Stop. You
want to go back. But you can't re-visit
everything said and done in the name of Modernity
and expect to get it the second time around. You
cannot find a foothold from which to view it. It
is everywhere; it is the ocean of your being.
There is no self for you but the Modern self. But
that is the point of your complaint: this is all
you know of yourself but you don't know what you
know. You know that your (post)modern world
shapes itself, but the tools--or the
templates--it uses are complex beyond
understanding.
So, in a
modern spirit, you narrow the scope of your
study. You go back to one source at a time.
Simplify. What did Rousseau have to do with what
you and your world became? The question leads
back to his works. It leads to some scholarly
aids to your search. It leads to familiar
vibrations that rattle around in your mind. You
try to connect these vibrations to what you think
you know about yourself in a modern world.
ROUSSEAU: A TAPROOT
OF MODERN SELFHOOD?
By finally
reading Rousseau, you hope to locate a taproot of
modern selfhood. You think that in The Confessions you will find the
pulsing heart of Individuality itself, that
feeling of uniqueness that drives your life
without your knowing quite why.
In Julie, or the New
Heloise, you expect a
first-hand encounter with the keynote of
Rousseau's lifetime project--the
sincerity of sentiment.
Emile, you hope, will show
you one of the sources of your attitude toward
learning. What makes you trust that students will
find their way to understanding on their own if
their guide will intervene just so and hold back
just so? Perhaps Rousseau's original idea on the
stages of educating a person for freedom had
permeated your own education without your being
conscious of its source.
Long ago, you
situated The
Social Contract in
your mental landscape of democratic theory. Yet,
like so many landmarks of modern culture, it was
a work you read about but had not read straight
through. Finally, you meet "the general
will" face to face.
You give
texture and detail to that vision by reading
Rousseau's Discourse on a
subject proposed by the Academy of Dijon: What is
the origin of inequality among men, and is it
authorized by natural law?.
You will add A Discourse on
Political Economy, and The
General Society of the Human Race. Rousseau
focused on the right-living individual, but his
vision of the individual was incomplete. He had
to enmesh the individual within a
social-political context that would complete him
and energize it. These works create that context.
Over all
these texts, you cast the incandescence of
Rousseau's first discourse. It had shot him from
obscurity to fame in the Parisian intellectual
circles of his day--A
Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and
Sciences. It establishes
Rousseau's ambitiousness and
comprehensiveness, no matter
what his topic. With the first discourse, he
skewered the excesses of the Enlightenment philosophes;
yet he wrote it with such wit that his targets
applauded his deft sword-play at their expense.
THE ROUSSEAU
"INDUSTRY"
A veritable
Rousseau industry came into being after the
French resurrected his name and took him as a
saint of the Revolution. This industry has never
ceased to churn out interpretations and
celebrations of his thought. Nor has it failed to
uncover faults and failures in Rousseau the man
and in his works.
You find that
a major question in Rousseau studies touches your
reason for reading him. What ideas of Rousseau's
were important in shaping the political and
personal form of modernist life as you know it?
William Gairdner sees Rousseau's ideas in modern
democratic practice. Arthur M. Melzer finds the
modern reliance on personal sincerity rooted in
Rousseau.
Scholars such
as Gairdner and Melzer may find flaws in
Rousseau's thinking, but they take his writing
and his life seriously. Rousseau's many-sidedness
brought nay-sayers to the industry as well as
yea-sayers. J. H.
Huizinga's debunking biography
put Rousseau's thoughts and the life he led under
close scrutiny. Huizinga found his thoughts
shockingly inconsistent; he found his life a bag
of unadmirable contradictions.
After
critically examining Rousseau's life and work
through more than 260 pages, Huizinga boiled down
his puzzlement as follows: "How
could a character so feeble, a thinker so
incoherent, a litterateur
whose prose is so patchy, have earned world-wide
recognition as a figure of great historical
importance?" (268)
What troubled
Huizinga most was Rousseau's unwavering focus on
himself. Rousseau, he said, lacked a grand
project such as Marx's. Huizinga found little
evidence to support the claim that Rousseau
inspired the Revolution or the Romantic movement.
