Major ideas of Enlightenment: Rousseau

Major Ideas of the Enlightenment: Rousseau

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The Enlightenment was a sweeping intellectual movement that reshaped Europe’s political and philosophical landscape across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — from the English political philosophers who first theorised the social contract, through the Scottish and French Enlightenments, to the counter-current of Romanticism and Rousseau’s radical rethinking of sovereignty, equality, and the general will. This article traces that arc, with a particular focus on Rousseau’s ideas, a key theme in the UPSC History Optional syllabus on Enlightenment political thought.

The English Enlightenment

The English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution

• Seventeenth-century England endured a pair of tense struggles for political power that profoundly shaped the philosophers of the English Enlightenment.
  • The first came in 1649, when the English Civil War resulted in the execution of King Charles I and the establishment of a commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. Although this republic lasted a decade, it essentially devolved into dictatorship, and England reverted to monarchy with the restoration of Charles II.
  • The restored monarchy had clear limits placed on its absolute power, as made evident in the bloodless Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the English people overthrew a king they deemed unacceptable and effectively chose their next rulers.
    • The revolution occurred because Charles II’s son, James II, was an overt Catholic — unacceptable to the predominantly Protestant public. The English rallied behind James II’s Protestant daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange, who led a nonviolent coup that dethroned James II and sent him into exile in France.
• When William and Mary ascended the throne, they effectively ended Catholic monarchy and the idea of divine right. In the years that followed, an English Bill of Rights was drafted, boosting parliamentary power and personal liberties — and in this freer environment, science, the arts, and philosophy flourished.

Thomas Hobbes

• The first major figure of the English Enlightenment was the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679).
  • In 1640, fearing that some of his writings had angered England’s Parliament, Hobbes fled to Paris, where he penned much of his major work. He is best known for the epic Leviathan (1651), a lengthy, groundbreaking exploration of human nature that laid the foundation for social-contract theory.
• In Leviathan, Hobbes elaborates on the nature of man and justifies absolutist rule.
  • He argues that human nature is inherently bad, and that humans will remain in a constant state of war, vying for power and material resources, unless awed by a single great power. He also holds that any group of men who ascend to positions of great power will be prone to abusing it, seeking more power than the stability of society requires.
  • Thus, he reasons, a single absolute ruler is preferable to an oligarchy or democracy: since that ruler’s wealth and power are largely equivalent to the wealth and power of the nation, he will seek to steer the nation on a stable and prosperous course.
  • Hobbes holds that the sovereign’s main duty is to protect the citizens, and that if he fails at this task, allegiance may be transferred to another ruler.
• An atheist, Hobbes long argued that religion is useful to the state as a propaganda tool, being the entity best able to remind the ignorant masses of their role and duties.
  • He held that human life is, by nature, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” and was pessimistic about the prospects for progress in a world short on ethics.
  • Fearing — justly — that Leviathan might offend certain groups, especially Anglicans and French Catholics, Hobbes judged himself safest at home, and returned to London, where he lived out his years privately.
• Commentators have praised Hobbes’s work for its logic and clarity, but have disagreed over precisely what he meant — for instance, the rules governing exactly when a citizen may transfer allegiance to a new sovereign remain unclear: broadly, only when a ruler kills or ceases to protect a subject may that subject oppose the ruler; at all other times, the subject must remain subservient.
  • The greatest criticism of Hobbes centres on his failure to explain how totally selfish men would be able to create and maintain the covenant of the state.
  • Hobbes represents the pessimistic side of the Enlightenment, seeing progress as the result of suppressing man’s instincts rather than granting freedom to them.
• Though Hobbes championed absolutism for the sovereign, he also developed some fundamentals of European liberal thought — including the right of the individual and the natural equality of all men.

John Locke

• On the opposite side of the spectrum from the pessimistic Hobbes stood John Locke (1632–1704), the other major English political philosopher of the seventeenth century.
  • Locke received a prestigious education and remained deeply involved in academics; it was while studying medicine under a mentor that he was introduced to political thought, which then captured his interest. He went on to influence later thinkers such as Rousseau and Voltaire.
• Locke remains known today for his liberalism in political theory, and particularly for developing social contract theory — an idea in political philosophy typically associated with Locke and Rousseau.
  • The theory held that a government and its subjects enter into an unspoken contract when that government takes power: in exchange for ceding some societal freedoms to the government and its laws, subjects receive, and remain free to demand, protection. The government’s authority thus lies in the consent of the governed.
  • Locke is well known for asserting that individuals have a right to “Life, Liberty and Property,” and for his belief that the natural right to property derives from labour.
• Locke’s early writings focused on the religious intolerance blighting England at the time. Though important, these did not carry the influence of his later works, such as Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), in which he advances his optimistic idea that the mind is a blank slate, capable of learning and improving through conscious effort.
  • Locke was better known still for Two Treatises of Government (also 1690) — a massively influential political work, particularly its second treatise, still considered a foundation of modern political thought.
• Not surprisingly, Locke’s more optimistic work was received more warmly, and proved more influential in the long run, than Hobbes’s.
  • Locke’s second treatise — which holds that every man is inherently good, but that the necessity of government requires people to compromise on some issues for the betterment of the whole — has endured, setting forth Locke’s vision of an ideal representative government and anticipating ideas such as the separation of powers, later adopted by the American founding fathers in drafting the U.S. Constitution.

The Scottish Enlightenment

• By 1750, Scotland’s major cities had built an intellectual infrastructure of mutually supporting institutions — universities, reading societies, libraries, periodicals, museums, and masonic lodges — and the Scottish network played a major role in the further development of the transatlantic Enlightenment.
  • In France, Voltaire remarked, “we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilization,” while the Scots, in turn, paid close attention to French ideas.
• The first major philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment was Francis Hutcheson, who held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1729 to 1746.
  • A moral philosopher offering alternatives to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, one of his major contributions was the utilitarian and consequentialist principle that virtue is that which provides “the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.” Regarded as the father of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hutcheson championed political liberty and the right of popular rebellion against tyranny.
• Much of what is incorporated in the scientific method, and some modern attitudes toward the relationship between science and religion, were developed by his protégés David Hume and Adam Smith.
  • David Hume became a major figure in the sceptical, empiricist tradition of philosophy. He and other Scottish Enlightenment thinkers developed a “science of man,” merging a scientific study of how humans behave in ancient and primitive cultures with a strong awareness of the determining forces of modernity — a movement from which modern sociology largely originated, and whose philosophical concepts directly influenced James Madison (and, through him, the U.S. Constitution).
  • Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations (1776), often considered the first work of modern economics, advocating liberty in commerce and the global economy, with an immediate impact on British economic policy that continues into the 21st century.
• Scientific progress in this milieu was aided by, among others, the discovery of carbon dioxide (“fixed air”) by Joseph Black and the invention of the steam engine by James Watt.

The French Enlightenment

• Although the first major figures of the Enlightenment came from England, the movement truly exploded in France, which became a hotbed of political and intellectual thought in the 1700s. Its roots lay largely in resentment over the decadence of the French monarchy in the late 1600s.
  • During the reign of the extravagant “Sun King” Louis XIV (1643–1715), wealthy intellectual elites began gathering regularly in Parisian salons (often hosted by high-society women) to complain about the state of the country — a habit that only grew in popularity after Louis XIV’s death, under the far less competent Louis XV.
  • Gradually, complaints in the salons and coffee shops evolved from idle whining into constructive political thought — especially once the works of John Locke became widespread — and cutting-edge thought across disciplines worked its way into the salons, giving birth to the French Enlightenment.

The Philosophes

• By the early 1700s, coffee shops, salons, and other social groups had sprung up across Paris, encouraging intellectual discussion on the political and philosophical status of the country. Members of these groups increasingly clamoured to read the latest work of leading thinkers, who came to be known as the philosophes — a group that championed personal liberties and the work of Locke and Newton, denounced Christianity, and actively opposed Europe’s abusive governments.
  • Predominantly writers, journalists, and teachers, the philosophes were confident that human society could be improved through rational thought.
• A large part of their attacks focused on the Church and its traditions.
  • In matters of faith, many prominent philosophes were deists, believing in an all-powerful being likened to a “cosmic watchmaker” who set the universe in autonomous motion and never again intervened.
  • They disdained organised religion and the Church’s traditional idea of the “chain of being,” implying a natural hierarchy of existence — God, then angels, monarchs, aristocrats, and so on.
  • They also objected to the decadent lifestyles of Church leaders, and to the Church’s persistence in collecting exorbitant taxes and tithes from commoners to fund outlandish salaries for bishops and other officials.
  • What the philosophes found most appalling, however, was the Church’s control over impressionable commoners through the instilled fear of eternal damnation — provoking the philosophes into challenging doctrines such as the existence of miracles and divine revelation, often disproving specific tenets with simple science. The Church, in turn, despised the philosophes and all they stood for.

Literacy

• Complementing this active social and political atmosphere was France’s dramatically improving literacy rate — beyond just talking about revolutionary ideas, more French people, especially in and around Paris, were also reading and writing about them.
  • A symbiotic relationship developed: readers anxiously awaited more literature from the philosophes, while the response writers received compelled them to write more. This scholarly atmosphere also gave women of French society — albeit still within traditional roles as salon hostesses — an opportunity to contribute to the conversation.

Montesquieu

• One of the French Enlightenment’s leading political thinkers, the Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), drew heavily on the works of Locke. His most critical work, The Spirit of Laws (1748), elaborated on many of Locke’s ideas, stressing the importance of separation of powers and becoming one of the first proponents of a system of checks and balances in government.
  • Although his work greatly influenced the development of democracy, Montesquieu himself believed no single governmental system was inherently superior — rather, different forms suited different situations.
  • An early pioneer of sociology, he spent considerable time collecting data from various world cultures, leading him to the rather outlandish conclusion that climate was a major factor in determining the best form of government for a given region — believing environmental conditions affect behaviour and response, and that governments in different climates should be adjusted accordingly.
  • Even Montesquieu admitted this idea worked better in theory than in practice; his legacy therefore lies primarily in his method — his combination of practicality and Enlightened idealism.

Voltaire

• The Enlightenment’s primary satirist, François-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name Voltaire (1694–1778), entered the literary world as a playwright, quickly becoming renowned for his wit and satire.
  • In and out of prison and other predicaments for much of his youth, Voltaire spent a period of exile in England, where he was introduced to the works of Locke and Newton — an encounter that had a profound impact on him, and after which he became wildly prolific, authoring more than sixty plays and novels, along with countless letters and poems.
• An avowed deist, believing in God but hating organised religion, Voltaire made Christianity — which he called “glorified superstition” — a frequent target of his wit.
  • He was also an ardent supporter of monarchy, and spent considerable time working toward judicial reform. Later, after moving between countries and working with several notable contemporaries, he wrote the satire Candide (1759), since regarded as one of history’s most influential literary works.
• Although Voltaire lacked the scientific breadth of some contemporaries, he compensated with sheer volume of output — using his sarcastic wit to analyse everything from philosophy to politics to law, extolling reason over superstition and intolerance, and effectively becoming the voice of the Enlightenment.
  • His satirical style let him make incredibly pointed criticisms while generally avoiding serious prosecution by those he attacked.
• His Dictionnaire philosophique (Philosophical Dictionary, 1764) and Letters on the English (1733) were revolutionary texts that spread the ideals of the Enlightenment, some of which proved influential and decisive in the course of the French Revolution, which began in 1789.
  • In Letters on the English, he narrates his experience of England, comparing conditions in France with British institutions, religion, and freedom of expression; the French government banned the book. He considered Newton greater than Caesar, holding that “we should honor the person who understands the world.”
  • His other famous works include The Age of Louis 14 and Treatise on Tolerance; people called him “King Voltaire.”
• Although detractors complain that Voltaire never offered solutions to the problems he criticised (and thus could not properly be called a philosopher), he never aspired to do so — yet by merely pointing out problems and criticising prevailing philosophies, he caused considerable change.

Denis Diderot

• The third major figure of the French Enlightenment was Denis Diderot (1713–1784), a writer and philosopher best known for editing and assembling the massive Encyclopédie — an attempt to collect virtually all human knowledge gathered up to that point.
  • Running to twenty-eight volumes, the portion edited by Diderot was published one volume at a time from 1751 to 1772, assisted by the French mathematician d’Alembert for part of the project.
  • Beyond facts, definitions, and explanations, the Encyclopédie also gave philosophes space to discuss their views on various topics, drawing contributions from a veritable who’s-who of Enlightenment-era scholars, including Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau.
• Owing to its highly scientific — and thus untraditional — nature, the Encyclopédie met with significant scorn: Diderot was widely accused of plagiarism and inaccuracy, and many considered the collection an overt attack on the monarchy and the Church.
  • It became one of the primary vehicles through which Enlightenment ideas spread across the European continent, being the first work to collect the myriad knowledge and developments the Enlightenment had fostered. Yet it succeeded not because it explicitly tried to persuade readers of Enlightenment ideas, but because it simply presented the accumulated knowledge of the Western world in one place, letting readers draw their own conclusions.
  • Unsurprisingly, Europe’s power establishment frowned upon people drawing their own conclusions; the Church and monarchy hated the Encyclopédie, since it implied many of their teachings and doctrines were fraudulent. In response to attempted bans, Diderot printed additional copies in secrecy and smuggled them out.

Skepticism and Romanticism: New Movements

• As the Enlightenment progressed into the mid-1700s, a noticeable shift occurred away from the empirical, reason-based philosophies of the leading French and English thinkers. The new philosophies that emerged tended to take one of two major directions:
  • Romanticism: A philosophy strongly attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, stressing emotion and a return to the natural state of man, over the confines and constructs of society. It stressed a return to life as it can be seen, felt, and experienced, encouraging reliance on emotion, intuition, and instinct rather than reason in guiding human behaviour. Its innate, approachable philosophy appealed to the public more than the pure rationalism of the Enlightenment, which often came across as cold.
  • Skepticism: Gaining prominence under the Scottish philosopher David Hume, and later elevated by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, this movement questioned whether human beings can truly perceive the world around them with any degree of accuracy.
• These two movements, together with Church anti-Enlightenment propaganda and rising unrest as the French Revolution neared, marked a departure from the thought that had dominated the Enlightenment’s peak.

David Hume

• David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish writer and philosopher who paved the way for the future of the sceptical school of thought.
  • A dogmatic sceptic, he devoted much of his work to investigating the limits of human reasoning. His first major work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), though now highly regarded, was widely ignored at the time owing to its complicated prose; he made up for this in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), which rearticulated much of the same material more accessibly.
• Hume’s studies focused on reason, perception, and morals.
  • He questioned whether the senses — and thus perception — could be trusted for a consistent view of the world, and held that if a person found a particular action reasonable, that action was morally appropriate. By adding this introspective, individual layer to questions of perception and morality, Hume stripped the philosophical world of its generalisations.
  • The sceptical Hume believed everything was subject to some degree of uncertainty — an idea that upended the intellectual world — returning always to the thought that, since we can never know anything beyond doubt, there is little point in the pursuit. He also applied his sceptical approach to science and religion, arguing that although neither could fully explain anything, science was the stronger of the two, since it could at least admit it would never be absolutely correct.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was one of the most influential thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Europe. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution and contained the seeds of many modern ideas.
  • Orphaned in Geneva at an early age, the nomadic, self-taught Rousseau drifted through much of his youth, contributing intellectually however he could — devising a new system for musical composition, submitting articles to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and composing essays on various topics.
  • It was one such essay, the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), that first earned him renown, followed by his famous Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755).

Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755)

• This work charted man’s progression from a peaceful, noble state in nature to an imbalanced state in society, blaming the advent of various professions and private property for inequality and moral degradation.
  • Rousseau showed how greed had corrupted man — how the strong had seized land and property and forced the weak to obey them.
• He identified two types of inequality:
  • Natural inequality: differences such as some being lazy, others intelligent — tolerable, since it is beyond control.
  • Conventional inequality: inequality created by society — for example, privileged sections having the right to a job while weaker sections do not. This type of inequality, Rousseau held, must be removed.
  • His focus was on conventional inequality, which he considered a product of the social system: the growth of civilisation, and the social system that accompanied it, produced various kinds of inequality based on status, wealth, and power.
• He held that mankind’s most ideal era was when there was no private property, since property had bred greed, corruption, and war.
  • In his vision of a perfect world, Rousseau wanted people restored to their most natural state, presenting the view that man in the state of nature was equal and free, but became unequal with the development of civilisation.
  • Nature, he argued, dignifies man, while civilisation corrupts him; people would be less corrupted if civilised institutions followed nature more closely — a view that reflects elements of Romanticism. His frequent denunciations of inequality and private property even carried an early suggestion of communism.
• The novel Julie (1761) told the story of a forbidden love, while Emile (1762) provided a revolutionary dissertation on the proper rearing and education of a child.

