Government as a Revocable Commission

Government as a Revocable Commission is the rule that executive authority belongs to officers appointed by the sovereign people, not to rulers who possess an independent claim to obedience. Government may administer the State, but it cannot inherit or represent the people’s sovereignty; when it usurps that authority, it breaks the compact on which legitimate political society rests.

Government as an Instrument, Not a Contract

The principle begins from the problem the social compact is meant to solve: how people can unite their strength to protect each person and their goods while remaining free. The compact establishes a common body governed by the general will; government is the executive instrument through which that body carries its laws into effect. Its office is therefore derivative. The people’s agreement creates the political association, while the institution of government is established by law rather than by a separate bargain between rulers and subjects.

That distinction determines the status of officeholders. Those entrusted with executive power are not masters who have contracted with the people on terms of their own choosing; they are public officers, bound to obedience in carrying out the functions assigned to them. Taking office is a duty performed as citizens, not the acquisition of a right to negotiate conditions or command the sovereign. Government can act only within the authority the people have placed in its hands.

Appointment and Removal

Because government is an institution rather than a contract, the people retain the power to set it up and pull it down. Even when they establish an hereditary government—monarchical and confined to one family, or aristocratic and confined to a class—they do not bind themselves permanently to that arrangement. They give administration a provisional form until they choose to order it otherwise. Heredity or class restriction may describe the arrangement of offices, but neither converts the arrangement into an irrevocable grant of sovereignty.

The possibility of change does not imply that every change is prudent. Altering an established government is dangerous, and it should not be attempted unless that government has become incompatible with the public good. But caution is a maxim of policy, not a rule of right: the risks of reform do not make rulers legally entitled to keep authority against the people’s will. The same principle applies whether the power at issue is civil or military; the State is no more bound to leave civil authority with its rulers than to leave military authority with its generals.

Sovereignty and the Risk of Usurpation

The people’s power to appoint and remove officers follows from sovereignty’s inalienable character. The general will cannot be represented by deputies who make definitive laws in the people’s place. Deputies can serve only as stewards, and a law the people have not ratified in person is not a law. Government therefore cannot turn administrative delegation into a claim to speak as the sovereign.

The rule also identifies the point at which government becomes illegitimate. If the prince stops administering according to the laws and usurps sovereign power, the political body contracts: within the larger State, a separate body is formed out of the government’s members, who become masters and tyrants over the rest. The social compact is then broken, and private citizens recover their natural liberty; they may be compelled to obey, but they are no longer bound by right to do so. If individual officeholders seize powers they should exercise only collectively, the breach is greater still: the government fragments into as many princes as there are magistrates, and the State may perish or change its form.

Limits and Institutional Vigilance

The right to revise government must be exercised through procedures that distinguish a legitimate act of the whole people from factional tumult. Yet those formalities can themselves be manipulated. A ruler may block assemblies needed to restore order, then present the silence imposed by fear as evidence of consent, or punish those who speak against the government. The danger is not merely open seizure of power but the gradual use of public authority to prevent the people from exercising the power that makes government legitimate.

The example of the Roman decemvirs makes that danger concrete: elected for one year, they remained in office for a second and sought to perpetuate their rule by forbidding the comitia to assemble. Their case illustrates why revocability must remain a real political capacity, not a nominal right defeated by executive control of public meetings. The principle’s central safeguard is the continuing distinction between the sovereign people, who authorize the government, and the officers, who administer under that authority.