[1] See Nettleship’s Remains, i. 160.
If then we are to coin an expression which will indicate the common features of the theories outlined in the previous chapter, we may venture upon some such phrase as “prima facie theories,” or “theories of the first look.” By this I do not mean that they stand in the same rank with the views of the Greek thinkers, who, undisturbed by previous speculation, saw the great facts of social experience with a freshness and wholeness of vision with which they can never be seen again. The “first look” of our own day is of a different kind. It is the first look of the man in the street or of the traveller, struggling at a railway station, to whom the compact self-containedness and self-direction of the swarming human beings before him seems an obvious fact, while the social logic and spiritual history which lie behind the scene fail to impress themselves on his perceptive imagination.
We see then that these theories of the first appearance are mainly guided by this impression of the natural separateness of the human unit. For this reason, as we noted, the experience of self-government is to them an enigma, with which they have to compromise in various ways. And because their explanations of it are not true explanations but only compromises, they rest on no principle, and dictate no consistent attitude. For Bentham all solid right is actually in the State, {81} though conceived by himself as a means to individual ends; for Mill, it is divided between the State and the individual, by a boundary which cannot be traced and therefore cannot be respected; for Herbert Spencer all right is in the individual, and the State has become little more than a record office of his contracts and consents.
The assumption common to the theories in question is dictated by their very nature. It is not precisely, as is often supposed to be the case, that the individual is the end to which Society is a means. Such a definition fails to assign a character which is distinctive for any social theories whatever. For Society, being, at the lowest rate, a plurality of individuals, whatever we say of the individual may be construed as true of Society and vice versa, so long as all individuals are understood in the same sense as one. Thus the “means” and the “ends” are liable to change places, as, for practical purposes, we saw that they did in Bentham. The ethical term “altruism” illustrates this principle. It shows that by taking “the individual” as the “end,” nothing is determined as to the relation between each individual and all, and it remains a matter of chance how far it is required of “each” individual, in the name of the welfare of “the individual,” to sacrifice himself to “all.”
The fact is that the decisive issue is not whether we call the “individual” or “society” the “end”; but what we take to be the nature at once of individuals and of society. This is the question of principle; and views which are at one in this have nothing which can in principle keep them apart, {82} although they may diverge to the seemingly opposite poles of the liberty of each and the welfare of all. We have observed this sliding from one narrowness to its opposite, as between Bentham, Mill, and Herbert Spencer.
The root idea then, of the views which we have been discussing, is simply that the individual or society—it makes no difference which we take—is what it prima facie appears to be. This is why we have called them “prima facie” theories, or “theories of the first look.” It would be a long story to explain how a first look can be possible in the eighteenth or nineteenth century A.D. But in brief, the history of thought shows certain leaps or breaks in culture; when the human mind seems to open its eyes afresh, or to emerge on a new platform, from which new point of view all its adjustments have to be re-made and its perceptions re-analysed. In these new stages a great advance is involved; but the advance is potential, and the possible insight has to be paid for by an initial blindness.
Such an occasion it was on which the legislator or economist or natural philosopher of the modern world turned his gaze upon man in society. He saw him as “one of millions enjoying the protection of the law,” [1] and society as the millions of which he is one. Such an onlooker inevitably proceeds to treat the social whole as composed of units A, B, C, etc., who, as they stand, and just as they seem to us when we rub against them in daily intercourse, are taken to be the organs and centres of human life. From this assumption all {83} the rest follows. Each of us, A, B, C, and all the others, seems to be, and to a great extent in the routine of life actually is, self-complete, self-satisfied, and self-willed. To each of us, A, B, or C, all the rest are “others.” They are “like” him; they are “repetitions” of him, but they are not himself. He knows that they are something to himself; but this “something” is still “something else,” and even in ethical reflection he is apt to call his recognition of it “altruism”—an indefinite claim and feeling, touching his being at its margin of contact with neighbouring circles, the centres of which are isolated.
[1] B. Jowett, in conversation, to author.
To the individual and society thus conceived—A, B, C, and the rest—it is plain that government can be nothing but self-protection. It is, in fact, a form of the impact of “others,” scientifically minimised, and accepted because it is minimised. For this reason it is, as we saw throughout, alien to the self, and incapable of being recognised as springing from a common root with the spontaneous life which we pretend to be aware of only within our private magic circle. Then the forcible impact of B and C upon the circle of A is a necessary evil, a diminution, pro tanto, of A. And the more altruistic A is, the more he will recognise this, as affecting not himself only, but B and C also.
It is for this reason that, on the views in question, all law and government necessarily remain formal and negative as compared with the substantive and positive ends of the self. The maintenance of “liberty,” of the circular or hexagonal [1] fences round A, B, C, and the rest, is {84} conceived as involving no determinate type of life, no relation to the ends which the units pursue within their hexagons. If in any way the self went beyond itself, and A recognised a positive end and nature which peremptorily bound him to B and the others, it would be impossible to keep this nature and end from reflecting themselves in the determinate content of the conditions of association between them. The assumption would be destroyed which keeps “government” alien to “self,” and it would be possible to consider in what sense and for what reason the nature of a spiritual animal turns against itself with the dualism which the paradox of self-government embodies, and that in pursuit of its true unity.
[1] See P. 73
2. We will now discuss Rousseau’s treatment of the paradox of “self-government.” And we discuss it, not because it is complete or self-consistent, but rather because, while breaking through to the root of the whole matter, it is as incomplete and as inconsistent as are the efforts of our own minds to lay hold of any profound truth. It displays, in fact, on the great stage of the history of philosophy, precisely the struggle which each of us has to go through if he tries to pierce the surface of commonplace fiction and tradition which persistently weaves itself about social facts. On almost every page there is relapse and vacillation. The fictions which are being cast aside continually reassert themselves; the embodiment of the principle which the author’s genius has discerned is sought for in expedients essentially opposite to its nature, while the instruments which it has developed for itself are contemptuously rejected.
{85} We are going to examine the main thesis of Rousseau’s Contrat Social. The reader who is surprised to find in our account little or nothing of the “return to nature,” “natural equality,” and the “natural rights of the individual,” may refer for these to Rousseau’s earlier essays on theses propounded by the Academy of Dijon. The first of the theses (1750) ran, “Whether the re-establishment of the sciences and the arts contributed to purify morals”; and Rousseau’s discourse, which won the prize, following the lead of the thesis, started from the later Renaissance, and dealt in general with the phenomena of decadence—a very real problem. The notable feature of this brief essay is its constant vacillation between the attack on science, art, and education as such, and the criticism, by no means an undiscerning criticism, of their abuses. Rousseau’s head is full, not of primitive man, but of Socrates and Cato, of Sparta and republican Rome. A writer who speaks of Newton and Verulam as preceptors of the human race can hardly be hostile to true intellectual achievement. [1] It is noteworthy that his zeal for educational reform is already apparent in this first published work.
