Rousseau: Enlightenment, Social Contract, and General Will
Rousseau and the Enlightenment
The context of Rousseau is the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment spans the eighteenth century, highlighting key dates and events: 1688, with the Glorious Revolution in England, which involved the establishment of an innovative policy framework; and 1789, with the French Revolution, which was the culmination of ideals called ilustrados. This era is characterized by the awareness that a new epoch begins, the reason that illuminates man. It is an era of optimism and the bourgeoisie, the rising social class, gains power politically and economically. The bourgeoisie was hampered by the maintenance of feudal privileges of the nobility and clergy. In the new ideas of the Enlightenment, the bourgeoisie found an ally to combat such a situation. In this cultural environment, the ideal of human liberation through reason emerges, reason being autonomous, independent of other bodies that try to base it.
Reason is autonomous and sovereign light which will see reality and organize collectively. For this, it requires that people have access to lights, to artwork, to take them out of the darkness that has hidden ignorance. Hence the enlightened give much importance to education to achieve progress. Rousseau shares the interests and concerns of Enlightenment thinkers. However, he marked differences with his contemporaries, distancing himself from them. Rousseau’s ideas clashed with those of the French Enlightenment entirely: the downgrading of culture, reason, and society for man in nature and feeling.
Rousseau’s Critique of Progress
Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, argues that they have perverted and weakened morals. In addition to bringing luxury and an artificial economy that destroyed virtues and morality. Culture has caused misery and slavery to the masses. Ideology, through ideas and values, creates an artificial, false consciousness of social reality.
The belief in progress is criticized by Rousseau, who doubts that science and technology serve to liberate human beings from oppression and misery. The ideology of science and technology promotes slavery instead of freedom. It is necessary to fight the despotic political order and address the true nature of man, which leads to the practice of virtue. The step from the state of nature to the social state is where inequality arises, and the cause is property, which implies: taxation of the rich, ambition, war, creation of political institutions, and despotism.
The Social Contract and General Will
According to Rousseau, the social state is pure artifice and the base of all our males. In his work defending The Social Contract, he aims to ensure natural freedom and avoid farms and slavery, to establish an agreement by which each individual is given a general will. Thus, the sovereign people put down state power to ensure freedom itself: this is the social contract. This social order cannot be validated by force because it does not respect personal will, nor by natural law, but by a pact whereby each individual, joining the community, is due not only to himself, defending the person and property of every associate. The State enacts laws, but these laws are born of the general will, in which individual wills are freely deposited. This will generally always tend to public utility, universal interest, and not to individuals.
Sovereignty and the Republic
In the general will, sovereignty is deposited, which can never be attributed to an individual, as in the case of Hobbes’ king. The law expressing the general will is just. So obeying the law, every man obeys himself and remains autonomous, while looking for the common good. The State is constituted as a republic, where the sovereign is the people themselves; in them is the power. Citizens of this republic, then, are sovereign in that they make the laws and subject because they comply with them.