Pros And Cons Of Rousseau

What’s tricky is to rule out the representation of sovereignty in such a big country. Giving back the rights to pass laws back to the people is good, but not enough. The ideal republic Rousseau has in mind is similar to Rome , where citizens assemble regularly, and actively discuss public affairs and laws for themselves. Voting online technically allows the people to exercise the legislative power – the sovereignty – but as explained before, for each member of the people to have moral freedom, he needs to obey to laws he prescribed to himself. What is being stressed here is that citizens must be active. If the laws are drafted by the Congress, and the people only care about electing the congressmen but not about discussing the laws, they are still

only free at the very moment when they vote for the congressmen, because they are not obeying laws established by themselves. Therefore, we can probably say the revised system allows room for people to be free, but in practice, the difficulty involved plus the lack of the sense of participation prevents the people from being free. Two major difficulties are the geographic distance, and that each person minds his own business, thus paying little attention to exercising the sovereign power. One easy solution may be breaking up the state into really small ones, which Rousseau thinks is the only solution but is not realistic . Another solution to the geographic distance problem is to have the assembly alternately located in each town .

As for the second difficulty, Rousseau seems to suggest that the only solution is to have slaves do all the job a citizen needs to do , so that the citizen can have enough time to do “everything the people had to do” (Rousseau, 236). Nevertheless, the existence of slavery means exactly that this state has members that are unfree. Again, if we resort to technology, we can have machines as our “slaves” – that is, when robots do all the work for human beings, we arguable go back to the time when we can do “everything the people had to do”. Finally, citizens must have motivation to participate in establishing laws. Rousseau suggests that they have the incentive because otherwise they become slaves, but this is insufficient. He suggests that to maintain the authority of the sovereignty, namely the freedom of the people, people needs to have a “love of the fatherland” (Rousseau, 235). This can be promoted by the so called civil religion – something like nationalism . These changes may not achieve the ideal freedom for a people of hundreds of millions of members, but they should at least bring us closer to such

freedom.