Le Contract Social: Jean Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Swiss-born writer, philosopher and political theorist whose treatises and novels influenced the leaders of the Romantic movement and the French Revolution. Rousseau was the poorest academic of contemporary philosophers yet the most influential in many respects. The culmination of the European Enlightenment (the “Age of Reason”) was characterised by his ideas. He made available new avenues for ethical and political thinking. His reforms changed taste forever, first in music and then in other arts. He had a significant impact on people’s lives; he persuaded parents to take a new interest in their children and to educate them differently; and he promoted emotional expressiveness above polite reserve in friendship and love. He popularised the religious emotion cult among those who had abandoned religious ideology.  

Rousseau’s Social Contract

“Men are born free, yet everywhere are in chains,” writes Rousseau in the introduction to The Social Contract. Rousseau goes on to outline the various ways in which civil society’s “chains” undermine man’s fundamental claim to physical freedom. He claims that civil society does nothing to maintain the equality and personal liberty guaranteed to man when he entered it. The only legitimate political authority, according to Rousseau, is that which has the consent of all the people, who have agreed to such administration by entering into a social compact for the purpose of their mutual preservation.

Rousseau has outlined the conceptual underpinnings of this social contract and proposes its ideal form. The sovereign, according to Rousseau, is the cumulative grouping of all people who enter a civil society by their permission, and this sovereign can be thought of, at least symbolically, as a singular person with a unified will. This notion is vital because, while individual people may have varied thoughts and desires according to their circumstances, the sovereign as a whole represents the people’s collective will. This general will, according to Rousseau, is the collective need of all to provide for the common good of all.

The Social Contract’s core point is that government obtains its right to exist and govern through “the consent of the governed.” This may not sound like an outlandish idea today, but it was when The Social Contract was released. Rousseau explores a variety of government structures that may not appear democratic to modern eyes, but his main goal was to figure out how to ensure that the people’s general will could be conveyed as accurately as possible in their government. He was always thinking about how to make society more democratic. In The Social Contract, Rousseau praises the Roman republic’s comitia to show that even large governments with many people may have assemblies of all their citizens.

Main Purpose of the Social Contract

The social contract is supposed to be a proper substitute for the “state of nature.” According to Rousseau, the state of nature was initially tranquil, with this harmony owing to the tiny population, abundance of nature, and lack of competition, among other factors. As society grew more complicated, private property was introduced, and new types of male reliance emerged, resulting in economic and social inequality. In general agreement with Hobbes, Rousseau proposed a new social covenant in response to the state of greed and competition that had developed. Hobbes declared mankind to be rational and motivated somehow in a social agreement since it would provide them with a better existence than the natural condition. 

Rousseau equates the social contract to a “act of association” in which the state and the individual have mutual commitment. Individuals share sovereign power as citizens, yet as subjects, they submit to the laws of the state. Government is also one of the primary actors, according to Rousseau: it is an intermediary body among the subjects and the state, with the main tasks of enforcing laws and maintaining civil and political liberty.

By contrasting losses and benefits, Rousseau evaluates the social contract: “What man loses by the social compact is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to all he wants to achieve and succeeds in getting; what he wins is civil liberty and proprietorship of all he possesses.”  (It’s worth noting that “natural liberty” is bound by an individual’s physical capacity, whereas “civil liberty” is defined by the general will.) Furthermore, “property” is founded on a legal title, while “possession” is the outcome of man’s force). According to Rousseau, the outcome of such a cost-benefit analysis is unmistakably positive: individuals will reap net gains since the social compact will safeguard and defend them through the general will fashioned by the same individuals. Furthermore, the creation of a social contract is rational, because without it, the state of nature (which Rousseau refers to as a “basic condition”) would be put under such strain that it would collapse.

Rousseau’s Theory

Rousseau believed that modern man’s indifference to his own wants was to blame for a variety of societal issues, such as dominance and exploitation of others, as well as poor self-esteem and sadness. The most fundamental purpose of good governance, according to Rousseau, is to ensure the freedom of all citizens.

The Social Contract, in particular, is Rousseau’s attempt to conceive the type of government that best supports all citizens’ individual freedom while also addressing the limits that come with living in a sophisticated, contemporary civil society. People can never be as free in modern society as they are in nature, according to Rousseau, as long as property and regulations remain, a remark later reiterated by Marx and many other Communist and anarchist social scientists. Nonetheless, Rousseau was a firm believer in the existence of some governing principles that, if implemented, can provide individuals of society with a level of liberty that is at least comparable to that enjoyed in nature. In The Social Contract and other political philosophy books, Rousseau devotes himself to elucidating these concepts and showing how they might be expressed in a viable modern state.

Conclusion

Rousseau’s work focuses on freedom more than any other issue in political philosophy, attempting to explain how man is blessed with an enviable absolute freedom in nature. For two reasons, this independence is complete. To begin with, natural man is physically free since he is neither enslaved by a repressive state machinery or dominated by his peers. Second, he is mentally and spiritually free since he is not imprisoned by any of modern society’s artificial requirements.

The independence from need, the second feeling of freedom, is a particularly perceptive and revolutionary aspect of Rousseau’s thought. Rousseau highlighted the need of expression in raising a well-balanced, freethinking youngster in his educational theory. He firmly believed that allowing children to develop organically without the restraints imposed by society would eventually allow them to reach their full moral and scholastic potential. This natural development should be child-centered, focusing on the child’s experience and needs at each developmental stage.