## 1. Life



Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in the independent Calvinist city-state
of Geneva in 1712, the son of Isaac Rousseau, a watchmaker, and
Suzanne Bernard. Rousseau's mother died nine days after his
birth, so Rousseau was raised and educated by his father until the age
of ten. Isaac Rousseau was one of the small minority of Geneva's
residents who enjoyed the rank of citizen of Geneva, and was therefore
a member of the city's nominally sovereign assembly.
Jean-Jacques was to inherit this status. According to his own
subsequent accounts, the haphazard education that he received from his
father included both the inculcation of republican patriotism and the
reading of historians of ancient republicanism, such as Plutarch.
After his father fled this city to avoid arrest, Jean-Jacques was put
in the care of a pastor at nearby Bossey and subsequently apprenticed
to an engraver. Rousseau left Geneva at the age of sixteen and came
under the influence of a Roman Catholic convert noblewoman,
Francoise-Louise de la Tour, Baronne de Warens. Mme de Warens
arranged for Rousseau to travel to Turin, where he converted to Roman
Catholicism in April 1728. He spent some time working as a domestic
servant in a noble household in Turin, and during this time a shameful
episode occurred in which he falsely accused a fellow servant of the
theft of a ribbon. This act marked him deeply and he returns to it in
his autobiographical works.



Rousseau then spent a brief period training to become a Catholic
priest before embarking on another brief career as an itinerant
musician, music copyist and teacher. In 1731 he returned to Mme de
Warens at Chambery and later briefly became her lover and then
her household manager. He remained with Mme de Warens through the rest
of the 1730s, moving to Lyon in 1740 to take up a position as a tutor.
This appointment brought him within the orbit of both Condillac and
d'Alembert and was his first contact with major figures of the
French Enlightenment. In 1742 he travelled to Paris, having devised a
plan for a new numerically-based system of musical notation which he
presented to the Academy of Sciences. The system was rejected by the
Academy, but in this period Rousseau met Denis Diderot. A brief spell
as secretary to the French Ambassador in Venice followed before
Rousseau moved to Paris on a more permanent basis from 1744, where he
continued to work mainly on music and began to write contributions to
the *Encyclopedie* of Diderot and d'Alembert.



In 1745 Rousseau met Therese Levasseur, a barely
literate laundry-maid who became his lover and, later, his wife.
According to Rousseau's own account, Therese bore
him five children, all of whom were deposited at the foundling
hospital shortly after birth, an almost certain sentence of death in
eighteenth-century France. Rousseau's abandonment of his
children was later to be used against him by Voltaire.



In 1749, while walking to Vincennes to visit the briefly-imprisoned
Diderot and idly reading a newspaper, Rousseau came across the
announcement of an essay competition organized by the Academy of
Dijon. The Academy sought submissions on the theme of whether the
development of the arts and sciences had improved or corrupted public
morals. Rousseau later claimed that he then and there experienced an
epiphany which included the thought, central to his world view, that
humankind is good by nature but is corrupted by society. He entered
his *Discourse on the Sciences and Arts* (conventionally known
as the *First Discourse*) for the competition and won first
prize with his contrarian thesis that social development, including of
the arts and sciences, is corrosive of both civic virtue and
individual moral character. The *Discourse* was published in
1751 and is mainly important because Rousseau used it to introduce
themes that he developed further in later work, especially the natural
virtue of the ordinary person and the moral corruption fostered by the
urge to distinction and excellence. The *First Discourse* made
Rousseau famous and provoked a series of responses to which he in turn
replied.



Music remained Rousseau's primary interest in this period, and
the years 1752 and 1753 saw his most important contributions to the
field. The first of these was his opera *Le Devin du Village*
(*The Village Soothsayer*), which was an immediate success (and
stayed in the repertoire for a century). The second was his
participation in a controversy known as the "querelle des
bouffons", that followed the performance in Paris of
Pergolesi's *La Serva Padrona* by a visiting Italian
company and which pitted the partisans of Italian music against those
of the French style. Rousseau, who had already developed a taste for
Italian music during his stay in Venice, joined the dispute through
his *Letter on French Music* and the controversy also informed
his (unpublished) *Essay on the Origin of Languages*.
Rousseau's emphasis on the importance of melody and the
communication of emotion as central to the function of music was in
opposition to the views of Rameau, who stressed harmony and the
relationships between music, mathematics, and physics. Rousseau went
so far as to declare the French language inherently unmusical, a view
apparently contradicted by his own practice in *Le Devin*.



Rousseau's conversion to Catholicism had rendered him ineligible
for his hereditary status as a citizen of Geneva. In 1754 he regained
this citizenship by reconverting to Calvinism. In the following year
he published his *Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of
Inequality among Men* (often referred to simply as the
*Discourse on Inequality* or as the *Second Discourse*).
Once again this was in response to an essay competition from the
Academy of Dijon. Though he did not win the Academy's prize a
second time, the *Discourse on Inequality* is a far more
accomplished work, and in it Rousseau begins to develop his theories
of human social development and moral psychology. With the
*Discourse on Inequality*, the distance between Rousseau and
the *Encyclopediste* mainstream of the French
Enlightenment thought became clear. This rift was cemented with his
1758 publication of the *Letter to d'Alembert on the
Theater*, in which he denounced the idea that his native city
would benefit from the construction of a theater. In Rousseau's
view theater, far from improving the population, tends to weaken their
attachment to the life of the political community.



