The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
In all times there will be men destined to be subjugated by the opinions of their age, their country, their society. Someone who today plays the freethinker and the philosopher would, for the same reason, have been a fanatic at the time of the League.3 One must not write for such readers when one wants to live beyond one’s age.
Before art had fashioned our manners and taught our passions to speak a borrowed language, our morals were rustic but natural, and differences in conduct announced those of character at first glance. Human nature, at bottom, was not better. But men found their security in the ease of seeing through one another, and that advantage, of which we no longer sense the value, spared them many vices.
Incessantly civility requires, propriety demands; incessantly it is customs that are followed, never one’s own genius.
Suspicions, offenses, fears, coolness, reserve, hatred, betrayal continually conceal themselves behind that uniform and deceitful veil of civility, behind that much lauded urbanity we owe to the enlightenment of our age. The name of the master of the universe will no longer be profaned by swearing, but it will be insulted by blasphemies without our scrupulous ears being offended by them.
It is from Athens that those astonishing works that will serve as models in every corrupted age have come. The picture of Lacedaemon is less brilliant. There, said other peoples, men are born virtuous and the very air of the country seems to inspire virtue. Of its inhabitants the only thing that remains for us is the memory of their heroic actions. Are such monuments worth less to us than the curious marbles Athens has left us?
Ever since learned men began to appear among us, said their own philosophers, good men have been eclipsed.29 Until then the Romans had been content to practice virtue; all was lost when they began to study it.
Astronomy was born from superstition; eloquence from ambition, hatred, flattery, lying; geometry from avarice; physics from vain curiosity; all of them, and even moral philosophy, from human pride. The sciences and the arts therefore owe their birth to our vices. We would be in less doubt regarding their advantages if they owed it to our virtues.
Who, in a word, would want to spend his life in sterile contemplation if each person, consulting only the duties of man and the needs of nature, had time only for the fatherland, the unfortunate, and his friends? Are we then destined to die fastened to the edge of the well into which the truth has withdrawn?34
In politics, as in morals, it is a great evil not to do good, and every useless citizen can be regarded as a pernicious man.
The misuse of time is a great evil. Other evils still worse accompany the letters and the arts. One of them is luxury, born like them from men’s idleness and vanity. Luxury rarely proceeds without the sciences and the arts, and never do they proceed without it.
The ancient politicians spoke constantly of morals and virtue; ours speak only of commerce and money.37 One will tell you that a man in a given land is worth the sum for which he would be sold in Algiers. Another, working through this calculation, will discover countries in which a man is not worth anything, and others in which he is worth less than nothing.38 They evaluate men like herds of cattle. According to them, a man is worth to the state only what he consumes in it. Thus, a Sybarite might well be worth thirty Lacedaemonians. Let one guess, then, which of these two republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was subjugated by a handful of peasants and which made Asia tremble.39
Let our politicians deign to suspend their calculations in order to reflect on these examples, and let them learn for once that with money one has everything, save morals and citizens.
When innocent and virtuous men enjoyed having the gods as witnesses of their actions, they lived together in the same huts. But soon, becoming wicked, they grew weary of these inconvenient spectators and relegated them to magnificent temples.
When the Goths ravaged Greece, all the libraries were saved from being burned only by that opinion, spread by one of them, that they should let their enemies keep belongings so well suited to deterring them from military training and to amusing them with idle and sedentary occupations.
From where do all these abuses arise, if not from the fatal inequality introduced among men by the distinction of talents and by the degradation of virtues? This is the most obvious effect of all our studies and the most dangerous of all their consequences. It is no longer asked of a man whether he has integrity but whether he has talents, or of a book whether it is useful but whether it is well written. Rewards are bestowed on the witty and virtue remains without honors.
If some men must be allowed to give themselves over to the study of the sciences and the arts, it is only those who feel they have the strength to walk alone in their footsteps and go beyond them. It belongs to this small number to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind.
