11

The Nature of Human Nature
in Hobbes and Rousseau

OUR IMAGES of human nature are centrally important ideological phenomena, for the evident reason that what distinguishes an ideology from a merely random string of moral and political imperatives is the way it incorporates the validating assumptions of those imperatives. The assumption that these imperatives—whether taken for granted, defended desperately, or pressed for the first time—have their roots in “human nature” is one main condition of their very intelligibility. Philosophical theories of ethics that have analyzed their subject matter in formal, nonnaturalistic terms—Kant’s Groundwork or Hare’s The Language of Morals, for instance—are unsatisfactory just because they cut themselves off from recognizable answers to the question “What is the point of acting in such and such a way?”1 But if any viable ideological position implies the possession of an image of human nature, this is far from suggesting that most cultures have felt any great need to articulate that image. Indeed, it is arguable that this possession, like many others, is noticed only when it is lost. A society in which the going rules are universally accepted, in which conflicts of interest do not appear to be intense or deep, may well get along in the belief that how men ought to behave there is how men ought to behave, because how men are there is how they are. Whether there are many, or any, such societies is unclear; the old sociological image of “primitive society” may simply be a myth that tells us less about the moral orderliness of savages than it does about the anxieties of our own social theorists. At any rate, what is clear is that an account of human nature is intrinsic to moral and political argument, and the need for an explicit account is the more urgent when moral and political argument becomes fiercer and gets more swiftly down to basics. Thus, the discovery by the Greeks that their way of life was so different from that of many of their neighbors provoked at once the question of how convention was, or was not, rooted in nature. Was there one justice, since fire burned in Athens and Persia alike; or was there nothing coherent to be said about the relative merits of different social arrangements?

The question to which students of human nature inevitably address themselves is, what are men really like? And it is important to stress that “really,” since it is at the heart of all sorts of problems. If we were to ask what men are like, we might invite a mere catalogue—men here have such and such beliefs, men there have such and such other beliefs. The tricky word “really” tells us that this will not do. When we add “really,” we always mean to rule out some possible deceptive factor—is she really blonde, or does she dye her hair? Is that really a Great Dane, or will it turn out to be a rug when I put my spectacles on? Now, we have to ask what “really” rules out when it appears in this context. What kind of tampering or deception are we ruling out? Plainly, the tampering is that stemming from social conventions, moral, religious or political brainwashing. The point of asking what human nature is like is to see through—or behind—what men locally believe, want, approve, and abhor, to uncover the substratum beneath man as he locally appears. But this presents us with a problem to which no wholly compelling answer has been given, certainly a problem that Hobbes and Rousseau set for us rather than solved. Men always live in society; so far as we can see, all the more complex forms of behavior that we regard as characteristically human are ones we learn slowly through social interaction. But if our evidence of human capacities comes from socialized man, what can we infer about nonsocialized man’s resources for good and evil? Even to ask the question shows up more problems. It is, in the first place, not clear that anyone does want to know what men would, as a matter of fact, be like without socialization. Rousseau explicitly denied that this was his concern, and neither he nor Hobbes would have gained much moral purchase from the occasional feral child. In the second place, if we hope to get at human nature by “stripping away” the effects of socialization, it looks as if we must already know what the effects of social life are. To then explain the effects of social life by reference to an underlying human nature looks very like arguing in a circle. No wonder, then, that practically the first remark that Rousseau makes is “écartons tous les faits” (let us lay aside all the facts); the concept of human nature is confessedly a theoretical construction.2

All the same, it is worth making one methodological point here; up to this point, nothing said about the difficulties of getting at human nature implies that these are different in kind from those involved in getting at the nature of nonhuman objects. To the seventeenth-century scientist—and to John Locke—a knowledge of the nature of lead was beyond us; for all we know of lead is what happens to samples of lead in various experimental situations—just as all we know of men is what happens to samples of humanity in those experiments that we call society. But a sufficiently dashing scientist would not stop there; he could reply that he had such a good deal of elaborate chemical and physical theory about the internal structure and organization of lead that he was justified in believing that he knew the nature of lead and knew why samples behaved as they did in experiments. No doubt the internal organization of men is imperfectly understood, and no doubt the variety of effects that the environment exerts on that structure is far beyond our present knowledge. But there is, in principle, no more reason to despair of knowing the nature of man than there is to despair of knowing the nature of lead.

