ABSTRACT

Rousseau's apparent "primitivism" had a powerful appeal to his contemporaries, as well as to men of later times. Others followed the logic of his Discours to its obvious end, dreamed of an equalitarian, communistic society, or even of an anarchistic social state. Rousseau's version of the social contract theory is brilliantly original. For him, as for Hobbes, it completely terminates the state of nature, with its natural freedom and equality. But a legitimate political society gives men, in their stead, something new and far more precious, political liberty and civil equality. In the Discours, Rousseau had said, countering the ethics of enlightened self-interest that more is to be gained by the immediate satisfaction of the private will than by the ultimate benefit accruing from sacrificing it in favor of the general good. Rousseau's concept of voting procedures, moreover, is "democratic," but not "liberal." The vote is not a way of expressing our wills, but of discovering the general will.