AUTHOR: JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
DATE: 1742
The Social Contract was a revolutionary book in the truest sense of the word, firing the imaginations and the passions of the leading lights of the French Revolution – an epoch-defining event that Rousseau did not witness, having died a decade or so before it started, but of which he was a posthumous figurehead. One of Rousseau’s greatest champions was Maximilien Robespierre, who wrote of him in his diary: ‘Divine man! It was you who taught me to know myself. When I was young you brought me to appreciate the true dignity of my nature and to reflect on the great principles which govern the social order.’
Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712 and proved to be almost as talented a musician and composer as he was a philosopher. One of his early achievements was the development of a system of mathematical musical notation. After dividing his time between various continental cities, he came to Paris when he was about thirty years old and soon became a fixture in its cultural and philosophical scene. Paris was his spiritual home, and where his philosophy would find its most ardent audience.
He struck up a particular friendship with Denis Diderot, the celebrated Enlightenment philosopher and editor of the famous Encyclopaedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts. Rousseau’s own career as a philosopher began in earnest when he won an essay-writing competition in 1750 on the subject of the moral benefits of the arts and sciences. He developed some of the themes from that paper in what became his first major work, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (also known as the Second Discourse), published in 1754. There he reflected on what he considered to be humankind’s ‘state of nature’. He concluded that Man in his primitive state was a figure whose morals had not yet been corrupted and who showed a gentleness ‘when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man’.
Primitive man, according to Rousseau, occupied a happy middle ground between brutish creatures and the decadent modern Man in his civil society. Civil society, he contended, was not a driver of progress but rather of human decay. If that were not critical enough, he also identified private property as the cause of its deep inequality:
The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine’, and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.
The revolutionary potential of such discourse was obvious and caused many in authority to regard Rousseau as a dangerous renegade. More controversy followed in 1762 with Emile, or On Education, with its confrontational assertion: ‘Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.’ Rousseau’s rebuttal of certain basic Christian tenets and his demand for complete religious tolerance saw the book banned in Paris and Geneva. But it was The Social Contract, published the same year, that really rocked the boat.
Rousseau argued that civil society denigrates humanity, a position he framed in one of philosophy’s most memorable quotations: ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Those who think themselves the masters of others are indeed greater slaves than they.’ He would go on to make the case against the divine right of monarchs and argued that no country had the right to impose its rule on another (‘Let us then admit that force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers’).
CONFESSIONS
Rousseau composed several volumes of memoir that were published after his death under the title Confessions. The work is regarded as one of the first autobiographies in a truly modern sense, one of the earliest examples of an introspective study of one’s own life by a non-religious figure. The book is notable too for recounting an anecdote about ‘a great princess’ who, when told that the peasants had no bread, replied: ‘Then let them eat brioches.’ This was the source of the saying so often later attributed to Marie-Antoinette, appearing a full seven years before she was alleged to have damagingly coined the phrase.
Sovereign power should reside with the people (including women – another radical position for the time), with all citizens participating in government. Harking back to a model of pure democracy, Rousseau called for a society in which all are equal and where laws are made in accordance with the common will, which he said would naturally promote justice and egalitarianism. He furthermore contended that the government should be distinct from this popular legislature, executing its business but under threat of abolition should it act against the will of the people.
Unsurprisingly, Europe’s powers by now considered him entirely beyond the pale and he spent the next few years traversing the continent in search of asylum. He died in 1778 but his time was still to come. A hero of the French Revolution, one wonders what he would have made of, say, Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. Regardless, in 1794, sixteen years after his death, he was interred in the Panthéon in Paris, commemorated as a national hero. Writing in the twentieth century, American philosopher Will Durant said of him:
How did it come about that this man, after his death, triumphed over Voltaire, revived religion, transformed education, elevated the morals of France, inspired the Romantic movement and the French Revolution, influenced the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, the plays of Schiller, the novels of Goethe, the poems of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, the socialism of Marx, the ethics of Tolstoy, and, altogether, had more effect upon posterity than any other writer or thinker of that eighteenth century in which writers were more influential than they had ever been before?