Rousseau Social Contract

In On the Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he included several justifications and encouragement for a revolution against the monarchy. Rousseau named the will of the people the “Sovereign” and claimed through the social contract the will of the Sovereign is where true power of any state resides. He claimed that if the government over reaches then there would not be enough provisions to provide for the people of the state. Consequently, this distress would result in a revolution and the downfall of the current regime. He also claimed that the rulers of the people ruled only by the will of the Sovereign, which gives the people the right to remove them whenever they choose. Rousseau wrote that when the monarch takes the power from

He wrote, “All these overcharges are a continual drain upon the subjects…there scarce remain resources enough to meet emergencies; and, when recourse must be had to these, the State is always on the eve of destruction” (30). This line likely spoke straight to the hearts of the citizens of France who were poor and starving with no help from their ruler, who had bankrupted the country when he assisted the American Revolution. Rousseau claimed, “the State, set on fire by civil wars, is born again, so to speak, from its ashes, and takes on anew, fresh from the jaws of death, the vigor of youth” (29). He means that older governments “become incorrigible” and therefore revolution became necessary to bring back the “vigor of youth” in order for the Sovereign to once again regain command of the government (29). In keeping with these claims, he asserted that at times the people would need to revolt in order to renew the general will of the people, for the common good of the

He wrote, “It is simply and solely a commission, an employment, in which the rulers, mere officials of the Sovereign, exercise in their own name the power of which it makes them depositaries” (38). Therefore, according to Rousseau, the government should execute the will of the Sovereign because without the general will of the people the rulers would not be rulers. By making the assertion that the monarchy is actually put in place by the people, this gives the citizens of the state the right to remove them should they not be working toward the common good of their subjects. Rousseau wrote, “the greater the force with which the government ought to be endowed for keeping the people in hand, the greater too should be the force at the disposal of the Sovereign for keeping the government in hand.” Consequently, the relationship between monarch and Sovereign, as exhibited by Rousseau, existed as a ratio that must change at the same rate and always remain constant. If the monarch gains more power, then the general will of the people must also increase. If ever the monarch over extends his power beyond that of the will of the general public then the people became ripe for