He contradicted the judgment of his famous
historian-father, who said that Rousseau had
"immense influence."
And then, as
a penance, Huizinga gave his father the last word
in his book: "With Rousseau, triumphed the
anti-stoical life-style." Rousseau ended
"the aristocratic culture which does not
advertise its sentiment but remains sober and
reserved in its manner of expression, stoical in
its general attitude." (277)
This brief
parting nod to paternal judgment seems to you to
address the younger Huizinga's puzzlement
satisfactorily. Rousseau is historically
important because his writing and his life
dramatized the way that men and women would think
of themselves in a modern world. He happened
along just as aristocratic culture was losing its
vitality and bourgeois culture was ascending to
dominance. Even with the inconsistencies and
vagaries chronicled by Huizinga, Rousseau gave
voice to that rising culture and proposed a model
of the society and politics that it would
require.
G.D.H. Cole
(1889-1959) originally edited Rousseau for
Everyman. His introduction to the The
Social Contract became a
classic in its own right. Cole would have
completely disagreed with Huizinga's dismissive
assessment of Rousseau. Cole found a solid
consistency in Rousseau's thought. It centered on
three concepts:
the
inalienability of human liberty, the natural
propensity of man to goodness, and the
necessity of basing political institutions on
democratic sovereignty as the means of
expression of the General Will. (lv)
Cole was
commenting on Rousseau's political writings. If
you consider also his idea of the modern
individual as it emerges in Emile
and Julie,
you will want to add a fourth concept:
"inner
sentiment" or "sincerity" as
the defining quality of the efficacious self.
Despite
nay-saying critics like Huizinga, then, you feel
that your reading of Rousseau can tell you
something interesting about the genealogy of the
self that you know in the society you know,
living through the 20th and into the 21st
century.
SINCERITY TRUMPS
SIN
Turning to Melzer for help in deepening
that feeling, you see a Rousseau who offered a
new "religion of sincerity" to counter
both the priests of traditional revelation and
the philosophers of Enlightenment rationality.
Melzer's essay examines that religion as Rousseau
presented it in the "Profession of Faith of
the Savoyard Vicar" in Emile(266-313).
Like the philosophes,
Rousseau opposed traditional Christianity because
it oppressed and corrupted the individual. But he
disagreed with them when they offered
Enlightenment rationalism as the remedy.
Rationalism, he decided, would not be sufficient
to unify the human soul and satisfy it with
earthly life. Its practice by the philosophers
looked too much like the practice of traditional
Christianity: it too alienated
and divided the individual; it prized a false
universalism.
The
corrupting power of the Church and the corrupting
power of intellectuals (the secular priesthood)
were equally bad. The Enlightenment wrongly
espoused a secular universalism; it elevated, in
Melzer's words, "talent and intellectual
accomplishment over moral virtue and dedication
to the fatherland."
The
Enlightenment, therefore, had to "overcome
itself" so it could move beyond its
limitations, as Melzer reads Rousseau. This
meant, for Rousseau, returning to religion, but
religion of a different sort. Melzer says that
Rousseau offered, through the Savoyard Vicar, a
"counter-Enlightenment" religion based
on "inner sentiment" or
"sincerity." One cannot base religion
on "truth" because man is incapable of
knowing it; this sets aside the rationalist
premise of the Enlightenment. But man is capable
of trying sincerely to do the right thing as much
as possible. Since God is just, he provides an
afterlife where he rewards moral conduct in this
life, with its passions and limits, as long as it
is sincere.
The Vicar's
radical theology jettisons original sin,
redemption, and grace, the pillars of traditional
Christianity. It puts
"conscience"--"the voice of the
soul"--at the heart of religion. The
conscience, says the Vicar in Emile,
is "in the depths of the soul,...an innate
principle of justice and virtue according to
which...we judge our actions and those of others
as good or bad." (289) This innate
conscience comes from nature: "love of the
good and hatred of the bad are as natural as the
love of ourselves. The acts of the conscience are
not judgments but sentiments."