But as long as power is by itself on the one side, enlightenment and wisdom by themselves on the other, the learned will rarely think of great things, princes will even more rarely do noble things, and people will continue to be abject, corrupt, and unhappy.
Once peoples are accustomed to masters, they are no longer capable of doing without them. If they try to shake off the yoke, they move all the further away from freedom since, mistaking freedom for an unbridled license that is opposed to it, their revolutions almost always deliver them up to seducers who only make their chains heavier.
It is not up to me—and, thank heaven, it is not necessary—to speak to you of the regard men of that stamp can expect from you: your equals by education as well as by the rights of nature and of birth, your inferiors by their will, by the preference they owe your merit, which they have recognized, and for which you in your turn owe them a kind of gratitude.
What is crueler still is that, since all the progress of the human species continually moves it further from its primitive state, the more we accumulate new knowledge, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all, and it is, in a sense, by dint of studying man that we have rendered ourselves incapable of knowing him.
Knowing nature so little and agreeing so poorly on the meaning of the term law, it would be quite difficult to agree on a good definition of natural law. As such, all those found in books, aside from not being uniform, have the further defect of being drawn from several kinds of knowledge men do not naturally have and from advantages the idea of which they are able to conceive only after having left the state of nature. One begins by searching for the rules on which it would be appropriate for men to agree among themselves for the sake of common utility; and then one applies the term “natural law” to the collection of these rules, without any further proof than the good they consider would result from their universal application. This is surely a most convenient way of putting together definitions and of explaining the nature of things by nearly arbitrary preferences.
It seems, indeed, that if I am obligated to not do any harm to my fellow human being, it is less because he is a rational being than because he is a sensitive being, a quality that, since it is common to beast and man, should at least give the beast the right not to be needlessly mistreated by man.
I conceive of two sorts of inequality in the human species: one which I call natural or physical because it is established by nature, and which consists in the difference in age, health, strength of the body, qualities of the mind, or of the soul; the other, which may be called moral or political inequality because it depends upon a sort of convention and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of men. The latter consists in the different privileges that some enjoy at the expense of others, such as being more wealthy, more honored, more powerful than they are, or even in making themselves obeyed by them.
Savage man’s body being the only implement with which he is familiar, he puts it to various uses of which ours are incapable for lack of practice, and it is our industry that deprives us of the strength and agility that necessity obliges him to acquire. If he had had an axe, would his wrist break such strong branches? If he had had a sling, would he throw a stone so hard? If he had had a ladder, would he climb a tree so nimbly? If he had had a horse, would he run so fast? Give civilized man time to gather all his machines around him, and there can be no doubt that he will easily overcome savage man. But if you want to see an even more unequal fight, put them face to face, naked and disarmed, and you will soon recognize the advantage of constantly having all one’s strength at one’s disposal, of always being ready for any eventuality, and of always carrying oneself, so to speak, wholly with oneself (VI [p. 124]).
Let us add that it does not appear that any animal naturally makes war upon man, except in the case of self-defense or extreme hunger, or displays those violent antipathies toward him that seem to announce that one species is destined by nature to serve as food for the other.
but I will ask whether there is any solid observation from which it might be concluded that the average lifespan of man is shorter in countries where this art is most neglected than in those where it is cultivated with the greatest care.
The horse, the cat, the bull, even the ass are mostly taller, all of them have a more robust constitution, more vigor, more strength in the forests than in our houses. They lose half of these advantages in becoming domesticated, and it might be said that all our care to treat and feed these animals well only ends up causing them to degenerate. It is the same with man himself: in becoming sociable and a slave, he becomes weak, timid, groveling, and his soft and effeminate way of life completes the enervation of both his strength and his courage.
It is therefore not so much understanding that constitutes the specific difference of man among the animals as it is his capacity as a free agent. Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impetus, but he recognizes that he is free to acquiesce or resist, and it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul is shown.
Man’s first language—the most universal, most energetic, and only language he needed before it was necessary to persuade assembled men—is the cry of nature.
