Rousseau, Wollstonecraft & the Enlightenment’s Critics from Within
- Explain Rousseau’s general will and how it departs from Locke
- Analyze Wollstonecraft’s critique of Enlightenment thinkers on women
- Evaluate the limits of Enlightenment universalism
Rousseau against progress
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) accepted Enlightenment method and rejected much of its optimism. In his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts he argued that civilization had corrupted a naturally good humanity; in the Discourse on Inequality he located the origin of that corruption in private property. Émile (1762) proposed an education following nature rather than drilling in convention — and, notoriously, prescribed a wholly different and subordinate education for Sophie, on the grounds that women should be formed to please men. He is thus both the most radical of the philosophes and, on this question, among the most reactionary.
The general will
The Social Contract (1762) opens "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Rousseau’s solution is that individuals surrender themselves entirely to the community and receive back citizenship in a sovereign body governed by the general will — what the people collectively will as a community, which is not simply the majority’s preference and not the sum of private interests. Obedience to the general will is obedience to oneself as a citizen, so a citizen who resists may be "forced to be free." That formulation has been read both as the foundation of democratic sovereignty and, by twentieth-century critics such as Isaiah Berlin, as an opening to totalitarian claims — a genuine interpretive dispute students should be able to state as a dispute.
Wollstonecraft turns the argument on its authors
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) attacks Rousseau by name and does so from inside Enlightenment premises. If reason is the defining human faculty and character is formed by education, then denying women education produces the frivolity that is then cited as proof of their incapacity — the argument is circular, and the evidence is manufactured by the very exclusion it justifies. She demanded national coeducational schooling and access to the professions, and made the civic case: an ignorant mother cannot raise reasoning citizens. Her force comes precisely from using the philosophes’ own tools against their inconsistency.
Hold both facts about the Enlightenment at once. It generated the universal language of rights that later movements used, and most philosophes excluded women, the poor and non-Europeans from it in practice. The interesting historical question is not whether they were hypocrites but why the language they produced kept escaping the limits they set for it.
Briefly explain how Rousseau’s general will differs from Locke’s view of government, and explain ONE way Wollstonecraft used Enlightenment principles against Enlightenment thinkers.
- 1.State Locke’s structure: individuals retain natural rights and government is a limited trustee that may be replaced if it exceeds its trust.
- 2.State Rousseau’s: individuals give themselves wholly to the community and are sovereign collectively through the general will, which is not merely the aggregate of private interests.
- 3.Identify the consequence of the difference — Locke protects the individual against the community, Rousseau locates freedom in membership of it.
- 4.Give Wollstonecraft’s move: she accepted that character is formed by education, then showed that excluding women from education creates the deficiency used to justify their exclusion.
Rousseau differed from most philosophes in arguing that —
Wollstonecraft’s central argument for women’s education was that —
Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.
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