutions, where at great cost our youth are educated, learning

everything except their duties. Your children will not know their own lan-

guage, but they will speak others that are useful nowhere; they will be

able to write poetry that they can barely understand; unable to tell truth

from error, they will know the art of making both of them unrecogniz-

able to others with specious arguments; but the meaning of the words

62 The First Discourse

magnanimity, equity, temperance, humanity, and courage they will not

know. The dear name of the Fatherland will never ring in their ears, and if

they are taught about God, they will learn fear instead of awe.* I would

have preferred, a wise man said,

∞∑

that my pupil had spent his time on the

tennis court instead; at least then he would have a healthy body. I know that

children must be kept occupied, and that idleness is for them the danger

most to be feared. What, then, should they learn? A ﬁne question! Let them

learn what they ought to do to behave as men,

†

not what they ought to

forget.

Our gardens are decorated with statues and our galleries with paintings.

What would you imagine these masterpieces of art, exhibited for public

*Pensées philosophiques, Diderot.

†

This was the kind of education the Spartans received, according to the greatest of

their kings. It is something worthy of great consideration, says Montaigne, that the

excellent rules of Lycurgus—in truth monstrously perfect and yet so solicitous of the

raising of children, as if that were their principal purview—in the very home of the Muses

make little mention of scholarly learning: as if these noble youths, disdaining every other

yoke, required, instead of teachers of the sciences, only instructors in valor, prudence, and

justice.

Let us see now how the same author speaks about the ancient Persians. Plato, he says,

relates that the heir to the throne was brought up in the following way: At his birth he was

given, not to women, but to eunuchs who, because of their virtue, had great standing with

the king. The eunuchs were responsible for giving him a beautiful and healthy physique

and for teaching him, at the age of seven, to ride and to hunt. When he reached fourteen,

he was placed in the hands of four men, the wisest, the most just, the most moderate, and

the most courageous persons in the kingdom. The ﬁrst taught him religion, the second

taught him to be always truthful, the third to master his own cupidity, the fourth to have no

fear. All of them, let me add, taught him to be good; none taught him to be learned.

Astyages, in Xenophon, asks Cyrus to give him an account of his last lesson. It was

this, he said: In our school an older boy with a small tunic gave it to one of his school-

mates who was small in size, snatching that boy’s tunic for himself. Having been asked by

our master to settle their feud, I decided that things should be left as they were at that point

and that both seemed better off. But the master scolded me, for I had bothered to take into

account appropriateness, when instead I should have taken into account only justice,

which holds that there should be no interference with one’s property. And he says that he

was punished for it, just as we are punished in our villages when we forget the ﬁrst aorist

tense of túptv. My schoolmaster would have to give me quite a speech, in genere

demonstrativo, to convince me that his school is as good as this one.

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts 63

admiration, represent? The defenders of our nation? or even greater men

who enriched it with their virtue? No. There are images of every folly of the

heart and mind, carefully extracted from ancient mythology and offered

early on to the curiosity of our children—without a doubt so that they may

have before their eyes models for bad deeds, even before they can read.

What else could produce these abuses if not the deplorable inequality

introduced among us by the prestige accorded to talent and the abasement

of virtue? This indeed is the most obvious result of all our studying and the

most dangerous of all its consequences. We no longer ask if a man has

integrity but rather if he has talent; we do not ask if a book is useful but

merely if it is well written. Rewards are showered on clever minds, but

virtue receives no honors. A thousand prizes are offered for ﬁne essays,

none for ﬁne deeds. But can someone tell me if the glory of having written

the best of the discourses crowned by the Academy is comparable to the

merit of having established the prize?

A wise man does not run after success, but he is not indifferent to glory,

and when he sees it so poorly distributed, his virtue, which a little emulation

might have energized and thus made beneﬁcial to society, languishes and

dies away in destitution and obscurity. This is what ultimately happens

when pleasing talents eclipse useful ones, something that has been only too

well conﬁrmed since the revival of the sciences and arts. We have physi-

cists, geometers, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, painters; we no

longer have citizens; or if a few remain, scattered over our abandoned

countryside, they are left to perish there, indigent and shunned. This is the

condition to which those who give bread to us and milk to our children have

been reduced, and this is the respect they wrest from us.

Still I must confess that the harm is not as great as it might have become.

Eternal Providence, by placing curative herbs alongside of noxious plants

and by making maleﬁcent animals contain the antidote to their lesions, has

taught the Sovereigns of the earth, who are its ministers, to imitate its

wisdom. By following this example, that great Monarch,

∞∏

on whose glory

every age will bestow new radiance, drew from the very bosom of the arts

and sciences, that source of a thousand moral lapses, those renowned so-

cieties which are responsible for both the dangerous trust of human knowl-

edge and the sacred trust of morals—and responsible as well for maintain-

ing the purity of those trusts and for demanding the purity of the members

they admit.

These wise institutions, solidiﬁed by his august successor and imitated

by all the kings of Europe, will at least serve as a brake on intellectuals, men

64 The First Discourse

of letters, who, all aspiring to the honor of being admitted into these Acade-

mies, will keep watch over themselves and endeavor to make themselves

worthy of such honor by useful works and irreproachable morals. Those

Academies, which, in their competitions for prizes bestowed on literary

merit, will propose subjects aimed at reviving the love of virtue in citizens’

hearts, will show that such love reigns among them and will give to all

nations that rare, sweet pleasure of seeing learned societies devote them-

selves to showering the human race not only with pleasurable enlighten-

ment but also with salutary ediﬁcation.

I am not interested in hearing an objection that only conﬁrms my argu-

ment. So many precautions show all too well the necessity for taking them,

and people do not seek remedies for ills that do not exist. Why should these,

by their very insufﬁciency, share the traits of ordinary remedies? The nu-

merous establishments created for the beneﬁt of scholars are only too able

to deceive them concerning the objects of the sciences and to turn minds

toward their cultivation. It would seem, from the kinds of precautions peo-

ple take, that we have a surplus of farmers and fear a shortage of philoso-

phers. I do not wish to attempt a comparison between agriculture and

philosophy, which people would reject. I shall only ask: What is philoso-

phy? What do the writings of the most famous philosophers contain? What

are the lessons of these friends of wisdom? To listen to them, would one not

take them for a gang of charlatans each calling out from a different corner

on a public square: Come to me, I alone do not deceive? One claims that

there are no bodies and that all is mere reﬂection. Another, that there is no

other substance than matter, and no other God than the world. One asserts

that neither virtues nor vices exist and that goodness and moral evil are

illusions. Another that men are wolves and can devour one another in good

conscience. O great philosophers! Why not keep these proﬁtable lessons for

your own friends and children? You would soon reap your rewards, and we

would not need to fear ﬁnding among our own friends and children your

disciples.

These indeed are the marvelous men who were showered with the es-

teem of their contemporaries during their lifetimes and for whom immor-

tality was reserved after their deaths! These are the wise maxims we have

received from them, and which we will pass on, from generation to genera-

tion, to our descendants. Did paganism, though susceptible to all the de-

rangements of human reason, leave posterity anything comparable to the

shameful monuments prepared for posterity by Printing, during the reign of

the gospel? The impious writings of a Leucippus and a Diagoras died with

them.

∞π

The art of immortalizing the extravagances of the human mind had

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts 65

not yet been invented. But thanks to the characters of typography* and the

use we make of them, the pernicious reveries of a Hobbes and a Spinoza

will endure forever. Go, famous writings, of which the ignorance and na-

iveté of our forefathers would have been incapable, go along to our descen-

dants with those even more dangerous works that reek of the moral corrup-

tion of our century, and together convey to the centuries to come a faithful

history of the progress and beneﬁts of our sciences and our arts. If they read

what you have to say, you will permit them no doubt as to the question we

debate today. And unless they are even more irrational than we, they will

raise their hands to Heaven and say, with bitter hearts, ‘‘Almighty God, you

who hold all souls in your hands, deliver us from the enlightenment and

deadly arts of our forefathers, give us back ignorance, innocence and pov-

erty, the only treasures that can make us happy and that are precious in

your sight.’’

But if the advancement of the sciences and the arts has contributed

nothing to our true happiness, if it has corrupted morality, and if the corrup-

tion of morality has adulterated purity of taste, what shall we think of that

throng of facile authors who removed from the entrance to the Temple of

the Muses the obstacles that nature had placed there as a test of strength for

those who might be tempted to seek knowledge? What shall we think of

those collators of works who mindlessly battered down the portal of the

sciences, letting into their sanctuary rabble unworthy of approaching it?

How much better it would have been if all those who could not go far in a

career in letters had been turned away at the entrance and steered toward

arts useful to society. A person who will never be more than a bad poet or a

*If we consider the horrible disorders that printing has already produced in Europe,

and if we judge the future in light of the progress this evil makes every day, we can easily

predict that sovereigns will not delay in making as much effort to banish this awful art

from their states as they made to establish it. The Sultan Achmet, yielding to the insistent

demands of certain supposed people of taste, had agreed to establish a printing press in

Constantinople. But the press had barely begun to function when people felt obliged to

destroy it and throw its machinery into a well. It is said that Caliph Omar, when asked

what should be done with the library in Alexandria, answered in the following words: If

the books in this library contain anything opposed to the Koran, they are bad and they

must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway: they

are superﬂuous. Our scholars have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. Imag-

ine, however, Gregory the Great instead of Omar and the Bible instead of the Koran, the

Library would still have been burned, and this might perhaps be the most noble deed in

the life of that illustrious Pontiff.

66 The First Discourse

third-rate geometer might have become an excellent cloth maker. Those

who were destined by nature to become her disciples hardly needed teach-

ers. A Bacon, a Descartes, and a Newton, those tutors of humanity, had

none themselves, and, moreover, what guides could have led them as far as

their vast genius took them? Ordinary teachers would only have shrunk

their intelligence by squeezing it into the narrow conﬁnes of their own. The

ﬁrst obstacles they encountered taught them to how to apply themselves and

how to work at leaping over the vast space they had mapped out. If a few

men should be permitted to devote themselves to the study of the sciences

and the arts, it should be only those who feel strong enough to walk alone in

their footsteps and to outdistance them. It is for these few to erect monu-

ments to the glory of the human mind. But if we want nothing to be beyond

their genius, nothing must be beyond their hopes. That is the only encour-

agement they need. Little by little, the soul assumes the size of the subjects

that preoccupy it, and thus it is great events that make great men. The Prince

of Eloquence was Consul of Rome, and perhaps the greatest of philoso-

phers Lord Chancellor of England.

∞∫

Can it be believed that if one had been

a professor at some university and the other a modest fellow in some

Academy, can it be believed, I say, that their works would not have reﬂected

their conditions? May kings, therefore, never disdain welcoming into their

councils people who are most able to give them good advice; may they

renounce that old prejudice, invented by the pride of the great, that the art of

governing nations is more difﬁcult than that of enlightening them, as if it

was easier to engage people to do good voluntarily than to compel them to

do so by force. May learned people of the ﬁrst rank ﬁnd honorable asylum

in their courts; may they receive there the only recompense worthy of them,

that of contributing by their inﬂuence to the happiness of the nations that

they will have taught to be wise. Only then will we see what virtue, science,

and authority can do when energized by noble emulation and working

together for the felicity of humanity. But as long as power remains alone on

one side and enlightenment and wisdom alone on the other, the learned will

rarely focus on great things, Princes will even more rarely perform great

ones, and nations will continue to be wretched, corrupt, and unhappy.

As for us, ordinary people on whom Heaven bestowed no great talents

nor destined for so much glory, let us remain in our obscurity. Let us not run

after a reputation that would only elude us and which, in the present state of

things, would never pay us back what it had cost us, even if we possessed all

the qualiﬁcations to obtain it. What good is it to seek our happiness in the

opinions of others if we can ﬁnd it within ourselves? Let us leave to others

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts 67

the responsibility for instructing nations in their duties and conﬁne our-

selves to fulﬁlling our own. We have no need of other knowledge.

O virtue, sublime science of simple souls! Are so much effort and so

much preparation really necessary to know you? Are your principles not

engraved in all our hearts? Does it not sufﬁce to learn your laws, to meditate

and listen to the voice of our conscience in the silence of our passions? That

is the true philosophy; let us be content with that; and without envying the

glory of those famous men who ﬁnd immortality in the Republic of Letters,

let us try to put between them and us that glorious distinction observed long

ago between two great peoples,

∞Ω

that one knew how to speak well, and the

other knew how to behave.

notes

Note to readers: Footnotes in the First Discourse are Rousseau’s own

notes that appeared in the original version.

1. The ‘‘Holy League’’ refers to French Catholics who tried to outlaw

Protestantism in the sixteenth century.

2. Constantinople was captured by the Crusaders in 1203 and was con-

quered by Turkey in 1453. (See Rousseau, Discours sur les sciences et les

arts, ed. George R. Havens [New York: Modern Language Association of

America, 1946], 180.)

3. Cambyses II, King of Persia, conquered Egypt in 525 b.c. (Havens,

190).

4. King Philip of Macedonia conquered the principal Greek city-states in

338 b.c. (Havens, 191).

5. Demosthenes, the great Athenian orator, opposed Macedonian power

in Greece.

6. Ennius, an early Latin poet (239 b.c. to 170 b.c.). Terence, a Latin

author of comedies (194 b.c. to 159 b.c.).

7. Petronius.

8. Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (Havens, 196).

9. Tacitus (c. a.d. 55 to c. a.d. 117), see his De moribus Germanorum

(Havens, 197).

10. Pisistratus, tyrant in Athens (554 b.c.–527 b.c.) was said to have

collected the writings of Homer (Havens, 200–201).

11. Plato, Rousseau’s free translation of Apologia for Socrates.

12. Fabricius, mentioned in Seneca and Plutarch, is the image of the

great virtuous man.

68 The First Discourse

13. Charles-André (‘‘Carle’’) Van Loo (1705–1765) and Jean-Baptiste-

Marie Pierre (1713–1789) were celebrated artists. (See Havens, 226–227).

14. Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714–1785), French sculptor. (Havens, 228)

15. Montaigne.

16. Louis XIV founded ﬁve such honoriﬁc ‘‘academies.’’

17. Leucippus, the teacher of Democritus. Diagoras, Democritus’s

disciple.

18. Cicero and Francis Bacon.

19. Athens and Sparta.

The Second Discourse:

Discourse

on the

Origin and Foundations

Inequality Among Mankind

Non in depravatis, sed in his quae bene secundum

naturam se habent, considerandum est quid sit naturale.*

aristotle

, Politics, 1, 2.

* ‘‘We should consider what is natural not in things which are depraved, but in those

which are rightly ordered according to nature.’’

Notice Regarding the Notes

I have appended a few notes to this work, following my indolent custom of

working by ﬁts and starts. These notes sometimes digress too far from the

subject to be read with the text. Therefore I have placed them at the end of

the Discourse, in which I have tried my best to follow a straight path. Those

who have the courage to continue may enjoy beating the bushes a second

time and try to go through the notes. As to the others, it is no great matter if

they do not read them at all.

J.-J. Rousseau

Dedication

to the

Republic of Geneva

most honorable, magnificent, and

sovereign lords,

Convinced that it belongs only to a virtuous citizen to present his country

those acknowledgments it may become her to receive, I have been for thirty

years past, endeavoring to render myself worthy to offer you some public

homage. In the meantime, this fortunate occasion replacing in some degree

the insufﬁciency of my efforts, I have presumed rather to follow the dictates

of zeal, than to wait till I should be authorized by merit. Having had the

good fortune to be born a subject of Geneva, how could I reﬂect on the

natural equality of mankind, and that inequality which they have intro-

duced, without admiring the profound wisdom by which both the one and

the other are happily combined in this State, and contribute, in a manner the

most conformable to the law of nature, and the most favorable to commu-

nity, to the security of public order and the happiness of individuals? In my

researches after the best and most sensible maxims, which might be laid

down for the constitution of government, I was surprised to ﬁnd them all

united in yours; so that had I not been a fellow-citizen, I should have

thought it indispensable in me to present such a picture of human society to

that people, who of all others, seem to be possessed of its greatest advan-

tages, and to have best guarded against its abuses.

If I had had to choose the place of my birth, I should have preferred a

community proportioned in its extent to the limits of the human faculties;

that is to the possibility of being well governed: in which every person

being capable of his employment, no one should be obliged to commit to

others the trust he ought to discharge himself: a State in which its individ-

uals might be so well known to each other, that neither the secret machina-

tions of vice, nor the modesty of virtue should be able to escape the notice

and judgment of the public; and in which the agreeable custom of seeing

and knowing each other, should occasion the love of their country to be

rather an affection for its inhabitants than for its soil.

I should have chosen for my birthplace a country in which the interest of

the sovereign could not be separated from that of the subject; to the end that

all the motions of the machine of government might ever tend to the general

happiness. And as this could not be the case, unless where the sovereignty is

lodged in the people, it follows that I should have preferred a prudently

tempered democracy.

Dedication 73

I should have been desirous to live and die free: that is, so far subject to

the laws that neither I, nor any other body else, should have it in our power

to cast off their honorable yoke: that agreeable and salutary yoke to which

the haughtiest necks bend with the greater docility, as they are formed to

bear no other.

I should have desired, therefore, that no person within the State should

be able to say he was above the laws; nor that any person without, should be

able to dictate such as the State should be obliged to obey. For, whatever the

constitution of a government, if there be a single member of it who is not

subject to the laws, all the rest are necessarily at his discretion. And if there

be a national chief within, and a foreign chief without, however they may

divide their authority, it is impossible that both should be duly obeyed and

the State well governed.

I should not have chosen to live in a republic of recent institution,

however excellent its laws, for fear the government being otherwise framed

than circumstances might require, it might either disagree with the new

subjects, or the subjects disagree with the new government; in which

case the State might be shaken to pieces and destroyed almost as soon as

founded.

For it is with liberty as it is with solid and succulent foods, or with rich

wines, proper to nourish and fortify robust constitutions accustomed to

them, but pernicious, destructive and intoxicating to weak and delicate

temperaments, to which they are not adapted. A people once accustomed to

masters are not able to live without them. If they attempt at any time to

shake off their yoke, they lose still more freedom; for, by mistaking licen-

tiousness for liberty, to which it is diametrically opposed, they generally

become greater slaves to some impostor, who loads them with fresh chains.

The Romans themselves, an example for every succeeding free people,

were incapable of governing themselves on their expulsion of the Tarquins.

Debased by slavery, and the ignominious tasks imposed on them, they were

at ﬁrst no better than a stupid mob, which it was requisite to manage and

govern with the greatest wisdom; so that, being accustomed by degrees to

breathe the salutary air of liberty, their minds which had been enervated or

rather brutalized under the burden of slavery, might gradually acquire that

severity of manners and spirit of fortitude which rendered them at length

the most respectable nation upon earth.

I should have searched out for my country, therefore, some peaceful and

happy republic, whose antiquity lost itself, as it were, in the obscurity of

time: one that had experienced only such salutary shocks as served to

display and conﬁrm the courage and patriotism of its subjects; and whose

74 The Second Discourse

citizens, long accustomed to a prudent independence, were not only free,

but worthy of their freedom.

I should have made choice of a country, diverted, by a fortunate impo-

tence, from the brutal love of conquest; and secured, by a still more fortu-

nate situation, from becoming itself the conquest of other states: a free city

situated between several nations, none of which should ﬁnd it their interest

to attack it, yet all think themselves interested in preventing its being at-

tacked by others: a republic, in short, which should present nothing to tempt

the ambition of its neighbors; but might reasonably depend on their assi-

tance in case of need. It would follow that a republican State so happily

situated as I have supposed, could have nothing to fear but from itself; and

that, if its members accustomed themselves to the exercise of arms, it must

be to keep alive that military ardor and courage, which is so suitable to free

men, and tends to keep up their taste for liberty, rather than through the

necessity of providing for their own defense.

I should have sought a country, in which the legislative power should be

vested in all its citizens: for who can better judge than themselves of the

propriety of the terms, on which they mutually agree to live together in the

same community? Not that I should have approved of plebiscites, like those

among the Romans, in which the leaders of the State, and those most

interested in its preservation, were excluded from those deliberations on

which its security frequently depended; and in which, by the most absurd

inconsistency, the magistrates were deprived of privileges enjoyed by the

lowest citizens.

On the contrary, I should have desired that, in order to prevent self-

interested and ill-designed projects, with any of those dangerous innova-

tions which at length ruined the Athenians, no person should be at liberty to

propose new laws at pleasure: but that this should be the exclusive privilege

of the magistrates; and that even these should use it with so much caution,

that the people on their part should be so reserved in giving their consent to

such laws; and that the promulgation of theirs should be attended with so

much solemnity, that before the constitution could be affected by them,

there might be time enough given for all to be convinced, that it is the great

antiquity of the laws which principally contributes to render them sacred

and venerable, that the people soon learn to despise those which they

see daily altered, and that States, by accustoming themselves to neglect

their ancient customs under pretense of improvement, frequently introduce

greater evils than those they endeavor to remove.

I should have particularly avoided a republic, as one that must of course

be ill-governed, in which the people, imagining themselves capable of

Dedication 75

subsisting without magistrates, or at least without investing them with any-

thing more than a precarious authority, should imprudently reserve to them-

selves the administration of civil affairs and the execution of their own

laws. Such must have been the rude constitution of the primitive govern-

ments, directly emerging from the state of nature; and this was another of

the vices that contributed to the dissolution of the republic of Athens.

But I should have chosen a republic, the individuals of which, contented

with the privileges of giving sanction to their laws, and of deciding in a

body, according to the recommendations of the leaders, the most important

public affairs, should have established respectable tribunals; carefully dis-

tinguished their several departments; and electing annually some of their

fellow-citizens, of the greatest capacity and integrity, to administer justice

and govern the State; a community, in short, in which the virtue of the

magistrates thus bearing testimony to the wisdom of the people, they would

mutually honor each other. So that if ever any fatal misunderstandings

should arise to disturb the public peace, even these intervals of confusion

and error should bear the marks of moderation, reciprocal esteem, and of a

mutual respect for the laws; certain signs and pledges of a reconciliation as

lasting as sincere. Such are the advantages, most honorable, magniﬁcent

and sovereign Lords, which I should have sought in the country I had

chosen.

And if providence had added to all these, a delightful situation, a temper-

ate clime, a fertile soil, and the most charming views that present them-

selves under heaven, I should desire only, to complete my felicity, the

peaceful enjoyment of all these blessings, in the bosom of this happy coun-

try; living in agreeable society with my fellow-citizens, and exercising

towards them from their own example, the duties of friendship, humanity,

and every other virtue, that I might leave behind me the honorable memory

of a worthy man, and an incorruptible and virtuous patriot.

But, if less fortunate or too late grown wise, I saw myself reduced to end

an inﬁrm and languishing life in other climates, vainly regretting that

peaceful repose which I forfeited in the imprudence of my youth, I would at

least have entertained the same sentiments within myself, though denied

the opportunity of avowing and indulging them in my native country. Af-

fected with a tender and disinterested love for my distant fellow-citizens, I

should have addressed them from my heart, in about the following terms.

‘‘My dear countrymen, or rather my brethren, since the ties of blood

unite most of us, as well as the laws, it gives me pleasure that I cannot think

of you, without thinking, at the same time, of all the blessings you enjoy, the

value of which none of you, perhaps, are so aware as I to whom they are

76 The Second Discourse

lost. The more I reﬂect on your situation, both civil and political, the less

can I conceive that the present state of human nature will admit of a better.

In all other governments, even when it is a question of securing the greatest

welfare of the State, they are always conﬁned to ideal projects, or at least to

bare possibilities. But as for you, your happiness is complete. You have

nothing to do but enjoy it; you require nothing more to be made perfectly

happy, than to know how to be satisﬁed with being so. Your sovereignty,

acquired or recovered by the sword, and maintained for two centuries past

by your valor and wisdom, is at length fully and universally acknowledged.

Your boundaries are ﬁxed, your rights conﬁrmed and your repose secured

by honorable treaties. Your constitution is excellent, dictated by the pro-

foundest wisdom, and guaranteed by friendly and respectable powers. Your

State enjoys perfect tranquillity; you have nothing to fear either from wars

or conquerors: you have no other master than the wise laws you have

yourselves made; and which are administered by upright magistrates of

your own choosing. You are neither so wealthy as to be enervated by

softness, and so to lose, in the pursuit of frivolous pleasures, a taste for

real happiness and solid virtue; nor yet are you so poor as to require

more assistance from strangers than your own industry is sufﬁcient to pro-

cure you. In the meantime that precious liberty, which is maintained in

great States only by exorbitant taxation, costs you hardly anything for its

preservation.

‘‘May a republic, so wisely and happily constituted, last forever, as well

for an example to other nations, as for the felicity of its own subjects! This

is the only wish you have left to make; the only subject of your solicitude. It

depends, for the future, on yourselves alone, not to make you happy, your

ancestors have saved you that trouble, but to render that happiness lasting,

by your prudence in its enjoyment. It is on your constant unanimity, your

obedience to the laws, and your respect for the magistrates, that your pres-

ervation depends. If there remain among you the smallest seeds of enmity

or distrust, hasten to root them up, as an accursed leaven from which sooner

or later will result your misfortunes and the destruction of the State. I

conjure you all to examine the bottom of your hearts, and to hearken to the

secret voice of your own consciences. Is there any among you who can ﬁnd,

throughout the universe, a more upright, more enlightened and more re-

spectable body than that of your own magistracy? Do not all its members

set you an example of moderation, of simplicity of manners, of respect for

the laws, and of the most sincere reconciliation? Place, therefore, without

reservations that salutary conﬁdence in such wise leaders, which reason

ever owes to virtue. Consider they are the objects of your own choice; that

Dedication 77

they justify that choice; and that the honors, due to those whom you have

exalted to dignity, are necessarily reﬂected back on yourselves. Is there any

among you so ignorant, as not to know that, when the laws lose their force,

and the magistrates their authority, neither the persons nor properties of

individuals are any longer secure? Why, therefore, should you hesitate to do

that cheerfully and conﬁdently, which your true interest, your duty and even

common prudence will ever require?

‘‘Let not a culpable and fatal indifference to the support of the constitu-

tion, ever induce you to neglect, in case of need, the prudent advice of the

most enlightened and zealous of your fellow-citizens: but let equity, moder-

ation and ﬁrmness of resolution continue to regulate all your proceedings;

exhibiting you to the whole universe as an example of a valiant and modest

people, equally jealous of their honor and their liberty. Beware particularly,

this is the last advice I shall give you, of sinister interpretations and calum-

niating reports, the secret motives of which are often more dangerous than

the actions at which they are leveled. The whole house will be awake and

take the ﬁrst alarm, given by a trusty and watchful mastiff, who barks only

at the approach of thieves; but we ever abominate the impertinent yelping

of those noisy curs, who are perpetually disturbing the public repose, and

whose continual and ill-timed warnings prevent our attending to them when

they may be needed.’’

And you, most honorable and magniﬁcent Lords, you, the worthy and

respectable magistrates of a free people, permit me to offer you in particular

my duty and homage. If there be in the world a station capable of conferring

honor on the persons who ﬁll it, it is undoubtedly that which virtue and

talents combine to bestow; that of which you have rendered yourselves

worthy, and to which you have been promoted by your fellow-citizens.

Their worth adds a new luster to yours; since men who are capable of

governing others have chosen you to govern them, I cannot help esteeming

you as superior to all other magistrates, as a free people, and particularly

that over which you have the honor to preside, is by its wisdom and knowl-

edge superior to the populace of other States.

May I be permitted to cite an example of which ought to have survived a

better remnant; an example which will be ever near and dear to my heart.

I cannot recall to mind, without the most agreeable emotions, the person

and manners of that virtuous citizen, to whom I owe my being, and by

whom I was instructed, in my infancy, in the respect which is due to you. I

see him still, subsisting on his manual labor, and improving his mind by

the study of the sublimest truths. I see, lying before him, the works of

Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius, intermixed with the tools of his trade. At his

78 The Second Discourse

side stands his darling son, receiving, alas with too little proﬁt, the tender

instructions of the best of fathers. But, though the follies of a wild youth

caused me a while to forget his prudent lessons, I have at length the happi-

ness to experience that, whatever propensity one may have to vice, it is not

easy for an education, thus affectionately bestowed, to be ever entirely

thrown away.

Such, my most honorable and magniﬁcent lords, are the citizens, and

even the common inhabitants of the country under your government; such

are those intelligent and sensible men, of which, under the name of me-

chanics and tradespeople, it is usual, in other nations to entertain a false and

contemptible idea. My father, I own it with pleasure, was not a distin-

guished man among his fellow citizens. He was only such as they are all:

and yet, such as he was, there is no country in which his acquaintance would

not have been coveted, and cultivated even with advantage by men of the

ﬁrst distinction. It would not become me, nor is it, thank heaven, at all

necessary for me to remind you of the regard which such men have a right

to expect of their magistrates, to whom they are equal both by birth and

education, and inferior only by that preference which they voluntarily pay

to your merit, and in so doing lay claim on their part to some sort of

gratitude.

It is with a lively satisfaction I learn with how much gentleness and

condescendence you temper that gravity which becomes the ministers of

the law; and that you so well repay them, by your esteem and attentions, that

respect and obedience which they justly pay to you. This conduct is not only

just but prudent, as it wisely tends to obliterate many unhappy events,

which ought to be buried in eternal oblivion;* it is also by so much the more

prudential, as this generous and equitable people ﬁnd a pleasure in their

duty; as they are naturally inclined to doing you honor, as those who are the

most zealous to maintain their own rights and privileges are at the same

time the best disposed to respect yours.

It ought not to be thought surprising that the leaders of a civil society

should have its welfare and glory at heart: but it is uncommonly fortunate

for them, when those persons who look upon themselves as the magistrates,

or rather the masters of a more holy and sublime country, demonstrate their

affection for the earthly spot which maintains them. I am happy in having it

* Rousseau is referring to uprisings by a large part of the population which was

oppressed by the ruling oligarchy. The description of the government of Geneva is largely

false, and an example of Rousseau’s frequent tactics of duplicity. He is trying to win the

favor of the Genevan authorities.—translator

Dedication 79

in my power to make so singular an exception in favor of my own country;

and to rank, in the number of its best citizens, those zealous depositaries of

the sacred articles of our established faith; those venerable pastors whose

powerful and captivating eloquence is so much the better calculated to

enforce the maxims of the gospel, as they are themselves the ﬁrst to put

them in practice.

The whole world is informed of the great success with which the oratory

of the pulpit is cultivated at Geneva; but, being too much used to hear

divines preach one thing, and see them practice another, few people have an

opportunity to know how far the true spirit of Christianity, holiness of

manners, severity with regard to themselves and indulgence to their neigh-

bors, prevail throughout the whole body of our ministers. It is, perhaps, in

the power of the city of Geneva alone to produce an edifying example of so

perfect a union subsisting between its clergy and men of letters. And it is in

great degree, on their wisdom, their known moderation, and on their zeal

for the prosperity of the State that I build my hopes of its constant and

perpetual tranquillity.

At the same time, I remark, with a pleasure mixed with surprise and

veneration, how much they detest the horrid maxims of those holy and

barbarous men, of whom history furnishes us with more than one example;

who, in order to support the pretended prerogative of the deity, that is to say

their own interest, have been so much the less sparing of human blood, as

they were more assured that their own should be always respected.

I must not here forget that precious half of the republic, which makes the

happiness of the other; and whose tenderness and prudence preserve its

tranquillity and virtue. Amiable and virtuous daughters of Geneva, it will be

always the lot of your sex to govern ours. Happy, so long as your chaste

inﬂuence, solely exercised within the limits of conjugal union, is exerted

only for the glory of the State and the happiness of the public. It is thus the

female sex commanded at Sparta; and thus that you deserve to command at

Geneva.

What man can be such a barbarian as to resist the voice of honor and

reason, breathing from the lips of an affectionate wife? Who would not

despise the tawdry charms of luxury, on beholding the simplicity and mod-

esty of an attire, which, from the luster it derives from you, seems to be the

most favorable to beauty? It is your task to perpetuate, by the insinuating

spirit of your manners, by your innocent and amiable inﬂuence, a respect

for the laws of the State, and harmony among individuals. It is yours to

reunite divided families by happy marriages; and, above all things, to cor-

rect, by the persuasive mildness of your lessons and the modest graces of

80 The Second Discourse

your discourse, those extravagances which our young people pick up in

other countries; from whence, instead of many useful things that come

within the reach of their observation and practice, they bring home hardly

anything but a puerile air and ridiculous manner, acquired among loose

women, and the admiration of I know not what pretended grandeur, a paltry

indemniﬁcation for slavery and unworthy of the real greatness of true

liberty.

Continue, therefore, always to be what you are, the chaste guardians of

our manners, and the gentle links of our peace; exerting on every occasion

the privileges of the heart and of nature to the advantage of moral obligation

and the interests of virtue.

I ﬂatter myself no sinister event will ever prove me to have been mis-

taken, in building on such a foundation my hopes of the felicity of my

fellow-citizens and the glory of the republic. It must be confessed, however,

that with all these advantages, it will not shine with that exterior luster, by

which the eyes of the generality of mankind are affected, a puerile and fatal

taste for which is the most mortal enemy to the happiness and liberty of a

State.

Let dissolute youth seek elsewhere those transient pleasures which are

followed by long repentance. Let pretenders to taste elsewhere admire the

grandeur of palaces, the beauty of equipages, the sumptuousness of furni-

ture, the pomp of public entertainments, with all the reﬁnements of luxury

and effeminacy. Geneva boasts nothing but men; such a sight has neverthe-

less its value, and those who have a taste for it are at least as good as the

admirers of the other things.

Deign, most honorable, magniﬁcent and sovereign lords, all and each, to

receive, and with equal goodness, this respectful testimony of the interest I

take in your common prosperity. And, if I have been so unhappy as to be

guilty of any indiscreet transport, in this glowing effusion of my heart, I

beseech you to pardon, and impute it to the tender affection of a real patriot,

and to the ardent and lawful zeal of a man, who places his own greatest

felicity in the prospect of seeing you happy.

I am, with the most profound respect, most honorable, magniﬁcent and

sovereign lords,

Your most humble,

Chambéry, and most obedient servant

June 12, 1754 and fellow-citizen.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Preface

The most useful and least perfected of all human studies is, in my opinion,

that of man, and I dare say that the inscription on the Temple of Delphi did

alone contain a more important and difﬁcult precept than all the huge vol-

umes of the moralists.* I therefore consider the subject of this discourse as

one of the most interesting questions philosophy can propose, and, unhap-

pily for us, one of the most knotty philosophers can labor to solve: For how

is it possible to know the source of the inequality among men, without

knowing men themselves? And how shall man be able to see himself, such

as nature formed him, in spite of all the alterations which a long succession

of years and events must have produced in his original constitution, and

how shall he be able to distinguish what is of his own essence, from what

the circumstances he has been in and the progress he has made have added

to, or changed in, his primitive condition? The human soul, like the statue of

Glaucus which time, the sea and storms had so much disﬁgured that it

resembled a wild beast more than a god, the human soul, I say, altered in

society by the perpetual succession of a thousand causes, by the acquisition

of numberless discoveries and errors, by the changes that have happened in

the constitution of the body, by the perpetual jarring of the passions, has in a

manner so changed in appearance as to be scarcely distinguishable; and by

now we perceive in it, instead of a being always acting from certain and

invariable principles, instead of that heavenly and majestic simplicity

which its author had impressed upon it, nothing but the shocking contrast of

passion that thinks it reasons, and an understanding grown delirious.

But what is still more cruel, as every advance made by the human

species serves only to remove it still further from its primitive condition, the

more we accumulate new knowledge, the more we deprive ourselves of the

means of acquiring the most important of all; and it is, in a manner, by

the mere dint of studying man that we have lost the power of knowing him.

It is easy to perceive that it is in these successive alterations of the

* The inscription read, ‘‘Know thyself,’’ and ‘‘Nothing in excess.’’

82 The Second Discourse

human constitution that we must look for the ﬁrst origin of those differences

that distinguish men, who, it is universally allowed, are naturally as equal

among themselves as were the animals of every species before various

physical causes had introduced those varieties we now observe among

some of them. In fact, it is not possible to conceive how these ﬁrst changes,

whatever causes may have produced them, could have altered, all at once

and in the same manner, all the individuals of the species. It seems obvious

that while some improved or impaired their condition, or acquired divers

good or bad qualities not inherent in their nature, the rest continued a longer

time in their primitive state; and such was among men the ﬁrst source of

inequality, which it is much easier thus to point out in general, than to trace

back with precision to its true causes.

Let not then my readers imagine that I dare ﬂatter myself with having

seen what I think is so difﬁcult to discover. I have opened some arguments;

I have risked some conjectures; but not so much from any hopes of being

able to solve the question, as with a view of throwing upon it some light,

and giving a true statement of it. Others may with great facility penetrate

further on the same road, but none will ﬁnd it an easy matter to get to the

end of it. For it is no such easy task to distinguish between what is natural

and what is artiﬁcial in the present constitution of man, and to make oneself

well acquainted with a state which, if ever it did, does not now, and in all

probability never will exist, and of which, notwithstanding, it is absolutely

necessary to have just notions to judge properly of our present state. A man

must be even more a philosopher than most people think, to take upon

himself to determine exactly what precautions are requisite to make solid

observations upon this subject; and, in my opinion, a good solution of the

following problem would not be unworthy of the Aristotles and Plinys of

our age: What experiments are requisite to know man as constituted by

nature, and which are the best methods of making these experiments in the

midst of society? For my own part, I am so far from pretending to solve this

problem, that I think I have sufﬁciently reﬂected on the subject of it to dare

answer beforehand, that the wisest philosophers would not be too wise to

direct such experiments, nor the most powerful sovereigns too powerful to

make them; a concurrence of circumstances which there is hardly any

reason to expect, and especially with that perseverance, or rather that suc-

cession of knowledge, penetration, and good will requisite on both sides to

insure success.

These investigations, so difﬁcult to make and which hitherto have been

so little thought of, are however the only means left us to remove a thousand

difﬁculties which prevent our seeing the true foundations of human society.

Preface 83

It is this ignorance of the nature of man that casts so much uncertainty and

obscurity on the genuine deﬁnition of natural right: for the idea of right, as

Monsieur Burlamaqui* says, and still more that of natural right, are ideas

evidently relative to the nature of man. It is therefore from this very nature

of man, he continues, from his constitution and his state, that we are to

deduce the principles of this science.

It is impossible to observe, without both surprise and scandal, the little

agreement there is to be found on this important subject between the dif-

ferent authors that have treated it. Among the gravest writers, you will

scarce ﬁnd two of the same opinion. Not to speak of the ancient philoso-

phers, who, one would imagine, had set out to contradict each other in

regard to the most fundamental principles, the Roman jurisconsults make

man and all other animals, without distinction, subject to the same natural

law, because they consider under this name, rather that law which nature

imposes upon herself than that which she prescribes; or, more probably, on

account of the particular acceptation of the word, law, among these juris-

consults, who, on this occasion, seem to have understood nothing more by it

than the general relations established by nature between all animated beings

for the sake of their common preservation. The moderns, by not admitting

anything under the word law but a rule prescribed to a moral being, that is to

say, a being intelligent, free, and considered with a view to his relations to

other beings, must of course conﬁne to the only animal endowed with

reason, that is, to man, the competency of the natural law; but then, by

deﬁning this law, every one of them his own way, they establish it on such

metaphysical principles, that so far from being able to ﬁnd out these princi-

ples by themselves, there are very few persons among us capable of so

much as understanding them. Thus, therefore, all the deﬁnitions of these

learned men, deﬁnitions in everything else so constantly at variance, agree

only in this, that it is impossible to understand the law of nature, and

consequently to obey it, without being a very subtle reasoner and a very

profound metaphysician. This is no more nor less than saying that men must

have employed for the establishment of society a fund of knowledge, which

it is a very difﬁcult matter, nay absolutely impossible, for most persons to

develop, even in a state of society.

As men, therefore, are so little acquainted with nature, and agree so ill

about the meaning of the word law, it would be very difﬁcult for them to

agree on a good deﬁnition of natural law. Accordingly, all those we meet

with in books, besides lacking uniformity, err by being derived from several

* Author of Principes du droit naturel (Geneva, 1747).

84 The Second Discourse

kinds of knowledge which men do not naturally enjoy, and from advantages

they can have no notion of, as long as they remain in a state of nature. The

writers of these books set out by examining what rules it would be proper

for men to agree to among themselves for their common interest; and then

they proceed to give the name of natural law to a collection of these rules,

without any other proof than the advantage they ﬁnd would result from a

universal compliance with it. This is, no doubt, a very easy method of

striking out deﬁnitions, and of explaining the nature of things by an almost

arbitrary ﬁtness.

But as long as we remain unacquainted with the constitution of natural

man, it will be in vain for us to attempt to determine what law he received,

or what law suits him best. All we can plainly distinguish in regard to that

law is that for it to be law, not only the will of him whom it obliges must be

able to submit to it knowingly, but also that, for it to be natural, it must speak

immediately by the voice of nature.

Laying aside therefore all the scientiﬁc treatises, which teach us merely

to consider men such as they have made themselves, and conﬁning myself

to the ﬁrst and most simple operations of the human soul, I think I can

distinguish in it two principles prior to reason; one of them interests us

deeply in our own preservation and welfare, the other inspires us with a

natural aversion to seeing any other being, but especially any being like

ourselves, suffer or perish. It is from the concurrence and the combination

our mind is capable of forming between these two principles, without there

being the least necessity for adding to them that of sociability, that, in my

opinion, ﬂow all the rules of natural right; rules, which reason is afterwards

obliged to reestablish upon other foundations, when by its successive de-

velopments, it has at last stiﬂed nature itself.

By proceeding in this manner, we shall not be obliged to make man

a philosopher before he is a man. His obligations are not dictated to

him merely by the slow voice of wisdom; and as long as he does not resist

the internal impulses of compassion, he never will do any harm to another

man, nor even to any sentient being, except in those lawful cases where his

own preservation happens to come in question, and it is of course his duty

to give himself the preference. By this means too we may put an end to the

ancient disputes concerning the participation of other animals in the law

of nature; for it is plain that, as they want both reason and free will,

they cannot be acquainted with that law; however, as they partake in

some measure of our nature in virtue of that sensibility with which

they are endowed, we may well imagine they ought likewise to partake of

the beneﬁt of the natural law, and that man owes them a certain kind of

Preface 85

duty.* In fact, it seems that, if I am obliged not to injure any being like

myself, it is not so much because he is a reasonable being, as because he is a

sensible being; and this quality, by being common to men and beasts, ought

to exempt the latter from any unnecessary injuries the former might be able

to do them.

This same study of original man, of his real needs, and of the fundamen-

tal principles of his duties, is likewise the only good method we can take, to

surmount an inﬁnite number of difﬁculties concerning the origin of moral

inequality, the true foundations of political bodies, the reciprocal rights of

their members, and a thousand other similar questions that are as important

as they are ill-understood.

If we consider human society with a calm and disinterested eye, it seems

at ﬁrst sight to show us nothing but the violence of the powerful and the

oppression of the weak; the mind is shocked at the cruelty of the one, and

equally grieved at the blindness of the other; and as nothing is less stable in

human life than those exterior relations, which chance produces oftener than

wisdom, and which are called weakness or power, poverty or riches, human

establishments appear at the ﬁrst glance like so many castles built upon

quicksand; it is only by taking a nearer survey of them, and by removing the

dust and the sand which surround and disguise the ediﬁce, that we can

perceive the unshakable basis upon which it stands, and learn to respect its

foundations. Now, without a serious study of man, his natural faculties and

their successive developments, we shall never succeed in making these dis-

tinctions, and in separating, in the present constitution of things, what comes

from the divine will from what human contrivance has aspired to do. The

political and moral reﬂections, to which the important question I examine

gives rise, are therefore useful in many ways; and the hypothetical history of

governments is, in regard to man, an instructive lesson in every respect. By

considering what we should have become, had we been left to ourselves, we

ought to learn to bless him, whose gracious hand, correcting our institutions,

and giving them an unshakable foundation, has thereby prevented the disor-

ders which they otherwise must have produced, and made our happiness

ﬂow from means, which seemed bound to complete our misery.

Quem te Deus esse

Jussit, et humana qua parte locatus es in re, Disce.

†

* Descartes had maintained that animals are merely machines, without conscious

feeling.

†

‘‘Learn whom God has ordered you to be and in what part in human affairs you have

been placed.’’ (Persius, Satires, III, 71).

QUESTION

Posed by the Academy of Dijon

What is the origin of inequality

among mankind and does

natural law decree inequality?

Discourse

on the Origin and the Foundations

of Inequality Among Mankind

It is of man I am to speak; and the question into which I am inquiring

informs me that it is to men that I am going to speak; for to those alone, who

are not afraid of honoring truth, it belongs to propose discussions of this

kind. I shall therefore defend with conﬁdence the cause of mankind before

the sages, who invite me to stand up in its defense; and I shall think myself

happy, if I can but behave in a manner not unworthy of my subject and of

my judges.

I conceive two species of inequality among men; one which I call natu-

ral, or physical inequality, because it is established by nature, and consists

in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the

mind, or of the soul; the other which may be termed moral, or political

inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention, and is established, or

at least authorized by the common consent of mankind. This species of

inequality consists in the different privileges, which some men enjoy, to the

prejudice of others, such as that of being richer, more honored, more power-

ful, and even that of exacting obedience from them.

It were absurd to ask, what is the cause of natural inequality, seeing the

bare deﬁnition of natural inequality answers the question: it would be more

absurd still to inquire, if there might not be some essential connection

between the two species of inequality, as it would be asking, in other words,

if those who command are necessarily better men than those who obey; and

if strength of body or of mind, wisdom or virtue are always to be found in

individuals, in the same proportion with power, or riches: a question, ﬁt

perhaps to be discussed by slaves in the hearing of their masters, but un-

becoming free and reasonable beings in quest of truth.

What therefore is precisely the subject of this discourse? It is to point

out, in the progress of things, that moment, when, Right taking place of

violence, nature became subject to law; to unfold that chain of amazing

events, in consequence of which the strong submitted to serve the weak,

and the people to purchase imaginary ease, at the expense of real happiness.

The philosophers, who have examined the foundations of society, have

88 The Second Discourse

all perceived the necessity of tracing it back to a state of nature, but not one

of them has ever got there. Some of them have not scrupled to attribute to

men in that state the ideas of justice and injustice, without troubling them-

selves to prove that he really must have had such ideas, or even that such

ideas were useful to him: others have spoken of the natural right of every

man to keep what belongs to him, without letting us know what they meant

by the word belong; others, without further ceremony ascribing to the

strongest an authority over the weakest, have immediately brought govern-

ment into being, without thinking of the time requisite for men to form any

notion of the things signiﬁed by the words authority and government. All of

them, in ﬁne, constantly harping on wants, avidity, oppression, desires, and

pride, have transferred to the state of nature ideas picked up in the bosom of

society. In speaking of savages they described citizens. Nay, few of our own

writers seem to have so much as doubted, that a state of nature did once

actually exist; though it plainly appears by sacred history, that even the ﬁrst

man, immediately furnished as he was by God himself with both instruc-

tions and precepts, never lived in that state, and that, if we give to the Books

of Moses that credit which every Christian philosopher ought to give to

them, we must deny that, even before the Deluge, such a state ever existed

among men, unless they fell into it by some extraordinary event: a paradox

very difﬁcult to maintain, and altogether impossible to prove.

Let us begin, therefore, by laying aside facts, for they do not affect the

question. The researches, in which we may engage on this occasion, are not

to be taken for historical truths, but merely as hypothetical and conditional

reasonings, ﬁtter to illustrate the nature of things, than to show their true

origin, like those systems, which our naturalists daily make of the formation

of the world. Religion commands us to believe that men, having been

drawn by God himself out of a state of nature, are unequal, because it is His

pleasure they should be so; but religion does not forbid us to draw conjec-

tures solely from the nature of man, considered in itself, and from that of the

beings which surround him, concerning the fate of mankind, had they been

left to themselves. This is then the question I am to answer, the question I

propose to examine in the present discourse. As mankind in general has an

interest in my subject, I shall endeavor to use a language suitable to all

nations; or rather, forgetting the circumstances of time and place in order to

think of nothing but the men I speak to, I shall suppose myself in the

Lyceum of Athens, repeating the lessons of my masters before the Platos

and the Xenocrates of that famous seat of philosophy as my judges, and in

presence of the whole human species as my audience.

O man, of whatever country you are, whatever your opinions may be,

First Part 89

attend to my words; here is your history such as I think I have read it, not in

books composed by your fellowmen, for they are liars, but in the book of

nature which never lies. All that comes from her will be true, nor will there

be anything false, but where I may happen, without intending it, to intro-

duce something of my own. The times I am going to speak of are very

remote. How much are you changed from what you once were! It is in a

manner the life of your species that I am going to write, from the qualities

which you have received, and which your education and your habits have

succeeded in depraving, but could not destroy. There is, I feel, an age at

which every individual would choose to stop; and you will look for the age

at which, had you your wish, your species had stopped. Discontented with

your present condition for reasons which threaten your unhappy posterity

with still greater vexations, you will perhaps wish it were in your power to

go back; and this sentiment ought to be considered a panegyric of your ﬁrst

ancestors, a criticism of your contemporaries, and a source of terror to those

who may have the misfortune of coming after you.

First Part

However important it may be, in order to form a proper judgment of the

natural state of man, to consider him from his origin, and to examine him, as

it were, in the ﬁrst embryo of the species, I shall not attempt to trace his

organization through its successive developments: I shall not stop to exam-

ine in the animal system what he may have been in the beginning, in order

to have become at last what he actually is. I shall not inquire, whether, as

Aristotle thinks, his extended nails were no better at ﬁrst than crooked

talons; whether his whole body was not, bear-like, thickly covered with

hair; and whether, walking upon all fours, his looks directed to the earth,

and conﬁned to a horizon of a few paces extent, did not at once point out the

nature and limits of his ideas. I could only form vague, and almost imagi-

nary, conjectures on this subject. Comparative anatomy has not as yet made

sufﬁcient progress; and the observations of natural philosophy are too un-

certain, to establish upon such foundations the basis of any solid reasoning.

For this reason, without having recourse to the supernatural information

with which we have been favored on this head, or paying any attention to

the changes, that must have happened in the internal, as well as external

conformation of man, in proportion as he applied his limbs to new purposes,

and took to new foods, I shall suppose his conformation to have always

been, what we now behold it; that he always walked on two feet, made the

90 The Second Discourse

same use of his hands that we do of ours, extended his looks over the whole

face of nature, and measured with his eyes the vast extent of the heavens.*

If I strip this being, thus constituted, of all the supernatural gifts which

he may have received, and of all the artiﬁcial faculties, which he could not

have acquired but by slow degrees; if I consider him, in a word, such as he

must have issued from the hands of nature; I see an animal less strong than

some, and less agile than others, but, upon the whole, the most advan-

tageously organized of any: I see him satisfying his hunger under an oak,

and his thirst at the ﬁrst brook; I see him laying himself down to sleep at the

foot of the same tree that afforded him his meal; and there are all his wants

completely supplied.

The earth, left to its own natural fertility, and covered with immense

woods that no hatchet ever disﬁgured, offers at every step food and shelter

to every species of animals. Men, dispersed among them, observe and

imitate their industry, and thus rise as high as the instinct of beasts; with this

advantage, that, whereas every species of beasts is conﬁned to one peculiar

instinct, man, who perhaps has not any that particularly belongs to him,

appropriates to himself those of all other animals, and lives equally upon

most of the different foods, which they only divide among themselves; a

circumstance which qualiﬁes him to ﬁnd his subsistence more easily than

any of them.

Accustomed from their infancy to the inclemency of the weather, and to

the rigor of the different seasons; inured to fatigue, and obliged to defend,

naked and without arms, their life and their prey against the other wild

inhabitants of the forest, or at least to avoid their fury by ﬂight, men acquire

a robust and almost unalterable constitution. The children, bringing with

them into the world the excellent constitution of their parents, and strength-

ening it by the same exercises that ﬁrst produced it, attain by this means all

the vigor that the human frame is capable of. Nature treats them exactly in

the same manner that Sparta treated the children of her citizens; those who

come well formed into the world she renders strong and robust, and de-

stroys all the rest; differing in this respect from our societies, in which the

State, by permitting children to become burdensome to their parents, mur-

ders them without distinction in the wombs of their mothers.

The body being the only instrument that savage man is acquainted with,

he employs it to different uses, of which ours, for want of practice, are

incapable; and we may thank our industry for the loss of that strength and

* Rousseau was well acquainted with the theory of evolution that had been sketched

by his friend, Diderot, in his Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature (1753).

First Part 91

agility, which necessity obliges him to acquire. Had he a hatchet, would his

hand so easily snap off from an oak so stout a branch? Had he a sling, would

it hurl a stone to so great a distance? Had he a ladder, would he climb so

nimbly up a tree? Had he a horse, would he run with such swiftness? Give

civilized man but time to gather about him all his machines, and no doubt he

will outmatch the savage: but if you have a mind to see a contest still more

unequal, place them naked and unarmed one opposite to the other; and you

will soon discover the advantage there is in perpetually having all our

forces constantly at our disposal, in being constantly prepared against

all events, and in always carrying ourselves, as it were, whole and entire

about us.

Hobbes would have it that man is naturally void of fear, and intent only

upon attacking and ﬁghting. An illustrious philosopher* thinks on the con-

trary, and Cumberland and Pufendorf likewise afﬁrm it, that nothing is more

timid than man in a state of nature, that he is always in a tremble, and ready

to ﬂy at the ﬁrst motion he perceives, at the ﬁrst noise that strikes his ears.

This, indeed, may be very true in regard to objects with which he is not

acquainted; and I make no doubt of his being terriﬁed at every new sight

that presents itself, whenever he cannot distinguish the physical good and

evil which he may expect from it, nor compare his strength with the dangers

he has to encounter; circumstances that seldom occur in a state of nature,

where all things proceed in so uniform a manner, and the face of the earth is

not liable to those sudden and continual changes occasioned in it by the

passions and inconstancies of men living in bodies. But savage man living

dispersed among other animals and ﬁnding himself early under a necessity

of measuring his strength with theirs, soon makes a comparison between

both, and ﬁnding that he surpasses them more in address, than they surpass

him in strength, he learns not to be any longer in dread of them. Turn out a

bear or a wolf against a sturdy, active, resolute savage (and this they all are),

provided with stones and a good stick, and you will soon ﬁnd that the

danger is at least equal on both sides, and that after several trials of this

kind, wild beasts, who are not fond of attacking each other, will not be very

disposed to attack man, whom they have found every whit as wild as

themselves. As to animals who have really more strength than man has

address, he is, in regard to them, what other weaker species are, who ﬁnd

means to subsist notwithstanding; he has even this great advantage over

such weaker species, that being equally ﬂeet with them, and ﬁnding on

every tree an almost inviolable asylum, he is always at liberty to accept or to

* Montesquieu, in the Esprit des lois, I, ii.

92 The Second Discourse

refuse the encounter, to ﬁght or to ﬂy. Let us add that it appears that no

animal naturally makes war on man, except in the case of self-defense or

extreme hunger; nor ever expresses against him any of these violent antipa-

thies, which seem to indicate that one species is intended by nature for the

food of another.

But there are other more formidable enemies, and against which man is

not provided with the same means of defense; I mean natural inﬁrmities,

infancy, old age, and sickness of every kind; melancholy proofs of our

weakness, whereof the two ﬁrst are common to all animals, and the last

chieﬂy attends man living in a state of society. It is even observable in

regard to infancy, that the mother being able to carry her child about with

her, wherever she goes, can perform the duty of a nurse with a great deal

less trouble than the females of many other animals, who are obliged to be

constantly going and coming with no small labor and fatigue, one way to

look out for their own subsistence, and another to suckle and feed their

young ones. True it is that, if the woman happens to perish, her child is

exposed to the greatest danger of perishing with her; but this danger is

common to a hundred other species, whose young ones require a great deal

of time to be able to provide for themselves; and if our infancy is longer

than theirs, our life is longer likewise; so that, in this respect too, all things

are in a manner equal; not but that there are other rules concerning the

duration of the ﬁrst age of life, and the number of the young of man and

other animals, but they do not belong to my subject. With old men, who stir

and perspire but little, the demand for food diminishes with their abilities to

provide it; and as a savage life would exempt them from the gout and the

rheumatism, and old age is of all ills that which human assistance is least

capable of alleviating, they would at last go off, without its being per-

ceived by others that they ceased to exist, and almost without perceiving it

themselves.

In regard to sickness, I shall not repeat the vain and false declamations

made use of to discredit medicine by most men, while they enjoy their

health; I shall only ask if there are any solid observations from which we

may conclude that in those countries, where the healing art is most ne-

glected, the mean duration of man’s life is shorter than in those where it is

most cultivated. And how is it possible this should be the case, if we inﬂict

more diseases upon ourselves than medicine can supply us with remedies?

The extreme inequalities in the manner of living of the several classes of

mankind, the excess of idleness in some, and of labor in others, the facility

of irritating and satisfying our sensuality and our appetites, the too exquisite

and out of the way foods of the rich, which ﬁll them with ﬁery juices, and

First Part 93

bring on indigestions, the unwholesome food of the poor, of which even,

bad as it is, they very often fall short, and the want of which tempts them,

every opportunity that offers, to eat greedily and overload their stomachs;

late nights, excesses of every kind, immoderate transports of all the pas-

sions, fatigues, mental exhaustion, in a word, the numberless pains and

anxieties annexed to every condition, and which the mind of man is con-

stantly a prey to; these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our

own making, and that we might have avoided them all by adhering to the

simple, uniform and solitary way of life prescribed to us by nature. Allow-

ing that nature intended we should always enjoy good health, I dare almost

afﬁrm that a state of reﬂection is a state against nature, and that the man who

meditates is a degenerate animal. We need only call to mind the good

constitution of savages, of those at least whom we have not destroyed by

our strong liquors; we need only reﬂect, that they are strangers to almost

every disease, except those occasioned by wounds and old age, to be in a

manner convinced that the history of human diseases might be easily writ-

ten by pursuing that of civil societies. Such at least was the opinion of Plato,

who concluded from certain remedies made use of or approved by Poda-

lirius and Machaon at the Siege of Troy, that several disorders, which these

remedies were found to bring on in his days, were not known among men at

that remote period; and Celsus relates that dieting, so necessary nowadays,

was ﬁrst invented by Hippocrates.

Man therefore, in a state of nature where there are so few sources of

sickness, can have no great occasion for physic, and still less for physicians;

neither is the human species more to be pitied in this respect, than any other

species of animals. Ask those who make hunting their recreation or busi-

ness, if in their excursions they meet with many sick or feeble animals.

They meet with many carrying the marks of considerable wounds, that have

been perfectly well healed and closed up; with many, whose bones formerly

broken, and whose limbs almost torn off, have completely knit and united,

without any other surgeon but time, any other regimen but their usual way

of living, and whose cures were not the less perfect for their not having been

tortured with incisions, poisoned with drugs, or worn out by fasting. In a

word, however useful medicine well administered may be to us who live in

a state of society, it is still past doubt, that if, on the one hand, the sick

savage, destitute of help, has nothing to hope for except from nature, on the

other, he has nothing to fear but from its ills; a circumstance which often

renders his situation preferable to ours.

Let us therefore beware of confusing savage man with the men with

whom we associate. Nature behaves towards all animals left to her care

94 The Second Discourse

with a predilection that seems to prove how jealous she is of that preroga-

tive. The horse, the cat, the bull, nay the ass itself, have generally a higher

stature, and always a more robust constitution, more vigor, more strength

and courage in their forests than in our houses; they lose half these advan-

tages by becoming domestic animals; it looks as if all our attention to treat

them kindly, and to feed them well, served only to bastardize them. It is thus

with man himself. In proportion as he becomes sociable and a slave to

others, he becomes weak, fearful, mean-spirited, and his soft and effemi-

nate way of living at once completes the enervation of his strength and of

his courage. We may add, that there must be still a wider difference between

man and man in a savage and domestic condition, than between beast and

beast; for as men and beasts have been treated alike by nature, all the

comforts with which men indulge themselves, still more than they do the

beasts tamed by them, are so many particular causes which make them

degenerate more markedly.

Nakedness, therefore, the want of houses, and of all these superﬂuities,

which we consider as so very necessary, are not such mighty evils in respect

to these primitive men, and much less still any obstacle to their preserva-

tion. Their skin, it is true, is destitute of hair; but then they have no occasion

for any such covering in warm climates; and in cold climates they soon

learn to apply to that use those of the animals they have conquered; they

have only two feet to run with, but they have two hands to defend them-

selves with, and provide for all their wants; their children, perhaps, learn to

walk later and with difﬁculty, but their mothers carry them with ease; an

advantage not granted to other species of animals, with whom the mother,

when pursued, is obliged to abandon her young ones, or regulate her step by

theirs. In short, unless we admit those singular and fortuitous concurrences

of circumstances, which I shall speak of hereafter, and which, it is very

possible, may never have existed, it is evident, in any case, that the man

who ﬁrst made himself clothes and built himself a cabin supplied himself

with things which he did not much need, since he had lived without them till

then; and why should he not have been able to support, in his riper years, the

same kind of life, which he had supported from his infancy?

Alone, idle, and always surrounded with danger, savage man must be

fond of sleep, and sleep lightly like other animals, who think but little, and

may, in a manner, be said to sleep all the time they do not think: self-

preservation being almost his only concern, he must exercise those faculties

most which are most serviceable in attacking and in defending, whether to

subdue his prey, or to prevent his becoming that of other animals: those

organs, on the contrary, which softness and sensuality can alone improve,

First Part 95

must remain in a state of rudeness, utterly incompatible with all manner of

delicacy; and as his senses are divided on this point, his touch and his taste

must be extremely coarse and blunt; his sight, his hearing, and his smelling

equally subtle: such is the animal state in general, and accordingly, if we

may believe travelers, it is that of most savage nations. We must not there-

fore be surprised, that the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope distinguish

with their naked eyes ships on the ocean, at as great a distance as the Dutch

can discern them with their glasses; nor that the savages of America should

have tracked the Spaniards with their smell, to as great a degree of exact-

ness, as the best dogs could have done; nor that all these barbarous nations

support nakedness without pain, use such large quantities of pimento to

give their food a relish, and drink like water the strongest liquors of Europe.

As yet I have considered man merely in his physical capacity; let us now

endeavor to examine him in a metaphysical and moral light.

