1762 2026
This is an AI modernization of The Social Contract into contemporary English. The original is available from Project Gutenberg. Also available as an epub.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau published this in Amsterdam in 1762 and signed the title page citizen of Geneva. Within weeks the Parlement of Paris had condemned it along with his book on education, Émile, and ordered his arrest, and Geneva, the city he had just named himself a citizen of, had both books burned by the public hangman. He fled, moved from one refuge to another for years, and renounced his Genevan citizenship the following year.
Its first sentence is the most quoted in political philosophy. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. It is nearly always used as a call to break the chains, and that is not what it is doing. Rousseau's next lines say he does not know how the change came about, and that the question he can answer is a different one: what could make the chains legitimate. The whole book is an attempt to describe the conditions under which obeying a government is not slavery, and it takes for granted that going back to the woods is not on offer.
The term that has done the most damage by being read loosely is the general will. It is not majority opinion and it is not what people happen to want. It is what a citizen wills when he asks what is good for the whole body he belongs to instead of what is good for himself, and Rousseau distinguishes it carefully from the will of all, which is only private interests added together. The limit is concrete: an act of the general will has to come from everyone and apply to everyone, so it can impose duties on a class of citizens and can never name a man. A decree about one person is not a law at all. His formula that a man who refuses to obey will be forced to be free has been quoted against him ever since, by people defending it and by people using it to explain where the guillotine came from.
The rest is short and fast. Sovereignty cannot be handed to representatives, which is why he says the English are free only during the election of members of parliament and are slaves the rest of the time. Democracy in his strict sense has never existed and would suit a people of gods rather than men. There is a long stretch on Roman institutions, the assemblies and the tribunate and the dictatorship and the censorship, which most abridgements cut and which is here in full, and a closing chapter on civil religion arguing that Christianity makes bad citizens because it points them at another world.
A generation later the French revolutionaries were quoting it. Hobbes' Leviathan is in this collection, and Rousseau argues with Hobbes by name, as he does with Grotius; so are Locke's Two Treatises and Burke's Reflections, which argues back at Rousseau.
"Fœderis æquas / Dicamus leges" — "Let us set equal terms for the truce." (Virgil, Aeneid XI)
This little book is part of a much longer work that I began years ago, before I understood my own limits, and abandoned long since. Of all the fragments that could have been rescued from what I wrote, this is the most substantial, and, I think, the least unworthy of being offered to the public. The rest no longer exists.
Here is what I want to find out: can there be, in civil society, any rule of government that is both reliable and legitimate — taking men as they are, and laws as they might be? Throughout this inquiry I will try to keep two things joined together: what right permits and what interest demands, so that justice and usefulness never find themselves pulled apart.
I begin without pausing to prove that the subject matters. Am I a prince or a legislator, that I should write about politics? I will be asked the question, and my answer is no — I am neither, and that is exactly why I write. If I were a prince or a legislator, I would not waste my time saying what ought to be done. I would do it, or keep silent.
But I was born a citizen of a free state and a member of its sovereign — a member, that is, of the body of people who together hold the lawmaking power. However faint my voice may be in public affairs, the right to vote on them makes it my duty to study them. And I am happy to find, whenever I reflect on governments, that my inquiries keep handing me new reasons to love the government of my own country.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
One man thinks himself the master of others — and remains a greater slave than any of them. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I believe I can answer.
If I considered nothing but force and the results that flow from it, I would say this: as long as a people is compelled to obey, and does obey, it does well; the moment it can shake off the yoke, and does shake it off, it does even better. For if a people regains its freedom by the same right that was used to take that freedom away, then either it is justified in taking it back, or no one was justified in taking it in the first place. But the social order is a sacred right, and it is the foundation of every other right. Yet this right does not come from nature. It must therefore rest on agreements. Before we come to those agreements, I have to prove what I have just claimed.
The oldest of all societies, and the only natural one, is the family. And even there, the children stay bound to the father only as long as they need him in order to survive. The moment that need ends, the natural bond dissolves. The children, released from the obedience they owed their father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, both return to independence. If they remain together, they do so no longer by nature but by choice; and from then on the family itself holds together only by agreement.
This shared freedom is a consequence of human nature. Man's first law is to look after his own preservation; his first cares are the ones he owes to himself. As soon as he reaches the age of reason, he alone can judge the best means of preserving himself — and at that moment he becomes his own master.
The family, then, may be called the first model of political societies. The ruler is the image of the father; the people are the image of the children; and since all are born free and equal, none of them gives up his freedom except for his own advantage. The whole difference is this: in the family, the father's love for his children repays him for the care he gives them, while in the State, the pleasure of commanding takes the place of a love the chief cannot feel for the peoples beneath him.
Grotius denies that all human power is established for the benefit of the governed, and he offers slavery as his proof. His usual method of reasoning is to establish right by appealing to fact. ("Learned inquiries into public right," wrote the Marquis d'Argenson, "are often only the history of past abuses; and we waste our effort when we insist on studying them too closely." That is exactly what Grotius does.) One could choose a more logical method, but none friendlier to tyrants.
So according to Grotius, it is an open question whether the human race belongs to a hundred men, or whether those hundred men belong to the human race; and throughout his book he seems to lean toward the first answer. That is Hobbes's view as well. On this account, the human species is divided up into so many herds of cattle, each with its own ruler, who guards the herd in order to devour it.
Just as a shepherd is a being of a higher nature than his flock, so the shepherds of men — their rulers — are beings of a higher nature than their peoples. That, Philo tells us, is how the Emperor Caligula reasoned, concluding with equal logic either that kings were gods or that men were beasts.
Caligula's reasoning matches that of Hobbes and Grotius. Aristotle, before any of them, had said that men are not naturally equal at all: some are born for slavery, others for mastery.
Aristotle was right — but he mistook the effect for the cause. Nothing is more certain than that every man born in slavery is born for slavery. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire to escape from them. They come to love their servitude, just as the companions of Ulysses came to love their brutish condition. (Plutarch wrote a short treatise on this, called "That Animals Reason.") If there are slaves by nature, it is because there were first slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves; their cowardice kept them slaves.
I have said nothing about King Adam, or about Emperor Noah, father of the three great monarchs who divided up the universe among themselves like the children of Saturn — indeed, some scholars have claimed they were the children of Saturn. I hope to be thanked for my restraint. For as a direct descendant of one of these princes — possibly of the eldest branch — how do I know that a careful check of the records would not show me to be the legitimate king of the human race? In any case, there is no denying that Adam was sovereign of the world, just as Robinson Crusoe was sovereign of his island, for as long as he was its only inhabitant. And that empire had one great convenience: the monarch, secure on his throne, had no rebellions, wars, or conspirators to fear.
The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty. Hence "the right of the strongest" — a phrase that sounds like irony, yet is laid down in practice as a genuine principle. But will no one ever explain it to us? Force is physical power; I do not see what morality could ever come from it. Giving in to force is something you do out of necessity, not choice — at most, out of prudence. In what sense could it ever be a duty?
Suppose for a moment that this so-called right exists. I say the only thing it produces is a heap of unexplainable nonsense. For if force creates right, then the effect changes whenever the cause does: any force greater than the first inherits its right. The moment you can disobey without being punished, your disobedience is legitimate; and since the strongest is always in the right, the only question that matters is how to become the strongest. But what kind of right is it that dies the moment force fails? If you must obey because you are forced to, there is no need to obey from duty; and if you are no longer forced to obey, you are no longer obliged to. Clearly, the word "right" adds nothing to force here. It means nothing at all.
Obey the powers that be. If that means "yield to force," the advice is sound but unnecessary — I can promise it will never be violated. All power comes from God, I grant; but so does all sickness. Does that mean we are forbidden to call a doctor? A robber surprises me at the edge of a wood. I must hand over my purse — I am forced to. But suppose I could manage to keep it from him: am I bound in conscience to give it up anyway? After all, the pistol in his hand is a power too.
Let us agree, then, that force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers. And with that, my original question returns.
Since no man has natural authority over his fellow man, and since force creates no right, we are left with agreements as the basis of all legitimate authority among men.
If an individual, says Grotius, can alienate his liberty — give it away or sell it — and make himself the slave of a master, why couldn't a whole people do the same and make itself the subject of a king? There are several slippery words in that sentence that would need explaining, but let us stay with the word alienate. To alienate is to give or to sell. Now, a man who becomes another man's slave does not give himself; he sells himself, at the very least in exchange for his keep. But what would a whole people sell itself for? A king is so far from supplying his subjects with their living that he draws his own entirely from them — and as Rabelais says, kings do not live on nothing. Do subjects, then, hand over their persons on condition that the king takes their goods as well? I fail to see what they would have left to protect.
It will be said that a despot guarantees his subjects civil peace. Granted — but what do they gain, if the wars his ambition drags them into, his bottomless greed, and the harassment they suffer from his ministers grind them down harder than their own quarrels ever would? What do they gain, if this very peace is one of their miseries? There is peace in dungeons too; is that enough to make dungeons desirable places to live? The Greeks shut up in the cave of the Cyclops lived there very peacefully — while waiting for their turn to be devoured.
To say that a man gives himself away for nothing is to say something absurd and unthinkable. Such an act is null and illegitimate for the simple reason that anyone who does it is out of his mind. To say the same of a whole people is to imagine a nation of madmen — and madness creates no right.
Even if a man could alienate himself, he could not alienate his children. They are born human and born free; their liberty belongs to them, and no one but they has the right to dispose of it. Before they reach the age of reason, their father may, in their name, set conditions for their preservation and well-being — but he cannot give them away, irrevocably and unconditionally. Such a gift runs contrary to the purposes of nature and exceeds the rights of fatherhood. So for an arbitrary government to be legitimate, every new generation would have to be free to accept it or reject it — and in that case the government would no longer be arbitrary.
To renounce your liberty is to renounce being human — to surrender the rights of humanity, and even its duties. There is no possible compensation for someone who gives up everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's very nature; to strip all liberty from his will is to strip all morality from his actions. Finally, an agreement that sets absolute authority on one side and unlimited obedience on the other is empty and self-contradicting. Is it not obvious that we owe nothing to a person from whom we have the right to demand everything? And does not that single condition — no equivalence, no exchange — make the act null and void all by itself? For what claim could my slave have against me, when everything he has belongs to me? His right is my right; and a right of mine against myself is a phrase with no meaning at all.
Grotius and the others find another source for this so-called right of slavery: war. The victor, they hold, has the right to kill the vanquished; so the vanquished can buy back his life at the price of his liberty — an agreement all the more legitimate, supposedly, because it benefits both sides.
But it is clear that this supposed right to kill the conquered cannot be derived from the state of war. Men living in their primitive independence have no relations with one another stable enough to constitute either a state of peace or a state of war; therefore they cannot naturally be enemies. War arises from a relation between things, not between persons. And since the state of war cannot be born of simple personal relations, but only of property relations, private war — war of man against man — can exist neither in the state of nature, where there is no settled property, nor in the social state, where everything is under the authority of the laws.
Individual fights, duels, and skirmishes are acts; they do not make a state of affairs. As for the private wars authorized by the Establishments of King Louis IX of France and suspended by the Peace of God, they were abuses of feudalism — a system as absurd as any that ever existed, contrary to the principles of natural right and to all sound politics.
War, then, is a relation not between man and man, but between State and State. In war, individuals are enemies only by accident — not as men, not even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of their country, but as its defenders. Finally, a State can have only other States for enemies, never men; for between things of completely different natures, no genuine relation is possible.
— On this point the Romans deserve a note, for no nation on earth understood and respected the right of war better. They carried their scruples so far that no citizen was allowed to volunteer without swearing himself in expressly against the enemy — against this particular enemy, by name. When the legion in which the younger Cato was serving his first campaign under Popilius was reorganized, the elder Cato wrote to Popilius that if he wanted the young man to go on serving under him, he must administer a new military oath; for the first oath had been annulled, and without a new one his son could no longer bear arms against the enemy. Cato also wrote to his son, warning him to take great care not to set foot in battle until he had sworn that new oath. I know the siege of Clusium and other isolated incidents can be quoted against me; but I am citing laws and customs. The Romans broke their own laws less often than any other people — and no other people has had laws so good.
This principle also agrees with the established rules of every age and the constant practice of every civilized people. Declarations of war are warnings less to governments than to their subjects. The foreigner — whether king, private person, or whole people — who robs, kills, or imprisons subjects without declaring war on their prince is not an enemy but a brigand. Even in the middle of a real war, a just prince may seize everything in enemy territory that belongs to the public, but he respects the persons and property of individuals: he respects the rights on which his own rights are founded. The object of war is the destruction of the enemy State, so the other side has the right to kill its defenders as long as they bear arms; but the moment they lay down their weapons and surrender, they stop being enemies, or instruments of the enemy, and become simply men again — and over their lives no one has any right. Sometimes a State can be killed without a single one of its members dying; and war confers no right that is not necessary to its purpose. These are not Grotius's principles, and they do not rest on the authority of poets. They flow from the nature of things, and they are founded on reason.
As for the right of conquest, it has no foundation but the right of the strongest. If war does not give the victor the right to massacre conquered peoples, then a right that does not exist cannot be the basis of a right to enslave them. A man has the right to kill an enemy only when he cannot make him a slave; so the right to enslave him cannot be derived from the right to kill him. It is therefore an unfair exchange to make him buy, at the price of his liberty, a life over which the victor holds no right at all. Founding the right of life and death on the right of slavery, and the right of slavery on the right of life and death — is the vicious circle not plain to see?
Even if we grant this terrible right to kill anyone and everyone, I maintain that a slave made in war, or a conquered people, owes a master nothing except obedience for exactly as long as it is compelled. By taking an equivalent for his victim's life, the victor has done him no favor: instead of killing him without profit, he has killed him profitably. Far from acquiring any authority over him beyond force, the victor remains with him in a state of war just as before. Their relation is itself the effect of that war, and exercising the rights of war implies no treaty of peace. An agreement has been made, yes — but that agreement, far from ending the state of war, presupposes that it continues.
So from whatever angle we examine the question, the right of slavery is null and void — not only because it is illegitimate, but because it is absurd and meaningless. The words slave and right contradict each other; they cancel each other out. Whether spoken by one man to another man, or by one man to an entire people, this sentence will always be equal nonsense: "I make with you an agreement entirely at your expense and entirely to my advantage; I shall keep it as long as I please, and you shall keep it as long as I please."
Even if I granted everything I have so far refuted, the friends of despotism would be no better off. There will always be a vast difference between subduing a crowd and ruling a society. Suppose scattered individuals, however many, were enslaved one after another by a single man. I still see nothing there but a master and his slaves — certainly not a people and its ruler. It is, if you like, an aggregation, but it is not an association. There is no public good there, and no body politic. That man, even if he enslaved half the world, is still only an individual; his interest, cut off from everyone else's, is still nothing but a private interest. When he dies, his empire is left scattered and without unity behind him, as an oak crumbles into a heap of ashes once the fire has consumed it.
A people, says Grotius, can give itself to a king. Then according to Grotius himself, a people is already a people before it gives itself. The gift itself is a civil act; it presupposes a public deliberation. So before examining the act by which a people gives itself to a king, we would do well to examine the act by which a people becomes a people. That act, coming necessarily before the other, is the true foundation of society.
Indeed, if there were no earlier agreement, then — unless the vote were unanimous — where would the minority's obligation to accept the majority's choice come from? By what right do the hundred men who want a master vote on behalf of the ten who do not? The rule of majority vote is itself something established by agreement, and it presupposes unanimity on at least one occasion.
I assume men have reached the point where the obstacles to their survival in the state of nature have grown stronger than the resources each individual can muster to maintain himself in it. At that point the primitive condition can last no longer, and the human race would perish if it did not change its way of living.
Now, men cannot create new forces; they can only unite and direct the forces that exist. So they have no other means of preserving themselves than to form, by combination, a sum of forces great enough to overcome the resistance — forces they must set in motion by a single impulse and make act together.
Such a sum of forces can arise only where many people come together. But each man's force and liberty are his chief instruments of self-preservation. How can he pledge them to the group without harming his own interests, without neglecting the care he owes himself? Brought back to my subject, the difficulty can be stated in these terms:
"The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." This is the fundamental problem to which the social contract gives the solution.
The clauses of this contract are so completely determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would make them empty and useless. Though they have perhaps never been formally stated, they are everywhere the same — everywhere tacitly accepted and recognized — until the social contract is violated, at which point each person regains his original rights and takes back his natural liberty, losing the contractual liberty for which he gave it up.
Properly understood, all the clauses come down to a single one: the total alienation of each associate, with all his rights, to the whole community. For, in the first place, since each gives himself entirely, the condition is the same for everyone; and since the condition is the same for everyone, no one has any interest in making it burdensome to the rest.
What is more, since the alienation is made without reservation, the union is as perfect as it can be, and no associate has anything further to claim. If individuals kept certain rights for themselves, then — there being no common superior to judge between them and the public — each man, being his own judge on one point, would soon demand to be his own judge on all. The state of nature would live on, and the association would inevitably become either useless or tyrannical.
Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to no one; and since there is no associate over whom he does not gain the same right that he grants over himself, he gains the equivalent of everything he loses — plus greater force to preserve what he has.
If, then, we strip the social contract of everything that is not essential to it, we will find that it reduces to these terms:
"Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole."
In that instant, in place of the individual person of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly has votes, and receiving from this same act its unity, its common self, its life, and its will. This public person, formed by the union of all the others, once took the name of city, and now takes that of Republic or body politic. Its members call it the State when it is passive, the Sovereign when it is active, and a Power when comparing it to others like itself. (Mark the word Sovereign well, for everything in this book depends on it: here it never means a king. The sovereign is the people themselves, acting together as one body to make the law.) Those who are associated in it take collectively the name of people; individually, each is called a citizen, as a sharer in the sovereign authority, and a subject, as one bound by the laws of the State. These terms often get mixed up and mistaken for one another; it is enough to know how to tell them apart when they are being used with precision.
— A word about that word city, whose true meaning has been almost entirely lost in modern times. Most people take a town for a city and a townsman for a citizen. They do not know that houses make a town, but citizens make a city. This same mistake once cost the Carthaginians dearly. I have never read of the title of citizen being given to the subjects of any prince — not even to the ancient Macedonians, or to the English of today, though they are nearer to liberty than anyone else. Only the French adopt the name citizen with easy familiarity — because, as their dictionaries show, they have no idea what it means; otherwise, in usurping the title they would be committing lèse-majesté, treason against the sovereign's majesty. Among them the name expresses a virtue, not a right. When Bodin tried to speak of our citizens and townsmen, he blundered badly, taking the one class for the other. M. d'Alembert avoided the error: in his article on Geneva he correctly distinguished the four orders of men (five, if you count simple foreigners) who live in our town, of which only two make up the Republic. No other French writer, as far as I know, has understood the real meaning of the word citizen.
This formula shows that the act of association contains a mutual commitment between the public and the individuals, and that each individual — contracting, so to speak, with himself — is committed in two capacities at once: as a member of the Sovereign toward the individuals, and as a member of the State toward the Sovereign. But the maxim of civil law that no one is bound by commitments made to himself does not apply here, for there is a great difference between an obligation to yourself and an obligation to a whole of which you are a part.
Notice, further, that public deliberation can bind all the subjects to the Sovereign, because each of them can be regarded in those two different capacities; but, for the opposite reason, it cannot bind the Sovereign to itself. It is therefore against the nature of the body politic for the Sovereign to impose on itself a law it cannot break. Since the Sovereign can regard itself in one capacity only, it is in the position of an individual making a contract with himself — which shows that there is not, and cannot be, any kind of fundamental law binding on the body of the people, not even the social contract itself. This does not mean the body politic cannot make commitments to others, so long as those commitments do not violate the contract; for in relation to the outside world, it is a simple being, an individual.
But the body politic, or Sovereign, draws its very being from the sanctity of the contract, and so it can never bind itself — even toward an outsider — to anything that violates that original act. It cannot, for instance, alienate any part of itself, or submit to another sovereign. To violate the act by which it exists would be to annihilate itself; and what is itself nothing can create nothing.
The moment this multitude is united in one body, no one can injure one of the members without attacking the body — still less injure the body without the members feeling it. So duty and interest alike oblige the two contracting parties to help each other; and the same men should seek to combine, in their double capacity, all the advantages that come with it.
Now the Sovereign, being formed entirely of the individuals who compose it, has no interest contrary to theirs, and can have none. Therefore the sovereign power has no need to give any guarantee to its subjects, because it is impossible for the body to want to harm all its members; and, as we shall see later, it cannot harm any one of them in particular either. The Sovereign, simply by being what it is, is always what it ought to be.
The same is not true of the subjects in relation to the Sovereign. Despite the common interest, nothing would guarantee that the subjects keep their commitments unless the Sovereign found means to assure itself of their fidelity.
In fact, each individual, as a man, may have a particular will that runs contrary to the general will he has as a citizen — or simply differs from it. His private interest may speak to him very differently from the common interest. His absolute and naturally independent existence may lead him to see what he owes the common cause as a donation freely given, whose loss will hurt others less than its payment burdens him. And since the moral person of the State is a fiction — an abstraction, not a flesh-and-blood man — he may want to enjoy the rights of a citizen without being willing to fulfill the duties of a subject. Left to spread, that injustice would be the ruin of the body politic.
So in order that the social contract may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes one commitment, which alone gives force to all the others: whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free. For this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his homeland, secures him against all personal dependence. In this condition lies the key to the working of the political machine; this alone makes civil commitments legitimate. Without it, they would be absurd, tyrannical, and open to the most monstrous abuses.
The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a truly remarkable change in man. It substitutes justice for instinct in his conduct, and gives his actions the morality they had always lacked. Only then, when the voice of duty replaces physical impulse, and right replaces appetite, does man — who until now had thought only of himself — find himself forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. In this new state he loses several advantages that nature gave him, but he gains advantages so much greater in return — his faculties exercised and developed, his ideas enlarged, his feelings ennobled, his whole soul lifted so high — that if the abuses of this new condition did not so often drag him below the one he left, he would have to bless without ceasing the happy moment that tore him from it forever, and that turned a stupid, shortsighted animal into an intelligent being and a man.
Let us reduce this whole balance sheet to terms that are easy to compare. What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty, and an unlimited right to anything that tempts him and that he can get. What he gains is civil liberty, and ownership of everything he possesses. To avoid miscalculating in this exchange, we must clearly distinguish natural liberty, which is bounded only by the individual's own strength, from civil liberty, which is limited by the general will; and possession, which is merely the effect of force or the right of the first occupant, from property, which can rest only on a positive legal title.
