Incapable of being represented, tasked with representing: women in domestic politics of Rousseau’s „Sophie“

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is famous for his disdain towards representation in parliaments. He sees not only powerful individuals such as absolute monarchs as a threat to freedom, but also organized groups, political parties and all other interest-based aggregates of citizens. The solution he proposes in The Social Contract, somewhat in contrast to his thoughts from Considerations on the Government of Poland, aims to bring freedom and sovereignty back to the people by getting rid of layers of parliamentary and/or monarchical representation that obscure the fact that his contemporaries are actually little more than slaves. Free citizens do not tolerate representatives and their liberty depends on them accepting or rejecting draft bills, decisions based solely on each citizen’s estimate of the draft’s contents’ approximation to the general will. No social contract between magistrates and the citizens is allowed, as free citizens can neither lend nor give away their freedom to anybody. A strict division of roles within a republic should keep the ambitious governments in check: people who hold executive authority should never influence the legislature while the parliament should almost never take on executive tasks. The division is perfect: every law that the parliament promulgates is general in its nature, while every executive act the magistrates enforce is derivative and individual. Rousseau stands firmly behind the view that the magistrates are not representatives, but only servants entrusted by citizens to enforce the general will and who can lose their jobs quite easily. However, our common intuition that governments in fact do represent their people might be correct even within Rousseau’s theoretical framework if we understand representation in Hannah Pitkin’s terms, as “the making present of an abstraction”. Rousseau, however, thinks of women as less capable of abstract thinking than men. This makes them very poor citizens and ill-equipped to participate in the legislature. However, surprisingly, Rousseau in „Sophie“ talks of women as superior and more powerful than men, particularly within the context of, in his view growingly effeminate, civilised society. His solution is to strike a “natural” balance between what he sees as growing feminine power and women’s natural attention to particularities and men’s natural strength and their presumed ability to think and plan in general terms. The solution is not to revert back to the state of nature, but to organise family relations in a way that resembles a republic. Men should rule as legislature and women should govern them as magistrates. In this paper we would like to explore the Rousseau’s paradox of family power dynamics within the wider framework of political representation – how can those who are not suitable for representation be the best representatives?