I wish to inquire whether, in the civil order, there can be some legitimate and sure rule of administration, taking men as they are and laws as they can be. From this inquiry arises, in this work, what I attempt to reconcile: right and force. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Such a one believes himself the master of others, yet remains more a slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? I believe I can answer this question. If I considered only force and the effect that flows from it, I would say: so long as a people is compelled to obey and does obey, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke and does shake it off, it does still better; for, recovering its freedom by the same right that stole it away, either it was justified in taking it back, or there was no justification for taking it away. The most ancient of all societies, and the only natural one, is that of the family: and yet the bond between father and children lasts only as long as they need him for their preservation. Once that need ceases, the natural bond dissolves. The children, released from the obedience that held them, and the father released from the care he owed, all return, if they remain united, to convention, and the family is maintained only by convention. Those who deliberate on a fundamental public law have to examine the question from two points of view: right and interest. Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow man, and since force produces no right, conventions remain as the basis of all legitimate authority among men. To say that a man gives himself gratuitously is to say something absurd and inconceivable; such an act is illegitimate, null, for the sole reason that he who performs it is not in his right mind. To say the same of an entire people is to suppose a nation of madmen: madness does not make right. Even if each man could give himself away, he cannot give his children: they are born men and free; their liberty belongs to them, and no one but themselves has the right to dispose of it. Thus, from whatever angle we regard things, the right of slavery is null, not only because it is illegitimate, but because it is absurd and meaningless. These words, slavery and right, are contradictory; they exclude each other. How to find a form of association which will defend and protect the person and goods of each associate, and by which each one, uniting with all, yet obeys only himself and remains as free as before? Such is the fundamental problem of which the social contract provides the solution. Each of us puts 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. At once, in place of the individual person of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly has voices, which receives from this same act its unity, its common self, its life and its will. Each giving himself to all gives himself to no one; and since there is no associate over whom one does not acquire the same right one cedes over oneself, one gains the equivalent of all one loses, and more force to preserve what one has. The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a most remarkable change, substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they formerly lacked. Though he loses in this state several advantages he derived from nature, he gains others so great that his faculties are exercised and developed, his ideas extended, his sentiments ennobled, his whole soul so elevated that, were not the abuses of this new condition often to degrade him below that from which he has emerged, he should ceaselessly bless the happy moment that tore him from it forever, and made of a stupid and limited animal an intelligent being and a man. Natural liberty has for its only limits the forces of the individual; civil liberty is limited by the general will. One gains on the side of liberty what one loses on the side of natural license. This is what man owes to the social compact: each submits to the common will, and obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself is liberty.