Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Rousseau and the Social Contract

Christopher Bertram

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134633951
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Rousseau's Social Contract is a benchmark in political philosophy and has influenced moral and political thought since its publication. Rousseau and the Social Contract introduces and assesses:

*Rousseau's life and the background of the Social Contract*The ideas and arguments of the Social Contract*Rousseau's continuing importance to politics and philosophy

Rousseau and the Social Contract will be essential reading for all students of philosophy and politics, and anyone coming to Rousseau for the first time.

1

ROUSSEAU, THE MAN

When we study the work of philosophers like Hobbes, Locke or Kant, we normally feel that we can do so without knowing much about their lives and personalities. Certainly, such facts can be interesting, but they are hardly essential to our understanding. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is hard to treat in the same detached fashion. He thought of his life and his work as a complete whole, and of his work as expressing a unique central principle, namely that man is naturally good and becomes evil only through society.¹ This commendable will to integrity can become a burden rather than an asset once the facts of his life and personality are known, since many of the facts that form the integral whole do not reflect well on him. Rousseau was an unstable and even paranoid individual for considerable periods of his life and despite promoting an ideal of authenticity and transparency in social relations has left us accounts of his life that sometimes cast doubt on his capacity for knowledge of himself. His psychological difficulties have also provided ammunition to a variety of hostile commentators who have sought to interpret his work in all areas as simply expressing his derangement. So it is important, from the outset, to have some conception of his life and work as a whole, of his own view of them and how they fit together.

Students of philosophy or political theory, who come to know Rousseau primarily through the Discourse on Inequality and the Social Contract are often surprised to learn of the breadth of his achievement. His treatise on education – Emile – made a lasting contribution to childcare and pedagogy. His novel Julie or La Nouvelle Heloise was one of the most popular novels of the century. In music he became famous both as the composer of the smash hit opera of the 1750s – Le Devin du Village (‘The Village Soothsayer’) – and as one of the chief protagonists in a cultural war between the upholders of the French operatic tradition and the devotees of the simpler Italian style. As a cultural critic he also famously opposed d’Alembert’s proposal that a theatre should be erected in Geneva by contrasting the theatre – where passive spectators have their emotions manipulated by actors who do not feel the passions they simulate – with the idea of genuinely inclusive festivals of the people. Through these various writings and through his lifelong interest in botany he promoted a new attitude to and appreciation of the natural world. Finally, in his various autobiographical writings Rousseau tried to explore how he became who he became and reveals his pain at his inability to realise relationships that embody the values of directness, transparency and immediacy.

CONFESSIONS

Our first and primary source for Rousseau’s life are these various attempts at autobiography. The most ambitious of these is the Confessions, but we also have a series of letters to the French censor Malesherbes, the paranoid but insightful Dialogues, and finally the wistful and beautifully written Reveries of the Solitary Walker. The Confessions purports to be ‘a portrait in every way true to nature’,² and aims to sketch an inner history that will explain how Rousseau became himself, shirking no detail however embarrassing and humiliating to their author. However bad things are, though, the Rousseau of the Confessions seems confident that he will emerge from the telling of his life with at least comparative credit when he says of his audience, ‘Let them groan at my depravities, and blush for my misdeeds … and may any man who dares say, “I was a better man than he”.’³ Indeed, Rousseau’s depiction of events, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic, is often remarkable for its frankness.

These moments of extreme candour contrast sharply with other episodes that betray an astonishing lack of self-knowledge. Rousseau often seems to have been genuinely mystified at the attitude that others took to him: why would they not endorse his own view of himself as uniquely committed to truth, honesty and friendship? He is quick to see others as being motivated by malice, is extremely suspicious of any generosity shown towards him, and increasingly sees so-called friends and associates as being implicated in a giant conspiracy against him. Although it is easy to see all this just as a manifestation of Rousseau’s own psychological difficulties, a fair account will reveal that not all of the malice directed towards him was simply imagined. In Rousseau’s case, Voltaire in particular seems not to have lived up to the maxim of tolerance sometimes attributed to him: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’⁴ And following the publication of Emile and of the Social Contract in 1762, Rousseau became the victim of persecution from the states of both France and Geneva and, partly as a result, the object of overt public hostility. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that someone as sensitive as Rousseau undoubtedly was should manifest his personality in an extreme manner.

