The Online Library of Liberty

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• Editorial Staff
• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Isaac Kramnick, English Middle-class Radicalism In the Eighteenth Century
• I: I Social and Political Thought
• Community, Individuality, and Freedom
• Rousseau's Social Thought
• A Sociological History of Utilitarianism
• Spencer and Comte In American Labor Thought
• Bureaucracy In Weber & Kafka
• Bergson's Political Doctrines
• Oakeshott's Political Theory
• Oakeshott's Political Philosophy
• Undermocratic Liberal Republicans
• Wilkes and Radical Politics
• Late Liberal Imperialism
• Kant and Reason In Politics
• II: Education, Politics, and Values
• Schools and Political Socialization
• Schooling For Imperialism
• The Political Economy of Public Schooling
• Federal Education Policy
• The Problems of Federal Education
• William James As Individualist
• Existential and Phenomenological Education
• Early Federal Educational Policy
• Education, Labor Markets, & Controlled Youth
• Government Control of Universities
• III: Economic Thought and Values
• Business and Legal History
• Schumpeter's Economic Theories
• Menger and Entrepreneurship
• Saint-simonian Economic Ideas
• The Free Market & the Third World
• Democratic Capitalism, Justice, & Religion
• Property, Law, and Economics
• The Economic Analysis of Law Vs. Values
• IV: Foreign Policy and Ideology
• The Attractiveness of War
• Walzer On International Morality
• Eduard Bernstein and Imperialism
• Roosevelt Vs. His War Critics
• American Preconceptions of Japan
• The Marshall Plan and Russia
• V: Self-knowledge, Autonomy, and Liberty
• The Self In Political Thought
• Autonomy, Self, and Will Power
• Self-knowledge: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel
• The Egoist As a “psychopath”
• The History of Social Psychology
• Psychology, Self, and Society
• Free Will, Responsibility, and Motivation
• Free Will, Purpose, and Responsibility
• Political “groupthink” and Reality
• Personal Freedom and Autonomy
• Research Fields
• Economics
• Education
• History
• Philosophy
• Political Philosophy
• Psychology
• Sociology

Rousseau's Social Thought

Lester G. Crocker

• University of Virginia, Charlottesville

We might reconcile the various antinomies found in Rousseau's social thought by a dialectical process reminiscent of Hegel's logic. Thus, the natural order of God's creation which is fractured by man's experience and. . . experiment, of discovering the moral realm” is recaptured by the imposition of the organically ordered state. By this artifice the natural order is realized in a synthesis of rational nature and human construction. Without the imposition of the moral constraints of the organic state, untutored instinct would lead to societal chaos of competing selfish desires. However, the state, by allegedly unifying and embodying the disparate wills of its constituents, reconciles their differences and by tyrannical means imposes the moral order that cannot prevail outside of the organic body politic. Therefore, according to Rousseau, “no voluntary cooperative utopia could ever exist. Men had to be coerced into becoming citizens. . .” Men had to be divested of their natural selfish impulses through the tutelage of the state in order to realize a higher, moral nature—one unconcerned with the automistic self.