rousseau on the social contract sparknotes

It should perhaps come as no surprise that Rousseau spent the last few years of his life gripped by a powerful and unhealthy degree of paranoia.

In the last analysis, despite Rousseau’s reputation as a thinker who embodied much of the Enlightenment spirit and paved the way for Romanticism, The Social Contract has little that is original in terms of ideas, is often muddled in its thinking, and fails to make much of an advance on the central precepts (which are also totalitarian in nature) outlined by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan over a century earlier. For insofar as the individual is also a subject of the state, the state has an interest in protecting what has. It’s little surprise that Robespierre, who presided over the Reign of Terror, should have taken his inspiration from Rousseau’s ideas. When an individual 'gives himself to' a civil state, he also gives 'all the resources at his command, including the goods he possesses.' This does not, however, entail relinquishing ones property. He also believes that the will of this ‘sovereign’ is absolute, and that anyone who fails to adhere to its demands should be put to death. It’s worth bearing in mind that, in replacing an actual sovereign, such as a king or emperor, with the ‘sovereign’ collective that is society, Rousseau simply replaces one tyrannical figure with another. It’s also what totalitarianism looks like: even the right of the individual to live cannot be guaranteed if his death would (potentially) benefit the general will. After all, that’s what putting the community ahead of the individual looks like. It is not difficult to trace a line from Rousseau’s argument in The Social Contract to the idea (expressed by the Emperor in Ray Bradbury’s short story ‘The Flying Machine’) that it is better for one innocent man to die if it potentially saves a million lives. But are they? Do they benefit every member of the community equally, and what further checks and balances might be necessary to ensure that the individual is not crushed under the wheels of the General Will? What if certain ideas are deemed ‘dangerous’ to society at large and are then silenced? Who decides what these are, and who decides on what qualifies them as dangerous?

Rousseau on the social contract sparknotes