Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Like many other “contract theorists” before him, Rousseau begins his analysis of the social contract that binds men together in society by analyzing pre-social man, offering an interpretation of man in the state of nature. Under such conditions, according to Rousseau, man acts on his own will with no sense of moral obligation to others, governed simply by his own strength. This “right” of force entails no moral choice or obligation because either he is strong enough to assert his will or he must follow the will of another; yielding to force out of necessity is a rational act, not a moral one.

The chimerical nature of strength and the obvious advantages that accrue from an association with others in providing security, sustenance, and stability led to the formation of society, and with it the concept of obligation was born. For Rousseau, however, the difficulty in any association is uniting with others but remaining as free as in the state of nature. The social contract implies a reckoning, but Rousseau argues that this act need not necessitate the surrendering of the self. “Each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody,” he writes, and thus becomes an indivisible part of the whole. The collection of all wills forms a “public person,” expressing the “general will,” which is the sovereign body.

Rousseau then turns to the obvious problem of the instance when someone's “particular will,” as a person clashes with his “general will” as a citizen. His solution is that the citizen must be “forced to be free.” Rousseau is not clear about what this means, but he implies that it might involve legal coercion, saving the individual from his own deviant personal will. As well as creating this tension, man's move into society also offers a degree of emancipation, by freeing the individual from being a slave to his animalistic passions and impulses.

The other major concern that Rousseau addresses is how we recognize a polity in which the “general will” manifests itself and in which the people are sovereign. His diagnostic measure is to use the common eighteenth-century measure of population growth and wealth. This rather circular argument meant that a state with a burgeoning population and wealthy citizens observed the “general will” in which duty and obligation thrived and personal wills were controlled. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a state or nation in which the government abused the “general will” was typically a monarchy, in which the interest of the king or court supplanted the will of all. Rousseau is adamant that while democracies can slide toward absolutism, a monarchy cannot make democratic concessions, because to do so would go against its ruling principles: fear and oppression. In such an event, the government would collapse and revert to a state of nature, requiring complete regeneration of the body politic.

The Social Contract built upon Rousseau's earlier “discourses” (Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men and others) and was arguably written when he was at the zenith of his powers, coinciding with the publication of his educational magnum opus, Émile (1762). However, both works heralded the beginning of a period of long and sporadic persecution for his religiously heterodox views, which played hard on his mental health. Many contemporaries found The Social Contract too paradoxical and abstract to have relevance to real political discourse, but it heavily influenced the political theory of the American and French Revolutions and is still considered to be a key political text.