[1] The whole piece breathes a spirit of prize essay paradox, and though, if sympathetically read, it is seen to be most characteristic of the author, no serious conclusion should be drawn from it as to his hostility to civilisation. A comic instance of his vacillation is produced by the necessity he felt himself under, of excepting, from his general dispraise of modern letters, such Academies as that of Dijon, which was to judge his essay. For an excellent appreciation of these earlier works, and of Rousseau in general, see the essay on “Our Natural Rights,” in the Lectures and Essays of the late Professor W. Wallace, Clarendon Press, 1898.
The second essay (1754), a much longer and {86} more serious piece, is on the thesis, “What is the origin of Inequality among mankind, and is it justified by natural law?” It was dedicated, with expressions of extravagant laudation, to Rousseau’s native state, the Republic of Geneva. His enthusiasm for this community, as for the ancient city-states, is a far truer guide to his genuine social ideas than any of his paradoxes about the state of nature and the bondage of social man. His genius, in fact, is very much under-rated by those who suppose him at any time to have believed the primitive state of nature, or earliest imaginable condition of the human race, to be capable of furnishing an ideal of life. He is perfectly aware that a state of nature, which is to furnish an ideal, must be selected at least from among the higher phases of man’s evolution, after morality and the family have begun to form themselves, and language and property have made some advance. Here, again, his vacillation is strikingly observable, and we can see that it arises from his profound insight. The vices of civilisation tend to force the desirable state of man down the scale of evolution, but the value of morality and respect for human nature tend to force it up, and Rousseau’s argument embodies the struggle. For Rousseau is far too critical and clear-sighted to ascribe true morality or strictly human nature to a state of animal innocence, and he knows that virtue involves potential vice; [1] and therefore it is with hesitation and regret that he selects a middle state as {87} representing his ideal, fully aware that it has forfeited animal innocence without having attained human morality. Even the famous declamation against the first founder of property in land seems to pass away in an admission that this was an inevitable stage in the growth of human capacities, which the author would not seriously desire to remain undeveloped. Two further points may be noted; first, the fundamental contention that men are by nature not equal but unequal, the evil of civilisation lying just in the replacement of natural by political inequality. If this political inequality were considered as modifiable, it is plain that the view would point to an advantage in the way of equality [2] possessed by society over nature. Secondly, the view here taken of natural liberty in relation to the social pact should be compared with that of the Contrat Social. In the essay, “natural liberty” is on the whole preferred; in the Contrat, another kind of liberty is held a truer good, although much of the tone and language associated with the preference of natural liberty continues by the side of the later view. It is plain that we are dealing, not with an unconsidering fanatical enthusiasm for one or another state of man, but with a struggling insight, which sees evil but also good in all, and, with hesitation and reluctance, depresses the scale first in favour of the one, and then in favour of the other condition of human beings.
[1] He seems to regard the beginnings of industrial co-operation as the end of the “state of nature” in the widest sense. The remark that “iron and corn civilised man and ruined the human race,” anticipates much in later speculations.
[2] We find Rousseau actually drawing attention to this in the Contrat Social. See Cont. Soc., I. ix. fin., where observe (i) that he half believes himself to have spoken of natural equality, and not of natural inequality, in the “Essay”; and (2) the “hedging” footnote on the illusoriness of social equality.
3. The famous opening words of chap. i. of the {88} Contrat Social (published 1762) sound like the beginning of a tirade against civilisation and the State. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, who does not fail to be more of a slave than they.” Here we might well suppose ourselves to be reading the preface to a demonstration that all social constraint is slavery, and that man, in a state of nature, possessed a liberty which he has now lost. We expect such an opening to be followed by a denunciation of the fetters of society, and a panegyric on the pre-social life. And there can hardly be a doubt that these sentences, along with a few similar phrases which stick in the memory, are the ground of the popular idea of Rousseau, shared by too many scholars. [1] But how does Rousseau go on? Here are the succeeding sentences. “How did this change take place? I do not know. What can render it legitimate? I think I can tell.” Here, as previously in the discourse on “Equality,” he (1) cuts himself loose in principle from the historical fiction of a social pact succeeding a state of nature; and (2) he promises to furnish a justification for the change (or, striking out the quasi-historical term “change,” for the condition of man), which is expressed by the words, “is everywhere in chains.”
[1] Professor Henry Sidgwick and Professor Ritchie are notable exceptions. See also, and pre-eminently, the essay of the late Professor Wallace referred to above.
This then is the task which he has set himself. The sentences last cited show that his answer will, in some degree, turn its back on his question, and that really man had little natural freedom to lose, and is not everywhere in chains. But the fact that {89} the problem first struck Rousseau’s mind through a feeling of rebellion against social slavery, and a loathing for the civilisation of his day, sets him at the very beginning of the path which social theory has to traverse, and ensures that the difficulties which we all feel at times will be met in their sharpest form. He knows, in short, that something, which can look like utter bondage, is a fact; and he knows that this fact has to be justified.
After some chapters devoted to clearing away inadequate solutions of the problem, he re-states it as follows, in terms of that form of the supposed social contract in which it was regarded as a compact of all with all for the constitution of a community:
“To find a form of association which shall defend and protect, with the entire common force, the person and the goods of each associate, and by which, each, uniting himself to all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and remain as free as before.” [1]
[1] Contrat Social, bk. i., ch. vi.
4. Before proceeding to examine the true meaning of this formula and its answer, we will briefly notice the conflict of ideas suggested by it. Man’s freedom, it is implied, remains at the same level. Even his power is not increased; it is only that individuals combine their forces, previously isolated. These implications suit neither the view he starts from, nor the view he arrives at. If man had a natural freedom, and then submitted to society, though merely to increase his force of action, some of his freedom must be lost, and he cannot remain as free as he was before. But if man in society {90} has a nature, which he could not have out of society, such that his individuality is maximised by the organisation of a social whole, then it is plain that he is not merely as free “as he was before,” but very much more free; free, indeed, strictly speaking, under social conditions alone. The notion which Rousseau started from, that man has surrendered some part of a previous freedom in order to make the most of the remainder, appears, as here, in the language of compromise, frequently through the Contrat Social. But it is not effectively relied on, for Rousseau is too acute to attempt a demarcation theory, and while he assumes, for example, according to the literal notion of a compact, that man only surrenders as much of his liberty as is necessary to the community, he sees that the sovereign is sole judge of this proportion and consequently is absolute. [1] In the same way he first deduces the sovereign’s right of inflicting capital punishment from the individual’s pre-existing right to risk his life in order to save it, in virtue of which he has transferred to the sovereign a right to demand his life when necessary to the public safety, which includes his own. And then, feeling this to be a fiction, he ekes it out by the precisely contrary suggestion that a criminal has broken the social treaty, has ceased to be a member of the community, and is dealt with as an enemy on terms of war. [2] This supplementation shows that Rousseau is aware of the weakness of his other account of the matter, based on non-social individual right. His constant failure, entire or partial, to free himself from the language of “first appearance {91} theories,” as we have ventured to call them, is just what makes him so instructive, in view of the similar inclination which besets us all.
