{253} The State of War
{254} The bulk of Rousseau’s manuscript for “The State of War” was published first in 1896 and repeatedly thereafter. A further fragment was discovered in 1965 and published first in 1967. However, it was not until 1987 that Grace G. Roosevelt established the correct order of the text and the relationship of the parts to the whole. This edition, therefore, follows her reconstruction.1 The text was drafted in the mid-1750s, between completion of the second Discourse and work on the Social Contract, and it must originally have formed part of the larger project that Rousseau abandoned when he decided to publish the Social Contract. The text is crucial for understanding the extent to which Rousseau’s political theory results from a close engagement with Hobbes.
D.W.
{255} THE STATE OF WAR
I open the books on rights and morals, I listen to the scholars and legal experts, and, moved by their “thought-provoking” arguments, I deplore the miseries of nature, I admire the peace and justice established by the civil order, I bless the wisdom of public institutions, and I console myself for being a man by viewing myself as a citizen. Well instructed as to my duties and my happiness, I close the book, I leave the classroom, and I look around me. I see poor wretches groaning under an iron yoke, the human race crushed by a handful of oppressors, a starving mass of people overcome by pain and hunger, whose blood and tears the rich drink in peace, and everywhere the strong armed against the weak with the formidable power of the laws.
All this occurs peacefully and without resistance. It is the tranquility of the companions of Ulysses imprisoned in the Cyclops’ cave waiting to be devoured. One can but groan and be quiet. Let us draw an eternal veil over these objects of horror. I lift my eyes and look off in the distance. I see fires and flames, countrysides deserted, and towns sacked. Wild men, where are you dragging these poor wretches? I hear a horrible racket. What an uproar! What cries! I draw near. I see a scene of murders, ten thousand men slaughtered, the dead piled up in heaps, the dying trampled underfoot by horses, everywhere the image of death and agony. This then is the fruit of these peaceful institutions! Pity and indignation rise up from the depths of my heart. Ah, barbarous philosopher! Read us your book on a battlefield!
What human feelings would not be moved by these sad objects? But being human and pleading the cause of humanity are no longer permitted. Justice and truth must be bent to the interest of the strongest—this is the rule. The people grant neither pensions nor jobs nor university chairs nor appointments to academies. What reason could there be for protecting them? Magnanimous princes, I speak in the name of the literary community; oppress the people with a clear conscience; we expect everything from you alone. As far as we are concerned, the people are good for nothing.
How would so weak a voice make itself heard over such self-serving outcries? Alas, I should keep quiet, but surely the voice of my heart could pierce so sad a silence? No; without entering into the disgusting details that would be taken for satires only because they are true, I will confine myself, as I have always done, to examining human institutions in relation to their principles, to correcting, if possible, the false ideas that self-interested authors give us about them, and at least to ensuring that injustice and violence do not shamelessly appropriate the name of right and equity.
As I consider the condition of the human species, the first thing I notice is a manifest contradiction in its constitution, which makes it always irresolute. {256} Man to man, we live in a civil state and are subject to laws; people to people, each enjoys natural freedom; this is what makes our situation fundamentally worse than if these distinctions were unknown. For living in both the social order and the state of nature, we are subject to the inconveniences of both without finding safety in either. It is true that the perfection of the social order consists in the conjunction of force and law; but for this to be the case, law must govern force. Nevertheless, according to the received ideas regarding the absolute independence of princes, force alone, speaking to citizens in the guise of law and to foreigners in the guise of reason of state, deprives the latter of the power and the former of the will to resist, so that everywhere the vain name of justice serves merely as a shield for violence.
As for what is commonly called “the right of nations,” it is certain that, for lack of sanction, these laws are but chimeras that are even weaker than the law of nature. This latter at least speaks to the heart of individuals. On the contrary, as for the right of nations, since it has no other guarantee than its usefulness to the one who submits to it, its decisions are respected only to the extent that self-interest confirms them. In the mixed condition in which we find ourselves, regardless of which one of the two systems one prefers, by doing too much or too little we have done nothing, and we have placed ourselves in the worst state possible. This, it seems to me, is the real origin of public calamities.
