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Among the contracts that enable groups of people to unite in a society (pactum sociale), the one to found a civil constitution between them (pactum unionis civilis) is a special kind. As far as execution is concerned, it has much in common with any other contract aimed at the joint promotion of some purpose; it is essentially different from the rest, however, in the principle of what it founds (constitutions civilis). The union of many people for some common end which they all have is found in all social contracts. But their union as an end in itself—as the end that everyone ought to have, and thus as the first and unconditioned duty in each external relationship of human beings who cannot avoid influencing one another—does not occur in a society unless it has attained to the civil state, i.e., unless it constitutes a community. The end, now, which in such an external relation is in itself a duty, and itself the supreme formal condition of all other external duties (conditio sine qua non), is the legal order (the right) of people under public coercive laws, by which each can be assigned his own, and each protected against the incursions of all others.

Yet the concept of external law as such derives completely from the concept of freedom in the external relations of men to one another. It has nothing whatever to do with the pursuit of happiness, the end which all men have by nature, or with the prescription of means to that end. There simply must not be any mingling of that law as such with the end of happiness posing as its determining ground. Law is the limitation of each man’s freedom to the condition of its consistency with everyone’s freedom to the extent possible in accordance with a universal law. And public law is the totality of the external laws that serve to make such thoroughgoing consistency possible. Since every limitation of freedom by another’s arbitrary will is termed coercion, it follows that a civil constitution is a relationship of free men who are nonetheless subject to coercive laws, their overall freedom in relation to others notwithstanding. They are subject to those laws because reason itself wills it so, pure reason which legislates a priori and irrespective of the empirical ends that have been summed up under the general name happiness. For human ideas regarding those ends differ greatly, and each man seeks them in a different place, so that their will cannot be brought under a common principle nor, consequently, under an external law consistent with everyone’s freedom.

The civil state, viewed purely as a legal state, is thus based a priori upon the following principles:

1. The freedom of each member of society as a human being;

2. The equality of each member with every other member as a subject of the state;

3. The independence of each member of the community as a citizen.

These principles are not laws given by a state already established, but they are the only laws that make it possible to found a state in accordance with pure rational principles of external human law as such. Therefore:

1. Human freedom as a principle for the constitution of a community I express in this formula: No man can compel me to be happy after his fashion, according to his conception of the wellbeing of someone else. Instead, everybody may pursue his happiness in the manner that seems best to him, provided he does not infringe on other people’s freedom to pursue similar ends, i.e., on another’s right to do whatever can coexist with every man’s freedom under a possible universal law.

If a government were founded on the principle of benevolence toward the people, as a fathers toward his children—in other words, if it were a paternalistic government (imperium paternale) with the subjects, as minors, unable to tell what is truly beneficial or detrimental to them, obliged to wait for the head of state to judge what should constitute their happiness and be kind enough to desire it also—such a government would be the worst conceivable despotism. It would be a constitution that cancels every freedom of the subjects, who retain no rights at all. A patriotic rather than paternalistic government (imperium, non paternale, sed patrioticum) is the only one conceivable for people capable of having rights, and also the only one conceivable for a benevolent ruler. For the patriotic way of thinking is that which makes everyone in the state, including the ruler, look upon the community as his mother’s womb, or on the country as his father’s land where he himself came into being, and which he must leave behind as a cherished pledge, in order to protect the rights of the community by laws issuing from the common will, not deeming himself entitled to subject it to the uses of his unconditional discretion.

This right to freedom belongs to every member of the community as a human being, provided he is a being capable of having rights at all.

2. The equality of subjects may be phrased as follows: Each member of the community has rights that entitle him to coerce every other member. Only the community’s head is excepted from that coercion. Not being a member of the community but its creator or preserver, he alone is authorized to coerce without being subject to legal coercion himself. Whoever is subject to laws in a state is a subject; that is to say, coercion by law applies to him as to all other members of the community, with the sole exception of one single (physical or moral) person, the head of state, who is the only one capable of exerting all legal coercion. For if he too could be coerced he would not be the head of the state, and the sequence of subordination would continue upwards ad infinitum. And if there were two persons free from coercion, neither of them would be subject to coercive laws and neither one could wrong the other— which is impossible.

