Opposite interpretations of the paradox of freedom divide our world in two. They represent the horns of the Rousseauean dilemma – the individualistic and the totalitarian. Traditionally, they are summed up as the two meanings of democracy: liberty and equality.
But Rousseau's proposition was more than a paradox in the treacherous field of political philosophy. There was a substantive content to his system which transcended its formal limitations. This will become apparent through a mere logical analysis of his terms, necessary though this be for a full comprehension. For tacitly underlying all his conceptions was the vision of a new hero whose accession he took for granted not only in the field of politics, but – a thing never before conceived of – also in the realm of life and culture. This hero was the people, validated as the representative of mankind. He acclaimed the people as the bearer of all human values: He pleaded for a popular culture, a civilization expressive of the actual life of the people. He had found in the people the fount of the collective life – its emotional, imaginative and religious mainspring. This also meant with him the rejection of emotional, imaginative and religious values that could not be shared by the people. He set up the people as the measure, and intended it to be as such. A culture apart from the people, a civilization vested in the few was to him a contradiction in terms. The life which he idealized was to be a life lived by the people.
Though never explicitly stated, this vision was a corollary to the Social Contract. It may yet to be found to lessen the gap between the seemingly incompatible implications of Rousseauean democracy. Within a popular culture – an entity to which we all contribute – liberty and equality may be principles not quite so antagonistic as they must seem in pure logic. To this point we will return in the end.
Admittedly, the modest cantonal scale of the Swiss background allowed Rousseau to borrow solutions from the ancient polis that were hardly suitable to the dimensions of the modern world. Here phenomena of mass existence prevail which are replete with sui generis perils. Moreover, the conditions of an industrial civilization give rise to unprecedented pressures towards conformity. Helpless millions depend hourly for water, light and peace on a switch in an unknown hand. A nameless and shapeless fear makes them insist on the need for limitless power in society. A voodoo of latent panic causes that they themselves enforce a deadening uniformity of views and opinions as the road to salvation. These anxious questions, the nightmare of our days, were still outside Rousseau's purview of the problem of freedom. Yet the fundamental dilemma has been set out by him in a manner that can not be lightly challenged by any one. We will re-state it in the light of our own time in which a popular culture is actually coming of age. We will do so in slightly modernised terms, plainly identifying the General Will with the survival of the group as such. It will then appear that the manner in which naturalistic factors are combined by him with realistically treated normative ones may point to still unexplored lines of study of the body politic.
The paradox of freedom in society has not been resolved by Rousseau, though he provided modern ethics with the master formula of the autonomy of the personality. But more important than all, he became the prophet of a popular culture, outside of which, in the convictions of the day, no free society is possible.
The totalitarian component of society derives from the naturalistic law of survival. This runs:
The individualistic component of society derives from the normative principle of natural law. This runs:
This poses a basic problem of political science: Is a free or legitimate society possible?
Neither of the two postulates can be invalidated. The first is borrowed from the general science of society. It is universally regarded as the starting point for the understanding of the behaviour of social bodies or groups as such. The second postulate is one that political science must incorporate; in relinquishing it, it would give up its claim to deal with the principles of political right and the sources of political obligation.
The question was first raised by the Greek philosophers. Their answer was the theory of the polis. But by admitting slavery and by depriving menial occupations of equal status the polis avoided the crux of the problem.
After the great intermezzo of the Church world which knew neither city nor state outside of the Christian Commonwealth, Rousseau was the first to put again the problem of the polis, this time in the fullness of its import. For the Church world had disappeared as an actuality and had become no more than a literary recollection; and Rousseau was not, like Plato and Aristotle, a member of a slave society, when he asked himself the question. Therefore he was confronted by the two postulates in all their rigour: the principle of survival and the principle of freedom.
His answer echoes the realism of the ancients. The form of government in the state must conform to the geographical and other objectively given conditions. Unless it does, the community can not survive. The customs and habits, the manners and morals of the population must be correspondingly adjusted. Unless they are, individuals can not be expected to will that which makes the community survive.
