Rousseau, Rawls, and Locke: Social Contract Theory Explained

Introduction: Rousseau and the Social Contract

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's work The Social Contract occupies a significant place in the political discourse of nineteenth-century France. It did not present something entirely new or different from previously held beliefs, but it did encompass some original concepts, including the idea of the general will and the elusive lawgiver. Rousseau's critique of existing social contract theory was grounded in the premise that by contracting with a man or an assembly of men, individuals are forced to part with some of their natural liberty. While he acknowledged that freedom is compromised to an extent when social contracts are entered into, he maintained that the relinquished freedom should be social freedom, not natural freedom.

Those who argue that Rousseau was against social contract theory miss a crucial point: Rousseau rejected the social contract theory as it existed in his time and tried to reform it in a manner that could ensure the natural freedom of everyone. In his own words: "What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and the absolute right to anything that tempts him and that he can take: what he gains by the social contract is civil liberty and the legal right of property in what he possesses." (p. 65)

Rousseau opposed the idea of sovereignty based on paternal lineage or dictatorship. Instead, he called for a system similar to democracy in which people would choose a person or assembly of men and surrender some of their social freedom in exchange for the full protection of their natural liberty. During his time, French monarchs were considered the absolute power exercising complete sovereignty. As Nannerl Keohane observed, "Frenchmen who welcomed consolidation of power in the monarchy were…not unconcerned with the securities and liberties of subjects. They believed that concentrated power provides more effective protection for all the members of a community than divided power." For Rousseau, it was unacceptable to allow someone to rule the public without their consent, and thus monarchy was not an option, since in those days "the king embodied the public aspect of the State as against the private character of his subjects."

The essential premise on which Rousseau based his theory was that man must be allowed to function within a society that protects his natural freedom and works for the common good of the community. This originated from his argument that: "Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow-man, and since force produces no right, conventions remain as the basis of all legitimate authority among men" (SC, p. 44).

General Will and the Lawgiver

Rousseau was fundamentally a democratic thinker who believed in allowing the public to choose the person who would implement laws, provided the system operated on the principle of general will. This is a contentious and rather complex concept. General will, according to Rousseau, is the will of those involved in a social contract — a will that seeks to procure the greater good. When people enter a social contract, they do so to maintain a social order. That order must not harm their natural liberty, but it must also aim at the greater good through collective consent. This collective consent is captured in Rousseau's claim that "the commitments which bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual, and their nature is such that in fulfilling them one cannot work for others without also working for oneself" (SC, p. 61).

However, since every person may not possess the ability to understand what is in the best interest of the community, a lawgiver or sovereign power is necessary. Rousseau argues that the general will is itself free of vested interests: "The general will is always upright, but the judgment which guides it is not always enlightened. It must be made to see objects as they are, sometimes as they should appear to be, shown the good path which it is seeking" (SC, p. 68). The guidance required is provided by the lawgiver — the sovereign power that the people choose.

Critics are divided on the nature of Rousseau's lawgiver. Was he referring to God when he described the lawgiver's characteristics? The lawgiver as Rousseau envisions him seems to possess no worldly vices or human limitations:

"To discover the best rules of society suited to each Nation would require a superior intelligence who saw all of man's passions and experienced none of them, who had no relation to our nature yet knew it thoroughly, whose happiness was independent of us and who was nevertheless willing to care for ours; finally, one who, preparing his distant glory in the progress of times, could work in one century and enjoy the reward in another. It would require gods to give men laws." (SC, p. 68)

If God were considered the supreme lawgiver, then Rousseau's sovereign power in this world would be a person assigned the task of implementing those laws to construct a livable society. This person would help in "transforming each individual who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole into part of a larger whole" (SC, p. 69), and would be considered everything a sovereign power "ought to be" (SC, p. 52). Such a person would protect the natural rights of each individual and provide guidance in matters of general will, since people may not always understand what is truly in their best interest: "Each individual, appreciating no other scheme of government than that which bears directly on his particular interest, has difficulty perceiving the advantages he is supposed to derive from the constant privations required by good laws" (SC, pp. 70–71).

John Rawls and the Veil of Ignorance

Rousseau was not the only thinker to develop a significant theory of the social contract. John Rawls was also a major influence on social contract theory, though his work attracted serious criticism. His theory appeared in A Theory of Justice, which provoked a wave of critical response when it was first published in 1971. These attacks were directed at the contractual reasoning on which Rawls based his hypothetical social contract. Rawls maintained that although many rules and laws exist in society, the fundamental question is: why would anyone want to follow those laws unless there is some social contract that everyone agrees upon?

To address this, he developed the idea of the "original position," in which all men and women in a society would be placed behind a veil of ignorance in order to develop the most fair and just contract. He argued that if people were denied "all knowledge about everything that makes them who they are: wealth, age, talents, race, religion, skill, sex and any conception of the good life, [they] would choose a low-risk strategy in which liberties and the highest minimum levels of wealth, opportunity and power are promoted even at the expense of lowering average levels of one or another." (UPI, 2001)

In practice, however, it is effectively impossible for people to think as though they were behind such a wall of ignorance. To deny people knowledge of characteristics such as sex, race, and religion is to strip away the basic ingredients of their identity. Without these traits, individuals would no longer be their authentic selves and could not function as normal human beings. They would instead be in an abstract, depersonalized state, unable to think meaningfully about the well-being of others. Under such conditions, it is difficult to see how they could discuss important clauses of a hypothetical social contract or contribute to the development of such an agreement.

Ideally speaking, such a contract might prove useful for maintaining peace, since much of the world's conflict is rooted in differences of race, gender, and religion. Violence and discrimination might be minimized if everyone were compelled to compromise their selfish motives for the general good. Yet such a contract does not guarantee justice, because the absence of competition and the elimination of incentives to improve one's social conditions might actually produce greater frustration and disruption. As The Economist noted, such a framework "hardly offers a conceptual yardstick for evaluating the presence or absence of justice in a society. And it is peculiar, and a bit disappointing, to watch one of the high priests of liberalism striving to construct a theory which would insulate non-liberal societies against liberal critics at a time when the idea of universal human rights, and of rules of international law based upon them, are becoming more widespread than ever before." (The Economist, 2000)

Conclusion: Natural Liberty and Modern Political Thought

Rousseau was essentially against any social order that curtailed personal freedom or natural liberty. His social contract theory was not based on the compromise of all rights, but on relinquishing only those rights that fell within the social sphere or could have an impact on the rights of the community. Rousseau's social contract theory shaped modern political thought and is still commonly cited when democracy and rights are discussed.

References

Habermas, J. (1998). Three normative models of democracy. In J. Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other (pp. 240–252). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Rousseau, J.-J. (1762). Of the Social Contract. In The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1999.

The social contract: Less original positions. The Economist, Vol. 354, 02-12-2000.