They therefore expressed visible and moving objects by gestures and audible ones by imitative sounds. But as gesture indicates hardly anything but objects which are present, or easily described, and visible actions, as it is not universally practicable since darkness or the interposition of a body render it useless, and as it requires rather than stimulates attention, men finally thought of substituting vocal articulations, which, while they do not have the same relation to specific ideas, are better suited to represent them all inasmuch as they are instituted signs—a substitution which could not be made except by common consent and in a such a manner as is rather difficult to put into practice for men whose crude organs as yet had little training, and which is even more difficult to conceive in itself, because this unanimous agreement must have had a motive and because speech appears to have been highly necessary in order to establish the use of speech.
If one oak was called “A,” another was called “B,” for the first idea derived from two things is that they are not the same, and much time is often needed to observe what they have in common. In this way, the more limited the knowledge, the more extensive the dictionary became.
Every general idea is purely intellectual; if imagination becomes the least bit involved, the idea immediately becomes particular. Try to draw for yourself the image of a tree in general: you will never succeed in doing so. In spite of yourself, it will have to be seen as small or large, bare or leafy, light or dark; and if it were up to you to see in it only what is found in every tree, this image would no longer resemble a tree. Purely abstract beings are seen in the same way, or they are conceived of only through discourse. The definition of the triangle alone gives you the genuine idea of it: as soon as you represent one for yourself in your mind, it is a given triangle and not another, and you cannot help making its lines perceptible or its plane colored.
If, then, the first inventors could give names only to the ideas they already had, it follows that the first substantives could never have been anything but proper nouns.
He had, in instinct alone, everything necessary for him to live in the state of nature; he has in cultivated reason only what is necessary for him to live in society.
As a result, it could be said that savages are not evil precisely because they do not know what it is to be good; for it is neither the development of enlightenment nor the restraint of law, but rather the calm of the passions and the ignorance of vice, which prevent them from doing evil. So much more does the ignorance of vice profit these men than does the understanding of virtue profit those.50
I do not believe I need fear any contradiction in granting to man the sole natural virtue that the most extravagant detractor of human virtues was forced to acknowledge.52 I speak of pity, a disposition suitable to beings as weak and as subject to so many ills as we are, a virtue all the more universal and all the more useful to man as it precedes the use of all reflection in him, and so natural that the beasts themselves sometimes show perceptible signs of it.
he did not see that from this single attribute flow all the social virtues he wants to deny to men. Indeed, what are generosity, clemency, humanity except pity applied to the weak, the guilty, or the human species in general? Benevolence and even friendship are, properly understood, products of a constant pity focused on a particular object. For is desiring that someone not suffer anything other than desiring that he be happy?
It is reason that engenders pride,56 and it is reflection that fortifies it. It is reason that turns man back upon himself. It is reason that separates him from everything that bothers and afflicts him. It is philosophy that isolates him; it is by means of it that he secretly says at the sight of a suffering man: perish if you will, I am safe. No longer do anything but dangers to the entire society disturb the tranquil slumber of the philosopher and tear him from his bed. His fellow human being can have his throat slit with impunity beneath his window; he has only to put his hands over his ears and argue with himself a bit to keep nature, which rebels within him, from making him identify with the person being assassinated. Savage man does not have this admirable talent, and, for want of wisdom and reason, he is always seen heedlessly yielding to the first feeling of humanity. In riots, in street fights, the populace assembles, the prudent man moves away. It is the rabble, it is the marketwomen, who separate the combatants and keep decent people from slitting one another’s throats.
It is it that, in the state of nature, takes the place of laws, morals, and virtue, with the advantage that no one is tempted to disobey its gentle voice. It is it that will deter every robust savage from robbing a weak child or an infirm old man of his hard-won subsistence, if he himself hopes to be able to find his own elsewhere. It is it that, in place of that sublime maxim of reasoned justice, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, inspires in all men this other maxim of natural goodness, much less perfect but perhaps more useful than the preceding one, Do what is good for you with the least possible harm to others.
