JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Of the Social Contract and Other Political Writings

Edited by

CHRISTOPHER BERTRAM

Translated by

QUINTIN HOARE

PENGUIN BOOKS

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OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT AND OTHER POLITICAL WRITINGS

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU was born in Geneva in 1712. Abandoned by his father at the age of ten, he tried his hand as an engraver’s apprentice before he left the city in 1728. From then on he was to wander Europe seeking an elusive happiness. At Turin he became a Catholic convert; and as a footman, seminarist, music teacher or tutor visited many parts of Switzerland and France. In 1732 he settled for eight years at Chambéry or at Les Charmettes, the country house of Madame de Warens, remembered by Rousseau as an idyllic place in the Confessions. In 1741 he set out for Paris, where he met Diderot, who commissioned him to write the musical articles for the Encyclopédie. In the meantime, he fathered five children by Thérèse Levasseur, a servant girl, and abandoned them to a foundling home. The 1750s witnessed a breach with Voltaire and Diderot and his writing struck a new note of defiant independence. In his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts and the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, he showed how the growth of civilization corrupted natural goodness and increased inequality between men. In 1758 he attacked his former friends, the Encyclopaedists, in the Letter to d’Alembert on Theatre, which pilloried cultured society. In 1757 he moved to Montmorency and these five years were the most fruitful of his life. His remarkable novel Julie, or the New Héloïse (1761) met with immediate and enormous success. In this and in Emile, which followed a year later, Rousseau invoked the inviolability of personal ideals against the power of the state and the pressures of society. The crowning achievement of his political philosophy was Of the Social Contract, published in 1762. That same year he wrote an attack on revealed religion, The Creed of a Savoyard Priest. He was driven from Switzerland and fled to England, where he only succeeded in making an enemy of Hume and returned to his continental peregrinations. In 1770 Rousseau completed his Confessions. His last years were spent largely in France, where he died in 1778.

CHRISTOPHER BERTRAM is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Rousseau and The Social Contract (Routledge, 2004) and is a past president of the Rousseau Association. His main research interests are in social contract theory, in theories of justice and in public justification.

QUINTIN HOARE won his first translation prize (at school) for a rendering of Homer, and in 1968 produced one of the earliest versions of Walter Benjamin to appear in English. He has translated from Italian (Antonio Gramsci, Franco Moretti), French (Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Paul Nizan, Germaine Tillion, Jacques Berque, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse), German (Hermann Grab, Richard Wagner, Siegfried Kracauer), Russian (Nikolai Chernyshevskii) and Bosnian (Mladen Vuksanović), winning the John Florio Prize in 1978/9, the Scott-Moncrieff Prize in 1984 and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize in 1989. He was general editor of the Pelican Marx Library, and since 1997 has been director of The Bosnian Institute. Married to the historian Branka Magaš, he has had a long association with the former Yugoslavia and its successor states.

Introduction

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of the dominant intellectual figures of the modern era. According to the cover of a special edition of the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, he invented childhood, nature, equality, democracy and ‘the cult of the self’.¹ Others have credited Rousseau as the great forerunner of Marx and Freud or as the theorist of participatory and deliberative democracy. Yet he has also been vilified as a charlatan, and accused of being the inspiration for the Great Terror of the French Revolution, for ‘totalitarian democracy’ and, thus, indirectly, for the evils of communism and fascism. Today, happily, we are to some extent free from the ideological blinkers of the Cold War and can assess Rousseau on his own merits rather than through the distorting lens of subsequent conflicts. And those merits are considerable. Rousseau was an unusual man with unusual gifts. Difficult to get along with, certainly mentally unbalanced, he was a Genevan outsider in the salons of Paris; a man who rejected religious orthodoxy, but could not bring himself to accept the scientism and scepticism of the Enlightenment; a late-developing autodidact, a dabbler in many fields and an expert in some; a lover of freedom but a pessimist about its realization, Rousseau was able to delineate many of the characteristic pathologies of modernity when the modern age was still being born.

Those who encounter Rousseau today are likely to get to know him through just one or two facets of his achievement. Students of philosophy or political science, for example, will probably read Of the Social Contract and, perhaps, the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. But Rousseau contributed to a wide variety of fields. His Confessions, together with his other autobiographical writings such as the paranoid Dialogues and the elegiac Reveries of the Solitary Walker, support a claim that he invented autobiography in its modern sense. By giving an interior account of how Rousseau became himself, an account predicated on the notion that a person’s psyche could be shaped and fixed by small but traumatic incidents, Rousseau made possible modes of thinking about the self that later found literary expression in writers like Proust, scientific form in Freudian psychoanalysis, and are with us today in modern obsessions with therapies of the self. His writings on childcare and education, particularly Emile, have also been tributaries to that same stream. How can we bring up our children to lead happy and fulfilled lives in a world of conflict and competition? It is a question that millions of parents have asked themselves in the West over the past two centuries, but Rousseau was one of the first people to attempt an answer. By trying to think through the elementary forms of psychological development, and the meaning and character of the emotions, not only did Rousseau begin child psychology, but he also prepared a stream of philosophical exploration of related themes, with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit being one prominent result. Rousseau was also a novelist, with his work Julie, or the New Héloïse being among the most popular creations of the eighteenth century, scandalizing and titillating both bourgeoisie and aristocracy but additionally providing a further vehicle for Rousseau’s wider psychological concerns.

If all that were not enough, we can mention his contribution to music, both as a composer and a theorist. Rousseau participated in one of the most significant ‘culture wars’ episodes of the past three centuries, the ‘Querelle des Bouffons’, in which he and his friends championed the aesthetic of Italian opera against the pomposity and bombast of its French counterpart. Yet despite condemning French as inherently unmusical, he composed an opera in the language, Le Devin du Village, which was the smash hit of 1752, earned him the offer of a pension for life from the King (Rousseau declined it) and stayed in the repertoire for a hundred years. As a music theorist and critic, Rousseau became one of the principal contributors to Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie and wrote his own Dictionary of Music before, at the very end of his life, befriending and corresponding with the great reformer of opera Gluck. We can even add to this list of wider interests: Rousseau’s writings on botany, expressed in the form of a series of letters to an English noblewoman, were later transformed into a textbook used at the University of Cambridge.

The texts collected in this volume comprise some of Rousseau’s principal later writings in political philosophy and political science. However, they were composed against the background of a set of earlier studies, most notably the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts and the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, which connect explicitly to the wider themes of Rousseau’s project. In those earlier studies, Rousseau had written about the fall of mankind and about the material and psychological causes of our modern unfreedom. In the Discourse on Inequality in particular, he paves the way for much later thinking about the development of the human species and about problems of cooperation and exploitation. From Marx to modern work in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, we can discern the traces of Rousseau’s influence. Some of the details of Rousseau’s evolutionary story and its psychological dynamics are discussed below. Here, it is important to note its underlying motivation and the principle which unifies it. The idea that gives coherence to all this work is the one that finds expression right at the outset of the Social Contract. It is the idea that mankind is free by nature but is everywhere in chains: legal, material and psychological. Rousseau combines this idea with an attempt to think through how our freedom could be restored to us in some form. Rousseau’s opponents, from Voltaire to Nietzsche and beyond, have tried to pin on him the naive idea that the answer to mankind’s problems is a return to nature, to some pre-social Eden.² Rousseau was indeed fascinated with nature and his appreciation of its beauty and grandeur helped to generate modern aesthetic sensibilities and finds expression in our contemporary concerns about our planet and the destruction of the environment. But Rousseau does not so much want to return to nature as to find a place for our nature in a world where it is both materially and psychologically impossible for us to recreate some lost paradise. At the beginning of Emile, he expresses this notion with the metaphor of a seedling that has taken root on a busy path. Left to nature alone, that seedling will quickly be trampled and die; to survive and flourish it needs protection and cultivation. In that work, the task is to form an individual who can grow to autonomous adulthood in a world of inequality and corruption. In Of the Social Contract, Rousseau is concerned with the possibility of a whole society combining the interdependence of modernity with the freedom and equality of individuals.

ROUSSEAU’S LIFE AND BACKGROUND

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712, the son of Isaac Rousseau, a watchmaker and a citizen of the independent city-state. Rousseau’s mother Suzanne died a few days after his birth, so he and his brother were brought up by their father. Jean-Jacques seems to have had a somewhat idiosyncratic education, involving much reading of the classics (especially Plutarch). Isaac appears to have been a fairly imprudent and impulsive individual, and, having managed to get himself into a dispute with a nobleman, was forced to flee Geneva when Jean-Jacques was ten years old. The boy was sent to live with a pastor’s family outside the city, an experience which is given a lively depiction in his Confessions. Later, Rousseau had to learn a trade and was apprenticed to an engraver, who, according to Rousseau’s later account, treated his charge with cruelty and violence. At the age of sixteen, having failed to get back inside the city gates before they were locked at curfew, the young apprentice decided not to return and face the beating he anticipated, but rather to seek a new life beyond Geneva.

The Geneva Rousseau abandoned was not the wealthy cosmopolitan city of today, but a republic founded on sectarian confessional principles by Jean Calvin himself in 1536. By the early eighteenth century, there was considerably more religious heterodoxy in Geneva than earlier, but it was still a Protestant fortress surrounded by hostile Catholic states, with a parallel system of religious law enforcement to punish moral deviation. In some formal sense, Geneva was democratic, in that its sovereign body was notionally the Grand Conseil, composed of all its citizens. But this apparently democratic constitution fell short of genuine popular sovereignty on two grounds. First, the hereditary citizens of the state had, by Rousseau’s time, become a minority of the population. Second, even those with political rights had very little effective power. In practice, control was in the hands of the interlocked group of a few families who controlled a much smaller body, the Petit Conseil. Much of Geneva’s recent political history had involved sharp and sometimes bloody contestation between those who sought to restore or establish citizen sovereignty and the small oligarchy who exercised power. Rousseau himself would become entangled in this controversy after the publication of the Social Contract in 1762, its banning by the Genevan authorities and subsequent protests by some of the Genevan bourgeoisie, a dispute that would lead to the composition of his Letters Written from the Mountains.

In 1728 the immediate alternative to Geneva appeared to Rousseau in the form of an attractive Catholic convert in Annecy, Françoise-Louise de Warens. Mme de Warens took the young Jean-Jacques under her protection before sending him to Turin for instruction in the Catholic faith. After converting and spending some time in service and starting to train for the priesthood, Rousseau then spent time as a travelling musician and music copyist before returning to the de Warens household near Chambéry in 1731. Rousseau remained there for most of the rest of the decade, becoming, for a while, de Warens’s lover. In 1740, whilst working as a tutor to the de Mably family in Lyon, Rousseau made his first contacts with leading figures of the Enlightenment such as Condillac and d’Alembert, before travelling to Paris in 1742 to present the Academy of Sciences with a novel numerical scheme for musical notation. This was not well received and Rousseau left Paris briefly to serve as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice, an episode which both made him familiar with a form of republican government other than Geneva’s and aroused a passion for Italian music. Returning to Paris in 1744, Rousseau befriended the philosopher Denis Diderot, and started to write on musical themes, with his contributions including articles for the Encyclopédie.³ The following year, he started a relationship with Thérèse Levasseur, a laundry-maid, with whom he had five children, all of whom were left at the foundling hospital shortly after birth, almost certainly to perish there.

Rousseau was now approaching middle age, with no substantial intellectual achievements to his name, a minor figure in the salons of fashionable Paris. Yet in 1749 Rousseau had an experience which, he claimed, transformed his life and outlook and certainly set him on a path to both fame and notoriety. Walking to the Château de Vincennes, where Diderot had been temporarily imprisoned for testing the limits of religious tolerance, Rousseau read in the Mercure de France newspaper of an essay competition set by the Academy of Dijon. The Academy invited submissions on the theme of whether the development of the arts and sciences had improved or corrupted public morals. Rousseau subsequently related that he had had some kind of epiphany on reading this question and had, in his dreamlike state, come to the realization that the human race is naturally good but is corrupted by society. He would often insist that it was this (somewhat elusive) thesis of natural goodness which gives unity to his works. He employed the idea to argue, in what was to become his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, that the human race had indeed been morally corrupted by cultural and scientific ‘progress’. This both won Rousseau the prize and, perhaps more importantly, provoked a series of replies from figures including the exiled King of Poland. His future celebrity was assured.

After concentrating on musical issues for much of the early 1750s, Rousseau returned to social theory in a major way with the publication of his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality among Men in 1755. This work, conventionally known as the Second Discourse, was again written in response to a competition call by the Academy of Dijon. Rousseau did not win the prize a second time, but he did produce a much more mature work and it represents the first really systematic exposition of his ideas on human social evolution, moral psychology and philosophical anthropology. It also contains a long dedicatory essay full of praise for the city of Geneva, of which he had reclaimed his citizenship after formally reconverting to Calvinism in 1754. The political status of this dedication is a matter of controversy: is it sincere or is its praise for the idea of Geneva’s institutions an implicit critique of the working of its actual ones?

The Second Discourse marks a deepening of Rousseau’s intellectual and personal estrangement from the mainstream of the French Enlightenment, a process that would be completed in 1758 with the appearance of his Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre, in which he opposed the Encyclopaedist’s proposal for the construction of a theatre in Geneva on the grounds that theatre is corrosive of the morals necessary for virtuous republican citizenship. This split with his erstwhile intellectual milieu began the most productive period of Rousseau’s life. Julie, or the New Héloïse appeared in 1761 and was an immediate literary sensation, followed in 1762 by both Emile and Of the Social Contract. Intellectual triumph was, however, accompanied by both personal and political catastrophe. Both of the latter two works contain passages of religious heterodoxy equally shocking to Parisian Catholics and Genevan Calvinists. As a consequence, Rousseau was obliged to flee, initially to Switzerland and then, in 1766, to England at the invitation of David Hume.

Rousseau’s stay in England has been the subject of much commentary. Rousseau developed paranoid fantasies about Hume, whom he erroneously believed to be implicated in a plot against him. It was certainly an unhappy time for the Genevan, though not unremittingly so. He spent much of it at Richard Davenport’s estate in Weaver Hills in Staffordshire, where he worked on the Confessions in a hermit’s grotto beside the house and botanized in the surrounding countryside. After fourteen months in Staffordshire, gripped by anxiety and paranoia, Rousseau fled again, to Lincolnshire and thence back to France, where he was still, technically, vulnerable to arrest.

Rousseau remained in France for the rest of his life, a somewhat isolated figure. Not that this period was without achievement: Rousseau completed some political works, notably his writings on Corsica and on Poland, but also made progress on his autobiographical writings. He completed the Confessions and the Dialogues, which – in a fit of derangement – he attempted to place on the altar at Notre Dame. His final and perhaps most beautiful work, the elegiac Reveries of the Solitary Walker, foretells his death and expresses his paranoid concern that his now all-pervasive enemies will attempt to publish forgeries in his name. Rousseau died in 1778 but his work grew in influence and, indeed, acquired cult status during the French Revolution. In 1794, the revolutionaries transferred his remains to the Panthéon.

MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND HISTORY

One of the difficulties that any reader coming fresh to the text of the Social Contract or to some of the related writings is likely to have is that the argument there presupposes a wider one, which Rousseau only hints at. When he tells us, in the briefest possible terms, that mankind was born free but is still in chains, or that he assumes that men are forced to associate because they can no longer subsist from their individual forces alone, he is assuming, but not stating, an account of human psychology and history that he provides only in other places. The conjectural history that he gestures towards is sketched most fully in the Discourse on Inequality, though elements are also to be found in such places as the Essay on the Origin of Languages (unpublished in his lifetime). The moral psychology is given extensive treatment in both the Second Discourse and in Emile (especially in Book IV). In the first, draft, version of Of the Social Contract, known as the Geneva Manuscript, Rousseau makes more of an effort to provide this essential background, through a chapter which engages with an argument that Diderot had put in his article on ‘Natural Right’ for the Encyclopédie. That draft chapter, ‘On the General Society of the Human Race’, is translated as part of the present volume.

While the account Rousseau gives of his moral psychology varies somewhat from text to text in detail and in emphasis, the basic picture is reasonably clear. He posits two basic psychological propensities as innate: one is a disposition to care for one’s self; the other is an instinct to feel compassion (pitié) for another suffering person. The first of these, which Rousseau calls amour de soi, directs individuals to seek the nourishment and shelter necessary for survival and to flee from danger; the second moves a person to attend to another’s needs and to relieve their distress, provided that doing so is compatible with the reasonably safe pursuit of the first person’s basic interests. The original humans, he believes, were not naturally sociable creatures at all, but wandered alone through primeval forests, sometimes encountering one another to reproduce, but essentially pursuing their limited goals with the powers and capacities that they had as natural creatures. Crucially, for Rousseau, these powers were in balance with their needs so that they did not depend on the cooperation of others in order to provide for themselves.

A long period of development follows, during which human nature is gradually transformed. As human populations grow, encounters between individuals become more and more frequent, and elementary forms of cooperation in activities like hunting start to develop. Eventually, people start to live in small communities. At around this time an important change in human psychology occurs. Sex ceases to be a matter of what people get up to instinctually with members of the opposite sex whom they encounter at random in the forest, and starts to be a matter of people deliberately choosing their mates from an array of potentially suitable candidates. Crucially, they themselves also become objects of possible choice for others and become aware of themselves as such. In such an environment people start to see and imagine themselves as others see them, and to compare themselves with their possible sexual rivals. This new awareness brings with it the advent of jealousy and the crime of passion, as well as of pride in being attractive and of shame and self-loathing at not being desirable. Thus emerges a sense of self as a social being among others and having an existence for others.

Rousseau calls the new psychological drive that arises amour propre. Rousseau’s texts are not altogether consistent about whether this is a third psychological force alongside pitié and amour de soi or whether it is a transformation of amour de soi corresponding to the new socially aware state of the person. It does not matter much for our purposes here. What amour propre introduces is a disposition to care about one’s relative position, one’s ranking in a social group and the esteem in which one is held by others. Whereas the original amour de soi focused on whether certain absolute needs of the person had been achieved – am I warm, fed, rested, etc.? – amour propre always has this relative and comparative feature.

In the Discourse on Inequality, even a fairly attentive reader could be forgiven for taking the impression that Rousseau thinks of amour propre as something wholly destructive and negative. And indeed many readers of Rousseau have come away from his writings with this idea: that amour propre is something bad to be repressed. Yet his view is more complex than this would suggest. While Rousseau sees amour propre as being the source of much evil and unhappiness, he also believes that it generates a transformation in the human psyche that makes possible the development of morality, reason and justice. This is one reason why he thinks of the primitive societies in which amour propre first emerges as being the happiest era of human existence: in such societies, individuals have achieved a certain level of self-awareness and rationality such that they have overcome the purely instinctual stupidity of their wood-wandering ancestors, without yet suffering too much of the corrosive social pathologies that amour propre will generate among their descendants. Those social pathologies, Rousseau believes, pervade the modern world and are the primary source of social conflict and personal unhappiness.

In the Second Discourse, Rousseau imagines a dialectic developing, according to which human psychological and material needs constantly expand, making people increasingly dependent on one another yet also putting them mutually at odds. New technologies in metallurgy and agriculture increase the output of goods and the size and density of human populations, but they also require the cooperation of individuals in a division of labour. These technologies also explain the development of property, as people who have invested in agriculture seek to protect their crops by excluding others from what was once common to them all. As people require the help of others to get what they want, they also start to do what is necessary in order to secure that help. They flatter others and deceive them about their real beliefs and intentions, in order to get those others to behave as they wish. Looking at themselves as if through the eyes of others, they also start to change themselves in order to become desirable. Yet no one can find true satisfaction, since everybody knows that this misrepresentation is what people must do to secure their aims. As serial deceivers themselves they are all too bitterly aware that others are showing them the face that it is advantageous for them to see.

Increasingly complex and hierarchical societies are thus pervaded by insincerity and inauthenticity. Each person seeks the satisfaction of their amour propre, to know that they are loved, preferred or respected. But they also know that others have a self-serving motive to pretend to love and respect them. Bosses seek to exact respect from their subordinates and threaten dire consequences if it is not forthcoming, but they also know that their underlings – who may titter and gossip about them in private – say what they say because they must. Amour propre remains frustrated: it even becomes enraged as people react bitterly to perceived signs of disrespect and revenge themselves on those who treat them with contempt.

Much of this dismal picture is familiar from Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature in Leviathan (1651),⁴ a condition where people are driven to conflict not only by competition for scarce resources, but also out of desire to dominate others or outrage at being treated with less respect than they believe they deserve. Rousseau’s quarrel with Hobbes was that Hobbes believed that these sources of conflict were basic and original features of human nature, whereas Rousseau saw them as being the result of a long period of social development that had transformed human beings into creatures who could not live together in peace but equally could not live apart. Although the human race does not begin as a bunch of angry Hobbesians, that is pretty much where it ends up, and Rousseau concludes the Second Discourse with a collective escape from the state of nature into a political order.

The ‘social contract’ that Rousseau imagines at the end of that work consists of individuals making a choice to abjure conflict and to subject themselves to the rule of law. Property rights, hitherto uncertain, are to be respected and guaranteed by the state. Faced with a choice between this law-governed regime and continual insecurity and fear of violent death, even those who possess little or nothing agree to the new order. Rousseau thinks this is a mistake on their part, though an understandable one in the circumstances. For now the inequalities that have grown up in society receive official and collective sanction: the power of the rich over the poor is assured. People have gained security, but they have gained it at the price of being permanently dependent on their wealthy masters. But even those masters, who seem to have come out on top, have gained an unsatisfactory victory. For the social position of this elite depends on opinion and reputation, on a fragile, interlocking system of beliefs and expectations.

Rousseau is consistently pessimistic about our chances of extricating ourselves from this prison-house of mutual dependence and opinion. The drive to satisfy our amour propre in conditions of inequality and dependence draws us into a looking-glass world of inauthenticity, where we lose sight of the very selves we are trying to care for as we make ourselves into the persons that we hope and imagine others will value. Sometimes this pessimism drives him to despair (as at the outset of the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, where he contemplates withdrawal and isolation). But when Rousseau is non-despairing he proposes two solutions to this problem of social co-existence. The first, to be found in Emile, argues for the possibility of managing the development of the passions in such a way that amour propre does not take the corrosive form it has for most people, and of satisfying the individual’s craving for recognition and respect through a satisfactory and reciprocal love-relationship with a member of the opposite sex. The second, expressed in the political writings, including Of the Social Contract, involves securing for each individual the status of a free and equal citizen, subject to laws which he himself has chosen rather than living at the behest of some supposed superior.

THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

Rousseau’s central aim in Of the Social Contract is to explain how the freedom of the individual can be reconciled with the authority of the state. Because of the process of social evolution sketched in other writings, but particularly in the Second Discourse, it is essential for human beings to associate together in order to fulfil their psychological and material needs. But this association carries with it the risk, indeed the probability, that our freedom will be extinguished and that we shall be subjected to the arbitrary will and opinions of others. Since, Rousseau believes, freedom is essential to our nature and is a condition of our having moral responsibility, it is vital to find a way of combining freedom and authority, but, at the same time, it is not at all clear how this can be done. States claim to act with authority: that their laws are commands that their subjects have an obligation to obey. How can a person be free and at the same time obliged to obey such instructions?

The General Will

The concept with which Rousseau carries out this attempted reconciliation is the general will. Rousseau argues that citizens who live in a state governed by the general will obey only themselves: freedom and obedience to law are thereby combined. Unfortunately, the concept of the general will as Rousseau deploys it is often unclear and ambiguous and he seems to operate with two contrasting and incompatible interpretations of it. This unclarity is the basis for many of the difficulties and subsequent controversies surrounding Rousseau’s ideas and their relationship to individual freedom and democracy. In one interpretation of the general will, it is simply what a people, voting as a body of sovereign legislators in their assembly, decides the law to be. The general will is thus the expression of popular sovereignty, of collective democratic choice. Yet at other times Rousseau seems committed to a different view according to which the general will corresponds to a fact of the matter concerning where the common interest lies, a fact of the matter that holds true quite independently of what the citizens actually believe or decide.⁵ This latter sense of the general will has featured prominently in attempts to suggest that Rousseau was in some sense responsible for later claims by dictatorial elites to speak in the name of the people; but Rousseau is consistently clear in the Social Contract that, though the people may make mistakes, they must legislate for themselves if the state is to be legitimate.

Although the two conceptions of the general will to be found in the Social Contract are in tension with one another, there are ways to reduce this tension. One possibility is to interpret Rousseau as thinking that there is a fact of the matter about where the common good lies and that, so long as the people legislate together under the right conditions, they can be more or less sure to decide on laws that align with and promote that common good. For Rousseau, it is crucial that the laws come from all citizens and apply to all citizens so that each person is simultaneously a maker of the law and subject to it. If this is so, he believes, voters will naturally be drawn to legislation that promotes their common interest at the same time as not being too demanding of them as individuals. For each person will be guided both by a sense that certain reciprocal restrictions on freedom are necessary for them to live together in a society and by a desire not to impose on themselves restrictions that go beyond what is necessary. This process of self-legislation has both a formal and a material aspect to it. One way of getting the citizens to go beyond a narrow selfish standpoint and to look on the law from a public and objective standpoint is built into the very notion of the law itself, since it applies indifferently to all citizens. So when a citizen wills that a proposition be incorporated into the law, he wills something that applies to himself as well as to everyone else. But Rousseau also sees that this objective aspect to the law is only actually even-handed in its effects on people where their material circumstances are roughly similar. As Anatole France is supposed to have remarked, the law forbids the rich and the poor alike from sleeping under bridges. A society that is already divided into extremes of wealth and poverty will not therefore be one in which the collective decisions of the citizenry reliably track the common good; indeed, there may not be much of common interest to track. Similarly, a society that is too large or diverse in morals and customs is likely to be one where the citizens have difficulty in discerning where the common good lies, if, indeed, there is a sufficient overlap in their interests.

Culture and the Legislator

To these formal and material factors, Rousseau sometimes adds a third, more subjective, one. Even citizens who are materially and culturally similar to one another and are choosing rules that apply to everyone will not reliably will the common good unless they have the right kind of psychology. The trick of looking upon oneself as a subject of the laws and thinking in terms of enlightened self-interest will not come naturally to a person who is excessively passionate, angry and has a short time horizon. Unfortunately, there is every danger that the individuals who initially form a society will lack the social perspective and public-spiritedness that are required of good citizens. These virtuous habits of mind in individuals come from long exposure to the laws and practices of a just society. Yet the initial founders of a society will have been pressed into their association under very different circumstances: almost certainly the quasi-Hobbesian nightmare depicted at the end of the Second Discourse, in which most people are aggressively concerned for their own relative status and seek to extract ‘respect’ from their peers. To survive together they need to be virtuous citizens who calmly discuss their common interests; in actuality they are jealous, resentful, proud, vain and quick to draw their swords.

Rousseau sees this problem and articulates a solution to it, but it is not one likely to convince his readers. Rousseau’s bridge between the violent anarchy of the pre-political stage and the stable consensus of the virtuous republic consists of a quasi-mythical individual: the legislator or lawgiver. The legislator is one of a group of similar characters in Rousseau’s writings whose task is to manipulate their subjects into a condition where they can take charge of their own lives (or, on a more sinister reading, acquire the illusion of being in charge of themselves). In Emile, the tutor has this role, leading his pupil through a series of stages until he is able to live as a free adult. In his novel Julie, the officially benign éminence grise is Wolmar, master of the Clarens estate. In all these cases, the same problems arise. If people are shaped by circumstances – as Rousseau makes clear he believes – and if the pre-political circumstances are intensely competitive and morally corrosive, then how does the legislator or the tutor acquire the skills and sensibility necessary for his job? Where could such a person come from? Rousseau has no satisfactory answer. The best that he can do is to point to a few historical examples of people who have inspired the laws of new societies: people like the Spartan Lycurgus and the Athenian Solon.⁶

Rousseau envisages the legislator as a kind of transitional fix. Good laws make for good citizens, but the first citizens are not yet virtuous enough or rational enough to will good laws on their own, nor are they yet in a condition to listen to rational arguments in favour of such laws. The legislator therefore has to use other methods to get them to vote the right way: he must ‘persuade without convincing’. He must employ non-rational means, including his own charismatic authority, to ensure that the citizens institute the laws that are in their long-term collective self-interest. Clearly this is unsatisfactory. If the laws are to be an expression of the citizens’ individual and collective freedom, a genuine reconciliation of freedom and authority, then the citizens ought to be choosing them with clear heads and undistorted vision. To read that they have to be inspired to support the laws by an implausible cult-leader figure leaves a sense that we are getting less than was originally advertised.

There are, however, things to be said in Rousseau’s defence. It may seem odd to claim Rousseau’s invocation of such an implausible figure as an instance of his ‘realism’, but, both in Of the Social Contract and in other places (particularly Considerations on the Government of Poland) Rousseau shows an openness to the idea that, if citizens are to live together in freedom and equality, we may need to foster among them feelings of patriotism and solidarity that have an emotive and not a rational basis. The lawgiver promotes such sentiments of identification not by argument but by practices such as children’s games and the use of music and dance. The creation of ‘we, the people’ cannot just be a matter of rational argument and cool calculation, but also depends on the immersion of the self in the collective.

Freedom

Rousseau’s claim that, in a state governed by the general will, freedom and authority are reconciled has encountered a great deal of scepticism over the years. But in order to evaluate it, we need a clear sense of what he means by freedom. It is no easy matter to work this out, especially since he fails to make explicit the most important understanding he has of the concept within the text of the Social Contract. When Rousseau introduces the task of the book, at I.6, he tells us that the new association will leave the citizens as free as they were before they entered it. However, this seems to be at best misleading, since he makes it clear that the sense in which the pre-political contractors were free (natural freedom) is quite different from any way in which the citizens of the new state are free. Indeed, that natural freedom, in which people’s capacity to act is limited only by their native abilities to get what they want, is permanently lost once they join together. What they get instead is civil freedom and the right to what they possess, a right specified and limited by the general will (I.8). Additionally, they get moral freedom, obedience to a law that they have prescribed to themselves. However, Rousseau frustratingly skates past the latter, telling us that it is not his subject.

The reader worried about the claim that authority and freedom have been reconciled is not going to be satisfied with the statement that the citizens have a new sort of freedom that is limited by the general will, because it is precisely the limitation of freedom by the general will that is likely to seem problematic to them. Similarly, the idea that citizens end up being morally free because they get to obey the laws that they have chosen for themselves invites the obvious objection that citizens who are out-voted in the assembly are subject to laws that other people have chosen. The sceptical reader is also unlikely to be persuaded that Rousseau has effected his reconciliation when he or she comes across the famous lines at I.7 where he tells us that the citizen constrained to obey the general will is thereby ‘forced to be free’.

That notorious passage, though, contains the crucial clue to Rousseau’s ideas, for there he says that submission to the general will frees individuals from personal dependence. The idea of freedom as a guarantee of non-subjection to the arbitrary will of another person is central to the classical republican tradition of which Rousseau is an inheritor. Rousseau does not make his allegiance to this idea explicit in Of the Social Contract’ but in other texts, most notably the eighth of the Letters Written from the Mountains, he is more forthcoming. There he tells us that liberty, ‘consists less in acting upon your wish than in not being subjected to the wish of others; it further consists in not subjecting the wish of others to our own’ (p. 185). Recall the final stages of the pre-political condition that Rousseau depicts in the Second Discourse. In that phase, individuals have become dependent on one another both materially and in terms of opinion. They can satisfy neither their physical needs nor their craving for respect and recognition without subjecting or enticing others to do their bidding. The rule of a law willed by all the citizenry and limiting their freedom only to the extent necessary for them to co-exist with others is Rousseau’s political alternative to this state of dependence, dominance and subjection. Individuals remain interdependent through the division of labour. That is unavoidable given the growth in their needs engendered in the process of historical development and technological change. But this interdependence is organized around fair terms of association that are the product of all the citizens choosing together in their assembly. Citizens are free because they are not at the beck and call of this or that rich or powerful person, but rather because they enjoy an equality of status⁷ and are subject only to constraints that they have chosen themselves.

What then of the other problem for Rousseau’s claim to have reconciled freedom and authority: that citizens who are in the minority cannot be said to be subject to a law that they have chosen for themselves? Rousseau would probably have conceded that if there are permanent majorities and minorities, rather than some people happening to be out-voted some of the time, then there is a real problem. But this is because a society with such entrenched factions cannot be said to have a genuinely general will at all. Part of his discussion in Book II of the Social Contract focuses on just this issue. Where the politics of a society is dominated by a faction – be it based on wealth, ethnicity or religion – then what happens is that the general will of that group, which is but a sectional interest of society as a whole, gets imposed as the choice of the entire people. In such a society there is no freedom, as some citizens are always subject to the alien choices of others. In the non-pathological case, where it is simply a matter of disagreement and the choices of others carry the day, Rousseau says something different. He tells us that the choice of the majority simply shows that the minority voter was wrong about where the general will lay, but, since that voter wants the general will, he is still subject to a law that he wills (IV.2). This will probably strike some readers as the worst kind of casuistry and evasion, but there are things that can be said in defence of the idea. The laws deal with the basic terms according to which citizens live together. We might think of legislation as involving two stages. In the first, since we want to live on fair terms with our neighbours, we are resolved on choosing from a range of possible conventions to solve practical problems. Shall we drive on the left or the right? Shall we strike a balance between individual freedom and social cohesion at this point or another? The legislative process then involves a choice from among these possibilities, where we are committed to the idea that some choice is better than none. The legislative process doesn’t just pick in an arbitrary way from among the possibilities, it also reflects the judgement of individuals about which option would be the best. Assuming a good level of competence among citizens, and assuming also that there is a fact of the matter about which option is best (or at least better than other options presented), there is good reason to believe that the assembly will converge on the optimal solution.

Government, Sovereign and Democracy

In the first two books of the Social Contract, Rousseau is principally concerned with the ideas of sovereignty, law and the general will. The sovereign people, in choosing the laws that define their terms of association, exercise their general will and govern themselves. Laws, however, by their very nature are general and abstract: they may specify that certain institutions are to exist, that if one thing occurs another thing should then happen, that all citizens have certain rights, and so on. The general form of the law is important for Rousseau because of its connection to the moral rectitude of the citizens. The law comes from all and applies to all, and each citizen, similarly situated to his fellows, is drawn to favour just principles which maximize freedom and guarantee equal status, because to do otherwise would be contrary to his own interest. However, the law neither interprets nor applies itself. To mention H. L. A. Hart’s famous example, the law may say that all vehicles are banned from the park, but it cannot specify in advance all the possible cases that might fall under its general principle.⁸ Particular cases need judgement: assuming that the law has been silent on the matter, someone needs to decide whether or not a child’s tricycle is a ‘vehicle’ for the purposes of the law. The law may specify that there should be a particular office or role in the state, perhaps with a title and remuneration; but, confined as it is to generalities, it cannot appoint a particular person to that role. And the law may give people title to their property, but it cannot decide particular property disputes, award compensation or punish thieves. For all these reasons (and many more besides) a society needs to apply general principles in particular cases. For Rousseau, this is the task of government or administration, a body that combines executive and judicial functions. The relationship between the government and the sovereign is both central to Rousseau’s political philosophy and the source of multiple difficulties in its interpretation.

Perhaps the first issue to be faced is that of who should fulfil this role of deciding in particular cases. Since people often come to Rousseau with an idea of him as some kind of participatory democrat, a view bolstered by some of his writings on sovereignty, they are perhaps naturally inclined to expect that he should be a democrat about government too, and it can come as a shock to discover that he is not. In fact, his thought is somewhat complex and nuanced, and sometimes his commitments look to be in tension with one another or even inconsistent. Rousseau rejects democracy as a form of government because he thinks it requires impossible levels of virtue in the citizenry. Legislating gives the individuals a more generalized and abstract perspective, seeing themselves as one among many; government, with its focus on the particular, has exactly opposite cognitive effects. Instead of thinking dispassionately about the rules and penalties that ought to apply to types of action, citizens, perhaps inflamed by the immediate facts, will be focused on how a particular decision applies to them. It is similar to the distinction between a sport where the players decide collectively on the rules but play subject to the authority of a referee and one where they referee each game as well. A consensus among footballers that players should not make dangerous challenges is easy to achieve; agreement among the players on the pitch that this challenge is dangerous is unlikely to be forthcoming. Referees will nearly always do a better job.

In Of the Social Contract Rousseau therefore favours government by a small group, an elective aristocracy. His account of the relationship between that group and the citizenry pulls in two directions. He spends much of Book III of the Social Contract discussing the threat that the magistrates pose to popular sovereignty. This threat arises from the nature of the problem they, and the wider society, face. In a small, equal and homogeneous society the laws will be few and simple, they will be widely understood and adhered to, and the conduct of citizens will be regulated as much by their shared sense of civic belonging as by any explicit regulations. In such a society, quite a large and loose collection of magistrates can share responsibility for the small amount of government that needs to be done. But as societies grow larger – Rousseau thought of population growth as the inevitable outcome of political success – and society becomes more diverse in its habits and ways of life, there may be more inequality, people know fewer and fewer of their fellow citizens and the polity becomes a distant abstraction. In larger and more anonymous societies, there will be more need for the magistrates to intervene, simply in order to remedy the fact that social order is no longer spontaneous. A large group of magistrates will be ineffective for this purpose because large committees are bad at deciding and acting. A small group takes charge of the machinery of the state, but also starts to think of itself as embodying the state. Eventually, thinks Rousseau, the magistrates will substitute their collective will for the general will of the citizenry, and inevitably the state will be brought to ruin.

Given that Rousseau sees this seizure of the proper rights of the sovereign by the magistrates as a mortal threat to the political order, it is surprising that he sometimes seems to favour the empowering of the magistrates at the expense of the citizens. In the Letters Written from the Mountains, for example, whilst deploring the long-term tendency of the government to undermine popular sovereignty, he stops short of permitting the citizens to have the positive rights to initiate new legislation. In Of the Social Contract he insists that no one can deprive citizens of the right to vote on legislation but nevertheless declares that ‘the Government always takes great care to confine to its own members [the right of voicing an opinion, proposing, dividing, and debating]’ (IV.1). Some critics have read these passages as expressing an elitist and undemocratic view and as sanctioning the domination of the supposedly sovereign people by the government. Others, however, read them as being in tension with the democratic spirit of the rest of the work and point out the somewhat ambiguous tone of the Social Contract passage, which is neither clearly normative nor descriptive.

The picture of the relationship between legislating people and government is also muddied by what he has to say about the idea of representation. Many modern readers of the Social Contract are almost instantly put off by his apparent rejection of representative government in III.15. However, he has often been misunderstood on just this point. Rousseau’s objection is to the representation of sovereignty. In Of the Social Contract, at least, he rejects the idea that the people, in deciding the laws that define their fundamental association, could hand over that task to representatives or deputies. If they were to do so, to hand over a general mandate to other people to decide such terms of association for them, they would be subject to laws that they had not themselves decided upon; they would, in his view, have enslaved themselves. But Rousseau’s conception of government, ideally run by an elective aristocracy, is very much a representative one. The distance between a Rousseauvian republic and a modern parliamentary democracy depends in part, then, on how we conceive of the divide between the laws and the decrees of the government. If, as often seems to be the case, the laws are very few in number and simple in nature (IV.1), then the legislative task of the people is really quite simple and requires little activity on their part: perhaps the occasional meeting to ratify some basic constitutional provision or other, whilst the elected government issues the day-to-day regulations. At other moments, though, Rousseau seems to have an altogether busier conception of citizenship (III.15), approximating the direct democracy of the ancient world. Even if we take the former view, however, it looks hard to reconcile universal participation in legislation with anything like the size of modern states.

Civil Religion

One of the oddities about reading Of the Social Contract more than two centuries after its composition is the profound disconnection between the way in which contemporary readers received the work and the manner in which it is often seen today. One section of the Social Contract that brings this out is the final proper chapter of the book, dealing with civil religion. At the time – and this was an important reason for its condemnation – the religiously orthodox objected to Rousseau’s Machiavelli-derived thought that true Christians make bad citizens and soldiers, that they would fight ineffectively for the republic because their loyalty is to an other-worldly power rather than to the state and the patrie. Today, it is the whiff of an official ideology that people find repellent, together with the suggestion that atheists have no place in the good society and that the death penalty might be appropriate for people who disbelievingly affirm their commitment to a supreme being but then conduct themselves as if they do not.

Rousseau’s own religious views were unorthodox, but this chapter is not where he affirms them. What it is about, rather, is toleration. The modern liberal political philosopher John Rawls has advanced the idea of an ‘overlapping consensus’ of what he calls ‘reasonable comprehensive doctrines’: the idea being that a liberal political order can be supported by people who converge on a set of basic principles and does not require more thoroughgoing agreement about philosophical and theological matters. Rousseau’s civil religion is, essentially, a similar idea. Though the exclusion of atheists is doubtless regrettable, Rousseau is promoting the idea that a stable and flourishing political society does not require religious uniformity and that Catholics, Protestants, Jews and others can co-exist and cooperate as citizens of equal standing. Their common affirmation of belief in the dogmas of civil religion helps to cement mutual trust among them; the limited nature of those dogmas that they can all assert from their separate doctrinal standpoints pushes sectarian disagreements out of the sphere of political power. Far from being evidence of an incipient totalitarianism on Rousseau’s part, this chapter, at least, reflects Rousseau’s concern to reconcile religious pluralism with the social unity necessary for any functioning political order.

BEYOND OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

The texts included in this volume provide evidence of another Rousseau besides the utopian dreamer of caricature. The now-reconstructed text of Principles of the Right of War shows us a savage and incisive critic of the received wisdoms of statists and international politicians everywhere. The state gets its supposed justification from the fact that it brings us peace and security, and its power and wealth call forth an array of philosophical and legal apologists for its actions, but in the international arena it turns out to be a formidable instrument of killing and oppression, often in the very name of high-sounding principles. It is hard to read Principles of the Right of War today without thinking both of the official rhetoric and legalese of interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere and the bloody reality of those conflicts. Rousseau’s text is a subversive reminder of the way in which we can use legal and moral reasoning as the self-deceiving cover for self-interest, hiding behind abstractions and concepts whilst the corpses pile higher.

The Letters Written from the Mountains, Constitutional Proposal for Corsica and Considerations on the Government of Poland show Rousseau’s connectedness to the real-world politics of his day and his willingness to revise and compromise his most abstract principles in the face of a concrete political problem. They also shed light back on Of the Social Contract, providing new materials on which to base our assessment of his political thought and perhaps rendering even more difficult any easy attempt to fit Rousseau into any simple ideological category. Partisans of a thoroughly democratic and participatory Rousseau will be given both encouragement and pause by the Letters Written from the Mountains. Rousseau’s incisive analysis of the ways in which governments work to steal sovereignty from the people is balanced by his refusal to give Geneva’s bourgeois faction everything they wanted in terms of the right to initiate legislation. And then there is the great lacuna of all his writings on Geneva, the refusal of the great advocate of the people’s sovereignty to speak about who gets included in ‘the people’: for Geneva’s citizenry were but a small fraction of the populace, many of whom included resident ‘foreigners’ of many generations’ standing, subject to the laws but with no part in the making of them.

The Constitutional Proposal for Corsica provides evidence of Rousseau’s economic egalitarianism, of his commitment to self-sufficiency and community, and of his view that independent self-government is incompatible with luxury. Modern readers are likely to see it either as a sign of the distance between Rousseau’s concerns and ours – of economic illiteracy and rejection of a global division of labour – or as the prescient image of some green future of zero-growth community. Considerations on the Government of Poland is valuable for two main reasons. First, it substantially complements the political sociology of the Social Contract, with its emphasis on mœurs, on culture and on nation-building, showing us that these are not minor concerns that we can separate out from Rousseau’s more formal treatments of will, law and legitimacy. Second, we see Rousseau taking a more permissive view of the representation of sovereignty than he had in Of the Social Contract. Poland was a large and diverse country, so he was open both to federalism and to the idea of people electing limited-term representatives subject to a system of public examination at the end of their service.

IMPACT AND INFLUENCE

Much of the twentieth century’s commentary on Rousseau, particularly from a liberal perspective, has sought to portray him as the source of totalitarianisms of various kinds, be they Jacobin, communist or fascist. There are various reasons behind thoughts of this kind, perhaps the most common ones being the claims of various self-proclaimed vanguards and elites from Robespierre to Lenin to incarnate the will of the people (or the proletariat) independently of the people’s actual choices; the somewhat sinister and non-rational aspects of Rousseau’s discussion of the legislator; worries about Rousseau’s conception of freedom (exacerbated by Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between positive and negative liberty);⁹ and Rousseau’s rejection of the idea that individuals have inalienable natural rights against the state.

So ingrained are some of these perceptions of Rousseau that they are likely to distort our view of him for some time to come. But all of them either are based on tendentious readings of what he has to say or turn out to be doctrines shared with thinkers whose liberal bona fides remain beyond question. The claim of vanguard elites to represent the general will, for example, may derive some support from Rousseau’s occasional remarks that there is a fact of the matter about the general will that holds even when the people prove incapable of perceiving it, but it founders on Rousseau’s repeated and consistent affirmation in Of the Social Contract that will, and especially the general will, cannot be represented: the people must speak for themselves. Rousseau’s rejection of the Lockean idea that people have natural rights against the state and its law and his assertion of the primacy of the general will over individuals may be positions that people can reasonably disagree upon, but it is essentially one shared by Kant in his affirmation that there are no conclusive rights to property in the state of nature and that the sovereign’s word is final in case of disputes about individual rights. Rousseau’s influence on Kant was profound and emerges in a number of places, including Kant’s formulations of the categorical imperative. But one way in which Rousseau’s political philosophy, as transmitted through Kant, is still with us is in the ideas of John Rawls and his liberal conception of a well-ordered society. Though Rawls does not share Rousseau’s ideal of an active, legislating citizenry, the idea of the general will is alive in the idea that principles of justice are those that would be chosen in circumstances of equality where citizens put aside their individual aims and try to adopt an impartial perspective.¹⁰

Some developments do, though, cast doubt on the continued relevance of Rousseau’s thinking. In Book I, Chapter 6 of the Social Contract, Rousseau argues for the necessity of quitting the state of nature at a certain point of human development, claiming that the human race would perish if it did not change its way of being. He suggests there is a fork between mutually destructive conflict among individuals inflamed by their amour propre and the creation of political and social institutions that reconcile freedom and authority. More than two centuries later, the interdependence that Rousseau worried about and which necessitated that association has become global, as have the environmental threats to the human race. The task of finding forms of association on a global scale that will defend and protect human beings at the same time as preserving their liberty is an altogether more daunting one.

NOTES

1.    ‘the cult of the self’: Le Nouvel Observateur, hors-série no. 7 (2010).

2.    to some pre-social Eden: The classic rebuttal is Arthur O. Lovejoy, ‘The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau’s “Discourse on Inequality” ’, Modern Philology 21:2 (1923), pp. 165–86.

3.    for the Encyclopédie: Edited and directed by Denis Diderot (1713–84) and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (1717–83), the Encyclopédie was the major unifying intellectual project of the French Enlightenment, its first volume appearing in 1751.

4.    Leviathan: The influence of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is pervasive throughout Rousseau’s political writings, though Rousseau often chooses to emphasize his disagreements with Hobbes.

5.    what the citizens actually believe or decide: The classic passage in which Rousseau discusses a possible divergence between the general will and what the people decide is Of the Social Contract II.3. His language there suggests a distinction between the sum of the selfish wills of individuals, ‘the will of all’, and the general will. However, readers should note that the phrase ‘the will of all’ does not consistently carry this connotation.

6.    The Spartan Lycurgus and the Athenian Solon: Lycurgus (800?–730? BC) was the legendary lawgiver of Sparta, supposedly inspired to give Spartan society its militarist and communalistic cast by the Oracle at Delphi. Solon (c.638–558 BC) was an Athenian statesman and lawgiver, often credited with laying the foundations of Athenian democracy.

7.    equality of status: Would this equality of status serve to satisfy the amour propre that has emerged in modern people? For a nuanced but sceptical view, see Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 5.

8.    its general principle: See H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 123–6.

9.    positive and negative liberty: See his ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ in his Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).

10.  Though Rawls … an impartial perspective: See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).

Further Reading

The standard French edition of Rousseau is currently the five-volume Oeuvres complètes, under the direction of Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Pléiade, 1959–95). It is likely to be superseded by a new Oeuvres complètes, published by Garnier under the direction of Jacques Berchtold, François Jacob and Yannick Séité, the first volumes of which will appear from 2011. Our understanding of some of the texts included in the Pléiade edition has been transformed by later scholarship, and this is particularly true of Rousseau’s writings on international affairs, for which Principes du droit de la guerre et Écrits sur la paix perpétuelle, edited by Bruno Bernardi and Gabriella Silvestrini (Paris: Vrin, 2008), should be consulted for now. The definitive edition of Rousseau’s correspondence is the Correspondance complète, ed. R. A. Leigh (Geneva and Oxford: Institut et Musée Voltaire and Voltaire Foundation, 1965–89).

The major biography of Rousseau in French is that by Jean Guéhenno, Jean-Jacques: histoire d’une conscience, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1962). In English, the three-volume study by Maurice Cranston is comprehensive: Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1754 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983); The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1754–1762 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991); and The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1997). The single-volume study by Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), is highly readable and gives a compelling portrait of Rousseau the man. Readers interested in Rousseau’s life should, of course, consult his autobiographical works, starting with the Confessions. Christopher Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The ‘Confessions’ as Political Philosophy (New York: Cornell, 1987), provides a sensitive commentary and interpretation.

As a general introduction to Rousseau’s life, thought and themes, a good place to start is R. A. Wokler’s Rousseau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Wokler’s collected essays, to be published as Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment and Their Legacies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012) will also be essential reading. Charles W. Hendel’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Moralist (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1934) is a comprehensive guide. The classic study in French is Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle, 2nd edn (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), published in somewhat abbreviated form in English as Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988). A major impetus to new work on Rousseau in the anglophone world was provided by N. J. H. Dent, Rousseau: An Introduction to His Psychological, Social and Political Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), which revised the standard negative evaluation of amour propre. Dent’s subsequent Rousseau (London: Routledge, 2005) is also worthy of note and his A Rousseau Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) is a valuable resource. Dent’s contribution to our understanding of Rousseau’s moral psychology has been taken forward by Frederick Neuhouser in his Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Alternatives to this approach are Jean Charvet, The Social Problem in Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) and Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity (New York: Atheneum, 1970). A comprehensive assessment of Rousseau as a philosopher is provided by Timothy O’Hagan, Rousseau (London: Routledge, 1999).

The classic work in English on Rousseau’s political writings is Roger D. Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). Other significant studies include Richard Fralin, Rousseau and Representation (New York: Columbia, 1978), which contains useful background to the later political writings and argues for Rousseau being a less democratic thinker than is commonly thought. James Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven: Yale, 1984) provides the opposite view. Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) is a useful study of the specifically Genevan roots of Rousseau’s thinking. Joshua Cohen’s Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) is a study of Rousseau by a leading analytical political philosopher. Zev Trachtenberg, Rousseau’s Political Theory of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993) is good on the interactions between institutions and psychology. Commentaries on Of the Social Contract include Christopher Bertram, Rousseau and The Social Contract (London: Routledge, 2004) and the somewhat Straussian view of Hilail Gildin, Rousseau’s Social Contract: The Design of the Argument (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1973). Two important recent essays on the idea of the general will are Frederick Neuhouser, ‘Freedom, Dependence and the General Will’, Philosophical Review 102:3 (1993); and Gopal Sreenivasan, ‘What Is the General Will’, Philosophical Review 109:4 (2000). The question of Rousseau’s impact on the politics of the French Revolution is considered by James Swenson in his On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

Rousseau’s writings on international relations are the subject of Grace G. Roosevelt’s Reading Rousseau in the Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Temple, 1990), and his views on war, together with his relations with Corsican and Polish republicanism, are ably covered in Karma Nabulsi’s Traditions of War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).

Feminist writers from Mary Wollstonecraft in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) onwards have highlighted the contrast between the liberatory potential of Rousseau’s politics and the misogyny of some of his writings. Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace have edited a telling selection of Rousseau’s own writings on this subject, Rousseau on Women, Love and Family (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2009), and the subject is covered by works including Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984); and Nicole Fermon, Domesticating Passions: Rousseau, Woman and Nation (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997).

OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

Prefatory Note

Rousseau’s fragment on political institutions is entitled Of the Social Contract or Principles of Political Right. Rousseau arrived at this title after a good deal of hesitation. In the manuscript of the draft version, now known as the Geneva Manuscript, Rousseau appears to have substituted Of Civil Society as his preferred choice before reverting to Of the Social Contract. That version also bears a different subtitle, ‘Essay on the Form of the Republic’, which replaces earlier choices including ‘Essay on the Constitution of the State’, ‘Essay on the Formation of the Body Politic’ and ‘Essay on the Formation of the State’. Maybe nothing much depends on these changes of mind, but they do underline the difficulty in classifying Rousseau’s text, which veers between political philosophy, constitutional law and political sociology.

Rousseau seems to have first had the idea to write a treatise on politics as early as 1743, when he was secretary to the French ambassador in Venice; at least, this is what he tells us in Book IX of the Confessions. The idea as originally conceived was broader in scope and, as is clear from the brief final chapter of the Social Contract, included plans to write on international relations and war. Some of that project may have survived in the form of the essay on Principles of the Right of War (included in this volume) and Rousseau’s commentaries on the Project for Perpetual Peace of the abbé de Saint-Pierre.¹ The basic ideas for Of the Social Contract start to show in Rousseau’s work from about 1753: the dedication to Geneva of the Discourse on Inequality anticipates some of the ideas and Rousseau’s entry on ‘political economy’ for the Encyclopédie contains the key notion that a legitimate state should be governed according to the general will. Rousseau completed the final version in 1761 and it was finally published in April 1762 by Rousseau’s usual publisher, Marc-Michel Rey in Amsterdam.

The draft version of the Social Contract is reasonably close to the final text, the most important divergence being the inclusion of the chapter on the ‘General Society of Mankind’, which serves as an important bridge between the argument of the Social Contract and Rousseau’s earlier writings in moral psychology and philosophical anthropology such as the Discourse on Inequality. For this reason, we have included a translation of this ‘missing chapter’ in the present volume.

The present translation is based on the text contained in volume 3 of the Pléiade edition of Oeuvres Complètes produced under the direction of Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond in 1964. Gagnebin and Raymond followed the edition published by Marc-Michel Rey in Amsterdam in 1762. Pierre-Alexandre Du Peyrou, a friend and confidant of Rousseau, published an edition of his works in 1782 in Geneva. On a few occasions we have preferred the 1782 variant and have indicated this in the text.

Of the

Social Contract;

or,

Principles

of

Political Right

by J. J. Rousseau,

citizen of Geneva.

… foederis aequas            

Dicamus leges.               

AENEID. XI¹                    

Foreword

This little treatise is extracted from a more extensive work, undertaken years ago with no heed for my strength and long since abandoned. Of the various fragments that might be drawn from what was done, this is the most considerable and has seemed to me least unworthy of being presented to the public. The rest already exists no more.

BOOK I

I wish to explore whether in the civil order – taking men as they are¹ and laws as they can be – there may be any legitimate and reliable rule of administration.² In this study, I shall attempt always to ally what is permitted by right to what is prescribed by interest, so that justice and utility may not be divided.

I shall embark upon my theme without first proving the importance of my subject. People will ask if I am a prince or a legislator, to be writing about Politics. I reply that I am not, which is why I am writing about Politics. If I were a prince or legislator, I should not waste my time saying what ought to be done; I should do it, or I should hold my peace.

Since by birth I am a citizen of a free State and a member of its sovereign body, the right to vote on public affairs is enough to impose on me the duty to inform myself about these, however weak an influence upon them my voice may have. Fortunate indeed, whenever I reflect on Governments, always to find in my inquiries new reasons for loving that of my own country!

Chapter 1

Subject of This First Book

Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.³ A person deems himself the master of others, yet still remains more of a slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? I think I can resolve that question.

If I were to consider force alone and the effect deriving from it, I should say: so long as a People is constrained to obey and obeys, it does well; as soon as it can cast off the yoke and casts it off, it does still better; for, in recovering its liberty by the same right whereby it was robbed of it, either it is entitled to seize back that liberty, or no one was entitled to remove it. But social order is a sacred right, serving as the basis for all others. Yet that right by no means comes from nature; hence, it is founded on conventions. The question is to know what those conventions are. Before tackling this, I must establish what I have just proposed.

Chapter 2

Of the First Societies

The oldest of all societies and the only natural one is that of the family. Yet children remain bound to their father only so long as they need him in order to survive. No sooner does this need cease than the natural bond is dissolved. The children released from the obedience they used to owe to their father, the father released from the care he used to owe to his children – all return alike to independence. If they do continue to remain united, this is no longer natural but voluntary, and the family itself is maintained only through convention.⁴

This common liberty is a consequence of man’s nature. His first law is to attend to his own survival; his first care is owed to himself and, once he reaches the age of reason, as sole judge of the means appropriate for survival he thereby becomes his own master.

So the family is, if you will, the first model for political societies; the ruler is the image of the father, the people is the image of the children, and all – having been born equal and free – alienate their liberty only where this is useful to them. The sole difference is that in the family a father’s love for his children repays him for the care he takes of them, while in the State the pleasure of commanding makes up for that love which the ruler does not have for his people.

Grotius⁵ denies that every human power is established in favour of those who are governed, citing the example of slavery. His preferred manner of reasoning is always to establish right by facts.*A more consistent method might be used, but not one more favourable to Tyrants.

Thus, according to Grotius, it is doubtful whether the human race belongs to a hundred men, or whether those hundred men belong to the human race; throughout his book he seems to lean towards the former opinion – which is also the view of Hobbes.⁶ So there we have the human race divided into herds of cattle, each with its ruler who tends it that he may devour it.

Just as a pastor’s nature is superior to that of his flock, the shepherds of men – who are their rulers – likewise are of a nature superior to that of their peoples. So reasoned the Emperor Caligula, by Philo’s account;⁷ fairly concluding from this analogy that kings were Gods, or that peoples were beasts.

Caligula’s reasoning is the same as that of Hobbes and Grotius. Before all of them Aristotle too had said that men are by no means naturally equal, but some are born for slavery and others for domination.

Aristotle was right, but he took the effect for the cause. Every man born in slavery is born for slavery, nothing is surer. Slaves lose all in their irons, even the desire to escape them; they love their servitude, just as Ulysses’ companions loved their brutish condition.*⁸ So if there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves,⁹ their cowardice has perpetuated them.

I have said nothing about king Adam, nor about emperor Noah, father of three great Monarchs who divided the universe between them as had Saturn’s children,¹⁰ whom some people have thought to recognize in them. I hope that gratitude will be shown me for this moderation. For who knows whether I – descended directly from one of these Princes, and perhaps from the senior branch – might not, if titles were to be verified, find myself legitimate king of the human race? Be that as it may, it cannot be denied that Adam was Sovereign of the world like Robinson of his island, since he was its sole inhabitant; and what was convenient in that empire was that the monarch safe on his throne had nothing to fear from rebellions or wars or conspirators.

Chapter 3

Of the Right of the Strongest

The strongest is never strong enough to be forever master, if he does not transform his strength into right and obedience into duty. Whence the right of the strongest: a right in appearance meant ironically, and in reality established as a principle. But will this word ever be explained to us? Strength is a physical power; I cannot at all see what morality can result from its effects. Yielding to force is an act of necessity, not of will; at most it is an act of prudence. In what sense could this be a duty?

Let us assume this supposed right for a moment. I say its only result is an inexplicable muddle. For as soon as it is force that makes right, the effect changes with the cause; any force surmounting the first inherits its right. As soon as you can disobey with impunity, you can do so legitimately; and since the strongest is always right, all that matters is contriving to be strongest. But what right is it, that perishes when strength ceases? If you have to obey by force, you do not need to obey out of duty; and if you are no longer forced to obey, you are no longer obliged to do so. So it is clear that this word ‘right’ adds nothing to strength; it means nothing at all here.

Obey the powers that be. If that means: yield to force, the precept is good but superfluous: I respond that it will never be violated. Every power comes from God, I admit; but every ailment likewise comes from Him. Does that mean it is forbidden to call the doctor? Let a brigand surprise me in some corner of a wood: not merely must I perforce surrender my purse, but if I could hide it am I in all conscience obliged to hand it over, since the pistol he holds is after all also a power?

Let us agree then that strength does not make right, and that you are obliged to obey only legitimate powers. So my original question still recurs.

Chapter 4

Of Slavery

Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow, and since strength produces no right, conventions are left as the basis of every legitimate authority among men.

If an individual, Grotius says, can alienate his liberty and enslave himself to a master, why could not a whole people alienate its own and subject itself to a king? There are plenty of ambiguous words here requiring explanation, but let us confine ourselves to ‘alienate’. To alienate is to give or to sell. Now, a man who enslaves himself to another does not give himself, he sells himself, at the very least for his subsistence. But for what does a people sell itself? A king, far from providing his subjects with their subsistence, derives his own subsistence from them alone, and according to Rabelais a king does not live off a pittance. Do subjects then give their person on condition that their property too will be taken? I fail to see what they have left to preserve.

You will say that the despot guarantees civil peace to his subjects. Very well. But what do they gain thereby, if the wars into which his ambition draws them, his insatiable greed, and the humiliations of his rule inflict more desolation upon them than would their own disputes? What do they gain thereby, if that very peace is one of their miseries? One may live at peace even in a dungeon – is that enough to feel at ease there? The Greeks imprisoned in Cyclops’ cave¹¹ lived there peacefully, awaiting their turn to be devoured.

To say that a man gives himself freely is to say something absurd and unthinkable. Such an action is illegitimate and null, if only because the person who performs it is not in his right mind. To say the same thing of an entire people is to assume a people of madmen: madness does not create right.

Even if each man could alienate himself, he cannot alienate his children. They are born men and free; their liberty belongs to them, they alone have the right to dispose of it. Before they have reached the age of reason, their father may in their name stipulate conditions to ensure their survival or their well-being; but not give them away irrevocably and without condition, for such a gift is contrary to the aims of nature and goes beyond the rights of fatherhood. Hence, for an arbitrary government to be legitimate, it would be necessary for the people in each generation to have the power to accept or reject it; but then that government would no longer be arbitrary.

To renounce your liberty is to renounce your character as a man – the rights and even the duties of humanity. There is no possible compensation for someone who renounces everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature. To strip his will of all liberty means to strip his actions of all morality. Stipulating on the one hand an absolute authority and on the other a boundless obedience is a vain and contradictory convention. For is it not obvious that you have no obligation to a person from whom you have the right to demand everything? And does not that circumstance – without equivalence, without exchange – of itself nullify the act? For what right could my slave have against me, since all that he has belongs to me; and since, his right being mine, this right of my own against myself has no meaning?

Grotius and others derive from war another source of the so-called right to enslavement. Since, according to them, the victor has the right to slay the vanquished, the latter may purchase his life in return for his liberty; an agreement all the more legitimate in that it benefits both parties.

But it is clear that this supposed right to slay the vanquished in no way results from the state of war. For the simple reason that men living in their primitive independence do not maintain sufficiently constant relations among themselves to constitute either a state of peace or a state of war; they are not natural enemies at all. It is the relationship between things not between men that constitutes war. And since the state of war cannot arise from mere personal relations, but only from property relations, a private war – or war between one man and another – cannot exist, either in the state of nature where there is no constant property, or in the social state where all is governed by laws.

Individual conflicts, encounters or duels are acts that do not constitute a state; and as for the private wars authorized by the legal code of King Louis IX of France and suspended by the Peace of God,¹² they are abuses of feudal government, an absurd system if ever there was one, against the principles of natural law and every good polity.

Thus war is by no means a relationship between one man and another, but a relationship between one State and another, in which individuals are enemies only accidentally, not as men or even as citizens,* but as soldiers; not as members of the fatherland, but as its defenders. For any State may have only other States as enemies, not men, considering that no real relation may be fixed between things of differing nature.¹⁴

This principle even accords with the maxims established in every age and with the constant practice of all civilized peoples. Declarations of war are warnings less to powers than to their subjects. The foreigner – whether king, or individual, or people – who steals, kills or detains subjects without declaring war upon the prince is not an enemy, he is a brigand. Even in the thick of war, a just prince may indeed seize all that belongs to the public in an enemy country; but he respects the person and the goods of individuals, he respects rights upon which his own are based. Since the aim of war is destruction of the hostile State, you have the right to kill its defenders so long as they are bearing arms; but as soon as they lay them down and surrender, ceasing to be enemies or instruments of the enemy, they again become merely men and you no longer have any right over their lives. Sometimes you may kill the State without killing a single one of its members: well, war gives no right that is not necessary to its objective. These principles are not those of Grotius; they are not based on the authority of poets, but derive from the nature of things and are based on reason.

As for the right of conquest, it has no basis other than the law of the strongest. If war does not give the victor the right to massacre the peoples he has vanquished, this right that he does not have cannot be the basis for a right to enslave them. You have the right to kill an enemy only when you cannot make him a slave; thus the right to make him a slave does not come from the right to kill him. It is thus an unjust exchange to make him buy his life, upon which you have no right, at the price of his liberty. In establishing the right of life and death upon the right to enslave, and the right to enslave upon the right of life and death, is it not clear that you are falling into a vicious circle?

Even assuming this dreadful right to kill everyone, I say that a slave made in war – or a conquered people – has no obligation whatsoever towards his master, other than to obey him to the extent that he is forced to do so. By taking an equivalent to his life, the victor has by no means spared it: instead of killing him fruitlessly, he has killed him usefully. Hence, far from the victor having acquired any authority over him in addition to force, the state of war subsists between them as before, their very relationship is a consequence of it, and use of the right of war implies no peace treaty. They have made a convention, very well; but that convention, far from destroying the state of war, implies its continuation.

Thus, however you look at things, the right to enslave is non-existent, not just because it is illegitimate, but because it is absurd and means nothing. The words slavery and right are contradictory; they mutually exclude one another. Whether from a man to a man, or from a man to a people, this argument will always be equally preposterous: I make a convention with you entirely at your expense and entirely for my benefit, which I shall observe to whatever extent pleases me, and which you will observe to whatever extent pleases me.

Chapter 5

How It Is Always Necessary to Go Back to a Primary Pact

Even were I to accept all that I have hitherto rejected, the advocates of despotism would thereby be no further forward. There will always be a great difference between subduing a multitude and governing a society. In the fact that dispersed men may successively have been enslaved – in whatever numbers – to a single individual, I perceive only a master and slaves, and by no means a people and its ruler. It is an aggregation, if you will, but not an association; neither public good nor body politic is involved here. Had that man enslaved half the world, he is still just an individual; his interest, separated from that of other men, is still just a private interest. If this same man happens to perish, his empire after him is left dispersed and disconnected, just as an oak dissolves and falls in a heap of ashes once the fire has consumed it.

A people, Grotius says, can give itself to a king. According to Grotius, therefore, a people is a people before giving itself to a king. This very gift is a civil act, assuming some public deliberation. So before examining the act whereby a people elects a king, it would be useful to examine the act by virtue of which a people is a people. For since this latter act necessarily precedes the former, it is the true foundation of society.

If there were no prior convention, in fact, where would be the obligation for the minority – unless the election were unanimous – to submit to the choice of the majority? And whence do a hundred who wish for a master have the right to vote for ten who do not wish for one at all? The law of voting by plurality is itself established by convention, and assumes unanimity on at least one occasion.

Chapter 6

Of the Social Pact

I assume men arrived at the point where the obstacles impeding their preservation in a state of nature prevail, through their resistance, over the forces each individual can deploy to maintain himself in such a state. The primitive state can then no longer subsist, and mankind would perish if it did not change its way of being.¹⁵

Now, since men cannot engender new forces, but merely unite and direct those that exist, they no longer have any means of self-preservation other than to form by aggregation a sum of forces capable of overcoming the resistance, to bring these into play through a single motive force, and to make them act in concert.

This sum of forces can be born only from the cooperation of many: but since the strength and liberty of each man are the first instruments of his preservation, how shall he commit them without harming himself, without neglecting the care he owes to himself? In relation to my subject, this difficulty can be articulated in the following terms. How to find a form of association that will, with the whole common force,defend and protect the person and goods of each associate, and through which each individual, while uniting with all, will nevertheless obey himself alone and remain as free as before? Such is the fundamental problem to which the social contract gives the solution.

The clauses of this contract are so much determined by the nature of the act that the least modification would render them vain and ineffective; so that, although they have perhaps never been formally articulated, they are everywhere the same, everywhere tacitly accepted and recognized; until such time as the social pact has been violated, when each person is restored to his original rights and recovers his natural liberty, losing the liberty by compact for which he renounced the latter.

These clauses can all be reduced, of course, to one alone: namely, the total alienation of each associate with all his rights to the community as a whole. For initially, since each person surrenders himself entirely, the condition is equal for all; and since the condition is equal for all, no one has any interest in making it onerous for the rest.

Moreover, since the alienation is made without reservation, the union is as perfect as may be, and no associate has anything further to claim. For if individuals did retain some rights, there would be no common superior able to adjudicate between them and the public. Then everyone, being his own judge on certain matters, would soon claim to be his own judge on all. The state of nature would thus live on, and the association would necessarily become tyrannical or vain.

For since each person gives himself to all, he gives himself to no one. And since there is no associate over whom you do not acquire the same right that you grant him over yourself, you gain the equivalent of all that you lose, and more strength to preserve what you have.

So if you eliminate from the social pact what is not essential to it, you will find it is reduced to the following terms. Each of us places his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and as a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.

Instantly, in place of the particular person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a corporate and collective body¹⁶ composed of as many members as the assembly has votes: a body that receives from this very act its unity, its common self, its life and its will. This public person thus formed by the union of all the rest was formerly given the name of City,*¹⁷ and is now given the name of Republic or body politic; which is called a State by its members when it is passive, a Sovereign when it is active, a Power when comparing it with its likes. So far as the associates are concerned, they collectively take the name of people, and in particular are called Citizens as participants in the sovereign authority, and Subjects as subjugated to the laws of the State. But these terms are often confused and taken one for the other; it is enough to know how to distinguish them when they are used with full precision.

Chapter 7

Of the Sovereign

It is clear from this formula that the act of association involves a reciprocal engagement between private persons and the public. And that each individual, contracting so to speak with himself, finds himself engaged by a twofold relationship: namely, as a member of the Sovereign towards private persons, and as a member of the State towards the Sovereign. But you cannot here apply the maxim of civil right that no one is bound by engagements to himself; for there is a clear difference between incurring an obligation to yourself and incurring one to a whole of which you form part.

We must further note that public deliberation, which may involve all subjects in an obligation towards the Sovereign, thanks to the two different relations in terms of which each of them is viewed, cannot for the opposite reason involve the Sovereign in an obligation towards itself; and that it is thus against the nature of the body politic for the Sovereign to impose a law on itself that it could not infringe. Being unable to consider itself other than in terms of one single relation, it is thus in the same situation as a private person contracting with himself. From which it may be seen that there is not – and cannot be – any kind of fundamental law binding on the body of the people, not even the social contract. Which does not mean that this body cannot perfectly well engage itself to others in whatever does not infringe this contract; for in relation to foreigners it becomes a simple being, an individual.

