Question

What political ideas and/or policies brought Rousseau about the French Revolution?

Answer 1

• Jean Jacques-Rousseau 's political philosophy dominated French thought from 1760 and on. He more than anyone else invented Romanticism, a worldview that champions sentimentality over logic, caprice over common sense, instinct over civilization, and mysticism over clarity.
• His political philosophy is founded on the assertion that humans originally lived in a state of peaceful equality, from which happy status they eventually fell because of ill advised innovations like tool making and property rights. In Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men Rousseau expands this hypothesis with scraps of explorer's tales about primitive societies with traditional way of life.
• When early political theorists, Hobbes, Locke, Madison, and Montesquieudefend the social contract of the citizenry or the rights of the citizen to elect representatives to government, they took for granted that citizenry would include only male property owners of some substance. No one among the advocates of liberal democracy supported voting rights for the non-property owners, for factory and farm workers, for women and certainly not for slaves.
• The term liberal (or bourgeois) democracy describes precisely and objectively the limited extend of political participation intended by the proponents of early capitalist democracy. The bourgeoisie and its ideologists ere fighting not for universal suffrage but its own class rights. Only Jean Jaques Rousseau among these early democratic theorists, stressed social equality as a presumption of the new proposed democratic system.
• These early theories with the exception of Rousseau are in broad agreement with the economic theories of early capitalism, especially writers like Adam Smith. Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, describes capitalist society as a competition of each against all, with egoistic self-interest the basic motivation for behavior, Through an invisible hand of the marketplace, however, Smith suggests the aggregation of individual self-interests ends up to be the optimal social outcome as well.
• In contrast to John Locke's emphasis on individual rights and freedoms, Rousseau stressed the collective rights and freedoms of the community. In his view, the people- not the state- are the sovereign. Together they form an organic body politic on the basis of a general will, which is the common good. For each individual to be free from tyranny, the community as a whole must be free.. The liberty of each depends on the liberty of all, a notion that requires each individual to conform to the general will.
• Rousseau's ideas had profound influence on French Revolution of 1789.
• Robespierre and Saint-Just, during the Reign of Terror, regarded themselves to be principled egalitarian republicans, obliged to do away with superfluities and corruption; in this they were inspired most prominently by Rousseau. According to Robespierre, the deficiencies in individuals were rectified by upholding the 'common good' which he conceptualized as the collective will of the people; this idea was derived from Rousseau's General Will. The revolutionaries were also inspired by Rousseau to introduce Deism as the new official civil religion of France:
• Ceremonial and symbolic occurrences of the more radical phases of the Revolution invoked Rousseau and his core ideas. Thus the ceremony held at the site of the demolished Bastille, organized by the foremost artistic director of the Revolution, Jacques-Louis David, in August 1793 to mark the inauguration of the new republican constitution, an event coming shortly after the final abolition of all forms of feudal privilege, featured a cantata based on Rousseau's democratic pantheistic deism as expounded in the celebrated ‘Profession de foi d’un vicaire savoyard’ in Book Four of Émile.