Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) was the leading French political thinker of the 18th century, a man often credited, though by then dead, with inspiring the French Revolution, and still perhaps the principal inspiration for the whole participatory democracy movement. His work, which covered many areas, as was typical of the Enlightenmentphilosophes, who were happy to number him among them, is best portrayed in three works. Of these the Social Contract is by far the best known, if only by its title, but the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality certainly and, arguably, Émile (his treatise on education) are equally important for an understanding of his political theory. In the Social Contract Rousseau argued that democracy was only possible, and could only guarantee freedom (his principal concern), when people lived in small ‘face-to-face’ communities where all citizens could and would fully join in the making of all laws in some form of participatory assembly. For Rousseau, representative democracy as usually practised in the West was meaningless, making citizens free only for a few minutes every few years when they went to the polls.
He insisted that freedom involved being subject only to those rules one had intentionally ‘willed’, hence his concept of the general will, a joint and communal intention which came about only when the whole society met together, ignored their private desires and voted for what they felt was in the public interest. Rousseau, though obviously a champion of an extreme if impracticable democratic freedom, has also been seen as a dangerously authoritarian writer, whose views anticipate fascism. This opposition comes about because of his very great concern for equality, and his belief in mass meetings and mass influence, both of which seem to threaten liberal individualism. What is usually forgotten in such attacks is that Rousseau himself was so aware of the social conditions necessary for his theories to apply, especially that they could only work in very small communities where everyone kneweach other, that he despaired of them ever being implemented in his contemporary Europe. Although his major book is called the Social Contract, and although he is usually considered along with Hobbes and Locke as a social contract thinker, his own views are much closer to the classical Greek political philosophers, in that he regarded mankind as essentially social in nature, and dismissed the idea of man living in a state of nature, except, perhaps, as a ‘noble savage’, one without the hallmark of humanity, the use of language.
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