The Social Contract[1]
Book I
Rousseau: “Since no man has a natural
authority over his fellow, and force creates no right, we must conclude that
conventions form the basis of all legitimate authority among men.” 5
Brian: Or, we could conclude that there is no
‘legitimate’ authority among men.
Rousseau: “”The problem is to find a form of
association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the
person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself
with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.” This is
the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution….
These clauses (of the Social Contract), properly understood,
may be reduced to one – the total alienation of each associate, together with
all his rights, to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each gives
himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no
one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.” 10-11
Brian: Why does everyone have to alienate all of their rights to the community?
Why can’t they just alienate their right to retaliate against aggressors, while
maintaining the rest of their rights (such as property rights) intact? This
would seem to solve the problem presented more effectively than the
totalitarian community that Rousseau is envisioning.
Rousseau: “Attention must further to called to
the fact that public deliberation, while competent to bind all the subjects to
the Sovereign, because the two different capacities in which each of them may
be regarded, cannot, for the opposite reason, bind the Sovereign to itself; and
that it is consequently against the nature of the body politic for the
Sovereign to impose on itself a law which it cannot infringe. Being able to
regard itself in only one capacity, it is in the position of an individual who
makes a contract with himself; and this makes it clear that there neither is
nor can be any kind of fundamental law binding on the body of the people – not
even the social contract itself.” 12
Brian: Hmm, a contract, the terms of which
the other party (the State/Sovereign) refuses to/cannot bind itself to. Only a
fool would sign such a useless thing, giving up their rights for nothing but
empty promises in return.
Rousseau: “Again, the Sovereign, being formed
wholly of the individuals who compose it, neither has nor can have any interest
contrary to theirs; and consequently the sovereign power need give no guarantee
to its subjects, because it is impossible for the body to wish to hurt all its
members. We shall also see later on that it cannot hurt any in particular. The
Sovereign, merely by virtue of what it is, is always what it should be.” 13
Brian: Firstly, no sovereign power in
history has ever been formed wholly of the individuals that it rules over. For
that to happen, all political affairs would have to be decided by all the
citizens together, in a real direct democracy sense. This would become horribly
unwieldy and inefficient once the community surpassed about 250 members or so.
Secondly, if ‘majority rules’ were to prevail in this
political body, then minorities could constantly be sacrificed to the whims of
majorities, resulting in harm to members of the body.
Thirdly, even if we grant that it is “impossible for the body
to wish to hurt all its members”, and that every member of the society that
this political body rules over is a member of the political body, the body
could still hurt its members through ignorance. This political body could have
the best of intentions and no ulterior motives, but if its decision-makers were
largely ignorant of economics and the other social sciences, their policies
would probably end up doing more harm than good, contrary to their intentions.
Rousseau: “In order then that the social
compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which
alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will
shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than
that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving
each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence.” 14
Brian: I fail to see why being enslaved to
a private individual is necessarily worse than being enslaved to ‘your country’
and to the ‘general will’ of its constituents. The fact that you would have a miniscule
amount of influence on your country’s political decision-making through
democratic procedures would be little consolation if your country frequently decided
to significantly violate your personal and property rights. Better to be under
the rule of a private, authoritarian tyrant who takes tribute less frequently
and less viciously.
Book II
Rousseau: “Each man alienates, I admit, by the
social compact, only such part of his powers, goods and liberty as it is
important for the community to control; but it must also be granted that the
Sovereign is sole judge of what is important.” 22
Brian: Ok, so in effect, each man alienates
everything that he has to the Sovereign, who can always just judge that
everything is important “for the community to control”.
Rousseau: “When I say that the object of laws
is always general, I mean that law considers subjects en masse and actions in
the abstract, and never a particular person or action. Thus the law may indeed
decree that there shall be privileges, but cannot confer them on anybody by
name. It may set up several classes of citizens, and even lay down the
qualifications for membership of these classes, but it cannot nominate such and
such persons as belonging to them; it may establish a monarchical government
and hereditary succession, but it cannot choose a king, or nominate a royal
family. In a word, no function which has a particular object belongs to the
legislative power.
