Rawls J. Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

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The Social Contract: Its Problem

§1. Introduction

1. Rousseau, unfortunately, we have to read in translation.

While a

great deal is lost, something of Rousseau’s marvelous style is nevertheless

preserved.

Earlier I mentioned that Hobbes’s Leviathan is the greatest work

of political philosophy in English, or so I think. Perhaps we can say also that

On the Social Contract is the greatest work in French. I say “perhaps” since

the Social Contract does not display the range of Rousseau’s thought as the

Leviathan does of Hobbes’s. But if we combine the Social Contract with the

Second Discourse (Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality) and

with Emile (on moral psychology and our education into society), the obser-

vation seems right. Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Constant are of the ﬁrst

rank, and splendid writers; but in Rousseau the union of literary force and

power of thought is unsurpassed.

I comment on this union of literary force and power of thought be-

cause it is so striking. One might wonder, however, whether the force and

splendor of style is a good or a bad thing in a philosophical work. Does it

add to or detract from the clarity of thought a writer hopes to convey? I

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1. In the following lectures on Rousseau I shall refer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The

First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Roger D. and Judith R. Masters

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), and On the Social Contract, with Geneva Manuscript and

Political Economy, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s

Press, 1978). Citations within the text will be abbreviated as SD for the Second Discourse,

and SC for the Social Contract. In the former, page numbers will be used; in the latter, refer-

ences will be to book, chapter, and paragraph.

2. On the hazards of translation, recall that (in 1987, I think) a Soviet announcer on

Moscow TV translated John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” as “Drunk in the Moun-

tains.” And in the early days of trying to write programs for computer translation into

Russian and back, the sentence “The spirit is willing but the ﬂesh is weak” came back as:

“The wine is good but the meat stinks.”

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shan’t pursue this question except to say that style can be a danger, attract-

ing attention to itself, as it does in Rousseau. We may be dazzled and dis-

tracted and so fail to note the intricacies of reasoning that call for our full

concentration.

I say this because I believe that Rousseau’s ideas are deep

and consistent; there are shifts of mood and no doubt surface contradic-

tions, but the whole structure of thought hangs together in one uniﬁed

view.

Perhaps the best philosophical style is clear and lucid, aiming to present

the thought itself, without side effects, yet with a certain grace and formal

beauty of line. Frege and Wittgenstein often achieve this ideal. But the

greatest German works in political philosophy—those of Kant, Hegel, and

Marx—are not especially well written; indeed, they are often rather badly

written. Nietzsche is a great stylist, but his works do not belong to political

philosophy, though his views certainly bear on it.

2. We must now try to get a sense of the questions and problems that

moved Rousseau in writing the Social Contract. His concerns are broader

than those of Hobbes and Locke: Hobbes, we saw, was concerned with

overcoming the problem of divisive civil war, while Locke’s concern was

with the justiﬁcation of resistance to the Crown within a mixed constitu-

tion. Rousseau, by contrast, is a critic of culture and civilization: he seeks to

diagnose what he sees as the deep-rooted evils of contemporary society and

depicts the vices and miseries it arouses in its members. He hopes to ex-

plain why these evils and vices come about, and to describe the basic frame-

work of a political and social world in which they would not be present.

Rousseau, like Hume, is of another century than Hobbes and Locke.

He represents the generation that rejected the old order, though it was still

in power during his lifetime, and that prepared the way for the coming

French Revolution. Established traditions were being questioned, and the

sciences were developing rapidly.

Much is known of Rousseau’s life, because he wrote three autobio-

graphical works. He was born in 1712 in Geneva, then a Protestant city-

state. His mother, whose family was of the academic and social elite, and

were therefore voting citizens, died soon after he was born, and for ten

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3. His marvelous style is also liable to spoofs, as when de Maistre, on hearing Rous-

seau’s famous sentence that opens Book I, Chapter I of On The Social Contract, “Man was

born free and he is everywhere in chains,” retorted: “You might as well say: ‘Sheep were

born carnivorous and everywhere eat grass.’” Or a recent book review in the New York

Times: “Monkeys were born free and are everywhere in zoos.”