I can discover nothing in any animal but an ingenious machine, to which

nature has given senses to wind itself up, and guard, to a certain degree,

against everything that might destroy or disorder it. I perceive the very

same things in the human machine, with this difference, that nature alone

operates in all the operations of the beast, whereas man, as a free agent, has

a share in his. One chooses by instinct; the other by an act of liberty; for

which reason the beast cannot deviate from the rules that have been pre-

scribed to it, even in cases where such deviation might be useful, and man

often deviates from the rules laid down for him to his prejudice. Thus a

pigeon would starve near a dish of the best meat, and a cat on a heap of fruit

or corn, though both might very well support life with the food which they

thus disdain, did they but bethink themselves to make a trial of it. It is in this

manner that dissolute men run into excesses, which bring on fevers and

death itself; because the mind depraves the senses, and when nature ceases

to speak, the will still continues to dictate.

All animals have ideas, since all animals have senses; they even com-

bine their ideas to a certain degree, and, in this respect, it is only the

difference of such degree that constitutes the difference between man and

beast: some philosophers have even advanced, that there is a greater differ-

ence between some men and some others, than between some men and

some beasts; it is not therefore so much the understanding that constitutes,

among animals, the speciﬁc distinction of man, as his quality of a free

agent. Nature speaks to all animals, and beasts obey her voice. Man feels

the same impulse, but he at the same time perceives that he is free to resist

or to acquiesce; and it is in the consciousness of this liberty, that the spir-

ituality of his soul chieﬂy appears: for natural philosophy explains, in some

96 The Second Discourse

measure, the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; but in the

power of willing, or rather of choosing, and in the consciousness of this

power, nothing can be discovered but acts, that are purely spiritual, and

cannot be accounted for by the laws of mechanics.

But even if the difﬁculties, in which all these questions are involved,

should leave some room to dispute on this difference between man and

beast, there is another very speciﬁc quality that distinguishes them, and a

quality which will admit of no dispute; this is the faculty of improvement;*

a faculty which, as circumstances offer, successively unfolds all the other

faculties, and resides among us not only in the species, but in the individ-

uals that compose it; whereas a beast is, at the end of some months, all he

ever will be during the rest of his life; and his species, at the end of a

thousand years, precisely what it was the ﬁrst year of that thousand. Why is

man alone subject to dotage? Is it not, because he thus returns to his primi-

tive condition? And because, while the beast, which has acquired nothing

and has likewise nothing to lose, continues always in possession of his

instinct, man, losing by old age, or by accidents, all the acquisitions he had

made in consequence of his perfectibility, thus falls back even lower than

beasts themselves? It would be a melancholy necessity for us to be obliged

to allow that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all

man’s misfortunes; that it is this faculty, which, though by slow degrees,

draws him out of his original condition, in which his days would slide away

insensibly in peace and innocence; that it is this faculty, which, in a succes-

sion of ages, produces his discoveries and mistakes, his virtues and his

vices, and, in the long run, renders him both his own and nature’s tyrant. (i)

It would be shocking to be obliged to commend, as a beneﬁcent being,

whoever he was that ﬁrst suggested to the Orinoco Indians the use of those

boards which they bind on the temples of their children, and which secure to

them the enjoyment of some part at least of their natural imbecility and

happiness.

Savage man, abandoned by nature to pure instinct, or rather indemniﬁed

for the instinct which has perhaps been denied to him by faculties capable

of immediately supplying its place, and of raising him afterwards a great

deal higher, would therefore begin with purely animal functions: to see and

to feel would be his ﬁrst condition, which he would enjoy in common with

other animals. To will and not to will, to wish and to fear, would be the ﬁrst,

and in a manner, the only operations of his soul, until new circumstances

occasioned new developments.

* Rousseau uses the word perfectibilité, which means the capacity to make progress.

First Part 97

Let moralists say what they will, the human understanding is greatly

indebted to the passions, which, on their side, are likewise universally

allowed to be greatly indebted to the human understanding. It is by the

activity of our passions, that our reason improves; we covet knowledge

merely because we covet enjoyment, and it is impossible to conceive, why a

man exempt from fears and desires should take the trouble to reason. The

passions, in their turn, owe their origin to our needs, and their increase to

our progress in science; for we cannot desire or fear anything, but in conse-

quence of the ideas we have of it, or of the simple impulses of nature; and

savage man, destitute of every species of knowledge, experiences no pas-

sions but those of this last kind; his desires never extend beyond his physi-

cal wants; (k) He knows no goods but food, a female, and rest; he fears no

evils but pain, and hunger; I say pain, and not death; for no animal, merely

as such, will ever know what it is to die, and the knowledge of death, and of

its terrors, is one of the ﬁrst acquisitions made by man, in consequence of

his deviating from the animal state.

I could easily, were it necessary, cite facts in support of this opinion, and

show that the progress of the mind has everywhere kept pace exactly with

the wants to which nature had left the inhabitants exposed, or to which

circumstances had subjected them, and consequently to the passions, which

inclined them to provide for these wants. I could exhibit in Egypt the arts

starting up, and extending themselves with the inundations of the Nile; I

could pursue them in their progress among the Greeks, where they were

seen to bud, grow, and rise to the heavens, in the midst of the sands and

rocks of Attica, without being able to take root on the fertile banks of the

Europus; I would observe, that, in general, the inhabitants of the north are

more industrious than those of the south, because they can less do without

industry; as if nature thus meant to make all things equal, by giving to the

mind that fertility she has denied to the soil.

But leaving aside the uncertain testimony of history, who does not per-

ceive that everything seems to remove from savage man the temptation and

the means of altering his condition? His imagination paints nothing to him;

his heart asks nothing from him. His moderate wants are so easily supplied

with what he everywhere ﬁnds ready to his hand, and he stands at such a

distance from the degree of knowledge requisite to covet more, that he can

neither have foresight nor curiosity. The spectacle of nature, by growing

quite familiar to him, becomes at last equally indifferent. It is constantly the

same order, constantly the same revolutions; he has not sense enough to feel

surprise at the sight of the greatest wonders; and it is not in his mind we

must look for that philosophy, which man must have to know how to

98 The Second Discourse

observe once, what he has every day seen. His soul, which nothing disturbs,

gives itself up entirely to the consciousness of its present existence, without

any thought of even the nearest futurity; and his projects, equally conﬁned

with his views, scarce extend to the end of the day. Such is, even at present,

the degree of foresight in the Caribbean: he sells his cotton bed in the

morning, and comes in the evening, with tears in his eyes, to buy it back, not

having foreseen that he should want it again the next night.

The more we meditate on this subject, the wider does the distance be-

tween mere sensation and the most simple knowledge become in our eyes;

and it is impossible to conceive how man, by his own powers alone, without

the assistance of communication, and the spur of necessity, could have got

over so great an interval. How many ages perhaps revolved, before man

beheld any other ﬁre but that of the heavens? How many different accidents

must have concurred to make them acquainted with the most common uses

of this element? How often have they let it go out, before they knew the

art of reproducing it? And how often perhaps has not every one of these

secrets perished with the discoverer? What shall we say of agriculture, an

art which requires so much labor and foresight; which depends upon other

arts; which, it is very evident, can be practiced only in a society which had

at least begun, and which does not so much serve to draw from the earth

food which it would yield them without all that trouble, as to oblige her to

produce those things which are preferable to our taste? But let us suppose

that men had multiplied to such a degree, that the natural products of the

earth no longer sufﬁced for their support; a supposition which, by the way,

would prove that this kind of life would be very advantageous to the human

species; let us suppose that, without forge or workshops, the instruments of

husbandry had dropped from the heavens into the hands of savages, that

these men had overcome that mortal aversion they all have for constant

labor; that they had learned to foretell their wants at so great a distance of

time; that they had guessed exactly how they were to break the earth, sow

the grain and plant trees; that they had found out the art of grinding their

corn, and improving by fermentation the juice of their grapes; all operations

which must have been taught them by the gods, since we cannot conceive

how they should make such discoveries of themselves; after all these ﬁne

presents, what man would be mad enough to cultivate a ﬁeld, that may be

robbed by the ﬁrst comer, man or beast, who takes a fancy to the produce of

it. And would any man consent to spend his days in labor and fatigue, when

the rewards of his labor and fatigue became more and more precarious in

proportion of his want of them? In a word, how could this situation engage

First Part 99

men to cultivate the earth, as long as it was not parceled out among them,

that is, as long as a state of nature subsisted.

Though we should suppose savage man as well-versed in the art of

thinking, as philosophers make him; though we were, following them, to

make him a philosopher himself, discovering by himself the sublimest

truths, forming to himself, by the most abstract arguments, maxims of

justice and reason drawn from the love of order in general, or from the

known will of his Creator: in a word, though we were to suppose his mind

as intelligent and enlightened as it would have had to be, and is in fact found

to have been dull and stupid; what beneﬁt would the species receive from

all these metaphysical discoveries, which could not be communicated, but

must perish with the individual who had made them? What progress could

mankind make in the forests, scattered up and down among the other ani-

mals? And to what degree could men mutually improve and enlighten each

other, when they had no ﬁxed habitation, nor any need of each other’s

assistance; when the same persons scarcely met twice in their whole lives,

and on meeting neither spoke to, or so much as knew each other.

Let us consider how many ideas we owe to the use of speech; how much

grammar exercises and facilitates the operations of the mind; let us, be-

sides, reﬂect on the immense pains and time that the ﬁrst invention of lan-

guages must have required: let us add these reﬂections to the preceding; and

then we may judge how many thousand ages must have been requisite to

develop successively the operations, which the human mind is capable

of producing.

I must now beg leave to stop one moment to consider the perplexities

attending the origin of languages. I might here barely cite or repeat the

researches made, in relation to this question, by the Abbé de Condillac,*

which all fully conﬁrm my system, and perhaps even suggested to me the

ﬁrst idea of it. But, as the matter in which this philosopher resolves the dif-

ﬁculties he himself raises concerning the origin of arbitrary signs shows

that he supposes, what I doubt, namely a kind of society already estab-

lished among the inventors of languages; I think it my duty, at the same

time that I refer to his reﬂections, to give my own, in order to expose the

same difﬁculties in a light suitable to my subject. The ﬁrst that offers itself

is how languages could become necessary; for as there was no correspon-

dence between men, nor the least necessity for any, there is no conceiv-

ing the necessity of this invention, nor the possibility of it, if it was not

* In the Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746).

100 The Second Discourse

indispensable. I might say, with many others, that languages are the fruit of

the domestic intercourse between fathers, mothers, and children: but this,

besides its not answering the difﬁculties, would be committing the same

error as those, who reasoning on the state of nature, transfer to it ideas

gathered in society, always consider families as living together under one

roof, and their members as observing among themselves a union, equally

intimate and permanent as that which exists among us, where so many

common interests unite them; whereas in this primitive state, as there were

neither houses nor cabins, nor any kind of property, everyone took up

his lodging at random, and seldom continued above one night in the same

place; males and females united without any premeditated design, as

chance, occasion, or desire brought them together, nor had they any great

occasion for language to make known what they had to say to each other.

They parted with the same ease. (l) The mother suckled her children, when

just born, for her own sake; but afterwards when habit had made them dear

to her, for theirs; but they no sooner gained strength enough to run about in

quest of food than they separated even from her, and as they scarcely had

any other method of not losing each other, than that of remaining constantly

in each other’s sight, they soon came to a point of not even recognizing each

other when they happened to meet again. I must further observe, that the

child having all his wants to explain, and consequently more things to say to

his mother, than the mother can have to say to him, it is he that must be at

the chief expense of invention, and the language he makes use of must be in

a great measure his own work; this makes the number of languages equal to

that of the individuals who are to speak them; and this multiplicity of

languages is further increased by their roving and vagabond kind of life,

which allows no idiom time enough to acquire any consistency; for to say

that the mother would have dictated to the child the words he must employ

to ask her this thing and that, may well enough explain in what manner

languages, already formed, are taught, but it does not show us in what

manner they are ﬁrst formed.

Let us suppose this ﬁrst difﬁculty conquered: Let us for a moment con-

sider ourselves on this side of the immense space, which must have sepa-

rated the pure state of nature from that in which languages became neces-

sary, and let us, after allowing their necessity, examine how languages could

begin to be established: a new difﬁculty this, still more stubborn than the

preceding; for if men stood in need of speech to learn to think, they must

have stood in still greater need of the art of thinking to invent that of

speaking; and though we could conceive how the sounds of the voice came

to be taken for the conventional interpreters of our ideas we should not be

First Part 101

the nearer knowing who could have been the interpreters of this convention

for such ideas, which, in consequence of their not corresponding to any

sensible objects, could not be indicated by gesture or voice; so that we can

scarcely form any tolerable conjectures concerning the birth of this art of

communicating our thoughts, and establishing a correspondence between

minds: a sublime art which, though so remote from its origin, philosophers

still behold at such a prodigious distance from its perfection, that I never

met with one of them bold enough to afﬁrm it would ever arrive there, even

though the revolutions necessarily produced by time were suspended in its

favor; though prejudice could be banished from, or would at least consent to

sit silent in the presence of our academies; and though these societies

should consecrate themselves, entirely and during whole ages, to the study

of this thorny matter.

The ﬁrst language of man, the most universal and most energetic of all

languages, in short, the only language he needed, before there was a neces-

sity of persuading assembled multitudes, was the cry of nature. As this cry

was never extorted but by a kind of instinct in the most urgent cases, to

implore assistance in great danger, or relief in great sufferings, it was of

little use in the common occurrences of life, where more moderate senti-

ments generally prevail. When the ideas of men began to extend and multi-

ply, and a closer communication began to take place among them, they

labored to devise more numerous signs, and a more extensive language:

they multiplied the inﬂections of the voice, and added to them gestures,

which are, in their own nature, more expressive, and whose meaning de-

pends less on any prior determination. They therefore expressed visible and

movable objects by gestures, and those which strike the ear by imitative

sounds: but as gestures scarcely indicate anything except objects that are

actually present or can be easily described, and visible actions; as they are

not of general use, since darkness or the interposition of a material object

renders them useless; and as besides they require attention rather than

excite it; men at length bethought themselves of substituting for them the

articulations of voice, which, without having the same relation to any deter-

minate object, are, in quality of conventional signs, ﬁtter to represent all our

ideas; a substitution, which could only have been made by common con-

sent, and in a manner pretty difﬁcult to practice by men, whose rude organs

were unimproved by exercise; a substitution, which is in itself still more

difﬁcult to be conceived, since such a common agreement would have

required a motive, and speech therefore appears to have been exceedingly

requisite to establish the use of speech.

We must suppose, that the words, ﬁrst made use of by men, had in their

102 The Second Discourse

minds a much more extensive signiﬁcation, than those employed in lan-

guages of some standing, and that, considering how ignorant they were of

the division of speech into its constituent parts, they at ﬁrst gave every word

the meaning of an entire proposition. When afterwards they began to per-

ceive the difference between the subject and attribute, and between verb

and noun, a distinction which required no mean effort of genius, the sub-

stantives for a time were only so many proper names, the inﬁnitive was the

only tense, and as to adjectives, great difﬁculties must have attended the

development of the idea that represents them, since every adjective is an

abstract word, and abstraction is an unnatural and very painful operation.

At ﬁrst they gave every object a peculiar name, without any regard to its

genus or species, things which these ﬁrst originators of language were in no

condition to distinguish; and every individual presented itself in isolation of

their minds, as they are in the picture of nature. If they called one oak A,

they called another oak B: so that their dictionary must have been more

extensive in proposition as their knowledge of things was more conﬁned. It

could not but be a very difﬁcult task to get rid of so diffuse and embarrassing

a nomenclature; as in order to marshal the several beings under common

and generic denominations, it was necessary to be ﬁrst acquainted with

their properties, and their differences; to be stocked with observations and

deﬁnitions, that is to say, to understand natural history and metaphysics,

advantages which the men of these times could not have enjoyed.

Besides, general ideas cannot be conveyed to the mind without the

assistance of words, nor can the understanding seize them except by means

of propositions. This is one of the reasons why mere animals cannot form

such ideas, nor ever acquire the perfectibility, which depends on such an

operation. When a monkey leaves without the least hesitation one nut for

another, are we to think he has any general idea of that kind of fruit, and that

he compares its archetype with these two individual bodies? No certainly;

but the sight of one of these nuts calls back to his memory the sensations

which he has received from the other; and his eyes, modiﬁed after some

certain manner, give notice to his palate of the modiﬁcation it is in its turn

going to receive. Every general idea is purely intellectual; let the imagina-

tion tamper ever so little with it, it immediately becomes a particular idea.

Endeavor to represent to yourself the image of a tree in general, you never

will be able to do it; in spite of all your efforts it will appear big or little, with

thin or thick foliage, light or dark; and were you able to see nothing in it, but

what can be seen in every tree, such a picture would no longer resemble any

tree. Beings perfectly abstract are perceivable in the same manner, or are

only conceivable by the assistance of speech. The deﬁnition of a triangle

First Part 103

can alone give you a just idea of that ﬁgure: the moment you form a triangle

in your mind, it is this or that particular triangle and no other, and you

cannot avoid giving breadth to its lines and color to its area. We must

therefore make use of propositions; we must therefore speak to have gen-

eral ideas; for the moment the imagination stops, the mind can continue to

function only with the aid of discourse. If therefore the ﬁrst inventors could

give no names to any ideas but those they had already, it follows that the

ﬁrst substantives could never have been anything more than proper names.

But when by means, which I cannot conceive, our new grammarians

began to extend their ideas, and generalize their words, the ignorance of the

inventors must have conﬁned this method to very narrow bounds; and as

they had at ﬁrst too much multiplied the names of individuals for want of

being acquainted with the distinctions called genus and species, they after-

wards made too few genera and species for want of having considered

beings in all their differences: to push the divisions far enough, they must

have had more knowledge and experience than we can allow them, and

have made more researches and taken more pains, than we can suppose

them willing to submit to. Now if, even at this present time, we every day

discover new species, which had before escaped all our observations, how

many species must have escaped the notice of men, who judged of things

merely from their ﬁrst appearances! As to the primitive classes and the most

general notions, it were superﬂuous to add that these they must have like-

wise overlooked: how, for example, could they have thought of or under-

stood the words, matter, spirit, substance, mode, ﬁgure, motion, since even

our philosophers, who for so long a time have been constantly employing

these terms, can themselves scarcely understand them, and since the ideas

annexed to these words being purely metaphysical, they could ﬁnd no

models of them in nature?

I stop at these ﬁrst advances, and beseech my judges to suspend their

reading a little, in order to consider, what a great way language has still to

go, in regard to the invention of physical substantives alone (though the

easiest part of language to invent), to be able to express all the sentiments of

man, to assume an invariable form, to bear being spoken in public, and to

inﬂuence society. I earnestly entreat them to consider how much time and

knowledge must have been requisite to ﬁnd out numbers, abstract words,

the aorists, and all the other tenses of verbs, the particles, and syntax, the

method of connecting propositions and arguments, of forming all the logic

of discourse. For my own part, I am so frightened by the difﬁculties that

multiply at every step, and so convinced of the almost demonstrated impos-

sibility of languages owing their birth and establishment to means that were

104 The Second Discourse

merely human, that I must leave to whoever may please to take it up, the

task of discussing this difﬁcult problem, ‘‘Which was the more necessary,

society already formed to invent languages, or languages already invented

to form society?’’

Whatever these origins may have been, we may at least infer from the

little care which nature has taken to bring men together by mutual wants,

and make the use of speech easy to them, how little she has done towards

making them sociable, and how little she has contributed to anything which

they themselves have done to become so. In fact, it is impossible to con-

ceive, why, in this primitive state, one man should have more occasion for

the assistance of another, than one monkey, or one wolf for that of another

animal of the same species; or supposing that he had, what motive could

induce another to assist him; or even, if he did so, how he, who wanted

assistance, and he from whom it was wanted, could agree upon the condi-

tions. I know we are continually told that in this state man would have been

the most wretched of all creatures; and if it is true, as I fancy I have

proved it, that he must have continued many ages without either the desire

or the opportunity of emerging from such a state, their assertion could

only serve to justify a charge against nature, and not any against the being

which nature had thus constituted. But, if I thoroughly understand this term

wretched, it is a word that either has no meaning, or signiﬁes nothing but a

privation attended with pain, and a suffering state of body or soul: now I

would fain know what kind of misery can be that of a free being, whose

heart enjoys perfect peace, and body perfect health? and which is most

likely to become insupportable to those who enjoy it, a civil or a natural

life? In civil life we can scarcely meet a single person who does not com-

plain of his existence; many even throw away as much of it as they can, and

the united force of divine and human laws can hardly put a stop to this

disorder. Was ever any free savage known to have been so much tempted to

complain of life, and do away with himself? Let us therefore judge with less

pride on which side real misery is to be placed. Nothing, on the contrary,

would have been so unhappy as savage man, dazzled by ﬂashes of knowl-

edge, racked by passions, and reasoning about a state different from that in

which he saw himself placed. It was in consequence of a very wise provi-

dence, that the faculties, which he potentially enjoyed, were not to develop

themselves, except in proportion as there offered occasions to exercise

them, lest they should be superﬂuous or troublesome to him when he did not

yet want them, or tardy and useless when he did. He had in his instinct alone

everything requisite to live in a state of nature; in his cultivated reason he

has barely what is necessary to live in a state of society.

First Part 105

It appears at ﬁrst sight that, as there was no kind of moral relations

between men in this state, nor any known duties, they could not be either

good or bad, and had neither vices nor virtues, unless we take these words in

a physical sense, and call vices, in the individual, the qualities which may

prove detrimental to his own preservation, and virtues those which may

contribute to it; in which case we should be obliged to consider him as most

virtuous, who made least resistance against the simple impulses of nature.

But without deviating from the usual meaning of these terms, it is proper to

suspend the judgment we might form of such a situation, and be on our

guard against prejudice, until, balance in hand, we have examined whether

there are more virtues or vices among civilized men; or whether their

virtues do them more good than their vices do them harm; or whether the

improvement of their understanding is sufﬁcient compensation for the mis-

chief they do to each other, in proportion as they become better informed of

the good they ought to do; or whether, on the whole, they would not be

much happier in a condition, where they had nothing to fear or to hope from

each other, than to have submitted to universal dependence, and to have

obliged themselves to depend for everything upon those, who do not think

themselves obliged to give them anything.

But above all things let us beware of concluding with Hobbes, that man,

as having no idea of goodness, must be naturally bad; that he is vicious

because he does not know what virtue is; that he always refuses to do any

service to those of his own species, because he believes that none is due to

them; that, in virtue of that right which he justly claims to everything he

wants, he foolishly looks upon himself as proprietor of the whole universe.

Hobbes very plainly saw the ﬂaws in all the modern deﬁnitions of natural

right: but the consequences, which he draws from his own deﬁnition, show

that the sense in which he understands it is equally false. This author, to

argue from his own principles, should say that the state of nature, being that

in which the care of our own preservation interferes least with the preserva-

tion of others, was consequently the most favorable to peace, and the most

suitable to mankind; whereas he advances the very reverse in consequence

of his having injudiciously included in that care which savage man takes of

his preservation, the satisfaction of numberless passions which are the work

of society, and have made laws necessary. A bad man, says he, is a robust

child. But this is not proving that savage man is a robust child; and though

we were to grant that he was, what could this philosopher infer from such a

concession? That if this man, when robust, depended on others as much as

when feeble, there is no excess that he would not be guilty of. He would

make nothing of striking his mother when she delayed ever so little to give

106 The Second Discourse

him the breast; he would claw, and bite, and strangle without remorse the

ﬁrst of his younger brothers, that ever so accidentally jostled or otherwise

disturbed him. But these are two contradictory suppositions in the state of

nature, to be robust and dependent. Man is weak when dependent, and his

own master before he grows robust. Hobbes did not consider that the same

cause, which hinders savages from making use of their reason, as our

jurisconsults pretend, hinders them at the same time from making an ill use

of their faculties, as he himself pretends; so that we may say that savages

are not bad, precisely because they don’t know what it is to be good; for it is

neither the development of the understanding, nor the curb of the law, but

the calmness of their passions and their ignorance of vice that hinder them

from doing ill: tanto plus in illis proﬁcit vitiorum ignoratio, quam in his

cognitio virtutis.* There is besides another principle that has escaped

Hobbes, and which, having been given to man to moderate, on certain

occasions, the ferocity of self-love, or the desire of self-preservation pre-

vious to the appearance of that love (o) tempers the ardor, with which he

naturally pursues his private welfare, by an innate abhorrence to see beings

suffer that resemble him. I shall not surely be contradicted, in granting to

man the only natural virtue, which the most passionate detractor of human

virtues could not deny him, I mean that of pity, a disposition suitable to

creatures weak as we are, and liable to so many evils; a virtue so much the

more universal, and withal useful to man, as it takes place in him before all

manner of reﬂection; and so natural, that the beasts themselves sometimes

give evident signs of it. Not to speak of the tenderness of mothers for their

young; and of the dangers they face to screen them from danger; with what

reluctance are horses known to trample upon living bodies; one animal

never passes unmoved by the dead carcass of another animal of the same

species: there are even some who bestow a kind of sepulture upon their

dead fellows; and the mournful lowings of cattle, on their entering the

slaughterhouse, publish the impression made upon them by the horrible

spectacle they are there struck with. It is with pleasure we see the author of

the Fable of the Bees,

†

forced to acknowledge man a compassionate and

sensitive being; and lay aside, in the example he offers to conﬁrm it, his cold

and subtle style, to place before us the pathetic picture of a man, who, with

his hands tied up, is obliged to behold a beast of prey tear a child from the

arms of his mother, and then with his teeth grind the tender limbs, and with

* ‘‘So much more does ignorance of vice proﬁt these than knowledge of virtue the

others.’’ (Justin, Histories, II, 2.)

†

Mandeville.

First Part 107

his claws rend the throbbing entrails of the innocent victim. What horrible

emotions must not such a spectator experience at the sight of an event

which does not personally concern him? What anguish must he not suffer at

his not being able to assist the fainting mother or the expiring infant?

Such is the pure impulse of nature, anterior to all manner of reﬂection;

such is the force of natural pity, which the most dissolute manners have as

yet found it so difﬁcult to extinguish, since we every day see, in our theatri-

cal representations, those men sympathize with the unfortunate and weep at

their sufferings, who, if in the tyrant’s place, would aggravate the torments

of their enemies. Mandeville was aware that men, in spite of all their

morality, would never have been better than monsters, if nature had not

given them pity to assist reason: but he did not perceive that from this

quality alone ﬂow all the social virtues which he would dispute mankind the

possession of. In fact, what is generosity, what clemency, what humanity,

but pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in

general? Even benevolence and friendship, if we judge right, will appear

the effects of a constant pity, ﬁxed upon a particular object: for to wish that a

person may not suffer, what is it but to wish that he may be happy? Though

it were true that commiseration is no more than a sentiment, which puts us

in the place of him who suffers, a sentiment obscure but active in the

savage, developed but dormant in civilized man, how could this notion

affect the truth of what I advance, but to make it more evident? In fact,

commiseration must be so much the more energetic, the more intimately the

animal, that beholds any kind of distress, identiﬁes himself with the animal

that labors under it. Now it is evident that this identiﬁcation must have been

inﬁnitely more perfect in the state of nature, than in the state of reason. It is

reason that engenders self-love, and reﬂection that strengthens it; it is rea-

son that makes man shrink into himself; it is reason that makes him keep

aloof from everything that can trouble or afﬂict him; it is philosophy that

destroys his connections with other men; it is in consequence of her dictates

that he mutters to himself at the sight of another in distress, You may perish

for aught I care, I am safe. Nothing less than those evils, which threaten the

whole community, can disturb the calm sleep of the philosopher, and force

him from his bed. One man may with impunity murder another under his

windows; he has nothing to do but clap his hands to his ears, argue a little

with himself to hinder nature, that startles within him, from identifying

him with the unhappy sufferer. Savage man lacks this admirable talent;

and for want of wisdom and reason, is always ready foolishly to obey the

ﬁrst whispers of humanity. In riots and street brawls the populace ﬂock

together, the prudent man sneaks off. It is the dregs of the people, the

108 The Second Discourse

market women, that part the combatants, and hinder gentlefolks from cut-

ting one another’s throats.

It is therefore certain that pity is a natural sentiment, which, by moderat-

ing in every individual the activity of self-love, contributes to the mutual

preservation of the whole species. It is this pity which hurries us without

reﬂection to the assistance of those we see in distress; it is this pity which, in

a state of nature, takes the place of laws, manners, virtue, with this advan-

tage, that no one is tempted to disobey her gentle voice: it is this pity which

will always hinder a robust savage from plundering a feeble child, or inﬁrm

old man, of the subsistence they have acquired with pain and difﬁculty, if he

has but the least prospect of providing for himself by any other means: it is

this pity which, instead of that sublime maxim of rational justice, Do to

others as you would have others do to you, inspires all men with that other

maxim of natural goodness a great deal less perfect, but perhaps more

useful, Do good to yourself with as little prejudice as you can to others. It is

in a word, in this natural sentiment, rather than in ﬁnespun arguments, that

we must look for the cause of that reluctance which every man would

experience to do evil, even independently of the maxims of education.

Though it may be the peculiar happiness of Socrates and other geniuses of

his stamp to reason themselves into virtue, the human species would long

ago have ceased to exist, had it depended entirely for its preservation on the

reasonings of the individuals that compose it.

With passions so tame, and so salutary a curb, men, rather wild than

wicked, and more attentive to guard against harm than to do any to other

animals, were not exposed to any dangerous dissensions: as they kept up no

manner of intercourse with each other, and were of course strangers to

vanity, to respect, to esteem, to contempt; as they had no notion of what we

call thine and mine, nor any true idea of justice; as they considered any

violence they were liable to as an evil that could be easily repaired, and

not as an injury that deserved punishment; and as they never so much as

dreamed of revenge, unless perhaps mechanically and unpremeditatedly, as

a dog who bites the stone that has been thrown at him; their disputes could

seldom be attended with bloodshed, were they never occasioned by a more

considerable stake than that of subsistence: but there is a more dangerous

subject of contention, which I must not leave unnoticed.

Among the passions which rufﬂe the heart of man, there is one of a hot

and impetuous nature, which renders the sexes necessary to each other; a

terrible passion which despises all dangers, bears down all obstacles, and

which in its transports seems proper to destroy the human species which it

is destined to preserve. What must become of men abandoned to this law-

First Part 109

less and brutal rage, without modesty, without shame, and every day disput-

ing the objects of their passion at the expense of their blood?

We must in the ﬁrst place allow that the more violent the passions, the

more necessary are laws to restrain them: but besides that the disorders and

the crimes, to which these passions daily give rise among us, sufﬁciently

prove the insufﬁciency of laws for that purpose, we would do well to look

back a little further and examine, if these evils did not spring up with the

laws themselves; for at this rate, even if the laws were capable of repressing

these evils, it is the least that might be expected from them, that they should

check a mischief which would not exist without them.

Let us begin by distinguishing between what is moral and what is physi-

cal in the passion called love. The physical part of it is that general desire

which prompts the sexes to unite with each other; the moral part is that

which determines this desire, and ﬁxes it upon a particular object to the

exclusion of all others, or at least gives it a greater degree of energy for this

preferred object. Now it is easy to perceive that the moral part of love is a

factitious sentiment, engendered by society, and cried up by the women

with great care and address in order to establish their empire, and secure

command to that sex which ought to obey. This sentiment, being founded

on certain notions of beauty and merit which a savage is not capable of

having, and upon comparisons which he is not capable of making, can

scarcely exist in him: for as his mind was never in a condition to form

abstract ideas of regularity and proportion, neither is his heart susceptible of

sentiments of admiration and love, which, even without our perceiving it,

are produced by our application of these ideas; he listens solely to the

dispositions implanted in him by nature, and not the taste which he never

could have acquired; and any woman answers his purpose.

Conﬁned entirely to what is physical in love, and happy enough not to

know these preferences which sharpen the appetite for it, at the same time

that they increase the difﬁculty of satisfying such appetite, men, in a state of

nature, must be subject to fewer and less violent ﬁts of that passion, and of

course there must be fewer and less violent disputes among them in conse-

quence of it. The imagination, which causes so many ravages among us,

never speaks to the heart of savages, who peaceably wait for the impulses of

nature, yield to these impulses without choice and with more pleasure than

fury; and the need once satisﬁed, all desire is lost.

Nothing therefore can be more evident, than that it is society alone,

which has added even to love itself as well as to all the other passions, that

impetuous ardor, which so often renders it fatal to mankind; and it is so

much the more ridiculous to represent savages constantly murdering each

110 The Second Discourse

other to glut their brutality, as this opinion is diametrically opposite to

experience, and the Caribbeans, the people in the world who have as yet

deviated least from the state of nature, are to all intents and purposes the

most peaceable in their amours, and the least subject to jealousy, though

they live in a burning climate which seems always to add considerably to

the activity of these passions.

As to the inductions which may be drawn, in respect to several species of

animals, from the battles of the males, who in all seasons cover our poultry

yards with blood, and in spring particularly cause our forests to ring again

with the noise they make in disputing their females, we must begin by ex-

cluding all those species where nature has evidently established, in the rela-

tive power of the sexes, relations different from those which exist among

us: thus from the battles of cocks we can form no induction that will affect

the human species. In the species, where the proportion is better observed,

these battles must be owing entirely to the fewness of the females compared

with the males, or what amounts to the same, to the intervals of refusal,

during which the female constantly refuses the advances of the males; for if

the female admits the male but two months in the year, it is all the same as if

the number of females were ﬁve-sixths less: now neither of these cases is

applicable to the human species, where the number of females generally

surpasses that of males, and where it has never been observed that, even

among savages, the females had, like those of other animals, their stated

times of heat and indifference. Besides, among several of these animals the

whole species takes ﬁre all at once, and for some days nothing is to be seen

among them but confusion, tumult, disorder and bloodshed; a state un-

known to the human species, where love is never periodical. We cannot

therefore conclude from the battles of certain animals for the possession of

their females, that the same would be the case of man in a state of nature;

and even if we did, since these contests do not destroy the other species,

there is at least equal room to think they would not be fatal to ours; and it is

very probable that they would cause fewer ravages than they do in society,

especially in those countries where, morality being as yet held in some

esteem, the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands every day

produce duels, murders, and even worse crimes; where the duty of an

eternal ﬁdelity serves only to propagate adultery; and the very laws of

continence and honor necessarily increase dissoluteness, and multiply

abortions.

Let us conclude that savage man, wandering about in the forests, without

industry, without speech, without any ﬁxed residence, an equal stranger to

war and every social tie, without any need of his fellows, as well as without

First Part 111

any desire of hurting them, and perhaps even without ever distinguishing

them individually one from the other, subject to few passions, and ﬁnding

in himself all he wants, let us, I say, conclude that savage man had no

knowledge or feelings but such as were proper to that situation; that he felt

only his real necessities, took notice of nothing but what it was his interest

to see, and that his understanding made as little progress as his vanity. If he

happened to make any discovery, he could the less communicate it as he did

not even know his children. The art perished with the inventor; there was

neither education nor improvement; generations succeeded generations to

no beneﬁt; and as all constantly set out from the same point, whole centuries

rolled on in the rudeness and barbarity of the ﬁrst age; the race was grown

old, and man still remained a child.

If I have enlarged so much upon the supposition of this primitive condi-

tion, it is because I thought it my duty, considering what ancient errors and

inveterate prejudices I have to extirpate, to dig to the very roots, and show

in a true picture of the state of nature, how much even natural inequality

falls short in this state of that reality and inﬂuence which our writers ascribe

to it.

In fact, we may easily perceive that among the differences, which dis-

tinguish men, several pass for natural, which are merely the work of habit

and the different kinds of life adopted by men living in a social way. Thus a

robust or delicate constitution, and the strength and weakness which de-

pend on it, are oftener produced by the hardy or effeminate manner in which

a man has been brought up, than by the primitive constitution of his body. It

is the same thus in regard to the forces of the mind; and education not only

produces a difference between those minds which are cultivated and those

which are not, but even increases the difference which is found among the

former in proportion to their culture; for let a giant and a dwarf set out in

the same road, the giant at every step will acquire a new advantage over the

dwarf. Now, if we compare the prodigious variety in the education and way

of living of the various orders of men in a civil state, with the simplicity and

uniformity that prevail in the animal and savage life, where all the individ-

uals feed on the same food, live in the same manner, and do exactly the

same things, we shall easily conceive how much the difference between

man and man in the state of nature must be less than in the state of society,

and how greatly every social inequality must increase the natural inequali-

ties of mankind.

But even if nature in the distribution of her gifts should really affect all

the preferences that are imputed to her, what advantage could the most

favored derive from her partiality, to the prejudice of others in a state of

112 The Second Discourse

things which admits hardly any kind of relation between them? Of what

service can beauty be, where there is no love? What will wit avail people

who don’t speak, or cunning those who have no business? Authors are

constantly crying out, that the strongest would oppress the weakest; but let

them explain what they mean by the word oppression. One man will rule

with violence, another will groan under a constant subjection to all his

caprices: this is indeed precisely what I observe among us, but I don’t see

how it can be said of savage men, into whose heads it would be a hard

matter to drive even the meaning of the words domination and servitude.

One man might indeed seize the fruits which another had gathered, the

game which another had killed, the cavern which another had occupied for

shelter; but how is it possible he should ever exact obedience from him, and

what chains of dependence can there be among men who possess nothing?

If I am driven from one tree, I have nothing to do but look out for another; if

one place is made uneasy to me, what can hinder me from taking up my

quarters elsewhere? But suppose I should meet a man so much superior to

me in strength, and withal so depraved, so lazy and so barbarous as to oblige

me to provide for his subsistence while he remains idle; he must resolve not

to take his eyes from me a single moment, to bind me fast before he can take

the least nap, lest I should kill him or give him the slip during his sleep: that

is to say, he must expose himself voluntarily to much greater troubles than

what he seeks to avoid, than any he gives me. And after all this, let him

abate ever so little of his vigilance; let him at some sudden noise but turn his

head another way; I am already buried in the forest, my fetters are broken,

and he never sees me again.

But without insisting any longer upon these details, everyone must see

that, as the bonds of servitude are formed merely by the mutual dependence

of men one upon another and the reciprocal necessities which unite them, it

is impossible for one man to enslave another, without having ﬁrst reduced

him to a condition which, as it does not exist in a state of nature, must leave

every man his own master, and render the law of the strongest altogether

vain and useless.

Having proved that inequality in the state of nature is scarcely felt, and

that it has very little inﬂuence, I must now proceed to show its origin and

trace its progress, in the successive developments of the human mind. After

having showed that perfectibility, the social virtues, and the other faculties,

which natural man had received as potentialities, could never be developed

of themselves, that they needed the fortuitous concurrence of several for-

eign causes, which might never arise, and without which he must have

eternally remained in his primitive condition, I must proceed to consider

Second Part 113

and bring together the different accidents which may have perfected the

human understanding while debasing the species, and made man wicked by

making him sociable, and from so remote a time bring man at last and the

world to the point at which we now see them.

I must own that, as the events I am about to describe might have hap-

pened many different ways, I can determine my choice only by mere con-

jecture; but aside from the fact that these conjectures become reasons, when

they are the most probable that can be drawn from the nature of things and

the only means we can have of discovering truth, the consequences I mean

to deduce from mine will not be merely conjectural, since, on the principles

I have just established, it is impossible to form any other system, that would

not supply me with the same results, and from which I might not draw the

same conclusions.

This will make it unnecessary for me to dwell on the manner in which

the lapse of time compensates for the slight probability of events; on the

surpising power of very trivial causes, when their action is constant; on the

impossibility, on the one hand, of destroying certain hypotheses, while on

the other we cannot give them the degrees of certainty of facts; on its being

the business of history, when two facts are proposed, as real, and connected

by a chain of intermediate facts which are either unknown or considered as

such, to furnish such facts as may actually connect them; and the business

of philosophy, when history is silent, to point out similar facts which may

answer the same purpose; ﬁnally, on the power of similarity, in regard to

events, to reduce facts to a much smaller number of different classes than is

generally imagined. It sufﬁces me to offer these matters to the consideration

of my judges; it sufﬁces me to have conducted my inquiry in such a manner

as to save the general reader the trouble of considering them at all.

Second Part

The ﬁrst man, who after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to

say, this is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the

real founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many

murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved

the human species, who pulling up the stakes or ﬁlling up the ditches should

have cried to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost,

if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth

itself to nobody! But it is highly probable that things had by then already

come to such a pass, that they could not continue much longer as they were;

114 The Second Discourse

for as this idea of property depends on several prior ideas which could only

spring up gradually one after another, it was not formed all at once in the

human mind: men must have made considerable progress; they must have

acquired a great stock of industry and knowledge, and transmitted and

increased it from age to age before they could arrive at this last point of the

state of nature. Let us therefore take up things at an earlier stage, and collect

into one point of view, and in their most natural order, the slow succession

of events and discoveries.

Man’s ﬁrst feeling was that of his existence, his ﬁrst care that of preserv-

ing it. The productions of the earth yielded him all the assistance he re-

quired, instinct prompted him to make use of them. Hunger and other

appetites made him at different times experience different modes of exis-

tence; one of these excited him to perpetuate his species; and this blind

propensity, quite void of anything like pure love or affection, produced

nothing but an act that was merely animal. Their need once gratiﬁed, the

sexes took no further notice of each other, and even the child was nothing to

his mother, the moment he could do without her.

Such was the condition of infant man; such was the life of an animal

conﬁned at ﬁrst to pure sensations, and so far from harboring any thought of

forcing her gifts from nature, that he scarcely availed himself of those

which she offered to him of her own accord. But difﬁculties soon arose, and

there was a necessity for learning how to surmount them: the height of some

trees, which prevented his reaching their fruits; the competition of other

animals equally fond of the same fruits; the ﬁerceness of many that even

aimed at his life; these were so many circumstances, which obliged him to

apply to bodily exercise. There was a necessity for becoming active, swift-

footed, and sturdy in battle. The natural arms, which are stones and the

branches of trees, soon offered themselves to his reach. He learned to

surmount the obstacles of nature, to ﬁght when necessary with other ani-

mals, to ﬁght for his subsistence even with other men, or indemnify himself

for the loss of whatever he found himself obliged to yield to a stronger.

In proportion as the human species grew more numerous, and extended

itself, its difﬁculties likewise multiplied and increased. The difference of

soils, climates and seasons succeeded in forcing them to introduce some

difference in their way of living. Bad harvests, long and severe winters, and

scorching summers which parched up all the fruits of the earth, required a

new resourcefulness and activity.* On the seashore, and the banks of rivers,

they invented the line and the hook, and became ﬁshermen and ﬁsh-eaters.

* The French word industrie combines both meanings.

Second Part 115

In the forests they made themselves bows and arrows, and became hunts-

men and warriors. In the cold countries they covered themselves with the

skins of the beasts they had killed; thunder, a volcano, or some happy

accident made them acquainted with ﬁre, a new resource against the rigors

of winter: they discovered the method of preserving this element, then that

of reproducing it, and lastly the way of preparing with it the ﬂesh of ani-

mals, which heretofore they had devoured raw.

This reiterated applying of various things to himself, and to one another,

must have naturally engendered in the mind of man the idea of certain

relations. These relations, which we express by the words, great, little,

strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold, and the like, compared occasionally,

and almost without thinking of it, produced in him some kind of reﬂection,

or rather a mechanical prudence, which pointed out to him the precautions

most essential to his safety.

The new knowledge resulting from this development increased his supe-

riority over other animals, by making him aware of it. He applied himself to

learning how to ensnare them; he played them a thousand tricks; and though

several surpassed him in strength or in swiftness, he in time became the

master of those that could serve him, and a sore enemy to those that could

do him mischief. Thus it was that the ﬁrst look he gave into himself pro-

duced the ﬁrst emotion of pride in him; thus it was that at a time he scarcely

knew how to distinguish between the different orders of beings, in consider-

ing himself the highest by virtue of his species he prepared the way for his

much later claim to preeminence as an individual.

Though other men were not to him what they are to us, and he had

scarcely more intercourse with them than with other animals, they were not

overlooked in his observations. The conformities, which in time he was

able to perceive between them, and between himself and his female, made

him presume of those he did not perceive; and seeing that they all behaved

as he himself would have done in similar circumstances, he concluded that

their manner of thinking and feeling was quite conformable to his own; and

this important truth, when once engraved deeply on his mind, made him

follow, by an intuition as sure and swift as any reasoning, the best rules of

conduct, which for the sake of his own safety and advantage it was proper

he should observe toward them.

Instructed by experience that the love of well-being is the sole spring of

all human actions, he found himself in a condition to distinguish the few

cases, in which common interest might authorize him to count on the assis-

tance of his fellows, and those still fewer, in which a competition of inter-

ests should make him distrust them. In the ﬁrst case he united with them in

116 The Second Discourse

the same herd, or at most by some kind of free association which obliged

none of its members, and lasted no longer than the transitory necessity that

had given birth to it. In the second case every one aimed at his own private

advantage, either by open force if he found himself strong enough, or by

ruse and cunning if he felt himself the weaker.

Such was the manner in which men were gradually able to acquire some

gross idea of mutual engagements and the advantage of fulﬁlling them, but

this only as far as their present and obvious interest required; for they were

strangers to foresight, and far from troubling their heads about a distant

futurity, they gave no thought even to the morrow. Was a deer to be taken?

Every one saw that to succeed he must faithfully stand to his post; but

suppose a hare to have slipped by within reach of any one of them, it is not

to be doubted that he pursued it without scruple, and when he had seized his

prey never reproached himself with having made his companions miss

theirs.

We may easily conceive that such an intercourse scarcely required a

more reﬁned language than that of crows and monkeys, which ﬂock to-

gether almost in the same manner. Inarticulate exclamations, a great many

gestures, and some imitative sounds, must have been for a long time the

universal language of mankind, and by joining to these in every country

some articulate and conventional sounds, of which, as I have already said, it

is not very easy to explain the ﬁrst institution, there arose particular lan-

guages, but rude, imperfect, and such nearly as are to be found at this day

among several savage nations. Hurried on by the rapidity of time, the

abundance of things I have to say, and the almost imperceptible progress of

the ﬁrst improvements, my pen ﬂies like an arrow over numberless ages; for

the slower the succession of events, the more quickly are they told.

At length, these ﬁrst advances enabled man to make others at a greater

rate. He became more industrious in proportion as his mind became more

enlightened. Men, soon ceasing to fall asleep under the ﬁrst tree, or take

shelter in the ﬁrst cave, hit upon several kinds of hatchets of hard and sharp

stones, and employed them to dig the ground, cut down trees, and with the

branches build huts, which they afterwards bethought themselves of plas-

tering over with clay or mud. This was the epoch of a ﬁrst revolution, which

produced the establishment and distinction of families, and which intro-

duced a species of property, and already along with it perhaps a thousand

quarrels and battles. As the strongest however were probably the ﬁrst to

make themselves cabins, which they knew they were able to defend, we

may conclude that the weak found it much shorter and safer to imitate, than

to attempt to dislodge them: and as to those, who were already provided

Second Part 117

with cabins, no one could have any great temptation to seize upon that of his

neighbor, not so much because it did not belong to him, as because he did

not need it; and as he could not make himself master of it without exposing

himself to a very sharp ﬁght with the family that was occupying it.

The ﬁrst developments of the heart were the effects of a new situation,

which united husbands and wives, parents and children, under one roof; the

habit of living together gave birth to the sweetest sentiments the human

species is acquainted with, conjugal and paternal love. Every family be-

came a little society, so much the more ﬁrmly united, as mutual attachment

and liberty were its only bonds; and it was now that the sexes, whose way of

life had been hitherto the same, began to adopt different ways. The women

became more sedentary, and accustomed themselves to stay at home and

look after the children, while the men rambled abroad in quest of subsis-

tence for the whole family. The two sexes likewise by living a little more at

their ease began to lose somewhat of their usual ferocity and sturdiness: but

if on the one hand individuals became less able to engage separately with

wild beasts, they on the other were more easily got together to make a

common resistance against them.

In this new state of things, the simplicity and solitariness of man’s life,

the paucity of his wants, and the instruments which he had invented to

satisfy them leaving him a great deal of leisure, he employed it to supply

himself with several conveniences unknown to his ancestors; and this was

the ﬁrst yoke he inadvertently imposed upon himself, and the ﬁrst source of

evils which he prepared for his descendants; for besides continuing in this

manner to soften both body and mind, these conveniences having through

use lost almost all their ability to please, and having at the same time

degenerated into real needs, the privation of them became far more intoler-

able than the possession of them had been agreeable; to lose them was a

misfortune, to possess them no happiness.

Here we may a little better discover how the use of speech was gradually

established or improved in the bosom of every family, and we may likewise

form conjectures concerning the manner in which divers particular causes

may have propagated language, and accelerated its progress by rendering it

every day more and more necessary. Great inundations or earthquakes sur-

rounded inhabited districts with water or precipices. Portions of the conti-

nent were by revolutions of the globe torn off and split into islands. It is

obvious that among men thus collected, and forced to live together, a com-

mon idiom must have started up much sooner, than among those who freely

wandered through the forests of the mainland. Thus it is very possible that

the inhabitants of the islands, after their ﬁrst essays in navigation, brought

118 The Second Discourse

among us the use of speech; and it is very probable at least that society and

languages commenced in islands, and even were highly developed there,

before the inhabitants of the continent knew anything of either.

Everything now begins to wear a new aspect. Those who heretofore

wandered through the woods, by taking to a more settled way of life,

gradually ﬂock together, coalesce into several separate bodies, and at length

form in every country a distinct nation, united in character and manners, not

by any laws or regulations, but by the same way of life, and alimentation,

and the common inﬂuence of the climate. Living permanently near each

other could not fail eventually to create some connection between different

families. The transient commerce required by nature soon produced, among

the youth of both sexes living in neighboring huts, another kind of com-

merce, which besides being not less agreeable is rendered more durable by

mutual association. Men begin to consider different objects, and to make

comparisons; they imperceptibly acquire ideas of merit and beauty, and

these soon give rise to feelings of preference. By seeing each other often

they contract a habit, which makes it painful not to see each other always.

Tender and agreeable sentiments steal into the soul, and are by the smallest

opposition wound up into the most impetuous fury: jealousy kindles with

love; discord triumphs; and the gentlest of passions requires sacriﬁces of

human blood to appease it.

In proportion as ideas and feelings succeed each other, and the head and

the heart become active, men continue to shake off their original wildness,

and their connections become more intimate and extensive. They now be-

gan to assemble round a great tree: singing and dancing, the genuine off-

spring of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation

of the men and women, free from care, thus gathered together. Everyone

began to notice the rest, and wished to be noticed himself; and public

esteem acquired a value. He who sang or danced best; the handsomest, the

strongest, the most dexterous, or the most eloquent, came to be the most

respected: this was the ﬁrst step towards inequality, and at the same time

towards vice. From these ﬁrst distinctions there arose on one side vanity

and contempt, on the other envy and shame; and the fermentation raised by

these new leavens at length produced combinations fatal to happiness and

innocence.

Men no sooner began to set a value upon each other, and know what

esteem was, than each laid claim to it, and it was no longer safe for any man

to refuse it to another. Hence the ﬁrst duties of politeness, even among

savages; and hence every voluntary injury became an affront, as besides the

hurt which resulted from it as an injury, the offended party was sure to ﬁnd

Second Part 119

in it a contempt for his person often more intolerable than the hurt itself. It is

thus that every man, punishing the contempt expressed for him by others in

proportion to the value he set upon himself, the effects of revenge became

terrible, and men learned to be sanguinary and cruel. Such precisely was

the degree attained by most of the savage nations with whom we are ac-

quainted. And it is for want of sufﬁciently distinguishing ideas, and observ-

ing at how great a distance these people were from the ﬁrst state of nature,

that so many authors have hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel, and

requires a civil government to make him more gentle; whereas nothing is

more gentle than he in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal

distance from the stupidity of brutes, and the pernicious enlightenment of

civilized man; and conﬁned equally by instinct and reason to providing

against the harm which threatens him, he is withheld by natural compassion

from doing any injury to others, so far from being led even to return that

which he has received. For according to the axiom of the wise Locke,

Where there is no property, there can be no injury.

But we must take notice, that the society now formed and the relations

now established among men required in them qualities different from those

which they derived from their primitive constitution; that as a sense of

morality began to insinuate itself into human actions, and every man, before

the enacting of laws, was the only judge and avenger of the injuries he had

received, that goodness of heart suitable to the pure state of nature by no

means was suitable for the new society; that it was necessary punishments

should become severer in the same proportion that the opportunities of

offending became more frequent, and the dread of vengeance add strength

to the too weak curb of the law. Thus, though men had become less patient,

and natural compassion had already suffered some alteration, this period of

the development of the human faculties, holding a just mean between the

indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of egoism, must

have been the happiest and most durable epoch. The more we reﬂect on this

state, the more convinced we shall be, that it was the least subject of any to

revolutions, the best for man, (p) and that nothing could have drawn him out

of it but some fatal accident, which, for the common good, should never

have happened. The example of savages, most of whom have been found in

this condition, seems to conﬁrm that mankind was formed ever to remain in

it, that this condition is the real youth of the world, and that all ulterior

improvements have been so many steps, in appearance towards the perfec-

tion of individuals, but in fact towards the decrepitude of the species.

As long as men remained satisﬁed with their rustic huts; as long as they

were content with clothes made of the skins of animals, sewn with thorns

120 The Second Discourse

and ﬁsh bones; as long as they continued to consider feathers and shells as

sufﬁcient ornaments, and to paint their bodies different colors, to improve

or ornament their bows and arrows, to fashion with sharp-edged stones

some little ﬁshing boats, or clumsy instruments of music; in a word, as long

as they undertook such works only as a single person could ﬁnish, and stuck

to such arts as did not require the joint endeavors of several hands, they

lived free, healthy, honest and happy, as much as their nature would admit,

and continued to enjoy with each other all the pleasures of an independent

intercourse; but from the moment one man began to stand in need of an-

other’s assistance; from the moment it appeared an advantage for one man

to possess enough provisions for two, equality vanished; property was

introduced; labor became necessary; and boundless forests became smiling

ﬁelds, which had to be watered with human sweat, and in which slavery and

misery were soon seen to sprout out and grow with the harvests.

Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts whose invention produced

this great revolution. With the poet, it is gold and silver, but with the

philosopher, it is iron and corn, which have civilized men, and ruined

mankind. Accordingly both one and the other were unknown to the savages

of America, who for that very reason have still remained savages; nay other

nations seem to have continued in a state of barbarism, as long as they

continued to exercise one only of these arts without the other; and perhaps

one of the best reasons that can be assigned, why Europe has been, if not

earlier, at least more constantly and highly civilized than the other quarters

of the world, is that it both abounds most in iron and is most fertile in corn.

It is very difﬁcult to conjecture how men came to know anything of iron,

and the art of employing it: for we are not to suppose that they should of

themselves think of digging the ore out of the mine, and preparing it for

smelting, before they knew what could be the result of such a process. On

the other hand, there is the less reason to attribute this discovery to any

accidental ﬁre, as mines are formed nowhere but in barren places, bare of

trees and plants, so that it looks as if nature had taken pains to keep from us

so mischievous a secret. Nothing therefore remains but the extraordinary

chance of some volcano, which belching forth metallic substances already

fused might have given the spectators the idea of imitating that operation of

nature. And we must further suppose in them great courage and foresight to

undertake so laborious a work, and have, at so great a distance, an eye to the

advantages they might derive from it; qualities scarcely suitable but to

minds more advanced than those can be supposed to have been.

As to agriculture, the principles of it were known a long time before the

practice of it took place, and it is hardly possible that men, constantly

Second Part 121

employed in drawing their subsistence from trees and plants, should not

have early hit on the means employed by nature for the generation of

vegetables; but in all probability it was very late before their industry took a

turn that way, either because trees which with hunting and ﬁshing supplied

them with food, did not require their attention; or because they did not know

the use of grain; or because they had no instruments to cultivate it; or

because they were destitute of foresight in regard to future necessities; or

lastly, because they lacked means to hinder others from running away with

the fruit of their labors. We may believe that on their becoming more

industrious they began their agriculture by cultivating with sharp stones and

pointed sticks a few vegetables or roots about their cabins; and that it was a

long time before they knew the method of preparing wheat, and were

provided with instruments necessary to raise it in large quantities; not to

mention the necessity there is, in order to follow this occupation and sow

lands, to consent to lose something now to gain a great deal later on; a

precaution very foreign to the turn of man’s mind in a savage state, in

which, as I have already remarked, he can hardly foresee in the morning

what he will need at night.

For this reason the invention of other arts must have been necessary to

oblige mankind to apply themselves to that of agriculture. As soon as some

men were needed to smelt and forge iron, others were wanted to maintain

them. The more hands were employed in manufactures, the fewer hands

were left to provide subsistence for all, though the number of mouths to be

supplied with food continued the same; and as some required commodities

in exchange for their iron, the rest at last found out the method of making

iron serve for the multiplication of commodities. Thus were established on

the one hand husbandry and agriculture, and on the other the art of working

metals and of multiplying the uses of them.

The tilling of the land was necessarily followed by its distribution; and

property once acknowledged, the ﬁrst rules of justice ensued: for to secure

every man his own, every man had to be able to own something. Moreover,

as men began to extend their views toward the future, and all found them-

selves in possession of goods capable of being lost, there was none without

fear of reprisals for any injury he might do to others. This origin is so much

the more natural, as it is impossible to conceive how property can ﬂow from

any other source but work; for what can a man add but his labor to things

which he has not made, in order to acquire a property in them? It is the labor

of the hands alone, which giving the husbandman a title to the produce of

the land he has tilled gives him a title to the land itself, at least until he has

gathered in the fruits of it, and so on from year to year; and this enjoyment

122 The Second Discourse

forming a continued possession is easily transformed into property. The

ancients, says Grotius, by giving to Ceres the epithet of legislatrix, and to a

festival celebrated in her honor the name of Thesmophoria, insinuated that

the distribution of lands produced a new kind of right; that is the right of

property different from that which results from the law of nature.

Things thus circumstanced might have remained equal, if men’s talents

had been equal, and if, for instance, the use of iron and the consumption of

commodities had always held an exact proportion to each other; but as

nothing preserved this balance, it was soon broken. The man that had most

strength performed most labor; the most dexterous turned his labor to best

account; the most ingenious found out methods of lessening his labor; the

husbandman required more iron, or the smith more grain, and while both

worked equally, one earned a great deal by his labor, while the other could

scarcely live by his. Thus natural inequality insensibly unfolds itself with

that arising from men’s combining, and the differences among men, devel-

oped by the differences of their circumstances, become more noticeable,

more permanent in their effects, and begin to inﬂuence in the same propor-

tion the condition of individuals.

Matters once having reached this point, it is easy to imagine the rest. I

shall not stop to describe the successive inventions of other arts, the prog-

ress of language, the trial and employment of talents, the inequality of

fortunes, the use or abuse of riches, nor all the details which follow these,

and which every one may easily supply. I shall just give a glance at mankind

placed in this new order of things.

Behold then all our faculties developed; our memory and imagination at

work; egoism involved; reason rendered active; and the mind almost ar-

rived at the utmost bounds of that perfection it is capable of. Behold all our

natural qualities put in motion; the rank and lot of every man established,

not only as to the amount of property and the power of serving or hurting

others, but likewise as to genius, beauty, strength or skill, merits or talents;

and as these were the only qualities which could command respect, it was

found necessary to have or at least to affect them. It became to the interest of

men to appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two

very different things, and from this distinction sprang haughty pomp and

deceitful knavery, and all the vices which form their train. On the other

hand, man, heretofore free and independent, was now, in consequence of a

multitude of new needs, brought into subjection, as it were, to all nature,

and especially to his fellows, whose slave in some sense he became, even

by becoming their master; if rich, he stood in need of their services, if poor,

of their assistance; even mediocrity itself could not enable him to do with-

Second Part 123

out them. He must therefore have been continually at work to interest them

in his happiness, and make them, if not really, at least apparently ﬁnd their

advantage in laboring for his: this rendered him sly and artful in his dealings

with some, imperious and cruel in his dealings with others, and laid him

under the necessity of using ill all those whom he stood in need of, as often

as he could not awe them into compliance and did not ﬁnd it his interest to

be useful to them. In ﬁne, an insatiable ambition, the rage of raising their

relative fortunes, not so much through real necessity as to overtop others,

inspires all men with a wicked inclination to injure each other, and with a

secret jealousy so much the more dangerous, as to carry its point with the

greater security it often puts on the mask of benevolence. In a word, compe-

tition and rivalry on the one hand, and an opposition of interests on the

other, and always a secret desire of proﬁting at the expense of others. Such

were the ﬁrst effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of nascent

inequality.

Riches, before the invention of signs to represent them, could scarcely

consist in anything but lands and cattle, the only real goods which men can

possess. So, when estates increased so much in number and in extent as to

take in whole countries and touch each other, it became impossible for one

man to aggrandize himself but at the expense of some other; at the same

time, the supernumerary inhabitants, who were too weak or too indolent to

make such acquisitions in their turn, impoverished without having lost

anything, because while everything about them changed they alone re-

mained the same, were obliged to receive or force their subsistence from the

hands of the rich. And from that began to arise, according to their different

characters, domination and slavery, or violence and rapine. The rich on their

side scarcely began to taste the pleasure of commanding, when they pre-

ferred it to every other; and making use of their old slaves to acquire new

ones, they no longer thought of anything but subduing and enslaving their

neighbors; like those ravenous wolves, who having once tasted human

ﬂesh, despise every other food, and thereafter want only men to devour.

It is thus that the most powerful or the most wretched, respectively

considering their power and wretchedness as a kind of right to the posses-

sions of others, equivalent in their minds to that of property, the equality

once broken was followed by the most terrible disorders. It is thus that the

usurpations of the rich, the pillagings of the poor, and the unbridled pas-

sions of all, by stiﬂing the cries of natural compassion, and the still feeble

voice of justice, rendered men avaricious, wicked, and ambitious. There

arose between the title of the strongest and that of the ﬁrst occupier a

perpetual conﬂict, which always ended in battle and bloodshed. The new

124 The Second Discourse

state of society became the most horrible state of war: Mankind thus de-

based and harassed, and no longer able to retrace its steps, or renounce the

fatal acquisitions it had made; laboring, in short, merely to its confusion by

the abuse of those faculties, which in themselves do it so much honor,

brought itself to the very brink of ruin.

