Before I get to the subject of this afternoon's lecture, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I wanted to
make a couple of additional points on Locke.
One, I didn't discuss, I said a good deal about Locke's second treatise on government,
but I didn't say anything about the first treatise on government, which is, no one ever
The first treatise on government was a reply to a work called Patriarcha by Sir Robert
Filmer, who was a defender of absolute monarchy, who was quite popular with the supporters
of Charles I. He had died I think in the 1650s, but his book was reissued by some of the people
Who Supported Charles II, who supported a very strong role for the king.
I should say one reason Locke issued, when he issued the two treatises, it was anonymous.
Although a lot of people knew he wrote the book, he never acknowledged this.
Even after he died, he never acknowledged being the author.
One reason for this was Algernon Sidney also wrote an attack on Filmer, and he was executed,
although not for that reason.
In those cases, if you wanted to write an attack on Sir Robert Filmer, you had to be
pretty careful about it.
What Filmer's contention was, was that the reason the king had authority was that originally
when God created the world, Adam had had governmental authority.
The first man had governmental authority and he passed this on to his descendants through
Line of Seth, and then this was passed on and on down to the currently existing kings.
Now, Filmer didn't, interestingly, Filmer denied Aristotle's contention that some people
were slaves by nature.
He didn't hold that, but he thought that just because of his historical argument, also the
The argument that fathers have authority in their family and that political power is like
that, so it's passed on to the present kings.
No one thinks Spielmer's argument is any good.
The only person I think of an exception to that, my late friend Mel Bradford, University
of Dallas, once wrote an article, it was in a Festschrift for Frederick Wilhelmsen, saying
Something that he thought that Filmer had the better of the argument, but most people
don't think so.
So, Locke, in his very long first treatise, denied all of Filmer's contention, said no,
first of all, we have no reason to think that any of the present kings, they can't show
any direct dissent from Adam, and even if they could, it wouldn't make any difference
And the reason is because we have no reason to think political power passed in that way.
We don't have Adam's authority in the family, it was nothing like that of a political ruler,
family rule, political ruler, completely different things.
And then there's also some question of what was the authority of Adam in his own family.
It was the authority of the husband and the father in the family, I mentioned that last
time.
Another point I wanted to make about Locke, in the question period, Roderick Long raised
the very interesting point that Locke says not only that we surrender to the community
the right, our right to enforce the law of nation, but we also surrender as much of our
Our liberty is needed to preserve the rest, so the question comes up, does this give supporters
of a stronger, non-limited government some Lockean argument for restricting liberty?
They could say, well, we're just, people have given up as much liberty as they need to preserve
the rest.
It seems to me, this passage is more plausibly interpreted this way, if you give up your
right to enforce the law of nature, it might be the case in the state of nature, you would
have chosen particular instances not to enforce the law of nature at all, say you see somebody
say assaulting somebody else and you decide you're just going to pass by, you don't want
to Get Involved. And it could turn out that if the government now has this role of enforcing
law of nature, they could, in pursuit of defense, say, require you to help them out or say there's
an invasion, they might require you to bear arms and defend the country. So I think this
When it's said to preserve the rest, what it's meant here is something like ancillary to enforcing the law of nature.
It's supplementary to this, rather than meaning that the government can simply rearrange people's rights in order somehow to maximize liberty.
If it's said to preserve the rest, that suggests, at least to me, that there's a pre-existing
pattern of rights and what the government is supposed to be doing is preserve that as
much as possible, say, from invasions.
And that said, we can now turn to Rousseau, who lived from 1712 to 1778.
Rousseau was born in Geneva, which was an independent city-state in Switzerland.
The states were joined in some kind of loose confederation, but Geneva was really largely
self-governed at that time.
And Rousseau attached a lot of importance to the fact that he was born in Geneva.
He remembered when he was growing up, he had memories of festivals in which all the people
would join in for patriotic celebration, there would be music and dancing.
He thought this was extremely important and he thought this should be recreated as much
in the social contract and elsewhere he talks about the need to have public festivals and have music that would attach great importance to music, having the proper music to educate the people and proper habits.
He himself, at one point, had lost his citizenship, his Genevaan citizenship, because he converted
to Catholicism, and Catholics weren't allowed to be citizens of Geneva, but then he renounced
Catholicism and he regained his citizenship, but I think he continued to sign himself as
This citizen of Geneva, even when he was no longer entitled to call himself that, so a
minor thing as legal propriety would not stop Rousseau from doing what he wanted.
Rousseau, in his youth, somehow became involved with a Swiss convert to Catholicism named
Madame de Warren. She encouraged him to convert to Catholicism, and I think it was because
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about, she replaced him with a younger man. She tended to do that, then he had to leave
and go elsewhere. He made his way to Paris, and he became friends with some of the leading
French intellectuals, including Denise Diderot and Voltaire and D'Alembert, some of the leading
The Theory of Money and Credit
is considered inflammatory. Rousseau describes he was on a visit to Diderot and he rested
a while and he said he was overcome by a vision and he said he could never write what he had
learned in that vision. He wished he could express even a part of what he had gotten
in that vision. This vision in 1749 was rather formative, was formative for his later works.
He wrote shortly thereafter two important works, the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
and the Discourse on Inequality, that I'll be talking about in a short while, but I just
want to first just give a sort of narrative of his life.
