IN CONTEXT

IDEOLOGY
Republicanism
FOCUS
The general will
BEFORE
1513 Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince offers a modern form of politics in
which a ruler’s morality and the concerns of state are strictly separate.
1651 Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan argues for the foundation of the state
on the basis of the social contract.
AFTER
1789 The Jacobin Club begins meeting in Paris. Its extremist members
attempt to apply Rousseau’s principles to revolutionary politics.
1791 In Britain, Edmund Burke blames Rousseau for the “excesses” of
the French Revolution.
For centuries in Western Europe, a certain style of thinking about human
affairs prevailed. Under the sway of the Catholic Church, the writings of
ancient Greece and Rome had been steadily studied and rehabilitated, with
outstanding intellectuals such as Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas
rediscovering ancient thinkers. A scholastic approach, treating history and
society as essentially unchanging and the higher purpose of morality as
fixed by God, had come to dominate the ways in which society was
considered. It took the upheavals associated with the development of
capitalism and urban life to begin to tear this approach apart.
 Humans existed in
a state of nature
before society.

They were free and . .. but they swapped

happy, close this liberty for a social
to animals ... contract and laws.

We cannot return to
a state of nature ...

. . . but we can write a

new social contract,
promoting freedom
through law.
Rethinking the status quo
In the 16th century, Niccolò Machiavelli, in a radical departure with the past,
had turned the scholastic tradition on its head in The Prince, drawing on
ancient examples not to act as a guide to a moral life, but to demonstrate how
an effective statecraft or politics could be cynically performed. Thomas
Hobbes, writing his Leviathan during the English Civil War of the mid-17th
century, used the scientific method of deduction, rather than the reading of
ancient texts, to argue for the necessity of a strong state to preserve security
among the people.

"You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the Earth belong to us all, and the Earth
itself to nobody."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

However, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an idiosyncratic Swiss exile from

Geneva whose personal life scandalized polite society, who proposed the
most radical break with the past. Rousseau’s autobiographical Confessions,
published after his death, reveal that it was during his time in the Italian
island-port of Venice – while working as an underpaid ambassadorial
secretary – that he decided “everything depends entirely on politics”. People
were not inherently evil, but could become so under evil governments. The
virtues he saw in Geneva, and the vices in Venice – in particular, the sad
decline of the city-state from its glorious past – could be traced not to human
character, but to human institutions.
Society shaped by politics
In his Discourse on Inequality of 1754, Rousseau broke with previous
political philosophy. The ancient Greeks and others writing on society –
including Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century – viewed political processes as
subject to their own laws, working with an unchanging human nature. The
Greeks, in particular, had a cyclical view of political change in which good
or virtuous modes of government – whether monarchy, democracy, or
aristocracy – would degenerate into various forms of tyranny before the
cycle was renewed again. Society, as such, did not change, merely its form
of government.
Rousseau disagreed. If, as he argued, society could be shaped by its
political institutions, there was – in theory – no limit to the ability of
political action to reshape society for the better.
This assertion marked Rousseau out as a distinctively modern thinker.
Nobody before him had systematically thought of society as something
distinct from its political institutions, as an entity that was itself capable of
being studied and acted upon. Rousseau was the first, even among the
philosophers of the Enlightenment, to reason in terms of social relations
among people. This new theory begged an obvious question: if human
society was open to political change, why, then was it so obviously
imperfect?
The corruption Rousseau found in Venice exemplified for him the way in which bad government
causes people to be bad. He contrasted this with the propriety of his home town, Geneva.
On property and inequality
Rousseau provided, again, an exceptional answer, and one that scandalized
his fellow philosophers. As his starting point, he asked that we consider
humans without society. Thomas Hobbes had argued such people would be
savages, living lives that were “poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, but Rousseau
asserted quite the opposite. Human beings free from society were well-
disposed, happy creatures, content in their state of nature. Only two
principles guided them: the first, a natural self-love and desire for self-
preservation; the second, a compassion for their fellow human beings. The
combination of the two ensured that humanity reproduced itself, generation
after generation, in a state close to that of other animals. This happy condition
was, however, brutally brought to a close by the creation of civil society and,
in particular, the development of private property. The arrival of private
property imposed an immediate inequality on humanity that did not
previously exist – between those who possessed property, and those who did
not. By instituting this inequality, private property provided the foundations
of further divisions in society – between those of master and slave, and then
in the separation of families. On the foundation of these new divisions,
private property then provided the mechanism by which a natural self-love
turned into destructive love of self, now driven by jealousy and pride, and
capable of turning against other human beings. It became possible to possess,
and acquire, and to judge oneself against others on the basis of this material
wealth. Civil society was the result of division and conflict working against a
natural harmony.

