We Must Always Go Back To A First Convention

There will always be a great difference between subduing a multitude and ruling a society.

Even if scattered individuals were successively enslaved by one man, however numerous they might be, I still see no more than a master and his slaves, and certainly not a people and its ruler; I see what may be termed an aggregation, but not an association; there is as yet neither public good nor body politic.

The man in question, even if he has enslaved half the world, is still only an individual; his interest, apart from that of others, is still a purely private interest. If this same man comes to die, his empire, after him, remains scattered and without unity, as an oak falls and dissolves into a heap of ashes when the fire has consumed it.

Grotius says that a people can give itself to a king. Then, according to Grotius, a people is a people before it gives itself. The gift is itself a civil act, and implies public deliberation. It would be better, before examining the act by which a people gives itself to a king, to examine that by which it has become a people; for this act, being necessarily prior to the other, is the true foundation of society.

Indeed, if there were no prior convention, where, unless the election were unanimous, would be the obligation on the minority to submit to the choice of the majority? How have a hundred men who wish for a master the right to vote on behalf of ten who do not? The law of majority voting is itself something established by convention, and presupposes unanimity, on one occasion at least.

CHAPTER 6: THE SOCIAL COMPACT

I suppose men to have reached the point at which the obstacles in the way of their preservation in the state of nature show their power of resistance to be greater than the resources at the disposal of each individual for his maintenance in that state.

That primitive condition can then subsist no longer. The human race would perish unless it changed its manner of existence.

But men cannot engender new forces. They can only unite and direct existing ones.

They have no other means of preserving themselves than the formation, by aggregation, of a sum of forces great enough to overcome the resistance.

These they have to bring into play by means of a single motive power, and cause to act in concert.

This sum of forces can arise only where several persons come together.

But the force and liberty of each man are the chief instruments of his self-preservation.

How can he pledge them without harming his own interests, and neglecting the care he owes to himself?

The fundamental problem is to find a form of association which will protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate while keeping each associate free as before.

The Social Contract solves this.

The clauses of this contract are so determined by contracting.

• The slightest modification would make them ineffective.

This contract might never been formally set forth.

Yet they are everywhere:

• the same
• everywhere tacitly admitted and recognised

The violation of the social compact lets each:

• regain his original rights
• resume his natural liberty
• lose the conventional liberty.

These clauses may be reduced to the total alienation of each associate with all his rights to the whole community for the same conditions for all.

In this way, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.

The alienation is without reserve. The union is perfect. No associate has anything more to demand.

If the individuals retained certain rights, there would be no common superior to decide between them and the public.

Each would be his own judge and would ask to be so on all.

The wild state would thus continue.

Each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody.

There is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he has.

The social contract distills into:

“Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will. In our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”

This act of association creates a moral and collective body.

It is composed of as many members as the assembly contains votes.

It gets unity, common identity, life and will from this association.

This public person is formed by the union of all other persons.

Formerly they took the name of city. [1]

Now they take the name of Republic or body politic.

Its members call it:

• State when passive
• Sovereign when active
• Power when compared with others like itself.

Its members are called:

• citizens when sharing in the sovereign power
• subjects when being under the laws of the State

But these terms are often confused and taken one for another.