The years following the publication of the *Discourse on
Inequality* were the most productive and important of
Rousseau's career. He withdrew from Paris and, under the
patronage of, first Mme d'Epinay and then the Duke and Duchess
of Luxembourg, worked on a novel, *Julie, ou La Nouvelle
Heloise*, and then on *Emile* and *The
Social Contract*. *Julie* appeared in 1761 and was an
immediate success. The novel is centred on a love triangle between
Julie, her tutor Saint Preux and her husband Wolmar. The work is cast
in epistolary form, and is an important supplementary source for the
interpretation of Rousseau's social philosophy, containing, as
it does, such elements as a vision of rural community and the presence
of a manipulative genius who achieves the appearance of natural
harmony through cunning artifice, and who thus anticipates both the
tutor in *Emile* and the legislator of *The Social
Contract*. Both works appeared in 1762, marking the high point of
Rousseau's intellectual achievement.



Unfortunately for Rousseau, the publication of these works also led to
personal catastrophe. *Emile* was condemned in Paris and both
*Emile* and *The Social Contract* were condemned in
Geneva on grounds of their religious heterodoxy, a condemnation that
Rousseau responded to in his *Letters from the Mountains*
Partly in response to the hostile attitude of the Genevan authorities,
Rousseau renounced his citizenship in May 1763. He was forced to flee
to escape arrest, seeking refuge first in Switzerland and then
travelling to England at the invitation of David Hume in January
1766.



Rousseau's stay in England was marked by his increasing mental
instability and he became wrongly convinced that Hume was at the
center of a plot against him. He spent fourteen months in
Staffordshire where he worked on his autobiographical
*Confessions*, which also contain evidence of his paranoia in
its treatment of figures like Diderot and the German author Friedrich
Melchior, Baron von Grimm. He returned to France in 1767 and then
spent much of the rest of his life working on autobiographical texts,
completing the *Confessions* but also composing the
*Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques* and *The
Reveries of the Solitary Walker*. He also completed his
*Considerations on the Government of Poland* in this period. In
later life he further developed his interest in botany (where his work
proved influential in England via his letters on the subject to the
Duchess of Portland) and in music, as he met and corresponded with the
operatic composer Christoph Gluck. Rousseau died in 1778. In 1794 the
French revolutionaries transferred his remains to the Pantheon
in Paris.


## 2. Conjectural history and moral psychology



Rousseau repeatedly claims that a single idea is at the centre of his
world view, namely, that human beings are good by nature but are
rendered corrupt by society (see Melzer 1990; Cohen 2010, chapter 4).
Unfortunately, despite the alleged centrality of this claim, it is
difficult to give it a clear and plausible interpretation. One obvious
problem is present from the start: since society, the supposed agent
of corruption, is composed entirely of naturally good human beings,
how can evil ever get a foothold? It is also hard to see what
"natural goodness" might be. In various places Rousseau
clearly states that morality is not a natural feature of human life,
so whatever sense it is that human beings are good by nature, it is
not the moral one that the casual reader would naturally assume. In
order, therefore, to address this puzzling central claim, it is best
to look first at the details of Rousseau's moral psychology,
especially as developed in the *Discourse on Inequality* and in
*Emile*.



Rousseau attributes to all creatures an instinctual drive towards
self-preservation. Human beings therefore have such a drive, which he
terms *amour de soi* (self love). *Amour de soi* directs
us first to attend to our most basic biological needs for things like
food, shelter and warmth. Since, for Rousseau, humans, like other
creatures, are part of the design of a benevolent creator, they are
individually well-equipped with the means to satisfy their natural
needs. Alongside this basic drive for self-preservation, Rousseau
posits another passion which he terms *pitie*
(compassion). *Pitie* directs us to attend to and
relieve the suffering of others (including animals) where we can do so
without endangering our own self-preservation. In some of his
writings, such as the *Discourse on Inequality*,
*pitie* is an original drive that sits alongside
*amour de soi*, whereas in others, such as *Emile* and
the *Essay on the Origin of Languages*, it is a development of
*amour de soi* considered as the origin of all passions.



In the *Discourse on Inequality* Rousseau imagines a
multi-stage evolution of humanity from the most primitive condition to
something like a modern complex society. Rousseau denies that this is
a reconstruction of history as it actually was, and Frederick
Neuhouser (2014) has argued that the evolutionary story is merely a
philosophical device designed to separate the natural and the
artificial elements of our psychology (for a contrasting view see
Kelly 2006). At each step of this imagined evolution human beings
change their material and psychological relations to one another and,
correspondingly, their conception of themselves, or what Rousseau
calls the "sentiment of their existence." According to
this narrative, humans live almost entirely solitary lives in the
original state of the human race, since they do not need one another
to satisfy their material needs. The human race barely subsists in
this condition, chance meetings between proto-humans are the occasions
for copulation and reproduction, child-care is minimal and brief in
duration. If humans are naturally good at this stage of human
evolution, their goodness is merely a negative and amounts to the
absence of evil. In this story, human beings are distinguished from
the other creatures with which they share the primeval world only by
two characteristics: freedom, and perfectibility. Freedom, in this
context, is simply the ability not to be governed solely by appetite;
perfectibility is the capacity to learn and thereby to find new and
better means to satisfy needs. Together, these characteristics give
humans the potential to achieve self-consciousness, rationality, and
morality. Nevertheless, it will turn out that such characteristics are
more likely to condemn them to a social world of deception,
dissimulation, dependence, oppression, and domination.



