324 Ch. 9 • Enlightened Thought And The Republic Of Letters
Exiled by the Parlement of Paris
because his writings offended monar
chy and Church, Rousseau returned
to Geneva. Following the condemna
tion of his writings there in the early
1770s, he abandoned his children in
an orphanage—as his father had
abandoned him—and set off to visit
England. Rousseau remained a con
tentious loner, quarreling with other
philosophes. He assumed that when
his former friends disagreed with his
ideas, they knew that he was right but
simply refused to admit it. In his
Confessions (the first volume of which
appeared in 1782), he appealed to
future generations to see how con
Portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. temporary thinkers had misinter
preted or misrepresented him.
In Discourse on the Arts and Sci
ences (1750), Rousseau argued that civilization had corrupted the natural
goodness of man, which he called the “fundamental principle” of political
thought. The intemperate quest for property had disrupted the harmony that
had once characterized mankind in its primitive state by creating a hierarchy
of wealth. Rousseaus idealization of relatively primitive, uncomplicated,
and, he thought, manageable social and political groupings led him to
believe that a republic, such as his own Geneva, alone offered its citizens the
possibility of freedom. As free people in primitive societies joined together
for mutual protection, enlightened people could associate for their mutual
development in a kind of direct democracy. However, Rousseau remained
suspicious of representative government, believing that people might ulti
mately vote themselves into slavery by electing unworthy representatives.
He remained vague on how people were to be organized and governed.
In The Social Contract (1762), Rousseau tried to resolve the question of
how people could join together in society to find protection and justice and
yet remain free individuals. Locke had described the relationship between
a ruler and his people as a contractual one. Hobbes, in contrast, had
argued that individuals could find refuge from the brutality of the state of
nature only by surrendering their rights to an absolute ruler in exchange
for safety. Rousseau imagined a social contract in which the individual sur
renders his or her natural rights to the “general will” in order to find order
and security. By “general will,” Rousseau meant the consensus of a com
munity of citizens with equal political rights. Citizens would live in peace
because they would be ruled by other citizens, not by dynastic rulers eager
to expand their territorial holdings.