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years he was brought up and educated by his father, a watchmaker. In 1722

his father had to leave Geneva after a ﬁght, and Rousseau was left for two

years with his mother’s brother, who put him in a pension with a Protestant

minister. He then served as an apprentice in various trades. He left town on

his own in 1728 at age sixteen, with no money, and made his way around

Europe serving as a lackey of various sorts—a footman, a secretary, a tutor,

a music teacher—sometimes working for, living with, and cultivating

friendships with very inﬂuential people, all the while reading and educating

himself, and taking ﬁnancial help where he could ﬁnd it. By 1742, when he

settled in Paris, to stay there until 1762, he was a composer (he wrote two

operas), poet, dramatist, essayist, philosopher, political scientist, novelist,

chemist, botanist—a self-made man.

After 1749 Rousseau began to write the works for which he was later fa-

mous. On the Social Contract and Emile, published in 1762, were the cause of

legal action against Rousseau in France and Geneva because it was felt they

attacked revealed religion, and he was forced to leave Paris. Rousseau’s later

years were spent in trying to justify his writing; and the Social Contract,

which was later quoted by Robespierre to justify the Revolution, was ac-

tually not much read until after 1789, the year the Bastille was stormed.

3. One way to convey the sweep of Rousseau’s thought is to note his

various writings and to indicate how they ﬁt together into a coherent body

of thought. The Second Discourse, which concerns the whole of human his-

tory and the origin of inequality, political oppression, and the social vices, is

dark and pessimistic; the Social Contract is sunnier and tries to set out the

basis of a fully just and workable, yet at the same time stable and happy re-

gime. In this sense, it is realistically utopian. Perhaps in view of its subject

and aim, it is the least eloquent and impassioned of Rousseau’s major works.

We can divide Rousseau’s major writings into three groups as follows:

(a) First, three works of historical and cultural criticism in which he sets

out what he sees as the evils of 18th-century French (European) civilization

and offers a diagnosis of their cause and origin:

1750: Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (The First Discourse)

1754: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (The Second Discourse)

1758: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theater

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The Social Contract: Its Problem

4. Biographical material is taken, for the most part, from Roger Masters, ed., On the

Social Contract, Introduction. See also Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and

Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (London: Penguin Books, 1983).

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In these works Rousseau appears as a critic of the Enlightenment, of its

ideas of progress and of the beneﬁt to human happiness of advances in the

arts and sciences, and of the possibilities of social improvement through

more widespread education. There is a conservative tendency in Rousseau,

and his contemporaries Diderot, Voltaire, and d’Alembert saw him as differ-

ent from themselves.

(b) Second, the three constructive works in which Rousseau describes

his ideal of a just, workable, and happy political society and considers how

it might be established and made stable:

1761: La Nouvelle Héloïse (which contains much of his alpine idyll of

Geneva as a rural democracy)

1762: Du Contrat Social

1762: Emile

inﬂuence in literature and on the sensibility of romanticism:

1766: Confessions: ﬁrst part completed on return to France after his stay

in England with Hume, the whole published in 1781

1772–76: Dialogues: Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques

1776–78: Reveries of a Solitary Walker

Indeed, these works are important for the modern emphasis on such

values as integrity and authenticity, and for the effort to understand oneself,

to overcome alienation, to live for oneself and not in the opinion of others;

and much else. This is a signiﬁcant part of some justiﬁcations for liberty of

thought and conscience, as we shall later see in Mill.

§2. The Stages of History before Political Society

1. As a way to indicate the background of the problem Rousseau is con-

cerned with in the Social Contract, I discuss ﬁrst the Second Discourse. Rous-

seau tells us in one of the four autobiographical letters that he wrote to

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5. This conservative tendency is illustrated by the contrast between the story of Rous-

seau’s opera, Devin du Village, with that of Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona. See Maurice

Cranston, Jean-Jacques, p. 279.