"The mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to the law we prescribe to ourselves
is liberty."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The advent of private property was responsible for all of the divisions and inequalities that exist
within society, according to Rousseau.
The loss of liberty
Rousseau built on this argument in The Social Contract, published in 1762.
“Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains,” he wrote. Whereas
his earlier writings had been resolutely bleak in their opposition to
conventional society, The Social Contract sought to provide the positive
foundations for politics. Like Hobbes and Hugo Grotius before him,
Rousseau saw the emergence of a sovereign power in society as the result
of a social contract. People could choose to forfeit their own rights to a
government, handing over their full liberty to a sovereign in return for the
king – in Hobbes’s account – providing security and protection. Hobbes
argued that life without a sovereign pushed humanity back to a vile state of
nature. By handing over a degree of liberty – in particular, liberty to use
force – and swearing obedience, a people could guarantee peace, since the
sovereign could end disputes and enforce punishments.
Rousseau rejected this. It was impossible, he thought, for any person or
persons to hand over their liberty without also handing over their humanity
and therefore destroying morality. A sovereign could not hold absolute
authority, since it was impossible for a free man to enslave himself.
Establishing a ruler superior to the rest of society transformed humanity’s
natural equality into a permanent, political inequality. For Rousseau, the
social contract envisaged by Hobbes was a form of hoax by the rich against
the poor – there was no other way that the poor would agree to a state of
affairs in which the social contract preserved inequality.
The societies that existed, then, were not formed in the state of nature,
deriving their legitimacy from improvement over that time. Rather,
Rousseau argued, they were formed after we had left the state of nature, and
property rights – with the resultant inequalities – had been established.
Once property rights were in place, conflicts would ensue over the
distribution of those rights. It was civil society and property that led to war,
with the state as the agency through which war could be pursued.
Revising the social contract
What Rousseau offered in The Social Contract was the possibility of this
dire situation transforming into its opposite. The state and civil society were
burdens on individuals, depriving them of a natural freedom. But they could
be changed into positive extensions of our freedom, if political institutions
and society were organized effectively. The social contract, instead of being
a pact written in fear of our evil natures, could be a contract written in the
hope of improving ourselves. The state of nature might have been free, but
it meant people had no greater ideals than that of their animal appetites.
More sophisticated desires could only appear outside the state of nature, in
civil society. To achieve this, a new kind of social contract would be
written.
Where Hobbes saw law only as a restraint, and freedom existing only in
the absence of law, Rousseau argued that laws could become an extension
of our freedom, provided that those subject to the law also prescribed the
law. Freedom could be won within the state, rather than against it. To
achieve this, the whole people must become sovereign. A legitimate state is
one that offers greater freedom than is obtainable in the raw state of nature.
To secure that positive freedom, a people must also be equal. In Rousseau’s
new world, liberty and equality march together, rather than in opposition.
Popular sovereignty
In The Social Contract, Rousseau laid down, in outline, many of the claims
that would underlie the development of the left in politics over subsequent
centuries: a belief that freedom and equality were partners, not enemies; a
belief in the ability of law and the state to improve society; and a belief in
the people as a sovereign entity, from which the state gained its legitimacy.
Despite the vehemence of his attack on private property, Rousseau was not
a socialist. He believed that the total abolition of private property would
pitch liberty and equality into conflict, whereas a moderately fair
distribution of property could enhance freedom. Indeed, he later went on to
argue for an agrarian republic of smallholding farmers. Nonetheless,
Rousseau’s ideas were, for the time, dramatically radical. By investing the
whole people with sovereignty, and by identifying sovereignty with
equality, he offered a challenge to an entire existing tradition of Western
political thought.
Rousseau was not against property, so long as it was distributed fairly. He considered a small,
agrarian republic in which all citizens were smallholders to be an ideal form of state.
A new contract
Rousseau did not equate this idea of popular sovereignty with democracy as
such, fearing that a directly democratic government, requiring all citizens to
participate, was uniquely prone to corruption and civil war. Instead, he
envisaged sovereignty being invested in popular assemblies capable of
delegating the tasks of government – via a new social contract, or a
constitution – to an executive. The sovereign people would embody the
“general will”, an expression of popular assent. Day-to-day government,
however, would depend on specific decisions, requiring a “particular will”.
It was in this very distinction, Rousseau thought, that conflict between the
“general will” and the “particular will” opened up, paving the way for the
corruption of the sovereign people. It was this corruption that so marked the
world of Rousseau’s time, in his view. Instead of acting as a collective,
sovereign body, the people were consumed by the pursuit of private
interests. In place of the freedom of popular sovereignty, society had pushed
people into separate, private spheres of endeavour, whether in the arts,
science, or literature, or in the division of labour. This numbed people into
habitual deference, and instilled a spirit of passivity.
To ensure the government was an authentic expression of the popular,
general will, Rousseau believed that participation in its assemblies and
procedures should be compulsory, removing – as far as possible – the
temptations of the private will. But this belief in the necessity of combating
private desires is exactly where Rousseau’s later, liberal critics have found
the deepest fault.
Private versus general will
The “general will”, however desirable in theory, could easily be vested in
deeply oppressive arrangements. Not least was the difficulty in actually
ascertaining the “general will”. The road for an individual or a group
claiming to express the general will, when merely exercising their own
particular wills, was clearly wide open. Rousseau, in desiring to make the
people sovereign, could be presented as the forefather of totalitarianism.
What repressive regime since his time has not attempted to claim the
support of “the people”?
Indeed, Rousseau’s provisions against factions and divisions among the
people – which he, like Machiavelli, saw as undermining the state – could
certainly turn into a tyranny of the majority, in which unpopular minorities
suffer at the hands of those exercising the “general will”. Rousseau’s
recommendation for dealing with this dilemma was to recognize the
inevitability of factions, and to multiply them indefinitely – making so
many particular wills that no one of them would stand a chance of
representing the general will, nor would any one faction be dominant
enough to oppose the general will.
States formed under illegitimate social contracts based on the fraud of the
powerful were not capable of expressing this will, precisely because their
subjects were bound to them only by deference to authority, not by mutual
assent. However, if the apparent contracts between rulers and ruled were
illegitimate, based on a denial of people’s sovereignty rather than its
expression, it would follow that the people had every right to depose their
rulers. That, at least, is how the more radical of Rousseau’s later followers
came to interpret him. Rousseau himself was at best ambiguous on the issue
of outright revolt, frequently denouncing violence and civil unrest and
urging respect for existing laws.
The French Revolution began when an angry mob stormed the Bastille in Paris on 14 July 1789.
The medieval fortress and prison was a symbol of royal power.
A revolutionary icon
Rousseau’s belief in the sovereignty of the people, and the perfectibility of
both people and society, has had an immense impact. In the French
Revolution, the Jacobins adopted him as a figurehead for their own belief in
the necessity of a ruthlessly complete, egalitarian transformation of French
society. In 1794, he was reinterred in the Panthéon, Paris, as a national hero.
Over the next two centuries, Rousseau’s work also acted as a touchstone for
all those who wished to see society radically overhauled for the common
good, from Karl Marx onwards.

