Rousseau

Rousseau's diagnostic opening line.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.1 Ch.1 [Primary] | Use: Iconic opening — frames the entire project as replacing illegitimate chains with legitimate ones.

"Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."

Rawls on Rousseau's critical project.

| Source: Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, Lecture 2 [Secondary] | Use: The clearest secondary summary of why Rousseau writes the Social Contract — it's a constructive response to the Discourses' diagnosis.

Rousseau "is a critic of culture and civilization: in the Second Discourse he diagnoses what he sees as the deep-rooted evils of society and depicts the vices and miseries it arouses in its members. He hopes to explain why these evils and vices come about, and to describe in the Social Contract the basic framework of a political and social world in which they would not be present."

Rousseau's fundamental problem.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.1 Ch.6 (cited in Rawls Lec.2) [Primary] | Use: The thesis statement of the whole Social Contract — every essay on freedom or legitimacy should reference this.

"Find a form of association that defends and protects the person and goods of each associate with all the common force… yet each one, uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before."

Rousseau on civilisation's corrupting effect.

| Source: Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, p.5 [Primary] | Use: Essential context for the Social Contract — freedom is limited not just by laws but by culture.

"The sciences, letters, and arts… spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains which weigh men down." And: "Our souls have been corrupted in proportion as our sciences and our arts have advanced toward perfection."

Rousseau on the founding of civil society through property.

| Source: Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality [Primary] | Use: The iconic "this is mine" passage — foundational for Rousseau on inequality and the illegitimate first contract.

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, thought of saying 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society."

Rousseau on how the rich trick the poor into the first (illegitimate) contract.

| Source: Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p.97–98 [Primary] | Use: Crucial context — the Social Contract is the SECOND, legitimate contract that replaces this bad first one.

The first contract "gave the weak new fetters and the rich new forces… irreversibly destroyed natural freedom, forever fixed the Law of property and inequality, transformed a skilful usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjugated the whole of Mankind to labour, servitude and misery."

Charles Mills on Rousseau's two contracts.

| Source: Mills, Rousseau, the Master's Tools / The Racial Contract, p.94 [Secondary] | Use: Central for making sense of the Discourses–Social Contract relation — Rousseau is anti-contractarian through contractarianism.

"Rousseau is the only contractarian writer to describe two contracts" — the bad one in the Discourses, where "the contract is a scam; the pretence is that everybody will be included in the codification of moral principles and legal rules" — and the idealised good contract of the Social Contract.

Mills on Rousseau's aim being to re-make the chains, not remove them.

| Source: Mills, The Racial Contract, p.94 [Secondary] | Use: Defensive citation — pre-empts misreadings of Rousseau as a primitivist.

"Rousseau's aim is not, as the reader might first think, to remove these chains, but to remove them of their burdensome and oppressive character. The 'chains' are the moral and legal norms and rules that are unavoidable in any sociopolitical order."

Mills on civil society (not nature) as Rousseau's horizon.

| Source: Mills, The Racial Contract, p.96 [Secondary] | Use: Use against the primitivist reading — only in society can human potential develop.

"Going back to natural primitivism is not a desirable option. Only in the social order can we develop our distinctively human potential. But what is required is a society that does not fall prey to the evils and corruptions of the domination contract."

Rousseau on the psychology of natural man.

| Source: Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (cited in Wolff) [Primary] | Use: Baseline for any question on the state of nature — Rousseau's natural man is solitary and minimal.

"The savage is a solitary being, rarely coming into contact with others… the savage desires only food, sexual satisfaction, and sleep, and fears only hunger and pain."

Amour de soi vs amour-propre — the technical distinction.

| Source: Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, Lecture 2 [Secondary] | Use: Essential for contrasting Rousseau's state of nature with Hobbes's or Locke's.

Amour de soi: free will, self-improvement, and compassion for others. Amour-propre: the craving for social standing and the right to make claims that limit others' conduct. The latter emerges only in society, and is the source of its corruptions.

The Social Compact stated.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.1 Ch.6 [Primary] | Use: The single most important formulation of the contract — memorise verbatim.

"Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole."