But this thorough equality of persons as the subjects of a state is quite consistent with the greatest inequality in the quantity and degree of their possessions, whether these be physical or mental superiority, external gifts of fortune, or simply rights (of which there can be many) with respects to others. One mans welfare, therefore, is greatly dependent on another’s will, as the poor man’s on the will of the rich; one must obey, as a child its parents or a wife her husband, when the other commands; or, one will serve as a day-laborer while the other pays wages, and so forth. And yet, as subjects all of them are equal before the law which, as the expression of the general will, can only be singular, and concerns the form of the right, not the matter or the object to which I have a right. For it is only by means of the public law and its executor, the head of state, that a man can coerce anyone else, but by the same means everyone else will resist him in like measure; and no one can lose this capacity to coerce—i.e., to have rights against others— except in consequence of his own crime. Nor can a man give it up of his own accord; there is no contract, no legal act, by which he can put himself in the position of having no rights any more, only duties. For if he were to do so, he would be depriving himself of the right to make a contract, and so the contract would cancel itself.

This idea of the human equality of men as subjects in a community results in the following formula: Each member of the community must be permitted to rise in it to any status or class (appropriate to a subject) to which his talent, industry, and luck may take him. And his fellow subjects may not block his way by any hereditary prerogative, as members of some specific privileged class, to keep him and his heirs beneath that class forever.

For right consists merely in limiting everybody else’s freedom to the point where it can coexist with my freedom according to a universal law, and the public law in a community is no more than a state of actual legislation in accordance with this principle and combined with power. Due to his legislation, consequently, all members of a people live as subjects in a state of law (status iuridicus), namely, in a state of equilibrium between the effect and counter-effect of wills that limit each other in accordance with the universal law of freedom. This is what we call the civil state; and in that state the innate right of everyone is the same (i.e., until he takes an action affecting that right), entitling him to compel all others to observe the bounds within which their use of their feedom is compatible with mine. Since a man’s birth is not an action of his and thus does not bring upon him unequal legal status, nor subject him to any coercive laws other than those which he, as a subject of the sole supreme lawmaking power, shares with all the rest, there can be no one member of the community, no fellow subject, who is innately privileged over another. No man can leave to his descendants any prerogative of the status he holds in the community; nor can he forcibly keep them, who are qualified by birth to be masters, so to speak, from rising by their own merits to higher levels in the order of ranks—where one is superior, another inferior, though neither is imperans while the other is subiectus. A man may leave his heirs everything else; he can bequeath whatever is material and does not concern the person, whatever can be acquired and disposed of as property; and in a sequence of descendants, considerable inequality of financial circumstances may result between the members of a community, between wage earners, tenants, landowners and the laborers who till the land, and so on. Only one thing he cannot prevent: the right of the less favored to rise to the same favored circumstances if enabled to do so by their talent, industry, and luck. For otherwise the testator would be allowed to coerce without being coercible in turn by the reaction of others, and would exceed the level of a fellow subject.

Nor can a man living in the legal framework of a community be stripped of this quality by anything save his own crime. He can never lose it, neither by contract nor by acts of war (occupatio bellica), for no legal act, neither his own nor another’s, can terminate his proprietary rights in himself. No such act can put him into the class of domestic animals which we use at will for any kind of service and keep in that state without their consent for as long as we please, albeit with the restriction—sometimes religiously sanctioned, as among the Hindus—that they not be mained or killed. No matter what his circumstances, a man may be deemed happy as long as he knows that the law does not discriminate in favor of his fellow subjects, that if he fails to rise to their level it is not due to the irresistible will of others but solely to himself, to his own faculties or resolve, or to circumstances for which he can hold no one else responsible.^*

3. Independence (sibisufficientia) of a member of a community as a citizen, that is to say, a co-legislator. With regard to legislation all men are free and equal under public law as already enacted, though they are not equal with respect to the right to enact that law. Those who are not able to have this right are still, as members of the community, required to obey its law, and share in its protection, though not as citizens but only as partakers in the law’s protection.

For all rights depend upon laws. But a public law that determines what all men are to be legally permitted or forbidden is the act of a public will from which all rights issue, and which must therefore be incapable of wronging anyone. There is but one will for which this is possible: the will of the people as a whole (when all decide about all, and each, accordingly, decides about himself)—because the one man to whom each person can do no legal wrong is himself. If it is otherwise, any decision made for all by a will other than the will of all might be an injustice, and a further law would still be required to limit such a will’s enactments. Thus no particular will can serve as lawmaker for a community. (In fact, the very concept of a community is made up of the coinciding concepts of the external freedom, the equality, and the unity of the will of all and, since the combination of the first two requires voting, independence is the premise of the last.) This basic law, which can emerge only from the general, united popular will, is called the original contract.