Such, anyway, would have had to be the reply of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and there have been no more dashing or ambitious figures in English philosophy. The very blandness with which he announces that all the conclusions of Leviathan except the preexcellence of monarchy are demonstrative truths is immensely appealing in view of the shock and outrage that those conclusions created. For a man who prided himself on his caution, even cowardice, in political matters, he was extraordinarily brave in intellectual fields. The ideological collapse that provoked Hobbes’s response was, of course, an overt and very far-reaching one, and Hobbes was an acute observer of its near and remote causes. The disorder Hobbes most minded was literal civil war, the collapse of law and order. The source of disorder was men’s inability to agree about the status and grounds of the rules that ought to maintain the legal and political system. Two particular causes of these disagreements were, in the first place, the conflict between the defenders of the traditional common law, who held, with Edward Coke, that the fundamental rules were traditional, built in, not open to change by royal say-so, and the defenders of royal prerogative, who held that law was what the sovereign said it was; and, in the second place, the multitude of religious prophets who preached doctrines of individual illumination that were, in implication, anarchic in the extreme. Now, it is easy to make two related errors about Hobbes’s work. The first is to detach it too completely from its time—for Quentin Skinner has certainly shown that Leviathan had immediate political implications that were perceived by Hobbes’s contemporaries.3 They knew that his equation of de facto and de jure authority implied a duty to swear allegiance to the new Commonwealth. But the second error is to underestimate the oddity and originality of Hobbes’s arguments in this context. He saw more plainly than his contemporaries that an entire picture of the natural order had been dealt a mortal blow. The old Christian-cum-Aristotelian metaphysics was simply played out; the usual inquiries about man’s place in the natural hierarchy were therefore nonsensical. Attempts at a rational inquest into the good life for man as laid down by Nature or God were old-fashioned scholastic junk. To understand nature, human nature, and the imperatives of social life, it was essential to throw out this meaningless rubbish and begin on scientific foundations. No account that sees Hobbes as other than a secular, materialistic utilitarian is an account of Hobbes at all, which is why Leo Strauss’s attempt to present Hobbes’s science as a mere tarting-up of old-fashioned conceptions of the state as a remedy for sin just misses the point.4 So equally do more recent attempts to present Hobbes’s political system as a derivation from Christian theology.5 Hobbes’s own contemporaries knew better than more recent commentators: orthodox supporters of royal prerogative knew that this secular, calculating politics was a creed quite unlike a belief in the divinity of kings.

Hobbes’s science of human nature is part of his science of nature in general—a fact that instantly puts Hobbes on the “hard” side of today’s debates about the status of the human sciences. Hobbes’s science of nature is the science of bodies in motion; what he is committed to is a universe in which there is nothing in the world except matter in motion. Hobbes’s psychology is in principle reducible to physiology, and ultimately to physics. Again, this puts Hobbes into some thriving contemporary company—that of those philosophers who call themselves “identity theorists” or “central state materialists” on the strength of identifying psychological and physiological processes as the same processes. A good deal of (not very successful) ingenuity is devoted by Hobbes to trying to account for, for example, memory in terms of “interior motions”: if present perception involves “phantasms” caused by the physical interaction of the internal motions of our brains and the corpuscular emanations of bodies external to us, then memory is a weakened “phantasm.” This ignores all sorts of difficulties, the most obvious of which is that my now remembering having read a book last week is nothing like my now reading a book—either a neat or a dilute version of that event. Hobbes’s physical analysis of human activity would no doubt have been more persuasive had his experience of “machines” extended beyond the clocks and watches that were the common basis of seventeenth-century corpuscularian analogies and on to that twentieth-century source of analogy, the computer. Certainly, what Hobbes wanted to tell the world was that human beings are self-regulating and self-maintaining mechanisms. That he was faced with the intractable difficulties we, too, face in explaining the “emergent” properties of self-maintaining physical systems is only one more of the things he shares with us.

