"The cause of human unhappiness is the contradiction…between nature and social institutions…Give man entirely to the State, or leave him entirely to himself. If you divide his heart, you will tear him apart." - Rousseau, "Du Bonheur Public, 1762

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712. His mother died from birthing complications. His father, a watchmaker, was a full citizen of Geneva. Jean-Jacques’ education was started at an early age. By 1722 when his father fled Geneva (leaving Jean-Jacques to be cared for by an uncle), he had grown to love classical histories, particularly the work of Plutarch. Jean-Jacques apparently did not fare well either with his uncle or with the engraver to whom he was apprenticed the following year. Rousseau left Geneva in 1728 and began an adult life which was, like his childhood, quite problematic. Although he claimed to love man-kind, he seemed unable to maintain a friendship. (Those interested in reading more of Rousseau’s life may wish to consult the several biographies written by Maurice Cranston.)

Rousseau wrote extensively on a number of subjects, including botany, education, language, love, music, nature, politics, theatre, war and peace. He also wrote autobiographical work and original music, novels, plays, operas, poetry, and other fiction prose. He is best known for his Social Contract. In the Social Contract, Rousseau observed that "man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." Rather than simply seeking to justify those chains, Rousseau sought a way to make them "legitimate."

Although there are paradoxical statements throughout his work, Rousseau believed that there was an underlying unity throughout his work. It may well be that that underlying unity is that human beings are themselves paradoxical.

Rousseau’s political work can be divided into two categories: descriptive and prescriptive work. Unfortunately, we can only briefly discuss a few of Rousseau’s most important works.

Descriptive Work

Rousseau’s first public fame came with the publication of his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, then 1750 winner of the Academy of Dijon’s Essay Contest. It addressed the question as to "Has the reestablishment of the sciences and the arts served to purify or to corrupt manners and morals." Rousseau forcefully, and unconventionally argued that the arts and sciences in fact served to corrupt manners and morals. Moreover, he argued that they also served to corrupt the human body itself. In contemporary Paris, Rousseau observed that people followed social moures rather than their own nature; rather than serving man, modern advancements made him week.

The Discourse on the Sciences and Arts began Rousseau’s consideration of anthropology -- the study of man. This anthropology is further developed in The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Amongst Mankind and in the Essay on the Language. Rousseau "put aside the facts," so that he could consider man as he likely was (during what we now call pre-history). Some suggest that the facts which he specifically wished to put aside were those authoritative facts of the Church.

Hobbes and other social contract theorists had failed, according to Rousseau, by reading current social conditions back into the state of nature.

Rather than a natural state of war, Rousseau found that natural man lived in a state of ignorant bliss. Man lived a solitary life, but when he did come upon one of his own kind, he was governed by a natural instinct to pity. No creature, Rousseau argued, was not moved by the site of its own kind suffering. Man, Rousseau argued, also had a certain self-love (amour de soi). Natural man was also blessed with certain latent capacities which set him apart from beasts. Natural man had capacities for reason, language, memory, and history. He also was blessed with perfectibility, which enabled those other latent capacities to develop. Amour de soi operated in part because natural man had not developed his reasoning capability. When he came upon a suffering human, he imagined that it was he who was in fact suffering.

Eventually, natural man began to cooperate with one another in primitive social relationships -- e.g. a cooperative hunt. This led to the development of man’s reason and in his ability to distinguish himself from his fellow men.

While reason was certainly a blessing, Rousseau also observed that man’s reasoning also corrupted him. Amour de soi (self-love) became corrupted into amour-propre (vanity or egocentrism). Rousseau was appalled at the fact that his contemporaries were able to say "Perish if you will; I am safe and sound." It was "The person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, [that] was the true founder of civil society." Rousseau, clearly believed that such government was illegitimate.

Prescriptive Work

Rousseau’s prescriptive work can be divided itself into two groups. One group is concerned with actual political systems and includes Considerations on the Government of Poland, The Project for a Constitution for Corsica. The other group consists on what we might call hypothetical or ideal prescriptions. These are principally, Emile; Or on Education and the Social Contract.

Emile was Rousseau’s largest single work, and he maintained that it was one of his most important work. Although it is largely a theory of education, its political meaning cannot be discounted. (Students who are interested in reading Emile are strongly encouraged to use the translation by Allen Bloom. The sequel of Emile, Emile et Sophie has yet to be translated.) Ultimately the natural education of you Emile fails when he and his wife Sophie move to Paris where she suffers depression and he learns his final lesson: what it is to suffer desperately.

Rousseau’s Social Contract, as I mentioned before, is his most famous work. Rousseau believed that it was not possible for man to return to the state of nature. Once his capacities were perfected, he had a longing for mental fulfillment; moreover, his body had softened from inactivity to the point where, Rousseau believed, social man could not live like beasts. It is necessary, we are told, to take "men as they are and laws as they might be."

Legitimate government is formed when "Each of us places his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and as one we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole."

Although under the Social Contract, men are not free to follow only their own particular wills, they achieve a new a new type of freedom. Moral freedom requires the respect of other moral beings. By entering into the contract, each member of the body politic mutually acknowledges the moral standing of each other member. Those who would voluntarily leave the Social Contract are leaving the moral recognition of the other members.

Rousseau believed that the "passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces quite a remarkable change in man, for it substitutes justice for instinct in his behavior and gives his actions a moral quality the previously lacked."

The General Will is formed when the body politic meets and enacts legislation. Direct political participation is required. It is not moral to pledge one’s freedom to the arbitrary discretion of a representative. Because each member the body politic expresses himself in the formation of the General Will, the General Will is said to be authentic.

Although each person has a particular will he freely sets it aside as he sees that the General Will is a more well reasoned authentic expression of his own particular will.

While every action of the body politic is authentic, the body politic is not always enlightened. It is the role of the Legislator to inform the body politic and propose legislation. Although the legislator has what can be called semi-divine reason, he may neither enact nor enforce legislation.

The central task of the legislator is to properly denature man. With the advent of fraudulent society, natural man’s amour de soi (self-love) became corrupted into bourgeois man’s amour-propre (vanity/egocentrism). But, with a Legislator who has a "sublime reason, which transcends the grasp of ordinary men," man might leave the state of solitary and ignorant bliss for a state of moral community and political participation.

Rousseau has been called both a "dreamer of democracy," and a forerunner of fascism. It is his insistence that each person may participate in the body politic that makes him a democrat. Yet, his instance that each person must participate in the body politic may go a bit beyond democracy. Rousseau’s reliance on the semi-divine Legislator to shape social values and thus public policy can be read favorably by those who would be totalitarians.