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ROUSSEAU S CONCEPT OF THE GENERAL WILL IS FLAWED
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- RULE BY GENERAL WILL IS TOTALITARIAN
- Bertrand Russell
- BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
ROUSSEAU S CONCEPT OF THE GENERAL WILL IS FLAWED1. MEANING OF GENERAL WILL IS UNCLEAR J.H. Huizinga, NQA, ROUSSEAU THE SELF-MADE SAINT, 1976, p. 234. ‘If you want us to get on,’ he [Rousseau] said to Madame d’Epinay when she objected to his boorish remark about not being for sale, ‘I advise you to learn my dictionary; believe me, my words rarely have the ordinary meaning.’ In fact, so obscure are they that even renowned political scientists, like the late G.D.H. Cole, have felt bound to admit that ‘the General Will, the most fundamental of all Rousseau’s Social Contract has found it easy to say either what precisely its author meant by it or what is its final value for political philosophy.’ 2. EXPLANATION OF GENERAL WILL IS NONSENSICAL J.H. Huizinga, NQA, ROUSSEAU THE SELF-MADE SAINT, 1976, p. 234. But who can make head or tail of what follows? ‘When a law is proposed in the popular assembly what the people is asked is not exactly whether it approves or rejects it but whether it is in conformity with the general will’. In other words, faced with a proposal to ban the theatre or disenfranchise over-age bachelors, the citizenry must decide whether it violates their constitutional obligation to respect majority rule, which seems about as sensible as consulting the Ten Commandments to decide whether or not to have ham and eggs for breakfast.
J.H. Huizinga, NQA, ROUSSEAU THE SELF-MADE SAINT, 1976, p. 234. But if one assumes that the General Will must, therefore, be less limited in scope than Jean-Jacques has just given one to understand, his further observations throw an even eerier light on the workings of his mind. Those who are out-voted, he tells us, are thereby shown to have been mistaken about what was the general will: ‘When the opinion that is contrary to own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than that I was mistaken and that what I thought to be the general will was not so.’ In his dream-world—which, it is only fair to say, he himself knew to be just that and nothing more-minorities only vote the way they do because they do not realize they really want the same as everybody else; only in the moment of proving a minority do its members make this comforting discovery.
1. ROUSSEAU ADVOCATES A TOTALITARIAN STATE Peter Gay, NQA, THE QUESTION OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, 1989, p.8. Paine gave a new twist to Rousseau criticism. Rousseau’s political theory, he argued, had been designed as the supreme assault on law and the state and had resulted, paradoxically but inevitably, in tyranny: ‘The doctrine of popular sovereignty, interpreted by the masses, will produce perfect anarchy until the moment when interpreted by the rulers, it will produce perfect despotism.” Rousseau’s state, as he put it in an epigram to which Cassirer refers, is a “lawman’s monastery,” and ‘in this democratic monastery which Rousseau establishes on the model of Sparta and Rome, the individual is nothing and the state everything.” 2. ROUSSEAU DOCTRINE IS A FORM OF TOTALITARIANISM Peter Gay, NQA, THE QUESTION OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, 1989, p. 8. This and similar views have now become predominant in the literature. We can hear echoes of it in Karl Popper’s description of Rousseau’s thought as “romantic collectivism” and in Sir Ernest Barker’s ‘in effect, and in the last resort, Rousseau is a totalitarian... Imagine Rousseau a perfect democrat: his perfect democracy is still a multiple autocracy.”
Peter Gay, NQA, THE QUESTION OF JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU, 1989, p.8. Many, although certainly not all, present-day readers of Rousseau, remembering the supremacy of the general will, the forcing men to be free, the civil religion, and forgetting the rest of his writings, will agree with Tame and Barker. The fashion in fact is to consider Rousseau a totalitarian—a “democratic totalitarian” perhaps, but a totalitarian nevertheless.
INTRODUCTION Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, skeptic, logician, essayist, and renowned peace advocate. Perhaps the Economist gives the best introduction: "A great deal of work has come upon me, neglect of some of which might jeopardize the continuation of the human race,’ wrote Bertrand Russell in a letter in 1967, explaining why he did not have time to comment in detail on a philosophical manuscript. Few dons could carry off such an excuse. Russell was, in his final decade, concentrating on three large campaigns: helping Soviet Jews, opposing the Vietnam War, and crusading for nuclear disarmament. The excuse might at first seem to be evidence of lunatic self-importance, or maybe senility (he was 95 at the time). But those who knew him would recognize its characteristic mix of a melodramatic, gently ironic style together with a profound commitment to public benevolence and political action.” BRIEF BIOGRAPHYRussell was born in 1872 in Ravenscroft, Wales. After the death of his parents, Russell’s grandfather (and former Prime Minister), Lord John Russell took custody of him. Russell was raised by his grandparents until he entered Trinity College at Cambridge, where he earned a B.A. in Mathematics with a top rank in 1893. He was elected a fellow at Trinity in 1895 after spending time with his wife, Miss Alys Pearsall Smith, in Berlin studying social democracy. In 1901, he wrote The Principles of Mathematics, his first major book. The same year, he discovered the infamous “Russell’s Paradox,” a seminal finding in the world of logic. He took up a lectureship at Trinity College in 1910 and began to dabble more into politics. During World War I, Russell became a vociferous opponent of Britain’s conscription policy. After he was found to be the author of a leaflet criticizing the two year sentence of conscientious objectors, he was fined one hundred pounds and stripped of his Trinity post, the first of many problems he encountered with the British government. After his dismissal, he attempted to take a job offer at Harvard but was refused a passport. Not long after that, the military prevented him from delivering a set of lectures that is now published as Political Ideals. Finally, in 1918, he was sentenced to six months in prison for a pacifist article he wrote in the Tribunal. While in prison, he wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. In 1920, he traveled to Russia to study the Bolshevik revolution, and then traveled to China to teach philosophy at Peking University. In 1938 Russell arrived at the United States and began to teach philosophy at a number of top universities. In 1940 he was elected to a lectureship at the City College of New York, but the offer was revoked following public protests regarding his views on morality and pacifism. In 1949 he was award the Order of Merit and was also awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950. In 1955, he released the Russell-Einstein manifesto, and followed that work up by becoming the founding president of the Campaign to End Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. In 1961, at the age of 89, he was imprisoned for a week in connection with anti-nuclear protests. Russell continued to be an avid letter writer and political activist until his death in 1970. Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 5.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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