Rousseau

Jean Jacques Rousseau was the intellectual "father" of the French Revolu­
tion, as well as the last and perhaps greatest of the modem contract theorists.
He was in some sense aware of his own importance, for he claimed to have
resolved what he believed to be the most fundamental issue of modem politi­
cal life. In his major political work, The Social Contract, he frames the issue
as follows:

Man is born free , and yet we see him everywhere in chains . Those who be­
lieve themselves masters of others cease not to be even greater slaves than
the people they govern. How this happens I am ignorant; but if I were
asked what renders it j ustifiable, I believe it may be in my power to resolve
the question. 1

At first glance, this statement seems extravagant. Despite the continued

existence of hereditary monarchy, had not the trend since the Renaissance
been an expansion of freedom, and had not modem political theorists given
increasing attention to the question of liberty? John Locke, for example, had
made the language of consent and popular sovereignty common currency
among eighteenth-century intellectuals. Where then lay the problem? How
could Rousseau seriously claim that men are "everywhere in chains"?
If these questions rise immediately to the mind of the modem reader of
Rousseau, they rose even more dramatically to the minds of his contempo-

221
222 Modern Political Theory

raries. We at least have come to question some of the more optimistic politi­
cal assumptions of Locke and his followers. But in the eighteenth century, no
serious intellectual was prepared to deal with the possibility that men were in
chains. This was the age of the Enlightenment, a period of time that stretches
roughly from Locke to the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was a time
in which supposedly the "light of reason" fully illuminated human affairs for
the fir:� time. And it was this light of reason that Enlightenment thinkers such
as Voltaire believed to be the cause of human liberation and the source of
human progress. Just as Galileo and Newton had used reason to liberate hu­
manity from superstition, John Locke and his followers had used it to liberate
people from false political doctrines such as those propounded by Filmer and
other pre-Enlightenment defenders of absolutism.
Seen in this context, it is not difficult to imagine how shocking
Rousseau 's claim appeared to his contemporaries. It was a claim that not
only ran counter to their optimism in the progress of liberty, but also chal­
lenged their unquestioning faith in reason itself. And such radical thinking is
not to be explained in intellectual terms alone. It must be seen in part as an
expression of a deeper emotional and temperamental reality. This is particu­
larly the case with Rousseau, for perhaps more than any other thinker we
have studied, Rousseau's political philosophy is a direct reflection of the man
himself. Just as his political thought was out of joint with the generally ac­
cepted assumptions of the times, so too was the man out of joint with the so­
ciety in which he lived. He was, in fact, an intensely unhappy and neurotic
person whose life ended in madness and despair.
Rousseau ( 1 7 1 2- 1 778) was born in Geneva to an artisan family. His
mother died of complications arising from his birth, a tragedy that filled
Rousseau with a lifelong sense of guilt and in all probability lay behind much
of his neurotic behavior and personal unhappiness. As a young man, he was
apprenticed in several trades, and in 1 728 he set out for a period of travel
during which he engaged in an extensive process of self-education. He was
not, like Hobbes and Locke, formally trained in the university, nor did he
consider himself a philosopher in any formal sense.
In 1 742 Rousseau set out for Paris where he met the leading cultural,
scientific, and philosophical luminaries of Enlightenment France. Among
them was Diderot, a leading philosophe (as the major French Enlightenment
thinkers were called) and the founder of the Encyclopedie , a multivolume
work that aimed at encompassing all knowledge. Rousseau contributed sev­
eral articles to the
Encyclopedie, the most important of which was the Dis­
course on Political Economy. This work, along with the First and Second
Discourses, and, most importantly, The Social Contract, constitutes the basic
source of Rousseau 's social and political thought, although he wrote several
other minor political works, such as The Government of Poland. In addition,
Rousseau wrote several novels and numerous essays, and he produced three
autobiographical works, the most important of which is The Confessions . In
1 76 1 , the same year that saw the publication of The Social Contract,
 Rousseau 223

Rousseau published Emile, perhaps the most famous work on education ever
written.
Emile marked a disastrous turning point in Rousseau's life, for so
shocking was the book to Rousseau's contemporaries that it was publicly
burned in Paris and Rousseau was threatened with arrest. Worst of all, both
Emile and The Social Contract were confiscated in his beloved Geneva, a
city that he frequently referred to as his political ideal. Rousseau had no
choice but to flee. He became for the last years of his life a wanderer and an
outcast. Many of his former friends abandoned him, the philosophes attacked
him, and Rousseau found it increasingly difficult to establish or maintain
friendships with anyone. Always a neurotic and unhappy man, he became in­
creasingly so near the end of his life. His last years were marked by psy­
chotic depression and paranoia.
Apart from the tragic condition of his birth, the precise reason for
Rousseau 's personal unhappiness is not known, and normally it would not re­
ally be important in itself. We want to know what a theorist said, not why he
said it, except insofar as the theorist's motivations and inner conflicts help us
to grasp the substance of his argument. Because the connection between this
man and his thought is so intimate, Rousseau is such a theorist. His inner and
essentially neurotic conflicts have a direct bearing upon his political theory.2
And the essence of Rousseau 's problems lay in the inconsistency between his
behavior and his beliefs. If ever there was a man who could say in all sincer­
ity "Do as I say, not as I do," it was Jean Jacques Rousseau.
In The Confessions, for example, he tells us that he feels for his fellow
human more deeply and genuinely than others, yet he could not maintain
friendships with anyone, and he thoroughly mistreated his mistress (eventu­
ally his wife) of many years. He tells us in Emile that the education of the
child requires the total attention of the tutor, yet he sent all of his illegitimate
children to a foundling home and never saw them again. He complains of the
superficiality and immorality of the theater and other forms of "civilized" en­
tertainment, yet he was an avid theatergoer, and his novels contain the kind
of excessive romanticism and sentilJlentality that he elsewhere indicts as the
"degrading influence of civilization." He argues that the intellectual life is the
unnatural product of civilization (in the Second Discourse he goes as far as to
say that "the man who meditates is a depraved animal"),3 yet he was a thor­
oughgoing intellectual and frequented the salons and other intellectual gath­
erings that he says he so heartily detests. And while he insists that the desire
for fame and other forms of ego gratification are civilized perversions, he
himself desperately sought fame and recognition.
Rousseau was not unaware of his own inconsistencies. Quite the con­
trary. He was not only aware, he was puzzled, for he was convinced that de­
spite his outwardly bad behavior he was a good man. In contrast to The
Confessions of St. Augustine, which aimed at demonstrating their author's
essential depravity, Rousseau, addressing his fellow man in the opening
pages of his Confessions, exclaims "let them groan at my depravities, and
224 Modern Political Theory

blush for my misdeeds. But let each one of them reveal his heart . . . with
equal sincerity, and may any man who dares say ' I was a better man than
he. ' "4
This inconsistency between Rousseau's outer behavior and his inner
life is the key to his political philosophy, for he insists that the inconsistency
characterizes all civilized peoples and is to be explained only by the absence
of liberty. If men were not everywhere in chains in European society, says
Rousseau, they would not behave as they do. For where real political control
had been taken from the people, he argues, there is not simply the loss of lib­
erty in the narrow political sense, but loss of inner freedom to express one's
innate decency and goodness as well. That people behave as other than the
loving and cooperative creatures they naturally are is proof that neither outer
political nor inner personal liberty is a reality.
But what causes this loss of liberty? Rousseau 's claim in The Social
Contract that he is ignorant of how men came to be in chains is not entirely
valid. In his Second Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality
Among Men , a work written some years before the publication of The Social
Contract, he attributes the loss of freedom to the inequality produced by the
emergence of private property. Primitive people had no property, says
Rousseau, and hence each was as equal and as free as everyone else. Civi­
lized people, on the other hand, have developed social classes based upon ex­
treme inequalities of property, and along with social inequality has come a
loss of liberty in both the political and the personal sense.
Political liberty is destroyed because the propertied classes possess the
power to dominate others. But this same inequality of property destroys as
well the freedom to express one 's innate goodness, Rousseau argues, because
it produces competition for economic goods, the struggle for political power,
and strivings for honor and status. All these unnatural social desires create
conflict rather than cooperation, envy and malice rather than love and affec­
tion. Human beings began to calculate their own self-interest rather than
thinking first of their fellows, and in the process they became what the soci­
ologist David Riesman has termed other directed. Rather than being true to
themselves, they act in ways calculated to gain praise or to elicit flattery.
They do anything to raise themselves above others.
Worst of all, says Rousseau, with the emergence of inequality reason it­
self becomes perverted. Not only do people begin to use their reason to cal­
culate their own advantage at the expense of others, reason becomes merely
another source of vanity. Learning and philosophy are acquired, not for their
own sakes, but to demonstrate one ' s intellectual superiority. Most seriously,
civilized people use their reason to produce philosophies that actually justify
loss of political and personal liberty.
This latter point Rousseau first developed in his Fi rs t Discourse on the
Question : Has the Restoration o f the Sciences and Arts Tended to Purify
Morals ( 1 750). The question was posed for an essay contest by the Academy
 Rousseau 225

of Dijon, a scientific institution comprised of the leading French Enlighten­

ment intellectuals. Rousseau 's First Discourse won the prize and made him
famous, for not only did he dispute the Enlightenment 's optimism in the
power of reason to liberate humankind, he insisted that reason had con­
tributed to the loss of freedom by blinding men to their actual condition of
slavery. In a full-scale assault upon the Enlightenment, Rousseau claimed
that

The sciences , letters, and arts . . . spread garlands of flowers over the
iron chains with which men are burdened, stifle in them the sense of
that original liberty for which they seemed to have been born, make
them love their slavery, and tum them into what is called civilized
peoples.5