If there is, then, no “best form of government”; no spontaneous spontaneity, no natural freedom which can make a society survive. Human society is an artifact, though of an art natural to man. Freedom is possible only if the dispositions of the people are such that they will spontaneously work their institutions in such a way as to allow society to survive. This demands that education can be provided by the community, and that all the moral and psychological influences emanating from the community should tend to evoke such a disposition in the people.
With this answer Rousseau reached the highest point yet attained by political science. Or rather, with these theses he may have anticipated still unattained levels of its development.
First among the moral problems of free society stands that of the double quality of every individual in society.
In a free society, by definition, the people are the sovereign. They are the ruler. That which serves the survival of the people is right. Every member of the community is part of that ruling body. As a member of that ruling body – in modern times: as a voter – no other will is possible to any person than to will the survival of the community. This defines one aspect of the individual's situation.
At the same time every individual is also ruled; he is subject to the law. As subject to the law, it is he who will have to work, say, serve, fight. This is the other aspect of his position. How shall he vote?
He votes as a member of the ruling body, the body that lays down the law; he does not vote as a private individual, subject to the law. Once he has understood this fact, he has grasped the meaning of the question he is expected to answer. Assuming the issue to be war or peace, the question is, whether he as a ruler believes war or peace to be preferable in the interest of the country. It us not whether he as a particular person wishes to take part in war. His physical survival, in some cases even the integrity of this moral personality would require that he do not. Yet as long as he himself believes that war would serve the common good better at this juncture, he would lie if he cast his vote against war. For the voter there is no dilemma, the moral problem is resolved.
The will to survive Rousseau calls the General Will (which, of course, it is); the particular wills of the individuals he calls the Will of All. If the voters are well informed on the issue they will be found to will very nearly the same and proclaim the General Will, whether it be peace or war.
We have reached the conclusion that as long as the individuals express their own particular will, and are informed, in a free society the Will of All must come fairly close to the General Will.
In Rousseau's words (Book II, Ch.3),
If, when the people, being furnished with the adequate information, held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication with one another, the grand total of the small differences would always give the general will, and the decision always be good.
Obviously, an important problem arises. The Will of All will often not coincide with the General Will. A minority will vote differently from the majority. How does this affect political obligations?
Rousseau's answer is consistent. Only if every individual votes as an isolated independent person, will it be true that the common denominator of their particular wishes will tend to eliminate small differences and produce the General Will. Chance divergences will cancel out and the common interest will prevail. But if the persons have coagulated into factions, groups, parties, “interests”, then they are not voting any more as isolated individuals. Instead, they have developed group loyalties. They have small General Will of their own group. The number of voters is now really only as great as the number of the factions of groups. There is no reason any more to suppose that the differences will cancel out, and the Will of All approximate the General Will. Rousseau, therefore, deprecates the forming of pressure groups in a free society. Fathering it on him, the French Revolution, in 1789 dissolved all corporations; in 1791 membership in trade unions was made punishable by law.
However, even in the absence of pressure groups which represent sectional interests, views need not agree. Unanimity is not the rule, even if informed individuals vote each for themselves, as isolated persons. Actually, Rousseau argues merely, that the vote will demonstrate the General Will, the will of the majority serving as an indicator. Those who have voted for the law are only conforming to what they themselves decreed and are, therefore, free. But in what sense is the member of the community free who has not voted for the law?
The answer is supplied by a fundamental consideration based on the meaning of freedom implied above. The opposite of freedom is slavery, the condition of being forced or compelled by an alien will. He who obeys a law which he has himself ordained, is free. In following the rules of the game of baseball, in following the rules of a college we have joined, in following the laws of our country to which we adhere, in following the principles which we embodied in our personality we are free. This is the meaning of moral liberty, as Kant deduced from Rousseau, and as no sound person would doubt. He who imagines that he is free, when he is free only to do “what he likes”, has never yet wished to do what is worth while, else he would know that he can not, then, do as he likes.
