Professor Steven Smith:
There's so much to say and so
little time.
Today, I want to talk about the
general will,
Rousseau's most important
contribution to political
science and I will also want to
talk about the legacies of
Rousseau and what he's meant for
the world that he did so much to
shape.
But I want to start first with
the general will which is his
answer to the problems of
civilization or the political
problem of the Second
Discourse that we talked
about last week,
the problems of inequality,
the problem of
amour-propre,
the problem of our general
discontent.
Social contract is his answer
to the problem of natural
freedom.
This is so, in a way,
because for Rousseau nature,
he tells us,
provides no standards or
guidelines for determining who
should rule.
Unlike Aristotle,
man is not here a political
animal, and notice that when
Rousseau speaks of the social
contract in the general will as
the foundation of all legitimate
authority,
he means, literally,
that all standards of justice
and right have their origins in
the will in this unique human
property of the will or free
agency.
It is this liberation of the
will from all transcendent
sources or standards,
whether those be found in
nature, in custom,
in revelation,
in any other source.
The liberation of the will from
all of these sources that is the
true, as it were,
center of gravity of Rousseau's
philosophy.
It is a world that begins to
emphasize the primacy and the
priority of the will,
a moral point of view that I
want to indicate a little later,
finds its, in many ways,
very powerful expression in the
philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
But given Rousseau's,
let's call it libertarian
conception of human nature,
his description of the actual
mechanism of the social contract
may come as something of a
surprise to us.
The problem,
to which the formula of the
general will is the answer,
is stated succinctly by
Rousseau in Book I,
chapter 6 of the Social
Contract.
"Find a form of association,"
he writes, "which defends and
protects with all the common
force,
the person and goods of each
associate and by means of which
each one while uniting with all
obeys only himself and remains
as free as before."
This, he calls,
the fundamental problem for
which the social contract is the
solution.
That statement,
a famous statement,
Book I, chapter 6,
really contains two parts that
merit close attention.
The first part says--the first
part of that clause says that
the aim of the contract is to
protect and defend with the
common force the goods and
person of each member.
So far, think of that,
this is entirely consistent
with Locke's claim or even
Hobbes' claim that the purpose
of society is to protect the
security or the life,
liberty, and estate of each of
its members.
Yet, Rousseau adds to this
Lockean or liberal clause you
might say, a second and more
distinctly Rousseauian claim,
namely, that the contract must
ensure not only the conditions
for mutual protection and the
preservation of self and
property,
but rather also that in uniting
with one another,
he says, each person obeys only
himself and then he says,
"remains as free as they were
before."
But how is this possible,
we want to know.
Isn't the essence of the social
contract that we give up some
part of our natural freedom to
guarantee mutual peace and
security?
How can we remain as free as we
were before, and as he says,
obey only our--that the
participant obey only himself.
That is the paradox,
in many ways,
or the fundamental problem,
as he calls it,
to which his contract is a
solution.
Rousseau provides an answer as
follows;
he says, "Properly understood
these clauses are all reducible
to one.
Namely," he says,
"the total alienation of each
associate together with all of
his rights to the entire
community."
The total alienation of each
associate with all of his rights
to the entire community.
And those two phrases,
"total alienation" and "entire
community" are obviously central
here.
In the first place,
all persons must give
themselves entirely over to the
social contract to ensure that
the terms of the agreement are
equal for all.
The total alienation clause as
it were, is Rousseau's manner of
ensuring that the terms of the
contract are the same for
everyone.
But secondly,
when we alienate ourselves,
it is crucial,
he says, that this be done or
given to the entire community,
for only then he wants to
argue, is the individual
beholden not to any private will
or any private association,
or to some other person but to
the general will,
the will of the entire
community.
The social contract is the
foundation of the general will
which is, for Rousseau,
the only legitimate sovereign.
Not kings, not parliaments,
not representative assemblies,
not presidents,
but the general will of the
entire community is the only
general sovereign,
the doctrine of the famous
doctrine of what we call the
sovereignty of the people or
popular sovereignty.
Since everyone combines to make
up this will,
when we give ourselves over to
it entirely, he wants to argue,
we do nothing more then obey
ourselves.
The sovereign,
in other words,
is not some distinct third
party that is created by the
contract,
but rather the sovereign is
simply the people as a whole
acting in its collective
capacity,
the people in their collective
capacity.
