On the general will and the road to tyranny
Rousseau and the Rights of Man Robert V. Andelson
SO CONFUSED and
self-contradictory seem Rousseau’s ideas on human rights that it may be seriously questioned whether they contain any kind of unifying locus or can be reduced to systematic form at all. Intellectual source of both the Jacobins and Hegel, equally condemned by Burke and Bentham, the works of this exasperating thinker constitute a kind of grab-bag in which can be found just about whatever suits one’s fancy - together with its opposite! At present, however, the prevailing academic fashion is to discover order in the midst of chaos, and numerous scholars profess to find some sort of underlying unity beneath his paradoxes.’ And it must not be forgotten that Rousseau himself claimed consistency for his writings, asserting, in both his major autobiographical works, the fundamental coherence of his ideas.2 In the last analysis, however, it is hard not to concur with the judgment of Henri Piiyre: “Rousseau is rife with contradictions, and the most ingenious men of learning . . . have not succeeded in convincing us of the unity of his t h ~ u g h t . ” ~ For one thing, they are by no means agreed as to wherein that unity lies. For example, Rousseau is seen as a pioneer individualist by Rosenkranz4 and as the Father of State Socialism by D u g ~ i t His .~ Calvinist connections are stressed by Lanson6 and his affinities with Catholicism by Masson.’ Irving Babbitt views him as a
romanticist,* and Ernst Cassirer, as a rationalist.9 According to Kingsley Martin, Rousseau began as an anarchist and ended as a tota1itarian;lO according to C.E. Vaughan, he began as a follower of Locke, shifted to Plato, and ended under the ruling influence of Montesquieu.ll Lanson explains the varying emphases of Rousseau’s different works by interpreting his early Discourses as protests against all hitherto existing societies; Emile and the Nouvelle Hkloise as guides to the reform of the individual in the spheres of personal morality, family relations, and education; and the later political writings as adumbrations of the kind of society in which the good man can properly live.’*Yet it is not merely between but within his works that baffling contradictions abound. In the Social Contract, which Ritchie calls “the great political treatise of his most mature and soundest period,”I3 individualism and collectivism, prudentialism and heroism, rationalism and functionalism - all appear to be negated by the affirmation of each, dissolved into a raging ferment over which broods the spirit of the general will, amorphous, enigmatic, and ineffable.l4 It is in part precisely because of all his inconsistencies and obscurities that Rousseau is, par excellence, the characteristic representative of what may be termed the “radical-humanist’’ view of human rights - i.e., the view that deduces rights from an uncritical veneration of
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man qua man; its ground being a romantic concept of man, its end, freedom, and its regulating principle, equality. Radicalhumanism is an empty abstraction that resolves itself into some other position whenever a serious attempt is made to give it content. It is always on the verge of going in one of several directions, and what make Rousseau especially significant is the fact that all of these directions are strongly represented in his philosophy. There have, it is true, been “pure” radical-humanists - men like Condorcet - whose thought is fairly unambiguous and free of contradiction. But these men can scarcely be regarded as original creative theorists of the first order; they were able to maintain a degree of formal consistency in their ideas because they operated on a relatively superficial level. An examination of Rousseau’s view of man reveals affinities both with the hedonistic utilitarians and with the ancient classical thinkers. In opposition to the ancients, he does not see man as a political animal by nature. The mental compass of the “natural man” is so restricted that in this respect he is hardly to be distinguished from the brute. Yet he differs from other animals in that he has two unique potentialities: freedom and perfectibility. By freedom, Rousseau means the consciousness of alternatives and the liberty to really choose among them instead of being guided by mere impulse. By perfectibility, he understands the capacity for psychological and moral growth.’5 But freedom, instead of being regarded as the condition of such growth, is seen rather as its object.16 “Man is by nature good” - to the degree in which this nature is not absorbed in sensual instincts but lifts itself “spontaneously and without outside help to the idea of freedom.”I7 This is where Rousseau stands farthest from the classical tradition, which never views freedom as an end in itself, but only as instrumental to the cultivation of reason, i.e., to the realization of humanity’s distinctive and predeterminate goal. Cobban, Chapman, Cassirer, Levine, and others18 have attempted, in varying degree, to make a
