The Social Contract

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other does not give himself; he sells himself, at the very least for his subsistence; but why would a people sell themselves? Far from a King providing his subjects with their subsistence, he draws his own only from them, and according to Rabelais François Rabelais, French Renaissance writer, a King does not live on little. Do the subjects give their persons on the condition that their property will also be taken? I do not see what they have left to preserve.

It will be said that the despot ensures civil tranquility for his subjects. Be it so; but what do they gain if the wars that his ambition brings upon them, if his insatiable greed, if the vexations of his ministry desolate them more than their own dissensions would? What do they gain, if this tranquility itself is one of their miseries? One also lives tranquil in dungeons;