Jean-Jacques Rousseau · Complete work
Part Two, 3
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C’est ainsi que les plus puissants ou les plus misérables, se faisant de leur force ou de leurs besoins une sorte de droit au bien d’autrui, équivalent, selon eux, à celui de propriété, l’égalité rompue fut suivie du plus affreux désordre: c’est ainsi que les usurpations des riches, les brigandages des pauvres, les passions effrénées de tous étouffant la pitié naturelle, et la voix encore faible de la justice, rendirent les hommes avares, ambitieux et méchants. Il s’élevait entre le droit du plus fort et le droit du premier occupant un conflit perpétuel qui ne se terminait que par des combats et des meurtres (Note 17). La société naissante fit place au plus horrible état de guerre: le genre humain avili et désolé, ne pouvant plus retourner sur ses pas ni renoncer aux acquisitions malheureuses qu’il avait faites et ne travaillant qu’à sa honte, par l’abus des facultés qui l’honorent, se mit lui-même à la veille de sa ruine.
Attonitus novitate mali, divesque miserque,
Effugere optat opes, et quoe modò voverat, odit.
Il n’est pas possible que les hommes n’aient fait enfin des réflexions sur une situation aussi misérable, et sur les calamités dont ils étaient accablés. Les riches surtout durent bientôt sentir combien leur était désavantageuse une guerre perpétuelle dont ils faisaient seuls tous les frais et dans laquelle le risque de la vie était commun et celui des biens, particulier. D’ailleurs, quelque couleur qu’ils pussent donner à leurs usurpations, ils sentaient assez qu’elles n’étaient établies que sur un droit précaire et abusif et que n’ayant été acquises que par la force, la force pouvait les leur ôter sans qu’ils eussent raison de s’en plaindre. Ceux mêmes que la seule industrie avait enrichis ne pouvaient guère fonder leur propriété sur de meilleurs titres. Ils avaient beau dire: C’est moi qui ai bâti ce mur; j’ai gagné ce terrain par mon travail. Qui vous a donné les alignements, leur pouvait-on répondre, et en vertu de quoi prétendez-vous être payé à nos dépens d’un travail que nous ne vous avons point imposé? Ignorez-vous qu’une multitude de vos frères périt, ou souffre du besoin de ce que vous avez de trop, et qu’il vous fallait un consentement exprès et unanime du genre humain pour vous approprier sur la subsistance commune tout ce qui allait au-delà de la vôtre? Destitué de raisons valables pour se justifier, et de forces suffisantes pour se défendre; écrasant facilement un particulier, mais écrasé lui-même par des troupes de bandits, seul contre tous, et ne pouvant à cause des jalousies mutuelles s’unir avec ses égaux contre des ennemis unis par l’espoir commun du pillage, le riche, pressé par la nécessité, conçut enfin le projet le plus réfléchi qui soit jamais entré dans l’esprit humain; ce fut d’employer en sa faveur les forces mêmes de ceux qui l’attaquaient, de faire ses défenseurs de ses adversaires, de leur inspirer d’autres maximes, et de leur donner d’autres institutions qui lui fussent aussi favorables que le droit naturel lui était contraire.
