Rousseau’s Conception of Liberty

Abstract

Rousseau wrote his Contrat Social¹ with Montesquieu continually in mind, as well as the Roman example, and he accepted his predecessor’s dictum that liberty is not a fruit that every climate can bear.² Rousseau also endorsed Montesquieu’s pessimism about the possibility of democratic government, and the corollary that virtue must be the guiding principle of any republic.³ But he rejected the monarchists’ restriction of “republic” to democracies and aristocracies only. Rousseau included any government guided by the general will, which is the law (“tout gouvernement guidé par la volonté générale, qui est la loi”). Even a monarchy could be a republic, provided the public interest (“l’intérêt public”) governed and the executive monarch was not confused with the legislative sovereign, which is the “people” collectively, the “body politic,” or “republic.”⁵ Yet monarchical governments make inferior republics, because monarchs generally seek to subvert the sovereignty of the people, by appointing nonentities to public office.⁶