As they had neither the slightest notion of thine and mine nor any genuine idea of justice, as they regarded any violence they might suffer as a harm easily redressed and not as an insult they had to punish, and as they did not even dream of vengeance, unless perhaps mechanically and on the spot like a dog that bites the stone thrown at it, their quarrels would seldom have led to bloodshed unless they had had a more sensitive subject than food.
But even if nature showed as much partiality in the distribution of its gifts as is claimed, what advantage would the most favored derive from them at the expense of others in a state of things which allowed for almost no kind of relationship among them? Where there is no love, of what use will beauty be? What use is wit for people who do not speak and cunning for those who have no dealings with one another?
Along the sea and rivers they invented line and hook, and they became fishermen and icthyophagous.
The one who sang or danced the best, the most beautiful, the strongest, the most clever, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered—and this, then, was the first step toward inequality and at the same time toward vice.
From these first preferences arose vanity and contempt, on the one hand, and shame and envy, on the other. And the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.
As long as men were content with their rustic huts, as long as they limited themselves to sewing their clothing of skins with thorns and fish bones, adorning themselves with feathers and shells, painting their bodies with various colors, perfecting or embellishing their bows and arrows, carving a few fishermen’s canoes or making a few crude musical instruments with sharp stones—in a word, as long as they applied themselves only to tasks a single person could do and only to arts that did not require the cooperation of several hands, they lived free, healthy, good, and happy insofar as they could be by their nature, and continued to enjoy the sweet pleasures of independent interactions64 with one another. But from the moment that one man needed the help of another, as soon as they perceived it was useful for a single person to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, labor became necessary, and vast forests were changed into smiling fields which had to be watered by the sweat of men and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout and grow together with the harvest.
in the marginwhat of the disabled?
For the poet it is gold and silver, but for the philosopher it is iron and grain
It is very difficult to conjecture how men came to be acquainted with and to use iron, for it is not credible that all by themselves they imagined extracting ore from the mine and making the necessary preparations to smelt it before knowing what would result from doing so. From another point of view, this discovery can be even less attributed to some accidental fire, since mines are formed only in arid places bare of trees and plants, so that it might be said that nature had taken precautions to conceal this deadly secret from us.
There remains, then, only the extraordinary circumstance of some volcano which, vomiting its metallic materials in melted form, will have given observers the idea of imitating this operation of nature. Even so, they must be assumed to have had a great deal of courage and foresight to undertake such a difficult labor
in the marginExplanation of disxovering iron
But their industry probably turned in that direction only rather late, either because the trees, which along with hunting and fishing furnished their food, did not require their care, or for want of knowing how to use wheat, or for want of implements with which to cultivate it, or for want of foresight concerning future need, or, finally, for want of means to prevent others from appropriating the fruit of their labor. Once they had become more industrious, it can be conjectured that, using sharp rocks and sharpened sticks, they began by cultivating some vegetables or roots around their huts, long before knowing how to prepare wheat and before having the necessary implements for large-scale cultivation, without taking account of the fact that in order to devote themselves to this occupation and to sow the land, they had to resolve to lose something initially in order to gain a great deal later—a precaution rather far from the turn of mind of savage man, who, as I have said, has great difficulty thinking in the morning of his needs for the evening.
From the cultivation of the land its division necessarily followed, and from property, once it was recognized, the first rules of justice. For in order to render unto each his own, each person has to be able to have something.
This origin is all the more natural as it is impossible to conceive the idea of nascent property arising from anything except manual labor, for it is not clear what a man can add, other than his labor, in order to appropriate things he has not made. It is labor alone that, giving to the cultivator a right to the product of the land he has worked, consequently gives him a right to the soil, at least until the harvest, and thus from one year to the next, which, since it constitutes a continuous possession, is easily transformed into property.
Things in this state might have remained equal if talents had been equal, and if, for example, the use of iron and the consumption of foodstuffs had always been exactly balanced. But the proportion, which nothing maintained, was soon upset. The stronger did more work, the more clever turned his work to better advantage, the more ingenious found ways to reduce his labor; the farmer needed more iron or the blacksmith more wheat; and, even though they worked equally, one person earned a great deal while another had difficulty staying alive. This is how natural inequality imperceptibly unfolds together with contrived inequality and how differences among men, developed by their different circumstances, make themselves more perceptible, more permanent in their effects, and begin to have a proportionate influence on the fate of individuals.
