The Social Contract

The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

This is an interesting piece of mid-18th century ‘progressive-politics’ work. As a politics student I find in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s texts intriguing amount of information (subject of the following analysis) which is quite enjoyable.
We have to see Rousseau as an architect, as well as other 18th century philosophers and those previous to him he envisioned a certain protocol of government to people’s doctrine in his own fashion that will fulfil man’s needs at best. The Social Contract is the blueprint of this vision.

It has mild controversy, and very little of it can be linked to Rousseau’s thinking without linking it to the time and place he belonged to. This will come later.
The fundamental ideas are quite cohesive, after all he is seeking a ‘political right’ and as such it is only normal that from ideas like his sprung new ideas that helped flourish the French Revolution and the American Revolution… with some discrepancies of course.

First, it is important to identify that Rousseau creates a division in man himself. The division between the individual and the group he belongs to, the people, the ‘sovereign’. An idea similar to that of Karl Marx in a near century in regards to the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’ however, within man, this means in private one behaves and express his ideas in a certain way but when one identifies himself as one more person in a governed society then his self-portrait is communal (another idea of identification later developed by Karl Marx). There is the ‘me’ in myself and ‘me’ in my country. There is a behaviour focused on servitude for the greater good and a mental behaviour that must be kept intimate and distant to others.

Rousseau was loyal to the idea of the people being governed through the consent of the population and not by force, particularly by aristocracy or a monarchy which relays in a more stable and traditional hegemony unlike nowadays with fluctuating candidacies every 4 years etc. It may seem less democratic but more stable. This idea was clearly not taken in consideration by the fathers of the United States of America.

The social contract involves discipline of acceptance, tolerance and cooperation. People accept the responsibility of the government in protecting them thus the submission into the rights they swore not to break, a very legitimate, righteous and sustainable form of regime however Rousseau believed in capital punishment given the case where one person breaks this sacred covenant.
I reason this idea with no incredulous beliefs towards Rousseau because I know like everyone else we have studied that he is a victim of his own time and condition thus capital punishment was standardised, however there are more resolute and dignifying ways of ‘re adaptation’ into society instead of such harsh punishment that one can not revoke.

Here is where I differ with Rousseau and quite frankly with our own social contract too, where we punish wrong doers and exclude them from our society in jail for the rest of their life time (if not kill them depending in which country or state within the country they have been prosecuted). What we must understand is that this form of legal punishment doesn’t develop a person’s understanding, doesn’t re insert them adequately into our society or helps them interact with us again in a healthy way; it excludes them, confines them and resents them. Apart from the fact that we might also kill an innocent person.

However this is Scandinavia’s work to do (given their superiority in human rights) and not diseased mid-18th century Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
I find quite satisfactory and idealistically inspiring those concepts where he claims that the government is as strong as the people, where one part of the government should be ruled by the whole people… it really does create a unified self-esteem of its own, the morality of the PEOPLE.

The specific political clauses are not extremely relevant but there are interesting points of view that we can apply today. This social contract raises questions regarding how the government conditions us, his most famous quote “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” opens a notorious debate regarding the society one is born into.
We didn’t choose any of the laws we live in, we vote but we don’t choose anything… most of the most important decisions that are made every day have no link to us other than the social, financial or religious repercussions our governments decides to channel through us.

Man’s conditioning, nonetheless is experienced way beyond the political into the natural where we find ourselves born into chains not of bureaucracy but genetics, social class, financial situation, etc. and thus we can only reflect such paradigm into our society and its system. We were born with chains of many kinds.
If we look at India’s casting system, and the principles of the Code of Manu we can see how the chains man is born into are of a political essence that sprung five thousand years ago and only remnants of genetic material have notion of. As well as those they commonly share in the society they live in.

Regardless of how truthful Rousseau’s interpretation of man’s political antithesis of tabula rasa may be, our conditions go much further than those imposed by the government we may have accepted, for they are vessels of the same essence as us.