I am reinventing myself with a new blog. The main difference is that this one is not pseudonymous but features my real name. This old blog is staying up, because people still seem to read some of the posts.

But my current, dynamic, real-time bloggage is now to be found at ‘Majestic Equality‘, one of those insufferable ‘snippet from famous quotation’ blogs. Old readers and new readers are equally desired.

I found my attitude towards Rousseau becoming more negative as I went through the text; initially, I thought a lot of what he was saying was interesting and relevant to questions about freedom and control – I agreed with his arguments for thinking in terms of ‘contract’, I was interested in what his idea of ‘the general will’.

But at each stage, the conclusions he drew were either the most authoritarian ones that were consistent with his premises, or more authoritarian ones that weren’t. Lots of critics have called Rousseau a fore-runner of European fascism, and I’ve come to feel that this is essentially accurate, despite the complexities of his philosophy.

This made the book a bit of a puzzle to me. In essence, Rousseau seems to be pursuing conservative aims with liberal principles (or, alternatively, collective aims with individualist principles – which set of terms is more ambiguous?).

All men are equal, freedom is the first among values, and every constraint must be justified by the free consent of the constrained. But he’s clearly intensely hostile to most aspects of a liberal capitalist society – to urbanisation, to self-interest, to luxury or inequality of wealth, to diversity or cosmopolitanism. Against these, he desires a cohesive, homogenous, public-spirited society, where individual freedom is the freedom to obey the laws, where people’s primitive tendency to do what they like is re-moulded into a love of duty and custom.

But if that’s the case, if that’s his vision, why bother with deducing any of it from something so selfish and a-social as a contract, why bother with freedom and equality and so forth?

Perhaps, being the good ‘historical materialists’ that we are, we could illuminate this contradiction by seeing Rousseau as trying to reconcile contradictory class interests or something. And there is, I think, a fairly obvious class contradiction in “The Social Contract”. But it doesn’t actually help us.

The contradiction is roughly as follows: Rousseau wants a unified, cohesive society, and is thus hostile to class conflict. Now, on the one hand, this requires ‘bringing everyone in’ – including all sections of society in the ‘sovereign assembly’ that will formulate the laws, so that nobody is alienated from the social body. This is why Rousseau upholds the degree of democracy that he does.

Yet he doesn’t oppose class society itself – he doesn’t oppose the existence of private property, or inequalities of status. Indeed, as we saw in Part 8, he’s fairly keen that the respectable, wise, and educated should keep the rabble in their place. As a result, class conflict won’t disappear, and a mechanism of suppression and control is needed – this is the role filled by the (ideally ‘aristocratic’) government.

Social unity, then, requires him to both empower and represent all classes (which ultimately supports the interests of exploited classes) while also establishing mechanisms to forcibly maintain order (which ultimately supports the interests of ruling/exploiting classes). This contradiction expresses itself in the conflict between the sovereign and the government, on which he is so strikingly pessimistic.

But this contradiction doesn’t really line up with that between liberal concepts and conservative vision: rather, it is intrinsic to the latter. Conservativism holds up the ideal of national unity behind the status quo. But unity demands accomodating the demands of the exploited, while the status quo demands quashing them. This tension may, in “The Social Contract”, take a form which is flavoured with Rousseau’s ‘liberal’ concepts and language, but it would arise whether or not that language was used.

I would suggest that a third, and even more interesting (as if anything could possibly be more interesting than the preceding 10 paragraphs) way to approach the book is through a feminist lens.

Now, of course, Rousseau is a misogynist. Indeed, the words ‘woman’ or ‘women’ appear only three times in the whole book – once in the phrase “excluding foreigners, women, children, or slaves”, and the other two times in commenting on relative fecundity in different climates.

But you might think that his ideas are not constitutively patriarchal – and there is a very significant section right at the beginning that might support that. Here he discusses the family aim (which is integral to his overall philosophy) is to deny that there are any substantive obligations or authority-relations stemming from the family: parents may have a duty to, and right to, look after their children but this is just temporary, based on their brief dependency.

It might seem, then, that if one simply correct the contingent fact that he doesn’t actually include women in his talk of ‘citizens’ etc., the basic structure is gender-neutral. But I think this would be mistaken. This is because, as I’ve argued in more length before, the sort of collectivism that Rousseau advocates replicates the male-female dyad in the relationship of collective to individuals.

As the sovereign, a group becomes active, assertive, supposedly rational and fitted by this rationality to govern and dominate that which is weak, passive, disorganised and irrational – namely, itself as a mass of individuals. In this, I would suggest, the same symbolic themes appear that in other areas characterise ‘masculinity’ as against ‘femininity’. And, in both cases, there is the risk that the dominance of ‘the feminine’/’individualism’ will bring weakness and decadence, will infect the muscular ‘virtue’ (latin for ‘manliness’) of ‘the masculine’/’the sovereign’.

Rousseau’s attempt to justify every form of dominance by the group over individuals then appears as an inherently patriarchal and gendered sort of dominance – and we might imagine what sort of practical policies this might lead to (men must not be sissified, or the state will be weak! women must not deny their femininity, or we will run out of babies!).

That’s the ‘conservative vision’ – but why, then, the ‘liberal principles’? I would suggest that this stems from that opposition to familial authority in Chapter 2. Taking this at face value, it is an endorsement of the rights of the young against the old. But if I’m right in the preceding paragraph, this is just as committed to male dominance as before. So it amounts to championing young men against old men.