Let us briefly contrast these ideas with the horrible system of Hobbes, and we will find, completely contrary to his absurd doctrine, that the state of war is far from being natural to man; rather, war is born of peace, or at least of the precautions men have taken to assure themselves a lasting peace. But, before entering into this discussion, let us try to explain what it …2
[Who could have imagined without shuddering the mad system of the natural war of each against all? What a strange animal he must be who would believe his good is bound up with the destruction of his entire species! And how can one conceive that this species, so monstrous and so detestable, could last even two generations? Yet this is how far the desire or rather the rage to establish despotism and passive obedience has led one of the finest geniuses who ever lived.3 So ferocious a principle was worthy of its purpose.
The state of society that constrains all our natural inclinations cannot, for all that, annihilate them. Despite our prejudices and despite ourselves, they continue to speak to us in the depths of our hearts and often bring us back to the true, which we abandon to pursue chimeras. If this mutual and destructive enmity were an essential part of our constitution, it would therefore still continue to make itself felt and would put us, despite ourselves, at odds with one another, cutting across all social bonds. The frightful hatred of humanity would eat away at man’s heart. He would grieve at the birth of his {257} own children; he would rejoice at the death of his brothers; and, on finding someone asleep, his first movement would be to kill him.
The benevolence that causes us to take part in the happiness of our fellowmen, the compassion that identifies us with the one who suffers and distresses us at his pain, would be sentiments unknown and directly contrary to nature. A sensitive and compassionate man would be a monster; and we would naturally be what we have a great deal of difficulty becoming amid the depravation that pursues us.
In vain would the sophist say that this mutual enmity is not innate and immediate but is based on the struggle that inevitably follows from each individual’s right to all things. For the sentiment of this alleged right is no more natural to man than the war that he causes to arise from it.]
I have already said and I cannot repeat too often that the error of Hobbes and of the philosophers is to confuse natural man with the men they have before their eyes, and to transfer into one system a being that can thrive only in another. Man wants his well-being and everything that can contribute to it; that is indisputable. But naturally this well-being of man is confined to what is physically necessary; for when he has a healthy soul and his body does not suffer, what is there, consistent with his constitution, that is lacking for him to be happy? He who has nothing desires little; he who commands no one has little ambition. But a surplus awakens greed; the more one gets, the more one desires. He who has much wants to have everything; and the mad passion for universal monarchy has never tormented the heart of anyone but a great king. Such is the march of nature; such is the development of the passions. A superficial philosopher observes souls kneaded and fermented a hundred times in the leaven of society and believes he has observed man. But to know him well, one needs to know how to disentangle the natural development of his sentiments, and it is not among the inhabitants of a city that one should look for the first feature of nature imprinted on the human heart.
Thus this analytical method leads to nothing but abysses and mysteries, where the wisest understand the least. Ask why mores are corrupted in proportion as minds are enlightened; unable to find the cause, they will have the nerve to deny the fact. Ask why savages brought among us share neither our passions nor our pleasures and take no interest in all that we desire with great fervor. They will never explain it, or they will explain it only by my principles. They know only what they see, and they have never seen nature. They know perfectly well what a city dweller from London or Paris is; but they will never know what a man is.
But even if it were true that this unlimited and ungovernable greed were as developed in all men as our sophist claims, it would still not produce that state of universal war of each against all, of which Hobbes dares to sketch the odious picture. This unbridled desire to appropriate everything is incompatible with that of destroying all of one’s fellowmen; and the victor who, having killed everyone, had the misfortune to remain alone in the {258} world, would enjoy nothing in it for precisely the reason that he would have everything. What are even riches good for, if not to be spent? What use to him is possessing the entire universe if he is its only inhabitant? What? Will his stomach devour all the fruits of the earth? Who will gather for him the crops from all parts of the world? Who will carry word of his empire into the vast wildernesses in which he will never live? What will he do with his treasures, who will consume his provisions, before whose eyes will he display his power? I know. Instead of massacring everyone, he will put them all in irons, at least in order to have slaves. This immediately changes the whole state of the question; and since it is no longer a question of destroying, the state of war is abolished. Let the reader here suspend his judgment. I will not forget to return to this point.
