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Historians and biographers have gone along with this image - ignoring Smith's caveat That human frailty had faced its severest test 10 years earlier when Hume offered to succour the radical author Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The year was and Rousseau had just cause to fear for his life. For more than three years he had been a refugee, forced to move on several times. His radical tract, The Social Contract, with its famous opening salvo, "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains", had been violently condemned.
An arrest warrant was issued in Paris and his books were publicly burned. In The Confessions, a literary landmark described as the first modern autobiography, Rousseau spoke of "the cry of unparalleled fury" that went up across Europe. Fleeing France, he had found safe haven in a remote village in his native Switzerland.
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But soon the local priest began to whip up hatred against him, charging him with being a heretic. The atmosphere turned ugly. Rousseau was abused in the street. Some believed this lean, dark man whose eyes were full of fire was possessed by the devil. One night, a drunken mob attacked his house. A shower of stones was thrown at the window. A rock "as big as a head" nearly landed on Rousseau's bed. When a local official finally arrived, he declared, "My God, it's a quarry.
Rousseau had no choice but to uproot once more. His saviour would be the Scotsman David Hume.
In October , Hume had gone to the French capital as under-secretary to the newly appointed British ambassador, Lord Hertford. Today, Hume is known above all for his philosophy, but then he was renowned for being an historian. His first philosophical work, The Treatise of Human Nature, had been, if not exactly ignored, then certainly not acclaimed as the sublime work of genius it is.
But his epic six-volume History of England, which had appeared between and , had become a bestseller, and made him financially independent. Turning his back on the previous mode of history writing as a sequence of dates, names and glorifications, Hume brilliantly combined character studies and the detail of events with an analysis of the broad sweep of underlying forces. The tone was thoughtful, civil, temperate.
The series would go through more than a hundred editions and still be in use at the end of the 19th century. Hume still felt, justly, under-appreciated. The "banks of the Thames", he insisted, were "inhabited by barbarians". There was not one Englishman in 50 "who if he heard I had broke my neck tonight would be sorry". Englishmen disliked him, Hume believed, both for what he was not and for what he was: In England, anti-Scottish prejudice was rife. But his homeland too seemed to reject him. The final humiliation came in June , when the Scottish prime minister, the Earl of Bute, appointed another Scottish historian, William Robertson, to be Historiographer Royal for Scotland.
The invitation from Lord Hertford must have seemed irresistible. Hume's friends travelling in France had already told him about his incomparable standing in Parisian society. And the two years he spent in Paris were to be the happiest of his life. He was rapturously embraced there, loaded, in his words, "with civilities". Hume stressed the near-universal judgment on his personality and morals.
Soon in the French capital it became social death not to be acquainted with him. In his Journal, Horace Walpole on a prolonged visit to Paris records, "It is incredible the homage they pay him. Every man I meet, and still more every lady, would think they were wanting in the most indispensable duty, if they did not make to me a long and elaborate harangue in my praise. The lavish attention paid by women must have come as a pleasant shock to this obese bachelor in his 50s. James Caulfeild later Lord Charlemont , who'd once described Hume's face as "broad and fat, his mouth wide, and without any other expression than that of imbecility", observed how in Paris, "no lady's toilette was complete without Hume's attendance".
Hume was glorified both in court circles and in the so-called "Republic of Letters", that unique French Enlightenment territory of salons governed by outstanding women. The salons became the transmission system of the French Enlightenment, creating, focusing and broadcasting radical opinion. The female hosts were the firm regulators of tact and etiquette: Their art was the creation and maintenance of civilised conversation. In the salons, Hume was introduced to the critics, writers, scientists, artists and philosophers who powered the French Enlightenment, the philosophes.
Diderot had recognised Hume as a fellow Enlightenment spirit - a cosmopolitan. All four men would be crucial in Hume's quarrel with Rousseau. One salon hostess was a vital link in bringing Rousseau and Hume together: The intimate tone of the letters between Hume and Mme de Boufflers indicates that he, at least, became infatuated. A spell apart had Hume writing to her: Why am I not near you so that I could see you for half an hour a day. Sadly, Hume might have misread the silken manners of her court. When the ambassador, Lord Hertford, was replaced, Hume's sojourn in paradise ended too.
