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Book 4, Chapter 5
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
If laws are too rigid and cannot adapt to circumstances, they can “bring about […] the ruin of the state.” For instance, sometimes legal proceedings need to be sped up to deal with impending circumstances, and sometimes the sovereign needs to suspend institutions—but only in the “rare and obvious cases” when the nation’s security is severely threatened. If a stronger government is the solution, national security can be entrusted to “one or two members of the government,” but if “the apparatus of law itself” is what puts the nation in danger, then the nation needs “a supreme head” who will “silence all the laws and temporarily suspend the sovereign authority.” Although the sovereign people cannot make laws while the “supreme head” or dictator has power, its general will still guides the state, whose first priority is survival.
As with many other political terms throughout the book, Rousseau uses the word “dictator” in a way distant from its modern meaning: he is talking specifically about the Roman dictators, who were given absolute authority in the way he describes here. Where modern-day people would use the word “dictator”—to mean a government official who takes authoritarian control over the state—Rousseau uses the word “tyrant.” Rousseau’s argument in this chapter is quite remarkable and seems to contradict the core principles that have shaped this entire book so far. While he consistently defends the people’s absolute right to sovereignty over their own nation, here he argues that sometimes the sovereign ought to be suspended and a magistrate ought to take all power. He clarifies that this is only reasonable in very extreme situations, when the decisiveness of action is more important than its correctness, or possibly when the sovereign and government are corrupted. That said, the sovereign still retains the ultimate power that the dictator is serving, like any other government magistrate.
Themes
At different times, Rome used both these strategies, but Rousseau focuses on its use of dictatorship. Rome repeatedly appointed dictators in its early years, when nobody wanted to participate in government and it needed someone to take charge, but it failed to do this in its later years, when a dictator could have preserved the people’s freedom against a rogue government or easily stopped seditious conspiracies. Instead, it gave power to the consuls (chief magistrates), which was a problem because these consuls had to exceed their normal powers during the crisis, but then answer for this excess later. Rousseau emphasizes that dictatorship should never last longer than “one short term,” because it “becomes either tyrannical or useless” when there is no immediate crisis that needs resolution.
Rome’s use of dictators is very similar to how modern states can declare a state of emergency, and then give wide-ranging emergency powers to executives (usually the head of state, like a prime minister or a president). This kind of policy requires the sovereign to both trust profoundly in the judgment of a single individual and be relatively desperate for quick action to be taken. As the dictator can easily usurp the suspended sovereign’s power and turn into a tyrant, the appointment of dictators clearly should never be taken lightly. But Rome’s failure to use dictators properly shows how the sovereign has to adapt its strategies for implementing the general will depending on context: namely, when it knows that the government is dysfunctional, it must take decisive steps to take away that government’s power.
Themes
