. JEAN-: Yh ^Z Kh^^ h[^ POLITICAL THOUGHT SOCIAL ......•They favoured an enlightened despotism....

College of Education

School of Continuing and Distance Education2014/2015 – 2016/2017

POLI 342: MODERN WESTERN POLITICAL THOUGHT

. JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU’S SOCIAL CONTRACT (PART 1)

(1712-1778)

Lecturers: Dr. E. Aggrey-Darkoh, Department of Political Science

Contact Information: [email protected]

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Session Overview

Welcome to session 8: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract Part 1. Rousseau was the first political thinker to make a text of his own. His Confessions and Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques are apologies for a life which went wrong. Rousseau was much more than a political theorist, he also wrote about religion, and education and his novel, La Nouvelle Neloise, was received with great enthusiasm. Rousseau was one of the most self-absorbed and emotional of writers as his writings are deeply affected by his personal difficulties. Rousseau really wanted fit for himself to live in, a heaven fit for himself to go to and a God worthy of his love. I am going to discuss a man who thought of himself as the most human of all human beings. He argued that “man is naturally good, as I have the happiness to feel. In this session, I discuss the background and sources of his political thought, the state of nature and the social contract. Please relax and enjoy Rousseau.

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Session outline

This session covers the following topics:

•The Background of J.J. Rousseau

•Sources of Rousseau’s Thought

•Rousseau and the State of Nature

•The Social Contract

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TOPIC ONE

The Background of J.J. Rousseau

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The Works of J.J. Rousseau

• Jean Jacques-Rousseau like Hobbes and John Locke discusses the Social Contract among other theoretical and philosophical postulations.

• The Social Contract was written in 1762-the covenant struck in a way as to get an overlord or the state to manage the affairs of societies.

• Earlier in 1758 he wrote the Political Economy.

• He also wrote the Discourse on the origin of Inequality among men.

• Earlier in his writing career, Rousseau stated in the Confessions that “man is naturally good and that our social institutions alone have rendered him evil.”

• Immediately after the publication of his Social Contract in 1762 the French Government ordered his arrest and the book was condemned.

• He went to Switzerland and started his life in exile

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Biography of J. J. Rousseau

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 12, 1712.

• His mother died soon after his birth, and his father, a watchmaker named Isaac Rousseau, abandoned him at the age of twelve.

• Rousseau spent many years as an itinerant, living in the homes of various employers, patrons, and lovers, working variously as a clerk, an engraver, and a private tutor.

• By 1742, when he was thirty years old, he had made his way to Paris, where he eked out a living as a teacher and a copier of music.

• He befriended Diderot, a major figure in the fledgling intellectual movement that would later be called the Enlightenment.

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Biography of J. J. Rousseau (cont’d)

• Rousseau had his first success as a writer when he was forty years old.

• In 1752, he won a prize from the Academy at Dijon for his First Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. The question was :“Has the advancement of civilization tended to corrupt or improve morals?”

• Rousseau answered in the negative, arguing that the advance of civilization mostly corrupted human morals and goodness.

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• In 1755, Rousseau’s first major political work, the Discourse on Inequality, was released.

• In 1762, Rousseau released both The Social Contract and Èmile, a novelistic take on education.

• Both works were violently scorned by official forces and intellectuals alike, and both were publicly burned in Paris and Geneva.

• The French monarchy ordered that Rousseau be arrested, and he fled to the Swiss town of Neuchâtel.

• He formally renounced his Genevan citizenship and began work on his great autobiography, the Confessions.

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• On July 2, 1778, a few years after returning to France from Scotland, where he had close contact with philosopher David Hume, Rousseau suddenly died.

• His death although a relief to many of his enemies in the French establishment, set off a great outpouring of regret by many of his readers.

• In 1794, French revolutionary government ordered that he be honored as a national hero and his ashes placed in the Pantheon for eternity.

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• Rousseau’s thought had a wide historical impact.

• His rhetoric laid much of the intellectual groundwork for the French and American Revolutions .

• As a memoirist, his Confessions in many ways inaugurated the modern genre of autobiography.

• As a theorist, Rousseau rigorously attempted to describe the rational foundations underlying modern civil society, in all its imperfections.

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TOPIC TWO

Sources of Rousseau’s Thought


Sources of Rousseau’s Thought

• Rousseau was influenced by the social and political issues of his day.

• His most often quoted words “man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” manifests Rousseau’s love for absolute freedom.

• The political ideas of Rousseau emerged at a comparatively advanced age.

• The individual personality, the character and mode of living are regarded as very powerful sources of his political philosophy.

• His pioneering work Social Contract starts with the famous sentence—“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

• Freedom occupied an important place in his writings. • In personal life he was sensitive, emotional, impatient and fastidio

us and this nature was reflected in his attitude towards institutions.


