Reading Guide to the Rousseau’s On the Social Contract

1st Level

From Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, Second Edition

Hackett, 2011

Translated by Donald A. Cress

Background

Rousseau’s On the Social Contract is one of the great works in the social contract tradition of political philosophy, following the legacy of Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke. First published in 1762, the initial reaction to it was one of outrage and censorship. Within afew decades, however, this work was regarded quite differently. By the end of the eighteenth century it had exerted a profound influence on the French Revolution and Rousseau’s remains had been moved to the Pantheon in Paris, where he was honored as a national hero.

In contrast to the Discourse on Inequality(the “second Discourse”),which portrays man’s entry into civil society as a corruption of his natural goodness, the Social Contract presents another side to Rousseau’s thought. Despite the book’s famous opening, with its ringing condemnation of social life – “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” – the overriding theme is more positive. Rousseau argues that while society requires man’s surrender of his natural liberty, it nonetheless makes it possible for man to be more than a mere animal. Only by being a member of a community can man become a moral and rational being, and this is a great gain.

Reading Guide

Book I

  1. One of the central themes of the book – the importance of man’s liberty or freedom – is indicated memorably in the opening lines of Chapter 1: “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”This brief remark signals both the main question Rousseau thinks a viable political theory must answer and a couple of key assumptions he makes.
  2. Assumption: One of Rousseau’s assumptions, familiar from the second Discourse, is that man’s natural state is a relatively simple, uncorrupted and pleasant existence in which he is free. (In talking about how “man is born,” Rousseau is not so much making a point about how each of us enters the world individually as he is asserting a broadclaim about human existence throughout history. And despite the sexism of the language, we should understand Rousseau as intending to discuss both men and women.) Rousseau’s characterization of natural human existence is strikingly different from that of Hobbes, for example, who famously portrays life in the state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short.”
  3. Assumption: Rousseau also assumes that civil society as it often exists is one in which people are in chains, shackled not only by government policies but also by less formal social mandates. “Look around you,” Rousseau implicitly encourages; you will see that people no longer enjoy the liberty of their natural state.
  4. Question: This exchange then – trading natural liberty for shackles – is clearly a bad deal. The main task of the book, then, is to find a form of civil society and social organization that would make this surrender of natural freedom a better trade As the discussion develops, it becomes clear that Rousseau thinks the loss of natural liberty cannot be justified by gaining security, or convenience, or a particular level of material well-being. (Here too, Rousseau intends important contrasts with his predecessors in the social contract tradition, like Hobbes and Locke.) Natural liberty is too valuable to be compensated for by external goods. Rather, in order for society’s existence to be justified, making man’s loss of natural liberty legitimate, two conditions must be met: 1) something must be gained in society that is more valuable than natural liberty, 2) society must be organizedto enable citizens to readily possess this very valuable thing. Thus, the overriding question of the book is what form of social and political organization can legitimize man’s loss of natural liberty?
  1. Rousseau criticizes Grotius and Hobbes for justifying an absolute monarch who, like the relationship between a leader and a herd of cattle, is able to guard a citizenry “in order to devour it.” Fairly or not, Rousseau thinks both theorists are guilty of justifying political power on the “right of the strongest” the very old idea that “might makes right.”

In the middle of Chapter 3, Rousseau makes a brief but powerful reductio ad absurdum argument against the right of the strongest (in the paragraph beginning, “Let us suppose for a moment…,” [p. 159]). The conclusion of the argument is that this alleged right makes no sense; the “right of the strongest,”he says, is an “utterly meaningless” expression. To understand his argument, however, we need to be clear about an important assumption Rousseau makes about the nature of rights and duties.