Emile and Rousseau’s Ideas on Education

• In Emile, Rousseau presented his idea of education, holding that it should be close to nature.
  • He opposed intensive bookish education, considering practical education more important, and held that:
    • Education should promote a child’s thinking and thought processes through his own experiences.
    • Education should be in harmony with the development of the child’s natural capacities.
  • He also emphasised the observation of nature as an important part of education.

Rousseau as a Pioneer of Romanticism

• Rousseau emphasised the natural order and the natural state of man, rather than the state distorted through an over-emphasis on reason in guiding human behaviour. His theory of Romanticism holds that all are born good, but are distorted by reason.
  • Romanticism, as noted, stressed a return to life as it can be seen, felt, and experienced, encouraging reliance on emotion, intuition, and instinct over reason. Shakespeare’s romantic tragedies were received with new appreciation during the Romantic era, as were the works of countless other authors and poets who came to prominence in the following century of Romantic writing — and this innate, approachable philosophy appealed to the public more than the Enlightenment’s pure rationalism, which often felt cold.
• Though not the only notable Romantic author, Rousseau was one of the first, and two of his works resonated greatly with the public:
  • Julie told a relatable story of forbidden love that struck a chord with readers.
  • Rousseau’s autobiography, Confessions, ushered in a whole new era of thinking that eventually developed into Romanticism — opening up an entirely new world of personal revelation within the genre of autobiography. No previous memoirist had ever discussed his anxiety over the struggle for integrity, or elucidated his own flaws, so openly.
• By being so frank and personal, Rousseau questioned the developments taking place in the world through reason, saying: “The Promptings of the Heart are more to be trusted than the Logic of the Mind” — reflecting his Romanticism, and emphasising drawing inspiration from the heart rather than the mind, since the mind might be corrupted by an over-emphasis on reason. His philosophy was clearly contrary to contemporary notions of reason.
  • Rousseau saw nothing of the “human face” in an era of scientific development and application that had brought material progress. In his view, industrialisation brought more misery than good, precisely because society trusted the application of the mind over the application of the heart; had the heart been trusted, there would have been less misery.
  • He favoured a loving family life and the dignity of labour — possible through the heart — over a materialistic life focused on scientific development, production, and profit.
• The English philosopher G.K. Chesterton‘s words capture Rousseau’s position well: “Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart but, we can do nothing to his head but hit it.”

Rousseau’s Frontal Assault on the Enlightenment

• Though many believed Rousseau shared the basic beliefs of the Enlightenment, some of his thought clearly reveals counter-Enlightenment ideas — he showed the same distaste for reason, knowledge, and individualism in general as he did for the sciences.
  • Rousseau is considered a counter-Enlightenment thinker, representing the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment’s scientific and rational learning.
• In his first work, A Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, Rousseau argued that science did not improve morality nor contribute much to happiness, and that the progress of the sciences had caused the corruption of virtue and morality — directly against the Enlightenment idea that scientific progress purified morals and happiness.
• In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau attacked the very foundation of the Enlightenment project: Reason.
  • Where the philosophes believed reason to be the foundation of civilisation, Rousseau held that civilisation’s “rational” progress is anything but progress, since it is achieved at the expense of morality. Human beings, he argued, are basically good by nature, but were corrupted by present-day civil society — and he emphasised the importance of empathy over reason as the ground of morality.
  • He argued that civilisation is thoroughly corrupting — not only the oppressive feudal system of eighteenth-century France, with its decadent and parasitical aristocracy, but also its Enlightenment alternative, with its exaltation of reason, property, the arts, and sciences.
• Rousseau’s arguments are rooted not in individualism, but in the belief that the good of all mankind is superior to that of the individual.
  • He viewed society as developing organically, its elements inextricably linked — putting him in conflict with the Enlightenment mainstream’s belief in individualism. To him, the Enlightenment’s atomised social ideal, based on an abstract individualism, failed to account for how real people actually behave in real societies.
• Rousseau fired the opening shot in the war between the Enlightenment and its critics, and historians such as William R. Everdell have situated him as the “founder of the Counter-Enlightenment.”

