ls he regains all
the rights he has sacrificed.

The compact, therefore, may be reduced to the following terms--"each of
us places in common his person and all his power under the supreme
direction of the general will; and we receive each member as an
indivisible part of the whole."

By this act is created a moral and collective body, composed of as many
members as the society has voices, receiving from this same act its
unity, its common "I," its life, and its will. This body is the
Republic, called by its members the state, the state when passive, the
sovereign when active, a power in its relations with similar bodies. The
partners are collectively called the people; they are citizens, as
participants in the sovereign authority, and subjects as under
obligation to the laws of the state.

The sovereign, then, is the general will; and each individual finds
himself engaged in a double relationship--as a member of the sovereign.
To the general will each partner must, by the terms of the contract,
submit himself, without respect to his private inclinations. If he
refuses to submit, the sovereign will compel him to do so; which is as
much as to say, that it will force him to be free; for in the supremacy
of the general will lies the only guarantee to each citizen of freedom
from personal dependence.

By passing, through the compact, from the state of nature to the civil
state, man substitutes justice for instinct in his conduct, and gives to
his actions a morality of which they were formerly devoid. What man
loses by the contract is his natural liberty, and an illimitable right
to all that tempts him and that he can obtain; what he gains is civil
liberty, and a right of secure property in all that he possesses.

I shall conclude this chapter with a remark which should serve as a
basis for the whole social system; it is that in place of destroying
natural liberty, the fundamental pact substitutes a moral and legitimate
equality for the natural physical inequality between men, and that,
while men may be unequal in strength and talent, they are all made equal
by convention and right.

_The Sovereign and the Laws_

The first and most important consequence of the principles above
established is that only the general will can direct the forces of the
state towards the aim of its institutions, which is the common good; for
if the antagonism of particular interests has rendered necessary the
establishment of political so