Book III, Chapter XVII: The Institution Of The Government
UNDER what general notion, then, must be included the act by which the government is instituted? I shall observe first that this act is complex, or composed of two others, viz. the establishment of the law and the execution of the law.
By the first, the sovereign determines that there shall be a governing body estabiished in such or such a form ; and it is clear that this act is a law.
By the second, the people nominate the chiefs who will be entrusted with the government when established. Now, this nomination being a particular act, is not a second law, but only a consequence of the first, and a function of the government.
The difficulty is to understand how there can be an act of government before the government exists, and how the people, who are only sovereign or subjects, can, in certain circumstances, become the Prince or the magistrates.
Here, however, is disclosed one of those astonishing properties of the body politic, by which it reconciles operations apparently contradictory; for this is effected by a sudden conversion of sovereignty into democracy in such a manner that, without any perceptible change, and merely by a new relation of all to all, the citizens, having become magistrates, pass from getieral acts to particular acts, and from the law to the execution of it,
This change of relation is not a subtlety of speculation without example in practice ; it occurs every day in the Parliament of England, in which the Lower House on certain occasions resolves itself into Grand Committee in order to discuss business better, and thus becomes a simple commission instead of the sovereign court that it was the moment before. In this way it afterwards reports to itself, as the House of Commons, what it has just decided in Grand Committee.67
Such is the advantage peculiar to a democratic government, that it can be established in fact by a simple act of the general will ;
and after this, the provisional government remains in power, should
that be the form adopted, or establishes in the name of the sovereign the government prescribed by the law ; and thus everything is according to rule. It is impossible to institute the government in any other way that is legitimate without renouncing the principles heretofore established.