listed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man by the French Revolutionaries). The American revolutionary hero Thomas Paine wrote famously of the importance of common sense, the age of reason, and the rights of man. This inspired both the idea of independence for America and the idea of creating a democratic government to ensure the independence and freedom of Americans inside the new country. If Paine spoke of the Rights of Man, however, he was quickly answered by Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Wollstonecraft was indignant at the failure to recognize women equally, but she had faith that eventually women’s rights would be recognized because this was, literally, only reasonable.
The example of equal rights for women reminds us that simply declaring rights does not mean effectively realizing them and that there are a variety of influential social forces, besides the exercise of reason. Sociology has been shaped both by the emphasis on independent reason – as sociologists have sought to use logic and evidence to understand society scientifically – and by the effort to understand those other social forces, from emotions to tradition to commitments to family or community or nation to the exercise of power. The Enlightenment encouraged a belief in progress based on the exercise of reason, but while many sociologists have believed in progress, most have also studied the limits or impediments to it and some have questioned whether it is as inevitable as the Enlightenment theorists imagined.
Already in the later years of the Age of Enlightenment, there were questioning voices. Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley, wrote the novel Frankenstein with its theme of a scientist who overreaches himself by seeking to create life. Her work was part of a Romantic movement that complemented and sometimes countered the Enlightenment faith in reason with more emphasis on tradition, emotions, and above all nature. Rousseau was a formative influence on this movement which, not surprisingly, found many of its later leaders among poets and musicians. This too shaped sociology, for the scientific researchers found that the evidence suggested that society was not simply the result of rational decisions by its members.
Authors and Readings
We start our section with two examples from the social contract tradition, representing opposing ends of the tradition. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was born in Westport, England and entered the University of Oxford at the age of 15. After graduating, he served as a tutor to the Cavendish family and traveled widely, exchanging ideas with the intellectuals of his age (including Descartes and Galileo). His first publication was a translation of Thucydides (1628), but it was reading Euclid that ultimately convinced Hobbes that matters of political philosophy needed similar axiomatic treatment. He wrote Leviathan or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil in 1651.
Hobbes was often personally fearful and lived amid civil war; he made fear and the need for caution key themes in his theory. He takes as his starting point that people are by nature equal – in the sense that even the strongest can be overtaken by coalitions of others; and that skill in one area is outweighed by the skills and strengths of others. In the state of nature, the hypothetical time before government, people are characterized by “First Competition; Secondly, Diffidence (that is mistrust); Thirdly, Glory” (Leviathan I, 13). People are by nature competitors trying to gain at others’ expense. This leads to living in a continual state of war, where the fruits of one’s labor are never safe from theft by others. This means, according to Hobbes, that “In such a condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; […] no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and, which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan I, 13). He arrives at this conclusion deductively from the basic point that, without restraint, people try to take what they can from others. That we all lock our doors at night is all the evidence Hobbes needs to confirm the initial premise, and then his conclusion follows from his rigorous application of the deductive method borrowed from geometry.
Hobbes sees only the power of the commonwealth as the solution to the problem of the state of nature. Driven by our natural passions to a self-destructive state of war, civilized survival requires a power to check the passions and create order. This power must have the ability to control others through force, since “Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words,” which lack the power necessary to enforce order. Hobbes sees this power arising when people give themselves completely to “one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will” (Leviathan 2, 17). This is done by each transferring their rights to the leader, which creates the sovereign. So long as all give their rights similarly, all are bound to the leader (or leadership body) similarly. Note the sovereign rules completely, as the covenant is among all subjects, not between the subjects and the sovereign, and thus there can be no breach of contract by the sovereign (Leviathan I, 18). It is interesting to note that this model does, however, generate power from the subjects rather than God. It is in the covenant of people with each other that the Sovereign’s power derives, not from the divine right of kings.
The views of human nature, rights, and the sovereign are very different for Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Born in Geneva, Rousseau lived most of his life in Paris. He was influenced by an idealized memory of the smaller community of Geneva, but he also remembered being driven out by the city’s Calvinist leaders who found his theories scandalous. He promoted new approaches to music and education, as well as social theory. In all of his work, however, he emphasized the importance of nature – both individual human nature (with its inner voice) and outside nature. In his theory of education, for example, he advocated raising children in the countryside so that they would be close to nature and also discover their distinctive inner selves without the distractions and pressures to conform to the norms of urban society.
Rousseau was passionate about the exercise of individual reason, but in unconventional ways, he burst on the scene by writing the winning essay in a contest calling for discourses on progress in the arts and science. Shockingly, he argued that progress in science actually brought humanity unhappiness by separating people from nature. Rousseau argued that much of what was widely accepted as progress in society in fact brought alienation, that is, separation of people not only from nature but also from their inner, natural selves. (Karl Marx was greatly influenced by Rousseau when he took up this theme in the 19th century; it has been recurrently important in sociology.) Rousseau placed great emphasis on inner reflection to discover the truth, for example, and less on conforming to accepted standards of logic. We see something of this in the reading here where he presents two different ideas about how the common will of the people may be found. One, the “will of all,” is more superficial, based on the aggregation of separate, self-interested individual wills (as in voting or opinion polls). The other, “general will,” is more basic, he suggests, but cannot be measured in such mechanistic ways. Each of us has within us, however, a capacity to see this light. Though many later thinkers have found the logic of Rousseau’s writings difficult, they have been profoundly influential. This is partly because he was a wonderful writer and his work is a pleasure to read even if hard sometimes to pin down. However, even more, his influence stems from the powerful way in which he established the ideas of freedom and equality as basic to modern thought. “Man is born free,” Rousseau wrote, “yet everywhere he is in chains,” limited by the arbitrary conventions of society and the exercise of power. Nature is given by God to all humanity, yet private property divides it and erects boundaries to exclude. How is this possible? Can it be just? The questions remain basic.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) admired Rousseau enormously and kept a bust of the earlier thinker in his study. He lived his whole life in Königsberg, a Prussian city in the north of Germany (which after the Second World War was acquired by Russia and resettled as Kaliningrad). He took walks on such a regular schedule that townspeople were said to set their watches by him (and the very spread of watches was part of the era’s more general concern for orderly, precise social life). Though he never traveled, Kant was intensely curious about the rest of the world, reading reports from explorers and missionaries.