But the body politic or Sovereign, drawing its being solely from the sanctity of the contract, can never incur an obligation – even towards another – for anything that infringes that primitive act, such as alienating some part of itself or submitting itself to another Sovereign. Violating the act whereby it exists would mean annihilating itself, and that which is nothing produces nothing.

As soon as the multitude is thus assembled into a body, you cannot harm one of its members without attacking the body; still less harm the body without the members feeling the effect. Thus duty and interest alike oblige the two contracting parties to help one another mutually, and the same men must seek to combine in this twofold relationship all the advantages flowing from it.

Now the Sovereign,¹⁹ being formed only by the individuals who make it up, neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs; hence, the Sovereign power has no need of a guarantor against its subjects, since it is impossible that the body should wish to harm all its members, and we shall see later that it cannot harm anyone individually. The Sovereign, merely by virtue of its existence, is always all that it must be.

But the same is not true for subjects against the Sovereign, to which despite the common interest nothing would guarantee their commitments, if it did not find means to ensure their loyalty.

Every individual may indeed as a man have a particular will contrary or dissimilar to the general will that he has as a Citizen. His particular interest can speak to him quite otherwise than the general will. His absolute and naturally independent existence can make him see what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which will be less harmful to others than payment of it is burdensome to himself. And viewing the corporate person which constitutes the State as a fictive being, since it is not a man, he would enjoy the rights of a citizen without wishing to fulfil the duties of a subject: an injustice that if it persisted would cause the ruin of the body politic.

Thus, in order that the social pact should not be a vain formula, it tacitly incorporates a commitment that alone can give force to the rest: namely, that whosoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the entire body. This means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free. For such is the condition that, by giving each Citizen to the Fatherland, guarantees him against all personal dependence:²⁰ the condition that makes the artifice and play of the political machinery, and that alone gives legitimacy to civil engagements which without it would be absurd, tyrannical and subject to the most enormous abuses.

Chapter 8

Of the Civil State

This passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a most remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his behaviour and endowing his actions with the morality they previously lacked. Only then, when the voice of duty succeeds physical impulsion and law succeeds appetite, does man, who until now had thought only of himself, find himself forced to act according to other principles, and to consult his reason before heeding his inclinations. Although in this state he denies himself a number of advantages granted him by nature, he gains others so great in return – his faculties are exercised and developed, his ideas expanded, his feelings ennobled, his entire soul soars so high – that if the abuses of this new condition did not often degrade him below that from which he emerged,²¹ he ought continually to bless the happy moment that wrested him thence for ever, and out of a stupid, limited animal made an intelligent being and a man.

Let us reduce this whole balance to terms easily compared. What man loses through the social contract is his natural liberty, and a limitless right to all that tempts him and that he can reach. What he wins is civil liberty and ownership of all that he possesses. In order not to be mistaken about these compensations, a clear distinction must be made between natural liberty, which has no limits other than the powers of the individual, and civil liberty, which is limited by the general will; between possession, which is the result merely of force or the right of the first occupant, and property, which can be based only on a positive title.

Apart from the foregoing, to the gains of the civil state might be added moral liberty,²² which alone makes man truly master of himself; for the impulsion of mere appetite is slavery, while obedience to the law you have set yourself is liberty. But I have said too much already on this topic, and the philosophical meaning of the word ‘liberty’ is not my subject here.

Chapter 9

Of Real Estate

Each member of the community gives himself to it at the moment of its formation, just as he currently is: himself and all his powers, including the goods he possesses. It is not that by this act possession changes its nature in changing hands, and becomes property in the hands of the Sovereign. But since the powers of the City are incomparably greater than those of an individual, public possession in fact is also stronger and more irrevocable, without being more legitimate, at least for foreigners. For the State with respect to its members is master of all their goods through the social contract, which in the State serves as the basis for all rights; but with respect to other Powers it is master only through the right of the first occupant, which it derives from individuals.

The right of the first occupant, though more real than that of the strongest, becomes a true right only after establishment of the right of property. Every man naturally has a right to all that is necessary to him; but the positive act that makes him the owner of some good excludes him from all the rest. Once his share is allotted he must limit himself to that, and no longer has any right to common property. This is why the right of the first occupant, so weak in the state of nature, is respected by every civil man. What is respected in this right is less what belongs to another than what does not belong to you.

In general, in order to authorize the right of the first occupant over any piece of land, the following conditions are necessary. First, that this land not yet be occupied by anyone; secondly, that you occupy only so much of it as you need to subsist; in the third place, that you take possession of it not through some vain ceremony, but by labour and cultivation, the only sign of ownership that, in the absence of legal titles, should be respected by others.

For if you grant the right of first occupant to need and to labour, are you not extending that right as far as it will go? Is it possible to place no limits upon it? Will it be enough to set foot on a piece of common land, in order at once to claim you are master of it? Will it be enough to have the strength to keep other men out of it for a while, in order to deny them the right ever to return to it? How can a man or a people seize hold of an immense territory and deprive the entire human race of it, other than through a usurpation deserving of punishment, since it denies to all other men the residence and sustenance that nature gives them in common? When Nuñez Balboa on the coast took possession of the South Sea and all southern America in the name of the crown of Castile, was that enough to dispossess all its inhabitants and exclude from it all the Princes of the world?²³ If such were the case, those ceremonies were multiplied to no purpose, and the Catholic King had only to take possession of the entire universe at a stroke from his study, subject to later subtracting from his empire what was already possessed by other Princes.

How the combined and contiguous lands of individuals become public territory is easily understood, and how the right of sovereignty, extending from the subjects to the land they occupy, becomes at once real and personal; which places the possessors in a greater dependence and makes their very forces into guarantees of their loyalty. An advantage that seems not to have been appreciated by the monarchs of old, who in calling themselves simply kings of the Persians, Scythians or Macedonians appeared to see themselves as rulers of men rather than masters of a country. Their counterparts today more astutely call themselves Kings of France, Spain, England, etc. By thus holding the land, they are quite sure of holding its inhabitants.

What is singular about this alienation is that the community, far from despoiling individuals of their goods when it accepts these, only ensures their legitimate possession of them, changing usurpation into a genuine right, use into ownership. Thus, with the possessors being considered as trustees of the public good, their rights respected by all members of the State and upheld with all the latter’s powers against foreigners, they have in a manner of speaking, through a transfer advantageous both to the public and still more to themselves, gained all that they have given. A paradox easily explained by the distinction between the rights the sovereign and the proprietor have to the same land, as we shall see later.

It may also happen that men begin to unite before they possess anything, and that later, seizing enough land for all of them, they use this in common or share it among themselves, either equally or according to proportions established by the Sovereign. In whatever way this acquisition is made, the right that each individual has over his own land is always subordinated to the right that the community has over all, without which there would be neither solidity in the social bond, nor real force in the exercise of Sovereignty.

I shall end this chapter and this book by a remark that should serve as the basis for the whole social system. It is that, rather than destroying natural equality, the fundamental pact on the contrary substitutes a corporate and legitimate equality for whatever physical inequality nature may have placed among men; and that, whereas they may be unequal in strength or intelligence, they all become equal through convention and by right.*

End of the First Book

BOOK II

Chapter 1

How Sovereignty Is Inalienable

The first and most important consequence of the principles established above is that only the general will can direct the forces of the State in keeping with the aim for which it was instituted, which is the common good. For if the conflict of particular interests made the establishment of societies necessary, it is the agreement of those same interests that made it possible. It is what those different interests have in common that forms the social bond, and if there were not some point at which all the interests agree, no society could exist. Now, it is solely on the basis of this common interest that society must be governed.

So I say that sovereignty, being merely the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated, and that the sovereign, which is merely a collective being, can be represented only by itself; power can indeed be transferred, but not will.

For if it is not impossible that an individual will may agree on some point with the general will, it is at least impossible that this agreement should be lasting and constant; for the individual will tends by its nature to partiality, the general will to equality. It is yet more impossible to have a guarantee of this agreement, even if it were still to exist, since it would be the result not of design but of chance. The Sovereign may well say: I currently will what such and such a man wills, or at least what he says that he wills. But it cannot say: what that man is going to will tomorrow, I shall still will. For it is absurd that will should shackle itself for the future; and it is inherent in no will to consent to anything opposed to the welfare of the being that does the willing. Hence, if the people promises simply to obey, by that act it dissolves itself and loses its quality as a people. As soon as there is a master there is no more Sovereign, and the body politic is destroyed forthwith.

This does not at all mean that the orders of rulers cannot be taken as general wills, so long as the Sovereign, being free to oppose them, does not do so. In such a case, the agreement of the people must be presumed from the universal silence. This will be explained at greater length.

Chapter 2

How Sovereignty Is Indivisible

For the same reason that sovereignty is inalienable, it is indivisible. For will is general,* or it is not; it is the will of the people as a body, or merely of one part. In the former case, this declared will is an act of sovereignty and constitutes law. In the latter, it is merely a particular will, or an act of magistracy; at most it is a decree.¹

But our political thinkers, unable to divide sovereignty in its principle, divide it in its object. They divide it into force and will; legislative power and executive power; rights of taxation, justice and war; domestic administration and power over foreign affairs. Sometimes they mingle all these parts, and sometimes they separate them.² They make the Sovereign into a fantastic being, composed of disparate pieces; it is as if they were putting a man together from various bodies, one of which had eyes, another arms, another feet, and nothing else. Mountebanks in Japan are said to dismember a child in full view of spectators, throw all its limbs one after another into the air, then bring the child down again alive and in one piece. Such, more or less, is the sleight-of-hand of our political thinkers: after dismembering the social body by a conjuring trick worthy of the fairground, they reassemble the pieces no one knows how.

This error comes from not having formulated precise notions of sovereign authority, and from having taken as parts of this authority what were mere emanations from it. Thus, for example, the act of declaring war and that of making peace have been seen as acts of sovereignty, which is not so. For each of these acts is no law, but only an application of the law, a particular act that decides the law in this case, as will be seen clearly once the idea attached to the word law has been fixed.

By scrutinizing the other divisions in the same way, you would find that whenever you believe you see sovereignty shared you are mistaken: the rights which you take to be parts of that sovereignty are all subordinated to it, and always presuppose supreme wills that these rights simply implement.

It would be hard to tell how much this lack of precision has obscured the conclusions of authors with respect to political right, when they have sought to adjudicate the respective rights of kings and peoples in keeping with the principles they had established. In chapters III and IV of the first book of Grotius,³ anyone can see how that learned man and his translator Barbeyrac become entangled, caught up in their sophisms, for fear of saying too much or too little, depending on their views, and offending the interests they had to reconcile. Grotius, having taken refuge in France and wishing to woo Louis XIII, to whom his book is dedicated, spares nothing to despoil peoples of all their rights and to cloak kings in these through every artifice. This would have been to the taste of Barbeyrac too, who dedicated his translation to George I, King of England; but unfortunately the expulsion of James II, which he calls an abdication, forced him to hold back, distort and prevaricate, in order to avoid making William into a usurper. If those two writers had adopted true principles, all difficulties would have been removed and they would always have been consistent; but they would sadly have told the truth and wooed only the people. Now, truth does not lead to fortune, and the people gives no embassies, chairs or pensions.

Chapter 3

Whether the General Will Can Err

From the foregoing it follows that the general will is always rightful and always tends to public utility. But it does not follow that the deliberations of the people always have the same rightness. You always will your own good, but you cannot always see it.⁴ The people is never corrupted, but it is often misled, and only then does it seem to will what is bad.

There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will: the latter takes account only of the common interest; the former takes account of private interest, and is only a sum of particular wills. But remove from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel each other out,* and what is left as the sum of differences is the general will.

If, when a properly informed people deliberates, Citizens held no communication with one another, the large number of small differences would always result in the general will and the deliberation would always be good. But when intrigues arise, and partial associations are formed at the expense of the greater one, the will of each of these associations becomes general in relation to its members and particular in relation to the State. You may then say that there are no longer as many voters as there are men, but only as many as there are associations. Differences become less numerous and give a less general result. Finally, when one of these associations is so large that it prevails over all the rest, you no longer have a sum of small differences as the result, but one single difference. Then there is no longer a general will, and the view that prevails is merely a particular view.

In order really to have the expression of the general will, it is thus important that there should be no partial society in the State, and that each Citizen should give only his own opinion.* Such were the unique and sublime institutions of the great Lycurgus. If there are partial societies, you must multiply their number and prevent inequality between them, as did Solon, Numa, and Servius.⁵ Such precautions alone are capable of ensuring that the general will is always enlightened, and the people never goes astray.⁶

Chapter 4

Of the Limits of Sovereign Power

If the State or the City is simply a corporate person [personne morale], whose life consists in the union of its members, and if the most important of its concerns is its own preservation, it must have a universal and coercive force to move and dispose each part in the manner most beneficial to the whole. Just as nature gives each man an absolute power over all his limbs, the social pact gives the body politic an absolute power over all its members; and it is this same power which, directed by the general will, bears, as I have said, the name of sovereignty.

But apart from the public person, we have to consider the private persons who make it up, and whose life and liberty are naturally independent of it. So it is a matter of clearly distinguishing between the respective rights of Citizens and the Sovereign,* and between the duties which the former have to fulfil as subjects and the natural right which they must enjoy as men.

We may agree that whatever of his power, his goods and his liberty each man alienates through the social pact is merely the part of it all whose use is important to the community; but it must also be agreed that the Sovereign alone can be the judge of this importance.

All the services a citizen may render to the State, he owes once the Sovereign demands them. But the Sovereign for its part cannot burden subjects with any fetter useless to the community. It cannot even will this, for under the law of reason nothing is done without cause, any more than under the law of nature.

The engagements that bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual, and their nature is such that by fulfilling them you cannot work for another without working also for yourself. Why is the general will always rightful, and why do all continuously wish for the happiness of each, unless it is because there is no one who does not appropriate that word each, and who does not think about himself in voting for all? This proves that equal rights, and the notion of justice they produce, derive from the preference that everyone accords to himself: hence, from the nature of man. And that the general will, to be truly general, must be so in its object as well as in its essence; that it must start off from all in order to apply to all; and that it loses its natural rightness when it tends towards some individual, determinate object. Because then, judging what is foreign to us, we have no true principle of equity to guide us.

For no sooner is it a matter of a particular fact or right, concerning a point that has not been settled by a general and previous convention, than the affair becomes contentious. It is an issue in which interested private individuals are one of the parties and the public is the other, but in which I can discern neither the law to be followed nor the judge who is to decide. It would be ridiculous to wish then to refer to an express decision of the general will, which can be only the conclusion of one of the parties, and which consequently for the other is only a foreign, particular will, inclined on this occasion to injustice and subject to error. Thus, just as a particular will cannot represent the general will, the general will in turn changes its nature if it has a particular object, and being general cannot pronounce either upon a man or upon a fact. When the people of Athens, for example, nominated or dismissed its rulers, granted honours to one and imposed penalties upon another, and by countless individual decrees exercised all acts of Government indiscriminately, then the people no longer had any general will properly speaking. It no longer acted as a Sovereign but as a magistrate. This will appear at variance with common views, but I must be allowed time to expose my own.

You must understand by all this that what generalizes will is less the number of votes than the common interest uniting them. For under these institutions everyone necessarily submits to the conditions he imposes on others. This admirable agreement between interest and justice gives common deliberations a character of equity, which can be seen to vanish in discussion of any particular affair, for lack of a common interest uniting and identifying the judge’s ruling with that of the party.

However we may trace our path back to the principle, we always reach the same conclusion: namely, that the social pact establishes such equality between citizens that they all engage themselves under the same conditions, and must all enjoy the same rights. Thus by the nature of the pact any act of sovereignty, that is to say any authentic act of general will, obliges or favours all Citizens equally, so that the Sovereign knows only the body of the nation and does not distinguish any one of those who make it up. So what really is an act of sovereignty? It is not a convention between a superior and an inferior, but a convention between the body and each of its members: a legitimate Convention, because it has as its basis the social contract; equitable, because it is common to all; useful, because it can have no object other than the general good; and solid, because it is guaranteed by public force and the supreme power. So long as subjects are subordinated only to such conventions, they obey no one, but only their own will; and to ask how far the respective rights of Sovereign and Citizens extend is to ask how far the latter can engage themselves to one another, each to all and all to each.

It is clear from this that the Sovereign power, absolute, sacred and inviolable though it be, does not and cannot exceed the limits of general conventions; and that every man may fully dispose of such of his goods and his liberty as these conventions have left him; so that the Sovereign is never entitled to burden one subject more than another, because with the affair then becoming particular its power is no longer competent.

Once these distinctions are conceded, it is so untrue that the social contract entails any real renunciation on the part of individuals that, as a result of that contract, their situation is found to be genuinely preferable to what it was previously. And, rather than an alienation, they have made only an advantageous exchange: of an uncertain and precarious way of being for a better and surer one; of natural independence for liberty; of the power to harm others for their own security; and of their force, which others might overwhelm, for a right that the social union renders invincible. The very life which they have devoted to the State is continuously protected by it; and when they expose that life in its defence, what are they then doing but giving back to the State what they have received from it? What are they doing that they did not do more frequently and at greater peril in the state of nature, when, engaging in inevitable conflicts, they would at the risk of their life defend what serves to preserve it? To be sure, everyone has to fight if need be for the fatherland, but then no one ever has to fight for himself. Do we not still gain, by risking for what ensures our security part of what we would have to risk for ourselves, were that security ever taken from us?

Chapter 5

Of the Right of Life and Death

Do you ask how individuals, having no right to dispose of their own life, can transmit to the Sovereign this very right that they do not have? The question seems hard to resolve only because it is badly put. Any man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has it ever been claimed that someone who throws himself through a window in order to escape from a fire is guilty of suicide? Has such a crime ever been imputed even to someone who perishes in a storm of whose danger he was aware when embarking?

The social treaty has preservation of the contracting parties as its end. Who wills the end, wills also the means, and these means are inseparable from certain risks, even certain losses. Whosoever wishes to preserve his life at the expense of others must also give it for them when necessary. Now, the Citizen is no longer judge of the danger to which the law wishes him to expose himself. And when the Prince has told him: ‘It is expedient for the State that you should die,’ then he must die, since it is upon this condition alone that he has lived in safety hitherto, and since his life is no longer merely a bounty of nature but a conditional gift from the State.

The death penalty inflicted on criminals can be viewed more or less from the same viewpoint: it is in order not to fall victim to an assassin that you agree to die if you become one. In this treaty, far from disposing of your own life you think only of guaranteeing it; and it is not to be supposed that any of the contracting parties plans at the time to be hanged.

Moreover, any malefactor attacking society’s law becomes by his misdeeds a rebel and traitor to the fatherland; he ceases to be a member of it by violating its laws, he even makes war upon it. So preservation of the State is incompatible with his own, one of the two has to perish; and when the guilty man is put to death, it is less as a Citizen than as an enemy. The proceedings and judgement are the proof and declaration that he has broken the social treaty, and that consequently he is no longer a member of the State. Now, since he has acknowledged himself as such, at least by residence, he must be cut off from it either by exile as a violator of the pact, or by death as a public enemy. For such an enemy is not a corporate person, but a man, in which case the right of war allows the vanquished to be killed.

But you will say that the condemnation of a Criminal is a particular act. Granted; so this condemnation is not the province of the Sovereign, but a right that it may confer without being able to exercise it itself. All my ideas are consistent, but I cannot expound them all at once.

Besides, the frequency of executions is always a sign of weakness or indolence in the Government. There is no man so wicked that he cannot be made good for something. Even in order to set an example, you have the right to put to death only a person who cannot be kept without danger.

With respect to the right to pardon, or to exempt a guilty man from the penalty inflicted by the law and pronounced by the judge, this belongs only to the one who is above the judge and the law, in other words the Sovereign. Yet the latter’s right in this respect is not very clear, and the cases in which it may be used are very rare. In a well-governed State there are few punishments, not because many pardons are granted, but because there are few criminals. The large number of crimes ensures their impunity when the State is in decline. Under the Roman Republic, neither the Senate nor the Consuls ever attempted to grant pardons; the people itself did not do so, although it sometimes revoked its own decision. Frequent pardons proclaim that crimes will soon no longer need them, and anyone can see where that leads. But I feel my heart protest and check my pen; let us leave these questions to be discussed by the just man who has never sinned, and never himself been in need of pardon.

Chapter 6

Of the Law

Through the social pact we have given the body politic existence and life; it is now a matter of giving it movement and will through legislation. For the primitive act whereby this body forms and unites does not yet determine anything of what it must do to preserve itself.

What is good and favourable to order is such by the nature of things, and independently of human conventions. All justice comes from God, who alone is its source; but if we could receive it from so high up, we should need neither government nor laws. There is doubtless a justice emanating from reason alone,⁷ but for this justice to be accepted among us it must be reciprocal. Considering things in human terms, for want of natural sanction the laws of justice are vain among men; they merely benefit the wicked man and do harm to the just, if he observes them towards everyone while no one observes them towards him. So conventions and laws are needed in order to unite rights with duties and restore justice to its object. In the state of nature, where everything is common, I owe nothing to those to whom I have promised nothing, I recognize as another’s only what is of no use to myself. It is otherwise in the civil state, where all rights are fixed by law.

But what is a law after all? So long as you are content with attaching only metaphysical ideas to this word, you will continue to reason without reaching agreement; and even when you have stated what a law of nature is, you will have no better notion of a law of the State.

I have already said that there is no general will concerning a particular object. For this particular object is either within the State or outside the State. If it is outside the State, a will that is foreign to it cannot be general with respect to it. And if this object is within the State, it is part of it. Then a relation is formed between the whole and its part which makes them into two separate beings, one of which is the part, the other the whole minus that same part. But the whole minus a part is not the whole; and so long as this relation persists there is no more whole, but two unequal parts. Whence it follows that the will of one part is never general either with respect to the other part.

But when the entire people rules over the entire people, it is considering itself alone; and if a relation is then formed, it is one between the whole object from one viewpoint and the whole object from another viewpoint, without any division at all. Then the matter ruled upon is general, as is the will that rules. It is this act that I call a law.

When I say that the object of laws is always general, I mean that the law considers subjects in a body and actions as abstract, never a man as an individual or a particular action. Thus the law may well rule that there will be privileges, but it cannot grant these to anyone by name. The law can make several Classes of Citizen, even assign the qualities that will grant entry to these classes, but it cannot name such and such persons to be admitted to them. It can establish a royal Government and a hereditary succession, but it cannot elect a king or name a royal family. In a word, any function relating to an individual object is not the province of the legislative power.

On this view, you can see at once that you no longer need to ask whose task it is to make laws, since they are acts of the general will; nor if the Prince is above these laws, since it is a member of the State; nor if the law can be unjust, since no one is unjust to himself; nor how we can be both free and subject to laws, since these register only what we will.

It is also clear that since the law combines the universality of the will with that of its object, what any man, no matter who, orders on his own authority is no law. What even the Sovereign orders with respect to a particular object is not a law either, but a decree; not an act of sovereignty, but one of magistracy.

So I call Republic any State ruled by laws, under any form of administration whatsoever: for only then does the public interest govern, and is the res publica a reality. All legitimate Government is republican.* I shall explain later what Government is.

Laws properly speaking are only the conditions of civil association. The People subjected to laws must be their author. It is the province only of those who associate in a society to regulate its conditions, but how will they do so? Will it be by common agreement, by sudden inspiration? Does the body politic have some organ to express its will? Who will give it the foresight necessary to formulate its acts and declare them in advance, or how will it proclaim them in time of need? How should a blind multitude, which often does not know what it wants, because it rarely knows what is good for it, by itself implement so great and difficult an undertaking as a system of legislation? The people of itself always wants what is good, but it does not of itself always see it. The general will is always rightful, but the judgement guiding it is not always enlightened. It must be brought to see objects such as they are, and sometimes such as they should appear; it must be shown the true path that it seeks; it must be safeguarded from the seduction of particular wills; places and times must be brought closer to its gaze; the charm of present, perceptible advantages must be weighed against the danger of distant, hidden ills. Individuals see the good they reject; the public wills the good that it does not see. All are equally in need of guides. The former must be obliged to adapt their wills to their reason; the latter must be taught to know that which it wills. Public enlightenment then results in the union of understanding and will in the social body, leading to exact cooperation of the parts and ultimately the greatest strength of the whole. Thence arises the need for a Legislator.

Chapter 7

Of the Legislator

In order to discover the best social rules appropriate for Nations, a superior intelligence would be necessary, which would live all the passions of men but experience none of them; which would have no part of our nature, but would know it through and through; whose happiness would be independent of us, yet which would be willing to concern itself with us; which finally, storing up a distant glory for itself over the course of time, would be able to work in one century and find enjoyment in another.* Gods would be necessary in order to give men laws.

What Caligula argued on the basis of reality, Plato argued on the basis of right when in his book on ruling he sought to define the civil or kingly man.⁸ But if it be true that a great Prince is a rare man, what will be the case for a great Legislator? The former has only to follow the model that the latter has to propose. The latter is the engineer who invents the machine, the former is only the workman who installs and operates it. At the birth of societies, Montesquieu says, it is the rulers of republics who make the institutions, and thereafter it is the institutions that mould the rulers of republics.

Anyone who dares undertake to give a people institutions must feel capable of so to speak changing human nature; of transforming every individual, who in himself is a perfect and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from which this individual in a sense receives his life and his being; of substituting a partial and corporate existence for the physical and independent existence that we have all received from nature. In a word, he must strip man of his own forces in order to give him others that are alien to him, and of which he cannot make use without another’s help. The more those natural forces are dead and destroyed, the more those gained are great and lasting, and the more too are the institutions solid and perfect. So that if every Citizen is nothing and can do nothing other than through all his fellows; and if the force acquired by the whole is equal or superior to the sum of natural forces of all the individuals; then legislation may be said to be at the highest point of perfection it could attain.

The Legislator is in all respects an extraordinary man in the State. If he must be so by virtue of his intelligence, he is just as much so by virtue of his function. This is not magistracy, nor is it sovereignty. This function, which constitutes the republic, forms no part of its constitution. It is a particular and superior function that has nothing in common with human power. For if he who commands men must not command the laws, neither must he who commands the laws command men. Otherwise those laws, catering to his passions, would often only perpetuate his injustices; and he could never guard against particular views impairing the sanctity of his work.

When Lycurgus gave laws to his fatherland, he began by surrendering his Royal status. It was the custom in most of the Greek cities to entrust the establishment of their laws to foreigners. The modern Republics of Italy often imitated this practice; that of Geneva did the same and prospered by doing so.* Rome in her finest age saw all the crimes of Tyranny reborn in her bosom, and saw herself on the verge of perishing, because she had united legislative authority and sovereign power on the same brows.

Yet the Decemvirs⁹ themselves never claimed the right to pass any law by their authority alone. Nothing of what we propose to you, they would say to the people, can pass into law without your consent. Romans, be yourselves the authors of the laws that are to ensure your happiness.

The man who draws up the laws thus has, or should have, no legislative right; and the very people, even should it wish to, cannot strip itself of that incommunicable right. Because, according to the fundamental pact, it is the general will alone that puts individuals under an obligation; and because you can never ensure that an individual will is in conformity with the general will, unless you have first submitted it to the free votes of the people. I have already stated this, but it is worth repeating.

So in the work of lawgiving you can find at one and the same time two things that seem incompatible: an undertaking that is beyond human powers, and for its execution an authority that is nothing.

There is another difficulty that deserves attention. Wise men intent on speaking their own language to the common man instead of his could not be understood by him. But there are innumerable kinds of idea that cannot be translated into the language of the people. Views too general and objects too remote are equally beyond its range. It is hard for any individual, appreciating no other plan of government than that relating to his particular interest, to discern the advantages he is to draw from the constant privations that good laws impose. For a nascent people to be able to appreciate healthy maxims of political thought and follow the fundamental rules of raison d’État, effect would have to succeed in becoming cause; the social spirit that must be the work of institutions would have to preside over the institutions themselves; and prior to laws men would have to be what they must become through them. Hence, since the Legislator is thus unable to use either force or reason, it is a necessity for him to have recourse to an authority of a different order, which may compel without violence and persuade without convincing.¹⁰

This is what, throughout time, forced the fathers of nations to have recourse to the intervention of heaven and ascribe their own wisdom to the Gods, so that peoples – subjected to the laws of the State as to those of nature, and acknowledging the same power in man’s formation and that of the city – might obey in liberty, and bear the yoke of public happiness with docility.

This sublime reasoning, which soars above the reach of common men, is that whereby the Legislator puts decisions in the mouth of the immortals, in order through divine authority to compel those whom human prudence could not shake.* But it is not the province of all men to make the Gods speak, nor to be believed when they announce themselves as their interpreters. The Legislator’s great soul is the true miracle that should prove his mission. Any man can engrave tablets of stone, or buy an oracle, or feign secret traffic with some divinity, or train a bird to whisper in his ear, or find other crude means with which to impose upon the people. The man who knows this alone may even by chance manage to assemble a flock of crazy people; but he will never found an empire, and his outlandish construction will soon perish with him. Empty illusions create an ephemeral bond, it is wisdom alone that can make it lasting. The Judaic law which still lives on, and that of Ishmael’s child which for ten centuries has ruled half the world, proclaim to this day the great men who dictated them. And whereas proud philosophy or blind partisanship see in them only lucky imposters, the true political thinker admires in their institutions the great and powerful genius that presides over enduring creations.

From all this it would be wrong to conclude with Warburton¹¹ that among us political thought and religion have a common object, but rather that in the origin of nations the latter serves as an instrument of the former.

Chapter 8

Of the People

Just as the architect, before erecting a great building, observes and plumbs the ground to see if it can bear the weight, so the wise founder of institutions does not begin by drafting laws good in themselves, but first examines whether the people for which he intends them is capable of supporting them. This is why Plato refused to give laws to the Arcadians and Cyrenians, knowing that those two peoples were rich and could not tolerate equality. This is why in Crete you saw good laws and wicked men, because Minos had imposed discipline only upon a people weighed down by vice.¹²

Countless nations have glittered upon this earth which could never have tolerated good laws; and even those which could have done so had throughout their span only a very short time for it. Most peoples like most men are docile only in their youth, becoming incorrigible as they grow older. Once customs are established and prejudices take root, it is a dangerous and vain undertaking to seek to reform them. The people cannot even endure its ills being touched in order to destroy them, like those stupid and cowardly patients who shudder at the sight of the doctor.

It is not that, just as some illnesses throw men’s minds into turmoil and strip them of all memory of the past, there are not sometimes violent epochs in the life of States wherein revolutions have the same effect on peoples as certain crises have upon individuals; in which horror of the past takes the place of forgetting; and in which the State, set aflame by civil wars, is so to speak reborn from its ashes and recovers the vigour of youth as it emerges from the arms of death. Such was Sparta in the time of Lycurgus, such was Rome after the Tarquins, and such among us have been Holland and Switzerland after the expulsion of their Tyrants.¹³

But these events are rare; they are exceptions, the reason for which is always to be found in the particular constitution of the exceptional State. They could not even take place twice for the same people; for it can free itself so long as it is merely barbarous, but can do so no longer once the civil order is eroded. Then troubles can destroy it without revolutions being able to re-establish it; and as soon as its fetters are broken, it falls in fragments and no longer exists. Henceforth it needs a master, not a liberator. Free peoples, remember this maxim: ‘you can win liberty, but you can never regain it’!

Youth is not childhood. For Nations, as for men, there is a time of youth or if you will of maturity, that must be awaited before subjecting them to laws; but the maturity of a people is not always easy to know, and if you anticipate it the undertaking is a failure. One people is susceptible to discipline at its birth, another is not after ten centuries. The Russians will never truly be civilized, because they were civilized too soon. Peter had a genius for imitation;¹⁴ he did not have true genius, that which creates and makes everything out of nothing. Some of the things he did were good; most were inappropriate. He saw that his people was barbarous, he failed to see that it was not ripe for civilization; he wished to civilize it when what was needed was merely to harden it. He wished first to make Germans or Englishmen, when it was necessary to begin by making Russians; he prevented his subjects from ever becoming what they might have become, by persuading them that they were what they are not. That is how a Tutor in France trains his pupil to shine for a moment in childhood, and thereafter never to be anything. The Empire of Russia will seek to subjugate Europe, and will itself be subjugated. The Tartars – its subjects or its neighbours – will become its masters and ours. This revolution seems to me inevitable. All the Kings of Europe are working in concert to hasten its coming.

Chapter 9

Of the People – continued

Just as nature has set limits to the stature of a well-formed man, beyond which she makes only Giants or Dwarfs, similarly with respect to the best constitution of a State there are limits to the extent it may have, so that it is neither too large to be well governed nor too small to maintain itself independently. In every body politic there is thus a maximum of strength that it would be unable to surpass, and from which it often moves away by dint of growing larger. The further the social bond stretches, the looser it grows; and in general a small State is proportionately stronger than a large one.

Countless reasons confirm this maxim. First, administration grows more irksome over large distances, just as a weight grows heavier at the end of a large lever. It also grows more onerous as its levels multiply. For at first every town has its administration, paid for by the people; every district has its own, again paid for by the people; then every province, then such major levels of government as Satrapies or Viceroyalties, which have to be paid for more dearly as you rise higher, and always at the expense of the unhappy people; finally comes the supreme administration, which crushes all. The subjects are constantly exhausted by so many additional burdens. Far from being governed better by these various orders, they are less well governed than if they had but a single one over them. Meanwhile there are barely any resources left for emergencies; and when it has to resort to them, the State is always on the brink of ruin.

That is not all. Not only does the Government have less vigour and promptness in ensuring observance of the laws, correcting abuses, or forestalling seditious undertakings that may occur in far-off places; but the people has less affection for its rulers, whom it never sees, for the fatherland, which seems to it like the world, and for its fellow citizens, most of whom are strangers to it. The same laws cannot be appropriate for so many diverse provinces, which have different mores, live under contrasting climates, and cannot tolerate the same form of government. Different laws engender only turmoil and confusion among peoples which, living under the same rulers and in constant communication, intermingle or intermarry and, being then subjected to other customs, never know if their patrimony is truly their own. Talents are buried, virtues ignored and vices unpunished in this multitude of men, unknown to one another, assembled in one place by the seat of the supreme administration. The Rulers, overwhelmed by the weight of business, see nothing for themselves; functionaries govern the State. In short, the measures that have to be taken to maintain the general authority, which so many distant Officials wish to evade or to exploit, absorb all the public concern. Nothing is left for the well-being of the people, hardly anything for its defence in case of need, which is why a body too large for its own constitution grows weak and perishes crushed beneath its own weight.

On the other hand, the State must give itself a certain base in order to have solidity; in order to bear up under the shocks it will not fail to experience and the efforts it will be obliged to make to maintain itself. For all peoples have a kind of centrifugal force, whereby they continuously act against each other and tend to expand at the expense of their neighbours, like Descartes’ vortices.¹⁵ So the weak risk being soon engulfed, and scarcely can any people preserve itself except by setting itself in a kind of equilibrium with all that will render the pressure more or less equal everywhere.

From this it may be seen that there are reasons to expand and reasons to contract; and that it is not the least talent of a political thinker to find, between the former and the latter, the proportion most advantageous for preservation of the State. You may say in general that the former reasons, being only external and relative, should be subordinated to the latter, which are internal and absolute. A healthy, strong constitution is the first thing to be sought; and you must rely more on the vigour born of a good government than on the resources provided by a large territory.

Moreover, we have seen States so constituted that the need for conquests formed part of their very constitution, and in order to maintain themselves they were forced constantly to expand. Perhaps they used to congratulate themselves greatly on this happy necessity; yet it showed them, along with the limit on their size, the inevitable moment of their downfall.

Chapter 10

Of the People – continued

A body politic may be measured in two ways: namely, by the extent of its territory and by the number of its people; and between these two measurements there is an appropriate ratio for giving the State its true greatness. It is men who make the State, and its territory that feeds the men. The appropriate ratio is thus that the land should be sufficient for the upkeep of its inhabitants, and that there should be as many inhabitants as the land can feed. It is in this proportion that the maximum force of a people of given number lies. For if there is an excess of territory, guarding it is burdensome, it is insufficiently cultivated, and its product is superfluous; this is the proximate cause of defensive wars. If there is not enough territory, the State finds itself looking to its neighbours to supplement it; this is the proximate cause of offensive wars. Any people that through its position has only the alternatives of trade and war is weak in itself. It depends on its neighbours, it depends on events, it never has anything other than an uncertain, brief existence. Either it subjugates and changes its situation, or it is subjugated and is nothing. It can keep itself free only by being small or large.

No fixed ratio can be worked out between the extent of land and the number of men that suffice for one another: as much because of the differences that occur in the quality of the land, its degree of fertility, the nature of its production, and the influence of its climate as because of the differences to be noted in the temperament of the men living on it, some of whom consume little in fertile country while others consume much on unrewarding soil. Account must also be taken of the greater or lesser fecundity of the women, of what is more or less favourable to population in the country, of the amount the legislator can hope to contribute through his institutions. So that he must not base his judgement on what he sees, but on what he foresees; nor dwell so much upon the present state of the population as upon the state it should naturally reach. After all, there are countless occasions when the particular incidentals of the place require or permit more territory to be incorporated than seems necessary. Thus you will expand a great deal in a land of mountains, where natural production in the shape of forests and pastures requires less labour, where experience teaches that women are more fecund than on the plains, and where extensive sloping terrain provides little flat land, that alone may be relied upon for vegetation. On the sea coast, by contrast, even among almost barren rocks and sands you may contract, because fishing can largely make up for terrestrial production, because men have to cluster more closely to repel pirates, and because too, by means of colonies, you will find it easier to deliver the country from the inhabitants with which it is overburdened.

To these conditions for giving a people institutions must be added one that cannot replace any other, but without which they are all useless: this is that you should enjoy abundance and peace. For the time when a State is in order, like the time when a battalion is formed, is the instant when the body is least capable of resistance and easiest to destroy. One would resist better in absolute disorder than in a moment of ferment, when everyone is concerned about his rank and not about danger. If war, famine or sedition occurs in this time of crisis, the State is infallibly overthrown.

Not that many governments have not been established during such storms; but then it is these governments themselves that destroy the State. Usurpers always bring on, or choose, such times of upheaval in order to put through, under cover of the public panic, destructive laws that the people would never adopt in cold blood. Choice of the right moment to form institutions is one of the surest features by which you may distinguish the work of the Legislator from that of the Tyrant.

So which people is fit to be given laws? A people that, finding itself already bound by some link of origin, interest or convention, has not yet borne the real yoke of laws; one that has no well-rooted customs or superstitions; one that does not fear being overwhelmed by a sudden invasion, and that, without entering its neighbours’ disputes, can on its own resist any one of them, or use the help of one to repel another; one each of whose members can be known by all, and in which you are not forced to load a man with a burden greater than a man can carry; one that can do without other peoples, and that any other people can do without;* one that is neither rich nor poor, and can be sufficient unto itself; finally one that combines the resistance of an ancient people with the docility of a new people. What makes the work of legislation irksome is less what must be established than what must be destroyed; and what makes success so rare is the impossibility of finding the simplicity of nature combined with the needs of society. All these conditions, to be sure, are hard to find together. So few well-constituted States are seen.

There is still one country in Europe fit to be given laws: it is the Isle of Corsica.¹⁶ The valour and constancy with which that brave people has managed to recover and defend its liberty would merit that some wise man should teach it to preserve that liberty. I have a feeling that one day that little island will astonish Europe.

Chapter 11

Of the Various Systems of Legislation

If you look for precisely what constitutes the greatest good for all, which must be the aim of every system of legislation, you will find that it is reduced to these two main objects: liberty and equality. Liberty, because every particular dependence is so much strength removed from the body of the State; equality, because liberty cannot exist without it.

I have already stated what civil liberty is. As for equality, this word must not be taken to mean that degrees of power and wealth should be absolutely identical, but that in the case of power it should stop short of all violence, and never be exerted other than in keeping with rank and the laws; and in the case of wealth no citizen should be so opulent as to be able to buy another, and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself. This implies moderation in goods and influence on the part of the great, moderation in avarice and covetousness on the part of the humble.*

This equality, people say, is a speculative fantasy that cannot exist in practice. But if abuse is inevitable, does it follow that it should not at least be regulated? It is precisely because the force of things always tends to destroy equality that the force of legislation must always tend to maintain it.

But these general aims of all good institutions must be modified in each country by the relations engendered alike by the local situation and the character of the inhabitants; and it is on the basis of these relations that each people must be assigned a particular system of institutions, which is perhaps best not in itself but for the State for which it is destined. For instance, is the soil unrewarding and barren, or the land too restricted for the inhabitants? Turn then towards industry and crafts, the products of which you will exchange for the commodities you lack. On the other hand, do you occupy rich plains and fertile slopes? On good land, do you lack inhabitants? Give all your concern then to agriculture, which multiplies men; and drive out crafts, which would only complete the depopulation of the land, by herding the few inhabitants there are onto certain parts of the territory.† Do you occupy an extensive, open coast? Cover the sea with ships, foster trade and navigation; you will have a brief and glorious existence. Does the sea on your shores wash only against almost inaccessible rocks? Remain ichthyophagous barbarians; you will live more tranquilly for that, perhaps better, and certainly more happily. In a word, apart from the maxims common to all, every People contains within itself some cause that orders these in a particular way and makes its legislation suitable for it alone. Thus formerly the Hebrews and recently the Arabs had Religion as their main aim, the Athenians letters, Carthage and Tyre commerce, Rhodes seafaring, Sparta war and Rome virtue. The author of The Spirit of Laws¹⁷ showed in a host of examples the skill with which the legislator directs institutions towards each of his aims.

What makes the constitution of a State truly solid and lasting is when conventions are observed in such a way that natural relations and laws always coincide on the same points, so that the latter in a manner of speaking only ensure, accompany and rectify the former. But if the Legislator, erring in his aim, takes a different principle from that which springs from the nature of things – if one principle tends towards servitude, the other towards liberty; one towards riches, the other towards population; one towards peace, the other towards conquest – then you will see laws imperceptibly weaken, the constitution deteriorate, and the State will not cease to be in turmoil until it is destroyed or changed, and until invincible nature has reasserted its sway.

Chapter 12

Division of Laws

For the whole to be set in order, or the best possible form given to the res publica, various relationships must be considered. First, the action of the whole body acting upon itself: in other words, the relation of the whole to the whole, or of the Sovereign to the State. And this relationship is made up of relations between intermediate terms,¹⁸ as we shall see below.

The laws regulating this relationship bear the name of political laws, and are also called fundamental laws, not without some reason if these laws are wise. For if in each State there is only one good way to set it in order, the people which has found this must hold fast to it. But if the established order is bad, why should you take laws to be fundamental that prevent it from being good? Whatever happens, moreover, a people is always in a position to change its laws, even the best; for if it is pleased to harm itself, who has the right to prevent it from doing so?

The second relationship is that of members with one another or with the whole body; and this relationship must in the former case be as little as possible, in the latter as great as possible. So that each Citizen should be perfectly independent of all the others, and excessively dependent upon the City; which is always achieved by the same means, since it is only the force of the State that can make its members free. It is from this second relationship that civil laws spring.

A third kind of relationship between man and the law may be considered: namely, that between disobedience and punishment; and this gives rise to the establishment of criminal laws, which are basically not so much laws of a particular kind as the sanction of all the others.

To these three kinds of law a fourth may be added, the most important of all, which is engraved neither on marble nor on brass, but in the hearts of citizens; which makes the true constitution of the State; which gains new strength every day; which, when other laws grow old or fade away, rekindles or replaces them, preserves a people in the spirit of its institutions, and imperceptibly substitutes the force of habit for that of authority. I am speaking about mores, about customs, and above all about opinion: a part [of the laws] unknown to our political thinkers, but upon which the success of all the rest depends; a part with which the great Legislator is concerned in secret, while he seems to confine himself to particular regulations that are merely the ribs of the vault, of which mores, slower to emerge, eventually form the unshakeable Keystone.

Among these various Classes, political laws, which constitute the form of Government, are alone relevant to my subject.

End of the Second Book

BOOK III

Before speaking about the different forms of Government, let us attempt to fix the precise meaning of this word, which has not yet been very well explained.

Chapter 1

Of Government in General

I warn the reader that this chapter must be read carefully, and that I do not have the trick of being clear to anyone who is not willing to be attentive.

Every free action has two causes that contribute to producing it: one moral, namely the will that determines the act; the other physical, namely the power that executes it. When I walk towards an object, it is necessary first that I should wish to go there; in the second place that my feet should carry me there. If a paralytic should wish to run or a nimble man not wish to do so, both will remain where they are. The body politic has the same motive forces. Strength and will are similarly to be discerned there: the latter designated as ‘legislative power’, the former as ‘executive power’. Nothing is done there, nor must be, without their contribution.

We have seen how legislative power belongs to the people, and can belong to the people alone. On the other hand, it is easy to see by the principles established above that executive power cannot belong to the general public, as Legislative or Sovereign. For this power consists only in particular acts that are not the province of law, nor consequently of the Sovereign, all of whose acts can only be laws. Hence, public force needs a specific agent to unite and actuate it as directed by the general will; to enable the State and the Sovereign to communicate; to do in the public realm, in a way, what the union of soul and body does in man. This is the reason for Government in the State, improperly confused with the Sovereign of which it is only the minister.

So what is Government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the Sovereign for their mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of laws and with the maintenance of liberty, both civil and political.

The members of this body are called Magistrates or Kings, in other words Governors, and the whole body bears the name of Prince.* Hence, those who claim that the act whereby a people submits to rulers is no contract are perfectly correct. This act is nothing whatsoever but a commission; a task in which, as mere officers of the Sovereign, they exercise in the latter’s name the power that it has vested in them; a power that it can limit, modify and take back when it likes, the alienation of such a right being incompatible with the nature of the social body and contrary to the purpose of association.

Thus I call Government or supreme administration the legitimate exercise of executive power, and Prince or magistrate the man or body charged with this administration.

It is in Government that the intermediate forces are to be found whose relations constitute the relationship between the whole and the whole, or between the Sovereign and the State. This latter relationship can be represented as the ratio between the extremes of a continued proportion² of which the mean proportional is the Government. The Government receives from the Sovereign the orders that it gives to the people, and for the State to be well balanced there must, all things being equal, be parity between the product or power of the Government taken in itself and the product or power of the citizens, who are sovereign on the one hand and subjects on the other.

Moreover, it would not be possible to alter any one of the three terms without instantly destroying the proportion. If the Sovereign wishes to govern, or if the magistrate wishes to give laws, or if the subjects refuse to obey, disorder succeeds rule, force and will no longer act in concert, and the dissolved State thus falls into despotism or into anarchy. For as there is only one mean proportional within each ratio, there is likewise only one possible good government in a State. But as a thousand events may change a people’s relations, diverse Governments can be good not merely for different peoples, but for the same people at different times.

In an attempt to give an idea of the diverse relations that can obtain between these two extremes, I shall take as an example the number of the people, this being an easier ratio to express.

Let us suppose that the State is composed of ten thousand Citizens. The Sovereign can be considered only collectively and as a body. But each particular man as a subject is considered as an individual. Thus the Sovereign is to the subject as ten thousand is to one. In other words, each member of the State has for his own share only one ten-thousandth part of the sovereign authority, even though he is wholly subjected to it. If the people consists of one hundred thousand men, the state of the subjects does not change, and each one bears equally the full empire of the laws, while his suffrage, reduced to one hundred-thousandth, has ten times less influence in their drafting. Hence, the subject always remaining single, the ratio between subject and Sovereign increases in proportion to the number of Citizens. Whence it follows that the more the State is enlarged, the more liberty is diminished.

When I say that the ratio increases, I mean that it moves farther from parity. So the larger the ratio in the Geometers’ sense, the smaller it is in the everyday sense. In the former the ratio, considered in terms of quantity, is measured by the quotient; whereas in the latter, considered in terms of identity, it is gauged by similarity.

Well, the less that particular wills relate to the general will, or morals to laws, the more that repressive force must increase. So the Government, in order to be good, must be relatively stronger to the extent that the people is more numerous.

On the other hand, since enlargement of the State gives those in whom public authority is vested more temptations and means to abuse their power, the more strength the Government must have to contain the people, the more the Sovereign must have in turn in order to contain the Government. I am speaking here not about an absolute strength, but about the relative strength of the different parts of the State.

It follows from this double ratio that the continued proportion between the Sovereign, the Prince and the people is by no means an arbitrary idea, but a necessary consequence of the nature of the body politic. It further follows that since one of the extremes, namely the people as subject, is fixed and represented by unity, whenever the duplicate ratio increases or diminishes, the simple ratio increases or diminishes likewise; and that consequently the middle term is changed. This shows that there is no unique and absolute constitution of Government, but that there can be as many Governments different in nature as States different in size.

If you were to ridicule this system by saying that, in order to find this mean proportional and form the body of Government, all that is necessary according to me is to find the square root of the number of the people, I should reply that I am taking this number here only as an example; that the relations about which I am speaking are measured not merely by the number of men, but in general by the quantity of action, which is the product of innumerable causes; and that furthermore, if in order to express myself in fewer words I borrow for a moment from geometrical terms, I am nevertheless not unaware that geometrical precision has no place in moral quantities.

The Government is in miniature what the body politic encompassing it is on a large scale. It is a corporate person endowed with certain faculties, active like the Sovereign, passive like the State; a person that can be broken down into other similar relations, which accordingly give birth to a new proportion, and within this yet another in accordance with the order of magistracies, until an indivisible middle term is reached, viz. a single head or supreme magistrate, who can be represented in the middle of this progression like the unity between the series of fractions and the series of integers.

Without entangling ourselves in this multiplication of terms, let us content ourselves with considering the Government as a new body in the State, distinct from the people and from the Sovereign, and intermediary between one and the other.

There is this essential difference between these two bodies, that the State exists by virtue of itself, while the Government exists only by virtue of the Sovereign. Thus the dominant will of the Prince is or must be only the general will or the law, and its force is only the public force concentrated in it; no sooner does it seek to perform some absolute and independent act of its own accord than the cohesion of the whole begins to loosen. If it happened indeed that the Prince had an individual will more active than that of the Sovereign, and that in obedience to this individual will it made use of the public force which is in its hands so that in a manner of speaking you had two sovereigns, one de jure and one de facto, the social union would instantly vanish and the body politic would be dissolved.

However, in order for the body of the Government to have an existence, a real life distinguishing it from the body of the State, and in order for all its members to be able to act in concert and answer the purpose for which it is established, it needs an individual self, a sensibility common to its members, a force and will of its own directed at its preservation. This individual existence presupposes assemblies, councils, a power of deliberation and resolution; rights, titles and privileges that belong to the Prince exclusively and make the condition of the magistrate proportionately more honourable the more burdensome it is. The difficulties lie in the manner of ordering within the whole this subaltern whole, in such a way that it does not at all alter the general constitution by asserting its own; that it always distinguishes its individual force, destined for its own preservation, from the public force destined for preservation of the State; and that, in a word, it is always ready to sacrifice the Government to the people and not the people to the Government.

Moreover, although the artificial body of the Government is the work of another artificial body and has in a sense only a borrowed and subordinate life, that does not prevent it from being able to act with more or less vigour or celerity; from so to speak enjoying more or less sound health. For, without departing directly from the purpose of its establishment, it may diverge from it more or less according to the way in which it is constituted.

It is all these differences that give rise to the diverse relations that the Government must have with the body of the State, in keeping with the accidental and particular relations by which this same State is modified. For often the best Government in itself will become the most vice-ridden, if its relations are not altered in accordance with the failings of the body politic to which it belongs.

Chapter 2

Of the Principle That Constitutes the Diverse Forms of Government

In order to uncover the general cause of these differences, it is necessary here to distinguish between the Prince and the Government, as I distinguished above between the State and the Sovereign.

The magistracy can be made up of a greater or lesser number of members. We have already said that the ratio between Sovereign and subjects was greater insofar as the people was more numerous; and by an obvious analogy we can say the same about the Government with respect to the Magistrates.

Now the total force of the Government, being always that of the State, does not vary. Whence it follows that the more it uses this force upon its own members, the less it has left to act upon all the people.

Thus the more numerous the Magistrates, the weaker the Government. Since this maxim is fundamental, let us set about clarifying it.

We can distinguish in the person of the magistrate three essentially different wills. Firstly, the individual’s own will, directed only at his private advantage; secondly, the common will of the magistrates, which relates solely to the advantage of the Prince and can be called corporate will, general with respect to the Government and particular with respect to the State of which the Government forms part; in the third place, the will of the people or sovereign will, which is general with respect to the State considered as the whole and likewise to the Government considered as part of the whole.

In a perfect legislation, the particular or individual will must be nil; the corporate will proper to the Government must be very subordinate; hence, the general or sovereign will must be always dominant, and the sole rule for all the others.

According to the natural order, on the other hand, these different wills become proportionately more active the more concentrated they are. Thus the general will is always the weakest, the corporate will ranks second, and the particular will is foremost: so that in Government each member is primarily himself, then a Magistrate, then a citizen. A gradation directly contrary to that required by the social order.

Given this, suppose all Government to be in the hands of a single man. You thus have the particular will perfectly joined with the corporate will, and the latter consequently at the highest degree of intensity attainable. Now, since it is upon the degree of will that the use of force depends, and since the absolute force of the Government is invariable, it follows that the most active of Governments is that of a single man.

On the other hand, let us unite Government with legislative authority. Let us make the Sovereign into the Prince, and all the Citizens into so many magistrates. Then the corporate will, merged into the general will, shall have no more activity than the latter, and leave the particular will in all its force. Hence the Government, still with the same absolute force, will be at its minimum of relative force or activity.

These ratios are incontestable, and other considerations serve to confirm them further. Each magistrate, for example, is seen to be more active in his body than each citizen in his, and as a consequence the particular will has much more influence upon the Government’s acts than upon the Sovereign’s. For each magistrate is almost always charged with some function of Government, whereas each citizen taken separately has no function of sovereignty. Moreover, the more the State expands, the more its real force increases, although it does not increase in proportion to its size. But with the State remaining the same, the magistrates multiply to no avail; the Government does not thereby acquire a greater real force, since this force is that of the State and its measure is always equal. Hence, the relative force or the activity of the Government diminishes, without its absolute or real force being able to increase.

It is certain, moreover, that business is dispatched more slowly, the more people are charged with it; that, in according too much to prudence, not enough is accorded to fortune; that opportunities are let slip; and that, by dint of deliberating, the fruit of deliberation is often lost.

I have just proved that Government slackens to the extent that magistrates multiply, and I proved earlier that the more numerous a people is, the more repressive force must increase. Whence it follows that the ratio between magistrates and Government must be the inverse of the ratio between subjects and Sovereign. In other words, the more the State grows in size, the more the Government must be restricted, in such a way that the number of rulers diminishes proportionately with the people’s increase.

However, I am speaking here about the relative force of the Government, not about its rectitude. For, on the contrary, the more numerous the magistracy, the more closely its corporate will approaches the general will. Whereas, as I have said, under a single magistrate that same corporate will is merely a particular will. Thus you lose on one side what you may gain on the other, and the Legislator’s art is to succeed in fixing the point at which the Government’s force and will, always in reciprocal proportion, combine in the ratio most advantageous to the State.

Chapter 3

Division of Governments

It has been seen in the preceding chapter why the various kinds or forms of Government are distinguished by the number of members composing them. It remains to be seen in this chapter how this division is made.

The Sovereign, in the first place, can entrust the charge of Government to the whole people or to the greater part of the people, in such a way that there are more citizens who are magistrates than are simple private citizens. This form of Government is given the name of Democracy.

Or it can confine Government within the hands of a small number, in such a way that there are more simple private Citizens than magistrates, and this form bears the name of Aristocracy.

Finally it can concentrate the whole Government in the hands of a single magistrate, from whom all the rest hold their power. This third form is the most common, and is called Monarchy or royal Government.

It must be noted that all these forms, or at least the two first, are capable of more or less, and have even a fairly broad scope. For Democracy can encompass the whole people or be restricted to half. Aristocracy, in turn, from half the people can be restricted without specification to the smallest number. Even Royalty is capable of being shared to some extent. Sparta always had two Kings according to its constitution; and in the Roman Empire eight Emperors were seen at one time without it being possible to say that the Empire was divided.³ Thus there is a point at which each form of Government merges with the next and, under just three designations, Government is in reality seen to be capable of as many diverse forms as the State has Citizens.

That is not all. Since this same Government is able in certain respects to be subdivided into different parts, one administered in one way and another in a different way, these three forms in combination can produce a multitude of mixed forms, each of which is multipliable by all the simple forms.

Throughout time, people have always argued a lot about the best form of Government, without considering that every such form is best in certain cases and worst in others.

If in different States the number of supreme magistrates must be in inverse ratio to the number of Citizens, it follows that in general Democratic Government suits small states, the Aristocratic form middling ones, and the Monarchical form large ones. This rule is drawn directly from the principle. But how are we to count the multitude of circumstances that can furnish exceptions?

Chapter 4

Of Democracy

He who makes the law knows better than anyone how it should be executed and interpreted. So you could seemingly not have a better constitution than one in which executive power and legislative power were joined. But this is precisely what makes this form of Government inadequate in certain respects, because things that ought to be distinguished are not; the Prince and the Sovereign being merely the same person, they form so to speak merely a Government without Government.

It is not good that he who makes the laws should execute them, nor that the body of the people should turn its attention from general considerations in order to direct it at particular objects. Nothing is more dangerous than the influence of private interests in public affairs, and abuse of the laws by Government is a lesser evil than corruption of the Legislator, inevitable consequence of particular considerations. The substance of the State being then adulterated, every reform becomes impossible. A people that would never abuse Government would not abuse independence either; a people that would always govern well would have no need to be governed.

Taking the term in its strictest sense, no true Democracy has ever existed, nor ever will exist. It is against the natural order for the large number to govern and the small to be governed. One cannot imagine the people remaining constantly assembled to attend to public affairs, and can easily see that it would not be able to establish commissions for this purpose without the form of administration changing.

Indeed, I think I can lay down as a principle that when the functions of Government are shared among several tribunals, the less numerous sooner or later acquire the greatest authority; if only because their facility in dispatching business leads them naturally to acquire it.

Furthermore, how many things does this Government [Democracy] not presuppose that are hard to combine? In the first place a very small State, in which the people is easy to assemble and in which every citizen can easily know all the rest. Secondly, a great simplicity of mores, to avert proliferating business and thorny discussions. Next considerable equality of rank and fortune, without which equality could not long subsist in rights and authority. Lastly little or no luxury, for either luxury is the result of wealth or it makes wealth necessary; it corrupts the rich man and the poor man alike, the former by possession and the latter by envy; it sells the fatherland to softness and vanity; it strips the State of all its Citizens in order to enslave them to each other, and all to public opinion.

That is why a celebrated author⁴ gave to the Republic virtue as its principle. For all these conditions could not subsist without virtue. But without having made the necessary distinctions, that fine genius often lacked aptness and sometimes clarity; he did not see that, Sovereign authority being everywhere the same, the same principle must apply in every well-constituted State, more or less to be sure depending on the form of Government.

Let us add that there is no Government so subject to civil war and internal strife as the Democratic or popular kind, because there is none that tends so strongly and continually to change form, nor that requires more vigilance and courage in order to be maintained in its own. It is above all in this constitution that the Citizen must arm himself with force and constancy, and each day of his life say in his innermost heart what a virtuous Palatine* used to say in the Polish Diet: Malo periculosam libertatem quem quietum servitium.⁵

If there were a people of Gods, it would govern itself Democratically. So perfect a Government is not suitable for men.

Chapter 5

Of Aristocracy

We have here two quite distinct corporate persons [personnes morales], viz. the Government and the Sovereign, and consequently two general wills, one relative to all citizens, the other only for members of the administration. Hence, although the Government can regulate its internal order as it pleases, it can only ever speak to the people in the name of the Sovereign, viz. in the name of the people itself, and this must never be forgotten.

The first societies were governed aristocratically. The heads of families would deliberate on public affairs among themselves. Young people would yield readily to the authority of experience. Whence such terms as Priests, elders, senate, Gerontes.⁶ The natives of North America still govern themselves thus today, and are very well governed.

But as institutional inequality prevailed over natural inequality, wealth or power† was preferred to age, and Aristocracy became elective. Finally power, transmitted with the father’s goods to the children, by making families patrician made Government hereditary, and Senators of twenty were seen.

So there are three kinds of Aristocracy: natural, elective and hereditary. The first suits only simple peoples; the third is the worst of all Governments. The second is the best: it is Aristocracy in the proper sense.

Apart from the advantage of the two powers being distinguished, it has that of its members being chosen. For in a popular Government all Citizens are born as magistrates, but this system limits them to a small number, and they become so only through election;* a means through which probity, enlightenment, experience and all the other reasons for preference and public esteem are so many new guarantees that you will be governed wisely.

Moreover, assemblies are convened more easily, business is discussed better and dispatched in a more orderly and diligent fashion, the credit of the State is upheld better among foreigners by venerable senators than by an unknown or despised multitude.

In a word, the best and most natural order is that the wisest should govern the multitude, when you are sure that they will govern it for its own benefit rather than for theirs. Competencies should not be multiplied needlessly, nor should you do with twenty thousand men what one hundred chosen men can do still better. But it must be noted that corporate interest begins to direct the public force less in keeping with the general will here, and that another inevitable tendency removes part of the executive power from the laws.

With respect to particular interests, you need neither a State so small nor a people so simple and upright that execution of the laws follows immediately from the public will, as in a good Democracy. Nor do you need a nation so large that the rulers dispersed to govern it ape the Sovereign, each in his own department, and begin by making themselves independent only to end up becoming the masters.

But if Aristocracy requires a few virtues less than popular Government, it also requires others that are specific to it; like moderation among the wealthy and contentment among the poor; for a strict equality would seemingly be out of place in it and was not observed even in Sparta.

Moreover, if this form involves a certain inequality of fortune, this is in order that in general the administration of public business should be entrusted to those who can best give all their time to it; but not, as Aristotle claims, in order that the wealthy should always be preferred. On the contrary, it is important that an opposite choice should sometimes teach the people that in the merit of men there are more important reasons for preference than wealth.

Chapter 6

Of Monarchy

Hitherto we have considered the Prince as a corporate [morale] and collective person, united by the force of the laws and vested with executive power in the State. Now we have to consider such power concentrated in the hands of a natural person, a real man, who alone has the right to dispense it in keeping with the laws. This is what is called a Monarch, or a King.

Quite unlike other administrations, where a collective being represents an individual, here an individual represents a collective being. So that the corporate unity constituting the Prince is at the same time a physical unity, in which all the faculties that the law so laboriously assembles in the former here find themselves assembled naturally.

Thus the will of the people and the will of the Prince and the public force of the State and the particular force of the Government all respond to the same motive force; all the levers of the machine are in the same hand; everything moves towards the same end; there are no contrary movements mutually destroying one another; and no kind of constitution is imaginable in which a lesser effort would produce a more considerable action. Archimedes⁷ seated tranquilly on the shore and effortlessly launching a large Vessel represents for me a skilful monarch governing his vast States from his study and, while appearing immobile, causing everything to move.

But even if there is no Government that has more vigour, there is none in which the particular will has more empire and more easily dominates the rest. Everything moves towards the same end, to be sure; but this end is by no means that of public felicity, and the very strength of the Administration ceaselessly turns to the detriment of the State.

Kings wish to be absolute and are loudly informed that the best way of accomplishing this is to make their peoples love them. This maxim is very fine, and even very true in certain respects. Unfortunately Courts will always pay no heed to it. The power conferred by the love of peoples is no doubt the greatest; but, being precarious and conditional, it will never satisfy Princes. The best Kings wish to be able to be wicked if it pleases them, without ceasing to be masters. In vain will a political sermonizer tell them that, the people’s strength being their strength, their highest interest is that the people should be flourishing, numerous and formidable: they know very well that this is not true. Their personal interest is primarily that the People should be weak, wretched and unable ever to resist them. I concede that, if you assume subjects who are always perfectly obedient, the interest of the Prince would then be that the people should be powerful, so that its power being his own would make him formidable to his neighbours. But as this interest is merely secondary and subordinate, and as the two assumptions are incompatible, it is natural that Princes always give preference to the maxim that is most directly useful to them. This is what Samuel pointed out forcefully to the Hebrews,⁸ and it is what Machiavelli clearly demonstrated. While professing to give lessons to Kings, he gave great lessons to their peoples. Machiavelli’s Prince is the book of republicans.* ⁹

We found on the basis of general proportions that monarchy is suited only to large States, and we find the same thing if we examine it in itself. The more numerous the public administration is, the more the ratio between Prince and subjects diminishes and approaches parity, so that in Democracy this ratio is one, or parity itself. The same ratio increases in proportion to the contraction of the Government, and is at its maximum when the Government is in the hands of a single man. Then there is too great a distance between Prince and People, and the State lacks coherence. In order to achieve the latter, therefore, intermediary orders are necessary, and Princes, grandees and a nobility are needed to fill these. Now, nothing of all this is suited to a small State, which is ruined by all such degrees.

But if it is difficult for a large State to be well governed, it is far more so for it to be well governed by a single man, and everyone knows what happens when the King gives himself deputies.

An essential and inevitable defect, which will always place monarchical below republican government, is the fact that in the latter the public vote almost never raises to the foremost positions any other than enlightened and capable men, who fill these with honour, whereas those who advance to them in monarchies are most often merely petty blunderers, petty rogues, petty schemers, who make use of the petty talents that in Courts bring advancement to great positions only to reveal their ineptitude to the public as soon as they have reached these. The people errs in its choice far less than the Prince, and a man of true merit is almost as rare in a ministry as a fool at the head of a republican government. So when, by some lucky chance, one of these men born to govern does take the helm of affairs in a Monarchy almost brought to ruin by such a fine pack of stewards, people are quite surprised by the resources he finds, and it represents a historic event for the country.

For a monarchical State to be well governed, its size or its extent would need to be tailored to the skills of the man who governs. It is easier to conquer than to rule. With a sufficient lever, you can shake the world with one finger; but to support it you need the shoulders of Hercules. If a State is large, the Prince is almost always too small. On the other hand, when it happens that the State is too small for its ruler, which is very rare, it is yet ill governed. For the ruler, still following the grandeur of his vision, forgets the interests of its peoples, and makes them no less wretched by the abuse of his excessive talents than does a limited ruler through the absence of the talents he lacks. A kingdom would, as it were, need to expand or contract with every reign, depending upon the Prince’s capacity; whereas, with a Senate whose talents have more fixed quantities, the State can have stable boundaries and its administration run just as well.

The most evident disadvantage of Government by a single man is the lack of that continuous succession that in the other two forms provides an unbroken bond. One King dead, another is needed; elections allow dangerous intervals; they are stormy, and, unless the Citizens have a disinterestedness and integrity scarcely compatible with this type of Government, intrigue and corruption come into play. It is hard for a man to whom the State has been sold not to sell it in turn, and not to seek compensation from the weak for the money extorted from him by the powerful. Sooner or later everything becomes venal under such an administration, and then the peace enjoyed under kings is worse than the disorder of interregna.

What has been done to forestall these ills? Crowns have been made hereditary in certain families, and an order of Succession has been established to forestall any conflict upon the death of Kings. In other words, replacing the disadvantage of elections by that of regencies, a semblance of tranquillity has been preferred to a wise administration; and people have chosen the risk of having a child, a monster or an idiot for a ruler rather than to quarrel over the choice of a good King. They have not considered that, by exposing themselves thus to the risks of these alternatives, they are pitting almost all the odds against them. There was sound sense in what the young Dionysius¹¹ would say when his father, reproaching him for some shameful action, asked: ‘Did I set you such an example?’ ‘No,’ the son replied, ‘but your father was not a king.’

Everything conspires to deprive a man brought up to command others of justice and reason. It is said that great trouble is taken to teach young Princes the art of ruling; this education does not appear to benefit them. People would do better to begin by teaching them the art of obedience. The greatest kings celebrated by history have not been brought up to rule at all. It is a knowledge that is never possessed less than when it has been too much learned, and that is better acquired by obeying than by commanding. Nam utilissimus idem ac brevissimus bonarum malarumque rerum delectus, cogitare quid aut nolueris sub alio Principe aut volueris [For the best and shortest way of choosing between good things and bad is to consider what you will have either wished for or not wished for under another Prince].*

One result of this lack of coherence is the inconstancy of royal government, which follows sometimes one plan and sometimes another, depending on the character of the Prince who rules or of the people who rule for him, so cannot for long have any fixed object or consistent conduct: a variability that always causes the State to drift from maxim to maxim, from project to project, and that does not occur in other Governments in which the Prince is always the same. It can also be seen that in general, if there is more guile in a Court, there is more wisdom in a Senate; and that Republics pursue their aims with more constant and coherent views, whereas every revolution in a Ministry produces one in the State – since the maxim common to all Ministries, and almost all Kings, is to do the reverse in all things of what their predecessor did.

This same incoherence gives the lie to a sophism very common among royalist political thinkers, which is not merely to compare civil Government to domestic Government and the prince to the paterfamilias, an error refuted earlier, but also to bestow liberally upon that magistrate all the virtues he would need, and always to assume that the Prince is what he ought to be: an assumption thanks to which royal Government is evidently preferable to any other, because it is undeniably the strongest, and because in order to be also the best it lacks only a corporate will more in conformity with the general will.

But if, according to Plato,† the King by nature is so rare a personage, how often will nature and fortune combine to crown him; and if the kingly education necessarily corrupts those who receive it, what is to be hoped of a succession of men brought up to rule? So it would be a great mistake to confuse royal Government with government by a good King. In order to see what this Government is in itself, it must be considered under limited or wicked Princes; for they will arrive such on the Throne, or the Throne will make them such.

These difficulties have not escaped our Authors, but they are by no means troubled by them. The remedy, they say, is to obey without grumbling. God in his wrath sends bad Kings, and they must be borne as punishments from Heaven. This argument is doubtless edifying; but I wonder if it might not be more fitting in the pulpit than in a political work. What would we say of a Doctor who promised miracles, and all of whose skill consisted in exhorting his invalid to be patient? Everyone knows that you must suffer a bad Government when you have one; the question is how to find a good one.

Chapter 7

Of Mixed Governments

Properly speaking, there is no simple Government. A single ruler must have subordinate magistrates; a popular Government must have a head. Hence, in the division of executive power, there is always a gradation from the large number to the lesser, with this difference that sometimes the large number depends upon the small, and sometimes the small upon the large.

At times there is an equal division. Either when the constituent parts are in mutual dependence, as in the Government of England; or when the authority of each part is independent but imperfect, as in Poland.¹² This latter form is bad, because there is no unity in the Government, and the State lacks cohesion.

Which is better, a simple Government or a mixed Government? This is a question hotly debated among political thinkers, and to which the same answer must be given that I gave earlier regarding any form of Government.

