Your thoughts and feelings about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the general will?

Question:

Your thoughts and feelings about Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the general will?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

He was one of the most original and important thinkers in history, and that is saying a lot. As a person he had personality problems - he was very self-indulgent, felt sorry for himself, wasn't very responsible to his family, and later in life became very paranoid. But he was extremely intelligent and for a man, unusually sensitive to emotion.So much so that he exalted feeling and imagination over reason and restraint. This had a powerful influence on the entire Romantic movement. Rousseau thought that people in the wild were better than people who lived in cities, and so he sparked a lot of interest in nature for its own sake and in the question of what exactly is human nature - and in particular is it born free? (He said it was.)
His concern about human nature was partly political. He thought that human society could be a lot freer, but that people also needed to cooperate with each other in order to prevent conflict. That's why he came up with the idea of the general will. Unfortunately he never defined this term, and this led to a lot of disputation about what he meant by it. Reading Rousseau, you can come away thinking he is a democratic socialist, a romantic idealist, or a fascist (his denigration of the role of reason had very serious consequences for European history). His self-pitying self indulgence also had unfortunate consequences, simply because he wrote so much about it. On the other hand, his honesty in examining himself was refreshing and unusual. He truly was a seminal figure.