As human populations grow, simple but unstable forms of co-operation
evolve around activities like hunting. According to Rousseau, the most
important transitional moment in human history occurs at a stage of
society marked by small settled communities. At this point a change,
or rather a split, takes place in the natural drive humans have to
care for themselves: competition among humans to attract sexual
partners leads them to consider their own attractiveness to others and
how that attractiveness compares to that of potential rivals. In
*Emile*, where Rousseau is concerned with the psychological
development of an individual in a modern society, he also associates
this new psychological feature with sexual competition and the moment,
puberty, when the male adolescent starts to think of himself as a
sexual being with rivals for the favours of girls and women.



Rousseau's term for this new type of self-interested drive,
concerned with comparative success or failure as a social being, is
*amour propre* (love of self, often rendered as pride or vanity
in English translations). *Amour propre* make the need to be
recognized by others as having value and to be treated with respect
central to the felt interests of each human being . The presentation
of *amour propre* in the *Discourse on
Inequality*--and especially in his note XV to that
work--often suggests that Rousseau sees it as a wholly negative
passion and the source of all evil. Interpretations of *amour
propre* centered on the *Discourse on Inequality* (which,
historically, are the most common ones (for example Charvet 1974)),
often focus on the fact that the need for recognition always has a
comparative aspect, so that individuals are not content merely that
others acknowledge their value, but also seek to be esteemed as
superior to them. This aspect of our nature then creates conflict as
people try to exact this recognition from others or react with anger
and resentment when it is denied to them. More recent readings of both
the *Discourse on Inequality*, and especially of
*Emile*, have indicated that a more balanced view is possible
(Dent 1988, Neuhouser 2008, but see McLendon 2019 for pushback).
According to these interpretations, *amour propre* is both the
cause of humanity's fall as well as the promise of its
redemption because of the way in which it develops humans'
rational capacities and their sense of themselves as social creatures
among others. Although Rousseau held that the overwhelming tendency,
socially and historically, is for *amour propre* to take on
toxic and self-defeating ('inflamed') forms, he also held
that there are, at least in principle, ways of organizing social life
and individual education that allow it to take on a benign character.
This project of containing and harnessing *amour propre* finds
expression in both *The Social Contract* and *Emile*. In
some works, such as the *Second Discourse*, Rousseau presents
*amour propre* as a passion that is quite distinct from
*amour de soi*. In others, including *Emile*, he
presents it as a form that *amour de soi* takes in a social
environment. The latter is consistent with his view in *Emile*
that *all* the passions are outgrowths or developments of
*amour de soi*.



Although *amour propre* has its origins in sexual competition
and comparison within small societies, it does not achieve its full
toxicity until it is combined with a growth in material
interdependence among human beings. In the *Discourse on
Inequality*, Rousseau traces the growth of agriculture and
metallurgy and the first establishment of private property, together
with the emergence of inequality between those who own land and those
who do not. In an unequal society, human beings who need both the
social good of recognition and such material goods as food, warmth,
etc. become enmeshed in social relations that are inimical both to
their freedom and to their sense of self worth. Subordinates need
superiors in order to have access to the means of life; superiors need
subordinates to work for them and also to give them the recognition
they crave. In such a structure there is a clear incentive for people
to misrepresent their true beliefs and desires in order to attain
their ends. Thus, even those who receive the apparent love and
adulation of their inferiors cannot thereby find satisfaction for
their *amour propre*. This trope of misrepresentation and
frustration receives its clearest treatment in Rousseau's
account of the figure of the European minister, towards the end of the
*Discourse on Inequality*, a figure whose need to flatter
others in order to secure his own wants leads to his alienation from
his own self.


### 2.1 Morality



*Amour de soi*, *amour propre* and *pitie*
are not the full complement of passions in Rousseau's thinking.
Once people have achieved consciousness of themselves as social
beings, morality also becomes possible and this relies on the further
faculty of conscience. The fullest accounts of Rousseau's
conception of morality are found in the *Lettres Morales* and
in sections of the *Confession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar*,
a part of *Emile*. In the most primitive forms of human
existence, before the emergence of *amour propre*,
*pitie* balances or restrains self-interest. It is, to
that extent, akin to a moral sentiment such as Humean sympathy. But as
something that is merely instinctual it lacks, for Rousseau, a
genuinely moral quality. Genuine morality, on the other hand, consists
in the application of reason to human affairs and conduct. This
requires the mental faculty that is the source of genuinely moral
motivation, namely *conscience*. Conscience impels us to the
love of justice and morality in a quasi-aesthetic manner. As the
appreciation of justice and the desire to act to further it,
conscience is based in a sentiment of love for the well-orderedness of
a benign God's plan for the world. However, in a world dominated
by inflamed *amour propre*, the normal pattern is not for a
morality of reason to supplement or supplant our natural proto-moral
sympathies. Instead, the usual course of events in civil society is
for reason and sympathy to be displaced while humans' enhanced
capacity for reasoning is put at the service, not of morality, but of
the impulse to dominate, oppress and exploit. (For recent discussion
of Rousseau on conscience and reason, see Neidleman, 2017, ch. 7.)



A theme of both the *Discourse on Inequality* and the
*Letter to d'Alembert* is the way in which human beings
can deceive themselves about their own moral qualities. So, for
example, theatre audiences derive enjoyment from the eliciting of
their natural compassion by a tragic scene on the stage; then,
convinced of their natural goodness, they are freed to act viciously
outside the theater. Philosophy, too, can serve as a resource for
self-deception. It can give people reasons to ignore the promptings of
*pitie* or, as in Rousseau's essay *Principles
of the Right of War*, it can underpin legal codes (such as the law
of war and peace) that the powerful may use to license oppressive
violence whilst deadening their natural feelings of compassion.