On this view, we at once see that it can no longer be asked
whose business it is to make laws, since they are acts of the general will; nor
whether the prince is above the law, since he is a member of the State; nor
whether the law can be unjust, since no one is unjust to himself; nor how we
can be both free and subject to the laws, since they are but registers of our
wills.” 28
Brian: Just because a law is worded
generally and abstractly, doesn’t mean that it is an emanation of the ‘general
will’, or that it is just a “register” of aggregated individual wills. If a law
is passed that prohibits smoking tobacco, it is obviously aimed at those who
previously enjoyed smoking tobacco, even if these people are not mentioned by
name. It is absurd to say that in this case, the law is simply a “register” of
the wills of individuals, including the smokers, and thus can’t be unjust to
them. Only smokers who for some reason, really hated other people that smoked,
might consent to such a law in their own interest, giving up smoking in exchange
for forcing others to do the same. Most smokers would bitterly oppose such a
law though, and wouldn’t be impressed if they were speciously told that, since it
was their own ‘general will’ doing the legislating, they shouldn’t complain.
Book III
Rousseau: “What is the end of political
association? The preservation and prosperity of its members. And what is the
surest mark of their preservation and prosperity? Their numbers and population.
Seek then nowhere else this mark that is in dispute. The rest being equal, the
government under which, without external aids, without naturalisation or
colonies, the citizens increase and multiply most, is beyond question the best.
The government under which a people wanes and diminishes is the worst.” 66-67
Brian: But sometimes a higher population
and increased prosperity are inversely correlated. When human labor in general,
as a factor of production, starts experiencing diminishing returns when more
and more is applied to production, given the country’s existing supply of land and
capital goods and state of technological knowledge, then more population will
soon start reducing the average standard of living, not raising it. Given this,
we are then faced with the philosophical question: which is better, having more
people alive at lower standards of living, or having higher standards of living
for a smaller number of people alive? I submit that this question is
unanswerable. Hence, Rousseau’s simplistic ‘mark of a good government’ fails.
Rousseau: “In Greece, all that the people had
to do, it did for itself; it was constantly assembled in the public square. The
Greeks lived in a mild climate; they had no natural greed; slaves did their
work for them; their great concern was with liberty. Lacking the same
advantages, how can you preserve the same rights? Your severer climates add to
your needs; for half the year your public squares are uninhabitable; the
flatness of your languages unfits them for being heard in the open air; you
sacrifice more for profit than for liberty, and fear slavery less than poverty.
What then? Is liberty maintained only by the help of slavery?
It may be so. Extremes meet. Everything that is not in the course of nature has
its disadvantages, civil society most of all. There are some unhappy
circumstances in which we can only keep our liberty at others’ expense, and where
the citizen can be perfectly free only when the slave is most a slave. Such was
the case with Sparta. As for you, modern peoples, you have no slaves, but you
are slaves yourselves; you pay for their liberty with your own. It is in vain
that you boast of this preference; I find in it more cowardice than humanity.” 75-76
Brian: In order to avoid the absurdities
discussed in these passages, it would be best not to accept Rousseau’s
definition of liberty. By liberty, Rousseau seems to mean constant, personal
involvement in the wielding of power over others (politics). I would prefer to
define liberty as freedom from politics,
not as freedom to engage in politics
constantly, as Rousseau seems to define it. The less the government or aggressive
people restrict your scope of action through physical violence, and the less
they encroach upon your market-derived property rights, the more liberty you
enjoy. How much time you spend assembled in town squares deliberating on
political policy issues really has very little to do with it.
If we adopt my definition of liberty (the one favored by
libertarians), than we don’t need some to be slaves so that others can enjoy ‘liberty’
(in Rousseau’s sense). Everyone can enjoy liberty, and can do whatever they
think best with their time, so long as they refrain from aggressing against one
another’s persons and property.
