92 Chapter V
dividually are known as citizens, in that they share in the sovereign authority, and
subjects, in that they are subject to the laws of the state.”^9
The act of association produces a General Will, the will of the community as
such, which includes the willingness of minorities to abide by majority decisions,
and of individuals to accept actions of government that they do not personally
favor. Any member may be obliged by the community to obey this General Will:
“which is to say nothing else than that he will be forced to be free.”^10 Here, too, it is
easy to travesty or misrepresent Rousseau’s real meaning, which is perfectly consis-
tent with a liberal and democratic practice: the existence of the community and
the liberty of its members require all to respect its authority. It must be remem-
bered that, for Rousseau, the General Will and the sovereignty of the community
operate only at an abstract or distant level, as the framework or prerequisite within
which more specific actions take place. Strictly speaking, he observes, the only act
of sovereignty is the act of association itself. Sovereignty, though “wholly absolute,
wholly sacred and wholly inviolable,” is limited to general agreements (conventions
générale). To suggest an elucidation which he does not himself give: There may be
two parties in a state, which to avoid all suggestion of ideology or partisanship we
may call the Greens and the Blues. If the Greens, using legal channels, and having
a majority at the moment, obtain passage of a law, it is not merely a Green law but
a law of the state. The Blues have voted against it, but they accept it as law, and not
as a mere act of force. They obey it as such, for it gains the force of law not by will
of the Greens, nor even by will of a majority only, but from the underlying general
will of both Greens and Blues, a general will which is the essence of the civil com-
munity, and is the only sovereign that men need obey. If there is no such will, or
such sovereign, there is no community, and no law, but only, as Rousseau says, two
separate and hostile powers.
All the argument about sovereignty is set up precisely to show that the govern-
ment is not sovereign. No one in government, not even a king, holds power by
personal right of his own; none has authority independent of the authority of the
governed. Their position is simply an office, a revocable trust. The people can del-
egate specific powers; it can never delegate sovereignty. I have demonstrated, de-
clares Rousseau, “that the depositories of the executive power are not the masters
of the people, but its officers; that the people may establish or remove them as it
pleases [the great democratic doctrine, and the contrary of all later totalitarian-
isms]; that for these officers there is no question of contracting, but only of obey-
ing; that in undertaking the functions which the State imposes on them, they only
fulfill their duty as citizens, with no right of any kind to dispute the terms.”^11 Even
the form or constitution of government is not absolute; it, too, is derived. A people,
for example, may institute a hereditary form of government, monarchical or aristo-
cratic. It has the ultimate right, however, to change this form of government at
will. The hereditary tenure of office, by kings, lords, councillors or magistrates,
gives them no untouchable inherited right. Nor is it the inheritance of a constitu-
9 Ibid., 141– 42.
10 Bk. I, Chap. VII, Ibid., 146.
11 Bk. III, Chap. XVIII, Ibid., 281.