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Malesherbes

in 1762 (there is a briefer account in Confessions, Bk. 8, 1749,

trans. J. M. Cohen, 327f ) that he had a sudden overwhelming illumination

on the road to Vincennes (six miles from Paris) in 1749. He had set out to

visit Diderot (there in prison), but it was a long walk and a hot day. He had

brought along a copy of Le Mercure de France and therein he saw the ques-

tion proposed by the Academy of Dijon—“Has the restoration of the sci-

ences and the arts tended to purify morals?” Rousseau felt dizzy and over-

come. Gasping for breath, he collapsed under a tree, weeping. He says:

If anything ever resembled a sudden inspiration, it was what that ad-

vertisement stimulated in me: all at once I felt my mind dazzled by a

thousand lights, a crowd of splendid ideas presented themselves to me

with such force and in such confusion, that I was thrown into a state

of indescribable bewilderment. I felt my head seized by a dizziness

that resembled intoxication...Unable to breathe and walk at the

same time, I sank down under a tree...if everIcould have written

the quarter of what I saw and felt under that tree, with what clarity

would I have revealed all the contradictions of the social system, with

what force would I have exposed all the abuses of our institutions,

with what simplicity would I have demonstrated that man is naturally

good and that it is through these institutions alone that men become

bad.

Rousseau said that this one ﬂeeting moment of ecstatic reverie pro-

vided the aims of his writings as a whole.

2. This quotation nicely states the well-known theme of Rousseau’s

thought, namely: that man is naturally good and that it is through social in-

stitutions alone that men became bad. But the meaning of this theme is not

obvious. Indeed, there is some difﬁculty knowing in what sense Rousseau

can assert it, for it seems to conﬂict with much that he says in the Second

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The Social Contract: Its Problem

6. Malesherbes was the King’s Directeur de la librairie, by law an ofﬁcial charged with

supervising the book trade in France. He was a friend of the philosophes and often helped

them to outwit the legal labyrinth of the regime. Rousseau was on good terms with him,

and before the Social Contract came out had written him four autobiographical letters. See

James Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984),

p. 76f.

7. See Cranston: Jean-Jacques: 1712–1754, p. 228.

8. See Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy, p. 5.

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Discourse. To explain this difﬁculty, and how it might be resolved, I look at

the Discourse itself.

In two parts of about equal length, this work is an account of the his-

tory of mankind beginning with the earliest stage of the state of nature

and ending with the beginning of political authority and civil society. It sur-

veys the historical changes in culture and society and connects the hostili-

ties and vices of civilization to increasing inequality in political power, in

social position, and in wealth and property.

At the outset Rousseau distinguishes between natural inequality and

moral or political inequality. The former is “established by nature and con-

sists in the difference of ages, bodily strengths, and qualities of mind or

soul.” The latter, which he sometimes calls contrived inequality, is founded

on convention and “is established, or at least authorized, by...consent”

(SD, 101). But he thinks it obvious that in civilization, as we now see it,

there is no essential link between these two inequalities. To think otherwise

would be like asking “...whether those who command are necessarily

worth more than those who obey, and whether strength of body or mind,

wisdom or virtue, are always found in the same individuals in proportion to

power and wealth: a question perhaps good for slaves to discuss in the hear-

ing of their masters, but not suitable for reasonable and free men who seek

the truth” (SD, 101–102). Rather, Rousseau wants to show how it came

about that there is no essential link, as he thinks there ought to be, and how

it is that, as things now are, “...achild (can) command an old man, an im-

becile lead a wise man, and a handful of men be glutted with superﬂuities

while the starving multitude lacks necessities” (SD, 181).

3. Now the idea of the state of nature can be understood in at least

three ways:

(1) The juristic sense, as the absence of political authority. This is

Locke’s sense. Individuals are in a state of nature when they are not subject

to any, or not to the same, political authority.

(2) The chronological sense, as the historically ﬁrst condition of man-

kind, whatever its characteristics. In patristic thought (that of the early

church fathers), the state of nature—that of Adam and Eve before the fall—

was a state of moral perfection (so far as this is possible for human beings

unaided by grace) and rationality. It was also a state of equality.

(3) The cultural sense, as a primitive state of culture, as a state in which

the arts and sciences—civilization in its non-political elements—have barely

begun.

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Plainly these different forms of society and culture need not all be real-

ized in the same period of time. The period preceding established political

authority may be a very long one, as it seems to have been for Locke, and is

explicitly said to be by Rousseau. For Rousseau divides the juristic state of

nature into four distinct stages of culture, all of them of long duration; and

in his terminology (in the Second Discourse), the term “state of nature”

means not the pre-political stage as a whole but only the ﬁrst and earliest of

the four cultural stages.

