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Book 1, Chapter 9
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Social Contract, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Human Freedom and Society
Sovereignty, Citizenship, and Direct Democracy
Government and the Separation of Powers
National Longevity and Moral Virtue
Summary
Analysis
In a society, Rousseau begins, “the general will alone” can allocate the state’s resources toward “the common good” (which is simply whatever best serves everyone’s common interests). He notes that sovereignty simply is “the exercise of the general will,” and the sovereign is “a collective being” made up of everyone in a society. Therefore, no private will ever fully matches up with the general will, although private individuals can be charged with enacting this general will. But those private individuals must truly fulfill the general will in order to be legitimate leaders. This means that any society based on pure obedience to leaders is not a true society at all.
The “general will” is a complicated and difficult-to-define concept that essentially means the sovereign’s capacity to determine and do whatever is best for the public. Rousseau emphasizes that this will actually and concretely exists, just as much as any individual’s will does, precisely because individuals create “a collective being” when they join together to form a nation (which is similar to how people can form entities like a sports team, household, or corporation). Ultimately, his aim in this section is to emphasize that, because the general will has to be society’s prime guiding force and nothing can voice this general will except the entire nation assembled as a whole, representative democracy can never suffice in a legitimate state, and no member of the sovereign can legitimately have more power than any other member.
Themes
