Rousseau's Social Contract

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Rousseau's puzzle: how could a free people bind itself into a legitimate state without becoming slaves to it?

In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau opened his little book Du contrat social with a sentence that has never stopped ringing: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The line is often misread as a call to smash the chains. It is not. Rousseau is not an anarchist. What he asks in the next paragraph is subtler and harder: What could make those chains legitimate?

Hobbes, a century earlier, had answered by drawing the state of nature as a war of all against all, and calling the state a bargain to escape it — obey, and you get to live. Locke had softened this by insisting the sovereign held power in trust and could be dismissed. Rousseau's answer is stranger than either. He wants a state whose subjects, when they obey it, are obeying only themselves.

The problem: freedom without atomism

Rousseau's picture of pre-political humans is not Hobbes' murderous savage. It is a solitary, self-sufficient creature living in a forest, largely at peace, largely unreflective, without language or vanity, moved only by amour de soi — a simple regard for one's own preservation. This being is free in a way we no longer are.

Then something happens. People settle, till fields, look at each other. Property appears. Comparison appears. The eye learns to notice status. Amour-propre — the anxious craving to be seen well by others — is born, and with it inequality, envy, ambition, and dependence. By the time political power has been invented, human beings are already deeply corrupted by needing one another. There is no going back to the forest.

So the problem is not: how do we get freedom? Freedom is gone. The problem is: given people who cannot live alone any more, is there a form of political association in which each person, though united with all the others, still obeys only himself, and remains as free as before? Rousseau calls this “the fundamental problem to which the social contract gives the answer.”

The general will

Rousseau's move is to distinguish two things that look the same and are not.

The will of all is what you get if you poll everyone and add up their private preferences. It is a sum of self-interests. The general will is what the whole community wills as a whole, aimed at its own common good. In a healthy republic these two overlap heavily; in a corrupt one they come apart, and factions push private interests through the machinery of the state.

The general will is not majority opinion. It is not a bureaucratic average. It is closer to what a single, unified moral person — the body politic — would want for itself if it were thinking clearly about its own preservation and flourishing. When I vote as a citizen, Rousseau says, I am not supposed to ask what do I want; I am supposed to ask what does the whole want. If I get the answer wrong and I am outvoted, I have not been wronged — I have been shown that I was mistaken about the general will.

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

Sovereignty, on this picture, belongs inalienably to the whole people. It cannot be sold to a king, gifted to a parliament, or represented by delegates. The English, Rousseau sneers, think they are free because they elect their MPs; but they are free only on the day of the election. As soon as it is over, they are slaves again. Sovereignty is an activity, not a title.

Forced to be free

Then comes the passage that has haunted political thought for two and a half centuries. If, Rousseau writes, a person refuses to obey the general will, the whole body shall compel him to do so — “which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free.”

Read casually, this is chilling. Read carefully, the logic is this: on Rousseau's account, my true freedom consists in living under laws I have authored as a co-sovereign, in pursuit of a common good that includes me. When I let a private appetite drag me against the general will, I am not being free — I am being pushed around by an impulse the way an animal is. Coercing me back into line is coercing me back into the version of myself that legislates rather than the version that merely craves. Freedom, for Rousseau, is not the absence of law; it is obedience to a law you have given yourself.

Whether this is a beautiful idea or a terrifying one has depended on who is reading it. The French revolutionaries who invoked Rousseau in 1789 heard the beautiful version. Isaiah Berlin, writing in 1958 in the shadow of Stalin, heard the terrifying version, and named it “positive liberty” — the doctrine that some enlightened authority always turns out to know your real interests better than you do. Both readings are in the text. Rousseau himself, characteristically, seems to have believed only the beautiful one and had nothing whatever to say about the machinery of the terrifying one.

What Rousseau left us

The Contrat social is a strange book: short, imperious, occasionally contradictory, in love with small city-states like Geneva and openly convinced that its scheme cannot work in any polity larger than one. Rousseau doubted even France could pull it off. And yet almost every serious idea in modern democratic theory has to reckon with him.

The insistence that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed — not consent as a one-time signature, but as an ongoing collective act — runs through Kant, through the American and French revolutions, through Rawls' original position, through every claim in the 21st century that a regime lacks a mandate. So does the darker inheritance: the temptation for someone to speak in the general will's name and to hear disagreement as false consciousness. The distance between “we the people” and the guillotine is uncomfortably short, and Rousseau, honest to the end, gave us both directions on the same page.

The chains of the opening sentence, then, are not to be broken. They are to be re-forged — by us, together, and on terms we would each accept if we were thinking not as a private appetite but as members of a whole. Whether that is possible is the political question of the modern world. Rousseau at least stated it more clearly than anyone before him, and left the answer for us to work out.