After he wrote those essays, he was also, his main work was, his profession was, he
was a music copyist, he earned most of his income copying music, and he developed a new
system of musical notation, which wasn't very successful, but he had greater success, he
was a popular composer of operas, one of which the King, King Louis XV liked very much. And
he, besides composing operas, he also wrote one of the most popular novels, the Nouvelle
Eloise, which was a bestseller for its time. And so he, while he was doing besides this,
He continued his work as a political theorist, including writing his most famous work, which
is the one I'll be talking about most, The Social Contract, which came out in 1762.
He continued all sorts of literary works, including his famous Confessions and his last
work, The Reveries of a Solitary Walker.
He was an extremely productive writer, as if that wasn't enough. He was also a botanist,
one of the best botanists of his time, and he collected all sorts of plants and wrote
about them. He was one of the best observers and recorders of nature of his time. Although,
As I hope to show, he had some, from a libertarian point, very wrong-headed ideas.
He was an extremely talented writer.
He was also, he had quite a few personality quirks.
If followers of Thomas Sase will forgive me, he was rather definitely paranoid, at least
at some points in his life.
He thought there was a conspiracy of nearly everyone, including people who claimed to
be his friends, to destroy his reputation.
One time he had been befriended by the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, and he visited
Hume, but he quarreled with Hume and then he considered Hume as somebody who was trying
to destroy him also. He didn't have a very conventional family life. He married a serving
woman named Therese Levesseur and had five children with her, but he gave them all up
to a Foundling Hospital. He didn't raise any of his children himself, so although he sometimes
wrote in his books about the benefits of family affection, it wasn't something he practiced
in his own life. If we look at Rousseau's thought, I think one of the key themes is
that he rejected a basic principle of economics, or at least to a large extent rejected it.
And the principle is one that, if you're familiar with the works of Murray Rothbard, has developed
this extensively, is the benefits of the division of labor.
If we think we all had to produce everything we needed for ourselves, we wouldn't be able
to get anywhere.
Say you had to produce all your own food or grow everything for yourself.
Very few people would be able, the earth couldn't support very many people, and people would
have to live their lives on a very poor basis.
You'd be spending all your time just trying to stay alive, I mean, not only that, say,
you wouldn't be able without just on your own, say, if you got sick, you wouldn't be
able to go to a doctor and get any medication.
You would just have to rely on your own devices to cure yourself.
You wouldn't be able to rely on any police agencies to protect you, you'd have to do
do everything by yourself.
This wouldn't be a very good state to be in.
We would clearly want to say with Hobbes, even if we didn't agree with him on what the state
of nature is like, it would clearly be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, what we wouldn't
want to be in it.
But Rousseau didn't agree with this at all, remembering the two discourses I mentioned,
Discourses on Inequality, Discourses on Arts and Sciences, he thought quite the contrary
that when a primitive man had not developed a division of labor, then people were much
happier. It wasn't that because we have a division of labor we're able to get all sorts
of Goods and Services We Couldn't Get If We Were Just By Our Own, This Makes Us All Better
Off. Rousseau said, no, this isn't right. Now, how could he have said that? Well, he
said, first of all, it's true that if you have a division of labor, you can get all
All sorts of things you couldn't get before, but when this happens, people have, along
with the extra goods, they develop all sorts of extra desires that they didn't have before.
So you always have, it turns out that you can have more things available to you, but
You always keep wanting more and more.
So you're not really any better off.
You're not, in fact, you're worse off because it turns out in the primitive state, you're
not getting very much, but you're satisfied.
You know that's pretty much all that's available, but in the division of labor, modern world,
you know there are all sorts of things available that you can't have that you want, so this
This makes you feel very bad.
Even worse, supposing, before you have a division of labor, people are, even if they find it
hard to produce things for themselves, they're not dependent on anyone else, but in the more
For a developed economy, you are dependent on other people.
Say, if I had to rely on people, if I had to, is now, if I couldn't rely on other people,
I wouldn't be able to eat anything, since I don't have any of the agricultural tools
No thought that everyone naturally has a certain amount of self-love. Everyone cares about
himself. He calls this amour de soi. But he says once we have people who aren't self-sufficient,
were dependent on others, then people are very much dependent on how other people view them.
People say, your self-esteem depends very much on whether other people think well of you.
So, people are concerned with their reputation.
Now, you say, well, what's wrong with this?
Well, Rousseau thought this makes people too faced because they'll do what they think will be required to get other people to like them,
but this won't reflect their true personality.
So, the developed economy, division of labor really makes people worse off because it makes them deceptive, they become, as they say, two-faced.
you can't you're there people are necessarily insincere people are no
longer transparent to each other because people have inner motives that others
are unable to discern so you would know even if someone has a certain appearance
you would think to yourself well is the person really like that you would say
the other person might be trying to deceive me so I can't really trust him
so people become mistrustful of each other in this situation. There's this feeling that
you don't really know what other people are like. There's a very good book on this theme
by Jean Starabinsky
on the theme of transparency in Rousseau.
So, in particular, what enables this state of affairs,
I say, where we have division of labor to develop and where people are insincere and
they're not transparent to each other, is what enables us to develop is individual property.
If we, in the primitive state of affairs, people just used what was available as they
Rousseau says whoever first fenced off an area and said this is mine was a great criminal
because by doing so he set in motion this whole process of division of labor and developed
economy in which people become much worse off, they're no longer transparent, they're
That's the bad side. Let's say a bit more about how Rousseau thought human beings began.
As Rousseau saw matter, when human beings first arose, people really were largely solitary.
They came together occasionally for a person of reproduction and you would have perhaps
small groups of people would live together, but people were largely solitary so they weren't
dependent on other people, they weren't at all dependent on other people.