Kantian rationalist of Rousseau,lg and it is perfectly true that he is far from the absolute irrationalist that popular imagination, on the strength of a few well-known passages, pictures him as being. He does not reject reason but only its perverted use; he would enlist it in the service of virtue. Despite all this, however, the fact remains that Rousseau is less sanguine about man’s intellectual endowment than about his innate moral capacity, and certainly he does not make reason either the essence or the end of human existence. Cobban tells us that virtue, in Rousseau’s sense of the word, may be defined as “the absence of moral conflict between the desires of the individual, or what he needs to render him happy, and the laws imposed on him by his envjronment.”*OThis is brought out in the Emile, where the system of moral education consists basically of teaching children “from the first to confine their wishes within the limits of their powers so that they will scarcely feel the want of whatever is not in their power.”21 Schinz, as a matter of fact, goes so far as to interpret the “Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar” as an expression of pragmatic religiousness, an enunciation of a doctrine intended to promote man’s temporal happinesszz;and although Cassirer no doubt rightly criticizes this as a misplaced emphasis, he admits that “this interpretation undoubtedly characterizes a certain element in Rousseau’s fundamental c o n c e p t i ~ n . ” ~ ~ Having conceded the existence of this element, however, we must not lose sight of the fact that Rousseau’s utilitarianism was strongly qualified by classical influences, especially of Plato and Plutarch. From them he derived the ideal of moral education as the primary function of the state and of political participation as a necessary requisite for complete human development. This is related to a concept of man quite at variance with that of the utilitarians. For according to Rousseau, the nurture and exercise of moral potentialities constitute not only the highest happiness for man, but also and more importantly, his proper good. And this can
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take place fully only in society. Over and asainst the above-cited passage from the Emile, another must be placed: “Speak the truth and do the right; the only thing that really matters is to do one’s duty in this world.”z4Yet “one’s duty” consists simply of moral autonomy - the recovery of that natural goodness vitiated by the tyranny of destructive habits engendered by adverse social influences. This is how Wright interprets the “return to nature”:
We can give up pride. We can cease from all comparison with other men and simply go about our destiny. We can renounce a host of imaginary needs and hold fast to the true things needful; cast away a world of illusion and rediscover our own self. We can be meek, and inherit our soul. In a word, we can return to nature. That is all the famous phrase m e a n ~ . ~ 5 Thus Rousseau’s idea of duty is not really a teleological concept, since it does not essentially relate to any referent beyond the self. This is not to say, of course, that Rousseau rejects God; but however much duty, for him, may accord with the will of God, its criterion lies elsewhere, in the fulfillment of the self. And this fulfillment is seen as the achievement of a radical autonomy, not as the pursuit of functional goals in a cosmic setting. This is what places Rousseau among the moderns, in spite of his reversion to certain aspects of the classical tradition. For in classical and medieval thought, as D’Entrkes remarks, “It is not from the individual that we are asked to start, but from the Cosmos, from the notion of a world well ordered and graded, of which natural law is the expression.”26In this connection it is significant that the first draft of the Social Contract contained a chapter intended to refute the theory of natural law.27 Two ruling themes characterize Rousseau’s thought: the state of nature and the general will. Both these themes are marked by ambiguity, and their relationship to one another, although of crucial importance to an understanding of his writings, is oftentimes so recondite as to
be virtually impenetrable. In his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men, the state of nature is represented as an idyllic (even if hypothetical) epoch, in which the savage “breathes only peace and liberty,” living “within himself,” in almost perfect equality with his fellows. Yet the state of nature is lacking in both moral and specifically human content. The civil state “produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they formerly lacked.. . . Instead of a stupid and unimaginable animal, it made him an intelligent being and a man.”28 Nevertheless, Rousseau, while accepting the unavoidable necessity of society, rejected, as was stated earlier, the classical conception of man as an inherently social entity. His answer to the question of the good life “takes on this form: the good life consists in the closest approximation to the state of nature which is possible on the level of h~manity.”