On the Social Contract

I periodically encounter the idea of the Social Contract being employed to justify something or other, some government policy or some informal opinion. However, when it’s employed in this way, such ideas strike me as commonly failing to do what the speaker intends largely due to the errors to the way they understand and attempt to utilize the original concept.i Wider misunderstanding leads to the belief in problematic ideas and their perpetuation, to the point of becoming another thing to help keep us divided—whether from such ideas justifying inequality between or cruelty toward one another, or simply because they foster confusion, which effectively hinders communication between people and groups. My intention in this essay is to try and clarify the concept of the Social Contract as I understand it, in order to better resolve the above problems, but also to suggest better ways we can make use of the concept in the contemporary world.

The Social Contract is an idea originally, explicitly, put forth by Jean Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century.ii,1 The essence of this social compact is as follows: “Each of us puts his person and his full 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.”2 To Rousseau, society was only possible through such an agreement. For individuals to lack such social associations and agreements is be in a state of conflict of all against all, where we all are able to use the full force of our individual power to gain for ourselves at the expense of others, where the most powerful reigns supreme. When we agree to cooperate instead, we effectively relinquish this power to the collective, where we have the combined power of all enforcing societal rules, which serves to protect us against the individual power of others, but which requires us to consent to the societal rules in exchange. Because the combined strength of all is strong enough to overpower any individual, individuals supported and protected by this force gain security and freedom over their relative lots in a state of nature, even when they aren’t able to employ their full, individual power as they would in a state of nature, and even if obedience to societal rules or laws compels the individual to act unselfishly.

The will that directs this force and dictates the laws that must be followed in order to be included within the collective that this force serves and protects is the general will, the will of the people, or the Sovereign. Though the Sovereign is composed of the will of everyone belonging to the nation, the general will is something different from “the sum of the particular wills,”3 and this I find to be a confusing, but important, part of Rousseau’s Contract. In Rousseau’s view, the general will never errs. Its laws are legitimate because they are acts that originate from everyone, acting in the interest of everyone. No “law can be unjust, since no man can be unjust toward himself.” And one is always free when subject to the laws stemming from this general will, because “they are nothing but registers of our wills.”4 This general will is governed by the dictates of reason. In this way, “the Sovereign … cannot burden the subjects with any chains useless to the community; it cannot even will to do so: for by the law of reason nothing is done without cause.”5 However, while “the general will is always upright and always tends to the public utility … it does not follow that the people’s deliberations are always equally upright.”6 The people can be confused, they can be tricked, they can reason with poor logic. They can divide into factions, “partial associations at the expense of the large one,” where “the will of each one of these associations becomes general in relation to its members and particular in relation to the State.” All of these errors lead the people to follow particular wills rather than the general will, wills that serve particular interests over the interest of all.

To Rousseau, force isn’t enough to dictate rights. More important to him was to determine the legitimacy of the rights, laws, or duties to help us dictate how to act.iii Force can compel, but it’s reasonable to circumvent illegitimate force when one finds a way to safely do so. This isn’t the case with something stemming from a legitimate source, and this is part of the nature of the Social Contract. It’s necessary for the individual to both give their powers over to the collective and to remain obedient toward the requirements of the general will to ensure that the collective force remains strong enough to support and protect the individual and their interests. This means that “[a]ll the services a Citizen can render to the State, he owes to it as soon as the Sovereign requires them,”5 but also that differentiating between the particular wills and the general will becomes of utmost importance because it allows us to determine who actually speaks on behalf of the Sovereign. This also comes with its own set of difficulties so steep that the task may feel near impossible. Rousseau suggests that the general will in something of a “pure” state can be approximated by the simple combination of individual wills, that whatever we’re left with after opposing wills effectively “cancel each other out” should show us the dictates of the general will. In this way, deliberation between citizens should be good when the people are adequately informed and the total sum of individual wills is made up of a “large number of small differences.” Confusions and factions serve to complicate this. Factions in particular effectively lessen the number of opinions that are given voice in deliberations, in turn working to constrain our perspective and thereby reducing the likelihood that the far more limited combination of wills can demonstrate to us anything resembling the general will. This is also why it’s unreliable to assume that majority agreement, or even consensus, results in an understanding of the general will, as counterintuitive as it may seem. For, a confused majority is unlikely to represent the will of the people, and a faction that prevails over all the rest likely results in a consensus reflecting a particular will of the faction rather than the general will.3 To lend its support in the creation of laws is to subject us to illegitimate laws in either instance.iv