## 3. Political Philosophy



Rousseau's contributions to political philosophy are scattered
among various works, most notable of which are the *Discourse on
Inequality*, the *Discourse on Political Economy*, *The
Social Contract*, and *Considerations on the Government of
Poland*. However, many of his other works, both major and minor,
contain passages that amplify or illuminate the political ideas in
those works. His central doctrine in politics is that a state can be
legitimate only if it is guided by the "general will" of
its members. This idea finds its most detailed treatment in *The
Social Contract*.



In *The Social Contract*, Rousseau sets out to answer what he
takes to be the fundamental question of politics, the reconciliation
of the freedom of the individual with the authority of the state. This
reconciliation is necessary because human society has evolved to a
point where individuals can no longer supply their needs through their
own unaided efforts, but rather must depend on the co-operation of
others. The process whereby human needs expand and interdependence
deepens is set out in the *Discourse on Inequality*. In that
work, the a decisive moment of Rousseau's conjectural history
involves the emergence of endemic conflict among the
now-interdependent individuals and the argument that the Hobbesian
insecurity of this condition would lead all to consent to the
establishment of state authority and law. This establishment amounts
to the reinforcement of unequal and exploitative social relations that
are now backed by law and state power. In an echo of Locke and an
anticipation of Marx, Rousseau argues that this state would, in
effect, be a class state, guided by the common interest of the rich
and propertied and imposing unfreedom and subordination on the poor
and weak. The propertyless consent to such an establishment because
their immediate fear of a Hobbesian state of war leads them to fail to
attend to the ways in which the new state will systematically
disadvantage them.



*The Social Contract* aims to set out an alternative to this
dystopia, one in which, claims Rousseau, each person will enjoy the
protection of the common force whilst remaining as free as they were
in the state of nature. The key to this reconciliation is the idea of
the general will: that is, the collective will of the citizen body
taken as a whole. The general will is the source of law and is willed
by each and every citizen. In obeying the law each citizen is thus
subject to his or her own will, and consequently, according to
Rousseau, remains free.


### 3.1 The idea of the general will



Rousseau's account of the general will is marked by unclarities
and ambiguities that have attracted the interest of commentators since
its first publication. The principal tension is between a democratic
conception, where the general will is simply what the citizens of the
state have decided together in their sovereign assembly, and an
alternative interpretation where the general will is the transcendent
incarnation of the citizens' common interest that exists in
abstraction from what any of them actually wants (Bertram 2012). To
these can be added a general will as the will of individual citizens
towards the common good (Canon 2022). All of these interpretations
find some support in Rousseau's texts, and all have been
influential. Contemporary epistemic conceptions of democracy often
make reference to Rousseau's discussion in Book 2 chapter 3 of
of *The Social Contract*. These accounts typically take
Condorcet's jury theorem as a starting point, where democratic
procedures are conceived of as a method for discovering the truth
about the public interest; they then interpret the general will as a
deliberative means of seeking outcomes that satisfy the preferences of
individuals and render the authority of the state legitimate (see for
example, Grofman and Feld 1988). The tension between the
"democratic" and the "transcendental"
conceptions can be reduced if we take Rousseau to be arguing for the
view that, under the right conditions and subject to the right
procedures, citizen legislators will be led to converge on laws that
correspond to their common interest; however, where those conditions
and procedures are absent, the state necessarily lacks legitimacy. On
such a reading, Rousseau may be committed to something like an a
posteriori philosophical anarchism. Such a view holds that it is
possible, in principle, for a state to exercise legitimate authority
over its citizens, but all actual states--and indeed all states
that we are likely to see in the modern era--will fail to meet
the conditions for legitimacy.



Rousseau argues that in order for the general will to be truly general
it must come from all and apply to all. This thought has both
substantive and formal aspects. Formally, Rousseau argues that the law
must be general in application and universal in scope. The law cannot
name particular individuals and it must apply to everyone within the
state. Rousseau believes that this condition will lead citizens,
though guided by a consideration of what is in their own private
interest, to favor laws that both secure the common interest
impartially and that are not burdensome and intrusive. For this to be
true, however, it has to be the case that the situation of citizens is
substantially similar to one another. In a state where citizens enjoy
a wide diversity of lifestyles and occupations, or where there is a
great deal of cultural diversity, or where there is a high degree of
economic inequality, it will not generally be the case that the impact
of the laws will be the same for everyone. In such cases it will often
not be true that a citizen can occupy the standpoint of the general
will merely by imagining the impact of general and universal laws on
his or her own case.


### 3.2 The emergence of the general will: procedure, virtue and the legislator



In The *Social Contract* Rousseau envisages three different
types or levels of will as being in play. First, individuals all have
private wills corresponding to their own selfish interests as natural
individuals; second, each individual, insofar as he identifies with
the collective as a whole and assumes the identity of citizen, wills
the general will of that collective as his or her own, setting aside
selfish interest in favor of a set of laws that allow all to coexist
under conditions of equal freedom; third, and very problematically, a
person can identify with the corporate will of a subset of the
populace as a whole. The general will is therefore both a property of
the collective and a result of its deliberations, and a property of
the individual insofar as the individual identifies as a member of the
collective. In a well-ordered society, there is no tension between
private and general will, as individuals accept that both justice and
their individual self-interest require their submission to a law which
safeguards their freedom by protecting them from the private violence
and personal domination that would otherwise hold sway. In practice,
however, Rousseau believes that many societies will fail to have this
well-ordered character. One way in which they can fail is if private
individuals are insufficiently enlightened or virtuous and therefore
refuse to accept the restrictions on their own conduct which the
collective interest requires. Another mode of political failure arises
where the political community is differentiated into factions (perhaps
based on a class division between rich and poor) and where one faction
can impose its collective will on the state as a whole.



