Book V begins by asserting that women and men are built in the exact same fashion, making them identical in almost all ways. However, he argues, their sexual characteristics are completely different, making it useless to compare them as equals. Thus, everything that men and women have in common is due to their shared species while everything that is different is related to their respective sexes.
As a result, men and women have different roles in nature that could not be fulfilled if they were identical in the eyes of society. According to Rousseau, women were created to please men and should therefore be agreeable, avoiding any assertion of authority whatsoever. With a proper education, women are to be taught to value of purity and to find themselves men with good morals.
Likewise, it is important that men marry women of lower social classes. Otherwise the woman, thinking she holds the authority in the relationship, will act as a tyrant and make the man look like a fool. Finally, because women manipulate men using caresses and tears, they need to be educated on moral decency.
Finding a balance between undereducated woman who cannot guide their children to virtue and over-educated women who will be disdainful of her feminine duties, he argues, is key. Men should also avoid marrying women who are too beautiful because they make for unhappy husbands.
They take on no more passengers after the ship is loaded. Even when they are free their seasons of receptivity are short and soon over; instinct pushes them on and instinct stops them. What would supplement this negative instinct in women when you have taken away their modesty? When the time comes that women are no longer concerned with men's well-being, men will no longer be good for anything at all.
The Supreme Being has deigned to do honor to the human race: in giving man unlimited desires, at the same time he provided the law that regulates them so he could be free and self-controlled; and while delivering him to these immoderate passions he added reason in order to govern them.
In endowing woman with unlimited desires he added modesty in order to restrain them; moreover he has also given a reward for the correct use of their faculties, to wit, the taste one acquires for right conduct when one makes it the law of one's behavior. To my mind this is certainly as good as the instinct of the beasts.
Whether the woman shares the man's desires or not, whether or not she is willing to satisfy them, she always repulses him and defends herself, though not always with the same vigor and not, therefore, always with the same success. For the attacker to be victorious, the besieged must permit or direct the attack. How adroitly she can force the aggressor to use his strength. The freest and most delightful of all the acts does not admit any real violence; both nature and reason oppose it; nature, in that she has given the weaker party strength enough to resist if she chooses; reason, in that real violence is not only the most brutal of all acts but defeats its own ends, not only because man thus declares war against his companion and gives her the right to defend her person and her liberty even at the expense of the aggressor's life, but also because the woman alone is the judge of the situation and a child would have no father if any man might usurp a father's rights.
Thus the different constitution of the sexes leads us to a third conclusion, namely, that the strongest seems to be the master, but depends in fact on the weakest; this is not based upon a foolish custom of gallantry, nor upon the magnanimity of the protector but upon an inexorable law of nature.
For nature, having endowed woman with more power to stimulate man's desire than he is able to satisfy, thus makes him dependent on woman's good will and compels him in turn to please her so that she may consent to yield to his superior strength.
Is it weakness that yields to force or is it voluntary self-surrender? This uncertainty constitutes the chief delight of the man's victory, and the woman is usually cunning enough to leave him in doubt.
In this respect women's minds exactly resemble their bodies; far from being ashamed of their weakness they revel in it. Their soft muscles offer no resistance; they pretend that they cannot lift the lightest loads; they would be ashamed to be strong. And why? This is not merely to appear delicate, they are too clever for that; they are providing themselves beforehand with excuses and with the right to be weak if need be. There is no parity between man and woman as to the importance of sex.
The male is only a male at certain moments; the female all her life, or at least throughout her youth, is incessantly reminded of her sex and in order to carry out its functions she needs a corresponding constitution. She needs to be careful during pregnancy; she needs rest after childbirth; she needs a quiet and sedentary life while she nurses her children; she needs patience and gentleness in order to raise them; a zeal and affection that nothing can discourage. She serves as liaison between the children and their father.
She alone wins the father's love for the children and gives him the confidence to call them his own. How much tenderness and care is required to maintain the entire family in unity!