(289-90)[my emphasis]
You see in
the Vicar's profession of faith the familiar
outlines of how persons still may think about
themselves today. The key is not
knowledge but sincerity. The
sincere person is the authentic person. It is not
necessary to trace the tortuous history of the
religious conscience since Rousseau's day to see
that sentiment, sincerity of feeling, remains
basic in our estimate of the modern person.
(Consider how important it is in the way George
W. Bush presents himself to the nation. Judge me,
he says, not on the number of books I've read but
on the sincerity of my convictions and actions.
"I will restore honor and dignity to the
White House.")
The modern
person excuses himself from the obligation to
imitate models of classic behavior; they do not
carry the weight of authority that his own
self-determined insights carry.
DEMOCRACY:
COLLECTIVE GOODNESS
You now turn
to Gairdner for help in seeing
the society in which Rousseau envisioned his
sincere, naturally good person in operation.
Gairdner reinforces your understanding of
Rousseau's self-determining person. Looking into
Rousseau for the Romantic roots of modern
democracy, he finds, first, a belief that
"individual sense" trumps "common
sense." Gairdner:
Whereas
for Voltaire, genius was a matter of
judicious imitation of the techniques,
principles, and authority of the masters, for
Rousseau the prime mark of genius was
precisely the refusal to imitate.
Rousseau's
naturally good individual remained unspoiled by
social conventions and, collectively, made
democracy possible. Gairdner refers to Rousseau
as "post-Christian" because he replaced
the ancient "internal dualism of good and
evil warring in the heart of man." He put in
its place a "new, external dualism between a
pure, sinless man and a corrupt, fallen
society." Democracy was, then, in Gairdner's
interpretation, "the collective
self-expression of goodness."
As you write,
Americans are descending on Iraq to help them
build a free democracy in that most ancient of
human places. Only a flattering view of human
nature such as Rousseau's could give us the
optimism to undertake such a task among Arabs
with such long and complicated histories. The
spirit of "Saint Jean-Jacques" surely
flickers in that optimism.
ROUSSEAU'S GRAND
"PROJECT"
But you have
not read enough to draw a definitive diagram of
the flow of Rousseauian energy into the modernist
sense of self and society. You decide to settle
for now on a hypothesis about his work that later
may stimulate you to further critical evaluation.
This leads
you at the outset to disagree with Huizinga.
Huizinga declared that Rousseau undertook no
grand project such as Marx's. He was too busy
gazing at his own navel, or words to that effect.
Huizinga, you think, missed what was going on in
Rousseau. Certainly Rousseau placed his concept
of the self at the center of all that he wrote.
And certainly "Jean-Jacques" was
himself his favorite example. But to acknowledge
this is simply to identify the keystone in an
architecture of ideas about self and society that
appears to stand with some stability and
strength.
These ideas,
taken together, presented the dawning modern
world with a revolutionary "project" to
which it could refer for guidance and definition
as the novelty of modernity rushed in. It stood
in contrast to the prevailing rationalistic
project of the Enlightenment philosophers. But it
did not reconstitute the idea of the individual
and society grounded in traditional Christianity.
Rather, it seized upon the new regard for
"feeling" and "sensibility"
that already was spreading in intellectual and
creative circles in the second half of the
eighteenth century.
You might
argue that Rousseau's project uniquely sought to
integrate separate psychological, religious,
esthetic, social, and political insights into
what would become the Romantic revolution.
Huizinga's question, then, ceases to be the right
one. The right question becomes this:
Does
Rousseau's comprehensive project to theorize a
new modern vision of self and society hold up
under critical scrutiny?
And a
follow-up empirical question is: Can we find
evidence that Rousseau's grand project influenced
the subsequent development of European culture
down to the present day?
