Western Civilization_ Volume B_ 1300 to 1815 - Jackson J. Spielvogel [254]
Thus, the people’s deputies are not and could not be its representatives; they are merely its agents; and they cannot decide anything finally. Any law which the people has not ratified in person is void; it is not law at all. The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as the Members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing.7
This is an extreme and idealistic statement, but it is the ultimate statement of participatory democracy.
Another influential treatise by Rousseau also appeared in 1762. Titled Émile, it is one of the Enlightenment’s most important works on education. Written in the form of a novel, the work is really a general treatise “on the education of the natural man.” Rousseau’s fundamental concern was that education should foster rather than restrict children’s natural instincts. Life’s experiences had shown Rousseau the importance of the promptings of the heart, and what he sought was a balance between heart and mind, between sentiment and reason. This emphasis on heart and sentiment made him a precursor of the intellectual movement called Romanticism that dominated Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
But Rousseau did not necessarily practice what he preached. His own children were sent to foundling homes, where many children died young. Rousseau also viewed women as “naturally” different from men: “To fulfill [a woman’s] functions, an appropriate physical constitution is necessary to her…. She needs a soft sedentary life to suckle her babies. How much care and tenderness does she need to hold her family together.” In Émile, Sophie, who was Émile’s intended wife, was educated for her role as wife and mother by learning obedience and the nurturing skills that would enable her to provide loving care for her husband and children. Not everyone in the eighteenth century agreed with Rousseau, however, making ideas of gender an important issue in the Enlightenment.
THE “WOMAN’S QUESTION” IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT For centuries, men had dominated the debate about the nature and value of women. In general, many male intellectuals had argued that the base nature of women made them inferior to men and made male domination of women necessary (see Chapter 16). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many male thinkers reinforced this view by arguing that it was based on “natural” biological differences between men and women. Like Rousseau, they argued that the female constitution made women mothers. Male writers, in particular, were critical of the attempts of some women in the Enlightenment to write on intellectual issues, arguing that women were by nature intellectually inferior to men. Nevertheless, some Enlightenment thinkers offered more positive views of women. Diderot, for example, maintained that men and women were not all that different, and Voltaire asserted that “women are capable of all that men are” in intellectual affairs.
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A Social Contract
Although Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the French philosophes, he has also been called “the father of Romanticism.” His political ideas have proved extremely controversial. Though some people have hailed him as the prophet of democracy, others have labeled him an apologist for totalitarianism. This selection is taken from one of his most famous books, The Social Contract.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
Book 1, Chapter 6: “The Social Pact”
“How to find a form of association which will defend the person and goods of each member with the collective force of all, and under which each individual, while uniting