Voltaire and Rousseau

Voltaire and Rousseau

June 17, 2014, 11:00 PM IST Markandey Katju in Satyam Bruyat | India | TOI

Voltaire (1696-1778) and Rousseau (1712-1778) are the two main intellectual creators of modern Europe. They both attacked feudalism, which was the prevailing system in France of that time. They complemented each other, Voltaire emphasizing reason, and Rousseau emphasizing emotion.

Voltaire admired the scientific progress of the age, and denounced Christian superstitions. He was a product and populizer of the Enlightenment, its interest in science, its belief in natural rights, human reason, and human perfectability, and he attacked the irrational ideas and institutions of the 18th Century. Against organized Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, he made particularly sharp thrusts, repeatedly calling it l’infame’, and using the battle-cry ‘Ecrasez l’infame’ (crush the infamy). To him all priests were imposters, all miracles were illusions, and all revelations were human inventions, and he used the weapon of satire to inveigh against them (see his books, ‘Candide’, ‘Zadig’, etc). He was a strong advocate of freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and tolerance, and condemned religious bigotry.

Rousseau believed that natural man was not the dangerous, selfish brute imagined by Hobbes but was a virtuous being, a ‘noble savage’. In his ‘ Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’, Rousseau tried to show how vanity, greed and selfishness had entered the hearts of the ‘noble savages’, how the strongest had fenced off plots of land for themselves and forced the weak to acknowledge the right of private property. This, he said, was the real origin of inequality among men

In his most famous book “The Social Contract’ Rousseau propounded his theory of the ‘general will’ (volonte generale), which really meant popular sovereignty. This was a revolutionary theory for that time. The feudal theory was that the king was supreme, and the people being his subjects must obey him. Rousseau’s theory reversed this relationship between the state and the people. According to Rousseau, it was the people who were supreme, and all state authorities were only servants of the people.

While the thinkers of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Diderot, Holbach, Helvetius, etc emphasized on reason, Rousseau emphasized on emotion. He was of the view that reason alone, without passion (to fight against injustice) was sterile. It was Rousseau’s philosophy which triumphed in the French Revolution (1789).

Those wishing to know more about Voltaire and Rousseau may read Will Durant’s ‘The Story of Civilization’ : “The Age of Voltaire’, and ‘Rousseau and Revolution’.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.