Rousseau subscribed more earnestly than perhaps any other major thinker of modern history to the proposition that human nature is shaped by politics. No figure of the Enlightenment took greater pride in his political identity than did the ‘Citizen of Geneva’ who heralded most of his principal works with this author’s flourish on their title page; no one before or since was so convinced, as he put it, that ‘everything depends upon politics’ and that the character of a people is always what its government makes of it.1 At the same time, both in his personal life and in almost all his writings, Rousseau showed a passionate attachment to freedom and the autonomy of the individual, as remarkable as any plea on behalf of the idea of liberty that can be found in Western philosophy or literature. His uncompromising determination to refuse the pensions pressed upon him; his contempt for urban artifice and the trappings of commercial society as against his love of the open sky outside the closed city; his ecstatic communion with Nature in preference to the disingenuous company of sophisticated persons, all drove him into such fierce craving for independence that he was left, as he put it, ‘incapable of the thraldom necessary for anyone who wishes to live among men’.2
In proclaiming that virtue springs from political life, while yet determined to be a free spirit apart from civil society, Rousseau has often perplexed his critics and admirers alike. At least since the French Revolution, many of his interpreters have observed that the commitment of radical republicans to reforming human nature through the reconstruction of the political order showed how Rousseau’s theoretical principles could in practice lend themselves to terror. Others have remarked instead upon the extent to which he perceived the dangers of political despotism, and on how his devotion to the freedom of every individual prompted his sceptical disdain of revolutionary movements which aspired to promote the liberty of humanity through violence. The connection between liberty and sovereignty which informs his conception of the state has long excited more partisan commentary than any of the themes in his philosophy of history for which he was better known in his own lifetime, and it is above all this feature of his political theory whose significance has come to be judged in the light of its putative influence on events which occurred in the French Revolution. I have tried to sketch certain aspects of Rousseau’s revolutionary significance on several occasions before,3 and I do not here mean to pursue that subject further. My aim, rather, will be to consider the political dimension of liberty, as he conceived it, in the light of a particular debate which to my mind has formed the most important contribution to the study of Rousseau’s political thought in the twentieth century, around a theme which had received perhaps insufficient, and certainly less problematic, attention before. This debate has to do with the place of natural law in his philosophy, and with the extent to which, in his idea of the foundations of the state, he upheld or rejected principles of jurisprudence espoused by earlier thinkers.4 I will consider such principles in three rather different forms, which I here term superior, anterior and generative natural law, and in my final and longest section I will comment on Rousseau’s idea of representation in the light of arguments drawn from a number of jurisprudential thinkers before him. In the course of my discussion, moreover, I mean to offer a new interpretation of his assessment of one figure in particular—that is, Pufendorf—whom I believe Rousseau came to confront in his writings as much as, if not more than, any other political thinker.
By superior natural law, I mean an immutable principle of justice or right reason independent of the positive laws of actual states, to which political enactments should always correspond, and which they must never transgress. When we speak of the protection of human rights or the prosecution of crimes against humanity, when our governments are taken before international tribunals for their failure to protect the rights of women, children or the unemployed, we generally have in mind standards of justice that stem from natural law conceived in this way, which is indeed derived from its classical formulations in Stoic and Scholastic philosophy.5 So defined, natural law establishes moral rules which transcend and delimit what is politically permissible, and superintends and sets restraints upon the policies of every government, however difficult the enforcement of such rules may be. In Rousseau studies, although there have been several important contributions to the subject in learned journals, the controversy about the place of natural law in his philosophy, conceived in this sense, has been pursued mainly by two scholars—C. E. Vaughan in his introduction to The Political Writings of Rousseau, published in 1915, and Robert Derathé in Rousseau et la science politique de son temps, which dates from 1950. Each of these texts offers a remarkable treatment of its subject, exercising a preponderant influence over other commentators for many years—in the first case, mainly in the interval between the two world wars; in the second, over the whole of the subsequent period.6
