FREE ESSAY ON ROUSSEAU AND THE IDEAL SOCIETY

ROUSSEAU AND THE IDEAL SOCIETY

Rousseaue and the Ideal Society
Has the progress of the arts and sciences contributed more to the corruption or
purification of morals? Rousseau criticized social institutions for having corrupted the
essential goodness of nature and the human heart. Rousseaue believed that by becoming
"civilized", society has actually become worse because good people are made unhappy and
are corrupted by their experiences in society.. He viewed society as articficial and
corrupt and that the furthering of society results in the continuing unhappiness of man.

He also argued that the advancement of art and science had not been beneficial to
mankind. He proposed that the progress of knowledge had made governments more powerful,
and crushed individual liberty. He concluded that material progress had actually
undermined the possibility of sincere friendship, replacing it with jealousy, fear and
suspicion. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality he elaborated on the process of
how social institutions must have developed into the extreme unequal rights of
aristocratic France where the nobility and the church lived in luxury while the poor
peasants had to pay most of the taxes. And in his Discourse on Political Economy he
suggested remedies for these injustices.
For Rousseau society itself is an implicit agreement to live together for the good of
everyone with individual equality and freedom. However, people have enslaved themselves
by giving over their power to governments which are not truly sovereign because they do
not promote the general will. Rousseau believed that only the will of all the people
together granted sovereignty. Various forms of government are instituted to legislate and
enforce the laws. He wrote, The first duty of the legislator is to make the 
laws conformable to the general will, the first rule of public economy is that the
administration of justice should be conformable to the laws. His natural political
philosophy echoes the way of Lao Tzu: The greatest talent a ruler can possess is to
disguise his power, in order to render it less horrible, and to conduct the State so
peaceably as to make it seem to have no need of conductors. [v]irtue, no virtue without
citizens; create citizens, and you have everything you need; without them, you will have
nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of the State downwards. He argued that the
goal of government should be to secure freedom, equality, and justice for all within the
state, regardless of the will of the majority. Yet Rousseau was not against positive law.
On the contrary, laws protect those who are free from the vile enslaved man who violates
them. We are free within the law, but again the laws must be in harmony with reason and
the general good.