[1] Contrat Social, bk. II., ch. v.
The “clauses of the contract” then reduce themselves to a single one, “the total alienation of each associated member, with all his rights, (the language is moulded by the fiction of an actual contract and pre-social rights,) to the community as a whole.” The community as a whole is therefore absolute. The subsequent passage, referred to above, [1] in which he speaks as if individual rights were retained, is a case of the vacillation on which we have remarked.
[1] P. 90.
{92} The essence of this “social pact” is further reducible to the following formula:
“Each of us puts into the common stock his person and his entire powers under the supreme direction of the general will: and we further receive each individual as an indivisible member of the whole.”
“Instantaneously, in place of the particular person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly has voices, which receives from this same act its unity, its common self (son moi commun), its life, and its will. This public person which thus forms itself, by the union of all the others, used to take the name of city, [1] and now takes that of republic or body politic, which is called by its members State when it is passive, Sovereign when it is active, Power when comparing it with others.”
[1] Rousseau’s footnote in loc. “The true sense of this word is almost entirely effaced among the moderns; most of them take a town for a city, and a townsman for a citizen. They are not aware that the houses make the town, but the citizens make the city.”
In this passage the formula of association, and much of the commentary upon it, imply the “contract” to have been an event in history. Such is the bearing of the words “act of association,” “produces,” “receives,” “forms itself.” It is admitted that Rousseau’s thoughts are always more or less struggling with this conception, which, it must however be remembered, he explicitly refuses to rely on; and henceforward, having sufficiently called attention to it, we shall not encumber ourselves with observing upon it in every instance.
Putting aside then the defective terminology, and {93} bearing in mind that Rousseau considers himself to be analysing the essence of that act or character “by which a people is a people,” we find in this passage very far-reaching ideas. We find that the essence of human society consists in a common self, a life and a will, which belong to and are exercised by the society as such, or by the individuals in society as such; it makes no difference which expression we choose. The reality of this common self, in the action of the political whole, receives the name of the “general will,” and we shall examine its nature and attributes in the following chapter.
The primary point which it is necessary to make clear, however, is whether the whole set of ideas is to be seriously pressed, or whether the unity which they indicate is merely formal and superficial. For phrases of the kind here employed may be found in many earlier writers. The term “person,” for example, comes through Hobbes from the Roman law. “Persona,” in Roman law, we are told, [1] means either a complex of rights or the possessor of those rights, whether an individual or a corporate body. “Unus homo sustinet plures personas.” Thus a man may devolve his “persona” on another man. A corporation has a single “persona.” It is in this sense that for Hobbes, the State is a “real unity in one person,” which person has been devolved by all the individuals of a multitude upon one man or a definite assembly of men, whose acts therefore are, politically speaking, the acts of the whole multitude so united in one “person.”