are.

The explanation of social order is not to be found in the family tie,
since, when a child grows up it escapes from tutelage; the parents'
right to exercise authority is only temporary. Nor can government be
based on servitude. An individual man may sell his liberty to another
for sustenance; but a nation cannot sell its liberty--it does not
receive sustenance from its ruler, but on the contrary sustains him. A
bargain in which one party gains everything and the other loses
everything is plainly no bargain at all, and no claim of right can be
founded on it. But even supposing that a people could thus give up its
liberty to a ruler, it must be a people before it does so. The gift is a
civil act, which pre-supposes a public deliberation. Before, then, we
examine the act by which a people chooses a king, it would be well to
examine the act by which a people becomes a people; for this act, which
necessarily precedes the other, must be the true foundation of society.

Let it be assumed that the obstacles which prejudice the conservation of
man in a state of nature have prevailed by their resistance over the
forces which each individual is able to employ to keep himself in that
state. The primitive condition can then no longer exist; mankind must
change it or perish.

The problem with which men are confronted under these circumstances may
be stated as follows--"To find a form of association that defends and
protects with all the common force the person and property of each
partner, and by which each partner, uniting himself with all the rest,
nevertheless obeys only himself, and remains as free as heretofore."
This is the fundamental problem to which the Social Contract affords a
solution.

The clauses of this contract are determined by the nature of the act in
such a manner that the least modification renders them of no effect; so
that, even when they have not been formally stated, they are everywhere
the same, everywhere tacitly acknowledged; and if the compact is
violated, everyone returns forthwith to his natural liberty.

The essence of the pact is the total and unreserved alienation by each
partner of all his rights to the community as a whole. No individual can
retain any rights that are not possessed equally by all other
individuals without the contract being thereby violated. Again, each
partner, by yielding his rights to the community, yields them to no
individual, and thus in his relations with individua