Excerpts from Jean Jacques Rousseau selected for Business and Society,
Spring 2019
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Editors’ gloss: Human societies involve informal norms as well as formal laws to
guide behavior. In order to obtain the benefits of living in society, we relinquish
our individual freedom to do or say whatever we want – for better or worse – and
we behave in keeping with those norms and laws. Additionally, we accept the
power of government to enforce laws and maintain social order. The term ‘social
contract’ has been used by philosophers and political theorists to describe both
informal social norms as well as the formal relationship between those who
govern and those who are governed. In both senses, the social contract remains
perennially subject to change and dispute.
The Social Contract. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1762)
Book I
6. The Social Compact
I SUPPOSE men to have reached the point at which the obstacles in the way of
their preservation in the state of nature show their power of resistance to be
greater than the resources at the disposal of each individual for his maintenance
in that state. That primitive condition can then subsist no longer; and the human
race would perish unless it changed its manner of existence.
But, as men cannot engender new forces, but only unite and direct existing ones,
they have no other means of preserving themselves than the formation, by
aggregation, of a sum of forces great enough to overcome the resistance. These
they have to bring into play by means of a single motive power, and cause to act
in concert.
This sum of forces can arise only where several persons come together: but, as
the force and liberty of each man are the chief instruments of his self-
preservation, how can he pledge them without harming his own interests, and
neglecting the care he owes to himself? This difficulty, in its bearing on my
present subject, may be stated in the following terms:
The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the
whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which
each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as
free as before." This 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 make them vain and ineffective; so that, although
1
they have perhaps never been formally set forth, they are everywhere the same
and everywhere tacitly admitted and recognised, until, on the violation of the
social compact, each regains his original rights and resumes his natural liberty,
while losing the conventional liberty in favour of which he renounced it.
These clauses, properly understood, may be reduced to one — the total
alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community;
for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the
same for all; and, this being so, no one has any interest in making them
burdensome to others.
Moreover, the alienation being without reserve, the union is as perfect as it can
be, and no associate has anything more to demand: for, if the individuals
retained certain rights, as there would be no common superior to decide between
them and the public, each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so
on all; the state of nature would thus continue, and the association would
necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical.
Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there
is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields
others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an
increase of force for the preservation of what he has.
If then we discard from the social compact what is not of its essence, we shall
find that it reduces itself to the following terms:
“Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme
direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each
member as an indivisible part of the whole.”
At once, in place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of
association creates a moral and collective body, composed of as many members
as the assembly contains votes, and receiving from this act its unity, its common
identity, its life and its will. This public person, so formed by the union of all other
persons formerly took the name of city and now takes that of Republic or body
politic; it is called by its members State when passive. Sovereign when active,
and Power when compared with others like itself. Those who are associated in it
take collectively the name of people, and severally are called citizens, as sharing
in the sovereign power, and subjects, as being under the laws of the State. But
these terms are often confused and taken one for another: it is enough to know
how to distinguish them when they are being used with precision.