A simple Government is best in itself, just because it is simple. But when the executive Power does not sufficiently depend upon the legislature, viz. when there is more of a relation between Prince and Sovereign than between People and Prince, it is necessary to remedy this lack of proportion by dividing the Government; for then all its parts have no less authority over the subjects, while their division makes them all together less strong against the Sovereign.

The same disadvantage is guarded against also by establishing intermediate magistrates, who, while leaving the Government in its entirety, serve only to balance the two Powers and to maintain their respective rights. Then Government is not mixed, but tempered.

The opposite disadvantage may be remedied by similar means, erecting Tribunals to reinforce Government when it is too weak. That is practised in all Democracies. In the former case, Government is divided in order to weaken it, and in the latter in order to strengthen it. For the maximum degrees of strength and weakness are alike to be found in simple Governments, whereas mixed forms of the latter give an average strength.

Chapter 8

How Every Form of Government Does Not Suit Every Country

Liberty, not being a fruit of every Clime, is not within the reach of all peoples. The more you reflect upon this principle established by Montesquieu,¹³ the more you sense its truth. The more you deny it, the more opportunity you provide to establish it by new evidence.

In all the world’s Governments, the public person consumes but produces nothing. So whence comes the substance consumed? From the labour of its members. It is the surplus of individuals that produces the wherewithal of the public. Whence it follows that the civil state can subsist only so long as the labour of men yields more than their needs.

Now this excess is not the same in all countries of the world. In several it is considerable, in others mediocre, in others nil, in others negative. This proportion depends upon the fertility of the climate, upon the kind of labour that the land demands, upon the nature of its production, upon the strength of its inhabitants, upon the greater or lesser consumption that is necessary to them, and upon several other similar proportions that make it up.

On the other hand, all Governments are not of the same kind. Some devour more, some less, and the differences are based on this other principle, that the more distant the public contributions are from their source, the more onerous they are. It is not in terms of the quantity of levies that this burden is to be measured, but in terms of the path these have to follow in order to return to the hands whence they emerged. When this circulation is speedy and well established, whether little is paid or much does not matter; the people is still rich and the finances are still healthy. On the other hand, however little the People may give, when this little does not come back to it at all, by continuing to give it is soon exhausted; the State is never rich, and the people is still wretched.

It follows from this that the more the distance between people and Government increases, the more onerous the tribute becomes. Hence, in Democracy the people is least burdened, in Aristocracy it is more so, in Monarchy it carries the heaviest load. So Monarchy suits only opulent nations, Aristocracy suits States of middling wealth and size, Democracy suits small and poor States.

Indeed, the more you reflect, the more difference between free and monarchical States you find in the following: while in the former everything is used for the common utility; in the latter the public force and individual forces are reciprocal, the former increasing through weakening of the latter. In short, instead of governing subjects in order to make them happy, despotism makes them wretched in order to govern them.

Clearly, therefore, in every climate there are natural causes which make it possible to assign the form of Government necessitated by the climate, and even to say what kind of inhabitants it must have. Thankless, sterile places where the produce does not repay the labour must remain uncultivated and deserted, or peopled only by Savages. Places where human labour yields only bare necessities must be inhabited by barbarous peoples; any polity would be impossible there. Places where the surplus of produce over labour is middling suit free peoples. Those where abundant, fertile land gives much produce for little labour need to be governed monarchically, so that the surplus of the excess subjects may be consumed through the luxury of the Prince. For it is better that this surplus be absorbed by the government than dissipated by individuals. There are exceptions, I know; but these very exceptions confirm the rule, in that they sooner or later produce revolutions that bring things back to the order of nature.

We must always distinguish general laws from the particular causes that can modify their effect. If the entire south were covered by Republics and the entire north by despotic States, it would be no less true that in terms of climate despotism suits hot countries, barbarism cold countries, and a good polity suits intermediate regions. I see too that while granting the principle, you could still argue over the application; you could say that there are very fertile cold countries and very barren southern ones. But this difficulty is one only for those who do not examine the matter in all its aspects. As I have already said, account must be taken of such factors as labour, strength, consumption, etc.

Let us assume two equal tracts, one yielding five units and the other ten. If the inhabitants of the former consume four and those of the latter nine, the surplus product of the former will be one-fifth and that of the latter one-tenth. The ratio between these two surpluses thus being the inverse of that between the two yields, the tract producing only five will give double the surplus of the tract producing ten.

But there is no question of the produce being double, and I do not think that anybody would dare in general to place the fertility of cold countries on an equal footing with that of hot ones. Let us, however, assume such equality. Let us allow, if you wish, England to balance out Sicily, Poland Egypt. Further to the south we shall have Africa and the Indies, further to the north we shall no longer have anything. For this equality of produce, what difference in cultivation? In Sicily it is necessary only to scratch the earth, in England what hard work to till it! Now, wherever more manpower is needed to yield the same product, the surplus must necessarily be less.

Apart from that, consider that the same quantity of men consumes much less in hot countries. The climate requires that people be abstemious there in order to be healthy: Europeans who wish to live there as at home all perish of dysentery or indigestion.

‘We are carnivorous beasts,’ says Chardin,¹⁴ ‘wolves, in comparison with Asiatics. Some people attribute the abstemiousness of the Persians to the fact that their country is less cultivated, but for my part I think that their country is less abundant in foodstuffs because its inhabitants require less. If their frugality’, he continues, ‘was an effect of the country’s dearth, only the poor would eat little, whereas it is generally everyone; and people would eat more or less in every province according to the fertility of the land, whereas the same abstemiousness is found throughout the kingdom. They are very boastful about their way of living, saying that it is necessary only to look at their complexion in order to recognize how much more excellent this way of living is than that of Christians. Indeed the complexion of the Persians is smooth, they have a beautiful, fine, polished skin; whereas the complexion of the Armenians, their subjects who live in the European manner, is coarse and blotchy, and their bodies are big and heavy.’

The closer you come to the equator, the more peoples live off little. They scarcely eat meat: rice, maize, couscous, millet and cassava are their usual victuals. In the Indies there are millions of men whose food costs less than a sou a day. In Europe itself we see perceptible differences in appetite between the peoples of the north and those of the south. A Spaniard will live for eight days off a German’s dinner. In the countries where men are greediest, luxury thus turns towards articles of consumption. In England, it is visible on a table laden with meats; in Italy you are regaled with sugar and flowers.

Luxury of apparel too presents similar differences. In climates where seasonal changes are speedy and violent, you have better and simpler costumes; in those where people dress only for finery, a striking effect is prized over usefulness and the costumes themselves are a luxury. In Naples you will every day see men in gold-braided coats but no stockings walking on Mount Pausillipus. It is the same thing for buildings: magnificence is the prime concern when there is nothing to fear from draughts. In Paris or London people wish to be lodged warmly and comfortably. In Madrid people have splendid drawing-rooms, but no windows that close, and sleep in garrets.

Foods are far more substantial and succulent in hot countries. This is a third difference that cannot fail to influence the second. Why do people eat so many vegetables in Italy? Because these are good and nourishing there, and taste excellent. In France where they are fed only with water, they give no nourishment; and count for almost nothing on people’s tables. Yet they occupy no less farmland, and take at least as much trouble to cultivate. It has been shown by experiment that the wheats of Barbary, albeit inferior to those of France, yield far more flour, and that those of France in turn yield more than the wheats of the North. Whence it may be inferred that a similar gradation is observed generally in the same direction from the equator to the pole. Now, is it not an evident disadvantage to have in an equal produce a lesser quantity of food?

To all these different considerations I can add one that derives from them and that reinforces them: it is the fact that hot countries have less need of inhabitants than cold countries, and could feed more of them, which produces a double surplus still favouring despotism. The larger the area that a certain number of inhabitants occupies, the more difficult rebellion becomes; for it is not possible to confer speedily and in secret, and it is always easy for the Government to get wind of projects and cut communications. But the more tightly a numerous people is crowded together, the less the Government can encroach upon the Sovereign; the latter’s rulers deliberate as securely in their rooms as the Prince in his council-chamber, and the mob assembles as soon in the market-places as the troops in their barracks. The advantage of a tyrannical Government thus consists in its ability to act over long distances. With the aid of the fulcra it provides for itself, its strength increases from afar like that of a lever.* The strength of the people, on the other hand, acts only when concentrated; it evaporates and is lost when it spreads, like the effect of gunpowder scattered on the ground which ignites only grain by grain. The least populated countries are thus most suitable for Tyranny: savage beasts reign only in wildernesses.

Chapter 9

Of the Signs of a Good Government

So when you ask in absolute terms what the best Government is, you pose a question at once insoluble and indeterminate. Or, if you like, it has as many good solutions as there are possible combinations in the absolute and relative positions of peoples.

But if you asked by what sign you can tell whether a given people is well governed or ill, that would be another thing, and the question might in fact be resolved.

However, it is not resolved at all, because everyone wishes to resolve it in their own way. Subjects extol public tranquillity, Citizens the liberty of individuals; one man prefers security of ownership, another personal security; one man deems the strictest Government best, another maintains that it is the mildest; this man wants crimes to be punished, that one wishes them to be prevented; one likes the idea of being feared by neighbours, another prefers to be ignored by them; one is content when money circulates, another demands that the people should have bread. Even if people could agree on these points and others like them, would they be any further forward? Since moral quantities lack a precise measure, if people were agreed on the sign, how would they agree on the assessment?

For my part, I am always astonished that so simple a sign should go unrecognized, and that people should have the bad faith not to acknowledge it. What is the purpose of political association? It is the preservation and prosperity of its members. And what is the surest sign that these are preserved and prospering? It is their numbers and [increasing] population. So do not look elsewhere for this much disputed sign. All other things being equal, the Government under which Citizens – without such external means as naturalization or colonies – increase and multiply most is infallibly the best. The one under which a people dwindles and declines is the worst. Reckoners, it is now up to you: count, measure, compare.*

Chapter 10

Of the Abuse of Government and Its Tendency to Degenerate

As the individual will constantly acts against the general will, so does the Government make a continual effort against Sovereignty. The more this effort increases, the more the constitution deteriorates; and since there is no other corporate will here that, by resisting, can balance that of the Prince, it must happen sooner or later that the Prince will at last oppress the Sovereign and break the Social treaty. This is the inherent and inevitable vice that from the birth of the body politic tends unremittingly to destroy it, just as old age and death destroy the body of man.

There are two general ways whereby a Government degenerates: viz. when it contracts, or when the State is dissolved.

The Government contracts when it passes from the many to the few: in other words, from Democracy to Aristocracy, and from Aristocracy to Monarchy. That is its natural tendency.* If it regressed from the few to the many, it could be said to loosen, but this inverse movement is impossible.

Indeed, the Government never changes form except when its worn mainspring leaves it too much enfeebled to retain its original form. Now, if through expansion it were to slacken still further, its strength would become entirely null, and even less would it survive. So it is necessary to rewind and tighten the mainspring even as it yields, otherwise the State it sustains would founder.

Dissolution of the State can come about in two ways.

The first is when the Prince no longer administers the State in keeping with the laws, but usurps the sovereign power. Then a remarkable change takes place. For it is not the Government but the State that contracts. I mean that the great State is dissolved, and another is formed within it, composed only of the members of the Government, which to the rest of the People is no longer anything but its master and tyrant, in such a way that, at the instant when the Government usurps sovereignty, the social pact is broken; and all simple Citizens, restored by right to their natural liberty, are forced – albeit not obliged – to obey.

The same thing also comes about when the members of the Government usurp severally the power that they should exercise only as a body; which is no less an infraction of the laws, and produces still greater disorder. Then you have, so to speak, as many Princes as Magistrates, and the State, no less divided than the Government, perishes or changes form.

When the State dissolves, abuse of the Government, whatever it may be, takes the common name of anarchy. To distinguish further, Democracy degenerates into Ochlocracy, Aristocracy into Oligarchy; I would add that Monarchy degenerates into Tyranny, but this latter word is ambiguous and requires some explanation.

In the vulgar sense, a Tyrant is a King who governs with violence and without regard to justice and the laws. In the precise sense, a Tyrant is an individual who arrogates to himself royal authority without having any right to it. It is thus that the Greeks understood this word Tyrant. They gave it indifferently to good and bad Princes whose authority was not legitimate.* Thus Tyrant and Usurper are two entirely synonymous words.

To give different names to different things, I call Tyrant the usurper of royal authority, and Despot the usurper of Sovereign power. The Tyrant is he who interferes against the laws in order to govern according to the laws; the Despot is he who places himself above the laws themselves. Thus the Tyrant can be no Despot, but the Despot is always a Tyrant.

Chapter 11

Of the Death of the Body Politic

Such is the natural and inevitable trend of the best constituted Governments. If Sparta and Rome perished, what State can hope to last for ever? Hence, if we wish to form a lasting institution, let us not think about making it eternal. In order to succeed we should not attempt the impossible, or flatter ourselves that we are giving the work of men a solidity that does not belong to human things.

The body politic, as much as the human body, begins to die from its birth on, and bears within itself the causes of its destruction. But both may have a constitution that is more robust or less, fit to preserve it for a longer or shorter time. The constitution of man is the work of nature, that of the State is the work of artifice. It does not depend upon men to prolong their life, it does depend upon them as far as possible to prolong that of the State, by giving it the best constitution it could have. The best constituted one will come to an end, but later than others, if no unforeseen accident brings it to destruction before its time.

The principle of political life is in Sovereign authority. Legislative power is the heart of the State, executive power is its brain, which gives movement to every part. The brain may become paralysed, yet the individual still lives. A man is left an imbecile and lives. But as soon as the heart has ceased its functions, the animal is dead.

It is by no means through laws that the State subsists, it is through legislative power. Yesterday’s law does not bind today, but tacit consent is presumed from silence, and the Sovereign is deemed ceaselessly to confirm laws that he does not abrogate, though he could do so. All that he ever proclaimed as his will, he still wills, unless he revokes it.

So why do people accord such respect to old laws? It is for that very reason. They must believe that it is only the excellence of former wills that could have preserved them for so long; if the Sovereign had not continuously acknowledged them as beneficial, he would have revoked them a thousand times. That is why, far from growing weaker, laws constantly acquire new force in every well-constituted State; the bias in favour of antiquity makes them daily more venerable. On the other hand, wherever laws grow weaker as they age, this proves that there is no longer any legislative power, and that the State is no longer alive.

Chapter 12

How Sovereign Authority Is Maintained

The Sovereign, having no force other than legislative power, acts only through laws; and laws being merely authentic acts of the general will, the Sovereign should be capable of acting only when the people is assembled. The people assembled, you will say! What a pipe-dream! It is a pipe-dream today, but two thousand years ago it was not. Have men changed their nature?

The limits of the possible in moral things are less narrow than we think. It is our weaknesses, our vices and our prejudices that shrink them. Mean spirits do not believe in great men at all; vile slaves smile mockingly at the word liberty.

Let what has been done show us what can be done. I shall not speak of the ancient republics of Greece, but the Roman republic seems to me to have been a great State, and the city of Rome a great city. The last census recorded four hundred thousand Citizens bearing arms in Rome, and the last count of the Empire more than four million Citizens without including subjects, foreigners, women, children or slaves.

How hard might you imagine it to be, frequently to assemble the vast people of that capital and its surroundings? Yet few weeks went by without the Roman people being assembled, even several times. It exercised not merely the rights of sovereignty, but in part those of Government. It used to deal with certain affairs, judge certain cases, and on the market-place that whole people was magistrate almost as often as Citizen.

If you went back to the earliest days of Nations, you would find that most ancient governments, even monarchical ones like those of the Macedonians and the Franks, had similar Councils. Be that as it may, this one incontestable fact answers all difficulties. Arguing from what has existed to what is possible seems valid to me.

Chapter 13

How Sovereign Authority Is Maintained – continued

It is not enough that the assembled people should once have fixed the constitution of the State by giving its sanction to a body of laws; it is not enough that it should have established a perpetual Government or that it should have provided once and for all for the election of magistrates. Apart from the extraordinary assemblies that unforeseen cases can demand, it is necessary that there should be fixed and periodic ones that nothing can abolish or adjourn, so that on the appointed day the people is legitimately summoned together by law, without this requiring any other formal summons.

But outside of these assemblies that are juridical by virtue of their date alone, every assembly of the People that has not been summoned by the magistrates appointed for that purpose and according to the prescribed forms must be deemed illegitimate and everything done at it deemed null; because the very order to assemble must emanate from the law.

As for the more or less frequent recurrence of legitimate assemblies, this depends upon so many considerations that precise rules could not be given in that respect. You can merely say in general that the more strength the Government has, the more frequently the Sovereign must appear.

This may be fine for a single town, you will say, but what is to be done when the State contains several? Is Sovereign authority to be shared, or should you concentrate it in a single town and subjugate all the rest?

I reply that neither one thing nor the other should be done. First of all, sovereign authority is simple and single, and it cannot be divided without destroying it. In the second place, a town cannot legitimately be subjugated to another any more than can a Nation, because the essence of the body politic lies in the reconciliation of obedience and liberty, and because these words subject and sovereign are identical correlatives whose meaning is united in the single word Citizen.

I reply further that it is always wrong to unite several towns in a single city, and that if you do seek to make such a union you should not flatter yourself that you can avoid its natural disadvantages. Abuse by great States should not be put forward as a counter-argument against someone who desires only small ones. But how may small States be given enough strength to resist great ones? As the Greek towns formerly resisted the great King, and as more recently Holland and Switzerland have resisted the house of Austria.

However, if the State cannot be reduced to proper limits, one recourse still remains; this is not to permit a capital at all, to have the Government sit in each town successively, and likewise to convene all the country’s Estates in each by turn.

Populate the territory evenly, extend the same rights throughout it, carry abundance and life throughout it: that is how the State will become at once the strongest and the best governed possible. Remember that town walls are formed only from the wreckage of cottages. Whenever I see a Palace raised in the capital, I have visions of a whole countryside cast into hovels.

Chapter 14

How Sovereign Authority Is Maintained – continued

The moment the People is legitimately assembled as a Sovereign body, all the Government’s jurisdiction ceases, executive power is suspended, and the person of the humblest Citizen is as sacred and inviolable as that of the highest Magistrate, because where the Represented is present there is no longer any Representative. Most conflicts that broke out in the comitia of Rome came from ignorance or neglect of this rule. The Consuls were then only Presidents of the People, the Tribunes mere Speakers,* the Senate was nothing at all.

These intervals of suspension, when the Prince recognizes – or should recognize – a present superior, have always been threatening to it; and these assemblies of the people, which are the aegis of the body politic and a curb on Government, have always filled rulers with dread. Hence, they regularly spare no endeavours, objections, obstructions or promises in order to discourage Citizens from them. When the latter are greedy, cowardly and pusillanimous, loving ease more than liberty, they do not long hold out against the redoubled efforts of the Government. In this way, as the force of resistance constantly increases, the Sovereign authority eventually evaporates, so that most cities fall and perish before their time.

But between Sovereign authority and arbitrary Government there is sometimes interposed an intermediate power, about which something must be said.

Chapter 15

Of Deputies or Representatives

As soon as public service ceases to be the main business of Citizens, and they prefer to serve with their purses than with their persons, the State is already near to its ruin. Is it necessary to go into combat? They pay troops and stay at home. Is it necessary to enter the Council? They nominate Deputies and stay at home. Helped by indolence and money, they end up with soldiers to serve the fatherland and representatives to sell it.

It is the hurly-burly of commerce and the arts, it is avid pursuit of gain, it is softness and love of comfort, that commute personal services into money. You yield part of your profit in order to increase it at your leisure. Give money, and soon you will have shackles. This word finance is a slave’s word: it is unknown in the City. In a truly free State, citizens do everything with their own hands and nothing with money. Far from paying to be exempted from their duties, they would pay to fulfil these themselves. I am very far from the common opinion: I consider labour dues less contrary to liberty than taxes.

The better the State is constituted, the more do public affairs prevail over private in the minds of its Citizens. There is even far less in the way of private affairs, since with the sum of common happiness providing a more considerable portion of each individual’s own, less remains for him to seek in personal concerns. In a well-conducted city everyone flies to assemblies; under a bad Government no one cares to take a step to reach them. For no one takes any interest in what is done there, the general will is not expected to prevail there, and lastly domestic concerns are all-absorbing. Good laws cause better ones to be made, bad laws bring worse. As soon as anyone says of State affairs: what do I care?, you must reckon that the State is lost.

Cooling of love for the fatherland, the activity of private interest, the immensity of States, conquests, and abuse of Government – all these have led people to devise the procedure of Deputies or Representatives of the people in the Nation’s assemblies. This is what in certain countries they dare to call the Third Estate, which means that the particular interest of two orders is ranked first and second, while the public interest is only third.

Sovereignty cannot be represented, for the same reason that it cannot be alienated. It consists essentially in the general will, and will cannot be represented: it is the same or it is other – there is no middle ground. Hence, the deputies of the people are not and cannot be its representatives; they are merely its agents, who cannot conclude anything definitively. Any law that the People has not ratified in person is null; it is no law at all. The English people thinks it is free, but it is quite mistaken: it is free only during the election of members of Parliament; as soon as these are elected, it is enslaved, it is nothing. The use it makes of its brief moments of liberty fully warrants its loss of it.

The idea of Representatives is modern. It comes to us from feudal Government, from that iniquitous and absurd Government which degrades the human race and dishonours the name of man. In ancient Republics and even monarchies, the People never had representatives: that word was not known. It is very striking that in Rome, where the Tribunes were so sacred, no one ever imagined that they might usurp the functions of the people; striking that in the midst of so great a multitude they never attempted to pass a single Plebiscite on their own authority. Yet the trouble the mob sometimes caused may be judged by what happened at the time of the Gracchi,¹⁷ when a portion of the Citizens cast their votes from the rooftops.

Where rights and liberty are everything, inconveniences are nothing. Among that wise people, everything was given its just due: it used to allow its Lictors to do what its Tribunes would never have dared to do; it had no fear that its Lictors might seek to represent it.

However, in order to explain how the Tribunes sometimes used to represent the People, it is enough to grasp how the Government represents the Sovereign. Since the Law is but a declaration of the general will, it is clear that in its Legislative power the People cannot be represented. But it can and must be represented in its executive power, which is simply force applied to the Law. This makes clear that, if things were examined properly, it would be found that very few Nations have laws. Be that as it may, the Tribunes, having no portion of the executive power, could certainly never represent the Roman People by virtue of the rights their posts conferred, but only by usurping the rights of the Senate.

Among the Greeks, the People used to do for itself all that it had to do; it continually assembled on the market-place. It lived in a mild climate; it was not at all greedy; slaves did its work; its chief concern was its liberty. No longer having the same advantages, how are you to preserve the same rights? Your harsher climes add to your needs,* for six months in the year the market-place is uninhabitable, your flat tongues cannot make themselves heard in the open, you care more for your profit than for your liberty, and you fear slavery far less than destitution.

What! Is liberty to be maintained only with the support of servitude? Perhaps. The two extremes meet. Everything unknown to nature has its disadvantages, and civil society more than all the rest. There are certain unfortunate situations in which you can preserve your liberty only at the expense of that of others, and in which the Citizen cannot be entirely free without the slave being utterly enslaved. Such was the situation in Sparta. For you, modern peoples, you have no slaves, but you are slaves; you pay for their liberty with your own. In vain do you boast of this preference: I find more cowardice in it than humanity.

I certainly do not mean by all this that it is necessary to have slaves, nor that the right to enslave is legitimate, since I have proved the opposite. I am merely stating the reasons why modern peoples which think themselves free have Representatives, and why ancient peoples had none. Be that as it may, from the moment that a People gives itself Representatives, it ceases to be free; it ceases to be.

Having examined everything carefully, I do not see how it is henceforth possible for the Sovereign to preserve among us the exercise of its rights, if the City be not very small. But if it is very small, surely it will be subjugated? No. How the external power of a great People can be combined with the easy administration and good order of a small State I shall demonstrate hereafter.*

Chapter 16

How the Institution of Government Is No Contract

Once the Legislative power is well established, the executive power must be established in similar fashion. For the latter, which operates only through particular acts, being essentially different from the former is necessarily separate from it. If it was possible for the Sovereign, considered as such, to have the executive power, right and fact would be so confused that you would no longer know what was law and what was not, and the body politic, thus disfigured, would be prey to the violence against which it was instituted.

Since the Citizens are all equal through the social contract, all may prescribe what all must do, whereas no one has the right to require another to do what he does not do himself. Yet it is this very right, indispensable for giving the body politic life and motion, that the Sovereign confers on the Prince by instituting Government.

Some have maintained that this act of establishing a Government was a contract between the People and its chosen rulers: a contract stipulating between the two parties the conditions under which one undertook to command and the other to obey. You will agree, I am sure, that this is a strange way to make a contract! But let us see if this opinion is tenable.

In the first place, the supreme authority can no more be modified than it can be alienated; to limit it is to destroy it. It is absurd and contradictory for the Sovereign to give itself a superior; to bind itself to obey a master is to return to absolute liberty.

Furthermore, it is evident that this contract between the people and specific persons would be a particular act. Whence it follows that this contract could not be a law or an act of sovereignty, and that consequently it would be illegitimate.

It is also clear that the contracting parties would between themselves be subject to the law of nature alone, and without any guarantee of their reciprocal undertakings, which is wholly repugnant to the civil state. Since whoever has force at his command is always the master of what is done, you might equally well apply the word ‘contract’ to the act of a man who says to another: ‘I shall give you all my goods, on condition that you give me back whatever you please.’

There is only one contract in the State, which is the contract of association; of itself alone it excludes all others. No public Contract could be imagined that was not a violation of this first.

Chapter 17

Of the Institution of Government

In what terms should we conceive of the act whereby Government is instituted? I shall begin by remarking that this act is complex, or composed of two others: viz. the establishment of law, and the execution of law.

By the former, the Sovereign decrees that a body of Government will be established in such and such a form; and it is clear that this act is a law.

By the latter, the People names the rulers who will be entrusted with the established Government. Now this nomination, being a particular act, is not a second law; it is merely a continuation of the first and a function of Government.

The difficulty is to understand how there can be an act of Government before Government exists, and how the People, which is only either Sovereign or subject, can in certain circumstances become a Prince or Magistrate.

Here again is revealed one of those astonishing properties of the body politic, whereby it reconciles apparently contradictory operations. For this is accomplished by a sudden conversion of Sovereignty into Democracy, in such a way that, without any perceptible change, and simply through a new relation of all to all, the Citizens, having become Magistrates, pass from general acts to particular acts, and from law to execution.

This changed relation is by no means a speculative ploy without any example in practice. It takes place daily in the Parliament of England, where the lower House on certain occasions turns into a Grand Committee, the better to discuss its business, and thus becomes a mere commission of the Sovereign Court that it was a moment before, in such a way that it later reports to itself as the House of Commons on what it has just settled in Grand Committee, and deliberates anew in one capacity on what it has already decided in another.

It is the peculiar advantage of Democratic Government that it can be established in fact by a simple act of the general will. After this, either this provisional Government remains in office, if such is the form adopted; or in the Sovereign’s name it establishes the Government prescribed by law, and all is thus in order. It is not possible to institute Government in any other legitimate way, and without renouncing the principles established earlier.

Chapter 18

Means of Preventing Usurpations by Government

In confirmation of Chapter 17, these clarifications show that the act instituting Government is no contract but a Law; that those in whom the executive power is vested are not the people’s masters, but its officers; that the people can appoint them and dismiss them as it pleases; that it is a matter for them not of contracting, but of obeying; and that in assuming the functions which the State imposes on them, they are merely fulfilling their duty as Citizens, without having any sort of right to argue over the conditions.

So when the People happens to institute a hereditary Government, either monarchical in one family or aristocratic in one order of Citizens, it is making no kind of commitment, but giving a provisional form to the administration, until it is pleased to order things otherwise.

It is true that such changes are always dangerous, and that the established Government should never be touched except when it becomes incompatible with the public weal; but this circumspection is a maxim of politics not a rule of right, and the State is no more bound to leave civil authority to its rulers than military authority to its Generals.

It is true too that in such cases the greatest care must be taken to observe all the formalities required in order to distinguish a regular and legitimate act from a seditious tumult, and the will of an entire people from the clamour of a faction. It is here, above all, that invidious cases must be dealt with only by what strict application of the law demands. It is from this same obligation that the Prince derives a great advantage for preserving its power in defiance of the people, without anyone being able to say that it has usurped that power. For while seeming only to exercise its rights, it can very easily extend these and on the pretext of public calm prevent assemblies intended to re-establish good order. So it exploits a silence that it prevents from being broken, or irregularities for which it is responsible, to claim it is favoured by the assent of those silenced by fear and to punish those who dare to speak. Thus did the Decemvirs, having first been elected for a year then kept on for another year, attempt to keep their power in perpetuity, by no longer allowing the comitia to assemble. And it is by this simple means that all the governments of the world, once invested with public force, sooner or later usurp the Sovereign authority.

The periodic assemblies of which I spoke above are suitable for forestalling or postponing this evil, above all when they require no formal convocation. For then the Prince could not prevent them without declaring itself openly a lawbreaker and enemy of the State.

These assemblies, whose sole purpose is maintenance of the social treaty, should always open with two motions that can never be omitted, to be voted on separately.

The first: if it please the Sovereign to maintain the present form of Government.

The second: if it please the People to leave the administration to those at present charged with it.

I assume here what I believe I have demonstrated, viz. that in the State there is no fundamental law that cannot be revoked, not even the social pact. For if all the Citizens came together to break this pact by common accord, one cannot doubt but that it would be very legitimately broken. Grotius even thinks that anyone can renounce the State of which he is a member, and recover his natural liberty and his goods by leaving the country.* Now, it would be absurd if the Citizens united could not do what each of them can do separately.

End of the Third Book

Book IV

Chapter 1

How the General Will Is Indestructible

So long as several men together consider themselves a single body, they have but a single will, which is directed towards their common preservation and general welfare. Then all the impulses of the State are vigorous and simple, its maxims are clear and luminous, it has no muddled or contradictory interests, and the common good is manifestly visible everywhere, requiring good sense alone in order to be discerned. Peace, unity and equality are enemies of political sophistication. Upright, simple men are hard to deceive because of their simplicity; sophisticated tricks and arguments do not impress them; they are not even subtle enough to be dupes. When, among the happiest people in the world, you see bands of peasants regulating affairs of State under an oak-tree, and always behaving wisely, can you prevent yourself from despising the subtleties of other nations, which make themselves illustrious and wretched with so much art and mystery?

A State thus governed has need of very few Laws, and as it becomes necessary to promulgate new ones, this necessity is universally seen. The first to propose them merely says what all have already felt, and there is no question of intrigues or eloquence in order to secure the passage into law of what each has already resolved to do, as soon as he is sure that the others will do likewise.

What misleads theorists is the fact that, seeing only States badly constituted from their inception, they are struck by the impossibility of maintaining such an administration in them. They imagine with delight all the idiocies of which a clever rascal or ingratiating talker could convince the people of Paris or London. They do not know that Cromwell¹ would have been set to hard labour by the people of Berne, and the Duke of Beaufort² clapped in a house of corrections by the Genevans.

But when the social knot begins to loosen and the State to grow weak, when particular interests begin to make themselves felt and lesser societies begin to influence the greater, the common interest becomes diluted and meets opposition. Unanimity no longer reigns in voting, the general will is no longer the will of all, contradictions and disputes arise, and the best opinion does not go unchallenged.

When at last the State, close to ruin, subsists only in a vain and illusory form, when the social bond is broken in every heart, when the basest interest shamelessly flaunts the sacred name of the public weal, then the general will falls silent. Prompted by secret motives, all no more speak as Citizens than as if the State had never existed; and iniquitous decrees directed only to particular interest are falsely passed in the guise of Laws.

Does it follow from this that the general will is annihilated or corrupted? No, it is always unchanging, incorruptible and pure. But it is subordinated to others that prevail over it. In detaching his own interest from the common interest, each sees clearly that he cannot separate it off entirely; but his share of the public evil seems as nothing to him, compared with the exclusive good that he means to appropriate. This particular good aside, he wills the general good in his own interest just as strongly as anyone else. Even in selling his suffrage for money, he does not extinguish the general will within himself, but evades it. The fault he commits is to change the state of the question, and to answer something other than what he has been asked, so that, instead of saying by his suffrage: it is beneficial to the State, he says: it is beneficial to some man or some party that such and such an opinion should prevail. Thus the law on public order in assemblies consists not so much in upholding the general will in them as in ensuring that it is always interrogated and always answers.

I would have many reflections to make here upon on the simple right to vote in every act of sovereignty: a right that no one can take away from Citizens. Also upon the right of voicing an opinion, proposing, dividing, and debating – which the Government always takes great care to confine to its own members.³ But this important subject would require a separate treatise, and I cannot say everything in this one.

Chapter 2

Of Suffrages

You can see from the preceding chapter that the way in which general affairs are conducted provides a clear enough indication of the present state of morals, and the health of the body politic. The more concord reigns in assemblies, i.e. the more opinions approach unanimity, the more the general will is dominant too. But long debates, dissension and tumult signal the ascendant of particular interests and the decline of the State.

This seems less obvious when two or more orders enter into its constitution, as in Rome with the Patricians and the Plebeians, whose disputes often disrupted the comitia even in the Republic’s best times. But this exception is more apparent than real. For the defect inherent in the body politic meant that you then, so to speak, had two States in one. What was not true for the two together was true for each separately. And indeed, even in the stormiest times, plebiscites of the People would always go through peacefully when the Senate did not interfere in them, and with a large majority of suffrages. Citizens having but one interest, the people had but a single will.

At the diametrically opposite extreme, unanimity recurs. This is when citizens, fallen into servitude, no longer have either liberty or will. Then fear and flattery change suffrages into acclamations; people no longer deliberate, they worship or they damn. Such was the Senate’s despicable way of voicing opinions under the Emperors. Sometimes this used to be done with ridiculous precautions. Tacitus observes that under Otho the Senators, while heaping curses on Vitellius, at the same time contrived to make a dreadful din, so that if by chance he became their master, he could not tell what each of them had said.⁴

These various considerations provide the maxims that should regulate the manner of counting votes and comparing opinions, depending on whether the general will is more or less easy to know, and the State more or less in decline.

There is but one law which by its nature demands unanimous consent. This is the social pact. For civil association is the most voluntary act in the world. Every man being born free and his own master, no one on any account whatsoever may subjugate him without his permission. To decide that the son of a slave is born a slave is to decide that he is not born a man.

So if at the time of the social pact there are opponents to it, their opposition does not invalidate the contract, it merely prevents their being included in it: they are foreigners among the Citizens. When the State is instituted, residence is consent; to dwell in the territory is to submit to the sovereignty.*

Outside of that original contract, the vote of the majority always binds all the others; it is a consequence of the contract itself. But one wonders how a man can be free, yet compelled to conform to wills that are not his own. How are opponents free, yet subjected to laws to which they have not consented.

I answer that the question is badly put. The Citizen consents to all laws, even those passed in spite of him, and even those that punish him when he dares to violate one of them. The constant will of all members of the State is the general will; it is through this that they are citizens and free.† When a law is proposed in the People’s assembly, what is asked of the members is not precisely whether they approve the proposal or reject it, but whether it is or is not in conformity with the general will which is their own. In giving his suffrage, each expresses his opinion on this, and from the reckoning of the votes the declaration of the general will is drawn. So when the opposite opinion to mine prevails, that proves nothing other than that I was mistaken, and that what I considered to be the general will was not. If my particular opinion had prevailed, I should have done something other than what I had willed, and it is then that I should not have been free.

This presupposes, to be sure, that all the qualities of the general will still reside in the majority; when they are there no longer, whichever side you take, there is no more liberty.

In showing above how particular wills were substituted for the general will in public deliberations, I indicated clearly enough the practicable means to forestall such abuse; I shall say more about that later. As for the proportional number of suffrages required to declare the general will, I likewise gave the principles according to which this can be determined. The difference of a single vote breaks a tie, a single opponent breaks unanimity; but between unanimity and a tied vote there are various unequal splits, to any one of which this number may be assigned, depending on the state and the needs of the body politic.

Two general maxims can serve to regulate these ratios; one: that the more important and serious the deliberations are, the closer the opinion that prevails must be to unanimity; the other: that the greater the urgency of the business under consideration, the narrower the allowable difference in the split of opinions must be. With deliberations that have to be resolved straight away, a single-vote majority should suffice. The first of these maxims seems more suitable for laws, the second for normal business. Be that as it may, it is by combining them that you can determine the best ratios to give to the majority in reaching a decision.

Chapter 3

Of Elections

With respect to elections of the Prince and the Magistrates, which, as I have said, are complex acts, there are two ways to proceed in them: viz. by choice and by lot. Both have been used in various Republics, and a very complicated mixture of the two can still be seen today in the election of the Doge of Venice.

Drawing lots, says Montesquieu, is natural to Democracy. I agree, but why so? Drawing lots, he continues, is a method of election that wounds no one. It leaves each Citizen a reasonable hope of serving the fatherland. These are not reasons.

If you keep in mind that the election of rulers is a function of Government and not of Sovereignty, you will see why recourse to lots is more natural to Democracy, where administration is all the better for its acts being fewer in number.

In every true Democracy, magistracy is not an advantage but an onerous responsibility, that cannot rightly be imposed upon one individual rather than another. The law alone can impose this responsibility on whomsoever is singled out by lot. For then, with the condition being equal for all and the choice depending on no human will, there is no particular application to dilute the universality of the law.

Under Aristocracy, the Prince chooses the Prince, the Government preserves itself by its own endeavours, and that is where suffrages are appropriate.

The example of the election of the Doge of Venice, far from undermining this distinction, confirms it. This combined form suits a mixed Government. For it is a mistake to see the Government of Venice as a true Aristocracy. If the People has no share in Government there, the nobility is itself the people. A host of poor Barnaboti⁵ never came close to any magistracy, and of their nobility had only the empty title of Excellency and the right to attend the Grand Council. This Grand Council being of equal number with our General Council in Geneva, its illustrious members have no more privileges than our mere Citizens. Setting aside the extreme disparity between the two Republics, it is certain that the bourgeoisie of Geneva accurately represents the Venetian Patriciate, our natives and residents represent the townsmen and the people of Venice, our peasants represent its mainland subjects. In short, however that Republic may be viewed, if its size is disregarded, its Government is no more aristocratic than ours. All the difference is that, having no ruler for life, we do not have the same need to draw lots.

Elections by lot would not have any great disadvantage in a true Democracy, where, everything being equal in terms of morals and talents, and also of maxims and fortunes, the choice would become almost immaterial. But I have already stated that no true Democracy has ever existed.

When choosing and drawing lots are combined, the former should fill positions that require specific talents, like military posts. The latter is suitable for those where good sense, justice and integrity are sufficient, like judicial posts; for in a well-constituted state, these qualities are common to all Citizens.

Neither drawing lots nor suffrages have any place in monarchical Government. The Monarch being by right alone the Prince and the sole Magistrate, the choice of his lieutenants belongs only to him. When the abbé de St Pierre proposed to multiply the Councils of the King of France and to elect their members by Ballot, he did not see that he was proposing to change the form of Government.⁶

I might still say something about the way of casting and counting votes in the people’s assembly, but perhaps a historical outline of the Roman polity in this respect will explain more vividly all the maxims I could establish. It is not beneath the dignity of a judicious reader to consider in some detail how public and private business was conducted in a Council of two hundred thousand men.

Chapter 4

Of the Roman Comitia

We have no well-attested records of the earliest days of Rome; it is even highly likely that most of the things retailed about those days are fables;* and in general the most instructive part of the annals of peoples, which is the story of their establishment, is the one that we most lack. Experience teaches us daily what causes engender the revolutions of empires. But since peoples are no longer formed, we scarcely have anything better than conjectures to explain how they were formed.

The customs we find established prove at least that those customs did have an origin. Among the traditions going back to such origins, those supported by the greatest authorities and that stronger reasons confirm must be taken as most reliable. Such are the maxims I have endeavoured to follow in inquiring how the freest and most powerful people on earth used to exercise its supreme power.

After the foundation of Rome the infant Republic, in other words the founder’s army, made up of Albans, Sabines and foreigners, was divided into three classes, which from this division took the name of Tribes. Each of these Tribes was subdivided into ten Curiae, and each Curia into Decuriae, at the head of which leaders were placed called Curions and Decurions.

In addition to this, a body of one hundred Equites or Horsemen called a Century was drawn from each Tribe. From this it is clear that those divisions, hardly necessary in a township, were at first only military. But it seems that an instinct of greatness led the little town of Rome to equip itself in advance with a polity fit for the capital of the world.

This first division soon produced a disadvantage. For since the Tribe of the Albans* and that of the Sabines† always remained in the same condition, while that of the foreigners‡ grew steadily through a constant influx, the latter did not take long to outstrip the two others. The remedy that Servius found for this dangerous fault was to change the division, replacing that by race – which he abolished – with a different one, derived from the areas of the town in which each Tribe dwelt. In place of three Tribes he made four of them, each of which dwelt on one of the hills of Rome and bore its name. Thus, remedying the present inequality, he further forestalled it for the future; and so that this division would be not just between places but between men, he forbade the residents of one neighbourhood to move into another, which prevented the races from merging.

He also doubled the three old Cavalry centuries and added twelve others to them, but still under the old names; a simple and judicious means by which he succeeded in distinguishing the body of Equites from that of the People, without causing the latter to grumble.

To these four urban Tribes Servius added fifteen more called rustic Tribes, because they were formed from residents in the countryside, split into as many cantons. Subsequently, as many more were created, the Roman People eventually became divided into thirty-five Tribes, a number that remained fixed until the end of the Republic.

This distinction between Town Tribes and country Tribes produced a noteworthy effect, because there is no other example of it, and because Rome was indebted to it for both the preservation of her mores and the growth of her empire. You might think that the urban Tribes soon appropriated power and honours, and lost no time in degrading the rustic Tribes. It was quite otherwise. The taste for rural life of the first Romans is well known. This taste came to them from the wise founder who united rustic and military toil with liberty, while to the town he so to speak relegated arts, crafts, intrigue, fortune and slavery.

Thus, with all the illustrious in Rome living in the country and cultivating the land, people grew accustomed to seek there alone the bulwarks of the Republic. This estate, being that of the most worthy Patricians, was honoured by everyone. The simple, hardworking life of Villagers was preferred to the easeful, lax life of the Townsmen of Rome; and, as a husbandman in the fields, one who would have been but a wretched proletarian in town became a respected Citizen. It was not for no reason, Varro used to say, that our magnanimous ancestors established in the Village the nursery for those sturdy, valiant men who defended them in time of war and fed them in time of peace. Pliny says positively that the country Tribes were honoured because of the men who made them up; whereas cowards whom people wished to degrade would be transferred ignominiously to the Town tribes. The Sabine Appius Claudius, having come to establish himself in Rome, was loaded with honours there and enrolled in a rustic Tribe that subsequently took the name of his family. Finally, all freedmen used to enter urban Tribes, never rural ones; and during the entire Republic there is not a single example of any of those freedmen, albeit having become a Citizen, attaining any magistracy.

This maxim was excellent; but it was pushed so far that it eventually gave rise to an alteration, and certainly a fault, in the polity.

First, the Censors, after having long appropriated the right to transfer arbitrarily the citizens of one Tribe to another, permitted most to have themselves enrolled in whichever they pleased: a permission that surely served no good purpose, and took away one of the great responsibilities of the censorship. Furthermore, with the Great and the powerful all having themselves enrolled in country Tribes, and with freedmen who had become Citizens remaining with the populace in the town ones, the Tribes in general no longer had any place or territory; but were all found so intermingled that it was no longer possible to discern the members of each except by the registers, so that the idea of the word Tribe shifted in this way from property to persons, or rather became almost a chimaera.

It happened also that the town Tribes, being closer at hand, often found themselves strongest in the comitia, and sold the State to any who deigned to buy the suffrages of the rabble who made them up.

As for the Curiae, the founder having made ten of them in each Tribe, the entire Roman people then enclosed within the walls of the town found itself made up of thirty Curiae, each of which had its temples, its Gods, its officers, its priests, and its festivals called compitalia, similar to the Paganalia that the rustic Tribes had subsequently.

When Servius made his new division, this number of thirty could not be shared equally among his four Tribes, and he did not want to touch these, so Curiae independent of Tribes became another division of Rome’s inhabitants. But there was no question of Curiae either in the rustic Tribes or in the people of which they were made up, because, the Tribes having become a purely civil institution and another system having been introduced for levying troops, the military divisions of Romulus proved superfluous. Thus, although each Citizen was enrolled in a Tribe, it was far from being the case that each was enrolled in a Curia.

Servius made also a third division that had no relation to the two preceding ones, and that through its effects became most important of all. He distributed the entire Roman people between six classes, which he distinguished neither by place nor by person but by property. So that the uppermost classes were filled by the rich, the lowest by the poor, and the middling by those who enjoyed a mediocre fortune. These six classes were sub-divided into 193 other bodies called centuries, and these bodies were so distributed that the uppermost Class alone included more than half of them, while the lowest formed but a single century. It thus transpired that the Class least numerous in men was most numerous in centuries, and the entire lowest class was reckoned only as a sub-division, although it contained more than half the inhabitants of Rome.

So that the people might perceive less clearly the consequences of this last arrangement, Servius took care to give it a military cast. Into the second class he inserted two centuries of armourers, and two centuries of instruments of war⁷ into the fourth. In each Class apart from the lowest he distinguished between young and old: in other words, between those who were obliged to bear arms and those whom by law their age exempted from doing so. A distinction which, more than that of property, resulted in the need frequently to initiate a new census or count. Finally, he wanted the assembly to take place on the Campus Martius, and all those who were of an age to serve to attend with their weapons.

The reason why he did not follow in the lowest class that same division into young and old is that the populace which made it up was not granted the honour of bearing arms for the fatherland. It was necessary to have homes in order to win the right to defend them; and there is perhaps not a single one out of those numberless hordes of beggars today adorning the armies of Kings who would not have been driven contemptuously from a Roman cohort, when soldiers were defenders of liberty.

A distinction was also made, however, in the lowest class between proletarians and those who were known as capite censi.⁸ The former, not wholly reduced to nothing, at least provided Citizens for the State, sometimes even soldiers at times of pressing need. As for those who had nothing at all and could be counted only by head, they were regarded as absolutely nothing, and Marius was the first who deigned to enlist them.⁹

Without deciding here if this third enumeration was good or bad in itself, I think I can assert that it was made practicable only by the simple mores of the first Romans, their disinterestedness, their taste for agriculture, and their disdain for commerce or pursuit of gain. Where is the modern people whose consuming greed, unsettled spirit, intrigue, constant movement, and perpetual reversals of fortune could allow such a system to last for twenty years without overturning the entire State? It must also be borne in mind that mores and censorship in Rome were stronger than this institution and corrected its flaws, so that certain rich men saw themselves relegated to the class of the poor for having made too great a display of their wealth.

From all this it can easily be understood why mention is almost never made of any but five classes, although there were really six of them. The sixth, providing neither soldiers for the army nor voters on the Campus Martius,* and being of almost no use in the Republic, was rarely counted for any purpose.

Such were the different divisions of the Roman people. Let us now see the effect that they produced in the assemblies. These legitimately convened assemblies were called comitia. They were held ordinarily in the Roman forum or on the Campus Martius, and were distinguished into Curiate comitia, Centuriate comitia, and Tribal comitia, depending on which of these forms was the basis of organization. The Curiate comitia had been instituted by Romulus, the Centuriate by Servius, and the Tribal by the people’s Tribunes. No law received sanction, no magistrate was elected, except in the comitia; and since there was no Citizen who was not enrolled in a Curia, a Century or a Tribe, it follows that no Citizen was excluded from the right of suffrage, and that the Roman People was truly Sovereign both de jure and de facto.

For the Comitia to be legitimately assembled, and for what they did to have force of law, three conditions had to be met: firstly, the body or Magistrate which convened them had to be vested with the requisite authority; secondly, the assembly had to be held on one of the days permitted by law; thirdly, the omens had to be favourable.

The reason for the first rule has no need of explanation. The second was an administrative matter: thus it was not permitted to hold comitia on holidays and market days, when the country people coming to Rome on business had no time to spend the day in the forum. By means of the third, the Senate would hold in check a proud and restless people, and when necessary temper the ardour of seditious Tribunes, though the latter found more than one means to rid themselves of this hindrance.

Laws and the election of leaders were not the only matters submitted to the judgement of the comitia. The Roman people having usurped the most important functions of Government, the fate of Europe may be said to have been settled in these assemblies. This variety of aims gave rise to the different forms these assemblies would take, according to the matters on which they had to pronounce.

To judge these different forms it suffices to compare them. In establishing the Curiae, Romulus had in mind to contain the Senate by the people and the People by the Senate, while dominating all equally. So by this form he gave the people all the authority of numbers, in order to balance the authority of power and wealth which he left to the Patricians. But in keeping with the spirit of Monarchy, he nevertheless left more advantage to the Patricians through the influence of their Clients on the majority of suffrages. This admirable institution of Patrons and Clients was a masterpiece of politics and of humanity, without which the Patriciate, so contrary to the spirit of the Republic, would not have been able to survive. Rome alone had the honour of giving the world this fine example, which never led to any abuse, yet which has never been followed.

The fact that this same form of Curiae survived under the Kings up until Servius, and that the reign of the last Tarquin was not counted as legitimate, led to the royal laws being generally distinguished by the name of leges curiatae.

Under the Republic the Curiae, still limited to the four urban Tribes, and no longer containing any but the populace of Rome, could not suit either the Senate, which was at the head of the Patricians, or the Tribunes, who, albeit plebeians, were at the head of the prosperous Citizens. So they fell into disrepute, and their degradation was such that their thirty Lictors in assembly used to do what the Curiate comitia should have done.

Division by Century was so favourable to the Aristocracy that at first you cannot see how the Senate did not always prevail in Comitia thus designated, which elected the Consuls, the Censors, and the other curule Magistrates. For of the one hundred and ninety-three centuries that constituted the six Classes of the whole Roman people, since the uppermost Class comprised ninety-eight of them and since votes were counted only by Century, this uppermost Class alone prevailed over the rest in number of votes. When all its Centuries were in agreement, the suffrages would no longer even be collected; what the smallest number had decided was taken as the decision of the multitude, and in the Centuriate Comitia business may be said to have been settled far more by majorities of cash than of votes.

But this excessive authority was tempered by two means. First, since the Tribunes ordinarily and a great number of Plebeians always were in the class of the wealthy, they balanced the influence of the Patricians in this uppermost class.

The second means consisted in this: that instead of first making the Centuries vote in order, which would have meant always starting with the foremost, one used to be drawn by lot, and this one* proceeded alone to the election; after which all the Centuries, summoned on another day according to their rank, would repeat the same election and ordinarily confirm it. The authority of example was thus removed from rank and given to chance, in keeping with the principle of Democracy.

This custom resulted in another advantage too. This is that Citizens from the countryside had time between the two elections to inform themselves of the merits of the Candidate provisionally nominated, in order to give their vote only with full knowledge. But, on the pretext of speed, this custom was successfully abolished, and the two elections took place on the same day.

The Tribal Comitia were properly the Council of the Roman people. They were convened by the Tribunes alone; they elected the Tribunes and passed their plebiscites. Not only did the Senate have no status there, it did not even have the right to attend them, and, forced to obey laws on which they had not been able to vote, the Senators in this respect were less free than the humblest Citizens. This injustice was wholly ill conceived, and alone sufficed to invalidate the decrees of a body to which all its members were not admitted. If all the Patricians had attended these Comitia in keeping with the right they possessed as Citizens, by becoming mere individuals they would scarcely have influenced a system where suffrages were collected by counting heads, and where the least proletarian had the same power as the Prince of the Senate.

So you can see that, apart from the order resulting from these various divisions for collecting the suffrages of so great a People, those divisions could not be reduced to forms indifferent in themselves, but each one had effects related to the purposes that led to its being chosen.

Without going into greater detail about this, the foregoing clarifications indicate that the Tribal Comitia were most favourable to popular Government, and the Centuriate Comitia to Aristocracy. As for the Curiate Comitia, where the populace of Rome alone formed the majority, as these served only to favour tyranny and evil designs they necessarily fell into disrepute, and even the seditious abstained from a means that too openly exposed their plans. It is certain that the entire majesty of the Roman People was to be found only in the Centuriate Comitia, which alone were complete, given that the rustic Tribes were missing from the Curiate Comitia, the Senate and the Patricians from the Tribal Comitia.

As for the manner of collecting suffrages, among the earliest Romans it was as simple as their mores, albeit still less simple than in Sparta. Each man would give his suffrage aloud, a Clerk would duly write them down. A majority of votes in each Tribe determined the suffrage of the Tribe, a majority of votes among the Tribes determined the suffrage of the people, and likewise with the Curiae and the Centuries. This custom was good so long as honesty reigned among the Citizens and each was ashamed to give his suffrage publicly for an unjust opinion or an unworthy subject. But when the people grew corrupt and votes were bought, it agreed that these should be cast in secret, so that buyers might be restrained through mistrust and scoundrels provided with means not to be traitors.

I know that Cicero¹⁰ condemns this change and holds it partly responsible for the ruin of the Republic. But although I am sensible of the weight that Cicero’s authority must have here, I cannot share his opinion. I think, on the contrary, that the downfall of the State was hastened because not enough changes of the kind were made. Just as the diet of healthy people is not fit for the sick, you should not seek to govern a corrupt people through the same Laws which suit a good people. Nothing proves this maxim better than the long life of the Republic of Venice, which still retains a simulacrum of existence solely because its laws are suited only to wicked men.

So tablets were distributed to the Citizens, by means of which each could vote without anyone knowing what his opinion was. New formalities were also established for collecting the tablets, counting the votes, comparing the numbers, etc. Which did not prevent the integrity of the Officers charged with these functions* from often coming under suspicion. To prevent intrigue and the buying and selling of votes Edicts were eventually passed, the large number of which proves their ineffectiveness.

Towards the final days, it was often necessary to have recourse to extraordinary expedients to compensate for the inadequacy of the laws. Sometimes miracles would be invoked; while this device might impress the people, however, it did not impress those who governed it. Sometimes an assembly would suddenly be convened before the Candidates had time to arrange their intrigues. Sometimes a whole session would be used up in talking, when the people was seen to be convinced and ready to make a wrong move. But finally ambition overcame everything. And what is unbelievable is that, amid so much abuse, that immense people, thanks to its ancient rules, did not fail to elect Magistrates, pass laws, try cases, expedite private and public business, with almost as much facility as the Senate itself could have done.

Chapter 5

Of the Tribunate

When an exact proportion cannot be established between the constituent parts of the State, or indestructible causes are forever altering the ratios between them, then one sets up a particular magistracy, not of the same kind as the rest, which places every term back into its true ratio, and which makes a bond or middle term either between Prince and People or between Prince and Sovereign or, if need be, vis-à-vis both at once.

This body, which I shall call Tribunate, is the preserver of the laws and of the legislative power. It sometimes serves to protect the Sovereign against the Government, as the Tribunes of the people did in Rome, sometimes to support the Government against the People, as the Council of Ten does today in Venice, and sometimes to hold the balance on both sides, as the Ephors used to do in Sparta.

The Tribunate is by no means a constituent part of the City, and should have no portion of the legislative or executive power. But it is just in this that its own power is the greater: for while being able to do nothing, it can prevent everything. It is more sacred and more revered as a defender of the Laws than the Prince which executes them and than the Sovereign which gives them. This is what was very clearly seen in Rome when those proud Patricians, who always disdained the entire people, were forced to bend before a mere officer of the people, who had neither auspices nor jurisdiction.

The Tribunate wisely tempered is the most solid support of a good constitution; but should ever its strength be too great, it overturns everything. As for weakness, this is not in its nature; and provided it is something, it is never less than what is necessary.

It degenerates into tyranny when it usurps the executive power of which it is only the moderator, and if it seeks to dispense laws that it should only protect. The enormous power of the Ephors, which held no danger so long as Sparta preserved her mores, accelerated her corruption once this set in. The blood of Agis,¹¹ whose throat was cut by those tyrants, was avenged by his successor: the crime and the punishment of the Ephors alike hastened the downfall of the Republic, and after Cleomenes¹² Sparta no longer amounted to anything. Rome too perished in the same way, and the excessive power of the Tribunes, usurped by degrees, with the help of laws made for liberty finally served to safeguard the Emperors who destroyed it. As for the Council of Ten in Venice, it is a Tribunal of blood, horrible alike to Patricians and People, and which, far from proudly protecting the laws, after their degradation serves only to deal in the shadows blows that no one dares to perceive.

The Tribunate, like Government, grows weaker through multiplication of its members. When the Tribunes of the Roman people, at first two in number, then five, sought to double this number, the Senate allowed them to do so in full confidence of being able to play them off against each other, which did not fail to happen.

The best means of preventing the usurpations of so redoubtable a body, a means that has not yet occurred to any Government, would be not to make the body permanent, but to set intervals during which it would remain suppressed. These intervals, which should not be long enough to give abuses time to assert themselves, can be fixed by law, in such a way that, if the need arises, they can easily be shortened by means of extraordinary commissions.

This method seems to me to have no disadvantage, because the Tribunate, as I have said, not being part of the constitution, can be removed without harm to the latter; and it seems to me to be effective, because a newly established magistrate starts off not from the power that his predecessor had, but from that which the law gives him.

Chapter 6

Of Dictatorship

The inflexibility of Laws, which prevents them from bending to events, can in certain cases render them harmful, so that they can bring about the downfall of the State at a time of crisis. The order and slow pace of legal forms require a span of time that circumstances sometimes preclude. A thousand cases may arise that the Legislator has not foreseen, and it is a very necessary kind of foresight to be aware that you cannot foresee everything.

So you should not seek to affirm political institutions to the point of forswearing the power to suspend their effect. Sparta itself allowed its laws to slumber.

But it is only the greatest dangers that can outweigh the danger of diluting public order, and the sacred power of the laws should never be stayed other than when it is a matter of saving the fatherland. In such rare and manifest cases, public safety is provided for by an individual act handing responsibility for it to the most worthy. This commission can be effected in two ways, depending on the type of danger.

If to find a remedy it is enough to increase the government’s activity, government is concentrated in one or two of its members. Hence, it is not the authority of the laws that is diluted, but merely the form of their administration. But if the danger is such that the apparatus of laws is an obstacle to being safeguarded against it, then a supreme ruler is named who for a while may silence all laws and suspend Sovereign authority. In such a case the general will is not called into doubt, and it is obvious that the primary intention of the people is that the State should not perish. In this way the suspension of legislative authority by no means abolishes it. The magistrate who silences it cannot make it speak; he dominates it without being able to represent it. He can do everything except make laws.

The former means was employed by the Roman Senate when, by an accepted formula, it would charge the Consuls with providing for the safety of the Republic. The second occurred when one of the two Consuls nominated a Dictator* – a custom Rome had taken from Alba.

In the early days of the Republic, Dictatorship would often be resorted to, because the State did not yet have a sufficiently stable grounding to be able to maintain itself by the strength of its constitution. Since its mores then made superfluous many of the precautions that would have been necessary at another time, people feared neither that a Dictator might abuse his authority, nor that he might attempt to retain it beyond its term. It seemed, on the contrary, that so great a power was a burden to the person vested with it, so hastily did he seek to rid himself of it, as if taking the place of the laws would have been too onerous and dangerous a responsibility!

So it is the risk not of abuse but of depreciation that in the earliest times causes injudicious use of this supreme magistracy to be condemned. For while the practice used to be lavished on Elections, Dedications and purely formal matters, it was to be feared that it might become less formidable when the need arose, and that people might become accustomed to look upon a title used only for empty ceremonies as an empty title.

Towards the end of the Republic the Romans, grown more circumspect, were as unreasonably sparing with Dictatorship as they had formerly been lavish with it. It was easy to see that their fear was ill-founded; that the weakness of the capital then ensured its safety against the Magistrates it harboured in its bosom; that a Dictator could in certain cases defend public liberty without ever being able to undermine it; and that Rome’s shackles would not be forged in Rome herself, but in her armies. The small resistance offered to Sulla by Marius, and to Caesar by Pompey,¹³ clearly showed what might be expected of internal authority against external force.

This error caused them to make big mistakes. One such, for example, was that of not nominating a Dictator during the Catiline affair.¹⁴ For as this involved only the interior of the town and at most a few provinces in Italy, a Dictator with the limitless authority that the Laws gave him would easily have dismantled the conspiracy, which was suppressed only by a combination of lucky chances that human prudence should never have expected.

Instead of that, the Senate contented itself with handing over all its power to the Consuls. Whence it happened that Cicero, in order to act effectively, was compelled to exceed that power at a critical juncture; and if the first transports of joy caused his conduct to be approved, it was with justice that he was subsequently called to account for the blood of Citizens shed against the laws – a reproach that would not have been made to a Dictator. But the Consul’s eloquence carried all before him. And since he himself, albeit a Roman, preferred his glory to his fatherland, he sought not so much the most legitimate and safest means to save the State as the means to have all the honour in this affair.* So he was rightly honoured as the liberator of Rome, and rightly punished as a violator of the laws. However brilliant his recall might have been, it was undoubtedly a pardon.

Furthermore, however this important commission is conferred, it is vital to fix its duration to one very brief term that can never be extended. In the crises that lead to its establishment, the State is soon destroyed or saved; and once the pressing need is over, Dictatorship becomes tyrannical or pointless. In Rome, where Dictators held office for only six months, most abdicated before this term. Had the term been longer, perhaps they would have been tempted to extend it further, as did the Decemvirs with their one-year term. The Dictator had time only to attend to the need that had prompted his election; he had no time to dream of other projects.

Chapter 7

Of the Censorship

Just as the general will is declared by the law, public judgement is declared by the censorship. Public opinion is the kind of law of which the Censor is the Minister, and which he merely applies to particular cases, following the example of the Prince.

Hence, far from the censorial tribunal being the arbiter of the people’s opinion, it is merely the body that declares the latter; and as soon as it distances itself from that opinion, its decisions are vain and ineffective.

It is useless to distinguish the mores of a nation from the objects of its esteem; for all this stems from the same principle and necessarily intermingles. Among all the peoples of the world, it is not nature at all but opinion that determines their choice of pleasures. Reform the opinions of men and their mores will purify themselves. You always love what is beautiful or what you find so, but it is in this judgement that you may err; so it is this judgement that must be regulated. Whosoever judges mores judges honour, and whosoever judges honour takes his law from opinion.

The opinions of a people spring from its constitution. Although the law does not regulate morals, it is legislation that engenders them; when legislation weakens, morals degenerate, but then the judgement of the Censors will not do what the force of the laws has not done.

It follows from this that the Censorship can be useful for preserving morals, never for re-establishing them. Establish Censors while the Laws are in vigour; as soon as they have lost their vigour, all is desperate. Nothing legitimate still has force, when the laws have force no longer.

The Censorship upholds morals by preventing opinions from becoming corrupted, by preserving their rectitude through wise applications, sometimes even by fixing them when they are still uncertain. The use of seconds in duels, carried to excess in the Kingdom of France, was abolished there by the following few words from an Edict of the King: as for those who are so cowardly as to call upon Seconds. This judgement, anticipating that of the public, at a stroke determined it. But when the same Edicts sought to declare that it was also an act of cowardice to fight a duel, which is quite true but contrary to the common opinion, the public took no heed of this decision, on which its judgement was already formed.

I have said elsewhere* that since public opinion is subject to no constraint, there should be no vestige of constraint in the tribunal established to represent it. The art with which this device, wholly lost among the moderns, was put into effect among the Romans and especially among the Lacedaemonians¹⁵ cannot be sufficiently admired.

When a man of bad morals offered a good suggestion in the council of Sparta, the Ephors paid no heed to it but had the same proposal made by a virtuous Citizen. What an honour for one, what shame for the other, without having given praise or blame to either of the two! Certain drunkards from Samos defiled the Tribunal of the Ephors.† The next day a public Edict gave Samians permission to be filthy. A real punishment would have been less severe than such impunity. When Sparta has pronounced on what is or is not decent, Greece does not appeal against its judgements.

Chapter 8

Of Civil Religion

Men at first had no other Kings than the Gods, nor any other than Theocratic Government. They reasoned like Caligula, and they were then reasoning correctly. It takes a long deterioration of feelings and ideas before you can bring yourself to take a fellow man as your master, and flatter yourself that you will do well by it.

From the mere fact that people used to place God at the head of every political society, it followed that there were as many Gods as peoples. Two peoples alien to one another and almost always hostile could not long acknowledge the same master. Two armies locked in battle would not be able to obey the same leader. So national divisions gave rise to polytheism, and thereafter to theological and civil intolerance, which are naturally the same, as will be stated below.

The fantasy harboured by the Greeks of finding their own Gods among barbarian peoples came from their other fantasy of regarding themselves as the natural Sovereigns of those peoples. But in our day the sort of erudition that turns upon the identity of Gods of different nations is quite ridiculous: as if Moloch, Saturn and Chronos could be the same God; as if the Baal of the Phoenicians,¹⁷ the Zeus of the Greeks and the Jupiter of the Latins could be the same; as if chimaerical Beings bearing different names could still have something in common!

And if you ask how it was that under paganism, when each State had its cult and its Gods, there were no wars of religion? I answer that it was precisely because every State, having its own cult as well as its Government, made no distinction at all between its Gods and its laws. Political war was also Theological: the provinces of the Gods were so to speak fixed by the boundaries of nations. The God of one people had no rights over other peoples. The Gods of the Pagans were by no means jealous Gods: they shared among them the empire of the world. Even Moses and the Hebrew People sometimes countenanced this idea, by speaking about the God of Israel. It is true that they regarded as naught the Gods of the Canaanites, proscribed peoples destined for destruction, whose place they were to occupy. But see how they used to speak about the divinities of the neighbouring peoples whom they were forbidden to attack! Is not the possession of what belongs to Chamos your God, Jephtha said to the Ammonites, lawfully due to you? We by the same token possess the lands that our victorious God has won.* It seems to me that there was a clearly acknowledged equivalence here between the rights of Chamos and those of the God of Israel.

But when the Jews, subject to the Kings of Babylon and later to the Kings of Syria, wished to insist on not acknowledging any other God than theirs, this refusal, viewed as a rebellion against the victor, brought down upon them the persecutions that can be read about in their history, and of which no other example is seen before Christianity.†

Since every religion was thus attached solely to the laws of the State that prescribed it, there was no other way of converting a people than to subjugate it, nor any other missionaries than conquerors. And since the obligation to change cult was the law for the vanquished, it was necessary to start by winning before talking about it. Far from men fighting for the Gods, as in Homer it was the Gods who would fight for men. Each man would ask his own for victory, and pay for it with new altars. Before taking a place, the Romans would call upon its Gods to abandon it; and when they left to the Tarentines their irate Gods, it was because they then regarded those Gods as subject to their own and obliged to do them homage. They let the vanquished keep their Gods as they let them keep their laws. A crown for the Capitoline Jupiter was often the only tribute they would impose.

Eventually, the Romans having extended their cult and their Gods with their empire, and having themselves adopted those of the vanquished by granting them and their Gods the rights of the City, the peoples of that vast empire imperceptibly found themselves with multitudinous Gods and cults, more or less the same everywhere. And this is how paganism in the known world was eventually just one single Religion.

It was in these circumstances that Jesus came to establish a Spiritual kingdom on earth, which, if the theological system is separated from the political system, resulted in the State ceasing to be one and caused the internecine divisions that have never ceased to trouble the Christian peoples. Now, since this new idea of an otherworldly kingdom had never succeeded in entering the heads of the pagans, they still regarded the Christians as true rebels who, cloaked in a hypocritical submission, were only waiting for the moment to make themselves independent and masters, and adroitly to usurp the authority that in their weakness they were feigning to respect. Such was the cause of the persecutions.

What the pagans had feared took place. Then everything began to look different, the humble Christians adopted a different language, and the supposed otherworldly kingdom was soon seen to become, under a visible ruler, the most violent despotism in this world.

However, since there was always a Prince and civil laws, the result of this twofold power was a perpetual conflict of jurisdiction that made any good polity impossible in the Christian States, and people never succeeded in knowing whom they were obliged to obey, the master or the priest.

Several peoples, however, even in Europe or its near neighbourhood, sought to preserve or to re-establish the old system, but without success. The spirit of Christianity was victorious everywhere. Holy worship still remained or again became independent of the Sovereign, and without any necessary connection with the body of the State. Mohammed had very sound views; he bound together his political system well and, so long as the form of his Government survived under the Caliphs who succeeded him, that Government was precisely single and in this respect good. But the Arabs, having become prosperous, learned, civilized, soft and weak, were subjugated by barbarians. Then division between the two powers began anew; although less apparent among Mohammedans than among Christians, it is nevertheless there, above all in the sect of Ali,¹⁸ and States exist such as Persia where it continually makes itself felt.

Among us, the Kings of England have installed themselves as rulers of the Church, the Tsars have done as much. But by this title they have made themselves less its masters than its Ministers. They have acquired not so much the right to change it as the power to preserve it. They are not its legislators, they are merely its Princes. Wherever the Clergy forms a body,* it is master and legislator in its domain. So there are two powers, two Sovereigns, in England and in Russia, just as elsewhere. Of all Christian Authors, the philosopher Hobbes is the only one to have seen clearly the malady and the cure; to have dared propose to join the two heads of the eagle and reduce everything to political unity, without which neither State nor Government will ever be well constituted. But he must have seen that the dominant spirit of Christianity was incompatible with his system, and that the interest of the Priest would always be stronger than that of the State. It is not so much what is horrible and false in his politics as what is right and true that has made it hateful.†

I think that by exploring historical facts from this angle it would be easy to refute the opposing sentiments of Bayle and Warburton,¹⁹ one of whom claims that no Religion is useful to the body politic, while the other maintains that on the contrary Christianity is the latter’s firmest prop. To the former I would prove that no State was ever founded without Religion serving as its basis, and to the second that Christian law is at bottom more harmful than useful to the strong constitution of the State. To make myself fully understood, it is necessary merely to give a little more precision to the overly vague notions of Religion that relate to my subject.

Religion considered in relation to society, which is either general or particular, can also be divided into two kinds, viz. the Religion of man and that of the Citizen. The former, without Temples, without altars, without rites, limited to the purely inward cult of the Supreme God and to the eternal duties of morality, is the pure and simple Religion of the Gospel, the true Theism, and what can be called natural divine right. The latter, inscribed in a single country, gives the latter its Gods, its own tutelary Patrons: it has its dogmas, its rites, its external cult prescribed by the laws; outside the single Nation that follows it, all is infidel for it, foreign, barbarous; it extends the duties and rights of man only as far as its altars. Such were all the Religions of the first peoples, which can be given the name of civil or positive divine right.

There is a third, more bizarre, form of Religion which, by giving men two legislations, two rulers, two fatherlands, subjects them to contradictory duties and prevents them from being at once devout men and Citizens. Such is the religion of the Lamas, such is that of the Japanese, such is Roman Christianity. It may be called the religion of the Priest and results in a sort of mixed and unsociable right that has no name.