I have digressed into a discussion of personal morality, where after all freedom can be defined on different levels like physical freedom or financial independence. In regard to society no other freedom than moral freedom is meaningful. Neither the liberty of the wild ass in the desert, nor the liberty of the freebooter on the high seas, nor the liberty of the small or big racketeer in the interstices of society has anything to do with freedom in society. They are free from the law, which is either absent, or is not such as to hinder or hamper them; they are not free under the law. They are free because they are outside society, not free through society; they have liberty apart from society not in society. They may have a romantic, a psychological, or commercial appeal to an immature imagination; morally their freedom is of no value: it is irrelevant.
Even the problem of private enterprise has nothing to do with moral freedom. John Stuart Mill in his essay On Liberty – the locus classicus of liberalism – laid it down that however strongly one may believe (as he himself did at that time) in free enterprise on its merits, one should not confuse free enterprise with a free society; it has no bearing on freedom, what form of trading a people believe in. And trade – as Mill used the term here – emphatically included the organization of industry.
Now let us return to our question: In what ways is an individual free in obeying a law he has not voted for?
The answer is provided by the device of the social life. Every member of the state is a member of the Sovereign people, and also a member of the subject body. He is ruler and ruled; he is governor and governed. This is meant by the social tie which is the source of all political obligation. “Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our cooperative capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole” (Book I, Ch. 6).
In concrete terms: If the slightest part of the territory of our country is attacked, if the most modest man's property is threatened by enemy action, all the people of the country will in all their might rush to the support of that single man.
The social tie is the formula which describes the double role of each adult citizen, as pledging his everything to the support of all, and receiving the same pledge from all, in exchange. To talk about a social Contract or Compact from which that tie originated does not mean that human beings ever actually existed outside society, and that society was founded by their coming together one day and deciding out of the plenitude of their wills that such a thing as society should exist. Of such naiveté Rousseau was innocent. He used the construct Social Compact or Social Contract as any scientist would use a hypothesis – and said so – merely in order to explain the facts. What the Social Compact device does for us is not to explain how society was created – Rousseau confesses he does not know – but what it is actually like. It does not show the origins of the thing, but he describes it as it is. It answers the chief question, in what situation does a person in a free society find himself? The device of the Social Compact serves that purpose perfectly.
The chief characteristic of the social tie is its comprehensiveness: it is total. Man who was a concrete and whole person before he entered the contract, enters society completely and wholly. First, because otherwise he could not expect others to do alike. Why should every one else work their lives for his sake, if he himself, overtly or covertly, made reservations to the pact? This would be contrary to reason. Secondly, if reservations were made, they would disrupt society, for nobody would know how far anybody was committed. The members of society would be looking to some third power to decide between them and the others what the true limits of their obligations were. Such a condition of affairs would foil the whole purpose of the tie and be, therefore, contrary to reason. As Rousseau puts it (Book II, Ch. 6): “If the individuals retained certain rights, as there would be no common superior to decide between them and the public, each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature would thus continue, the association would necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical.”
This being so, the social tie as a source of political obligation, would be contrary to reason unless each insisted on mutuality, i.e., on everybody equally, “putting his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the General Will […] [But] “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 all.”
But how burdensome exactly will they make them? In giving ourselves up to society, must we expect society to swallow us up altogether? What about the “natural rights” of men which are at the basis of Rousseau's system? What about the private person whose life and liberty, in Rousseau's phrase, “are naturally independent” of the public person, the all powerful Sovereign, the people? Again, in more modern terms: how is the totalitarian element in democracy to be prevented from extinguishing the individual altogether?
With Rousseau society is conceived of in the dual terms symbolized as survival and freedom. Survival stands here for the principles of nature; freedom, for those of right, morality and justice. Rousseau declared: “In this inquiry I shall endeavour always to unite what Right sanctions with what is prescribed by Interest, in order that Justice and Utility may in no case be divided.” A theory of society which can not stand the test of these dual terms has failed. In producing a system that stands the test – imperfect though it otherwise be – Rousseau established political science as distinct from sociology and anthropology which deal with society in other terms than those of moral law.
In recognizing political society as real, i.e., subject to laws of nature and morality, independent of our whims and wishes, Rousseau set limits to illusions and wishful thinking. It is an illusion to believe that freedom is a principle on which society can be safely based and that individuals will spontaneously conform to all demands.