Dans cette vue, après avoir exposé à ses voisins l’horreur d’une situation qui les armait tous les uns contre les autres, qui leur rendait leurs possessions aussi onéreuses que leurs besoins, et où nul ne trouvait sa sûreté ni dans la pauvreté ni dans la richesse, il inventa aisément des raisons spécieuses pour les amener à son but. « Unissons-nous, leur dit-il, pour garantir de l’oppression les faibles, contenir les ambitieux, et assurer à chacun la possession de ce qui lui appartient. Instituons des règlements de justice et de paix auxquels tous soient obligés de se conformer, qui ne fassent acception de personne, et qui réparent en quelque sorte les caprices de la fortune en soumettant également le puissant et le faible à des devoirs mutuels. En un mot, au lieu de tourner nos forces contre nous-mêmes, rassemblons-les en un pouvoir suprême qui nous gouverne selon de sages lois, qui protège et défende tous les membres de l’association, repousse les ennemis communs et nous maintienne dans une concorde éternelle. »
Il en fallut beaucoup moins que l’équivalent de ce discours pour entraîner des hommes grossiers, faciles à séduire, qui d’ailleurs avaient trop d’affaires à démêler entre eux pour pouvoir se passer d’arbitres, et trop d’avarice et d’ambition, pour pouvoir longtemps se passer de maîtres. Tous coururent au-devant de leurs fers croyant assurer leur liberté; car avec assez de raison pour sentir les avantages d’un établissement politique, ils n’avaient pas assez d’expérience pour en prévoir les dangers; les plus capables de pressentir les abus étaient précisément ceux qui comptaient d’en profiter, et les sages mêmes virent qu’il fallait se résoudre à sacrifier une partie de leur liberté à la conservation de l’autre, comme un blessé se fait couper le bras pour sauver le reste du corps. Telle fut, ou dut être, l’origine de la société et des lois, qui donnèrent de nouvelles entraves au faible et de nouvelles forces au riche (Note 18), détruisirent sans retour la liberté naturelle, fixèrent pour jamais la loi de la propriété et de l’inégalité, d’une adroite usurpation firent un droit irrévocable, et pour le profit de quelques ambitieux assujettirent désormais tout le genre humain au travail, à la servitude et à la misère. On voit aisément comment l’établissement d’une seule société rendit indispensable celui de toutes les autres, et comment, pour faire tête à des forces unies, il fallut s’unir à son tour. Les sociétés se multipliant ou s’étendant rapidement couvrirent bientôt toute la surface de la terre, et il ne fut plus possible de trouver un seul coin dans l’univers où l’on pût s’affranchir du joug et soustraire sa tête au glaive souvent mal conduit que chaque homme vit perpétuellement suspendu sur la sienne. Le droit civil étant ainsi devenu la règle commune des citoyens, la loi de nature n’eut plus lieu qu’entre les diverses sociétés, où, sous le nom de droit des gens, elle fut tempérée par quelques conventions tacites pour rendre le commerce possible et suppléer à la commisération naturelle, qui, perdant de société à société presque toute la force qu’elle avait d’homme à homme, ne réside plus que dans quelques grandes âmes cosmopolites, qui franchissent les barrières imaginaires qui séparent les peuples, et qui, à l’exemple de l’être souverain qui les a créés, embrassent tout le genre humain dans leur bienveillance.
Les corps politiques restant ainsi entre eux dans l’état de nature se ressentirent bientôt des inconvénients qui avaient forcé les particuliers d’en sortir, et cet état devint encore plus funeste entre ces grands corps qu’il ne l’avait été auparavant entre les individus dont ils étaient composés. De là sortirent les guerres nationales, les batailles, les meurtres, les représailles qui font frémir la nature et choquent la raison, et tous ces préjugés horribles qui placent au rang des vertus l’honneur de répandre le sang humain. Les plus honnêtes gens apprirent à compter parmi leurs devoirs celui d’égorger leurs semblables; on vit enfin les hommes se massacrer par milliers sans savoir pourquoi; et il se commettait plus de meurtres en un seul jour de combat et plus d’horreurs à la prise d’une seule ville qu’il ne s’en était commis dans l’état de nature durant des siècles entiers sur toute la face de la terre. Tels sont les premiers effets qu’on entrevoit de la division du genre humain en différentes sociétés. Revenons à leur institution.
