Rousseau believed in going back to the basics of human living, basically getting rid of all of our cities, technologies and comfortable living we are used to nowadays and going back to being 'natural man'. He considered natural man to be righteous and virtuous. He idealised the primitive people or the noble savage (tribes which had yet to evolve and expand into democracy or any kind of organised society). Hunters and gatherers where innocent and beautiful because they were natural and un-corrupted by the temptations of our society like alcohol and constrains of work.
Romanticism is the period of time which is known to be the reaction against the enlightenment era. It was the belief that emotions where the key to living opposed to greed and success. civilization had corrupted us and the state left us alienated. Rousseau stated:
'"man is born free, but everywhere is in chains"
People nowadays are trapped in the competition of self-esteem.
Rousseau wrote up something known as the 'social contract'. This was a contract in which he thought we should live. Within this contract he admitted that there was no way back to living naturally, he wrote;
"find a form of association, which defends and protects with all the common force, the person and the goods of each associate and by means of which each one while uniting with all obeys only himself and remains as free as before."
His beliefs were similar to that of Machiavelli's. With this social contract came rousseau's 'general will' theories.
He believed that since we all contribute to the shaping of this general will, when we obey its laws we do no more than obey ourselves. "For it be driven by appetite alone is slavery and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom". This general will can be seen to hold dangers however as this could potentially turn into a new kind of dictatorship, or the tyranny of law. Anyone who refuses to obey the general will, will "be forced to be free". For example 'the storming of the Bastille' in the French revolution where the middle class had formed a national guard and destroyed the prison which was a symbol of royal authority in the centre of France.
What is known as the legacy of Rousseau today can be understood by three factors; Firstly his decleration of the rights of man, secondly men are born and remain free and equal in rights and thirdly that law is the expression of general will for every citizen. Rousseaus ideas where eventually understood and attempted through the 'tennis court oath'. This 'utopia' however led to massacres as nobody knew who was in charge and various mobs in Paris where given weapons. These massacres can be known as 'The Terror'. in 1792 it looked as if Paris was going to be attacked by the Parisians, this meant that the citizens of Paris were given arms in order to defend themselves. In 1793 the king was executed using the revolutionary device known as the guillotine. Ultimately this led to the government deliberately using violence against its own citizens in a reign of terror. After this a committee of public safety or a 'vendee' was formed.
Mary Wollstonecraft started to appear in this romanticist period as well. She can be considered to be the first every feminist. She believed that the education given to women was superficial and promoted an obsession with appearance.Therefore if you educated women properly they would obviously achieve a lot more in society than just being beautiful and pretty. She believed that men and women should be equal. They should be asexual being until two people fall in love, but until then they should not assume a gendered identity. Mary wollstonecraft did not believe in rousseaus hatred of sophistication and focused more on equality between the sexes.
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