JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Rousseau was born of a poor family in Geneva. Rousseau's mother died a few days after giving bir t h to him, and his father was unable to raise Rousseau in any coherent fashion. From the age of twelve he was apprenticed to several masters, but lie failed to set up himself in any trade or art. For mainly of his life he remained in poverty, surviving through dint of his ingenuity and benevolence of women. For temporary material advantages he even changed his religion and accepted charity from people he detested. In 1744 he went to Paris; tried his hand at several schemes—the theatre, opera, music, poetry, without creation much success of anything. Yet his personality opened for him the doors of the best salons in Paris, where he met leading encyclopedias as well as influential, charming women, with many of whom he maintained secure liaison. But he shunned the exalted society, never shedding his plebian, puritanical background of a low-middle class family.

Rousseau existed at a time when the absolutist feudal order presided in excess of through Louis XV reigned France. Political power, privilege and social prestige were the monopoly of the king, clergy and the nobility, who existed extravagantly at the expense of the masses occupied i n a grim battle of survival. Having been denied even the minimum required of decent livelihood through the corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy of the King, discontent was rampant and the desire for change had created a climate of defiance. Sharing the discontent and the desire for change was a new emergent class of the French bourgeoisie, which establish the extant order too restrictive for its own development and had joined hands with the peasantry.

In shaping the climate of opinion and the spirit of dissent against the ancient regime the French played a major role. Enlightenment judged everything based on cause and experience alone. Inevitably it brought under attack several things that had hitherto been taken for granted, including the church and the traditional political institutions of France. Rousseau shared some of the enlightenment thoughts, but not wholly. I n so distant as the philosophers desired change, pinned their faith in man as a free agent, Rousseau was with them, but he did not share their thought of progress implied in their modernity and had greater regard for feeling than respect for rationality. Rousseau whispered that the part of what was wrong with contemporary man is that he had lost touch with his feelings. Philosophers' insensitivity towards feelings and emption led to revolt against 'cause'.

REVOLT AGAINST CAUSE

Rousseau attacked Enlightenment, in a prize-winning essay written in 1749 on the question: "Has the progress of science and arts contributed to corrupt or purify morality?" Rousseau science was not saving but bringing moral ruin upon us. Progress was an illusion. What appeared to be advancement was in reality regression. The arts of civilized society served only to 'cast garlands of flowers in excess of the chains men bore'. The development of contemporary culture had not made men either happier or more virtuous. Virtue was possible in a easy society, where men existed austere and frugal lives. In the contemporary sophisticated society man was corrupted, and greater the sophistication the greater the corruption.

As for the grand Baconian hope of creating abundance on earth, Rousseau saw more evil than good i n it. Abundance to him spelt luxury, and luxury was notoriously the breeder of corruption. Luxury, undermined nations as it undermined men. Athens, the centre of vices, was doomed to perish because of its elegance, luxury, wealth, art and sciences. He also establish support in Roman history—so extensive as Rome was poor and easy she was able to command respect and conquer an empire; after having urbanized luxury and engulfed the riches of the Universe Rome fell prey to peoples who knew not even what riches were.

Rousseau argued that 'our minds have been corrupted in proportion as the arts and sciences have improved'. The much-vaunted politeness, the glory of civilized refinement, was for Rousseau, a 'uniform and perfidious veil' under which he saw jealousy, suspicion, fear, wildness, reverse, hate and fraud.' Against intelligence, the growth of knowledge and the progress of sciences, which the Enlightenment whispered to be the only hope of culture, Rousseau set amiable and benevolent sentiments, the goodwill and reverence. He privileged sentiments and conscience in excess of cause, and proposed that all moral valuations he had done on the foundation of sentiments. Intelligence was dangerous because it undermined reverence; science was destructive because it takes absent faith; cause was bad because it sets prudence against moral intuition. Without reverence, faith and moral intuition there is neither character nor society.

CRITIQUE OF CIVIL SOCIETY

The themes introduced in his prize winning essay were urbanized further in his second essay written in 1754 on "what is the origin of inequality in the middle of men, and is it authorized through natural law?" The second Discourse, as this essay is described, is a narrative of the fall of man-how his nature got twisted, warped and corrupted with the emergence of civil society, which in turn was necessitated through the rise of the institution of private property and the require to defend it through institutionalizing social inequality through law'. Here, Rousseau is extolling the 'natural man' and pouring scorn in excess of the so-described 'civilized men'. The problem evidently was not with man, but the nature of society i n which he was livelihood.

