Key Arguments

• Rousseau notes that association may precede or follow territorial occupation, and that land may be enjoyed in common or divided by decision of the sovereign, showing that the precise path of acquisition can vary: “It may also happen that men begin to unite one with another before they possess anything, and that, subsequently occupying a tract of country which is enough for all, they enjoy it in common, or share it out among themselves, either equally or according to a scale fixed by the Sovereign.”
• However, he insists that the hierarchy of rights is constant: “However the acquisition be made, the right which each individual has to his own estate is always subordinate to the right which the community has over all:” making communal superiority over property an invariant feature of legitimate order.
• He argues that without this primacy of the community’s right, collective life and sovereign power would lack firmness: “without this, there would be neither stability in the social tie, nor real force in the exercise of Sovereignty.”
• Rousseau then generalizes to a foundational principle of his political theory: the social compact does not abolish natural inequality but transforms it into a moral‑legal equality: “I shall end this chapter and this book by remarking on a fact on which the whole social system should rest: i. e. that, instead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal” (the sentence continues onto the next page).
• This closing claim links property and sovereignty back to Rousseau’s larger aim: securing a form of political association where, despite natural differences, all are equally recognized and bound under the law.

Source Quotes

It may also happen that men begin to unite one with another before they possess anything, and that, subsequently occupying a tract of country which is enough for all, they enjoy it in common, or share it out among themselves, either equally or according to a scale fixed by the Sovereign. However the acquisition be made, the right which each individual has to his own estate is always subordinate to the right which the community has over all: without this, there would be neither stability in the social tie, nor real force in the exercise of Sovereignty. I shall end this chapter and this book by remarking on a fact on which the whole social system should rest: i. e. that, instead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal

This paradox may easily be explained by the distinction between the rights which the Sovereign and the proprietor have over the same estate, as we shall see later on. It may also happen that men begin to unite one with another before they possess anything, and that, subsequently occupying a tract of country which is enough for all, they enjoy it in common, or share it out among themselves, either equally or according to a scale fixed by the Sovereign. However the acquisition be made, the right which each individual has to his own estate is always subordinate to the right which the community has over all: without this, there would be neither stability in the social tie, nor real force in the exercise of Sovereignty.

However the acquisition be made, the right which each individual has to his own estate is always subordinate to the right which the community has over all: without this, there would be neither stability in the social tie, nor real force in the exercise of Sovereignty. I shall end this chapter and this book by remarking on a fact on which the whole social system should rest: i. e. that, instead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal

Key Concepts

• However the acquisition be made, the right which each individual has to his own estate is always subordinate to the right which the community has over all: without this, there would be neither stability in the social tie, nor real force in the exercise of Sovereignty.
• It may also happen that men begin to unite one with another before they possess anything, and that, subsequently occupying a tract of country which is enough for all, they enjoy it in common, or share it out among themselves, either equally or according to a scale fixed by the Sovereign.
• I shall end this chapter and this book by remarking on a fact on which the whole social system should rest: i. e. that, instead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal

Context

Final sentences of Chapter IX and of Book I, where Rousseau both reasserts the community’s superior right over all property and articulates the foundational principle that the social compact converts natural inequalities into a moral and legal equality among citizens.