Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau French; 28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, philosophe, writer, and composer. His political philosophy influenced the progress of the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the development of modern political, economic, and educational thought.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau held the position that human beings are naturally good but are corrupted by the institutions of civil society, particularly through the introduction of private property which created inequality and vice. He argued that while the state of nature offered physical freedom, modern civilization imposed chains of dependency and moral decay, necessitating a new social order based on the general will.

Rousseau's political philosophy centered on the Social Contract, a theory proposing that legitimate authority arises only from a collective agreement where individuals surrender their natural rights to the community as a whole. This framework advocates for direct democracy and popular sovereignty, where the sovereign is the entire citizen body acting to ensure the common good, rather than a monarch or elected representatives.

In the realm of education, Rousseau championed a child-centered learning approach in his treatise Émile, asserting that education should follow the child's natural development rather than imposing societal constraints. His broader legacy includes a critique of the Enlightenment's faith in progress, arguing instead that the arts and sciences often lead to moral decadence, and he is recognized as a precursor to Romanticism and modern democratic theory.

Critiques

Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, which argues that private property is the source of inequality, and The Social Contract, which outlines the basis for a legitimate political order, are cornerstones in modern political and social thought.

In truth it is not private property that brings Inequality but it is the dependence on political power that is also the result of centralizing power in the hands of government and the degeneration of the masses.

Rousseau's autobiographical writings—the posthumously published Confessions (completed in 1770), which initiated the modern autobiography.

Locke

John Locke famously wrote that man has three natural rights: life, liberty and property. In his “Thoughts Concerning Education” (1693), Locke argued for a broadened syllabus and better treatment of students—ideas that were an enormous influence on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel “Emile” (1762).

Burke

"The hot-headed idealists who manned the barricades were entirely wrong to believe they could construct a new world from the ashes of the old. They placed their faith in destruction rather than preservation; thereby acting contrary to what Burke claimed should be the guiding principles of society." </Ref>

The guiding principals of society are often lost on the generation that has not learned nor practiced them. Legal charity demoralizes the people and of course divides the people degenerating those bonds through a civil table of welfare that is a snare.

"Unlike other social contract theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes; Burke believed that “society is but a contract between the dead, the living and those yet to be born.” We must therefore construct civilisation by giving weight to our ancestors, ourselves and those still to be born."

Alexis

Alexis de Tocqueville would be influenced by the thinking of men like Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Aristotle, Max Weber, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek among many others.

The democracy in America was at that time he travelled through it was still limited by the spirit of the Republic where men saw responsibility as an essential pursuit.

Tocqueville, in his Memoir on Pauperism, given to the Royal Academy of Cherbourg, attacked the British system of “legal charity on a permanent basis” as a method of impoverishment that not only increased the “indigent population” but “their laziness along with their needs and their idleness with their vices.”

"[I]ndividual alms-giving established valuable ties between the rich and the poor. The deed itself involves the giver in the fate of the one whose poverty he has undertaken to alleviate. The latter, supported by aid which he had no right to demand and which he had no hope to getting, feels inspired by gratitude. A moral tie is established between those two classes whose interests and passions so often conspire to separate them from each other, and although divided by circumstance they are willingly reconciled. This is not the case with legal charity. The latter allows the alms to persist but removes its morality. The law strips the man of wealth of a part of his surplus without consulting him, and he sees the poor man only as a greedy stranger invited by the legislator to share his wealth. The poor man, on the other hand, feels no gratitude for a benefit that no one can refuse him and that could not satisfy him in any case. Public alms guarantee life but do not make it happier or more comfortable than individual alms-giving; legal charity does not thereby eliminate wealth or poverty in society. One class still views the world with fear and loathing while the other regards its misfortune with despair and envy. Far from uniting these two rival nations, who have existed since the beginning of the world and who are called the rich and poor, into a single people, it breaks the only link which could be established between them. It ranges each one under a banner, tallies them, and, bringing them face to face, prepares them for combat."