hilosopher Faceoff: Rousseau vs.

Mill
When reading “On Liberty” by John Stuart Mill this week, I couldn’t help but think how much the text directly
contradicted one of our other favorite political thinkers – Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Mill argues for individuality to
take precedence over the demands of society; Rousseau claims people should almost always follow the “general
will”. Rousseau pretty much founded and certainly believes strongly in social contract theory; Mill all but rejects it.
It’s my contention that since these texts were written the western world has moved away from Rousseau’s social
contract theory and more towards the liberalism and individualism described by Mill, which is the way it should be.
(Side-note – I use some quotes from parts of the texts outside our readings, as they’re a little more relevant to my
argument)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, author of “The Social Contract”

“It is a contradiction,” Rousseau says in his book The Social Contract, “in terms to say that any human being should
wish to consent to something that is the reverse of his own good.” As the “sovereign” termed by Rousseau is a
compilation of all citizens in a society, and they are the people making decisions, they in turn will only make
choices that benefit them, thus finally resulting in a successful society. Furthermore, “whoever refuses to obey the
general will,” Rousseau proclaims, “shall be constrained to do so by the whole body; which means nothing other
than that he shall be forced to be free.” Essentially, Rousseau is saying people who disagree with the majority should
and will end up conforming to the majority view – he believes the individual in a society should “give” himself to
that society, forming the basis of the “social contract”.

John Stuart Mill, author of “On Liberty” and opponent of social contracts
Now let’s switch gears a little bit. John Stuart Mill contradicts Rousseau’s views on the ideal relationship between
the individual and society. Mill’s most basic theory revolves around the harm principal – “that the only purpose for
which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent
harm to others.” He does not think that governments or societies (“the general will”) should decide things for people
that do not affect anybody but himself or herself. This largely represents the major theme of the essay, in that
individuals should have freedoms from the state and from society in everything “self-regarding”. If individuals are
not allowed to have these freedoms from the state, as maintained by Mill, then it can lead to a “tyranny of the
majority.”
I see a couple of major assumptions and problems in the logic of Rousseau that are improved upon by Mill,
especially when relating the theory to the world today. The first main assumption is that the majority opinion is
always correct. Rousseau’s avocation of everyone following the “general will” completely dismisses the fallibility of
man. How would it be possible for knowledge and the world to progress if minority opinions were not allowed to
exist? We might still think the world was flat if Galileo were not allowed to pursue his theory of the earth rotating
around the sun. As shown throughout history – new, amazing, and correct ideas are often thought of at the time as
absurd and ridiculous. But, these minority ideas and innovations are often how society learns new things and
progresses. However, Mill does not assume the majority to be perfect, as he states, “All silencing of discussion is an
assumption of infallibility.” As the western world has progressed, it has grown to allow minority opinions to exist
and be heard, no matter how ludicrous they may seem.

Unlike Rousseau, I do not think suppressing the minority leads to freedom and a successful society
The other major assumption I believe Rousseau to make is that society can “force” the minority to be free. When
you think about it – forcing a person to be free all but discredits the entire notion of what freedom is. Freedom, as
Mill proposes, is being able to take the knowledge of the past and apply it however one would like; to be able to
pursue whatever path one chooses; and to hold any opinion one chooses. The only times society may intervene, Mill
proposes, is when an individual’s actions affect others or when they are breaking a vital obligation. Mill does not
discount the importance of society, but rather believes society will be best served through individuals holding their
own unique perspectives and opinions. To not make these choices, Mill believes, would be contrary to being a
human. Again, I absolutely agree with Mill over Rousseau here. I do not think you can ever force a person to be
free. What could also pose a conundrum to Rousseau’s thinking is when the majority opinion is barely a majority.
What would happen when the “general will” only consisted of 51 or 52 percent of society? That small of a majority
trying to silence the large minority would likely have disastrous results.
Rousseau had a great start on the fundamentals of democracy, namely the idea that the people of a society should
determine its rules and conventions. However, his beliefs relating to the majority and minority are where I go astray.