Je sais que plusieurs ont donné d’autres origines aux sociétés politiques, comme les conquêtes du plus puissant ou l’union des faibles, et le choix entre ces causes est indifférent à ce que je veux établir: cependant celle que je viens d’exposer me paraît la plus naturelle par les raisons suivantes: 1. Que dans le premier cas, le droit de conquête n’étant point un droit n’en a pu fonder aucun autre, le conquérant et les peuples conquis restant toujours entre eux dans l’état de guerre, à moins que la nation remise en pleine liberté ne choisisse volontairement son vainqueur pour son chef. Jusque-là, quelques capitulations qu’on ait faites, comme elles n’ont été fondées que sur la violence, et que par conséquent elles sont nulles par le fait même, il ne peut y avoir dans cette hypothèse ni véritable société, ni corps politique, ni d’autre loi que celle du plus fort. 2. Que ces mots de fort et de faible sont équivoques dans le second cas; que dans l’intervalle qui se trouve entre l’établissement du droit de propriété ou de premier occupant, et celui des gouvernements politiques, le sens de ces termes est mieux rendu par ceux de pauvre et de riche, parce qu’en effet un homme n’avait point avant les lois d’autre moyen d’assujettir ses égaux qu’en attaquant leur bien, ou leur faisant quelque part du sien. 3. Que les pauvres n’ayant rien à perdre que leur liberté, c’eût été une grande folie à eux de s’ôter volontairement le seul bien qui leur restait pour ne rien gagner en échange; qu’au contraire les riches étant, pour ainsi dire, sensibles dans toutes les parties de leurs biens, il était beaucoup plus aisé de leur faire du mal, qu’ils avaient par conséquent plus de précautions à prendre pour s’en garantir et qu’enfin il est raisonnable de croire qu’une chose a été inventée par ceux à qui elle est utile plutôt que par ceux à qui elle fait du tort.
Le gouvernement naissant n’eut point une forme constante et régulière. Le défaut de philosophie et d’expérience ne laissait apercevoir que les inconvénients présents, et l’on ne songeait à remédier aux autres qu’à mesure qu’ils se présentaient. Malgré tous les travaux des plus sages législateurs, l’état politique demeura toujours imparfait, parce qu’il était presque l’ouvrage du hasard, et que, mal commencé, le temps en découvrant les défauts et suggérant des remèdes, ne put jamais réparer les vices de la constitution. On raccommodait sans cesse, au lieu qu’il eût fallu commencer par nettoyer l’aire et écarter tous les vieux matériaux, comme fit Lycurgue à Sparte, pour élever ensuite un bon édifice. La société ne consista d’abord qu’en quelques conventions générales que tous les particuliers s’engageaient à observer et dont la communauté se rendait garante envers chacun d’eux. Il fallut que l’expérience montrât combien une pareille constitution était faible, et combien il était facile aux infracteurs d’éviter la conviction ou le châtiment des fautes dont le public seul devait être le témoin et le juge; il fallut que la loi fût éludée de mille manières; il fallut que les inconvénients et les désordres se multipliassent continuellement, pour qu’on songeât enfin à confier à des particuliers le dangereux dépôt de l’autorité publique et qu’on commît à des magistrats le soin de faire observer les délibérations du peuple: car de dire que les chefs furent choisis avant que la confédération fût faite et que les ministres des lois existèrent avant les lois mêmes, c’est une supposition qu’il n’est pas permis de combattre sérieusement.
Il ne serait pas plus raisonnable de croire que les peuples se sont d’abord jetés entre les bras d’un maître absolu, sans conditions et sans retour, et que le premier moyen de pourvoir à la sûreté commune qu’aient imaginé des hommes fiers et indomptés a été de se précipiter dans l’esclavage. En effet, pourquoi se sont-ils donné des supérieurs, si ce n’est pour les défendre contre l’oppression, et protéger leurs biens, leurs libertés, et leurs vies, qui sont, pour ainsi dire, les éléments constitutifs de leur être? Or, dans les relations d’homme à homme, le pis qui puisse arriver à l’un étant de se voir à la discrétion de l’autre, n’eût-il pas été contre le bon sens de commencer par se dépouiller entre les mains d’un chef des seules choses pour la conservation desquelles ils avaient besoin de son secours? Quel équivalent eût-il pu leur offrir pour la concession d’un si beau droit; et, s’il eût osé l’exiger sous le prétexte de les défendre, n’eût-il pas aussitôt reçu la réponse de l’apologue: Que nous fera de plus l’ennemi? Il est donc incontestable, et c’est la maxime fondamentale de tout le droit politique, que les peuples se sont donné des chefs pour défendre leur liberté et non pour les asservir. Si nous avons un prince, disait Pline à Trajan, c’est afin qu’il nous préserve d’avoir un maître.