Rousseau believes there are certain obvious political conclusions that

follow from his analysis of Enlightenment civilization (an analysis, inciden­
tally, that can be applied to our own contemporary society). Clearly, Euro­
pean society and polity must be reconstituted such that political liberty and
inner freedom are returned to "the people." Indeed, the two must be united,
says Rousseau. Political liberty must be made a reality so that people can
shape their social order to encourage the expression of that natural goodness
that is the essence of inner liberty.It is not sufficient that people individually
reform themselves, as St. Augustine proposes, nor is it even a second best al­
ternative, as Plato suggests. Rousseau 's own life had demonstrated to him
that human freedom and fulfillment cannot exist apart from a polity that
makes them possible. Apart from this, human beings will behave badly de­
spite their innate goodness.
Since Rousseau believes that inequality is the source of the problem,
one might reason that his reforms will include the elimination of private
property. Such is not the case. While he clearly disagrees with Locke that
property is the source of rights and liberties, he is in no sense a proto-Marxist,
although his critique of private property in the Second Discourse clearly had
a great impact upon Marx. Indeed, much of what Rousseau proposes will at
first perplex the reader, for his political theory runs essentially contrary to our
normal political assumptions. Indeed, scholars have not themselves been able
to determine how best to interpret his political thought, and he has been la­
beled everything from a liberal to a totalitarian.6
But if Rousseau 's meaning is not always easy to discern, the manner in
which he must be interpreted is clear. Rousseau is the last of the great con­
tract theorists. As such, his political thought must be understood within the
context of his theory of contract, which is developed most clearly in his
major political work, The Social Contract. Yet even in The Social Contract
Rousseau presents difficulties in interpretation, for he need not have em­
ployed the idea of the contract at all. Indeed, there are elements of his politi-
226 Modern Political Theory

cal thought that contradict the notion that political society is the result of an
express agreement as opposed to an unthinking historical evolution. But, in
certain important respects, the theory of contract corresponded to Rousseau 's
most fundamental assumptions about the nature of social and political order.
Moreover, he understood that a political theorist must speak in a language fa­
miliar to his readers if he expects to change their political opinions,and in his
day the contract theory had become the dominant mode of political analysis.
For these reasons, he chose to employ that theory.
W hat is unique about Rousseau's political analysis is that he combines
elements of Hobbes's and Locke's theories of contract in a way that chal­
lenges both. This is true as well in his interpretation of the state of nature,
which, of course, is the starting point for all contract theorists. In the case of
Rousseau, however, the state of nature is treated more as an actual historical
condition than it is by his predecessors, although the basic mode of reasoning
he employs in thinking about the state of nature and the contract is still essen­
tially that of logical imagination. W hat Rousseau does unequivocably con­
cede to Hobbes and Locke is that, whether the state of nature is conceived
historically or imaginatively, people's natural condition is one of absolute
l iberty and equality. From this point on Rousseau selectively accepts,rejects,
and modifies Hobbes's and Locke's contractual analysis.
To begin with,he agrees with Hobbes that in the state of nature human
beings lack any social capacity, but he goes much further than Hobbes. He
not only claims that human beings are naturally isolated individuals, he ar­
gues that they are utterly amoral as welI.7 Hobbes had conceded that humans
in the state of nature could,in the abstract,conceive of something like natural
law, but according to Rousseau they cannot even imagine it, much less be­
have according to its dictates as Locke believes.
Rousseau's insistence that human beings are naturally amoral (not im­
moral) and asocial (not antisocial ) is based upon an insight that never oc­
curred to either Hobbes or Locke. Language, Rousseau argues, is an
invention of civilization. "Primitive peoples" are without it; they can there­
fore neither reason nor speak. As such, they are incapable of knowing those
moral rules necessary to create a viable community.Like Aristotle, Rousseau
insists that without speech politics is impossible for speech is the necessary
precondition for human sociability.
Despite his agreement with Hobbes that people are innately asocial in­
dividualists, however,Rousseau does not conclude that the state of nature is a
state of war. Rather, he agrees with Locke that human beings are essentially
decent creatures and that, as a consequence, their natural condition must be
one of peace and concord . But, as we have seen, he cannot accept Locke 's
contention that this peace is the result of people's abili ty to know and obey
natural law. Without language and the capacity to reason , human beings are
incapable of knowing moral truths.
 Rousseau 227

What then inclines people to peace? Feeling, says Rousseau. Hobbes

did not notice, he argues, that "savage man . . . tempers the ardor he has for
his own well-being by an innate repugnance to see his fellow man suffer."8
This innate repugnance Rousseau calls pity, the only natural virtue that
human beings posses (all other virtues, says Rousseau, are socially created,
or conventional). And pity, he continues, is "all the more universal and useful
to man because it precedes in him the use of all reflection; and so natural that
even beasts sometimes give perceptible signs of it"9
Simply put, Rousseau believes the state of nature is a state of peace be­
cause people are naturally "good" in the sense that they have a natural empa­
thy for their fellow creatures. (Bear in mind, however, that this is not in the
strictest sense moral goodness since morality requires the ability to speak and
reason . ) This natural "goodness" is easily confirmed, says Rousseau, because
we see it in ourselves as well as in others. No normal person wants to see oth­
ers suffer, and there are many examples of people risking their lives to pre­
vent others from being hurt. Even the beasts, as he says, give perceptible
signs of pity or compassion, and he gives as an example the tendency of a
horse to avoid trampling underfoot another l iving creature.
It follows from this analysis that pity or compassion is the foundation
of all human virtue and goodness for Rousseau since it is a universal and pre­
rational tendency to be concerned about our fellow beings. (This natural con­
cern, however, is not interpreted by Rousseau as an indication of a natural
sociability.) Without this, other virtues would either not exist or would be lit­
tle more than hollow rules of behavior. Indeed, this is precisely Rousseau's
complaint about Enlightenment civilization : It had lost its capacity to feel
and, as such, its purported virtues were little more than vanities . Worse, he
believes that Enlightenment virtues are actually destructive of human good­
ness.
It is clear that Rousseau's description of the state of nature is not simply
a metaphor for human nature, as it is for Hobbes and Locke. It is a thorough­
going critique of contemporary civilization, for it vividly illustrates that civi­
lization has had the effect of repressing human goodness. And it is apparent,
therefore, that for Rousseau the fundamental flaw in both Hobbes's and
Locke's conceptions of the state of nature is that they had read into it civi­
lized man and civilized conditions. In Rousseau's words "they spoke about
savage man and they described civil man . " IO
Locke, for example, speaks of natural man's ability to know natural law
when the capacity to reason, says RO:Jsseau, is clearly a civilized trait. Worse,
Locke and the other Enlightenment thinkers impose a form of reasoning on
people in the state of nature that is already perverted by a diseased social
order. The kind of social and political structure that Locke assumes people
would rationally consent to is one that only a "civilized" mind would find
agreeable.
228 Modern Political Theory

But Hobbes made the more fundamental mistake in reading the real
conditions of the state of nature. Locke merely imposes the civilized capacity
to reason upon natural man; Hobbes imposes the passions produced by civi­
lization. The desire for power after power that he ascribes to human nature is
in fact a product of civilization, says Rousseau. Moreover, he argues, the
state of war that Hobbes claims is the consequence of the struggle for power
is first observed in nascent society, not in the state of nature. In short, Hobbes
did not look deeply enough into his own heart. He did not recognize his own
underlying goodness. Precisely because he was a civilized man he assumed
that his desires and passions were innate in human nature rather than the un­
natural by-product of social inequality.
Given Rousseau's argument that both Hobbes and Locke failed to grasp
the real essence of human nature, we can expect his view of the contractual
act to differ considerably from those of his predecessors. Yet the reason why
human beings contract out of the state of nature Rousseau does not make
entirely clear. He simply tells us that the contract is made at that point
where "the strength of each individual is insufficient to overcome the re­
sistance of the obstacles to his preservation. " 11 But what are these ob­
stacles? Clearly they cannot be those discussed by Hobbes or Locke : the
war of everyone against everyone or, what comes to the same thing, the in­
security of property. Such views are contrary to Rousseau's theory that the
state of nature is peaceful and that humans have a natural regard for one an­
other.
The obstacles Rousseau seems to have in mind are purely physical in
nature, for in his Essay on the Origin of Languages he tells us that "human
associations are due largely to accidents of nature,"12 such as floods, earth­
quakes, and the like. People unite to help protect themselves from natural
catastrophes. Yet, in Rousseau 's case, it is more relevant to ask what benefits
accrue from contracting than what impels human beings to enter political so­
ciety. And here Rousseau is both clear and explicit :

The passing from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a
very remarkable change, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct,
and giving to his actions a moral character which they lacked before. 13

It is clear that for Rousseau the act of contracting has an effect far sur­
passing anything imagined by either Hobbes or Locke. For these thinkers,
human beings remain the same before and after the act of contracting. The
contract simply makes them more secure than they had been in the state of
nature. For Rousseau, on the other hand, the act of contracting transforms
what are little more than dumb animals into human beings by "substituting
justice for instinct ." Upon entering society people learn to relate to one an­
other on the basis of moral rules rather than mere feeling. As such, they be-
 Rousseau 229

come truly free for the first time. In Rousseau's words, the contract creates
"moral liberty, which alone renders a man master of himself. "14
Rousseau is in no sense, therefore, a primitivist. He does not prefer the
"noble savage" to civilized humanity as many have mistakenly believed.
Quite the contrary in fact. The superiority of civilized people, at least their
potential superiority, is clear : They alone have risen above mere animal exis­
tence to become moral beings who are capable of making moral choices. In
Aristotle's words, they have become capable of reasoned action and thereby
free. Thus it is clear that Rousseau's critique of Enlightenment people is not
that they are civilized as such, but that the form of their civilization is per­
verse. And his claim in the First Discourse that the arts and sciences have
corrupted and enslaved them is not to be interpreted as an attack upon reason
in and of itself, but upon a perverted form of reason.
It also bears repeating here that Rousseau's contract is, at bottom, an
imaginative construct; it is not to be taken literally. Unless this is kept in
mind, what Rousseau says about the contractual act makes little sense. Cer­
tainly no mere agreement to enter into society can create language or tum
people into reasoning creatures. To be perfectly precise, human beings could
not contract at all without the ability to reason or speak. (It is probably for
this reason that Rousseau sometimes treats the state of nature as a historical
condition in which human beings evolve over time sufficiently to allow them
to acquire those social and linguistic skills necessary to "contract out" of the
state of nature.)
If we take what Rousseau says metaphorically, however, we find that he
is agreeing with some of the profoundest insights of modem social science.
For what Rousseau means to say in his theory of the contractual act is that
language and reason are acquired in society. Consequently, all of our moral
rules are social products; they are conventional rather than natural. More­
over, what we are ethically and in fact in every other way is largely the result
of socialization. Beyond our natural capacity for pity, there is no innate
human nature. "Human nature" is itself a social product.
W hat Rousseau really wants to do in his analysis of the contract, there­
fore, is to demonstrate that people can be genuinely free and happy only
when human nature has been socially structured such that reason is made
moral. Reason must become ethically based; it must be made to be some­
thing other than mere calculation of one's self-interest. But how is this to be
accomplished? Rousseau has in fact already given us the answer : Reason
must be united with feeling, with people's natural and prerational tendency to
have compassion for their fellow beings. And such a unification requires a
society in which gross inequalities are not allowed to debase people and
make them self-interested and rapacious rather than public-interested and
loving. Ideally conceived, this is the kind of society that the contract is sup­
posed to create according to Rousseau.
230 Modern Political Theory