People will always have differing views, perspectives, and opinions. As Mill proposes, the primary motive for
constraining the individual should be preventing harm to others. This idea, I think, makes up the groundwork for
modern law. Rousseau, believing a person should give so much of themselves to society, seemed to discredit and
dismiss the importance of individuality. Societies and democracies have over time I think shifted more towards
Mill’s way of thinking, prioritizing individuality and protecting the minority whenever possible. If Mill looked down
on the United States today, I think he would say we got it pretty darn close.
Key Concepts of the Philosophy of John Stuart Mill
Updated on January 26, 2017

Contact Author
John Stuart Mill was a 19th Century English philosopher who was instrumental in the development of the moral
theory of Utilitarianism and a political theory that’s goal was to maximize the personal liberty of all citizens. He was
able to inspire a number of social reforms in England during his lifetime after the industrial revolution had causes
huge gaps between the rich and the poor, rampant child labor and horrible health conditions. Mill’s political theory
disregarded social contract theory, which had obsessed the previous centuries political thinkers, in favor of a theory
that used his moral imperatives as its basis. His theory serves as the alternative to Marxism, which had developed as
the other major political theory in the 19th century. While his political theory has been less popular due to a return to
the social contract model and other proposed alternatives in the 20 th century, his arguments for Utilitarianism serve
as the basis for the theories status as one of the three major moral theories taken most seriously by contemporary
philosophers, alongside Virtue Ethics and Deontological ethics, based on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

Mill was raised with an advanced education and was translating Greek before he was even in his teens. His teacher
and mentor, Jeremy Bentham, was an enormous influence on his philosophy but Mill was able to minimize most of
the major flaws in Bentham’s version of Utilitarianism to allow it to hold the status that it currently does today.
Many find the relation between Mill’s political theories and his moral theories to be problematic but they both led
him to be a proponent for women's rights, gay rights and animal rights at a time when both stances were thought by
the majority to be absurd. In terms of making a social impact on society, Mill can be seen as one of the most
successful philosophers at implementing social change through his philosophy.
Hedonism and Utilitarianism
Mill was a hedonist, and while this word has a very different meaning when used in today’s society, what it meant to
Mill was that he believed pleasure was the only intrinsic good to human beings. He believed that all other ideas of
good where extrinsic and simply were in the service of gaining pleasure. Pleasure itself was the one idea of the good
that could lead nowhere else. One of the obvious problems with this view is that many people get pleasure from
things that are harmful to other people and there are many people who get pleasure from things that do not benefit
themselves and could even be harmful to themselves. Mill attempted to address this problem.
One example of a person that may get pleasure from something that harms themselves is a drug addict. In this
example, what Mill would say is that while they are getting great pleasure in the short term from the drugs they are
ultimately also getting a lot of pain and discomfort from their addiction. The long term pleasure they would receive
from actually kicking their drug habit would greatly outweigh the pleasure that they get from the drugs. There is also
the problem of people who get pleasure from simply being lazy or from simple instead of more complex things. For
instance, somebody may enjoy a trashy romance novel over Shakespeare but just because they enjoy the romance
novel more doesn’t mean that it is more valuable does it? Mill says no, and he separates the two into “higher” and
“lower” pleasures. The distinction between the two is that somebody who is capable of understanding both the
romance novel and Shakespeare would always prefer Shakespeare and the pleasure derived from the higher
pleasures is always greater than that derived from the lower.
This strikes some people as being a bit elitist but the alternative is to believe that there are no objective values to
judge art and therefore all art is valuable in that it gives pleasure. If this were true then all art should be judged on
the number of people that it makes happy. So American Idol would be greater art than a classic novel. Mill compares
it to the differences between a human and a pig. A pig is happy to be rolling in the mud but this is hardly a good
existence for a human. Mill famously proclaimed, “Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.”
As far as people who get pleasure from hurting others, Mill’s moral theory of Utilitarianism addresses this issue.
Mill claims that it is our moral imperative to make decisions that benefit the greater good and Utilitarianism makes
the claim that the moral good is “the greatest good to the greatest number of people.” Since most contemporary
proponents of this theory are advocates of animal rights it is often now stated as “sentient beings” rather than as
simply people. Mill’s version of Utilitarianism also has some key differences from the version put forth by his
mentor Jeremy Bentham and we will address those through common objections to Utilitarian thinking.