Les politiques font sur l’amour de la liberté les mêmes sophismes que les philosophes ont faits sur l’état de nature; par les choses qu’ils voient ils jugent des choses très différentes qu’ils n’ont pas vues et ils attribuent aux hommes un penchant naturel à la servitude par la patience avec laquelle ceux qu’ils ont sous les yeux supportent la leur, sans songer qu’il en est de la liberté comme de l’innocence et de la vertu, dont on ne sent le prix qu’autant qu’on en jouit soi-même et dont le goût se perd sitôt qu’on les a perdues. Je connais les délices de ton pays, disait Brasidas à un satrape qui comparait la vie de Sparte à celle de Persépolis, mais tu ne peux connaître les plaisirs du mien.
Comme un coursier indompté hérisse ses crins, frappe la terre du pied et se débat impétueusement à la seule approche du mors, tandis qu’un cheval dressé souffre patiemment la verge et l’éperon, l’homme barbare ne plie point sa tête au joug que l’homme civilisé porte sans murmure, et il préfère la plus orageuse liberté à un assujettissement tranquille. Ce n’est donc pas par l’avilissement des peuples asservis qu’il faut juger des dispositions naturelles de l’homme pour ou contre la servitude, mais par les prodiges qu’ont faits tous les peuples libres pour se garantir de l’oppression. Je sais que les premiers ne font que vanter sans cesse la paix et le repos dont ils jouissent dans leurs fers, et que miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant; mais quand je vois les autres sacrifier les plaisirs, le repos, la richesse, la puissance et la vie même à la conservation de ce seul bien si dédaigné de ceux qui l’ont perdu; quand je vois des animaux nés libres et abhorrant la captivité se briser la tête contre les barreaux de leur prison, quand je vois des multitudes de sauvages tout nus mépriser les voluptés européennes et braver la faim, le feu, le fer et la mort pour ne conserver que leur indépendance, je sens que ce n’est pas à des esclaves qu’il appartient de raisonner de liberté.
Musean translation
Mouseia’s complete machine-assisted Musean translation, made directly from the complete French text (dedicatory epistle, preface, both parts and the notes) for fidelity, the author’s force and cadence, and modern clarity.
Thus the most powerful or the most destitute, making of their strength or their need a kind of right to another’s goods, equivalent, in their eyes, to the right of property, brought the end of equality and the most dreadful disorder in its wake. Thus the usurpations of the rich, the robberies of the poor, and everyone’s unbridled passions, stifling natural pity and the still faint voice of justice, made men greedy, ambitious, and wicked. Between the right of the strongest and the right of the first occupant there arose a perpetual conflict, ended only by combat and murder (Note 17). Nascent society gave way to the most terrible state of war: humanity, degraded and desolate, unable to retrace its steps or relinquish its ill-fated acquisitions, and working only to its own disgrace through abuse of the faculties that do it honor, brought itself to the brink of ruin.
Stunned by a strange new evil, the rich man and the poor
Long to escape their wealth, and hate what they had wished for just before.
Men could not fail, at last, to reflect on so wretched a situation and on the calamities overwhelming them. The rich especially must soon have felt how little they stood to gain from a perpetual war whose whole cost fell on them alone, while the risk to life was common to all and the risk to property theirs alone. Moreover, whatever color they gave their usurpations, they knew well enough that these rested on a precarious and abusive right, and that what force had won, force could take away without giving them any just cause to complain. Even those enriched solely by their own labor could scarcely ground their property on better titles. They might say, “I built this wall; I earned this land by my labor.” But they could be answered: “Who gave you the boundary lines, and by what right do you claim payment at our expense for work we never required of you? Do you not know that a multitude of your brothers perish, or suffer for want of what you have in excess, and that you needed the express and unanimous consent of the human race to appropriate from our common sustenance anything beyond your own share?” Without valid grounds for his defense, or sufficient strength to defend himself, able easily to crush one man but crushed in turn by bands of brigands, alone against everyone and unable, through mutual jealousy, to join his equals against enemies united by a common hope of plunder, the rich man, driven by necessity, finally conceived the most carefully considered scheme ever to enter the human mind. He would enlist on his side the very forces attacking him, turn his adversaries into his defenders, inspire them with new principles, and give them institutions as favorable to him as natural right was hostile.