It is at this point, however, that Rousseau confronts what he considers

to be the major theoretical problem inherent in the contractual theory of soci­
ety. He has agreed with the other contract theorists that people must contract
out of the state of nature because of the obstacles to their preservation. Yet, it
is apparent that the terms of the contract specify that they must give up their
natural liberty and agree to live by society'S rules. There is no other possible
reading of the contract that makes any logical sense, says Rousseau. How,
then, is the liberty of the individual to be made compatible with the necessity
of social order? The problem is summarized by Rousseau in the following
way :

Where shall we find a form of association which will defend and protect
with the whole common force the person and the property of each associ­
ate, and by which every person, while uniting himself with all, shall obey
only himself and remain as free as before?15

Hobbes's response to this dilemma was to conclude that people have no

rights in society but those granted by government, a conclusion that
Rousseau cannot accept since the enhancement of liberty, both political and
personal, is the whole intent of the contract. Without liberty, people could not
exercise that moral autonomy that it is the purpose of the contract to create in
the first place. Yet, Rousseau cannot accept Locke's solution of limiting the
exercise of sovereign power over the community either. Like Hobbes, he
conceives of people in the state of nature as essentially isolated individuals .
He absolutely rejects Locke 's thesis that they possess a natural social capac­
ity. Thus, unless the sovereign power is absolute in all spheres, as Hobbes
claims it must be, Rousseau concedes that society would disintegrate into an
individualistic state of nature.
Rousseau's greatest claim to fame as a political thinker is that his analy­
sis of the contract resolves this apparent contradiction between the liberty of
the individual and the requirements of social order. He had found a way to
create a sovereign power as absolute as Hobbes's yet which, at the same
time, allows individuals to maintain their liberty in an even more absolute
sense than Locke would have it . 16
Before we consider precisely how Rousseau accomplishes this, it is
worth noting the enormous importance of what he proposes to do. Rousseau
claims to have resolved a paradox that not only confounded the great contract
theorists but has lain at the heart of Western political thought from the begin­
ning. One might even say that this contradiction between individual liberty
and the imperatives of social order has been the defining issue in Western
normative theory since Socrates. Indeed, Socrates founded Western political
thought around this very issue when he refused to sacrifice his liberty to
teach yet died in order to affirm the necessity of law.
The Socratic solution Rousseau does not find acceptable. Death may be
 Rousseau 231

an appropriate means to overcome the contradiction for the philosopher, but

not for the average person. In practical terms, a political rather than a philo­
sophical solution is required. The state must be so constructed that both lib­
erty and social control are possible. And the political principles that must be
employed to accomplish this task can only be determined by a radically new
interpretation of the contract, Rousseau argues.
To begin with, says Rousseau, the act of contracting must, as Hobbes
maintained, involve "the total alienation of each associate and all his
rights. "l7 Anything short of this would not work. But, he continues, this
alienation of rights is from the individual to the whole community, not sim­
ply to one man or assembly of men who, as Hobbes held, are not a party to
the contract. In other words, each individual must contract with all others to
tum over their natural rights to every other individual. In this way, says
Rousseau, the locus of sovereignty remains within the whole community of
which each individual is a part. It follows, therefore, that while all are subject
to the sovereign power of the community, at the same time all share a por­
tion of that power in their capacity as citizens. If, for example, the state is
composed of ten thousand citizens, then, says Rousseau, "each has . . . a
ten-thousandth part of the sovereign authority, though he is entirely subjected
to it. "l8
W hat this analysis points to in political terms, Rousseau argues, is that
the legislative power must belong to the entire community of citizens, and
each citizen must have an equal voice in the legislative process. This is the
only way in which the individual can be made subject to the sovereign au­
thority of the community yet retain a legitimate share of that authority. And
that this reading of the contract is correct, Rousseau insists, is proven by the
political results that follow.
Recall that the purpose of the contract is to create a form of association
in which "every person, while uniting himself with all, shall obey only him­
self and remain as free as before. " This, says Rousseau, is precisely what oc­
curs when the legislative authority is given to the whole community. Each is
united with all to form a sovereign authority, yet in obeying the law the indi­
vidual obeys rules he himself has had a share in making . Sovereignty and lib­
erty, social order and freedom, are thus rendered compatible. More than this,
the one becomes the necessary condition for the other.
It should not be thought that Rousseau is simply propounding Locke's
doctrine of popular sovereignty in a new guise. He is most surely a theorist of
popular sovereignty, and he therefore agrees with Locke that government is
merely a trust or, in his words, merely a law, by which he means that it is cre­
ated by a legislative act of the sovereign community. 9
l But Rousseau's theory
of popular sovereignty is not only different from Locke 's, it is in fact a thor­
oughgoing critique of the whole tradition of Lockean liberal democracy. For
while Locke recognizes the principle of popular sovereignty in theory, he re­
jects it in practice, says Rousseau . In point of fact, he argues, Locke's con-
232 Modern Political Theory

tract does not give the legislative power to the people, but to a representative
legislature. As such, sovereignty belongs to the elected representatives, or
more precisely to a majority of representatives, rather than to the community
as a whole. Thus, Locke actually puts sovereignty in the hands of a very
small minority, thereby denying to the people that political liberty that a cor­
rect reading of the contract shows they rightfully ought to possess.
One might contend that liberty is in fact no more assured in Rousseau's
ideal state than in Locke's, since the community may pass laws to which par­
ticular members will object. Each, after all, has only a small part of the sov­
ereign authority, only one vote among many. And there is no more guarantee
that the citizen will agree with laws passed by the whole community than
with laws passed by a representative legislature. It would seem, therefore,
that in obeying the law citizens in Rousseau's state do not necessarily obey
themselves.
This argument, while seeming unassailable on the suIiace, really misses
the point, says Rousseau . Admittedly, some members of the community may
object to a particular law, but this does not mean that they will not willingly
and freely obey it. If society and polity are appropriately organized, the "dis­
senters" will recognize that the laws were made for their own good and will
freely grant their obedience. And if the citizen should refuse to obey the gen­
eral will, he "shall be compelled to it by the whole body,"20 says Rousseau, and
he concludes in what is arguably the most controversial statement ever made
in Western political theory : "This . . . only forces him to be free[!]"21
The obvious objection to this line of reasoning is that to be forced to be
free is a contradiction in terms. Rousseau anticipated the objection; indeed,
The Social Contract is, in a sense, an extended answer to it. For unless
Rousseau can demonstrate that in his ideal polity there is no contradiction be­
tween force and freedom (as there is, he would argue, in Hobbes's or Locke's
state) he will have failed to accomplish his major theoretical objective. He
will have failed to demonstrate that there is no incompatibility between ab­
solute sovereignty and absolute liberty, for there will obviously be times, al­
though Rousseau believes they will be infrequent, in which the subject must
be forced to obey the law.
The key to Rousseau's answer is to be found in his statement that those
who shall be forced to be free are those who refuse to obey the general will.
The concept of the general will is Rousseau's major contribution to Western
political thought, and any comprehension of his political theory requires a
thorough grasp of it. Actually, we have already gone a long way toward ex­
plaining the concept without explicitly using the term, so we should be able
to grasp the idea of the general will fairly readily.
The general will is Rousseau 's term for the sovereign power. When the
community as a whole meets in legislative assembly, says Rousseau, it ex­
presses in law the will or moral sense of the general or whole community. By
moral, of course, Rousseau means that which is in the public interest (from
 Rousseau 233

