Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We are talking about a lot of different philosophers today because the Enlightenment had more than just social contract theorists.

And we need to look at how these philosophers influenced modern government beyond even more than what the social contract theorists of Locke and Rousseau promote.

So let's get back into Rousseau and let's understand a little bit more about him because in our last episode, all we focused on was the social contract nature of his philosophy and his idea of the general will, that the social contract works much better when the people who do not get what they want submit to the people who do, that governments work much better when there's direct democracy that follows the general will of the people.

Rousseau had some other things to say also.

And basically, let's go ahead and get back into that idea of the general will of the people.

What happens if someone doesn't agree with the general will of the people? Well, Rousseau said that the government should then...

force that person to be free.

Rousseau, basically what he was saying there was that it was the government's duty to follow the general will of the people, and therefore if someone is not in agreement with the laws and the way that governing system works, then the government's duty was to force that person to obey the laws.

And we are going to see a general change to the way of thinking for the middle class, the literate middle class amongst Europe.

Today what I would like to do is go over three ways in which the Enlightenment spreads and becomes more of a middle class phenomenon that allows people to... discuss these ideas of these philosophers like Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Voltaire, and just have their ideas be part of the common speak amongst the educated people of Europe.

I would like to start with Dennis Diderot.

And Dennis Diderot is the architect, I don't want to say author, the architect of Encyclopedia.

And her big argument was that if you educated women the same way that you educated men, you would see women doing the same intellectual activities as men.

and it would be much better for society.

You might also remember that Rousseau, in his book Emile, argued that women should only be educated for the domestic role, for nothing other than that which was related to being a wife and mother and taking care of the home.

But To counter those ideas of people like Rousseau and the philosophes that were not promoting these Enlightenment ideas, women did have the ability to embrace the Enlightenment in what was known as their salons.

And I read this book by Yak.

And what he does, it's an intellectual history of Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche.

And what he argues is that Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche are anti-enlightenment thinkers.

So rather than reason and evidence, they rely on aesthetics.

So what they do in their writings is they paint a picture for you.

Hobbs, one of the writers of individual natural law that a lot of things in our constitution were based on.

Hobbes and Rousseau arrived at opposite conclusions about human nature and both were substantially correct.

Human beings have a large capacity for cooperation and creative contribution, and also the equivalent capacity for brutality and systematic cruelty.

Ideological possession tends to produce the second set of outcomes while remaining completely convinced it is producing the first.

It's the old debate between Hobbes and Locke and between Jefferson and Hamilton.

And Rousseau was through one with the, oh, you know, it's just the institutions that are bad.

Just change the institutions.

Everything will be fine.

It's the old debate between Hobbes and Locke and between Jefferson and Hamilton.

And Rousseau was through one with the, oh, you know, it's just the institutions that are bad.

Just change the institutions.

Everything will be fine.

So today what we are doing is looking at the basics of the Enlightenment in a very general way.

In our next podcast, we're going to look at the social contract theorists of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

and then in our third podcast on the enlightenment we are going to look at various philosophers and how they brought about the enlightenment in france and then finally we will be looking at how the social phenomenon of the enlightenment spreads through france and then eventually through europe so we're looking at a quite a few podcast episodes here looking at the enlightenment and in its effect and we're going to spend a lot of podcast time on this because it is a turning point in European history.

The way I like to look at the Enlightenment, the way I like to tell my kids what it is, I tell them that it's sort of like the Renaissance, except it's the Renaissance for everyone, and it leads to great change, including the founding of the United States and the American Revolution and an eventual constitution that we still use to this day.

The cases where people actually have a lot of power, where they really could make a difference, are low status and people don't participate very much.

And by the way, me saying this, if you think about one of the first philosophers to really defend democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that was his hypothesis.

He thought democracy really requires smallness.

It requires a small polity of maybe 30,000 people.

So he cannot be next to Hobbes.

He disagrees also with people like Locke or Rousseau or even Spinoza.

In the sense that what is important for Gandhi? First of all, the idea of freedom is very important for him and freedom does not stop at emancipation from colonialism.

Okay.