GENEVA

One of the central facts in understanding who Rousseau was – and who he believed himself to be – has to be his Genevan background. He was born in the city on 28 June 1712. The birth was a difficult one and his mother Suzanne, a member of the patrician Bernard family, only lived for eight days after the appearance of Jean-Jacques. This meant that his father, Isaac Rousseau, a watchmaker, was left to bring up the boy alone. Isaac, though a citizen, was far from wealthy and the increasingly impoverished family had to move to the artisan quarter of St Gervais, a centre of radical dissent. Eighteenth-century Geneva was a state that, like so many since, was torn between its sociological reality as a plutocratic oligarchy and a legitimating myth of freedom, equality and democratic inclusion. The theologian Calvin, in his role as lawgiver, had devised a constitution for the Protestant city-state in 1541 and had vested sovereignty in the body of citizens. But at least by Rousseau’s day, this was just the surface form of things. Although the citizens were nominally sovereign, actual power was vested not in the Conseil General (their annual assembly) but in the smaller Grand Conseil (200 members) and the Petit Conseil (25 members). Since even the citizens represented a mere ten per cent of the population (the rest being non-citizen immigrants and their descendants), effective political power was, therefore, in the hands of a very narrow oligarchy indeed. The question of who had the right to rule was a matter of bitter contestation that sometimes became violent and bloody. This was a conflict not just about the rights and wrongs of democratic and oligarchic forms of government, but also the proper meaning and interpretation of Genevan identity.⁵

Rousseau’s father brought him up to have a strong sense of patriotic identification and a sense of republican virtue fostered by father and son reading the classics, and especially Plutarch, together. The ideal of the ancient republic that Rousseau picked up from those readings was something that he eventually imported into his aspirations for his homeland. Rousseau marked his own attachment to the city by styling himself ‘Citizen of Geneva’, though this was not something he was entitled to do between his conversion to Catholicism in 1728 and his reconversion in 1754. His attitude to the city emerges most strikingly in two pieces of writing: the dedicatory essay to the Discourse on Inequality and the Letter to D’Alembert on the Theatre. Given Genevan reality, the praise Rousseau heaps on the city in the dedicatory essay cannot be taken at face value, but probably represents an ironic attack on the city’s oligarchy.⁶ Rousseau is depicting the state not as it is, but as he would like it to be. He commends the republic for its democratic characteristics:

the sovereign and the people could have only one and the same interest, so that all the motions of the machine might always tend only to the common happiness; since this is impossible unless the People and the Sovereign are the same person, it follows that I should have wished to be born under a democratic government wisely tempered.

(G1: 114–15/OC3: 112)

But even if the institutions of Genevan life failed to measure up to Rousseau’s aspirations, he nevertheless saw in its people the material from which virtuous citizens could be made. Nowhere does this come out more vividly than in the Letter to D’Alembert, where Rousseau invokes the image of the St Gervais regiment eating and dancing together and remembers his father pointing to the scene and telling his son to remember the brotherhood of all Genevans.⁷ This notion of Geneva – though not its reality – thus expressed for Rousseau a political ideal: the possibility of realising in the modern world a republic of virtue to rival the Greek polis and the Roman republic, an amalgam of order and spontaneity where individual citizens partake freely in a relationship of unity.