Book IV
Rousseau: “There is but one law which, from
its nature, needs unanimous consent. This is the social compact; for civil
association is the most voluntary of all acts. Every man being born free and
his own master, no one, under any pretext whatsoever, can make any man subject
without his consent. To decide that the son of a slave is born a slave is to
decide that he is not born a man.
If then there are opponents when the social compact is made,
their opposition does not invalidate the contract, but merely prevents them
from being included in it. They are foreigners among citizens. When the State
is instituted, residence constitutes consent; to dwell within its territory is
to submit to the Sovereign.” 84
Brian: What a curt and obfuscatory passage
for such a vital issue! Firstly, there is the historical fact that no such
unanimous social contract has ever been recorded, and if it has never been
recorded, how can the ‘territory’ of these supposedly ‘voluntary States’ be
determined?
Secondly, assuming for the moment that such a contract was
agreed to by a number of inhabitants of a geographical region, what happened to
the opponents of the contract, the “foreigners among citizens”? Shouldn’t the
territory that they possessed at the time still be in a Stateless mode, or be
possessed by a different State than the dominant one of the region, if they had
never agreed to a ‘social contract’ with the citizens of the dominant State?
And yet, there is no evidence of such political arrangements in the real world.
Thirdly, Rousseau here anticipates the modern political
slogan: “America, Love It Or Leave It!” Rousseau and this slogan assumes that
regional States have a legitimate claim to all of the territory within their
self-proclaimed borders, that this territory is ‘their’ territory, not territory
legitimately owned by various private individuals. With this assumption,
Rousseau is able to make his social contract hereditary, without formally
making it hereditary. According to Rousseau, being born the son of a slave does
not make one a slave, but living on land that had slave-like conditions
attached to it in the distant past does make one a slave. Since it is
arbitrarily assumed that monopolistic regional States were all established by
the unanimous consent of every single inhabitant of the region that the State
claims, then voila, every State is really voluntary! You are not born a slave;
but if you wish to live anywhere on this earth, then the land on which you live
makes you a slave, because of some shadowy ‘social contract’ supposedly agreed
to in the past.
I suppose the only escape would be to colonize the moon and
to keep constant video surveillance in place over the whole moon. This way, no
political theorist could automatically assume, due solely to lack of evidence, that
a social contract, binding on the moon’s territory, was agreed to unanimously
by the colonists. Or, preferably, we could just discard the whole social
contract notion, due to its complete lack of correspondence to reality.
Rousseau: “When in the popular assembly a law
is proposed, what the people is asked is not exactly whether it approves or
rejects the proposal, but whether it is in conformity with the general will,
which is their will. Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on that
point; and the general will is found by counting votes. When therefore the opinion
that is contrary to my own prevails, this proves neither more nor less than
that I was mistaken, and that what I thought to be the general will was not so.
If my particular opinion had carried the day I should have achieved the
opposite of what was my will; and it is in that case that I should not have
been free.” 84
Brian: Stop it right there. The ‘general
will’ of a group of people, if such a thing is a legitimate concept at all,
must be defined as follows: What an individual member of the group would will
if somehow he could feel all of the pain and happiness of every other member of
the group as acutely as he felt his own pain and happiness. This would be in
accord with the universalist utilitarian precept: “Each to count for one, none
to count for more than one” (when weighing various people’s pain and happiness
while considering social policy issues).
Now, it could well be that widespread adoption of such a
perspective and of such a maxim would prove conducive to better law-making than
its absence. But it is a fact that no one actually thinks this way consistently.
The utility of this construct of thinking as if guided by the theoretical ‘general
will’ of the body when making political decisions does not mean that the
construct becomes the ‘real will’ of all of the individual members of the body.
Their actual will remains their actual will, with all of its personal biases,
partialities, and attachments included. If legislation, supposedly framed based
on the ‘general will principle’, does not accord with an individual’s actual, personal
will, one cannot say that the individual’s will was ‘really’ realized, because
the legislation was in accordance with the ‘general will principle’. No
supposed ‘social contract’, of any sort, has the power to change what is explicitly
not my will into my will.
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