In fear of worst-case scenarios, Rousseau thought that people agreed to societies dedicated to protecting them from threats, real or imagined, that then took away their freedom and protected the inequalities that further led everybody, including the rulers, into vice. His alternative is to create a social contract that will allow all members of the society to be as free as they were in the state of nature, that is, to enable them to follow their own will all the time while still living in a society.
It will remove the unnatural inequalities that degrade both the rich and the poor. It will ensure that everyone is equal before the law that they create.
To achieve this, he formulates one of the more radically democratic systems of government ever to achieve widespread consideration. He posits that any legitimate state must be based on the general will, which is the fundamental source of sovereignty.
All laws and actions the state undertakes must be in line with it. The general will is the will of the entire body politic, which exists independently of the will of any one member or any group of people that comprise it. It is also not just the sum of individual wills.
Because an individual contributes to the general will as a citizen, the general will is, at least partly, their will. It is a universal, generally applied concept and, when done correctly, will be used to create laws that apply to everyone in the community equally. In principle, a person can follow it and still be following their will, since they helped to forge it.
In the ideal case, a person fully understands that the greater good is also in their interest and there is no friction between their interests and that of the community. This is how Rousseau supposes people can be as free in society as they are in nature.
However, if the shift between being able to follow the individual will and the general will is one that is quite so easy to make is a point many philosophers have raised.
How we find what the general will even is creates another problem. There are generally two approaches to figuring it out, with a third splitting the difference. The first is a highly democratic model, featuring the citizenry discussing legislation at town hall meetings every time an issue comes up. While magistrates would exist to run the government day by day, they would be elected and duty-bound to follow the will of the people as determined by the debate and votes at these meetings.
Minorities will exist, but their participation in the debate assures that they helped forge the general will and that the resulting laws will be good for them, too. Going the other way, the general will could be a somewhat transcendental thing that just exists for every political group that only some well-educated people can grasp without the help of well-made social institutions.
The hybrid of the two is a procedural model, where citizen-legislators discuss issues and realize why the common good is also their own good when making law. He is probably most famous for his social and political philosophy. His first love, he claimed, was not philosophy but music.
He wrote a successful opera, and designed a new system of musical notation. He is often characterized as an Enlightenment thinker, and he does express some core Enlightenment ideals such as the rejection of certain established dogma.
However, his work is also counter-Enlightenment in important ways. In his first successful work, the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts , he argues that morality and virtue can actually be corrupted by progress.
Additionally, Rousseau understands the creation of civil society itself as the source of the worst of human vices. The theme of nature, and specifically human nature, as inherently good is one of the most important in his writings.
Against the criticism that his works are inconsistent with one another, he claims that this is the central idea underlying the system of his thought. Current society, however, is united under a specious social contract put in place by those in power to keep their advantage. It is nearly impossible to achieve virtue in such a society. The former focuses on the moral education of an individual in a corrupt society.
There are many general overviews written on Rousseau. The sources listed here provide a sampling of some of the more influential of these works and provide sources aimed at various different audiences. For those coming to Rousseau for the first time, Delaney and Simpson give very accessible and basic introductions. Wokler is another important resource for scholars, which is relatively short.
Broome, Jack H. In , a year after the publication of the Second Discourse , Rousseau and Therese Levasseur left Paris after being invited to a house in the country by Mme. In , after repeated quarrels with Mme. It was during this time that Rousseau wrote some of his most important works. In he published a novel, Julie or the New Heloise , which was one of the best selling of the century. Then, just a year later in , he published two major philosophical treatises: in April his definitive work on political philosophy, The Social Contract , and in May a book detailing his views on education, Emile.
Paris authorities condemned both of these books, primarily for claims Rousseau made in them about religion, which forced him to flee France. He settled in Switzerland and in he began writing his autobiography, his Confessions. A year later, after encountering difficulties with Swiss authorities, he spent time in Berlin and Paris, and eventually moved to England at the invitation of David Hume.
However, due to quarrels with Hume, his stay in England lasted only a year, and in he returned to the southeast of France incognito. After spending three years in the southeast, Rousseau returned to Paris in and copied music for a living. It was during this time that he wrote Rousseau: Judge of Jean-Jacques and the Reveries of the Solitary Walker , which would turn out to be his final works.
He died on July 3, His Confessions were published several years after his death; and his later political writings, in the nineteenth century. Rousseau wrote the Confessions late in his career, and it was not published until after his death.
