Social 2 / Rousseau's "The Social Contract"

1. At the beginning of the 1700s, grain and bread were the most highly sought after dietary staple by the common people. Peasants, landless laborers, and urban workers all believed that there was a just price for food and that the prices should protect consumers and producers and imposed by government laws if necessary. In the late-1700s, this traditional, moral view of goods entered into conflict with the government-support, unregulated supply and demand. In years with poor harvest and high prices, food riots and popular disturbances occurred and mobs would attack exports and seize what they thought was adequate. Governments paid heavy attention to food supplies and sometimes controlled prices to prevent civil unrest. Vegetables, particularly peas and beans, were eaten and sometimes used in soups. Meat and eggs were highly prized but seldom eaten. The eighteenth century agricultural transformation increased per capita meat consumption in Britain and the Low Countries. Game laws prevented most European people from hunting and eating game. When the poor did eat meat, it was usually lamb or mutton. Milk was rarely drunk but often made into cheese and butter. The diet of the aristocrats, officials, and wealthy bourgeoisie consisted of large amounts of meat with fish, sweets, cheeses, and nuts. They were no fruits or vegetables eaten. The rich drank much more. The diet of small traders, master craftsmen, and minor bureaucrats was more diverse than the peasants', as markets provided a variety of meats, vegetables, and fruits. Northern, Atlantic Europeans ate better than southern, Mediterranean Europeans did.

2. The bread-and-vegetable diet of the poor was usually good, though during late winter and early spring, there was a deficiency in vitamins A and C, caused from not enough green vegetables or milk. This caused scurvy, which lead to rotting gums, swelling of the limbs, and great weakness. This was usually fixed after the first harvest of vegetables. Sailors had a similar problem but that was fixed when they had a daily ration of lime juice. Because the rich did not eat fruits and vege-tables, they also lacked vitamins A and C. Gout came from overfeeding and underexercising. People who ate meat, dairy, bread, and vegetables were best off. The potato was grown in Eu-rope and it contained a good amount of carbohydrates, calories, and vitamins A and C. it made up for the lack of vitamins from green vegetables and had a higher caloric yield than grain per land. The growth of market gardening and a greater variety of vegetables occurred in the 1700s and helped people’s diets. People suffered from the “purification” of bread that removed all of the nutrients. The growing consumption of sugar increased cavities.

3. The “competing groups” of medical practitioners were faith healers, apothecaries, physicians, surgeons, and midwives. Men and women were in all of the groups, though women were being forced out by 1700 because medical colleges denied their admission and women did not have the requirements to become doctors. Faith healers and their patients believed that demos and evil spirits caused disease by staying in the body and that it was necessary to exorcise the devil out. This view of disease was strongest in the countryside. Faith healing was most effective in treat-ment of medical disorders. Apothecaries sold a high number of herbs, drugs, and patent medi-cines in large towns and cities for all sorts of diseases. Their prescriptions were complex and very expensive, with some working and others, such as purging of the bowels, hurting the patient and sometimes leading to death. Midwives and women healers were popular in the countryside for herbs and folk remedies. Physicians, who were mostly men, received education as an apprentice and by working in the hospital. Since this was expensive, most physicians came from the upper class and usually only attended to upper-class urban patients. Physicians experimented many times and used purging and bloodletting. Bloodletting was used when there were inflammatory fevers, in all inflammations, and for diseases. Surgeons were normal workers who studied anato-my seriously and improved their trade. Army surgeons tried numerous things such as amputation to save an individual’s life. Almost all operations were performed without any painkillers, many people died for the agony and shock of amputation, and it was a dirty business where the simplest wound treated by a surgeon could become infected and kill the patient. Midwives, typically older, often widowed women of modest social origins and long professional experience, continued to deliver the majority of babies. They were trained by another woman practitioner and treated female problems. Male surgeons and husband rarely delivered babies because most births were normal and spontaneous. Surgeons were only called if the child died without having been born and instruments were needed to deliver it. With the invention of forceps, surgeon-physicians used them to gain new business and force midwives out of their trade. Women, though, maintained most of their business.

4. Martha Ballard was an American midwife who lived in Maine during the late-1700s. She kept ex-tensive records, had learned her trade on the job, and helped other midwives deliver babies. In the 1790s, the arrival of a young and inexperienced male doctor brought some competition, though Martha prevailed. She had a strong constitution and character, an accepting nature, and faith in God as well as her skill, justifiable self-confidence, and high record of success. She did not lose any babies out of more than eight hundred deliveries and no mother in birthing. She was also a nurse, physician, mortician, and pharmacist.

5. Hospitals were terrible in the 1700s, as there was no isolation of patients, operations were per-formed in the bed, nurses were old, ignorant, greedy, and drunk, fresh air was harmful, and there were many infections. Hospitals were hated and viewed as death houses. In the late-1700s, efforts were made to improve ventilation and eliminate filth because bad air caused disease. Mental hospitals were also horrible and the treatment for mental illness was bleeding and cold water to control the patient and not rid the disease. Violent people were chained to the wall and forgotten. In the 1790s, William Tuke founded the first human sanitarium in England. Philippe Pinel took the chains off the mentally disturbed in 1793 and treated them as patients. In the second part of the 1700s, medicine became more practical and experimental.

