Jean Jacques Rousseau was a major philosopher, writer, and composer of the eighteenth century Enlightenment,
whose political philosophy with seeds of socialism influenced the French Revolution and the development of modern political and educational thought.
Perhaps Jean Jacques Rousseau’s most important work is The Social Contract, which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order within a framework of classical republicanism. The treatise begins with the dramatic opening lines, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
One man thinks he the master of others, but remains more of a slave than they.” Rousseau claimed that the state of nature was a primitive condition without law or morality, which human beings left for the benefits and necessity of cooperation.
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As society developed, division of labor and private property required the human race to adopt institutions of law. In the degenerate phase of society, man is prone to in frequent competition with his fellow men while at the same time becoming increasingly dependent on them.
This double pressure threatens both his survival and his freedom. According to Rousseau, by joining together into civil society through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free. This is because submission to the authority of the general will of the people as a whole guarantees individuals against being subordinated to the wills of others and also ensures that they obey themselves because they are, collectively, the authors of the law.
Although Rousseau argues that sovereignty (or the power to make the laws) should be in the hands of the people, he also makes a sharp distinction between the sovereign and the government. The government is composed of magistrates, charged with implementing and enforcing the general will. The “sovereign” is the rule of law, ideally decided on by direct democracy in an assembly. Under a monarchy, however, the real sovereign is still the law.
From this very idea the concept of absolutism took its shape later. Rousseau was opposed to the idea that the people should exercise sovereignty via a representative assembly Template. The kind of republican government of which Rousseau approved was that of the city state, of which Geneva, was a model, or would have been, if renewed on Rousseau’s principles. The notion of the general wills is wholly central to Rousseau’s theory of political legitimacy.