Rousseau on the natural tendency of governments to degenerate into tyranny (1762)

In this passage from The Social Contract (1762) Rousseau uses some public choice-like insights about the self-interested behaviour of members of the government who will inevitably use the power of their position to pursue their own private interests (their “particular will”) at the expense of the people (the “general will”). He calls this “the unavoidable and inherent defect” which afflicts all political organizations just like aging afflicts the human body. When this process inevitably happens he believes that “the social compact is broken” and that “all private citizens recover by right their natural liberty, and are forced, but not bound, to obey” the state. The path by which various types of government reach this end point differs: democracy degenerates into ochlocracy, aristocracy into oligarchy; and royalty degenerates into tyranny. Many of Rousseau’s followers believed that they could break out of this cycle which they attempted to do when revolution broke out in France in July 1789, with results that only seemed to confirm Rousseau’s original pessimism.