~g Perhaps the most striking paradox in Rousseau’s thinking is the way he conceives of the relationship between the individual and society. On the one hand, the natural man is innocent and good; on the other, he is a stupid and limited animal. On the one hand, society is the corrupting influence; on the other, it is only in society that his moral potentiality can develop. By shifting “original sin” from the individual to society, Rousseau doubtless felt that he was preserving man’s free will. But actually, according to his theory of psychology, the sinful proclivities are in the individual all along- they merely cannot be hatched apart from a conscious relation to others. In spite of the baneful effects of civilization upon the individual, Rousseau disclaims any desire to regress to barbarism: “Human nature does not turn back. Once man has left it, h e can never return to the time of innocence and equaliSociety, being necessary to man in his present stage, is in that sense “natural,”31but it is natural only insofar as it preserves man’s primal potentiality for self-determination. The Social Contract
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addresses itself to the problem of how this is to be achieved, but its solution can hardly be viewed as an unqualified success. If one were to compress into a single sentence those passages of the Social Contract most pertinent to our topic, the result would probably read somewhat as follows:
Christian man, who is at the same time the “servant of all” and the “most free lord of There is important truth in the idea that real freedom involves disciplined submission to a goal outside oneself, but this must occur in such a way that that goal is personally appropriated and made the voluntary object of one’s will. This is to say, such submission to be moral must be, as Rousseau rightly understood, “obedience to a law which we prescribe to o u r s e l ~ e s . ”But ~ ~ this kind of obedience cannot be forced. As Sabine aptly puts it, “forcing a man to be free is a euphemism for making him blindly obedient to the mass or the strongest party.’I4*Rousseau’s dangerous verbal jugglery was godfather to a long and vicious semantic tradition passing from Robespierre and Hegel through Hitler and Stalin - a tradition in which tyranny is baptized with the name of liberty. To him, more than to any other, belongs the dubious distinction of having invented “Newspeak,” for Big Brother’s sinister slogan, “Freedom is Slavery,”42is nothing but an aphoristic echo from the Social Contract. If I may be permitted to repeat some observations made by me in another context:
Man has the right to be compelled to abdicate his inherent individual liberties, so as to acquire genuine freedom in order that he might, through the exercise of moral will, fulfill his destiny as a human being. For we are told, to begin with, that “the social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights.”32 We are then given to understand that this order consists of “the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole ~ o m m u n i t y , ” ~and ~ that “whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.”34Finally, this order gives his actions “the morality they had formerly lacked. . . .”35 Lest this method of interpretation be dismissed as arbitrary, we must protest that it is no more so than any other. All interpretation is necessarily selective, and a mode of selection that records the original author’s paradoxes is, in fact, more faithful to his thought than is a mode that ignores his inconsistencies, or seeks to harmonize them by means of some interpretative key not inherent in the text itself. When Cassirer reads Kantian categories into R o u ~ s e a u , ~ ~ when Hoffding says that it was the “opposition of the absolute and the relative that Rousseau meant by the opposition of nature and ci~ilization,”~~ when Chapman understands the moi commun to refer to “the - reality of man’s moral p~tentialities,”~~ they are indulging in an intellectual game of speculation which, however shrewdly and skillfully played, remains, in the final analysis, speculation. Rousseau’s social teaching is not merely paradoxical; it is pragmatically absurd. It is, in fact, a monstrous perversion of Luther’s doctrine of the freedom of the
Kant understood that man is inwardly free only as he submits to moral law. The self-mastery whereby the will fulfills itself through obedience to the command of duty he denominated “positive freedom.” But he apprehended that politics is fitly concerned only with “negative freedom” - reciprocal freedom from external constraint. In this he displayed a perspicuity superior alike to that of his direct philosophical successors and to that of his progenitor, Rousseau. The burden of Isaiah Berlin’s great inaugural address at Oxford, as also of Talmon’s monumental studies, is very largely to remind us that the attempt to make “positive freedom” the immediate responsibility of the state is fraught with consequences which reduce all freedom to a There is but one sense in which
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Rousseau was right about “forcing people to be free.” Freedom is an unalienable trust. Nobody has the right to opt for any form of servitude that is likely to extend beyond the one who does the opting.44
Napoleons, Mussolini, Hitler, PCron, and Stalin - all made the same ominous claim and were equally ruthless in enforcing it. Yet the concept of the legislator by no means exhausts the totalitarian implications of Rousseau’s social teaching.
