The Social Contract

The Social Contract

by

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Direct Democracy Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Human Freedom and Society Theme Icon
Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Direct Democracy Theme Icon
Government and the Separation of Powers Theme Icon
National Longevity and Moral Virtue Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Social Contract, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Direct Democracy Theme Icon

In a republic, who should govern and what powers should they have? By definition, a nation’s highest authority is its sovereign, or the body with legitimate authority to make laws. Rousseau insists that, because a people collectively agrees to establish a political community, or body politic, this same collectivity of people must make up the sovereign. In other words, the people must make their own laws—that is, have sovereignty over themselves. Although Rousseau uses the word “democracy” in a way very different from its present-day meaning, his influential concept of popular sovereignty is foundational to the kind of society that is now called liberal democracy. Beyond arguing that a republic must be built by and for its citizens, Rousseau also insists that these citizens must directly participate in legislation, which makes his political theory as radical by today’s standards as it was during his own era.

When citizens join together and form a nation through the pact that Rousseau calls the social contract, they do not sign away their freedom: rather, they preserve their liberty by agreeing to make major decisions collectively, as a community. These collective decisions are laws, and the body or “collective being” that makes these laws is the sovereign, which must be made up of all the citizens (just like a team is made up of players). Rousseau’s argument is straightforward: when any individual agrees to join society, they take on a twofold relationship to the community—they agree to take an active role in preserving everyone else’s rights, in exchange for knowing that everyone else will do the same for them. This means they both participate in lawmaking (as citizens) and are protected by the laws (as subjects). Because all citizens have a right and responsibility to participate in lawmaking, then, all citizens are part of the sovereign. Moreover, all citizens are equal in the sovereign: they have all freely agreed to the social contract, and nobody would ever freely agree to be oppressed, which means that the social contract is predicated on the equality of all citizens. In turn, this means that everyone must equally share the power and burden of sovereignty, and everyone’s interests are equally important in the nation. The sovereign takes everyone’s interests into account by pursuing the “general will,” that is, doing whatever is in society’s best interests. Rousseau carefully notes that that does not simply mean doing what is best for the majority, or giving everyone a little bit of what they want—rather, it means pursuing what is in people’s common interests as a collective.

Having shown that the sovereign must be the citizenry as a whole, Rousseau concludes that the citizens must hold the ultimate power in any legitimate republic. First, at the beginning of Book II, Rousseau clarifies that the sovereign power is neither alienable nor divisible: nobody can take away the people’s lawmaking power, and all laws must be made with the entire population in mind. Because the sovereign is composed of “the people as a whole […] without any division whatsoever” and expresses their general will, the sovereign is the only true voice of the nation. The government (or executive branch) has no authority independent of the sovereign (or legislative branch), which is its boss. Therefore, the sovereign people can agree to fire their government at any time. However, although nothing has power over the sovereign, this doesn’t mean its power is unlimited. The sovereign does not have the power to apply laws in specific ways (which is the government’s job), and the sovereign cannot violate its members’ individual rights (which are guaranteed through the social contract). While the people constitute a legitimate state’s ultimate sovereign authority, Rousseau emphasizes, they are not the whole state by any means.

Finally, Rousseau argues that true sovereignty requires what is now called direct democracy. Because the people are the sovereign, Rousseau contends, they must make the laws. If they delegate this job to elected representatives, Rousseau warns, those representatives will become corrupt and turn citizens into “slaves.” Of course, this system of representation is standard in contemporary republics (including virtually every country in Europe and the Americas), and in the 21st century, most people would find it very difficult to imagine letting every single citizen have a say in setting the law. But Rousseau anticipates this objection and emphasizes how the Roman Republic and Ancient Greece used direct democracy, even though doing so required thousands of citizens to assemble in public. If this worked, Rousseau argues, any state should be able to legislate through direct democracy, especially if they do not grow too big (he saw the city-state as an ideal size). It may be difficult to picture direct democracy working in modern nations of millions and billions, but it is still achievable in local governments and smaller nations. Indeed, there are a few remaining examples of direct democracy: some towns in Rousseau’s native Switzerland still make laws through Landsgemeinde, or public citizens’ councils, and some nonstate political groups (like the Zapatistas in Mexico) write laws communally.