It is a consequence of Hobbes’s mechanistic approach that he presents men as having two crucial properties. First, their actions are wholly determined. There is no such thing as free will; men are free in just the same sense that anything else in the world is free, and no more so. A stream runs downhill freely when nothing impedes its progress—though that progress is certainly caused. A man acts freely when there is no external impediment to his actions, but those actions have determinate causes. What men call the will is simply the last appetite in deliberation; willing is in no sense a voluntary act, as the nonsense of saying, “I will to will . . .” shows. As we shall see, there are a good many hidden problems here. The second crucial quality is human selfishness. Not only are our actions determined, but they are determined by our desire to maximize our own pleasure. The successful maintenance of the human organism is accompanied by pleasure—pleasure is, so to speak, the way that the maximization of vital motions appears to us, just as “phantasms” are the way our sensory interactions with the external world appear to us. Thus, the self-maintaining mechanism pursues the maximum of pleasure for itself. Hobbes was quite aware that the assertion that we always try to pursue our own pleasure is fraught with danger. A friend saw him giving alms to a beggar and raised the obvious question of how a believer in selfishness could act in this seemingly altruistic way. Hobbes’s reply—absolutely correct according to his theory—was that the beggar’s distress caused him distress, and by relieving the beggar, he relieved himself.6 But the reply itself creates another puzzle, for it reveals an ambiguity in the concept of pleasure. If it is a necessary truth that every action is done to maximize the apparent pleasure of the actor, then it is certainly not necessarily true that men are selfish or pleasure seeking in the usual sense of the terms. It is not true that the benevolent man is “really selfish”; rather, the reason why we call him benevolent is that his gaining pleasure depends upon the pleasure of others. The difficulty for Hobbes is that if it is only in this rather formal sense that men are pleasure seeking or selfish, this in itself offers no reason for thinking that they will be selfish in the usual sense. But only if they are selfish in the usual sense will they get themselves into the kind of trouble that Hobbes’s state of nature describes and that the Leviathan is supposed to rescue them from.

Self-maintenance is clearly the major imperative facing the Hobbesian man. The organism is, so to speak, programmed to keep itself in existence. So clear is this to Hobbes that he regards suicide as proof of madness; and this imperative underlines his claim that the one thing we cannot promise to do is destroy ourselves even if our absolute ruler requires us to, for nothing would count as a genuine promise to do so, so contrary is it to our basic nature. Equally importantly, it explains Hobbes’s claim, made in opposition to the Aristotelian tradition, that there is no natural summum bonum (supreme good) for men, although there is a summum malum (supreme evil). The open-ended imperative to survive means that we must do what looks like the survival-enhancing thing on each occasion. Felicity in this life is not attained in a condition of happy and tranquil rest, for all life is incessant motion and incessant change of desire; felicity can consist only in achieving the objects of our different desires one after another. But the absence of vital motion is an absolute evil; death, the cessation of all desire and activity, is the summum malum. Hence, Hobbes’s assumption that the great evil of ineffective government is the way it exposes us all to the danger of violent death; hence, too, his belief that it is our common interest in avoiding such risks that provides the securest foundation for the power of Leviathan.