With this in view, having laid before his neighbors the horror of a condition that armed them all against one another, made their possessions as burdensome as their wants, and left no one secure in poverty or in wealth, he readily devised plausible reasons to bring them around to his purpose. “Let us unite,” he told them, “to protect the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure to each person the possession of what belongs to him. Let us establish rules of justice and peace binding on everyone, favoring no one, and in some measure correcting the whims of fortune by subjecting the powerful and the weak alike to mutual duties. In a word, instead of turning our strength against ourselves, let us gather it into a supreme power that governs us by wise laws, protects and defends every member of our association, repels our common enemies, and keeps us in everlasting concord.”
Far less than even the equivalent of this speech was needed to carry away rough men easily beguiled, who had too many disputes among themselves to do without arbiters and too much greed and ambition to do without masters for long. All rushed to meet their chains, believing they were securing their liberty; for they had enough reason to perceive the advantages of a political order, but not enough experience to foresee its dangers. Those most capable of foreseeing abuses were precisely those who expected to profit from them, and even the wise saw that they must sacrifice part of their liberty to preserve the rest, as a wounded man has his arm amputated to save the rest of his body. Such was, or must have been, the origin of society and laws, which imposed new fetters on the weak and gave new strength to the rich (Note 18), destroyed natural liberty beyond recovery, fixed forever the law of property and inequality, turned a clever usurpation into an irrevocable right, and henceforth subjected the whole human race, for the profit of a few ambitious men, to labor, servitude, and misery. It is easy to see how the founding of one society made the founding of all the others indispensable, and how, to face united forces, men had to unite in turn. As societies multiplied or spread rapidly, they soon covered the whole surface of the earth; no corner of the world remained where anyone could shake off the yoke and withdraw his head from the often ill-directed sword that each man saw forever suspended over him. Civil law having thus become the common rule among citizens, the law of nature survived only between different societies. There, under the name of the law of nations, it was tempered by certain tacit agreements to make dealings possible and to make up for natural compassion, which, losing from society to society nearly all the strength it had possessed from man to man, survives only in a few great cosmopolitan souls. Crossing the imaginary barriers that divide peoples, these souls, like the sovereign being who created them, embrace the whole human race in their benevolence.
Political bodies thus remaining in a state of nature toward one another soon felt the disadvantages that had forced individuals to leave it; between these great bodies, that state became even more disastrous than it had formerly been among their individual members. From this came national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals that make nature shudder and outrage reason, and all those horrible prejudices that rank the honor of spilling human blood among the virtues. The most upright people learned to count the slaughter of their fellow human beings among their duties; at last men were seen massacring one another by the thousand without knowing why. More murders were committed in a single day’s battle, and more horrors in the capture of a single city, than had been committed throughout the state of nature over entire centuries and across the whole face of the earth. Such are the first effects we can discern of humanity’s division into distinct societies. Let us return to their institution.
I know that several writers have offered other origins for political societies, such as conquest by the most powerful or the union of the weak; the choice between these causes makes no difference to the point I wish to establish. Nevertheless, the origin I have just described seems to me the most natural, for the following reasons: 1. In the first case, the right of conquest is no right at all and therefore could found no other right. The conqueror and the conquered peoples remain in a state of war toward one another unless the nation, restored to full liberty, voluntarily chooses its conqueror as its leader. Until then, whatever terms of surrender may have been agreed, they rest on violence alone and are consequently void by their very nature; under this hypothesis there can be no true society, no political body, no law but that of the strongest. 2. In the second case, the words strong and weak are ambiguous. In the interval between the establishment of the right of property, or of first occupancy, and that of political governments, poor and rich better convey their meaning: before the laws, a man had no other means of subjecting his equals than by attacking their goods or giving them a share of his own. 3. Since the poor had nothing to lose but their liberty, they would have been profoundly foolish to surrender voluntarily the one good left to them for nothing in return. The rich, by contrast, were, so to speak, vulnerable in every part of their property and much easier to harm. They therefore had more precautions to take to protect themselves; and finally it is reasonable to believe that something was invented by those who benefited from it rather than by those it injured.