Socrates on, the public interest has always been defined as the essence of jus­
tice or political morality). And what makes the general will a moral will is
precisely its generality. Since members of the community must legislate for
the whole (general) community including themselves, they have every per­
sonal interest in making law in the public interest. Remember that the cre­
ation of the general will requires the alienation of the rights of each to all
others. Consequently, says Rousseau, "the condition of every person is alike;
and being so, it would not be to the interest of anyone to render that condition
offensive to others."22 By the simple expedient of putting the sovereign leg­
islative power in the whole community, in other words, it becomes the self­
interest of each to promote the public interest of all.
On the opening page of The Social Contract, Rousseau says that he
"shall endeavor to unite what right permits with what interest prescribes, that
justice and utility may not be separated."23 This merging of justice, or the
public interest, and utility, or self-interest, is the essence of the general will
and may be said to be the key organizational principle of Rousseau's ideal
state. For when self-interest, as Hobbes believes, is opposed to the public in­
terest, sheer power must be exercised to maintain social order and real liberty
is thereby destroyed. W hen self-interest is identical to the public interest, on
the other hand, as is the case says Rousseau when each citizen has a share of
the sovereign legislative power, the need to exercise power is dramatically
decreased and liberty is maintained. Under most circumstances people will
willingly obey laws that they themselves have made and that they believe re­
flect a genuine public good.
More than this, the recognition that one's self-interest lies in the public
interest (a recognition that can occur only when each has a share in the sover­
eign legislative power) generates over time a larger love of one's fellow citi­
zens, says Rousseau. To grasp that one's self-interest is the public interest is
to recognize that self-love can only be expressed by love of country. Thus, in
connecting justice and utility, the general will gives political expression to
people's natural virtue of compassion, of concern for others. In this way, rea­
son is united with feeling, and political decisions thereby become moral deci­
sions.
In real life, of course, it is not quite this simple, as Rousseau is well
aware. There will always exist the danger that the citizen legislators will fail
to see that it is in their self-interest to vote the public interest. They may
come to support laws that reflect their own narrow or short-term self-interest,
what Rousseau calls their private will, rather than those that reflect the public
interest or general will. Indeed, the danger is that the community will disinte­
grate into nothing more than a collection of private or corporate wills. Rea­
son and feeling will become disjoined and people will begin to act as amoral
and self-regarding individuals. For this reason, as we shall see, Rousseau ad­
vocates a complete restructuring of society and polity to prevent the emer­
gence of any type of particular will in the community. But making each
234 Modern Political Theory

citizen a member of the legislative body is the first and absolutely necessary
condition for the existence of the general will. Without this, the general will
could not possibly be expressed, since it would clearly not be in the self­
interest of each to be concerned with the public interest of all. Justice and
utility, in short, could not be united.
For now, it is sufficient to recognize that so long as the general will is
not alienated to a legislative assembly and is not allowed to disintegrate into
a collection of particular wills, it remains by definition general, hence moral. 24
As such, Rousseau concludes, the general will is "always right," that is, al­
ways right in the moral sense of reflecting the public good. It may happen, of
course, that the sovereign community will misjudge the real public interest,
but this Rousseau considers a technical problem that can in large measure be
resolved by effectively structuring society and state. But it cannot happen that
the general will, so long as it remains general, would ever consciously pervert
the public good. "The people are never corrupted," says Rousseau, "but they
are often deceived, and only then do they seem to will what is bad." 25
It is now clear why the citizen can be "forced to be free" in Rousseau 's
ideal state. Inasmuch as the general will is always morally right, refusal to
obey the law would clearly be wrong. And since the whole purpose of the
contract is to give human beings that "moral liberty which alone renders a
man master of himself," it cannot logically be maintained that to do moral
wrong, that is, to disobey the general will, is an act of moral liberty. By defi­
nition moral liberty is always conformity to the general will. Hence, were
some inclined to disobey the general will, their freedom could be maintained
only by being compelled to obey. Real liberty is always obedience to the law
because the law reflects a genuine moral will.
Rousseau 's analysis is perfectly logical once it is recognized that he
holds a positive theory of liberty.26 The idea of positive liberty is that free­
dom cannot be discussed apart from some moral end. To be free means to be
free for something. In Socratic terms, for example, real freedom means seek­
ing that which enhances virtue and order within us. In much the same way,
Rousseau believes that genuine liberty comprises only those actions that en­
hance us as moral beings. Hence, conformity to the general will, even if co­
erced, is clearly an expression of liberty since the general will is always
moral .
The contrary view of liberty, the negative theory, supposes that liberty
means simply the absence of external restraints. There is in this no moral di­
mension at all. People are free so long as there is nothing to prevent them
from doing what they want to do. One is not free for something, only from
something . This is the view propounded by Hobbes and, less bluntly, by
Locke. For this reason, the notion of positive liberty seems to us to be a con­
tradiction in terms. We have been influenced so greatly by Lockean liberal­
ism that we automatically assume people ought to have liberty to do anything
not specifically circumscribed by law. The idea that freedom involves certain
 Rousseau 235

moral constraints is simply alien to our mode of political thinking. And the
logical extension of this idea in Rousseau's claim that the state can force its
members to be free seems to us not only erroneous but, in application, totali­
tarian.
Yet, there is nothing illogical or even necessarily totalitarian about the
positive theory of liberty, even when carried to the extreme of forcing people
to be free. As we have seen , the positive theory rests upon political assump­
tions that are perfectly coherent even if we do not share in those assumptions.
And, as we shall see, the totalitarian implications of the theory are mitigated
by the kind of polity Rousseau advocates. But the best way to come to terms
with Rousseau's theory of positive liberty is to apply it to a real situation. In
application, it will be seen to make as much practical as theoretical sense.
For the sake of argument, let us take an extreme case. Let us suppose
that certain citizens in Rousseau's ideal state have become addicted to drugs.
We may safely assume that the community is opposed to the abuse of drugs
and has expressed itself as such in the law. Now, given the nature of drug ad­
diction, those addicted will surely attempt to break the law if left to their own
devices. In the process, they will become increasingly enslaved to their ad­
diction and will likely rob from others in order to continue supporting their
habit.
Clearly, the behavior of our hypothetical citizens is unethical since it is
a violation of the general will. It reflects their short-term "self-interest" rather
than the public interest or moral will of the whole community. Moreover, as
members of the sovereign community our citizens almost surely voted for the
prohibition of drugs knowing that their use would be as damaging to them­
selves as to the community. Thus, when the community forces them to give
up the use of drugs it really forces them to do that which they themselves de­
sire to do because, as ethical beings, they desire to do that which is right for
themselves and others. The community merely "forces them to be free." And
if our citizens have become so corrupted that they no longer care what is
right or wrong, this only indicates that they have become utterly enslaved to
their addiction. Eliminate the enslavement, even if by force, and you set them
free.
Of course the prohibition against drug abuse exists in all modem liberal
states. But the prohibition is simply that, a prohibition. The act of obeying the
law carries with it no positive notion of free moral choice, only the negative
idea that breaking the law will meet with punishment. Certainly the idea that
those who break the law will be "forced to be free" is unthinkable from the
liberal perspective. Either you are free or you are not, and the scope of law
determines how much or how little freedom you have.
It is, in fact, this negative conception of liberty that lies behind the lib­
eral's theory of the negative state. In order to enlarge individual liberty there
was no choice but to severely delimit the scope of state power. If, as Hobbes
maintains, liberty is nothing other than the absence of law, then the rights and
236 Modern Political Theory

liberties of the individual could be ensured only by reducing the scope of law.
This was to be done both by limiting the number and extent of laws ("the less
government the better") and by erecting more fundamental laws or constitu­
tions that would set parameters around the kinds of laws that could be made .
A case in point is the First Amendment to the American Constitution, which
states that "Congres s shall make no law respecting an establishment of reli­
gion . . . ; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the pre s s ," and so on.
Rousseau would certainly not accept such constitutional limitations in
his ideal state . He expects religion, speech, and press to be carefully regu­
lated and controlled for reasons that should by now be obvious. Clearly
Rousseau's conception of liberty requires that the citizens of his republic be
trained in moral virtue. They must learn to think first of the public interest
rather than their narrow self-interest (or, more precisely, they must learn to
recognize that the public interest is their self-interest). In other words , the state
must play the role of moral educator. Rousseau is an advocate of the positive
state (that is, of the state actively involving itself in regulating the community)
as a necessary corollary to his theory of positive liberty, just as on the oppo­
site side the liberals supported the negative state as the corollary to their the­
ory of negative liberty.
As products of the liberal tradition, it is difficult for us to imagine pre­
serving individual liberty and preventing the abuse of state power from any
other than this negative point of view. Rousseau thus remains essentially hos ­
tile t o our most basic political assumptions. But i t is important t o recognize
that Rousseau's defense of the positive state and positive liberty is not only
logically coherent but that it embodies much practical political sense as well.
For Rousseau is quite correct in his insistence that a political community can­
not be simply a collection of self-interested individuals who have no concern
for the larger public good . Without some sense of the general will, no society
could exist, for it would quickly disintegrate into Hobbes ' s "war of everyone
against everyone."
Indeed, it is with Hobbes in mind that we can now see the real value of
Rousseau's general will. It is in essence a moral concept that illuminates
what he believes to be the fundamental flaw in all modem states organized on
Hobbesian or Lockean premises. They lack any genuine ethical basis and, as
such, the citizens have no inner reason or self-imposed duty to obey the law.
Law then becomes in Hobbes's words "command," that i s , a civilized form
of force or coercion . Thu s , obedience to law ceases to be an act of freedom
and genuine liberty is destroyed. The concept of the general will indicates
that it is the liberal state that is based upon force and coercion, not
Rou sseau's ideal polity where if force is employed it actually enhances
freedom.
This brings us to Rousseau 's principles of political organization, for it
should be apparent at this juncture that his political ideals require a unique
political structure . And quite clearly the basic organizational principle is that
 Rousseau 237

the state must be constructed so as to maintain and promote the general will.
Unless this principle can be realized in practice, the state will rest upon sheer
power, the laws will be little more than coercion, and real liberty will be de­
stroyed. And while Rousseau discusses a number of ways to preserve the
general will, two considerations are of particular importance: The state must
be relatively small, and the underlying social order must be essentially egali­
tarian.
The most important and obvious reason for a small state is that it allows
the people to gather into a sovereign lawmaking assembly. Smallness is thus
the necessary precondition for the existence of the general will. In extremely
large states it becomes necessary to elect representatives, which, as we have
seen, subverts the general will . Moreover, the larger the state the smaller the
proportion of sovereign power that each individual possesses. This is why,
Rousseau insists, "that liberty is diminished by the enlargement of the
,,
state. 27
Moreover, a small state contributes to an intense sense of community,
and this encourages citizens to care for one another. It thus evokes within
them that natural virtue of other-regardingness that undergirds the general
will. Rousseau would agree with Aristotle that a primary function of political
life is to engender friendship, and that without friendship and concern for
each other people would be incapable of giving expression to the general
will.
Finally, a small state contributes to a simplicity of manners that pre­
vents the people from being misled about what constitutes the real public in­
terest. This is so, says Rousseau, because "men of integrity and simplicity are
difficult to deceive because of their very simplicity : Lures and refined pre­
texts do not impose upon them, and they have not even cunning enough to be
dupes."28 For this reason, a small state discourages those political sub­
terfuges on the part of special interests that might deceive the people as to
what constitutes the real general will . It is precisely "sophisticated" people
who are most easily deceived by the appeals of special interests, and large
complex states tend to produce sophisticated people. Hence, Rousseau con­
cludes in one of the more famous passages in The Social Contract:

