Rousseau and Weber: Two Studies in the Theory of Legitimacy [Reprint ed.] 0415611105, 9780415611107

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WEBER

ROUSSEAU AND WEBER

ROUSSEAU AND WEBER Two Studies in the Theory of Legitimacy

J. G. MERQUIOR

First published in 1984

Reprinted in 2006 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, OX14 4RN 270 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an informa busineSJ

First issued in paperback 2010 © 1984]. G. Merquior All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The publishers have made every effort to contact authors and copyright holders of the works reprinted in the Weber series. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals or organisations we have been unable to trace. These reprints are taken from original copies of each book. In many cases the condition of these originals is not perfect. The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of these reprints, but wishes to point out that certain characteristics of the original copies will, of necessity, be apparent in reprints thereof. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Rousseau and Weber ISBN 13: 978-0-415-40210-1 (set) ISBN 13:978-0-415-40217-0 (volume) (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-61110-7 (pbk) Routledge Library Editions: Weber

Rousseau and Weber Two studies in the theory of legitimacy

J. G. Merquior

~ ~~o~;~;n~~;up LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published in 1980 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016 Set in Linotron Times by Input Typesetting Ltd, London

©

J. G. Merquior 1980 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Merquior, J G Rousseau and Weber. - (International library of sociology). 1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques - Political science 2. Weber, Max 3. Legitimacy of governments I. Title II. Series 320'.01 JC179.R9 ISBN 0 7100 0513 X

For H.

Being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just. Pascal

Unanimity is almost always an indication of servitude. Charles de Remusat

Nor in the critic let the man be lost. Pope

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: the problem of legitimacy in social theory I Rousseau and Weber as typical theorists of legitimacy II The concept of legitimacy: norm- and power-legitimacy III Theories of legitimacy: subjectivist and objectivist IV 'Belief theory and 'power' theory of legitimacy V The rise of social theory: the birth of the idea of social problem in the Enlightenment

1 1 2 4 6 9

Part one Rousseau's political philosophy

1

Rousseau's theory of political legitimacy: the general will

17

2 The intellectual background of the Social Contract

25

3 Conflicting misinterpretations and unilateral assessments

35

4

The theory of democratic legitimacy

5 Concluding remarks: Rousseau the 'anarchist'

57 77

Part two Weber's sociology of legitimacy

6

An outline of Weber's theory of legitimacy

89

viii 7

8

CONTENTS

A brief assessment of Weber's theory of legitimacy I Conceptual queries: on charisma II Empirical objections: on bureaucracy III The suggestiveness of Weber's typology: towards a theory of charismatic bureaucracy IV The theoretical status of Weber's theory of legitimacy Historicism and sociology I Historicisms galore II The logic of historical science III The theory of social causality IV Cultural history as sociological explanation V Rationalization takes command VI The nemesis of culturalism

104 104 113 122 130 137

138 146 155 171

180 188

Conclusion

202

Notes

225

Bibliography

248

Index of subjects

267

Index of authorities

271

Acknowledgments

A slightly different version of the following studies was presented as a PhD thesis at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where they have greatly benefited from the critical supervision of Professor Ernest Gellner and also from the comments of the external examiner, Geoffrey Hawthorn, from Cambridge. On the other hand, as part and parcel of an ongoing research on the theory and history of legitimacy concepts, this work has been the subject of constant if intermittent exchanges of ideas with a number of friends: Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco, Alberto da Costa e Silva, Arnaldo Carrilho, Celso Lafer, Claude Levi-Strauss, Ernst Topitsch, Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Gabriel Cohn, Gilberto Freyre, Heloisa Vilhena de Araujo, Jose Francisco Rezek, Jose Jeronimo M. de Souza, Jean-Marie Benoist, Kenneth Minogue, Leandro Konder, Leszek Kolakowski, Lucio Colletti, Luiz Navarro de Brito, MarcHio Marques Moreira, Perry Anderson, Raymond Aron, Roberto de Oliveira Campos (who generously encouraged the perpetration of this book), Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Roberto Schwarz, Raphael Valentino Sobrinho, Sergio P. Rouanet, Shirley Robin Letwin .... Needless to say, none of them can be responsible for my views on our two heroes. By far the main victim of my obsession with legitimacy, however, has been my wife. I wonder how much of her personal partiality towards Jean-Jacques (as against Max) is reflected in what follows. I should also like to thank the libraries of the LSE and of King's College, London, Mr Eloi Rosa and a wonderful librarian, Miss Ophelia Vesentini, for their prompt help in gathering the literature without which these pages could never have been written. Finally, I am very grateful to Peter Hopkins, of Routledge & Kegan Paul, and to the director of the International Library of Sociology, Professor John Rex, for their welcome to

X

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

this book, as well as to Julia Warner, for the competence and friendly solicitude with which she edited it.

J. G. M. London, October 1979

Introduction The problem of legitimacy in social theory

I Rousseau and Weber as typical theorists of legitimacy

This book is chiefly an attempt to describe and assess the theory of legitimacy at two distinct stages and levels of social theory: the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) and the sociology of Max Weber (1864-1920). There seems to be general agreement as to the fact that the problem of legitimacy figures at the very heart of our concern with the nature and value of modern society. Being as it is a main dimension of political culture - the dimension where the validity of power forms is at stake - legitimacy has indeed become a key issue in contemporary social theory. We propose to make a contribution to the history of its conceptual realization by scrutinizing the work of two thinkers usually reckoned to be at the forefront of social theory, and, within the latter, as the two most influential classics of an explicit analysis of legitimacy. Rousseau and Weber are as different in spirit as they are distant in time. Therefore, the present book is actually composed of two quite separate studies, only tangentially connected. Nevertheless, the very contrast between our two theorists yields a fairly illuminating perspective on the concept of legitimacy. Indeed, each of them might very well be taken as the supreme representative, the archetype, so to speak, of one of two basic ways of looking at the phenomenon of legitimacy: that which views it in terms of belief, and that which sees it in terms of power. While JeanJacques Rousseau was the main founder of what we might call the 'power theory of legitimacy', Max Weber remains the locus classicus of the 'belief theory of legitimacy'. But this distinction calls for some elaboration; in order fully to understand its import, we 1

INTRODUCTION

must cast a glance at the mainlines of the history of the concept of legitimacy, both long before Rousseau and after Weber. II The concept of legitimacy: norm- and power-legitimacy

The cradle of legitimacy theory was legal philosophy. In Classical Latin legitimus meant just 'lawful, according to law'. Cicero employs the expressions legitimum imperium, potestas legitima when referring to power and magistrates lawfully established. The De Officiis (III, 108) distinguishes the legitimate enemy (legitimus hostis) from the robber or pirate, because treaties are signed with the first, and they are law-like documents. Apparently, ancient Greek did not possess a special word for legitimate (as distinct from lawful) either. Nominon meant just lawful; if we believe Xenophon's report (Memorabilia, IV, 4), Socrates once had a lot of trouble to convince Hippias that the lawful (nominon) was also just (dikaion). With the Middle Ages, the word /egitimitas enters the stage; however, it now came to denote that which is in conformity with custom, rather than with the law 1 : in the semantics of legitimacy, the medieval mind replaced lex by consuetudo (to which the Greek nomos was akin), thus adumbrating the millenary difference between the two European ideas of right: continental Romanism and Anglo-Saxon common law. But it was also in the Middle Ages that the idea of legitimacy was decisively brought closer to the experience of power. Actually, the rise of the concept of legitimacy as a political problem was prompted by the collapse of direct rule in the ancient world. It owes much to the substitution of imperial authority for the direct democracy of the agora or the personal rule of local tyrants. Thus the medieval application of 'legitimate' to persons in office reflects the long acquaintance with the power of deputies of the emperors and popes. The practical need for justifying such delegations of authority naturally stimulated the theoretical analysis of the validity of power, or legitimacy. With Thomas Aquinas, as with Bartolo di Sassoferrato in the fourteenth century, a subtle distinction between two kinds of tyranny was drawn. Tyranny ex parte exercitii meant illegality, whereas tyranny ex defectu tituli meant illegitimacy. 2 One might date from this 'gothic' a contrario concept of legitimate power highly sensitive as it was to the occurrence of illegitimacy - the dawn of legitimacy theory. Medieval law and philosophy established, therefore, the notion of legitimacy as a quality of the title to rulership. They also advanced the idea of consent as constitutive of legitimate power. 2

INTRODUCTION

The first definition of governmental legitimacy as derived from consent grounded on natural law is due to William of Occam (first half of the fourteenth century), the thinker whose nominalism so profoundly revolutionized medieval philosophy. The basis of Occam's reasoning was the older medieval argument quod omnes tanget - what touches all must be approved by all. Popular consent was boldly advocated in the political theory of Occam's contemporary, Marsiglia of Padua. In the following century, Nicholas of Cusa transformed the old jusnaturalist tenet of natural equality from a primitive state of innocence into the logical prop for legitimizing consent to government in church and state. The jura-political theoretical framework was to prevail among early modern political philosophers, from Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf to Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau, all of whom engaged the problem of validity in power relations, internal or (as in Grotius) international. Grotius's restructuring of the concept of international law, Hobbes's theory of obligation, Pufendorfs classic statement of the twofold nature of the social covenant, Locke's defence of natural rights and Rousseau's doctrine of the social contract as 'general will' all enriched the very idea of legitimacy, and left their mark on many a past and present notion about legitimate authority, as also did the much more proto-sociological work of Montesquieu. Coming now to the contemporary scene, we may credit it with two significant accretions. First, in the juridical field, modern theorists renewed the concept of legitimate norm. While for Kelsen the latter amounts to a validity strictly immanent to the positive, as distinct from 'natural', law, Herbert Hart favours a qualified positivism, which allows for a 'minimal overlap between law and morality'. 3 In The Concept of Law, Professor Hart claims that, given some basic 'truisms' about human nature (viz., men are liable to harm; they are approximately equal in intellectual and physical abilities; they are limited in their good will toward others, and in their own selfcontrol; they live in a world of scarcity), men, in order to be able to live together, actually require a certain amount of 'fundamental' rules guaranteeing a degree of mutual forbearance. Unless these rules are followed, there is no point, in fact, in having any laws at all; for society these are minimum requirements for its existence, and, after all, society cannot possibly be, argues Hart, 'a suicide club'. As a consequence, one cannot wisely subscribe to the radical legal positivist tenet that 'law may have any content'. Thus, without accepting the sanguine assumptions of classical jusnaturalism about man's natural inclination toward the good, Hart incorporates to his qualified legal positivism what he deems the 3

INTRODUCTION

'core of good sense' of natural law theory, in its concern for legitimacy, and not just the legality, of the norm. But the modern theorists also contributed another significant innovation: they considerably enriched our concept of legitimate power. Here, as might be expected, the main ideas came from a relatively young discipline, namely, political science. Let us briefly consider the highlights of its approach to legitimacy. III Theories of legitimacy: subjectivist and objectivist