[1] Contrat Social, bk. II., ch. v.
[2] Bk. II., ch. v.
5. We will now examine the real nature of his solution. For the historical fiction of a social contract, he substitutes, in answer to the problem formulated above (see section 3, end), the conditions which constitute a “people” or commonwealth. He speaks, indeed, of the “act” or “contract” which constitutes it—a survival of the language which belongs to the fiction. [1] But it is plain, even if he had not said so distinctly in the first chapter, that he is dealing not with an act in historical time, but with the essential nature of a social body. The “clauses of the contract,” he explains, are dependent on “the nature of the act”; they are implicit and universal—that is to say, not capable of being affected by any actual or supposed agreement in contravention of what the essence of a body politic requires. He is, as he has clearly said in the previous chapter, analysing the “act” “by which a people is a people,” i.e. the conditions of political unity.
[1] Contrat Social, bk. II., ch. v.
The “clauses of the contract” then reduce themselves to a single one, “the total alienation of each associated member, with all his rights, (the language is moulded by the fiction of an actual contract and pre-social rights,) to the community as a whole.” The community as a whole is therefore absolute. The subsequent passage, referred to above, [1] in which he speaks as if individual rights were retained, is a case of the vacillation on which we have remarked.
{92} The essence of this “social pact” is further reducible to the following formula:
“Each of us puts into the common stock his person and his entire powers under the supreme direction of the general will: and we further receive each individual as an indivisible member of the whole.”
“Instantaneously, in place of the particular person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly has voices, which receives from this same act its unity, its common self (son moi commun), its life, and its will. This public person which thus forms itself, by the union of all the others, used to take the name of city, [1] and now takes that of republic or body politic, which is called by its members State when it is passive, Sovereign when it is active, Power when comparing it with others.”
[1] Rousseau’s footnote in loc. “The true sense of this word is almost entirely effaced among the moderns; most of them take a town for a city, and a townsman for a citizen. They are not aware that the houses make the town, but the citizens make the city.”
In this passage the formula of association, and much of the commentary upon it, imply the “contract” to have been an event in history. Such is the bearing of the words “act of association,” “produces,” “receives,” “forms itself.” It is admitted that Rousseau’s thoughts are always more or less struggling with this conception, which, it must however be remembered, he explicitly refuses to rely on; and henceforward, having sufficiently called attention to it, we shall not encumber ourselves with observing upon it in every instance.
Putting aside then the defective terminology, and {93} bearing in mind that Rousseau considers himself to be analysing the essence of that act or character “by which a people is a people,” we find in this passage very far-reaching ideas. We find that the essence of human society consists in a common self, a life and a will, which belong to and are exercised by the society as such, or by the individuals in society as such; it makes no difference which expression we choose. The reality of this common self, in the action of the political whole, receives the name of the “general will,” and we shall examine its nature and attributes in the following chapter.
The primary point which it is necessary to make clear, however, is whether the whole set of ideas is to be seriously pressed, or whether the unity which they indicate is merely formal and superficial. For phrases of the kind here employed may be found in many earlier writers. The term “person,” for example, comes through Hobbes from the Roman law. “Persona,” in Roman law, we are told, [1] means either a complex of rights or the possessor of those rights, whether an individual or a corporate body. “Unus homo sustinet plures personas.” Thus a man may devolve his “persona” on another man. A corporation has a single “persona.” It is in this sense that for Hobbes, the State is a “real unity in one person,” which person has been devolved by all the individuals of a multitude upon one man or a definite assembly of men, whose acts therefore are, politically speaking, the acts of the whole multitude so united in one “person.”
[1] See, e.g., Green’s Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, p. 61.
{94} This use of the term “person” is one of the cases alluded to in ch. I., where an abstraction of law has preserved the seed of a philosophical idea of unity. How far the unity thus indicated is an empty fiction, or how far it is grasped as something vital, into which the individual mind goes out and in which it finds what its nature demands, is what we now have to consider further.
6. Chapters vii. and viii. of book I. of the Contrat Social show the outcome of Rousseau’s conflicting ideas in a very few remarkable propositions.
The question is whether the unity of a body politic is an arbitrary abstraction or a fundamental force and reality.
Rousseau is discussing in chapter vii. the guarantees which exist for a fulfilment of obligations by the sovereign (or whole) to its members and by the members to the sovereign respectively. As regards the obligation of the sovereign to its members, he runs straight into the fallacy referred to in ch. I. He contends, that is to say, that the whole is necessarily, by its constitution, that which it ought to be, and being composed of all the individuals can have no interest opposite to theirs as a whole, while, qua sovereign, it is debarred from any such special [1] action as might be hurtful to any single individual. This presupposes that the whole always acts according to its idea as a whole, and neither is “captured” by individual interests nor transgresses the limits set to its action by restriction to true public concerns. But if this were so, the State would be perfectly wise and {95} good; and we do not need to be told that a State, qua wise and good, could do no injustice to its members. The whole is of course liable to vices correlative to those which Rousseau is about to guard against when they arise in the individual.
[1] See below, p. 112.
And his view of individual disloyalty is decisive as to the vitality of his conception of political unity.
“Indeed,” he says, “each individual may, as a man, have a particular will contrary to or unlike the general will which he has as citizen; his particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest; his absolute and naturally independent existence may make him regard what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which would be less injurious to others than its payment is burdensome to himself; and considering the moral person which constitutes the State as an abstraction (être de raison) because it is not a man, he would enjoy the rights of the citizen without consenting to fulfil the duties of the subject—an injustice the progress of which would cause the ruin of the body politic.”
“In order, then, that the social pact may not be a vain formula, it tacitly includes the covenant, which alone can confer binding force on the others, that whoever shall refuse to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing else than that he will be forced to be free.”
In this passage Rousseau lays bare the very heart of what some would call political faith, and others political superstition. This lies in the {96} conviction that the “moral person [1] which constitutes the state” is a reality, as opposed to the natural idea that it is an abstraction or fiction of the reflective mind (an “ens rationis,” être de raison), because it is not an actual individual human being. The theories of the first appearance, as we have called them, are characterised by accepting as ultimate “the absolute and naturally independent existence” of the physical individual, and therefore regarding government as an encroachment on the self, and force as oppression. Whereas, if the social person is taken as the reality, it follows, as Rousseau points out, that force against the physical individual may become a condition of freedom. We saw even in Mill how extreme cases bring out the necessity for assuming a “real” will at variance with the individual’s immediate desire. [2] There is more to be said, of course, as to the limits within which force can be so applied. [3]
[1] For the meaning of “person,” see account above, p. 93. Note on the meaning of “moral” as here used that it is determined by a general opposition to physical, as in “moral certainty.” None the less, this use of “moral person” forms an interesting stage in the advance from the physical individual through the legal “person” towards the notion of a higher or greater self.