Considering these three sorts of religion politically, they all have their defects. The third is so manifestly bad that to amuse oneself by proving it is a waste of time. All that breaks social unity is worthless. All institutions that place man in contradiction with himself are worthless.

The second is good in that it unites the divine cult with love of the laws, and by making the fatherland the object of the Citizens’ adoration teaches them that to serve the State is to serve its tutelary God. This is a kind of Theocracy, in which there should be no other pontiff than the Prince, nor other priests than the magistrates. To die for your country is then to seek martyrdom, to violate the laws is to be impious, and to subject a guilty man to public execration is to consign him to the anger of the Gods: sacer estod.²⁰

But it is bad in that, being based on error and falsehood, it deceives men, makes them credulous and superstitious, and drowns the true cult of divinity in empty ceremonial. It is bad too when, becoming exclusive and tyrannical, it renders a people bloodthirsty and intolerant; in such a way that it exudes only murder and massacre, and believes it is carrying out a holy action by killing whomsoever does not accept its Gods. This places such a people in a natural state of war against all others, very harmful to its own security.

So there remains the Religion of man or Christianity, not that of today, but that of the Gospel, which is entirely different. Through this holy, sublime and genuine Religion men, as children of the same God, all recognize one another as brethren, and the society that unites them is not dissolved even at death.

But this Religion, having no particular relation with the body politic, allows to the laws only such force as they draw from themselves, without adding to them any other force; hence, one of the great bonds of particular societies remains ineffective. Even worse, far from attaching Citizens’ hearts to the State, it detaches them from it, as from all earthly things: I know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.²¹

We are told that a people of true Christians would form the most perfect society imaginable. I see only one great difficulty in this supposition, which is that a society of true Christians would no longer be a society of men.

I even say that this supposed society, for all its perfection, would be neither the strongest nor the most durable. By dint of being perfect, it would lack cohesion; its destructive vice would lie in its very perfection.

Everyone would fulfil his duty. The people would submit to the laws, the rulers would be just and moderate, the magistrates would be honest and incorruptible, the soldiers would scorn death, there would be neither vanity nor luxury: all this is very fine, but let us look further.

Christianity is a wholly spiritual religion, concerned solely with Heavenly things: the Christian’s fatherland is not of this world. He does his duty, to be sure, but he does it with profound indifference as to the good or bad outcome of his efforts. Provided he has nothing with which to reproach himself, it matters little to him whether everything goes well or ill here below. If the State prospers, he scarcely dares to enjoy the public felicity, fearing to grow proud of his country’s glory; if the State declines, he blesses the hand of God that weighs heavily upon his people.

For society to be peaceful and harmony maintained, all Citizens without exception would have to be equally good Christians. But if a single ambitious man is unfortunately to be found there, a single hypocrite – a Catiline, for example, or a Cromwell – this man will very surely pay little heed to his pious compatriots. Christian charity does not easily allow anyone to think ill of his neighbours. Once he has found by some ruse the art of imposing himself upon them and seizing a portion of the public authority, behold a man set up in dignity: God wills that he be respected. Soon behold a power: God wills that he be obeyed. Does the man in whom that power is vested abuse it? He is the rod with which God punishes his children. You would scruple to drive out the usurper: it would be necessary to disturb the public peace, use violence, shed blood, all of which accords ill with Christian meekness. And after all, what does it matter if you are free or a serf in this vale of tears? The essential thing is to go to paradise, and resignation is simply one more means to that.

Does some foreign war break out? The Citizens march unconcernedly to battle, none of them thinks of fleeing. They do their duty, but without passion for victory; they know better how to die than how to win. Whether they are victors or vanquished, what matter? Does providence not know better than they what they need? Just imagine what advantage a proud, impetuous and impassioned enemy can draw from their stoicism! Pit against them those generous peoples who used to be consumed by ardent love for glory and the fatherland, imagine your Christian republic against Sparta or Rome; the pious Christians will be beaten, crushed, destroyed before having had time to gather their wits, or will owe their salvation only to the scorn that their enemy will conceive for them. The oath of Fabius’ soldiers²² was a fine one and to my liking: they did not swear to die or conquer; they swore to return victorious, and they kept their oath. Never would Christians have made its like; they would have thought they were tempting God.

But I err in speaking of a Christian Republic: each of these two words excludes the other. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is too favourable to tyranny for tyranny not always to benefit by it. True Christians are made to be slaves; they know this and are scarcely perturbed by it; this brief life has too low a price in their eyes.

Christian troops are excellent, we are told. I deny it. Let me be shown any such. As for me, I do not know of any Christian troops. People will cite the Crusades. Without disputing the valour of the Crusaders, I shall note that, far from being Christians, they were soldiers of the priest; they were Citizens of the Church: they were fighting for its Spiritual country, which it had made temporal, one knows not how. When all is said and done, this amounts to paganism. As the Gospel establishes no national Religion, a holy war is impossible among Christians.

Under pagan Emperors, Christian soldiers were brave; all Christian authors assert this, and I believe it. They were vying for honour against pagan Troops. As soon as the Emperors were Christians this rivalry ceased, and once the cross had driven out the eagle all Roman valour disappeared.

But leaving political considerations aside, let us return to right and determine its principles on this important point. The right that the social pact gives the Sovereign over its subjects, as I have said, does not go beyond the limits of public utility.* Hence, subjects must account to the Sovereign for their opinions only in as much as these opinions concern the community. Now, it does indeed concern the State that every Citizen should have a Religion that makes him love his duties; but the dogmas of this Religion are of interest to the State or to members only in as much as these dogmas have to do with morality and the duties which the person who professes them is bound to fulfil towards others. Everyone may in addition have such opinions as he pleases, without it being the Sovereign’s province to know them. For since no competency exists in the other world, whatever the fate of subjects may be in the life to come, that is not the Sovereign’s business, provided they are good citizens in this life.

So there is a purely civil profession of faith whose articles it is the Sovereign’s province to determine, not precisely like dogmas of Religion, but as feelings of sociability, without which it is impossible to be a good Citizen or a loyal subject.* Without being able to oblige anyone to believe them, the Sovereign can exile from the State anyone who does not believe them. It can exile him, not as impious, but as unsociable: as incapable of sincerely loving the laws and justice, or of sacrificing his life if need be to his duty. And if anyone, after having publicly recognized these same dogmas, conducts himself as though not believing them, may he be punished by death. He has committed the greatest of crimes, he has lied before the laws.²³

The dogmas of the civil Religion²⁴ must be simple, few in number, enunciated with precision and without explanations or commentaries. The existence of the powerful, intelligent, beneficent, prescient and provident Divinity; the life to come; the happiness of the just; the punishment of the wicked; the sanctity of the Social Contract and of the Laws: these are the positive dogmas. As for the negative dogmas, I restrict them to just one: viz. intolerance, which belongs to the cults we have excluded.

Those who distinguish civil intolerance and theological intolerance are mistaken, in my opinion. These two kinds of intolerance are inseparable. To live in peace with people you believe are damned is impossible; to love them would be to hate God, who punishes them. It is absolutely necessary to either bring them back to the fold or consign them to torment. Wherever theological intolerance is accepted, it is bound to have some civil effect;* and once it does, the Sovereign is no longer Sovereign, even in the temporal sphere. From then on Priests are the true masters; Kings are merely their officers.

Now that there is no longer, and can no longer be, an exclusive national Religion, we must tolerate all those which tolerate others, in so far as their dogmas have nothing contrary to the duties of the Citizen. But anyone who dares to say No salvation outside the Church must be driven from the State. Unless the State is the Church, and the Prince is the Pontiff. Such a dogma is good only in a Theocratic Government; in any other it is pernicious. The reason why Henri IV is said to have embraced the Roman Religion ought to cause any honest man to leave it, and especially any Prince who knows how to reason.

Chapter 9

Conclusion

Having set forth the true principles of political right and attempted to ground the State on this basis, what remains is to buttress it by its external relations, including the right of nations, commerce, the right of war and conquest, public right, leagues, negotiations, treaties, etc. But all this forms a new subject too vast for my short gaze, which I should always have fixed closer at hand.

End

GENEVA MS

(extract)

Prefatory Note

The chapter ‘Of the General Society of Mankind’, included in the draft version of the Social Contract but excised from the final text, is an important bridge between the published version and Rousseau’s earlier writings such as the Discourse on Inequality. It is also of great importance for understanding Rousseau’s conception of the relationship between political institutions and morality.

The chapter essentially consists of an engagement with an article which Denis Diderot had published on the topic of ‘Natural Right’ in 1755. Diderot’s article appeared in the same volume of the Encyclopédie as Rousseau’s entry on ‘Political Economy’. In that article, Diderot attempts to argue against a sceptic who sees what the demands of justice are but sees no reason to comply with them and prefers to take his chances in a world of mutual predation. Diderot argues that such a sceptic is unreasonable and fails a basic test of reciprocity. Diderot further argues for a thesis concerning the content of justice, which is determined by the general will of the human race as a whole. After canvassing the possibility of a kind of general assembly of the human race (and even of a broader circle of moral concern, including animals), Diderot suggests that we can locate the content in existing moral practice and institutions and by introspection: by each person looking into their heart and determining what it is reasonable for people to demand of one another. Rousseau’s somewhat incredulous response to Diderot emphasizes the importance of political institutions to the acquisition of moral sensibility. Diderot’s ‘violent interlocutor’, standing outside of such institutions, has no reason to recognize the claims of justice.

The present translation is based on the text contained in volume 3 of the Pléiade edition of Oeuvres Complètes produced under the direction of Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond in 1964. The paragraphs contained in square brackets are crossed-out in Rousseau’s original manuscript.

OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

or

Essay on the Form of the Republic

(first version)

BOOK I

Chapter 2

Of the General Society of Mankind

Let us begin by inquiring whence the necessity for political institutions arises.

Man’s strength is so proportionate to his natural needs and to his primitive state that no sooner does this state change and his needs increase than the assistance of his fellows becomes necessary to him; and when his desires finally embrace the whole of nature, the help of all mankind is scarcely enough to assuage them. Thus it is that the same causes which make us wicked make us also slaves, enslaving us by depraving us. The sense of our weakness comes less from our nature than from our cupidity: our needs draw us closer even as our passions divide us, and the more we become enemies to our fellows the less we can do without them. Such are the first bonds of the general society; such are the foundations of that universal goodwill whose acknowledged necessity seems to stifle feeling, whose fruits each man would like to pluck without being obliged to cultivate them. For, so far as natural identity goes, its effect is null in this respect, since for men it is as much a source of conflict as of unity, and as often sets rivalry and jealousy among them as good intelligence and agreement.

From this new order of things arise a host of relations, without measure or rule or consistency, which men continually alter and change, a hundred working to destroy them for each one who works to fix them. And since the relative existence of a man in the state of nature depends upon countless other relations that are in continual flux, he can never be certain of being the same through two moments of his life. Peace and happiness are for him but a lightning flash; nothing is permanent except the wretchedness that results from all these vicissitudes. Even might his feelings and his ideas attain the love of order and the sublime notions of virtue, it would be impossible for him ever to make a certain application of his principles in a state of affairs that would not let him discern either good or evil, either the honest man or the wicked.

The general society such as our mutual needs may engender thus offers no effective assistance to man become wretched; or at least gives new strength only to the man who already has it in excess, while the weak man, lost, stifled, crushed in the multitude, finds no shelter in which to take refuge, no crutch for his weakness, and finally dies a victim to that deceptive unity from which he expected his happiness.

[If you are once convinced that among the motives leading men to unite among themselves by voluntary ties there is nothing relating to the point where they come together; and that, far from proposing a goal of common felicity whence each may derive his own, one man’s happiness makes his fellow’s misfortune; and finally if you consider that, instead of all tending towards the general good, men draw closer to one another only because all are moving away from it; then you must also feel that, even if such a state could exist, it would be merely a source of crime and wretchedness for men, each of whom would see only his own interest, follow only his own inclinations and listen only to his own passions.]

Hence, the sweet voice of nature is no longer an infallible guide for us, nor is the independence we have received from nature a desirable state. Peace and innocence eluded us for ever before we had tasted their delights. Inaccessible to the brutish men of the earliest days, eluding the enlightened men of later days, the happy life of the golden age was always a state alien to the human race, either because humans were unaware of it when they might have enjoyed it or because they lost it when they might have known it.

There is yet more. Even had that perfect independence and that unregulated liberty remained united with the ancient innocence, they would always have had an essential defect, harmful to the progress of our most excellent faculties: namely, the lack of that bond between the parts which constitutes the whole. The earth would be covered with men among whom there would be almost no communication; we would touch one another at certain points, without being joined at any of them; each person would remain isolated among the rest, each would think only of himself; our understanding would be unable to develop; we should live without feeling anything, we should die without having lived; all our happiness would consist in not knowing our wretchedness; there would be neither kindness in our hearts nor morality in our actions, and we should never have tasted the most delightful feeling of the soul, which is the love of virtue.

[Assuredly the word mankind offers the mind merely a collective idea supposing no real unity among the individuals who constitute it. Let us add, if you will, this Supposition: let us conceive mankind as a corporate person possessing, along with a feeling of common existence that gives it individuality and constitutes it as one, a universal motivation that makes each part act for a general end relating to the whole. Let us conceive that this common feeling is that of humanity, and that natural law is the active principle of the entire machinery. Let us then observe what results from man’s constitution in his relations with his fellows; and, quite otherwise from what we imagined, we shall find that the progress of society stifles humanity in people’s hearts, by awakening private interest; and that the notions of natural Law, which should rather be called the law of reason, begin to develop only when the earlier development of the passions renders all its precepts powerless. Thus it is seen that this supposed social treaty dictated by nature is a veritable pipe-dream; for its conditions are always unknown or impracticable, and must necessarily be ignored or infringed.

If the general society existed anywhere other than in the systems of Philosophers, it would, as I have said, be a corporate [moral] Being that would have qualities of its own distinct from those of the particular Beings constituting it, rather as chemical compounds have properties that they do not derive from any of the elements that make them up. There would be a universal language that nature would teach all men, and that would be the first instrument of their mutual communication. There would be a kind of common sensorium enabling all the parts to correspond. The public good or ill would not be merely the sum of individual goods or ills as in a simple aggregation, but would reside in the bond uniting them and be greater than that sum. And far from public felicity being established upon the happiness of individuals, it would be the source of the latter.]

It is false that, in the state of independence, reason leads us to contribute to the common good from a perception of our own interest. Far from individual interest allying itself to the general good, they exclude one another in the natural order of things, and social laws are a yoke that everyone wishes to impose upon others, but not to be burdened with himself. ‘I am aware that I bring terror and distress to mankind,’ says the independent man whom the wise man stifles;¹ ‘but I must either be wretched or make others wretched, and no one is dearer to me than myself.’ ‘In vain,’ he might add, ‘would I seek to reconcile my interest with that of others; all that you tell me about the advantages of the social law might well be right, if while observing it scrupulously towards others I was sure that all would observe it towards me. But what assurance of that can you give me? And can my situation be any worse than to see myself exposed to all the injuries that stronger men may wish to do me, without daring to recompense myself at the expense of the weaker? Either give me guarantees against every unjust action or do not hope that I in turn shall abstain from such. It is fruitless for you to tell me that, by renouncing the duties imposed upon me by natural law, I at the same time deprive myself of its rights, and that my acts of violence will authorize all those that people may wish to use against me. I grant it all the more readily since I do not at all see how my moderation could guarantee me against them. Furthermore, it will be my concern to win the strong to my interests by sharing with them the spoils from the weak. This will be worth more than justice for my advantage and my security.’ The proof that this is how the enlightened and independent man would have reasoned is that this is how every sovereign society reasons, accounting for its conduct only to itself.

What solid reply can be given to such arguments, if you do not wish to bring Religion to the aid of ethics, and have the will of God intervening directly to unite the society of men? But the sublime notions of the God of the wise, the sweet laws of brotherhood imposed by him, the social virtues of pure souls that are the true worship he wishes from us, will always elude the multitude. Foolish Gods will always be made for the latter in its own image, to whom it will sacrifice minor comforts only to yield to a thousand horrible and destructive passions in their honour. The whole earth would overflow with blood and mankind would soon perish if Philosophy and the laws did not hold back the furies of fanaticism, and if the voice of men were not stronger than that of the Gods.

In fact, if the notions of the great Being and natural law were innate in every heart, it was a quite superfluous concern to teach both of these expressly. That was teaching us what we already knew, and the way people set about it would have been far more apt to make us forget it. If these notions were not innate, then all men to whom God has not given them would be excused from knowing them. Once you needed specific forms of education for this, every People has its own – proved to it to be the only good ones – whence Carnage and murder more often derive than concord and peace.

So let us leave aside the sacred precepts of the various Religions, abuse of which causes as many crimes as use of them can spare, and let us yield to the Philosopher the examination of a question that the Theologian has only ever treated to mankind’s detriment.

But the former will send me back to face mankind itself, which alone has the right to decide, because the greatest good of all is the sole passion it has. It is to the general will that the individual must address himself, the Philosopher will tell me, in order to know how far he must be man, Citizen, Subject, Father, child, and when he should live and die. ‘I certainly see there, I confess, the rule that I can consult,’ our independent man will say; ‘but I do not yet see the reason that should subject me to that rule. It is not a matter of teaching me what justice is; it is a matter of showing me what interest I have in being just.’ For no one will deny that the general will is in each individual a pure act of comprehension, reasoning in the silence of passions upon what man may demand of his fellow and upon what his fellow has the right to demand of him. But where is the man who can thus separate himself from himself? And if concern for his own preservation is the first precept of nature, can you force him thus to view the species in general, in order to impose upon himself duties whose connection with his individual constitution he can by no means perceive? Do not the foregoing objections still subsist, and does it not still remain to be seen how his private interest requires him to submit to the general will?

There is more. Since the art of thus generalizing your ideas is one of the hardest and most belated exercises of human comprehension, will the average man ever be capable of drawing the rules of his behaviour from this manner of reasoning? And if it were necessary to consult the general will about a particular act, how often would it not befall a well-intentioned man to be mistaken about the rule or about its application, and to follow only his own inclination while thinking to obey the law? What shall he then do to guard himself against error? Shall he listen to his inner voice? But this voice, people say, is formed only by the habit of judging and feeling within society and according to its laws, so it cannot serve to establish these; moreover, it would be necessary for his heart not to have harboured any of those passions that speak more loudly than conscience, drown its timid voice, and cause philosophers to maintain that this voice does not exist. Shall he consult the principles of written law, the social actions of all peoples, the tacit conventions of the very enemies of mankind? The former difficulty always recurs, and it is only from the social order established among us that we draw our ideas about the one we imagine. We conceive the general society according to our particular societies, the institutions of small Republics make us think about the great Republic, and we begin truly to become men only after having been Citizens, whereby we can see what is to be thought of those supposed Cosmopolitans who, justifying their love for the fatherland by their love for mankind, boast of loving everyone in order to have the right to love no one.

What reasoning shows us in this respect is entirely confirmed by the facts, and we need only go back to high antiquity in order to see easily that the sound ideas of natural law and common brotherhood of all men spread quite belatedly, making such slow progress in the world that it was Christianity alone which generalized them sufficiently. Indeed even in the Institutes of Justinian² we find the ancient forms of violence authorized in many respects, not merely against declared enemies, but against all that was not subject to the Empire; so that the humanity of the Romans extended no further than their dominion.

Indeed, as Grotius observes, it was long believed permissible to rob, pillage and mistreat foreigners, especially barbarians, and even reduce them to slavery. From this it comes that people would ask strangers, without shocking them, if they were Brigands or Pirates; for the craft, far from being disgraceful, was then considered honourable. The first Heroes like Hercules and Theseus who waged war against Brigands did not refrain from practising brigandage themselves; and the Greeks often called peace treaties those made between peoples who were not at war at all. The words stranger and enemy were for long synonyms among several ancient peoples, even among the Latins: Hostis enim, says Cicero, apud majores nostros [is] dicebatur, quem nunc peregrinum dicimus.³ Thus Hobbes’s error is not to have established the state of war among men once independent and grown sociable, but to have supposed that state natural to the species, and to have made it the cause of those vices of which it is the effect.⁴

But although there is no natural and general society among men; although they become wretched and wicked as they become sociable; although the laws of justice and equality mean nothing to those who live at once in the liberty of the state of nature and subjugated to the needs of the social state; far from thinking that there is neither virtue nor happiness for us and that heaven has abandoned us irrevocably to the depravity of our species, let us strive to draw from the malady itself the remedy that should cure it. Let us if possible correct through new associations the lack of the general association. Let our violent interlocutor himself be the judge of our success. Let us in perfected art show him redress for the ills that incipient art caused to nature. Let us show him all the wretchedness of the state he thought solid. Let him see in a better constitution of things the reward of good deeds, the punishment of evil ones, and the sweet harmony of justice and happiness. Let us enlighten his reason with new knowledge, let us warm his heart with new feelings, and may he learn to expand his being and his felicity by sharing them with his fellows. If my zeal does not blind me in this undertaking, let us not doubt that with a strong soul and a right direction this enemy of mankind will finally abjure his hatred along with his errors; that the reason which led him astray will bring him back to humanity; that to his apparent interest he will learn to prefer his interest rightly understood; that he will become good, virtuous, sensitive and finally, in sum, rather than the fierce Brigand he sought to be, the firmest bulwark of a well-ordered society.

PRINCIPLES OF THE RIGHT OF WAR

Prefatory Note

Rousseau tells us at the very beginning of the Social Contract that it is but a small piece of a much larger project which he has come to realize is beyond his powers. We know from the Confessions that this project would have been a more thoroughgoing account of political institutions. The final one-paragraph chapter of the Social Contract also tells us that the account he gives there needs to be supplemented by a theory of the external relations of states, including such questions as the right of war. To this evidence we can add a letter from Rousseau to his publisher, Marc-Michel Rey, of 9 March 1758. Rousseau informs Rey that he envisages the publication of a section of that work, under the title Principles of the Right of War, as a free-standing work. The text we now have is, very probably, most of a developed working draft of this.

The text presented here of the Principles of the Right of War is, in effect, the translation of a previously unpublished text by Rousseau. Fragments of this text have been available in earlier editions, but what we present here is a more continuous and coherent piece of writing than existed before, the version contained in the Gagnebin and Raymond Oeuvres Complètes being based on C. E. Vaughan’s attempt in 1914 to make something of a few pages published by Dreyfus Brissac in 1896 (pages that Rousseau had included with papers given to Pierre-Alexandre du Peyrou). Subsequently, further textual materials were discovered and published by Bernard Gagnebin. An important breakthrough was made in Rousseau scholarship when Grace G. Roosevelt argued that the various pieces of this text had probably been assembled in the wrong order by previous editors and proposed a reconstruction. Now Bruno Bernardi and Gabriella Silvestrini, working anew with the various manuscript materials, have put forward what looks like a comprehensive and rational version of Rousseau’s intended piece, which now fills an important lacuna in his available writings. Bernardi and Silvestrini have also done important work on the dating of the text, which they believe to have been composed in 1755–6. This dating means that Rousseau’s thinking in the piece pre-dates his engagement with the work of the abbé de Saint-Pierre.

The text presented here is based on the translation and arrangement presented by Bruno Bernardi and Gabriella Silvestrini in their edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Principes du droit de la guerre, Écrits sur la paix perpetuelle (Paris: Vrin – Librairie Philosophique, 2008), under the direction of Blaise Bachofen and Céline Spector. The content of this prefatory note draws on the ‘Présentation de l’édition’ by Bernardi and Silvestrini in that volume, which readers wanting a more comprehensive account of the textual reconstruction should consult.

Principles of the Right of War

I open books on right and on ethics; I listen to scholars and jurisconsults and, convinced by their ingratiating arguments, I deplore the miseries of nature; I admire the peace and justice established by the civil order; I bless the wisdom of public institutions, and console myself for being a man by seeing myself as a citizen. Well instructed upon my duties and my good fortune, I close the book, leave the classroom, and look around me. I see wretched peoples groaning beneath an iron yoke, the human race crushed by a handful of oppressors, a host overwhelmed by misery and starved for bread whose blood and tears the rich man quaffs in peace, and everywhere the strong armed against the weak with the formidable power of the laws. All this takes place peacefully and without resistance: it is the calm of Ulysses’ companions imprisoned in the cavern of the Cyclops, waiting to be devoured. They must languish in silence. Let us draw an eternal veil over these objects of horror. I raise my eyes to gaze afar. I see fire and flame, deserted fields, towns being pillaged. Cruel men, whither are you dragging those wretches! I hear a frightful din, such commotion and such screams, I approach and perceive a scene of murder, ten thousand men butchered, the dead stacked in heaps, the dying trampled underfoot by horses, bearing the image of death and its last agony. So that is the fruit of those pacific institutions. Pity and indignation well up in the depths of my heart. O barbarous Philosopher! come read us your book on a battlefield.

What human bowels would not be stirred by those sad sights; but it is no longer permitted to be a man and plead the cause of humanity. Justice and truth must be bent to the interest of the most powerful, that is the rule. The People bestows no pension, no post, no chair, no place in the academy; for what reason should it be protected? Princes, magnanimous beings from whom we expect all, I speak in the name of the world of letters. Oppress the people with a clear conscience; it is from you alone that we expect all, the people will never be of any use to us.

How could so frail a voice make itself heard through so much venal clamour? Alas, I must hold my tongue; but might my heart’s voice not pierce so dismal a silence? No, without entering into odious details which would be taken as satirical for the very reason that they would be true, I shall limit myself as I have always done to examining human institutions by way of their principles; to correcting if possible the false ideas about them that partisan authors give us; and to ensuring at least that injustice and violence do not brazenly parade as right and equity.

The first thing I note when considering the position of the human species is a manifest contradiction in its constitution, rendering it forever unstable. From one man to the next, we live in a civil state and subject to laws. From one people to the next, each enjoys natural liberty. But this basically makes our situation worse than if these distinctions were unknown. For, living at once in social order and a state of nature, we are subjected to the disadvantages of both without finding safety in either. The perfection of social order consists, to be sure, in the collaboration of force and law; but for this it is necessary that law should direct force. Whereas in princes’ ideas about absolute independence force alone, addressing Citizens in the name of law and foreigners in the name of raison d’état, renders the latter unable and the former unwilling to resist, so that the vain name of justice serves everywhere only as a shield for violence. As for what is commonly called the right of nations,¹ it is certain that for want of sanction its laws are merely chimaeras, weaker even than the law of nature. The latter at least speaks in individual hearts, whereas, since the law of nations has no guarantee apart from its usefulness to the person who submits to it, its decisions are respected only insofar as interest confirms them. In the mixed condition wherein we find ourselves, and whichever of the two systems we may favour, by doing either too much or too little we have done nothing, and placed ourselves in the worst state in which we could possibly be. This strikes me as the true origin of our public calamities.

Let us for a moment contrast these ideas with the horrible system of Hobbes, and we shall find, running quite counter to his absurd doctrine, that far from the state of war being natural to man, war was born from peace, or at least from the precautions men took to ensure a lasting peace. But before entering into this discussion, let us attempt to settle how we should conceive of the state of war.

What the State of War Is

Although these two words war and peace appear to correlate exactly, the latter contains a far broader meaning, given that you may interrupt or disturb peace in a number of ways without going so far as war. Repose, unity, concord, all the ideas of benevolence and mutual affection seem contained in this sweet word peace. It brings a plenitude of feeling to the soul, causing us to love at once our own existence and that of others; it represents the bond between beings that unites them in the universal system; it attains its full extent only in the spirit of God, who can be harmed by nothing that exists and who seeks the preservation of all the beings he has created.

The constitution of this universe does not allow all the sentient beings which compose it to share simultaneously in mutual happiness; but since the well-being of one is another’s harm, in keeping with the law of nature each gives preference to himself; and when he works for his own advantage against the interest of another, peace is instantly disturbed in regard to the one who suffers. Not only is it thus natural to repel the harm that pursues us, but when an intelligent being sees that this harm comes to him by the ill will of another, he is angered and seeks to turn it back against its author. Thence are born discord and disputes, sometimes conflicts, but not yet war.

At last, when things have reached the point where a being endowed with reason is convinced that concern for his own preservation is incompatible not just with the well-being but with the very existence of another, then he arms himself against the latter’s life and seeks to destroy him with the same passion with which he seeks to preserve himself and for the same reason. The one under attack, feeling that the security of his existence is incompatible with the existence of the aggressor, in turn with all his strength attacks the life of the one who threatens his own. This demonstrated will to mutual destruction, and all the acts that flow from it, produce a relationship between the two enemies that we call war.

It follows from this that war by no means consists in one or several unpremeditated conflicts, nor yet in homicide and murder committed in some fit of anger, but in the steady, well-considered and manifest will to destroy our enemy. For to judge that the existence of this enemy is incompatible with our well-being demands a cool head and reason, producing a durable resolve; and for the relationship to be mutual, the enemy in turn, knowing that his life is under threat, must be intent on defending it at the expense of our own. All these ideas are contained in this word war.

The public effects of this ill will reduced to action are called hostilities; but whether there are hostilities or not, the relation of war, once established, can cease only through a formal peace. Otherwise each of the two enemies, having no proof that the other has ceased to threaten his life, could not or should not cease to defend it at the expense of the other’s.

These differences give rise to certain distinctions in terminology. When parties keep one another in mutual tension by constant hostilities, that is what is properly known as waging war. On the other hand, when two declared enemies remain calm and carry out no offensive action against one another, their relationship is not thereby changed, but so long as it has no current effect it is called merely a state of war. Long wars of which parties grow weary but which they cannot bring to a halt commonly produce this state. Sometimes their animosity, far from subsiding through inaction, is merely awaiting a favourable moment to surprise the enemy; and often the state of war that relaxation produces is more dangerous than war itself.

There has been argument as to whether truces, cease-fires, the Peace of God,² are a state of war or of peace. As the foregoing notions make clear, all these are just a modified state of war, in which the two enemies tie their hands without losing or disguising the will to harm one another. Preparations are made, arms and siege materials are amassed, all military operations other than ones specified continue. This shows clearly enough that the intentions remain unchanged. The same is true again when two Enemies meet on neutral ground without attacking one another.

Who can have imagined without shuddering the senseless system of a natural war of all against all? What a strange animal it must be that would believe its well-being depended on the destruction of its entire species. And how is it conceivable that this species, so monstrous and so detestable, could last even two generations? Yet that is how far one of the finest geniuses ever to have lived was led by his desire, or rather his passion, to establish despotism and passive obedience. So savage a principle was worthy of its purpose.

The social state, which constrains all our natural inclinations, is nevertheless incapable of annihilating them; despite our prejudices and despite ourselves they still speak in our innermost hearts, often bringing us back to the true which we abandon for pipe-dreams. If that mutual and destructive enmity was part of our constitution, then it would still make itself felt, and would thrust us back despite ourselves through every social chain. The dreadful hatred of humanity would gnaw at man’s heart. He would be anguished by the birth of his own children, would rejoice at the death of his brethren – and when he found one of them asleep, his first impulse would be to kill him.

The benevolence that causes us to participate in the happiness of our fellows, the compassion that identifies us with the person who suffers and that distresses us at his grief, would be unknown sentiments directly contrary to nature. A feeling, merciful man would be a monster, and we should be naturally what we find it so hard to become amidst the depravity that dogs us.

In vain would the sophist say that this mutual enmity is not innate and immediate, but based on the inevitable competition engendered by every individual’s right to all things; for the sentiment of this supposed right is no more natural to man than the war that the sophist derives from it. I have already said and cannot repeat too often: the mistake of Hobbes and other philosophers is to confuse natural man with the men they see before them, and to transport into one system a being who can survive only in another. Man wishes for his well-being and all that can contribute to it; that is undeniable. But in nature man’s well-being is limited to what is physically necessary. For when he has a healthy soul and his body does not ail him, what does he lack to be happy in keeping with his constitution? He who has nothing desires little; he who commands no one has little ambition. But superfluity arouses greed: the more you get, the more you desire. He who has much wants to have everything, and the lunacy of universal monarchy has never tormented the heart of any but a great king. Such is the course of nature; such is the development of the passions. A superficial philosopher observes souls kneaded and fermented countless times in the leaven of society and believes that he has observed man. But in order to know him well, you must know how to disentangle the natural gradation of his sentiments; and it is by no means among those who live in great cities that you should seek nature’s first feature imprinted on the human heart.*

But even were it true that this boundless and unconquerable greed had developed in all men to the extent that our sophist assumes, it would still not produce that state of universal war of each against all, the odious image of which Hobbes dares to outline. That unbridled desire to appropriate everything is incompatible with the desire to destroy all one’s fellows; and the victor who, having killed everyone, had the misfortune to remain alone in the world would enjoy nothing there, just because he would have everything. What good are even riches, if not to be handed on? What use would it be to him to own the entire universe, if he were its only inhabitant? What? Will his stomach devour all the fruits of the earth? Who will collect the products of all climates for him? Who will bear witness to his empire in the vast wastes that he will not inhabit? What will he do with his treasures, who will consume his foodstuffs, to what eyes will he display his power? I see. Instead of massacring everyone, he will clap everyone in irons in order at least to have Slaves. That at once changes the whole question. Since it is no longer a matter of destroying them, the state of war is abolished. Let the reader suspend his judgement here. I shall not forget to deal with this point.

Man is naturally peaceable and timorous. At the least sign of danger, his first impulse is to flee. He becomes warlike only by dint of habit and experience. Honour, interest, prejudice, vengeance, all the passions that can lead him to brave dangers and death are far from him in the state of nature. It is only after having kept company with some man that he takes the decision to attack another; and he becomes a soldier only after having been a citizen. You do not see any great propensity here to wage war on all his fellows. But I am devoting too much time to a system as revolting as it is absurd, and that has already been refuted countless times.

So there is no general war of man against man, and the human species has not been created solely in order to destroy one another. What remains to be considered is the accidental and particular war that may arise between two or more individuals.

If the law of nature were written only in human reason, it would hardly be capable of directing most of our actions. But it is engraved too in the heart of man in indelible characters, where it speaks to him more loudly than all the precepts of the Philosophers; where it cries out to him that only to preserve his own life is he allowed to sacrifice that of his fellow, and fills him with horror at spilling human blood other than in anger, even when he finds himself obliged to do so.

I suppose that in such unregulated disputes as may arise in the state of nature an angry man may sometimes kill another, either in open combat or by surprise. But when a genuine war is involved, just imagine what a strange position this same man must be in if he can preserve his life only at the expense of another’s and, by virtue of a relation established between them, one has to die for the other to live. War is a permanent state presupposing constant relations, and such relations very rarely obtain between one man and another, where among individuals everything is in a continual flux which ceaselessly changes relations and interests. So that a subject of dispute arises and ceases almost instantaneously, a quarrel begins and ends in a day, and there may be fights and murders but never or very rarely protracted enmities and wars.

In the civil state, where the life of all citizens is in the sovereign’s power and no one has the right to dispose of his own life or anyone else’s, the state of war can likewise not exist between individuals; and as for Duels, challenges, cartels, invitations to single combat, apart from the fact that these involved an illegitimate and barbarous abuse of a wholly military constitution, the result was not a genuine state of war but an individual affair that would be settled within a limited time and space, so that for a second fight a new challenge was necessary. Exception must be made for the private wars that were suspended by daily truces called ‘the Peace of God’, and that received sanction from the legal code of Saint Louis.³ But this example is unique in history.

It may further be asked if Kings, who are de facto independent of human power, might engage in personal, individual wars between themselves, independent of those of the State. This is surely a pointless question, since Princes are notoriously not in the habit of sparing others in order to expose themselves personally. Moreover, this question depends upon another, which is not up to me to decide: namely, whether or not the Prince is himself subject to the laws of the State. For if he is subject to them, his person is bound to the State and his life like that of the least Citizen belongs to it. But if the Prince is above the laws, he lives in the pure state of nature and owes no account for any of his actions either to his subjects or to Anybody.

Of the Social State

We now enter a new order of things. We are going to see men united by an artificial concord assemble to cut each other’s throats, and all the horrors of war arise from the efforts they had made to avert it. But it is important first to form more precise notions about the essence of the body politic than we have done so far. Let the reader merely reflect that it is a question here not so much of history and facts as of right and justice, and that I mean to examine things in terms of their nature rather than our prejudices.

The first society formed necessarily leads to formation of all the rest. People have to belong to it, or unite to resist it. People have to imitate it, or let themselves be swallowed up by it.

Thus the entire face of the earth is changed; everywhere nature has disappeared; everywhere human contrivance [art] has taken its place; natural independence and liberty have given way to laws and to slavery, there no longer exists any free Being; the philosopher seeks a man and no longer finds one. But it is futile to think of abolishing nature; it is reborn and reveals itself where it was least expected. The independence wrested from men takes refuge in societies; and these great bodies, given over to their own impulses, produce shocks more terrible in proportion as their mass exceeds that of individuals.

But, you will say, since each of these bodies has so solid a footing, how can they possibly ever clash with one another? Should their own constitution not keep them in everlasting mutual peace? Must they, like men, look outside for the wherewithal to meet their needs? Have they not within themselves all that is necessary for their preservation? Are competition and exchange a source of inevitable discord? But in all the countries of the world did the inhabitants not exist before commerce? Irrefutable proof that they could subsist without it.

I could content myself with replying to this with facts, without needing to fear any rejoinder. But I have not forgotten that I am reasoning here about the nature of things, and not about events that can have a thousand particular causes independent of the common principle. But let us consider attentively the constitution of political bodies. Although in the last resort each suffices for its own preservation, we shall find that their mutual relations do not fail to be far more intimate than those of individuals. For man basically has no necessary relationship with his fellows; he can survive without their help in all possible vigour. He needs not so much the care of men as the fruits of the earth; and the earth produces more than is needed to feed all its inhabitants. Add that man has a measure of strength and size fixed by nature, beyond which he cannot go. However he may view himself, he finds all his faculties limited. His life is short, his years are numbered. His stomach does not grow larger with his wealth. However much his passions increase, his joys have their measure. His heart has bounds like all the rest. His capacity for enjoyment is always the same. However high he raises himself in thought, he still remains small.

The State, by contrast, being an artificial body, has no determinate measure. The size pertaining to it is undefined; it can always increase this. It feels weak so long as any are stronger than it. Its security and self-preservation require it to make itself more powerful than all its neighbours; it can increase, sustain and exert its forces only at their expense. And if it does not need to seek its subsistence outside itself, it constantly seeks new members there who may give it a more unshakeable stability. For inequality between men has limits set by the hands of nature, but inequality between societies can grow constantly until one absorbs all the rest.

Hence, since the size of the body politic is purely relative, it is forever obliged to compare itself in order to know itself. Depending upon all that surrounds it, it must take an interest in all that occurs there. For, however much it may wish to remain within itself without gain or loss, it becomes small or large, weak or strong, according to whether its neighbour expands or contracts and grows stronger or weaker. Lastly, its very solidity, by rendering its relations more constant, gives all its actions a surer outcome and makes all its quarrels more dangerous.

People seem to have undertaken to overturn all true ideas about things. Everything inclines natural man to repose; eating and sleeping are the only needs he knows; and hunger alone drags him from idleness. People have made him out to be a madman, always ready to torment his fellows through passions of which he is wholly unaware; meanwhile such passions, heightened in society by all that can inflame them, are held not to exist there. Countless writers have dared to declare that the body politic is passionless, and that no raison d’état exists other than reason itself, as if it were not evident, on the contrary, that the essence of society consists in the activity of its members, and that a State without movement would be merely a dead body, as if all the histories of the world did not show us that the best-constituted societies are also the most active. Both within and without, the continual action and reaction of all their members testifies to the vigour of the whole body.

The difference between human contrivance and the works of nature makes itself felt in its effects. However much citizens may call themselves members of the State, they cannot become joined to it as real members are joined to the body. It is impossible to prevent each of them from having a separate, individual existence, through which he alone can provide for his own survival. The nerves are less sensitive, the muscles have less vigour, all the bonds are looser, the least mishap can dismember everything.

If you consider how inferior the public force is in the aggregate of the body politic to the sum of individual forces, and how much friction there is so to speak in the working of the whole mechanism, then you will find that the feeblest man has more strength for his self-preservation, all other things being equal, than the sturdiest State has for its own.

Hence, for this State to survive, the intensity of its passions must replace that of its movements, and its will must quicken even as its power grows slack. This is the law of conservation that nature itself establishes between species, and that maintains them all despite their inequality. It is also the reason incidentally why small States have proportionately more vigour than large ones. For public sensitivity does not increase with territory: the more this expands, the more the will cools, the more the movements weaken, and that great body overburdened by its own weight collapses, languishes and withers away.

Having seen the earth covered with new States, having discovered among them a general relationship tending towards their mutual destruction, it remains for us to see in what precisely their existence, their well-being and their life consist, in order then to find by what manner of hostilities they may attack and harm one another.

It is from the social pact that the body politic receives its unity and common self. Its government and laws make its constitution more or less sturdy. Its life is in the hearts of its citizens; their courage and their morals make it more or less durable. The only actions that it performs freely, and that may be imputed to it, are dictated by the general will; and it is by the nature of these actions that you may judge if the being which produces them is well or badly constituted.

Hence, so long as there exists a common will to observe the social pact and the laws, this pact still survives; and so long as this will manifests itself through external acts, the State is not abolished. But without ceasing to exist, it may find itself in a condition of vigour or decline, strong or weak, healthy or sick, and tending to self-destruction or self-assertion. Its well-being may increase or diminish in an infinity of ways, almost all of which depend upon it. These myriad cases are outside my scope, but here is a summary of those that do relate to it.

General Idea of War between State and State

The life principle of the body politic and so to speak the heart of the State is the social pact: once wounded there, it instantly dies, falls and is dissolved. But this pact is no charter in parchment, needing only to be torn up in order to be destroyed; it is written in the general will, where revoking it is not so easy.

Hence, being unable at first to divide the whole, they attack it in its parts. If the body is invulnerable, they wound the limbs in order to weaken it. If they cannot rob it of its existence, at least they affect its well-being. If they cannot reach the seat of life, they destroy what maintains it: they attack its government, laws, mores, goods, possessions, men. The State must surely perish, when all that preserves it is annihilated.

All these means are employed, or can be, in war between one power and another; and they are frequently also the conditions imposed by a victor in order to continue harming the vanquished once disarmed.

For the purpose of all the harm you do to your enemy through war is to force him to suffer you to do still more of the same through peace. There are no hostilities of this kind of which history does not furnish us with examples. I need not speak about pecuniary contributions, in merchandise or in foodstuffs; nor about territory stolen and inhabitants transplanted. Annual tribute in men is not even something rare. Without going back to Minos and the Athenians, we know that the emperors of Mexico attacked their neighbours only in order to have captives to sacrifice; and in our day the mutual wars of the kings of Guinea,⁴ and their treaties with the peoples of Europe, had no other object than tribute and trade in slaves. Neither is it hard to justify the fact that the aim and effect of war is sometimes only to change the constitution of the enemy State. The Republics of Greece used to attack each other less in order to deprive each other of liberty than to change their form of government; and they would change the government of the defeated only the better to keep them under their sway. The Macedonians and all conquerors of Sparta always made a great point of abolishing the laws of Lycurgus there, and the Romans believed that they could give no greater mark of clemency to a subjugated people than to let it keep its own laws. We also know that it was a maxim of their policy to foment among their enemies and ward off from themselves the effeminate, sedentary arts that enervate and soften men. Let us leave to the Tarentines their angry Gods, Fabius used to say, when urged to bring to Rome some of the statues and pictures with which Tarentum was adorned; and the initial decadence of Roman mores was rightly imputed to Marcellus, because he did not follow the same policy at Syracuse.⁵ For it is true that a skilful conqueror sometimes harms the vanquished more by what he leaves them than by what he takes from them; and that on the other hand a greedy usurper often damages himself more than his enemy by the unrestrained harm he does to him. This influence of morals has always been viewed as very important by truly enlightened princes. The only hardship that Cyrus imposed on the rebellious Lydians was a soft, effeminate life; and the way the tyrant Aristodemos went about keeping the inhabitants of Cumae beneath his sway is too curious not to be related.⁶

These examples suffice to give an idea of the various means whereby you may weaken a State, and those whose use is seemingly authorized by war in order to harm your enemy. With respect to the treaties for which some of these means are conditions, what at bottom are such forms of peace other than a continuation of war, with all the more cruelty in that the vanquished enemy no longer has the right to defend himself? I shall speak about this elsewhere.

Add to all this such tangible manifestations of ill will, proclaiming the intention of doing harm, as denying some power the titles due to it; failing to acknowledge its rights; rejecting its claims; depriving its subjects of commercial liberty; stirring up enemies against it; in short, infringing the right of nations in its regard upon any pretext whatsoever.

These various ways of injuring a body politic are not all equally practicable or equally useful for the one who employs them; those which redound to both our own advantage and the enemy’s detriment are naturally preferred. Land, money, men – all the spoils you can appropriate – thus become the principal objects of mutual hostilities; and since such base greed insensibly changes the ideas of things, war finally degenerates into brigandage, while little by little enemies and warriors turn into Tyrants and thieves.

Lest we unwittingly adopt these changed ideas, let us first fix our own with a definition, and try to make this so simple as to be impossible to misuse.

I call war between one power and another, therefore, the effect of a constant, demonstrated, mutual disposition to destroy the enemy State, or at least to weaken it, by all possible means. This disposition reduced to actions is war properly speaking; so long as it remains without effect it is merely the state of war.

I foresee an objection. Since according to me the state of war is natural among powers, why does the disposition from which it results need to be demonstrated? My answer is that I spoke earlier about the natural state; that I am speaking here about the legitimate state; and that I shall show later how, in order to make the latter legitimate, war needs to be declared.

Fundamental Distinctions

I beg readers not to forget that I am seeking not what makes war advantageous to the one who wages it, but what makes it legitimate. There is almost always a cost to being just. Are you then exempted from being so?

If there never was, nor could be, a genuine war between individuals, who then are those between whom it takes place, and who may really call themselves enemies? I answer that they are public persons. And what is a public person? I answer that it is the corporate being called sovereign, which the social pact has endowed with existence and all of whose wills bear the name of laws. Let us here apply the foregoing distinctions: regarding the effects of war, it is the sovereign that may be said to do harm and the State to suffer it.

If war takes place only between corporate beings, there is no hostility towards men, and it can be waged without taking anyone’s life. But this needs to be explained.

Viewing things only in strict terms of the social pact, land, money, men and all that is included within the confines of the State belongs to it unreservedly. But since the rights of society, being based on those of nature, cannot abrogate these, all such objects must be considered in a twofold light: to whit, the land as both public territory and the patrimony of individuals; goods as belonging in one sense to the sovereign and in another to the owners; inhabitants as citizens and as men. Since the body politic is basically only a corporate person, it is only a fictive being. Take away public convention, this being is instantly destroyed without the least change for the worse in whatever makes it up; and never could all the conventions of men change anything in the physical nature of things. What then does it mean to wage war on a sovereign? It means to attack public convention and all that flows from it; for the essence of the State consists in that alone. If the social pact could be severed with a single blow, there would instantly be no more war; and by that one blow the State would be killed, without a single man dying. Aristotle says that, in order to authorize the cruel treatment meted out to the Helots in Sparta, the Ephors on taking office would solemnly declare war upon them.⁷ This declaration was as superfluous as it was barbaric. A state of war necessarily existed between them, for no other reason than that they were respectively the masters and the slaves. Since the Lacedaemonians used to kill Helots, the Helots undoubtedly had every right to kill Lacedaemonians.

LETTERS WRITTEN FROM THE MOUNTAINS

(selections)

Prefatory Note

What might have been the moment of Rousseau’s greatest triumph, the publication of Emile and the Social Contract in 1762, quickly turned into a personal disaster for him, and he was forced to flee into exile. The principal cause of official disapproval was the heterodox religious views expressed in both works. In the Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, a subsection of Emile, Rousseau had criticized the intolerance of the traditional churches and had championed the idea of a natural religion based as much on feeling as on reason; in the Social Contract he had cast doubt on whether the doctrines of the Christian gospel were conducive to the citizenly virtues necessary for a just society.

Though he had upset the authorities in both France, the country of his origin, and Geneva, the city of his birth, it was only in the latter that both books were condemned.¹ The Genevan condemnation, on 19 June 1762, was an event with a place in a much longer and sometimes violent story: the struggle between the patrician elite and the wider citizenry, who were themselves but a tiny minority of Geneva’s actual population. The patrician elite dominated the governmental bodies which ran Geneva, particularly the Petit Conseil, and resisted any attempt to make the sovereignty of the people, expressed through their assembly, the Conseil Générale, anything more than nominal. The relationship between the various governing councils and the people was, at the time, reasonably stable, having been fixed by a new constitutional law, the Règlement, in 1738.

Rousseau’s relationship to his home city is a complex one, expressed in a number of writings through his life. The attitude that he usually expresses to the institutions of his native city is respectful, supportive and conservative, at least on the surface. So in the ‘dedication’ to the Discourse on Inequality he heaps praise on Geneva but gives an account of its constitution and functioning that makes it sound much more democratic than it was. This leaves open the question of whether he was praising a reality he believed in or subtly criticizing the actuality of Geneva by holding up a superior ideal. In the Letter to d’Alembert he endorses his native city but warns against its cultural corruption, perhaps suggesting that it had already reached an advanced stage. And in the Social Contract the institutions he argued for resemble a Geneva that might have been rather than the Geneva that was: in particular, the requirement of periodic assemblies would not have found favour with the Genevan oligarchy.

When Emile and Of the Social Contract were condemned, there was little reaction from the Genevan bourgeoisie, though at least one member of the oligarchy protested that Rousseau had not been treated fairly and circulated an open letter to that effect. Rousseau, who had been worried, if anything, about a popular overreaction, eventually despaired at the lack of support from his fellow citizens and decided to renounce his citizenship in May 1763. It was only at this point that his supporters were provoked into action and submitted two formal grievances against the Petit Conseil. The Petit Conseil, however, rejected the charges and asserted its right to refuse to pass on any such petition to the supposedly sovereign Conseil Générale. In an atmosphere of increasing disaffection, the attorney-general, Léon Tronchin, produced a defence of the rights of the Petit Conseil entitled Letters Written from the Country. It is to this text that Rousseau’s Letters Written from the Mountains is a reply. The Letters were published in December 1764.

The selection published here contains three items. First, the Sixth Letter in its entirety. This letter contains Rousseau’s direct response to the reception and suppression of the Social Contract in Geneva as well as a succinct summary of the argument of the latter. Second, a brief extract from the Seventh Letter provides an account of how governments work to undermine sovereigns that illustrates the parallel theme of Book III of the Social Contract. Third, a passage from the Eighth Letter contains a much clearer statement of Rousseau’s understanding of the nature of freedom than he makes explicitly in Of the Social Contract. This passage is therefore an important guide in the interpretation of that book.

Earlier editions and references to this text translate it as Letters Written from the Mountain (singular). But, although the French word is indeed singular, it means ‘mountainous area’ as well as ‘mountain’, and here there is a clear implied contrast with Tronchin’s Letters Written from the Country.

The present translation is based on the text contained in volume 3 of the Pléiade edition of Oeuvres Complètes produced under the direction of Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond in 1964.

Letters Written From The Mountains

Sixth Letter

One further letter, Sir, and you will be free of me. As I begin it, however, I find myself in a very strange position: obliged to write it, but not knowing how to fill it. Can you imagine having to justify yourself for a crime of which you are ignorant, and having to defend yourself without knowing of what you are accused? Yet that is what I have to do on the issue of Governments. I am, not accused, but judged, nay denounced, for having published two Works – ‘reckless, scandalous, impious, tending to destroy the Christian Religion and all Governments’. Regarding Religion, we have at least had some purchase whereby to discover what they meant, and we have examined it. But regarding Governments, nothing can provide us with the least clue. They have always avoided any kind of explanation on this point: they have never been willing to say where I thus undertook to destroy them, nor how, nor why, nor anything capable of certifying that the crime is not imaginary. It is as if someone were judged for having killed a man, without saying either where, or whom, or when: for an abstract murder. Before the Inquisition, the accused man is indeed forced to guess of what he is accused; but judgement is not passed on him without saying for what.

The Author of Letters Written from the Country with the same care avoids any explanation of this alleged crime: he joins Religion and Governments alike in the same general accusation; then, becoming specific about Religion, he says he means to limit himself to this – and he keeps his word. How shall we manage to verify the accusation regarding Governments, if those who level it refuse to say what it concerns?

Note even how with a stroke of the pen this Author changes the state of the question. The Council declares that my Books tend to destroy all Governments; the Author of the Letters says merely that Governments are subjected in them to the most audacious criticism. That is very different. Criticism, however audacious it may be, is not conspiracy. To criticize or condemn certain Laws is not to overthrow all Laws. You might as well accuse someone of murdering the sick when he points out the errors of Doctors.

Once again, what to respond to arguments that they will not reveal? How to justify myself against a verdict delivered with no grounds? If, without proof on either side, these Gentlemen say that I wish to overthrow all Governments, and if for my part I say that I do not wish to overthrow all Governments, there is exact parity between these two assertions, except that the balance tilts in my favour, since it is to be presumed that I know better than anyone what I wish to do.

But where parity is lacking is in the effect of the assertion. After theirs, my book is burned, my person is under warrant, and what I affirm re-establishes nothing. However, if I prove that the accusation is false and the judgement iniquitous, the affront they have done me rebounds upon them: the warrant, the Executioner, everything should rebound on them, since no one destroys Government so radically as the one who derives from it some use directly contrary to the purpose for which it is instituted.

It is not enough for me to assert, I have to prove; and it is here that you may see how pitiable is the fate of an individual subjected to unjust Magistrates, when they have nothing to fear from the Sovereign and when they place themselves above the laws. They turn assertion without proof into demonstration: at once the innocent man is punished. Far worse, they make his very defence into a new crime, and it should not be up to them to punish him again for having proved that he was innocent.

How am I to set about showing that they have not told the truth, proving that I am no destroyer of Governments? Whatever part of my Writings I may defend, they will say this is not the part they condemned, even though they condemned everything, the good with the bad, without any distinction. In order to allow them no defeat, everything would have to be gone over again, everything followed through from end to end, Book by Book, page by page, line by line, and in short almost word by word. Moreover, all the Governments of the world would have to be examined, since they are saying that I destroy them all. What an undertaking! How many years would have to be devoted to it! How many folios would have to be written! And, after that, who would read them?

Demand of me what is feasible. Any reasonable man should content himself with what I have to say to you: you assuredly want nothing more.

Of my two Books burned together upon common charges, there is but one that deals with political right and Government matters. If the other does deal with such, it is only in an extract from the former. Hence, I presume that it is only against this last that the accusation is directed. If this accusation bore upon some particular passage, it would doubtless have been cited; at least some maxim, faithful or otherwise, would have been extracted from it, as has been done for the points concerning Religion.

Therefore, it is the System established in the body of the work that destroys Governments. It is thus a matter simply of expounding this System or making an analysis of the Book. And if we do not manifestly see the destructive principles in question, we shall at least know where to seek them in the work, by following the method of the Author.

However, Sir, if during this analysis, which will be brief, you find some consequence to draw, for pity’s sake do not be hasty. Wait until we may reason about it together. After that, you will return to it if you please.

What ensures that the State is one? It is the union of its members. And whence arises the union of its members? From the obligation that binds them. Everything is consensual so far.

But what is the basis of this obligation? Here is where Authors divide. According to some, it is force; according to others, paternal authority; according to others, the will of God. Each establishes his principle and attacks that of the rest: I have not done otherwise myself, and, following the soundest part of those who have discussed these matters, I have posited as basis of the body politic the convention of its members; I have refuted principles different from mine.

Independently of the truth of this principle, it prevails over all others by virtue of the solid basis it establishes. For what surer basis can obligation have among men than the free engagement of the one who commits himself? Every other principle can be disputed;* you would not be able to dispute that one.

But by virtue of this condition of liberty, which encompasses others, all kinds of engagement are not valid even before human Tribunals. Hence, in order to determine this one, you have to explain its nature, you have to find its use and its purpose, you have to prove that it is suitable for men, and that it has nothing contrary to natural Laws: for infringing natural Laws by the Social Contract is no more permitted than it is permitted to infringe positive Laws by the Contracts of individuals, and it is only by these same laws that the liberty which gives force to the engagement exists.

The result I draw from this examination is that the establishment of the Social Contract is a particular kind of pact, by which each man engages himself towards all, whence follows the reciprocal engagement of all men towards each, which is the immediate object of the union.

I say that this engagement is of a particular kind in that, being absolute, without condition or reservation, it yet cannot be unjust or susceptible of abuse, since it is not possible that the body should wish to harm itself, so long as the whole wills only for all.

It is of a particular kind too in that it binds contracting parties without subjecting them to anybody, and that in giving them for a rule their will alone, it leaves them as free as before.

The will of all is thus order, the supreme rule, and this general and personified rule is what I call the Sovereign.

It follows from this that Sovereignty is indivisible, inalienable, and that it resides essentially in all members of the body.

But how does this abstract and collective being act? It acts through Laws, and it could not act otherwise.

And what is a Law? It is a public and solemn declaration of the general will regarding an object of common interest.

I say: regarding an object of common interest, because the Law would lose its force and cease to be legitimate if the object did not concern everyone.

The Law cannot by its nature have a particular and individual object, but the application of the Law bears upon particular and individual objects.

Legislative power, which is the Sovereign, thus needs another power that executes, i.e. that may reduce the Law into particular acts. This latter power must be established in such a manner that it always executes the Law, and that it never executes anything but the Law. Here comes in the institution of Government.

What is Government? It is an intermediary body established between subjects and the Sovereign for their mutual correspondence, entrusted with execution of the Laws and with the maintenance of Liberty both civil and political.

Government, as an integral part of the body politic, participates in the general will which constitutes it; as a body itself, it has its own will. These two wills sometimes accord and sometimes fight. It is from the combined effect of this cooperation and this conflict that the play of the whole machinery results.

The principle constituting the various forms of Government consists in the number of members who compose it. The smaller this number, the more force the Government has; the larger the number, the weaker the Government is; and as sovereignty always tends to grow looser, Government always tends to grow stronger. Hence, the executive Body must in the long run prevail over the legislative body, and when the Law is eventually submitted to men, only masters and slaves remain: the State is destroyed.

Before this destruction, Government must through its natural progress change form and pass by degrees from the larger number to the lesser.

The various forms of which Government is capable may be reduced to three main ones. Having compared these in terms of their advantages and drawbacks, I give my preference to that which is intermediary between the two extremes and which bears the name of Aristocracy. It must be recalled here that the constitution of the State and that of the Government are two very distinct things and that I have not confused them. The best of Governments is the aristocratic; the worst of sovereignties is the aristocratic.

These discussions lead to others on the manner in which Government degenerates and the means to delay destruction of the body politic.

Finally, in the last Book, I examine – through comparison with the best Government to have existed, viz. that of Rome – the polity most favourable to good constitution of the State; then I end this Book and the entire Work by studies on the manner in which Religion can and should enter as a constituent part into the composition of the body politic.

What think you, Sir, in reading this brief and faithful analysis of my Book? I can guess. You were saying to yourself: ‘But this is the history of the Government of Geneva.’ That is what all those who know your Constitution have said upon reading this same Work.

And, indeed, that primitive Contract, that essence of Sovereignty, that empire of Laws, that institution of Government, that way of restricting it to various degrees in order to offset authority by force, that tendency to usurpation, those periodic assemblies, that skill in removing them, finally that imminent destruction which threatens you and which I was seeking to prevent – is it not the very likeness of your Republic, from its birth up until today?

Hence, I took your Constitution, which I found noble, as a model for political institutions. And in proposing you as an example to Europe, far from seeking to destroy you, I was setting forth the means to preserve you. However good that Constitution is, it is not faultless: it was possible to prevent the adulterations it has suffered, safeguard it against the danger it runs today. I foresaw that danger, I made it known, I would indicate means of protection. Showing what had to be done to uphold it – was that seeking to destroy it? It was by virtue of my attachment to it that I should have wished nothing to adulterate it. There is my entire crime! I was wrong, perhaps; but if in this respect love of the fatherland blinded me, was it up to the latter to punish me for it?

How could I aim to overthrow all Governments, by laying down as principles all those of your own? The fact alone destroys the accusation. Since there was an existing Government upon my model, then I did not aim to destroy all those that existed. Well, Sir, if I had made only a System, you may be very sure that nothing would have been said. They would have contented themselves with relegating Of the Social Contract – along with Plato’s Republic, Utopia and Sévarambes – to the land of dreams.² But I was depicting an existing object, and they wished this object to change its aspect. My Book testified against the attempt they were about to make: it is for this that they have not forgiven me.

But here is something that will strike you as strange. My Book attacks all Governments, and it is proscribed in none! It establishes just one of them, it proposes it as an example, and it is in this one that it is burned! Is it not singular that the attacked Governments should be silent, and that the respected Government should punish? What! The Magistrate of Geneva makes himself the protector of other Governments against even his own! He punishes his own Citizen for having preferred the Laws of his country to all others! Is that conceivable? And would you believe it if you had not seen it? In all the rest of Europe, has anyone thought to denounce the work? No, not even the State where it was printed.* Not even France, where the Magistrates are so strict about such things. Did they ban the Book there? Nothing of the kind; at first they would not allow the Dutch edition to enter, but it was counterfeited in France, and the work circulates there without difficulty. So it was a matter of trade and not of polity: they preferred the profit of France’s Bookseller to the profit of the foreign Bookseller. That is all.

Of the Social Contract has not been burned anywhere other than in Geneva, where it was not printed; the Magistrate of Geneva alone has found in it principles destructive of all Governments. In truth, this Magistrate has not at all said what those principles were; in this I think he has acted very prudently.

The effect of indiscreet bans is to be not observed at all, and to enfeeble the strength of authority. My Book is in the hands of everyone in Geneva, and why is it not equally in all hearts! Read it, Sir, this Book so censured but so necessary; everywhere in it you will see the Law placed above men; everywhere in it you will see liberty demanded, but always beneath the authority of the laws, without which liberty cannot exist, and beneath which one is always free, however one is governed. I am not courting the powers by this, people say: so much the worse for them; for I am serving their true interests, if they were able to see them and follow them. But passions blind men regarding their own good. Those who subject Laws to human passions are the true destroyers of Governments: those are the people who should be punished.

The foundations of the State are the same in all Governments, and these foundations are better laid down in my Book than in any other. When it is then a matter of comparing the various forms of Government, one cannot avoid weighing separately the advantages and drawbacks of each: this is what I think I have done with impartiality. Having weighed up everything, I gave the preference to the Government of my country. That was natural and reasonable; I should have been blamed if I had not done so. But I by no means excluded other Governments; on the contrary, I showed that each had its reason that could make it preferable to any other, depending upon men, times and places. Hence, far from destroying all Governments, I established them all.

In speaking of Monarchic Government in particular, I have clearly asserted the advantage of it, but neither have I disguised its defects. This, I think, is the right of a man who reasons; and if I had excluded it, which I certainly did not do, would it follow that I should have been punished for it in Geneva? Has Hobbes been pursued by a warrant in any Monarchy, because his principles are destructive of every republican Government? And in Kingdoms, have Authors been tried for rejecting and demoralizing Republics? Is the right not reciprocal? And are Republicans not Sovereign in their country as Kings are in theirs? For my part, I have rejected no Government, I do not hold any in contempt. In examining them, in comparing them, I have held the balance and calculated their weights; I have done nothing more.

Reason ought nowhere to be punished, nor even reasoning; such punishment would prove too much against those who inflicted it. The Representatives have very clearly established that my Book, where I do not stray from the general argument – by no means attacking the Government of Geneva, and printed outside its territory – can be considered only among those dealing with natural and political right, over which the Laws give the Council no powers and which have always been sold publicly in the Town, whatever principle may be advanced in them and whatever sentiment may be upheld in them. I am not the only one who, in discussing questions of politics through abstraction, can have handled them with some boldness. Everyone does not do so, but every man has the right to do it; some exercise this right, and I am the only one to be punished for having exercised it. The unfortunate Sidney³ thought like me, but he acted; it is for his deed and not for his book that he had the honour to spill his blood. Althusius in Germany⁴ made enemies, but there was no thought of pursuing him criminally. Locke, Montesquieu, the abbé de Saint-Pierre dealt with the same subjects, and often with at least the same liberty. Locke in particular dealt with them in exactly the same principles as me. All three were born under Kings, lived tranquilly and died honoured in their countries. You know how I have been treated in mine.

Be certain too that, far from being ashamed of these marks of infamy, I glory in them, since they serve only to bring out the cause that draws them upon me, and the fact that this cause is simply to have deserved well of my country. The conduct of the Council towards me does undoubtedly distress me, by breaking knots that were so dear to me. But can it shame me? No, it raises me up, it places me on the level of those who have suffered for liberty. My Books, whatever may be done, will always bear witness on their own behalf; and the treatment they have received will only save from opprobrium those which will have the honour of being burned after them.

Extract from the Seventh Letter

What has happened to you, Sirs, is what has happened to all governments similar to yours. First, the Legislative power and the executive power that constitute sovereignty are not distinct from it. The Sovereign People wills of itself, and of itself it does what it wills. Soon the inconvenience of this involvement of everyone in everything forces the Sovereign People to charge some of its members with executing its wishes. These Officers, having fulfilled their commission, account for it and return to the common equality. Little by little these commissions become frequent, eventually permanent. Insensibly a body is formed that always acts. A body that always acts cannot account for every action, so it accounts only for the main ones; soon it manages to account for none of them. The more active the power that acts, the more it enfeebles the power that wills. Yesterday’s wish is deemed to be also today’s, instead of yesterday’s act not dispensing from acting today. At last, the inaction of the power that wills subjects it to the power that executes; the latter gradually renders its actions independent, and soon its wishes – instead of acting for the power that wills, it acts upon it. There then remains in the State only one acting power, viz. the executive. The executive power is merely force, and where force alone rules the State is dissolved. There, Sir, is how all democratic States ultimately perish.

Extract from the Eighth Letter

Seeking to confuse independence with liberty is futile. These two things are so different that they even mutually exclude one another. When each does what he pleases, he often does what displeases others; and this cannot be called a free state. Liberty consists less in acting upon your wish than in not being subjected to the wish of others; it further consists in not subjecting the wish of others to our own.⁵ Whosoever is a master cannot be free, and to rule is to obey. Your Magistrates know that better than anyone, they who, like Otho,⁶ omit nothing servile in order to command.* I know no truly free will other than that to which no one has the right to offer resistance. In the common liberty, no one has the right to do what another’s liberty forbids him, and true liberty is never destructive of itself. Thus liberty without justice is a veritable contradiction; for, however you may go about it, everything will hamper you in executing a disordered will.

So there is no liberty without Laws, nor is there liberty where anyone is above the Laws. In the very state of nature, man is free only by dint of the natural Law that commands all. A free people obeys, but it does not serve; there are leaders and not masters. It obeys the Laws, but obeys only the Laws; and it is through the strength of the Laws that it does not obey men. All the barriers to the power of Magistrates provided in Republics are established only to guarantee the sacred domain of the Laws against their violations. They are Ministers of the Laws, not their arbiters; they must maintain them, not infringe them. A People is free, whatever the form of its Government, when, in the one who governs it, it sees not the man but the organ of the Law. In a word, liberty always follows the fate of the Laws, it rules or perishes with them – I know nothing more certain.

You have good and wise Laws, whether in themselves or merely by virtue of the fact that they are Laws. Any condition imposed upon each by all can be burdensome to no one; and the worst of Laws is still preferable to the best master; for every master has preferences, and the Law never has such.

CONSTITUTIONAL PROPOSAL FOR CORSICA

Prefatory Note

The Corsican Republic, under the leadership of Pasquale Paoli, had proclaimed its independence from Genoa and sovereignty in 1755. Rousseau, an admirer of the new republic, had written:

There is still one country in Europe fit to be given laws: it is the Isle of Corsica. The valour and constancy with which that brave people has managed to recover and defend its liberty would deserve that some wise man should teach it to preserve that liberty. I have a feeling that one day that little island will astonish Europe. (Of the Social Contract, Book II, Chapter 10)

As a result of these words, a Corsican patriot and officer in the French army, Matthieu Buttafoco, wrote to ask him if he would be willing to draft a constitution for the republic. In his reply, on 22 September 1764, Rousseau declares himself daunted by the task given his lack of direct knowledge of the territory and the impossibility, in his state of health, of visiting the island in person. Buttafoco supplied Rousseau with further information, and the philosopher set to work in early 1765, producing the somewhat fragmentary text we have today. Had history turned out differently, Rousseau might have returned to the project, but the Genoese, perceiving correctly that they could not dislodge the republic, sold their interest to France, which invaded in 1768–9, ending the republic and forcing Paoli into exile. The main respect in which the island ended up astonishing Europe was not as a beacon of republican virtue, but rather by providing the world with the future French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte.

The text is an interesting example of Rousseau trying to apply the principles of the Social Contract to a real political subject. One noteworthy point is that Rousseau espouses a much more collectivist view of property in Corsica than he does elsewhere in his writings. The text was unpublished until an edition by G. Streickeisen-Moltou in 1861.

The present translation is based on the text contained in volume 3 of the Pléiade edition of Oeuvres Complètes produced under the direction of Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond in 1964.

Constitutional Proposal for Corsica

Foreword

You ask for a Plan of Government fit for Corsica. It is asking more than you think. There are peoples who could not be well governed, however you might go about it, because among them the law has no purchase, and a government without laws cannot be a good government. The Corsican people, quite to the contrary, strikes me as most fortunately disposed by nature to receive a good administration. But this is not yet enough. All things have their abuses, often inevitable, and those of political institutions follow so hard upon their being established that it is hardly worth doing it only to see them degenerate so quickly.

People seek to guard against this inconvenience by mechanisms to maintain government in its primitive state. They bind it with a thousand chains, a thousand fetters, to keep it from declining; and they so burden it that, crushed by the weight of its irons, it remains inactive and immobile. If it does not slide towards its fall, neither does it advance towards its goal.

All this comes from the fact that they separate two inseparable things: viz. the body that governs and the body that is governed. As originally established these two bodies form but one; they separate only through abuse of that original establishment.

In such a case, wise men shape the government for the nation, ensuring appropriate relations. Yet there is something far better to do, which is to shape the nation for the government. In the former case, as the government declines while the nation remains the same, its appropriateness disappears. In the latter case, everything changes at the same pace; and the nation, forcibly dragging the government with it, maintains the government when it maintains itself, but causes its decline when it itself declines. They are appropriate to one another at all times.

The Corsican people is in the fortunate condition that makes good institutions possible: it can start off from the first point and take steps not to degenerate. Full of vigour and health, it can yield to a government that will keep it vigorous and healthy. However, the establishment of such a government is already bound to find obstacles. The Corsicans have not yet adopted the vices of other nations, but they have already adopted their prejudices. It is these prejudices that must be combated and destroyed in order to shape good institutions.