Attonitus novitate mali, divesque miserque,

Effugere optat opes; et quae modo voverat, odit.*

But it is impossible that men should not sooner or later have made

reﬂections on so wretched a situation, and upon the calamities with which

they were overwhelmed. The rich in particular must have soon perceived

how much they suffered by a perpetual war, of which they alone supported

all the expense, and in which, though all risked life, they alone risked any

property. Besides, whatever color they might pretend to give their usurpa-

tions, they sufﬁciently saw that these usurpations were in the main founded

upon false and precarious titles, and that what they had acquired by mere

force, others could again by mere force wrest out of their hands, without

leaving them the least room to complain of such a proceeding. Even those,

who owed all their riches to their own industry, could scarce ground their

acquisitions upon a better title. It availed them nothing to say, It was I built

this wall; I acquired this spot by my labor. Who traced it out for you,

another might object, and what right have you to expect payment at our

expense for doing that we did not oblige you to do? Don’t you know that

numbers of your brethren perish, or suffer grievously for want of what you

have too much of, and that you should have had the express and unanimous

consent of mankind to appropriate to yourself more of the common subsis-

tence, more than you needed for yours? Destitute of valid reasons to justify,

and sufﬁcient forces to defend himself; crushing individuals with ease, but

with equal ease crushed by banditti; one against all, and unable, on account

of mutual jealousies, to unite with his equals against enemies united by the

common hopes of pillage; the rich man, thus pressed by necessity, at last

conceived the deepest project that ever entered the human mind: this was to

employ in his favor the very forces that attacked him, to make allies of his

enemies, to inspire them with other maxims, and make them adopt other

institutions as favorable to his pretensions, as the law of nature was un-

favorable to them.

With this view, after laying before his neighbors all the horrors of a

* Both rich and poor, shocked at their newfound ills, would ﬂy from wealth, and hate

what they had sought. (Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI, 127.)

Second Part 125

situation, which armed them all one against another, which rendered their

possessions as burdensome as their wants, and in which no one could

expect any safety either in poverty or riches, he easily invented specious

arguments to bring them over to his purpose. ‘‘Let us unite,’’ said he, ‘‘to

secure the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure to

every man the possession of what belongs to him: Let us form rules of

justice and of peace, to which all may be obliged to conform, which shall

give no preference to anyone, but may in some sort make amends for the

caprice of fortune, by submitting alike the powerful and the weak to the

observance of mutual duties. In a word, instead of turning our forces against

ourselves, let us collect them into a sovereign power, which may govern us

by wise laws, may protect and defend all the members of the association,

repel common enemies, and maintain a perpetual concord and harmony

among us.’’

Many fewer words of this kind would have sufﬁced to persuade men so

uncultured and easily seduced, who had besides too many quarrels among

themselves to live without arbiters, and too much avarice and ambition to

live long without masters. All gladly offered their necks to the yoke, think-

ing they were securing their liberty; for though they had sense enough to

perceive the advantages of a political constitution, they had not experience

enough to see beforehand the dangers of it. Those among them who were

best qualiﬁed to foresee abuses were precisely those who expected to bene-

ﬁt by them; even the soberest judged it requisite to sacriﬁce one part of their

liberty to insure the rest, as a wounded man has his arm cut off to save the

rest of his body.

Such was, or must have been the origin of society and of law, which gave

new fetters to the weak and new power to the rich; irretrievably destroyed

natural liberty, ﬁxed forever the laws of property and inequality; changed an

artful usurpation into an irrevocable right; and for the beneﬁt of a few

ambitious individuals subjected the rest of mankind to perpetual labor,

servitude, and misery. We may easily conceive how the establishment of a

single society rendered that of all the rest absolutely necessary, and how, to

withstand united forces, it became necessary for the rest of mankind to unite

in their turn. Societies once formed in this manner, soon multiplied or

spread to such a degree, as to cover the face of the earth; and not to leave a

corner in the whole universe, where a man could throw off the yoke, and

withdraw his head from under the often ill-conducted sword which he saw

perpetually hanging over it. The civil law being thus become the common

rule of citizens, the law of nature no longer obtained except between the

different societies, where under the name of the law of nations, it was

126 The Second Discourse

modiﬁed by some tacit conventions to render commerce possible, and sup-

ply the place of natural compassion, which, losing by degrees all that inﬂu-

ence over societies which it originally had over individuals, no longer exists

but in some great souls, who consider themselves as citizens of the world,

force the imaginary barriers that separate people from people, after the

example of the sovereign being from whom we all derive our existence, and

include the whole human race in their benevolence.

Political bodies, thus remaining in a state of nature among themselves,

soon experienced the inconveniencies that had obliged individuals to quit

it; and this state became much more fatal to these great bodies, than it had

been before to the individuals who now composed them. Hence those na-

tional wars, those battles, those murders, those reprisals, which make nature

shudder and shock reason; hence all those horrible prejudices, which make

it a virtue and an honor to shed human blood. The worthiest men learned to

consider cutting the throats of their fellows as a duty; at length men began to

butcher each other by thousands without knowing for what; and more mur-

ders were committed in a single action, and more horrible disorders at the

taking of a single town, than had been committed in the state of nature

during ages together upon the whole face of the earth. Such are the ﬁrst

effects we may conceive to have arisen from the division of mankind into

different societies. Let us return to their institution.

I know that several writers have assigned other origins to political so-

ciety; as for instance, the conquests of the powerful, or the union of the

weak; and it is no matter which of these causes we adopt in regard to what I

am going to establish. That which I have just laid down, however, seems to

me the most natural, for the following reasons. First, because, in the ﬁrst

case, the right of conquest being in fact no right at all, it could not serve as a

foundation for any other right, the conqueror and the conquered ever re-

maining with respect to each other in a state of war, unless the conquered,

restored to the full possession of their liberty, should freely choose their

conqueror for their chief. Until then, whatever capitulations might have

been made between them being founded upon violence, and thus ipso facto

null and void, there could not have existed in this hypothesis either a true

society, or a political body, or any other law but that of the strongest.

Secondly, because these words strong and weak, are, in the second case,

ambiguous; for during the interval between the establishment of the right of

property or prior occupancy, and that of political government, the meaning

of these terms is better expressed by the words poor and rich, as before the

establishment of laws men in reality had no other means of subjecting their

equals, but by invading their property, or by parting with some of their own

Second Part 127

property to them. Thirdly, because the poor having nothing but their liberty

to lose, it would have been the height of madness in them to give up

willingly the only blessing they had left without obtaining some consider-

ation for it; whereas the rich being sensitive if I may say so, in every part of

their possessions, it was much easier to do them mischief, and therefore

more incumbent upon them to guard against it; and because, in ﬁne, it is but

reasonable to suppose that a thing has been invented by him to whom it

could be of service, rather than by him to whom it must prove detrimental.

Government in its infancy had no regular and permanent form. For want

of a sufﬁcient fund of philosophy and experience, men could see no further

than the present inconveniencies, and never thought of providing for future

ones except as they arose. In spite of all the labors of the wisest legislators,

the political state still continued imperfect, because it was in a manner the

work of chance; and, as the foundations of it were ill laid, time, though

sufﬁcient to reveal its defects and suggest the remedies for them, could

never mend its original faults. It was always being mended; whereas they

should have begun as Lycurgus did at Sparta, by clearing the ground and

removing all the old materials, so that they could then put up a good ediﬁce.

Society at ﬁrst consisted merely of some general conventions which all the

members bound themselves to observe, and the performance of which the

whole body guaranteed to every individual. Experience was necessary to

show the great weakness of such a constitution, and how easy it was for

those who infringed it to escape the conviction or chastisement of faults, of

which the public alone was to be both the witness and the judge; the laws

could not fail of being eluded a thousand ways; inconveniencies and disor-

ders could not but multiply continually, until it was at last found necessary

to think of committing to private persons the dangerous trust of public au-

thority, and to magistrates the care of enforcing obedience to the decisions

of the people. For to say that chiefs were elected before the confederacy

was formed, and that the ministers of the laws existed before the laws

themselves, is a supposition too ridiculous to deserve serious refutation.

It would be equally unreasonable to imagine that men at ﬁrst threw

themselves into the arms of an absolute master, without any conditions or

consideration on his side; and that the ﬁrst means contrived by jealous and

unconquered men for their common safety was to run headlong into slavery.

In fact, why did they give themselves superiors, if it was not to be defended

by them against oppression, and protected in their lives, liberties, and prop-

erties, which are in a manner the elements of their being? Now in the

relations between man and man, the worst that can happen to one man being

to see himself at the mercy of another, would it not have been contrary to

128 The Second Discourse

the dictates of good sense to begin by making over to a chief the only things

they needed his assistance to preserve? What equivalent could he have

offered them for so great a right? And had he presumed to exact it on

pretense of defending them, would he not have immediately received the

answer in the fable: What worse will an enemy do to us? It is therefore past

dispute, and indeed a fundamental maxim of all political law, that people

gave themselves chiefs to defend their liberty and not to be enslaved by

them. If we have a Prince, said Pliny to Trajan, it is in order that he may

keep us from having a master.

Politicians argue in regard to the love of liberty with the same sophistry

that philosophers do in regard to the state of nature; by the things they see

they judge of things very different which they have never seen, and they

attribute to men a natural inclination to slavery, on account of the patience

with which the slaves within their notice bear the yoke; not reﬂecting that it

is with liberty as with innocence and virtue, the value of which is not known

but by those who possess them, and the taste for which is lost when they are

lost. I know the charms of your country, said Brasidas to a satrap who was

comparing the life of the Spartans with that of the Persepolites; but you

cannot know the pleasures of mine.

As an unbroken courser erects his mane, paws the ground, and rages at

the bare sight of the bit, while a trained horse patiently suffers both whip

and spur, just so the barbarian will never reach his neck to the yoke that

civilized man carries without murmuring, but prefers the most stormy lib-

erty to a peaceful slavery. It is not therefore by the servile disposition of

enslaved nations that we might judge of the natural dispositions of man for

or against slavery, but by the prodigies done by every free people to secure

themselves from oppression. I know that the former are constantly crying

up that peace and tranquillity they enjoy in their irons, and that miserrimam

servitutem pacem appellant:* But when I see the latter sacriﬁce pleasures,

peace, riches, power, and even life itself to the preservation of that one

treasure so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see freeborn animals

through a natural abhorrence of captivity dash their brains out against the

bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of naked savages despise Euro-

pean pleasures, and brave hunger, ﬁre and sword, and death itself to pre-

serve their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to argue about liberty.

As to paternal authority, from which several have derived absolute gov-

ernment and every other mode of society, it is sufﬁcient, without having

recourse to Locke and Sidney, to observe that nothing in the world differs

* ‘‘They call the most wretched slavery peace.’’ (Tacitus, Histories, IV, 17.)

Second Part 129

more from the cruel spirit of despotism than the gentleness of that authority,

which looks more to the advantage of him who obeys than to the utility of

him who commands; that by the law of nature the father continues master of

his child no longer than the child stands in need of his assistance; that after

that term they become equal, and that then the son, entirely independent of

the father, owes him no obedience, but only respect. Gratitude is indeed a

duty which we are bound to pay, but which benefactors cannot exact. Instead

of saying that civil society is derived from paternal authority, we should

rather say that it is to the former that the latter owes its principal force. No

one individual was acknowledged as the father of several other individuals,

until they settled about him. The father’s goods, which he can indeed dis-

pose of as he pleases, are the ties which hold his children to their dependence

upon him, and he may divide his substance among them in proportion as

they shall have deserved by a continual deference to his commands. Now

the subjects of a despotic chief, far from having any such favor to expect

from him, as both themselves and all they have are his property, or at least

are considered by him as such, are obliged to receive as a favor what he

relinquishes to them of their own property. He does them justice when he

strips them; he treats them with mercy when he suffers them to live.

By continuing in this manner to test facts by right, we should discover as

little solidity as truth in the voluntary establishment of tyranny; and it would

be a hard matter to prove the validity of a contract which was binding only

on one side, in which one of the parties should stake everything and the

other nothing, and which could only turn out to the prejudice of him who

had bound himself. This odious system is even today far from being that of

wise and good monarchs, and especially of the kings of France, as may be

seen by divers passages in their edicts, and particularly by that of a cele-

brated piece published in 1667 in the name and by the orders of Louis XIV.

‘‘Let it therefore not be said that the Sovereign is not subject to the laws of

his Realm, since the contrary is a maxim of the law of nations which ﬂattery

has sometimes attacked, but which good princes have always defended as

the tutelary divinity of their Realms. How much more reasonable is it to say

with the sage Plato, that the perfect happiness of a State consists in the

subjects obeying their prince, the prince obeying the laws, and the laws

being equitable and always directed to the good of the public?’’ I shall not

stop to consider whether, liberty being the noblest faculty of man, it is not

degrading our nature, lowering ourselves to the level of brutes, who are the

slaves of instinct, and even offending the author of our being, to renounce

without reserve the most precious of his gifts, and to submit to committing

all the crimes he has forbidden us, merely to gratify a mad or a cruel master;

130 The Second Discourse

and whether that sublime craftsman must be more irritated at seeing his

work dishonored than at seeing it destroyed. I shall only ask what right

those, who were not afraid thus to degrade themselves, could have to sub-

ject their posterity to the same ignominy, and renounce for them, blessings

which come not from their liberality, and without which life itself must

appear a burden to all those who are worthy to live.

Pufendorf says that, as we can transfer our property from one to another

by contracts and conventions, we may likewise divest ourselves of our

liberty in favor of other men. This, in my opinion, is a very poor way of

arguing; for, in the ﬁrst place, the property I cede to another becomes a

thing quite foreign to me, and the abuse of which can no way affect me; but

it concerns me greatly that my liberty is not abused, and I cannot, without

incurring the guilt of the crimes I may be forced to commit, expose myself

to become the instrument of any. Besides, the right of property being of

mere human convention and institution, every man may dispose as he

pleases of what he possesses: but the case is otherwise with regard to the

essential gifts of nature, such as life and liberty, which every man is permit-

ted to enjoy, and of which it is doubtful at least whether any man has a right

to divest himself: by giving up the one, we degrade our being; by giving up

the other we annihilate it as much as it is our power to do so; and as no

temporal enjoyments can indemnify us for the loss of either, it would be an

offense against both nature and reason to renounce them for any consider-

ation. But though we could transfer our liberty as we do our property, it

would be quite different with regard to our children, who enjoy the father’s

property only by the transmission of his right; whereas liberty being a

blessing, which as men they hold from nature, their parents have no right to

strip them of it; so that, just as to establish slavery it was necessary to do

violence to nature, so it was necessary to alter nature to perpetuate such a

right; and the jurisconsults, who have gravely pronounced that the child of a

slave is born a slave, have in other words decided that a man will not be

born a man.

It therefore appears to me incontestibly true, that not only governments

did not begin by arbitrary power, which is but the corruption and extreme

term of government, and at length brings it back to the law of the strongest

against which governments were at ﬁrst the remedy; but even that, suppos-

ing they had begun in this manner, such power being illegal in itself could

never have served as a foundation for social law, nor of course for the

inequality it instituted.

Without embarking now upon the inquiries which still remain to be

made into the nature of the fundamental pact underlying every kind of

Second Part 131

government, I shall accept the common opinion, and conﬁne myself here to

holding the establishment of the political body to be a real contract between

the multitude and the chiefs elected by it. A contract by which both parties

oblige themselves to the observance of the laws that are therein stipulated,

and form the ties of their union. The multitude having, in regard to their

social relations, concentrated all their wills in one, all the articles, in regard

to which this will expresses itself, become so many fundamental laws,

which oblige without exception all the members of the State, and one of

which regulates the choice and power of the magistrates appointed to look

to the execution of the rest. This power extends to everything that can

maintain the constitution, but extends to nothing that can alter it. To this

power are added honors, that may render the laws and their ministers re-

spectable; and the ministers are distinguished by certain prerogatives,

which may recompense them for the heavy burdens inseparable from a

good administration. The magistrate, on his side, obliges himself not to use

the power with which he is entrusted except in conformity to the intention

of his constituents, to maintain every one of them in a peaceable possession

of his property, and upon all occasions prefer the public good to his own

private interest.

Before experience had shown, or knowledge of the human heart had

made the abuses inseparable from such a constitution foreseeable, it must

have appeared so much the more perfect, as those appointed to look to its

preservation had themselves had most interest in it; for magistracy and its

rights being built solely on the fundamental laws, as soon as these ceased to

exist, the magistrates would cease to be legitimate, the people would no

longer be bound to obey them, and, as the essence of the State did not

consist in the magistrates but in the laws, each one would rightfully regain

his natural liberty.

A little reﬂection would afford us new arguments in conﬁrmation of this

truth, and the nature of the contract might alone convince us that it cannot

be irrevocable: for if there were no superior power capable of guaranteeing

the ﬁdelity of the contracting parties and of obliging them to fulﬁll their

mutual engagements, they would remain sole judges in their own cause, and

each of them would always have a right to renounce the contract, as soon as

he discovered that the other had broke the conditions of it, or that these

conditions ceased to suit his private convenience. Upon this principle, the

right of abdication may probably be founded. Now, to consider, as we do,

only what is human in this institution, if the magistrate, who has all the

power in his own hands, and who appropriates to himself all the advantages

of the contract, has nonetheless a right to renounce his authority; how much

132 The Second Discourse

better a right should the people, who pay for all the faults of its chief, have

to renounce their dependence upon him. But the shocking dissensions and

disorders without number, which would be the necessary consequence of so

dangerous a privilege, show more than anything else how much human

governments stood in need of a more solid basis than that of mere reason,

and how necessary it was for the public tranquillity, that the will of the

Almighty should interpose to give to sovereign authority a sacred and

inviolable character, which should deprive subjects of the fatal right to

dispose of it. If mankind had received no other advantages from religion,

this alone would be sufﬁcient to make them adopt and cherish it, since it is

the means of saving more blood than fanaticism has been the cause of

spilling. But let us resume the thread of our hypothesis.

The various forms of government owe their origin to the various degrees

of inequality that existed between individuals at the time of their institution.

Where a man happened to be preeminent in power, virtue, riches, or credit,

he became sole magistrate, and the State assumed a monarchical form. If

several of pretty equal eminence stood out over all the rest, they were

jointly elected, and this election produced an aristocracy. Those whose

fortune or talents were less unequal, and who had deviated less from the

state of nature, retained in common the supreme administration, and formed

a democracy. Time demonstrated which of these forms suited mankind best.

Some remained altogether subject to the laws; others soon bowed their

necks to masters. The former labored to preserve their liberty; the latter

thought of nothing but invading that of their neighbors, jealous at seeing

others enjoy a blessing that they themselves had lost. In a word, riches and

conquest fell to the share of the one, and virtue and happiness to that of the

other.

In these various modes of government the ofﬁces at ﬁrst were all elec-

tive; and when riches did not decide, the preference was given to merit,

which gives a natural ascendancy, and to age, which is the parent of deliber-

ateness in council, and experience in execution. The ancients among the

Hebrews, and Gerontes of Sparta, the Senate of Rome, nay, the very ety-

mology of our word Seigneur, show how much gray hairs were formerly

respected. The oftener the choice fell upon old men, the oftener it became

necessary to repeat it, and the more the trouble of such repetitions became

sensible; intrigues took place; factions arose, the parties grew bitter; civil

wars blazed forth; the lives of the citizens were sacriﬁced to the pretended

happiness of the State; and things at last came to such a pass, as to be ready

to relapse into their primitive confusion. The ambition of the principal men

induced them to take advantage of these circumstances to perpetuate the

Second Part 133

hitherto temporary ofﬁces in their families; the people already inured to

dependence, accustomed to ease and the conveniences of life, and too much

enervated to break their fetters, consented to the increase of their slavery for

the sake of securing their tranquillity; and it is thus that chiefs, become

hereditary, contracted the habit of considering their ofﬁces as a family

estate, and themselves as proprietors of those communities, of which at ﬁrst

they were but mere ofﬁcers; of calling their fellow-citizens their slaves; of

numbering them, like cattle, among their belongings; and of calling them-

selves the peers of gods, and kings of kings.

By pursuing the progress of inequality in these different revolutions, we

shall discover that the establishment of laws and of the right of property was

the ﬁrst term of it; the institution of magistrates the second; and the third

and last the changing of legal into arbitrary power; so that the different

states of the rich and poor were authorized by the ﬁrst epoch; those of the

powerful and weak by the second; and by the third those of master and

slave, which formed the last degree of inequality, and the term in which all

the rest at last end, until new revolutions entirely dissolve the government,

or bring it back nearer to its legal constitution.

To conceive the necessity of this progress, we are not so much to con-

sider the motives for the establishment of the body politic, as the forms it

assumes in its realization; and the faults with which it is necessarily at-

tended: for those vices, which render social institutions necessary, are the

same which render the abuse of such institutions unavoidable. And as laws

(Sparta alone excepted, whose laws chieﬂy regarded the education of chil-

dren, and where Lycurgus established such manners and customs, as made

laws almost needless) are in general less strong than the passions, and

restrain men without changing them, it would be no hard matter to prove

that every government, which carefully guarding against all alteration and

corruption should scrupulously comply with the purpose of its establish-

ment, was set up unnecessarily; and that a country, where no one either

eluded the laws, or made an ill use of magistracy, required neither laws nor

magistrates.

Political distinctions necessarily lead to civil distinctions. The inequality

between the people and the chiefs increases so fast as to be soon felt by

individuals, and appears among them in a thousand shapes according to

their passions, their talents, and circumstances. The magistrate cannot

usurp any illegal power without making for himself creatures with whom he

must share it. Besides, citizens only allow themselves to be oppressed in

proportion as hurried on by a blind ambition, and looking rather below than

above them, they come to love authority more than independence. When

134 The Second Discourse

they submit to fetters, it is only to be the better able to fetter others in their

turn. It is no easy matter to reduce to obedience a man who does not wish to

command; and the most astute politician would ﬁnd it impossible to subdue

those men who only desire to be independent. But inequality easily gains

ground among base and ambitious souls, ever ready to run the risks of

fortune, and almost indifferent whether they command or obey, as she

proves either favorable or adverse to them. Thus then there must have been

a time, when the eyes of the people were bewitched to such a degree, that

their rulers needed only to have said to the lowest of men, ‘‘Be great you

and all your posterity,’’ to make him immediately appear great in the eyes of

everyone as well as in his own; and his descendants took still more upon

them, in proportion to their distance from him: the more distant and uncer-

tain the cause, the greater the effect; the longer line of drones a family

produced, the more illustrious it was reckoned.

Were this a proper place to enter into details, I could easily explain

in what manner inequalities of credit and authority become unavoidable

among private persons (s) the moment that, united into one body, they are

obliged to compare themselves one with another, and to note the differences

which they ﬁnd in the continual intercourse every man must have with his

neighbor. These differences are of several kinds; but riches, nobility or

rank, power, and personal merit, being in general the principal distinctions,

by which men in society measure each other, I could prove that the har-

mony or conﬂict between these different forces is the surest indication of

the good or bad original constitution of any State: I could show that among

these four kinds of inequality, personal qualities being the source of all the

rest, riches is that in which they ultimately terminate, because, being the

most immediately useful to the prosperity of individuals, and the most easy

to communicate, they are made use of to purchase every other distinction.

By this observation we are enabled to judge with tolerable exactness, how

much any people has deviated from its primitive institution, and what steps

it has still to make to the extreme term of corruption. I could show how

much this universal desire of reputation, of honors, of preference, with

which we are all devoured, exercises, and compares our talents and our

forces; how much it excites and multiplies our passions; and, by creating a

universal competition, rivalry, or rather enmity among men, how many

disappointments, successes, and catastrophes of every kind it daily causes

among the innumerable aspirants whom it engages in the same competition.

I could show that it is to this itch of being spoken of, to this fury of

distinguishing ourselves which seldom or never gives us a moment’s re-

spite, that we owe both the best and the worst things among us, our virtues

Second Part 135

and our vices, our sciences and our errors, our conquerors and our philoso-

phers; that is to say, a great many bad things and a very few good ones. I

could prove, in short, that if we behold a handful of rich and powerful men

seated on the pinnacle of fortune and greatness, while the crowd grovel in

darkness and misery, it is merely because the former value what they enjoy

only because others are deprived of it; and that, without changing their

condition, they would cease to be happy the minute the people ceased to be

miserable.

But these details would alone furnish sufﬁcient matter for a more consid-

erable work, in which we might weigh the advantages and disadvantages of

every species of government, relatively to the rights of man in a state of

nature, and might likewise unveil all the different faces under which in-

equality has appeared to this day, and may hereafter appear to the end of

time, according to the nature of these several governments, and the revolu-

tions which time must unavoidably occasion in them. We should then see

the multitude oppressed by domestic tyrants in consequence of those very

precautions taken by them to guard against foreign masters. We should see

oppression increase continually without its being ever possible for the op-

pressed to know where it would stop, nor what lawful means they had left to

check its progress. We should see the rights of citizens, and the liberties of

nations extinguished by slow degrees, and the groans and protestations and

appeals of the weak treated as seditious murmurings. We should see policy

conﬁne to a mercenary portion of the people the honor of defending the

common cause. We should see taxes made necessary, the disheartened hus-

bandman desert his ﬁeld even in time of peace, and quit the plough to gird

on the sword. We should see fatal and whimsical rules laid down for the

code of honor. We should see the champions of their country sooner or later

become her enemies, and perpetually holding their daggers to the breasts of

their fellow-citizens. Nay the time would come when they might be heard to

say to the oppressor of their country:

Pectore si fratris gladium juguloque parentis

Condere me jubeas, gravidaeque in viscera partu

Conjugis, invita peragam tamen omnia dextra.*

From the vast inequality of conditions and fortunes, from the great

variety of passions and of talents, of useless arts, of pernicious arts, of

* ‘‘If you order me to plunge my sword into my brother’s breast and into my father’s

throat and into the vitals of my wife heavy with child, I shall do, nevertheless, all these

things even though my hand is unwilling.’’ (Lucan, Pharsalia, I, 376–8.)

136 The Second Discourse

frivolous sciences, would issue clouds of prejudices equally contrary to

reason, to happiness, to virtue. We should see the chiefs foment everything

that tends to weaken men united in societies by dividing them; everything

that, while it gives society an air of apparent harmony, sows in it the seeds of

real dissension; everything that can inspire the different classes with mutual

distrust and hatred by an opposition of their rights and interests, and so

strengthen that power which controls them all.

It is from the midst of this disorder and these revolutions, that despotism,

gradually rearing up her hideous head, and devouring in every part of the

State all that still remained sound and untainted, would at last succeed in

trampling upon the laws and the people, and establish itself upon the ruins of

the republic. The times immediately preceding this last alteration would be

times of calamity and trouble; but at last everything would be swallowed up

by the monster; and the people would no longer have chiefs or laws, but only

tyrants. From this fatal moment all regard to virtue and manners would

likewise disppear; for despotism, cui ex honesto nulla est spes,* tolerates no

other master, wherever it reigns; the moment it speaks, probity and duty lose

all their inﬂuence, and the blindest obedience is the only virtue to slaves.

This is the last term of inequality, the extreme point which closes the

circle and meets that from which we set out. It is here that all private men

return to their primitive equality, because they are nothing; and that, sub-

jects having no longer any law but the will of their master, nor the master

any other law but his passions, all notions of good and principles of justice

again disappear. This is when everything returns to the sole law of the

strongest, and of course to a new state of nature different from that with

which we began, inasmuch as the ﬁrst was the state of nature in its purity,

and this one the consequence of excessive corruption. There is, in other

respects, so little difference between these two states, and the contract of

government is so much dissolved by despotism, that the despot is master

only so long as he continues the strongest, and that, as soon as they can

expel him, they may do it without his having the least right to complain of

their violence. The insurrection, which ends in the death or deposition of a

sultan, is as juridical an act as any by which the day before he disposed of

the lives and fortunes of his subjects. Force alone upheld him, force alone

overturns him. Thus all things take place and succeed in their natural order;

and whatever may be the upshot of these hasty and frequent revolutions, no

one man has reason to complain of another’s injustice, but only of his own

indiscretion or bad fortune.

* ‘‘in which there is no hope afforded by honesty.’’

Second Part 137

By thus discovering and following the lost and forgotten road, which

man must have followed in going from the state of nature to the social state,

by restoring, together with the intermediate positions which I have been just

indicating, those which want of time obliges me to omit, or which my

imagination has failed to suggest, every attentive reader must unavoidably

be struck at the immense space which separates these two states. In this slow

succession of things he may meet with the solution of an inﬁnite number of

problems in morality and politics, which philosophers are puzzled to solve.

He will perceive that, the mankind of one age not being the mankind of

another, the reason why Diogenes could not ﬁnd a man was, that he sought

among his contemporaries the man of a bygone period: Cato, he will then

see, fell with Rome and with liberty, because he did not suit the age in which

he lived; and the greatest of men served only to astonish that world, which

would have cheerfully obeyed him, had he come into it ﬁve hundred years

earlier. In a word, he will ﬁnd himself in a condition to understand how the

soul and the passions of men by insensible alterations change as it were their

very nature; how it comes to pass, that in the long run our wants and our

pleasures seek new objects; that, original man vanishing by degrees, society

no longer offers to the eyes of the sage anything but an assemblage of

artiﬁcial men and factitious passions, which are the work of all these new

relations, and have no foundation in nature. What reﬂection teaches us on

that score, observation entirely conﬁrms. Savage man and civilized man

differ so much at the bottom of their hearts and in their inclinations, that

what constitutes the supreme happiness of the one would reduce the other to

despair. The ﬁrst sighs for nothing but repose and liberty; he desires only to

live, and to be exempt from labor; nay, the ataraxy of the most conﬁrmed

Stoic falls short of his profound indifference to every other object. Civilized

man, on the other hand, is always in motion, perpetually sweating and

toiling, and racking his brains to ﬁnd out occupations still more laborious:

he continues a drudge to his last minute; nay, he courts death to be able to

live, or renounces life to acquire immortality. He pays court to men in power

whom he hates, and to rich men whom he despises; he sticks at nothing to

have the honor of serving them; he boasts proudly of his baseness and their

protection; and proud of his slavery, he speaks with disdain of those who

have not the honor of sharing it. What a spectacle must the painful and

envied labors of a European minister of state form in the eyes of a Carib-

bean! How many cruel deaths would not this indolent savage prefer to such

a horrid life, which very often is not even sweetened by the pleasure of

doing good? But to see the purpose of so many cares, his mind would ﬁrst

have to afﬁx some meaning to these words power and reputation; he should

138 The Second Discourse

be apprized that there are men who set value on the way they are looked on

by the rest of mankind, who know how to be happy and satisﬁed with

themselves on the testimony of others rather than upon their own. In fact,

the real source of all those differences is that the savage lives within him-

self, whereas social man, constantly outside himself, knows only how to

live in the opinion of others; and it is, if I may say so, merely from their

judgment of him that he derives the consciousness of his own existence. It is

foreign to my subject to show how this disposition engenders so much

indifference toward good and evil, notwithstanding such ﬁne discourses on

morality; how everything, being reduced to appearances, becomes mere art

and mummery; honor, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we

at last learn the secret of boasting; how, in short, ever asking others what

we are, and never daring to ask ourselves, in the midst of so much philoso-

phy, humanity and politeness, and such sublime moral codes, we have

nothing but a deceitful and frivolous exterior, honor without virtue, reason

without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. It is sufﬁcient that I have

proved that this is certainly not the original state of man, and that it is

merely the spirit of society, and the inequality which society engenders, that

thus change and transform all our natural inclinations.

I have endeavored to reveal the origin and progress of inequality, the

institution and abuse of political societies, as far as these things are capable

of being deduced from the nature of man by the mere light of reason, and

independently of those sacred maxims which give the sanction of divine

right to sovereign authority. It follows from this survey that inequality,

almost non-existent among men in the state of nature, derives its force and

its growth from the development of our faculties and the progress of the

human mind, and at last becomes permanent and lawful by the establish-

ment of property and of laws. It likewise follows that moral* inequality,

authorized, solely by positive right,

†

clashes with natural right, whenever it

is not in proportion to physical

‡

inequality; a distinction which sufﬁciently

determines what we are to think of that kind of inequality which obtains in

all civilized nations, since it is evidently against the law of nature that

children should command old men, and fools lead the wise, and that a

handful should gorge themselves with superﬂuities, while the starving

masses lack the barest necessities of life.

* ‘‘Moral’’ should here be interpreted as meaning ‘‘social,’’ or ‘‘artiﬁcial.’’

†

i.e., established laws.

‡

i.e., ‘‘natural.’’

Notes 139

notes

(i) A celebrated author,* by calculating the goods and the evils of human

life and comparing the two sums, found that the last greatly exceeded the

ﬁrst, and that everything considered life to man was no such valuable

present. I am not surprised at his conclusions; he drew all his arguments

from the constitution of man in a civilized state. Had he looked back to man

in a state of nature, it is obvious that the result of his inquiries would have

been very different; that man would have appeared to him subject to very

few evils but those of his own making, and that he would have acquitted

nature. It has cost us much trouble to make ourselves so miserable. When

on the one hand we consider the immense labors of mankind, so many

sciences brought to perfection, so many arts invented, so many powers

employed, so many abysses ﬁlled up, so many mountains leveled, so many

rocks rent to pieces, so many rivers made navigable, so many tracts of land

cleared, lakes emptied, marshes drained, enormous buildings raised upon

the earth, and the sea covered with ships and sailors; and on the other weigh

with ever so little attention the real advantages that have resulted from all

these works to mankind; we cannot help being amazed at the vast dis-

proportion observable between these things, and deplore the blindness of

man, which, to feed his foolish pride and I don’t know what vain self-

admiration, makes him eagerly court and pursue all the miseries he is

capable of feeling, and which beneﬁcent nature had taken care to keep at a

distance from him.

That men are wicked, a sad and constant experience renders the proof of

it unnecessary; man, however, is naturally good; I think I have demon-

strated it; what then could have depraved him to such a degree, unless the

changes that have happened in his constitution, the advantages he has made,

and the knowledge he has acquired. Let us admire human society as much

as we please, it will not be the less true that it necessarily leads men to hate

each in proportion as their interests clash; to do each other apparent ser-

vices, and in fact heap upon each other every imaginable mischief. What

are we to think of a commerce, in which the interest of every individual

dictates to him maxims diametrically opposite to those which the interest of

the community recommends to the body of society; a commerce, in which

every man ﬁnds his proﬁt in the misfortunes of his neighbor? There is not,

* This author was Maupertuis, whose theory appeared in the Essai de philosophie

morale (1749).

140 The Second Discourse

perhaps, a single man in easy circumstances, whose death his greedy heirs,

nay and too often his own children, do not secretly wish for; not a ship at

sea, the loss of which would not be an agreeable piece of news for some

merchant or another; not a house which a debtor would not be glad to see

reduced to ashes with all the papers in it; not a nation, which does not

rejoice at the misfortunes of its neighbors. It is thus we ﬁnd our advantages

in the ill fortune of our fellows, and that the loss of one man almost always

constitutes the prosperity of another. But, what is still more dangerous,

public calamities are ever the objects of the hopes and expectations of

innumerable individuals. Some desire sickness, others mortality; some war,

some famine. I have seen monsters of men weep for grief at the appearance

of a plentiful season; and the great and fatal conﬂagration of London, which

cost so many wretches their lives or their fortunes, may have made the

fortune of more than ten thousand persons. I know that Montaigne ﬁnds

fault with Demades the Athenian for having caused to be punished a work-

man who, selling his cofﬁns very dear, was a great gainer by the deaths of

his fellow-citizens. But Montaigne’s reason being, that by the same rule

every man should be punished, it is plain that it conﬁrms my argument. Let

us therefore look through our frivolous displays of benevolence at what

passes in the inmost recesses of the heart, and reﬂect on what must be that

state of things, in which men are forced with the same breath to caress and

to destroy each other, and in which they are born enemies by duty, and

knaves by interest. Perhaps somebody will object that society is so formed

that every man gains by serving the rest. That would be ﬁne, if he did not

gain still more by injuring them. There is no legitimate proﬁt that is not

exceeded by what may be made illegitimately, and we always gain more by

hurting our neighbors than by doing them good. It is only a matter of ﬁnding

a way to do it with impunity; and this is the end to which the powerful

employ all their strength, and the weak all their cunning.

Savage man, when he has dined, is at peace with all nature, and the friend

of all his fellows. Does a dispute sometimes happen about a meal? He

seldom comes to blows without having ﬁrst compared the difﬁculty of con-

quering with that of ﬁnding his subsistence elsewhere; and, as pride has no

share in the squabble, it ends in a few cuffs; the victor eats, the vanquished

retires to seek his fortune, and all is quiet again. But with man in society it’s

quite another story; in the ﬁrst place, necessaries are to be provided, and then

superﬂuities; delicacies follow, and then immense riches, and then subjects,

and then slaves. He does not enjoy a moment’s relaxation; what is most

extraordinary, the less natural and pressing are his wants, the more head-

strong his passions become, and what is still worse, the greater is his power

Notes 141

of satisfying them; so that after a long run of prosperity, after having swal-

lowed up many treasures and ruined many men, our hero will end up by

cutting every throat, until he at last ﬁnds himself the sole master of the

universe. Such is in miniature the moral picture, if not of human life, at least

of the secret ambitions in the heart of every civilized man.

Compare without prejudice the state of social man with that of the

savage, and ﬁnd out, if you can, how many inlets, besides his wickedness,

his wants, his miseries, the former has opened to pain and death. If you

consider the afﬂictions of the mind which prey upon us, the violent passions

which waste and exhaust us, the excessive labors with which the poor are

overburdened, the still more dangerous indolence, to which the rich give

themselves up and which kill the one through want, and the other through

excess. If you reﬂect a moment on the monstrous mixture, and pernicious

manner of seasoning so many dishes; on the putreﬁed food; on the adulter-

ated medicines, the tricks of those who sell them, the mistakes of those who

administer them, the poisonous qualities of the vessels in which they are

prepared; if you but think of epidemics bred by bad air among great num-

bers of men crowded together, or those occasioned by our delicate way of

living, by our passing back and forth from the inside of our houses into the

open air, the putting on and taking off our clothes with too little precaution,

and by all those conveniences which our boundless sensuality has changed

into necessary habits, and the neglect or loss of which afterwards costs us

our life or our health; if you set down the conﬂagrations and earthquakes,

which devouring or overturning whole cities destroy the miserable inhabi-

tants by thousands; in a word, if you sum up the dangers with which all

these causes are constantly menacing us, you will see how dearly nature

makes us pay for the contempt we have showed for her lessons.

I shall not here repeat what I have elsewhere said of the calamities of

war; I only wish that sufﬁciently informed persons are willing or bold

enough to make public the detail of the villainies committed in armies by

the contractors for food and for hospitals; we should then plainly discover

that their monstrous frauds, scarcely concealed, destroy more soldiers than

actually fall by the sword of the enemy, so as to make the most gallant

armies melt away. The number of those who every year perish at sea, by

famine, by the scurvy, by pirates, by shipwrecks, would furnish matter for

another very shocking calculation. Besides it is plain, that we are to place to

the account of the establishment of property and therefore to that of society,

the assassinations, poisonings, highway robberies, and even the punish-

ments for these crimes; punishments, it is true, requisite to prevent greater

evils, but which, by making the murder of one man prove the death of two,

142 The Second Discourse

double in fact the loss to the human species. How many are the shameful

methods to prevent the birth of men, and cheat nature? Either by those

brutal and depraved appetites which insult her most charming work, ap-

petites which neither savages nor mere animals ever knew, and which could

only spring in civilized countries from a corrupt imagination; or by those

secret abortions, the worthy fruits of debauch and vicious notions of honor;

or by the exposure or murder of multitudes of infants, victims of the poverty

of their parents, or the barbarous shame of their mothers; or ﬁnally by the

mutilation of those wretches, part of whose existence, with that of their

whole posterity, is sacriﬁced to vain singsong, or, which is still worse, the

brutal jealousy of some other men: a mutilation, which, in the last case, is

doubly outrageous to nature, both by the treatment of those who suffer it,

and by the service to which they are condemned.* But what if I undertook

to show the human species attacked in its very source, and even in the

holiest of all ties, in forming which nature is never listened to until fortune

has been consulted, and social disorder confusing all virtue and vice, conti-

nence becomes a criminal precaution, and a refusal to give life to beings

like oneself, an act of humanity? But without tearing open the veil that

hides so many horrors, it is enough to point out the disease for which others

will have to ﬁnd a remedy.

Let us add to this the great number of unwholesome trades which

shorten life, or destroy health; such as the digging and preparing of metals

and minerals, especially lead, copper, mercury, cobalt, arsenic, realgar;

†

those other dangerous trades, which every day kill so many men, for exam-

ple, tilers, carpenters, masons, and quarrymen; let us, I say, unite all these

things, and then we shall discover in the establishment and perfecting of

societies the reasons for that diminution of the species, which so many

philosophers have taken notice of.

Luxury, which nothing can prevent among men who are avid for their

own comforts and the deference of others, soon puts the ﬁnishing hand to

the evils which society had begun; and on pretense of giving bread to the

poor, whom it should never have made such, impoverishes all the rest, and

sooner or later depopulates the State.

Luxury is a remedy much worse than the disease which it pretends to

cure; or rather is in itself the worst of all diseases; both in great and small

States. To maintain those crowds of servants and wretches which it creates,

* A passage on arranged marriages, which ﬁrst appeared in the posthumous edition of

1782, is here omitted.

†

Arsenic monosulphide; found in the dust of certain caves.

Notes 143

it crushes and ruins the farmer and the townsman; not unlike those scorch-

ing south winds, which covering both plants and foliage with devouring

insects rob the useful animals of subsistence, and carry famine and death

with them wherever they blow.

From society and the luxury engendered by it, spring the liberal and

mechanical arts, commerce, letters, and all those superﬂuities which make

industry ﬂourish, and enrich and ruin nations. The reason for such ruin is

very simple. It is plain that agriculture, by its very nature, must be the least

lucrative of all arts, because its products being of the most indispensable

necessity for all men, their price must be proportionate to the abilities of

the poorest. From the same principle it may be gathered, that in general

arts are lucrative in the inverse ratio of their usefulness, and that in the end

of the most necessary must come to be the most neglected. From this we

may form a judgment of the true advantages of industry, and of the real

effects of its progress.

Such are the evident causes of all the miseries into which opulence at

length precipitates the most celebrated nations. In proportion as industry

and arts spread and ﬂourish, the despised husbandman, loaded with taxes

necessary for the support of luxury, and condemned to spend his life be-

tween labor and hunger, leaves his ﬁelds to seek in town the bread he should

take to it. The more our capital cities strike with wonder the stupid eye of

the common people, the greater reason is there to weep, the countryside

abandoned, ﬁelds lie uncultivated, and the high roads crowded with unfor-

tunate citizens turned beggars or robbers, and doomed, sooner or later to

lay down their wretched lives on the wheel or the dunghill. It is thus,

that while States grow rich on one hand, they grow weak, and are depopu-

lated on the other; and the most powerful monarchies, after innumerable

labors to enrich and depopulate themselves, fall at last a prey to some poor

nation, which has yielded to the fatal temptation of invading them, and then

grows opulent and weak in its turn, until it is itself invaded and destroyed by

some other.

I wish somebody would condescend to inform us what could have pro-

duced those swarms of barbarians, which during so many ages overran

Europe, Asia, and Africa? Was it to the activity of their arts, the wisdom of

their laws, the excellence of their State they owed so prodigious an in-

crease? I wish our learned men would be so kind as to tell us, why instead of

multiplying to such a degree, these ﬁerce and brutal men, without sense or

science, without restraint, without education, did not murder each other

every minute in quarreling for the spontaneous productions of their ﬁelds

and woods? Let them tell us how these wretches could have the assurance to

144 The Second Discourse

look in the face such skillful men as we were, with so ﬁne a military

discipline, such excellent codes, and such wise laws. Why, in short, since

society has been perfected in the northern climates, and so much pains have

been taken to instruct the inhabitants in their duties to one another, and the

art of living happily and peaceably together, do we no longer see them

produce anything like those numberless hosts, which they formerly used to

send forth? I am afraid that somebody may at last take it into his head to

answer me by saying, that truly all these great things, namely arts, sciences,

and laws, were very wisely invented by men, as a salutary plague, to pre-

vent the too great multiplication of mankind, lest this world, which was

given us should at length become too small for its inhabitants.

What then? Must societies be abolished? Must meum and tuum be anni-

hilated, and must man go back to living in forests with the bears? This

would be a deduction in the manner of my adversaries, which I choose to

anticipate rather than permit them the shame of drawing it. O you, by whom

the voice of heaven has not been heard, and who think your species destined

only to ﬁnishing in peace this short life; you, who can lay down in the midst

of cities your fatal acquisitions, your restless spirits, your corrupted hearts

and unbridled desires, take up again, since it is in your power, your ancient

and primitive innocence; retire to the woods, there to lose the sight and

remembrance of the crimes committed by your contemporaries; nor be

afraid of debasing your species, by renouncing its enlightenment in order to

renounce its vices. As for men like me, whose passions have irretrievably

destroyed their original simplicity, who can no longer live upon grass and

acorns, or without laws and magistrates; all those who were honored in the

person of their ﬁrst parent with supernatural lessons; those, who discover,

in the intention to give immediately to human actions a morality which

otherwise they must have been so long in acquiring, the reason of a precept

indifferent in itself, and utterly inexplicable in every other system; those, in

a word, who are convinced that the divine voice has called all men to the

enlightenment and happiness of the celestial intelligences; all such will

endeavor to deserve the eternal reward promised their obedience, by prac-

ticing those virtues to the practice of which they oblige themselves in

learning to know them. They will respect the sacred bonds of those societies

to which they belong; they will love their fellows, and will serve them to the

utmost of their power; they will religiously obey the laws, and all those who

make or administer them; they will above all things honor those good and

wise princes who ﬁnd means to prevent, cure, or palliate the crowd of evils

and abuses always ready to overwhelm us; they will animate the zeal of

those worthy chiefs, by showing them without fear of ﬂattery the impor-

Notes 145

tance of their talk, and the rigor of their duties. But they will not for that

reason have any less contempt for a social organization which cannot sub-

sist without the assistance of so many men of worth, who are oftener wanted

than found; and from which, in spite of all their cares, there always spring

more real calamities than even apparent advantages.

(k) This appears to me as clear as daylight, and I cannot conceive whence

our philosophers can derive all the passions they attribute to natural man.

Except the bare physical necessities, which nature herself requires, all our

other needs are merely the effects of habit, before which they were not

needs, or of our cravings; and we don’t crave that which we are not in a

condition to know. Hence it follows that as savage man longs for nothing

but what he knows, and knows nothing but what he actually possesses or

can easily acquire, nothing can be so calm as his soul, or so conﬁned as his

understanding.

(l)* Mr. Locke, in ﬁne, proves at most that there may be in man a motive to

live with the woman when she has a child; but he by no means proves that

there was any necessity for his living with her before her delivery and

during the nine months of her pregnancy; if a pregnant woman comes to be

indifferent to the man by whom she is pregnant during these nine months, if

she even comes to be entirely forgotten by him, why should he assist her

after her delivery? Why should he help her to rear a child, which he does not

know to be his, and whose birth he neither foresaw nor planned? It is

evident that Mr. Locke supposes the very thing in question: for we are not

inquiring why man should continue to live with the woman after her deliv-

ery, but why he should continue to attach himself to her after conception.

The appetite satisﬁed, man no longer stands in need of any particular

woman, nor the woman of any particular man. The man does not have the

slightest concern, nor perhaps the slightest notion of what must follow his

act. One goes this way, the other that, and there is little reason to think that at

the end of nine months they should remember ever to have known each

other: for this kind of remembrance, by which one individual gives the

preference to another for the act of generation, requires, as I have proved in

the text, a greater degree of progress or corruption in the human understand-

ing, than man can be supposed to have attained in the state of animality we

* Only the last part of this note is given here. Rousseau is replying to Locke’s

contention that men and women naturally stayed together in families because of the

dependency of their young.

146 The Second Discourse

here speak of. Another woman therefore may serve to satisfy the new

desires of the man fully as conveniently as the one he has already known;

and another man in like manner satisfy the woman’s, supposing her subject

to the same appetite during her pregnancy, a thing which may be reasonably

doubted. But if in the state of nature, the woman, when she has conceived,

no longer feels the passion of love, the obstacle to her associating with men

becomes still greater, since she no longer has any occasion for the man by

whom she is pregnant, or for any other. There is therefore no reason on the

man’s side for his coveting the same woman, nor on the woman’s for her

coveting the same man. Locke’s argument therefore falls to the ground, and

all the logic of this philosopher has not secured him from the mistake

committed by Hobbes and others. They had to explain a fact in the state of

nature; that is, in a state in which every man lived by himself without any

connection with other men, and no one man had any motives to associate

with any other, nor perhaps, which is still more serious, men in general to

herd together; and it never came into their heads to look back beyond the

times of society, that is to say, those times in which men have always had

motives for herding together, and in which one man has often motives for

associating with a particular man, or a particular woman.

(o) We must not confuse selﬁshness with self-love; they are two very dis-

tinct passions both in their nature and in their effects. Self-love is a natural

sentiment, which inclines every animal to look to his own preservation, and

which, guided in man by reason and qualiﬁed by pity, is productive of

humanity and virtue. Selﬁshness is but a relative and factitious sentiment,

engendered in society, which inclines every individual to set a greater value

upon himself than upon any other man, which inspires men with all the

mischief they do to each other, and is the true source of what we call honor.

This position well understood, I say that selﬁshness does not exist in our

primitive state, in the true state of nature; for every man in particular

considering himself as the only spectator who observes him, as the only

being in the universe which takes any interest in him, as the only judge of

his own merit, it is impossible that a sentiment arising from comparisons,

which he is not in a condition to make, should spring up in his mind. For the

same reason, such a man must be a stranger to hatred and spite, passions

which only the opinion of our having received some affront can excite; and

as it is contempt or an intention to injure, and not the injury itself that

constitutes an affront, men who don’t know how to set a value upon them-

selves, or compare themselves one with another, may do each other a great

deal of mischief, as often as they can expect any advantage by doing it,

Notes 147

without ever offending each other. In a word, man seldom considering his

fellows in any other light than he would animals of another species, may

plunder another man weaker than himself, or be plundered by another that

is stronger, without considering these acts of violence otherwise than as

natural events, without the least emotion of insolence or spite, and without

any other passion than grief at his failure, or joy at his good success.

(p) It is very remarkable, that for so many years past that the Europeans

have been toiling to make the savages of different parts of the world con-

form to their manner of living, they have not as yet been able to win over

one of them, not even with the assistance of the Christian religion; for

though our missionaries sometimes make Christians, they never make civi-

lized men of them. There is no getting the better of their invincible reluc-

tance to adopt our manners and customs. If these poor savages are as

unhappy as some people would have them, by what inconceivable de-

pravity of judgment is it that they so constantly refuse to be governed as we

are, or to live happy among us; whereas we read in a thousand places that

Frenchmen and other Europeans have voluntarily taken refuge, nay, spent

their whole lives among them, without ever being able to quit so strange a

kind of life; and that even very sensible missionaries have been known to

regret with tears the calm and innocent days they had spent among those

men we so much despise. Should it be observed that they are not enlight-

ened enough to judge soundly of their condition and ours, I must answer,

that the valuation of happiness is not so much the business of the under-

standing as of feeling. Besides, this objection may still more forcibly be

turned against ourselves; for our ideas are more remote from that disposi-

tion of mind requisite for us to conceive the relish, which the savages ﬁnd in

their way of living, than the ideas of the savages are from those by which

they may conceive the relish we ﬁnd in ours. In fact, very few observations

are enough to show them that all our labors are conﬁned to two objects,

namely the conveniences of life and the esteem of others. But how shall we

be able to imagine that kind of pleasure, which a savage takes in spending

his days alone in the heart of a forest, or in ﬁshing, or in blowing into a

wretched ﬂute without ever being able to fetch a single note from it, or ever

giving himself any trouble to learn how to make a better use of it?*

(s) Nay, this rigorous equality of the state of nature, even if it were practi-

cable in civil society, would clash with distributive justice; and as all the

* The remainder of this note is not given here.

148 The Second Discourse

members of the State owe it services in proportion to their talents and

abilities, they should be distinguished in proportion to their services. It is in

this sense we must understand a passage of Isocrates, in which he extols the

primitive Athenians for having distinguished which of the two following

kinds of equality was the more useful, that which consists in sharing the

same advantages indifferently among all the citizens, or that which consists

in distributing them to each according to his merit. These able politicians,

adds the orator, banishing that unjust inequality which makes no difference

between the good and the bad, inviolably adhered to that which rewards and

punishes every man according to his merit. But in the ﬁrst place there never

existed a society so corrupt as to make no difference between the good and

the bad; and in those points concerning morals, where the law can prescribe

no measure exact enough to serve as a rule to magistrates, it is with the

greatest wisdom that in order not to leave the fate or the rank of citizens at

their discretion, it forbids them to judge of persons, and leaves actions alone

to their discretion. There are no mores, except those as pure as those of the

old Romans, that can bear censors, and such a tribunal among us would

soon throw everything into confusion. It belongs to public esteem to mark a

difference between good and bad men; the magistrate is judge only as to

strict law; whereas the multitude is the true judge of manners; an upright

and even an intelligent judge in that respect; a judge which may indeed

sometimes be imposed upon, but can never be corrupted. The rank therefore

of citizens ought to be regulated, not according to their personal merit, for

this would be putting it in the power of magistrates to make almost an

arbitrary application of the law, but according to the real services they

render to the State, since these will admit of a more exact estimation.

The Social Contract

BY J.-J. ROUSSEAU

CITIZEN OF GENEVA

—foederis aequas

Dicamus leges.

(Let us make fair terms for

the compact.)

—The Aeneid, Bk. XI

Prefatory Note

This little treatise is taken from a longer work undertaken at an earlier time

without considering my strength, and long since abandoned. Of the various

fragments that might be taken from what was done, the following is the

most substantial, and appears to me the least unworthy of being offered to

the public.

The rest of the work no longer exists.

Contents

Prefatory Note 151

BOOK I

Introductory Note 155

I. Subject of the First Book 156

II. Primitive Societies 156

III. The Right of the Strongest 158

IV. Slavery 158

V. That It Is Always Necessary to Go Back to a First

Convention

162

VI. The Social Pact 163

VII. The Sovereign 165

VIII. The Civil State 166

IX. Real Estate 167

BOOK II

I. That Sovereignty Is Inalienable 170

II. That Sovereignty Is Indivisible 171

III. Whether the General Will Can Err 172

IV. The Limits of the Sovereign Power 173

V. The Right of Life and Death 176

VI. The Law 178

VII. The Legislator 180

VIII. The People 183

IX. The People (continued) 185

X. The People (continued) 187

XI. The Different Systems of Legislation 189

XII. Classiﬁcation of the Laws 191

154 The Social Contract

BOOK III

I. Government in General 193

II. The Principle Which Constitutes the Different Forms of

Government

197

III. Classiﬁcation of Governments 199

IV. Democracy 200

V. Aristocracy 202

VI. Monarchy 204

VII. Mixed Governments 208

VIII. That All Forms of Government Are Not Suited for

Every Country

209

IX. The Signs of a Good Government 213

X. The Abuse of Government and Its Tendency to Degenerate 214

XI. The Dissolution of the Body Politic 216

XII. How the Sovereign Authority Is Maintained 218

XIII. How the Sovereign Authority Is Maintained (continued) 218

XIV. How the Sovereign Authority Is Maintained (continued) 220

XV. Deputies or Representatives 220

XVI. That the Institution of the Government Is Not a Contract 223

XVII. The Institution of the Government 224

XVIII. Means of Preventing Usurpations of the Government 225

BOOK IV

I. That the General Will Is Indestructible 227

II. Voting 228

III. Elections 231

IV. The Roman Comitia 232

V. The Tribuneship 240

VI. Dictatorship 242

VII. The Censorship 244

VIII. Civil Religion 245

IX. Conclusion 254

Book I

Introductory Note

I want to inquire whether, taking men as they are and laws as they can be

made to be, it is possible to establish some just and reliable rule of admin-

istration in civil affairs. In this investigation I shall always strive to recon-

cile what right permits with what interest prescribes, so that justice and

utility may not be at variance.

I enter this inquiry without demonstrating the importance of my subject.

I shall be asked whether I am a prince or a legislator that I write on politics. I

reply that I am neither; and that it is for this very reason that I write about

politics. If I were a prince or a legislator, I would not waste my time saying

what ought to be done; I would do it or remain silent.

Born a citizen of a free State, and a member of that sovereign body,

however feeble an inﬂuence my voice may have in public affairs, the right

to vote on them is sufﬁcient to impose on me the duty of informing myself

about them; and I feel happy, whenever I meditate on governments, always

to discover in my research new reasons for loving that of my own country.

156 The Social Contract

Chapter 1

subject of the first book

Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Many a one believes

himself the master of others, and yet he is a greater slave than they. How has

this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? I

believe I can settle this question.

If I looked only at force and the results that stem from it, I would say that

as long as a people is compelled to obey and does obey, it does well; but

that, as soon as it can shake off the yoke and does shake it off, it does even

better; for, if men recover their freedom by virtue of the same right by

which it was taken away, either they are justiﬁed in taking it back, or there

was no justiﬁcation for depriving them of it. But the social order is a sacred

right that serves as a foundation for all others. This right, however, does not

come from nature. It is therefore based on conventions. The question is to

know what these conventions are. Before coming to that, I must establish

what I have just stated.

Chapter II

primitive societies

The earliest of all societies, and the only natural one, is the family; yet

children remain attached to their father only so long as they need him for

their own survival. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dis-

solved. The children being freed from the obedience which they owed to

their father, and the father from the concern he owed his children, become

equally independent. If they remain united, it is not because of nature but of

choice; and the family itself is kept together only by convention.

This common liberty is a consequence of man’s nature. His ﬁrst law is to

attend to his own survival, his ﬁrst concerns are those he owes to himself;

and as soon as he reaches the age of rationality, being sole judge of how to

survive, he becomes his own master.

The family is, then, if you will, the ﬁrst model of political societies; the

leader is the analogue of the father, while the people are like the children;

and all, being born free and equal, give up their freedom only for their own

advantage. The whole difference is that, in the family, the father’s love

for his children repays him for the concern that he bestows upon them;

while, in the State, the pleasure of ruling makes up for the leader’s lack of

love for his people.

Book I: Chapter II 157

Grotius denies that all human authority is established for the beneﬁt of

the governed, and he cites slavery as an example. His steady line of reason-

ing is to establish right by fact.* A more consistent method might be used,

but none more favorable to tyrants.

It is doubtful, then, according to Grotius, whether the human race belongs

to a hundred men, or whether these hundred men belong to the human race;

and he appears throughout his book to incline to the former opinion, which is

also that of Hobbes. In this way we have mankind divided like herds of cattle,

each of which has a master, who looks after it in order to devour it.

Just as a herdsman is superior in nature to his herd, so leaders, who are

the herdsmen of men, are superior in nature to their people. Such was,

according to Philo’s account, the reasoning of the Emperor Caligula, infer-

ring truly enough from this analogy that kings are gods, or that men are

animals.

The reasoning of Caligula is similar to that of Hobbes and Grotius.

Aristotle, before them all, had also said that men are not naturally equal, but

that some are born to be slaves and others to rule.

Aristotle was right, but he mistook the effect for the cause. Every man

born in slavery is born for slavery; nothing is more certain. Slaves lose

everything in their chains, even the desire to escape from them; they love

their servitude as the companions of Ulysses loved their brutishness.

†

If,

then, there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves con-

trary to nature. The ﬁrst slaves were made by force; their cowardice kept

them in bondage.

I have said nothing about King Adam nor about Emperor Noah, the

father of three great monarchs who split the universe among them, like the

children of Saturn with whom they are likened. I hope that people will give

me credit for my moderation; for, as I am a direct descendant of one of these

princes, and perhaps of the eldest branch, how do I know whether, by exam-

ination of titles, I might not ﬁnd myself the legitimate king of the human

race? Be that as it may, it cannot be denied that Adam was sovereign of the

world, as Robinson was of his island, so long as he was its sole inhabitant;

and it was a convenient feature of that empire that the monarch, secure on

his throne, had nothing to fear from rebellions, or wars, or conspirators.

* ‘‘Learned researches in public law are often nothing but the history of ancient

abuses; and to devote much labor to studying them is misplaced pertinacity’’ (Treatise on

the Interests of France in Relation to Her Neighbours, by the Marquis d’Argenson). That

is exactly what Grotius did.

†

See a small treatise by Plutarch, entitled That Brutes Employ Reason.

158 The Social Contract

Chapter III

the right of the strongest

The strongest man is never strong enough to be always master, unless he

transforms his power into right, and obedience into duty. Hence the right of

the strongest—a right in appearance assumed in irony, and in reality estab-

lished in principle. But will this term ever be explained to us? Force is a

physical power; I do not see what morality can result from its effects. To

yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; it is at most an act of

prudence. In what sense can it be a duty?

Let us assume for a moment this so-called right. I say that nothing re-

sults from it but inexplicable nonsense; for if might makes right, the effect

changes with the cause, and any force that can overcome the ﬁrst can claim

its rights. As soon as men can disobey with impunity, they can do so

legitimately; and since the strongest is always in the right, it makes sense to

act in such a way as to be the strongest. But what kind of right perishes

when might disappears? If one is compelled to obey by force, there is no

need to obey from duty; and if one is no longer forced to obey, obligation is

at an end. We see, then, that this word right adds nothing to force; here it

means nothing at all.

Obey the powers that be. If that means, Yield to force, the precept is

good but superﬂuous; I reply that it will never be violated. All power comes

from God, I admit; but every disease comes from Him too; does it follow

that we are prohibited from calling in a physician? If a robber should catch

me deep in a forest, am I bound not only to give up my money when forced,

but am I also morally bound to do so when I might hide it? For, after all, the

gun he holds is a superior force.

Let us agree, then, that might does not make right, and that we are bound

to obey none but lawful authorities. Thus we return to my original question.

Chapter IV

slavery

Since no man has any natural authority over his fellow men, and since

might is not the source of right, conventions remain as the basis of all lawful

authority among men.

If an individual, says Grotius, can alienate his freedom and become the

slave of a master, why should a whole people not be able to alienate theirs,

and become subject to a king? In this there are many equivocal terms

Book I: Chapter IV 159

requiring explanation; but let us conﬁne ourselves to the word alienate. To

alienate is to give or sell. Now, a man who becomes another’s slave does not

give himself; he sells himself at the very least for his subsistence. But why

does a nation sell itself? So far from a king providing his subjects with their

subsistence, he draws his from them; and, according to Rabelais, a king

does not live on a little. Do subjects, then, give up their persons on condi-

tion that their property also shall be taken? I do not see what is left for them

to keep.

It will be said that the despot secures for his subjects civil peace. Be it so;

but what do they gain by that, if the wars which his ambition brings upon

them, together with his insatiable greed and the vexations of his administra-

tion, harass them more than their own dissensions would? What do they

gain by it if this tranquillity is itself one of their miseries? Men live tran-

quilly also in dungeons; is that enough to make them contented there? The

Greeks conﬁned in the cave of the Cyclops lived peacefully until their turn

came to be devoured.

