Personal experience of "The Social Contract"

[Michael]

I finished reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Du Contrat Social" in French ("The Social Contract"). I had been wanting to read this for some time, hoping to learn why some French citizens choose to exercise their right to freedom of expression by burning the cars of others. This book did not help answer that question, but it was very interesting and stimulating nonetheless. I will need to investigate anarchy literature, I think, to understand the car burnings.

I found Rousseau's unmooring from locating authority in a person or persons -- such as a king or a senate -- and instead locating authority in an abstraction -- the General Will -- very exciting and novel. This is quite daring and contrary to Rousseau's predecessors. Many interesting ideas and insights. For example, Rousseau makes a strong argument for small states: small in physical extent. This tends to argue in support of primacy of state government over federal government. The basic argument is that the more large the territory of the "state" the less affiliated the citizen feels. How can a Texan have common feeling with a dude from Boston? How can a Chicagoan have common feeling with a cowboy from Wyoming? But yet the feeling of commonality and shared experience and shared manners/morals is integral to the proper working of a "state." This is is just one example.

Rousseau likewise disparages vanity and luxury as antagonistic to the smooth working of the body politic.