ABSTRACT
Having eliminated various false ideas about political rule, the way is clear for Rousseau to begin to outline his own conception of what a legitimate political order looks like. He does this mainly in the two most compressed and closely articulated chapters of Book 1, Chapters 6 and 7. How does an aggregate of persons come to form a people? Why should they come together to form a state? What are the effects of them doing so?
I assume men having reached the point where the obstacles that interfere with their preservation in the state of nature prevail by their resistance over the forces which each individual can muster to maintain himself in that state. Then that primitive state can no longer subsist, and humankind would perish if it did not change its way of being.
(1.6.1)