Proposal

The advantageous situation of the Island of Corsica and the happy nature of its inhabitants seem to offer them a reasonable hope of managing to become a prosperous people, and one day to make their appearance in Europe if, in the institutions they are contemplating, they turn their gaze in that direction. But the extreme exhaustion into which forty years of continuous warfare have cast them, the present poverty of their island, and the state of depopulation and devastation in which it finds itself, do not allow them at once to endow themselves with the costly administration that would be needed to civilize them for that purpose. Moreover, countless unconquerable obstacles would stand in the way of implementing such a plan. Genoa, still mistress of part of the coast and almost all the maritime strongholds, would repeatedly crush their infant navy, constantly exposed to the twofold danger of the Genoese and the Barbary pirates.¹ They could rule the sea only with warships that would cost them ten times more than trade could bring them. Exposed on land and sea, forced to protect themselves on all sides, what would they become? They would be at everyone’s mercy, unable in their weakness to conclude any advantageous commercial treaty, and everyone would lay down the law to them. Amid so many risks, they would have only those profits that no one else would deign to make, and that would be reduced to nothing. And if, by some good fortune hard to comprehend, they overcame all these difficulties, their very prosperity, drawing upon them the eyes of their neighbours, would be a fresh danger to their ill-established liberty. A continual object of greed for the great powers and jealousy for the lesser, their island would be threatened at every moment by a fresh enslavement that it would no longer be able to escape.

To whatever end the Corsican nation may wish to civilize itself, the first thing it must do is to endow itself by its own endeavours with all the coherence it can achieve. Whosoever depends on others, and does not have his resources within himself, could never be free. Alliances, treaties, the pledged word of men – all this can bind the weak to the strong, but never binds the strong to the weak. So leave negotiations to the powers that be, and rely only on yourself. Noble Corsicans, who knows better than you all that men may draw from themselves? Without friends, without support, without money, without an army, enslaved to terrible masters, you alone have shaken off their yoke. You have seen the most formidable potentates of Europe band together turn by turn against you, swamping your island with foreign armies. You have overcome everything. Your constancy alone did what money could not have done: by seeking to preserve your wealth, you would have lost your liberty. Conclusions must not be drawn from other nations for your own. Maxims drawn from your own experience are the best according to which you could govern yourselves.

The important thing is not so much to become other than what you are, it is to know how to remain like that. The Corsicans have gained a lot since becoming free: they have combined prudence with courage, they have learned to obey their equals, they have acquired virtues and mores, and they had no laws. If they could remain thus by their own endeavour, I should see almost nothing to do. But when the danger that has united them recedes, the factions that it wards off will be reborn among them and, instead of combining their forces for the maintenance of their independence, they will use them against one another and have none left to defend themselves, if anyone comes again to attack them. So there you already have what needs to be prevented. The divisions among the Corsicans have from time immemorial been a device of their masters to render them weak and dependent; but this continually employed device has eventually produced an inclination, and has rendered them naturally restless, turbulent, hard to govern even by their own rulers. Good laws are needed, and a new constitution, in order to re-establish the concord for which tyranny has destroyed the very desire. Corsica, subjected to foreign masters whose hard yoke it has never borne patiently, was ever in turmoil. Its people must now make a new study, and must seek peace in liberty.

So these are the principles which in my view should serve as a basis for their legislation: to take advantage of their people and their country as far as possible; to cultivate and assemble their own forces, rely only upon these, and no more think about foreign powers than if none such existed.

Let us start off from this in order to establish the maxims of our foundation.

Since the island of Corsica cannot grow rich in money, it should strive to grow rich in men. The power that comes from population is more real than that which comes from finances, and produces its effect more surely. Use of manpower being impossible to hide, it always goes to its public destination. This is not the case with use of money, which flows and melts into private destinations. It is amassed for one purpose, it is dispensed for another. The people pays to be protected, but what it gives serves to oppress it. This means that a state rich in money is always weak, and that a state rich in men is always strong.

In order to multiply men, you must multiply their subsistence, hence agriculture. By this word I do not mean the art of paying attention to agriculture, establishing academies to talk about it, or making books to study it. I mean a constitution that will induce a people to spread across the whole surface of its territory, to settle there and cultivate it at every point, to love rural life and its related labours, to find in these the essentials and the charms of life so effectively that it will have not the slightest wish to abandon them.

The taste for agriculture is advantageous to population not merely in increasing men’s subsistence, but in endowing the body of the nation with a temperament and mores that cause men to be born in greater numbers. In all countries, dwellers on the land propagate more than city dwellers, whether thanks to the simplicity of rural life which forms better-constituted bodies, or thanks to the unflagging labour which prevents disorder and vice: for, all things being equal, the chastest women – those whose senses are less inflamed by recourse to pleasure – produce more children than others; and it is no less certain that men over-stimulated by debauchery, the inevitable effect of idleness, are less fit for reproduction than those whom a hardworking condition makes more temperate.

Peasants are far more attached to their soil than town-dwellers are to their cities. The equality and simplicity of rural life, for those who know no other, has a charm that gives them no wish to change it. Whence the contentment with his condition that makes man peaceable; whence the love of his fatherland that attaches him to its constitution.

Cultivation of the land forms patient, sturdy men such as are needed to become good soldiers. Those drawn from the towns are surly and soft, they cannot endure the fatigues of war, they melt away on the march, sicknesses consume them, they fight among themselves and flee before the enemy. Trained militia are the best and most reliable troops; the true education of the soldier is husbandry.

The only way to maintain a State in independence from others is agriculture. Should you have all the riches of the world, if you do not have the wherewithal to feed yourself you depend on others. Your neighbours can set whatever price they please on your money, because they can wait; but the bread we need has a price for us that permits no argument. In every kind of commerce, it is always the person in less haste who imposes his law on the other. I concede that in a system of finance you would have to operate according to other views; everything depends on the final target at which you are aiming. Commerce produces wealth, but agriculture ensures liberty.

You will say that it would be better to have both at once – but they are incompatible, as will be shown hereafter. In all countries, you will add, people cultivate the land. I agree. Just as in all countries there is commerce, everywhere people engage in a little business or a lot, but this does not mean that everywhere agriculture and commerce flourish. I am examining here not what takes place in the nature of things, but what results from the kind of government and general spirit of the nation.

Although the form of government that a people gives itself is more often the product of chance and luck than of any real choice, there are nevertheless qualities in the nature and soil of every country that provide it with a government more suitable than others, and each form of government has a particular strength that carries peoples towards one occupation or another.²

The form of government that we have to choose is on the one hand the least costly, because Corsica is poor, and on the other hand the most favourable for agriculture, because agriculture is for the moment the only occupation that can preserve for the Corsican people the independence it has won and give it the stability it needs.

The least costly administration is that which passes through the fewest degrees and requires the fewest different orders: such is generally the republican and in particular the democratic state.

The most favourable administration for agriculture is the one whose strength, not being concentrated at any point, does not involve an unequal distribution of the people but leaves the latter equally distributed across the territory: such is democracy.

In Switzerland you may see a very striking application of these principles. Switzerland is in general a poor and barren country. Its government is everywhere republican. But in cantons more fertile than the rest, like those of Berne, Soleure and Fribourg, the government is aristocratic. In the poorer ones, those where cultivation is more thankless and requires greater labour, the government is democratic. The State has only what is needed to subsist under the simplest administration. Under any other it would waste away and perish.

You will say that Corsica, more fertile and with a milder climate, can support a costlier government. That would be true at another time, but now, burdened by a lengthy enslavement and desolated by lengthy wars, the nation first and foremost needs to recover. Once it has put its fertile soil to good use, it will be able to think about becoming prosperous and endowing itself with a more splendid administration. The success of the original institution will subsequently make necessary its transformation. Cultivation of the fields cultivates the mind. Every cultivating people multiplies: it multiplies in proportion to the product of its land; and when this land is fecund, the people eventually multiplies so vigorously that the land can no longer provide for it; then it is forced to establish colonies, or to change its government.

When the country is saturated with inhabitants, it is no longer possible to employ the surplus in agriculture, and this surplus must be used for industry, for commerce, for the Arts, and this new system requires another administration. May the institutions that Corsica is going to create soon impose upon her the need to change in this way. But so long as she has no more men than she can feed, so long as an inch of fallow land remains on the island, she must stick to the rural system and change it only when the island is no longer sufficient for it.

The rural system, as I have said, prefers the democratic state. Thus the form we have to choose is given. It is true that in its application there are a few modifications to be made, because of the island’s size; for a purely democratic government suits a small Town rather than a nation. You could not assemble the whole people of a country like that of a city; and when the supreme authority is entrusted to deputies, the government changes and becomes aristocratic. What is suitable for Corsica is a mixed government, where the people assembles only through parties and where the depositaries of its power are often changed. This is what was seen very clearly by the author of the report drawn up at Vescovado in 1764,³ an excellent report that may be consulted with confidence on everything not explained in this one.

This well-established form will have two big advantages. Firstly, entrusting the administration only to a small number allows the choice of enlightened people. Secondly, ensuring that all members of the State contribute to the supreme authority places the whole people on a perfect level, thus allowing it to spread across the whole surface of the island and to populate it evenly everywhere. Herein lies the fundamental maxim of our institutions. Let us make them such that they will keep the population everywhere in equilibrium, and by this alone we shall have made them as perfect as they can be. If this maxim is good, our rules become clear and our work is simplified to an astonishing extent.

Part of this work is already done: we have fewer institutions than prejudices to destroy, it is less a matter of changing than of completing. The Genoese themselves prepared your institutions and, through a care worthy of Providence, thinking to reinforce tyranny they grounded liberty. They stripped you of almost all commerce, and indeed now is not the time to have any such. If commerce were open to the outside, it would have to be forbidden until your constitution had become well founded and until the interior provided you with all that you may derive from it. They obstructed the export of your staples. Your best interest is not that these should be exported, but that enough men should be born on the island to consume them.

The communes [pievi]⁴ and special jurisdictions the Genoese formed or preserved, in order to facilitate the collection of taxes and the execution of orders, are the only possible means to establish democracy in an entire people that cannot assemble all at once in a single place; these are also the only means to maintain the countryside independent of towns, which are more easily kept under the yoke. The Genoese also set about destroying the nobility, depriving it of its dignities and its titles, eliminating the great fiefs. It is lucky for you that they took upon themselves what was hateful in that enterprise, which you would perhaps not have undertaken had they not done so before you. Do not hesitate to complete their work: while believing that they were working for themselves, they were working for you. The aim alone is very different, since that of the Genoese concerned the thing itself, while yours concerns its effect. They sought only to debase the nobility; you are seeking to ennoble the nation.

This is a point upon which I see that the Corsicans do not yet have sound ideas. In all their supporting documents and in their Aix-la-Chapelle remonstrance, they complained about how Genoa had demeaned, or rather destroyed, their nobility.⁵ This was doubtless a grievance, but it was no misfortune; on the contrary, it was an advantage, without which it would be impossible for them to remain free.

To identify the dignity of a State with the titles of certain of its members is to take the shadow for the substance. When the Kingdom of Corsica belonged to Genoa, it could be useful to it to have marquesses, counts and titled nobles who might so to speak serve as mediators between the Corsican people and the Republic. But against whom might now be useful to the people such protectors, less fit to safeguard it from tyranny than themselves to usurp its place, protectors who would distress it with their vexations and their quarrels, until one of them, having subjugated the rest, made all his fellow citizens into his subjects?

Let us distinguish two kinds of nobility: the feudal nobility which belongs to monarchy, and the political nobility which belongs to aristocracy. The former has several orders or degrees, some with titles, some without, from great vassals to mere gentlemen. Its rights, though hereditary, are so to speak individual, particular, attached to every family, and so independent from one another that they are independent even from the constitution of the state and its sovereignty. The latter, on the other hand, united in a single, indivisible body all of whose rights belong to the body and not to its members, forms so essential a part of the body politic that it cannot survive without the latter nor the latter without it; and all the individuals who compose it, equal by birth in titles, privileges and authority, are merged beneath the common name of patricians.

It is clear from the titles borne by the ancient Corsican nobility, and from the fiefs that it owned, with rights coming close to actual sovereignty, that it belonged to the former category; and that it owed its origin either to Moorish or French conquerors, or to the princes in whom the Popes had vested the island of Corsica.⁶ Well, this kind of nobility can so little enter into a democratic or mixed republic that it cannot even enter into an aristocracy, since aristocracy allows only corporate rights and not individual rights. Democracy knows no other nobility after virtue than liberty, and aristocracy similarly knows no other nobility than authority. All that is alien to the constitution must be scrupulously banished from the body politic. Leave, therefore, to other states all those marquesses’ and counts’ titles that demean mere citizens. The fundamental law of your institutions must be equality. Everything must be related to that, even authority itself, which is established only to defend equality; everyone must be equal by right of birth. The State must grant distinctions only for merit, for virtues, for services rendered to the fatherland; and these distinctions must no more be hereditary than are the qualities upon which they are based. We shall soon see how different orders may be graduated for a people, without birth and nobility playing any part whatsoever.

All fiefs, homages, feudal rents and rights shall thus, if previously abolished, be so for ever; and the State shall redeem those that still survive, so that all seigneurial titles and rights shall remain extinguished and suppressed throughout the island.

In order that all parts of the State may so far as possible maintain the same level between one another that we are seeking to establish between individuals, the boundaries of districts, communes and jurisdictions shall be fixed in such a way as to diminish the extreme inequality discernible in them. The province of Bastia and Nebbio alone contains as many inhabitants as the seven provinces of Capocorso, Alleria, Porto Vecchio, Sartène, Vico, Salvi and Algagliola. That of Ajaccio contains more than its four neighbours. Without entirely removing the borders and disrupting the competencies, by a few slight changes these enormous disproportions can be moderated. For example, the abolition of fiefs makes it possible to form from those of Canari, Brando and Nonza a new jurisdiction, which, reinforced by the commune of Pietrabugno, will become almost equal to the jurisdiction of Capo Corso. The fief of Istria joined to the province of Sartène will still not make the latter equal to the province of Corte; and the province of Bastia and Nebbio, albeit diminished by a commune, can be divided along the line of the Guolo between two still very stable jurisdictions. This is simply an example to make myself understood; for I do not know the locality well enough to be able to determine anything.

By these slight changes the island of Corsica, which I am assuming to be wholly free,⁷ would find itself divided into twelve jurisdictions that would not be extremely disproportionate, above all once you had restricted the municipal rights of the towns as you should, so leaving them with less weight in their jurisdictions.

Towns are useful in a country insofar as commerce and the arts are cultivated in them, but they are harmful to the system we have adopted. Their inhabitants are farmers or idle. Well, farming is always carried out better by small-holders than by town dwellers, while it is from idleness that derive all the vices that have hitherto racked Corsica. The foolish pride of burghers merely demeans and discourages the husbandman. Given over to softness and to the passions it excites, they plunge into debauchery and sell themselves to satisfy it; interest makes them servile and laziness makes them restless, they are slaves or rebels, never free. This difference has made itself clearly felt during the present war, and since the nation broke its fetters. It is the vigour of your communes that made the revolution, it is their firmness that sustained it: this unbreakable courage that no reverse can shatter comes from them. The towns, peopled by mercenary men, sold their nation in order to keep for themselves a few little privileges that the Genoese skilfully knew how to point out to them; duly punished for their cowardice they remain nests of tyranny, while the Corsican people is already gloriously enjoying the liberty it has won at the price of its blood.

A farming people has no need at all to look covetously at life in towns, and enviously at the lot of the idlers who inhabit them; consequently, there is no need at all to encourage town-dwelling by advantages harmful to the general population and the nation’s liberty. A farmer must by birth be inferior to no man, must see above him only the laws and the magistrates, and must be able to become a magistrate himself if he is worthy of it on account of his knowledge and his probity. In a word, the towns and their inhabitants must no more than the fiefs and their owners retain any exclusive privilege; the whole island must enjoy the same rights, bear the same burdens, and become without distinction what in the country’s parlance is called terra di commune [communal land].⁸

Now if towns are harmful, capitals are still more so. A capital is an abyss wherein almost the entire nation is bound to lose its mores, its laws, its courage and its liberty. People imagine that large towns encourage agriculture because they consume a great quantity of its products, but they consume a still larger quantity of farmers, either because the latter are influenced by the wish to adopt a better occupation, or because of the natural deterioration of urban species, still recruited from the countryside. The surroundings of capitals have a semblance of life, but the further you move away the more everything is deserted. A plague is continuously exhaled from the capital, which undermines and eventually destroys the nation.

However, the government needs a centre, a meeting place and reference point for everything: it would be too great a disadvantage for the topmost administration to be obliged to move around. For the government to circulate from Province to Province, it would be necessary to divide the island into several little confederated States, each of which would hold the presidency in turn; but this system would complicate the functioning of the governmental machine, and its parts would be more disconnected. While the island is not large enough to make such a division necessary, it is too large to be able to do without a capital. But this capital must form the connection between all the jurisdictions without attracting their populations; everyone must communicate through it while everything remains in its place. In a word, the seat of the supreme Government must be less a capital than an administrative centre.

Necessity alone has directed the nation’s choice in this regard as reason itself would have done. The Genoese, remaining masters of the seaports, have left you only the town of Corte, no less fortunately situated for the Corsican administration than Bastia was for the Genoese administration. Corte, located in the middle of the island, has all the latter’s coastlines at almost equal distance. It is precisely between the two main parts⁹ di quà e di là dai monti [this side and beyond the mountains], within equal range of everywhere. It is far from the sea, which will safeguard its inhabitants’ mores, simplicity, probity and national character longer than if it was subject to the influx of foreigners. It is in the highest part of the island, in a very healthy atmosphere, but on not very fertile soil and almost at the source of the rivers, which makes access to crops more difficult, thus not allowing the town to grow too much. If only you add to all this the precaution of not making any of the great offices of State hereditary or even lifelong, it is to be presumed that public men, taking up only transitory residences there, will for long not give the town that fatal splendour which makes the lustre and the ruin of States.

Such are the first reflections suggested to me by a swift examination of the island’s situation. Before speaking now in greater detail about the Government, it is necessary to begin by seeing what it must do and upon what maxims it must conduct itself. This is what must finally determine its form, since every form of government has its spirit that is natural and appropriate for it, and from which it will never depart.

Until now we have so far as possible levelled the national territory; let us now attempt to trace upon it the plan of the edifice to be constructed. The first rule we have to follow is the national character. Every people has or should have a national character, and if it lacks one we should have to begin by giving it one. Islanders, being above all less mixed or intermingled with other peoples, usually have one that is more pronounced. Corsicans in particular have one that is very sensitive by nature; and if, disfigured by slavery and tyranny, it has become hard to recognize; on the other hand thanks to their isolated position it is also easy to restore and preserve.

The island of Corsica, Diodorus says,¹⁰ is mountainous, heavily wooded, and watered by big rivers. Its inhabitants live on milk, honey and meat, with which the land provides them in abundance. Among themselves, they observe rules of justice and humanity more scrupulously than other barbarians. The first person to find honey on the mountains and in the hollow of trees can be sure that no one will contest his claim to it. They are always certain to find their ewes, upon which each man puts his mark and which they then allow to graze in the fields without anyone to look after them: the same spirit of equity seems to govern them in all life’s encounters.

Great historians are able, in the simplest narratives and without any reasoning of their own, to make their readers aware of the reason behind every fact that they record.

When a country is not peopled by colonies, the primitive character of its inhabitants springs from the nature of the soil. A harsh terrain, irregular and hard to cultivate, must be more suitable for feeding animals than men: fields must be rarer there and pastures abundant. Whence the multiplication of livestock and the pastoral life. Individuals’ flocks roaming the mountains mingle and merge. Honey has no distinguishing mark beyond that of the original inhabitant; ownership can be neither established nor preserved except with public trust, and everybody must be honest otherwise nobody would have anything and the nation would perish.

Mountains, woods, streams, pastures. Might you not be reading a description of Switzerland? And indeed in former times the Swiss showed the same character that Diodorus ascribes to the Corsicans: equity, humanity, good faith. The sole difference was that, inhabiting a harsher climate, they were more hardworking. Buried in snow for six months, they were forced to make provision for the winter; they cultivated the rocks over which they were scattered with an exertion that made them sturdy; constant toil left them no time to know passions; communications were always arduous, and when snow and ice finally closed them each man in his hut was forced to suffice to himself and his family: whence a fortunate if crude industriousness, with every man practising all the necessary crafts at home – all were masons, carpenters, joiners, wheelwrights. The streams and torrents that separated them from one another provided everyone in return with the means to do without his neighbours; as saws, forges and mills multiplied, they learned to direct the watercourses as much to drive cogs as to increase irrigation. In this way, amid their cliffs and valleys, each man living on his own land managed to draw all that he needed from it; to find himself well off there and want nothing more than that. With interests and needs never crossing, and with no man dependent upon another, among them all there prevailed relations solely of kindliness and friendship. Amity and peace reigned effortlessly in their numerous families; they had almost nothing to discuss among themselves, other than marriages in which inclination alone was considered: marriages that ambition never arranged, and that interest or inequality never prevented. This people, poor but free from need, in the most perfect independence, thus multiplied in a unity that nothing could pervert. It had no virtues, since without vices to overcome doing good cost it nothing; and it was good and just without even knowing what justice or virtue were. The strength whereby this hardworking, independent life attached the Swiss to their fatherland produced two greater means of defending it, viz. commonality of resolution and courage in combat. When you consider the constant unity that reigned among men without masters, almost without laws, and how the Princes surrounding them strove to divide them by every political manoeuvre; when you see the unbreakable steadfastness, the constancy, the ferocity even that these terrible men displayed in combat, determined to die or to conquer, and having not the least notion of separating their lives from their liberty; you no longer have any difficulty in imagining the prodigies they have accomplished in defence of their country and their independence; you are no longer surprised to see the three greatest powers and the most warlike troops of Europe failing one after another in their attempts against this heroic nation,¹¹ which its simplicity made as impervious to trickery as its courage made it to valour. There is the model, Corsicans, that you have to follow in order to return to your original condition.

But these rustic men, who at first knew only themselves, their mountains and their livestock, through defending themselves against other nations learned to know these. Their victories opened to them the frontiers of their neighbourhood, their reputation for bravery gave Princes the idea of employing them. Those Princes began to hire the troops whom they had been unable to defeat. Those noble men who had defended their liberty so well became oppressors of the liberty of others. People were astonished to see them bringing the same valour to the service of Princes that they had devoted to resisting them, the same loyalty that they had maintained to the fatherland; to see them selling for money the virtues that least have to be paid for and that money most rapidly corrupts. But in those early days they brought the same pride to the Princes’ service that they had devoted to resisting them; they saw themselves less as their satellites than as their defenders, and believed themselves to have sold them less their services than their protection.

Imperceptibly they sank to becoming merely mercenaries. Taste for money made them feel that they were poor; contempt for their condition imperceptibly destroyed the virtues that were its product; and Swiss soldiers could be hired for five pence as French could for four. Another more hidden cause corrupted that vigorous nation. Their isolated, simple life had made them independent as well as sturdy, each man knew no other master than himself, yet since all had the same interest and the same tastes they easily united to desire and to do the same things: for them, the uniformity of their lives was a substitute for law. But when association with other peoples had caused them to love what they should have feared and to admire what they should have despised, the ambition of their leaders caused them to alter their maxims; for those leaders felt that in order to dominate the people better they needed to give it more dependent tastes. Whence the introduction of commerce, industry and luxury, which, binding individuals to the public authority through their occupations and their needs, made them depend upon those who govern, far more than they had depended upon them in their original condition.

Poverty made itself felt in Switzerland only once money began to circulate there. Money introduced the same inequality into resources as into fortunes; it became a great means of acquisition removed from those who had nothing. Commercial and manufacturing establishments multiplied. Crafts took a multitude of hands away from agriculture. As men divided unequally, they multiplied, and they spread into the most favourably situated lands, where resources were still easier. Some deserted their fatherland, others became useless to it by consuming and producing nothing. The multitude of children became a burden. The country became noticeably less well peopled. As the towns became crowded, cultivation of the land grew more neglected and living needs grew more burdensome; foreign commodities thus became more necessary, placing the country in a greater dependency upon its neighbours. Idle lives introduced corruption and multiplied the pensioners of foreign powers. Love of the fatherland, extinguished in every heart, gave way to love of money alone. All those feelings that give motivation to the soul were stifled, so that neither firmness of conduct nor vigorous determination were any longer to be seen. Formerly a poor Switzerland laid down the law to France; now a rich Switzerland trembles when a French minister frowns.¹²

Here are some great lessons for the Corsican people. Let us see how it should apply them to itself. The Corsican people preserves a large number of its original virtues, which will greatly facilitate our constitution. It has also in servitude contracted many of the vices that it must remedy. Of these vices, some will disappear of their own accord along with the cause that engendered them; others need some cause to eradicate the passion that produces them.

In the former class, I place the indomitable and ferocious spirit that people ascribe to the Corsicans. People accuse them of being rebellious, but how do people know, since the Corsicans have never been governed justly? If they are constantly set in enmity against one another, people should foresee that this enmity might often turn against those who kindled it.

In the latter class, I place the propensity for robbery and murder that has made them hateful. The source of these two vices is idleness and impunity: this is clear as to the former, and easy to prove as to the latter, since the family hatreds and plans for vengeance that the Corsicans were forever engaged in satisfying spring from futile arguments, gain substance through gloomy meditation, and are implemented with ease thanks to the guarantee of impunity.

Who could fail to be horror-struck at a barbaric government which, when it saw those wretches cutting each other’s throats, spared no effort in spurring them on? Murder was not punished – nay, it was rewarded. The price of blood was among the revenues of the republic. The wretched Corsicans, in order to avoid total destruction, were obliged through a tribute to purchase the favour of being disarmed.¹³

The Genoese boast of having encouraged agriculture on the island, the Corsicans seem to agree. I would not agree likewise, since the poor success of agriculture proves that the Genoese adopted poor means. In this undertaking, the republic did not have the aim of multiplying the island’s inhabitants, since it so openly encouraged assassinations; nor that of helping them to live at ease, since it ruined them by its exactions; nor even that of facilitating the collection of land taxes [tailles],¹⁴ since it burdened the sale and transport of foodstuffs with duties and forbade their export. On the contrary, its aim was to make more onerous those same land taxes which it dared not increase; to keep the Corsicans for ever in servility, by so to speak binding them to their glebe, diverting them from commerce and crafts and all lucrative occupations, and preventing them from raising themselves, gaining an education or growing rich. Its aim was to have all foodstuffs at a very cheap price, through the monopolies of its officials. It took every measure to drain the island of money, in order to make money necessary there yet prevent it from returning there. The tyranny could not have used a more refined stratagem: by seeming to encourage agriculture it crushed the nation wholly; it sought to reduce it to a pack of base peasants living in the most deplorable misery.

What was the result? The Corsicans, disheartened, abandoned a toil that was enlivened by no hope. They preferred to do nothing than exhaust themselves for pure loss. A life of simple toil gave way to idleness, unemployment, all manner of vices. Robbery got them the money they needed to pay their land taxes, and that they could not derive from their crops: they left their fields in order to work on the highways.

May the Corsicans, brought back to a life of toil, lose the habit of wandering across the island as bandits! May their occupations, simple and equal, keep them concentrated in their families and leave them few interests to quarrel over among themselves! May their toil provide them easily with enough to survive on, they and their families! May those who have all things necessary for life not be also obliged to have cash money, whether to pay land taxes and other levies, or to provide for imagined needs and for a luxury which, without contributing to the well-being of the person who displays it, merely excites the envy and hatred of others!

You can easily see how the system to which we have given preference leads to these advantages, but this is not enough. It is a matter of persuading the people to adopt the practice of this system: of persuading the people to love the occupation that we wish to give it; to find its pleasures, its desires and its tastes in it; to derive the general happiness of its life from it; and to confine its ambitions and plans within it.

I see no prompter or more certain means of arriving at this than the two following: the first is so to speak to attach men to the land, by deriving their distinctions and their rights from it; the second is to reinforce this bond by that of the family, by making the latter necessary to the condition of fathers.

It has occurred to me that, in this view which bases the fundamental law upon distinctions drawn from the nature of things, you could divide the entire Corsican nation into three classes, the still personal inequality of which could be substituted satisfactorily for the inequality of race or domicile that results from the feudal municipal system we are abolishing.

The first class will be that of citizens.

The second that of patriots.

The third that of candidates.

The qualifications for being registered in each class, and the privileges enjoyed in it, will be made clear below.

This distinction by class must not be achieved by a census or headcount at the moment of the system’s inauguration, but determined subsequently of its own accord through the mere progress of time. The first act of the projected system should be a solemn oath sworn by all Corsicans aged twenty and over; and all those who swear this oath must be registered without distinction as citizens. It is quite right that all these brave men, who have delivered their nation at the cost of their blood, should enter into possession of all these advantages and be among the first to enjoy the liberty they have won.

But from the day that unity has been formed and the oath solemnly sworn, all those who though born on the island have not reached the right age will remain in the class of candidates, until under the following conditions they can rise to the other two classes.

Each candidate, married according to law, who has a holding of his own independently of his wife’s dowry, will be registered in the class of patriots.

Each patriot, married or widower, who has two living children, a residence of his own and a land-holding sufficient for his subsistence will be registered in the class of citizens.

This first step, sufficient to place the lands in credit, is not sufficient to place them under cultivation, unless the need for money, which has caused the island’s poverty under Genoese government, is removed. It must be established as a sure maxim that wherever money is a prime necessity, the nation becomes detached from agriculture, to plunge into more lucrative occupations. The condition of farm-worker is then either a target of commerce and a kind of manufacture for big farmers, or the last resort of destitution for the mass of peasants. Those who enrich themselves through commerce and industry, when they have earned enough, place their money in landed property, which others cultivate for them; the whole nation thus finds itself divided between wealthy idlers who own the land and wretched peasants who starve while cultivating it.

The more necessary money is to individuals, the more necessary it is to the government. Whence it follows that the more commerce flourishes, the higher taxes are. And in order to pay these taxes, in vain does the peasant cultivate his land if he does not sell the produce. It is fruitless for him to have wheat, wine and oil, he absolutely must have money; he must ferry his produce back and forth to the towns, make himself into a petty merchant, a petty seller, a petty rogue. His children, raised on selling, are lured away, attach themselves to the town, lose the taste for their condition and become sailors or soldiers rather than embrace their father’s estate. Soon the countryside is depopulated and the towns overflow with vagrants; little by little bread runs short, public destitution increases with the wealth of individuals, and both combine to introduce all the vices that eventually bring about a nation’s ruin.

I am so convinced that any commercial system is destructive of agriculture that I do not make an exception even for commerce in foodstuffs, which are the product of agriculture. For the latter to be able to survive in this system, it would have to be possible for the profit to be shared equally between the shopkeeper and the farmer. But that is just what is not possible, because the former’s trade being free and the latter’s coerced, the former will always lay down the law to the latter, a relationship devoid of balance that cannot create a stable and permanent state.

You must not imagine that, when the island has a great deal of money, it will thereby be richer. That is true vis-à-vis other peoples and in its external relations. But in itself a nation is neither richer nor poorer for having more or less money, or, which comes to the same thing, because the same amount of money circulates there with more or less activity. Not only is money a token; it is a relative token, that has no real effect other than through inequality of distribution. For supposing that each individual on the island of Corsica had just ten crowns, or that each individual had one hundred thousand crowns, the respective condition of all is absolutely the same in these two cases. Among themselves they are neither richer nor poorer, and the sole difference is that the latter supposition makes business more cumbersome. If Corsica needed foreigners, she would need money; but since she can be self-sufficient, she does not need any. And since money is useful only as a sign of inequality, the less that circulates on the island, the more real abundance will prevail there.

It must be seen whether what people do with money cannot be done without money; and, supposing that it can, the two methods must be compared in relation to our aim.

It is proved by the facts that the island of Corsica, even in its present state of neglect and exhaustion, suffices for its inhabitants’ subsistence, since during thirty-six years of war, when they handled arms more than the plough, not a single cargo of food or provisions of any kind for their use came in. It even has everything necessary, in addition to food, to place and keep them in a flourishing state, without borrowing anything from outside. It has wool for its fabrics, hemp and flax for ropes and linens, leather for shoes, timber for its navy, iron for its forges, copper for pans and coins. It has salt for its own use, and will have far more when it restores the Alleria saltpans, which the Genoese went to such trouble and expense to keep in a ruined state, yet which still produced salt in spite of them. Even if they wished to, the Corsicans could not trade outside by barter, unless they bought unnecessary things; so even in such a case they would not need money for trade, since it is the only commodity they would need to procure. Whence it follows that in these relations between nation and nation Corsica has no need of money.

Internally the island is quite large and cut up by mountains; its numerous, big rivers are scarcely navigable. Its parts do not communicate naturally with each other, but the difference in what they produce keeps them in mutual dependence, through the need they have for one another. The province of Cap Corse, which hardly produces anything but wine, has need of wheat and oil, with which Balagna provides it. Corte in the highlands likewise produces grain, but lacks everything else; Bonifacio below the peaks and at the other extremity of the island needs everything and provides nothing. Hence, the project of an equal population¹⁵ requires a circulation of staples, easy payment from one jurisdiction to another, and consequently internal trade.

But I have two comments here. Firstly, with the government’s help this trade can largely be accomplished by barter. Secondly, that with similar help and as a natural consequence of our institutions, this trade and this barter should diminish day by day and eventually be reduced to very little.

We know that in the exhaustion to which the Genoese have consigned Corsica, money, always flowing out and never flowing in, eventually became so rare that in certain of the island’s cantons cash was no longer known, and sales or purchases were made only by barter.

In their memoranda the Corsicans cited this fact among their grievances. They were right, since money was necessary to pay their land taxes; those poor people, who no longer had any, were dispossessed by warrant in their homes, saw themselves stripped of their most essential utensils, their furniture, their clothes and their rags, which had to be carried from place to place and whose sale did not fetch the tenth part of their worth, so that, for want of money, they would pay the tax ten times over.

But as in our system people will no longer be forced to pay the land tax in cash, lack of money, no longer being a sign of poverty, will not serve to increase it. Barter will be able to take place in kind and without intermediary values, and people will be able to live in plenty without ever handling a penny.

I see that under the Genoese administrations, which in innumerable ways forbade and obstructed trade in foodstuffs between one province and the next, the communes would establish warehouses for wheat, wine and oil, while awaiting a moment favourable and permitted for trade; and that these warehouses served the Genoese officials as a pretext for innumerable hateful monopolies. Not being new, the idea of these warehouses will thereby be all the easier to implement, and will provide the public and individuals with a convenient, simple means for barter, without risk of the disadvantages that used to make it burdensome for the people.

Even without having recourse to real warehouses or stores, a public double-entry register could be established in each parish, where individuals could record each year, on the one side, the kind and quantity of foodstuffs they have in excess, on the other those that they lack. By balancing and comparing these registers from province to province, it would be possible to regulate the price of staples and the amount of trade in such a way that each commune would see its surplus consumed and its necessities provided for, without there being either lack or excess in the quantity and almost as easily as if its harvest were tailored to its needs.

These operations can be effected with the greatest accuracy and without real money, either through barter or with the aid of a simple ideal currency that would serve as a term of comparison such as the pistoles in France,¹⁶ or else by taking as currency some real commodity that can be numbered, as the ox was among the Greeks or the ewe among the Romans, and that is fixed at its average value; for then an ox may be worth more or less than an ox and a ewe more or less than a ewe, a difference that makes the ideal currency preferable, because it is always exact, being taken only as an abstract number.

So long as you stick to this, trade will be kept in equilibrium; barter, being regulated solely in terms of the relative abundance or scarcity of staples and the greater or lesser ease of their transport, will always and everywhere remain in a balanced relationship; and all the island’s products, equally distributed, will of themselves adjust to the level of the population. I may add that the public administration will be able without disadvantage to preside over such trade and such barter, to keep them in balance, regulate their quantity and effect their distribution, because so long as that trade and that barter are effected in kind public officials will not be able to abuse them, or even have the temptation to do so; whereas the conversion of staples into money opens the door to every kind of extortion, every kind of monopoly, every kind of knavery habitual to people in power in such cases.

You must expect many obstacles at the beginning, but such obstacles are inevitable in any new order that is being initiated and that goes against an established usage. I may add that this system, once established, will become easier year by year, not simply through practice and experience, but through the successive diminution of trade that must necessarily result from it, until this is of itself reduced to the smallest possible quantity, which is the final aim you must set yourself.

Everyone must live and no one must grow rich. That is the fundamental principle of the nation’s prosperity, and the polity which I am proposing for its part moves towards this end as directly as possible.

Surplus foodstuffs, being neither an object of commerce nor converted into money, will be cultivated only in proportion to the need people have for necessities; and anyone who can at once procure the foodstuffs he lacks will be uninterested in having too much of them.

As soon as the products of the earth are no longer merchandise, their cultivation will gradually be adapted in each province, and even in each patrimony, to the general need of the province and to the individual need of the farmer. Everyone will strive to have all the things that are necessary to him in kind and through his own farming, rather than through barter, which will always be less reliable and less convenient however much it may be facilitated.

It is an incontestable advantage to give each soil what it is most fit to produce; by this arrangement you draw more from the land, and more easily, than by any other. But important as this consideration is, it is merely secondary. It is preferable for the land to produce a bit less and for the inhabitants to be better ordered. Among all these movements of trafficking and barter, it is impossible that destructive vices should not creep into a nation. The lack of certain advantages in the choice of soil can be compensated for by labour, and it is preferable to use fields badly than men. Besides, every farmer can and must make this choice on his lands, and every parish or community on its communal holdings, as is set out below.

You will fear, I can tell, that this economy may produce a contrary effect to that which I expect of it: that instead of stimulating agriculture, it may discourage it; that the farmers, having no sale for their foodstuffs, may neglect their labours; that they may limit themselves to subsistence, without seeking abundance; and that, content with harvesting what is absolutely necessary for themselves, they may for the rest let their land lie fallow. You will even seem confirmed by the experience of the Genoese administration, under which the ban on exporting foodstuffs outside the island had produced exactly that effect.

But it must be considered that under this administration, since money was of prime necessity, it formed the immediate object of labour; consequently all labour that could not produce any such was necessarily neglected; the farmer, overwhelmed by scorn, vexations and woes, viewed his condition as the direst misfortune and, seeing that he could not meet his needs thereby, would seek another or give way to discouragement, whereas under our system all views tend to make this condition happy in its mediocrity, respectable in its simplicity. Providing all the needs of life, all public taxes without selling and without trafficking, all means of consideration, it will not allow a better or nobler to be even imagined. Those who fill this condition, seeing no one above them, will glory in it; and making their way from it to the highest positions, they will fill it like the early Romans. Being unable to leave this condition, people will wish to distinguish themselves in it: to fill it better than others, achieve larger harvests, provide a stronger contingent to the State, merit the people’s votes in elections. Numerous well-fed and well-clad families will bring honour upon their heads; and since real plenty will be the sole object of luxury, everyone will wish to distinguish himself by that sort of luxury. So long as the human heart remains what it is, such institutions will not produce idleness.

What individual magistrates and family heads must do in each jurisdiction, in each commune, on each patrimony, in order not to need others, the general government of the island must do in order not to need the neighbouring peoples.

An accurate record of goods that have entered the island over a certain number of years will provide a sure and faithful list of those without which it cannot do; for the current situation there is not one where luxury and excess can exist. With careful observations both on what the island produces and on what it can produce, you will find that foreign necessities are reduced to very little; this is wholly confirmed by the facts, since in the years 1735 and ’36, when the island was blockaded by the Genoese navy and had no communication with the mainland, not only was nothing lacking there in terms of victuals, but no needs of any kind were unendurable. Those which were most keenly felt were war munitions, leather, cotton for wicks – and even this last was provided for by the pith of certain reeds.

From this small number of necessary imports, you must further cut out everything that the island does not provide now but can provide, if better cultivated and invigorated by industry. The more the idle arts, the arts of pleasure and softness, must be carefully eliminated, the more those that are useful for agriculture and advantageous to human life must be encouraged. We need neither sculptors nor goldsmiths, but we do need carpenters and blacksmiths; we need weavers, good workers in wool, and not embroiderers or drawers of gold thread.

You will begin by providing yourselves with the most essential raw materials, namely wood, iron, wool, leather, hemp and flax. The island used to abound in wood both for construction and for heating, but you should not rely on this abundance and leave the use and felling of forests merely to the discretion of their owners. As the island’s population grows and clearances increase, there will be rapid devastation of the woods that you will be able to repair only very slowly. Regarding this, precautionary lessons can be drawn from the country where I live. Switzerland was formerly covered by woods in such abundance that it was hampered by them. But the multiplication of pastures and the establishment of manufactures alike led to these being felled without restraint or method. Now those immense forests display only virtually bare rock. Luckily, warned by the example of France, the Swiss saw the danger and regulated matters so far as lay within their power. It remains to be seen whether their precautions are not too late; for if, despite these precautions, their woods dwindle daily, it is clear that they must eventually be destroyed.

Corsica, tackling things in better time, will not have the same danger to fear. You must establish rigorous control of the forests early on, and regulate their felling in such a way that reproduction matches consumption. You must not do as in France, where the Masters of Rivers and Forests,¹⁷ who have rights over the felling of trees, have an interest in destroying the lot: an aim that they pursue to the best of their ability. You must foresee the future well in advance. Although it is not at present the right time to establish a navy, the time will come when this will have to be done, and then you will be aware of the advantage of not having given up to foreign navies the fine forests that lie close to the sea. You must exploit or sell the old woods that are no longer profitable, but you must leave standing all those that are in their prime. There will be a use for them when the time comes.

People say that a copper mine has been found on the island, but iron mines are worth even more, and there certainly are some on the island. The situation of the mountains, the nature of the terrain, the thermal springs to be found in the province of Cap Corse and elsewhere – all this makes me think that many such mines will be found if you look carefully and use capable people for the search. On this assumption, you will not allow their exploitation indiscriminately, but will choose the most favourable sites, closest to woods and streams for the establishment of forges, and where you will be able to open up the easiest routes for transport.

You will pay the same attention to manufactures of every kind, each in its respective materials, in order to facilitate labour and distribution as much as possible. However, you will take care not to create these kinds of establishment in the most populous and most fertile parts of the island. On the contrary, all things being equal you will choose the most arid lands, ones that would remain deserted if they were not populated through industry. By doing this, you will have some additional problems in supplying them with what they need; but the advantages you will find thereby, and the disadvantages you will avoid, should easily outweigh any such consideration.

Firstly, we shall be following here our first great principle, which is not just to extend and multiply the population, but to equalize it as far as possible throughout the whole island. For if the barren places were not populated through industry, they would remain deserted and that would be so much the more lost for the potential advancement of the nation.

If you formed similar establishments in fertile places, the abundance of victuals and the profit of labour – necessarily greater in the arts than in agriculture – would, by diverting farmers or their families from rural concerns and gradually depopulating the countryside, oblige new settlers to be drawn in from far away in order to cultivate the latter. Hence, by overloading certain parts of the territory with inhabitants we should depopulate others, and by thus breaking the balance we should indirectly go against the spirit of our institutions.

The transport of staples, by making them more costly in the factories, will thereby diminish the profit of the workers; this will keep their condition closer to that of the farmer, thus better maintaining the balance between them. This balance, however, cannot be such that the advantage does not always lie with industry, either because the money that is in the state flows there in greater abundance, or through the chance means whereby power and inequality come into play, or thanks to the greater strength possessed by a number of men assembled, which the ambitious know how to harness to their own advantage. It is important, therefore, that this over-favoured part should remain dependent upon the rest of the nation for its subsistence; in case of internal divisions, it is in the nature of our institutions that it should be the farmer who lays down the law to the worker.

With precautions, you may safely encourage the establishment of useful arts on the island, and I doubt not but that these creations well run may be able to provide for all that is necessary, without needing to bring anything from outside, apart from a few trifles, for which you will allow a proportionate export, always carefully balanced by the administration.

I have so far shown how the Corsican people could subsist in ease and independence with very little trading; how the bulk of what little it will find necessary can easily be acquired by barter; and how it can reduce almost to nothing the need for imports from outside the island. You can see by this that, if the use of money and cash cannot be wholly abolished in the affairs of individuals, it can be reduced at least to so little that abuses are unlikely to arise from it; that no fortunes will be made by such means; and that if any could be made, they would become almost useless and give little advantage to their owners.

But how shall we govern the public finances? What revenues shall we assign to their administration? Shall we establish it as free, or how shall we regulate its upkeep? That is what we must now consider.

Financial systems are modern inventions. The word ‘finance’ was no more known to the ancients than were our land taxes or capitation.¹⁸ The word vectigal¹⁹ was understood differently, as will be made clear below. The sovereign instance would impose tribute on conquered or defeated peoples, never on its direct subjects especially in republics. Far from the people of Athens being burdened with taxes, the government used on the contrary to pay it. And Rome, to whom her wars must have been so costly, would often distribute wheat and even land to the people. The State nevertheless subsisted, maintained great armies on sea and land, carried out sizeable public works and incurred expenses at least as great as are made proportionately by modern States. How was this done?

Two epochs must be distinguished in States: their beginning and their growth. In the beginning of a State, it would have no other revenue than the public domain, and this domain would be considerable. Romulus formed it from a third of all estates. He allocated the second third for the upkeep of Priests and sacred things; the remaining part alone was shared among the citizens. It was little, but that little was freely held. Do you not think that the French husbandman would willingly be reduced to one-third of what he cultivates, on condition of having that third free from any land tax, quit-rent [cens] or tithe, and not paying any kind of duty?

Hence, the public revenue was not taken in money, but in foodstuffs and other produce. Expenditures were of the same kind as takings. Neither magistrates nor troops were paid, they were fed and provided with uniforms; and in times of pressing need, the extraordinary burdens on the people consisted of forced labour rather than money. Those splendid public works cost the State almost nothing; they were the work of those formidable legions, which toiled just as they fought, and which were made up not of riff-raff but of citizens.

When the Romans began to expand and became conquerors, they took the upkeep of their troops from the conquered peoples; when they paid them, their subjects were taxed, never the Romans. In times of pressing danger, the Senate raised a subscription, took out loans that it returned faithfully, and, during the whole course of the Republic, I do not know of the Roman people ever having paid a pecuniary tax, either by head or on its estates.

There is a fine model for you, O Corsicans! Do not be surprised at there being more virtue among the Romans than elsewhere: money was less necessary there. The State had small revenues and did great things. Its wealth was in the lives of its citizens. I might say that, thanks to the situation of Corsica and thanks to the form of her government, there will be none in the whole world less costly. For, being an island and a Republic, she will have no need of regular troops; and the leaders of the State, all reverting to equality, will not be able to draw anything from the common mass that will not very speedily return to it.

But this is not how I envisage the sinews of your public force. On the contrary, I wish a great deal to be spent on the State service. More precisely, I am arguing only about the choice of currency. I view finances as the fat of the body politic, which by congealing in certain muscular systems overloads the body with a useless corpulence and makes it heavy rather than strong. I wish to feed the State with a healthier diet, that will merge into its substance; that will change into muscle and fibre without clogging the vessels; that will give the limbs vigour rather than size; and that will strengthen the body without weighing it down.

Far from wishing the State to be poor, I should on the contrary wish it to have everything, and for each man to have a share of the common property only in proportion to his services. The acquisition of all the Egyptians’ goods to which Joseph persuaded the King would have been good, if he had not done too much or too little.²⁰ But without going into such hypotheses, which distract me from my purpose, it is enough to elucidate my thought here: which is not to destroy individual property absolutely, because that is impossible, but to confine it within narrower limits; to give it a measure, a rule and a brake that may contain it, direct it, subjugate it, and keep it always subordinated to the public good. In a word, I wish the State’s property to be as large and strong, and that of citizens to be as little and weak, as possible. That is why I avoid putting it in things whose individual owner is too much the master, such as cash and money, which are easily hidden from public inspection.

The establishment of a public domain is, I admit, not as easy a thing to do today in Corsica, already shared out between her inhabitants, as it was in Rome at her birth, before her conquered territory as yet belonged to anyone. However, I know that there remains on the island a large quantity of excellent untilled land, of which it is very easy for the government to take advantage: either by alienating it for a certain number of years to those who will put it under cultivation; or by having it tilled through forced labour [corvées],²¹ organized in each community. One would need to have been on the ground, in order to judge how this land might be distributed, and what profit might be drawn from it. But I have no doubt but that, by means of a few exchanges and certain quite simple agreements, it would be possible in each jurisdiction and even each commune to procure communal funds, which may even increase before many years have gone by, thanks to the system about which we shall speak in relation to the law on inheritance.

Another still simpler means, which should provide a more definite, more certain and far more considerable income, is to follow an example that I have before my eyes in the Protestant cantons. During the Reformation in these cantons, they seized the ecclesiastical tithes; and these tithes, with which they maintained their clergy decently, formed the principal income of the State. I am not saying that the Corsicans should touch the revenues of the Church, God forbid! But I think that the people will not be very much put out if the State asks it for as much as is asked of it by the clergy, already adequately endowed with property in land. The basic funding for this tax will be established without trouble or impediment, and at almost no cost, since you need only double the ecclesiastical tithe and take half of it.

I draw a third kind of revenue, the most reliable and best, from men themselves, by using their labour, their arms and their hearts rather than their purses in the fatherland’s service, whether for its defence in the militia or for its comforts through forced labour on public works.

Let republicans not take fright at this term ‘forced labour’! I know that it is abominated in France, but is it in Switzerland? The roads there are built also by forced labour, and no one complains. The seeming convenience of payment can seduce only superficial minds; and it is a certain maxim that the fewer the intermediaries between the need and the service, the less burdensome the service should be.

Without daring to set out my thinking entirely, without here presenting forced labour and all private labour by citizens as an absolute good, I shall agree, if you will, that it would be better for it all to be done by payment if the means of payment did not introduce a host of unrestrained abuses and greater ills, more limitless than those which can result from constraint, especially when the person imposing the latter belongs to the same state as those upon whom it is imposed.

Moreover, in order that the contribution should be shared equally, it is right that a person who has no land, so cannot pay the tithe from its produce, should pay it with the labour of his arms; hence, forced labour should fall especially on the order of candidates. But citizens and patriots must lead them to labour and set them an example. Let all that is done for the public good always be honoured! Let the very magistrate, busy with other cares, show that these ones are not beneath him, like those Roman consuls who, to set an example to their troops, would be the first to turn their hands to camp labours!

As for fines and confiscations, which in republics constitute a fourth kind of revenue, I hope that thanks to these present institutions this may be reduced almost to nothing in our republic, so I take no account of it.

Since all these public revenues are in physical kind rather than in cash, they appear cumbersome to collect, to store and to use. And this is partly true, but what matters here is less the easiest administration than the healthiest; so it is preferable for it to be a little more cumbersome but engender less abuse. The best economic system for Corsica or for a republic is assuredly not the best for a monarchy or a great State. The one I am proposing would not succeed either in France or in England, and could not even be established there. But it has the greatest success in Switzerland, where it has been established for centuries and is the only system the country could have borne.

The revenues are farmed out in each jurisdiction; they are made in kind or in money as the taxpayer chooses; the payment of magistrates and officials is likewise effected for the most part in wheat, in wine, in fodder, in timber. In this way, tax collection is neither burdensome for the public nor onerous for individuals; but the disadvantage I see here is that there are men whose profession is to earn from the prince and to harass the subjects.

It is of extreme importance not to permit any financier by profession in the republic: less because of their dishonest profits than because of their principles and their example, which, spreading too rapidly throughout the nation, destroy all good sentiments through esteem for illicit plenty and its advantages; which heap scorn and opprobrium upon disinterestedness, simplicity, morals and all virtues.

Let us take care not to increase pecuniary wealth at the expense of moral wealth. It is the latter which truly places us in possession of men and all their power, whereas through the former we obtain only the semblance of their services, but cannot buy their will. It is preferable for the exchequer to be run by a family man and lose something than to be run by a usurer and take in more.

Let us, therefore, leave tax collection under state administration, even should it bring in far less. Let us even avoid making this administration into a profession, for that would have almost the same disadvantage as farming it out. What makes a financial system most pernicious is the role of financier. At all costs, there must be no publicans in the State.²² Instead of making collection by the state and public revenues into a lucrative profession, they should on the contrary be made into a test of the merit and integrity of young citizens. The tax administration must be, so to speak, the apprenticeship for public posts and the first step towards reaching magistracies. What suggested this idea to me is the comparison between the administration of the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris, whose depredations and brigandry are known to one and all, and that of the Hôtel-Dieu in Lyons,²³ which offers an example of order and disinterestedness that has perhaps no equal on earth. Whence does this difference come? Are the Lyonnais in themselves worth more than the Parisians? No. But in Lyons that administrative office is a state of passage. You must begin by filling it well in order to become a town councillor [échevin] or municipal leader [prévôt des marchands], whereas in Paris administrators are such by profession for life. They arrange to derive the greatest possible advantage from a post that is no kind of test for them, but a profession, a recompense, a calling so to speak attached to other callings. There are certain positions whose income, it is understood, will be augmented by the right to rob the poor.

And you should not think that this work requires more experience and learning than young people can have; it requires merely an activity for which they are particularly suited. And since they are normally less greedy, less harsh in exaction than older people – on the one hand, sensitive to the poor man’s miseries; on the other, keenly interested in filling well a post that serves them as a test – they conduct themselves in it exactly as the matter requires.

Each parish’s tax collector will present his accounts to his commune, each commune’s to his jurisdiction, and each jurisdiction’s to the auditing chamber, which will be made up of a certain number of State councillors and presided over by the Doge. The public exchequer will in this way consist for the most part of foodstuffs and other produce, scattered among small warehouses throughout the realm; and it will consist partly of money, which will be lodged in the general coffers, after the disbursement of minor expenses to be made on the spot.

As individuals will always be free to pay their quota in money or in staples, at a rate that will be fixed annually in each jurisdiction, once the government has calculated the best ratio that should obtain between these two types of contribution, as soon as this ratio alters it will be able forthwith to register the alteration, seek its cause and remedy it.

Here is the key to our political government, the only part that requires skill, calculation and mediation. This is why the auditing chamber, which everywhere else is merely a very junior court, will here be at the centre of affairs, give impetus to the entire administration and be composed of the State’s foremost brains.

When the collection of foodstuffs exceeds its target and that of money fails to attain it, that will be a sign that all is well with agriculture and the population, but that useful industry is being neglected and will have to be revived somewhat, for fear that individuals may also grow too isolated, independent and wild, hence may no longer sufficiently value the government.

But this lack of proportion, an infallible sign of prosperity, will always hold few fears and be easy to remedy. The same will not be the case with the opposite lack, which as soon as it makes itself felt is already of the greatest consequence and cannot be too soon corrected. For when the taxpayers provide more money than food, that will be a sure sign that there is too much exporting abroad; that commerce is becoming too weak; that profit-making skills are spreading on the island at the expense of agriculture; hence, that simplicity and all its attendant virtues are starting to decline. The abuses that produce this deterioration indicate the remedies that should be applied; but these remedies require great wisdom in the manner of administering them, for here it is far easier to prevent the malady than to destroy it.

If you merely put duties on luxury items, close your ports to foreign commerce, suppress manufactures, and halt the circulation of specie, you will only cast the people into idleness, misery and discouragement. You will cause money to disappear without increasing foodstuffs. You will remove the resource of wealth without re-establishing that of labour. Interfering with the price of currencies is still a bad course of action in a republic. Firstly, because it is then the public which steals from itself, which means nothing at all. Secondly, because between the quantity of tokens and the quantity of things there is a proportion that always likewise regulates their respective values; and because, when the Prince wishes to change the tokens, he changes only the names, since then the value of things necessarily changes in the same proportion. With kings things are different, and when the Prince raises the face value of the coinage he derives the real advantage of stealing from his creditors.²⁴ But once this operation is repeated, the advantage is offset and erased by the loss of public trust.

Establish sumptuary laws, then, but always make them harsher for the foremost in the State, relax them for the lower orders. Ensure that there is pride in being simple, and that a rich man will be unable to derive honour from his money. These are by no means impracticable fantasies. For it is thus that the Venetians grant only to their nobles the right to wear their coarse, ugly black Padua cloth, so that the best citizens will consider it an honour to have the same permission.

When there is simplicity in mores, agrarian laws are necessary; for then the rich man, being unable to place his wealth in anything else, accumulates his estates. But neither agrarian laws nor any other laws can ever have retroactive effect; and no lands legitimately acquired can be confiscated, whatever their quantity may be, on the basis of a later law forbidding ownership of so much.

No law can strip any individual of any portion of his property. The law can merely prevent him from acquiring more of it. Then, if he infringes the law, he deserves punishment and the unlawfully acquired surplus can and should be confiscated. The Romans saw the necessity of agrarian laws when it was too late to establish them; and, for lack of the distinction I have just made, they finally destroyed the Republic by a means that should have preserved it: the Gracchi wished to strip the patricians of their lands, whereas they should have been prevented from acquiring them. It is quite true that subsequently those same patricians acquired more lands in spite of the law; but the fact was that the evil was deeply rooted when the law was introduced, and it was too late to remedy it.

Fear and hope are the two instruments with which to govern men. But instead of employing both indiscriminately, they must be used according to their nature. Fear does not stimulate, it restrains; and its use in penal laws is not to induce to act well but to prevent from doing wrong. We do not even see fear of destitution make idlers hardworking. Hence, to stimulate among men a genuine emulation in work, it should be presented to them not as a means of avoiding hunger, but as a means of advancing to prosperity. Let us, therefore, posit this general rule: that no one should be punished for having abstained, but for having done.

Thus to awaken a nation’s activity you must present it with great desires, great hopes, great positive motives for acting. The great motivations that make men act are reduced, when examined carefully, to two: sensual delight [volupté] and vanity. Moreover, if you remove from the former all that belongs to the latter, you will find in the last analysis that everything is reduced almost solely to vanity. It is easy to see that all those who find delight in display are merely vain. Their supposed delight is mere ostentation: it consists more in being shown or described than in being savoured. True pleasure is simple and peaceful, it loves silence and contemplation; the one who savours it is wholly absorbed therein and does not spend his time saying: ‘I feel pleasure!’ Well, vanity is the fruit of opinion, born from it and fed by it. With the consequence that the arbiters of a people’s opinion are arbiters of its actions too. The people seeks things in proportion to the price it puts on them; showing it what it should esteem is telling it what it should do.

This term ‘vanity’ is not well chosen, because it is merely one of the two branches of amour propre. I must explain. The opinion that puts a high price on frivolous objects produces vanity; but that which falls upon objects that are great and fine in themselves produces pride. You can thus make a people proud or vain depending on the choice of objects towards which you direct its judgements.

Pride is more natural than vanity, since it consists in esteeming yourself for truly estimable qualities; whereas vanity, putting value on what has no value, is the work of prejudices slow to arise. You need time to fascinate the eyes of a nation. As there is nothing more truly fine than independence and power, every people that is formed is at first proud. But never was a new people vain, since vanity by its nature is individual; it cannot be the instrument of so great a thing as forming a national body.

Two opposite states cast men into the torpor of idleness. One is that peace of mind which ensures that you are satisfied with what you possess; the other is an insatiable covetousness which proclaims the impossibility of satisfying it. The man who lives without desires and the man who knows he cannot obtain what he desires alike remain inactive. In order to act, you must both aspire to something and have some hope of attaining it. Any government wishing to stimulate activity in the people must take care to place within the latter’s reach objects capable of tempting it. Ensure that work offers citizens great advantages, not merely in your own estimation, but in theirs; you will infallibly make them hardworking. Among these advantages, not only are riches not always the most attractive, but they can be less so than any other, as long as they do not serve as a means to attain those by which one is tempted.

The most general and most reliable way you can have to satisfy your desires, whatever these may be, is power. Thus to whatever passions a man or a people may be inclined, if such passions be vigorous he will have a vigorous aspiration to power, either as an end if he is proud or vain, or as a means if he is vengeful or a sensualist.

Hence, it is in the well-arranged economy of civil power that the great art of government consists, not merely in order to maintain itself, but in order to extend activity and life throughout the State; in order to make the people active and hardworking.

Civil power is exercised in two ways: one legitimate, through authority; the other abusive, through wealth. Wherever wealth dominates, power and authority are usually separated, because the means of acquiring wealth and the means of attaining authority, not being the same, are rarely employed by the same people. Hence, apparent power is in the hands of magistrates and real power is in the hands of the wealthy. Under such a government, everything proceeds at the whim of men’s passions, nothing tends towards the institutional ends.

It then happens that the object of desire divides: some aspire to authority in order to sell its use to the wealthy and by this means enrich themselves; others, more numerous, aim directly at wealth, with which they are sure one day to have power, by buying either authority or those who are its depositaries.

Suppose that in a State thus constituted, on the one hand honours and authority are hereditary, and on the other hand the means of acquiring wealth are within reach of only a small number, and depend upon credit, favour, friends. It is then impossible that, while a few adventurers proceed to fortune and thereby gradually to employment, the bulk of the nation should not be overwhelmed by universal discouragement and cast into listlessness.

[Disconnected fragments]

Hence, in every rich nation the government is generally weak, and I term as such alike the government that acts only with weakness and, which comes to the same thing, that which needs violent means to maintain itself.

I can clarify my thought no better than by the example of Carthage and Rome. The former would massacre and crucify her generals, her magistrates and her members, and was merely a weak government forever frightened and shaken by everything. The latter would take no one’s life, nor even seize his goods; the accused criminal could depart in peace and the trial end there. The vigour of that admirable government had no need for cruelty. The greatest of misfortunes was to be excluded from its membership.

Peoples will be industrious when work is honoured, and it is always up to the government to make it so. If esteem and authority are within the Citizens’ reach, they will strive to attain them; but if they see them as too far away, they will not take a step. What casts them into despond is not the scale of the work but its futility.

I shall be asked if it is by tilling your field that you acquire the necessary talents to govern. I shall answer yes, in a simple and upright government like our own. Great talents are a substitute for patriotic ardour; they are necessary to guide a people that does not love its country and does not honour its leaders. But make the people feel affection for the res publica, seek virtues, and leave your great talents be they would do more harm than good. A government’s best motivation is love of the fatherland, and this love is cultivated along with the land. Common sense is enough to guide a well-constituted State, and common sense is developed as much in the heart as in the head; men not blinded by their passions always act well.

Men are naturally lazy, but enthusiasm for work is the first fruit of a well-regulated society; and when a people relapses into idleness and discouragement, it is always thanks to the abuse of that same society, which no longer accords work the price it has a right to expect.

Wherever money rules, that which the people gives to maintain its liberty is always the instrument of its enslavement, and what it pays voluntarily today is used to force it to pay tomorrow.

Every child born in the Island shall be a citizen and member of the Republic when he comes of age while following the statutes, and no one shall be able to become such other than in that way.

Hence, it will not be possible to grant civil rights to any foreigner – except once in fifty years, to just one, if he should present himself and be judged worthy, or the most worthy of those presenting themselves; his reception will be a general festival throughout the Island.

Every Corsican who on completing forty years is not married and never has been shall be excluded from Civil rights for his entire life.

Every individual who in changing domicile moves from one commune to another shall lose his Civil rights for three years, and at the end of this time shall be registered in the new commune by paying a due, without which he shall continue to be excluded from Civil rights until he has paid.

All those who perform some public office shall be exempted from the foregoing provision; they must be admitted to all Civil rights in whichever commune they may find themselves in, so long as they are on duty.

The Corsicans were subjected to the Genoese. It is well known what kind of treatment obliged them to revolt, almost forty years ago. Since that time they have maintained themselves in independence. Yet the Gazetteers²⁵ still call them rebels, and who knows for how many centuries they will continue to call them thus. The present generation has not seen servitude: it is hard to conceive how a man born free, and who keeps himself such, is a rebel, while a fortunate usurper after two or three years is a consecrated monarch, a legitimate King. Thus the amnesty takes place only in favour of Tyranny, it is never admitted in favour of liberty. This attitude is as rational in itself as it is honourable for its supporters. Fortunately words are not things. Redeemed at the cost of their blood, the Corsicans, rebels or no, are free and worthy of being so despite the Genoese and the Gazetteers.

In each commune a register shall be kept of all the lands that each individual holds.

No one shall be able to own lands outside his commune.

No one shall be able to own more than … plots of land. Anyone having this quantity shall be able, through exchanges, to acquire similar quantities but no larger, even of less good land. And all gifts or bequests that may be made to him in land shall be null.

Because for three years you have governed a free people justly, it entrusts the same administration to you for a further three years.

No man under age shall be able to make a will, but all his property shall pass to the community.

Corsicans, be silent, I am going to speak in the name of everyone. Let those who do not agree depart, and let those who do agree raise their hands.

This act will have to be preceded by a general proclamation, enjoining upon everyone to repair to the place of his domicile within a time that will be prescribed, on pain of losing his born and natural rights.

I. The whole Corsican nation shall through a solemn oath come together in a single body politic, of which both the bodies that must form the nation and individuals will henceforth be members.

II. This act of union shall be celebrated on the same day throughout the island, and all Corsicans shall attend so far as possible, each in his town, village or parish, as he is more specifically instructed.

III. Formula for the oath, pronounced in the open air with hand on Bible:

In the name of all-powerful God and on the holy Gospels, by a sacred and irrevocable oath I unite my body, my goods, my will and all my power with the Corsican nation, to belong to it in full ownership, myself and all that depends upon me. I swear to live and die for it, to observe all its laws and obey its legitimate leaders and magistrates, in everything that conforms with the laws. So may God succour me in this life and have mercy on my soul. May liberty, justice and the Republic of the Corsicans live for ever. Amen.

All shall raise their right hands and reply: Amen.

Each parish shall keep an accurate register all those who have attended this solemn celebration. Their name, their father’s name, their age and their domicile shall be noted down in it.

As for those who are unable, because of valid impediments, to attend this solemn celebration, they shall be allocated other days to take the same oath and have themselves registered, within a period of three months at the latest after the solemn oath: after this period, all those who have neglected to fulfil this duty shall be debarred from their right, and shall remain in the Class of foreigners or candidates to be discussed below.

A country enjoys its greatest independent strength when the land in it produces as much as possible, in other words when the land has as many farmers as it requires.

For each child he has above the number of five, he shall be allocated a patrimony by the commune.

Fathers who have absent children shall be able to register them only after their return, and those remaining outside the Island for a whole year shall no longer be able to be registered, even after their return.

They will be diverted from superstition by keeping them very busy with their duties as citizens; by investing national festivals with pomp; by greatly reducing the time accorded to ecclesiastical ceremonies, in order to give it to civil ceremonies; and with a little adroitness this can be done without angering the Clergy, by ensuring that it always does play some part, but that this part is small enough for public attention not to remain fixed upon it.

Of all ways of living, that which most binds men to their country is rural life.

The Guardians of the Laws shall be able to convoke the states general as often as they please and, from the day of convocation until the morrow of the assembly, the authority of the grand Podestat and the council of State shall be suspended.

The person of the guardians of the laws shall be sacred and inviolable, and there shall be no one in the island having the power to arrest them.

Each commune shall have the right to recall its people and replace them with others, as often as it pleases; but unless they have been expressly recalled, they shall be for life.

Once the states general have been convoked extraordinarily by the Senate, they shall not be able to be dissolved unless the Senate or the grand Podestat have been overturned.

The Laws regarding estates must always tend to bring things back to equality, so that each man may have something and no one have too much.

Every Corsican who leaves his commune to go and reside in another shall lose his civil rights for three years. At the end of this time, upon his request and a proclamation, if nothing comes up against him he shall be inscribed in the registers of the new commune, and into the same order in which he was inscribed in the other: citizen if he was a citizen, patriot if he was a patriot, and candidate if he was only a candidate.

And the Corsicans had to pay tribute in order to win the favour of being disarmed.

There shall be no carriage in the Island: Ecclesiastics and women will be able to use two-wheeled chaises. But lay people of any rank whatsoever shall be able to travel only on foot or horseback, unless they are crippled or seriously ill.

No one shall be admitted to the oath in matters concerning his own interests. But the oath …

No one shall be able to be imprisoned for debt, and even in such seizures as may be made in the house of a debtor he shall be left, apart from the clothes to cover himself, with his plough, his oxen, his bed, and his most indispensable items of furniture.

Every boy who marries before the age of a full twenty years, or only after the age of a full thirty years, or who weds a girl having less than a full fifteen years, or a person – girl or widow – whose age differs from his own by more than twenty years, shall remain excluded from the order of citizens, unless he attains it as a public reward for services rendered to the State.

In view of the unequal distribution of the island’s produce, communications must not be closed; in some things regard must be shown for the prejudices and short-sightedness of the people. Seeing that it was not allowed to go about the neighbourhood to seek from among its compatriots the foodstuffs that it lacked, the people would accuse our laws of caprice and harshness; it would mutiny against them, or hate them in secret.

If we were able to do without money and have all the advantages that money gives, we should enjoy those advantages far better than with riches, since we should have them separated from the vices that poison them, and that money brings with it.

No one should be a magistrate by station or a soldier by station. Everyone should be ready to fulfil indiscriminately those functions that the fatherland imposes upon them. There should be no other permanent station in the Island than that of citizen, and that station alone should embrace all others.

So long as money is useful to the Corsicans, they will love it; and so long as they love it, the Republic will foster agents and traitors who will influence its deliberations and, so to speak, keep the State on the purse-strings of its former masters.

You must not rely upon a lively but always short-lived enthusiasm in the wake of your recovered liberty. Popular heroism is a moment of passion followed by languor and slackness. The liberty of a people must be based on its way of being, and not on its passions. For passions are transitory and change their object; but the effect of a good constitution lasts as long as it does; and no people would be able to remain free for longer than it was satisfied with liberty.

Let them remember well that privileges of every kind are advantageous to the individuals who obtain them, and burdensome to the nation that grants them.

This is the ridiculous contradiction into which all violent governments fall: seeking to keep peoples in a state of weakness, they nevertheless through them seek to place themselves in a state of strength.

The nation will not be illustrious, but it will be happy. It will not be talked about; it will not be held in high esteem abroad, but it will have plenty, peace and liberty at home.

Any advocate who has rejected the arbitration of the elders, or who after accepting it refuses to rely upon their judgement, if he loses his case in ordinary justice will be noted down and unable for five years to exercise any public function.

Any citizen’s daughter who marries a Corsican, of whatever class he may be, will receive a dowry from the husband’s commune; this dowry will always be a plot of land, and will be enough if he is a candidate to raise him to the class of patriots.

Of all governments, the Democratic is always the least costly, because public luxury consists only in abundance of men; and where the people is master, its power has no need of any spectacular sign.

For if two or several States are subjected to the same prince, that has nothing contrary to law or reason. But if a State is subjected to another State, that seems incompatible with the nature of the body politic.

Although I know that the Corsican nature has prejudices very opposed to my principles, my intention is not to employ the art of persuasion to make them adopt the latter. On the contrary, I seek to tell them my opinion and my reasons with such simplicity that there is nothing that might seduce them, because it is very possible that I am mistaken, and because I should be very vexed were they to adopt my view to their own disadvantage.