While Rousseau absolutely believed in democracy in the modern sense of the term, his feelings about “democracy” can be difficult to understand because he uses the word in a completely different context. For Rousseau, a state is a democracy when most or all citizens participate in the executive functions of government—meaning that absolutely everyone works for the government. However, in its contemporary usage, “democracy” refers to a society in which all the citizens participate in the legislative side of governance. In this second sense, Rousseau believes in a democracy more radical than any that exists today: he rejected representative democracy and thought that a people must make its own laws and retain the final say over all political matters. While this form of participatory democracy has been virtually erased from the modern world as nations have grown and consolidated themselves, Rousseau reminds his readers that it should not be unthinkable, as “the boundaries of the possible in the moral realm are less narrow than we think.”

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Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Direct Democracy Quotes in The Social Contract

Below you will find the important quotes in The Social Contract related to the theme of Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Direct Democracy.
Book 1, Introduction Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Human Body and the Body Politic
Page Number: 49
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 1, Chapter 7 Quotes

The act of association consists of a reciprocal commitment between society and the individual, so that each person, in making a contract, as it were, with himself, finds himself doubly committed, first, as a member of the sovereign body in relation to individuals, and secondly as a member of the state in relation to the sovereign. Here there can be no invoking the principle of civil law which says that no man is bound by a contract with himself, for there is a great difference between having an obligation to oneself and having an obligation to something of which one is a member.

Related Characters: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Human Body and the Body Politic
Page Number: 62
Explanation and Analysis:

Hence, in order that the social pact shall not be an empty formula, it is tacitly implied in that commitment—which alone can give force to all others—that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free; for this is the necessary condition which, by giving each citizen to the nation, secures him against all personal dependence, it is the condition which shapes both the design and the working of the political machine, and which alone bestows justice on civil contracts—without it, such contracts would be absurd, tyrannical and liable to the grossest abuse.

Related Characters: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Human Body and the Body Politic
Page Number: 64
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 5 Quotes

It is in order to avoid becoming the victim of a murderer that one consents to die if one becomes a murderer oneself.

Related Characters: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (speaker)
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 6 Quotes

I have already said that the general will cannot relate to any particular object. For such a particular object is either within the state or outside the state. If it is outside, then a will which is alien to it is not general with regard to it: if the object is within the state, it forms a part of the state. Thus there comes into being a relationship between the whole and the part which involves two separate entities, the part being one, and the whole, less that particular part, being the other. But a whole less a particular part is no longer a whole; and so as long as this relationship exists there is no whole but only two unequal parts, from which it follows that the will of the one is no longer general with respect to the other.

Related Characters: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (speaker)
Page Number: 81
Explanation and Analysis:

We can no longer ask who is to make laws, because laws are acts of the general will; no longer ask if the prince is above the law, because he is a part of the state; no longer ask if the law can be unjust, because no one is unjust to himself; and no longer ask how we can be both free and subject to laws, for the laws are but registers of what we ourselves desire.

Related Characters: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (speaker)
Page Number: 82
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 7 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (speaker)
Page Number: 84-5
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 2, Chapter 11 Quotes

As for equality, this word must not be taken to imply that degrees of power and wealth should be absolutely the same for all, but rather that power shall stop short of violence and never be exercised except by virtue of authority and law, and, where wealth is concerned, that no citizen shall be rich enough to buy another and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself; this in turn implies that the more exalted persons need moderation in goods and influence and the humbler persons moderation in avarice and covetousness.

Related Characters: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (speaker)
Page Number: 96
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3, Chapter 12 Quotes

The sovereign, having no other force than the legislative power, acts only through the laws, and since the laws are nothing other than authentic acts of the general will, the sovereign can act only when the people is assembled.

Related Characters: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (speaker)
Page Number: 136
Explanation and Analysis:

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.”

Related Characters: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (speaker)
Page Number: 136
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 3, Chapter 15 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (speaker)
Page Number: 140-1
Explanation and Analysis:

The idea of representation is a modem one. It comes to us from feudal government, from that iniquitous and absurd system under which the human race is degraded and which dishonours the name of man. In the republics and even in the monarchies of the ancient world, the people never had representatives; the very word was unknown.

Related Characters: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (speaker)
Page Number: 141
Explanation and Analysis:
Book 4, Chapter 1 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (speaker)
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis: