many details of policy are affected, especially those, likeabortion, and birth
control, which relate to family life and private morality.
The sheer size of the Roman Catholic congregation world-wide, combined
with the highly authoritarian and hierarchical nature of the church, has at times
made its leader, the Pope, a major figure in world politics, with little power but
with the sort of influence seldom held by heads of even the biggest states. As
reforming movements such as that in Dutch Roman Catholicism reduce the
political power of the Roman hierarchy within the Church, and as church
members privately or publicly act in defiance of church teaching, this role may
well decline. At the same time the influence ofliberation theologyhas made
the Roman Catholic Church in areas of the Third World positively radical,
often to the consternation of the authorities in Rome.
Rousseau
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) was the leading French political thinker of
the 18th century, a man often credited, though by then dead, with inspiring
the French Revolution, and still perhaps the principal inspiration for the whole
participatory democracymovement. His work, which covered many areas,
as was typical of theEnlightenmentphilosophes, who were happy to number
him among them, is best portrayed in three works. Of these theSocial Contract
is by far the best known, if only by its title, but theDiscourse on the Origin of
Inequalitycertainly and, arguably,E ́mile(his treatise on education) are equally
important for an understanding of his political theory. In theSocial Contract
Rousseau argued that democracy was only possible, and could only guarantee
freedom (his principal concern), when people lived in small ‘face-to-face’
communities where all citizens could and would fully join in the making of all
laws in some form of participatory assembly. For Rousseau,representative
democracyas usually practised in the West was meaningless, making citizens
free only for a few minutes every few years when they went to the polls. He
insisted that freedom involved being subject only to those rules one had
intentionally ‘willed’, hence his concept of thegeneral will, a joint and
communal intention which came about only when the whole society met
together, ignored their private desires and voted for what they felt was in the
public interest. Rousseau, though obviously a champion of an extreme if
impracticable democratic freedom, has also been seen as a dangerously author-
itarian writer, whose views anticipatefascism. This opposition comes about
because of his very great concern for equality, and his belief in mass meetings
and mass influence, both of which seem to threaten liberal individualism. What
is usually forgotten in such attacks is that Rousseau himself was so aware of the
social conditions necessary for his theories to apply, especially that they could
only work in very small communities where everyone knew each other, that he
Rousseau