Broadly speaking, there are two concepts of legitimacy in contemporary political science: subjectivist and objectivist. From the subjectivist standpoint- that of Carl Joachim Friedrich, Seymour Martin Lipset or David Easton - the problem of legitimacy amounts to 'the question of fact whether a given rulership is believed to be based on good title by most men subject to it'. This conception deserves to be termed 'subjectivist' because it identifies legitimacy with 'the conviction on the part of the member that it is right and proper ... to accept and obey the authorities'. 5 The subjectivist concept of legitimacy yielded some useful analytical results. Easton's well-known classification of the basic objects of political support within a given political system is a case in point. These are the community (generally, a nation-state), the regime and the authorities. For instance, in 1974 America, loyalty to the community and to the regime remained quite widespread, while the legitimacy of the number one authority, President Nixon, quickly vanished. In Weimar Germany, the legitimacy of the community was intensely felt, but the regime enjoyed only a very precarious support from most of the national elites. Finally, for a large number of people from Quebec or from Scotland, the legitimacy of Canada or the United Kingdom as their respective political communities is very much in question - and for most of the Lebanese, the legitimacy of Lebanon as a two-confessional state seems now (1978) hopelessly wrecked. The concept of legitimacy as a conviction of the ruled also highlighted a key experiential aspect, that of the element of trust involved in the operation of legitimacy. Operationally, in fact, legitimacy may be described as the result of the trust put on rulers by the ruled. In his well-known study, Nation-Building and Citizenship, Reinhard Bendix stressed this fiduciary note by likening political legitimacy to the confidence the depositors of a bank have in its soundness. It is this confidence that allows the bank to invest the depositors' savings for extended spells, on the reasonable assumption that their owners will not all decide to withdraw 4

INTRODUCTION

all their money simultaneously. Likewise, incumbent authorities tend to see the public acceptance of their rule as a kind of implicit mandate from the people to govern in an expected manner. Not, of course, in any manner, for, just like the bank's credit, the people's mandate is never, normally, carte blanche; still, in legitimacy as in banking, the margin of discretion to rule or to invest is usually quite large. However, despite this modicum of analytical gains, not everyone is happy about the subjectivist approach. Equating legitimacy with the contingent feelings of the ruled says next to nothing about the criteria of legitimacy. As Peter Stillman remarked, some epoch-making claims of legitimacy - e.g. the traditionalism of Burke, or, closer to us, the nationalism of de Gaulle- simply do not fit in Friedrich-like standards. They posit objective criteria, that is to say, criteria which are external to the mere floating 'conviction' of the majority. 'A government is legitimate', writes Stillman, 'if and only if the results of governmental output are compatible with the value pattern of the society.' More specifically, legitimacy is the compatibility between the results of governmental output with the value patterns held by the several groups within the society. 6 Hence the posibility of a lack of overall legitimacy whenever the society's value pattern is too bifurcated, or, as in civil war, too fraught with inner antagonisms due to social cleavages. Note that whereas, in the subjectivist concept, stress was laid on the political plan, with a clear focus on the rulers/ruled relation, in the objectivist approach, the emphasis has somehow shifted from the political to the socio-cultural. The main focus now falls on social values, not the experience of rule. Significantly enough, the theory of legitimacy as a symbol of social values first arose (in the work of Karl Deutsch) under the influence of Talcott Parsons's apotheosis of the role of values in 'social systems'. The objectivists' goal was to remove the analysis of legitimacy from the flux of opinion. They rightly thought that, for all its laudable 'democratism', this plebiscitarian view of legitimacy (legitimacy, said Renan, is 'the plebiscite of everyday') made it into a blanket notion, easily assimilated to the most superficial moods of the collective mind. Yet the outcome of their efforts seems in turn nothing less than a blind alley: the intractable puzzle of how to ascribe values to social groups on a reasonable empirical basis. Those who know the difficulty of inferring value-beliefs from avowed preferences ascertained in research polls have the right to be quite sceptical in the face of any facile optimism about value ascription. So the objectivist approach turns out to be a liability on two scores: it introduces an unwelcome distance

5

INTRODUCTION

between our conceptual weaponry and the actual political experience of legitimacy (or illegitimacy), and all it substitutes for the shallowness of subjectivist analysis is a set of improbable assumptions about value-sharing in society. IV 'Belief' theory and 'power' theory of legitimacy

Be that as it may, there seems to be at least an element common to the subjectivist and the value concept of legitimacy. In both of them, in fact, everything revolves around the same assumption: the assumption of belief. Needless to say, the subjectivist approach stresses the 'psychological' side of the legitimating belief, while the objectivist one gives pride of place to the social aspect, external to the ruled's consciousness, of value-beliefs. Yet both found the experience of legitimacy upon a common ground, believing in the rulers' claims to power. Belief is therefore a major experiential aspect of legitimacy, and as such the very rationale of the trust element we mentioned a few paragraphs ago. It is here that we find one of our two heroes, Max Weber. For Weber remains the theorist par excellence of legitimacy as being first and foremost (as will be discussed in detail in Chapter 6) a matter of belief ( Glaube), so that studying his theory of legitimacy is one of the best conceivable ways of vetting the meaning and value of a whole school of thought on the subject. Viewing legitimacy as grounded on belief enabled social theory to make a considerable progress in the identification of claims to legitimacy throughout history. Actually, since, as already intimated, the empirical imputation of legitimating beliefs to the ruled is more often than not a moot point, one could even say that the best of legitimacy analysis to date belongs to historical political sociology, and consists in the anatomical description, as it were, of the beliefs of the rulers in their own legitimacy, as embodied in ideologies of rulership. The resulting historical taxonomy of patterns of historically given legitimacy claims soon became part of the stock-in-trade of macro-sociology, a discipline which is to a large extent based on generalizations provided by the submission of the historical record to the comparative method. Weber's own celebrated trichotomy - traditional, charismatic and rational-legal legitimacy - still embodies the paradigm of such analysis. Nevertheless, no theory centred on rulers' claims can possibly qualify as a satisfactory empirical description of legitimacy, since it leaves altogether unanswered the question of ascertaining the other, decisive, side of the experience of legitimacy: the view from below. As a matter of fact, this problem will engage our attention when assessing (in Chapter 7) Weber's sociology of legitimacy, 6

INTRODUCTION

which is overtly 'ruler-centred'. In particular, no such theory seems to be much illuminating when it comes to the crucial issue of distinguishing between degrees of validity in power situations. Legitimacy and illegitimacy are only exceptionally an either-or matter; rather, legitimacy patterns form a continuum of degrees, but its analysis can hardly proceed without warranted references to the actual feelings of the ruled, well beyond the mere identification- no matter how sophisticated- of the rulers' ideology. The ultimate question, therefore, appears to be the following: can we find a conceptual path which would avoid both the superficiality of the 'subjectivist' approach to legitimacy analysis and the empirical shortcomings of the 'objectivist' value or claim approach? Now the very fact that both these insufficient perspectives share a 'belief theory' of legitimacy suggests that our answer may lie in an alternative way of conceptualizing our phenomenon. This alternative consists, I submit, in conceiving of legitimacy in terms of power. (We could name this kind of approach cratic, in order to distinguish it from the 'belief' one, whether subjectivist or objectivist.) In a sense, seeing legitimacy in terms of power already enjoys a certain degree of citizenship in contemporary sociological theory (though the field is still very much dominated by the 'belief' schools). Arthur Stinchcombe, for example, pioneered what we call the cratic approach when he defined legitimacy as a 'power reserve'. Stinchcombe's reasoning underscores the role of credibility in the experience of legitimacy. According to him, a power is reckoned legitimate whenever its holder can effectively call on other centres of power for support. The psychological element is therefore by no means eliminated from the cratic perspective. But mark the difference: we are dealing now with credibility, not credence. There is no question of believing as in faith, only of believing in the sense of cool expectation and assent. The prime psychological aspect involved does not necessarily imply any kind of faith in the rulers, just a sheer calculus of costs and benefits on the part of the ruled. When I obey the policeman, it is not at all because I believe in him; it is just because I believe him to be quite able to be backed in his authority by other, higher lawful powers in the country, which it would be quite foolish of me to resist. We saw that, for the Parsonians and their like, the 'social system' is basically ruled by a set of core values, which permeate all the main functions of society. Stinchcombe mercilessly reverts the shift. In his view, social values are effective only where they are backed by power mechanisms. 7 Institutions are foci of power 7

INTRODUCTION

at the service of distinct values and interests. See what happened to Protestant values in Europe, for instance. Where they were upheld by the crown, they survived and prevailed. Where they weren't, they didn't. In other words, their legitimacy went challenged wherever its power reserve was weak. However, one cannot help noticing that something is amiss in this 'cratic' picture, too. For, in a decisive sense, legitimacy as a power reserve scarcely deserves its name. What is legitimacy, after all, but the experience of the validity of a given normative order? Even at its strictest 'empiricalness', legitimacy is a de jure, not a de facto issue. Now, nothing in the Stinchcombian rule indicates that he experiences anything like a sense of validity. He bows before power out of an awareness of coercive prospects in case he doesn't - and that is all. There is no logical difference, at this juncture, between the citizen who obeys the lawful policeman and the victim of a hireling of the Mafia. Is not whe latter, most conspicuously, a formidable power reserve? Of course. And yet should we, on this sole account, pronounce it to be legitimate? Of course not. But if this is so, then something is missing in our 'cratic' description of legitimacy. But let us try another way of thinking in 'cratic' terms about legitimacy. Let us for a while forget the notion of a power reserve and all that it implies of the backing legitimate power enjoys, and turn to the idea of power situation. The first thing observable in power situations is their variety. In fact, as soon as we (following Roderick Martin) isolate the basic components of power situations, first, the occurrence of asymmetrical patterns of dependence, hinging upon differences in the ability to control access to desired resources, and, second, the bigger or smaller availability of escape routes to the subordinate, we see that several possible power configurations arise. Put in a nutshell, the general picture would be the following: (a) too asymmetrical a dependence coupled with easy escape invites coercion on the part of superordinates; (b) too much dependence without any easy escape routes calls, in principle, for non-coercive authority, because the availability of escape renders coercion ineffective or too painstaking, while the subordinates will normally prefer to shun coercion; (c) a lesser dependence with difficult escape shapes a nice mould for influence; for, on the one hand, the power difference between superordinates and subordinates is not so large, but on the other, the latter are bound to remain in the power 8

