On Rousseau's Social Contract

This is the first of two philosophy essays that I wrote for a course that I took in my spare time (thus, despite the academic style, I count it as flakery). The question asked how well Rousseau's theory of the Social Contract meets his own aim, which is laid out in the first quotation below. The line numbers can be ignored, since without the course handout they won't mean anything.

“The problem is to find a norm of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.”

Rousseau (1762)^a, ll. 5–7^b

Thus Jean-Jacques Rousseau sets out his aim, and quite a formidable aim it is. He hopes to establish an appropriate “norm of association” (i.e. relationship between individual and state) in which

• all individuals and their possessions are protected, to the greatest extent possible, by the state (or body politic);
• each individual gives himself wholly to the general cause of the state; and
• all individuals act freely and of their own volition.

It should be noted here that the state, in Rousseau's picture of things, is constituted wholly and exclusively of the individuals subject to these criteria. There is no separate institutional government whose members have a materially different relationship to the whole, and so the people are simultaneously the holders of power and the legal subjects in the body politic. In the former capacity they are referred to by Rousseau as citizens, and the active group made up by them is called the sovereign, a “public person, [formed] by the union of all other persons” (l. 41).

Rousseau sums up the terms of his solution succinctly thus: “the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community” (ll. 17–18). This is not intended to be as unilateral as it may sound. The key concept that brings together Rousseau's social contract theory is the bifurcation of each state member's resolve into the general will and the individual will; the distinction being most importantly that the general will is common to all members whilst the individual will is more specific. This combination of private and public interests may produce a conflict in an individual if the two aspects of will are incompatible, and this is more generally true when the will of all, being the union of all individual wills, is compared with the general will, which is necessarily invariant between individuals. But Rousseau claims that when the opinions of all the state members are combined together, the differences amongst the will of all should cancel out, leaving the general will to emerge as a consensus:

“There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will; the latter considers only the common interest, while the former takes private interest into account, and is no more than a sum of particular wills: but take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel one another, and the general will remains as the sum of the differences.”

ll. 127–130

The solution put forward in this way by Rousseau superficially fulfils his criteria, and has certain advantages that make it more convincing than some of the social contract theory that predated him. Firstly, it has a credible historical precedent. The communalism (i.e. primary focus on community) of some hunter–gatherer societies, and certain religious groups such as monastic orders, had elements of Rousseauist ideas. The influence of classical direct democratic government, in which all citizens were involved in the making of all state decisions, and in particular that of Sparta^c, is plain: he is advocating a similar scheme.

Secondly, the idea of a social contract as put forward by Hobbes (1651), and then later by Locke (1690), relies on an explicit or implicit personal agreement by the members of a state to be governed in a particular way. This perspective was savaged by David Hume, a contemporary and friend of Rousseau's, on the persuasive basis of scant historical evidence:

“Almost all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally either on usurpation or conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent or voluntary subjection of the people. [...] The consent of the people [...] has very seldom had place in any degree, and never almost in its full extent.”

Hume (1748), ll. 81–83, 107, 109

Whilst not having extricated itself entirely from the idea of consent (“when the state is instituted, residence constitutes consent” — l. 220), Rousseau's system, once established, neither calls for nor relies upon any popular consent in order to legitimise it; and as a result it need not get involved in the anthropological tangles associated with trying to justify itself against the background of a purely hypothetical, precivilised “state of nature”.^d

However, the theory has its problems. First of all, considerable difficulty arises from the word “free”. Rousseau divides the meaning of liberty between “natural” and “civil” variants:

“What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and [...] what he gains is civil liberty. [...] We must clearly distinguish natural liberty, which is bounded only by the strength of the individual, from civil liberty, which is limited by the general will.”

ll. 84–86

In essence, the Rousseauist state member gives up the freedom to do as he likes in exchange for the freedom to do as is best for that state. Moreover, “whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body”; that is, “he will be forced to be free” (ll. 60–62). However, since this angle assumes that a single course of action, that dictated by the general will, is always the correct one, it sits uncomfortably with more recent conceptions of what it means to be free. To give an example, George Orwell wrote in his famous dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, that “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four” (Orwell, 1949, p. 84), explicitly against an establishment which in that case is sufficiently entrenched to command the general will. It is partly against the homogeneity implied by such political ideologies as Rousseau's that Orwell and other twentieth century dystopian or antiutopian authors such as Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World (Huxley, 1932), were protesting.^e The tendency towards dissatisfaction brought by such homogeneity of rôle and purpose is one flaw in Rousseau's ideas that makes them less convincing as a practical framework. The possibility for an Orwellian manipulation of the general will is another, and in this situation it is highly questionable that each individual can be said to “obey himself alone”.