To all the gains of the civil state we could add one more: moral liberty, which alone makes man truly master of himself. For the impulse of mere appetite is slavery, and obedience to a law we prescribe to ourselves is liberty. But I have already said too much on this point, and the philosophical meaning of the word liberty is not my subject here.
Each member of the community gives himself to it at the moment of its founding, just as he is — himself and all his forces, including the goods he possesses. This act does not make possession change its nature as it changes hands; it does not turn possession into property in the hands of the Sovereign. But since the forces of the city are incomparably greater than those of any individual, public possession is in fact stronger and more irrevocable, without being any more legitimate — at least in the eyes of foreigners. For the State, in relation to its own members, is master of all their goods through the social contract, which inside the State is the basis of all rights; but in relation to other powers, it is master only by the right of the first occupant, a right it holds from its members.
The right of the first occupant, though more real than the right of the strongest, becomes a true right only after the right of property has been established. Every man naturally has a right to everything he needs; but the positive act that makes him owner of one thing excludes him from everything else. Once his share is assigned, he must keep to it, and he has no further claim against the community. This is why the right of the first occupant, so weak in the state of nature, commands the respect of every man in civil society. What we respect in this right is not so much what belongs to another as what does not belong to ourselves.
In general, to establish the right of the first occupant over any plot of ground, these conditions are necessary: first, the land must not yet be inhabited by anyone; second, a man must occupy only as much as he needs to live on; and third, he must take possession of it not by an empty ceremony, but by labor and cultivation — the only sign of ownership that others are bound to respect when no legal title exists.
In granting the right of first occupancy to need and to labor, haven't we already stretched it as far as it can go? Can this right be left without limits? Is setting foot on a piece of common ground enough to make you instantly its master? Is having the strength to drive other men off for a moment enough to strip them of the right ever to return? How can a man or a people seize a vast territory and keep the whole human race out of it, except by a usurpation that deserves punishment — since it robs the rest of mankind of the dwelling place and the food that nature gave to all in common? When Núñez de Balboa stood on the shore and took possession of the South Seas and the whole of South America in the name of the crown of Castile, was that enough to dispossess every inhabitant and shut out every prince on earth? On that basis, such ceremonies could be multiplied without end, and the Catholic King need only take possession of the entire universe at one stroke, from the comfort of his private apartments — subtracting afterward, of course, whatever already belonged to other princes.
We can understand how the lands of individuals, lying side by side and joined together, become public territory, and how the right of sovereignty, extending from the subjects to the very ground they occupy, comes to cover both things and persons. This places the possessors in greater dependence and turns their own forces into guarantees of their fidelity — an advantage the ancient monarchs do not seem to have appreciated. Calling themselves King of the Persians, of the Scythians, of the Macedonians, they appear to have regarded themselves as rulers of men rather than masters of a country. Today's monarchs are cleverer: they call themselves King of France, of Spain, of England, and so on. Holding the land, they are quite sure of holding its inhabitants.
What is remarkable about this alienation is that the community, in accepting the goods of individuals, is so far from robbing them that it does nothing but assure them legitimate possession — changing usurpation into a genuine right, and mere use into ownership. From then on, the possessors are regarded as trustees of the public good; their rights are respected by every member of the State and defended with all its force against foreigners. By a surrender that benefits the public, and themselves still more, they have — so to speak — acquired everything they gave up. This paradox is easily explained by the distinction between the rights the Sovereign and the owner hold over the same piece of ground, as we shall see later on.
It can also happen that men begin to unite before they possess anything, and that, afterward taking over land enough for everyone, they enjoy it in common or divide it among themselves — either equally, or in shares fixed by the Sovereign. However the acquisition is made, each individual's right over his own plot is always subordinate to the community's right over the whole. Without that, there would be no strength in the social bond, and no real force in the exercise of sovereignty.
I will end this chapter, and this book, with a remark that should serve as the foundation of the whole social system. The fundamental contract, instead of destroying natural inequality, does the opposite: for whatever physical inequality nature may have set between men, it substitutes an equality that is moral and legitimate. Men may be unequal in strength or in genius; by agreement and by right, they all become equal.
— Add one caution to that: under bad governments, this equality is only apparent and illusory. It serves merely to keep the poor man in his poverty and the rich man in everything he has usurped. In reality, laws are always useful to those who possess and harmful to those who have nothing. From this it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all have something and none has too much.
The first and most important conclusion from the principles we've laid down so far is this: only the general will can steer the State toward the purpose it was founded for — the common good. If the clash of private interests made it necessary to establish societies, it was the agreement among those same interests that made it possible. What these different interests have in common is what forms the social bond; if there were no point on which they all agreed, no society could exist at all. And it is solely on the basis of this common interest that every society must be governed.
So I hold that Sovereignty, which is nothing other than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated, and that the Sovereign — a collective being and nothing less — can be represented only by itself. Power can be handed over. Will cannot.
In practice, it isn't impossible for a private will to line up with the general will on some particular point. But it is impossible for that agreement to be steady and lasting, because the private will leans, by its very nature, toward playing favorites, while the general will leans toward equality. And it's even more impossible to have any guarantee of such agreement; even if it held forever, that would be luck, not design. The Sovereign can certainly say, "Right now I will what this man wills — or at least what he says he wills." But it cannot say, "Whatever he wills tomorrow, I will too," because it is absurd for a will to tie its own hands for the future, and no will can be obligated to consent to anything that harms the being who does the willing. So if a people simply promises to obey, by that very act it dissolves itself and stops being a people. The moment there is a master, there is no longer a Sovereign — and from that moment the body politic has ceased to exist.
This doesn't mean the commands of rulers can't pass for expressions of the general will — so long as the Sovereign is free to oppose them and chooses not to. In such a case, universal silence is taken to mean the people consents. I'll explain this more fully later on.
For the same reason that sovereignty cannot be given away, it cannot be divided. A will either is general or it is not — and let me note that for a will to be general, it need not always be unanimous; but every vote must be counted, for any exclusion breaks the generality. The will belongs either to the body of the people as a whole, or only to a part of it. In the first case, the declared will is an act of Sovereignty and makes law. In the second, it is merely a private will, or an act of administration — at most, a decree.
But our political theorists, unable to divide Sovereignty in principle, divide it by its objects instead: into force and will; into legislative power and executive power; into the rights of taxation, justice, and war; into domestic administration and the power to make foreign treaties. Sometimes they mash all these pieces together, sometimes they pull them apart. They turn the Sovereign into a fantastical creature built of connected parts — as if they were assembling a man out of several bodies, one with eyes, one with arms, another with feet, and nothing else. They say that the jugglers of Japan cut a child to pieces before the audience's eyes, throw the pieces into the air one by one, and the child comes down alive and whole. The conjuring tricks of our political theorists are much the same: first they dismember the body politic with an illusion worthy of a carnival, and then they put it back together — nobody knows how.
This mistake comes from not having exact ideas about Sovereign authority, and from mistaking mere emanations of that authority for parts of it. For example, declaring war and making peace have been treated as acts of Sovereignty. But they are not. Neither act makes a law; each merely applies a law — a particular act deciding how the law falls in a given case. This will become perfectly clear once we've defined what the word law actually means.
If we worked through the other supposed divisions the same way, we would find that whenever Sovereignty appears to be divided, we're looking at an illusion. The rights taken to be pieces of Sovereignty are in fact all subordinate to it; every one of them presupposes a supreme will, which those rights merely carry out.
It is hard to overstate how much confusion this lack of precision has poured over the conclusions of writers on political right whenever they used their own principles to judge the respective rights of kings and peoples. Anyone can see, in chapters three and four of the first book of Grotius, how that learned man and his translator, Barbeyrac, tangle and trip themselves up in their own clever arguments — terrified of saying too little or too much of what they really think, and of offending the interests they need to flatter. Grotius, a refugee in France, unhappy with his homeland and eager to please Louis XIII, to whom his book is dedicated, spares no effort to strip peoples of all their rights and dress kings in them by every trick he can devise. That approach would have suited Barbeyrac just fine too — he dedicated his translation to George I of England. But unluckily for him, the expulsion of James II — which he tactfully called an "abdication" — forced him to hedge, dodge, and talk out of both sides of his mouth to avoid making William look like a usurper. If these two writers had adopted the true principles, every difficulty would have vanished and they would have been consistent throughout. But they would have been telling a sad truth, and the only court it would have paid was to the people. Truth is no road to fortune, and the people hands out no ambassadorships, no professorships, and no pensions.
It follows from everything above that the general will is always right and always tends toward the public good. But it does not follow that the people's deliberations are always equally sound. We always will our own good — but we do not always see what it is. The people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived; and only then does it seem to will what is bad.
There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will. The general will looks only to the common interest. The will of all looks to private interest, and is nothing more than a sum of particular wills. But take those same wills and cancel out the pluses and minuses that offset one another, and what remains — the sum of the differences — is the general will.
— "Every interest," says the Marquis d'Argenson, "has different principles. The agreement of two particular interests is formed by opposition to a third." He might have added that the agreement of all interests is formed by opposition to the interest of each. If there were no differing interests, the common interest would scarcely be felt, because it would meet no resistance; everything would run on its own, and politics would stop being an art.
If, when an adequately informed people deliberates, the citizens had no communication with one another, then the grand total of all the small differences would always yield the general will, and the decision would always be good. But when factions arise — when partial associations form at the expense of the great association — the will of each of these groups becomes general with respect to its own members while remaining particular with respect to the State. Then we can no longer say there are as many votes as there are people; there are only as many votes as there are associations. The differences become fewer, and the result less general. Finally, when one of these associations grows large enough to outweigh all the rest, the result is no longer a sum of small differences but a single difference. At that point there is no longer a general will at all, and the opinion that wins is purely a private one.
So if the general will is to express itself, it is essential that there be no partial society inside the State, and that each citizen think his own thoughts — which was precisely the sublime and singular system established by the great Lycurgus. And if partial societies must exist, then it is best to have as many of them as possible and to keep them from being unequal, as Solon, Numa, and Servius did. These precautions are the only ones that can guarantee that the general will is always enlightened and that the people never deceives itself.
— "There are in fact," says Machiavelli, "some divisions that harm a Republic and some that benefit it. The harmful ones are those that come with sects and parties; the beneficial ones are those that come with neither. Since the founder of a Republic cannot prevent enmities from arising, he ought at least to prevent them from hardening into sects" (History of Florence, Book VII).
If the State is a moral person whose life consists in the union of its members, and if the most important of its concerns is its own preservation, then it must have a universal and compelling force to move and arrange each part in whatever way best serves the whole. Just as nature gives every man absolute power over all his limbs, the social contract gives the body politic absolute power over all its members; and it is this power, directed by the general will, that bears, as I have said, the name of Sovereignty.
But besides the public person, we have to consider the private persons who compose it, whose life and liberty are naturally independent of it. So we must distinguish clearly between the respective rights of the citizens and the Sovereign, and between the duties the citizens must fulfill as subjects and the natural rights they should enjoy as men. — Attentive readers, please don't rush to accuse me of contradicting myself here. Given the poverty of the language, the terminology made it unavoidable. Wait and see.
I grant that under the social contract each man alienates only that portion of his powers, goods, and liberty which it matters to the community to control. But it must also be granted that the Sovereign alone is the judge of what matters.
Every service a citizen can render the State, he owes the moment the Sovereign asks for it. But the Sovereign, for its part, cannot load its subjects with any chain that is useless to the community — it cannot even wish to, for under the law of reason, just as under the law of nature, nothing happens without a cause.
The commitments that bind us to the social body are binding only because they are mutual, and their nature is such that in fulfilling them we cannot work for others without also working for ourselves. Why is the general will always right? Why does everyone constantly will the happiness of each member? Because there is no one who doesn't take the word "each" to mean himself, and who isn't thinking of himself when he votes for all. This proves that equality of rights, and the idea of justice that such equality produces, spring from the preference each man gives to himself — and therefore from the very nature of man. It proves that the general will, to be truly general, must be general in its object as well as in its essence; that it must come from all in order to apply to all; and that it loses its natural rightness the moment it is aimed at some particular, identified target — because then we are judging something foreign to us, with no true principle of fairness to guide us.
Indeed, as soon as a dispute arises over some particular fact or right that no prior general agreement has settled, the matter becomes contentious. It is a case where the individuals concerned are one party and the public is the other — but I can see neither what law should be followed nor what judge should decide. It would be absurd to propose referring such a question to an express decision of the general will, because that decision could only be the conclusion of one of the parties, and so, for the other party, it would be merely an external and particular will — inclined, on this occasion, toward injustice and open to error. So just as a particular will cannot stand in for the general will, the general will in turn changes its nature when it takes a particular object: as general, it cannot pass judgment on an individual man or a single fact. When the people of Athens, for instance, appointed or removed its leaders, voted honors to one man and penalties to another, and through heaps of particular decrees carried out all the functions of government at once, the people in those moments no longer had a general will in the strict sense. It was acting no longer as Sovereign but as magistrate. This will sound contrary to accepted ideas — but give me time to lay out my own.
From all this we should see that what makes a will general is less the number of voters than the common interest that unites them. Under this system, each person necessarily submits to the same conditions he imposes on others — an admirable harmony between interest and justice that stamps the community's deliberations with a fairness which evaporates the instant any particular question comes up, because then there is no common interest to unite and align the standard of the judge with the standard of the party.
From whatever angle we approach our principle, we reach the same conclusion: the social contract establishes among the citizens an equality of such a kind that they all commit themselves under the same conditions and must all enjoy the same rights. So by the very nature of the contract, every act of Sovereignty — that is, every authentic act of the general will — binds or benefits all citizens equally. The Sovereign recognizes only the body of the nation and draws no distinctions among the individuals who make it up. What, then, is an act of Sovereignty, strictly speaking? It is not an agreement between a superior and an inferior, but an agreement of the body with each of its members. It is legitimate, because it rests on the social contract; fair, because it is common to all; useful, because it can have no object except the general good; and solid, because it is backed by the public force and the supreme power. As long as subjects submit only to agreements of this kind, they obey no one but their own will. To ask how far the respective rights of the Sovereign and the citizens extend is simply to ask how far the citizens can commit themselves to one another — each to all, and all to each.
From this we can see that the sovereign power, absolute, sacred, and inviolable as it is, does not and cannot overstep the limits of general agreements, and that every man may fully dispose of whatever goods and liberty those agreements leave him. The Sovereign never has the right to burden one subject more than another, because then the matter becomes particular, and falls outside the Sovereign's competence.
Once these distinctions are admitted, the claim that individuals make any real renunciation in the social contract collapses. So far from giving things up, they find their position after the contract genuinely preferable to what it was before. Instead of a renunciation, they have made a profitable exchange: instead of an uncertain, precarious way of living, one that is better and more secure; instead of natural independence, liberty; instead of the power to harm others, safety for themselves; and instead of their own strength, which others might overpower, a right which the social union makes invincible. Their very lives, which they have devoted to the State, are constantly protected by it; and when they risk those lives in the State's defense, what are they doing but giving back what they received from it? What are they doing that they would not have to do more often, and at greater peril, in the state of nature — where they would inevitably fight battles at the risk of their lives to defend the very means of staying alive? Everyone must fight for the homeland when it needs them, true; but then, no one ever has to fight for himself. To preserve what keeps us safe, we run only a part of the risks we would have to run for ourselves the moment we lost it — do we not come out ahead?
The question is often asked: since individuals have no right to dispose of their own lives, how can they transfer to the Sovereign a right they do not possess? The question seems hard to answer only because it is badly put. Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. Has anyone ever said that a man who jumps out a window to escape a fire is guilty of suicide? Has that crime ever been charged to someone who dies in a storm at sea, even though he knew the danger when he boarded the ship?
The purpose of the social treaty is the preservation of the contracting parties. Whoever wills the end wills the means, and the means here involve some risks — even some losses. Whoever wants his life preserved at the expense of others must also be ready, when necessary, to give it up for their sake. Furthermore, the citizen is no longer the judge of the dangers the law requires him to face; and when the government says to him, "It is expedient for the State that you should die," he ought to die — because it is only on that condition that he has lived in security up to now, and because his life is no longer simply a gift of nature, but a conditional gift of the State.
The death penalty inflicted on criminals can be viewed in much the same light: it is so that we will not become the victims of a murderer that we consent to die if we become murderers ourselves. Under this treaty, far from disposing of our own lives, we are thinking only of protecting them — and it is hardly to be supposed that any of the parties, at the time, is planning to get himself hanged.
Moreover, every wrongdoer who attacks the rights of society becomes, by his crimes, a rebel and a traitor to his homeland. By violating its laws he ceases to be a member of it; he even makes war upon it. Then the State's preservation and his own are incompatible — one of the two must perish — and when the guilty man is put to death, it is less as a citizen than as an enemy. The trial and the verdict are the proof and the declaration that he has broken the social treaty, and consequently is no longer a member of the State. And since he had acknowledged himself a member, at the very least by living there, he must be cut off from it — by exile, as a violator of the contract, or by death, as a public enemy. For such an enemy is not a moral person but simply a man, and in that case the right of war is to kill the defeated.
But, it will be objected, the condemnation of a criminal is a particular act. Granted — and for that reason it is not a function of the Sovereign. It is a right the Sovereign can confer without being able to exercise it itself. All my ideas hold together, but I cannot lay them all out at once.
Let me add that frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or laziness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. The State has no right to put anyone to death, even as an example, if that person can be left alive without danger.
As for the right of pardon — of exempting a guilty man from the penalty set by the law and pronounced by the judge — it belongs only to an authority above both judge and law: that is, the Sovereign. And even the Sovereign's right here is far from clear, and the occasions for using it are extremely rare. In a well-governed State there are few punishments — not because pardons are many, but because criminals are few. When a State is in decay, the sheer multitude of crimes guarantees they will go unpunished. Under the Roman Republic, neither the Senate nor the Consuls ever attempted to grant pardon; even the people never did, though it sometimes revoked its own judgment. Frequent pardons announce that crime will soon need no pardon at all — and anyone can see where that road leads. But I feel my heart protesting and holding back my pen. Let us leave these questions to the just man who has never offended, and who has never needed a pardon himself.
By the social contract we have given the body politic existence and life. Now, by legislation, we must give it movement and will. For the original act that forms and unites the body still determines nothing about what it must do to preserve itself.
Whatever is good and consistent with order is so by the nature of things, independent of any human agreement. All justice comes from God; he alone is its source. But if we knew how to receive inspiration from so high, we would need neither government nor laws. There is, no doubt, a universal justice that flows from reason alone — but for that justice to be accepted among us, it must be mutual. Speaking in human terms, the laws of justice, lacking any natural enforcement, are empty among men. They serve only to profit the wicked and ruin the just, when the just man keeps them toward everyone and no one keeps them toward him. So agreements and laws are needed to join rights to duties and bring justice back to its object. In the state of nature, where everything is common, I owe nothing to a man to whom I have promised nothing; I recognize as belonging to others only what is of no use to me. In the civil state, where all rights are fixed by law, the case is different.
But what, in the end, is a law? As long as we settle for attaching purely metaphysical ideas to the word, we will keep arguing without ever understanding each other — and even once we have defined a law of nature, we will be no closer to defining a law of the State.
I have already said that there can be no general will directed at a particular object. That particular object is either inside the State or outside it. If it's outside, then a will that is foreign to it is not general with respect to it. If it's inside, then it is a part of the State — and a relation springs up between the whole and the part that makes them two separate beings: the part is one, and the whole minus the part is the other. But the whole minus a part is not the whole; so as long as this relation holds, there is no whole at all, only two unequal parts. It follows that the will of one is in no way general with respect to the other.
But when the whole people decrees for the whole people, it considers only itself. If a relation is formed, it is between the entire object seen from one angle and the entire object seen from another, with no division of the whole at all. Then the matter decreed about is general, just like the will that decrees it. This is the act I call a law.
When I say that the object of law is always general, I mean that law considers subjects in a body and actions in the abstract — never an individual person or a particular action. So the law can perfectly well decree that there shall be privileges, but it cannot grant them to anyone by name. The law can create several classes of citizens, and even specify the qualifications for belonging to each class, but it cannot name this or that person as a member. It can establish a monarchical government and hereditary succession, but it cannot elect a king or appoint a royal family. In a word, no function that bears on a particular object belongs to the legislative power.
Seen this way, several questions evaporate at once. We need no longer ask whose business it is to make laws, since laws are acts of the general will. We need not ask whether the government is above the law, since the government's members belong to the State. We need not ask whether the law can be unjust, since no one is unjust to himself. And we need not ask how we can be both free and subject to the laws, since the laws are merely the registers of our own wills.
We can also see that since the law unites universality of will with universality of object, whatever any man commands on his own authority — no matter who he is — is not a law. Even what the Sovereign commands about a particular matter is no law either; it is a decree — an act not of sovereignty but of magistracy.
I therefore give the name Republic to every State that is governed by laws, whatever its form of administration may be; for only then does the public interest govern, and only then is the public thing — the res publica — a reality. Every legitimate government is republican. — By "republican" I do not mean only an aristocracy or a democracy, but in general any government guided by the general will, which is the law. To be legitimate, the government must not be confused with the Sovereign, but must serve as its minister. In that case even a monarchy is a Republic. All this will become clearer in the next book. — What government itself is, I will explain later on.
Laws, properly speaking, are nothing but the conditions of civil association. The people, being subject to the laws, ought to be their author; only those who form the association have the right to set its terms. But how are they to set them? By spontaneous common agreement? By sudden inspiration? Does the body politic have an organ for declaring its will? Who will give it the foresight to frame its acts and publish them in advance — or announce them at the moment of need? How can a blind multitude, which often does not know what it wills because it rarely knows what is good for it, carry out by itself an enterprise as vast and difficult as a system of legislation? Of itself, the people always wills the good; of itself, it does not always see it. The general will is always right, but the judgment that guides it is not always enlightened. The people must be made to see things as they are — sometimes as they ought to appear; it must be shown the good road it is looking for, shielded from the seductions of private wills, taught to take in times and places in sequence, and brought to weigh the pull of present, visible advantages against the danger of distant, hidden evils. Individuals see the good they reject; the public wills the good it does not see. Both stand equally in need of guides. Individuals must be compelled to bring their wills into line with their reason; the public must be taught to know what it wills. When that happens, public enlightenment unites understanding and will in the social body; the parts mesh exactly, and the whole rises to its greatest power. This is why a Lawgiver is necessary.