You suspect
that a robust Rousseau "industry" would
not continue to flourish if his project did not
have some semblance of coherence and some
attraction to thinkers through the two centuries
since his time. But you decide that digging these
questions out of your reading goes as far as you
want to go for now in pursuit of Rousseau.
Developing answers to them would constitute a
project of your own on a grander scale than you
are now prepared to undertake.
Let it
suffice for now to strip Rousseau's
"project" to bare bones and spread it
forth as follows.
The
human individual is not what traditional
Western Christian civilization has believed.
He is not fallen in original sin and in need
of salvation through divine grace. He is good
from the start, capable of feeling sincerely
and capable of acting freely.
Human
society should be harmonious with this
concept of the individual. However,
experience shows that civilized society
traditionally is harmful to the individual's
natural virtues. The innocence of savage life
in undeveloped corners of the globe offers an
instructive foil.
The
project for Rousseau, then, was to theorize a
social and political order that would
preserve the individual's natural goodness,
develop its potential, and utilize it for the
good of all.
This
would require a new kind of education for
boys and girls. (Emile sets this forth.)
A new
kind of social arrangement would have to
arise to support the full development of
individuals. To find the elements of such an
arrangement, we would shun the
artificialities of urban life and turn toward
simple life in the country. Natural feeling
rather than socially determined roles would
govern the relations between men and women.
A new
kind of political arrangement would be
integral to this social order. We would first
have to theorize the origins of human
society. We would find the state of nature to
contain the nucleus of good individuals and
of a sound society. These findings would lead
to the "social contract" that makes
possible the modern state. This political
arrangement would have a democratic grounding
in the "general will" of the people
who entered into the social contract.
Individual freedom would have its assurance
within a consensus acknowledging the state's
superordinate authority.
The
practice of traditional religion would have
to change so that it would not corrupt
individuals and warp the workings of the
social and political systems. The natural
goodness of the individual would recompose
religious doctrine. Sincerity of feeling
about God would replace rational tests of
truth and falsehood about God. This would
allow everyone to practice the religion of
his childhood without imposing it on others.
Religious toleration would follow when people
stopped testing religion for eternal truths
and began to measure it by the sincerity with
which individuals held it.
The
new system also would have to resist the
over-reaching ambition of philosophers to
overcome the disastrous consequences of
traditional religion. It would oppose their
attempt to install rationality in place of
religious precept, for their attempt would
lead to the same kind of oppression and
intolerance that arose from traditional
religion.
While
resisting any impulse to flesh out this skeletal
description of Rousseau's project
comprehensively, you decide to choose a couple of
its parts for more detailed scrutiny. These
selections will perhaps exemplify the ambitiousness
of Rousseau's attempt to rewrite the West's
vision of the world, just as the skeleton
suggests its comprehensiveness.
(1) You look
first at the articles of faith professed by the
Savoyard Vicar in Emile. You hope that by
reading them carefully you will see more clearly
how Rousseau gave "sincerity" its
critically important place in the construct of
the self.
And you will try to show how Rousseau's natural
religion gives the individual self the freedom
to act. Your reading of
Rousseau's report on the Vicar will complement
what you have already gained from Melzer's
analysis of his "counter-Enlightenment"
faith.
(2) You look
second at the political arrangement envisioned by
Rousseau in the The
Social Contract. You hope to see how
his imagined social polity not only enables
individual freedom but also derives its
legitimacy and strength from it.
THE SAVOYARD
VICAR'S PROFESSION OF FAITH
The Savoyard
Vicar begins with an understanding that he exists
as a self apart from other beings. "My
sensation, which is in me, and its cause or its
object, which is outside of me, are not the same
thing." (270) He seems to follow the
philosopher Descartes in this as in his vow to
"love truth." (270)
But he
disavows all philosophers, who cancel one another
out with their arguments. His idea of loving
truth is not that of the rationalist philosopher.
