Monday, July 11, 2005
Rousseau
Philosophy
Notes on Rousseau
January 11, 2002 (Revised July 11, 2005)
1. Man is naturally good, but becomes corrupted by society. The exact quote is “Man is naturally good, but our social institutions have rendered him evil.” Discourse on the Sciences and Arts.
2. Human nature is best prior to and apart from social institutions: that people are naturally loving, virtuous, and selfless; and that it is society, with its artificial rules and conventions, that makes them envious, hypocritical, and competitive. See, The Social Contract, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, and Discourse on Inequality. (thus, he rejected the concept of Original Sin and Christian Morality. See 11. below)
3. He rejected anything that limited the freedom of the inner self. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” (The Social Contract) He called for freedom from the chain of institutions, rules, customs, and traditions. He ascribed to the romantic notion of the “infinite perfectibility of man, ” which has been derided ever since in conservative philosophy. We have all too many examples of "perfectibility" from the history of mankind.
4. The revolution is between the society and the state. Between family, church, class, and local community, versus the all-powerful State(=Sovereign = the will of the citizens en masse) as savior!
5. Each person should be completely independent from his fellow man, and fully dependent on the state. In fact, he advocated that each member turn over to the state all property not needed for his living. (SC) The Sovereign State controls all.This is Socialism/Collectivism/Communism.
6. Since human nature is undefined, there are no moral principles limiting the state’s ambitions. The State need not treat its citizens justly or unjustly, but as it sees the situation at the moment. There are no moral limitations on the State’s use of power. In other words, moral relativism. Whatever the Sovereign and the citizens declare to be law is law. Conversely, what has not been declared to be law is not law, 3,000 years of the history of natural law notwithstanding.
7. There being no other way to create such a citizenry, with such a common will, and hence such a Sovereign, this philosophy advocates the complete overthrow of existing society and its total destruction in order to build a new society from scratch. Thus also invoking the idea of justifying present actions by the future goals of building a perfect society( but which can never happen in the real world, as example after example proves.).
8. He believed that one should throw off the constraints of society and explore your inner self, your natural, spontaneous self. (Discourse on Inequality, and Confessions)( he was a Bohemian, and had many mistresses, before settling down with Therese, with whom he had 5 bastard children.)
9. Responsibility for rearing and educating children should be taken away from parents and be given to the State. (his five children were left on the doorstep of the local orphanage, since he was not willing to be a parent. Most babies left in this orphanage died soon after entering, which was known to Rousseau. (Confessions)
10. He believed in conformance to the General Will – merger of individual wills into a grand sum will. The people who rejected the General Will must be forced to be free. (SC)
The General Will is the linchpin of this philosophy of government. There have been numerous papers that deride this idea as being infantile, unrealizable, and unstable. Most see it as degenerating into tyranny once the first strong-willed person manages to acquire the very first foothold on power. Many see it as tyranny to begin with, in that you are forced to accept it, and obey its tenets, or else leave.
(Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and Leo Strauss, among many other political philosophers, were negative on Rousseau and his Contract.)
11. “ The subjects then owe the sovereign an account of their opinions only to such an extent that they matter to the community. Now it matters very much to the community that each citizen should have a religion. That will make him love his duty, but the dogmas of that religion concern the state and its members only so far as they have reference to morality and to the duties he who professes them is bound to do to others.” (SC) Thus, Rousseau is giving the Sovereign full rule over the moral lives of citizens, but kindly leaving the afterlife to such religion as any citizen wishes to follow. He is thereby usurping the Ten Commandments and Natural Law, and he rejected the concepts of Original Sin and Christian Morality.)
These ideas sparked the Reign of Terror in France headed by Robespierre, and the imprisonment of 300,000 nobles, priests and political dissidents, and the deaths of 17,000 citizens in a year.
The same pattern was adopted by Marx , Lenin, And Stalin, where the General Will was replaced by the State.
Voltaire, after reading his Discourse on Inequality wrote to Rousseau “ I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such cleverness used in making us all stupid! One longs, when reading the book, to walk on all fours.!
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