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
Having established that governments differ primarily based on “the number of members [magistrates] who compose them,” now Rousseau defines the different kinds of government on this basis. If every citizen (or the majority of citizens) serves as a magistrate, there is democracy. If a few citizens are magistrates, there is aristocracy. And if there is one magistrate who has fundamental power over government, there is monarchy. But this is a spectrum, and there can be “mixed forms” (with different parts of government run in different ways).
Readers must be careful to distinguish Rousseau’s usage of the terms “democracy,” “aristocracy,” and “monarchy” from their contemporary meanings, in which they refer to the way that laws are made (or legislation), rather than the way they are implemented (or government). In other words, Rousseau always believes in what is now called democracy, because he thinks that the legislature should always be made of citizens. In this and the next few chapters, he is only asking about how many people should actually run the administration, or the executive branch. It also must be emphasized that the quantity of magistrates is not the same as the total number of people who work for the government, but rather the number of people who participate in the highest level of governmental deliberations. For instance, monarchy is not a government of one person, but rather a government in which one person holds all the power and makes all the decisions.
Themes
Whereas most philosophers have looked for a single “best form of government,” Rousseau recalls his conclusion from the last chapter: states with larger populations of citizens should have relatively fewer magistrates. Therefore, he concludes, “democratic government suits small states, aristocratic government suits states of intermediate size and monarchy suits large states.” But there can be exceptions.
Rousseau explicitly breaks with the history of political theory by insisting that there is no “best form of government” that functions across all contexts and refusing to propose a system that he imagines could work in any nation. However, in just a few chapters he begins doing the opposite when he argues that an elected aristocracy is essentially the best form of government. Readers will have to decide whether this conflict detracts from his argument, and to what extent.
Themes