Tracing the fall, Rousseau says that in the state of nature, which is a condition prior to the emergence of society, man was a 'noble savage'; existed in separation and had a few elementary, easily appeased needs. It was neither a condition of plenty nor scarcity; neither there was disagreement nor cooperative livelihood. There was no language or knowledge of any science or art. In such a situation man was neither happy nor unhappy, had no conception of presently and unjust, virtue and vice. The noble savage was guided not through cause but through two instincts—self love or the instinct of self-preservation, and sympathy or the gregarious instinct.

The state of nature, which was one of innocence, did not last forever. In course of time, the noble savage who existed in separation exposed the utility and usefulness of labor. Without yet having given up their primitive dispersal, men began to collaborate occasionally and created a degree of provisional order. Later men began to build shelters for themselves and families stayed jointly—a stage Rousseau calls the patriarchal stage. But as lie consolidated his first social dealings, he gave himself to labor and to thought, i.e., to the use of cause and language. This brought in the first fall for man, wrenching him from the happiness of the 'patriarchal stage' even as the detection of division of labor, enabled men to pass from a survival economy to an economy of productive development. The emergence of metallurgy and agriculture was indeed a great revolution, but iron and corn, which civilized men, ruined humanity.

The farming of earth led to the enclosure of land, and this necessarily gave rise to the thought of property, As Rousseau puts it in a well-known statement: "The first man who after fencing off a piece of land, took it upon himself to say "This belongs to me" and establish people easy-minded enough to consider, was the true founder of the civil society".

Once men began to claim possessions, the inequality of men's talents and skills led to an inequality of fortunes.

Disagreement led in turn to a demand for a system of law for sake of order and tranquility. The rich especially voiced this demand, for while the state of violence threatened everyone's life it was 'worse for the rich because it threatened their possessions also. Hence the expedient of a 'social contract' was thought of through a rich man to the detriment of the poor.

The result, says Rousseau, was the origin of civil society and laws, which gave new fetters to the poor, and new powers to the rich; which destroyed natural liberty for ever, fixed for all the law of property and inequality, transformed shrewd usurpation into settled right, and to benefit a few ambitious persons, subjected the whole of human race thenceforth to labor, servitude and wretchedness.

Rousseau suggests though, that things require not have turned out as badly as they had. If, with the establishment of the government, men, 'ran headlong into chains', that was because men had the sense to see the advantages of political institutions, but not the experience to foresee the dangers. To this theme Rousseau was to return some years later in the Social Contract.

It may though be noted here that Rousseau was not depicting the transition from state of nature to 'civil society' as a historical information.

SOCIAL CONTRACT

Though Rousseau critiqued 'civil society', he did not suggest man to choose the savage subsistence, as some of his contemporaries mistook him. In information Voltaire even ridiculed Rousseau for wanting us to walk on all four. In the Discourse itself, Rousseau exclaims: "What then is to be done? Necessity societies be totally abolished? Necessity meum and tuum be annihilated, and necessity we return again to the forests to live in the middle of bears? This is a deduction in the manner of my adversaries, which I would as soon expect and let them have the shame of drawing."

There was therefore no going back to the state of nature. For Rousseau society was inevitable, without which man could not fulfill him or realize his native potentials. If lie was critiquing civil society it was because it was not founded on presently principles and had corrupting power. The task so was to make a new social order that would help man realize his true nature.

To such a task Rousseau devoted himself in Social Contract. The key to the construction of the ideal social-political order was to handle the problem of political obligation, namely, why should man obey the state through a proper reconciliation of power with freedom, as it ought to be—a task which, just as to Rousseau, was unsatisfactorily and inadequately done through his predecessor philosophers.

Social Contract opens dramatically: "Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains". His purpose is how to create the chains legitimate in lay of the illegitimate chains of the modern society. With such a purpose, Rousseau's theoretic problem is: "To discover a form of association capable of defending and protecting with the total general forage, the person and the property of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before", through a social contract.

The social contract involves: "the total alienation of each associate, jointly with all his rights, to the whole society." Each man provides himself to all; he provides himself to nobody in scrupulous: "As there is no associate in excess of whom he does not acquire the similar right as he yields in excess of himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an augment of force for the preservation of what he has." Reduced to its essence, the participants of the social contract agree amongst themselves that: "each of us puts his person and all his power to the general use under the supreme direction of the General Will; and as a body we receive each member an indivisible part of the whole".

As a result of the contract, the private person ceases to exist for the contract produces a moral and communal Body, which receives from the similar act its unity, its general identity, its life and its will. This public person shaped from the union of all scrupulous individuals is the State when it is passive; the Sovereign when it is active; a Power, when compared with similar institutions.

