Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow, and since force creates no right, we must conclude that conventions form the basis of all legitimate authority among men. If an individual, said Grotius, can alienate his liberty and make himself a slave master, why a people could he not alienate his own and make itself subject to a king? There is plenty of ambiguous words which would need explaining, but let's stick to the word alienate. Alienate is to give or sell. Or a man who becomes the slave of another does not give himself, he sells himself, at least for his subsistence: but a people for what he sells? Far from a king to his subjects provide their subsistence that he gets his own only from them, and according Rabelais, kings do not live on nothing. The subjects then give their persons on condition that takes their goods also? I do not see what they have left to preserve. We say that the despot assures his subjects civil tranquility. Either, but what do they gain if the wars his ambition brings down upon them, if his insatiable greed, if the vexations of his ministers would afflict more than their differences? What do they gain, even if this peace is one of their miseries? Tranquillity is found also in dungeons, is that enough to be there right? The Greeks imprisoned in the cave of the Cyclops lived there alone, waiting for their turn to be devoured. That a man gives himself gratuitously, is to say something absurd and inconceivable; such an act is null and illegitimate, only that he who does not in his senses. The same is true of a whole people is to suppose a people of madmen madness
does not. When each man could alienate himself, he could not alienate his children: they are born men and free; their liberty belongs to them, no one has right to dispose of them. Before they are old because the father can provide for them the conditions for their preservation, for their welfare, but not give them irrevocably and unconditionally, for such a gift is contrary for the nature and exceeds the rights of fatherhood. It would therefore an arbitrary government was legitimate in every generation the people should master to admit or reject, but then the government would no longer be arbitrary.
renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, the rights of humanity, even its duties. There is no indemnity is possible for him who renounces everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man is to remove all morality from his acts to remove all liberty from his will. Finally it is an empty and contradictory convention that sets up a hand an absolute authority and the other an unlimited obedience.
Is it not clear that we are committed to nothing to that which we are entitled to demand everything, and this condition alone, without parallel, without exchange she does not invalidate the act? For what right can my slave have against me, since all he has is mine, and his right being mine, this right of mine against myself is a word that makes no sense?
Grotius and the rest find in war another origin of the so-called right of slavery. The victor having, in their view, the right to kill the loser, he may redeem his life at the expense of his liberty; convention is the more legitimate because it is the benefit of both. But it is clear that this supposed right to kill the conquered is by no means the rule of war. Only that the men living in their primitive independence, they have no mutual relations stable enough to constitute either the state of peace or a state of war, they are naturally enemies. It is the ratio of things and not men who constitute the war, and the state of war can not arise out of simple personal relations, but only real relations, private war, or man and man can not exist, nor in the state of nature where there is no constant property, nor in the state society where everything is under the authority of law. Individual combats, duels and encounters, are acts that constitute a state, and wars against private institutions authorized by King Louis IX of France and suspended by the Peace of God, are abuses the feudal government, absurd system if ever there was, contrary to the principles of natural law, and good policy. War then is a relationship between man and man, but a relationship from state to state, in which individuals are enemies only accidentally, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers, not so as members of the fatherland, but as its defenders. Finally, each State can have for enemies only other States and not of men, between things of different nature there can be no real relation.
This principle is in conformity with the established rules of all time and the constant practice of all civilized peoples. Declarations of war are intimations less to powers than their subjects. The foreigner, whether king, individual, or people, who robs, kills or detains the subjects, without declaring war on the prince, is not an enemy, but a robber. Even during the war a just prince, while laying hands in enemy country of everything that belongs to the public, but he respects the person and property of individuals, he respects rights on which his own are founded. The end of the war being the destruction of the enemy State, it was right to kill the defenders as they have the weapons in hand, but as soon as they lay them down and surrender, they cease to be enemies or instruments of the enemy, they again become mere men, and it has a stronger claim on their lives.
Sometimes you can kill the State without killing a single member: Gold war gives no right which is not necessary to an end. These principles are not those of Grotius: they are not based on the authority of poets, but derived from the nature of things, and are based on reason. In respect of the right of conquest, he has no other foundation than the law of the jungle. If the war does not give the victor the right to massacre the conquered peoples, the right that he does not base it can enslave. We have the right to kill the enemy when you can not do slave the right to do slave therefore does not have the right to kill him, so it's an unfair exchange to make him buy at the price his liberty his life on which we have no rights. By establishing the right of life and death over the right of slavery, and the right of slavery on the right of life and death, is it not clear that we fall into the vicious circle? Even assuming that terrible right to kill everybody, I say that a slave made in war or a conquered people is bound to nothing at all to his master to be obeyed as it is forced. By taking an equivalent for his life, the victor than it has done through point: instead of killing him without fruit it has killed him usefully. So far he has acquired over him any authority in addition to force, the state of war exists between them as before, their relation is the effect, and use the law of war does not imply Treaty peace. They have a convention is but this convention, far from destroying the state of war, presupposes its continuance.
Thus, from whatever aspect we regard the question, the right of a slave is zero, not only because it is illegitimate, but because it is absurd and meaningless. These words, slavery and law, are contradictory, they are mutually exclusive. Let a man a man or a man to a people, this speech will always be equally foolish.
I'm with you all a convention at your expense and wholly to my advantage, that I will keep as long as I please, and you shall keep it as I please.
ROUSSEAU, The Social Contract, From Slavery I, 4
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