As leis civis e a liberdade no do contrato social de Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Abstract

The main objective of this dissertation is to investigate the relationship between law and freedom in Rousseau's political theory, more specifically in the Social Contract. The central issue from which the work departs concerns the tension that seems to originate between the individual's freedom and total submission to the community, the latter effected by the fundamental clause of the social contract. Thus, if, on the one hand, Rousseau intends to recover the freedom lost with the emergence and development of society, on the other hand, such recovery seems threatened by the total submission to the community that originates in the act of total surrender of the individual's rights. This tension is clearly expressed in the Genevan philosopher's own statement that at certain times citizens must be “forced to be free”. Based on this question, this work seeks to investigate more rigorously the concepts of freedom and law, as well as others that are intertwined in this relationship, such as contract, sovereignty, general will, legislator and virtue. Our proposal is modest, not intending to completely resolve this issue, which has been investigated throughout the interpretative history of Rousseau's work, however, showing that this tension can be resolved if we better understand the notion of civil freedom, it being fundamentally related to the republican notion of freedom and which, therefore, has the proper meaning of self-government, of the ability of the people to give laws to themselves. To do so, we propose to show how the notion of law ends up incorporating the very notion of freedom, thus being two complementary instances in Rousseau's thought, which are mobilized by the author to shape his republican model of society.