1762

1762 was the year Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract and Emile appeared, a turning point that the book’s prefatory account presents as the culmination of his career. The political work gathered a developed theory of legitimate society and traced how the conditions that strengthen a state can also expose it to administrative burdens, institutional imbalance, and eventual dissolution.

Publication and culmination

The Social Contract was first published in 1762 in the same year as Emile. The account describes the year as a culmination: Rousseau had now given the public his views on the fundamental problems of politics and education, and his theories were developed. Thereafter, he was to write controversial and confessional works rather than extend the constructive political system presented in The Social Contract.

The book is called The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right. Its second title clarifies its ambition: Rousseau aimed to establish the principles that must underlie every legitimate society, not to catalogue the actual institutions of existing states. He distinguishes this inquiry into political right from the study of established governments and their positive laws. Historical facts, on this account, cannot by themselves create a right; the task is to ground society in principles that can both challenge existing arrangements and explain how political association may be legitimate.

The scale and strength of the state

The political argument associated with this mature work examines the relation between the size of a state and its capacity to govern. Rousseau argues that the social bond slackens as it extends and that, in general, a small state is stronger in proportion than a great one. Distance makes administration harder and more costly: authority accumulates through cities, districts, provinces, and larger governing levels, each adding burdens borne by the people. The supreme administration then overshadows the rest, while the state’s resources for emergencies dwindle until it stands close to destruction.

Territory and population must also be fitted to one another. The land should sustain its inhabitants, and the population should be proportionate to what the land can maintain. Too much territory is difficult to guard and may be undercultivated; it can produce surpluses and defensive wars. Too little leaves the state dependent on neighbors and may lead to wars of aggression. Because fertility, climate, products, consumption, and population growth differ, no single numerical ratio works everywhere. A legislator must judge not only the population present but the level it can naturally attain. These claims make state strength a question of proportion and circumstances, rather than simple territorial expansion.

Government and political survival

The work also connects political forms to the scale of the communities they govern. In general, Rousseau associates democracy with small states, aristocracy with states of middle size, and monarchy with great ones, while allowing that innumerable circumstances may create exceptions. The rule follows from the inverse relation between the number of supreme magistrates and the number of citizens; it is not a universal prescription detached from local conditions.

At the same time, political institutions contain an inherent danger. Government’s particular will continually opposes the general will, and its exertion against sovereignty alters the constitution. Without another corporate will to balance the prince, government tends sooner or later to suppress the sovereign and break the social treaty. One form of degeneration is contraction: government passes from the many to the few, from democracy to aristocracy and then to royalty. The theory therefore treats the state’s decline not as an accidental interruption of political life but as a tendency present from the body politic’s beginning.

Rome as an institutional example

The account of Rome’s early organization supplies a concrete instance of political structure responding to population and composition. After Rome’s foundation, the new republic—described as the army of its founder and made up of Albans, Sabines, and foreigners—was divided into three tribes. Each tribe contained ten curiae, and each curia was divided into decuriae, with leaders known as curiones and decuriones. Each tribe also supplied one hundred Equites, or Knights, forming a century: divisions that Rousseau regards as evidence of the system’s original military character.

The initial arrangement became unequal as the foreigner tribe, the Luceres, grew with continued immigration while the Alban and Sabine tribes remained unchanged. Servius responded by abolishing the racial division and reorganizing the tribes according to the quarters of the city. He made four tribes, each associated with one of Rome’s hills, and barred residents from moving between quarters, preventing the mingling of the groups. The reform addressed the imbalance then present while also anticipating future growth. In the larger argument of 1762, the episode shows institutions being shaped by the actual composition of a people—and the difficulty of designing arrangements that remain stable as that composition changes.