Rousseau

Life

• Early life
  • 1712: Jean-Jacques Rousseau is born in Geneva
  • Mother died nine days after his birth
  • Rousseau was raised and educated by his father until the age of ten.
  • His father was a watchmaker and citizen of Geneva, which his son inherited
  • From his accounts, the education he received from his father included the inculcation of republican patriotism and the reading of classical authors who dealt with the Roman republic.
  • He is put under the care of a pastor in Bossey after his father’s exile and abandonment to avoid arrest
  • Rousseau is apprenticed as an engraver
  • At 16, he left the city and became under the influence of a Roman Catholic convert noblewoman
  • 1728: He converts to Roman Catholicism
  • He spends some time working as domestic servant in a noble household in Turin, during which time he is deeply marked by an episode in which he falsely accused a fellow servant of theft
  • 1742: Goes to Paris and writes some work
  • For brief time he trained to become a Catholic priest, then he has another brief career as an itinerant musician, music copyist and teacher
  • He later converts back to Calvinism to regain status as a Citizen of Geneva
  • He abandoned his children to, contrary to the suggestions of his writing
  • He thought little of the monarchy and aristocracy

Philosophy

Morality

• Social evolution/scientific progress does not led to a moral people
  • Individuals were once good and happy
  • Once people joined society they became plagued by vice and sin
  • Adam and Eve in paradise is his “State of Nature”
  • People were more introspective, drawn towards love of family, respect for nature, awe of the universe, curiosity, taste for entertainment
  • Guided by pity and empathy for others
  • Civilization led to self obsession, centered around pride, jealousy, and vanity
  • Occurs with urbanization; people compare themselves to others
  • Instead of tending to their own needs, people imitated others and sought status
  • This is where the term “native savage” originates, the colonizers corrupted their society.
• Emile ou De l’Education
  • Children both naturally good
  • Prevent their corruption from society
  • Stressed importance of fathers raising their children
  • They have innate wisdom, leads to a more hands off approach
  • Leads to child-centered education
  • New trend for breastfeeding
  • Girls needed to be educated differently, they needed to be made submissive
• Discours sur les sciences et les art
  • Progress of arts and science leads to decrease in morality
  • They bring forth corruption and moral decay
  • Monarchy and aristocracy are bad examples
• Discours sur l’origine et les fondements et l’inegalité parmi des hommes
  • Private property is the source of inequality
• Discourse on Political Economy
  • Starting point for social contract
  • deals with the state of nature
  • Unlike Hobbes, he is more optimistic, he felt society was bad and nature was good
  • He felt that government had the potential to be good

State of nature

• State of Nature is Utopia
  • Opposite Hobbes, he thought the SoN is a utopia, not hell
  • People are born equal and free in the state of nature
  • Disagreed with the original sin, he felt people were good by nature
  • There is no luxury in the state of nature
  • People need to survive and are self-sufficient
  • Aristotle thought men were social animals, Rousseau thought people could be self-sufficient (individualist)
  • People had amour de Soi, not egoism
  • Society creates inequality
• Social harmony
  • The state of nature is the state of social harmony
  • Society corrupts, nature is pure
  • Creates the idea of the noble savage

• Corruption of the state of nature

  • Property is the source of corruption
  • Also mentioned society forms in a way that leads to oppression
  • A shift towards social interdependence led to corruption
  • Social diversification leads to different values in labor, which leads to inequality
  • Thus, hierarchy is formed in interdependent society and amour propre (negative self-love)
  • Also creates social and political inequality

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Social contract

• The individual and the State
  • He thought the fundamental question of politics was the reconciliation of the freedom of the individual with the authority of the state.
  • Individuals can no longer supply their own needs unaided
  • Endemic conflict among interdependent individuals leads to Hobbesian insecurity; therefore law and state authority are necessary
  • Inequality and exploitative social relations can be backed by law and state power
• Protection
  • Protects liberty and property to maintain peace
  • (refer to types of freedom below)
  • Rule should not be absolute or timeless, political power is handed over temporarily

General Will

• General Will
  • Tension between democratic conception (general will of the citizens) and alternative where will is the transcendent incarnation of citizen’s common interest regardless of their will
  • His views on this are not clear, ambiguous in his writing
  • Citizen legislators can agree on laws corresponding to their common interests, but without this procedure the state lacks legitimacy
  • Most modern states lack this legitimacy
  • General will must come from and apply to all
  • Law must be general in application and scope
  • Law cannot name particular individuals and must apply to all within the state
  • Citizen will therefore favor laws that secure the common interest impartially and that are not intrusive
  • Situation of citizens must be similar: states diverse in profession or ethnicity or with a high degree of econ inequality, laws will not have equal impact
  • Not true that a citizen can apply the golden rule to the impact of general and universal laws
• Reason
  • Not the accumulation of wills, but the will governed by reason
  • It is the moral attitude in the heart of citizens
• Three levels of Will
  • procedure, virtue, and the legislator
  • Individuals have private wills
  • Each individual wills the general will of the collective as his or her own, setting aside selfish interest in favor of laws that allow coexistence under equal freedom
  • A person can identify with the corporate will of a part of the populace
  • General will is property of the collective, and a property of the individual since individuals are members of the collective
• In ordered society, there is no tension between private and general will
  • Individuals accept both justice and their individual self-interest are subordinate to law that safeguards them from private violence and personal domination
  • In practice, Rousseau believes many societies will fail to have this character
  • Failure if private individuals are insufficiently enlightened or virtuous and refuse to accept the restrictions on their conduct collective interest demands
  • Failure if the political community fractions, and one fraction can impose its will on the state as a whole
• Individual and other individuals
  • Sometimes Rousseau favors procedure: individual contemplation of self-interest will result of general will from assembly
  • No need for citizens to train moral qualities if choice is constrained
  • Citizen virtue is requisite for general will
  • Legislators are a solution
  • Good laws make good citizens, but good laws can only be willed by good citizens and must be agreed on in the assembly to be legitimate
  • Legislator therefore functions as guardian, inspiring a sense of collective identity and move them to support legislation
  • the new citizens initially lack the capacity to discern the good reasons that support the new laws
  • The lawgiver has to persuade them by non-rational means to work in their best interests (illusion of free choice)

