History
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an influential 18th-century philosopher whose ideas on social contract theory and the nature of man greatly impacted political thought. He argued for the inherent goodness of human nature and the importance of individual freedom. His works, including "The Social Contract" and "Emile," continue to be influential in the fields of political philosophy and education.
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11 Key excerpts on "Jean-Jacques Rousseau"
- A. R. M. Murray(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
CHAPTER IX Rousseau’s Theory of the General Will Jean Jacqes Rousseau was born in Geneva, the son of a mad watchmaker, in 1712, and died in 1778. Having left school at the age of twelve, and failed to settle in any of the trades to which he had been apprenticed, he fled from Geneva to Savoy four years later, and began a life of wandering and exile which, apart from twelve years spent in Paris (1744–1756), continued to his death. For part of these early years he was supported by women who befriended him; for part of them he lived the life of a vagabond and earned a livelihood as best he could. In 1743 he became secretary to the French Ambassador to Venice, and appears to have served him well, but quarrelled because he received no salary. In 1750 he achieved fame through winning a prize offered by the Academy of Dijon for the best essay on the question ‘Have the arts and sciences conferred benefits on mankind?’ Rousseau answered the question in the negative, contending that the arts and sciences create artificial wants and jeopardise the natural morality of unspoiled man. This theme was elaborated in his Discourse on Equality (1754), in which Rousseau argued that ‘man is naturally good, and only by institutions is he made bad’. It was in 1762 that Rousseau’s two most important works were published— Emile, his treatise on education, and the Social Contract or Principles of Political Right. The first offended both the Catholic and Protestant Churches by its support of natural religion., and the latter offended both the Council of Geneva and the French Government by its implied denial of the Divine Right of Kings. Rousseau left France and was befriended by Frederick the Great, who gave him asylum at Motiers. After spending three years there, however, he incurred local suspicion which placed his life in danger, and he fled to England in 1765. George III granted him a pension, and he formed friendships with both Burke and Hume
eBook - ePubCrowd psychology. Philosophical and Literary Works. Illustrated Edition
The Social Contract, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Group Psychology and The Analysis of the Ego, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud, Charles Mackay, Wilfred Trotter, Everett Dean Martin, G. D. H. Cole, James Strachey(Authors)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing(Publisher)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract Introduction For the study of the great writers and thinkers of the past, historical imagination is the first necessity. Without mentally referring to the environment in which they lived, we cannot hope to penetrate below the inessential and temporary to the absolute and permanent value of their thought. Theory, no less than action, is subject to these necessities; the form in which men cast their speculations, no less than the ways in which they behave, are the result of the habits of thought and action which they find around them. Great men make, indeed, individual contributions to the knowledge of their times; but they can never transcend the age in which they live. The questions they try to answer will always be those their contemporaries are asking; their statement of fundamental problems will always be relative to the traditional statements that have been handed down to them. When they are stating what is most startlingly new, they will be most likely to put it in an old-fashioned form, and to use the inadequate ideas and formulae of tradition to express the deeper truths towards which they are feeling their way. They will be most the children of their age, when they are rising most above it. Rousseau has suffered as much as any one from critics without a sense of history. He has been cried up and cried down by democrats and oppressors with an equal lack of understanding and imagination. His name, a hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Social Contract, is still a controversial watchword and a party cry. He is accepted as one of the greatest writers France has produced; but even now men are inclined, as political bias prompts them, to accept or reject his political doctrines as a whole, without sifting them or attempting to understand and discriminate
eBook - ePubA New Modern Philosophy
The Inclusive Anthology of Primary Sources
- Gwendolyn Marshall, Susanne J. Sreedhar, Gwendolyn Marshall, Susanne J. Sreedhar(Authors)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
25 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003406525-25Author IntroductionJean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a French philosopher, novelist, autobiographer, and composer. His two most important works of political theory are the “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” (1755) and The Social Contract (1762). Often called the “Second Discourse,” the former was written as an entry to an essay competition at the Academy of Dijon. The question posed by the Academy was “What is the Origin of the Inequality among Mankind; and whether such Inequality is authorized by the Law of Nature?” Rousseau did not win the competition and instead published the discourse as a stand-alone piece. In it Rousseau offers a conjectural history of the development of mankind. His social philosophy centers around notions of natural human goodness and the corrupting influence of society. The Second Discourse is highly critical of previous social contract theorists, specifically Hobbes and Locke. In The Social Contract, Rousseau presents his positive view of political authority; that is, his picture of legitimate and just government. Rousseau takes up the challenge of reconciling individual freedom with political rule. This reconciliation is achieved when government acts according to what Rousseau calls “the general will.”A Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind (published 1755)
…I conceive two species of inequality among men; one which I call natural, or physical inequality, because it is established by nature, and consists in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and the qualities of the mind, or of the soul; the other which may be termed moral, or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention, and is established, or at least authorized, by the common consent of mankind. This species of inequality consists in the different privileges, which some men enjoy, to the prejudice of others, such as that of being richer, more honored, more powerful, and even that of exacting obedience from them.