Rousseau on particular will vs general will.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.1 Ch.7 [Primary] | Use: Sets up the free-rider problem that "forced to be free" is designed to solve.

"Each individual, as a man, may have a particular will contrary or dissimilar to the general will which he has as a citizen. His particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest: his absolute and naturally independent existence may make him look upon what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which will do less harm to others than the payment of it is burdensome to himself."

Rousseau's "forced to be free" passage.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.1 Ch.7 [Primary] | Use: THE most notorious passage in Rousseau — anchor for any essay on positive liberty, Berlin, or paternalism.

"In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free."

Rawls on "forced to be free" as a free-rider problem.

| Source: Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, Lecture 3, p.243 [Secondary] | Use: The strongest defensive reading of the notorious passage — recasts coercion as the solution to collective-action failure.

"It is clear that Rousseau has in mind a case of what today we call free-riding on collectively advantageous schemes of cooperation."

Bertram on "restricting freedom for the sake of freedom."

| Source: Bertram, Rousseau and the Social Contract, p.194 [Secondary] | Use: The best single secondary citation for defending Rousseau — pair with Rawls on free-riding.

The state restricts freedom in two ways: the sovereign people assign rights that constrain others, and they retain the capacity to block Lockean-style inequalities. "In each of these two cases, freedom is restricted for the sake of freedom. The individual who is 'forced to be free' is constrained to guarantee the conditions under which he and others can both coexist and be free."

Rousseau on what is lost and gained in the social compact.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.1 Ch.8 [Primary] | Use: The essential trade-off at the heart of Rousseau's theory of freedom.

"What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses."

Rousseau's three liberties — natural, civil, moral.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.1 Ch.8 [Primary] | Use: Ready-made essay scaffolding for any question on freedom in Rousseau.

Natural liberty is "bounded only by the strength of the individual"; civil liberty is "limited by the general will"; moral liberty "alone makes [man] truly master of himself; for the mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty."

Rawls on moral freedom.

| Source: Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, Lecture 3, p.244 [Secondary] | Use: Best secondary gloss on moral freedom as self-legislation under general laws.

Citizens have "a similar capacity for moral freedom — that is, the capacity to act in accordance with general laws they give to themselves as well as others for the sake of the common good."

Rousseau on natural inequality vs civil equality.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.1 Ch.9 [Primary] | Use: Rousseau's foundational claim about the compact's purpose — it replaces physical with moral equality.

"Instead of destroying natural inequality, the fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men, who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by convention and legal right."

Rousseau on property as subject to the community.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.1 Ch.9 [Primary] | Use: Key contrast with Locke — property is real but subordinate to collective sovereignty.

"The right which each individual has to his own estate is always subordinate to the right which the community has over all: without this, there would be neither stability in the social tie, nor real force in the exercise of Sovereignty."

Rousseau on renouncing liberty.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.1 Ch.4 [Primary] | Use: The key anti-slavery passage — pair with the critique of Locke's §23–24.

"To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts."

Rousseau's challenge to Locke on conquest-based slavery.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.1 Ch.4 [Primary] | Use: Direct confrontation with Locke's §23–24 — wars are between states, not men, so captives cannot be slaves.

"The object of the war being the destruction of the hostile State, the other side has a right to kill its defenders, while they are bearing arms; but as soon as they lay them down and surrender, they cease to be enemies." And: "The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest. If war does not give the conqueror the right to massacre the conquered peoples, the right to enslave them cannot be based upon a right which does not exist."

Rousseau on the inalienability of sovereignty.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.2 Ch.1 [Primary] | Use: Crucial for the anti-representation argument — power may be transmitted but will cannot.

"Sovereignty, being nothing less than the exercise of the general will, can never be alienated, and… the Sovereign, who is no less than a collective being, cannot be represented except by himself: the power indeed may be transmitted, but not the will."

Rousseau on the self-dissolution of a people who merely "obey."

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.2 Ch.1 [Primary] | Use: Powerful anti-monarchical citation — obedience without sovereignty erases the people.

"If then the people promises simply to obey, by that very act it dissolves itself and loses what makes it a people; the moment a master exists, there is no longer a Sovereign."

