Answer to Why do some people find Jean Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy so compelling? by Frederick Dolan https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-people-find-Jean-Jacques-Rousseau-s-philosophy-so-compelling/answer/Frederick-Dolan?ch=17&oid=127729072&share=316ccc31&srid=6MG9J&target_type=answer Here are just two things that I find compelling about Rousseau. By “compelling” I don’t necessarily mean persuasive. I mean something like “requires (or at least deserves) further thought.” Rousseau offers a distinctive understanding of freedom. People like Hobbes and Locke define freedom as the ability to do what you want without anyone getting in your way. Rousseau defines it as “obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself” – what Isaiah Berlin calls “positive freedom” as opposed to the “negative freedom” of Hobbes and Locke. For Rousseau, freedom is self-control or self-mastery. To see the difference between self-control and unobstructed will, imagine someone who’s addicted to opiates. If freedom is the absence of obstruction, the addict is acting freely when he’s able to connect with his supplier and buy drugs, and he’s unfree after his siblings have put him in rehab and prevented him from buying drugs. Rousseau thinks it’s absurd to regard someone who’s a slave to his appetites as free. Imagine that the addict prescribes to himself the rule that he won’t use opiates no matter how badly he wants them. He avoids them for a couple of days, but then breaks down and takes the drug. For Rousseau, the addict was free during the time he obeyed his rule, and unfree when his desire for opiates overrode his will. Real freedom requires autonomy. That is, Rousseau associates the concept of freedom with what we can call “self-fashioning.” Human beings are “perfectible.” We can make ourselves into something more than we are by nature. Clearly, there’s something to this. It requires further thought. Rousseau links the concept of a free will to that of a properly organized state. He thinks that a people (a collective or corporate entity), like individuals, are free when they are ruled by laws they prescribe to themselves. But this has a curious consequence. To decide whether they should prescribe a proposed law, the people must determine whether the law conforms to the “general will.” This is very different from determining whether or not they personally like the law. The question is whether the law is consistent with the common interest of the whole state. This means, Rousseau thinks, that if your opinion about the law differs from that of the majority, you are mistaken as to what the general will wills. If you resist the law, the state may have to force you to obey it – which is okay, because according to Rousseau’s theory of freedom that amounts to forcing you to be free. You can see this principle in action today in France, where girls in state schools are not allowed to wear headscarves, which many Muslims regard as a religious duty. The French point of view is that the girls who want to wear headscarves aren’t really free; they’re enslaved to their religious superstitions and authorities. The ban on headscarves is a way of forcing them to be free. Again, this is a problem that clearly requires further thought. There’s much else about Rousseau that’s compelling: his speculations about the origin of property and inequality, his psychological insights into the nature of desire, envy, and status, his ideas about the possibility of withdrawing from society and enjoying le sentiment de soi, the delight taken in just being alive. What I’ve said above presents only two of many reasons to find Rousseau compelling. Below, Maximillian Robespierre selflessly applies the general will by calling for the execution of Louis XVI.