When we see, among the happiest people in the world, groups of peasants
directing affairs of state under an oak, and always acting wisely, can we
help but despise the refinements of those nations which render themselves
illustrious and miserable by so much art and mystery?29

Equality is even more essential to the maintenance of the general will

than smallness and simplicity for "liberty cannot subsist without it,"30 says
Rousseau. The reasons behind his claim we have already examined in our
discussion of his Second Discourse. Inequality means that some will be dom­
inated by others and that, as a consequence, the people will lose that moral
238 Modern Political Theory

autonomy that is the essence of liberty and the very foundation of the general
will. But, Rousseau hastens to add :

Equality . . . must not be understood to mean that power and riches should
be equally divided between all; but that power should never be so strong as
to be capable of acts of violence, or exercised but in virtue of the exer­
ciser's station, and under direction of the laws; and that in regard to riches ,
no citizen should be sufficiently opulent to be able to purchase another, and
none so poor as to be forced to sell himself. This supposes on the side of
the great, moderation in wealth and position, and, on the side of the lower
classes , moderation in avarice and greed. 3 I

Clearly, Rousseau is no fanatical egalitarian, nor does he condemn the

existence of private property as one might suppose from a reading of the Sec­
ond Discourse. It is not necessary that everyone be absolutely equal to every­
one else; it is sufficient that no one group be so rich or so powerful that it can
dominate others. Relative, rather than absolute, equality is Rousseau's goal.
To this end, he argues in his Political Economy, it is government's function to
prevent extreme inequalities by removing the means of accumulating too
much wealth .32 And rather than raising taxes to accomplish its ends, says
Rousseau, government should strive to limit needs. He is convinced that in­
creases in taxation are a mark of social disintegration. They imply that un­
necessary social needs are increasing and along with them that complexity
and social inequality that subverts the general will. And for Rousseau the first
principle of political economy is precisely the maintenance of the general
will, not the unlimited accumulation of wealth.
Note here the dramatic difference between Rousseau's economic views
and those of Locke and modem economists. Like the classical thinkers,
Rousseau takes as a given that economic considerations, no less than politi­
cal ones, are in essence moral concerns. Economic decisions have as their
object the preservation of a larger public good. Thus, Locke's notion of the
unlimited right to accumulate property is alien to Rousseau, as is the contem­
porary idea that economic health resides in an ever-expanding gross national
product . Both ideas conceive economics to be an end in itself rather than part
of a larger ethical whole. And both ideas have become the theoretical under­
pinnings of the modem industrial state with all those complexities and in­
equalities that Rousseau insists destroy the public good. For this reason,
Rousseau's insistence that the economy must exist within certain ethical con­
straints carries with it an ideal of a small, simple, and essentially agrarian
state.
Apart from this, there are several political or quasi-political institutions
that Rousseau recommends as further supports to the general will . Interest­
ingly, he follows Machiavelli's lead and returns to the experience of the
Roman Republic. Like Machiavelli , Rousseau believes the Romans to have
been the most political of all peoples and to have devised the most excellent
 Rousseau 239

of political institutions. Their example, therefore, he believes to be of great

value to the theorist.
We need not discuss all of the institutions that Rousseau recommends
except to note their Roman origins as a review of the chapter on Cicero will
make clear. Two of them, the dictatorship and the tribuneship, have to do
with certain technical constitutional considerations that need not concern us
here. And Rousseau's analysis of the Roman Comita, or assembly, shows
how his ideal sovereign assembly is to function, a matter we will discuss
shortly. Two institutions, however, deserve special mention because they illu­
minate Rousseau's more fundamental political ideas.
The first of these is the censorship, an institution, says Rousseau, estab­
lished "to preserve morality by preventing the opinions of men from being
corrupted."33 For Rousseau, opinion is really the most fundamental law of
the state. It is the law "written" within the human heart without which civil
laws can have no meaning. As such, morality is subverted and the state
ceases to express the general will if opinion is allowed to become corrupted,
if, for example, people come to believe their individual interest is superior to
the collective interest. The censorship is thus crucial to the maintenance of
the public good.
We, of course, are rather shocked by the notion of censorship since
freedom of opinion is one of our most cherished values. But it bears repeat­
ing that Rousseau holds a positive view of liberty and a positive theory of the
state. To his mind, it is precisely the object of the state to engage in moral ed­
ucation so that the liberty of the subject will conform to the general will. Ab­
solute freedom of opinion can no more exist in his ideal state than can an
absolute right to the unlimited accumulation of property.
This same logic lies behind Rousseau's argument for the institution of
civil religion. Clearly, religious opinions, as with any opinions that have so­
cial or political import, must be fixed in Rousseau's ideal state. Hence, he ar­
gues, there must be a purely civil profession of faith on the part of the
citizens, the articles of which are to be determined by the sovereign. And
while he is willing to tolerate other religions so long as they do not contradict
the tenets of the civil faith (the most important of which is the sanctity of the
social contract), it is clear that Rousseau prefers the civil religion to others.
Rousseau's preference is again reminiscent of Machiavelli. Like
Machiavelli, he criticizes Christianity and other such universalistic religions,
what he calls the "religion of man," because their otherworldly orientation
directs people's attention away from the political community and makes
them concerned only with "the purely internal cult of the supreme God."34
Civil religion, or the "religion of the citizen," on the other hand, is an inti­
mate part of the state and thus makes religious and political values compati­
ble.35 Where Christianity teaches otherworldliness and humility, civil
religion glorifies the state and teaches those political virtues that contribute to
its survival.
If we now take these various institutions as a whole and recall
240 Modern Political Theory

Rousseau's basic principles of smallness and equality, it becomes apparent

that the whole social infrastructure of his ideal polity is such as to direct the
citizen's attention almost totally toward the state. Love of country is the in­
evitable result, and this is precisely what Rousseau intended, for the prime
political virtue, indeed the absolutely necessary virtue, he argues, is patrio­
tism. For patriotism, says Rousseau, combines "the force of egoism with all
the beauty of virtue!"36
We come full circle back to Rousseau's starting point. Recall his basic
principle of political organization: Justice and utility, moral rightness and
self-interest, must be united. Rousseau has already shown that in making
each citizen a part of the sovereign body it does become the self-interest of
each to be concerned with the public interest of all. But patriotism absolutely
ensures this unity, says Rousseau, because it is the very embodiment of jus­
tice (virtue) and utility (egoism). Patriots are those who cannot distinguish
between their own interests and those of their country. Patriotism thus unites
self-love with love of others. As such, it evokes people's natural goodness
and makes them concerned above all else with the public good. For this rea­
son, patriotism is the very foundation of the general will.
It is at this juncture that we must analyze the structural and organiza­
tional principles of the two most crucial political institutions in Rousseau 's
ideal state : the sovereign and the government. The sovereign, of course, is
the more important of the two. We shall, therefore, discuss it first. But it must
be kept in mind that what makes the sovereign work, what makes it give ex­
pression to the general will, is the patriotism of the citizenry. And patriotism,
in tum, is the result of those organizational principles and political structures
we have just discussed.
Rousseau's sovereign, of course, is the legislative assembly of all citi­
zens constituted to give expression to the general will. To this end, there are
certain obvious rules that apply. The citizens must meet in legislative assem­
bly periodically, and they must be able to assemble during crises or emergen­
cies. Rousseau does not provide us with any precise schedule, but he does
state a general rule : The more powerful the government the more frequently
the general will must meet. The logic behind this rule will become evident
shortly. For now, it is sufficient to note that government has a tendency to
� usurp the prerogatives of the lawmaking body. As the power of government
increases the danger of usurpation also increases, thus necessitating more fre­
quent meetings of the assembly to guard against the increased danger.
Now the task of the legislative assembly is not burdensome, nor is it
complicated, says Rousseau, because a small egalitarian state "requires but
very few laws. "37 If this were not the case , as it usually is not in large and
complex industrial states, the general will could not be expressed since the
legislative task would be beyond the average person. In fact, Rousseau ar­
gues, the sole object of the legislative assembly "is the maintenance of the
social treaty" [that is, the social contract] .38 Consequently, it is primarily laws
of constitutional stature , what Rousseau terms political or Jundamental laws,
 Rousseau 241

that concern the assembly. As for subordinate civil or criminal laws of a more
complex and detailed nature, government may promulgate the requisite rules.
Rousseau is insistent, however, that only those decisions made by the legisla­
tive assembly are, properly speaking, laws, since they alone embody the
moral sense or general will of the whole community.
There are, however, two decisions that Rousseau argues the legislature
must always make at the beginning of its deliberations. The first deals with
the fundamental constitutional issue of whether or not the existing form of
government should continue. The second deals with the less fundamental,
but still crucially important issue of whether or not the existing administra­
tion should remain. The latter, of course, is routinely dealt with in all liberal­
democratic states in election years. This, however, is the only issue generally
dealt with by the people as a whole since real decision making rests with the
elected deputies once the election is over. It is for this reason, says Rousseau,
that the people of England are free "only during the election of members of
parliament: For as soon as a new one is elected, they are again in chains and
are nothing."39
Now, despite the fact that the general will is absolute, "it neither will,
nor can, exceed the bounds of general conventions,"4o says Rousseau. That
is, while the general will is sovereign, the legislative assembly cannot pass
laws that contravene the generally accepted values held by the society, the
most important of which, he concedes, is the right of property. Indeed it is
precisely because Rousseau considers property to be the most sacred of con­
ventions that he does not advocate its total elimination in the name of equal­
ity. And while it may seem a contradiction that the sovereign is absolute yet
limited by the conventions of society, Rousseau in fact is stating a truism.
Since the general will is the moral will of the whole community, it can nei­
ther legislate that which is contrary to its will, nor could it possibly enforce
such laws even if it did pass them.
But if it is an obvious fact that the general will is constrained by general
conventions, it is a fact premised upon the structure of Rousseau's sovereign.
Where the sovereign power resides in Hobbes's man or assembly of men, or
in Locke's chamber of deputies, there the very real danger does exist that the
sovereign power will exceed the bounds of general conventions. For, if
Rousseau's analysis is correct, wherever ultimate power resides in a minority
of the community, there the possibility always exists that the minority will
act independently of the wishes of the community as a whole.
How, then, is the sovereign assembly to actually make laws that express
the general will? Quite simply, says Rousseau, by voting until a simple ma­
jority is reached.4! Like Locke, Rousseau insists that only the social contract
that creates political society need be decided by unanimous consent; all sub­
sequent decisions require only a majority.
The objection will almost surely be raised here that a majority is not the
whole community. Yet, there is no inconsistency in Rousseau's argument. To
begin with, Rousseau roots his majority in the whole community rather than
242 Modern Political Theory

