Furthermore he is one of the first thinkers to explicitly distinguish state and society. In the Discourse on Inequality he goes further than anyone before in arguing that a properly human being only comes into existence in the context of a society of such beings. In it he tells a story of how humans began as isolated individuals who came into contact only fleetingly, but were eventually driven to associate to satisfy some common needs, and then developed amour propre , the urge to gain status in the eyes of others. In turn this became the driving force of their further socialisation and humanisation, for better or worse. In this session we will reconstruct Rousseau s account of the emergence of humanity through mutual socialisation, and the images of human being and society that go with it.
Man is the animal that lives in the eyes of others.
The Discourse on Inequality is the story of the socialisation and thereby humanisation of the human race, but also of its simultaneous degeneration into a state of mutual unfreedom. In the Social Contract Rousseau argues for a form of society in which humans could be social and free. He imagines such a society being generated directly from a state of nature by a contract similar to Hobbes s, except that in it each person would transfer the right to command him not to another individual but to the collective made up of all the individuals who take part in the contract, who must then take their decisions by a direct democracy. Thereby each would remain as free as before . We will examine Rousseau s account of the ideal state of the social contract, asking in particular how the contract is supposed to turn humans into moral beings, and how it can give rise to a general will which is not just the expression of the decision of the people when they deliberate together but is also a part of the psyche of each of them.