People were not hostile to each other.
On the contrary, people had a feeling of compassion for each other.
They would, if they saw someone suffering, their tendency would be to help them out.
People were basically compassionate, so human beings were really good, but they didn't have
any developed consciousness.
They found, they lived by, just by hunting or fishing, sometimes cultivating small areas.
They didn't really require much effort for them to live, so it was, in Rousseau's opinion,
they were very happy.
Now, it's interesting, of course, what Rousseau was saying was completely speculative, but
there are cultural anthropologists who think this view that he had was pretty largely correct.
There's one, Marshall Solons, who has argued that this is a correct picture thing, although
it may be that he holds this view, maybe Solons holds this view just because he's a disciple
I'll write with Rousseau because that made them even happier. There was a famous essay by Arthur Lovejoy, it was a great intellectual historian, who said that you can't really say that the primitive people that Rousseau described, they aren't really human beings at all.
All we can take is some sort of evolution, we can take it kind of as an evolutionary
stage in which it could be perhaps some higher anthropoids were in that state.
Now what ruined this idyllic state?
Rousseau thought that population had gotten out of hand, people reproduced too much to
to maintain this kind of life where people could just, say, hunt and just get what they need to live fairly easily.
If you had more people around, they couldn't maintain themselves in such a lifestyle, so this required a more organized life.
Things were alright for a while until property came on the scene and then that ruined things.
Now, you might think from this that Rousseau, given that he had this view, would say, well,
what we have to do is get rid of the arts and sciences and try to go back to this primitive
stage, then we could all be happy.
But he didn't, that wasn't his view at all, I mean, that wouldn't really be a very sensible
view.
Well, that state of affairs, even if Rousseau is right about that people would be happier
living in that state of affairs, that could support only very few people.
So we'd have to get rid of nearly everybody if we wanted to try to go back to that.
Furthermore, once we'd gotten out of that state, we wouldn't be able to recreate this
primitive kind of mentality, that the innocence that people had then couldn't be regained,
so we're pretty much stuck with human mentality the way it is as we have it.
So what Rousseau said was, is there something we can do, as he says in Social Contract,
making men as they are, but laws as they could be. So his aim wasn't to change people back
to some primitive state, but he would say, given that we have human beings in a certain
way, how can we make things better? How can we remedy these defects of the modern world
where people are dominated by a more proper, they're dominated by their need to put on
appearances for each other that they can't be sincere, they're dependent on each other.
So in the, as Rousseau says at the beginning of Social Contract, man is born free but he's
Everywhere in Chains, and what he wants to do is, he wants to come up, he says, can he
justify the transition that people have gotten into in getting into civilized life?
He says, if we could do this, what we would be doing, could we come up with some way in
in which people would create a government which they would be giving up their liberties
to the government, but each one would be as free as he was before once he'd given up these
things.
So, again, Rousseau surprised expectations.
You would think, well, if people want to try to be as free as possible, they would want
to give up as little liberty as possible to the government.
I shouldn't say to the government, because, as it turns out, the government has a very
special meaning in Rousseau's work.
What we're really giving up is to the common will, what he calls in the book the general
will.
But you would think that Rousseau would say we want to give up as little of our liberty
as possible, but Rousseau, again, is a very paradoxical writer.
He surprises expectations and says, well, no, what he claims to have to come up with
is the way in which each person will give up everything to this body, this entity, the
general will, and in return will find that he's as free as before. So Rousseau has set
himself a very tall order, saying each of us can give up everything, but we'll still
be free once we do it. And then the question is, will he be successful in this very daring
Banking Enterprise. I'll let you in on the result he isn't.
All right. What he does, first of all, before he gets to his own views on the proper, the
general will, he refutes or attacks earlier theories of the origin of the state. Now,
He tends a bit to fall perhaps into this fallacy. He'll say there are so and so many views possible
of the origin of the state A, B, C, and D. I've shown that A, B, and C are all wrong.
That Leaves D, which is my view. So we should accept that one. And this isn't such a good
way of arguing, because first of all, he would have to show that all those alternatives,
those alternatives are exhaustive. There couldn't be other alternatives. But even if those are
the alternatives, it could turn out that all the theories are wrong. Who says we have to
We have to have a satisfactory theory of the origins of state authority, because now they're all wrong, so the fact, if it is a fact that he's successful in refuting some of the theories, doesn't show that his view is correct.
One of the views he attacks is one that I mentioned before in connection with Locke,
one held by Filmer that the political power comes from the human family, just as the father
has authority in the family. The political ruler has authority somewhat like a father
over his people. But Rousseau made short work of this theory in an argument similar
to Locke. He was very familiar with Locke and also with Hobbes and practically everybody,
all the classical authors. He was a very well-read writer. He just said, well, no, just as Locke
The political authority isn't at all like that of a family.
The father of a family is motivated by affection for his children, and then his authority lapses
after the children become adults, and this is nothing like the situation in conventional
and Politics, where the government isn't motivated by affection for the people.
He mentions also the theory held by Hobbes that people are in such a bad state of affairs
In a state without government people are constantly at war with each other, people are hostile
to each other, that they set up a government to get out of this bad state of affairs.
But he said, this is wrong because it assumes that there's some kind of constant human
nature that make people at odds with each other, and in fact, what people's nature
The theory, as far as their hostility to others or how peaceful they are, very much depends
on the social conditions.