Vaughan, who had been a professor of English literature in the University of Leeds and was a meticulous scholar, produced collations and transcriptions of the texts from their original manuscripts which set a standard perhaps unmatched even in the recent more or less definitive Pléiade edition of Rousseau’s Oeuvres complètes. His lengthy introduction set a standard of another sort which, I suspect, may be equally unparalleled. If we bear in mind that he was the nephew of T. H. Green and drew much inspiration from the political idealism of his uncle, we should quickly grasp one of the main themes of his reading of Rousseau, to whom he ascribed a collectivist view of liberty which situated men’s fundamental rights and duties within, rather than outside, the state. In so far as Rousseau believed that our nature was shaped by politics, he was persuaded that there could be no moral dimension to human conduct independent of state control, and thus rejected any idea of a superior natural law which might hold political authority in check. Personal liberty was properly defined by state membership, and the state, in turn, was perceived as the pre-eminent collective agency through which autonomous citizens ruled themselves. According to Vaughan, the major significance of this doctrine was that it provided a response to Locke’s ‘charter of individualism’, by which he meant the notion that the state is ‘wholly external’ to the moral life of man. Thus whereas the social contract of Locke, claimed Vaughan, had been ‘expressly designed to preserve and confirm the rights of the individual, that of Rousseau ends, and is intended to end, in their destruction . . . for the sake of a greater and higher benefit’.7
Unfortunately, however, Rousseau had not been fully consistent in subscribing to this collectivist ideal, since in both the Discours sur l’inégalité and subsequently in the first few pages of the Contrat social he had introduced individualist notions of human nature and liberty which proved to be disturbing elements in his theory and were incompatible with his main argument. Worse still, having already refuted the idea of natural law in his early draft of the Contrat social, that is, the so-called Manuscrit de Genève, and having therein shown, in a lengthy chapter, that the social contract could have no overriding moral sanction, Rousseau had himself demonstrated how his own conception of the state’s foundation out of the mutual transfer of rights must be at fault; yet rather than abandon that theory he elected instead to erase his own refutation of natural law from the published text, deleting the offending chapter. Vaughan’s sympathetic attempt to render Rousseau truly coherent thus led him to propose a revision of Rousseau’s argument, by way of wholly different excisions from the published works. Taken together, they form an extraordinary deconstructivist reading of a major author, perhaps unrivalled in its absurdity: ‘Strike out the state of nature and the contract from the opening pages of the treatise’, Vaughan counsels cheerfully:
Replace them by the idea of a gradual growth from barbarism to what may fairly be called the ‘civil state’. Admit that the discipline which slowly brought men to that state was, in its earlier stages, largely a discipline of force. . . . Make these changes in Rousseau’s argument, and its inconsistencies, its other inherent blemishes, will have largely disappeared. He would no longer have been hampered by the necessity of basing a collectivist structure upon a foundation of individualism. . . . But to have recast his argument in this fashion would have been to accept the idea of progress.
And alas—one can hear Vaughan’s weary sigh of regret—‘The idea of progress was wholly alien to his way of thought’.8
New and much needed light was shed upon this amicable darkness by Derathé’s Rousseau et la science politique de son temps. Whereas Vaughan had laboured under the impression that the collectivist doctrine of Rousseau was founded upon his rejection of natural law, Derathé insisted that, on the contrary, the whole of Rousseau’s political theory was designed to conform to such a principle. His works, it was now claimed, incorporate a multitude of allusions to jurisprudential writers, from whose treatises of natural law were drawn the main themes of his philosophy. For Rousseau, as for Locke or Pufendorf, Derathé contended, civil law may prescribe nothing which is contrary to the law of nature, a truth giving rise to consequences as crucial for an understanding of Rousseau’s politics as were the implications of the opposite perspective adopted by Vaughan. For if the obligations of persons to respect the terms of the social contract are founded upon a principle of natural law, then no provisions of the contract can require that men entirely renounce the rights which they enjoy under that law. It is therefore clear that ‘the total alienation of each associate together with all his rights to the whole community’, as prescribed in Book I, chapter six of the Contrat social, does not in Rousseau’s doctrine lead to the suppression of our natural rights [OC vol. 3, p. 360; SC 50]. Vaughan and his followers are found to have been mistaken in their belief that for Rousseau the liberty of individuals in the state of nature was absolutely lost when men collectively joined together to form the sovereign. The allegation that he endorsed a collectivist idea of the state in reply to Locke’s ‘charter of individualism’ is deemed incorrect, since based on a false assumption. Rousseau’s theory of politics turns out to be in fact the work of a disciple of Locke, and the conception of natural law which he drew from Locke and others must be understood as a constant feature of his thought.9
Derathé comes to these conclusions partly by placing emphasis upon a scattered selection of passages from Rousseau, including his correspondence, which had apparently escaped Vaughan’s attention, and partly by juxtaposing certain themes from his work with those of jurisprudential writers before him. But despite the profound scholarship that underlies his study, I believe that Derathé’s account is in its fashion as fundamentally misconceived as that of Vaughan. For if Vaughan attributed to Rousseau the rudiments of a theory he could not have anticipated, still less adopted, Derathé ascribes to him a political philosophy which in large measure it was his intention to refute.