What is particularly striking about the Confessions is the almost apologetic tone that Rousseau takes at certain points to explain the various public as well as private events in his life, many of which caused great controversy. It is clear from this book that Rousseau saw the Confessions as an opportunity to justify himself against what he perceived as unfair attacks on his character and misunderstandings of his philosophical thought.
His life was filled with conflict, first when he was apprenticed, later in academic circles with other Enlightenment thinkers like Diderot and Voltaire, with Parisian and Swiss authorities and even with David Hume. Although Rousseau discusses these conflicts, and tries to explain his perspective on them, it is not his exclusive goal to justify all of his actions. He chastises himself and takes responsibility for many of these events, such as his extra-marital affairs.
At other times, however, his paranoia is clearly evident as he discusses his intense feuds with friends and contemporaries. And herein lays the fundamental tension in the Confessions.
Rousseau is at the same time trying both to justify his actions to the public so that he might gain its approval, but also to affirm his own uniqueness as a critic of that same public. As such, it is appropriate to consider Rousseau, at least chronologically, as an Enlightenment thinker. Descartes was very skeptical about the possibility of discovering final causes, or purposes, in nature.
Yet this teleological understanding of the world was the very cornerstone of Aristotelian metaphysics, which was the established philosophy of the time. In the Meditations , Descartes claims that the material world is made up of extension in space, and this extension is governed by mechanical laws that can be understood in terms of pure mathematics. The scope of modern philosophy was not limited only to issues concerning science and metaphysics.
Philosophers of this period also attempted to apply the same type of reasoning to ethics and politics. In doing so, they hoped to uncover certain characteristics of human nature that were universal and unchanging. If this could be done, one could then determine the most effective and legitimate forms of government.
Hobbes contends that human beings are motivated purely by self-interest, and that the state of nature, which is the state of human beings without civil society, is the war of every person against every other. Hobbes does say that while the state of nature may not have existed all over the world at one particular time, it is the condition in which humans would be if there were no sovereign.
These obligations are articulated in terms of natural rights, including rights to life, liberty and property. Rousseau was also influenced by the modern natural law tradition, which attempted to answer the challenge of skepticism through a systematic approach to human nature that, like Hobbes, emphasized self-interest.
Rousseau would give his own account of the state of nature in the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men , which will be examined below.
Also influential were the ideals of classical republicanism, which Rousseau took to be illustrative of virtues. These virtues allow people to escape vanity and an emphasis on superficial values that he thought to be so prevalent in modern society. This is a major theme of the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts. This is the work that originally won Rousseau fame and recognition. For the Enlightenment project was based on the idea that progress in fields like the arts and sciences do indeed contribute to the purification of morals on individual, social, and political levels.
The First Discourse begins with a brief introduction addressing the academy to which the work was submitted. In addition to this introduction, the First Discourse is comprised of two main parts.
The first part is largely an historical survey. Using specific examples, Rousseau shows how societies in which the arts and sciences flourished more often than not saw the decline of morality and virtue. He notes that it was after philosophy and the arts flourished that ancient Egypt fell. Similarly, ancient Greece was once founded on notions of heroic virtue, but after the arts and sciences progressed, it became a society based on luxury and leisure. The one exception to this, according to Rousseau, was Sparta, which he praises for pushing the artists and scientists from its walls.
Sparta is in stark contrast to Athens, which was the heart of good taste, elegance, and philosophy. Interestingly, Rousseau here discusses Socrates, as one of the few wise Athenians who recognized the corruption that the arts and sciences were bringing about. In his address to the court, Socrates says that the artists and philosophers of his day claim to have knowledge of piety, goodness, and virtue, yet they do not really understand anything.
The second part of the First Discourse is an examination of the arts and sciences themselves, and the dangers they bring. The attack on sciences continues as Rousseau articulates how they fail to contribute anything positive to morality. They take time from the activities that are truly important, such as love of country, friends, and the unfortunate. Philosophical and scientific knowledge of subjects such as the relationship of the mind to the body, the orbit of the planets, and physical laws that govern particles fail to genuinely provide any guidance for making people more virtuous citizens.
Rather, Rousseau argues that they create a false sense of need for luxury, so that science becomes simply a means for making our lives easier and more pleasurable, but not morally better. The arts are the subject of similar attacks in the second part of the First Discourse. Artists, Rousseau says, wish first and foremost to be applauded. Their work comes from a sense of wanting to be praised as superior to others.
Society begins to emphasize specialized talents rather than virtues such as courage, generosity, and temperance. This leads to yet another danger: the decline of military virtue, which is necessary for a society to defend itself against aggressors. And yet, after all of these attacks, the First Discourse ends with the praise of some very wise thinkers, among them, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton.
