Jean-Jacques Rousseau
On the Social Contract
or
Principles of Political Right
Translated
by
Ian Johnston
Vancouver Island University
Nanaimo, British Columbia
[A Rich Text Format version of this text is available for
download (in Word or Open Office) at the following site: Social
Contract RTF]
Translator’s Note
This translation is based
upon the 1762 French edition of Du
Contrat social. Rousseau’s additions to that text in a later edition (1782)
are given in the translator’s footnotes.
There are two groups of
endnotes at the end of this text: in the first group are those which appear in
Rousseau’s original text; in the second group are explanatory notes provided by
the translator. A link in the text to an endnote is indicated by a letter and a
number in brackets. A number with the letter R in front of it—e.g., (R10)—indicates a link to a note from Rousseau’s text; a number with the letter
T in front of it—e.g., (T24)—indicates a link to an endnote provided by the translator. Rousseau’s later
additions to the first edition are included among the translator’s endnotes.
This text may be freely
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members of the general public, who may also edit the text to suit their
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commercial publication or distribution of it is allowed without written
permission of the translator (johnstoi.ian@gmail.com).
On the Social Contract
or
the Principles of Political Right
by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Citizen of Geneva
Let
us speak of the laws of an equal federation. (Aeneid XI)
Table of Contents
Which examines how
people pass from the state of nature into the civil state and what are the
essential conditions of the social pact.
Chapter 1: Subject of this First Book
Chapter 2: On the First Societies
Chapter 3: On the Right of the Strongest
Chapter 4: On Slavery
Chapter 5: That It is Always Necessary to Go
Back to a First Agreement
Chapter 6: On the Social Compact
Chapter 7: On the Sovereign
Chapter 8: On the Civil State
Chapter 9: On Real Property
Book 2
Which deals with
legislation.
Chapter 1: That Sovereignty is Inalienable
Chapter 2: That Sovereignty is Indivisible
Chapter 3: Whether the General Will Can be
Mistaken
Chapter 4: On the Limits of the Sovereign Power
Chapter 5: On the Right of Life and Death
Chapter 6: On the Law
Chapter 7: On the Lawgiver
Chapter 8: On the People
Chapter 9: [On the People] (continued)
Chapter 10: [On the People] (continued)
Chapter 11: On the Various Systems of Legislation
Chapter 12: The Division of the Laws
Book 3
Which deals with
political laws, that is to say, with the form of the government.
Chapter 1: On Government in General
Chapter 2: On the Principle that Determines the
Different Forms of Government
Chapter 3: Division of Governments
Chapter 4: On Democracy
Chapter 5: On Aristocracy
Chapter 6: On Monarchy
Chapter 7: On Mixed Governments
Chapter 8: That All Forms of Government are not
Appropriate for Every Country
Chapter 9: On the Signs of a Good Government
Chapter 10: On the Abuse of Government and Its
Tendency to Degenerate
Chapter 11: On the Death of the Body Politic
Chapter 12: How Sovereign Authority Is Maintained
Chapter 13: [How Sovereign Authority Is
Maintained] (continued)
Chapter 14: [How Sovereign Authority Is
Maintained] (continued)
Chapter 15: On Deputies or Representatives
Chapter 16: That the Institution of Government is
not a Contract
Chapter 17: On the Institution of Government
Chapter 18: Ways to Prevent Usurpations of the
Government
Book 4
Which continues to
deal with political laws and sets out ways one can strengthen the constitution
of the state.
Chapter 1: That the General Will is
Indestructible
Chapter 2: On Voting
Chapter 3: On Elections
Chapter 4: On the Roman Comitia
Chapter 5: On the Tribunate
Chapter 6: On Dictatorship
Chapter 7: On the Censorship
Chapter 8: On Civil Religion
Chapter 9: Conclusion
NOTES
On the Social Contract
or
the Principles of Political Right
This small treatise
is part of a more extensive work that I carried out earlier, without having
taken into account my own powers, and that I abandoned a long time ago. Of the
various parts one could extract from what it was, this is the most significant,
and to me it seemed the least unworthy of being offered to the public. The rest
no longer exists.
I wish to explore
whether in the civil order, if one takes men as they are and laws as they might
be, there can be some sure and legitimate rule of administration. In this
search, I will attempt always to unite what right permits with what interest
prescribes, so that there will be no division of justice and utility.
I launch my
undertaking without demonstrating the importance of my subject. People will ask
me if, writing on politics, I am a prince or a lawgiver. My answer is that I am
neither, and that is the reason I am writing on politics. If I were a prince or
a lawgiver, I would not waste my time talking about what must be done. I would
do it, or remain silent.
Since I was born a
citizen of a free state and a member of the sovereign, no matter how weak the
influence of my voice on public affairs may be, the right to vote on such
issues is enough to impose on me the duty to instruct myself about them. And every
time I meditate on governments, I am happy that in my research I always find
new reasons to love the government of my country!
Subject of This First Book
Man is born free, and
everywhere he is in chains. Someone who believes he is the master of others
does not escape being more enslaved than they. How did this transformation come
about? I do not know. What can render it legitimate? This question I believe I
can resolve.
If I were to consider
nothing but power and the effects that
follow from it, I would say: as long as a people is compelled to obey
and does obey, it is doing well; as soon as it can throw off its yoke and does
shake it off, it is doing even better, for by recovering its liberty through
the same right that robbed the people of it, either it is justified in taking
it back or those who deprived the populace of freedom had no justification for
doing so. But the social order is a sacred right that serves as the foundation
for all the others. This right, however, does not come from nature and is thus
founded on conventions. It is a matter of knowing what these conventions are.
Before coming to that, I ought to establish what I have just asserted.
On the First Societies
The oldest of all
societies and the only natural one is that of the family. Even there, the
children remain linked to the father only as long as they need him for their
self-preservation. As soon as this need ends, the natural bond dissolves. Once
the children are free of the obedience they owed their father and the father is
free of the care he owed his children, they all return equally to independence.
If they continue to remain united, this is no longer natural but voluntary, and
the family maintains itself only by convention.
This common liberty
is a consequence of the nature of man. His first law is to look after his own
preservation, his first cares are those he owes himself, and as soon as he
reaches the age of reason, since he is the sole judge of the means appropriate
to preserving himself, he thereby becomes his own master.
Thus, the family is,
if you will, the first model of political societies. The leader is viewed as
the father, and the people as the children. Since they are all born equal and
free, they do not alienate their freedom except for their own advantage. The
only difference is that in the family the love of the father for his children
repays him for the care he takes of them, and that in the state the pleasure of
commanding replaces this love, which the leader does not feel for his people.
Grotius denies that
all human power is established for the benefit of those who are governed. He
cites slavery as an example. His most characteristic style of
reasoning is always to establish right by fact.(R1) One could use a more
logical method, but not one more favorable to tyrants.
Thus, according to
Grotius, it is unclear whether the human race belongs to a hundred men or
whether these hundred men belong to the human race, and in his whole work he
seems to incline towards the former opinion. That is also Hobbes’s sentiment.
And in this way, the human race is divided into herds of
cattle, each of which has its chief, who guards it in order to devour it.(T1)
As a shepherd has a
nature superior to that of his flock, so the shepherds of men, who are their
leaders, also possess a nature superior to that of their peoples. The emperor
Caligula, according to what Philo reports, reasoned this way, and from this analogy came to the appropriate conclusion that either kings
were gods or the people were beasts.(T2).
Caligula’s reasoning
is the same as the arguments in Hobbes and Grotius. Before all of them, Aristotle
had also claimed that men are not naturally equal, but that some are born for
slavery and others for dominion.
Aristotle was
correct, but he took the effect for the cause. All men born into slavery are
born for slavery. Nothing is more certain. Slaves lose everything in their
chains, even the desire to escape them. They love their
servitude, just as Ulysses’ companions loved their brutish condition.(R2)
So then if there are slaves by nature, that is because there have been slaves
against nature. Force made the first slaves; their cowardice has kept them so.
I have not said
anything about king Adam or about emperor Noah, father of three great monarchs
who divided up the universe among them, as did the children of Saturn, whom
some have claimed they recognize in Noah’s sons. I hope that people will find
my moderation agreeable, for since I am a direct descendant of one of these
princes—perhaps of the oldest branch—how do I know that with a verification of
titles, I might not find myself the legitimate king of the human race? Whatever
the case, one cannot deny that Adam was the sovereign of the world, just as
Robinson [Crusoe] was of his island, as long as he was the sole inhabitant. And
this empire had the advantage that in it, the monarch was secure
upon his throne, and had to fear neither rebellions, nor wars, nor conspirators.(T3)
On the Right of the Strongest
The strongest is
never strong enough to be master all the time, unless he transforms his power
into right and obedience into duty. From that comes the right of the strongest,
a right which, although apparently intended ironically, is truly established in
principle. But are we never to receive an explanation of this phrase? Force is
physical power. I do not see what morality can result from its effects. To
yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will, at most an act of prudence.
In what sense can that be a duty?
Let us assume for a
moment this alleged right. I maintain that the result of such a right is
nothing but inexplicable nonsense. For as soon as it is force that creates
right, the effect changes with the cause. Every force that is more powerful
than the first inherits its right. Once we can disobey with impunity, we can do
so legitimately, and since the strongest is always right, it is simply a matter
of making ourselves the strongest. But what kind of right perishes when force
ends? If we must obey because of force, we have no need to obey because it is
our duty, and if we are no longer forced to obey, we have no obligation to do
so. One can see, therefore, that this word right
adds nothing to force. Here it
signifies nothing at all.
Obey those in power.
If that means yield to force, it is a good precept, but superfluous. I reply
that it will never be violated. All power comes from God—that I concede—but all
sickness comes from Him as well. Does that mean we are forbidden to summon the
doctor? If a brigand surprises me in a part of the forest, am I not merely
compelled by force to surrender my purse, but also in conscience obliged to
give it to him, when I could withhold it? For in the end, the pistol he holds
is also a power.
So let us agree that
force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate
powers. Thus, we inevitably return to my original question.
On Slavery
Since no man has a
natural authority over his fellow man and since force creates no right,
therefore conventions remain as the basis of all legitimate authority among
human beings.
If a particular
individual can alienate his liberty, Grotius says, and make himself the slave
of a master, why could not an entire people alienate its liberty and make
itself subject to a king? In this question there are a number of ambiguous
words that require an explanation, but let us restrict ourselves to that word alienate. To alienate means to give or
to sell. Now, a man who makes himself the slave of someone else is not giving
but selling himself, at least for his subsistence. But why does a people sell
itself? A king, far from providing his subjects their subsistence, derives his
own only from them, and, according to Rabelais, a king does not live on a
pittance. So, do subjects surrender their persons on condition
that their goods will also be taken away? I do not see what they have left to
preserve(T4).
Some will say that
the despot assures his subjects civil tranquility. That may be so, but what do
they gain from that, if the wars that his ambition draws them into, if his
insatiable greed and the humiliating demands of his ministers bring them more
desolation than their own quarrels would have done? What do they gain from it,
if this tranquility is itself one of their miseries? People also live
peacefully in dungeons. Is that enough to make them a good place to live? The
Greeks imprisoned in the cave of Cyclops lived there
peacefully, while waiting for their turn to be devoured.(T5)
To say that a man
gives s himself gratuitously is to make an absurd and inconceivable claim. Such
an act is illegitimate and void, for the sole reason that the man who does it
is not in his right mind. To say the same thing about an entire people is to
assume a population of madmen. Madness creates no rights.
Even if each man were
able to alienate himself, he cannot alienate his children. They are born human
beings and free. Their liberty belongs to them. They alone have the right to
dispose of it. No one else has that right. Before they reach the age of reason,
the father can stipulate in their name the conditions for their preservation,
for their well-being, but he cannot give them away irrevocably and
unconditionally. For such a gift is contrary to the ends of nature and goes
beyond the rights of paternity. Thus, for an arbitrary government to be
legitimate, in every generation the people would have to have the power to
accept or reject it. But then this government would no longer be arbitrary.
To renounce one’s
liberty is to renounce one’s quality as a man, the rights of humanity, and even
his duties. There is no possible compensation for someone who surrenders
everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man, and to
remove all liberty from someone’s will is to remove all morality from his
actions. Finally, it is an empty and contradictory convention to stipulate, on
the one hand, an absolute authority and, on the other, an unlimited obedience.
Is it not clear that we have no obligations towards someone from whom we have
the right to demand everything? And does this condition alone, where there is
no equivalence or exchange, not involve nullifying the act? For what right
would my slave have against me, since all he possesses belongs to me? Now that
his right is mine, this right I have against myself is meaningless.
Grotius and others
derive from warfare another origin for the alleged right of slavery. Since the
victor, according to them, has the right to kill the vanquished, the latter can
purchase his life back at the expense of his liberty, and this convention is
all the more legitimate because it is profitable to both parties.
But it is clear that
this alleged right to kill the vanquished in no way results from the state of
war. Given the simple fact that human beings living in their original
independence have no sufficiently constant relations among themselves to
constitute either a state of peace or a state of war, they are not naturally
enemies. What constitutes war is a relationship between things and not between
men, and since a state of war cannot arise from simple personal relationships,
but only from relationships involving property, a private war or a war of man
against man cannot exist, either in the state of nature, where there is no
definite property, or in the social state, where everything is under the
authority of laws.
Individual fights, duels,
and confrontations are not acts that establish a state, and as far as private
wars are concerned, authorized by the ordinances of Louis IX, king of France,
and suspended by the peace of God, these are abuses of feudal government, an
absurd system if ever there was one, contrary to the principles
of natural right and to all good polities.(T6)
Hence, war is a not a
relation between one man and another, but between one state and another. In war
individuals are enemies only by accident, not as men, nor even
as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of their homeland, but as its
defenders.(T7) Finally, each state
can have as its enemies only other states and not other men, for between things
with such different natures we can establish no true relationship.
This principle even
complies with the established maxims of all times and with the constant
practice of all civilized peoples. Declarations of war are warnings, not so
much to those in power as to their subjects. A foreigner—whether king,
individual, or people—who steals, kills, or detains the subjects without
declaring war on the prince is not an enemy but a brigand. Even in the middle
of a war, a just prince in a hostile country rightly seizes everything that
belongs to the public, but he respects the persons and the goods of
individuals. He respects the rights on which his own are founded. Since the end
of war is the destruction of the enemy state, one has a right to kill its
defenders as long as they bear arms. But as soon as they lay down their weapons
and surrender, thus ceasing to be enemies or tools of the enemy, they return to
being simply men, and one no longer has a right to their lives. Sometimes one
can kill a state without killing a single one of its members, and war grants no
right that is not essential to its purpose. These principles are not those of
Grotius, nor are they founded on the authority of poets. But they do derive
from the nature of things and are based upon reason.
As far as the right
of conquest is concerned, that has no foundation other than the law of the
strongest. If war does not give the victor the right to massacre the
vanquished, this right that he does not have cannot be the basis of his right
to enslave them. One has the right to kill an enemy only when one cannot make him
a slave. Hence, the right to make someone a slave does not stem from the right
to kill him. It is thus an iniquitous exchange to make him purchase his life,
to which one has no right, at the price of his liberty. Is it not clear that by
establishing the right of life and death on the right of slavery, and the right
of slavery on the right of life and death, one falls into a vicious circle?
Even assuming this
terrible right to kill everyone, I claim that someone enslaved in war or a
conquered people is bound by nothing at all where their master is concerned,
other than to obey him as much as they are forced to do so. By accepting an
equivalent for his life, the victor has not done him a favor, for instead of
killing him without profit, he has killed him for his own use. And thus, it is
far from the case that he has acquired any authority over him that is not
linked to force, and the state of war continues between them as before. The
very relationship between them is the effect of war, and using the right of war
does not presuppose any treaty of peace. They have established a convention.
That may well be so. But this convention, far from destroying the state of war,
assumes its continuation.
Thus, however one
examines the issue, the right of slavery is non-existent, not only because it
is illegitimate, but also because it is absurd and signifies nothing. The words
slavery and right are contradictory and mutually exclusive. Whether one man is
speaking to another or one man is speaking to a people, the following statement
will always be equally absurd: “I am making an agreement with you entirely at
your expense and entirely to my advantage, which I will observe as long as it
pleases me, and you will observe it as long as it pleases me.”
That It is Always Necessary to Go Back to a First
Agreement
Even if I were to
concede everything I have refuted up to this point, the apologists for
despotism would not have advanced their cause any further. There will always be
a great difference between subduing a multitude and governing a society. If
scattered individuals were successively enslaved to one man, no matter how many
there might be, I still see nothing there but a master and slaves. I do not see
a people and its leader. It is, if you will, an aggregation, but not an
association. There is in it no public good and no body politic. Even if that
man had enslaved half the world, he is still merely an individual. His
interest, separate from the interest of the others, is always merely a private
interest. If this same man happens to die, after he is gone his empire remains
scattered and disconnected, as an oak tree, once fire has consumed it,
collapses and dissolves into a heap of ashes.
A people, Grotius
says, can give itself to a king. According to him, therefore, a people is a
people before it gives itself to a king. This gift is itself a civil act. It
assumes a public deliberation. Hence, before examining the act by which a
people chooses a king, it would be good to examine the act by which a people
becomes a people. For since this act is necessarily prior to the former, it is
the true foundation of society.
In fact, if there
were no previous agreement, unless the election was unanimous, how would there
be an obligation for the minority to submit to the choice of the majority?
Where would the hundred people who want a master acquire the right to vote on
behalf of the ten who do not? The law of majority vote is itself established by
convention and presupposes unanimity on at least one occasion.
On the Social Compact
I assume that men
have reached the stage where the obstacles harmful to their preservation in a
state of nature are winning out, because these obstacles resist the forces that
each individual can employ in order to maintain himself in this condition. At
that point, this primitive state can no longer continue, and the human race
would die out if it did not change its way of life.
Now, since men are
incapable of creating new forces but only of uniting and directing existing
ones, they have no way of preserving themselves other than to form by
aggregation a sum of their forces, something that could prevail over that
resistance, then to bring these forces to bear by a single motive power and to
make them work in concert.
This sum of forces cannot
arise except through several people combining together. But since the power and
liberty of each man are the principal instruments of his preservation, how will
he commit them to others without harming himself and without neglecting the
care he owes himself? If we apply this difficulty to my subject, we can define
it in these terms:
“To find a form of
association that defends and protects with full communal force the person and
the possessions of each member and in which each person, by uniting with all,
nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before.” Such is the
fundamental problem to which the social contract provides the solution.
The clauses of this
contract are determined by the nature of the act in such a way that the least
modification renders them empty and ineffectual. As a result, even though they
perhaps have never been formally stated, they are the same everywhere and are
tacitly admitted and recognized everywhere, until the moment when, once the
social pact has been violated, each person then returns to his original rights
and resumes his natural liberty, losing the conventional freedom for which he
renounced it.
These clauses,
properly understood, all come down to one, that is, the total alienation of
each member of the association, along with all his rights, to the entire
community. For, first of all, since each person gives himself entirely, the
condition is equal for all, and since the condition is the same for everyone,
no one has an interest in making it burdensome for the others.
Furthermore, because
the alienation is made without reservation, the union is as perfect as it can
be, and no member of the association has any further demands. For, given that
there would be no shared superior who could decide between particular members
and the public, if individuals retained certain rights, each one would, on some
point, be his own judge and would soon claim to be that in all things. The
state of nature would remain, and the association would necessarily become
tyrannical or pointless.
Finally, since each
person gives himself to everyone, he gives himself to no one, and since there
is no member of the association over whom he does not acquire the same right
that he grants that person over himself, he gains the equivalent of everything
he loses, as well as more power to preserve what he has.
If then we remove
from the social pact what is not part of its essence, we will find that it is
reduced to the following terms: Each one
of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction
of the general will, and as a body we receive each member as an indivisible
part of the whole.
This act of
association immediately replaces the individual personality of each member of
the contract with a moral and collective body composed of as many members as
there are voices in the assembly. From this same act, the assembly acquires its
unity, its common self, its life, and
its will. The public person produced in this way by the union
of all the others in earlier days took the name of city and now bears the name of republic
or body politic.(R3)
It is called the state by its members
when it is passive, the sovereign
when it is active, and a power when
it is being compared to others like itself. So far as the members of the
association are concerned, they take on collectively the name of people, calling themselves, as
individuals, citizens, since they are
participants in the sovereign authority, and subjects, since they submit to the laws of the state. These terms,
however, are often confused and taken for one another. It is sufficient to know
how to distinguish them when they are used with complete precision.
On the Sovereign
We see in this
formulation that the act of association contains a reciprocal commitment
between the public and the individual, and that, by making a contract with
himself, so to speak, each individual finds himself bound in a double
relationship: that is, as a member of the sovereign towards each individual,
and, as a member of the state, towards the sovereign. However, we cannot apply
here that principle of civil law that no person is bound by commitments made to
himself, for there is a significant difference between having an obligation to
oneself and having an obligation to a whole of which one is a part.
We must also observe
that public deliberations that can impose obligations on all subjects to the
sovereign, given the two different relationships under which each
citizen-subject is regarded, cannot, for the opposite reason, impose
obligations on the sovereign to itself and thus that it is contrary to the
nature of the body politic for the sovereign to impose a law on itself that it
cannot break. Since the sovereign can view itself in terms of only one single
relationship, it is then in the position of a particular individual making a
contract with himself. From that we see that there is not and cannot be any
sort of fundamental law imposing obligations on the body of the people, not
even the social contract. That does not mean that this body cannot properly
enter into undertakings with other political bodies concerning matters that do
not violate this contract, for as far as foreigners are concerned, the body
politic becomes a single entity, an individual.
But since the body
politic or the sovereign derives its being only from the sanctity of the
contract, it can never commit itself, even towards foreigners, to anything that
violates this original act, for instance, by alienating some part of itself or
by submitting itself to another sovereign. To violate the act by which it
exists would be to annihilate itself, and what is nothing produces nothing.
As soon as this
multitude is thus unified into a body, one cannot offend against one of its
members without attacking the body; still less can one harm the body without
its members feeling the effects. Thus, obligation and interest require the two
contracting parties equally to provide mutual help to one another, and in this
double relationship the same people should seek to combine all the advantages
that depend on it.
Now, since the
sovereign is composed only of individuals who make it up, it does not have and
cannot have an interest contrary to theirs. Therefore, the sovereign power has
no need to give its subjects a guarantee, because it is impossible that the
body would want to harm all its members, and later on we shall see that it
cannot harm any particular individual. From the very fact that it exists, the
sovereign is always everything it ought to be.
However, it is not
the same for the subjects with regard to the sovereign, since, despite their
common interest, the sovereign would have no guarantee of their commitments
unless it found ways of assuring itself of their loyalty.
In fact, each
individual, as a man, can have a particular will at odds with or different from
the general will that he has as a citizen. His particular interest can speak to
him in an entirely different way from the common interest. His absolute and
naturally independent existence can lead him to look on what he owes the common
cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which will be less injurious to
the others than the payment is onerous to him, and by viewing the moral person
who constitutes the state as a notional being, because he is not a man, he may
want to enjoy the rights of a citizen without being willing to fulfill
the duties of a subject, an injustice whose progress would lead to the ruin of
the body politic.(T8)
Therefore, to ensure
that the social pact is not an empty formula, it tacitly includes this
commitment, which alone can give force to the others: whoever refuses to obey
the general will shall be constrained to do so by the entire body. This simply
means that he will be forced to be free. For that is the condition which, by
giving each citizen to his native land, protects him from all personal
dependency, a condition that makes the artifice and the working of the
political machine, and which alone confers legitimacy on civil
commitments—which would otherwise be absurd, tyrannical, and subject to the
most enormous abuses.
On the Civil State
This transition from
the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable
change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct and by giving his
actions a moral quality they previously lacked. Only then, when the voice of
duty takes over from physical impulses and right takes the place of appetite
does a man, who up to that point has considered only himself, see himself
compelled to act on other principles and to consult his reason before listening
to his inclinations. Although in this state he deprives himself of several of
the advantages he derives from nature, those he gains in return are so great
that his faculties are stimulated and developed, his ideas grow more extensive,
his sentiments are ennobled, and his whole soul is uplifted, so much so that,
if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below the
condition he left, he ought never to stop blessing the happy moment that tore
him away from it forever, and that changed him from a stupid and limited animal
into an intelligent being and a man.
Let us reduce this
balance sheet to terms we can easily compare. Through the social contract, man
loses his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything which tempts him
and which he is able to reach. What he wins is civil liberty and the ownership
of everything he possesses. In order not to be mistaken about these compensations,
we must make a clear distinction between natural liberty, which has no limits
other than the powers of the individual, and civil liberty, which is limited by the general will, and between possession, which is merely a result of
force or the right of the first occupant, and property, which can be founded only on a positive title.
To the preceding we
could add to those things a man acquires in the civil state moral liberty,
which alone makes him truly master of himself. For following the impulses of
mere appetite is slavery, while obeying the law that one has set down for
oneself is liberty. But I have already said too much on this topic, and the
philosophical meaning of the word liberty
is not part of my subject here.
On Real Property
Each member of the
community gives himself to it at the moment it is formed, just as he presently
is, his person and all his powers, a part of which is the goods he possesses.
This does not mean that through this act of changing hands, possession changes
its nature and becomes property in the hands of the sovereign. However, since
the forces of the city are incomparably greater than those of an individual,
public possession is also, in fact, stronger and more irrevocable, without
being more legitimate, at least from the point of view of foreigners. For where
its members are concerned, the state is master of all their goods thanks to the
social contract, which within the state serves as the basis for all rights.
However, where other powers are concerned, the state is master only by the
right of the first occupant, which it derives from particular individuals.
Although the right of
the first occupant is more real than the right of the strongest, it does not
become a true right until after the establishment of the right of property.
Every man by nature has a right to everything that is necessary to him, but the
positive act that makes him the owner of some goods excludes him from all the
rest. Once his share is determined, he should limit himself to that; he has no
further right with respect to the community. That is why the right of the first
occupant—so weak in the state of nature—is respected by everyone in civil
society. In this right, a person is respecting not so much what belongs to
other people, as what does not belong to him.
Generally speaking,
in order to authorize the right of first occupant over any territory, the
following conditions must apply: first, this territory must not yet be
inhabited by anyone; second, one must occupy only as much land as one requires
to subsist; third, one must take possession of the land, not by an empty
ceremony, but by toil and cultivation, the only sign of ownership which, when
legal titles are not available, should be respected by others.
In fact, by according
the right of first occupant to need and labor, are we not extending this right
as far as it can go? Is it possible to assign this right without limits? Will
it be sufficient to place one’s foot on some common land in order to claim
immediately that one is its master? Will it be sufficient to have the power to
push other men aside for a moment in order to remove from them the right ever
to return there? How can a man or a people seize an immense territory and take
it away from the entire human race other than by a punishable usurpation, since
such an act deprives the rest of humanity of the habitable places and the food
that nature gives them in common? When Nuñez Balboa, standing on the seashore,
took possession of the South Sea and all of South America in the name of the
crown of Castille, was that enough to dispossess all the inhabitants there and
to exclude from the region all the princes of the world? If so, it is quite
pointless to multiply these ceremonies, and the Catholic king in his private
rooms merely has to take possession all at once of the entire
universe, provided he later removes from his empire what was possessed first by
other princes.(T9)
We can conceive how
the unified and contiguous lands of particular individuals become public
territory and how the right of sovereignty, by extending from the subjects to
the land they occupy, becomes at once real and personal. This process makes
those who possess the land more heavily dependent and turns even their own
forces into guarantees of their fidelity. This advantage does not seem to have
been fully perceived by ancient monarchs, who called themselves only kings of
the Persians, Scythians, or Macedonians, apparently considering themselves
rulers of men rather than masters of countries. Today’s rulers are more astute
and call themselves kings of France, Spain, England, and so on. By thus holding
the land, they are quite confident of holding its inhabitants.