eBook - ePub- Jean-Jacques Rousseau(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Perlego(Publisher)
At the present day, his works possess a double significance. They are important historically, alike as giving us an insight into the mind of the eighteenth century, and for the actual influence they have had on the course of events in Europe. Certainly no other writer of the time has exercised such an influence as his. He may fairly be called the parent of the romantic movement in art, letters and life; he affected profoundly the German romantics and Goethe himself; he set the fashion of a new introspection which has permeated nineteenth century literature; he began modern educational theory; and, above all, in political thought he represents the passage from a traditional theory rooted in the Middle Ages to the modern philosophy of the State. His influence on Kant's moral philosophy and on Hegel's philosophy of Right are two sides of the same fundamental contribution to modern thought. He is, in fact, the great forerunner of German and English Idealism.It would not be possible, in the course of a short introduction, to deal both with the positive content of Rousseau's thought and with the actual influence he has had on practical affairs. The statesmen of the French Revolution, from Robespierre downwards, were throughout profoundly affected by the study of his works. Though they seem often to have misunderstood him, they had on the whole studied him with the attention he demands. In the nineteenth century, men continued to appeal to Rousseau, without, as a rule, knowing him well or penetrating deeply into his meaning. "The Social Contract," says M. Dreyfus-Brisac, "is the book of all books that is most talked of and least read." But with the great revival of interest in political philosophy there has come a desire for the better understanding of Rousseau's work. He is again being studied more as a thinker and less as an ally or an opponent; there is more eagerness to sift the true from the false, and to seek in the Social Contract the "principles of political right," rather than the great revolutionary's ipse dixit in favour of some view about circumstances which he could never have contemplated.The Social Contract
eBook - ePub- Alfred Cobban(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
CHAPTER VIJean-Jacques Rousseau AND THE MODERN POLITICAL MIND
1. BACK TO NATURE
Rousseau, I have said, was not a maker of systems: the incompleteness of his political thought is patent. For this reason it is somewhat apt to give an impression of patchwork, of patterns unfinished and threads left loose. I have tried to show that, despite this defect, a fairly consistent scheme of political ideas emerges from his works. There is a kind of unity which results from the activity of a powerful and original mind, dominated by well-defined intellectual preoccupations. That Rousseau’s thought possesses such unity becomes manifest above all if we consider his ideas in relation to their basic impulse, the partly intellectual, partly emotional motive force inspiring his political enquiry.If ever a writer had a single inspiring idea it was Rousseau. His primary interest was ethical. As has often been observed, he was brought by ethics to politics. The apparent impossibility of achieving his ideal for human life and conduct in the existing condition of society convinced him of the necessity for thinking out afresh their political foundations. In order therefore to appreciate the inspiration of his political writings and understand their underlying unity, we must discover what more general principle is hidden behind his political thought. One might suggest that his ideal is freedom. Yet in the Contrat social we find the primitive idea of freedom greatly restricted, and in fact natural liberty, as he recognizes, cannot exist once men have agreed to live together in a state. If we reflect on the careful moral training of Emile, the patriarchal regime of the Nouvelle Héloïse , the civic discipline of the Contrat social , the patriotic sacrifices demanded in the Corsica and the Poland
eBook - ePub- Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey, Leo Strauss, Joseph Cropsey(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau1712–1778Rousseau begins the Social Contract with the celebrated words: “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. . . . How did this change come to pass? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? I believe I can resolve this question.” With this statement he poses the political problem in its most radical form and at the same time suggests the revolutionary principle that almost all existing regimes are illegitimate. Civil society enchains man and makes him a slave to law or other men whereas he was, as man, born to freedom, to the right to behave as he pleases. What is more, civil society, as it is now constituted, has no claim on the moral adhesion of its subjects; it is unjust. Rousseau’s political thought points away from the present in both directions: to man’s happy freedom of the past and to the establishment of a regime in the future which can appeal to the will of those under its authority. It is the task of the philosopher to make clear what man’s nature truly is and, on this basis, to define the conditions of a good political order. Rousseau’s thought has an externally paradoxical character, seeming at the same time to desire contradictories—virtue and soft sentiment, political society and the state of nature, philosophy and ignorance—but it is remarkably consistent, the contradictions reflecting contradictions in the nature of things.1 Rousseau undertook to clarify the meaning of modern theory and practice, and in so doing he brought to light radical consequences of modernity of which men were not previously aware.Modern politics, according to Rousseau, are based on a partial understanding of man. The modern state, the Leviathan, is directed to its own preservation and, consequently, to that of its subjects. It is, hence, totally negative, taking into account only the condition of happiness, life, while forgetting happiness itself. Any political system which takes into account only one side of human existence cannot satisfy men’s longing for fulfillment or call forth their full loyalty. And it is further Rousseau’s argument that the modern state based on self-preservation constitutes a way of life precisely contrary to that which would make men happy. The life of the big nations is characterized by commerce and, consequently, by the distinction between rich and poor. Each man can pursue his gain within the framework laid down by the state. Money is the standard of human worth, and virtue is forgotten. Calculation of private advantage is the basis of human relations; this may not lead to perpetual war, but it destroys the foundations of trust and easy sociability and leads to selfishness and poor citizenship. But, most of all, because there is scarcity and the needs and desires of all men in society cannot be satisfied, the rich are protected and the poor oppressed. Civil society is a state of mutual interdependence among men, but the men are bad and the majority are forced to give up their own wills to work for the satisfaction of the few. And, since these few control the laws, the many do not even enjoy the protection for which they are supposed to have entered into society. The result of the oversimplified and onesided concentration on preservation is the destruction of the good life which is the only purpose of preservation.2
eBook - ePubTeachers of the People
Political Education in Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville, and Mill
- Dana Villa(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
CHAPTER TWO Jean-Jacques Rousseau Creating—and Preserving—a Free People Anyone who ventures to create institutions for a people must feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, transforming each individual, who in himself is a perfect and isolated whole, into a part of a larger whole from which this same individual in a sense receives his life and being; he must feel capable of changing the constitution of man in order to strengthen it, and of replacing the physical and independent existence we have all received from nature with a partial and corporate existence. In short, he must deprive man of his own powers to give him powers which are foreign to him, and which he cannot use without the help of others. Social Contract, book 2 Here lies the root of the whole matter. It is education which ought to stamp on the soul of your citizens the print of their nationality and so guide their tastes and opinions that by inclination, by passion, by necessity they will be patriots. Considérations sur le Gouvernement de Pologne Do you want to get an idea of public education? Read Plato’s Republic. It is not at all a political work, as think those who judge books only by their title. Émile, book 1 It is obvious that no matter how complete the theory may be, a middle term is required between theory and practice, providing a link and a transition from one to the other. Kant, On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True in Theory, but It Does Not Apply in Practice’ I. Introduction: The Rousseauian Paradox True to its title, Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762) begins with the elucidation of the specific form of agreement, between individuals in a precivil condition, that yields a corporate body—a political community—with a will and reality of its own. Building on the work of Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau insists that political society is not, as Aristotle and Aquinas contended, something natural or God-given
eBook - ePubCentral Works of Philosophy v2
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
- John Shand(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The Social Contract Jonathan RileyDOI: 10.4324/9781315712253-8Introduction
