The Social Contract
Length: 6hrs Summary Written in 1767 ten years before America’s independence Rousseau give’s his version of the social contract theory. Social contract theory in a nutshell is that individuals give up certain rights to attain a higher level of security than they could have in a state of nature. Rosseau is probably most famous for his optimistic view of this “state of nature” in opposition to his predecessor Hobbes who described it as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. The focus of this book was on what types of governments make for the best quality of life when you are past the state of nature. As you probably guessed the answer is “it’s complicated”. He starts by attempting to demonstrate that even though governments and institutions are man-made and thus arbitrary they can have some legitimacy and should be followed excepting certain circumstances. Another difference from Hobbes is that he argues that the freedom that men give up in order to enter a social contract is returned with interest in the form of civil freedoms. So while the social contract removes natural liberty which gives unlimited ownership to what you can take by force, it replaces it with civil liberty in which ownership is decided via convention and enforced via an entire group. This is a neat trick we human’s played because unlike the rest of the animal kingdom we seem to like fighting to the death over the smallest things. In Rosseau’s view the social contract aims to equalize nature’s inequalities. He interestingly observes that almost all governments require a god in their formation as an anchor point that gives a leader authority initially, but after the government is well underway the authority of god can fade into obscurity. He then talks about different types of governments. An important distinction he makes is that between the sovereign and the legislature. Like church and state these two should be kept separate. To Rousseau the sovereign is every citizen in a state (or body politic, a new term to me, thanks Jacque) together that form this magical thing called the general will. The legislature on the other hand is the people, one or many that implement the general will. A legislature made of one would be a monarchy a legislature of many approaches a direct democracy. These two branches should be kept separate because if the sovereign (the people) attempt to implement particular things they lose their generality (general will poofs out of existence). This separation also allows for the sovereign to overthrow the legislature if it is not following the general will. He argues that smaller the state is the bigger the government should be, and the larger the state is the smaller the government should be. Because small governments are efficient and large governments are slow (think bureaucracy). He says that small states with big governments (like Geneva where he was living) allow freedom to flourish the most of any type of government. He argues (mistakenly as I think the following 200 years has shown) that states should be self-sufficient and not reliant on other countries for trade. ...