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Explore Jean-Jacques Rousseau's critical discourse on Hobbes's theory of human nature and the enlightenment's concept of progress. Rousseau delves into the natural state of man, morals, compassion, and the need for a social contract to address inequalities.
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Philosophy 219 Rousseau, “Discourse” and “Of the Social Contract”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Born in Geneva (1712-1778). Spent most of his life in France. • He is clearly influenced by the model of politics offered by Geneva, a small republic (in contrast to the monarchies dominating the rest of Europe). • Above all, Rousseau was a participant in and critic of the enlightenment.
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality • The “Discourse” has two primary targets: • Hobbes’s theory of human nature (Locke’s?). • The Enlightenment’s ideal of progress, and its confidence in the capacity of the arts and sciences to improve the human condition and character.
A Different Starting Point • Rousseau begins from a significantly different assumption than Hobbes. • For Hobbes, the state of nature is a “war of all against all” because human’s are fundamentally selfish and egoistic. • Rousseau insists the opposite: “humans are naturally good, and that it is solely by [our] institutions that [we] become wicked” (418). • Notice, however, that Rousseau doesn’t employ that assumption in his analysis of our natural state (he’s not just rejecting Hobbes’s egoism, he’s showing us why it’s wrong).
Natural (Hu)Man • Part 1 of the “Discourse” begins with a theory of human nature. • It takes the form of a reflective consideration of human embodiment and inclinations. • What do we find? • The “most advantageously organized” animal (422c1). • Civilized humans are like domesticated animals, “weak, timid, and servile” (422c2). • Solitude, “…[Nature] has contributed little to make them sociable” (423c1). • Freedom. • Happiness, “I should be glad to have explained to me, what kind of misery a free being, whose heart is at ease and whose body is in health, can possibly suffer” (Ibid.).
What did Hobbes Not Get? • For Rousseau, the problem is that Hobbes does make an assumption about our natural moral state: egoism. • Hobbes’s model is the child—undisciplined impulsive, fundamentally self-concerned, manageable only by external control. • The contract is the only thing that keeps us in line. • Rousseau grants that a bad person is a “child”in this sense, but disagrees that this is what we observe about the natural state of humans.
Why didn’t he get it? • Rousseau thinks Hobbes failed to appreciate the significance of our self-love, our desire for self-preservation. • For one thing, self-love encourages restraint of the passions and leads us to desire peace. • More importantly, it serves as an opening to empathetic identification with others, we have, “…an innate repugnance at seeing a fellow creature suffer…” (424c1).
Reason and Compassion • For Rousseau, this “natural feeling” of compassion provides the moral basis for the elaboration of social relations, and ultimately of a social contract. • It’s most important function is as a constraint/support of reason. • Rousseau is suspicious of reason—remember, he’s an enlightenment critic.
Love • Love is another significant natural feeling. It serves as the basis for Rousseau’s discussion of the family. • Key here is the distinction between love as physical desire and “moral” love. • The latter is a “factitious” feeling.
What it all Means • See the summary at 427c1-2. • In our natural state, there are few differences between human lives, and those that do develop disappear at death. • But, our experience is one of significant differences between human lives, and significant inequalities. • Where do they come from?
“the successive developments of the human mind” • Reason is not all bad. It is what explains the ability of humans to thrive in the state of nature. • The techniques and improvements of our understanding of the world correspond to a natural “perfectibility.” • Quite naturally, humans identified points of differentiation which helped and encouraged social bonding, led to language, and produced conflict and inequality. • Property is a big part of the conflict and inequality.
Why we need a contract. • That’s the story. The discriminating capacity of reason allows for the development of power over the world and other people, but the price is a blunting of our natural virtues and increasing inequalities • The social contract is our way out of this impasse, but because of the inequalities that (inevitably?) developed, the contract we have is broken. • Vive la Revolution!
From the “Discourse” to the “Contract” • In the “Dedication” to the “Discourse” Rousseau writes that he wants to live in a country where “the interest of the sovereign could not be separated from that of the subject.” • Hobbes says the same thing, but the answer he provides is, as Rousseau has shown, conditioned by his error. • Rousseau’s answer: When the subject is the sovereign. • In other words, a democracy, like Geneva’s! “I feel happy…always to find in my researches new reasons for loving that of my own country!”
The Existing Contract • “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (437c1). • The basis of this failed project is the power made possible by the inequalities produced by social relations. • In “Of the Social Contract,” Rousseau is attempting to specify how this power can be legitimated as authority.
You Can’t Go Back • Remember, there is a sort of inevitability, based in our perfectibility, to the development of social relations. • As Rousseau recounts the development of ever more complex social forms (family-rule of the strong-the self-subordination of an individual in slavery), he makes it clear that a return to the state of nature is impossible. • Inevitable development requires a social contract.
The Pact • The challenge is to “Find a form of association which defends and protects with all common forces the person and goods of each associate, and by means of which each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before” (440c1). • This is possible only by exchanging my natural liberty for civil liberty: the freedom to do what the laws allow (freedom limited by law). • This exchange has to be total: I give up myself and my rights to the community (becoming equal in this “alienation” with everyone else). • This exchange then gives me access to civil rights, which gain the protection of whole of civil society, which is nothing other than me (and everyone else) as a collective social whole.
Self-Rule • The social contract produces an interesting reflexive political subject: each of us is both sovereign and citizen. • This isn’t just self-assertion, however, “…for there is a great difference between being obligated to oneself and to a whole of which one forms a part” (441c2). • This satisfies the condition articulated in the “Dedication.”
The General Will • The “person” of the sovereign that emerges from the social contract is called the General Will: the will of all citizens directed towards the common good (443c1-2). • The GW organizes society by isolating and instituting what is common to the interests of all of the citizens. It is made apparent in directly democratic political assemblies, taking the form of law. • The GW is not the government, which is just a collection of magistrates and functionaries, the actions of which may or may not be consistent with the GW.
The Will of All • The General Will is just one measure of the will of a people. • We can also consider the will of a people as a sum of their individual wills. Rousseau calls this the Will of All. • Rousseau clearly insists on their difference, but maintains that they are related. The General Will is what remains when all of the differences between individual wills are abstracted (445c2). • Just as obviously, the forms of willing need not agree, and can be in conflict.
A Crucial Distinction • Noting the difference between the General Will and the Will of All is not only important for understanding Rousseau, it crystalizes an issue we’ve seen emerging from the various contract theorists. • That issue is the tension, if not conflict, between individual interests and and the interests of the social and/or political order(s). • It is this conflict that the question of authority is designed to address.