What caused the conflicts, quarrels and civil wars that racked Corsica for so many years, forcing her eventually to have recourse to the Pisans, and then the Genoese? Was all that not the work of her nobility? Was it not the latter that reduced the people to despair, forcing it to choose a tranquil enslavement over the ills it used to suffer under so many Tyrants? Now that the yoke has been cast off, does the people wish to return to the condition that obliged it to accept that yoke?

I shall not preach morality to them, I shall not order them to have virtues, but I shall place them in such a position that they will have virtues without knowing the word; such that they will be good and just without knowing much about what justice and goodness are.

I do not know how it comes about, but I do know that those operations for which the largest number of records and account-books are kept are precisely those in which there is most theft.

Such were those young Romans who would begin by being quaestors or treasurers of armies before commanding them. Such financiers would not be base men; it would never so much as enter their heads that it was possible to make a profit from the public purse; and the military coffers could without risk be entrusted to the Catos.²⁶

Instead of [suppressing] luxury by sumptuary laws, it is better to prevent it by an administration that makes it impossible.

I am convinced that if you search thoroughly you will find iron mines on the Island; it would be better to find iron mines there than gold mines.

And even when in doubt, it is better to begin by the state that leads naturally to the other, and from which you may always pass on to the latter if you hope to be happier there, rather than by the state from which you can no longer return to the former, and which has nothing ahead of it except destruction and ruin.

Le prerogative che goderanno le sudette famiglie …²⁷ [The prerogatives that the families mentioned below will enjoy …].

This provision is destructive of the spirit of the republic, which requires the soldier to be thoroughly subordinated to the magistrate and to see himself merely as the minister of the ministers of the law. It is extremely important that the soldier should not in himself be an estate, but an accidental form of the estate of citizen. If the nobility had prerogatives and Army distinctions, military Officers would soon believe themselves above civil officials; the leaders of the Republic would be seen merely as Lawyers, and the State under military government would very rapidly succumb to despotism.

An excellent means of learning to relate everything to the law is to see the man who has been so much respected while in office return to private life; and for him himself it is a great lesson to uphold the rights of individuals to be assured that one day he will find himself among their number.

For example, the province of Cap Corse being unable to produce anything other than wine, you must prevent so much being cultivated in all the rest of the Island that this part is no longer able to sell its own.

For individual property being so weak and so dependent, the Government needs but little strength and guides peoples, so to speak, by moving a finger.

Where are the Princes who think of assembling Theologians to consult about whether what they wish to undertake is legitimate?

Pre[face]

I have a deep respect for the Republic of Genoa. I respect every sovereign in particular, although I sometimes tell them all rather harsh truths. And may it please heaven, for their own advantage, that people should dare tell them such more often, and that they should sometimes deign to hear them.

Note well, I beg you, that I do not present corvées or any kind of forced labour here as an absolute good; it would be better for all that to be done freely and for payment, if the means to pay did not introduce a measureless infinity of abuses and greater and more limitless ills than those that can result from this constraint, above all when those who impose it are of the same estate as those subject to the imposition.

For when there will be only one kind of revenue, viz. the fruits of the earth, there will be only one kind of goods too, namely the land itself.

For the true spirit of public ownership is that individual ownership should be very strong in the direct line, and very weak or null in the collaterals.

And raise rates in order to place commodities in credit and depreciate cash money.

The Corsicans are almost still in the natural and healthy state, but great skill is needed to keep them there, because their prejudices take them away from it. They have precisely what is suitable for them, but they wish for what is not good for them. Their feelings are sincere, it is their false knowledge that deceives them. They see the false brilliance of neighbouring nations and yearn to be like them, because they are not aware of their misery and do not see that they themselves are infinitely better.

Preventing the export of commodities means cutting off large holdings at the root.

Noble people, I do not wish to give you artificial, systematic laws invented by men, but bring you back beneath the sole laws of nature and order, which rule hearts and do not tyrannize wills.

CONSIDERATIONS ON THE GOVERNMENT OF POLAND

Prefatory Note

Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland is his final political work. Just as his text on Corsica was provoked by a request by a Corsican patriot, Buttafoco, this long discussion of Polish history, politics and institutions came about because Rousseau was approached by a Polish patriot, Count Wielhorski, acting on behalf of the Confederation of Bar, an association of wealthy noblemen and landowners who had risen up in 1768 to resist Russian domination and the proposed reforms of Poland’s pro-Russian king, Poniatowski. Rousseau was not alone in being courted in this way: another republican thinker, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, was also approached and produced a text.

It is far from clear that Rousseau knew much about Poland before he embarked on the project, and the fact that this group of Polish nobles would seek him out and that he would write for them looks surprising given their political character. Poland had been in decline for several centuries and was dominated by a caste of wealthy landowners, the Magnates, who resisted political change. Change was, in any case, extraordinarily difficult within the system they defended, because of the institution of the liberum veto according to which any session of the Sejm, the legislative assembly, could be abandoned and its decisions nullified by the declaration of a single member. This requirement of unanimity placed the political order at the mercy of anyone who stood to lose by change, or, for that matter, anyone bribable by foreign powers or outside interests.

Among the matters that animated the Confederation’s resistance was pressure to accord greater religious toleration to non-Catholics. Since religious toleration was a key principle for Rousseau in the Social Contract, it is hard to imagine that he would have sympathized with the nobles on that matter.

Rousseau worked on the project, drawing on materials supplied by Wielhorski, from 1770 to 1771, but the work was not published in his lifetime. One of the principal reasons for this is that any such plans had become moot because of the so-called First Partition of Poland in 1772 which divided Poland between Prussia, Russia and Austria. A version finally appeared in 1782.

Students of Rousseau have several reasons to take an interest in this text, which, like Corsica, constitutes an attempt by him to apply his ideas to a concrete political subject. At the end of the second book of the Social Contract, Rousseau had stressed that the most important part of the legislator’s work consists not in the elaboration of particular institutions but rather in changing the mores and sensibilities of a people. Along with education, games and patriotic festivals are an important part of this nation-building project and this theme, already present in the Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre, features prominently in Poland. Rousseau feared, with good reason, that the Poles would be unable to preserve their political independence. He nevertheless advised them that, by focusing on national culture and the preservation of a distinct Polish character, they would be able to resist being digested by these stronger powers.

Poland also show us a pragmatic side to Rousseau’s thinking about politics. Whereas he had been, in the Social Contract (Book III, Chapter 15), an emphatic opponent of the representation of the sovereign people by deputies sitting in an assembly, the size of the Polish nation compelled him to revise this opposition.

The present translation is based on the text contained in volume 3 of the Pléiade edition of Oeuvres Complètes produced under the direction of Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond in 1964.

Considerations on the Government of Poland

AND ON ITS PROPOSED REFORMATION

[I] State of the Question

Count Wielhorski’s description of the government of Poland, and his accompanying reflections, are instructive documents for anyone wishing to form a regular plan for the recasting of this government.¹ I know no one more capable of outlining such a plan than he himself, since to the general knowledge required by this task he adds every kind of knowledge concerning the place, and concerning the particular details impossible to convey in writing yet necessary to be known in order to make any institutions suited to the people for which they are destined. If you do not know thoroughly the Nation for which you are working, the work you will make for it, however excellent it may be in itself, will always go astray in its application; and far more so when a nation already fully constituted is involved, whose tastes, manners, prejudices and vices are too deep-rooted to be able easily to be smothered by new sowings. Good institutions for Poland can be the work only of the Poles, or of someone who has studied carefully on the spot the Polish nation and its neighbours. A foreigner can scarcely give other than general views, to enlighten rather than to guide the lawmaker. Even when my wits were in full vigour, I should not have been able to grasp the ensemble of those large relationships. Today, when I barely retain the ability to connect ideas, in order to obey Count Wielhorski and display my ardour for his fatherland I must limit myself to giving him an account of the impressions made upon me by reading his work, and the reflections it has suggested to me.

Reading the history of Poland’s government, you can hardly comprehend how a State so bizarrely constituted has been able to survive for so long. A large corpus formed out of a large number of dead members and a small number of disunited members; all of whose movements – almost independent from one another – far from having a common aim, destroy each other; which is forever busy but does nothing; which can offer no resistance to whoever seeks to do it harm; which falls into dissolution five or six times in every century; which falls into paralysis whenever it seeks to make any effort, or provide for any need; and which, in spite of all this, is alive and retains its vigour: this seems to me one of the most remarkable spectacles to be encountered by a thinking being. I see all the States of Europe rushing to their ruin. Monarchies, Republics, all those nations with such magnificent institutions, all those fine governments so sensibly balanced, have fallen into decay and look destined for an imminent death. While Poland, this depopulated, devastated, oppressed region, open to its aggressors, in the midst of its misfortunes and its anarchy, still shows all the fire of youth. She dares to demand a government and laws, as if she has only just been born. She is in fetters, and discusses the means to keep herself free; she senses within herself the strength which that of tyranny cannot subjugate. I picture Rome under siege calmly governing the lands upon which her enemy has just established his camp. Brave Poles, take care; take care that you do not make your situation worse by seeking to better yourselves too much. In thinking about what you wish to gain, do not forget what you may lose. Correct, if possible, the abuses of your constitution; but do not scorn the one that has made you what you are.

You love liberty, you are worthy of it, you have defended it against a powerful and wily aggressor who, feigning to offer you bonds of friendship, weighed you down with fetters of servitude. Now, weary of your fatherland’s troubles, you yearn for tranquillity. I think this may very easily be obtained; but preserving it in liberty, that is what I consider difficult. It is in the midst of that anarchy which is hateful to you that were formed those patriotic souls which safeguarded you from the yoke. They were slumbering in a lethargic repose; the storm awakened them. Having broken the fetters planned for them, they now feel the weight of fatigue. They would like to combine the peace of despotism with the sweets of liberty. I am afraid they may be wishing for contradictory things. Repose and liberty seem to me incompatible: a choice must be made.

I am not saying that things must be left in the state in which they are; but I do say that tampering with this requires extreme circumspection. At this moment you are more struck by the abuses than by the advantages. The time will come, I fear, when you will better feel those advantages, and unfortunately that will be when you have lost them.

Though it is easy, if you will, to make better laws, it is impossible to make ones that men’s passions do not abuse, as they abused the former laws. Foreseeing and weighing all these future abuses is perhaps an impossible task for the most consummate man of State. Placing law above man is a problem in politics that I compare to that of squaring the circle in geometry. Solve this problem well, and the government based on that solution will be good and free from abuse. But until then be assured that where you think to make laws hold sway, it will be men who hold sway.

There will never be any good and solid constitution other than one in which the law holds sway over the hearts of citizens. So long as the force of legislation does not reach that point, laws will always be eluded. But how to reach hearts? This is something that our lawmakers, who always see only force and punishment, never think about; and it is something that material rewards would perhaps have no greater success in achieving. Even the most righteous justice does not achieve it, because justice like health is a good that you enjoy without being aware of it, which inspires no enthusiasm, and whose price you become aware of only after losing it.

So how to move hearts, and inspire love for the fatherland and its laws? Shall I dare to say it? Through children’s games, through institutions pointless to the eyes of superficial men, but which form cherished habits and invincible attachments. If I am raving here, I am at least doing so utterly, for I confess that I see my madness wearing the features of reason.

[II] Spirit of the Institutions of Antiquity

When you read ancient history, you think yourself transported into another universe and among other beings. What do the French, the English, the Russians have in common with the Romans and the Greeks? Almost nothing but the face. The strong souls of the latter appear exaggerations of history to the others. How would those who feel so small imagine that there have been such great men? Yet they did exist, and they were men like us. What prevents us from being men like them? Our prejudices, our mean philosophy, and the passions of low interest, concentrated with egoism in all hearts by inept institutions that genius never dictated.

I look at the modern nations. I see many makers of laws and not one legislator. Among the ancients, I see three of them who deserve particular attention: Moses, Lycurgus and Numa. All three devoted their main attention to objects that would seem risible to our doctors. All three had successes that would be judged impossible if they were less well attested.

The first shaped and carried out the astonishing enterprise of constituting into a national body a swarm of wretched fugitives, without arts, without weapons, without talents, without virtues, without courage, and who, not having a single inch of land of their own, formed an alien troop on the face of the earth. Moses dared to make this wandering, slavish troop into a body politic, a free people, and while it was wandering in the deserts without having a stone on which to rest its head, he gave it those lasting institutions, tested by time, fortune and conquerors, which five thousand years have not been able to destroy or even alter, and which still survive today at full strength, even when the national body no longer survives.

In order to prevent his people from melting away among alien peoples, he gave it manners and customs impossible to blend with those of other nations; he burdened it with rites and particular ceremonies; he troubled it in a thousand ways to keep it constantly in suspense and render it always alien among other men; and all the bonds of brotherhood that he placed between the members of his republic were so many barriers that kept his people separate from its neighbours and prevented it from mingling with them. This is how that singular nation, so often subjugated, so often dispersed and apparently destroyed but always idolizing his rules, nevertheless preserved itself until our day, scattered among others without merging into them; and how its manners, its laws, its rites, survive and will last as long as the world, despite the hatred and persecution of the rest of mankind.

Lycurgus undertook to give institutions to a people already degraded by servitude and the vices that result from it. He imposed on it an iron yoke, the like of which no other people ever bore; but he attached the people to it, as it were identifying the people with the yoke by keeping it ever present. He constantly showed the fatherland to the people in its laws, in its games, in its homes, in its loves, in its feasts; he did not leave it a moment of relaxation to be on its own, and that continual constraint, ennobled by its object, engendered in it that ardent love of the fatherland which was always the strongest or rather sole passion of the Spartans, and which made them beings above humanity. Sparta was just a city, it is true; but by the sole strength of its institutions that city gave laws to all Greece, became its capital, and made the Persian Empire tremble. Sparta was the source from which his legislation spread its effects all around her.

Those who have seen Numa merely as an institutor of rites and religious ceremonies have judged that great man very ill. Numa was the true founder of Rome. If Romulus had merely assembled brigands whom one reverse could scatter, his imperfect work would not have been able to resist time. It was Numa who made it solid and durable, by uniting those brigands into an indissoluble body; by transforming them into Citizens, less through laws, of which their rural poverty hardly as yet had need, than through gentle institutions which attached them to one another and all to their soil; lastly by rendering their city holy through his apparently frivolous and superstitious rites, of whose strength and effect so few people are aware, yet whose first foundations had been laid by Romulus, the fierce Romulus himself.

The same spirit guided all the ancient Legislators in their institutions. All sought bonds that would attach Citizens to the fatherland and to one another; and they found them in particular customs, in religious ceremonies that by their nature were always exclusive and national (see the end of the Social Contract);² in games that kept citizens frequently gathered together; in exercises that along with their vigour and strength used to increase their pride and self-esteem; in spectacles which, reminding them of the history of their ancestors – their misfortunes, their virtues and their victories – would engage their hearts, inflame them with lively emulation, and attach them strongly to the fatherland that was constantly kept present to them. It is Homer’s poems, recited to the Greeks in solemn assembly, not in stalls or on benches paying cash, but in the open air and as a national body; it is the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, often played out before them; it is the prizes with which, to the acclamation of all Greece, the victors in their games would be crowned – it is these which, continually setting them ablaze with emulation and glory, raised their courage and their virtues to a degree of energy that has no comparison today, and that is even inconceivable to modern men. If the latter have laws, it is solely in order to teach them to obey their masters well, not to pick pockets, and to give a lot of money to public rogues. If they have manners, it is only to tickle the idleness of easy women and display their own with grace. If they assemble, it is in Temples for a cult that has nothing to do with the nation, does nothing to remind them of the fatherland and is almost an object of derision; or it is in tightly closed halls and by paying money, to see ham actors declaim and prostitutes simper on effeminate, dissolute stages where love is the only subject, and there to take lessons in corruption,³ which alone bring benefit of all those claimed to be on offer there; or it is in festivals where the people is always despised and always without influence, where public blame and approbation produce nothing; or it is in licentious throngs, to form secret liaisons, to seek the pleasures that separate and isolate most men, and that most loosen hearts. Are these stimulants for patriotism? Should we be surprised that such dissimilar ways of living should produce such different effects, and that the moderns no longer find in themselves any of that vigour of soul that everything inspired in the ancients? Forgive these digressions due to a remnant of warmth you have rekindled. I return with pleasure to the one among all peoples today that separates me least from those of which I have just been speaking.

[III] Application

Poland is a large State surrounded by still more considerable States, which by virtue of their despotism and their military discipline have great offensive strength. Rendered weak, however, by her anarchy, despite Polish valour she is exposed to all their insults. She has no strongholds to halt their incursions. Her depopulation renders her almost absolutely incapable of defence. No economic order; few or no troops; no military discipline, order or subordination; always divided within, always threatened without, by herself she has no stability and depends upon the whim of her neighbours. In the present state of things, I see but one means to give her the stability that she lacks. This is, as it were, to instil in the whole nation the soul of the confederates. It is to so establish the Republic in the heart of the Poles that it survives there despite all the efforts of its oppressors, since that seems to me to be the sole refuge where strength can neither reach nor destroy it. A proof of this has just been seen that will always live in the memory.⁴ Poland was in Russia’s fetters, but the Poles remained free: a great example that shows you how you can brave the power and ambition of your neighbours. If you cannot prevent them from swallowing you up, at least ensure that they cannot digest you. However you may go about it, before you have given Poland all that she lacks in order to be capable of resisting her enemies, she will be overwhelmed a hundred times. The virtue of her citizens, their patriotic ardour, the particular form that national institutions can give to their souls – there is the sole rampart always ready to defend her, and that no army could breach. If you make sure that a Pole can never become a Russian, I answer for it that Russia will not subjugate Poland.

It is national institutions which form the genius, the character, the tastes and the manners of a people, causing it to be itself and no other; which instil in it the ardent love of the fatherland that is based on customs impossible to eradicate: customs that cause it to die of boredom among other peoples amid delights of which it is deprived in its own country. Remember the Spartan, sated with delicacies at the great King’s Court, who was reproached because he pined for black sauce.⁵ ‘Oh well,’ he told the satrap with a sigh, ‘I know your pleasures, but you don’t know ours.’

Today there are no longer Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, even Englishmen, whatever may be said about it. There are only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, the same manners, because none has received a national form through particular institutions. All, in the same circumstances, will do the same things. All will say they are disinterested but be rogues; all will talk of the public good while thinking only of themselves; all will praise mediocrity while wishing to be another Croesus.⁶ They have ambition only for luxury, they have no passion but for gold: sure of having with the latter all that tempts them, all will sell themselves to the first man willing to pay them. What does it matter to them which master they obey, the laws of which State they follow? Provided they find money to steal and women to corrupt, they are in their own country everywhere.

Give another inclination to the passions of the Poles, you will give their souls a national physiognomy that will distinguish them from other peoples, and prevent them from merging, feeling at ease, or intermarrying with the latter; a vigour that will replace the excessive use of vain precepts, and make the Poles do out of preference and passion what is never done enough when it is done only out of duty or interest. Such are the souls over which a well-adapted legislation will take hold. They will obey the laws and not elude them, because those laws will suit them and have the internal assent of their will. Loving the fatherland, they will serve it zealously and with all their heart. With this feeling alone, even bad legislation would make good Citizens; and it is good Citizens alone who make the strength and prosperity of the State.

I shall explain later the administrative regime that, almost without affecting the basis of your laws, strikes me as capable of carrying patriotism and the virtues inseparable from it to the highest possible degree of intensity. But whether you adopt this regime or not, still begin by giving the Poles a high opinion of themselves and their fatherland: after the way in which they have just displayed themselves, this opinion will not be false. The circumstance of the present event must be grasped to raise souls to the pitch of those of the ancients. It is certain that the Confederation of Bar saved the expiring fatherland. That great epoch must be carved in sacred letters in all Polish hearts. I should like a monument to be raised in its memory; I should like the names of all the Confederates to be placed on it, even those who subsequently may have betrayed the common cause, since so great an action should erase a whole life’s faults; I should like a periodic ceremony to be instituted in order to celebrate it every ten years, with a pomp that is simple, proud and republican rather than showy and frivolous; I should like those virtuous citizens who had the honour to suffer for the fatherland in the enemy’s fetters to be praised in a dignified manner, but without bombast; I should like their families to be granted even some honorific privilege that would always recall this noble memory to the public gaze. I should not, however, like any invective against the Russians to be permitted on these solemn occasions, nor for them even to be spoken of: that would do them too great honour. This silence, the memory of their barbarity, and the praise for those who resisted them will say all that needs to be said about them: you should despise them too much to hate them.

I should like all the patriotic virtues to be blazoned by honours and by public rewards; should like Citizens constantly to be busied with the fatherland, for it to be made their principal concern and kept ceaselessly before their eyes. In this way, I admit, they would have fewer means and less time to enrich themselves, but they would also have less desire or need to do so; their hearts would learn to know another happiness than that of fortune; and there you have the art of ennobling souls and making them into an instrument more powerful than gold.

The succinct account of the manners of the Poles with which M. de Wielhorski has been good enough to supply me is not enough for me to be informed about their civil and domestic customs. But a large nation that has never mingled too much with its neighbours must have many such that are specific to it, and that are perhaps degenerating daily thanks to the general tendency in Europe to adopt the tastes and manners of the French. The old customs must be maintained and re-established, and suitable ones introduced that are specific to the Poles. These customs, should they be indifferent, should they even be bad in certain respects, provided they are not essentially bad, will always have the advantage of inspiring the Poles with affection for their country, and giving them a natural repugnance for mingling with the foreigner. I regard it as fortunate that they have a particular style of clothing. Preserve this advantage carefully: do exactly the opposite of what that much praised Tsar did.⁷ Let neither the King, nor the Senators, nor any public man ever wear any other apparel than that of the nation, and let no Pole dare to appear at Court dressed in the French style.

A great many public games, at which the good mother country may delight to see her children at play. May she be often concerned with them, so that they are always concerned with her. Even at Court, in order to set an example, you must abolish the usual court amusements – gaming, theatres, comedy, opera, all that makes men effeminate, all that distracts them, isolates them, makes them forget their fatherland and their duty, all that makes them feel content everywhere provided they are amused; you must devise games, festivals, ceremonies that are so specific to this particular Court that they are to be found in no other. People must amuse themselves more in Poland than in other countries, but not in the same way. In a word, you must reverse an execrable proverb and cause every Pole to say in his innermost heart: Ubi patria ibi bene [where the fatherland is, there am I well off].

If possible, nothing exclusively for the Great and the rich. Many spectacles in the open air, where ranks are distinguished with care, but where the whole people takes part equally, as among the ancients, and where on certain occasions young nobles may test their strength and skill. Bull fights have contributed no little to maintaining a certain vigour in the Spanish nation. Those circuses in which the youth formerly used to exercise in Poland should be carefully re-established; they should be made for her into theatres of honour and emulation. Nothing would be easier than to replace the old contests with less cruel exercises, in which strength and skill would nevertheless play a part and in which the victors would similarly receive honours and rewards. Horse-riding, for example, is a very fitting exercise for the Poles, and very well able to provide a brilliant spectacle.

Homer’s Heroes would all distinguish themselves by their strength and their skill, and thereby in the people’s eyes would show that they were made to command it. Knightly tournaments would form men who were not merely valiant and courageous, but thirsty for honour and glory and apt for all virtues. The use of firearms, by making those bodily faculties less useful for glory, has caused them to fall into discredit. The result is that – aside from mental qualities, which are often ambiguous, inappropriate, about which there are countless ways to be mistaken and on which the people is a poor judge – a man with the advantage of birth has nothing in him that distinguishes him from another, justifies fortune or shows in his person a natural right to superiority. And the more those external signs are ignored, the more those who govern us grow effeminate and corrupt with impunity. Yet it does matter, and more than is thought, that those who must one day command others should from their youth show themselves superior to them in every way, or at least strive to do so. It is good, moreover, that the people should often be present at agreeable occasions with its leaders; that it should know them, grow used to seeing them and share its pleasures with them. Provided that subordination is always maintained and that it never merges with them, this is the way for it to develop an affection for them and combine attachment to them with respect. Lastly, a taste for bodily exercises distracts from a dangerous idleness, from effeminate pleasures and spiritual luxury. It is above all for the soul’s sake that the body must be exercised, which is what our petty wiseacres are far from seeing.

By no means neglect a certain public display; let it be noble and imposing, and may the magnificence characterize men rather than things. You would not credit to what extent the people’s heart follows its eyes, and how much it is influenced by ceremonial. This gives authority an air of order and regularity, which will inspire confidence and dispel the image of whim and fantasy associated with that of arbitrary power. It is necessary only to avoid, in the trappings of the ceremonies, the gleam, glitter and luxury adornments that are customary in courts. The festivals of a free people must always be redolent of decency and seriousness, and only objects worthy of its esteem should be presented there for its admiration. The Romans, in their triumphs, displayed immense luxury, but it was the luxury of the conquered; the more it shone, the less seductive it was; its very sheen was a great lesson for the Romans. Captive Kings were chained with chains of gold and precious stones. That was luxury, to be sure. You may often reach the same goal by two opposite routes. The two bales of wool placed by the chancellor’s seat in England’s House of Lords form in my view a touching and sublime ornament. Two sheaves of wheat similarly placed in Poland’s Senate would to my mind have just as fine an effect there.

The vast disparity in fortunes separating the Magnates⁸ from the minor nobility is a big obstacle to the reforms necessary to make love of the fatherland the dominant passion. So long as luxury rules among the Magnates, cupidity will rule over all hearts. The object of public admiration will always be the object of individual wishes; and if it is necessary to be rich in order to shine, the dominant passion will always be to be rich, a great means of corruption that must be weakened as much as possible. If other attractive objects, if marks of rank distinguished highly placed men, those who were merely rich would be deprived of them; secret wishes would naturally direct themselves towards these honourable distinctions, in other words those of merit and virtue, if such were the only way to succeed. The Consuls of Rome were often very poor, but they had lictors, the trappings of those lictors were envied by the people, and plebeians rose to the Consulate.

Where inequality rules, I must confess that removing luxury entirely strikes me as a very difficult undertaking. But would there not be some way of changing the objects of that luxury and making its example less pernicious? For example, in former times impoverished noblemen in Poland would attach themselves to the Magnates, who would give them education and subsistence in their retinues. That was a truly great and noble luxury; I am perfectly sensible of its disadvantage, but at least far from degrading souls it elevates them, giving them feelings and motivation, and it was free from abuse among the Romans for as long as the Republic lasted. I have read that the duc d’Epernon, on meeting one day the duc de Sully,⁹ wanted to provoke him to a fight; but, having only six hundred gentlemen in his retinue, he did not dare attack Sully, who had eight hundred. I doubt that luxury of this kind leaves much room for a luxury of trinkets; and the example of it will at least not seduce the poor. Convince the Magnates in Poland to have only this kind; it will perhaps lead to divisions, parties and quarrels, but it will not corrupt the nation. After that, let us tolerate military luxury, that of weapons and horses; but let all effeminate finery be held in scorn, and if it is impossible to get women to renounce it, let them at least be taught to reprove and disdain it in men.

Besides, it is not by sumptuary laws that you will succeed in extirpating luxury. It is from people’s innermost hearts that it must be torn, while implanting there healthier and nobler tastes. Forbidding things that you should not do is an inept, futile expedient, if you do not begin by causing them to be hated and despised; and the disapproval of the law is effective only when it comes to support that of judgement. Whoever ventures to devise institutions for a people must be able to dominate opinions and govern men’s passions through them. This is true above all in the object of which I am speaking. Sumptuary laws provoke desire by constraint rather than extinguish it by punishment. Simplicity in manners and dress is less the fruit of law than that of education.

[IV] Education

This is the important point. It is education that must give souls national strength, and so direct their opinions and their tastes that they may be patriots by inclination, passion and necessity. A child opening its eyes must see the fatherland and until death must see no more than that. Every true republican sucked with his mother’s milk the love of his fatherland, in other words the love of laws and liberty. This love makes his whole existence; he sees only the fatherland, he lives for it alone; once he is alone, he is nothing; once he no longer has a fatherland, he is no more; and if he is not dead, he is worse.

National education belongs only to free men; it is they alone who have a common existence, and who are truly bound by the Law. A Frenchman, an Englishman, a Spaniard, an Italian, a Russian are all more or less the same man. He leaves school already fully moulded for a degree: in other words, for servitude. At twenty a Pole must not be another man, he must be a Pole. I want him, when learning to read, to read about his country’s affairs; to know at ten all its products, at twelve all its provinces, roads and towns, at fifteen to know the whole of its history and at sixteen all its laws. I want there not to have been in all Poland a fine action or an illustrious man of which his memory and his heart are not full, and of which he cannot instantly give an account. You may judge by this that it is no ordinary studies, directed by foreigners and priests, that I should like to have children pursue. The law must regulate the content, order and form of their studies. As teachers they must have only Poles, all married if possible, all distinguished by their morals, their probity, their good sense and their knowledge, and all destined, when after a certain number of years they have fulfilled this job well, not for more important or more honourable posts, since that is not possible, but for ones that are less arduous and more brilliant. Beware above all of making the condition of pedagogue into a profession. Every public man in Poland must have no other permanent state than that of Citizen. All the posts he fills, and above all those that are important to him, must like this one be considered only as testing grounds, and as rungs for rising higher once he has deserved it. I exhort the Poles to pay attention to this maxim, which I shall often stress. I consider it the key to one of the State’s great resources. We shall see below how in my view it can be made applicable without exception.

I do not at all like those distinctions between schools and academies which ensure that the rich nobility and the poor nobility are raised differently and separately. All, being equal by virtue of the State’s constitution, should be raised together and in the same way; and if a wholly free public education cannot be established, it must at least be set at a price that the poor can pay. Would it not be possible in each school to set up a certain number of purely free places, viz. at the State’s expense, and which in France are called bourses [scholarships]? These places, given to the children of impoverished gentlemen who had deserved well of the fatherland, not as an act of charity but as a reward for the fathers’ good services, would on this account become honourable, and could produce a twofold advantage that would not be negligible. For that it would be necessary for nomination for them not to be arbitrary, but to be made by a kind of judgement that I shall speak of later. Those who would fill these places would be called children of the State, and distinguished by some honourable mark that would give them precedence over other children of their age, not excepting those of the Magnates.

In all Schools a gymnasium or place for bodily exercises must be established for the children. This badly neglected point is in my view the most important part of education, not just in order to form robust, healthy temperaments, but still more for its moral purpose, which is either neglected or fulfilled only by a mass of futile, pedantic precepts that are so many wasted words. I shall never repeat enough that good education must be negative. Prevent vices from arising, and you will have done enough for virtue. The means to do so is extremely easy in good public education. It is always to keep children expectant, not through boring studies where they understand nothing, and which they come to hate simply because they are forced to remain in their place; but through exercises that please them, satisfying the need to move about that their body has as it grows, and whose appeal for them will not be limited to this.

You must not allow them to play separately at their whim, but all together and in public, so that there is always a common aim to which all aspire and which stimulates competition and emulation. Parents who prefer home education, and who raise their children under their own eyes, must still send them to these exercises. Their instruction can be domestic and individual, but their games must always be public and common to all. For it is a matter here not simply of keeping them busy, giving them a robust constitution, or making them agile and sturdy, but of accustoming them early on to rules, equality, fraternity and competitions; to live beneath the gaze of their fellow citizens and desire public approbation. For that, it is necessary that the prizes and rewards of the victors should not be distributed arbitrarily by games masters or by school heads, but by acclamation and according to the judgement of the spectators. And you may rely on these judgements always being just, above all if you take care to make these games attractive to the public, by arranging them with a little pomp and in such a way as to make a spectacle of them. It can then be assumed that all decent people and all good patriots will find it a duty and a pleasure to attend them.

In Berne, there is a very singular exercise for young Patricians leaving school. It is what is called the ‘moot State’ [Etat extérieur].¹⁰ It is a miniature copy of everything that makes up the government of the Republic: a Senate, Avoyers, Officers, Ushers, Orators, trials, verdicts, ceremonies. The moot State even has a small government and a few revenues; and this institution, authorized and protected by the sovereign, is the nursery for the Statesmen who will one day direct public affairs in the same functions that they first perform only in play.

Whatever form is given to public education, into the details of which I shall not enter here, a College of Magistrates of the first rank should be established to have supreme authority over it, and to appoint, dismiss and change at their discretion not merely the school Principals and heads, who will themselves as I have said be candidates for the top magistracies, but also the games masters, whose zeal and vigilance will be carefully stimulated by the higher posts that will be open or closed to them according to the manner in which they have filled their present ones. Since it is upon these establishments that the hope of the Republic and the glory and fate of the nation depend, I confess I find them to have an importance I am very surprised people have nowhere thought to accord them. I am distressed for humanity that so many ideas that seem to me good and useful should always, though quite practicable, be so far removed from whatever is done.

Besides, I am here merely giving an indication; but it is enough for those whom I am addressing. These badly developed ideas show from afar the paths unknown to the moderns by which the ancients used to lead men to that vigour of soul, to that patriotic zeal, to that esteem for truly personal qualities, ignoring what is merely alien to man, of which there are no examples among us, but the yeasts of which are waiting to ferment in all men’s hearts once they have been activated by suitable institutions. By directing the education, the habits, the customs and the manners of the Poles in this spirit, you will develop in them that yeast which has not yet been rendered stale by corrupt maxims, by outworn institutions, by a selfish philosophy which preaches what kills. The nation will date her second birth from the terrible crisis from which she is emerging and, seeing what her as yet undisciplined members have done, she will expect much and obtain more from well-balanced institutions. She will cherish and respect laws that flatter her noble pride, that render and keep her happy and free. Plucking from her bosom those passions that lead to evasion of the laws, she will nourish there those which cause them to be loved. In short, by as it were herself accomplishing her renewal, she will in this new age recover all the vigour of a nation newly born. But without these precautions, expect nothing from your laws. However wise, however far-sighted they may be, they will be evaded and futile, and you will have corrected a few abuses that bother you only to introduce others that you will not have foreseen. So much for some preliminaries I thought indispensable. Let us now cast our eyes upon the constitution.

[V] Radical Defect

Let us, if possible, avoid rushing with our very first steps into chimaerical projects. What undertaking, Gentlemen, concerns you for the moment? That of reforming the Government of Poland: in other words, endowing the constitution of a large kingdom with the same stability and vigour as that of a small republic. Before working to implement this project, it should first be seen if success in it is possible. The size of nations! – the extent of States! – first and principal source of the misfortunes of mankind, and above all of the innumerable calamities that undermine and destroy well-ordered peoples. Almost all small States, whether republics or monarchies, prosper for the sole reason that they are small; because all citizens know one another and look at one another; because the leaders can themselves see the evil that is done and the good they have to do; and because their orders are carried out before their eyes. All large peoples crushed by their own masses either groan like you in anarchy or groan beneath the subaltern oppressors whom their Kings are forced to impose on them in a necessary gradation. It is God alone who can govern the world, and merely human faculties would not be enough to govern large nations. It is astonishing, it is miraculous that the vast extent of Poland has not a hundred times already caused the government to be converted into despotism, caused the souls of the Poles to degenerate, and corrupted the mass of the nation. It is a unique example in history that after centuries such a State should have come merely to anarchy. The slowness of its progress is due to advantages inseparable from the handicaps from which you wish to deliver yourselves. Oh, I could not repeat it too often: think well before tinkering with your laws, above all those which made you what you are. The first reform you would need is that of your extent. Your vast provinces will never allow the strict administration of small Republics. Begin by contracting your frontiers, if you wish to reform your government. Perhaps your neighbours are thinking about rendering you that service. That would doubtless be a great evil for the dismembered parts; but it would be a great benefit for the body of the Nation.

But if these reductions do not take place, I see only one means perhaps to substitute for them, and fortunately that means is already in the spirit of your institutions. Let the separation of the two Polands be as distinct as Lithuania’s from them: have three States combined in one.¹¹ If possible, I should like you to have as many as you have Palatinates. Form as many particular administrations in each. Perfect the form of the Dietines,¹² extend their authority in their respective Palatinates. But mark their boundaries carefully, and ensure that nothing can break the bond between them of common legislation and subordination to the body of the Republic. In short, apply yourselves to extending and perfecting the system of federative Governments, the only one that could suit you. If you ignore this advice, I doubt whether your work could ever be successful.

[VI] Question of the Three Orders

I hardly ever hear people speak of government without finding an appeal to principles that strike me as false or ambiguous. The Republic of Poland, it has often been said and repeated, is made up of three orders: the equestrian Order, the Senate, and the King. I should prefer to say that the Polish nation is made up of three orders: the nobles, who are everything; the burghers, who are nothing; and the peasants, who are less than nothing. If you count the Senate as an order in the State, why not also count as such the chamber of Deputies, which is no less distinct and has no less authority? Furthermore, in the very sense in which it is put forward this division is obviously incomplete; for you would have to add the Ministers, who are neither Kings, nor Senators, nor Deputies, and who in all independence are invested nonetheless with full executive power. How shall I ever be brought to understand how a part existing only through the whole nevertheless forms, in relation to that whole, an order independent of it? The Peerage in England, given that it is hereditary, does, I admit, form an order existing by itself. But in Poland, if you remove the equestrian Order there is no longer a Senate, since no one may be a Senator if he is not first a Polish noble. Similarly, there is no longer a King, since it is the equestrian order that appoints him and the king can do nothing without it. But if you remove Senate and King, the equestrian order, and thereby the State and the sovereign, remain in their entirety; and tomorrow already, if it so please the latter, there will be a Senate and a King as before.

But because it is not an order in the State, that does not mean the Senate counts for nothing there. Even were it not the corporate depositary of the laws, its members, independently of that corporate authority, would still be the depositaries of legislative power. To prevent them from voting in the full Diet whenever it is a matter of making or repealing laws would be to strip them of a right they hold by birth; but then it is no longer as Senators that they are voting, but merely as Citizens. As soon as the legislative power speaks, everyone reverts to equality; every other authority falls silent before it; its voice is the voice of God on earth. The King himself, presiding over the Diet, does not then have the right, I maintain, to vote in it unless he is a Polish nobleman.

You will doubtless tell me here that I am proving too much, and that if Senators as such do not have votes in the Diet, no more should they have votes as Citizens, since members of the equestrian order do not vote there individually, but only through their representatives, among whom the Senators are not included. And why should they vote as individuals in the Diet, since no other nobleman, unless he is a deputy, can vote there? This objection strikes me as valid in the present state of affairs, but when the planned changes have been made, it will no longer be valid; because the Senators will then themselves be permanent representatives of the nation, albeit ones who will be able to act in the legislative domain only in concert with their colleagues.

Hence, let it not be said that the concert of King, Senate and equestrian order is necessary to create a law. That right belongs to the equestrian order alone, of which the Senators are members like the deputies, but with which the Senate has nothing to do corporately. Such is, or should be, the law of the State in Poland. But the law of nature, that sacred, imprescriptible law that speaks to man’s heart and to his reason, does not allow legislative authority to be thus restricted, nor laws to bind anyone who has not voted on them personally, as the deputies have done, or at least through their representatives, as the nobles have done corporately. That sacred law is not violated with impunity; and the state of weakness to which so great a nation sees itself reduced is the work of that feudal barbarism which causes the body of the State to be shorn of its most numerous and sometimes healthiest part.

God forbid that I should think it necessary here to prove what a little good sense and compassion suffice to make everyone feel! And whence does Poland claim to draw the power and the forces that she so wantonly stifles within her bosom? Noble Poles, be more, be men. Only then will you be happy and free; but do not ever pride yourselves on being that, so long as you keep your brothers in irons.

I am aware that the plan of emancipating your peoples is difficult. What I fear is not merely the ill-conceived interest, the amour propre and the prejudices of the masters. That obstacle once overcome, I should fear the vices and the cowardice of the serfs. Liberty is succulent fare, but hard to digest; it takes a very strong stomach to tolerate it. I laugh at those debased peoples who, letting themselves be stirred up by plotters, dare to speak of liberty without having the least idea of it; and who, their hearts filled with all the vices of slaves, imagine that in order to be free it is enough to be mutineers. Proud and sacred liberty! If those poor wretches could be acquainted with you, if they knew at what cost you are won and kept, if they were aware of how much more severe your laws are than the tyrant’s yoke is harsh; their weak souls, slave to passions that ought to be stifled, would fear you a hundred times more than servitude; they would flee you in terror like a burden about to crush them.

To emancipate the peoples of Poland is a great and fine undertaking, but risky and perilous, one that must not be attempted thoughtlessly. Among the precautions to be taken, one is indispensable and takes time. This is, before anything else, rendering the serfs you are seeking to emancipate worthy of liberty and able to endure it. I shall explain below one of the means that may be employed for this. It would be rash of me to guarantee its success, although I have no doubt of it. If there is any better means, let it be adopted. But whatever it may be, think that your serfs are men like you; that they have the stuff within them to become all that you are. Work first at releasing this, and free their bodies only after having freed their souls. Without this preliminary, be assured that your undertaking will turn out badly.

[VII] Means of Maintaining the Constitution

Poland’s legislation has been made successively and piecemeal, like all those in Europe. As people would see an abuse, they would make a law to remedy it. From this law other abuses would arise, which had again to be corrected. This way of operating has no end, and leads to the most terrible of all abuses, which is to enfeeble all laws by dint of multiplying them.

The weakening of legislation has taken place in Poland in a quite particular and perhaps unique way. Namely, it has lost its strength without having been subjugated by the executive power. For the time being, the legislative power still preserves all its authority; it is inactive, but without seeing anything above it. The Diet is as sovereign as it was upon its establishment. However, it is devoid of strength; nothing dominates it, but nothing obeys it. This state is remarkable and merits reflection.

What has hitherto preserved legislative authority? It is the continuous presence of the legislator.¹³ It is the frequency of Diets and the frequent renewal of Deputies that have maintained the Republic. England, which enjoys the former of these advantages, lost its liberty through having neglected the latter. The same Parliament lasts so long that the Court, which would ruin itself in buying it every year, is quite happy to buy it for seven and does not fail to do so. First lesson for you.

A second means whereby the legislative power has been preserved in Poland is, firstly, the division of the executive power, which has prevented those invested with the latter from acting in concert to oppress the former; and, secondly, the frequent passage of that same executive power through different hands, which has prevented any consistent system of usurpation. Every King would in the course of his reign take a few steps towards arbitrary power. But the election of his successor would force the latter to retreat rather than press on; and at the beginning of every reign Kings would be obliged by the pacta conventa¹⁴ all to start off from the same point, so that, despite the habitual inclination, there was no real progress towards despotism.

It was the same for the Ministers and high Officials. Independent both from the Senate and from each other, all had an unbounded authority in their respective departments. But apart from the fact that these offices balanced each other out mutually, by not being perpetuated within the same families they carried no absolute strength, and all the power, even usurped, would always return to its source. It would not have been the same if all the executive power had been either in a single Body like the Senate, or in one family through the heredity of the crown. This family or this body would probably sooner or later have oppressed the legislative power, and thereby placed the Poles beneath the yoke that all nations bear, and from which they alone are still exempt; for I already no longer count Sweden. Second lesson.

There you have the advantage; it is doubtless large, but here is the drawback, which is scarcely any smaller. The executive power shared among several individuals lacks harmony between its parts, and causes a continuous conflict incompatible with good order. All those invested with part of that power place themselves, by virtue of that part, in every respect above the magistrates and the laws. They do, to be sure, acknowledge the authority of the Diet; but acknowledging only this, when the Diet is dissolved they acknowledge none at all: they despise the courts and flout their rulings. They are so many little Despots, who, without precisely usurping the sovereign authority, do not fail to oppress Citizens singly; they set a disastrous and too persistent example of violating the rights and the liberty of individuals without scruple and without fear.

I think that this is the first and principal cause of the anarchy that holds sway in the State. In order to remove this cause, I see only one means. It is not to arm the individual tribunals of the public force against these little tyrants: for that force, at times badly administered and at times overcome by a superior force, might provoke disturbances and disorders capable of turning by degrees into civil wars. But it is to arm with the full executive force a respectable and permanent body, such as the Senate, able by virtue of its stability and its authority to hold to their duty the Magnates tempted to depart from it. This means strikes me as effective, and would certainly be so; but the danger in it would be terrible and very difficult to avoid. For as can be seen in the Social Contract,¹⁵ every body invested with the executive power aims strongly and continuously to subjugate the legislative power, and sooner or later succeeds in doing so.

In order to guard against this drawback, you are urged to divide the Senate into a number of councils or departments, each presided over by the Minister responsible for that department; this Minister, like the members of each Council, would change at the end of a fixed term and rotate with those of the other departments. This idea may be good; it was that of the abbé de Saint-Pierre, and he developed it well in his Polysynodie.¹⁶ The executive power thus divided and transitory will be more subordinate to the legislative, and the various parts of the administration will be more thorough and better dealt with separately. However, do not rely too much on this means. If the parts are always separated, they will lack coordination and soon, blocking each other mutually, they will use up almost all their strength against one another, until one of them has won ascendancy and dominates them all; or else, if they do achieve agreement and coordination, they will really constitute but a single body and have but a single mind, like the chambers of a Parliament. And in any case I consider it impossible for independence and equilibrium to be so well maintained between them that they do not always produce a centre or focus of administration, where all the individual forces will always come together to oppress the sovereign. In almost all our republics, the Councils are distributed thus among departments that in their origin were independent from one another, but that soon ceased to be so.

The invention of this division into chambers or departments is modern. The ancients, who knew better than we do how liberty is maintained, had no knowledge of this expedient. The Senate of Rome governed half the known world, and never dreamed of such a division. Yet that Senate never managed to oppress the legislative power, though the Senators were for life. But the laws had Censors, the People had Tribunes, and the Senate did not elect the Consuls.

For the administration to be strong and good, and serve its purpose well, all the executive power must be in the same hands. But it is not enough for these hands to change; they must if possible act only in sight of the Legislator, who must be the one to guide them. That is the true secret, if they are not to usurp his authority.¹⁷

So long as Estates meet and Deputies change frequently, it will be difficult for the Senate or the King to oppress or usurp the legislative authority. It is noteworthy that the Kings have hitherto not sought to make Diets rarer, even though they were not forced like their English counterparts to call them frequently on pain of being left without money. Either things must always have been in a state of crisis that rendered the royal authority insufficient to achieve it, or the Kings must have been persuaded by their intrigues in the Dietines that they still had the majority of Deputies at their disposal, or thanks to the liberum veto¹⁸ they must have been confident of always halting any deliberations that displeased them and dissolving Diets at will. When all these reasons no longer obtain, it must be expected that the King, or the Senate, or both together, will make great efforts to get rid of Diets and make them as rare as possible. That is what you must above all anticipate and forestall. The means I have proposed is the only one; it is simple and cannot fail to be effective. It is quite remarkable that before the Social Contract, where I advance it,¹⁹ no one should have been aware of it.

One of the greatest drawbacks of large States, and precisely that which makes liberty most difficult to preserve, is the fact that the legislative power cannot show itself directly, but can act only by delegation. That has its bad and its good side, but the bad prevails. The Legislator corporately²⁰ is impossible to corrupt, but easy to deceive. His representatives are hard to deceive, but easily corrupted, and it rarely happens that they are not. You have before your eyes the example of the Parliament of England, and thanks to the liberum veto that of your own nation. Now an assembly that is mistaken cannot be enlightened, but how may one that sells itself be restrained? Without being informed about the affairs of Poland, I should wager everything on earth that there is more knowledge in the Diet and more virtue in the Dietines.

I see two means of averting this terrible evil of corruption, which turns the organ of liberty into the instrument of servitude.

The first, as I have already said, is the frequency of Diets, which by often changing the representatives makes their seduction more costly and more difficult. On this point your constitution is preferable to that of Great Britain, and once you have removed or modified the liberum veto I see no other change to be made to it, unless it be to add a few obstacles to sending the same deputies to two consecutive Diets, and to prevent their being elected a great many times. I shall return to this point later on.

The second means is compelling representatives to follow their instructions precisely, and to provide their constituents with a strict account of their conduct in the Diet. On this head, I can only marvel at the negligence, the carelessness and, dare I say, the stupidity of the English Nation, which, having armed its deputies with supreme power, adds no brake to control the use they may make of it over the seven whole years that their mandate lasts.

I see that the Poles are insufficiently aware of the importance of their Dietines, or of all that they owe them, or of all that they can obtain from them by extending their authority and giving them a more regular form. For my part, I am convinced that, if the Confederations saved the fatherland, it is the Dietines which have preserved it, and that is where the true Palladium of liberty is to be found.

The Deputies’ instructions must be drawn up with great care, both on matters announced in the royal summons and on other current needs of the State or Province. This must be done by a commission presided over, if you will, by the Marshal of the Dietine, but for the rest made up of members chosen by a majority of votes; and the nobility must not disperse before these instructions have been read, discussed and agreed in plenary assembly. In addition to the original of these instructions, delivered to the Deputies with their credentials, a copy signed by them must remain in the archives of the Dietine. Upon their return, they must account for their conduct at reporting Dietines, which must absolutely be re-established, in the light of these instructions; and it is on the basis of this account that they must either be excluded from any other subsequent mandate as deputy, or once again be declared admissible if they have followed their instructions to the satisfaction of their constituents. This scrutiny is of the utmost importance. It would be impossible for too much attention to be devoted to it, or its effect recorded too meticulously. Whenever the Deputy utters a single word in the Diet, whenever he takes an initiative there, he must see himself in advance beneath the gaze of his constituents and be aware of the influence their judgement will have, upon both his plans for advancement and the esteem of his compatriots, indispensable for realization of those plans. For, after all, it is not so that Deputies may voice their individual sentiments there, but so that they may express the wishes of the Nation, that she sends them to the Diet. This restraint is absolutely necessary in order to bind them to their duty and forestall all corruption, from any source whatsoever. Whatever people may say about it, I see no disadvantage to this hindrance, since the chamber of Deputies has or ought to have no part in the details of administration, hence can never have to deal with any unforeseen matter. Besides, provided that a deputy does nothing contrary to the express will of his constituents, they would not blame him for having offered an opinion, as a good Citizen, on a matter they had not foreseen and regarding which they had not decided anything. Lastly I must add that, even if there really were some drawback to thus keeping Deputies bound to their instructions, there would be none capable of outweighing the immense advantage that the law would never be anything but the real expression of the nation’s wishes.

But also, if these precautions are taken, there should never be a conflict of jurisdiction between the Diet and the Dietines; and once a law has been enacted by the full Diet, I do not even grant the Dietines any right of protest. Let them punish their deputies. If need be, let them even have those deputies’ heads cut off if they have been corrupt. But let the Dietines obey fully, always, without exception, without protest; let them as is proper pay the penalty for their bad choice; at the next Diet, however, if they think it relevant, let them make representations as vigorous as they please.

Being frequent, Diets have less need to be long; and a duration of six weeks strikes me as quite sufficient for the ordinary needs of the State. But it is contradictory that the sovereign authority should impose fetters on itself, above all when it is directly in the hands of the nation. Let this duration of ordinary Diets continue to be fixed at six weeks, very well. But it will always be open to the assembly to prolong this term by an express decision when affairs so require. For after all, if the Diet, which by its nature is above the law, says: ‘I wish to remain,’ who will say to it: ‘I do not wish you to remain’? There is just the one case when a Diet might wish to last for more than two years, but would not be able to do so: its powers would then come to an end and those of another Diet would begin with the third year. The Diet, which can do everything, can unquestionably prescribe a longer interval between Diets: but this new law could apply only to subsequent Diets, and the one enacting it cannot profit by it. The principles from which these rules may be deduced are established in the Social Contract.

With respect to extraordinary Diets, good order in fact requires that they be rare, and convoked only for urgent necessities. When the King judges them to be such, I admit that he should be believed. But such necessities might exist without his acknowledging it. Should the Senate then be the judge? In a free State, all that can attack liberty must be foreseen. If the Confederations remain, they can in certain cases replace extraordinary Diets; but if you abolish the Confederations, rules for such Diets become a necessity.

It strikes me as impossible for the law to be able to fix the duration of extraordinary Diets rationally, since this depends absolutely upon the nature of the affairs causing it to be convoked. Speed is usually necessary; but since this speed is relative to the matters to be dealt with, which do not come under the heading of current affairs, nothing can be ruled on this in advance; and you might find yourselves in such a state that it would be important for the Diet to remain assembled, until either that state is changed or the time for an ordinary Diet terminates the powers of the present one.

In order to conserve the precious time of the Diets, you should endeavour to rid these assemblies of futile discussions that serve only to waste it. You do, of course, need not just rules and order in them, but ceremonial and majesty too. I should even wish you to pay particular attention to this point and, for example, feel the barbarism and horrible impropriety of seeing the panoply of arms profane the sanctuary of law. Poles, are you more warlike than the Romans were? Yet never in the most troubled times of their Republic did the sight of a blade defile the comitia²¹ or the Senate. But I should also like you to concentrate on important and necessary things, while avoiding anything that can be done equally well elsewhere. The Rugi,²² for instance, when the Deputies’ legitimacy is scrutinized, is a waste of time in the Diet. Not that this scrutiny is not an important thing in itself, but because it can be done as well or better in the same place where they were elected, where they are best known and where all their rivals are. It is in their Palatinate itself, in the Dietine that mandates them, that the validity of their election may best be confirmed and in less time, as is the practice with Radom’s commissaries and with deputies to the Tribunal.²³ That done, the Diet should admit them without any discussion on the Laudum²⁴ they present, in order to prevent not merely obstacles that may delay election of the Marshal, but especially those intrigues whereby the Senate or the King may interfere with elections and quibble over subjects who are not to their liking. What has just taken place in London is a lesson to the Poles. I am well aware that this Wilkes is a mere troublemaker.²⁵ But the example of his exclusion has set a precedent, and henceforth only subjects acceptable to the Court will be admitted to the House of Commons.

You should begin by paying more attention to the selection of members with a vote in the Dietines. In this way it would be easier to identify those who are eligible to serve as deputies. Venice’s Golden Book²⁶ is one model to follow, because it is so simple. It would be convenient and very easy to keep a precise register in every Grod²⁷ of all nobles with a right, under the conditions specified, to appear and vote in the Dietines. You would enter them in the register of their district as soon as they reached the age specified by the laws, and you would erase those to be excluded as soon as they come into that category, noting down the reason for their exclusion. By means of these registers, to which a very authentic form should be given, you would easily distinguish both legitimate members of the Dietines and subjects eligible to serve as deputies, and the length of discussions in this regard would be greatly shortened.

Better discipline in the Diets and Dietines would assuredly be a very useful thing; but I shall never repeat too often that you must not seek two contradictory things at the same time. Discipline is all very well, but freedom is worth more; and the more you trammel liberty with formalities, the more these formalities will provide means for usurpation. All those that you may use to prevent licence in the legislative order, however good in themselves, will sooner or later be used to oppress it. Lengthy, futile orations that waste such precious time are a great evil; but it is a far greater one when a good Citizen does not dare to speak when he has useful things to say. As soon as there are only certain mouths that open in the Diets, and these are forbidden to speak freely, they will no longer say anything except what may please the powerful.

After the indispensable changes in appointments to functions and the distribution of favours, there will probably be fewer futile orations and less toadying addressed to the King in this form. However, in order to prune somewhat the circumlocution and bombast, you might oblige each orator to enunciate at the start of his speech the proposal he is seeking to make, and after inferring his reasons to give his summary conclusions, as the King’s officials do in the courts. If this did not shorten the speeches, it would at least restrain those who wish to speak without having anything to say or to waste time doing nothing.

I am not sure what the form established in the Diets for ratifying laws is, but I do know that, for reasons explained earlier, this form ought not to be the same as in the Parliament of Great Britain; that Poland’s Senate ought to have administrative rather than legislative authority; that on any legislative matter the Senators ought to vote solely as members of the Diet, not as members of the Senate; and that the votes ought to be counted by head equally in both chambers. Perhaps the custom of liberum veto has prevented this distinction being made, but it will be very necessary when the liberum veto is removed, all the more because this will be of immense benefit at least in the chamber of Deputies, for I do not imagine that the Senators, still less the Ministers, have ever shared in this right. The veto of the Polish Deputies represents that of the people’s Tribunes in Rome. Now, the latter did not exercise this right as Citizens, but as Representatives of the Roman People. Loss of the liberum veto thus affects only the chamber of Deputies, and the Senate, corporately losing nothing, consequently gains by it.

Having established this, I see a defect to be corrected in the Diet. This is the fact that, since the number of Senators is almost equal to that of Deputies, the Senate has too large an influence in deliberations, and can easily, through its standing in the equestrian order, win the small number of votes it needs to be always preponderant.

I say that it is a defect; because the Senate, being a particular body in the State, necessarily has corporate interests different from those of the nation, and which can even in certain respects be contrary to the latter. Now the law, which is merely the expression of the general will, is indeed the result of all the particular interests combined and balanced by their multiplicity.²⁸ But corporate interests, constituting too considerable a weight, would break the equilibrium and should not enter it collectively. Every individual must have his vote, but no body whatsoever should have one. Now, if the Senate had too much weight in the Diet, it would not only introduce its own interest, but render this preponderant.

A natural remedy for this defect presents itself directly; this is to increase the number of Deputies; but my fear would be that this might agitate the State too much and bring it too close to the Democratic tumult. If it were absolutely necessary to change the proportion, rather than increase the number of Deputies, I should prefer to decrease the number of Senators. And I do not really see why, already having a Palatine there at the head of each province, Grand Castellans are also needed. But let us never lose sight of the important maxim of changing nothing, either to subtract or to add, unless necessary.

It is preferable in my view to have a less numerous Council and leave more liberty to those who make it up, rather than to increase its number and hamper the liberty of its deliberations, as one is always forced to do when this number becomes too large. To which I should add, if it is permitted to anticipate good as well as ill, that you must avoid making the Diet as numerous as possible, in order not to deprive yourselves of the means one day to admit new Deputies without any fuss, if you ever come to ennoble the Towns and emancipate the serfs, as is desirable for the strength and happiness of the nation.

Let us then seek a means to remedy this defect in another way, and with the least change possible.

All Senators are appointed by the King, and are consequently his creatures. Moreover, they are for life, and by virtue of this form a body independent both of the King and of the equestrian order, which as I have said has its own separate interest and must aim at usurpation. And you must not accuse me here of contradiction, because I admit the Senate as a distinct body in the Republic, although I do not admit it as a constituent order of the Republic, since that is very different.

First of all, you must remove the King’s right to appoint the Senate, not so much because of the power he thereby retains over Senators, which may not be very great, as because of that which he has over all those who aspire to being Senators, and through them over the entire body of the Nation. In addition to the effect of this change to the constitution, it will have the inestimable advantage of quelling the spirit of sycophancy among the nobles, and replacing it by the spirit of patriotism. I see no disadvantage in Senators being appointed by the Diet, and I see great benefits in it, too obvious for me to need to detail them. This appointment can take place straight away in the Diet, or initially in the Dietines with a number of subjects being presented for each vacant seat in their respective Palatinates. Among those elected the Diet would make its choice; or else it would elect a lesser number of them, from among whom the king could still be left the right to choose. But to proceed straight away to the simplest, why should each Palatine not be elected definitively in the Dietine of his province? What disadvantage has been seen to arise from such elections for the Palatines of Polock or of Witebsk, and for the Starost of Samogitie;²⁹ and what would be wrong with the privilege of these three provinces becoming a common right for all? Let us not lose sight of how important it is for Poland to turn her constitution towards the federative form, in order as far as possible to avoid the ills attached to the size, or rather extent, of the State.

In the second place, if you arrange that Senators should no longer be for life, you will considerably weaken the corporate interest aiming at usurpation. But this operation has its difficulties: firstly, because it is hard for men accustomed to handling public affairs to see themselves suddenly reduced to the private state without having incurred any blame; secondly, because Senatorial seats are joined with the titles of Palatine and Castellan, and with the local authority that is attached to these; unrest and grievances would thus flow from any permanent transfer of these titles and this authority from one individual to another. Moreover, this removability cannot be extended to Bishops, and perhaps ought not to be extended to Ministers, whose posts require particular talents and are not always easy to fill adequately. If Bishops alone were for life, the authority of the clergy, already too great, would increase considerably; and it is important that this authority should be balanced by Senators who, like the bishops, are for life and have no greater fear than they do of being demoted.

Here is what I should devise in order to remedy these various disadvantages. I should wish Senatorial seats of the first rank to continue to be for life. That would make, counting in addition to Bishops and Palatines all Castellans of the first rank, eighty-nine immovable Senators.

As for Castellans of the second rank, I should like them all to have a fixed mandate, either for two years allowing for a fresh election in every Diet, or for longer if this is judged appropriate; but always leaving the seat when each mandate is over, subject to electing anew those whom the Diet would like to retain, which I should permit a certain number of times only, in keeping with the plan to be found below.

The obstacle of the titles would be a minor one, since as these titles grant almost no function apart from sitting in the Senate, they could be suppressed without any disadvantage; and instead of the title of bench Castellans, they could simply bear that of deputy Senators. Thanks to the reform the Senate, invested with executive power, would be in permanent session with a certain number of its members; so a proportionate number of deputy Senators would similarly be obliged to attend, again by turns. But this is not the place for such details.

Through this scarcely perceptible change, those Castellans or deputy Senators would become so many real representatives of the Diet, providing a counterweight to the body of the Senate and strengthening the equestrian order in the Nation’s assemblies. In this way the Senators for life, albeit grown more powerful thanks to abolition of the veto and the diminution of royal and Ministerial power, now partly absorbed by themselves as a body, would nevertheless be unable to make the spirit of this body dominant there. And the Senate, now divided between temporary members and life members, would be as well constituted as possible in order to make an intermediary power between the chamber of Deputies and the King, having at once enough stability to run the administration and enough dependency to be subject to the laws. This arrangement seems good to me, because it is simple and yet very effective.

In order to moderate the abuses of the veto, it is proposed no longer to count the Deputies’ votes by head, but to count them by Palatinates. As much reflection as possible must be given to this change before adopting it, even though it has its advantages and is favourable to the federative form. Votes taken en masse and collectively always serve the common interest less directly than those taken individually and separately. It will very often happen that among the Deputies of a Palatinate one of them, in their particular deliberations, will gain ascendancy over the rest and sway the majority to his view, which he would not achieve if each vote remained independent. Hence, corrupters will have less to do and better know whom to approach. Moreover, it is preferable that each Deputy should have to answer for himself to his Dietine, so that none may pass blame to the rest, the innocent and the guilty may not be confused, and distributive justice may be better observed. Many reasons can be adduced against a form that would greatly loosen the common bond and at every Diet might expose the State to division. By making the Deputies more dependent on their instructions and their constituents, you gain more or less the same advantage without any drawback. This supposes, to be sure, that suffrages are not cast by ballot, but by show of hands, so that the conduct and the opinion of each Deputy at the Diet should be known, and that he should answer for them in his own, personal name. But as this matter of suffrages is one of those that I have discussed most carefully in the Social Contract,³⁰ it is superfluous to repeat myself here.

As for the elections, you will perhaps at first find some awkwardness in appointing so many deputy Senators at the same time in every Diet, and generally in electing a large number out of a larger number as will sometimes recur in the plan I have to propose. But by resorting to a ballot in this case, you would easily remove this awkwardness, by means of printed, numbered cards that you would distribute to the electors on the eve of the election, and that would contain the names of all the candidates among whom a choice must be made in this election. The next day the electors would queue up to return all their cards into a basket, after each had marked on his own card those whom he selects or those whom he rejects, depending on the decision noted at the top of his card. The tallying of these same cards would be carried out at once in the presence of the assembly by the Diet secretary, assisted by two other secretaries ad actum appointed on the spot by the Marshal from among the deputies present. By this method the operation would become so short and simple that the whole Senate would easily be filled without conflict or fuss in one sitting. It is true that a rule would still be needed to determine the list of candidates; but this point will have its place and will not be forgotten.

It remains to talk about the King, who presides over the Diet, and who must by his position be the supreme administrator of the Laws.

[VIII] Of the King

It is a great evil that the Head of a nation should be the born enemy of the liberty of which he ought to be the defender. This evil, in my opinion, is not so inherent in that position that it cannot be detached from it, or at least considerably lessened. There is no temptation without hope. Make usurpation impossible for your Kings, you will rid them of that fantasy; and all the efforts that they now put into enslaving you they will put into your good governance and your defence. Poland’s lawmakers, as Count Wielhorski has noted, did indeed give thought to depriving her Kings of the means to do harm, but not of the means to corrupt, and the favours they distribute give them this means in abundance. The difficulty is that, by taking away their ability to distribute favours, you appear to deprive them of everything. But this is what should not be done; for you might just as well not have a King at all, and I consider it impossible for a State as large as Poland to do without one, in other words without a supreme head who is for life. Now unless the head of a nation is entirely null, and consequently useless, he must be able to do something, and however little he does it must necessarily be good or bad.

At the moment the whole Senate is appointed by the King: it is too much. If he plays no part in its appointment, that is not enough. Although the Peerage in England is also appointed by the King, it is far less dependent, because this Peerage once given is hereditary, whereas the Bishoprics, Palatinates and Castellanies, being only for life, revert to the King’s appointment upon the death of every title-holder.

I have said how it seems to me that such appointment should take place, namely the Palatines and Grand Castellans for life by their respective Dietines, the second-ranking Castellans for a term and by the Diet. With respect to the Bishops, it strikes me as difficult, unless you have them elected by their chapters, to remove their appointment from the King, so I think you may leave this to him; always excepting that of the Archbishop of Gniezno,³¹ which naturally belongs to the Diet, unless you separate from it the Primacy, which must be in the gift of the Diet alone. As for Ministers, especially senior Generals and Grand Treasurers, although their power which counterbalances that of the King must be diminished in proportion to his, it does not strike me as prudent to leave to the King the right to fill these posts with his creatures; and I should like him at least only to have a choice from among a small number of subjects presented by the Diet. I agree that, no longer being able to take those posts away having once given them, he can no longer rely absolutely on those who fill them; but they give him enough power over candidates, if not to enable him to change the face of the government, at least to leave him with the hope of doing so, and it is this hope above all that must at all costs be taken away from him.

As for the Grand Chancellor, he should in my view be a royal appointment. Kings are born judges of their peoples; it is for this function, even though they have all abandoned it, that they were established. It cannot be taken away from them; and if they are not willing to exercise it themselves, the appointment of proxies for this function is their right, because it is always they who must answer for judgements delivered in their name. The nation can give them assessors, to be sure, and must do so when Kings do not act as judges themselves. Hence, the Crown court, where the Grand Chancellor, not the King, presides, is under the nation’s supervision; and it is right that the Dietines should appoint the other members. If the King dispensed justice in person, I consider that he would have the right to do so alone. In any case, it would always be in his interest to be just, and iniquitous judgements were never a good path to usurpation.

Regarding other dignities, be they Crown or Palatine, which are merely honorific titles and bring more glitter than credit, you can do no better than to leave them entirely at the King’s disposal: let him be able to honour merit and flatter vanity, but let him not be able to confer power.

The majesty of the throne should be maintained with splendour, but it is important that you leave the King to make as little as possible of all the expenditure necessary for this purpose. It would be desirable for the wages of all the King’s officials to be paid by the Republic rather than by him; and for all the royal revenues to be reduced in proportion, in order to lessen the King’s handling of money as far as possible.

It has been proposed to make the Crown hereditary. Be assured that the moment such a law is passed Poland can bid farewell to her liberty for ever. People think this can be sufficiently provided for by limiting the royal power. They do not see that such limits imposed by the laws will in the course of time be breached by gradual usurpations, and that a system adopted and uninterruptedly followed by a royal family must eventually prevail over a legislation that by its nature constantly tends to slacken. If the King cannot corrupt the Magnates with favours, he can always corrupt them with promises guaranteed by his successors; and since the plans formed by the royal family are perpetuated with it, people will have far more confidence in its commitments and rely far more on their being fulfilled than when an elective crown makes clear that the monarch’s projects end with his life’s end. Poland is free because each reign is preceded by an interval during which the nation, having regained all its rights and rediscovered a fresh vigour, halts the progress of abuses and usurpations, and during which legislation is restored and recovers its original impetus. What will become of the pacta conventa, Poland’s aegis, when a family established in perpetuity on the throne occupies it without any such interval, between the father’s death and the son’s coronation, leaving the nation only an empty shadow of ineffectual liberty, soon to be erased by the pretence of an oath taken by all Kings at their consecration, and by all forgotten forever an instant later? You have seen Denmark, you see England, and you will soon see Sweden.³² Profit by these examples to learn once and for all that, however many precautions you may amass, heredity in the throne and liberty in the nation will forever be incompatible things.

The Poles have always had a propensity for transmitting the Crown from Father to son, or to the next in succession, though always by right of election. This inclination, if they continue to follow it, will sooner or later lead them to the tragedy of making the crown hereditary. And they should not hope to struggle for as long in this way against the royal power as the members of the German Empire struggled against that of the Emperor. For Poland does not have within herself any sufficient counterweight to keep a hereditary King in legal subordination. Despite the power of several members of the Empire, without the accidental election of Charles VII the imperial capitulations³³ would already be no more than an empty formula, as they were at the beginning of this century. And the Pacta Conventa will become far hollower still, once the royal family has had time to consolidate itself and subordinate all the rest. To sum up my sentiments on this point, I think that an elective Crown with the most absolute power would still suit Poland better than a hereditary Crown almost devoid of power.

In place of that fatal law which would make the Crown hereditary, I should propose a quite contrary one, which if it were accepted would maintain Poland’s liberty. This would be to ordain through a fundamental law that the Crown would never pass from father to son, and that every son of a King of Poland would be forever excluded from the throne. I say that I should propose this law if it were necessary; but, as I have in mind a plan that would achieve the same effect without it, I shall defer the explanation of this plan to its proper place. And assuming that it will result in sons being excluded from their father’s throne, at least immediately, it seems to me that a secure liberty will not be the sole advantage to flow from that exclusion. Another very considerable one will be engendered by it: namely, by taking away from Kings all hope of usurping and transmitting to their children an arbitrary power, to direct all their activity towards the glory and prosperity of the State, the only prospect that remains open to their ambition. It is thus that the Head of the Nation, ceasing to be its born enemy, will become its first Citizen. It is thus that he will make it his prime concern to illustrate his reign by useful works that will render him dear to his people and worthy of respect from his neighbours, who will ensure that after him his memory is blessed. And it is thus that, aside from means of harming and seducing, which must never be left to him, it will be advisable to increase his power in all that can contribute to the public weal. He will have little immediate, direct force to act by himself, but he will have a great deal of authority, with powers of supervision and inspection in order to hold everyone to their duty and direct the Government to its true purpose. Presiding over the Diet, the Senate and all bodies; strict scrutiny of the conduct of all office holders; a great concern to maintain justice and integrity in all the courts, to preserve order and tranquillity within the State and give it a good standing without; command of the armies in wartime, useful works in peacetime – these are duties that belong particularly to his office as king, and that will occupy him enough if he wishes to perform them by himself. For since the details of administration are entrusted to Ministers created for this, it should be a crime for a King of Poland to entrust any part of his own to favourites. Let him do his job in person, or let him give it up, an important point regarding which the nation should never grow lax.

