It is the misfortune of extraordinary doctrines that they suffer a remarkably common fate in the hands of their interpreters, and at first glance there may appear to be nothing very special about the prevalent distortions of the political thought of Rousseau. His ideas, like those of other great thinkers, have been widely embraced or denounced with almost equal abandon, in fierce and recurrent controversies which merely reflect the striking impact his philosophy has had upon his followers from the French Revolution to the present day. It is not particularly odd that professed disciples should have obscured his meaning as much as his detractors have done, nor even that we have come to judge the significance of his claims in the light of the activities of others who sought to realize them in practice. What is peculiar about Rousseau’s reputation among preeminent political theorists, however, is the extent to which his critics are agreed that he could not have been committed to the philosophy he actually set forth.
In the history of political thought there is no more outspoken defender of freedom than Rousseau, no one who expressed a deeper regret over the liberty we have lost or a more profound longing for the liberty we should seek, and yet the main charge levelled against him by his opponents has consistently been that the manipulative powers entrusted in his works to sovereign assemblies, legislators, and tutors alike deprive persons of the very liberty he claims they should enjoy. Of all thinkers decried as collectivist or totalitarian, of all those vilified for sacrificing liberty upon the altars of state control and social indoctrination, none professed a greater love of freedom, nor a more resolute determination to maintain the independence of a free man. My remarks here are inspired by just this puzzling antinomy, as if what Rousseau really stands for is the opposite of what he stood for in his life and thought. The objection to his doctrine which I wish to consider, therefore, is not the reproach so commonly made against political and social thinkers that their pursuit of one great goal conflicts with others of at least equal value. It is, rather, that the very concept acknowledged to lie at the heart of his philosophy in fact means the opposite of what he claims on its behalf—in effect, that his defence of liberty is illiberal.
That charge of illiberalism is of course generally premised on the claim that Rousseau defined liberty falsely, and that the institutions he prescribed for its fulfilment in fact thwart or destroy it. At least when Bertrand Russell spoke of Hitler as ‘an outcome of Rousseau’, or when T. D. Weldon remarked that men can be forced to be free in Rousseau’s sense when they are incarcerated in Wormwood Scrubs or Broadmoor,1 I take it that something like this complaint is what they had in mind. To be sure, the alternative view of liberty presupposed by such criticism is all too seldom explained, and it may seem difficult to identify such darkly sinister portraits as are commonly drawn of Rousseau’s thought against an allegedly contrasting background that is itself so dimly lit. Yet just that lack of definition, I believe, forms an essential ingredient of the concept of freedom which Rousseau is accused by his liberal critics of having ignored. For while he is said to have prescribed and delimited the nature of human freedom by confining it in a political strait-jacket that requires all men to act together, his opponents hold dear a principle which has no determinant content, and whose attainment is marked by the lack of interference of other persons in the pursuit of what each of us may choose to do. Rousseau’s imputed circumscription of an imprescribable concept is crucial to the liberal case against him, for from a truly liberal perspective individuals are free only when they are unhindered in their actions, when they have no duty opposed to their will, and not, as it is suggested he would have us believe, when they have no will but to perform their duty.2 Now at least since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, liberalism has come to be associated above all with the idea and exercise of personal freedom safeguarded from public control, but this element of its theory is generally acknowledged to stem largely from the definition of liberty as ‘the absence of external impediments’ which was first provided by Hobbes, and the same theme also lies at the heart of the concept which Isaiah Berlin has rightly termed ‘negative liberty’.3 Freedom in that sense is properly defined by the non-existence of forces that might confine it, by the absence of any restrictions against it and not the presence of prescribed ends towards which it should be aimed. Those to whom it is attributed are directed nowhere in particular; quite the contrary, others are enjoined not to harm them or stand in their way.
It is true that for nearly all liberal thinkers a rule of law is acknowledged to be indispensable to the enjoyment of such freedom, in that it establishes where the frontiers of individual liberty lie and protects each person’s freedom from infringement by everyone else. But in its enforcement, the rule of law can only preserve liberty and does not itself create or promote it. Since by their very nature laws set limits to the enjoyment of freedom, men in society are most free, as Hobbes imagined, when the rule of law is most effective but the laws themselves remain most reticent about what men may do. Because he defined liberty in terms of the outspoken making of laws rather than in the context of their general silence—because he thought it prevailed under the very constraints imposed by a legal system—Rousseau, it is claimed, did not hold to this conception of freedom.
His alleged failure to safeguard personal rights and interests from state interference has also not endeared him to most liberals. It is precisely on account of their fundamental concern with the demarcations between us rather than with the activities we pursue within those bounds that liberals are so anxious to preserve the distinction between our private and public domains which Rousseau’s political doctrine is seen to have undermined. Here again Hobbes laid the foundation for this principle of liberalism, above all, perhaps, in his contention that the ancient Greeks and Romans and their followers had adopted a confusing concept of liberty in associating it with the commonwealth as a whole rather than with the relations between particular men within it.4 Under the classical liberal formulations of such thinkers as von Humboldt, Constant and John Stuart Mill, the liberty of particular men has come to require the protection of their individual affairs and aspirations from state or social control. But in extolling the merits of so-called civil liberty under the rule of an absolute sovereign, Rousseau, it is so often alleged, sought to submerge all that makes us different from one another under a fictitious liberty of the commonwealth which true liberals decry. More than any other complaint, this anxiety underlies most liberals’ mistrust of his doctrine. Committed as they are to the liberties of separate individuals pursuing diverse personal initiatives, they show little sympathy for Rousseau’s apparent confusion of liberty with public engagement and social solidarity. Even under regimes of popular self-rule of the kind he prescribed, it is not the liberty of particular men that prevails but the illiberal rule of each person by all the rest. Never mind Rousseau’s contention that in our political institutions we have already fabricated such a world; according to his liberal critics, this is what his doctrine entails.
Of course such misgivings about Rousseau’s doctrine are not shared by all liberal interpreters of his political thought. Robert Derathé, the most distinguished of contemporary commentators, has stressed the importance of the safeguards for individual liberty against the exercise of sovereign power that Rousseau introduced in his writings,5 and which have been overlooked by so many of his critics, while other scholars have even attempted to restore Rousseau to his rightful place near the pinnacle of classical liberal thought, from whose principles some modern pretenders have been seen to renege.6 If only for the good reason that I believe they generally provide more accurate readings of Rousseau’s works than do the denigrators of his totalitarianism, I do not intend to challenge these perspectives here, except perhaps for such oversights as stem from the company in which they have thought fit to re-introduce Rousseau, now that their interpretations show him to have really been on his best behaviour. In attempting to dissociate his remarks about liberty from the history of liberalism, I mean to show that liberal adumbrations of his ideas have as a rule departed from their actual meanings, and indeed that Rousseau may be portrayed as hostile to freedom only against a canvas from which the widely shared conceptions of liberty he inherited, employed, and refined before the advent of liberalism, have been wiped out.
Hobbes, I believe, was quite right to remark upon the absence of his own idea of liberty from both ancient and modern political thought. But to accept the originality of his perspective on this subject is tantamount to admitting that other uses of the term which he and his followers have rejected may be more orthodox than the meanings they have stipulated and prefer. Liberals have shown themselves to be remarkably tolerant about most matters apart from the definition of liberty, and yet before Hobbes, and in his own day, and with Rousseau later, liberty was conceived as having a quite different sense from ‘the absence of external impediments’ and ‘the silence of the law’ as applied to particular men rather than to commonwealths as a whole.
Contemporary scholars have come to agree with Hobbes that the ancient Greeks did not share the definition of liberty which he supposed to be uniquely correct. Herodotus showed no hesitation in ascribing the term eleutheroi—free men—to the Greeks in general, whose liberty he contrasted with the tyranny of Persian government; nor did Thucydides doubt that Athenians owed their greatness over Sparta to the liberty of their polis as a whole. Even when Plato and Aristotle condemned the excesses and abuses of individual liberty, they perceived it as engendered under democratic constitutions and not just as a matter of the unfettered relations of particular men. For Hobbes the idea of a free state meant no more than its lack of subjection to alien rule; for the Greeks it had everything to do with the quality of life of politically autonomous citizens. Whereas for liberals the idea of freedom has come to be divorced from that of democracy, the Greeks had no conception of liberty without it; while for liberals we are free when left by the state to ourselves, for the Greeks we were most free when as political agents we took common part in the deliberations of public affairs.
If for the ancient Greeks liberty meant democratic self-rule above all, for the Romans the idea was connected more closely still with the obligations of law. Libertas est potestas faciendi quod jure liceat was a commonplace of the Roman Republic, as Maurice Cranston has observed.7 To be liber—free from paternal control—was at the same time to be civis—civilized for political life, so that the acquisition of citizenship and liberty went hand in hand. Hobbes was later to oppose liberty and law, but lawlessness was defined by the Romans not as libertas but licentia, a distinction appropriated by Locke in his own conception of natural liberty, so different in turn from that of Hobbes.
