Jean Jacques Rousseau

“Rousseau was the father of the romantic movement, the imitator of system of thought which infer non-human fact from human emotions and the inventor of the political philosophy of pseudo-democratic dictatorship as opposed to traditional absolute monarchs. Hitler was the outcome of Rousseau.” (Bertrand Russel)

Rousseau was born on June 28, 1712 at Geneva of parents of French Protestant ancestry, in a middle class family. His father, Isaac, was a skilled watchmaker, but abandoned this profession to become a dancing master. Rousseau left school at the age of 12, learnt various crafts but adopted none. He also worked as an apprentice under a cruel engraver. He filled with a wonder lust that was never to be satisfied. Restless, impulsive, unstable he embraced the career of a vagabond as others might enter upon a profession and thereafter for twenty years he led the life of a vagabond wandering in different places. In 1742, he gravely mediated to lead a regulated life, went to Paris and tried his luck at different schemes, the opera, the theatre but his efforts ended in fiasco. Then he opened a small hotel.

The year of 1749 was a turning point in his life, chance brought Rousseau fame and immortality. The Academy of Dijon announced a prize for the best essay on the subject “Has the progress of sciences and arts contributed to corrupt and purify morals”. He thought a strong plea that progresses of sciences and arts had tended to degrade human morality. Rousseau depicted in the essay, an early state of society in which all men lived under conditions of simplicity and innocence, and traced the purging evils of society emanated from the artificialities introduced by civilization. He won the prize. Hearn Shaw remarked, “it created a great sensation in the artificial society of the Age of Reason. It was the first ramble of the Revolution.”

The publication of his book “Social Contract” aroused the indignation of the French Government, which ordered his arrest. He escaped to Geneva, where the Democratic Council burned his book and threatened his life. He took refuge in Germany, where an angry mob almost strangulated him. He fled to England where only one man, Hume, took him into his affection. By this time, however, Rousseau’s suffering had greatly perturbed his brain and he was tormented by a prosecution mania. He suspected that Hume was plotting to poison him. He thought that “Everyone hurts me because of my love for mankind.” Finally his fear of being murdered drove him to commit suicide.

Hearn Shaw said, “Rousseau led a life of fugitive for sixteen years and he drove through a period of deepening gloom, failing health, broken spirit, haunting terrors, paralyzing illusions and accumulating despair.”

Rousseau’s State of Nature

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. Many a one believes himself the master of others, and yet he is greater slave than they. How has this change come about? I do not know. What can render it legitimate? I believe that I can settle this question.” (Rousseau)

Man is born free only in the sense that freedom is his inborn right; it is the necessary condition for the development of the various potentialities of human nature. We can say that he is born for freedom that he ought to be free. The second part of the first sentence that he is everywhere in chains imply that customs and conventions of society and state regulations imposer upon him certain artificial and unnecessary restraints which arrest the development of his personality.

Rousseau, a philosopher of the heart rather than of the head, presented his State of Nature to be an earthly paradise though he himself confessed that the conception of the State of Nature was quite hypothetical. As Rousseau says, “A state which exists no longer, perhaps never existed, probably never will exist and of which none the less it is necessary to have just idea in order to judge well our present state.” He always maintained that the natural state was also better than the social state. For, in it, the natural man, or the noble savage, lived a solitary, happy and carefree life of the brute was independent, contented and self-sufficing.

In short, Rousseau’s man was a non-social being unknown to good or evil or the coming death. Thus the noble savage was in the state of paradise, everyone being equal to the other. Man’s life in the state of nature was regulated not by reason but by the feelings of self-preservation and hatred towards incalculable massacre and incredible violence. According to Rousseau, “primitive man was near animal than man; he lived an isolated and solitary life having no ties and obligations. He was guided by two sentiments self-interest and pity, and having no oral obligation with other men he could not be good or bad, virtuous or vicious. He led a solitary life completely devoid of language and wandered about the primeval forests begetting his offspring by the way, hunting for his food, and concerned only with the satisfaction of physical needs. In a word, the natural man was neither happy nor unhappy.”

But with the appearance of fixed homes, family and property, the knell of human equality was sounded. But even this primitive society was tolerable. The least subjects to revolutions, the best for man. Only when the serpent entered into the society in the form of private property, was the life of man changed from prosperity to adversity.

