Rousseau: Embracing Paradox

“Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody” (Book 1:6)

Jean Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract. Trans. G.D.H. Cole 1782. Rendered into HTML and texts by Jon Roland of the Constitution society. http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Maurice Quentin De La Tour (1753)

In the work of Rousseau all contradictions meet. They are not resolved but are accepted as part of the bigger picture -anticipating the dialectics of Hegel. A person in search of the truth must be able to work with them. After all, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald: "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise." Rousseau passed this test with flying colours. He reconciled the concern of authority with the importance of liberty; a marriage of political realism and political idealism, its progeny: the republic. 

Rousseau was an author of novels, opera, philosophical and educational treaties. He was loved by many, and despised by a few more. He was catapulted into fame when he won an essay contest with an extremely controversial submission. The work he submitted gave a negative answer to the question of how arts and sciences had improved the world. However, despite his pessimism he continued to be a champion of the arts and sciences, even working on the French Encyclopédie. It seems that paradoxes were part of his life as well as his philosophy. 

In The Social Contract Rousseau offers the solution to a problem that he sees has arisen in Locke's treatise: the problem of materialistic confinement and the lack of political wholesomeness.  In the game of interest politics people do not actively contribute. They merely represent interest parties vying for attention. Additionally they console themselves by amassing property which only ties them down, hinders their movement in the political sphere, and distracts them from making any meaningful contribution. In his philosophical work Rousseau offers to do away with private property -because it was always the State's concern anyway. He proposed that people should merely become guardians of that which, because it belongs to the state, belongs to everybody. In a republic the people are sovereign. They sacrifice their own particular desires in pursuit of the common good. In doing so they form an indivisible whole with a general will. The general will can never be false, can never have anything else in mind than the good of the people, and as such, it is the supreme law.