While The Social Contract primarily focuses on what a legitimate republic should look like in theory, Rousseau also cites a number of historical examples to show why real states have failed in practice. In doing so, he emphasizes the unavoidable fact that no nation will survive forever, but he also outlines a number of strategies and best practices that nations can use to stay around for as long as possible. Even a state with perfectly-structured institutions can fail if self-perpetuating factors like inequality, inefficiency, or corruption lead the people or government administrators to put their own personal interests above the common interests of the nation. In order to remain strong, then, republics need more than a good structure: they need a culture of moral virtue that gives people faith in their institutions, like religion did in the past, and that emphasizes the good governance that keeps nations healthy.
While Rousseau emphasizes the common traits and fundamental principles that he thinks should underlie all effective states, he also acknowledges the way diverse geographical, cultural, and historical contexts make different approaches to governance more and less appropriate in different places. For instance, he notes that a state must adjust its population to the amount and quality of territory it possesses, lest it leave fertile land untended or become overpopulated. While this argument looks relatively logical today, some of Rousseau’s other explanations are based on antiquated biases. For instance, Rousseau argues that hot climates produce despots and cold climates produce barbarians, while civilization happens to come about in “temperate regions.” Similarly, he argues that certain groups of people (like Russians) are too unruly or unintelligent to form civilizations—he believes such peoples need “a master, not a liberator,” and this argument replicates the logic that was used to justify the colonial conquest of non-Europeans’ land. To contemporary political scientists and anthropologists, Rousseau’s prejudiced analyses of ethnic, cultural, and geographical differences look racist and pseudoscientific. But it is up to readers to determine if this also threatens his underlying point: that diverse nations face different kinds of challenges, and to grow strong and survive, they must adapt to their unique local contexts.
Having argued why different kinds of states are more or less suitable for different conditions, Rousseau then emphasizes something that all states, “even the best constituted” ones, have in common: they will eventually fall. Rousseau compares the body politic (or republic) to the human body: its strength determines its longevity, but it can never live forever. Rousseau compares the sovereign (legislative branch) to the body’s heart: both must continue functioning in order for the whole organism to survive. If the government falls apart, the sovereign can replace it, but nothing can save a sovereign that starts passing poor laws or loses track of the principles on which the nation was founded. According to Rousseau, states tend to collapse when a strong government usurps the power of a weak sovereign: either the executive gets too much power and starts taking over legislative functions or the legislature grows so divided and indifferent that people stop sincerely looking out for the public good. Often, it is a combination of both. Regardless, if the government—which is made of particular people following their personal, private wills—takes over the legislature—which is supposed to comprise the people as a whole implementing the general will—then the republic ceases to truly exist, because the people as a whole have lost the freedom to truly determine their own future. Rousseau argues that, while most aspects of government are relative—the concentration or dispersion of power works in some contexts and is counterproductive in others, for example—it is always possible to tell “whether a given people is well or badly governed,” in any culture, based on a number of “signs.” One such “sign” of a weakening state is a legislature that is divided into a few primary, warring factions. On the other hand, two “signs” of a strong state are a growing population and high levels of political engagement. Just as the heart has to keep beating, Rousseau concludes, the sovereign has to constantly return to the nation’s founding laws and assert its validity “in perpetuity,” just as many nations do with their founding constitutions.
For Rousseau, the way to keep the state’s “heart” beating is to form a moral culture that valorizes the nation, its laws, and its institutions. At the end of Book IV, Rousseau includes a lengthy chapter on religion, in which he implies that Christianity should have no place in prominent institutions and instead the sovereign should create its own “civil religion” to teach and reinforce moral behavior. Christianity effectively creates social harmony in unequal and hierarchical societies by convincing people to accept their oppression, Rousseau suggests, but a modern form of government needs a modern version of religion that rejects oppression. By focusing on principles like “the sanctity of the social contract and the law” and teaching people to never accept “intolerance,” Rousseau argues, a nation can teach its citizens to understand and cherish their place in the nation. This will lead them to participate actively in politics and strengthen the nation, and this moral culture can be passed down from generation to generation. More controversially, Rousseau also advocates censorship in order to “preserv[e]” a nation’s moral culture and prevent people from being “corrupted.” This point shows how profoundly important he thinks public morality is in shaping a nation’s political life, but it also raises doubts about the kinds of liberties he considers fundamental. Regardless, Rousseau’s ultimate point is that a healthy moral culture perpetuates itself and grows over time in a society: if a state correctly teaches its citizens to respect its founding laws and principles, those laws and principles grow stronger through time, and so does the state. This moral culture is like a vaccination for the state: it protects institutions from collapsing and ensures that the people will defend their rights and freedoms whenever they are threatened, even generations down the line.