Mme de Boufflers asked him to assist the persecuted Rousseau in securing asylum in England. How could Le Bon David possibly say no? Saviour and exile finally met in Paris in December There had, until then, been only a short epistolatory relationship between them - marked by mutual effusions of love and admiration. Here is Rousseau on Hume: Rousseau is of small stature; and would rather be ugly, had he not the finest physiognomy in the world, I mean, the most expressive countenance.
His modesty seems not to be good manners but ignorance of his own excellence. Several of his philosophe friends tried to shake Hume from his complacency. Grimm, D'Alembert and Diderot all spoke from personal experience, having had a spectacular falling-out with the belligerent Rousseau in the previous decade. In consequence, they had totally severed relations with him. Most chilling was the warning from Baron d'Holbach. It was 9pm on the night before Hume and Rousseau set out for England.
Hume had gone for his final farewell.
This does not mean, however, that it is a state of license: If it did not exempt him from persecution, at least it ensured that his persecution was observed, and admiring femmes du monde intervened from time to time to help him so that Rousseau was never, unlike Voltaire and Diderot, actually imprisoned. Engel, on the other hand, Rousseau's nationalism anticipated modern theories of "imagined communities" that transcend social and religious divisions within states. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. More recently, philosophers from different perspectives have offered new criticisms of social contract theory.
Apologising for puncturing his illusions, the baron counselled Hume that he would soon be sadly disabused. It is a somewhat fraudulent social contract that introduces government, since the poor get so much less out of it than do the rich. Even so, the rich are no happier in civil society than are the poor because people in society are never satisfied. Society leads people to hate one another to the extent that their interests conflict, and the best they are able to do is to hide their hostility behind a mask of courtesy.
Thus, Rousseau regards inequality not as a separate problem but as one of the features of the long process by which men become alienated from nature and from innocence. Like Plato , Rousseau always believed that a just society was one in which everyone was in his proper place. And having written the second Discourse to explain how people had lost their liberty in the past, he went on to write another book, Du Contrat social ; The Social Contract , to suggest how they might recover their liberty in the future.
Again Geneva was the model: The Social Contract begins with the sensational opening sentence: If a civil society, or state, could be based on a genuine social contract, as opposed to the fraudulent social contract depicted in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality , people would receive in exchange for their independence a better kind of freedom, namely true political, or republican, liberty. Such liberty is to be found in obedience to a self-imposed law.
For while it can be readily agreed that an individual is free if he obeys only rules he prescribes for himself, this is so because an individual is a person with a single will. A society, by contrast, is a set of persons with a set of individual wills, and conflict between separate wills is a fact of universal experience. The social contract that brings society into being is a pledge, and the society remains in being as a pledged group. Rousseau sounds very much like Hobbes when he says that under the pact by which people enter civil society everyone totally alienates himself and all his rights to the whole community.
Rousseau, however, represents this act as a form of exchange of rights whereby people give up natural rights in return for civil rights. He does not claim that a whole society can be forced to be free but only that an occasional individual, who is enslaved by his passions to the extent of disobeying the law, can be restored by force to obedience to the voice of the general will that exists inside of him.
For Rousseau there is a radical dichotomy between true law and actual law. Actual law, which he described in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality , simply protects the status quo. True law, as described in The Social Contract , is just law, and what ensures its being just is that it is made by the people in their collective capacity as sovereign and obeyed by the same people in their individual capacities as subjects. Rousseau is confident that such laws could not be unjust because it is inconceivable that any people would make unjust laws for itself. Rousseau is, however, troubled by the fact that the majority of a people does not necessarily represent its most-intelligent citizens.
