Rousseau: The Social Contract (Summary & Analysis)

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In this episode of the Philosophy Hour at Literary Tales we explain and summarize Rousseau's The Social Contract and his social contract theory in contradistinction to Hobbes, Locke, and others.
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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is a writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous publications in the English-speaking world. He is the author of Finding Arcadia (2023), The Odyssey of Love (2021), and the Politics of Plato (2020); he has also contributed to The College Lecture Today (2019) and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters (2022).

[@lotoreo]

I love Rousseau, but I think there is a fatal flaw in his secular rethinking of the Golden Rule; (paraphrasing) "Ultimately, I'm only interested in the freedom and equality for others, because this secures freedom and equality for myself, because if the freedom of others can be taken away, so can mine." Ok, very nice on paper, but in practice we've often seen one group of people being completely indifferent to the freedom of another group because the overal system guarantees that the lack of freedom of that other group will never result in the lack of freedom for one's own group. Think for example most white people during slavery or Jim Crow, being completely indifferent to securing the freedom and liberation of black people, because they knew that their own freedom was not at stake, and because they personally materially benefited from the status quo. More is needed to get motivated to fight for the freedom of others, when there is no self-serving reason to do so. I'm not sure if his brand of secularism can ever do the trick. It seems to me that a belief in something higher is necessary, though I do not know what. And maybe I'm wrong.

[@kwaniboi9264]

Also a fan of Rousseau. Though I am more familiar with Emile than I am with his other body of work. In this example, Would Rousseau not argue that the white people’s social status be by its very nature of dependency on Jim Crow or during slavery dependency on the labor of slavery make the oppressing group also ‘unfree’ and ‘in shackles’- ie they cannot exist independent of the construct of social status or private property? I’m asking with sincere curiosity I would love to better understand Rousseau I think the ideology he poses are worth a pondering about whether or not I agree or disagree with it.