For Rousseau individuals only exist within societies. Rousseau’s contract-based society is govered by a “General Will”. The general will is not simply the “will of all” or the sum of all the particular wills. Rousseau’s general will is reached after a process of negotion and deliberation which necessarily reflects the common interest of the social body. It does not leave unchanged the wills of the individuals who contribute to it. Equally, the sacrifices these individuals make for its sake are ambivalent. What he loses in “natural liberty” he gains in civil and “moral liberty.”
This equation of liberty with subjection to law has been seen as a first approch to totalitarianism, a licence for the tyrannical view that individuals can be “forced to be free”. But as against this, we should note that whatever the defects of existing societies, it is only within societies that individuals exist as rational, goal-oriented, moral beings with access to a range of values, interests and forms of life incomparably richer than the meagre repertoire of our instinctual responses and biological needs.
That is one version of freedom where Rousseau was quite different from the rest of his French enlightened contemporaries.
( Of course Hobbes probally thought the same too although he wasn’t French.)
I would say that such a stance isn’t realistic because people simply are not capable of being uniform on everything absolutely.
Such a stance might work temporarily if you used enough fear and terror to strike into the citizenry ( Like martial law) but overtime things deteriorate where Rousseau’s general will is no exemption.
a better question is " what’s the feasible alternative to the social contract in a developed society and not just a utopian commune"? if you have a suggestion i want to hear it and reshape my opinions
chaos? that will come eventually. why press the rewind button now?(coz you’re angry at society for being shit, i am too but i’d rather change it for the better ).
Such contradictions.
).