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National Longevity and Moral Virtue Quotes in The Social Contract
Born as I was the citizen of a free state and a member of its sovereign body, the very right to vote imposes on me the duty to instruct myself in public affairs, however little influence my voice may have in them. And whenever I reflect upon governments, I am happy to find that my studies always give me fresh reasons for admiring that of my own country.
If there are slaves by nature, it is only because there has been slavery against nature. Force made the first slaves; and their cowardice perpetuates their slavery.
Whoever ventures on the enterprise of setting up a people must be ready, shall we say, to change human nature, to transform each individual, who by himself is entirely complete and solitary, into a part of a much greater whole, from which that same individual will then receive, in a sense, his life and his being. The founder of nations must weaken the structure of man in order to fortify it, to replace the physical and independent existence we have all received from nature with a moral and communal existence. In a word each man must be stripped of his own powers, and given powers which are external to him, and which he cannot use without the help of others. The nearer men’s natural powers are to extinction or annihilation, and the stronger and more lasting their acquired powers, the stronger and more perfect is the social institution.
Such is the natural and inevitable tendency of the best constituted governments. If Sparta and Rome perished, what state can hope to last for ever? If we wish, then, to set up a lasting constitution, let us not dream of making it eternal. We can succeed only if we avoid attempting the impossible and flattering ourselves that we can give to the work of man a durability that does not belong to human things.
The boundaries of the possible in the moral realm are less narrow than we think; it is our own weaknesses, our vices and our prejudices that limit them. Base minds do not believe in great men; low slaves jeer in mockery at the word “freedom.”
The better the state is constituted, the more does public business take precedence over private in the minds of the citizens. There is indeed much less private business, because the sum of the public happiness furnishes a larger proportion of each individual’s happiness, so there remains less for him to seek on his own. In a well-regulated nation, every man hastens to the assemblies; under a bad government, no one wants to take a step to go to them, because no one feels the least interest in what is done there, since it is predictable that the general will will not be dominant, and, in short, because domestic concerns absorb all the individual’s attention. Good laws lead men to make better ones; bad laws lead to worse. As soon as someone says of the business of the state—“What does it matter to me?”—then the state must be reckoned lost.
At the opening of these assemblies, of which the only purpose is the maintenance of the social treaty, two motions should be put, motions which may never be annulled and which must be voted separately:
The first: “Does it please the sovereign to maintain the present form of government?”
The second: “Does it please the people to leave the administration to those at present charged with it?”
In the end, when the state, on the brink of ruin, can maintain itself only in an empty and illusory form, when the social bond is broken in every heart, when the meanest interest impudently flaunts the sacred name of the public good, then the general will is silenced: everyone, animated by secret motives, ceases to speak as a citizen any more than as if the state had never existed; and the people enacts in the guise of laws iniquitous decrees which have private interests as their only end.
Does it follow from this that the general will is annihilated or corrupted? No, that is always unchanging, incorruptible and pure, but it is subordinated to other wills which prevail over it. Each man, in detaching his interest from the common interest, sees clearly that he cannot separate it entirely, but his share of the public evil seems to him to be nothing compared to the exclusive good he seeks to make his own.
It is useless to separate the morals of a nation from the objects of its esteem; for both spring from the same principle and both necessarily merge together. Among all the peoples of the world, it is not nature but opinion which governs the choice of their pleasures. Reform the opinions of men, and their morals will be purified of themselves. Men always love what is good or what they think is good, but it is in their judgement that they err; hence it is their judgement that has to be regulated. To judge morals is to judge what is honoured; to judge what is honoured, is to look to opinion as law.
Christianity preaches only servitude and submission. Its spirit is too favourable to tyranny for tyranny not to take advantage of it.
The dogmas of the civil religion must be simple and few in number, expressed precisely and without explanations or commentaries. The existence of an omnipotent, intelligent, benevolent divinity that foresees and provides; the life to come; the happiness of the just; the punishment of sinners; the sanctity of the social contract and the law—these are the positive dogmas. As for the negative dogmas, I would limit them to a single one: no intolerance. Intolerance is something which belongs to the religions we have rejected.