The conditions which Rousseau established for a free society are indeed, comprehensive:
The institutions themselves must be adjusted to conditions. Small and large, populous and un-populous, tropical and non-tropical, poor and rich countries demand different institutions, different forms of government; only small and poor countries, e.g., can have an ideal – simple and direct – democracy.
Men must be educated, trained and inured to the kind of life their forms of government require; the notion that any wish, whim, fashion, mood, spontaneity, emotional pattern can find its vent in a “free society” is an illusion.
Even so, a free society can exist only if its citizens are public spirited, disinterested, given to civic virtues and prepared to sacrifice all and everything in the service of their country and its free institutions.
In the last resort, the individual must be forced to be free.
It must be admitted that on the purely normative level the paradox of freedom in society remains unresolved.
Indeed nothing might have ever been heard of Rousseau as a political scientist outside of a circle of scholars and students, but for that other side of his oeuvre which was not concept, not thought, but intuitive discovery of a unique kind. He had a vision which no one had before. He identified himself with something no one else cared to touch. He had become the germ of a movement of surpassing importance. I have of course in mind Rousseau's discovery of the people: not as a political term meaning the multitude; not as an economic term, meaning the poor; but the people as the repository of culture. Implicit in this was the conviction almost generally accepted today that a culture not shared by the people was no true culture.
The Contrat Social proclaimed the sovereignty of the people. Now just as the Contrat Social itself was an old idea, so was the sovereignty of the people. If you will, Hobbes – counterpole to Rousseau and defender of despotism – had stood for both. But such constructions meant very little. The simple reason being, that whatever the political regime would be, nobody thought of the human race in any other terms than those of a hierarchy, the best being at the top, the weakest and most numerous at the bottom. That did not mean that the people had been overlooked. The Church undertook to care for their soul, and, occasionally, one of their ranks might even become a pope. The schoolmen might think of educating them and one or another might rise to be prince among scholars. The manufacturers might make productive use of them and once again they might become rich men themselves. But they were invariably thought of as materiel out of which something different from themselves should be made; a level from which to elevate; a darkness which was to be illuminated; maybe a rough diamond to be polished. But as for what they were, namely the common people, they were to Voltaire “the source of all fanaticism and suspicion”, “the canaille”, to Holbach the “stupid populace”, to Diderot, “the most dense and vicious of all human beings”; to “unpeople” the people, he said, “or to improve them, is one and the same thing …”. Thus the leaders of the Enlightenment.
Rousseau's was a breathtaking recognition: What the people felt, thought and did; the way they worked and lived; their traditions, their loyalties were valid and sound. Their faiths and beliefs were deep and inspired; their native vigour and moral sense, their patriotism and natural religion made them the stuff of God's creation. In its positive aspect it was a discovery of the people's creative role in human culture. In its negative aspect it induced later generations to reject a culture that did not comprise the mass of the people.
Rousseau's political philosophy, together with his discovery of the people in the flesh, is transforming the history of the race. Implicitly, it was through this ideal that the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Socialist Britain, were made possible. For what democracy means to the world at large, is essentially a way of life in which the people themselves and not their betters or superiors set the measure.
When all is said, Jean Jacques Rousseau indissolubly linked the concept of a free society with the idea of a popular culture. The contradiction between freedom and equality which the polis had only partially resolved was bound to come to a head in any community larger than “Our Town.” England, America, France, Russia, China and India mean by democracy very different ways of life. But what separates them equally from the ancien régime and its aristocratic outlook is the fact that they take the ideal of popular culture for granted. The shape and mould of their particular cultures is far from evoking outbursts of mutual admiration. Yet fundamentally common to them all is the postulate of universality to be approximated in their ways of life. In the abstract realm of normativity democracy's endeavour to fulfil itself must ever be doomed to frustration owing to the inherent antagonism between the ideals of freedom and equality in society. It is in the concrete medium of cultures, however much they differ, that liberty and equality may coexist and should seek simultaneous fulfilment.