Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a Genevan philosopher and writer whose ideas about society, Political Legitimacy, and human nature made him the most consequential and the most misread thinker of the Enlightenment. He is the origin of both the Romantic glorification of natural innocence and the Terror's logic of the general will — consequences he did not intend and probably would not have recognized as his own.

Rousseau's central claim — that man is naturally good but corrupted by civilization — inverted Hobbes's premise without improving it. Where Hobbes argued that political authority rescues us from natural savagery, Rousseau argued that civilization itself produces the inequality, vanity, and moral corruption it pretends to remedy. His prescription, the Social Contract (1762), grounds legitimate authority in the general will — the collective rational interest of the community as a whole, distinct from the mere aggregate of private desires. Government that expresses the general will is legitimate; government that serves particular interests is not.

The problem, immediately apparent to his critics and catastrophically demonstrated by the French Revolution, is that no one can reliably distinguish the general will from the will of whoever happens to be in power and confident enough to claim it. Rousseau gave political legitimacy its most dangerous upgrade: a concept of popular sovereignty that could be invoked to justify anything done in the name of the people.