Custom is king! Here are excerpts from Rousseau's the social contract on law making, legislative authority and individual/ collective sovereignty.

The lawgiver is the engineer who invents the machine; the prince is merely the mechanic who set it up and operates it.

Montesquieu says that at the birth of political societies, it is the leaders of the republic who shape the institutions but that afterwards it is the institutions which shape the leaders of the republic.

Whoever ventures on the enterprise of setting up a people must be ready, shall we say, to change human nature, to transform each individual, who by himself is entirely complete and solitary, into a part of a much greater whole, from which that same individual will then receive, in a sense, his life and his being. The founder of nations must weaken the structure of man in order to fortify it, to replace the physical and independent existence we have all received from nature with a moral and communal existence. In a word each man must be stripped of his own powers, and given powers which are external to him, and which he cannot use without the help of others. The nearer men's natural powers are to extinction or annihilation, and the stronger and more lasting their acquired powers, the stronger and more perfect is the social institution.

So much so, that if each citizen can do nothing whatever except through cooperation with others, and if the acquired power of the whole is equal to, or greater than, the sum of the natural powers of each of the individuals, then we can say that law-making has reached the highest point of perfection.

The lawgiver is, in every respect, an extraordinary man in the state. Extraordinary not only because of his genius, but equally because of his office, which is neither that of the government nor that of the sovereign. This office which gives the republic its constitution has no place in that constitution. It is a special and superior function which has nothing to do with empire over men; for just as he who has command over men must not have command over laws, neither must he who has command over laws have command over men; otherwise, the laws, being offspring of the legislator's passions, would often merely perpetuate his injustices, and partial judgements would inevitably vitiate the sanctity of his works.

When Lycurgus gave laws to his country, he began by abdicating his monarchical functions. It was the habit of most Greek cities to confer on foreigners the task of framing their laws. The modern republics of Italy have often copied this custom; the republic of Geneva did so, and found that it worked well. (Those who think of Calvin merely as a theologian do not realize the extent of his genius. The codification of our wise edicts, in which he had a large share, does him as much credit as his Institutes. whatever revolutions may take place in our church, the memory of that great man will not cease to be honoured among the adepts of that religion while the love of country and of liberty still lives among us).

Rome in its happiest age saw all the crimes of the Tyranny revived within its borders, and came near to perishing simply because it had put both the legislative authority and the sovereign power in the same hands.

And yet even the deceivers themselves never arrogated the right to make any law on their own authority alone. "Nothing we propose to you," they said to the people, "can become law without your consent. Romans, be yourselves the authors of the laws which are to ensure your happiness."

Thus the man who frames the laws has not nor ought to have any legislative right, and the people itself cannot, even should it wish, strip itself of this untransferable right; for, according to the fundamental compact, it is only the general will which binds individuals and there can be no assurance that an individual will is in conformity with the general will until it has submitted to the free suffrage of the people — I have said this already, but it is worth repeating.

And so we find in the work of the lawgiver two things which look contradictory — a task which is beyond human powers and a non-existent authority for its execution.

.. it is difficult for the individual, who has no taste for any scheme of government but that which serves his private interest, to appreciate the advantages to be derived from the lasting austerities which good laws impose. For a newly formed people to understand wise principles of politics and to follow the basic rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit which must be the product of social institutions would have to preside over the setting up of those institutions; men would have to have already become before the advent of law that which they become as a result of law. And as the lawgiver can for these reasons employ neither force nor argument, he must have recourse to an authority of another order, one which can compel without violence and persuade without convincing.

('The truth is', writes Machiavelli, 'that there has never been in any country an extraordinary legislator who has not invoked the deity; for otherwise his laws would not have been accepted. A wise man knows many useful truths which cannot be demonstrated in such a way as to convince other people). A man who can carve tablets of stone, or bribe an oracle, claim a secret intercourse with some divinity, train a bird to whisper in his ear, or discover some other vulgar means of imposing himself on the people. A man who can do such things may conceivably bring together a company of fools, but he will never establish an empire, and his bizarre creation will perish with him. Worthless tricks may set up transitory bonds, but only wisdom makes lasting ones. We must not conclude from this, with Warburton, that religion and politics have the same purpose among men; it is simply that at the birth of nations, the one serves as the instrument of the other.

Nations, like men, are teachable only in their youth; with age they become incorrigible. Once customs are established and prejudices rooted, reform is a dangerous and fruitless enterprise; a people cannot bear to see its evils touched, even if only to be eradicated; it is like a stupid invalid who trembles at the sight of a physician.

Although a people can make itself free while it is still uncivilized, it cannot do so when its civil energies are worn out. Disturbances may then destroy a civil society (from within) without a revolution being able to restore it, so that as soon as the chains are broken, the state falls apart and exists no longer; then what is needed is a master, not a liberator. Free peoples, remember this maxim: liberty can be gained, but never regained.