“Each of us,” proclaims Rousseau, “puts the person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”45 “Each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over which he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he Sir Ernest Barker has admirably exposed the fallacy of such reasoning:
Omit the legislator altogether: the result is still there. Imagine Rousseau a perfect democrat: his perfect democracy is still a multiple autocrat. He leaves no safeguard against the omnipotence of the souuerain. It is significant that the Social Contract ends with the suggestion of religious persecution. . . . Rousseau was so far from believing in les droits de l’homme that he went to the other extreme. He was so convinced that it was enough for the individual to enjoy political rights (as a fraction of the collectivity) that he forgot the necessity of his enjoying the rights of “civil and religious liberty.”51
The paradox conceals a paralogism. I surrender all myself - and 1 surrender it all to 999 others as well as myself; I only receive a fraction of the sovereignty of the community; and ultimately 1 must reflect that if I am the thousandth part of a tyrant, I am also the whole of a slave. Leviathan is still Leviathan, even when he is ~orporate.~’ The general will, according to Rousseau, is the ultimate, absolute and final authority, an oracle which cannot err.48 Yet nowhere are we given a definite and unambiguous statement as to how it can be discerned. Rousseau admits that the people may not know its own will,49and he provides for this contingency, at least to his own satisfaction, by postulating a legislator - a sort of medium who is able to intuit that which is hidden to the But alas! Who is to intuit the identity of the legislator? This is the perennial problem of authoritarian political theory, and Rousseau can scarcely be said to have solved it. When the Jacobin spokesman flatly informed the Convention that “Our will is the general will,” his words were pregnant with the guillotine. The two
The subtle imagination of Leo Strauss sees in the very emptiness of Rousseau’s doctrine of the state of nature the clue to the riddle of his political ethic. According to this ingenious theory, Rousseau represents the reductio ad absurdum of the radical-humanist tradition, attributing to man the natural right to a freedom which has no object outside itself and no validation apart from its connection with the individual. The notion that the good life consists in the return on the level of humanity to the state of nature, Le., to a state which completely lacks all human traits, necessarily leads to the consequence that the individual claims such an ultimate freedom from society as lacks any definite human content. But this fundamental defect of the state of nature as a goal of human aspiration made that state the ideal vehicle of freedom. . . . The notion of a return to the state of nature on the level of humanity was the ideal basis for claiming a freedom from society which is not a freedom for something. It was the
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If morality or humanity were to be understood adequately, they had to be traced to a right or a freedom which is radically and specifically human. Hobbes had implicitly admitted the existence of such a freedom. For he had implicitly admitted that if the traditional dualism of substances, of mind and body, is abandoned, science cannot be possible except if meaning, order or truth originates solely in man’s creative action, or if man has the freedom of a creator. . . . What Hobbes had, in fact, suggested in regard to science was applied by Rousseau to morality.54
These ideas are so suggestive that we must be permitted to carry Strauss’s theory a step beyond his own venture by relating its implications to the concept of the hegemony of the general will. Remembering that Rousseau’s thought is geared to the two antipodal foci of unconditional duties and nonmercenary virtue on the one hand, and primacy of freedom on the other, is not the general will that element in his philosophy which satisfies abstractly the demands of both? In its insistence upon unquestioning obedience it calls forth sentiments of heroic loyalty, while at the same time its very elusiveness renders it the creation of its subject. The totalitarianism of the general will is as void of content as is the anarchy of the state of nature, yet the creative freedom elicited by its vacuity is informed by virtuous commitment to a non-prudential goal, the vagueness of which permits the individual to remain radically independent by identifying himself absolutely with it. If indeed (which is by no means certain) Rousseau’s political ethic is to be regarded as anything but an ill-assorted pof-pourri of rhetorical extravagances, this interpretation may conceivably help us to get at the underlying structure and meaning of the whole - provided that we are willing to ignore the law of parsimony! Even supposing that we have succeeded, however, in absolving Rousseau to some degree from the charge of reckless inconsistency, it needs to b e remarked that he is only vindicated on a strictly formal and artificial level. In practice, historically, the doctrine of the general will has ever been an ignis fatuus leading men to tyranny.
