I hate Philosophy.

[Drunk Clown]

Is epistemology useless then?

PHILOSOPHY!!1!!1

[Kralizec]

That depends on how you interpret "Forced to be Free" - either at face value, or the actual meaning of ensuring that the minority don't try to screw up the democratic system solely on the sole grounds that they lost, and that participation in the system entails legitimation of it.

It's been a while since I've read Rousseau (or any real philosophical work, for that matter), but I'll try:

- Unlike philospophers like Montesquieu, Rousseau was never interested in curtailing government power. He merely wanted to wrest it from absolutist monarchs and invest it in the "general will of the people"
- Rousseau was opposed to any sort of elected assembly, saying that such a representative body could never express the General Will of the people and thus could never be sovereign. Part of the reason is because the general will is supposedly indivisible.
- He says that the will of the majority is not (necessarily) the same as the General Will, because individuals can have petty desires that influence their personal will, wich is distinct from their will as citizens (wtf?)
- Which brings up the question who gets to determine what the general will is, anyway.

I'm not saying that Rousseau is personally responsible for any dictatorships that came after him, but several of them (including the regimes that followed the French revolution) show us that it's a pretty bad idea to have a government or leader that claims absolute power under the guise of acting in the interest, or will of all.