Machiavelli of course drew most of his account of liberty from Roman Republican sources, specially emphasizing the need for a patriotic spirit and the public devotion of a free people bearing its own arms. Such was enough to try the patience of Hobbes yet again, who dismissed Machiavelli with the same stroke as had swept away the ancient Greeks and Romans, for neglecting the liberty of particular men.8 Among Hobbes’s contemporaries, moreover, perhaps the most systematic political philosopher was Spinoza, who defined true liberty as the guidance of reason which overcame our enslavement to passion. This was hardly an original notion, since it had been central to ancient Greek, Roman and Christian accounts of the human will and the nature of self-determination, which Rousseau was also to recapitulate in a wholly familiar terminology in the next century. But the idea of freedom of the will, so crucial to that tradition, was similarly rejected by Hobbes, for whom the postulate of slavery to one’s passions, that is, subjection to internal impediments, was nonsense. Hobbes may have been right on every point that he raised against both ancient and modern thinkers, but his Procrustean disposal of Western political thought hardly left a single unmutilated bedfellow with whom he might share his concept, and it is therefore at least odd that liberals should have adopted his definition of liberty as if it were central to all meanings of the term.
I leave aside Marxist, so-called New Liberal, and other more recent conceptions of liberty which have been similarly judged an abuse of language, but before I move on to those elements of Rousseau’s account of freedom which are most strikingly his own, I think it is worth noting that his doctrine, unlike that of Hobbes, contains so many commonplace and familiar features. Rousseau’s reflections on liberty in the light of autonomy, democracy, political engagement, citizenship, patriotism, the rule of law, the bearing of arms, and subjection to reason, were the stock-in-trade of most definitions of liberty, apart from those stipulated by Hobbes, up to his own day. Why, then, has his conception of liberty been judged so illiberal?
One historical reason above all others, I believe, underlies this charge against him—and that is the influence which his ideas allegedly exercised upon the French Revolution. Liberalism as a political doctrine has been traced to a variety of sources, including Greek democracy, the Protestant Reformation, modern constitutionalism and laissez-faire political economy, as against Oriental or Papal despotism, royal or mercantilist absolutism, and much else besides. I have here instead stressed the contribution of Hobbes, simply because I believe that his philosophy enunciates the theoretical foundations of liberalism in the framework which has most characteristically shaped its language since the turn of the nineteenth century. It may appear strange that Hobbes—the pre-eminent theorist of absolute sovereignty—should have played as crucial a part in the conception of liberalism as Rousseau—the foremost theorist of liberty—has played in its apparent betrayal; but it seems to me that both figures, of whom neither was a liberal, have had a decisive impact upon the course of its history, the one by way of originally articulating its central ideas, the other by bearing its severest censure.
As a political ideology liberalism is of course as absent from the periods in which Hobbes and Rousseau lived as it is alien to their writings. Not only did the words ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ first appear in European political discourse around the beginning of the nineteenth century, but the peculiar terminology of liberal doctrines which we have come to inherit from von Humboldt, Constant, and later John Stuart Mill, as well as others, may be distinguished from earlier languages of liberty along just those lines that Hobbes had stipulated as uniquely correct. Hobbes’s contention that the Greeks and Romans and their modern disciples had failed to address themselves to the liberty of particular men was recapitulated by liberal thinkers of the early nineteenth century in their focus upon the private liberty of individuals as against the allegedly false doctrine that freedom could be achieved through our shared subjection to the community. For Constant, no less than for Hobbes, this plain contrast marked the difference between what he termed ‘ancient liberty’ and ‘modern liberty’. On his interpretation, any idea of collective liberty as realized through democracy, political legislation, or the institution of popular sovereignty, at least in the context of modern society, was a dangerous sham.9
Just such a confusion of real liberty with despotism was unearthed by Constant as an implication of Rousseau’s thought, which in Constant’s own lifetime had given rise to the worst excesses of Jacobin tyranny, upheld in the name of the people’s freedom. It has today become fashionable to follow Jacob Talmon in attributing to Rousseau the first principles of totalitarian democracy,10 but we too often forget that much the same charge had already been made against Rousseau in the course of the French Revolution, once the Jacobins had been deposed. Of course this imputed influence of Rousseau upon the Revolution by early liberals is hardly surprising, both in the light of the immense intellectual debt which the Jacobins and other revolutionaries professed to owe to him, and on account of the fact that for most major nineteenth-century thinkers—Hegel, Marx and Proudhon, for instance, as well as Constant—the authentic voice of Rousseau was actually that of Rousseauism, with his meaning thus in effect distilled from his interpreters’ assessments of a revolution which, it was taken for granted, he had inspired.
This is not the place to pursue the details of that strange saga in the history of political theory and practice, and I shall not even attempt to disengage what I take to be Rousseau’s meaning from his revolutionary influence, however much it should be stressed that he in fact recoiled from any actual revolution he anticipated, and claimed that the liberty of the whole of humanity could not justify shedding the blood of a single man.11 My point here is rather to emphasize that the modern political doctrine of liberalism first took shape around the perceived judgement, confirmed by Jacobin despotism, that Rousseau had defined freedom wrongly.12 The Revolution had shown that liberty and popular sovereignty could not go hand in hand. Thereafter, no defence of liberty other than in terms of the private life of unregulated individuals could be acknowledged as truly liberal. Rousseau has become the enemy of freedom just because the triumph of his ideas in practice was held to have destroyed the only form of liberty which liberals judge worthy of the name.
Such misconceptions have strayed from Rousseau’s political doctrine almost as far as it is possible to go. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the critique of his illiberalism has been its utter neglect of the central theme of all his writings—that is, his constant lament that while Nature has made us happy and good, in society we have made ourselves miserable and depraved. This continual refrain, this guiding principle which he tells us informed all his major works,13 has been wholly ignored by those who have instead resolved on his behalf to fix his gaze upon a vision of mankind’s liberated future which they then judge unsatisfactory. In his own lifetime and before the Revolution it was Rousseau’s philosophy of history, his bitter attack upon the trappings of civilization and culture, which at once excited most of his radical admirers and at the same time estranged him from both the philosophes and the religious and political establishments of his day. Only in the Revolution and afterwards did the attention of disciples and critics alike come to be focused instead upon his theory of our political redemption, in which our liberty might be achieved through membership of a sovereign assembly. The significance of this oversight by his detractors can scarcely be exaggerated, since the idea of liberty allied most closely to his principal doctrine is in fact not that which persons might somehow gain or regain in political life but rather the liberty they have lost in becoming subject to the laws.
In his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, with which he effectively burst upon the literary world of the Enlightenment, Rousseau charged that civilization had been the bane of humanity and that men in society had forsaken, as he put it, ‘that original liberty for which they seem to have been born’ (OC, vol. 3, p. 7 [DSA 6]). It is this deprivation of the freedom for which we had been born that in Rousseau’s philosophy marked our passage from nature to culture and our enslavement in the stultifying social world we had constructed. In his Discourse on Inequality he developed that proposition largely in terms of the subjugation of our freedom attributable to private property and all the morally pernicious institutions and forms of government built upon such a miserable base. Liberty, he exclaimed there, was an essential gift of Nature, which men possessed by virtue of their humanity alone (OC, vol. 3, p. 184 [DI 179])—an attribute which thus could only be impaired and not fulfilled through our civil and political undertakings. In his Essay on the Origin of Languages he put forward much the same thesis in terms of the corruption of our speech that had occurred in the course of our social history, as modern languages, increasingly devoid of their original musical inflexion, had rendered those who spoke them progressively more passive, servile and unfree. These themes recur throughout Rousseau’s works and lie very near the heart of most of them. However sharp was the contrast between his own account of the state of nature and that of Hobbes, he certainly agreed with Hobbes that our fundamental liberty was to be found there, and not under the political hegemony of any sovereign’s rule.
As distinct from Hobbes, however, Rousseau is alleged by his liberal critics to have believed in an illusory form of freedom which was realized when men were bound by civil laws or ‘artificial chains’, as Hobbes described them. That illusion of freedom can indeed be found in Rousseau’s doctrine, but only because it is explicit in his argument, in his claim that civil society was fabricated from it. In the course of our history, he contended, we have made ourselves slaves just because we have been credulous, running ‘headlong into our chains’, he remarked, ‘supposing that we had ensured our freedom’ (Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 177 [DI 173]). How else could we have accepted the yoke of despotism but because it had been wrapped around us like a mantle of justice? In a passage of an essay entitled ‘On the State of War’, devoted largely to an attack upon what he termed ‘the horrible system of Hobbes’, Rousseau developed this theme most emphatically. ‘I open books of law and morality’, he wrote:
I listen to wise men and jurists and, moved by their penetrating words, I deplore the miseries of nature, I admire the peace and justice established by the civil order, I bless the wisdom of public institutions and take comfort that I am a man in seeing myself a citizen. Well instructed in my duties and my happiness, I shut the book, leave the class, and what do I see outside? I see unfortunate people trembling under an iron yoke, the whole of humanity crushed by a handful of oppressors, a starving multitude racked by pain and hunger, of whom the rich peacefully lap up the blood and tears, and throughout the world nothing but the strong holding sway over the weak, armed with the redoubtable strength of the laws. (OC, vol. 3, pp. 608–10)
Such lines, so characteristic of Rousseau’s conception of the liberty we have lost, do not figure prominently in the canon of his illiberalism. Yet, in his view, it was only because men thought their artificial chains had made them free that these self-inflicted shackles kept them in their place.
