3. The famous opening words of chap. i. of the {88} Contrat Social (published 1762) sound like the beginning of a tirade against civilisation and the State. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, who does not fail to be more of a slave than they.” Here we might well suppose ourselves to be reading the preface to a demonstration that all social constraint is slavery, and that man, in a state of nature, possessed a liberty which he has now lost. We expect such an opening to be followed by a denunciation of the fetters of society, and a panegyric on the pre-social life. And there can hardly be a doubt that these sentences, along with a few similar phrases which stick in the memory, are the ground of the popular idea of Rousseau, shared by too many scholars. [1] But how does Rousseau go on? Here are the succeeding sentences. “How did this change take place? I do not know. What can render it legitimate? I think I can tell.” Here, as previously in the discourse on “Equality,” he (1) cuts himself loose in principle from the historical fiction of a social pact succeeding a state of nature; and (2) he promises to furnish a justification for the change (or, striking out the quasi-historical term “change,” for the condition of man), which is expressed by the words, “is everywhere in chains.”
[1] Professor Henry Sidgwick and Professor Ritchie are notable exceptions. See also, and pre-eminently, the essay of the late Professor Wallace referred to above.
This then is the task which he has set himself. The sentences last cited show that his answer will, in some degree, turn its back on his question, and that really man had little natural freedom to lose, and is not everywhere in chains. But the fact that {89} the problem first struck Rousseau’s mind through a feeling of rebellion against social slavery, and a loathing for the civilisation of his day, sets him at the very beginning of the path which social theory has to traverse, and ensures that the difficulties which we all feel at times will be met in their sharpest form. He knows, in short, that something, which can look like utter bondage, is a fact; and he knows that this fact has to be justified.
After some chapters devoted to clearing away inadequate solutions of the problem, he re-states it as follows, in terms of that form of the supposed social contract in which it was regarded as a compact of all with all for the constitution of a community:
“To find a form of association which shall defend and protect, with the entire common force, the person and the goods of each associate, and by which, each, uniting himself to all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and remain as free as before.” [1]
[1] Contrat Social, bk. i., ch. vi.
4. Before proceeding to examine the true meaning of this formula and its answer, we will briefly notice the conflict of ideas suggested by it. Man’s freedom, it is implied, remains at the same level. Even his power is not increased; it is only that individuals combine their forces, previously isolated. These implications suit neither the view he starts from, nor the view he arrives at. If man had a natural freedom, and then submitted to society, though merely to increase his force of action, some of his freedom must be lost, and he cannot remain as free as he was before. But if man in society {90} has a nature, which he could not have out of society, such that his individuality is maximised by the organisation of a social whole, then it is plain that he is not merely as free “as he was before,” but very much more free; free, indeed, strictly speaking, under social conditions alone. The notion which Rousseau started from, that man has surrendered some part of a previous freedom in order to make the most of the remainder, appears, as here, in the language of compromise, frequently through the Contrat Social. But it is not effectively relied on, for Rousseau is too acute to attempt a demarcation theory, and while he assumes, for example, according to the literal notion of a compact, that man only surrenders as much of his liberty as is necessary to the community, he sees that the sovereign is sole judge of this proportion and consequently is absolute. [1] In the same way he first deduces the sovereign’s right of inflicting capital punishment from the individual’s pre-existing right to risk his life in order to save it, in virtue of which he has transferred to the sovereign a right to demand his life when necessary to the public safety, which includes his own. And then, feeling this to be a fiction, he ekes it out by the precisely contrary suggestion that a criminal has broken the social treaty, has ceased to be a member of the community, and is dealt with as an enemy on terms of war. [2] This supplementation shows that Rousseau is aware of the weakness of his other account of the matter, based on non-social individual right. His constant failure, entire or partial, to free himself from the language of “first appearance {91} theories,” as we have ventured to call them, is just what makes him so instructive, in view of the similar inclination which besets us all.
[1] Contrat Social, bk. II., ch. v.
[2] Bk. II., ch. v.
5. We will now examine the real nature of his solution. For the historical fiction of a social contract, he substitutes, in answer to the problem formulated above (see section 3, end), the conditions which constitute a “people” or commonwealth. He speaks, indeed, of the “act” or “contract” which constitutes it—a survival of the language which belongs to the fiction. [1] But it is plain, even if he had not said so distinctly in the first chapter, that he is dealing not with an act in historical time, but with the essential nature of a social body. The “clauses of the contract,” he explains, are dependent on “the nature of the act”; they are implicit and universal—that is to say, not capable of being affected by any actual or supposed agreement in contravention of what the essence of a body politic requires. He is, as he has clearly said in the previous chapter, analysing the “act” “by which a people is a people,” i.e. the conditions of political unity.