Rousseau_contrat-social
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
e-establishment of order; with the result that he takes advantage of a<br />
silence he does not allow to be broken, or of irregularities he causes<br />
to be committed, to assume that he has the support of those whom fear<br />
prevents from speaking, and to punish those who dare to speak. Thus it<br />
was that the decemvirs, first elected for one year and then kept on in<br />
office for a second, tried to perpetuate their power by forbidding the<br />
comitia to assemble; and by this easy method every government in the<br />
world, once clothed with the public power, sooner or later usurps the<br />
sovereign authority.<br />
The periodical assemblies of which I have already spoken are designed to<br />
prevent or postpone this calamity, above all when they need no formal<br />
summoning; for in that case, the prince cannot stop them without openly<br />
declaring himself a law-breaker and an enemy of the State.<br />
The opening of these assemblies, whose sole object is the maintenance of<br />
the <strong>social</strong> treaty, should always take the form of putting two<br />
propositions that may not be suppressed, which should be voted on<br />
separately.<br />
The first is: "Does it please the Sovereign to preserve the present form<br />
of government?"<br />
The second is: "Does it please the people to leave its administration in<br />
the hands of those who are actually in charge of it?"<br />
I am here assuming what I think I have shown; that there is in the State<br />
no fundamental law that cannot be revoked, not excluding the <strong>social</strong><br />
compact itself; for if all the citizens assembled of one accord to break<br />
the compact, it is impossible to doubt that it would be very<br />
legitimately broken. Grotius even thinks that each man can renounce his<br />
membership of his own State, and recover his natural liberty and his<br />
goods on leaving the country.[33] It would be indeed absurd if all the<br />
citizens in assembly could not do what each can do by himself.<br />
--------------------------------<br />
80