More than any other thinker before, and certainly more than any liberal philosopher after him, Rousseau developed his account of our illusory freedom across the whole spectrum of social and cultural life. His conception of private property as the crucial institution marking our long passage from the natural to the civil state of course raised an economic dimension of striking significance in his political thought, addressed as it was to the class origins of different constitutions and the perpetual conflict, at least of interest, between rich and poor. So strong was the link he perceived between inequalities of wealth and deprivations of freedom (in effect between poverty and slavery) that we might even with some justice ascribe to Rousseau an economic theory of history, indeed a theory of economic determinism, according to which our political systems were shaped by forces of a still more fundamental kind.14 But we must bear in mind that even in his account of private property Rousseau placed greatest emphasis upon the cunning eloquence of those who claimed that right, and on the foolishness of persons so readily beguiled. Rhetoric, persuasion and deception were as central to his account of how we had ensnared ourselves as was the institution of private property, established through the manipulation and abuse of language. In a sense, language—the medium of our conjugation—was for Rousseau the main instrument of our subjugation as well, since from the linguistic base of our specification of terms stemmed the moral emblems of our specialization of roles, and ultimately the fixation of social man in an abstract world of his own making.
Rousseau’s whole theory of culture, moreover, reinforces, elaborates and embellishes this conception of the illusory bonds under which political slavery masquerades as freedom. Our arts, letters and sciences, he remarked in his first Discourse, are but ‘garlands of flowers round the iron chains by which men are weighed down’ (OC, vol. 3, p. 7 [DSA 6]). Contemporary theatre, he complained in his Letter to d’Alembert, not only made an adornment of the most terrible vices but also promoted and increased the inequality of fortunes, which is incompatible with the preservation of liberty.15 Music, displaced from its springs of poetry and melody, he lamented in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, has become a collection of artificial scales and listless harmonies, echoed in speech by the prosaic rhetoric of mountebank kings and charlatan priests.16 Just as in society we have come to be enmeshed within hierarchical moral relations, so in music we have become enthralled by the calculation of harmonic intervals, each measuring the loss of our independence under artificial chains more insidious than any imagined by Hobbes, each a proof of the strength of our illusions and the captivating power of the instruments of our captivity. When liberals decry Rousseau’s commitment to an uplifting form of positive liberty that threatens our true freedom, they forget how profoundly negative was his philosophy of history, according to which our liberty had been lost already. Others might suppose that individuals gained their freedom as society developed and its arts and sciences were perfected. For Rousseau every stride in the apparent advance of civilization had in reality been a step towards the decrepitude of our species and the alienation of our fundamental liberty (Discours sur l’inégalité, in OC, vol. 3, p. 171 [DI 167]).
Of course, it must be remembered that his idea of natural liberty was in an important sense illusory as well, in so far as mankind never actually inhabited the innocent pristine state in which such liberty could be enjoyed. According to Rousseau’s philosophy, in order to get at the truth it was often necessary to lay the facts aside, as he remarked himself, and even though we must not exaggerate this distinction, since he drew much of the evidence for his portrait of primitive man from the available historical record of our origins, it remains the case that the state of nature he conceived was a fiction. There could therefore be no point in our attempting to return to it, he noted in a long discussion on the subject in his Discourse on Inequality (n. 9, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 202–08 [DI 197–204]); there was no sense in our trying to recover the merely hypothetical freedom he had ascribed to mankind in that state. Critics, who believe that in his political doctrine Rousseau sought to re-establish the independence from one another which we had lost, rather neglect this feature of his thought, and they also overlook his repeated claims that in political society man’s nature is transformed.17 With duty substituted for instinct as our guide, Rousseau observed, our constitution is altered, and our lives are reshaped. Good social institutions do not fulfil human nature but instead denature man, depriving him of the wholeness of his physical existence in exchange for a moral existence that is relative and partial.18 For these very reasons Rousseau’s liberal critics have been wrong to locate his fundamental account of freedom in the state. The liberty that was most expressive of human nature in his philosophy could not be gained or restored in a new form under the institutions he described in the Social Contract. Nowhere did he map out a programme for the political redemption of our freedom, made progressively more remote from our grasp as civilization and society advanced relentlessly towards our subjection.
Indeed, it is almost everywhere else apart from in his political writings that we find Rousseau longing for and attempting to preserve that fragile independence of the human spirit that in the modern world was at least akin to natural liberty. A passionate desire to find freedom informed his botanical communion with Nature in his later years, when the company of other men had become so burdensome to him. Earlier it had inspired his disenchantment with much of the Enlightenment establishment, from whose dark and oppressive influence he had sought refuge in his escape from Paris. Rousseau’s uncompromising (if eventually unsuccessful) determination to refuse the pensions that were offered to him, his contempt for urban artifice and culture and his love of the open sky outside the closed city—indeed, the whole of his life, and most of its crises—were inspired by the profoundest expression of the human craving for freedom recorded in Western literature. It is true that many of his works were also emblazoned with the signature ‘Citizen of Geneva’, and I shall presently return to this proclamation and to its place in his account of liberty. But let us not forget that Rousseau’s republican identity was of briefer duration, and brought him less untrammelled joy, than this essentially solitary dreamer’s life-long rapture in ecstatic love of Nature. ‘I was never really fit for civil society’, he wrote with weary resignation in his Reveries, his last major work.
My natural independence always left me incapable of the thraldom necessary for anyone who wishes to live among men. . . . As soon as I feel the yoke, either of necessity or of men . . . I am nothing. . . . I had never thought that the liberty of man consists in doing what he wishes, but rather in not doing that which he does not wish. (Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Sixième promenade, in OC, vol. 1, p. 1059 [R 103–04])
Critics who find Rousseau so hostile to real freedom are too inattentive to these features of his life and thought. And yet they herald much of the spirit of a dawning age of Romanticism, from which modern liberals have in fact borrowed more of their vocabulary of personal negative liberty than they nowadays admit, even while contrasting its language with that pernicious conception of liberty they instead impute to him.
If there is one work which more than any other expresses Rousseau’s fullest account of negative liberty, it must surely be Emile. ‘The first of all goods’, Rousseau remarked there, ‘is not authority but freedom’ (Emile II, in OC, vol. 4, p. 309 [E 84]). It is in vain that we seek to find liberty associated with the laws, he continued, since ‘liberty does not exist under any form of government [but] only in the heart of the free man’ (Emile V, in OC, vol. 4, p. 857 [E 473]). The whole purpose of the tutor’s education of the child in that text was to subvert and retard, as far as possible, the development of those relations of mutual dependence which in society have rendered us unfree, for such reasons as Rousseau had already explained in his Discourse on Inequality. ‘There are two kinds of dependence’, he now argued, in one of the work’s more celebrated passages:
Dependence on things, which is natural, [and] that on men, which is due to society. Dependence on things, having no morality, does no harm to liberty and engenders no vices. Dependence on men, being disordered, engenders them all, and it is because of them that master and slave mutually deprave one another. . . . Keep the child in dependence on things alone; you will have followed the order of nature in the course of its education.19
The child, born free like savage man, must be protected from the social bonds that ineluctably debase the savage’s nature and destroy his freedom. Unlike our primitive forebears, who were enticed to plunge headlong into their chains, Emile is encouraged to improve his robust faculties spontaneously and without the contamination of others, until he has gained sufficient strength, with the late blossoming of his reason, to confront the tribulations of life in society. If the Social Contract recounts the terms required for savage man’s political metamorphosis into a citizen, Emile offers instead an education according to nature, in which the original passions and attributes of the child—not least its sexuality—are brought to fruition, each in his good time. To control their nature, as citizens are required to do, is to reform the work of God, to undo, as Rousseau put it in Emile, what God had inscribed at the bottom of each person’s heart (Emile IV, in OC, vol. 4, p. 491 [E 212]). The fundamental task of Emile’s tutor, then, is to avert society’s reformation of God’s work. He must, wrote Rousseau, provide his pupil with an education that is at first ‘purely negative’ (Emile II, in OC, vol. 4, p. 323 [E 93]), rather along the isolationist lines of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe than the consolidating paths of Plato’s Republic.20
Critics21 have of course not been slow to observe that in undoing the oppressive handiwork of society, Emile’s tutor often appears to exercise God’s powers himself, and there are certainly some extraordinary passages in the text in which Rousseau speaks of the subjection of Emile to his tutor, in that while acting under the belief that he is master of his will, he yet finds that all his wishes coincide with those of his tutor on his behalf.22 How the tutor’s manipulation of Emile’s world establishes his dependence upon things and not upon man is a problem to which I believe Rousseau provides an inadequate answer. But if we are persuaded that herein lies the seeds of his programme of totalitarian indoctrination, we might pause for a moment to consider how inept must be a social system built upon that programme, according to which each child must be kept away from all others by a single tutor who devotes much of his own life to the task, only to find, in due course, that his charge is unfit for both political and domestic responsibilities, and, following the infidelity of his wife, becomes a vagabond, and then a slave to pirates, perhaps even ending his days on a desert island.23 Notwithstanding all the numerous claims about Rousseau’s insidious influence, Emile hardly offers the stuff of which Hitler might have been a proud follower.