The distinction between the general will and the will of all.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.2 Ch.3 [Primary] | Use: Essential technical distinction — defuses the charge that the general will = majority vote.

"There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter considers only the common interest, while the former takes private interest into account, and is no more than a sum of particular wills: but take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel one another, and the general will remains as the sum of the differences."

Rousseau against factions.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.2 Ch.3 [Primary] | Use: Central for the difficulty of applying Rousseau to modern pluralist politics.

"When factions arise, and partial associations are formed at the expense of the great association, the will of each of these associations becomes general in relation to its members, while it remains particular in relation to the State: it may then be said that there are no longer as many votes as there are men, but only as many as there are associations."

Rousseau on the legitimacy of acts of sovereignty.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.2 Ch.4 [Primary] | Use: Defends Rousseau from the charge of arbitrary majoritarianism — sovereignty is bounded.

An act of sovereignty "is a convention between the body and each of its members. It is legitimate, because based on the social contract, and equitable, because common to all; useful, because it can have no other object than the general good, and stable, because guaranteed by the public force and the supreme power."

The limits of sovereignty.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.2 Ch.4 [Primary] | Use: Important qualifier on the "forced to be free" passage — the sovereign cannot burden one citizen more than another.

"Sovereign power, absolute, sacred, and inviolable as it is, does not and cannot exceed the limits of general conventions… the Sovereign never has a right to lay more charges on one subject than on another, because, in that case, the question becomes particular, and ceases to be within its competency."

Rousseau on the state's right to the citizen's life.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.2 Ch.5 [Primary] | Use: The most illiberal passage — key for essays on the limits of freedom in Rousseau.

"When the prince says to him: 'It is expedient for the State that you should die,' he ought to die, because it is only on that condition that he has been living in security up to the present, and because his life is no longer a mere bounty of nature, but a gift made conditionally by the State."

Rousseau on law-breakers as enemies of the state.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.2 Ch.5 [Primary] | Use: Key passage — the law-breaker ceases to be a citizen.

"By violating its laws he ceases to be a member of it… in putting the guilty to death, we slay not so much the citizen as an enemy."

Rousseau's qualification on the death penalty.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.2 Ch.5 [Primary] | Use: Counter-citation to the harsh passages — Rousseau is not simply bloodthirsty.

"The State has no right to put to death, even for the sake of making an example, any one whom it can leave alive without danger. Frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or remissness on the part of the government."

Rousseau on law as the register of our wills.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.2 Ch.6 [Primary] | Use: Key citation on Rousseau's theory of law — dissolves traditional puzzles about legislative authority.

"It can no longer be asked whose business it is to make laws, since they are acts of the general will; nor whether the prince is above the law, since he is a member of the State; nor whether the law can be unjust, since no one is unjust to himself; nor how we can be both free and subject to the laws, since they are but registers of our wills."

Rousseau on the people as authors of the law.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.2 Ch.6 [Primary] | Use: Concise statement of popular sovereignty.

"Laws are, properly speaking, only the conditions of civil association. The people, being subject to the laws, ought to be their author."

Rousseau on the fallibility of the general will's judgement.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.2 Ch.6 [Primary] | Use: Key concession — use to acknowledge that Rousseau's system requires education and guidance (and so licenses paternalism).

"The general will is always in the right, but the judgment which guides it is not always enlightened… All stand equally in need of guidance. The former must be compelled to bring their wills into conformity with their reason; the latter must be taught to know what it wills."

Rousseau on civil equality and wealth.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.2 Ch.11 [Primary] | Use: Key passage for Rousseau as egalitarian — wealth must not be great enough for domination.

"I have already defined civil liberty by equality… not that the degrees of power and riches are to be absolutely identical for everybody; but that power shall never be great enough for violence, and shall always be exercised by virtue of rank and law; and that, in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself."

Rousseau on the three forms of government.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.3 Ch.2 [Primary] | Use: Sets up Rousseau's institutional analysis — the sovereign chooses any form, but government remains subject to legislation.