Man is naturally peaceable and timid; at the slightest danger his first movement is to flee; he becomes warlike only by dint of habit and experience. Honor, self-interest, prejudices, vengeance—all the passions that can make him brave perils and death—are alien to him in the state of nature. It is only after having entered into society with another man that he decides to attack someone else, and it is only after having been a citizen that he becomes a soldier. That does not demonstrate strong inclinations to wage war with all his fellowmen. But I am pausing too long over a system as revolting as it is absurd and that has already been refuted a hundred times.
There is then no general war between man and man; and the human species was not formed merely for mutual self-destruction. It remains to consider the accidental and particular war that can arise between two or more individuals.
If the natural law were inscribed only in human reason, it would hardly be capable of directing most of our actions, but it is also engraved in the heart of man in indelible characters, and it is there that it speaks to him more forcefully than do all the precepts of the philosophers; it is there that it cries out to him that he is not allowed to sacrifice the life of his fellowman except to preserve his own, and there that it makes him feel horror at spilling human blood not in anger, even when he finds himself obliged to do so.
I find it conceivable that in the quarrels that can arise in the state of nature and where there is no one to arbitrate, an irritated man could sometimes kill another, either openly or by surprise. But if this were a genuine war, imagine the strange position this same man would have to be in if he could preserve his own life only at the expense of someone else’s; and if by virtue of a relation established between them it were necessary for one to die so that the other might live. War is a permanent state that presupposes constant relations, and these relations rarely obtain between man and man, where everything between individuals is in a continual flux that constantly changes relations and interests. Thus the subject of a dispute arises and ceases at almost the same moment, a quarrel begins and ends in a single day, and there can be fights and murders but never or very rarely lengthy enmities and wars.
{259} In the civil state, where the life of all citizens is within the power of the sovereign and where no one has the right to dispose of his own life or that of another, the state of war cannot obtain any more than among individuals; and as for duels, provocations, cartels, calls to one-on-one combat, aside from the fact that they were an illegitimate and barbarous abuse of an entirely military constitution, they did not result in a genuine state of war but in a private affair that was resolved within a limited time and place, such that, for a second fight to take place, a fresh call to arms was needed. An exception to this must be made for the private wars that were suspended by short-lived truces that were called “The Peace of God” and that were sanctioned by the Institutions of Saint Louis. But this case is unique in history.
One could ask further whether the kings who are de facto independent of human power could initiate among themselves personal and private wars independent of those of the state. This question is certainly an idle one, for, as everyone knows, princes are not in the habit of sparing others in order to expose themselves to danger. Moreover, this question depends on another question that it is not for me to decide, namely, whether or not the prince is himself subject to the laws of the state; for if he is subject to them, his person is tied to the state and his life belongs to it, just like that of the least citizen. But if the prince is above the laws, he lives in the pure state of nature and need not account for any of his actions either to his subjects or to anyone else.
On the Social State
We now enter into a new order of things. We will see men, united by an artificial concord, assemble to cut one another’s throats and all the horrors of war arise from the efforts made to prevent war. But, first of all, it is important to formulate more precise notions about the essence of the body politic than has been done until now. The reader should take note of the fact that it is a question here not so much of history and facts as of right and justice and that I examine things in terms of their nature rather than in terms of our prejudices.
From the first society formed, the formation of all the others necessarily follows. One must either be part of it or unite to resist it. One must either imitate it or allow oneself to be swallowed up by it.
Thus the entire face of the earth is changed; everywhere nature has disappeared; everywhere human art has taken its place; independence and natural liberty have given way to laws and slavery; there is no longer a free being; the philosopher looks for a man and no longer finds one. But it is vain to think that nature can be annihilated; it springs up again and appears where it was least expected. The independence that is taken away from men finds refuge in societies, and these great bodies, left to their own impulses, {260} produce shocks that are more terrible in proportion as their mass exceeds that of individuals.