After the institution of a state, Rousseau visualizes a great transformation in the human being. It substitutes in his conduct a rule of justice for the rule of instinct and provides to his action a moral character which theretofore lie had lacked. Rousseau goes to the extent of saying that he is transformed from a stupid and limited animal into an intelligent creature and man.

But such a transformation would be fantastic, quite improbable, if the contract is conceived as a single, specific occurrence. But for Rousseau, the contract is not a single event, but a method of thinking. Therefore conceived, contract becomes a procedure and we can think of alteration of human nature as also being gradual and not instantaneous. Here we have a conception of man whose moral sensibilities and intellectual prowess slowly evolves and develops pari pasii with the widening and deepening of man's social dealings brought in relation to the through a continuous participation in the General Will.

THEORY "OF GENERAL WILL

Through creation the General Will sovereign and individuals as participants in the General Will, Rousseau reconciled power with freedom as none before him had done. In order to understand how Rousseau achieved this end, we require to appreciate the nature of the General Will.

In the Discourse on Political Economy, where lie had first stated the concept of General Will, Rousseau says that "General will tends always to the preservation and welfare of the whole and of every part, and is the source of the laws, constitutes for all the members of the state, in relation to one another and to it, the rule of what is presently and unjust." It aims always at the public good and is dissimilar from the will of all, for while the former aims at the general interest, the latter aims only at the private interests and is a sum of scrupulous wills.

The generality of the will is not so much a matter of numbers as of intrinsic excellence and goodness; it is not an empirical information so much as a moral information. It is an outcome of the moral attitude in the hearts of citizens to act justly. It is produced whenever all individual members of group, sacrificing their private interests, unite in aiming at some substance whispered to be good for the whole group. The general will comes from all and apply to all and embodies the free rational will of all.

Rousseau though recognizes that unanimity amongst members on general will may not be possible at times, because while people may be willing the good; they might not always be understanding or knowing it correctly, This happens, particularly when factions create it hard for self-governing citizens to pursue the general good. In such situation Rousseau suggests that if we "...take absent from the wills the several scrupulous interests which disagreement with one another, what remnants as die sum of die differences is the general will." But there is one significant condition here—the result will be general will, only if and so distant as, all the individuals of a group are moved (even in the pursuit of their private interest) through the thought of themselves as members of a group, ail of whose members have interests deserving respect and consideration, Such being the nature of general will, there is no problem in obeying the general will but if some one refuses to obey it, Rousseau says that he will be compelled to do so: "This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free", otherwise the social contract will become an empty formula. Moreover, such compulsion is justified because the individual has given his prior consent for being restrained through the state, knowing well that socially cohesive conduct in the extensive run best promotes his own interests, and knowing also that lie will occasionally discover the attractions of some more immediate selfish good too strong to resist and so lie should be restrained whenever lie yields to such temptation.

In other languages, when a man is being compelled to obey the general will, through the whole body of citizens, it only means that lie is being salted to follow his own best interest, which he at a scrupulous instance is unluckily unaware of. Obeying the General Will is then, an expression of the moral freedom of the individuals. Therefore , when general will rules in excess of the people, the latter should have no grumble in relation to the corrosion of their liberty. Because obedience to the sovereign is no longer an obedience to any external power or arbitrary rule through one or few; it is actually an obedience to the rational part of their own selves or to a self-government — a government that would do what one's rational self would, indeed, want to do.

GENERAL WILL AS THE SOVEREIGN

It is also clear that Rousseau's conception of sovereignty is dissimilar from both Hobbes and Locke. I n Hobbes, the people set up a sovereign and transfer all powers to him. In Locke's social contract the people set up a limited government for limited purposes, but Locke shuns the conception of sovereignty — popular or monarchical — as a symbol of political absolutism. Rousseau's sovereign, on the other hand, is the people, constituted as a political society through social contract.

Unlike almost all other major political thinkers, Rousseau considers sovereignty of the people inalienable and indivisible. The people cannot provide absent, or transfer, to any person or body their ultimate right of self-government, of deciding their own destiny. Whereas Hobbes sets up a ruler as sovereign, Rousseau draws a sharp distinction flanked by sovereignty, which always and wholly resides in the people, and government, which is but a temporary agent (as in Locke's conception) of the sovereign people. Whereas, in Locke, the people transfer the exercise of their sovereign power, legislative, executive and judicial, to organs of government, Rousseau's concept of inalienable and indivisible sovereignty does not permit the people to transfer their legislative function, the supreme power in die state. As to the executive and judicial functions, Rousseau realizes that they have to be exercised through special organs of government, but they are totally subordinate to the sovereign people, and that there is no hint or suggestion of separation or balance of powers.