Now, you might suggest that
there is something deeply amiss
here.
That is to say,
from a highly individualistic
set of premises where each
person is concerned only in the
state of nature,
or in the pre-contract
tradition, only with the
protection of their lives,
persons and property,
Rousseau seems to be leading us
to a highly regimented and
collectivized conclusion,
where the individual has given
over virtually his or her entire
being to the will of the
community.
In what way does this render us
as free as we were before?
In what way do we remain free
and obey only ourselves?
That seems to be the problem.
Is Rousseau's formula for the
general will,
a recipe or a formula for
freedom,
or is it a recipe for the
tyranny of the majority of the
type later analyzed by
Tocqueville that we'll be seeing
after the break?
Rousseau wants to say,
paradoxically,
only through this total
alienation do we remain free.
Why is this?
Why is this?
Because he wants to argue no
one is dependent upon the will
of another.
The people established through
their act a new kind of
sovereign, the general will,
which he says is not strictly
speaking the sum total,
the additive total of the
individual wills or the
individual parts,
but is more like the general
interest or the rational will,
if you want to use that kind of
Kantian formulation,
the rational will of a
community.
Since we all contribute to the
shaping of this general will,
when we obey its laws we do,
he wants to say,
no more than obey ourselves.
Rousseau describes this new
kind of freedom that we achieve
under the general will.
He wants to say that this
brings about,
in some ways,
a radical transformation of
human nature in itself.
The freedom of the citizen
under the general will is not
the freedom of the state of
nature,
it's not the freedom to do
anything we like,
anything that our will and
power allows us to do,
but it is a new kind of freedom
that he calls moral freedom,
a freedom to do what the law
commands.
The passage from the state of
nature, he writes,
to the civil state,
the passage from the state of
nature to the civil state
produces a remarkable change in
man.
For it substitutes justice for
instinct in his behavior and
gives his actions a moral
quality that they previously
lacked.
And Rousseau continues that
statement as follows.
"What man loses through the
social contract is his natural
liberty and unmitigated right to
everything that tempts him and
he can acquire.
What he gains is civil liberty
and proprietary ownership of all
he possesses,
but--and here I think is the
crucial argument or the crucial
clause, but he writes--to the
preceding acquisitions,"
that is to say civil liberty,
"could be added the acquisition
of moral liberty which alone,"
he says, "makes man truly the
master of himself.
For it to be driven by appetite
alone is slavery and obedience
to the law one has prescribed
for oneself is freedom."
That is a remarkable statement.
"Obedience to the law that one
prescribes for oneself is
freedom."
That is moral liberty,
which is only created and
possible through the social
contract,
and the implications of this,
the moral and political
implications of that statement
are massive.
It is here, in many ways,
where Rousseau departs most
powerfully, most dramatically
from his early modern
predecessors.
Consider the following.
For Hobbes and Locke,
liberty meant that sphere of
human conduct which is
unregulated by the law.
Remember chapter 21 of
Leviathan,
where Hobbes says,
"where the law is silent"
praetermitted in his term,
"where the law is silent,
the citizen is free to do what
ever he or she chooses to do."
Freedom begins,
so to speak,
where the law is silent.
But for Rousseau,
law is the very beginning of
our freedom.
Where the law is silent,
we may have a kind of natural
freedom, but our moral freedom,
we are free to the extent that
we are participants in the laws
that we in turn obey.
Freedom means acting in
conformity with self-imposed
law.
A radically different
understanding of what freedom
consists and it seems underlying
the difference between,
one could say Hobbes and Locke
on the one side,
and Rousseau on the other;
it's a difference between two
very different conceptions of
liberty.
One might call them liberal and
republican respectively,
small "r" republican of course
or democratic even,
if you like.
For liberals,
following in the tradition of
Hobbes and Locke,
again, freedom has always meant
a sphere of privacy where the
law does not intrude or where
other people do not intrude.
This is why the separation of
the public and the private
sphere has always been so sacred
to liberals,
because only in the private
sphere, only in that area of
civil society where the state
does not intrude is the
individual really and truly
free.
But for the republican theory
of liberty of which Rousseau is
a most powerful modern exponent,
this separation of public and
private is only an exercise in
what might be thought of as
private selfishness.
