result was not long to wait. Before the appearance of the Contrat social, the whole tide of things both in thought and action, from the Reformation onwards, had flowed strongly in favour of individualism. Since that day-England is the one marked exception-it has set steadily in the opposite direction. Few books have a better claim to have marked a turningpoint in the history of Europe.

III

The main argument of the Contrat social is exceedingly simple. It would have been simpler yet but for one lamentable hesitation which meets us on the threshold. Rousseau was never able to make up his mind whether the Contract, which forms the pivot of his whole theory, is to be regarded as a transaction which actually happened in the past, or as a symbolic presentation of the ideal to which all well-ordered communities are consciously or unconsciously moving in other words, whether he was dealing with a question of origins or with an idea of Right.

There were moments in which he declared, boldly or timidly, for the latter alternative. Timidly, in the opening chapter of the final version; from which we may safely conclude that, if the 'convention' or 'contract,' which serves as the base of all other rights,' has really ended in leaving man 'everywhere in chains,' it was no better than a 'vain formulary,' an obligation which it was worth no man's while to undertake, and which, therefore, was presumably never undertaken.' Timidly again, in his repeated insistance that no Contract which does not provide for the 'absolute surrender' of all concerned in it can for one moment be regarded as valid-a plea which, at one stroke, transfers the question from the region of origins to that of Right.2 Boldly, in a passage of the earlier draft where we find the explicit statement that, 'in the multitude of aggregations actually

1 C.S. I. i.

2 C.S. I. vi.; Lettres de la Montagne, vi. (ŒŒuvres, iii. p. 203).

existing under the name of civil societies, it may well be that no two have been formed on the same model, and not one upon the model which I have adopted. What I am in search of, however, is Right and reason. I am not concerned

to wrangle over facts.'1

Such moments, however, are unfortunately rare. And there can be little doubt that, as he brooded over the subject and as he put his thoughts into words, Rousseau habitually conceived of the Contract as a historical fact, or, at the very least, as a 'tacit understanding' which formed the historical foundation of every existing community and which is still present to the mind, and accepted as valid by the heart, of all its members whenever they seriously set themselves to consider the origin and nature of the bond which binds each of them to the others.2

The mischief of this assumption is not merely that it is unhistorical; that it runs counter not only to such scanty facts as are now discoverable, but even to all human probability. This, in itself, is damaging enough. It is still more damaging that, thanks to a bad tradition, a great thinker should have allowed himself to be drawn off on a false scent; that an idea, capable of transforming the whole field of political thought, should have been distorted into a beggarly story of historical origins. Such, however, was the form in which political theory had come down to Rousseau from a long line of thinkers. And, ready to counter their systems at all other points, he was unable to shake off the yoke of authority in this. Few things have done more to confuse his argument, few things have done more to hide the extent of his originality, than this.

Having cleared away this obstacle from the threshold, we are now free to consider the main argument of the revolutionary book. As has already been said, it is simple enough. The Contract, the communal self' which it calls into being,

1 First Draft of C.S. I. v. ; Pol. Writ. i.
2 C.S. I. vi.; Lettres de la Montagne, vi.

462.

the 'general will' which is the organ of the communal self, and the Law which is the outward expression of the general will it is round these conceptions, themselves inseparably interwoven with each other, that all which is vital in the treatise may be said to centre. And, apart from the first, no one of these presents any difficulty which care and reflection will not enable us to overcome.