Indeed, he agrees with Plato that most people are stupid. Thus, the general will, while always morally sound, is sometimes mistaken. Hence Rousseau suggests the people need a lawgiver —a great mind like Solon or Lycurgus or Calvin —to draw up a constitution and system of laws. He even suggests that such lawgivers need to claim divine inspiration in order to persuade the dim-witted multitude to accept and endorse the laws it is offered.
Rousseau does not go so far as Machiavelli in proposing a revival of pagan cults, but he does propose a civil religion with minimal theological content designed to fortify and not impede as Christianity impedes the cultivation of martial virtues. By the year , however, when The Social Contract was published, Rousseau had given up any thought of settling in Geneva. But he became increasingly ill at ease in such worldly society and began to quarrel with his fellow philosophes.
Rousseau hastened into print with a defense of the Calvinist orthodoxy of the pastors and with an elaborate attack on the theatre as an institution that could only do harm to an innocent community such as Geneva. After formally renouncing his Genevan citizenship in , Rousseau became a fugitive, spending the rest of his life moving from one refuge to another. The New Eloise , being a novel , escaped the censorship to which the other two works were subject; indeed, of all his books it proved to be the most widely read and the most universally praised in his lifetime.
It develops the Romanticism that had already informed his writings on music and perhaps did more than any other single work of literature to influence the spirit of its age. If it did not exempt him from persecution, at least it ensured that his persecution was observed, and admiring femmes du monde intervened from time to time to help him so that Rousseau was never, unlike Voltaire and Diderot, actually imprisoned.
It is about people finding happiness in domestic as distinct from public life, in the family as opposed to the state. The central character, Saint-Preux, is a middle-class preceptor who falls in love with his upper-class pupil, Julie. She returns his love and yields to his advances, but the difference between their classes makes marriage between them impossible. As a dutiful daughter, Julie marries Wolmar and Saint-Preux goes off on a voyage around the world with an English aristocrat, Bomston, from whom he acquires a certain stoicism.
Julie succeeds in forgetting her feelings for Saint-Preux and finds happiness as wife, mother, and chatelaine.
Some six years later Saint-Preux returns from his travels and is engaged as tutor to the Wolmar children. All live together in harmony, and there are only faint echoes of the old affair between Saint-Preux and Julie. At the end of The New Eloise , when Julie has made herself ill in an attempt to rescue one of her children from drowning, she comes face-to-face with a truth about herself: The members of the Wolmar household are depicted as finding happiness in living according to an aristocratic ideal.
They appreciate the routines of country life and enjoy the beauties of the Swiss and Savoyard Alps. But despite such an endorsement of the social order, the novel was revolutionary; its very free expression of emotions and its extreme sensibility deeply moved its large readership and profoundly influenced literary developments. It is also halfway between a novel and a didactic essay. At the same time the book sets out to explore the possibilities of an education for republican citizenship.
Rousseau devotes many pages to explaining the methods the tutor must use. Those methods involve a noticeable measure of deceit, and although corporal punishment is forbidden, mental cruelty is not. In this different context religion plays a different role. Instead of a civil religion, Rousseau here outlines a personal religion, which proves to be a kind of simplified Christianity , involving neither revelation nor the familiar dogmas of the church.
Since the sovereign is invested with the authority and power to mete out punishments for breaches of the contract which are worse than not being able to act as one pleases, men have good, albeit self-interested, reason to adjust themselves to the artifice of morality in general, and justice in particular. Society becomes possible because, whereas in the State of Nature there was no power able to "overawe them all", now there is an artificially and conventionally superior and more powerful person who can force men to cooperate.
While living under the authority of a Sovereign can be harsh Hobbes argues that because men's passions can be expected to overwhelm their reason, the Sovereign must have absolute authority in order for the contract to be successful it is at least better than living in the State of Nature.
And, no matter how much we may object to how poorly a Sovereign manages the affairs of the state and regulates our own lives, we are never justified in resisting his power because it is the only thing which stands between us and what we most want to avoid, the State of Nature. Prior to the establishment of the basic social contract, according to which men agree to live together and the contract to embody a Sovereign with absolute authority, nothing is immoral or unjust - anything goes.