*The Social Contract* harbors a further tension between two
accounts of how the general will emerges and its relation to the
private wills of citizens. Sometimes Rousseau favors a procedural
story according to which the individual contemplation of self interest
(subject to the constraints of generality and universality and under
propitious sociological background conditions such as rough equality
and cultural similarity) will result in the emergence of the general
will from the assembly of citizens (see Sreenivasan 2000). In this
account of the emergence of the general will, there seems to be no
special need for citizens to have any specifically moral qualities:
the constraints on their choice should be enough. However, Rousseau
also clearly believes that the mere contemplation of self interest
would be inadequate to generate a general will. This may partly
concern issues of compliance, since selfish citizens who can will the
general will might still not be moved to obey it. But Rousseau also
seems to believe that citizen virtue is a necessary condition for the
emergence of the general will in the first place. This presents him
with a problem for which his figure of the legislator is one supposed
solution. As a believer in the plasticity of human nature, Rousseau
holds that good laws make for good citizens. However, he also believes
both that good laws can only be willed by good citizens and that, in
order to be legitimate, they must be agreed upon by the assembly. This
puts him in some difficulty, as it is unlikely that the citizens who
come together to form a new state will have the moral qualities
required to will good laws, as those citizens will have been
psychologically shaped by unjust institutions. The legislator
therefore has the function of inspiring a sense of collective identity
in the new citizens that allows them to identify with the whole and be
moved to support legislation that will eventually transform them and
their children into good citizens. In this story, however, the new
citizens at first lack the capacity to discern the good reasons that
support the new laws and the lawgiver has to persuade them by
non-rational means to legislate in their own best interests.



The figure of the legislator is a puzzle. Like the tutor in
*Emile*, the legislator has the role of manipulating the
desires of his charges, giving them the illusion of free choice
without its substance. Little wonder then that many critics have seen
these characters in a somewhat sinister light. In both cases there is
a mystery concerning where the educator figure comes from and how he
could have acquired the knowledge and virtue necessary to perform his
role. This, in turn, raises a problem of regress. If the legislator
was formed by a just society, then who performed the
legislator's role for that society, and how was that legislator
formed? How did the tutor acquire his education if not from a tutor
who, in turn, was educated according to Rousseau's program by an
earlier tutor? At least in the case of the legislator, Rousseau might
point to some actual historical examples such as the Spartan,
Lycurgus, to argue that the idea is not entirely divorced from
reality, but this seems a weak straw to clutch at.


### 3.3 Rousseau's claim to reconcile freedom and authority



What then of Rousseau's key claim that freedom and authority can
be reconciled in his ideal republic through obedience to the general
will? The opening words of *The Social Contract* themselves
refer to freedom, with the famous saying that "Man is born free,
but is everywhere in chains". This ringing declaration, however,
is almost immediately followed by a note of paradox, as Rousseau
declares that he can make this subjection "in chains"
legitimate. The thought that Rousseau's commitment to freedom
might not be all that it first appears is strengthened by other
passages in the book, most notably his notorious declaration in Book 1
chapter 7 of *The Social Contract* that those subject to the
general will are "forced to be free."



The value of freedom or liberty is at the center of Rousseau's
concerns throughout his work , though he uses the term in various
different ways (Simpson 2006). He regards the capacity for choice, and
therefore the ability to act against instinct and inclination, as one
of the features that distinguishes humans from animals species and
makes truly moral action possible. In the *Discourse on
Inequality*, for example, he characterizes animals in essentially
Cartesian terms, as mechanisms programmed to a fixed pattern of
behavior, in contrast to humans, who are not tied to any particular
mode of life and can reject the promptings of instinct. This makes
possible both the development of the human species and also its fall
from grace, since individuals can ignore benign impulses (such as
*pitie*) if they wish to. The freedom to act contrary to
the "mechanism of the senses", and the power of willing
and choosing is, for Rousseau, something entirely outside the laws of
the physical world and is therefore not subject to scientific
explanation. Rousseau also takes this freedom to choose to act as the
basis of all distinctively moral action. In *The Social
Contract* the connection between freedom of choice and morality is
central to his argument against despotic government, where he writes
that the renunciation of freedom is contrary to human nature and that
to renounce freedom in favour of another person's authority is
to "deprive one's actions of all morality" (SC
1.4).



In Book I chapter 8 of the *The Social Contract*, Rousseau
tries to illuminate his claim that the formation of the legitimate
state involves no net loss of freedom, but in fact, he makes a
slightly different claim. The new claim involves the idea of an
exchange of one type of freedom (natural freedom) for another type
(civil freedom). Natural freedom involves an unlimited right to all
things, an idea that is reminiscent of Hobbes's "right of
nature" in *Leviathan*. Since all human beings enjoy this
liberty right to all things, it is clear that in a world occupied by
many interdependent humans, the practical value of that liberty may be
almost nonexistent. This is because any individual's capacity to
get what they wants will be limited by their physical power and the
competing physical power of others. Further, inevitable conflict over
scarce resources will pit individuals against each other, so that
unhindered exercise of natural freedom will result in violence and
uncertainty. The formation of the state, and the promulgation of laws
willed by the general will, transforms this condition. With sovereign
power in place, individuals are guaranteed a sphere of equal freedom
under the law, with protection for their own persons and security for
their property. Provided that the law bearing equally on everyone is
not meddlesome or intrusive (and Rousseau believes it will not be,
since no individual has a motive to legislate burdensome laws) there
will be a net increase in freedom compared to the pre-political
state.



