How Useful is Rousseau's Political Philosophy for Theorising Democracy - Book Report/Review Example

Running Head: How useful is Rousseau's political philosophy for Theorising Democracy How useful is Rousseau's political philosophy for Theorising Democracy Author's Name Institution's Name Jean-Jacques Rousseau: An Introduction Rousseau (1712-78) born in Geneva of a poorer background. His mother died in consequence of his delivery and he had a lot of psychosis. He appears to have been cynical, and afterward in life he dealt with his children very roughly. In 1741, Rousseau settled in Paris and became interested with the philosophies. He became famous with his article on the 'Progress of the Arts and Sciences' in which he disputed against progress as it disconnected men from their normal state. His Works Treatise on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences -1750 Treatise on the Origin of Inequality - 1755 Emile - 1762 On the Social Contract- 1762 Essentials of Rousseau' Thought The fundamental driving force of his thought was a concern with desirable quality. His outlook of material goods shows an aversion of modern society. Political Concept of On the Social Contact Rousseau believed the Social Contract as the fundamental law of society. Liberty is submission to the law the people have accepted, and equality means all are equally dependent on society and not on any other individual. The Social Contact should be written by a legislator, Moses or Lycurgus, who should then leave the scene thus forcing men to be free. Accordingly Rousseau wants freedom and social equality in society although refutes these are innate. Somewhat he craves civil liberty and equality be accorded by the state. The rights people have are the ones they have in the society, to which people give all their natural liberty and equality when they joined it. The social contract was not between government and people; however between people themselves, thus the best society was a participatory democracy, like early Athens, Geneva, or New England towns. Rousseau's society relies upon public enthusiasm, in contrast with Locke and Smith for whom the most significant part of Life was personal. Generally Rousseau is in disagreement with personal liberalism and materialism. Sovereign Power & General Will The people are the basis of lawful power. Sovereignty then is inherent in the people, nevertheless how to articulate this in action; Rousseau came up with the concept of a General Will. The concept of a General Will was the theory behind the strength of the Social Contract. In this concept political society is seen as involving the complete subjugation of every individual to the General Will of the whole. The difficulty is finding out what the General Will is: for Rousseau it is not the same as the desires of mainstream majority, somewhat it is what is in their best interests. As a consequence, Rousseau said some Legislator should identify the command of heaven to get his law approved. People should be at liberty as the aim was to build a better human being. Impacts of Rousseau's Ideas Rousseau's Ideas was not much read initially. He first becomes prominent on the Jacobins and Robespierre. He is very important in later political theorizing. Rousseau's arguments for democracy and equality had a usually moderate effect in the USA and Britain Modern Anglo-American law, similar to European civil law, is based on a will theory of contract, in relation to which all terms of a contract are binding on the parties since they chose those terms for themselves. However the idea of the General Will, which is not the same as majority vote, has supported those who have faith in Vanguards of Revolution, and provides an outline for dictatorship in its modern sense. It has true dictatorial implications, particularly the concept that the people may not know their own will. Rousseau's Legacy Rousseau's concepts were powerful at the time of the French Revolution nevertheless, since collective sovereignty was implemented through legislative body rather than directly, it cannot be said that the Revolution was in any sense a realization of Rousseau's doctrine. Consequently, writers for instance Benjamin Constant and Hegel sought to censure the excesses of the Revolution and particularly the Reign of Terror on Rousseau, although the impartiality of their claims is a matter of debate. Rousseau was one of the first contemporary writers to critically attack the society of private property, and thus is sometimes considered a pioneer of modern socialism and communism. Rousseau also distrusted the theory that majority will is always proper. He maintained that the objective of government should be to obtain liberty, equality, and justice for all within the state, irrespective of the will of the majority. One of the main doctrines of Rousseau's political philosophy is that politics and morality should not be divided. When a state fails to act in a moral fashion, it stops to work in the correct way and stops to apply legitimate influence over the individual. The second important principle is liberty, which the state is established to safeguard. Rousseau's concepts about education have greatly influenced modern