INTRODUCTION

situation - thereby a transactional figure of power is likely to emerge; (d) finally, if dependence is not markedly asymmetrical and escape is available, there evolves a situation in which power will tend to take the form of authority based on free consent. 8 Power situations (a) and (c), i.e. defined by coercion or influence, have obviously little room for legitimacy feelings. Again, situation (b), authority without consent, or rather, authority resting on faute de mieux consent, denotes a power relation, so to speak, sublegitimate. Only situation (d), marked by authority based on free consent, seems in turn fully compatible with conscious feelings of legitimacy, equated with the free trust of the ruled in their rulers and their genuine belief in the latters' claim to rulership. Now, in all the history of social theory, no name has been more closely associated with the advocacy of legitimate authority as power based on the full freedom of consent than that of Rousseau. Therefore we might state that, whenever the 'cratic' approach to legitimacy retains a due concern with the validity of power in the eyes of the ideally free ruled, the shadow of Rousseau is bound to loom large in the analysis. For just as Weber is the quintessential analyst of legitimacy in its dimension of belief, Rousseau is the paradigmatic thinker of legitimacy in its normative level of power. One was the greatest anatomist of ruling justifications of rule; the other, the greatest legislator of legitimate authority devised for the sake of the ruled. Each of our two studies, then, will be devoted to spelling out and evaluating their two different attempts at looking into legitimacy as historical claim and as political ideal. So much for the historical framework of legitimacy analysis in social theory, and the place of both Rousseau and Weber in it. But before we enter the study of the former, we might as well say a word about the origins of the intellectual environment within which a proper theoretical problematique of legitimacy was brought forward, that is, about 'social theory' itself. V The rise of social theory: the birth of the idea of social problem in the Enlightenment

The rise of legitimacy to the full status of a genuine sociological subject was due to classical sociology in the work of Max Weber. But long before this legitimation of legitimacy in academic social science, apart from legal studies, a distinguished intellectual tradition had made the phenomenon of the validity of institutions into one of its major concerns. Indeed, it does not sound very rash to think that the theoretical realization of legitimacy issues within 9

INTRODUCTION

society at large, as well as the keenness to examine them from a non-juridical and (partly) non-speculative point of view, coincided with the very formation of 'social theory' in the modern sense. But to get this clear, we must explain what is meant by social theory in this modern acceptation. In the sense of an often implicit doctrine about the social order, including a strong awareness of legitimacy and its contrary, social theory is as old as the oldest known mythologies. In the sense of (to employ a philosophical term) thematic theory of socio-political principles, it goes back to at least Plato - a philosopher, incidentally, quite obsessed by what he considered the illegitimacy of the polis. But Plato is not, of course, a social theorist in the modern fashion. So where lies the difference? Perhaps the best way to grasp it is a brief historical consideration. If we proceed with a minimum of historical-mindedness, we can hardly escape the impression that 'social theory' in any meaning basically close to ours is something whose cradle was the Enlightenment. Now, whenever we speak of the Enlightenment, we tend to evoke at once its secularism and its love for science. Nevertheless, the secular tone so readily associated with enlightened writings did not harbour alone the specific novelty we are seeking. The secularized approach to politics dates spectacularly from Machiavelli, less notoriously from Marsiglio of Padua, a contemporary of Petrarch; but Machiavelli is not exactly the kind of intellectual we have in mind when we think of social theory. Could it be, then that the main roots of social theory lie in that rationalist spirit which, succeeding Renaissance humanism, sealed so powerful an alliance between new philosophy and Galilean science in the seventeenth century and bequeathed it to the science-worshipping 'philosophes'? Not quite, for nobody applied the razor's edge of rationalist philosophy to political thought more sharply than Hobbes - and yet, it is by no means plausible, nor indeed usual, to rank him among modern social theorists proper. 'Social theory' peculiarly belongs to the Enlightenment because of four main aspects (each of which was, in their time, an intellectual revolution in its own right). Firstly, modern social theory exhibits a concern for determinisms affecting social processes. This 'materialist' sense of determinisms did not appear in full before Montesquieu. Secondly, mainstream eighteenth-century social theorists were keen to adopt a Lockean logic of research. At the outset of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke directed the science of man to engage in a 'historical, plain method' - the scientific method of Bacon and Newton, instead of cultivating worn-out 'speculations' about the 'essence' of the mind. Taking 10

INTRODUCTION

up this empirical-minded programme, many a progressive school of thought, among which the Scottish enlightenment was quite prominent, embarked upon a study of man and society identified with the search for structures and functions, at a far remove from essentialist constructions. Thirdly, eighteenth-century social theory managed to separate, for analytical purposes, 'society' from 'state' - a vital achievement for the launching of sociology as a scientific programme. Lastly, enlightened social theory, in overall terms, fed on an emancipatory drive. 'Enlightenment is man's release from his selfincurred tutelage', wrote Kant, defining 'tutelage', as 'man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another'. 9 The emancipation of reason, Kant's famous sapere aude! became the motto of Enlightenment. In practice, however, emancipation meant a relentless impulse towards the critique of key extant institutions - a new, widespread doubting of their legitimacy. Coupled with the sense of determinisms, the willingness to perform empirical research and the identification of societal structures, this emancipatory drive pervaded most of eighteenth-century social thinking. It was this, for instance, which induced a Voltaire or a Lessing to denounce the arbitrariness of state church dogma; it was this which led Hume to undermine, so decisively, moral objectivism; it was this which animated Smith's plea for the liberation of economic forces from political constraints and guildlike business privileges; and again it was this which inspired Rousseau's bold reshuffling of social contract theory. Now the emancipatory drive in Enlightenment social theory fostered a recurrent reflection on the validity of social arrangements. Although Rousseau remained largely isolated (however influential on several scores) in his global rejection of the course of civilization, nearly every main theorist of the French lumieres, the British Enlightenment and the German AufkHirung questioned in earnest major dimensions of the social order. The social and political stances of these thinkers varied a lot, from support of 'enlightened despotism' to communist utopianism. On the whole, however, they present an unmistakably daring reformist mentality. At the heart of their reformism, there lay what one author has aptly summarized as the displacement of 'piety in social attitudes' but 'the habit of asking for results'. And as the same writer, Charles Fraenkel, perspicuously comments, this frame of mind ultimately gave birth to the very idea that there are such things as 'social problems' . 10 We owe to the Enlightenment legacy the recognition that social problems are but evils and deficiencies 11

INTRODUCTION

springing from man-made institutions, which are as such reformable by the intervention of critical reason. 'Modern' social theory is, then, the critical, vocationally scientific approach to social problems. That was the outlook that first arose in the Enlightenment and its 'age of reform'. In a sense, eighteenth-century social theory was, if you wish, social engineering in the bud. Unlike, however, most of contemporary versions of social engineering, enlightened social theory was strongly committed to challenging the very foundations of ancien regime society, taking issue at their pretence to legitimacy. In so doing, the philosophes put legitimacy into the centre of their main enquiries. That they did seldom analyse legitimacy in itself did not at all deflect them from focusing on crucial legitimacy issues. Indeed, they had made legitimacy, almost everywhere, into a 'social problem'. In point of fact, when eighteenth-century social theory explicitly discussed legitimacy, it often remained in the grip of a traditional level of discourse. Thus Montesquieu, as he analysed, in books II to VIII of The Spirit of Laws, the 'types of government', considerably updated Aristotle's time-honoured typology. Aristotle's Politics distinguished three kinds of political regimes, monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, as well as their respective illegitimate versions, despotism, oligarchy and the rule of the mob. Montesquieu's triadic scheme, republic, monarchy and despotism, introduces two significant changes. It lumps together two of the Aristotelian forms - aristrocracy and democracy- under one heading (republic). Moreover, it elevates what was for Aristotle just a degenerate form- despotism- into a main type, explainable in terms of social volume (since Montesquieu thought political stability in large, populous empires had to rely on widespread fear on the part of the ruled), yet as derogatory, in the author's view, as it had been in classical times. The last point illustrates perfectly our contention, for here Montesquieu locates illegitimacy (and therefore, a contrario, legitimacy) exactly where ancient thought used to do. On the other hand, between Montesquieu and Weber, social theory both deepened and expanded the critical intelligence of the phenomenon of (il)legitimacy. It deepened it by seeking to discuss the social foundations of existing (and admittedly spurious) or of ideal (and genuine) patterns of political authority. It expanded it by extending the enquiry on the lawfulness of several social practices and institutions, thereby opening up for critical reflection a whole set of as yet largely unquestioned areas where collective feelings about validity pertain. The world of work, the realm of

12

INTRODUCTION

education, the experience of art - to say nothing of religion were just some of these new provinces. We shall now turn to the thinker in whose writings this process of deepening and expansion of the critical theory of legitimacy reached its first peak: Rousseau.

13

part one Rousseau's political philosophy

1

Rousseau's theory of political legitimacy: the general will

If we take the deepening and expansion of the critical reflection on legitimacy issues as criteria for gauging the strength with which social theory, in the modern sense, faced the subject (and, to a large extent, identified itself with this task), then the greatest individual thinker to emerge, until at least the mid-nineteenth century, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78). No other social theorist of his time at once sharpened and unfolded the critical perspective on the forms and dimensions of validity in society; in none was the social criticism which animated the Enlightenment at the same time more radical and more comprehensive. Rousseau is at the root of deep changes in western ideas about standards of legitimacy in at least four areas: political thought, religious sentiment, education and literature. But we shall refer only in passing to his tremendous importance in religion, pedagogy and letters; for lack of space and for the sake of cogency, we shall concentrate on his redefinition of the basis of political legitimacy. However, the best known among the premises of his political theory is an assumption clearly central to his views in education and 'natural religion' as much as in politics: the postulate of the natural goodness of man. The idea most usually associated with the name of Rousseau is his epoch-making claim that so much of what had been regarded, in the worst side of man's predicament, as inherently human was in reality but the product of society. For Rousseau, evil was not a native blemish in man; it had sprung from the degeneration of social life. Moralists had relentlessly stated that unhappiness was a consequence of vice. Rousseau wanted to show that vice is a consequence of unhappiness, and that unhappiness has social causes. 1 Plato held that contact with the body stains the soul; Rousseau, who significantly cites the Platonic myth of the soul's fall from purity in the preface of

