The Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau pushed forward the idea of popular sovereignty – power stemming from the people – and in doing so figured into the equation the importance of personal life in relation to the body politic. Rousseau in writing The Social Contract was addressing an 18th-century world before the French revolution where people were bound by their poverty and inequality, even under increasingly liberal conceptions like equality under the laws and property rights. These for Rousseau did not address or alleviate the deep unhappiness felt by most people summoned by his ‘Man is born free and is everywhere in chains.’

Rousseau thought Locke’s belief in the accumulation of property as the defining human characteristic a moral distortion. Our better selves had been worn down by the advance of civilisation and government, which is habitually competitive, Rousseau believed. The real human state was not one of Amour Propre (conceit, pride, egoism) but one of compassion, self-reliance, and basic self-respect (Amour de Soi). Rousseau believed humans could become easily overwhelmed by the coarseness of such things as property accumulation and consciousness of esteem, though he saw a civil and personal remedy ahead. The civil remedy demanded involving citizens in their government, not by way of Locke’s notion of consent, nor through thin representation, but via real engagement – the General Will – where the people became sovereign, controllers of their laws. The people giving over their liberty to a government directed by themselves delivered much more by way of true freedom than any well-intended liberal government.

To Rousseau, they would become moral citizens in the real and classic sense of the word. These ideas were intrinsic to the French Revolutions but Rousseau, was a pragmatist and remained conscious of the fact that real participation could only work on a relatively small scale. Hence in his help authoring the constitutions of Corsica and Poland, he pushed towards small-scale localised democracies. Ideas later echoed by Jefferson’s wish for a ‘nation of small Yeoman farmers.’

With regards to his emphasis on private life, Rousseau’s solution to moral breakdown within society was a life that focused on being present in existence. He saw a relationship to the natural world as the primary means of achieving this, and through rediscovering our sensibility and compassion to the natural world around us (themes set loose in the Romantic and Transcendental movements) society would be improved through the celebration of the natural, the beautiful, and the decidedly unpolitical in each life.