Rousseau (1712-1778) was born in Geneva, but came to France in 1743, when after a quarrel with his employer (the French Ambassador to Venice) over unpaid wages, he travelled to Paris to obtain justice for himself.
His first literary work was not published until 1950, it was an essay on the question: 'Have The Arts and Sciences conferred benefits on mankind?'. Rousseau argued that they had not, and did so with such success that he was awarded the prize.
Rousseau's argument was that science, letters and the arts were the enemy of morals, and that by creating desires in people, they led away from a peoples 'natural' state of being. Believing that science and virtue were incompatible, Rousseau argued that the 'noble savage' was the closest to a human ideal, and that everything that made up civilisation was to be despised and deplored, as it led to great evil.
Rousseau followed up his first essay with a second entitled 'Discourse on Inequality' which was published in 1754. In this he stated 'man is naturally good, and only by institutions is he made bad'. Rousseau sent the essay to his contemporary Voltaire, who responded 'I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours.'
Rousseau's belief in natural instinct over rational thought is still very much with us today and used frequently in advertising and by politicians, when making an appeal to the emotion, rather than logic. Just as one example, watch this advertisement for a mobile phone, in which some overly photogenic young people frolic in a variety of settings, while the voice-over extols the virtues of impatience. Do we believe that it was impatience that led to the development of that mobile phone? Or is it possible that hundreds of years of scientific advance have contributed towards this particular device?
Rousseau's most important work was his 'Social Contract', published in 1762. In which he speaks of 'general will' in relation to democracy. Rousseau also speaks of 'The Sovereign', in this work, but does not mean an individual, such as a king or leader. Instead he means that the people of a state, will form the sovereign and determine the general will.
Rousseau's democracy is a 'true' democracy, where all the people of the state come together to form the sovereign and determine what the 'general will' might be. In Rousseau's world, this could lead to somebody who held a viewpoint that ran contrary to the general will, being 'forced to be free'. E.g. being forced to act contrary to their own will and inclination.
Rousseau's argument for this system, was that if each individual is forced to vote alone, acting only for their own self-interest, then the result of such a vote, would be the best possible outcome for the state as a whole, as the majority of people would have their interests looked after.
The obvious downside of such an approach, would be that anybody who's viewpoint differed from the general will, would be forced to follow the general will, or presumably leave the state. I do not believe that Rousseau himself offered any alternative to following the general will.
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