So, people might be that way in certain historical periods, but that's not a constant that explains
why government exists, because people need not be like this.
I should say, as usual, there's a Straussian view, which says, as you might expect, Rousseau
is like Locke, a secret Hobbesian, and he really does hold that the state of nature
is pretty Hobbesian.
Even if people don't have to be in that state, they pretty much are in that state, the Hobbesian
state of nature.
And so this does explain how government comes about.
There's this very good Straussian author on Rousseau, Hillel Gilden, who has a book on
the social contract where he gives this view.
Now, another view that Rousseau gives is, he says, here he mentions Grotius. Grotius just
appealed to various historical events, especially described in the Bible, on how, say, people
The people had been captured in war in order not to be killed and had accepted the rule of their conquerors.
So Rousseau says the problem with Grotius is he has no distinction between what happened and what should happen.
He just accepts whatever happened in the past is valid.
He doesn't say, is this the right thing to do or not, he just said, well, I have some
historical precedents that such and such happened, so this gives a basis for government.
That isn't a good way of doing things.
Now what Rousseau argued was that we should explain the origins of the state in this way.
We imagine a group of people, everyone surrenders all his rights and liberty to everyone else.
So it's somewhat a bit like the community and lock system, except you surrender not
Not just your right to enforce the law of nature, but you surrender everything to the community.
But the community then decides everything by everyone having the same will.
So everyone is as free as before because the community is all sort of acts as one.
And so, you end up with each person not having rights and liberties, but better off than
he was before, because in the state of nature, he had no way of ensuring that he'd have
any rights and liberties protected.
But if you have everyone is unified in one entity, and they all act together, they all
All have a unified will, so-called general will, volontaire, général.
So if you have everyone acting together in a unified will, then no one is subject to
to anybody else. Everyone is, so we have, so gets what he wants, because everyone has
surrendered everything to the general will, but you're as free as you were before, because
you're all acting, you all have the same will, so you all want the same thing, and you're
as free as you were before. Now, the difficulty here is, why would it be the case that everyone
Why would everybody have the same will?
Why would everybody will the same thing?
It doesn't seem very plausible that everybody has the will to do the identical thing all the time.
So how can Rousseau say this?
Well, he says what you imagine is it isn't to say that everybody decides we all have the same preferences in food
or we all want the same kind of house.
It's that what the general will does is limited to general laws. All it can do is pass laws that don't refer to any particular person by name or description.
They just pass certain general regulations. And everyone wants these general regulations.
So, this is how you achieve the unanimity.
Now, to some extent, this reduces the problem because it isn't that we have to get people
agreeing on absolutely everything, so we now have people have to agree just on the general,
these general laws.
But it seems doesn't the problem just come back?
Why should we think that everyone would agree on the general laws?
Well, here Rousseau says this, he says, you have to get people in the right frame of mind for this agreement.
Specifically, you can't have people getting together in factions, because if you could have, say, interested groups,
then they wouldn't be voting what would be in the interests of all.
all. You just have to imagine there are no groups or factions. Each person then votes
just separately on what he thinks would be in the general interest. So, in that way,
we will get everybody voting the same way. If you say, well, that's ridiculous, people
Rousseau thinks somehow the personal differences will cancel out, say one person might think, make a mistake, but this will be balanced by somebody else making a mistake in some other direction, and what will result if everybody votes separately will be the general will, which will be a correct statement of what will be in everyone's interest.
Everyone's Interest
Now, it still seems to be a problem, though, is that supposing what Rousseau says is right,
then the result will be the correct general law in everybody's interest.
But it doesn't follow that everybody has supported that.
What about the people who didn't?
It just turns out that, say, there's a majority who supports doing things one way, some other
people vote the other way, so we say, well, the general will is to do such and such.
What about the people who voted the other way?
So remember Rousseau's argument is, if everybody votes the same way, everybody wants
the same thing, so we're as free as we were before because we're all doing what we want
We're better off because we're now protected by the whole social order.
We're not just dependent on ourselves to secure our liberties.
We have the whole social order behind us.
But as I say, how does he then get around the problem?
This works if it does work only if everybody votes the same way, everybody wants the same
way.
Well, he says, if it turns out that after the vote, what you wanted isn't the way the general will turns out, what the majority voted,
then what you wanted isn't what you really wanted. What you really wanted is what the general will wanted.
Now, the general will can make you do what the decision of the majority, because this
is what you really want, even though you don't think so, but you really do want this.
So as Rousseau says, you can be forced to be free by doing this.
I want to, it sounds like a ridiculous view, and I want to, though, ask, can we say anything
in favor of it?
I mean, after all, Rousseau, whatever one may think of him, was certainly not a stupid
person.
He was extraordinarily intelligent.
How could he have thought that?
I want to mention two arguments that have been given, I think, by philosophers I think are
interesting to look at in this connection.
One was by a philosopher I mentioned in an earlier lecture when I was discussing Plato's
Republic, the Oxford philosopher H. A. Pritchard, and he had an essay where he discusses his
general will argument, it was in a discussion of T.H. Green's lectures on principles of
political obligation. Now, he took the general will or what's called a real will argument
to go something like this. If we say, we want to say, sometimes we want to say people find
and the conflict between the right thing to do, what's the moral thing to do, and what's
in their interest.
This would say, as we have said in the case, suppose we think that what the general will
does is the right course of action.
We say what the individual who's voting in the minority wants to act in his own interest.
So how can we reconcile self-interest with morality?
