Revocability of government

The Revocability of government principle makes executive authority a public trust rather than an alienation of popular sovereignty. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account, the people remain the sovereign lawgiver; government is an intermediary commissioned to execute laws and maintain civil and political liberty. Its powers can therefore be limited, modified, or recovered, and when government usurps sovereignty, citizens are no longer bound by the compact that once authorized it.

Sovereignty and the Executive

The principle follows from the distinction between the general will and the particular acts of administration. Legislative power belongs to the people alone, because the sovereign’s acts must take the form of laws. Execution, by contrast, concerns particular acts that cannot be performed by the people as sovereign legislature. The public force consequently requires an agent to coordinate and direct it under the general will, linking the State and the sovereign without becoming sovereign itself.

Government is this intermediate body between subjects and the sovereign. It is charged with executing laws and maintaining liberty, while its members—magistrates or governors—exercise deposited authority as officials. The distinction is consequential: the people’s constitution of a government does not establish a second social contract by which they surrender sovereignty to a prince. It commissions administrators to exercise a power that remains the people’s.

Delegated Power and Its Limits

The commission is revocable because permanent alienation of executive authority would contradict both the nature and the purpose of political association. The sovereign may limit or modify the government’s powers, or recover them altogether. Government’s legitimate exercise of executive power depends on this continuing subordination; the magistrates administer, but do not own, the authority entrusted to them.

This arrangement addresses the tension that gives the social compact its purpose. The association must use the common force to defend each person and their goods while allowing each associate, in joining with all, to remain free. Its compact binds members to the general will, and those who refuse it may be compelled by the whole body. That enforcement is presented as a condition of civic freedom and protection from personal dependence—not as permission for officeholders to replace the sovereign will with their own.

Usurpation and the Breach of the Compact

The decisive limit appears when the government ceases to administer according to law and usurps sovereign power. At that point the political body contracts: a new body forms within the State from the government’s members, who become masters over the rest of the people. The social compact is broken, and private citizens recover their natural liberty. They may be forced to obey the usurping government, but they are no longer bound to do so.

Usurpation can also occur when individual members seize powers that should be exercised only by the government as a body. This fragments authority into as many princes as there are magistrates and produces greater disorder; the State may perish or change its form. The principle thus subjects both collective government and its individual officers to a boundary: executive authority is legitimate only while exercised in its assigned capacity, under law, and in service of the sovereign people.

Political Significance

Revocability completes the distinction between popular sovereignty and administration. The people’s power to authorize government does not make their sovereignty representable or transferable: deputies, too, are stewards rather than representatives capable of definitive acts, and a law requires the people’s personal ratification. The government’s executive commission is likewise not a substitute for the sovereign’s continuing authority.

The result is a conception of political freedom tied to control over public power. A government may use common force, but it cannot convert that delegated force into an independent right to rule. When it does, the difference between lawful administration and domination becomes visible in the people’s regained liberty and the compact’s collapse.