Table of Contents
| HOBBES |
| THE SOCIAL CONTRACT |
| ROUSSEAU LECTURE NOTES |
| SMITH |
| MARX |
| the circle of political philosophy |
| return to Unit I |
Rousseau's master work, The Social Contract, attempted to spell out the social relation that a properly educated man--a free man--bears to other free men. This treatise is a difficult and subtle work of a penetrating intellect fired by a great passion for humanity. The liberating fever of the work, however, is easily captured in the key notions of popular sovereignty and the general will.
Government is not to be confused with sovereignty of the people or with the social order which is created by the social contract. The government is only an intermediary set up between the people as law followers--or subjects--and law creators--the state. Furthermore, the government is an instrument created by the citizens through collective action expressed in the general will. The purpose of this instrument is to serve the people by seeing to it that laws expressive of the general will of the citizens are in fact executed. In short, the government is the servant of the people, not their master. And further, the sovereignty of the people as expressed in the general will is to be found not merely in the will of the majority or in the will of all but rather in the will as enlightened by right judgement.
It was Rousseau's basic contention that the delegation of power to a government was revocable in the event that the state was no longer representative of the will of the people or failed in its duty to ensure equal protection under the law or provide for the general welfare. The state itself was to be all-inclusive, small enough for every citizen to know every other citizen, and no decision was to be made without fully-informed, truthful discussion free of outside interference. It was essential in every instance that every citizen exercise his social conscience--or empathy--in the determination of the general will of the people.
As with an earlier work, L'Emile, The Social Contract is a work best understood as elaborating the principles of an ideal social order rather than a scheme for implementing a mechanism for political change. Rousseau did, however, write political treatises more concerned with immediate application in his works Political Economics (1755) and Considerations of Government (1772).
| JEAN ROUSSEAU |
The Swiss-born philosopher, author, political theorist,
and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) ranks as one of the greatest figures of the
French Enlightenment.. His major work, The Social Contract, published in
1762, expanded upon Hobbes' concept of the social contract but asserted that the sovereign
was merely the servant of the general will of the citizens..
"MAN IS BORN FREE, YET EVERYWHERE HE IS IN CHAINS."
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Principle Ideas Advanced | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| I. NATURE A. INSTINCT: SELF-INTEREST, SURVIVAL, AGGRESSION
B.
REASON:
II. THE SOCIAL CONTRACT III. SOVEREIGNTY IV. DEMOCRACY |
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