Was there, over the last couple of centuries, a grand shift in power towards young men as opposed to old men, and a corresponding change in the sexual economy in accordance with their interests? If you believe some people, yes there was, and that is in fact the major ‘sex-class-revolution’ that has occurred.

Rousseau is no enthusiast for capitalism; but could he be seen as an enthusiast for this new style of patriarchy (what some have called ‘fratriarchy’)? I think that seeing him in this way makes a lot of sense.

To support this claim, I would suggest that one of the symptoms of the rise of ‘fratriarchy’ is that a lot of the role of maintaining order is taken away from the family (and from religious institutions), and given to the state (and, later on, the media). For example, families in developed countries have, over the 20th century, progressively lost more and more of their right to use violence.

Does Rousseau want to reduce the political significance of the family? Yes. Does he want to completely subordinate the church? Yes. Does he love the state? Oh yes.

So, my conclusion is something like this: Rousseau is not writing for liberal or emancipatory purposes, but for essentially authoritarian and conservative purposes – to hold together (class) society in spite of diverse and conflicting individual interests (and in spite of the contradictions, between democratic carrots and authoritarian sticks, that this involves). He is also not writing for an actively or enthusiastically capitalist sort of conservatism (one might suspect that this role belongs more to figures like Locke or Hobbes, but don’t quote me on that).

Rather, he is writing to express the sort of conservative authoritarianism that is possible in a ‘sexually liberal’ society, and hence where other conservative authoritarians might want stability and cohesion maintained by a powerful familial authority, he must look to a powerful state authority; where others might demand people’s devotion to religious ideals, he demands people’s devotion to the nation and its own mythology – the mythology of themselves as collectively the masters of themselves individually.

Consequently, there are roughly three dangers that Rousseau seems concerned to avoid.

• One is the existence of multiple intolerant religions within society, each holding its own laws, and its own judgements about people’s relative worth, higher than any broader social laws. In such cases they form parasitic, or at unhealthy, ‘sub-societies’ within the larger society, dividing and thus weakening it by internal conflicts.

• The second is the conquest of society by such a religious group, i.e. the domination of a group with its own interests and principles, that rivals or overrules the political authority. This again weaken society by giving people two conflicting authorities, and usurping the legitimate governmental forms.

• Thirdly, though, Rousseau is hostile to even ‘un-worldly’ religions, those which reject no political rules or authority, precisely because they teach their followers to disdain worldly things and focus their attention on the afterlife, or personal enlightenment, or other such goals. Such a religion (which he identifies as the original Christianity of the Gospels) undermines people’s committment to, and enthusiasm to defend, their society and its laws.

What Rousseau advocates instead is the toleration of all religions which 1) tolerate other religions (in particular, not claiming that all infidels will burn), and 2) are consistent with ‘the civil profession of faith’: the existence of a providential God,  “the life to come, the happiness of the just, the punishment of sinners,” and “the sanctity of the social contract and the laws.”

(Note that Rousseau therefore implicitly places atheists and agnostics in the third of the above categories – “unable to sincerely love law and justice”, not because they are too concerned with the afterlife but because they deny it. I don’t know whether this opinion would persist into a time when atheism was more common.)

In essence, then, Rousseau says that any doctrine should be tolerated, as long as it will teach its members that 1) the claims of the nation are overriding, and 2) its own spiritual claims are not. Any body which has the kind of quasi-political authority that religions possess, may keep that authority only so long as directs it towards society, only so long as it is a support for, and not a rival to, loyalty to one’s society.

How plausible are Rousseau’s views? I think that they follow logically from the following three premises:

P1) Religion is, necessarily, a focus of political or quasi-political loyalty;

P2) Adherence to a particular religion is not, in fact, necessary for salvation, which is far more valuable than anything else;

P3) Society should tolerate no rival focus of loyalty.

P1. might be false – the defining essence of religion might be something that doesn’t involve this, or it might have no such essence at all. But let’s grant this premise for the sake of argument (after all, it seems to be true of at least some religions sometimes).

P2. also might be false – if everyone who’s not Zoroastrian will burn eternally, then who cares about political justice or the social contract, or indeed anything but maximising piety? But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that this is not the case.

Given these assumptions, Rousseau’s view rests on premise 3 – that, as he says, “Everything that destroys social unity is worthless.” Is this plausible?

We should quickly make a distinction: Rousseau is, as noted above, unhappy at three distinct prospects – fanatical sects that undermine the unity of society by their conflicts, sects which come to dominate society in conflict with the legitimate authorities, and ‘pacifistish’ groups who refuse to endorse and uphold ‘the sanctity of the laws’. Of these, I won’t dispute the undesirability of the second – who wants a bunch of priests in charge? And of course there are legitimate questions about how society deals with groups with a proven record of violence or abuse.

But one might certainly dispute that the law should banish or suppress any group that doesn’t tell its members that defending society and its laws is a sacred duty, whether it advances its own laws instead or not. What are Rousseau’s reasons for this view?