[2] The trivial case which he takes, of its being no curtailment to freedom to keep a man off an untrustworthy bridge, as he certainly does not want to be drowned, has received terrible illustration of late (June, 1898) by the disaster at the launch of the “Albion.” The disaster occurred because not enough force was used against the passionate momentary eagerness of individuals, and in favour of what it is fair to presume their real will would be.
[3] See below, ch. VIII.
It is worth while to cite here the whole of the short chapter viii., which draws out the {97} consequences of the above conception of a social pact and of sovereignty.
“Of the Civil Condition.—This passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces in man a very remarkable change by replacing, in his conduct, instinct by justice, and giving to his actions the morality which they lacked before. It is then alone that, the voice of duty succeeding to physical impulse, and right to appetite, man, who till then had only considered himself, sees himself compelled to act on other principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations. Although he deprives himself in this state of several advantages which he holds from nature, he gains such great ones in their place, his faculties exercise and develop themselves, his ideas expand, his sentiments are ennobled, his whole soul is exalted to such a degree, that, if the abuses of his new condition did not often degrade him below that from which he has emerged, [1] it would be his duty to bless without ceasing the happy instant which tore him from it for ever, and, from a stupid and narrow animal, made him an intelligent being and human.
“Let us reduce these pros and cons to terms easy to compare. What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to all which attracts him and which he can obtain; what he gains is civil liberty and the {98} property of what he possesses. To avoid error in these reckonings we must carefully distinguish natural liberty, which has no bounds but the powers of the individual, from the civil liberty which is limited by the general will; and possession, which is only the effect of force or the right of the first occupant, from property, which can only be founded on a positive title.
“We might, in view of the preceding, add to the gains of the civil state the moral freedom which alone makes man master of himself; for the impulsion of appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law which we have prescribed to ourselves is liberty. But I have already said too much on this head, and the philosophical sense of the word liberty is not my subject here.”
[1] Cf. the well-known lines of Faust:
“Ein wenig besser würd er leben,
Hätt’st Dur ihm nicht den Schein des Himmelslichts gegeben;
Er nennt’s Vernunft, und braucht’s allein
Nur thierischer als jedes Thier zu seyn.”
Besides the terminology of the historical fiction this curious passage shows in the strongest light the struggle by which Rousseau passed from the position of the “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” to that of the “Contrat Social.” The “hedging” of the sentence, “Although he deprives himself,” etc., represents a loathing of the decadent society of his day, which was deep-seated in Rousseau’s mind, and which his life enables us thoroughly to understand. The son of a Genevese artisan, with a touch of vagabond impulses, and more than a touch of Wordsworthian genius, he was the first, perhaps, of great modern writers to feel the true democratic passion, [1] and to see his artificial age as Plato or as Ruskin might {99} have seen it. It was no small feat of insight to subdue his just repugnance so far as to estimate, in the language of the chapter before us, the use, as distinct from the abuse, of law and society.
[1] Note the sentence in Émile, “C’est le peuple qui compose le genre humain; ce qui n’est pas peuple est si peu de chose que ce n’est pas la peine de le compter.” (Bk. iv., 3rd maxim.)
As a feature of this conflict of ideas, we may observe more especially the notion of original individual right, ascribed to a condition of man in which, according to the previous paragraph, right could not exist. The phrase is merely taken up from previous writers, as is also the so-called “right of the first occupant.” And the antithesis with true right and property, recognised by the social mind, in which this chapter presents them, has the effect of a destructive analysis of these uncritical conceptions. [1]
[1] Rousseau’s brilliant criticism, bk. I., ch. iii., has finally destroyed the conception of a right, whether natural or social, founded merely on force.
True right, then, begins with that social unity “by which a people is a people,” figured by Rousseau under the image of the social compact. This unity is one aspect of the rule of reason, the sense of duty, and the essence of humanity. The quality of man is liberty, [1] and we here see that this fundamental principle which Rousseau has above laid down in an undetermined sense, must, in the course of his reasoning, take on the higher meaning demanded by the conceptions of this chapter.
[1] Bk. i., ch. iv.
And the import of the term “liberty” in this chapter is a measure of the modification of ideas which has been brought about in the process of “justifying” the “bondage” of man. [1] The famous {100} sentence, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” now turns out to mean, “Man is born in natural liberty (which, if it refers to any actual condition at all, implies, in animal isolation), and by subservience to social law, he attains the civil liberty through which alone he becomes truly man.” Of course, however, the phrase “born free” has the under current of meaning, “is born for the truest freedom,” but in order that this import may be elicited the rhetorical antithesis, “and everywhere is in chains,” must be abandoned.
[1] See bk. i., ch. i.
The final paragraph of chapter viii. makes it clear that Rousseau considers the civil state as an embodiment of moral liberty, while he is rightly anxious not to seem to cut the knot of his problem by appealing to the merely ethical or philosophical sense of the term freedom. For this latter conception, taken by itself, is apt to be understood as the establishment of unity in the self by the path of renunciation. Now, the freedom of the true civil state is, on the one hand, only a stage in the ascent towards perfect ethical freedom or unity, for it involves rather the recognition of such freedom as the imperative end of social law, than the actual attainment of it; and, on the other hand, it is something broader and more substantial than ethical freedom is apt to be conceived as implying, because of that outgrowth of the self into an organised social content which the civil condition involves. The distinction between the civil state and ethical freedom is therefore a sound one, but yet does not prevent their juxta-position in this passage from throwing {101} important light on Rousseau’s conception of the former.
The expansion of old conceptions in Rousseau’s hands, and the direction in which his views are advancing, are well illustrated by the paragraph before us in comparison with Locke’s idea of consent. A recent editor of the Contrat [1] cites in illustration of the words, “Obedience to the law which we have prescribed to ourselves is liberty” Locke’s sentence, “The liberty of man in society is to be under no other legislative power but that established by consent in the commonwealth.” [2] But Locke is speaking, according to his theory, of the actual or tacit consent of individuals to the establishment of a governing power; a consent which, for him, is conditional and revocable, and therefore fails to meet the full difficulty of self-government. Rousseau, borrowing very likely his actual phrases from Locke, is speaking of something quite different, viz., the recognition of a law and a will, with which one’s everyday self may be at odds, as nevertheless one’s truer and fuller self, and imperative as against the commonplace trivial moods which constitute one’s inferior existence.
[1] M. Dreyfus-Brisac.
[2] Civil Government, ii. 22.