So how does one ensure something represents the general will? It’s hard to say with any assurance, but there are likely a few suggestions that can help to lead the way. One is to try to keep hold in the mind the stated purposes behind the Social Contract, to ensure the security and freedom of all. This means that projects to oppress the multitude or those that endanger us more generally cannot reflect the general will, even when they appear to have the consent of the people. In this way, any attempt to manipulate violates the general will; to convince voters to support a project by way of effective propaganda is to uphold the particular will of the faction over the general will. It also should do us well to remember that the general will acts in accord with these goals to the benefit of the members that make up the collective as indivisible parts of the whole, meaning that equality should be an integral part of it.v While this does not necessarily result in the exact same benefits or expectations for each member of the collective, it should never result in the more specific enrichment of an individual or faction to the obvious detriment of others. Any inequalities should be sensible, such as supports to those who legitimately struggle to labour productively, or the expectation that everyone should labour to their best abilities even when others are unable to be as productive.vi And to receive and consume without labouring to one’s best abilities is not sensible for the collective project and, therefore, not a reflection of the general will. Similarly, by the very nature of the general will, it would be unable to consent to any individual having the ability to accumulate enough wealth to be able to seriously challenge the power of many.vii On top of this, the stronger we become, the better we become at judging all this. As we learn and grow, as we challenge ourselves, as we allow ourselves free play of mind through inflexible honesty, as we protect ourselves from corrupting elements, as we do anything that makes us thoughtful and brave, the simpler it becomes to understand the things that tangibly benefit society and all of us who make it up. Better understanding of the Social Contract and everything that composes it can effectively serve us as a compass that helps keep us on this course.

Notes

i. One example of such misunderstanding is the suggestion that the Social Contract allows that an individual should be supported by society in retirement on account of the many years they worked. Another is the idea that the first instance of intolerance, of an individual exhibiting intolerance to another, makes it allowable for the rest of us to be intolerant toward them, because the original perpetrator broke the Social Contract, which makes them no longer considered to be part of society, and, therefore, they may be attacked and excluded at will. Both examples exhibit a narrow understanding of real aspects of the original concept that serve to warp the conclusions of the holders of such opinions.

ii. Thomas Hobbes also put forward an influential idea of a social contract around a century earlier in his famous work, Leviathan,7 that was similar to Rousseau’s in many important ways: that consent to such a contract allows for society on account of the force that maintains law and order when individuals relinquish power in support of and obedience to this force, that they benefit from this resulting cooperation by removing individuals from a state of perpetual conflict. An important difference between the two concerns the will that controls this force, the Sovereign. To Hobbes, the King (or equivalent stand-in, such as a limited counsel of men) unquestionably makes governing decisions and creates laws to the service of the security and unity of the members of the nation. For Rousseau, the Sovereign was instead the will of the people, and this is commonly the Sovereign implied when people invoke the Social Contract.

iii. “To yield to force is an act of necessity, not of will; at most it is an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty? … Let us agree, then, that force does not make right, and that one is obliged to obey only legitimate powers.”8

iv. It probably would do us some good here to briefly touch on what Rousseau has to say about how Government fits into all this. Within the nation, the Sovereign, made up of the general will, is effectively the legislative power, in that it makes the laws,9 in other words “the conditions of the civil association.”10 Government is “[a]n intermediary body established between the subjects and the Sovereign,” composed of individual Magistrates, which constitutes the executive power, meaning that it is entrusted with utilizing the total force of the collective to execute the laws.9 “It is absolutely nothing but a commission,” where these Magistrates are “mere officers of the Sovereign,” who may only “exercise in its name the power it has vested in them and which it can limit, modify and take back whenever it pleases.”11 The combined will of the Government, its corporate will, is made up of the individual wills of its Magistrates, both of which—corporate and individual wills—are subordinate to the general will. The fewer the Magistrates that compose the Government, the closer the corporate will approximate individual wills, while the corporate will should come closer to the general will as their number grows. (This, of course, is complicated by the presence of factions, including political parties, which serves to decrease the number of individual views, effectively causing the corporate will to become dominated by the particular wills of these factions.) The relative strength and efficiency of the Government in its task, on the other hand, is inversely proportional to the number of Magistrates. In this way, though having a single Magistrate would cause the corporate will to be equivalent to their individual will, they should be more effective in employing the collective force to the service of their goals than a Government composed of many Magistrates, which should, as a trade off, be better at discovering or approximating the general will in its task.12 Should the Government ever usurp the sovereignty by failing to administer the nation according to the laws as put forth by the general will, “the social pact is broken, and all ordinary Citizens, restored by right to their natural freedom, are forced but not obligated to obey.”13

v. “If one inquires in what precisely consists the greatest good of all – which ought to be the end of every system of legislation – one will find that it comes down to the following two principle objects, freedom and equality.”14

vi. And to state this differently expresses the general nature of both with greater clarity. When a member of the collective demonstrates a specific deficiency, a support is provided to them to the general good of the collective; when a member of the collective demonstrates a specific ability, it’s their duty to utilize it to the general good of the collective.

vii. “[T]he social state is advantageous to men only insofar as all have something and none of them has too much.”15

References

  1. Rousseau JJ. “Of the Social Contract.” The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings. Cambridge University Press, 2019. pp. 39-155.
  2. Ibid., p. 52, italics his.
  3. Ibid., pp. 62.
  4. Ibid., p. 69.
  5. Ibid., p. 63.
  6. Ibid., p. 61.
  7. Hobbes T. Leviathan. Penguin Books: Pelican Classics, 1975.
  8. Rousseau JJ, op. cit., p. 46.
  9. Ibid., p. 84.
  10. Ibid., p. 70.
  11. Ibid., p. 85.
  12. Ibid., pp. 89-91.
  13. Ibid., p. 110.
  14. Ibid., p. 80, emphasis his.
  15. Ibid., p. 58.