Before leaving Hobbes’s premises about human nature for his conclusions about the plight it gets us into, it is worth summarizing the legacy he has left us. His belief that explanation in terms of matter in motion—mechanical, causal explanation—is the only satisfactory kind of explanation has been triumphant since his day. During this century, the goal of tough-minded scientists has been to reduce the psychological vocabulary of desire, purpose, and intention to something more akin to the austere vocabulary of mechanics. The efforts of psychologists of the persuasion of Clark Hull or John Watson has, to a large extent, been directed to the Hobbesian program, though in a more empirical and inductive way, and one that is more cautious in hypothesizing interior mechanisms.7 Crucially for our comparison, it is the suspicion of talk about mental entities that carries across the centuries, the fear that talk about the contents of consciousness verges on mysticism. Conversely, the problems that Hobbes found intractable remain intractable today for the same reason. Hobbes, for example, tries to graft an account of the conventional meaning of words onto a causal foundation by showing words provoking ideas—a sort of stimulus-response backing. But he cannot manage it with any ease; to raise merely one problem, logical constructions such as “if . . . then . . .” are utterly recalcitrant to a name-object analysis. And attempts to resolve the problem invariably wind up in circularity, since the only way of identifying the appropriate response to the word stimulus depends on already knowing the meaning of the word that the response is meant to explain. Who, after reading Noam Chomsky’s devastating attacks on B. F. Skinner’s view of language, would not agree that Hobbes’s difficulties are alive and unsolved and living in Harvard?8 Again, all the phenomena of self-consciousness—except, perhaps, anxiety about the open future—receive a rough analysis from Hobbes. Is the process of trying to make up our minds only a matter of overhearing the decision-making machinery hunting through its routines—the conflict of one good reason with another a matter of the ebb and flow of motions until a decisive shift is made? Do we stand as such spectators in our own bodies that what seems phenomenologically to be a choice is no more than a spasm when the machinery settles down? Like his successors in this tradition, Hobbes found it hard to explain consciousness without thereby explaining it away.

The condition of hypothesized selfish, rational man is familiar today from another contemporary hypothetical science—strategic studies. Our natural condition is one of merciless competition. For rational, selfish creatures, competition has three sources—scarcity, fear, and pride (or vainglory). Scarcity hardly needs elaboration, but the other two causes do. The effects of fear are, again, the commonplaces of deterrence theory. In a condition in which there is no power sufficient to overawe us all—which is, by definition, the condition we are in without government—we know that another man can, by brute force or by guile, do us any injury up to and including death. The ability to kill one another is the one basic equality that Hobbes assumes, and it gives us all an approximate equality of vulnerability. It also gives us all a powerful motive to strike first rather than be struck against. I know that any of my fellows sees me as a threat; he knows that my only certain defense against him is to eliminate him before he can eliminate me; he knows, too, that I know this—that I have, therefore, every reason to strike at once—and that knowledge gives him every reason to beat me to it. When each of us has a lethal first-strike capacity, and none of us has any second-strike capacity at all, the strategic logic necessarily leads to a war of all against all—individually, it is irrational to forgo the preemptive strike, but individual rationality leads to destruction for all. This is not to say that men have any intrinsic lust for conquest, desire to dominate their fellows, or the like. That men seek restlessly for power after power throughout their lives is a result of their insecurity. Men, unlike animals, can fear tomorrow as much as today. We cannot enjoy the goods we have at the present moment unless we have some certainty that we can enjoy them in future, and this means we must have some way of protecting them. But the demands of power are inexorable, for we must always protect the position from which we protect our goods: to eat the apple, we grab the tree; to defend the tree, we build a fence; to protect the fence, we dig a ditch; and so endlessly on. But as if this were not enough, Hobbes endows man with an urge to emulate, to outrun his fellows. Not that Hobbes moralizes about pride; he merely asserts that since men can recognize other men as essentially like themselves, they begin to compare their own success with that of other men and, having done so, become dissatisfied with any position other than the best. We do not merely wish to survive; we wish to survive better than anyone else. And this introduces a kind of scarcity that nothing can cure and a kind of competition to which there can be no end. When we are all intent on occupying first place, and the evidence that it is the first place is the envy of the defeated, there is no possible way to create enough goods to go round. The state of nature is thus overdetermined.