By the Lawgiver I mean not a legislature, but the extraordinary founder-figure who frames a people's laws at its beginning. To discover the rules of society best suited to nations would require a superior intelligence: one that could see all of men's passions without feeling any of them; one with no connection to our nature, yet knowing it through and through; one whose happiness was independent of us, yet who was willing to concern itself with ours; and finally, one that could look ahead, across the march of time, to a distant glory — working in one century to reap the reward in the next. It would take gods to give laws to men.
What Caligula argued from the facts, Plato argued from right, in the dialogue called the Statesman, when he set out to define the civil or kingly man. But if great princes are rare, how much rarer are great Lawgivers? Princes have only to follow the pattern; the Lawgiver has to invent it. The Lawgiver is the engineer who designs the machine; the prince is merely the mechanic who assembles it and keeps it running. "At the birth of societies," says Montesquieu, "it is the leaders of Republics who shape the institutions — and afterward, it is the institutions that shape the leaders."
Whoever dares to undertake the founding of a people's institutions should feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature. He must transform each individual — who, left alone, is a complete and solitary whole — into part of a greater whole from which that individual receives, in a sense, his life and his being. He must alter man's constitution in order to strengthen it. He must replace the physical and independent existence nature gave us all with an existence that is partial and moral. In a word, he must take away man's own resources and give him new ones in their place — resources foreign to him, which he cannot use without the help of other men. The more completely those natural resources are wiped out, the greater and more lasting the new ones acquired, and the more stable and perfect the new institutions. So if each citizen is nothing and can do nothing without all the rest, and if the resources acquired by the whole equal or exceed the sum of the natural resources of all the individuals, then we may say that lawmaking has reached the highest point of perfection it can attain.
The Lawgiver — the extraordinary founder-figure who frames a people's laws at its beginning, a Lycurgus or a Moses, not a legislature or parliament — occupies a unique position in the State in every respect. If his genius sets him apart, so does his office, which is neither magistracy nor Sovereignty. This office founds the Republic, yet it appears nowhere in the Republic's constitution. It is a special, higher function that has nothing in common with ordinary human rule. For if the man who commands men should not command the laws, then the man who commands the laws should not command men either. Otherwise his laws, made the servants of his passions, would often do nothing but perpetuate his injustices, and his private aims would inevitably stain the sanctity of his work.
When Lycurgus gave laws to his country, he began by giving up the throne.
— A people becomes famous only when its legislation begins to decline. We do not know for how many centuries the system of Lycurgus made the Spartans happy before the rest of Greece took any notice of it.
It was the custom of most Greek towns to entrust the framing of their laws to foreigners. The republics of modern Italy often followed this example; Geneva did the same, and profited by it.
— Those who know Calvin only as a theologian badly underestimate the range of his genius. The drafting of our wise edicts, in which he played a large part, does him as much honor as his Institutes. Whatever revolution time may bring to our religion, as long as the love of country and of liberty still lives among us, the memory of that great man will be blessed forever.
Rome, at the height of its prosperity, saw all the crimes of tyranny come back to life and found itself on the brink of destruction, because it had placed legislative authority and sovereign power in the same hands.
And yet even the decemvirs — the board of ten who drafted Rome's first written code — never claimed the right to pass any law on their own authority alone. "Nothing we propose to you," they told the people, "can become law without your consent. Romans, be yourselves the authors of the laws that are meant to make you happy."
The man who drafts the laws, then, has no right of legislation — or should have none. And the people cannot strip itself of this incommunicable right even if it wants to; for under the fundamental contract, only the general will can bind individuals, and there is no way to be certain that a particular will agrees with the general will until it has been put to the free vote of the people. I have said this already, but it is worth repeating.
So in the work of legislation we find two things together that seem impossible to combine: an undertaking beyond human powers and, to carry it out, an authority that is no authority at all.
There is a further difficulty that deserves attention. Wise men who insist on speaking their own language to ordinary people, instead of the people's language, cannot make themselves understood. There are a thousand kinds of ideas that simply cannot be translated into popular speech. Notions that are too general and goals that are too distant are both out of range. Each individual, with no taste for any plan of government except the one that serves his private interest, has a hard time seeing the benefits he stands to gain from the constant sacrifices that good laws demand. For a newly formed people to appreciate sound principles of politics and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause. The social spirit, which the institutions are supposed to create, would have to preside over the founding of those very institutions; men would have to be, before the laws exist, what the laws are supposed to make them. The Lawgiver, then, can appeal neither to force nor to reason. He must fall back on an authority of a different order — one that can compel without violence and persuade without convincing.
This is what has driven the fathers of nations, in every age, to call in heaven and credit the gods with their own wisdom — so that the peoples, submitting to the laws of the State as they submit to the laws of nature, and recognizing the same power at work in the creation of the city as in the creation of man, might obey freely and bear the yoke of public happiness with docility.
This sublime reasoning, far over the heads of ordinary men, is what the Lawgiver places in the mouths of the immortals, in order to sway by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move.
— "In truth," says Machiavelli, "there has never been, in any country, an extraordinary lawgiver who did not have recourse to God; otherwise his laws would not have been accepted. There are, in fact, many useful truths a wise man may know that do not carry, in themselves, reasons clear enough to convince anyone else." (Discourses on Livy.)
But not just anyone can make the gods speak, or get himself believed when he announces that he is their interpreter. The great soul of the Lawgiver is the only miracle that can prove his mission. Any man can carve tablets of stone, or buy an oracle, or fake secret dealings with some divinity, or train a bird to whisper in his ear, or find some other crude way of imposing on the people. A man whose skill goes no further may even gather a band of fools around him; but he will never found an empire, and his extravagant creation will quickly die with him. Empty tricks can form a passing bond; only wisdom can make it last. The Jewish law, which still endures, and the law of the child of Ishmael, which for ten centuries has ruled half the world, still proclaim today the greatness of the men who laid them down. And while the pride of philosophy and the blind spirit of faction see in such men nothing but lucky impostors, the true student of politics admires, in the institutions they built, the great and powerful genius that presides over things made to endure.
We should not conclude from all this, with Warburton, that among us politics and religion share a common object — only that, at the birth of nations, the one serves as the instrument of the other.
An architect, before putting up a large building, surveys and tests the ground to see whether it can bear the weight. In the same way, the wise Lawgiver does not begin by drafting laws that are good in themselves; he first examines whether the people they are meant for is fit to receive them. That is why Plato refused to give laws to the Arcadians and the Cyrenaeans: he knew both peoples were rich and could not tolerate equality. And that is why good laws and bad men were found together in Crete: Minos had imposed discipline on a people already loaded down with vice.
A thousand nations have achieved earthly greatness that could never have endured good laws; and even those that could have endured them could have done so only for a very brief stretch of their long history. Most peoples, like most men, are teachable only in their youth; as they grow old, they become incorrigible. Once customs are established and prejudices have taken root, trying to reform them is dangerous and useless. The people cannot stand having anyone touch its faults, even to cure them — like those foolish, cowardly patients who panic at the sight of the doctor.
It is true that there are times in the history of States when — just as certain illnesses unhinge men's minds and erase their memory of the past — periods of violence and revolution do to peoples what those crises do to individuals. Horror of the past does the work of forgetting, and the State, set ablaze by civil war, is born again from its ashes, so to speak, and recovers the vigor of youth in the very act of escaping death's grip. Such was Sparta in the time of Lycurgus; such was Rome after the Tarquins; and such, in our own era, were Holland and Switzerland after the expulsion of their tyrants.
But such events are rare. They are exceptions, and the cause always lies in the particular constitution of the State concerned. They cannot even happen twice to the same people; for a people can make itself free while it is still rough and unformed, but not once the civic spring has worn out. Then disorder can destroy it, but no revolution can restore it: it needs a master, not a liberator. Free peoples, remember this maxim: Liberty may be gained, but it can never be recovered.
Youth is not infancy. Nations, like men, have a period of youth — or, if you prefer, maturity — that must come before they are made subject to laws. But the maturity of a people is not always easy to recognize, and if the moment is forced, the work is ruined. One people can be disciplined from its very beginnings; another is not ready after ten centuries. Russia will never be truly civilized, because it was civilized too soon. Peter had a genius for imitation; he lacked true genius, the kind that creates, that makes everything out of nothing. Some of what he did was good; most of it was out of place. He saw that his people was uncivilized; he did not see that it was not yet ripe for civilization. He tried to refine it when it needed only to be toughened. He wanted to turn out Germans and Englishmen, when he should have begun by making Russians. He prevented his subjects from ever becoming what they might have been, by persuading them that they were something they are not — exactly the way a French tutor grooms his pupil to dazzle as a child prodigy and to amount to nothing for the rest of his life. The Russian empire will aspire to conquer Europe, and will itself be conquered. The Tartars, its subjects or its neighbors, will become its masters — and ours. That revolution seems to me inevitable. Indeed, all the kings of Europe are working together to hasten its arrival.
Nature has set limits to the stature of a well-made man; beyond those limits she produces only giants and dwarfs. In the same way, when it comes to the best constitution for a State, there are limits to its size: it must be neither too large to be well governed nor too small to maintain itself. Every body politic has a maximum of strength which it cannot exceed, and which it often loses by the very act of growing. The further the social bond stretches, the looser it becomes; and in general, a small State is proportionally stronger than a great one.
A thousand arguments support this principle. First, administration becomes more difficult over great distances, just as a weight grows heavier at the end of a longer lever. It also becomes more burdensome as the layers multiply. Each city has its administration, which the people pays for; each district has its own, still paid for by the people; then comes each province; then the great regional governments, the satrapies, the viceroyalties, each costing more the higher you climb, and always at the expense of the unlucky people at the bottom. Last of all comes the supreme administration, which crushes everything beneath it. All these surcharges are a constant drain on the subjects; and far from being better governed by all these layers of authority, they are governed worse than if there were a single authority over them. Meanwhile, hardly any resources are left for emergencies; and when the State must dip into those reserves, it stands forever on the brink of ruin.
Nor is that all. Not only does the government have less vigor and speed in enforcing the laws, stopping nuisances, correcting abuses, and heading off the seditious schemes hatched in distant corners; the people also has less affection for its leaders, whom it never sees; for its country, which looks to it as vast as the world; and for its fellow citizens, most of whom are strangers to it. The same laws cannot suit so many different provinces, with their different customs and their contrasting climates, unable to bear the same form of government. Yet different laws breed nothing but trouble and confusion among peoples who live under the same rulers and in constant communication — who mingle and intermarry and, coming under the sway of other customs, can never be sure that what they call their inheritance is truly theirs. Talents are buried, virtues go unrecognized, vices go unpunished, in that crowd of strangers thrown together at the seat of the central administration. The leaders, buried under business, see nothing with their own eyes; clerks govern the State. And in the end, the measures required to maintain the general authority — an authority all those distant officials want either to escape or to exploit — soak up all the public's energy. None is left for the people's happiness, and barely enough for the people's defense when the need arises. And so a body too big for its constitution sags and collapses, crushed under its own weight.
On the other hand, the State must give itself a certain breadth of foundation if it is to have stability — if it is to withstand the shocks it is bound to suffer and the efforts it will be forced to make to sustain itself. For all peoples generate a kind of centrifugal force: they push continually against one another and tend to expand at their neighbors' expense, like the vortices of Descartes. So the weak risk being swallowed up in short order, and hardly any people can preserve itself except by reaching a kind of equilibrium with all the rest, which makes the pressure roughly equal on every side.
Clearly, then, there are reasons to expand and reasons to contract; and it is no small part of the statesman's talent to find, between the two, the proportion most favorable to the State's preservation. In general, since the reasons for expansion are merely external and relative, they should give way to the reasons for contraction, which are internal and absolute. A strong, healthy constitution is the first thing to look for; and the vigor that comes of good government is worth more than the resources a vast territory supplies.
It should be added that States have existed which were so constituted that the need for conquest was built into their very constitution: to maintain themselves, they were forced to expand without end. Perhaps they congratulated themselves on this happy necessity. Yet it showed them, along with the limit of their greatness, the inevitable moment of their fall.
A body politic can be measured in two ways: by the extent of its territory and by the number of its people. Between these two measurements there is a right ratio that gives the State its true greatness. Men make the State, and land sustains the men. The right ratio, then, is for the land to be enough to maintain the inhabitants, and for the inhabitants to be as many as the land can feed. In that proportion lies the maximum strength of a given population. If there is too much land, guarding it is a burden, cultivation falls short, the harvest exceeds the need — and there lie the seeds of defensive wars. If there is too little, the State must depend on its neighbors for what it lacks — and there lie the seeds of offensive wars. Any people whose position leaves it no choice except between commerce and war is weak in itself. It depends on its neighbors; it depends on events; its existence can never be anything but short and uncertain. Either it conquers its way out of that situation, or it is conquered and ceases to exist. It can stay free only by being very small or very great.
No fixed ratio between land and population can be laid down that fits every case — because soils differ in quality, in fertility, in the nature of their products, and in the influence of their climates, and because the people who live on them differ in temperament: some consume little in a fertile country, others a great deal on a stingy soil. One must also weigh the greater or lesser fertility of the women, the conditions in each country that help or hinder the growth of population, and the influence the Lawgiver can hope to exert through his institutions. So the Lawgiver should judge not by what he sees but by what he foresees; he should dwell less on the population as it stands than on the size it ought naturally to reach. Finally, there are countless cases where the particular circumstances of a place demand or permit taking in more territory than seems strictly necessary. A State will spread wide in mountain country, where the natural products — woods and pastures — call for less labor, where experience shows that women are more fertile than on the plains, and where great stretches of slope leave only small patches of level ground that can be counted on for crops. By contrast, a State can draw itself in tight along the coast, even among rocks and near-barren sands, because fishing makes up for much of what the land fails to yield, because the inhabitants must cluster together to fend off pirates, and because colonies make it easier to relieve the country of its surplus population.
To these conditions for founding a people, one more must be added. It cannot replace any of the others, but without it they are all useless: the enjoyment of peace and plenty. The moment when a State sets its house in order, like the moment when a battalion forms ranks, is the moment when the body is least able to resist and easiest to destroy. There would be better resistance in a time of total disorder than in a moment of ferment, when everyone is absorbed in his own standing instead of the common danger. Let a war, a famine, or an uprising strike at that critical time, and the State inevitably falls.
Not that governments have never been set up during such storms — plenty have. But then it is those very governments that destroy the State. Usurpers always bring about or pick troubled times, so that they can use the public panic to push through destructive laws that the people would never adopt with a cool head. The choice of the moment of founding is one of the surest marks by which to tell the work of the Lawgiver from the work of the tyrant.
What people, then, is fit to receive laws? One that already finds itself bound together by some tie of origin, interest, or agreement, but has never yet borne the real yoke of law. One with no deeply rooted customs or superstitions. One that does not fear being crushed by sudden invasion, and that can, without entering its neighbors' quarrels, resist any one of them alone or enlist one to drive off another. One in which every member can be known to every other, and no man has to carry a burden too heavy for a man. One that can do without all other peoples, and that every other people can do without.
— If of two neighboring peoples one could not do without the other, the situation would be very hard on the first and very dangerous for the second. Any wise nation, in such a case, would move quickly to free the other from its dependence. The republic of Tlaxcala, an enclave inside the Mexican empire, chose to do without salt rather than buy it from the Mexicans — rather, even, than accept it from them as a gift. The Tlaxcalans were wise enough to see the trap hidden under that generosity. They kept their freedom; and that little State, shut up inside that great empire, became in the end the instrument of its ruin.
One that is neither rich nor poor, but sufficient to itself. And lastly, one that combines the steadiness of an ancient people with the docility of a new one. What makes the work of legislation hard is less what must be built than what must be destroyed; and what makes success so rare is that natural simplicity is almost never found joined to the needs of society. All these conditions, it is true, rarely come together. And that is why few States have good constitutions.
There is still one country in Europe capable of receiving laws: Corsica. The valor and steadfastness with which that brave people has regained and defended its liberty deserve a reward: some wise man should teach it how to preserve what it has won. I have a feeling that one day that little island will astonish Europe.
If we ask what exactly the greatest good of all consists in — the good that ought to be the aim of every system of legislation — we will find that it comes down to two main objects: liberty and equality. Liberty, because every private dependence is that much force subtracted from the body of the State; equality, because liberty cannot exist without it.
I have already explained what civil liberty is. As for equality, the word should not be taken to mean that everyone must have exactly the same degree of power and wealth. It means, where power is concerned, that it should stop short of all violence and never be exercised except by virtue of rank and law; and where wealth is concerned, that no citizen should ever be rich enough to buy another, and none so poor that he is forced to sell himself.
— If you want to give the State stability, bring the two extremes as close together as possible: allow neither rich men nor beggars. These two conditions, naturally inseparable, are equally fatal to the common good. From the one come the agents of tyranny; from the other, the tyrants. It is always between them that public liberty is put up for auction: the one buys it, and the other sells it.
All this implies, on the side of the great, moderation in wealth and influence; on the side of the humble, moderation in greed and envy.
Such equality, we are told, is a theorist's dream that cannot exist in practice. But if its abuse is inevitable, does it follow that we should not at least regulate it? It is precisely because the force of circumstances is always working to destroy equality that the force of legislation should always be working to maintain it.
But these general objects of every good system of laws must be adjusted, in each country, to the situation of the place and the character of the inhabitants; and on the basis of those circumstances, each people must be given the particular system of institutions that is best — not perhaps in itself, but for the State it is meant to serve. Suppose the soil is barren and unproductive, or the land too small for its people: then let them turn to industry and the crafts, and trade what they make for the goods they lack. Suppose, on the contrary, a people lives on rich plains and fertile slopes; suppose the land is good but short of inhabitants: then let them give all their care to agriculture, which multiplies men, and drive out the crafts, which would only finish depopulating the country by herding its few inhabitants into a handful of towns.
— "Any branch of foreign commerce," says the Marquis d'Argenson, "spreads little more than a false benefit through a kingdom at large. It may enrich a few individuals, even a few towns; but the nation as a whole gains nothing from it, and the people is none the better off."
Does a nation occupy a long and convenient coastline? Then let it cover the sea with ships and cultivate commerce and navigation: its life will be brilliant and brief. Does the sea along its shores wash nothing but nearly inaccessible rocks? Then let it stay a rough nation of fish-eaters: it will live more quietly — better, perhaps — and certainly more happily. In a word, beyond the principles common to all, every people carries within itself some cause that arranges those principles in its own particular way, and makes its legislation right for itself alone. That is how, long ago, the Hebrews — and more recently the Arabs — made religion their chief object; the Athenians, letters; Carthage and Tyre, commerce; Rhodes, seafaring; Sparta, war; and Rome, virtue. The author of The Spirit of the Laws has shown, with a wealth of examples, the art by which the lawgiver steers the constitution toward each of these objects.
What makes a State's constitution truly solid and lasting is this: when what is fitting is so well observed that the natural relations and the laws always agree on every point, and the law serves only, so to speak, to secure, accompany, and correct what nature has arranged. But if the Lawgiver mistakes his object and adopts a principle different from the one that grows out of the nature of things — if his principle points to servitude while circumstances point to liberty; to riches, while they point to population; to peace, while they point to conquest — then the laws will weaken little by little, the constitution will decay, and the State will know no rest until it is destroyed or transformed, and invincible nature has resumed her reign.
To set the whole in order, to give the commonwealth the best possible form, there are various relations to consider. First, there is the action of the whole body on itself — the relation of the whole to the whole, of the Sovereign to the State. This relation, as we shall see later, is itself made up of the relations between intermediate terms.
The laws that regulate this relation are called political laws; they are also called fundamental laws — and not without reason, if they are wise. For if there is only one good way of ordering each State, the people that has found it should hold fast to it. But if the established order is bad, why should we treat as fundamental the very laws that prevent men from being good? Besides, in any case, a people is always free to change its laws, even the best of them; for if it chooses to do itself harm, who has the right to stop it?
The second relation is that of the members to one another, or to the body as a whole. This relation should be as slight as possible in the first respect and as great as possible in the second: each citizen perfectly independent of all the others, and extremely dependent on the city. Both results are achieved by the same means; for only the strength of the State can secure the liberty of its members. From this second relation arise the civil laws.
We may consider a third kind of relation between the individual and the law: the relation between disobedience and its penalty. This gives rise to the criminal laws — which, at bottom, are less a separate class of laws than the sanction standing behind all the others.
To these three kinds of law a fourth must be added, the most important of all. It is engraved neither on marble nor on bronze, but in the hearts of the citizens. It is the State's true constitution. Every day it gathers new strength. When the other laws age or die out, it revives them or replaces them; it keeps a people in the spirit of its founding; and little by little it substitutes the force of habit for the force of authority. I am speaking of morals, of customs, and above all of public opinion — a power unknown to our political thinkers, yet one on which the success of everything else depends. This is the part the great Lawgiver attends to in secret, while he seems to confine himself to particular regulations; for the regulations are only the curve of the arch, while morals and customs, slower to be born, form in the end its immovable keystone.
Among these different classes of laws, only the political laws — those that determine the form of the government — concern my subject here.
Before we speak of the different forms of government, let us try to pin down the exact meaning of the word, which has never yet been explained very clearly.
I warn the reader: this chapter must be read carefully. I do not know how to make myself clear to anyone who refuses to pay attention.
Every free action is produced by two causes working together. One is moral — the will that decides on the act. The other is physical — the power that carries it out. When I walk toward something, two things have to happen: first, I must will to go there; second, my feet must carry me. If a paralyzed man wills to run, and an able-bodied man wills to stay put, both of them stay exactly where they are. The body politic has the same two motors. Here too we can tell force and will apart: the will goes by the name of legislative power, the force by the name of executive power. Nothing is done — and nothing should be done — without the two working together.
We have seen that the legislative power belongs to the people, and can belong to the people alone. By the same principles, it is just as easy to see that the executive power cannot belong to the people as a body — to the people as legislature, as Sovereign — because the executive power consists entirely of particular acts, and particular acts are outside the province of the law, and therefore outside the province of the Sovereign, all of whose acts must be laws.
