A Clash with Democracy 91
of the day, where they were supreme, such as the Parliament in Great Britain,
made somewhat the same claim to absolute sovereignty; or they argued from his-
tory and tradition, that what gave legal and compelling force to law was a legal
tradition, with old charters and constitutions, inherited from the past. Rousseau,
who once observed that if God wished to speak to Jean- Jacques he should not go
through Moses, also thought that no free man could be expected to obey a law on
the authority of another. He must comply of his free will. Even if he did what he
did not wish to, paid taxes of which he did not personally approve, or fought in a
war which he thought to be mistaken, he must yet in a sense be following his own
inclination. Otherwise he would be only yielding to force; he would act only be-
cause of necessity; he would be justified in evading as much as he could, and free
to rebel at pleasure, like the nobles of Poland.
The Social Contract was therefore a quest for rightful authority, for a form of
state in which obedience would turn into duty, while all the while an ethical phi-
losophy stressing individual liberty was preserved. Rousseau could find no place to
locate this final authority except in the community itself. Those who obey must in
the last analysis command. The subject must, in the end, be the sovereign—another
of the famous “paradoxes” of Rousseau.
But what was the community? Before studying the act by which a people sets
up a government, says Rousseau, “it would be well to examine the act by which a
people is a people; for this act, being necessarily anterior to the other, is the true
foundation of society.”^7 This act or agreement, “by which a people is a people,” was
in Rousseau’s thought the one act that must be unanimous. On other and lesser
questions there would be a majority and a minority. But why should a minority be
bound to accept majority rule? Later generations, fearful of the domination of
minorities by majorities, have often missed the force of this question, which, how-
ever, was by no means academic in the real history of Europe, where the right of
minorities to ignore government, or rebel against it, had more than once led to
ruin. It is right and necessary, according to Rousseau, for a minority to accept ma-
jority ruling, so long as they both agree (are “unanimous”) that they constitute a
people. If there is no such agreement there is no people, and no majority and mi-
nority, but only separate and hostile powers. To put it in another way, those who do
not share in this agreement are not members of the people at all.
The “social contract” is this act by which a people is a people. It is an association
“which protects the person and property of each associate by the common force,
and in which each, uniting with all, obeys only himself and remains as free as he
was before.”^8 And Rousseau, amplifying this idea, conjures up some of the key
words of the coming generation (the italics are his): “This public person, thus
formed by the union of all, took in former times the name of city, and is now
known as the republic or body politic, which is called by its members the state when
it is passive, the sovereign when it is active, and a power when compared to others
of its kind. As for the associates, they take collectively the name of people, and in-
7 Contrat social, Bk. I, Chap. V, ed. G. Beaulavon, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1914), 136.
8 Bk. I, Chap. VI, Ibid., 138.