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Unit 8: Jean Jacques Rousseau

even in the state of nature. He rejected the idea that the social contract involved the surrender of Notes
freedom to a third person. Instead, a legitimate polity had to “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 conception had many positive points. He took it for granted that human beings could
not return to the state of nature. Consequently, whatever had to be achieved was discovered only
within civil society. This enabled him to dream of a golden past and visualize a future based on a
better order and human perfection. Analogically, the difference could be compared with the
distinction between primitive communism and true communism that existed in Marxism. Another
important aspect in Rousseau’s theory was the realization that every human activity was basically
related to politics:
I had realized that everything was basically related to politics, and that no matter how
one approached it, no people would ever be anything but what the nature of its
government made it. Therefore, the great question of the best possible government
seemed to me to reduce itself to this: which is the form of government fitted to shape
the most virtuous, the most enlightened, the wisest, and in short, the “best” people,
taking that word in its noblest meaning?
Rousseau regarded consent as the basis of society, but emphasized the importance of the community
along with the need to protect individual freedom. A community was created for the benefit of the
individual, and Rousseau attempted to reconcile the two claims: that of the community with that
of the individual, the claims of authority with those of liberty. A community that was constituted
by all consenting individuals voluntarily submitting to the general will was the solution to his
paradox of persons born free, but yet in chains. There was a moral transformation in the individual
once a community was created. This was because, having voluntarily created it, the community
was seen as furthering the individual’s moral autonomy. Since it was through society that
individuals realized their full potential, it could be reorganized to ensure the freedom that
individuals enjoyed when they were in a state of nature. This was possible once the right society
was created, for that would maximize (or at least offer the quintessence of) individual liberty.
To project the question on a grander scale, one can see in Rousseau’s political thought
an intuitive attempt to reconcile the greatest traditions of western political philosophy,
that of “will and artifice” and that of “reason and nature”. For general will is surely
rationalized well. And yet it is not self rationalized will in a Kantian sense but will
rationalized by the standards and conditions of idealized ancient polity. Whatever
Rousseau means, in undertaking a fusion of two great modes of political thinking, and
however unsuccessful the attempt to make general will a viable conception, one must
always, while analyzing and even criticizing the result, grant the grandeur and
importance of the effort. For if one could succeed in having the best of both idioms,
one would have a political philosophy which would synthesize almost everything of
value in the history of western political thought (Riley 1980: 97).
Rousseau amalgamated the cohesiveness and solidarity of the ancient Greek polis with modern
voluntarism and the notion of individual freedom. His ideal republic would be a community of
virtue, for only virtuous individuals could be truly free. A free society presupposed virtue. A
whole community rested on moral law. From Plato Rousseau got the idea that political subjection
was primarily moral and the community was the supreme ethical entity. The community was a
moral and collective person and not merely an aggregation. He kept ancient Sparta and Rome in
mind as models of his ideal republic. He described the community vested with a “General Will”,
a will of all individuals thinking of general and. public interests. It was the “Common Me”,
meaning that the best spirit of the individual was represented in it. The selfish nature of the
human individual was transformed, bringing forth cooperative instincts and essential goodness:

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