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the Discourse on Inequality, replaces 'body' by 'society'. The 'great principle' of all his writings, said he at the outset of Emile au de l'education, was just this: that nature made man good and happy, yet society depraved him and made him wretched. Rousseau's real concern was not so much the assertion of man's congenital goodness as the denial of his intrinsic perversity. As such, it amounted, as is well known, to a rejection of Hobbes's view of the human condition. 2 Not that eighteenth-century social theory waited for Rousseau to refute the gloomy anthropology of Leviathan: the first book of The Spirit of the Laws (an influential work, like Hobbes's, with which Rousseau was more than conversant) already discarded the idea of man's natural aggressiveness and endeavoured to show that it was a social, rather than human, phenomenon. But Rousseau went far beyond Montesquieu's sober qualifications. Using his outstanding rhetorical skill, he built an impressive array of sweeping indictments of civilization, accusing the whole course of history of having betrayed justice and happiness. As he saw it, equality among men had been destroyed by the very pristine forms of the division of labour and private property. Since time immemorial, mastery of nature had been paid for with the bitter seeds of disquiet and oppression. 'It was iron and corn which first civilized men, and ruined humanity.' What was until so recently - until the coming of rabid conservationism - celebrated as 'the neolithic revolution' - Rousseau cursed as the original sin. So, the same man who removed the problem of evil from religion into politics3 also drew a powerful interpretation of history as a kind of lay Fall. Rousseau was no crude primitivist. 4 The idea of the 'noble savage' living in an utterly blissful 'state of nature' was a fable convenue of his time, but he took pains to warn that natural man, although not a bad fellow, was not a full moral being. Morality, as language, presupposes for Rousseau life in society. Rousseau's Arcadia, his image of mankind's golden age, did not coincide, for that matter, with any natural state, but rather with 'the youth of the world', the first stage in the evolution of society. At any rate, as the preface to the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality peremptorily asserts, the state of nature is only a 'hypothesis', a conceptual device, a foil and yardstick which enables us 'to form a proper judgment of our present state' and measure the extent of mankind's depravation. In this hypothetical Rousseauian state of nature man is neither moral nor immoral, but rather amoral (provided we cleanse the term of its original Wildean flippancy). It was Locke, and not Rousseau, who fancied that natural man lived in a perfect moral 18

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condition, and thought man capable of achieving humanity before entering social relationships. It was the Lockean Condillac who stressed that biological (as distinct from social) man already contains within himself all of his species' perfectibility. For Rousseau, perfectibility, besides not being, as the Enlightenment was inclined to believe, automatic, is indissolubly linked to sociability. Thus the Rousseauian politicization of the problem of theodicy goes hand in hand with a veritable socialization of the idea of morality. He therefore regarded justice, as much as evil, as something essentially social. And that is why Rousseau, always keen on paradoxes, found himself facing a very big one: he had held society responsible for inequality and injustice, and yet he also stated that only by social means could man ever get rid of such evils. In short, he contended that society alone can undo what society did. Rousseau in fact set out to wrestle with a thorny problem: how can civilized man recover the goodness and happiness of natural man, given that a return to the innocence and happiness of natural life is not only inconceivable but, from the viewpoint of morality, even undesirable, since only social man possesses, despite his present profligacy, the privilege of moral sense? His solution was two-fold: it lay in the call of the inner voice, and in the reliance on the general will. The inner voice was a kind of higher instinct, an instinctive ethicity springing pure and uncorrupted from the heart of man. As stated by the Savoyard Vicar, whose celebrated 'profession of faith' is inbuilt in Emile, 'conscience is an innate principle of justice and virtue, whereby we judge our own or other men's actions good or evil'. Heeding the commandments of this spontaneous moral sense, man in society can overcome the faults of history. Such a concept looms as large in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality as in Emile, but it also plays a role, as will be seen, in his political writings. 'The idea that man must be perfected by reason in accordance with his nature runs through all of Rousseau's work.' 5 Listening to his inner voice, man can reprieve himself from the wicked oppression of society. Nevertheless, men, as a whole, cannot. Societies, or at least some societies, can only be put right by acting in accordance with a collective voice of reason, which is political and not just moral. It is this inner voice writ large, and politicized, that Rousseau calls, in the Social Contract, the 'general will'. The aim of the Social Contract is to show what can lend legitimacy to the social order (bk I, ch. 1). 'Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.' 'How did such a change happen?'

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asks Rousseau at once. Then, after quickly saying that he does not know (in point of fact, the explanation had been precisely the subject matter of the Discourse on Inequality), he faces to the central issue of the book: 'what can make such a change legitimate?' What can legitimize this fateful deviance from the state of nature? This question he believes he can answer, by means of a new theory of the social contract. But why must it be a social contract theory? Because, explains Rousseau (in ch. V of the first draft of Du Contrat social, the socalled Geneva manuscript; and in bk I, chs II-IV of the final version of the same treatise), all other current explanations of the social bond rest on 'false notions'. Such unsatisfactory explanations attribute the origin 9f the social order, and hence of political compliance, to one of four things: either they see political rule as an extension of 'natural', i.e. parental, authority, or as a rightful claim of the wealthy, or as the product of conquest (might is right), or as the result of legitimation of usurpation by time ('prescription' derived from lengthy 'tacit consent'). Now, in the eyes of Rousseau, none of these claims proves able to justify political obedience. Neither time nor nature, force nor economic power engenders a genuine right and a lawful obligation. Therefore the source of all legitimate authority must be elsewhere - it must reside in a free covenant, for only this can have been dictated, not by fear merely disguised as voluntary compliance, but by the sense of 'common interest'. The goal could not be stated more clearly: it is the justification of a political order, the reasoned establishment of a principle of legitimacy. Which amounts to nothing less than 'to found the state upon its basis' (bk IV, ch. IX). Rousseau's position in the history of ideas about legitimacy stems exactly from his particular way of outlining such foundations. Its rationale comes down to the following. The just society, thought Rousseau, must be so built that its members may dispense with any resorting to 'natural rights' against the iniquity of positive law. In other words, its actual law itself ought to conform with the dictates of justice. Now laws in the elaboration of which all citizens would take part could in principle merge positive with rational legislation, since the product of such free and egalitarian law-making would most likely embody the common interest, which is justice. The 'general will' is precisely the common interest ascertained in free and egalitarian law-making. That makes it the legitimate aim, as well as the result, of a social contract. The general will is the natural telos of the social covenant. Note the parallel between the general will and the inner voice of freedom and morality. The inner voice of natural reason called

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for liberty. In bridging the gap between positive law and natural right, the social contract as general will also works for freedom and equality - a state which in Rousseau is always the equivalent of freedom from dependence and oppression. But there is also a more down-to-earth bent in Rousseau's reasoning. Every past or extant political rule, he thinks, presupposes a previous social pact. 'If, as Grotius said, a people may give itself to a king, then it was already a people before it gave itself.' Consequently, before examining any act of submission, one must scrutinize 'the act whereby a people is a people'. Such a bond, prior to any other, harbours the 'true foundations of society' (bk I, ch. V). This line of argument seems more down-to-earth than the rationale of justice and freedom above in that it does not resort to any visible ethical imperative, but only to a 'logical' one. I do not mean these approaches are in any way contradictory one with the other; I just want to stress - for reasons that will be manifest later on - that they are quite distinct, and that Rousseau uses the second, or logical, kind of justification as often as the first. As a matter of fact, in most of the Social Contract, one may even say that the prevalent approach, despite dramatized moral connotations such as the famous hyperbolic antithesis ('l'homme est ne libre ... ') at the overture of its first chapter, tends to avoid downright metaphysical flights. A good instance of this propensity can be found in the crucial chapter on the social pact proper (bk I, ch. VI), where the social contract is defined by the concept of general will. The strength and freedom of the individual, says Rousseau, are the prime instruments of his ability to survive. How can he, as he becomes a member of an all-demanding social covenant, surrender them to society without doing harm to himself? The answer to this question lies in the idea of 'a form of association that will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and the goods of each associate, and in which everyone, while uniting himself with all, still obeys himself alone and remains as free as before' (bk I, ch. VI). Have we not indeed seen that the prime cause of the social bond was the general realization by men of their 'common interest'? To a quite utilitarian question, a perfectly utilitarian answer. The social pact as general will constitutes such a form of useful association. As for sovereignty, it is but the exercise of the general will so conceived (bk II, ch. I). Hence the collective nature of the sovereign, 'the people', that is, the assembly of all the members of the social bond; and hence the inalienable character of sove-

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reignty, which, being a will in action, cannot possibly be transferred. Still more important, here also lies the reason why the popular sovereignty has limits, as expressly stated in bk II, ch. IV. No act of sovereignty can lawfully command anything harmful to the essential equality of rights and duties in which the members of the social contract united; no particular interest may ever be legitimized as such by the general will. All the sovereign people's acts are to be performed, not in the spirit of a convention between superiors and inferiors, but in the spirit of an agreement between the body and each of its members. In book III, Rousseau brings his theory of popular sovereignty to bear upon the problem of government. Sovereignty and government are to the body politic what will and strength are to the physical body. Sovereignty is the law-making will; government, the force that executes its commands. As such, government is for Rousseau something definitely far from sacred. Not deriving, unlike sovereignty, from the social contract (bk III, ch. XVI), it can and must be legitimate, but can never, by definition, be a genuine source of legitimacy. But Rousseau freely acknowledges the need for government. Why? Because he admits the practical impossibility of assigning to the entire body politic (even in his small favourite political model, the city-state) the performance of acts of necessity geared to particulars, and not, as laws must be, to the establishing of general norms. Moreover, combining his awareness of the indispensability_of governmental mediation with a Montesquieu-like concern with the effects of social volume, Rousseau draws a very interesting picture of the relationship between the respective power of sovereignty and government - or, as we would say, of people and state (bk III, ch. II). His main conclusion is that the larger the population, the more concentrated should be the power of the government, if it is to carry out its tasks. Large societies make the controlling exercise of the general will in popular assemblies normally difficult; on the other hand, increase in the number of magistrates weakens the government by excessively dividing it. As less participant citizens tend to behave as less docile subjects, governments in big societies are prompted to use repression, which in turn implies greater centralization of power. As a result, sovereignty - the general will - falls a prey to increasing usurpation. Rousseau traces a dialectic between sovereignty and government, or better still, between legitimacy and power- the weaker the government, the closer is the state to the general will. He is very careful to make clear that what he says about the logic of 22

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power concentration has nothing to do with the problem of legitimacy.6 That is why, in his Letters from the Mountain (I, 6) he asserts that 'the best kind of government is aristocratic', whereas 'the worst kind of sovereignty is aristocratic' too. There is no paradox here, since sovereignty and government are quite different things, and the first alone embodies legitimacy. As far as the latter is concerned, Rousseau lays down a very transparent rule: the stronger the government, the more often must the sovereign convene (bk III, ch. XIII). As we consider his classification of political regimes, we find further evidence of this tendency - a basic thrust in the Social Contract - to make political legitimacy denote democratic rule. Unlike Montesquieu's, Rousseau's three types of government do not depart from the Aristotelian tradition: he sticks to democracy, aristocracy and monarchy (bk III, ch. III). He admits that a perfect democracy is an impossibility, at least in the sense of a perfect direct democracy, since this would imply something not feasible, fulltime political work done by the totality of the people (bk III, ch. IV). In a 'contextualist' vein akin to the method of Montesquieu, he indicates the preconditions of genuine, however imperfect, democracy: a small state where the citizenry might easily be gathered into popular assemblies, a simplicity of customs which forestalls the multiplication of issues and their complexity; and an underlying spirit of civic virtue. Then, alluding to the 'celebrated author' of The Spirit of the Laws, he gently chides him for having assigned virtue, as a guiding principle of behaviour, only to republican states (as against 'honour' in monarchy and 'fear' under despotism). Rousseau's objection here is that, 'the sovereign authority [i.e. the general will as First Covenant] being everywhere the same, the same principle [of virtue] must operate in every well-established state.' Variations in its strength, depending on the form of government, will of course take place. But in so far as it is part and parcel of the general will and of its ineradicably collective nature as the ultimate source of sovereignty, regardless of governmental form, republican, or civic, virtue underpins every conceivable form of legitimate rule. Without civic virtue, which is to be reinforced by 'civil religion' (bk IV, ch. VIII), the general will risks inertia, usurpation of sovereignty becomes inevitable, and illegitimacy reigns unopposed. But virtue is much more practical or attitudinal than intentional and affectual: when the charms of social quietness surpass the often too demanding love for liberty, true popular sovereignty is in peril (bk III, ch. XIV). The test of virtue is public action, not private feeling. Legitimacy as general will does not thrive on

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impalpable gifts of disembodied conscience, but on the concrete exercise of tangible freedoms.

