Explanation
The contract is association, not submission
Rousseau’s pact differs from an agreement by which a people gives itself to a ruler. Individuals associate with one another and together constitute the sovereign.
Why force cannot generate obligation
Physical superiority explains compliance but not duty. If might created right, a change in power would automatically reverse justice.
Alienation under equal conditions
Total commitment sounds severe, but reciprocity is meant to prevent private domination. Because everyone enters on the same terms, no individual retains an authority denied to others.
The public person
The pact creates more than a collection of agreements. It establishes an enduring agent capable of willing, legislating and acting through institutions.
General will and will of all
The will of all aggregates private advantage. The general will concerns what citizens share as members of one political body. A majority is not automatically general if faction or manipulation determines it.
Being compelled to be free
The controversial formula assumes that enforcement restores a person to reciprocal terms already accepted as a citizen. Its danger lies in allowing officials to identify their own commands with freedom.
Moral liberty
Freedom is not merely absence of restraint. Rousseau connects it with self-rule: action governed through laws one shares in authoring rather than appetite or another person’s will.
Sovereignty cannot be represented
Delegates may administer or advise, but no representative can possess another person’s civic will. This places Rousseau in tension with large modern representative states.
Law must be general
A law comes from the whole and considers classes of persons or actions rather than naming private beneficiaries. Generality limits legislation as well as defining it.
The legislator’s paradox
A founder needs insight capable of shaping citizens but lacks sovereign authority. Institutions must persuade and educate without replacing the people’s right to enact law.
Government is not the sovereign
Government executes decisions and develops its own institutional interests. Keeping this agent subordinate to citizens is the central constitutional problem.
No universally best government
Geography, size, wealth, custom and population affect which executive form is workable. Political judgement must therefore connect principles with circumstances.
The tendency towards usurpation
Officials possess continuous organisation while citizens assemble intermittently. Government consequently tends to enlarge its independence unless sovereign activity is renewed.
Assemblies sustain citizenship
Periodic meetings do more than select personnel. They reaffirm that public authority originates in the citizens and allow judgement of institutional trust.
Emergency power
Strictly temporary dictatorship addresses circumstances normal law cannot manage quickly. Rousseau recognises necessity but warns that prolonged suspension destroys republican order.
Civil religion and toleration
Public belief should support law and social duty without creating a competing church. The proposed exclusion of the intolerant nevertheless raises its own problem about who defines civic acceptability.
Continuing democratic challenge
Rousseau forces representative societies to ask whether voting occasionally is enough for self-government and how common interest can be formed amid organised inequality.