Here, then, are all our faculties developed, memory and imagination in play, pride66 involved, reason activated, and the mind having almost reached the extent of the perfection of which it is susceptible. Here are all the natural qualities set in action, the rank and fate of each man based not only on the quantity of goods and the power to help or to harm, but on the mind, beauty, strength, or skill, on merit or talents. And since these qualities are the only ones that could attract consideration, it was soon necessary to have them or to affect them. For one’s advantage, it was necessary to appear to be different from what one in fact was. To be and to appear to be became two entirely different things, and from this distinction came ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake.
Finally, consuming ambition, the ardor to raise one’s relative fortune, less out of genuine need than in order to place oneself above others, inspires in all men a dark inclination to harm one another, a secret jealousy all the more dangerous as it often assumes the mask of benevolence in order to strike its blows more surely. In a word, competition and rivalry on the one side, opposition of interests on the other, and always the hidden desire to profit at the expense of others. All these evils are the first effect of property and follow inevitably in the wake of nascent inequality.
The rich, for their part, had scarcely experienced the pleasure of dominating than they soon disdained all other pleasures, and using their old slaves to subdue new ones, they thought only of subjugating and enslaving their neighbors—like those ravenous wolves which having once tasted human flesh refuse all other food and no longer want to devour anything but men.
in the marginLocke sounds no different than common thought today
A perpetual conflict arose between the right of the stronger and the right of the first occupant which ended only in fights and murders (XVII [p. 149]). Nascent society gave way to the most horrible state of war. The human race, debased and dispirited, no longer able to retrace its steps, or renounce the unhappy acquisitions it had made, and working only toward its shame by the abuse of the faculties that do it honor, brought itself to the brink of its ruin.
The rich above all must have soon sensed how disadvantageous to them was a perpetual war in which they alone paid all the costs and in which the risk to life was common to all, while the risk to goods was theirs alone.
Even those who industry alone had enriched could scarcely base their property on better titles. They could well say: “It is I who built this wall; I earned this plot by my labor.” “Who gave you its dimensions?” it might be responded to them, “And by virtue of what do you lay claim to be paid at our expense for work we have not imposed on you? Don’t you know that a great many of your brethren perish or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you had to have express and unanimous consent of the human race to appropriate for yourself anything from the common subsistence above and beyond your own?”
Devoid of valid reasons to justify himself and sufficient force to defend himself; easily crushing an individual, but himself crushed by gangs of bandits; alone against all, not being able due to mutual jealousy to unite with his equals against enemies united by the common hope of plunder, the rich man, pressed by necessity, finally conceived the most carefully considered project that ever entered the human mind. It was to use the very strength of those who attacked him in his favor, to make his defenders out of his adversaries, to instill different maxims in them, and to give them different institutions that were as favorable to him as natural right was adverse to him. With this in mind, after having shown his neighbors the horror of a situation that made them all take up arms against one another, that made their possessions as burdensome as their needs, and in which no one found safety in either poverty or wealth, he easily invented specious reasons to lead them to his goal. “Let us unite,” he tells them, “to protect the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure for each the possession of what belongs to him. Let us institute rules of justice and peace to which all are obliged to conform, which make no exception for anyone, and which compensate, as it were, for the whims of fortune by subjecting the powerful and the weak alike to mutual duties. In a word, instead of turning our forces against ourselves, let us gather them together into a supreme power that…
in the marginHow laws came to create status quo for wealthy. John lewis quote
All ran toward their chains, believing they were securing their freedom,
Such was, or must have been, the origin of society and of laws, which gave new fetters to the weak man and new forces to the rich man (XVIII [p. 150]), irreversibly destroyed natural freedom, forever established the law of property and of inequality, made an irrevocable right out of a clever usurpation, and henceforth subjected the entire human race to labor, servitude, and misery for the profit of a few ambitious people.