Democracy: government by "the whole people or the majority of the people"; aristocracy: government restricted to a small number; monarchy: "the whole government in the hands of a single magistrate." The sovereign can choose any form, but the government remains subject to the people's legislation.

Rousseau on the subordination of government to sovereignty. |

Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.3 Ch.1 [Primary] | Use: The core principle of Rousseauian institutional design.

The well-ordered state is "always ready to sacrifice the government to the people, and never to sacrifice the people to the government."

Rousseau against democracy (strictly speaking).

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.3 Ch.4 [Primary] | Use: Strikingly counter-intuitive — useful for showing Rousseau is not straightforwardly a democrat.

"If we take the term in the strict sense, there never has been a real democracy, and there never will be. It is against the natural order for the many to govern and the few to be governed." Further: "It is unimaginable that the people should remain continually assembled to devote their time to public affairs."

Rousseau on elective aristocracy as the best form.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.3 Ch.5 [Primary] | Use: Use for any question on Rousseau's preferred institutional form — the wise govern for the people's profit.

"In a word, it is the best and most natural arrangement that the wisest should govern the many, when it is assured that they will govern for its profit, and not for their own."

Cobban on Rousseau's limits on popular participation.

| Source: Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern State, p.30 [Secondary] | Use: Crucial qualification — the people participate in law-making but NOT in execution.

"What the people must participate in is the law-making process, and this, according to him, is a rare and exceptional activity; from the executive acts of government the sovereign people is rigorously excluded."

Cobban on Rousseau's attack on the English constitution.

| Source: Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern State, p.41 [Secondary] | Use: Useful for contextualising the anti-representation stance.

"Rousseau's attack on the English constitution can be reduced to a criticism of one particular feature, to which he is opposed on general theoretic grounds, the system of representation."

Rousseau on representation and freedom.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.3 Ch.15 [Primary] | Use: The emphatic anti-representation statement.

"In any case, the moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer free: it no longer exists."

Rousseau's critique of English "freedom."

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.3 Ch.15 [Primary] | Use: A rhetorical gem — distinguishes Rousseauian from parliamentary freedom in a single quotable passage.

"The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing."

Rousseau on deputies as stewards, not representatives.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.3 Ch.15 [Primary] | Use: Technical distinction — deputies can execute but cannot legislate.

"The deputies of the people, therefore, are not and cannot be its representatives: they are merely its stewards and can carry through no definitive acts. Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void."

Rousseau on civic decay through delegation.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.3 Ch.15 [Primary] | Use: Classical republican note — civic virtue declines when citizens pay others to do their civic duty.

"As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall. When it is necessary to march out to war, they pay troops and stay at home: when it is necessary to meet in council, they name deputies and stay at home."

Rousseau on the inherent defect of the body politic.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.3 Ch.10 [Primary] | Use: Rousseau's fatalism about political decay — pair with Book 3 Ch.11 and Ch.15.

"As the particular will acts constantly in opposition to the general will, the government continually exerts itself against the Sovereignty… sooner or later the prince must inevitably suppress the Sovereign and break the social treaty. This is the unavoidable and inherent defect which, from the very birth of the body politic, tends ceaselessly to destroy it."

Rousseau on the natural contraction of government.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.3 Ch.10 [Primary] | Use: Structural claim — governments contract from democracy to aristocracy to monarchy as their natural tendency.

"Government undergoes contraction when it passes from the many to the few, that is, from democracy to aristocracy, and from aristocracy to royalty. To do so is its natural propensity."

Rousseau on voting and the general will.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.4 Ch.2 [Primary] | Use: Central for the idealisation of voting — consent holds even when one's vote loses.

"The citizen gives his consent to all the laws, including those which are passed in spite of his opposition, and even those which punish him when he dares to break any of them. The constant will of all the members of the State is the general will; by virtue of it they are citizens and free."

Rousseau on being in the minority as having been mistaken.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.4 Ch.2 [Primary] | Use: Striking claim — minority dissent is evidence the dissenter misjudged the general will, not that the general will is wrong.

"When the opinion contrary to my own prevails, it proves nothing more than I made a mistake, and that what I took to be the general will was not."