The most common objections to this moral theory is that it is impossible to know with any certainty what
consequences ones actions will lead to. (see Kant) This extends to the idea that because this theory does not protect
the intrinsic value of each human being the way Kant’s theory does it can lead to cases where an individual’s rights
are violated in service of the greater good. An example of this is a surgeon who kills one patient in order to get body
parts for four other patients who need them to live and a judge who frames an innocent man in order to avoid a riot
from citizens who are enraged by a crime.
Modern Utilitarians point out that both of these examples are outrageously contrived and Mill feels that he has an
answer to both objections. He states that moral action should not be judged on the individual case but more along the
lines of “rule of thumb”. What he means by this is that if a certain action can be generally determined to lead to
good consequences, then that is the action that should be taken unless there is an obvious difference that is known
with certainty that this time it will lead to different consequences. Mill would probably say that both examples are
not situations where the consequences of killing an innocent person could be known with any certainty to lead to a
better outcome. He further states, “There is no difficulty in proving any ethical standard whatever to work ill, if we
suppose universal idiocy to be conjoined with it,” meaning he thinks that only an idiot could possible think that
situations like these would lead to good outcomes. Still these objections persist and the matter is far from settled.
On Liberty
It is also a contention made against Utilitarianism that it is incompatible with individual liberty and Mill attempts to
reject that claim through his political theory. Mill claims the ideal society is one where the individual has economic
and personal freedom from the state apparatus and he bases the claim for individual freedom on the fact that it will
lead to the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. In this way, we can avoid the tyranny or the majority
that opponents of Democracy often fear. It is important to note that while Mill believed strongly in the right to free
speech and expression and in the “harm principle”, which states that individuals should have complete freedom to
the point where their actions harm others, he did not believe in the idea of inalienable rights. Mill thought that if
giving citizens a certain freedom would lead to more harm than good to society as a whole then that right should be
rejected. In this way, he is not in the libertarian school of thought that he is sometimes put under but is something
else entirely.
Mill was a social progressive for his time. Though he still held some common racial attitudes of the 19th Century he
strongly opposed the idea of slavery. He believed in the freedom of people to live the way they chose, even
demonized groups such as homosexuals and also championed the idea of religious tolerance no matter what faith a
person may choose. These were all based on the idea that being tolerant of others and respecting the freedom of
others would maximize the happiness of society. His influence greatly improved living conditions in much of
England at the time though whether his political views and his faith in moral Utilitarianism are truly compatible is
still a debated issue.
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment
January 5, 2010 Meta 8 Comments anti-technology, Athens, attacks on the Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment,
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Lycurgus, Michel Foucault, Progress as facade, Reason and egoism, Reason as sin, Sparta
[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to
Foucault]
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment
The first great frontal assault on the Enlightenment was launched by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Rousseau
has a well-deserved reputation as the bad boy of eighteenth-century French philosophy. In the context of
Enlightenment intellectual culture, Rousseau’s was a major dissenting voice. He was an admirer of all things
Spartan—the Sparta of militaristic and feudal communalism—and a despiser of all things Athenian—the classical
Athens of commerce, cosmopolitanism, and the high arts.
Civilization is thoroughly corrupting, Rousseau argued—not only the oppressive feudal system of eighteenth-
century France with its decadent and parasitical aristocracy, but also its Enlightenment alternative with its exaltation
of reason, property, the arts and sciences. Name a dominant feature of the Enlightenment, and Rousseau was against
it.
In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau started his attack at the foundation of the Enlightenment
project: Reason. The philosophes were exactly right that reason is the foundation of civilization. Civilization’s
rational progress, however, is anything but progress, for civilization is achieved at the expense of morality. There is
an inverse relationship between cultural and moral development: Culture does generate much learning, luxury, and
sophistication—but learning, luxury, and sophistication all cause moral degradation.
