An Appraisal of the Concept of Sovereignty in the Social Contractarian Thoughts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Abstract

The concept of sovereignty is one of the major concepts that have elicited response from political thinkers in one form or the other throughout the ages. Discourses and contributions by thinkers as it were are divided into two strands, the classical theory of sovereignty and the constitutional theory of sovereignty. The difference that exists between these schools of thought ramifies the question of how the concept of sovereignty relates to state authority. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) also contributed to discourse on the concept of sovereignty. This he did while putting forward his thoughts on the social contract. In Rousseau’s contractarian thought, sovereignty is popular, unlimited, inalienable, and resides within the people and as such, the people in Rousseau’s thinking “calls the shots” in any democratic political configuration. This paper engages the expository and analytic method of data analysis in its bid to appraise the Rousseauan conception of sovereignty with the intent of bringing to the fore, its inherent merits and demerits and to accordingly extrapolates its implications for democratic legitimacy in an age where democracy has been accepted in the world over as the world-best practice in governance. In the final third, the paper holds that the inherent demerits of the Rousseauan conception of sovereignty notwithstanding, Rousseau seems to have laid down the prototype of all legitimate government through his exclusive conferment of sovereignty on the people. It concludes that legitimate democratic regimes can be realized in Africa through the adoption of the Rousseauan model of contractual governance.

Keywords: Sovereignty, Social Contract, Consent, People, Legitimacy.