After these contracts are established, however, then society becomes possible, and people can be expected to keep their promises, cooperate with one another, and so on. The Social Contract is the most fundamental source of all that is good and that which we depend upon to live well. Our choice is either to abide by the terms of the contract, or return to the State of Nature, which Hobbes argues no reasonable person could possibly prefer. Given his rather severe view of human nature, Hobbes nonetheless manages to create an argument that makes civil society, along with all its advantages, possible.
Within the context of the political events of his England, he also managed to argue for a continuation of the traditional form of authority that his society had long since enjoyed, while nonetheless placing it on what he saw as a far more acceptable foundation. For Hobbes, the necessity of an absolute authority, in the form of a Sovereign, followed from the utter brutality of the State of Nature. The State of Nature was completely intolerable, and so rational men would be willing to submit themselves even to absolute authority in order to escape it.
For John Locke , , the State of Nature is a very different type of place, and so his argument concerning the social contract and the nature of men's relationship to authority are consequently quite different. Locke's most important and influential political writings are contained in his Two Treatises on Government. According to Locke, the State of Nature, the natural condition of mankind, is a state of perfect and complete liberty to conduct one's life as one best sees fit, free from the interference of others. This does not mean, however, that it is a state of license: The State of Nature, although a state wherein there is no civil authority or government to punish people for transgressions against laws, is not a state without morality.
The State of Nature is pre-political, but it is not pre-moral. Persons are assumed to be equal to one another in such a state, and therefore equally capable of discovering and being bound by the Law of Nature. Because we all belong equally to God, and because we cannot take away that which is rightfully His, we are prohibited from harming one another. So, the State of Nature is a state of liberty where persons are free to pursue their own interests and plans, free from interference, and, because of the Law of Nature and the restrictions that it imposes upon persons, it is relatively peaceful.
The State of Nature therefore, is not the same as the state of war, as it is according to Hobbes. It can, however devolve into a state of war, in particular, a state of war over property disputes. Whereas the State of Nature is the state of liberty where persons recognize the Law of Nature and therefore do not harm one another, the state of war begins between two or more men once one man declares war on another, by stealing from him, or by trying to make him his slave.
Since in the State of Nature there is no civil power to whom men can appeal, and since the Law of Nature allows them to defend their own lives, they may then kill those who would bring force against them. Since the State of Nature lacks civil authority, once war begins it is likely to continue. And this is one of the strongest reasons that men have to abandon the State of Nature by contracting together to form civil government. Property plays an essential role in Locke's argument for civil government and the contract that establishes it.
According to Locke, private property is created when a person mixes his labor with the raw materials of nature. So, for example, when one tills a piece of land in nature, and makes it into a piece of farmland, which produces food, then one has a claim to own that piece of land and the food produced upon it. Given the implications of the Law of Nature, there are limits as to how much property one can own: Because nature is given to all of mankind by God for its common subsistence, one cannot take more than his own fair share.
According to Locke, the State of Nature is not a condition of individuals, as it is for Hobbes. Rather, it is populated by mothers and fathers with their children, or families - what he calls "conjugal society" par. These societies are based on the voluntary agreements to care for children together, and they are moral but not political. Political society comes into being when individual men, representing their families, come together in the State of Nature and agree to each give up the executive power to punish those who transgress the Law of Nature, and hand over that power to the public power of a government.
Having done this, they then become subject to the will of the majority. One joins such a body, either from its beginnings, or after it has already been established by others, only by explicit consent. Having created a political society and government through their consent, men then gain three things which they lacked in the State of Nature: Each man therefore gives over the power to protect himself and punish transgressors of the Law of Nature to the government that he has created through the compact. Given that the end of "men's uniting into common-wealths" par.
When the executive power of a government devolves into tyranny, such as by dissolving the legislature and therefore denying the people the ability to make laws for their own preservation, then the resulting tyrant puts himself into a State of Nature, and specifically into a state of war with the people, and they then have the same right to self-defense as they had before making a compact to establish society in the first place.