On the one hand, divisive religious groups, he says, lead to “intestine divisions” and “endless conflict”, and makes “any kind of good polity impossible.” On the other hand, if the laws are deprived of divine sanction, then the society’s armies will fight “without passion for victory”, and will swiftly “be beaten, crushed, destroyed” by any rival society “whose hearts are devoured by an ardent love of glory and their country.”

Is this a utilitarian argument, then? If so, it seems quite weak, for in both cases what it prescribes is barely distinguishable from what it fears. Religious persecutions as a method of securing peace? That sounds fun. Charitably, we might observe that Rousseau hadn’t seen the 20th century, in which secular-nationalistic persecution of religion loomed as large as religious conflict, but we have, so we lack that excuse.

And apparently from the fact that any society without religiously-supported patriotism will (supposedly) be defeated by one with it, is an argument *for* the set-up that led the latter to ‘beat, crush and destroy’ the other? Why is this not an argument that, since pluralistic societies are less likely to go out and ‘beat, crush, and destroy’ each other, we should prefer pluralism?

But if we decided not to be charitable with Rousseau, we might observe that his arguments don’t seem to be utilitarian – they don’t seem to be consistently anti-violence, anti-war, anti-conflict. They seem more to aim at the minimum of internal conflict with the maximum of (at least readiness for) external conflict.

To my mind, that suggests that the underlying motivation is will-to-power: make ‘the sovereign’ as big, strong, and badass as possible. Anyone who isn’t willing to “sacrifice, if need be, his life to his duty” weakens the collective-badass, and thus must be purged like a toxin from the ‘body politic’.

So I end up supporting freedom of religion. What a surprise. Only took me 1000 words…

Edit: this post probably should have a picture.

can spread infectious diseases.

On the other hand, it’s well-documented that pets (such as mice) provide substantial health benefits to their owners, both psychologically, with stress or depression, and physically, with things like blood pressure.

On the third hand, the robust trend of developed societies is towards smaller and smaller dangers from infectious diseases, with an increasing proportion of health risks coming from either psychological disaffection (at least, these are becoming more often diagnosed…) or from illnesses relating to lifestyle rather than microbes, like heart disease.

This suggests that over time, the potential health benefits of animals living in houses become more significant, while the potential health risks become less significant.

(Obviously assumptions are made here, e.g. that the comfort provided by a pet can be provided by a pest as well. But it seems that this would depend a lot on the details of interaction)

Last couple of posts both argued that, according to his own principles, Rousseau’s democratic commitments should extend to all areas of life, and not just periodic legislative assemblies – and that despite this, he comes out strongly in favour of aristocratic government, for reasons that were left a little unclear. I believe that discussing the class politics of ‘The Social Contract’ will illuminate them.

Rousseau doesn’t talk much about economics or property per se – he discusses only the first principles (where property rights come from) and the last consequences (how class divisions impact political stability).

On the former topic, his account is not very remarkable – it’s similar to Locke’s or Kant’s, with individuals acquiring rights by their occupation, use, or production of things, and society then working to secure to them these property claims. Compared to Locke’s more famous account, he I think puts slightly stricter limits on how much each person can appropriate, and affirms more emphatically the right of society to interfere in private property under certain circumstances. But he never suggests that property per se is illegitimate or avoidable. (I’ve written a bit about these kinds of accounts, posts are here)

But the latter is more interesting. Consider, in particular, the extended discussion of the Roman Republic, in glowing terms, which he includes towards the end of the book. I’m qualified neither to comment on the actual Roman Republic or on the accuracy of Rousseau’s version of it, but what he sees fit to praise or condemn is very revealing.

In one of the republic’s grand assemblies, voting was done according to groups called centuries, but these did not contain equal numbers of people: “it came about that the class with the fewest number of men had the greatest number of centuries, while the last [poorest] whole class counted only as one single [century], although it contained more than half the inhabitants of Rome…and what had been decided by a minority passed for a decision of the multitude.” No criticism is offered of this – indeed, “there is no doubt that the whole majesty of the Roman people was to seen only in [this assembly].”

On the other hand, in a different type of assembly (not the comitia centuriata, but the comitia tribute), “not only had the Senate no status in the assembly, but no senator had even the right to attend, and being thus forced to submit to laws in the enactment of which they had no voice, the senators were to that extent less free than the humblest citizen. This injustice was altogether ill-conceived, and alone sufficed to invalidate [the assembly’s] decrees.”

So when a minority is excluded from an assembly, this is injustice and invalidates its decisions; when a minority is allowed to overall the majority in an assembly, nothing it particularly amiss.

Other examples further show where Rousseau’s sympathies lie. The fact that “the patricians…could buy clients to influence numerical majorities” is called an “admirable institution…a masterpiece of politics and humanity.” Similarly endorsed is the rule that assemblies could be called only if the auguries were right, which “enabled the Senate to keep a restraining hand on a proud and restless people and temper the ardour of seditious tribunes.”

Reading his account of Rome makes it very obvious that he considers it more important to control the poor majority than to secure their interests against the rich minority. Certainly, he hates some rich people – especially the urban sort. He dislikes the selfish, divisive, ostentatious sort of rich person, and lambasts the “devouring greed, unsettled hearts, intrigue, continual movement and constant reversals of fortune” of modern people. An ideal society is one where “all possess something and none has too much”, and where there is “moderation among the rich and contentment among the poor.”