It is easy to see how the establishment of a single society makes the establishment of all the others indispensible, and how, in order to face united forces, it was necessary to unite in turn.
in the marginDomino effect. Growth patern. Microorganism. Macroorganisms. Sytems. Cancer.
Civil right having thus become the common rule of citizens, the law of nature no longer held except between different societies, where, under the name of right of nations, it was tempered by a few tacit conventions to make relations68 possible and to take the place of natural commiseration, which, losing nearly all of the strength between one society and another that it had between one man and another, no longer resides in any but a few great cosmopolitan souls who surmount the imaginary barriers that separate peoples and who, following the example of the sovereign being that created them, embrace the entire human race in their benevolence.
Political bodies, thus remaining in the state of nature among themselves, felt the effect of the inconveniences that had forced individuals to leave it, and this state became still more deadly among these great bodies than it had previously been among the individuals of which they were composed. From this arose the national wars, battles, murders, reprisals which make nature tremble and shock reason, and all those horrible prejudices which rank the honor of shedding human blood among the virtues. The most decent men learned to count among their duties that of slitting the throats of their fellow human beings. Men were eventually seen massacring one another by the thousands without knowing why; and more murders were committed in a single day of fighting and more horrors in the taking of a single city than had been committed in the state of nature during whole centuries over the entire face of the earth. Such are the first effects one glimpses of the division of the human race into different societies.
in the marginThe origin of war. Complete opposite trajectoryg from agricultural age
I know that some have attributed other origins to political societies, such as the conquests of the more powerful or the union of the weak, and the choice between these causes does not make any difference for what I want to establish. However, the one I have just presented appears to me to be the most natural for the following reasons. (1) That, in the first case, since the right of the conqueror is not a right, it could not have served as the basis of any other right, for the conqueror and the conquered peoples always remain in a state of war with one another, unless the nation, given back its complete freedom, voluntarily chooses the victor as its leader. Until then, whatever the terms of capitulation were, as they were based only on violence and as they are consequently null and void by that very fact, based on this hypothesis there can be neither genuine society, nor body politic, nor any other law than that of the stronger. (2) That, in the second case, these words strong and weak are equivocal, since, during the interval between the establishment of the right of property or of the first occupant and that of political governments, the meaning of these terms is better expressed by poor and rich since, in fact, before the laws a man did not have any other means of subjecting his equals than by attacking their goods or by giving them a portion of his own. (3) That, since the poor have nothing to lose except their freedom, it would have been a very foolish act for them to…
in the marginDefense of his etiology of society vs others
They continually patched it whereas it would have been necessary to begin by sweeping the area clean and throwing away all the old materials, as Lycurgus did in Sparta, in order then to raise a good edifice.
in the marginWhat is this story?
For to say that the leaders were chosen before the confederation was established, and that the ministers of the laws existed before the laws themselves, is a supposition that does not permit of serious debate.
in the marginHe wont even entertain the idea that magustrates came before laws
Now, since the worst thing that can happen in the relations between one man and another is for one of them to find himself at the other’s discretion, would it not have been contrary to good sense to begin by surrendering into the hands of a leader the only things they needed his help to preserve? What equivalent could he have offered them for the concession of so fine a right? And, if he had dared to require it under pretext of defending them, would he not straightaway have received the answer of the fable: What more will the enemy do to us? It is therefore incontestable, and it is the fundamental maxim of all political right, that peoples have given themselves leaders to defend their freedom and not to enslave them. If we have a prince, said Pliny to Trajan, it is so that he may preserve us from having a master.69
As an untamed steed bristles his mane, stomps the ground with its hoof, and struggles impetuously at the very approach of the bit, whereas a trained horse patiently endures whip and spur, so barbarous man does not bend his head for the yoke civilized man wears without a murmur, and he prefers the most turbulent freedom to a tranquil subjection. Man’s natural dispositions for or against servitude therefore have to be judged not by the degradation of enslaved peoples but by the prodigious deeds performed by all free peoples to protect themselves from oppression. I know that the former do nothing but incessantly boast of the tranquility they enjoy in their chains, and that they call the most miserable servitude peace.72 But when I see the latter sacrifice pleasures, tranquility, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good, so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and abhorring captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see large numbers of completely naked savages despise European voluptuousness and brave hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve nothing but their independence, I feel that it does not befit slaves to reason about freedom.