Instead of pure reason, the Vicar turns to
"the inner light" (269) as his test of
truth:
I am
resolved to accept as evident all knowledge
to which in the
sincerity of my heart
I cannot refuse my consent....(269-270)
Heart
supersedes head in the quest for truth. If
something appeals necessarily to the Vicar's
heart, he will accept it as true. He will remain
agnostic toward all the uncertain rest of
reality. (270)
The Vicar's
"self" is able to stand apart from the
rest of nature and compare and judge it. He holds
three "articles of faith" about matter
and its motion in the world he observes.
(1) There is
a first cause: "a will moves the universe
and animates nature." (273)
(2) There is
order in the world: "matter moved according
to certain laws [by the will ascertained in the
first article of faith] shows me an
intelligence." (275) This orderly
arrangement of the world by an intelligent
Being--"the preservation of the whole in its
established order"--is what the Vicar calls
God.
(3) "Man
is...free in his actions and as such is animated
by an immaterial substance." (281) This
immaterial substance is spirit or soul. A human
being does not exhibit the same orderliness found
in nature. He embodies "two distinct
principles" (278) that cause him to be in
conflict with himself. One principle is that of
the will; it is free of the passions and bondage
that the other principle--that of the
senses--imposes on the person. The immaterial
(spiritual) will of the person allows him to
choose. Being "free, good, and happy"
(281) is the gift man has from God. He has
happiness because he has the freedom of will to
choose to be good rather than evil. If he abuses
his freedom and turns toward evil, this does not
disturb the natural order but simply falls back
on the person:
Evil
exists only in the sentiment of the suffering
being, and man did not receive this sentiment
from nature: he gave it to himself. (282)
The Vicar
explains that his three articles of faith lead
him to follow his conscience. It is "the
voice of the soul." (286)
The Vicar's
notion of the immortal soul seems to resemble the
familiar Greco-Christian notion of it. But he
radically departs from tradition when he
emphasizes the "natural" goodness that
the soul implants in the human being. There is
something inherently "moral in the heart of
man." (287) This we get from nature. Obey
it, and we win happiness. "The serenity of
the just man is internal"--where the
conscience lies. (288)
The conscience,
says the Vicar, is in the soul. It is
an innate
principle of justice and virtue according to
which, in spite of our own maxims, we judge
our actions and those of others as good or
bad. (289) [my emphasis]
You think
traditionally of judging as an act of rational
choice. But the Vicar takes a different turn.
Conscience does not house an engine of
rationality. "Acts of conscience
are...sentiments." (290) Sensibility, he
says, precedes intelligence: "we had
sentiments before ideas." (290)
You wonder
what innate "sensibilities"
specifically are. For the isolated individual,
the Vicar says that they are "the
love of self, the fear of pain, the horror of
death, the desire of well-being."
(290) But the isolated individual also has
"other innate sentiments relative to his
species," since he is a social being. Trying
to cipher his meaning from the paragraph in
question, you suddenly sympathize with Huizinga's
sour opinion of Rousseau's reasoning powers, and
you decide not to try to follow the thread of his
thought. Suffice it to infer from it that love of
the good somehow associates in the Vicar's mind
with an innate sentiment. (290)
The Vicar
ends his profession of faith with several themes
that are familiarly modern. Let each person
reason for himself about religious authority and
not depend on others who claim to speak for God.
(295-301) Books cannot be the source of religious
truth. (303) Christian prejudice against Jews is
indefensible. (304) Christians are wrong to
believe that they should convert the whole world.
(304-5) Stick with the traditional religious
practices of your upbringing rather than pursuing
an impossible quest for final religious truth;
but let your religious belief at heart be a
simple "religion of nature." (313)
And so the
Savoyard Vicar finishes with a peroration:
Be
sincere and true without pride. Know how to
be ignorant....Never speak to [men] except
according to your conscience, without
worrying whether they will applaud
you....Dare to acknowledge God among the
philosophers; dare to preach humanity to the
intolerant....speak the truth; do the good.
