Jean Jacques Rousseau · Politics
Rousseau’s answer to how people can unite under government yet remain free - by obeying only a collective will that is truly their own.
Rousseau sets himself the hardest problem in politics. We need to live together under common rules, which means obeying some authority - yet he has insisted that humans are born free and that freedom is our deepest good. So how can people unite under government without losing the very liberty that makes them human? His answer is the general will: a form of association in which each, by obeying the whole, obeys only himself, and so remains as free as before.
From this, Rousseau draws a radically democratic conclusion. Legitimate political authority can rest only on the general will of the people themselves - never on a king’s claim, conquest, or inheritance. The people are the sovereign; laws are legitimate only if they express the general will; and sovereignty can never be given away or represented, because to hand your will to a representative is to be enslaved again. When citizens together make the laws they then obey, they are at once author and subject - ruling and ruled by the same will - and that, says Rousseau, is the only way to be free under government.
Rousseau’s ideal of self-rule by the general will runs into a hard practical problem that drives him to two of his most unsettling proposals. The problem is circular: a good society requires good citizens who reliably will the common good, but good citizens are produced only by a good society and good laws. How does the cycle ever start? How do you get a corrupt, self-interested people to institute the very laws that would make them virtuous? Rousseau’s answer is the Legislator (or Lawgiver) - an extraordinary, almost superhuman founding figure (he cites Lycurgus, Moses, Numa) who, at the birth of a nation, frames its laws and shapes its mores, ‘changing human nature’ to transform isolated individuals into citizens. The Legislator has no coercive power and holds no office; he works by wisdom and persuasion, even invoking divine authority to win acceptance for laws the people are not yet wise enough to value. It is a troubling device: a founder who must, in a sense, manipulate a people into the freedom they cannot yet choose for themselves.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Rousseau makes legitimate authority rest on the general will. Explain how this is supposed to keep citizens free even while they obey, in your own words.
Leads to Maximilien Robespierre.
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