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2

The intellectual background of the Social Contract

In western thought, the question of political legitimacy seems to have emerged, in explicit form, only in late Antiquity. We saw (p. 2 above) that the Greeks had not a special word for the idea of legitimacy, as distinct from lawfulness. The legitimacy of authority was of course broached by Aristotle in his classification of good and bad types of government, but not even Plato, who so strongly challenged the validity of polis democracy, may be said to have theorized political legitimacy an sich. Apparently, the realization of legitimacy as a theoretical problem came in the wake of the vanishing of direct government. As the 'direct' democracy of the polis and the equally direct domination of the tyrants gradually dwindled away into larger, imperial forms of rule, there arose the problem of how to justify the legitimacy of representatives. 1 The question now surfaced of how to validate authority resting on a transfer of rights. The speculation of Roman jurists, the self-assertion of church and papacy as representatives of Christ, Germanic electoral customs, all contributed in turn to the rise of a theory of legitimacy, whose jura-political crystallization took place, we recall, in the high Middle Ages. When Rousseau entered the stage, in mid eighteenth century, the body of thought on legitimacy and closely related issues had been considerably enlarged by early modern thinkers like Machiavelli, Bodin, Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu. The last three, besides having exerted a wide influence in their own right, belong so much to the frame of reference of Rousseau's own thinking, inside or outside the Social Contract, that any attempt to grasp the basic meaning of the Rousseauian theory of legitimacy is bound to discuss them, if only for brief comparative purposes. Thomas Hobbes wanted to put the Occam's razor of 'new phil25

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osophy', i.e. Cartesian rationalism, at the service of political thought. At the same time, he shared with the tenants of natural law the idea that political authority is based on a social contract, and civil society rests on the consent of the subjects (note that until Hegel the expression civil society, stemming from ancient political theory, meant the body politic, not 'society' as contrasted with the state). Natural law theorists held that civil society ultimately derived from two such contracts: a pactum societatis, by which men agreed to unite in order to preserve their safety from internecine strife, and a pactum subjectionis, by which, having so agreed, men hand over power to a sovereign (this dual social contract theory reached a paradigmatic formulation in Pufendorf's De Jure Naturae, bk VIII, ch. 2). Now Hobbes had a grim view of man as 'homo homini lupus', of human nature entailing a 'war of all against all' unless an absolute power imposed order, when fear of such power therefore removed the mutual fear caused by what would otherwise be endless mutual violence. This led him to conceive of a sovereign power thoroughly unbound. This conception in turn made him depart radically from the dual theory of the social contract. As the great nineteenth-century German legal historian Otto von Gierke said, 'he substituted for the two original contracts a single contract by which each pledges himself to each to submit to a common Ruler, who, on his side, takes no part in the making of the contract. ' 2 Thus a relation of contract between ruler and people becomes inconceivable. For who is to be judge in case they disagree, asks Hobbes. Therefore, the pact which gives its foundation to civil society is by no means a contract between the ruled and the ruler. True, the citizens pledge themselves to the sovereign as well as to each other; but while their obligation to each other is reciprocal, their pledging to the sovereign is strictly one way: it does not in the least bind the ruler. Reacting against this, Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government (1691), the gospel of Whig politics, preached control of the power of the crown by popular sovereignty through 'majority rule'. There has been much debate as to the exact nature of the relationship between Locke and Hobbes. Some scholars, among whom Leo Strauss figures prominently, even contend that Locke was but a disguised Hobbesian. However, it is undeniable that in the Second Treatise Locke criticized some key conceptions of Hobbes. For instance, he polemically opposed those who confound the state of nature with a war of all against all(§. 19), and he no less vigorously rejected the thesis that the command of an

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individual ruler over the multitude is to be preferred to the state of nature (§ 13). Inasmuch as legitimacy is concerned, these criticisms clearly outweigh the formal similarities between their common individualistic premises in viewing society and the social contract. Last but not least, Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (1748), also very critical of absolutist rule, recommended the fragmentation of sovereignty by means of a 'distribution of powers' (bk XI). Like Hobbes, Rousseau stresses the absolute character of sovereignty. Indeed, as far as the logic of the contractarian argument is concerned, he is an orthodox Hobbesian. He thoroughly rejects the dual contract theory, accepting only a pact of society. 3 However, he conceives of this pact itself in terms very different from the English philosopher's. Whilst Hobbes speaks of a 'covenant of every man with every man' (Leviathan, ch. XVII), Rousseau makes 'les particuliers' contract with the 'public' (Social Contract, bk I, ch. VII). As a result, reciprocity reappears at the level of sovereignty: for the body politic becomes a party to the contract. But if this is so, then the big problem explained away by Hobbes's logic also comes back: in case of conflict between the citizens and the public, who will be judge? Rousseau's answer is a masterpiece of democratic rhetoric. It consists in saying that the sovereignty public cannot possibly harm its members, for this would mean to harm itself. The sovereign will is by its very nature universal and equality-inspired, so if it damaged one of the citizens it would also damage the others, and therefore itself. 4 We shall say more about this apparently intriguing relationship between sovereignty and the individual in the Social Contract. For the moment, let us just proceed to an instant comparison with the other two main political philosophers, Locke and Montesquieu. Rousseau agreed with Locke, against Hobbes, in placing the seat of sovereignty in the people's hands, not in the ruler's, thereby transforming submissive subjects into free citizens. But he amplified the Lockean idea of popular sovereignty by extending its social basis. The citizenry which bears the general will in the Social Contract is the whole country's population enfranchised, not just the property democracy contemplated by Locke. The rationale for this extension was Rousseau's belief that freedom presupposed equality. Liberty and equality, he wrote, were the greatest goods of all, which should be the end of every system of legislation; liberty and equality, because the former cannot subsist without the latter (bk II, ch. XI). In order to stress how much equality is inherent in the general will, Rousseau established a difference between the truly general will and the simple will of all. The distinction, as remarked by Sir

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Ernest Barker in the introduction to his edition of the Social Contract, went back to Roman and canon lawyers, who used to discern between omnes ut singuli and omnes ut universi. The will of all is the merely numerical maximization of convergent particular wills, regardless of their relationship with the genuinely common, universal interest of the associates. The point is that the spirit of the general will is justice within freedom, not an ethically neutral Lockean 'majority rule'. In the eyes of Rousseau, either liberty is democratic or it is no liberty at all. Locke was ultimately interested in the protection of a few natural rights within a constitutional framework, whereas Rousseau, who paid little attention to constitutional arrangements, used popular sovereignty as an assertion of a much more demanding, indeed almost absolutistic, concept of liberty. Locke was a moderate liberal; Rousseau, a radical preacher of egalitarian freedom. Significantly, Locke, much invoked in the Discourse on Inequality, gets no mention at all in the Social Contract. Rousseau also alternated approval and rejection in the case of Montesquieu. We already saw him giving a radical twist to Montesquieu's love of republican virtue. He valued the latter's flair for 'social geography' too, as it can be seen from bk III, ch. VIII of the Social Contract ('que toute forme de gouvernement n'est pas propre a tout pays'). Again, in his own classification of laws political, civil, criminal and 'moeurs', based on 'opinion' (bk II, ch. XII), he emphasized, in a way which strongly recalls the very notion of a 'spirit' of the laws, that mores and opinion were supreme among the four classes of social norms. 'Moeurs' and beliefs - not coercive rules - are the unwritten Grundnorm of society, that engraved 'not on marble nor brass, but in the hearts of the citizens', thus enshrining the 'true constitution of the state'. But he opposed one of Montesquieu's pet theories - the doctrine of the distribution, or separation, of powers- on the grounds that, as legitimate sovereignty lies in the general will, it must be indivisible, for a divided will is inconceivable. In order to be truly sovereign (as befits its nature as will) authority must remain undivided (Social Contract, bk II, ch. II). In the Geneva manuscript, Rousseau reproached Montesquieu for speaking of 'executive' and 'legislative' as nouns, instead of as simple adjectival modes of the one authority, popular sovereignty. Because of this, nineteenth-century liberals such as Benjamin Constant rightly pointed out that Rousseau's idea of sovereignty remained at bottom structurally akin to Hobbes's, the 'only' difference being that the Leviathan assigned undivided power to an individual sovereign, the absolute prince, whereas the Social Con28

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tract put it in the hands of the 'collective sovereign', i.e. the people. The Social Contract is first and foremost the truthful portrait of what the Discourse on Inequality already called 'the legitimate institution', 5 namely, the social bond based on freedom and equality. In this capacity, it unfolds, as we saw, as a treatise on the foundations of the just state, and it is worth recalling that for Rousseau, as for classical thinking, Machiavelli and Hobbes, foundation, in the singular, was the political act par excellence. Rousseau's usage of the word 'institution', also in the singular, echoes this assumption in its Latin etymon. The foundation issue was indeed the core of political theory from Plato to Rousseau, if only because it focused on legitimacy in statu nascendi. The difference lay in the retrospective or prospective direction taken by this venerable 'genetic' approach to legitimacy: whilst Roman political thought tended to cherish foundation as something basically enacted in the past, and hence enshrined in the authority of the mos maiorum, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Rousseau yearned for the foundation of legitimacy as something yet to be accomplished. 6 However, the 'foundational' tradition in political thought is somewhat too abstract to provide a more meaningful intellectual frame of reference for the Social Contract. In short, the foundation topos was not only 'genetic' - it was also too generic, no matter how central. To connect Rousseau's political treatise with a more specific background, we must turn to a more consistent tradition, a true 'school of thought' - the theory of natural law. We have already glimpsed its political theory when briefly commenting on the Rousseau-Hobbes connection, but it is also worth considering its ethical side proper. Natural law theory, or jusnaturalism, has rested since the Sophists on the belief that nature provides a moral standard with which to gauge the rightfulness of conventional law, mainly on the grounds that men are by nature equals, as Hippias puts it in Plato's Protagoras (337). From Grotius to Locke natural law loomed very large in contractarian political theory, to which Rousseau was to make so powerful a contribution. The exact nature of Rousseau's position concerning natural law is an often mooted question. Some distinguished scholars do not even hesitate to say that Rousseau simply 'broke' with jusnaturalism. Professor Alexandre Passerin d'Entreves, whose eminence amidst twentieth-century experts on the history of natural law thinking is only matched by that of H. Rommen and Leo Strauss, takes just this stand, which lends much authority to downright statements of pioneer Rousseaulogists (like C. E. Vaughan) for

