Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Man is born free, yet everywhere (even England, Voltaire) he is in chains!" The father of The Social Contract & Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one of the most influential philosophes of the Enlightenment. As the claimant to a legacy that influenced the course of historical events long after his death in 1788, Rousseau and his ideas on government and gender played a large role in the French Revolution. Primarily, his influence is most strongly exerted over the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. Opening with a play on Rousseau's most famous quote--"men are born free and remain free and equal in rights"--the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen asserts that law must be in the expression of the general will.
However, Rousseau, a believer in radical democracy, upholder of majority rule, and a potential protosocialist, would've found fault with a couple of aspects of the Declaration that drew more upon a Locke-ian construct rather than a popular sovereignty philosophy. The dichotomy between these two philosophers is highlighted by the contents of the Declaration: when the document asserts that the source of all sovereignty resides in the nation (popular sovereignty), this point is contrasted to the classical liberalism idea that the law only has the right to forbid a certain action if it is deemed injurious to society (individual rights). A firm believer in the corrective value of a unified community, Rousseau would've found the individual rights aspect of the Declaration a hard fact to swallow. |
John Locke"All mankind...being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions (property)." A life-long believer in the idea that the ideal government was a republic, John Locke's philosophies were like nails on a chalkboard to Rousseau's protosocialist aims. As the advocate for individual rights and classic liberalism whose Two Treatises on Government sparked the Glorious Revolution in 1689, John Locke was the original champion of constitutional monarchy. His idea to minimize the power of the monarch by forming a social contract with the people, thus guaranteeing the human rights of life, liberty, and property, reappeared with a stir on the other side of the globe - in the United States of America.
Through Thomas Jefferson, a sucker for any and all Locke-ian constructs, Locke's ideas lived on through the Declaration of Independence, a document that inspired the authors of France's own Declaration. Locke's philosophy strived to siphon out the voice of the common citizen from the fracas of the estates system by establishing a basic set of human rights that were applicable to members of all social classes. Through his revolutionary political theories coupled with Rousseau's protosocialism, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was born. |