Every man who has the right to vote on this legislation is termed a citizen (citoyen, i.e., a citizen of the state, not of a city or borough, a bourgeois). The only necessary qualification, aside from the natural one of not being a child or a woman, is that he be his own master (sui iuris): that he own some sort of property—among which may be counted any skill, craft, fine art, or science that supports him. This is to say that whenever he needs to acquire things from others in order to live, he will acquire them only by disposing of what is his own,^* not by allowing others to use his services, so that he will not, in the proper sense of the word, be anyone’s servant but the community’s. Here, then, craftsmen and large (or small) landowners are all equal, each entitled to cast one vote only. We may disregard the question how one man can have rightly come to own more land than his own hands can put to use (for acquisition by armed conquest is not original acquisition), and how so many who otherwise would have been capable of acquiring permanent property happen to be reduced to serving that landowner for their livelihood. In any event it would conflict with the previous principle, equality, if the large landowning class were so privileged by law that either its descendants would always remain large landowners (of the feudal type, whose estates could not be divided by sale or inheritance so as to benefit more of the people), or that in case of such division none but members of a certain, arbitrarily chosen class could acquire any part of the estates. The large landed proprietor eliminates the votes of as many smaller proprietors as could occupy his place; thus he is not voting in their name and, consequently, has only one vote.

It is necessary, then, to rely exclusively on the ability, industry, and luck of each community member, that these will enable each of them in time to acquire a part of the community, and enable all to acquire the whole. But these differences cannot be taken into account in the making of the general laws. The number of eligible voters on legislation must be set one per capita of property owners, and not according to the size of their possessions.

Yet all of those who have this right to vote must agree that the public law is just. Otherwise there would be a legal conflict between those who agree and those who disagree, and the resolution of that conflict would require an additional, higher principle of law. Since we cannot expect unanimity of a whole people, however, the only attainable outcome to be foreseen is a majority of votes—and not a majority of direct voters, in a large nation, but only a majority of those delegated as representatives of the people. The acceptance by general consent, hence by contract, of the principle that this majority suffices must be the supreme ground on which to establish a civil constitution.

Here we have an original contract on which alone a civil and thus consistently legal constitution among men can be based and a community established.

Yet this contract, which we call contractus originarius or pactum sociale, as the coalition of every particular and private will within a people into a common public will for purposes of purely legal legislation, need by no means to be presupposed as a fact. It is not necessary first to demonstrate historically, so to speak, that a people, whose rights and duties we have inherited, must really have performed such an act at some time and must have left us, by word of mouth or in writing, some reliable news or instrument of it, before we are to consider ourselves bound by an existing civil constitution. It is rather a mere idea of reason, albeit one with indubitable practical reality, obligating every lawmaker to frame his laws so that they might have come from the united will of an entire people, and to regard any subject who would be a citizen as if he had joined in voting for such a will. For this is the touchstone of the legitimacy of all public law. If a law is so framed that all the people could not possibly give it their consent—as, for example, a law granting the hereditary privilege of master status to a certain class of subjects—the law is unjust; but if it is at all possible that a people might agree on it, then the people’s duty is to look upon the law as just, even assuming that their present situation or the tenor of their present way of thinking were such that, if consulted, they would probably refuse to agree.^*

But this restriction obviously applies to the lawmaker’s judgment only, not to the subject’s. If a people were to judge that a certain actual legislation will with the utmost probability deprive them of their happiness—what can such a people do? Should they not resist? The answer can be only: they can do nothing but obey. For the question is not what happiness the subject may expect from the establishment of a community or from its administration. Rather, the issue is first of all the legal order which is thereby to be secured for all. This is the supreme principle from which all maxims concerning a community must start, and which is not limited by any other principle. Regarding happiness no universally valid principle of legislation can be given. For both the circumstances of the time and the highly contradictory and constantly changing delusions in which each man seeks his happiness (and no one can prescribe for him where he should seek it) render all fixed principles impossible and unfit by themselves to serve as principles of legislation. The proposition salus publica suprema civitatis lex est—the public welfare is the community’s highest law—remains undiminished in validity and public esteem; but the common weal to be considered first of all is precisely that legal constitution which secures the freedom of everyone by means of laws, leaving him to pursue his happiness by whichever way seems best to him as long as he does not infringe upon that universal freedom under the law and thus upon the rights of other fellow subjects.