The task is rather to create a
community where the individual
and the public interest are not
in conflict with one another,
where the individual does not
think of him or herself as a
being apart from the social
body.
This is the freedom of the
citizen, for Rousseau,
who takes an active role in the
determination of the laws of
one's own community.
Rousseau's purpose in saying
this and in writing this seems
to be to bring back to life a
concept that he believes has
been dormant,
had laid dormant for centuries
and that concept is the citizen.
The last people who really knew
what a citizen meant,
he says, were the Romans.
In a footnote,
again to Book I,
chapter 6, he indicates to what
degree the true meaning of
citizen has been lost on modern
subjects.
"Most modern men," he writes,
"mistake a town for a city,
and a bourgeois for a citizen."
Think of that.
Most mistake a bourgeois for a
citizen.
The modern world furnishes
almost no examples of what a
citizen is, and this is why it
is necessary for Rousseau to
return to the histories of
antiquity,
especially Rome and Sparta to
find models of citizenship.
Only in these societies can one
find the spirit of
self-sacrifice and devotion to
the common good,
a kind of patriotic devotion
upon which citizenship is
founded.
If I could take perhaps
Rousseau's most memorable
example of the true citizen it
comes from an example he lifts
from the Roman writer,
Plutarch that he uses in the
opening pages of his book,
The Émile,
which I hope you will have a
chance to read at some other
time.
Here, he tells an unforgettable
story for anybody who ever reads
Émile.
"A Spartan woman," he writes,
"had five sons in the army and
was awaiting news of the
battle,"
had five sons in the army and
was awaiting news of the battle.
"A helot, slave arrives
trembling she asks him for news.
‘Your five sons were killed,'
the helot replies.
‘Base slave,
did I ask you this?'
‘We won the victory,' he says.
The mother runs to the temple
and gives thanks to the gods."
Here, for Rousseau,
was the ancient citizen.
An example that is both
terrible and sublime,
which of course he wants it to
be, he intends it to be.
There is the example of what
the true citizen is.
The question,
when you consider this
possibility, is whether
Rousseau's idea of the freedom
of the citizen,
freedom to live under
self-imposed law,
leads to a higher form of
nobility,
higher than the kind of low
minded pursuit of one's
self-interest as Rousseau wants.
He wants to dignify politics
again by leading to a higher
form of nobility or does it
result in a new kind of
despotism,
the despotism of law,
the despotism of obedience to
the general will and of course
underlying that sinister reading
of Rousseau is the famous or
maybe infamous statement that
not only that the general will
is the source of freedom,
but that anyone who obeys,
who refuses to obey,
the general will may be in his
famous formulation,
may be forced to be free.
That anyone who disobeys it and
being chastised or can be,
as it were, forced to be free.
Recall that this is a
conception of freedom which,
again, is almost the opposite
of that of what we might again
call the liberal tradition.
A view, which,
and again in a slightly
paradoxical way,
was given, a very powerful
formulation by Hobbes.
I want to read a passage that I
read a couple of weeks ago from
Hobbes which I think stands as a
striking contrast to that of
Rousseau's.
Again, in chapter 21 of
Leviathan Hobbes writes,
"The Athenians and the Romans
were free, that is,
they were free commonwealths.
Not that any particular men had
liberty to resist their own
representatives,
but their representatives had
the liberty to resist or invade
other people."
Hobbes clearly says that the
ancient freedom was the freedom
of the collective;
it wasn't the freedom of the
individual.
"The freedom of the
authorities," as he says,
"to resist or invade other
people."
There is written,
on the turrets of the city of
Lucca, remember that,
in the great characters at this
day the word libertas and
yet,
he goes on to say,
"no man can thence infer that a
particular man has more liberty
or immunity from service to the
commonwealth there than in
Constantinople."
That is to say,
freedom for Hobbes consists of,
as he puts it,
immunity from service,
immunity from service and for
this reason there is no reason
to believe that anyone is freer
in the republican city of Lucca,
which has libertas on
the wall than in Constantinople.
That seems to,
already a 100 or so years
before Rousseau,
suggest a powerful alternative
to his view of freedom.
Hobbes' point,
like Rousseau's,
is extreme and that in many
ways is the power of these two
views.