The social compact can be dissolved and the process to create political society begun anew. Because Locke did not envision the State of Nature as grimly as did Hobbes, he can imagine conditions under which one would be better off rejecting a particular civil government and returning to the State of Nature, with the aim of constructing a better civil government in its place.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau , , lived and wrote during what was arguably the headiest period in the intellectual history of modern France--the Enlightenment. He was one of the bright lights of that intellectual movement, contributing articles to the Encyclopdie of Diderot, and participating in the salons in Paris, where the great intellectual questions of his day were pursued. Rousseau has two distinct social contract theories. The first is found in his essay, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men , commonly referred to as the Second Discourse, and is an account of the moral and political evolution of human beings over time, from a State of Nature to modern society.
As such it contains his naturalized account of the social contract, which he sees as very problematic. The second is his normative , or idealized theory of the social contract, and is meant to provide the means by which to alleviate the problems that modern society has created for us, as laid out in the Social Contract. Rousseau wrote his Second Discourse in response to an essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. Rousseau had previously won the same essay contest with an earlier essay, commonly referred to as the First Discourse.
According to Rousseau, the State of Nature was a peaceful and quixotic time. People lived solitary, uncomplicated lives. Their few needs were easily satisfied by nature. Because of the abundance of nature and the small size of the population, competition was non-existent, and persons rarely even saw one another, much less had reason for conflict or fear.
Moreover, these simple, morally pure persons were naturally endowed with the capacity for pity, and therefore were not inclined to bring harm to one another.
As time passed, however, humanity faced certain changes. As the overall population increased, the means by which people could satisfy their needs had to change. People slowly began to live together in small families, and then in small communities. Divisions of labor were introduced, both within and between families, and discoveries and inventions made life easier, giving rise to leisure time. Such leisure time inevitably led people to make comparisons between themselves and others, resulting in public values, leading to shame and envy, pride and contempt.
Most importantly however, according to Rousseau, was the invention of private property, which constituted the pivotal moment in humanity's evolution out of a simple, pure state into one characterized by greed, competition, vanity, inequality, and vice. Having introduced private property, initial conditions of inequality became more pronounced. Some have property and others are forced to work for them, and the development of social classes begins. Eventually, those who have property notice that it would be in their interests to create a government that would protect private property from those who do not have it but can see that they might be able to acquire it by force.
So, government gets established, through a contract, which purports to guarantee equality and protection for all, even though its true purpose is to fossilize the very inequalities that private property has produced. In other words, the contract, which claims to be in the interests of everyone equally, is really in the interests of the few who have become stronger and richer as a result of the developments of private property.
This is the naturalized social contract, which Rousseau views as responsible for the conflict and competition from which modern society suffers. The normative social contract, argued for by Rousseau in The Social Contract , is meant to respond to this sorry state of affairs and to remedy the social and moral ills that have been produced by the development of society.
The distinction between history and justification, between the factual situation of mankind and how it ought to live together, is of the utmost importance to Rousseau. While we ought not to ignore history, nor ignore the causes of the problems we face, we must resolve those problems through our capacity to choose how we ought to live.
Might never makes right, despite how often it pretends that it can. The Social Contract begins with the most oft-quoted line from Rousseau: This claim is the conceptual bridge between the descriptive work of the Second Discourse, and the prescriptive work that is to come. Since a return to the State of Nature is neither feasible nor desirable, the purpose of politics is to restore freedom to us, thereby reconciling who we truly and essentially are with how we live together. So, this is the fundamental philosophical problem that The Social Contract seeks to address: Or, put another way, how can we live together without succumbing to the force and coercion of others?
We can do so, Rousseau maintains, by submitting our individual, particular wills to the collective or general will, created through agreement with other free and equal persons. Like Hobbes and Locke before him, and in contrast to the ancient philosophers, all men are made by nature to be equals, therefore no one has a natural right to govern others, and therefore the only justified authority is the authority that is generated out of agreements or covenants.
