Against Arbitrary Authority

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

[From Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, 1753]

…It would be no more reasonable to believe that at first peoples threw themselves into the arms of an absolute master without conditions and for all time, and that the first means of providing for the common security imagined by proud and unconquered men was t rush into slavery. In fact, why did they give themselves superiors if not to defend themselves against oppression, and to protect their goods, their freedoms, and their lives, which are, so to speak, the constituent elements of their being? Now in relations between one man and another, as the worst that can happen to one is to see himself at the discretion of the other, would it not have been contrary to good sense to begin by surrendering into the hands of a chief 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 had he dared to require it under pretext of defending them, would he not promptly have received the answer of the allegory: 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 chiefs to defend their freedom and not to enslave themselves. "If we have a prince," said Pliny to Trajan, "it is so that he may preserve us from having a master."

Our politicians make the same sophisms about love of freedom that our philosophers have made about the state of nature; by the things they see they make judgments about very different things which they have not seen. And they attribute to men a natural inclination to servitude due to the patience with which those who are before their eyes bear their servitude, without thinking that it is the same for freedom as for innocence and virtue -- their value is felt only as long as one enjoys them oneself, and the taste for them is lost as soon as one has lost them. ...

As an untamed steed bristles his mane, paws the earth with his hoof, and breaks away impetuously at the very approach of the bit, whereas a trained horse patiently endures whip and spur, barbarous man does not bend his head for the yoke that civilized man wears without a murmur, and he prefers the most turbulent freedom to tranquil subjection. Therefore it is not by the degradation of enslaved peoples that man's natural dispositions for or against servitude must be judged, but by the marvels done by all free peoples to guard themselves from oppression: I know that the former do nothing but boast incessantly of the peace and repose they enjoy in their chains, and that miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant. But when I see the others sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel that it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.

Regarding paternal authority, from which many have derived absolute government and all society, without having recourse to the contrary proofs of Locke and Sidney, it suffices to note that nothing in the world is farther from the ferocious spirit of despotism than the gentleness of that authority which looks more to the advantage of the one who obeys than to the utility of the one who commands; that by the law of nature, the father is master of the child only as long as his help is necessary for him; that beyond this stage they become equals, and the son, perfectly independent of the father, then owes him only respect and not obedience; for gratitude is certainly a duty which must be rendered, but not a right which one can require. Instead of saying that civil society is derived from paternal power, it should be said on the contrary that it is from civil society that this power draws its principle force. An individual was not recognized as the father of many until they remained assembled around him. The goods of the father, of which he is truly the master, are the bonds which keep his children dependent on him, and he can give them a share of his inheritance only in proportion as they shall have properly deserved it from him by continual deference to his wishes. Now subjects, far from having some similar favor to expect from their despot, since they and all they possess belong to him as personal belongings -- or at least he claims this to be the case -- are reduced to receiving as a favor what he leaves them of their own goods. He renders justice when he plunders them; he renders grace when he lets them live.

Continuing thus to test the facts by right, one would find no more solidity than truth in the voluntary establishment of tyranny; and it would be difficult to show the validity of a contract that would obligate only one of the parties, where all would be given to one side and nothing to the other, and that would only damage the one who binds himself. This odious system is very far from being, even today, that of wise and good monarchs, and especially of the Kings of France, as may be seen in various parts of their edicts and particularly in the following passage of a famous writing, published in 1667 in the name and by orders of Louis XIV:

Let it not be said therefore that the sovereign is not subject to the laws of his State, since the contrary proposition is a truth of the law of nations, which flatten' has sometimes attacked, but which good princes have always defended as a tutelary divinity of their States. How much more legitimate is it to say, with wise Plato, that the perfect felicity of a kingdom is that a prince be obeyed by his subjects, that the prince obey the law, and that the law be right and always directed to the public good.

I shall not stop to inquire whether, freedom being the most noble of man's faculties, it is not degrading one's nature, putting oneself on the level of beasts enslaved by instinct, even offending the author of one's being, to renounce without reservation the most precious of all his gifts and subject ourselves to committing all the crimes he forbids us in order to please a ferocious or insane master; nor whether this sublime workman must be more irritated to see his finest work destroyed than to see it dishonored. I shall neglect, if one wishes, the authority of Barbeyrac, who clearly declares, following Locke, that no one can sell his freedom to the point of subjecting himself to an arbitrary power which treats him according to its fancy: "Because," he adds, "that would be selling one's own life, of which one is not the master." I shall only ask by what right those who have not been afraid of so greatly debasing themselves have been able to subject their posterity to the same ignominy, and to renounce for it goods which do not depend on their liberality' and without which life itself is burdensome to all who arc worthy of it.

Pufendorf says that just as one transfers his goods to another by conventions and contracts, one can also divest himself of his freedom in favor of someone else. That, it seems to me, is very bad reasoning: for, first, the goods I alienate become something altogether foreign to me, the abuse of which is indifferent to me; but it matters to me that my freedom is not abused, and 1 cannot, without making myself guilty of the evil I shall be forced to do, risk becoming the instrument of crime. Moreover, as the right of property is only conventional and of human institution, every man can dispose at will of what he possesses. But it is not the same for the essential gifts of nature, such as life and freedom, which everyone is permitted to enjoy and of which it is at least doubtful that one has the right to divest himself: by giving up the one, one degrades his being, by giving up the other one destroys it insofar as he can; and as no temporal goods can compensate for the one or the other, it would offend both nature and reason to renounce them whatever the price. But if one could alienate his freedom like his goods, there would be a very great difference for children, who enjoy the father's goods only by transmission of his right; whereas since freedom is a gift they receive from nature by being men, their parents did not have any right to divest them of it. So that just as to establish slavery violence had to be done to nature, nature had to be changed to perpetuate this right; and the jurists, who have gravely pronounced that the child of a slave would be born a slave, have decided in other terms that a man would not be born a man.

It therefore appears certain to me not only that governments did not begin by arbitrary power, which is only their corruption and extreme limit, and which finally brings them back to the sole law of the strongest for which they were originally the remedy; but also that even if they had begun thus, this power, being by its nature illegitimate, could not have served as a foundation for the rights of society, nor consequently for instituted inequality. ...