Hobbes' view of freedom is
immunity from service,
Rousseau's view is that freedom
consists, you might say,
only in service.
Our freedom starts where the
law begins.
Again, at the basis of this are
two radically different views of
the role of political
participation in lawmaking.
For Rousseau,
again, laws are legitimate only
if everyone has a direct share
in making them.
It doesn't mean we all agree
with the outcome but only if we
have some kind of share or voice
in making them.
For Hobbes, for Locke,
for the authors of the
federalist papers,
on the other hand,
the direct involvement of the
citizen in lawmaking is clearly
a subordinate or a secondary
good.
Legislation is better handled
by persons chosen from the
electorate who are,
so to speak,
the agents or representatives
of the people.
This was what the federalist
authors argued was the great
advance of modern political
science, the doctrine of
representation.
What is far more important for
the federalist authors,
as well as for Locke,
Hobbes and that tradition is
that laws be generally known,
that they be applied by
impartial judges,
rather than they be the direct
expression of the general will.
In many ways underlying the,
again, liberal conception of
law is a certain distrust of the
collective wisdom or the
collective sovereignty of the
people.
It is too cumbersome,
in many ways,
and also too dangerous a
mechanism to call people
together to decide on matters
over public concern.
This is better left according
to this tradition to
representatives.
Rousseau obviously could not
disagree more.
One could say that Rousseau
makes heroic and unreasonable
assumptions about human nature.
Why do we want to gather
together constantly or often to
decide, to deliberate,
and to debate over questions of
public concern?
Most people,
it's hard enough just to get
most people, as we know,
to go out to vote,
why do we want to engage in
endless debate of something like
a college council meeting trying
to discuss what to do,
whether to buy or not a new set
of dumbbells for the weight
room.
This is a debate that will go
on for hours and hours and maybe
even weeks.
Don't people simply want to be
left alone?
Rousseau, again,
he seems in some way,
to make unreasonable
assumptions about human nature
and our capacity to engage in
debate.
But Rousseau will tell you he
is not being idealistic at all.
He is starting from the
assumption of men as they are,
he says.
Unless everyone he wants to say
is engaged in the process of
legislation, there is no way for
you know that the laws will be
an expression of your will
rather than simply the private
will or corporate will of some
individual or intermediary body.
You will find yourself in a
condition of dependence and
slavery on the will of others.
And what is really at issue for
Rousseau is freedom from
dependence on some faction,
some interest,
or some association that we
have come to call today interest
groups,
in some way.
Rousseau's appeal is not to our
altruism, but rather,
to our selfishness,
in some way.
Our desire, our private or
selfish desire to preserve our
freedom and resist the willful
domination of others upon it.
So far, this all,
in many ways,
is very abstract and Rousseau
deliberately sets out his plan
for the general will in a highly
abstract and semi-technical
language.
But he turns to questions
particularly in Book III about
how is the general will actually
applied.
How is it applied?
Here Rousseau is far more
specific sociologically and so
on about the conditions under
which the general will,
or a general will,
can come about.
In the first place,
the general will can only
operate in small states,
much like the size of an
ancient republic.
In one place,
one particularly notable place
in the social contract,
he says,
only the island country of
Corsica is today a place where
the general will might be
established.
The modern nation-state,
as we have come to think of it,
is far too large and diffuse to
determine the general will.
Such a state,
such large states will
necessarily entail considerable
degrees of social inequality of
wealth,
of status and with such
inequalities,
there can be no general will.
Finally, or in addition,
such a state where the general
will is operative would be one
that would have to,
in some sense,
eschew the temptations of
commerce and luxury for these
bring with them,
again, large scale inequalities.
His ideal city seems to be a
kind of agrarian democracy,
a small-scale agrarian society.
Yet, at the same time,
we might get the impression
that only a direct democracy
would satisfy Rousseau's
requirements for the general
will and yet we find out this is
not quite the case.
In Book III,
which I hope you will look at
with some care,
he shows surprising flexibility
about the forms of government
that may be appropriate to
different physical and different
climates and different
topographies and so on.
In the chapter on democracy,
he remarks even,
"were there a people of God's
that would govern itself
democratically,"
and then he adds,
"so perfect a government is not
suited to men."
So he is skeptical about the
possibility of a direct
democracy and by that he means a
democracy not only where the
people legislate,
bring, create law but where
they are in charge also with the
administration of law as well,
the execution or enforcement of
the law.