To say that a man gives himself for nothing is to say something absurd

and inconceivable; such an act is illegitimate and invalid, for the simple

reason that he who performs it is not in his right mind. To say the same thing

of a whole nation is to suppose a nation of fools; and madness does not

confer rights.

Even if each person could alienate himself, he could not alienate his

children; they are born free men; their liberty belongs to them, and no one

has a right to dispose of it except them themselves. Before they have

reached the age of rationality, the father can, in their name, stipulate condi-

tions for their preservation and welfare, but not surrender them irrevocably

and unconditionally; for such a gift is contrary to the ends of nature, and

exceeds the rights of paternity. In order, then, that an arbitrary government

might be legitimate, it would be necessary for the people in each generation

to have the option of accepting or rejecting it; but in that case such a

government would no longer be arbitrary.

To renounce one’s liberty is to renounce one’s essence as a human being,

the rights and also the duties of humanity. For the person who renounces

everything there is no possible compensation. Such a renunciation is in-

compatible with human nature, for to take away all freedom from one’s will

is to take away all morality from one’s actions. In short, a convention which

stipulates absolute authority on the one side and unlimited obedience on the

other is meaningless and contradictory. Is it not clear that we are under no

obligations whatsoever toward a man from whom we have a right to de-

mand everything? And does not this single condition, without equivalent,

160 The Social Contract

without exchange, presuppose the nullity of the act? For what rights would

my slave have against me, since all that he has belongs to me? His rights

being mine, this right of me against myself is a meaningless term.

Grotius and others derive from war another origin for the supposed right

of slavery. The victor having, according to them, the right of slaying the

vanquished, the latter may purchase his life at the cost of his freedom;

an agreement so much the more legitimate that it turns to the advantage

of both.

But it is clear that this supposed right of slaying the vanquished in no

way results from the state of war. Men are not naturally enemies, if only for

the reason that, living in their primitive independence, they have no mutual

relations sufﬁciently durable to constitute a state of peace or a state of war.

It is the relation of things and not of men that constitutes war; and since the

state of war cannot arise from simple personal relations, but only from real

relations, private war—war between man and man—cannot exist either in

the state of nature, where there is no settled ownership, or in the social state,

where everything is under the authority of the laws.

Private combats, duels, and encounters are acts that do not constitute a

state of war; and with regard to the private wars authorized by the Estab-

lishments of Louis IX, king of France, and suspended by the peace of God,

they were abuses of the feudal government, an absurd system if ever there

was one, contrary both to the principles of natural right and to all sound

government.

War, then, is not a relation between man and man, but a relation between

State and State, in which individuals are enemies only by accident, not as

men, nor even as citizens,* but as soldiers; not as members of the father-

land, but as its defenders. In short, each State can have as enemies only

* The Romans, who understood and respected the rights of war better than any nation

in the world, carried their scruples so far in this respect that no citizen was allowed to

serve as a volunteer without enlisting expressly against the enemy, and by name against a

certain enemy. A legion in which Cato the younger made his ﬁrst campaign under Popilius

having been re-formed, Cato the elder wrote to Popilius that, if he consented to his son’s

continuing to serve under him, it was necessary that he should take a new military oath,

because, the ﬁrst being annulled, he could no longer bear arms against the enemy (Cicero,

De Ofﬁciis I, II). And Cato also wrote to his son to abstain from appearing in battle until

he had taken his new oath. I know that it will be possible to urge against me the siege of

Clusium and other particular cases; but I cite laws and customs (Livy, V. 35–37). No

nation has transgressed its laws less frequently than the Romans, and no nation has had

laws so admirable.

Book I: Chapter IV 161

other States and not individual men, inasmuch as it is impossible to claim

any true relation between things of different kinds.

This principle also conforms to the established maxims of all ages and to

the accepted practices of all civilized nations. Declarations of war are not so

much warnings to the powers as to their subjects. The foreigner, whether

king, or nation, or private person, that robs, slays, or detains subjects with-

out declaring war against the government, is not an enemy, but a pirate.

Even in open war, a just prince, while he rightly takes possession of all that

belongs to the State in an enemy’s country, respects the person and property

of individuals; he respects the rights on which his own are based. The aim

of war being the destruction of the hostile State, we have a right to slay its

defenders so long as they have arms in their hands; but as soon as they lay

them down and surrender, ceasing to be enemies or instruments of the

enemy, they become again simply men, and no one has any further right

over their lives. Sometimes it is possible to destroy the State without killing

a single one of its members; but war confers no right except what is neces-

sary to its end. These are not the principles of Grotius; they are not based on

the authority of poets, but are derived from the nature of things, and are

founded on reason.

With regard to the right of conquest, it has no other foundation than the

law of the strongest. If war does not confer on the victor the right of slaying

the vanquished, this right, which he does not possess, cannot be the founda-

tion of a right to enslave them. If we have a right to slay an enemy only

when it is impossible to enslave him, the right to enslave him is not derived

from the right to kill him; it is, therefore, an iniquitous transaction to make

him purchase his life, over which the victor has no right, at the cost of his

liberty. In establishing the right of life and death upon the right of slavery,

and the right of slavery upon the right of life and death, is it not manifest

that one falls into a vicious cycle?

Even if we grant this terrible right of killing everybody, I say that a slave

taken in war, or a conquered nation, is under no obligation at all to a master,

except to obey him so far as compelled. In taking an equivalent for his life

the victor has conferred no favor on the slave; instead of killing him un-

proﬁtably, he has destroyed him for his own proﬁt. Far, then, from having

acquired over him any authority in addition to that of force, the state of war

subsists between them as before, their relationship itself is the effect of it;

and the exercise of the rights of war supposes that there is no treaty of

peace. They have made a convention. Be it so; but this convention, far from

terminating the state of war, supposes its continuance.

Thus, however we might view things, the right of slavery is null and

162 The Social Contract

void, not only because it is illegitimate, but because it is absurd and mean-

ingless. These words, slavery and right, are contradictory and mutually

exclusive. Whether spoken by a man to a man, or by a man to a nation, such

speech as this will always be equally aberrant: ‘‘I make an agreement with

you wholly at your expense and wholly for my beneﬁt, and I shall observe it

as long as I please, while you also shall observe it as long as I please.’’

Chapter V

that it is always necessary to go back to a

first convention

Even if I conceded all that I have so far refuted, those who favor despotism

would be no farther advanced. There will always be a great difference

between subduing a multitude and governing a society. When isolated men,

however numerous they may be, are subjected one after another to a single

person, this seems to me only a case of master and slaves, not of a nation

and its leader; they form, if you will, an aggregation, but not an association,

for they have neither public property nor a body politic. Such a man, even if

he enslaved half the world, is never anything but an individual; his interest,

separated from that of the rest, is never anything but a private interest. If he

dies, his empire after him is left disconnected and disunited, as an oak

disintegrates and becomes a heap of ashes after ﬁre has consumed it.

A people, says Grotius, can give itself to a king. According to Grotius,

then, a people is a people before it gives itself to a king. This gift itself is a

civil act, and presupposes public deliberation. Consequently, before exam-

ining the act by which a people elects a king, it would be well to examine

the act by which a people becomes a people; for this act, being necessarily

anterior to the other, is the real foundation of the society.

In fact, if there were no anterior convention, where, unless the election

were unanimous, would be the obligation upon the minority to submit to the

decision of the majority? And from where do the hundred who desire a

master derive the right to vote on behalf of ten who do not desire one? The

law of the plurality of votes is itself established by convention, and presup-

poses unanimity at least at one point in time.

Book I: Chapter VI 163

Chapter VI

the social pact

I imagine men reaching a point when the impediments that endangered their

survival in the state of nature prevailed by their resistance over the forces

that each individual could use to survive in that state. At that point this

primitive condition can no longer subsist, and the human race would perish

unless it changed its mode of existence.

Now, as men cannot create any new forces, but only combine and con-

trol those that do exist, they have no other means of self-preservation than

to form by aggregation a sum of forces which may prevail over the re-

sistance, to put them in action by a single motive power, and to make them

work in concert.

This sum of forces can be produced only by the combination of many;

but the strength and freedom of each man being the chief instruments of his

survival, how can he pledge them without doing harm to himself, and

without neglecting the concern he owes to himself? This difﬁculty, applied

to my subject, may be expressed in these terms:—

‘‘To ﬁnd a form of association that may defend and protect with the

whole force of the community the person and property of every associate,

and by means of which each, joining together with all, may nevertheless

obey only himself, and remain as free as before.’’ Such is the fundamental

problem of which the social contract provides the solution.

The clauses of this contract are so determined by the nature of the act

that the slightest modiﬁcation would render them pointless and ineffectual;

so that, although they have never perhaps been formally enunciated, they

are everywhere the same, everywhere tacitly accepted and recognized, un-

til, the social pact being violated, each man returns to his original rights and

takes back his natural liberty, while losing the conventional liberty for

which he renounced it.

These clauses, rightly understood, can be reduced to a single one,

namely, the total alienation to the whole community of each associate with

all his rights; for, in the ﬁrst place, since each gives himself up entirely, the

situation is equal for all; and, the conditions being equal for all, no one has

any interest in making them burdensome to others.

Further, the alienation being made without reserve, the union is as per-

fect as it can be, and no individual associate need claim anything more; for,

if any rights were left to individuals, since there would be no common

superior who could adjudicate between them and the public, each, being on

some issue his own judge, would soon claim to be so on all; the state of

164 The Social Contract

nature would still exist, and the association would necessarily become

tyrannical or pointless.

In short, each giving himself to all, gives himself to no one; and since

there is no associate over whom we do not acquire the same rights which we

concede to him over ourselves, we gain the equivalent of all that we lose,

and more power to preserve what we have.

If, then, we set aside whatever does not belong to the essence of the

social contract, we shall ﬁnd that we can reduce it to the following terms:

‘‘Each of us puts in common his person and all his power under the supreme

direction of the general will; and in return each member becomes an indi-

visible part of the whole.’’

Right away, in place of the particular individuality of each contracting

party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body, com-

posed of as many members as the assembly has voices, and which receives

from this same act its unity, its common self (moi), its life, and its will.

This public person, which is thus formed by the union of all the individual

members, used to be called a city,* and now is called republic or body

politic. When it is passive, it is called by its members State, and sover-

eign when it is active, power when it is compared to similar bodies.

With regard to the associates, they take collectively the name of people, and

are called individually citizens, inasmuch as they participate in the sov-

ereign power, and subjects, inasmuch as they are subjected to the laws of

the State. But these terms are often confused and are mistaken for one

another; it is sufﬁcient to be able to distinguish them when they are used

with precision.

* The real meaning of this word has been almost completely erased among the

moderns; most people take a town for a city, and a burgess for a citizen. They do not know

that houses make the town, and that citizens make the city. This very mistake cost the

Carthaginians dear. I have never read of the title citizens (cives) being given to the sub-

jects of a prince, not even in ancient times to the Macedonians, nor, in our days, to the

English, although nearer liberty than all the rest. The French alone employ familiarly this

name citizen, because they have no true idea of it, as we can see from their dictionaries;

but for this fact, they would, by assuming it, commit the crime of high treason. The name,

among them, expresses a virtue, not a right. When Bodin wanted to give an account of

our citizens and burgesses he made a gross blunder, mistaking the one for the other.

M. d’Alembert has not erred in this, and, in his article Geneva, has clearly distinguished

the four orders of men (even ﬁve, counting mere foreigners) which exist in our town, and

of which two only compose the republic. No other French author that I know of has

understood the real meaning of the word citizen.

Book I: Chapter VII 165

Chapter VII

the sovereign

We see from this formula that the act of association comprises a reciprocal

engagement between the public and individuals, and that every individual,

contracting so to speak with himself, is engaged in a double relation, that is,

as a member of the sovereign toward individuals, and as a member of the

State toward the sovereign. But we cannot apply here the maxim of civil

law that no one is bound by engagements made with himself; for there is a

great difference between being bound to oneself and to a whole of which

one forms part.

We must further observe that public deliberations which bind all sub-

jects to the sovereign in consequence of the two different relations under

which each of them is regarded cannot, for a contrary reason, bind the

sovereign to itself; and that accordingly it is contrary to the nature of the

body politic for the sovereign to impose on itself a law which it cannot

transgress. Since it can only be considered under one and the same relation,

it is in the position of an individual contracting with himself; from which

we see that there is not, nor can there be, any kind of fundamental law that is

binding upon the body of the people, not even the social contract. This does

not imply that such a body cannot perfectly well enter into engagements

with others in what does not derogate from this contract; for, in regard to

foreigners, it becomes a simple being, an individual.

But the body politic or sovereign, deriving its existence only from the

sanctity of the contract, can never bind itself, even to others, in anything

that derogates from the original act, such as alienation of some portion of

itself, or submission to another sovereign. To violate the act by which it

exists would be to annihilate itself; and what is nothing produces nothing.

As soon as the multitude is thus united in one body, it is impossible to

harm one of the members without attacking the body, still less to harm the

body without the members feeling the effects. Thus duty and interest alike

oblige the two contracting parties to give mutual assistance; and those same

men must seek to combine in this double relationship all the advantages

implicit in it.

Now, the sovereign, being formed solely by the individuals who com-

pose it, neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs; thus the

sovereign power need make no guarantee to its subjects, because it is

impossible for the body to wish to harm all its members; and we shall see

hereafter that it can harm no one as an individual. The sovereign, for the

simple reason that it is so, is always everything that it should be.

166 The Social Contract

But this is not the case regarding the relation of subjects to the sovereign,

which, notwithstanding the common interest, could not depend on them to

fulﬁll their engagements, unless there were a way to ensure their ﬁdelity.

Indeed, every individual can, as a man, have a particular will contrary to,

or divergent from, the general will which he has as a citizen; his private

interest may appear to him quite different from the common interest; his

absolute and naturally independent existence may make him envisage what

he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which

would be less harmful to others than the payment of it would be onerous to

him; and, viewing the moral person that constitutes the State as an abstract

being because it is not a man, he would be willing to enjoy the rights of a

citizen without being willing to fulﬁll the duties of a subject. The perpetua-

tion of such injustice would bring about the ruin of the body politic.

So that the social pact not be a pointless device, it tacitly includes this

engagement, which can alone give force to the others—that whoever re-

fuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole

body; which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free; for

such is the condition which, uniting every citizen to the fatherland, protects

him from all personal dependency, a condition that ensures the control and

working of the political machine, and alone renders legitimate civil engage-

ments, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and subject to the

most enormous abuses.

Chapter VIII

the civil state

The transition from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very

remarkable change in man, by substituting in his behavior justice for in-

stinct, and by imbuing his actions with a moral quality they previously

lacked. Only when the voice of duty prevails over physical impulse, and

law prevails over appetite, does man, who until then was preoccupied only

with himself, understand that he must act according to other principles, and

must consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although, in this

state, he gives up many advantages that he derives from nature, he acquires

equally great ones in return; his faculties are used and developed; his ideas

are expanded; his feelings are ennobled; his entire soul is raised to such a

degree that, if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him

below that from which he has emerged, he ought to bless continually the

Book I: Chapter IX 167

wonderful moment that released him from it forever, and transformed him

from a stupid, limited animal into an intelligent being and a man.

Let us simplify this whole scheme into terms easy to compare. What

man loses because of the social contract is his natural liberty and an un-

limited right to anything that tempts him and that he can attain; what he

gains is civil liberty and property in all that he possesses. So not to misun-

derstand these gains, we must clearly distinguish natural liberty, which is

limited only by the powers of the individual, from civil liberty, which is

limited by the general will; and we must distinguish possession, which is

nothing but the result of force or the right of ﬁrst occupancy, from property,

which can be based only on a lawful title.

We might also add to the advantages of the civil state moral freedom,

which alone enables man to be truly master of himself; for the impulse of

mere appetite is slavery, while obedience to a self-prescribed law is free-

dom. But I have already said too much on this subject, and the philosophical

meaning of the term freedom need not concern us here.

Chapter IX

real estate

Every member of the community at the moment of its founding gives

himself up to it, just as he is, that is, with all his being, his powers, and

property. By this act, possession does not change its nature when it changes

hands, and become property in those of the sovereign; but, as the powers of

the State (cité) are incomparably greater than those of an individual, public

possession is also, in fact, more secure and more irrevocable, without being

more legitimate, at least in respect of foreigners; for the State, with regard

to its members, is owner of all their property by the social contract, which,

in the State, serves as the basis of all rights; but with regard to other powers,

it is owner only by the right of ﬁrst occupancy which it derives from

individuals.

The right of ﬁrst occupancy, although more real than that of the strong-

est, becomes a true right only after the establishment of the right of prop-

erty. Every man has by nature a right to all that he needs; but the positive act

which makes him proprietor of certain property excludes him from owner-

ship of other property. His portion having been allotted, he must conﬁne

himself to it, and he has no further right to the property of the collectivity.

That is why the right of ﬁrst occupancy, so weak in the state of nature, is

168 The Social Contract

respected by all citizens. In this right men respect not so much what belongs

to others as what does not belong to themselves.

In order to legalize the right of ﬁrst occupancy over any real estate

whatsoever, the following conditions are necessary: ﬁrst, the land must not

yet be inhabited by any one; secondly, a man must occupy only the area

required for his subsistence; thirdly, he must take possession of it, not

by ceremonial statements, but by labor and cultivation, the only mark of

ownership which, in the absence of legal title, ought to be respected by

others.

Indeed, if we accord the right of ﬁrst occupancy to necessity and labor,

why not extend it as far as it can go? Is it impossible to assign limits to this

right? Will the mere setting foot on common ground be sufﬁcient to give an

immediate claim of ownership? Will the power of driving away other men

from it for a moment sufﬁce to deprive them forever of the right of returning

to it? How can a man or a people take possession of an immense territory

and rob the whole human race of it except by a punishable usurpation, since

other men are deprived of the place of residence and the sustenance that

nature gives to them in common? When Núñez de Balboa on the seashore

took possession of the Paciﬁc Ocean and of all of South America in the

name of the crown of Castille, was this sufﬁcient to dispossess all the

inhabitants, and exclude from it all the princes in the world? There could be

innumerable ceremonies of the same kind; and the Catholic king in his

study might, by a single stroke, have claimed possession of the whole

world, only eliminating from his empire lands previously occupied by other

princes.

We perceive how the lands of individuals, united and contiguous, be-

come public territory, and how the right of sovereignty, extending itself

from the subjects to the land they occupy, becomes at once real and per-

sonal; which places the possessors in greater dependency, and transforms

their own powers into a guarantee of their ﬁdelity—an advantage that

ancient monarchs did not understand, for, calling themselves only kings of

the Persians or Scythians or Macedonians, they seem to have regarded

themselves as rulers of men rather than as masters of countries. Monarchs

of today call themselves more cleverly kings of France, Spain, England,

etc.; in thus holding the land they are quite sure of holding its inhabitants.

The unusual feature of this alienation is that the community, in receiving

the property of individuals, so far from robbing them of it, only assures

them lawful possession, and changes usurpation into true right, enjoyment

into ownership. Also, the possessors being considered as holders of the

public property, and their rights being respected by all members of the

Book I: Chapter IX 169

State, as well as defended by all its power against foreigners, they have, as it

were, by a transfer advantageous to the public and still more to themselves,

acquired all that they have given up—a paradox easily explained by distin-

guishing between the rights that the sovereign and the proprietor have over

the same property, as we shall see hereafter.

It might also happen that men begin to unite before they possess any-

thing, and that afterwards taking over territory sufﬁcient for all, they enjoy

it in common, or split it among themselves, either equally or in parts deter-

mined by the sovereign. In whatever way this acquisition is made, the right

that every individual has over his own property is always subordinate to the

right that the community has over all; otherwise there would be no stability

in the social union, and no real force in the exercise of sovereignty.

I shall close this chapter and this book with a remark which can serve as

a basis for the whole social system; it is that instead of destroying natural

equality, the fundamental pact, on the contrary, substitutes a moral and law-

ful equality for the physical inequality that nature imposed upon men, so

that, although unequal in strength or intellect, they all become equal by

convention and legal right.*

* Under bad governments this equality is only apparent and illusory; it serves only to

keep the poor in their misery and the rich in their usurpations. In fact, laws are always

useful to those who possess and injurious to those that have nothing; whence it follows

that the social state is advantageous to men only so far as they all have something, and

none of them has too much.

Book II

Chapter I

that sovereignty is inalienable

The ﬁrst and most important consequence of the principles established

above is that the general will alone can direct the forces of the State accord-

ing to the object of its founding, which is the common good; for if the

opposition of private interests has rendered necessary the establishment of

societies, it is the concord of these same interests that has rendered it

possible. That which is common to these different interests forms the social

bond; and unless there were some point in which all interests agree, no

society could exist. Now, it is solely with regard to this common interest

that the society should be governed.

I say, then, that sovereignty, being nothing but the exercise of the general

will, can never be alienated, and that the sovereign power, which is in fact a

collective being, can be represented only by itself; power indeed can be

transmitted, but not will.

In fact, if it is not impossible that a particular will might agree on some

point with the general will, it is at least impossible that this agreement

should be lasting and steady; for the particular will naturally tends to certain

preferences, and the general will to equality. It is still more impossible to

have a guarantee for this agreement, even though it should always exist; it

would not be a result of art, but of chance. The sovereign may indeed say:

‘‘I want now what a certain man wants, or at least what he says that he

wants’’; but he cannot say: ‘‘What that man wants tomorrow, I shall also

want,’’ since it is absurd that the will should take on chains as regards the

future, and since it is not incumbent on any will to consent to anything

contrary to the welfare of the being that wills. If, then, the people simply

promises to obey, it dissolves itself by that act and loses its character as a

people; the moment there is a master, there is no longer a sovereign, and

forthwith the body politic is destroyed.

This does not imply that the orders of the leaders cannot pass for deci-

Book II: Chapter II 171

sions of the general will, so long as the sovereign, free to oppose them,

refrains from doing so. In such a case the consent of the people should be

inferred from the universal silence. This will be explained at greater length.

Chapter II

that sovereignty is indivisible

For the same reason that sovereignty is inalienable it is indivisible; for the

will is either general,* or it is not; it is either that of the body of the people,

or that of only a part of it. In the ﬁrst case, this declared will is an act of

sovereignty and constitutes law; in the second case, it is only a particular

will, or an act of magistracy—it is at most a decree.

But our politicians, being unable to divide sovereignty in its principle,

divide it in its object. They divide it into force and will, into legislative

power and executive power; into rights of taxation, of justice, and of war;

into internal administration and foreign relations—sometimes conﬂating

all these branches, and sometimes separating them. They make the sov-

ereign into a fantastic being, formed of disparate parts; it is as if they

created a man from several different bodies, one with eyes, another with

arms, another with feet, and nothing else. The Japanese conjurers, it is said,

cut up a child before the eyes of the spectators; then, throwing all its limbs

into the air, they make the child come down again alive and whole. Such

almost are the jugglers’ tricks of our politicians; after dismembering the

social body, by magic worthy of the circus, they recombine its parts, in any

unlikely way.

This error arises from their not having formed clear ideas about the

sovereign authority, and from their regarding as elements of this authority

what are only emanations from it. Thus, for example, the acts of declaring

war and making peace have been regarded as acts of sovereignty, which is

not the case, since neither of them is a law, but only an application of the

law, a particular act which determines the case of the law, as will be clearly

seen when the idea attached to the word law is deﬁned.

By following out the other divisions in the same way, it would be found

that, whenever sovereignty appears divided, we are mistaken in our think-

ing; and that the rights which are considered as parts of that sovereignty are

* That a will may be general, it is not always necessary that it should be unanimous,

but it is necessary that all votes should be counted; any formal exclusion destroys the

generality.

172 The Social Contract

all subordinate to it, and always imply supreme wills of which these rights

are merely functions.

It would be impossible to describe the obscurity into which this lack of

precision has thrown the conclusions of writers on the subject of political

rights when they have meditated on the respective rights of kings and

peoples, on the principles that they had established. Every one can see, in

chapters III and IV of the ﬁrst book of Grotius, how that learned man and

his translator Barbeyrac become entangled and embarrassed in their soph-

isms, for fear of saying too much or not saying enough according to their

views, and so offending the interests that they had to conciliate. Grotius,

having taken refuge in France, discontent with his own country, and wish-

ing to pay court to Louis XIII, to whom his book is dedicated, spares no

pains to despoil the people of all their rights, and, in the most artful manner,

bestow them on kings. This also would clearly have been the inclination of

Barbeyrac, who dedicated his translation to the king of England, George I.

But unfortunately the expulsion of James II, which he calls an abdication,

forced him to be reserved and to equivocate and evade, in order not to make

William appear a usurper. If these two writers had adopted true principles,

all difﬁculties would have been removed, and they would have been always

consistent; but they would have spoken the truth with regret, and would

have paid court only to the people. Truth, however, does not lead to fortune,

and the people confer neither embassies, nor professorships, nor pensions.

Chapter III

whether the general will can err

It follows from what precedes that the general will is always right and

always tends to the public good; but it does not follow that the deliberations

of the people always have the same rectitude. Men always desire their own

good, but do not always discern it; the people are never corrupted, though

often deceived, and it is only then that they seem to will what is evil.

There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the

general will; the latter regards only the common interest, while the former

has regard to private interests, and is merely a sum of particular wills; but

take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses which cancel one

another,* and the general will remains as the sum of the differences.

* ‘‘Every interest,’’ says the Marquis d’Argenson, ‘‘has different principles. The

accord of two particular interests is formed by opposition to that of a third.’’ He might

Book II: Chapter IV 173

If citizens deliberate when adequately informed and without any com-

munication among themselves, the general will would always result from

the great number of slight differences, and the resolution would always be

good. But when factions, partial associations, are formed to the detriment of

the whole society, the will of each of these associations becomes general in

relation to its members, and particular with reference to the State; it may

then be said that there are no longer as many voters as there are men, but

only as many voters as there are associations. The differences become less

numerous and yield a less general result. Lastly, when one of these associa-

tions becomes so great that it dominates all the others, you no longer have

as the result a sum of small differences, but a single difference; there is then

no longer a general will, and the opinion which prevails is only a particular

opinion.

It is important, then, in order to have a clear declaration of the general

will, that there should be no factions in the State, and that every citizen

should express only his own opinion.* Such was the unique and sublime

institution of the great Lycurgus. But if there are factions, it is necessary to

multiply their number and prevent inequality, as Solon, Numa, and Servius

did. These are the only proper precautions for ensuring that the general will

may always be enlightened, and that the people may not be deceived.

Chapter IV

the limits of the sovereign power

If the State or polity is but a moral person, the life of which consists in the

union of its members, and if the most important of its functions is that of

self-preservation, it needs a universal and coercive force to move and orga-

nize every part in the manner most appropriate for the whole. As nature

have added that the accord of all interests is formed by opposition to that of each. Unless

there were different interests, the common interest would scarcely be felt and would never

meet with any obstacles; everything would go of itself, and politics would cease to be

an art.

* ‘‘It is true,’’ says Machiavelli, ‘‘that some divisions injure the State, while some are

beneﬁcial to it; those are injurious to it which are accompanied by cabals and factions;

those assist it which are maintained without cabals, without factions. Since, therefore, no

founder of a State can provide against enemies in it, he ought at least to provide that there

shall be no cabals’’ (History of Florence, Book VII).

174 The Social Contract

gives every man an absolute power over all his limbs, the social pact gives

the body politic an absolute power over all its members; and it is this same

power which, when controlled by the general will, bears, as I said, the name

of sovereignty.

But besides the public person, we have to consider the private persons

who comprise it, and whose life and liberty are naturally independent of it.

The question, then, is to distinguish clearly between the respective rights of

the citizens and of the sovereign,* as well as between the duties which the

former have to fulﬁll in their capacity as subjects and the natural rights

which they ought to enjoy in their character as men.

We agree that whatever part of his power, property, and liberty each

person alienates by accepting the social compact is only what is useful and

important to the community; but we must also agree that the sovereign

alone is judge of what is important.

All the services that a citizen can render to the State he owes to it as soon

as the sovereign demands them; but the sovereign, for its part, cannot

impose on its subjects any burden which is useless to the community; it

cannot even wish to do so, for, by the law of reason, just as by the law of

nature, nothing is done without a cause.

The engagements which bind us to the social body are obligatory only

because they are reciprocal; and their nature is such that in fulﬁlling them

we cannot work for others without also working for ourselves. Why is the

general will always right, and why do all invariably desire the prosperity of

each, unless it is because there is no one who appropriates to himself this

word each without also thinking of himself when voting on behalf of all?

This proves that equality of rights and the notion of justice that it produces

are derived from the preference which each gives to himself, and conse-

quently from man’s nature; that the general will, to be truly such, should be

so in its object as well as in its essence; that it ought to proceed from all in

order to be applicable to all; and that it loses its natural rectitude when it

tends to some individual and speciﬁc object, because in that case, judging

what is unknown to us, we have no true principle of equity to guide us.

Indeed, as soon as a particular fact or right is in question with regard to a

point which has not been regulated by an anterior general convention, the

matter becomes contentious; it is a proceeding in which the private persons

interested are one of the parties and the public the other, but in which I

perceive neither the law which must be followed, nor the judge who should

* Attentive readers, do not, I beg you, hastily charge me with contradiction here. I

could not avoid it in terms owing to the poverty of the language, but wait.

Book II: Chapter IV 175

decide. It would be ridiculous in such a case to wish to refer the matter for a

formal decision of the general will, which can be nothing but the decision of

one of the parties, and which, consequently, is for the other party only a will

that is foreign, partial, and inclined on such an occasion to injustice as well

as liable to error. Therefore, just as a particular will cannot represent the

general will, the general will in turn changes its nature when it has a

particular concern, and cannot, as general, decide about either a person or a

fact. When the people of Athens, for instance, elected or deposed their

leaders, decreed honors to one, imposed penalties on another, and by multi-

tudes of particular decrees exercised indiscriminately all the functions of

government, the people no longer had any real general will; they no longer

acted as a sovereign power, but as magistrates. This will appear contrary to

common ideas, but I must be allowed time to expound my own.

From this we must understand that what generalizes the will is less the

number of voices than the common interest that unites them; for, under this

system, each person necessarily submits to the conditions which he imposes

on others—an admirable union of interest and justice, which gives to the

deliberations of the community a spirit of equity that seems to disappear in

debates about any private affair, for want of a common interest to unite and

identify the guidelines of the judge with that of the concerned party.

By whatever path we return to our founding principle we always arrive

at the same conclusion, that is, that the social compact establishes among

the citizens such an equality that they all pledge themselves under the same

conditions and ought all to enjoy the same rights. Thus, by the nature of the

compact, every act of sovereignty, that is, every authentic act of the general

will, binds or favors equally all the citizens; so that the sovereign recog-

nizes only the body of the nation, and singles out none of those who com-

pose it.

What, then, constitutes a real act of sovereignty? It is not an agreement

between a superior and an inferior, but an agreement of the collective body

with each of its members; a lawful agreement, because it has the social

contract as its foundation; equitable, because it is common to all; useful,

because it can have no other object than the general welfare; and stable,

because it has the public force and the supreme power as a guarantee. So

long as the subjects submit only to such agreements, they obey no one,

other than their own will; and to ask how far the respective rights of the

sovereign and citizens extend is to ask up to what point the latter can make

engagements among themselves, each with all and all with each.

Thus we see that the sovereign power, wholly absolute, wholly sacred,

and wholly inviolable, does not, and cannot, transcend the limits of general

176 The Social Contract

agreements, and that every man can fully control what is left to him of his

property and liberty by these agreements; so that the sovereign never has a

right to burden one subject more than another, because then the matter

would become particular and his power would no longer apply.

These distinctions once understood, so untrue is it that in the social

contract there is on the part of individuals any real relinquishment, that their

situation, as a result of this contract, is in reality preferable to what it was

before, and that, instead of an abdication, they have only made an advan-

tageous exchange of an uncertain and precarious mode of existence for a

better and more assured one, of natural independence for liberty, of the

power to injure others for their own security, and of their strength, which

others might overcome, for a right which the social union renders invio-

lable. Their lives, also, which they have devoted to the State, are con-

tinually protected by it; and in exposing their lives for its defense, what do

they do but give back what they have received from it? What do they do but

what they used to do more frequently and with more risk in the state of

nature, when, engaging in inevitable battles, they defended at the peril of

their lives their means of preservation? All have to ﬁght for their country in

case of need, it is true; but then no one ever has to ﬁght for himself. Do we

not gain, moreover, by incurring, for what insures our security, a part of the

risks that we would have to incur for ourselves individually, as soon as we

were deprived of it?

Chapter V

the right of life and death

It may be asked how individuals who have no right to dispose of their own

lives can transmit to the sovereign this right which they do not possess. The

question appears hard to solve only because it is poorly phrased. Every man

has a right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been said

that one who throws himself out of a window to escape from a ﬁre is guilty

of suicide? Has this crime, indeed, ever been imputed to a man who per-

ishes in a storm, although, on embarking, he was not oblivious to the

danger?

The social contract has as its end the preservation of the contracting

parties. He who desires the end also desires the means, and some risks, even

some losses, are inseparable from these means. He who is willing to pre-

serve his life at the expense of others must also give it up for them when

necessary. Now, the citizen is not a judge of the peril to which the law

Book II: Chapter V 177

requires that he expose himself; and when the prince has said to him: ‘‘It is

expedient for the State that you should die,’’ he ought to die, since it is only

on this condition that he has lived in security up to that time, and since his

life is no longer merely a gift of nature, but a conditional gift of the State.

The penalty of death inﬂicted on criminals may be regarded almost from

the same point of view; it is in order not to be the victim of an assassin that a

man consents to die if he becomes one. In this contract, far from disposing

of his own life, he thinks only of protecting it, and it is not to be supposed

that any of the contracting parties contemplates at the time being hanged.

Moreover, every evildoer who attacks social rights becomes by his

crimes a rebel and a traitor to his country; by violating its laws he ceases to

be a member of it, and even makes war upon it. In that case, the preservation

of the State is incompatible with his own—one of the two must perish; and

when a guilty man is executed, it is less as a citizen than as an enemy. The

proceedings and the judgment are the proofs and the declaration that he has

broken the social contract, and consequently that he is no longer a member

of the State. Now, as he has acknowledged himself to be such, at least by his

residence, he ought to be cut off from it by exile as a violator of the

compact, or by death as a public enemy; for such an enemy is not a moral

person, he is simply a man; and this is a case in which the right of war is to

slay the vanquished.

But, it will be said, the condemnation of a criminal is a particular act.

Granted; but this condemnation does not belong to the sovereign; it is a

right which that power can confer, though itself unable to exercise it. All

my ideas are connected, but I cannot expound them all at once.

Again, the frequency of capital punishments is always a sign of weak-

ness or indolence in the government. There is no man so worthless that he

cannot be made good for something. We have a right to kill, even for

example’s sake, only those who cannot be kept alive without danger.

As regards the right to pardon or to exempt a guilty man from the penalty

imposed by the law and inﬂicted by the judge, it belongs only to a power

which is above both the judge and the law, that is to say, the sovereign; still

its right in this is not very clear, and the occasions for exercising it are very

rare. In a well-governed State there are few punishments, not because many

pardons are granted, but because there are few criminals; the multitude of

crimes insures impunity when the State is decaying. Under the Roman

Republic neither the Senate nor the consuls attempted to grant pardons; not

even the people granted any, although they sometimes revoked their own

sentences. Frequent pardons proclaim that crimes will soon need them no

longer, and every one sees to what that leads. But I feel my heart murmuring

178 The Social Contract

and holding back my pen; let us leave these questions to be discussed by the

just man who has not erred, and who never needed pardon himself.

Chapter VI

the law

By the social compact we have given existence and life to the body politic;

the question now is to endow it with movement and will by legislation. For

the original act by which the body is formed and consolidated determines

nothing in addition as to what it must do for its own preservation.

What is right and conformable to order is such by the nature of things,

and independently of human conventions. All justice comes from God, He

alone is the source of it; but if we understood how to receive it direct from

so lofty a source, we would need neither government nor laws. Without

doubt there is a universal justice emanating from reason alone; but this

justice, in order to be accepted among us, should be reciprocal. Regarding

things from a human standpoint, the laws of justice are inoperative among

men for want of a natural sanction; they only bring good to the wicked and

evil to the just when the latter observe them with everyone, and no one

observes them in return. Conventions and laws, then, are necessary to

couple rights with duties and apply justice to its object. In the state of

nature, where everything exists in common, I owe nothing to those to whom

I have promised nothing; I recognize as belonging to others only what is

useless to me. This is not the case in the civil state, in which all rights are

determined by law.

But then, ﬁnally, what is a law? So long as men are content to attach to

this word only metaphysical ideas, they will continue to debate without

being understood; and when they have stated what a law of nature is, they

will know no better what a law of the State is.

I have already said that there is no general will with reference to a

particular object. In fact, this particular object is either in the State or

outside of it. If it is outside the State, a will which is foreign to it is not

general in relation to it; and if it is within the State, it forms part of it; then

there is formed between the whole and its part a relation which makes of it

two separate beings, of which the part is one, and the whole, less this same

part, is the other. But the whole less one part is not the whole, and so long as

the relation endures, there is no longer any whole, but two unequal parts;

whence it follows that the will of the one is no longer general in relation to

the other.

Book II: Chapter VI 179

But when the whole people decree concerning the whole people, they

consider themselves alone; and if a relation is then constituted, it is between

the whole object under one point of view and the whole object under

another point of view, without any division at all. Then the matter respect-

ing which they decree is general like the will that decrees. It is this act that I

call a law.

When I say that the object of the laws is always general, I mean that the

law considers subjects collectively, and actions as abstract, never a man as

an individual nor a particular action. Thus the law may indeed decree that

there shall be privileges, but cannot confer them on any person by name; the

law can create several classes of citizens, and even assign the qualiﬁcations

which shall entitle them to rank in these classes, but it cannot nominate such

and such persons to be admitted to them; it can establish a royal government

and a hereditary succession, but cannot elect a king or appoint a royal

family; in a word, no function which has reference to an individual object

appertains to the legislative power.

From this standpoint we see immediately that it is no longer necessary to

ask whose ofﬁce it is to make laws, since they are acts of the general will;

nor whether the prince is above the laws, since he is a member of the State;

nor whether the law can be unjust, since no one is unjust to himself; nor how

we are free and yet subject to the laws, since the laws are only registers of

our wills.

We see, further, that since the law combines the universality of the will

with the universality of the object, whatever any man prescribes on his own

authority is not a law; and whatever the sovereign itself prescribes respect-

ing a particular object is not a law, but a decree, not an act of sovereignty,

but of magistracy.

I therefore call any State a republic which is governed by laws, under

whatever form of administration it may be; for then only does the public

interest predominate and the commonwealth count for something. Every

legitimate government is republican;* I will explain hereafter what govern-

ment is.

Laws are properly only the conditions of civil associations. The people,

being subjected to the laws, should be the authors of them; it concerns only

the associates to determine the conditions of association. But how will they

* I do not mean by this word an aristocracy or democracy only, but in general any

government directed by the general will, which is the law. To be legitimate, the govern-

ment must not be combined with the sovereign power, but must be its minister; then

monarchy itself is a republic. This will be made clear in the next book.

180 The Social Contract

be determined? Will it be by a common agreement, by a sudden inspiration?

Has the body politic an organ for expressing its will? Who will give it the

foresight necessary to frame its acts and publish them at the outset? Or how

shall it declare them in the hour of need? How would a blind multitude,

which often knows not what it wishes because it rarely knows what is good

for it, execute by itself an enterprise so great, so difﬁcult, as a system of

legislation? By themselves, the people always desire what is good, but do

not always discern it. The general will is always right, but the judgment

which guides it is not always enlightened. The general will must be made to

see objects as they are, sometimes as they ought to appear; it must be shown

the good path that it is seeking, and guarded from the seduction of private

interests; it must be made to observe closely times and places, and to

balance the attraction of immediate and palpable advantages against the

danger of remote and concealed evils. Individuals see the good which they

reject; the public desire the good which they do not see. All alike have need

of guides. The former must be compelled to conform their wills to their

reason; the public must be taught to understand what they want. Then from

the public enlightenment results the union of understanding and will in the

social body; and from that the close cooperation of the parts, and, lastly, the

maximum power of the whole. Hence arises the need of a legislator.

Chapter VII

the legislator

In order to discover the rules of association that are most suitable to nations,

a superior intelligence would be necessary who could see all the passions of

men without experiencing any of them; who would have no afﬁnity with

our nature and yet know it thoroughly; whose happiness would not depend

on us, and who would nevertheless be quite willing to interest himself in

ours; and, lastly, one who, storing up for himself with the progress of time a

far-off glory in the future, could labor in one age and enjoy in another.*

Gods would be necessary to give laws to men.

The same argument that Caligula adduced as to fact, Plato put forward

with regard to right, in order to give an idea of the civil or royal man whom

he is in quest of in his work the Statesman. But if it is true that a great prince

* A nation becomes famous only when its legislation is beginning to decline. We are

ignorant during how many centuries the institutions of Lycurgus conferred happiness on

the Spartans before they were known in the rest of Greece.

Book II: Chapter VII 181

is a rare man, what will a great legislator be? The ﬁrst has only to follow the

model which the other has to conceive. The latter is the engineer who

invents the machine, the former is only the workman who assembles it and

turns it on. In the birth of societies, says Montesquieu, it is the leaders of the

republics who frame the institutions, and afterwards it is the institutions

which mold the leaders of the republics.

He who dares undertake to give institutions to a nation ought to feel

himself capable, as it were, of changing human nature; of transforming

every individual, who in himself is a complete and independent whole, into

part of a greater whole, from which he receives in some manner his life and

his being; of altering man’s constitution in order to strengthen it; of sub-

stituting a social and moral existence for the independent and physical

existence which we have all received from nature. In a word, it is necessary

to deprive man of his native powers in order to endow him with some which

are alien to him, and of which he cannot make use without the aid of other

people. The more thoroughly those natural powers are deadened and de-

stroyed, the greater and more durable are the acquired powers, and the more

solid and perfect also are the institutions; so that if every citizen is nothing,

and can be nothing, except in combination with all the rest, and if the force

acquired by the whole be equal or superior to the sum of the natural forces

of all the individuals, we may say that legislation is at the highest point of

perfection which it can attain.

The legislator is in all respects an extraordinary man in the State. If he

ought to be so by his genius, he is not less so by his ofﬁce. It is neither

magistracy nor sovereignty. This ofﬁce, which constitutes the republic, does

not enter into its constitution; it is a special and superior ofﬁce, having

nothing in common with human jurisdiction; for, if he who rules men ought

not to control legislation, he who controls legislation ought not to rule men;

otherwise his laws, being ministers of his passions, would often serve only

to perpetuate his acts of injustice; he would never be able to prevent private

interests from corrupting the sacredness of his work.

When Lycurgus gave laws to his country, he began by abdicating his

royalty. It was the practice of the majority of the Greek towns to entrust to

foreigners the framing of their laws. The modern republics of Italy often

imitated this usage; that of Geneva did the same and found it advanta-

geous.* Rome, at her most glorious epoch, saw all the crimes of tyranny

* Those who consider Calvin only as a theologian are but little acquainted with the

extent of his genius. The preparation of our wise edicts, in which he had a large share,

does him as much credit as his Institutes. Whatever revolution time may bring about in

182 The Social Contract

spring up in her bosom, and saw herself on the verge of destruction, through

uniting in the same hands legislative authority and sovereign power.

Yet the Decemvirs themselves never appropriated the right to pass any

law on their sole authority. Nothing that we propose to you, they said to the

people, can pass into law without your consent. Romans, be yourselves the

authors of the laws which are to secure your happiness.

He who frames laws, then, has, or ought to have, no legislative right, and

the people themselves cannot, even if they wished, divest themselves of this

incommunicable right, because, according to the fundamental compact, it is

only the general will that binds individuals, and we can never be sure that a

particular will is conformable to the general will until it has been submitted

to the free votes of the people. I have said this already, but it is not useless to

repeat it.

Thus we ﬁnd simultaneously in the work of legislation two things that

seem incompatible—an enterprise surpassing human powers, and, to ex-

ecute it, an authority that is a mere nothing.

Another difﬁculty deserves attention. Wise men who want to speak to

the vulgar in their own language instead of in a popular way will not be

understood. Now, there are a thousand kinds of ideas which it is impossible

to translate into the language of the people. Views very general and objects

very remote are alike beyond its reach; and each individual, approving of no

other plan of government than that which promotes his own interests, does

not readily perceive the beneﬁts that he is to derive from the continual

deprivations which good laws impose. In order that a newly formed nation

might approve sound maxims of politics and observe the fundamental rules

of state-policy, it would be necessary that the effect should become the

cause; that the social spirit, which should be the product of the institution,

should preside over the institution itself, and that men should be, prior to the

laws, what they ought to become by means of them. Since, then, the legisla-

tor cannot employ either force or reasoning, he must have recourse to an

authority of a different order, which can compel without violence and per-

suade without convincing.

It is this which in all ages has constrained the fathers of nations to resort

to the intervention of heaven, and to give the gods the credit for their own

wisdom, in order that the nations, subjected to the laws of the State as to

our religion, so long as love of country and of liberty is not extinct among us, the memory

of that great man will not cease to be revered.

Book II: Chapter VIII 183

those of nature, and recognizing the same power in the creation of man and

in that of the State, might obey willingly, and bear submissively the yoke of

the public welfare.

The legislator puts into the mouths of the immortals that sublime reason

which soars beyond the reach of common men, in order that he may win

over by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move.*

But it does not belong to every man to make the gods his oracles, nor to be

believed when he proclaims himself their interpreter. The great soul of the

legislator is the real miracle which must give proof of his mission. Any man

can engrave tables of stone, or bribe an oracle, or pretend secret intercourse

with some divinity, or train a bird to speak in his ear, or ﬁnd some other

clumsy means to impose himself on the people. He who is acquainted with

such means only will perchance be able to assemble a crowd of foolish

persons; but he will never found an empire, and his extravagant work will

soon perish with him. Empty deceptions form but a transient bond; it is only

wisdom that makes it lasting. The Jewish law, which still endures, and that

of the child of Ishmael, which for ten centuries has ruled half the world, still

bear witness today to the great men who dictated them; and while proud

philosophy or blind party spirit sees in them nothing but lucky impostors,

the true statesman admires in their systems the great and powerful genius

which directs durable institutions.

It is not necessary from all this to conclude with Warburton that politics

and religion have among us a common aim, but only that, in the origin of

nations, one serves as an instrument of the other.

Chapter VIII

the people

As an architect, before erecting a large ediﬁce, examines and tests the soil in

order to see whether it can support the weight, so a wise lawgiver does not

begin by drawing up laws that are good in themselves, but considers ﬁrst

whether the people for whom he designs them are ﬁt to maintain them. It is

* ‘‘It is true,’’ says Machiavelli, ‘‘there never was in a nation any promulgator of

extraordinary laws who had not recourse to God, because otherwise they would not have

been accepted; for there are many advantages recognized by a wise man which are not

so self-evident that they can convince others’’ (Discourses on Titus Livius, Book I, chap-

ter II).

184 The Social Contract

on this account that Plato refused to legislate for the Arcadians and Cyre-

nians, knowing that these two peoples were rich and could not tolerate

equality; and it is on this account that good laws and worthless men were to

be found in Crete, for Minos had only disciplined a people steeping in vice.

A thousand nations that have ﬂourished on the earth could never have

tolerated good laws; and even those that might have done so could have

succeeded for only a very short period of their whole duration. The majority

of nations, as well as of men, are tractable only in their youth; they become

incorrigible as they grow old. When once customs are established and

prejudices have taken root, it is a perilous and futile enterprise to try and

reform them; for the people cannot even endure that their ills be touched

with a view to their removal, like those stupid and cowardly patients who

shudder at the sight of a physician.

But just as some illnesses unhinge men’s minds and deprive them of all

remembrance of the past, so we sometimes ﬁnd, in the history of States,

epochs of violence, in which revolutions produce an inﬂuence upon nations

such as certain crises produce upon individuals, in which horror of the past

takes the place of forgetfulness, and in which the State, inﬂamed by civil

wars, springs forth so to speak from its ashes, and regains the vigor of youth

in springing from the arms of death. Such was Sparta in the time of Lycur-

gus, such was Rome after the Tarquins, and such among us moderns were

Holland and Switzerland after the expulsion of their tyrants.

But these events are rare; they are exceptions, the explanation of which

is always found in the particular constitution of the excepted State. They

could not even happen twice with the same nation; for it may render itself

free so long as it is merely barbarous, but can no longer do so when the

resources of the State are exhausted. Then commotions may destroy it

without revolutions being able to restore it, and as soon as its chains are

broken, it falls in pieces and ceases to exist; henceforward it requires a

master and not a liberator. Free nations, remember this maxim: Liberty may

be acquired but never recovered.

There is for nations as for men a period of maturity, which they must

await before they are subjected to laws; but it is not always easy to discern

when a people is mature, and if time is rushed, the labor is abortive. One

nation is governable from its origin, another is not so at the end of ten

centuries. The Russians will never be really governed, because they have

been governed too early. Peter had an imitative genius; he had not the true

genius that creates and produces anything from nothing. Some of his mea-

sures were beneﬁcial, but the majority were ill-timed. He saw that his

people were barbarous, but he did not see that they were unripe for govern-

Book II: Chapter IX 185

ment; he wished to civilize them, when it was necessary only to discipline

them. He wished to produce at once Germans or Englishmen, when he

should have begun by making Russians; he prevented his subjects from

ever becoming what they might have been, by persuading them that they

were what they were not. It is in this way that a French tutor trains his pupils

to shine for a moment in childhood, and then to be for ever a nonentity. The

Russian Empire will desire to subjugate Europe, and will itself be subju-

gated. The Tartars, its subjects or neighbors, will become its masters and

ours. This revolution appears to me inevitable. All the kings of Europe are

working in concert to accelerate it.

Chapter IX

the people (continued)

As nature has set limits to the stature of a properly formed man, outside of

which it produces only giants and dwarfs; so likewise, with regard to the

best constitution of a State, there are limits to its possible size so that it may

be neither too large to enable it to be well-governed, nor too small to enable

it to maintain itself by itself. There is in every body politic a maximum of

force which it cannot exceed, and which is often diminished as the State

grows. The more the social bond is extended, the more it is weakened; and,

in general, a small State is proportionally stronger than a large one.

A thousand reasons demonstrate the truth of this maxim. In the ﬁrst

place, administration becomes more difﬁcult at great distances, as a weight

becomes heavier at the end of a longer lever. It also becomes more burden-

some in proportion as its parts are multiplied; for every town has ﬁrst its

own administration, for which the people pay; every district has its admin-

istration, still paid for by the people; next, every province, then the superior

governments, the satrapies, the vice-royalties, which must be paid for more

dearly as we ascend, and always at the cost of the unfortunate people;

lastly comes the supreme administration, which overwhelms everything. So

many additional burdens perpetually exhaust the subjects; and far from

being better governed by all these different orders, they are less well gov-

erned than if they had but a single order above them. Meanwhile, hardly any

resources remain for cases of emergency; and when it is necessary to have

recourse to them the State trembles on the brink of ruin.

Nor is this all; not only has the government less vigor and speed in

enforcing observance of the laws, in putting a stop to vexations, in reform-

ing abuses, and in forestalling seditious schemes which may be conducted

186 The Social Contract

in distant places; but the people have less affection for their leaders whom

they never see, for their country, which is in their eyes like the world, and

for their fellow-citizens, most of whom are strangers to them. The same

laws cannot be suitable to so many different provinces, which have different

customs and different climates, and cannot tolerate the same form of gov-

ernment. Different laws beget only trouble and confusion among the na-

tions which, living under the same leaders and in constant communication,

mingle or intermarry with one another, and, when subjected to other cus-

toms, never know whether their patrimony is really theirs. Talents are hid-

den, virtues ignored, vices unpunished, in that multitude of men, unknown

to one another, whom the seat of the supreme administration gathers to-

gether in one place. The leaders, overwhelmed with business, see nothing

themselves; clerks govern the State. In a word, the measures that must be

taken to maintain the general authority, which so many ofﬁcers at a distance

wish to evade or impose upon, absorb all governmental attention; no regard

for the welfare of the people remains, and scarcely any for their defense in

time of need; and thus a body too vast for its constitution sinks and perishes,

crushed by its own weight.

On the other hand, the State must secure a certain foundation, that it may

possess stability and resist the shocks which it will doubtless experience, as

well as sustain the efforts which it will be forced to make in order to

maintain itself; for all nations have a kind of centrifugal force, by which

they continually act against one another, and tend to aggrandize themselves

at the expense of their neighbors, like the vortices of Descartes. Thus the

weak are in danger of being quickly swallowed up, and none can preserve

itself long except by putting itself in a kind of equilibrium with all, which

renders the compression almost equal everywhere.

Hence we see that there are reasons for expansion and reasons for con-

traction; and it is not the least of a statesman’s talents to ﬁnd the proportion

between the two which is most advantageous for the preservation of the

State. We may say, in general, that reasons for expansion, being only exter-

nal and relative, ought to be subordinated to the others, which are internal

and absolute. A healthy and strong constitution is the ﬁrst thing to be

sought; and we should rely more on the vigor that springs from a good

government than on the resources furnished by a vast territory.

States have, however, been constituted in such a way that the necessity

of making conquests entered into their very constitution, and in order to

maintain themselves they were forced to enlarge themselves continually.

Perhaps they rejoiced in this happy necessity, which nevertheless revealed

to them, with the limit of their greatness, the inevitable moment of their fall.

Book II: Chapter X 187

Chapter X

the people (continued)

A body politic may be measured in two ways, by the extent of its territory,

and by the number of its people; and there is between these two modes of

measurement an appropriate ratio according to which the State may be

given its genuine dimensions. It is the men who constitute the State, and it is

the soil that sustains the men; the ratio, then, is that the land should sufﬁce

for the maintenance of its inhabitants, and that there should be as many

inhabitants as the land can sustain. In this ratio is found the maximum

power of a given number of people; for if there is too much land, the care of

it is burdensome, the cultivation inadequate, and the output superﬂuous,

and this is the immediate cause of defensive wars. If there is not enough

land, the State is at the mercy of its neighbors for the additional crops; and

this is the immediate cause of offensive wars. Any nation which has, by its

position, only the alternative between commerce and war is weak in itself; it

is dependent on its neighbors and on events; it has only a short and pre-

carious existence. It conquers and changes its situation, or it is conquered

and reduced to nothing. It can preserve its freedom only by virtue of being

small or large.

It is impossible to express numerically a ﬁxed ratio between the extent

of land and the number of men that are reciprocally sufﬁcient, on account of

the differences that are found in the quality of the soil, in its degree of

fertility, in the nature of its products, and in the inﬂuence of climate, as well

as on account of those which we observe in the constitutions of the inhabi-

tants, of whom some consume little in a fertile country, while others con-

sume much on an unfruitful soil. Further, attention must be paid to the

greater or less fecundity of the women, to the conditions of the country,

whether more or less favorable to population, and to the numbers which the

legislator may hope to draw together by his institutions; so that an opinion

should be based not on what is seen, but on what is foreseen, not on the

current size of the population but on the size it ought naturally to attain. In

short, there are a thousand occasions on which the particular accidents of

situation require or permit that more territory than appears necessary should

be taken up. Thus men will spread out a good deal in a mountainous

country, where the natural productions, that is, woods and pastures, require

less labor, where experience teaches that women are more fecund than in

the plains, and where with an extensive inclined surface there is only a

small horizontal base, which alone should count for vegetation. On the

other hand, people may inhabit a smaller space on the seashore, even

188 The Social Contract

among rocks and sands that are almost barren, because ﬁshing can, in great

measure, supply the deﬁciency in the productions of the earth, because men

ought to be more concentrated in order to repel pirates, and because, fur-

ther, it is easier to relieve the country, by means of colonies, of the inhabi-

tants with which it is overburdened.

In order to establish a nation, it is necessary to add to these condi-

tions one which cannot supply the place of any other, but without which

they are all useless—it is that the people should enjoy abundance and

peace; for the time of a State’s founding is, like that of constituting sol-

diers into a regiment, the moment when the body is least capable of re-

sistance and most easy to destroy. Resistance would be easier in a state of

absolute disorder than at a moment of fermentation, when each is occupied

with his own position and not with the common danger. Should a war,

a famine, or a sedition erupt at this critical period, the State is inevita-

bly overthrown.

Many governments, indeed, may be established during such storms, but

then it is these very governments that destroy the State. Usurpers always

bring about or select tumultuous times for passing, under cover of the

public agitation, destructive laws which the people would never adopt

when sober-minded. The choice of the moment for the establishment of a

government is one of the surest marks for distinguishing the work of the

legislator from that of the tyrant.

What people, then, is suited for legislation? One that is already united by

some bond of interest, origin, or convention, but has not yet borne the real

yoke of the laws; one that has neither customs nor superstitions ﬁrmly

rooted; one that has no fear of being overwhelmed by a sudden invasion, but

that, without entering into the disputes of its neighbors, can single-handed

resist either of them, or aid one in repelling the other, that in which every

member can be known by all, and in which there is no necessity to impose

on a man a greater burden than a man can bear; one that can do without

other nations, and without which every other nation can make do,* one that

* If of two neighboring nations one could not survive without the other, it would be a

very hard situation for the ﬁrst, and a very dangerous one for the second. Every wise

nation in such a case will endeavor very quickly to free the other from this dependence.

The republic of Thlascala, enclosed in the empire of Mexico, preferred to do without salt

rather than buy it of the Mexicans or even accept it gratuitously. The wise Thlascalans saw

a trap hidden beneath this generosity. They kept themselves free; and this small State,

enclosed in that great empire, was at last the instrument of its downfall.

Book II: Chapter XI 189

is neither rich nor poor and is self-sufﬁcient; lastly, one that combines the

stability of an ancient people with the docility of a new one. The work of

legislation is made arduous not so much by what must be established as by

what must be destroyed; and what makes success so rare is the impossibility

of ﬁnding a meeting of the simplicity of nature and the needs of society. All

these conditions, it is true, are with difﬁculty combined; hence few well-

constituted States are seen.

There is still one country in Europe capable of legislation; it is the island

of Corsica. The courage and ﬁrmness which that brave nation has exhibited

in recovering and defending its freedom would well deserve that some wise

man should teach it how to preserve it. I have some presentiment that this

small island will one day astonish Europe.

Chapter XI

the different systems of legislation

If we ask precisely wherein consists the greatest good of all, which ought to

be the aim of every system of legislation, we shall ﬁnd that it is summed up

in two principal objects, liberty and equality—liberty, because any individ-

ual dependence is so much force removed from the body of the State;

equality, because liberty cannot survive without it.

I have already said what civil liberty is. With regard to equality, we must

not understand by this word that the degrees of power and wealth should be

absolutely the same; but that, as to power, it should fall short of all violence,

and never be exercised except by virtue of station and of the laws; while, as

to wealth, no citizen should be rich enough to be able to buy another, and

none poor enough to be forced to sell himself,* which supposes, on the part

of the wealthy, moderation in property and inﬂuence, and, on the part of

ordinary citizens, moderation of avarice and covetousness.

It is said that this equality is an abstract chimera which cannot exist in

practice. But if the abuse is inevitable, does it follow that it is unnecessary

even to regulate it? It is precisely because the force of circumstances always

* If, then, you wish to give stability to the State, bring the two extremes as near

together as possible; tolerate neither rich people nor beggars. These two conditions,

naturally inseparable, are equally fatal to the general welfare; from the one class spring

tyrants, from the other, the supporters of tyranny; it is always between these that the trafﬁc

in public liberty is carried on; the one buys and the other sells.

190 The Social Contract

tends to destroy equality that the force of legislation should always tend to

maintain it.

But these general objects of every good institution ought to be modiﬁed

in each country by the relations which arise both from the local situation

and from the character of the inhabitants; and it is with reference to these

relations that we must assign to each nation a particular system of insti-

tutions, which shall be the best, not perhaps in itself, but for the State

for which it is designed. For instance, if the soil is unfruitful and barren,

or the country too conﬁned for its inhabitants, turn your attention to arts

and manufactures, and exchange their products for the provisions that you

require. On the other hand, if you occupy rich plains and fertile slopes, if, in

a productive region, you are in need of inhabitants, bestow all your cares on

agriculture, which multiplies men, and drive out the arts, which would only

end in depopulating the country by gathering together in a few spots the few

inhabitants that the land possesses.* If you occupy extensive and conve-

nient coasts, cover the sea with vessels and foster commerce and naviga-

tion; you will have a short and brilliant existence. If the sea on your coasts

bathes only rocks that are virtually inaccessible, remain ﬁsh-eating barbar-

ians; you will lead more peaceful, perhaps better, and certainly happier

lives. In a word, besides the maxims common to all, each nation contains

within itself some cause that inﬂuences it in a particular way, and makes its

legislation suitable for it alone. Thus the Hebrews in ancient times, and the

Arabs more recently, had religion as their chief object, the Athenians litera-

ture, Carthage and Tyre commerce, Rhodes navigation, Sparta war, Rome

valor. The author of the Spirit of the Laws has shown in a multitude of

instances by what arts the legislator directs his institutions towards each of

these objects.

What makes the constitution of a State really solid and enduring is the

observance of expediency in such a way that natural relations and laws

always coincide, the latter only serving, as it were, to secure, support, and

rectify the former. But if the legislator, mistaken in his object, takes a

principle different from that which springs from the nature of things; if the

one tends to servitude, the other to liberty, the one to riches, the other to

population, the one to peace, the other to conquests, we shall see the laws

imperceptibly weakened and the constitution impaired; and the State will

* Any branch of foreign commerce, says the Marquis d’Argenson, diffuses merely a

deceptive utility through the kingdom generally; it may enrich a few individuals, even

a few towns, but the nation as a whole gains nothing, and the people are none the better

for it.

Book II: Chapter XII 191

be ceaselessly agitated until it is destroyed or changed, and invincible

nature has resumed her sway.

Chapter XII

classification of the laws

So that everything may be duly regulated and the best possible form given

to the commonwealth, there are various relations to be considered. First, the

action of the whole body acting on itself, that is, the relation of the whole to

the whole, or of the sovereign to the State; and this relation is composed of

that of the intermediate terms, as we shall see hereafter.

The laws governing this relation bear the name of political laws, and are

also called fundamental laws, not without some justiﬁcation if they are wise

ones; for, if in every State there is only one good method of regulating it, the

people who discovered it ought to adhere to it; but if the established order is

bad, why should we regard as fundamental laws that prevent it from being

good? Besides, in any case, a nation is always at liberty to change its laws,

even the best; for if it likes to injure itself, who has a right to prevent it from

doing so?