Thus far, then, we have seen how the problem of self-government is transformed by a deeper insight. (a) The negative relation of the self to other selves begins to dissolve away before the conception of the common self; and (b) the negative relation of the self to law and government begins to disappear in the idea of a law which expresses our real will, as opposed to our trivial and rebellious moods. The whole notion of man as one among {102} others tends to break down; and we begin to see something in the one which actually identifies him with the others, and at the same time tends to make him what he admits that he ought to be. We have now to follow these ideas to their application.
{103}
1. We saw in the course of the last chapter that for Rousseau’s political theory everything turns on the reality of the “moral person” which constitutes the State. When active, this “moral” or “public person,” or common self, is called sovereign; [1] and sovereignty for Rousseau consists in the exercise of the General Will; [2] and it is in this characteristic of political society that he finds that justification for the use of force upon individuals [3] which he set out to seek. At the close of the last chapter we noted the transformation in the problem of “self-government” which such a conception tends to produce. In face of it, the opposition between self and others, and between self and law or government, will have to be interpreted altogether afresh. The present chapter will be devoted to explaining the idea of a General Will with reference to Rousseau’s presentation of it, and the rest of the work will develop and apply it more freely.
[1] Bk. I., ch. vi.
[2] Bk. II., ch. i.
[3] Bk. i., ch. vii.; cf. I., ch. i.
A few words may be said upon Rousseau’s relation to Hobbes [1] and Locke, simply to {104} illustrate the process by which deepening political experience awakened the ancient meaning within abstractions which had preserved it in a latent form.
[1] See also p. 93 above.
Both Hobbes and Locke use expressions, in treating of the government and unity of a commonwealth, which closely resemble Rousseau’s phrases respecting the General Will, the moral person, and the real unity.
Hobbes, for example, insisted that sovereignty must lie in a will, and that this will must be real and must be taken as representing or standing for the will of the community. “This is more than consent or concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person.” [1] Only, interpreting “real” as implying inherence in tangible determinate individuals, he in fact substituted the will (taking the word in its ordinary sense) of a certain individual or certain individuals for the will of the community or moral person as such. His temperament was emphatically one of those described by Rousseau as treating the “moral person” as a fiction. But so far from abandoning for that reason all idea of actual effective unity, he replaces the fictitious or abstract unity of the “person” by the “real unity” of an actual human being or a determinate group of human beings, to be taken as the unity of the Commonwealth as such. Thus, for instance, with a logic which is irresistible on the basis which he adopts, he denies all possibility of other representation of the people where there is already a sovereign power. For the one and only representative of the people is for him the {105} sovereign, on whom the “person” of the community is, by the very fact of his sovereignty, assumed to be conferred. We may say then, in short, that Hobbes places the unity of political society in a will, and that, in his sense, a real or actual will, but emphatically not in a general will. He inherits the language which enables him to predicate unity and personality of the state, but in his mouth the terms have not recovered a true political meaning, and the social right, which they are intended to account for, remains a mere name.
[1] Leviathan, pt. II., ch. xvii. Italics mine.
Locke brings to bear a truer political experience, but a far less coherent logic. He feels that actual government is a trust, and that the ultimate supreme power remains in the community as a whole. The difficulty in his case is to understand how the will or interest of the community as such obtains determinate expression. Generally, and apart from particular causes of dissent, it is to be taken as one with the will of the governing body to which, according to the constitution, the work of government is given in trust. But the trust is conditional, and theoretically revocable; the ultimate supreme power is in the community at large, which may withdraw the trust if its conditions are violated. Of course, no determinate means of doing this in a lawful manner is, or can be, suggested, [1] and therefore the will of the people is not expressed by Locke as a real or actual will. And so the right, which was to be displayed as social, remains {106} a latent right in individuals to assent or to dissent, and society is not represented as a genuine unity.
[1] The referendum is not really such a means. It can only work within a well organised constitution, and could not be used to re-make the whole constitution—the forms and conditions of sovereignty—at a blow.
For Hobbes, then, we might venture to say, political unity lies in a will which is actual, but not general; while for Locke it lies in a will which is general, but not actual. If the two are pressed to extremes, the former theory annihilates “self,” and the latter annihilates “government.” For the former there is no true right, because the will of the state is related as mere force to the actual individual will; for the latter there is no true right, because the individual’s will remains a mere natural claim, which is never thoroughly transformed by social recognition and adjustment.
But if it were possible to inspire a logic as coherent as that of Hobbes, with a political content as large as that which animates Locke, a new ground would be won. And this is what Rousseau has attempted in his conception of a will at once actual and general; on the one hand, an absolute and determinate adjustment and recognition of rights; on the other hand, embodying in its recognitions all individual claims which represent a true individuality. Here, if such a theory were workable, we should have a genuine account of self-government, political obligation, and social right. It may be admitted that the theory is not workable in the form which Rousseau gave it. As Bentham contemptuously said, his doctrine would make all laws invalid, excepting, perhaps, those of the Republic of San Marino. But we shall see that these difficulties arise just where Rousseau failed to be true to his own best insight; and we shall find indications in his writings which suggest a different conclusion.
{107} 2. What Rousseau means to indicate by his expression, “the General Will,” may seem to many persons, as he clearly saw, to have no actual existence. It is of the nature of a principle operating among and underneath a great variety of confusing and disguising factors, and can only be defined by the help of an “as such” or “in so far as.” It is, we might say, the will of the whole society “as such” or the wills of all individuals “in so far as” they aim at the common good. It is expressed in law, “in so far as” law is what it ought to be; and sovereignty, “as such,” i.e. when truly itself because rightly acting for the common interest, is the exercise of the General Will. In its idea, as the key to the whole problem of self-government and freedom under law, it is that identity between my particular will and the wills of all my associates in the body politic which makes it possible to say that in all social co-operation, and in submitting even to forcible constraint, when imposed by society in the true common interest, I am obeying only myself, and am actually attaining my freedom. It embodies indeed the same factors as the conception of self-government, but in a shape which is a stage nearer to reconciliation. It postulates a will which in some sense transcends the individual whose will it is, and is directed upon an object of wider concern. And in one way or other, we know that this may be, and indeed always is the case, for our will is always directed to something which we are not.
We may, perhaps, approach Rousseau’s thought more successfully by starting from the idea of what is implied in the nature of will, as a characteristic {108} of an intelligent being. We may then find ground for conceiving that my will or yours, as we exercise it in the trivial routine of daily life, does not fulfil all that it implies or suggests. It is narrow, arbitrary, self-contradictory. It implies a “true” or “real” or “rational” will, which would be completely, or more completely, what ours attempts to be, and fails. Thus, it has been said that what Rousseau really aimed at, with his conception of the General Will, was the will “in itself,” or the will as it would be if it carried out what its nature implies and demands.
We can see that some notion of this kind floats before Rousseau’s mind from the predicates which he assigns to Sovereignty and the General Will, which are for him nearly convertible terms.