What is significant
about this alienation is that, by taking the goods of individuals, the
community, far from depriving them, merely assures them of legitimate
possession, for it changes usurpation into a genuine right and enjoyment into
ownership. Thus, given that the possessors are considered agents of the public
good and that their rights are respected by all the members of the state and
maintained with all their forces against foreigners, these owners, by a
surrender advantageous to the public and even more so to themselves, have, so
to speak, acquired everything that they have given up. This paradox is easily
explained by the distinction between the rights that the sovereign and the
owner have over the same resources, as we will see later.
It can also happen
that men begin to unite before they possess anything and then later take over a
territory sufficient for all, which they enjoy in common or which they divide
up among themselves, either equally or according to proportions determined by
the sovereign. However this acquisition is accomplished, the right of each particular
individual over his own land is always subordinate to the right of the
community over everything, without which there would be no strength in the
social bond and no real force in the exercise of the sovereignty.
I will end this
chapter and this book with a comment that should serve as the foundation for
the entire social system: instead of destroying natural equality, the
fundamental pact, by contrast, substitutes for the physical inequalities which
nature could have established among men a moral and legitimate equality, and people who could be unequal in power or intelligence all become
equal by convention and by right.(R4)
End of Book 1
Book 2
That The Sovereignty is Inalienable
The first and most
important consequence of the principles established above is that only the
general will can direct the forces of the state according to the end for which
it was set up, that is, for the common good. For if the opposition of
particular interests made the institution of societies necessary, the agreement
among these same interests made it possible. What these different interests
have in common creates the social bond, and if there were not some point on
which all the interests were in agreement, no society could exist. Now, this
common interest is the only basis on which society must be governed.
Therefore, I maintain
that, since the sovereignty is nothing but the exercise of the general will, it
can never be alienated, and that the sovereign, which is only a collective
being, cannot be represented except by itself. The power can be readily
transferred, but not the will.
In fact, if it is not
impossible for a particular will to agree on some point with the general will,
it is at least impossible for this agreement to be durable and constant, for the
particular will tends by its nature towards things it prefers, and the general
will towards equality. It is even more impossible to have a guarantee of this
agreement, even if it should always exist. That would be a result, not of art,
but of chance. The sovereign could well say, “I now will what such and such a
man wills or at least what he says he wills,” but it cannot say, “What this man
is going to will tomorrow, I shall will as well,” because it is absurd that the
will gives itself fetters for the future and because no will is required to
consent to anything contrary to the good of the one doing the willing. Thus if
a people promises simply to obey, by that act it dissolves itself and loses its
quality as a people. The instant there is a master, there is no longer a
sovereign, and from that point on the body politic is destroyed.
This is not to say
that orders from the leaders cannot pass for expressions of the general will,
so long as the sovereign is free to oppose them and does not do so. In such a
case, one should assume that universal silence indicates the consent of the
people. This point will be explained in greater detail.
That the Sovereignty is Indivisible
For the same reason that the sovereignty is inalienable, it is indivisible. For
either the will is general, or it is not.(R5) It is the will of
the body of the people or of merely a part. In the first case, this will, once
declared, is an act of sovereignty and makes law. In the second case, it is
only a particular will or an act by a magistrate, at most a decree.
But our political
thinkers, unable to divide sovereignty in principle, divide it according to its
aims—separating it into force and will, into legislative power and executive
power, into rights of taxation, of justice and war, into internal
administration and the power to deal with foreigners. Sometimes they mix all
these parts together, and sometimes they separate them. They turn the sovereign
into a fantastic entity made up of jumbled pieces. It is as if they were producing
a man from several bodies, one of which had eyes, another arms, another feet,
and nothing else. People say that Japanese conjurors dismember a child in full
view of the spectators, then throw all its limbs into the air, one after the
other, and make the child fall down again, alive and completely reassembled.
The conjuring tricks of our political thinkers are almost like that: after they
have dismembered the social body using an illusion worthy of a fair, they put
the pieces back together again—no one knows how.
This error arises
because they have not established precise notions about sovereign authority,
and because they have taken for parts of this authority things that were merely
emanations from it. In this way, for example, they have looked upon the acts of
declaring war and of making peace as acts of sovereignty, which they are not,
for each of these actions is not a law but simply an application of the law, a
particular act that determines how the law applies to a case, as we shall see
clearly once the idea attached to the word law
has been defined.
By exploring the
other divisions in the same manner, we would find that every time we think we
see the sovereignty split up, we are mistaken, and that the rights that we take
for parts of this sovereignty are all subordinate to it and always assume
supreme wills whose execution these rights merely authorize.
It would be
impossible to state how much obscurity this lack of precision has cast over the
decisions of those who have written about issues of political rights, when, by
applying the principles they have established, they wished to judge the
respective rights of kings and peoples. Everyone can see in Chapters 3 and 4 of
the first book of Grotius how this learned man and his translator Barbeyrac get
tangled up in and confused by their sophistries, for fear of saying too much or
of not saying enough about something in accord with their ends and of offending
the interests they had to accommodate. Grotius, unhappy with his homeland, was
a refugee in France and wished to pay court to Louis XIII, to whom his book was
dedicated. He spares no effort to rob the people of all their rights and to
invest kings with them by every possible artifice. This would have also been
much to Barbeyrac’s taste; he dedicated his translation to the king of England,
George I. Unfortunately, however, the expulsion of James II, which he calls an
abdication, forced him to restrain himself, to distort and to
dance around the issue, so as not to make William a usurper.(T10) If these two writers had adopted genuine principles, all
the difficulties would have been removed and they would have always been
consistent. But they would have spoken the truth, sadly for them, and paid
court only to the people. For truth does not lead to fortune, and the people do
not award ambassadorships, or university chairs, or pensions.
Whether the General Will Can Be Mistaken
From what has been
said above it follows that the general will is always right and always tends
towards public utility. However, it does not follow that the deliberations of
the people are always equally correct. We always will our own good, but we do
not always recognize it. A people is never corrupted, but it is often misled,
and it is only then that it appears to will what is bad.
There is often a
significant difference between the will of everyone and the general will. The
latter considers only the common interest; the former considers private
interest and is merely a sum of particular wills. But remove from these same
wills the pluses and minuses which cancel each other out, and
what remains as the sum of the differences is the general will.(R6)
If, when the people
are sufficiently informed and deliberate, and the citizens had no communication
among themselves, the general will would always result from the large number of
small differences, and the deliberation would always be good. But when
intrigues are launched, partial associations at the expense of the large one,
the will of each of these associations becomes general with respect to its
members and particular with respect to the state. At that point one could say
that there are no longer as many voters as there are men, but only as many as
there are associations. The differences become less numerous and provide a less
general result. Finally, when one of these associations is so great that it
wins out over all the others, you no longer have a result that is the sum of
small differences, but a single difference. Then there is no longer a general
will, and the prevailing view is only a particular opinion.
Therefore, in order
to have a clear statement of the general will, it is important that
there be no partial society within the state and that each citizen express only
his own opinion.(R7) Such was the unique
and sublime system of the great Lycurgus. However, if there are partial
societies, it is necessary to multiply their number and
prevent them from becoming unequal, as did Solon, Numa, and Servius.(T11) These precautions are the only good ones to ensure that the
general will is always enlightened and that the people do not make mistakes.
On
the Limits of the Sovereign Power
If the state or the
city is simply a moral person whose life consists of the union of its members,
and if the most important of its concerns is taking care of its own
preservation, it requires a universal and compelling force to move and arrange
each part in the manner most advantageous to the whole. As nature gives each
man an absolute power over all his limbs, the social pact gives the body
politic an absolute power over all its members, and it is this same power that,
directed by the general will, bears, as I have said, the name of sovereignty.
But apart from the
public person, we have to consider the private persons who comprise it, and
whose life and liberty are naturally independent of it. One must thus clearly
distinguish between the respective rights of the citizens and of the sovereign,
and between the obligations that the former must carry out as
subjects and the natural right they should enjoy as men.(R8)
I concede that in the
social pact each man alienates only as much of his power, goods, and liberty as
it is important for the community to have at its disposal, but one must also
acknowledge that the sovereign is the sole judge of what is important.
All the services that
a citizen can render the state, he has an obligation to provide to it as soon
as the sovereign asks for them. But the sovereign, for its part, cannot impose
on the subjects any fetters that are useless to the community. It cannot even
will to do so, for according to the law of reason, nothing takes place without
a cause, any more than it does under the law of nature.
The commitments
binding us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual, and
their nature is such that in fulfilling them one cannot work for another
without working for oneself, as well. Why is the general will always right, and
why does everyone constantly will the wellbeing of each of them, if not because
there is no one who does not apply that word each to himself and who does not think of himself as he votes for
them all? This demonstrates that the equality of right and the concept of
justice it produces stem from the preference each person has for himself and
thus from the nature of man; that for the general will to be truly general it
must be so in its aims as well as in its essence; that it must originate from
all in order to be applied to all; and that it loses its natural rectitude when
it tends towards some individual and determinate purpose, because then, when we
are rendering judgment on something foreign to us, we have no true principle of
equity to guide us.
Indeed, as soon as it
is a question of a fact or of a particular right in a matter that has not been
regulated by a previous general agreement, the issue becomes contentious. It is
a case in which the particular interests are one of the parties and the public
the other, but where I do not see either the law which must be followed or the
judge who should rule. In such a case, it would be ridiculous to wish to refer
the question to an express decision of the general will, which can only be the
conclusion of one of the parties and which, for the other party, is therefore
merely a particular and alien will, one tending on this occasion to injustice
and subject to error. And so, just as a particular will cannot represent the
general will, the general will, in its turn, changes its nature when it has a
particular object and, since it is general, cannot pronounce either on a man or
on a fact. For example, when the people of Athens nominated or demoted its
leaders, proclaimed honours for one, imposed penalties on another, and with a
multitude of particular decrees carried out indiscriminately all the actions of
government, at that time the people no longer had a general will, in the strict
sense, for it was no longer acting as a sovereign but as a magistrate. This
will appear contrary to commonly held ideas, but I must be given time to set
down my own.
From these points one
should realize that what makes the will general is not so much the number of
votes as the common interest which unites them. For in this institution, each
person necessarily submits himself to the conditions which he imposes on the
others, an admirable agreement between interest and justice, which gives to the
common deliberations an equitable character that disappears in a discussion of
any particular issue, given the lack of a common interest which unites and
identifies the ruling of the judge with that of the party.
From whatever side we
return to this principle, we always reach the same conclusion, namely, that the
social pact establishes among the citizens such equality, that they all commit
themselves to the same conditions and should all enjoy the same rights. Thus,
by the nature of the pact, each act of sovereignty, that is to say, every
authentic act of the general will, imposes obligations on or favours all the citizens
equally. Hence, the sovereign recognizes only the body of the nation and makes
no distinctions among any of those who compose it. What, then, strictly
speaking, is an act of sovereignty? It is not a convention between a superior
and an inferior, but a convention between a body and each one of its members.
It is a legitimate convention, because it is founded on the social contract,
equitable, because it is common to all, useful, because it can have no purpose
other than the general good, and firm, because it is guaranteed by public force
and the supreme power. As long as the subjects are bound solely to conventions
like this, they are not obeying anyone other than their own will. And to ask
how far the respective rights of the sovereign and of the citizens extend is to
ask how far the latter can commit themselves to themselves, each person to all
and all to each.
We see from this that
the sovereign power, wholly absolute, wholly sacred, and wholly inviolable as
it is, does not and cannot exceed the limits of general conventions, and that
every man is fully capable of disposing of what these conventions have left him
of his goods and his liberty, so that the sovereign never has the right to
impose more on one subject than on another, because then, when the issue
becomes particular, the sovereign’s power is no longer competent.
Once we have
acknowledged these distinctions, it is altogether wrong to claim that in the
social contract there is any genuine renunciation on the part of individuals,
so much so that their situation, as a result of this contract, is actually
preferable to what it was previously and that, rather than an alienation, they
have only made an advantageous exchange of an uncertain and precarious way of
life for a better and more secure alternative, trading natural independence for
liberty, power to harm others for their own security, and their own strength,
which others can overwhelm, for a right that the social union makes invincible.
Their very life, which they have dedicated to the state, is constantly
protected by it, and when they risk their lives in its defense what are they
doing then other than giving back to the state what they have received from it?
What are they doing that they would not be doing more frequently and more
dangerously in the state of nature, when they would be fighting inevitable
battles and putting their lives in peril to defend what serves to preserve
them? Everyone must fight when the homeland needs him, that is true. But it is
also true that no one ever has to fight for himself. Where our security is
concerned, do we not still gain by running some of the risks we would have to
run on our own as soon as it was taken away from us?
On the Right of Life and Death
Since individuals
have no right to take their own lives, one may ask: how can they transfer this
same right, which they do not possess, to the sovereign? This question appears
difficult to resolve only because it is poorly framed. Each man has the right to
risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has anyone ever claimed that a
person who throws himself out of a window to escape a fire is guilty of
suicide? Has this same criminal charge ever been laid against someone who
perishes in a storm at sea, on the ground that when he embarked he was not
ignorant of the danger?
The purpose of the
social treaty is the preservation of those making the contract. A person who
wills an end also wills the means, and these means are inseparable from certain
risks, even a few losses. He who wishes to preserve his life at the expense of
others should also give his life for them when the need arises. Now, the
citizen is no longer the judge of the peril which the law wishes him to face,
and when the prince has said to him, “It is in the state’s interest that you
die,” he should die, for it is only on that condition that he has lived in
security up to that point, and his life is no longer merely a bountiful gift of
nature but also a conditional gift of the state.
The death penalty
imposed on criminals can be viewed more or less in the same way: in order not
to be the victim of an assassin, we agree to die if we become one. In this
social treaty, far from disposing of his life, a person thinks only of
protecting it, and we should not assume that any of those agreeing to the
contract is intending at the time to get himself hanged.
Furthermore, every
wrongdoer, by attacking social right, becomes, as a result of his crimes, a
rebel and a traitor to his homeland. He ceases to be a member of it by
violating its laws; he even wages war against it. At that point, the
preservation of the state is incompatible with his own. One of the two must
perish, and when we put the guilty person to death, he is not so much a citizen
as an enemy. The trial and the sentence are the proof and the declaration that
he has broken the social treaty and is thus no longer a member of the state.
Now, since he has acknowledged that that is what he was, at least by living
there, he should be removed from it by exile, as someone who has violated the
social pact, or by death, as a public enemy. For an enemy like him is not a
moral person. He is a man, and in such a case it is a right of war to kill the
vanquished.
But, someone will
say, condemning a criminal is a particular act. Granted. But this condemnation
is also not a function of the sovereign. It is a right that the sovereign can
confer without the power to exercise it on its own. All my ideas cohere, but I
cannot set them down all at once.
We should add that frequent
harsh punishment is always a sign of weakness or laziness in the government.
There is no wrongdoer who could not be made good for something. We have no
right to put anyone to death, even as an example, other than a person whom we
cannot preserve without danger.
As far as the right
to pardon is concerned, or to exempt a guilty person from the punishment
imposed by the law and pronounced by the judge, it belongs only to the one who
is above the judge and the law, that is to say, to the sovereign, although its
right in this matter is not at all clear, and the cases where it is used are
extremely rare. In a well-governed state, there are few punishments, not
because it issues plenty of pardons, but because there are few criminals. When
the state is growing weak, the multitude of crimes is a guarantee of impunity.
Under the Roman Republic, neither the Senate nor the consuls ever tried to
grant pardons. Even the people did not do so, although it sometimes revoked it
own judgments. Frequent pardons declare that soon criminal acts will no longer
need them, and everyone sees where that leads. But I feel my heart murmuring
and I restrain my pen. Let us leave the discussion of these questions to the
just man who has not done wrong and who has never himself had need of a pardon.
On the Law
With the social pact
we have provided existence and life to the body politic. It is now a matter of
giving it, through legislation, movement and will. For the original act by
which this body is formed and united still does not establish any of those
things that need to be done to preserve it.
What is good and
conforms to order is so by the nature of things, independent of human
conventions. All justice comes from God. He alone is its source. But if we knew
how to accept justice from such a lofty place, we should need neither
government nor laws. Undoubtedly there is a universal justice that emanates
from reason alone, but in order for this justice to be admitted among us, it
must be reciprocal. If we consider things from a human perspective, because we
lack a natural sanction, the laws of justice are ineffectual among men. All
they achieve is the good of the wrongdoer and troubles for the just, when the
latter observes the laws with everyone, but no one observes them with him.
Consequently, we must have conventions and laws to unite rights with duties and
to lead justice back to its object. In the state of nature, where everything is
common, I do not owe anything to those to whom I have promised nothing, and I
recognize as someone else’s possession only what is of no use to me. That is
not the case in a civil state, where all rights are fixed by law.
But what then, in the
final analysis, is a law? As long as we are content to attach nothing to this
word but metaphysical ideas, we will continue to argue without agreement, and
when we have declared what a law of nature is, we will, for all that, have no
better understanding of what a law of the state is.
I have already
remarked that there is no general will in a matter concerning a particular
object. In effect, this particular object is either within the state or outside
it. If it is outside the state, an alien will is not general in relation it;
and if this object is within the state, it is part of the state. In that case,
there is created between the whole and its part a relation that produces two
separate beings: one of them is the part, and the other is the whole minus this
very part. But the whole minus a part is not a whole, and as long as this
relationship continues, there is no longer a whole but two unequal parts. From
this it follows that the will of one is no longer general with respect to the
other.
But when an entire
people delivers a ruling concerning all the people, it is considering only
itself, and if at that time a relationship is created, it is between the entire
object seen from one point of view and the entire object seen from another
point of view, without any division of the whole. In such a case, the matter
about which the rule is established is general, as is the will that creates it.
This is the act I call a law.
When I say that the
object of the laws is always general, I mean that the law considers the
subjects as a body and actions in the abstract; it never considers a man as an
individual or a particular action. Hence, the law can readily decree that there
will be privileges, but it cannot confer these on anyone by name; the law can
create several classes of citizens and even designate the qualifications that
give people the right to belong to these classes, but it cannot nominate this
or that person for admittance to them; it can establish a monarchical
government and a hereditary succession, but it cannot choose a king or nominate
a royal family. In a word, no function linked to an individual object is part
of the legislative power.
With this idea in
mind, we see at once that we no longer need to ask whose role it is to make
laws, since they are acts of the general will; or whether the prince is above
the laws, since he is a member of the state; or whether the law can be unjust,
since no one is unjust to himself; or how we are free and subject to laws,
since they are merely registers of what we have willed.
We also see that
because the law combines the universality of the will with that of the object,
what a man, whoever he may be, orders on his own initiative is not a law. Even
something the sovereign commands concerning a particular object is no closer to
a law, but is a decree. It is an act, not of the sovereignty, but of the
judiciary.
Thus, I call every
state ruled by laws, no matter what form its administration may be, a republic. For only then does the public interest govern and the public entity become something real.(T12) Every legitimate government is republican.(R9)
I will explain later what government is.
The laws, strictly
speaking, are only the conditions of the civil association. The people who are
subject to the laws ought to be their author. Society belongs only to those who
have come together to rule on its conditions. But how will they regulate these
conditions? Will that be by common agreement, by a sudden inspiration? Does the
body politic have an organ for announcing what it wills? Who will give it the
foresight it requires to formulate and publicize its acts in advance, or how
will it make them known when the need arises? How would a blind multitude,
which often does not know what it wants, because it rarely knows what is good
for it, carry out all on its own such an enormous and such a difficult
enterprise as a system of legislation? By itself, a people always desires what
is good, but by itself it does not always see what that is. The general will is
always right, but the judgment which guides it is not always enlightened. It must
be to made to see objects as they are, sometimes as they ought to appear to it,
to show it the good road it seeks and to protect it from the seduction of
particular wills. It must be given a better sense of places and times, to weigh
the attractions of present perceptible advantages against the danger of distant
and hidden evils. Individuals see the good they reject; the public wills the
good it does not see. They are all equally in need of guides. The former must
be compelled to make their wills conform to their reason, and the latter must
be taught to recognize what it wills. Then, as a result of this public
enlightenment, in the social body there will be a union of the understanding
and the will, leading to a precise coordination of the parts, and finally to
the greatest strength of the whole. From all this arises the necessity of a
lawgiver.
On the Lawgiver
To discover the best
rules for society, those suited for nations, it would be necessary to have a
superior intelligence who perceived all the passions of men and experienced
none of them, one who had no connection to our nature and yet understood it
completely, whose happiness would have to be independent of us, and yet who
would have to be entirely willing to involve himself with ours. Finally, it
would have to be one who, in the progress of time, by managing
things carefully for its own distant glory, could work in one age and enjoy
itself in another.(R10). Gods would be
needed to give laws to men.
The same reasoning
that Caligula used in arguing about the facts, Plato used in his work The Statesman about right, in order to
define what he was looking for, the civil or royal man. But if it is true that
a great prince is a rare being, how rare will a great lawgiver be? The former
only has to follow the model that the latter has to propose for him. The
lawgiver is the engineer who invents the machine; the prince is merely the
worker who sets it up and makes it work. “When societies are born,” Montesquieu
states, “it is the leaders of republics who create
institutions, and after that it is institutions that make the republic’s
leaders.”(T13)
Anyone who ventures
to take on the task of instituting a people must feel that he is, so to speak,
in a position to change human nature; to transform each individual, who by
himself is a perfect and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from
which this individual in some way receives his life and his being; to alter the
man’s constitution in order to reinforce it; to substitute a partial and moral
existence for the physical and independent existence we have all received from
nature. In a word, he must remove from the man his own powers in order to
provide him ones which are foreign to him and which he is incapable of using
without the help of others. The more these natural forces die off and are
destroyed, the greater and more durable are the ones he acquires, and the more
solid and perfect the institution is as well. As a result, if each citizen is
nothing and cannot do anything except with all the others, and if the strength
acquired by the whole is equal or superior to the sum of the natural forces of
all the individuals, we can say that the legislation is at the highest point of
perfection it can attain.
The lawgiver is, in
every respect, an extraordinary man in the state. If that is what he must be
thanks to his genius, he is no less so thanks to the work he does, which is not
that of a magistrate or of the sovereign. This office, which constitutes the
republic, does not enter into its constitution. It is a particular and superior
function with nothing in common with empire over human beings. For if a person
who commands men should not command the laws, then the person who commands the
laws should not issue orders to men. Otherwise his laws, ministers of his
passions, would often serve merely to perpetuate his injustices, and he would
never be able to prevent particular opinions from damaging the sanctity of his
work.
When Lycurgus gave
laws to his homeland, he began by abdicating the kingship. It was the custom of
most Greek city-states to entrust the establishment of their laws to
foreigners. Modern republics in Italy have often imitated this
practice. The republic of Geneva did the same, and found it did well.(R11) In its finest period Rome witnessed within the state a
rebirth of all the crimes of tyranny and saw itself nearing destruction because
it had put legislative authority and sovereign power together in the same
hands.
However, the decemvirs never arrogated to themselves the right to have any law passed on
their authority alone. “Nothing of what we propose to you,” they used to say to
the people, “can pass into law without your consent. Romans,
be yourselves the authors of the laws which ought to create your happiness.”(T14)
Thus the person who
draws up the laws does not have or should not have any right to legislate, and
a people cannot deprive itself of this incommunicable right, even if it wishes
to, because according to the fundamental pact, it is only the general will that
imposes obligations on individuals and because we can never be certain that a
particular will conforms with the general will until we have submitted it to
the free votes of the people. I have already stated that, but it is worth
repeating.
And so in the task of
drafting legislation we find simultaneously two apparently incompatible things:
an enterprise which is beyond human powers and, to carry it out, an authority
which is no authority.
Another difficulty
warrants attention. Wise men who wish to use their own language rather than
popular speech to communicate with common men would be incapable of making
themselves understood. For there are thousands of kinds of ideas that cannot be
translated into the language of the people. Views that are too general and
objects that are too far away are equally beyond its grasp. Each individual,
having no taste for any form of government other than the one that relates to
his own particular interest, has difficulty recognizing the advantages he is to
derive from the continual privations imposed by good laws. In order for an
emerging people to be capable of appreciating the sound principles of politics
and to follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to
become the cause. The social spirit, which should be the work of the
institution, would have to preside over the institution itself, and, before
there were the laws, men would have to be what they are to become thanks to
those laws. Thus, the lawgiver, unable to use force or reason, must have recourse
to an authority of a different order, something that can constrain without
violence and persuade without convincing.
That is what in every
age has forced the fathers of nations to resort to heavenly intervention and to
credit the gods with their own wisdom, so that the people, subject to the laws
of the state as to the laws of nature, and acknowledging the same power in the
creation of man and of the city, freely obey and dutifully bear the yoke of
public happiness.
This sublime
reasoning, that ascends beyond the reach of common men, is the one through
which the lawgiver puts his decisions into the mouth of the immortals, so that those whom human prudence cannot shake will be drawn in
by divine authority.(R12) But not every man
can make the gods speak or be believed when he announces he is their
interpreter. The great soul of the lawgiver is the true miracle that must prove
his mission. Any man can engrave stone tablets, or purchase an oracle, or
pretend to have secret dealings with some divinity, or train a bird to speak in
his ear, or find other crude ways of impressing the people. The one who knows
nothing but such things will perhaps be able to collect by chance a troop of
fools, but he will never found an empire, and his extravagant achievement will
soon die with him. Empty ruses create a passing bond; wisdom alone can make it
lasting. Judaic law, which still endures, and the law of the child of Ishmael,
which has governed half the world for ten centuries, still proclaim today the
great men who dictated them, and while proud philosophy or the blind spirit of
sectarianism sees in these men nothing but fortunate imposters, the true
political thinker admires in what they established that great
and powerful genius which presides over enduring institutions.(T15)
From all of this we
should not conclude, with Warburton, that among us politics and religion have a
common object, but rather that in the early years of a nation
one serves as an instrument for the other.(T16)
On the People
As the architect,
before raising a large edifice, examines and tests the soil, in order to see if
it can bear the weight of the structure, so the wise institutor does not begin
by drawing up laws good in themselves; instead, he first examines whether the
population for whom they are intended is equipped to support them. That was the
reason Plato refused to give laws to the Arcadians and to the Cyrenians. He
knew that these two peoples were rich and could not tolerate equality. That is
also why one sees good laws and bad men in Crete, because Minos had imposed
discipline on nothing but a vice-riddled people.