The new government had no fixed and regular form. For want of philosophy and experience, men saw only the troubles immediately before them, and thought of remedying others only as they arose. Despite all the labors of the wisest legislators, the political state remained imperfect, because it was almost the work of chance and, having begun badly, time could never repair the defects of its constitution, even as it revealed them and suggested remedies. Men went on patching it when they ought to have begun by clearing the ground and removing all the old materials, as Lycurgus did in Sparta, before raising a sound building. At first society consisted only of a few general agreements that every individual undertook to observe and that the community guaranteed to each. Experience had to show how weak such a constitution was, how easily offenders could escape detection or punishment for offenses of which the public alone was to be witness and judge. The law had to be evaded in a thousand ways, difficulties and disorders had to multiply without cease, before men finally thought of entrusting individuals with the dangerous charge of public authority and assigning magistrates the task of enforcing the people’s resolutions. For to say that leaders were chosen before the confederation was formed, and that ministers of the laws existed before the laws themselves, is a supposition that cannot seriously be argued against.
It would be no more reasonable to believe that peoples first cast themselves into the arms of an absolute master, unconditionally and irrevocably, and that the first means devised by proud, untamed men to secure their common safety was to plunge into slavery. Why, indeed, did they give themselves superiors if not to defend them from oppression and to protect their goods, their liberties, and their lives, which are, so to speak, the elements of their very being? Now, since the worst thing that can happen to one man in his relations with another is to find himself at that other’s mercy, would it not have defied common sense to begin by surrendering to a leader the very things whose preservation made his help necessary? What could he have offered them in exchange for the concession of so splendid a right? And if he had dared demand it on the pretext of defending them, would he not immediately have received the answer from the fable: “What more could the enemy do to us?” It is therefore beyond dispute, and the fundamental maxim of all political right, that peoples gave themselves leaders to defend their liberty, not to enslave them. “If we have a prince,” Pliny said to Trajan, “it is so that he may spare us having a master.”
Statesmen employ the same sophisms about the love of liberty that philosophers have employed about the state of nature. From the things they see, they judge very different things they have not seen; from the patience with which the people before their eyes bear servitude, they attribute to mankind a natural inclination toward it. They forget that liberty is like innocence and virtue: we know its worth only while we possess it ourselves, and lose our taste for it as soon as we have lost it. “I know the delights of your country,” Brasidas said to a satrap who compared life in Sparta with life in Persepolis, “but you cannot know the pleasures of mine.”
As an untamed horse bristles its mane, stamps the ground, and struggles fiercely at the mere approach of the bit, while a trained horse patiently endures the whip and spur, the uncivilized man does not bow his head to the yoke that civilized man bears without a murmur; he prefers the most turbulent liberty to peaceful subjection. We must judge, then, the natural disposition of man for or against servitude not by the degradation of enslaved peoples, but by the prodigies wrought by all free peoples to guard against oppression. I know that the former never cease praising the peace and quiet they enjoy in their chains, and that “they call the most wretched slavery peace”; but when I see others sacrifice pleasure, rest, wealth, power, and life itself to preserve this one good so scorned by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free, abhorring captivity, dash their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of naked peoples of the wild despise European luxuries and defy hunger, fire, steel, and death simply to keep their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to reason about liberty.
Plain English translation
Mouseia’s complete Plain English edition, made independently and directly from the complete French text (dedicatory epistle, preface, both parts and the notes).
That is how the most powerful and the most destitute came to treat their strength or their need as a kind of right to other people's goods, equal, in their eyes, to the right of property. Once equality was broken, the most dreadful disorder followed. The rich seized what they wanted, the poor stole, and everyone's unchecked passions stifled natural pity and the still faint voice of justice. People became greedy, ambitious, and cruel. The right of the strongest and the right of the first occupant came into constant conflict. Only fighting and killing settled it (Note 17). The society that was just emerging gave way to the most terrible state of war. Humanity was degraded and devastated. It could not go back or give up the unfortunate gains it had made. By misusing the very abilities that gave it distinction, it worked only toward its own disgrace and brought itself to the brink of destruction.
Stunned by this new evil, rich and poor alikeWish to escape wealth and hate what they had just prayed for.
