Abstract
This chapter re-examines Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concepts of political freedom and equality, just laws, popular sovereignty, the general will, and democracy. It argues that these concepts have to be understood in light of Rousseau’s work as a whole, riddled by the fundamental problem of man’s dependence within social relationships, and especially within the social relations on which modern societies are built. This reading acknowledges intrinsic tensions and paradoxes in Rousseau’s concepts of freedom and justice, but it also indicates how his approach can nourish a deeper reflection on democracy and its challenges even today. It will thus contribute to the rehabilitation of Rousseau’s political thinking that is under way and that points out (inter alia) its relevance to contemporary debates about radical democracy—seen as a space where common laws and rights remain open to be contested by free members of society.
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Notes
- 1.
In his articles “Das Problem Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (1932) and “Kant und Rousseau” (1939), Ernst Cassirer saw Kant ’s reading of Rousseau as a key to understanding how the “irrationalist” Rousseau could end up as a vigorous defender of universal reason and of the state under the rule of law. The articles are reprinted in Ernst Cassirer , Über Rousseau. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012.
- 2.
Rousseau, Confessions, in Œuvres complètes I, Paris: Gallimard 1959, p. 9.
- 3.
See the autobiographical part of his writings, with the posthumously published Reveries of a Solitary Walker as a high point.
- 4.
On the “homeopathic model” in Rousseau’s thinking, see Starobinski , Jean (1989) Le remède dans le mal: La pensée de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Paris: Gallimard.
- 5.
Work on a “political solution” of this kind can be traced far back in Rousseau ’s writings; it also finds expression in his article on “Political economy” in the great French Encyclopedia. After The Social Contract, his political thinking is expressed more concretely in the Constitutional Project for Corsica (1764, but first published in 1861) and in Considerations on the Government of Poland in the 1760s, which was published in his Collected Works in 1782. Rousseau wrote the texts about international relations in parallel to The Social Contract: the Abstract of Monsieur l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre ’s “Plan for Perpetual Peace,” which was printed in 1761 (the more critical postscript was not published until after Rousseau’s death).
- 6.
Rousseau 1997, pp. 132 and 151.
- 7.
Rousseau 1997, pp. 132–133.
- 8.
Rousseau 1997, p. 134.
- 9.
Rousseau 1997, p. 157.
- 10.
Rousseau 1997, pp. 154–155.
- 11.
Rousseau 1997, p. 187.
- 12.
Rousseau 1997, p. 167.
- 13.
Rousseau 1997, p. 167.
- 14.
Rousseau 2012, p. 41.
- 15.
Rousseau 1997, p. 173.
- 16.
Rousseau 1997, p. 180.
- 17.
Rousseau 2012, p. 41.
- 18.
Rousseau 2012, pp. 53 and 56.
- 19.
See Schlar , Judith (1998) “Reading the Social Contract” and “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Equality,” in Political Thought and Political Thinkers. Chicago: UCP. See also Israel , Jonathan 2001 and 2006.
- 20.
Rousseau 2012, p. 45.
- 21.
Rousseau 2012, pp. 49–50.
- 22.
Rousseau 2012, p. 50.
- 23.
Rousseau 2012, Book IV.
- 24.
See for example Riley , Patrick (1986) The General Will before Rousseau. Princeton: PUP.
- 25.
Rousseau 2012, Book II, ch. 3.
- 26.
Rousseau 2012, pp. 57 and 60.
- 27.
Rousseau 2012, p. 53.
- 28.
See for example Boucher , David in Kelly and Boucher (eds) (2009) Political Thinkers from Socrates to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, ch. 15.
- 29.
Rousseau 2012, p. 54.
- 30.
Rousseau 2012, p. 53.
- 31.
On Kant ’s development of Rousseau ’s line of thought and of formulations from The Social Contract, see for example the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785). However, as Helga Varden has shown in her article on Kant in the present volume, Kant draws a much stricter distinction than Rousseau between ethics and politics/philosophy of law. For Kant , ethics is about maxims and moral motivation; it is the internal obligating motivation that can make the individual action morally good. Law, on the other hand, applies only to interaction, and it is based on a legitimate external compulsion rather than on an internal obligation. To act in accordance with the law is thus not the same as to act morally good. The law consists of external demands that the choices of the individual should be compatible with respect for other persons’ freedom to choose, in a perspective of interaction.
- 32.
Rousseau 2012, Book 3, ch. 1.
- 33.
Rousseau 2012, Book 3, ch. 4.
- 34.
Rousseau 2012, p. 92.
- 35.
Rousseau 2012, p. 80.
- 36.
Rousseau 2012, Book 3, ch. 18.
- 37.
Lycurgus was the legendary legislator in Sparta in the seventh century before the Common Era, who is said to have carried out the successful militarization of the Spartan city state. Rousseau wrote admiringly about Lycurgus. He also emphasized the significance of soldiers for the feeling of community in his home city of Geneva, for example at the close of his Letter to M. D’Alembert on Spectacles (1758). These factors lend support to those interpretations that point to the soldier as the model for Rousseau’s nostalgic concept of civil virtue.
- 38.
Rousseau 2012, Book II, chs. 6–7.
- 39.
- 40.
Rousseau, 2010, p. 524.
- 41.
Kant ’s knowledge of Saint-Pierre and of Rousseau ’s summary can be seen clearly already in Kant’s Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1784). In the third Part of On the Common Saying: “That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice” (1793), which deals with international law, Kant also refers to Saint-Pierre ’s and Rousseau ’s enthusiastic ideas about a European league of states. Kant agrees with these ideas, because we are obliged to accept perpetual peace as a possibility.
- 42.
Miller 1984, ch. 6.
- 43.
Miller 1984.
- 44.
See Bernard Gagnebin ’s Introduction to Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, III. Paris, Gallimard, Pléiade, p. xxvi.
- 45.
Berlin , I. (1958) Two Concepts of Liberty . Oxford. Berlin himself regarded Rousseau as “the most sinister and the most formidable enemy of liberty in the whole history of modern thought” in Freedom and its Betrayal. Six Enemies of Human Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy , Princeton University Press, p. 49.
- 46.
“De la liberté des anciens comparée à celle des modernes”, Athénée Royal de Paris, 1819.
- 47.
Constant , Benjamin The Liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns, translated by Jonathan Bennett , 2010, http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/conslibe.pdf, p. 7.
- 48.
Constant , 2010, p. 14.
- 49.
Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock , historians of political ideas, have recently highlighted the historical role of the republican tradition.
- 50.
See for example Kylmakoski , Merja (2001) The Virtue of the Citizen: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Republicanism in the Eighteenth-Century French Context. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Pub. Inc.
- 51.
Inston , Kevin (2010) Rousseau and Radical Democracy. London: Continuum.
- 52.
This is a revised version of an article published in Norwegian in Jørgen Pedersen (ed), Politisk filosofi fra Platon til Hannah Arendt . Oslo: Pax, 2013, here translated to English by Brian McNeil and Ellen Krefting .
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Krefting, E. (2015). Rousseau – Equality and Freedom in the Community. In: Fløistad, G. (eds) Philosophy of Justice. Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9175-5_12
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