In this series, I’m going through The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Grab a copy here.
Part 1, covering Book 1, Chapters 1-4. Rousseau makes a bunch of claims about what he’s trying to do, and then dashes those claims. However, he does make an interesting argument against slavery.
Part 2, covering Book 1, Chapters 5 & 6. Rousseau actually defines his Social Contract, and it is a terrifying ball of tyranny and self-contradiction.
Part 3, covering Book 1, Chapters 7-9. Aside from a valuable critical look at the concept of natural rights, most of the content in these chapters is Rousseau saying how unlimited the State must be.
Part 4, covering Book 2, Chapters 1-3. Rousseau tries to use the words “inalienable” and “indivisible” to give his system a bit of popular flair, but fails. Then he produces an extremely nonsensical and self-contradictory argument about something that doesn’t even exist.
Part 5, covering Book 2, Chapters 4 & 5. Rousseau begins to see that he is creating a horrible totalitarian framework and contradicting himself, so he begins to pathetically backpedal.
Part 6, covering Book 2, Chapters 6 & 7. Rousseau talks about law and legislators, and unveils his framework’s plan to create a dependent and helpless populace.
Part 7, covering Book 2, Chapters 8-10. Rousseau talks about the people, and manages to argue that his system is really only workable on one island in Europe.
Part 8, covering Book 2, Chapters 11 & 12. Rousseau talks about the structure of laws and different types of laws, and gets stuck in the usual quagmires of “equality” and autarky. Then he says legislators should use subterfuge to change moral perceptions of the people.
Part 9, covering Book 3, Chapter 1. Rousseau talks about the physical manifestation of government and the necessary decay of liberty in larger States in his framework.
Part 10, covering Book 3, Chapter 2. Rousseau goes all-in on his weird government math, and ends up in a major contradiction.
Part 11, covering Book 3, Chapters 3-6. Rousseau spends a bunch of time stumbling over his own terminology while he inordinately worries about the number of magistrates in his totalitarian system. Also, he makes a very odd criticism of Plato.
Part 12, covering Book 3, Chapters 7 & 8. Rousseau plays around with some definitions and then tries to justify the worst excesses of colonial administrations.
Part 13, covering Book 3, Chapters 9-11. Rousseau tries to describe what makes a good government, but is vague and self-contradictory. Then he talks about why and how governments collapse… and is vague and self-contradictory.
Part 14, covering Book 3, Chapters 12-15. Rousseau is tangled up again in his own weird vocabulary and his inability to use it consistently. He pushes for frequent assemblies of the people, wasting their time and wealth, and argues (poorly) that representation makes the citizens into slaves.
Part 15, covering Book 3, Chapters 16-18. Rousseau makes a bunch of weird redundant language-only distinctions for things in order to make his framework seem like a system with checks and balances, without actually having any checks and balances.
Part 16, covering Book 4, Chapters 1-3. Rousseau throws out a bunch of caveats and what-ifs all of a sudden, but they seem to contradict a lot of what he’s previously said. He puts forward a lot of wishes for good government, but no real ways for people to deal with bad ones.
Part 17, covering Book 4, Chapter 4. Rousseau spends a very long chapter talking about ancient Rome, while acknowledging that much of what we know might be fable, at least in part. And after arguing that the details of Roman government wouldn’t help anyone other than Romans. He raises a lot of interesting questions, and then glosses over them.
Part 18, covering Book 4, Chapters 5-7. Rousseau introduces three more really bad ideas to his framework: The Tribunate (basically a dictatorship with a status-quo bias), The Dictatorship (actual dictatorship), and The Censorship (shame and re-educate people). He does nothing to minimize the bad incentives that these three groups would see.
Part 19, covering Book 4, Chapters 8 & 9, and with an overall summary. Rousseau puts forward his idea of “Civil Religion” and strips freedom of conscience from the people. Then he apologizes for not writing treatments of international relations. I finish with a summary of what we’ve found going through this book.