A thousand nations
that were incapable of tolerating good laws have enjoyed an earthly brilliance,
and even those who could have endured them would have been able to do so for only a very short period of their existence. Peoples, like men,
are docile only when they are young.(T17) As they grow older,
they become incorrigible. Once customs have been established and prejudices
have taken root, it is a dangerous and futile business to wish to reform them.
The people cannot bear even having someone touch their faults in order to get
rid of them, like those stupid and cowardly invalids who tremble at the sight
of a doctor.
That does not mean
that in the life of a state there are not sometimes violent epochs when
revolutions, like some illnesses which overturn men’s minds and remove their
memory of the past, do to the people what certain critical events do to
individuals, when a horror of the past takes the place of forgetting, and when
the state, set ablaze by civil wars, is, so to speak, reborn from its own ashes
and, eluding death’s embrace, recaptures the vigour of youth. Sparta was like
that at the time of Lycurgus, as was Rome after the Tarquins
and, in our own times, Holland and Switzerland after the expulsion of the
tyrants.(T18)
But these events are
rare. They are exceptions whose cause is always found in the particular
constitution of the state concerned. They cannot take place even twice for the
same people. For a people can make itself free as long as it is barbarous, but
it can no longer do that once its civic mainsprings are exhausted. In such a
case, troubles can destroy the state, without revolutions being able to
re-establish it, and as soon as its chains are broken, it falls apart and no
longer exists. From then on it requires a master and not a liberator. Free
peoples, remember this precept: Liberty can be attained, but it can never be
recovered.
For nations, as for men, there is a time of maturity which one must await
before subjecting people to laws.(T19) But the maturity of
a people is not always easy to recognize, and if one anticipates it, the work
is ruined. One people can be disciplined while emerging; another is not
disciplined after ten centuries. The Russians will never be truly civilized
because they were civilized too soon. Peter [the Great] had a genius for imitation, but lacked true genius, the kind that creates and
makes everything out of nothing.(T20) Some of the things
he did were good, most were out of place. He saw that his people were
barbarous. He did not see that they were not ripe for civilization. He wanted
to civilize them when the only thing necessary was to toughen them. At first he
wanted to create Germans and Englishmen, when he had to begin by creating Russians.
By convincing his subjects they were something they were not, he prevented them
from ever becoming what they could have been. This is the way a French private
tutor trains his pupil to shine brilliantly for a moment in his infancy and
then never amount to anything. The Russian Empire will want to conquer Europe
and will itself be conquered. The Tartars, its subjects or its neighbors, will
become its masters and ours. This revolution seems to me inevitable. All the
kings of Europe are working together to hasten it.
[On the People] (continued)
As nature has set
limits to the stature of a well-developed man, beyond which she creates only
giants or dwarfs, so in the same way, where the best constitution of a state is
concerned, there are limits to the size it can have, so that it is neither too
large to be capable of being well governed, nor too small to be capable of
maintaining itself on its own. In every political body there is a maximum strength which it cannot exceed
and which it often reduces by increasing in size. The more the social bond
expands, the more it relaxes, and, in general, a small state is proportionally
stronger than a large one.
A thousand reasons
demonstrate this principle. First of all, when long distances are involved,
administration becomes more difficult, just as a weight become heavier at the
end of a longer lever. It also becomes more onerous as its levels increase,
for, to begin with, each town has its own, paid for by the people, each
district has its own, also paid for by the people, after that each province,
then the large governing bodies—the satrapies, the vice-regal districts—the
higher one goes, the more one always has to pay, always at the expense of the
unfortunate people. Finally comes the supreme administration, which crushes
everyone. So many surcharges constantly wear down the subjects. Far from being
better governed by all these different levels, they are ruled worse than if
they had over them only a single administration. In the meantime, there are
hardly any resources to deal with emergencies, and when they must turn to them,
the state is always on the eve of ruin.
That is not all. Not
only is the government less energetic and less prompt in enforcing observance
of the laws, preventing irritations, correcting abuses, and preventing
seditious enterprises that can develop in distant locations, but the populace
has less affection for its leaders, whom it never sees, for the homeland,
which, in its eyes, is like the world, and for its fellow citizens, most of
whom are strangers. The same laws cannot be appropriate for so many different
provinces with dissimilar customs, live under very different climates, and
cannot tolerate the same form of government. Different laws create nothing but
trouble and confusion among peoples living under the same leaders and in
constant communication. They intermingle and intermarry, are subjected to other
customs, and never know whether their patrimony is truly their own. Talents are
buried, virtues ignored, and vices unpunished in this multitude of people
unknown to one another whom the seat of the supreme administration gathers
together in one place. Overwhelmed with business, the leaders see nothing for
themselves, and clerks govern the state. Finally, those measures which must be
adopted to maintain the general authority, which so many distant officials wish
to evade or meddle with, absorb all the attention of the public, and there is
nothing left for the happiness of the people and scarcely any for its defense
in time of need. Thus, a body too large for its constitution collapses and
dies, crushed under its own weight.
On the other hand,
the state should give itself a certain foundation in order to have solidity, to
withstand the tremors it will inevitably experience and the efforts it will be
forced to make to maintain itself. For all peoples have a kind of centrifugal
force thanks to which they are constantly working against one another
and tending to expand at the expense of their neighbors, like the vortices of
Descartes.(T21) In this way, the weak run the risk of
being soon swallowed up, and it is almost impossible for any one of them to
preserve itself, except by establishing between it and all the others some form
of equilibrium, which makes the pressure on all sides just about equal.
From this we see that
there are reasons to expand and reasons to contract, and finding the proportion
between the two most advantageous for the preservation of the state is not the
least of the political figure’s talents. In general, we can say that the
arguments for expansion, which is merely external and relative, ought to be
subordinate to the arguments for contraction, which are internal and absolute.
A healthy and strong constitution is the first thing one must look for, and one
should rely more on the vigour born from a good government than on the
resources provided by a large territory.
One might add that we
have seen states established in such a way that the need to conquer made its
way even into their constitution and that, in order to maintain themselves,
they were forced continuously to expand. Perhaps they congratulated themselves
a great deal for this fortunate necessity, which nonetheless showed them, along
with the limits of their greatness, the inevitable moment of their fall.
[On the People] (continued)
One can measure a
body politic in two ways, namely, by the extent of its territory and by the
size of its population, and between these two measurements there is an
appropriate relationship for providing the state its true greatness. People
make the state, and the land nourishes the people. The proper relationship,
therefore, is one in which the land is sufficient to maintain its inhabitants
and there are as many inhabitants as the land can sustain. It is in this
proportion that the maximum strength
of a given number of people is found. For if there is too much land, guarding
it is onerous: it is inadequately cultivated, and it produces a surplus. This
is the proximate cause of defensive wars. If there is not enough land, the
state finds itself relying on its neighbours for its additional needs. And this
is the proximate cause of offensive wars. Any population that, given its
position, has no alternative other than commerce or war is inherently weak. It
depends upon its neighbors, and it depends upon events. It never has anything
other than an uncertain and short existence. Either it subjugates and changes
the situation, or it is subjugated and becomes nothing. It can preserve its
freedom only by being insignificant or great.
It is impossible to
provide by calculation a fixed relationship between the extent of territory and
the number of people that makes them mutually appropriate, both because of the
differences in the quality of land, the degree of its fertility, the nature of
what it produces, and the influence of climate—and because of the differences
one notices in the temperaments of the people who inhabit the land, some of
whom consume little in a fertile country, others a great deal on a poor soil.
One must also take into account the greater or lesser fecundity of women, the
things the country can have which are more or less favorable to the population,
and the number of people the lawgiver can hope to bring together there through
his institutions. As a result, he should not base his judgment on what he sees
but on what he foresees, nor should he focus on the actual state of the
population as much as on what it should naturally attain. Finally, there are a
thousand situations where the particular features of a place demand or allow
one to include more territory than seems necessary. Thus, one would extend it a
great deal in mountainous country, where nature’s productions—that is, woods
and pastures—demand less work, where experience shows that women are more
fertile than on the plains, and where a large tract of sloping soil provides
only a small area of flat land, the only one that can be counted on for
vegetation. By contrast, populations can contract by the edge of the sea, even
among rocks and almost barren sands, because for them fishing can compensate,
in large part, for the lack of land crops and because people need to be closer
together to ward off pirates. In addition, it is easier, thanks to colonies, to
relieve the land of its surplus inhabitants.
To these conditions
for establishing a people, we must add one that cannot make up for any of the
others but without which they are all useless, and that is that the people
enjoy abundance and peace. For the period when a state is being organized is
like the moment when a battalion is moving into formation—at that moment the
body is least capable of resisting and most easily destroyed. Resistance is
more effective in absolute disorder than during a moment of fermentation, when
each person is concerned about his own position and not about the danger. If
war, famine, or sedition occurs during this time of crisis, the state is
inevitably overthrown.
This does not mean that
many governments have not been established during these storms, but in such
cases it is the governments themselves that destroy the state. Usurpers always
bring with them or choose these troubled times and take advantage of the public
alarm to get destructive laws passed, which the people would never adopt were
their minds calm. The choice of timing for establishing laws is one of the most
reliable criteria by which one can distinguish the work of a lawgiver from that
of a tyrant.
Which people, then, is
well-suited for legislation? A population that finds itself already linked by
some unity of origin, interest, or convention and has not yet borne the genuine
yoke of laws; one that does not have deeply rooted customs or superstitions,
that has no fear of being overwhelmed by a sudden invasion, and that, without
entering into its neighbors’ quarrels, can resist each of them on its own or
obtain the assistance of one to fight off another; one in which each member can
be known to all, and where there is no need to load a man with a burden greater
than one man can bear; one that can get along without other
people and that all other people can get along without;(R13) one that is neither rich nor poor and could survive on its
own; and finally, one that unites the consistency of an ancient people with the
docility of a new one. What makes the work of legislation difficult is not so
much what has to be established as what has to be destroyed, and what makes
success so rare is the impossibility of finding natural simplicity linked to
the needs of society. All these conditions, it is true, are difficult to find
in combination; that is why we see few well-constituted states.
In Europe there
remains one country capable of having legislation enacted—the island of
Corsica. The courage and persistence with which this brave people has been able
to recover and defend its liberty would richly deserve some wise man to teach the people how to preserve it. I have a feeling that one day this
little island will astound Europe.(T22)
On the Various Systems of Legislation
If we look for what
precisely makes up the greatest good of all, which ought to be the goal of
every system of legislation, we will discover that it comes down to these two
principal objects: liberty and equality. Liberty, because all
particular dependency is that much force removed from the body of the state,
and equality, because liberty cannot survive without it.
I have already stated
what civil liberty is. As far as equality is concerned, by this word we should
understand, not that the degrees of power and wealth are to be absolutely the
same, but that, with respect to power, it does not rise to the level of any
violence and is never exercised except by virtue of rank and the laws, and
that, with respect to wealth, no citizen is rich enough to be able to purchase
another, and none is so poor that he is forced to sell himself. This assumes,
on the part of the great, moderation in goods and authority,
and, on the part of the lesser lower groups, moderation in avarice and
covetousness.(R14)
This equality, they
say, is a speculative chimera that cannot exist in practice. But if abuse is
inevitable, does it follow that we must not at least regulate it? It is
precisely because the force of circumstance always tends to destroy equality
that the power of legislation should always strive to maintain it.
But these general
purposes of every good institution should be modified in each country by the
relationships which arise, as much from the local situation as from the
character of the inhabitants, and it is on the basis of these relationships
that one must assign to each people the particular institutional system which
is the best, not perhaps in itself, but in the state for which it is destined.
For example, is the soil infertile and unproductive or the country too crowded
for its inhabitants? Turn to industry and crafts; you will be exchanging their
products for the foodstuffs you lack. By contrast, are you living in rich
plains and on fertile slopes? Or, on good land, do you lack inhabitants? Put
your effort into agriculture, which increases the population, and get rid of
the crafts, which would only result in emptying the countryside
of people, by grouping together in a few places in the territory the few
inhabitants there are.(R15) Do you live on
extensive and accessible coastlines? Cover the sea with ships and cultivate
trade and navigation. You will have a brilliant and brief existence. Does the
sea on your coasts wash nothing but almost inaccessible rocks? Remain barbarous
and feed yourselves on fish: you will live more peacefully, perhaps better, and
certainly more happily. Briefly put, other than the principles common to
everyone, each people has within itself some cause which organizes it in a
particular manner and makes its legislation appropriate only to it. That is why
the Hebrew people long ago and, more recently, the Arabs have had religion as
their main purpose, while the Athenians had letters and the arts, Carthage and
Tyre had trade, Rhodes had shipping, Sparta had war, and Rome had virtue. The
author of The Spirit of the Laws has
pointed out in his numerous examples the artistry the lawgiver
uses to direct what he establishes towards each of these aims.(T23)
What makes the
constitution of a state truly firm and lasting is to have the conventional
rules of behaviour observed in such a way that natural relationships and laws
always agree on the same points, and that the latter serve, so to speak, only
to strengthen, accompany, and rectify the former. But if the lawgiver is
mistaken in his purpose and selects a principle different from the one which
arises from the nature of things—if, for example, one tends towards servitude
and the other towards freedom, one towards riches, the other towards population
growth, one towards peace, the other towards conquest—the laws will
imperceptibly weaken, the constitution will deteriorate, and the state will not
stop being disturbed until it is destroyed or transformed, and invincible
nature has regained her empire.
The Division of the Laws
In order to organize
a whole or to give the best possible form to the commonwealth, one has to think
about various relations. First, the action of the entire body working on
itself, that is, the relationship of the whole to the whole, or of the
sovereign to the state, a relationship that, as we shall see later on, is made
up of relations of intermediate terms.
The laws that govern
this relationship bear the name political laws and are also called fundamental
laws, not without reason, if these laws are wise. For if in each state there is
only one good way of organizing it, the people who have found that way should
hang onto it. But if the established order is bad, why should we consider
fundamental those laws that prevent it from being good? Besides, whatever the
case, a people always has the authority to change its laws, even the best ones.
For if it feels like inflicting damage on itself, who has the right to prevent
it from doing so?
The second
relationship is that of the members among themselves or with the entire body,
and, with respect to the former, this relationship should be as small as
possible and, with respect to the latter, as large as possible, so that each
citizen is perfectly independent of all the others and excessively dependent on
the city, a condition which is always achieved by the same means, for it is
only the power of the state which creates the liberty of its members. It is
from this second relationship that civil laws arise.
We can also consider
a third kind of relationship between a person and the law, that is, between
disobedience and the penalty. This gives rise to the establishment of criminal
laws, which are basically less a particular type of law than the sanction for
all the others.
Linked to these three
kinds of laws is a fourth, the most important of all. It is not carved in
marble or brass but in the hearts of the citizens. It forms the true
constitution of the state, takes on new powers every day, reinvigorates or
supplants other laws when these grow old or die away, maintains in a people the
spirit with which it was established, and imperceptibly substitutes the force
of habit for that of authority. I am speaking about morality and customs, and
above all about opinion, a subject unknown to our political thinkers, but on
which the success of all the rest depends, a part with which the great lawgiver
concerns himself in secret, while he seems to be limiting himself to particular
regulations, which are only the curved section of the arch in which morality
and customs, arising more slowly, form in the end the unshakeable keystone.
Among these various
classes, the only one relevant to my subject is political laws, which determine
the form of the government.
End of Book 2
Book 3
Before discussing the
various forms of government, let us attempt to define precisely the meaning of
this word, which has not yet been explained very well.
On Government in General
I warn the reader
that this chapter needs to be read carefully and that I know nothing of the art
of being clear to someone who does not wish to be attentive.
Every free action has
two causes that combine to produce it: one is moral, that is, the will which
determines the act; the other is physical, that is, the power which executes
it. When I walk towards an object, the first requirement is that I wish to go
there, and the second is that my feet carry me to it. If a paralyzed person
wishes to run or if an active person does not wish to, they both will remain
where they are. The motive forces in the body politic are the same. In it we
make the same distinction between the power and the will. The latter is called
the legislative power and the former the executive power. Nothing is done—or
nothing ought to be done—without the collaboration of these two.
We have seen that the
legislative power belongs to and can only belong to the people. It is easy to
see, by contrast, that, according to principles previously established, the
executive power cannot belong to the people in general, as lawmaker or
sovereign, because this power consists only of particular acts, which are not
the domain of law and consequently of the sovereign, all of whose acts can only
be laws.
The public force
therefore requires its own agent to unite it and set it to work, according to
the directions of the general will. This agent serves as a means of
communication between the state and the sovereign and acts in the person of the
public in somewhat the same way as the union of the soul and body does in human
beings. There you have the reason for government in the state, something people
confuse with the sovereign, for which it is merely the minister.
What, then, is the
government? It is a body established as an intermediate between the subjects
and the sovereign, for the purpose of mutual communication between the two,
charged with executing the laws and maintaining liberty, both civil and
political.
The members of this
body are called magistrates or kings, in other words, governors,
and the entire body bears the name prince.(R16) Thus, those who allege that the act by which a populace
submits itself to leaders is not a contract are perfectly right. Such an act is
nothing of the kind, but merely a commission, an employed service in which the
magistrates, as simple officers of the sovereign, exercise in its name the
power which it has given them as its agents and which it can limit, modify, and
take back when it wishes, for the alienation of such a right is incompatible
with the nature of the social body and contrary to the goal of the association.
Hence, I call government, or supreme administration, the legitimate exercise of executive power,
and prince or magistrate, the man or the body charged with this administration.
Within the government
we find the intermediate forces whose relationships make up that of the whole
to the whole or of the sovereign to the state. We can represent the latter
relationship as one between the extremes of a continued proportion, whose mean
proportional is the government. The government receives from the sovereign the
orders it issues to the people. For a state to be in proper equilibrium, it is
necessary, all things considered, for there to be an equality between the
product or power of the government, taken in itself, and the product or the power of citizens, who are, on the one hand, sovereigns,
and, on the other hand, subjects.(T24)
Moreover, one cannot
alter any of these three terms without immediately breaking up the proportion.
If the sovereign wishes to govern, or if the magistrate wishes to enact laws,
or if the subjects refuse to obey, disorder replaces good order, force and will
no longer act in concert, and the state dissolves and thus falls into despotism
or anarchy. Finally, given that there is only one mean proportional between
each relation, there is only one good government possible in a state. But since
a thousand events can change the relationships of a people, different
governments can be good not only for different peoples, but also for the same
people at different times.
In attempting to
provide some idea of the different relationships that can hold between these
two extremes, I will take as an example the number of a
people, for that relationship is easier to explain.(T25)
Suppose that the
state consists of ten thousand citizens. The sovereign can be considered only
collectively, as a body. But each particular person, in his capacity as a
subject, is considered individually. Thus, the sovereign is to the subject as
ten thousand is to one; that is say, each member of the state has, as his share
of the sovereign authority, only one part in ten thousand, although he is
entirely subject to it. If the population consists of one hundred thousand
people, the condition of the subjects does not change, and each one bears
equally the full weight of the law, while his vote, reduced to one in one
hundred thousand, has ten times less influence in formulating laws. Thus, since
the subject always remains a single unit, the ratio of the sovereign to the
subject grows proportionally larger as the population of citizens increases.
From that it follows that the larger the state grows, the more liberty
diminishes.
When I say the ratio
grows larger, I mean that it moves away from equality. Thus, the greater the
ratio in the geometrical sense, the smaller the ratio in the common
understanding of the term. In the former, the ratio, considered according to
its quantity, is measured by the quotient, and in the latter,
considered according to identity, it is measured by similarity.(T26)
Now, the smaller the
relationship between the particular wills and the general will, that is,
between moral customs and the laws, the more the repressive force should
increase. Hence, the government, in order to be good, should be relatively
stronger in proportion to an increase in the population.
On the other hand,
since the growth of the state provides agents of public authority more
temptations and ways to abuse their power, the greater the force the government
ought to have to control the people, the greater the force the sovereign, in
its turn, ought to have to control the government. I am not talking here about
an absolute force, but of the relative powers of the various parts of the
state.
It follows from this
double relationship that the continued proportion between the sovereign, the
prince, and the people is not an arbitrary idea, but a necessary consequence of
the nature of the body politic. It also follows that since one of these
extremes, namely, the people as subjects, is fixed and represented by unity,
every time the double ratio increases or decreases, the simple ratio increases
or decreases in a similar manner, and that as a result the middle term is
changed. This goes to show that there is no single, unique, and absolute
constitution for a government, but that there can be as many
governments with different natures as there are states of different sizes.(T27)
If someone wished to
ridicule this system and said that in order to find this mean proportional and
form the body of the government, then, according to me, all one must do is take
the square root of the number of people, I would reply that here I am taking
this number only as an example, that the relationships I am talking about are
not measured solely by the number of people, but in general by the amount of
action, which is a combination of a great many causes, and in addition, that
if, in order to express myself more concisely, I momentarily borrow terms from
geometry, I am nonetheless not ignorant of the fact
that geometric precision has no place in moral quantities.
The government is, on
a small scale, what the body politic that includes it is on a large one. It is
a moral person, endowed with certain faculties, active like the sovereign,
passive like the state, and capable of being broken down into other similar
relationships, which give rise, as a result, to a new proportion, within which
is yet another, according to the arrangement of departments, until one reaches
an indivisible middle term, that is to say, a single leader or supreme
magistrate, who may be represented in the middle of this progression as the
unity between the series of fractions and the series of whole numbers.
Without burdening
ourselves with this multiplication of terms, let us be content to look upon the
government as a new body in the state, distinct from the people and the
sovereign, and intermediate between the two.
There is this
essential difference between these two bodies: the state exists by itself, and
the government exists only through the sovereign. Hence, the dominant will of
the prince is not or should not be anything other than the general will or the
law; his force is merely the public force concentrated in himself. As soon as
he wishes to derive from himself some absolute and independent act, the links
of the whole begin to loosen. If it should come to pass that the prince has a
particular will more active than the will of the sovereign, and that he uses
the public force in his hands to obey this particular will, so that one has, as
it were, two sovereigns, one by right and the other in fact, at that instant
the social union would vanish and the body politic would be dissolved.
Yet in order for the
body of the government to exist, to have a real life that distinguishes it from
the body of the state, and in order for all its members to be able to act in
concert and to meet the purpose for which it was established, it must possess a
particular self, a sensibility common
to its members, a force, a unique will which tends to its preservation. This
particular existence presupposes assemblies, councils, a power of deliberation
and decision-making, rights, titles, and privileges belonging exclusively to
the prince that make the position of the magistrate more honorable as it
becomes more onerous. The difficulties stem from the manner of organizing this
subordinate whole within the whole, in such a way that the government does not
impair the general constitution by reinforcing its own, that it always
distinguishes its particular power, intended for its own preservation, from the
power of the public, intended for the preservation of the state, and that,
simply put, it is always prepared to sacrifice the government to the people and
not the people to the government.
Moreover, although
the artificial body of the government is the work of another artificial body
and has, in a sense, only a borrowed and subordinate life, this does not hinder
it from being able to act with more or less vigour or speed, or from enjoying,
so to speak, more or less robust health. Finally, without straying directly
from the goal for which it was established, it can deviate from it to a greater
or lesser extent, depending on the manner in which it was constituted.
From all these
variables arise the different relationships that the government must have with
the body of the state, in accordance with the accidental and particular
relationships through which this state itself is modified. For often the
government that is inherently the best will become the most pernicious, if its
relationships are not adjusted, according to the defects of the body politic to
which it belongs.
On the Principle that Determines the various Forms of
Government
To set down the
general cause of these differences, we must distinguish here between the prince
and the government, just as I made a distinction earlier between the state and
the sovereign.
The body of
magistrates can comprise a larger or smaller number of members. We have said
that the ratio of the sovereign to the subjects increases proportionally with
an increase in population, and by a clear analogy, we can say the same thing
about the government in relation to the magistrates.
Now, since the total
power of the government is always the power of the state, it does not vary.
From this it follows that the more of this power it uses on its own members,
the less power it will have left to deal with the people as a whole.
Therefore, the more
numerous the magistrates, the weaker the government. Since this principle is
fundamental, let me strive to explain it more clearly.
In the person of the
magistrate, we can distinguish three essentially different wills: first, the
will belonging to the individual, which tends only to his own particular
advantage; second, the communal will of the magistrates, which has a unique
relationship to what is advantageous to the prince, something we can call a
corporate will, which is general in relation to the government and particular
in relation to the state, of which the government is a part; and third, the
will of the people or the sovereign will, which is general, both with respect
to the state considered as the whole and with respect to the government
considered as part of that whole.
In a perfect order of
legislation, the particular or individual will should be absent, the corporate
will belonging to the government should be very subordinate, and consequently,
the general or sovereign will should always dominate and serve as the only rule
for all the others.
According to natural
order, however, these different wills become more active as they become more
concentrated. Hence, the general will is always the weakest, the corporate will
is in second place, and the particular will is the most important of all, so
that in the government each member is first himself, then a magistrate, and
then a citizen, a ranking directly opposed to the one demanded by the social
order.
Once we assume this,
if the entire government is in the hands of a single man, then the particular
will and the corporate will are perfectly united, and thus the latter has the
highest level of intensity possible. Now, since the use of force depends upon
the degree of the will, and since the absolute power of the government does not
change, it follows that most active government is that of a single person.
In contrast, let us
combine the government and the legislative authority, by making the sovereign
the prince and all the citizens so many magistrates. In that case, once the
corporate will is merged with the general will, the former is not going to be
any more active than the latter and will leave the particular will with all its
force. Thus, the government, which always has the same absolute power, will be
at its minimum relative force or
activity.
These relationships
are incontestable, and still other considerations serve to confirm them. For
example, it is clear that each magistrate is more active in his corporate group
than each citizen is in his and that, as a result, the particular will has
considerably more influence in acts of government than in those of the
sovereign. For each magistrate is almost always charged with some function of
government; whereas each citizen, considered individually, carries out no
function of sovereignty. Moreover, the more the state expands, the greater its
real power grows, although it does not increase in proportion to its size. But
if the state remains the same, the magistrates could well increase in number,
and yet the government does not thereby acquire any more real force, because
its power is that of the state, whose size is always the same. Thus, the
relative power or activity of the government diminishes, while its absolute or
real power cannot increase.
It is also certain
that to the extent that more people are charged with it, the expediting of
business becomes slower, and that by overly emphasizing prudence, we pay
insufficient attention to fortune, let slip an opportunity, and by deliberation
often lose the fruits of deliberation.
I have just
established that the government grows proportionally more lax as the number of
magistrates increases, and I demonstrated above that the more numerous the
people, the more the force of restraint should increase. From that it follows
that the ratio of magistrates to government should be the inverse of that of
subjects to sovereign; in other words, that the larger the state grows, the
more the government should contract, in such a way that the number of leaders
decreases in proportion to the increase of the people.
I should add that
here I am talking only about the relative power of the government and not about
its rectitude. For, by contrast, the greater the number of magistrates, the
more the corporate will of the government approaches the general will; whereas,
under a single magistrate this same corporate will, as I have said, is merely a
particular will. Thus, we lose on one side what we can gain on the other, and
the art of the lawgiver is to know how to fix the point where the power and the
will of the government, which are always inversely related, are combined in the
relationship most advantageous to the state.
Division of Governments
We saw in the
previous chapter why we distinguish the various types or forms of government by
the number of members who compose them. We still have to see in this one how
these distinctions are made.