Sovereignty, for example, is inalienable and indivisible; [1] that is to say, it is a simple consequence of the nature of a body politic, “that by which a people is a people.” You can no more alienate or break it into parts than you can alienate or break into parts the use of your own judgment. To be capable of sovereignty means to be a people “as such” or “as a whole,” that is a living and choosing people. The people may of course give general orders to subordinates to hold good till revoked, as I may give a power of attorney for more or less specified purposes to another man. But that is the delegation “of power, not of will.”
[1] Bk. II., chs. i. and ii. Here Rousseau is following Hobbes very closely.
We see the author’s intention still more clearly when he maintains that the General Will is always {109} right, [1] and is indestructible. [2] Though it is always right, as Will, yet the people may be misled in their knowledge and judgment of details; though it is indestructible in the human breast, yet a man may vote at the polling booth on another issue than that which he would have before him if he consulted the General Will. He may answer by his vote not the question, “Is this for the public good?” but the question, “Is this for my private good?” If so, he does not indeed extinguish the General Will in himself, but he evades it. Or, as we might say, the man does not altogether cease, however ignorant or interested, to possess a man’s leaning towards making the real best of himself, though his private interest may at times so master his mind as to throw the higher or common good into the second place. Thus, the relation of the general will to a community is plainly apprehended by Rousseau much in the spirit of the doctrine that man always aims at something which he takes to be good. And so the General Will is as much implied in the life of a society as some sort of will for good in the life of an individual. The two, in fact, are not merely analogous but to a great extent identical. The General Will seems to be, in the last resort, the ineradicable impulse of an intelligent being to a good extending beyond itself, in as far as that good takes the form of a common good. Though this impulse may be mastered or cheated in a degree, yet, if it were extinct, human life would have ceased.
[1] Bk. II., ch. iii.
[2] Bk. iv., ch. i.
We need not enter at length upon the question whether the good which extends beyond oneself {110} is adequately described as the good which is general or common to oneself and others. It is plain that the unity of myself with others in a common good is the same in principle as the unity of myself with myself which I aim at in aiming at my own good. Thought and language, we should bear in mind, unite me to myself just as they unite me to others, and they expand my being by binding my own life into a whole no less than by making intercourse possible between my fellow men and myself. Just so, the good at which I aim extends beyond my trivial or momentary self—that is to say, is universal as against myself as particular—in ways which are not prima facie exhausted by saying that they include the good of others. But again, just like thought and language, the good which enables me to enter deeper into communion with myself or with the world must always have an aspect of extending that communion to others; and therefore, for the purposes of social philosophy, we may treat the universal good or self as also in its nature a general or common good or self. It is that at least, though it may be more, in accordance with the logical relation between the rational universal, and the numerical generality.
This indestructible impulse towards the Good, which is necessarily a common good, the substantial unity and filling of life by the interests through which man is human, is what Rousseau plainly has before him in his account of the General Will. But it has rightly been observed [1] that he did not really distinguish this conception, analogous as it is to what Plato or Aristotle might have said {111} of the “divine reason which is the source of the laws and discipline of the ideal polity,” from the legal idea of the sovereign “in the sense of some power of which it could reasonably be asked how it was established in the part where it resides, when and by whom and in what way it is exercised.” We will point out, however, the negative and positive indications which he furnishes as to where it is not and where it is to be looked for. That he fails to emancipate himself from the fallacies which he acutely indicates is a phenomenon for which the reader is, I trust, sufficiently prepared.
[1] Green, Principles of Political Obligation, p. 82.
3. Rousseau develops his idea of a General Will by the contrast which he draws between the General Will and the Will of All. [1] The General Will aims at a common interest; and it is this community of interest, and not the number of votes in which it may find expression, which in truth “generalises the will.” [2] The Will of All aims at private interest as such (“l’intérêt privé”) and is only a sum of particular wills. Only, Rousseau fancies, if you let the particular wills fight it out freely, their differences are likely to cancel each other, and the General Will to make itself felt, like any pervading factor through a chaos of indefinite variations.
[1] Contrat Social, II. iii.
[2] Ib. II. iv.; cf. above.
The important point in the idea of the Will of All” lies in its being “a sum” of “particulars,” as opposed to something common or general in its nature. Thus, in the limiting case, you may have a unanimous vote in favour of a certain course of action, and yet the voters may severally have been determined by aims and considerations which {112} Rousseau would not admit to be capable of entering at all into a determination of the General Will. For a private affair as such is incapable in Rousseau’s view of being made the subject of law, that is of an act of the General Will. Such an act must be general, not only in the number of votes (which, as we have seen, is the less important factor), but in the nature of its subject-matter, which must be, as we should say, a question of genuine public interest. [1] Now, when men’s minds leave out of sight the public or truly general aspect of a question, and are determined, each of them severally, by the expected consequences to himself as a private individual; then, though all may practically agree in the decision which is arrived at, yet such a decision is founded on no view of truly public interest, but is what Rousseau calls “a sum of particular wills.” The distinction between such a sum of wills, and a will that aims at a truly common interest or good, rests upon that fundamental contrast between a mere aggregate and an organic unity, which is embodied in the opposing views of society which we have been discussing. Pushed to extremes, it might raise a difficulty for those who are not familiar with the logical distinction between a Judgment of Allness and a true Universal Judgment. [2] What harm can there be, it may be asked, in my voting according to the effect a measure will have upon my affairs, if everyone else is allowed to vote according to the effect it will have upon his affairs, especially as in the extreme case suggested, the result is that we are all agreed? What can be more for the general {113} interest than a decision in which every particular interest is satisfied? On the mere basis of comparative generality, as estimated by number, there is plainly no answer to this objection. We meet here with another instance of the difficulties which arise from working with the notion of society as “self and others,” and of the good as an altruistic aim. For in the case supposed, the others are all satisfied as much as myself; and so I should give weight to no higher aim by considering their interest than by considering my own, unless I considered it on different grounds from those which I admitted in judging of my own advantage. But any different, higher, or deeper grounds might just as well present themselves to me with reference to my own advantage as with reference to theirs; and would differ from motives of private interest, not by bringing about a more unanimous adhesion, but by belonging to a deeper appreciation of the common good, and therefore producing a less superficial unity of resolve. The real difference between Allness and true Universality is that a “universal” characteristic goes more deeply into the nature of that which it characterises than does a mark or attribute which, like the owner’s name in the books of a library, simply happens to be attached ab extra to all the objects in question. So here, the supposed accordant decisions of all the voters, as guided each by his strictly private interest, are not really or completely accordant. They happen to come together in one point which has to be settled at the moment; but beyond that they express no oneness of life or principle; still less can they give voice to any demand of the greater or rational {114} self in which the real common good resides. This is what Rousseau means by saying that it is the community of the interest or the nature of the object, and not the number of voices, which distinguishes the General Will from the Will of All. It follows, therefore, that the private interest as such, which in the case supposed determines the individual voter, is not ultimately his true interest; and it may be said, “But if each followed his own true interest the Will of All would be right.” But a true interest, as opposed to an apparent interest, necessarily has just the characters which the true Universal has as against the collection of particulars, or the General Will against the Will of All. So that to say, “If everyone pursued his own true private interest the Will of All would be right,” is merely to say, “If everyone pursued his true private interest he would pursue the common interest”; or, “The Will of All, if directed to the common good, would be one with the General Will.” The reason why it is necessary to insist upon the distinction between true and apparent interest, universal and aggregate of particulars, General Will and Will of All, is just that a true interest generally requires some degree of energy or effort, perhaps of self-sacrifice; while the purely private or apparent interest, the interest of each of us in his routine frame of mind, is that by which many are always determined, and a whole community is only too likely to be guided. That is why it is worth while to distinguish the Will of All from the General Will. Let us suppose that Themistocles had been beaten in the Athenian assembly when he proposed that, instead of dividing the revenue {115} from the silver mines among all the citizens, they should devote this revenue annually to building a fleet—the fleet which fought at Salamis. It is easy to see that in such a case a relatively ideal end, demanding a certain self-denial, might appear less attractive to all the individuals—each keeping before himself his own separate share of profit—than the accustomed distribution of money. And if such a view had gained the day, history would never have told, and no free Europe would have existed to understand, by what decision the true general will and common interest of Athens might have transcended the aggregate private interests of all her citizens. No doubt, it may be added, a true universal end is usually more powerful than a limited interest even in the mere area of its operation; and we may ultimately find, in the benefits conferred by Athens on the world, a justification of her courage and self-denial, even by the rough and unreliable standard of the number of individuals beneficially affected.
