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Western Political Thought

Notes Thus Rousseau rejected the Enlightenment’s belief in human progress of reason through science
and technology. The latter did not bring about moral improvement, since continued decadence
measured in terms of human unhappiness would be the fate of most contemporary societies. He
summarized this state of affairs in the Emile as, though God had made all things good, it was man
who meddled with them and made them evil. On receiving a copy of the Discourses, Voltaire, the
high priest of the Enlightenment, replied scornfully that he had never seen any one use such
intelligence to denigrate human progress and civilization. Starobinski (1988) regarded it as a
substitute for sacred history, for Rousseau had rewritten the Genesis as a work of philosophy,
complete with the Garden of Eden, original sin and the confusion of tongues. Its tone was that of
a “mystic revealing great secrets”. It influenced important social critics, from Robiespierre
to Marx, for it focused on freedom and the deepest ills that flow from evil forms of society to
scuttle it.
8.8 General Will and Individual Freedom

In the Social Contract, Rousseau portrayed the nature of the higher organization where he attempted
to show that a human being’s transformation need not always be for the worse, provided the right
kind of polity could be built. Unlike the early contractuahsts, Rousseau was keen to show how the
right rather than the first society could be created, for he was hopeful that the right society would
transform the noble savage to a humane person, immortalized by his famous words, “Man is born
free and is everywhere in chains”. It would be a polity that would aim for the general, rather than the
particular, interests of its members. The freedom that the noble savage enjoyed in the state of
nature would be possible under the right kind of society governed by the “General Will”. According
to Riley (1998) the notions of the General Will (volonte generale) and Particular Will (volonte
particuliere) were elaborately used in the works of eminent scholars such as Pascal, Malebranche,
Bayle, Fenelon, Bousset, Fontenelle and Leibniz between 1640 and 1715. However, in the writings
of Diderot and Rousseau the notion of General Will was secular rather than theological. Society
and the individual, in his theory, were complementary. This became very clear at the very beginning
of the book:

Man is born free and is everywhere in chains.

I mean to inquire if, in the civil order, there can be any sure and legitimate rule of
administration, men being taken as they are and law as they might be. In this inquiry,
I shall endeavour always to unite what right sanctions with what is prescribed by
interest, in order that justice and utility may in no case be divided.
The right kind of society would enhance human freedom, for nothing was dearer to a person than
liberty:
To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity
and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such
a renunciation is incomparable with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will
is to remove all morality from his acts.
Most of the French thinkers of the eighteenth century regarded liberty as crucial to the individual’s
development. Rousseau too reiterated this theme and regarded liberty as central to his theoretical
construct. For Rousseau, the entire objective of a contract was to reconcile liberty with authority.
Liberty was fundamental; so was authority, for one could not exist meaningfully without the
other. The priority of freedom was the highest, which was the most instinctive urge in the individual,

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