It is generally agreed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the critique that he levels against the ‘right of the stronger’ in Chapter III of Book I of The Social Contract, is above all attacking Hobbes; sometimes it is added that he is also attacking Spinoza. Now this is quite possible, even if it might address only a minor aspect of the question. But supposing that these are indeed the two adversaries that Rousseau targets, does this critique hit its mark?

Let us briefly recall in what this critique consists. Rousseau first of all indicates the aim pursued by those he is after, namely to secure an inviolable legitimacy for whomever actually possesses power [pouvoir]: ‘The stronger is never strong enough to be forever master, unless he transforms his force into right, and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the stronger.’ After this comes a brief characterisation of the thesis in question. On the one hand, the ‘right of the stronger’ is ‘apparently understood ironically’: since right must add something to the force of the stronger in order to reinforce it, it is important to declare that the two must not be confused, and even to condemn those who reduce the former to the latter; this is why one agrees that it is a ‘moral power [pouvoir moral]’. But, on the other hand, the ‘right of the stronger’ is ‘in principle really established’: since the objective is to justify existing powers [pouvoirs], it is important to ground the theory of right on principles from which one could always deduce, whatever the case may be, that whoever possesses force has, as if by chance, the right to it; and this amounts to including this conclusion, in a disguised form, in advance. In other words, the thesis of the ‘right of the stronger’ consists in two equally indispensable propositions, but of which only one is explicit, whereas the other only plays its role via the intermediary of its applications without ever being stated as such: