B EFORE speaking of the different forms of government, let us try to fix the exact sense of the word, which has not yet been very clearly explained.1.GOVERNMENT IN GENERAL I WARN the reader that this chapter requires careful reading, and that I am unable to make myself clear to those who refuse to be attentive.Every free action is produced by the concurrence of two causes; one moral, i.e., the will which determines the act; the other physical, i.e., the power which executes it.When I walk towards an object, it is necessary first that I should will to go there, and, in the second place, that my feet should carry me.If a paralytic wills to run and an active man wills not to, they will both stay where they are.The body politic has the same motive powers; here too force and will are distinguished, will under the name of legislative power and force under that of executive power.Without their concurrence, nothing is, or should be, done.
We have seen that the legislative power belongs to the people, and can belong to it alone.It may, on the other hand, readily be seen, from the principles laid down above, that the executive power cannot belong to the generality as legislature or Sovereign, because it consists wholly of particular acts which fall outside the competency of the law, and consequently of the Sovereign, whose acts must always be laws.
The public force therefore needs an agent of its own to bind it together and set it to work under the direction of the general will, to serve as a means of communication between the State and the Sovereign, and to do for the collective person more or less what the union of soul and body does for man.Here we have what is, in the State, the basis of government, often wrongly confused with the Sovereign, whose minister it is.
What then is government? An intermediate body set up between the subjects and the Sovereign, to secure their mutual correspondence, charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of liberty, both civil and political.
The members of this body are called magistrates or kings , that is to say governors , and the whole body bears the name prince.18 Thus those who hold that the act, by which a people puts itself under a prince, is not a contract, are certainly right.It is simply and solely a commission, an employment, in which the rulers, mere officials of the Sovereign, exercise in their own name the power of which it makes them depositaries.This power it can limit, modify or recover at pleasure; for the alienation of such a right is incompatible with the nature of the social body, and contrary to the end of association.
I call then government , or supreme administration, the legitimate exercise of the executive power, and prince or magistrate the man or the body entrusted with that administration.
In government reside the intermediate forces whose relations make up that of the whole to the whole, or of the Sovereign to the State.This last relation may be represented as that between the extreme terms of a continuous proportion, which has government as its mean proportional.The government gets from the Sovereign the orders it gives the people, and, for the State to be properly balanced, there must, when everything is reckoned in, be equality between the product or power of the government taken in itself, and the product or power of the citizens, who are on the one hand sovereign and on the other subject.
Furthermore, none of these three terms can be altered without the equality being instantly destroyed.If the Sovereign desires to govern, or the magistrate to give laws, or if the subjects refuse to obey, disorder takes the place of regularity, force and will no longer act together, and the State is dissolved and falls into despotism or anarchy.Lastly, as there is only one mean proportional between each relation, there is also only one good government possible for a State.But, as countless events may change the relations of a people, not only may different governments be good for different peoples, but also for the same people at different times.
In attempting to give some idea of the various relations that may hold between these two extreme terms, I shall take as an example the number of a people, which is the most easily expressible.
Suppose the State is composed of ten thousand citizens.The Sovereign can only be considered collectively and as a body; but each member, as being a subject, is regarded as an individual: thus the Sovereign is to the subject as ten thousand to one, i.e., each member of the State has as his share only a ten-thousandth part of the sovereign authority, although he is wholly under its control.If the people numbers a hundred thousand, the condition of the subject undergoes no change, and each equally is under the whole authority of the laws, while his vote, being reduced to a hundred-thousandth part, has ten times less influence in drawing them up.The subject therefore remaining always a unit, the relation between him and the Sovereign increases with the number of the citizens.From this it follows that, the larger the State, the less the liberty.
When I say the relation increases, I mean that it grows more unequal.
Thus the greater it is in the geometrical sense, the less relation there is in the ordinary sense of the word.In the former sense, the relation, considered according to quantity, is expressed by the quotient; in the latter, considered according to identity, it is reckoned by similarity.
Now, the less relation the particular wills have to the general will, that is, morals and manners to laws, the more should the repressive force be increased.The government, then, to be good, should be proportionately stronger as the people is more numerous.