When the supreme power makes laws that are initially aimed at happiness—at the prosperity of citizens, at population, and the like —this is not done for the purpose of establishing a civil constitution. It is done simply as a means to secure the state of law, chiefly against the people’s foreign enemies. The head of state must have the authority to judge by himself alone whether such laws are needed for the community to flourish as it must in order to safeguard its strength and stability, internally as well as against foreign foes. But the purpose is not to make the people happy, against their will as it were; the only purpose is to make them exist as a community.^* The lawmaker may err in judging whether or not those measures are prudently taken; but there can be no error of judgment when he asks himself whether or not the law is in accord with the legal principle. For here he possesses that infallible yardstick (and a priori at that)—the idea of the original contract. (He need not wait for experience, as he must in following the principle of happiness, to instruct him first about the suitability of his means.) Just as long as it is not self-contradictory to assume that all the people consent to such a law, however distasteful they may find it, the law is in accord with justice. But if a public law is in accord with justice, if it is unimpeachable, irreprehensible from the point of view of the right, it carries with it the authority to coerce and, conversely, a ban on any active resistance to the lawmaker’s will. In other words, the power in the state that lends effect to the law is irresistible, and there is no legally existing community that does not have such power to crush all inner resistance, since this resistance would be following a maxim whose general application would destroy all civil constitutions in which alone men can have rights.

It follows that any resistance to the supreme lawmaking power, any incitement of dissatisfied subjects to action, any uprising that bursts into rebellion—that all this is the worst, most punishable crime in a community. For it shatters the community’s foundations. And this ban is absolute, so unconditional that even though that supreme power or its agent, the head of state, may have broken the original contract, even though in the subject’s eyes he may have forfeited the right to legislate by empowering the government to rule tyrannically by sheer violence, even then the subject is allowed no resistance, no violent counteraction. The reason is that once a civil constitution exists, a people no longer have the right to judge how that constitution ought to be administered. For suppose they had such a right and their judgment ran counter to that of the actual head of state: who is to decide which side is right? Neither one can act as a judge in his own case. To decide between the head and the people there would have to be a head above the head— which is self-contradictory.

Nor, by the way, can a sort of right of necessity (ius in casu necessitatis)—which supposed right to do torong in extreme (physical) need is an absurdity anyway ^*—arise here to provide a way in which the barrier blocking the people’s own power could be lifted. For the head of state is just as apt to justify his harsh treatment of the subjects by their recalcitrance as they are to justify their rebellion with complaints of their undue suffering at his hands. And who is to decide? The one who is in control of the supreme administration of public justice, and this is precisely the head of state—he alone can decide. And no one in the community can thus have a right to contest that control of his.

And yet there are estimable men who maintain that in certain circumstances the subject does have this right to oppose his superior with force. Among them I will here mention only Achenwall who, in presenting his doctrines of natural law,^* exhibits great caution, precision, and modesty. He says: “If the danger from enduring further the injustice of its head poses a greater threat to the community than may be feared from taking up arms against him, then the people may resist him; on the strength of this right they may set aside their contract of submission and depose him as a tyrant” And he concludes: “In this fashion (respective to their former overlord) the people return to a state of nature.”

I can well believe that in an actual case neither Achenwall nor any of the good men who have aired their minds in agreement with him on this point would ever have lent their counsel or consent to such dangerous undertakings. And as for the uprisings in which the Swiss, the Dutch, or even the British won their much vaunted constitutions, there can be hardly a doubt that if those revolts had miscarried, readers of their history would view the execution of their now so exalted initiators as nothing more than the well-earned punishment of high political criminals. For the outcome usually colors our judgment of the legal grounds, though it was uncertain while the latter are certain. As far as these legal grounds are concerned—granting even that such a rebellion might do no wrong to a prince (who may have violated, say, a joyeuse entree, or an actual underlying contract with his people)—it is clear that the people by pursuing their rights in this manner have done the greatest wrong. For this manner, if adopted as a maxim, would render every legal constitution insecure and introduce a state of utter lawlessness (.status naturalis) in which all rights would lose at least their effectiveness.

