Abstract
AbstractHow should institutions be designed so that the votes of the people reflect the general will and not the corporate will of the politically powerful? Rousseau'sSocial Contractprovides us with two mutually exclusive solutions. The first is the more commonly discussed Spartan model where an encompassing public education system eliminates pluralism through social engineering. The second is the often overlooked Roman model of organizing the population into multiple overlapping electoral divisions and checking the power of various interest groups. Rousseau's discussion of Servius's electoral reforms anticipates Madison's arguments about controlling the effects of factions. By distinguishing these two institutional solutions, the article challenges the dominance of Sparta in readings of theSocial Contractand supports the broader antiutopian turn in Rousseau scholarship.
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