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 agrees with the philosopher Montesquieu that “freedom is not a fruit of every climate.” Specifically, people who work for the government must live off of the surplus produced by the state’s members, but “this surplus is not the same in every country”—it depends both on a country’s climate and its people—and different governments consume different amounts of resources. Of course, the closer government administrators are to people who pay taxes, the more likely taxpayers will see the benefits of their contributions. So taxpayers see the least benefit in monarchies, which must be “opulent” to survive. In general, in fact, monarchies concentrate power in private hands while democracies tend to distribute it for the common good.
Rousseau’s populist undertones are clear here: while local and democratic forms of government more equitably distribute resources, he argues, monarchies function by extorting the population. However, the Montesquieu quote he includes borders on deterministic, because it suggests that some places are destined to achieve freedom while others are destined to be oppressed. (Europeans have often used this idea to argue that Europe’s colonial conquests and genocides were natural and inevitable outcomes of intractable cultural differences, rather than morally significant choices.) It is up to readers to determine if Rousseau’s belief in the importance of climate reproduces this flawed logic.
Themes
Rousseau returns to the question of climate. The richer and more fertile the land, he suggests, the more surplus it will produce (so the more likely it can have a monarchy). Overall, he declares, hot and cold climates are fitting for despots and barbarians (respectively), while civilization arises in “temperate regions.” For many reasons, hot countries produce a greater surplus: their land is more fertile, their people consume less, and their food is more nutritious. Accordingly, “hot countries need fewer inhabitants than cold countries, and can feed more,” so they have lower population density. Rousseau concludes that this is why hot countries are ruled by despots: people are easier to control and less likely to rebel when they live far apart.
Notably, Rousseau does not declare that a more fertile territory should be ruled by a monarchy, but only that a territory must be relatively fertile in order for monarchy to be possible there. By modern standards, the rest of Rousseau’s argument in this passage is both empirically wrong and morally unconscionable. It is not at all true that hot territories are always more fertile: for instance, the Sahara Desert is very hot, but not at all fertile. And neither are “hot countries” less densely populated than “cold countries” in the present day. Needless to say, Rousseau’s perspective is entirely based on Europe, and it neither holds up to scientific scrutiny nor should be generalized to explain anything about political differences anywhere in the world. While it is clear that he was influenced by the biased science and speculative anthropology of his time, however, Rousseau’s arguments were still more radical than not, as most of Europe was ruled by monarchies in his day, and to them popular sovereignty was unthinkable.
Themes
