The Social Contract

Glossary

A

Aristocracy: Government by a select few, which Rousseau traces from primitive "natural aristocracy" of elders, through hereditary aristocracy (which he calls the worst kind), to elective aristocracy, which he considers the best form of government — "the best and most natural arrangement is that the wisest should govern the many, when it is assured that they will govern for its profit, and not for their own."; Related: Democracy, Monarchy, Government (The Prince)

C

Civil Religion: Rousseau's proposal, in the book's penultimate chapter, for a minimal set of sociable dogmas — the existence of a benevolent, powerful divinity, the sanctity of the social contract and the laws, and tolerance of all religions that themselves tolerate others — enforceable not by punishment but by banishment for those who cannot sincerely hold them, meant to bind citizens together without reviving theocracy.; Related: The Legislator, The Censorship

D

Democracy: The form of government in which the whole or most of the people hold executive power. Rousseau considers it the form requiring the most civic virtue and the least practical to sustain, warning that uniting the legislative and executive powers in the same hands produces "so to speak, no more than a government without government," and famously adding that true democracy "never has existed, and never will exist" in the strictest sense.; Related: Government (The Prince), Aristocracy, Monarchy
Deputies or Representatives: Rousseau's sharply skeptical treatment of political representation: "as soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall." Because Sovereignty is inalienable, he argues that the general will itself can never truly be represented, only its execution delegated.; Related: Sovereignty Is Inalienable, Voting

G

Government (The Prince): The executive body Rousseau sharply distinguishes from the Sovereign: an intermediate agent, whether one person or many, charged with executing the laws and maintaining civil and political liberty. "Every free action is produced by the concurrence of two causes; one moral... the other physical," and government supplies the physical, executing power that the Sovereign's legislative will alone cannot provide.; Related: Sovereign, Democracy, Aristocracy, Monarchy

L

Law: For Rousseau, an act of the general will that is always general in its object — "law considers subjects en masse and actions in the abstract, and never a particular person or action." Law may establish classes of citizens or forms of government, but it can never single out named individuals, which is what distinguishes legitimate legislation from a mere particular decree.; Related: The General Will, The Legislator, Sovereign
Legislative Power vs. Executive Power: Rousseau's foundational separation between the Sovereign's legislative will (which decides what the general will requires) and government's executive power (which carries that will into action). Confusing the two, he warns, is what causes despotism, since a body that both makes and applies the law recognizes no check on itself.; Related: Sovereign, Government (The Prince), Law
Liberty and Equality: The "two main objects" Rousseau names as the true end of any system of legislation: "liberty, because all particular dependence means so much force taken from the body of the State, and equality, because liberty cannot exist without it." He clarifies that equality does not mean identical power or wealth for everyone, but that no citizen should be wealthy enough to buy another or poor enough to be forced to sell himself.; Related: The General Will, Law, The Legislator
Lycurgus: The legendary lawgiver of Sparta, cited by Rousseau as the model Legislator: "when Lycurgus gave laws to his country, he began by resigning the throne." His example illustrates Rousseau's claim that founding just laws requires giving up, rather than seizing, personal power over the people being legislated for.; Related: The Legislator, Law

M

Monarchy: Government in which executive power is concentrated in a single natural person, a "real man" called a monarch or king, rather than distributed across a collective body. Rousseau treats this concentration as monarchy's chief strength — unity and speed of action — and simultaneously its chief danger, since a single will can too easily substitute itself for the general will.; Related: Government (The Prince), Aristocracy, Democracy

R

Real Property (Right of the First Occupant): Rousseau's account of how private land becomes legitimate public territory once its owners join the social compact: individual possession, once absorbed into the community, becomes property "in the hands of the Sovereign," more secure precisely because the collective force of the State backs it, though "without being any more legitimate" than it was before in principle.; Related: Social Compact, Sovereign, Civil State

S

Slavery (Rousseau's Refutation): Rousseau's rejection of the claim, attributed to Grotius, that a people can legitimately enslave itself to a king the way an individual supposedly could sell himself into servitude. "To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties... it is an empty and contradictory convention that sets up, on the one side, absolute authority, and, on the other, unlimited obedience."; Related: Right of the Strongest, Social Compact
Sovereignty Is Inalienable: Rousseau's principle that "the general will alone can direct the State according to the object for which it was instituted, i.e. the common good," and therefore Sovereignty can never be transferred to a representative or ruler without ceasing to be Sovereignty at all — only its exercise, never the power itself, can be delegated.; Related: Sovereign, The General Will, Deputies or Representatives

