…Not matter how many isolated individuals may submit to the enforced control of a single conqueror, the resulting relationship will ever be that of Master and Slave, never of People and Ruler.
An individual may conquer half the world, but he is still only an individual. His interests, wholly different from those of his subjects, are private to himself. When he dies his empire is left scattered and disintegrated. He is like an oak which crumbles and collapses in ashes so soon as the fire consumes it.
Before, therefore, we consider the act by which a People is constituted as their “king”, it were well if we considered the act by which a People chooses such. For it necessarily precedes the other, and is the true foundation on which societies rest.
Had there been no original compact, why, unless the choice were unanimous, should the minority ever have agreed to accept the decision of the majority? What right have the hundred who desire a master to vote for the ten who do not? The institution of the franchise is, in itself, a form of compact, and assumes that, at least once in its operation, complete unanimity existed.
Source: J.J. Rousseau; The Social Contract - That We Must Always Go Back to an Original Compact.
An individual may conquer half the world, but he is still only an individual. His interests, wholly different from those of his subjects, are private to himself. When he dies his empire is left scattered and disintegrated. He is like an oak which crumbles and collapses in ashes so soon as the fire consumes it.
Before, therefore, we consider the act by which a People is constituted as their “king”, it were well if we considered the act by which a People chooses such. For it necessarily precedes the other, and is the true foundation on which societies rest.
Had there been no original compact, why, unless the choice were unanimous, should the minority ever have agreed to accept the decision of the majority? What right have the hundred who desire a master to vote for the ten who do not? The institution of the franchise is, in itself, a form of compact, and assumes that, at least once in its operation, complete unanimity existed.
Source: J.J. Rousseau; The Social Contract - That We Must Always Go Back to an Original Compact.
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