The Social Contract: The Great Agreement

If force cannot make power legitimate, what can? Rousseau’s answer is an agreement among all the people: the social contract.

“Imagine people in a state of nature reaching a point where the dangers they face are greater than the strength of each person alone.Men cannot create new strength; they can only unite and direct the strength they already have.But each person’s strength and freedom are his main tools for staying alive, so how can he give them up without harming himself?The problem is to find a form of association that will defend and protect each member with the whole common force, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, still obeys only himself and remains as free as before.This is the basic problem that the social contract solves.

Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will.Because each gives himself completely, the conditions are the same for all, and so nobody has an interest in making them hard for others.In this way, a crowd of separate people becomes one public body, with its own life and its own will.

What man loses by the social contract is his natural freedom and an unlimited right to anything he wants and can get.What he gains is civil freedom and the ownership of everything he has.He also gains moral freedom, which alone makes him truly master of himself.For to be driven by appetite alone is slavery, while to obey a law we give ourselves is freedom.”