The Social Contract (1762)

• Rousseau’s best-known and most influential work, The Social Contract, opens with the famous words: “Men are born free, yet everywhere are in chains.”
  • From this opening, Rousseau describes the myriad ways the “chains” of civil society suppress man’s natural birthright to physical freedom. He writes that man in the state of nature was free, equal, and independent, with no chains — but with the growth of civilisation and prosperity, and the rise of the state and civil institutions needed to protect it, natural equality and the bliss of natural life were lost, and man everywhere fell into chains — that is, into various forms of inequality and bondage.
  • He holds that civil society does nothing to enforce the equality and individual liberty promised to man upon entering it.
• For Rousseau, the only legitimate political authority is one consented to by all the people, who agree to such government by entering into a social contract for their mutual preservation.
  • Rousseau calls the collective grouping of all citizens the “sovereign,” to be considered, in many ways, like an individual person. While each individual has a particular will aimed at his own best interest, the sovereign expresses the general will, aimed at the common good.
  • Rousseau recommends the death penalty for those who violate the social contract.

General Will

• Rousseau describes his idea of a perfect political system: one in which every individual articulates their wants, but ultimately compromises for the betterment of the general public — the “general will,” which contains traces of every citizen’s will, and thus serves everyone in some way.
  • The general will represents the will of the people, provided each member of the group thinks and acts selflessly; it represents the genuine interest and common good of the collective body, which everyone must follow because everyone’s interest lies within it.
  • The general will also establishes freedom: true freedom means obeying the general will, since in obeying it, people obey their own true nature (being, by nature, inclined to think of others). The general will evolves gradually, through appropriate discussion and debate, rather than developing suddenly.
  • An individual within the collective body may hold a particular will contrary or dissimilar to the general will — meaning that person is not thinking or acting selflessly, but is focused on their own interest. If such a person insists on placing self-interest above the community’s interest, the general will should be imposed upon them (an element of autocracy).
• The general will is established as sovereign, supreme legal power — infallible and final in authority, an absolute sovereignty that no one has any right to refute or violate, since it expresses the general will, in which lies the common good of everyone.
  • Rousseau thus transforms sovereignty — from a monarch (a single representative) or a parliamentary institution (a group of representatives) — into the collective body, or community as a whole.
  • Since general will/sovereignty cannot be transferred or represented, but always resides in the community, Rousseau rejected any political system involving representation, such as monarchy or parliament — arguing that representation is incompatible with the spirit of the general will, since it dissolves the general will and subjects the collective body to the will of a single representative or group of representatives.
  • Monarchy represents the will of one person, and parliamentary institutions the will of a group of persons; in both cases, the collective body comes under the will of another. Rousseau’s alternative — the general will, established as sovereignty — is a supreme rule, since everyone’s interest lies within it, and in obeying it, everyone obeys their own will, and is thus free (general will as an idea of democracy).
  • In this sense, Rousseau’s ideas contain elements of democracy, and are said to have broadened Locke’s democratic ideas of popular sovereignty (the state’s duty to protect the natural rights of life, liberty, and property).
• The government, composed of magistrates, is charged with implementing and enforcing the general will; the “sovereign” is the rule of law, ideally decided upon through direct democracy in an assembly.
  • In this way, the power to make laws remains in the hands of the people, while the government implements them — reconciling both individual liberty and the institution of government. In this reconciliation, Rousseau asks each individual to surrender the right to control their own life in exchange for an equal voice in setting the ground rules of society, and appeals to people to surrender their individual rights to a new moral and collective body, with one will: the general will.

Criticism of the General Will

• Rousseau’s conception of the general will is very vague, which makes it dangerous and vulnerable to misuse.
  • According to Rousseau, the general will differs from the mere consensus of individual members of society — a differentiation that led to conflict between individual liberty and the institution of government, and gave rise to the charge that Rousseau’s philosophy contained the seeds of absolutism.
  • The “general will” is not simply the “will of all”: the will of all may include private individual interests, but the general will does not contain private will. This implies that, instead of the democratic principle of people voting for what they want (even if not good for them), there is a notion of what is genuinely best for them — which the general will represents.
  • Since general will thus supersedes any particular individual’s will (which might not be good for the individual), Rousseau holds that one should submit to the authority of the general will even by abandoning one’s natural rights — a submission that guarantees individuals against subordination to the wills of others, and ensures they obey only themselves, since they are, collectively, the authors of the law (the general will).
• The government could remove any “particular wills” not conforming to the general will — a notion used by dictators to interpret the general will for their own ends.
  • For example, Robespierre, a follower of Rousseau, spread a reign of terror during the French Revolution in the name of imposing the “general will,” executing anyone he considered not to be following it. The government, charged with implementing and enforcing the general will, could do so even by force.
• Rousseau also argued that the more political parties there are, the more they divide the people and interfere with the general will — an idea that, in France, led to viewing any political party as a faction to be removed for the general will to function effectively.
  • These ideas had the power to turn the French “republic” into a one-party state without a democratic vote — in effect, a totalitarian regime run by the Committee for Public Safety. Rousseau was opposed to the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly.