First of all, the
sovereign can commit the duties of the government to all the people or to the
greater part of them, so that there are more citizen magistrates than ordinary
individual citizens. This form of government we call a democracy.
Alternatively, the
sovereign can restrict the government to the hands of a small number, so that
there are more ordinary citizens than magistrates. We call this form of
government an aristocracy.
Finally, the
sovereign can concentrate the entire government in the hands of a single
magistrate exclusively, from whom all the others derive their power. This third
form, the most common, we call a monarchy
or royal government.
I should observe that
all these forms, or at least the first two, can be adjusted to a greater or
lesser extent and even offer considerable latitude. For democracy can include
all the people or be restricted to half. Aristocracy, in its turn, can be
restricted indeterminately from half the people down to the smallest number.
Even monarchy can be divided up. Sparta always had two kings, as its
constitution stipulated, and we know that in the Roman Empire there were up to
eight emperors at a time, and yet we could not claim that the empire was
divided. Thus, there is a point at which each form of government blurs into the
next, and one sees that under these three labels alone, government is, in fact,
capable of as many different forms as the state has citizens.
And there is more.
Since this same government can, in certain respects, be subdivided into other
parts, one administered in one way, another in a different way, the
combinations of these three forms can produce a multitude of mixed forms, each
of which can be multiplied by all the simple forms.
In every age people
have argued a great deal about the best form of government, without taking into
account the fact that each of them is the best in certain circumstances and the
worst in others.
If in different
states, the number of supreme magistrates ought to be inversely proportional to
the number of citizens, it follows that, in general, democratic government
suits small states, aristocratic government suits medium-sized states, and
monarchy suits large states. This rule is derived directly from the above
principle. But how does one count the multitude of circumstances that can
furnish exceptions?
On Democracy
The person who
creates the law understands better than anyone how it should be executed and
interpreted. Thus, it seems that we could not have a better constitution than
one in which the executive and legislative powers are combined. But that is
precisely what makes this government inadequate in certain respects, because
matters which should be differentiated are not, and, given that the prince and
the sovereign are the same person, they form, so to speak, only a government
without government.
It is not good for
the person who creates the laws to execute them, or for the body of the people
to turn its attention away from a general viewpoint in order to focus on
particular things. Nothing is more dangerous than the influence of private
interests on public affairs, and the abuse of laws by the government is a
lesser evil than the corruption of the legislator, an inevitable consequence of
particular views. When that happens, once the state has been changed in its
substance, all reform becomes impossible. A people that would never abuse
government would also never abuse independence, and a people that always
governed well, would have no need of being governed.
If we take the term
in its strict sense, a genuine democracy has never existed and never will. It
is against natural order that the majority govern and the minority be governed.
It is impossible to imagine that the people would remain constantly assembled
in order to attend to public business, and it is easy to see that it could not
establish commissions to carry out this work without changing the form of the
administration.
In fact, I believe I
can set down the following principle: when the functions of government are
shared among several departments, the ones with the fewest members sooner or
later acquire the greatest authority, if only because they will find it easy to
carry out their business, a fact which will naturally bring them to this
position.
Besides, how many
things difficult to combine does such a government presuppose? Firstly, a very
small state, where the people may be easily assembled and where each citizen
can readily recognize all the others; secondly, a great simplicity of customs,
which prevents a great increase in public business and thorny discussions;
thirdly, a large measure of equality in rank and fortune, without which
equality of rights and authority cannot last long; and finally, little or no
luxury, for luxury either is the effect of wealth or makes wealth necessary. It
corrupts rich and poor simultaneously, the former by possession and the latter
by covetousness; it sells the country to softness and vanity; it takes away
from the state all its citizens, to make them slaves to one another, and all of
them slaves to opinion.
That is why a famous
author established virtue as the principle in a republic, for none of these
conditions could survive without virtue. But because this remarkable genius
failed to make the necessary distinctions, he was often imprecise and sometimes
unclear and did not see that, since the sovereign authority is the same
everywhere, the same principle should be found in every well-constituted state,
to a greater or lesser extent, of course, depending on the form of the
government.
Let me add that there
is no government so prone to civil wars and internal agitation as a democratic
or popular one, because there is none with such a strong and continual tendency
to change its form or one which demands more vigilance and courage to maintain
the way it is. In this constitution, above all, the citizen must arm himself
with strength and steadfastness and say every day of his life, in the depths of
his heart, what a virtuous Palatine said in the Diet of
Poland: I would rather have a perilous
freedom than a peaceful servitude.(R17)
If there were a
population made up of gods, it would govern itself as a democracy. Such a
perfect government is not suitable for men.
On Aristocracy
We have here two very
distinct moral persons, namely, the government and the sovereign, and, as a
result two general wills, one relative to all the citizens and the other
relative solely to the members of the administration. Thus, although the
government can regulate its internal public order as it wishes, it can never
speak to the people except in the name of the sovereign, that is to say, in the
name of the people itself. That is something one must never forget.
The first societies
governed themselves as aristocracies. The heads of families would discuss
public business among themselves, and the young people had no difficulty
yielding to the authority of experience. From this arose the names of priests, elders, senate, and gerontes. The savages of North America
still govern themselves in this way today, and they are very well governed.
But as inequality of
institution prevailed over natural inequality, wealth or power
was preferred to age, and aristocracy became elective.(R18) Finally, once the power and property transferred from the
father to his children created patrician families, the government was made
hereditary, and twenty-year-old senators appeared.
There are thus three
varieties of aristocracy: natural, elective, and hereditary. The first is
suitable only for simple people, the third is the worst of all governments, and
the second is the best: it is aristocracy in the proper sense of the term.
Apart from the advantage
of distinguishing between the two powers, aristocracy also has the advantage
that its members are chosen. For in a popular government all the citizens are
born magistrates, but aristocracy restricts them to a small number, and they
become magistrates only by being elected, a method in which integrity,
enlightenment, experience, and all the other reasons for public preference
and esteem are so many additional guarantees that one will be governed wisely.(R19)
Moreover, its
assemblies are more conveniently arranged, business is better discussed and
carried out in a more orderly and diligent manner, and the state’s credit is
maintained better among foreigners by venerable senators than by an unknown or
despised multitude.
In a word, the best
and most natural order is to have the wisest governing the multitude, when one
is certain that they govern it for its profit and not for their own. It is not
necessary to multiply jurisdictions for no purpose, or to use twenty thousand
men to do what one hundred chosen men can do even better. But one must note
that the interest of the corporate body begins here to direct public power
under less control from the general will, and that another inevitable tendency
removes from the laws a part of the executive power.
As far as particular
relations that make this arrangement suitable, the state need not be so small
or the people so simple and upright, that the execution of the laws immediately
follows the public will, as in a good democracy. Nor does the nation need be so
large that its leaders, scattered about in order to govern it, can make
sovereign decisions, each in his own department, and start to make themselves
independent so that they can, in the end, become the masters.
But if aristocracy
requires somewhat fewer virtues than does a government by the people, it also
demands others unique to it, such as moderation among the rich and content
among the poor, for it seems that a rigorous equality would be out of place
there. Such a thing was not observed even in Sparta.
Furthermore, if this
form of government includes a certain inequality in wealth, it is good to
ensure that in general, the administration of public business is confined to
those who are best able to devote all their time to it, but not, as Aristotle maintains,
so that the wealthy will always be the ones selected. On the contrary, it is
important that from time to time an opposite choice teaches the people that in
men’s merits there are more important reasons for preference than riches.
On Monarchy
So far we have looked
at the prince as a moral and collective person, unified by the force of laws,
and the agent of executive power in the state. Now we must consider this power
consolidated in the hands of a natural person, an actual man, the only one with
the right to use it according to the laws. Such a person we call a monarch or a
king.
In complete contrast
to the other administrations, where a collective entity represents an
individual, in a monarchy an individual represents a collective entity, so that
the moral unity that constitutes the prince is at the same time a physical
unity, in which all the faculties that the law has so much difficulty combining
in the other governments are naturally united.
Thus, the will of the
people, the will of the prince, the public power of the state, and the
particular power of the government—all of these answer to the same motive
force, all the springs of the machine are in the same hand, everything moves
towards the same goal, there are no opposing movements working against each
other, and one cannot imagine any form of constitution in which a smaller
effort produces a more significant action. Archimedes seated calmly on the
shore and effortlessly pulling a large floating vessel represents for me a
skillful monarch governing his vast estates from his study and making
everything move while he appears stationary.
But while there is no
government more vigorous, there is none in which the particular will has more
control and more easily dominates the others. Everything moves to the same
goal, that is true; but this goal is not that of public happiness, and the
power of the administration itself constantly works against the interests of
the state.
Kings want to be
absolute, and from far away the cry goes out to them that the best way to be
that is to make themselves loved by their people. This principle is all very
well and, in certain respects, even very true. Unfortunately, those at court
will always ridicule it. The power that comes from the love of the people is
undoubtedly the greatest, but it is precarious and conditional, and princes
will never be satisfied with it. The best kings wish to be wicked if they
please, without ceasing to be masters. Those who deliver political sermons may
well tell them that, since the power of the people is their own, their greatest
interest is that the people are flourishing, numerous, and formidable; but
kings know very well that this is not true. Their personal interest is, first
and foremost, that the people be weak, unhappy, and incapable of ever resisting
them. I admit that if the subjects were always perfectly submissive, the
prince’s interest would thus be for the people to be powerful, so that, because
this power is his own, it would make him formidable to his neighbors. But since
this interest is merely secondary and subordinate, and since these two
suppositions are incompatible, it is natural that princes always prefer the
principle that is most immediately useful to them. This is what Samuel set
forth strongly to the Hebrews and what Machiavelli has clearly shown. By
pretending to provide lessons for kings, he gave important
lessons to the people. Machiavelli’s Prince
is the book of republicans.(T28)
By considering
general relationships, we found that monarchy is suitable only for large
states, and we find the same thing again if we examine it in itself. The more
numerous the public administration, the more the ratio of the prince to the
subjects diminishes and approaches equality, so that in a democracy it is
one-to-one or actual equality. This same ratio increases proportionally as the
government decreases in size, and it is at its maximum when the government is in the hands of a single person. In
that case, there is too great a distance between the prince and the people, and
the state lacks cohesion. To form that, one must have intermediate orders:
there must be princes, great men, and a nobility to fill them. Yet none of that
is suitable for a small state, which is ruined by all these ranks.
But if it is
difficult for a large state to be well governed, it is considerably more
difficult for it to be well governed by a single man, and everyone knows what
happens when the king assigns deputies.
An essential and
inevitable defect, which will always place monarchical government below
republican government, is that in the latter the public voice almost never
elevates to the most important positions anyone except capable and enlightened
men who fill them with honor; whereas in monarchies, those who attain these
offices are most commonly merely petty incompetents, petty rascals, petty
schemers, whose petty talents get them their important position at court but,
as soon as they get there, serve only to display their ineptitude to the
public. The people makes far fewer mistakes in this choice than the prince, and
a man of genuine merit is almost as rare in the royal ministry as a fool is at
the head of a republican government. Hence, when by some happy chance one of
those men born to govern takes the helm of public business in a monarchy almost
ruined by these crowds of splendid officials, people are totally surprised by
the resources he discovers, and he ushers in an epoch in his country’s history.
For a monarchical
state to be capable of being well-governed, its size or extent would have to be
commensurate with the abilities of the one who governs. It is easier to conquer
than to rule. With a long enough lever, someone could shake the world with a
single finger, but to support it he would need the shoulders of Hercules. No
matter how small a state may be, the prince is almost always too small for it.
When, by contrast, the state happens to be too small for its leader—which is
very rare—it is still badly governed, because the leader, always pursuing his
grand visions, forgets the interests of the people and makes them no less
miserable by the abuse of his talents, which he has in excess, than a leader
limited by the lack of talents he does not possess. A kingdom would have to
expand or contract, so to speak, in each reign, according to the capability of
the prince; whereas with a senate, given that the amount of talent is more
stable, the state can have permanent limits without the administration running
any less well.
The most striking
inconvenience of a single-individual government is the lack of the continuous
succession that creates in the other two forms of government an uninterrupted
bond. Once a king dies, one needs another. Elections leave dangerous intervals
and are stormy. Unless the citizens display an impartiality and an integrity
rarely accompanying this form of government, cabals and corruption come into
play. It is difficult for the person to whom the state has sold itself not to
sell it in turn, and compensate himself at the expense of the weak for the
money that the powerful have extorted from him. Sooner or later, under an
administration like this everything becomes venal, and the peace people enjoy
under kings is worse than the disorders of an interregnum.
What has been done to
avoid these evils? They have made crowns hereditary in certain families, and
have established an order of succession that prevents any dispute on the death
of kings. In other words, by substituting the disadvantage of regencies for
that of elections, they have chosen an apparent tranquility over a wise
administration and, rather than having to argue over the choice of good kings,
they have preferred to risk having as leaders children, monsters, and
imbeciles. They did not think about how, by thus exposing themselves to the
risks of this alternative, they are going against almost all the odds.
Dionysius the Younger spoke very sensibly when his father reproached him for a
shameful act with the words, “Did I set you an example of this
kind?” “Ah,” replied the son, “your father was not a king!”(T29)
Everything combines
to remove justice and reason from a man who has been brought up to command
others. A great deal of trouble is taken, so people say, to teach young princes
the art of ruling. It does not seem that this education does them much good. It
would be better to begin by teaching them the art of obeying. The greatest
kings whom history has celebrated were not raised to reign. Reigning is a
science that we never grasp less well than after we have been taught too much
of it, and that is more readily acquired by obeying than by giving orders. For the most useful and the shortest method
of determining what is good and what is bad is to think about
what you would have wanted to happen or not to happen if someone else were
leader.(R20)
One consequence of
this lack of consistency is the unpredictability of royal government which, by
organizing itself sometimes on one plan and sometimes on another, depending on
the character of the reigning prince or of those people who reign on his behalf,
cannot have a fixed goal or consistent conduct for any length of time, a
variability that makes the state drift from principle to principle, and from
project to project— and that does not happen in governments where the prince is
always the same. Thus, we see that, in general, if there is more scheming in a
court, there is more wisdom in a senate, and that republics move towards their
ends with a way of looking at things which is more consistent and better
followed; whereas, every revolution in a royal ministry creates a revolution in
the state, since the principle common to all ministers and to almost all kings
is to select on every issue the course directly opposite to that of their
predecessor.
From this same
inconsistency we also derive the answer to a sophistical argument very familiar
to political writers defending royal government: they not only compare civil
government to domestic government and the prince to the father of the family—an
error already refuted—but also are generous in providing this magistrate with
all the virtues he may need. They always assume that the prince is what he
ought to be: with the help of which royal government is obviously preferable to
all others, because it is decidedly the strongest and, in order to be the best
as well, requires only a corporate will more closely aligned to the general
will.
However, if, as Plato
observes, a king by nature is such a rare person, how often
will nature and fortune work together to give him the crown?(R21) And if the education of a king necessarily corrupts those
who receive it, what should one expect from a series of men brought up to
reign? Thus, to mistake monarchical government for the government of a good
king stems clearly from a desire to deceive oneself. To see what this
government essentially is, we must consider what it is under obtuse or wicked
princes, for either they come to the throne with these qualities, or the throne
makes them so.
These difficulties
have not escaped our writers, but they do not find them embarrassing. The cure,
they say, is to obey without a murmur. God, in his anger, sends bad kings, and
we must bear them as punishments from heaven. Such discussions are, no doubt,
edifying, but I would think they are more appropriate in a pulpit than in a
book about politics. What does one say about a doctor who promises miracles and
whose entire art is to urge the invalid to be patient? We are well aware that
when we have a bad government we must endure it. The question should be how to
find a good one.
On Mixed Governments
Strictly speaking,
there is no simple government. A single leader must have subordinate
magistrates; a popular government must have a leader. Thus, in the division of
executive power, there is always a gradation from a large number to a smaller
number, with this difference: sometimes the large number depends on the small
number, and sometimes the small number depends on the large one.
Sometimes the
division is equal, either when the constituent parts are mutually dependent, as
with the government in England, or when the authority of each part is
independent but imperfect, as in Poland. This latter form is bad, because there
is no unity in the government and the state lacks cohesion.
Which government is
better: a simple one or a mixed one? This question has been extensively debated
by political writers, and I must give to it the same reply I made earlier about
every form of government.
A simple government
is inherently the best for one reason alone: it is simple. But when the
executive power is not sufficiently dependent upon the legislative power—that
is to say, when the prince has a stronger relationship to the sovereign than
the people has to the prince—one must remedy this lack of proportion by
dividing the government, for then all its parts have just as much authority
over the subjects and their division makes them collectively less strong with
respect to the sovereign.
One also prevents the
same disadvantage by establishing intermediate magistrates, who leave the
government entirely as it is and serve only to balance the two powers and to
maintain their respective rights. In that case, the government is not mixed, it
is tempered.
By similar measures
one can remedy the opposite disadvantage and, when the government is too lax,
set up tribunals to concentrate it. This is done in all democracies. In the
first case, one divides the government to weaken it and in the second case to
strengthen it. For the maximum of force and of weakness are found equally in
simple governments; whereas, the mixed forms provide a moderate strength.
That All Forms of Government are not Appropriate for
Every Country
Since liberty is not
a fruit of all climates, it is not within reach of all peoples. The more one
meditates on this principle established by Montesquieu, the more one perceives
its truth. The more one challenges it, the more one provides opportunities to
confirm it with new proofs.
In all governments of
the world, the public person consumes without producing anything. Where, then,
do the materials it consumes come from? From the work of its members. The
surplus of particular individuals produces what the public needs. Thus, it
follows that the civil state can survive only as long as men’s work produces
more than they need.
Now, this surplus is
not the same in all the countries of the world. In several it is considerable,
in others modest, in others non-existent, in others negative. The relationship
between production and surplus depends upon the fertility of the climate, the
kind of work which the land demands, the nature of its products, the strength
of its inhabitants, the greater or lesser amount they need to consume, and a
number of other similar factors which make up that relationship.
On the other hand,
not all governments have the same nature: they are more or less voracious, and
the differences among them are based upon another principle, as follows: the
further the public contributions are distant from their source, the more
onerous they are. This burden must be measured, not by the amount of the
impositions but by the road they must take to get back into the hands from
which they came. When this circulation is quick and well-established, whether
one pays a little or a great deal does not matter. The people is always rich,
and the finances are always sound. By contrast, no matter how little the people
gives, when that little does not come back to it, the constant giving soon
exhausts the people, the state is never rich, and the population is always
impoverished.
From this it follows
that the more the distance between the people and government increases, the
more burdensome their payments become. Thus, in a democracy the people bear the
smallest load; in an aristocracy the load is greater, and in a monarchy it is
the heaviest. Hence, a monarchy is suitable only in wealthy nations,
aristocracy only in moderately wealthy states of medium size, and democracy
only in small and poor states.
In fact, the more we
reflect on this matter, the more we find a difference between free and
monarchical states on this point: in the former everything is applied to what
is useful for the community; in the latter public and individual powers are
inversely related, with one increasing through the weakening of the other.
Finally, instead of governing the subjects in order to make them happy,
despotism makes them miserable in order to govern them.
Thus, in every
climate there are natural causes on the basis of which we can designate the
form of government to which the influence of that climate leads, and can even
state what sort of inhabitants it should have. Infertile and barren places,
where the product is not worth the labor, should remain uncultivated and
abandoned or peopled only by savages. Places where men’s work provides only
what is strictly necessary should be inhabited only by barbarous people. All
polities there would be impossible. Places where labour produces a modest
surplus are suitable for free people, and those where the abundant and fertile
soil provides many products for little work demand a monarchical government, so
that the prince’s luxury consumes the excess superfluities of the subjects. For
it is better that this excess be absorbed by the government than dissipated by
particular individuals. I realize that there are exceptions, but these
exceptions themselves confirm the rule, for sooner or later they bring about
revolutions that lead things back to the natural order.
Let us always
distinguish general laws from the particular causes that can modify their
effects. If all the south were covered with republics and all the north with
despotic states, it would be no less true that, thanks to the effects of
climate, despotism suits hot countries, barbarism suits cold countries, and
good polities suit intermediate regions. I recognize, too, that, if we accept
the principle, we can argue about its application. We could say that there are
cold countries that are very fertile and southern lands that are very
unproductive. But this difficulty is a problem only for those who do not examine
every aspect of the issue. As I have already said, one must take into account
labor, force, consumption, and so on.
Let us assume there
are two lands of equal size. One yields five units of produce and the other
ten. If the inhabitants of the first consume four and those of the second nine,
the surplus of the first will be one-fifth, and the surplus of the second
one-tenth. The ratio of these two surpluses will therefore be the inverse of
the ratio of their products. The land producing only five units will give twice
the surplus of the land producing ten.
But the issue here is
not that there is twice as much production, and I do not believe that anyone
ventures to propose that, as a general rule, the fertility of cold countries is
even equal to that of hot countries. All the same, let us assume this equality.
Let us, if you will, make England the equal of Sicily, and Poland the equal of
Egypt. Further south we have Africa and the Indies and further north nothing at
all. To achieve this equality in production, what difference must there be in
the work of cultivation? In Sicily, one only has to scrape the earth; in
England, how the laborer has to toil! Now, where more hands are needed to
produce the same yield, the surplus must necessarily be smaller.
Furthermore, consider
the fact that the same number of men consume far less in hot countries, for the
climate requires them to practice moderation in order to preserve their health.
Europeans who wish to live there as they do among us all perish from dysentery and
indigestion. “We are,” Chardin states, “carnivorous animals, wolves, in
comparison with those in Asia. Some people attribute the moderation of the
Persians to the fact that their country is less cultivated, but, as for me, I
believe the reverse—their country is less abundant in commodities because its
inhabitants require less. If their frugality,” he continues, “were an effect of
a shortage of food in that country, only the poor would eat little; but, in
general, it is true of everyone. And people would eat more or less in each
province, depending on the fertility of the country; whereas the same restraint
is found throughout the kingdom. They are very proud of their way of life,
claiming that one only has to look at their complexion to recognize how much it
surpasses that of the Christians. In fact, the Persians have an even
complexion, with handsome skin, fine and smooth. By contrast, the Armenians,
their subjects, who live like Europeans, have coarse, blotchy
complexions, and their bodies are fat and ungainly.”(T30)
The closer one gets
to the equator, the less people live on. They eat hardly any meat. Their basic
foods are rice, maize, couscous, millet, and cassava. In the Indies there are
millions of people whose nourishment costs less than a halfpenny per day. Even
in Europe we see appreciable differences in appetite between the people in the
north and those in the south. A Spaniard will live for eight days on what a
German eats for dinner. In countries where men have more voracious appetites,
luxury also inclines towards things to consume. In England, it manifests itself
in a table laden with meats; in Italy, you will be treated to sugar and
flowers.
Luxury in clothing
offers similar differences. In climates where changes in the season are sudden
and violent, people have better and simpler garments. In those where people
dress only for show, they look more for what is striking than for what is
practical, and there the clothes themselves are a luxury. Every day in Naples,
you will see men strolling on the Posillipo in gold-embroidered coats with
nothing covering their legs. The same holds true with buildings. When people
have nothing to fear from the weather, they focus completely on magnificence.
In Paris and London, they want to be housed in warmth and comfort. In Madrid,
they have superb salons, but no windows that close, and they sleep in rats’
nests.
Foods are much more
substantial and succulent in hot countries, a third difference that cannot fail
to have an influence on the second. Why do they eat so many vegetables in
Italy? Because they are good and nutritious, with an excellent taste. In
France, where vegetables are nourished with nothing but water, they are not at
all nutritious, and at table are almost irrelevant. Nonetheless, they take up
just as much land and cost at least as much effort to cultivate. It is an
established fact that the wheat in Barbary, in other respects inferior to those
in France, yields much more flour, and that wheat in France, in turn, yields
more than wheat from the north. From that we can infer that, generally
speaking, there is a similar gradation in the same direction from the equator
to the pole. Now, is it not an obvious disadvantage to have equal production
but a smaller amount of nourishment?
To all these
different considerations I can add one that follows from and fortifies them,
namely, that hot countries have less need of inhabitants than cold ones and
could nourish more of them. This produces a double surplus that always favours
despotism. The greater the area occupied by the same number of inhabitants, the
harder it becomes to rebel, because people cannot concentrate themselves either
quickly or secretly and it is always easy for the government to expose plots
and sever communications. But the more a numerous people gather together, the
less the government can usurp the role of the sovereign. The people’s leaders
deliberate in their rooms just as securely as the prince in his council, and
the crowd gathers as quickly in the public squares as the troops in their
quarters. Thus, the advantage for a tyrannical government in this situation is
that it can act over great distances. With the help of the
bases it establishes, its power, like that of a lever, increases with distance.(R22) The power of the people, by contrast, is effective only
when it is concentrated. By extending itself, it evaporates and is lost, like
the effect of gunpowder scattered on the earth, which catches fire only grain
by grain. Hence, the least populated peopled countries are those most suited
for tyranny. Ferocious beasts reign only in deserts.
On the Signs of a Good Government
When one thus asks
what is unequivocally the best government, one is posing an unanswerable and
indeterminate question, or, if you wish, a question with as many good answers
as there are possible combinations in the absolute and relative positions of
peoples.
But if one were to
ask what sign enables us to recognize that a given people is well or badly
governed, that would be a different matter, and the question of fact could be
answered.
Yet the question is
not resolved, because everyone wants to answer it in his own way. Subjects
praise public tranquility; citizens praise individual liberty. The former
prefer security of possessions, the latter security of the person; one
maintains that the best government is the most severe, the other that it is the
mildest; one wants crimes punished, the other wants them prevented; one finds
it good to be feared by one’s neighbors, the other prefers to be ignored by
them; one is happy when money circulates, the other demands that the people
have bread. Even if there were agreement on these and other similar points,
would we even know? Since moral qualities do not admit of precise measurement,
even if there were a consensus on the sign, how could there be about the
evaluation?
As for myself, I am
always amazed that people fail to recognize such a simple sign or have the bad
faith not to agree about it. What is the purpose of a political association? The
preservation and the prosperity of its members. And what is the most certain
sign that they are being preserved and are prospering? Their numbers and the
population. So do not go looking elsewhere for this much disputed sign.
Everything else being equal, the government under which the citizens are
populous and multiply the most—without external methods, without
naturalization, and without colonies—is infallibly the best. A government under
which the people diminishes and wastes away is the worst.
Calculators, it is now up to you. Count, measure, and compare.(R23)
On the Abuse of Government and its Tendency to
Degenerate
As the particular
will is continuously working against the general will, so the government is
constantly asserting itself against the sovereignty. The more this effort
increases, the more the constitution changes for the worse, and since there is
here no other corporate will resisting the will of the prince and establishing
an equilibrium with it, sooner or later, the time must come when the prince
finally oppresses the sovereign and breaks the social treaty. That is the
inherent and inevitable vice which, since the birth of the body politic, tends
relentlessly to destroy it, just as old age and death eventually destroy the
human body.
There are two general
ways in which a government degenerates, that is, when it contracts or when the
state is dissolved.
Government contracts
when it passes from a large number to a small one, that is to say, from democracy to aristocracy and from aristocracy to monarchy.