  1. Assumption: The key assumption is revealed by Rousseau’s rhetorical question: “what kind of right is it that perishes when the force on which it is based ceases?” [p. 159] The right at issue is the right to be obeyed. If X has a right to be obeyed, then everyone else has a duty to obey X. This is an important presupposition. By definition, the right of the strongest imposes duties on those who are weaker than the right-holder. But a right that imposes duties in such a contingent and variable way is not really a right after all, Rousseau implies. It is a strange right indeed if it disappears because someone else gets stronger. (Can you think of a right of yours that you would lose just because someone else gained in strength relative to you?)
  2. Question: Are Rousseau’s predecessors really guilty of arguing on the basis of “might makes right,” as Rousseau suggests? Does Plato do that? Does Aristotle do that? Does Hobbes do that?
  1. Rousseau alludes at the end of Chapter 3 to his “original question,” which he says “keeps on returning.” This is the question of what kind of political society could be legitimate. The key to the answering the question, for Rousseau, lies in finding the right kind of political authority. In the traditional language of political philosophy, the answer requires finding the right kind of sovereign.
  2. Question: More specifically, the answer requires understanding how it is possible that people could “unite with all,” and yet “nevertheless obey only [themselves] and remain as free as before.” What does Rousseau have in mind? How is it possible, given that being a member of civil society requires loss of some natural liberty, that people could still be “as free as before”?
  3. Question: What does this imply about sovereignty, for Rousseau?
  4. Question: What obligations does the sovereign have towards each individual?
  1. Rousseau draws an important contrast between someone’s “privatewill” and what he calls the “general will,” a contrast further developed in Chapter II.
  2. Question: Given that political authority always represents the dictate of some will or other, what kind of will is represented by legitimate or justified political authority?
  3. Question: What is the difference, exactly, between someone’s private will and the general will?
  4. Question: In one of the Social Contract’s most memorable and paradoxical passages, Rousseau says that in order for the social contract not to be merely an empty formula, people can be “forced to be free.” Normally, though, we take being forced and being free to be opposites. Set aside for the moment the kinds of practical questions Rousseau’s remark raises and the specific policies Rousseau may have in mind. Conceptually, does the contrast between the general will and people’s private wills help make sense of how someone could be forced to be free? In what sense is someone free if she is being forced?
  1. One of the most important contrasts between Rousseau and previous social contract theorists like Hobbes and Locke is that Rousseau draws a more pronounced contrast between people in their “natural” state and people in society. For both Hobbes and Locke, it is fair to say that before and after entering civil society people themselves change very little – what changes are their circumstances, their social surroundings, the disposition of justice, and so forth. Both in the earlier second Discourseandin the Social Contract, however, Rousseau characterizes society as fundamentally changing man’s nature. For example, at the beginning of Chapter 8,he says that the civil state produces “quite a remarkable change in man.” [p. 167].
  2. Question: Summing up his assorted and scattered comments in the Social Contract, what in Rousseau’s view differentiates people in the state of nature from in civil society, and how is it possible for civil society to make man better off than he was in his natural state?

Book II

  1. Asserting that sovereignty resides with the general will leaves unanswered exactly what the general will is. Answering that question is one of the main tasks of Book II. One important issue to be considered is what we might call the object of the general will – what is the general will trying to do or achieve? (Any act of will requires some end or goal aimed at.)
  2. Question: What is the object of the general will?

One model of political legitimacy is that sovereignty is properly directed towards securing the rights of each individual citizen. This conception – familiar to us from John Locke – is not exactly Rousseau’s view, however. Because the general will is the voice of the people collectively, Rousseau infers that the object of the general will must likewise be the collective. The general will is and ought to be focused on the common good. “What makes the will general is not so much the number of votes as the common interest that unites them” [p. 175].

  1. Clarifying the object of the will does not take us very far, however. After all, what is the common good? For one thing, Rousseau is aware that more needs to be said about what distinguishes the general will from what he calls the “will of all,” which is merely the sum of all private wills.
  2. Question: What differentiates the general will from the will of all?

Several steps towardsanswering this question can be taken simply by reflecting on the nature of the general will. Given that the object of the general will is the common good, the general will is not expressed when citizens support only what favors each of them individually. What results in that case is not the general will, but many private wills. Likewise, the general will is not attained when society is divided or factionalized, such that the interests of one group are pitted against those of another. A particular danger in this regard is that groups of people fall under the influence of powerful leaders and group interests. For these reasons, Rousseau claims that “it is therefore important that there should be no partial society in the state and that each citizen make up his own mind” [p. 173].

Underlying these points, however, is the thought that at bottom, the difference between the general will and the will of all is the attitude of the citizens. So long as people deliberate and vote thinking first and foremost of themselves and their private interests, genuine sovereignty will be impossible. Unless each citizen is committed to advancing the common good, there is no general will.

  1. The issue of what constitutes the general will is analogous to an important conceptual question about the nature of law. While all wills makes decisions and issue directives of some kind, there is intuitively a difference between an order backed by force – a mere demand – and a genuine law. The key lies inunderstanding the tight connection that exists between laws and the general will. What makes something a law is both that it is collectively agreed upon by the sovereign power and that it applies to everyone. Since the sovereign power is nothing but the people collectively willing the common good, both law and the general will must be universal both in terms of their “inputs” and their objects.

