The Social Contract: Book 3, Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

In monarchy, a single person carries the government’s entire executive power. Therefore, it produces maximal results with minimal effort, but it places no checks on the monarch’s will: nothing forces a king to pursue “the public happiness.” Instead, monarchs want to amass absolute power, and while they get some power from being beloved by the people, this is usually not enough. In fact, what’s even better for a king is for the people to “be weak, wretched and never able to resist” his policies.

Rousseau recalls that, according to his calculations, monarchies work best in large states. He further explains that, because monarchies vest all power in one magistrate’s hands, kings become too disconnected from the people, so they create “social orders” (like nobility) to fill the gap. This would not work in a small country.

But monarchy has several serious problems. First, it rewards incapable but loyal people with powerful roles in the administration, which they ruin through corruption. Meanwhile, in a republic, only competent people are elected to such offices. Similarly, while monarchs are good at conquering territory, they “are almost always inadequate” at administrating it. In a democracy or aristocracy, government is always continuous, but when a monarch dies, electing a new one is complicated, which is why most monarchies have become hereditary—and put in “monsters or imbeciles for rulers.” Indeed, when a monarch’s child is raised and educated to rule, it is all the more likely they will lack “justice and reason.” This also creates inconsistency in the government’s agenda from one period of rule to another. So, while monarchy “is incontestably the strongest” kind of government, monarchs themselves are usually incompetent, and they squander this strength.