For Rousseau, the most important function of the general will is to inform the creation of the laws of the state. Accordingly, though all laws must uphold the rights of equality among citizens and individual freedom, Rousseau states that their particulars can be made according to local circumstances. Although laws owe their existence to the general will of the sovereign, or the collective of all people, some form of government is necessary to carry out the executive function of enforcing laws and overseeing the day-to-day functioning of the state.
Rousseau writes that this government may take different forms, including monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, according to the size and characteristics of the state, and that all these forms carry different virtues and drawbacks. He claims that monarchy is always the strongest, is particularly suitable to hot climates, and may be necessary in all states in times of crisis.
He claims that aristocracy, or rule by the few, is most stable, however, and in most states is the preferable form. Rousseau acknowledges that the sovereign and the government will often have a frictional relationship, as the government is sometimes liable to go against the general will of the people.
Genuine morality, on the other hand, consists in the application of reason to human affairs and conduct. This requires the mental faculty that is the source of genuinely moral motivation, namely conscience. Conscience impels us to the love of justice and morality in a quasi-aesthetic manner. However, in a world dominated by inflamed amour propre , the normal pattern is not for a morality of reason to supplement or supplant our natural proto-moral sympathies.
For recent discussion of Rousseau on conscience and reason, see Neidleman, , ch. So, for example, theatre audiences derive enjoyment from the eliciting of their natural compassion by a tragic scene on the stage; then, convinced of their natural goodness, they are freed to act viciously outside the theater. Philosophy, too, can serve as a resource for self-deception. However, many of his other works, both major and minor, contain passages that amplify or illuminate the political ideas in those works.
This idea finds its most detailed treatment in The Social Contract. In The Social Contract , Rousseau sets out to answer what he takes to be the fundamental question of politics, the reconciliation of the freedom of the individual with the authority of the state.
This reconciliation is necessary because human society has evolved to a point where individuals can no longer supply their needs through their own unaided efforts, but rather must depend on the co-operation of others.
The process whereby human needs expand and interdependence deepens is set out in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. In the Second Discourse , this establishment amounts to the reinforcement of unequal and exploitative social relations that are now backed by law and state power. In an echo of Locke and an anticipation of Marx, Rousseau argues that this state would, in effect, be a class state, guided by the common interest of the rich and propertied and imposing unfreedom and subordination on the poor and weak.
The propertyless consent to such an establishment because their immediate fear of a Hobbesian state of war leads them to fail to attend to the ways in which the new state will systematically disadvantage them. The Social Contract aims to set out an alternative to this dystopia, an alternative in which, Rousseau claims, each person will enjoy the protection of the common force whilst remaining as free as they were in the state of nature.
The key to this reconciliation is the idea of the general will: that is, the collective will of the citizen body taken as a whole. The general will is the source of law and is willed by each and every citizen.
In obeying the law each citizen is thus subject to his or her own will, and consequently, according to Rousseau, remains free. On such a reading, Rousseau may be committed to something like an a posteriori philosophical anarchism.
Such a view holds that it is possible, in principle, for a state to exercise legitimate authority over its citizens, but all actual states—and indeed all states that we are likely to see in the modern era—will fail to meet the conditions for legitimacy.
Rousseau argues that in order for the general will to be truly general it must come from all and apply to all. This thought has both substantive and formal aspects. Formally, Rousseau argues that the law must be general in application and universal in scope. The law cannot name particular individuals and it must apply to everyone within the state. Rousseau believes that this condition will lead citizens, though guided by a consideration of what is in their own private interest, to favor laws that both secure the common interest impartially and that are not burdensome and intrusive.
For this to be true, however, it has to be the case that the situation of citizens is substantially similar to one another. In a state where citizens enjoy a wide diversity of lifestyles and occupations, or where there is a great deal of cultural diversity, or where there is a high degree of economic inequality, it will not generally be the case that the impact of the laws will be the same for everyone.
In such cases it will often not be true that a citizen can occupy the standpoint of the general will merely by imagining the impact of general and universal laws on his or her own case.