‘Ernst Cassirer, The Question o f Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. with introduction by Peter Cay (New Y o r k , 1954); John W. Chapman, Rousseau-Totalitarian or Liberal? (New York, 1956); Alfred Cobban, Rousseau and the Modern State (London, 1934); Lester G. Crocker, Rousseau’s “Social Contract, ” (Cleveland, 1968); Stephen Ellenburg, Rousseau’s Social Philosophy: An Interpretation from Within (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976); Charles William Hendel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Moralist
(London, 1929); Harold HBffding, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and His Philosophy, trans. William Richards and Leo E. Saidla (New Haven, 1930); Gustave Lanson, Histoire de la littkrature franfaise, 22nd ed. (Paris, 1930); Roger D. Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton, N.J., 1968); and Ernest Hunter Wright, The Meaning o f Rousseau (London, 1929). *Confessions, Livre IX. Rousseau juge de Jeanilacques, Troisieme Dialogue. 3“The Influence of Eighteenth Century Ideas on the
ideal basis for an appeal from society to something indefinite and indefinable, to an ultimate sanctity of the individual as individual, unredeemed and unjustified. . . . Every freedom which is freedom for something, every freedom which is justified by reference to something higher than the individual or than man as mere man, necessarily restricts freedom. . . .52 What Rousseau attempted was a logical impossibility: to “graft the notion of unconditional duties and of nonmercenary virtue onto the Hobbesian notion of the primacy of freedom or of rights.”53 He agreed with Hobbes that duties are derivative from rights and that there is no natural law .which antedates the human will. But he departed from Hobbes in seeking the basic right in something more distinctively human than self-preservation, an impulse that man shares with brutes.