So the public force needs an agent of its own: something to gather it together and set it working under the direction of the general will; something to serve as the channel of communication between the State and the Sovereign; something that does for the public person more or less what the union of soul and body does for a man. There it is — the thing that, within the State, we call the government, so often wrongly confused with the Sovereign, whose servant it is.
What, then, is government? An intermediate body set up between the subjects and the Sovereign to keep the two in touch with each other, charged with executing the laws and maintaining liberty, civil and political alike.
The members of this body are called magistrates or kings — that is to say, governors — and the body as a whole bears the name prince. Mark that word carefully: from here on, "the prince" means the government itself, the whole body of magistrates acting as one person — not a crowned monarch. — The usage is old and exact: at Venice, the governing College is addressed as "Most Serene Prince" even when the Doge is not in the room.
So those who hold that the act by which a people places itself under a prince is not a contract are entirely right. It is nothing more than a commission — a job. The rulers are simply officers of the Sovereign, exercising in its name a power that the Sovereign has deposited with them, a power it can limit, modify, or take back whenever it pleases. For the Sovereign to alienate such a right — to give it away for good — would be incompatible with the very nature of the social body, and contrary to the purpose of the association.
I therefore call government, or supreme administration, the legitimate exercise of the executive power; and I call prince or magistrate the man or the body entrusted with that administration.
In the government live the intermediate forces whose relations make up the relation of the whole to the whole — of the Sovereign to the State. We can picture this last relation as a continuous proportion: the Sovereign stands to the government as the government stands to the people. The government is the middle term — what geometers call the mean proportional. It receives from the Sovereign the orders it passes on to the people; and for the State to stand in good balance, there must, once everything is reckoned in, be an equality between the two products: the power of the government, taken by itself and multiplied by itself, must equal the combined power of the citizens, who are sovereign at one end of the proportion and subjects at the other. (In any such proportion, the middle term multiplied by itself equals the product of the two extremes.)
What is more, none of these three terms can be altered without that equality being instantly destroyed. If the Sovereign tries to govern, or the magistrate tries to make laws, or the subjects refuse to obey, then disorder replaces order, force and will stop working together, and the State dissolves into despotism or anarchy. Finally, just as there is only one mean proportional between any two terms, there is only one good government possible for a given State. But since countless events can change the relations within a people, different governments may be good not only for different peoples, but for the same people at different times.
To give some idea of the range of relations that can hold between the two extremes, I will take as my example the size of a people's population, because numbers are the relation easiest to express.
Suppose the State is made up of ten thousand citizens. The Sovereign can only be considered collectively, as a body; but each member, as a subject, counts as an individual. So the Sovereign stands to the subject as ten thousand to one: each member of the State has only a one ten-thousandth share of the sovereign authority, even though he is entirely under its control. Now let the people grow to a hundred thousand. The subject's condition does not change — each is still fully under the whole authority of the laws — but his vote has shrunk to one hundred-thousandth, so he has ten times less influence in drawing those laws up. The subject always remains a single unit; so the ratio between him and the Sovereign grows with the number of citizens. From this it follows that the larger the State, the less the liberty.
When I say the ratio grows, I mean it grows more unequal. The greater the ratio in the geometer's sense, the less relation there is in the everyday sense of the word. In the first sense, the relation is a matter of quantity, and is measured by the quotient; in the second, it is a matter of likeness, and is reckoned by similarity.
Now, the less the particular wills resemble the general will — that is, the less morals and customs match the laws — the more the restraining force has to increase. So the government, to be good, must be proportionately stronger as the people grows more numerous.
On the other hand, the growth of the State gives the holders of public authority more temptations and more opportunities to abuse their power. So the more force the government needs to keep the people in hand, the more force the Sovereign needs, in its turn, to keep the government in hand. I am speaking here not of absolute force, but of the relative force of the different parts of the State.
From this double relation it follows that the continuous proportion between the Sovereign, the prince, and the people is no arbitrary idea, but a necessary consequence of the nature of the body politic. It follows further that, since one of the extreme terms — the people as subject — is fixed and stands for the number one, then whenever the doubled ratio (Sovereign to subject) grows or shrinks, the simple ratio (each single step of the proportion) grows or shrinks along with it, and the middle term — the government — changes accordingly. From which we see that there is no single, unique, absolute form of government, but as many governments differing in nature as there are States differing in size.
If anyone wanted to ridicule this system, he might say that on my theory, to find the mean proportional and give the body of the government its form, all you need to do is take the square root of the population. I would answer that I am using population only as an example here. The relations I am speaking of are not measured by the number of men alone, but in general by the quantity of action, which is the combined result of a multitude of causes. And if I borrow the language of geometry for a moment to save words, I am perfectly aware that geometrical precision has no place in moral quantities.
The government is, on a small scale, what the body politic that contains it is on a large one. It is a moral person endowed with certain faculties — active like the Sovereign, passive like the State — and it can be broken down into further relations of the same kind. From these arises a new proportion, and within that yet another, following the ranks of the magistracies, until we come down to an indivisible middle term: a single ruler or supreme magistrate, who can be pictured, in the middle of this progression, as the number one standing between the series of fractions and the series of whole numbers.
Rather than tangle ourselves in this multiplication of terms, let us be content to regard the government as a new body within the State — distinct from both the people and the Sovereign, and standing between them.
Between these two bodies there is this essential difference: the State exists by itself, while the government exists only through the Sovereign. So the dominant will of the prince is — or should be — nothing but the general will, nothing but the law. Its force is only the public force concentrated in its hands; and the moment it tries to perform some absolute and independent act on its own authority, the tie that binds the whole together begins to loosen. If it finally came about that the prince had a particular will more active than the will of the Sovereign, and used the public force in its hands to obey that particular will, there would then be, so to speak, two Sovereigns — one by right and one in fact. At that instant the social union would vanish, and the body politic would be dissolved.
And yet, for the government to have a real existence, a real life that marks it off from the body of the State — for all its members to be able to act in concert and fulfill the purpose for which it was set up — it must have a particular self: a feeling shared by its members, a force and a will of its own that works for its preservation. This separate existence implies assemblies, councils, the power to deliberate and decide — rights, titles, and privileges that belong exclusively to the prince, and that make the magistrate's office more honorable in proportion as it is more burdensome. The difficulty lies in arranging this subordinate whole within the larger whole in such a way that it never alters the general constitution while asserting its own; that it always distinguishes its own particular force, meant for its own preservation, from the public force, meant for the preservation of the State; and that, in a word, it stands ever ready to sacrifice the government to the people, and never the people to the government.
Besides, although the artificial body of the government is the work of another artificial body, and has, so to speak, only a borrowed and subordinate life, that does not prevent it from acting with more or less vigor and speed — from enjoying, as it were, more or less robust health. Finally, without straying directly from the purpose for which it was set up, it can drift more or less away from that purpose, depending on the way it is constituted.
From all these differences arise the various relations that the government ought to bear to the body of the State, according to the accidental and particular relations by which the State itself is modified. For often the government that is best in itself becomes the most ruinous of all, if its relations have fallen out of step with the defects of the body politic it belongs to.
To explain the general cause of these differences, I must now distinguish between the government and its principle, just as I earlier distinguished between the State and the Sovereign.
The body of magistrates can be made up of more members or fewer. We said that the ratio of the Sovereign to the subjects grows as the people grows more numerous; by an obvious analogy, the same can be said of the ratio of the government to the magistrates.
But the total force of the government is always the force of the State, and so it never varies. From this it follows that the more of that force the government spends on its own members, the less it has left to use on the whole people.
Therefore: the more numerous the magistrates, the weaker the government. Since this principle is fundamental, let me do my best to make it clear.
In the person of a magistrate we can distinguish three essentially different wills. First, the individual's own private will, which aims only at his personal advantage. Second, the will the magistrates share among themselves, which is directed solely to the advantage of the prince — call it the corporate will: general in relation to the government, but particular in relation to the State, of which the government is only a part. Third, the will of the people, the sovereign will, which is general both in relation to the State considered as the whole and in relation to the government considered as a part of that whole.
In a perfect system of legislation, the private, individual will should count for nothing; the corporate will of the government should be kept strictly subordinate; and the general or sovereign will should therefore always dominate, the single rule for all the rest.
In the natural order of things, the exact opposite happens: each of these wills grows more active the more concentrated it is. The general will is always the weakest, the corporate will comes second, and the individual will is the strongest of all. So in the government, each member is first of all himself, then a magistrate, and only then a citizen — precisely the reverse of the order the social system requires.
Granting all that: if the whole government is in the hands of a single man, the particular will and the corporate will are perfectly united, and the corporate will therefore reaches the highest pitch of intensity it can possibly have. Now, since the use that is made of force depends on the degree of will behind it, and since the absolute force of the government never varies, it follows that the most active government is the government of one man.
Suppose, on the other hand, we merge the government with the legislative authority — we make the Sovereign the prince, and turn every citizen into a magistrate. Then the corporate will, fused with the general will, can be no more active than the general will is, and it leaves the particular will at full strength. So the government, with the same absolute force as ever, will be at the lowest point of its relative force, its activity.
These relations are beyond dispute, and other considerations confirm them further. We can see, for instance, that each magistrate is more active within his body than each citizen is within his, so the particular will has far more influence on the acts of the government than on the acts of the Sovereign; for each magistrate is almost always charged with some function of government, while each citizen, taken alone, exercises no function of sovereignty at all. Moreover, the bigger a State grows, the more its real force increases, though not in direct proportion to its growth. But if the State stays the same size, multiplying the magistrates adds nothing whatever to the government's real force — because that force is the force of the State, whose dimensions have not changed. So the government's relative force, its activity, decreases, while its absolute, real force cannot increase.
It is certain, too, that business gets executed more slowly as more people are put in charge of it. Where too much weight is given to prudence, too little is given to fortune: the opportunity slips past, and deliberation ends by losing the very thing being deliberated about.
I have just proved that the government slackens as the magistrates multiply; and I proved earlier that the more numerous the people, the greater the restraining force has to be. Put the two together, and it follows that the ratio of the magistrates to the government should run inversely to the ratio of the subjects to the Sovereign. In other words: the larger the State grows, the tighter the government should contract, the number of rulers shrinking as the number of people increases.
I should add that I am speaking here of the government's relative strength, not of its rightness. For the opposite also holds: the more numerous the magistracy, the closer its corporate will comes to the general will; while under a single magistrate, that same corporate will is, as I said, nothing but a particular will. So what is gained on one side is lost on the other; and the lawgiver's art is to know how to fix the point at which the government's force and the government's will — always inversely proportioned — meet in the combination most advantageous to the State.
We saw in the last chapter why the kinds or forms of government are distinguished by the number of members composing them. It remains to see, in this chapter, how the division is actually made.
The Sovereign may, in the first place, put the government in the hands of the whole people, or of the majority of the people, so that more citizens are magistrates than are mere private individuals. This form of government is called democracy.
Or it may confine the government to a small number, so that there are more private citizens than magistrates; and this form bears the name aristocracy.
Finally, it may concentrate the whole government in the hands of a single magistrate, from whom all the others hold their power. This third form is the most common of all, and it is called monarchy, or royal government.
Note that all these forms — or at least the first two — admit of degrees, and over a wide range. Democracy may take in the whole people or shrink to half of it. Aristocracy, in its turn, may shrink from half the people down to the smallest possible number. Even royalty allows for a measure of sharing: Sparta, by its constitution, always had two kings; and the Roman Empire saw as many as eight emperors at once without anyone being able to say the Empire had split apart. So there is a point at which each form of government blends into the next; and it becomes clear that under just three labels, government actually admits of as many different forms as the State has citizens.
There are even more than that. For since the government can also, in certain respects, be subdivided into parts — one administered one way, another administered another — the combinations of the three forms can yield a multitude of mixed forms, each of which can be multiplied again by all the simple ones.
In every age people have argued about the best form of government, without considering that each of them is the best in some cases and the worst in others.
If the number of supreme magistrates in different States ought to run inversely to the number of citizens, it follows that, in general, democratic government suits small States, aristocratic government suits middle-sized ones, and monarchy suits great ones. The rule comes straight from the principle. But who could count the innumerable circumstances that may furnish exceptions?
Whoever makes the law knows better than anyone else how it should be executed and interpreted. It would seem, then, that there could be no better constitution than one in which the executive and legislative powers are joined together. But this is the very thing that makes such a government inadequate in certain respects: things that ought to be kept distinct get mixed together, and the prince and the Sovereign, being one and the same person, form, so to speak, nothing but a government without government.
It is not good for the one who makes the laws to execute them, nor for the body of the people to turn its attention away from general considerations and spend it on particular objects. Nothing is more dangerous than the influence of private interests on public affairs; and the government's abuse of the laws is a lesser evil than the corruption of the lawmaker, which is the inevitable consequence of taking up particular points of view. When that happens, the State is altered in its very substance, and all reform becomes impossible. A people that would never misuse the powers of government would never misuse independence either; a people that would always govern well would not need to be governed at all.
Taking the term in its strict sense, a true democracy has never existed, and never will. It is against the natural order for the many to govern and the few to be governed. We cannot imagine the people staying permanently in session to handle public business; and it is easy to see that they could not set up commissions for the purpose without the form of the administration changing.
In fact, I believe I can lay this down as a principle: whenever the functions of government are divided among several bodies, the smaller bodies sooner or later acquire the greatest authority — if only because they are positioned to handle business quickly, which naturally brings power into their hands.
Besides, think how many conditions such a government presupposes — conditions that are hard to find together! First, a very small State, where the people can easily assemble and where every citizen can easily know all the rest. Second, great simplicity of manners, so that business does not pile up and breed thorny questions. Next, a large measure of equality in rank and fortune, without which equality in rights and authority cannot last long. Finally, little or no luxury — for luxury either comes from wealth or makes wealth necessary. It corrupts rich and poor at one stroke: the rich through possession, the poor through craving. It sells the homeland out to softness and vanity; it robs the State of all its citizens by making them slaves to one another, and every one of them a slave to public opinion.
This is why a famous writer — Montesquieu — made virtue the fundamental principle of republics: none of these conditions could exist without virtue. But for want of the necessary distinctions, that great mind was often inexact and sometimes obscure. He did not see that since the sovereign authority is everywhere the same, the same principle must hold in every well-constituted State — to a greater or lesser degree, it is true, according to the form of the government.
Add to this that no government is so prone to civil wars and internal upheaval as democratic or popular government, because none tends so strongly and so constantly to change into another form, and none demands more vigilance and courage simply to keep the form it has. Under this constitution above all others, the citizen must arm himself with strength and steadfastness, and say from his heart, every day of his life, what a virtuous Count Palatine — the Palatine of Posen, father of the King of Poland and Duke of Lorraine — declared in the Diet of Poland: Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium. "I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery."
Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men.
Here we have two quite distinct moral persons — the government and the Sovereign — and consequently two general wills: one general in relation to all the citizens, the other general only for the members of the administration. So although the government may arrange its internal affairs however it pleases, it can never speak to the people except in the name of the Sovereign — that is, in the name of the people itself. This must never be forgotten.
The first societies governed themselves aristocratically. The heads of families deliberated together on public business; the young yielded without question to the authority of experience. That is the origin of names like priests, elders, senate, and gerontes — Greek for "the old men." The indigenous peoples of North America still govern themselves this way today, and their government is admirable.
But as the artificial inequality created by institutions came to outweigh natural inequality, wealth or power came to matter more than age, and aristocracy became elective. — It is worth noting that among the ancients the word optimates, "the best men," meant not the best but the most powerful. — Finally, when a father's power began passing to his children along with his property, creating patrician families, government became hereditary — and there came to be senators twenty years old.
There are, then, three kinds of aristocracy: natural, elective, and hereditary. The first suits only simple peoples; the third is the worst of all governments; the second is the best, and it is aristocracy properly so called.
Besides the advantage of keeping the two powers distinct, elective aristocracy has the advantage of choosing its members. In popular government, every citizen is born a magistrate; here the magistracy is confined to a few, who hold the office only by being elected. By this means, integrity, intelligence, experience, and all the other grounds of preference and public esteem become so many additional guarantees of wise government. — It matters greatly, though, that the method of electing magistrates be fixed by law; for if it is left to the prince's discretion, the slide into hereditary aristocracy is unavoidable, which is exactly what happened to the Republics of Venice and Berne. Venice has accordingly been a dissolved State for a long time now; Berne, however, keeps itself alive through the extreme wisdom of its senate, and stands as an honorable — and highly dangerous — exception.
Moreover, assemblies are easier to convene; business is better discussed, and carried out with more order and diligence; and the State's standing abroad is better upheld by venerable senators than by a multitude that is unknown or despised.
In a word, the best and most natural arrangement is for the wisest to govern the many — provided we can be sure they will govern for the people's profit and not for their own. There is no need to multiply the machinery, or to use twenty thousand men to do what a hundred well-chosen men can do even better. But it must not be forgotten that here the corporate interest begins to direct the public force less strictly by the rule of the general will, and that another, unavoidable tendency drains part of the executive power away from the laws.
As for what is desirable in particular: the State should not be so small, nor the people so simple and upright, that carrying out the laws follows immediately from the public will, as it does in a good democracy. Nor should the nation be so large that the rulers, scattered far apart in order to govern it, can each play the Sovereign in his own district — beginning by making themselves independent, and ending by making themselves masters.
But if aristocracy demands fewer virtues than popular government does, it demands other virtues all its own: moderation among the rich, for instance, and contentment among the poor. For it seems that strict, thoroughgoing equality would be out of place here; it was not observed even at Sparta.
And if this form of government brings with it a certain inequality of fortune, that is justifiable as a general matter — so that the administration of public business can be entrusted to those best able to give it their whole time — but not, as Aristotle maintains, so that the rich may always be preferred. On the contrary, it is important that an opposite choice should occasionally teach the people that a man's merit gives him a claim to preference more important than his wealth.
So far we have considered the prince as a moral and collective person, unified by the force of the laws, and holding the State's executive power in trust. We must now consider that power gathered into the hands of a natural person — a real, flesh-and-blood man — who alone has the right to dispose of it according to the laws. Such a person is called a monarch, or king.
Quite unlike the other forms of administration, where a collective being represents an individual, here an individual represents a collective being: the moral unity that constitutes the prince is at the same time a physical unity, and all the qualities that the law can only combine with great difficulty in the other forms are found united by nature in this one.
So the will of the people, the will of the prince, the public force of the State, and the particular force of the government all answer to a single mover. All the springs of the machine are in one hand; everything moves toward the same end; there are no opposed motions canceling each other out; and no constitution imaginable produces more action from less effort. Archimedes, sitting calmly on the shore and effortlessly drawing a great ship through the water — that is my image of a skillful monarch, governing vast States from his study and moving everything while seeming himself unmoved.
But if no government has more vigor, there is also none in which the particular will holds more sway, or dominates the rest more easily. Everything moves toward the same end, true — but that end is not the public happiness; and the very strength of the administration turns constantly against the State.
Kings want to be absolute, and from a safe distance men keep calling out to them that the best way to be absolute is to make their people love them. The maxim is very fine — and in some respects even very true. Unfortunately, it will always be laughed at in royal courts. The power that comes from a people's love is no doubt the greatest power of all; but it is precarious and conditional, and princes will never settle for it. The best kings want to keep the option of being wicked if they please, without ceasing to be masters. A political sermonizer can tell them all he likes that, the people's strength being their own strength, their first interest is for the people to be flourishing, numerous, and formidable. They know perfectly well that this is not true. Their first personal interest is for the people to be weak and wretched, and never able to resist them. I admit that if the subjects could be counted on to stay submissive forever, the prince's interest would then be for the people to be powerful, so that this power, being his own, would make him formidable to his neighbors. But this interest is merely secondary and subordinate, and the two conditions cannot coexist — strength does not go with submission — so princes will always naturally prefer the maxim that serves them most immediately. This is what Samuel laid out so forcefully for the Hebrews; and it is what Machiavelli demonstrated beyond doubt. While professing to teach lessons to kings, he taught great lessons to the people. Machiavelli's The Prince is the book of republicans.
— Machiavelli was a decent man and a good citizen; but, tied as he was to the court of the Medici, he had no choice, while his country lay under oppression, but to disguise his love of liberty. The very choice of so detestable a hero as Cesare Borgia is enough to reveal his hidden purpose; and the contradiction between the teaching of The Prince and that of his Discourses on Livy and his History of Florence shows that this profound political thinker has so far been read only by shallow or corrupt readers. The Court of Rome sternly banned his book. I can well believe it: that Court is the one it portrays most clearly.
We concluded on general grounds that monarchy suits only large States, and examining monarchy in itself confirms it. The more numerous the administration, the smaller the gap between ruler and subjects, and the closer the two come to equality — in a democracy the ratio is one to one, perfect equality. As the government shrinks in numbers, the ratio grows, and it reaches its maximum when the government rests in the hands of a single man. Then the distance between prince and people is too great, and the State has nothing to bind it together. To forge such a bond, there must be intermediate ranks — princes, grandees, nobles — to fill the gap. But none of that suits a small State, which is ruined by class distinctions of every kind.
If it is hard for a large State to be governed well, it is far harder for it to be governed well by a single man; and everyone knows what happens when kings hand the work to substitutes.
There is one essential and unavoidable defect that will always place monarchy below republican government. In a republic, the public voice almost never lifts to the highest offices men who are not enlightened and capable, men who fill those offices with honor. In monarchies, those who rise to the top are most often petty bunglers, petty swindlers, and petty schemers, whose petty talents get them into the great positions at Court — and then, the moment they arrive, serve only to display their incompetence to the public. The people is far less often mistaken in its choices than the prince is; a man of real worth among a king's ministers is almost as rare as a fool at the head of a republican government. So when, by some lucky accident, one of these born statesmen takes the helm in a monarchy nearly buried under swarms of "gentlemanly" administrators, everyone is astonished at the resources he discovers, and his arrival marks an era in his country's history.
For a monarchy to have any chance of being well governed, its size and population must match the abilities of its governor. It is easier to conquer than to rule. With a long enough lever, a single finger could move the world; to hold the world up takes the shoulders of Hercules. However small a State may be, its prince is almost never big enough for it. And when the opposite happens — when the State is too small for its ruler — it is badly governed in those rare cases too, because the ruler, forever chasing his grand designs, forgets the interests of his people, and makes them no less miserable by misusing the talents he has than a lesser ruler would by lacking the talents he needed. A kingdom ought, so to speak, to expand or shrink with every reign, according to the prince's capacity; whereas a senate's abilities stay more constant, so a State governed by one can keep permanent borders without the administration suffering for it.
