Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778)

Just as the writings of John Locke shaped the American Revolution, its Declaration of Independence, and its state and national constitutions, so did the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau influence the French Revolution and its aftermath. But whereas Locke, in clear, logical exposition, addressed the fundamental problem of the relation between society and government, Rousseau focused on how to voluntarily reconcile the conflicts between individual and social action. Locke laid a firm foundation for constitutional republican government; Rousseau wrote in a peculiar language that allows both libertarians and totalitarians to find support for their agendas.

The difficulty of interpreting Rousseau arises from a tendency for many scholars to try to credit him with a logical consistency that is not characteristic of his writings. His concept of the general will, employed throughout The Social Contract (sometimes translated as Compact), as the source of political authority, is open to widely divergent methods of determining what that will might be in particular circumstances, especially when there are conflicting factions. Ideas that seem radical in A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality or in A Discourse on Political Economy can be seen as fairly reasonable and a bit conservative when he criticizes, in A Project for a Perpetual Peace, the proposal for a united Europe by the Abbé Charles de Saint-Pierre, or when he offers specific proposals for plans of government in Constitutional Project for Corsica or Considerations on the Government of Poland. The student should try to understand his major works by the light shone on them by the minor ones.

Despite the title, there is very little of contractarian theory in The Social Contract, although it was clearly inspired by natural law theorists such as Hobbes and Locke. It is about perceiving and attempting to resolve the psychological conflicts between individual liberty and the needs of society for people to live and work together and act for the common good. He does not resolve those conflicts but points the way for others to do so. Or fail to do so. The comparative harmony among the cantons of Switzerland, where Rousseau's writings were little read, was ill-matched by the tempests of the other European states where his writings were more popular. The French Revolution inspired everything except success.

Although not a Calvinist, Rousseau was influenced by Calvinism, with its emphasis on strict simplicity and unremitting duty and by the republican ideals of his native Geneva. His writing is suffused with moral activism, but Rousseau gave it a secular cast. He rejected the Calvinist doctrine of original sin. While others might accept a despotic government that achieves desirable results, for Rousseau no government was justified that did not rest on not only the consent but the active participation of its citizens.

Rousseau is sometimes misunderstood as regarding the state of nature as idyllic and inhabited by the noble savage, but he makes explicit in The Social Contract that the transition from the state of nature to the state of civil society was necessary for the moral development of mankind. Reason and morality do not exist in the state of nature, except in very rudimentary form. Despite the corruptions of society, however, it is essential to the development of the sense of duty, without which there can be no morality.

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