Rousseau makes a further claim in the same chapter of *The Social
Contract*, namely that in conditions of civil society the citizen
achieves "moral freedom," by which he means obedience to a
law that one has prescribed to oneself (for discussion see especially
Neuhouser 1993). Although this latter claim is presented almost as an
afterthought, it is the form of freedom most directly responsive to
the challenge Rousseau had set for himself two chapters earlier, which
involved finding "a form of association" in which each
citizen would "obey only himself." Naturally, this raises
the question of whether the citizen does in fact obey only himself
when he obeys the general will. On the face of it, this claim looks
difficult to reconcile with the fact of majorities and minorities
within a democratic state, since those citizens who find themselves
outvoted would seem to be constrained by a decision with which they
disagree. Rousseau's solution to this puzzle is found much
later, in Book 4 chapter 3 of *The Social Contract*, where he
argues that those who obey laws they did not vote for remain bound by
a will that is their own, since the democratic process has enabled
them to discover the content of a general will in which they share.
Many commentators have found this argument unconvincing.



Rousseau's invocation of three types of freedom (natural, civil,
and moral) in the text of *The Social Contract* can appear
confusing. The picture is further complicated by the fact that he also
relies on a fourth conception of freedom, related to civil freedom but
distinct from it, which he nowhere names explicitly. This is
"republican freedom" and consists, not in my being subject
to my own will, but rather in the fact that the law protects me from
being subject to the will of any other particular person in the manner
that a slave or a serf is. To find Rousseau's explicit
endorsement of this idea, we have to look not to *The Social
Contract*, but rather to some of his unpublished notes and to his
*Letters from the Mountains*. Yet the concept is clearly
implicit in the notorious "forced to be free" passage in
Book 1 chapter 7, since he there explains that when each citizen is
constrained to obey the general will, he is thereby provided with a
guarantee against "all personal dependence".


### 3.4 Representation and government



One feature of Rousseau's political philosophy that has proved
least persuasive to later thinkers is his doctrine of sovereignty and
representation, with his apparent rejection of "representative
government". At the center of Rousseau's view in *The
Social Contract* is his rejection of the Hobbesian idea that a
people's legislative will can be vested in some group or
individual that then acts with their authority but rules over them.
Instead, he argues that to hand over one's general right of
ruling oneself to another person or body is a form a slavery, and that
to recognize such an authority would amount to an abdication of moral
agency. This hostility to the representation of sovereignty also
extends to the election of representatives to sovereign assemblies,
even where those representatives are subject to periodic re-election.
Even in that case, the assembly would be legislating on a range of
topics on which citizens have not deliberated. Laws passed by such
assemblies would therefore bind citizens in terms that they have not
themselves agreed upon. Not only does the representation of
sovereignty constitute, for Rousseau, a surrender of moral agency, the
widespread desire to be represented in the business of self-rule is a
symptom of moral decline and the loss of virtue.



The practical difficulties of direct self-rule by the entire citizen
body are obvious. Such arrangements are potentially onerous and must
severely limit the size of legitimate states. It is noteworthy that
Rousseau takes a different view in a text aimed at practical politics:
*Considerations on the Government of Poland*. Nevertheless, it
is not entirely clear that the widespread interpretation of Rousseau
as rejecting all forms of representative government is correct. One of
the key distinctions in *The Social Contract* is between
sovereign and government. The sovereign, composed of the people as a
whole, promulgates laws as an expression of its general will. The
government is a more limited body that administers the state within
the bounds set by those laws, and which issues decrees applying them
in particular cases. If the laws are conceived of as the people
setting a constitutional framework for society, with the
government's decrees comprising the more normal business of
"legislation," then the distance between a Rousseauian
republic and a modern constitutional democracy may be smaller than it
at first appears. In effect, while the sovereignty of the people may
be inconsistent with a representative model, the executive power of
the government can be understood as requiring it. Such a picture gains
credibility when the details of Rousseau's views on government
are examined. Although a variety of forms of government turn out to be
theoretically compatible with popular sovereignty, Rousseau is
sceptical about the prospects for both democracy (where the people
conduct the day to day running of the state and the application of the
laws) and monarchy. Instead, he favors some form of elective
aristocracy: in other words, he supports the idea that the day-to-day
administration should be in the hands of a subset of the population,
elected by them according to merit.



Two important issues arise in relation to Rousseau's account of
relations between sovereign and government. The first of these
concerns his political pessimism, even in the case of the
best-designed and most perfect republic. Just as any group has a
collective will as opposed to the individual private will of its
members, so does the government. As the state becomes larger and more
diffuse, and as citizens become more distant from one another both
spatially and emotionally, so the government of the republic will need
a proportionally smaller and more cohesive group of magistrates if its
rule is to be effective. Rousseau thinks it almost inevitable that
this group will end up usurping the legitimate sovereign power of the
people and substituting its corporate will for the people's
general will. The second issue concerns how democratic Rousseau
envisaged his republic to be. He sometimes suggests a picture in which
the people would be subject to elite domination by the government,
since the magistrates would reserve the business of agenda-setting for
the assembly to themselves. In other cases, he endorses a conception
of a more fully democratic republic. (For competing views of this
question see Fralin 1978 and Cohen 2010.)



Although Rousseau rejects Hobbes's view of the sovereign as
representing or acting in the person of the subject, he has a similar
view of what sovereignty is and its relation to the rights of the
individual. He rejects the idea that individuals associated together
in a political community retain some natural rights over themselves
and their property. Rather, such rights as individuals have over
themselves, land, and external objects, are a matter of sovereign
competence and decision. Individual rights must be specified by the
sovereign in ways that are compatible with the interests of all in a
just polity, and Rousseau rejects the idea that such rights could be
insisted on as a check on the sovereign's power.



