Rousseau's The Social Contract (1762): The General Will

The Social Contract (Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique), published in April 1762, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s major work of political philosophy. It argues that legitimate government rests on the “general will” of the people, who alone hold sovereignty. Condemned and burned in Rousseau’s native Geneva, the book later became one of the most influential, and most disputed, texts of the French Revolution and modern democratic thought.

Rousseau’s path to the Social Contract

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva on 28 June 1712, the son of a watchmaker; his mother died days after his birth. He left the city at 15 and led a wandering life in Savoy, Italy and France, working as a servant, secretary, music teacher and copyist. In Paris in the 1740s he became a friend of Denis Diderot and contributed articles on music to the Encyclopédie.

Fame came suddenly in 1750, when his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences won a prize from the Academy of Dijon by arguing that the progress of civilisation had corrupted morals. His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755) went further, tracing how private property and society had turned free, independent humans into unequal and dependent beings.

Rousseau had long planned a large work on “political institutions”. He abandoned most of it, but extracted the part that became The Social Contract, completed while he lived at Montmorency, north of Paris. It was published in Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey in April 1762, only weeks before his novel on education, Emile.

The central problem and the general will

The book opens with one of the most famous lines in political writing: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau does not claim to explain how this happened. Instead he asks what could make political authority legitimate.

He rejects the idea that force creates right, and he denies that a people could ever legitimately give itself into slavery to a king, as some earlier theorists such as Hugo Grotius had suggested. Political authority, he concludes, can rest only on agreement.

The task, as Rousseau puts it, is to find a form of association that defends each member with the whole common force, while each, uniting with all, still obeys only himself and remains as free as before. His answer is the social contract.

Under the contract, each person gives himself and all his rights entirely to the community. Because everyone does so equally, no one has an interest in making the conditions burdensome for others. The result is a collective body, the sovereign, made up of all citizens.

This body has a “general will”, which aims at the common good. Rousseau distinguishes it from the “will of all”, the sum of private interests. Laws are legitimate only when they express the general will: they must come from all and apply to all, and they must be general rather than aimed at particular individuals.

Rousseau adds a phrase that has troubled readers ever since. Anyone who refuses to obey the general will, he writes, will be compelled to do so by the whole body, which means that he will be “forced to be free”. For Rousseau, obeying a law one has helped to make is a form of moral freedom, unlike obedience to another person’s will.

Sovereignty and government

In Rousseau’s theory sovereignty belongs to the people and cannot be transferred or divided. He therefore rejects representation for legislation: the people’s will cannot be represented. He famously remarks that the English think themselves free but are free only while electing members of Parliament, and become slaves again once the election is over.

Government is something different. It is the body that carries out the laws, and it can take many forms, democratic, aristocratic or monarchical, depending on a country’s size, climate and character. Rousseau thought elective aristocracy, rule by chosen magistrates, often the best form, and that true democracy suited only a people of gods.

Other features of the book include the figure of the Legislator, a wise founder who gives a people its first laws, inspired by ancient lawgivers such as Lycurgus; admiration for the Roman Republic and Sparta; and a preference for small states in which citizens can assemble.

Civil religion

The final chapters of Book IV propose a “civil religion” with a few simple articles of belief, including the existence of God, an afterlife, the rewarding of the just and the punishment of the wicked, and the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. Citizens could hold any other private beliefs, but those who rejected these articles could be banished, and Rousseau argued that intolerant religions could not be accepted.

He also criticised Christianity as a political force, arguing that it turned citizens’ hearts away from the state. This chapter, more than the political theory, provoked the authorities.

Condemnation and exile

The reaction was swift. On 9 June 1762 the Parlement of Paris condemned Emile for its religious views and ordered Rousseau’s arrest; he fled to Switzerland. On 19 June the Small Council of Geneva condemned both Emile and The Social Contract as destructive of religion and government, ordered them burned and threatened to arrest their author if he entered the city.

Rousseau took refuge at Môtiers in the territory of Neuchâtel, then ruled by Frederick II of Prussia. In 1763 he renounced his Genevan citizenship, and in 1764 he attacked the Geneva authorities in his Letters Written from the Mountain. Driven from Môtiers in 1765, he went to England in 1766 at the invitation of David Hume, but quarrelled bitterly with him and returned to France in 1767. He died at Ermenonville, north of Paris, on 2 July 1778.

Influence on the French Revolution

Historians debate how widely The Social Contract was read before 1789; it seems to have been less popular than Rousseau’s novels and Emile. During the Revolution, however, it became famous. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of August 1789 states in Article 6 that law is the expression of the general will, a direct echo of Rousseau’s language.

The Jacobins, and above all Maximilien Robespierre, admired Rousseau and invoked the general will and civic virtue. In 1794, during the Reign of Terror, Robespierre’s Festival of the Supreme Being drew on ideas resembling Rousseau’s civil religion. On 11 October 1794 Rousseau’s remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris.

Legacy and debate

Rousseau’s book is one of the founding texts of modern democracy. His insistence that sovereignty belongs to the people as a whole, and that laws must be general and equal for all, shaped republican thought in Europe and the Americas. He influenced Immanuel Kant’s idea of moral autonomy, and his argument stands alongside John Locke’s Two Treatises and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws as a classic of social contract theory.

Critics have read him very differently. Some 20th-century writers, notably J. L. Talmon in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952), argued that the idea of an infallible general will, and of citizens being “forced to be free”, could justify suppressing dissent. Defenders reply that Rousseau insisted on equal laws, the rule of law and the protection of each member. The debate continues in political philosophy today.

Rousseau also applied his ideas to real countries, drafting a Constitutional Project for Corsica (written in 1765) and Considerations on the Government of Poland (written in 1771–1772).

Myths and facts

Myth: Rousseau coined the idea of the social contract. The idea that political society rests on an agreement was much older. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke had developed influential versions in the 17th century. Rousseau’s originality lay in placing sovereignty permanently in the whole people and in his concept of the general will.

Myth: Rousseau wanted people to return to the state of nature. He never proposed this. In The Social Contract he argues that the passage into civil society can make humans moral and rational beings, provided that society is rightly ordered.

Myth: The general will is simply majority rule. Rousseau accepts that votes are usually counted by majority, but he insists that a majority expresses the general will only when citizens vote on general questions with the common good in mind. When factions dominate, the result is merely the will of a group.

Myth: The ’noble savage’ phrase comes from Rousseau. The expression is older, used by John Dryden in 1672, and Rousseau did not use it, although his ideas about natural humanity are often summarised by it.

Timeline

• 1712, 28 June: Jean-Jacques Rousseau is born in Geneva.
• 1750: His Discourse on the Arts and Sciences wins the Dijon Academy’s prize.
• 1755: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality is published.
• 1762, April: The Social Contract is published in Amsterdam by Marc-Michel Rey.
• 1762, May: Emile is published.
• 1762, 9 June: The Parlement of Paris condemns Emile; Rousseau flees to Switzerland.
• 1762, 19 June: Geneva condemns Emile and The Social Contract to be burned.
• 1778, 2 July: Rousseau dies at Ermenonville.
• 1789, August: The Declaration of the Rights of Man defines law as the expression of the general will.
• 1794, 11 October: Rousseau’s remains are transferred to the Panthéon.

Why it matters

The Social Contract gave modern politics the idea that the people as a whole are sovereign and that laws are legitimate only if they express the common will of equal citizens. Its promise of freedom through self-government, and the dangers some readers see in it, remain central to debates about democracy.