The root of our moral degradation is reason, the original sin of humankind.[6] Before their reason was awakened,
humans were simple beings, mostly solitary, satisfying their wants easily by gathering from their immediate
environment. That happy state was the ideal: “this author should have said that since the state of nature is the state in
which the concern for our self-preservation is the least prejudicial to that of others, that state was consequently the
most appropriate for peace and the best suited for the human race.”[7]
But by some unexplainable, unfortunate occurrence, reason was awakened[8]; and once awakened it disgorged a
Pandora’s Box of problems upon the world, transforming human nature to the point that we can no longer return to
our happy, original state. As the philosophes were heralding the triumph of reason in the world, Rousseau wanted to
demonstrate that “all the subsequent progress has been in appearance so many steps toward the perfection of the
individual, and in fact toward the decay of the species.”[9] Once their reasoning power was awakened, humans
realized their primitive condition, and this led them to feel dissatisfied. So they started to make improvements, those
improvements culminating most strikingly in the agricultural and metallurgical revolutions. Undeniably, those
revolutions improved mankind’s material lot—but that improvement has in fact destroyed the species: “it is iron and
wheat that have civilized men and ruined the human race.”[10]
The ruin took many forms. Economically, agriculture and technology led to surplus wealth. Surplus wealth in turn
led to the need for property rights.[11] Property, however, made humans competitive and led them to see each other
as enemies.
Physically, as humans became wealthier they enjoyed more comforts and luxuries. But those comforts and luxuries
caused physical degradation. They began to eat too much food and to eat decadent food, and thus became less
healthy. They came increasingly to use tools and technologies, and thus became physically less strong. What was
once a physically hardy species thus became dependent upon doctors and gadgets.[12]
Socially, with luxuries came an awakening of aesthetic standards for beauty, and those standards transformed their
sex lives. What was once a straightforward act of copulation became tied to love, and love is messy and exclusive
and preferential. Love, accordingly, awakened jealousy, envy, and rivalry[13]—more things that set human beings
against each other.
Thus reason led to the development of all of civilization’s features—agriculture, technology, property, and
aesthetics—and these made mankind soft, lazy, and in economic and social conflict with itself.[14]
But the story gets worse, for the ongoing social conflicts generated a few winners at the top of the social heap and
many oppressed losers beneath them. Inequality became a prominent and damning consequence of civilization. Such
inequalities are damning because all inequalities “such as being richer, more honored, more powerful” are
“privileges enjoyed by some at the expense of others.”[15]
Civilization, accordingly, became a zero-sum game along many social dimensions, the winners gaining and enjoying
more and more while the losers suffered and were left increasingly far behind.
But civilization’s pathologies became even worse, for the reason that made civilization’s inequalities possible also
made the better-off uncaring about the suffering of the less fortunate. Reason, according to Rousseau, is opposed to
compassion: Reason generates civilization, which is the ultimate cause of the sufferings of the victims of inequality,
but reason also then creates rationales for ignoring that suffering. “Reason is what engenders egocentrism,” wrote
Rousseau, “and reflection strengthens it. Reason is what turns man in upon himself. Reason is what separates him
from all that troubles him and afflicts him. Philosophy is what isolates him and what moves him to say in secret, at
the sight of a suffering man, ‘Perish if you will; I am safe and sound.’”[16]
In contemporary civilization, this lack of compassion becomes more than a sin of omission. Rousseau argues that,
having succeeded in the competitions of civilized life, the winners now have a vested interest in preserving the
system. Civilization’s advocates—especially those who are living at the top of the heap and therefore insulated from
the worst of the harms—go out of their way to praise civilization’s advances in technology, art, and science. But
these advances themselves and the praise heaped upon them serve only to mask the harms civilization does.
Foreshadowing Herbert Marcuse and Foucault, Rousseau wrote in the essay that made him famous, the Discourse
on the Sciences and the Arts: “Princes always view with pleasure the spread, among their subjects, of the taste for
arts of amusement and superfluities.” Such acquired tastes within a people “are so many chains binding it.” “The
sciences, letters, and arts”—far from freeing and elevating mankind—“spread garlands of flowers over the iron
chains with which men are burdened, stifle in them the sense of that original liberty for which they seem to have
been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized peoples.”[17]
So corrupt, accordingly, is the whole edifice of civilization that no reform is possible. Against the timid moderates
who want to achieve the good society in piecemeal fashion, Rousseau called for revolution. “People were
continually patching it [the state] up, whereas they should have begun by clearing the air and putting aside all the old
materials, as Lycurgus did in Sparta, in order to raise a good edifice later.”[18]
References
[6] Rousseau 1755, 37.