in the marginLook to acts of fighting not those of accepting as signs of how much humans prefer freedom over peace
by the law of nature the father is master of the child only as long as his help is necessary to him, that beyond this point they become equals, and then the son, being perfectly independent of the father, owes him only respect and not obedience, for gratitude is indeed a duty that must be fulfilled, but not a right that can be required.
Instead of saying that civil society derives from paternal power, on the contrary it must be said that this power draws its principal force from civil society. An individual was recognized as the father of many only when they stayed assembled around him.
in the marginBrilliant metaphor
The magistrate, for his part, obligates himself to use the power confided to him solely in accordance with the intention of those granting it, to maintain for each person the peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him, and to prefer on every occasion the public utility to his own interest.
The ambition of the most preeminent made the most of these circumstances to perpetuate their offices within their families. The people—already accustomed to dependence, tranquility, and the conveniences of life, and already incapable of breaking its chains—consented to allow its servitude in order to assure its tranquility. And this is how leaders, having become hereditary, grew accustomed to regard their magistracy as a family possession, to regard themselves as the owners of the state of which they were at first merely the officers, to call their fellow citizens their slaves, to count them like cattle among the number of things that belonged to them, and to call themselves the equals of the gods and the kings of kings.
The Indian kept his word and succeeded in doing everything he had promised. For the way in which he did it and for all the detail of the fight, one can consult the first volume in 12° of M. Gautier’s Observations sur l’histoire naturelle, page 262, from which this fact is taken.93
I begin my discussion without proving the importance of my subject. I will be asked whether I am a prince or lawgiver given that I am writing about politics. I reply that I am not, and that it is for this very reason that I write about politics. If I were a prince or a lawgiver, I would not waste my time saying what needs to be done; I would do it, or I would remain silent. Born a citizen of a free state, and a member of the sovereign, the right to vote there is enough to impose on me the duty to learn about public affairs, regardless of how weak the influence of my voice on them may be. How happy I am, every time I meditate about governments, always to find in my research new reasons to love that of my country!
As a shepherd is of a superior nature to that of his herd, so shepherds of men—who are their leaders—are also of a nature superior to that of their peoples. So reasoned the Emperor Caligula, according to Philo’s account, concluding rightly enough from this analogy that kings were gods or that peoples were beasts.11
Every man born in slavery is born for slavery—nothing is more certain. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire to leave them. They love their servitude just as Ulysses’ companions loved their brutishness.*2 If there are slaves by nature, then, it is because there have been slaves contrary to nature. Force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them.
Once one can disobey with impunity, one can do so legitimately, and because the stronger is always right, it is merely a matter of making it so that one is the stronger.
If one must obey due to force, there is no need to obey due to duty, and if one is no longer forced to obey, one is no longer obligated to do so.
It is the relationship between things and not between men that constitutes war,
War is therefore not a relation between one man and another, but a relation between one state and another, in which private individuals are enemies only by accident—not as men, nor even as citizens,*3 but as soldiers; not as members of the fatherland,23 but as its defenders.
as soon as they lay down their arms and surrender, since they thereby cease to be enemies or the enemy’s instruments, they once again become simply men and one no longer has a right over their lives. Sometimes a state can be killed without killing a single one of its members.
Thus, from whatever vantage point one looks at things, the right of slavery is null and void, not only because it is illegitimate, but because it is absurd and meaningless.
the following speech will always be equally absurd: I am making an agreement25 with you entirely at your expense and entirely to my benefit, which I will observe so long as I please and which you will observe so long as I please.