The defect felt most sharply in monarchical government is the lack of the continuous succession that, in the other two forms, provides an unbroken chain of authority. When one king dies, another is needed. Elections leave dangerous gaps and are full of storms; and unless the citizens are honest and disinterested to a degree that rarely goes with this form of government, scheming and bribery run wild. The man to whom the State has sold itself can hardly help selling it in his turn, squeezing out of the weak the money the powerful extorted from him. Under such an administration, corruption sooner or later seeps into every part, and the peace enjoyed under such a king is worse than the chaos of an interregnum.
What has been done to prevent these evils? Crowns have been made hereditary within certain families, and orders of succession have been established to head off disputes when kings die. In other words, the drawbacks of regencies have been swapped for the drawbacks of elections; an appearance of calm has been preferred to wise administration; and men have chosen to risk getting children, monsters, or imbeciles as rulers rather than to argue over the choice of good kings. What they failed to consider is that in accepting that gamble, they are stacking nearly every chance against themselves. There was sound sense in the reply the younger Dionysius gave his father. The old tyrant, scolding him for some shameful act, demanded, "Did I ever set you such an example?" "No," his son answered, "but your father was not king."
Everything conspires to strip a man raised to command others of his sense of justice and reason. Great pains are taken, we are told, to teach young princes the art of reigning; the education does not seem to do them any good. It would be better to begin by teaching them the art of obeying. The greatest kings whom history praises were not brought up to reign. Ruling is a science we are never further from possessing than when we have studied it too much — a science learned better by obeying than by commanding. "For the most useful, and also the shortest, way of telling good from bad is to ask yourself what you would have wished for, or dreaded, if someone other than you had been emperor" (Tacitus, Histories I.16).
One result of this lack of coherence is the inconstancy of royal government. Steered now by one plan and now by another, depending on the character of the reigning prince or of whoever reigns in his name, it cannot hold a fixed aim or a consistent policy for long. This wobbling — absent from the other forms of government, where the prince is always the same body — keeps the State forever lurching from principle to principle and from project to project. We may say in general that while a court is more cunning at intrigue, there is more wisdom in a senate, and republics pursue their goals through steadier and better-considered policies; whereas every shake-up in a royal ministry produces a shake-up in the State, since the rule common to nearly all ministers and nearly all kings is to reverse, in everything, whatever their predecessors did.
This same incoherence dissolves a piece of sophistry that royalist writers are very fond of. Not only do they liken civil government to a household and the prince to the father of a family — an error already refuted — but they also generously credit the prince with every virtue he ought to have, and assume he is always what he should be. Grant that assumption, and royal government is obviously preferable to every other, because it is unquestionably the strongest, and would need only a corporate will more in line with the general will to be the best as well.
But if, as Plato says (in the Statesman), the "king by nature" is so rare a creature, how often will nature and fortune team up to crown one? And if a royal upbringing necessarily corrupts those who receive it, what can be hoped from a whole line of men raised to reign? It is willful self-deception, then, to confuse royal government with government by a good king. To see this form of government as it really is, we must look at it under princes who are incompetent or wicked: for either they come to the throne incompetent or wicked, or the throne makes them so.
These difficulties have not escaped our writers — they just are not troubled by them. The remedy, they say, is to obey without a murmur: God sends bad kings in His anger, and they must be endured as scourges from Heaven. Such talk is edifying, no doubt; but it belongs in a pulpit, not in a book of political theory. What would we think of a doctor who promises miracles, and whose whole art consists of urging the patient to be patient? We know for ourselves that a bad government must be endured while we have it. The question is how to find a good one.
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a simple government. A single ruler must have subordinate magistrates; a popular government must have a head. So in the distribution of executive power there is always a gradation from the larger number to the smaller, with this difference: sometimes the many depend on the few, and sometimes the few on the many.
Sometimes the distribution is balanced — either because the component parts depend on one another, as in the government of England, or because the authority of each branch is independent but incomplete, as in Poland. This second form is bad, because it gives the government no unity, and the State is left with nothing to hold it together.
Which is better, simple government or mixed? Political writers argue the question endlessly, and it must get the same answer I gave earlier about every form of government.
Simple government is better in itself, precisely because it is simple. But when the executive power does not depend closely enough on the legislative — that is, when the government stands in closer relation to the Sovereign than the people stands to the government — this imbalance must be cured by dividing the government. Each of its parts then has just as much authority over the subjects as before, while the division makes all of them together weaker against the Sovereign.
The same drawback can also be prevented by installing intermediate magistrates who leave the government whole and serve only to balance the two powers and protect the rights of each. Then the government is not mixed, but moderated.
The opposite drawback has a similar cure: when the government is too loose, tribunals can be set up to concentrate it. This is done in every democracy. In the first case the government is divided to weaken it; in the second, to strengthen it. The maximums of both strength and weakness belong to the simple forms; the mixed forms give a middling strength.
Liberty is not a fruit of every climate, and so it is not within the reach of every people. The more you consider this principle, which Montesquieu laid down, the more you feel its truth; the more it is attacked, the more chances arise to confirm it with fresh proofs.
In every government in the world, the public person consumes without producing. Where, then, does what it consumes come from? From the labor of its members. The needs of the public are supplied out of the surplus of individuals. It follows that the civil State can survive only so long as men's labor brings in more than their needs require.
This surplus is not the same in every country. In some it is large, in others modest, in others zero, in some actually negative. The ratio of what the land yields to what subsistence demands depends on the fertility of the climate, the kind of labor the soil requires, the nature of its products, the strength of its inhabitants, how much or how little they need to consume, and several other factors that together make up the whole relation.
On the other side, governments are not all of the same nature either. Some devour more than others, and the differences rest on this second principle: the farther public contributions travel from their source, the heavier they become.
The burden should be measured not by the amount of the taxes, but by the distance they must travel to return to the hands that paid them. When the circulation is quick and well established, it hardly matters whether the payment is large or small; the people is always rich, and financially speaking, all is well. But however little the people gives, if that little never comes back, the people is soon drained by giving constantly: the State is never rich, and the people is forever a people of beggars.
It follows that the wider the distance between people and government grows, the heavier the tribute becomes. So in a democracy the people carries the lightest load; in an aristocracy, a heavier one; and in monarchy, the weight is heaviest of all. Monarchy therefore suits only wealthy nations; aristocracy suits States of middling size and wealth; and democracy suits States that are small and poor.
In fact, the more we reflect on it, the more we find this to be the difference between free States and monarchies: in free States, everything is turned to the public advantage; in monarchies, public strength and private strength feed on each other, and one grows as the other weakens. In the end, instead of governing subjects to make them happy, despotism makes them miserable in order to govern them.
So in every climate there are natural causes that point to the form of government the climate demands, and we can even say what kind of inhabitants the country should have.
Harsh and barren lands, where the produce does not repay the labor, should stay wild and uncultivated, or be peopled only by scattered indigenous tribes. Lands where men's labor yields exactly the bare minimum needed to survive should be inhabited by rough, half-settled peoples: in such places, organized political life is impossible. Lands where the surplus of produce over labor is moderate suit free peoples. Lands where the soil is rich and fertile and gives a great yield for little labor call for monarchical government, so that the prince's luxury may consume the excess of the subjects' surplus — for it is better that this excess be absorbed by the government than squandered by private individuals. There are exceptions, I know; but the exceptions themselves confirm the rule, because sooner or later they produce revolutions that put things back into the natural order.
We should always distinguish general laws from the particular causes that can modify their effects. Even if the whole South were covered with republics and the whole North with despotisms, it would still be true that, as far as climate goes, despotism suits hot countries, barbarism suits cold countries, and good political order suits the temperate regions. I see, too, that even when the principle is granted, its application can be disputed: there are cold countries that are very fertile, it will be said, and tropical ones that are very unproductive. But this difficulty exists only for those who do not examine the question from every side. We must, as I have already said, take into account labor, strength, consumption, and the rest.
Take two tracts of land of equal size, one yielding five and the other ten. If the inhabitants of the first consume four and those of the second consume nine, the first surplus is a fifth of the product and the second is a tenth. Since the two surpluses are inverse to the yields, the tract producing only five gives a surplus double that of the tract producing ten.
But there is no question of a doubled yield, and I think no one would generally rank the fertility of cold countries equal to that of hot ones. Still, let us suppose that equality exists. Let us, if you like, set England level with Sicily, and Poland level with Egypt — farther south we will have Africa and the Indies; farther north, nothing at all. To get this equality of product, what a difference there must be in the farming: in Sicily you only have to scratch the ground; in England, how men must toil! And where more hands are needed to raise the same yield, the surplus is necessarily smaller.
Consider, besides, that the same number of men consume far less in hot countries. The climate demands restraint for the sake of health: Europeans who try to live there as they would at home all die of dysentery and indigestion. "Compared with the Asiatics," says Chardin, "we are carnivorous animals — wolves. Some attribute the temperance of the Persians to the fact that their country is less cultivated; my belief is the reverse — that their country abounds less in produce because the inhabitants need less. If their frugality were the effect of the land's bareness," he goes on, "only the poor would eat little; but everyone does. And people would eat more or less in each province according to the fertility of the land; instead, the same restraint is found throughout the kingdom. They take great pride in their way of living, saying you have only to look at their complexions to see how far their way of life excels that of the Christians. The Persians are indeed of an even complexion; their skin is fair, fine, and smooth; while the complexion of the Armenians, their subjects, who live in the European fashion, is rough and blotchy, and their bodies heavy and clumsy."
The nearer you get to the equator, the less people live on. They barely touch meat; rice, corn, sorghum, millet, and cassava are their everyday foods. In the Indies there are millions of men whose food costs less than a halfpenny a day. Even within Europe we see real differences of appetite between Northern and Southern peoples: a Spaniard will live for a week on a German's dinner. In countries where men are more ravenous, luxury runs toward consumption: in England it shows itself in a loaded table; in Italy, you feast on sugar and flowers.
Luxury in clothing shows the same differences. In climates where the seasons change fast and hard, people wear better and simpler clothes; in climates where people dress only for show, flash matters more than use, and the clothes themselves become a luxury. In Naples you may see men strolling daily along the Posillipo in gold-embroidered jackets and nothing else. It is the same with buildings: where there is nothing to fear from the weather, magnificence is the only consideration. In Paris and London, you want to be housed warm and snug; in Madrid you have superb salons, but not a window that shuts, and you sleep in a closet.
In hot countries, foods are also far more substantial and full of flavor — a third difference that cannot help influencing the second. Why are so many vegetables eaten in Italy? Because there they are good, nourishing, and excellent to the taste. In France, where they are fed on nothing but water, they nourish little and count for nothing at the table — yet they take up just as much ground and cost at least as much labor to grow. It is an established fact that the wheat of Barbary, in other ways inferior to that of France, yields far more flour, and that French wheat in turn yields more than the wheat of the northern countries. From this we may infer that the same gradient, running from equator to pole, holds generally. And is it not an obvious disadvantage for an equal harvest to contain less nourishment?
To all these points we can add another, which both depends on them and reinforces them. Hot countries need fewer inhabitants than cold ones, and can feed more — a double surplus, and all of it to despotism's advantage. The larger the territory a fixed population occupies, the harder revolt becomes: quick or secret coordination is impossible, and the government can easily expose plots and cut communications. But the more closely a numerous people is gathered together, the less the government can usurp the Sovereign's place: the people's leaders can deliberate as safely in their houses as the prince in his council, and the crowd can assemble in the squares as fast as the prince's troops in their barracks. The advantage of a tyrannical government, then, lies in acting across great distances. Using the strongpoints it establishes, its power, like the power of a lever, grows with distance. The people's strength, by contrast, works only when concentrated: spread out, it evaporates and is lost, like gunpowder scattered on the ground, which catches fire only grain by grain. The least populated countries are thus the best suited to tyranny: fierce beasts reign only in deserts.
— This does not contradict what I said earlier (Book II, chapter 9) about the disadvantages of large States. There we were dealing with the government's authority over its own members; here we are dealing with its force against its subjects. Its scattered members serve as strongpoints for acting on a distant people, but it has no strongpoint for acting directly on the members themselves. So the length of the lever is its weakness in the one case and its strength in the other.
Ask "What, absolutely, is the best government?" and the question is as unanswerable as it is vague — or rather, it has as many right answers as there are possible combinations in the absolute and relative situations of all the nations.
But ask instead by what sign we can tell whether a given people is well or badly governed, and that is another matter. That question is a question of fact, and it can be answered.
Yet it never is answered, because everyone wants to answer it his own way. Subjects praise public order; citizens praise individual liberty. One side prefers security of property, the other security of persons. One holds that the best government is the most severe; the other insists the mildest is best. One wants crimes punished, the other wants them prevented. One wants the State feared by its neighbors; the other would rather it be ignored. One is satisfied if money circulates; the other demands that the people have bread. And even if agreement were reached on these points and others like them, would we be any further along? Moral qualities admit of no exact measurement: agreeing on the sign does not mean agreeing on the assessment.
For my part, I am continually amazed that so simple a mark goes unrecognized — or that men are dishonest enough not to admit it. What is the purpose of political association? The preservation and prosperity of its members. And what is the surest sign that they are being preserved and prospering? Their numbers — their population. Look nowhere else, then, for the mark everyone disputes. All else being equal, the government under which the citizens increase and multiply most — with no outside help, no naturalizations, no colonies — is beyond question the best. The government under which a people shrinks and wastes away is the worst. Calculators, the rest is your business: count, measure, compare.
— By the same principle we ought to judge which centuries deserve preference for human prosperity. The ages in which letters and the arts flourished have been admired far too much, because the hidden purpose behind their culture has not been fathomed, nor its fatal effects reckoned: "Fools called 'civilization' what was a part of their servitude" (Tacitus, Agricola 31). Shall we never see, behind the maxims the books lay down, the self-interest that makes their authors talk? No — whatever they may say, when a country is losing its people, despite all its brilliance, it is not true that all is well; and a poet with an income of a hundred thousand francs is not enough to make his age the best of all. We should pay less attention to the apparent calm and comfort of the rulers than to the well-being of whole nations, above all the most populous States. A hailstorm flattens a few districts, but it rarely causes a famine. Riots and civil wars give rulers a bad fright, but they are not the real misery of peoples — who may even get a breathing-space while the great argue over who shall tyrannize them. It is a people's permanent condition that produces its real prosperity or its real calamities. It is when everything lies crushed beneath the yoke that decay sets in, and the rulers destroy the people at their leisure: "Where they make a desert, they call it peace" (Tacitus, Agricola 31). When the squabbles of the great convulsed the kingdom of France, and the Coadjutor of Paris carried a dagger in his pocket into the Parliament, none of it kept the French people from prospering and multiplying in dignity, comfort, and freedom. Long ago Greece flourished in the midst of the most savage wars; blood ran in torrents, and yet the whole country was thick with inhabitants. It seemed, says Machiavelli, that amid murders, proscriptions, and civil wars, our republic only grew stronger: the virtue, the morals, and the independence of its citizens did more to strengthen it than all its quarrels had done to weaken it. A little agitation gives the soul its spring. What makes the race truly prosper is not so much peace as liberty.
Just as the particular will acts constantly against the general will, so the government strains continually against the Sovereignty. The harder it strains, the more the constitution is altered; and since here there is no other corporate will to balance the prince's will by resisting it, sooner or later the prince is bound to end up suppressing the Sovereign and breaking the social treaty. This is the inherent and unavoidable defect which, from the very birth of the body politic, works without rest to destroy it, just as age and death finally destroy the human body.
There are two general roads by which a government degenerates: when it contracts, or when the State dissolves.
A government contracts when it passes from the many to the few — from democracy to aristocracy, and from aristocracy to royalty. That is its natural drift. If it moved backward, from the few to the many, we could say it was loosening; but that reverse movement is impossible.
A government, in fact, never changes its form except when its spring has worn down and left it too weak to keep the form it has. If it loosened while it expanded, its force would drop to nothing at all, and it would survive even less. The spring must therefore be wound up and tightened as it runs down, or the State it supports will collapse.
The dissolution of the State can come about in two ways.
First, when the prince stops administering the State according to the laws and usurps the Sovereign power. Then a remarkable change takes place: not the government but the State contracts. I mean that the great State dissolves, and another forms inside it, made up only of the members of the government — a State which, to the rest of the people, is nothing but master and tyrant. The instant the government usurps the Sovereignty, the social contract is broken, and every ordinary citizen rightfully recovers his natural liberty: he is then forced to obey, but no longer bound to.
The same thing happens when the members of the government individually usurp the power they ought to exercise only as a body. This is just as great a violation of the laws, and it produces even worse disorder. There are then, so to speak, as many princes as there are magistrates, and the State, as divided as the government, either perishes or changes its form.
When the State dissolves, the abuse of government — whatever shape it takes — goes by the common name of anarchy. To be more exact: democracy degenerates into ochlocracy, that is, mob rule; aristocracy degenerates into oligarchy; and I would add that royalty degenerates into tyranny. But this last word is ambiguous and needs explaining.
In everyday speech, a tyrant is a king who governs by violence, without regard for justice or law. In the precise sense, a tyrant is an individual who grabs royal authority without any right to it. That is how the Greeks understood the word: they applied it equally to good and bad princes whose authority was not legitimate. Tyrant and usurper are therefore exact synonyms.
So that I may give different things different names, I call the man who usurps royal authority a tyrant, and the man who usurps the sovereign power itself a despot. The tyrant is one who forces his way in against the laws in order to govern according to the laws; the despot is one who sets himself above the laws themselves. Thus the tyrant need not be a despot, but the despot is always a tyrant.
— The slow formation and growth of the Republic of Venice in its lagoons is a striking example of this sequence; and it is truly astonishing that, after more than twelve hundred years of existence, the Venetians seem to be only at the second stage, which they reached with the Serrar di Consiglio — the closing of their Great Council — in 1198. As for the ancient Doges who are thrown in their faces, whatever the Squittinio della libertà veneta may say of them, it has been proved that they were in no sense Sovereigns.
— One case is sure to be cited against my view: the Roman Republic, which, people will say, followed exactly the opposite course, passing from monarchy to aristocracy and from aristocracy to democracy. I see it very differently.
What Romulus first set up was a mixed government, and it quickly rotted into despotism. From special causes, that State died an early death, the way a newborn child sometimes dies before reaching adulthood. The real birth of the Republic came with the expulsion of the Tarquins. But at first it took no settled form, because by failing to abolish the patriciate it left half its work undone. Hereditary aristocracy — the worst of all the legitimate forms of administration — remained locked in conflict with democracy, and the form of the government, as Machiavelli has proved, was only fixed when the tribunate was established. Only then was there a true government and a genuine democracy. At that point the people was not only Sovereign but magistrate and judge as well; the senate was merely a subordinate tribunal that tempered and concentrated the government; and the consuls themselves — patricians, first magistrates, absolute generals in wartime — were, inside Rome itself, no more than presidents of the people.
From then on, the government followed its natural slope and leaned strongly toward aristocracy. The patriciate, you might say, abolished itself, and the aristocracy came to live no longer in the body of patricians, as at Venice and Genoa, but in the body of the senate, which contained patricians and plebeians alike — and even in the body of the tribunes, once they began to usurp an active role. For names do not change facts: when the people has rulers who govern on its behalf, whatever those rulers are called, the government is an aristocracy.
The abuse of aristocracy led to the civil wars and the triumvirate. Sulla, Julius Caesar, and Augustus became real monarchs in everything but name; and finally, under the despotism of Tiberius, the State dissolved. Roman history, then, confirms my principle instead of refuting it. —
— On the word "tyrant": Omnes enim et habentur et dicuntur tyranni, qui potestate utuntur perpetua in ea civitate quae libertate usa est — "For all are called and considered tyrants who hold perpetual power in a State that has known liberty" (Cornelius Nepos, Life of Miltiades). It is true that Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, chapter 10) distinguishes the tyrant from the king by saying that the tyrant governs in his own interest while the king governs only for the good of his subjects. But the Greek authors in general used the word "tyrant" in a different sense — Xenophon's Hiero makes that perfectly clear — and besides, it would follow from Aristotle's distinction that, from the beginning of the world to this day, there has never yet been a single king. —
Such is the natural and inevitable tendency of even the best-constituted governments. If Sparta and Rome perished, what State can hope to last forever? If we want to build a long-lived form of government, let us not even dream of making it eternal. To succeed, we must not attempt the impossible, or flatter ourselves that we can give the work of human hands a permanence that human things do not allow.
The body politic, like the human body, begins to die the moment it is born; it carries within itself the causes of its own destruction. But either body may have a constitution more or less robust, suited to preserve it for a longer or a shorter time. The constitution of a man is the work of nature; the constitution of the State is the work of art. It is not within men's power to lengthen their own lives, but it is within their power to lengthen the life of the State as far as possible, by giving it the best constitution it can have. Even the best-constituted State will come to an end — but it will end later than any other, unless some unforeseen accident destroys it before its time.
The principle of political life lies in the sovereign authority. The legislative power is the heart of the State; the executive power is its brain, setting all the parts in motion. The brain can become paralyzed while the individual lives on; a man can lose his wits and still live. But the moment the heart stops doing its work, the animal is dead.
The State survives not by its laws but by its legislative power. Yesterday's law does not bind today; but silence is taken as tacit consent, and the Sovereign is presumed to be constantly reconfirming every law it does not repeal while it has the power to repeal it. Whatever the Sovereign has once declared itself to will, it wills always — until it revokes the declaration.
Why, then, do old laws command so much respect? For precisely this reason. We have to believe that nothing but the excellence of those old acts of will could have preserved them so long: if the Sovereign had not found them beneficial through and through, it would have revoked them a thousand times over. That is why, far from growing feeble, the laws continually gain new strength in any well-constituted State; the precedent of antiquity makes them more venerable by the day. Wherever the laws weaken as they age, that fact alone proves there is no longer a legislative power — and that the State is dead.
The Sovereign has no force except the legislative power, so it acts only through the laws; and since the laws are nothing but authentic acts of the general will, the Sovereign can act only when the people is assembled. The people in assembly — I can hear the objection already — is a fantasy. It is a fantasy today; two thousand years ago it was not. Has human nature changed?
The limits of what is possible, in moral matters, are less narrow than we imagine. It is our weaknesses, our vices, and our prejudices that shrink them. Base souls do not believe in great men; vile slaves smirk at the very word liberty.