In The Social Contract Rousseau envisages three different types or levels of will as being in play. First, individuals all have private wills corresponding to their own selfish interests as natural individuals; second, each individual, insofar as he or she identifies with the collective as a whole and assumes the identity of citizen, wills the general will of that collective as his or her own, setting aside selfish interest in favor of a set of laws that allow all to coexist under conditions of equal freedom; third, and very problematically, a person can identify with the corporate will of a subset of the populace as a whole.
The general will is therefore both a property of the collective and a result of its deliberations, and a property of the individual insofar as the individual identifies as a member of the collective. In a well-ordered society, there is no tension between private and general will, as individuals accept that both justice and their individual self-interest require their submission to a law which safeguards their freedom by protecting them from the private violence and personal domination that would otherwise hold sway.
In practice, however, Rousseau believes that many societies will fail to have this well-ordered character. One way in which they can fail is if private individuals are insufficiently enlightened or virtuous and therefore refuse to accept the restrictions on their own conduct which the collective interest requires.
Another mode of political failure arises where the political community is differentiated into factions perhaps based on a class division between rich and poor and where one faction can impose its collective will on the state as a whole.
The Social Contract harbors a further tension between two accounts of how the general will emerges and its relation to the private wills of citizens. Sometimes Rousseau favors a procedural story according to which the individual contemplation of self interest subject to the constraints of generality and universality and under propitious sociological background conditions such as rough equality and cultural similarity will result in the emergence of the general will from the assembly of citizens see Sreenivasan In this account of the emergence of the general will, there seems to be no special need for citizens to have any specifically moral qualities: the constraints on their choice should be enough.
However, Rousseau also clearly believes that the mere contemplation of self interest would be inadequate to generate a general will. This may partly concern issues of compliance, since selfish citizens who can will the general will might still not be moved to obey it.
But Rousseau also seems to believe that citizen virtue is a necessary condition for the emergence of the general will in the first place. This presents him with a problem for which his figure of the legislator is one attempted solution.
As a believer in the plasticity of human nature, Rousseau holds that good laws make for good citizens. However, he also believes both that good laws can only be willed by good citizens and that, in order to be legitimate, they must be agreed upon by the assembly.
This puts him in some difficulty, as it is unlikely that the citizens who come together to form a new state will have the moral qualities required to will good laws, shaped as those citizens will have been by unjust institutions.
The legislator or lawgiver therefore has the function of inspiring a sense of collective identity in the new citizens that allows them to identify with the whole and be moved to support legislation that will eventually transform them and their children into good citizens. In this story, however, the new citizens at first lack the capacity to discern the good reasons that support the new laws and the lawgiver has to persuade them by non-rational means to legislate in their own best interests.
The figure of the legislator is a puzzle. Like the tutor in Emile , the legislator has the role of manipulating the desires of his charges, giving them the illusion of free choice without its substance. Little wonder then that many critics have seen these characters in a somewhat sinister light.
In both cases there is a mystery concerning where the educator figure comes from and how he could have acquired the knowledge and virtue necessary to perform his role.
This, in turn, raises a problem of regress. Since he uses the notion in several distinct ways, though, it is important to distinguish several uses of the term. First, we should note that Rousseau regards the capacity for choice, and therefore the ability to act against instinct and inclination, as one of the features that distinguishes the human race from animal species and makes truly moral action possible. In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality , for example, he characterizes animal species in essentially Cartesian terms, as mechanisms programmed to a fixed pattern of behavior.
Human beings, on the other hand are not tied to any particular mode of life and can reject the promptings of instinct. Rousseau also takes this freedom to choose to act as the basis of all distinctively moral action. In Book I chapter 8 of the The Social Contract , Rousseau tries to illuminate his claim that the formation of the legitimate state involves no net loss of freedom, but in fact, he makes a slightly different claim.
The new claim involves the idea of an exchange of one type of freedom natural freedom for another type civil freedom. Since all human beings enjoy this liberty right to all things, it is clear that in a world occupied by many interdependent humans, the practical value of that liberty may be almost nonexistent.
Further, inevitable conflict over scarce resources will pit individuals against each other, so that unhindered exercise of natural freedom will result in violence and uncertainty. The formation of the state, and the promulgation of laws willed by the general will, transforms this condition.