Finally all this should not be a matter of virtue but of inclination, without which the human species would soon be extinct. The relative duties of the two sexes are not and cannot be equally rigid. When woman complains about the unjust inequalities placed on her by man she is wrong; this inequality is by no means a human institution or at least it is not the work of prejudice but of reason. She to whom nature has entrusted the care of the children must hold herself accountable for them.
No doubt every breach of faith is wrong and every unfaithful husband who deprives his wife of the sole reward for the austere duties of her sex is an unjust and barbarous man. But the unfaithful wife is worse. She dissolves the family and breaks all the bonds of nature; by giving her husband children who are not his own she betrays both him and them and adds perfidy to faithlessness. Thus it is not enough that a wife should be faithful, but that she should be so judged by her husband, by her neighbors and by the world.
She must be modest, devoted, reserved and she should exhibit to the world as to her own conscience testimony to her virtue. Finally, for a father to love his children he must esteem their mother. For these reasons the appearance of correct behavior must be among women's duties; it repays them with honor and reputation that are no less indispensable than chastity itself.
From these principles derives, along with the moral difference of the sexes, a new motive for duty and propriety that prescribes to women in particular the most scrupulous attention to their conduct, manners, and behavior.
To advance vague arguments about the equality of the sexes and the similarity of their duties is to lose oneself in vain declamation and does not respond to my argument. Is it not illogical to cite exceptions in response to general laws so firmly established?
Women, you say, are not always bearing children. Agreed, yet it remains their particular mission. Just because there are a hundred large towns in the world where women live licentiously and have few children, would you maintain that it is their business to have few children?
And what would become of your towns if the remote countryside, where women live more simply and more chastely, did not offset the sterility of the ladies. There are plenty of provincial areas where women with only four or five children are reckoned unfruitful.
In conclusion, if a woman here or there has few children, what difference does it make? Is it any the less a woman's business to be a mother? Does it not accord with general laws that nature and morals both contribute to this state of things? I am quite aware that Plato, in his Republic, assigns to women the same exercises as to men.
Having excluded individual families from his government, and not knowing what to do with women, he finds himself forced to make them into men. Rousseau attributes to all creatures an instinctual drive towards self-preservation. Human beings therefore have such a drive, which he terms amour de soi self love. Amour de soi directs us first to attend to our most basic biological needs for things like food, shelter and warmth.
Since, for Rousseau, humans, like other creatures, are part of the design of a benevolent creator, they are individually well-equipped with the means to satisfy their natural needs. In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Rousseau imagines a multi-stage evolution of humanity from the most primitive condition to something like a modern complex society.
Rousseau denies that this is a reconstruction of history as it actually was, and Frederick Neuhouser has argued that the evolutionary story is merely a philosophical device designed to separate the natural and the artificial elements of our psychology. The human race barely subsists in this condition, chance meetings between proto-humans are the occasions for copulation and reproduction, child-care is minimal and brief in duration.
If humans are naturally good at this stage of human evolution, their goodness is merely a negative and amounts to the absence of evil. In this story, human beings are distinguished from the other creatures with which they share the primeval world only by two characteristics: freedom, and perfectibility.
Freedom, in this context, is simply the ability not to be governed solely by appetite; perfectibility is the capacity to learn and thereby to find new and better means to satisfy needs. Together, these characteristics give humans the potential to achieve self-consciousness, rationality, and morality. Nevertheless, it will turn out that such characteristics are more likely to condemn them to a social world of deception, dissimulation, dependence, oppression, and domination.
As human populations grow, simple but unstable forms of co-operation evolve around activities like hunting. According to Rousseau, the central transitional moment in human history occurs at a stage of society marked by small settled communities. At this point a change, or rather a split, takes place in the natural drive humans have to care for themselves: competition among humans to attract sexual partners leads them to consider their own attractiveness to others and how that attractiveness compares to that of potential rivals.