Since so many right-thinking authors have this tendency to argue the people’s case (to the people’s own ruin), I will note only that this is due, at times, to a common fallacy whereby, while talking of the principle of right, they shift the ground of their judgment to the principle of happiness. At other times, no document can be produced of a contract actually submitted to the community, accepted by its head, and sanctioned by both. Having assumed the idea of an original contract—an idea that always provides the rational basis—to be something that must have happened in actual fact, they believe the people to have always retained the right to depart from the contract whenever, in the people’s own judgment, there is a gross violation of it.^*

It is plain to see here what mischief the principle of happiness (and happiness is really incapable of any determinate principle) causes in constitutional law, just as it does in morality, despite the best intentions of those who teach it. The sovereign wants to make the people happy according to his own notions and becomes a despot; the people will not be deprived of the universal human claim to their own happiness and become rebels. If one had asked, to begin with, what is right—and the principles of this are a priori certain and cannot be bungled by any empiricist—the idea of the social contract would retain its unimpeachable prestige. It would not do so as a fact, as Danton would have it when he declares that without such a fact all property and all rights contained in the actually existing constitution are null and void. But the idea would retain its prestige solely as the rational principle for judging any public lawful constitution as such. And one would see that until a general will exists, the people possess no right at all to coerce their ruler, since it is only through him that they can legally coerce. Yet, once that general will exists, there can be no popular coercion of the ruler, because then the people themselves would be the supreme ruler. Consequently, the people never have any right of coercion (any right to be refractory in word or deed) against the head of state.

This theory is also amply confirmed in practice. In Great Britain, whose people boast of their constitution as if it were the model for all the world, we nonetheless find the constitution completely silent on what the people have a right to do in case the monarch should transgress the contract of 1688. In other words: if he wanted to violate it, the constitution, in the absence of any specific law, secretly reserves the right to rebel. That the constitution should contain a law for such a case—a law to justify the overthrow of the existing constitution which is the source of all particular laws (even assuming a breach of contract)—is a clear contradiction, because then it would have to contain a publicly constituted^* opposing power, a second head of state to protect the people’s right against the first. And there would have to be a third, then, to decide which of the two sides is right.

Worried, moreover, about such charges in the event their enterprise should fail, those popular guides (or guardians, if you will) who frightened the monarch away preferred to impute to him a voluntary surrender of the reins of government rather than to arrogate to themselves a right to depose him—a claim that would have brought the constitution into a flagrant contradiction with itself.

Surely I will not be accused of flattering the monarch too much with this kind of inviolability; ard so I hope also to be spared the charge of favoring the people too much when I say that they, too, have inalienable rights against the head of state, even though these rights cannot be coercive.

Hobbes is of the opposite opinion. According to him (de Cive, chapter 7, section 14) the head of state is bound by no contractual obligation toward the people. He cannot wrong the citizens, he may dispose of them as he wishes. This thesis would be quite true if “wrong” were understood to give the injured a coercive right against the man who inflicted the wrong; but stated in such general terms the proposition is terrifying.

The nonrecalcitrant subject must be able to assume that his sovereign does not want to wrong him. On this assumption, since every man has inalienable rights which he cannot give up even if he would, and concerning which he is himself entitled to judge, the wrong that a citizen believes himself to have suffered can be due only to an error, or to the ignorance of certain consequences that follow from laws made by the supreme power. Accordingly the citizen must be free to inform the public of his views on whatever in the sovereign decrees appears to him as a wrong against the community, and he must have this freedom with the sovereign’s own approval. For to assume that the head might never be in error, never in ignorance of anything, would be to imagine him graced with divine intuitions and exalted above all men. Freedom of the pen—within the bounds of respect and affection for the constitution one lives under, kept within those bounds by the subjects’ liberal way of thinking which the constitution itself instills in them (and to which the pens automatically restrict one another, lest they lose their freedom)—this is the sole shield of popular rights. For to deny the people this freedom would not merely deprive them of every claim to justice in regard to the supreme commander according to Hobbes); it would also deprive the supreme commander, whose will commands the subjects as citizens only by representing the general will of the people, of any knowledge of matters which he himself would change if only he knew them. Hence, to limit this freedom would bring him into contradiction with himself. But to make the head apprehensive that public unrest might be incited if men were to think for themselves and to think out loud amounts to arousing in him distrust of his own power or even hatred of his own people.