As Sovereignty of the General Will is inalienable and indivisible, it cannot be represented. Second, representative assemblies tend to develop scrupulous interest of their own, forgetting those of the society. Not surprising, Rousseau's preference was always for direct democracies of Swiss municipality-republic though such a preference was anachronistic, when contemporary nation-state^ were emerging. Nor can the General Will be delegated in any method whatever. Any effort to, delegate will means its end. As he said; "The moment there is a master, there is no longer a sovereign." It is only the "voice of people" that is "the voice of God."

CRITICAL APPRECIATION

There appears to be an obvious divide and fundamental logical discrepancy flanked by his earlier writings in Discourse on Inequality and the later work Social Contract. As Vaughan says, the first stage of his work is marked with defiant individualism, while in die latter there is an equally defiant collectivism.

Rousseau himself though never felt such an opposition. In the Confessions he says that every strong thought in the Social Contract had been before published in the Discourse on Inequality. Sabine opines that Rousseau is correct in his opinion, though it is also true that incompatible thoughts abound in his writings. Much that appears defiant individualism persists in Social Contract: As for instance, the use of the concept of social contract for generation of General will.

The variation flanked by the earlier works and the Social Contract is merely that in the former lie is writing himself free from the uncongenial social philosophy and in the latter he was expressing a counter-philosophy of his own. The social philosophy from which he disengaged himself was that of systematic individualism, which whispered that man was moral and rational; had sense of ownership and inherent rights; that man cooperated out of enlightened self-interest; that society or social group was created out of universal selfishness and was utilitarian in nature meant for the protection of rights and promotion of happiness or self-satisfaction; and that in itself it had no value though it protects values.

Rousseau was critical of this systematic individualism in Locke because, it did not concur with human nature, the method lie understood it. For Rousseau, the attributes of rationality, the power to calculate, die desire for happiness, the thought of ownership, and the power to communicate with others and enter into agreement for creating a government are all attributes acquired through man through Jiving in society and not attributes of a natural man. Besides, Rousseau thought that it was absolutely false to think that cause through itself would ever bring men jointly, if they were concerned only with their individual happiness, because even the thought of self-interest arises societies in which men live. Secondly self-interest is not more natural or innate than die social needs that draw men jointly i n societies. Rousseau measured that in excess of and above self-interest, men have an innate revulsion against sufferings in others. The general foundation of sociability is not cause but feeling. The calculating egoist of the theories exists not in nature but only in perverted society. Consequently, their theories were wrong and had shades of die 'evil contract' in the Discourses on Inequality. Human nature could best be understood through going beyond the stage of socialization. This neither Hobbes nor Locke does; for them the state of nature is a stage prior to political order. Though Hobbes says state of nature is pro-social, it is in information not because the attributes of the Hobbessian man are those of a public person. Natural egoist is a fiction for Rousseau.

In developing his counter-philosophy, Rousseau got immense help from the classical Greek thought:

That it is in die nature of man to associate with others in organic methods/which means that the development of each is dependent upon the development of all. Without such organic dealings man cannot realize his true nature or attain his full stature as a man; solitude and' separatism is contrary to his nature—Robinson Crusoe is therefore a false mode:

That it is only in society that man acquires right, freedom and morality—outside the society there might be independence, and right as mere force only but no morality;

That man is what the society creates him; if the socialization is bad, his nature will be twisted and warped;

That society is the chief moralizing agent and so symbolizes the highest moral value; and

That political subjection is essentially ethical and only secondarily a matter of law and power.

With insights gleaned from Classical Greek philosophy, Rousseau worked out his own political theory. It rejected systematic individualism, compelling one to think that society was more than a heap of individual atoms; that good of all—the 'public good' cannot be produced through each individual's pursuit of private interests or universal selfishness. Unless men thought beyond their private interests, in conditions of public interest or the good of the whole of which they are integral part, they could not attain their own good.

Moreover, only when individuals are disposed towards thinking in conditions of public good, that power, which is required for order and, freedom, which is needed for felicity or self-development can be reconciled. Locke and Hobbes both failed in this reconciliation because they had a false theory of man. Locke becomes fearful of power while securing liberty; for the sake of order and tranquility sacrifices individual at the altar of the sovereign.

