Rousseau and the Geneva model

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was one of the cardinally important eighteenthcentury-thinkers. Less original than Vico, less erudite than Montesquieu, less penetrating than Locke or Hume, less profound than Herder or Goethe, and less acute than Voltaire, he was more versatile and many-sided than any of these, and brings together a number of revolutionary strands in the Enlightenment. His novels Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Emile, ou de l’éducation (1762) became figureheads for sentiment as an affect equal in value to rational cogitation, and fixed for centuries the sentimental image of childhood as a period of innocence and openness. His proclamation to turn ‘back to nature’, and his glorification of the ‘Noble Savage’, gave voice, in the very heart of the Enlightenment, to a discontent with the rigidity of over-refined civility, and prepared the Romantics’ opposition between human society and divine nature. His Confessions (1782-1788) re-launched the genre of the moral autobiography; widely admired as a benchmark in self-honesty, they prepared the way for the Romantic cult of the self: the preoccupation with one's own personality and personal growth. There was no cultural endeavour that he did not pursue: he speculated on the origins of language and human inequality along with the greatest philosophers of the century; he even wrote an opera.

But the Rousseau whose importance is to be traced here is the author of a book which was entitled Du contrat social and which he signed as a Citoyen de Genève.Du contrat social was written in 1754 and appeared in 1762; as the title indicates, it goes over the familiar ground, already trodden by Grotius, Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu, of the mutual obligations of the partners, monarch and people, whose contract forms the root of human society and the basis of power distribution. But Rousseau’s Contrat social was more than a mere rehash of familiar arguments; it was a radical and even revolutionary extension of democratic thought. Earlier thinkers had all started with an a priori top-down distribution of power: power comes from On High, and works its way downwards.