The social contract & discoursesRousseau, Jean-Jacques
Philosophy
The social contract & discourses
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Economics; Political science -- Early works to 1800; Social contract
But our political theorists, unable to divide Sovereignty in
principle, divide it according to its object: into force and will;
into legislative power and executive power; into rights of taxation,
justice and war; into internal administration and power of foreign
treaty. Sometimes they confuse all these sections, and sometimes they
distinguish them; they turn the Sovereign into a fantastic being
composed of several connected pieces: it is as if they were making man
of several bodies, one with eyes, one with arms, another with feet,
and each with nothing besides. We are told that the jugglers of Japan
dismember a child before the eyes of the spectators; then they throw
all the members into the air one after another, and the child falls
down alive and whole. The conjuring tricks of our political theorists
are very like that; they first dismember the body politic by an
illusion worthy of a fair, and then join it together again we know not
how.
This error is due to a lack of exact notions concerning the Sovereign
authority, and to taking for parts of it what are only emanations from
it. Thus, for example, the acts of declaring war and making peace have
been regarded as acts of Sovereignty; but this is not the case, as
these acts do not constitute law, but merely the application of a law,
a particular act which decides how the law applies, as we shall see
clearly when the idea attached to the word _law_ has been defined.
If we examined the other divisions in the same manner, we should find
that, whenever Sovereignty seems to be divided, there is an illusion:
the rights which are taken as being part of Sovereignty are really all
subordinate, and always imply supreme wills of which they only sanction
the execution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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