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whom it was almost self-evident that Rousseau rejected jusnaturalism root and branch. But did he indeed? Those who think so usually set great store by the fact that Rousseau challenged the notion, current in jusnaturalist thought in his day, that man could find the principles of natural law merely by using reason, and this in civilization and savagery alike. True, in the first draft of the Social Contract there occurs a pointed denial of such a 'natural', direct access to the moral law of nature. Polemicizing against Diderot's articles on the subject in the Encyclopedie, Rousseau notes that natural reason alone is not enough to discover natural law; a proper statement of justice and equity is contingent upon social life and upon a minimum of familiarity with positive law, with the jural order of a given society. 'We only begin properly to become men after we have become citizens' (bk I, ch. II). Leo Strauss has skilfully profited by this tendency in Rousseau to draw a shrewd parallel between him and Hobbes. In his influential book, Natural Right and History (ch. V), Strauss entreats us to forget for a while the obvious difference between those two thinkers in so far as their social and political views are concerned, and turn instead our attention to a basic similarity in the logical form of their theories of obligation. In equating justice with the general will, it is argued, Rousseau to a certain extent went away from Locke and back to Hobbes. Locke believed that the natural instinct of self-preservation, on which ultimately rests his concept of freedom as a right and as a source of legitimate sovereignty, was prior to sociation, whereas Hobbes, as he deduces his own principle of legitimacy from the social covenant, recognizes no source of legitimacy external, or superior, to society. According to him, obedience, the fear which frees from fear (of mutual destruction in the natural war of all against all), is most emphatically a product of sociation, since it derives from the social pact. Now, just as Hobbes's fearful obedience proceeds from sociation, so does Rousseau's general will, which in no way pre-exists the social contract whose substance, on the contrary, it constitutes. Thus both the advocate of absolute monarchy and the professed enemy of monarchic sovereignty joined hands in liquidating natural law in all but the name. Both Hobbesian and Rousseauian natural law are for Strauss dictated by history (hence the antithesis in the title of his book), not by a divine, higher nature. Moreover, this 'modern' natural law embodies the triumph of the idea of principle over that of end. While classic jusnaturalism thought in terms of transcendent ends, modern natural law thinking, as in Hobbes or Rousseau, dropped the sense of transcendence and operated with a strictly immanent view of the law of nature 30

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immanent, that is, to society. From Hobbes onwards, the ends of society are no longer external, or superior, to it. Rousseau achieved this revolution in moral philosophy by identifying justice with the collective will. We shall see how this Straussian dirge in praise of teleological natural law, presumably assassinated by modern political philosophy, set the tone of some contemporary interpretations of Rousseau's politics. Be that as it may, the plain meaning of Rousseau's writings does not allow us to doubt that, however subversively new his conceptions, he never intended simply to discard the jusnaturalist idea. On the contrary: in the Geneva manuscript, he expressly states that 'the greatest advantage' of the concept of the social contract as general will lies in its ability to show 'the true foundations of justice and natural law' (bk II, ch. IV). Rousseau's argument runs as follows. The general will, instituting the just state, liberates men from the war of all against all. Once thus freed, men are drawn 'by nature, habit and reason' to treat other men like they treat their own fellow citizens, and from 'such a disposition translated into action' there arise the rules of 'reasoned natural law' as distinct from 'natural law properly speaking', which is based on true but 'very vague' feeling, often stifled by selfesteem. The difference between an instinctive and a reasoned conception of natural law was traditionally acknowledged. Legal theorists had long been wont to distinguish the apprehension of the law of nature secundum motus sensualitatis (Rousseau's vague 'sentiment') from the intelligence of natural law secundum motus ration is. The distinction was discussed in the standard early modern treatise on natural law, that of Pufendorf (who incidentally favoured the 'rational' variety), and as such is echoed both in the preface to the Discourse on Inequality and the Geneva manuscript. Commenting on this technical background, Derathe, in a note to the Geneva manuscript (in the Pleiade edition of Rousseau's political writings), claims that the very traditional character of the concept of a reasoned, i.e. society-fostered, idea of natural law disposes of the insistence on viewing Rousseau as an enemy of jusnaturalism. Rousseau blamed Grotius, Pufendorf and above all Locke for conferring the articulate morals of reasoned natural law on the human mind still in the state of nature, thereby assigning to bare nature what could only be reached through social life; but he had nothing against the principle of the existence of a natural law. For Rousseau, political right, deliberately created by acts of will, differs a lot from the primitive 'sense' of right. However, both reflect natural law, because neither is intended to violate

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man's deep nature. No right, in Rousseau's view, could ever be at once legitimate and contrary to man's way of being, no matter how much human nature might be stifled by evil forms of society. Legitimacy - and this is highly typical of his century's thought ultimately springs from nature. Let nomos mirror physis- such is the motto which best suits the eighteenth-century idea of lawfulness. It animated the social vision of Diderot and Rousseau alike; it drove the latter to a passionate revulsion against despotism, 'enlightened' or not- for despotism, denying freedom, aimed at establishing right without deriving it from man's (free) nature. 7 The Social Contract is in this sense all of a piece with Emile, Rousseau's most elaborate theoretical work- a book which should indeed be read as a paradigm of the Stoic principle that man must live according to nature. No doubt, in his radical remodelling zeal, Rousseau often sounds tough with man's nature, as in his celebrated words about the need for the legislator to 'change human nature', and to recast the individual so as to make him a virtuous citizen whose virtue is inseparable from a political, i.e. 'antinatural' sociability (bk II, ch. VII). But the truth is that even in the heat of all this 'platonic' reforming ardour, he never forgets the theme of obedience to nature. At the very moment he requires the 'annihilation' of 'natural powers' and their replacement by the socialized morality of the good citizen, he is at pains to add that the human constitution is thus to be changed only in order to be strengthened. Where the first draft of the Social Contract spoke of the need to 'somewhat mutilate' the constitution of man so that it might be strengthened, the final version of the treatise prefers to say just 'change' (alterer) - a most telling emendation, in a book that Rousseau himself wished to be read as an 'appendix' to Emile. If we now return to those articles on natural law in the Encyclopedie, we shall see that, except for the stress on reasoned natural right, Rousseau may be said basically to agree with Diderot as to the content of the law of nature. Significantly, it was Diderot who, in these articles, was the first to take over Montesquieu's formula, 'volonte generate'. He also defined the general will in two ways. One, closer to traditional jusnaturalism, equated the volonte generate with the sense of justice which manifests itself as the unwritten law of all nations, civilized or not, and even in the instinctive indignation of an injured animal. But the second was Rousseau ante litteram: it called general will the 'pure act of the understanding' which reasons 'amidst the silence of passions' about that which every man can legitimately demand from his equal, as the latter from him. It fell to Rousseau to maximize this second meaning by depicting the general will so conceived as the

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THE INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND OF THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

supreme norm of a social pact producing a 'moral and collective body' (Social Contract, bk I, ch. VI). We may now sum up in turn Rousseau's overall position concerning natural law theory. Very briefly, three things can be said. First, he did acknowledge the authority of the law of nature. When in 1758 some lawyers objected to his Letter to d'Alembert, on the grounds that he had admitted an authority superior to the sovereign, Rousseau retorted that he indeed recognized three such authorities: that of God, that of honour, and 'that of natural law derived from man's constitution'. Secondly, departing from mainstream jusnaturalism, he stressed the role of conscience and of social evolution in the development of moral conceptions, thereby dissenting from those who, like Locke, intellectualistically overrated the rational powers of natural man and undervalued the part of society in the formation of moral consciousness (lest it sound preposterous to blame Locke, the empiricist epistemologist, for the sin of intellectualism, let us recall that his masterpiece in the theory of knowledge, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, actually excepts (bk I, ch. 2, §13) the intellectual apprehension of natural law from the general critique of innatism). Lastly, he gave prominence to a long neglected element in natural law philosophy - the element of freedom. 8 To be sure, the legitimating force of freedom had already received a great impulse in Locke's hands. Just as firmly as Rousseau, Locke had protested against Grotius and Pufendorf for arguing that the social contract could allow men to enslave themselves, a fortiori to submit themselves to absolute rule. Moreover, it was Locke who redefined consent in strongly individualistic terms - and individualism was also the basis of Rousseauian liberty. Before Locke, consent as a natural law tenet was basically a corporate act of the community; with him, it became primarily an individual act grounded on the unresignable 'natural right' to freedom. But Rousseau's contribution was no less momentous. He gave a radical twist to the individualism of freedom by merging it with a passionate plea for equality as a condition of self-sufficiency - and in so doing, he may be said to have lent a vast political glamour to what was as we saw one of the oldest among jusnaturalist ideas - the belief in the natural equality of men. It seems fair to conclude by underlining the significance of both the preservation and the innovation of natural law theory by Rousseau. Having emphatically resocialized the natural sense of right, having moreover given new lustre to its pristine egalitarian implications, he added a new dimension by the vigour of his libertarian interpretation of natural law. In the last analysis, freedom was for him the paramount principle of legitimacy, so

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supreme as to rule over the general will itself. 'But by this condition of freedom . . . all kinds of engagements are not valid, even before human tribunals', says the sixth of the Letters from the Mountain. Natural law in the guise of freedom is precisely what sets limits to the sovereignty of the general will. 9 But it is also what maintains an essential agreement between the bold democratic scope of the general will and the fundamentally emancipatory drive of the century's appeal to nature. Such is, I think, the core of the theoretical background of the Social Contract. Rousseau's creative self-insertion in modern political philosophy definitely did not represent a breaking with the principle of natural law: if nothing, it decisively energized it. This may be best inferred from his place in the three main stages in the history of natural law political theory. In the first, which lasted up to Grotius, stress fell on law rather than on right, and on society rather than on the individual. In the second, chiefly due to Hobbes, the emphasis was on the individual, but not on right. Finally, with Locke and Rousseau, both right and individualism turned out to be victorious, the main difference between these two thinkers lying here in the full social dimension that the access to, and the nature of, natural law acquired through the more critical and demanding approach of Rousseau.