"We are approaching a state of crisis and the age of revolutions."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Similarly, the arguments against Rousseau, during his life and after, have
helped to shape both conservative and liberal thought. In 1791, Edmund
Burke, one of the founders of modern conservatism, held Rousseau to be
almost personally responsible for the French Revolution and what he saw as
its excesses. Writing almost 200 years later, the radical-liberal philosopher
Hannah Arendt believed the errors in Rousseau’s thinking helped to drive the
Revolution away from its liberal roots.
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva,
Switzerland. The son of a freeman entitled to
vote in city elections, he never wavered in his
appreciation of Geneva’s liberal institutions.
Inheriting a large library and a voracious
appetite for reading, Rousseau received no
formal education. At the age of 15, an
introduction to the noblewoman Françoise-
Louise de Warens led to his conversion to
Catholicism, exile from Geneva, and
disownment by his father.
Rousseau began studying in earnest in his 20s and was appointed
secretary to the ambassador to Venice in 1743. He left soon after for Paris,
where he built a reputation as a controversial essayist. When his books
were banned in France and Geneva, he fled briefly to London, but soon
returned to France where he spent the rest of his life.
Key works
1754 Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men
1762 Emile
1762 The Social Contract
1770 Confessions

See also: Ibn Khaldun • Niccolò Machiavelli • Hugo Grotius • Thomas

Hobbes • Edmund Burke • Hannah Arendt