10 - Rousseau’s French Revolution

Summary

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's own campaign of enlightenment aims to retrieve liberty by inspiring new mores, tastes, and opinions. To delineate the contours of Rousseau's French revolution, this chapter explores Rousseau's reflections on changing these opinions. Rousseau enunciates a key general principle, one that would seem to have particular concern for the legislator who wishes to reform a corrupt society, one in which mores have already degenerated. He originally discusses the royal censorship tribunal in the Letter to M. d'Alembert on Theatre. In the Social Contract, Rousseau insists that since public opinion is not subject to constraint, there must be no vestige of constraint in the tribunal established to represent it. In the Letter, taking advantage of the French attraction to qualities in others that are unlike their own, and in tandem with his appeals to vanity or interest, Rousseau also seeks to detach the estimable from the pleasing.