Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Social Contract, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Human Freedom and Society
Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Direct Democracy
Government and the Separation of Powers
National Longevity and Moral Virtue
Summary
Analysis
Because “might does not make right,” Rousseau continues, “all legitimate authority among men must be based on covenants.” While Grotius might be right that people sometimes accept slavery in exchange for having their basic needs met, this does not apply to a people and their king: just as parents cannot control their children once they have grown up, a government cannot control people unless they actively consent to it. But people cannot willingly give up their freedom, which is their “very nature” and the basis of all morality. So contracts based on “absolute dominion for one party and absolute obedience for the other” are not legitimate because they are not reciprocal.
The importance of covenants, or contractual agreements, comes from the inherent equality that all people share because of their fundamental freedom. Because Rousseau sees freedom and self-preservation as the two essential principles of human nature, he thinks that no legitimate state can defy them. There is a difference between accepting servitude to meet one’s needs and promising “absolute obedience”: the first is an exchange of goods for services, and even if it is deeply unequal, it is still based on someone’s free agreement to accept certain conditions, when they could have refused to accept those conditions. On the other hand, “absolute dominion […] and absolute obedience” are not valid terms for a contract because they require people to give away the very freedom that allows them to make contracts in the first place. This means that, for Rousseau, Hobbes’s version of the social contract is inherently illegitimate.
Themes
Grotius also considers slavery legitimate because the winner of a war has a “right to kill the vanquished,” but Rousseau disagrees. War is about “conflicts over things,” not “mere personal relations.” But there can be no property in the “state of nature,” before societies exist, so there also cannot be war. In fact, war is ultimately not “between men, but between states.” (This is why foreigners who attack a country are criminals, not soldiers, unless they have the support of their own nation in doing so.)
Rousseau points out that people have different kinds of rights under different circumstances: there are no rights at all until some moral agreement guarantees them. A war is about competing claims to a certain resource or territory, which means that when a war is over, the only rights of the vanquished that can be violated are the ostensible rights to that resource or territory. While Rousseau’s argument is complex, it is based on straightforward intuitions about when different concepts of law do and don’t apply. There is no “war” if two individuals fight because of a personal dispute, and no state will blame another state for the actions of its rogue citizens. States rightly recognize these as individual matters, in which people act as private citizens rather than representatives of the state—but war is precisely the opposite, which means that an opposing state does not actually have rights over someone’s life. War allows both sides to kill in pursuit of their objectives, but once those objectives are achieved, the war is over, and they no longer have a right to kill.
Themes
Because war is fought between countries, not individuals, it is wrong for military leaders to kill civilians when waging war, and as soon as a war is won, the victor no longer has a right to kill its former soldiers, who stop representing their country and “become simply men once more.” Accordingly, victors also have no right to enslave “the vanquished.” If they do so, victors are maintaining the state of war, rather than acting as legitimate rulers, which means they are not recognizing any “rights” at all. So Rousseau concludes that there is no “‘right’ of slavery,” and in fact “‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out.”
Rousseau carefully notes that people are not acting in the same capacity when they fight for the state as when they make private decisions: they shift status, from government functionaries to “simply men.” This ability to transform one’s role based on the context becomes crucial to Rousseau’s theory of governance, as it requires citizens to balance different kinds of interests (or different wills), including their own personal desires and the common good of their political community as a whole.
Themes