Sources of Rousseau’s Thought (cont’d)

• From birth he got neither affection nor good treatment nor proper education.

• Very early in his life he met a very beautiful and kind-hearted lady by name Madame de Warens who took him and began to nurse him just like his mother.

• When he was twenty however, he broke relations with Madame de Warens.

• The society in which he lived was quite affluent but this affluence was enjoyed only by few.



• Rousseau’s political thought can be traced to Voltaire, Montesquieu and Diderot.

• All of them reacted against obscurantism and despotism.

• Many of his predecessors were preoccupied with finding out a solution to the despotic rule of monarchs but they had no courage to plead for its total destruction.

• They favoured an enlightened despotism.

• Rousseau projected a political reform that aimed at the total remodeling of government, state and society.

• Rousseau argued that any kind of despotism was anathema, and the so-called enlightened people seemed worse than others.



• Rousseau was in many ways a devoted classicist.

• His profound admiration for Aristotle’s Politics and the civil societies of antiquity is clear throughout his political work.

• He argues that direct democracy may not be possible in the modern age of nations.

• Rousseau’s philosophical project was to describe the passage of human beings from their natural state into a civil society.



• In between the writings of the Discourse on Inequality and the Social Contract Rousseau read the works of Hobbes.

• Rousseau was well acquainted with Hobbes’s views.

• He also read another contractarian, John Locke.

• Both Hobbes and Locke supplied inspiration or material to Rousseau.

• Rousseau was also indebted to legal theorists or juris such as Grotius, Pufendorf, Barbeyras, and Burlamaqui. 3/3/2018 16 eadarkoh

TOPIC THREE

Rousseau and the State of Nature


Rousseau and the State of Nature

• Rousseau’s State of Nature is rather different from the ones explained by the predecessors.

• He agrees with Hobbes and Locke that in a state of nature men’s main drive is towards self-preservation.

• According to Rousseau, however, Hobbes and Locke overestimated the likelihood of falling in a state of war.

• Rousseau often criticized Thomas Hobbes views on the state of nature.

• Rousseau wanted to give an account of a true society, that is, a society based on social and moral bond.


Rousseau and the State of Nature (cont’d)

• In Rousseau’s view, men entered into the true society from state of nature through the instrument of the social contract.

• He thus attempted to describe the supposed state of nature. • Hobbes imagined a state of nature as a state of war. • It was a war of all against all. • The war was waged by ferocious and egoist men. • Each man of the state of nature was guided by personal inter

ests and physical appetite. • The people of the state of nature were devoid of sympathy a

nd fellow feeling and all sorts of noble intentions. • The society was poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Rousseau, ho

wever, criticizes Hobbes views. • In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau offered his views.



• In his view we should not conclude with Hobbes that because man has no idea of goodness he must be naturally wicked and vicious because he does not know virtue.

• Rousseau wants to bring home the point that even in an organized political society men are involved in continuous strife.

• The war is essentially the product of civilized society.

• Rousseau states unequivocally that “such circumstances rarely occur in a state of nature.”



• In Rousseau’s state of nature a man would be like a savage, whose actions are primarily determined by immediate needs food, sexual satisfaction, sleep and fears only hunger and pain.

• The savage man is also motivated by self-preservation and pity. • He thinks that human beings are naturally affected by others’ hum

an beings’ sufferance. • Human beings have an innate repugnance to the suffering of a fell

ow creature. • So it is compassion which acts as a powerful mean to restrain peo

ple to harm others. • Rousseau pictures the savage man as a solitary human being, able

to survive alone. • His speech is not yet developed and cannot express opinions on th

ings.



• Rousseau believes that civilization and progress have somehow polluted the goodness in the state of nature.

“God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil”.

• However, Rousseau’s point on morality is dramatically different form Locke’s one.

• He states that in a state of nature there is no room for law, right and morality.

• Rousseau simply means that we tend to avoid harming others because of our natural aversion to pain and suffering.

• Therefore, if men are in a state of war they would feel terrible for all the harming caused to other fellows.

• In the state of nature men are equal. 3/3/2018 22 eadarkoh


• Rousseau sees the private property as a source of inequality, mutual dependence and jealousy:

• “The destruction of equality was attended by the most terrible disorders. Usurpation by the rich, robbery by the poor, and the unbridled passions of both, suppressed the cries of natural compassion and still feeble voice of justice, and filled man with avarice, ambition, and vice. Between the title of the strongest and that of first occupier, there arouse perpetual conflicts, which never ended but in battle and bloodshed. The new-born state of society thus gave rise to a horrible state of war”.

• There was sufficiency in food, clothing and shelter and scope to satisfy sexual desires.

