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What is freedom? What is equality? And what is sovereignty? A foundational text of modern political philosophy, Rousseau's Social Contract has generated much debate and exerted extraordinary influence not only on political thought, but also modern political history, by way of the French Revolution and other political events, ideals, and practices. The Social Contract is regularly studied in undergraduate courses of philosophy, political thought, and modern intellectual history, as well as being the subject of graduate seminars in numerous disciplines. The book inspires an ongoing flow of scholarly articles and monographs. Few texts have offered more influential and important answers to research questions than Rousseau's Social Contract, and in this new Cambridge Companion, a multidisciplinary team of contributors provides new ways to navigate this masterpiece of political philosophy- and its animating questions.
In book III chapter 4 of the Social Contract, Rousseau takes up the political principle established by Montesquieu in the Spirit of the Laws by correlating the form of a polity’s government to the extent of its territory: it is impossible, in his view, to answer once and for all the question of the best regime, without considering the suitability of regime types for particular situations. Yet democracy could still have a crucial advantage in Rousseau’s system: this kind of government confers most power to the people. A republican state seems to call for a democratic regime. This is why Rousseau’s response may come as a surprise: far from being the best form of government, democracy is the worst – or at least it is not suitable for a people of men, not gods. This essay reassesses Rousseau’s case against democracy. Why does Rousseau declare that democracy causes, so to speak, “a government without government,” and threatens popular sovereignty itself? This paradoxical claim needs to be explained.
Reasoned and impassioned controversy have accompanied The Social Contract since its publication in 1762. Once the book entered conversations about the foundations and ends of modern politics, it never left them.
Immanuel Kant’s debt to Rousseau, for example, was deep and multidimensional. He drew many of his own ethical and political arguments from contemplating Rousseau’s philosophy, including the general will and other ideas that extended well beyond the portrait of Rousseau that famously adorned his otherwise sparsely decorated study.
Rousseau’s Social Contract begins with breathtakingly ambitious declarations about freedom and justice. Yet the project comes to an abrupt end, and the manuscript remains a fragment. Given that Rousseau sees daring arguments to their end elsewhere, why was this particular project – one so close to the core of his thought – abandoned? On the surface, the Social Contract appears beset by contradictions, but it pursues its conclusions toward an intricate and audacious coherence, giving an account of ancient political orders to overcome what Rousseau understands as misapprehensions associated with the Enlightenment. Yet it is not the Enlightenment, but Christianity that inaugurates the break with and confusions of ancient political distinctions. An attempt to confront this origin directly shatters Rousseau’s penultimately profound coherence. In remarkable congruence with patterns of figurative language developed in Descartes, Rousseau seeks to both ground and energize his account of political life by deploying diverse, often distinctly modern aspirations and metaphors in order to escape the Christian interruption of proper political ordering and concludes he cannot do so.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourse on Political Economy has been largely neglected, and the little attention it has received has been widely disparate. This chapter argues that the primary and unifying aim of the third Discourse is to define the best form of government for safeguarding individual or negative liberty. It also argues that the thread that connects the seemingly disparate elements of the text is a commitment to defining the institutions and policies that might best guarantee the preservation of property rights with a minimum degree of government infringement. Most crucially, even in defending the individual right to property possession, Rousseau is consistently critical of the pursuit of property, and especially the pursuit of superfluities or luxuries. He insists throughout the third Discourse that the primary task of popular and legitimate government is to make virtue reign.