But he is equally hostile to the poor – again, especially the urban poor, the “rabble”, and this hostility allows us to grasp the subtext of his criticisms of democracy: “a government without government”, “the corruption of the legislator…from the pursuit of private interests”, “liable to civil war and internecine strife”.

His ideal is rule by the wisest, the just, the elevated, with “honesty, sagacity, experience”. This will usually, he clearly thinks, be members of the upper classes, most likely rural. Indeed, I was struck by the resemblance to Plato’s “Republic”, which is painfully, painfully upper-class, aristocratic book, and yet one which prescribes the substantial abolition of private property and hereditary privileges. The attitudes, culture, and power-structures of a class system are retained, even while the material wealth itself that realised them is hypothetically removed or opposed.

There is a bit more to say about what sort of class perspective in embodied in “The Social Contract”, and I’ll try to wrap it into my concluding post. For now I’ll just tie up the thread left dangling last post, about Rousseau’s relation to democracy. The fundamental idea of the book, the contract, the general will, the legislative sovereign, etc. is a strongly democratic one – and yet Rousseau is in practice largely hostile to democracy, more supportive of an elite government to control the immoderate passions of the mob.

It seems then that the this democratic starting principle functions not so much as a genuine premise, a pivot from which re-order or democratise society, but more a device to legitimise elite government (rather as one suspects elections do in most modern societies). Government for the people, oh of course – but not by or of the people.

But that is, after all, exactly what he promises in the first paragraph. “Man,” he says, “is everywhere in chains.” He does not then ask how this bondage might be abolished, but “how can it be made legitimate?”

This is bizarre, as though he were to tell us that we are required for our own good to invite a monster into our bed, despite knowing that it would eat our heart and then eat our brain. What’s going on?

Even his perhaps most unconventional and radical demand – periodic sovereign assemblies, in which the population assumes direct legislative power – does not prevent this inevitable corruption. For, he grants, “one cannot observe with too great care all the formalities required to distinguish a correct and legitimate act from a seditious tumult, and the will of a whole people from the clamour of a faction.” This is a more verbose way of expressing Blair’s (possibly apocryphal, don’t make me do research) comment on the million-strong anti-war march in London: that there are, after all, 59 million people not marching.

But immediately after making this concession, Rousseau explains that it gives any government “a great opportunity of holding his power in defiance of the people, without it being possible to say that he has usurped it. For while appearing to exercise only his rights it is very easy for him to enlarge those rights and to prevent, on the pretext of public tranquillity, assemblies designed to re-establish good government; thus he exploits the silence which he prevents men breaking, and the irregularities which he makes them commit.” Once again, we find ourselves wondering why Rousseau advocates the setting up of such sinister and dangerous institutions.

A further complication is that strictly, the need for some sort of government, on Rousseau’s terms, is only semantic – the people themselves, as the sovereign, cannot execute their own laws simply because then they would not be considered the sovereign. But they can get around this by simply constituting themselves as a government – i.e. making the government a full democracy. In such a case, for the government to ‘sacrifice the people’ to itself would seem impossible – and yet Rousseau regards this as unworkable. “If there were a nation of gods, it would govern itself democratically. A government so perfect is not suited to men.” So understanding Rousseau’s apparently contradictory stance on government requires an examination of what he says about different forms of government – democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy.

In sketch form, he regards democracy as an unrealistic ideal, and monarchy as close to the worst form of realistic government – though he calls hereditary aristocracy ‘the worst’. The best, he says, is an elective aristocracy. The relationship between such an aristocracy and a representative system such as Canada’s, which he despises as entirely missing the point of popular sovereignty, is not entirely clear, but I won’t consider that question. His three most extended evaluations concern democracy (too hot), monarchy (too cold), and the right sort of aristocracy (just right!).

Democracy

His primary criticism of democracy is not, as one might think, that it is ‘impractical’ – while he admits that it requires a population with leisure time available, and a relatively small territory, his own requirement that all governments be judged periodically by popular assemblies imply that it’s possible. He does say that “in the strict sense, there has never been a true democracy” because day-to-day affairs are always put in the hands of smaller commissions – but this itself need not prevent the system being democratic, any more than a monarch’s extensive staff of ministers and servants makes their rule any less monarchical.

Instead, the primary criticism seems to be along these lines: that “it is not good that…the body of the people should turn its attention away from general perspectives and give it to partoicular objects…the abuse of the law by the government is a lesser evil than that corruption of the legislator which inevitably results from the pursuit of private interests.” He says that “no government [is] so liable to civil war and internecine strife…for there is none which has so powerful and constant a tendency to change to another form.”

Things become most puzzling when he says that “things which ought to be kept apart are not, and the prince and sovereign being the same person constitute, so to speak, a government without government.” One would think, after all, that this is precisely the point? Or does he mean that the government is not ‘governed’ with sufficient wisdom? He does say in praising aristocracy that “the credit of the state is better upheld in the eyes of foreigners by venerable senators than it is by an unknown and despised multitude.”

Monarchy

Rousseau says a lot about monarchy: “there is no government more vigorous than monarchy, [but] there is also none where the particular will [of the government] has more command…Kings want to be absolute…Their personal interest is primarily that the people should be weak, wretched and never able to resist them.” Moreover, “when someone is brought up to command others, everything conspires to rob him of justice and reason” and “those who rise under monarchies are nearly always muddled little minds, petty knaves and intriguers with small talents which allow them to rise to high places in courts.”

