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6 replies

  1. Henrike Vogel

    Fellow

    Week 1. The first chapter begins with the line everyone knows, that man is born free and everywhere he is in chains, and then, which people forget, Rousseau says he does not know how this came about but thinks he can say what makes it legitimate. So the book isn't a call to break the chains. It's an account of when chains become rightful. I had remembered it as far more revolutionary than it is.

  2. Hugo Marchetti

    Contributor

    Still week 1, from a union delegate. "Forced to be free" made me think of a strike vote. We debate, we vote, and the minority who voted against are then bound to walk out with us, and most of them accept it, because the alternative is that the boss deals with each of us alone. Rousseau's claim is that obeying the general will is obeying yourself. In a good meeting that is almost true. In a bad one it is a slogan used against the people who lost.

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  3. Deepa Nair

    Fellow

    Week 2. Book II chapter 3 surprised me: Rousseau worries that "partial associations" will distort the general will, and says there should ideally be none, or if there are, as many as possible and as equal as possible. As a law student interested in Ambedkar, I immediately thought of caste as the ultimate partial association. Ambedkar's worry about majorities formed by birth rather than by opinion is almost a sharpened version of this chapter.

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  4. Mateo Quispe

    Fellow

    Week 3. The Legislator is the strangest figure in the book: someone who must be capable, Rousseau says, of changing human nature, and who has no power himself but persuades people by appealing to the gods. Reading it in Lima, I couldn't help thinking of how many founders of Latin American republics read this book. A theory of the self-governing people that needs a near-superhuman founder to get started has a problem it never quite admits.

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  5. Johanna Reinhardt

    Fellow

    Week 4. The civil religion chapter is where liberal readers get nervous: the dogmas are few and tolerant, but someone who publicly professes them and then acts as if he doesn't believe them is to be punished severely. Hegel later read the French Revolution's Terror as what happens when an abstract general will tries to become actual with nothing to mediate it. I think that is unfair to Rousseau, but this chapter is where you can see what Hegel was worried about.

  6. Khady Faye

    Fellow

    Thank you all. My students' favourite objection this year was Hugo's in another form: "Who decides what the general will is, monsieur, when we disagree?" I don't think Rousseau has a clean answer, and I've stopped pretending he does. What he has is the question of legitimacy posed better than almost anyone before him, which is why he's still on the paper.

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