Note: The theory of contract from the Middle Ages up to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke had hinged on an agreement between the governed and a single Governor (e.g., a monarch) or a group of Governors (e.g., a parliament) — a political contract. Rousseau’s contract, by contrast, involves no agreement between the governed and any single or group of governors; rather, the entire society agrees to be ruled by its own general will — a contract among themselves, and hence properly a social contract. This marked a departure from earlier contract theories.

Rousseau’s Sovereign: “Hobbesian Leviathan with Its Head Chopped Off”

Thomas Hobbes’s Sovereign

• Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign.
  • He famously held that in a “state of nature” — how human life might have been before societies existed — life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In the absence of political order and law, everyone would possess unlimited natural freedoms, including the freedom to plunder, rape, and murder — an endless “war of all against all.”
  • To avoid this, free men contract with one another to establish a political community, gaining security in return for subjecting themselves to an absolute sovereign, who must protect the people externally and internally — peace and preservation being the very basis for creating the sovereign, or Leviathan. Hobbes’s sovereign thus represents the ultimate, supreme, and single authority in the state.
  • Though the absolute sovereign may well prove arbitrary and tyrannical, Hobbes saw absolute government as the only alternative to the terrifying anarchy of the state of nature.

Comparing Rousseau’s Sovereign with Hobbesian Sovereignty

• Rousseau’s sovereign, by contrast, is based on the general will.
  • His theory of the general will has been criticised as incomplete, vague, and vulnerable to misuse — in actual practice, it is very difficult to distinguish the general will from the mere “will of all.” Prof. Vaughan criticised Rousseau’s general will as resembling Hobbes’s Leviathan with its head chopped off — since both lead to absolutism.
  • The “head” is chopped off in the sense that:
    • There is no single person acting as absolute sovereign, as in Hobbesian sovereignty.
    • The general will is instead the source of all laws.
    • Each individual must be a lawmaker, consenting to obey the law.
  • It was for this reason that Rousseau desired the free state to be a consensual, participatory democracy — insisting the general will could emerge only in an assembly of equal lawmakers, and that only the legislative will, which was sovereign, could constitute the general will.
  • The general will would always aim to promote the general interest and the will of all its members; Rousseau saw the government as an agent of the general will — the sovereign entity in the body politic.
• Rousseau’s concept of sovereignty differs from both Hobbes’s and Locke’s.
  • In Hobbes, the people set up a sovereign and transfer all power to him.
  • In Locke’s social contract, the people set up a limited government for limited purposes, but Locke shuns the very idea of sovereignty — popular or monarchical — as a symbol of political absolutism.
  • Rousseau’s sovereign, on the other hand, is the people themselves, constituted as a political community through the social contract. Unlike other major political thinkers, Rousseau considers the sovereignty of the people inalienable and indivisible.