But, it will be said, since each of these bodies has such a solid foundation, how is it possible for them ever to collide? Should not their own constitution keep them in an eternal peace between themselves? Are they required, like men, to go looking outside for whatever provisions they need? Have they not within themselves all that is necessary for their preservation? Are competition and trade an inevitable source of discord, and is not the fact that the inhabitants in all the countries of the world existed before there was commerce insurmountable proof that they could subsist without it?
End of the chapter: There is no war between men; there is war only between states.
To this I could be satisfied with answering with facts and then I would have no rebuttal to fear, but I have not forgotten that I am reasoning here about the nature of things and not about events that can have a thousand particular causes independent of the common principle. But let us carefully consider the constitution of bodies politic, and although each one could, strictly speaking, see to its own preservation, we will find that their mutual relations are nevertheless more intimate than those among individuals. For man fundamentally has no necessary relation with his fellowmen; he can subsist in full vigor without their assistance; he needs not so much the attentions of man as the fruits of the earth; and the earth produces more than is necessary to feed all its inhabitants. Add to this that man’s force and size has a limit set by nature that he cannot exceed. From whatever perspective he looks at himself, he finds all of his faculties limited. His life is short; his years are numbered. His stomach does not increase in size along with his wealth, his passions increase in vain, his pleasures have their limits, his heart is limited like everything else, his capacity for enjoyment is always the same. He may well fancy he is becoming bigger; he remains forever small.
On the contrary, the state, being an artificial body, has no determinate measure; the size proper to it is indefinite, and it can always increase it. It feels weak as long as there are others that are stronger than itself. Its security, its preservation demand that it make itself more powerful than all its neighbors. It cannot become larger, feed itself, flex its muscles except at their expense, and if there is no need for it to look for its subsistence outside itself, it constantly looks outside itself for new members who might give it a more resolute firmness. For the inequality of men has limits imposed by the hands of nature, but the inequality of societies can grow without cease until a single society absorbs all the others.
Thus, since the size of the body politic is purely relative, it is ceaselessly forced to compare itself in order to know itself; it depends on everything that surrounds it, and it has to take an interest in everything occurring around it, for it would be impossible to remain within itself without gaining or losing anything. Its becoming small or great, weak or strong depends on whether {261} its neighbor expands or contracts and grows stronger or weaker. Finally, its very solidity, by making its relations more stable, means that it produces a more certain result in all of its actions and renders all of its quarrels more dangerous.
It appears that people have taken on the task of turning upside down all true ideas of things. Everything inclines natural man to rest; eating and sleeping are the only needs he knows; and only hunger pries him from his torpor. He is represented as a ferocious creature, always ready to torment his fellowmen on account of passions of which he has no knowledge. By contrast, those passions that are aroused within the bosom of society by everything that can inflame them are considered nonexistent. A thousand writers have dared to say that the body politic is without passions and that there is no other reason of state aside from reason itself. As if it were not apparent, on the contrary, that the essence of society consists in the activity of its members and that a state without movement would be nothing but a dead body. As if all the histories of the world did not show us that the best constituted societies are also the most active and the continual action and reaction, internal as well as external, of their members did not attest to the vigor of the entire body.
The difference between human art and the work of nature makes itself felt in its effects. Citizens call themselves limbs of the state, but they cannot unite themselves to it in the way that true limbs are joined to a body. It is impossible to bring it about that each of them does not have an individual and separate existence by means of which he can be sufficient unto himself for his own preservation. The nerves are less sensitive, the muscles have less strength, all the ties are more slack, the least accident can break up everything.
Considering how inferior the public force in the aggregate of the body politic is to the sum total of private forces, how much friction, so to speak, there is in the working of the entire machine, it is apparent then that, all things being equal, the weakest man has more force for his own preservation than the most robust state has for its own.
For this state to last, the liveliness of its passions must supplement the liveliness4 of its movements, and its will must enliven itself by as much as its power tapers off. This is the law of self-preservation that nature itself establishes among the species and that maintains them all despite their inequality. This too, one might say in passing, is the reason small states have proportionately more vigor than large ones, for public sensitivity5 does not increase with territory; the more the territory expands, the more the will weakens, the more the movements become feeble, and this great body, overcome by its own weight, sinks down, languishes, and shrivels away.
