s and
protects with the whole common force the person and property of each
associate, and by which, each uniting himself to all, still only obeys
himself, and remains as free as he was before. Solution: a social
compact reducible to these words, "Each of us places in common his
person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general
will; and we further receive each member as indivisible part of the
whole." This act of association constitutes a moral and collective
body, a public person.

The practical importance and the mischief of thus suffering society to
repose on conventions which the human will had made, lay in the
corollary that the human will is competent at any time to unmake them,
and also therefore to devise all possible changes that fell short of
unmaking them. This was the root of the fatal hypothesis of the
dictator, or divinely commissioned lawgiver. External circumstance and
human nature alike were passive and infinitely pliable; they were the
material out of which the legislator was to devise conventions at
pleasure, without apprehension as to their suitableness either to the
conditions of society among which they were to work, or to the
passions and interests of those by whom they were to be carried out,
and who were supposed to have given assent to them. It would be unjust
to say that Rousseau actually faced this position and took the
consequences. He expressly says in more places than one that the
science of Government is only a science of combinations, applications,
and exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstance.[226] But
to base society on conventions is to impute an element of
arbitrariness to these combinations and applications, and to make them
independent, as they can never be, of the limits inexorably fixed by
the nature of things. The notion of compact is the main source of all
the worst vagaries in Rousseau's political speculation.

It is worth remarking in the history of opinion, that there was at
this time in France a little knot of thinkers who were nearly in full
possession of the true view of the limits set by the natural ordering
of societies to the power of convention and the function of the
legislators. Five years after the publication of the Social Contract,
a remarkable book was written by one of the economic sect of the
Physiocrats, the later of whom, though specially concerned with the
material interests of communities, very properly felt the necessity