That is its natural tendency.(R24) If it were to go in
the other direction, from a small number to a large one, we could say it was
growing slack, but this reverse development is impossible.
In fact, the
government never changes its form except when its spring is exhausted and
leaves it too weak to be capable of retaining what it has. Now, if a government
were to grow slack while it is still expanding, its power would become
completely ineffectual and it would have even less chance of surviving. Hence,
as the government gives way, it is necessary to wind up and tighten its spring.
Otherwise, the state that it supports would collapse in ruins.
The situation where
the state dissolves can come about in two ways.
First, it can
dissolve when the prince no longer administers the state according to the laws
and usurps sovereign power. At that point a remarkable change occurs: there is
a contraction, not of the government, but of the state. What I mean is that the
large state is dissolved and within it another is formed, which is composed
solely of members of the government and which for the rest of the people is no
longer anything but its master and tyrant. As a result, the instant the
government usurps the sovereignty, the social pact is broken, and all the
common citizens return by right to their natural liberty and are forced, but
not obliged, to obey.
The same situation
also arises when the members of the government separately usurp the power that
they ought to exercise only as a body. That is no less an infraction of the
laws and produces an even greater disorder. In that case, one has, so to speak,
as many princes as magistrates, and the state, no less divided than the
government, dies or changes its form.
When the state is
dissolved, the abuse of government, whatever it may be, takes on the common
name of anarchy. By way of making
distinctions, democracy degenerates into ochlocracy,
and aristocracy into oligarchy. I
would add that monarchy degenerates into tyranny,
but this last word is ambiguous and demands an explanation.
In the ordinary
meaning of the term a tyrant is a king who governs with violence and without
regard for justice and the laws. In the precise sense, a tyrant is an
individual who arrogates to himself royal authority without having a right to
it. This is how the Greeks understood this word tyrant: they
gave it indifferently to good and bad princes whose authority was illegitimate.(R25) Thus, tyrant and usurper are two perfectly synonymous
words.
In order to give
different names to different things, I call someone who usurps royal authority
a tyrant and someone who usurps the
power of the sovereign a despot. A
tyrant is a man who interferes illegally in order to govern according to the
laws; a despot is a man who sets himself above the laws themselves. Thus, a
tyrant cannot be a despot, but a despot is always a tyrant.
On the Death of the Body Politic
Such is the natural
and inevitable tendency of the best constituted governments. If Sparta and Rome
perished, what state can hope to last forever? If we wish to form an enduring
institution, then let us not dream of making it eternal. In order to succeed we
do not have to attempt the impossible or flatter ourselves that we are giving
the work of men a stability which human things do not permit.
The body politic, as
well as the human body, begins to die from the moment of its birth and carries
in itself the causes of its destruction. But both of them can have a more or
less robust constitution, one appropriate to preserving them for a longer or
shorter time. The human constitution is a work of nature; the constitution of
the state is a work of art. Men are not in a position to prolong their lives,
but they are in a position to prolong the life of the state as long as
possible, by giving it the best possible constitution. The best-constituted one
will come to an end, but later than another, unless some unanticipated accident
leads to its downfall before its time.
The principle of
political life is in the sovereign authority. The legislative power is the
heart of the state, and the executive power is the brain, which gives movement
to all the parts. The brain can collapse into paralysis and the individual
still be live. A man remains an imbecile and lives. But as soon as the heart
ceases to function, the animal is dead.
A state does not
survive through its laws, but through its legislative power. The law of
yesterday is not binding today, but silence is assumed to indicate tacit
consent, and it is presumed that the sovereign constantly confirms laws it does
not repeal, when it has the power to do so. Everything it has at some point
declared as its will is always its will, unless it revokes it.
Why, then, do we pay
so much respect to ancient laws? For this very reason: we have to believe that
nothing except the excellence of these ancient acts of will could have
preserved them for so long and that if the sovereign had not constantly
recognized them as beneficial, it would have revoked them a thousand times.
That is why in every well-constituted state the laws, far from growing weak,
continuously acquire new strength: every day the prejudice towards antiquity
makes them more venerable; whereas, wherever the laws grow weak as they get
older, we have proof that there is no longer a legislative power and that the
state is no longer alive.
How The Sovereign Authority is Maintained
Since the sovereign
has no force other than the legislative power, it acts only through laws, and
since laws are only authentic acts of the general will, the sovereign cannot
act except when the people is assembled. Someone will say: an assembly of the
people! What a chimera! It is a chimera nowadays, but it was not two thousand
years ago. Have men changed their nature?
The boundaries of
what is possible in moral matters are less narrow than we think. What limits
them is our weaknesses, our vices, and our prejudices. Base souls do not
believe in great men. Vile slaves smile with a mocking air at the word liberty.
Let us consider what
can be done on the basis of what has been done. I will not speak about the
ancient republics of Greece, but the Roman Republic was, it seems to me, a
great state, and the city of Rome was a great city. The last census in Rome
showed that it had four hundred thousand citizens bearing arms, and the last
population count of the empire showed more than four million citizens, not
including subject peoples, foreigners, women, children, and slaves.
What difficulties
might we not imagine in assembling frequently the immense people of this
capital and its surroundings? Nonetheless, few weeks went by without the Roman
people gathering in an assembly, even on several occasions. It exercised not only
the rights of sovereignty, but some of the rights of the government. It dealt
with certain business matters and judged certain cases. This entire people was
in the public square as magistrates almost as often as they were as citizens.
If we returned to the
earliest years of nations, we would find that most of the ancient governments,
even the monarchies, like those of the Macedonians and the Franks, had similar
councils. Whatever the case, this one fact is incontestable and answers all
difficulties: arguing from the existing to the possible seems like good
reasoning to me.
[How The Sovereign Authority is Maintained]
(Continued)
It is not sufficient
for the people to have assembled once and set the constitution of the state by
giving its sanction to a body of law. Nor is it is sufficient that it have
established a government for all time or once and for all organized the
election of magistrates. Apart from extraordinary assemblies that unforeseen
circumstances can require, there must be fixed and periodic assemblies that
nothing can abolish or prorogue, so that on a designated day the people may be
legitimately called together by law, without the need for any other formal
convocation.
But apart from these
assemblies lawfully established by their date alone, every assembly of the
people which has not been convened by the magistrates appointed for this action
and in accordance with the prescribed procedures should be considered
illegitimate and all its actions there null and void, because even the order to
assemble should emanate from the law.
As for recalling
legitimate assemblies more or less frequently, this depends upon so many
considerations that one cannot provide specific rules about the matter. The
only thing one can state is that, in general, the more power the government
has, the more frequently the sovereign should show itself.
That may be all very
well, someone will say, for a single town; but what do we do when the state
consists of several? Shall we divide the sovereign authority, or else should we
concentrate it in a single town and make all the others subject to its
authority?
My answer is that we
must do neither one nor the other. First of all, the sovereign authority is
simple and singular. It cannot be divided without being destroyed. Second, one
town cannot legitimately be made subject to another town, any more than one
nation to another nation, because the essence of the body politic is in the
agreement between obedience and liberty, and because these words subject and sovereign are identical correlatives, whose idea is united in the
single word citizen.
Furthermore, I reply
that it is always an evil to combine several towns into a single city and that
if we wish to create such a union, we should not flatter ourselves that we can
avoid its natural disadvantages. In objecting to someone who wants only small
states, one should not point to the abuses of large ones. But how does one give
small states enough strength to resist large ones, the way the Greek cities in
the past stood firm against the Great King and, more recently,
Holland and Switzerland resisted the House of Austria?(T31)
Nonetheless, if the
state cannot be reduced to suitable limits, there is still one option; that is,
not to allow any capital, and to have the seat of government alternate from
town to town, assembling in each of them in turn the provincial estates of the
country.
Populate the
territory evenly, extend everywhere in it the same rights, bring prosperity and
life to every place there. In this way the state will become at once as strong
and well governed as possible. Remember that town walls are built only from the
rubble of houses in the countryside. With every palace I see going up in the
capital, I imagine I see an entire region reduced to tumbledown shacks.
[How The Sovereign Authority is Maintained]
(Continued)
The moment the people
is legitimately assembled in the sovereign body, all jurisdiction of the government
ceases, the executive power is suspended, and the person of the lowest citizen
is as sacred and inviolable as that of the first magistrate, for where we find
the person represented, there is no longer a representative. Most of the
commotions that arose at Rome in the comitia occurred because people were ignorant
of or negligent about this rule. At that time, the consuls were only presidents of the people, the tribunes no more than ordinary speakers, and
the senate nothing at all.(R26)
These intervals of suspended
government, when the prince recognizes or ought to recognize a real superior,
have always been alarming for the prince, and these assemblies of the people,
which are the shield of the body politic and the curb on the government, have,
in every age, been horrifying to leaders, who therefore never spare any
efforts, objections, difficulties, or promises to discourage the citizens from
having them. When the citizens are greedy, timid, and pusillanimous, more in
love with ease than with liberty, they do not hold out for long against the
redoubled efforts of the government. In this way, the government’s power of
resistance constantly increases, the sovereign authority vanishes in the end,
and most cities collapse and perish before their time.
But between the
sovereign authority and arbitrary government, an intermediate power is
sometimes introduced, about which we must speak.
On Deputies or Representatives
As soon as public
service ceases to be the principal business of the citizens and they prefer to
serve with their purse than with their persons, the state is already close to
ruin. Is it necessary to go into combat? They pay soldiers and remain at home.
Is it necessary to go to the council? They nominate deputies and remain at
home. Thanks to idleness and money, they end up having soldiers to enslave the
homeland and representatives to sell it.
Hassles about
business and the arts, the avid interest in profit, and the softness and love
of commodities change personal services into money. People give up a part of
their profit in order to increase it at their leisure. Give money, and soon you
will have chains. This word finance
is a slave’s word. It is unknown in a city. In a genuinely free state, the
citizens do everything with their own hands and nothing with money. Far from
paying to be excused from their duties, they would pay to fulfill them on their
own. I am a long way from conventional ideas: I believe compulsory labour is
less opposed to liberty than taxes.
The better the state
is constituted, the more public affairs predominate over private matters in the
minds of the citizens. There is even considerably less private business,
because the sum total of communal happiness provides a larger share of the
happiness of each individual, so that there remains less for him to seek out in
his particular concerns. In a well administered city, each person flies to the
assemblies; under a bad government no one wants to take a single step to get
there, because no one has any interest in what goes on in them, because people
foresee that the general will shall not prevail, and finally because domestic
concerns absorb all of their attention. Good laws lead to making better ones;
bad laws lead to worse ones. As soon as anyone says of state business, “What does
that matter to me?” one should look upon the state as lost.
The cooling of love
for the homeland, the activity of private interests, the immense size of
states, the conquests, and the abuses of government made people imagine the
idea of having deputies or representatives of the people in the national
assemblies. This group is what in certain countries people have presumed to
call the Third Estate. In this way, the particular interest of two orders is
ranked first and second, while the interest of the public is only third.
Sovereignty cannot be
represented, for the same reason that it cannot be alienated: it consists
essentially in the general will, and the will is not represented. It is what it
is, or it is something else; there is no middle ground. Hence deputies of the
people are not and cannot be its representatives. They are merely its stewards
and cannot conclude anything definitively. Every law that the people have not
personally ratified is null and void: it is not a law. The English people think
themselves free; they are seriously mistaken. They are free only during the
election of the members of parliament. As soon as these are elected, the people
are enslaved and are nothing. The use they make of the brief moments of their
liberty shows that they certainly deserve to lose it.
The concept of
representation is modern. It comes to us from feudal government, from that
iniquitous and absurd government in which the human species is degraded and the
name of man dishonored. In the ancient republics and even in monarchies, the
people never had representatives. The word itself was unknown. It is very
remarkable that in Rome, where the tribunes were so sacrosanct, no one even
imagined that they could usurp the functions of the people, and that in the midst
of such a large multitude, they never attempted to pass a single plebiscite on
their own authority. However, we can get some idea of how such a crowd of
people sometimes created difficulties by what happened at the
time of the Gracchi, when one group of citizens delivered its vote from the
rooftops.(T32)
Where right and
liberty are everything, inconveniences are nothing. Among this wise people,
everything was carried out in an appropriately just manner. Lictors were
allowed to do what the tribunes would not have dared to do,
for the people did not fear its lictors would want to represent it.(T33)
However, in order to
explain how the tribunes did represent the people sometimes, it is enough to
conceive how the government represents the sovereign. Since the law is only a
declaration of the general will, it is clear that in the legislative power the
people cannot be represented; but it can and must be represented in the
executive power, which is merely force applied to the law. This makes it clear
that, if we examined matters thoroughly, we would find that very few nations
have laws. Whatever the case, it is clear that the tribunes, having no share of
executive power, could never represent the Roman people through the rights of
their office, but only by usurping those of the senate.
Among the Greeks,
everything the people had to do, it did by itself. It was constantly assembled
in the public square. The people lived in a mild climate; it was not greedy;
slaves carried out the work; its important business was its liberty. No longer
having the same advantages, how do you preserve the same
rights? Your harsher climates give you more needs.(R27) For six months of
the year you cannot use the public square, your murmuring voices cannot make
themselves understood in the open air, you focus more on your profits than on
your liberty, and you fear slavery far less than you do poverty.
What? Is liberty
maintained only with the help of slavery? Perhaps these two extremes do meet.
Everything that is not in nature has its disadvantages, civil society more than
all the rest. There are certain unhappy circumstances where we cannot preserve
our liberty except at the expense of another’s, and where the citizen cannot be
perfectly free except when the slave is thoroughly enslaved. That was the
situation in Sparta. As for you, modern people, you do not have slaves, but you
are slaves. You pay for their liberty with your own. You boast of this
preference in vain; in it I find more cowardice than humanity.
In saying all this, I
do not mean that we need to have slaves or that the right of slavery is
legitimate, since I have proved the opposite. I am only stating the reasons why
modern people, who think themselves free, have representatives, and why ancient
peoples did not have them. Whatever the case, the moment a people gives itself
representatives, it is no longer free. It no longer exists.
All things well
considered, I do not see how, from this point on, it is possible for the
sovereign to preserve among us the exercise of its rights, unless the city is
very small. But if it is very small, will it not be conquered? No. Later on I
will demonstrate how one can combine the external power of a
great people with the easily managed civil forms and good order of a small
state.(R28)
That the Institution of Government is not a Contract
Once the legislative
power has been properly established, it is a matter of setting up the executive
power in a similar fashion; for since the latter, which operates only by
particular actions, is not essentially part of the former, it is naturally
separate from it. If it were possible for the sovereign, in its capacity as
sovereign, to possess executive power, right and fact would be so confused that
one would no longer know what was law and what was not, and the body politic,
denatured in this way, would soon fall prey to the violence it was instituted
to prevent.
Since the citizens
are all equal through the social contract, all of them can prescribe what
everyone should do, but no one has a right to demand that another person do
what he does not do himself. Now, strictly speaking, it is this right,
indispensable for providing life and movement to the body politic, that the
sovereign gives to the prince by establishing the government.
Several people have
maintained that this act of establishment was a contract between the people and
the leaders it gives itself, an agreement through which the two parties
stipulate the conditions under which one is obliged to command and the other to
obey. It will be agreed, I am sure, that this is a strange way to enter into a
contact! But let us explore whether this opinion can be sustained.
First, the supreme
authority can no more modify itself than it can alienate itself. To limit it is
to destroy it. It is absurd and contradictory for the sovereign to give itself
a superior; to oblige itself to obey a master is to return to complete liberty.
Moreover, it is clear
that this contract between the people and these or those persons would be a
particular act, and thus it follows that this contract could neither be a law
nor an act of sovereignty and that, as a result, it would be illegitimate.
One sees as well that
the contracting parties would be, with respect to each other, under only one
law—the law of nature—without any guarantee of their reciprocal commitments, a
situation entirely repugnant to a civil state. Since the person who has the
power in his grip is always the master of how it is applied, it would be just
like giving the name “contract” to the act of a man who said to someone else,
“I am giving you all my possessions, on the condition that you give me back as
many of them you please.”
There is only one
contract in the state, and that is the contract of association, which, in
itself, excludes all others. It is impossible to imagine any other public
contract that was not a violation of the first.
On the Institution of Government
How then must we
conceptually grasp the act by which government is instituted? I will first
observe that this act is complex or composed of two others, namely, the
establishment of the law and the execution of the law.
In the first of these
acts, the sovereign decrees that there will be a governmental body established
in this or that form. It is clear that this act is a law.
In the second, the
people nominate the leaders who will be responsible for the government
established. Now, since this nomination is a particular act, it is not a second
law, but merely a consequence of the first and a function of government.
The difficulty is to
understand how one can have an act of government before the government exists,
and how the people, who are only sovereign or subject, can become prince or
magistrate in certain circumstances.
Here again we
discover one of those astonishing properties of the body politic by which it
reconciles apparently contradictory operations. For this reconciliation is
brought about by a sudden transformation of the sovereignty into a democracy,
so that, without any perceptible change and merely by a new relation of all to
all, the citizens become magistrates and pass from general acts to particular
ones, from laws to executing them.
This change in
relation is not a speculative subtlety without practical examples. It happens
every day in the English parliament, where the Lower House at certain times
turns itself into a large committee, in order to have a better discussion of
its business, and thus becomes a simple commission of the sovereign court it
was just a moment before. The result is that it later reports to itself, as the
House of Commons, on what it has just settled in the large
committee and deliberates again under one name what it has already resolved
under another.(T34)
Democratic government
has this unique advantage that it can, in fact, be established by a simple act
of the general will. After this, the provisional government remains in power,
if that is the adopted form, or establishes in the name of the sovereign the
government prescribed by the law, and thus everything proceeds in an authorized
way. It is not possible to institute government legitimately in any other
manner, without renouncing the principles established above.
Ways to Prevent the Usurpations of the Government
As a result of these
clarifications, it follows that we have confirmed Chapter 16: the act which
institutes the government is not a contract but a law, and those entrusted with
executive power are not masters of the people but its officers. The people can
appoint them and discharge them when it wishes. For these officials, it is not
a question of entering into a contract but of obeying; in taking on the
functions that the state imposes on them, they are merely fulfilling their duty
as citizens, without having any kind of right to dispute the conditions.
Thus, when it happens
that the people institutes a hereditary government, whether a monarchy within a
family or an aristocracy within a class of citizens, it is not undertaking a
firm commitment, but is giving the administration a provisional form until such
time as the people desires to set up an alternative arrangement.
It is true that these
changes are always dangerous and that one should never touch an established
government except when it becomes incompatible with the public good. But such
circumspection is a political maxim and not a rule of right, and the state is
no more obliged to leave civil authority to its leaders than it is to leave
military authority to its generals.
It is also true that
in such a case one cannot be too careful about observing all the formalities
necessary for distinguishing between a regular, legitimate act and a seditious
tumult, and between the will of an entire people and the clamours of a faction.
Here, above all, one must not concede anything to potentially dangerous cases other than what
one cannot refuse, following the full strictness of the law.
(T35) From this obligation the prince also derives a great
advantage for preserving his power in spite of the people, without anyone being
able to claim that he has usurped it. For while the prince appears to be using
only his rights, it is very easy for him to extend them and, under the pretext
of public tranquility, to prevent public assemblies whose purpose is to
re-establish good order. As a result, he takes advantage of a silence which he
does not allow people to break, or of irregularities which he himself has had
committed, in order to assume that he has the support of those who have been
silenced by fear and to punish those who dare speak out. This is how the Decemvirs, who were at first elected for
one year and then continued for another year, tried to retain
their power in perpetuity, by not permitting the comitia to assemble.(T36) And it is by this
simple means that all governments in the world, once vested with public power,
sooner or later usurp sovereign authority.
The periodic
assemblies I discussed above are appropriate to prevent or postpone such a
disaster, above all when there is no need for them to be formally summoned. For
then the prince cannot prevent them without openly announcing that he is a
lawbreaker and an enemy of the state.
These assemblies,
whose sole purpose is to maintain the social treaty, must always open with two
propositions which can never be suppressed and which are voted on separately:
First: Is it the pleasure of the sovereign to maintain the present form of
government?
Second: Is it the pleasure of the people to leave the administration to those
who are presently in charge of it?
Here I am assuming
what I believe I have shown, namely, that in the state there is no fundamental
law that cannot be revoked, not even the social pact. For if all the citizens
assembled in order to break this pact by common agreement, there is no possible
doubt that the breach would be thoroughly legitimate. Grotius even thinks that
each person can renounce the state in which he is a member and
regain his natural liberty and his possessions by leaving the country.(R29) Now, it would be absurd if all the citizens combined could
not do what each one of them can do on his own.
End of Book 3
Book 4
That the General Will is Indestructible
As long as several
men have assembled and consider themselves a single body, they have only a
single will, which is concerned with communal preservation and general
wellbeing. Then all the springs of the state are vigorous and simple, its
principles clear and luminous, there are no confused and contradictory
interests, and the common good manifests itself clearly everywhere, requiring
only good sense to be perceived. Peace, unity, and equality are the enemies of
political subtleties. Men who are upright and straightforward are difficult to
deceive because of their simplicity. They are not taken in by ruses and
sophisticated pretexts. They are not even shrewd enough to be fooled. When we
see among the happiest people of the world groups of peasants governing the
affairs of the state under an oak tree and always behaving wisely, is it
possible to prevent ourselves despising the refinements of other nations, which
make themselves famous and miserable with so much art and mystery?
A state governed in
this manner requires very few laws, and as it becomes necessary to promulgate
new ones, this need is universally seen. The first man to propose them merely
expresses what they all have already felt, and it is not a question of trickery
or eloquence to get passed into law what each person has already resolved to do,
as soon as he is sure that the others will act as he does.
What leads reasoners
astray is that they examine only states that have been poorly constituted since
their origin and are struck by the impossibility of maintaining there a
political order similar to the one just mentioned. They amuse themselves in
imagining all the silly things a clever knave, someone with an insinuating way
of speaking, could convince the people of Paris or London to believe. They do
not realize that Cromwell would have been sent to the bells by the people of Berne and the Duke of Beaufort would have been
disciplined by those in Geneva.(T37)
But when the social
tie begins to relax and the state to weaken, when particular interests begin to
make themselves felt and small societies begin to exert an influence on the
large one, the common interest changes and finds opponents, unanimity no longer
rules in the voting, the general will is no longer the will of all,
contradictions and debates arise, and the best opinions are not adopted without
disputes.
Finally, when the
state, close to ruin, no longer survives except in an illusory and empty form,
when the social bond is broken in every heart and the vilest interest
insolently adorns itself with the sacred name of the public good, at that point
the general will becomes mute, all people, guided by secret motives, no more
state their views as citizens than if the state had never existed, and
iniquitous decrees—whose purpose is merely to advance a particular interest—get
passed under the false name of laws.
Does it follow from
this that the general will has been annihilated or corrupted? No. It is always
constant, unalterable, and pure. But it has been subordinated to other wills
that prevail over it. Each man, in detaching his interest from the common
interest, sees well enough that he cannot completely separate from it, but his
part of the public evil appears negligible to him alongside the exclusive
benefit he means to appropriate for himself. Apart from this particular
benefit, he desires the general good in his own interest as strongly as anyone
else. Even in selling his vote for money, he does not extinguish the general
will within him. He avoids it. The fault he commits is changing the nature of
the question and responding to something other than what is asked. As a result,
instead of declaring with his vote, “It is advantageous to the state,” he says,
“It is advantageous to this man or to this party that such and such an opinion
passes.” Thus, the law of public order in the assemblies is not so much to
maintain the general will as it is to see to it that it is always questioned
and always responds.
Here I could offer a
number of reflections on the simple right of voting in every act of
sovereignty, a right that nothing can remove from the citizens, as well as on
the right to state one’s opinion, to make proposals, to divide, and to discuss
things that the government always takes great care not to allow, except to its
members. But this important matter would require a separate treatise, and I
cannot say everything in this one.
On Voting
We see from the
preceding chapter that the way in which general affairs are dealt with can
provide a reasonably accurate indication of the actual state of morality and of
the health of the body politic. The more the assemblies are governed by
agreement, that is to say, the more opinions approach unanimity, the more the
general will dominates as well. But long debates, dissention, and uproar
announce the ascendancy of particular interests and the decline of the state.
This appears less
evident when two or more orders enter into the state’s constitution, as the
patricians and the plebeians did in Rome. Their quarrels often disturbed the comitia, even in the best periods of the
Republic. But this exception is more apparent than real, for then, thanks to
the inherent defect in the body politic, they had, so to speak, two states in
one. What is not true about the two together is true about each one separately.
And, in fact, even in the stormiest times, the plebiscites of the people, when
the senate did not interfere with them, always passed peacefully with a large
majority of votes. Since the citizens had only one interest, the people had
only one will.
At the other
extremity of the circle, unanimity returns. This happens when the citizens,
having fallen into servitude, no longer have either liberty or will. At that
point, fear and flattery change voting into acclamations. People no longer deliberate:
they adore, or they curse. Such was the despicable way of expressing opinions
in the senate under the emperors. Sometimes that was done with ridiculous
precautions. Tacitus observes that under Emperor Otho, while the senators
heaped insults on Vitellius, at the same time they arranged to make a dreadful noise, so that if by chance he became their master, he could not
know what each of them had said.(T38)
From these various
considerations arise the principles according to which one should regulate
procedures for counting votes and comparing opinions, according to whether the
general will is more or less easy to recognize and the state is more or less in
decline.
There is only a
single law that by its nature demands unanimous consent. That is the social pact.
For the civil association is the most voluntary act in the world. Since every
man is born free and master of himself, no one can, under whatever pretext,
make him a subject without his consent. To decide that the son of a slave is
born a slave is to decide that he is not born a man.
Therefore, if at the
time of the social pact there are those who oppose it, their opposition does
not invalidate the contract; it simply prevents them from being included in it.
These are foreigners among the citizens. Once the state is established, to be resident in it indicates consent. To live in the territory
is to submit oneself to the sovereign.(R30)
Other than this
original contract, the voice of the majority is always binding on all the
others. That is a consequence of the contract itself. But someone will ask how
a man can be free and forced to conform to wills that are not his own. How are
opponents both free and subject to laws to which they have not consented?
My answer is that the
question is poorly framed. The citizen consents to all the laws, even to those
passed in spite of him, and even to those that punish him when he dares to
violate any one of them. The constant will of all the members
of the state is the general will; through that, they are citizens and free.(R31) When a law is proposed in the assembly of the people, what
is being asked of them is not precisely whether they approve the proposal or
reject it, but whether or not it conforms to the general will, which is theirs.
In giving his vote, each person delivers his opinion on this question, and the
declaration of the general will is obtained by counting the votes. Thus, when
an opinion contrary to my own prevails, that proves nothing other than that I
was mistaken and that my estimate of the general will was wrong. If my
particular opinion had prevailed, I would have done something different from
what I had intended and, in that case, I would not have been free.
This assumes, it is
true, that all the characteristics of the general will are still in the majority.
When they cease to be, whatever side one takes, there is no longer any liberty.
