The Social Contract

For such a small treatise - the little paperback edition in my hand numbers to page 168 - The Social Contract has had an awful lot of influence on Western thought. Its impact on the French during the period that led up to the French Revolution is generally acknowledged, and its simple but persuasive principles regarding the qualities of a good state makes it an indispensable reference for anyone who wishes to understand the state of politics and especially democracy in the world today.

Its simple exposition hides surprising complexity, because the topic at hand is no small matter and Rousseau's ability to think about it in a way that appears relevant and almost fresh over two centuries later, and yet must have been novel and highly original in its day, is remarkable. That is not to say that some of the ideas and references aren't dated, but the logic still challenges one to think about the issues in the current world.

Before heading into a few highlights - rather than cover too much I will touch on a few of the worthwhile topics - I should mention an ineresting contradiction I noticed. Now, Rousseau is known for his talk about the Noble Savage, and that humans are inherently good and that society corrupted them, but in The Social Contract he starts out with a new tune: "And although in civil society man surrenders some of the advantages that belong to the state of nature, he gains in return far greater ones ... if the abuse of his new condition did not in many cases lower him to something worse than he had left he should constantly bless the happy hour that lifted him for ever from the state of nature" (p. 20)

That is quite a change (even though he makes a point of saying that the peaople have abused their newfound state, so it's not the ideal it could be) and is indeed the assumption throughout most of the work. However at one point Rousseau loses his cool - I could literally feel the change in his attitude as if he looked around him and was suddenly disgusted at his "modern" peers: "What? Is freedom to be maintained only with the support of slavery? Perhaps. The two extremes meet. Everything outside nature has its disadvantages, civil society more than all the rest." (p. 114) The basic wage has gone up in two hundred years and these days you can get a loan for a house but, dear middle class friends, we are most of us just white collar farm workers. Believe it.

There is therefore this ambivalence in the work, after all at the very start he says: "Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains." (One of those famous "first sentences" that can make you go simply weak at the knees, like the first time you lay eyes on the local girl whose sex appeal does more to enliven the town than Tesco's entire supply of Red Bull). With reference to this he states the intention of the treatise: "How did this transformation come about? I do not know. How can it be made legitimate? That question I believe I can answer." (p. 2)

On that note, more to come!