I have suggested that the “state” envisioned in The Social Contract is not a state at all but an internally coordinated “republic of ends.” However, in this respect as in so many others, Rousseau is revealingly equivocal. “The moral and collective body” founded by the social contract does sometimes coordinate individuals' behaviors through force and does concentrate the means of coercion into a single institutional nexus. If the state is conceived in the standard way as an institutionalized monopoly of the means of violence, the social contract therefore does establish a state or, at least, a social order superintended by institutions with statelike properties.

However, the ambiguity that surrounds the state of The Social Contract is submerged during what I shall call the Age of States, the time when states that accord no place for “the exercise of the general will” reign everywhere on earth. These are the states Hobbes had individuals establish in order to end the war of all against all, the states whose “origins” Rousseau recounted in The Second Discourse. For both Hobbes and Rousseau, the opposition of private wills makes states necessary. But states that only coordinate private wills will not solve the “fundamental problem of political life.” They will not “defend and protect with all common forces the person and goods of each associate” while assuring that each individual “obeys only himself and remains as free as before.”