(313)
By recounting
the faith of the fictional Savoyard Vicar,
Rousseau showed how ambitious he was to revise
the West's traditional notion of human nature. He
further showed how traditional religious belief
and practice--a particular part of the general
state of the society of his time--were ill-fitted
for the new man of sentiment and how he should
change them. Along the way, he made sure to fault
the rationalist philosophers of the Enlightenment
for merely replicating in secular forms the
dangers of traditional religion for the naturally
good person.
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
Huizinga
posed a basic dilemma. In The Social Contract, he said, we have
"an essay in logic-chopping at times so
obscure that he [Rousseau] himself said of it
towards the end of his life: 'Those who boast of
understanding all of it are cleverer than me, it
is a book that should be rewritten but I no
longer have either the time or the energy.'"
(229) The Social Contract,
Huizinga suggested, depicts a political
"dream-world" that never was or could
be. (235) Huizinga became exercised especially
because The Social Contract,
by his reading, pointed toward a totalitarian
regime; it would suppress individual political
will in the interest of state solidarity. (230)
Yet, it posited the freedom and liberty of the
individual.
You have to
stipulate that the text presents confusing ideas
that never resolve. Then you can approach it with
G.D.H. Cole's final thoughts about Rousseau's
political ideas ringing in your ear. Cole thought
that for Rousseau human liberty was
"inalienable." And political
institutions had to emerge from "democratic
sovereignty," however difficult it was for
him to define it clearly. According to Huizinga,
Cole confessed that Rousseau's concept of
"the general will" was
incomprehensible. (234) But that did not stop him
from affirming the importance of Rousseau's basic
ideas.
Dream-world
or not, The Social Contract
comes to mind today as Americans seek to guide
newly freed Iraqis toward a new government. As
Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds jockey for political
position, we think about the grounds of
legitimacy for the new government. The
sovereignty of the new Iraq, we urgently hope,
will inhere in the people as a whole. Somewhere
in that hope lies a shadow, at least, of a
Rousseauian "general will" that somehow
will encompass and supersede particular wills.
The fear that Iraqis will tear themselves to
political pieces makes this a deadly serious
matter.
So, in spite
of its reputation for incoherence, you
purposefully approach the text of The
Social Contract. Perhaps you
can gain insight by trying to sketch the rise of
Rousseau's "dream-world"
chronologically, starting with individuals in a
state of nature and following them into their
creation of systems of governance.
(1) Before
they enter into a social "compact,"
individuals have "natural liberty."
(196) They are completely free to get what they
can by their own strength. Other individuals of
course are equally at liberty to get from others
what they can by the same brute means.(196) Only
the natural family in this "most
ancient" state of affairs has the attributes
of political organization.
(2) When
individuals see that they can no longer survive
in this state of nature, several come together to
change their manner of existence. (190-91) They
want to associate so that the whole group will
defend and protect each individual; but they want
to "remain as free as before." (191)
This seemingly contradictory goal they meet by
creating the social contract:
Each
of us puts his 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. (192)
(3) By
signing onto this agreement, the individuals create
a wholly new collective body, a new "public
person" made up of the union of them all.
(192) This new corporate or collective entity in
classical times was the city
and the individuals composing it were citizens.
In modern times, we call this public person a body
politic or a Republic.
(192) Other names for it can be State,
Sovereign, or
Power.
(193) The citizens collectively are the
people. (193)
(4)
Individuals who created this new entity--body
politic, or Sovereign--now find out how they will
relate to it. This relation is novel because as
individuals they are relating to themselves
as a collectivity. The body politic or Sovereign
owes its whole existence to them and would not
exist without them. (194) They come to understand
that the Sovereign therefore has no interest
whatever that is contrary to their interests.
(194) It manifests "the general will"
of all.
(5) Ah, but
wait. Individuals who signed on might well decide
that they have a particular desire that
contradicts the general will. This poses an
injustice against the contract that could tear
apart the new and fragile body politic. (194-95)
(6) But never
fear. From the start, the social compact has had
a tacit meaning that will prevent this
catastrophe. "Whoever refuses to obey the
general will shall be compelled to do so by the
whole body." (195)
(This
presumably is the point at which Huizinga saw the
social contract becoming a totalitarian solution.