In their neglect of his philosophy of history, perhaps the most striking of his critics’ omissions is the very definition of our fundamental liberty which Rousseau put forward. For the freedom we had suppressed, he believed, was no uplifting principle of public virtue but only a faint distinction between savage man and beast. All other creatures, he remarked in the Discourse on Inequality, behaved as their instincts impelled them to do, while we alone, even in our original state, must have been the authors of our actions, as we came to terms with each situation in a manner free from Nature’s control. It was therefore because we lacked a set of prescribed responses to our natural drives rather than because we were endowed with any positive traits unique to our species that, according to Rousseau, we must always have enjoyed a prospect of development—in due course out of the state of nature and into another of our own making—which animals did not share.24
This idea of liberty as a merely inchoate trait distinguishing man from beast is perhaps the most remarkably negative conception of freedom in Western social and political thought.25 In Rousseau’s philosophy it was linked to no substantive goal or desirable end of any sort, being without a determinant moral content such as critics have judged to be the principal illiberal characteristic of his doctrine in general. Quite the contrary, Rousseau’s conception of our natural liberty was at least partly designed to show how other accounts of freedom were inadequate just because they were not negative enough, a thesis which he developed above all, once again, in reply to Hobbes, whose reflections on this subject he found wanting for two reasons.
First, Hobbes had failed to grasp the fact, so central to our plight, as Rousseau understood it, that men may render themselves subject to internal impediments, which, in their operation upon the human spirit, were no less a constraint upon their freedom than shackles round their wrists or threats to box their ears. Any suggestion that we might be or become slaves to our passions was as absurd for Hobbes as the correlative idea of a disembodied freedom of the will, but freedom of the will and the absence of human slavery to innate passions were for Rousseau crucial to that otherwise scarcely perceptible differentia between man and beast. If we were not at least capable of being the agents of what we did, if it was only our appetites and aversions that moved us, then our lives were just a succession of events that happened to us, lacking all merit, vice or perfectibility, with each member of our species trapped in the same changeless world as all the others. Without free will, he supposed, both morality and human history were impossible. In his opposition to Hobbes on this point, Rousseau’s view that our distinctive qualities were not wholly explicable with reference to natural causes or impulsions comes to much the same verdict as Isaiah Berlin’s contention in ‘Historical Inevitability’ that if determinism were true then we would not be free to act in a morally responsible way.26 No less than for Berlin in his understanding of moral agency, for Rousseau the language of free will lay at the heart of our ordinary perception of social relations—with this difference, of course, that according to Rousseau our history bore witness to our becoming slaves to new passions, that is, to the fundamental and ever worsening abuse of our liberty, rather than, as for Berlin, to diverse cases of its exercise for better or worse.
Less controversial, perhaps, is what I take to be Rousseau’s second reason for regarding Hobbes’s conception of liberty as insufficiently negative, and this was that Hobbes had drawn too complex a picture of human nature in support of his belief that the freedom of each person was imperilled by that of all his neighbours. In ascribing certain socially developed characteristics of our lives, such as the pursuit of power and glory, to humanity in general, Hobbes had wrongly supposed that masterless men were naturally in need of a commonwealth for protection. This is to say that he found fault with human nature mainly because, in Rousseau’s terminology, he mistook amour propre for amour de soi, imagining that we cared for ourselves at the expense of others rather than without regard to them. Much the same error, moreover, was held by Rousseau to be a common failing of most philosophies of natural law and the social contract, including those of Grotius, Locke and Pufendorf, who attributed rather more benign qualities or principles, such as a sense of justice or a right of property, to mankind in the state of nature. All such thinkers had failed to strip away our social traits from their postulates about the essence of the human race as a whole; according to Rousseau, they had confused our acquired attributes with what was fundamental to our constitution.
Yet in their focus upon his unduly collectivist conception of liberty, critics of Rousseau’s illiberalism (I must stress once more) forget that he claimed time and again that it was just because we had already made ourselves social that we had forsaken our freedom. While savage man lives within himself, Rousseau remarked, ‘sociable man, always outside himself, only knows how to live in the opinions of others’.27 Our natural integrity, and with it our freedom from one another, had been lost just because we had come to value ourselves in the light of qualities we imagined that others judged worthy of esteem. Rousseau agreed with Hobbes that the natural life of man must have been solitary, but it could only have become poor, nasty, brutish and short when subject to the fears and aspirations of a social world we did not at first inhabit. The more negative our approach to an understanding of human nature, the less negative, or at any rate, the less defective, appears the state of nature we uncover.
As is well known, Rousseau believed that civil society must originally have been founded when men, already socialized by vice, attempted to obtain Locke’s political warrant for the morally pernicious institution of private property, which in turn must have occasioned Hobbes’s vile state of war, fought over the distribution of property. Rather like the debauched protagonists of the Marquis de Sade’s The New Justine, the so-called natural men portrayed first by Locke and then Hobbes might well have said of themselves, ‘No sooner did we commit a horror than we sought to legitimate it’.28 These two thinkers and others had inadvertently drawn an accurate picture of the state of civil society, supposing it to be a description of the state of nature, for the vices in need of remedy which they depicted were not those of our original constitution but rather those that stemmed from the very social systems they commended to us. According to Rousseau, in short, Hobbes and Locke had conceived their ideas as solutions to some problems of which those solutions were in fact the cause.29
Liberal thinkers since the end of the eighteenth century have largely inherited Hobbes’s and Locke’s concern with inviolable frontiers, safeguards and barriers between persons; but that is because their philosophies continue to be imbued with many of the assumptions about our essential motives, fears and desires that Rousseau believed his social contract precursors had confused for natural traits. To that extent their views of human nature are overburdened with the weight of attributes they believe universally characteristic of mankind; and, tied to these encumbrances, they stand apart from Rousseau’s emptier, more formal, more strictly negative conception of our distinguishing behavioural traits—unique only because, in his view, they are uncontrolled by instincts. Paradoxically, again, it is at least some of the doctrines of negative liberty so often contrasted with his allegedly positive idea which in contemporary political thought constitute the prevailing forms of ‘the retreat to the inner citadel’, as Berlin has termed it. In the light of the argument Rousseau himself presents, we could only retreat to citadels we had already taken the trouble to construct, and we were only prompted to seek sanctuary there because we had contrived to make enemies outside.
I suspect that few of these comments about Rousseau’s conception of negative liberty will be thought pertinent by those who deplore his philosophy of illiberalism and who may be impatient for me to get to the real point, which is the place of liberty in his specifically political doctrine. It might at first appear that his prescriptive writings must be ill-suited to a philosophy of history which charts the course of human corruption, or at least that his vision of our transformation into free citizens can have little in common with his account of our lost natural liberty. Yet Rousseau’s political writings are of crucial significance to his reflections on the human condition in general, inspired as they all are by the proposition he enunciated in his Confessions and elsewhere, that everything depends ultimately upon politics and that the character of a people is invariably shaped by its government.30 That claim about the central determinant of the ways we live underlies Rousseau’s account of virtue as well as of vice, and it is scarcely possible for an interpretation of his ethics to stray far from it. Just the same, it is important that we recognize the fact that so many themes of Rousseau’s political theory of freedom have a more settled place in the familiar galaxy of great doctrines than do his philosophies of nature and history.
I have already noted the marked differences between Rousseau’s programme of natural education in Emile and Plato’s scheme of public instruction in the Republic; and yet perhaps no work by a major modern political theorist more closely follows the Republic than Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland. Here Rousseau speaks of the solitary individual as nothing, and of the love of his country as forming the whole existence of the citizen (OC, vol. 3, p. 966 [P 189]). How is it possible, asked Rousseau, to stir the hearts of a free people and to make them love their fatherland and its laws? ‘Dare I say it?’, he replied. ‘Through children’s games’ (OC, vol. 3, p. 955 [P 179]): through a national system of public education, appropriate only to free men, binding them to a common existence under the law.31 I doubt if any other text of Rousseau, moreover, bears the imprint of Machiavelli’s influence more conspicuously than does his Discourse on Political Economy. ‘The fatherland cannot exist without liberty’, he wrote there, ‘nor liberty without virtue, nor virtue without citizens’.
