JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER 1712 - 1778

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER 1712 - 1778

Biographical Background

As the author of The Social Contact, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is considered one of the world s greatest political philosophers. During his early life he lived in Geneva, France with his father. His mother died when Jean-Jacques was quite young. Many of his biographers believe her death played a major role in formulating Rousseau’s philosophy and thinking. Her death also led Rousseau to live with relatives and other non-family acquaintances prior to adulthood. It was while living with these people that he first began to develop his “renaissance” life.¹
Rousseau was a man of considerable interests and talents. In addition to his widely read publications on politics and government, Rousseau was also an accomplished writer on other topics such as education. For example, he wrote La Nouvelle HeLoise a best selling novel about “illicit passion and spiritual redemption.”² During his lifetime, his treatise on education, Emile, was much better known and read than The Social Contract. Additionally, Rousseau wrote poems, plays, and several volumes about the social impact of music. It is ironic that he was a man who wrote and published extensively during his 76 years’ yet, it is reported that he regretted the day he ever began to write and hated the notoriety it brought him.³
Rousseau’s Philosophical Foundations

To understand the significance of Rousseau’s writings, it is important to be aware of his philosophical foundation. He had deep-seated feelings about issues like existence, purpose, and life which affected his point-of-view. In his book A Rousseau Dictionary, N.I.H. Dent offers one of the most comprehensive explanations of Rousseau’s relevance as an important contributor to philosophy: “My own view is that it is in Rousseau’s work in social and political theory, with its underpinning in his views on psychological development, that should be seen as the basis for his position as a thinker of the first rank.” ⁴ Dent and several other scholars believe that three of Rousseau’s books, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Emile and The Social Contract provide the necessary proof for the contention that Rousseau is one of the most important philosophers of his era.

liberty and equality for each person in society. Dent writes that Rousseau finally believed that liberty and equality were “the inalienable titles that belong to each and every human being, the full enjoyment of which is his or her absolute tight.”⁶

With this three-pronged philosophical foundation in mind, summaries and criticisms of The Social Contract and Emile are offered below.

The Social Contract

If the average college library is any indication of the significance of Rousseau’s social contract theory, there have been literally hundreds of books, articles, dissertations, and theses on the topic. Yet, in all of these analyzes, it is difficult to find a comprehensive, universally agreed-upon description of Rousseau’s theory. What one scholar calls liberty, another calls enslavement What one describes as authority, another derides as state control. However, the following is offered as an over-simplified explanation for purposes of understanding the essence of Rousseau’s theory.
Rousseau believed that all people begin life virtually free, with complete liberty. However, in order to protect themselves and their property, they need to give up this absolute freedom and enter into society. In turn, society grants liberty to all while protecting individuals from hurting each other. As one scholar put it, “What Rousseau is saying is that instead of surrendering their liberty by the Social Contract the people convert their liberty from independence into political and moral freedom, and this is part of their transformation from creatures living brutishly according to impulse, into men living humanly according to reason and conscience.”⁸
What Rousseau argued for was a form of civil authority in which every member of the community would stand as equal members of the “sovereign body,” such that the common laws regulating society would have no legitimacy without the willing assent of every member. In other words, government authority would stem from the general will of all citizens and extend to all citizens. Without such a contract between people, Rousseau believed it was impossible to enjoy a fulfilling life, because one would constantly be struggling to survive and protect oneself from the invasion of others.
The outline for Rousseau’s political philosophy was put forth in Du Contrat Social, published in April 1962. In an interesting aside, it was published one month before Emile. Because Enule was a very controversial book, especially for the Catholic Church, both books were burned in Rousseau’s hometown of Geneva. There is still some confusion today about which book eventually led to Rousseau’s condemnation and censure by the Church. Some scholars believe it was the combination of both books— the criticisms they contained of then-modern society and implicitly the Church—that led to Rousseau’s downfall.
The Social Contract is divided into four books. Book I identifies the rightful basis for a civil society and some of the principle characteristics of such a society. The conditions necessary for the establishment of a civil society are presented in Book II. In Book III, various issues related to government are discussed, such as its place in the state, forms of government, and its powers and limits. Book IV extends the discussion further to treat issues about the form and organization of a just society.
One of the most frequent criticisms raised when the book was published was that it was difficult to read. Rousseau was not concise in his arguments, or particularly well organized.⁹ Thus, the English translations of the original French version are even more difficult to read.
Substantive criticisms of Rousseau’s theory focus on the apparent contradictions in his writing. For example, I. H. Huizinga claims that Rousseau “preached for a collectivism so extreme as to demand the

dissolution of the individual into the community,”¹⁰ while simultaneously insisting on the “uniqueness of the self.” To Huizinga and other scholars with similar criticism, Du Cozurat Social is filled with such inconsistencies.

Other criticisms center on the use and definitions—or lack—of key phrases and ideas. For instance, G.D.H. Cole said that Rousseau’s concept of the “General Will,” so fundamental to his political philosophy, is practically incomprehensible. He wrote, “No critic of The 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.”¹¹ Such criticism notwithstanding, The Social Contract remains one of the greatest political texts ever written.

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