In this short clip from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Arthur, King of the Britons, attempts to exercise his dominion over two of his supposed subjects—peasants who claim to live in an anarcho-syndicalist commune and to have no lord. One of them raises two objections to the legitimacy of Arthur’s power that are illustrative when discussing Rousseau’s social contract theory.
Selections from Rousseau’s Social Contract are a staple in my introductory “Citizens and their Cities” class. We read most of Bk. I, and short sections of Bks. II and IV, in order to trace where Rousseau’s initial commitments lead him. Near the beginning of our engagement with Rousseau, I ask the students to pick a partner and talk for two minutes about (1) why they follow the law (if they do), and (2) why one should follow the law (if they should). The students come up with some interesting reasons, but most reasons are variations on “If I don’t, I’ll be punished.” (That the Rousseauian answer—the law is mine—is rarely given certainly says something about our political chains condition.) This exercise gets the students primed to understand the delicate balancing act Rousseau sets out in the Introductory Note. There he states his aim:
I want to inquire whether, taking men as they are and laws as they can be made to be, it is possible to establish some just and reliable rule of administration in civil affairs.
And the basic principle that will guide this inquiry:
In this investigation I shall always strive to reconcile what right permits with what interest prescribes, so that justice and utility may not be at variance.
At this point, on the board, I classify the reasons given by the students on either side of this line: interest (utility) or right (justice).
Everything we could classify as “right” has its foundation in Bk. I, ch. V, where Rousseau argues that “it is always necessary to go back to a first convention.” Here lies the origin of legitimacy in Rousseau’s account: if we cannot explain how a bunch of folks became one people, we cannot justify the exercise of power over any of those individuals. This “first convention” is the act “by which a people becomes a people,” and is therefore “the real foundation of society.” Even something as simple as majority rules requires this foundation for Rousseau—otherwise, why would those in the minority be bound by right to follow that decision?
To make clearer Rousseau’s basic problem in I.V, I turn to the Monty Python clip above. Here Arthur queries two peasants, Dennis (age 37) and a woman who remains unnamed. Let’s call her Denise. From Rousseau’s point of view, Denise raises two very good objections.
ARTHUR: I am Arthur, King of the Britons.
DENISE: King of the who?
ARTHUR: The Britons.
DENISE: Who are the Britons?
ARTHUR: Well, we all are. We’re all Britons and I am your king.
And later,
ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
DENISE: Order, eh—who does he think he is?
ARTHUR: I am your king!
DENISE: Well, I didn’t vote for you.
So Denise has two very Rousseauian questions for Arthur:
- Who even are the Britons, such that I’m subject to their government?
- Even if I am, why am I subject to something (or someone) I didn’t vote for?
Remember Rousseau’s guiding principle. If we can’t show Denise the origin of the Britons such that she, as an integral part of that people, is bound to their collective decisions, she is certainly not obliged by right to obey, even if it were in her interest to do so.
After working through Rousseau’s argument, I re-present the example, modified such that the Britons were constituted as a people in a “first convention,” and the terms of Rousseau’s social contract were met:
DENISE: Who are the Britons?
ARTHUR: Well, we all are. We’re all Britons and I am your king, [we established ourselves as a people through a social pact that involved unanimous agreement. In case you weren’t there, you gave tacit consent by continued residence].
[…]
DENISE: Order, eh—who does he think he is?
ARTHUR: I am your [legitimate executive executing the laws]!
DENISE: Well, I didn’t vote for you, [but I agreed to the social contract so I’m morally bound to follow the laws].
For Rousseau, political obligation stems from the sort of promise that would occur in the original constitution of a people from out of a multitude of individuals. Only in such a case are these collective decisions of the Britons also Denise’s decisions, and only in case of such authorship is one, for Rousseau, legitimately subject to authority. As a parochial New Englander, at this point I usually provide the students the text of the Mayflower Compact as an example of such a first convention.
One of the reasons I love to teach Rousseau is that he pushes his balancing act all the way. Students often don’t like seeing where these premises, which at the beginning they agree to as reasonable enough, bring them. Rousseau’s double commitment to devising a “just and reliable rule of administration” in which “what right permits” and “what interest prescribes” are never at odds leads him to insist that the terms of the social contract provide that “each, joining together with all,… nevertheless obey[s] only himself, and remain[s] as free as before” (I.VI). This, in turn, means that sometimes we must be “forced to be free” (punished according to law after due conviction) (I.VII). And it ultimately results in his argument that, when we are outvoted in the assembly, we merely find out that we were mistaken about the general will and that, “had my private opinion prevailed, I would have done something other than I wished; and in that case I would not have been free” (IV.II).
Students are very unsettled when they see where the familiar commitments we began with take them. Rousseau’s insistence on drawing out these consequences provides a rich landscape in which to examine with students where one might object to a philosophical argument, how to go about doing so, and what might be the price somewhere else when one tweaks an argument. One place to object might be the beginning: is legitimacy the right question to be asking after? Or, à la Pettit, whether Rousseauian “autonomy” is really the republican freedom we ought to be going for, rather than “non-domination.” We could also poke a bit at whether social contract theory produces a necessarily vague outline of what “society” is, or whether we can really do normative political philosophy well without critical engagement with relevant social science.
But in class, I tend to turn to a different place to object and to see the price paid for tweaking the argument. The outlines of Locke’s political philosophy are often familiar to many students, even if they don’t know it by name. For Locke, I likewise begin in a natural condition in which I am very free but, when I join up to be one of the Britons, I “quit” this condition and “part with [my] freedom.” This small tweak makes all the difference in the resulting political theory. For Locke, I exchange some of my natural freedom to secure the natural freedom that remains for me. Under government I am therefore less free (Second Treatise, secs. 123–124). Rousseau scoffs. Freedom is too precious—we must devise a republic such that, upon entering it, we are each just as free as before. Free even while being punished.
Possible Readings
I assign selections from Susan Dunn’s edition of The Social Contract. I am happy to share the pdf of my selections, on request.
- Locke, John. 1980. Second Treatise of Government. Indianapolis: Hackett.
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2002. The Social Contract, trans. Susan Dunn. In The Social Contract and the First and Second Discourses, ed. Susan Dunn. Yale University Press.
Sources
- Forrester, Katrina. 2022. “Liberalism and Social Theory after John Rawls.” Analyse & Kritik 44(1): 1–22.
- “Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Scene 3: Repression is Nine Tenths of the Law?” Another Bleedin’ Monty Python Website.
- Pettit, Philip. 2014. Just Freedom: A Moral Compass for a Complex World. W. W. Norton.
- Roberts, William Clare. 2021. “Do We Live in a Society?” Polity 53(4): 572–79.
- Roberts, William Clare. 2022. “Whose Realism? Which Legitimacy? Ideologies of Domination and Post-Rawlsian Political Theory.” Analyse & Kritik 44(1): 41–60.
Other Resources
- Harris, James A. 2025. “The People in Modern Political Thought: An Outline History.” History of European Ideas: 1–21.
- See also the podcast episode here: James Harris, “Hobbes and Rousseau on ‘the act by which a people is a people,’” Institute of Intellectual History, University of St. Andrews, 2023.
- Lincoln, Abraham. “Gettysburg Address.” Library of Congress.
- Mayflower Compact. Yale University, Avalon Project.
- Office of the Vermont Secretary of State. 2008. A Citizen’s Guide to Vermont Town Meeting (Montpelier, VT).
- Shklar, Judith. 1989. “Rousseau and the Republican Project.” French Politics and Society 7 (2): 42–29.
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