Guest Blogger: Amy McMeeking

While reading Rousseau, I started out very much in favor of what he was saying, but by the end of our excerpt, I was thinking, “What? No, that’s completely wrong.” However, I think a lot of my reaction was caused by how well his ideas agreed with modern viewpoints. For example, I really liked his point that while the general will “tends to the public advantage…it is often deceived.” There are many instances of this throughout history. The concepts of racial and gender equality used to be widely disregarded—at the turn of the 20th century, even many women didn’t want the right to vote. Nowadays it’s clear that people back then had false ideas because that was how they had been brought up. As the reading progressed, Rousseau’s claims became more and more novel to me. He says that the most vital part of a state is the legislative rather than executive power. This makes sense, but I found it interesting in comparison with our tendency to focus on the President, even though he doesn’t have that much power to personally enact policies. Where I started having problems was when Rousseau asserts that different forms of government are better for different states: large, warm, rich countries should be monarchies; medium-sized, temperate climate, averagely wealthy countries should be aristocracies; and small, cold, poor countries should be democracies. Immediately after reading this, I started thinking of the many, many nations that do not fit this model at all yet are successful. I reacted similarly to his claim that the only measure of a government’s success is how much the population is increasing. Wealthy nations today have low or negative growth rates, and how can he have no preference for a type of government? A lot of thinking led me to the conclusion that I have trouble accepting some of Rousseau’s theories because he operated on completely different paradigms than I do. In the context of his time, what he said was much more reasonable than it is today. In the late 1700’s, an expanding population meant a country could feed its people. Virtually every country was a monarchy, whereas today the ideal of democracy is practically worshipped. What I took away from the reading, in addition to Rousseau’s ideas, was that it’s important to view everyone’s argument in the correct context in order to completely understand it.