Livingstone—Unscientific Character of the Second Discourse
The Unscientific Character of Rousseau’s Second Discourse
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is typically grouped with those political theorists who
have combined to give shape to the modern understanding of democracy and social
contract theory. Whatever his specific disagreements with his immediate predecessors
may be, he is regarded as part of a tradition of thought that developed a theory of politics
suited to a new understanding of man. The new understanding arises, at least in part, from
the application of modern science to the study of man.
It results in the claim that human
beings are fundamentally equal, and consent becomes the sole source of legitimate
political authority. Thus, the moderns turn away from classical political philosophy and
the claims both that political life is natural and that superior wisdom—natural inequality
—establishes the worthiest claim to rule.
The political argument of the classical theorists was embedded in a teleological
view of nature, whereas the new science of nature, associated with the names of Francis
Bacon and Rene Descartes, proposes a mechanistic model of the cosmos. As Charles
Taylor notes, since man is also an object of nature, “the new science breeds a type of
understanding of man, mechanistic, atomistic, homogenizing and based on contingency.”
Many scholars seem to agree that, if Rousseau finds this picture of man distasteful, he
nevertheless tries to work out a solution within the confines of modern science; he neither
ejects the modern understanding of nature nor does he return, even implicitly, to a
Platonic or Aristotelian position on nature and politics; indeed, nothing would seem to be
clearer about Rousseau’s political thought, especially given the argument of the Second
1
Thomas Hobbes, “The Citizen,” 91 in Man and Citizen: Thomas Hobbes’ De Homine and De Cive, ed.
with an introduction by Bernard Gert (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972).
2
Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 10.
2
Convention