Without them you will have nothing but degraded slaves, beginning with the rulers of the state. . . . If men could be accustomed early to regard their individuality . . . just as a part of the state, they could at length come to identify themselves . . . with this greater whole, to feel themselves members of the country, and to love it with that exquisite feeling which men in isolation have only for themselves. (OC, vol. 3, p. 259 [PE 20])
It would be difficult, furthermore, to find in any pre-eminent political treatise an idea of liberty more conspicuously indebted to that of Montesquieu than this passage from Rousseau’s Social Contract: ‘Liberty’, Rousseau remarked, ‘is not the fruit of all climates, nor within the grasp of all peoples’. The difference between free states and monarchies lies in the fact that in the one all are devoted to the common good, while in the other subjects are made miserable in order for despotism to reign (Social Contract III.8, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 414, 415 [SC 100, 101]). In each of these statements, and many others like them, Rousseau appears to have set aside what Hobbes termed the liberty of particular men and to have addressed himself instead to the liberty of the commonwealth as a whole. But while his concern with citizenship, obedience to the laws, and the public domain in general shows how he identified freedom differently from most liberals, these features of his doctrine nevertheless stand him in good company among many illustrious predecessors of other persuasions. They form a part, but not a peculiarly original part, of the tradition of positive liberty which liberals decry.
Of course Rousseau seems sometimes to have invited special criticism for his pains, when, as for instance in the Social Contract once more, he contrasted lowly natural liberty with ennobling civil and moral liberty: the one now identified, in apparent contradiction with the Discourse on Inequality, as mere slavery to one’s passions; the others as intelligent self-mastery, limited by the general will.32 ‘People have vainly attempted to confuse liberty with independence’, but, he added in his Letters from the Mountain,
These two things are so different that they exclude one another. When everyone does what he pleases he often does what displeases others, and that cannot be called a free state. . . . In the common liberty no one has the right to do what the liberty of another forbids him. . . . Liberty without justice is a veritable contradiction. (Lettres de la montagne, Huitième Lettre, in OC, vol. 3, p. 841–42 [LWM 261])
Passages such as these have prompted Rousseau’s liberal critics to observe that his political philosophy betrays the faith in freedom he so disingenuously proclaimed. Lester Crocker, the most distinguished, learned and prolific of Rousseau’s modern detractors has no doubt that real liberty is ‘swallowed up’ by his ‘collective monolith’, the ‘all-devouring general will’. Throughout his writings, suggests Crocker, we find Rousseau promoting the ‘destruction of privacy’ under systems of ‘control and manipulation’.33 In his doctrine of civil and moral liberty, therefore, according to which men are denatured and made free, lies the germ of what is perceived by liberals to be the repressive rule of totalitarian politics. But what is it about that doctrine which distinguishes Rousseau from other collectivists, so that only he incurs such wrath?
I have already suggested that the main reason for this has to do with his assimilation of liberty to popular sovereignty, a link discredited in both theory and practice under the Jacobin dictatorship of the French Revolution. That point bears re-emphasis, and its significance requires further attention, since the conjunction of liberty with sovereignty forms an original theme in his writings (indeed, a major innovation in the history of political thought) which sets Rousseau apart even from Plato, Machiavelli, Montesquieu and others, who like him were concerned with political and not just personal liberty. Prior to its use in his philosophy, the concept of sovereignty had been connected by its interpreters with the idea of force, power or empire, and it generally pertained to the dominion of kings or other governors over their subjects rather than to citizens’ freedom. For both Bodin and—yet again—Hobbes, in particular (the best-known advocates of absolute sovereignty before Rousseau) the terms ‘souveraineté’ or ‘sovereignty’ were derived from the Latin summam potestatem or summum imperium, which defined the prevailing, that is to say, unequalled, power of the ruler. For Rousseau, by contrast, the idea of sovereignty was essentially a principle of equality, which identified the ruled element, or the subjects themselves, as the supreme authority, and it was connected with the concepts of will or right rather than force or power: it expressed ‘le moral’ of politics and not ‘le physique’, a most fundamental distinction in his philosophy, on which I shall comment presently. But I believe it is just because of his innovative association of an altogether unlikely pair of terms—‘liberty’, as drawn from an ancient republican tradition with emphasis on self-rule, and ‘sovereignty’, from a modern absolutist ideology addressed to the need for predominating power—which prompts liberal critics to judge his doctrine to be more sinister than any other collectivist conception of freedom. How can absolute force and perfect liberty possibly go hand in hand? To be ‘forced to be free’, to achieve one’s liberty under the constraint of the whole body politic, as Rousseau stipulated in one of the most famous passages of the Social Contract (I.7, in OC, vol. 3, p. 364 [SC 53]), seems the vilest deception imaginable from a man pretending to be liberty’s truest friend. Small wonder, then, that Rousseau perceived as so splendid and just the inscription of the word ‘Libertas’ on the prisons and fetters of the galleys of the city of Genoa. ‘It is only evil-doers of all states’, he observed in a footnote of his Social Contract (IV.2, in OC, vol. 3, p. 440 n. 2 [SC 124 n. 2]), ‘who prevent the citizen from being free. In a country where all such men were in the galleys, one would enjoy the most perfect liberty’. As Hobbes had already remarked, ‘It is an easy thing, for men to be deceived, by the specious name of liberty’ (Leviathan, ch. 21, p. 140), evidenced, in his case, by the meaningless inscription of the word ‘Libertas’ on the turrets of the city of Lucca.
Against this hostile construction of Rousseau’s doctrine, many of his sympathetic readers have in recent years adopted a point of view, best developed by Robert Derathé, to the effect that the absolute power he attributed to the sovereign was none the less circumscribed by natural law. Several notable passages in his writings confirm that he did indeed conceive the sovereign to be subject to a higher moral principle;34 but it is not clear how Rousseau’s invocation of natural law was designed to protect the freedom of individuals from absolute rule, and, as Maurice Cranston has noted,35 there seems to be no hint of this constraint in the Social Contract itself, whose account of popular sovereignty has been the focus of most objections to his political thought.
What his liberal critics have all too commonly failed to grasp, in my view, is not so much an overriding theory of natural law but rather the very concept of absolute sovereignty they deem a threat to the exercise of our real freedom. For Rousseau defined popular sovereignty in such a way as to exclude precisely the infliction of that harm to persons which his theory is alleged to justify. The absolute authority of the sovereign, he wrote, must both come from all and apply to all (Contrat social II.4, in OC, vol. 3, p. 373 [SC 61]). The voice of the general will which it enacts cannot pronounce on individuals without forfeiting its own legitimacy, since it articulates in laws the common interest of every citizen, whereas the exercise of force over disparate persons is reserved exclusively for a nation’s government. Rousseau’s sovereign never implements its own laws and never punishes transgressors against it (see the Contrat social II.5 and III.1, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 377 and 397 [SC 65, 83–84]) nor indeed forces anyone to be free. In a richly perceptive reading of the remark about enforced freedom, John Plamenatz has suggested that it is inspired by Rousseau’s understanding of how men come to discipline themselves and feel at once thwarted and liberated in their performance of duty.36 Yet even if we allow that Rousseau actually speaks of the force over a person which may be exercised on behalf of the whole body politic and not just a compulsion an individual places over himself, it still does not follow that this force is wielded on command of the sovereign.
More than any other major political theorist before or after him Rousseau distinguished ‘right’ from ‘power’, the formulation of principle from its application (in this context the moral will which determines laws from the physical force that implements them) by placing each in different hands, here respectively, the legislative power and the executive power. I shall return to that theme about moral will and physical force, and to its overall bearing on Rousseau’s conception of liberty, in my final section; but it is worth stressing just now how much we owe our appreciation of the fundamental contrast between force and freedom in human affairs to the writings of Rousseau himself, and not just to Hobbes and liberal thinkers. As well as because of the fact that sovereignty and liberty had been generally opposed by earlier commentators, it is also because Rousseau so sharply discriminated force from freedom on most occasions, that the conjunction of these terms in the Social Contract seems odd. In a later passage of the same text he even added that ‘it is only the force of the state which ensures the liberty of its members’ (Contrat social II.12, in OC, vol. 3, p. 394 [SC 80]). But critics wholly misread Rousseau’s meaning in those passages—indeed, they ignore what he says—when they ascribe to him the view that the punishment we suffer for flouting the law renders us truly free. For such force as governments exercise against recalcitrants, Rousseau contended, was designed to protect them from personal dependence (which invariably does deprive them of their freedom), and to legitimate their own civil undertakings, without which the social contract would otherwise be ‘absurd, tyrannical and liable to the gravest abuse’ (Contrat social I.7, in OC, vol. 3, p. 364 [SC 53]). Rousseau believed that according to the terms of their association, all subjects undertook to obey the laws and that without exception all were then required to take part in the laws’ formulation as members of their state’s sovereign assembly. His point about force and freedom means scarcely more than that citizens must always be bound by their own agreements, even if they are occasionally inclined to break or overlook them. No force is exercised except over persons who have reneged on their decision to abide by laws they enact themselves, and no force is exercised at all by the sovereign.