These men were carried by their vast genius and were able to avoid corruption. However, Rousseau says, they are exceptions; and the great majority of people ought to focus their energies on improving their characters, rather than advancing the ideals of the Enlightenment in the arts and sciences. It exceeded the desired length, it was four times the length of the first, and made very bold philosophical claims; unlike the First Discourse , it did not win the prize.
However, as Rousseau was now a well-known and respected author, he was able to have it published independently. This is primarily because Rousseau, like Hobbes, attacks the classical notion of human beings as naturally social.
In the Confessions , Rousseau writes that he himself sees the Second Discourse as far superior to the first. The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality is divided into four main parts: a dedication to the Republic of Geneva, a short preface, a first part, and a second part.
Like them, Rousseau understands society to be an invention, and he attempts to explain the nature of human beings by stripping them of all of the accidental qualities brought about by socialization. Thus, understanding human nature amounts to understanding what humans are like in a pure state of nature. This is in stark contrast to the classical view, most notably that of Aristotle, which claims that the state of civil society is the natural human state.
Like Hobbes and Locke, however, it is doubtful that Rousseau meant his readers to understand the pure state of nature that he describes in the Second Discourse as a literal historical account. In its opening, he says that it must be denied that men were ever in the pure state of nature, citing revelation as a source which tells us that God directly endowed the first man with understanding a capacity that he will later say is completely undeveloped in natural man. However, it seems in other parts of the Second Discourse that Rousseau is positing an actual historical account.
Some of the stages in the progression from nature to civil society, Rousseau will argue, are empirically observable in so-called primitive tribes. Hobbes describes each human in the state of nature as being in a constant state of war against all others; hence life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Instead, they have taken civilized human beings and simply removed laws, government, and technology. The presentation of amour propre in the Second Discourse —and especially in his note XV to that work—often suggests that Rousseau sees it as a wholly negative passion and the source of all evil.
Interpretations of amour propre centered on the Second Discourse which, historically, are the most common ones for example Charvet , often focus on the fact that the need for recognition always has a comparative aspect, so that individuals are not content merely that others acknowledge their value, but also seek to be esteemed as superior to them. This aspect of our nature then creates conflict as people try to exact this recognition from others or react with anger and resentment when it is denied to them.
More recent readings of both the Second Discourse , and especially of Emile , have indicated that a more nuanced view is possible Den , Neuhouser This project of containing and harnessing amour propre finds expression in both The Social Contract and Emile. In some works, such as the Second Discourse , Rousseau presents amour propre as a passion that is quite distinct from amour de soi.
In others, including Emile , he presents it as a form that amour de soi takes in a social environment. The latter is consistent with his view in Emile that all the passions are outgrowths or developments of amour de soi. Although amour propre has its origins in sexual competition and comparison within small societies, it does not achieve its full toxicity until it is combined with a growth in material interdependence among human beings.
In the Discourse on Inequality , Rousseau traces the growth of agriculture and metallurgy and the first establishment of private property, together with the emergence of inequality between those who own land and those who do not.
In an unequal society, human beings who need both the social good of recognition and such material goods as food, warmth, etc. Subordinates need superiors in order to have access to the means of life; superiors need subordinates to work for them and also to give them the recognition they crave.
In such a structure there is a clear incentive for people to misrepresent their true beliefs and desires in order to attain their ends. Thus, even those who receive the apparent love and adulation of their inferiors cannot thereby find satisfaction for their amour propre. Once people have achieved consciousness of themselves as social beings, morality also becomes possible and this relies on the further faculty of conscience.
It is, to that extent, akin to a moral sentiment such as Humean sympathy. But as something that is merely instinctual it lacks, for Rousseau, a genuinely moral quality. Genuine morality, on the other hand, consists in the application of reason to human affairs and conduct. This requires the mental faculty that is the source of genuinely moral motivation, namely conscience.
Conscience impels us to the love of justice and morality in a quasi-aesthetic manner. However, in a world dominated by inflamed amour propre , the normal pattern is not for a morality of reason to supplement or supplant our natural proto-moral sympathies.
For recent discussion of Rousseau on conscience and reason, see Neidleman, , ch. So, for example, theatre audiences derive enjoyment from the eliciting of their natural compassion by a tragic scene on the stage; then, convinced of their natural goodness, they are freed to act viciously outside the theater. Philosophy, too, can serve as a resource for self-deception. However, many of his other works, both major and minor, contain passages that amplify or illuminate the political ideas in those works.