No principles of natural law could possibly apply to individuals in the state of nature, Rousseau insists in his Discours sur l’inégalité, since the savage inhabitants of that state, having no perceptible duties or moral relations with one another, would have been incapable of following its dictates.10 In the Manuscrit de Genève he maintains that the law of nature could only become intelligible after the prior development of men’s passions had rendered all its precepts powerless, from which, he concludes, ‘it is manifest that this so-called social trait dictated by nature is a veritable chimera’.11 It was only in society, when relations between individuals were made permanent and binding, that they could recognize and perform their obligations under law, for in their state of natural independence, as Derathé himself admits, Rousseau’s savage men cannot grasp the meaning, nor feel the binding force, of law.12 The notion of a ‘droit naturel’ in the passages cited by Derathé is not that of a moral rule but of an impulse of nature, engraved in our hearts, as Rousseau puts it, rather than our reason.
None of Derathé’s references to Rousseau’s putative sources establish any intellectual debt of a kind that Rousseau would, or should, have been willing to repay, for he was overwhelmingly critical of these sources and claimed, in Emile, that a proper definition of the meaning of law had still to be drawn.13 A principle designed by its main authors to bridge the gulf between nature and politics was ill-suited to his philosophy, which set political artifice apart from man’s inchoate nature, and according to which our passage into civil society had not fulfilled our original potentialities but had instead denatured and transformed us. To the question set by the Academy of Dijon for which he produced his Discours sur l’inégalité—that is, ‘What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?’—he clearly replies in the negative: ‘Moral inequality [is] authorized solely by positive law’.14 In the Contrat social he introduces no principle of natural law which might constrain the sovereign’s powers; the idea is not even mentioned there. Men’s natural rights are indeed renounced completely according to the terms of Rousseau’s fundamental compact; in contrast most particularly with Locke, the sovereign power which they establish is described as legitimate only if it has absolute authority over them.
It may at first appear that Pufendorf is unlikely to have exercised a major influence on Rousseau, if only because he is so seldom mentioned in Rousseau’s writings, by contrast with figures such as Plato, Montaigne, Montesquieu and Buffon, to whom a profound intellectual debt is acknowledged, or those, like Hobbes, Locke, Rameau and Voltaire, whose doctrines are, for the most part, vigorously opposed. Rousseau no doubt had Pufendorf in mind—together with Grotius, Locke, Burlamaqui and Hobbes—when he remarked in the Discours sur l’inégalité, his fragmentary essay on ‘L’Etat de guerre’ and elsewhere, that the ‘jurisconsultes’ had wrongly transposed mankind’s acquired social traits to the original state of nature, and had proposed political doctrines to remedy the inconveniences of such a state, whereas it was the very prescriptions that those doctrines set forth which were responsible for human misery and conflict. When Rousseau addressed the ideas of earlier jurisprudential thinkers he characteristically charged them with having proffered solutions to problems of which those solutions were in fact the cause.15 But in his reflections on such thinkers, taken collectively, he does not cite Pufendorf in particular. We know from his Confessions that when he acquired the only systematic education that he was ever to receive, at the bosom of Madame de Warens in Annecy around 1730, he read Pufendorf, presumably the De jure naturae et gentium, or conceivably its crib, the De officio hominis et civis, both available in a French translation by Jean Barbeyrac, although he points to no text in particular. The two memoirs dating from the early 1740s which he prepared for the education of the son of Jean Bonnot de Mably also refer generally to Pufendorf, in addition to Grotius, as essential reading in natural law,16 but in each case he just notes Pufendorf’s name, without any comment or even mention of a specific work. Elsewhere, his infrequent references to Pufendorf are uniquely to the De jure naturae et gentium in the Barbeyrac edition entitled Le droit de la nature et des gens, first published in 1706; and they most characteristically cite Pufendorf by way of Barbeyrac’s own commentary and annotations, particularly where Barbeyrac objects to Pufendorf’s principles.
