Page 152 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Western Political Thought

Notes Self-Assessment
Choose the correct option:
1. Jean Jacques Rousseau was the greatest thinker that the ............... produced.
(i) English (ii) Russian (iii) French (iv) None of these.
2. Rousseau was born on June 28, 1712 in the city of ...............
(i) Germany (ii) France (iii) Geneva (iv) None of these.
3. Le Devin du village (The Village Soothsayer) was performed for the first time in Paris on
March 1, ............... .
(i) 1754 (ii) 1753 (iii) 1760 (iv) 1751
4. In the ............... Rousseau distinguished between the state of nature and civil society.
(i) Emile (ii) Discourses (iii) Politics (iv) None of these.

8.13 Summary

Rousseau’s theory, like Marx’s, was international in character. There was a conception of the
human family and an international federation as the end of his political ideal. He also projected
the body politic as a moral being which would preserve the welfare of the whole as well as
its constituent parts. It was the source of all laws, and determined the relationships between
its members. It would be an end in itself and also a means to an end. Rousseau was also seen
as the spiritual father of the French Revolution of 1789. Burke referred to him as “the insane
Socrates of the National Assembly”. Many of the ideas of Rousseau were put into practice
during the “later and more terrible phases of the Revolution”.
Rousseau provided an excellent analysis of human nature in politics. He refused to look at
the individual as a supernatural entity. He rejected the idea of natural sociability that the
ancients propounded, and also the notion of radical selfishness and egoism that the moderns
stressed on. He supported the idea of transformation of human nature from a narrow self-
seeking being into a public-spirited person. He took the individual as he was, “partly rational,
partly emotional, influenced by considerations of utility, but even more swayed by passions
and prejudices, at bottom moral and virtuous, but easily corrupted by bad institutions, and
in most cases, dependent for the maintenance of his virtue of good ones. He brought to the
fore the importance of ethics in politics as he was not interested merely in happiness or
utility” (Cassirer 1946: 70). In the last resort, the value of Rousseau’s political thought, “was
not completely individualist, while at the same time it was equally not based on any
glorification of society as distinct from the individuals of which it was composed” (Cobban
1964: 168). He had the most rigorous and revolutionary theory of sovereignty conceived as
omnipotent and omnipresent. The state represented the pinnacle of human existence, the
source of all morality, freedom and community. Its purpose was not merely to resolve conflicts,
but to be a means to liberate the individual from the uncertainties and hypocrisies of traditional
society. The state was a redeemer of the individual, enabling the latter to escape the “torments,
insecurities and dissensions of ordinary society” (Nisbet 1990: 125-126, 138). “Sovereignty,
for Rousseau, is not a mere legal thing; it is the sum total of all virtues and even freedoms”
(Nisbet ibid: 110).
The individual and the state were two themes in Rousseau’s theory. Both were simultaneously
sovereign. Both were needed to realize a just social and political order. To see Rousseau as an
individualist or a champion of state absolutism would be to do injustice to the complex
kaleidoscopic nature of his political philosophy. What emerged was a radical individualism
on the one hand, and tmcompromising authoritarianism on the other. His individualism was
not in the sense of an immunity from the state, but one that was coextensive of the state.

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