Perhaps the most quoted line of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract begins its first chapter: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" (SC. i.l [1]; Rousseau 1997b : 41).1 Man is naturally free in the sense that he is born without any genuine obligations to others to refrain from doing whatever he judges is necessary for his self-preservation, once he acquires the capacities for judgement. Yet everywhere he is subjected to positive laws administered by some government whose leaders claim to be his rightful masters.The author of that provocative line, which echoes similar statements by the great seventeenth-century English social contract theorists Hobbes and Locke, was born in Geneva in 1712 to parents who were native citizens of the small republic. His mother died within days of his birth, and his watchmaker father left Geneva in 1722, forcing Jean-Jacques to find work as an apprentice to a notary and then an engraver. He wandered away in 1728 and found shelter with Mme de Warens at Annecy in Savoy Aside from a brief stint in Turin, where he converted from Calvinism to Roman Catholicism (although he reconverted to Calvinism in 1754), he spent the next dozen years living with her, educating himself at her salon and becoming her lover as of 1733. In 1740, he moved to Lyon to tutor the children of M. de Mably and became acquainted with Mably's elder brother, Etienne Bonnot (later the Abbe de Condillac), whom Patrick Riley calls "with Voltaire the greatest 'Lockean' in post-Regency France" (2001: 3). In 1742, Rousseau moved to Paris. There, after a few years, he began his lasting partnership with Therese Lavasseur, whom he eventually married in 1768, after she had apparently borne him five children, all said by him to have been abandoned at a home for foundlings (rather as he had been left to the care of others by his parents). He also met Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert and became a contributor to their famous Encyclopedia. Its fifth volume, for instance, published in 1755, included his Discourse on Political Economy. But his distinctive moral and political ideas led to tensions with them and other French Enlightenment philosophers, notably Voltaire, culminating in a decisive break in 1758, when he published his Letter to M. d'Alembert. In that work, he rejected d'Alembert's suggestion, which at the urging of Voltaire had been inserted into an article on "Geneva" published in 1757 in the seventh volume of the Encyclopedia,
eBook - ePub- J.G. Merguior(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Thus Emile Faguet, as he tried to rescue Jean-Jacques from the charge of illiberalism, stressed his individualism, but admitted that the Social Contract was an exception to it and hence an aberration in the Rousseauian oeuvre. On the other hand, the leading expert in Rousseau’s political writings, C. E. Vaughan, regarded the Social Contract as the term of a strenuous philosophical evolution from individualism to collectivism: individualism, under the influence of Locke, in the early writings; collectivism, inspired by Montesquieu, in the later ones. Such an evolution did not prevent Vaughan from detecting irreconcilable ‘rival elements’ in the politics of Rousseau. To a large extent, Vaughan performed the academic legitimation of the Janus mask of Rousseau, the dubious theorist of both ‘anarchic individualism’ and totalitarian rule. As late as 1949, philosophical historians of ideas trained in the geisteswissenschaftlich tradition still opposed the ‘contractual’ Jean-Jacques, a defender of individual liberties, to the ‘social’ Rousseau, a devotee of social cohesion. 3 It took three decades and half-a-dozen careful monographs, from the studies of Henri Sée, E. H. Wright and Albert Schinz in the 1920s, the essays of Ernst Cassirer in the 1930s and 1940s, those by Bertrand de Jouvenel and Robert Derathé just after the war to the ‘existentialist’ readings of Burgelin and Starobinski in the 1950s, to restore the unity of Rousseau’s thought. 4 In the event, we got a much more balanced picture – one which incidentally did away, hopefully once and for all, with the more-heat-than-light style of biased contumely. Yet, as we shall presently see, more than one old misreading still lingers on, even in basically sympathetic modern appraisals. It seems therefore very much advisable – in seeking an accurate account of his theory of legitimacy – to recall the main criticisms raised against Rousseau
eBook - ePub- Jeffrey Bercuson(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Lectures: “Rousseau believes that all of us must, for our happiness, respect ourselves and maintain a lively sense of self-worth;” and so, to reiterate, Rousseau’s answer to the problem of inequality is “equality at the highest level […] [C]itizens can moderate lower-level inequalities by general laws in order to preserve conditions of personal independence so that no one is subject to arbitrary power, and no one experiences the wounds and indignities that arouse self-love” (ibid., 247). This distinct combination of ideas—the ideas of equality at the “highest level,” of citizens as equals at this level by virtue of their shared fundamental interests and (moral) capacities, and of the political salience of self-love and the damaging psychological experience of status envy—constitutes Rousseau’s “distinctive” and “original” contribution to political philosophy and to debates about what equality means (ibid., 248).III
