The Social Contract

The Social Contract, major work of political philosophy by the Swiss-born French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78).

Du Contrat social (1762; The Social Contract) is thematically continuous with two earlier treatises by Rousseau: Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750; A Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, conventionally referred to as the First Discourse), the winning entry in an essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Dijon that posed the question “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts tended to purify morals?”; and Discours sur l’origine de l’inegalité (1755; Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, conventionally referred to as the Second Discourse), an entry (though not the winning one) in another essay contest sponsored by the Academy that posed the question “What is the origin of inequality among men and is it authorized by the natural law?” In the First Discourse, Rousseau introduced a theme that was to inform almost everything else he wrote. Throughout his life he kept returning to the thought that people are good by nature but have been corrupted by society and civilization. He did not mean to suggest that society and civilization are inherently bad but rather that both had taken a wrong direction and become more harmful as they became more sophisticated.

Rousseau’s Second Discourse follows on the argument of the First Discourse by developing the proposition that people are naturally good and then tracing the successive stages by which they have descended from primitive innocence to corrupt sophistication. Rousseau suggests that original humans were not social beings but entirely solitary, and to that extent he agrees with the account of the state of nature put forward by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). But in contrast to the English pessimist’s view that human life in such a condition must have been “poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” Rousseau claims that original humans, although admittedly solitary, were healthy, happy, good, and free. Human vices, he argued, date from the time when societies were formed. Rousseau thus exonerates nature and blames society. He says that passions that generate vices hardly existed in the state of nature but began to develop as soon as people formed societies.

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The introduction of property marked a further step toward inequality, since it made law and government necessary as a means of protecting it. Rousseau laments the “fatal” concept of property in one of his more-eloquent passages, describing the “horrors” that have resulted from the departure from a condition in which the earth belonged to no one. Civil society, as Rousseau describes it, comes into being to serve two purposes: to provide peace for everyone and to ensure the right to property for anyone lucky enough to have possessions. It is thus of some advantage to everyone but mostly to the advantage of the rich, since it transforms their de facto ownership into rightful ownership and keeps the poor dispossessed.

Like Plato (428/27–348/47 bce), Rousseau always believed that a just society was one in which all people were in their proper place. And having written the Second Discourse to explain how people had lost their liberty in the past, he went on to write The Social Contract to suggest how they might recover their liberty in the future.

The Social Contract begins with the sensational opening sentence, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” and proceeds to argue that people need not be in chains. If a civil society, or state, could be based on a genuine social contract, as opposed to the fraudulent social contract depicted in the Second Discourse, people would receive in exchange for their independence a better kind of freedom, namely true political, or republican, liberty. Such liberty is to be found in obedience to a self-imposed law.

Rousseau’s definition of political liberty raises an obvious problem. For while it can be readily agreed that individuals are free if they obey only rules they prescribe for themselves, this is so because each individual is a person with a single will. A society, by contrast, is a set of persons with a set of individual wills, and conflict between separate wills is a fact of universal experience.

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Rousseau’s response to the problem is to define civil society as an artificial person united by a general will, or volonté générale. The social contract that brings society into being is a pledge, and the society remains in being as a pledged group. Rousseau’s republic is a creation of the general will—of a will that never falters in each and every member to further the public, common, or national interest—even though it may conflict at times with personal interest.

Rousseau sounds very much like Hobbes when he says that under the pact by which they enter civil society people totally alienate themselves and all their rights to the whole community. Rousseau, however, represents this act as a form of exchange of rights whereby people give up natural rights in return for civil rights. The bargain is a good one, because what is surrendered are rights of dubious value, whose realization depends solely on an individual’s own might, and what is obtained in return are rights that are both legitimate and enforced by the collective force of the community.

There is no more-haunting paragraph in The Social Contract than that in which Rousseau speaks of “forcing a man to be free.” But it would be wrong to interpret these words in the manner of those critics who see Rousseau as a prophet of modern totalitarianism. He does not claim that a whole society can be forced to be free but only that occasional individuals, who are enslaved by their passions to the extent of disobeying the law, can be restored by force to obedience to the voice of the general will that exists inside of them. Persons who are coerced by society for a breach of the law are, in Rousseau’s view, being brought back to an awareness of their own true interests.

For Rousseau there is a radical dichotomy between true law and actual law. Actual law, which he described in the Second Discourse, simply protects the status quo. True law, as described in The Social Contract, is just law, and what ensures its being just is that it is made by the people in their collective capacity as sovereign and obeyed by the same people in their individual capacities as subjects. Rousseau is confident that such laws could not be unjust because it is inconceivable that any people would make unjust laws for itself.

Rousseau is, however, troubled by the fact that the majority of a people does not necessarily represent its most-intelligent citizens. Indeed, he agrees with Plato that most people are stupid. Thus, the general will, while always morally sound, is sometimes mistaken. Hence Rousseau suggests the people need a lawgiver—a great mind like Solon or Lycurgus or Calvin—to draw up a constitution and system of laws. He even suggests that such lawgivers need to claim divine inspiration in order to persuade the dim-witted multitude to accept and endorse the laws it is offered.

That suggestion echoes a similar proposal by the Italian statesman and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), whom Rousseau greatly admired and whose love of republican government he shared. An even more conspicuously Machiavellian influence can be discerned in Rousseau’s chapter on civil religion, where he argues that Christianity, despite its truth, is useless as a republican religion on the grounds that it is directed to the unseen world and does nothing to teach citizens the virtues that are needed in the service of the state, namely, courage, virility, and patriotism. Rousseau does not go so far as Machiavelli in proposing a revival of pagan cults, but he does propose a civil religion with minimal theological content designed to fortify and not impede (as Christianity impedes) the cultivation of martial virtues.