Rousseau (1712-1778)

Major Written Works:  "The Social Contract" (1760)& "A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality"

    In many respects Rousseau, the French political philosopher, threw himself against the currents of the age.  He preached a return to nature.  His political ideas are to be found in many of his works, but they are summed up in the small book which is entitled the "Social Contract"  The famous book had an immense influence upon his own and te next generation, and has been rightly described as the Bible of the French Revolution.

    In this book he asserts that the origin of all governments is to be found in the people themselves, not in any divine right of kings governed states owning to a contract with their subjects.  If the rulers did not fulfill this contract then it was the right and the duty of the people to oppose them.  The power belonged, he maintained, originally to the people, and always belongs by right to them.  As all governments emanate from them, so they have a right to overthrow all governments; but when they have established a government that suits them there can be no limit to its power either in matters political or religious.  So while he seems to at one moment to be preaching doctrines of wild revolution, another part of his book was quoted by the revolutionary leaders as justifying their most despotic action.

    Rousseau's "Le Contract Social" opened with the bold statement 'Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains'  The American Declaration of Independence borrowed his theories of the rights of man, including the 'sacred rights of insurrection.'  When the people exercised their right to oppose their rulers, said Rousseau, they would return to a 'state of nature' where everything was good and beautiful, and would be able to set up a democracy which, in small states at least, he declared to be the best form of government.

    Rousseau's reasoning fired many thinkers in France.  It helped to turn men's minds toward revolution.  When the opportunity came, many followers of Rousseau were ready to hack the old system to pieces and set up a new society in its place.  Political theorists have generally insisted that a high degree of social and economic equality is a prerequisite for a democracy.  Rousseau wrote in "The Social Contract":

                Allow neither rich men nor beggars.  These two estates which are naturally inseparable

             are equally fatal to the common good; from the one come the friends of tyranny, and from

             the other tyrants.  It is always between them that the public liberty is put up t auction; the

             one buys, and the other sells.

    Rousseau's conception of a republic was that every citizen in it would be morally free and yet bound by laws of his own.  In his "A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality", Rousseau traced the origins of inequalities of power in equalities in property.  Inequality in property, he maintained, led in turn to inequalities in other resources.  Less than a century after Rousseau, Marx and Engels put forth a similar explanation in the "Communist Manifesto."

    In his "Social Contract" Rousseau endeavored to construct a theory of government based on the consent of the governed while reconciling the conflicting demands of individual liberty and social organization.  In Rousseau's ideal society an individual surrenders all his natural rights as envisaged by Locke to the group people as a while.  The people and the state are therefore identical, but the government is something quite different - it is merely the executive agent of the people's will.

    Rousseau was hailed as the champion of democracy.  But it is also true that his doctrine of the the General Will later came to be used by ambitious despots.  Claiming that he alone knew what constituted the General Will, a shrewd leader could justify his seizure of power.  It is one history's ironies that the "Social Contract." written to justify democracy, was used later on to justify dictatorship.

Nandy, Milon, Terms & Theories in Politics, Government International Relations and the Humanities, EurAsia-Pacific Books, 1993.