The tyrannical abuse of powers which liberal critics impute to Rousseau’s sovereign was actually perceived by him to be a misappropriation of the powers of government, against which the absolute sovereignty of citizens was the only real safeguard. In their periodic election of parliamentary representatives the people of England perversely entrusted their legislative authority to what should have been merely an executive power, and thereby showed themselves unfit for the liberty it was their duty to exercise directly themselves (see the Contrat social III.15, in OC, vol. 3, p. 430 [SC 114]). In Geneva, somewhat differently, the executive power (effectively the Petit Conseil) had made itself progressively more dominant by arrogating responsibilities that properly belonged to the assembly of citizens (the Conseil Général), even obstructing that sovereign body from meeting. With the executive force of Rousseau’s native state substituted for its popular will, absolute right was corrupted into unfettered power.37 ‘Where force alone reigns’, Rousseau remarked in his Letters from the Mountain, ‘the state is dissolved. That . . . is how all democratic states finally perish’ (Lettres de la montagne, Septième Lettre, in OC, vol. 3, p. 815 [LWM 239]).
Having regard to such claims it is worth bearing in mind that Rousseau’s conception of civil liberty in the Social Contract was drawn as much from an idealized model of Geneva as from Spartan and Roman sources, and that his political self-identification as ‘Citizen of Geneva’ thus referred to a republic whose constitutional liberties, in his view, had already been undermined. The modern citizens of Geneva, no less than our primitive forebears portrayed in the Discourse on Inequality, had been deprived of their liberty, but in the case of his compatriots that was because they had allowed their sovereign will to be stilled and the executive power of government to rise up despotically in its stead.38 Paradoxically, it appears, Rousseau’s conception of an absolute sovereign ensured civil liberty not so much by virtue of an overarching natural law as on account of an infrastructural separation of powers. Once again, Hobbes, for whom absolute sovereignty entailed the undivided concentration of all powers, appears in this matter as his foremost adversary. Rousseau, no less than Locke, was determined that governments must not exercise ‘force beyond right’. Unlike Locke, however, he found protection from such despotism only in a vigilant sovereign of the whole people. Liberty was thus made secure, in his view, by the very institution which, his liberal critics have since alleged, can only destroy it. So long as the general will of a community remained general, citizens kept their freedom under the rule of its laws.
I take this novel association of the ideas of sovereignty and freedom to have informed the meaning of what Rousseau termed ‘civil liberty’; but it must be remembered that the Social Contract also introduces a second positive concept of freedom, which Rousseau called ‘moral liberty’, or ‘obedience to the law we prescribed to ourselves’ (Contrat social I.8, in OC, vol. 3, p. 365 [SC 54]). Defined in that way, the concept seems to mean little more than the ancient Greek notion of autonomy, although in Rousseau’s nomenclature, especially in its affinities with his idea of the general will, it has distinctive connotations somewhat different from the sense of autonomy as political self-rule or independence. Both in his definition of moral liberty and in his novel use of the expression ‘general will’, Rousseau articulated classical principles of freedom in a modern vocabulary which may, at first glance, seem as alien to those principles as his invocation of ancient liberty in justification of modern sovereignty. Indeed, some of Rousseau’s most striking images derive their force from just such attempts to illuminate the values of old cultures in a new language commonly thought to have dispensed with them, and much may be learnt about his meaning if we regard him, to use his own words (although not about himself), as one of those ‘moderns who had an ancient soul’.39
A distinctive feature of his concept of moral liberty is its peculiarly reflexive element of self-prescription. For Rousseau, every morally free agent was required to determine the rules that would guide him by looking inward into the depths of his own conscience in a self-reliant manner, free from the influence of all other persons. The most absolute authority, he observed in his Discourse on Political Economy (OC, vol. 3, p. 251 [PE 13]), ‘is that which penetrates into man’s innermost being’, incorporating him in the common identity of the state, as he put it in the Social Contract (I.6, in OC, vol. 3, p. 361 [SC 50]). Liberal critics recoil in horror from these claims, in so far as they take them to imply the complete submergence of our separate wills under the collective (even organic) will of the body politic which envelops and moulds us. Yet what Rousseau meant by his conjunction of moral liberty with the general will has no such significance, and it was designed to avert rather than achieve the social indoctrination of individuals. Not only did he insist upon the fact that a nation’s general will could only be realized through opposition to the particular wills of each of its members, with the constant tension between two kinds of will or interest—instead of the suppression of one by the other—indispensable to the achievement of the common good (see the Contrat social II.3, note, in OC, vol. 3, p. 371 [SC 60]). He also stressed that the same opposition was present in the minds of all citizens, so that every person was motivated by both a particular will and a general will, dividing his judgement of what was beneficial to himself from what was right for the community (see the Contrat social I.7, in OC, vol. 3, p. 363 [SC 52–53]). Especially in the modern world, Rousseau believed, our general will was much weaker than our particular will, and it was to be strengthened and animated not by our imbibing the collective opinions of our neighbours in a public assembly, but just the reverse—by all men expressing their own opinions alone, ‘having no communication amongst themselves’, which might render their separate judgements partial to this or that group interest (Contrat social II.3, in OC, vol. 3, p. 371 [SC 60]). To ensure that in the assembly there were as many votes as individuals, every member must act without regard to the rest, consulting his own general will as a citizen, thereby still obeying himself alone. Our personal identity was only lost when in legislation we echoed the opinions of an unreflective, undiscriminating multitude. For Rousseau, the more perfect our independence from others (the more profoundly we turned into ourselves for guidance) the more likely were our deliberations to yield the common good.
In the social contract state which he envisaged, deep introspection was therefore the corollary of the outward pursuit of that common good or public interest. The idea of ‘will’, in this context, as has been noted before, expresses the voluntarist, contractarian strain of modern political thought, whereas what is general encapsulates the ancient idea of a public good towards which each person’s will should be aimed. It follows that according to Rousseau’s philosophy, in order to be a citizen of a res publica one must look deep within oneself for a personal commitment to a collective goal. Of course, in promoting the general will, it is our dedication to the shared good of all which renders our moral liberty, as he conceived it, so much grander and more noble than the natural freedom he claimed men forfeit when they enter into civil society. But that belief in an uplifting form of liberty, so often decried by his liberal critics, requires for its fulfilment no great leap forward into the modern world of Hitler and Broadmoor. It is, yet again, an expression of the ancient idea of liberty that Hobbes and Constant, in their different ways, found unacceptable by contrast with the modern concept of personal freedom.
We have only to turn to Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland to note how passionate was his commitment to ancient political liberty as against this alternative, individualist notion. In a chapter of that work entitled ‘The Spirit of Ancient Institutions’ Rousseau grieved over the civil and moral liberty we had lost in passing from antiquity into the modern world, much as in other contexts he lamented our forsaken natural liberty, destroyed in the abandonment of our primeval state. ‘Modern men’, he wrote, ‘no longer find in themselves any of that spiritual vigour which inspired the ancients in everything that they did’ (OC, vol. 3, p. 959 [P 182]).40 Ancient legislators sought to forge links that would attach citizens to their fatherland and to one another, in religious ceremonies, games and spectacles. The laws that rule modern men, by contrast, are solely designed to teach them to obey their masters (see OC, vol. 3, p. 958 [P 182]). In his Letter to d’Alembert on the theatre he pursued a similar theme (p. 137 [OC, vol. 5, p. 93; LD 102]), complaining that we have lost all the strength of the men of antiquity. In Sparta, especially, the citizens, in continual assembly, consecrated the whole of their lives to amusements which were great matters of state (p. 179 [OC, vol. 5, p. 122; LD 133]). Why should it not be so in modern republics as well?, he exclaimed, above all in Geneva, where the people ought to be ‘forever united’ through festivals held ‘in the open air, under the sky’ (p. 168 [OC, vol. 5, p. 114; LD 125]). Yet what do we find instead? ‘Private meetings (les tête-à-tête) . . . taking the place of public assemblies’, the people hiding themselves, as if guilty of a vice that they dare not reveal except in shadows (pp. 172–73 [OC, vol. 5, p. 117; LD 128–29]). It thus appears that for Rousseau ancient liberty had been lost, largely because of its displacement from the public arena into the world of private affairs. Where today, he asked, is ‘the concord of citizens’? ‘Where is public fraternity? . . . Where is peace, liberty, equity, innocence?’ (pp. 178–79 [OC, vol. 5, p. 121; LD 133]). The term ‘fraternity’ cited here in conjunction with liberty does not figure often in Rousseau’s works, however much its meaning seems so obviously infused in his conception of the general will and indeed resonates throughout his political writings as a whole. But it is employed as well, once again, in his Considerations on the Government of Poland, where he proclaimed the need for Polish youth to become accustomed to ‘equality’ and ‘fraternity’, ‘living under the eyes of their compatriots, seeking public approbation’ (OC, vol. 3, p. 968 [P 191]).
