Western Civilization_ Volume B_ 1300 to 1815 - Jackson J. Spielvogel [255]
Book 1, Chapter 7: “The Sovereign”
Despite their common interest, subjects will not be bound by their commitment unless means are found to guarantee their fidelity.
For every individual as a man may have a private will contrary to, or different from, the general will that he has as a citizen. His private interest may speak with a very different voice from that of the public interest; his absolute and naturally independent existence may make him regard what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which would be less painful for others than the payment is onerous for him; and fancying that the artificial person which constitutes the state is a mere rational entity, he might seek to enjoy the rights of a citizen without doing the duties of a subject. The growth of this kind of injustice would bring about the ruin of the body politic.
Hence, in order that the social pact shall not be an empty formula, it is tacitly implied in that commitment—which alone can give force to all others—that whoever refused to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to the nation, secures him against all personal dependence, it is the condition which shapes both the design and the working of the political machine, and which alone bestows justice on civil contracts—without it, such contracts would be absurd, tyrannical and liable to the grossest abuse.
What was Rousseau’s concept of the social contract? What implications did it have for political thought, especially in regard to the development of democratic ideals?
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It was women thinkers, however, who added new perspectives to the “woman’s question” by making specific suggestions for improving the condition of women. Mary Astell (AST-ul) (1666–1731), daughter of a wealthy English coal merchant, argued in 1697 in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies that women needed to become better educated. Men, she believed, would resent her proposal, “but they must excuse me, if I be as partial to my own sex as they are to theirs, and think women as capable of learning as men are, and that it becomes them as well.”8 In a later work titled Some Reflections upon Marriage, Astell argued for the equality of the sexes in marriage: “If absolute sovereignty be not necessary in a state, how comes it to be so in a family … ? For if arbitrary power is evil in itself, and an improper method of governing rational and free agents, it ought not be practiced anywhere…. If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?”9
The strongest statement for the rights of women in the eighteenth century was advanced by the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (WULL-stun-kraft) (1759–1797), viewed by many as the founder of modern European feminism. In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written in 1792, Wollstonecraft pointed out two contradictions in the views of women held by such Enlightenment thinkers as Rousseau. To argue that women must obey men, she said, was contrary to the beliefs of the same individuals that a system based on the arbitrary power of monarchs over their subjects or slave owners over their slaves was wrong. The subjection of women to men was equally wrong. In addition, she argued, the Enlightenment was based on the ideal that reason is innate in all human beings. If women have reason, then they are entitled to the same rights that men have. Women, Wollstonecraft declared, should have equal rights with men in education and in economic and political life as well.
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Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman selected topics (1792)
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The Social Environment of the Philosophes
The social background of the philosophes varied considerably, from the aristocratic Montesquieu to the lower-middle-class Diderot and