The second relation is that of the members with one another, or with the

body as a whole, and this relation should, in respect of the ﬁrst, be as small,

and, in respect of the second, as great as possible; so that every citizen may

be perfectly independent of all the rest, and in absolute dependence on the

State. And this is always effectuated by the same means, for it is only the

power of the State that secures the freedom of its members. It is from this

second relation that civil laws arise.

We may consider a third kind of relation between the individual man and

the law, that of punishable disobedience; and this gives rise to the establish-

ment of criminal laws, which at bottom are not so much a particular species

of laws as the sanction of all the others.

To these three kinds of laws is added a fourth, the most important of all,

which is engraved neither on marble nor on bronze, but in the hearts of the

citizens; a law which creates the real constitution of the State, which ac-

quires new strength daily, which, when other laws grow obsolete or pass

away, revives them or reinforces them, preserves a people in the spirit of

their institutions, and imperceptibly substitutes the force of habit for that of

authority. I speak of manners, customs, and above all of opinion—a prov-

ince unknown to our politicians, but one on which the success of all the rest

depends; a province with which the great legislator is occupied in private,

192 The Social Contract

while he appears to conﬁne himself to particular regulations, that are merely

the sides of the arch, of which customs and morals, slower to develop,

ultimately form the immovable keystone.

Of these different types of law, political laws, which constitute the form

of government, alone relate to my subject.

Book III

Before speaking of the different forms of government, let us try to deter-

mine the precise meaning of that word, which has not yet been explained

clearly.

Chapter I

government in general

I warn the reader that this chapter must be read carefully, and that I do not

know the art of making myself intelligible to those that will not be attentive.

Every free act has two causes which together produce it; one is moral,

that is, the will that determines the act; the other is physical, that is, the

power that executes it. When I walk toward an object, ﬁrst I must want to go

toward it; in the second place, my feet must take me to it. Should a paralytic

wish to run, or an agile man not wish to do so, both will remain where they

are. The body politic has the same driving forces; in it, we discern force and

will, the latter under the name of legislative power, the former under the

name of executive power. Nothing is, or ought to be, done in it without

them.

We have seen that the legislative power belongs to the people and can

belong only to them. On the other hand, it is easy to see from the principles

already established, that the executive power cannot belong to the people

generally as legislative or sovereign, because that power is used only in

particular acts, which are not within the province of the law, nor conse-

quently within that of the sovereign, all the acts of which must be laws.

The public force, then, requires a suitable agent to concentrate it and set

it in motion according to the directions of the general will, to serve as a

means of communication between the State and the sovereign, to create in

some manner in the public person what the union of soul and body creates

in a man. This is, in the State, the function of the government, improperly

confused with the sovereign of which it is only the minister.

194 The Social Contract

What, then, is the government? An intermediate body established be-

tween the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual correspondence,

charged with the execution of the laws and with the maintenance of liberty

both civil and political.

The members of this body are called magistrates or kings, that is, gover-

nors; and the body as a whole bears the name Prince.* Those therefore who

claim that the act by which a people submits to its leaders is not a contract

are quite right. It is absolutely nothing but a commission, an employment,

in which, as simple ofﬁcers of the soverign, they exercise in its name the

power of which it has made them depositaries, and which it can limit,

modify, and take back when it pleases. The alienation of such a right, being

incompatible with the nature of the social body, is contrary to the object of

the association.

I therefore give the name government or supreme administration to the

legitimate exercise of the executive power, and I give the name of Prince or

magistrate to the man or body charged with that administration.

It is in the government that are found the intermediate powers, the

relations of which constitute the relation of the whole to the whole, or of

the sovereign to the State. This last relation can be represented by that of the

extremes of a continuous proportion, of which the proportional mean is the

government. The government receives from the sovereign the orders it

gives to the people; and so that the State may be in stable equilibrium it is

necessary, everything being balanced, that there should be equality between

the product or the power of the government taken by itself, and the product

or power of the citizens, who are sovereign on the one hand and subjects on

the other.

Moreover, we could not alter any of the three terms without at once

destroying their proportionality. If the sovereign wishes to govern, or if the

magistrate wishes to legislate, or if the subjects refuse to obey, disorder

prevails over order, force and will no longer act in concert, and the State

being dissolved falls into despotism or anarchy. Lastly, as there is but one

proportional mean between each relation, there is only one good govern-

ment possible in the State; but as a thousand events may change the rela-

tions of a people, not only may different governments be good for different

peoples, but for the same people at different times.

To try and give an idea of the different relations that may exist between

* It is for this reason that at Venice the title of Most Serene Prince is given to the

College, even when the Doge does not attend it.

Book III: Chapter I 195

these two extremes, I will take for example the population ﬁgures as a

relation most easy to express.

Let us suppose that the State is composed of ten thousand citizens. The

sovereign can only be considered collectively and as a body; but every

private person, in his capacity of subject, is considered an individual; there-

fore the sovereign is to the subject as ten thousand is to one, that is, each

member of the State has as his share only one ten-thousandth part of the

sovereign authority, although he is entirely subjected to it.

If the nation consists of a hundred thousand men, the position of the

subjects does not change, and each alike is subjected to the whole authority

of the laws, while his vote, reduced to one hundred-thousandth, has ten

times less inﬂuence in their enactment. The subject, then, always remaining

one, the ratio of the sovereign to the subject increases in proportion to the

number of citizens. From which it follows that the more the State is en-

larged, the more liberty is diminished.

When I say that the ratio increases, I mean that it is farther removed from

equality. Therefore, the greater the ratio is in the geometrical sense, the less

is the ratio in the ordinary sense; in the former sense, the ratio, considered in

terms of quantity, is measured by the quotient, and in the other, considered

in terms of likeness, it is estimated by the similarity.

Now, the less the particular wills correspond to the general will, that is,

customs with laws, the more should the repressive power be increased. The

government, then, in order to be good, should be relatively stronger in

proportion as the people are more numerous.

On the other hand, since the enlargement of the State gives those en-

trusted with the public authority more temptations and more opportunities

to abuse their power, the more force the government should have to restrain

the people, and the more should the sovereign have in its turn to restrain the

government. I am not speaking here of absolute force, but of the relative

force of the different parts of the State.

It follows from this double relationship that the continuous proportion

between the sovereign, the Prince, and the people is not an arbitrary idea,

but a necessary consequence of the nature of the body politic. It follows,

further, that one of the extremes, that is, the people, as subject, being

deﬁned and represented by unity, whenever the doubled ratio increases or

diminishes, the single ratio increases or diminishes in like manner, and

consequently the middle term is changed. This shows that there is no unique

and absolute constitution of government, but that there may be as many

governments different in nature as there are States different in size.

196 The Social Contract

If, taking these ideas to their extreme, one argues that, in order to ﬁnd

this mean proportional and form the body of the government, it is, accord-

ing to me, only necessary to take the square root of the number of people, I

would answer that I take that number here only as an example; that the

relationships of which I speak are not measured solely by the number of

men, but in general by the quantity of action, which results from the com-

bination of a multitude of causes; that, moreover, if for the purpose of

expressing myself in fewer words, I borrow for a moment geometrical

terms, I am nevertheless aware that geometrical precision does not exist in

moral quantities.

The government is on a small scale what the body politic which includes

it is on a large scale. It is a moral person endowed with certain faculties,

active like the sovereign, passive like the State, and it can be broken down

into other similar relations from which arises as a consequence a new

proportion, and yet another within this, according to the order if the mag-

istracies, until we come to an indivisible middle term, that is, to a single

leader or supreme magistrate, who may be represented, in the middle of this

progression, as unity between the series of fractions and that of the whole

numbers.

Without getting confused by this multiplication of terms, let us be con-

tent to consider the government as a new body in the State, distinct from the

people and from the sovereign, and intermediate between the two.

There is this essential difference between those two bodies, that the State

exists by itself, while the government exists only through the sovereign.

Thus the prevailing will of the Prince is, or ought to be, only the general

will, or the law; his force is only the public force concentrated in himself; so

soon as he wishes to perform some absolute and independent act, the con-

nection of the whole begins to fall apart. If, lastly, the Prince should happen

to have a particular will more active than that of the sovereign, and if, to

enforce obedience to this particular will, he should use the public force

which is in his hands, in such a manner that there would be so to speak two

sovereigns, the one de jure and the other de facto, the social union would

immediately disappear, and the body politic would be dissolved.

Further, in order that the body of the government may have an existence,

a real life which distinguishes it from the body of the State; so that all its

members may be able to act in concert and fulﬁll the object for which it is

instituted, a particular personality is necessary to it, a feeling common to

its members, a force, a will of its own focused on its preservation. This indi-

vidual existence supposes assemblies, councils, a power of deliberating

Book III: Chapter II 197

and resolving, rights, titles, and privileges which belong to the Prince ex-

clusively, and which render the position of the magistrate more honorable

in proportion as it is more arduous. The difﬁculty lies in the method of

organizing, within the whole, this subordinate whole, in such a way that it

may not weaken the general constitution in strengthening its own; that its

particular force, intended for its own preservation, may always be kept

distinct from the public force, designed for the preservation of the State;

and, in a word, that it may always be ready to sacriﬁce the government to

the people, and not the people to the government.

Moreover, although the artiﬁcial body of the government is the work of

another artiﬁcial body, and has in some respects only a derivative and

subordinate existence, that does not prevent it from acting with more or less

vigor or celerity, from enjoying, so to speak, more or less robust health.

Lastly, without directly departing from the object for which it was in-

stituted, it may deviate from it more or less, according to the manner in

which it is constituted.

From all these differences arise the different relations which the govern-

ment must have with the body of the State, so as to accord with the acciden-

tal and particular relations by which the State itself is modiﬁed. For often

the government that is best in itself will become the most corrupt, unless its

relations are changed so as to redress the defects of the body politic to

which it belongs.

Chapter II

the principle which constitutes the different

forms of government

To explain the general cause of these differences, I must here distinguish the

Prince from the government, as I before distinguished the State from the

sovereign.

The body of the magistracy may be composed of a greater or smaller

number of members. We said that the ratio of the sovereign to the sub-

jects was so much greater as the people were more numerous; and, by an

evident analogy, we can say the same of the government with regard to the

magistrates.

Now, the total force of the government, being always that of the State,

does not vary; from which it follows that the more it uses this force on its

own members, the less remains for acting upon the whole people.

198 The Social Contract

Consequently, the more numerous the magistrates are, the weaker is the

government. As this maxim is fundamental, let us endeavor to explain it

more clearly.

We can distinguish in the person of the magistrate three essentially

different wills; ﬁrst, the will belonging to the individual, concerned only

with his personal advantage; secondly, the common will of the magistrates,

concerned solely with the interest of the Prince, and which may be called

the corporate will, being general in relation to the government, and particu-

lar in relation to the State of which the government forms part; in the third

place, the will of the people, or the sovereign will, which is general both in

relation to the State considered as the whole, and in relation to the govern-

ment considered as part of the whole.

In a perfect system of legislation the particular or individual will should

be null and void; the corporate will belonging to the government quite

subordinate; and consequently the general or sovereign will always domi-

nant, and the sole ruling agency of all the others.

On the other hand, according to the natural order, these different wills

become more active to the extent that they are concentrated. Thus the

general will is always the weakest, the corporate will has the second rank,

and the particular will the ﬁrst of all; so that in the government each mem-

ber is, ﬁrstly, himself, next a magistrate, and then a citizen—a gradation

directly opposed to what the social order requires.

But suppose that the whole government is in the hands of a single man;

then the particular will and the corporate will are perfectly united, and

consequently the latter is in the highest possible degree of intensity. Now, as

it is on the degree of will that the use of force depends, and as the absolute

power of the government does not vary, it follows that the most active

government is that of a single person.

On the other hand, let us unite the government with the legislative

authority; let us make the sovereign the Prince, and all the citizens magis-

trates; then the corporate will, combined with the general will, will be no

more active than the latter, and will leave the particular will in all its force.

Thus the government, always with the same absolute force, will be at its

minimum of relative force or activity.

These relations are incontestable, and other considerations serve still

further to conﬁrm them. We see, for example, that each magistrate is more

active in his body than each citizen is in his, and that consequently the

particular will has much more inﬂuence in the acts of government than in

those of the sovereign; for every magistrate is almost always charged with

some function of government, whereas each citizen, taken by himself, has

Book III: Chapter III 199

no function of sovereignty. Moreover, the larger a State’s territory, the more

its real force is increased, although it does not increase as a result of its size;

but, while the State remains the same, it is useless to increase the number of

magistrates, for the government acquires no greater real force, inasmuch as

this force is that of the State, the quantity of which is always uniform. Thus

the relative force or activity of the government diminishes without its abso-

lute or real force being able to increase.

It is certain, moreover, that the dispatch of business is delayed when more

people are responsible for it; that, in laying too much stress on prudence, we

leave too little to luck; that opportunities are allowed to pass by, and that

owing to excessive deliberation the fruits of deliberation are often lost.

I have just shown that the government is weakened as the number of

magistrates increases, and I have before demonstrated that the more nu-

merous the people is, the more ought the repressive force to be increased.

From which it follows that the ratio between the magistrates and the gov-

ernment ought to be the inverse of the ratio between the subjects and the

sovereign; that is, the more the State expands, the more the government

should contract; so that the number of leaders should diminish as a result of

an increase in the number of the people.

But I speak here only of the relative force of the government, and not of

its rectitude; for, on the other hand, the more numerous the magistracy is,

the more the corporate will approaches the general will; whereas, under a

single magistrate, this same corporate will is, as I have said, only a particu-

lar will. Thus, what is lost on one side can be gained on the other, and the art

of the legislator consists in knowing how to determine the point at which

the force and will of the government, always in reciprocal proportion, are

combined in the ratio most advantageous to the State.

Chapter III

classification of governments

We have seen in the previous chapter why the different kinds or forms of

government are characterized by the number of members that comprise

them; it remains to be seen in the present chapter how this division is made.

The sovereign may, in the ﬁrst place, place the responsibility for the

government in the whole people, or in the majority of the people, in such a

way that there may be more citizens who are magistrates than simple indi-

vidual citizens. We call this form of government a democracy.

Or it may conﬁne the government to a small number, so that there may

200 The Social Contract

be more ordinary citizens than magistrates; and this form bears the name of

aristocracy.

Lastly, it may concentrate the whole government in the hands of a single

magistrate from whom all the rest derive their power. This third form is the

most common, and is called monarchy, or royal government.

We should remark that all these forms, or at least the ﬁrst two, admit of

degrees, and may indeed have a considerable range; for democracy may

embrace the whole people, or be limited to a half. Aristocracy, in its own

way, may conﬁne itself not to a half of the people but to an even smaller

number. Even royalty may undergo some division. Sparta by its constitu-

tion always had two kings; and in the Roman Empire there were as many as

eight Emperors at the same time without it being possible to say that the

Empire was divided. Thus there is a point at which each form of govern-

ment blends with the next; and we see that, under three forms only, the

government may adapt to as many different forms as the State has citizens.

What is more, this same government being in certain respects capable of

subdivision into other parts, one administered in one way, another in an-

other, there may result from combinations of these three forms a multitude

of mixed forms, each of which can be multiplied by all the simple forms.

For ages there has been much debate about the best form of government,

without considering the fact that each of them is the best in certain cases,

and the worst in others.

If, in the different States, the number of the supreme magistrates must be

in inverse ratio to that of the citizens, it follows that, in general, democratic

government is suitable to small States, aristocracy to those of moderate

size, and monarchy to large ones. This rule stems directly from the princi-

ple. But how is it possible to estimate the multitude of circumstances which

may produce exceptions?

Chapter IV

democracy

He who makes the law knows better than any one how it should be executed

and interpreted. It would seem, then, that there could be no better constitu-

tion than one in which the executive power is united with the legislative; but

it is that very circumstance which makes a democratic government inade-

quate in certain respects, because things which ought to be speciﬁed are not,

and because the Prince and the sovereign, being the same person, only form

as it were a government without government.

Book III: Chapter IV 201

It is not correct that the person who makes the laws execute them, nor

that the body of the people divert its attention from general considerations

in order to bestow it on particular objects. Nothing is more dangerous than

the inﬂuence of private interests on public affairs; and the abuse of the laws

by the government is a lesser evil than the corruption of the legislator,

which is the infallible result of the pursuit of private interests. For when the

State is changed in its substance, all reform becomes impossible. A people

that would never abuse the government would likewise never abuse its

independence; a people that always governed well would not need to be

governed.

Taking the term in its strict sense, there never has existed, and never will

exist, any true democracy. It is contrary to the natural order that the majority

should govern and that the minority should be governed. It is impossible to

imagine the people remaining in perpetual assembly to attend to public

affairs, and it is readily apparent that commissions could not be established

for that purpose without changing the form of administration.

In fact, I think I can posit as a principle that when the functions of

government are shared among several magistrates, the least numerous ac-

quire, sooner or later, the greatest authority, if only on account of the facility

with which a smaller number of men can transact business.

How difﬁcult it is, moreover, to combine all the features that this kind of

government requires! First, a very small State, in which the people may be

readily assembled, and in which every citizen can easily know all the

others; secondly, great simplicity of customs and morals, which prevents a

multiplicity of issues and thorny debates; next, considerable equality in

class and fortune, without which equality in rights and authority could not

long survive; lastly, little or no luxury, for luxury is either the result of

wealth or makes it necessary; luxury corrupts simultaneously the rich and

the poor, the former by ownership, the latter by coveting; it betrays the

country to indolence and vanity; it deprives the State of all its citizens in

order to enslave them to one to another, and all to opinion.

That is why a famous author posited virtue as the founding principle of a

republic, for all these conditions could not survive without virtue; but, by

not making the necessary distinctions, this brilliant genius often lacked

precision and sometimes clarity, and did not see that the sovereign authority

being everywhere the same, the same principle ought to have a role in every

well-constituted State, in a greater or lesser degree, it is true, according to

the form of government.

Let us add that there is no government so subject to civil wars and

internal agitations as the democratic or popular, because there is none

202 The Social Contract

which tends so strongly and so constantly to change its form, none which

demands more vigilance and courage to be maintained in its own form. It is

especially in this constitution that the citizen should arm himself with

strength and steadfastness, and say every day of his life from the bottom of

his heart what a virtuous Palatine* said in the Diet of Poland: Malo peri-

culosam libertatem quam quietum servitium.

If there were a nation of gods, it would be governed democratically. So

perfect a government is unsuited to men.

Chapter V

aristocracy

We have here two very different moral persons, that is, the government and

the sovereign; and consequently two general wills, one having reference to

all the citizens, the other only to the members of the administration. Thus,

although the government can regulate its internal policy as it pleases, it can

never speak to the people except in the name of the sovereign, that is, in the

name of the people themselves. This must never be forgotten.

The earliest societies were aristocratically governed. The heads of fam-

ilies deliberated among themselves about public affairs. The young men

yielded readily to the authority of experience. Hence the names priests,

elders, senate, gerontes. The Indians of North America are still governed in

this way at the present time, and are very well governed.

But in proportion as the inequality due to institutions prevailed over

natural inequality, wealth or power

†

was preferred to age, and aristocracy

became elective. Finally, the power transmitted with the father’s property to

the children, rendering the families patrician, made the government heredi-

tary, and people beheld senators who were only twenty years old.

There are, then, three kinds of aristocracy—natural, elective, and hered-

itary. The ﬁrst is suitable only for simple nations; the third is the worst of all

governments. The second is the best; it is aristocracy in the true sense.

Other than the advantage of the distinction between the two powers,

aristocracy has that of the choice of its members; for in a popular govern-

ment all the citizens are born magistrates; but this one limits them to a small

* The Palatine of Posnania, father of the King of Poland, Duke of Lorraine.

†

It is clear that the word optimates among the ancients did not mean the best, but the

most powerful.

Book III: Chapter V 203

number, and they become magistrates by election only;* a method by

which integrity, intelligence, experience, and all other grounds of prefer-

ment and public esteem are so many fresh guarantees that men will be

wisely governed.

Further, assemblies are more easily convened; issues are better dis-

cussed and are dispatched with greater order and diligence; while the credit

of the State is better maintained abroad by venerable senators, than by an

unknown or base multitude.

In a word, it is the best and most natural order of things that the wisest

should govern the multitude, when we are sure that they will govern it for

its advantage and not for their own. We should not pointlessly multiply

means, nor ask twenty thousand men to do what a hundred chosen men can

do still better. But we must note that the corporate interest begins here to

steer the public force in a lesser degree according to the rule of the general

will, and that another inevitable propensity deprives the laws of a part of the

executive power.

With regard to special expediencies, a State must not be so small, nor a

people so simple and upright, that the execution of the laws follows imme-

diately upon the public will, as in a good democracy. Nor again must a

nation be so large that its leaders, who are dispersed in order to govern it,

install themselves as sovereigns, each in his own province, and begin by

making themselves independent so as at last to become masters.

But if aristocracy requires fewer virtues than popular government, it also

requires others that are peculiarly its own, such as moderation among the

rich and contentment among the poor; for a rigorous equality would seem to

be out of place in it, and was not even observed in Sparta.

Besides, inasmuch as this form of government includes a certain in-

equality of fortune, it would be well in general that the administration of

public affairs be entrusted to those who are best able to devote their whole

time to it, but not, as Aristotle maintains, that the rich should always be

preferred. On the contrary, it is important that an opposite choice sometimes

teach the people that there are, in men’s personal merits, reasons for prefer-

ence more important than wealth.

* It is very important to regulate by law the form of election of magistrates; for, in

leaving it to the will of the Prince, it is impossible to avoid falling into hereditary

aristocracy, as happened in the republics of Venice and Berne. In consequence, the ﬁrst

has long been a decaying State, but the second is maintained by the extreme wisdom of its

Senate; it is a very honorable and a very dangerous exception.

204 The Social Contract

Chapter VI

monarchy

We have hitherto considered the Prince as a moral and collective person

united by the force of the laws, and as the depositary of the executive power

in the State. We now have to consider this power concentrated in the hands

of a natural person, of a real man, who alone has a right to use it according

to the laws. He is what is called a monarch or a king.

Quite the reverse of the other forms of administration, in which a collec-

tive being represents an individual, in this one an individual represents a

collective being; so that the moral unity that constitutes it is at the same time

a physical unity in which all the powers that the law combines in the other

with so much effort are combined naturally.

Thus the will of the people, the will of the Prince, the public force of the

State, and the particular force of the government, all obey the same motive

power; all the parts of the machine are in the same hand, everything moves

toward the same end; there are no opposing movements that counteract one

another, and no kind of constitution can be imagined in which more action

is produced with less effort. Archimedes, quietly seated on the shore, and

launching without difﬁculty a large vessel, represents to me a skillful mon-

arch, governing from his cabinet his vast States, and, while he appears

motionless, setting everything in motion.

But if there is no government that has more vigor, there is none in which

the particular will has more sway and more easily governs others. Every-

thing moves toward the same end, it is true; but this end is not the public

welfare, and the very power of the administration turns continually to the

prejudice of the State.

Kings wish to be absolute, and from afar men shout to them that the best

way to become so is to make themselves beloved by their people. This

maxim is very ﬁne, and also very true in certain respects; unfortunately it

will always be ridiculed in royal circles. Power which springs from the

affection of the people is doubtless the greatest, but it is precarious and

conditional; princes will never be satisﬁed with it. The best kings wish to

have the power to be wicked if they please, without ceasing to be masters. A

political sermonizer will tell them in vain that, the strength of the people

being their own, it is their greatest interest that the people ﬂourish, nu-

merous, and formidable; they know very well that that is not true. Their

personal interest is, in the ﬁrst place, that the people should be weak and

miserable, and should never be able to resist them. Supposing all the sub-

jects always perfectly submissive, I admit that it would then be the Prince’s

Book III: Chapter VI 205

interest that the people should be powerful, in order that this power, being

his own, might render him formidable to his neighbors; but inasmuch as this

interest is only secondary and subordinate, and as the two suppositions are

incompatible, it is natural that princes should always give preference to the

maxim that is most immediately useful to them. It is this that Samuel

insisted on to the Hebrews; it is this that Machiavelli clearly demonstrated.

While pretending to give lessons to kings, he gave great ones to peoples.

The Prince of Machiavelli is the book for republicans.*

We have found, by general considerations, that monarchy is suited only

to large States; and we shall ﬁnd this again by examining monarchy itself.

The more numerous the public administrative body is, the more does the

ratio of the Prince to the subjects diminish and approach equality, so that

this ratio is unity or equality itself, in a democracy. This same ratio in-

creases in proportion as the government contracts, and is at its maximum

when the government is in the hands of a single person. Then the distance

between the Prince and the people is too great, and the State lacks cohesion.

In order to unify it, then, intermediate orders, princes, grandees, and nobles

are required to ﬁll them. Now, nothing at all of this kind is suitable for a

small State, which would be ruined by all these orders.

But if it is difﬁcult for a large State to be well governed, it is much more

so for it to be well governed by a single man; and every one knows what

happens when the king appoints substitutes.

One essential and inevitable defect, which will always make a monar-

chical government inferior to a republican one, is that in the latter the public

voice hardly ever raises to the highest posts any but enlightened and capa-

ble men, who ﬁll them honorably; whereas those who succeed in monar-

chies are most frequently only petty mischief-makers, petty crooks, petty

intriguers, whose petty talents, which enable them to climb to high posts in

courts, only serve to show the public their ineptitude as soon as they have

attained them. The people are much less mistaken about their choice than

the Prince is; and a man of real merit is almost as rare in a royal ministry as a

fool at the head of a republican government. Therefore, when by some

* Machiavelli was an honorable man and a good citizen; but, attached to the house of

the Medici, he was forced, during the oppression of his country, to conceal his love for

liberty. The mere choice of his execrable hero sufﬁciently manifests his secret intention;

and the opposition between the maxims of his book the Prince and those of his Dis-

courses on Titus Livius and his History of Florence shows that this profound politician

has had hitherto only superﬁcial or corrupt readers. The court of Rome has strictly

prohibited his book; I certainly believe it, for it is that court which he most clearly depicts.

206 The Social Contract

fortunate chance one of these born rulers takes the helm of affairs in a

monarchy almost wrecked by such a ﬁne set of ministers, it is quite as-

tonishing what resources he ﬁnds, something quite epoch-making.

So that a monarchical State might be well-governed, it would be neces-

sary for its greatness or size to be in proportion to the abilities of the person

who governs. It is easier to conquer than to rule. With a sufﬁcient lever, the

world can be moved by a ﬁnger; but to hold it up the shoulders of Hercules

are required. However small a State may be, the Prince is almost always too

small for it. When, on the contrary, it happens that the State is too small for

its leader, something very rare, it is still badly governed, because the leader,

always pursuing his own great designs, forgets the interests of the people,

and renders them no less unhappy by the abuse of his abundant abilities,

than an inferior leader by his lack of talent. It would be necessary, so to

speak, for a kingdom to be enlarged or contracted in every reign, according

to the capacity of the Prince; whereas, the talents of a senate have more

deﬁnite limits, the State may have permanent boundaries, and the admin-

istration prosper equally well.

The most obvious disadvantage of the government of a single person is

the lack of that continual succession which creates in the two others an

uninterrupted chain. One king having died, another is necessary; elections

leave dangerous intervals; they are stormy; and unless the citizens are of a

disinterestedness, an integrity, something this government hardly encour-

ages, intrigue and corruption sweep in. It would be hard for a man to whom

the State has been sold not to sell it in his turn, and indemnify himself out of

the helpless for the money which the powerful have extorted from him.

Sooner or later everything becomes venal under such an administration,

and the peace which is then enjoyed under a king is worse than the disorder

of an interregnum.

What has been done to prevent these evils? Crowns have been made

hereditary in certain families; and an order of succession has been estab-

lished which prevents any dispute on the demise of kings; that is to say, the

inconvenience of regencies being substituted for that of elections, an ap-

pearance of tranquillity has been preferred to a wise administration, and

men have preferred to risk having as their leaders children, monsters, and

imbeciles, rather than have a dispute about the choice of good kings. They

have not considered that in thus exposing themselves to the risk of this

alternative, they set themselves up for failure. That was a very sensible

answer of Dionysius the younger, to whom his father, in criticizing him for

a dishonorable action, said: ‘‘Did I set you the example in this?’’ ‘‘Ah!’’

replied the son, ‘‘your father was not king.’’

Book III: Chapter VI 207

All things conspire to deprive of justice and reason a man brought up to

govern others. Much trouble is taken, so it is said, to teach young princes

the art of reigning; this education does not appear to help them. It would be

better to begin by teaching them the art of obeying. The greatest kings

whom history has celebrated were not trained to rule; that is a science which

men are never less masters of than after excessive study of it, and it is better

acquired by obeying than by ruling. Nam utilissimus idem ac brevissimus

bonarum malarumque rerum delectus, cogitare quid aut nolueris sub alio

principe, aut volueris.

A result of this lack of coherence is the instability of royal government,

which, being regulated sometimes on one plan, sometimes on another,

according to the character of the reigning Prince or that of the persons who

reign for him, cannot long pursue a deﬁnite aim or a consistent course of

conduct, a mutability which always makes the State ﬂuctuate between

maxim and maxim, project and project, and which does not exist in other

governments, where the Prince is always the same. So we see that, in

general, if there is more cunning in a court, there is more wisdom in a

senate, and that republics pursue their ends by more steadfast and regular

methods; whereas every revolution in a royal ministry produces one in the

State, the maxim common to all ministers, and to almost all kings, being to

reverse in every respect the acts of their predecessors.

From this same lack of coherence issues the solution of a sophism very

familiar to royal politicians; this is not only to compare civil government

with domestic government, and the Prince with the father of a family, an

error already refuted, but, further, to bestow liberally on this magistrate all

the virtues he might need, and always to assume that the Prince is what he

ought to be—a supposition on which is based the idea that royal govern-

ment is clearly preferable to every other, because it is without doubt the

strongest, and because it only lacks a corporate will that corresponds to the

general will.

But if, according to Plato, a king by nature is so unusual a personage,

how many times will nature and fortune conspire to crown him? And if

royal education necessarily corrupts those who receive it, what should be

expected from a succession of men trained to rule? It is, then, voluntary

self-deception to confuse royal government with that of a good king. To see

what this government is in itself, we must consider it under inept or wicked

princes; for such will come to the throne, or the throne will make them such.

These difﬁculties have not escaped our authors, but they have not been

confused by them. The remedy, they say, is to obey without murmuring; God

gives bad kings in His wrath, and we must endure them as chastisements of

208 The Social Contract

heaven. Such talk is doubtless edifying, but I am inclined to think it would

be more appropriate in a pulpit than in a book on politics. What should we

say of a physician who promises miracles, and whose whole art consists in

exhorting the sick man to be patient? We know well that when we have a bad

government it must be endured; the question is to ﬁnd a good one.

Chapter VII

mixed governments

In truth, there is no simple government. A single leader must have subordi-

nate magistrates; a popular government must have a leader. Thus, in the

division of executive power, there is always a gradation from the greater

number to the less, with this difference, that sometimes the majority de-

pends on the minority, and sometimes the minority on the majority.

Sometimes there is an equal division, either when the constituent parts

are in mutual dependence, as in the government of England; or when the

authority of each part is independent, but imperfect, as in Poland. This latter

form is bad, because there is no unity in the government, and the State lacks

cohesion.

Is a simple or a mixed government the better? A question much debated

among political thinkers, and one to which the same answer must be made

that I have made before about every form of government.

The simple government is the better in itself, for the reason that it is

simple. But when the executive power is not sufﬁciently dependent on the

legislative, that is, when there is a closer rapport between the Prince and the

sovereign than between the people and the Prince, this defective relation-

ship must be remedied by dividing the government; for then all its parts

have no less authority over the subjects, and their division renders them all

together less strong against the sovereign.

The same defect is also guarded against by the establishment of inter-

mediate magistrates, who, leaving the government in its entirety, only serve

to balance the two powers and maintain their respective rights. Then the

government is not mixed, but moderate.

The opposite defect can be guarded against by similar means, and, when

the government is too lax, tribunals may be erected to concentrate it. That is

customary in all democracies. In the ﬁrst case the government is divided in

order to weaken it, and in the second in order to strengthen it; for the

maximum of strength and also of weakness is found in simple governments,

while the mixed forms give a medium strength.

Book III: Chapter VIII 209

Chapter VIII

that all forms of government are not suited

for every country

Liberty, not being a fruit of all climates, is not within the reach of all

peoples. The more we consider this principle established by Montesquieu,

the more do we perceive its truth; the more it is contested, the greater

opportunity is given to establish it by new proofs.

In all the governments of the world, the public person consumes, but

produces nothing. From where, then, comes the substance it consumes?

From the labor of its members. It is the superﬂuity of individuals that

supplies the necessaries of the public. Hence it follows that the civil State

can subsist only so long as men’s labor produces more than they need.

Now this excess is not the same in all countries of the world. In several it

is considerable, in others moderate, in others nothing, in others a minus

quantity. This proportion depends on the fertility due to climate, on the kind

of labor which the soil requires, on the nature of its products, on the physi-

cal strength of its inhabitants, on the greater or less consumption that is

necessary to them, and on several other like proportions of which it is

composed.

On the other hand, all governments are not of the same nature; there are

some more or less wasteful; and the differences are based on this other

principle, that the more the public contributions are distanced from their

source, the more burdensome they are. We must not measure this burden by

the amount of the taxes, but by the distance they have to travel in order to

return to the hands from which they have come. When this circulation is

prompt and well-established, it matters not whether little or much is paid;

the people are always rich, and the ﬁnances are always prosperous. On the

other hand, however little the people may contribute, if this little does not

revert back to them, they are soon exhausted by constantly giving; the State

is never rich and the people are always in beggary.

It follows from this that the more the distance between the people and

the government is increased, the more burdensome do the taxes become;

therefore, in a democracy the people are least encumbered, in an aristocracy

they are more so, and in a monarchy they bear the greatest weight. Mon-

archy, then, is suited only to wealthy nations; aristocracy, to States moderate

both in wealth and size; democracy, to small and poor States.

Indeed, the more we reﬂect on this, the more we ﬁnd in this the dif-

ference between free and monarchical States. In the ﬁrst, everything is

used for the common good; in the others, public and private resources are

210 The Social Contract

reciprocal, and the former are increased by the diminution of the latter;

lastly, instead of governing subjects in order to make them happy, despotism

renders them miserable in order to govern them.

There are, then, in every climate natural causes by which we can assign

the form of government which is adapted to the nature of the climate, and

even say what kind of inhabitants the country should have.

Unfruitful and barren places, where the produce is not commensurate

with the labor, ought to remain uncultivated and abandoned, or should only

be peopled by savages; places where men’s toil yields only bare necessities

ought to be inhabited by barbarous nations; in them any polity would be an

impossibility. Places where the excess of the produce over the labor is

moderate are suitable for free nations; those in which abundant and fertile

soil yields much produce for little labor are willing to be governed monar-

chically, in order that the superﬂuity of the subjects may be consumed by

the luxuries of the Prince; for it is better that this excess be absorbed by the

government than squandered by private persons. There are exceptions, I

know; but these exceptions themselves prove the rule, in that, sooner or

later, they produce revolutions which restore things to their natural order.

We should always distinguish general laws from the particular causes

that may modify their effects. If all southern lands were covered with

republics, and all northern lands with despotic States, it would not be less

true that, through the inﬂuence of climate, despotism is suitable to warm

countries, barbarism to cold countries, and a good polity to intermediate

regions. I see, however, that while the principle is accepted, its application

may be disputed; it will be said that some cold countries are very fertile, and

some southern ones very unfruitful. But this is a difﬁculty only for those

who do not examine the matter in all its aspects. It is necessary, as I have

already said, to reckon those connected with labor, resources, consump-

tion, etc.

Let us suppose that the product of two districts equal in area is in the

ratio of ﬁve to ten. If the inhabitants of the former consume four and those

of the latter nine parts, the surplus product of the ﬁrst will be one-ﬁfth, and

that of the second one-tenth. The ratio between these two surpluses being

then inversely as that of the produce of each, the district that yields only ﬁve

will give a surplus double that of the district which produces ten.

But it is not a question of a doubled product, and I do not think that any

one dare, in general, place the fertility of cold countries even on an equal

par with that of warm countries. Let us, however, assume this equality; let

us, if you will, put England on the scale with Sicily, and Poland with Egypt;

Book III: Chapter VIII 211

more to the south we shall have Africa and India; more to the north we shall

have nothing. To achieve equality in product, what are the differences in

cultivation? In Sicily it sufﬁces to scratch the soil; in England what toil is

needed to till it! But where more exertion is required to yield the same

product, the surplus must necessarily be very small.

Consider, besides this, that the same number of men consume much less

in warm countries. The climate demands that people be moderate to be

healthy; Europeans who want to live as at home all die of dysentery and

dyspepsia. ‘‘We are,’’ says Chardin, ‘‘carnivorous beasts, wolves, in com-

parison with Asiatics. Some attribute the moderation of the Persians to the

fact that their country is scantily cultivated; I believe, on the contrary, that

their country is not very abundant in provisions because the inhabitants

need very little. If their frugality,’’ he continues, ‘‘resulted from the poverty

of the country, it would be only the poor who would eat little, whereas it is

the people generally; and more or less would be consumed in each prov-

ince, according to the fertility of the country, whereas the same abstemious-

ness is found throughout the kingdom. They pride themselves greatly on

their mode of living, saying that it is only necessary to look at their com-

plexions, to see how much superior they are to those of Christians. Indeed,

the complexions of the Persians are smooth; they have beautiful skin, deli-

cate and clear; while the complexions of their subjects, the Armenians, who

live in European fashion, are rough and blotched, and their bodies are

coarse and heavy.’’

The nearer we approach the Equator, the less the people have to live on.

They scarcely eat any meat; rice, maize, couscous, millet, cassava, are their

ordinary foods. There are in India millions of men whose diet does not cost

a half-penny a day. We see even in Europe palpable differences in appetite

between northern and southern nations. A Spaniard can live for eight days

on a German’s dinner. In countries where men are most voracious luxury

revolves around appetite; in England it is displayed in a table loaded with

meats; in Italy you are regaled with sugar and ﬂowers.

Luxury in dress presents similar differences. In climates where the

changes of the seasons are sudden and violent, garments are better and

simpler; in those where people dress only for ornament, splendor is more

sought after than utility, for clothes themselves are a luxury. In Naples you

will see men every day walking to Posilippo with gold-embroidered coats,

and no stockings. It is the same with regard to buildings; everything is

sacriﬁced to magniﬁcence when there is nothing to fear from the climate. In

Paris and in London people must be warmly and comfortably housed; in

212 The Social Contract

Madrid they have superb drawing-rooms, but no windows that shut, while

they sleep in mere closets.

Food is much more substantial and nutritious in warm countries; this is a

third difference which cannot fail to inﬂuence the second. Why do people

eat so many vegetables in Italy? Because they are good, nourishing, and

ﬂavorful. In France, where they are fertilized only with water, they are not

nourishing and count almost for nothing on the table; they do not, however,

occupy less soil, and they cost at least as much labor to cultivate. We know

from experience that the wheat of Barbary, inferior in other respects to that

of France, yields much more ﬂour, and that the wheat of France yields more

than the wheat of the north. From this we may infer that a similar gradation

is observable generally, in the same direction, from the Equator to the Pole.

Now is it not a clear disadvantage to have in an equal quantity of produce a

smaller quantity of nutrition?

To all these different reﬂections I want to add one that springs from, and

reinforces, them; it is that warm countries have less need of inhabitants than

cold countries, but would be able to maintain a greater number; hence a

double surplus is produced, always to the advantage of despotism. The

greater the surface occupied by the same number of inhabitants, the more

difﬁcult do rebellions become, because conspiracies cannot be concerted

promptly and secretly, and because it is always easy for the government to

discover the plans and cut off communications. But the more closely

packed a numerous population is, the less power a government has to usurp

the sovereignty; the leaders deliberate as securely in their ofﬁces as the

Prince in his council, and the multitude assemble in the town squares as

quickly as the troops in their quarters. The advantage, then, of a tyrannical

government lies in this, that it can act from great distances. With the help of

its collaborators, its power increases with the distance, like that of levers.*

That of the people, on the other hand, acts only when concentrated; it

evaporates and disappears as it extends, like the effect of gunpowder scat-

tered on the ground, which takes ﬁre only grain by grain. The least popu-

lous countries are thus the best adapted for tyranny; wild beasts reign

only in deserts.

* This does not contradict what I said before (Book II, chapter ix) on the inconve-

niences of large States; for there it was a question of the authority of the government over

its members, and here it is a question of its power against its subjects. Its scattered

members serve as points of support to it for operating at a distance upon the people, but it

has no point of support for acting on its members themselves. Thus, the length of the lever

is the cause of its weakness in the one case, and of its strength in the other.

Book III: Chapter IX 213

Chapter IX

the signs of a good government

When, then, it is ﬁnally asked which is the best government, an insoluble,

undeterminable question is posed; or, if you will, it has as many correct

solutions as there are possible combinations in the absolute and relative

situations of nations.

But if it were asked by what sign it can be known whether a given people

is well or badly governed, that would be a different matter, and the question

of fact might be determined.

It is, however, not settled, because every one wishes to decide it in his

own way. Subjects extol the public tranquillity, citizens the liberty of indi-

viduals; the former prefer security of property, the latter, that of persons; the

former think that the best government is the most authoritarian, the latter

maintain that it is the mildest; one party wants crimes to be punished, the

other wants them to be prevented; one party thinks it well to be feared by

their neighbors, the other party prefers to be unacquainted with them; one

party is satisﬁed when money circulates, the other party demands that the

people have bread. Even if there were agreement on these and other similar

points, would we know more? Since moral quantities lack a precise mode of

measurement, even if we agreed on the sign, how could we do so about the

valuation of it?

For my part, I am always astonished that people fail to recognize so

simple a sign, or that they should have the insincerity not to agree about it.

What is the object of political association? It is the security and prosperity

of its members. And what is the surest sign that they are safe and pros-

perous? It is their number and population. Do not, then, go and seek else-

where for this contentious sign. All other things being equal, the gov-

ernment under which, without external aids, without naturalizations, and

without colonies, the citizens increase and multiply most, is infallibly the

best. That under which a people decreases and decays is the worst. Statisti-

cians, it is now your affair; count, measure, compare.*

* On the same principle must be judged the centuries which deserve preference in

respect of the prosperity of the human race. Those in which literature and art were seen to

ﬂourish have been too much admired, without the secret object of their cultivation being

penetrated, without their fatal consequences being considered: Idque apud imperitos

humanitas vocabatur, quum pars servitutis esset. Shall we never detect in the maxims of

books the gross self-interest which makes the authors speak? No, whatever they may say,

when, notwithstanding its brilliancy, a country is being depopulated, it is untrue that all

214 The Social Contract

Chapter X

the abuse of government and its tendency to

degenerate

As the private will acts incessantly against the general will, so the govern-

ment makes a continual effort against the sovereignty. The more this effort

is increased, the more the constitution is altered; and as there is no other

corporate will which, by resisting that of the Prince, creates a balance with

it, sooner or later the Prince oppresses the sovereign and violates the social

treaty. Therein is the inherent and inevitable vice which, right from the birth

of the body politic, tends ineluctably to destroy it, just as old age and death

ultimately destroy the human body.

There are two general ways by which a government degenerates, that is,

when it contracts, or when the State is dissolved.

The government contracts when it passes from the majority to the mi-

nority, that is, from democracy to aristocracy, and from aristocracy to roy-

alty. That is its natural tendency.* If it retrograded from the minority to the

majority, it might be said to weaken; but this inverse progress is impossible.

goes well, and it is not enough that a poet should have an income of 100,000 livres for his

epoch to be the best of all. The apparent repose and tranquillity of the chief men must be

regarded less than the welfare of nations as a whole, and especially that of the most

populous States. Hail lays waste a few cantons, but it rarely causes scarcity. Riots and

civil wars greatly startle the chief men; but they do not produce the real misfortunes of

nations, which may even be abated, while it is being disputed who shall tyrannize over

them. It is from their permanent condition that their real prosperity or calamities spring;

when all is left crushed under the yoke, it is then that everything perishes; it is then that the

chief men, destroying them at their leisure, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

When the broils of the great agitated the kingdom of France, and the coadjutor of Paris

carried a poniard in his pocket to the Parlement, that did not prevent the French nation

from living happily and harmoniously in free and honorable ease. Greece of old ﬂour-

ished in the midst of the most cruel wars; blood ﬂowed there in streams, and the whole

country was covered with men. It seemed, said Machiavelli, that amid murders, proscrip-

tions, and civil wars, our republic became more powerful; the virtues of its citizens, their

manners, their independence, were more effectual in strengthening it than all its dissen-

sions had been in weakening it. A little agitation gives energy to men’s minds, and what

makes the race truly prosperous is not so much peace as liberty.

* The slow formation and the progress of Venice in her lagoons present a notable

example of this succession; it is indeed astonishing that, after more than twelve hundred

Book III: Chapter X 215

In reality, the government never changes its form except when its de-

pleted energy leaves it too weak to preserve itself; and if it becomes still

more weakened as it expands, its strength will be annihilated, and it will be

unable to survive. We must therefore concentrate the energy as it dwindles;

otherwise the State that it sustains will fall into ruin.

The dissolution of the State may occur in two ways.

Firstly, when the Prince no longer administers the State in accordance

with the laws; and, secondly, when he usurps the sovereign power. Then a

remarkable change takes place—the State, and not the government, con-

years, the Venetians seem to be still only in the second stage, which began with the Serrar

di Consiglio in 1198. As for the ancient Doges, with whom they are reproached, whatever

the Squittinio della libertà veneta may say, it is proved that they were not their sovereigns.

People will not fail to bring forward as an objection to my views the Roman Republic,

which followed, it will be said, a course quite contrary, passing from monarchy to aristoc-

racy, and from aristocracy to democracy. I am very far from regarding it in this way.

The ﬁrst institution of Romulus was a mixed government, which speedily degener-

ated into despotism. From peculiar causes the State perished before its time, as we see a

newborn babe die before attaining manhood. The expulsion of the Tarquins was the real

epoch of the birth of the Republic. But it did not at ﬁrst assume a regular form, because,

through not abolishing the patrician order, only a half of the work was done. For, in this

way, the hereditary aristocracy, which is the worst of legitimate administrations, remain-

ing in conﬂict with the democracy, the form of the government, always uncertain and

ﬂuctuating, was ﬁxed, as Machiavelli has shown, only on the institution of the tribunes;

not till then was there a real government and a true democracy. Indeed, the people then

were not only sovereign, but also magistrates and judges; the Senate was only a subordi-

nate tribunal for moderating and concentrating the government; and the consuls them-

selves, although patricians, although chief magistrates, although generals with absolute

authority in war, were in Rome only the presidents of the people.

From that time, moreover, the government seemed to follow its natural inclination, and

tend strongly to aristocracy. The patriciate abolishing itself as it were, the aristocracy was

no longer in the body of patricians as it is at Venice and Genoa, but in the body of the Senate,

composed of patricians and plebeians, and also in the body of tribunes when they began to

usurp an active power; for words make no difference in things, and when a nation has chiefs

to govern for them, whatever name those chiefs bear, they always form an aristocracy.

From the abuses of aristocracy sprang the civil wars and the triumvirate. Sylla, Julius

Cæsar, Augustus, became in fact real monarchs; and at length, under the despotism of

Tiberius, the State was broken up. Roman history, then, does not belie my principle, but

conﬁrms it.

216 The Social Contract

tracts; I mean that the State dissolves, and that another is formed within it,

which is comprised only of the members of the government, and which is

for the rest of the people nothing more than their master and their tyrant. So

that as soon as the government usurps the sovereignty, the social compact is

broken, and all the ordinary citizens, rightfully regaining their natural lib-

erty, are forced, but not morally bound, to obey.

The same thing occurs also when the members of the government usurp

individually the power that they ought to exercise only collectively, which

is no less a violation of the laws, and creates still greater disorder. Then

there are, so to speak, as many Princes as magistrates; and the State, not less

divided than the government, perishes or changes its form.

When the State is broken up, the violation of the government, whatever

it may be, takes the common name of anarchy. To be clear, democracy

degenerates into ochlocracy, aristocracy into oligarchy; I should add that

royalty degenerates into tyranny; but this last word is equivocal and re-

quires explanation.

In the vulgar sense a tyrant is a king who governs with violence and

without regard to justice and the laws. In the strict sense, a tyrant is an

individual who arrogates to himself the royal authority without having a

right to it. It is in this sense that the Greeks understood the word tyrant; they

bestowed it equally on good and bad Princes whose authority was not

legitimate.* Thus tyrant and usurper are two perfectly synonymous words.

To give different names to different things, I call the usurper of royal

authority a tyrant, and the usurper of sovereign power a despot. The tyrant

is he who, contrary to the laws, takes it upon himself to govern according to

the laws; the despot is he who sets himself above those very laws. Thus the

tyrant cannot be a despot, but the despot is always a tyrant.

Chapter XI

the dissolution of the body politic

Such is the natural and inevitable tendency of the best constituted govern-

ments. If Sparta and Rome perished, what State can hope to endure forever?

If we wish to form an enduring constitution, let us, then, not dream of

* Omnes enim et habentur et dicuntur tyranni, qui potestate utuntur perpetua in ea

civitate quae libertate usa est. (Corn. Nep., in Miltiad., cap. viii) It is true that Aristotle

(Mor. Nicom., Book VIII, cap. x) distinguishes the tyrant from the king, by the circum-

stance that the former governs for his own beneﬁt, and the latter only for the beneﬁt of his

Book III: Chapter XI 217

making it eternal. To succeed we must not attempt the impossible, nor

ﬂatter ourselves that we can bestow on the work of men a permanence that

human things cannot attain.

The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die from its birth,

and contains in itself the causes of its own destruction. But both may have a

more or less robust constitution, that can preserve them for a long while.

The constitution of man is the work of nature; that of the State is the work of

art. It is not men’s prerogative to prolong their lives; it is their prerogative to

prolong the life of the State as long as possible, by giving it the best

constitution possible. The best constituted will come to an end, but later

than another, unless some unforeseen accident brings about its premature

destruction.

The principle of political life is in the sovereign authority. The legisla-

tive power is the heart of the State; the executive power is its brain, giving

movement to all the parts. The brain might be paralyzed and yet the individ-

ual can still live. A man might be an imbecile but still live; but as soon as the

heart stops, the animal dies.

It is not by laws that the State survives, but by the legislative power. The

law of yesterday is not binding today; but tacit consent is presumed from

silence, and the sovereign is supposed to conﬁrm continually the laws it

does not abrogate when able to do so. Whatever it once declared that it

wills, it wills so always, unless the declaration is revoked.

Why, then, do people show so much respect for ancient laws? That is

exactly the reason. We are right to believe that it is the very excellence of

ancient laws that has enabled them to survive so long; if the sovereign had

not recognized them as salutary, it would have revoked them a thousand

times. That is why, far from being weakened, the laws are ever acquiring

fresh vigor in every well constituted State; the prejudice in favor of antiq-

uity makes them more revered every day; while, wherever laws are weak-

ened as they grow old, this fact proves that there is no longer any legislative

power, and that the State no longer lives.

subjects; but besides the fact that, in general, all the Greek authors have taken the word

tyrant in a different sense, as appears especially from Xenophon’s Hiero, it would follow

from Aristotle’s distinction that, since the beginning of the world, not a single king has yet

existed.

218 The Social Contract

Chapter XII

how the sovereign authority is maintained

The sovereign, having no other force than the legislative power, acts only

through the laws; and the laws being nothing but authentic acts of the general

will, the sovereign can act only when the people are assembled. A conven-

tion of the people! People will say: What a fantasy! It is a fantasy today; but it

was not so two thousand years ago. Have men changed their nature?

The limits of the possible in moral things are less narrow than we think; it

is our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices, that shrink them. Sordid souls

do not believe in great men; vile slaves smile mockingly at the word liberty.

From what has been done let us consider what can be done. I shall not

speak of the ancient republics of Greece; but the Roman Republic was, it

seems to me, a great State, and the city of Rome a great city. The last census

in Rome showed that there were 400,000 citizens bearing arms, and the last

census of the Empire showed more than 4,000,000 citizens, without includ-

ing subjects, foreigners, women, children, and slaves.

What a difﬁculty, we might suppose, there would be in assembling fre-

quently the enormous population of the capital and its environs. Yet few

weeks passed without the Roman people being assembled, even several

times. Not only did they exercise the rights of sovereignty, but a part of the

rights of government. They discussed certain issues and adjudicated certain

problems, and in the public assembly the whole people were almost as often

magistrates as citizens.

By going back to the early times of nations, we would ﬁnd that the

majority of the ancient governments, even monarchical ones, like those of

the Macedonians and the Franks, had similar councils. Be that as it may, this

single incontestable fact answers all objections; inference from the actual to

the possible appears to me sound.

Chapter XIII

how the sovereign authority is maintained

(continued)

It is not sufﬁcient for the assembled people to have, at one point in time,

determined the constitution of the State by giving their sanction to a body of

laws; it is not sufﬁcient for them to have established a permanent govern-

ment, or to have once and for all provided for the election of magistrates.

Besides the extraordinary assemblies which unforeseen events may require,

Book III: Chapter XIII 219

it is necessary to have regular and periodic ones that nothing can cancel or

postpone; so that, on the appointed day, the people are rightfully convened

by the law, without any formal call.

But, except for these assemblies which are lawful by their date alone,

every assembly of the people not convoked by magistrates appointed for

that duty and not corresponding to the prescribed forms, must be seen as

illegitimate and all that is done in it as invalid, because even the order to

assemble must emanate from the law.

As for the more or less frequent meetings of the lawful assemblies, they

depend on so many considerations that no precise rules can be formulated

about them. But we can say in general that the more strength a government

has, the more frequently should the sovereign meet in public.

This, I shall be told, may be good for a lone city; but what is to be done

when the State comprises many cities? Will the sovereign authority be

divided? Or must it be concentrated in a single city and render subject all

the others?

My answer is that neither alternative is good. In the ﬁrst place, the

sovereign authority is simple and undivided, and we cannot divide it with-

out destroying it. In the second place, a city, no more than a nation, can be

lawfully subject to another, because the essence of the body politic consists

in the union of obedience and liberty, and these words, subject and sov-

ereign, are correlatives, the notion underlying them being expressed in the

one word citizen.

My answer, furthermore, is that it is always bad to merge several towns

into a single State, and, in desiring to create such a union, we must not

ﬂatter ourselves that we can avoid the usual problems. The defects of large

States cannot be used as an objection against a man who only desires small

ones. But how can small States be endowed with sufﬁcient force to resist

large ones? Just as Greek towns used to resist the great King, and as more

recently Holland and Switzerland resisted the House of Austria.

If, however, the State cannot be reduced to proper limits, one option still

remains; it is not to allow any capital, but to make the government sit

alternately in each town, and also to assemble in them one by one the people

of the country.

Populate the territory uniformly, extend the same rights everywhere,

spread everywhere abundance and life; this is how the State will become

simultaneously the strongest and the best governed that may be possible.

Remember that the walls of the towns are constructed solely of the wreck-

age of farm houses. For every palace that I see built in the capital, I seem to

see a whole rural district laid in ruins.

220 The Social Contract

Chapter XIV

how the sovereign authority is maintained

(continued)

As soon as the people are lawfully assembled as a sovereign body, the

whole jurisdiction of the government ceases, the executive power is sus-

pended, and the person of the lowliest citizen is as sacred and inviolable as

that of the ﬁrst magistrate, because where the represented are, there is no

longer any representative. Most of the tumult that arose in Rome in the

comitia stemmed from ignorance or neglect of this rule. The consuls were

then only presidents of the people and the tribunes simple orators;* the

Senate had no power at all.

These intervals of suspension, in which the Prince recognizes or ought to

recognize the presence of a live superior, have always been dreaded by him;

and these assemblies of the people, which are the shield of the body politic

and the curb of the government, have in all ages terriﬁed leaders; hence

such men are never wanting in solicitude, objections, obstacles, and prom-

ises, in an attempt to make the citizens disgusted with the assemblies. When

citizens are avaricious, cowardly, pusillanimous, and more desirous of calm

than of freedom, they do not long hold out against the strenuous efforts of

the government; and thus, as the resisting force constantly increases, the

sovereign authority ﬁnally disappears, and most of the States fall and perish

before their time.

But between the sovereign authority and an arbitrary government there

sometimes emerges an intermediate power of which I must speak.

Chapter XV

deputies or representatives

As soon as public service ceases to be the principle concern of citizens, and

they prefer helping with their wallets rather than with their persons, the

State is already on the brink of ruin. Must they march to battle? They pay

troops and stay at home. Is it necessary to go to the council? They appoint

deputies and stay at home. Because of indolence and wealth, they ulti-

* Almost in the sense given to this term in the Parliament of England. The resem-

blance between their ofﬁces would have set the consuls and tribunes in conﬂict, even if all

jurisdiction had been suspended.

Book III: Chapter XV 221

mately create soldiers who enslave their country and create representatives

who sell it.

It is the bustle of commerce and of the arts, it is the greedy pursuit of

proﬁt, it is indolence and love of comforts, that transform public service

into money. People sacriﬁce a portion of their proﬁt in order to increase it

when they like. Give money and soon you will have chains. That word

ﬁnance is a slave’s word; it is unknown among citizens. In a state that is

really free, the citizens do everything with their hands and nothing with

money; far from paying to avoid their duties, they would pay to perform

them themselves. Far from me ordinary ideas; I believe that hard labor is

less contrary to liberty than taxation is.

The better constituted a State is, the more public affairs outweigh private

ones in the minds of the citizens. There is, indeed, a much smaller number

of private affairs, because the amount of general prosperity makes each

individual more prosperous, and less remains to be sought by individual

exertions. In a well governed city-state every one hastens to the assemblies;

under a bad government no one budges to attend them, because no one

takes an interest in the proceedings; they know in advance that the general

will will not prevail, because private concerns have become all-absorbing.

Good laws pave the way for better ones; bad laws lead to worse ones. As

soon as any one says about the affairs of the State, ‘‘Why should I care?’’ the

State is gone.

The decline of patriotism, the active pursuit of private interests, the vast

size of States, conquests, and the violations of government led to the idea of

deputies or representatives of the people in the national assemblies. It is this

which in certain countries they dare to call the Third Estate. Thus the

private interest of two orders is placed in the ﬁrst and second rank, the

public interest only in the third.

Sovereignty cannot be represented for the same reason that it cannot be

alienated; it consists essentially in the general will, and the will cannot be

represented; it is itself or it is something else; there is no middle ground.

The deputies of the people, then, are not and cannot be its representatives;

they are only its agents and can conclude nothing deﬁnitively. Every law

which the people in person have not ratiﬁed is invalid; it is not a law. The

English nation thinks that it is free, but is greatly mistaken, for it is so only

during the election of members of Parliament; as soon as they are elected, it

is enslaved and counts for nothing. The use it makes of the brief moments of

freedom renders the loss of liberty well-deserved.

The idea of representatives is modern; it comes to us from feudal

222 The Social Contract

government, that absurd and iniquitous government, under which mankind

is degraded and the name of man dishonored. In the republics, and even in

the monarchies, of antiquity, the people never had representatives; they did

not know the word. It is noteworthy that in Rome, where the tribunes were

so sacred, it was not even imagined that they could usurp the functions of

the people, and in the midst of so great a multitude, they never attempted to

pass on their own authority a single plebiscite. We can imagine, however,

the confusion the crowd sometimes caused from what occurred in the time

of the Gracchi, when some citizens shouted their votes from the housetops.

Where right and liberty mean everything, inconveniences are nothing.

In that wise nation everything was estimated at its true value; it allowed the

lictors to do what the tribunes had not dared to do, and was not afraid that

the lictors would want to represent it.

To explain, however, in what manner the tribunes sometimes repre-

sented it, it sufﬁces to understand how the government represents the sov-

ereign. The laws being nothing but the declaration of the general will, it is

clear that in their legislative capacity the people cannot be represented; but

they can and should be represented in the executive power, which is only

force applied to law. This shows that very few nations would, upon careful

examination, be found to have laws. Be that as it may, it is certain that the

tribunes, having no share in the executive power, could never represent the

Roman people by right of their ofﬁce, but only by encroaching on the rights

of the Senate.

Among the Greeks, whatever the people had to do, they did themselves;

they were constantly assembled in the public space. They lived in a mild

climate and they were not avaricious; slaves performed the manual labor;

the people’s great preoccupation was liberty. Without those same advan-

tages, how can people preserve those same rights? Your more rigorous

climates give you more wants;* for six months in a year the public place is

deserted, and your hoarse voices cannot be heard in the open air. You care

more for proﬁt than for liberty, and you fear slavery far less than you do

poverty.

What! is liberty secured only through slavery? Perhaps; extremes meet.

Everything which is not according to nature has its drawbacks, and civil

society more than all the rest. There are circumstances so unfortunate that

people can preserve their freedom only at the expense of that of others, and

the citizen cannot be completely free except when the slave is enslaved to

* To adopt in cold countries the effeminacy and luxuriousness of Orientals is to be

willing to assume their chains, and to submit to them even more necessarily than they do.

Book III: Chapter XVI 223

the utmost. Such was the situation in Sparta. As for you, modern nations,

you have no slaves, but you are slaves; you pay for their freedom with your

own. In vain you boast of this preference; I consider it more cowardice than

humanity.

I do not mean by all this that slaves are necessary and that the right of

slavery is lawful, since I have proved the contrary; I only mention the

reasons why modern nations who believe themselves free have representa-

tives, and why ancient nations had none. Be that as it may, as soon as a

nation appoints representatives, it is no longer free; it no longer exists.

After very careful consideration I do not see that it is possible hencefor-

ward for the sovereign to preserve among us the exercise of its rights unless

the State is very small. But if it is very small, will it not be subjugated? No; I

shall show hereafter* how the external power of a great nation can be

combined with benign government and the good order of a small State.

Chapter XVI

that the institution of the government is not

a contract

The legislative power, having been, at one point in time, well established,

the question is to set up also the executive power; for the latter, which

operates only by speciﬁc acts, not sharing the essence of the other, is

naturally distinct from it. If it were possible for the sovereign, considered as

such, to wield executive power, law and fact would be so intermixed that it

would no longer be clear what is law and what is not; and the body politic,

thus deformed, would soon become prey to the violence against which it

was instituted.

The citizens being all equal according to the social contract, all can

prescribe what all ought to do, while no one has a right to demand that

another do what he is unwilling to do himself. Now, it is precisely this right,

indispensable to make the body politic live and move, that the sovereign

gives to the Prince when establishing the government.

Some people have claimed that this founding act is a contract between

the people and the leaders they choose—a contract by which it is stipulated

between the two parties on what conditions one binds itself to rule, the other

* It is this which I had intended to do in the sequel to this work, when, in treating of

external relations, I came to confederations—a wholly new subject, the principles of

which have yet to be established.