By demonstrating
above how particular wills are substituted for the general will in public
deliberations, I have sufficiently indicated the practical ways of preventing
this abuse. I shall have more to say about that later on. As for the
proportional number of votes for declaring this will, I have also provided the
principles upon which one can determine it. The difference of a single vote
breaks the equality; a single opposing vote breaks the unanimity. But between
unanimity and equality, there are several unequal divisions of the votes, at
each of which this number can be fixed in accordance with the condition and the
needs of the body politic.
Two general
principles can help to govern these relationships: one is that the more
important and serious the deliberations are, the more the prevailing opinion
should approach unanimity; the other is that the more the matter being debated
requires a quick decision, the more one should restrict the prescribed
difference in the number of votes. In deliberations where it is necessary to
reach a decision immediately, a majority of a single vote should be sufficient.
The first of these principles seems more appropriate to laws, and the second to
business. Whatever the case, it is by their combination that one establishes
the best ratios one can provide for announcing a majority decision.
On Elections
With respect to
elections of the prince and the magistrates, which are, as I have said, complex
actions, there are two ways to proceed, that is, by choice and by lot. These
have both been used in various republics, and nowadays a very complicated
mixture of the two still takes place in the election of the Doge in Venice.
“Voting by lot,” says
Montesquieu, “is in the nature of a democracy.” I agree with that, but why
should that be the case? “Drawing lots,” he continues, “is a way of electing
that harms no one; it leaves every citizen with a reasonable hope of serving
his homeland.” These are not reasons.
If we bear in mind
that the election of leaders is a function of the government and not of
sovereignty, we will see why a lottery is the method more natural to a
democracy, where the smaller the number of administrative acts, the better the
administration.
In every genuine
democracy, being a magistrate is not an advantage but an onerous duty, which
cannot be imposed justly on a particular person rather than on someone else.
Only the law can impose this office on the person to whom the lot falls. For in
such a case conditions are equal for everyone, and the choice does not depend
on any human will. There is no particular application that alters the
universality of the law.
In an aristocracy,
the prince chooses the prince, the government preserves itself on its own, and
there voting is quite appropriate.
Far from destroying
this distinction, the example of the election of the Doge of Venice confirms
it. This combined form suits a mixed government. For it is a mistake to assume
that the government of Venice is a genuine aristocracy. If the people there
have no share in the government, the nobility is itself the people. A multitude
of poor Barnabites has never come close to attaining any magistrate’s office,
and its nobility is merely the empty title of Excellency and
the right to attend the Grand Council.(T39) Since this Grand
Council has as many members as our General Council at Geneva, its illustrious
members have no more privileges than our ordinary citizens. It is certain that,
apart from the extreme disparity between the two republics, the bourgeoisie of
Geneva is the exact equivalent of the patriciate in Venice. Our natives and
inhabitants correspond to the city dwellers and the people of Venice, while our
peasants correspond to the subjects on the mainland. Finally, however one
thinks about that republic, if we set aside its size, its government is no more
aristocratic than our own. The entire difference is that, since we in Geneva do
not have a leader for life, we do not have the same need for drawing lots.
Elections by lot
would have few disadvantages in a genuine democracy, where, because everything
was equal in morals and talents, as well as in principles and wealth, the
choice would become almost indifferent. But I have already said that there is
no true democracy.
When choice and lots
are used in combination, the former ought to fill positions that require
specific talents, like military appointments, and the latter is appropriate for
positions where good sense, justice, and integrity suffice, like those with
judicial responsibilities; because in a well-constituted state these qualities
are common to all citizens.
Neither lots nor
voting have any place in monarchical government. Since the king is by right the
sole prince and the only magistrate, the choice of his lieutenants belongs to
him alone. When the Abbé de St. Pierre proposed to increase the number of the
councils of the King of France and to elect their members by ballot,
he did not realize that he was proposing to change the form of the government.(T40)
It remains for me to
discuss the manner of giving and collecting votes in the assembly of the
people. But perhaps the history of the political order of the Romans in this
matter will explain more palpably all the principles I could set down. A
judicious reader will not find it beneath him to read in some detail how public
and private affairs were dealt with in a council of two hundred thousand men.
On the Roman Comitia
We have no
well-confirmed records of the early days of Rome. It even
seems highly likely that most of the things people recite about it are fables.(R32) And, generally speaking, the most instructive part in the
annals of a people, the history of its founding, is what we lack the most.
Experience teaches us every day the causes that give rise to the revolutions of
empires, but since new peoples are no longer being formed, we have hardly
anything other than conjectures to explain how they were developed.
The customs we find
established attest at least to the fact that these customs had an origin. Of
the traditions that go back to these origins, the ones that carry the greatest
authority and are confirmed by the most compelling reasons should pass for the
most certain. Those are the principles I attempted to follow in exploring how
the freest and most powerful people on earth exercised its supreme power.
After the founding of
Rome, the emerging republic, that is to say, the army of the founder, made up
of Albans, Sabines, and foreigners, was divided into three classes, which, as a
result of this division, took the name of tribes.
Each of these tribes was subdivided into ten curias, and each curia into decurias,
at the head of which were placed leaders called curions and decurions.
Beyond that, a body
of one hundred horsemen or knights, called a century, was taken from each tribe. From that we recognize that
these divisions, for which there is hardly any need in a market town, were at
first merely military. But it seems that an instinct for greatness led the
small town of Rome to give itself in advance a political structure suitable for
the capital of the world.
From this initial
division a disadvantage soon resulted. The tribe of Albans (Ramnenses) and the tribe of Sabines (Tatienses) remained always in the same
condition, while the tribe of foreigners (Luceres)
steadily increased, thanks to the constant arrival of foreigners, so that it
soon surpassed the other two. The remedy Servius found for
this dangerous abuse was to change the means of division.(T41) He abolished classification by race and substituted for it
another based on the places in the town where each of the tribes lived. Instead
of three tribes, he created four, each of which occupied and took its name from
one of the hills of Rome. Thus, while correcting present inequalities, he also
prevented any future reoccurrence of the problem. In order that this division
would apply not only to places but to people, he forbade the inhabitants of one
quarter from moving into another, which prevented the races from blurring
together.
Servius also doubled
the three old centuries of knights and added twelve others, but always keeping
the old names, a simple and judicious way of successfully distinguishing the
body of knights from that of the people, without raising a popular murmur.
To these four urban
tribes, Servius added fifteen others, called rustic tribes, because they were
made up of people who lived in the country, separated into fifteen cantons.
Later on, the same number of new tribes was created, and the Roman people
finally found itself divided into thirty-five tribes. It remained fixed at this
number until the end of the Republic.
From this distinction
between the city and the rustic tribes, there resulted one effect worth
observing, because there is no other example of it, and because Rome owed to it
the preservation of its moral traditions and, at the same time, the expansion
of its empire. One would have thought that the urban tribes would soon arrogate
power and honours to themselves and would not wait to demean the country
tribes. What happened was just the reverse. The early Romans’ taste for country
life is well-known. This taste came to them from the wise founder, who linked
liberty with rustic and military work and, so to speak, relegated to the city
the arts, trades, intrigue, fortune, and slavery.
In this way, since
all of Rome’s illustrious persons lived in the country and cultivated the soil,
Romans grew accustomed to looking only there for supporters of the Republic.
Because this was the condition of the most worthy patricians, it was honored by
everyone. The simple and laborious life of the villagers was preferred to the
leisurely and slack life of the bourgeoisie in Rome, and the sort of person who
would have been merely an unhappy proletarian in the town became a respected
citizen by working in the fields. It is not without reason, said Varro, that
our magnanimous ancestors established in the village the nursery of those
robust and valiant men who defended them in times of war and fed them in times
of peace. Pliny states positively that the country tribes were honored because
of the men who made them up; whereas, the cowards whom people wanted to
dishonour were transferred in disgrace to the town tribes. When the Sabine
Appius Claudius came to settle in Rome, he was lavished with honours there and
enrolled in a country tribe that later took his family name. Finally, freedmen
all entered the urban tribes, never the country ones, and during the entire
Republic, there is not a single example of any of these freedmen attaining any
magistrate’s office, despite their becoming citizens.
This principle was
excellent, but it was pushed so far that it finally resulted in a change and a
definite abuse within the political order.
First, the censors,
after having for a long time arrogated to themselves the right of arbitrarily
transferring citizens from one tribe to another, allowed most
people to have themselves enrolled in whatever tribe they wished.(T42) This permission certainly did no good and deprived the
censorship of one of its important resources. Furthermore, the great and
powerful all had themselves enrolled in the country tribes, while the freedmen,
once they became citizens, remained with the populace in the urban tribes, so
that, in general, the tribes no longer had any place or territory. Instead,
they all found themselves so intermixed that they could no longer recognize the
members of each tribe except from the registers. As a result, the idea of the
word tribe went from something
referring to property to something personal, or rather, it became almost a
chimera.
It also turned out
that since the urban tribes were more at the center of things, they often found
themselves stronger in the comitia,
and they sold the state to those who deigned to buy the votes of the rabble who
made up those tribes.
As far as the curias are concerned, the founder had
made ten in each tribe. Thus, the entire Roman people enclosed at that time
within the town walls was composed of thirty curias, each of which had its temples, its gods, its officials, its
priests, and its festivals, called compitalia,
which were similar to the paganalia
held by the rustic tribes later on.
When Servius made his
new division, since he could not distribute this number of thirty curias equally among his four tribes, he
did not wish to meddle with them, and the curias
became an additional division of those living in Rome, independent of the
tribes. But there was no question of curias
in the rustic tribes or in the people who made them up, because, as the tribes
had become a purely civil arrangement and that another procedure had been
introduced for levying troops, the military divisions of Romulus were
superfluous. Thus, although every citizen was enrolled in a tribe, there were
many who were not enrolled in a curia.
Servius made still a
third division, unrelated to the two preceding ones, which, thanks to its
effects, became the most important of all. He separated all the Roman people
into six classes, which he distinguished neither by location nor by person, but
by possessions, so that the first classes were filled with the rich, the last
ones with the poor, and the middle ones with those who enjoyed a modest
fortune. These six classes were subdivided into one hundred and ninety-three
other bodies, called centuries, and these bodies were distributed in such a way
that the first class alone included more than half of them and the last class
included only one. Thus, the class with the smallest number of men had the
largest number of centuries, and the entire last class was counted as only one
subdivision, although by itself it contained more than half the inhabitants of
Rome.
To ensure that the
people were less aware of the consequences of this last arrangement, Servius
pretended to give it a military air. He inserted into the second class two
centuries of armourers and into the fourth class two centuries of those who
made instruments of war. In each class except the last, he distinguished the
young and the old, that is, those who were obliged to bear arms and those whose
age gave them legal exemption from this duty. This distinction, more than the
one based on possessions, made it necessary to hold frequent renewals of the census
or head count. Finally, Servius wanted the assembly to be held on the Field of Mars, and all those whose age made them eligible to serve to
come there with their weapons.(T43)
The reason he did not
follow this same division of young and old in the last class is that the
populace making it up was not given the honour of bearing arms on behalf of the
homeland. A person had to possess a hearth in order to obtain the right to
defend it, and of all those countless hordes of the dispossessed who nowadays
make the armies of kings sparkle, there is perhaps not one who would not have
been chased away in contempt from a Roman cohort, when soldiers were the
defenders of liberty.
However, in the last
class, there was also a distinction made between the proletarians and those who were called the capite censi. The former, who were not entirely reduced to nothing,
at least provided citizens to the state and sometimes even soldiers in times of
pressing need. As for those who possessed nothing at all and who could not be tallied
except by counting heads, they were looked upon as nullities.
Marius was the first who deigned to enlist them.(T44)
Without determining
here whether this third way of counting the inhabitants was inherently good or
bad in itself, I think I can affirm that the only thing that could have make it
workable was the simple morality of the early Romans, their disinterestedness,
their taste for agriculture, and their scorn for commerce and for love of
profit. Where is the modern people among whom voracious greed, restless
spirits, intrigue, constant displacements, and perpetual changes in fortune
could allow a similar arrangement to last for twenty years without convulsing
the whole state? We must also observe that in Rome morality and censorship,
which were stronger than this system, corrected its defects, and that a rich
man might see himself relegated to the class of the poor for making too great a
display of his wealth.
From all this, one
can readily understand why people almost always speak of only five classes,
although there were, in fact, six of them. Since the sixth furnished neither
soldiers for the army nor voters for the Field of Mars, and
played hardly any role in the Republic, it was rarely thought to count for
anything.(R33)
These were the
different divisions of the Roman people. Let us now see the effect these
divisions produced in the assemblies. When these assemblies were legally
summoned, they were called comitia.
They were normally held in the public square in Rome or in the Field of Mars
and were differentiated into comitia by curias, comitia by centuries, and comitia
by tribes, according to which of these three arrangements had been ordered.
The comitia by curia had been established by Romulus, the comitia by centuries by Servius, and the comitia by tribes by the tribunes of the people. No law was
sanctioned and no magistrate elected except in the comitia, and since there was no citizen who was not enrolled in a curia, in a century, or in a tribe, it
followed that no citizen was excluded from the right to vote, and that the
Roman people was truly sovereign, in right and in fact.
In order for the comitia to be legitimately assembled and
for what happened there to have the force of law, three conditions had to be
satisfied: first, the body or the magistrate who summoned the assemblies had to
be vested with the necessary authority to do so; second, the assembly had to
take place on one of the days permitted by law; and third, the auguries had to
be favorable.
The reason for the
first condition requires no explanation. The second is a matter of policy.
Thus, it was not permitted to hold comitia
on festival or market days, when the country people came to Rome to conduct
their business and did not have the time to spend all day in the public square.
With the third condition, the senate held in check a proud and boisterous
people, and appropriately restrained the zeal of seditious
tribunes. However, the latter discovered more than one way to evade this
difficulty.(T45)
The laws and the
election of leaders were not the only matters submitted to the judgment of the comitia. Since the Roman people had
seized control of the most important functions of government, we could say that
the fate of Europe was settled in its assemblies. This variety in the purposes
of these assemblies gave rise to the various forms they assumed, according to
the matters on which they had to pronounce.
In order to assess
these different forms, all we have to do is compare them. In establishing the curias, Romulus was intending to use the
people to restrain the senate and the senate to restrain the people, while
exercising equal control over both. Hence, with this form of assembly he gave
the people complete authority of numbers to balance the authority of power and
wealth that he left to the patricians. However, following the spirit of
monarchy, he nevertheless left the patricians a greater advantage, thanks to
the influence of their clients on the majority of votes. This admirable
institution of patrons and clients was a masterpiece of politics and humanity,
without which the patriciate—so contrary to the spirit of the Republic—could
not have survived. Rome alone had the honour of giving the world this excellent
example, which never resulted in any abuse and which, in spite of that, has never
been followed.
Since this same form
of curias lasted under the kings up
to Servius, and since the reign of the last Tarquin was not considered
legitimate, royal laws were generally designated by the name leges curiatae [laws of the curias].
Under the Republic,
the curias, always limited to the
four urban tribes and including only the population of Rome, could work neither
with the senate, which stood at the head of the patricians, nor with the
tribunes, who, although plebeians, were leading figures among the affluent
citizens. Hence, the curias fell into
disrepute and became so degraded that their thirty lictors, once assembled,
used to do what the comitia by curia should have done.
The division by
centuries was so favorable to the aristocracy that at first one does not
understand how the senate did not always prevail in the comitia with this name, in which the
consuls, censors, and the other cural magistrates were elected.(T46) In effect, of the one hundred and ninety-three centuries
which formed the six classes of all the Roman people, the first class contained
ninety-eight, and since the votes were counted only by centuries, this class by
itself prevailed over all the others in the number of votes. When all these
centuries were in agreement, they did not even continue to collect the votes.
What the smallest number had determined passed for a decision by the multitude,
and one could say that in the comitia by
centuries, affairs were governed more by the preponderance of money than of
votes.
However, this extreme
authority was tempered in two ways. First, the tribunes, as a rule, were in the
class of the wealthy, which always had a large number of plebeians as well.
Hence, they counterbalanced the influence of the patricians in this first
class.
The second way
consisted of the following: instead of having the centuries begin by voting
according to their order, which would have always made them start with
the first class, they chose one century by lot, which went ahead with the
election on its own.(R34) After that, all the
centuries were summoned on a different day, according to their rank, repeated
the same election, and usually confirmed it. In this way, the authority of
example was removed from rank in order to assign it by lot, in accordance with
democratic principle.
Yet another advantage
resulted from this practice. The citizens in the countryside had time between
the two elections to inform themselves about the merits of the candidate who
had been provisionally nominated, so that they did not cast their votes without
knowing about the case. However, under the pretext of speed, this practice was
finally abolished, and the two elections took place on the same day.
The comitia by tribes were, strictly
speaking, the council of the Roman people. They were convened only by the
tribunes. In them the tribunes were elected and passed their plebiscites. The
senate had no standing there. Not only that, it did not even have the right to
be present. Forced to obey laws on which they could not vote, the senators
were, in this respect, less free than the lowest citizens. This injustice was
totally misconceived and by itself was enough to invalidate the decrees of a
body to which all its members were not admitted. If all the patricians had been
present at these comitia, in
accordance with the right they possessed as citizens, and had then become
ordinary individuals, they would have had hardly any influence on a form of
voting which counted heads, where the lowest proletarian had as much power as
the leading member of the senate.
Thus, we see that,
apart from the resulting order from these various ways of dividing up so great
a people to collect their votes, these distributions were not reducible to
inherently indifferent forms, but that each one had effects relative to the
views that made it the preferred arrangement.
Without going into
further details about this matter, we can see from the preceding explanations
what resulted: the comitia by tribes
were the most favorable to popular government, while the comitia by centuries were the most favorable to the aristocracy. As
for the comitia by curias, where the Roman populace by
itself formed the plurality, because they were good only for favoring tyranny
and malicious designs, they went on to fall into disrepute. Even seditious men
abstained from a means that made their projects too prone to discovery. It is
certainly true that the entire majesty of the Roman people was found only in
the comitia by centuries, the only
assemblies that included everybody, given that rustic tribes were not part of
the comitia by curias and the senate and patricians were not part of the comitia by tribes.
As for the method of
collecting the votes, among the early Romans that was as simple as their morality,
although less simple than in Sparta. Each man shouted out his vote, and a clerk
duly recorded it. The majority of votes in each tribe determined the tribe’s
vote, and a majority of the votes among the tribes determined the people’s
vote. The curias and centuries did
the same. This practice was good as long as honesty ruled among the citizens
and each man was ashamed to give his vote publicly for an unjust proposal or an
unworthy issue. But when the people became corrupt and votes were purchased, it
was appropriate for votes to be given in secret, so that a lack of trust would
discourage those purchasing votes, and scoundrels had a way of avoiding
treachery.
I know that Cicero
criticizes this change and attributes to it, in part, the ruin of the Republic.
But although I am aware of the weight one should give to Cicero’s authority on
this point, I cannot agree with his opinion. On the contrary, I think that the
failure to make a sufficient number of similar changes hastened the downfall of
the state. Just as the regimen of healthy people is inappropriate for the sick,
so one should not wish to govern a corrupt people with the same laws that are
appropriate for a good people. Nothing proves this principle better than the
long life of the Venetian Republic, whose simulacrum still exists, solely
because its laws are suitable only for wicked men.
The citizens were
thus given tablets on which each person could vote without anyone knowing what
his opinion was. They also instituted new formalities for collecting the
tablets, counting the votes, comparing the numbers, and so on. These did not
prevent people from frequently suspecting the trustworthiness
of the officials charged with carrying out these duties.(R35) Finally, to prevent trickery and trafficking in votes, edicts
were announced, but the large number of these shows how ineffectual they were.
Towards the end of
the Republic, it was often necessary to turn to extraordinary expedients in
order to make up for the inadequacy of the laws. Sometimes it was implied that
miracles had taken place, but this method, while capable of impressing the
people, had no effect on those who governed them. Sometimes an assembly was
summoned abruptly, before the candidates had time to organize their intrigues.
Sometimes an entire session was spent talking, when it was clear that the
people had been won over and was ready to adopt a bad position. But in the end
ambition eluded all such efforts, and what is incredible is that in midst of so
much abuse, this immense people, thanks to its ancient ordinances, did not fail
to elect magistrates, pass laws, judge cases, and expedite private and public
business with almost as much facility as the senate itself could have done.
On the Tribunate
When it is impossible
to establish an exact proportion between the parts making up the state, or when
causes that cannot be eliminated constantly alter the relationships among those
parts, then a special magistracy is established which does not share a corporate
form with the others. This magistracy restores each term to its correct
relation and creates a link or a middle term, either between the prince and the
people, or between the prince and the sovereign, or, if necessary, between both
sides at once.
This body, which I
shall call the tribunate, is the
preserver of the laws and of the legislative power. Sometimes it serves to
protect the sovereign against the government, as the tribunes of the people did
in Rome, sometimes to maintain the government against the people, as the
Council of Ten now does in Venice, and sometimes to preserve
the balance between the two, as the ephors did in Sparta.(T47)
The tribunate is not
a constituent part of the city, and should have no share of legislative or
executive power. But from that very fact, its power is greater, for although it
cannot do anything, it can prevent everything. As the defender of the laws, it
is more sacred and more revered than the prince who executes them and the
sovereign who gives them. This was clearly evident in Rome when those proud
patricians, who always despised the people as a whole, were forced to bow down
before a simple officer of the people who had neither auspices nor
jurisdiction.
A wisely tempered
tribunate is the strongest support for a good constitution, but if its power is
even a little excessive, it overturns everything. As for being weak, that is
not in its nature, and provided it is something, it is never less than it needs
to be.
The tribunate
degenerates into tyranny when it usurps executive power, for which it is only
the moderator, and when it wishes to administer the laws that it must only
protect. The enormous power of the ephors, which posed no danger as long as
Sparta preserved its traditional morality, accelerated corruption there, once
it had commenced. The blood of Agis, whose throat was slit by these tyrants,
was avenged by his successor. The crime and the punishment of the ephors
hastened equally the fall of the republic, and after Cleomenes Sparta was no
longer significant. Rome also perished in the same way: the excessive power of
the tribunes, gradually usurped, together with the help of
laws made for liberty, finally served as a safeguard for the emperors who
destroyed it.(T48) As for the Council
of Ten in Venice, it is a tribunal of blood, a horror to the patricians and the
people alike, which, far from proudly protecting the laws, no longer serves for
anything, now that those laws have been degraded—except to strike blows in the
shadows, which no one dares notice.
The tribunate, like
the government, grows weak as its members multiply. When the tribunes of the
Roman people, who at first numbered two and later five, wished to double this
number, the senate let them do it, fully confident that it could use some of
them to restrain the others, and this did not fail to occur.
The best way to
prevent the usurpations of such a redoubtable body, a method that no government
has used up to this point, would be not to make the tribunate a permanent body
but to regulate the periods during which it would remain suppressed. These
periods, which should not be long enough to allow abuses the time to grow
strong, can be fixed by the law in such a way that it would be easy to shorten
them, if need be, by extraordinary commissions.
This method, in my
view, would have no disadvantages, because, as I have said, the tribunate is
not part of the constitution and can be removed without damaging it, and it
seems to me effective because a newly reinstated magistrate begins, not with
the power that his predecessor had, but with the power the law assigns him.
On Dictatorship
The inflexibility of
the laws, which prevents them from being adapted to events, can in certain
cases make them harmful, and during a crisis, lead them to bring about the ruin
of the state. The order and the slowness of procedures require a space of time
that circumstances sometimes do not allow. A thousand situations can arise that
the lawgiver has not anticipated, and a very necessary part of foresight is
having a sense that one cannot foresee everything.
Thus, one should not
demand that political institutions be strengthened to the point where one makes
it impossible to suspend their activity. Even Sparta allowed its laws to
slumber.
But only the very
gravest dangers can offset the danger of changing the public order, and the
sacred power of the laws should never be suspended, except when it is a matter
of the safety of the homeland. In these rare and obvious cases, one provides
for the safety of the public by a particular act that assigns this
responsibility to the most worthy person. This commission can be assigned in
two ways, depending on the nature of the danger.
If one can remedy
things sufficiently by increasing the activity of the government, one
concentrates it in one or two of its members. In this way, one is not altering
the authority of the laws, but only the form of their administration. If the
peril is such that the system of laws is an obstacle to their preservation, in
that case one nominates a supreme leader who silences all the laws and suspends
for the moment the sovereign authority. In a situation like that, the general
will is not in doubt: it is clear that the people’s primary intention is that the
state does not perish. In this way, the suspension of the legislative authority
does not abolish it. The magistrate who silences it cannot make it speak. He
dominates it, but does not have the power to represent it. He can do anything,
except make laws.
The first method was
employed by the Roman senate when, with a consecrated formula, it charged the
consuls to provide for the safety of the Republic. The second
occurred when one of the two consuls appointed a dictator,(R36) a practice for which Alba had given Rome an example.(T49)
At the beginning of
the Republic, there was frequent recourse to dictatorship, because the state
did not yet have a sufficiently firm foundation to be capable of maintaining
itself by the strength of its constitution alone. Since at that time,
traditional morality rendered superfluous many of the precautions that would
have been necessary in another age; they feared neither that a dictator would
abuse his authority, nor that he would attempt to retain it beyond his term. It
seemed, on the contrary, that such enormous power was a burden to the man
entrusted with it, so eager was he to divest himself of it quickly, as if it
had been too difficult and too perilous to stand in the place of the laws!
Thus, what makes me
criticize the indiscreet use of this supreme magistrate in the early days of
Rome is the danger, not of abusing it, but of demeaning its significance. For
while they squandered it in elections, dedications, and purely formal
occasions, there was a fear that it would become less formidable in times of
need and that people would grow accustomed to looking on it as an empty title,
used only at empty ceremonials.
Towards the end of
the Republic, the Romans, becoming more circumspect, were as unreasonable in
limiting dictatorship as they had been previously in using it too much. It was
easy to see that their fears were not well-founded, that the weakness of the
capital at the time made it safe from the magistrates who lived inside it, that
a dictator could, in certain situations, defend public freedom, without ever
being able to attack it, and that Rome’s shackles would be forged not in Rome
itself, but in its armies. The feeble resistance that Marius
offered against Sulla and Pompey offered against Caesar clearly showed what one
could expect from the authority within the city against a force from outside.(T50)
This mistake led the
Romans to commit major blunders, such as, for example, not naming a dictator
during the Catiline affair. For since this involved only the interior of the
city and, at most, some provinces in Italy, a dictator with the unlimited
authority provided by law would have easily broken up the conspiracy, which was
snuffed out only by a combination of fortunate chance events,
which human prudence should never expect.(T51)
Instead of that, the
senate contented itself with handing over all its power to the consuls. The
result was that Cicero, in order to act effectively, was forced to overstep
this power at a critical point, and if the first transports of joy led them to
approve of his conduct, later on he was justly called to account for the blood
of citizens shed in violation of the laws, a reproach which could not have been
made against a dictator. But the eloquence of the consul carried all before it,
and he himself, although a Roman, loved his own glory more than his homeland
and sought out, not so much the most legitimate and surest way
of saving the state, as the one that would give him all the honour in this
affair.(R37) And so he was justly celebrated as the
liberator of Rome and justly punished as a breaker of the
laws. However brilliant his recall may have been, it clearly was a pardon.(T52)
Moreover, in whatever
manner this important commission is conferred, it is important to establish
that its term will last for a very short period of time and can never be
extended. In the crises that lead to its implementation, the state is soon
destroyed or saved, and once the pressing need has passed, a dictatorship
becomes tyrannical or useless. In Rome, dictators were appointed for only six
months, and most abdicated before this term was over. If the term had been
longer, perhaps they might have been tempted to prolong it further, as the decemvirs did with their one-year term.