People must finally have thought about their wretched situation and the calamities that overwhelmed them. The rich in particular must soon have realized how much a perpetual war hurt them. They alone paid its full costs: everyone risked their life, but only they risked their property. Whatever excuse they offered for what they had taken, they knew that their claim rested on an insecure and wrongful right. They had acquired their possessions by force, and force could take them away again, leaving them no grounds for complaint. Even those whose own work had made them rich could hardly claim a better title to their property. They could say, “I built this wall. I earned this land by working it.” But someone could answer: “Who gave you the boundary lines? On what grounds do you expect us to pay for work we never asked you to do? Don't you know that many of your fellow human beings are dying or suffering for lack of what you have in excess? To take for yourself from our common means of subsistence anything beyond what you need, you would have required the express, unanimous consent of the whole human race.” The rich man had no sound argument to justify himself and not enough strength to defend himself. He could easily crush one person but would himself be crushed by bands of robbers. He stood alone against everyone else. Mutual jealousy kept him from joining with his equals against enemies united by the shared hope of plunder. Necessity finally led him to the most carefully considered plan ever conceived by the human mind: to turn the very forces attacking him to his own advantage. He would make his opponents his defenders, teach them new principles, and give them institutions as favorable to him as natural right was hostile to him.
With this aim, he described to his neighbors how terrible their situation was. It armed each against all the others, made their possessions as burdensome as their needs, and gave no one safety in poverty or wealth. He easily came up with convincing-sounding reasons to win them over. “Let us unite,” he told them, “to protect the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure each person's possession of what belongs to them. Let us establish rules of justice and peace that everyone must follow. They must favor no one, and they must, to some extent, correct the whims of fortune by putting the powerful and the weak under the same mutual duties. In short, instead of turning our strength against one another, let us combine it in a supreme power. Let it govern us by wise laws, protect and defend every member of our association, repel our common enemies, and keep us in lasting harmony.”
It took much less than a speech like this to persuade unsophisticated people who were easily misled. They had too many disputes among themselves to do without arbitrators and too much greed and ambition to do without masters for long. They all rushed to accept their chains, thinking they were securing their freedom. They had enough sense to recognize the benefits of a political system, but not enough experience to foresee its dangers. The people best able to anticipate abuses were precisely those who hoped to profit from them. Even wise people saw that they had to sacrifice some of their freedom to preserve the rest, as an injured person has an arm cut off to save the rest of the body. This was, or must have been, the origin of society and laws. They put new restraints on the weak and gave new strength to the rich (Note 18). They destroyed natural freedom for good, permanently established the law of property and inequality, turned a clever seizure into an irrevocable right, and, for the profit of a few ambitious people, subjected the whole human race from then on to labor, servitude, and misery. It is easy to see how the establishment of one society made all the others necessary: people had to unite in turn to face united forces. Societies quickly multiplied or expanded until they covered the entire earth. No corner of the world remained where a person could escape the yoke or withdraw their head from the often badly handled sword that everyone saw hanging over it all the time. Civil law thus became the common rule for citizens. The law of nature remained in force only between different societies. There it was called the law of nations and was softened by a few unspoken agreements that made dealings possible. These agreements made up for natural compassion, which had lost almost all its strength between societies, though it once operated between individuals. That compassion now survives only in a few great cosmopolitan souls. They cross the imaginary boundaries that divide peoples and, like the supreme being who created them, embrace the whole human race in their goodwill.
Political communities remained in the state of nature in relation to one another. They soon felt the same difficulties that had forced individuals out of that state, and among these large bodies it became still more disastrous than it had been among the people who made them up. This gave rise to wars between nations, battles, killings, and reprisals that make nature shudder and offend reason. It also gave rise to all those horrible prejudices that treat the honor of shedding human blood as a virtue. Even the most decent people learned to count slaughtering others among their duties. At last people were massacring one another by the thousands without knowing why. More people were killed in a single day of battle, and more horrors committed when one city was taken, than had occurred across the whole earth during entire centuries in the state of nature. These are the first effects we can see of humanity's division into different societies. Let us return to how those societies were established.