With sovereign power in place, individuals are guaranteed a sphere of equal freedom under the law with protection for their own persons and security for their property. Provided that the law bearing equally on everyone is not meddlesome or intrusive and Rousseau believes it will not be, since no individual has a motive to legislate burdensome laws there will be a net benefit compared to the pre-political state.
On the face of it, this claim looks difficult to reconcile with the fact of majorities and minorities within a democratic state, since those citizens who find themselves outvoted would seem to be constrained by a decision with which they disagree.
Many commentators have not found this argument fully convincing. The picture is further complicated by the fact that he also relies on a fourth conception of freedom, related to civil freedom but distinct from it, which he nowhere names explicitly.
This hostility to the representation of sovereignty also extends to the election of representatives to sovereign assemblies, even where those representatives are subject to periodic re-election.
Even in that case, the assembly would be legislating on a range of topics on which citizens have not deliberated. Laws passed by such assemblies would therefore bind citizens in terms that they have not themselves agreed upon.
Not only does the representation of sovereignty constitute, for Rousseau, a surrender of moral agency, the widespread desire to be represented in the business of self-rule is a symptom of moral decline and the loss of virtue.
The practical difficulties of direct self-rule by the entire citizen body are obvious. Such arrangements are potentially onerous and must severely limit the size of legitimate states. It is noteworthy that Rousseau takes a different view in a text aimed at practical politics: Considerations on the Government of Poland. Nevertheless, it is not entirely clear that the widespread interpretation of Rousseau as rejecting all forms of representative government is correct.
One of the key distinctions in The Social Contract is between sovereign and government. The sovereign, composed of the people as a whole, promulgates laws as an expression of its general will.
The government is a more limited body that administers the state within the bounds set by the laws, and which issues decrees applying the laws in particular cases. In effect, the institution of the sovereign may be inconsistent with a representative model, where the executive power of the government can be understood as requiring it. The liberal individual is purported to be universal: raceless, sexless, classless, disembodied, and is taken to represent an abstract, generalized model of humanity writ large.
Many philosophers have argued, however, that when we look more closely at the characteristics of the liberal individual, what we find is not a representation of universal humanity, but a historically located, specific type of person. Macpherson, for example, has argued that Hobbesian man is, in particular, a bourgeois man, with the characteristics we would expect of a person during the nascent capitalism that characterized early modern Europe. Feminists have also argued that the liberal individual is a particular, historical, and embodied person.
As have race-conscious philosophers, such as Charles Mills, to be discussed below. More specifically, they have argued that the person at the heart of liberal theory, and the social contract, is gendered. Christine Di Stefano, in her book Configurations of Masculinity , shows that a number of historically important modern philosophers can be understood to develop their theories from within the perspective of masculinity, as conceived of in the modern period.
In particular, it fails to adequately represent children and those who provide them with the care they require, who have historically been women.
Theorizing from within the emerging tradition of care ethics, feminist philosophers such as Baier and Held argue that social contract theory fails as an adequate account of our moral or political obligations. Social contract theory, in general, only goes so far as to delineate our rights and obligations. But this may not be enough to adequately reveal the full extent of what it means to be a moral person, and how fully to respond to others with whom one interacts through relations of dependence.
Baier argues that Gauthier, who conceives of affective bonds between persons as non-essential and voluntary, therefore fails to represent the fullness of human psychology and motivations. She argues that this therefore leads to a crucial flaw in social contract theory.
Liberal moral theory is in fact parasitic upon the very relations between persons from which it seeks to liberate us. While Gauthier argues that we are freer the more that we can see affective relations as voluntary, we must nonetheless, in the first place, be in such relationships e.
Certain kinds of relationships of dependence, in other words, are necessary in the first place if we are to become the very kinds of persons who are capable of entering into contracts and agreements. She therefore suggests that we consider other models of human relationships when looking for insight into morality.
In particular, she offers up the paradigm of the mother-child relationship to at least supplement the model of individual self-interested agents negotiating with one another through contracts. Such a model is more likely to match up with many of the moral experiences of most people, especially women. Feminist critiques of the contractarian approaches to our collective moral and political lives continue to reverberate through social and political philosophy.