224 The Social Contract

to obey. It will be agreed, I am sure, that this is a strange method of

contracting. But let us see whether such a position is tenable.

First, the supreme authority can no more be modiﬁed than alienated; to

limit it is to destroy it. It is absurd and contradictory that the sovereign

should acknowledge a superior; to bind itself to obey a master is to regress

to primitive freedom.

Further, it is clear that this contract of the people with such or such

persons is a particular act; from where it follows that the contract cannot be

a law or an act of sovereignty, and that consequently it is illegitimate.

Moreover, we see that the contracting parties themselves would be under

the law of nature alone, and without any security for the performance of their

reciprocal responsibilities, which is in every way adverse to the civil state.

He who disposes of power being always capable of using it, we might as well

give the name contract to the act of a man who says to another: ‘‘I give you all

my property, on condition that you restore to me what you please.’’

There is but one contract in the State—that of association; and this of

itself excludes any other. No public contract can be conceived which would

not be a violation of the ﬁrst.

Chapter XVII

the institution of the government

Under what general concept, then, should we view the act by which the gov-

ernment is founded? I shall note ﬁrst that this act is complex, or composed of

two others, that is, the establishment of the law and the execution of the law.

By the ﬁrst, the sovereign determines that there shall be a governing

body established in such or such a form; and it is clear that this act is a law.

By the second, the people appoint the leaders who will be entrusted with

the government when established. Now, these appointments, being a par-

ticular act, are not a second law, but only a consequence of the ﬁrst, and a

function of the government.

The difﬁculty is to understand how there can be an act of government

before the government exists, and how the people, who are only sover-

eign or subjects, can, in certain circumstances, become the Prince or the

magistrates.

Here, however, we discover one of those astonishing properties of the

body politic, by which it reconciles operations apparently contradictory; for

this is made possible by a sudden conversion of sovereignty into democracy

in such a manner that, without any perceptible change, and merely by a new

Book III: Chapter XVIII 225

relationship of all to all, the citizens, having become magistrates, move

from general acts to particular acts, and from the law to the execution of it.

This change of relation is not a subtlety of theory with no real applica-

tion; it occurs every day in the Parliament of England, in which the Lower

House on certain occasions transforms itself into Grand Committee in order

to discuss business better, and thus becomes a simple commission instead

of the sovereign court that it was the moment before. In this way it after-

wards reports to itself, as the House of Commons, what it has just decided in

Grand Committee.

Such is the advantage peculiar to a democratic government, that it can be

established in fact by a simple act of the general will; and after this, the

provisional government remains in power, should that be the form adopted,

or establishes in the name of the sovereign the government prescribed by

the law; and thus everything is according to rule. It is impossible to found

the government in any other way that is legitimate without renouncing the

principles heretofore established.

Chapter XVIII

means of preventing usurpations of the

government

From these explanations it follows, in conﬁrmation of chapter XVI, that the

act which institutes the government is not a contract, but a law; that the de-

positaries of the executive power are not the masters of the people, but its

ofﬁcers; that the people can appoint them and dismiss them at pleasure; that

for them it is not a question of contracting, but of obeying; and that in under-

taking the functions that the State imposes on them, they simply fulﬁll their

duty as citizens, without having in any way a right to argue about the

conditions.

When, therefore, it happens that the people institute a hereditary govern-

ment, whether monarchical in a family or aristocratic in one class of cit-

izens, it is not an engagement that they make, but a provisional form that

they give to the administration, until they decide to organize it differently.

It is true that such changes are always dangerous, and that the estab-

lished government must never be touched except when it becomes incom-

patible with the public good; but this circumspection is a political truth, not

a rule of law; and the State is no more bound to give the civil authority to its

leaders than the military authority to its generals.

Moreover, it is true that in such a case all the formalities requisite to

226 The Social Contract

distinguish a regular and lawful act from seditious tumult, and the will of a

whole people from the clamors of a faction, cannot be too carefully ob-

served. It is especially in this case that only such concessions should be

made as cannot in strict justice be refused; and from this obligation also the

Prince derives a great advantage in preserving his power in spite of the

people, without their being able to say that he has usurped the power; for

while appearing to exercise nothing but his rights, he may very easily

increase them, and, under the pretext of maintaining public order, obstruct

the assemblies designed to reestablish good order; so that he takes advan-

tage of a silence that he prevents from being broken, or of irregularities that

he instigates, so as to interpret in his own favor the approbation of those

silenced by fear and punish those who dare to speak. It is in this way that the

Decemvirs, having at ﬁrst been elected for one year, and then kept in ofﬁce

for another year, attempted to retain their power in perpetuity by no longer

permitting the comitia to assemble; and it is by this easy method that all the

governments in the world, when once invested with the public force, usurp

sooner or later the sovereign authority.

The periodic assemblies of which I have spoken before are designed to

prevent or postpone this damage, especially when they need no formal

convocation; for then the Prince cannot interfere with them, without openly

proclaiming himself a violator of the laws and an enemy of the State.

These assemblies, which have as their object the maintenance of the

social treaty, must always be opened with two propositions, which no one

should eliminate, and which should pass separately by vote.

The ﬁrst: ‘‘Whether it pleases the sovereign to maintain the present form

of government.’’

The second: ‘‘Whether it pleases the people to leave the administration

to those at present entrusted with it.’’

I presuppose here what I believe that I have proved, that there is in the

State no fundamental law which cannot be revoked, not even the social

compact; for if all the citizens assembled to break this compact by a solemn

agreement, no one can doubt that it would be quite legitimately broken.

Grotius even thinks that each man can renounce the State of which he is a

member, and regain his natural freedom and his property by leaving the

country.* Now it would be absurd if all the citizens combined would be

unable to do what each of them can do separately.

* It must be clearly understood that no one should leave in order to evade his duty and

relieve himself from serving his country at a moment when it needs him. Flight in that

case would be criminal and punishable; it would no longer be retirement, but desertion.

Book IV

Chapter I

that the general will is indestructible

As long as a certain number of men consider themselves to be a single body,

they have but one will, which relates to the common security and to the

general welfare. In such a case all the forces of the State are vigorous and

simple, and its principles are clear and luminous; it has no confused and

conﬂicting interests; the common good is everywhere plainly clear and only

good sense is required to perceive it. Peace, union, and equality are foes to

political subtleties. Upright and guileless men are hard to deceive because

of their candor; temptations and subtle tricks do not impress them; they are

not even cunning enough to be dupes. When, in the happiest nation in the

world, we see troops of peasants deciding the affairs of the State under an

oak and always acting wisely, can we refrain from scorning the reﬁnements

of other nations, who make themselves illustrious and wretched with so

much art and mystery?

A State thus governed needs very few laws; and in so far as it becomes

necessary to promulgate new ones, this necessity is universally recognized.

The ﬁrst man to propose them only gives expression to what all have

previously felt, and neither factions nor eloquence will be needed to pass

into law what every one has already resolved to do, so soon as he is sure that

the rest will act as he does.

What misleads theorists is that, seeing only States that are ill-constituted

from their beginning, they are struck by the impossibility of maintaining

good organization in those States; they laugh to think of all the follies to

which a cunning knave, a smooth talker, can persuade the people of Paris or

London. They know not that Cromwell would have been put in irons by the

people of Berne, and the Duke of Beaufort imprisoned by the Genevans.

But when the social bond begins to fail and the State is weakened, when

private interests begin to make themselves felt and small factions to ex-

ercise inﬂuence on the State, the common interest is harmed and ﬁnds

228 The Social Contract

opponents; unanimity no longer reigns in the voting; the general will is no

longer the will of all; opposition and debates arise, and the best advice is not

accepted without disputes.

Finally, when the State, on the verge of ruin, no longer subsists except in

a meaningless and illusory form, when the social bond is broken in all

hearts, when the basest interest shelters itself impudently under the sacred

name of the public welfare, the general will becomes mute; all, under the

sway of ulterior motives, no more express their opinions as citizens than if

the State had never existed; and, under the name of laws, they deceptively

pass unjust decrees that have only private interest as their aim.

Does it follow from this that the general will is destroyed or corrupted?

No; it is always constant, unalterable, and pure; but it is subordinated to

others which get the better of it. Each, detaching his own interest from the

common interest, sees clearly that he cannot completely separate from it;

but his share in the harm done to the State appears small to him in com-

parison with the exclusive advantage that he aims at getting for himself.

With this exception, he desires the general welfare for his own interests

quite as strongly as any other. Even in selling his vote for money, he does

not extinguish in himself the general will, but eludes it. The fault that he

commits is to change the nature of the question, and to answer something

different from what he was asked; so that, instead of saying by a vote: ‘‘It is

beneﬁcial to the State,’’ he says: ‘‘It is beneﬁcial to a certain man or a

certain party that such or such a motion should pass.’’ Thus the law of

public order in assemblies is not so much to maintain in them the general

will as to ensure that it shall always be consulted and always respond.

I might at this point make many reﬂections on the simple right of voting

in every act of sovereignty—a right which nothing can take away from the

citizens—and on the right of speaking, proposing, dividing, and discussing,

which the government is always very careful to leave to its members only;

but this important matter would require a separate treatise, and I cannot say

everything in this one.

Chapter II

voting

We see from the previous chapter that the manner in which public affairs are

managed may give a sufﬁciently trustworthy indication of the character and

health of the body politic. The more that harmony reigns in the assemblies,

that is, the more the voting approaches unanimity, the more also is the

Book IV: Chapter II 229

general will predominant; but long debates, dissensions, and tumult an-

nounce the ascendancy of private interests and the decline of the State.

This is not as clear when two or more orders enter into its constitution,

as, in Rome, the patricians and plebeians, whose quarrels often disturbed

the comitia, even in the greatest days of the Republic; but this exception is

more apparent than real, for, at that time, by a vice inherent in the body

politic, there were, so to speak, two States in one; what is not true of the two

together is true of each separately. And, indeed, even in the stormiest times,

the plebiscites of the people, when the Senate did not interfere with them,

always passed peaceably and by a large majority of votes; the citizens

having but one interest, the people had but one will.

At the other extremity of the circle unanimity returns; that is, when the

citizens, fallen into slavery, have no longer either liberty or will. Then fear

and ﬂattery change votes into acclamations; men no longer deliberate, but

adore or curse. Such was the disgraceful mode of speaking in the Senate

under the Emperors. Sometimes it was done with ridiculous precautions.

Tacitus observes that under Otho the senators, in pounding Vitellius with

curses, sought to make at the same time a frightful tumult, so that, if he

happened to become master, he would not know what each of them had

said.

From these different reﬂections are deduced the principles by which we

should regulate the method of counting votes and of comparing opinions,

depending on whether the general will is more or less easy to ascertain and

the State more or less deteriorating.

There is but one law which by its nature requires unanimous consent,

that is, the social compact; for civil association is the most voluntary act in

the world; every man being born free and master of himself, no one can,

under any pretext whatsoever, enslave him without his assent. To conclude

that the son of a slave is born a slave is to conclude that he is not born a man.

If, then, at the time of the social compact, there are opponents of it, their

opposition does not invalidate the contract, but only prevents them from

being included in it; they are intruders among citizens. When the State is

established, consent lies in residence; to dwell in the territory is to submit to

the sovereignty.*

Excepting this original contract, the vote of the majority always binds all

* This must always be understood to relate to a free State; for otherwise family,

property, want of an asylum, necessity, or violence, may detain an inhabitant in a country

against his will; and then his residence alone no longer supposes his consent to the

contract or to the violation of it.

230 The Social Contract

the rest, this being a result of the contract itself. But it will be asked how a

man can be free and yet forced to conform to wills that are not his own. How

are opponents free and yet subject to laws they have not consented to?

I reply that the question is wrongly put. The citizen consents to all the

laws, even to those passed in spite of him, and even to those that punish him

when he dares to violate any of them. The unvarying will of all the members

of the State is the general will; it is through the general will that they are

citizens and free.* When a law is proposed in the assembly of the people,

what is asked of them is not exactly whether they approve the proposition or

reject it, but whether it conforms or not to the general will, which is their

own; each one in casting his vote expresses his opinion thereupon; and from

the counting of the votes is obtained the declaration of the general will.

When, therefore, an opinion opposed to my own prevails, that simply

shows that I was mistaken, and that what I considered to be the general will

was not so. Had my private opinion prevailed, I would have done some-

thing other than I wished; and in that case I would not have been free.

This supposes, it is true, that all the features of the general will are still in

the majority; when they cease to be so, whatever side we take, there is no

longer any liberty.

In showing before how particular wills were substituted for general wills

in public deliberations, I have sufﬁciently indicated the useful means for

preventing this abuse; I will speak of it again hereafter. With regard to the

proportional number of votes for declaring this will, I have also laid down

the principles according to which it may be determined. The difference of a

single vote destroys unanimity; but between unanimity and equality there

are many unequal divisions, at each of which this number can be ﬁxed

according to the condition and requirements of the body politic.

Two general principles may serve to regulate these proportions: the one,

that the more important and weighty the deliberations, the nearer should the

dominant opinion approach unanimity; the other, that the greater the dis-

patch required in the matter under discussion, the more should we restrict

the prescribed difference in the division of opinions; in deliberations which

must be decided immediately, the majority of a single vote should sufﬁce.

The ﬁrst of these principles appears more suitable to laws, the second to

* At Genoa we read in front of the prisons and on the fetters of the galley slaves the

word, Libertas. This employment of the device is becoming and just. In reality, it is only

the malefactors in all States who prevent the citizen from being free. In a country where

all such people are in the galleys the most perfect liberty will be enjoyed.

Book IV: Chapter III 231

affairs under discussion. Be that as it may, it is by their combination that we

can set the best proportions for determining the decision of a majority.

Chapter III

elections

With regard to the elections of the Prince and the magistrates, which are, as

I have said, complex acts, there are two modes of procedure: choice and lot.

Both have been used in different republics, and a very complicated mixture

of the two is seen even now in the election of the Doge of Venice.

‘‘Election by lot,’’ says Montesquieu, ‘‘belongs to the nature of democ-

racy.’’ I agree, but how is it so? ‘‘The lot,’’ he continues, ‘‘is a mode of

election that demeans no one; it gives every citizen a reasonable hope of

serving his country.’’ But those are not reasons.

If we are mindful that the election of leaders is a function of government

and not of sovereignty, we shall see why the method of election by lot is

more in the nature of democracy, in which the administration is so much the

better when its acts are less multiplied.

In every true democracy, the magistracy is not a boon but an onerous

charge, which cannot fairly be imposed on one individual rather than on

another. The law alone can impose this burden on the person upon whom

the lot falls. For then, the conditions being equal for all, and the choice not

being dependent on any human will, there is no particular application to

alter the universality of the law.

In an aristocracy the Prince chooses the Prince, the government is main-

tained by itself, and voting is rightly established.

The example of the election of the Doge of Venice, far from destroying

this distinction, conﬁrms it; this mixed form is suitable in a mixed govern-

ment. For it is an error to take the government of Venice for a true aristoc-

racy. If the people have no share in the government, the nobles themselves

are numerous. A multitude of poor Barnabotes never come near any mag-

istracy, and have for their nobility only the empty title of Excellency and the

right to attend the Great Council. This Great Council being as numerous as

our General Council in Geneva, its illustrious members have no more priv-

ileges than our simple citizens (citoyens). It is certain that, setting aside

the extreme disparity of the two Republics, the burgesses (la bourgeoisie)

of Geneva exactly correspond to the Venetian order of patricians; our na-

tives (natifs) and residents (habitants) represent the citizens and people of

232 The Social Contract

Venice; our peasants ( paysans) represent the subjects of the mainland; in

short, in whatever way we consider this Republic apart from its size, its

government is no more aristocratic than ours. The whole difference is that,

having no leader for life, we do not have the same need for election by lot.

Elections by lot would have few drawbacks in a true democracy, in

which, all being equal in morals and ability as well as in ideas and fortune,

the choice would become of little consequence. But I have already said that

there is no true democracy.

When choice and lot are combined, the ﬁrst should be used to ﬁll the

posts that require special talents, such as military appointments; the other is

suitable for those in which good sense, justice, and integrity are sufﬁcient,

such as judicial ofﬁces, because, in a well-constituted State, these qualities

are common to all the citizens.

Neither lot nor voting has any place in a monarchical government. The

monarch being by right sole Prince and sole magistrate, the choice of his

lieutenants belongs to him alone. When the Abbé de Saint-Pierre proposed

to multiply the councils of the King of France and to elect the members of

them by ballot, he did not see that he was proposing to change the very form

of government.

It remains for me to speak of the method for recording and collecting

votes in the assembly of the people; but perhaps the history of the Roman

policy in that respect will explain more clearly all the principles that I might

be able to establish. It is not unworthy of a judicious reader to see in

some detail how public and private affairs were dealt with in a council of

200,000 men.

Chapter IV

the roman comitia

We have no very trustworthy records of the early times of Rome; there is

even great probability that most of the things which have been handed

down are fables,* and, in general, the most instructive part of the annals of

nations, which is the history of their institution, is the most defective.

Experience every day teaches us from what causes spring the revolutions of

* The name of Rome, which is alleged to be derived from Romulus, is Greek and

means force; the name of Numa is also Greek and means law. What likelihood is there that

the ﬁrst two kings of that city should have borne at the outset names so clearly related to

what they did?

Book IV: Chapter IV 233

empires; but, as nations are no longer in process of founding, we have

scarcely anything but conjectures to explain how they were formed.

The customs that we see at least testify that these customs had a begin-

ning. Of the traditions that go back to these origins, those which the greatest

authorities countenance, and which the strongest reasons conﬁrm, should

be accepted as the surest. These are the principles I have tried to follow in

inquiring how the freest and most powerful nation in the world exercised its

supreme power.

After the foundation of Rome, the growing republic, that is, the army of

the founder, composed of Albans, Sabines, and foreigners, was divided into

three classes, which, from this division, took the name of tribes. Each of

these tribes was subdivided into ten curiæ, and each curia into decuriæ, at

the head of which were placed curiones and decuriones.

Besides this, a body of one hundred horsemen or knights, called a cen-

turia, was drawn from each tribe, whence we see that these divisions, not

very necessary in a town, were at ﬁrst only military. But it seems that an

instinct for greatness induced the little town of Rome from the ﬁrst to adopt

a policy suitable to the capital of the world.

From this ﬁrst division a drawback soon resulted; the tribe of the Al-

bans* and that of the Sabines

†

remaining always in the same condition,

while that of the foreigners

‡

increased continually through perpetual acces-

sions, the last soon outnumbered the two others. The remedy which Servius

found for this dangerous situation was to change the mode of division, and

for the division by races, which he abolished, to substitute another drawn

from the districts of the city occupied by each tribe. Instead of three tribes

he made four, each of which occupied one of the hills of Rome and bore its

name. Thus, in remedying the existing inequality, he also prevented it for

the future; and in order that this might be a division, not only of localities,

but of men, he prohibited the inhabitants of one quarter from moving into

another, which prevented the races from being mingled.

He also doubled the three old centuriæ of cavalry and added twelve

others to them, but still under the old names—a simple and judicious means

by which he created a distinction between the corps of knights and that of

the people, without making the latter object.

To these four urban tribes Servius added ﬁfteen others, called rural

tribes, because they were comprised of inhabitants of the country, divided

* Ramnenses.

†

Tatientes.

‡

Luceres.

234 The Social Contract

into so many cantons. Afterwards many new ones were formed; and the

Roman people were ultimately divided into thirty-ﬁve tribes, a number that

remained the same until the end of the Republic.

This distinction between the urban and the rural tribes had a noteworthy

result, because there is no other example of it, and because Rome owed to it

both the preservation of her mores and the growth of her empire. It might be

supposed that the urban tribes soon arrogated to themselves power and

honors, and were ready to disparage the rural tribes. It was quite the reverse.

We know the taste of the old Romans for the country life. This taste they

inherited from their wise founder, who united with liberty rural and military

endeavors, and relegated, so to speak, to the towns arts, trades, intrigue,

wealth, and slavery.

Thus, since every eminent man in Rome lived in the ﬁelds and tilled the

soil, it was expected that supporters of the Republic lived in the country.

This condition, being that of the worthiest patricians, was honored by ev-

eryone; the simple and laborious life of villagers was preferred to the lax

and indolent life of the burgesses of Rome; and many who would have been

only wretched proletarians in the city became, as laborers in the ﬁelds,

respected citizens. It is not without reason, said Varro, that our magnani-

mous ancestors created in the village the nursery of those hardy and valiant

men who defended them in time of war and sustained them in time of peace.

Pliny says without hesitation that the rural tribes were honored because of

the men who composed them, while the worthless whom they wanted to

disgrace were transferred as a mark of ignominy into the urban tribes. The

Sabine Appius Claudius, having come to settle in Rome, was there show-

ered with honors and enrolled in a rural tribe, which afterwards took the

name of his family. Lastly, all the freedmen entered the urban tribes, never

the rural; and during the whole of the Republic there is not a single example

of any of these freedmen attaining a magistracy, although they had become

citizens.

This policy was excellent, but was pushed so far that ﬁnally a change,

and certainly an abuse, in government resulted from it.

First, the censors, after having long arrogated the right of transferring

citizens arbitrarily from one tribe to another, allowed the majority to be

enrolled in whichever they pleased. This permission was certainly in no

way useful and took away one of the great resources of the censorship. Fur-

ther, since the great and powerful all enrolled themselves in the rural tribes,

while the freedmen who had become citizens remained with the populace in

the urban ones, the tribes in general had no longer any district or territory,

Book IV: Chapter IV 235

but all were so intermingled that it was impossible to distinguish the mem-

bers of each except by the ofﬁcial registers; so that the idea of the word tribe

passed from the real to the personal, or rather became almost an illusion.

Moreover, it came about that the urban tribes, being close at hand, were

often the most powerful in the comitia, and sold the State to those who

stooped to buy the votes of the mob of which they were composed.

With regard to the curiæ, the founder having set up ten in each tribe, the

whole Roman people, at that time enclosed in the walls of the city, consisted

of thirty curiæ, each of which had its temples, its gods, its ofﬁcers, its

priests, and its festivals called compitalia, resembling the paganalia that

the rural tribes had afterwards.

In the new division of Servius, the number thirty being incapable of

equal distribution into four tribes, he was unwilling to touch them; and the

curiæ, being independent of the tribes, became another division of the

inhabitants of Rome. But there was no question of curiæ either in the rural

tribes or in the people composing them, because the tribes having become a

purely civil institution, and another mode of levying troops having been

introduced, the military divisions of Romulus were found superﬂuous.

Thus, although every citizen was enrolled in a tribe, it was far from being

the case that each was enrolled in a curia.

Servius made yet a third division, which had no relation to the two

preceding, but became by its consequences the most important of all. He

divided the whole Roman people into six classes, which he distinguished,

not by the place of residence, nor by the men, but by property; so that the

ﬁrst classes were ﬁlled with rich men, the last with poor men, and the

intermediate ones with those who enjoyed a moderate fortune. These six

classes were subdivided into one hundred and ninety-three other bodies

called centuriæ, and these bodies were so distributed that the ﬁrst class

alone comprised more than a half, and the last comprised only one. It thus

happened that the class least numerous in men had most centuriæ, and that

the last entire class was counted as only one subdivision, although it alone

contained more than a half of the inhabitants of Rome.

So that the people did not discern the consequences of this last form,

Servius affected to give it a military appearance. He introduced in the

second class two centuriæ of armorers, and two of makers of instruments of

war in the fourth; in each class, except the last, he distinguished the young

and the old, that is to say, those who were obliged to bear arms, and those

who were exempted by law on account of age—a distinction that, more

than that of property, gave rise to the necessity of frequently repeating the

236 The Social Contract

census or enumeration; ﬁnally, he required the assembly to be held in the

Campus Martius, and all who were qualiﬁed for service by age to gather

there with their arms.

The reason why he did not follow in the last class this same division into

seniors and juniors is that the honor of bearing arms for their country was

not granted to the populace; it was necessary to own homes to obtain the

right of defending them; and out of those innumerable troops of beggars

with which the armies of kings nowadays glitter, there is not one who would

have been driven out with scorn from a Roman cohort, when soldiers were

defenders of liberty.

Yet again, there was in the last class a distinction between the proletarii

and those who were called capite censi. The former, not altogether desti-

tute, at least supplied citizens to the State, sometimes even soldiers, when

there was need. As for those who had nothing at all and could only be

counted by heads, they were regarded as altogether unimportant, and

Marius was the ﬁrst who condescended to enroll them.

Without concluding here whether this third enumeration was good or

bad in itself, I think I can state that nothing but the simple manners of early

Romans—their disinterestedness, their taste for agriculture, their contempt

for commerce and for the ardent pursuit of proﬁt—could have made it

possible. In what modern nation would rapacious greed, restlessness of

spirit, intrigue, continual changes of residence, and the perpetual revolu-

tions of fortune have allowed such an institution to endure for twenty years

without the whole State being subverted? It is, indeed, necessary to observe

carefully that morality and the censorship, more powerful than this institu-

tion, corrected its imperfections in Rome, and that many a rich man was

relegated to the class of the poor for making too much display of his wealth.

From all this we may easily understand why mention is scarcely ever

made of more than ﬁve classes, although there were really six. The sixth,

which furnished neither soldiers to the army, nor voters to the Campus

Martius* and which was almost useless in the Republic, rarely counted as

anything.

Such were the different divisions of the Roman people. Let us see now

what effect they produced in the assemblies. These assemblies, lawfully

convened, were called comitia; they were usually held in the Forum of

Rome or in the Campus Martius, and were distinguished as comitia curiata,

* I say, ‘‘to the Campus Martius,’’ because it was there that the comitia centuriata

assembled; in the two other forms the people assembled in the Forum or elsewhere; and

then the capite censi had as much inﬂuence and authority as the chief citizens.

Book IV: Chapter IV 237

comitia centuriata, and comitia tributa, in accordance with the one of

the three forms by which they were regulated. The comitia curiata were

founded by Romulus, the comitia centuriata by Servius, and the comitia

tributa by the tribunes of the people. No law received sanction, no magis-

trate was elected, except in the comitia; and since there was no citizen who

was not enrolled in a curia, in a centuria, or in a tribe, it follows that no

citizen was excluded from the right of voting, and that the Roman people

were truly sovereign de jure and de facto.

In order for the comitia to be lawfully assembled, and for what was done

in them to have the force of law, three conditions were necessary: the ﬁrst,

that the body or magistrate which convoked them should be invested with

the necessary authority for that purpose; the second, that the assembly

should be held on one of the days permitted by law; the third, that the

auguries should be favorable.

The reason for the ﬁrst regulation need not be explained; the second is a

matter of organization; thus it was not permitted to hold the comitia on feast

days and market days, when the country people, coming to Rome on busi-

ness, had no leisure to pass the day in the assembly. By the third, the Senate

kept in check a proud and turbulent people, and tempered the ardor of

seditious tribunes; but the latter found more than one means of freeing

themselves from this constraint.

Laws and the election of leaders were not the only issues submitted for

the decision of the comitia; the Roman people having usurped the most im-

portant functions of government, the fate of Europe may be said to have been

determined in their assemblies. This variety of issues produced the different

forms these assemblies took according to the matters that had to be decided.

To judge these different forms, it is sufﬁcient to compare them. Romulus,

in instituting the curiæ, desired to restrain the Senate by means of the people,

and the people by means of the Senate, while ruling equally over all. He

therefore gave the people by this form all the authority of numbers in order to

balance that of power and wealth, which he left to the patricians. But, accord-

ing to the spirit of a monarchy, he gave still more weight to the patricians

through the inﬂuence of their plebeian dependents in securing a plurality of

votes. This admirable institution of patrons and dependents was a master-

piece of policy and humanity, without which the patrician order, so opposed

to the spirit of a republic, could not have survived. Rome alone had the honor

of giving to the world such a ﬁne institution, from which there never resulted

any abuse, and which notwithstanding has never been copied.

Since the form of the assembly of the curiæ survived under the kings

down to Servius, and since the reign of the last Tarquin is not considered

238 The Social Contract

legitimate, the royal laws were on this account generally distinguished by

the name of leges curiatæ.

Under the Republic the assembly of the curiæ, always limited to the four

urban tribes, and containing only the Roman populace, could not corre-

spond either with the Senate, which was at the head of the patricians, or

with the tribunes, who, although plebeians, were at the head of the middle-

class citizens. It therefore fell into disrepute; and its degradation was

such that its thirty assembled lictors did what the comitia curiata ought to

have done.

The comitia centuriata was so favorable to the aristocracy that we do not

at ﬁrst see why the Senate did not always prevail in the comitia which bore

that name, and by which the consuls, censors, and other curule magistrates

were elected. Indeed, of the one hundred and ninety-three centuriæ which

made up the six classes of the whole Roman people, the ﬁrst class compris-

ing ninety-eight, and the votes being counted only by centuriæ, this ﬁrst

class alone outnumbered in votes all the others. When all these centuriæ

were in agreement, the recording of votes was not even completed; what the

minority had decided passed for a decision of the multitude; and we may

say that in the comitia centuriata affairs were regulated rather by the major-

ity of coins (écus) than of votes.

But this excessive power was moderated in two ways: ﬁrst, the tribunes

usually, and a great number of plebeians always, being in the class of the

rich, counteracted the inﬂuence of the patricians in this ﬁrst class. The

second means consisted in this, that instead of making the centuriæ vote

according to their order, which would have permitted the ﬁrst class always

to begin, one of them* was drawn by lot and proceeded alone to the elec-

tion; after which all the centuriæ, being summoned on another day accord-

ing to their rank, repeated the election and usually conﬁrmed it. Thus the

power of example was taken away from rank to be given to lot, according to

the principle of democracy.

From this practice resulted yet another advantage; the citizens from the

country had time, between the two elections, to gather information about

the merits of the candidate provisionally chosen, and so record their votes

with knowledge of the case. But, under pretense of dispatch, this practice

was abolished and the two elections took place on the same day.

The comitia tributa were properly the council of the Roman people.

They were convoked only by the tribunes; in them the tribunes were elected

* This centuria, thus chosen by lot, was called prærogativa, because its suffrage was

demanded ﬁrst; hence came the word prerogative.

Book IV: Chapter IV 239

and passed their plebiscites. Not only had the Senate no status in them—it

had not even a right to attend; and, being compelled to obey laws on which

they could not vote, the senators were, in this respect, less free than the

lowliest citizens. This injustice was altogether impolitic, and alone sufﬁced

to invalidate the decrees of a body to which all the citizens were not admit-

ted. If all the patricians had taken part in these comitia according to the

rights they had as citizens, having become in that case simple individuals,

they would have scarcely inﬂuenced a form in which votes were counted by

the head, and in which the lowliest proletarian had as much power as the

leader of the Senate.

We see, then, that besides the order resulting from these different divi-

sions for the collection of the votes of so great a people, these divisions

were not reduced to forms immaterial in themselves, but that each had

results corresponding to the purposes for which it was chosen.

Without entering upon this in greater detail, it follows from the preced-

ing explanations that the comitia tributa were more favorable to popular

government, and the comitia centuriata to aristocracy. With regard to the

comitia curiata, in which the Roman populace alone formed the majority, as

they served only to favor tyranny and evil designs, they deserved to fall into

discredit, the seditious themselves refraining from a means which would

too plainly reveal their projects. It is certain that the full majesty of the

Roman people was found only in the comitia centuriata, which were alone

complete, seeing that the rural tribes were absent from the comitia curiata

and the Senate and the patricians from the comitia tributa.

The mode of collecting the votes among the early Romans was as simple

as their customs, although still less simple than in Sparta. Each cast his vote

with a loud voice, and a recording ofﬁcer duly registered it; a majority of

votes in each tribe determined the suffrage of the tribe; a majority of votes

among the tribes determined the suffrage of the people; and so with the

curiæ and centuriæ. This was a good practice so long as integrity prevailed

among the citizens and every one was ashamed to cast his vote publicly for

an unjust measure or an unworthy man; but when the people were corrupted

and votes were bought, votes were cast in secret in order to defy purchasers

and give crooks an opportunity of not being traitors.

I know that Cicero criticizes this change and attributes to it in part the

fall of the Republic. But although I feel the weight which Cicero’s authority

ought to have in this matter, I cannot accept his opinion; on the contrary, I

think that through not making sufﬁcient changes of this kind, the downfall

of the State was hastened. As the regimen of healthy persons is unﬁt for the

ill, so we should not desire to govern a corrupt people by the laws that suit a

240 The Social Contract

good nation. Nothing supports this maxim better than the duration of the

republic of Venice, only the shadow of which now exists, solely because its

laws are suitable to none but worthless men.

Tablets, therefore, were distributed to the citizens by means of which

each could vote without his decision being known; new formalities were

also established for the collection of tablets, the counting of votes, the

comparison of numbers, etc.; but this did not prevent suspicions as to the

ﬁdelity of the ofﬁcers* charged with these duties. At length edicts were

framed, the multitude of which proves their uselessness.

Towards the closing years, they were often compelled to resort to ex-

traordinary measures to correct the defects of the laws. Sometimes miracles

were feigned; but this method, which might impress the people, did not

impress those who governed them. Sometimes an assembly was hastily

summoned before the candidates had had time to canvass. Sometimes a

whole sitting was consumed in talking when it was clear that the people

having been won over were ready to pass a bad resolution. But ultimately

ambition eluded everything; and it seems incredible that in the midst of so

many abuses, this great nation, thanks to its ancient institutions, did not

cease to elect magistrates, to pass laws, to judge issues, and to dispatch

public and private affairs with almost as much facility as the Senate itself

could have done.

Chapter V

the tribuneship

When an exact relation cannot be established among the constituent parts of

the State, or when indestructible causes are incessantly changing their rela-

tions, a special magistracy is instituted, which is not incorporated with the

others, but which restores each part to its true relation, forming a connec-

tion or middle term either between the Prince and the people, or between

the Prince and the sovereign, or if necessary between both at once.

This body, which I shall call the tribuneship, is the guardian of the laws

and of the legislative power. It sometimes serves to protect the sovereign

against the government, as the tribunes of the people did in Rome; some-

times to uphold the government against the people, as the Council of Ten

now does in Venice; and sometimes to maintain an equilibrium among all

parts, as the ephors did in Sparta.

* Custodes, diribitores, rogatores, suffragiorum.

Book IV: Chapter V 241

The tribuneship is not a constituent part of the State, and should have no

share in the legislative or in the executive power; but it is in this itself that

its own power is greatest; for, while unable to do anything, it can prevent

everything. It is more sacred and more venerated, as defender of the laws,

than the Prince who executes them and the sovereign that enacts them. This

was very clearly seen in Rome, when those proud patricians, who always

scorned the people, were forced to bow before a simple ofﬁcer of the

people, who had neither auspices nor jurisdiction.

The tribuneship, wisely moderated, is the strongest support of a good

constitution; but if its power is ever even a little in excess, it overthrows

everything. Weakness is not natural to it; and provided it has some power, it

is never less than it should be.

It degenerates into tyranny when it usurps the executive power, of which

it is only the moderator, and when it wishes to make laws it should only

defend. The enormous power of the ephors, which was without danger as

long as Sparta preserved her morality, accelerated the incipient corruption.

The blood of Agis, slain by these tyrants, was avenged by his successor; but

the crime and the punishment of the ephors alike hastened the fall of the

republic, and, after Cleomenes, Sparta mattered no longer. Rome, too,

perished in the same way; and the excessive power of the tribunes, usurped

by degrees, served, with the help of laws framed on behalf of liberty, as a

shield for the emperors who destroyed liberty. As for the Council of Ten in

Venice, it is a tribunal of blood, horrible both for the patricians and for the

people; and, far from nobly defending the laws, since their degradation, it

does nothing but strike secret blows that men dare not notice.

The tribuneship, like the government, is weakened by the increase of its

members. When the tribunes of the Roman people, at ﬁrst two in number

and afterwards ﬁve, wished to double this number, the Senate allowed them

to do so, being quite sure of controlling some by means of others, which did

not fail to happen.

The best means for preventing the usurpations of such a formidable

body, a means of which no government has hitherto availed itself, would be,

not to make this body permanent, but to set intervals during which it should

remain suspended. These intervals, which should not be long enough to

give abuses time to grow, can be determined by law in such a way that

they can be easily shortened in case of need by means of extraordinary

commissions.

This method appears to me problem free, because, as I have said, the

tribuneship, forming no part of the constitution, can be eliminated with-

out harm; and it strikes me as efﬁcacious, because a newly established

242 The Social Contract

magistrate does not start with the power that his predecessor had, but with

the one the law gives him.

Chapter VI

dictatorship

The inﬂexibility of the laws, which prevents them from adapting to events,

can in certain cases make them pernicious, and thereby cause the ruin of the

State in a time of crisis. The order and delay of procedure require a space of

time which circumstances sometimes do not allow. A thousand cases may

arise which the legislator has not foreseen, and to perceive that everything

cannot be foreseen is a very necessary kind of foresight.

It is therefore not a good idea to establish political institutions so rigidly

as to take away the power to suspend their consequences. Even Sparta

allowed her laws to sleep.

But only the greatest dangers can outweigh that of changing the public

order, and the sacred power of the laws should never be interfered with

except when the survival of the country is at stake. In these rare and obvious

cases, the public security is provided for by a special act, which entrusts its

care to the most worthy man. This commission can be conferred in two

ways, according to the nature of the danger.

If an increase in the activity of the government sufﬁces to remedy this

evil, we may concentrate it in one or two of its members; in that case it is not

the authority of the laws that is changed but only the manner of their

administration. But if the danger is such that the formal process of law is an

obstacle to our security, a supreme leader is named, who may silence all the

laws and suspend for a moment the sovereign authority. In such a case the

general will is not in doubt, and it is clear that the primary intention of

the people is that the State should not perish. In this way the suspension of

the legislative power does not involve its abolition; the magistrate who

silences it can make it speak; he dominates it without having power to

represent it; he can do everything but make laws.

The ﬁrst method was used by the Roman Senate when it asked the

consuls, by a consecrated formula, to provide for the safety of the Republic.

The second was adopted when one of the two consuls appointed a dictator,*

something of which Alba had furnished the precedent to Rome.

* This nomination was made by night and in secret as if they were ashamed to set a

man above the laws.

Book IV: Chapter VI 243

At the beginning of the Republic they very often had recourse to dic-

tatorship, because the State had not yet a sufﬁciently ﬁrm foundation to be

able to maintain itself by the vigor of its constitution alone.

Public morality making superﬂuous many precautions that might have

been necessary at another time, there was no fear either that a dictator

would abuse his authority or that he would attempt to keep it beyond his

term. On the contrary, it seemed that so great a power must be a burden to

the person invested with it, such haste did he make to divest himself of it, as

if to take the place of laws were an ofﬁce too arduous and too dangerous.

Therefore it is the danger, not of its being abused, but of its degradation,

that makes me blame the indiscreet use of this supreme magistracy in early

times; for while it was freely used at elections, at dedications, and in purely

formal matters, there was reason to fear that it would become less formida-

ble in case of need, and that the people would grow accustomed to regard as

an empty title that which was only used in empty ceremonies.

Toward the close of the Republic, the Romans, having become more

circumspect, used the dictatorship sparingly with as little reason as they had

formerly been prodigal with it. It was easy to see that their fear was ill-

founded; that the weakness of the capital then constituted its security

against the magistrates whom it had within it; that a dictator could, in

certain cases, defend the public liberty without ever being able to assail it;

and that the chains of Rome would not be forged in Rome itself, but in her

armies. The slight resistance which Marius made against Sylla, and Pompey

against Cæsar, showed clearly what might be looked for from the authority

within against the force without.

This error caused them to commit great mistakes; such, for example,

was that of not appointing a dictator in the Catiline affair; for as it was only

a question of the interior of the city, or at most of some province of Italy, a

dictator, with the unlimited authority that the laws gave him, would have

easily broken up the conspiracy, which was suppressed only by a combina-

tion of fortunate accidents which human prudence could not have foreseen.

Instead of that, the Senate was content to entrust all its power to the

consuls; whence it happened that Cicero, in order to act effectively, was

constrained to exceed his authority in a material point, and that, although a

ﬁrst rush of enthusiasm caused his conduct to be approved, he was after-

wards justly called to account for the blood of citizens shed contrary to the

laws, a reproach which could not have been brought against a dictator. But

the consul’s eloquence won over everybody; and he himself, although a

Roman, preferred his own glory to his country’s good, and sought not the

most certain and legitimate means of saving the State but rather the way to

244 The Social Contract

garner all the honor for this affair.* Therefore he was justly honored as the

liberator of Rome and justly punished as a violator of the laws. However

brilliant his return to power may have been, it was certainly a pardon.

Moreover, in whatever way this important commission may be con-

ferred, it is important to determine its duration for a very short term which

can never be prolonged. In the crises which cause it to be established, the

State is soon destroyed or saved; and, the urgent need having passed away,

the dictatorship becomes tyrannical or useless. In Rome the dictators held

ofﬁce for six months only, and the majority abdicated before the end of this

term. Had the term been longer, they would perhaps have been tempted to

prolong it still further, as the Decemvirs did their term of one year. The

dictator only had time to provide for the necessity which had led to his

election; he had no time to think of other projects.

Chapter VII

the censorship

Just as the declaration of the general will is made by the law, the declaration

of public opinion is made by the censorship. Public opinion is a kind of law

of which the censor is minister, and which he only applies to particular

cases in the manner of the Prince.

The censorial tribunal, then, far from being the arbiter of the opinion of

the people, only declares it, and so soon as it departs from this position, its

decisions are fruitless and ineffectual.

It is useless to distinguish the character of a nation from the objects of its

esteem, for all these things depend of the same principle and are necessarily

intermixed. In all the nations of the world it is not nature but opinion which

decides the choice of their pleasures. Reform men’s opinions and their

mores will be puriﬁed by themselves. People always like what is becoming

or what they judge to be so; but it is in this judgment that they make mis-

takes; the question, then, is to guide their judgment. He who judges of mores

judges of honor; and he who judges of honor takes his law from opinion.

The opinions of a nation spring from its constitution. Although the law

does not regulate morality, it is legislation that gives it birth, and when

legislation becomes impaired, morality degenerates; but then the judgment

of the censors will not do what the power of the laws has failed to do.

* He could not be satisﬁed about this in proposing a dictator; he dared not nominate

himself, and could not feel sure that his colleague would nominate him.

Book IV: Chapter VIII 245

It follows from this that the censorship may be useful to preserve moral-

ity, never to restore it. Institute censors while the laws are vigorous; so soon

as they have lost their power all is over. Nothing that is lawful has any force

when the laws cease to have any.

The censorship supports morality by preventing opinions from being

corrupted, by preserving their integrity through wise applications, some-

times even by deﬁning them when they are still uncertain. The use of

seconds in duels, carried to a mad extreme in the kingdom of France, was

abolished by these simple words in an edict of the king: ‘‘As for those who

have the cowardice to appoint seconds.’’ This judgment, anticipating that of

the public, immediately decided it. But when the same edicts wanted to

declare that it was also cowardice to ﬁght a duel, which is very true, but

contrary to common opinion, the public ridiculed this decision, on which its

judgment was already formed.

I have said elsewhere* that as public opinion is not subject to constraint,

there should be no vestige of this in the tribunal established to represent it.

We cannot admire too much the art with which this force, wholly lost

among the moderns, was set in operation among the Romans and still better

among the Lacedæmonians.

A man of bad character having brought forward a good measure in the

Council of Sparta, the ephors, without paying attention to him, caused the

same measure to be proposed by a virtuous citizen. What an honor for the one,

what shame for the other, without praise or blame being given to either! Cer-

tain drunkards from Samos

†

deﬁled the tribunal of the ephors; on the morrow a

public edict granted permission to the Samians to be ﬁlthy. A real punishment

would have been less severe than such impunity. When Sparta pronounced

what was or was not honorable, Greece did not appeal those decisions.

Chapter VIII

civil religion

Men had at ﬁrst no kings except the gods and no government but a the-

ocracy. They reasoned like Caligula, and at that time they reasoned rightly.

A long period is needed to change men’s feelings and ideas in order that

* I merely indicate in this chapter what I have treated at greater length in the Letter to

M. d’Alembert.

†

They were from another island, which the delicacy of our language forbids us to

name on this occasion.

246 The Social Contract

they may resolve to take a fellow man as a master and ﬂatter themselves that

all will be well.

From the single fact that God was placed at the head of every political

society, it followed that there were as many gods as nations. Two nations

foreign to each other, and almost always hostile, could not for long ac-

knowledge the same master; two armies engaged in battle with each other

could not obey the same leader. Thus from national divisions resulted

polytheism, and, from this, theological and civil intolerance, which are by

nature the same, as will be shown hereafter.

The fancy of the Greeks that they recognized their own gods among

barbarous nations arose from their regarding themselves as the natural

sovereigns of those nations. But in our days that is a very ridiculous kind of

erudition which turns on the identity of the gods of different nations, as if

Moloch, Saturn, and Chronos could be the same god! As if the Baal of the

Phœnicians, the Zeus of the Greeks, and the Jupiter of the Latins could be

the same! As if there could be anything in common among imaginary

beings bearing different names!

But if it is asked why under paganism, when every State had its cult and

its gods, there were no wars of religion, I answer that it was for the same

reason that each State, having its own form of worship as well as its own

government, did not distinguish its gods from its laws. Political warfare was

also theological; the regions of the gods were, so to speak, ﬁxed by the

limits of the nations. The god of one people had no right over other peoples.

The gods of the pagans were not jealous gods; they shared among them-

selves the empire of the world; even Moses and the Hebrew nation some-

times countenanced this idea by speaking of the god of Israel. It is true that

they regarded as nought the gods of the Canaanites, proscribed nations,

devoted to destruction, whose country they were to occupy; but see how

they spoke of the divinities of the neighboring nations whom they were

forbidden to attack: ‘‘The possession of what belongs to Chamos your

god,’’ said Jephthah to the Ammonites, ‘‘is it not lawfully your due? By the

same title we possess the lands which our conquering god has acquired.’’*

In this, it seems to me, there was a well-recognized parity between the

rights of Chamos and those of the god of Israel.

But when the Jews, subjected to the kings of Babylon, and afterwards to

the kings of Syria, obstinately refused to acknowledge any other god but

* ‘‘Nonne ea quae possidet Chamos deus tuus tibi jure debentur?’’ (Judges xi: 24).

Such is the text of the Vulgate. Père de Carrières has translated it thus: ‘‘Do you not

believe that you have a right to possess what belongs to Chamos your god?’’ I am ignorant

Book IV: Chapter VIII 247

their own, this refusal, seen as a rebellion against the conqueror, drew upon

them the persecutions which we read of in their history, and of which no

other instance appears before Christianity.*

Every religion, then, being exclusively attached to the laws of the State

which prescribed it, there was no other way of converting a people than to

conquer it, and no other missionaries than conquerors; and the obligation to

change their form of worship being the law imposed on the vanquished, it

was necessary to begin by conquering before speaking of conversions. Far

from men ﬁghting for the gods, it was, as in Homer, the gods who fought for

men; each demanded victory from his own god and paid for it with new

altars. The Romans, before attacking a place, summoned its gods to aban-

don it; and when they left to the Tarentines their exasperated gods, it was

because they then regarded these gods as subjected to their own and forced

to pay them homage. They left the vanquished their gods as they left them

their laws. A crown for the Capitoline Jupiter was often the only tribute that

they imposed.

At last, the Romans having extended their religion and their laws with

their empire, and having themselves often adopted those of the vanquished,

the nations of this vast empire, since the right of citizenship was granted to

all, found little by little that they had multitudes of gods and religions,

almost the same everywhere; and this is why paganism was at length known

in the world as one and the same religion.

It was in these circumstances that Jesus came to establish on earth a

spiritual kingdom, which, separating the theological system from the politi-

cal system, destroyed the unity of the State, and created the intestine divi-

sions which have never ceased to arouse Christian nations. Now this new

idea of a kingdom in the other world having never been able to enter the

minds of the pagans, they always regarded Christians as actual rebels, who,

under cover of a hypocritical submission, only sought an opportunity to

make themselves independent and supreme, and to usurp by cunning the

authority which, in their weakness, they pretended to respect. This was the

cause of persecutions.

of the force of the Hebrew text, but I see that in the Vulgate Jephthah positively acknowl-

edges the right of the god Chamos, and that the French translator weakens this acknowl-

edgment by an ‘‘according to you’’ which is not in the Latin.

* There is the strongest evidence that the war of the Phocæans, called a sacred war,

was not a war of religion. Its object was to punish sacrilege, and not to subdue un-

believers.

248 The Social Contract

What the pagans had feared came to pass. Then everything changed; the

humble Christians altered their tone, and soon this supposed kingdom of the

other world became, under a visible leader, the most violent despotism in

this world.

As, however, there have always been a Prince and civil laws, a perpetual

conﬂict of jurisdiction has resulted from this double power, which has

rendered any good polity impossible in Christian States; and no one has

ever succeeded in understanding whether he was bound to obey the ruler or

the priest.

Many nations, however, even in Europe or on its outskirts, wished to

preserve or to reestablish the old system, but without success; the spirit of

Christianity prevailed over everything. The sacred cult always retained or

regained its independence of the sovereign, and without any necessary

connection with the body of the State. Muhammad had very sound views;

he thoroughly uniﬁed his political system; and so long as his form of gov-

ernment survived under his successors, the caliphs, the government was

quite uniﬁed and in that respect good. But the Arabs having become ﬂour-

ishing, learned, cultivated, lax, and cowardly, were subjugated by the bar-

barians, and then the division between the two powers began again. Al-

though it may be less apparent among the Muhammadans than among the

Christians, the division nevertheless exists, especially in the sect of Ali; and

there are States, such as Persia, in which it is still seen.

Among us, the kings of England have established themselves as heads of

the church, and the Tsars have done the same; but by means of this title they

have made themselves its ministers rather than its rulers; they have acquired

not so much the right to change it as the power to maintain it; they are not its

legislators but only its princes. Wherever the clergy form a corporation,*

they are masters and legislators in their own country. There are, then, two

powers, two sovereigns, in England and in Russia, just as elsewhere.

Of all Christian authors, the philosopher Hobbes is the only one who has

clearly seen the evil and its remedy, and who has dared to propose to unite

* It must, indeed, be remarked that it is not so much the formal assemblies, like those

in France, that bind the clergy into one body, as the communion of churches. Communion

and excommunication are the social pact of the clergy, a pact by means of which they will

always be the masters of nations and kings. All priests who are of the same communion

are fellow citizens, though they are as far asunder as the poles. This invention is a

masterpiece of policy. There was nothing similar among pagan priests; therefore they

never formed a body of clergy.

Book IV: Chapter VIII 249

the two heads of the eagle and to restore political unity, without which no

State or government will ever be well constituted. But he ought to have seen

that the domineering spirit of Christianity was incompatible with his sys-

tem, and that the interest of the priest would always be stronger than that of

the State. It is not so much what is horrible and false in his political theory

as what is just and true that has rendered it odious.*

I believe that by developing historical facts from this point of view,

the opposite opinions of Bayle and Warburton might easily be refuted. The

former of these maintains that no religion is useful to the body politic; the

latter, on the other hand, asserts that Christianity is its strongest support. To

the ﬁrst it might be proved that no State was ever founded without religion

serving as its basis, and to the second, that the Christian law is more inju-

rious than useful to a ﬁrm constitution of the State. In order to succeed in

making myself understood, I need only give a little more precision to the

exceedingly vague ideas about religion in its relation to my subject.

Religion, considered with reference to society, which is either general or

particular, may also be divided into two kinds, that is, the religion of the

man and that of the citizen. The ﬁrst, without temples, without altars, with-

out rites, limited to the purely internal worship of the supreme God and to

the eternal duties of morality, is the pure and simple religion of the Gospel,

the true theism, and what may be called the natural divine law. The other,

inscribed in a single country, gives to it its gods, its peculiar and tutelary

patrons. It has its dogmas, its rites, its external religion prescribed by the

laws; outside the single nation which observes it, everything is for it inﬁdel,

foreign, and barbarous; it extends the duties and rights of men only as far as

its altars. Such were all the religions of early peoples, to which may be

given the name of divine law, civil or positive.

There is a third and more extravagant kind of religion, which, giving to

men two sets of laws, two leaders, two fatherlands, imposes on them contra-

dictory duties, and prevents them from being simultaneously devout men

and citizens. Such is the religion of the Lamas, such is that of the Japanese,

such is Roman Christianity. This may be called the religion of the priest.

There results from it a kind of mixed and unsocial law which has no name.

Considered politically, these three kinds of religion all have their

* See, among others, in a letter from Grotius to his brother of the 11th April, 1643,

what that learned man approves and what he blames in the book De Cive. It is true that,

inclined to indulgence, he appears to pardon the author for the good for the sake of the

evil, but everyone is not so merciful.

250 The Social Contract

defects. The third is so evidently bad that it would be a waste of time to stop

and prove this. Whatever destroys social unity is good for nothing; all

institutions which put a man in contradiction with himself are worthless.

The second is good so far as it combines divine worship with love for the

laws, and, by making their fatherland the object of citizens’ adoration,

teaches them that to serve the State is to serve the guardian deity. It is a kind

of theocracy, in which there ought to be no pontiff but the Prince, no other

priests than the magistrates. Then to die for one’s country is to achieve

martyrdom, to violate the laws is to be impious, and to subject a guilty man

to public execration is to subject him to the wrath of the gods: Sacer esto.

But it is bad in so far as being based on error and falsehood, it deceives

men, renders them credulous and superstitious, and obscures the true wor-

ship of the Deity with superﬁcial rituals. It is bad, again, when, becoming

exclusive and tyrannical, it makes a nation sanguinary and intolerant, so

that it thirsts after nothing but murder and massacre, and believes that it is

performing a holy action in killing whosoever does not acknowledge its

gods. This puts such a people in a natural state of war with all others, which

is very harmful to its own security.

There remains, then, the religion of man or Christianity, not that of today,

but that of the Gospel, which is quite different. By this holy, sublime, and

pure religion, men, children of the same God, all recognize one another as

brethren, and the social bond which unites them is not dissolved even at

death.

But this religion, having no particular relation with the body politic,

leaves to the laws only the force that they derive from themselves, without

adding to them any other; and thereby one of the great bonds of the particu-

lar society remains ineffective. What is more, far from attaching the hearts

of citizens to the State, it detaches them from it as it does from all earthly

things. I know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.

We are told that a nation of true Christians would form the most perfect

society conceivable. In this supposition I see only one great difﬁculty—that

a society of true Christians would be no longer a society of men.

I say even that this supposed society, with all its perfection, would be

neither the strongest nor the most durable; by virtue of its perfection it

would lack cohesion; its perfection, indeed, would be its destroying vice.

Each man would perform his duty; the people would be obedient to the

laws, the leaders would be just and moderate, and the magistrates upright

and incorruptible; the soldiers would scorn death; there would be neither

vanity nor luxury. All this is very good; but let us look further.

Christianity is an entirely spiritual religion, concerned solely with heav-

Book IV: Chapter VIII 251

enly things; the Christian’s country is not of this world. He does his duty, it

is true; but he does it with a profound indifference as to the good or ill

success of his efforts. Provided that he has nothing to reproach himself with,

it matters little to him whether all goes well or ill down here. If the State is

ﬂourishing, he scarcely dares to enjoy the public felicity; he fears to take a

pride in the glory of his country. If the State declines, he blesses the hand of

God which lies heavy on his people.

In order that the society might be peaceable and harmony maintained, it

would be necessary for all citizens without exception to be equally good

Christians; but if unfortunately there happens to be in it a single ambitious

man, a single hypocrite, a Catiline or a Cromwell, for example, such a man

will certainly get the better of his pious compatriots. Christian charity does

not encourage men to think ill of their neighbors. As soon as a man has

found by cunning the art of dominating them and securing for himself part

of the public authority, he is invested with dignity; God wills that he be

respected. Soon he exercises dominion; God wills that he be obeyed. Does

the depositary of this power abuse it? This is the rod with which God

punishes His children. They would have scruples about driving out the

usurper; it would be necessary to disturb the public peace, to use violence,

to shed blood; all this ill accords with the meekness of the Christian, and,

after all, does it matter whether they are free or enslaved in this vale of

woes? The essential thing is to reach paradise, and resignation is but one

means the more toward that.

What if foreign war comes on? The citizens march to battle without

anxiety; none of them think of ﬂight. They do their duty, but without an

ardent desire for victory; they know better how to die than to conquer. What

matters it whether they are the victors or the vanquished? Does not Provi-

dence know better than they what is needful for them? Conceive what an

advantage a bold, impetuous, enthusiastic enemy can derive from this sto-

ical indifference! Set against them those noble peoples who are consumed

with a burning love of glory and of country. Suppose your Christian re-

public confronted with Sparta or Rome; the pious Christians will be beaten,

crushed, destroyed, before they have time to collect themselves, or they will

owe their survival only to the contempt which the enemy may conceive for

them. To my mind that was a noble oath of the soldiers of Fabius; they did

not swear to die or to conquer, they swore to return as conquerors, and kept

their oath. Never would Christians have done such a thing; they would have

believed that they were tempting God.

But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; each of these

two words excludes the other. Christianity preaches only servitude and

252 The Social Contract

dependence. Its spirit is too favorable to tyranny for the latter not to proﬁt

by it always. True Christians are made to be slaves; they know it and are

hardly aroused by it. This short life has too little value in their eyes.

Christian troops are excellent, we are told. I deny it; let them show me

any that are such. For my part, I know of no Christian troops. The crusades

will be cited. Without disputing the valor of the crusaders, I shall observe

that, far from being Christians, they were soldiers of the priest, citizens of

the Church; they fought for their spiritual country, which the Church had

somehow rendered temporal. Property regarded, this brings us back to

paganism; as the Gospel does not establish a national religion, any sacred

war is impossible among Christians.

Under the pagan emperors Christian soldiers were brave; all Christian

authors afﬁrm it, and I believe it. There was a rivalry of honor against the

pagan troops. As soon as the emperors became Christians, this rivalry no

longer subsisted; and when the cross had driven out the eagle, all the Roman

valor disappeared.

But, setting aside political considerations, let us return to the subject of

rights and determine principles on this important point. The right which the

social pact gives to the sovereign over its subjects does not, as I have said,

go beyond the limits of public utility.* Subjects, then, owe no account of

their opinions to the sovereign except so far as those opinions are of impor-

tance to the community. Now it is very important for the State that every

citizen should have a religion which may make him delight in his duties; but

the dogmas of this religion concern neither the State nor its members,

except so far as they affect morality and the duties which he who professes

it is bound to perform toward others. Each may have, in addition, such

opinions as he pleases, without its being the business of the sovereign to

know them; for, as he has no jurisdiction in the other world, the destiny of

his subjects in the life to come, whatever it may be, is not his affair, pro-

vided they are good citizens in this life.

There is, therefore, a purely civil profession of faith, the articles of

which it is the duty of the sovereign to determine, not exactly as dogmas of

religion, but as sentiments of sociability, without which it is impossible to

* ‘‘In the commonwealth,’’ says the Marquis d’Argenson, ‘‘each is perfectly free in

what does not injure others.’’ That is the unalterable limit; it cannot be more accurately

placed. I could not deny myself the pleasure of sometimes quoting this manuscript,

although it is not known to the public, in order to do honor to the memory of an illustrious

and honorable man, who preserved even in ofﬁce the heart of a true citizen, and just and

sound opinions about the government of his country.

Book IV: Chapter VIII 253

be a good citizen or a faithful subject.* Without having power to compel

any one to believe them, the sovereign may banish from the State whoever

does not believe them; it may banish him not as impious, but as unsociable,

as incapable of sincerely loving the law, justice and of sacriﬁcing, if need

be, his life to his duty. But if any one, after publicly acknowledging these

dogmas, behaves like an unbeliever in them, he should be punished with

death; he has committed the greatest of crimes, he has lied before the laws.

The dogmas of civil religion ought to be simple, few in number, stated

with precision, and without explanations or commentaries. The existence of

the Deity, powerful, wise, beneﬁcent, prescient, and bountiful, the life to

come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, the sanctity

of the social contract and of the laws; these are the positive dogmas. As for

the negative dogmas, I limit them to one only, that is, intolerance; it belongs

to the creeds which we have excluded.

Those who distinguish civil intolerance from theological intolerance

are, in my opinion, mistaken. These two kinds of intolerance are insepa-

rable. It is impossible to live at peace with people whom we believe to be

damned; to love them would be to hate God who punishes them. It is

absolutely necessary to convert them or to punish them. Wherever theologi-

cal intolerance is allowed, it cannot but have some effect in civil life;

†

and

as soon as it has any, the sovereign is no longer sovereign even in secular

affairs; from that time the priests are the real masters; the kings are only

their ofﬁcers.

Now that there is, and can be, no longer any exclusive national religion,

we should tolerate all those which tolerate others, as long as their dogmas

have nothing contrary to the duties of a citizen. But whosoever dares to say:

‘‘Outside the Church no salvation,’’ ought to be driven from the State,

unless the State be the Church and the Prince be the pontiff. Such a dogma

belongs only in a theocratic government; in any other it is pernicious. The

reason for which Henry IV is said to have embraced the Roman Catholic

religion ought to have made any honorable man renounce it, and especially

any prince who knew how to reason.

* Cæsar, in pleading for Catiline, tried to establish the dogma of the mortality of the

soul; Cato and Cicero, to confute him, did not waste time in philosophizing; they were

content to show that Cæsar spoke as a bad citizen and put forward a doctrine pernicious to

the State. Indeed, it was that which the Roman Senate had to decide, and not a theological

question.

†

Marriage, for example, being a civil contract, has civil consequences, without which

it is even impossible for society to subsist. Let us, then, suppose that a clergy

254 The Social Contract

Chapter IX

conclusion

After laying down the principles of political right and attempting to found

the State on this basis, it still remains for us to strengthen it in its foreign

relations; which would include the law of nations, commerce, the right of

war and conquests, public law, alliances, negotiations, treaties, etc. But all

this constitutes a new subject too vast for my limited scope. I ought always

to have conﬁned myself to a narrower sphere.

should succeed in arrogating to itself the sole right to perform this act, a right which it

must necessarily usurp in every intolerant religion; then, is it not clear that in taking the

opportunity to strengthen the Church’s authority, it will render ineffectual that of the

Prince, which will no longer have any subjects except those which the clergy are pleased

to give it? Having the opinion of marrying or not marrying people, according as they hold

or do not hold such or such a doctrine, according as they admit or reject such or such a

formulary, according as they are more or less devoted to it, is it not clear that by behaving

prudently and keeping ﬁrm, the Church alone will dispose of inheritances, ofﬁces, cit-

izens, and the State itself, which cannot subsist when only composed of bastards? But, it

will be said, men will appeal as against abuses; they will summon, issue decrees, and

seize on the temporalities. What a pity! The clergy, however little they may have, I do not

say of courage, but of good sense, will let this be done and go their way; they will quietly

permit appealing, adjourning, decreeing, seizing, and will end by remaining masters. It is

not, it seems to me, a great sacriﬁce to abandon a part, when one is sure of getting

possession of the whole.