The central concept of the general will is also problematic, theoretically speaking, because it is open to the accusation of artificiality. Such a will as Rousseau describes is only general in a rather contrived and circular sense. Tellingly, Rousseau resists clearly defining this crucial aspect of his theory as far as possible, preferring instead to refer to it in vague terms as an infallible tendency to act for the common good. The closest he comes to a tangible definition is to say that “the constant will of all the members of the state is the general will; by virtue of it they are citizens and free” (ll. 230–231). But this does not represent the idea of a general will as emerging organically from popular opinion; instead it turns the argument around to imply that anyone whose will doesn't match up with the (still undefined) general will is no longer to be counted as a citizen, or, as we saw earlier, is to have his mind forcefully changed.

Furthermore, Rousseau's claim, quoted above, that when the differences in individual will are balanced against one another they will cancel out, is not compelling. This is because it makes two impractical assumptions, both of which are partially acknowledged by Rousseau.

The decision of sovereign (i.e. the people acting in their capacity as citizens), he writes, is always in agreement with the general will when “the people, being furnished with adequate information, [hold their] deliberations, [and] the citizens [have] no communication one with another” (ll. 132–133). The availability of the (potentially vast) “adequate” information for making a decision, and the required isolation of all citizens from one another, is far from realistic in all but very small states, and almost certainly in eighteenth century France. Moreover, these two aims are mutually antagonistic, since one has to communicate with people in order to acquire information. Whilst this oversight is understandable in the light of Rousseau's admiration for classical direct democracy, it nevertheless makes his proposals seem less than satisfactory, once again.

The second dubious aspect of Rousseau's claim is related: it is the assumption that the “small differences” between individual wills are in some sense equal and opposite across the people as a whole. There is no credible reason for believing this to be so, especially in light of the reality of communication, and discussion, between citizens. Rousseau admits to the possibility that “factions arise, and partial associations are formed at the expense of the great association”, resulting in “a less general result” (ll. 135, 138), but he doesn't dwell for long on this, preferring to simply say that it should be avoided as far as possible. But again, in a state of any appreciable size, the validity of this assumption is far from assured.

A final criticism of Rousseau's theory is due to its apparent fragility. He describes, in various parts of the extract, the terminally destructive effects of wanting to have the benefits of a citizen without the duties of a subject (ll. 55–57); of the emergence of a master who supersedes the sovereign to some extent (ll. 111–113); and of extensive faction-forming (ll. 138–141). It is hard to be convinced by Rousseau's ideas if they are really so easily laid to waste. Furthermore, the existence, or perceived existence, of these weaknesses is dangerous in practice, since it is likely to lead to overzealous and dictatorial enforcement of the principles of the body politic in order that it maintain itself. As Rousseau says, “the most important of its cares is the care for its own preservation” (ll. 151–152).

Overall, the combined effect of the various difficulties outlined in the preceding paragraphs makes Rousseau's philosophy unconvincing to me. Whilst in a sense a step forward from the seventeenth century ideas of Hobbes and Locke, it is still very far from perfect. Rousseau does not, to my mind, satisfactorily answer the challenge that he sets out for himself in the opening lines of the extract. Although the subject of this essay is not whether or not it is possible for any system to meet these criteria, I would nevertheless briefly volunteer that it probably is not.

The argument that societies with Rousseauist hallmarks have historically existed does not swing the debate, since these societies generally confirm rather than alleviate my doubts. Those groups that existed before Rousseau's time were invariably small to very small, this being the only environment in which I find his propositions at all practicable. In those larger scale political systems influenced by Rousseau, such as Marxist communism^f and the totalitarianism of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party^g, there is evidence of some of the flaws mentioned above coming to the fore — the propagandist Nuremberg Rallies, for example, could be seen as broad manipulation of the general will — and little vindication of the claim that each member of such societies “[obeys] himself alone, and [remains] as free as before.” At least, not free in the way that we would understand the term in the twentyfirst century.

References

Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan (extract). In J. Cottingham (ed.), Western Philosophy: an anthology; Blackwell, 1996.
Hume, D. (1748). “Of the Original Contract” (extract), from Essays Moral and Political. In J. Cottingham (ed.), Western Philosophy: an anthology; Blackwell, 1996.
Huxley, A. (1932). Brave New World; Chatto & Windus, 1932.
Locke, J. (1690). Two Treatises of Government (extract). In J. Cottingham (ed.), Western Philosophy: an anthology; Blackwell, 1996.
Marx, K. (1875). Critique of the Gotha Programme. Available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/.
Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four; Penguin Classics, 2000.
Rousseau, J.-J. (1754). Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men. Translation by I. Johnston; available at http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/rousseau/seconddiscourse.htm.
Rousseau, J.-J. (1762). The Social Contract (extract). In J. Cottingham (ed.), Western Philosophy: an anthology; Blackwell, 1996.