[1] Contrat Social, II. iv.
[2] Cf. p. 110 above.
If such a theory as that just stated were to be literally pressed, it would lead to the conclusion that a law which was not really for the general interest was not binding on the subjects of a state. For, by the definition, such a law could not be a true act of sovereignty. No political theorist, however visionary, could accept such a conclusion as this, and Rousseau, seeing that the decision of the recognised sovereign must be final, attempts to show how and when it comes nearest to a true General Will.
The decisive point of his doctrine on this subject is his hostility to representative government, [1] {116} and his consequent demand of a primary assembly and a small community as the only guarantees for the genuine expression of a will for the common good. “The English people,” according to his well-known saying, “is only free during a general election.” Further, it is a sign that the Will of All is, on the whole, coinciding with the General Will, when unanimity prevails in the assembly. But long discussions and the organisation of minor “interests” and associations within the state, in short, all the phenomena of mature political life, are signs and conditions of failure to express the General Will, which is most likely to make itself felt when particular wills neutralise one another in the way explained above. [2]
[1] Bk. III. xv.; cf. IV. ii.
Now all this makes it clear that in endeavouring to point out the signs of the General Will, Rousseau is really enthroning the Will of All. He aims at eliciting a direct opinion, uncontaminated by external influence or interest, from each and every member of the citizen body. In this aim, what is present to his mind is of course the popular idea of the ancient City-State. But the actual working even of Athenian or of Roman institutions was far more subtle and complex than this. And more especially, the very core of the common good represented by the life of a modern Nation-State is its profound and complex organisation, which makes it greater than the conscious momentary will of any individual. By reducing the machinery for the expression of the common good to the isolated and unassisted judgment of the members of the whole body of citizens, Rousseau is ensuring the {117} exact reverse of what he professes to aim at. He is appealing from the organised life, institutions, and selected capacity of a nation to that nation regarded as an aggregate of isolated individuals. And, therefore, he is enthroning as sovereign, not the national mind, but that aggregate of private interests and ideas which he has himself described as the Will of All. He is so far aware of this that, as we have seen, he refuses to contemplate a great modern nation as a political whole, because he fails to conceive how, for such a community, the General Will can satisfactorily find expression. But in as far as he commits himself to the view that the sovereign, constituted as he would have it, “necessarily is what it ought to be,” or “is incapable of injustice to any of its members,” so far he has forgotten the dangers of the Will of All, and has affirmed the absolute supremacy of the popular will in the very sense against which his conception of the Will of All is a protest. The notion of primary assemblies and of direct participation in citizen life has no doubt a real lesson for the political theorist; but it does not point to reducing the whole political system of a great state to a model which never, perhaps, thoroughly fulfilled its idea except under very special conditions.
4. The other and more fruitful direction of Rousseau’s speculations upon the General Will is to be found in his remarks on the function of the Legislator. We will approach them by help of a short restatement of the problem as it now stands.
It was observed above that what Rousseau had before him in his notion of the General Will might {118} be described as the “Will in itself,” or the Real Will. Any such conception involves a contrast between the Real Will and the Actual Will, which may seem to be meaningless. How can there be a Will which is no one’s Will? and how can anything be my Will which I am not fully aware of, or which I am even averse to?
This question will be treated more fully on psychological grounds in a later chapter. For the present, it is enough to call attention to the plain fact that often when people do not know what they mean, they yet mean something of very great importance; or that, as has commonly been said, “what people demand is seldom what would satisfy them if they got it.” We may recall the instances [1] in which even Mill admitted that it is legitimate to infer, from the inherent nature of will, that people do not really “will” something which they desire to do at a given moment. The example of slavery is a striking one. A man may contract to become a slave, but no civilised government will enforce his contract at law, and the ultimate reason for the refusal is, as Mill in effect points out, that man’s nature is to exercise will—to have liberty—and a resolution to divest himself of this capacity must be taken as ipso facto void, by contradicting the very essence of humanity. [2]
[1] P. 69 above.
[2] “Liberty is the quality of man.” (Rousseau, Contrat Social).
Now the contradiction, which here appears in an ultimate form, pervades the “actual” will, which we exert from moment to moment as conscious individuals, through and through. A comparison of our acts of will through a month or a year is {119} enough to show that no one object of action, as we conceive it when acting, exhausts all that our will demands. Even the life which we wish to live, and which on the average we do live, is never before us as a whole in the motive of any particular volition. In order to obtain a full statement of what we will, what we want at any moment must at least be corrected and amended by what we want at all other moments; and this cannot be done without also correcting and amending it so as to harmonise it with what others want, which involves an application of the same process to them. But when any considerable degree of such correction and amendment had been gone through, our own will would return to us in a shape in which we should not know it again, although every detail would be a necessary inference from the whole of wishes and resolutions which we actually cherish. And if it were to be supplemented and readjusted so as to stand not merely for the life which on the whole we manage to live, but for a life ideally without contradiction, it would appear to us quite remote from anything which we know. Such a process of harmonising and readjusting a mass of data to bring them into a rational shape is what is meant by criticism. And criticism, when applied to our actual will, shows that it is not our real will; or, in the plainest language, that what we really want is something more and other than at any given moment we are aware that we will, although the wants which we are aware of lead up to it at every point.
