Pluralism and the general will: The Roman and Spartan models in Rousseau’s social contract

How 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’s Social Contract provides 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 the Social Contract and supports the broader antiutopian turn in Rousseau scholarship.