educational theory. In mile he distinguishes between vigorous and "useless" crippled children. Only a healthy child can be the worthwhile entity of any educational work. He devalues book-learning, and proposes that a child's feelings should be trained before his motive. He put an extraordinary importance on learning by experience. John Darling (1994) claims that the history of modern educational theory is a series of appendices to Rousseau. In his writings, Rousseau distinguishes nature with the prehistoric state of savage man. Afterward he took nature to mean the impulsiveness of the process by which man builds his self-centered, instinct-based character and his small world. Nature consequently means interiority and integrity, rather than that captivity and dependence which society imposes in the name of progressive liberation from cruel viciousness. Thus, to go back to nature means to reinstate to man the forces of this natural process, to place him outside every tormenting link and the bias of society. Rousseau was the first to attack natural law, as Sabine wrote: "Rousseau attacked only one limited segment of the system of natural law, the artificiality of seeing society merely as an agent to secure individual goods had Rousseau stood alone, the imposing system of natural law elaborated in a century and a half of philosophical development, would hardly have fallen" Paine supported Rousseau's views about state by stating: "a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate and in which each, whilst uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone and be as free as before". (Hampsher-Monk, p. 157) In spite of some resemblances in thinking, there is little confirmation that Rousseau had an influence on Thomas Jefferson and, in fact, seems to have had little bearing on 18th century American thought, which was ruled by Republicanism and Liberalism. Nevertheless he did have some effect on several later Transcendentalists. Rousseau's Theoretical Democracy: An Analysis Rousseau is considered as a fundamental political theorist that analysts have a predisposition either to admire or dislike for many a centuries. Immanuel Kant's had great respect for Rousseau and the influence of Rousseau on Kant's ideals of the state, acumen, right, practical reason, and the relationship between theory and tradition (Cassirer, 1954). Similarly G.W.F. Hegel affirms that "it was the achievement of Rousseau to put forward the will as the principle of the state," only to then launch into a brief, albeit famous, critique of Rousseau's entire social contract theory of freedom as arbitrary, abstract, and destructively against the historical march of Geist in the world. Like Friedrich Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human, Hegel argues that Rousseau's ideas signify drastic unenlightened "abstractions divorced of the Idea" (Hegel, 1821). Rousseau's political views nevertheless divide political theorists at the moment as much as it did earlier. Among Rousseau's devoted modern advocate include Tzvetan Todorov, who believes Rousseau as a key theorist establishing major concepts into the political domains that people continue to apply and discuss. "Reading Rousseau today," writes Todorov, "we cannot help but attribute a prophetic clairvoyance to him" Todorov, 2001). Bernard Boxill and many scholars working in the fields of Caribbean political philosophy and critical race theory are developing new optics by integrating the study of thoughts arising in the Caribbean with concepts arising from Rousseau's work (Boxill, 2005). As well, the writings of philosophers have provided intellectual discussion for inquiring and centering of arguments introduced by Rousseau concerning the state of nature, general will, sovereignty, republicanism, dependence, and liberty (Lovejoy, 1923). On the other hand, opponents of Rousseau cast doubt on any position crediting to Rousseau a positive mystic vision. In Arendt's analysis, Rousseau's theorizing was mystic only as much as its empathetic, close political vision warned of all that would go terribly inappropriate in the French Revolution. For Arendt, the French Revolution under the impact of Rousseau resulted in conceiving of the pessimistic state of liberation to the detriment of failing to both optimistically found liberty and develop intellectual tools vital to establishing a durable state (Arendt, 1963). By embracing Rousseau's concept for a political community could only result in the implosion of a polity "built not on sand but quicksand" (Arendt, 1993). Pateman remains far less disparaging than Arendt of Rousseau's social contract as theoretically it explains freedom. Pateman's concern contains Rousseau's support of an exclusionary social contract for men that on no account reject the continuance of an enslaving sexual contract. If the social contract tells about freedom, the sexual contract describes a subjugation of women from the political field (Pateman, 1988). Conceivably one of the distinctive aspects of Rousseau's theory, which distinguishes him from many of his experienced followers and opponents, is that Rousseau never wished for a professional academic. As Leo Damrosch remarks in a recent domineering description