4. This ﬁrst stage of primitive man is not regarded by Rousseau as an

ideal stage at all. It is the third stage, by which time considerable cultural

development has occurred, that he thinks of as ideal in the Second Discourse,

and is the one he regrets did not endure. In his account Rousseau draws on

several previous writers: his ﬁrst stage draws on Pufendorf; his third is simi-

lar to the state of nature of Montaigne; and his fourth stage—which is one

of great conﬂict and disorder and eventually leads to the establishment of

political authority under the domination of those with property—draws on

Hobbes, although Rousseau differs from him in important ways, as I men-

tion later.

The relevance of all this for us is in the following: Rousseau wants to

say that man is naturally good and that it is through social institutions that

we become bad. Yet when we look at the details of his account of the de-

velopment of culture and social organization and the role that our various

faculties play in it—particularly our reason, imagination and self-conscious-

ness—it may seem inevitable that the social evils and individual vices Rous-

seau deplores will come about.

In the ﬁrst stage our faculties are not developed. We are then moved by

amour de soi (natural love of ourselves) and by simple desires such as the de-

sires for food, shelter, sleep, and sex. And while we feel compassion (SD, 130–

134) for others, which is the source of the social virtues (SD, 131f ), this

stage is still one of a brute. That is, it is the stage of a lazy, unreﬂective,

though happy and fairly harmless animal, one not prone to inﬂict pain on

others.

Yet even as animals, human beings are distinguished from other animals

in two very important respects:

First, they possess the capacity for free will, and so the potentiality to

act in the light of valid reasons; they are not, like animals, guided by in-

stincts alone (SD, 113f ).

Second, human beings are perfectible, that is, they have the potentiality

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The Social Contract: Its Problem

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for self-improvement through the development of their faculties and their

expression in culture over time. An aspect of our perfectibility, which de-

pends on language (SD, 124), is that we are historical beings. This means

that perfectibility resides as much in the species as in the individual, and it is

seen in the historical development of civilization. The particular realization

of our nature depends on the culture of the society in which we live. By

contrast, animals become all that they will be in a relatively few months,

and are the same today as thousands of years ago (SD, 114–115).

5. When, however, we become distinguished from other animals

through cultural development—by language and by simple forms of social

organization (families and small groups)—we become concerned for two

things: ﬁrst, for our natural well-being and the means of sustaining life;

and, second, for what others think of us and our relative standing in our so-

cial group. The ﬁrst concerns are the object of amour de soi (the natural love

of ourselves), which, as noted above, is the concern for one’s good as given

by certain natural needs common to man and other animals. The second

are the object of amour-propre, a distinct form of self-concern that arises

only in society. It is the natural concern for a secure standing in relation to

others and involves a need for equal acceptance with them.

I stress that amour-propre has a natural form along with its proper ob-

ject, as well as an unnatural form, which has its perverted, or unnatural ob-

ject. In its natural, or proper, form (its form appropriate to human nature),

amour-propre is a need which directs us to secure for ourselves equal stand-

ing along with others and a position among our associates in which we are

accepted as having needs and aspirations which must be taken into account

on the same basis as those of everyone else. This means that on the basis of

our needs and wants we can make claims which are endorsed by others as

imposing rightful limits on their conduct. Needing and asking for this ac-

ceptance from others involves giving the same to them in return. For,

moved by this natural amour-propre, we are ready to grant the very same

standing to others, and to recognize the rightful limits that their needs and

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9. My account of amour-propre follows that of N. J. H. Dent, Rousseau (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1988), and that of Frederick Neuhouser in his “Freedom, Dependence, and the

General Will,” Philosophical Review, July 1993, pp. 376f. Dent gives a statement in his A

Rousseau Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 33–36. I am indebted to Neuhouser for

this account of how amour-propre is related to the principle of reciprocity.

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rightful claims impose on us, provided—and this is essential—our equal sta-

tus is accepted and made secure in social arrangements.