In Emile , where Rousseau is concerned with the psychological development of an individual in a modern society, he also associates the genesis of amour propre with sexual competition and the moment, puberty, when the male adolescent starts to think of himself as a sexual being with rivals for the favours of girls and women. Amour propre makes a central interest of each human being the need to be recognized by others as having value and to be treated with respect.
The presentation of amour propre in the Second Discourse —and especially in his note XV to that work—often suggests that Rousseau sees it as a wholly negative passion and the source of all evil. Interpretations of amour propre centered on the Second Discourse which, historically, are the most common ones for example Charvet , often focus on the fact that the need for recognition always has a comparative aspect, so that individuals are not content merely that others acknowledge their value, but also seek to be esteemed as superior to them.
This aspect of our nature then creates conflict as people try to exact this recognition from others or react with anger and resentment when it is denied to them. More recent readings of both the Second Discourse , and especially of Emile , have indicated that a more nuanced view is possible Den , Neuhouser This project of containing and harnessing amour propre finds expression in both The Social Contract and Emile.
In some works, such as the Second Discourse , Rousseau presents amour propre as a passion that is quite distinct from amour de soi. In others, including Emile , he presents it as a form that amour de soi takes in a social environment. The latter is consistent with his view in Emile that all the passions are outgrowths or developments of amour de soi.
Although amour propre has its origins in sexual competition and comparison within small societies, it does not achieve its full toxicity until it is combined with a growth in material interdependence among human beings. In the Discourse on Inequality , Rousseau traces the growth of agriculture and metallurgy and the first establishment of private property, together with the emergence of inequality between those who own land and those who do not.
In an unequal society, human beings who need both the social good of recognition and such material goods as food, warmth, etc. Subordinates need superiors in order to have access to the means of life; superiors need subordinates to work for them and also to give them the recognition they crave. In such a structure there is a clear incentive for people to misrepresent their true beliefs and desires in order to attain their ends.
Thus, even those who receive the apparent love and adulation of their inferiors cannot thereby find satisfaction for their amour propre. Once people have achieved consciousness of themselves as social beings, morality also becomes possible and this relies on the further faculty of conscience. It is, to that extent, akin to a moral sentiment such as Humean sympathy.
But as something that is merely instinctual it lacks, for Rousseau, a genuinely moral quality. Genuine morality, on the other hand, consists in the application of reason to human affairs and conduct. This requires the mental faculty that is the source of genuinely moral motivation, namely conscience. Conscience impels us to the love of justice and morality in a quasi-aesthetic manner.
However, in a world dominated by inflamed amour propre , the normal pattern is not for a morality of reason to supplement or supplant our natural proto-moral sympathies. For recent discussion of Rousseau on conscience and reason, see Neidleman, , ch. So, for example, theatre audiences derive enjoyment from the eliciting of their natural compassion by a tragic scene on the stage; then, convinced of their natural goodness, they are freed to act viciously outside the theater.
Philosophy, too, can serve as a resource for self-deception. However, many of his other works, both major and minor, contain passages that amplify or illuminate the political ideas in those works. This idea finds its most detailed treatment in The Social Contract. In The Social Contract , Rousseau sets out to answer what he takes to be the fundamental question of politics, the reconciliation of the freedom of the individual with the authority of the state.
This reconciliation is necessary because human society has evolved to a point where individuals can no longer supply their needs through their own unaided efforts, but rather must depend on the co-operation of others.
The process whereby human needs expand and interdependence deepens is set out in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. In the Second Discourse , this establishment amounts to the reinforcement of unequal and exploitative social relations that are now backed by law and state power.
In an echo of Locke and an anticipation of Marx, Rousseau argues that this state would, in effect, be a class state, guided by the common interest of the rich and propertied and imposing unfreedom and subordination on the poor and weak. The propertyless consent to such an establishment because their immediate fear of a Hobbesian state of war leads them to fail to attend to the ways in which the new state will systematically disadvantage them.