in a minority of legislators as does Locke. Hence, Rousseau 's majority is

much more likely to reflect the real interests of the community. But, more im­
portant, Rousseau nowhere suggests that the majority is identical to the gen­
eral will. It is perfectly possible, although if the state is appropriately
structured Rousseau believes improbable, that the majority will merely re­
flect the self-interest or individual wills of the larger number of citizens. Yet
this is equally true of the "will of all," says Rousseau. A unanimous decision
may reflect nothing more than the self-interest or private will of each voting
citizen. For this reason, he argues, there is often a great difference between
the will of all and the general will.

The latter regards only the common interest; the former regards private in­
terest, and is indeed but a sum of private wills: But remove from these
same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel each other, and then the gen­
eral will remains as the sum of the differences .42

In other words, the general will cannot be determined simply by count­

ing votes. Even if the votes are unanimous, this does not in and of itself guar­
antee a moral decision, that is, a decision in the public interest as opposed to
one reflecting a collection of individual self-interests. The entire assembly,
for example, may refuse to increase taxes it knows to be in the public interest
simply because each member's selfish interest in paying lower taxes predom­
inates. Thus, the general will is expressed only when the votes, whatever
their number, reflect the general or public interest of the whole community, a
condition that Rousseau describes rather mechanically when he speaks of
subtracting from each other the pluses and minuses of self-interest.
All that can be said about the number of votes, and this is all Rousseau
does say, is that the larger the majority the greater the probability that it is an
expression of the general will . And the only general rule of number that
Rousseau provides is that the more important the issue at stake the larger the
majority should be, and the more immediately serious the issue-a crisis sit­
uation for example-the smaller it need be .
The point is that majority rule is perfectly legitimate for Rousseau so
long as it is understood that a majority decision is not necessarily a moral de­
cision. Rousseau is thus a good corrective to the popular notion that a major­
ity decision is necessarily a "correct one . " Where the state has only negative
functions, and liberty is simply the absence of restraints, it cannot be ex­
pected that majority decisions will be more than the sum of self-interests,
Rousseau would argue. Within the liberal-democratic framework proposed
by Locke, he insists, a majority will rarely assert the public interest because it
is largely incapable of expressing the general will . This, and not majority rule
as such, is the problem.
Such, then, are the basic organizational principles of Rousseau's sover­
eign assembly. But the issue of government still remains : What is the appro-
 Rousseau 243

priate relationship of the government to the sovereign, and what is the best
form of government in maintaining this relationship? Put simply, what form
of government is most compatible with the maintenance of the general will?
There are two points that must be made before we get to these specific issues.
First, Rousseau makes a great point of distinguishing government and
sovereignty, a distinction that he believes some thinkers (Hobbes rather obvi­
ously) have confounded. For Rousseau, government refers to the executive
power in the state, not the legislative or lawmaking power that belongs to the
sovereign assembly alone. And, technically speaking, government does in
fact refer to the executive. We have a tendency in this country to subsume
under government the executive, legislative, and judicial functions. But in
European parliamentary systems the term government is reserved for the ex­
ecutive power.
Second, Rousseau insists that the existence of government in no way
violates the basic principle of sovereignty that the general will is inalienable
because, as he argues , "the power may well be transmitted but not the wi11."43
In other words, the essence of the general will is precisely its will or moral
capacity. This it cannot alienate without ceasing to be a general will . In polit­
ical terms, the legislative function of the whole community cannot be trans­
mitted to any other body such as Locke's assembly of representatives. But
power or the ability to enforce the laws can and must be transmitted, says
Rousseau, since it would be undesirable, not to mention impossible in most
cases, for the people as a whole to enforce the laws. The exercise of power, in
other words , properly belongs to government.
This is not to suggest that government does not pose a potential threat
to the sovereignty of the general will. Quite the contrary-this is precisely
the danger according to Rousseau: "Just as the private will continually acts
against the general will, so the government makes an unremitted effort
against the Sovereign"44 until the social contract is broken. And he continues,
"this innate and inevitable vice tends, from the birth of the body politic, to
destroy it, as old age and death do in the human frame."45
In other words, while government is necessary, it inevitably subverts
the general will. This is so because the government is itself a particular will ,
what Rousseau calls a group will, that stands as a constant threat to the gen­
eral will. But unlike the private will of the individual, or the corporate will of
an interest group, the group will of government has real power behind it.
Hence, of all the particular wills in the community, government is the most
dangerous because it is most capable of asserting its prerogatives against the
public interest.
Surely Rousseau presents us with a troublesome paradox. Government
is necessary, yet it is the prime cause of social disintegration. But this is the
same paradox that Plato raises in The Republic : The ideal state must in­
evitably decline because the principle of decay is built into all human affairs.
And, like Plato, Rousseau argues that the best that can be done is to forestall
244 Modern Political Theory

the inevitable for as long as possible. This is to be done, he says, by fixing

"the exact point where the force and the will of government . . . can be com­
bined in the manner most advantageous to the state. "46 That is, the point must
be found where the power of government and its own group will are so bal­
anced that government will act as an agent of the general will rather than as
its master.
The founder of a state, says Rousseau, must strike this appropriate bal­
ance .47 And the general rule is this : The larger the number of magistrates or
officials in government, the weaker its group will and the less able it is to
abuse its power. Conversely, the smaller the number of officials the stronger
its group will and the more powerful it will be . Thus, the most powerful gov­
ernment is monarchy because the group will is identical to the private will of
the monarch . The weakest is direct democracy because the group will is con­
founded with the general will of the whole community.
A moment's thought will reveal the logic behind Rousseau's reasoning .
A s the size o f government increases "the more . . . force [it must] employ on
its own members, [and] the less there . . . remain[s] to expend on the whole
people . "48 Simply stated, the larger the government the more difficult it is to
get internal agreement upon policy or to execute decisions once they have
been made, hence the more energy that must be expended to accomplish
these objectives and the less available to expend on the citizenry. The smaller
the government, the easier these tasks become. Clearly where one person
rules there can be neither dissension over policy nor over execution so long
as the monarch is secure upon the throne. The monarch is thus free to employ
all his power upon the citizenry.
What, then, is the best form of government? Although Rousseau does
have a clear preference, the answer in the final analysis depends upon how
strong the government needs to be under existing circumstances. Rousseau's
basic rule of thumb is that the larger the state the stronger government must
be, the smaller the state the less so . Hence, larger states require smaller gov­
ernments since small governments are most powerful; smaller states are
more compatible with larger governments.
Once again, the logic behind Rousseau's analysis is obvious. As the
state increases in size so too does inequality, complexity, and the emergence
of special interests, all those social ills that subvert the general will. And, as
Rousseau has already demonstrated, where the general will is weak or nonex­
istent, force or power becomes the basis of political control. Hence, large
states require powerful governments . They are thus most compatible with
monarchy, which, for reasons we have just discussed, is the form of govern­
ment most likely to subvert the general will. This, among other reasons, is
why Rousseau dislikes large states and monarchical governments.
On the other side, an extremely small state does not require a powerful
government because it is easy to govern and less likely to develop those di­
verse private interests that threaten the general will. Hence, an extremely
 Rousseau 245

small state is most compatible with direct democracy, a very weak form of
government precisely because it is so large. Yet, says Rousseau, democracy
is not the ideal form of government either. In the first place, it confounds the
legislative and executive powers since the citizen is both legislator and ex­
ecutor of the laws. This poses a threat both to the purity of the general will
and to the appropriate functioning of government. Second, it is not, he in­
sists, in the natural order of things "that the greater number should govern,
and the smaller number be governed. "49 And it is rare to find a state small
enough and a people sufficiently simple to make democracy a very practical
possibility in any case, he argues.
Rousseau's ideal is elective aristocracy, a form of government most
compatible with middle-sized states. Here is a government neither too large
to be effective nor too small to be overly powerful. Moreover, it is comprised
of the best elements in society leading the rest. Hereditary aristocracy, on the
other hand, Rousseau dislikes as much as monarchy since the heredity princi­
ple makes popular control of government more difficult . And while he does
not explicitly say so, it is clear that he also dislikes it because it does not en­
sure rule by the excellent. 50
Most students are perplexed to discover that the "father" of the French
Revolution is a defender of aristocracy. But it must be remembered that it is
an aristocratic government that Rousseau prefers, not an aristocratic state .
The sovereign general will belongs to the whole people and it is expressed
within the legislative assembly by a democratic vote. Thus, Rousseau's ideal
state remains thoroughly democratic despite its aristocratic form of govern­
ment.
A final type of government Rousseau discusses is the Aristotelian
mixed form. And while in theory Rousseau prefers a simple rather than a
mixed government "because it is simple,"5 1 in truth he admits that all govern­
ments are in some sense mixed. Moreover, he argues, there are times when a
proper balance between the various constitutional elements of the state re­
quires consciously mixing different forms of government to produce a desir­
able result.
Indeed, Rousseau agrees with Montesquieu, an important eighteenth­
century political thinker, that "liberty not being a fruit that every climate will
produce, it is not within the abilities of all peoples. "52 A country's geography,
natural resources, historical circumstances, and other such factors determine
to a great extent what form of government is possible, and it is the task of the
wise political leader to produce the best government possible under existing
circumstances . As a general and by now obvious rule, however, Rousseau
notes that "monarchy . . . is suited to none but opulent nations; aristocracy to
those states which are moderately rich and extensive; and democracy to such
states as are both small and poor. "53
We can now see that much in Rousseau's analysis of government is
reminiscent of Aristotle . Like Aristotle, Rousseau's ideal is aristocracy and,
246 Modern Political Theory