T

The Body Politic: Rousseau's term for the State considered as a unified, quasi-organic whole, formed the moment individuals unite under the social compact. Like a living body, it "begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries in itself the causes of its own destruction" — a mortality that leads Rousseau to warn against ever expecting a constitution to last forever.; Related: Social Compact, The Death of the Body Politic, Sovereign
The Censorship: A Roman office Rousseau treats as the guardian of public morals and opinion, not the creator of them: "as the law is the declaration of the general will, the censorship is the declaration of the public judgment." A censor's authority is valid only so long as it accurately reflects existing public opinion rather than trying to impose a new one.; Related: Law, Civil Religion
The Civil State: The condition created by the social compact, in which "justice" replaces "instinct" as the guide to conduct and human actions gain a morality they lacked in the state of nature. Rousseau writes that only in the civil state does man find himself "forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations."; Related: State of Nature, Social Compact, Body Politic
The Death of the Body Politic: Rousseau's chapter arguing that no constitution, however well made, can last forever: "the body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries in itself the causes of its own destruction." Government, he warns, continually tends to encroach on Sovereignty until it eventually breaks the social treaty altogether.; Related: Body Politic, The Abuse of Government
The Dictatorship: The Roman institution of temporarily suspending ordinary law and concentrating emergency power in one person during a crisis, which Rousseau endorses cautiously: "the inflexibility of the laws, which prevents them from adapting themselves to circumstances, may, in certain cases, render them disastrous." He insists such power must be brief and strictly bounded to avoid becoming permanent tyranny.; Related: The Tribunate, Government (The Prince)
The General Will: The collective will of the body politic directed always at the common good, distinct from any individual's private wishes. Rousseau's central claim is that "the general will is always right and tends to the public advantage," even when the people's particular judgments about how to achieve it are mistaken — "the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived."; Related: Will of All, Sovereign, Social Compact, Law
The Legislator: The extraordinary founding figure Rousseau imagines as necessary to draft a people's laws — someone who would need "a superior intelligence beholding all the passions of men without experiencing any of them," unrelated to human nature yet knowing it thoroughly. Because ordinary people cannot recognize wisdom they have not yet been shaped by, Rousseau notes that legislators like Lycurgus historically resigned all personal power and often invoked divine authority to secure obedience.; Related: Lycurgus, The People, Law
The People: The population that must already possess a certain fitness before it can be legitimately legislated for, much as "the wise legislator does not begin by laying down laws good in themselves, but by investigating the fitness of the people... to receive them." Rousseau devotes three consecutive chapters to the conditions — size, unity, timing — under which a people is ready to be given laws at all.; Related: The Legislator, Law, Sovereign
The Right of the Strongest: The proposition Rousseau opens the book by demolishing: that mere force could ever create genuine obligation. "Force is a physical power... how can it produce morality?" He concludes that "since no man has a natural authority over his fellow, and force creates no right, we must conclude that conventions form the basis of all legitimate authority among men."; Related: Slavery, Social Compact
The Roman Comitia: The popular assemblies of ancient Rome, which Rousseau surveys at length as a historical case study in how a large state can still practice genuine collective self-legislation, examining the comitia curiata, centuriata, and tributa and how their differing structures shifted power among patricians, the wealthy, and ordinary citizens.; Related: Voting, Elections
The Social Compact: The founding agreement by which individuals give up their natural liberty and unite into a single body, formulated by Rousseau as: "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." It is the act that creates both the Sovereign and the State.; Related: The Sovereign, Body Politic, Civil State
The Sovereign: The collective body of citizens acting in their public, legislative capacity — not a monarch or ruler, but the people themselves united by the social compact. Rousseau insists Sovereignty is "inalienable" and "indivisible" because it consists precisely in the exercise of the general will, which "cannot be represented" or handed to any smaller group without ceasing to be itself.; Related: The General Will, Social Compact, Sovereignty Is Inalienable
The State of Nature: The pre-political condition Rousseau imagines humanity leaving once "the obstacles in the way of their preservation... show their power of resistance to be greater than the resources at the disposal of each individual for his maintenance in that state." Unlike Hobbes, Rousseau treats this passage to civil society as producing a moral improvement in man, not merely an escape from danger.; Related: The Social Compact, Civil State
The Tribunate: A distinct magistracy, exemplified by the Roman tribunes, instituted to preserve the proper balance among the constituent powers of the State when that balance cannot otherwise be maintained: "a peculiar magistracy that enters into no corporate unity with the rest," acting as a mediating link between prince and people, or prince and Sovereign.; Related: The Roman Comitia, The Dictatorship
The Will of All: The mere sum of individual private wills, which Rousseau carefully distinguishes from the general will: "there is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter considers only the common interest, while the former takes private interest into account, and is no more than a sum of particular wills."; Related: The General Will, Sovereign

V

Voting: The mechanism by which the general will is ascertained in assembly; Rousseau treats the closeness of a vote to unanimity as a direct measure of the body politic's health. "The more concert reigns in the assemblies, that is, the nearer opinion approaches unanimity, the greater is the dominance of the general will," while "long debates, dissensions and tumult proclaim the ascendancy of particular interests and the decline of the State."; Related: The General Will, Elections, The Roman Comitia