Rethinking

The First and Second Discourses

and

The Social Contract

Rousseau, Cultural Critic

GITA MAY

Enlightenment aesthetics generally stressed the social usefulness of the

arts. The philosophes, unlike the seventeenth-century moralistes, were not

disabused, world-weary observers of human foibles with no hope for the

future betterment of society. They were passionately dedicated to improv-

ing social and political conditions, and even though their program was far

from monolithic, it rested on a shared belief that the writer and artist should

not be content merely to create entertaining, decorative works aimed at

pleasing the rich and powerful.

Such seventeenth-century moralistes as La Rochefoucauld and La Bru-

yère had been conservative misanthropes who harbored a rather dim and

pessimistic view of human nature. Their pithy maxims and observations

sought to unmask the hidden, selﬁsh motivations that drive even our appar-

ently most virtuous acts. Self-interest, according to them, is at the core of

human behavior and behind our most seemingly altruistic, charitable, and

philanthropic endeavors lurks the irrepressible (if subconscious) need for

self-aggrandizement. The Augustinian notion that, without the saving grace

of faith, humanity is mired in evil and sin informs the ethics of the moral-

istes. This bleak and rather desolate theological and psychological land-

scape, however, is redeemed and ennobled by writers who succeeded in

distillating their darkest thoughts in patiently honed, brilliantly provocative

aphorisms. Classical art represents a triumph of beauty and orderliness of

form over the chaotic, dark impulses of the human heart. This perfection

and economy of style is evident in La Rochefoucauld’s maxims, in Pous-

sin’s compositions, and in the architectural symmetry of Versailles. Art

strove mightily to compensate for the irremediable frailties inherent in our

sinful nature by exalting and glorifying the cultural achievements possible

in an absolute monarchy, incarnated by the Sun King, Louis XIV.

The philosophes, on the other hand, held fast to the notion that art has a

positive, indeed aggressively political role to play in society. And no one

was more passionately dedicated to the notion of art as a force capable of

liberating the most creative human energies and impulses, even in a corrupt

258 Gita May

society, as the France of Louis XV and Louis XVI was viewed by the

philosophes, than Denis Diderot, the Encyclopedist and for many years

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s best friend. In his plays, novels, and art criticism

Diderot advocated a bold renewal and regeneration of all the art forms, and

one of his major goals was to formulate a new relationship between culture

and society, as well as between the creative individual and society. All his

life, he approached the artist’s creative process and procedures and the

interrelation between art and society with the liveliest interest and with a

keen personal sense of sympathetic, enthusiastic involvement.

Whereas Rousseau perceived a profound and fatal cleavage between art

and moral values, Diderot tirelessly sought to reconcile the respective ex-

igencies of the aesthetically pleasing and the socially useful. He did not

look on the arts as above or separate from life, and from the outset he

acknowledged the essential roles of passion and enthusiasm in the creative

process and of subjective sensibility in aesthetic appreciation and pleasure.

The sublime, in particular, had great appeal for him, and it reinforced his

rejection of neoclassicism in favor of a new aesthetic stressing the over-

powering rather than pleasing emotions and experiences.

The Paris to which Rousseau came in August of 1742 was the capital not

only of France, but of the Western world. The thirty-year-old Rousseau was

then an obscure Genevan who had sought to escape the restrictive environ-

ment of his native city and his own troubled family through a series of

wanderings and unsuccessful and unsatisfying attempts at various jobs,

including working as an apprentice to an engraver, doing a stint as a valet,

being a music teacher, serving as a secretary in a land survey ofﬁce, and

tutoring the children of a rich merchant in Lyons. As an exciting center of

intellectual and cultural activity, Paris was a magnet for young men like

Diderot and Rousseau, who came from the French provinces and even

beyond to test their mettle and seek fame.

By the time Rousseau decided to conquer the French capital, he had

already experienced many trials and torments as a youth left to his own

devices. As a semi-orphan (his mother died shortly after his birth) aban-

doned by an emotionally unstable father, he had had to face injustice and

indifference on the part of adults in charge of his care. Although he would

later become a harsh critic of city life, as a young man he saw the French

capital as the only place that could satisfy his dream of self-fulﬁllment.

In his early wanderings Rousseau had brieﬂy visited Paris in 1732. His

ﬁrst impressions of the city turned out to be deeply disappointing. In his

own mind and fertile imagination he had pictured it as a beautiful, orderly

Rousseau, Cultural Critic 259

city, even more imposing in its appearance than Turin, which had greatly

impressed him with its splendid urban architecture, broad streets and ave-

nues, and great mansions. What struck him upon his arrival in Paris was

the stark contrast between the rich and powerful and the poor and disen-

franchised. There was the Paris of elegant mansions, sophisticated salons,

and a reﬁned, pleasure-loving society. Brilliant, witty conversation and

gallantry prevailed in the salons. On the other hand, ordinary people lived

in crowded, squalid tenements in narrow, unpaved streets and alleys. What

struck him, above all else, was the sordid poverty and ﬁlth in which they

were forced to live.

Rousseau, who wholly identiﬁed with the common people, never over-

came this initial negative impression:

As I entered through the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, I saw nothing but

dirty, stinking little streets, ugly black houses, a general air of squalor

and poverty, beggars, cart pushers, clothes menders, hawkers of herb-

drinks and of old hats. All this so affected me at the outset that all the real

magniﬁcence I have since seen in Paris has not overcome this ﬁrst

impression, and I have always retained a secret aversion for living in the

capital. I can state that all the time I subsequently resided there was em-

ployed toward seeking means that would enable me to live elsewhere.

∞

The publication of Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and Arts in

1751 determined the course of his whole life and career. The years spent in

Paris had only conﬁrmed him in his belief that urban civilization was irre-

mediably corrupt and beyond redemption. His strictures against the French

capital may have had something to do with his own personal disappoint-

ments. He had arrived in Paris in the summer of 1742 with high hopes,

ﬁfteen louis in his pocket, as well as his comedy Narcisse and a new scheme

for musical notation from which he expected fame and fortune. But nothing

came of these ambitious projects. Instead, he had to live in squalid lodgings

and resort to expedient means in order to survive. But this was also the time

he met and befriended Denis Diderot, a struggling young writer hailing

from Langres.

They were both of the same age, both were sons of artisans, both were

poor, both had been drawn to Paris for similar reasons, and both had a great

number of interests in common, such as a passion for knowledge, music,

chess, a rebellion against the establishment, and a need for recognition.

Diderot, however, had already begun to gain a reputation, to make friends

in the world of letters, and to establish himself with publishers as a transla-

tor of English works, notably his copiously annotated version of the English

260 Gita May

philosopher Shaftesbury’s Inquiry concerning Merit and Virtue. More im-

portantly, in 1746 he had been contracted as co-editor, with the mathemati-

cian Jean le Rond d’Alembert, to bring out a French translation of the

commercially successful Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia. This ambitious

enterprise rapidly turned into an original work eventually amounting to

seventeen folio volumes of text and an additional twelve of plates, and its

publication was a stormy one because of its ofﬁcial condemnation, both by

state and Church.

In early October of 1749 an event took place that propelled Rousseau

out of his obscurity. On July 24 of that year Diderot had been imprisoned in

the medieval fortress of Vincennes, a few miles east of Paris, for the pub-

lication of his Letter on the Blind, a work deemed dangerous to religion and

morals. When Diderot, who had been in solitary conﬁnement for a month,

was granted the privilege of receiving visitors, Rousseau hastened to see

him. Because of lack of money, he had to make the journey on foot from

central Paris, a good six-mile walk each way.

The summer of 1749 had been unusually hot, and the heat wave con-

tinued well into autumn. Knowing that he would tend to rush impetuously

in order to see his imprisoned friend as soon as possible, Rousseau put in his

pocket a well-known literary periodical, the Mercure de France, so that he

would have something to read during the stops he would impose upon

himself on the way. Directing his steps eastward, he left behind him the city,

its imposing structures and teeming streets, and soon reached the more

countriﬁed suburbs. As both the heat and fatigue overtook him, he sat down

underneath an oak tree and pulled out of his pocket the Mercure de France.

Perusing the periodical in order to force himself to take a much-needed rest

he came across the announcement of a 1750 literary prize essay contest

offered by the academy of Dijon, one of the many provincial academies

gracing the cultural landscape of Old Regime France.

The question proposed by the academy of Dijon was not a startling one,

for it invited contestants to participate in a longtime debate: ‘‘Has the Re-

vival of the Sciences and Arts Contributed to Improving Morality?’’ The

stakes were high, for the whole notion of progress was in question. The phi-

losophes, including Diderot himself, were passionately committed to the

idea that Enlightenment meant that advancement in both the sciences and

arts would also necessarily have a direct and positive impact on human

moral betterment.

As Rousseau sat beneath his oak tree, recovering from the heat and

fatigue, he pondered the question proposed by the academy of Dijon, and a

stunning, overpowering vision came to him: ‘‘The moment I read this I

Rousseau, Cultural Critic 261

beheld another universe and I became another man.’’

≤

In his mind’s eye he

perceived a profound split between progress in the arts and sciences on the

one hand and the more problematic and complex question of ethics on the

other. This was a moment of extraordinary inspiration and insight in Rous-

seau’s intellectual and moral life. He intuitively sensed that his answer to

the academy of Dijon question would have to be a resounding NO to the

smug and arrogant belief that progress in the sciences and arts automat-

ically also meant progress in the realm of human morality. In a state of

feverish excitement he immediately scribbled in pencil the ideas that came

to him in a rush, and these would constitute the most eloquent section of the

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, the so-called Prosopopoeia to Fab-

ricius.

≥

A Prosopopoeia is a rhetorical device consisting in addressing an

absent, dead, or imaginary ﬁgure, in this case, Fabricius, the Roman general

and statesman, reputed for his civic virtue:

O Fabricius! What would your noble soul have if, unhappily for you,

called back to life, you had seen the pompous visage of Rome, the city

saved by your valor and on which your name bestowed more glory than

all her conquests? ‘‘My Gods!’’ you would have said, ‘‘what has become

of the thatched roofs and rustic hearths where moderation and virtue

once dwelled? What fatal splendor has displaced Roman simplicity?

When Rousseau eloquently invoked the ghost of the civic-minded Fab-

ricius returning in order to contemplate sadly the fate of his city which by

now had become the capital of a dissolute, pleasure-seeking empire, he was

of course clearly referring to Paris. The French capital was, according to

Rousseau, the very embodiment of the fundamental weaknesses of contem-

porary society, notably its obsession with materialistic gains and gratiﬁca-

tions and its moral cynicism. Even more importantly, Rousseau’s major

thesis was that the sciences and arts not only remained passively subser-

vient to the most oppressive forces in society but also actively contributed

to their perpetuation.

Rousseau was still in a state of great agitation ‘‘close to delirium’’ when

he reached the Vincennes prison. Diderot, for his part, had been deeply

affected by his imprisonment and solitary conﬁnement, so contrary to his

own gregarious nature. He immediately noticed his friend’s state of excite-

ment. Rousseau responded by reading the Prosopopoeia to Fabricius he had

excitedly penciled under the oak tree. Diderot not only urged Rousseau to

vie for the prize, he also exhorted him to pursue this negative, controversial

view, for he perceived it as a provocative paradox that would give his friend

a better chance at winning the prize against the majority of the contestants,

262 Gita May

who would in all probability subscribe to the overly optimistic notion that

there is a necessary correlation between progress in the arts and sciences

and morality.

∂

Little did Diderot fathom the intensity, depth, and sincerity of Rous-

seau’s negative response to the Academy of Dijon proposal, and its conse-

quences. Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and Arts constituted far

more than a paradox, an intellectual or ideological game play in which

the philosophes liked to indulge. The eloquent and belligerently negative

stance he took in the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts represented an

existential posture, a deeply personal, moral lifetime commitment that

would soon alienate Rousseau from the philosophes, including his friend

Diderot. With his tendency at rhetorical hyperbole, in his Confessions

Rousseau ascribes to what he views as Diderot’s undue inﬂuence not only

much of the responsibility for the negative response to the Dijon Academy

proposal, but also indirectly for the many misfortunes that befell him after

what he melodramatically characterizes as ‘‘this moment of frenzy.’’ Yet, at

the same time, he proclaims that it was the extraordinary vision he experi-

enced under the oak tree that ultimately not only inspired him to write the

Prosopopoeia to Fabricius but also emotionally and morally sustained him

for the following several tumultuous years:

All my petty passions were stiﬂed by an overwhelming enthusiasm for

truth, liberty, and virtue, and what is most astonishing is that this state of

excitement was sustained in my heart for more than four or ﬁve years as

intensely perhaps as has ever been entertained in the heart of any human

being.

∑

Rousseau’s writings on literature and the arts make clear that his aes-

thetics were inseparable from his ethical and political ideas. Although mu-

sic, ﬁction, poetry, and the theater are intimately intertwined in almost all

his work, for Rousseau the development of the arts, the progressive reﬁne-

ment in manners, mores, and standards of beauty, and the impressive ad-

vances and achievements in architecture, theater, opera, literature, and

painting had not been matched by political, social, and moral progress and

only testiﬁed to an ever-widening rift between culture and morality.

Rousseau’s 1758 Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre has come to oc-

cupy an increasingly central place in his oeuvre. It is indeed of crucial

importance, for no other writing by him so intimately and consistently

interweaves his politics and his aesthetics, or so powerfully underscores the

problematic role the arts play in society. Allan Bloom, the translator of the

Rousseau, Cultural Critic 263

Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre and the Emile, who achieved controver-

sial celebrity with his book on The Closing of the American Mind, speaks of

it as an unjustly neglected work.

∏

If Rousseau so sharply focused on the theater, it was not so much, as has

so frequently been stated, to protect the virtue of his Genevan compatriots

against the corrupting inﬂuence of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists as to

show how our instinctive sociability (the pleasure we derive from dealing

with our fellow human beings) becomes denatured in a corrupt society.

Neither does he seek to emulate Pascal in a wholesale denunciation of any

form of diversion. Far from it. Rather he seeks to transform the very notion

of theatricality in order to bring it into greater conformity with our natural

impulses as well as with his idea of a new political order.

The sophistication and codiﬁcation of the French theater only demon-

strated its hopeless artiﬁciality and irrelevance. Rousseau’s ferocious on-

slaught on the contemporary French theater, on its hallowed traditions and

repertoire, and on what he views as the dubious morality of the profession

of the actor and especially the actress, rests on the belief that it is irremedia-

bly artiﬁcial and outdated. The Lettre to d’Alembert on the Theatre con-

stitutes a passionate plea for a total renewal of public spectacles in favor of

a new kind of participatory theatricality involving all citizens in one way or

another: in informal balls where young people of marriageable age can

meet, in healthy outdoor activities such as athletic games and competitions,

or in patriotic events celebrating the great civic virtues that are the bedrock

of a true republic.

Rousseau boldly challenged the commonly held and cherished notion

that great scientiﬁc and artistic accomplishments necessarily contribute to

the betterment of the human condition. This meant that he would have to

stand alone against the philosophes, and especially against his friend Di-

derot. One cannot but wonder why Diderot did not immediately recognize

the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts as a clear and ﬂagrant repudiation of

everything the Encyclopédie stood for. Indeed he did everything in his

power to promote the success of the Discourse. Perhaps it was because he

was a loyal, generous, and steadfast friend eager to see Rousseau’s essay

win the prize, but perhaps also because he not only admired Rousseau’s

rhetorical virtuosity, but also subconsciously acknowledged that the darker,

more ominous message of the Discourse deserved to be taken seriously.

For Diderot had his own doubts about the role of culture in modern

society. His endorsement of Greuze’s overtly didactic compositions, his

harsh strictures against such contemporary practitioners of the slyly erotic

and titillating art of Boucher and Fragonard, and his creation of a new

264 Gita May

dramatic genre reﬂecting the concerns of middle-class people and their

family problems are proof that his preoccupations are not as far removed as

one would like to think from Rousseau’s stance. Furthermore, the lesson

that the cynical and ne’er-do-well Rameau’s Nephew proclaims he ﬁnds in

Molière’s plays is a compendium of ways in which to indulge one’s favorite

vices with impunity: ‘‘When I read The Miser, I say to myself, ‘Be as

miserly as you like, but don’t talk like the miser.’ When I read Tartuffe, I say

‘Be a hypocrite if you choose, but don’t talk like one. Keep any useful vices,

but don’t acquire the tone and air which would make you ridiculous.’ ’’

∫

The

lesson is clear: In a society with a devalued morality every individual

becomes an actor—that is, one well-versed in the art of wearing a mask and

in the ruses of deception. Similarly, Diderot was as capable as Rousseau of

railing against the nefarious effect of superﬂuity and luxury on the moral

ﬁber of a society, as is evidenced in his Satire against Luxury in the Style

of Persius.

Ω

Like Rousseau, Diderot denounces the loss of all moral values

as a result of an economy based upon personal enrichment and general

ostentatiousness.

In his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts Rousseau deliberately set out

to contrast the simple, frugal ways of Sparta with the high culture of Athens

as a strong warning that as a nation grows rich and powerful and as its

prosperity increases, it may come to give in to a fatal craving for luxury,

urbanity, and reﬁned manners and pleasures. This narcissistic preoccupa-

tion with pleasure, politeness, elegance, and good taste will be fatally inimi-

cal to morality and to the survival of such basic, simple, and essential

virtues as truthfulness, sincerity, loyalty, courage, humanity, and love of

duty and of freedom. Furthermore, instead of contributing to the happiness

and well-being of people, the advancement of the sciences and arts has all

too often fostered unrealistic aspirations and ambitions, thereby creating

frustrated misﬁts: ‘‘How much better it would have been if all those who

could not go far in a career in letters had been turned away at the entrance

and steered toward arts useful to society. A person who will never be more

than a bad poet or a third-rate geometer might have become an excellent

cloth maker.’’

We like to believe that culture represents our highest and noblest as-

pirations. Rousseau, for his part, was convinced that its role is far more

problematic. All too often it serves as the complicitous handmaiden of

the establishment and contributes to the perpetuation of the status quo.

Despite their rhetorical hyperbole Rousseau’s stern admonitions are par-

ticularly relevant in our own self-indulgent, cynical postmodern age, for

they pointedly remind us that culture profoundly affects the fate of a nation

Rousseau, Cultural Critic 265

by either fostering or discouraging those virtues that are at the core of its

political survival.

notes

1. Rousseau, Confessions, Book 4 in Oeuvres complètes de Rousseau

(Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, Gallimard, 1964), I, 159 (my translation).

2. Rousseau, Confessions, Book 8, 351.

3. In his Confessions, Book 8, 351, Rousseau states that he wrote the

Prosopopoeia to Fabricius ‘‘in pencil under an oak tree.’’

4. Rousseau, Confessions, Book 8.

5. Rousseau, Confessions, Book 8.

6. Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, tr. Allan Bloom (Glencoe,

Illinois: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1960), xviii.

7. Whether the grandiose Fêtes de la Révolution answered Rousseau’s

wish for popular, patriotic but generally simple and informal events is not

certain. Cf. Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) and Mona Ozouf, Festivals and

the French Revolution, tr. Alain Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1988). Also cf. Gita May, ‘‘Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alem-

bert sur les spectacles and Revolutionary Aesthetics,’’ Actes du Colloque

de Montréal sur Rousseau et la Révolution, ed. J. Roy (Ottawa: Association

nord-américaine des études sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1991), 199–207.

8. Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, tr. J. Barzun and R. H.

Bowen (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 50.

9. Diderot, Salon de 1767, in Salons III; Ruines et paysages, ed. E. M.

Bukdahl, M. Delon, A. Lorenceau (Paris: Hermann, 1995), 549–57.

Rousseau on Society and the Individual

ROBERT N. BELLAH

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the strangest, and one of the most intel-

ligent, men of the eighteenth century—of any century. He said himself that

he was a man of paradoxes, and several of his most important works begin,

famously, with paradoxes. The Social Contract: ‘‘Man was born free and

everywhere he is in chains.’’ Emile: ‘‘Everything is good as it leaves the

hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.’’

And The Reveries of a Solitary Walker: ‘‘So now I am alone in the world,

with no brother, neighbor or friend, nor any company left me but my own.

The most sociable and loving of men has with one accord been cast out by

all the rest.’’ The third paradox concerns Jean-Jacques alone; the other two

concern the whole of humanity.

The paradox on which I wish to focus in this chapter is as follows: no

one has argued more strongly than Rousseau that human nature is funda-

mentally individualistic, yet no one has more clearly seen what humans

owe to society. According to him society is what makes us fully human and

society is what debases us below our natural state. Rousseau has a story to

tell which explains how all this came to be; it is a very complex story, so

complex that scholars continue to disagree about how to interpret it. Yet it

is a story which is still very much part of the self-understanding of the mod-

ern world. We have much to learn from it, not only about Rousseau, but

about ourselves, who are, more than we are aware, still under his inﬂu-

ence. I want to tell that story brieﬂy by examining the arguments of the

Second Discourse and The Social Contract, considering in passing the First

Discourse and several other of his writings. Then I want to test whether

these arguments are true, scientiﬁcally and morally. I hope only to lead

readers into conversation with Rousseau’s great texts themselves; I cannot

replace Rousseau’s answers nor foresee the answers that his future readers

will give.

Many have noted that Rousseau was born and raised a Protestant in Cal-

vin’s city, Geneva. His Deism distanced him from the Protestant and Catho-

lic churches alike, but his sympathies

and perhaps the inner structure of his

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 267

thought had a Protestant cast. Charles Taylor has argued that Rousseau’s

contrast between that which is good from the hands of God and the evil men

have made of it brought an Augustinian, even a hyper-Augustinian, strand

into eighteenth-century thought,

and we should remember that Augustine

was the church father who had the greatest inﬂuence on Protestantism.

Rousseau’s pessimism about human progress in history was surely one of

the reasons for his alienation from the literary and philosophical circles of

his day. Those thinkers who were determined to erase the infamy of Chris-

tian superstition were not happy to see its shadow reappearing in one of

their own.

It is commonly held that Rousseau, along with many eighteenth-century

thinkers, believed that human nature is basically good, that he rejected the

idea of original sin, and Rousseau himself said as much. But on closer

inspection Rousseau’s view of human nature is perhaps closer to that of

orthodox Christianity, especially Protestantism, than is usually recognized.

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden were not evil—they hadn’t sinned.

From the hand of God they were, like all of creation, good. It was their own

action, their own sin, that brought about the Fall and distorted all subse-

quent human nature, so in this sense sin is not original. Human nature for

Rousseau is good only in the state of nature, before the beginning of society.

It was the human creation of society, with all its attendant vices, that began

the fatal process of human distortion and degeneration. Further, just as

Christians can be saved from their sinful state through belief in Jesus Christ

and membership in the Church which is his body on earth, so human beings

for Rousseau may regain something like their natural freedom if they enter

the social contract and gain civil freedom, or if they as individuals attain

moral freedom. But these forms of salvation for Rousseau, in spite of his

Pelagianism, are more difﬁcult to attain and rarer than those offered by

Christianity; his view of human history is marked by a more than Augustin-

ian gloom.

There is one further parallel between Christian teaching and that of

Rousseau which will lead me into the central concern of this essay. Adam’s

fall was not viewed as wholly a disaster. Without it there would have been

no salvation history of the human race, no need for the redeemer, Jesus

Christ. The human condition in the Garden of Eden has been referred to as

‘‘dreaming innocence,’’ an existence so simpliﬁed as to be hardly human.

Viewing Paradise in this way, the fall has been seen as fortunate, a felix

culpa, for it is only through it that we became fully human, though in need

of salvation. For Rousseau man in the state of nature is solitary, without

language or culture, satisﬁed with meeting only his simplest biological

268 Robert N. Bellah

needs, in short, little different from non-human animals. But entering so-

ciety brings dramatic changes. In Chapter 8 of Book 1 of The Social Con-

tract, Rousseau puts it succinctly:

The transition from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very

remarkable change in man, by substituting in his behavior justice for

instinct, and by imbuing his actions with a moral quality they previously

lacked. Only when the voice of duty prevails over physical impulse, and

law prevails over appetite, does man, who until then was preoccupied

only with himself, understand that he must act according to other princi-

ples, and must consult his reason before listening to his inclinations.

Although, in this state, he gives up many advantages that he derives

from nature, he acquires equally great ones in return; his faculties are

used and developed; his ideas are expanded; his feelings are ennobled;

his entire soul is raised to such a degree that, if the abuses of this new

condition did not often degrade him below that from which he emerged,

he ought to bless continually the wonderful moment that released him

from it forever, and transformed him from a stupid, limited animal into

an intelligent being and a man.

A happy fall indeed.

Although he sometimes, as in the above quotation, describes the shift

from the state of nature to the civil state as occurring in a single jump, at

other times, especially in the Second Discourse, he describes the transition

as more gradual, with several intermediary stages. Jean Starobinski, a lead-

ing French specialist on Rousseau, has described these stages in some detail

and it is useful to follow his discussion in order to understand better the role

of society in Rousseau’s conception of social evolution.

It is true that

Rousseau insisted that his views on the original state of nature ‘‘are not to be

taken as historical truths, but merely as hypothetical and conditional rea-

sonings.’’ Nonetheless, his account of the several stages of the transition

between the state of nature and the formation of civil society is circumstan-

tial, including references to existing peoples representing various stages,

and some of it could still be defended today as having a degree of historical

accuracy. In these respects Rousseau’s account is more than the ‘‘just so’’

story which the accounts of Hobbes and Locke, for example, so clearly are.

In the state of nature itself humans are solitary, without speech or cul-

ture, have only the briefest of contacts with each other, and do not even

know that they will die; they are, in effect, without self-consciousness.

Mating consists of only passing encounters, and even children, though

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 269

brieﬂy suckled by their mother (Rousseau blithely informs us that children

among primitives grow up much more quickly than among us), ‘‘no sooner

gained strength to run about in quest of food than they separated even from

her.’’ Eventually mother and child came not even to recognize each other.

These utterly unsociable creatures are governed, says Rousseau, by two

principles prior to reason: ‘‘one of them interests us deeply in our own

preservation and welfare, the other inspires us with a natural aversion to

seeing any other being, but especially any being like ourselves, suffer or

perish.’’ The ﬁrst principle, self-preservation, Rousseau shares with Hobbes

and Locke, but he does not draw a Hobbesian conclusion from it. Precisely

because humans are solitary, the quest for self-preservation involves no

necessary hostility toward others nor even any competition with them. The

second principle, quite absent in Hobbes but essential to Rousseau, he calls

pity, and deﬁnes as a sentiment, not a rule of reason. It is the feeling of pity

which will hinder ‘‘even a robust savage from plundering a feeble child, or

an inﬁrm old man’’ unless in the direst need himself. And although pity

does not rise to the level of the golden rule, it results in a ‘‘maxim of natural

goodness a great deal less perfect, but perhaps more useful, Do good to

yourself with as little prejudice as you can to others’’ (Rousseau’s em-

phasis). We will have to consider below whether pity as Rousseau deﬁnes it,

is, after all, compatible with the radically non-social nature he is trying

to describe.

However hypothetical this starting point may be, the succeeding stages

begin to be empirically recognizable. But why should there be any succeed-

ing stages—why not an everlasting contentment with the ‘‘natural’’ state?

Rousseau gives two kinds of reasons, internal and external. Starting ﬁrst

with the internal reasons, there are two things about human nature even

in its earliest stage which makes it different from that of other animals.

Whereas animals operate solely according to the laws of mechanics and are

strictly governed by instinct (here Rousseau follows Descartes), humans

have the ‘‘spiritual’’ capacity for ‘‘willing, or rather choosing,’’ and ‘‘the

consciousness of this power.’’ In other words humans are free; they have the

‘‘quality of a free agent.’’ But there is another quality equally if not more

important than freedom that distinguishes man from beast, perfectibility, ‘‘a

faculty which, as circumstances offer, successively unfolds all the other

faculties, and resides among us not only in the species, but in the individ-

uals that compose it.’’ Yet neither of these internal potentialities, freedom

and perfectibility, though they make possible developments not open to

other animals, necessitate such developments. It is, rather, the external

270 Robert N. Bellah

reasons, ‘‘accidents’’ Rousseau calls them, which pressure men to take the

ﬁrst steps toward what will prove a fatal course:

After having showed that perfectibility, the social virtues, and the other

faculties, which natural man had received as potentialities, could never

be developed of themselves, that they needed the fortuitous concurrence

of several foreign causes, which might never arise, and without which he

must have eternally remained in his primitive condition, I must proceed

to consider and bring together the different accidents which may have

perfected the human understanding while debasing the species, and

made man wicked by making him sociable, and from so remote a time

bring man at last and the world to the point at which we now see them.

(Rousseau’s emphasis)

One of these accidents, perhaps the most important (and one often in-

voked today by scholars who think about social evolution) was population

increase. What was easy when men were few became more difﬁcult when

they multiplied. It was need that motivated ingenuity, leading to the inven-

tion of hooks and lines, bows and arrows, and it was need that led men,

solitary by nature, to begin to associate, although the association was transi-

tory, lasting only as long as the need was felt. It was also need that instigated

the ﬁrst use of language in the hitherto silent species. ‘‘The ﬁrst language of

man,’’ said Rousseau, ‘‘was the cry of nature,’’ imploring ‘‘assistance in

great danger, or relief in great sufferings.’’

These earliest forms of associa-

tion, based only on moments of temporary mutual need, as in a common

hunt, ‘‘scarcely required a more reﬁned language than that of crows and

monkeys.’’ This is what Starobinski calls the ﬁrst stage, ‘‘one in which

pressed by need [men] begin to associate themselves for a common effort:

occasional collaboration, where anarchic hordes without permanence are

constituted.’’

Once technological advances began, they led to others at an increasing

rate resulting in a ‘‘ﬁrst revolution,’’ from which emerged what Starobinski

calls the ‘‘patriarchal age.’’ This stage he identiﬁes with life in the Paleo-

lithic, though it is the ﬁrst of the stages to be represented by still living

peoples.

Huts and villages were constructed, family life began, language

reached a degree of subtlety similar to our own, but private property was

still minimal, the land being used in common for hunting and gathering.

Rousseau’s description of this age is both idyllic and ominous:

They now began to assemble round a great tree: singing and dancing, the

genuine offspring of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 271

the occupation of the men and women, free from care, thus gathered

together. Everyone began to notice the rest, and wished to be noticed

himself; and public esteem acquired a value. He who sang or danced

best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most dexterous, or the most

eloquent, came to be the most respected: this was the ﬁrst step toward

inequality, and at the same time toward vice.

In this stage some differences between the strong and the weak, the

skilled and the less skilled, the beautiful and the less beautiful, began to

appear, and, though ideas of justice and morality began to emerge, retribu-

tion for wrongs was left to the action of those aggrieved, there being no law.

Nonetheless this was a happy state, what Starobinski calls a golden age.

Rousseau describes it as follows:

[Though] natural compassion had already suffered some alteration, this

period of the development of human faculties, holding a just mean

between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of

egoism [amour propre], must have been the happiest and most durable

epoch. The more we reﬂect on this state, the more convinced we shall be,

that it was the least subject of any to revolutions, the best for man, and

that nothing could have drawn him out of it but some fatal accident,

which, for the common good, would never have happened. The example

of savages, most of whom have been found in this condition, seems to

conﬁrm that mankind was formed ever to remain in it, that this condition

is the real youth of the world, and that all ulterior improvements have

been so many steps, in appearance towards the perfection of individuals,

but in fact towards the decrepitness of the species.

Before turning to the ‘‘great revolution’’ which would end this golden

age, the age Rousseau’s description of which has led people to attribute to

him the idea of the ‘‘noble savage,’’ a term he did not use, we must look

at another key but problematic distinction in his account, that between

‘‘amour de soi’’ and ‘‘amour propre.’’ Careful translators distinguish them

by translating the ﬁrst as ‘‘love of self’’ and the second as ‘‘self-love.’’

Unfortunately Lester Crocker, whose translation of the Second Discourse is

used in this volume, is inconsistent in his translation of these terms, which

in normal French do indeed mean the same thing, so Rousseau’s distinction

cannot be followed in his translation. According to Rousseau’s analysis in

note O of the Second Discourse, the love of self (amour de soi) in the true

state of nature is a natural passion little different from the animal instinct of

self-preservation. In particular, it involves no comparisons with others, for

272 Robert N. Bellah

in his solitary state ‘‘man seldom consider[s] his fellows in any other light

than he would animals of another species.’’ This primitive love of self, then,

involves no consciousness of others as comparable to one’s self, and, con-

versely, no consciousness of self as comparable to others. It is selﬁsh only in

an innocent sense, since it lacks any desire to elevate the self at the expense

of others. Self-love (amour-propre), on the other hand, is based fundamen-

tally on invidious comparisons with others and so gives rise to all the vices

of pride, envy, resentment, and spite. As we have seen, self-love is present

already in the golden age, but its consequences will grow steadily worse in

succeeding historical periods.

Turning then to the great revolution, let us consider how Rousseau de-

scribes it and to what causes he attributes it:

[F]rom the moment it appeared an advantage for one man to possess

enough provisions for two, equality vanished; property was introduced;

labor became necessary; and boundless forests became smiling ﬁelds,

which had to be watered with human sweat, and in which slavery and

misery were soon seen to sprout out and grow with the harvests.

Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts whose invention pro-

duced this great revolution. . . [I]t is iron and corn, which have civilized

men, and ruined mankind.

Starobinski identiﬁes this change with the Neolithic revolution as cur-

rently understood, although we know that agriculture considerably pre-

dated metallurgy, particularly the iron metallurgy that Rousseau had in

mind. Nonetheless, Rousseau, who began the Second Part of the Second

Discourse by ﬁnding the ﬁrst man who enclosed a piece of ground to be the

cause of crimes, wars, murders, misfortunes, and horrors, was probably

right in seeing agriculture as the origin of private property in land and the

exploitation of agricultural surplus (Starobinski notes that though he does

not use the terms Rousseau accurately describes the transition from a sub-

sistence economy to a production economy)

as the most fundamental

cause of human inequality. Such an insight was not new: ‘‘Subjection enters

the house with the plough’’ is a saying attributed to the Prophet Muham-

mad.

And recent scholars have shown that agrarian societies had greater

inequality than any other societies before or since.

The problem that soon arose under the new agricultural regime was that

even those who prospered and who had extensive property could claim no

right to it, for the very idea of law and right did not yet exist. Even though

one had, as Locke had argued, a just claim to the soil to which one had

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 273

added one’s labor, there was no reason for others to respect such a claim.

Thus, says Rousseau:

There arose between the title of the strongest and that of the ﬁrst oc-

cupier a perpetual conﬂict, which always ended in battle and bloodshed.

The new state of society became the most horrible state of war.

At this point Rousseau, though rejecting the Hobbesian view of human

nature and the original condition of men, comes to agree with Hobbes that a

war of all against all indeed lies in the human past (and always potentially

in the present as well). Even in the golden age of hunters and gatherers

there had been a difference between the strong and the weak and the begin-

ning of invidious self-love (amour-propre), but the new situation gave

rise to the distinction between rich and poor and invidious self-love grew

exponentially.

In this situation of calamity, according to Rousseau, ‘‘[t]he rich in par-

ticular must have soon perceived how much they suffered by a perpetual

war, of which they alone supported all the expense, and in which, though all

risked life, they alone risked any property.’’ For Rousseau, the claim to

legitimacy of ownership by the rich, even when based on the right of ﬁrst

possession, was without foundation as long as many who had no property

‘‘suffered grievously for want of what [the rich] had too much of.’’ Without

justiﬁcation for his wealth or forces sufﬁcient to defend himself against all

comers ‘‘the rich man . . . at last conceived the deepest project that ever

entered the human mind: this was to employ in his favor the very forces that

attacked him, to make allies of his enemies, to inspire them with other

maxims, and make them adopt other institutions as favorable to his preten-

sions, as the law of nature was unfavorable to them.’’ Thus was born the

social contract and the civil society based on it. In the words of the rich,

Rousseau deﬁnes the essence of the new order: ‘‘[I]nstead of turning our

forces against ourselves, let us collect them into a sovereign power, which

may govern us by wise laws, may protect and defend all the members of the

association, repel common enemies, and maintain a perpetual concord and

harmony among us.’’ Thus emerged the ﬁrst state.

For Rousseau, it is clear that the new order, establishing justice and right

in name but not in fact, was a trick the rich played on the poor:

Such was, or must have been the origin of society and of law, which gave

new fetters to the weak and new power to the rich; irretrievably de-

stroyed natural liberty, ﬁxed for ever the laws of property and inequality;

274 Robert N. Bellah

changed an artful usurpation into an irrevocable right; and for the beneﬁt

of a few ambitious individuals, subjected the rest of mankind to per-

petual labor, servitude and misery.

It is not necessary to follow the argument in the remaining pages of the

Second Discourse, describing as they do in depressing detail how civil

society degenerates gradually into sheer tyranny and the relation between

rich and poor turns into the relation between master and slave. Given that

the social contract guarantees life and property, however unequally, it might

appear that Rousseau is describing a Hobbesian contract between ruler and

subject in which the latter gives up his freedom in exchange for his life. But

such is not the case. Rousseau refutes the idea that the social contract is

based on acquiescence to the rule of the stronger. However deluded the

poor and the weak are when they are persuaded to enter the social contract,

they do so believing that what they give up in the way of freedom of action

will be returned to them by the rule of law, to which all, rich and poor, ruler

and ruled, are to be subject. There is even the ﬁrst appearance of the idea of

the general will that will be central to the argument of The Social Contract:

‘‘The multitude having, in regard to their social relations, concentrated, all

their wills in one, all the articles, in regard to which this will expresses

itself, become so many fundamental laws, which oblige without exception

all the members of the State’’ (my emphasis). Here Rousseau touches on the

matter of right, which will be central in the later book, as opposed to fact

which largely occupies him here.

Before turning to The Social Contract, which in comparison to the

historical narrative, however hypothetical, of the Second Discourse, would

seem to be an abstract, logical, even mathematical argument, we might

assess brieﬂy the empirical validity of the story so far. As I have implied,

the story of the transition from the hunting and gathering societies of the

Paleolithic, to the agricultural societies of the Neolithic, to the formation of

the early state, though not reliable in detail, is not radically different from

the story we would tell today. Rousseau’s account of social evolution was

the ﬁrst of many, and not the least accurate, that have been told subse-

quently. But what of Rousseau’s starting point, the original state of nature,

on which he staked so much?

Why Rousseau believed that man in the state of nature was solitary is not

easy to answer. One can point to his own life: he lost his mother shortly

after his birth and his father left him at the age of ten. Subsequently his

movements were frequent and his attachments few and mostly ﬂeeting. One

can perhaps see a source in his Protestant background where the individual

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 275

is seen as ultimately alone in the presence of God. Most obviously, in the

tradition of modern political philosophy by which he was greatly inﬂuenced

even when he argued against it, man was seen as originally solitary: in

Hobbes’s famous phrase human life in the ‘‘naturall condition of mankind’’

was ‘‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.’’

Whatever the sources of Rousseau’s idea, the empirical basis for it,

unlike that for much of his subsequent account, is entirely lacking. Not only

are the chimpanzees, with whom we are most closely related, and with

whom we share a common ancestor four or ﬁve million years ago, as well as

the other great apes, social, but so are all the primates, whose origin is at

least forty million years ago. That is a long way back to go to ﬁnd a solitary

ancestor and such an ancestor would hardly qualify as a man, even in

Rousseau’s stripped down version of the state of nature. As far as the genus

Homo is concerned, of which we have evidence for several million years,

again everything points to the fact that all the species of the genus were

social. Of course Rousseau did not have the advantage of paleontology to

help him reconstruct the early history of man, but there is a glaring error in

his argument where he seems almost willfully to overlook an obvious fact.

This mistake is his attempt to minimize the length of time it takes for a child

to become independent. The long dependency of human childhood not only

necessitates the continuing relation of mother and child, but some degree of

cross gender cooperation in its care and feeding. Some recognition of kin-

ship and local group relations appears to have existed among all humans

and among most of our close primate relatives.

Finally, one must doubt whether the solitary animals that Rousseau

describes could have had the sentiment of pity that he attributes to them.

Pity as he describes it, a concern for the sufferings of others, would seem to

imply just the degree of identiﬁcation with another that Rousseau wants to

deny was yet possible. For putting oneself in the place of the other entails

just that capacity to see oneself as the other sees one, which would also

generate the comparative self-consciousness that Rousseau called self-love

(amour-propre). Only a social animal can have pity of the sort Rousseau

describes and the other side of the generous love of another which he calls

pity is always the possibility of the self-consciousness that is a form of

self-love.

It is, then, safe to say that human beings are social by nature and that

society is not an artiﬁcial creation at a late stage of social evolution. What

difference does this make to how we think about Rousseau’s ideas? We will

have to return to this subject later, but we can say that the extreme ten-

sion that Rousseau ﬁnds between the human desire for liberty and the

276 Robert N. Bellah

obligations that any kind of society requires may be less ‘‘natural’’ than he

assumes. The understanding of human beings as social by nature would

seem to mitigate the pessimism of his account, though it would still require

us to explain tensions between individual and society where they actually

exist. But when Rousseau says that ‘‘[t]he subjecting of man to law is a

problem in politics which I liken to that of the squaring of the circle in

geometry,’’

he assumes a creature more recalcitrant to the demands of

society than humans in fact are.

Nonetheless, to the extent that Rousseau believed that human beings are

deeply asocial, the theoretical problem of how society is possible is acute,

and in The Social Contract required all his genius to explain. Here he does

not entirely ignore the historical conditions leading up to the social contract

as explained in the Second Discourse, but he concentrates on what could

possibly make it legitimate in the eyes of intransigently individualistic

humans. He states the ‘‘fundamental problem’’ of which the social contract

is the solution as follows:

To ﬁnd a form of association that may defend and protect with the whole

force of the community the person and property of every associate, and

by means of which each, joining together with all, may nevertheless

obey only himself, and remain as free as before. (Book 1 , ch. 6)

He spells out the solution as follows:

[The contract to form such an association implies] the total alienation to

the whole community of each associate with all his rights; for, in the ﬁrst

place, since each gives himself up entirely, the situation is equal for all;

and, the conditions being equal for all, no one has any interest in making

them burdensome to others. . .

In short, each giving himself to all, gives himself to no one; and since

there is no associate over whom we do not acquire the same rights which

we concede to him over ourselves, we gain the equivalent of all that we

lose, and more power to preserve what we have.

If, then, we set aside whatever does not belong to the essence of the

social contract, we shall ﬁnd that we can reduce it to the following terms:

‘‘Each of us puts in common his person and all his power under the

supreme direction of the general will; and in return each member be-

comes an indivisible part of the whole.’’ (Book 1, ch. 6)

Here we have a series of assertions that must seem bewildering, espe-

cially to Americans. On the one hand there is an intense desire to maintain

one’s liberty, even ‘‘to remain as free as before,’’ that is, in the totally

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 277

asocial state of nature. On the other hand there seems to be an extreme

abdication of just that freedom, in that one alienates one’s self, one’s prop-

erty, and all one’s rights to the community. In part Rousseau seems to be

getting ahead of himself here, for it can be only hypothetical rights that are

being alienated. In the state of nature there are no rights; rights derive

exclusively from the social contract. Even though Rousseau reassures us

quickly that we will get everything back, we aren’t so sure. Especially

important for him, by giving ourselves to all, we give ourselves to nobody.

Living in a still quasi-feudal society where personal dependence on others

was everywhere (including in his own life), Rousseau believed dependence

on the community to be far preferable. But personal dependence is not so

central an issue for us. What about ‘‘total alienation to the whole commu-

nity’’? For freedom-loving Americans that is hard to take. From being a

radical individualist, Rousseau seems to have turned into a radical commu-

nitarian in the strong sense that makes Americans nervous.

If we are nervous already then we will be really upset by Rousseau’s

next move: ‘‘So that the social pact not be a pointless device, it tac-

itly includes this engagement, which can alone give force to the others—

that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to

do so by the whole body; which means nothing else than that he shall

be forced to be free.’’ (Book 1, ch. 7, my emphasis. Consult the whole

passage.)

We have noted Rousseau’s penchant for paradox. We should remember

that a paradox is not a contradiction. Something important may be going on

in this strange expression, ‘‘forced to be free.’’ Some critics have found that

something indeed important is going on: the invention of totalitarianism,

the state forcing the individual to be ‘‘free’’ in some preordained way that is

in fact the total violation of freedom. Given the whole context of Rous-

seau’s work and the argument of The Social Contract, the idea of a total-

itarian Rousseau is hard to understand except as the result of the overheated

sensitivities about totalitarianism in the mid-twentieth century. At one level

all he is saying is that it is law that makes us free (for in the state of nature

there is no law and, once we are no longer isolated, no freedom) and that

law is only law when it is enforced. We will be forced to be law-abiding, for

only thus can we be free. But he is probably saying more than that.

What more is going on begins to be apparent in the opening paragraph of

Book 2:

The ﬁrst and most important consequence of the principles established

above is that the general will alone can direct the forces of the State

278 Robert N. Bellah

according to the object of its founding, which is the common good; for if

the opposition of private interests has rendered necessary the establish-

ment of societies, it is the concord of these same interests that has

rendered it possible. That which is common to these different interests

forms the social bond; and unless there were some point in which all in-

terests agree, no society could exist. Now, it is solely with regard to this

common interest that the society should be governed. (Book 2, ch. 1)

Although we Americans are familiar with the phrase ‘‘common good,’’

we have difﬁculty understanding it as meaning anything other than the

sum of private goods. But that is just what Rousseau says the common good

is not:

There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the

general will; the latter regards only the common interest, while the

former has regard to private interests, and is merely a sum of particular

wills. (Book 2, ch. 3)

The distinction between the will of all and the general will is critical.

is one of the most important distinctions between Rousseau’s position,

which we might characterize as civic republicanism, and that of Locke,

which we might characterize as classical liberalism. The liberal view is

expressed by Mandeville in the idea that the pursuit of private vice will

result in public good, or Adam Smith’s notion of the ‘‘invisible hand’’ of the

market which guarantees that the individual pursuit of self-interest will

result in an increase in wealth in the society as a whole. The Lockean strand

in the Anglo-American tradition is so powerful that we suspect Rousseau of

a totalitarian willingness to sacriﬁce the individual good to the common

good if he means by the latter anything other than the sum of private goods.

The difference between the liberal and the civic republican positions is

sometimes expressed by a contrast between negative liberty and positive

liberty. Negative liberty protects individuals from the abrogation of their

rights by the state. Positive liberty requires the active participation of cit-

izens in their own government. Pushed to the extreme, the emphasis on

positive liberty can be seen as totalitarian: individuals are ‘‘forced to be

free.’’ But Rousseau’s position does not ﬁt easily into this dichotomy, for he

is as adamant as any liberal in defense of the rights of individuals, that is, of

negative liberty. He holds that the idea that ‘‘government is allowed to

sacriﬁce an innocent man for the safety of the multitude’’ is ‘‘one of the

most execrable that tyranny ever invented.’’ In fact ‘‘if a single citizen

perished who could have been saved; if a single one were wrongly held in

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 279

prison; and if a single suit were lost due to evident injustice’’ then ‘‘the civil

state is dissolved.’’

Even the ACLU could hardly go further than that. So

Rousseau’s insistence that the general will is not the same as the will of all

has nothing to do with any willingness to trample on individual rights.

Perhaps we can begin to understand the elusive idea of the general will if

we ask ourselves what we mean when we use the term so common in con-

temporary political discourse, ‘‘special interests.’’ We mean that some indi-

viduals or groups—very rich persons, corporations, labor unions, etc.—

are putting their own interests ahead of the general interest. But again what

is the general interest? Do we really mean, as the cynics would say, that we

object to the special interests of others and would prefer that our own

special interests be honored instead? That would hardly seem to capture the

passion that the denunciation of special interests arouses in the citizenry.

But can we imagine that the general interest is merely the additive sum of

everyone’s special interest? Could it be, for example, that if every one of us

preferred to ride in our own individual automobile and spend no tax money

on public transportation that would be in the general interest? James Stock-

inger, one of the wisest commentators on Rousseau that I know, puts it well

when he writes:

The central theoretical point is that the general will is the result of an

ongoing disposition on the part of each citizen or member of a commu-

nity to ask himself or herself ‘‘What is best for all of us?,’’ rather than the

Lockean question, ‘‘What’s in it for me?’’

If Rousseau believed, as he did, that the civil state is dissolved if a single

individual is unjustly treated, he also believed that if the citizens never

think of the general interest, what is best for all of us, but only of what’s in it

for me, then there too the civil state is dissolved. And, since the civil state is

the only protector of our liberty once society has developed, without it we

are subject to sheer tyranny. Thus, ﬁnally to return to the meaning of the

paradox ‘‘forced to be free,’’ if it doesn’t mean the violation of our individ-

ual rights, as it clearly doesn’t, it does mean that if we want to retain our

freedom we will have to think of the common good, for if we don’t, then our

freedom will be lost. That is a theme which is central to the entire political

thought of Alexis de Tocqueville.

While it is important to get clear on what Rousseau means by the social

contract and the general will on which it is based, we must still ask where

this rather abstract idea ﬁts into his understanding of the social history of

mankind. In one sense it is a purely theoretical construction which can be

used as a measure by which to judge all past and present societies. Since

280 Robert N. Bellah

Rousseau’s description of the social contract as a measure is sternly uncom-

promising, it is evident that virtually all existing societies are illegitimate

and that what we have instead of a civil state is a more or less disguised

return to the state of nature in which the rich and strong tyrannize over the

poor and weak. That is pretty much what Rousseau did think. Although he

was very moderate in his advice as to practical political action, his ideas

were indeed revolutionary and would have revolutionary consequences.

Even so, Rousseau’s idea of the social contract in its pure form was not

entirely a theoretical construct. He thought it had actually existed in human

history and he described the conditions that made it possible. His usual

examples were Sparta (which seems to have been his type-case), republican

Rome, and (in theory if not in fact) his home city of Geneva. It is obvious

that these are all city states, and he makes it clear that a republic based on a

genuine social contract could not exist in any other kind of society. He often

contrasted the relatively small and rigorous republican cities with the great

luxurious cities that were capitals of empires: Sparta with Athens, republi-

can Rome with imperial Rome, Geneva with Paris. In every case the civil

freedom of the republic was lost in the inevitable tyranny beﬁtting an

imperial city.

But although size is critical, it is not the only precondition of a true re-

public. The single most important precondition is the quality of the people:

As an architect, before erecting a large ediﬁce, examines and tests the

soil in order to see whether it can support the weight, so a wise lawgiver

does not begin by drawing up laws that are good in themselves, but

considers ﬁrst whether the people for whom he designs them are ﬁt to

maintain them. (Book 2, ch. 8)

The quality of the people is indicated by their mores,

that is, their

manners and morals, their customs. For Rousseau, as for Tocqueville after

him (there were classical precedents as well), the mores are more important

than the laws, for without suitable mores the laws will not function. So what

kind of mores are requisite for a true republic? On this issue Rousseau is

both speciﬁc and narrow. The proper mores will exist only among a people

at a late stage of patriarchal society, his golden age. For him it is essential

that the society be young. ‘‘The majority of nations, as well as of men, are

tractable only in their youth; they become incorrigible as they grow old’’

(Book 2, ch. 8). As he explains in detail in the First Discourse, old societies,

that is, ones advanced in the arts and sciences and in the luxury that attends

them, will be so permeated by vicious mores that they will never endure the

rigors of a true republic; they are incapable of freedom. What is critical

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 281

about youth, whether in an individual or in a society, is the capacity to

become virtuous, something that Rousseau does not discuss extensively in

our texts but which he does discuss at length in Emile.

On occasion, civil

wars and revolutions can allow a people to regain the vigor of youth. ‘‘Such

was Sparta in the time of Lycurgus, such was Rome after the Tarquins, and

such among us moderns were Holland and Switzerland after the expulsion

of their tyrants.’’ But once the opportunity is past, it cannot be regained:

‘‘Liberty may be acquired but never recovered.’’ (Book 2, ch. 8).

But even the healthy mores that go with youth or youth regained are not

enough. There is another factor, rare, indispensable: the presence of a legis-

lator. The reader should peruse chapter 7 of Book 2 of The Social Contract,

entitled ‘‘The Legislator,’’ although that is only one of the places where

Rousseau discusses the issue. Here it is enough to say that the legislator

must be an extraordinary person, perhaps even someone we could call

charismatic, personally disinterested and concerned only with the good of

the new state. And we should remember that even the best of legislators

would be helpless unless the people for whom he is legislating has mores

that can be molded into good laws. The necessary coincidence of such an

extraordinary leader and a society at just the right stage of development

would appear to be so rare as scarcely to exist. That is what Rousseau

believed; he was no optimist.

But there is one more qualiﬁcation that brings us to an issue we have not

directly discussed so far in this chapter: religion. Even the wisest and most

charismatic of legislators will not convince a people by reason alone. Only

the sanction of the gods will make the new republic possible: ‘‘The legisla-

tor puts into the mouths of the immortals that sublime reason which soars

beyond the reach of common men, in order that he may win over by divine

authority those whom human prudence could not move’’ (Book 2, ch. 7). In

a footnote to this passage Rousseau cites Machiavelli, but he could also

have cited Spinoza. For all of them the primary model of the legislator is

Moses who was able to impose his God-given laws on a people such that it

has survived for millennia. The achievement of most legislators has been

more transient. Among Rousseau’s prime examples, as we would suspect,

were Lycurgus, for Sparta, Numa, for Rome, and, interestingly enough,

Calvin, for Geneva.

But it is not only at the inception of a new republic that the gods must be

invoked: a civil society requires a civil religion. The chapter ‘‘On Civil

Religion’’ near the end of The Social Contract has been considered horrify-

ing by some and we will have to consider why. The content of Rousseau’s

civil religion is far from horrifying. It would seem to be moderation itself:

282 Robert N. Bellah

The dogmas of the civil religion ought to be simple, few in number,

stated with precision, and without explanation or commentaries. The

existence of the Deity, powerful, wise, beneﬁcent, prescient, and bounti-

ful, the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of the

wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and of the laws; these are the

positive dogmas. As for the negative dogmas, I limit them to one only,

that is, intolerance. (Book 4, ch. 8)

Not only are the positive dogmas of the civil religion few and so general

that all the existing religions, at least those of Rousseau’s day, could afﬁrm

them, but Rousseau explicitly stated that citizens could hold whatever other

religious beliefs they chose without the knowledge or interference of the

state, so long as they did not violate these few. The founders of the Ameri-

can republic, being good deists, that is more or less on the same page as

Rousseau in their religious beliefs, were fairly explicit in thinking that just

this set of beliefs was essential if the new republic was to survive. That is

why I took from Rousseau the term ‘‘civil religion’’ in my 1967 essay

‘‘Civil Religion in America.’’

So what is so horrifying? It is the following illiberal conclusion:

Without having power to compel any one to believe [these dogmas], the

sovereign may banish from the state whoever does not believe them; it

may banish him not as impious, but as unsociable, as incapable of sin-

cerely loving law and justice and of sacriﬁcing, if need be, his life to his

duty. But if any one, after publicly acknowledging these dogmas, be-

haves like an unbeliever in them, he should be punished with death; he

has committed the greatest of crimes, he has lied before the laws.

(Book 4, ch. 8)

Rousseau would enforce tolerance by being intolerant of intolerance.

That is shocking to us today as we have learned that to tolerate intolerance

is the price of our liberty. But the societies of Rousseau’s day had not

learned the ﬁrst lesson of tolerance. He was himself the victim of intoler-

ance—it was for his views of religion that he was persecuted, and both in

Catholic France and in Protestant Switzerland. Even in America, where the

founders of our republic believed that the dogmas of Rousseau’s civil reli-

gion were a prerequisite for a free society, but without Rousseau’s draco-

nian provisions for enforcing them, tolerance of deviant religious views

was limited, if not in law, then in public opinion. Thomas Paine discovered

how unpopular a self-proclaimed atheist could be on these shores, in spite

of his many services to the republic.

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 283

It is important to remember that the idea that shared religious belief is a

prerequisite for social coherence long predated Rousseau and has survived

long after him, though in various forms. Tocqueville said of religion in

America that it was ‘‘the ﬁrst of their political institutions.’’ For Durkheim

religion was the expression of social solidarity. It would take us too far

aﬁeld to explore the ramiﬁcations of this idea, which at face value would

seem to be in complete contradiction to our American belief in the separa-

tion of church and state and the idea that religion is essentially private. To

understand why Rousseau held a belief that seems so alien to us, we must

see that he, along with many others, doubted whether religion and morality,

and morality and politics, can really be separated. If republican politics

depend on republican mores, and if republican mores depend on republican

religion, then republican politics depend on republican religion. It is for this

reason that Tocqueville, speaking of the Americans, said ‘‘they have a

democratic and a republican religion,’’ and he included American Catholics

as well as Protestants.

Remember that Rousseau had no interest in enforcing religious beliefs

and practices as such. In the passage outlining his draconian enforcement

he says he would banish unbelievers ‘‘not as impious, but as unsociable, as

incapable of sincerely loving law and justice.’’ In short, Rousseau, and in

this view the founders of the American republic resembled him, was trying

to balance two potentially contradictory intentions: they felt that they

needed to found society in religious belief, but they wanted that belief to be

minimal and tolerant. Neither Rousseau’s minimalist civil religion nor that

of the American founders seems vigorous enough to sustain the task as-

signed them. Rousseau apparently sensed that, for he relied on more than

deist dogmas to create the solidarity necessary in his true republic.

In several places he speaks of the civic celebrations that are essential to

the life of a republic, but nowhere more clearly than in his Letter to M.

d’Alembert on the Theatre. He contrasts the passivity of the audience in a

darkened theater, seduced by unseemly and privatized emotions,

with the

open air celebrations of republican peoples. In particular he describes the

festivals of the Genevans which he knew from his own experience:

[O]ne must have been there with the Genevans to understand with what

ardor they devote themselves to [the festivities]. They are unrecogniz-

able; they are no longer that steady people which never deviates from its

economic rules; they are no longer those slow reasoners who weigh

everything, including joking, in the scale of judgment. The people are

lively, gay, and tender; their hearts are then in their eyes as they are

284 Robert N. Bellah

always on their lips; they seek to communicate their joy and their plea-

sures. They invite, they importune, and coerce the new arrivals and

dispute over them. All the societies constitute but one, all become com-

mon to all. It is a matter of indifference at which table one sits.

Here it is as if the general will becomes visible; that which people share

overcomes that which separates them. It is hard not to see in Rousseau’s

description a precursor of Durkheim’s idea of ‘‘collective effervescence,’’

the ritual occasions in which society becomes visible to itself as he put it in

Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.

One must remember, too, that the late eighteenth century saw a critical

moment in the development of modern nationalism. Rousseau was not

without a role in that development. The content of civic festivities is patrio-

tism. He describes what followed a joyous dance of his father’s military

company after the completion of their exercises:

The dance was suspended, now there were only embraces, laughs,

healths, and caresses. There resulted from all this a general emotion that

I could not describe but which, in universal gaiety, is quite naturally felt

in the midst of all that is dear to us. My father, embracing me, was seized

with trembling which I think I still feel and share. ‘‘Jean-Jacques,’’ he

said to me, ‘‘love your country. Do you see these good Genevans? They

are all friends, they are all brothers; joy and concord reign in their midst.

You are a Genevan.’’

Rousseau put on the title page of The Social Contract and certain of his

other works, ‘‘J. J. Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva.’’ Perhaps it was the Ge-

neva of his dreams of which he was a citizen, for he never lived there again

after running away at the age of ﬁfteen. And Emile and The Social Contract

were publicly burned by the Genevan authorities shortly after their publica-

tion. Today the great Pléïade edition of the complete works of Rousseau is

underwritten in part by the City of Geneva, at last proud of one of its most

illustrious sons. But the paradox of the solitary walker as citizen of Geneva

remains one of the most poignant in a life of paradox.

Perhaps we can say that Rousseau avoided nothing, that he lived in his

person the conﬂicts of emerging modernity. He experienced great joy and

great suffering, but he did not share in any triumphant conﬁdence about

human progress. If the conﬂict between the individual and society is less

deeply embedded in human nature than he thought, it is nonetheless one of

the great tensions of modernity. No one saw more clearly than he, in spite of

his deep devotion to individual freedom, that the new self-assertion of the

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 285

individual in the modern age

was fraught with danger. To continue the

passage with which I began this chapter:

What man loses because of the social contract is his natural liberty and an

unlimited right to anything that tempts him and that he can attain; what he

gains is civil liberty and property in all that he possesses. So not to

misunderstand these gains, we must clearly distinguish natural liberty,

which is limited only by the powers of the individual, from civil liberty,

which is limited by the general will; and we must distinguish possession,

which is nothing but the result of force or the right of ﬁrst occupancy,

from property, which can be based only on a lawful title.

We might also add to the advantages of the civil state moral freedom,

which alone enables man to be truly master of himself; for the impulse

of mere appetite is slavery, while obedience to a self-prescribed law is

freedom. (Book 1, ch. 8)

For those who believe that all we need to understand about society is that

it is composed of competing individuals, each with his consumer prefer-

ences, Rousseau’s insistence on the tension between individual and society

becomes invisible, because, as Margaret Thatcher put it, ‘‘society does not

exist.’’ But if the will of all replaces the general will, Rousseau would argue,

any hope of civil freedom will evaporate and the ‘‘soft despotism’’ that

Tocqueville, in this respect his disciple, predicted, will be upon us. It is

hard to overestimate Rousseau’s deep and continuing inﬂuence. Kant,

Hegel, Tocqueville, Durkheim, and a host of others owe him vital elements

in their thought. Yet for Americans today and for people all over the world

who are inﬂuenced by American culture, he is a difﬁcult thinker. Rebellious

against authority, yet enraptured by Genevan festivities, Rousseau reminds

us that society is both the problem and the answer. We will forget him only

at our peril.

notes

1. ‘‘Experience teaches that of all the Christian sects, Protestantism, as

the wisest and gentlest, is also the most peaceful and social. It is the only

one in which the laws can maintain their dominion and the leaders their

authority.’’ J.-J. Rousseau, The Geneva Manuscript, in On the Social Con-

tract, ed. Roger D. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 201.

2. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1989), 356.

3. In spite of his gloomy view of human progress, Rousseau remained

286 Robert N. Bellah

personally happy, or so he claimed in his last work, The Reveries of the

Solitary Walker, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (New York: Harper and Row,

1967).

