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
Rousseau argues that, in order to be successful, a republic needs to use different kinds of laws to define “various relations” among various kinds of entities. First, to determine “the relation of all with all, or of the sovereign with the state,” it needs “Political Laws” (which, if suitable to a given country, become the “Fundamental Laws” of its government, and if unsuitable, can be changed). Then, to define how each citizen relates to the whole body politic, it requires “Civil Laws.” Next, it uses “Criminal Laws” to establish disobedient people’s relation to the state, and finally, “the most important of all” is the law of “morals, customs and, above all, belief,” which are central to the state’s integrity. However, because Rousseau is focused on government in this book, here he will only discuss Political Laws.
While Rousseau’s specific roadmap for how nations should structure their legal systems is only tangentially related to the main thread of his argument, it reflects the different domains of life in a republican society, which makes it easy to see how influential Rousseau’s thought has been on contemporary liberal democratic states. “Political Laws” or “Fundamental Laws,” the focus of Rousseau’s book, are essentially equivalent to a nation’s constitution, which defines how its political system must work. The division between “Civil” and “Criminal” is present in many contemporary court systems and reflects the way that members of society can both make demands on the political system as citizens and have demands made on them as subjects (for instance, when they break the law). Finally, Rousseau again points out that “morals, customs and, above all, belief” are the backbone of a society’s health because they are what actually bind people together into a community and lead them to see one another as equals.
Themes