The dissident, Rousseau says, "will be
forced to be free." (195) Shades of Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union rise up, along with
the madness of George Orwell's political
"doublespeak." Rousseau means,
presumably, that the individual, by joining the
compact and thus helping to constitute the
Sovereign, frees himself from dependence on
himself alone for his security. The body politic
will secure his life more effectively, as long as
he remains in harmony with its general will.)
(7) Now
firmly in the harness of the social contract,
individuals are able to reflect on the
comparative advantages of their old and new state
of being. They realize that they have left behind
the life of a "stupid and unimaginative
animal" and have become in a civil society
"an intelligent being and a man." (196)
Yes, they have lost "natural liberty,"
their unlimited right to get what they could by
brute force. In its place they have "moral
liberty"--freedom from
their erstwhile slavery to "the mere impulse
of appetite." Second, they have gained "civil
liberty," their right
that they agree to limit by participating in the
general will. Third, they have gained the new right
to property, positively
titled by civil society. (196)
Individuals
with these new rights now can see that the new
civil state eliminates their "physical
inequality" based on brute force in a
natural state. It establishes "moral and
legitimate" equality among individuals who
otherwise may be unequal in "strength or
intelligence." (199)
(8) "But
wait a minute," say the recently
"civilized" savages. "We had
freedom in the forest and waters to do whatever
we could by our wit and muscle. Now we are stuck
in a complicated new system of relations that
limits us. We understand that we gain civil
liberty by losing natural liberty. But
how does this new system by which we have agreed
to live together actually operate?"
And they
gradually figure it out as follows.
When they
signed their Social Contract as individuals, they
became collectively the Sovereign. As such, this
collective power expresses their common interest,
their general will. It can 'never be alienated'
and never divided. (200-201) Nor can it ever be
fallible as long as they, the people, receive
adequate information, hold deliberations, and do
not form partial associations that lead to
intrigue by seeking particular wills instead of
the general will. (203)
Then someone
asks, "But how do we, the Sovereign,
actually ACT?"
Again, an
answer develops. Acting as the Sovereign, they
make LAWS, to which all of them are subject.
These laws express their general will and apply
to them one and all.
(9) Someone
in the crowd asks how they, acting as the
Sovereign, are to start
the process of making such laws.
The answer
forms as follows. They turn to their Legislator
for a beginning. He is their 'founding father.'
He is 'the engineer who invents the
machine.'" (214)
Yet another
individual voice from the crowd objects:
"But I thought that WE the people invent the
machine. I thought that we cannot deprive
ourselves of the 'incommunicable right' to draw
up laws, since only 'the general will can bind
us' and no other voice. (215)
At that
moment the Legislator, or founding father, makes
a grand appearance at the top of the hill. He
looks like a religious leader and speaks as if he
has heard a divine mandate. "I come not as
one of you but as a disinterested authority. I
bring you the writ that will start your system of
government going. By it I set up your Republic. I
will not participate in that government. You
still constitute the sole Sovereign. But you will
accept this initial act of governmental
establishment because I bring it to you by
'divine authority.'" (216)
The people
affirm what is to come under their sole authority
by accepting the Legislator's (founding father's)
religious invocation of it. By this act of
acceptance, they ritualistically raise the
general will above their particular wills. They
acknowledge that the general will should prevail
even if, in their ignorance or private desires,
they do not fully know what it is. They agree to
"bear with docility the yoke of the public
happiness." (216)
(10) Through
this appearance of "divine
intervention," then, the Sovereign (body
politic) feels empowered to legislate that a
government be established and that nominees be
chosen to run it.
They
determine that the government
is an "intermediate
body set up between the people ('subjects') and
the Sovereign, to secure their mutual
correspondence." It executes
the laws that the Sovereign decrees. It maintains
civil and political liberty. (230)
Those chosen
by the Sovereign to run the government are
"magistrates." They may be called
"kings, that is to say, governors."