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French Revolution,” in Herman Ausubel, ed., The Making ofModern Europe (New York, 1951). I, 482. ‘Karl Rosenkranz, Diderofs Leben und Werke (Leipzig, 1866), II, 75. 5Lbon Duguit, Rousseau, Kanf et Hegel (1918),p. 6. Quoted by Cobban, p. 42. 6Lanson, pp. 788 f. 7Pierre-Maurice Masson, La Riligion de Rousseau (Paris, 1916). passim. 8Rousseau and Romanficism (Boston, 1919). Tassirer, p. 82 and passim. laFrench Liberal Thoughf in the Eighfeenfh Cenfury (London, 1929), p. 196. ”The Polifical Wrifings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge, 1915), I , 77-81. 1Z“L‘Unit6de la Pensbe de JeanJacques Rousseau,” reviewed by Peter Gay in his introduction to Cassirer, pp. 18-19. I3David G. Ritchie, Nafural Rights (London, 1894), p. 51. I4For individualism, see The Social Contract, in Frederick Watkins, trans. and ed., Rousseau-Polifical Writings (Edinburgh, 1953), p. 31; Leo Strauss, Natural Righf and Hisfory (Chicago, 1953), p. 298. For collectivism, see Watkins, pp. 17-18; Strauss, p. 286; George H. Sabine, History OfPolifical Theory (New York, 1950), pp. 587, 588-91. For prudentialism, see Watkins, p. 31; Strauss, pp. 266-76, 282-84. For heroism, see Watkins, p. 20; Strauss, pp. 277-98. For rationalism, see Watkins, p. 3; Strauss, pp. 279-81, 293-94. For functionalism, see Watkins, p. 20; and the editor’s introduction to The Social Contract, in lnfroducfionto Contemporary Civilizafion in the West, 2 vols. (New York, 1946), I, 954. l5See Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Social Contracf and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (Everyman’s Library; London, 1947), pp. 157 f., 169 f. For a good summary of Rousseau‘s theory of human nature, see Chapman, Part 1. %ee The Social Contract, in Cole’s translation, p. 16. I7Cassirer, pp. 104 f. This involves a partial misunderstanding of Rousseau. For him, the pyrpose of the state is to provide just such help. See Emile, p. 437. Iscobban, p. 223; Chapman, pp. 113-15; Cassirer, p. 82 and passim; Sir Ernest Barker, lntroducfion lo Social Contracf: Essays by Locke,
’
Hume and Rousseau (New York, 1948), p. xxxii; Wright, p. 32; Andrew Levine, The Politics of Aufonomy: A Kantian Reading of Rousseau 5 “Social Confract”(Amherst, Mass., 1976). IgRobert Dkrathb criticizes Cassirer for overstating his case in this connection. See Le Rationalisme de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris, 1948). p. 188. z°Cobban, p. 135. 21Emile,trans., Barbara Foxley (New York, 1948), p. 35. zZA.Schinz, La Pens& de J.-J. Rousseau (Paris, 1929), pp. 446, 506, and elsewhere. Cited in Cassirer, p. 11;. 231bid. 24Emile,p. 257. Z5Wright,pp. 20 f. 26A. P. D’Entrirves, Nafural Law (London, 1951), pp. 45-46. ZTBarker, pp. xxix f . 28The Social Contract, Bk. I , chap. vii, in Watkins, p. 20. 29Strauss,p. 282. 3aRousseaujuge de Jean-Jacques, Troisiirme Dialogue. Cited in Cassirer, p. 74. 31Hendel, I, 134. 32TheSocial Contract and Discourses (Cole’s translation), p. 3. 33/bid., p. 12. 34/bid.,p. 15. 35/bid.Tassirer, pp. 56-59, 126. 37Hoffding, p. 103. T h a p m a n , p. 28. 39Martin Luther, A Treafise on Christian Liberty (Philadelphia, 1947). p. 5. 4aThe Social Contract and Discourses (Cole’s translation), p. 16. “Sabine, p. 591. 4ZGeorgeOrwell, Ninefeen Eighty-four (New York, 1954), p. 23. 43Robert V. Andelson, lmputed Rights (Athens, Ga., 1971). p. 81. The works alluded to are Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty (London, 1958). and J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy and Political Messionism (New York, 1960). 44Andelson, p. 114. 4STheSocial Confruct and Discourses (Cole’s translation), p. 13. .461bid.,p. 12. The concept of the general will was anticipated i? Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis (1324). See D’Entrirves, p. 75. For a contemporary interpretation of the concept, see the philosophy of the Dutch juristic theorist, H. Krabbe, reviewed in Charles Grove Haines, The Revival of Nafural Law Concepts (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), pp. 274-77. 47Barker,pp. xxxiv-v. “The Social Confract, Bk. I, chap. 6. 49TheSocial Confract and Discourses (Cole’s translation), pp. 22-23, 30-3 1. 501bid., pp. 32-35. 51Barker, p. xxxviii. %Strauss, pp. 293 f. 53/bid.,p. 280. 541bid.,281.
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