Rousseau on Government and the Limits of Democracy

• “If there were a nation of Gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.” — this statement is from The Social Contract, where Rousseau explicitly rejected “pure democracy.”
• In Rousseau’s republican political theory, there are three components: the sovereign assembly of the people, the prince or government, and the people — who, as subjects, obey the government in power, and, as citizens, may exercise sovereignty by changing the government if it abuses its authority.
  • While the sovereign exercises legislative power through laws, states also need a government to exercise executive power and carry out day-to-day business. Different forms of government — democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy — can roughly be distinguished by their size.
  • Monarchy, Rousseau held, is the strongest form of government, best suited to large populations and hot climates, while aristocracies tend to be the most stable form.
• Rousseau argues that sovereignty (the power to make laws) should rest with the people, while carefully separating government — as administration — from sovereignty — as legislation.
  • The government is composed of princes or magistrates, charged with implementing and enforcing the general will; the “sovereign” is the rule of law, ideally decided upon through direct democracy in an assembly (he opposed representative assemblies), maintaining that legislation must be democratic in the sense that every citizen should participate in it, and participate in person.
  • For Rousseau, the citizen is a watchdog rather than a demigod, whose function is to monitor the government — monarchical or aristocratic — and periodically convene with fellow citizens to survey, and if necessary amend, the state’s fundamental laws. This ultimate legislative sovereign authority belongs to the citizenry and cannot be delegated.
• Rousseau rejected the device of representation as a mockery, famously condemning the English system: “The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as the Members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing.”
  • Rousseau rejects — as unsuited to men — democratic administration: the participation of all citizens in executive government he considered altogether too utopian to be desirable in practice. Executive government, he argues, must be entrusted to magistrates, without any abridgment of liberty entailed by this institution.
• Rousseau insists that democratic government is not natural, writing: “In the strict sense of term, there has never been a democracy, and there never will be. It is contrary to the natural order that the greater number should govern and the smaller number be governed.”
  • His real point was that government by all would be against the natural order, since it would result in anarchy — just as sovereignty, being inalienable, would be against the natural order if possessed by less than all the people.
  • Rousseau held it impossible, outside a very small community, to have democracy; the necessary conditions for a legitimate democracy — a small state where members can readily assemble, near-perfect homogeneity of manners and morals, economic equality, and so on — are rarely, if ever, seen in practice. For this reason, democracy, among all forms of government, is the most vulnerable to “civil war and internecine strife.”
• Rousseau had thus rejected the notion that a democratic system could promote liberty in any fuller sense. The statement quoted above meant that democracy is suitable only for exceptionally well-informed people, who understand the interests of everyone and not merely themselves.
  • For Rousseau, the only justification for direct democracy would be in small communities, where all individuals understand the collective interests of the community.
  • In the Discourse on Inequality, he writes: “I would have wished to be born under a wisely-tempered democratic government,” adding that his ideal country would be one where the right to legislate was common to all citizens, but where citizens had no right to initiate legislation or hold plebiscites, and where magistrates held the right to exercise the executive function — not a democracy on the model of Athens.
• Rousseau wished for democracy only in the legislative organ — the sovereign body, whose every act is the promulgation of a law — but since he rejected democratic government, it would be more accurate to describe him as a champion of popular sovereignty rather than a democrat.
  • He did not have the temperament of a democrat, nor much confidence in the wisdom of the common people. He regarded democracy as an unrealistic ideal, and monarchy as close to the worst realistic form of government — though he termed hereditary aristocracy “the worst” of all. The best, he held, was an elective aristocracy — his three most extended evaluations concern democracy (too hot), monarchy (too cold), and the right sort of aristocracy (just right).
  • Rousseau took pride in having been born to a family whose manners distinguished it from the common people, admitting in The Confessions that he was never attracted to working-class girls or even daughters of the bourgeoisie, responding only to the elegant, delicate looks of the nobly born.
• The Social Contract has, in this sense, a pessimistic conclusion: while Rousseau insists that executive and administrative functions must be conferred on a prince or magistrates, he also argues that such magistrates will naturally tend, over time, to encroach on the territory of legislation, making more and more decisions that ought rightly to belong to the sovereign body — ultimately destroying the republic.
  • On balance, then, the best and most realisable option, in Rousseau’s view, was an elective, rather than hereditary, aristocracy; he held that the election of magistrates should be regulated by law, since leaving this to the will of a prince would lead inevitably to a decline into hereditary aristocracy.
• Like many of the other philosophes, Rousseau admitted that his ideal system, as outlined in The Social Contract, was just that — an idea, never actually realised in practice, nor likely ever to be. Indeed, when asked to give concrete advice to actual governments, Rousseau often gave counsel far more moderate than the suggestions of The Social Contract, knowing his ideas would likely not work in practice.
  • In this sense, Rousseau was an idealist, heavily influenced by the “utopian” republics of ancient Greece and Rome, in which each citizen had a vote and a say in government.

Rousseau’s Ideas: “A Medley of Magnificent Confusion”

Rousseau’s thought contains a number of striking contradictions:

• He was an advocate of democracy, yet also advocated absolutism.
• He championed individual liberty, yet also advocated the absolute submission of the individual to the state.
• He considered property a curse of civilisation, yet elsewhere wrote that “property is a sacred institution.”
• He held equality as a great ideal, yet accepted the subordinated position of women.
• He spoke of the importance of toleration, yet also supported banishing an atheist from the country.

Rousseau ended his career in solitude, though not before releasing the deeply intimate Confessions (1765–1770) — an autobiographical work chronicling his struggle to remain true to his principles amid mounting fame and wealth.