The monarch, it seems, best embodies what Rousseau says about government in general: that it serves its own interests at the expense of society’s, and prefers the security of own power to the security of its citizens. And so, in between monarchy, where government eats your heart, and democracy, where the despised multitude governs so poorly, he advocates aristocracy – “it is the best and most natural arrangement for the wisest to govern the multitude”. But only if, he continues “we are sure that they will govern it for its advantage and not for their own.” Which, of course, we cannot – indeed, given enough time, we can be sure that they will not.

It seems, in essence, that Rousseau simultaneously will not trust people to run their own affairs, and cannot believe anyone’s promise to run their affairs well for them. This leads him to an overarching pessimism – even the best constituted society will descend into tyranny and injustice before long. The only task of political philosophy is to enquire how we may best delay this. But to fully understand Rousseau’s lack of faith in democracy – which, it seems here he should support for practical reasons, and which we saw last post he should support for principled reasons – we will need to consider the issue of wealth and class.

(Rousseau’s use of words is a little different from what’s common: he uses the word ‘state’ as another word for ‘sovereign’ or, as we might say, ‘the people’, or ‘society’. For what we would call ‘the state’ he uses the terms ‘government’ and ‘prince’)

The essential distinction is that the sovereign – i.e. the assembly of all the people – is the sole legislative authority. It alone can establish the abstract rules according to which the affairs of society will be arranged. The government, by contrast, takes responsibility for the execution of these laws, and hence makes all concrete decisions, all decisions involving particular cases.

While the sovereign is bound to a particular form – a directly democratic assembly – the government can take any form that the laws (established by the sovereign) decide. It may be a democracy itself (in the classical sense), in which case the sovereign and government somewhat coincide. It may be a monarchy or an aristocracy, elective or hereditary, or any number of other forms.

The law also establishes when and how often the sovereign assembly is to be called together, which should be regular but practical. At such times the government’s authority vanishes and the sovereign decides whether to keep or change the current government, and whether to change the laws. The relationship between sovereign and government is essentially one of compulsory employment – the sovereign dictates terms to the government, which has no right to argue back.

Now, there are two questions we might ask Rousseau here. Firstly: why must the legislative power be exercised via. direct democracy? Secondly: why is it fine for the government to be a hereditary monarchy (indeed, Rousseau seems somewhat to prefer certain sorts of aristocracy to democracy, as far as the government is concerned)? That is, why does Rousseau insist on a very stringent sort of democracy in one case, but not in the other?

Given that so much of Rousseau’s argument up to this point has been concerned to affirm people’s equal freedom and the injustice of compulsory control, we might wonder why he doesn’t go all out for democracy.The challenge would suggest something like this: ‘in proportion as decisions are reached democratically, with the active involvement of the people involved, they are more legitimate and the people involved are more free. In proportion as government is taken out of the people’s hands, they are enslaved.’ What can Rousseau say against this?

I think the core of his response is something like this: if 6 people approach me in the street and propose a vote on whether I should be tied up and kept in their basement for a while, and I lose the vote 1 to 6, I am not thereby ‘free’ during my basement captivity. Any number of other people’s wills remain from my perspective an alien will, not a ‘general’ one. Hence, democracy per se is not sufficient for political freedom.

What does Rousseau think is also necessary? He says that “there is only one law which by its nature requires unanimous assent. This is the social pact…apart from this original contract, the votes of the greatest number always bind the rest.” That is, even if I don’t assent to every execution of every law, in entering ‘the social contract’ I essentially say ‘I agree to submit to whatever is the will of this society’s majority, whatever that shall be.’ Similarly, when the majority vote to endorse a given law, they give democratic legitimacy to every act which takes place in accordance with that law (including, e.g., the acts of whatever government it establishes).

So Rousseau says that there are three stages: the social contract itself requires unanimity, the laws require majority, and particular acts of government require only to be in accordance with the laws. The essential idea is that if someone agrees to an abstract principle, then even if they oppose a particular instantiation of it (e.g. one which is disadvantageous to them), this is not a conflict between their will and an alien will, but between their own ‘principled will’ and their own ‘particular desires’. And so in being forced to obey the principle, they remain free, and merely constrain themselves.

Now, the democratic challenger to Rousseau might agree that all of this is necessary for freedom – but not that it is sufficient. That is, they might grant his point that mere majorities of some group are not sufficient, but maintain that they are necessary. Rousseau, on the other hand, says that if there is assent by individuals and majorities at the origin, then this ‘transmits’ to every particular act.

This seems problematic though. Do people know in advance all the outcomes that will follow from a given law or from the social contract itself? If not, isn’t it sort of loan-shark-ish to use their past agreement as a ticket to compel and control them? And even if they did know what they were getting into, the passage of time leads people to change their minds and personalities, and after a certain length of time it seems increasingly unfair to treat every past decision as equally binding.

Rousseau does recognise this to a degree. Although he says that individuals assent to all the laws when they enter the social contract, he also says that “each citizen may renounce his membership of the state…on withdrawing from the country”, but this is heavily qualified both by the need to physically leave the country, which Rousseau admits is often, in ‘unfree states’, prevented by “family, property, lack of asylum, necessity or violence”, and in ‘free states’ “none may leave the country to evade his duty…in such a case, flight would be criminal and punishable.” But this takes us back to the issue of individual rights discussed last post.