Recent writers on deterrence have argued that the war of all against all can be averted by the creation of second-strike capacity. The urge to launch a preemptive strike disappears when it is obvious that it will bring only lethal retaliation in its train. In the nuclear field, doomsday machines or a belief in the human urge for revenge is enough to create the plausible threat. For Hobbes’s system, it is the Leviathan who provides second-strike capacity; if you murder me, I certainly cannot kill you in reply, but the state can, and this knowledge ought to powerfully reduce your enthusiasm for making the first move. In short, Hobbes applies the logic of the game theorist to human nature, and much like Anatol Rapaport arguing that rational egoists will get into an irrational mess, Hobbes shows us that the state of nature is a state of universal war.9 And like his successors, Hobbes argues that some enforceable system must be found whereby it is made the interest of every party to pursue the common interest in peace.

But what does the Leviathan do when he creates order in this chaos? I have argued all along that the point of inquiring into human nature is to inquire into the underlying reasons why social order is both necessary and possible; it must also be to show what kind of order is required. And here Hobbes seems to offer two responses, which are worth distinguishing rather sharply. In one view, the sovereign creates a minimal order of peace and security. Men may do whatever they wish within the limits of keeping the peace. The sovereign certainly judges, for example, what religious views may be put forward—but he does not judge their truth; all he does is ensure that ceremonies of praise and honor to a deity are agreed on and cause no dissension. Religion, as Hobbes insists, is law, not philosophy—conventions, not truth. What men choose to believe in the privacy of their hearts concerning such contentious matters as the origin of the world is their own business. In other words, there is no legal limit on the sovereign’s authority and no theoretical limit on what he may find it necessary to regulate. But men being what they are, an effective government can be a very laissez-faire one. Much of what Hobbes says supports this view. It accords well with his jokes against original sin and his dislike of interfering clerical authority. And this side of Hobbes suggests that the association between liberalism and secular utilitarianism is more than a historical accident.

Yet there is another side to the story, less obvious, but well brought out in John Watkins’s Hobbes’s System of Ideas.10 In this view, the Leviathan is more than a mere contractual arrangement. It is, as Hobbes says, a real and perfect unity of them all. We become literally one body—though an artificial body, nonetheless a real one. The famous frontispiece to the first edition of Leviathan is to be taken quite literally. Now what this suggests is a much more radical jump from prepolitical man to political man. The state is to take each of us and so mold us that we become elements of it. Yet the way in which this is to occur is not through coercion, but through teaching us the language of civility, a vocabulary in which treason becomes unsayable, hence unthinkable. Since the Leviathan is, although a body, a body whose sinews are conventions, its parts—the citizens—must have as little choice about keeping these conventions as have things in the natural world about obeying the laws governing them. Hence, Hobbes makes it a primary task of the sovereign to lay down rules by which acts are to be named and judged. Common rules of right and wrong are to be established, and Hobbes appears to envisage these as being so established that it will appear self-contradictory to question them. The simplest example is Hobbes’s claim that what the sovereign does is, by definition, just—“just” means here “in accordance with the sovereign’s commands”—so nobody can think himself unjustly treated by the sovereign. This is a profoundly totalitarian image, and one that speaks to our contemporary terrors. Orwell’s Newspeak and Jean-Luc Godard’s dictionary-eating computer in Alphaville are powerful images of the ways in which vocabulary may shape political possibilities. But Hobbes’s state is still light-years away from the horrors of the twentieth-century totalitarian state. His successors in our century are fictional ones—the rulers of Brave New World and the planners of Walden Two. But the only moral that I want to draw is that—as the preceding account of a more liberal Hobbes shows—utilitarian, manipulative accounts of human nature are not bound to lead in this direction. The revolt against recent applications of a certain kind of Benthamite rationalism, which several writers have documented—none more soberly or clearly than Stuart Hampshire—is a revolt against possible rather than inevitable applications.11 But what is true is that once we have, with Hobbes, taken up this secular, mechanical, naturalistic approach to human nature, we are left with no absolutely forbidden actions, no intrinsically wicked behavior. The limits of politics, even when pursued by the undeniably benevolent, are set by psychological technology rather than by independent standards of human dignity or the like.