6. The greatest medical accomplishment of the century was the immunization of smallpox. In the 1600s, 25% of the deaths in the British Isles were caused by smallpox, and in the 1700s, about 60 million Europeans died from it. English aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife to the British ambassador of the Ottoman Empire, learned that the Turks used inoculation to prevent polio and had her son inoculated, leading to the growth of inoculation after 1722. Inoculation was risky as about 20% of those inoculated died. People who had been inoculated were infectious and spread the diseases, leading to condemnation of inoculation in the 1730s. With the reduced risks of in-oculation and cheaper methods, inoculation became widespread in the 1760s in England. Upper-class people were inoculated on the continent. The inoculation of smallpox led to a decline of the death rate and an increase in population. Edward Jenner discovered that cowpox could be in-jected into a person and that person would be immune to smallpox. In 1796 and in the next few years, he successfully inoculated twenty-four people, and after Austrian medical authorities repli-cated Jenner’s results, smallpox was greatly reduced and almost extinct.

7. Local parish churches were the basic religious unit across Europe because it coincided with the agricultural village, was the focal point of religious devotion, organized processions and pilgri-mages to shrines, and was a place to congregate and talk. Priests and parsons were the bookkee-pers of agriculture and history and they distributed charity, looked after orphans, and provided primary education for the common people. The Protestant Reformation was a culmination of me-dieval religiosity and a desire to purify Christian belief and saying that a person could reach God directly, without the need of a priest. The Reformation led to a bureaucratization of the church and local religious life. It also increased the practical power of Catholic rulers over their churches, and in the 1700s, they increased state control over the Catholic church. Spain did this by requiring all papal proclamations to be approved by the government before being read, asserting state control over the Spanish Inquisition, and creating a national Catholic church. Because of the Society of Jesus’s success, it had created many enemies, especially in France. The French king in 1763 ordered all the Jesuits out of France and confiscated their property. France and Spain pressured Rome to dissolve the Jesuits completely and it did in 1773 though the order was revived after the French Revolution. Other Catholic rulers reformed monasteries and convents so that the large monastic clergy could make a more practical contribution to the state.

8. The Protestant revival began in Germany in the late-1600s. It was known as “Pietism,” and called for a warm, emotional religion that everyone could experience, reasserted the earlier radical stress on the priesthood of all believers by extending Bible reading and study, and belief in the practical power of Christian rebirth in everyday affairs. It had a major impact on John Wesley, whose methodical views of religion became known as the Methodist faith. Building of churches in England stopped, leading to overpopulation of churches. Deism became popular. Unlike Protes-tant churches, baroque art adorned Catholic ones. People in Catholic Europe remained intensely religious. Catholics enjoyed their religious festivals as well as their saint days, processions, and pilgrimages. Priests explained the significance of religious activities. Due to the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the Enlightenment, parish priests and Catholic hierarchies sought to purify popular religious practice.

9. Carnival was the biggest festival of the year because in only a few days, there was wild drinking, masquerading, and dancing with many plays, processions, and rowdy spectacles turning the es-tablished order upside down. People became other people. The usual pattern of leisure and recreation was verbal socialization in the form of fireside fun, all-women gatherings, and drinking in public places. Urban fairs had prepared foods, acrobats, freak shows, open-air performances, and optical illusions. There were traveling circuses, horse races, boxing matches, and bullfights. Blood sports such as bullbaiting and cockfighting were popular


1. Rousseau’s idea of “noble savagery” was that man should be in a natural state, living as a savage did. In “The Social Contract,” there was no mention of noble savagery or of a return to the forest. It pleads to recognize the necessary tragedy of society, to submit to the power of the state and to political obligations.

2. The most important right is social order and it does not come from nature but is rather created by man. Its possible foundations are force and slavery, but force doesn’t work because whoever is most powerful will ultimately be conquered by one or many. Force is simply a mechanism in social order. Slavery can’t be either because man does not give himself up gratuitously and the idea of it is absurd. Hobbes believes that social order comes from force, but Rousseau does not belief that and states that consent is the only possible foundation for political obligation.

3. Consent is the only possible foundation for political obligation. At some point in time, men had decided that each of them puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direc-tion of the general will and that each member is a part of the whole, thus creating a social con-tract when who must submit to the general will. When a social contract is agreed upon, an entity is formed that is independent of the individuals within it but absolutely dependent upon the indi-viduals for its existence. Secondly, the individuals involved in it become known as the people, in-dividually as citizens, who share in the sovereign authority, and subjects under the laws of the State. Thirdly is the selection of a system of government

4. A Sovereign is a being that has been given life, power, and authority by the citizenry to rule over them. It is formed from the individuals who compose it, neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs, and consequently does not need to guarantee anything to its subjects. A Sove-reign is attentive to its subjects, cannot nullify the rights of citizens, cannot commit to slavery, and cannot will itself non-existent. The Sovereign has the right to use force to compel citizens to con-form to the social contract.

5. Too much government causes man to suffer. Since human nature states the individual interests are higher than state interests, government ends up running the state with the individual will re-placing the general will. Internal alliances are slowly formed and the citizenry suffers. A real de-mocracy cannot exist because it is against the natural order for the many to govern and the few to be governed. People cannot remain continually assembled to devote their time to public af-fairs. Aristocracies are the best form of government because the wisest should govern the many, when assured that they will govern for its profit and not their own. The poor remain poor though. Aristocracy must be based upon merit and not heredity. An aristocracy is always unequal and the citizenry suffers under the repression and tyranny heaped upon it. The worst type of government is monarchy because citizens are reduced to nothing by the means of supporting the regent.

6. The social contract benefits the individual by putting a state’s citizenry in the position of power and by empowering the individual to have a say in his government, ensuring a democracy. Be-cause of the utter corruptibility of government, it is destined to always decline and be replaced and to naturally go through a series of revolutions. As a new state is created, the government eventually supersedes the Sovereign, the government declines and a revolution ensues, creating a new state, and the cycle continues.