¹ Émile, ed. Bloom, Allan (New York: Basic Books, 1979), pp. 84–89;Google ScholarSocial Contract, bk. 1, chap. 8; bk. 2, chaps. 1, 4, 6; bk. 4, chaps. 1, 2; Political Economy, ed. Cole, G. D. H. (London: Dent, 1946), pp. 240–43.Google Scholar “Liberty,” Rousseau writes in the Letters from the Mountain, “consists less in doing your will than in not being submitted to the will of another; it consists further in not subjecting another's will to our own.” Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Pléiade, (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–1969), 3:837–38Google Scholar (subsequently referred to as Letters). He reiterates this distinction in one of his last writings, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker: “I have never believed that man's freedom consists in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do” (ed. France, Peter [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books], 1979), p. 104.Google Scholar

² Émile pp. 39–40;Google ScholarSocial Contract, bk. 1, chaps. 5–8; bk. 2, chaps. 4, 7. Rousseau of course does not mean here economic dependence. On the contrary, it is economic independence which is to ensure that people cannot be manipulated into voting against their own will and judgment. Wealth is no less corroding, though, for Rousseau than abject poverty; both extremes threaten justice, and thus an authentic politics. “The rich keep the law in their pocket and the poor prefer bread to liberty,” he says in the Letters (p. 889), a restatement of his well-known precept in the Social Contract (bk. 2, chap. 11): “No citizen shall be rich enough to be able to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.” He therefore urges the Corsicans to confine private property “within the narrowest possible limits: to give it a measure, a rule, a rein which will restrain, direct, and contain it, and keep it always subordinate to the public good” (Constitutional Project for Corsica, Oeuvres, 3: 931).Google Scholar Excesses in private property cause obesity on the one side and servility on the other, Rousseau explains, and neither is compatible with self-choosing and right-acting in politics (pp. 927–28). The inequality of wealth should never be such as to undermine man's equality as a citizen. “Strange and fatal must be that constitution,” Rousseau observes in a lesser known passage, “in which the accumulation of riches always facilitates the means of further accumulation, and in which it is impossible for him that has nothing to acquire anything; in which an honest man has no means to extricate himself from poverty; in which knaves are most honored, and in which a man must necessarily renounce all virtue to become a respectable person. … All these vices belong not so much to man himself, as to man in a state of society ill-governed” (Preface to Narcissus, The Miscellaneous Works of Mr. J. J. Rousseau, anon. [New York: Burt Franklin, 1767; repr. 1972], 2: 139).Google Scholar No one can ever be free, Rousseau tells the Corsicans and the Poles, who lacks resources of his own, and he recommends an essentially agrarian economy of property-owning farmers, with a minimum of commerce, finance and trade.

³ Émile, pp. 40–41;Google Scholar Preface toNarcissus, p. 138.Google Scholar

⁴ Émile, p. 85.Google Scholar In the first draft of the Social Contract, the so-called Geneva Manuscript, Rousseau maintains that man reasons also quite differently “in the state of independence” (Masters, Roger D., ed., On the Social Contract [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978], p. 160).Google Scholar

⁵ Émile, pp. 84–86.Google Scholar

⁶ Ibid., p. 84.

⁷ Ibid., p. 85.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid., p. 89. Letters, p. 841.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Geneva Manuscript, p. 161.Google Scholar This impartiality is for Rousseau inseparable from an essential equality, without which he cannot conceive of a just patrie. “The fundamental law of your constitution,” Rousseau advises the Corsicans, “must be equality. Everything must be related to it, including authority, which is established only to defend it” (Corsica, p. 908).Google Scholar The first and greatest public interest, he says elsewhere, is always justice, and justice “is no more than equality …; he who fears exceptions loves the law” (Letters, pp. 890–91).Google Scholar

¹¹ Émile (“Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar”), pp. 273, 280.Google Scholar

¹² Ibid., p. 274.

¹³ Ibid., pp. 280–81.

¹⁴ Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (subsequently referred to as Inequality), ed. Bair, Lowell in The Essential Rousseau (New York: New American Library, 1974), p. 153.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Preface toNarcissus, p. 127.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 138.

¹⁷ Social Contract, bk. 4, chap. 8.

¹⁸ Émile, p. 280;Google ScholarReveries, p. 94.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Émile, p. 275.Google Scholar

²⁰ Political Economy, p. 246.Google Scholar

²¹ Ibid.; Émile, p. 39;Google Scholar Preface toNarcissus, p. 136.Google Scholar

²² Geneva Manuscript, p. 159.Google Scholar

²³ Inequality (“Dedication”), pp. 127–28.Google Scholar

²⁴ Ibid., p. 128.

