“Rousseau’s theory of Social Contract in Hobbes’s Leviathan with its head chopped off.” Discuss. (1998)
The well-known remark holds that Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s The Social Contract (1762) keeps the body of Thomas Hobbes‘s Leviathan (1651), an absolute and indivisible sovereignty, but removes the ruling head, the separate sovereign person. Rousseau saw the kinship himself. In a 1767 letter to the Marquis de Mirabeau he found no tolerable middle between the most austere democracy and the most perfect Hobbism. The image fits the structure of the two theories but misses what Rousseau changed in purpose.
The Body Retained
- Total alienation. Each associate gives himself with all his rights, to the whole community (Book I, ch. 6). Hobbes’s subjects likewise give up their right of governing themselves.
- Absolute sovereignty. The sovereign is inalienable and indivisible (II.1–2) and cannot be bound by any fundamental law, not even the contract itself (I.7).
- No resistance. Whoever refuses to obey the general will is to be forced to be free (I.7).
- No rival bodies. Partial associations distort the general will (II.3), just as Hobbes called corporations worms in the entrails of the commonwealth.
- Religion under the state. The chapter on civil religion (IV.8) praises Hobbes as the only Christian writer who dared to reunite the two heads of the eagle.
The Head Removed
- Who is sovereign. Hobbes’s contract is made among subjects for a third party outside it, a man or an assembly. Rousseau’s sovereign is the community itself, so sovereign and subjects are the same people in two capacities.
- No representation. Sovereignty cannot be represented (III.15). Government is a mere commission executing the law (III.1), and periodic assemblies ask whether to keep it (III.18).
- Different ends. Hobbes’s aim is security. Rousseau’s is freedom: obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty (I.8).
- Different man. The Discourse on Inequality (1755) accuses Hobbes of projecting civil vices into nature. Amour-propre, not natural wickedness, is the problem.
- A qualification. Richard Tuck (The Sleeping Sovereign, 2016) shows that Hobbes’s De Cive already separated sovereignty from government. The two heads were closer than the remark implies.
Is the Headless Body Safer?
- Liberal critics. Benjamin Constant (Principles of Politics, 1815) warned that giving oneself to all means giving oneself to those who act in the name of all. Jacob L. Talmon (The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 1952) traced totalitarian democracy to this source, and Isaiah Berlin counted Rousseau among liberty’s enemies.
- The defence. Rousseau’s law must be general in source and object, and the sovereign cannot burden one citizen more than another (II.4). Immanuel Kant and John Rawls later built on this idea of self-legislation.
The Indian Anchor
India’s Constitution rests on “We the People” but restores the checks both theories removed: judicial review and the basic structure (Kesavananda Bharati, 1973). Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar warned on 25 November 1949 that bhakti in politics is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship. A sovereign people too can surrender its liberties.
Conclusion
The remark is accurate about structure. Rousseau kept Hobbes’s unlimited, undivided sovereignty and transferred it to the people. It is misleading about purpose, since the people’s rule was meant to secure freedom, not only security. Without constitutional limits, however, a headless Leviathan can become as absolute as the crowned one.