POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY of civilization are likely to assume that the chains are those of social institutions, and that we are about to be encouraged to reject the social order Instead, we are told that it is a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights Social institutions, Rousseau now thinks, liberate rather than enslave Like Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau begins with a consideration of human beings in a state of nature His account of such a state is, in accordance with his earlier thoughts about the noble savage, more optimistic than Hobbes’ In a state of nature men are not necessarily hostile to each other They are motivated by self-love, to be sure, but self-love is not the same as egoism: it can be combined, in both humans and animals, with sympathy and compassion for one’s fellows In a state of nature a man has only simple, animal, desires: ‘the only goods he acknowledges in the world are food, a female, and sleep; the only ills he fears are pain and hunger’ These desires are not as inherently competitive as the quest for power in more sophisticated societies Rousseau agrees with Hobbes, against Locke, that in a state of nature there are no property rights and therefore neither justice nor injustice But as society develops from its primitive state, the lack of such rights begins to be felt Economic cooperation and technical progress make it necessary to form an association for the protection of individuals’ persons and possessions How can this be done while allowing each member of the association to remain as free as he was before? The Social Contract provides the solution by presenting the concept of the general will The general will comes into existence when ‘each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole’ (SC 6) This compact creates a public person, a moral and collective body, the state or sovereign people Every individual is both a citizen and a subject: as a citizen he shares in the sovereign authority, and as subject owes obedience to the laws of the state Rousseau’s sovereign, unlike Hobbes’ sovereign, has no existence independent of the contracting citizens who compose it Consequently, it can have no interest independent of theirs: it expresses the general will and it cannot go wrong in its pursuit of the public good Men lose their natural liberty to grasp whatever tempts them, but they gain civil liberty, which permits the stable ownership of property 296