The question arises whether amour-propre, which expresses our social

nature, contains within itself, as a natural disposition, a principle of reciproc-

ity. I believe not. The principle of reciprocity is formulated and grasped by

reason, imagination, and conscience, and not by amour-propre. So that princi-

ple is not known and followed by amour-propre alone. However, moved by amour-

propre we are ready to accept and to act on a principle of reciprocity when-

ever our culture makes it available and intelligible to us, and society’s basic

arrangements establish our secure and equal standing along with others.

By contrast, unnatural, or perverted, amour-propre (often translated sim-

ply as “vanity”) shows itself in such vices as vanity and arrogance, in the de-

sire to be superior to and to dominate others, and to be admired by them.

Its unnatural or perverted object is to be superior to others and to have

them in positions beneath us.

I should mention, however, that the ﬁrst interpretation I have given

above of amour-propre is not widely accepted. Far more widely accepted is

that amour-propre is simply what I have called unnatural or perverted

amour-propre, and nothing more than that. Thus, whether it incorporates

the principle of reciprocity never arises. I accept what we may call the wide

view of amour-propre for two reasons (aside from the fact that the main idea

is in N. J. H. Dent, whose book and dictionary are recommended).

The ﬁrst reason (and I must say it carries much weight with me) is that Kant

endorses the wide view when he says in the Religion: Bk. I, Sec. 1, Ak: VI:27:

The predisposition to humanity can be brought under the general title

of self-love which is physical and yet compares...that is to say, we

judge ourselves happy or unhappy only by making comparisons with

others. Out of this self-love springs the inclination to acquire worth in

the opinion of others. This is originally a desire merely for equality, to

allow no one superiority above oneself, bound up with a constant care

lest others strive to obtain such superiority; but from this arises gradu-

ally the unjustiﬁable craving to win it for oneself over others. Upon

this twin stem of jealousy and rivalry may be grafted the very great

vices of secret and open animosity against all whom we look upon as

not belonging to us—vices, however, which really do not sprout from

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10. N. J. H. Dent, Rousseau, and A Rousseau Dictionary.

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nature as their root; rather they are inclinations aroused in us by the

anxious endeavors of others to attain a hated superiority over us...

the vices which are grafted upon this inclination might be termed the

vices of culture, the highest form of malignancy, as, for example, in

envy, ingratitude, spitefulness, andthelike...theycanbecalled the dia-

bolical vices.

It was not until I connected the Second Discourse with Kant’s remarks

here that I felt I ﬁnally understood what either of them was saying. As so

often, Kant is the best interpreter of Rousseau.

The second reason for accepting the wide view of amour-propre is that it

is required to make sense of Rousseau’s great works as a coherent and con-

sistent view. For reasons I shall try to make clear, the solution of the human

predicament Rousseau offers in the Social Contract only coheres with the

Second Discourse when we adopt the wide view of amour-propre. Without it,

Rousseau’s thought becomes all the more darkly pessimistic, and the kind

of political society depicted in the Social Contract appears utterly utopian.

The reason is that if amour-propre is not at ﬁrst, as Kant says, a desire merely

for equality, and if it is not ready, assured of that equality by society’s insti-

tutions, to grant in reciprocity the same equality to others, what psycholog-

ical basis is there in human nature, as Rousseau conceives it, to make such a

society possible? Reason and conscience alone? That is hardly sufﬁcient.

Rousseau’s overall scheme of thought becomes, indeed, unworkable. Lack-

ing the wide view of amour-propre leads us to say foolish things about Rous-

seau, such as that he is a dazzling though confused and inconsistent writer.

Don’t believe it.

6. Above I remarked that the social evils founded on inequality and un-

natural amour-propre seem, offhand, inevitable. This is because they are con-

nected with our reason, imagination, and self-consciousness. Reﬂection,

reason, and imagination can become the enemies of compassion and block

its tendencies leading us to identify with the sufferings of others (SD, 132f).

Rousseau says (SD, 132): “Reason engenders vanity and reﬂection fortiﬁes

it; reason turns man back upon himself, it separates him from all that both-

ers and afﬂicts him. Philosophy isolates him; because of it he says in secret,

at the sight of a suffering man: Perish if you will, I am safe. No longer can

anything except dangers to the entire society trouble the tranquil sleep of

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11. See Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1954).

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