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
When citizens stop prioritizing their “public service” as members of the sovereign over their own personal wealth—for instance, by preferring to “pay mercenaries” rather than fight in wars personally—the state declines. In a successful state, on the other hand, citizens prioritize their public lives over their private lives and derive happiness from their participation in the state.
Rousseau’s skepticism of representative democracy is telling, because essentially all modern-day republics use representative rather than direct democracy to make their laws. Sure enough, most modern-day republics also see their citizens complain about their representatives being corrupt, self-interested, and out of touch with everyday people and their needs. So, while Rousseau’s call for widespread direct democracy is impractical, it also reflects reasonable, serious concerns about the legitimacy of any state that does not let citizens directly influence policy.
Themes
As citizens gradually give up on participating in the sovereign legislature, they put representatives and deputies in their place. But Rousseau considers this incorrect, because sovereignty resides entirely in the general will and so can neither be represented nor alienated. (Of course, representation is proper for the executive power, or government, as Rousseau has argued throughout Book 3.) Representation in legislatures is a historical anomaly: even in Rome, everyone voted directly, and in ancient Greece, citizens assembled publicly all the time (which Greece’s “mild climate” made possible). In contrast, modern people are “slaves” to their political system, and they gain nothing from sacrificing their freedom.
Rousseau sees the use of representatives as a sign that a democracy’s civic culture has failed and citizens have stopped truly caring about the welfare of the national community. Of course, people also have strong incentives to want to be representatives, because this gives them power and status, so the citizens need to maintain a strong culture of civic responsibility in order to retain their status as the sovereign. By using the highly-respected precedents of Rome and Greece as examples, Rousseau points out that direct participation in democracy does not require technological or organizational sophistication: in fact, it is just the contrary. As societies become more sophisticated, it seems, people begin to take their states for granted and lose interest in actively maintaining their legitimacy.
Themes
