Hatred of Jews: The Collapse of Rousseau’s Social Contract

Rousseau believed that a just society rests on a shared moral bond: the contrat social. But what happens when hatred turns citizens into enemies? The global rise of hatred of Jews shows that the social contract can die not with a revolution, but with indifference.

When the Political “We” Disintegrates

Few ideas have shaped modern political thought as profoundly as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s vision of the contrat social. Written in 1762, Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique articulated a radical promise: that freedom and equality are possible only when individuals unite under laws they collectively author. Yet the durability of this promise depends on a fragile precondition—mutual recognition among citizens. When that recognition collapses, the contract itself dissolves.

In recent years, the surge in violence and rhetoric against Jews across the globe has put this very premise to the test. From campus intimidation to violent attacks on Jewish communities, we are witnessing a social fracture that cannot be dismissed as merely “another form of prejudice.” Hatred of Jews strikes at the moral and political foundation of the democratic order itself. In Rousseau’s terms, it is the undoing of the volonté générale—the shared will that binds a people into a political community.

This essay revisits Rousseau’s political theory and argues that contemporary Jew-hatred constitutes not just a social pathology, but a direct negation of the social contract.

Rousseau´s Vision

Rousseau’s Vision: From Individual Will to the General Will

Rousseau’s social contract is not a historical pact but a normative model for legitimate political life. It posits that individuals, by subordinating private interests to the volonté générale, create a collective body that is both sovereign and protective of freedom (Rousseau 1762/2002). The challenge is that this general will is not the sum of private desires (volonté de tous), but what all reasonable citizens recognize as serving the common good.

As Bertram (2012) and others have noted, this vision presupposes not only deliberation but also civic virtue and equality. The general will arises only where citizens can reason together as moral equals, where none are systematically excluded.

Canon (2022) deepens this idea by distinguishing three dimensions of the volonté générale: the declarative, the deliberative, and the morally reflective. The declarative aspect is expressed through laws and institutions; the deliberative through open, reasoned debate; the reflective through the moral transformation of citizens who learn to identify with the community as a whole.

In this richer view, Rousseau’s project becomes more than a theory of democratic procedure: it is an ethical ideal. The general will demands a citizenry capable of transcending self-interest and cultivating solidarity. Without this moral groundwork, democracy degenerates into either majoritarian tyranny or bureaucratic emptiness.

Unity and Diversity: Rousseau’s Ambivalent Pluralism

Rousseau was acutely aware of the threats posed by entrenched factionalism. He feared that sociétés partielles (partial societies) could corrupt the general will by privileging private interests over the common good (Rousseau 1762/2002). Yet his response was not monolithic. Oprea (2019) identifies two contrasting models in Rousseau’s thought: the Spartan model of cultural homogeneity and the Roman model of institutional pluralism.

The Spartan model pursues civic unity through strict conformity: national education, moral discipline, and a shared ethos. In Sparta, Rousseau admired, individuality dissolved into citizenship; freedom was inseparable from belonging. In contrast, the Roman model allows for diversity but seeks to balance it through fair institutional arrangements. Pluralism is legitimate only when no group dominates the rest.

Oprea’s reading reveals a pragmatic Rousseau: his tolerance for diversity depends on whether it sustains or threatens civic equality. The criterion is not cultural sameness but political reciprocity. The social contract endures only where differences are contained within the horizon of the common good.

The Lawgiver and the Myth of Political Origins

Rousseau’s enigmatic “lawgiver” plays a pivotal role in establishing this horizon. The lawgiver precedes the political order, shaping the conditions under which citizens can later govern themselves. Holm (2024) interprets this as an “origin within the origin”, a necessary fiction that makes political subjectivity possible.

This mythic moment underscores Rousseau’s conviction that political community does not emerge spontaneously. It requires deliberate formation, sustained by shared norms and symbolic foundations. Without such moral infrastructure, the general will cannot take shape.

Hatred of Jews as Contract Breach

If the social contract rests on mutual recognition, then hatred of Jews is its precise negation. Hatred of Jews does not merely express bias; it rejects the political equality of Jewish citizens. It transforms them from co-authors of the law into its presumed enemies.

In the wake of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel—an atrocity that claimed around 1,200 lives, including the massacre of civilians and mass abductions—the global resurgence of hatred of Jews revealed how fragile civic solidarity has become. Instead of empathy for victims, demonstrations across Europe and the United States often morphed into displays of Jew-hatred disguised as political critique.

The 2023 Antisemitism Report by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs documented a 235% rise in incidents worldwide, with a 33% increase in violent attacks and record levels of Holocaust denial on social media (Schmoll 2025). In Germany, the RIAS report (2024) recorded a surge in assaults and intimidation during “pro-Palestinian” rallies. Universities, too, became sites of hostility: at one-third of German institutions surveyed, Jewish students faced harassment or threats (Franzen/König/Träger 2024).

These are not isolated acts. They mark a social rupture. By turning Jews into targets, society withdraws recognition from a segment of its own members: precisely what Rousseau warned against. The volonté générale cannot exist where citizens live in fear of exclusion or violence.

As Arendt (1951/2005) demonstrated in her analysis of totalitarianism, the stripping away of minority rights is never a marginal issue. It signifies the collapse of the political as such, the transition from a community of citizens to a mass ruled by resentment and myth.

The Death of the Political

To grasp why Jew-hatred is so corrosive to the political order, it helps to return to Rousseau’s premise: political legitimacy depends on the consent of all. “In order for any form of society to be legitimate,” he wrote, “the consent of all citizens must precede it” (Rousseau 1762/2002: 48).

Hatred of Jews annuls that consent. It assigns collective guilt to Jewish identity and thus excludes Jews from the category of “citizen.” This exclusion is not only moral but structural: it breaks the communicative bond on which the general will relies. Public discourse becomes poisoned by suspicion and myth, while solidarity gives way to scapegoating.

Rousseau recognized that when partial societies capture the political imagination, they destroy the very space where the general will could appear. Jew-hatred functions precisely as such a factionalizing force. It fabricates a conspiratorial “Jewish other,” transforming political difference into metaphysical enmity.

Oprea’s (2019) contextual pluralism offers a way to frame the response: diversity must be defended insofar as it contributes to the common good—but must be constrained when it turns destructive. Hatred of Jews, being a politics of annihilation rather than critique, falls squarely in the latter category.

The Suspension of Citizenship

Rousseau’s social contract is more than a juridical construct; it is a moral covenant. Its endurance depends not merely on laws but on civic trust. When Jewish citizens withdraw from public life out of fear, the contract is effectively suspended. The political “we” fractures into an “us” and “them,” and the general will becomes an empty formula.

The erosion of civic safety for Jewish communities, whether in synagogues, schools, or online spaces, thus signals something deeper than social intolerance. It marks the loss of political reciprocity. The exclusion of any group on the basis of identity renders the contrat social illegitimate, because the community no longer includes all who are governed by its laws.

Defending the Contract

Rousseau’s contrat social endures as both a philosophical ideal and a moral test. It demands equality not as an abstract right, but as a lived practice of recognition. In this sense, contemporary Jew-hatred does more than threaten safety—it corrodes the very capacity for collective self-rule.

Arendt once warned that the denial of rights to one group always foreshadows the erosion of rights for all. The resurgence of hatred of Jews today is therefore not a marginal issue of prejudice, but a symptom of political decay.

To defend the social contract in Rousseau’s spirit means to reject exclusion at its root, to insist that no member of the political community may be turned into an outsider. Only then can freedom, equality, and the volonté générale remain more than historical words on a page.