Previous
Government
While Rousseau argues that a social contract is the basis of society and ensures that all citizens are equal, he also notes that such a contract does not appear out of thin air. Rather, some force—often some person—needs to organize people and lead them to see themselves as a unified whole, a society or nation with some inherent connection to one another. Rousseau calls this organizing person a lawgiver (or founder), and he contends that they must have almost superhuman abilities (and usually employ religion) in order to create effective and cohesive nations. But if such lawgivers can successfully give people a sense of “moral and communal existence,” they can lead these people to think of themselves as a collective and agree on a social contract that converts them into a true nation. However, this does not mean that lawgivers have any special authority once a nation is born—even though they help spur the formation of the social contract, they still agree to it as equals, like every other citizen, and should have no special rights or privileges in the state.
Lawgiver Quotes in The Social Contract
The The Social Contract quotes below are all either spoken by Lawgiver or refer to Lawgiver. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Book 2, Chapter 7
Quotes
Whoever ventures on the enterprise of setting up a people must be ready, shall we say, to change human nature, to transform each individual, who by himself is entirely complete and solitary, into a part of a much greater whole, from which that same individual will then receive, in a sense, his life and his being. The founder of nations must weaken the structure of man in order to fortify it, to replace the physical and independent existence we have all received from nature with a moral and communal existence. In a word each man must be stripped of his own powers, and given powers which are external to him, and which he cannot use without the help of others. The nearer men’s natural powers are to extinction or annihilation, and the stronger and more lasting their acquired powers, the stronger and more perfect is the social institution.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Social Contract LitChart as a printable PDF.
Lawgiver Term Timeline in The Social Contract
The timeline below shows where the term Lawgiver appears in The Social Contract. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Book 2, Chapter 6: On Law
...learn to use reason “to recognize what it desires,” which is why it needs “a lawgiver.”
(full context)
Book 2, Chapter 7: The Lawgiver
...same “passions” that lead them to stray. It is therefore very rare to find competent lawgivers who are capable of “transform[ing] each individual […] into a part of a much greater...
(full context)
In fact, the lawgiver has both “a task which is beyond human powers and a non-existent authority for its...
(full context)
Book 2, Chapter 8: The People
Before “laying down good laws,” lawgivers must ensure that the people will support those laws. Unfortunately, “once customs are established and...
(full context)
Book 3, Chapter 11: The Death of the Body Politic
Even “the best constituted” states eventually fall, and lawgivers must recognize this in order to set up effective ones. The body politic ages and...
(full context)