This idea finds its most detailed treatment in The Social Contract. In The Social Contract , Rousseau sets out to answer what he takes to be the fundamental question of politics, the reconciliation of the freedom of the individual with the authority of the state. This reconciliation is necessary because human society has evolved to a point where individuals can no longer supply their needs through their own unaided efforts, but rather must depend on the co-operation of others.
The process whereby human needs expand and interdependence deepens is set out in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. In the Second Discourse , this establishment amounts to the reinforcement of unequal and exploitative social relations that are now backed by law and state power. In an echo of Locke and an anticipation of Marx, Rousseau argues that this state would, in effect, be a class state, guided by the common interest of the rich and propertied and imposing unfreedom and subordination on the poor and weak.
The propertyless consent to such an establishment because their immediate fear of a Hobbesian state of war leads them to fail to attend to the ways in which the new state will systematically disadvantage them. The Social Contract aims to set out an alternative to this dystopia, an alternative in which, Rousseau claims, each person will enjoy the protection of the common force whilst remaining as free as they were in the state of nature.
The key to this reconciliation is the idea of the general will: that is, the collective will of the citizen body taken as a whole. The general will is the source of law and is willed by each and every citizen. In obeying the law each citizen is thus subject to his or her own will, and consequently, according to Rousseau, remains free.
On such a reading, Rousseau may be committed to something like an a posteriori philosophical anarchism. Such a view holds that it is possible, in principle, for a state to exercise legitimate authority over its citizens, but all actual states—and indeed all states that we are likely to see in the modern era—will fail to meet the conditions for legitimacy.
Rousseau argues that in order for the general will to be truly general it must come from all and apply to all. This thought has both substantive and formal aspects. Formally, Rousseau argues that the law must be general in application and universal in scope. The law cannot name particular individuals and it must apply to everyone within the state.
Rousseau believes that this condition will lead citizens, though guided by a consideration of what is in their own private interest, to favor laws that both secure the common interest impartially and that are not burdensome and intrusive. For this to be true, however, it has to be the case that the situation of citizens is substantially similar to one another.
In a state where citizens enjoy a wide diversity of lifestyles and occupations, or where there is a great deal of cultural diversity, or where there is a high degree of economic inequality, it will not generally be the case that the impact of the laws will be the same for everyone.
In such cases it will often not be true that a citizen can occupy the standpoint of the general will merely by imagining the impact of general and universal laws on his or her own case.
In The Social Contract Rousseau envisages three different types or levels of will as being in play. First, individuals all have private wills corresponding to their own selfish interests as natural individuals; second, each individual, insofar as he or she identifies with the collective as a whole and assumes the identity of citizen, wills the general will of that collective as his or her own, setting aside selfish interest in favor of a set of laws that allow all to coexist under conditions of equal freedom; third, and very problematically, a person can identify with the corporate will of a subset of the populace as a whole.
The general will is therefore both a property of the collective and a result of its deliberations, and a property of the individual insofar as the individual identifies as a member of the collective.
In a well-ordered society, there is no tension between private and general will, as individuals accept that both justice and their individual self-interest require their submission to a law which safeguards their freedom by protecting them from the private violence and personal domination that would otherwise hold sway.
In practice, however, Rousseau believes that many societies will fail to have this well-ordered character. One way in which they can fail is if private individuals are insufficiently enlightened or virtuous and therefore refuse to accept the restrictions on their own conduct which the collective interest requires.
Another mode of political failure arises where the political community is differentiated into factions perhaps based on a class division between rich and poor and where one faction can impose its collective will on the state as a whole. The Social Contract harbors a further tension between two accounts of how the general will emerges and its relation to the private wills of citizens.
Sometimes Rousseau favors a procedural story according to which the individual contemplation of self interest subject to the constraints of generality and universality and under propitious sociological background conditions such as rough equality and cultural similarity will result in the emergence of the general will from the assembly of citizens see Sreenivasan In this account of the emergence of the general will, there seems to be no special need for citizens to have any specifically moral qualities: the constraints on their choice should be enough.
However, Rousseau also clearly believes that the mere contemplation of self interest would be inadequate to generate a general will. This may partly concern issues of compliance, since selfish citizens who can will the general will might still not be moved to obey it.
But Rousseau also seems to believe that citizen virtue is a necessary condition for the emergence of the general will in the first place. This presents him with a problem for which his figure of the legislator is one attempted solution.
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