34

3

Conflicting misinterpretations and unilateral assessments

'The question of Rousseau', as Cassirer called it, is perhaps the most striking case of persistent misinterpretation of a major modern thinker. Not even Nietzsche can be said to have been so widely victimized, because in his case at least the state of many a crucial text, due to well-known biographical circumstances, invited misconstruction. Besides, most of his misinterpretators were not at all derogatory, while Rousseau, whose writings generally reached us in the form intended by him, has been as much rebuked as misunderstood. Except for a brief while in German classicism, when Kant, Schiller and Holderlin paid lavish tribute to him, and Hegel entertained mixed feelings, he was hotly condemned by his intellectual peers, from the disparaging remarks of the philosophes to the scorn of Marx and the frantic abuse of Nietzsche. Even nowadays, when at last the dominant tone in discussing his work is no longer one of blame, one might wonder whether approval has not been bought at the cost of maiming and taming much of the intellectual sharpness and the practical import of his thought. But let us not anticipate. The first stage in the long history of the misinterpretation of Rousseau was outright censorious. In short, it was essentially the work of self-conscious reactionary publicists such as de Bonald and de Maistre, for whom Rousseau was first and foremost the progenitor of romantic anarchism, guilty of an irresponsible loosening of social discipline. The very founder of conservatism, Burke, initiated this charge of obnoxious individualism, though he also occasionally accused Rousseau of promoting too much collectivism. This line of attack was resumed in the late nineteenth century by Maurice Barn~s, the aestheticist who turned into a mythmaker for the anti-Dreyfus right, and was given a new lease of life in the early twentieth century by the

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appallingly crude conservatism of Irving Babbitt. In his Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), Babbitt sternly scolded our thinker on the grounds that 'faith in one's natural goodness is a constant encouragement to evade moral responsibility' - a claim not only highly questionable in itself, but utterly preposterous if applied to the moral mood of the Social Contract, a book where behaviour is emphatically placed under the spell of duty and of an unflinching sense of personal responsibility. · Curiously enough, a completely opposite misconstruction ran parallel to this pejorative image of Rousseau the anarchist. 1 In its terms, Rousseau was rather the first apologist of unfreedom, the apostle of illiberal egalitarianism. Such was the view of Constant, Taine and Maurras; and such is the view of the last influential detractor of Rousseau, Professor J. L. Talmon, who regards the Social Contract as the intellectual mainspring of totalitarian democratism. 2 Thus the same thinker who was accused of giving his blessing to moral dissolution came to be blamed for heralding modern despotism. The yogi turned commissar; the romantic individualist, a collectivist Jacobin. The basic contradiction between these opposite hostile interpretations found its way into some of the best Rousseau scholarship up to around 1930. Thus Emile Faguet, as he tried to rescue Jean-Jacques from the charge of illiberalism, stressed his individualism, but admitted that the Social Contract was an exception to it and hence an aberration in the Rousseauian oeuvre. On the other hand, the leading expert in Rousseau's political writings, C. E. Vaughan, regarded the Social Contract as the term of a strenuous philosophical evolution from individualism to collectivism: individualism, under the influence of Locke, in the early writings; collectivism, inspired by Montesquieu, in the later ones. Such an evolution did not prevent Vaughan from detecting irreconcilable 'rival elements' in the politics of Rousseau. To a large extent, Vaughan performed the academic legitimation of the Janus mask of Rousseau, the dubious theorist of both 'anarchic individualism' and totalitarian rule. As late as 1949, philosophical historians of ideas trained in the geisteswissenschaftlich tradition still opposed the 'contractual' Jean-Jacques, a defender of individual liberties, to the 'social' Rousseau, a devotee of social cohesion. 3 It took three decades and half-a-dozen careful monographs, from the studies of Henri See, E. H. Wright and Albert Schinz in the 1920s, the essays of Ernst Cassirer in the 1930s and 1940s, those by Bertrand de Jouvenel and Robert Derathe just after the war to the 'existentialist' readings of Burgelin and Starobinski in the 1950s, to restore the unity of Rousseau's thought. 4 In the 36

CONFLICTING MISINTERPRETATIONS

event, we got a much more balanced picture - one which incidentally did away, hopefully once and for all, with the more-heatthan-light style of biased contumely. Yet, as we shall presently see, more than one old misreading still lingers on, even in basically sympathetic modern appraisals. It seems therefore very much advisable - in seeking an accurate account of his theory of legitimacy- to recall the main criticisms raised against Rousseau. We shall begin by the liberal strictures, recently rekindled through the concept of totalitarian democracy. Let us start by discussing the alleged state idolatry of the Social Contract, which is the main target of liberal criticisms of Rousseau. There is undeniably a streak of civic mysticism in the book, a Spartan concern for the 'sanctity' of civil religion accompanied by a rather puritan praise of censorship (bk IV, ch. VIII). This civic mystique stands in open contrast with Locke. In the latter's view, the political commonwealth remained substantially external to the individuals, whom, unlike Rousseau, he did not regard as being born to live in society. Devotion to the state was therefore utterly alien to the thinker who was with Montesquieu the main spokesman of the qualified liberalism which dominated political theory before the arrival of Rousseau. This striking discrepancy between the latter and the founding fathers of liberalism made the Rousseauian shift towards state-worship all the more distressing to the liberal mind, and greatly contributed to accredit the portrayal of Jean-Jacques as the originator of Jacobin fanaticism. However, Rousseau's cult of the state would have seemed much less foreboding if his critics had realized two things. First, his civil religion does not lend itself to being likened to political indoctrination. To begin with, Rousseau explicitly distinguishes its 'articles' from every kind of dogmatic belief. He willingly and approvingly recognizes that the state lacks the power to force people to believe, and starts his characterization of civil religion by stressing that the members of the social contract as general will are not liable for their opinions, but only for their morals and civic duties. The only 'negative dogma' of civil religion is intolerance- precisely the hallmark of religious, i.e. ideological, cults. The test of orthodoxy, in terms of civil religion, is not to be faith, but behaviour; so much so, that no delinquent under its reign will be punished for being impious, but just for being unsociable. It is indeed grossly unfair to read a chapter so patently devoted to denouncing 'theological intolerance' as though it were a plea for simply replacing it with state bigotry. Significantly, in Rousseau's only elaborate vindication of censorship, the Letter to d'Alembert (1758), the case for protecting the purity of customs of small towns against the moral evils pre37

ROUSSEAU'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

sumably attendant on cosmopolitanism rests on a jealous defence of selfhood (allegedly threatened by cosmopolitan status-seeking), not of any state-ruled belief-system. Theatre-going is refused because, stimulating the spread of show off manners, it degrades the autonomy of the self, not, as in Plato, because the passions aroused by the stage undermine official morality. 5 Let us not lose sight of Rousseau the pre-romantic by setting too much of a store by his 'Spartan' make-up: for no true Cato would be so much concerned with selfhood. Conversely, the very fact of dreaming so often, if anachronistically, of ancient republics deprived Rousseau's love for the state of any totalitarian ring. Totalitarianism is inconceivable outside the social space of bureaucracy and 'mass' society - but the man who wrote 'state' meaning civitas was not thinking of sanctifying bureaucratic Molochs. If his antiquarian nostalgia did not sharpen his realization of the true political mechanics of his age, at least it certainly exempted him from any meaningful sin of Hegel-like state worship. The real trouble lies elsewhere. In making the state into a strong-willed self ruled by natural reason speaking through the free voice of citizenship, Rousseau certainly did not have in mind anything even dimly prescient, let alone desirous, of a totalitarian superperson, like Oceania's 'revolutionary' party in 1984. But did he not conceive of freedom under the rule of the general will as an uncanny compact, often quite uncomfortable for the individual? Did he not go as far as to say that while the citizen-subjects may very well find themselves at variance with the general will, the latter, in its capacity as sovereign, 'is always what it ought to be' (Social Contract, bk I, ch. VII)? And did he not further say - an ominous addendum - that, whenever the man dissents from the citizen, and, driven by 'particular interest', disobeys the general will, the body politic has the right to 'force him to be free'? Here we must be aware of the actual level of Rousseau's discourse in the Social Contract. His political system, presented outright as an ideal state, can hardly be expected to be liable for practical difficulties arising from the need to accommodate the realm of rational freedom to the demands of earthly rights. In the Elysian landscape of ideal republican virtue, the paradox of enforced freedom makes perfectly good sense. The higher self of man, guided by his uncorrupted inner voice, cannot possibly deviate from the common good without negating himself; and if it does, that can never happen out of freedom, but out of enslavement to the impurity of baser passions. Kant, who regarded Rousseau as 'the Newton of the moral world', likewise carefully distinguishes between personal morality and individualistic 38

CONFLICTING MISINTERPRETATIONS

caprice. The essence of the categorical imperative translates indeed very well the concept of freedom as 'obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself' (Social Contract, bk I, ch. VIII). However, to be completely fair, let us also recognize that suspicious liberal critics of general will politics will hardly be placated solely by being told that Rousseau legislates in abstracto, not for real society. After all, even avowedly ideal political models must bear some degree of resemblance to the real world of men -, and in this stubborn universe, the philosophical idea of coerced liberty turns out to be a true squaring of the circle. Morever, the founding aim of the book does not help those who interpret it as altogether inapplicable. Rousseau even indulges (in bk IV) in institutional devising, not just in a bare delineation of abstract principles. In brief, therefore, it seems safe to insist on saying that, while the Social Contract puts too much weight on freedom through society, it rather overlooked the other side of liberty - freedom from society. At bottom, Rousseau, the paladin of liberty, fraternity and equality, ends up by faring at best as an unwitting liberticide. But his liberal critics do not stop here. They try to show that, given Rousseau's highly tense emotional background, his thought just had to stifle freedom under the pretext of promoting it. Liberal alarm in the face of Rousseau's 'totalitarian' bent has in fact become prodigal of charitable, 'understanding' psychological explanations. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a mind rent by violent contradictions. The apostle of heroic civic unity was also the archetypal solitary, a master of self-pity who became the greatest autobiographer of his time (the obverse of enlightened rationalism being, as is increasingly acknowledged, the 'age of (pre-romantic) sensibility' of which Rousseau was the richest single instance). The stoic Spartan who wrote the Social Contract also delighted the universe with the highly sentimental novel La Nouvelle Heloise (which Hume deemed his masterpiece) and a no less emotional Emile, where education consists in withdrawing character from the bad influence of state or society. Hegel rebuked him for indulging in the narcissism of the schone Seele 'which thinks only of its own transparence and, in the end, of its own void'. True, not every one has accepted the view that the state-worship of the Social Contract and the antisocial tendencies of Emile are strongly antithetical works representing contradictory pulls in Rousseau's mind. It has been ingeniously argued that the opposite appraisals of society's role in these two books result from basic differences in the kind of social environment they deal with. Thus, in Emile, there prevails the big, corrupted modern society, from 39

