Rousseau is discussing in chapter vii. the guarantees which exist for a fulfilment of obligations by the sovereign (or whole) to its members and by the members to the sovereign respectively. As regards the obligation of the sovereign to its members, he runs straight into the fallacy referred to in ch. I. He contends, that is to say, that the whole is necessarily, by its constitution, that which it ought to be, and being composed of all the individuals can have no interest opposite to theirs as a whole, while, _qua_ sovereign, it is debarred from any such special [1] action as might be hurtful to any single individual. This presupposes that the whole always acts according to its idea as a whole, and neither is “captured” by individual interests nor transgresses the limits set to its action by restriction to true public concerns. But if this were so, the State would be perfectly wise and {95} good; and we do not need to be told that a State, _qua_ wise and good, could do no injustice to its members. The whole is of course liable to vices correlative to those which Rousseau is about to guard against when they arise in the individual. [1] See below, p. 112. And his view of individual disloyalty is decisive as to the vitality of his conception of political unity. “Indeed,” he says, “each individual may, as a man, have a particular will contrary to or unlike the general will which he has as citizen; his particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest; his absolute and naturally independent existence may make him regard what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which would be less injurious to others than its payment is burdensome to himself; and considering the moral person which constitutes the State as an abstraction (_être de raison_) because it is not a man, he would enjoy the rights of the citizen without consenting to fulfil the duties of the subject--an injustice the progress of which would cause the ruin of the body politic.” “In order, then, that the social pact may not be a vain formula, it tacitly includes the covenant, which alone can confer binding force on the others, that whoever shall refuse to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free.”