The Social Contract

The Social Contract (1762) opens with its most famous sentence: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Rousseau's task is to explain how legitimate political authority is possible at all, given that authority claimed by force alone is no authority.

The answer is the general will. Political legitimacy requires that the people collectively be both sovereign and subject. When citizens obey the law, they obey themselves, because the law expresses the general will, the will of the community as such rather than the sum of private interests. The general will always aims at the common good, though it can be mistaken about how to achieve it. Sovereignty cannot be delegated or represented; only the assembled citizenry can express it. Rousseau is hostile to representative government on principle, and calls for small, participatory republics rather than the large monarchies of his day.

The implications are radical. Private interests must yield to the common good. A citizen who refuses to obey the general will "will be forced to be free," a phrase that has troubled every reader since. The Social Contract also treats civil religion as a political necessity: a society needs shared beliefs to function, and a faith that places ultimate loyalty anywhere other than the community is a threat to the republic.

The Social Contract was the theoretical text of the French Revolution, invoked to justify both the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Terror. Kant read the general will as the political expression of practical reason. Marx dismissed it as a bourgeois contract that consecrates existing property relations. The tension between Rousseau's popular sovereignty and liberal constitutionalism has not been resolved.