Glossary

agreement: The item that Rousseau calls a convention is an event, whereas what we call ‘conventions’ (setting aside the irrelevant ‘convention’ = ‘professional get-together’) are not events but enduring states of affairs like the conventions governing the meanings of words, the standards of politeness, etc. So ‘convention’ is a wrong translation; and ‘agreement’ is right.

alienate: To alienate something that you own is to bring it about that you no longer own it; in brief, to give it away or sell it.

arbitrary: It means ‘brought into existence by the decision of some person(s)’. It’s no part of the meaning here (as it is today) that the decision was frivolous or groundless.

censorship: This translates Rousseau’s censure. It doesn’t refer to censorship as we know it today; censure didn’t have that meaning until the 19th century. Rousseau’s topic is a role that certain officials had in some periods of the Roman republic, namely as guardians of, and spokesmen for, the people’s mœurs (see below). They could be thought of as an institutionalising of the ‘court of public opinion’. In 4.7 we see him stretching the original sense.

compact, contract: These translate Rousseau’s pacte and contrat respectively. He seems to mean them as synonyms.

constitution: In this work a thing’s ‘constitution’ is the sum of facts about how something is constituted, how its parts hang together and work together (so the constitution of a state is nothing like a document). Items credited with ‘constitutions’ are organisms and political entities; the mention in 4.7 of the constitution of a people seems aberrant.

magistrate: In this work, as in general in early modern times, a ‘magistrate’ is anyone with an official role in government. The magistracy is the set of all such officials, thought of as a single body.

mœurs: The mœurs of a people include their morality, their basic customs, their attitudes and expectations about how people will behave, their ideas about what is decent. . . and so on. This word—rhyming approximately with ‘worse’—is left untranslated because there’s no good English equivalent to it. English speakers sometimes use it, for the sort of reason they have for sometimes using Schadenfreude.

moral person: Something that isn’t literally person but is being regarded as one for some theoretical purpose. See for example here and here.

populace: Rousseau repeatedly speaks of a ‘people’ in the singular, and we can do that in English (‘The English—what a strange people!’); but it many cases this way of using ‘people’ sounds strained and peculiar, and this version takes refuge in ‘populace’. Here, for instance, that saves us from ‘In every generation the people was the master. . . ’.

prince: As was common in his day, Rousseau uses ‘prince’ to stand for the chief of the government. This needn’t be a person with the rank of Prince; it needn’t be a person at all, because it could be a committee.

sovereign: This translates souverain. As Rousseau makes clear here, he uses this term as a label for the person or group of persons holding supreme power in a state. In a democracy, the whole people constitute a sovereign, and individual citizens are members of the sovereign. In Books 3 and 4 ‘sovereign’ is used for the legislator (or legislature) as distinct from the government = the executive.

subsistence: What is needed for survival—a minimum of food, drink, shelter etc.

wise: An inevitable translation of sage, but the meaning in French carries ideas of ‘learned’, ‘scholarly’, ‘intellectually able’, rather more strongly than whatever it is that you and I mean by ‘wise’.

you, we: When this version has Rousseau speaking of what ‘you’ or ‘we’ may do, he has spoken of what ‘one’ may do. It is normal idiomatic French to use on = ‘one’ much oftener than we can use ‘one’ in English without sounding stilted (Fats Waller: ‘One never knows, do one?’).