Democracy And Rousseau Social Contract

The result of this perspective is an assumption that humans need a dictator or an absolute ruler. Furthermore, he held that people deserve little to no representation or voice in the decisions that dictate their lives. This perspective on a social contract is not much of a contract at all. Due to the lack of proper representation that people get, there are so few rights guaranteed to citizens, while the government gets a significant amount of power. This system does not yield a legitimate government as it fails to meet standards for representing the people. Furthermore, a legitimate government established through a social contract must ensure the protection of basic human rights. Looking at the history of dictatorships and absolute rulers,

Representation of citizens is essential to a legitimate government because it completes a proper social contract: people give up some freedom to make decisions to their government, and in return, the government protects them. Leadership resulting in abuse of human rights, mass famines, genocide, or other major injustices indicate a breach of the social contract.

Rousseau’s social contract, the main focus of his writing, sounds rather utopic: people give up freedoms to be part of their society and their community as it governs itself. However, there are problems that arise from giving too much power to people. The main issue with giving too much power to citizens is that a society can almost never be well-educated enough to consistently act in its own self interest. In a direct democracy, citizens have the power to vote on policy initiatives or proposals. While in theory this sounds like a rather perfect society, in practice, people are not aware of how to preserve their own interests including fundamental rights.

For example, in the US, a representative democracy, many Americans, if not most, are so patriotic that they believe burning an American flag should be illegal. However, this viewpoint limits a basic right that a

Locke’s social contract includes several components making it the strongest basis for legitimate government. First of all, Locke’s social contract ensures that the legislative and executive branches create and enforce laws with the “public good” in mind. This

“public good” means that laws must be enacted for “the good of every particular member of that society, as far as by common rules it can be provided for,” (Locke 62). The second aspect of Locke’s social contract that makes it unique is its favoring of representative government. Locke wrote that when a leader “quits this representation, this public will, and acts by his own private will, he degrades himself, and is but a single private person without power and without will; the members owing no obedience but to the public will of the society,” (Locke 170-171). In other words, a leader in

Locke’s society must represent the people or else he will lose his power to govern. This notion leads to the third and final aspect of Locke’s social contract that is superior: the right of people to disassociate with or rebel against an unrepresentative government. If the executive does not provide laws that allow for natural rights to flourish, then “the people have a