Abstract The social contract tradition, I conjecture, is constituted by an understanding of peoples as persons. I explore this conjecture in investigating one substantial contribution to the tradition: Rousseau's. It is in the systematic consideration of the nature of persons, defined with respect to autonomy that the heart of his social contract theory may be understood. I argue that ‘arguments from principle’ in Rousseau originate from (1) considering the autonomy of individual citizens, and (2) considering the autonomy of the whole of the people as a person. The first produces a constraint on the content of laws (that they are oriented to the common good), and the second produces a constraint on the form of laws, or the way they may be permissibly given (that legislative right remains always the people's alone, and that its transfer, in despotism or representation, is collective enslavement). The latter allows us to understand Rousseau's principled argument for democracy. A crucial insight for political philosophy: further than personhood delimiting how citizens may be treated or relate to each other, personhood may delimit also the shape of social-institutional organization (namely, in conformance with one's conception of what it takes for the social totality to be a person).
William Grant Ray (Thu,) studied this question.