How can it be the case that if I act in my own interest, I'm always acting in accord
with morality? So Pritchard said, well, it sometimes turns out that morality, at least
in the surface, requires us to act against our own interests. So the way then we can
To reconcile the two, according to Pritchard, people in the Rousseauian tradition, such
as T.H.
Green and Dennis, say self-interest and morality are identical, because really people should
be taken as ultimately identical.
We appear to have different bodies, but we're really all the same person.
So this is one way, I think, of understanding Rousseau's contention.
He's saying people in the society really become unified into one entity, one sort of collective
mind, and if, say, a physical individual finds himself at variance with what the general
The general rule requires him to do what it wants.
It isn't really, the general rule really isn't restricting him, it's just sort of requiring
kind of a subordinate part of a single entity to actually cord with the whole entity.
So if you take, one way to make sense of Rousseau is to take him in this very collectivistic
way.
But I don't think, I hope you would agree with me, this isn't a very plausible view.
Why should we think that all of us or all people in a society form part of a single
entity in this way?
Now there's a better argument for a general will, a real will position, found in a chapter
in the book by the idealist philosopher Brann Blanchard called Reason and Goodness.
I'm going to say a bit about this because I think this is the most plausible argument
I found for this position.
Blanchard says this, he says, well, we all want to do what's rational and we all want
The Theory of Money and Credit
We all have the same will. We all want what the general will wants, simply because we all want to be rational, and what being rational is, is what the general will wants.
So we all have the same will, namely to do what is rationally required.
Now, I think this is, as I say, I think it's a more interesting argument than the one Pritchard ascribes to Greene and Rousseau, because Pritchard is a very negative critic of theirs, he doesn't favor the general will doctrine at all, and Blanchard is an advocate of it, he's trying to put it in the best of light as possible.
I think we can see Blanchard's argument doesn't work. Let me just put this down, this way.
I think we can take the basic argument that Blanchard is suggesting, the way of interpreting
So, it's saying people want to be rational, people want to do the right thing, so I want
to be rational, so I find out rationality requires me to do X, in this case, to do what
the general will says, so therefore I want to do what the general will says.
Now, this argument is formally valid, but it could turn out that when I find out that
Rationality Requires X, it could be that that would induce me to drop the first premise.
It could be when I find, oh, rationality is going to require me to do this, like to enlist
in the armed forces, defend the, say, defend Geneva from an impending French invasion.
Maybe I'd say, oh, I don't want to do that. Let's forget about rationality for a while.
It's too hard on me. So it doesn't follow that once you see what rationality is required,
that you're going to go along with it. Furthermore, supposing you did accept the argument, there
would still be a very definite sense in which you wouldn't be doing what you wanted, mainly
Even if you say, well, it's some kind of, your conscious desires don't reflect your real self,
still you do have this desire not to do what the general will says.
You voted the other way.
So at least in some sense you don't want to do what the general will says, and it's merely
playing with words to say that you really do, at least in a sense in which if you say
you want something, it's not the case that you don't want it.
You can't say that here, even if this argument worked, which I don't think it does, it would
then just be the case in one sense you want what the general will says, in another sense
One wonders, having thought about this, how could Rousseau have made the claim that each
Each person, by surrendering to the general will, is just as free as he was before.
It seems like this claim doesn't get him very far, and I think we could see two things
that could explain how Rousseau could have fallen into fallacy, and I think another thing
makes the claim less surprising than we might think.
If we say, well, how could Rousseau have possibly thought that people are free under the conditions
he set out, because after all, you could end up not, say you turned out you kept being
Being outvoted, you could turn out, you'd be free in the Rousseauian sense, even if
you never, practically never got to do what you wanted, you always lose the votes.
Well, Rousseau, remember when he was talking about what's wrong with the developed economy,
why we like the primitive, why you like the primitive state, fears better, he was concerned
And with people being dependent on others, and what he had in mind was you're dependent
on particular other people.
So here it isn't that you're dependent on any one person or other, it's just you're
dependent on everybody, you're dependent on the whole social body of which you're a constituent
part, you have an equal part to everybody else.
So somehow I think this is the fallacy, a key fallacy in Rousseau's argument, he thought
somehow this meant you weren't dependent because you're not dependent on a particular person,
you're just dependent on the social body.
And I think we can see the same fallacy in many political proposals today.
For example, sometimes people defend conscription, forcing people to enlist in the army by saying
this is democratically voted, as if somehow, if the fact that it isn't that a dictator
is telling you you have to be in the army, it's that there's somehow a vote for it,
If you had one of the votes that go into the conscription law, somehow this means that
you're free because it isn't a particular person ordering you to do this.
And I think this is certainly not a correct view of freedom to adopt.
You're just as involuntarily in the army if you don't want to be there.
If you're there because of a vote, and if you were there because you got orders from
some king or dictator, I remember there was a letter I once saw by the political theorist
Benjamin Barber, who very much likes the Swiss style of collective decision-making.
He defended conscription, so somebody wrote in and said, I think it was in Descent Magazine,
which is a socialist periodical. Somebody said, oh, conscription is really a form of slavery,
and he got very upset. He said, oh, how can you possibly say this is just the kind of thinking
we have to get away from, as if there had been a democratic vote for something that
settled the question. Now, I said that I think is a fallacy. Falling into that fallacy could
of Account for Rousseau's line of thought, why he thought that, how could he say that
people are free even if they're, turns out they're not doing what they want.
Now I think another thing that could mitigate the enormity of Rousseau's claim is, remember
What he's saying is that people will find that they're as free as they were before, before getting into this.