Herein lies another important contrast between Rousseau’s view and that of his predecessors. Whether we have in mind absolute monarchy as defended by Grotius and Hobbes or the majoritarianism of Locke, none of these theorists put constraints on law in the way that Rousseau does. (For Hobbes, for example, the law is essentially whatever the king says it is.)Laws are necessarily the product of the general will, but in a sense the general will is also dependent on laws, since a legitimate political society cannot exist without them.

  1. Question: What makes something a (genuine) law (as opposed to a mere order or demand?).
  1. This conceptual connection between political legitimacy and law puts us in a position to appreciate the depth of Rousseau’s answer to the main question of the Social Contract: the issue of what justifies civil and political society (given that a significant sacrifice of natural freedom is involved). There is a sort of “master argument” underlying the first two books of the work, which we can see if we understand Rousseau as making the following assumption:
  2. Assumption: The only thing that could legitimate the loss of natural liberty is the gain of more liberty. (This thought is at least partially implicit in Rousseau’s rejection of external or material goods as a possible justification for the state.)

The problem, though, is that by their nature states require the loss of liberty. So how could being a member of society mean a gain in freedom? The key is to recognize that natural liberty is not the only kind of liberty; in fact, it is not the most valuable kind of liberty either. Consider the following reasoning:

  1. Premise: Society must be governed according to laws.
  2. Premise: Laws must be willed by the sovereign – in this case, all the people.

Taken together, these claims suggest the paradoxical-sounding claim that freedom is being governed according to the laws of one’s own will. Rousseau’s root solution to the problem of political legitimacy thus involves conceiving of liberty as being governed by the laws imposed on oneself.

While Rousseau is not the first philosopher to reject the idea that real freedom means a complete absence of constraint, his conception of freedom is a departure from that of his social contract predecessors. Neither Grotius, nor Hobbes nor Locke thought of liberty in this way. For each, freedom remains in essence the liberty of non-interference. But a complete lack of constraint means that one simply becomes a slave to instincts and inclinations. And slavery is of course not freedom. Rousseau is contrasting governing oneself with merely doing what one wants; similarly, he is contrasting acting according to reason with acting on one’s desires. For Rousseau, freedom is the governance of reason, an idea with roots that go back to Plato. Rousseau’s conception of liberty or freedom had a profound influence on subsequent philosophers, such as on Kant’s conception of autonomy.

  1. Saying that laws must be approved of by the general will does not yet sufficiently explain how the laws are to be articulated or written in the first place. Rousseau’s “legislator” is needed to solve this problem.
  2. Question: How are society’s laws formulated?

The legislator’s role is more basic than that of a judge or legislator of political leader. In essence, the legislator’s role is in essence to write the “rules of society.” If this sounds like a tall order, Rousseau basically agrees. Noting that it is not obvious how a society will be able to “carry out an enterprise as great and as difficult as a system of legislation,” he later adds that “Gods would be needed to give men laws” [p. 180]. So the legislator must be “extraordinary.”

But the legislator’s job is not impossible. Rousseau himself was asked to write two political constitutions: one for Poland and another for Corsica, although due to later developments, neither ended up being implemented. In emphasizing the need for “genius” in formulating the state’s norms, Rousseau can be seen as looking back to Plato’s Republicon again. Like Plato, Rousseau thought that crafting the just state required unusual wisdom, and that it was important to shield the intellectual leaders of the state from the corrupting temptations of political power. But while Plato’s proposed solution relied on an unusual education, Rousseau’s solution is at least partly procedural: the legislator cannot be allowed to command or have “authority over men” [p. 181].

  1. In addition to an unusually gifted legislator, Rousseau thinks that a legitimate state requires a certain kind of citizens. For one thing, the people must receive the laws at a certain point in their development. If the laws are received too early, the people will not be ready for them; too late, and the people will already have developed many bad habits. Also, the state cannot be either too large or too small. Small states are particularly vulnerable to outside threats, while large states are difficult to manage. Rousseau’s ideal is a city state like Geneva, his beloved birthplace. (In advocating something on the order of the Greek city state, here too Rousseau’s thought manifests the influence of the ancients.)

a.Question: What must the citizens of a justified political society be like?

More basic to Rousseau’ thought still is the idea that liberty requires equality. The people’s relationship to each other must be one in which material inequalities between them do not become overly pronounced. “No citizen should be so rich as to be capable of buying another citizen, and none so poor that he is forced to sell himself” [p. 189]. Nonetheless, he is well aware that an excessive emphasis on equality can rob people of their liberties just as much as excessive inequality. Rousseau does not agree with socialists who reject private property altogether, but neither does he embrace the economic laissez-faire favored by libertarians. He consistently defends private property, but does not believe citizens’ right to their possessions trumps the common good.