The dictator had time only to cope with the need that had led to his election;
he had no time to muse upon other projects.
On Censorship
Just as the
declaration of the general will is made through the law, the declaration of
public judgment is made through the censorship. Public opinion is the kind of
law administered by the censor, which he applies only to particular cases,
following the example of the prince.
Thus, the censorial
tribunal, far from being the arbiter of public opinion, is only its voice, and
as soon as the tribunal moves away from this opinion, its decisions are empty
and without effect.
It is pointless to
distinguish the morality of a nation from the objects it esteems, for all these
things are derived from the same principle and are necessarily interconnected.
Among all the peoples of the world, it is not nature but opinion that
determines the choice of their pleasures. Set straight men’s opinions, and
their morality will purify itself. People always love what is good or what they
find good, but in this judgment they err. Therefore, it is a question of
regulating this judgment. Anyone who judges morality is judging honor, and
anyone who judges honour takes his law from opinion.
The opinions of a
people are born from its constitution. Although the law does not regulate
morality, it is legislation that gives birth to it. When legislation is weak,
morality degenerates, but in such situations the judgment of the censors will
not achieve what the power of the law has failed to bring about.
From that it follows
that the censorship can be useful for preserving morals, but never for
restoring them. Establish censors when the laws are strong. As soon as they
lose their strength, everything is hopeless. Nothing legitimate has force any
more once the laws no longer have any.
Censorship supports
morality by preventing opinions from becoming corrupted, by preserving their
rectitude with wise applications, and sometimes even by determining opinions
when they are still uncertain. The use of seconds in duels, carried to a frenzy
in the kingdom of France, was abolished there simply by these words in a royal
edict: as for those who have the
cowardice to call upon seconds. This judgment, anticipating that of the
public, instantly determined the matter. But when the same edicts wanted to
announce that it was also cowardice to fight duels—which is very true but
contrary to common opinion—the public ridiculed this decision in a matter on
which it had already rendered judgment.
I have said elsewhere
that since public opinion is not subject to constraint, there
must be no trace of that in the tribunal set up to represent it.(R38) It is impossible to admire too much the skill with which
this resource, entirely lost among the moderns, was implemented among the
Romans and even better still among the Lacedaemonians.
When a man with bad
morals offered good advice in the Spartan Council, the ephors paid no attention
to it and had the same opinion put forward by a virtuous citizen. What an
honour for one, and what a disgrace for the other, without a word of praise or
blame for either of the two! When certain drunkards from Samos defiled the Tribunal of Ephors, the next day a public edict gave the
Samians permission to be disgusting.(T53) A real punishment
would have been less severe than this kind of impunity. When Sparta has made a
pronouncement on what is or is not respectable, Greece does not appeal its
judgments.
Chapter 8
On Civil Religion
At first men had no
kings other than the gods, nor any government other than a theocratic one. They
reasoned like Caligula, and at that time such reasoning was correct. Changes in
feelings and ideas over a long time are necessary in order for men to be
capable of deciding to take someone like themselves as their master, and of
flattering themselves that things will work out well for them.
From the mere fact
that a god was placed at the head of each political society, it followed that
there were as many gods as peoples. Two populations foreign to each other and
almost always enemies could not recognize the same master for long; two armies
busy fighting each other could not obey the same leader. And so national
differences produced polytheism, and from that theological and civil
intolerance, which, as I will mention later, are naturally the same.
The fanciful way the
Greeks had of rediscovering their gods among barbarous peoples came from the
habit they also had of looking upon themselves as the natural sovereigns of
these peoples. But nowadays the erudition that merges the identities of the
gods of various nations is truly ridiculous, as if Moloch, Saturn, and Cronos
could have been the same god, as if Baal of the Phoenicians, Zeus of the
Greeks, and Jupiter of the Latins could have been the same, as if there could
have been anything in common among chimerical beings bearing different names!
If one asks how there
were no wars of religion in pagan times, when each state had its cult and its
gods, I answer that it was for that very reason: since each state had its own
cult as well as its own government, it did not distinguish between its gods and
its laws. Political war was also theological. The departments of the gods were,
so to speak, fixed by national boundaries. The god of one people had no right
over other peoples. The gods of the pagans were not jealous gods; they shared
among themselves the empire of the world. Even Moses and the Hebrew people
sometimes lent credence to this idea by speaking of the god of Israel. It is
true they regarded the gods of the Canaanites as nothing at all, but these
people were outcasts, condemned to destruction, and the Hebrews were to occupy
their lands. But consider how they spoke about the divinities of neighboring
peoples they were forbidden to attack. “Is not the possession of what belongs
to your god Chamos,” said Jephthah to the Ammonites, “legitimately your own? We possess the same title to the lands that our
victorious god has acquired for himself.”(R39) At that point, it
seems to me, there was a clear recognition that the rights of Chamos and those
of the God of Israel were equal.
But when the Jews
were subjects of the kings of Babylon and then later of the kings of Syria,
they were obstinate in refusing to recognize any god but their own, and their
refusal was looked upon as a rebellion against their conqueror. It brought down
on them the persecutions we read about in their history. We
see no other examples of this before Christianity.(R40)
Thus, since each
religion was exclusively linked to the laws of the state that prescribed it,
there was no way of converting a people except by subjugating it, and there
were no missionaries other than conquerors; since the obligation to change
religious cult was a law of the vanquished, one had to begin by conquering
before talking about such things. Far from men fighting for the gods, it was
the gods, as in Homer, who fought for men. Each man asked his god for victory
and paid him for it with new altars. Before capturing a place, the Romans
called upon its gods to abandon it. When they let the Tarentines keep their
angry gods, the reason was that at the time they considered these gods subject
to their own and forced to pay them homage. The Romans left those they
conquered have their own gods, as they left them their laws. Often the only
tribute they imposed was a wreath to Capitoline Jupiter.
Finally, once the
Romans had extended their cult and their gods along with their empire and had
often themselves adopted those of the peoples they had conquered, they accorded
to both the rights of the city, and the peoples of this vast empire found
themselves imperceptibly acquiring multitudes of gods and cults, which were
almost the same everywhere. That is how paganism in the known world eventually
became a single integrated religion.
It was in these
circumstances that Jesus came to establish on earth a spiritual kingdom, which,
by separating the theological system from the political system, made it so that
the state ceased to be unified and caused internecine divisions that have never
stopped agitating Christian peoples. Now, since this new idea of a kingdom in
another world could never have occurred to pagans, they always looked upon
Christians as genuine rebels who, beneath a hypocritical submission, were only
looking for an opportunity to make themselves independent and masters, and
adroitly usurp the authority they pretended in their weakness to respect. This
was the cause of the persecutions.
What the pagans had
feared came to pass, and then the appearance of everything was transformed: the
humble Christians changed their language, and soon people saw this alleged
kingdom in another world become, under a visible leader, the most violent
despotism in this one.
However, since there
have always been a prince and civil laws, this double power has resulted in a
perpetual conflict over jurisdiction, which has made all good polities
impossible in Christian states, and people have never been able to resolve the
question of whether they were obliged to obey the master or the priest.
However, several
peoples, even in Europe or its vicinity, wished to preserve or reinstate the
old system, but without success. The spirit of Christianity won over
everything. The sacred cult has always remained or has once more become
independent of the sovereign, without a necessary connection to the body of the
state. Mohammed had very sensible views, and he linked his political system
together well. As long as his form of government lasted under the caliphs who
succeeded him, this government was strictly unified and, in that respect, a
good one. But once the Arabs became prosperous, literate, civilized, soft, and
cowardly, they were subjugated by barbarians. Then the division between the two
powers started once again. Although it is less apparent among the Mohammedans
than among the Christians, it is there, nonetheless, above all in the sect of
Ali, and there are states, like Persia, where it never ceases to make itself
felt.
Among us, the kings
of England have made themselves heads of the church, and the tsars have done
the same. But with this title they have made themselves less masters than
ministers. What they have acquired is not so much the right to change it as the
power to maintain it. They are not its legislators, only its princes.
Wherever the church is a corporate body, it is master and legislator in its own
domain.(R41) Thus, there are two powers, two
sovereigns, in England and in Russia, just as there are elsewhere.
Of all Christian
authors, the philosopher Hobbes is the only one who has clearly seen the evil
and the remedy, who has dared to propose reuniting the two heads of the eagle
and returning everything back to political unity, without which neither the
state nor the government will ever be well constituted. But he should have seen
that the dominating spirit of Christianity was incompatible with his system and
that the interest of the priest would always be stronger than that of the
state. What makes his political theory hated is not so much
what is horrible and false in it, as what is just and true.(R42)
I believe that if we
developed the historical facts from this point of view, we would easily refute
the opposing opinions of Bayle and Warburton: the former maintains that no
religion is of any use to the body politic, and the latter, by
contrast, claims that Christianity is its firmest support.(T54) We could prove to the first that no state has ever been
established where religion did not serve as its foundation, and to the second
that Christian law is basically more injurious than useful to the strong
constitution of a state. To make myself understood, I need only provide a
little more precision to the overly vague ideas of religion relevant to my
subject.
Religion, considered
in relation to society, which is either general or particular, can also be
divided into two types, namely, the religion of man and the religion of the
citizen. The first has no temples, no altars, no rites, and is limited to the
purely interior worship of the supreme God and to the eternal duties of
morality. This is the pure and simple religion of the Gospel, the true theism,
and we can call it divine natural law.
The other, established in a single country, provides its gods, its own tutelary
patrons. It has its dogmas, its rites, and its external worship prescribed by
the laws. Outside the single nation that follows it, everything is, from its
point of view, infidel, foreign, and barbarous. It extends the duties and the
rights of man only as far as its altars. Such were all the religions of early
peoples. We can give these the name civil
or positive divine law.
There is a third and
more bizarre kind of religion which provides men with two legislations, two
leaders, and two homelands; subjects them to contradictory obligations and
makes them incapable of being both devout and citizens at the same time. The
religions of the Lamas and of the Japanese are like this, as is Roman
Christianity. We can call this kind the religion
of the priest. It results in a sort of mixed and unsociable law that has no
name.
Considered from a
political perspective, these three varieties of religion all have their faults.
The third is so obviously bad that to amuse oneself by demonstrating the fact
would be a waste of time. Everything that fractures social unity is worthless:
all institutions that set a man in contradiction with himself are worthless.
The second is good,
in that it unites the divine cult and love of the laws and, by making the
homeland the object of adoration among the citizens, teaches them that to serve
the state is to serve its tutelary god. It is a type of theocracy in which
there is to be no pontiff but the prince, and no priests but the magistrates.
Thus, dying for one’s country means becoming a martyr, violating the laws is
impiety, and subjecting a guilty person to public execration
is to commit him to the anger of the gods. Sacer
estod.(T55)
However, this form of
religion is bad, in that, being based on error and lies, it deceives people,
makes them credulous and superstitious, and drowns genuine worship of the
divinity in an empty ceremonial. It is bad, too, when it becomes exclusive and
tyrannical, and makes a people bloodthirsty and intolerant, so that it breathes
only murder and massacre and believes it is carrying out a sacred act by
killing anyone who does not accept its gods. That places such a people in a natural
state of war with all the others, something very injurious to its own security.
Thus, what remains is
the religion of man or Christianity—not the Christianity of today, but that of
the Gospel, which is entirely different. In this holy, sublime, and true
religion, all men, children of the same God, recognize each other as brothers,
and the society that unites them is not dissolved even at death.
But since this
religion has no specific relationship with the body politic, it leaves the laws
with the power they draw from themselves alone, without adding anything else to
them, and in that way one of the great bonds of a particular society remains
inactive. And more than that, far from tethering the citizens’ hearts to the
state, it detaches them from it, as it does from all things of the earth. I
know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.
We are told that a
people of true Christians would form the most perfect society one could
imagine. In this supposition I see only one large difficulty: a society of true
Christians would no longer be a society of men.
I even claim that
this supposed society, for all its perfection, would be neither the strongest
nor the most durable. By virtue of being perfect, it would lack cohesive bonds;
its very perfection would be its destructive vice.
Each person would
fulfill his duty, the people would be subject to the laws, the leaders would be
just and temperate, the magistrates honest and incorruptible, the soldiers
would scorn death, and there would be neither vanity nor luxury. That is all
well and good. But let us look further.
Christianity is an
entirely spiritual religion, exclusively concerned with heavenly things. A
Christian’s homeland is not of this world. He does his duty—that is true—but he
does it with a profound indifference to the success or lack of success of his
efforts. Provided he has nothing to reproach himself with, it matters little to
him whether everything here below goes well or ill. If the state is
flourishing, he hardly ventures to rejoice in the public happiness, for fear of
growing proud of his country’s glory; if the state languishes, he blesses the
hand of God weighing down His people.
For such a society to
be peaceful and for harmony to be maintained, all the citizens without
exception would have to be equally good Christians. But if, by some misfortune,
there was one ambitious person, a single hypocrite, a Catiline, for example, or
a Cromwell, he would inevitably get the better of his pious compatriots.
Christian charity does not readily permit one to think ill of one’s neighbor.
The moment he finds a way of forcing himself on them by some ruse and of
seizing a share of public authority, then there you have it, a man established
in dignity, someone God wants people to respect, and then, soon, you have a
power, someone God wants people to obey. The man who is entrusted with this
power, does he abuse it? That is the rod with which God punishes His children.
People would have scruples about driving out the usurper: that would require
upsetting public tranquility, using violence, spilling blood—none of which sits
well with Christian gentleness. And, after all, what does it matter whether one
is a free man or a serf in this vale of sorrow? The essential matter is
reaching paradise, and resignation is merely one more way of getting there.
What if there is some
war with a foreign state? The citizens have no trouble marching out to fight.
Not one of them dreams of running away. They do their duty. But they have no
passion for victory. They know more about dying than about conquering. Whether
they are the victors or the vanquished, what does that matter to them? Does not
Providence understand better than they do what is right for them? Imagine how a
proud, impetuous, and passionate enemy could take advantage of their stoicism!
Set against them those generous people consumed with an ardent love of glory
and of their homeland. Imagine your Christian republic up against Sparta or
Rome. The pious Christians will be beaten, crushed, and destroyed, before they
have had time to know where they are, or will owe their safety solely to the
scorn their enemy feels for them. In my view, that was a fine oath that the
soldiers of Fabius took: they did not swear to die or conquer, but to return as
conquerors, and they kept their oath. Christians would never have done anything
like that. They would have believed they were tempting God.
However, I am wrong
to talk about a Christian republic. These two words are mutually exclusive.
Christianity preaches nothing but servitude and dependence. Its spirit is too
favorable to tyranny for tyranny not to use it always for its own advantage.
True Christians are made to be slaves. They know this and are scarcely moved by
it. This short life has too little value in their eyes.
Someone will tell me
that Christian troops are excellent. I deny it. Show me an example of such
troops. As far as I am concerned, I do not know of any Christian troops. People
will cite the Crusades. Without disputing the courage of the Crusaders, I will
observe that they were far from being Christians. They were the soldiers of the
priest; they were citizens of the Church. They fought for their spiritual
country, which the Church had made temporal, no one knows how. Properly
understood, this is a reversion to paganism. Since the Gospel does not
establish a national religion, all holy wars are impossible among Christians.
Under the pagan
emperors, Christian soldiers were brave. All the Christian authors affirm the
fact, and I believe it. It was a rivalry for honour with pagan soldiers. From
the time the emperors were Christians this rivalry came to an end, and when the
cross had chased away the eagle, all Roman valour disappeared.
However, setting
aside political considerations, let us return to right and determine the
principles on this important point. The right that the social pact gives the sovereign over his subjects, as I have stated, does not pass
beyond the limits of public utility.(R43) Thus, the subjects
do not have to answer to the sovereign for their opinions, except to the extent
that these opinions are significant to the community. Now, it is very important
to the state that each citizen has a religion that makes him love his duties,
but neither the state nor its members have any interest in the doctrines of
this religion except insofar as these doctrines relate to morality, and to the
duties that the person professing them is obliged to fulfill towards others.
Beyond that, each man can have whatever opinions he pleases, without the
sovereign having any business knowing about them. For, since the sovereign has
no authority in the world beyond, whatever the fate of his subjects in the life
to come, it is not his concern, provided that they are good citizens in this
one.
Therefore, there is a
purely civil profession of faith; its articles are the business of the
sovereign to establish, not as religious dogmas exactly, but as
sentiments of sociability, without which it is impossible to be a good citizen
or a faithful subject.(R44) While the sovereign
cannot oblige anyone to believe them, it can banish from the state anyone who
does not believe them, and it can banish him not because the person is impious,
but because he is unsociable, because he is incapable of sincerely loving the
laws of justice and of sacrificing his life, if need be, to his duty. And if
someone who has publicly accepted these very doctrines behaves as if he does
not believe them, he should be punished with death, for he has committed the
greatest of crimes: he has lied before the laws.
The doctrines of
civil religion must be simple, few in number, and precisely stipulated, without
explications or commentaries: the existence of the Divinity, a powerful,
intelligent, beneficent, provident, and foreseeing god, the life to come, the
happiness of the just, the punishment of the wicked, and the sanctity of the
social contract and the laws: there are the positive doctrines. As for the
negative ones, I limit them to one: intolerance. It is part of the cults we
have excluded.
In my view, those who
distinguish between civil intolerance and theological intolerance are making a
mistake. These two forms of intolerance are inseparable. It is impossible to
live in peace with people one believes to be damned. To love them would be to hate
the God who punishes them. It is necessary that one brings them back or
tortures them. Wherever theological intolerance is permitted, it is impossible
for it not to have some civil effect, and as soon as it has,
the sovereign is no longer sovereign, even in temporal matters.(R45) From that point on, the priests are the true masters. Kings
are merely their officers.
Nowadays, when there
is no longer—and cannot be—an exclusive national religion, people should
tolerate all those who tolerate the others, as long as their doctrines contain
nothing which contradicts the duties of the citizen. However, anyone who dares
to say, Outside the Church there is no
salvation should be driven from the state, unless the state is the church
and the prince its pontiff. Such a doctrine is good only in a theocratic
government. In all others it is pernicious. The reason Henry IV is said to have
embraced the Roman religion should make every honest man leave it, especially
any prince who knows how to reason.
Conclusion
Now that I have set
down the true principles of political right and attempted to establish the
state on its foundation, it remains to support it in its external relations.
This would include the rights of nations, trade, the right of war and
conquests, public right, leagues, negotiations, treaties, and so on. But all
that is a new subject, too vast for my limited vision, which I should always
keep focused on things closer to me.
End of the fourth and
final part.
[These are the footnotes which
appear in Rousseau’s Text]
(1)
Scholarly studies into public right are often merely histories of ancient
abuses, and one is labouring in vain when one takes the trouble to study them
too much.” Manuscript of A Treatise on the Interests of France in Relation to her Neighbours,
by the Marquis L. M. d’Argenson. That is precisely what Grotius has done. [Translator’s Comment] Hugo Grotius
(1583-1645): an eminent and extremely influential philosopher, who wrote extensively
on international and natural law. [Back to Text]
(2)
See Plutarch’s short essay entitled That Animals Use Reason. [Back to Text]
(3)
The true sense of this word has been almost entirely erased among the
moderns. Most of them assume that a town is a city that and that a bourgeois is
a citizen. They do not understand that houses make a town but that citizens
make a city. This same mistake cost the Carthaginians dearly in earlier days. I
have never read of the title citizens
being given to the subjects of any prince, not even in ancient times to the
Macedonians nor, in our own times, to the English, although they are closer to
liberty than anyone else. The French are the only ones who adopt this name of citizens with complete familiarity,
because they have no true idea of its meaning, as we can see from their
dictionaries. If they did, by usurping the word, they would be guilty of the
crime of lèse-majesté. Among them, this name expresses a virtue and not a
right. When Bodin wished to speak of our citizens and townspeople, he made a
serious blunder in taking one group for the other. M. d’Alembert did not make
this mistake, and in his article Geneva, clearly distinguished the four orders
of men (even five, if one includes ordinary foreigners) who live in our town,
only two of which comprise the republic. No other French author I know of has
understood the true meaning of the word citizen.
[Translator’s note]
Jean Bodin (1530-1596) was a French political writer, professor of law, and a
member of parliament. Jean-Baptiste d’Alembert (1717-1783) was a French
mathematician, philosopher, and one of the leading intellectuals of the
eighteenth century. [Back to Text]
(4) Under
bad governments this equality is only apparent and illusory. It serves only to
keep the poor man destitute and the rich man in the place he has usurped. In
fact, laws are always useful to those who have possessions and harmful to those
who have nothing. Hence, it follows that the social state is advantageous to
people only to the extent that they all have something and that none of them
has too much.
[Back to
Text]
(5) In
order for a will to be general, it is not always necessary for it to be
unanimous, but it is necessary that all the votes be counted. Every formal
exclusion breaks the generality. [Back to Text]
(6) Each interest, states the Marquis d’Argenson, has different principles. The agreement of two particular interests is
created by opposition to a third. He could have added that the agreement of
all interests is created by opposition to the interest of each. If there were
no different interests, we would hardly perceive the common interest, which
would never encounter an obstacle. Everything would proceed on its own, and
politics would cease to be an art. [Back to Text]
(7) The truth is, says Machiavelli, some
divisions harm the republic, and others benefit it. When they are accompanied
by sects and partisan groups they are harmful, but those without sects and
partisan groups are advantageous. Since the founder of a republic cannot
prevent the emergence of enmities within it, he should at least stop them
growing into factions. (History of
Florence, Book 7).
[Translator’s note]
Rousseau offers the above quote from Machiavelli in Italian: Vera cosa è . . . che alcune divisioni
nuocono alle Republiche, e alcune giovano: quelle nuocono che sono dalle sette
e da partigiani accompagnate: qulle giovano che seza sette, senza partigiani si
mantengono. Non potendo adunque provedere un fondatore d'una Republica che non
siano nimicizie in quella, hà da proveder almeno che non vi siano sette.
[Back to
Text]
(8) Attentive readers, please
do not be in a hurry here to accuse me of contradiction. I was unable to avoid
that in my terms, given the poverty of language. But wait. [Back to Text]
(9) By this word I do not mean
merely an aristocracy or a democracy, but in general every government guided by
the general will, which is the law. To be legitimate, the government does not
have to be merged with the sovereign, but it has to be the sovereign’s
minister. In that case, even a monarchy is a republic. This point will be
explained in the book that follows. [Back to Text]
(10) A
people only become famous when its legislation begins to decline. We do not
know for how many centuries the institution of Lycurgus made the Spartans happy
before the rest of Greece took notice of them. [Back to Text]
(11) People
who think of Calvin merely as a theologian have a poor grasp of the extent of
his genius. The drafting of our wise edicts, in which he played a major role,
does him as much honour as his Institutes. Whatever revolution time may bring
in our religion, so long as love of homeland and of liberty is not extinguished
among us, this great man’s memory will never cease to be a blessing.
[Translator’s
comment] John Calvin (1509-1564): a French
theologian who played a formative role in the development of Protestantism (his
Institutes of the Christian Religion
was published in 1536) and who was a major figure in reforming the church and
the political system in Geneva. [Back to Text]
(12) And in truth,
says Machiavelli, there has never been,
among any people, an extraordinary codifier of laws who did not have recourse
to God, because without that his laws would not have been accepted. For a
prudent man is aware of many beneficial things which do not, in themselves,
contain clear reasons which make them capable of convincing others.
Discourses on Titus Livy, Book 1, Chapter 11.
[Translator’s
comment] Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527): Italian
diplomat, dramatist, and politician. Rousseau quotes the Italian: E veramente, dit Machiavel, mai non fù
alcuno ordinatore di leggi straordinarie in un popolo, che non ricorresse a
Dio, perche altrimenti non sarebbero accettate; perche sono molti beni conosciuti
da uno prudente, i quali non hanno in se raggioni evidenti da potergli
persuadere ad altrui. [Back to Text]
(13)
If there were two neighboring peoples and one
could not do without the other, the situation would be very difficult for the
first and very dangerous for the second. Every wise nation, in a similar case,
will make a great effort to rid the other of this dependency very quickly. The
Republic of Tlaxcala, enclosed within the Mexican empire, preferred to do
without salt rather than to purchase it from the Mexicans or even to accept it
as a free gift. The wise people of Tlaxcala saw the trap hidden beneath this
generosity. They kept themselves free, and this little state, confined inside
that great empire, was finally the instrument of its ruin. [Back to Text]
(14) Do
you wish then to provide consistency to a state? Bring the extremes together as
much as possible. Tolerate neither rich people nor beggars. These two
conditions, by nature inseparable, are equally fatal to the common good. From
one come partisans of tyranny and from the other come the tyrants. It is always
between these two that public liberty becomes a market commodity: one purchases
it, and the other sells it. [Back to Text]
(15) Any branch of
foreign trade, says the Marquis d’Argenson, offers little more than an apparent
benefit to the kingdom in general. It can enrich some individuals and even some
towns, but the entire nation gains nothing from it, and the population is no
better off. [Back to Text]
(16)
For this reason, the College in Venice is called
Most Serene Prince, even when the
Doge is not in attendance. [Back to Text]
(17) [Rousseau’s note] The Palatine of Posen,
father of the King of Poland, Duke of Lorraine.
[Translator’s comment]
Rousseau quotes the Latin: Malo
periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium. [Back to Text]
(18) It
is clear that the word Optimates
among the ancients was not intended to mean the best but the most powerful. [Back to Text]
(19) It is particularly
important to have laws regulating the way magistrates are elected, for in
leaving that to the will of the prince, one cannot avoid falling into a
hereditary aristocracy, as has happened to the republics of Venice and Berne. Thus, the former has for a long time been in a state of
ongoing dissolution, but the latter has maintained itself thanks to the extreme
wisdom of its senate. That makes it a very honorable and very dangerous
exception. [Back to Text]
(20) Tacitus, Histories, Book I. [Translator’s
comment] Rousseau quotes the Latin: Nam utilissimus idem ac brevissiumus bonarum
malarumque rerum delectus, cogitare quid aut nolueris sub alio principe, aut
volueris. [Back to Text]
(21) In The Statesman. [Back to Text]
(22) This does
not contradict what I said above in Book 2, Chapter 9 about the disadvantages
of large states. For there the issue was the authority of the government over
its members, and here the issue is its power against the subjects. The government’s
scattered members serve as pressure points for acting on the people from a
distance, but it has no pressure point for acting directly on its members
themselves. Thus, in one of these cases, the length of the lever is a source of
its weakness, and in the other a source of its strength. [Back to Text]
(23) We should
use the same principle to judge those ages which deserve pride of place for the
prosperity of the human race. We have admired excessively those periods where
arts and letters are seen to have flourished, without penetrating the secret
object of their culture or without considering its fatal effects. What was part of slavery, ignorant people
called humanity. Will we never see in the maxims of books the crude
interest which prompts the authors to speak out? No, for no matter what they
can say, when a country, despite its brilliance, has a declining population, it
is not true that all is going well, and the fact that a poet has an income of
one hundred thousand livres is not enough to make his age the finest of all. We
need to examine, not so much the apparent calm and the tranquility of the
leaders, but the wellbeing of entire nations, and above all of the most highly
populated states. A hailstorm desolates a few cantons, but it rarely leads to
famine. Riots and civil wars make leaders very afraid, but they do not cause
genuine disasters for the people, who can even get some relief during a dispute
over who will be their tyrants. Their real prosperity or calamity arises from
their permanent condition. When everything remains crushed under the yoke, that
is when everything declines; that is when their leaders destroy them at will: Where they make a desert, they call it peace.
