The Social Contract Summary

In The Social Contract, the influential 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau addresses two interrelated questions that play a core role in social philosophy: how can people remain free while living under the authority of a state, and what makes such a state’s power valid (or legitimate)? In Book I of The Social Contract, Rousseau answers both of these questions by concluding that citizens form their own nations “by uniting their separate powers” through a kind of covenant, or social contract, in which they agree to govern themselves as a collective and protect one another’s rights. Therefore, while forming a nation requires citizens to give up certain freedoms that they still had in the state of nature, it replaces these freedoms with the far more valuable “civil freedom” of living in society, which allows citizens to more fully develop themselves morally and rationally. In Book II, Rousseau argues that a state is only legitimate when the people rule, or have sovereignty, over themselves. The people’s job is to make laws and delegate the power to implement those laws to a set of institutions called a government, or executive power. In Book III, Rousseau explores the various forms government can take, explains how those different structures of government work best in different types of states, and concludes that the sovereign (the people) must keep a careful watch over the government in order to ensure that it does not try to seize power. And in Book IV, he explains how the people can figure out what is in their best interests, analyzes examples from the history of the Roman Republic to show why all citizens should directly participate in lawmaking, and argues that effective states must systematically teach civic virtues in order to preserve popular sovereignty and strengthen their institutions from generation to generation.

In Book I of The Social Contract, Rousseau briefly explains the purpose of his book and then declares: “man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” He means to say that the powerful systematically oppress the powerless, which he concluded in his previous book, the Discourse on Inequality. However, whereas the Discourse was a historical analysis of how property rights and political systems actually formed, The Social Contract takes a theoretical look at how a state should form in order for its rule to be legitimate.

Rousseau begins by arguing that freedom and self-preservation are the “basis for all other [human] rights,” so nobody can coherently act in a way that deprives them of their freedom or works against their own well-being. Because of this natural independence, nobody can legitimately pledge their “absolute obedience” to any other person or institution (which means that slavery is immoral and unjustifiable, and philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius were wrong to defend it). Rather, Rousseau concludes, “all legitimate authority” has to be “based on covenants,” or free agreements among equals. By extension, society is only legitimate if people freely decide to join it, which means that a state’s true authority (or sovereignty) comes from an agreement—or social contract—made by its citizens. In Rousseau’s words, people form society, or the body politic, by agreeing to “defend the person and goods of each member with the collective force of all.” They receive society’s protection in return for fulfilling their civic duties and following the laws they choose together, as a community. They create these laws by assembling together and following what Rousseau calls the general will—basically, they decide to do what is best for the community as a whole. Accordingly, members of a nation become two things at once: they are both citizens responsible for helping set the law and subjects responsible for obeying the law. But because everyone gets to participate in the political decision-making process, nobody has to give up their freedom by agreeing to the social contract: rather, citizens pursue their freedom as a community, rather than as individuals. In the process, they also “develop” and “elevate” their rational and moral capacities because society gives them the security and legal property rights that they need in order to pursue more complex goals and projects, which are not possible in the state of nature. The social contract, Rousseau concludes, replaces the “physical inequality [of] nature” with the “moral and lawful equality” of society.

In Book II of The Social Contract, Rousseau turns specifically to the nature of a national community’s sovereignty over itself. The sovereign, he explains, is “a collective being” or “artificial person” made up of all a nation’s citizens. This sovereign must act in the best interests of the national community as a whole, rather than choosing to help some citizens at the expense of other citizens. In other words, it always has to put the public interest above private interests, or else it becomes illegitimate. This means that political parties are usually evil, especially in a two-party system where the majority can simply outvote the minority and ignore its interests. Because the sovereign must be impartial, it also has to protect citizens’ individual rights, and it cannot force anyone to do anything that “is not necessary to the community.” On the other hand, it can take extreme measures—like sending citizens to fight in wars or executing murderers—when this is necessary for the nation’s survival (and therefore the freedom of its people). But because laws must apply equally to all citizens, Rousseau explains, they have to be “abstract” and cannot name individual people.