They surrendered everything to general will.
But then we have to ask, well, how free were they before?
It could turn out they're not very free before, say, if they were in something like a...
They couldn't, by hypothesis, really protect their rights in the state fairs before the general will, so they're not really free, really very free to begin with, so if they're no more free than they were as free as they were before, it isn't perhaps that much of a claim.
I think he would be being rather tricky, so maybe he was a secret student. The Straussians are right, after all.
I mean, if you took him this way, he wouldn't really, in saying that people would be as free as before, he wouldn't really be making a very strong claim.
And I said we have to distinguish, when I said I first talked about setting up the government,
but I said, then I said I shouldn't really say government because this is a special term
in Rousseau's thinking.
Now, Rousseau didn't call the entity constituted by the general will, didn't call that the
government.
The general will just handles, makes rules that apply universally, but the general will
doesn't handle day-to-day legislation and executive policy.
So the government, in the sense we have it, say we talk about the U.S. government or government of countries, what handles day-to-day affairs in a state isn't the general will, is the general will chooses particular people to form the government, and they don't have to choose a democracy, according to Rousseau.
In fact, he thought that democracy could only work for a very small society.
In larger societies, he thought the best type of government was an elective aristocracy.
A hereditary aristocracy wasn't very good, that would be one, but the best would really
be an elective aristocracy.
Then he has rather hard to understand mathematical formulas for just how big the government should
be, how many people should be in it.
He thinks, on the one hand, if you have a large society, then if you have the government
is too small, then it won't be able to control the large society. You just have too few people.
They won't be able to handle, if they have this problem, day-to-day administration of
justice, for example, they won't be able to administer justice if there is a whole lot
of people and just a few people in the government. So you need a larger government if there are
more people in the society, so you have a larger number of people, in the form of general will, have a larger government.
On the other hand, if you have too large a government, that tends to be inefficient.
Say, if you have a monarch, there's just one person he decides on the policy,
so that's much more efficient than if you have to get a whole lot of people to agree on things.
Remember, this is unlike the general will. This is day-to-day policy, so Rousseau arrives
at the result that the size of the government should be the square root of the number of
people in the society. I can't say I understand how he arrives at that result, but that's
What He Says. Now, we have a further addition, there's a further point that's rather, I think, a very important point in the political theory, is we have, so far we have the general will, and it's supposed to be voting on what's the general laws that are in everybody's interest, and then what it arrives at will be turned out to be what everybody
How do we know which general laws to vote on?
If Rousseau is right, whatever way they vote will give the general will, but that doesn't
give them the agenda to vote on.
How will they know what are the general laws they're supposed to think about?
Here Rousseau brings in the figure of the legislator, and this is not someone who's
in the government.
This is an outside person, sometimes from outside the society, who Rousseau considers
a genius, someone who attracts people to him by his powers of persuasion.
And he's able to propose to the people, without forcing them, the proper laws that they should
pass.
Rousseau has in mind people like Kyrgyz, who was one of the founders of Sparta, and Moses,
who had legislation, who proposed the legislation for the people of Israel.
They did have political authority also, but Rousseau's legislator wouldn't, he would
just be someone dependent, who would be relying on his powers of persuasion, he would be superior
to everyone else in his intellect, and people would look up to him.
I suspect that Rousseau thought his own books would act in that way on other people, and
and he hoped that other people would learn from his books and put him in the position and treat him as if he were the legislator, even if not in person, just by following what he said in his writings.
In order to have a general will of the kind Rousseau wanted, you would need a fairly small
society. As I said, Rousseau had views on how the government should vary in relation
How many people in the society? But even within those limits didn't go all that far. Once
you had more than a certain number of people, Rousseau doesn't specify exact limits, once
you had more than a certain number of people, you really couldn't get, very unlikely you
get the required consensus that would be needed for general will. So Rousseau wanted a fairly
I think Hannah Arendt is supposed to have said that Rousseau suffered from policy envy.
So, additionally, one of the things that would secure required unity and proper good morals
and manners among the people, education would have to be very carefully regulated and like
Like Plato in both the ideal city of the Republic, Callipolis, the ideal city, the best city
of the laws, Magnesia, like Plato, Rousseau favored censorship.
He wrote, there was a letter he wrote to D'Alembert, one of the figures of the French Enlightenment,
which he very much defends censorship in Geneva.
He said, we shouldn't, it's wrong, people are having too many stage plays, these are
very bad.
It's better to have not stage plays, but festivals in which people participate themselves.
And furthermore, it's very important to regulate the music that people listen to, because if
they listen to the wrong kind of music, this can get people very upset, and then they won't
be in the right frame of mind for proper politics.
The writer, Alan Bloom, who was a follower of Strauss, was also very devoted to Rousseau,
continues this theme very much in his famous attack on current American education, the
closing of the American mind.
He devotes a great deal of attention to what he considers the dangers of rock music, how
this has corrupted youth.
People wondered when they read this, well, if he doesn't like this kind of music, why
is he getting so upset about it?
Why is it such a big deal?
You see, in doing this, he's following very much in Rousseau's footsteps.
This is a very Rousseauian theme.
The music that people listen to is really helping to determine their life. Music is
one of the keys to Rousseau's thought. And Rousseau thought that contemporary French
music was too corrupt, it was too artificial, and he wrote a tax on it, and he defended
Italian music and opera is much better because it wasn't as hyper-refined, it was much better.
