The Social Contract: 2

I felt like trying out the PC pronoun, possessive pronoun, reflexive pronoun, possessive adjective set per / pers / perself / per.

Rousseau's Social Contract considers not only politics but also what it isn't. To understand this one must go back to the reason society exists in the first place - for Rousseau society came into being because at some point the threat to people's "preservation in the state of nature" became too great and they were compelled to unite for the benefits that collective efforts afford.

In his first set of arguments he tries to prove that no person has any natural authority over another. This is important because it leads to the important conclusion that legitimate authority is always based on covenants between people. The notion that there is something like "the right of the strongest" makes no sense, because it tries to extend the power of force to morality - to transform a localised force into a universal right.

He develops this further to prove that there exists no right to slavery either. He makes nonsense first off of the idea that anyone would willingly enter into a covenant in which per is completely dependent on another who is completely dominant. The point is that by stripping someone of pers freedom per loses pers moral significance, and per is thereby robbed of what any legitimate covenant would strive to preserve first and foremost.

Many of these arguments he aims at Grotius with whom he obviously disagrees on a great many accounts. War is seen as similarly problematic when it is used as a justification for slavery, because the subjugation contains the state of war in the relation itself, and the so-called "right" to conquest is from the start nothing but the law of the strongest, which has nothing to do with morality at all as already proved. Thus slavery has no moral basis.

Rousseau then reaches the central problem that he tries to solve:

How to find a form of association which will defend the person and goods of each member with the collective force of all, and under which each individual, while uniting himself with the others, obeys no one but himself, and remains as free as before

The answer is the social contract - the social pact - which has the following characteristics:

Firstly, every individual gives perself completely including all rights, and since everyone does the same there is no one who can say it is in someone's personal interest to make life hard for anyone else.

Secondly, because the individual alienation is total the collective union is perfect. No individual retains any rights and there is therefore complete equality.

Lastly, by giving perself to all, per gives perself to no one and still recovers everything per loses - and in addition there is more power in the collective to preserve it.

Rousseau summarises these characteristics:

Each one of us puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will; and as a body, we incorporate every member as an indivisible part of the whole.