He is very skeptical about that
kind of democracy.
Again, democracies are only
possible under very,
very special unique
circumstances;
otherwise, aristocracy,
monarchy, some kind of even
mixed government is possible or
even desirable.
He insists on the separation of
powers for much the same reasons
that one finds in Locke.
The people who make the law
should not be charged with,
responsible for executing and
enforcing them,
and throughout this part of the
book Rousseau seems to be in
dialogue with an unnamed rival
whom he sometimes simply refers
to as a famous author.
That author is of course,
Montesquieu,
the author of The Spirit of
the Laws.
That came out in 1755 and
Montesquieu was,
of course, famous for arguing
that different forms of
government must be tailored to
different climates,
different geographies,
different circumstances.
In many ways,
in Book III,
Rousseau seems to indicate or
to introduce a very,
very almost un-Rousseauian
emphasis on prudence,
moderation, flexibility that
seems at odds with the dogmatic
claims of the first two books
with its emphasis upon the
absolute inviolability of
sovereignty.
But most important for
Rousseau, it is important that
legislative authority,
in whatever kind of
constitution and under whatever
kind of government,
that legislative authority is
only,
is always held by the people in
their collective capacity.
This is why,
in a very powerful chapter,
Book III, chapter 15,
Rousseau rejects altogether the
legitimacy of representative
government.
That passage or that chapter
could be taken already as a kind
of repudiation,
not just of Locke,
Locke's theory of the
representative but also twenty
years or so before the fact of
the federalist argument for
representation.
"Sovereignty," he says,
"can never be delegated."
Sovereignty can never be
represented, it can only be
expressed.
The general will can never be
delegated to someone else.
If you do that,
if you delegate the authority
for making law you are,
he wants to say,
on the first step down the road
to tyranny because you give
someone else,
some partial body or
association the power to make
law over you.
The lawmaking function can only
legitimately be held by the
people themselves.
I'm going to skip over a bunch
of stuff that has to do,
very interestingly,
I hope you can discuss it in
your sections perhaps,
with Rousseau's account of the
legislator, the extraordinary
individual who was responsible
at the beginnings of regimes,
for shaping the general,
for molding a people and for,
as it were, giving the general
will a kind of shape and
distinctive direction,
and I'm also going to skip,
for our purposes,
the very interesting discussion
of civil theology,
which occupies the theme,
the very last chapter of the
book, Book IV,
chapter 8,
where Rousseau talks about the
way in which a civil religion
must be tailored to bring about
love and obedience to the
general will.
It was that chapter,
I should say,
that more than anything else
led to the books being burned
and banned in Geneva and other
places and for its powerful
attack on Christianity in that
chapter.
I'm going to pass over that for
the time being to look at the
legacies of Rousseau and to talk
about what--and I just
deliberately use that word in
the plural--the legacies of
Rousseau,
because there is virtually no
part of modern life,
political, cultural,
intellectual,
moral that does not in some
sense bear the stamp or
fingerprints of Jean-Jacque
Rousseau.
Rousseau's description of the
legislator, the kind of
political founder creating a
people,
was for many,
in many ways,
the closely connected with the
French Revolution and
particularly the claim of the
revolutionaries to create a new
nation,
a new people,
a new sovereign,
a new popular sovereign in
France.
Consider the following words of
the famous revolutionary
Robespierre in his homage to
Rousseau written in 1791.
Divine man, this is
Robespierre, "Divine man you
taught me to know myself.
While I was still young,
you made me appreciate the
dignity of my nature and reflect
upon the great principles of the
social order.
The old edifice is crumbling,
the portico of the new edifice
is rising up on its ruins and
thanks to you I have brought my
stone to it.
Receive my homage,
as weak as it is,
it must be please you.
I wish to follow your venerable
footsteps, happy if in the
perilous career that an
unprecedented revolution just
opened up before us.
I remain constantly faithful to
the inspirations that I found in
your text."
People might tell you that the
writings of Rousseau had no
influence on the French
Revolution,
that the French Revolution was
brought about by bread crises
and economic problems and so on;
absolute baloney.
The writings of Rousseau had
this powerful influence on the
idea of creating a new people
and a new nation.
