Rousseau anyone?

[outsydrka]

Hey everyone,

i've got a question concerning Rousseau. I've read his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men and now there's just something i dont understand - he says something like, a human being has this thing -capability of being free, while animals dont have that, they just follow what nature 'tells' them to do. a human being can fight that, and as i understood, he says that this capability is larger than reason. in what way did he mean it? because what if reason brings this human being to the point where he can see that he can decide by himself and is free because of this?

[kromando33]

I disagree with Rousseau on the point of direction free will, such freedom does not exist because it seems to put man outside the sphere of social responsibility and consequence.

[lvatt]

Rousseau saw the initial state of nature as a state of liberty (not liberty of action in the sense of Hobbes or Beccaria but rather political liberty as Montesquieu meant it) and simplicity in which the people's needs are fulfilled to satisfaction. This is as philosophical as it is psychological IMO, because he believed that if people grow up in a small, classless community such as a farmer's village or something, they will naturally end up doing what's best for each other instead of just trying to eat each other like he argues animals would do (or humans, if your read Thomas Hobbes)

Hoever he argues that this status quo is destined to change by the augmentation of population and the increasing complexity of social life. For him, this is where the original social contracyt was born, meaning the one by which those in power try to preserve their own superiority and prevent the weak to access the superior classes, which creates injustice and "inequality amongst men." This is the "bad" social contract, which he argues is destroyed in favor of the "good" social contract.

In the book "du contrat social," Rousseau looks for a solution to this problem within a normative contract by which the general will expressed in an agreement between free people would be successfull in protecting (by the creation of a sovereign people) the natural freedom of men which was destroyed by progress.

So for Rousseau, unlike Locke, the one who is awared the power of the people isn't really a part of the contract but rather a third party chosen by general will and invested with the power of fighting injustices. Thus since the sovereign exist only by means of the social contract, he cannot violate that contract without destroying his very existence.

In some ways, you can say that this is philosophical justification for a communist revolution. Thomas Hobbes didn't believe so because he said that even the worst of tyrannies was better than Anarchy, but Rousseau thought that since it isn't that bad to live without a government, it's okay to make a revolution to have a new government even if in the process there will be a short transitory period of anarchy. The major difference is that, while Hobbes thought that it is "human nature" for people to hunt and kill each other unless they are forced not to by a powerful government, Rousseau didn't think so.

Unlike theoricians like Pufendorf and Burlamaqui, Rousseau didn't agree that the people transfered its sovereignity, because for him such sovereignity is untransferable. He argued that the social contract couldn't be a renunciation to liberty when the objective of that same contract was the obtention of a greater liberty. This is an argument against the authoritarian governments that Hobbes defended.