Wolff on the repressive implications of Rousseau's tight social unity.

| Source: Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, p.94 [Secondary] | Use: The sharpest liberal critique — Rousseau's democracy is instrumentally defensible only by being intrinsically repressive.

"The same measures which, in Rousseau's model, make democracy defensible in instrumental terms also make it intrinsically undesirable."

Wolff on dissent as treason in Rousseau.

| Source: Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, p.94 [Secondary] | Use: Use for the liberal critique — minority dissent is criminalised at the margin.

"Rousseau's treatment of those who hold a minority view is hard to admire. Dissenters are to be 'forced to be free'. Those who first affirm the principles of the civil religion and then disobey them are to be put to death. Against the background of the tight unity of the state, dissent is a crime, and crime is treason."

Rousseau on civil religion's social articles of faith.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.4 Ch.8 [Primary] | Use: Core passage on civil religion — Rousseau's most illiberal institutional proposal.

"There is therefore a purely civil profession of faith of which the Sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject."

Rousseau on banishing (or killing) civil-religion dissenters.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.4 Ch.8 [Primary] | Use: The most extreme civil-religion passage — essential for freedom-focused essays.

The Sovereign "can banish from the State whoever does not believe [the articles] — it can banish him, not for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice… If anyone, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law."

Bertram on the five dogmas of Rousseau's civil religion.

| Source: Bertram, Rousseau and the Social Contract, p.186 [Secondary] | Use: Clean structural summary — five dogmas, cleanly enumerable.

Five dogmas: (1) a benevolent deity exists; (2) there is life after death; (3) the just will be rewarded and the wicked punished; (4) the social contract and the laws are sacred; (5) sectarian intolerance is prohibited.

Cobban on religion as social utility.

| Source: Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern State, p.50 [Secondary] | Use: Useful contextualisation — Rousseau shares with the philosophes a focus on religion's social function rather than its truth.

That the church should be under the state was common to the philosophes, "for whom indeed the truth of a religion seemed distinctly less important than its social utility."

Bertram on civil religion's function in civic solidarity.

| Source: Bertram, Rousseau and the Social Contract, p.188 [Secondary] | Use: More sympathetic reading — civil religion underwrites shared civic identity and mutual trust.

"The civil religion, so long as it is not hypocritically affirmed, can give citizens a confidence in dealing with one another, a confidence that will underpin their feelings of common identity and solidarity." The sole negative dogma — the rejection of intolerance — is essential because intolerance "is bound to have effects in society and to disrupt civic unity."

Rousseau on censorship as the voice of public judgement.

| Source: Rousseau, Social Contract, Bk.4 Ch.7 [Primary] | Use: Often under-cited institutional feature that constrains freedom — censorship is to public opinion as law is to the general will.

"As the law is the declaration of the general will, the censorship is the declaration of the public judgment: public opinion is the form of law which the censor administers, and, like the prince, only applies to particular cases."

Okin on Rousseau's sexual double standard.

| Source: Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, Ch.3, p.99 [Secondary] | Use: Use whenever the universality of Rousseau's freedom is in question.

"It is interesting, since Rousseau was so much an advocate of the natural, to see how different his reasoning is about what is natural in and for women from about what is natural in and for 'man.'"

Okin on Sophie's education in Emile.

| Source: Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, Ch.3, p.160 [Secondary] | Use: Essential for the gender critique — devastatingly quotable.

Rousseau on Sophie: "The first and most important quality in a woman is gentleness; created to obey a being as imperfect as man, often so vicious and always so full of faults, she must learn at an early age to suffer injustice, and to put up with the wrongs of a husband without complaint."

Okin on Rousseau and distinct female morality.

| Source: Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, Ch.3, p.162 [Secondary] | Use: Use alongside the Emile passage — it is not mere oversight but a distinct moral scheme for women.

"Rousseau clearly regarded female morality and male morality as essentially different."

Okin on Rousseau excluding women for the sake of property.

| Source: Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, Ch.3, p.147 [Secondary] | Use: Structural argument — exclusion of women is required for his system of property and inheritance.

"Rousseau does not recognize certainty of paternity as the prescript of a certain type of society, with its sacred institutions of private property and inheritance; he attaches so much importance to it that in order to assure it, he, of necessity, excludes women from all the otherwise inviolable rights to equality and self-government."

