first process is the determination of the sovereign, that the
government shall assume such and such a form; this is the establishment
of a law. The second process is the nomination by the people of those to
whom the government is to be entrusted; this is not a law, but a
particular act, a function of government.

How, then, can we have an act of government before the government
exists? How can the people, who are only sovereigns or subjects, become
magistrates under certain circumstances? Here we discover one of those
astonishing properties of the body politic, by which it reconciles
operations apparently contradictory; for the process is accomplished by
a sudden conversion from sovereignty to democracy, so that, with no
sensible change, and simply by a new relation of all to all, the
citizens become magistrates, pass from general to partiacts, and from
the law to its execution. In this manner the English House of Commons
resolves itself into committee, and thus becomes a simple commission of
the sovereign court which it was a moment before; afterwards reporting
to itself, as House of Commons, as to its proceedings in the form of a
committee.

It is a logical sequence of the Social Contract that in the assemblies
of the people the voice of the majority prevails. The only law requiring
unanimity is the contract itself. But how can a man be free and at the
same time compelled to submit to laws to which he has not consented? I
reply that when a law is proposed in the popular assembly, the question
put is not precisely whether the citizens approve or disapprove of it,
but whether it conforms or not to the general will. The minority, then,
simply have it proved to them that they estimated the general will
wrongly. Once it is declared, they are as citizens participants in it,
and as subjects they must obey it.

_Civil Religion_

Religion, in its relation to society, can be divided into two kinds--the
religion of the man, and that of the citizen. The first, without
temples, without altars, without rites, limited to the inner and private
worship of the Supreme God, and to the eternal duties of morality, is
the pure and simple religion of the Evangel, the true theism. The other,
established in one country only, gives that country its own gods, its
own tutelary patrons; it has its own dogmas and ritual, and all
foreigners are deemed to be infidels. Such were all the religions of the
primitive peoples.

There is a third a