Freedom and Authority

• Citizens are forced to be free
  • Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains
  • Capacity for choice, the ability to act against instinct and inclination, is what makes us political animals
  • Individuals can ignore benign impulses
  • Freedom to choose is the basis of moral action
  • enunciating freedom is contrary to human nature
  • To renounce freedom in favor of another person’s authority is to deprive one’s actions of all morality
  • Legitimate state involves no net loss of freedom, but an exchange of freedom (natural freedom for civil freedom)
• Types of freedom
  • Rousseau’s invocation of three types of freedom in the The Social Contract can appear confusing.
  • Natural: In state of nature, the unlimited right to anything that temps a man and that which he is able to attain
  • Civil: Exchange of one freedom for another, individual freedom for rights defended by the community
  • Moral: One’s actions conform to their own true will, conforms to general will
  • Republican freedom: laws protect citizen from being subject to the will of another unfairly
• Freedom and will
  • General rule should rule
  • No man has any natural authority over his fellow men
  • People are corrupted by society, he idolized farmers and country people
• Slavery
  • Discussed in his work, but in a different way (political relation)
  • Rousseau is criticized for not speaking out against racial slavery

Government

• Sovereignty and representation
  • Giving up authority to someone else is a form of slavery and abdication of moral agency
  • Hostility to representation of sovereignty extends to representatives, who would legislates range of topics not deliberated by the citizens
  • Laws not passed by citizens binds them to something they did not agree to
  • For Rousseau, The representation of sovereignty constitute surrendering moral agency and the loss of virtue.
  • The sovereign is the administration, the people constitute government
  • Gov is An intermediate body established between the subjects and the sovereign for their mutual communication, and charged with the execution of the laws and the maintenance of civil as well as political freedom.
• Solutions
  • Limit the size of states
  • The sovereign, composed of the people as a whole, promulgates laws that express the general will
  • Gov is a limited body that administers the state within the bounds set by law and applies law
  • If the laws are the people’s constitutional framework, however, legislators can work within it in accordance to the general will
  • He is skeptical about democracy and monarchy, favoring elective aristocracy (daily administration should be in the hands of elected body according to merit)
  • He rejects Hobbes’ view that the sovereign representing or acting for the subject, and the relation of rights
  • Rejects that individuals retain some natural rights over themselves or property, but such rights are a matter of sovereign competence and decision
  • Individual right must be specified by sovereign in accordance to the interests of all
• Types of government
  • Dependent on the size of gov
  • Small states: democracy in direct form (still found in Switzerland)
  • Medium state: aristocracy, leaders elected on merit
  • Large state: monarchy
• Three types of aristocracy
  • Natural
  • Elective
  • Hereditary
  • Unlike Aristotle, he believed in government by those who merit it not based on wealth

Law

• Three types of law

  • Fundamental or political law
  • Relation to the state
  • Laws that regulate the relation between the sovereign are political or fundamental laws
  • If the state is organized well, the people will abide by it
  • If the establishment is bad, it should not be accepted
  • People can change their laws
  • Civil law
  • Members to each other or the entire body
  • Should be small as possible for the former and large as possible for the latter, each citizen is in independence and dependent upon the City
  • Only the force of the state creates freedom
  • Criminal Law
  • Law of disobedience and penalty
  • It is a sanction against all others for wrongdoing
  • Constitutional law
  • Mores, customs, opinions
  • Preserves a spirit of institution
  • Revies and replaces old laws when they die out

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Religion

• Tolerance
  • Christianity cannot foster patriotism and solidarity
  • He accepts plurality in religion, and thus tolerance, which is contrary to his encouragement of cultural homogeneity for the emergence of general will
  • Like Locke, he insists sovereign cannot decide the private beliefs of citizens
• Supreme being
  • Affirms existence of supreme being and the afterlife
  • just will prosper, wicked will be punished
  • social contract and laws are sacred
  • Tolerance for the tolerant, those that are religiously intolerant should not be citizens
  • Those who do not accept the dogmas should be banished, atheists cannot be trusted to obey law
  • Death to those that affirm the dogmas but do not act accordingly
• Social
  • Leads to obedience and interdependence
  • Not a fan

Impact

• General will
  • Still debated today
  • Forms democratic principles
  • Inspires populist movements and leaders
  • True, legitimate system, power should be in the hands of the people
• French revolution
  • 11 years after his death
  • Seen by the French as a contribution to political society
  • Rule of terror ensued afterward and multiple coups
  • Article 6: Law is the expression of the general will, then they crown Napoleon as emperor
  • Robespierre used his ideas of general will to justify mass murder
  • Liberty, equality, brotherhood
  • Power shifted from the king and Church to the middle class
  • Legacy, implementation of a new ideology: nationalism which spread throughout the world
• Romantic movement