Let us judge what can be done by what has been done. I will say nothing of the republics of ancient Greece; but the Roman Republic was, to my mind, a great State, and the city of Rome a great city. The last census counted four hundred thousand citizens in Rome capable of bearing arms, and the last count of the Empire's population found more than four million citizens — not including subjects, foreigners, women, children, and slaves.
Imagine the difficulties of frequently assembling the enormous population of that capital and its surroundings. Yet hardly a few weeks went by without the Roman people meeting in assembly — sometimes more than once. It exercised not only the rights of Sovereignty but a share of the rights of government as well. It handled certain business and judged certain cases, and in the public meeting-place this whole people appeared almost as often in the role of magistrate as in the role of citizen.
Go back to the earliest history of nations and you will find that most ancient governments, even monarchical ones like the Macedonian and the Frankish, held similar councils. In any case, the one undeniable fact I have just given answers every objection: reasoning from what has actually happened to what is possible is good logic.
It is not enough for the assembled people to have fixed the constitution of the State once, by giving its sanction to a body of laws. It is not enough to have set up a permanent government, or to have provided once and for all for the election of magistrates. Besides the extraordinary assemblies that unforeseen events may require, there must be fixed, regular assemblies that nothing can abolish or postpone — so that on the appointed day the people is legitimately convened by the law itself, with no need for any formal summons.
But apart from these assemblies, made lawful by their date alone, every assembly of the people that has not been called by the magistrates appointed for that purpose, and according to the prescribed forms, must be regarded as unlawful, and everything it does as null and void — because the order to assemble must itself come from the law.
How often lawful assemblies should meet depends on so many factors that no exact rule can be laid down. One can only say in general that the stronger the government, the more often the Sovereign should show itself.
This, I will be told, may work for a single town; but what do you do when the State contains several? Should the sovereign authority be divided among them? Or should it be concentrated in one town that rules all the rest?
Neither, I answer. First, the sovereign authority is one and simple; it cannot be divided without being destroyed. Second, one town can no more legitimately be made subject to another than one nation can — because the essence of the body politic lies in reconciling obedience with liberty, and the words subject and Sovereign are matched correlatives whose meanings come together in the single word citizen.
I answer further that uniting several towns into a single city is always bad, and that anyone who wants such a union should not expect to escape its natural drawbacks. It is useless to throw the abuses of great States at someone who wants only small ones. But then how can small States be given enough strength to resist great ones — the way the Greek towns once resisted the Great King, and the way Holland and Switzerland have more recently resisted the House of Austria?
Still, if the State cannot be cut back to its proper limits, one resource remains: allow no capital at all. Make the seat of government move from town to town, and assemble the Provincial Estates of the country in each of them by turns.
People the territory evenly; extend the same rights to every part of it; carry abundance and life into every corner. That is how the State becomes at once as strong and as well governed as it can possibly be. Remember: the walls of cities are built from the ruins of country houses. For every palace I see rising in the capital, my mind's eye sees a whole countryside laid waste.
The moment the people is legitimately assembled as a sovereign body, all jurisdiction of the government ceases. The executive power is suspended, and the person of the humblest citizen is as sacred and inviolable as that of the highest magistrate — for where the one represented stands present in person, representatives no longer exist. Most of the riots that broke out in the Roman comitia came from ignoring or neglecting this rule. In those assemblies the consuls were merely the people's presiding officers, the tribunes were mere speakers — in nearly the sense that word carries in the English Parliament — and the senate was nothing at all. (Even with all jurisdiction suspended, the similarity of those two functions would have set the consuls and the tribunes in conflict.)
These intervals of suspension, in which the government recognizes — or ought to recognize — an actual superior, have always filled it with alarm. Assemblies of the people are the shield of the body politic and the bridle on the government, and for that reason they have been the horror of rulers in every age. Rulers never spare pains, objections, obstacles, or promises to keep the citizens from holding them. And when the citizens are greedy, cowardly, and faint-hearted — when they love comfort more than liberty — they do not hold out long against the government's redoubled efforts. As the resisting force grows without pause, the sovereign authority finally vanishes, and most cities fall and perish before their time.
But between sovereign authority and arbitrary government there sometimes slips in an intermediate power, and something must be said about it.
The moment public service stops being the citizens' chief business — the moment they would rather serve with their money than with their persons — the State is already close to ruin. Is it time to march to war? They pay troops and stay home. Time to meet in council? They name deputies and stay home. Through laziness and money, they end up with soldiers to enslave their country and representatives to sell it.
It is the bustle of commerce and the crafts, the greedy hunger for profit, softness, and the love of comforts that turn personal services into money payments. Men hand over a part of their profits so they can be left in peace to grow the rest. Give money instead of yourself, and you will not be long without chains. The word finance is a slave's word; the true city-state never knew it. In a country that is genuinely free, the citizens do everything with their own hands and nothing with money. Far from paying to be excused from their duties, they would pay for the privilege of performing those duties in person. I am far from holding the common view here: I believe forced labor is less of an enemy to liberty than taxes are.
The better constituted a State is, the more public business outweighs private business in the minds of its citizens. Private business actually shrinks — because the sum of the common happiness supplies a larger share of each individual's happiness, leaving him less to chase through private effort. In a well-run city, every man flies to the assemblies. Under a bad government, no one will take a single step to reach them: no one cares what happens there, since everyone can see in advance that the general will will not prevail, and in the end domestic worries swallow up everything else. Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad laws bring worse. The moment any man says of the affairs of the State, What does it matter to me? — the State may be given up for lost.
The cooling of patriotism, the busy pull of private interest, the sheer size of States, conquest, and the abuse of government: these are what suggested the device of sending deputies or representatives of the people to the nation's assemblies. They are what some countries have dared to call the Third Estate — as if the private interest of two orders deserved first and second place, and the public interest only third.
Sovereignty cannot be represented, for the same reason that it cannot be alienated. It consists essentially in the general will, and a will cannot be represented: either it is itself, or it is something else; there is no middle ground. The deputies of the people, then, are not its representatives and cannot be. They are merely its stewards, and they can settle nothing on their own. Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void — it is not a law at all. The people of England regards itself as free, but it is gravely mistaken: it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. And the use it makes of its brief moments of liberty shows that it deserves to lose them.
The idea of representation is modern. It comes down to us from feudal government — that wicked and absurd system which degrades humanity and dishonors the very name of man. In the ancient republics, and even in the ancient monarchies, the people never had representatives; the word itself was unknown. It is remarkable that in Rome, where the tribunes were held so sacred, no one ever even imagined that they might usurp the functions of the people — and that in the middle of so vast a multitude, the tribunes never once tried to pass a single plebiscite on their own authority. True, the sheer size of the crowd sometimes caused real trouble: in the days of the Gracchi, some citizens had to cast their votes from the rooftops.
But where right and liberty are everything, inconveniences count for nothing. This wise people gave each thing its true value. It allowed its lictors to do what it would never have let its tribunes dare to attempt — because it had no fear that its lictors would try to represent it.
To explain how the tribunes nevertheless did sometimes represent the people, it is enough to understand how the government represents the Sovereign. Law is purely a declaration of the general will, so it is clear that in the legislative power the people cannot be represented. But in the executive power — which is only force applied to give the law effect — the people both can and should be represented. Look closely into this, and you will find that very few nations actually have laws. Be that as it may, one thing is certain: since the tribunes held no share of the executive power, they could never represent the Roman people by right of their office, but only by usurping the rights of the senate.
In Greece, whatever the people had to do, it did for itself; it was constantly assembled in the public square. The Greeks lived in a mild climate; they were not greedy by nature; slaves did their work for them; their great business was liberty. Lacking those advantages, how are you to keep the same rights? Your harsher climates multiply your needs — and to adopt, in cold countries, the luxury and softness of the East is to ask for its chains; indeed, it means bowing to them even more inevitably than the East itself does. For half the year your public squares are unusable; your flat-voiced languages cannot carry in the open air; you sacrifice more for profit than for liberty; and you fear slavery less than you fear poverty.
What follows, then? That liberty can be kept only with the help of slavery? Perhaps so. The two extremes meet. Everything that lies outside the course of nature has its drawbacks, and civil society most of all. There are unhappy situations in which one can preserve one's own liberty only at others' expense, and in which the citizen can be perfectly free only when the slave is utterly a slave. Such was the situation of Sparta. As for you, modern peoples: you have no slaves, but you are slaves yourselves; you pay for their liberty with your own. You may boast of that bargain all you like — I find more cowardice in it than humanity.
By all this I do not mean that having slaves is necessary, or that the right of slavery is legitimate. I am simply giving the reasons why modern peoples, who believe themselves free, have representatives, while ancient peoples had none. In any case, the moment a people gives itself representatives, it is no longer free; it no longer exists.
All things weighed, I do not see how it is possible from now on for the Sovereign to preserve the exercise of its rights among us, unless the city is very small. But if it is very small, will it not be conquered? No. I will show later how the outward strength of a great people can be combined with the easy order and good government of a small State. — I had meant to do this in the sequel to the present work, when, in treating external relations, I came to the subject of confederations. The subject is entirely new, and its principles are still to be laid down. —
Once the legislative power is firmly established, the next task is to establish the executive power in the same way. The executive, which operates only by particular acts, is not of the essence of the legislative, and so is naturally separate from it. If it were possible for the Sovereign, as Sovereign, to hold the executive power, right and fact would be so tangled together that no one could tell what was law and what was not; and the body politic, deformed in this way, would soon fall prey to the very violence it was instituted to prevent.
Since the social contract makes all the citizens equal, all may prescribe what all must do — but no one has the right to demand that another do what he will not do himself. Yet it is precisely this right, indispensable for giving the body politic life and movement, that the Sovereign confers on the government at the moment of instituting it.
Some have claimed that this act of establishment was a contract between the people and the rulers it sets over itself — a contract laying down terms between the two parties, binding the one to command and the other to obey. A strange contract to enter into, you will agree. But let us see whether the claim can stand.
First, the supreme authority can no more be modified than it can be alienated; to limit it is to destroy it. It is absurd and self-contradictory for the Sovereign to set a superior over itself. For the Sovereign to bind itself to obey a master would be to dissolve itself and return to bare natural liberty.
Moreover, a contract between the people and particular persons would obviously be a particular act. From this it follows that it could be neither a law nor an act of Sovereignty — and therefore that it would be illegitimate.
It is also plain that the contracting parties would stand toward each other under the law of nature alone, with no guarantee whatsoever of their mutual obligations — and that is contrary to everything the civil state is. Since whoever holds the force always controls the performance, you might as well give the name "contract" to the act of a man who says to another: "I give you all my goods, on the condition that you give back as much of them as you please."
There is only one contract in the State: the act of association itself. And that one, by its very nature, excludes any other. No second public contract can be imagined that would not be a violation of the first.
Under what general idea, then, should we place the act by which government is instituted? I begin by observing that this act is complex — it is composed of two others: the establishment of the law, and the execution of the law.
By the first, the Sovereign decrees that there shall be a governing body established in this or that form. That act is clearly a law.
By the second, the people names the rulers who are to be entrusted with the government just established. That nomination is a particular act; it is therefore not a second law, but merely a consequence of the first, and a function of government.
The difficulty is this: how can there be an act of government before a government exists? How can the people, which is only ever Sovereign or subject, become, under certain circumstances, a magistrate?
Here one of the astonishing properties of the body politic reveals itself — its power to reconcile operations that look contradictory. For the thing is done by a sudden conversion of Sovereignty into democracy: without any visible change, and merely through a new relation of all to all, the citizens become magistrates and pass from general acts to particular ones — from making the law to executing it.
This shift of relation is no theorist's subtlety without real examples. It happens every day in the English Parliament, where on certain occasions the Lower House resolves itself into a Grand Committee in order to discuss business more conveniently — turning, in an instant, from a sovereign court into a mere commission. Afterward it reports back to itself, as the House of Commons, on what it has just settled as the Grand Committee, and debates all over again under one name what it has already decided under another.
This is, in fact, the peculiar advantage of democratic government: it can be brought into actual existence by a simple act of the general will. After that, the provisional government either remains in power, if that is the form adopted, or else establishes, in the name of the Sovereign, whatever government the law prescribes — and so the whole proceeding is regular. There is no other way of instituting government legitimately and consistently with the principles laid down so far.
What I have just said confirms Chapter 16, and it makes this much clear: the act that institutes the government is not a contract but a law; the holders of the executive power are not the people's masters but its officers; the people can appoint them and dismiss them whenever it pleases; for them there is no question of contracting, only of obeying; and in taking on the functions the State lays upon them, they are simply doing their duty as citizens, without the slightest right to argue over the terms.
So when the people establishes a hereditary government — whether monarchical, confined to one family, or aristocratic, confined to one class — it is not entering into a binding undertaking. It is giving the administration a provisional form, until the people chooses to order things differently.
It is true that such changes are always dangerous, and that an established government should never be touched until it has become incompatible with the public good. But that caution is a maxim of policy, not a rule of right; and the State is no more obliged to leave civil authority in the hands of its rulers than to leave military authority in the hands of its generals.
It is also true that in such cases one cannot be too careful to observe every formality that distinguishes a regular and legitimate act from a seditious uproar — the will of an entire people from the clamor of a faction. Here, above all, nothing should be conceded to the dangerous case beyond what the strictest logic cannot refuse it. And from this very obligation the government draws a great advantage for keeping its power against the people's will, without anyone being able to say it has usurped anything. For while appearing to exercise nothing but its rights, the government finds it very easy to extend those rights — and, under the pretext of keeping the peace, to prevent the very assemblies whose purpose is to restore good order. It then takes advantage of a silence it does not allow to be broken, or of irregularities it has itself caused to be committed: it assumes the support of those whom fear keeps quiet, and it punishes those who dare to speak. This is exactly how the decemvirs, elected first for one year and then continued for a second, tried to make their power perpetual by forbidding the comitia to assemble. And it is by this easy method that every government in the world, once clothed with the public power, sooner or later usurps the sovereign authority.
The periodic assemblies I spoke of earlier are designed to prevent or postpone this calamity — above all when they need no formal summons. For then the government cannot stop them without openly declaring itself a breaker of the laws and an enemy of the State.
The opening of these assemblies, whose only object is the preservation of the social contract, should always take the form of two motions that may never be suppressed, voted on separately.
The first: "Does it please the Sovereign to keep the present form of government?"
The second: "Does it please the people to leave the administration in the hands of those who currently hold it?"
I am assuming here what I believe I have already shown: that there is no fundamental law in the State that cannot be revoked — not even the social contract itself. For if all the citizens assembled and agreed with one accord to break that contract, no one can doubt that it would be broken with complete legitimacy. Grotius even holds that each man may renounce his membership in his own State, and recover his natural liberty and his goods on leaving the country — provided, of course, that he does not leave to dodge his obligations, or to escape serving his homeland in its hour of need; flight in that case would be criminal and punishable — not withdrawal, but desertion. — And it would be absurd indeed if all the citizens together could not do what each of them can do alone.
As long as a number of men gathered together consider themselves a single body, they have only a single will, aimed at their common preservation and the general well-being. When this is so, all the machinery of the State is vigorous and simple, and its rules are clear and bright. There are no tangles, no clashing interests; the common good is plainly visible everywhere, and nothing but good sense is needed to see it. Peace, unity, and equality are the enemies of political subtlety. Upright, simple men are hard to deceive precisely because they are simple. Lures and clever pretexts do not fool them; they are not even refined enough to be made fools of. When we see bands of peasants among the happiest people in the world settling affairs of State under an oak tree, and always acting wisely, how can we help despising the ingenious methods of other nations, which make themselves famous and miserable with so much art and mystery?
A State governed this way needs very few laws; and whenever a new one becomes necessary, everyone sees the necessity at once. The first man to propose it is only saying what everyone already feels. There is no need for factions or scheming or eloquence to pass into law what each person has already decided to do, the moment he is sure the rest will act with him.
What leads theorists astray is that, seeing only States that were badly built from the start, they are struck by the impossibility of running such States this way. It makes them laugh to imagine all the nonsense a clever crook or a smooth talker could get the people of Paris or London to swallow. They do not know that Cromwell would have been "put to the bells" by the people of Berne, and the Duc de Beaufort sent to the treadmill by the Genevans.
But when the social bond begins to slacken and the State to weaken, when private interests start to make themselves felt and the smaller societies within the larger one begin to sway it, the common interest changes and finds opponents. Opinion is no longer unanimous; the general will is no longer the will of all; contradictions and debates spring up; and even the best advice does not pass without a fight.
Finally, when the State, on the edge of ruin, lives on only as an empty, illusory form, when the social bond is broken in every heart, when the meanest self-interest brazenly wraps itself in the sacred name of "the public good" — then the general will falls silent. Everyone, guided by secret motives, no more speaks his mind as a citizen than if the State had never existed; and wicked decrees, aimed at nothing but private interest, get passed falsely under the name of laws.
Does it follow that the general will has been wiped out or corrupted? Not at all. It is always constant, unalterable, and pure; but it is pushed beneath other wills that crowd into its place. Each man, in splitting his own interest off from the common interest, sees well enough that he cannot separate the two completely; but his share of the public harm seems like nothing to him next to the exclusive good he means to grab for himself. That private good aside, he wills the general good, for his own sake, as strongly as anyone else. Even when he sells his vote for money, he does not extinguish the general will inside himself — he only dodges it. His fault is to change the question, and to answer something different from what he was asked. Instead of saying with his vote, "This is good for the State," he says, "It is good for this man or that party that this or that measure should pass." So the law of public order in assemblies is not so much to uphold the general will there as to make sure that the question is always put to it, and that the answer always comes from it.
I could say a great deal here about the simple right of voting in every act of sovereignty — a right no one can take away from the citizens — and about the right to speak, to propose, to divide a question, and to debate it, which the government always takes great care to reserve for its own members alone. But this important subject would need a treatise of its own, and I cannot say everything in a single book.
You can see from the last chapter that the way public business is handled gives a fairly reliable reading of the current state of a people's morals and the health of the body politic. The more harmony reigns in the assemblies — that is, the closer opinion comes to unanimity — the more the general will is in command. Long debates, dissension, and uproar, on the other hand, announce that private interests are gaining the upper hand and that the State is in decline.
This seems less obvious when two or more orders are built into the constitution, as the patricians and plebeians were at Rome; for the quarrels between those two orders often disturbed the comitia — the great voting assemblies of the Roman citizens — even in the best days of the Republic. But the exception is more apparent than real. In such cases, because of the defect built into the body politic, there are, so to speak, two States in one; and what is not true of the two together is true of each one separately. Indeed, even in the stormiest times, the people's plebiscites — the votes of the plebeians acting on their own — always passed quietly and by large majorities, whenever the Senate did not interfere. Having only one interest, the citizens had only a single will.
At the far end of the circle, unanimity comes back around. This is what happens when the citizens, fallen into servitude, have lost both liberty and will. Then fear and flattery turn voting into acclamation. People no longer deliberate; they worship or they curse. Such was the vile way the Senate expressed its views under the Emperors — sometimes with absurd precautions. Tacitus observes that under Otho, the senators, while heaping curses on Vitellius, took care to make a deafening racket at the same time, so that if Vitellius should ever become their master, he could not tell what any one of them had said.
From these various considerations come the rules for regulating how votes are counted and opinions weighed, depending on how easy or hard the general will is to recognize, and how far gone the State is in its decline.
There is only one law that by its very nature demands unanimous consent: the social contract itself. For civil association is the most voluntary act in the world. Every man is born free and his own master, and so no one, on any pretext whatsoever, can place a man under another's authority without his consent. To decide that the son of a slave is born a slave is to decide that he is not born a man.
If, then, there are opponents when the social contract is made, their opposition does not invalidate the contract; it only keeps them out of it. They are foreigners living among citizens. Once the State is established, residence implies consent: to live within its territory is to submit to the Sovereign.
— This must be understood, of course, as applying only to a free State; for elsewhere, family, property, the lack of any refuge, necessity, or violence may hold a man in a country against his will, and then his merely living there no longer implies his consent to the contract — or to its violation.
Apart from this original contract, the vote of the majority always binds all the rest; that follows from the contract itself. But here a question is raised: how can a man be both free and forced to conform to wills that are not his own? How can the losing side be free, yet subject to laws it never agreed to?
I answer that the question is badly put. The citizen consents to all the laws — including the ones passed over his opposition, and even the ones that punish him when he dares to break any of them. The constant will of all the members of the State is the general will; it is through the general will that they are citizens and free. When a law is proposed in the assembly of the people, what they are being asked is not exactly whether they approve or reject the proposal, but whether it conforms to the general will, which is their own will. Each man casts his vote to give his opinion on that question; and the general will is found by counting the votes. So when the opinion contrary to mine prevails, that proves nothing more and nothing less than that I was mistaken — that what I took to be the general will was not the general will. If my private opinion had carried the day, I would have accomplished the opposite of what I willed; and in that case I would not have been free.
— At Genoa, the word Liberty can be read across the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. The motto is well and justly applied. It is in fact only the wrongdoers, of every rank, who prevent the citizen from being free. In a country where all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.
This presupposes, it is true, that all the marks of the general will are still found in the majority. When they cease to be, then no matter which side a man takes, liberty is no longer possible.
When I showed earlier how particular wills get substituted for the general will in public deliberations, I pointed out clearly enough the practical ways of preventing that abuse; I will have more to say about them later. I have also given the principles for setting the proportion of votes needed to declare that will. A difference of a single vote breaks an even split; a single opponent breaks unanimity; but between an even split and unanimity there are many unequal grades of division, and the required proportion can be fixed at any of them, according to the condition and the needs of the body politic.
Two general rules can guide us in setting this proportion. First: the graver and more important the question under discussion, the closer the winning opinion should come to unanimity. Second: the more urgent the matter, the smaller the required margin of votes may become; in decisions that must be made on the spot, a majority of one vote should be enough. The first of these rules seems better suited to laws, the second to practical business. In any case, it is the combination of the two that gives the best proportions for fixing the deciding majority.
In the election of the prince and the magistrates — which is, as I have said, a complex act — there are two possible procedures: choice and lot. Both have been used in various republics, and a highly complicated mixture of the two survives even now in the election of the Doge of Venice.
"Election by lot," says Montesquieu, "is democratic in nature." I agree that it is — but in what sense? "The lot," he continues, "is a way of choosing that is unfair to nobody; it leaves each citizen a reasonable hope of serving his country." These are not reasons.