{262} [War and the State of War]
After having seen the earth become covered with new states, after having discovered a general relationship among them that tends to their mutual destruction, it remains for us to see what exactly constitutes their existence, their well-being, and their life, in order then to discover the kinds of hostilities by which they can attack and harm one another.
It is from the social pact that the body politic receives its unity and its “common self.”6 Its government and its laws make its constitution more or less robust. Its life is in the hearts of the citizens; their courage and their mores make it more or less durable. The only actions that it performs freely and that can be imputed to it are dictated by the general will, and it is by the nature of these actions that one can judge whether the being that produces them is well- or ill-constituted.
Thus, as long as there exists a common will to observe the social pact and the laws, this pact continues to subsist, and as long as this will manifests itself through outward acts, the state is not annihilated. But without ceasing to exist, it can find itself at a point of either vigor or decline, from which—be it weak, healthy, or sick, and tending either to destroy or to strengthen itself—its well-being can grow or change in an infinite number of ways, almost all of which depend on it. This immense detail is not part of my subject, but here is a summary that has a bearing on it.
The General Idea of War between One State and Another
The principle of life of the body politic and, so to speak, the heart of the state, is the social pact, which, as soon as it is wounded, immediately dies, falls down, and dissolves. However, this pact is not a charter on parchment that can be destroyed simply by being torn up; it is inscribed in the general will, and it is there that it is not easily annulled.
Therefore, since it is impossible at first to smash the whole, it is gotten at through its parts; if the body is invulnerable, the limbs are wounded in order to weaken it; if it cannot be deprived of existence, at least its well-being is reduced; if it is impossible to reach the seat of life, then what preserves it is destroyed; an attack is made on the government, the laws, mores, goods, possessions, men. When everything that preserves it is annihilated, the state must eventually perish.
All these means are or can be used in a war of one power against another, and they are also frequently the conditions imposed by the victors in order to continue harming the vanquished once they have been disarmed.
{263} For the object of all the evil that is inflicted on one’s enemy by war is to force him to endure having even more evil done to him by peace. There is not a single type of these kinds of hostilities of which history does not provide examples. I need not speak of the economic contributions in the form of commodities or provisions or about territory seized or inhabitants moved elsewhere. Even an annual tribute of men is not all that rare. Without going back to Minos and the Athenians, it is widely known that the emperors of Mexico attacked their neighbors only in order to have captives to sacrifice, and in our own day the wars the kings of Guinea fight among themselves and their treaties with the peoples of Europe have as their sole object tribute and slave trafficking. It is not difficult to substantiate the claim that sometimes the purpose and effect of war is to pervert the constitution of the enemy state.
The republics of Greece attacked each other less in order to deprive one another of freedom than to change the form of their government, and they changed the government of the vanquished only to hold them more effectively in their dependence. The Macedonians and all the other conquerors of Sparta always placed great importance on abolishing the laws of Lycurgus, and the Romans believed they could show no greater sign of clemency toward a subject people than to leave it its own laws. It is also widely known that one of the maxims of their politics was to foster among their enemies and cast out from among themselves the effeminate and sedentary arts that enervate and soften men. “Leave their angry gods to the Tarentines,” said Fabius when he was asked to bring to Rome the statues and paintings that adorned Tarentum; and the first signs of decadence in Roman morals is rightly imputed to Marcellus for not having followed the same policy in Syracuse. So true is this that a clever conqueror sometimes does more harm to the vanquished by what he leaves them than by what he takes away from them, and that, by contrast, a greedy usurper often harms himself more than his enemy by the evil that he does him indirectly. This influence of mores has always been regarded as most important by truly enlightened princes. The only punishment Cyrus imposed on the rebellious Lydians was a soft and effeminate life, and the manner in which the tyrant Aristodemus went about keeping the inhabitants of Cumae in a state of dependence is too curious not to be related.…
What the State of War Is7
These examples are sufficient to give an idea of the various means by which a state can be weakened and of those whose use seems permitted by war in order to harm one’s enemy; as for the treaties, which are the preconditions for one or more of these means, what basically are such types of peace except a war {264} continued with all the more cruelty since the vanquished enemy no longer has the right to defend himself? I will speak about this elsewhere.