But if human nature is so manipulable, one of the functions of the notion of human nature is much impaired, for it plays a much-reduced role in setting a limit to political possibility. Unless something substantial, basic, and important survives the process of socialization and remains intact behind social appearances, we are unable to say anything very profound about how well or how ill social arrangements satisfy human needs and aspirations. Hobbes begins by setting up social arrangements to cater for human needs, but ends by teaching us how to remake human beings to fit social arrangements. Certainly, the friendly relativism of a lot of sociology owes what respectability it possesses to a similar emancipation of the social sciences from their psychological basis. Societies create their own raw material; they can, therefore, be coherent or incoherent in the way that they do it; if they are too incoherent, then they will grind to a standstill, but between two equally coherent societies there seems nothing to choose—neither would satisfy the “human nature” created in the other, but each satisfies the “nature” it creates. But there is no question of a society coherently violating human nature. The suspicion that appeals to human nature were politically ineffectual in just this way was one of the many doubts that tormented Rousseau. I do not want to embroil us in a blow-by-blow account of the similarities and divergences between Hobbes and Rousseau, but I do want to show how this suspicion fits into a use of the concept of nature that is different from Hobbes’s in important ways. If Hobbes’s descendants are the “tough-minded” behaviorists, then Rousseau’s are a ragged collection ranging from revisionist Marxists through to the existentialists and beyond.

The disorder to which Rousseau responded most keenly was psychological disorder. It was the chaotic condition of the individual self that distressed him, and although he insisted that this condition had social causes and social consequences, it was the fusion of the personal and the political that unified his essays, his novel, his autobiography. He described the disorder he saw as alienation: “l’homme est devenu hors de lui-même.” Men cannot live within themselves; they are not self-sufficient, either singly or together. This was both the cause and the effect of inequality and injustice. But whereas Hobbes is willing to accept the world’s account of who wins and who loses in the social race, Rousseau says that everyone loses. One man thinks himself the master of many and yet remains a greater slave than they. Competition breeds greed, envy, servility, false conceit, and false humility. It forces men to perform for the sake of public approval, and where they cannot or will not, it forces them to retire into themselves, to dream of revenge and preeminence founded on fear. Rousseau was a great admirer of his own talents as a painter of the human heart, and he excels himself at the end of the Discourse on Inequality with a description of the lonely crowd that encapsulates an entire tradition, pre-echoing Hegel and Freud and looking back to Plato’s account of the self-enslaving tyrant in book 9 of the Republic.

But how had men got into this condition, where had they taken a wrong turning, and could they have done better? Rousseau provides no one answer, and his hopes for improving the human condition are minimal. But there are some illuminating suggestions. In the Discourse, Rousseau claims that men without society must be mere isolated animals. For him, natural man is not the noble savage, nor is he Hobbes’s rational egoist. Both these conditions are social conditions and, in an important sense, nonnatural. As an animal, man is neither moral nor immoral, but amoral; his conduct cannot sensibly be judged by moral standards, any more than that of animals can be. Such “natural goodness” as man does possess, he possesses only in potentiality—and this potentiality is by no means certain to be realized. As an animal, natural man shares with animals an advantage denied to social, truly human man. He is lacking in any sort of self-consciousness, and therefore he is lacking in any kind of anxiety. Animals are afraid in the presence of a terrifying thing that provokes their fear, but the haunting fear of extinction that pervades human life, the factitious anxieties about how we look in the eyes of others—these are fears the animal knows nothing of. That these anxieties are a central element in the human condition and are importantly nonnatural is, of course, one respect in which Rousseau anticipates the central commonplaces of existentialism. But human nature contains seeds of a total transformation that animals cannot undergo—we alone are so educable that we change individually over an entire lifetime, and so adept at transmitting what we have learned that as a species we change as drastically. An animal is the same after a few months as during its whole life; the species is the same at the end of a thousand years as at the beginning. Only human beings can properly be said to have a history; but once we enter history, our former nature is irretrievably lost, and knowledge of it merely hypothetical. This capacity for indefinite transformation Rousseau terms perfectibilité, but it is by no means a capacity to make ourselves perfect—indeed, its chief effect is to put us quite at odds with ourselves. Our “natural” condition, in the sense of our existence as mere isolated animals, is not an elevated condition—we eat, sleep, copulate at random, and fight at necessity—but it is one in which desires and their satisfaction are matched to each other. Dissatisfaction has not yet entered the world. And this matching of desire and attainment gives the state of nature a moral quality for Rousseau, though not that of prescribing how we should behave in society.12 It is rather as an image of harmony, the opposite of the restless, striving competitiveness of civilization, that it finds its moral role; but the critic with an ear attuned to Rousseau’s pessimism catches the implication that such harmony is possible only where everything that is distinctively human—speech, self-consciousness, individual and social aspiration—is absent.

