3
one has begun. “Such was, or must have been, the origins of Society and of Laws, which gave
the weak new fetters and the rich new forces” (DOI, 173 [III: 178]). Without realizing it, the
poor have become the slaves of the rich. They become the defenders of society’s laws and rules
of justice—even though these very laws and rules seek to permanently prevent them from
attaining the privileges of true citizens. Thus is born the age of chains.
It is in this set of chains that Rousseau’s citizens find themselves bound at the
opening of the Social Contract: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (SC, 41 [III:
351]). Rousseau claims to be unaware of how these fetters were imposed, but the careful student
knows better. They are the chains found at the end of the Second Discourse.1 As Rousseau says,
the aim of the Social Contract is to turn these chains of slavery into legitimate chains of
citizenship.
Surprisingly little, however, has been written of these chains that play such a
large role in Rousseau’s political theory. This essay seeks to demonstrate exactly what they mean
in the context of his larger vision of politics. The metaphor of the chain owes a great deal to
Plato, and Rousseau’s employment of it suggests deeper affinities with the Athenian than are
commonly acknowledged.2 This reading of Rousseau serves at once as a heuristic to his corpus,
1 This has been previously noted in Strong 2002, 68.
2 Only a small handful of scholars have gone so far as to suggest that Rousseau has a theory of
the Cave. Robert Wokler says in discussing the chains found in the First Discourse, “Here is
Rousseau’s myth of the cave. No postmodernist critic of the Enlightenment Project ever plumbed
the depths of his deconstruction of Homo sapiens into Homo deceptus more deeply” (Wokler,
421). Allan Bloom proposes reading the Emile as a re-telling of Plato’s Cave (Bloom, 8-9). And
Laurence D. Cooper suggestively remarks that by virtue of his philosophic training, Emile
“would have avoided ever being imprisoned in the Republic’s famous cave” (Cooper 2002, 116;
see also Cooper 1999, 59). I hope to vindicate these suggestions here with a more fully
Convention