A Clash with Democracy 93
tion that makes a constitution authoritative. The past cannot bind the present.
Even the inheritance of legality is lawful because willed by the community in the
eternal present—and only so long as it is so willed.
On particular forms of government Rousseau seems not to have felt very
strongly. He observed that in a sense all legitimate government must be demo-
cratic: it must be willed by the sovereign people. But the people may will to have
government of one kind or another. Any government of laws he would call a re-
public. He defines democracy as a state in which there are more citizens who are
magistrates than ordinary citizens who are not magistrates; he finds this possible
only in small communities, and so dismisses democracy as suited only for gods.
Monarchy may be legitimate, but he has little of interest to say about it. He finds
three kinds of aristocracy: natural aristocracy, or government by tribal elders; elec-
tive aristocracy, in which “wealth or power are preferred to age”; and hereditary
aristocracy, in which those who inherit wealth and power also inherit governmen-
tal position. The last, says Rousseau, is the worst of all forms of government; it was
also characteristic, as I have shown in preceding chapters, of almost all govern-
ments in his day. He declares that the best form of government is the second form
of aristocracy, the elective. He seems to have meant a system in which the citizens
elected persons to positions of government, and so to be talking about what later
generations would call democracy. Nevertheless, by his own surprising definition,
the persons so elected are elected for their “wealth or power.”^12
What, then, of equality? What of the gap between wealth and destitution that
he had so passionately denounced only a few years before? In the Social Contract
inequality becomes a political problem, or a moral problem so far as it affects the
maintenance of a free and lawful state. “By equality we must not understand that
degrees of power and wealth should be absolutely the same.” Power should never
be exercised except according to law. “As for wealth, no citizen should be rich
enough to be able to buy another, and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself.”^13
Here, as elsewhere, it is the liberty, self- respect, and self- determination of the indi-
vidual that are most important. Inequality is bad when it suppresses these. It is so
bad that it must be corrected. “It is precisely because the force of things always
tends to destroy equality that the force of legislation should always tend to main-
tain it.”^14 Here was a paradox, indeed, for those who held that the rich needed
special representation because they were rich; but the general idea was not espe-
cially radical or anarchic—Prince Kaunitz said the same thing to Maria Theresa in
12 Bk. III, Chap, V, Ibid., 231–32. Rousseau does also allow that election of officers will favor men
of “probity, enlightenment and experience,” but his whole discussion here gives less attention to the
problem of merit- vs.- inheritance than that of the conservative Réal de Curban, who in defending in-
heritance of office concedes that the belief that office should be held for “merit” is the “popular preju-
dice” (see Chapter III above); or of d’Argenson, who attacks venality of office because it obstructs “the
progress of Democracy” (Considerations [1765] p. 151). It must be recalled that Rousseau was less in
contact with the real bourgeoisie of France than with intellectuals, Bohemians, and people of fashion.
The Social Contract was a theoretical work, written by a déeraciné, as critics hostile to Rousseau have
often emphasized to their own satisfaction.
13 Bk. II, Chap. XI, Ibid., 201.
14 Ibid., 202.