6

Identifying, as we have seen, the question of Right with the question of origins, Rousseau makes short work of various false solutions' offered in the past. The State, he argues, is not an outgrowth of the Family; for it lacks the 'natural' basis, the tie of natural affection, upon which the Family rests. It is not founded upon the right of the stronger,' nor, more specifically, upon the 'right of slavery,' the right of the conqueror to enslave those he has subdued in battle; for such claims are the negation of all Right. And, even if this were not so, they could give rise to nothing more than an 'aggregation'; they could never produce that organic union' which is essential even to the most rudimentary forms of what we recognise as the State.2 The only alternative left, he urges, is to base political society upon convention, or contract'; and that, in fact, is the solution adopted by 'the soundest of those who have written of such matters': above all, by two thinkers. so different as Hobbes and Locke.4

3

/Contract, however, is a term which may cover a variety of meanings. It was one thing to Locke; it was another to Hobbes ; and yet another to Rousseau. To the first, it was the sacrifice of some few liberties-in particular, the right of the individual to be judge in his own cause-to secure the free exercise of the rest. To the second, it was

the total enslavement of all to the will of an absolute

1 C.S. I. ii. v. ; first Draft, I. v.

2 C.S. I. v. (Fausses notions du lien social).

3 C.S. I. vi.

4 Lettres de la Montagne, vi. (Œuvres, iii. p. 202).

despot, who in return undertook to guard all from the 'force and fraud' of all, except himself. To the third, as to the second, it was the 'total surrender' of the whole community, not however to a despot exalted above the community, but to the community itself.

Or to put the matter from another point of view, to Locke it was a perfectly free contract, which might take as many forms as were consistent with retaining the maximum of liberty to the individuals contracting. To Hobbes and Rousseau, on the other hand, it was a tied contract, the terms of which were prescribed beforehand by the necessities of the case-by the need of guarding the individual from the force and fraud of his neighbours, in Hobbes' version; by the need of securing his moral freedom, of saving him from his own passions, as well as from those of his fellow-men, according to Rousseau.

What then are the conditions which, in Rousseau's view, the ends of the Contract thus inexorably impose? They may be summed up in one phrase: the absolute surrender of the individual, with all his rights and all his powers, to the community as a whole' in other words, the replacement of his own will by that of the community, of his individual self by the corporate self' (le moi commun), which he has joined with all the others to create.

And if we ask, what is the justification for this sweeping sacrifice of individual liberty, Rousseau is at once ready with his answer. By no other means can we form that corporate self, without which there can be no moral life for the individual. By no other means can we secure that absolute equality, without which there can be no such thing as individual liberty. By no other means can we shut the door against that oppression of the weak by the strong, which it is the first object of civil society to prevent. Let the individual retain in the civil state any one of the powers, or rights,' which he held in the state of nature,

1 C.S. I. vi ix.; II. iv.

and, sooner or later, the strong will inevitably use them to re-establish that superiority over the weak which he enjoyed in the state of nature: to reassert that tyranny over the weak which made the state of nature, in its later phases, a state of misery from which it was the first interest of all save the strongest-or rather, of all save those who felt sure of always remaining the strongest to escape.' Laissez faire, laissez mourir : freedom of contract is freedom of enslavement-that is the conviction, a conviction but too well justified by experience, upon which Rousseau's argument, in all but its distinctively moral aspect, ultimately

rests.

The moral aspect of the argument demands a few further words of explanation. What did Rousseau mean by his assertion that, with the passage from the natural to the civil state, the sense of justice and duty is first awakened in the mind of man; that 'his actions receive thereby a moral character which was wanting to them before'; that 'from a stupid and limited animal, he now for the first time becomes a reasoning being and a man'; 2 in one word, that, apart from the State, no distinctively moral life is possible for man? He surely did not mean that, as a member of the State, man suddenly finds himself in possession of qualities of which, in his previous condition, he had given no sign, no promise, whatever. Such a view would, in itself, be wholly irrational. It is, moreover, directly contrary to the doctrine which, as we have seen, Rousseau consistently enforces, and which, in fact, is implicitly restated in the very chapter now under consideration: henceforth justice takes the place of instinct in man's conduct towards others.' 8 The instinct of justice, that is, at least under the form of natural pity, is from the 1 C.S. I. vi.; II. xi.

2 C.S. I. viii.; a startling sentence in the first Draft (Pol. Writ. ii. p. 494) should be interpreted in the same light: La Loi est antérieure à la justice, et non pas la justice à la Loi.'

3 Ibid.