of Rousseau's life, "Rousseau's triumph was the more surprising since, unlike most famous writers then or later, he did not go to school for a single day and was essentially self-taught" (Damrosch, 2005). Despite the fact that never facing complete un-free existence as a slave dependent on the legal, political, and social rejection by the state of the ability to learn, Rousseau empathized with the slave theorist to the extent that he tried to visualize what freedom would mean outside the precincts of traditional schooling and tight educational discourse. Rousseau did not have the pragmatic insights of the slave theorist and this lack of perception caused critical mistakes in his theory of freedom. Yet, Rousseau's did not deny the role of slavery in freedom theorizing in the ways that Arendt and Philip Pettit engaged in. Political freedom is a standard model in Rousseau's political philosophy. Yet another thought central to Rousseau from his original writings to the incomplete outcome to Emile, Emile et Sophie ou les solitaires, is the notion of slavery. Amazingly, all over the literature on Rousseau, very little focus has been paid to theorizing the particular concept of slavery that plays an important part in Rousseau's perception of freedom's basic characteristics. Freedom's Sovereignty For Rousseau the sovereign represents a "collective being," a being granted a particular legitimatized power. Sovereignty, in fact is "the exercise of the general will" (Social Contract II.1, 57). Sovereignty as said by Rousseau is inseparable and absolute (SC II.1, 57; II.2, 58). For Rousseau, as in the outlook of some modern political theorists, sovereignty does not depict a stipulation attributable only to states (Markell, 2003). People, like states, have the capacity to endorse sovereign agency. Rousseau's chain theorizing granting absolutism to sovereignty signifies, and in reality influences Karl Marx's thoughts into creating a model of politics able to propose a remedy to the human's estrangement from the framework of social existence (Della, 1979). Rousseau includes one more rule to the conception of sovereignty beside it being absolute and inseparable it cannot be represented (Merriam, 1968). Rousseau believes there is a basic reason behind the nonexistence of depiction as a word in the political lingo of early Western societies. Contemporary polities for example England claim to symbolize the interests of the people in a manner supposedly better than the predicaments of pre-revolutionary French citizens in the Old Regime living under an dictatorial sovereign, however nothing could be away from the truth. Representing the sovereign people only divides them, its causes them to go wrong, it enslaves the people to the intrusive state's capricious and non-arbitrary force. Rousseau writes emotively in the chapter "Of Deputies or Representatives": 'Sovereignty cannot be represented for the same reason that it cannot be alienated, it consists essentially in the general will, and the will does not admit of being representedThe English people thinks it is free; it is greatly mistaken, it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as they are elected, it is enslaved, it is nothing. The use it makes of its freedom during the brief moments it has it fully warrants it's losing it' (SC III.15, 114). If Rousseau's claim that man is born free and finds her or himself universally in chains suggests his most stimulating statement focusing the brilliance of his freedom theory, conceivably the most controversial declaration comes following introducing the idea of the general will. References Arendt, Hannah. (1963), On Revolution. New York: Viking Press. Arendt, Hannah. (1993), "What is Freedom" in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, p. 164. Boxill, Bernard. (2005), "Rousseau, Natural Man, and Race," in A. Valls, Ed., Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, pp. 150-168. Cassirer, Ernst. (1954), The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. and ed. Peter Gay. New York: Columbia University Press. Damrosch, Leo. (2005), Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius. Houghton Mifflin Company Trade & Reference Division, p. 1. Darling, John. (1994), Child-centred education and its critics. London: Paul Chapman. Department of Education and Science (DES). (1972). Education: A framework for expansion. London: HMSO. Della Volpe, Galvano. (1979), Rousseau and Marx: and Other Writings. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press. Hampsher-Monk, Ian. (1992), Modern Political Thought. Blackwell Publishers UK, p.5. Hegel, G.W.F. (1821), Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Lovejoy, Arthur. (1923), "The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality" Modern Philology, pp. 165-186. Markell, Patchen. (2003), Bound by Recognition. Princeton University Press. Merriam, C.E Jr. (1968), History of the Theory of Sovereignty since Rousseau. Pateman, C. (1988), The Sexual Contract. Polity Press. Sabine, G.H. (1941), A History of Political Theory. Harraps, p. 597. Todorov, Tzvetan, (2001), Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau. Translated by John T. Scott and Robert D. Zaretsky. Read More