Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "The Social Contract and the Discourses" is composed of five essays, and together they show the radical nature of Rousseau's political thought as well as place Rousseau in the intellectual history of the West. To modern Western readers there is no denying the tragic failings of Rousseau's ideas, but there is also no denying the tragic power of his words. Rousseau's words would give birth to the French Revolution, and would help shape many dangerous revolutions after that. When Edmund Burke published "Reflections on the Revolution in France" in 1790, he was responding less to the tumult in France than to the political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, twelve years after his death.
If Rousseau were a student at today's Oxford or Harvard and he were to turn in any of his now famous political essays here's what his political science professor would write: "You make wildly unsubstantiated claims, and commit numerous logical fallacies, the two most egregious being circumlocution and inductive reasoning. Your paper digresses to the point of distraction. Overall, you rely too much on stirring people's sentiments rather than logically, thoughtfully arguing your thesis, which is more an emotional over-reaction than a nuanced and balanced synthesis of knowledge and experience. I will grant that you write superbly and with flourish. Make haste to transfer to the poetry major."
Indeed, Rousseau is a master stylist, who saves a faulty and often nonsensical argument with the beauty of his style and the power of his conviction. There is a great joy in reading Rousseau's writing, for each sentence is pithy and pregnant with meaning, each paragraph a world onto itself. But that is also the dangerous evil in Rousseau: it is so easy to take his ideas and paragraphs out of context, with the consequence that his words would make concrete and focused one's otherwise directionless anger and fury. In his beautifully written essay "A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality," Rousseau harks back to man's natural state, where he is compassionate, virtuous, and just; in Rousseau's calibration, private property is what upsets the natural world of equality and destroys man's virtue. These ideas fuel the French Revolution, anticipate Marx, and tragically help shape the fanatical flattening of totalitarian communism.
In "A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences," he praises the Spartans and early Romans for their simplicity and ignorance, which makes them steadfastly loyal to their equality and virtue. The arts and sciences in a society that is already corrupted by wealth and luxury (and in fact the arts and sciences could only flourish in a corrupt wealthy society, in Rousseau's worldview) only make the body politic that much more enervated and lethargic, prone to revolution or invasion.
The most dangerous of all Rousseau's ideas can be found in his most famous essay "The Social Contract" (although oddly it is the most haphazard and least convincing of all five essays): the idea of the General Will. The Sovereign is the body politic, the General Will is the collective norms and values of the citizenry, and the laws are the emanations of the General Will. In a perfect society there is a perfect harmonization of the Sovereign, the General Will, laws and legislators, the state and the individual so that equality and virtue are ever present, and laws and legislators are in fact unnecessary.
What is so dangerous about the General Will is that it supersedes everything because it is meant to be the one and everything: laws and legislators, individual rights and state rights, the monarch and the citizen must all be subservient to its absolute, inalienable, indivisible rule -- and no one can have a choice or say in the matter. That's because the General Will is the source of the supreme good, the supreme good, and the supreme interpreter and arbiter of the supreme good. To use a very inexact analogy, the General Will is the framers of the American constitution, the American constitution, the Supreme Court, and the legislators which can make amendments all rolled into one neat concept.
Thus, the General Will is Rousseau's ultimate circumlocution in a book of many circumlocutions. The ultimate irony in this book of many ironies (a gifted rhetorician decrying the corrupting power of the arts and knowledge is the most obvious) is that Rousseau in trying to fashion a system that is most fair and just, equal and virtuous locates all power in one concept that permits one man to be God: nothing can restrain -- neither laws nor customs nor traditions nor his fellow men and especially not himself -- a man who promises to represent the General Will.
Edmund Burke was right: the French Revolution would cause the rise of Napoleon, and the legacy of the French Revolution would legitimize the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
It is intellectually invigorating to be able to discover that the wild and inexplicable, cold and calculated madness of the twentieth century can in fact be found partly in a collection of essays written by a genius more obsessed with his own internal failings (Rousseau was a paranoid at the end of his life, and most certainly a bipolar throughout most of his life) than the injustices of the world around him. Rousseau's ideas launched revolutions, and reading "The Social Contract and the Discourses" is a powerful reminder of the beauty of words to inspire or confuse and the power of ideas to create or destroy.