Let us shift gears now and turn to the chapter’s second stated purpose: to outline in more complete detail the Rousseauvian heritage of justice as fairness. How, we ask in this vein, does Rawls’s engagement with Rousseau inform his own political project? The important theme here is the pedagogical one mentioned in the Introduction. Says Rousseau in this vein (this passage is particularly important to Rawls’s interpretation): “At the birth of societies, says Montesquieu, it is the chiefs of republics who make the institution, and after that it is the institutions that form the chiefs of republics ” (Rousseau 1997, 69). Again: “A people’s opinions arise from its constitution” (ibid., 141). In other words, institutional arrangements (when properly designed) generate the social spirit necessary to sustain them: we become attached to said institutions and principles, and we are willing to work in the service of their stability and reform (see e.g. Shklar 1969, 20, Cohen 1986, 294 and 1997, 115 and Melzer 1991, 103–106). We also become attached to those fellows whose self-understanding is centred on similar political commitments.A multitude of individuals are thus transformed into a people. In other words, institutions change human nature : one who undertakes the founding of a people “[transforms] each individual, who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole from which the individual receives his life and his being” (Rousseau 1997, 69). But this is no quick, easy process. Part of the confusion (and disappointment) over the role of the legislator in Rousseau’s political philosophy is the by-product of overestimating the efficacy of those founding moments described by Rousseau in The Social Contract. Rawls’s Lectures, for instance, stress that the society of the social compact can come about in many different ways and that it could happen gradually over many centuries: it is clear, he says, that Rousseau “never supposes that people’s entering into an agreement of any kind could be a transition from a pre-political stage to a society whose basic institutions conformed to the requisite terms of the social compact […] The institutions that fashion a general will are designed by the law-giver who persuades the people that his authority is of a higher order […] In due course, later generations come to have and to perpetuate a general will” (Rawls 2007, 241). Political autonomy—or the sovereignty of the general will—thus emerges over time. We need to approach the matter, in other words, from an appropriate historical perspective, for “the ideal of a just constitution is always something to be worked toward” (Rawls 1993, IX.3.2).19
eBook - ePubMinerva's Owl
The Tradition of Western Political Thought
- Jeffrey Abramson(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
Rousseau’s emphasis on the political making of citizens creates a “chicken and egg” sort of problem. It takes good citizens to make good laws, but it takes good laws to make good citizens in the first place. Facing up to this problem, Rousseau once more agrees with Machiavelli that the founding of a decent community requires the presence of an extraordinary legislator, of the likes of a Moses or Lycurgus, to lay down enduring laws. Only then can the scheme envisioned by the social contract— empowering the citizenry at large to be the sovereign legislature—work.One can appreciate why Rousseau relies on the figure of the “great legislator” to get things started. Still, it involves him in inconsistency. As long as we are obeying the laws laid down by the original legislator, we are obeying the authority of someone else and not our own general will, collectively expressed. Rousseau’s response is that certain persons are so extraordinary, so God-like, that they essentially embody the “general will.” But if he allows the great man to embody the general will in order to found a republic, what is to stop other persons at moments of crisis from claiming that they too embody the “general will” and speak for us?The Molding of Citizens
However citizens are made, Rousseau’s general point remains that the psychology of the citizen has to be crafted; it does not come naturally to any of us. Yet as unnatural as the life of the citizen is, a moral vision connects it back to the idealized portrait Rousseau once drew of the natural savage. Love of country instills in the citizen that sense of being at one with the people around him which the savage achieved by ignoring them. In the Second Discourse Rousseau starts with a vision of the self at peace through splendid solitude. In The Social Contract
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