This got him into a lot of trouble with the French musicians at the time and kind of prevented
him from being as successful in his musical work as he might have been otherwise.
So, as you see, the society Rousseau depicted in The Social Contract is one that isn't very
friendly to liberty.
It's one where there's kind of a forced unity, and then we say that people are really free
because they're doing what, according to him, they really want to be.
There's an additional aspect to Rousseau's work that's also covered in the social contract.
This is his chapter on civil religion.
As we've seen in previous lectures, religion is a very key theme in the political philosophies.
What is the Proper Role of Religion in Society?
Now, Rousseau, as he does for the origins of society, goes through different theories,
ones that he rejects, different views that he rejects before giving his own view.
Now he first says, in the ancient world, the gods were very closely tied to the city. Each
city really had its own gods. You would find, say among the Greeks, the gods were really
the same one, different cities, but there would be minor variations. So each city would
to have its own special deity to which it would be devoted.
There is a great famous book later in the 19th century by the historian Foustel de Collage
that develops, if you very much defend it, sort of showing how the ancient city was tied
to the gods in a very close way.
Now Rousseau, you might think from what I've said about his wanting to go back to the ancient Greeks, you might think he would endorse this, but he doesn't.
He said, well, you know, we can't accept this because, after all, this polytheistic view isn't true.
There aren't these separate gods for each city, so we have to reject that.
Then the second view we consider is kind of a mild form of Christianity, one that doesn't
have very strict dogmas.
Somehow you have a view where you believe in universal brotherhood and you think Jesus
was kind of a supreme person, but you're not really committed to any theological dogmas.
Rousseau doesn't like this view very much either. He says, what's wrong with this is that it separates people's religious views from their political life.
If people just think politics is just one sphere of life and they have a higher allegiance
namely to religion, and this also could lead to people not being wholehearted, if say there's
a war between one state and another, then people who hold this religious view might
In holding these views, Rousseau is clearly influenced by Machiavelli, who, in his discourses on Livy, has this same view.
So, what Rousseau proposes instead, instead of saying that this mild version of Christianity
or having separate gods in the city, he says what we have instead, we have a religion consisting
of a few articles that everyone has to believe in.
And one is that there is a God, a single God, who is the creator of the world, second, that
people have immortal souls and have, there's rewards and punishments after death.
Remember, this is quite similar to one of Locke's arguments.
Locke says morality is dependent in this way, on this belief, and Rousseau has this also.
So he says also people who hold to those are free then to hold particular, more detailed
religious views of their own, so long as they're tolerant of others, of other religions.
You couldn't have, say, if a religion says that you can only achieve salvation by joining
in that church, then that isn't allowed because that would contribute to disunity in the state.
You could only have religions that accepted the fundamental articles, including being
tolerant of others. Now, what happens if you say someone doesn't agree with that, or then
If he, first he could be admonished, but if he said that, if he agreed, if he said alright, he did agree, but then acted against that, then Rousseau holds, he could be put to death.
you sort of you you really don't you have to really accept this these articles of
civil religion or you didn't if you and if you say you do and you they turn you
don't then you'd be executed you remember where this this proposal comes
from it's similar to Plato's laws with the nocturnal council you have number
in that, but there's also a civil theology of quite similar kind. So I think here again
Rousseau is showing a strong platonic influence. So what Rousseau has come up with is really,
when he talks about people being free, it's really an attempt somehow to reconstruct a
and the version of platonic politics and people would be free only in a very unusual sense of the term.
Let me see, Rousseau, I should say, one thing also I should mention on Rousseau's system.
Given his views, I mentioned he had on property, one wouldn't expect that property would fare
very well, individual property would fare very well in the state that described in the social
contract, and indeed it doesn't.
Sometimes in Rousseau's work, he's more favorable to private property.
For example, in an article he wrote for the Encyclopedia, a great multi-volume work of
the French Enlightened, he wrote the article on political economy for them.
Here he's fairly sympathetic to private property. Other times he's very much opposed. For example,
he wrote suggestions, considerations for the government of Corsica. The Corsican authorities
made the mistake of asking him for proposals on how they could write a constitution. He
had some suggestions. Here he suggests maybe it would be better to do away with private
Property Altogether and Have Everything in Common. So what his usual position, when he
has a social contract, is you would have some individual property but you couldn't have
very large inequalities because this would interfere with the formation of the general
will. So individual property would be quite limited. Again, this is a theme found in Plato's
laws and also in the Republic. So in conclusion then I don't think Rousseau
can be really put in the classical liberal libertarian tradition. All right,
to Rousseau et al.
And hopefully everybody listened to your presentation.
They're clear on the authoritarian aspects, which I agree with,
and I see the platonic side that you spoke about.
I just would like to remind that Rousseau,
he makes a devastating critique of representative government.
That his, in my understanding of the concept of a social contract,
is that if not a state, would it be a plan to found a polity
And the reason why it might be a path to a greater freedom, or at least, and I agree with your comment, equal to the freedom that people previously had before, is because he sees himself as hopefully increasing the more direct participation in government as distinct from representative government.
He has all these ideas about consciousness and everything that makes him seem like he's concerned that maybe people can't govern themselves and he has this idea about civil religion and all that.
But what I understand he's saying about the theater besides censorship is that when people get emotionally excited about observing cultural representation,
And they're moved emotionally by a drama, say, that talks about people's self-governing capacities.
He said, no, no, no, no. Just because they're emotionally excited and you see an action film or you see a great drama,
they're seeing politics for government as outside themselves.