There is much value in the philosophical insight of theory of General Will and it led to an alternative conceptualization of state, not as a machine but as an organism; but Rousseau did not care to work out the practical implications of his theory. One consequence of this has been that whereas Rousseau had set out to give a philosophical justification for democratic governance and resolve the tension flanked by power and freedom establish in the mechanistic theory of state, quite contrary to his intentions, Rousseau became for several an apotheosis of totalitarianism.

Theory of General Will unluckily provided a pretext for any arbitrary ruler to coerce recalcitrant subjects, pleading that they, much as they are enslaved to their scrupulous wills, do not know what the general will is. In this context 'the paradox of freedom' in Rousseau, acquired dangerous propensities. Liberty became an 'honorific' word, the name for a sentiment with which even attacks on liberty could be baptized.

But even more dangerous was the implied view that a man whose moral convictions are against those generally held in his society is merely capricious and ought to be suppressed. As Sabine comments this was perhaps not a legitimate inference from the abstract theory of General Will, because freedom of conscience really is a social and not merely an individual good. But in every concrete situation the general will has to be recognized with some body of actual opinion, and moral intuitionism usually means that morality is recognized with standards, which are usually accepted. Forcing a man to be free therefore becomes a euphemism for creation blindly obedient to the mass or the strongest party.

In a method such abuse happened because the theory of general will was too abstract and there was difficulty with regard to its site or identification. That general will is always right is merely a truism because it stands for social good, which is itself the standard of right. But how does this absolute right stand in relation to several perhaps conflicting judgments in relation to the it? Who is entitled to decide what is right? Sabine writes that Rousseau's effort to answer these questions produced a diversity of contradictions and evasions. Likewise Wayper comments that unluckily Rousseau cannot help us here. "He can never tell how we can be sure of finding the General Will....So much vagueness in relation to the something as significant as the finding of the General will is to be regretted."

Notwithstanding such criticisms, the significance of Rousseau cannot be ever diminished. In protection of Rousseau it may be said, as Ebenstein has observed, that he was the first modem writer to have attempted, though not always successfully, to synthesize good government with self-government in the key concept of the general will. The classical doctrine of Plato and Aristotle had accentuated good government at the expense of self-government. And the more contemporary thoughts of Locke and the liberal‘ school were concerned principally with self-government; it relegated the problem of good government into background.

Secondly, Rousseau also was clearer than the conventional liberal doctrines that the end of government is not confined to the protection of individual liberty but also comprises equality because 'liberty cannot exist without it.' In the Social Contract one may not notice the hostility that he showed to the institution of private property in the Discourse on Inequality but he does not abandon the ideal of economic equality. No citizen "shall be ever wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself." Rousseau realizes that in practice it is extremely hard to uphold the ideal of equitable sharing of property, but it is precisely because the force of circumstances tends continually to destroy equality that the force of legislation should always tend to its maintenance. Whereas Locke failed to see property as a relation of power of man in excess of man, Rousseau clearly recognized property as a form of private power that had to be kept under manage through the general will.

Third, Rousseau was not socialist in the contemporary sense of the term, yet indirectly this part of Rousseau—the stress on equality—has aided the development of the socialist sentiment through sharpening the awareness that political liberty and crass economic inequality are ultimately incompatible if democracy is to survive and expand. And secondly that all rights, including those of property, are rights within the society and not against it.

Fourth, Rousseau himself was in no sense a nationalist, though his philosophy contributed to nationalism. Through reviving the intimacy of feeling and the reverence connoted through citizenship in the municipality-state, he made it accessible, at least as an emotional coloring, to citizenship in the national state. The cosmopolitanism implied through natural law, he chose to regard as merely a pretext for evading the duties of a citizen.

To our present times, Rousseau's thoughts are still extremely relevant, for, how often we have lamented character of the representative, party-democracy and feared the state turning against the people. And as bulwark against such depredation, have wished to strengthen the civil society for the sake of protecting and retrieving our freedom. No less frequent has been the lament that the troubles of our society caused through the spawning of many primordial ties have arisen because of the failure to take the value of citizenship seriously. His theory of popular sovereignty is a constant reminder to citizens to guard against the usurpation of power through the executive, The record of free government everywhere has proved that there can be no reliance on contrivances and institutions alone in the eternal thrash about for liberty, and that its survival depends, in the last analysis, on those moral qualities that Rousseau calls General will, justice, virtue. In addition, we an also discover attendance of Rousseau in Rawlsian theory of distributive justice, in the conception of development as-expansion of human capabilities. And perhaps it would not be wrong to suggest that Rousseau, as critic of civil society is a precursor of Marx and much of the radical thought ever since.