again like Aristotle, Rousseau recognizes that creating the best possible state
depends upon a host of circumstances that the wise statesman must take into
account . For both thinkers, the object is to approach the ideal within the
framework of what is possible. The Social Contract essentially establishes
Rousseau's ideal. (In this sense it is similar to Plato's Republic. ) Rousseau's
other political works deal with the best possible state that can be established
under existing circumstances. In The Government of Poland, for example,
Rousseau suggests employing the federal principle to create a condition of
smallness and simplicity within a larger nation-state that otherwise would be
much too extensive to allow for the expression of the general will.
Such, then, is the political philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau. But
there is more to this philosophy than is immediately apparent. As we have
seen, Rousseau wanted a theory that would expose the fallacies of Enlighten­
ment civilization and the inadequacy of modern political values. As such, he
was not simply interested in constructing a logically coherent political the­
ory ; he wanted to construct a theory that, when taken as a whole, would stand
in direct opposition to the political ideals of the modern world, ideals that he
believed actually destroy human freedom. This is precisely what Rousseau's
political philosophy accomplishes, for it is a thoroughgoing reaffirmation of
classical ideals.
We have seen this in Rousseau's distinction between the best and the
best possible states. He is following the classical mode of political analysis,
which distinguishes between the ideal and the real. We have seen this same
connection to classical thought in the other striking similarities between
Rousseau and the classical thinkers. But it is Rousseau's concept of the gen­
eral will that most clearly and directly connects his philosophy to the classi­
cal tradition , for the general will affirms on a new basis the classical ideal of
the small state or polis engaged in moral education and the Aristotelian con­
cept of citizenship as direct involvement in political affairs.
More than this, the general will is a reaffirmation of the classical belief
in the unity of ethics and politics. Without this assumed unity, Rousseau's
distinction between the best and best possible state would make no sense, nor
would any of his other political ideals . And, most important, without it
Rousseau would have been unable to affirm what he believed to be the prime
political virtue of classical political thought, namely, its emphasis upon au­
thority ; or to demonstrate the corresponding defect of modern political analy­
sis , its focus upon power.
Rousseau understood very w ell the philosophical genesis of the modern
emphasis upon power. The naturalistic view of the universe had in Hobbes,
and even in Locke, led to a strictly mechanistic and utilitarian vision of hu­
mankind that replaced the classical language of ethical virtue with the lan­
guage of pleasure and pain. The general consequence of this was that
political scientists came to as sume that power alone is sufficient to control
 Rousseau 247

human beings. This is seen most clearly in Hobbes, of course, but this em­
phasis upon power begins as far back as Machiavelli and has continued as a
general trend down to our own day. Even Locke and the later liberals took
power to be the essence of politics and were concerned, not with eliminating
it, but only with controlling its effects.
But Rousseau also understood what few of his contemporaries could: It
was precisely the exercise of power and all that goes with it that transforms
people into practicing utilitarians. It is not because human beings are
pleasure-pain machines that power becomes necessary. It is power that
transforms what are otherwise compassionate creatures into self-interested
pleasure seekers. Modem political theorists had mistaken the effect for the
cause.
Viewed from this perspective, Rousseau's emphasis upon authority in­
volves much more than that strictly political critique of power relationships
that we have discussed in previous chapters. It is not merely the fact that
power is an insufficient basis to hold the state together that troubles
Rousseau; Machiavelli admitted this much, and even showed the advantage
of authority, or at least the appearance of authority. Rousseau is also con­
cerned with the effect power relationships have upon individual human be­
ings. Clearly, where individuals are coerced to obey the law in a situation
where there exists no general will or conception of the public good, they lose
their moral autonomy. Once this happens, they cease to act as free agents and
become calculating and self-interested individuals lacking any genuine con­
cern for their fellow creatures. Vanity and egotism become rampant as people
attempt to gratify their desires at the expense of others. Psychologically,
human beings become increasingly alienated from their own "natural good­
ness ." They lose their inner freedom to be as they truly are as surely as they
lose their political freedom to determine their collective destiny .
Authority, then, is not only more politically effective than power for
Rousseau, it is the necessary precondition for human integrity and happiness.
This is what the classical thinkers understood, and this is why Rousseau re­
turns to classical ideals. Yet, paradoxically, the genuine importance of
Rousseau as a political thinker lay precisely in the fact of his modernity. His
ideal polity may have had a classical form, but his underlying theoretical as­
sumptions were thoroughly modem. It is for this reason that Rousseau could
not be easily dismissed by his contemporaries. He used their own underlying
assumptions to challenge their explicit political beliefs.
For example, Rousseau adopts the modem position that the state is con­
tractual or conventional in origin. This sharply distinguishes him from the
classical thinkers who believed the state to be natural. But Rousseau also dis­
tinguishes himself from the classical thinkers when he speaks of the moral
basis of the state, for the general will is a product of the contract . Hence, the
general will itself is purely conventional; it is an expression of subjective,
248 Modern Political Theory

even arbitrary, values held by a particular community of human beings. It is

not an expression of objective universal standards such as form or natural
law.
We have already noted that the natural law tradition was in a state of
disintegration from the seventeenth century on. This disintegration reflected
a deeper set of epistemological changes in which modem thinkers began to
reject the notion of the existence of any kind of universal ethical standard.
Rousseau clearly reflects these changes, so much so that he goes further than
many of his contemporaries in his rejection of the natural law tradition . 54 All
moral values, at least those expressed in the political domain, are conven­
tional for Rousseau; they are human-made values that reflect attitudes and
opinions of a particular culture.
For the same reason, Rousseau rejects the concept of natural right. He
does not accept the Lockean notion that rights are rooted in a universal stan­
dard that applies to all peoples at all times. As with any other set of ethical
values, rights are conventional expressions of a particular culture . Rousseau
denies, for example, that property is a natural right. It is, he argues, a strictly
conventional right granted by society. And while he considers the right of
property to be the most sacred of conventions because it is recognized as
such in most societies, it nevertheless remains a convention. It remains a
right granted by society and not, as Locke would have it, a right that all soci­
eties must recognize as a matter of course. And it certainly is not true that
people have a natural right to the unlimited accumulation of property. As we
have seen, Rousseau expects the community to set definite limitations upon
the amount of property any citizen may possess.
In sum, Rousseau believes the laws and rights that pertain in any given
society are socially determined . In this he agrees with the basic insights of
modem social science, which argue that ethical values are not a reflection
of the word of God or of other such standards external to society. But un­
like modem social science, and in contradistinction to the Hobbesian­
behavioralist school of political thought, Rousseau does not employ these
insights to deny the reality or validity of ethical values. Rather, he attempts to
reaffirm them on a new basis. Hence, the unity of ethics and politics that
characterizes Rousseau's political thought is classical in form but modem in
substance. His concept of the general will, in other words, is a thoroughly
modem idea in the guise of a classical ideal.
Here we may begin our critical analysis of Rousseau ' s political theory,
for while the concept of the general will is Rousseau 's rightful claim to fame,
it is also the source of the most important theoretical criticisms that have
been leveled against his political thought. There is, however, a frequently
made criticism of a more practical nature with which we should first dis­
pense , namely, that Rousseau 's ideal polity would not work given the size
and complexity of the modem nation-state . Some scholars have gone so far
as to argue that Rousseau 's political theory is irrelevant because his ideal
 Rousseau 249

state is a throwback to the Greek polis, a form of polity that simply does not
fit modem political conditions.
This criticism largely misses the point. As we have seen, Rousseau fol­
lows the classical distinction between the ideal political order and the real,
and the purpose of the ideal is to establish a standard by which to judge exist­
ing states. The point, then, is not the practicality of Rousseau's ideal, al­
though, as he himself suggests, even in practical terms it might be possible to
modify the modem state in the direction of his ideal. The point is that
Rousseau's ideal polity may well have been intended to demonstrate the in­
adequacies of the nation-state,55 and, whether intended or not, The Social
Contract makes quite clear what those inadequacies are . In its largeness and
impersonality the nation-state fails to develop the conditions for the exis­
tence of the general will. As a consequence, authority is replaced by power
and human beings are thereby debased. Read in this way, Rousseau's critique
of the nation-state is the political side of his intellectual assault upon Enlight­
enment civilization and modem values.
What we can say with some assurance about the practical applications
of Rousseau's ideals is that given the nation-state as it now exists, they would
likely prove disastrous. In a large modem state with its bureaucratic imper­
sonality on the one hand and its lack of any deep sense of community on the
other, any attempt to evoke more than a very limited expression of the gen­
eral will would likely have totalitarian implications . It is one thing to attempt
moral unanimity to the point of "forcing men to be free" in a small state with
an intense sense of community. It is quite another in a large state that encom­
passes many diverse interests. In such a situation unanimity is well-nigh im­
possible, and any attempt to create it will necessarily involve forms of almost
total political control over a recalcitrant citizenry. For this reason, most of us
find Locke preferable to Rousseau. On the other hand, those Lockeans who
insist that Rousseau's political ideal is totalitarian forget that he had in mind
a radically different form of polity than the nation-state.
Beyond these considerations, criticisms of the practical viability of
Rousseau's political schemes do not take us very far. The more important
criticisms are those that challenge the validity of the general will at a theoret­
ical l�el. And perhaps the most fundamental theoretical criticism we might
make is that the general will is too ambiguous as an ethical ideal. This is be­
cause it is an ideal that lacks any real substance or content. We know that the
general will is derived by a majority vote of the sovereign community. We do
not know, however, whether a vote really gives expression to it. Even com­
plete unanimity is no guarantee that the general will has been found. Thus,
the moral underpinnings of Rousseau's ideal state are not very clearly de­
fined.
There are two fairly evident reasons for this. The general will is, as we
have seen, an expression of a particular community at a particular point in
time. The general will, in other words, is socially relative. As such, it cannot
250 Modern Political Theory