One such critique, that of Carole Pateman, has influenced philosophers writing outside of feminist traditions. As such, it also calls into question the supposed universality of the liberal individual who is the agent of contract theory. Some persons, in particular white men, are full persons according to the racial contract. As such they are accorded the right to enter into the social contract, and into particular legal contracts. They are seen as fully human and therefore as deserving of equality and freedom.
Their status as full persons accords them greater social power. In particular, it accords them the power to make contracts, to be the subjects of the contract, whereas other persons are denied such privilege and are relegated to the status of objects of contracts. This racial contract is to some extent a meta-contract, which determines the bounds of personhood and parameters of inclusion and exclusion in all the other contracts that come after it.
It manifests itself both formally and informally. So, race is not just a social construct, as others have argued, it is more especially a political construct, created to serve a particular political end, and the political purposes of a specific group.
The contract allows some persons to treat other persons, as well as the lands they inhabit, as resources to be exploited. This contract is not hypothetical, as Hobbes describes the one argued for in his Leviathan.
This is an actual contract, or series of contracts, made by real men of history. The racial contract makes possible and justifies some people, in virtue of their alleged superiority, exploiting the peoples, lands, and resources of other races. It is not the case that we have a political system that was perfectly conceived and unfortunately imperfectly applied. One of the reasons that we continue to think that the problem of race in the West is relatively superficial, that it does not go all the way down, is the hold that the idealized social contract has on our imagination.
We continue to believe, according to Mills, in the myths that social contract theory tells us — that everyone is equal, that all will be treated the same before the law, that the Founding Fathers were committed to equality and freedom for all persons, etc. One of the very purposes of social contract theory, then, is to keep hidden from view the true political reality — some persons will be accorded the rights and freedoms of full persons, and the rest will be treated as sub-persons.
The racial contract informs the very structure of our political systems, and lays the basis for the continuing racial oppression of non-whites. We cannot respond to it, therefore, by simply adding more non-whites into the mix of our political institutions, representation, and so on.
Rather, we must reexamine our politics in general, from the point of view of the racial contract, and start from where we are, with full knowledge of how our society has been informed by the systematic exclusion of some persons from the realm of politics and contract. Contractual models have come to inform a vast variety of relations and interaction between persons, from students and their teachers, to authors and their readers.
Given this, it would be difficult to overestimate the effect that social contract theory has had, both within philosophy, and on the wider culture. Social contract theory is undoubtedly with us for the foreseeable future.
But so too are the critiques of such theory, which will continue to compel us to think and rethink the nature of both ourselves and our relations with one another.
Celeste Friend Email: cfriend hamilton. Modern Social Contract Theory a. John Locke For Hobbes, the necessity of an absolute authority, in the form of a Sovereign, followed from the utter brutality of the State of Nature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau , , lived and wrote during what was arguably the headiest period in the intellectual history of modern France—the Enlightenment.
More Recent Social Contract Theories a. Contemporary Critiques of Social Contract Theory Given the longstanding and widespread influence that social contract theory has had, it comes as no surprise that it is also the objects of many critiques from a variety of philosophical perspectives. Feminist Arguments For the most part, feminism resists any simple or universal definition.
Arguing from Care Theorizing from within the emerging tradition of care ethics, feminist philosophers such as Baier and Held argue that social contract theory fails as an adequate account of our moral or political obligations.
References and Further Reading Baier, Annette. June : Baier, Annette. Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Braybrooke, David.
XV, No. DiStefano, Christine. Filmer, Robert. Cambridge University Press Gauthier, David. Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moral Dealing: Contract, Ethics, and Reason.
Cornell: Cornell University Press. Gilligan, Carol. Hampton, Jean. Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Held, Virginia. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Hobbes, Thomas. B Macpherson Editor. Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Locke, John. Yale University Press Macpherson, C. Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press. Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.
Okin, Susan Moller. Justice, Gender, and the Family. Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Five Dialogues. Grube Hackett Publishing Company Grube, Revised by C. New York: Doubleday. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press. Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Basic Political Writings. Donald A. Cress Hackett Publishing Company Sandel, Michael.
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Vallentyne, Peter. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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