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which everything must be done to wrest the individual. By contrast, in the small state, still untouched by the vices of civilization, which forms the social space of the Social Contract, it is society itself that can be saved. Hence the individualist optics of Rousseau's pedagogic treatise, as against the social emphasis of his political system. In societies degenerated beyond retrieval, education is to do for the sake of individuals what, in healthy societies, morals-as-politics can still do for the entire community. 6 Ingenious, but not quite convincing. For in Rousseau's own words, the gap between the individualistic and the 'republican' ideal is prior to any stage in social pathology. It is an unbridgeable chasm, a schism inscribed into the very nature of man, no matter what the social setting. Either you opt for making a man, or for building a citizen (Emile, bk I). 'Give [man] entirely to the State or leave him entirely to himself', explains one of Rousseau's political fragments, '-but if you divide his heart, you tear him in two.' Is it not reasonable to suppose that this same insurmountable division also inhabits the Social Contract, in the guise of a tense conflict between liberal, even libertarian, tendencies and a sort of inbuilt despotism - the high-minded tyranny of the general will? No wonder Rousseau's politics have been blamed in so contradictory a way! Worse still, one may easily complement the portrayal of political contradictions motivated by, or 'compensating' for, psychological imbalance by pointing out serious deficiencies in Rousseau's social views. The only thing required is the ability to see through, or beyond, the conventional 'progressive' image of Rousseau, the prophet of revolution. The fact that Marat and Robespierre professed to be Rousseauists, as well as the fate of the myth of the general will, from the French Revolution to the ongoing national revolutions in the Third World, invite us to see in Rousseau a theorist who, dreaming of ancient polis while thinking of his native Geneva, nevertheless drew the outlines of radical democratism. The man who starkly refused the march of civilization would also have been the prophet of modern polity. 'So far as "political" theory in the strict sense is concerned', wrote a brilliant former Marxist, Lucio Colletti, 'Marx and Lenin have added nothing to Rousseau, except for the analysis of the "economic basis" for the withering away of the state.' 7 However, it may be wondered whether to present our thinker as a harbinger of modernity is not substantially misleading. For one thing his sociological myopia seems undeniable. Whether or not he was, as Marx believed, a 'spokesman of the threatened petty-bourgeoisie', the fact remains that he does not seem to have

40

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grasped in any meaningful way the basis of social evolution on the eve of industrialism. Moreover, in his otherwise commendable allergy to dependence, he went as far as to confiate unequal exchange with the very realities of the division of labour, thereby often inflating his social criticism into a utopian indictment of society in general. 8 This proclivity he combined with a hopelessly antiquated view of economics. He thought the economy was so static, that he was convinced that one man's wealth came 'directly from the impoverishment of another'. 9 The polities he devised (most notably in the third part of his article on political economy, written for the Encyclopedie) mirror this social immobilism; they are tiny agricultural Arcadias, rustic mini-states based on small-scale landowning. Not quite the world in which he actually lived, let alone the one which lay ahead of him. With the judgment passed on Rousseau's sociological myopia, the liberal critics rest their case. Rousseau, it is claimed, is not only, as a political philosopher, at best a nai:ve and at worst a totalitarian mind; he is also blind to modernity. The friends of freedom have every reason to keep such a visionary at a harmless distance. Poor Jean-Jacques was not, after all, like so many philosophes, a perceptive social critic; rather, he remained a misguided social prophet. Above all, he was highly symptomatic of a typical social disease: psychological maladjustment teeming with paranoid totalitarian utopianism - a sad case of 'authoritarian personality'. 10 Or perhaps one could stress the more historical aspect of it and see in him, as Nietzsche did, the first resounding example of modern ressentiment. It would not be too difficult to 'sociologize' such an insight (provided we know, as Nietzsche did, how creative ressentiment can be). For was not the life of Rousseau, the professional (as much as real) victim, deeply enmeshed in the malaise of the deplace in the very age of sociability? When all is said, Harold Laski's portrait seems to hit the nail right on the head: '[Rousseau] incarnated in himself all the dissatisfaction and discontent of his time. He taught men to see their wrongs with new intensity.' As for the thinker, 'it was his special genius less to determine what men thought in matters of social constitution than to disturb their minds so profoundly as to provide new foundations for their thinking'. 1 We shall presently say a word about these ad hominem explanations of liberal critics of Rousseau. But first let us examine the grounds of their argument. All their claim about the supposed totalitarian seeds of the politics of the Social Contract can be reduced to two alleged pieces of evidence: one rather circumstan41

ROUSSEAU'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

tial, the other direct. The 'circumstantial' evidence rests on the defence of the cult of the state and of censorship, and we have already shown that it has largely been misconstrued. But the direct evidence touches a very sensitive point: the nature of the relationship between the general will and personal liberty. Consequenty, it presents a much more serious charge, on which we shall dwell for a while. What upsets the liberal critics most is the end of the chapter on the sovereign, that is to say, the general will in actu: ' ... quiconque refusera d'obeir a la volonte generate y sera constraint par tout le corps: ce qui ne signifie autre chose sinon qu'on le forcera d'etre libre' (bk I, ch. VII). There's the rub, cry the liberals: for what does that mean, if not that freedom becomes null if it happens to be in disagreement with a collective will which, experience has taught us, coincides for every practical purposes with its 'interpretation' by power-holders often coercing men in the name of humanity? As always, 'positive' freedom, i.e. freedom conceived as the rational perfection of man, and as such, as the goal of history, ends by serving as a lofty motive for suppressing empirical freedoms . . . 12 In the so-called J en a Realphilosophie, Hegel had been the first so to describe this authoritarian transmutation of the idea of radical freedom. His remarks on the 'despotism of liberty', which virtually contain the whole contemporary theory of totalitarian democracy, also form the backbone of the critique of absolute freedom in the second part of the chapter on Geist in the Phenomenology of Spirit. As Hegel sees it, the will to absolute freedom, being unable to achieve any positive realization whatsoever, cannot help turning to destruction. Starting from a passionate desire for radical liberty, it wipes out every existing institution and social group, till nothing is left but the opposition between universal will and dissenting individuals. Besides, in practice, the abstract idea of absolute freedom as universal will become of necessity embodied in some particular group, a faction which rules in the name of all by ruthlessly suppressing other groups and arbitrarily declaring them to be selfish enemies of the universal. Taking Jacobin dictatorship for a historical application of the theory of the general will, Hegel derives this double process of compulsory institutional and social destructiveness and political usurpation from a dialectic whereby absolute freedom engenders the terror, and liberty turns into its very opposite. In this sense, Hegel remains by far the greatest of Rousseau's critics, since he encompasses both the conservative criticism (the denunciation of absolute freedom) and the liberal one (the imputation of despotic tendencies). 42

CONFLICTING MISINTERPRETATIONS

There is no gainsaying that something like the dialectic of freedom and terror belongs to the core of totalitarian democracy ideology. But the point is, can this be really read into the Social Contract? To this vital question the late John Plamenatz answered with a categorical no. More than any other modern commentator, he underscored the clarity with which Rousseau asserted the mutual implication of liberty and the general will. Again and again, Rousseau makes it clear that 'it is of the essence of that will that those who share in it recognize one another as equals'. 13 Now, the right of equality, writes Rousseau, stems from the 'preference each one gives to oneself' (bk II, ch. IV) - a preference which inheres in man's own nature. Let us observe, in passing, the utilitarian ring of this statement, which is in deep accordance with that naturalist approach we identified in chapter 1 as being at least as important, in the logical architecture of the Social Contract, as its 'ethical' notes. But the gist of the matter is that the general will is defined by active equality, and equality in turn means for Rousseau the exercise of rights under conditions that exclude dependence and oppression -in other words, under conditions of freedom. Thus, when Rousseau states, in the Geneva manuscript, that the general will comes down to determining what a man can legitimately require from his fellow, and his fellow from him, Plamenatz remarks that no question of a contrast between power and right is involved. Power would indeed signify the ability to impose one's will on others, and would therefore be thoroughly alien to the egalitarian spirit of the general will. Now, if power is not at all involved, then how could an abuse of (state) power occur? In bk I, ch. VIII of the Social Contract a very neat distinction between three kinds of liberty is drawn. There is natural liberty, the amoral freedom in the state of nature. There is civil liberty, determined by the general will, i.e. by the social contract. Finally, there is moral liberty, 'which alone makes man his own master'. Moral liberty is nothing more than compliance with self-imposed rules. And here is the solution to our riddle of that 'enforced freedom' in chapter VII, because it is of moral liberty that Rousseau is thinking when he accepts the possibility of someone's being 'forced' to be free by the general will. He will be forced all right - except that, ultimately, given the nature of the general will, he will be forced by no other than himself. No trace of illiberalism here. All we can admit, as does John Hall, is that Rousseau, in speaking of forcing one to be free, has been carried away by his craze for paradox, and ended by suggesting the occurrence of coercion where none obtains. Not quite - the liberal critic might object. After all, look at the

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context of the chapter. Rousseau is speaking precisely of the possible conflict between individual interest and general will. In such a situation, how could the enforcement of the latter be felt by the dissenting individual as an instance of self-coercion? Yet Rousseau has an answer to this. He would not dream of denying that every member of the body politic may often find himself at odds with the will of the majority. But he thinks that the constant will of each member is the general will, in so far as each one, having of his free will joined the social contract, binds himself to accept all laws made under it (and within, as we saw, its rational limits) and may in this sense be said to accept even laws adopted against his vote, as well as those in virtue of which, be they or not among the latter, he is to be punished whenever he breaks them. Such is the theory he offers in bk IV, ch. II, where he copes with the practical difficulties of relating the general will to the votes of the majority and those opposing its wishes (very sensibly, he ends by recommending that while a straight majority is to be considered enough in matters requiring quick decisions, the more serious the issue, the closer the unanimity must be the expression of the general will determined through universal suffrage): Essentially, therefore, the 'volonte constante' of each member preserves the essential meaning of 'moral freedom', since in his constant will each one obeys nothing other than his own selfdetermination to join, out of his equal freedom, the social contract and its living embodiment, that volonte generate whose exercise is alone sovereignty and legitimacy. What may be binding even against one's temporary preference can only be so inasmuch as it comes from a free and egalitarian assembly where each one 'n'opine que d'apres lui' (bk II, ch. III). The doctrine of the general will can seem too much bent on the ideal - but it is certainly not dangerous to individual liberty. Indeed, 'if we look carefully at the conditions which Rousseau says must be satisfied if the assembly is to be the bearer of the general will, we see that the citizen has all the guarantees he can reasonably expect.' What a contrast between such statement, which may be read as the apt sum of a thorough perusal of the Social Contract, and the curious unconcern for the truth of the text, coupled with an amazing indulgence in sweepingly slanderous idees re