He also says “it is not enough that the assembled people should have once determined the constitution of the state… [and] set up a perpetual government…in addition to the extraordinary assemblies that unforeseen events may necessitate, there must be fixed and periodic assemblies which nothing can abolish.” He is also, note, scathingly contemptuous of ‘representatives’. But the timing of these regular assemblies is left entirely open.

It seems that Rousseau would consider it binding for a group of people to set up as their constitution “we will select 1 person randomly and make them dictator for life, and hold another assembly either when they call it, or in 30 years.” If, 20 years later, that 1 person has become tyrannical and, armed with a team of lawyers, operates entirely within the law, but sadistically and gleefully, exploiting loopholes and abusin their powers – if they have 5 people thrown in prison on a technicality, are those 5 people ‘free’? Surely it would be absurd to say so. And yet by Rousseau’s principles it seems they are – stupid, no doubt, but suffering in the manner that one suffers while making a bad but free decision.

This, it seems to me, is a reductio of the picture of ‘freedom’ Rousseau presents, in which real consent is made something ‘transcedent’, separate from but justifying the day-to-day decisions of a government. He claims that it makes social constraint into self-constraint, specifically the constraint of one’s selfish desires by one’s rational principles.

But it’s not. The thing which is elevated and made to coerce the person is not ‘their reason’ but how they were reasoning on a particular occasion, with all the contingencies of emotion, circumstance, and ignorance that it involved. To be subordinated for years to yourself at one moment is just as much a sort of enslavement as it is to be subordinated to an addiction or compulsion or neurosis.

Hence, I conclude, the democratic challenge to Rousseau succeeds: it is not enough for the abstract laws to be made democratically every few years, or however long. If Rousseau is committed to re-making society so as to be consistent with freedom, then that same democracy must be present throughout the running of society. That leaves its precise form and limits unspecified – but it does at least rule out 30 years under a king or queen.

Rousseau is very contradictory on the subject of government. The contradiction we’ve considered here is one example of that – in my next post I’ll consider the curious ambivalence in his attitude towards governments, considering them both necessary and yet also sinister.

Firstly, “a public decision can impose an obligation on all subjects towards the sovereign…while, conversely, such decisions cannot impose an obligation on the sovereign towards itself; and hence it would be against the very nature of a political body for the sovereign to set over itself a law which it could not infringe.”

Secondly, “as the sovereign is formed entirely of the individuals who compose it, it has not, nor could it have, any interests contrary to theirs; and so the sovereign has no need to give guarantees to the subjects, because it is impossible for a body to wish to hurt all of its members…But this is not true of the relation of subjects to sovereign…subjects will not be bound by their committment unless means are found to guarantee their fidelity.”

So on the one hand, the sovereign need not bind itself to any guarantees, and cannot do so anyway; on the other hand, individual subjects can be thus bound, and must be. Even when Rousseau grants that subjects are entitled to expect the sovereign to not interfere with those parts of their life that affect nobody else, he swiftly adds that “the sovereign alone is judge of what is of such concern.”

Note, I am still assuming that certain problematic issues have been solved – I’m assuming that agreements are unanimous and expressed by direct votes (or, rather, if unanimous, by consensus-decision-making). Even in this case, though, why is it that this group-individuals relationship, which is after all one of identity (the group is the individuals), seems so skewed? I want to argue that it shouldn’t be – and that Rousseau’s reasons for holding it to be are contradictory.

So firstly, Rousseau says that while “a public decision can impose an obligation on all subjects…while, conversely, such decisions cannot impose an obligation on the sovereign.” Now this is trivially true, because he specifies that he is speaking of public decisions – i.e. decisions made by the sovereign themselves. So if the group can make the decision, it can un-make it. But the real question is whether private decisions can impose obligations on the sovereign – can I, just by deciding to do X, impose an obligation on the rest of society, for example to allow me to do X, or prevent others from preventing me?

That is, are there any personal freedoms or rights that are specifically social, and yet which do not depend on society deciding to endorse them? Rousseau never poses the question in these terms, but from this neglect we can conclude that his answer is ‘no’. But I think there are things within his system that should lead him to say ‘yes’.

Firstly, note that he does say this: “since the…sovereign, owes itsbeing to the sanctity of the contract alone, it cannot commit itself…to anything that would derogate from the original act of association.” But his only examples are external acts – “it could not…alienate a part of itself or submit to another sovereign.”

Secondly, note that although he talks constantly of ‘the general will’, he never mentions ‘the general intellect’. But it seems that you can’t have one without the other: to determine what I desire, what I decide, which options I prefer, I need to think about it, and the way I think about matters can change what desires I have towards them. At least, I would think so.

Now, if an individual intellect works primarily by analysis and synthesis, by distinguishing and connecting, in short by the relations of idea, then the general intellect should work primarily by the relations of different people’s ideas, i.e. by communication. That’s fairly plausible, isn’t it: if the group is to form a single ‘artificial person’ then they must be able to discourse and dialogue so that this person can have an ‘artificial thought-process’ to direct its ‘artificial limbs’.

But then it follows that anything which sets limits to this thought-process is an intimate injury to that collective person, a sort of destruction of part of its brain. Hence, arguably, social rules which specify certain opinions or ideas as inadmissible for expression (or even for belief) should be, by Rousseau’s lights, inadmissible and automatically illegitimate.