The arrival of language and society drastically transform the situation; they make morality possible—but they also make men depraved: “L’homme qui pense est un animal méchant” (The thinking man is a depraved animal). The raw animal material of morality was the twin sentiments of self-love and sympathy; we shun, by an instinctive reaction, both pain to ourselves and pain to our fellows. The arrival of reason transforms these into principled benevolence and a proper, conscientious self-respect. We recognize other men as entitled to correct treatment, and we claim it from them in return. We also, more alarmingly, become able to grade men for their qualities, to rank them as more and less estimable. And we can therefore desire to be esteemed ourselves. At this point, someone emerges who closely resembles Hobbes’s natural man—proud, selfish, competitive. Rousseau draws attention to the fact, and goes on to draw Hobbes’s conclusion that this will be the prelude to the war of all against all. But he is at pains to point out that the state of war exists only within society and as a consequence of social dealings. This claim is not, of course, a straightforwardly historical or sociological one. Rather, it is a way of denying Hobbes’s comparatively cheerful assumption that if this is how men are, then we had better construct a social order that will accommodate them without bloodshed. The perpetual motion of Hobbesian man is not a neutral phenomenon, but a disease to be cured. And Rousseau’s concern for the damage done by universal competition is not limited to fearing that we shall make war on one another, that the fist, the knife, or the gun will replace the market. It is not the danger that we shall damage one another that agitates Rousseau; it is the certainty that we are damaging ourselves.

Civilization is a condition in which we lose touch with ourselves. We put on masks; we play particular social roles as if we were actors in the theater, or even puppets on a string. Rousseau was fascinated and repelled by the theater—it was both an allegory of the falseness of social life and a celebration of that falseness. The more society develops, the more elaborate its games become, and then the greater become the temptations that beset the man who tries to be himself and to live within himself. Social distinctions are, of course, merely conventional—but nonetheless real. It was quite impossible for Rousseau to address his aristocratic patrons as if they were his equals, just as it was impossible for him to pretend that he thought their disparity in rank was based on a like disparity in merit. Once the conventions are set, they are as much an objective part of the world as anything else is. And if they give us no chance to build up a liveable-with character, that, too, is a fact about the nature of civilization. What haunted Rousseau was the fear that there might be no real self behind the several masks we wear; this emerges even in his Confessions, in which he both promises to reveal everything about himself and yet produces such a variety of disparate revelations that we can suppose only that even he was unable to find one single coherent story about a single coherent self.

But where, we might ask, does Rousseau go from here? What escape is there, and how does the knowledge of human nature help? One thing only is certain: that he found the status quo quite intolerable. Moreover, he had enough of a sense of history to feel that our situation had to be explained genetically, that the present is unintelligible until related to its origins in the past. Unlike his historicist successors Hegel and Marx, he had no faith that the process would ultimately reveal itself as benign. The obvious similarities between his ideas and theirs make it the more necessary to insist on this difference—as Marshall Berman’s otherwise excellent book fails to do.13 But if there is no optimism about the benefits of history, there is no assumption that we can simply go back on our tracks. If the present is intolerable, the condition of natural man no longer charms us; and even Rousseau agrees that a refusal to embark on human history at all is no answer to the question of how to be both human and happy. Not that natural man is unimportant as a critic of civilized society—the mindless paradise of Adam and Eve testifies to the vitality of the image. But the presocial state is not offered as a utopia to which we might aspire. And the simple lives that Rousseau does praise are, at most, nearer nature, and they are not exactly paradise either. The Caribs of the Discourse are already corrupted by vanity, and they are cruel too; the shepherds of the Haut-Valais are more attractive, but even they are clumsy and ignorant by the standards of civilization.