There is a universal principle by which a people must judge its rights negatively—i.e., must judge what the supreme legislature, in all good faith, might be deemed not to have ordained. This principle is contained in the proposition: Whatever resolution the people cannot make about themselves, the lawmaker cannot make about the people.

Suppose, for example, a law were to command the permanent establishment of a previously decreed state religion. Could this be viewed as expressing the lawmaker’s real will and intent? One should first ask himself whether a people may enact a law to the effect that certain tenets of faith and outward religious forms, once adopted, should remain forever; that is, may a people prevent itself (in its future generations) from progressing in religious insight or from correcting what may be old errors? It will be clear then that an original contract in which the people made such a law would be null and void in itself, because it runs counter to the destiny and to the ends of mankind. A law so made is thus not to be regarded as the monarch’s true will, and remonstrances may be made to him.

But in each case in which something of the kind has nevertheless been decreed by supreme legislation, general and public judgments on it may be offered, but resistance in word or deed must never be mobilized.

What must prevail in every community is obedience, bowing to coercive laws that suffer no exception within the mechanism of the state constitution. But at the same time a spirit of freedom must prevail, since in matters of universal human duty everyone wants to be rationally convinced of the justice of this coercion, lest he come into contradiction with himself. Obedience without the spirit of freedom is the effective cause of all secret societies. For it is a natural calling of mankind to communicate with one another, especially about what concerns man in general; with the cultivation of this feedom those societies would disappear.

And how else could a government obtain the knowledge that promotes its own essential intent than by allowing the spirit of freedom, a spirit so worthy of respect both in its origin and its effects, to express itself?

Nowhere will a practice that avoids all pure rational principles disparage theory more arrogantly than in the question of what a good state constitution requires. This is because a long-standing legal constitution gradually causes the people to make it their rule to judge both their happiness and their rights by the state of affairs in which everything so far has functioned peacefully—but not, conversely, to evaluate the state of affairs by concepts of both their rights and happiness with which reason supplies them. The rule is, rather, always to prefer that passive state to the perilous position of seeking a better one, a position to which Hippocrates’ advice to physicians applies: indicium anceps, experimentum periculosum— decision is difficult, experiment perilous. All constitutions of sufficiently long standing, whatever their flaws and for all their differences, yield the same result: one is content with the constitution one lives under. Hence, from the viewpoint of the people’s icelfare, no theory properly applies at all; instead, everything rests on a practice submissive to experience.

But if there is something in reason which the term “constitutional law” can express, and if men who face each other in the antagonism of their freedom find in this concept a unifying force—if it shows them an objective, practical reality (and here no reference must be made to whatever well-being or ill-being it may cause them, for that can be learned only by experience)—it is based on a priori principles, because experience cannot teach us what is right. And then, there is a theory of constitutional law with which all practice, to be valid, must agree.

The only argument to be advanced against this thesis is that while men have in their heads the idea of rights that are their due, their hard hearts make them incapable and unworthy of being treated accordingly, so that they may and must be kept in order by a supreme power acting solely on rules of prudence. Yet this desperate leap (salto mortale) is such that, once we are talking not of right but of power only, the people may try their own power and jeopardize every legal constitution. Unless there is something which rationally compels immediate respect, such as human rights, all influences upon human choice will be incapable of curbing human freedom. But when the right, joined by benevolence, makes its voice heard, human nature shows itself not too depraved to listen deferentially. (Tum pietate gravem meritisque si forte virum quern/ Conspexere silent arrectisque auribus adstant: Once they behold a man weighty with merits and righteousness, they stand in silence, pricking up their ears. Virgil.)

^* If we want to link the word “gracious" with a determinate concept differentiating it from “kind," “benevolent," “protective," and the like, we can use it only for a person who is not subject to legal coercion. In other words, since it is the head of the state government who effects and grants every benefit possible under public law (for the sovereign who gives those laws is invisible, as it were; he is the law personified, not its agent), that head alone, as the only one not subject to legal coercion, can rightly be titled “gracious lord." Even in an aristocracy, as in Venice for example, the Senate is the only “gracious lord." All the nobles who constitute it are subjects (not even the Doge excepted, for the Grand Council alone is the sovereign) and, as far as the execution of the laws is concerned, the equals of everyone else. Every subject has the right to coerce any one of them.