• So there was no perpetual war and perennial discontent. 3/3/2018 23 eadarkoh


• The primitive men were non-social.

• The primitive men were not natural enemies of each other.

• They had hardly anything to quarrel about.

• In the state of nature, there was also uniformity in occurrences and the earth was not subject to sudden changes.

• So the savage people of the early society had no reason to tremble or to be afraid of anything.

• They were not highly intelligent, but they possessed certain amount of intelligence which was enough to understand the behavior of nature.



• The natural appetites of the primitive people were very limited and, therefore, there was very little struggle to fulfill these desires.

• They were neither egoist nor altruist. • They could not be called immoral, but rather they were

premoral. • The early men had qualities which under the influence

of society would subsequently take on a moral character.

• The primitive men had compassion which created fellow feeling and sympathy.

• His state of nature was, therefore, free from the ferocious misery depicted by Hobbes.



• Rousseau did not base his political organization on utilitarian principles.

“Society he accounted for, and justified, only as a means of enabling men to advance to a higher level of achievement than could be arrived at in its absence. It had to be regarded as a necessary means to the development of the moral potentialities of man’s original nature.”


TOPIC FOUR

The Social Contract


The Social Contract

• A state with coercive power or apparatus emerged because men voluntarily agreed to the establishment of such a state.

• The implication is that obedience to governments is in some way chosen and thus morally binding.

• The philosophical construct that has come to embody this approach is described by the term “social contract.”

• Rousseau’s notion of social contract reflects to some extent his position on inequality in society.

• At the end of his Discourse on Inequality Rousseau observes, among other societal issues, that there was hardly any inequality in the state of nature.


The Social Contract (cont’d)

• All the inequality which now prevails owes its strength and growth to the development of our faculties and the advance of human mind

• It is contrary to the law of nature, however defined, that children should command old men and fools should command wise men.

• This gross inequality and violation of the moral principles cannot be allowed to continue further.

• Rousseau, being the champion of freedom, equality and moral norms and principles was overly anxious to find explanations and solutions to such inequalities



• The development of civilization also endangered the freedom of man. In the state of nature man was quite free.

• The gradual progress of the arts and sciences man had to contend with the gradual loss of liberty.

• It is in the Social Contract that Rousseau begins his exploration of politics with emphasis on the sources of the legitimacy or otherwise of the ruling elite.

• He rejects that its source is found in nature, because such a position implies the inherent natural superiority of the rulers over the ruled.

• He argues that force is not the basis for legitimacy either: the idea that “might makes right” is nonsensical.



• Liberty and equality were the characteristics of the state of nature and with the progress of civilization they have disappeared.

• Legitimate political authority is based on a kind of “social contract” created between society’s members.

• One’s freedom can never be surrendered in a fair exchange.

• Furthermore, once freedom is surrendered, then all rights are forfeited.



• The starting sentence of the Social Contract is “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”

• Rousseau believes that although freedom and equality have disappeared in the civil society they can be revived with the establishment of institutions and government.

• In state of nature and political society, liberty and authority are contradictories.

• So the only way of reviving the freedom and equality is to go back to the state of nature.

• How do we reconcile liberty and authority and nature and political organization ?



• His solution to what he perceives as contradiction in society is the creation of a social compact or contract.

• Why should such a contract ever be necessary?

• There comes a point in the state of nature at which society must be formed in order for mankind to survive.

• The social contract’s purpose is to resolve the problem of how to bind people to each other without infringing upon their freedom.

• The contract is enacted by requiring the unconditional surrender of the individual’s freedom to the whole community.



• The important implications of this definition are that the contract will – impose the same conditions for all,

– creating no interest for one person making the conditions difficult for others

– there will be no rights that remain that stand in opposition to the state, because the contract is formed unconditionally;

– because each person enters the contract on equal terms, no person loses their natural freedom.

• The ultimate reduction of the social contract can be described thus: “Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” 3/3/2018 34 eadarkoh


• The new entity, that is formed as a result of this contract comes to be known as – the “Republic” or “body politic,”

– or, depending on the context, the State,when passive; the Sovereign when active, the Power when compared with others like itself.

• The contrast between nature and civil society is important here: – though in joining the contract we lose the physical freed

om to act upon our personal appetites,

– we gain liberty 3/3/2018 35 eadarkoh

Features of the Social Contract

• One form is used as a protest against the royal absolutism

• The idea that the power of the sovereign authority is to be vested in the whole community.

• Rousseau used the term public person. This makes Rousseau’s body politic an organic entity.

• Rousseau speaks of active agreement periodically renewed.

• The terms of the contract are binding on all. Nobody can venture to disobey it. The recalcitrant elements will face severe consequences.

• The contract will benefit the whole community.


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