Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Thinker · 1712-1778 · Politics, stage 3: Meet the thinkers
Held that people can be free under government only when they make the laws themselves.
Overview
Rousseau was born a citizen of Geneva and spent most of his working life in France, an outsider to the salons he wrote for. The Discourse on Inequality argues that the miseries of social life are historical rather than natural, arriving with settled property and the comparisons between people that it invites. The Social Contract then asks how people can join a political body and remain as free as they were before, and answers that they can if they are governed by laws in whose making they have a share: each gives himself to all, and so to no one in particular. The general will, meaning the collective interest of citizens as citizens rather than the sum of their private interests, is the central and most contested idea, since critics from Constant to Berlin have argued that it licenses forcing people to be free. His later constitutional writings for Poland and Corsica treat shared customs as what holds a self-governing people together, which made him an early source for nationalist thought as well. Read Books I and II of The Social Contract first, then the Discourse on Inequality.
Where to start reading
The Social Contract 1762
His account of legitimate authority: the general will, popular sovereignty, and the claim that law made by the citizens is the only law consistent with freedom.
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality 1755
A conjectural history arguing that inequality is not natural but arrives with property, dependence and the desire to be seen well by others.
Part of
Sources
- Jean Jacques Rousseau Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