The details of this argument, and ‘how far it should extend’, are tricky (and very familiar) arguments that I’ll ignore. The point is, Rousseau’s system does not in principle pose any impediment to holding at least one individual freedom (free thought and expression) to be an entirely fundamental ‘first principle’ of political systems. The fact that Rousseau doesn’t say this is his own choice.

The second issue I want to look at is the question of securing obedience by individuals to collectively-decided rules. Here Rousseau has no hesitation in affirming the group’s right to harm, imprison, or kill individuals. But the legitimation of this actually follows two opposite lines.

On the one hand, the offender is punished because “it is tacitly implied in [the social contract] that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body” – i.e., because they agreed to it. Here the emphasis is on the individual’s ongoing participation in the social contract. On the other hand, they are punished because “by violating [society’s] law, he ceases to be a member of it; indeed, he makes war against it.” Here the emphasis is on the individual’s removing themselves from the social contract.

Obviously the significance of this depends heavily on whether individuals have a right to defect from the social contract that they have entered. If they do, after all, then why would criminals not simply defect immediately prior to committing their crimes? But if they don’t, can it really be fair to hold people, at the age of, say, 60, to an agreement they made at the age of 18? Hell, I would feel a little harsh for holding a 25-year-old to their 18-year-old word. People do, after all, change. In important ways, people are not the same individual at all points in their life, so we shouldn’t give a youth the freedom to rob all freedom from an aged person in the future.

Moreover, I argued last time that the social ‘contract’ isn’t really a contract in the sense of an exchange of promises, but more like a collective act of permission, granting the right to balance harms and benefits between people as well as within them. This might strengthen the impression that it should be something that can be withdrawn from – if someone can give permission, why can they not take it back? Perhaps Rousseau is relying on his doctrine that in entering the social contract, each member gives up ‘all their rights’ to the group – but I argued that he has very weak grounds for holding this. Yet if the permission can be withdrawn, how are the costs of society to be imposed on anyone, since individuals can, if pushed, slip out of the social contract?

This is somewhat paradoxical, isn’t it? I don’t know how to decide for one side or the other, but I do think that there may be ways to stop the conflict from arising. That would be to design the system of penalties so that the legitimacy of inflicting the penalties is independent of whether someone is ‘still a party to’ the social contract.

This would involve two sides. On the one side, it must be legitimate to deprive a non-member of the benefits and privileges of membership – to simply refuse to provide them with certain services, refuse to help them in certain ways. This (along with the accompanying social costs) would be potentially a strong deterrent, given how dependent individuals are on society’s help, and would be unquestionably legitimate (even if this legitimacy encounters limits, e.g. providing life-saving treatment etc).

On the other side, it would be madness to say that certain acts – such as physical assault, restraint, and injury – can never be naturally legitimate. Most obviously, they seem to be legitimate when directed at those who have themselves committed equally severe violations of others. Only a tiny minority would deny that it can be right to use violence to defend yourself or others from violence. If that’s the case, then the justification of severe punishment becomes much easier when the crime is equally severe, in particular when it’s violent crime.

So a system of penalties that used refusal of benefits for lesser crimes and ‘naturally just’ counter-violence for violent crimes would avoid the need to argue over whether and for how long people give up their rights to society. It also happens to be what I’ve argued for on-and-off for the last year or so.

Of course it carries certain constraints. It would make it impossible, for instance, to have non-violent crimes punished violently – to have the death penalty for adultery, say. But that seems to me a good thing. Admittedly there are some tricky questions about how the boundaries of, for instance, ‘violence’ are drawn (e.g. does poisoning count? if so, what else?) But the rough principle – no violent penalties for non-violent crimes – seems to be a good and valuable one.

So the upshot of what I’ve been arguing here is that Rousseau’s picture, where the group enjoys a marked superiority over individuals, does not follow necessarily from his principles or from the notion of the general will/sovereign. A view which includes, as entirely fundamental principles of political life, things like a right to free speech and a strict restriction on violent punishments (such as imprisonment), fits just as well, if not better.

One response, which we might call ‘liberal’, is to divide the individual’s life into two domains, the public and the private, and be constrained in the former and free in the latter. This solution is not at all to be sneezed at – it may even be the best available. But you don’t have to be a fascist to suspect that splitting your life in half like this may not be ideal, and there are major worries about whether, and how, that split is drawn in the real world. Not only that, but it’s not clear how this approach deals with issues that are simultaneously political and personal.

So there are reasons to consider alternatives to this ‘liberal’ response, and I think Rousseau can to some extent be read as offering one. The essential proposal is that the constraint that society imposes is compatible with freedom, if the power that constrains comes from the subject who is constrained – if it is self-constraint.

To be free, it seems reasonable to say, is to act according to your own will. The sovereign, Rousseau says, is an ‘artificial and corporate person’, it has a will, what he calls ‘the general will’. This is “the balance that remains, when we take away from [individual wills], the pluses and minuses which cancel each other out.” What flows from this ‘general will’ is, for each individual, ‘their own’. Hence when they obey it, they are only obeying themselves – and, in that famous line, when they are coerced into obedience, they are being “forced to be free”.