Collectively, they may bear the name "prince."
(230)
The people
carefully note that they do not
put themselves under a prince by contracting
with him. The prince or governor simply receives
a commission to execute, to carry out the
business of government. (230) The only contract
of importance is the social contract that the
people make among themselves to create the
Sovereign, which expresses the general will.
(230)
Although
magistrates, governors, princes, and kings may
traditionally appear to be the government, they
are not. They merely administer through the
structures of the government the executive power
that derives from the Sovereign. The people
collectively are the only Sovereign; and at the
same time they are individually the
"subjects" of that Sovereignty that
they create. (230)
The State
will function well when (a) the Sovereign, (b)
the magistrate, and (c) the subjects do their
respective duties equally. The Sovereign gives
laws; the magistrate runs the government
machinery; the subjects obey the laws
administered by the magistrates. The people come
to understand that despotism or anarchy will
result if any of the three elements gets out of
its groove. (231)
(11) States
vary according to the size of their populations
and the size and character of their lands.
Because of these differences, no one form
of government will fit all.
Depending on circumstances, democracy,
aristocracy, monarchy, or mixed governments may
suit. (231-256)
Particularly
interesting are democracies. They are vulnerable
to civil wars and demand "vigilance and
courage" to keep them stable. "Were
there a people of gods, their government would be
democratic. So perfect a government is not for
men." (240) Democracy suits only States that
are small and poor. (251)
(12) A body
politic resembles a human body: "it begins
to die as soon as it is born." (260) The vitality
of the Sovereign, the people assembled, brings it
into being. By periodically assembling and
expressing its will, the Sovereign can revitalize
the government until the next assembly. When they
assemble, the Sovereign people must (a) approve
or disapprove the present form of government and
(b) keep or dismiss the present magistrates or
prince responsible for running the government.
(273) No other questions should come before the
people assembled.
(13) Finally,
the people understand that the new State must
have "civil
religion." Every
citizen should have a spiritual life of his
choosing. The Sovereign will not impose this or
that religion on the people. The Sovereign will
tolerate all religions "so long as their
dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of
citizenship." (308) Those duties of
citizenship constitute the civil religion to
which all must subscribe or be banished. (305)
The civil religion has just a few positive
dogmas: "the existence of a mighty,
intelligent, and beneficent Divinity, possessed
of foresight and providence, the life to come,
the happiness of the just, the punishment of the
wicked, the sanctity of the social contract and
the laws." (307-308) It prohibits
intolerance. (308)
So,
Rousseau's "dream-world" arises as a
fable. It is romantically idealistic in its root
event, the voluntary association of savage
individuals into a new social compact. It draws
on Enlightenment theory already current in
Rousseau's Europe for its democratic inspiration.
It draws almost equally on historical experience
in monarchical Europe and in classical Greece and
Rome for examples of governmental structures
(much of which is omitted in the thirteen steps
above). It installs a civil religion that, to
your present-day ear, still sounds overly
theocentric; yet it proscribes intolerance and
stands against religious operation of government.
AN AMBITIOUS AND
COMPREHENSIVE PROJECT
Looking back
over your summation of the Savoyard Vicar's faith
and the social contract, you reaffirm the
ambitiousness and comprehensiveness of Rousseau's
project. He redefined the self. To do so he had
to redefine society and the relationship between
the secular and the sacred. He sought to tame the
galloping power of reason to dominate the
emerging modern mind. He trumped reason with the
power of sentiment. He thus revised the
Enlightenment with feeling and pointed toward a
"natural" theme in modern life that
continues to influence the way we think and
behave. Without "Jean-Jacques", the
Beatles would have been a cultural aberration.
His thoughts
may dazzle and double back on one another.
Huizinga, however, surely went too far in
dismissing him because of that. He took so much
for his province and he wrote so colorfully and
attractively about it (rhetorical fireworks) that
his "project" lived on to influence us
even today.
7 May 2003; last
updated 8 May 2003 Copyright © 2003 Richard
P. Richter
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