[1] _Contrat Social_, bk. II., ch. v. [2] Bk. II., ch. v. 5. We will now examine the real nature of his solution. For the historical fiction of a social contract, he substitutes, in answer to the problem formulated above (see section 3, end), the conditions which constitute a “people” or commonwealth. He speaks, indeed, of the “act” or “contract” which constitutes it--a survival of the language which belongs to the fiction. [1] But it is plain, even if he had not said so distinctly in the first chapter, that he is dealing not with an act in historical time, but with the essential nature of a social body. The “clauses of the contract,” he explains, are dependent on “the nature of the act”; they are implicit and universal--that is to say, not capable of being affected by any actual or supposed agreement in contravention of what the essence of a body politic requires. He is, as he has clearly said in the previous chapter, analysing the “act” “by which a people is a people,” _i.e._ the conditions of political unity. [1] _Contrat Social_, bk. II., ch. v. The “clauses of the contract” then reduce themselves to a single one, “the total alienation of each associated member, with all his rights, (the language is moulded by the fiction of an actual contract and pre-social rights,) to the community as a whole.” The community as a whole is therefore absolute. The subsequent passage, referred to above, [1] in which he speaks as if individual rights were retained, is a case of the vacillation on which we have remarked. [1] P. 90. {92} The essence of this “social pact” is further reducible to the following formula: “Each of us puts into the common stock his person and his entire powers under the supreme direction of the general will: and we further receive each individual as an indivisible member of the whole.” “Instantaneously, in place of the particular person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly has voices, which receives from this same act its unity, its common self (_son moi commun_), its life, and its will. This public person which thus forms itself, by the union of all the others, used to take the name of city, [1] and now takes that of republic or body politic, which is called by its members State when it is passive, Sovereign when it is active, Power when comparing it with others.” [1] Rousseau’s footnote _in loc_. “The true sense of this word is almost entirely effaced among the moderns; most of them take a town for a city, and a townsman for a citizen. They are not aware that the houses make the town, but the citizens make the city.”