It is on similar principles that you should establish the balance and weighting of the powers that make up the legislation and the administration. These powers, as equitably distributed as possible among those invested with them, should be directly proportionate to their number and inversely proportionate to the time they remain in place. The constituent parts of the Diet will follow this equitable distribution quite closely. The chamber of Deputies, the most numerous, will also be the most powerful, but all its members will change frequently. The Senate, less numerous, will play a lesser part in legislation, but a greater part in the executive power; and its members, taking part in the constitution from both extremes, will in part be for a fixed term and in part for life, as befits an intermediary body. The King, presiding over the whole, will continue to be for life; and his power, still very great with respect to inspection, will be limited by the chamber of deputies with respect to legislation and by the Senate with respect to administration. But in order to maintain the constitution’s principle of equality, nothing in it must be hereditary apart from the nobility. If the Crown were hereditary, to preserve a balance the Peerage or Senatorial order would have to be hereditary likewise, as in England. Then the humbled equestrian order would lose its power, since the chamber of Deputies does not like the House of Commons have the power to open and close the public treasury annually, and the Polish constitution would be overturned from top to bottom.

[IX] Particular Causes of Anarchy

The Diet, thus well proportioned and well balanced in all its parts, will be the source of a good legislation and a good government. But for this its orders must be respected and followed. The contempt for the laws and the anarchy in which Poland has lived hitherto have clearly visible causes. I have already noted the main one above, and indicated the remedy. The other contributory causes are: 1. the liberum veto; 2. the confederations; 3. abuse by individuals of the right left to them to have men at arms in their service.

This last abuse is such that, if you do not begin by removing it, all other reforms are useless. So long as individuals have the power to resist the executive power, they will believe that they have the right; and so long as they have little wars between them, how do you think the State could be at peace? I concede that strongholds need guards; but why should you need any such that are strong only against Citizens and weak against the enemy? I fear that this reform may encounter difficulties. However, I do not think it impossible to overcome these, and if only a powerful Citizen be reasonable, he will easily agree to no longer having his own men at arms when no one else has them.

I plan to speak subsequently about military institutions; so I shall defer until then what I might have said about them here.

The liberum veto is not in itself a pernicious right, but as soon as it goes beyond its limit it becomes the most dangerous of abuses: it was the guarantor of public liberty; it is now merely the instrument of oppression. In order to eliminate this fatal abuse, the only way left is to destroy the cause of it entirely. But man’s heart leads him to be more attached to individual privileges than to greater and more general advantages. It is only a patriotism enlightened by experience that can teach him to sacrifice for greater benefits a glorious right grown pernicious through abuse, and from which such abuse is henceforth inseparable. All Poles must feel keenly the ills that this wretched right has made them suffer. If they love order and peace, they have no means to establish among them either of these, so long as they allow this right to survive, a right that is good when the body politic is being formed or is fully perfect, but that is absurd and disastrous so long as changes remain to be made. And it is impossible that changes should not always remain to be made, above all in a large State surrounded by powerful and ambitious neighbours.

The liberum veto would be less irrational if it affected only fundamental points of the constitution; but what is utterly unacceptable is its general use in all deliberations in the Diets. It is a defect of the Polish constitution that legislation and administration are not distinguished sufficiently, and that the Diet, while exercising legislative power, also performs administrative functions; that it performs acts of sovereignty and government indiscriminately, and often even mixed acts in which its members are all at once magistrates and legislators.

The proposed changes aim to distinguish these two powers more clearly, thus marking more clearly the limits of the liberum veto. For I do not think it ever occurred to anyone to extend it to matters of pure administration, which would be to nullify civil authority and government as a whole.

By the natural right of societies, unanimity was required³⁴ for the formation of the body politic and for the fundamental laws pertaining to its existence: for example, the first as amended, the fifth, the ninth and the eleventh, all recorded in the Pseudo-Diet of 1768.³⁵ Now, the unanimity required for the enactment of these laws must be required equally for their abrogation. So there you have some subjects on which the liberum veto can continue to exist. And since there is no question of abolishing it totally, Poles who without much grumbling saw this right restricted by the illegal Diet of 1768 ought easily to see it reduced and limited in a freer and more legitimate Diet.

You must weigh and consider carefully those capital points which you will establish as fundamental laws, and bring to bear on these points alone the force of the liberum veto. In this way you will render the constitution solid and the laws so far as possible irrevocable. For it is against the nature of the body politic to impose laws upon itself that it cannot revoke; but it is neither against nature nor against reason that it should be able to revoke those laws only with the same formality that it adopted to enact them. There you have the only chain with which it can bind its future. This will suffice both to reinforce the Constitution and to satisfy the Poles’ love of the liberum veto, without exposing itself thereafter to the abuses the veto has engendered.

As for that plethora of items that have ridiculously been added to the number of fundamental laws, and that constitute merely the body of legislation, as with all those that are classified under the heading of State matters, by the changing nature of things they are subject to inevitable variations which do not allow unanimity to be required on them. It is still absurd that, in any case whatsoever, a member of the Diet should be able to halt its activity, and that the withdrawal or the protest of a Deputy or of several should be able to dissolve the assembly and thus nullify the sovereign authority. This barbarous right must be abolished, and capital punishment be imposed upon anyone who might be tempted to avail himself of it. If there were cases of protest against the Diet, which cannot happen so long as it is free and complete, it would be Palatinates and Dietines which could be granted this right, but never Deputies, who as members of the Diet must not have any degree of authority over it or challenge its decisions.

Between the veto, which is the greatest individual power that members of the sovereign can have and which must be applied only for genuinely fundamental laws, and majority, which is the least and which relates to matters of mere administration, there are various proposals regarding which the preponderance of views can be determined in proportion to the importance of the topic. For example, when it is a matter of legislation, at least three-quarters of the suffrages can be required, two-thirds on matters of State, a simple majority for elections and other current, ephemeral business. This is simply an example to explain my idea, and not a proportion that I have fixed on.

In a State such as Poland where souls still have great energy, perhaps this fine right of liberum veto might have been preserved in its entirety without much risk, and perhaps even with advantage, provided that the right had been made dangerous to exercise, and serious consequences had been attached to it for anyone availing himself of it. For it is extravagant, I venture to say, that he who interrupts the activity of the Diet and leaves the State without recourse should go off home to enjoy, tranquil and unpunished, the public desolation he has caused.

So if, in an almost unanimous resolution, a single opponent retained the right to nullify it, I should like him to answer with his head for his opposition, not merely to his constituents in the post-assembly Dietine, but then to the whole nation he has injured. I should like it to be decreed by law that six months after his opposition he would be ceremoniously judged by an extraordinary court established for that sole purpose, made up of all the nation’s wisest, most illustrious and most respected men, and which could not simply acquit him, but would be obliged to condemn him to death without hope of pardon, or else to grant him a reward and public honours for his whole life, without ever being able to take any middle course between these two alternatives.

Institutions of this kind, so favourable to vigorous courage and the love of liberty, are too far removed from the modern spirit for it to be hoped they might be adopted or appreciated; but they were not unknown to the ancients, and were the means whereby their lawmakers were able in the hour of need to uplift souls and fire them to a truly heroic ardour. In Republics where still harsher laws prevailed, generous Citizens were known to risk death when the fatherland was in peril, in order to advance an opinion that might save it. A veto followed by the same danger may save the State on occasion, and will never be a cause for great alarm.

Should I venture here to speak about the confederations and not share the view of scholars? They see only the evil that these do; the evil that they prevent ought also to be seen. Indubitably confederation is a violent state in the Republic; but there are extreme evils which make extreme remedies necessary, and which you must seek to cure at all costs. Confederation in Poland is what Dictatorship was among the Romans: both cause the laws to fall silent in time of pressing danger, but with this great difference: that Dictatorship, directly contrary to Rome’s Legislation and the spirit of its government, finished by destroying the latter; while Confederation, on the contrary, being merely a means of reinforcing and restoring the constitution shaken by great efforts, can aim to strengthen the loosened mainspring of the State without ever being able to break it. This federative form, which in its origin perhaps had a fortuitous cause, strikes me as a masterpiece of politics. Wherever liberty reigns, it is ceaselessly attacked and very often in peril. Every free State in which great crises have not been foreseen is in danger of perishing from every storm. It is the Poles alone who have been capable of drawing from these very crises a new means of upholding the Constitution. Without the Confederations, the Republic of Poland would long ago have ceased to exist, and I fear she will not last long after them, if the decision is taken to abolish them. Cast your eyes upon what has just taken place. Without the Confederations, the State was subjugated; liberty was annihilated for ever. Do you wish to take away from the Republic the resource that has just saved it?

And let it not be thought that when the liberum veto is abolished and majority re-established, the confederations will become useless, as if their entire advantage consisted in that majority. It is not the same thing. The executive power attached to the confederations will always give them at moments of dire need a vigour, an activity, a speed that the Diet cannot have, forced as it is to advance at a slower pace, with more formalities, and unable to make a single irregular move without overturning the constitution.

No, the Confederations are the buckler, the refuge, the sanctuary of that constitution. So long as they survive, it seems impossible to me that it should destroy itself. They must be left, but they must be regulated. If all abuses were taken away, the confederations would become almost useless. The reform of your Government must bring about this effect. Violent undertakings alone will necessitate having recourse to them, but such undertakings are in the nature of things to be foreseen. So instead of abolishing the confederations, decide on the cases in which they may legitimately take place, and then carefully regulate their form and effect, in order to give them so far as possible a legal sanction, without hampering their formation or their activity. Situations may even arise when for that very reason all Poland should be instantly confederated. When, for example, upon any pretext whatsoever and outside a situation of open warfare, foreign troops set foot in the State. For after all, whatever the motive for such entry and even had the government itself agreed to it, confederation at home is not hostility to others. When, for whatever reason it may be, the Diet is prevented from assembling at the time prescribed by the law; when, at the instigation of whosoever it may be, men at arms appear at the time and place of its assembly; or when its form is altered; or when its activity is suspended; or when its liberty is trammelled in any way whatsoever: in all these cases, general Confederation ought for that very reason to exist. Private assemblies and signatures are merely its offshoots, and all its Marshals should be subordinated to whichever has been appointed first.

[X] Administration

Without going into administrative details about which I lack knowledge and opinions alike, I shall venture only, upon the two subjects of finance and war, a few ideas that I must express because I think them good, though I am almost sure they will not be appreciated. But first of all I shall make a comment on the administration of justice which is a little less far removed from the spirit of the Government of Poland.

The two estates of men of the sword and men of the gown³⁶ were unknown to the ancients. Citizens were not soldiers or judges or priests by profession: they were everything by duty. There you have the true secret of ensuring that everyone moves towards the common goal; of preventing the spirit of estate from taking root in bodies at the expense of patriotism, and the hydra of dissension from devouring a nation. The function of judge, as much in the highest tribunals as in the land courts, should be a temporary and trial estate, on the basis of which the nation can assess the merit and probity of a Citizen, in order subsequently to raise him to the most eminent positions of which he is found to be capable. This way of viewing themselves cannot fail to make judges very careful in shielding themselves from all reproach, and to endow them generally with all the care and all the integrity that their position demands. It is in this way that in the golden days of Rome you would pass by way of the Praetorship to reach the Consulate. There you have the means whereby justice may be well administered, even with few clear and simple laws and even with few judges, by leaving judges the power to interpret the laws, and if need be supplement them with the natural wisdom of righteousness and good sense. Nothing is more puerile than the precautions taken in this respect by the English. In order to eliminate arbitrary judgements, they have submitted to a thousand iniquitous and even eccentric judgements: swarms of legal men devour them, unending trials consume them, and with the mad idea of wishing to anticipate everything they have made their laws into an immense maze, where memory and reason alike get lost.

It is necessary to make three codes. One political, another civil, and another criminal. All three as clear, brief and precise as possible. These codes will be taught not only in the universities, but in all schools, and no other body of law is needed. All the rules of natural law are better inscribed in men’s hearts than in all Justinian’s jumble. Simply make them honest and virtuous and I promise you they will know enough law. But all Citizens and especially public men must be instructed in the positive laws of their country and the particular rules according to which they are governed. They will find them in those codes, which they must study. And all nobles, before being registered in the golden book that will give them entry to a Dietine, must undergo an examination on these codes, especially the first, that is no mere formality, and on the basis of which, if they are not sufficiently instructed, they will be rejected until such time as they are more so. With respect to Roman and customary law, all that, if it exists, must be removed from the schools and courts. No authority must be recognized in them except for the Laws of the State; these must be uniform in all provinces, in order to dry up a source of trials; and questions not decided in them must be decided by the good sense and integrity of the judges. Be assured that when the magistracy for those who exercise it is only a trial estate in order to rise higher, this authority will not be as much abused by them as might be feared; or, if such abuse does occur, it will still be less than that of those proliferating and often contradictory laws, the number of which makes trials unending and the conflict between which makes judgements just as arbitrary.

What I say here about judges must be understood as applying a fortiori to Lawyers. This estate, so respectable in itself, is degraded and abased as soon as it becomes a profession. The lawyer should be the first and harshest judge of his client. His job should be, as it was in Rome and as it still is in Geneva, the first step to reaching the magistracies; and lawyers are indeed highly regarded in Geneva, and deserve to be. They are candidates for the Council, very careful to do nothing that might expose them to public disapprobation. I should like all public functions thus to lead from one to another, so that no one by arranging to remain in his own could make it into a lucrative profession and place himself above the judgement of men. This arrangement would perfectly fulfil the aim of making the children of rich citizens pass through the lawyer’s estate, in this way rendered honourable and temporary. I shall develop this idea more clearly in a moment.

I must say here in passing, since it comes into my mind, that it is against the system of equality in the equestrian order to establish entails or Majorats.³⁷ Legislation must always aim at diminishing the great inequality of fortune and power that puts too much distance between the Magnates and the mere nobles, and that a natural progression always tends to increase. With respect to the Census through which the quantity of land is fixed which a noble must own to be admitted to the Dietines, seeing good and bad in this and not knowing the country well enough to compare the effects, I absolutely do not dare to decide on this question. It would indubitably be desirable that a Citizen with the right to vote in a Palatinate should own some lands there; but I should not much like the quantity of these to be fixed: in counting possessions for a great deal, should men then count for nothing at all? What, then! Because a Gentleman has little or no land, does he thereby cease to be free and noble, and is his poverty alone a crime serious enough to make him lose his right as a Citizen?

Besides, no law must ever be allowed to fall into disuse. Even if it is indifferent or bad, it must be formally abrogated or kept in force. This maxim, which is fundamental, will make it necessary to pass under review all ancient laws, to abrogate many of them, and to endow any you wish to keep with the severest sanction. It is seen as a State maxim in France to close your eyes to many things, which is what despotism always imposes; but in a free Government it is the means to enfeeble legislation and undermine the constitution. Few laws, but well digested and above all well observed. All abuses that are not forbidden are still without consequence. But whoever pronounces a law in a free State pronounces something at which every Citizen trembles, and the King first of all. In a word, allow everything rather than waste the resource of the laws; for once this resource is wasted, the State is ruined without recourse.

[XI] Economic System

Choice of the economic system Poland should adopt depends upon the objective she sets herself in correcting her constitution. If you wish only to become noisy, glittering, formidable and have an effect on the other peoples of Europe, you have their example, apply yourself to imitating it. Cultivate the sciences, the arts, commerce, industry, have regular troops, strongholds, Academies, above all a good system of finances which makes money circulate well, which thereby multiplies it, and which procures you a great deal of it. Work at making it very necessary, in order to keep the people highly dependent, and to that end foment both material luxury and luxury of the spirit, which is inseparable from it. In this way you will form a scheming, hot-blooded, greedy, ambitious, servile and rascally people like the rest, always with no middle term between the two extremes of destitution and opulence, licence or enslavement. But you will be counted among the great powers of Europe, you will enter all political systems, in all negotiations your alliance will be sought, you will be bound by treaties. There will be no war in Europe in which you do not have the honour of being mixed up. If fortune has it in for you, you will manage to regain your old possessions, perhaps conquer new ones, and then say like Pyrrhus or like the Russians, in other words like children: ‘When the whole world is mine, I shall eat a lot of sugar.’

But if by chance you would prefer to form a free, peaceful and wise nation that neither fears nor needs anyone, that suffices for itself and is happy, then you must adopt a quite different method: retain or re-establish among yourselves simple manners, healthy tastes and a martial spirit without ambition; form courageous and disinterested souls; apply your peoples to agriculture and to the arts necessary to life; make money contemptible and if possible useless, seeking and finding more powerful and reliable resources in order to achieve great things. I concede that by following this path you will not fill the gazettes with the noise of your festivities, your negotiations or your exploits; that philosophers will not shower praise upon you; that poets will not hymn you; that you will be little spoken of in Europe. Perhaps people will even affect to disdain you. But you will live in genuine abundance, in justice and in liberty. No one will seek to provoke you, people will fear you without seeming to, and I promise you neither the Russians nor anyone else will any longer come to lord it over you, or if they do have the misfortune to come they will be in a far greater hurry to leave. Above all, do not try to ally these two plans. They are too contradictory, and seeking to advance on both in a combined march would mean failing in both. So choose, and if you prefer the former path, stop reading me here. For of all that remains for me to propose, there is nothing relative to anything but the latter.

There are indubitably excellent economic opinions in the papers that have been communicated to me. The fault I perceive in them is that of being more favourable to wealth than to prosperity. With respect to new institutions, you must not be satisfied with seeing their immediate effect; it is necessary to see clearly their remote but inevitable consequences also. For example, the plan for the sale of elderships (starostwa) and for the way of using the proceeds strikes me as well conceived and easy to implement in the system established throughout Europe of doing everything with money. But is this system good in itself and does it achieve its aim? Is it certain that money is the sinew of war? Rich peoples have always been beaten and conquered by poor peoples. Is it certain that money is the mainspring of a good government? Financial systems are modern. I see nothing good or great proceeding from them. Ancient Governments did not even know that word ‘finance’, and what they did with men is prodigious. Money is at most men’s supplement, and the supplement will never equal the thing itself. Poles, leave all that money to others, or content yourselves with what they will have to give you, since they have more need of your wheat than you do of their gold. It is preferable, believe me, to live in abundance than in opulence; be better than moneyed, be rich. Cultivate your fields well, without caring for the rest, soon you will be harvesting gold, and more than you need to procure the oil and wine you lack, since apart from these Poland abounds or can abound in everything. To keep yourselves happy and free, it is heads, hearts and arms that you need: that is what makes the strength of a State and the prosperity of a people. Financial systems make venal souls, and as soon as you seek only to earn, you always earn more by being a rogue than an honest man. The use of money goes astray and becomes hidden; it is destined for one thing and used for another. Those who handle it soon learn to divert it, and what are all the overseers you may give them but other rogues whom you send to share with them. If there were only public, evident wealth; if the progress of gold left a visible mark and could not be hidden; there would be no more convenient expedient for buying services, courage, fidelity, virtues. But in view of its secret circulation, it is even more convenient for making plunderers and traitors, and for putting liberty and the public weal up for auction. In short, money is at once the weakest and most futile mainspring I know for making the political machine advance to its goal, the strongest and most reliable for diverting it from that goal.

You can make men act only through their interest, I know. But pecuniary interest is the worst of all, the basest, the most apt for corruption, and even, I repeat with confidence and shall always maintain, the least and weakest in the eyes of anyone who knows well the human heart. In all hearts, there are naturally great passions in reserve; when the passion for money alone still remains there, it is because all others that needed to be aroused and developed have been enfeebled and stifled. The miser has no real passion dominating him: he craves money only out of forethought, to satisfy those passions that may come to him. Know how to foment and satisfy them directly, without that resource: it will soon lose all its value.

Public expenditures are inevitable, I again concede. Make them with anything else but money. You still see to this day in Switzerland officials, magistrates and other public stipendiaries being paid in kind. They have tithes, wine, wood, rights both useful and honorific. All public service is done through obligatory duties [corvées], the State pays almost nothing in money. Money is needed, you will say, for paying the troops. This point will be attended to in a moment. This manner of payment is not without its disadvantages: there is loss and wastage; the administration of these kinds of goods is more cumbersome, and is especially unappealing to those charged with it since they find less profit there. All this is true. But how small the evil is, in comparison with the host of evils that it saves! Should a man seek to embezzle, he would not be able, at least without being seen to do so. You will counter me with the Bailiffs of the Canton of Berne;³⁸ but whence do their outrages spring? From the pecuniary fines they impose. These arbitrary fines are already a great evil in themselves. However, if they could demand them only in kind, it would be almost nothing. The money they extort is easily hidden, storehouses could not be hidden in like fashion. Ten times more money is handled in the Canton of Berne alone than in all the rest of Switzerland; so its administration is iniquitous in proportion. Seek in every country, in every government and throughout the world. You will not find a single great evil in either morals or politics that does not involve money.

You will tell me that the equality of fortunes prevailing in Switzerland makes parsimony in the administration easy; whereas all those powerful houses and great Lords that exist in Poland require great expenditures for their upkeep and finances to provide for these. Not at all. Those great Lords are rich by virtue of their inherited wealth, and their expenditures will be less when luxury ceases to be honoured in the State, without thereby distinguishing them any the less from inferior fortunes, which will follow the same proportion. Pay their services with authority, with honours, with high positions. Inequality of rank is compensated in Poland by the advantage of nobility, which makes those who fill the various ranks more jealous of honours than of profit. In graduating and distributing these purely honorific rewards as appropriate, the Republic is storing up a treasure that will not ruin it and that will give it heroes as Citizens. This treasury of honours is an inexhaustible resource for a people that has honour. If Poland could only hope to exhaust that resource. Oh, happy the nation that will no longer find within it possible distinctions for virtue!

To the defect of not being worthy of virtue, pecuniary rewards add that of not being sufficiently public, of not forever speaking to eyes and hearts, of vanishing as soon as they are granted, and of leaving no visible trace that may fire emulation by perpetuating the honour that should accompany them. I should wish that all grades, all functions and all honorific rewards be marked by external signs; that a man in high office never be allowed to walk incognito; that the marks of his rank or his dignity follow him everywhere, so that the people would always respect him and he would always respect himself; that he be able in this way always to dominate opulence. I should wish that a rich man who is merely rich, and constantly overshadowed by poor Citizens with titles, find neither consideration nor esteem in his fatherland; that he be forced to serve it in order to shine in it, forced to be honest by ambition, and forced to aspire despite his wealth to ranks accessible only through public approval, and from which blame can always exclude. That is how to weaken the power of wealth, and make men who are not for sale. I insist a great deal on this point, quite convinced that your neighbours, and especially the Russians, will spare no effort to corrupt your high officials, and that your Government’s main task is to work at making these incorruptible.

If I am told that I am seeking to make Poland a people of Capuchins,³⁹ I answer first that this is merely a French style of argument, and joking is not reasoning. I answer further that my maxims must not be exaggerated beyond what I intend and beyond reason; that my plan is not to suppress the circulation of currency, but merely to slow it and, above all, prove how important it is that a good economic system should not be a system of finance and money. Lycurgus, in order to uproot cupidity in Sparta, did not abolish coinage, but he made one out of iron. For my part, I intend to proscribe neither money nor gold, but to make them less necessary and ensure that whosoever has none, though poor, should not be a beggar. Basically, money is not wealth, but merely its sign; it is not the sign that should be multiplied, but the thing represented. In spite of travellers’ tales, I have seen that the English amid all their gold are individually no less needy than other peoples. And what does it matter to me, after all, to have a hundred guineas instead of ten, if those hundred guineas do not bring me an easier subsistence? Pecuniary wealth is merely relative, and, depending on ratios that can change for a thousand reasons, you can find yourself successively rich and poor with the same sum. But not with goods in kind; for, as directly useful to man, they always have their absolute value that does not depend on any commercial operation. I shall grant that the English people is richer than the rest, but it does not follow that a London burgher lives more comfortably than a Paris burgher. As between peoples, the one that has more money has some advantage; but this has nothing to do with the fate of individuals, nor is it wherein the prosperity of a nation resides.

Encourage agriculture and the useful arts, not by enriching farmers, which would merely incite them to quit their estate, but by making the latter honourable and agreeable for them. Establish manufactures that are a prime necessity; constantly multiply your hamlets and your men, without concerning yourself with the rest. The surplus product from your lands, which thanks to the multiplication of monopolies the rest of Europe will lack, will necessarily bring you more money than you have need of. Beyond this necessary and reliable product, you will be poor so long as you want to have; as soon as you know how to do without, you will be rich. That is the spirit I should like to have prevail in your economic system. Think little about abroad, worry little about commerce; but at home multiply both staples and consumers as much as possible. The infallible and natural effect⁴⁰ of a free and just Government is population. So the more you perfect your Government, the more you will multiply your people without even giving it a thought. You will thus have neither beggars nor millionaires. Luxury and indigence will imperceptibly disappear together, and the Citizens, cured of the frivolous tastes that opulence gives and the vices attendant upon destitution, will devote their efforts and their glory to serving the fatherland well and will find their happiness in their duties.

I should like you always to tax men’s arms more than their purse; to provide for roads, Bridges and public buildings, or service to Prince and State, through corvées rather than money payments. This kind of tax is basically the least onerous, and above all is least open to abuse. For money vanishes as it leaves the hands that pay it; but everyone sees what men work at, so they cannot be overburdened to no purpose. I know this method is impracticable where luxury, commerce and the arts hold sway: but nothing is as easy among a simple people with virtuous manners, and nothing is more useful for keeping their manners virtuous. That is one more reason to prefer it.

So I return to the elderships, and I concede from the outset that the plan of selling them with a view to using the proceeds for the benefit of the public exchequer is good and well conceived with regard to its economic aim. But as for the political and moral aim, this plan is so little to my taste that, if the elderships were sold, I should like them to be bought back and made into a fund for the salaries and rewards of those who serve the fatherland or deserve well of her. In short, if possible I should like there to be no public exchequer, and the treasury to be unacquainted with money payments. I am aware that such a thing strictly speaking is impossible; but the spirit of government must always aim to make it possible, and nothing is more contrary to that spirit than the sale in question. The Republic would be richer, it is true; but the government’s vigour would thereby be proportionately weaker.

I admit that the management of public property would become more difficult, and above all less agreeable for the managers, if all such property were in kind rather than in money. But this management and its supervision must then be made into so many tests of good sense, vigilance and above all integrity, for attaining more exalted posts. In this respect, you will simply imitate the municipal administration established at Lyons, where it is necessary to begin by being Administrator of the Hôtel-Dieu⁴¹ before other positions in the city can be attained; and it is on the basis of how you acquit yourself in that position that people judge whether you are worthy of the others. The integrity of the Quaestors of Roman armies was unsurpassed, since the Quaestorship was the first step to reaching curule positions. In posts that may invite cupidity, it must be ensured that this is restrained by ambition. The greatest benefit flowing from this is not elimination of swindles; it is paying honour to disinterestedness, and making poverty respectable when it is the fruit of integrity.

The Republic’s revenues do not meet its expenditures. I can well believe it: its Citizens want to pay nothing at all. But men who wish to be free should not be slaves to their purses, and where is the State in which liberty is not paid for, often very dearly? You will bring up Switzerland; but, as I have already said, in Switzerland Citizens themselves perform the functions that everywhere else they prefer paying to have others perform for them. They are soldiers, officials, magistrates, labourers; they are everything for the State’s service and, always ready to pay with their person, they have no need to pay also with their purse. When the Poles wish to do the same, they will have no more need of money than the Swiss; but if so large a State refuses to behave in accordance with the maxims of small Republics, it must not expect the advantages of the latter, or seek the effect while rejecting the means to obtain it. If Poland, as I should wish, were a confederation of thirty-three small States, it would combine the strength of large Monarchies with the liberty of small Republics; but for that it would have to renounce ostentation, and I fear this would be the most difficult thing.

Of all the ways to establish a tax, the most convenient and least costly is unquestionably capitation.⁴² But it is also the most forcible and most arbitrary. That is doubtless why Montesquieu relates it to slavery, although it was the only one practised by the Romans and still exists in the present day in several Republics; under other names, to be sure, as in Geneva, where it is called ‘paying the Guards’, and where the tax is paid by Citizens and Burghers alone, whereas residents and natives pay others. This is the exact opposite of Montesquieu’s idea.

But as it is unjust and senseless to tax people who have nothing, levies on property are always preferable to those on the person. However, those that are difficult and costly to collect must be avoided, and especially those that are eluded by contraband, which devalues assets, fills the State with smugglers and brigands, and corrupts Citizens’ loyalty. Taxation must be so well balanced that the bother of fraud outweighs its benefits. So never any tax upon what can easily be hidden, like lace or jewels; it is better to forbid the wearing of these than their import. In France the temptation of contraband is stimulated without restraint, and that makes me think that the Tax administration benefits from the existence of smugglers. This system is abominable and contrary to all good sense. Experience teaches that tax stamps are singularly burdensome for the poor, and frustrating for commerce; they generate endless quibbles and cause the people to complain wherever they are established. I should not advise you to consider them. A duty on livestock strikes me as far better, provided you avoid fraud, since any possible fraud is always a source of ills. But it can be a burden on the taxpayers, in that it has to be paid in money; and the proceeds from this kind of duty are too subject to being diverted from their destination.

The best tax, in my view, the most natural, and one that is not subject to fraud at all, is a proportional tax on estates, and on all estates without exception, as the Maréchal de Vauban and the abbé de Saint-Pierre⁴³ have proposed. For, after all, it is that which produces that should pay. All properties – of King, nobility, Church and commoner – should pay equally: in other words, proportionately to their extent and their yield, whoever their proprietor may be. This levy would seem to require a preliminary operation that is long and costly, namely a general land registry. But this expense may very easily be avoided, and even with advantage, by basing the duty not directly upon the land, but upon its yield, which would be still fairer. In other words by establishing, in whatever proportion may be deemed appropriate, a tithe to be levied in kind on the harvest, like the church tithe; and in order to avoid the trouble of their retail and storage, these Tithes could be farmed out to the highest bidder, as parish priests do. In that way individuals would be obliged to pay the Tithe only on their harvest, paying it out of their purses only if they preferred to do so, at a tariff set by the government. The pooled Tithes could be used as an object of commerce, since the foodstuffs they produce could be sold off abroad via Danzig or Riga. In this way you would also avoid all collection and management costs, all those swarms of agents and clerks so odious to the people, so inconvenient for the public; and, most important point of all, the republic would have money without citizens being obliged to give any. For I shall never repeat enough that what makes the land tax [taille] and all duties burdensome to the farmer is the fact that they are pecuniary, and that before he can pay he is first obliged to sell.

[XII] Military System

Of all the Republic’s expenditures, the upkeep of the army of the Crown is the most considerable; and the services that this army renders are certainly not commensurate with what it costs. However, you will say at once, troops are needed to protect the State. I should agree if those troops did indeed protect it; but I cannot see that this army has ever safeguarded the State from any invasion, and I greatly fear it will not safeguard it any more in future.

Poland is surrounded by warlike powers, which constantly maintain at the ready large numbers of highly disciplined troops, whom, try as she may, she will never be able to match like for like, without exhausting herself in a very short space of time, especially in the deplorable state in which she will be left by the brigands ravaging her. Besides, she would not be allowed to do it; and if, with the resources of the most vigorous administration, she sought to place her army on a respectable footing, her neighbours, intent on preventing her, would very swiftly crush her before she could implement her plan. No, if she wishes merely to imitate them, she will never stand up to them.

The Polish nation is different by temperament, government, manners and language not merely from its neighbours but from all the rest of Europe. I should wish her to be different also by military constitution, tactics and discipline; always to be herself and no other. It is only then that she will be all that she can be, and that she will draw from her bosom all the resources that she is capable of having. The most inviolable law of nature is the law of the strongest. There is no legislation, no constitution, that can exempt you from that law. To pursue the means to safeguard yourself from the invasions of a neighbour stronger than you is to pursue a pipe-dream. It would be a still greater one to seek to make conquests and endow yourself with an offensive strength: that is incompatible with your form of government. Whosoever seeks to be free must not seek to be a conqueror. The Romans were conquerors out of necessity and, in a manner of speaking, despite themselves. War was a necessary remedy for the defect of their constitution. Always attacked and always victorious, they were the only disciplined people amid those barbarians, and became masters of the world while still defending themselves. Your position is so different that you would not even know how to defend yourselves against anyone who attacked you. You will never have offensive strength; you will not have defensive strength for a long while; but you will soon have, or rather you already have, the preservative strength that will safeguard you from destruction even if you are subjugated, and that will preserve your government and your liberty in its sole true sanctuary, which is the hearts of Poles.

Regular troops, the plague and depopulators of Europe, are good for two ends alone: either for attacking and conquering neighbours or for chaining and enslaving Citizens. These two ends are equally alien to you; so renounce the means whereby they are arrived at. The State must not be left without defenders, I know; but its true defenders are its members. Every citizen must be a soldier out of duty, none must be a soldier by profession. Such was the military system of the Romans; such today is that of the Swiss; such must be that of every free State, and especially of Poland. In no position to pay for a sufficient army to defend herself, she must when needed find that army among her inhabitants. A good militia, a proper and well-trained militia, is alone capable of fulfilling this aim. This militia will cost the Republic little, will always be ready to serve her, and will serve her well, because after all you always defend your own property better than you do another’s.

Count Wielhorski proposes to levy one Regiment per Palatinate, and to keep it always at the ready. This assumes that the army of the Crown, or at least the infantry, would be discharged. For I think that the upkeep of these thirty-three Regiments would overburden the republic too much if she had the crown’s army to pay in addition. This change would have its utility and appears easy to effect; but it may still become burdensome, and preventing abuses will be difficult. I would not counsel scattering the soldiers to keep order in towns and villages; that would be bad for their discipline. Soldiers, especially professional ones, ought never to be left to their own devices, still less charged with any control over citizens. They should always march and be quartered as a body: always subordinated and overseen, they should be simply blind instruments in the hands of their officers. Should they be entrusted with the least degree of control, it would lead to violence, harassment and countless abuses; soldiers and inhabitants would become enemies to one another. This is an evil attendant upon regular troops everywhere; those permanently standing regiments would adopt their spirit, and this spirit is never favourable to liberty. The Roman republic was destroyed by its legions when the remoteness of its conquests forced it to keep them always standing. Once again, the Poles should not cast their gaze about them in order to imitate what is done there, even excellently. This excellence in relation to quite different constitutions would be an evil in their own. They should follow only what is appropriate for them and not what others do. Why, then, instead of regular troops a hundred times more burdensome than useful to any people that does not have the spirit of conquest, should you not establish a real militia in Poland, exactly like that established in Switzerland, where every inhabitant is a soldier, but only when he needs to be? The serfdom established in Poland does not, I admit, allow you to arm the peasants so soon: arms in servile hands will always be more dangerous than useful to the State. But while waiting for the happy moment of their enfranchisement to arrive, Poland abounds with towns, the inhabitants of which once enrolled could in time of need furnish numerous troops, whose upkeep outside of that time of need would cost the State nothing. Most of these inhabitants, having no lands, would thus pay their quota in service, and this service could easily be distributed in such a way as not to be burdensome to them, yet they would be properly drilled.

In Switzerland every individual who marries is obliged to be equipped with a uniform that becomes his holiday wear, a rifle of military calibre, and a foot-soldier’s full equipment; and he is enrolled in his local company. During the summer, these militias are drilled on Sundays and holidays in the order of their enrolment, first in small squads, then in companies, then in regiments; until, when their turn comes, they assemble in the field and form a succession of small encampments, in which they are drilled in all manoeuvres appropriate for infantry. So long as they do not leave their place of residence, not being distracted much or at all from their labours, they receive no pay; but as soon as they march out into the field, they have army rations and are in the State’s employ. And no one is allowed to send another in his place, so that each may himself be drilled and all do service. In a State such as Poland, you can draw from its vast provinces the wherewithal easily to replace the army of the Crown by a sufficient number of militias always at the ready, but which, changing at least every year and taken in small detachments from all units, would not be very burdensome to individuals, whose turn would come barely once every twelve or fifteen years. In this way, the whole nation would be drilled, you would have a fine and numerous army always ready when needed, and which would cost much less, especially in peacetime, than the army of the Crown costs today.

But in order to carry out this operation successfully, you would have to begin by changing public opinion in this respect concerning an estate that will indeed be wholly changed; and ensure that in Poland a soldier is no longer seen as a bandit who to live sells himself for five sous a day, but as a Citizen who serves the fatherland and is on duty. That estate must be restored to the same honour in which it was formerly held, and still is in Switzerland and at Geneva, where the finest Burghers are as proud in their corps and under arms as in the town hall and in the Sovereign Council. For this, it is important that in the choice of officers you should pay no regard to rank, reputation or fortune, but solely to experience and talent. Nothing is easier than to make skill at handling arms a point of honour, so that everyone trains zealously to serve the fatherland in sight of his family and his intimates; a zeal that cannot be aroused in the same way among riff-raff enrolled at random, who feel only the hardship of training. At Geneva, I saw the time when Burghers would manoeuvre far better than regular troops; but the Magistrates, finding that this provoked a military spirit among the Burghers that did not accord with their views, took pains to stifle such emulation, and succeeded only too well.

In the implementation of this plan, you could without risk yield to the King the military authority naturally attached to his position; for it is not fitting that the Nation should be used to oppress itself, at least when all those comprising it will share in its liberty. Only with regular and permanently standing troops can the executive power ever enslave the State. The great Roman armies were free of abuses so long as they changed with every Consul, and until Marius it never so much as occurred to any Consul that he might use them as a means to enslave the Republic. It was only when the great remoteness of their conquests forced the Romans to keep the same armies standing for a long while, to recruit them from vagabonds, and to perpetuate command of them in the hands of Proconsuls, that the latter began to sense their independence and seek to use it to establish their own power. The armies of Sulla, Pompey and Caesar became proper regular troops, who substituted the spirit of military government for that of republican government; so much so that Caesar’s soldiers felt greatly offended when, at a moment of mutual dissatisfaction, he addressed them as Citizens, Quirites. In the plan that I imagine, and that I shall soon finish outlining, all Poland will become warlike, as much in defence of her liberty against the schemes of the Prince as against those of her neighbours; and I shall venture to say that, once this plan has been well implemented, you might suppress the post of Grand General and reattach it to the Crown without the least danger for liberty resulting, unless the Nation were to let itself be seduced by plans for conquest, in which case I should no longer answer for anything.

Why would the equestrian order, true home of the republic, not itself follow a plan similar to that which I propose for the infantry? Establish cavalry corps in all Palatinates in which the whole nobility would be enrolled, and which would have its officers, its General staff, its standards, its designated quarters in case of alarms, its appointed times to assemble every year: let that fine nobility be trained to form squadrons, to make all manner of moves and turns, to invest its manoeuvres with order and precision, to learn military subordination. I should not wish it to imitate slavishly the tactics of other nations. I should wish it to create its own specific tactics, which would develop and perfect its natural and national temperament; wish it to train above all for speed and lightness, for breaking, scattering and reforming without trouble or confusion. I should wish it to train for what is called small warfare, in all manoeuvres suitable for light troops: the art of flooding an area like a torrent; attacking everywhere without ever being attacked; always acting in concert though separate; severing communications; intercepting convoys; charging rearguards; cutting off vanguards; surprising detachments; harassing large units marching and camping in a body. I should wish it to adopt the way of the ancient Parthians, as it has the same valour, and learn like them to defeat and destroy the best-disciplined armies without ever giving battle and without allowing them a breathing space. In short, have infantry since you must, but rely only upon your cavalry, and omit nothing to devise a system that will put the whole outcome of the war in its hands.

It is not advisable for a free people to have strongholds. These do not suit the Polish genius, and everywhere they sooner or later become nests of tyrants. Those strongholds that you think you are fortifying against the Russians you will infallibly be fortifying for them; and for you they will become fetters from which you will never release yourselves. Ignore the advantages even of bases, and do not ruin yourselves on artillery; all that is not what you need. A sudden invasion is no doubt a great misfortune, but permanent chains are a far greater one. You will never succeed in making it hard for your neighbours to enter your territory; but you can succeed in making it hard for them to leave with impunity, and you should put all your efforts into that. Antony and Crassus easily entered the territory of the Parthians,⁴⁴ but to their own misfortune. A country as vast as yours always provides its inhabitants with places of refuge and great possibilities for eluding its attackers. The sum of human skill would not be able to prevent the sudden action of the strong against the weak, but it can preserve energies for a reaction; and once experience has taught that leaving your territory is so hard, people will be in less of a hurry to enter it. So leave your country entirely open, like Sparta, but like her build strong citadels in Citizens’ hearts; and as Themistocles⁴⁵ used to take Athens with him onto his fleet, if necessary take your towns with you onto your horses. The spirit of imitation produces few good things, and never produces anything great. Each country has advantages that are specific to it, and that its institutions must extend and encourage. Preserve and cultivate those of Poland, and she will have few other nations to envy.

One thing alone suffices to make her impossible to subjugate: love of fatherland and liberty, prompted by the virtues inseparable from it. You have just given a forever memorable example of it. So long as this love burns in your hearts, though it may not safeguard you from an ephemeral yoke, sooner or later it will explode, shake off the yoke and make you free. So labour unremittingly, ceaselessly, to raise patriotism to the highest degree in all Polish hearts. I indicated earlier some of the means suitable to that end: all that remains for me to do here is to expand on that which I think strongest, most powerful, even infallibly bound to succeed, if it is well implemented. This is to ensure that all Citizens feel themselves constantly in the public’s gaze; that no one may advance or succeed other than through public favour; that no position or function be filled other than by the nation’s wish; and that lastly, from the humblest nobleman or even the humblest villein up to the King, all should if possible be so dependent upon public esteem that without it they may do nothing, acquire nothing, attain nothing. The effervescence this common emulation stimulates will give rise to that patriotic intoxication which alone is capable of raising men above themselves, and without which liberty is merely an empty word and legislation a pipe-dream.

In the equestrian order, this system is easy to establish, if you take care everywhere to follow a gradual advancement, and admit no one to State honours and dignities without his first having passed through the inferior grades, which will serve as an entry and trial before he can reach a higher station. Since equality among the nobility is a fundamental law of Poland, the career of public affairs must always begin there by junior functions, in the spirit of the constitution. These must be open to any Citizen induced by his zeal to put himself forward, and who feels himself capable of filling them successfully. But they must be the first indispensable step for whosoever, great or small, seeks to advance in this career. Each is free not to put himself forward for it; but as soon as anyone does enter it, unless he withdraws voluntarily he must advance, or be rejected with disapprobation. In all his conduct, seen and judged by his fellow citizens, he must know that his every step is followed, that his every action is weighed, and that a faithful account is kept of the good and the bad, an account whose influence will extend over all the rest of his life.

[XIII] Plan for Subjecting All Members of the Government to a Gradual Advancement

In order to graduate this advancement, here is a plan that I have tried to adapt as well as possible to the form of the established government, reformed only with respect to the appointment of Senators, in the manner and for the reasons set out earlier.

All active members of the Republic, I mean those who will take part in its administration, shall be divided into three classes identified by as many distinct signs which those comprising these classes shall carry on their persons. The orders of chivalry that were formerly proofs of virtue are now merely signs of the favour of Kings. The ribbons and jewels denoting them have the look of trinkets or feminine adornments, a look that must be avoided in our system. I should like the badges of the three orders that I propose to be medals made from various metals, whose material price would be in inverse proportion to the grade of those wearing them.

The first step in public affairs will be preceded by a trial period for the young, in posts as Lawyers, Assessors, even judges in lower courts, managers of some portion of the public funds, and generally in all junior posts which give those filling them an opportunity to display their merit, their capability, their accuracy, and above all their integrity. This trial status should last at least three years, at the end of which, armed with certificates from their superiors and with the testimony of public opinion, they shall present themselves to the Dietine of their province; there, after a strict scrutiny of their conduct, those who are judged worthy will be honoured by a gold medal bearing their name, that of their province, the date of their acceptance, and this inscription underneath in larger letters: Spes Patriae [hope of the fatherland]. Those who have received this medal shall always wear it attached to the right arm or over the heart; they will take the title of ‘State Servants’, and in the equestrian order it will only ever be State Servants who may be elected Deputies to the Diet, Tribunal Deputies, or Commissaries in the chamber of accounts, or entrusted with any public function belonging to sovereignty.

In order to reach the second grade, it will be necessary to have thrice been a Deputy to the Diet, and each time to have obtained the approval of one’s constituents at the reporting Dietines; and no one will be able to be appointed as a Deputy for a second or third time if he is not armed with this document for his previous mandate. Service in the Tribunal, or as a commissary or Deputy in Radom, will be the equivalent of a deputy’s mandate, and it will be enough to have sat thrice in any one of these assemblies, but always with approval, in order to reach the second grade by right. So that on the basis of the three certificates presented to the Diet, the State Servant who has obtained them shall be honoured with the second medal and the title of which it is the badge.

This medal will be of silver and have the same shape and size as the previous one; it will bear the same inscriptions, except that instead of the two words Spes Patriae, the two following will be engraved on it: Civis electus. Those wearing these medals will be called ‘Citizens-Elect’, or simply ‘Elect’, and will no longer be able to be mere Deputies, Tribunal Deputies, or Commissaries in the Chamber: they will be so many candidates for Senatorial seats. No one shall be able to enter the Senate unless he has passed through this second grade and worn its badge, and all Deputy Senators who in accordance with the plan will immediately be drawn from this grade will continue to wear its badge until they reach the third grade.

It is from among those who have reached the second grade that I should wish to choose the school Principals and inspectors of children’s education. They might be obliged to fill such posts for a certain time before being admitted to the Senate, and would be expected to present the Diet with their approval by the College of educational administrators; without forgetting that such approval like all the rest should always be confirmed by public opinion, which there are a thousand ways of consulting.

The appointment of Deputy Senators will take place in the chamber of Deputies on the occasion of each ordinary Diet, so that they will remain in place for only two years. But it will be possible to reappoint them or appoint them anew twice more, provided that each time upon leaving their seat they have first obtained from the same chamber a document of approval similar to that which must be obtained from the Dietines in order to be elected deputy for a second or third time. For without such a document obtained in each session no further appointment will be possible; and in order to avoid exclusion from government, the sole recourse will be to start again through the lower grades. This must be permitted, in order not to deprive a zealous citizen, whatever fault he may have committed, of all hope of expunging it and achieving office. Furthermore, no individual committee should ever be given the task of forwarding or rejecting these certificates of approval; such judgements must always be handed down by the whole chamber. This will be done without trouble or loss of time, if the same method of Cards is followed for judging Deputy Senators when they leave their seats that I proposed for appointing them.

You will perhaps say here that all these certificates of approval given first by individual bodies, then by the Dietines, and lastly by the Diet, will be less in tune with merit, justice and truth than extorted by intrigue and credit. To that I have but one thing to say in reply. My belief has been that I was addressing a people which, without being exempt from vice, still had energy and virtues; and on that assumption, my plan is good. But if Poland is already at the point where everything in her is venal and corrupt to the roots, then in vain does she seek to reform her laws and preserve her liberty; she must give up the idea and bend her neck to the yoke. But let us resume.

Each Deputy Senator who has served three times with approval will pass by right to the third grade, the highest in the State, and its badge will be conferred on him by the King when the Diet is appointed. This badge will be a medal of blue steel, similar to the previous ones, and will bear this inscription: Custos legum [guardian of the laws]. Those who have received it will wear it for all the rest of their lives, however high they may rise, and even on the throne if they happen to ascend it.

The Palatines and Grand Castellans will be drawn only from this body of Guardians of the Laws, in the same way that the latter were from the Citizens-Elect, namely by choice of the Diet. And since these Palatines occupy the Republic’s most eminent positions and occupy them for life, in order to prevent their spirit of emulation from slumbering in posts where they no longer see anything above them but the Throne, access to this will be open to them, albeit in a way that again allows it to be attained only through public approval and by dint of virtue.

Before proceeding further, let us note that the career I give citizens to follow in order gradually to reach the head of the Republic appears sufficiently well adapted to the measures of human life for those holding the reins of Government, though they have passed the ardour of youth, to be still at a vigorous age; for them still, after fifteen or twenty years of trial constantly in the public eye, to have a sufficiently large number of years left them to allow the fatherland to enjoy their talents, experience and virtues, and to allow themselves to enjoy in the foremost positions of the State the respect and the honours they will have well deserved. Assuming that a man begins to enter public affairs at twenty, it is possible that at thirty-five he may already be a Palatine; but as it is very hard, and not even desirable, for this gradual advancement to occur so rapidly, this eminent position will scarcely be reached before the age of forty, which in my view is the most suitable age for combining all the qualities to be looked for in a statesman. Let us here add that such an advancement appears as well suited as may be to the needs of government. In the reckoning of probabilities, I estimate that you will have every two years at least fifty new citizens-elect and twenty guardians of the laws: numbers more than adequate to recruit the two parts of the Senate to which these two grades respectively lead. For you can easily see that, although the first rank of the Senate is the most numerous, being for life it will less often have seats to fill than the second, which in my plan is renewed on the occasion of each ordinary Diet.

We have already seen, and will soon see again, that I do not leave idle the supernumerary Elect, pending their entry to the Senate as deputies; in order to avoid leaving the Guardians of the Laws idle either, pending their arrival there as Palatines or Castellans, it is from their body that I should form the college of educational Administrators that I mentioned above. As President of this college you could appoint the Primate or some other Bishop, while also ruling that no other Ecclesiastic may be admitted to it, be he even Bishop and Senator.

So there you have, I think, a quite well-graduated advancement for the essential and intermediary part of the whole, viz. the nobility and the magistrates. But we still lack the two extremes, viz. the people and the King. Let us begin with the former, of which no account has hitherto been taken, but which must finally count for something if you are seeking to endow Poland with a certain strength and stability. Nothing is of greater delicacy than the operation involved here. For, after all, although everyone feels what a great evil it is for the Republic that the nation should be in a sense enclosed within the equestrian order, while all the rest, Peasants and Burghers, is nothing in either Government or legislation, such is the ancient Constitution. At this moment it would be neither prudent nor possible to change it all at once, but to bring about this change by degrees might be; without any perceptible revolution, to ensure that the most numerous part of the nation is attached by affection to the Fatherland and even to the Government. This will be achieved by two means: the first, a scrupulous observance of justice, whereby the serf and the commoner, never having to fear being unjustly injured by the nobleman, may be cured of the aversion that they must naturally have for him. This requires a great reform in the courts and a particular concern for how the body of lawyers is formed.

The second means, without which the first is nothing, is to open a door for the serfs to acquire liberty and for the Burghers to acquire nobility. If the thing would not actually be practicable, you should at least envisage it as a possibility. But you can do more, it seems to me, and that without running any risk. Here, for example, is a means that appears to me to lead in this way to the proposed end.

Every two years, in the interval between one Diet and the next, you would choose in each province a suitable time and place where those Elect from the same province who are not yet Deputy Senators would assemble, under the presidency of a Custos legum who is not yet a Senator for life, in a censorial or charitable Committee, to which you would invite not all priests, but only those whom you would judge most worthy of this honour. I even think that this preference, constituting a tacit judgement in the people’s eyes, might also inspire a spirit of emulation among the Village Priests, and safeguard a large number of them from the dissolute manners to which they are only too prone.

In this assembly, to which you might also summon old men and notables from every estate, you would engage in scrutinizing plans for establishments useful to the province. You would hear reports from Priests on the state of their parishes and the neighbouring parishes, a report by notables on the condition of farming and of families in their canton. These reports would be carefully checked. Each member of the Committee would add his own observations, and you would keep a faithful register of all this, from which concise summaries would be drawn for the Dietines.

You would examine in detail the needs of overburdened families, the infirm, widows, and orphans, and you would provide for them proportionately from a fund created by the free contributions of the province’s well-to-do. These contributions would be all the less burdensome in that they would become the only charitable charge, seeing that neither beggars nor poor-houses should be tolerated in all Poland. The Priests will doubtless raise a great outcry for the preservation of poor-houses, and that outcry will be merely one more reason to destroy them.

In this same committee, which would never concern itself with punishments or reprimands, but merely with rewards, praise and encouragement, on the basis of good information you would make accurate lists of individuals from every estate whose conduct is worthy of honour and recompense.* These lists would be sent to the Senate and to the King to be consulted at the right moment, so that they may allocate their choices and their preferences well; and it is on the basis of indications from these same assemblies that in schools the free places I mentioned earlier would be given by the Administrators of education.

But the principal and most important business of this committee would be to draw up, on the basis of faithful summaries, and on the basis of the well-verified report of the public’s voice, a register of those Peasants distinguished by good conduct, good cultivation, good manners, care for their families, all the duties of their estate well performed. This register would then be presented to the Dietine, which would choose from it a number fixed by the law to be emancipated, and which would provide by agreed means for the compensation of the Masters, while granting them enjoyment of exemptions, prerogatives and advantages finally made proportionate to the number of their peasants who would have been found worthy of liberty. For you must absolutely ensure that, instead of being burdensome to the master, the serf’s emancipation becomes honourable and advantageous to him. Of course, in order to avoid abuse, these emancipations would not be carried out by the master, but in the Dietines, by judgement, and only up to the number fixed by the law.

When you had successively emancipated a certain number of families in a canton, you could emancipate whole villages, little by little form communes there, allocate them a few estates, a few communal lands as in Switzerland, establish communal officials there, and when you had by degrees brought things to the point of being able without any perceptible revolution to accomplish the operation on a large scale, finally give them back the right that nature gave them to take part in the administration of their country by sending deputies to the Dietines.

All this once done, you would arm all those peasants become free men and Citizens, you would enrol them in regiments, you would drill them, and you would finish by having a truly excellent militia, more than sufficient for the defence of the State.

You might follow a similar method for the ennoblement of a certain number of Burghers, and even without ennobling them you could set certain glittering positions aside for them, which they alone could fill to the exclusion of the nobles. In this you would be imitating the Venetians, who though so jealous of their nobility nonetheless, in addition to other humbler functions, always give the second place in the State, viz. that of Grand Chancellor, to a townsman, without any Patrician ever being able to aspire to it. In this way, opening the door to nobility and honours to the Bourgeoisie, you would attach its affections to the fatherland and maintenance of the constitution. You might also, without ennobling individuals, ennoble certain towns collectively, favouring those where commerce, industry and the arts flourish more, and where municipal administration is consequently best. These ennobled towns could like imperial towns send Deputies to the Diet, and their example would not fail to stimulate in all the rest a lively desire to obtain the same honour.

The Censorial Committees entrusted with this area of charitable work, which to the shame of Kings and peoples has never yet existed anywhere, albeit unelected, would be constituted in the manner best adapted for them to fulfil their functions with zeal and integrity; for their members, as candidates for those Senatorial seats to which their respective grades lead, would take great care to deserve the suffrages of the Diet through public approbation. And this would be a sufficient concern to keep these candidates on tenterhooks and in the public eye during such intervals as might separate their successive elections. Note that this would nevertheless occur without removing them in these intervals from the condition of mere graded Citizens, since this kind of tribunal, so useful and so respectable, never having any function other than beneficial, would be endowed with no power of constraint. So I am not here multiplying magistracies, but making use of the passage from one to another to take advantage by the way of those who must fill them.

On the basis of this plan, graduated in its implementation by a successive advancement that you would be able to hasten, slow down or even halt depending on its success or otherwise, one would advance only by will, guided by experience; one would arouse in all the lower estates a burning desire to contribute to the public weal; one would manage finally to invigorate all parts of Poland, and to bind them together in such a way as to make only a single body, whose vigour and strength would be at least ten times greater than they can be today, and this with the inestimable advantage of having avoided any sharp, sudden change and the danger of revolutions.

You have a fine opportunity to begin this operation in a striking and noble manner that should produce the greatest effect. It is not possible that, amid the misfortunes that Poland has just suffered, the confederates have not received help and signs of affection from some burghers and even from some peasants. Imitate the magnanimity of the Romans, so careful after their republic’s great calamities to shower with tokens of their gratitude those foreigners, those subjects, those slaves and even those very animals who, in their time of disaster, had rendered them any signal service. Oh, that is the fine start I should like, ceremoniously to give nobility to those burghers and the franchise to those peasants, and this with all the pomp and all the panoply needed to make the ceremony dignified, touching and memorable! And do not confine yourselves to that start. The men thus distinguished should always remain the chosen offspring of the fatherland. You must watch over them, protect them, help them, support them, even should they be bad subjects. At all costs you must ensure that they prosper as long as they live, so that through this example placed in the public eye Poland may show all Europe what anyone who dared to help her in her hour of distress should expect of her when she is successful.

There you have some crude idea, simply in the shape of an example, of the way in which you might proceed so that everyone might see before him the road clear to achieving everything; so that everyone by serving the fatherland well may aim gradually at the most honourable ranks; and so that virtue may open all the doors that fortune is fond of closing.

But everything is not yet done, and the part of this plan that remains for me to set forth is indubitably the most awkward and difficult; it presents obstacles to be overcome upon which the prudence and experience of the most consummate political minds have always run aground. However, it seems to me that, assuming that my plan is adopted, by the very simple means that I have to propose, all difficulties are removed, all abuses are prevented, and what seemed to constitute a new obstacle turns into an advantage in its execution.

[XIV] Election of Kings

All these difficulties are reduced to that of giving the State a leader, the choice of whom does not cause disputes and who does not violate liberty. What increases this same difficulty is that the leader must be endowed with the great qualities necessary to anyone who dares to govern free men. Inheriting the Crown prevents disputes, but it brings servitude; election maintains liberty, but before every reign it rocks the state. This alternative is regrettable, but before talking about means of avoiding it, allow me a moment of reflection on the way in which the Poles normally dispose of their Crown.

Firstly, I wonder, why must they give themselves foreign Kings? Thanks to what inexplicable blindness have they thus taken the surest means to enslave their nation, abolish their customs, render themselves the plaything of other courts, and wantonly increase the stormy nature of their interregna? What an injustice towards themselves, what an affront offered to their fatherland, as if, despairing of finding within the latter’s bosom a man worthy of commanding them, they were forced to go and seek one far away. How have they not felt, how have they not seen, that it was just the opposite? Open the annals of your Nation, you will see her illustrious and triumphant only under Polish Kings; you will see her almost always oppressed and humiliated under foreigners. May experience finally come to the aid of reason; see what evils you are causing yourselves, and what benefits you are denying yourselves.

For I wonder anew how it is that the Polish nation, having done so much to make its crown elective, has given no thought to taking advantage of that law to arouse among the members of its administration an emulation of zeal and glory, which alone would have done more for the good of the fatherland than all the other laws together. What a powerful stimulus to great, ambitious minds, that crown intended for the most worthy and placed in full view before the eyes of every citizen capable of meriting public esteem! What virtues, what noble efforts, must the hope of winning its highest prize not arouse in the nation, what a ferment of patriotism in every heart, once people realize that these furnish the only way of obtaining that position which has become the secret object of every individual’s desires, once it depends upon themselves by dint of their merit and their services to approach it ever more closely, and if fortune favours them eventually to reach it entirely. Let us seek the best way of bringing this great and powerful stimulus, hitherto so neglected, into play in the Republic. I shall be told that it is not enough to give the Crown only to Poles, in order to eliminate the difficulties in question. This is what we shall see in a moment, once I have proposed my expedient. This expedient is simple, but it will at first appear to miss the goal I have myself just signalled, when I say that it consists in introducing lottery into the election of Kings. I ask as a favour that you allow me time to explain, or that you simply reread me attentively.

For if you ask: ‘how can it be ensured that a King drawn by lot would have the qualities required to fill that position worthily?’, you are making an objection that I have already answered, since to achieve this it suffices that the King can be drawn only from among the Senators for life. For since these will themselves be drawn from the order of Guardians of the Laws, and will have passed with honour through all the Republic’s grades, the test of their entire life and public approval in all the posts they have filled will be sufficient guarantees of the merits and virtues of each of them.

I nonetheless do not intend that even among the Senators for life, lottery alone would decide who is to be preferred. That would still be to miss in part the great goal which you should set yourselves. Lottery must do something and choice must do a great deal, in order on the one hand to stifle the intrigues and machinations of foreign powers, and on the other to engage all the Palatines through an interest sufficient for them not to relax in their conduct, but to continue serving the fatherland zealously in order to merit being preferred to their rivals.

I confess that the class of these rivals strikes me as rather numerous, if you include the Grand Castellans, almost equal in rank to the Palatines by virtue of the current Constitution. But I do not see what drawback there would be in giving Palatines alone immediate access to the Throne. This would make within the same order a new grade which the Grand Castellans would still have to pass through to become Palatines, hence a further means to keep the Senate dependent upon the legislator. As we have already seen, these Grand Castellans strike me as superfluous in the Constitution. Nevertheless, in order to avoid any great change, let them be left their seat and rank in the Senate, I concur with that. But in the graduation that I am proposing, nothing obliges you to put them on the level of the Palatines; and since nothing prevents it either, you can with no disadvantage opt for the course you think best. I am assuming here that your preferred course will be to open immediate access to the throne to Palatines alone.

Hence, at once after the death of the King, in other words within the shortest time that is both possible and in accordance with the law, the election Diet will be solemnly convoked. The names of all Palatines will be placed in competition, and three of them will be drawn by lot, with all possible precautions against any fraud distorting this procedure. These three names will be read out to the assembly, which at the same sitting and by a majority of votes will choose whichever it prefers, and he will be proclaimed King on that very day.

In this form of election you will find one great disadvantage, I confess: this is that the nation is unable to choose freely from among the number of Palatines the one whom she honours and cherishes most, and whom she judges most worthy of kingship. But this disadvantage is not new in Poland, where we have seen in several elections, and especially in the last, that with no regard for those whom the Nation favoured she was forced to choose someone she would have rejected. As against this advantage that she no longer had and that she sacrifices, what a number of more important ones she gains through this form of election!

Firstly, the effect of the lottery at once stifles the factions and intrigues of foreign Nations, which cannot influence this election, being too uncertain of success to put any great efforts into it, seeing that even fraud would be insufficient in favour of a subject whom the nation can always reject. The very scale of this advantage is such that it ensures Poland’s repose, suffocates venality in the republic, and confers upon election almost all the tranquillity of inheritance.

The same advantage occurs against the very intrigues of the candidates. For who among them will be willing to go to any expense to ensure a preference that does not depend on men at all, and sacrifice his fortune to an event depending upon so many unlucky chances as against a single lucky one. Let us add that those favoured by lot are no longer in time to buy electors, since the election has to take place at the same sitting.

The free choice of the Nation between three candidates preserves her from the drawbacks of the lot that might hypothetically fall upon an unworthy subject. For, under this hypothesis, the Nation will take care not to choose him; and it is not possible that among thirty-three illustrious men, the elite of the Nation, in which it is incomprehensible that a single unworthy subject should be found, those favoured by lot should all three be unworthy.

Hence, and this observation is of great weight, we join through this form all the advantages of election to those of inheritance.

For in the first place, with the crown not passing from father to son, there will never be a continuity of system to enslave the republic. Secondly, in this form lottery itself is the instrument of an enlightened and voluntary election: it cannot make any choice whatsoever, in the respectable body of the Guardians of the Laws and the Palatines drawn therefrom, that has not already been made by the nation.

But see what emulation this prospect can introduce into the body of the Palatines and Grand Castellans, who with seats for life might relax, thanks to the certainty that these could no longer be taken from them. They can no longer be restrained by fear; but the hope of occupying the throne, which each of them sees so close at hand, is a new goad that keeps them perpetually careful of themselves. They know that the lottery would favour them in vain were they to be rejected in the election, and that the only way of being chosen is to merit it. This advantage is too big and too obvious for insistence upon it to be necessary.

Let us assume for a moment, taking the worst case, that you cannot avoid fraud in the operation of the lottery, and that one of the rivals succeeds in deceiving the vigilance of all the others, so interested in this operation. That fraud would be a misfortune for the excluded candidates; but the effect for the republic would be the same as if the decision of the lottery had been fair. For you would nonetheless have the advantage of election; you would nonetheless forestall the disputes of interregna and the dangers of inheritance; the candidate so seduced by his ambition as to resort to this fraud would nonetheless, apart from that, be a man of merit, capable in the nation’s judgement of wearing the crown with honour; and lastly, even after this fraud, in order to profit by it he would nonetheless depend on the subsequent, formal choice of the Republic.

Through this plan, adopted in its full extent, everything in the State is connected and, from the last individual to the first Palatine, no one sees any way of advancing other than by the path of duty and public approbation. The King alone, once elected, no longer seeing anything but the laws above him, has no other curb to restrain him; and, no longer having need of public approbation, he can safely do without it if his plans so require. I scarcely see any remedy for this other than one that should not even be contemplated. This would be for the Crown in some way to be removable, and for Kings to need confirmation after specific periods. However, once again, this expedient cannot be proposed. Keeping the throne and the State in constant turmoil, it would never leave the administration in a stable enough condition to be able to apply itself solely and fruitfully to the public weal.

There was an ancient custom that has only ever been practised by a single people, but astonishingly its success has tempted no other to imitate it. To be sure, it is scarcely suitable other than for an elective kingdom, albeit invented and practised in a hereditary kingdom. I am speaking about how the Kings of Egypt were judged after death, and about the ruling whereby royal burial and honours were granted or refused them, according to whether they had governed the State well or ill in their lifetime. The indifference of the moderns to all such moral issues, and to everything that can animate souls, will doubtless make them look upon the idea of re-establishing that custom for the kings of Poland as a folly. It is not by Frenchmen, especially philosophers, that I should seek to have it adopted, but I think it can be proposed to Poles. I even venture to suggest that this institution would have great advantages for them, impossible to replace in any other way, and not a single drawback. In the present case, it is clear that, short of some vile soul indifferent to the honour of his memory, it is not possible that the integrity of an inevitable judgement should not impress the King and place a curb upon his passions: more or less strong, I admit, but still capable of restraining them to a certain degree, above all when combined with the interests of his children, whose destiny will be decided by the ruling pronounced upon the father’s memory.

So I should wish that upon the death of every King his body be deposited in a suitable place, until his memory has been pronounced upon; that the court which must decide on it and order his burial be convened as soon as possible; that his life and his reign be strictly examined there; and that, after an inquiry to which any citizen would be admitted to accuse him or defend him, the well-informed trial would be followed by a ruling delivered with all possible solemnity.

As a consequence of this ruling, if it was favourable, the late King would be declared a good and just Prince, his name inscribed with honour in the list of Kings of Poland, his body laid with pomp in their burial place, the epithet ‘Of glorious memory’ added to his name in all public documents and speeches, a dowry awarded to his widow, and his children, proclaimed Princes Royal, would be honoured as long as they lived by all the advantages attached to this title.

If, on the contrary, he was found guilty of injustice, violence and embezzlement, and above all of having infringed public liberty, his memory would be condemned and excoriated, his body denied royal burial would be interred without honours as that of a private individual, his name erased from the public register of kings; and his children, denied the title of Princes Royal and the prerogatives attached to it, would revert to the class of mere citizens, without any distinction of either honour or excoriation.

I should like this judgement to be made with the greatest pomp and circumstance, but if possible to precede the election of his successor, so that the latter’s credit could not influence the verdict, the severity of which he would have an interest in mitigating. I am aware that it would be desirable for there to be more time to reveal many hidden truths and better inform the trial. But if there was any delay after the election, I should fear lest this important act soon become merely an empty ceremony and, as would infallibly happen in a hereditary kingdom, more of a funeral oration for the late King than a just and strict judgement upon his conduct. It is preferable on this occasion to give more to the public voice and lose a few detailed insights, in order to preserve the integrity and the austerity of a judgement that would otherwise become futile.

With respect to the court that would pronounce this verdict, I should like it to be neither the Senate nor the Diet nor any body invested with some authority in government, but an entire order of Citizens that cannot easily be either deceived or corrupted. It strikes me that the Cives electi, better informed and with more experience than the State Servants, and less partisan than the Guardians of the Laws already too close to the throne, would be precisely the intermediary body wherein you would find at once most enlightenment and most integrity: the body most appropriate to deliver only reliable judgements, hence preferable to the other two on this occasion. Even if it should happen that this body was not numerous enough for a judgement of such importance, I should prefer it to be given associates drawn from the State Servants than from the Guardians of the Laws. Lastly, I should wish the court not to be presided over by any man of position, but by a Marshal drawn from his own corps, that would itself elect him, like those of the Diets and the Confederations. For you should avoid any individual interest influencing this action, which may be very impressive or very ridiculous depending on how it is undertaken.

In concluding this topic of the election and judgement of Kings, I must say here that one thing in your customs has struck me as quite shocking, and quite contrary to the spirit of your constitution. This is to see the latter almost overturned and destroyed upon the King’s death, to the point where all courts are suspended and closed, as if the constitution were so dependent on this Prince that the death of the one entailed the destruction of the other. Nay, by Heaven, it should be just the opposite. With the King dead, everything should proceed as if he were still alive. You should scarcely notice that a piece of the machinery is missing, so little is that piece essential to its stability. Fortunately this inconsistency depends on nothing. You have simply to say that it will no longer exist, and nothing more need be changed. But you should not let this strange contradiction survive, for if it is already one in the present constitution, it would be a far larger one still after the reform.

[XV] Conclusion

There you have a sufficient outline of my plan, so I shall stop. Whichever one you may adopt, you should not forget what I said in the Social Contract⁴⁶ about the state of weakness and anarchy in which a nation finds itself while it is establishing or reforming its constitution. In this moment of disorder and effervescence, it is in no condition to offer any resistance and the least shock is capable of overturning everything. So it is important at all costs to arrange for oneself an interval of calm, during which one can act on oneself and rejuvenate one’s constitution without risk. Although the changes to be made in yours are not fundamental, and do not seem very great, they are enough to dictate this precaution. A certain time is necessarily required for the effect of the best reform to be felt, and for the coherence that should be its fruit to be attained. It is only by assuming that your success will match the courage of the Confederates and the justice of their cause that you can contemplate the undertaking in question. You will never be free so long as a single Russian soldier remains in Poland, and you will always be threatened with losing your freedom so long as Russia meddles in your affairs. But if you manage to force her to deal with you as one power to another, and no longer as protector and protégé, then take advantage of the exhaustion into which the Turkish War⁴⁷ has cast her to accomplish your business before she can interfere in it. Although I place no reliance upon such external security as may be procured by treaties, this unique circumstance will perhaps force you to shore yourself up as much as possible by such props, if only to know the present disposition of those who will parley with you. But excepting this case, and perhaps at other times some commercial treaties, do not weary yourselves with vain negotiations, do not ruin yourselves by Ambassadors and Ministers at other courts, and do not set any store by alliances and treaties. All that is worthless with the Christian powers. They know no other bonds than those of their interest. When they find that this lies in fulfilling their commitments, they will fulfil them; when they find that it lies in breaking them, they will break them. Just as well not enter into any. If only their interest was always true, knowledge of what they ought to do might let you foresee what they will do. But it is almost never raison d’État that guides them, it is the fleeting interest of a Minister, a daughter, a favourite; it is the motive that no human wisdom could have foreseen which decides them now for, now against their true interests. What may be relied upon, with people who have no fixed system, and who behave only in accordance with random impulses? Nothing is more frivolous than the political theory of Courts: as it has no guaranteed principle, no certain consequence may be drawn from it; and that whole fine doctrine concerning the interests of Princes is a game for children that makes sensible men laugh.