Yet, despite what appears to be
a utopian and impractical in his
politics, again,
Rousseau had a profound
influence on the politics of his
era.
He was approached during his
lifetime to write constitutions
for Poland and for Corsica,
and of course that was the
island where a generation later
a man named Napoleon Bonaparte
was born who attempted to,
you might say in some way,
extend Rousseau's teaching,
not just to France but to all
of Europe at the point of a gun
to bring democracy to all of
Europe at the point of a gun.
Does that sound familiar at all
in any way related to events
going on now?
Where we have a new kind of
Bonapartism, perhaps.
In many ways,
although Rousseau's attack on
representative government would
seem to put him strongly at odds
with the American
Constitution,
his glorification of the rural
republic based on equality,
moral simplicity,
skepticism of commerce and
luxury, this was to be re-echoed
in the writings of Jefferson,
with his ideal of a nation of
small Yeoman farmers and
certainly any reader of
Tocqueville's depiction in
celebration of the independent
townships of New England.
Tocqueville's account of this
was directly dependent on his
reading of Rousseau,
the small-scale experiment in
direct democracy that
Tocqueville saw was a real world
example of a kind of politics
governed by the general will.
And when you read those early
chapters from Tocqueville's
democracy in America about the
New England township you will
very much see Tocqueville
looking at America through the
lenses that were in some ways
crafted or shaped by Rousseau.
That influence was palpable on
a whole host of later
nineteenth-century writers.
Like Tolstoy,
for instance,
whose celebration of Russian
peasant life was inspired by
Rousseau and through Tolstoy,
Rousseau influenced the
establishment of the Israeli
kibbutz movement that was also
founded by Russian Jews who had
been influenced by Tolstoy,
so you have a sort of
self-reinforcing cycle of
influence.
These, you might say,
small rural socialistic
experiments in communal living
exhibit the same kind of
equality,
self-government devotion to the
common good that Rousseau helped
people imagine might be
possible.
Yet, Rousseau's influence was
not limited to politics.
If he was a divine man,
as Robespierre called him,
he was no less so to Immanuel
Kant,
who claimed that it was his
reading of Rousseau that led him
to learn respect for the dignity
and the rights of man;
that's what Kant said.
He called Rousseau "the Newton
of the moral universal."
Kant's entire philosophy and I
hope you also have a chance to
read Kant's critique of
practical reason in some later
philosophy course,
Kant's entire moral philosophy
is a kind of deepened and
radicalized Rousseauianism where
what Rousseau called the general
will is transmuted into what
Kant calls the rational will and
the categorical imperative.
It was not the least of
Rousseau's legacies that after
his death he became a hero both
to the revolution and to the
counter-revolution,
both to a revival of
Roman-style republicanism as
well as to Romanticism,
or if I can use the words of
great Rousseauian,
Jane Austin,
he became both an advocate of
sense and sensibility.
Emerson, Thoreau,
American transcendentalism with
its worship of nature and its
protests against the kind of
deadening and corrupting
influence of society,
all of these people were the
direct heirs of Rousseau.
Rousseau's last work,
a book called The Reveries
of a Solitary Walker,
set the stage for later
American classics like Walden
Pond and generations of nature
writers that have come after it
and imitated it.
Only by turning away from the
noise and business of society
can one return to what precedes
society,
to the feeling of existence,
to the feeling of or sweetness
of mere existence,
to the sentiment of existence,
the le sentiment de soi,
as Rousseau calls it,
the sentiment of the self.
There is a kind of union that
he celebrates with nature that
puts the solitary,
the solitary walker either
above humanity or below it.
That type of man foreshadowed
by Rousseau, the solitary is no
longer a philosopher in any
sense that we would understand.
It might be better understood
as an artist or a visionary.
He can claim a privileged place
in society because such a person
regards him or herself as the
conscience of that society.
His claim to privilege is based
on a heightened moral
sensitivity rather than his
wisdom or his rationality,
and it is this kind of radical
individualism,
the radical detachment of the
solitary from the interests of
society that is perhaps
Rousseau's deepest and most
enduring legacy for us today.
So, on that note I wish you a
good break.
I hope you have a lot of turkey
to eat and you come back well
rested and most,
most, most importantly we come
back with a win over that evil
empire to our north.
Thank you very much.
 