Wolff on Rousseau's assumption of women's subordination.

| Source: Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, p.91 [Secondary] | Use: Pair with Okin — Wolff reinforces how baked-in the gender exclusion is.

"Rousseau believed that women were subordinate beings, and he simply seems to have assumed that the privilege of citizenship should be extended only to men. The doctrine of the equality of citizens is rather soured by Rousseau's assumption that there would naturally be inequalities between male citizens and female non-citizens."

Klausen on Rousseauian negative education.

| Source: Klausen, Fugitive Rousseau [Secondary] | Use: Useful for the primitivism/Stoicism reading of Rousseau.

"If man is naturally good, then the goal of Rousseauian negative education is thus to preserve a human's nature from the poisonous tentacles of social institutions in order to make possible a life in rational harmony with nature."

Klausen on freedom and dependence.

| Source: Klausen, Fugitive Rousseau [Secondary] | Use: Rousseau's analysis goes beyond political freedom — clientelism and luxury are also forms of slavery.

For Rousseau, freedom is undone by societal dependence: "economic dependence, clientelism and luxury economies" are all forms of slavery. Rousseau is "less optimistic but more honest than other liberal theorists: freedom depends on social vigilance, political freedom can decay into social slavery."

Bertram on the "Rousseau-as-liberal" reading.

| Source: Bertram, Rousseau and the Social Contract, p.199 [Secondary] | Use: Use to resist the anachronistic attempt to assimilate Rousseau to liberalism.

"Look at his comments in Emile about how good social institutions would strip man of his nature and give him a purely artificial character and then proceed to consider the chapter on civil religion, the prospect of Rousseau-as-liberal looks remote."

Bertram on the post-hoc character of moral freedom.

| Source: Bertram, Rousseau and the Social Contract, p.203 [Secondary] | Use: Subtle interpretive point — Rousseau is not purely contractarian; moral freedom is a fruit only recognised afterwards.

"One of the types of freedom they have in the state, 'moral freedom', is a fruit of their association and could not be anticipated beforehand… insofar as the Social Contract provides a solution to the problem of social coexistence for people whose amour propre has been awakened, it is a solution that they can come to value and appreciate only retrospectively."

Bertram on Rousseau and the French Revolution.

| Source: Bertram, Rousseau and the Social Contract, p.196 [Secondary] | Use: Useful for questions on Rousseau's legacy — Robespierre is anti-Rousseauian, not Rousseauian.

Robespierre's claim that the Committee of Public Safety constituted the general will "was doubly anti-Rousseauian: not only does it breach Rousseau's strictures against the representation of sovereignty, but it also nullifies Rousseau's principled distinction between the sovereign and the government, since the Committee was concerned with the application and enforcement of the law in particular cases."

Wolff on training Rousseau's citizens.

| Source: Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, p.85 [Secondary] | Use: Short quotable line on the educative dimension of Rousseauian citizenship.

Rousseau's citizens "are to be trained to 'will nothing contrary to the will of society'. This is essential to the health and preservation of the state."

Wolff on voting in accordance with the general will.

| Source: Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, p.87 [Secondary] | Use: Useful gloss — voting is NOT expressing your interest; it's judging what the general will is.

"Exercising your vote in the first way — in your interests — is to pursue your particular will. Voting for what is in your view the morally correct outcome, or the common good, is, for Rousseau, a matter of voting in accordance with your idea of the general will."

Wolff on factions — either none or many.

| Source: Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, p.88 [Secondary] | Use: Clarifies Rousseau's anti-faction stance — the institutional prescription that follows from Bk.2 Ch.3.

"Rousseau's main response is to recommend that either there should be no political parties or factions, or, if there are any, there should be very many… In this way the interests of particular groups should have little influence on the decisions of the whole."

How does Rousseau jump from (1) needing a state with laws but freedom to (3) Egalitarian and Democratic states
(People are fundamentally malleable and are moral agents by virtue of being citizens of society…so human nature is shaped by politics)

He believes that institutions will shape people, motivations and self-understanding