Rousseau

The Genevan-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau has long drawn accusations of inconsistency or paradox. Many readers have seen in his political project not a reinvention of republican ideals in modernity but instead a dangerous collectivism. The prospects of making man—unsociable by nature—into a being fit for society might appear tenuous at best, totalitarian at worst. Such concerns, however, give too little weight both to Rousseau’s originality as a republican thinker and to his hopeful yet chastened view of the possibilities of politics. In taking the republic’s sovereign power into the Enlightenment, Rousseau adopts the radical premise of modern natural right and of man’s natural liberty and equality. Social man can only reclaim this title by transferring his rights to the whole of the political body of which he is part. Through the sovereignty of the general will and the creation of law, the community reestablishes right. Though Rousseau insists upon the goodness of nature and of human nature in particular, the conventions—human agreements—that sustain a well-ordered society allow for a greater perfection through the civil state. All the same, convention is not nature, and Rousseau acknowledges its inherent limitedness. He recognizes that even the greatest of human institutions have their source in particular relations and affections that only the civil condition can give man occasion to know. In this, he acknowledges a more subtle approach to the virtuous society and provides a welcome resource for public philosophy.