Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great is cited in two sharply contrasting examples of political power. In Macedon, Rousseau presents him as a ruler who would not execute a criminal without a public hearing and condemnation by fellow citizens; in the case of the Ichthyophages, he presents him as a ruler who deliberately altered a people’s way of subsistence to make them dependent. Together, the examples show both the civic restraint that protects an individual and the political leverage that dependence can give a sovereign.

Civic judgment and the accused

Rousseau invokes Alexander to demonstrate the importance Macedon attached to an individual life. Even at the height of his glory, Alexander would not, the text says, have dared to put a Macedonian criminal to death in cold blood without first allowing the accused to make a defence before fellow citizens and receive their condemnation. The decision to punish was therefore not presented as the ruler’s private prerogative: the accused had to answer publicly, and the citizen body had to judge.

This example belongs to a broader comparison of governments that respect their members. Rousseau sets Macedon beside Sparta and Rome, emphasizing that civic protection is most visible among free peoples. Alexander’s example is distinctive in its procedural detail: it makes the hearing and the fellow citizens’ judgment the conditions that precede the sentence.

Dependence and artificial needs

In a later discussion of luxury and political subjection, Alexander appears in a different role. Wishing to keep the Ichthyophages dependent, he compelled them to give up fishing and to subsist instead on the customary food of civilized nations. The episode connects a change in livelihood with a change in political vulnerability: a people that once met its needs through fishing was made reliant on an imposed way of life.

Rousseau places this measure within a wider argument that rulers welcome the spread of amusement, superfluity, and artificial wants because growing needs can bind people more tightly to authority. He contrasts the Ichthyophages with American peoples who went naked and lived on the products of the chase, describing them as difficult to subdue because they needed so little. The point is not simply that one ruler imposed a different diet, but that control over what people need can become a means of control over the people themselves.

Political significance

The two references resist reducing Alexander to a single political type. In the Macedonian example, his authority is bounded by the accused person’s right to answer before fellow citizens; in the Ichthyophages episode, his policy is an instrument for producing dependence. Rousseau thus uses the same ruler to distinguish protection of members from the manipulation of their needs.

Together, these brief examples clarify a central concern of the argument: public power is not justified merely by its capacity to command. Its relation to individual security and popular independence matters. A civic procedure can prevent a ruler from treating a citizen’s life as his own decision, while manufactured dependence can make a population easier to govern by narrowing its freedom to provide for itself.