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
After warning the reader that this chapter is complex, Rousseau declares that all actions have two causes—a “moral” cause (the will or intention) and a “physical” cause (“the strength which executes” the intention). In a state, these correspond to the legislative and executive powers, respectively, which must work together to enact the general will. The people hold the legislative power, but they cannot hold the executive power, because this encompasses “particular acts” that are beyond the sovereign’s job of making laws. Rather, the sovereign needs a government, which (first) communicates between subjects and the sovereign and (second) implements laws and actively preserves people’s freedom. The sovereign gives this government its power and has the right to “limit, modify and resume” this power. In short, Rousseau concludes, “government” is another word for “the legitimate exercise of executive power.” He uses the words “prince” and “magistrate” to refer to the institution that governs.
It is important to note that Rousseau uses the word “government” to refer solely to the executive branch, rather than in its contemporary (particularly American) usage as a synonym for “state” as a whole. Similarly, his use of the word “prince” is very unconventional, but essentially it refers to the entire administration. (It may be a reference to Rousseau’s predecessor Niccolò Machiavelli, who is best remembered for the guide to statecraft The Prince.) The technical difference between “moral” and “physical” causes, which is borrowed from earlier philosophers, allows Rousseau to establish a philosophical justification for the separation of powers between the sovereign (which establishes the will of the people) and the executive or government (which enacts that will).
Themes
The government communicates between the sovereign and the subjects (which are different perspectives on the people). To function well, the sovereign, government, and subjects must remain in balance—Rousseau explains this in confusing mathematical terms, but his argument is simple. First, as a country’s population grows, each citizen gets less say in politics, and the government needs to grow stronger to get people to obey the laws. But if governments grow too large, administrators “abuse their power,” so the sovereign must increase its relative power over the government to stop these “abuse[s].” Therefore, the sovereign’s power over government and government’s power over the people must remain in proportion with the size of the population. Rousseau concludes that the government should be very approximately proportional to “the square root of the number of the people,” in terms of “the amount of activity” (although this cannot actually be calculated).
In their capacity as citizens, the people form the sovereign and make laws. In their capacity as subjects, they are bound to follow these laws. However, there would be a conflict of interest if they directly had to police themselves, which is why the government serves as a mediator to ensure that the laws actually get implemented. Again, an analogy to self-control can be useful: someone could set their own goals (like the sovereign) but also need the help of another person (the government) to ensure that they (like the subject) meet these goals. Rousseau’s mathematical formula is unnecessarily complex, but his essential point is that government has to be strong enough to make the people follow the laws, yet small enough that it does not “abuse [its] power.” This requires the government to grow with, but not as fast as, the population. When the population grows, the people grow weaker, which means that the government has to grow stronger, and so each government official needs to start presiding over a larger proportion of the population.
Themes
Rousseau continues by declaring that a government is like a microcosm of the body politic and says that it is comprised of different parts or administrators, organized hierarchically. However, governments only exist because of the sovereign, and their one and only function is to enact the general will. If officials pursue their personal interests, they are abusing their power, and if they use the government’s resources to enforce their personal interests, they destroy the integrity of the state, leading “the body politic [to be] dissolved.” While the government needs its own culture and institutions to structure and preserve itself over time, they cannot be too strong, lest they lead administrators to abuse their power. Both the government’s strength and its willingness to fulfill its mission can waver over time, depending on this culture and its relations with the rest of the state.
Rousseau compares the government to the body politic because both are full of individuals who are asked to put the public interest above their private interest. (To make things even more complicated, members of the government are also citizens and members of the sovereign, so they have to balance three different sets of interests.) Just like civic, moral, and institutional culture significantly affect the health of society as a whole, the same factors are crucial to keeping a government honest. However, the difference is that the government’s culture cannot be so strong that people put their loyalty to the government above their loyalty to society as a whole. Rousseau argues that the sovereign is the best check against the government’s ability to abuse its power, because the sovereign is essentially the government’s boss: the government’s only job is to fulfill the sovereign’s will, and it can be fired whenever it fails to do this.
Themes
