By the middle of the eighteenth century the concept of individual freedom became crystallized in the doctrines of the natural rights of the individual, the contractual societary relationships between independent individuals, and the laissez faire principle in governmental science. The physiocrats, who took up the ideas of natural liberty and economic freedom, exercised a tremendous influence in France during the three decades following 1750. Their leaders were Quesnay, de Gournay, Condorcet, and Turgot. They believed that there was a natural law ruling human lives, just as there is a natural law ruling the physical world. They chafed under social restraints. Under the natural law, every individual has natural rights, chief of which is the right to the free exercise of all his faculties so long as he does not infringe on the similar right of other individuals. Unlike John Locke and other English thinkers who accepted the idea of individual liberty, the physiocrats argued that this natural liberty could not be abridged by a social contract.
According to the physiocrats the chief function of governmental control is to preserve the natural liberty of individuals. Industry and commerce must not be governmentally regulated, for by such regulation the rights of some men, chiefly employers, will be infringed upon. Employees, on the other hand, who are being treated unjustly will freely quit a harsh employer and obtain employment with considerate masters. Thus, an unjust employer will be unable to secure workers and be forced to discontinue his unjust practices—without government regulation. Likewise, a dishonest merchant will lose his customers and be forced to become honest or to close his shop—and again without government regulation. The physiocrats became known by their famous phrase, laissez faire, laissez passer.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), an able but baffling character, is the best known champion of the social contract idea. Although he advocated the family as a social institution and praised fatherhood, he reports that he carried his own children to a foundling asylum. He deprecated the disintegrating elements in civilization and urged a return to nature’s simple ways. In his chief works, the Contrat social and Emile, he attacked civilization vigorously. He asserted that civilization had almost destroyed the natural rights of man. His dictum was: Trust nature.
According to Rousseau the early life of mankind was nearly ideal in its simplicity and pleasantness. War and conflict were relatively unknown. In his later writings, Rousseau modified his belief and asserted that primitive confusion made necessary some kind of social organization. On the other hand, it became the belief of Rousseau that civilization generates social evils and results sooner or later in social deterioration. Corruption in society has become notorious. Social inequality is rampant and unbearable. “Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains.” People have become so engrossed in the artificialities of social life and so bewildered by its complexities that happiness has been lost.
Leave the individual free to carry out his own plans, untrammelled by complex social rules, restrictions, and duties. There is no social sanction at all; there is no authority except nature, which is necessity. In Emile, Rousseau takes his two leading characters to an island, where they live alone—happily! Liberty not authority reigns. But Emile, who has declared for liberty as opposed to authority, insists in his discussions of domestic relationships that “woman is made to please man.” The “unselfish, unsocial life” of Emile and Sophie turns out to be more than purely individualistic—it is anarchic and sensual. Emile fails to demonstrate the merit of Rousseau’s own theories, such as “Man is good naturally but by institutions he is made bad,” and “Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Author of Nature; everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
Slavery is wrong, according to Rousseau.[XI-11] It is a contract or agreement, at the expense of the slave and for the profit of the slaveholder, in which the slaveholder asserts: I’ll observe the agreement and you will observe it—as long as it pleases me.
Strength does not make right. Strength and moral force are not necessarily the same. Strength may often be ironically accepted in appearance and established in principle. By a social contract man loses his natural liberty and gains civil and moral liberty.[XI-12] In this connection Rousseau was simply the spokesman of a point of view which found frequent expression in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, in 1635, John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts colony, made a clear-cut distinction between natural liberties, and civil and moral liberties. Natural liberty is liberty to do what one lists, to do evil as well as good. Civil, or moral, liberty is liberty under the covenant between God and man, under the political covenants between men and men, and under the moral law. It is a liberty to do only that which is good, just, and honest.[XI-13]
It was Rousseau who contended that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are man’s inalienable rights. It was this doctrine which profoundly influenced Thomas Jefferson, as evidenced in the Declaration of Independence. Sovereignty rests not in a ruler or monarch but in the community of people—this was perhaps Rousseau’s main contribution to social thought.
Before Rousseau, however, wrote the Contrat social, the social contract theory had been overthrown. The writings of Montesquieu (1689–1755) offer an elaborate analysis of social and political processes. These analyses are similar, in some ways, to Aristotle’s analyses of 158 constitutions. Montesquieu discussed the doctrine of natural rights, but did not believe that the natural state of mankind was one of conflict, in which social organization was forced as a means of meeting the needs of individual protection. He asserted that there was a natural, innate tendency in man toward association. In the support of this belief, Montesquieu drew facts from the lives of the individual members of the primitive tribes which were extant in his day. The influence of Montesquieu was clearly inimical to the social contract doctrine.
In the Esprit des lois, Montesquieu dissected the laws of many nations and tried to show the relations between these laws and social and political conditions. The general implication is that laws are a natural outgrowth of life conditions rather than of formal contractual agreements. Hence, society is a natural evolution rather than a contract.