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
In monarchy, a single person carries the government’s entire executive power. Therefore, it produces maximal results with minimal effort, but it places no checks on the monarch’s will: nothing forces a king to pursue “the public happiness.” Instead, monarchs want to amass absolute power, and while they get some power from being beloved by the people, this is usually not enough. In fact, what’s even better for a king is for the people to “be weak, wretched and never able to resist” his policies.
Rousseau’s version of monarchy is not the same as a state in which the king holds all power. Rather, he still thinks the people need to make the laws, and then he is imagining that the people would appoint a single person to completely direct the implementation of those laws. The dangers of this system are obvious—even if it is the people’s will, giving all power to a single person is dangerous because that person can become too strong for the sovereign (the people) to control. So Rousseau again emphasizes that, while monarchy can be valid in theory, in practice, it would work in very few contexts.
Themes
Rousseau recalls that, according to his calculations, monarchies work best in large states. He further explains that, because monarchies vest all power in one magistrate’s hands, kings become too disconnected from the people, so they create “social orders” (like nobility) to fill the gap. This would not work in a small country.
It must be recalled that Rousseau’s division of different kinds of government is about where ultimate decision-making power lies, and not about how many people actually work for the government. A monarch can have half the population on their payroll and still run a monarchy, if nobody else has any real say over how the law is put into place. What is more likely, however, is that some of the monarch’s employees (or the nobility) would take some power themselves, converting the state into something of an aristocracy.
Themes
But monarchy has several serious problems. First, it rewards incapable but loyal people with powerful roles in the administration, which they ruin through corruption. Meanwhile, in a republic, only competent people are elected to such offices. Similarly, while monarchs are good at conquering territory, they “are almost always inadequate” at administrating it. In a democracy or aristocracy, government is always continuous, but when a monarch dies, electing a new one is complicated, which is why most monarchies have become hereditary—and put in “monsters or imbeciles for rulers.” Indeed, when a monarch’s child is raised and educated to rule, it is all the more likely they will lack “justice and reason.” This also creates inconsistency in the government’s agenda from one period of rule to another. So, while monarchy “is incontestably the strongest” kind of government, monarchs themselves are usually incompetent, and they squander this strength.
Rousseau’s distrust of monarchs is based on the principle that the government works for the sovereign and has no legitimate power except that which the sovereign gives them. Therefore, a monarch can only rule well if they completely put their own individual personal will aside, but essentially nobody can do this successfully, since (as he has argued elsewhere) people are self-interested and tend to put their personal will first. Similarly, his consistent suspicion of inherited power not only reminds the reader that he considers moral fitness to rule the most important criterion for joining the government, but also reflects his underlying faith in social equality, because he thinks that kings’ children become “monsters or imbeciles” precisely because they grow up with too much power and privilege to truly see their fellow citizens as equals.
Themes