I know that several writers have proposed other origins for political societies, including conquest by the most powerful and union among the weak. My argument does not depend on choosing among these causes. Still, the origin I have described seems to me the most natural, for the following reasons. 1. In the first case, the right of conquest is no right at all, so it cannot establish any other right. Conquerors and conquered peoples remain in a state of war with one another unless a nation, restored to full freedom, voluntarily chooses its conqueror as its leader. Until then, whatever terms of surrender may have been agreed, they were based on violence and are therefore void by their very nature. On this account, there can be no real society, no political body, and no law except the law of the strongest. 2. In the second case, the words “strong” and “weak” are ambiguous. For the period between the establishment of the right of property or first occupancy and the establishment of political governments, “poor” and “rich” express the distinction better. Before there were laws, a person could bring equals under their control only by attacking their property or giving them a share of their own. 3. The poor had nothing to lose but their freedom. It would have been sheer folly for them to surrender voluntarily the only good they still possessed and gain nothing in return. The rich, by contrast, could be hurt, so to speak, in every part of their property. It was far easier to do them harm, so they had more precautions to take against it. Finally, it is reasonable to think that an institution was invented by those who benefit from it rather than those it harms.
At first, government had no settled, orderly form. With little understanding or experience, people saw only the immediate problems. They thought of remedies for other problems only as they arose. Despite all the efforts of the wisest lawmakers, the political state remained imperfect. It was largely a product of chance. Because it had started badly, time could expose its faults and suggest remedies but could never repair the flaws in its structure. People kept patching it up when they should first have cleared the ground and removed all the old materials, as Lycurgus did at Sparta, before putting up a sound building. At first society consisted only of a few general agreements. All individuals pledged to follow them, and the community guaranteed them to each person. Experience had to show how weak such an arrangement was and how easily offenders could escape being found guilty or punished when only the public could witness and judge their offenses. The law had to be evaded in countless ways. Problems and disorders had to keep multiplying before people finally thought of placing the dangerous trust of public authority in the hands of particular individuals and assigning magistrates the task of enforcing the people's decisions. To say that leaders were chosen before the confederation was formed, and that officers of the laws existed before the laws themselves, is an assumption not worth seriously debating.
It would be no more reasonable to believe that people immediately threw themselves into the arms of an absolute master, without conditions and without any way back. Proud, untamed people could hardly have imagined that the first way to provide for common safety was to plunge into slavery. Why, after all, did they give themselves superiors if not to defend them from oppression and protect their possessions, their freedoms, and their lives—the very elements, so to speak, of their existence? Between one person and another, the worst thing that can happen to someone is to be at the other's mercy. Would it not have been absurd to begin by handing a leader the very things they needed his help to preserve? What could he have offered them in exchange for surrendering so valuable a right? If he had dared to demand it on the pretext of defending them, wouldn't they immediately have answered as in the fable: “What worse could the enemy do to us?” It is therefore beyond dispute, and a basic principle of all political right, that peoples appoint leaders to defend their freedom, not to enslave them. “If we have a prince,” Pliny said to Trajan, “it is so that he will keep us from having a master.”
Political thinkers make the same flawed arguments about love of freedom that philosophers have made about the state of nature. They judge very different things they have never seen by the things they see. They take the patience with which people around them bear servitude as evidence that humans naturally tend toward it. They forget that freedom is like innocence and virtue. Only those who enjoy it know its value, and once it is lost, so is the taste for it. “I know the delights of your country,” Brasidas said to a satrap who compared life in Sparta with life in Persepolis, “but you cannot know the pleasures of mine.”
An untamed horse bristles its mane, stamps the ground, and struggles fiercely at the mere approach of a bit, while a trained horse patiently endures the whip and spur. In the same way, a person outside civilization will not bow to the yoke that a civilized person carries without complaint. The first prefers even the most turbulent freedom to quiet subjection. We should judge the natural human response to servitude, for or against it, not from the degradation of enslaved peoples but from the extraordinary things free peoples have done to protect themselves against oppression. I know that the first group constantly praises the peace and rest it enjoys in chains, and that “they call the most wretched slavery peace.” But when I see others sacrifice pleasure, rest, wealth, power, and even life to preserve this one good so scorned by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and hating captivity smash their heads against the bars of their cages; when I see crowds of naked people living outside civilization reject European luxuries and face hunger, fire, steel, and death just to keep their independence, I know it is not for slaves to theorize about freedom.