When the bickering among our great men disturbed the kingdom of France and the
coadjutor of Paris carried a knife in his pocket into the Parliament, that did
not prevent the French people from living happily in populous abundance, in an
honest and free ease. In an earlier age, Greece flourished in the midst of the
most cruel wars: there were rivers of blood, and yet the entire country was
covered with men. It would seem, says Machiavelli, that in the midst of
murders, proscriptions, and civil wars, our republic became stronger. The
virtue of its citizens, their morality, and their independence did more to
strengthen it than all the quarrels did to weaken it. A little agitation gives
souls their motive springs, and what truly makes the species prosper is not so
much peace as liberty.
[Translator’s
comment] Rousseau quotes the Latin: Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur,
cum pars servitutis essent; and ubi
solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. [Back to Text]
(24) The slow formation
and the progress of the Republic of Venice in its lagoons offers a notable
example of this succession, and it is truly astonishing that over a period of
more than twelve hundred years the Venetians seem to be still only at the
second stage, which began with the Serrar di Consiglio in 1198. As far as
concerns the ancient dukes, for whom the Venetians are criticized, it has been
established, no matter what the Scrutiny
of Venetian Liberty [Squitino della
libertà Veneta] may say about them, that they were not their sovereigns.
People will not fail to raise
the Roman Republic as an objection to what I say. They will claim that it
followed a completely opposite development, passing from monarchy to
aristocracy and from aristocracy to democracy. I am a long way from thinking of
it this way.
What Romulus first established
was a mixed government, which quickly degenerated into despotism. For
particular reasons the state died before its time, the way one sees a newborn
die before reaching adulthood. The expulsion of the Tarquins was the true age
of the birth of the Republic. But at first it did not take on a constant form,
because, by not abolishing the patriciate, it carried out only half its work.
For in this way, a hereditary aristocracy, which is the worst of legitimate
administrations, remained in conflict with democracy, and so the form of the
government, always uncertain and fluid, was not fixed until the establishment
of the tribunes, as Machiavelli has demonstrated. Only then was there a true
government and a genuine democracy. At that time, the people were, in fact, not
merely sovereign but also magistrate and judge. The senate was only a
subordinate tribunal to moderate or concentrate the government. The consuls
themselves, although patricians, chief magistrates, and absolute generals in
war, were in Rome merely presidents of the people.
From that point on, the
government, too, followed its natural tendency and inclined strongly to
aristocracy. Once the patriciate, as it were, abolished itself on its own, the
aristocracy was no longer confined to the body of patricians, as it is in
Venice and Genoa, but was in the body of the senate made up of patricians and
plebeians, even in the body of tribunes when they began to usurp active power.
For words have no effect on things, and when the people has leaders who govern
on its behalf, no matter what name these leaders bear, it is always an
aristocracy.
The abuses of the aristocracy
gave rise to the civil wars and the triumvirate. Sulla, Julius Caesar, and
Augustus became, in fact, veritable monarchs, and finally, under the despotism
of Tiberius, the state was dissolved. The history of Rome, therefore, does not
contradict my principle but confirms it.
[Translator’s
comment] The Serrar
di Consiglio (Closing of the Council)
refers to the decision to limit membership on the ruling council in Venice to a
small group, an action which, in effect, created a hereditary aristocracy. This
took place later than Rousseau indicates (in 1297 rather than 1198). Squitino della libertà Veneta, published
in 1612, attacked the traditional notion of Venetian liberty and argued that
Venice had been subject to German emperors. The Tribunes were elected Roman
officials representing the people. The office was established in 494 BC, in
response to a political crisis. The First Triumvirate was a private
power-sharing agreement among Pompey (106-48 BC), Julius Caesar (100-44 BC),
and Marcus Licinius (115-53 BC). Sulla (c. 138-78 BC) established himself as a
dictator at Rome. Augustus (63 BC-AD 14) emerged as the winner in the civil
wars and became Rome’s first emperor; Tiberius (42 BC-AD 37) was his successor.
[Back to
Text]
(25) For all those are considered and called tyrants who wield perpetual
power in a state which is accustomed to liberty. Cornelius
Nepos in Life of Miltiades. It is
true that Aristotle in the Nicomachean
Ethics, Book 8, Chapter 10, makes a distinction between a tyrant and a
king, in that the former governs to benefit himself and the latter only to
benefit his subjects. But apart from the fact that generally all the Greek
writers took the world tyrant in another sense, as is most apparent in the Hieron of Xenophon, it would follow from
Aristotle’s distinction that since the beginning of the world there has not yet
been a single king.
[Translator’s
comment] Rousseau quotes Nepos in Latin: Omnes enim et habentur et dicuntur tyranni,
qui potestate utuntur perpetua in ea civitate quae libertate usa est. Nepos
was a Roman historian (c. 110 BC–c. 25 BC). Xenophon (c. 430 BC–354 BC) was a
Greek writer who wrote a dialogue featuring Hiero, a tyrant of Syracuse. [Back to Text]
(26) In the general
sense of the word in the English parliament. The similarity of these offices
would have led to conflict between the consuls and the tribunes, even if all
jurisdictions had been suspended.
[Translator’s
comment] In Rome the comitia were popular assemblies. Rousseau discusses them in detail
in Book 4. The tribunes were leaders of the people (rather than the upper
classes). [Back to Text]
(27) To adopt
in cold countries the luxury and softness of the Orientals is to wish to give
oneself their chains. It is to submit to those chains even more unavoidably
than they did. [Back to Text]
(28) That is
what I had proposed to do in the sequel to this work, when, in dealing with
external relations, I would have come to confederations, a completely new
subject whose principles have yet to be established. [Back to Text]
(29) On the
condition, of course, that he does not leave in order to evade his duty and to
avoid serving his homeland at a time when she has need of us. Escaping then
would be a criminal and punishable act. It would no longer be a departure, but
desertion. [Back to Text]
(30) This
should always be understood as applying to a free state. For in other places,
family, possessions, lack of shelter, necessity, and violence can keep a
resident in the country in spite of himself. In that case, his remaining there,
in itself, no longer presupposes consent to or violation of the contract. [Back to Text]
(31) In Genoa,
one reads the word Liberty on the
front of prisons and on the chains of the galley slaves. This use of the motto
is fine and just. In fact, it is only the malefactors of all stations who
prevent the citizen from being free. In a country where all such people were in
the galleys, one would enjoy the most perfect freedom. [Back to Text]
(32) The name Rome, which people claim comes from Romulus, is Greek and signifies force. The name Numa is also Greek and signifies law. How likely is it that the first two kings of this town would
have had in advance names so well related to what they achieved? [Back to Text]
(33) I say on the Field of Mars, because it was there
that the comitia by centuries assembled. In the two other arrangements, the
people gathered at the forum or
elsewhere, and on those occasions the capite
censi had as much influence and authority as the foremost citizens. [Back to Text]
(34) The
century chosen by lot in this manner was called praerogativa, because it was the first one asked for its vote, and
from this practice the word prerogative is
derived. [Back to Text]
(35) Supervisors,
distributors of the ballots, and collectors of votes. [Translator’s note]
Rousseau uses Latin terms: Custodes, Diribitores, Rogatores suffragiorum. [Back to Text]
(36) This
appointment was made at night and in secret, as if they were ashamed to set a
man above the laws. [Back to Text]
(37) This
point he [Cicero] could not have been
sure about if he had proposed a dictator, for he did not dare nominate himself,
and he could not be sure that his colleague would nominate him. [Back to Text]
(38) In this
chapter I am merely pointing out something I have dealt with at greater length
in the Letter to M. d’Alembert. [Back to Text]
(39) Nonne ea quae possidet Chamos deus tuus tibi
jure debentur? Such is the text of the Vulgate. Father de Carrières has
translated it: Do you not believe you
have the right to possess what belongs to Chamos, your god? I do not know
the force of the Hebrew text, but I see that in the Vulgate Jephthah positively
recognizes the right of the god Chamos and that the French translator has
weakened this acknowledgement by adding according
to you, which is not in the Latin. [Back to Text]
(40) It is
perfectly clear that the Phocian War, which was called a Sacred War, was not a
war about religion. Its purpose was to punish sacrilegious actions, not to
subdue non-believers. [Back to Text]
(41) One
should take careful note that what binds the clergy together into a body is not
so much formal assemblies, like those in France, as the communion of churches.
Communion and excommunication are the social pact for the clergy, a pact with
which it ensures that it will always be the master of peoples and kings. All
the priests in communion together are fellow citizens, even if they are at
opposite ends of the earth. This invention is a political masterpiece. There
was nothing like it among the pagan priests, and that is why they never formed
a corporate body of clergy. [Back to Text]
(42) See among
other things in a letter of Grotius to his brother (April 11, 1643), what this
learned man agrees with and what he criticizes in the book De Cive. It is true that, with his tendency to be indulgent, he
appears to forgive what the author has done well for the sake of what he has
done badly, but not everyone is so merciful. [Back to Text]
(43) “In the
republic,” says the Marquis d’Argenson, “each person is perfectly free in what
is not harmful to others.” There you have the invariable limit. One cannot
state the matter more precisely. I could not deny myself the pleasure of
quoting this manuscript from time to time, although it is unknown to the
public, to render homage to the memory of an illustrious and respectable man,
who even in ministerial office maintained the heart of a true citizen as well
as just and sound views on the government of his country. [Back to Text]
(44) Caesar,
pleading for Catiline, tried to establish the doctrine of the mortality of the
soul. Cato and Cicero, in their refutation of him, did not waste time
philosophizing. They were content to show that Caesar spoke like a bad citizen
and was advancing a doctrine pernicious to the state. And this, in fact, was
what the Roman senate had to judge, not a question of theology. [Back to Text]
(45) Marriage,
for example, is a civil contract and thus has civil consequences without which
it is impossible for society even to subsist. Suppose, then, that the clergy
succeeded in claiming the sole right to permit this act, a right that it must
necessarily usurp in every intolerant religion. In that case, is it not obvious
that validating the authority of the church in this matter will make the
authority of the prince ineffectual, for he will then have only as many
subjects as those the clergy will be willing to provide him? If the church has
the power to marry or not to marry people depending on whether or not they
profess this or that doctrine, on whether they accept or reject this or that
formula, or on whether they are more or less devout, is it not obvious that, by
behaving prudently and holding firm, it alone will administer inheritances,
offices, citizens, and even the state, which could not subsist, no longer being
composed of anything but bastards? But, it will be said, there will be appeals
on the grounds of abuse, there will be summonses and decrees, and temporal
goods will be seized. How pitiful! The clergy, given that it has a little—I
will not say courage—but good sense, will let this happen and go on its way. It
will calmly permit these appeals, summonses, decrees, and seizures and will end
up being the master. There is no great sacrifice, it seems to me, in abandoning
a portion when one is sure of grasping the whole. [Back to Text]
(1) Thomas
Hobbes (1588-1679): an English philosopher and author of Leviathan (1651), a groundbreaking work on political philosophy. [Back to Text]
(2)
Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC-c. 50) a
Jewish philosopher, born in Egypt; Caligula (12-41): a Roman emperor notorious
for his cruelty and irrationality. [Back to Text]
(3)
The three children of Saturn were Jupiter,
Neptune, and Pluto (in Greek the father was Cronos, and the children were Zeus,
Poseidon, and Hades). They divided up the world when Jupiter overthrew Saturn.
Robinson Crusoe, the hero of a novel by Daniel Defoe was shipwrecked on an
island. [Back to Text]
(4)
Francois Rabelais (1483-1553): French monk,
doctor, and writer, famous for his bawdy satires. [Back to Text]
(5)
The Cyclops was a one-eyed monster who ate
human flesh. The reference is to an episode in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus and some of his crew are trapped in the
Cyclops’ cave. [Back to Text]
(6) The Établissements of Louis IX (1214-1270),
king of France, complied around 1273, contains a set of ordinances governing
conduct at the court in Paris. The Peace of God was an attempt by the Catholic
Church (starting in the late tenth century) to limit private wars with
spiritual sanctions rather than by force. [Back to Text]
(7) Here
the edition of 1782 adds the following passage: “The Romans, who had a better
understanding of and a greater respect for the right of war than any nation on
earth, carried their scruples about this matter so far that they did not permit
a citizen to serve as a volunteer unless he had expressly committed himself
against the enemy and against a particular named enemy. When a legion in which
Cato the Younger was doing his first military service under Popilius was being
decommissioned, Cato the Elder wrote to Popilius that if he wanted his son to
continue to serve under him, he would have to make him swear a new military
oath, because, once his first oath was annulled, he could no longer bear arms
against the enemy. And the same Cato wrote to his son to take care to present
himself for combat only after he had sworn this new oath. I know that one could
counter my argument with the siege of Clusium and other specific examples, but
my concern is to cite laws and customs. The Romans were those least likely to
transgress their own laws, and they are the only ones who have had such
excellent legislation.” [Back to Text]
(8) The point here is that
Rousseau’s notion of the state requires each citizen to be rationally capable
of understanding the social contract. This means that, while he may well have a
private interest different from the interest of the general will, he
understands why it is right that the interest of the general will prevail.
There is a danger, however, that individual citizens might not identify
themselves with such a rational person (who is a theoretical model) and would
thus avail themselves of the advantages of city life without being willing to
carry out their civic duties. [Back to Text]
(9)
Nunez de Balboa (c. 1475 to 1519), a
Spanish explorer, was the first European to lead an expedition to the Pacific
(in 1513). [Back to Text]
(10) James II (1633-1701),
the legitimate king of England, was opposed by many powerful forces in the
country (for various reasons, especially his Roman Catholic faith). He was
forced to leave the country in 1688 in a bloodless coup. He was succeeded by
William of Orange and his wife Mary, who in 1689 became the joint sovereigns
William III and Mary II.
[Back to Text]
(11) Lycurgus
(c. 820 BC-730 BC): a legendary king of Sparta who established that state’s
constitution; Solon (c. 638 BC-558 BC): an Athenian lawmaker; Numa (753 BC-673
BC): legendary second king of Rome; Servius (578 BC-535 BC): legendary sixth
king of Rome. [Back to Text]
(12) The
phrase public entity is here used for
the French chose publique, a literal
translation of the Latin phrase res
publica, meaning a republic. [Back to Text]
(13) Plato (428-348
BC): a major philosopher of ancient Greece, whose Socratic dialogue The Statesman explores, among other
things, the knowledge required for political power; Montesquieu (1689-1755): a
French political thinker. The words by Montesquieu are not in italics or in
quotation marks in Rousseau, although they are an exact quotation. The reference
is to his book Considerations on the
Causes of the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans (1734). [Back to Text]
(14) The
term decemvirs refers to a committee
of ten magistrates in the Roman Republic charged with drawing up a code of
laws. [Back to Text]
(15) The
phrase “child of Ishmael” is a reference to Mohammed. [Back to Text]
(16) William
Warburton (1698-1779): an English cleric who, among other things, wrote on
religious and political subjects. [Back to Text]
(17) In the
edition of 1782, this sentence reads: “Most peoples, like men, . . .” [Back to Text]
(18) The
Tarquins were legendary kings of early Rome. According to tradition, they were
eventually overthrown, and the Roman Republic was established. The Dutch
Republic became independent in 1648, after many years of war against Spanish
control. Switzerland’s independence from the Holy Roman Empire was recognized
in the same year.
[Back to Text]
(19) In the edition of
1782, this sentence reads: “Youth is not infancy. For nations, as for men,
there is a period of youth or, if you will, of maturity. One must wait for this
. . .” [Back to Text]
(20) Peter
the Great (1672-1725): Tsar of Russia, who presided over the expansion of the
Russian Empire and widespread reforms. [Back
to Text]
(21) Rene Descartes
(1596-1650): French philosopher, whose mechanical theory of nature proposed
that all matter in space was swirling in vortices.
[Back to Text]
(22) Corsica
won its independence and declared itself a republic in 1755. [Back to Text]
(23) The Spirit of the Laws (De L’esprit des
lois): a book on political theory written by Baron de Montesquieu, first
published in 1748. [Back to Text]
(24)
A continued proportion is one in which the
second term in the first ratio, is the first term in the second: e.g., A is to
B as B is to C, or A/B = B/C. See the
next footnote for further details of Rousseau’s mathematical analysis. [Back to Text]
(25) In
the following paragraphs Rousseau’s mathematical language may sound rather odd
and, in places, confusing, but his overall point is clear enough: in a properly
ordered state the established relationships among the people as subjects, the
sovereign assembly of citizens, and the government will vary depending upon the
overall size of the population. In the eighteenth century it was not uncommon
for thinkers to subject moral and political issues to mathematical analysis,
often in a search for some precise formula which would define the best
political arrangement or course of action. Rousseau himself sounds, at times,
quite sceptical of what he is doing here and, in fact, concludes his
mathematical ruminations by, in effect, dismissing them. To many readers, the
analogies contribute little to his argument, other than to emphasize that there
is no one specific form of government that will suit every state.
Briefly put, Rousseau’s mathematical
analysis goes something like this. There are three variables: the total
population, as the sovereign (S), the people as individual citizens (C), and
the government (G). He proposes that these should exist in a continued
proportion, so that S/G = G/C. (S and C are the extremes, and G is the mean
proportion). The value of C is always 1 (the individual citizen); therefore,
the larger S becomes, the larger G (the ‘middle term’) will have to be in order
to maintain the proportion. If we cross-multiply this equation, then S x 1 = G2
and G (the government) is equal to the square root of S (the sovereign). In
other words, the size of the government should be the square root of the total
population, a notion which (we find out) Rousseau does not wish to reduce to a
specific, easily calculated number, in case that makes him look ridiculous. [Back to Text]
(26)
This awkwardly worded sentence seems to
mean that with the ratio of the sovereign to the citizen (S/C), if the
population grows, from a mathematic point of view the fraction gets larger:
since C is always equal to 1, any increase in S (the quotient) will increase
the value of the total ratio. However, from the point of view of the individual
citizen, the larger S becomes the smaller his share in the sovereignty, and
thus the more his fraction of rule decreases. [Back to Text]
(27)
The phrase “double ratio” is somewhat
confusing. It seems to refer to the product of the two simple ratios (S/G and
G/C). If we multiply these together and remember that C = 1, the product is
SG/GC which factors down to S. Thus if the double ratio increases or decreases,
S increases or decreases correspondingly. To maintain the equality of the two
simple ratios, the middle term (G) will have to change. For all the potentially
confusing mathematical language, Rousseau’s point is simple enough: changes in
the size of the total population should result in a corresponding change in the
size of the government (“the middle term”). [Back to Text]
(28) The
following passage was added to the edition of 1782: “Machiavelli was an
honorable man and a good citizen, but he was attached to the House of Medici,
and so, when his homeland was oppressed, he was forced to disguise his love of
liberty. The choice of his detestable hero in itself demonstrates well enough
his secret intention, and the contradiction between the principles in his book The Prince and those in his Discourses on Livy and in his History of Florence shows that this
profound political thinker has so far had only superficial or corrupt readers.
The court in Rome has strictly prohibited his book. I can well believe it, for
that is the court he portrays most clearly.”
[Translator’s
note] The “detestable hero” referred to in the
quotation is Cesare Borgia, a notoriously corrupt and ultimately unsuccessful
politician, whom Machiavelli repeated praises in The Prince. [Back to Text]
(29) Dionysius the Younger, or Dionysius II (c. 397 BC–343 BC): king
of Syracuse, famous for his dissolute lifestyle. [Back to Text]
(30) Jean
Chardin (1643-1713), a French traveller, who wrote about his travel in Persia
and the Near East.
[Back to Text]
(31)
The Great King was a common title for the
king of Persia. Alliances of Greek cities twice defeated Persian invasions (in
490 BC and 480 BC).
[Back to Text]
(32)
The Gracchi were two brothers in the second
century BC who led efforts for land reforms to benefit the people. They were
both assassinated. [Back to Text]
(33)
Lictors were Roman citizens selected to
protect the more important public officials. [Back to Text]
(34) This process is still
standard procedure in meetings run on parliamentary principles or under
Robert’s Rules of Order. It is called
“moving into Committee of the Whole.” The procedure permits discussions which
are not bound by the stricter rules of the regular meeting or legislative
session. [Back to Text]
(35)
Rousseau uses the term cas odieux (literally odious cases), here translated as “potentially
dangerous cases.” According to Christopher Betts, the French phrase is an old
legal term “denoting a case in which the exercise of a right, if permitted,
would be harmful in some way.” [Back
to Text]
(36)
The comitia
in ancient Republican Rome were the legal assemblies of the people. The decemvirs, as noted earlier, were
members of a commission (originally set up in ancient Rome in 452 BC) entrusted
to create a code of law.
[Back to Text]
(37)
The phrase “sent to the bells” refers to
the fact that in Berne those sentenced to hard labour had bells hung around
their necks. It is not clear what punishment is meant by à la discipline. Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658): leader of the
parliamentary forces in the English Civil War, who led a successful rebellion
against Charles I, executed the king, and became Lord Protector; Duke of
Beaufort (Francois de Vendome) (1616-1669): important French political figure
who joined the insurrection against royal power (the Fronde). [Back to Text]
(38) Publius
Cornelius Tacitus (56 AD-117): historian of the Roman emperors; Marcus Salvius
Otho (32-69): a Roman emperor; Aulus Vitellius Germanicus (15-69): Roman
emperor, who succeeded Otho. [Back
to Text]
(39) The
Doge was the leader of the Venetian Republic, elected for life from among the
aristocratic Venetians. The Barnabites were impoverished nobles who had a right
to attend the Grand Council, the governing assembly in Venice. [Back to Text]
(40) Abbé de
Saint-Pierre (1658-1743): French writer, who, among other things, proposed
certain reforms of Louis XIV’s administration. [Back to Text]
(41) Servius
Tullius (who reigned from 578-535 BC): legendary sixth king of Rome. [Back to Text]
(42)
The censors were public officials in charge
of the census and public morality. [Back to Text]
(43)
Field of Mars (Campus Martius): a large
open area in Rome, used for military training and displays. [Back to Text]
(44)
Gaius Marius (157-86 BC): Roman general who
reorganized Rome’s military forces and served as consul (i.e., head of the
government) seven times. [Back to Text]
(45) The tribunes were
officials elected by the plebs (common people) to represent them. They had no
official powers but, because no one was allowed to harm them (i.e., they were
sacrosanct), they exercised considerable political influence. [Back to Text]
(46)
A cural magistrate in Rome was a senior
official entitled to use a special chair (the sella curulis). [Back
to Text]
(47) The ephors were
elected senior officials in ancient Sparta who played a major role in running
the state. [Back to Text]
(48) Agis (265–241 BC):
king of Sparta, who tried to correct political abuses; Cleomenes: king of
Sparta (235-222 BC). [Back to Text]
(49)
The consuls were the most important
political figures in the Roman Republic. Two were elected each year. Alba was a
legendary king of Rome.
[Back to Text]
(50)
Lucius Cornelius Sulla (138-78 BC): a Roman
general and politician, who marched on Rome, defeated Gaius Marius (157–86 BC),
who was defending the city, and established himself as a dictator; Gnaeus
Pompeius (106–48 BC), an important political and military leader in Rome, who
in 49 BC refused to defend the city against the advance of Julius Caesar
(100–44 BC) and his army.
[Back to Text]
(51)
Lucius Sergius Catilina (108–62 BC): a
Roman senator who attempted conspiratorial revolts against the Roman Republic,
after the second of which (in 63 BC) he fled from Rome. [Back to Text]
(52)
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC): a major
Roman writer, orator, and politician, elected Consul in 63 BC, exiled after his
success in the Catiline affair (for executing Roman citizens illegally) and
then permitted to return.
[Back to Text]
(53) In the 1782
edition, Rousseau adds: “They were from a different island which the refined
nature of our language does not permit me to name on this occasion.” Critics
have suggested that the island referred to here is Chios, a name that resembles the French word chier meaning to shit.
[Back to Text]
(54) Pierre
Bayle (1647-1706): a French philosopher who advocated a separation between
organized religion and the state; William Warburton (1698-1779): English writer
and bishop who, among many other endeavours, wrote about the importance of an
alliance between church and state. [Back
to Text]
(55) Sacer estod [Be accursed]: an ancient Roman formal sentence of severe punishment.
[Back to Text]
Ian Johnston is an Emeritus Professor at
Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, British Columbia. He is the author
of The Ironies of War: An
Introduction to Homer’s Iliad and of Essays and Arguments: A Handbook for
Writing Student Essays. He also translated a number of works,
including the following:
Aeschylus, Oresteia (Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides)
Aeschylus, Persians
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
Aeschylus, Seven Against
Thebes
Aeschylus, Suppliant Women
Aristophanes, Birds
Aristophanes, Clouds
Aristophanes, Frogs
Aristophanes, Knights
Aristophanes, Lysistrata
Aristophanes, Peace
Aristotle, Nicomachean
Ethics (Abridged)
Cuvier, Discourse on the
Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Earth
Descartes, Discourse on
Method
Descartes, Meditations on
First Philosophy
Diderot, A Conversation
Between D’Alembert and Diderot
Diderot, D’Alembert’s Dream
Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew
Euripides, Bacchae
Euripides, Electra
Euripides, Hippolytus
Euripides, Medea
Euripides, Orestes
Homer, Iliad (Complete
and Abridged)
Homer, Odyssey (Complete
and Abridged)
Kafka, Metamorphosis
Kafka, Selected Shorter Writings
Kant, Universal History of
Nature and Theory of Heaven
Kant, On Perpetual Peace
Lamarck, Zoological
Philosophy, Volume I
Lucretius, On the Nature of
Things
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and
Evil
Nietzsche, Genealogy of
Morals
Nietzsche, On the Uses and
Abuses of History for Life
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Rousseau, Discourse on the
Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men [Second
Discourse]
Rousseau, Discourse on the
Sciences and the Arts [First Discourse]
Rousseau, Social Contract
Sophocles, Antigone
Sophocles, Ajax
Sophocles, Electra
Sophocles, Oedipus at
Colonus
Sophocles, Oedipus the King
Sophocles, Philoctetes
Wedekind, Castle
Wetterstein
Wedekind, Marquis of Keith.
Most of these translations have been
published as books or audiobooks (or both)—by Richer Resources Publications,
Broadview Press, Naxos, Audible, and others.
Ian Johnston maintains a web site where
texts of these translations are freely available to students, teachers,
artists, and the general public. The site includes a number of Ian Johnston’s
lectures on these (and other) works, handbooks, curricular materials, and
essays, all freely available.
The addresses where these texts are available is as follows:
https://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/
http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/homepageindex.html