Abstract
‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’1 So begins the Social Contract (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s great effort to break the chains binding mankind so as to allow human nature to recapture some of the moral potential which civilisation had stolen. Much of the power in Rousseau’s political thinking comes from the cruel connection between the chains of corrupted human nature, tyranny and war. While Rousseau might have removed some links through his fierce personal independence and solitude and his theory of the social contract state, he found the chains of war the most difficult to loosen. Since amour propre, tyranny, and war connect in Rousseau’s thinking, any hope for even a slight moral regeneration in the individual was lost if the state of war was not somehow resolved. Man may be born free; but, in Rousseau’s thinking, international relations threatened that everywhere he would remain in chains.
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Notes
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, bk I, ch. I in Ernest Barker (ed.), Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 169.
See also Grace G. Roosevelt, Reading Rousseau in the Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, J. M. Cohen (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 283.
Maurice Cranston, Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1754 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 173.
Cranston notes that Voltaire ‘observed that it was a pity that Rousseau did not write against the tragedy that was then engulfing the theatre of Europe — the Seven Years War as it was afterwards known — rather than against the idea of a theatre of comedy in Geneva’, Maurice Cranston, The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1754–1762 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 148.
Voltaire also criticized Rousseau for taking a chimerical position in the Abstract (see M. Perkins, ‘Voltaire’s Concept of International Order,’ Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 36 (1965), p. 110).
‘Incomplete as his own treatment of relations among states was, the frequency and intensity of his references indicate the depth of his concern’, Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Rousseau on War and Peace,’ in ibid., Janus and Minerva: Essays in the Theory and Practice of International Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1987), p. 25.
See Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 16–41.
In Émile, Rousseau writes that ‘[e]very patriot is harsh to foreigners’, Émile, Allan Bloom (trans.) (New York: Basic Books, 1979), bk I, p. 39.
Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (eds) (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991), p. 17.
See J. L. Windenberger, La République confédérative des petits états: essai sur le système de politique étrangère de J. J. Rousseau (Paris: Alfonse Picard et Fils, 1900), ch. 2.
On Rousseau’s confederations, see C. E. Vaughan (ed.), Political Writings of J.-J. Rousseau, I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), pp. 95–102.
On Kant’s international relations thinking, see Carl J. Friedrich, Inevitable Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948),
Pierre Hassner, ‘Les Concepts de guerre et de paix chez Kant,’ Revue française de science politique, 11 (1961), 642–70;
Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘Kant, Liberalism, and War,’ American Political Science Review, 56 (1962), pp. 331–40;
Francis H. Hinsley, ‘Kant’, in ibid., Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 62–80;
Andrew Hurrell, ‘Kant and the Kantian Paradigm in International Relations’, Review of International Studies 16 (1990), pp. 183–205;
T. J. Hochstrasser, ‘Review of Rousseau on International Relations’, Cambridge Law Journal (1992), p. 163.
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© 1996 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Fidler, D.P. (1996). Desperately Clinging to Grotian and Kantian Sheep: Rousseau’s Attempted Escape from the State of War. In: Clark, I., Neumann, I.B. (eds) Classical Theories of International Relations. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27509-0_6
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