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Book 1, Chapter 8
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
People join society “just as [they are],” bringing whatever they possess and turning it into private property. Public property, Rousseau notes, belongs to everyone. But private possessions belong to individuals and public possessions belong to a society simply by virtue of “the ‘right of the first occupant,’” which only becomes enforceable in society, as possession turns into property. This does not mean that the first person to step on or conquer a piece of land rightly owns it, but rather that the land is theirs if they are really the “first occupant,” they don’t take “more [land] than [they] need[] for subsistence,” and they “actually work[] and cultivat[e] the soil.”
Although this chapter is tangential to the rest of Rousseau’s argument, it is important for two reasons: first, it directly responds to John Locke’s social contract theory, and secondly, it refers back to Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. According to Locke, property is a natural human right, given by God, but Rousseau denies that rights exist outside the context of a human society that agrees on them. (Locke’s position is based on Christianity, which Rousseau considers a poor basis for governance, and it also undercuts the importance of covenants, which Rousseau thinks are the only way to truly establish moral rules.) In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau argued that society and inequality were first institutionalized when people claimed private property. Having shown how property can be the basis for an illegitimate and oppressive form of government in that previous work, Rousseau wants to explain here how property should work under a legitimate state.
Themes
If they already possess land, people bring this land under the control of the sovereign when they join a society. This guarantees it to them as private property, but it also incorporates it into the public territory of the nation as a whole. Alternatively, people can join together before possessing territory, and then work together to legitimately occupy and share or divide up a territory. In either case, while people have individual rights over their private property, the sovereign’s communal right to that property always comes first. To close Book 1, Rousseau notes that society does not “destroy[] natural equality,” but rather creates “a moral and lawful equality” in its place. In fact, while people may be naturally “unequal in strength and intelligence,” society makes them socially “equal by covenant and by right.”
Although this may be difficult to imagine in the 21st century, when all inhabited land on Earth is claimed by a particular nation, when Rousseau talks about land joining the sovereign’s control, he means this literally: imagine how a city-state’s territory grows as it convinces surrounding landowners to join its community. Like with their individual rights, people have legitimate but not inviolable rights to their land: the sovereign can redistribute it when it is necessary for the national interest. (Rousseau does not explicitly say whether this includes simply making the distribution of power more equal, but he emphasizes that the equal distribution of land tends to create more effective states and freer societies.) This is just like how society can force individuals to threaten their safety for the sake of the community (as in a war), but it is also why some critics have accused Rousseau of giving the state a totalitarian level of power over its subjects.
Themes