If we keep in mind that the election of rulers is a function of government, not of sovereignty, we will see why the lot is the method more natural to democracy — where the administration is better in proportion as its acts are few.
In every true democracy, public office is not an advantage but a heavy burden, and it cannot justly be laid on one individual rather than another. Only the law can lay that burden on the man the lot falls upon. For then the conditions are the same for everyone, the choice depends on no human will, and no particular favoritism distorts the universal reach of the law.
In an aristocracy, the prince chooses the prince; the government preserves itself by its own act; and there, voting is rightly in place.
The example of the election of the Doge of Venice confirms this distinction instead of refuting it: a mixed form suits a mixed government. For it is a mistake to take the government of Venice for a true aristocracy. The people there may have no share in the government, but in Venice the nobility itself is the people. A crowd of poor Barnabotes — impoverished nobles, named for the parish of San Barnaba where many of them lived — never comes near any office; their nobility amounts to nothing but the empty title of Excellency and the right to sit in the Great Council. And since that Great Council is as numerous as our General Council at Geneva, its illustrious members have no more privileges than our plain citizens. It is beyond dispute that, setting aside the extreme difference in size between the two republics, the bourgeoisie of Geneva corresponds exactly to the patriciate of Venice; our natives and inhabitants correspond to Venice's townsmen and common people; and our peasants correspond to its subjects on the mainland. However you look at that republic, leaving its size out of account, its government is no more aristocratic than our own. The whole difference is that we have no ruler who serves for life, and so we do not need the lot as Venice does.
Election by lot would have few drawbacks in a true democracy, where everything would be equal — in morals and talents as much as in principles and fortunes — and where it would therefore hardly matter who was chosen. But I have already said that a true democracy is only an ideal.
When choice and lot are combined, choice should fill the positions that require special talents, such as military commands; the lot will do for offices such as judgeships, where good sense, justice, and integrity are enough — because in a well-constituted State, those qualities are common to all the citizens.
Neither the lot nor voting has any place in monarchical government. Since the monarch is by right the sole prince and the only magistrate, the choice of his lieutenants belongs to him alone. When the Abbé de Saint-Pierre proposed multiplying the Councils of the King of France and electing their members by ballot, he did not see that he was proposing to change the form of government.
I should now speak of how votes are given and counted in the assembly of the people; but perhaps an account of this side of the Roman constitution will illustrate, more forcefully than any rules I could lay down, everything I might say. It is worth a thoughtful reader's while to follow in some detail how public and private business was handled in a Council of two hundred thousand men.
We have no well-attested records of Rome's earliest period; it even seems very likely that most of the stories told about it are fables. In general, the most instructive part of any people's history — the story of its founding — is the part we have least of. Experience teaches us every day what causes drive the revolutions of empires; but since no new peoples are formed anymore, we have almost nothing but conjecture to explain how peoples were created in the first place.
The customs we find established prove, at least, that those customs had an origin. Among the traditions that reach back to those origins, the ones backed by the greatest authorities and confirmed by the strongest evidence should count as the most certain. These are the rules I have tried to follow in asking how the freest and most powerful people on earth exercised its supreme power.
After the founding of Rome, the newborn republic — that is, the founder's army, made up of Albans, Sabines, and foreigners — was divided into three classes, which from this division took the name of tribes. Each tribe was subdivided into ten curiae — wards — and each curia into smaller groups called decuriae, headed by officers called curiones and decuriones.
Besides this, from each tribe was drawn a body of one hundred Equites, or Knights, called a century — a unit of one hundred. This shows that these divisions, hardly necessary in a small town, were at first purely military. But an instinct for greatness seems to have led the little township of Rome to equip itself in advance with a political system fit for the capital of the world.
This original division soon produced an awkward problem. The tribes of the Albans (the Ramnenses) and of the Sabines (the Tatienses) stayed always the same size, while the tribe of the foreigners (the Luceres) kept growing as more and more foreigners came to live at Rome, until it soon outweighed the other two. Servius remedied this dangerous flaw by changing the basis of the division: he abolished the racial division and replaced it with a new one based on the quarter of the city each tribe inhabited. Instead of three tribes he created four, each occupying one of the hills of Rome and bearing its name. In curing the inequality of the moment, he also prevented it for the future; and so that the division would be one of persons as well as of places, he forbade the residents of one quarter to move to another, which kept the groups from mingling.
He also doubled the three old centuries of Knights and added twelve new ones, while keeping the old names — a simple and prudent device by which he managed to set the body of Knights apart from the people without a murmur of complaint from the latter.
To the four urban tribes Servius added fifteen others, called rural tribes because they were made up of those who lived in the countryside, divided into fifteen districts. Later, fifteen more were created, so that the Roman people finally found itself divided into thirty-five tribes — the number at which it stayed down to the end of the Republic.
This distinction between town tribes and country tribes had one effect worth noting, both because there is no parallel to it anywhere else, and because Rome owed to it both the preservation of its morals and the growth of its empire. One would expect the urban tribes to have quickly monopolized the power and the honors, and lost no time in degrading the rural tribes. What happened was exactly the opposite. The early Romans' taste for country life is well known. That taste they owed to their wise founder, who joined rural and military labor to liberty and, so to speak, banished to the town the arts, the crafts, intrigue, fortune, and slavery.
Since all of Rome's most illustrious citizens lived in the fields and tilled the soil, men grew used to looking there, and nowhere else, for the pillars of the republic. Because it was the condition of the best patricians, the farmer's life was honored by everyone; the simple, hardworking life of the villager was preferred to the slack and idle life of the Roman bourgeoisie; and a man who would have been just one more wretched proletarian in the town became, as a laborer in the fields, a respected citizen. It was not without reason, says Varro, that our great-souled ancestors made the village the nursery of those sturdy and valiant men who defended them in time of war and fed them in time of peace. Pliny states outright that the country tribes were honored because of the men who made them up, while cowards whom men wished to disgrace were transferred, as a public humiliation, into the town tribes. When the Sabine Appius Claudius came to settle in Rome, he was loaded with honors and enrolled in a rural tribe, which later took his family's name. Finally, freedmen — freed slaves — always entered the urban tribes, never the rural ones; and in the whole history of the Republic there is not a single example of a freedman reaching any public office, even though he had become a citizen.
This was an excellent rule; but it was pushed so far that in the end it produced a change — and certainly an abuse — in the political system.
First, the censors — the magistrates who kept the rolls of citizens and watched over public morals — after long claiming the right to transfer citizens arbitrarily from one tribe to another, allowed most people to enroll themselves in whatever tribe they pleased. This permission certainly did no good, and it robbed the censorship of one of its greatest instruments. What is more, since the great and powerful all had themselves enrolled in the country tribes, while the freedmen who had become citizens stayed with the populace in the town tribes, the tribes soon ceased to have any local or territorial meaning at all. Everything became so jumbled that the members of one tribe could not be told from the members of another except by checking the registers. The word tribe thus came to refer to persons instead of places — or rather, it became little more than a fiction.
It also happened that the town tribes, being closer to the spot, were often the stronger force in the comitia, and they sold the State to whoever stooped to buy the votes of the rabble who composed them.
As the founder had set up ten curiae in each tribe, the whole Roman people, which was then contained within the city walls, consisted of thirty curiae, each with its own temples, its gods, its officials, its priests, and its festivals — called compitalia, and resembling the paganalia that the rural tribes held in later times.
When Servius made his new division, the thirty curiae could not be shared out evenly among his four tribes, and he was unwilling to touch them; so they became a further division of the inhabitants of Rome, fully independent of the tribes. But among the rural tribes and their members there was no question of curiae, for by then the tribes had become a purely civil institution, and since a new system of raising troops had been introduced, the military divisions of Romulus were no longer needed. So although every citizen was enrolled in a tribe, there were very many who belonged to no curia at all.
Servius made yet a third division, quite distinct from the two we have mentioned, which became, in its effects, the most important of all. He distributed the entire Roman people into six classes, defined neither by place nor by person but by wealth: the first classes held the rich, the last held the poor, and the middle ones held those of moderate means. These six classes were subdivided into one hundred ninety-three other bodies, called centuries — and they were arranged so that the first class by itself contained more than half of all the centuries, while the whole last class formed only one. So the class with the fewest members had the largest number of centuries, and the entire last class counted as just a single subdivision, even though it alone included more than half the inhabitants of Rome.
So that the people would have less insight into the consequences of this arrangement, Servius dressed it up in military colors. Into the second class he inserted two centuries of armorers, and into the fourth, two centuries of makers of weapons of war. In every class except the last he distinguished the young from the old — that is, those who were obliged to bear arms from those whose age gave them a legal exemption. It was this distinction, more than the distinction of wealth, that made it necessary to repeat the census — the official count and registration of the citizens — so frequently. Finally, he ordered that the assembly be held on the Campus Martius, the Field of Mars, and that everyone of an age to serve come there armed.
The reason he did not divide the last class, too, into young and old is that the common mass who composed it were not granted the right to bear arms for their country. A man had to possess a hearth to acquire the right to defend one; and of all the troops of beggars who today add luster to the armies of kings, there is perhaps not one who would not have been driven out of a Roman cohort with contempt, in the days when soldiers were the defenders of liberty.
Even in this last class, however, the proletarians were distinguished from the capite censi. The proletarians, not quite reduced to nothing, at least gave the State citizens — and sometimes, when the need was pressing, even soldiers. But those who had nothing at all, and could be numbered only by counting heads — which is what capite censi means — were regarded as worth absolutely nothing; Marius was the first who stooped to enlist them.
Without deciding here whether this third arrangement was good or bad in itself, I think I can safely assert that only the simple morals of the early Romans could have made it workable — their freedom from self-interest, their taste for agriculture, their scorn for commerce and for the love of gain. Where is the modern people whose devouring greed, restlessness, scheming, constant uprooting, and perpetual turns of fortune would let such a system last twenty years without turning the State upside down? We should note, indeed, that at Rome, morality and the censorship proved stronger than this institution and corrected its defects — and that a rich man could find himself demoted to the class of the poor for making too great a show of his wealth.
From all this it is easy to see why only five classes are almost always mentioned, though there were really six. The sixth supplied no soldiers to the army and no votes in the Campus Martius, and since it had almost no function in the State, it was rarely counted as anything at all.
— I say "in the Campus Martius" because that is where the comitia met when they voted by centuries. In their two other forms the people gathered in the Forum or elsewhere, and there the capite censi — the citizens counted only by head — carried as much weight and authority as the foremost men of the city.
These, then, were the various ways the Roman people was divided. Now let us see the effect on the assemblies. When lawfully summoned, these assemblies were called comitia. They usually met in the public square at Rome or in the Campus Martius, and they were known as the Comitia Curiata, the Comitia Centuriata, or the Comitia Tributa, depending on the form under which they were convened. The Comitia Curiata were founded by Romulus, the Centuriata by Servius, and the Tributa by the tribunes of the people. No law was ratified and no magistrate was elected anywhere but in the comitia; and since every citizen was enrolled in a curia, a century, or a tribe, it follows that no citizen was shut out from voting, and that the Roman people was truly sovereign both in law and in fact.
For the comitia to assemble lawfully, and for their acts to carry the force of law, three conditions had to be met. First, the body or magistrate convening them had to hold the proper authority. Second, the assembly had to be held on a day the law allowed. Third, the auguries — the official reading of the omens — had to be favorable.
The first rule needs no explanation. The second is a matter of practical policy: the comitia could not be held on festival days or market days, when the country folk, in Rome on business, had no time to spend the whole day in the public square. And by means of the third, the senate kept a rein on a proud and restless people, and usefully cooled the ardor of troublemaking tribunes — though the tribunes found more than one way around that obstacle.
Laws and the election of rulers were not the only questions put to the judgment of the comitia. Since the Roman people had taken the most important functions of government into its own hands, you could say that the fate of Europe was settled in its assemblies. This variety of business explains the various forms the assemblies took, according to the matters they had to decide.
To judge these various forms, it is enough to compare them. When Romulus set up the curiae, he meant the people to check the senate and the senate to check the people, while he kept his own ascendancy over both. Through this assembly he gave the people all the authority of numbers, to balance the authority of power and wealth that he left to the patricians. But, in the true spirit of monarchy, he still left the patricians the greater advantage through the influence their clients had over the majority of votes. This excellent institution of patron and client was a masterpiece of statesmanship and humanity; without it the patriciate, which flatly contradicted the spirit of a republic, could not have survived. Rome alone has the honor of giving the world this great example — one that never led to any abuse, and yet has never been imitated.
Since the assemblies by curiae lasted under the kings down to the time of Servius, and the reign of the last Tarquin was not regarded as legitimate, royal laws came to be known generally as leges curiatae.
Under the Republic, the curiae — still confined to the four urban tribes, and containing only the city populace of Rome — suited neither the senate, which led the patricians, nor the tribunes, who, plebeians though they were, stood at the head of the well-off citizens. So the curiae fell into disrepute, and sank so low that thirty lictors — the magistrates' ceremonial attendants — would simply gather and do what the Comitia Curiata should have done.
The division by centuries was so favorable to the aristocracy that at first it is hard to see why the senate did not always carry the day in the comitia that bore their name — the assemblies that elected the consuls, the censors, and the other curule magistrates, the high officers of state. Of the hundred and ninety-three centuries into which the six classes of the whole Roman people were divided, the first class held ninety-eight; and since the vote was counted by centuries alone, that one class outvoted all the rest combined. When all its centuries agreed, the other votes were not even collected; what the smallest number had decided passed for the decision of the multitude. In the Comitia Centuriata, you may fairly say, matters were settled far more by depth of purse than by count of votes.
But this extreme power was softened in two ways. First, the tribunes as a rule, and always a large number of plebeians, belonged to the class of the rich, and so counterbalanced the influence of the patricians within that first class.
The second way was this. Instead of having the centuries vote straight through in order — which would have meant always starting with the first class — the Romans drew one century by lot, and that century alone proceeded to the election. After that, all the centuries were summoned on another day according to their rank, the same election was repeated, and as a rule it was confirmed. In this way the authority of setting an example was taken away from rank and handed to the luck of the draw, on a democratic principle.
This custom had a further advantage. Between the two elections, the citizens from the countryside had time to learn something about the merits of the provisionally nominated candidate, so they did not have to vote in ignorance of the case. But under the pretext of speeding things up, this custom was eventually abolished, and both elections were held on the same day.
The Comitia Tributa were, properly speaking, the council of the Roman people. Only the tribunes could convene them; in them the tribunes were elected and passed their plebiscita — their popular decrees. The senate had no standing in them, and senators had not even the right to attend; forced to obey laws they could not vote on, the senators were in this respect less free than the lowest citizens. This injustice was altogether ill-conceived, and it was by itself enough to invalidate the decrees of a body to which not all its members were admitted. Had every patrician attended these comitia by the right he held as a citizen, they would have been mere private individuals there, with hardly any influence in a vote counted by heads, where the poorest proletarian weighed as much as the princeps senatus — the first man of the senate.
We can see, then, that besides the good order achieved by these various ways of distributing so great a people and collecting its votes, the different methods were not just interchangeable formalities. Each produced results tied to the purpose for which it was preferred.
Without going into further detail here, we can gather from what has been said that the Comitia Tributa were the most favorable to popular government, and the Comitia Centuriata to aristocracy. As for the Comitia Curiata, where the city populace formed the majority, they were fit only to further tyranny and evil designs, and so they naturally fell into discredit; even troublemakers avoided a method that exposed their schemes too plainly. It is beyond dispute that the whole majesty of the Roman people resided solely in the Comitia Centuriata, for they alone included everyone — the Curiata excluded the rural tribes, and the Tributa excluded the senate and the patricians.
As for the manner of taking the vote, among the early Romans it was as simple as their morals, though not so simple as at Sparta. Each man declared his vote aloud, and a clerk duly wrote it down. The majority in each tribe determined the vote of the tribe, the majority of the tribes the vote of the people, and the same with the curiae and the centuries. This custom worked well as long as honesty reigned among the citizens, and each man was ashamed to cast a public vote for an unjust proposal or an unworthy candidate. But when the people grew corrupt and votes were bought, it was fitting that the vote be cast in secret, so that distrust might rein in the buyers, and scoundrels be given a way of not being traitors.
I know that Cicero attacked this change and blamed it in part for the ruin of the Republic. And though I feel the weight Cicero's authority must carry on such a point, I cannot agree with him. I hold, on the contrary, that for want of enough such changes, the destruction of the State was hastened. Just as the diet of the healthy does not suit the sick, we should not try to govern a corrupted people by the laws that a good people requires. There is no better proof of this rule than the long life of the Republic of Venice — its shadow still exists today — and it has lasted solely because its laws suit none but wicked men.
So the citizens were given tablets, by which each man could vote without anyone knowing how he voted. New procedures were also introduced for collecting the tablets, counting the voices, comparing the totals, and so on; but none of these precautions kept the good faith of the officers charged with these duties — the custodes, diribitores, and rogatores suffragiorum, the guards, sorters, and collectors of the ballots — from being frequently suspected. Finally, to prevent intrigue and the trafficking of votes, edicts were issued; and their sheer number proves how useless they were.
Toward the close of the Republic, it was often necessary to resort to extraordinary expedients to patch the inadequacy of the laws. Sometimes miracles were invented; but that trick, while it might fool the people, could not fool the men who governed them. Sometimes an assembly was called together in haste, before the candidates had time to organize their factions. Sometimes a whole sitting was eaten up with talk, once it was clear the people had been won over and was about to take the wrong side. But in the end ambition slipped past every attempt to check it. And the most incredible fact of all is this: in the midst of all these abuses, that vast people, thanks to its ancient regulations, never stopped electing magistrates, passing laws, judging cases, and carrying through business both public and private, almost as smoothly as the senate itself could have done.
When no exact proportion can be established among the constituent parts of the State, or when causes that cannot be removed keep altering the relation of one part to another, the remedy is to set up a special magistracy that forms no corporate body with the rest. This office restores each term to its right relation with the others, and supplies a link or middle term either between the government and the people, or between the government and the Sovereign, or, if necessary, both at once.
This body, which I shall call the tribunate, is the preserver of the laws and of the legislative power. It serves sometimes to protect the Sovereign against the government, as the tribunes of the people did at Rome; sometimes to uphold the government against the people, as the Council of Ten does now at Venice; and sometimes to keep the balance between the two, as the Ephors — Sparta's board of overseers — did.
The tribunate is not a constituent part of the city, and it should have no share in either legislative or executive power. But this very fact makes its own power the greater: for though it can do nothing, it can prevent anything from being done. As defender of the laws, it is more sacred and more revered than the government that executes them, or than the Sovereign that ordains them. This was seen very clearly at Rome, when the proud patricians, for all their scorn of the people, were forced to bow before one of the people's plain officers — a man who had neither auspices nor jurisdiction of his own.
Wisely tempered, the tribunate is the strongest support a good constitution can have. But let its strength run even slightly past the mark, and it overturns the whole State. Weakness, on the other hand, is not in its nature: provided it is anything at all, it is never less than it ought to be.
It degenerates into tyranny when it usurps the executive power it should only restrain, and when it tries to set aside the laws it should only protect. The immense power of the Ephors, harmless as long as Sparta kept its morals, hastened the corruption once corruption had begun. The blood of Agis, slaughtered by these tyrants, was avenged by his successor; the crime of the Ephors and their punishment alike sped the republic's destruction, and after Cleomenes, Sparta counted for nothing. Rome perished the same way: the excessive power of the tribunes, usurped degree by degree, ended by serving — with the help of laws made to secure liberty — as a shield for the emperors who destroyed that liberty. As for the Venetian Council of Ten, it is a tribunal of blood, an object of horror to patricians and people alike; far from giving the laws lofty protection, now that the laws have been degraded it does nothing but strike in the darkness blows that no one dares to notice.
The tribunate, like the government, grows weak as its members multiply. When the tribunes of the Roman people, who at first numbered only two, and then five, wished to double that number, the senate let them do it — confident that it could use some to check the others, as indeed it freely did afterwards.
The best way to prevent usurpation by so formidable a body — though no government has yet tried it — would be not to make it permanent, but to fix by rule the periods during which it stands suspended. These intervals should not be long enough for abuses to take root, and they can be set by law so that extraordinary commissions may easily shorten them in case of need.
This method seems to me to have no drawbacks, because, as I have said, the tribunate forms no part of the constitution and can be removed without the constitution suffering. And it seems effective too, because a newly restored magistrate starts out not with the power his predecessor wielded, but with the power the law allows him.
The inflexibility of the laws, which keeps them from bending to events, can in certain cases make them disastrous — can make them, in a moment of crisis, the very ruin of the State. The order and the slowness of legal forms demand a stretch of time that circumstances sometimes refuse to give. A thousand situations can arise that the lawgiver never provided for; and to recognize that not everything can be foreseen is itself a very necessary kind of foresight.
It is wrong, therefore, to want political institutions made so rigid that their operation can never be suspended. Even Sparta let its laws sleep.
But only the greatest dangers can outweigh the danger of tampering with the public order, and the sacred power of the laws should never be halted except when the survival of the country is at stake. In these rare and obvious cases, public security is provided for by a special act that entrusts it to the worthiest person. This commission can be carried out in either of two ways, depending on the nature of the danger.
If quickening the activity of the government is remedy enough, power is concentrated in the hands of one or two of its members. In that case it is not the authority of the laws that changes, only the form of administering them. But if the peril is such that the whole machinery of the laws is an obstacle to saving them, then a supreme ruler is named — one who silences all the laws and suspends the sovereign authority for a moment. In such a case there is no doubt about the general will: clearly the people's first intention is that the State shall not perish. The suspension of the legislative authority is in no sense its abolition. The magistrate who silences it cannot make it speak; he dominates it, but he cannot represent it. He can do anything, except make laws.
The first method was used by the Roman senate when, in a consecrated formula, it charged the consuls to provide for the safety of the Republic. The second was used when one of the two consuls named a dictator — a single man given supreme emergency power for a fixed term, a custom Rome borrowed from Alba.
— The nomination was made secretly, by night, as if there were something shameful in setting a man above the laws.
During the first period of the Republic, the dictatorship was used very often, because the State did not yet rest on a base firm enough to stand by the strength of its constitution alone. Public morals in those days made many precautions unnecessary that would have been needed at other times, so there was no fear that a dictator would abuse his authority or try to keep it past his term of office. On the contrary, so much power seemed a burden to the man clothed in it, and he hurried to lay it down, as if standing in the place of the laws were a post too troublesome and too dangerous to hold.