ADOLESCENCE

This childhood of Plutarch and republican festivity was not to last forever. Isaac Rousseau was forced into exile following a quarrel in which he was unwise enough to unsheathe his sword. As a result, the young Jean-Jacques was sent to live with a pastor named Lambercier at Bossey, outside the city. It was here that he experienced the delights of corporal punishment at the hands of the thirty-year-old Mlle Lambercier, a taste that would remain with him always. The Lambercier household was also the birthplace both of his acute sense of justice and of his amour propre. The first was born when he was falsely accused and punished for breaking the teeth of a comb. He recounts how he boiled with indignation at being blamed for something he had not done. His amour propre took flight when the young Rousseau and his cousin diverted a ditch which pastor Lambercier had dug to water a newly-planted walnut tree. When the pastor discovers the diversion he exclaimed ‘an aqueduct! An aqueduct’, leading Rousseau to glow with pride at his precocity as a civil engineer.⁸

This happy period in his life did not last. Rousseau had to earn his living and was apprenticed as an engraver to a brutal master. One night the sixteen-year-old found himself locked outside the city gates, and, rather than face more punishment he decided to set off into the world. In neighbouring Savoy he was adopted by the young estranged wife of a Swiss nobleman: the Catholic convert Francoise-Louise de la Tour, Baronne de Warens. Mme de Warens promptly sent him off to Turin to be instructed in the Catholic faith. It is there, working as a servant in a noble household, that he committed an act which caused him lifelong shame: he falsely denounced a servant-girl for the theft of a ribbon that he himself had stolen, thereby bringing disgrace and probably penury on an innocent person. It is an episode that he returns to again and again in his autobiographical writings. His experience of being in service left him with a strong dislike of subjection to the will of others and a corresponding love of freedom and independence.

Rousseau soon made his way back to Mme de Warens’s house and became, briefly, her lover. Sometimes he represents his life with her as idyllic, especially when he looks back in the Reveries, written at the end of his life. But at other times he recognises that the relationship with a woman he refers to as ‘maman’ is hardly one between equals. Nevertheless, it continued to be a model for love and friendship: with Mme de Warens he felt ‘peace of heart, calmness, serenity, security, confidence’,⁹ feelings which were largely absent from his other relationships. We get a sense of how deeply unsatisfactory even this relationship was from the fact that he had to imagine himself with someone else during sex in order to preserve for himself his ideal conception of who she was.

FROM VENICE TO VINCENNES

Mme de Warens soon tired of her protégé, at least as someone to share her bed with. In the years 1740 to 1749 the building blocks for his future career were assembled. He enjoyed a brief career as a tutor (where he met Condillac for the first time). He also worked extensively on music and in 1742 presented a Project for a New Musical Notation to the Academy of Sciences in Paris.¹⁰ It is also during this period that Rousseau started to think about writing a study of political institutions. He travelled to Venice as secretary to the French ambassador there and observed at first hand the sclerotic government of the Venetian republic. His stay in Venice was not only fateful for his political development, his exposure to the delicious music of Venice also shaped his aesthetic views.

The Rousseau of the 1740s was not, yet, the man who is famous today. He mixed freely with Diderot and his collaborators on the Encyclopedie and became a member of the Paris literary scene that he was later to reject. At this period he also met the woman who became the mother of the five children he was to deposit at the foundling hospital – Therese Levasseur, an illiterate laundry maid. We shall never know exactly what turned the Rousseau of the salons into the Roussea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• References
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Rousseau, the Man
• 2 Human Nature and Moral Psychology
• 3 Man is Born Free (Book 1, Chs 1–2)
• 4 False Theories of the Body Politic (Book 1, Chs 3–5)
• 5 The Social Pact and Property (Book 1, Chs 6–9)
• 6 Sovereignty and the General Will (Book 2, Chs 1–6)
• 7 The Lawgiver, Culture and Morality (Book 2, Chs 7–12)
• 8 Government and Sovereign (Book 3)
• 9 Civil Religion (Book 4, Ch. 8)
• 10 The Social Contract in Retrospect
• Bibliography
• Index