Rousseau's commitment to the freedom and equality of citizens is
marred and limited to the fact that he envisages those citizens as
exclusively male: women are subject to the authority of the state but
have no voice in the determination of the general will. While it is
tempting for the modern reader simply to excuse this as reflective the
prejudices of Rousseau's own times, his works are marked at
times by a rather extreme misogyny which characterizes women as
necessarily inauthentic and fated to live in a world of appearance and
deception. Rousseau's insistence in Book I of the *Social
Contract* that the apparently slavish nature of some people might
be the consequence of their unjust subjection rather than a
justification for it, is not a thought that he extends to the
subjection of women. Rousseau's inconsistencies and the tension
between his liberatory philosophy and his exclusion of women was noted
not long after his death by Mary Wollstonecraft and has been the
subject of feminist critique in modern times (Fermon 1997,
Rousseliere 2021, but see Rosenblatt 2002).


### 3.5 Civil religion and toleration



The final full chapter of *The Social Contract* expounds
Rousseau's doctrine of civil religion. Contemporary readers were
scandalized by it, and particularly by its claim that true (original
or early) Christianity is useless in fostering the spirit of
patriotism and social solidarity necessary for a flourishing state. In
many ways the chapter represents a striking departure from the main
themes of the book. First, it is the only occasion where Rousseau
prescribes the content of a law that a just republic must have.
Second, it amounts to his acceptance of the inevitability of pluralism
in matters of religion, and thus of religious toleration; this is in
some tension with his encouragement elsewhere of cultural homogeneity
as a propitious environment for the emergence of a general will.
Third, it represents a very concrete example of the limits of
sovereign power: following Locke, Rousseau insists upon the inability
of the sovereign to examine the private beliefs of citizens. The
tenets of Rousseau's civil religion include the affirmation of
the existence of a supreme being and of the afterlife, the principle
that the just will prosper and the wicked will be punished, and the
claim that the social contract and the laws are sacred. In addition,
the civil religion requires the provision that all those willing to
tolerate others should themselves be tolerated, but those who insist
that there is no salvation outside their particular church cannot be
citizens of the state. The structure of religious beliefs within the
just state is that of an overlapping consensus: the dogmas of the
civil religion are such that they can be affirmed by adherents of a
number of different faiths, both Christian and non-Christian.



Despite Rousseau's concern for religious toleration both in the
chapter and elsewhere, modern readers have often been repelled by one
striking note of intolerance. Rousseau argues that those who cannot
accept the dogmas can be banished from the state. This is because he
believes that atheists, having no fear of divine punishment, cannot be
trusted by their fellow citizens to obey the law. He goes even
further, to suggest the death penalty for those who affirm the dogmas
but later act as if they do not believe them.


## 4. Language



Rousseau's writings on language and languages are contained in
two places, the unpublished *Essay on the Origin of Languages*
and in a section of the *Discourse on the Origins of
Inequality*. In the *Essay*, Rousseau tells us that human
beings want to communicate as soon as they recognize that there are
other beings like themselves. But he also raises the question of why
language, specifically, rather than gesture is needed for this
purpose. The answer, strangely enough, is that language permits the
communication of the passions in a way that gesture does not, and that
the tone and stress of linguistic communication are crucial, rather
than its content. This point enables Rousseau to make a close
connection between the purposes of speech and melody. Such vocabulary
as there originally was, according to Rousseau, was merely figurative
and words only acquire a literal meaning much later. Theories that
locate the origin of language in the need to reason together about
matters of fact are, according to Rousseau, deeply mistaken. While the
cry of the other awakens our natural compassion and causes us to
imagine the inner life of others, our purely physical needs have an
anti-social tendency because they scatter human beings more widely
across the earth in search of subsistence. Although language and song
have a common origin in the need to communicate emotion, over time the
two become separated, a process that becomes accelerated as a result
of the invention of writing. In the south, language stays closer to
its natural origins and southern languages retain their melodic and
emotional quality (a fact that suits them for song and opera).
Northern languages, by contrast, become oriented to more practical
tasks and are better for practical and theoretical reasoning.



In Part I of the *Second Discourse*, Rousseau's focus is
slightly different and occurs in the context of a polemic against
philosophers (such as natural law theorists like Condillac) who
attribute to primitive human beings a developed capacity for abstract
reasoning. Rousseau proposes need as the cause of the development of
language, but since language depends on convention to assign arbitrary
signs to objects, he puzzles about how it could ever get started and
how primitive people could accomplish the feat of giving names to
universals.


## 5. Education



Rousseau's ideas about education are mainly expounded in
*Emile*. In that work, he advances the idea of "negative
education", which is a form of "child-centered"
education. His essential idea is that education should be carried out,
so far as possible, in harmony with the development of the
child's natural capacities by a process of apparently autonomous
discovery. This is in contrast to a model of education where the
teacher is a figure of authority who conveys knowledge and skills
according to a pre-determined curriculum. Rousseau depends here on his
thesis of natural goodness, which he asserts at the beginning of the
book, and his educational scheme involves the protection and
development of the child's natural goodness through various
stages, along with the isolation of the child from the domineering
wills of others. Up to adolescence at least, the educational program
comprises a sequence of manipulations of the environment by the tutor.
The child is not told what to do or think but is led to draw its own
conclusions as a result of its own explorations, the context for which
has been carefully arranged. The first stage of the program starts in
infancy, where Rousseau's crucial concern is to avoid conveying
the idea that human relations are essentially ones of domination and
subordination, an idea that can too easily by fostered in the infant
by the conjunction of its own dependence on parental care and its
power to get attention by crying. Though the young child must be
protected from physical harm, Rousseau is keen that it becomes
accustomed to the exercise of its bodily powers and he therefore
advises that the child be left as free as possible rather than being
confined or constrained.



