Enlightenment
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
1712–1778
“The first man who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan-born writer of the French Enlightenment who made nature, freedom, and the general will central themes of political and educational thought. The traces moral corruption to social comparison and property. holds that legitimate authority rests on a pact in which each, uniting with all, remains free under laws he gives himself. Sovereignty belongs to the people. Government is only the executive of their will. Later democratic theory still answers his terms.
In the Conversation
25 of the Great Ideas
Ethics
Politics
Liberty
True liberty is obedience to the law one prescribes for oneself: the general will.
Government
Legitimate government expresses the general will: the people ruling themselves in common.
Law
Legitimate law is the act by which the people give themselves a rule: the expression of the general will.
War and Peace
War is a relation between states, not between men. It is a consequence of political society itself.
Democracy
Sovereignty belongs to the people and cannot be represented; the general will is the only legitimate authority.
State
The legitimate state is constituted by the general will, which expresses the common good and cannot err.
Wealth
Private property is the origin of inequality; wealth corrupts natural goodness and civil society was invented to protect the rich.
Revolution
When the social contract is violated by the sovereign, the people reclaim their natural liberty and revolution restores the general will.
Tyranny
A tyrant usurps royal authority; a despot usurps sovereign power; both violate the social contract and free the people from obedience.
Family
The natural family is the only genuinely natural society — but good families in a corrupt society require the most careful artificial formation.
Citizen
True citizenship requires that each member identify so completely with the common good that self-interest and civic duty become indistinguishable.
Labor
Labor and property inequality corrupted natural freedom: the social contract is a fraud perpetrated by the rich on the poor.
Slavery
The right of slavery is null and void; force does not create right, and no man can renounce his freedom.
Constitution
The general will of the people is the sole foundation of legitimate law; sovereignty cannot be represented or divided.
Monarchy
Monarchy concentrates executive power effectively, but its natural tendency is to degenerate into despotism.
Aristocracy
Elective aristocracy is the best form of government; it places administration in the hands of the wisest few, chosen by the sovereign people.
Oligarchy
Private property creates inequality, inequality creates oligarchy, and oligarchy corrupts the social bond that makes free government possible.