The most basic covenant, the social pact, is the agreement to come together and form a people, a collectivity, which by definition is more than and different from a mere aggregation of individual interests and wills. This act, where individual persons become a people is "the real foundation of society" The sovereign is thus formed when free and equal persons come together and agree to create themselves anew as a single body, directed to the good of all considered together. So, just as individual wills are directed towards individual interests, the general will, once formed, is directed towards the common good, understood and agreed to collectively.
Included in this version of the social contract is the idea of reciprocated duties: Given this, individuals cannot be given liberty to decide whether it is in their own interests to fulfill their duties to the Sovereign, while at the same time being allowed to reap the benefits of citizenship. For Rousseau, this implies an extremely strong and direct form of democracy.
One cannot transfer one's will to another, to do with as he or she sees fit, as one does in representative democracies. Rather, the general will depends on the coming together periodically of the entire democratic body, each and every citizen, to decide collectively, and with at least near unanimity, how to live together, i.
As it is constituted only by individual wills, these private, individual wills must assemble themselves regularly if the general will is to continue. One implication of this is that the strong form of democracy which is consistent with the general will is also only possible in relatively small states.
The people must be able to identify with one another, and at least know who each other are. They cannot live in a large area, too spread out to come together regularly, and they cannot live in such different geographic circumstances as to be unable to be united under common laws. Could the present-day U. Although the conditions for true democracy are stringent, they are also the only means by which we can, according to Rousseau, save ourselves, and regain the freedom to which we are naturally entitled.
Rousseau's social contract theories together form a single, consistent view of our moral and political situation. We are endowed with freedom and equality by nature, but our nature has been corrupted by our contingent social history. We can overcome this corruption, however, by invoking our free will to reconstitute ourselves politically, along strongly democratic principles, which is good for us, both individually and collectively.
In , the publication of John Rawls ' extremely influential A Theory of Justice brought moral and political philosophy back from what had been a long hiatus of philosophical consideration. For Rawls, as for Kant, persons have the capacity to reason from a universal point of view, which in turn means that they have the particular moral capacity of judging principles from an impartial standpoint. In A Theory of Justice , Rawls argues that the moral and political point of view is discovered via impartiality. It is important to note that this view, delineated in A Theory of Justice , has undergone substantial revisions by Rawls, and that he described his later view as "political liberalism".
It is the position from which we can discover the nature of justice and what it requires of us as individual persons and of the social institutions through which we will live together cooperatively. These are the conditions under which, Rawls argues, one can choose principles for a just society which are themselves chosen from initial conditions that are inherently fair.
Because no one has any of the particular knowledge he or she could use to develop principles that favor his or her own particular circumstances, in other words the knowledge that makes for and sustains prejudices, the principles chosen from such a perspective are necessarily fair. For example, if one does not know whether one is female or male in the society for which one must choose basic principles of justice, it makes no sense, from the point of view of self-interested rationality, to endorse a principle that favors one sex at the expense of another, since, once the veil of ignorance is lifted, one might find oneself on the losing end of such a principle.
In such a position, behind such a veil, everyone is in the same situation, and everyone is presumed to be equally rational. Since everyone adopts the same method for choosing the basic principles for society, everyone will occupy the same standpoint: Therefore all who consider justice from the point of view of the original position would agree upon the same principles of justice generated out of such a thought experiment.
Any one person would reach the same conclusion as any other person concerning the most basic principles that must regulate a just society. The principles that persons in the Original Position, behind the Veil of Ignorance, would choose to regulate a society at the most basic level that is, prior even to a Constitution are called by Rawls, aptly enough, the Two Principles of Justice. These two principles determine the distribution of both civil liberties and social and economic goods.
The first principle states that each person in a society is to have as much basic liberty as possible, as long as everyone is granted the same liberties. That is, there is to be as much civil liberty as possible as long as these goods are distributed equally.