Add to all this the palpable displays of ill will that are indicative of the intent to do harm, such as refusing to a power the titles due to it, misrepresenting its rights, rejecting its claims, depriving its subjects of the freedom to trade, stirring up enemies against it, or, finally, infringing on the right of nations in respect to it on any pretext whatsoever.
Not all of these various ways of hurting a body politic are equally practicable or equally useful to the one who makes use of them, and those that work to our own advantage and the disadvantage of the enemy are naturally preferred. Land, money, men, all the spoils that can be appropriated thus become the principal objects of mutual hostilities. As this base greed imperceptibly changes people’s ideas of things, war finally degenerates into pillage, and those who began as enemies and warriors gradually become tyrants and thieves.
So as not to adopt unthinkingly these changes in ideas, let us start by fixing our own ideas by means of a definition and try to make it so simple that it would be impossible to misuse it.
I therefore call war between one power and another the effect of a mutual, steady, and manifest inclination to destroy the enemy state, or at least to weaken it, by all means possible. This inclination put into action is war properly so called; as long as it remains in a state of inaction, it is merely the “state of war.”
I foresee an objection: since according to me the state of war is natural between powers, why does the inclination from which war results need to be made manifest? To this I answer that I was speaking previously about the natural state; that I am speaking here of the legitimate state; and that later on I will show how, in order to make it legitimate, war needs a declaration.
Fundamental Distinctions
I beg my reader not to forget that I am not investigating what makes war advantageous to the one who wages it but what makes it legitimate. Being just almost always has a cost. Is one therefore exempted from being so?
If there never were and never could be a genuine war between individuals, who then are those between whom it takes place and who can really call themselves enemies? I answer that they are public persons. And what is a public person? I answer that it is that moral being that is called “sovereign,” which has been given its existence by the social pact, and all of whose wills bear the name “laws.” Let us here apply the above distinctions; as for the effects of war, the sovereign may be said to be the one doing the damage and the state the one suffering it.
{265} If war takes place only between moral beings, then there is no need to attack real men, and war can be waged without depriving anyone of his life. But this requires an explanation.
If we look at things solely in terms of a strict understanding of the social pact, then land, money, men, and everything included within the confines of the state belong to it without reservation. But since the rights of society, being founded on those of nature, cannot abolish them, all these objects need to be considered in a twofold relation, namely, the soil as both public territory and as the patrimony of private individuals; goods as belonging in one sense to the sovereign and in another sense to the owners; the inhabitants as citizens and as men. Basically, since the body politic is only a moral person, it is merely a construction of reason.8 Take away the public convention, and right away the state is destroyed without the slightest change in all that comprises it; and never will all the conventions of men know how to change anything in the physical makeup of things. What then is it to wage war on a sovereign? It is to attack the public convention and all that results from it; for the essence of the state consists exclusively in that. If the social pact could be broken with a single stroke, right away there would be no more war; and with that single stroke the state would be killed, without a single man dying. Aristotle says that in order to authorize the cruelties inflicted upon the helots in Sparta, the ephors, on taking charge, solemnly declared war on them. This declaration was as superfluous as it was barbarous. The state of war necessarily existed between them solely because they were the masters and the others were the slaves. Without doubt, since the Lacedaemonians killed the helots, the helots had every right to kill the Lacedaemonians.
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1 [Grace G. Roosevelt, “A Reconstruction of Rousseau’s Fragments on the State of War,” History of Political Thought 8 (1987): 225–44; Roosevelt, Reading Rousseau in the Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).]
2 [Rousseau crossed out the four paragraphs that follow in his manuscript.]
3 [I.e., Thomas Hobbes.]
4 [Rousseau evidently meant “the lack of liveliness” or “the torpor.”]
5 [The sense of community.]
6 [Its corporate identity.]
7 [Omitted here is a fairly lengthy passage that is crossed out in the manuscript. The argument is restated in a briefer form in the passage that follows.]
8 [Rousseau’s term is être de raison, which corresponds to the scholastic ens rationis. See Social Contract, note 30.]