The Social Contract: Rousseau (1762)
 

“Man is born free and yet everywhere he lives in chains.” (Rousseau, Social Contract 1:1) 

Upon receiving a copy of Rousseau's book, The Social Contract, Voltaire wrote back to Rousseau: "I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it."

In his Discourse on the Origin of Human Inequality, Rousseau argued that freedom is the inherent, natural condition of mankind; therefore, all political inequality, all slavery, all absence of freedom follows from social, not natural conditions.

Thus, freedom is both an inherent right and a means towards maintaining just, moral societies. 

In his Social Contract, Rousseau then offered was a means of actually implementing this philosophy into a set of laws to create this society.  Those means became the basis of American and most all European democracies.

Unfortunately, to understand what Rousseau gave us, you need to learn some political terms:

Consider that in any society there are two competing interests: the group and the individual.  The group often threatens the freedom and security of the individual (that’s what “democracy” is: a lot of people ganging up on fewer people) and the individual often threatens the group (by, say, pissing upstream of everyone else, literally or so to speak, or driving recklessly etc.).

Liberty: Liberty is the power to control one’s own choices and behavior. Generally, it is control over one’s own body.  Rousseau argues that liberty is the natural state of all humans, it is therefore a moral ends, rather than simply a means to an ends. Thus liberty itself is the highest moral good.

The Social Contract and General Will: However, individuals must agree to surrender their individual liberty (which is still that thing of the utmost highest value) to the General Will in order to maintain that same personal liberty. This is because few if any individuals have the individual power, alone, to protect themselves from the threats of other individuals or groups.

This is the "social contract": and agreement that each of us must give up some of our will to rule over others; I curtail my absolute liberty in exchange for you curtailing yours. In simplistic terms you might say I give up my freedom to treat another as a slave in exchange for the promise that I will never be a slave. 

The General Will: This term means the will of all those in the society combined. Roughly speaking, it's the democratic consensus or what we now call “democracy”: what the society as a whole chooses when it votes.  But in Rousseau's terms, he means “the greater good”, the protection of all the individuals in that society; or, that which is best for the society.

The danger here of course, and Rousseau recognizes this, is that a democratic general will really only means 51% of the group agrees and the other 49% is out of luck. More on this below.

The Sovereign: Literally, this word simply means who/whatever is in charge, whoever holds/rules the power (of police, military, whoever is given the power to carry out law (the king, the state).  Until the Enlightenment, the sovereign was always some combination of the church and the king or queen.  But Rousseau makes the General Will the Sovereign.  This is his grand contribution to democracy and, literally, to our Constitution. It's a radical step we now simply take for granted.

The Limits of the Sovereign:  By definition, moral sovereignty can only be that which protects the individual liberty; all else is tyranny (immoral power of one over another).   Locke had argued that the role of civil government was only to protect  the public good and “Civil interests I call life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, lands, houses, furniture, and the like.”  Rousseau goes a step further and argues that in fact the Sovereign can really only protect individual liberty. The role of a state/government is to keep all free.

(Here, Rousseau sows the seeds of what we now call the Libertarian view; see William Godwin; see JS Mill)

But Why Can We Trust The General Will?   As we said above, the problem is that the larger group often threatens the freedom and security of the individual or minority and the individual or minority often threatens the larger group.  For this reason, since the downfall of the Roman Republic and until Rousseau’s time, no Western society was willing to trust democracy. What is to protect us from mob rule?

Rousseau argued we should be willing to trust democracy for the following reasons:

a) The Moral General Will tends to prevail: Yes, in any society many will not vote for the general will (the greater good) but for self interest (I want lower taxes because I don't send my child to a public school etc.). Let us call these people “the selfish bastards”; they want laws that protect their own self interests even if it hurts others.  The selfish bastards will of course attempt to rule over others (which is inherently immoral; see liberty, above). But Rousseau argued that, generally, in a system of true equality, true democracy (one person, one vote, all people have equal vote) in theory at least, those who vote for their own self interest will tend to cancel out one another, so the moral element will still win the vote, and thus rule.

Keep in mind that Rousseau believes that people are inherently good, that we are naturally compassionate and empathetic. It's worth asking, however, whether he's completely wrong, because if he is then clearly democracy is a futile, doomed attempt, because if we're all a bunch of selfish bastards, the general will will of course be immoral.

b) However, simply hoping for the Moral General Will is not enough: the system must also inherently protect the liberty of the minority; it must not allow the majority to tyrannize the minority (ie enslaving or disenfranchising racial, ethnic minorities, or homosexuals).  This is why we have a constitutional democracy, not just a "democracy":  equality is the founding concept of our Declaration of Independence and the Bill Of Rights serves to institutionalize Rousseau's philosophy: it guarantees through legal protection the right of the minority and individual (to equality) against the tyranny of the majority.

Or that was the theory, at least. Clearly the treatment of Native Americans, Blacks, women, the Chinese, homosexuals...well, just about everyone, suggests the document works in theory better than in practice.

On the other hand, it's worth remembering what government looked like before Rousseau's theory existed and considering whether the often failed, limited protection of minority rights could or would exist today without this theory.