[7] Rousseau 1755, 35.
[8] Rousseau 1755, 28.
[9] Rousseau 1755, 50.
[10] Rousseau 1755, 51.
[11] Rousseau 1755, 44, 52.
[12] Rousseau 1755, 20, 22, 48.
[13] Rousseau 1755, 49.
[14] Rousseau 1755, 54-55.
[15] Rousseau 1755, 16.
[16] Rousseau 1755, 37.
[17] Rousseau 1749, 36.
[18] Rousseau 1755, 58-9.
[Next relevant post: Rousseau’s collectivism and statism.]
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to
Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See
also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism
January 6, 2010 Meta 3 Comments Collectivism, Counter-Enlightenment, Declaration of Independence,
Enlightenment, French Revolution, French versus American Revolutions, general will, Human Nature,
Individualism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, passion, Reason, separation of church and state, state of nature,
statism, The Social Contract
[This excerpt is from Chapter 4 of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to
Foucault. Previous post: Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment.]
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism
Once the corruption is totally swept away, the project of building a moral society can commence. Naturally, the
good edifice to be raised must start from a good foundation. The primitive state of nature was good, but
unfortunately we cannot return to it. Reason, once awakened, cannot be dulled entirely. But neither can we tolerate
anything that would lead us back to contemporary advanced civilization. Fortunately, history provides us with good
models, for looking back upon most tribal cultures we find that their societies, maintaining a middle position
between the indolence of our primitive state and the petulant activity of our egocentrism, must have been the
happiest and most durable epoch. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least subject
to upheavals and the best for man.[19]
The best we can do, accordingly, is to try to recreate in modern form a society on that model.
The re-creation must begin from a proper understanding of human nature. Contrary to the claims of the
Enlightenment philosophes, man is naturally a passional animal, not a rational one.[20] Man’s deepest passions
should set the direction of his life, and reason should always give way before them.
Passions are an appropriate foundation for society, since one of the deepest desires is to believe in religion, and,
Rousseau believes, religion is essential to social stability. That desire to believe can and must override all
Enlightenment objections. “I believe therefore that the world is governed by a powerful and wise will. I see it or,
rather, I sense it.”[21] Rousseau’s feeling that God exists, however, did not provide him with much detailed
information about the nature of God. God “is hidden equally from my senses and from my understanding,” so his
feeling gave him only the sense that a powerful, intelligent, and good being created the world. The arguments of the
philosophers about God not only did not clarify matters, they made things worse: “The more I think about it,”
Rousseau wrote, “the more I am confused.”[22] So he resolved to ignore the philosophers—“suffused with the sense
of my inadequacy, I shall never reason about the nature of God”[23]—and to let his feelings guide his religious
beliefs, holding that feelings are a more reliable guide than reason. “I took another guide, and I said to myself, ‘Let
us consult the inner light; it will lead me astray less than they lead me astray.’“[24] Rousseau’s inner light revealed
to him an unshakeable feeling that God’s existence is the basis for all explanations, and that feeling was to him
immune to revision and counter-argument: “One may very well argue with me about this; but I sense it, and this
sentiment that speaks to me is stronger than the reason combating it.”[25]
This feeling was not to be merely one of Rousseau’s personal whims. At the foundation of all civil societies,
Rousseau argued, one finds a religious sanction for what its leaders do. The society’s founding leaders may not
always genuinely believe in the religious sanctions they invoke, but their invoking them is nonetheless essential. If
the people believe that their leaders are acting out the will of the gods, they will obey more freely and “bear with
docility the yoke of the public good.”[26] Enlightenment reason, by contrast, leads to disbelief; disbelief leads to
disobedience; and disobedience leads to anarchy. This is a further reason why, according to Rousseau, “the state of
reflection is a state contrary to nature and the man who meditates is a depraved animal.”[27] Reason, accordingly, is
destructive to society, and should be limited and replaced with natural passion.[28]
So important is religion to a society, wrote Rousseau in The Social Contract, that the state cannot be indifferent to
