Page 50 - History 2020

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the down-to-earth 16 century essayist Michel de Montaigne to the architect of the
EU institutions, Jean Monnet. But it is their love affair with ideas that stands out.

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The 18 century philosophe who best exemplifies both the Enlightenment and the
French rationalist tradition is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778). His life and
career were chequered; born in the independent Calvinist city of Geneva, he lost his
father at ten, loved and married a barely literate laundry maid; their five children
were all placed in an institution; and gravitated to Paris and the philosophes. He
wrote for Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedia, then won first prize in an essay

competition, based, he said, on an epiphany: that human beings are good by nature
but are corrupted by society. This remained his central belief.

Rousseau, like the Enlightenment itself, defies easy description. He is the Karl Marx
of the Enlightenment, its most original and daring thinker, who bequeathed a body of
ideas unequalled in their range and depth. Often provocative and contradictory, he
opened up new vistas of enquiry and debate that still resonate today. His beliefs in

some ways define the popular view of the Enlightenment; freedom, democracy and
equality, rejecting intellectual authority, thinking and feeling for oneself; he wrote
like an angel and his books were best sellers; he was the first celebrity intellectual.
Yet he quarreled with the other philosophes and died alone in humble circumstances.

He enjoyed being provocative. Some of his views contradicted Enlightenment
thinking. Take his views on reason. Critics accused the Enlightenment of putting
excessive faith in reason. Rousseau agreed. He argued that everyone had an “inner

voice”, of conscience or emotion, which was equally valid in the peasant as the
educated philosophe in providing an infallible moral guide; hence his belief in
equality and democracy. His idea of freedom was that people were freer in more
primitive times, in a “state of nature”, but modern society brought artificiality and a
striving for wealth and status: “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”

There are many gaps and contradictions in his thinking. For example, if people are
good by nature, and society is the source of all evil, how, given that society is
composed entirely of naturally good human beings, could evil ever get a foothold?

In his “Social Contract” (1762) he is the first person to address the fundamental
problem of modern democracy: how can the freedom of the individual be reconciled
with the authority of the state? His solution is the concept of the “General Will”. He
says that a state can be only be legitimate if it is guided by the “General Will” of its
members. This is the source of law and is willed by every citizen. In obeying the law

they are thus subject to their own will. They therefore remain perfectly free. The