Do not, therefore, rely confidently either upon your allies or upon your neighbours. You have but one upon whom you may count a little. This is the Grand Turk,⁴⁸ and you must spare no effort to gain his support. Not that his Statecraft is much more reliable than that of the other powers. All in it likewise depends upon some Vizier, Favourite or Harem intrigue. But the Porte’s interest is clear, simple and all-important to her; and with far less knowledge or refinement, more uprightness and good sense generally prevail therein. With her, you have at least this advantage more than with the Christian powers, that she likes to fulfil her commitments, and usually respects treaties. You must endeavour to make one with her for twenty years, as strong and clear as may be. This treaty, so long as another power hides her plans, will be the best and perhaps sole guarantee that you could have. And, in the state in which the present war will probably leave Russia, I estimate that it may be enough for you to undertake your business safely. All the more so because the common interest of the European powers, and especially your other neighbours, is always to leave you as a barrier between them and the Russians; and by dint of changing their follies, they must at least sometimes be wise.

One thing makes me believe that they will generally without jealousy see you working to reform your constitution. This is that your undertaking aims only to reinforce legislation, hence liberty; and that this liberty is viewed in every court as a fad of visionaries, which tends rather to weaken than to strengthen a State. This is why France has always favoured the liberty of the Germanic corpus and of Holland, and that is why today Russia favours the present government of Sweden, obstructing the King’s plans with all her might. All those grand Ministers who think to know men, judging the generality of man by themselves and those around them, are very far from imagining what energy love of fatherland and passion for virtue can give to free souls. However often, deceived by the low opinion they have of republics, they may find there in all their undertakings a resistance they were not expecting, they will never shake off a prejudice based on the contempt that they feel befits them and that underlies their estimation of the human race. Despite the rather striking experience that the Russians have just had in Poland, nothing will make them change their opinion. They will always look upon free men as they should themselves be looked upon, namely as nobodies upon whom two instruments alone have any hold, viz. money and the Knout. Hence, if they see that the Republic of Poland, instead of devoting herself to filling her coffers, swelling her finances and raising plenty of regular troops, is on the contrary thinking of disbanding her army and doing without money, they will think that she is striving to weaken herself. And convinced that in order to conquer her they need only turn up whenever they please, they will leave her to order her affairs at her leisure, inwardly mocking her labours. And it must be conceded that the state of liberty does deny a people offensive strength, and that in following the plan I propose you must renounce all hope of conquest. But in twenty years, your business once done, let the Russians try to invade you, and they will know what soldiers they are, these men of peace who do not know how to attack the homes of others and who have forgotten the price of money, when they are defending their own homes.

Moreover, when you are delivered from these cruel guests, beware of taking any middle course with respect to the King they sought to give you.⁴⁹ It is necessary either to have his head cut off as he has merited, or else, taking no account of his initial election which is entirely null, to elect him anew, with other Pacta conventa whereby you will make him give up the right to appoint high officials. This second course is not merely the more humane, it is wiser; I even find in it a certain generous pride that will perhaps mortify the Court of Petersburg just as much as if you made another appointment. Poniatowski was no doubt very criminal; perhaps today he is merely unfortunate; at least in the present situation, he seems to me to conduct himself pretty much as he should do, not meddling in anything at all. Of course, he must in his innermost heart wish ardently for the expulsion of his harsh masters. There would perhaps be some patriotic heroism in joining the Confederates to drive those masters out; but it is well known that Poniatowski is no hero. Besides, apart from the fact that he would not be allowed to do it and that he is indubitably held in custody, I frankly declare that, if I were in his place, owing everything to Russia, I would certainly not for anything in the world wish to be capable of that kind of heroism.

I am well aware that this is not the King you will need once your reform is complete; but he is perhaps the one you need in order to accomplish it peacefully. Should he live just another eight or ten years, your machinery having then begun to move, and several Palatinates being already filled by Guardians of the Laws, you will not be afraid of giving him a successor who resembles him. But for my part, I am afraid lest in simply deposing him you may not know what to do with him and may expose yourselves to new conflicts.

Nevertheless, whatever the difficulties from which his free election might deliver you, you should contemplate it only after assuring yourselves of his true attitude, and on the assumption that you still find in him some good sense, some feeling of honour, some love for his country, some knowledge of his true interests, and some desire to pursue them. For at any time, and especially in the wretched situation in which Poland’s misfortunes are going to leave her, there would be nothing more fatal for her than to have a traitor at the head of her Government.

As for the way to embark on the business in question, I cannot appreciate all the subtleties being proposed to you in order to surprise, and as it were deceive, the Nation regarding the changes to be made to her laws. My only advice would be, when you show your plan in its full extent, not to begin its implementation abruptly by filling the republic with malcontents; to leave most officials where they are; to confer posts in line with the new reform only as they once again fall vacant. Never shake the machinery too abruptly. I have no doubt but that a good plan, once adopted, may change the spirit even of those who have taken part in Government under a different one. Not being able to create new citizens all at once, you should begin by taking advantage of the existing ones; and offering a new path for their ambition is the means of disposing them to follow it.

What if, despite the courage and constancy of the Confederates and despite the justice of their cause, fortune and all the powers abandon them and deliver up the fatherland to its oppressors … ? But I do not have the honour to be Polish; and in a situation like the one in which you are, it is not permitted to give one’s advice other than by one’s own example.

I have just fulfilled to the best of my abilities, and please God with as much success as enthusiasm, the task that Count Wielhorski imposed upon me. Perhaps it is all merely a collection of pipe-dreams, but there you have my ideas. It is not my fault if they are so unlike those of other men, and it was not up to me to organize my thoughts in another way. I even confess that whatever singularity may be found in them, for my part I see nothing other than what is well adapted to the human heart, good, and practicable, especially in Poland, since I took care in my views to follow the spirit of that Republic, and to propose only the fewest changes I could to correct its faults. It seems to me that a Government based on such resources must proceed to its true goal as directly, as certainly and for as long as possible; without being unaware, moreover, that all the works of men are imperfect, ephemeral and perishable like them.

I have deliberately omitted many very important topics upon which I did not feel that my knowledge was sufficient to pass judgement properly. I leave that task to men more enlightened and wiser than I. And I put an end to this lengthy hotchpotch by making my apologies to Count Wielhorski for having taken up his time with it for so long. Although I think differently from other men, I do not flatter myself that I am wiser than they, nor that there is anything in my musings that might be really useful to his fatherland. But my wishes for her prosperity are too sincere, too pure, too disinterested for pride in contributing to it to add anything to my ardour. May she triumph over her enemies, become and remain peaceful, happy and free, set a great example to the universe, and, benefiting from the patriotic labours of Count Wielhorski, find and form in her bosom many Citizens resembling him!

Notes

OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

Prefatory Note

  1.  the abbé de Saint-Pierre: Charles-Irénée Castel, abbé de Saint-Pierre (1658–1743) was the author of a project for perpetual peace and a number of other works on public affairs and international relations.

Title-page

  1.  foederis aequas / Dicamus leges: Aeneid, Book XI, line 321: ‘Let us declare fair terms of compact’.

BOOK I

  1.  taking men as they are: Here Rousseau echoes a passage from Spinoza’s Political Treatise.

  2.  any legitimate and reliable rule of administration: Rousseau’s reference to ‘administration’ here can mislead. His real focus is on the fundamental principles of the constitutional order.

  3.  Man was born free … chains: Rousseau’s account of humankind’s natural freedom and its replacement by various forms of servitude and dependence is given in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men.

  4.  only through convention: Here, Rousseau recapitulates arguments put by John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government; see, for example, §55 of that work.

  5.  Grotius: Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) was the author of De Jure Belli ac Pacis, one of the founding texts for international law.

  6.  also the view of Hobbes: In fact, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) argued for the natural equality of human beings in Leviathan (1651) as part of his argument for unlimited sovereignty. Rousseau often seeks to exaggerate the distance between Hobbes’s views and his own.

  7.  Philo’s account: ‘The Embassy to Gaius’ was a report made by Philo Judaeus on the embassy he led from the Jews of Alexandria to the Emperor Gaius Caligula, which Rousseau probably read in a 1687 French edition of works by Flavius Josephus in which it was included.

  8.  Ulysses’ companions loved their brutish condition: Ulysses, Latin name for Odysseus, a legendary Greek king of Ithaca and the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, in a celebrated episode of which he visits the island of Circe, who changes half his crew into swine.

  9.  Force made the first slaves: Rousseau’s rejection of the idea of natural aristocracy and subordination here stands in contrast to his claims that women are naturally subordinate to men in Book V of Emile.

10.  emperor Noah … Saturn’s children: The biblical figure of Noah had three sons, who were generally interpreted in medieval Christianity as ancestors of the populations of the three known continents, Japheth: Europe, Shem: Asia, and Ham: Africa. According to the Romans, Saturn (Chronos in Greek mythology) was a god, the son of Uranus. He was credited with six children, of whom three – Jupiter, Pluto and Neptune – ruled respectively over the sky, the underworld and the sea (while Vesta, Ceres and Juno were patrons of the home, fertility and women).

11.  in Cyclops’ cave: Cyclops was in Greek and Roman mythology a member of a primordial race of giants, each with a single eye in the middle of his forehead.

12.  the Peace of God: The so-called Peace of God (supplemented in AD 1040 by the ‘Truce of God’) was a broad reform movement initiated by the Church in late tenth- and early eleventh-century France, its aim not merely to protect ecclesiastical property from devastation and the population at large from the ravages of castellans, but beyond that to regulate internecine violence more generally in feudal society. King (St) Louis IX (1226–70) built upon these to limit (albeit not suppress) private wars between barons by imposing a forty-day moratorium before they might be launched, and by abolishing duels as an element of the judicial system.

13.  Cato the Elder … Popilius: Marcus Porcius Cato, 234–149 BC,statesman, general, agriculturist and writer, is taken here by Rousseau as a model of the traditional Roman virtues of respect for discipline and order. His son was likewise called Marcus Porcius Cato (as was his better-known great-grandson Cato the Younger). The Popilius in question was Gaius Popilius Laenas, consul in 172 bc and again in 158. The story here is taken from Cicero’s De Officiis. The reference to the siege of Clusium (c.391 BC) involves a discreditable episode in which Roman treachery led the besieging Gauls to abandon the siege and march instead on Rome itself.

14.  For any States … differing nature: Rousseau is here summarizing the argument of his Principles of the Right of War, contained in this volume but unpublished in his own lifetime.

15.  The primitive state can no longer subsist … way of being: The theory of human development gestured at here is the one sketched in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men.

16.  a corporate and collective body: The French phrase Rousseau uses here is ‘corps moral et collectif’, which poses formidable translation difficulties. The most direct translation, ‘moral’, has the misleading connotation of ‘ethical’, whereas what Rousseau intends is that the entity has a special sort of personhood, akin in some ways to legal personality. ‘Artificial’ would probably be too Hobbesian in its associations.

17.  formerly given the name of City: Rousseau’s reference here is probably to Jean Bodin (1530–96) and his Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576).

18.  M. d’Alembert … ‘Geneva’: D’Alembert’s essay on ‘Geneva’ appeared in the Encyclopédie, vol. 7 (1757).

19.  Now the Sovereign: Rousseau’s subject, both in this paragraph, and the two which immediately follow, is the classical problem of who should judge the matter of a breach in the social contract, given that there is no common superior for individuals and the sovereign to appeal to.

20.  guarantees him against all personal dependence: Rousseau makes the connection between freedom and not being dependent on the particular will of another person explicit in the Eighth of the Letters Written from the Mountains; see p. 185–6.

21.  below that from which he emerged: This is another tacit reference to the argument of the Discourse on Inequality. Rousseau believed that the psychological changes that accompany the development of the human race were overwhelmingly likely to result in oppression, alienation and a damaging dependence of individuals on the wills and desires of others, but that they also make possible human rationality and morality.

22.  moral liberty: Although Rousseau here presents ‘moral liberty’ as an afterthought, obedience to oneself is central to the problem of reconciling liberty and authority that he sets himself in Book I, Chapter 6.

23.  When Nuñez Balboa … Princes of the world: Vasco Núñez de Balboa (c.1475–1519) established the first mainland Spanish colony in the Americas in 1510, and in 1513 was the first Spaniard to cross the isthmus of Panama and reach the Pacific Ocean, which he named the Mar del Sur, or South Sea.

BOOK II

  1.  at most it is a decree: Here Rousseau makes an essential distinction, which he returns to in Book II, Chapter 6 below. Law is always what the sovereign decides upon as a matter of its general will: it comes from all the citizens and applies to them all. Particular acts of administration are always applications of such laws rather than being laws themselves.

  2.  sometimes they separate them: It may appear to a modern reader as if Rousseau is here rejecting a doctrine of the separation of powers. That is not what this passage is about. Rather, he is arguing against the idea that sovereignty can be understood as a list of different functions rather than as the exercise of the general will by the whole people.

  3.  the first book of Grotius: The reference is to De Jure Belli ac Pacis (see Book I, note 5 above).

  4.  You always will your own good … see it: Cf. Plato, Protagoras 345e and Gorgias 466d, where Socrates argues that all actions aim at the good of the person who acts and that the pursuit of aims that are not actually beneficial to the agent is explained by defects in knowledge.

  5.  Numa, and Servius: Numa Pompilius (753–673 BC) was the legendary second king of Rome, succeeding Romulus. He was credited with establishing many of the early institutions of monarchical Rome, and with reforming the calendar. Servius Tullius was the legendary sixth king of Rome, reigning 578–535 BC. Gaining the throne without election by the Senate, he enjoyed popular support and introduced numerous reforms (including an expanded franchise and the city’s first true coinage). He also increased the territory of Rome.

  6.  If, when a properly informed people … astray: Some modern writers have seen in the last two paragraphs of this chapter an anticipation by Rousseau of the jury theorem devised by the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94). However, the evidence for any direct influence of Rousseau on Condorcet is weak. See B. Grofman and S. L. Feld, ‘Rousseau’s General Will, a Condorcetian Perspective’, American Political Science Review 82 (1988), pp. 567–76.

  7.  a justice emanating from reason alone: Rousseau here distances himself from Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu’s opening paragraph in his The Spirit of Laws (1748).

  8.  the civil or kingly man: The reference is to Plato’s dialogue Politikos, ‘The Statesman’.

  9.  the Decemvirs: A commission of ten men or decemvirate was appointed in 452 BC to draw up a code of administration for Rome, with all other magistracies being temporarily suspended; a code of law under ten headings was duly drawn up and passed. A second decemvirate was then appointed in 450, but although two further laws were added – thus completing the Law of the Twelve Tables that was to form the basis of Roman administration for centuries – on this occasion the experiment turned out to be less successful, since the decemvirate became increasingly violent and tyrannical, leading to its enforced resignation under popular pressure in 449 BC and a return of the normal magistracies.

10.  persuade without convincing: Rousseau gives more detail of the kinds of techniques a legislator might use in his unpublished An Essay on the Origin of Languages, ch. 20, and in Considerations on the Government of Poland, chs. 1–2 (below).

11.  to conclude with Warburton: William Warburton (1698–1779), Bishop of Gloucester, was the author of The Alliance between Church and State (1736, French translation 1742) and Divine Legation of Moses (1737 and 1741).

12.  Minos had imposed discipline … vice: Minos was a mythical king of Crete, or according to some scholars two different kings, one ‘good’ and a lawgiver, the other, his grandson, ‘bad’ and the master of the Minotaur, to whom he sacrificed an annual tribute extracted from Athens of seven boys and seven girls.

13.  Such was Sparta … Tyrants: For Lycurgus, see note 6 to the Introduction above. The seven legendary Tarquin rulers supposedly held sway in Rome before the popular uprising that established the Roman Republic in 509 BC. In 1581 the northern provinces of the Netherlands adopted the Act of Abjuration, the declaration of independence in which the provinces officially deposed Philip II of Spain as reigning monarch. In Switzerland, the ‘Old Confederacy’ fought a long struggle for independence in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but it was only at the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that the country’s independence from the Holy Roman Empire was generally recognized.

14.  Peter had a genius for imitation: The reference is to Peter I ‘the Great’ (1672–1725), who as tsar of Russia carried out a sweeping programme of modernization, inspired by West European models.

15.  Descartes’ vortices: In his 1644 Principles of Philosophy, René Descartes wrote: ‘Whatever was the manner whereby matter was first set in motion, the vortices into which it is divided must now be so disposed that each turns in the direction in which it is easiest for it to continue its movement for, in accordance with the laws of nature, a moving body is easily deflected by meeting another body.’ His theory of vortices became for a time (prior to Newton) the accepted explanation for the regular movement of planets in the solar system.

16.  the Isle of Corsica: For the Corsican struggle for independence from Genoa, and Rousseau’s own involvement with that cause, see the Prefatory Note to his Constitutional Proposal for Corsica on pp. 189–90.

17.  The author of The Spirit of Laws: I.e. Montesquieu. See Book II, note 7 above.

18.  between intermediate terms: As Rousseau makes clear below, the government is the principal one of these ‘intermediate terms’.

BOOK III

  1.  even when the Doge is not present: The Doge was the chief magistrate and leader of the Most Serene Republic of Venice from the eighth century AD until the republic’s overthrow by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797. The office was elective not hereditary, and was normally a lifetime appointment.

  2.  a continued proportion: A ‘continued (or continuous) proportion’ in mathematics is one composed of two or more equal ratios, in which the consequent of each preceding ratio is identical to the antecedent of the following one, as in 4:8, 8:16, 16:32; or an ordered set of numbers such that the ratio between any two successive terms is identical, as in 1:3:9:27:81. A ‘mean proportional’ in mathematics differs from an arithmetic mean or ‘average’ in that the numbers are multiplied and then the nth root taken (where n is the count of numbers in the set). The ‘quotient’ (exposant) here results from division of the antecedent by the successive term.

  3.  eight Emperors were seen at one time … divided: This doubtless refers to the decade after AD 275 during which eight emperors laid claim to the imperial power, prior to the establishment of Diocletian’s undisputed rule.

  4.  a celebrated author: Montesquieu (see Book II, note 7) in his Spirit of Laws, Book III, Chapter 3.

  5.  Malo periculosam libertatem quem quietum servitium: ‘I prefer dangerous liberty to tranquil servitude’.

  6.  Gerontes: Magistrates in ancient Sparta, who formed the supreme civic authority alongside the kings and ephors.

  7.  Archimedes: Archimedes of Syracuse (c.287–c.212 BC) was a Greek mathematician, inventor, astronomer and engineer, credited notably with many achievements in theoretical and applied hydraulics.

  8.  Samuel pointed out forcefully to the Hebrews: See I Samuel, chapter 8.

  9.  Machiavelli’s Prince is the book of republicans: Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Florentine writer and political theorist. In addition to The Prince his Discourses on Livy were also influential on Rousseau.

10.  Titus Livius: The great Roman historian Titus Livius (59 BC–AD 17) is more commonly known in English as Livy.

11.  the young Dionysius: Dionysius the Younger, who succeeded his father Dionysius the Elder as tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily in 367 BC, ruling until 357 and again 346–44.

12.  as in Poland: See Considerations on the Government of Poland, ‘Means of Maintaining the Constitution’, p. 266 below, where Rousseau discusses the independence of ministers and high officials in Poland.

13.  this principle established by Montesquieu: Rousseau will have had in mind Book XVII, Chapters 2 and 6 of The Spirit of Laws, and perhaps also a passage from Letter CXXXI of the same author’s Persian Letters.

14.  We are all carnivorous beasts, says Chardin: This passage comes from Jean Chardin, Voyage en Perse (Amsterdam 1735), volume III, pp. 76 and 83–4. Originally published in ten volumes in 1711 as Voyages de monsieur le chevalier Chardin en Perse et autres lieux de l’Orient, the work was translated into English as The Travels of Sir John Chardin in Persia and the Orient.

15.  We should follow … as liberty: The two Latin quotations in this foontnote are from Tacitus’ Agricola, sections 21 and 31 respectively. The ‘bickerings’ to which Rousseau refers were the so-called 1651–3 Fronde of the nobles; the Coadjutor of Paris was the Cardinal de Retz, himself active in the Fronde, whose lively description of the volatile situation in the parliament can be found in his memoirs: see Mémoires, 1, III (Geneva edition of 1777, volume 2, p. 122). The passage quoted from Machiavelli (see Book III, note 9) can be found in the preface to his The Florentine Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p.7.

16.  The slow formation … confirms it: The Serrar del Consiglio of 1198 was defined by Ruskin in his Stones of Venice as ‘the final and absolute distinction of the nobles from the commonalty and the establishment of the government in their hands to the exclusion alike of the influence of the people on the one side and the authority of the doge on the other’. The Squitinio della libertà veneta (Scrutiny of Venetian Liberty) was an anonymous anti-Venetian pamphlet published in 1612 which sought to establish the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Emperor over the Republic of Venice. Lucius Cornelius Sulla (c.136–78 BC) was a Roman general and statesman who was appointed dictator by the Senate in 82 BC but resigned the office at the end of 81 after a year of virtually absolute power. The first Triumvirate, formed in 59 BC between Gaius Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey) and Marcus Licinius Crassus, lasted until the death of Crassus in 53. A second Triumvirate was formed in 43 BC following the assassination of Julius Caesar, between Octavian (later known as Augustus), Marcus Aemilius Lepidus and Mark Antony; this lasted until 33 BC, when Augustus became sole ruler, emperor in all but name. In AD 14 Augustus died and was succeeded by Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus (42 BC–AD 37), whose rule marked the formal transition from Republic to Empire.

17.  at the time of the Gracchi: In the late Roman Republic, the Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius, were plebeian tribunes (respectively 133–131 and 123–121 BC), each of whom sought to limit patrician power and landholding by rallying popular support, leading in each case to their violent deaths. According to Plutarch, Gaius attracted so many supporters from outside the city that there was no room for them to vote in the usual place, so many of them climbed onto the roofs of houses to cast their votes for him.

BOOK IV

  1.  Cromwell: Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was the most prominent anti-monarchist leader in the English Civil War and was Lord Protector of England 1653–58.

  2.  the Duke of Beaufort: François de Vendôme, duc de Beaufort (1616–69), was the illegitimate grandson of Henri IV of France, a prominent leader of the Fronde and opponent of Cardinal Mazarin, later an admiral serving with distinction against Algerian corsairs and Ottomans in the Mediterranean. He was portrayed fictionally in the novels Twenty Years After and The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas.

  3.  I would have many reflections … own members: This paragraph is important to the assessment of how democratic Rousseau’s ideal state would be. On the one hand, this suggests that the magistrates exercise significant control over the political agenda; on the other, it is unclear whether Rousseau is merely reporting the natural tendency of governments to seek control – a theme that is an important part both of this text and the Letters Written from the Mountains – or recommending how government should act.

  4.  Tacitus observes … each of them had said: See Tacitus, Histories, I, 85. Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian all briefly wore the imperial purple in AD 69, the so-called year of the four emperors.

  5.  Barnaboti: Impoverished Venetian nobles in the later years of the Republic, so called after the area round Campo San Barnaba, where they habitually met and lodged.

  6.  the abbé de St Pierre proposed … form of Government: In his Discours sur la Polysynodie (1718).

  7.  instruments of war: More precisely, performers of martial music.

  8.  capite censi: Literally, ‘those counted by head’.

  9.  Marius was the first who deigned to enlist them: Gaius Marius (157–86 BC) was a Roman general and statesman, seven times elected Consul, who enacted sweeping military reforms that included allowing the recruitment of landless citizens.

10.  Cicero: Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), Roman statesman and philosopher. See De Legibus, III, I5.

11.  the blood of Agis: Agis IV, King of Sparta 245–241 BC and a would-be reformer, was the first Spartan king to be killed by the ephors (after a mock trial).

12.  Cleomenes: Cleomenes III, King of Sparta 235–222 BC, after Agis’ execution was forced to marry his widow, Agiatis; when he himself ascended to the throne, he sought to follow Agis’ reforming example; however, despite eliminating the ephors who had killed Agis, he himself was eventually defeated and committed suicide.

13.  Pompey: Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (106–48 BC) was a military and political leader of the Roman Republic, allied to Julius Caesar in the first Triumvirate, but contending with him for power after the death of the third triumvir Crassus in 53 BC; he was defeated by Caesar at the battle of Pharsalus and later assassinated in Egypt, where he had taken refuge.

14.  the Catiline affair: Lucius Sergius Catilina (108–62 BC) was a Roman politician, implicated (on the first occasion perhaps unjustly) in two conspiracies to overthrow the Republic, in 65 and 63 BC.

15.  the Lacedaemonians: Sparta was generally referred to in ancient Greek times as Lacedaemon, or Lacedaemonia.

16.  from another Island: Chios, in French Chio, pronounced indistinguishably from the vulgar slang word chiots (chiottes) ‘jakes’, ‘shithouse’.

17.  Moloch, Saturn and Chronos … Baal of the Phoenicians: Moloch was the name of an ancient Semitic god, particularly venerated by the Phoenicians, to whom human sacrifices were made. For Saturn and Chronos, see Book I, note 10 above. Baal was an ancient Semitic title (lord) given to various local deities, patrons of individual cities, and used in the Hebrew Bible as synonymous with ‘false god’.

18.  the sect of Ali: Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law Ali, whom the adherents of Shia Islam hold to have been the Prophet’s true successor.

19.  Bayle and Warburton: Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), French philosopher and author of the Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695); for Warburton see Book II, note 11 above.

20.  sacer esto[d]: ‘Be accursed!’: traditional Roman formula pronounced when delivering someone up to execution and the wrath of the gods.

21.  contrary to the social spirit: Rousseau here reproduces, almost unchanged, the opinions of Machiavelli in the Discourses (II.2).

22.  Fabius’ soldiers: Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (known as Cunctator, the Delayer, c.280–203 BC) was a Roman politician and general, whose advocacy of attritional warfare was important in Rome’s eventual victory over Carthage in the Second Punic War.

23.  And if anyone … lied before the laws: Rousseau’s rather bloodthirsty opinion here contradicts his stance in other writings such as Julie, where he writes that, if he were a judge in a system where atheists faced the death penalty, he would begin by condemning to death those who denounce their fellow citizens as such (Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 2, p. 589n).

24.  The dogmas of the civil Religion: The only laws that Rousseau specifically prescribes for his ideal state. They therefore form an unusual exception, since it is for the sovereign people and not for some philosopher to decide on the content of the laws.

GENEVA MS

  1.  the independent man whom the wise man stifles: The same person as the ‘violent interlocutor’ to whom Diderot responds in his article on ‘Natural Right’ for the Encyclopédie. Diderot replies to this figure by referring him to an abstract general will of the human race; Rousseau’s reply here expresses scepticism about the motivational power of such abstract ideas before rejecting them in favour of particular societies and institutions with their own general will and the capacity to reshape the psychology of individuals.

  2.  Justinian: Justinian (AD 483–565), often known as Justinian the Great, ruled as Byzantine emperor from 527 to 565. His reign saw an ambitious attempt to restore the Roman Empire, whose western half had long been effectively defunct. His generals, most notably Belisarius, defeated Vandals and Ostrogoths, and brought large territories in Italy, south-east Europe, Iberia and North Africa back under imperial control. He oversaw a flowering of Byzantine culture, and above all initiated the systematic rewriting of Roman law, the Corpus Juris Civilis, which still forms the basis of civil law in many countries to this day.

  3.  Hostis enim … dicimus: ‘For, among our ancestors. he whom we now call foreign was called an enemy’ (De Officiis (On Duties), I, xii, 37).

  4.  Hobbes’s error … effect: Rousseau here reproduces an argument against Hobbes that features prominently in the Discourse on Inequality.

PRINCIPLES OF THE RIGHT OF WAR

  1.  the right of nations: In other words, international law.

  2.  Peace of God: See Of the Social Contract, Book I, note 12, above.

  3.  Saint Louis: See Of the Social Contract, Book I, note 12, above.

  4.  Minos and the Athenians … emperors of Mexico … kings of Guinea: Minos was a legendary king of Knossos in Crete, who figures in ancient Attic literature and myth (e.g. the story of Theseus) as having exacted from Athens a yearly tribute of seven youths and seven maidens to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. The emperors of Mexico referred to here must be the pre-Hispanic Aztec rulers. Guinea here means the whole of western and equatorial Africa south of the Sahara prior to the establishment of European colonial rule.

  5.  Let us leave to the Tarentines … the same policy at Syracuse: In 209 BC, during the Second Punic War of the Roman Republic against Carthage, Quintus Fabius Maximus (see Of the Social Contract, Book IV, note 22, above) recaptured Tarentum (today‘s Taranto) from forces siding with the Carthaginian general Hannibal. During the same war, in 212 BC, Marcus Claudius Marcellus took Syracuse for Rome (Archimedes dying during the subsequent sack of the city) and carried off numerous artworks to adorn Rome.

  6.  The only hardship that Cyrus imposed … not to be related: Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian Empire, conquered Lydia and its capital Sardis in about 546 BC. According to Herodotus (I, 155), he was persuaded by the former Lydian ruler Croesus, who was his prisoner, to respond to a subsequent revolt by the Lydians not, as he had at first planned, by enslaving them, but rather by turning their minds to a life of peace and luxury. Aristodemus (born 550 BC), nicknamed Malakos (the Tender), ruled Cumae, a Greek colony north-west of present-day Naples. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, he rose to power with popular support, defeated an Etruscan coalition in 524 BC, but became a ruthless tyrant and was assassinated. Plutarch tells the story of how he compelled young men to dress effeminately and young girls to dress in masculine garb, and how he was brought down by the hand of Xenocrite, a girl whom he had taken against her will.

  7.  Aristotle says … declare war upon them: Aristotle reported on this custom in ‘Fragment 538’, included in the third volume of the Bekker edition of his works, edited by Valentin Rose; his account was referred to in Plutarch‘s Life of Lycurgus, 28, 7.

LETTERS WRITTEN FROM THE MOUNTAINS

  1.  both books were condemned: For a fuller account of the events in Geneva surrounding the suppression of Of the Social Contract, see Richard Fralin, Rousseau and Representation (New York: Columbia, 1977), ch. 8, which this note draws upon.

  2.  the land of dreams: The utopian works referred to here alongside Plato’s Republic are Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Histoire des Sévarambes by Denis Vairasse d’Allais.

  3.  The unfortunate Sidney: Algernon Sidney was an English republican soldier, diplomat and theorist, executed in 1683 for his part in the Rye House Plot to kill Charles II and his brother, the future James II. At his trial for treason, the draft of his Discourses concerning Government, discovered among his papers on his arrest, was taken in lieu of a second witness for the prosecution. The work was published posthumously in 1698, and translated into French in 1702.

  4.  Althusius in Germany: The German Calvinist jurist Johannes Althusius (1563–1638) published his Politica methodice digesta in 1603, in which he notably insisted upon the indivisible and inalienable nature of sovereignty, and developed an early version of federalism based on his espousal of the Dutch Revolt.

  5.  Liberty consists … your own: Here Rousseau clearly commits himself to an understanding of freedom or liberty as non-subjection to the particular will of others. In other places, such as the famous ‘forced to be free’ passage in Of the Social Contract, he relies on this understanding but does not formulate it as explicitly as he does here.

  6.  like Otho: Marcus Salvius Otho was Roman emperor for three months in AD 69. According to Tacitus in Histories, I, 36: ‘Nec deerat Otho protendens manus adorare volgum, jacere oscula, et omnia serviliter pro dominatione’ (‘Otho did not fail to play his part; he stretched out his arms, and bowed to the crowd, and kissed his hands, and altogether acted the slave, to make himself the master’).

CONSTITUTIONAL PROPOSAL FOR CORSICA

  1.  the Barbary pirates: Berber pirates, otherwise known as corsairs, operating out of such North African ports as Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers, ravaged shipping especially in the Western Mediterranean from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, capturing hundreds of vessels and perhaps one million mainly Christian slaves for the Islamic (notably Ottoman) market.

  2.  each form of government … one form of government or another: On this point, see Of the Social Contract, Book III, Chapter 8, above.

  3.  the report drawn up at Vescovado in 1764: The reference is to Count Matthieu de Buttafoco’s ‘Memoria sopra la Costituzione Politica da stabilire nel Regno di Corsica’, presented to the Corsican assembly held at Vescovado in May 1764, but not in fact considered by this body.

  4.  pievi: A pieve (plural pievi) was originally a medieval ecclesiastical unit in Italy and in Corsica, roughly equivalent to a parish. Through Pisan administrative reforms in the eleventh century, the pievi of Corsica were established as the basic administrative units on the island, intermediate between communes and provinces. In Rousseau’s day, they were the principal administrative units, rendered here as ‘communes’. The boundaries of the sixtytwo pievi correspond exactly to those of today’s cantons.

  5.  Aix-la-Chapelle remonstrance … their nobility: In 1748 the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle at the end of the War of Austrian Succession placed Corsica back under Genoese jurisdiction, despite remonstrations by Corsican patriots arguing that Genoese rule was intolerable to them, and complaining in particular because the Corsican nobility did not enjoy the same privileges as that of Genoa.

  6.  the Popes had vested the island of Corsica: The Papacy played a major role in Corsica from the late eleventh century, and annexed the island to the Holy See in 1217, in an ultimately vain attempt to end the rival claims of Genoa and Pisa, cities which, later joined by Aragon, were to contend for mastery over it, and for Papal backing, for the next three centuries.

  7.  wholly free: As opposed to the island’s actual condition of semifreedom, with its main ports still in Genoese hands.

  8.  terra di commune: Communal land established in the early eleventh century, by a movement aimed at curbing feudal anarchy comparable to the Peace of God movement in Languedoc. In the course of the fourteenth century the entire north-east of the island (between Calvi, Bastia and Solenzara) was freed from feudal obligations; henceforth twelve autonomous communes, each with its own assembly headed by a Podestat, would band together as terra di commune, with the land either leased to individual peasants or left open for flocks. This effectively put an end to the wars between rival barons and petty lords in the north of the island, although the south remained wild.

  9.  between the two main parts: Corsica is roughly divided by a mountain range running from south-east to north-west. The area closer to the Italian peninsula, comprising six provinces with forty-one pievi, is known as ‘di quà dai monti’ or ‘this side of the mountains’; the area facing across the Mediterranean to the Iberian peninsula, with three provinces containing twenty-one pievi, is known as ‘di là dai monti’ or ‘beyond the mountains’.

10.  Diodorus says: Diodorus of Sicily was a Greek historian writing in the first century BC, author of a monumental ‘Universal history from the origins of the world up to Caesar’, from which Rousseau takes this description.

11.  you are no longer surprised … against this heroic nation: The three attacks on Switzerland alluded to are presumably those of Austria in the fourteenth century, Burgundy in the fifteenth and the Holy Roman Empire under Maximilian I in the sixteenth.

12.  when a French minister frowns: The reference here is to the duc de Choiseul, principal minister of Louis XV, whom Rousseau blamed for intervening with the authorities of Berne and so causing his expulsion from Switzerland, as he recounts in Confessions, Book XII. He compares this with the time, prior to the Perpetual Peace signed with the Swiss in 1515 by François I, when France feared Swiss depredations.

13.  The wretched Corsicans … the favour of being disarmed: The Genoese raised considerable revenue in Corsica from the sale of permits to bear arms, and also from the sale of safe-conducts to persons guilty of murder. Confronted by an alarming rise in blood crimes, and by public indignation in Corsica, they eventually decided to forbid the bearing of arms. But in order to make up for the consequent loss of revenue, they imposed a new tax indiscriminately on the entire population. Not only did these measures do nothing to lessen the number of murders; they also proved so unpopular that they were a direct cause of the 1729 uprising.

14.  the collection of land taxes: The taille was a feudal direct tax on land; in France by the late fifteenth century it had become a purely royal prerogative, and it continued to be levied until the 1789 Revolution.

15.  the project of an equal population: Rousseau advances the idea that a territory should be evenly populated in Of the Social Contract, Book III, Chapter 13 above.

16.  the pistoles in France: The French name for the Spanish gold coin known in English as a ‘doubloon’, i.e. the double escudo. The louis d’or introduced by Louis XIII in 1640, upon which pre-revolutionary French coinage was based, was initially its equivalent.

17.  Masters of Rivers and Forests: The Grand maître des eaux et forêts was an important officer in feudal France, charged with protecting the royal domain especially in respect of hunting, fishing and wood-gathering rights. From the late sixteenth century on, the office was progressively subdivided, so that the maître des eaux et forêts became an essential official of local administration.

18.  capitation: Capitation or poll-tax was the main form of direct taxation in pre-revolutionary France, with amounts to be paid by head varying according to class.

19.  vectigal: Term used in ancient Rome for all the state’s revenues, but at the height of Roman power the bulk of these did indeed derive from external tribute.

20.  The acquisition … too much or too little: According to the Old Testament story (Genesis 47: 20–31), Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt, but rose to be the Pharaoh’s vizier after interpreting his dream. Following his advice, Egypt stored up goods during seven years of abundance in order to survive the seven years of famine that would follow. Towards the end of the seven lean years, however, even Egypt began to run short, so Joseph obliged its inhabitants – with exception made for the priestly caste – to sell all their property to the Pharaoh in return for seed, so that it became state property. Since they would henceforth be farming on state land, they would have to pay one-fifth of their produce to the Pharaoh.

21.  forced labour: The corvée is a form of unpaid labour imposed by force, as for instance in pre-revolutionary France.

22.  no publicans in the State: Publicans in the ancient world were public contractors, and notably – e.g. in Rome – tax collectors.

23.  Hôtel-Dieu in Paris … Lyons: Hôtel-Dieu, or ‘hostel of God’, was the old term for the principal hospital in French towns, that of Paris dating from 660 and that of Lyons from 1478.

24.  stealing from his creditors: The modern reader, accustomed to fiat currency, may find this passage puzzling since governments intent on fleecing their creditors now inflate away debt in a manner that reduces the value of the currency. However, in earlier times, such as Rousseau’s, currency purportedly derived its value fr0m its metallic content (often gold). Governments could therefore debase the coinage either by stamping a higher face value on coins of constant metallic content (the practice Rousseau refers to here) or by adulterating the metal or by clipping the coin

25.  Gazetteers: Journalists.

26.  the Catos: Members of a distinguished Plebeian family in ancient Rome, notably the statesmen Marcus Porcius Cato (234–149 BC) and his great-grandson Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis (95–46 BC), both noted for their strict republican morality.

27.  Le prerogative che goderanno le sudette famiglie: The opening words of a quotation from Buttafoco’s report (see note 3 above), expressing support for an idea with which Rousseau strongly disagreed, namely that the privileges of the Corsican nobility should be restored.

CONSIDERATIONS ON THE GOVERNMENT OF POLAND

  1.  Count Wielhorski’s description … government: The document Rousseau refers to has not been identified.

  2.  end of the Social Contract: The reference is to the chapter on civil religion.

  3.  there to take lessons in corruption: Rousseau had condemned the modern theatre for its corrupting effects on republican virtue in his Letter to d’Alembert.

  4.  A proof of this … live in the memory: The Bar Confederation of 1768: an association of nobles determined to preserve Polish independence.

  5.  black sauce: Spartan ‘black broth’ was a stew made from pork, salt, vinegar and blood; according to Plutarch the older inhabitants of Sparta were devoted to it, but it did not meet with favour elsewhere. The individual referred to is Brasidas.

  6.  to be another Croesus: Croesus (596–c.547 BC) was king of Lydia in Asia Minor until his defeat by the Persians, proverbial for his wealth.

  7.  what that much praised Tsar did: A reference to Tsar Peter I the Great, who obliged his court to adopt Western (especially French) apparel and customs.

  8.  the Magnates: In reference to the Middle Ages, the term ‘magnate’ is widely used for major territorial landowners. Specifically in the Kingdom of Poland, and later in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the magnates were a distinct social class of wealthy and influential nobility.

  9.  duc d’Epernon … duc de Sully: Jean Louis de Nogaret, duc d’Epernon (1554–1642), was a Catholic nobleman who made a brilliant military career under Henri III; out of favour under Henri IV, he took part in various plots culminating in the latter’s assassination, after which he returned to public life and was involved in the persecution of Huguenots. Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully (1564–1640) was a prominent Huguenot nobleman, principal adviser to Henri IV from the latter’s accession in 1589 until his assassination in 1610, but obliged to withdraw from the court in 1611.

10.  ‘moot State’: By analogy with ‘moot courts’, ‘moot assemblies’, etc.

11.  three States combined in one: Greater Poland, Lesser Poland and Lithuania being three parts of the whole.

12.  the Dietines: The assemblies of each Palatinate.

13.  the legislator: Rousseau’s reference to the legislator here is confusing, and matters are not helped by the subsequent references in this chapter. He may be referring to the sovereign people who legislate rather than to a figure like the Legislator of Of the Social Contract, Book II, Chapter 7.

14.  the pacta conventa: Articles of agreement: a pledge made by each Polish king to uphold the constitution.

15.  in Of the Social Contract: See Of the Social Contract, Book III, Chapter 18.

16.  in his Polysynodie: See Of the Social Contract, Book IV, note 6, above.

17.  his authority: Again, this may not be a reference to a figure such as the Legislator of Of the Social Contract.

18.  liberum veto: A device that allowed any member of the assembly to bring a session to an end and nullify anything approved there by declaring ‘I do not allow’.

19.  where I advance it: Of the Social Contract, Book III, Chapters 12–13.

20.  The Legislator corporately: The reference to ‘the Legislator corporately’ strengthens the notion that this is a reference to the sovereign people, especially given the language so strongly reminiscent of the opening paragraph of Of the Social Contract, Book II, Chapter 3.

21.  the comitia: For the Roman comitia, see Of the Social Contract, Book IV, Chapter 4.

22.  Rugi: The Polish word rugi can be translated as ‘eviction’ or ‘exclusion’.

23.  Radom’s commissaries … the Tribunal: The dicastery of Radom was a kind of fiscal court scrutinizing accounts, made up of senators designated by the Diet and commissaries elected by the Dietines, abolished by the Diet in 1764 and replaced by a commission of the exchequer. The Tribunal was a supreme court of appeal held alternately at Piotrków and Lublin.

24.  Laudum: The confirmation sworn by officials in each Palatinate that a particular candidate had been duly elected.

25.  this Wilkes is a mere troublemaker: The reference is to John Wilkes (1725–97), the English radical journalist and politician, who in 1769 was elected to Parliament and disqualified three times, formally on the grounds that he had been an outlaw at the time of his election, but more substantially on the grounds of his unacceptability to King George III and the Court.

26.  Venice’s Golden Book: The Libro d’Oro or Golden Book was the formal register of nobles in the Republic of Venice.

27.  in every Grod: The Grod was the registry attached to every local administration.

28.  Now the law … balanced by their multiplicity: These remarks recall Rousseau’s discussion in Of the Social Contract, Book II, Chapter 3 of the difference between the general will and the will of all.

29.  the Palatines of Polock and Witebsk … the Starost of Samogitie: The Palatines of Polock and Witebsk, and the Starost (Elder) of Samogitie, whose status was equivalent to that of a Palatine, were appointed by the King and sat in the Senate; but their appointment went through a two-stage process of election by ‘popular’ assembly and then by the Dietine.

30.  I have discussed most carefully in the Social Contract: See Of the Social Contract, Book IV, Chapter 2.

31.  the Archbishop of Gniezno: The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Gniezno is traditionally Primate of the Polish Church.

32.  Denmark … England … Sweden: In 1770 the Danish royal doctor, Johann Friedrich Struensee (1737–72), who had become the Queen of Denmark’s lover, insinuated himself into a position of supreme power within the state, which he used to promote various Enlightenment reforms. He alienated both the nobility and the Danish people and was arrested and executed in 1772. Ironically, given the remarks here, Struensee was an admirer of Rousseau. In England, the radical John Wilkes (see note 25) was repeatedly disbarred and re-elected to Parliament in 1769. In Sweden, following half a century of parliamentary domination, King Gustav III (1746–92) came to the throne in 1771, and in 1772 led a coup d’état, with French support, that established him as an ‘enlightened despot’.

33.  the imperial capitulations: In 1519 the Imperial Diet and Grand Electors imposed ‘capitulations’ on the German Emperor in return for their recognition of the hereditary principle, and new guarantees were given in 1711 when Charles VI inherited the Habsburg domains and was elected Emperor.

34.  unanimity was required: See Rousseau’s assertion in Of the Social Contract, Book IV, Chapter 2 that the social pact is the only law which requires unanimity.

35.  the Pseudo-Diet of 1768: The last extraordinary Diet of Warsaw, convened under Russian pressure in October 1767, prorogued in March 1768, which listed a number of fundamental laws and constitutional provisions. Those referred to here were the first, that the republic of Poland was composed of three orders, the King, the Senate and the Equestrian Order; the fifth, that the election of kings must be unanimous and excluded heredity of the Crown; the ninth, confirming the indissoluble unity of the Crown and the Grand Duchy; and the eleventh, guaranteeing the equality and the prerogatives of the szlachta, body politic of the nation.

36.  men of the sword and men of the gown: In France, the noblesse d’épée referred to the traditional nobility rooted in medieval feudalism, while noblesse de robe – attained through the occupation of a range of public functions – was formalized in 1600; in European parlance it subsequently came to refer more generally to members of the legal professions and public servants.

37.  entails or Majorats: Majorat is the right of succession to property according to age (primogeniture). A majorat (fidéicommis) would be inherited by the eldest son, or if there was no son by the nearest male relative. The institution was designed to prevent the division of wealthy estates between many family members. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, majorat was known as ordynacja. Introduced in the late sixteenth century by King Stefan Batory, it assisted the creation of major magnate fortunes such as that of the Radziwills, and survived until the Communist period following the Second World War.

38.  the Bailiffs of the Canton of Berne: Berne was ruled by a Grand Council, whose members were known as Bailiffs (a term, widespread in Europe, that had lost its original meaning of royal steward and come merely to designate an important civic official). Rousseau’s earlier good opinion of the administration of Berne had given way to the harsh judgements expressed here, following his two expulsions from the canton.

39.  a people of Capuchins: Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, founded in 1520, originally as a reform movement within the Franciscans and aiming to return the latter to the poverty recommended by St Francis. Known for their austere way of life, often as hermits, they took their name from the cappuccio or hood that they wore.

40.  the infallible and natural effect: Rousseau sets out this criterion in Of the Social Contract, Book II, Chapter 9.

41.  Hôtel-Dieu: See Constitutional Proposal for Corsica, note 24, above.

42.  capitation: See Constitutional Proposal for Corsica, note 19, above.

43.  the Maréchal de Vauban and the abbé de Saint-Pierre: Sébastien Le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban (1633–1707), the great military theorist and engineer, also wrote widely on economic issues, including notably in his Projet d’une dixme royale (1707), which called for the imposition of a single 10 per cent tax on all agricultural output (payable in kind) and on income from trade and manufactures, with no exemptions. For Saint-Pierre, see Of the Social Contract, Prefatory Note, note 1, above.

44.  Antony and Crassus easily entered the territory of the Parthians: Marcus Licinius Crassus (115–53 BC) was a Roman politician and general, proverbially wealthy, and a member of the first Triumvirate (see Of the Social Contract, Book III, note 15, above). Given the governorship of Syria, he invaded the territory of the Parthian empire (in present-day Iran) in 53 BC, but was defeated and killed. Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius, 83–30 BC) was a Roman politician and general, a close supporter and ally of Julius Caesar, who following the latter’s assassination became a member of the second Triumvirate. He was involved in sporadic warfare against the Parthians between 41 and 33 BC, sometimes successfully, at other times leading to defeat on Parthian territory, notably in 37 BC.

45.  Themistocles: Themistocles (c.524–459 BC) was an Athenian politician and general, pre-eminent following the battle of Marathon and playing a vital role in the establishment of Athenian naval power and the defeat of the Persians at Salamis. He was widely viewed by later generations as the symbol of ancient Greek statesmanship.

46.  what I said in the Social Contract: See Of the Social Contract, Book II, Chapter 10.

47.  the Turkish war: The Russo–Turkish War of 1768–74 eventually turned into a decisive Russian victory, which brought southern Ukraine, northern Caucasus and the Crimea under Russian rule. In it Turkey was allied with the Polish Confederation of Bar, while Russia was allied with Great Britain.

48.  The Grand Turk: In eighteenth-century Europe, the Ottoman Sultan was commonly referred to as the Grand Turk, and his administration, headed by the Grand Vizier, as the Sublime Porte, or simply Porte, from the gate to the Divan at which the Vizier would receive diplomatic visitors.

49.  the King they sought to give you: Stanisław August Poniatowski (1732–98), a lover of Catherine the Great, was elected King of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1764, following a Russian-backed coup d’état. He supported Russian suppression of the Confederation of Bar in 1768–72, and was briefly taken prisoner by Confederate sympathizers in 1771. Although he did protest against the first partition of the Commonwealth in 1772, he was powerless to do anything about it. He remains a very controversial figure in Polish history.

Chronology

1707 Following acute conflict between the Genevan bourgeoisie and the ruling oligarchy, the leader of the democratic party, Pierre Fatio, is executed.

1712 Jean-Jacques Rousseau born on 28 June in Geneva; his mother Suzanne dies on 7 July.

1715 Death of Louis XIV of France.

1722 Rousseau’s father flees from Geneva. Rousseau is sent to live with the Lambercier family outside the city.

1724 Rousseau is apprenticed to an engraver in Geneva.

1728 Rousseau runs away and meets Mme de Warens at Annecy. She sends him to Turin, where he converts to Roman Catholicism.

1729 Rousseau returns to Annecy to live with Mme de Warens.

1738 Following further civil strife in Geneva, the Act of Mediation establishes a new constitution.

1740 Rousseau becomes a tutor to the de Mably family in Lyon. Frederick the Great comes to power in Prussia.

1742 Rousseau moves to Paris and unsuccessfully proposes a numerically based system of musical notation.

1743–4 Serves as secretary to the French Ambassador in Venice.

1744 Rousseau meets with Diderot and is inducted into French Enlightenment circles.

1745 He begins his lifelong relationship with Thérèse Levasseur.

1748 Montesquieu publishes The Spirit of Laws.

1749 On his way to visit the imprisoned Diderot, Rousseau experiences an epiphany on reading of an essay competition set by the Academy of Dijon.

1750 The Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts wins the prize from the Dijon Academy and Rousseau enjoys widespread fame.

1751 The first volume of the Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, appears.

1752 Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du Village enjoys success.

1754 Rousseau visits Geneva and reconverts to Protestantism in order to regain his citizenship.

1755 Rousseau publishes the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and, as an entry in the Encyclopédie, the Discourse on Political Economy. The Lisbon earthquake. Pasquale Paoli proclaims Corsica a republic, independent of Genoa.

1756 Beginning of the Seven Years War.

1758 The Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre signals Rousseau’s breach with the mainstream of the French Enlightenment.

1761 Publication of Julie, or the New Héloïse.

1762 Publication of the Social Contract and Emile. Condemnation in Paris and Geneva. Facing arrest, Rousseau flees to Môtiers in Switzerland. Catherine the Great comes to power in Russia.

1763 Rousseau renounces his Genevan citizenship. Treaty of Paris ends the Seven Years War.

1764 With Letters Written from the Mountains, Rousseau intervenes in the political debate in Geneva.

1766 At the invitation of David Hume, Rousseau travels to England, where he settles at Wootton in Staffordshire and begins work on the Confessions. Quarrels with Hume and becomes mentally unstable.

1767 Rousseau returns to France under an assumed name.

1768 Confederation of Bar forms to defend Polish independence against Russia.

1768-9 Genoa transfers its nominal sovereignty over Corsica to France. France invades Corsica and ends the Corsican Republic.

1770 Rousseau returns to Paris.

1772 First partition of Poland.

1776 Rousseau composes his final work, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. American Declaration of Independence. Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations.

1778 Rousseau dies on 2 July, aged sixty-six.

1789 Fall of the Bastille, the French Revolution begins.

1794 The French revolutionaries transfer Rousseau’s remains to the Panthéon in Paris.

1798 Geneva annexed by France.

1815 Geneva becomes a canton of Switzerland.

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This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2012

Translation © Quintin Hoare, 2012
Editorial material © Chris Bertram, 2012

Cover : detail from Equality of duties, the card replacing the jack in the New Cards of the French Republic, 1793 playing cards (Photograph © Collection Grob/Kharbine-Tapabor)

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ISBN: 978-0-14-193199-9

* ‘Scholarly studies on public law are often merely the story of ancient abuses, and people have been over-zealous when they have taken the trouble to pay them too much attention.’ Traité des intérêts de la Fr. avec ses voisins, par M. le Marquis d’Argenson (printed by Rey in Amsterdam). That is just what Grotius has done. [1782 edition]

* See a little treatise by Plutarch entitled: ‘Beasts are rational’ [Bruta animalia ratione uti].

* The Romans, who understood better and respected more the right of war than any other nation in the world, carried their scruples in this respect so far that a Citizen was not allowed to serve as a volunteer without having expressly engaged himself against the enemy, and against the particular enemy by name. When a Legion in which the young Cato was seeing his first service under Popilius was reorganized, Cato the Elder wrote to Popilius¹³ that if he wanted his son to continue to serve under him, he must make him swear a new military oath, because the former oath having been annulled he was no longer able to bear arms against the enemy. And that same Cato wrote to his son to take care not to present himself for combat if he had not sworn this new oath. I know that you could bring up against me the siege of Clusium and other specific events, but for my part I am citing laws and customs. The Romans are the people who least often infringed their laws, and they are the only people to have had such fine ones. [1782 edition]

* The true meaning of this word has been almost wholly erased in the modern world; most people today take a town for a City and a townsman for a Citizen. They are unaware that houses make a town but Citizens make a City. This same mistake once cost the Carthaginians dear. I have not read that the title Cives has ever been given to the subjects of any Prince, not even in olden times to the Macedonians, nor in our own day to the English, closer to liberty though they be than all the rest. The French alone adopt this title of Citizens quite casually, since as can be seen from their Dictionaries they have no real idea about it; otherwise by usurping it they would fall into the crime of Lèse-Majesté. Among them, this name expresses a quality, not a right. When Bodin thought to speak about our Citizens and Townsmen, he made a serious blunder in taking one for the other. M. d’Alembert did not fall into the same error, and in his article ‘Geneva’¹⁸ clearly distinguished the four orders of men (even five, counting mere foreigners) who exist in our town, and of whom two alone make up the Republic. No other French author, to my knowledge, has understood the true meaning of the word Citizen.

* Under bad governments this equality is only apparent and illusory; it serves only to maintain the poor man in his misery and the rich man in his usurpation. In fact, laws are always useful to those who own and harmful to those who have nothing. Whence it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only in so far as all have something and none has anything in excess.

* For a will to be general, it is not always necessary that it be unanimous, but it is necessary that all votes be counted; any formal exclusion breaks its generality.

* ‘Every interest’, says M. d’A[rgenson], ‘has different principles. Agreement between two particular interests is formed through opposition to that of a third party.’ He might have added that agreement between all interests is formed through opposition to the interest of each. If there were no different interests, you would scarcely be aware of the common interest, which would never encounter any obstacle. Everything would proceed of its own accord, and politics would cease to be an art.

* ‘It is very true’, says Machiavelli, ‘that some divisions are harmful to the Republic, while some are beneficial: harmful are those associated with factions and followers; beneficial those maintained without factions or followers. The founder of a Republic being therefore unable to ensure that there are no enmities within it, he must at least ensure that there are no factions.’ History of Florence, L, 7. [Cited by Rousseau in Italian.]

* I beg of you, attentive readers, do not rush to charge me here with inconsistency. I have been unable to avoid it in my terms, given the poverty of the language. But wait.

* By this word, I do not mean only an Aristocracy or a Democracy, but in general any government guided by the general will, which is the law. To be legitimate, the Government must not be confused with the Sovereign, but be its minister: then monarchy itself is a republic. This will be clarified in the following book.

* A people becomes famous only when its legislation begins to decline. We do not know for how many centuries before the rest of Greece ever took notice of the Spartans the institutions of Lycurgus ensured their well-being.

* Those who consider Calvin only as a theologian have poor knowledge of the scope of his genius. The drafting of our wise Edicts, in which he played a large part, does him as much honour as do his Institutes. Whatever revolution time may bring to our faith, the memory of that great man will never cease to be blessed in it, for as long as love of the fatherland and liberty have not been extinguished among us.

* ‘And in truth’, says Machiavelli, ‘there was never any ordainer of extraordinary laws in a people who did not have recourse to God, because otherwise they would not be accepted; for many good things are known to a prudent man that do not in themselves have manifest reasons such as to persuade others of them.’ Discourses on Titus Livius, L, I, c, XI.

* If two neighbouring peoples could not do without one another, it would be a very difficult situation for one and a very dangerous situation for the other. Every wise nation, in such a case, will strive with all haste to free the other from its dependence. The Republic of Tlaxcala, which formed an enclave within the Empire of Mexico, preferred to go without salt than to buy any from the Mexicans, or even to accept any from them as a gift. The wise Tlaxcalans saw the trap hidden beneath such generosity. They kept their liberty, and that little State surrounded by that great Empire was finally the instrument of the latter’s ruin.

* Do you wish then to give the State coherence? Bring the extreme degrees as close together as possible: do not tolerate either opulent persons or beggars. Those two conditions, naturally inseparable, are equally fatal to the common good. From one come the creators of tyranny, from the other come tyrants. It is always between them that public liberty is trafficked: one buys it, the other sells it.

† Some branches of external commerce, says the M[arquis] d’A[rgenson], scarcely provide anything other than false utility for a kingdom in general; they may enrich certain individuals, even certain towns, but the nation as a whole gains nothing from them, and the people is no better off.

* Thus in Venice the College is called most serene Prince, even when the Doge is not present.¹

* The Palatine of Poznan, father of the King of Poland, Duke of Lorraine.

† Clearly the word Optimists in the ancient world does not mean the best, but the most powerful.

* It is of great importance to regulate the form of elections of magistrates by laws. For if it is left to the will of the Prince, you cannot avoid falling into hereditary Aristocracy, as happened to the Republics of Venice and Berne. Thus the former has for long been a dissolved State, but the latter maintains itself through the extreme wisdom of its Senate; it is a very honourable and very dangerous exception.

* Machiavelli was an honest man and a good citizen. But, being attached to the house of Medici, he was forced under the oppression of his fatherland to disguise his love of liberty. The very choice of his execrable Hero shows clearly enough his secret intention; and the contrast between the maxims of his book on the Prince and those in his discourses on Titus Livius ¹⁰ and in his history of Florence shows that this profound political thinker has hitherto had only superficial or corrupt Readers. The Court of Rome severely proscribed his book, as I can well believe; for that court is what the book most clearly portrayed. [1782 edition]

* Tacitus, Histories, Book I.

† In The Statesman.

* This does not contradict what I said earlier in Book II, Chapter 9, on the disadvantages of large States. For there it was a matter of the Government’s authority over its members, while here it is a matter of its strength against its subjects. Its scattered members serve it as fulcra to act upon the people from afar, but it has no fulcrum to act directly upon those members themselves. Thus in one case the length of the lever makes for weakness, in the other for strength.

* We should follow the same principle in judging which centuries merit our preference in terms of the prosperity of mankind. We have admired too much those in which letters and arts have been seen to flourish, without grasping the secret aim of their cultivation, and without considering its fateful effect, idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset [and the ignorant called it ‘human nature’, whereas it was part of slavery]. In the maxims of books, shall we never see the vulgar interest that makes their Authors speak? No, whatever they may say about it, when a country becomes depopulated in spite of its brilliance, it is not true that all is going well; and it is not enough for a poet to have an income of a hundred thousand livres for his century to be best of all. We should pay less regard to the apparent ease and tranquillity of rulers than to the well-being of whole nations, and above all of the most populous states. Hail may lay waste a few cantons, but it rarely brings a famine. Riots and civil wars greatly frighten rulers, but they do not cause the true misfortunes of peoples, which can even have some respite while argument rages over who will tyrannize them. It is their permanent state which gives birth to their real prosperity or their real calamities. It is when everything remains crushed beneath the yoke that everything declines, and that rulers, destroying them with ease, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant [where they create solitude, call it peace]. When the bickerings of the Nobles were disrupting the kingdom of France, and the Coadjutor of Paris used to go to Parliament with a dagger in his pocket, that did not prevent the French people, happy and numerous, from living at their ease in respectability and liberty. In olden times Greece flourished amid the cruellest wars; blood flowed copiously, yet the whole land was filled with men. It seemed, Machiavelli says, that amid murders, banishments and civil wars our [Florentine] Republic grew all the more powerful; the virtue of its citizens, their morals and their independence had more effect in strengthening it than all its disputes had in weakening it. A little unrest gives vigour to the soul, and what makes the species truly prosper is not so much peace as liberty.¹⁵

* The slow formation and the progress of the Republic of Venice in its lagoons offers a notable example of this succession. And it is astonishing indeed that after more than twelve hundred years the Venetians seem still to be only at the second stage, which began at the Serrar del Consiglio in 1198. As for the old Doges who are brought up against them, whatever the Squitinio della libertà veneta may say about them, it is proven that they were not their Sovereigns at all. People will not fail to cite against me the Roman Republic, which they will claim followed a quite opposite progress, passing from monarchy to Aristocracy, and from Aristocracy to Democracy. I am very far from viewing things like this.

The first establishment of Romulus was a mixed Government, which quickly degenerated into Despotism. For specific reasons the State perished before its time, as a newborn child sometimes dies before having reached manhood. The expulsion of the Tarquins was the true epoch when the Republic was born. But it did not at first take a constant form, because by not abolishing the patriciate only half the work was done. For in this way the hereditary Aristocracy, which is the worst of legitimate administrations, remained in conflict with Democracy, so that the still uncertain and fluctuating form of Government was settled, as Machiavelli proved, only when the Tribunes were established; then alone was there a true Government and a true Democracy. In fact the people was then not merely Sovereign, but also magistrate and judge, the Senate was merely a subsidiary tribunal to moderate or concentrate the Government, and the Consuls themselves, albeit Patricians, albeit first Magistrates, albeit absolute Generals in war, in Rome were only the presidents of the people.

Thenceforth the Government too was seen to take its natural tendency and to incline strongly to Aristocracy. With the Patriciate being abolished almost of its own accord, Aristocracy was no longer in the body of Patricians as it is in Venice and Genoa, but in the body of the Senate made up of Patricians and Plebeians, even in the body of the Tribunes when these began to usurp an active power; for words do nothing to things, and when the people has rulers who govern for it, whatever name these rulers bear, it is always an Aristocracy. From the abuse of Aristocracy sprang the civil wars and the Triumvirate. Sulla, Julius Caesar, Augustus became in fact real Monarchs, and finally under the Despotism of Tiberius the State was dissolved. Roman history thus does not refute my principle, it confirms it.¹⁶

* Omnes enim et habentur et dicuntur Tyranni qui potestate utuntur perpetua, in ea Civitate qua libertate usa est [For all are both deemed and called Tyrants who use perpetual power, in that City which is used to liberty], Cornelius Nepos, Life of Miltiades. It is true that Aristotle in Nichomachean Ethics, Book VIII, chapter X, distinguishes the Tyrant from the King, in that the former governs for his own utility and the latter only for the utility of his subjects. But apart from the fact that all Greek authors generally took the word Tyrant in another sense, as appears above all from the Hieron of Xenophon, it would follow from Aristotle’s distinction that since the beginning of the world there would never have existed a single King.

* More or less in the sense given to this term in the Parliament of England. The similarity between these functions would have brought the Consuls and the Tribunes into conflict even if all jurisdiction had been suspended.

* To adopt in cold countries the luxury and softness of Orientals is to be willing to accept their chains, indeed to submit to these even more inevitably than they do.

* This is what I had proposed to do in the remainder of this work, when, in dealing with external relations, I came to confederations. This is a wholly new topic, and one whose principles remain to be established.

* Provided, of course, that he does not go away in order to evade his duty and excuse himself from serving his fatherland at the moment when it has need of him. Flight would then be criminal and punishable; that would no longer be withdrawal, but desertion.

* This should always be understood in relation to a free State, for elsewhere family, goods, lack of refuge, necessity and violence may keep an inhabitant in the country unwillingly, and then his mere residence no longer presupposes his consent to the contract or to violation of the contract.

† In Genoa, the word Libertas may be read on the façade of prisons and the shackles of galley-slaves. This application of the motto is splendid and right. For it is only criminals of every condition who prevent the Citizen from being free. In a country where all such people were in the Galleys, you would enjoy the most perfect liberty.

* The name Rome, which is claimed to come from Romulus is Greek, and means strength. The name Numa is Greek too, and means Law. What is the likelihood that the two first Kings of that city should in advance have borne names so clearly related to what they did?

* Ramnenses.

† Tatienses.

‡ Luceres.

* I say on the Campus Martius, because it was there that the comitia assembled by centuries; in the two other forms the people would assemble at the forum or elsewhere, and then the Capite censi had as much influence and authority as the first Citizens.

* This century drawn thus by lot was called prae rogativa, because it was the first to be asked for its suffrage, and that is the source of the word prerogative.

* Custodes, Diribitores, Rogatores suffragiorum.

* This nomination would be made at night and in secret, as if they were ashamed to place a man above the laws.

* That is what he could not guarantee by proposing a Dictatorship, not daring to nominate himself and not being able to ensure that his colleague would nominate him.

* In this chapter I merely allude to what I dealt with at greater length in the Letter to M. d’Alembert.

† They were from another Island,¹⁶ which the delicacy of our language forbids me to name on this occasion. [1782 edition]

* Nonne ea quae possidet Chamos deus tuus tibi jure debentur? Such is the Vulgate text. Father Carrières has translated: Do you not believe in your right to possess what belongs to Chamos your God? I do not know the import of the Hebrew text, but I see that in the Vulgate Jephtha positively acknowledges the right of the God Chamos, and that the French Translator weakens this acknowledgement by an according to you that is not in the Latin.

† It is perfectly evident that the war of the Phocians known as the sacred war was not a war of religion at all. Its aim was to punish sacrilege, not to subdue unbelievers.

* It is noteworthy that it is not so much formal assemblies, like those of France, which bind the clergy into a body as it is the communion of Churches. Communion and excommunication are the social pact of the clergy, a pact by virtue of which it will always be the master of peoples and Kings. All priests who are in communion together are fellow citizens, even should they come from opposite ends of the earth. This invention is a masterpiece in politics. The pagan Priests had nothing like it; accordingly, they never formed a body of Clergy.

† See among other things, in a Letter from Grotius to his brother on 11 April 1643, what that learned man approves and what he condemns in the book De Cive. It is true that, being inclined to indulgence, he seems to forgive the author what is good for the sake of what is bad; but everyone is not so merciful.

* In the Republic, says M. d’A[rgenson], every man is perfectly free in what does not harm others. There is the invariable limit; it cannot be stated more accurately. I have been unable to deny myself the pleasure of sometimes quoting this manuscript, albeit unknown to the public, in order to pay honour to the memory of an illustrious and worthy man, who even in the Ministry had preserved the heart of a true citizen and upright, sound views on the government of his country.

* Caesar pleading for Catiline sought to establish the dogma of the soul’s immortality. Cato and Cicero, in order to refute it, did not amuse themselves by philosophizing. They contented themselves with showing that Caesar was speaking as a bad Citizen and advancing a doctrine harmful to the State. For that was what the Senate of Rome had to pass judgement on, not a question of theology.

* Marriage, for example, being a civil contract, has civil effects without which it is even impossible that society should survive. Let us then suppose that a Clergy manages to attribute to itself alone the right to approve this act; a right that it must necessarily usurp in every intolerant Religion. Is it not then clear that, in validating the authority of the Church in this respect, it will render vain that of the Prince, who will no longer have any more subjects than those whom the Clergy is willing to give him. Is it not clear that, by behaving prudently and standing firm, the Clergy – with the power to marry people or not depending on whether they do or do not have such and such a doctrine; depending on whether they accept or reject such and such a form; depending on whether they are more devout or less so – will alone dispose of the inheritances, offices and Citizens of the State itself, which would be unable to survive were it henceforth to be made up only of bastards? But, you may say, abuses will be appealed against, summonses will be issued, decrees made, temporal property seized. What a tragedy! The Clergy, provided it has I shall not say courage but common sense, will let this happen and continue as usual. It will calmly let abuse be appealed against, summonses be issued, decrees be passed, and seizures be made, and will end up as the master. It does not strike me as any great sacrifice to abandon a part when you are confident of capturing the whole.

* Thus this analytical method offers reason only abysses and mysteries, where the wisest understands least. If you ask why manners become corrupted as minds become enlightened, being unable to find the cause they will have the audacity to deny the fact. If you ask why savages transported among us share neither our passions nor our pleasures, and are not concerned with all that we so ardently desire, they will never explain it, or will explain it only by my principles. They know only what they see, and have never seen nature. They very well know what a Burgher of London or Paris is, but they will never know what a man is.

* Even that of God’s will, at least with respect to its application. For although it is clear that man ought to will whatever God wills, it is not clear that God wills some Government to be preferred to some other, nor that you should obey Jacques rather than Guillaume. Well, this is what the issue is.

* At the height of the initial hullabaloo caused by the proceedings of Paris and Geneva, the surprised Magistrate banned the two Books: but after his own examination this wise Magistrate simply changed his mind, above all with respect to Of the Social Contract.

* ‘In general’, says the author of the Letters [Written from the Country], ‘men are even more afraid of obeying than they are fond of commanding.’ Tacitus thought otherwise and knew the human heart. If the maxim were true, the Lackeys of the Great would be less insolent with Townsmen, and you would see fewer idlers lurking in the Courts of Princes. There are few men of sound enough heart to be able to love liberty. All wish to command; at that price, no one fears to obey. A petty upstart gives himself a hundred masters in order to acquire ten lackeys. You need only see the pride of the nobles in Monarchies; how vehemently they pronounce those words ‘service’ and ‘to serve’; how great and respectable they deem themselves when they can have the honour of saying ‘the King, my master’; how much they despise Republicans who are merely free, and who are certainly nobler than they.

* In these estimates, you must have far more regard for persons than for isolated actions. True good is done with little show. It is through a uniform and sustained conduct, through private and domestic virtues, through all the duties of his estate well fulfilled, lastly through actions flowing from his character and his principles, that a man can deserve honours, rather than through a few great dramatic actions that already find their reward in public admiration. Philosophical ostentation is very fond of showy actions; but a person with five or six actions of this kind, very splendid, very clamorous, very much extolled, has no other aim than to falsify his account and to be all his life unjust and harsh with impunity. ‘Give us the small change for great actions.’ This saying by a woman is a very judicious saying.