religious matters. It cannot pursue a policy of toleration for disbelievers, or even view religion as a matter of
individual conscience. It absolutely must, therefore, reject the Enlightenment’s dangerous notions of religious
toleration and the separation of church and state. Further: so fundamentally important is religion that the ultimate
penalty is appropriate for disbelievers:
“While the state can compel no one to believe it can banish not for impiety, but as an antisocial being, incapable of
truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, if needed, his life to his duty. If, after having publicly
recognized these dogmas, a person acts as if he does not believe them, he should be put to death.”[29]
A society properly founded on natural passion and religion will override the self-centered individualism that reason
leads to, making it possible for individuals to form a new, collectivized social organism. When individuals come
together to form the new society, “the individual particularity of each contracting party is surrendered to a new
moral and collective body which has its own self, life, body, and will.” The will of each individual is no longer that
individual’s own, but becomes common or general, and under the direction of the spokesmen for the whole. In moral
society, one “coalesces with all, [and] in this each of us puts in common his person and his whole power under the
supreme direction of society’s leaders.”[30]
In the new society, the leadership expresses the “general will” and enacts policies that are best for the whole, thus
enabling all individuals to achieve their true interests and their true freedom. The requirements of the “general will”
absolutely override all other considerations, so a “citizen should render to the state all the services he can as soon as
the sovereign demands them.”[31]
Yet there is something about human nature, corrupted as it is now by reason and individualism, that militates and
always will militate against the general will. Individuals rarely see their individual wills as being in harmony with
the general will; consequently “the private will acts constantly against the general will.”[32] And so to counteract
these socially destructive individualistic tendencies, the state is justified in using compulsion: “whoever refuses to
obey the general will will be forced to do so by the entire body; this means merely that he will be forced to be
free.”[33] The power of the general will over the individual will is total. “The state … ought to have a universal
compulsory force to move and arrange each part in the manner best suited to the whole.”[34] And if the leaders of
the state say to the citizen, “‘it is expedient for the state that you should die,’ he should die.”[35]
We thus find in Rousseau an explicitly Counter-Enlightenment set of themes, attacking the Enlightenment’s themes
of reason, the arts and sciences, and ethical and political individualism and liberalism. Rousseau was a contemporary
of the American revolutionaries of the 1770s, and there is an instructive contrast between the Lockean themes of
life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness in the Americans’ Declaration of Independence and Rousseau’s social contract
oath for his projected constitution for Corsica: “I join myself—body, goods, will and all my powers—to the
Corsican nation, granting to her the full ownership of me—myself and all that depends upon me.”[36]
Lockean Enlightenment politics and Rousseauian Counter-Enlightenment politics will lead to opposite practical
applications.
References
[19] Rousseau 1755, 50.
[20] Rousseau 1755, 14.
[21] Rousseau 1762a, 276.
[22] Rousseau 1762a, 277.
[23] Rousseau 1762a, 277.
[24] Rousseau 1762a, 269.
[25] Rousseau 1762a, 280.
[26] Rousseau 1762b, 2:7.
[27] Rousseau 1755, 22.
[28] Rousseau extended the limiting of reason to limiting its tools of expression: “Considering the awful disorders
printing has already caused in Europe, and judging the future by the progress that this evil makes day by day, one
can easily predict that sovereigns will not delay in taking as many pains to banish this terrible art from their States as
they once took to establish it” (1749, 61). And following the examples of Cato the Elder and Fabricius, Rousseau
urged: “hasten to tear down these amphitheatres, break these marble statues, burn these paintings, chase out these
slaves who subjugate you and whose fatal arts corrupt you” (1749, 46).
[29] Rousseau 1762b, 4:8.
[30] Rousseau 1762b, 1:6.
[31] Rousseau 1762b, 2:4.
[32] Rousseau 1762b, 3:10.
[33] Rousseau 1762b, 1:7.
[34] Rousseau 1762b, 2:4.
[35] Rousseau 1762b, 2:5.
[36] Rousseau 1765, 297, 350. See also 1762b, 1.9.
[This is an excerpt from Stephen Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to
Foucault (Scholargy Publishing, 2004, 2011). The full book is available in hardcover or e-book at Amazon.com. See
also the Explaining Postmodernism page.]