By so linking the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity, Rousseau—in this as in so much else—heralded an incoming French Revolution with his gaze fixed upon a bygone ancient world. Without equality, he observed in the Social Contract, ‘freedom cannot subsist’, for between the estate of the rich man and the beggar, public liberty is always traded; the one buys, and the other sells. ‘Each is equally fatal to the common good’ (II.11, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 391–92 n. [SC 78 n.]). For that common good to be promoted, he added in his Project for a Constitution for Corsica, it was necessary that ‘no one should enrich himself’ (OC, vol. 3, p. 924 [PCC 143]). In the feast of the grape pickers which he portrayed in his New Héloïse, moreover, all three principles were drawn together. ‘Everyone lives under the most intimate familiarity’, he wrote; ‘all the world is equal’ (Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, Cinquième Partie, Lettre VII, in OC, vol. 2, p. 607 [J 496]). At dinner each gaily joins with all the rest, in ‘sweet equality’ but without luxury, in the enjoyment of liberty limited only by perfect candour (pp. 608–09 [J 498]). The exultant feast in which all partake freely, equally and fraternally was of course purely imaginary; and no doubt similarly fanciful was Rousseau’s belief that it reflected (indeed surpassed in joy) the saturnalian banquets of the ancient Romans (see p. 608 [J 497]). But there is no doubting the fact that the concept of liberty which Rousseau’s image evokes is altogether different from the ideas of personal liberty set forth by Hobbes and Constant. For in the modern world, as he perceived it, liberty had come to be shorn of its associations with equality and fraternity. Rousseau complained in his Essay on the Origin of Languages that whereas our ancestors had once sung ‘Aimez-moi’ and cried out ‘Aidez-moi’ to one another, we now only mutter ‘Donnez de l’argent’ (see the Essai sur l’origine des langues, chs. 10 and 20, pp. 131 and 197–99 [OC, vol. 5, pp. 408, 428–29; EOL 279, 298–99]. The same expression, repeated in the Social Contract, is described there as the harbinger of a society in chains, ruled by the slavish institution of finance, unknown to the men of antiquity.41 We moderns have been transformed into mute auditors of declamations from the pulpit and proclamations from the throne, our collective voice stilled. While once our interests were openly shared and inscribed in our hearts, now they are in conflict, secreted away in the linings of our purses. Have we forgotten that once we aspire to serve the state with our purses rather than our person, it is on the edge of ruin? Have we forgotten that ‘in a well-ordered city everyone flies to the assemblies’? (Contrat social III.15, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 428–29 [SC 113]). Modern liberty, stripped of fraternity, on the one side, and equality, on the other, stands exposed as nothing more than private gain. But so far from it embracing the only proper use of the term ‘liberty’, the contemporary ethos of private gain was for Rousseau just ancient slavery in a modern form, all the more psychologically insidious for our pursuing it as if it were real freedom. Turned inward on himself and outward against his neighbours, modern man in fact, like primeval man in fiction, had run headlong into chains which he supposed had made him free.
If natural liberty may be regarded as Rousseau’s negative idea of freedom, and civil and moral liberty his positive idea, how are these two concepts related? Why did he employ the same term to embrace our personal liberty, on the one hand, and our political liberty, on the other, particularly since he considered the two notions mutually exclusive? To that extent, of course, he would actually have agreed with Hobbes and Constant that different ideas have been implied by a single word, although unlike them he judged both uses correct and still appropriate, each in its proper place. His reason for invoking one expression in two distinct ways, I think, is quite simply that he found them to share at least a certain range of meanings, in the light of which their differences may be seen to be in direct opposition and conflict.
For one thing, each concept meant for Rousseau the absence of personal dependence or domination. When he remarked, for instance, in his Project for a Constitution for Corsica, that ‘Whoever depends upon others . . . could not be free’ (OC, vol. 3, p. 903 [PCC 127]), he ascribed to that term a sense which embraced both his negative and positive concepts, since our lack of subjection, either to the will of other individuals, or to our own passions in society, was a central feature of each perspective. So too is his claim, with regard to both concepts, that poverty enslaves us. Our passage from antiquity into modernity, no less than from the state of nature into society, had each been marked by our loss of independence, on account of the unequal distribution of private property that made both rich and poor beholden to one another. Most important of all, perhaps—though it is least often noticed—is the fact that both concepts were for Rousseau indeterminate in their exercise and undirected towards any particular goal. There could be no proper aim of human endeavour that was prescribed in advance with regard to either our natural freedom or our civil and moral liberty. However perfectible men might be, he supposed in his Discourse on Inequality, as free agents they had done almost everything possible to make themselves worse than animals. Whatever equality was indispensable to the freedom he proclaimed in the Social Contract, moreover, he set out no socialist programme to achieve it, for that would have merely shifted responsibility for our subjection from the rich to the state, thereby bringing the principle of equality into conflict with that of liberty. According to his social doctrine, the abolition of slavery did not entail the abolition of property as well. Liberal critics who complain of the totalitarian nature of Rousseau’s absolute sovereign ignore the fact that he prescribed no policies that the sovereign must promote, nor could he have done so, except by legislating what he supposed to be right on behalf of the people, thus again depriving them of their freedom of choice.
These and other similarities between Rousseau’s two concepts of liberty are not insignificant, and a proper elaboration of their place in his philosophy might well require a whole essay in itself. I concentrate here upon the differences, however, for two reasons: first, because I believe that for Rousseau they were of greater importance than the common frame of reference which warranted his use of the same term ‘liberty’ in both cases; and, second, because my principal aim throughout has been to elucidate those distinctions against the background of liberal critiques of his doctrine and the charge that neither of the two concepts of liberty he employed (if, that is, their difference was even noted) really mean what we understand by freedom. For Rousseau, there were indeed two concepts, and not one. In their failure to recognize this fact, Hobbes and his followers have stipulated a unique alternative definition, but only—it would appear in the light of his doctrine—by abusing its meaning and impoverishing our political discourse.
How could this be so? Let me attempt to explain it. Until recently, it was fashionable in the history of philosophy (albeit quite wrong) to contrast seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century British empiricism with Continental rationalism in the same period. For those who find it useful to take stock of particular doctrines in bulk, I would suggest that a dichotomy between British monism, stemming mainly from Hobbes and Hume, as opposed to Continental dualism, embracing above all Descartes and Kant, might be a slightly more apt wholesale description of the most pertinent difference between two great traditions of thought in and around the Enlightenment. With regard to the concept of liberty, it is at any rate odd that by and large each of the major Continental European languages possesses one term, to which many native philosophers have ascribed two contrary meanings, whereas in English we have two terms, which our leading philosophers have deemed must share the same sense.42 In most European languages, that is, the idea of liberty has been derived lexically from either the Latin liber or the Germanic fréo, whereas in English, with our common inheritance, we employ the terms liberty and freedom more or less interchangeably. It is true that there are certain locutions and contexts in which this is not the case, but these give rise to no profound philosophical differences, and throughout my remarks here I have used both words as if each did indeed serve equally as a translation of Rousseau’s term liberté. Yet notwithstanding the stipulations of Hobbes, liberté, Freiheit and their cognates have throughout their etymological history been employed by philosophers in two distinct senses, whose opposed meanings at once informed and reflected dual interpretations of our nature. Whether couched in the vocabulary of reason’s opposition to appetite, or of the conflict of mind and body, or the tensions between an inner and outer or higher and lower self, two contrasting concepts of liberty or freedom have been invoked by almost countless European thinkers before Rousseau and after him—for a time, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, by a fair number of British philosophers who were themselves dualists, in some cases even followers of his doctrine.43
The distinction which Rousseau drew between natural liberty, on the one hand, and civil and moral liberty, on the other, derived its terminology largely from that form of dualism which first arose under the influence of Descartes and Malebranche in the seventeenth century, according to which l’homme physique and l’homme moral were marked by different attributes and properties. This dichotomy between ‘le physique’ and ‘le moral’ proved almost a commonplace of Enlightenment speculation in a whole variety of disciplines, and it was perhaps most prevalent in French philosophical biology in the late eighteenth century, in the period culminating with the publication, in 1802, of the Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme by Cabanis.44 Like Buffon and others among his contemporaries, Rousseau adopted that terminology and indeed developed some of the central ideas of his philosophy around it. The contrast of ‘le physique’ and ‘le moral’ appears on the opening page of his Discourse on Inequality (see OC, vol. 3, p. 131 [DI 131]), where it announces the work’s main theme—in effect that our moral distinctions cannot be ascribed to the physical or natural differences between us. Nothing could be more plain to Rousseau’s readers than the fact that he was determined to disengage two kinds of inequality, and one critic, Louis Bertrand Castel, even entitled his reply to the second Discourse, L’Homme moral opposé à l’homme physique. According to Rousseau, moreover, as he explained in so many of his writings, the same dichotomy set apart love from sex, authority from power, right from force—even legislation from government, he remarked in the Social Contract: ‘Every free action’, he wrote there,
is produced by the concurrence of two causes, one moral, that is, the will which determines the act, the other physical, that is, the power which executes it. . . . The body politic has the same impetus . . . force and will . . . the latter . . . the legislative power, the former, the executive power.45
No political thinker ever drew a sharper divide than Rousseau between what was natural or physical in our constitution and what was moral or political in our social arrangements. If only his biographers had borne that in mind, we might have been spared volumes of misguided analyses of his life, whose authors have thought fit to infer his political principles from his urinary complaint or sexual repressions. It is a particular virtue of Maurice Cranston’s recent biography46 that it keeps intact this fundamental distinction between ‘le physique’ and ‘le moral’ and does not, as so many others have done, trace the main promptings of Rousseau’s philosophy to the region of his genitals. With regard to his philosophy, it is of course that same distinction which marks the contrast between natural liberty as against civil and moral liberty—the achievement of the one, as Rousseau put it in the Social Contract (I.8, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 364–65 [SC 53–54]), requiring the alienation of the other. ‘What man loses by the social contract’, let us recall,
is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything that he attempts to get . . . what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses. . . . Beyond this [he also acquires] moral liberty, which alone renders man truly master of himself.