From the age of about twelve or so, the program moves on to the
acquisition of abstract skills and concepts. This is not done with the
use of books or formal lessons, but rather through practical
experience. The third phase of education coincides with puberty and
early adulthood. The period of isolation comes to an end and the child
starts to take an interest in others (particularly the opposite sex),
and in how he is regarded. At this stage the great danger is that
excessive *amour propre* will extend to exacting recognition
from others, disregarding their worth, and demanding subordination.
The task of the tutor is to ensure that the pupil's relations
with others are first mediated through the passion of
*pitie* (compassion) so that through the idea of the
suffering others, of care, and of gratitude, the pupil finds a secure
place for the recognition of his own moral worth where his *amour
propre* is established on a non-competitive basis. The final
period of education involves the tutor changing from a manipulator of
the child's environment into the adult's trusted advisor.
The young and autonomous adult finds a spouse who can be another
source of secure and non-competitive recognition. This final phase
also involves instruction into the nature of the social world,
including the doctrines of Rousseau's political philosophy.



In addition to Rousseau's theory of education for an individual,
he also addresses the topic of mass education for citizens, primarily
in the *Discourse on Political Economy* and in
*Considerations on the Government of Poland*. There, his stress
is on the formation of patriotic citizens, committed to the general
will and the law, and on education as being one of the primary
responsibilities of magistrates. He deplores class segregation in
education and argues for the desirability of common institutions for
all, either free or at an affordable charge.


## 6. Place in the history of philosophy



In the course of his work, Rousseau engaged intellectually with a wide
range of predecessors and contemporaries, and was deeply influenced by
ancient writers, perhaps especially Plato. The most immediate
influences on his political philosophy include Montesquieu, Hobbes,
Locke, Mandeville and Diderot. Hobbes's conception of sovereign
power, duly transmuted by Rousseau's rejection of the notion of
representative sovereignty, clearly marks the *Social
Contract*, and Rousseau sometimes claimed that all he was doing
was to restate Locke, though this has often been read with some
perplexity (Brooke 2009). Among the contemporary philosophers who
engaged closely with Rousseau's work was Adam Smith, who
famously reviewed the *Discourse on Inequality* for the
*Edinburgh Review* (Griswold 2018). Rousseau's thinking
has had a profound influence on later philosophers and political
theorists, although the tensions and ambiguities in his work have
meant that his ideas have been developed in radically incompatible and
divergent ways. In modern political philosophy, for example, it is
possible to detect Rousseau as a source of inspiration for liberal
theories, communitarian ideas, civic republicanism, and in theories of
deliberative and participatory democracy. Hostile writers have
portrayed Rousseau as a source of inspiration for the more
authoritarian aspects of the French revolution and thence for aspects
of fascism and communism.



Rousseau's most important philosophical impact was on Immanuel
Kant. A portrait of Rousseau was the only image on display in
Kant's house, and legend has it that the only time that Kant
forgot to take his daily walk was when reading *Emile*.
Instances of direct influence include Kant's idea of the
categorical imperative, the third formulation of which in the
*Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals* (the so-called formula
of the kingdom of ends) recalls Rousseau's discussion of the
general will in *The Social Contract*. Ironically, Kant's
detachment of the idea of universal legislation from its context in
the particularity of single society reverses Rousseau's own
approach, since Rousseau had, in preparatory work for *The Social
Contract* rejected the idea of a general will of the human race as
that notion appeared in Diderot's article "Natural
Right" in the *Encyclopedie*. Rousseau's
influence can also be seen in Kant's moral psychology,
especially in work such as *Religion Within the Limits of Reason
Alone*, in Kant's own thinking about conjectural history,
and in his writings on international justice which draw on
Rousseau's engagement with the work of the Abbe St.
Pierre.



The cases of Hegel and Marx are more complex. Hegel's direct
references to Rousseau are often uncomplimentary. In the
*Philosophy of Right*, while praising Rousseau for the idea
that will is the basis of the state, he misrepresents the idea of the
general will as being merely the idea of the overlap between the
contingent wills of private individuals. In the *Encyclopedia
Logic* he demonstrates an awareness that this was not
Rousseau's view. Hegel's discussion of the master-slave
dialectic and the problem of recognition in the *Phenomenology of
Spirit* also draws on Rousseau, in this case on the notion of
*amour propre* and the ways in which attempts to exact respect
and recognition from others can be self-defeating. Karl Marx's
concerns with alienation and exploitation have also been thought to
bear some kind of relationship to Rousseau's thinking on related
topics. Here the evidence is more indirect, since the references to
Rousseau in Marx's work are few and insubstantial.



In contemporary political philosophy, it is clear that the thinking of
John Rawls, especially in *A Theory of Justice* reflects the
influence of Rousseau and Rawls himself referred to his two principles
of justice as an effort to "spell out the content of the general
will" (Cohen 2010, p.2; Brooke 2015). A good example of
Rousseau's influence is the way in which Rawls uses the device
of the "original position" to put self-interested choice
at the service of the determination of the principles of justice. This
exactly parallels Rousseau's argument that citizens will be
drawn to select just laws as if from an impartial perspective, because
the universality and generality of the law means that when considering
their own interests they will select the measure that best reflects
their own interests. Echoes of Rousseau's contractualism are
also found in the work of the later Frankfurt School, most notably in
Habermas and Honneth.