State of War

The State of War, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account, is a relation between states rather than a natural condition of enmity between individuals. That definition sets strict limits on what war can justify: people are enemies only insofar as they serve as defenders of a state, and the defeat of that state does not confer a right to kill, enslave, or rule them at will. The argument challenges conquest as a source of political authority and clarifies the alternative Rousseau proposes: a legitimate association that protects each person through common force while allowing each to remain free.

A Relation Between States

Human beings in their primitive independence, Rousseau argues, lack the stable relations necessary to constitute either peace or war. War cannot arise simply from personal contact or hostility; it is a relation between things, founded on real relations between political communities. For that reason, private war between individuals can exist neither in the state of nature, where there is no constant property, nor in civil society, where law governs relations. Individual combats, duels, and encounters do not create a state of war. The private wars once authorized by the establishments of Louis IX of France, then suspended by the Peace of God, are instead described as feudal abuses, contrary to natural right and sound political order.

War, properly understood, is between state and state. Individuals become enemies accidentally—not simply as human beings or citizens, but as soldiers and defenders of their country. A state can therefore have other states as enemies, not individual people considered in themselves. This distinction separates political conflict from personal violence and makes the scope of wartime action answerable to the conflict’s public object.

Limits on Wartime Power

The rules and practices of civilized peoples, Rousseau maintains, accord with this account. Declarations of war address not only rulers but their subjects. A foreign king, person, or people who robs, kills, or detains subjects without declaring war on their prince is not an enemy but a brigand. Even in a declared war, a just prince who takes public property in enemy territory respects the lives and goods of individuals, since the rights respected are also the foundation of his own.

The object of war is the destruction of the hostile state, not the destruction of its members. The opposing side may kill defenders while they bear arms, but once they lay down their arms and surrender, they cease to be enemies or instruments of the enemy and become people whose lives are no longer subject to a wartime claim. Sometimes a state can be defeated without a single member being killed. War, accordingly, grants no right beyond what is necessary to achieve its purpose. Rousseau presents these limits as conclusions drawn from the nature of political relations and reason, rather than from the authority of poets invoked by Hugo Grotius.

Conquest, Slavery, and Force

This account undercuts the proposed right to enslave people captured in war. The right of conquest, Rousseau argues, has no basis beyond the right of the strongest. If a conqueror has no right to massacre a defeated people, enslavement cannot rest on a supposed right to kill them. Nor can the argument be reversed: the claim to kill an enemy only when enslavement is impossible cannot establish a right to enslave. To make a captive purchase life with liberty is therefore an unfair bargain, because the victor had no right to take that life in the first place.

Even if the alleged right to kill were provisionally granted, Rousseau argues, a captive or conquered people would owe the victor no obligation beyond obedience compelled by force. The victor has not done a favor by sparing a life in exchange for submission. Since the relation between the parties remains the effect of war, the arrangement does not establish peace or create legitimate authority; it presupposes that the state of war continues. What looks like an agreement is thus not a reciprocal political compact but an extension of force.

Political Freedom and the Civil Compact

The critique of wartime subjection belongs to Rousseau’s larger account of legitimate association. The problem of political order is to unite enough common force to protect each associate’s person and goods while allowing each, in joining with all, to obey himself alone and remain as free as before. The compact’s clauses are tacitly recognized, Rousseau says, and its central term is the total alienation of each associate, with all rights, to the community as a whole. Because all submit on equal terms, no individual has an interest in making those terms disproportionately burdensome to others.

That reciprocal arrangement contrasts with the conqueror’s one-sided demand. A citizen may hold a particular will at odds with the general will, seeking the benefits of citizenship while treating duties to the common cause as an avoidable burden. To keep the compact from becoming an empty formula, Rousseau says, it includes the undertaking that anyone who refuses the general will may be compelled by the whole body to obey. This compulsion is described as being forced to be free: it is intended to secure each citizen against personal dependence, not to establish the victor’s private authority over a defeated person.

The distinction between natural and civil liberty gives the contrast further definition. Natural liberty is limited by an individual’s strength and permits an unlimited claim to whatever that person can obtain and hold. Civil liberty is limited by the general will, and civil property rests on a positive title rather than force or first occupancy. Rousseau also identifies moral liberty with mastery of oneself through obedience to a law prescribed to oneself. These forms of freedom depend on the common political framework that conquest and enslavement fail to create.

The State of War Within the State

The same distinction between public authority and private domination appears in Rousseau’s account of political dissolution. When a prince stops administering the state according to its laws and usurps sovereign power, the state contracts into a body composed only of the government’s members, while the rest of the people become subjects of its mastery. At that moment the social compact is broken: private citizens recover their natural liberty and are compelled, but no longer bound, to obey. If government members separately usurp powers that should be exercised collectively, the disorder deepens, and the state may perish or change its form.

The comparison sharpens the article’s central claim. Force can compel obedience, whether exercised by a conqueror over the defeated or by a government that has usurped sovereignty, but compulsion alone does not create a binding political obligation. For Rousseau, legitimate authority depends on a common compact and the general will. Without them, the apparent relation of rule remains grounded in force, and the political freedom that a legitimate civil order should protect has been lost.