The question remains whether the things that are lacking in the simple life really are losses—are they goods that we have bought at too high a price, or are they not really goods anyway? It seems to me that Rousseau’s answer is the former. Certainly, it is more than mere rhetoric when Rousseau claims that the simple life is better than the life of Paris; but the situation is not simple. Maybe we are the better for suppressing our literary talents, but we are also the poorer; these are genuinely human talents we have suppressed. Harmony would involve the blending of our many and diverse skills; all we ever seem to achieve is discord; therefore we would do better to settle for unison. Still, all this is, in a sense, beside the point; for Rousseau’s major claim is that even if we saw that the simple life was the better life, we could not choose it. Rousseau’s propagandist motives are infinitely less direct than were Hobbes’s. We would die of boredom in the Haut-Valais and of disgust among the Caribs. And Judith Shklar is more than persuasive when she claims that Rousseau’s utopias set no positive goals—that they serve to point out the irremediably rotten condition of this society, not a perfection to be found in some other.14

That the simple life of this kind is not intended by Rousseau to be a picture of the good life is suggested too by the most famous of all Rousseau’s works, the Social Contract. For there Rousseau contrasts the condition of natural man with the condition of the man who is both free and virtuous—indeed, free only because he is virtuous. The life of impulse is a form of slavery, but obeying laws that we prescribe for ourselves is freedom. All this shows one further important aspect of Rousseau’s concern with human nature. Presocial man’s desires and satisfactions coincide; civilized man’s desires and satisfactions are drastically at odds with each other. The depravity of society and the arbitrariness of social convention create an obsession with personal prestige that is utterly self-destructive. One of the insights that Durkheim extracted from Rousseau was the idea that nature could be re-created inside society; for this to happen, social rules must possess the same degree of impersonality, nonarbitrariness, and externality to our desires that the descriptive laws of nature possess. This links up with some very characteristic ideas in both the Social Contract and in Julie. The legislator of the Contract has to know how to abolish human nature and create something new and socially adaptable. And Wolmar’s talent is precisely that he can do this for his own charges—his wife, children, and servants—by so arranging the environment of Clarens that the obvious (or natural) path is the path of virtue. But all this remains as ambiguous as everything else in Rousseau’s work—the legislator of the Social Contract seems to end up with nothing more attractive than Sparta to his credit, which hardly suggests that Rousseau was the originator of totalitarian democracy. And Wolmar’s Clarens is not the greatest success we can imagine—Julie remains in love with Saint-Preux, and the artificiality of the life at Clarens is eventually reflected in her unwillingness to go on living it. Something in her nature must surely have been mortally abused, and Wolmar is as much her murderer as her benefactor.15

The Rousseau whose views of human nature I have sketched so briefly and crudely is not, of course, the only Rousseau to be found in the writings of that ambivalent and alarming man. There is a good deal of straightforward Hobbes-like utilitarianism in the Social Contract—where Rousseau acknowledges with perfect calm that conflicting interests makes society necessary and shared interests make it possible. But what there is in Rousseau that possesses a curiously current interest is the fear that not enough of our nature is visible or recoverable to provide us with a clear guide to what viable self we can create. The anguish at having so many masks to wear, so many roles to act, so many choices with so few guides on how to make them—this is something that really does seem to have begun with Rousseau. It is all too easy to read Sartre, Hegel, or Marx back into Rousseau and thereby blur the contributions of all of them. But even the most austere and historically cautious writer can hardly ignore that new tone of voice. To become as familiar as it has, it had to start a long tradition, one that has recently reemerged in sociological theory, literary criticism, and philosophy. But if Rousseau’s successors have added their own, original contributions, he ought, I think, to get the credit for starting the argument in these distinctively modern terms.