So it is the danger not of its abuse, but of its cheapening, that makes me criticize the careless use of this supreme magistracy in the earliest times. While it was being spent freely on elections, dedications, and purely formal functions, there was reason to fear it would grow less formidable in time of real need, and that men would come to treat as empty a title used only for empty ceremony.
Toward the end of the Republic, the Romans, grown more cautious, became as unreasonably stingy with the dictatorship as they had once been lavish. It is easy to see that their fears were groundless; that the very weakness of the capital was its protection against the magistrates inside it; that a dictator might, in certain cases, defend the public liberty but could never endanger it; and that the chains of Rome would be forged, not in Rome itself, but in her armies. The feeble resistance Marius offered Sulla, and Pompey offered Caesar, showed clearly what could be expected from authority at home against force from abroad.
This misjudgment led the Romans into great mistakes — such as, for example, failing to name a dictator during the conspiracy of Catiline. For since only the city itself was at stake, with at most some province in Italy, a dictator, armed with the unlimited authority the laws gave him, would have made short work of the conspiracy — which was in fact smothered only by a lucky cluster of chances that human prudence had no right to count on.
Instead, the senate settled for handing its whole power to the consuls. The result was that Cicero, in order to act effectively, was driven to exceed his powers on a capital point; and though in the first transports of joy his conduct was applauded, he was later, and justly, called to account for the blood of citizens spilled in violation of the laws — a reproach that could never have been leveled at a dictator. But the consul's eloquence carried all before it; and he himself, Roman though he was, loved his own glory better than his country, and looked less for the most lawful and secure way of saving the State than for the way that gave him the whole honor of having done it. — That honor was just what he could not be sure of if he proposed a dictator; for he dared not name himself, and could not be certain his colleague would name him. — So he was justly honored as the liberator of Rome, and also justly punished as a breaker of the laws. However brilliant his recall from exile may have been, it was undoubtedly an act of pardon.
However this important trust is conferred, it matters greatly that its duration be fixed at a very short term that can never be extended. In the crises that lead to its adoption, the State is either soon lost or soon saved; and once the pressing need has passed, the dictatorship becomes either tyrannical or useless. At Rome, where dictators held office for six months only, most of them resigned before their time was up. Had the term been longer, they might well have been tempted to stretch it further, as the decemvirs — the board of ten lawmakers — did with their term of a year. The dictator had only time enough to meet the need that had caused him to be chosen; he had none to dream of other projects.
Just as the law is the declaration of the general will, the censorship — the office charged with watching over public morals — is the declaration of the public judgment. Public opinion is the kind of law the censor administers; and, like the government, he only applies it to particular cases.
Far from being the arbiter of the people's opinion, the censorial tribunal only declares it; and the moment the two part company, its decisions are null and void.
It is useless to distinguish a nation's morals from the objects of its esteem: both rest on the same principle and necessarily run together. Among all the peoples of the world, it is opinion, not nature, that decides the choice of their pleasures. Set men's opinions right, and their morals will purify themselves. Men always love what is good, or what they take to be good; it is in judging what is good that they go wrong. So it is this judgment that has to be regulated. Whoever judges morals judges honor; and whoever judges honor takes his law from opinion.
A people's opinions are born of its constitution. Although the law does not regulate morals, it is legislation that gives them birth; and when legislation weakens, morals degenerate. But at that point the judgment of the censors will not accomplish what the force of the laws has failed to do.
From this it follows that the censorship may be useful for preserving morals, but it can never be useful for restoring them. Set up censors while the laws are vigorous; once the laws have lost their vigor, all hope is gone. No legitimate power keeps its force when the laws have lost theirs.
The censorship upholds morals by keeping opinion from growing corrupt, by preserving its rightness through wise applications, and sometimes even by settling it while it is still uncertain. The use of seconds in duels, which had been carried to wild extremes in the kingdom of France, was abolished by nothing more than these words in a royal edict: "As for those who are cowards enough to call upon seconds." This judgment anticipated the public's own, and so decided it at a stroke. But when edicts from the same source tried to pronounce that dueling itself was an act of cowardice — which it certainly is — then, since common opinion did not see it that way, the public simply ignored a ruling on a question its mind was already made up about.
I have said elsewhere — and dealt with the subject at greater length in my Letter to M. d'Alembert — that since public opinion is not subject to constraint, there must be no trace of constraint in the tribunal set up to represent it. One cannot admire too much the art with which this device, wholly lost to us moderns, was put to work by the Romans, and even better by the Spartans.
A man of bad morals once made a good proposal in the Spartan Council. The Ephors ignored it, and arranged for the same proposal to be made by a virtuous citizen. What an honor for the one, and what a disgrace for the other — without a word of praise or blame for either! Certain drunkards from Samos defiled the tribunal of the Ephors; the next day, a public edict gave the people of Samos permission to be filthy. A real punishment would have stung less than impunity like that. When Sparta pronounced on what was or was not decent, Greece did not appeal her judgments.
— In truth they were from another island, which the delicacy of our language forbids me to name on this occasion.
At first men had no kings but the gods, and no government but theocracy. They reasoned as Caligula did — and at that stage, they reasoned rightly. It takes a long time for feelings to change enough that men can bring themselves to accept their own equals as masters, and to persuade themselves they will profit by doing so.
From the simple fact that a god was set over every political society, it followed that there were as many gods as there were peoples. Two peoples foreign to each other, and almost always enemies, could not recognize the same master for long; two armies locked in battle could not obey the same leader. So national divisions produced polytheism, and polytheism in turn produced theological and civil intolerance — which, as we will see in a moment, are by nature the same thing.
The Greeks had a fancy for rediscovering their own gods among the barbarians, and it came from their habit of regarding themselves as the natural sovereigns of those peoples. But nothing is more absurd than the scholarship of our own day, which identifies and confuses the gods of different nations. As if Moloch, Saturn, and Chronos could be the same god! As if the Phoenician Baal, the Greek Zeus, and the Latin Jupiter could be the same! As if imaginary beings with different names could have anything in common at all!
Someone may ask why, in pagan times, when every State had its own cult and its own gods, there were no wars of religion. My answer: for precisely that reason. Each State, having its own worship as well as its own government, drew no line between its gods and its laws. Political war was theological war; the provinces of the gods were marked out, so to speak, by the borders of nations. One people's god had no rights over other peoples. The gods of the pagans were not jealous gods; they divided up the empire of the world among themselves. Even Moses and the Hebrews sometimes lent themselves to this way of thinking by speaking of the God of Israel. True, they considered the gods of the Canaanites powerless — those being a proscribed people, marked for destruction, whose land they were to occupy. But notice how they spoke of the gods of the neighboring peoples they were forbidden to attack. "Is not what your god Chemosh possesses lawfully yours?" Jephthah said to the Ammonites. "We hold by the very same title the lands our conquering God has made his own." Here, I think, is a clear admission that the rights of Chemosh and the rights of the God of Israel were rights of the same kind.
— That is the text in the Vulgate (Judges 11:24): Nonne ea quæ possidet Chamos deus tuus, tibi jure debentur? Father de Carrières translates it: "Do you not regard yourselves as having a right to what your god possesses?" I cannot judge the force of the Hebrew; but I notice that in the Vulgate, Jephthah positively acknowledges the right of the god Chemosh, and that the French translator watered down that admission by slipping in an "according to you" which is not in the Latin.
But when the Jews, subject first to the kings of Babylon and afterward to the kings of Syria, still stubbornly refused to recognize any god but their own, that refusal was treated as rebellion against their conqueror. It brought down on them the persecutions we read of in their history — persecutions without parallel until the coming of Christianity.
— It is quite clear, by the way, that the Phocian war, the so-called "Sacred War," was not a war of religion. Its purpose was to punish acts of sacrilege, not to conquer unbelievers.
Since every religion was attached solely to the laws of the State that prescribed it, there was no way to convert a people except by enslaving it, and no missionaries except conquerors. The obligation to change cults was simply the law imposed on the defeated, so you had to be the victor before you could even raise the subject. Far from men fighting for the gods, the gods — as in Homer — fought for men. Each side asked its god for victory and paid for it with new altars. Before taking a city, the Romans formally summoned its gods to leave it; and when they let the people of Tarentum keep their outraged gods, it was because by then they regarded those gods as subject to their own and compelled to pay them homage. They left the conquered their gods just as they left them their laws. A wreath for the Jupiter of the Capitol was often the only tribute they demanded.
Finally, as the Romans spread their cult and their gods along with their empire, and often adopted the gods of the conquered as well, granting the rights of the city to both alike, the peoples of that vast empire gradually found themselves with multitudes of gods and cults that were nearly the same everywhere. And that is how paganism, throughout the known world, finally became one and the same religion.
These were the circumstances in which Jesus came to establish a spiritual kingdom on earth. By separating the theological system from the political system, this destroyed the unity of the State, and it brought on the internal divisions that have never stopped troubling Christian peoples. Since the new idea of a kingdom of another world could never have entered the heads of the pagans, they always looked on the Christians as actual rebels — people who, behind a mask of submission, were only waiting for the moment to make themselves independent and supreme, and to seize by cunning the very authority they pretended, in their weakness, to respect. That was the cause of the persecutions.
What the pagans feared came to pass. Then everything changed its face: the humble Christians changed their language, and soon this so-called kingdom of the other world became, under a visible leader, the most violent despotism in this one.
Yet since there has always been a civil ruler and there have always been civil laws, this double power has created an endless conflict of jurisdiction that has made all good polity impossible in Christian States. People have never managed to settle whether they are obliged to obey the master or the priest.
Several peoples, even in Europe and on its borders, have tried to preserve or restore the old system, but without success: the spirit of Christianity has won everywhere. The sacred cult has always remained, or become once again, independent of the Sovereign, with no necessary link between it and the body of the State. Muhammad had very sound views; he tied his political system firmly together, and as long as the form of his government lasted under the caliphs who succeeded him, that government was exactly one, and to that extent it was good. But when the Arabs grew prosperous, lettered, polished, soft, and cowardly, they were conquered by barbarians, and the division between the two powers began again. Though it is less visible among Muslims than among Christians, the division exists all the same, above all in the sect of Ali — the Shia — and there are States, such as Persia, where it makes itself felt continually.
Among us, the kings of England have made themselves heads of the Church, and the tsars have done the same. But with this title they have made themselves less the Church's masters than its ministers; they have acquired not so much the right to change it as the power to maintain it. They are not its legislators; they are merely its princes. Wherever the clergy forms a corporate body, it is master and legislator in its own house. So there are two powers, two Sovereigns, in England and in Russia, just as everywhere else.
— Note carefully that what binds the clergy into one body is not so much their formal assemblies as the communion of Churches. Communion and excommunication are the social contract of the clergy — a contract that will always make them the masters of peoples and of kings. All priests who share communion are fellow citizens, even if they come from opposite ends of the earth. This invention is a masterpiece of statecraft: there is nothing like it among pagan priests, which is why pagan priests never formed a clerical body.
Of all Christian writers, the philosopher Hobbes is the only one who saw both the disease and the remedy — the only one who dared to propose reuniting the two heads of the eagle and restoring political unity entire, without which no State and no government will ever be rightly constituted. But he should have seen that the domineering spirit of Christianity was incompatible with his system, and that the interest of the priest would always be stronger than the interest of the State. It is not what is false and terrible in his political theory that has drawn hatred down on it, but what is just and true.
— See, for instance, what that learned man Grotius found to praise and to blame in the De Cive, in a letter to his brother of April 11, 1643. It is true that, inclined to indulgence, he seems to forgive the author the good for the sake of the bad; but not everyone is so forgiving.
I believe that if the study of history were developed from this point of view, it would be easy to refute the opposite errors of Bayle and Warburton — the one holding that religion is of no use whatever to the body politic, the other maintaining, on the contrary, that Christianity is its strongest support. To the first we could prove that no State was ever founded without religion at its base; to the second, that the law of Christianity does the constitution of the State more harm by weakening it than good by strengthening it. To make myself fully understood, I only need to give a little more precision to the overly vague ideas about religion that bear on my subject.
Religion, considered in relation to society — whether society in general or some particular society — can be divided into two kinds: the religion of man and the religion of the citizen. The first, with no temples, no altars, no rites, confined to the purely inward worship of the supreme God and to the eternal duties of morality, is the pure and simple religion of the Gospel, the true theism — what may be called natural divine law. The second, established in a single country, gives that country its gods, its own guardian patrons. It has its dogmas, its rites, its external worship prescribed by law; outside the one nation that follows it, everything is, in its eyes, infidel, foreign, barbarous; it extends the duties and rights of man no farther than its own altars. All the religions of the early peoples were of this kind, and we may call it civil or positive divine law.
There is a third, stranger sort of religion which, by giving men two sets of laws, two rulers, two homelands, subjects them to contradictory duties and makes it impossible for them to be faithful to religion and to citizenship at the same time. Such is the religion of the Lamas; such is that of the Japanese; such is Roman Christianity. One may call it the religion of the priest. It produces a kind of mixed, anti-social code of law that has no name.
Considered politically, all three kinds of religion have their defects. The third is so obviously bad that it would be a waste of time to stop and prove it. Whatever destroys social unity is worthless. Every institution that sets a man in contradiction with himself is worthless.
The second is good in this respect: it joins the worship of God to the love of the laws, and by making the homeland the object of the citizens' adoration, it teaches them that to serve the State is to serve its guardian god. It is a kind of theocracy, in which there should be no pontiff but the prince and no priests but the magistrates. Then to die for one's country is martyrdom; to break its laws is impiety; and to subject a guilty man to public execration is to deliver him to the anger of the gods: Sacer estod — let him be accursed.
But it is bad in this respect: being founded on error and lies, it deceives men, makes them credulous and superstitious, and drowns the true worship of the Divinity in empty ceremony. It is bad again when it turns exclusive and tyrannical and makes a people bloodthirsty and intolerant — when it breathes nothing but slaughter and massacre, and counts it a holy act to kill anyone who does not accept its gods. That puts such a people into a natural state of war with everyone else, which does its own security no good at all.
There remains, then, the religion of man, or Christianity — not the Christianity of today, but the Christianity of the Gospel, which is altogether different. Under this holy, sublime, and true religion, all men, children of the same God, recognize one another as brothers, and the society that unites them is not dissolved even by death.
But this religion, having no particular relation to the body politic, leaves the laws only the force they draw from themselves, adding nothing to it; and so one of the great bonds that hold a particular society together is left without effect. Worse: far from attaching the citizens' hearts to the State, it detaches them from it as from all earthly things. I know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.
We are told that a people of true Christians would form the most perfect society imaginable. I see only one great difficulty in this supposition: a society of true Christians would no longer be a society of men.
I say more: this society, with all its perfection, would be neither the strongest nor the most lasting. Its very perfection would rob it of its bond of union; the flaw that destroyed it would lie in its perfection itself.
Everyone would do his duty; the people would obey the laws; the leaders would be just and moderate; the magistrates would be upright and incorruptible; the soldiers would despise death; there would be neither vanity nor luxury. So far, so good. But listen to what comes next.
Christianity is an entirely spiritual religion, concerned only with the things of heaven. The Christian's homeland is not of this world. He does his duty, yes — but he does it with deep indifference to whether his efforts succeed or fail. As long as he has nothing to reproach himself with, it matters little to him whether things go well or badly down here. If the State prospers, he hardly dares enjoy the public happiness, for fear of growing proud of his country's glory. If the State declines, he blesses the hand of God lying heavy on His people.
For the society to be peaceful and harmony preserved, every single citizen without exception would have to be an equally good Christian. But if, by bad luck, there is one ambitious man among them, one hypocrite — a Catiline, say, or a Cromwell — he will most certainly get the better of his pious compatriots. Christian charity does not easily allow a man to think ill of his neighbors. The moment such a man discovers, by some trick, the art of fooling them and grabbing a share of the public authority, there he stands, a man established in dignity: it is God's will that he be respected. Soon there stands a power: it is God's will that it be obeyed. Does the man who holds that power abuse it? It is the rod with which God punishes His children. Conscience would balk at driving out the usurper: public peace would have to be disturbed, violence used, blood spilled — all of which sits badly with Christian meekness. And after all, in this vale of tears, what does it matter whether we are free men or serfs? The essential thing is to get to heaven, and resignation is just one more means of getting there.
If war breaks out with another State, the citizens march readily to battle; not one of them thinks of fleeing. They do their duty, but without any passion for victory; they know better how to die than how to win. What does it matter whether they conquer or are conquered? Doesn't Providence know better than they do what they need? Just imagine what a proud, fiery, passionate enemy could make of their stoicism! Set against them those generous peoples who were consumed by a burning love of glory and of homeland; imagine your Christian republic face to face with Sparta or with Rome. The pious Christians will be beaten, crushed, and destroyed before they know where they are — or they will owe their safety to nothing but the contempt their enemy comes to feel for them. To my mind, the oath taken by the soldiers of Fabius was a fine one: they did not swear to conquer or die — they swore to come back victorious, and they kept their oath. Christians would never have taken such an oath; they would have thought it was tempting God.
But I am wrong to speak of a Christian republic; the two words exclude each other. Christianity preaches nothing but servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that tyranny always profits by it. True Christians are made to be slaves; they know it, and it hardly troubles them: this short life counts for too little in their eyes.
I will be told that Christian troops are excellent. I deny it. Show me one example. For my part, I know of no Christian troops. The Crusades will be cited. Without disputing the valor of the Crusaders, I will point out that, far from being Christians, they were the priests' soldiers — citizens of the Church. They fought for their spiritual country, which the Church, somehow or other, had made temporal. Properly understood, this is a relapse into paganism: since the Gospel establishes no national religion, a holy war is impossible among Christians.
Under the pagan emperors, the Christian soldiers were brave; every Christian writer affirms it, and I believe it. It was a competition of honor against the pagan troops. Once the emperors became Christian, that rivalry disappeared; and when the Cross had driven out the eagle, all Roman valor vanished with it.
But let us set political considerations aside and come back to right; let us fix our principles on this important point. The right which the social contract gives the Sovereign over the subjects does not, as we have seen, go beyond the limits of public utility.
— "In the republic," says the Marquis d'Argenson, "each man is perfectly free in whatever does not harm others." That is the unchanging boundary; it cannot be stated more exactly. I have not been able to deny myself the pleasure of quoting now and then from this manuscript, though the public has never seen it, to honor the memory of a good and illustrious man who kept, even as a Minister, the heart of a true citizen, along with sane and right views on the government of his country.
The subjects, then, owe the Sovereign an account of their opinions only so far as those opinions matter to the community. Now it matters very much to the community that each citizen have a religion that makes him love his duties. But the dogmas of that religion concern the State and its members only so far as they bear on morality and on the duties that whoever professes them is bound to fulfill toward others. Beyond that, everyone may hold whatever opinions he pleases, and it is no business of the Sovereign's to know what they are. The Sovereign has no authority in the other world; whatever the fate of its subjects in the life to come, that is not its affair — provided they are good citizens in this one.
There is therefore a purely civil profession of faith, and it is the Sovereign's place to fix its articles — not precisely as religious dogmas, but as sentiments of sociability, without which it is impossible to be a good citizen or a faithful subject. The Sovereign cannot compel anyone to believe these articles, but it can banish from the State anyone who does not believe them. It can banish him not for impiety, but as an anti-social being — as someone incapable of sincerely loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, if need be, his life to his duty. And if anyone, after publicly acknowledging these same dogmas, behaves as though he does not believe them, let him be punished with death: he has committed the greatest of all crimes — he has lied before the laws.
— When Caesar pleaded for Catiline, he tried to establish the dogma that the soul is mortal. Cato and Cicero, to refute him, did not waste time philosophizing. They were content to show that Caesar was speaking like a bad citizen and advancing a doctrine harmful to the State. That, and not a question of theology, was what the Roman senate had to judge.
The dogmas of the civil religion ought to be simple, few in number, and precisely worded, without explanations or commentary. The existence of a powerful, intelligent, benevolent Divinity, possessed of foresight and providence; the life to come; the happiness of the just; the punishment of the wicked; the sanctity of the social contract and of the laws: these are the positive dogmas. As for the negative dogmas, I limit them to a single one: intolerance. It belongs to the cults we have ruled out.
Those who distinguish civil intolerance from theological intolerance are, in my opinion, mistaken. The two are inseparable. It is impossible to live at peace with people one believes are damned; to love them would be to hate the God who punishes them; one absolutely must either reclaim them or torment them. Wherever theological intolerance is admitted, it cannot fail to have some civil effect; and the moment it has one, the Sovereign is no longer Sovereign, even in temporal matters. From that point on, the priests are the real masters, and kings are merely their officers.
— Marriage, for example, being a civil contract, has civil effects without which society cannot even subsist. Suppose, then, a clergy that claims the exclusive right to perform this act — a right it must necessarily claim in every intolerant religion. Is it not clear that in establishing the Church's authority on this point, it destroys the authority of the prince, who from then on will have only as many subjects as the clergy chooses to grant him? Free to marry or not to marry people according to whether they hold this or that doctrine, accept or reject this or that formula, and show more or less devotion, the Church alone — acting with firmness and holding its ground — will dispose of all inheritances, all offices, all citizens, and even the State itself, which cannot survive once it is composed of nothing but bastards. But, I will be told, there will be appeals against abuses; there will be summonses, decrees, seizures of Church revenues. What a pity! The clergy, if it has even a little — I will not say courage — sense, will let it all happen and quietly go its way. It will calmly permit the appeals, the summonses, the decrees, and the seizures, and in the end it will remain the master. Giving up a part, I think, is no great sacrifice when one is sure of securing the whole.
Now that there no longer is, and no longer can be, an exclusive national religion, tolerance should be extended to all religions that tolerate others, as long as their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of the citizen. But whoever dares to say "Outside the Church there is no salvation" should be driven from the State — unless the State is the Church and the prince is the pontiff. Such a dogma is good only in a theocratic government; in any other, it is fatal. The reason Henry IV is said to have had for embracing the Roman religion ought to make every honest man leave it — and above all, every prince who knows how to reason.
Now that I have laid down the true principles of political right and tried to set the State on a foundation of its own, what remains is to support it through its external relations. That would take in the law of nations, commerce, the right of war and conquest, public right, leagues, negotiations, treaties, and so on. But all of this forms a new subject far too vast for my narrow scope. I should always have kept my sights closer to home.