And so his critique, as I understand it in the literature, is that the problem with popular culture doesn't have to be rock and roll music,
Like Blum said, is that people see what you say, the division of labor that reinforces the idea of representative government.
And the division of labor, what's bad about it is it creates a state and civil society dichotomy where citizenship is thought to be separate from state power.
And I think he's a critic of that.
And so the idea of social contracts, if we don't see it as a state and we see it as a project of an enhanced associational life, it's still flawed, but it could have a certain libertarian aspect, and certain scholars like Robert Paul Wolfe and C.L.R. James have seen Musso in a more anarchistic light, which doesn't mean that they haven't missed all the things they're speaking of, which was very important.
Well, thank you. That was, if I may say, an excellent comment. The gist of it, as I understand it, was that in my talk, I stressed the authoritarian aspects of Rousseau, but there are also libertarian aspects, or at least aspects of Rousseau in which he's more in sympathy with libertarianism. Specifically, that
Rousseau is a critic of representation, both in the theater and in government.
He wants to stress the value of popular participation, say, in the government, instead of saying
letting our representatives do everything for us or viewing action movies or listening
to music.
We are involved ourselves in various associations and it is further suggested that there are scholars such as Robert Paul Wolf and CLR James who have written on this theme.
I think there is certainly a measure of truth to that, and I did mention that Rousseau criticizes
people going to the theater instead of participating in the festivals themselves, and you're certainly
right that Rousseau wanted to limit the authority of the government, you know, that would be
not ourselves, the ones who were handling the day-to-day administration, as against
and the general will, but I think the popular participation, remember, is people getting
all together and voting for general policy.
So I don't think it gives adequate stress to the individual, the individual liberties.
This was a theme that the great 19th century classical liberal Benjamin Constant had in
where he distinguished liberty of the ancients and modern sort of the ancient liberty would
be stressing this kind of popular participation, but Constant didn't reject that altogether
but he pointed out the need for more emphasis on individual liberty.
I would just say, since you mentioned Barbara Wolf, I think, Robert Paul, this isn't really
Directly on Rousseau. One book, I think everyone should read, is a very good book on political
philosophy. It's the one by Robert Paul Wolf called In Defense of Anarchy. I'll just put
that down. I should say also, if you look at Rousseau's last work, The Reveries of a
Solitary Walker, it appears he isn't altogether satisfied with the position he took in social
because here he seems to stress not political participation but just his own grasp of what the sentiment of existence, sort of an individual, quite an individual thing.
He's in touch with himself and he seems there to be stressing that as the kind of the most important thing that he's grasped his own sentiment or feeling of existence.
He really, I don't think he really had a statement set up as the one he describes in the social contract. I don't think he would have really fitted in very well in it. Rodman.
to someone else.
It's going to be alienating the liberty to someone else,
then you're not free.
So they think, well, the way the community comes in,
they think, if I just go by myself,
alienating my liberty to the community of no one else
but what I'm going to say to the community.
But if all the members of the community alienate their liberty
to give all the plethora of themselves to the community,
then there's no longer distinction between the rule
The Community as a whole, they're taking authority over all these individual groups.
So somehow, and this is something that worked, but this is an idea that that way you haven't really lost any freedom
because there's no real distinction between the giver of the liberty and the receiver of it.
All these people are getting into this sort of collective body.
And then they would leave to whatever is in the interest of that collective body.
And that's why it can't just be the authority will.
The suggestion was that perhaps we can take Rousseau's argument in this way and say how could he have thought that people were still free if they, given his view of general will, is that instead of each person hasn't alienated his liberty to any particular person,
If you take a person who has alienated his liberty to the whole community, if one person
would do that and nobody else did, then he wouldn't be free.
But if you imagine everybody doing that, everyone has alienated his liberty to the whole community,
then maybe you thought somehow people were still free because there'd be no real distinction
between the individuals and the collective body.
So I think that is probably what he meant and I think the problem there is, as I tried to
bring out in the lecture, is that he's left with the fact that even if there is this kind
of unification taking place in some sense, even if he's right about that, you still haven't
gotten rid of the individual will, sort of the down-to-earth individual, and that will
can still be very much in conflict with what the general will wants.
So even Rousseau is right, he's still wrong.
So there's a very good book on Rousseau by David Gaultier where he brings out this point
that Rousseau really wasn't able to come up with a sense of freedom that fully satisfied
himself. Even his own standards. Anybody else? Yeah.
The question was, regardless of how you feel about Hobbes or Locke, that they take very
consistent positions, but it seems that Rousseau isn't consistent, in fact, it was suggested
is incoherent, so why is it that Rousseau is viewed as an important thinker? What's
the big deal about Rousseau? Well, I think there are a couple things. One is, although
Although he certainly has positions that don't fit well with each other, he has interesting
arguments.
I mean, if you look, say, at the way, at social contracts, you see, he was certainly no dummy.
He had very carefully worked out arguments.
Some of them, they don't always fit with each other.
They are interesting and they've been extremely influential, especially in the French Revolution later writers have looked at him.
I think one reason you ask, why is he influential with people outside this room?
Well, he really formulated some of the key arguments that critics of capitalism have used.
sort of that division of labor alienates people from themselves or that people are not really free if they're dependent on others in the market.
He also had a major influence on the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who thought extremely highly of him.
and I suppose one reason if you could ask your same if you want to ask the same
question about Kant I don't know that you would but if you take Kant as an
important thinker you would have a good reason to take Rousseau was important
also well I think we're out of time though so thank thanks very much