be given a definite content. (Paradoxically, Rousseau's attempt to affirm the

importance of ethical standards upon a modem basis leads, as it does in most
modem thought, to ethical relativism.) And second, the general will is ulti­
mately a subjective standard. It is incapable, therefore, of being fully ex­
pressed in logically coherent terms. Remember that the general will is rooted
in what Rousseau believes to be our natural capacity for compassion. It is
thus based, in the final analysis, upon feeling rather than reason. And feeling,
however real or intense it may be, is a purely subjective experience.
Yet, we should temper this criticism by crediting Rousseau with having
recognized that the ethical underpinnings of the state cannot be based upon
reason alone. Quite apart from the validity of such strictly rational systems as
natural law, they reflect only one aspect of people's ethical capacity. We feel
as well as reason, and our moral sense surely includes both. We do not, for
example, refrain from hurting others on rational terms alone, but because we
feel for our fellow creatures. This really is what Rousseau wished to empha­
size when he claimed that we all have the natural virtue of pity or compas­
sion. And his claim was based upon what he rightly perceived to be a
disregard for the emotional dimension of human experience by modem sci­
ence and Enlightenment philosophies. The complaint one hears today about
the impersonality and coldness of modem technological society echoes a
concern first expressed by Rousseau.
On the other hand , Rousseau perhaps is too pessimistic about the power
of reason to establish the ethical basis of the state and too optimistic about
feeling and emotion. Feeling, as we have noted, can produce only a subjec­
tive, hence ambiguous, ethical standard. The great advantage of such rational
standards as form or natural law, conversely, is that they are explicit, logical ,
and therefore unambiguous. As such, rational standards are capable of pro­
ducing a knowable body of rules that apply universally. It was this optimism
in the power of reason alone to shape the human community for beneficial
ends that lay behind the emergence of Western political thought . With
Rousseau this optimism is shattered.
It must be kept in mind, of course, that theories of form or natural law
may be philosophically invalid. Rousseau thought so, as do most modem so­
cial scientists . Hobbes may be quite correct when he says there is no know­
able summum bonum, or "greatest good." But, in and of itself, feeling does
not adequately replace rational ethical systems, and Rousseau does not seem
fully sensitive to this fact. Moreover, the emphasis upon feeling and subjec­
t ive experience carries with it the danger of encouraging irrationalism. As a
matter of fact, this is precisely what occurred in certain strains of nineteenth­
century romantic thought that were heavily influenced by Rousseau. Those
same strains of thought contributed to the development of various fanatical
ideologies later in the century.
When all is said and done, however, Rousseau has the mark of a truly
great political thinker: Our criticisms take us to the very heart of his political
 Rousseau 25 1

theory and raise the perennial political issues. It does not really matter
whether or not we agree fully with Rousseau. W hat matters is that his politi­
cal analysis raises all the important political issues and makes us think about
them from fresh perspectives .
Most important, Rousseau alerts us to the contradictions inherent in
Western political thought, contradictions that he alone had the insight to rec­
ognize were reflected in his own personality and the personalities of all Euro­
pean peoples. Ethics versus politics, sovereignty versus freedom, the
individual versus the state, and classical ideals versus modem ideas, all are
encompassed in Rousseau's political thought. And while we may or may not
agree that he overcomes these contradictions, we cannot deny that in his at­
tempt to do so Rousseau raises the key issues in the long tradition of Western
political thought and makes us think about them anew.

MODERN POLITICAL THEORY: THE REJECTION

OF THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

In our concluding remarks in Part I, we noted that the unity of ethics and pol­
itics was the defining characteristic of classical and medieval political
thought. We also noted that modem political thought is characterized by a
breakdown of that unity, and for reasons that should now be clear. Beginning
with Machiavelli there emerge new metaphysical and epistemological as­
sumptions that call into question the reality of ethical absolutes, and new vi­
sions of the human condition that raise serious doubts about the moral and
social basis of human behavior.
In political theory, the obvious consequence of this separation of ethics
and politics has been an emphasis upon power as the organizational basis of
the state. But, as we have seen, the concern with power is based upon a more
fundamental political fact : the emergence of the modem nation-state. The
nation-state is premised upon the consolidation and centralization of power,
more so than would have been even imaginable in the medieval world, and
political theory inevitably gave paramount importance to this fact. The mod­
em concept of sovereignty, to take the most obvious example, would have
been inconceivable without the reality of the nation-state.
The role of the nation-state in the formation of modem political thought
points out, once again, that directly or indirectly political theories are reflec­
tions of a given form of polity. Classical political thought took for granted the
unity of ethics and politics precisely because the small and socially unified
p olis was by its very nature a moral community. Thus, the political condition
of the city-state inevitably led theorists to think in terms of community and
moral responsibility. An Aristotle could claim that the essence of politics is
friendship because his polity gave credence to his claim. Hobbes's insistence
that the essence of politics is power reflected an entirely different set of polit-
252 Modern Political Theory

ical circumstances. He was not speaking against the background of a small

unitary community but against that of a large and impersonal political struc­
ture that, precisely because of its largeness and impersonality, was incapable
of acting as a moral community. He was dealing with a condition in which
the unity of ethics and politics in the classical sense had, in political fact, dis­
integrated.
Initially, modem political theorists perceived no problem inherent in
the rejection of the classical tradition. To their minds the modem state need
not be based upon ethical absolutes because nationalism, self-interest, or the
effective implementation of power were believed to be sufficient to maintain
social and political unity. They believed, in other words, that they had found
social and political surrogates for ethical absolutes. But with Rousseau this
belief is challenged, for he not only reaffirms the ethical basis of political
order, he shows that in ignoring the ethical dimension the modem state may
actually damage the human personality.
Rousseau's challenge essentially lays the foundation of contemporary
political thought. On the one hand, his criticism foreshadows the contempo­
rary concern with the centralization of power and bureaucratic impersonality
that typifies the modem state. On the other hand, Rousseau 's critique has led
to an equal concern with the psychological consequences of the new political
order. In this century in particular, increasing numbers of political thinkers
speak of modem people as creatures lost and unhappy within the very civi­
lized order they have created. They pursue a line of reasoning first articulated
by Rousseau.
But this pessimistic side of contemporary political thought carried with
it, at least until this century, a fundamentally optimistic point of view. If
Rousseau had shown that modem society was debasing humankind, he also
demonstrated the innate goodness of the human personality. For subsequent
radical thinkers this was a uniquely important insight, for it meant that with
the revolutionary overthrow of those conditions that suppress humanity 'S
natural goodness the good society would emerge almost automatically.
In point of fact, the nineteenth century was an age of rampant opti­
mism, despite the warnings of some of the more sober thinkers. It was not
just radical thinkers in the tradition of Rousseau who felt that the good soci­
ety was at hand; almost all thinkers saw the future in terms of unlimited
human possibilities. Following the French Revolution, doctrines of unlimited
progress and the perfectibility of the species abounded, for the majority of
thinkers shared with Rousseau a fundamental belief in the ability of human
beings to better themselves by altering their society, however much they may
have disagreed with him in other matters. These new doctrines came to be
called ide ologies. In Part III we will be examining in detail three of the most
intellectually important of them : liberalism, conservatism, and Marxian so­
cialism. And we will conclude with an analysis of modem nationalism, for
nationalism has ceased to be merely that ardent form of patriotism preached
 Rousseau 253

by a Mac h iavelli or a Rousseau . Nationalism has itself become an ideology,

indeed the most influential ideology of our time, so influential that the other
major ideologies must now be understood within the context of national
ideals.

Notes

1 . Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, rev. by Charles Frankel (New
York: Hafner Press, 1 947), p . 5 .
2 . See Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau , in Peter Gay,
ed./trans. (B loomington: Indiana University Press, 1 963), p. 39: "The man
and the work are so closely interwoven that every attempt to disentangle
them must do violence to both . "
3 . Jean Jacques Rousseau, "The Second Discourse," i n Roger D . Masters and
trans . Roger D. Masters , and Judith R. Masters , eds . , The First and Second
D iscourses (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1 964) , p . 1 1 0.
4. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, J . M . Cohen, trans . (Baltimore :
Penguin B ooks , 1 954), p. 1 7 .
5 . Jean Jacques Rousseau, "The First Discourse," i n Masters e t aI. , eds . , First
and Second D iscourses , p. 36.
6. S e e Joan McDonald, Rousseau a n d the French Revolution : 1 762-1 791
(London : The Athlone Press, 1 965), pp. 1 1-2 1 , for a good, if brief, survey
of the variety of interpretations of Rousseau's political thought.
7. Rousseau does concede that the family constitutes a precontract form of
simple society. Indeed, he argues that the family is the only natural society
that exists; all others being contractual or conventional . B ut he hastens to
add that "the children remain attached to the father no longer than they
have need for his protection. As soon as that need ceases, the bond of na­
ture is dissolved. The child, exempt from the obedience he owed the father,
and the father, from the duties he owed the child, return equally to indepen­
dence." (Rousseau, The Social Contract, p. 6 . )
8 . Rousseau , "The Second Discourse," p . 1 30.
9. Ibid.
1 0 . Ibid . , p . 1 02.
1 1 . Rousseau, The Social Contract, p . 1 4.
1 2. Jean Jacques Rousseau, "Essay on the Origin of Languages Which Treats
of Melody and Musical Imitation," in John H. Moran and Alexander Gode,
trans . On the Origin of Language (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1 966), p. 40.
1 3 . Rousseau, The Social Contract, p . 1 8 .
1 4 . Ibid. , p. 1 9.
1 5 . Ibid . , pp. 1 4- 1 5 .