Princes—i.e., those who have a hereditary right to the rule—are styled “gracious lords" by courtesy, court fashion, on account of their prospects and claims; but in their proprietary status they are fellow subjects nonetheless, and their humblest servant must have the right to coerce them legally through the head of state.

As for the gracious (more properly, noble) ladies, it might be considered that it is their status together with their sex which gives them a claim to this title (a claim, consequently, only upon the male sex), and this owing to the refinement of manners (called gallantry), whereby the male believes to do himself greater honor in proportion as he concedes greater prerogatives to the fair sex.

^* The producer of an opus can convey it to another by transfer, just as if it were his property; but praestatio operae is not such a transfer. The domestic servant, the shop clerk, the laborer, even the hairdresser—these are mere operarii, not artifices in the broader sense, and they are not members of the state, hence not entitled to be citizens. Although my relations to the man I give my firewood to cut, and to the tailor to whom I give my cloth with which to make me a garment, seem altogether similar, yet the first differs from the second as the haidresser differs from the wigmaker (even if I have given him the hair for my wig) or the day-laborer from the artist or craftsman who fashions a work that belongs to him until he has been paid. The latter, acting as a tradesman, will exchange his property (opus) with others; the former will permit others to ues his services (operam).

It is, I confess, somewhat difficult to determine just what it takes to be able to claim the status of being one’s own master.

^* If, for example, a proportional war tax were levied on all subjects, the fact that it is onerous would not permit them to call it unjust on the grounds that the war, in their view, was unnecessary. This they have no right to judge, because there is always the possibility that the war is unavoidable and the tax indispensable, and hence must be considered lawful in the judgment of the subjects. But if in such a war the property of certain owners is onerously commandeered while others, equally situated, are spared this burden, it is easy to see that all the people cannot consent to such a law, and because they cannot consider such an unequal distribution of burdens as just, they are entitled at least to remonstrate against it.

^* This includes certain import restrictions in order to promote the use of purchasing power for the subjects’ own good rather than to benefit foreigners and to stimulate foreign industry; because the state, without a prosperous people, would not be strong enough to resist foreign enemies or to maintain itself as a community.

^* There is only one casus necessitatis—the case in which an absolute duty conflicts with one that, though perhaps major, is still only a conditional duty. For example, to save the state from calamity it may be necessary to betray one’s relative, perhaps a father or son. To save the state from calamity is an unconditional duty, but it is only a conditional duty to avert the relative’s unhappiness (as long as he has not become guilty of a crime against the state). Reporting a relative’s plans to the authorities may be performed with extreme reluctance, but is compelled by necessity, to wit, moral necessity.

But when a shipwrecked man pushes another off his raft to save his own life, then to say that he had a right to do so because of his (physical) need is totally false. For I have a duty to save my life only on condition that I can do so without committing a crime. But I have an unconditional duty not to take the life of someone else who is not injuring me nor even causing the danger threatening mine. Even so, the professors of law are quite consistent in making legal allowance for such emergency acts. For the authorities cannot attach any punishment to this injunction, because that punishment would have to be death. And it would be an absurd law that threatened death to one who refuses to die voluntarily in a dangerous situation.

^* No matter how the people’s real contract with their sovereign may be violated, they cannot immediately react as a community, but only as a mob. For the former constitution has been torn up by the people, while their organization as a new community is still to occur. This is when the state of anarchy arises with all its at least potential horrors. And the wrong in that situation is whatever each of the people’s parties inflicts on the other. This also emerges from an example cited, where the rebellious subjects of that state finally sought to force on each other a constitution that would have become far more oppressive than the one discarded—namely, the prospect of being devoured by clerics and aristocrats instead of being able to look to an all- governing head for a more equitable distribution of the state’s burdens.

^* No right in the state can be insidiously concealed, as it were, by way of a secret reservation, least of all the right which the people presume to be a part of the constitution. For all constitutional laws must be conceived as deriving from a public will. If the constitution were to permit rebellion, it would have to state publicly the right to rebel and the way to exercise it.