Next, Rousseau switches gears and asks how laws are formulated in the first place. Citizens make the state through the social contract, but they have to learn to think of themselves as a community first, in order to even get to this stage. Rousseau explains how “special and superior” people called lawgivers—or founders—help such communities form. He notes that communities are likely to be stronger if formed duringtimes of scarcity and suffering, when people stand to gain much more from banding together, but communities can also be stronger or weaker depending on a number of other circumstances. For instance, smaller states tend to be more cohesive, but they can be easily conquered, while large states have more resources but may lack unity. In general, a community sticks together if they share some common “origin, interest or convention,” and while all laws should aim to crate “freedom and equality,” different nations can do this best in different ways: for instance, a nation with a lot of fertile land could focus on agriculture, while one with a long coastline could “develop trade and navigation.”

In Book III, Rousseau explains how a nation can effectively enforce its laws by creating a government (or executive branch). The sovereign (or legislature) can create general laws, but it cannot implement those laws through “particular acts” without creating conflicts of interest, since the citizens who write laws cannot objectively enforce the law against themselves. Therefore, the sovereign creates a government to put its laws into action, but also to mediate between the people as citizens and as subjects. However, the government works for the sovereign, which has complete authority to “limit, modify and resume” its power at any time.

Rousseau next argues that the size of government is an important factor in maintaining order in a society. In a larger state, government must act more efficiently over a wider population and territory, so it should be more hierarchical, with fewer administrators (or magistrates) at the top, each of whom wields more power. Rousseau distinguishes three kinds of government, which exist on a spectrum: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. However, Rousseau uses these terms in a way very different from their modern-day meanings: he is only talking about how the executive power should be structured. He firmly believes that any legitimate state must be what is now called a democracy: it has to be governed by and for the people. But when Rousseau uses the term democracy, he is referring to a political system in which all of the people help implement the laws, in addition to writing them. He thinks this is obviously undesirable, because the whole point of government is to make sure that the same people do not both write and implement the laws. A monarchy is similarly undesirable because it gives a single person complete authority over the entire executive branch, leading to frivolous and ineffective policies, albeit efficient decisions. Kings also often try to usurp the people’s lawmaking power and establish tyranny. In contrast, Rousseau praises aristocracy, in which a few bureaucrats share the highest authority over executing the laws. However, he emphasizes that such an aristocracy should be elected, not hereditary.

Different kinds of government are better suited for different contexts, Rousseau admits, but a government’s overall quality can be roughly measured by how “protected and prosperous” the people are. Ultimately, however, all states collapse, almost always because the government seizes the people’s legitimate power to make the laws. To prevent this and keep a state heathy for as long as possible, Rousseau argues, the people must regularly assemble in a public forum to directly deliberate on the laws and check the power of government. When he says the people, he means all the people—Rousseau uses the example of the Roman Republic to show how a nation really can create its laws by inviting all citizens to directly deliberate on them.

In Book IV, Rousseau takes up a handful of remaining issues that surround his understanding of government. First, he again emphasizes that the general will must involve the common interests of all citizens, but he admits that people often give up on voting for the common good and start trying to advance their own interests instead, which is another sign of a republic in decline. He explains how elections should work and cites Rome’s comitia, or citizens’ assemblies, as an imperfect example of how citizens can have sovereignty over their own nation. He notes that a court system, or tribunate, can be necessary to stop other agents of the state from overstepping their power. In extreme cases of power imbalance or national emergency, Rousseau even advocates dictatorship—not in the word’s contemporary sense (which is closer to what Rousseau calls “tyranny”), but rather in its ancient Roman sense, when it referred to a magistrate who was given absolute authority over the state in times of crisis. Finally, he argues that the best way to maintain a healthy government is to ensure that citizens have the right moral values, and he proposes creating a kind of “civil religion” to teach and transmit these values. Whereas Christianity teaches people to seek purity in the hopes of achieving salvation in the afterlife, Rousseau argues, the institutionalized “civil religion” should teach people “positive dogmas” that encourage them to be active and tolerant citizens who respect “the sanctity of the social contract and the law.”