Rousseau was of the view “the first man having enclosed a piece of land he thought himself of saying this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him the real founder of social inequality and injustice.” The institution of private property created a sense of jealousy and struggle, converted usurpation into an acknowledged right and led to the promotion of society. He became subject to violence, bloodshed, crimes against property and person and all the evils of society and civilization including slavery. Thus the life of man became pitiable, miserable and intolerable. As Rousseau says, “the problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate and in which each while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone and remain as free as before.”

Rousseau’s General Will

“The development of the theory of the general will in the Social Contract was involved in paradoxes, partly because of cloudiness of Rousseau’s ideas but partly; it seems, because he had a rhetorician’s liking for paradox. Manifestly, in view of his criticism of the natural man, he ought to have avoided the notion of contract altogether as both meaningless and misleading.” (Sabine)

The will of each individual merged into a General Will, which is the cardinal pillar in the Rousseau’s philosophy, has aroused keen controversy and has been subjected to severe criticism. It has been remarked by Bertrand Russell that the doctrines enshrined in his Social Contract, “though they pay lip service to democracy, tend to the justification of the totalitarian state.”

Dr. McDoughall defines General Will as “The General Will is conceived as coming to be when every individual in a group or society has a conception or idea of the group as a whole and identifies his good with the good of that whole.”

Rousseau explains that by the free act of those who enter into an agreement, all their powers and rights vested in the community and their respective wills are superseded by the General Will. He was of the view that man possesses two kinds of wills:

1. Actual Will:
It is related to the will of the individuals. It is irrational will of man. This Will makes self-confined and self centered.

2. Real Will:
It is rational will of the individual. It always aims at general welfare of the society. It leads to eternal decision imparting self-satisfaction to the individual. It is based upon reason and rationality.

Rousseau’s whole arguments depended upon the fact that a community of citizens is unique with its members, they neither make it nor have rights against it.

Rousseau said, “The social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights. The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. 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.”

Rousseau clearly distinguishes the General Will from will of the majority and the minority. The General Will may or may not coincide with any of these Wills; it may sometimes be coincident with the Will of an individual.


Characteristics of the General Will:

1. Unity:
It is not self-contradictory. It is indivisible, because if it were divided it would not remain General Will but would become Sectional Will.

2. Unlimited:
It is unlimited. Rousseau assigns absolute powers to his sovereign by following the Hobbes’s line of action.

3. Inalienable:
The General Will and sovereignty are inalienable and undetectable.

4. Un-representable:
The General Will cannot be represented. That is why Rousseau laid the foundation of direct democracy. The General Will can conveniently be realized in a small city state where the population can assemble and pass laws for their interest. It does not admit of representative democracy.

W. T. Jones appreciated Rousseau’s theory in these words, “The notion of the General Will is not only the most central concept of Rousseau’s theory, it is also the most original, the most interesting, and historically the most important contribution which he made to political theory.”


Criticism:

1. Rousseau’s theory of General Will is incomplete and vague.

2. It is in actual practice difficult to distinguish the General Will from the Will of all. The General Will is not the unanimous Will of the whole people because that might be the Will of all. General Will has its own merits and demerits.

3. Rousseau’s belief that an individual has his actual and real Wills at the same time is quite wrong. An individual’s Will is a corporate thing, one complete whole, incapable of any division.

4. He was of the view that the General Will neglects the force of moral law which dictates to anyone as to what is just and unjust.

5. There arises a sort of conflict between the common interest and the interest of the individual. The General Will assigns a very high place to the state and the individual will have to sacrifices his interest over the interest of the state.

6. Rousseau’s concept of General Will is rather abstract and narrow. In actual practice, it is nothing if it does not mean the Will of the majority.

7. It pre-supposes common interests, which is difficult to define or determine. These interests grow out of organic relations between members of a community and are hardly possible in the multinational states of today with their conflicting ideals and interests.

8. This theory is not applicable to the bigger state in population and territory, and does not admit of representative government.

9. It is rarely and for a short time that general will is actually realized. Self-consciousness can exist only at periods of great crisis in the life of a nation, when the whole society is in danger.

10. Where we are determined to decide what are the visible manifestation of this Will, Rousseau leaves us in the realm of darkness. He stresses that General Will always tends to the public advantage and that is infallible. But it does not follow that the deliberations of the people are equally correct.

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