4. Jean Starobinski, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Discours sur l’Origine et les fon-

dements de l’inégalité, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres Complètes

(Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléïade, 1964), Vol. 3, xlii–lxxi.

5. In Essay on the Origin of Languages Rousseau writes that among

men in Northern climes ‘‘[t]he ﬁrst words among them were not love me

[aimez-moi] but help me [aidez-moi].’’ See Jean-Jacques Rousseau and

Johann Gottfried Herder, On the Origin of Language, trans. John H. Moran

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 47.

6. Starobinski, ‘‘Introduction,’’ lxii.

7. Starobinski, ‘‘Introduction,’’ lxii.

8. Starobinski, ‘‘Introduction,’’ lxii.

9. Starobinski, ‘‘Introduction,’’ lxiii.

10. Cited by Ernest Gellner in Plough, Sword and Book (Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 1988), 10.

11. Gerhard Lenski, Power and Privilege; a Theory of Social Stratiﬁca-

tion (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).

12. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], Pt. I, ch. 13.

13. I don’t want to say that ‘‘pity’’ or what today we might more likely

call ‘‘empathy’’ necessarily implies invidious comparison, only that the

possibility is always present. Indeed ‘‘pity’’ has been criticized as a way of

‘‘looking down’’ on another: ‘‘Oh you poor thing, you’re so much worse off

than I am.’’

14. Considerations on the government of Poland, in Jean-Jacques Rous-

seau, Political Writings, translated and edited by Frederick Watson (Madi-

son, University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 161–162.

15. Rousseau’s distinction between the general will and the will of all is

expressed by Durkheim in his frequently reiterated assertion that society is

more than the sum of its parts. Indeed the strongly objective meaning of

society in Durkheim owes more than a little to Rousseau. See ‘‘Rousseau’s

Social Contract’’ in Emile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau: Fore-

runners of Sociology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960.) On

Durkheim’s view of society see Robert N. Bellah, Introduction to Emile

Durkheim on Morality and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1973).

16. In Discourse on Political Economy in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On

the Social Contract, ed. Roger D. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press,

1978), 220.

Rousseau on Society and the Individual 287

17. James Stockinger, ‘‘Locke and Rousseau: Human Nature, Human

Citizenship, and Human Work,’’ unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Depart-

ment of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, 1990, 226.

18. Rousseau was not immune to empirical evidence. He had held that

Sparta, unlike Athens, had no theater until a scholar pointed out to him that

the ruins of a theater had been discovered there. (See J.-J. Rousseau, Poli-

tics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan

Bloom (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), 152, note 64. Rousseau accepted

the correction. One would wonder what he would say to the fact that de-

mocracy survived far longer in Athens than in any Greek city. Perhaps he

would say it was not real democracy.

19. French moeurs. Allan Bloom hesitates to translate this term by

‘‘mores,’’ its Latin root, but prefers the rather awkward ‘‘morals [man-

ners].’’ (See Letter to d’Alembert, 149, note 3.) Mores, however, has be-

come standard in translations of the same French word in Tocqueville and is

a familiar term in social science.

20. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, Allan Bloom tr.

(New York: Basic Books, 1979).

21. He writes, ‘‘Those who consider Calvin only as a theologian are but

little acquainted with the extent of his genius.’’ (The Social Contract, Book

2, ch. 8)

22. Robert N. Bellah, ‘‘Civil Religion in America,’’ Daedalus, 96 (1),

1967, 1–21. Reprinted in Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a

Post-Traditional World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991

[1970]), 168–189.

23. It would be helpful to compare Rousseau’s position on the punish-

ment of unbelievers in the civil dogmas with the punishments proposed in

Book 10 of Plato’s Laws, 907d to the end of the book. Although Plato’s

treatment of civil theology in the Laws is clearly a model for Rousseau, the

differences are as signiﬁcant as the similarities.

24. It is worth remembering that Rousseau, so passionately opposed to

the establishment of a theater in republican Geneva, was himself a passion-

ate theatergoer and the composer of a successful opera, Le Devin du Village

(The Village Soothsayer). He was also the author of one of the most widely

read (and sentimental) novels of the eighteenth century, Julie, ou La Nou-

velle Héloïse. Another paradox?

25. Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, 127.

26. Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, 135.

27. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge,

Mass.: MIT Press, 1983 [1966]).

Rousseau and the Self without Property

DAVID BROMWICH

‘‘The ﬁrst man,’’ writes Rousseau in a phrase like a thunderclap, ‘‘who after

enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, This is mine, and

found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil

society.’’ Rousseau does not much care for this man. Still, the claim to

personal property was original, if only in the sense in which the Fall was

original. It earns its place therefore at the start of the ‘‘conjectural history’’

of human nature that occupies much of the Discourse on Inequality. The

history takes us broadly speaking from nature to culture— from a creature

of two primary instincts, self-preservation and sympathy, to one in whom a

third instinct, self-improvement, has taken control and changed the shape of

all experience. A world originally of separate beings, not bound together as

a herd, ‘‘free, healthy, honest and happy, as much as their nature would

admit,’’ was altered ‘‘from the moment one man began to stand in need of

another’s assistance.’’ In the very idea of convenience, Rousseau sees the

germ of an economy of privilege: ‘‘from the moment it appeared an advan-

tage for one man to possess enough provisions for two, equality vanished.’’

The enjoyment of privilege brings in its turn a love of luxury, a ceaseless

clamor for distinction and honors, vastly expanded trade for goods that only

enhance distinction, and, to complete the cycle, the creation of still more

reﬁned and artiﬁcial ‘‘needs.’’ Meanwhile, the man who says This is mine is

on the way to forgetting what it could mean to say This is me.

Rousseau believed that there was an intimate relation between inequal-

ity and a wrong understanding of the self. The pervasive modern error, he

thinks, is to identify the self with its socialized qualities— distinctions,

honors, reputation, ofﬁcial character—in short its properties, in the widest

sense of the word. A modern man or woman is to be understood in terms of

amour-propre, or sociable self-love; what he or she has lost is amour de soi-

même, or care for the true self. These words are not so directly employed in

the Discourses as they are in other works, but their centrality is implicit

throughout. Rousseau comes to the marrow of his purpose when he says, in

part two of the Second Discourse, that with the rise of artiﬁcial society ‘‘It

Rousseau and the Self without Property 289

became to the interest of men to appear what they really were not.’’ How it

came to pass that to be and to appear are different things is explained in an

important note:

We must not confuse selﬁshness (amour-propre) with self-love (amour

de soi-même); they are two very distinct passions both in their nature and

their effects. Self-love is a natural sentiment, which inclines every ani-

mal to look to his own preservation, and which, guided in man by reason

and qualiﬁed by pity, is productive of humanity and virtue. Selﬁshness is

but a relative and factitious sentiment, engendered in society, which

inclines every individual to set a greater value upon himself than upon

any other man.

This distinction is vital to Rousseau’s task as a breaker of illusions. It also

serves to connect his ethics with a reading of human psychology.

Amour-propre, he explains, is ‘‘a sentiment arising from comparisons,’’

from our thought of the way other people appear and the way our own

demeanor probably strikes them. On the other hand, amour de soi-même

comes from ‘‘every man in particular considering himself as the only spec-

tator who observes him, as the only being in the universe which takes any

interest in him, as the only judge of his own merit.’’ So the self has its own

history. I move from a nature in which I am myself the only spectator of my

thoughts, feelings, and actions, to a social and cultural stage on which the

imagined gaze and known interests of a crowd of others come into my mind

and shape every possible thought, feeling, and action. Morality, which

begins as an inquest into native feeling, ends as a protocol of assent; and as

the approval of others perfects my self-approval, conformity at last takes

the place of conscience. Human action thereby becomes a spectacle in the

precise sense that I conceive of my choices as occurring under the scrutiny

of others. The Discourse on the Sciences and Arts suggests an unstated

corollary. The theater, and the other arts in their different ways, by their

status as ‘‘ﬁne’’ or ‘‘polite,’’ vindicate our attachment to spectacle. They

abstract amour-propre into a received idea of taste, and support a conven-

tional morality with all the possible intricacy of manners.

The hypothesis of a ‘‘state of nature’’ had been used before, by Hobbes,

Locke, and others to show how their vision of politics answered to an

essential fact about human nature. Rousseau says memorably against these

state-of-nature theorists that for all the machinery they deploy to recover

the origins of morality ‘‘not one of them has got there.’’ Their portraits of

natural man have been drawn from modern citizens, with all the modern

appetites, reﬁnements, and corruptions. If we truly imagine natural man as a

290 David Bromwich

self-sustaining being, we shall see that his life is far from ‘‘nasty, brutish,

and short,’’ though it is indeed solitary. Nor can such a primitive being truly

be judged wicked. He does not know evil for the same reason that he does

not know good. So far, it is a superb polemic; but, having arrived at this

point, the reader may have a question to put to Rousseau. Why should we

treat any conjectural history as more than a fanciful exercise? Rousseau

wants his account to replace the earlier accounts of natural man because

such stories are used for more than entertainment. It is necessary to reﬂect

on ‘‘the constitution of natural man’’ in order to arrive at a just estimate of

our present state—and this, even though the earlier state ‘‘if it ever did,

does not now, and in all probability never will exist.’’ To know what we may

become, we have to judge ourselves against what we are by nature. We must

try to know what man was like before society captured him.

Though Rousseau’s idea of the state of nature is a ﬁction, it is not meant

to be an altogether attractive one. He points out that the ‘‘sublime maxim of

rational justice, Do to others as you would have others do to you,’’ must

have been unknown to natural man. The principle of reciprocity had not yet

entered his idea of conduct, any more than consciousness of others had

entered his idea of himself. Another notable good is missing from his state.

Furnished with the habits that we now possess, we can hardly imagine not

desiring to sustain a pleasure—Rousseau admits this propensity, and does

not see it as a source of corruption—but before society comes on the scene,

nothing good can be relied on to happen twice. Improvement only follows

in channels worn by the arts of memory, but those arts no more belong to

nature than the other arts and sciences. ‘‘The art perished with the inventor;

there was neither education nor improvement; generations succeeded gen-

erations to no beneﬁt; and as all constantly set out from the same point,

whole centuries rolled on in the rudeness and barbarity of the ﬁrst age; the

race was grown old, and man was a child.’’ No modern citizen could ra-

tionally desire to live in such a state. Yet Rousseau does not rest his argu-

ment here. We are lost if we fail to consider the ways in which our progress

has also been a catastrophe.

The latter part of the story Rousseau largely trusts us to ﬁll in for our-

selves, and some of the work has already been done in the First Discourse.

His criticism there was mainly directed against the ﬂatterers of the rich and

powerful—those who, in their striving for honors and preferment, debase

the very arts and sciences they are supposed to exalt. It is impossible to read

his observations on this subject without feeling that his indictment ﬁts the

‘‘culture industry’’ of the modern commercial democracies. Whatever one

makes of Rousseau as an observer of the eighteenth century, he is an extra-

Rousseau and the Self without Property 291

ordinarily accurate prophet of the twenty-ﬁrst. The vein of horror, mockery,

and distrust that is so notable a feature of the Discourses feels like a natural

response to the mesh of therapeutics, pharmacology, miscellaneous infor-

mation and mass entertainment that now sets the cultural tone in America,

and that is coming to deﬁne what the world agrees to call civilization.

Indeed, the current uses of the words culture and technology closely follow

the implications of Rousseau’s arts and sciences. Let us, then, pursue the

comparative estimate of natural man and social man, which the two Dis-

courses together suggest. What do we ﬁnd when we look at the life our

culture and technology have made for us?

‘‘The savage,’’ observes Rousseau, ‘‘lives within himself, whereas so-

cial man, constantly outside himself, knows only how to live in the opinion

of others.’’ One would expect an apologist for culture eventually to argue

that living outside oneself is a good thing. This has become a conventional

academic sentiment, over the past two decades, but with a simplicity of

optimism that would have startled even Rousseau. The contemporary theo-

rists of society and the arts known as ‘‘postmodern’’ have sided with social

man to the furthest reach of artiﬁce. Experience, they say, can never be

individually known; it comes to us ‘‘mediated’’ by its reﬂections in culture

and technology. We have crossed the line whether we like it or not, and

stand together now as creatures utterly outside ourselves, spectators watch-

ing the other spectators watching an image of something somebody once

called ‘‘myself.’’ Suppose that they are right. The analysis certainly puts us

in possession of a clue to the texture of American life. The aim of the

contemporary media, one may judge by experience, is not only to place us

but to keep us outside ourselves by showing that the correct inner response

is already there—predigested, programmed, and requiring nothing but a

tacit consent which we express through cooperation and reiteration. The

canned laughter of TV sitcoms is an example of this process and a metaphor

for what it wants to accomplish everywhere. The response of the audience

is built into the product itself. In other settings too, the responsive signals of

the ideal spectator are in your eye and ear as you watch and listen, though

with variations suitable to the different media. In the typical format of rock

or rap video, for example, the built-in response is danced and sung by

spectators within the performance, the clapping, nodding, approving min-

ions of the lead singer or group. The habits of such spectatorship bear an

inverse relation to the duties of citizenship. If the right way to allow people

to acquire a moral self is to leave them time to think, and show them the

value of having time for thinking, the popular arts of our day go far to

discourage this. The result aimed at by the productions of culture and

292 David Bromwich

technology is to clinch a sensational effect or to gratify a familiar need.

They rivet attention in a way calculated to blot out and tranquilize thought.

How would one describe the popular culture of America to the sort of

witness—a sensitive and unfamiliar observer—whom Rousseau admon-

ishes us always to employ against ourselves? From talk shows to live police

hunts captured with a hand-held camera, to Internet search engines and

their advertising inserts, to the standard sadistic fare of the video arcades, to

the seasonal blockbuster action thrillers with a line of dialogue per bullet, to

the routine use of the cell phone by citizens while driving a Sport Utility

Vehicle or walking the dog—in all its varied aspects, our culture is plainly

ingenious, efﬁcient, exciting, hypnotic, brutal, sedative, and ultimately stu-

pefying. These traits taken together, of course, would be nothing new to

Rousseau. What has been added in our time is the ambition of culture and of

technology to ﬁll every crevice and outpost of human experience. Culture

has been sapped of the power to reﬂect on itself, and released from the duty

to reform itself. The maxim of a cynical and proﬁteering aestheticism, ‘‘We

don’t make the culture, we only reﬂect it,’’ has become the slogan of every

hustler in need of a literate excuse.

Yet the sensational effects are on the surface. The deeper malady lies in

what the culture teaches implicitly by its examples: that we human beings

are endlessly malleable and adaptive creatures, and that our nature is to

want to crowd our lives with moments of choice among various possible

and optional goods, all of them tempting, none of them intrinsically more

valuable than the others. The lifework of the citizen as pictured in our

culture is: to produce what people consume. The end of life is to become

a fulﬁlled consumer. The market, with its evangelizing techniques and

rhetoric—the very word market has taken on an aura that is religious—now

penetrates our daily lives as never before. In all sectors of the mass media

and the personal media, the boundary between content and advertisement

has been effaced, so that children far into adolescence ﬁnd the distinction

incomprehensible. The norm that is inculcated by the morale of the popular

arts and sciences is hyperactive listlessness, in the service of an ideal that a

modern philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, has aptly described as interpassivity. To

look at the society of the spectacle in the light of natural man is to want to

ask again what has gone wrong.

Oddly, at this point a consolation is suggested by Rousseau. He suspects

that we are creatures of culture far more shallowly than we are taught—far

less completely than culture itself would have us be. Most people, even in

America today, still live a large portion of their lives outside the routines of

culture. For we do have a distinct life of thinking, feeling, and acting, a life

Rousseau and the Self without Property 293

that is partly the creation of nature and necessity. The monstrous ﬁction that

culture altogether deﬁnes us is refuted not only by our authentic experi-

ence of stray passions and instincts, such as love, sex, sympathy, and self-

preservation, but also by occasional deeper experiences of those rare works

of art which are not only or mainly the productions of a shared culture of the

arts and sciences. Such a work has the power to break through the compla-

cent satisfaction that is nurtured by even the most exquisite productions of

conventional culture. Rousseau would seem to have acknowledged as much

in various reserve clauses that appear in his replies to the critics of the

Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and in the Discourse on Inequality

itself. One of his recurrent suggestions is that the arts and sciences are

compelled to act as a cure for diseases of which they themselves are the

leading cause.

The Social Contract has in view another kind of cure: a moral education

achieved through a practice of politics without end. Here the opposition of

the natural and the social self, the tension between amour de soi-même and

amour-propre, the mutual repulsion of a conscience that takes no account

of others and a gregariousness that feeds on vanity—these contraries are at

last surmounted by being writ large as the separation between the public

and the private good. The people of a free and rational republic are sure to

ﬁnd that acting for long-term prudence and the public good is a tangible

expression of a genuine care for the self. The result, as Rousseau presents it,

is a moral system that naturally extends the sublime morality of Do to

others as you would have others do to you. Citizens are asked to judge for

others as they would judge for themselves if none had a proper self, and a

moral law that evades the scrutiny of individuals is made to cover society as

a whole. In this way, the problem is not so much solved as restated. But with

an immense advantage: a more than personal agency is now in place to

unmask the false and disclose the true self. We know how to interpret the

result because we are looking at the false and the true self of society. No

personal amour-propre can obstruct the judgment where the vanity of all

has been conquered by all.

A lot of people for a long time have thought such speculations worse

than fanciful. Rousseau consistently taught that imitation is a treachery

against ourselves, yet a generation of French politicians, the Jacobins of the

1790s, contended for the honor of being the most perfect of his imitators. It

has been said of them, with truth, that they committed their acts of terror

with less compunction as his disciples, since his writings assured them that

whatever they did was done on behalf of all humanity. (This pattern of

inﬂuence is traced in fascinating detail in Carol Blum’s study Rousseau and

294 David Bromwich

the Republic of Virtue.) The most eloquent arraignment of Rousseau as a

sponsor of revolutionary terror came from Edmund Burke in his Letter to a

Member of the National Assembly. ‘‘The professor of vanity’’ is Burke’s

nickname for the author of the Social Contract and the Confessions; to the

question which of the fanatics of 1791 most resembles Rousseau, he an-

swers with grim irony ‘‘in truth they all resemble him.’’ It is curious to see

Burke single out, as Rousseau’s great moral fault, vanity—vanity of all

things, in the defender of amour de soi-même, who counted himself the

sworn enemy of people existing in the opinion of others. Yet Burke’s insight

is genuine and it is deep. There is something not only selﬁsh but con-

tagiously selﬁsh about the man who claims to stand utterly alone with his

conscience. He of all others is likeliest to draw the heedless emulation of

souls eager for the intoxicant of new feelings. Whereas, Burke implies, a

more docile and circumspect person is restrained from such inﬂuences by

the force of custom, by inertia and acquiescence, virtues that are the op-

posite of romantic.

And yet, Rousseau’s own politics in practice were moderate. When

reading his most spartan and utopian passages, one must not forget that he

shared with his century a peculiar taste for schemes of perfectibility. This is

an epochal trait, not to be compared with anything more recent, except,

perhaps, the taste for science ﬁction. Both genres offer allegorical equip-

ment for living, ways of enchanting us into an understanding of the world.

Neither can be pronounced innocent of desiring to effect real changes in

society, but both rely implicitly on an audience well versed in the uses of

metaphor. When Rousseau, in the Social Contract, says that frequent par-

dons signify that great crimes soon will go unpunished—but then adds that

his heart whispers and restrains his pen—he does not mean that literally he

cannot write another word or draw a logical inference on the punishment of

death. Rather, he has found a way to suggest without saying: ‘‘Great crimes

are wicked; and we should not be afraid of inﬂicting death on the wicked;

but I am fallible, and so are you, reader; remember this when you talk of

giving the state the power to kill.’’ The doctrine of the general will cannot

be excused as a metaphor, but the fairest conclusion may be that of T. H.

Green, the great nineteenth-century theorist of obligation, who thought the

phrase mainly signiﬁcant as an appeal to the ‘‘common good’’ in settings

where ‘‘obedience to it is a means to an end desirable in itself or abso-

lutely.’’ In this sense, the general will is a name for a residual sentiment of

unconscious approval that all states require. It was, added Green, an error

for Rousseau to have confounded the sentiment with the power of the

people to give approval in the form of a vote.

Rousseau and the Self without Property 295

Rousseau is vulnerable on many grounds. But the argument that carries

through all his books is an extreme statement of a principle and it yields a

perpetual challenge. The argument denies that the improvement of society

is the improvement of humanity. It asks us to consider whether the prestige

enjoyed by the idea of ‘‘progress’’ may not be philosophically absurd—a

way of talking with apparent meaning but without sense, which ﬂatters the

self-esteem of persons who have lost the power of judging good and bad or

right and wrong. They have been taught by society to think that whatever

comes to us wrapped as progress cannot be bad or wrong. Yet no greater

deception, Rousseau believes, has ever been practiced by human nature

against itself than the belief that by a fortunate necessity we are socialized

into virtue. The notion that morality is at bottom a social good that tallies

with the achievement of good works, worldly esteem, and prosperity—this

heresy of Protestantism, which the seventeenth century knew by the name

of Arminianism, had left its tracks all over the new creed of progress and it

went against the deepest of Rousseau’s convictions, namely that true virtue

is of the heart and not to be known by worldly deeds. He has been widely,

indeed epidemically, misunderstood as therefore saying that human beings

are essentially good. At the earliest moment described in his conjectural

history, he supposed that they were neither good nor evil. They were self-

sufﬁcient and episodically attentive to others. But in this world, as we know

this world, Rousseau no more believed that people are essentially good than

his near contemporary Jonathan Edwards did. He seems to have felt that

individuals have a nature, a character, as inveterate as their manner of

pausing to listen or show concern. This nature is a given fact. It is also a new

fact—it brings something into the world. Conventional morality will never

realize that this new fact is unassimilable. There is something that is your-

self that is not anyone’s property, not even your own, but this is a truth

society cannot bear to know.

How did Rousseau arrive at his truth? The First Discourse was really a

prelude: a circumstantial attack on fashion, including the fashion of prog-

ress, and a cursory view of the frenzy for distinction that is another name for

the desire to resemble a herd of indistinguishable others. As he advanced to

the Second Discourse and later works, Rousseau’s inquest into the sickness

of imitative conduct drove him gradually deeper, until he was left to grapple

with a metaphor that seems to govern the ﬁeld of social relations. His

iconoclasm is directed ﬁnally against the idea that the self is identical with

its properties, the things it is attached to and the things it owns. To regard

property as a part of nature is to confuse the costume with the body and

substance of things. Property, propriety, with the realm of the propria and

296 David Bromwich

amour-propre that they sanction, all this undergrowth of the arts and sci-

ences can ramify so densely, so indecently in the name of decency that most

people are convinced most of the time that the claim that is thus made

rightly supersedes every other imperative. We come to believe that a second

nature is our only nature after all.

Some way into his enterprise, Rousseau saw that property, when placed

at the head of our moral knowledge of others, has the same corrupting effect

that culture has when allowed to shape our self-imaginings. An important

clue lies in his Letter to d’Alembert. This great pamphlet argues that even

the ﬁnest work of art confronts a division between the truth of its subject

matter and the treatment that will hold the audience. When asked to choose

between a theatrical lie and an untheatrical truth, even the greatest artist will

often choose the lie. Or rather, the economy of art will make the choice

almost without the intervention of the artist. In the case in question, the

character of Alceste in Molière’s comedy The Misanthrope, Rousseau in-

vites us to notice how the traits of a cold and unworldly arrogance, which

belong to a true misanthrope, are allowed insensibly to pass out of focus. It

could hardly be otherwise in the theater, where such a portrayal would be

tedious. Instead, the character is rendered laughable by his commonplace

love of ﬂattery and a helpless desire to conciliate those he adores, qualities

that of course have nothing to do with misanthropy. Thus the unsociable

man is exposed as an adept in secret of all the sociable vices. The story

appeals to the sense of ridicule that is part of our amour-propre, but the

result is a sacriﬁce of truth to theatrical plausibility. What happens in The

Misanthrope will be found to occur, says Rousseau, only more penetrably

in the lesser productions of culture. They want to hold us in our seats, and

they give us an appetite for unreality.

Rousseau, then, writes steadily against art and science, against culture

and technology, and against a convenience that society prizes for the sake of

its own advancement. At the same time he defends a self that is inward, a

self that does not exist merely in the opinion of others. His perception, and it

was never in the history of human feelings an obvious one, is that society

cannot do anything to assist this principle or germ of the self. It can only

allow it to exist. We are compelled to respect the self by virtue of its

existence as such, not for any attribute or quality or property. It is natural for

us to use society as a medium for ordinary commerce between persons,

which disposes for the individual’s inspection an array of collaborative

thoughts and feelings, ways of knowing people and ways of joining them in

common projects. So long as society conﬁnes itself to this function of

Rousseau and the Self without Property 297

merely exhibiting the possible combinations, it remains nothing but a useful

extension of the world in which the earliest human creatures, who Rousseau

believes may have been arboreal, occasionally linked with each other from

tree to tree.

But the error of the social self is to suppose that the complication,

elaboration, and fortiﬁcation of the group in its character as a group would

be the end desired by a single being reasonably reﬂecting on its own wel-

fare. We know on the contrary that people in the mass take on a character

more base and presumptuous—above all, more reﬁned in the excuses they

make for their own perpetuation—than the most ingeniously perverse and

self-justifying individual. Beneath the forms of caring that are native to the

social self, which say, and believe when they hear themselves say, that they

care for the good of the individual, can be glimpsed an active jealousy of the

inward self that will stop at nothing. What the attitude suggests is prudent

guidance; what it means is the opposite of love. Here our amour-propre is

an outward expression, in the great book of manners which all obey more

than we know we obey, of a wish for collective stability as an end, a wish

that never really is identical with the desire of a single separate man or

woman. So long as the wishful social body retains expressive dominance,

and stays sure of its good intentions, there is no enormity of delusion or

crime of which it is not capable.

We have a bad reason, besides dullness, for accepting the moral claim of

amour-propre. There is an innocence about the inward self which we are

apt to judge warily because it looks so like indifference. Yet the person who

consults amour de soi-même is limited in the wrongs that he or she is likely

to commit. This limitation has partly to do with the eccentric manner in

which motives work their way toward conduct for the unconnected individ-

ual. It is also a fact, seldom brought into such discussions, that individuals

commonly show a surprising readiness to forgive, when assurance can be

had that important others are not watching. This is a profound though

unprincipled and capricious form of charity, unknown to society at large.

But sooner or later people merge into one group and another, beyond their

own conscious wish for such an identity, thanks to the sheer convenience of

custom and the enchantment of imitation. We come to feel a craving for

distinction when we learn what other people want. ‘‘Born originals, how

comes it to pass that we die copies?’’ asked Edward Young in his Conjec-

tures on Original Composition, a work published four years after the Dis-

course on Inequality. We do become copies, to a greater degree than any of

us anticipates—the social side of our nature both urges and rewards it.

298 David Bromwich

Rousseau’s task, at this late stage of development, is not so much to per-

suade as to warn. To the extent that you agree with society, and believe there

is nothing that is yourself that is not someone’s property, to that extent you

cut off your original contribution to human hopes and fears. You treat

yourself as one more dispensable proof of the satisfactoriness of the avail-

able options.

Common-sense detractors of Rousseau have always replied that it is

only by collaboration that any enlightened change ever comes to pass. This

is true in a conspicuous and pragmatic sense, and it is not denied by Rous-

seau. But though such reforms may be a necessary condition for, they do

not add up to the actual extensions of, the kind of human imagining Rous-

seau’s admirers generally have in view when honoring him. To deepen our

knowledge of the kind of creature we are, it is not enough to expose our-

selves to occasional disagreements among agreeable persons. We require,

even when we cannot fully comprehend, the inﬂux of a moral energy that

may come suddenly and seem to shake the ground beneath us. There is

(Rousseau would have us believe) such a thing as moral originality. The

consequences of his suggestion themselves have made a change in the self-

imagining of human beings. The writings of Shelley and Tolstoy for exam-

ple were sustained attempts to follow Rousseau’s beginning. This is true not

least in works like The Mask of Anarchy and The Death of Ivan Ilych, which

show the triumph of the social will over an intuition of personal freedom.

The same idea of moral originality must have been vivid to John Stuart Mill

in On Liberty, where the teachings of Rousseau are mentioned as acts of

courage which their earliest readers could not but resist, but by which the

moral world has been incalculably enlarged.

What kind of courage does such originality bring? We hear its ground

note in the opening of Rousseau’s Confessions: ‘‘I have resolved on an

enterprise which has no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no

imitator. My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to

nature, and the man I shall portray will be myself.’’ Rousseau could not

have meant to say that nobody after him would write an autobiography. In

announcing that his enterprise was without precedent and would be without

imitators, he was saying that there were memories, tones and colors from

experience, which by their nature seemed to be uniquely his. Not in spite of

that fact, but because of it, his story would have exemplary value. Could the

same be true of the story of any of us? Rousseau implies that it could:

potentially, any of us. It is not written in the book of usable hours that we

shall die copies. The paradox remains that Rousseau, who distrusts writing

Rousseau and the Self without Property 299

as he distrusts any technology, should have elected to convey his teachings

and his memories into the world through writing. But of all mediums writ-

ing offers the densest fabric by which the weave of a particular character

may be known. Perhaps by its very nature, it can come to be a defense

against the delusions of egotism, just as the social contract is a defense

against the delusions of sociability.

From the way in which the idea of true self-love is made to emerge in the

Discourses, a reader might fairly guess a circumstance that is conﬁrmed in

Rousseau’s ﬁnal work, another kind of memoir, the Reveries of the Solitary

Walker. He followed a strict personal code in which the requirements of

sincerity and accuracy were blended. He thought it permissible to embellish

a tale that shades the truth, so long as the lie harms no one and is told for the

sake of wit or fancy. On the other hand, according to his code, it is forbidden

to tell the slightest falsehood that could stain the character of another per-

son; and it is compulsory (where relevant) to recount any circumstantial

truth that could reﬂect discredit upon oneself. Here again we meet Rous-

seau’s emphasis on the good of exposure and its connection with a self-

knowledge freed from artiﬁce. The inward self relates to the full amplitude

of experience, and so its intimate knowledge matters more, in the sense that

it deserves more attention, than ﬁdelity to the course and catalogue of

things-that-have-happened. Together the Confessions and Reveries repre-

sent the faiblesse, the unexceptional weakness or frailty, the susceptibility

to mundane faults of the person from whom the philosophy proceeds. It

seems possible that Rousseau intended these works to remind us of the very

mixed human materials from which any philosophy is worked up from

experience to theory.

His view of the personal accent of all experience cannot be reduced to a

difference between subjective and objective reports, any more than his

deﬁnition of amour de soi-même can be reduced to a preference for sponta-

neous over responsible feelings. I submit myself to the tribunal of other

human beings or fellow citizens in the same stroke by which I subject

myself to a judgment of my own. The two processes will have become the

same when all are persuaded to shed the vanity that leads them to favor

themselves. This is where the arts take on their immense power to charm

and corrupt, since they encourage us to confuse vanity with the dramatic

allure of ‘‘consistency.’’ And this is where the moral imagination must

assume the place of authority vacated by art. Most lives, once looked at

close, are wretchedly inconsistent, but a love of pattern and probability

blinds us to this discovery until we forget that it is a truth about ourselves.

300 David Bromwich

Rousseau’s understanding of ethics, aesthetics, and psychology all point to

a charitable and not a self-serving conclusion. A good book is one in which

the reader is not invited to acquit the author. A good society is one in which

a citizen will not be unfairly punished for the choice to reveal a truth about

himself. It was necessary for autobiography to be invented at the same time

as the social contract in order for each to justify the other.

Rousseau, Robespierre, Burke,

Je√erson, and the French Revolution

CONOR CRUISE O’BRIEN

From the beginning of the second phase of the French Revolution—the

manic phase beginning with the deposition of the King by the Paris mob on

the 10th August 1792—Revolutionary France saw Rousseau and Burke as

polar opposites representing good and evil, respectively.

For the French Revolutionaries, Rousseau was the great mentor and

exemplar. His Social Contract was ‘‘the beacon of legislators.’’ Rousseau

had of course been loved and admired by all sorts of French people—

including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette—in pre-revolutionary France.

But that was the sentimental, idealistic Rousseau of La Nouvelle Héloïse, of

The Reveries of a Solitary Walker, of Emile, and especially The Profession

of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar.

That was what we might call the ‘‘nice cop’’ Rousseau. The cult of the

‘‘tough cop’’ Rousseau, and The Social Contract, came in with the second

phase of the French Revolution following the deposition of the King and

the rise of the Jacobins and in particular of Maximilien Robespierre for

whom The Social Contract was both the object of a cult and the guarantee

of his own personal political holiness and absolute power for a time, as the

arch-priest of the cult. Rousseau was also, in a curious way, the guarantee of

Robespierre’s impartiality, as a being above normal politics, spokesman for

a mysterious and awe-inspiring entity: the General Will. In his address to

the French of the eighty-three Departments in the summer of 1792—about

the summit period of his personal authority—Robespierre came forward

conﬁdently in the persona of spokesman for the General Will, addressing

the Jacobins whom he now totally dominated:

‘‘For us, we are not of any party, we serve no faction, you know it,

brothers and friends, our will is the General Will.’’

‘‘Our will is the General Will.’’ Once accepted as spokesman for the

General Will, itself an absolute, Robespierre was able to wield absolute

power, even at a time when he held no ofﬁce.

He was seen as the ‘‘guide’’ or ‘‘legislator’’ who makes his appearance in

chapters 6 and 7 of Book 2 of The Social Contract. The function of the

302 Conor Cruise O’Brien

guide or legislator is to direct the General Will, ‘‘to show it how to see

objects as they are, sometimes as they ought to be.’’

In 1793–1794, to be designated by Robespierre, with no evidence at all,

as opposed to the General Will, was invariably the prelude to the fatal

prosecution of the individual concerned, to a trial with the result known in

advance, and then to speedy execution.

The cult of the General Will ﬂourished, in a way, even after the fall of

Robespierre. The Thermidorians, having killed Robespierre, declared that

he had falsiﬁed Rousseau and that they themselves were the true heirs to

Rousseau. On 14 September 1794 the Thermidorian-dominated Conven-

tion ordered that Rousseau’s remains be brought from his original burial

place on the Isle of Poplars in Ermenonville and placed in the Pantheon in

Paris with appropriate ceremony. Gordon MacNeil describes the central

place of The Social Contract in the ceremonies: ‘‘The Social Contract, the

‘beacon of legislators’ was carried on a velvet cushion, and a statue of its

author in a cask pulled by twelve horses.’’

In substance, the ceremonies were less like an apotheosis than like an

exorcism. There was no heir to Robespierre. The Thermidorians had killed

Robespierre and declared that he had falsiﬁed Rousseau, of whom they

themselves were the true heirs. But they could not agree among themselves

about what The Social Contract meant, still less were they able to exe-

cute people in its name. The Revolution was fading, soon to be replaced

by the Empire. And there the cult of Rousseau suddenly stopped. It van-

ished for the long period during which Napoleon Bonaparte held supreme

power.

Napoleon Bonaparte had a deﬁnite personal reason for dismantling the

cult of Rousseau. Rousseau had gloriﬁed General Paoli who had fought for

Corsican independence. Indeed Rousseau had gloriﬁed him in a charac-

teristic passage, asserting absolutism in the name of freedom. In Rousseau’s

fragment of a constitution for Corsica, he represents his hero General Paoli

as landing on an island and addressing his people in the following words,

provided for him by Rousseau, and redolent of Rousseau’s politics:

‘‘Corsicans be silent: I am going to speak in the name of all. . . . Let those

who will not consent, depart, and let those who consent raise their hands.’’

For Napoleon this was not only pernicious nonsense but also dangerous

because it challenged his personal right to be Emperor of the French. If

Paoli had succeeded, as Rousseau wished, Napoleon could not have be-

come Emperor of the French because he would not have been French at all,

but a citizen of an insigniﬁcant independent Corsica. So throughout the

The French Revolution 303

long period of Napoleon’s dominance, in the Consulate followed by the

Empire, Rousseau was in total eclipse.

After the end of the Napoleonic period and the restoration of the Mon-

archy, the cult of Rousseau resumed in France, and still ﬂourishes. But it has

been mainly a literary cult, without direct political application. There may

have been an exception. It seems to me that Marx’s combination of a cult of

freedom with intimations of absolutism may well derive ultimately from

Rousseau and speciﬁcally from The Social Contract. But so far as I know,

Marx never explicitly acknowledged any such debt, and in the absence of

evidence, speculation cannot be usefully pursued.

The second phase of the French Revolution, from August 1792 on, saw

the virtual deiﬁcation of Robespierre, as the infallible interpreter of Rous-

seau’s General Will. The same period saw the diabolization of Edmund

Burke in the France of the second phase of the Revolution. To the parlia-

mentary revolutionaries of the ﬁrst phase (1789 to 1792) Burke had been

merely irritating as predicting their own failure, with absolute accuracy. But

to the revolutionaries of the second phase—1792 to 1794—and principally

to Robespierre—Burke’s insights were dangerous. Burke was dangerous,

ﬁrst of all, because he had predicted their own emergence and diagnosed

their characters. In Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, published

in January 1791, Burke had predicted the failure of the ‘‘moderates’’ who

then dominated the Assembly and the advent to power of a ﬁercer and more

ruthless revolutionary strain. He begins by showing the inﬁrmity of the

moderates and goes on to depict the character of the men who are about to

replace them. He depicts the moderates as working together with the extre-

mists in a common cause but hoping to dominate them ‘‘on the credit of the

sobriety with which they show themselves disposed to carry on what may

seem most plausible in the mischievous projects they pursue in common.’’

From that piece of analysis, Burke proceeds immediately to his clinching

prediction:

‘‘But these men naturally are despised by those who have heads to know,

and hearts that are able to go through, the necessary demands of bold

wicked enterprises. They are naturally classed below the latter description,

and will only be used by them as inferior instruments. They will be only the

Fairfaxes of your Cromwells.’’

Burke here predicts in January 1791 the transit of power within the

Revolution, which would come about in the second half of 1792. And it was

this transit, of course, that led directly to what Burke also foresaw: the

304 Conor Cruise O’Brien

execution/assassination of the king of France. Burke predicted that in that

same Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, in which he predicted

the emergence of those who would carry it out:

‘‘Nothing that I can say, or that you can say, will hasten them [the hard-

line revolutionaries] by a single hour, in the execution of a design which

they have long since entertained. In spite of their solemn declarations, their

soothing addresses and the multiple oaths they have taken and forced others

to take, they will assassinate the king when his name will no longer be

necessary to their designs, but not a moment sooner.’’

Burke’s profound understanding of the workings of the French Revolu-

tion, attained very early on, is nowhere more evident than in his prediction,

contained in his Reﬂections on the Revolution in France that the Revolution

would necessarily end in military dictatorship:

It is known that armies have hitherto yielded a very precarious and

uncertain obedience to any senate, or popular authority; and they will

least of all yield it to an assembly which is to have only a continuance of

two years. The ofﬁcers must totally lose the characteristic disposition of

military men, if they see with perfect submission and due admiration,

the dominion of pleaders; especially when they ﬁnd, that they have a

new court to pay to an endless succession of those pleaders, whose

military policy, and the genius of whose command (if they should have

any) must be as uncertain as their duration is transient. In the weakness

of one kind of authority, and in the ﬂuctuation of all, the ofﬁcers of an

army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some

popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and

who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men

upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no

other way of securing military obedience in this state of things. But the

moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really com-

mands the army is your master; the master (that is little) of your king, the

master of your assembly, the master of your whole republic.

The seizure of power by Napoleon Bonaparte—the event predicted in

this remarkable passage—occurred on 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799),

four years after the death of the predictor.

According to a writer in the London Review of Books (February 1989)

‘‘Burke has always been ignored in France.’’ Quite untrue, both in the past

and in the present. Burke’s Reﬂections on the Revolution in France was

translated into French in the month after its English publication. The French

edition sold two thousand copies in its ﬁrst two days and was immediately

The French Revolution 305

at the center of a ﬁerce controversy. This was during the ‘‘constitutional’’

initial phase of the French Revolution, a phase for which Burke rightly saw

no future. Nor was Burke exactly ignored during the Terror when mere

possession of his book was enough to send its possessor to the guillotine.

Nor in the next century did Michelet ignore Burke when he called Reﬂec-

tions ’’that infamous book’’ and loudly and inaccurately denounced its

author.

By the time, however, when the readers of the London Review of Books

were learning how the French had ‘‘always ignored’’ Burke, the school of

French historiography now in the ascendant was already paying respectful

attention to him. The attitudes of that school—far more critical of the

French Revolution than any of its predecessors—are reﬂected in the great

Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, edited by François Furet and

Mona Ozouf, and published in Paris in 1988 (an English edition followed in

1989). The Critical Dictionary contains a respectful entry on Burke by Gé-

rard Gengembre. Burke is the only English speaker to be included among

the seventeen thinkers in the section ‘‘Historians and Commentators.’’ The

only other non-Francophones to ﬁgure in the list are four Germans: Fichte,

Hegel, Kant, and Marx. Gengembre’s essay concludes: ‘‘Study of this pen-

etrating foreigner’s scrutiny of France remains proﬁtable for anyone who

would understand what was truly at stake in a Revolution from which the

whole modern French political tradition ultimately derives.’’ The ‘‘pen-

etrating foreigner’’ bit is better in the original French: ‘‘ce regard étranger,

d’une clairvoyance pénétrante.’’ Pity that English-speaking readers should

miss that keyword ‘‘clairvoyance.’’

Thomas Jefferson, Burke’s contemporary, became the French Revolu-

tion’s warmest admirer in America right at the beginning of the Revolution,

and so remained throughout the Terror. He was one of the ﬁrst Americans to

obtain a copy of Burke’s Reﬂections, immediately after its publication in

America. Before that he had—like most Americans—reacted favorably to

what he knew of Burke, because Burke had been the leading ﬁgure in the

parliamentary minority in Britain which had opposed the coercion of Amer-

ica. But when Jefferson read Reﬂections, and found Burke implacably op-

posed to the French Revolution, he decided that Burke’s opposition to the

coercion of America must have been corruptly motivated. Jefferson wrote

to a sympathetic English correspondent on 11 May 1791:

‘‘The Revolution of France does not astonish me as much as the Revolu-

tion of Mr. Burke. I wish I could believe the latter proceeded from as pure

motives as the former. But what demonstration could scarcely have estab-

306 Conor Cruise O’Brien

lished before, less than the hints of Dr. Priestley [Dr. Joseph Priestley,

leading English radical, and a friendly correspondent of Jefferson] and Mr.

Paine establish ﬁrmly now [sic]. How mortifying that this evidence of the

rottenness of his mind must oblige us now to ascribe to wicked motives

those actions of his life which wore the mask of virtue and patriotism.’’

Jefferson’s sputtering indignation at Reﬂections was no doubt quite sin-

cere. But it also served a political purpose. Most Americans, from 1789 to

1795, were highly sympathetic to the French Revolution which they tended

to see as resembling their own Revolution and somehow complementary to

it. But enthusiasm for the French Revolution was not evenly distributed

throughout America. In the North, dominant commercial interests, consid-

ering that the fast expanding trade with Britain was vital to America’s

future, were suspicious of enthusiasm for the French Revolution, seeing

that enthusiasm as having the potential to carry America into a war with

Britain which would be ruinous to American prosperity. The economically

backward and debt-ridden Southern states had no such reasons to hold

back. American enthusiasm for the French Revolution was seen by Jeffer-

son as a major asset for the South—and Jefferson’s Virginia in particular—

in the burgeoning struggle for dominance within the new Republic. Jeffer-

son saw this clearly and cleverly exploited enthusiasm for the French Revo-

lution as a weapon against John Adams—his main potential rival for the

succession to the Presidency. Jefferson drew attention to similarities be-

tween Burke’s Reﬂections and certain writings of John Adams. The contro-

versy was damaging to Adams and politically proﬁtable to Jefferson. And it

paved the way not only for Jefferson’s own presidency but for three Virgin-

ian presidencies, of two terms each.

Jefferson never, so far as I know, explicitly acknowledged a debt to

Rousseau. To do so would have been politically compromising, since most

Americans were more religious than most Europeans and most religious

people classiﬁed Rousseau—not quite accurately—along with Voltaire as

undermining all forms of religion. Jefferson, throughout his life, remained

suspect to Americans with strong religious convictions. Toward the end of

his life, after the British had burned down the center of Washington and

destroyed the nucleus of the Library of Congress, Jefferson offered to sell

his own splendid collection of books to Congress to make up for the loss.

Religious people in Congress warned against accepting the gift because

Jefferson’s library contained the works of Voltaire and Rousseau. Congress,

nonetheless, bought the collection. But Jefferson would not have been sur-

prised at the objection. Rousseau, like Voltaire, was a compromising ally,

politically speaking. Jefferson, always keenly alert, in his long march to the

The French Revolution 307

presidency, to considerations of political advantage and disadvantage, must

have been well aware that to acknowledge a debt to Rousseau would have

been politically damaging. So such a debt was never acknowledged but we

are not to understand from that, that the debt was not there.

The debt appears in Jefferson’s relation to the concept of ‘‘civil reli-

gion,’’ a phrase which appears to have been coined by Rousseau.

The Jefferson of the early 1790s, the champion of the French Revolu-

tion, was an ardent believer in, and prophet of, civil religion in the sense

adumbrated by Rousseau. That is, he sought to animate an apparently secu-

lar and political idea—that of liberty—by breathing into it the kind of

emotions and dispositions with which religion had been invested in the

Ages of Faith. Of this religion Thomas Jefferson was more than a prophet,

he was a pope. As author of the Declaration of Independence he possessed

the Magisterium of liberty. He could deﬁne heresy and excommunicate

heretics. To fail to acknowledge (for example) that the French Revolution

constituted an integral part of the holy cause of liberty along with the

American Revolution constituted heresy, and the heretic had to be driven

from public life.

The words ‘‘heresy’’ and ‘‘holy cause’’ appear repeatedly in Jefferson’s

correspondence between 1789 and 1794 and occasionally even later. And

they are always there to link the American Revolution with the French one

and to sanctify the linkage.

Yet Jefferson’s most profoundly revealing implicit acknowledgement of

a debt to Rousseau comes from a period—early 1798—when the Revolu-

tion was already in retreat before the rise of Napoleon, and Jefferson’s own

faith in the Revolution was already well on the wane. His correspondence

from this period shows that he no longer wanted America to be directly

dominated, or even strongly inﬂuenced, by the French Revolution. But he

still wishes that the French Revolutionaries should succeed in occupying

and dominating Britain—an event which appeared to many quite probable

in the last years of the eighteenth century. The conquest of Britain by

revolutionary France would be a victory, in Jefferson’s opinion, for the

principles of the American Revolution. ‘‘Nothing can establish ﬁrmly the

republican principles of our government (my italics) but establishment of

them in England. France will be the apostle for this.’’

‘‘The apostle. . .’’ The idea of Revolutionary France as having a quasi-

divine mission had dominated Jefferson’s vision of international politics in

the period 1789–94 at the height of his mystical enthusiasm for the French

Revolution. By the late 1790s that faith had disappeared in relation to

French inﬂuence over America. But Jefferson could still see conquest by

308 Conor Cruise O’Brien

the French as a kind of redemption for a more benighted Britain. To a

correspondent, Peregrine Fitzhugh, who had apparently expressed some

qualms about Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the subjugation of England by

revolutionary France, Jefferson wrote on 23 February 1798:

The ensuing month will probably be the most eventful ever yet seen in

Modern Europe. It may probably be the season preferred for the pro-

jected invasion of England. It is indeed a game of chances. The sea

which divides the combatants gives to fortune as well as to valor its

share of inﬂuence on the enterprise. But all the chances are not on one-

side. The subjugation of England would indeed be a general calamity.

But happily it is impossible. Should it end in her being only republi-

canized, I know not on what principle a true republican of our country

could lament it, whether he considers it as extending the blessings of a

purer government to other portions of mankind, or strengthening the

cause of liberty in our own country by the inﬂuence of that example. I do

not indeed wish to see any nation have a form of government forced on

them; but if it is to be done, I should rejoice at its being a freer one.

They may not be ‘‘subjugated,’’ but if the government ‘‘forced’’ on them

is ‘‘a freer one,’’ Jefferson would rejoice. The concept that people might

be ‘‘forced to be free’’ originated with Rousseau, in The Social Contract

(Book 1, chapter 7, last paragraph). Jefferson never acknowledged any

intellectual or moral debt to Rousseau but the debt is evident in this peremp-

tory paradox. ‘‘Forced to be free’’ is a truly revolutionary concept, common

to the French Revolution, and to its twentieth-century heir, the Russian

Revolution.

Rousseau, Burke, Robespierre, Jefferson: this quartet of late eighteenth-

century movers and shakers has challenged my imagination for many years.

Such relations as existed among the four men were uneven and partly

equivocal. By 1778, when Rousseau died, Burke had been a Member of the

British Parliament for thirteen years and had attracted a great deal of atten-

tion, mainly as the strongest parliamentarian opponent of the American

war. Rousseau would have at least heard of him. But Rousseau’s direct

political interests—never more than ﬂeeting—appear to have been con-

ﬁned to continental Europe. When Rousseau visited Britain in 1766—just

after Burke’s election to Parliament—he was in close touch with James

Boswell and David Hume, both of whom knew Burke well. Burke seems to

have discussed Rousseau’s visit with them. But if they discussed Burke

The French Revolution 309

with Rousseau, the discussion seems to have left no trace. In any case

Rousseau soon quarreled with both of them—as he did with almost all of

his acquaintances throughout his life—and he cut short his unhappy visit to

Britain.

Burke, on the other hand, took quite a keen interest in Rousseau. Burke

wrote ‘‘sharply critical’’ reviews of Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert in the

Annual Register for 1759 and of Emile for the same publication in 1762.

When Rousseau became a posthumous hero of the French Revolution-

aries— from 1789 to the end of the Revolution—Burke’s animosity against

him increased and hardened in tone. To an unknown acquaintance Burke

wrote in January 1790 about the literary heroes of the French Revolution-

aries of that time: ‘‘Such masters, such scholars. Who ever dreamt of Vol-

taire and Rousseau as legislators? The ﬁrst has the merit of writing agree-

ably; and nobody has ever united blasphemy and obscenity so happily

together. The other was not a little deranged in his intellects, to my almost

certain knowledge. But he saw things in bold and uncommon lights, and he

was very eloquent.’’

Just one year later, in January 1791, Burke returned to the subject of

Rousseau with a vengeance, in Letter to a Member of the National Assem-

bly [of revolutionary France]. Rousseau was a topical subject when Burke

was writing. On 22 December, less than a month before Burke’s Letter was

written, the National Assembly had decreed that ‘‘there shall be erected to

the author of Emile and Du Contrat Social a statue bearing the inscription:

LA NATION FRANCAISE LIBRE A J.J. ROUSSEAU,’’ Burke writes:

The Assembly recommends to its youth a study of the bold experimen-

ters in morality. Everybody knows that there is a great dispute amongst

their leaders, which of them is the best resemblance to Rousseau. In

truth, they all resemble him. His blood they transfuse into their minds

and into their manners. Him they study; him they meditate; him they

turn over in all the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the

day, or the debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of holy writ;

in his life he is their canon of Polycletus; he is their standard ﬁgure of

perfection. To this man and this writer, as a pattern to authors and to

Frenchmen, the foundries of Paris are now running for statues, with the

kettles of their poor and the bells of their churches. If an author had

written like a great genius on geometry, though his practical and spec-

ulative morals were vicious in the extreme, it might appear that in voting

the statue, they honoured only the geometrician. But Rousseau is a

310 Conor Cruise O’Brien

moralist, or he is nothing. It is impossible, therefore, putting the circum-

stances together, to mistake their design in choosing the author, with

whom they have begun to recommend a course of studies.

Their great problem is to ﬁnd a substitute for all the principles which

hitherto have been employed to regulate the human will and action.

They ﬁnd dispositions in the mind, of such force and quality, as may ﬁt

men, far better than the old morality, for the purposes of such a state as

theirs; and may go much further in supporting their power, and destroy-

ing their enemies. They have therefore chosen a selﬁsh, ﬂattering, se-

ductive, ostentatious vice, in the place of plain duty. True humility, the

basis of the Christian system, is the low, but deep and ﬁrm foundation of

all real virtue. But this, as very painful in the practice, and little imposing

in the appearance, they have totally discarded. Their object is to merge

all natural and all social sentiment in inordinate vanity. In a small degree,

and conversant in little things, vanity is of little moment. When full

grown, it is the worst of vices, and the occasional mimic of them all. It

makes the whole man false. It leaves nothing sincere or trust-worthy

about him. His best qualities are poisoned and perverted by it, and

operate exactly as the worst. When your lords had many writers as

immoral as the object of their statue (such as Voltaire and others) they

chose Rousseau; because in him that peculiar vice which they wished to

erect into a ruling virtue, was by far the most conspicuous.

We have had the great professor and founder of the philosophy of

vanity in England. As I had good opportunities of knowing his proceed-

ings almost from day to day, he left no doubt in my mind, that he

entertained no principle either to inﬂuence his heart, or to guide his

understanding, but vanity. With this vice he was possessed to a degree

little short of madness. It is from the same deranged eccentric vanity, that

this, the insane Socrates of the National Assembly, was impelled to

publish a mad Confession of his mad faults, and to attempt a new sort of

glory, from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices which

we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents. He has not

observed on the nature of vanity, who does not know that it is om-

nivorous; that it has no choice in its food; that it is fond to talk even of its

own faults and vices, as what will excite surprise and draw attention, and

what will pass at worst for openness and candor. It was this abuse and

perversion, which vanity makes even of hypocrisy, which has driven

Rousseau to record a life not so much as chequered, or spotted here and

there, with virtues, or even distinguished by a single good action. It is

such a life he chooses to offer to the attention of mankind. It is such a

The French Revolution 311

life, that with a wild deﬁance, he ﬂings in the face of his Creator, whom

he acknowledges only to brave. Your Assembly, knowing how much

more powerful example is found than precept, has chosen this man (by

his own account without a single virtue) for a model. To him they erect

their ﬁrst statue. From him they commence their series of honours and

distinctions.

It is that new-invented virtue which your masters canonize, that led

their moral hero constantly to exhaust the stores of his powerful rhetoric

in the expression of universal benevolence; whilst his heart was incapa-

ble of harbouring one spark of common parental affection. Benevolence

to the whole species, and want of feeling for every individual with

whom the professors come in contact, form the character of the new

philosophy. Setting up for an unsocial independence, this their hero of

vanity refuses the just price of common labour, as well as the tribute

which opulence owes to genius, and which, when paid, honours the

giver and the receiver; and then he pleads his beggary as an excuse for

his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by

the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as

a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and

sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks,

and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers (my italics).

According to his own account in his Confessions, Rousseau had sent off

all his ﬁve children by Thérèse Levasseur to the foundling asylum as soon

as possible. If we accept Rousseau’s own account, Burke’s last comment

above appears well merited.

Of Robespierre’s own connections with the other three eighteenth-

century ﬁgures under consideration here, only the connection with Rous-

seau and especially with The Social Contract is well attested. Robespierre’s

rise and his ascendancy of 1793–94 were based on being accepted as the

authentic interpreter of the otherwise enigmatic Social Contract. Robes-

pierre was no ordinary political leader but the high priest of a dominant cult.

High priest and also supreme judge. He alone would determine who was

obedient to the General Will and who was refractory to it. Those judged

refractory went to the guillotine as soon as Robespierre made known his

verdict. All this authority was based on Robespierre’s acceptance as Rous-

seau’s living voice.

For our other two subjects—so far as I can ﬁnd—Robespierre never

made known a personal verdict. Nevertheless we know what he thought

about Burke. The mere possession of Burke’s Reﬂections on the Revolution

312 Conor Cruise O’Brien

in France became a capital offense under the Terror, and that could not have

been done without the sanction of the all-powerful Robespierre.

Concerning the remaining member of our quartet, Robespierre’s opin-

ions, so far as I know, have left no trace. He must have known, I think, of

Jefferson’s oft expressed admiration of the French Revolution which did

not cease with Robespierre’s advent to power or during Robespierre’s dic-

tatorship. But, assuming that Robespierre did know of Jefferson’s admira-

tion for the French Revolution, Robespierre could not have been greatly

impressed by that. Robespierre felt that the French Revolution belonged to

the French alone. He was correspondingly suspicious of foreign sym-

pathizers with the French Revolution, most of whom, he thought, were

probably spies. Many of the victims of the Terror, under Robespierre, were

foreign residents, strong sympathizers with the French Revolution. One of

these was Anacharsis Cloots. Cloots, of Prussian origin, became a natu-

ralized Frenchman and almost ecstatic in his enthusiasm for the French

Revolution. He even wrote a long letter to Edmund Burke in which he

invited Burke to come to France and enlist in the cause of the Revolution.

‘‘Leave your island, my dear Burke, come to France!’’ Burke, of course, did

not reply, but Cloots was duly guillotined, under Robespierre, by the Revo-

lution he had so enthusiastically embraced.

A similar case was that of Tom Paine who also became a naturalized

Frenchman and also wrote to Burke extolling the French Revolution. Paine

was imprisoned under the Terror and was probably only saved from execu-

tion as a result of Robespierre’s own fall and execution in Thermidor 1794.

Jefferson did eventually condemn what he called ‘‘the atrocities of

Robespierre.’’ But that was in 1795 and Robespierre was not only dead but

anathema to the new masters of the French Revolution. Throughout the

period of the ascendancy of Robespierre, Jefferson continued to approve

the Revolution in general terms and did not acknowledge that Robespierre

had committed any atrocities. In January 1793—the month of the execution

of Louis XVI—Jefferson wrote a letter to his protégé William Short, in

which he acknowledged virtually no limit to the slaughter that might legit-

imately be perpetrated by the French Revolutionaries: ‘‘The liberty of the

whole earth was dependent on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a

prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been

deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it

should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there

but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better

than it is now.’’

The French Revolution 313

That was the paroxysm of Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the French Revolu-

tion. But he continued to support the Revolution throughout the Terror and

did not condemn it until well after Robespierre’s fall and death. Two cen-

turies later Pope Pius XII went through a similar evolution after the fall and

death of Adolf Hitler.

In conclusion I should like to consider the reason for Rousseau’s as-

tonishing popularity in France, both in his own time and in the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries.

The origin of that popularity may be precisely dated. It began in 1749

when the academy of Dijon offered a prize for an essay on the effect of the

progress of civilization on morals. Rousseau decided to compete for the

prize. His idea of how to treat the subject seems originally to have been an

orthodox one: progress beneﬁcial to morals. But Diderot—then still his

friend—showed Rousseau a better idea. Why not enlist the power of para-

dox and describe the superiority of the savage state? Rousseau took the hint,

deployed his paradox and won the prize.

Henceforward, paradox was among the principal weapons of his formi-

dable controversial armory. Another great resource was his grasp of the

power latent in conﬁdent, fulminating assertion, unsupported either by ar-

gument or common sense. The most notable example of all this was the

famous sentence:

‘‘Man was born free and everywhere is found enslaved and in chains.’’

It is obvious, that man was never ‘‘born free.’’ A baby is dependent for

years after its birth and, if not taken care of, will die in infancy. Everybody

of course knew that then, just as well as everybody knows it now. Yet the

French of the late eighteenth century obviously were delighted with the idea

of ‘‘born free and everywhere enslaved.’’ Why should this be?

General de Gaulle, who had a profound understanding of the psychic

processes underlying modern French history, dated the maturing of the

processes which were to lead to the French Revolution from 15 January

1757, the date on which the French were beaten by the Prussians in the

battle of Rossbach. There is no doubt that this was a traumatic event for the

French people. France had been the predominant power in continental Eu-

rope for more than a hundred years. The Monarchy needed the prestige of

military success. Defeat by a power classiﬁed as minor—Prussia—under-

mined the monarchy. Then there was the fact that France’s ally in the Seven

Years War was Catholic Austria. The Catholic Church, seen as blessing the

Austrian alliance, became increasingly discredited by the discredit of the

314 Conor Cruise O’Brien

alliance itself. Both Church and Monarchy were largely discredited after

Rossbach, and the discredit of each of the partners also told upon the other.

But even before the revolutionary process set in in earnest (after 1757)

both Church and Monarchy were losing authority during the long, frivolous

and inglorious reign of Louis XIII. The Catholic Church, the social and

moral pillar of the Monarchy, was already tottering under the assaults of the

philosophes well before 1750. The Church was undermined in its moral

authority. But also, by the second half of the century, the authority of those

who had undermined the Church’s authority was itself being undermined.

Few believed what the Church taught any more, but even those who did not

believe were growing dissatisﬁed with the conﬁdent cerebrality and the

cold mockeries of the victorious philosophes.

In short there was what would later be called ‘‘a gap in the market.’’

Rousseau had an unerring eye and ear for such a gap and conﬁdently moved

in to ﬁll it. He did so in 1761 with La Nouvelle Héloïse. What he offered was

a vague religious emotionalism and rhetoric, disconnected from all intellec-

tual dogma, and also from inconvenient restrictions on practice. You could

feel good without actually having to endure restrictions on practice. This

worked like a charm: French people loved Rousseau then as they have

never loved any of the other philosophes. And—with the comparatively

brief apparent exception of the Napoleonic years—the French have loved

him ever since. His admirers generally cite Rousseau’s style as the reason

for their admiration. But Rousseau’s style is no more than the very efﬁcient

medium for the conveyance of a perennially seductive message: how to

know you are good without having to give anything away.

Rousseau’s place in France now appears perennially secure. He simply

comes with the language. But Rousseau also holds an inﬂuential place

within the English-speaking world through the vogue for the ‘‘politically

correct’’ and ‘‘multiculturalism’’ now dominant in certain faculties of

several major American universities. These work in Rousseau’s manner:

through strong, repeated, unargued assertion: ‘‘Hey ho, hey ho, Western

culture’s got to go’’ chanted the students. No matter that the students in

question have no other culture than the culture of the English language, the

only language that they know, or have any intention of knowing. They are

in fact monocultural multiculturalists; intellectual monsters, incapable of

doing anything except exercising a kind of power through agreed nonsense,

and feeling good while doing so.

All that is very much in the spirit of Rousseau. I believe that Rousseau

has been, and still remains a noxious force within Western culture. He is

The French Revolution 315

noxious because of a fundamental lack of seriousness. He does not think or

argue. He talks for effect and teaches others to do the same. Unfortunately

there are some in every generation who are seduced either by his message

or—more probably—by the example of his successes. The malignant

magic of the grand charlatan is liable to be with us for a long time.