In civil society we do not make our natural liberty secure, but renounce it in exchange for liberty of another sort. ‘Give man entirely to the state or leave him entirely to himself’, Rousseau concluded in a fragment ‘On Public Happiness’ (OC, vol. 3, p. 510), for the contradiction between our desires and our duties renders our condition miserable. Men could not possibly enjoy both forms of liberty together.
Neither form of liberty, it is as well to remember, had ever been enjoyed by men at all. In contrast with Hobbes, who supposed the misconceived idea of ancient liberty had been corrected by his own modern notion, Rousseau identified both his positive and negative concepts with the past—one ancient, and the other antediluvian—each construed as must have been the case, though the facts did not always confirm it. His intensely drawn portrait of modern man as subjugated victim of the illusion of his freedom still speaks eloquently to our age, perhaps even more poignantly than it addressed his own; to my mind, it comprises the most remarkable moral indictment ever conceived of a social and political world which, not long after his death, was to adopt liberalism as its main philosophy. But his glorious description of the world of antiquity must carry less conviction, from whatever perspective we approach it, if only because—as Rousseau himself admitted in the Social Contract (III.15, in OC, vol. 3, p. 431 [SC 115])—the Greeks maintained their freedom because of their possession of slaves, which is to say that the splendid liberty of some men had been achieved by cutting it off from others. Rousseau’s contrast between two kinds of liberty was surely not intended mainly to distinguish classes or to justify slavery—the very antithesis of liberty in both senses of his term. His intoxicating images of Sparta and Rome, like his picture of the state of nature, owed as much to his contempt for the institutions of the present world as to his love of antiquity, and many of their most vivid colours may be seen to emerge only as the sombre canvas of modern institutions is wiped clean. Just because of this, it is difficult to conceive the civil and moral liberty which Rousseau prescribed in the Social Contract as any less fictitious than the natural liberty he claimed we had lost as well. Yet if both of his concepts of liberty were drawn from imaginary lost worlds; and if in his day the only states in which men might still be capable of achieving true political freedom were Corsica and, perhaps, Poland; and if, even there, freedom once lost could never be acquired again; what is it about his peculiar vision of liberty that could have inspired the hostility of his liberal critics and occasioned, from some of them, the charge that it lays the foundation of modern totalitarianism? Judging, at any rate, from the experience of Corsica, which was invaded, and Poland, which was partitioned (each soon after Rousseau drafted constitutions for them), the impact of his ideas upon those few specific political causes he advanced ought to have been more a matter for concern to his friends than alarm to his enemies.
But it is not, I believe, because of any of his particular programmes that Rousseau has won the hearts of so many of his readers, and just for that reason has excited the deep enmity and distrust of others. On the contrary, it is on account of the very generality of his doctrines, and the prodigious force of the imagery through which he conveyed them. In discriminating public liberty from private despotism, he has inspired generations of his followers to perceive the malignancies of their world in the light of blissful ideals to which they might aspire. Yet more captivating even than his portraits of ancient virtue and modern vice has been his remarkable vision of our metamorphosis. As he conceived them, our contemporary institutions had betrayed the fundamental principles from which they sprang. ‘Nothing is more free than your legitimate state’, he addressed his compatriots in his Letters from the Mountain (Septième Lettre, in OC, vol. 3, p. 813 [LWM 237]); ‘nothing more servile than your actual state’. Because our corruption in society had been due to human endeavour, it was possible to conceive how we might correct the abuse of our liberty, how we might turn our will instead in the direction of personal fulfilment and political regeneration. ‘The limits of possibility in moral affairs are less sharply circumscribed than we suppose,’ he commented in the Social Contract (III.12, in OC, vol. 3, p. 425 [SC 110]), and ‘we may judge what still can be done by what has been done already’. If, to his critics, his ideas were only chimeras, his reply, in Emile (IV, in OC, vol. 4, p. 549 [E 253–54]), was that theirs were just prejudice.
Of course Rousseau proposed no revolutionary transformations of corrupt society into new republics of virtue, and it cannot be stressed too strongly that he wished to avert rather than promote revolution and spurned the idea of overthrow, through violence, of any of the governments of his day. The uplifting enhancement of our social relations which he envisaged was all entirely in his dreams and reveries, but it was through those dreams—through what in his Moral Letters he called the ‘devouring strength’ and ‘noble distraction’ of ‘sublime delirium’ (Lettres morales IV, in OC, vol. 4, p. 1101 [ML 191])—that he has illuminated the prospect of a wholly changed universe of social relations and thus aroused the profound enthusiasm of his disciples and admirers. While ‘the world of reality has its limits’, he exclaimed, ‘the world of imagination is infinite’ (Emile II, in OC, vol. 4, p. 305 [E 81]). There, like his own fictitious pupil Emile, Rousseau could drink from the waters of oblivion, the past effacing itself from his memory, with a new horizon opening up before him (see Emile et Sophie, Lettre Deuxième in OC, vol. 4, p. 912 [ES 711]). There, in savouring the solitary enjoyment of undisturbed natural liberty, he could contemplate a social world of perfect civil and moral liberty as well.
It is such flights of fancy which, to my mind, offend Rousseau’s liberal critics most of all. His idea of ‘perfectibility’ (a term which, we should recall, he invented in his Discourse on Inequality) has raised, as they see it, the nightmare prospect of reshaping human nature in accordance with ideals that violate their sense of personal freedom. Worse still, his claim to the effect that men are always what their governments make of them has for liberals a particularly sinister ring, when it is attached as much to the manufacture of virtue as of vice—especially in the light of Rousseau’s belief, as expressed, for instance in his Discourse on Political Economy (OC, vol. 3, p. 251 [PE 12–13]), that, however good it is to deal with men as they are, ‘it is better to make them what they must be’. Does this not suggest, his opponents fear, the complete indoctrination of our minds under governments more despotic than any ever previously experienced? As they read Rousseau, worst of all are his accounts of our need for legislators, that is, persons who occupy an extraordinary position in the state, attempting to ‘change . . . human nature’, as he put it, and ‘transform each individual’ from a solitary being into part of a greater whole (Contrat social II.7, in OC, vol. 3, pp. 381–82 [SC 69]). Do not such claims anticipate the most insidious feature of totalitarianism in the modern world, in which Hitler has shown us only too well how the monstrous ideal of the legislator may be given real substance?
In reply to his detractors, it is perhaps pointless to recollect Rousseau’s insistence that the legislator or lawgiver was the father of a nation and not its ruler, that he had no subjects but instead inspired individuals to form their own new state, and that, if he miraculously succeeded in transforming human nature, this was because his divine eloquence had persuaded others to establish a sovereign for themselves. Never mind the fact that Rousseau’s legislators—principally Moses, Lycurgus and Numa—were for the most part ancient prophets and guides who had pointed the way to men’s achievement of civil and moral liberty such as had been unknown to them before.47 In probing the metamorphoses of human nature which Rousseau conceived in his dreams on the model of ancient myths, his liberal critics resolutely uncover a vision of an alternative world that they judge dangerously abhorrent. Yet where else but in his dreams could Rousseau find escape from the social and political tyrannies under which liberals believe their true freedom is enjoyed already? Where else but in reverie could Rousseau’s imagination have come to legislate for all mankind? Why is it that his liberal critics find his fanciful ideals more intolerable than all the weight of the social systems of the world that he described and they inhabit? So long as liberal principles prevail, individuals in society who are anxious to learn why their liberty seems so oppressive will find in Rousseau’s works the resonant voice of a solitary prophet of the brotherhood of man.48