²⁵ Considerations on the Government of Poland (Oeuvres, 3: 969–70).Google Scholar The queston of size, timing, and character of nationhood is discussed more fully in my “National Culture and Political Legitimacy: Herder and Rousseau,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 44 (1983), 231–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ Political Economy, p. 246.Google Scholar

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Geneva Manuscript, p. 159.Google Scholar

³² Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 10; Inequality, pp. 177–78.Google Scholar

³³ Émile, pp. 39, 85;Google Scholar Preface toNarcissus, p. 138.Google ScholarDiscourse on the Arts and Sciences in Essential Rousseau, pp. 226–27.Google Scholar

³⁴ Preface to Narcissus, p. 138.Google Scholar

³⁵ Social Contract, bk. 1, chap. 8; bk. 2, chaps. 1, 4, 7.

³⁶ Inequality, p. 177.Google Scholar

³⁷ Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 4; bk. 4, chap. 8.

³⁸ Poland, pp. 965, 961;Google ScholarReveries, p. 154.Google Scholar

³⁹ Social Contract, bk. 4, chaps. 1, 2; Letters, p. 830.Google Scholar It is not clear, though, whether Rousseau has argument in mind here or mere voting; whether, that is, public discourse or mere numbers should decide if claims of generality are truly warranted. The ironical tone of his remarks suggests that he does not wish to confine the expression of opinions, of criticism, or dissent to members of the government, but at the same time Rousseau generally seems to prefer voting to argument, and consensus to opposition. Argument, conflict, or dissent are things that, evidently, do not and need not occur in a proper political order. It almost appears as though discursive reasoning is called for only during the founding of states or during periods when they are threatened or actually approach their demise.

⁴⁰ Social Contract, bk. 2, chaps. 4, 5.

⁴¹ Letters, p. 685.Google Scholar

⁴² Ibid., p. 897.

⁴³ Inequality, p. 154.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Political Economy, p. 235, 240.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ “Wouldn't it often happen that a well-intentioned man would make a mistake about the rule of its [the general will's] application, and follow only his inclination while thinking that he is obeying the law?” (Geneva Manuscript, p. 161.Google Scholar) Similarly, Political Economy, pp. 237–38.Google Scholar Most interestingly, Rousseau sees an intimate connection between self-choosing, accountability, and right-acting in politics. “The sovereign people wills by itself, and by itself it does what it wills. Soon the inconvenience of everyone deciding on everything forces the sovereign people to charge a few of its members with the execution of its wishes. … Imperceptibly, a body grows up which acts the whole time. A body which acts the whole time cannot give an account of every action; it only gives an account of the main ones; soon it ends up by giving an account of none” (Letters, p. 813).Google Scholar Once people abandon self-choosing and leave everything to the executive, Rousseau warns, political accountability and, with it, political legitimacy are in peril.

⁴⁶ I do not know whether Kant was familiar with Rousseau's Letters from the Mountain, but he would have found there much to agree with, in particular Rousseau's emphasis on the interdependence of liberty and law, and of the concepts of “will” and “right” (esp. Letters, pp. 837–41).Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Émile, p. 304;Google ScholarLetters, p. 841.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ In the Geneva Manuscript (pp. 161–62),Google Scholar Rousseau insists that general principles of morality become known to us solely “on t he basis of our particular societies; the establishment of small republics makes us think about the larger one, and we do not really begin to become men until after we have been citizens.” He castigates “those supposed cosmopolites” who claim to deduce their particular obligations as citizens from their general obligations as men. There is no substance to such claims, he says; such transference is inconceivable since “there is no natural and general society among men; it is only from the social order established among us that we derive ideas about the one we imagine.”

⁴⁹ Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 12.

⁵⁰ I discuss Kant's ideas on “self-legislation” in ”Self-Direction: Thomasius, Kant, and Herder,” Political Theory, 11 (1983), 343–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵¹ One may justifiably deplore the customarily scant treatment of Kant in histories of political thought without endorsing exuberant claims about his prominence or originality as a political theorist. For some elaboration of this point, see my review of Saner's, HansKant's Political Thought in Canadian Journal of Political Science, 7 (1974).Google Scholar

Work on this essay was done in conjunction with a research project on “Accounting for Actions” assisted by a Research Time Stipend of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.