To obtain something which approximates to a real will, then, involves a process of criticism and {120} interpretation, which may be either natural or intellectual; that is to say, it may proceed by “natural selection,” through the method of trial and error, or it may be rapidly advanced at favourable moments by the insight of a great mind. But some forwardness in this criticism and interpretation, bringing with it some deposit, so to speak, of objects of volition in which the private will, so far as it is distinguished at all, finds harmony and expansion, must be coeval with social life, and, in short, with humanity.
It is such a process of interpretation that Rousseau ascribes to the legislator. He fathers on him the whole labour of history and social logic in moulding the customs and institutions of mankind. And in agreement with our general attitude to Rousseau’s historical imagination, we may take what he says of legislation and the legislator as an expression of his views on the function of customs and ordinances in the constitution of will. It is very remarkable, considering the other aspect of his views, that he should have conceived so distinctly, as the following passage shows that he did, the immense contrast between a real will and anything which could be presented as a whole in the momentary consciousness of human beings.
Here is his statement of the problem.
“Laws are, strictly speaking, only the conditions of civil association. The people which submits to the laws ought to be their author. Only the associates can have the right to regulate the conditions of the society. But how are they to regulate them? Can {121} it be done by a common agreement, by a sudden inspiration? Has the body politic an organ for pronouncing its acts of will? Who will give it the necessary foresight to form such acts and to publish them before they are needed? Or how is it to pronounce them at the moment when they are required? How is a blind multitude, which often does not know what it wills, because it rarely knows what is good for it, to execute for itself so great and difficult an enterprise as a system of legislation? Of itself, the people always wills the good, but it does not always see it. The general will is always right, but the judgment which guides it is not always enlightened. It must be made to see objects such as they are, and, sometimes, such as they ought to appear to it; it must be shown the right road which it seeks, must be protected from the allurements of private will; places and times must be brought close to its eyes, and the attractions of present and visible advantages counterbalanced by the danger of remote and latent evils. Private persons see the good which they reject; the public wills the good which it does not see. All alike need guidance. The former must be obliged to conform their will to their reason; the latter must be taught to know what it wills. [2] Then, from the public enlightenment there results the union of understanding and of will in the social body; and hence the precise co-operation of the parts and the greatest power {122} of the whole. Hence springs the necessity of a legislator.” [1]
[1] Contrat Social, bk. II., ch. vi.
[2] There is a prima facie contradiction in this rhetorical antithesis; if all private individuals were enlightened, but selfishly interested, there could be no public good will. The contrast must lie between different classes of persons, if it is to have a meaning.
In the following chapter [1] Rousseau touches the essence of laws and institutions in a few words, which only embody a contradiction or a miracle because he is thinking of the legislator’s work as a creation accomplished at one blow.
“In order that a people at its birth should have the capacity to appreciate the sound maxims of policy and follow the fundamental rules of political reason, it would be necessary for the effect to become the cause; for the social spirit, which is meant to be the work of the legislation, to preside over the legislation itself, and for men to be, before laws are made, what they are meant to become by their means.”
The legislator then, in face of this contradiction, must have recourse to supernatural sanctions.
[1] Contrat Social, II. vii.
But the paradox precisely expresses the fact. Laws and institutions are only possible because man is already, what they gradually make more and more explicit; because he has a general will, that is, because the good which he presents to himself as his own is necessarily in some degree a good which extends beyond himself, or a common good. The criticism or interpretation which elicits the general will or actual social spirit, by removal of contradictions, and embodiment in permanent form, is essentially one with the work which Rousseau ascribes to the legislator. And his paradox is removed when we understand that the legislator is merely one of the organs of the social spirit itself, as it carries out its self-criticism and self-interpretation, in part by trial and error {123} and in part by conscious insight and adjustment. The habits and institutions of any community are, so to speak, the standing interpretation of all the private wills which compose it, and it is thus possible to assign to the General Will an actual and concrete meaning as something different at once from every private will, and from the vote of any given assembly, and yet as standing, on the whole, for what both the one and the other necessarily aim at sustaining as the framework of their life. It is needless to observe that such a representation of the Real Will is imperfect, since every set of institutions is an incomplete embodiment of life; and any given system of life is itself also incomplete. It is more important to remember that, though always incomplete, just as the system of sciences is an incomplete expression of truth, the complex of social institutions is, as we have seen, very much more complete than the explicit ideas which at any given instant move any individual mind in volition.
{124}
1. We have now seen that the problem of Self-Government may be regarded from a point of view other than that which presented it as a contradiction in terms. The contradiction depended on the absolute opposition between self and others which was embodied in the prima facie idea of society; the result of which was that all increase of individuality and all assertion of self were at the first view hostile as regarded others, and liberty, the condition of individuality, became a negative idea, prescribing as it were a maximum of empty space, to be preserved against all trespassers, round every unit of the social whole. We saw that notions of this kind were pushed so far as to endanger the fundamental principle, according to which self-affirmation is the root of morality, and it was maintained that the ethical attitude essentially lay in the negation and limitation imposed by social life upon the natural tendency to self-assertion. [1] According to these ideas, the self in society is something less than, if it could so exist, it would {125} be out of society, and liberty is the arrangement by which, at a sacrifice of some of its activities, it is enabled to disport itself in vacuo with the remainder.
[1] Pp. 27 and 73.
But if we may give weight to the suggestions of the two previous chapters, the assumptions which we work with are transformed. The difference of principle is that the average individual, such as each of us takes himself to be in his ordinary [1] trivial moods, when he sees, or thinks he sees, nothing in life but his own private interest and amusement,—this average individual is no longer accepted as the real self or individuality. The centre of gravity of existence is thrown outside him. Even his personality, his unique and personal being, the innermost shrine of what he is and likes to be, is not admitted to lie where a careless scrutiny, backed by theoretical prejudice, is apt to locate it. It is not in the nooks and recesses of the sensitive self, when the man is most withdrawn from things and persons and wrapped up in the intimacies of his feeling, that he enjoys and asserts his individual self to the full. This idea is a caricature of the genuine experience of individuality. It is true that to feel your individuality is to feel something distinctive, which gives you a hold and substance in yourself and a definite position among others, and, it may be, against them. But on a careful consideration, it will be found that this substance and position are always sustained by some kind {126} of determinate achievement or expansion on the part of the self. It always comes from taking hold of the world in some definite way; which, just because it is definite and affirmative, is at once a distinct assertion of the self, and a transition from the private self into the great communion of reality. The simplest machine will show us that it is the differences of the parts which enable them to make a whole. And so, we are now suggesting, it is in the difference which contributes to the whole that the self feels itself at home and possesses its individuality.