ABSTRACT
In Rousseau’s presentation, the size, and the inclusiveness and exclusiveness, of the simple family were important factors in its capacity to provide well-being for its members. Direct close living produced familiarity and nurtured a social order which was informal, and egalitarian, which required participation in economic protective and cultural activity and so kept the community together. The only way to reintroduce familial communality into the civilised world would be the construction of small-scale political communities – in which the prevailing conditions established the requirement and the means for full-scale participation in ethical and practical communal life and in the collective discourse on the conditions of communality. Thus the ideal political order presented in The Social Contract is ‘a very small state where it is easy for the people to gather together, and where each citizen can easily know all the others’ (Rousseau 1986: 180).