The Social Contract aims to set out an alternative to this dystopia, an alternative in which, Rousseau claims, each person will enjoy the protection of the common force whilst remaining as free as they were in the state of nature.
The key to this reconciliation is the idea of the general will: that is, the collective will of the citizen body taken as a whole. The general will is the source of law and is willed by each and every citizen.
In obeying the law each citizen is thus subject to his or her own will, and consequently, according to Rousseau, remains free. On such a reading, Rousseau may be committed to something like an a posteriori philosophical anarchism. Such a view holds that it is possible, in principle, for a state to exercise legitimate authority over its citizens, but all actual states—and indeed all states that we are likely to see in the modern era—will fail to meet the conditions for legitimacy.
Rousseau argues that in order for the general will to be truly general it must come from all and apply to all. This thought has both substantive and formal aspects. Formally, Rousseau argues that the law must be general in application and universal in scope. The law cannot name particular individuals and it must apply to everyone within the state. Rousseau believes that this condition will lead citizens, though guided by a consideration of what is in their own private interest, to favor laws that both secure the common interest impartially and that are not burdensome and intrusive.
For this to be true, however, it has to be the case that the situation of citizens is substantially similar to one another. In a state where citizens enjoy a wide diversity of lifestyles and occupations, or where there is a great deal of cultural diversity, or where there is a high degree of economic inequality, it will not generally be the case that the impact of the laws will be the same for everyone.
In such cases it will often not be true that a citizen can occupy the standpoint of the general will merely by imagining the impact of general and universal laws on his or her own case. In The Social Contract Rousseau envisages three different types or levels of will as being in play.
First, individuals all have private wills corresponding to their own selfish interests as natural individuals; second, each individual, insofar as he or she identifies with the collective as a whole and assumes the identity of citizen, wills the general will of that collective as his or her own, setting aside selfish interest in favor of a set of laws that allow all to coexist under conditions of equal freedom; third, and very problematically, a person can identify with the corporate will of a subset of the populace as a whole.
The general will is therefore both a property of the collective and a result of its deliberations, and a property of the individual insofar as the individual identifies as a member of the collective. In a well-ordered society, there is no tension between private and general will, as individuals accept that both justice and their individual self-interest require their submission to a law which safeguards their freedom by protecting them from the private violence and personal domination that would otherwise hold sway.
In practice, however, Rousseau believes that many societies will fail to have this well-ordered character. One way in which they can fail is if private individuals are insufficiently enlightened or virtuous and therefore refuse to accept the restrictions on their own conduct which the collective interest requires. Another mode of political failure arises where the political community is differentiated into factions perhaps based on a class division between rich and poor and where one faction can impose its collective will on the state as a whole.
The Social Contract harbors a further tension between two accounts of how the general will emerges and its relation to the private wills of citizens.
Sometimes Rousseau favors a procedural story according to which the individual contemplation of self interest subject to the constraints of generality and universality and under propitious sociological background conditions such as rough equality and cultural similarity will result in the emergence of the general will from the assembly of citizens see Sreenivasan In this account of the emergence of the general will, there seems to be no special need for citizens to have any specifically moral qualities: the constraints on their choice should be enough.
However, Rousseau also clearly believes that the mere contemplation of self interest would be inadequate to generate a general will. This may partly concern issues of compliance, since selfish citizens who can will the general will might still not be moved to obey it. But Rousseau also seems to believe that citizen virtue is a necessary condition for the emergence of the general will in the first place.
This presents him with a problem for which his figure of the legislator is one attempted solution. As a believer in the plasticity of human nature, Rousseau holds that good laws make for good citizens. However, he also believes both that good laws can only be willed by good citizens and that, in order to be legitimate, they must be agreed upon by the assembly. This puts him in some difficulty, as it is unlikely that the citizens who come together to form a new state will have the moral qualities required to will good laws, shaped as those citizens will have been by unjust institutions.
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