This doctrine has come in for a fair amount of criticism, especially along the lines that it just confuses and obscures actual, literal, freedom, and thus justifies illiberality.

Now, I think there is certainly a lot we can criticise in Rousseau on this subject (and I intend to in coming posts). This ‘a lot’ includes:

• How is the general will expressed – what political and social institutions actually tell us what is is?
• How does the generality of the general will change over time – i.e. does the social contract have to just be made once, or renewed regularly, or what?
• How does disagreement among members of the group affect the generality of the will – in particular, how sound is the distinction Rousseau draws between law (which deals with general cases in the abstract, and expresses the general will) and governmental acts (which deal with particular cases, and do not)?
• What is the actual psychology of this act of collective identification, and what effects might this psychology have?
• Why does Rousseau make certain of the actual claims he does, about for instance punishing rule-breakers, which seem contradictory or unjustified?

But I also think (once again) that there’s a kernel in what Rousseau is saying that’s worth getting at. In the next post or two I’ll hit him on the above points, but for now I want to consider the idea of the general will in relative isolation from messy reality.

What is the point of Rousseau’s talk of the general will? For this we need to examine the idea of ‘will’ and the idea of that social contract itself.

Everyone has desires (if you like, we can speak of interests – the relationship is complex but beside the point here). These desires, much of the time, conflict, and when they conflict we must choose between them. This involves considering our different desires, weighing them up, and trying to see how the greatest weight of them can be satisfied. And finally, it involves selecting one course of action and deciding to pursue it – which will satisfy some desires but frustrate others, bring benefits but also costs. This activity of ‘cutting through’ the mass of competing desires and determining which are to be satisfied and which denied, is I think what is meant here by ‘will’.

The moral significance of ‘will’ can be seen in the following asymmetry:

When I act so as to satisfy one of my desires, I should feel pleased with myself; when someone else acts so as to satisfy one of my desires, I owe them gratitude.

When I act so as to frustrate one of my desires, I should feel angry with myself’; when someone else acts so as to frustrate one of my desires, I am entitled to be angry with them.

When I act so as to frustrate some of my desires as a means towards satisfying a greater number of them, I should feel pleased with myself, and should not feel angry with myself – the benefits ‘nullify’ or ‘override’ the harms.

BUT when someone else, independently, acts so as to frustrate some of my desires as a means towards satisfying a greater number of them, I need not owe them gratitude, and I am still entitled to be angry with them. It seems that with other people, the benefits they may provide me with cannot ‘nullify’ or ‘override’ any harms they impose on me.

The difference – that others cannot simply decide to harm me for my own benefit, even if they do in fact benefit me overall – seems to be based on the fact that ‘will’, the faculty of justifying harms by greater benefits, is individual: the only entity that seems to be capable of doing it is the human brain, an individualised entity.

Of course, this changes if I use my individual will to voluntarily tell someone else that I would like them to do X for me, despite the harms that X will inflict on me, because I think the benefits justify it. Now, they can impose harms on me with full justification, because they are acting as an extension of my will. So the will can be extended by voluntary agreement.

This, I think, illuminates what the social ‘contract’ is really about. What is supposed to be going on, in Rousseau’s story, is that each of the contracting individuals says something like this: ‘I consent to be harmed for my own benefit in the course of implementing the rules that we draft’. That is, they are, by their act of will, enabling the cost-outweighing-by-benefits, that is characteristic of an individual will, to be done across individuals.

It’s in this sense that the social contract isn’t really a contract, in that it’s not simply pre-existing people exchanging promises to act in certain ways. It is, as Rousseau says, the creation of an ‘artificial person’, where that means simply the legitimation of a weighing and exchanging of desires across a new, and much larger, range of desires. The sovereign is created as a person simply in that a new ‘will’ is created.

Now, is this notion of the general will, then, a justifiable one? It seems to me that it must be, in principle. Because it seems clearly just that if I have reached a decision, and requested of someone else that they help me implement it, even though it will inflict on me certain harms, they are still right to help – excepting cases where the harms are so great, or the benefits so small, or other circumstances such, that they doubt I am in my right mind.

That is: I can give people permission to do things that affect me in ways I could otherwise object to. I don’t know how this could realistically be denied.

Indeed, something like the general will seems to be involved in every act of agreeing to a rule. If a group of cohabitants agree, unanymously and after due discussion, on a rota for washing the dishes, and that if someone doesn’t do so when it is their turn, the dishes get dumped on their bed, then what is each member doing, except permitting the others to impose a harm on them (messing up their bed) in order to secure a benefit (the dishes get washed)?

If someone just randomly dumped dirty dishes on my bed, I would have grounds to object quite strongly – and, I think, I would have grounds to object, even if that dumping was ultimately (and intentionally) to my benefit, say by stimulating me to personal growth and character-building or something.

But if I knew it was my turn, and nevertheless neglected to wash up, I would have no grounds to object to a messy bed. The basis for my not having grounds to object would be my prior agreement to the rule; that is, it would be the accordance of the event with my previous will.

If I can lose my right to object to a certain action against me, on the grounds that it is in accordance with my (earlier) will, then is it really that much of a jump to say that I am being ‘forced to be free’?

All this means, of course, is that any valid criticism must be of his use and deployment of the concept, not of its innate coherence – and as I said, there is plenty to criticise. I’ll discuss some of it next post.