On the evidence which has survived, Rousseau appears to accept Barbeyrac’s authority as a reliable critic of Pufendorf, and as an interpreter of other doctrines to which he refers in his notes. These notes may have served as Rousseau’s source for his remarks in the Discours sur l’inégalité on a passage about princely obedience to law from an obscure anonymous work devoted to Spanish monarchism, the Traité des droits de la reine of 1667,17 and they were probably the only source for his references or allusions in the Discours sur l’inégalité, the article ‘Economie politique’, the Manuscrit de Genève and the Contrat social, to the political philosophy of Filmer.18 Occasional remarks in Barbeyrac’s notes, perhaps reinforced by his lengthy introductory essay devoted to a historical and critical account of the science of morality, are likely to have been Rousseau’s main inspiration, furthermore, for the distinction he draws in the preface to the Discours sur l’inégalité between modern natural law, in its application to intelligent moral beings only, and ancient natural law, which had defined the relations of all living creatures.19 Compared with his intellectual debt to Pufendorf’s editor, Rousseau’s interest in the ideas of Pufendorf himself seems slight, there being only five specific references to them in the whole corpus of his writings, all of them figuring in the Discours sur l’inégalité, the ‘Economie politique’ or the Lettres de la montagne. Neither Pufendorf’s name nor any of his works is mentioned in the Contrat social, or, indeed, anywhere in Rousseau’s voluminous correspondence.20
In the Discours sur l’inégalité there are three passages21 that address Pufendorf’s ideas directly, in the first of which Rousseau notes that Pufendorf, in company with Cumberland and an unnamed ‘illustrious philosopher’ (Montesquieu), differed from Hobbes in his conception of human nature, because he supposed men naturally timid rather than aggressive. This is a point also pursued in a later passage22 in which Rousseau remarks that to be robust excludes dependence, which arises only from frailty, here implying the main difference between Hobbes’s and Pufendorf’s doctrines without, however, mentioning either Pufendorf or his work. In the second and third passage he takes up Barbeyrac’s criticism of Pufendorf, following Locke, to the effect that men have no right to forsake their liberty, however much they may choose to alienate their property. Liberty, claims Rousseau, being a gift of nature and not a product of human industry, may never be renounced or transferred. In the ‘Economie politique’23 he cites Pufendorf again, this time by way of support for the contention that the right to transfer property may only be enjoyed by the living, since the dead can have no estates. In the eighth of his Lettres de la montagne,24 he notes with approval the unchallenging idea that ‘according to Pufendorf, right is a moral quality which prescribes something that is due to us’.25
I should add that apart from these direct references to Pufendorf, there are a number of obvious, and perhaps many more not so obvious, allusions to Pufendorf’s ideas or Barbeyrac’s interpretations of them in Rousseau’s writings. When remarking adversely upon the ferocity of natural man as conceived by Hobbes, he appears in the Discours sur l’inégalité to follow an observation drawn from Barbeyrac, and in the same text he also seems to allude to a passage by Pufendorf himself on the lack of periodicity of human sexual relations.26 Rousseau’s reflections on the absence from man’s most primitive condition of any language apart from inarticulate cries, and on savages quenching their thirst at the first stream, or finding refuge in caves and forests, resemble Pufendorf’s exposition in his own portrayal of the state of nature (De jure naturae et gentium II.ii.2); his insistence on investigating savage man as he emerged from the hands of nature, and before his acquisition of artificial powers, corresponds to Barbeyrac’s gloss to the De jure naturae et gentium (II.i.5), that ‘by original condition [is meant] that in which man finds himself in leaving the hands of his Creator . . . prior to having made any use of his faculties’; and it may even be that Rousseau’s reiterated claims on the general unreality or inexistence of the state of nature were inspired by similar observations of both Pufendorf and Barbeyrac.27 There are a number of other allusions to Pufendorf’s text which merit at least passing notice as well, perhaps most importantly a passage in Book I, chapter two of the Manuscrit de Genève28 in which Rousseau’s reference to the expression ‘bienveillance universelle’ suggests that he might have had Pufendorf’s text (II.iii.18) in mind, since these words appear as Barbeyrac’s translation of Pufendorf’s ‘communis amor’ but are missing from the article ‘Droit naturel’, by Diderot, to which this chapter of the Manuscrit de Genève is nominally addressed. In my next section I will consider the sense in which that work may have been intended by Rousseau to challenge Pufendorf’s doctrine of sociability in an indirect fashion by way of a response, only in the first instance, to Diderot.
Yet all of these citations and allusions, and perhaps a few others still more oblique which I shall not pursue here, might be deemed of merely minor significance for a contextual understanding of Rousseau’s ideas, if only because his express references to other political writers are so much more substantial, or because his images of a pristine state of nature draw upon wider sources, and his perception of Pufendorf among modern philosophers of natural law locates him in unspecified company from which Rousseau characteristically neglects to set him apart. Until a few years ago, I believed that the direct influence of Pufendorf upon the intellectual formation of Rousseau’s ideas was slight, but I now hold that view to be false. Although his citations from Pufendorf are scanty, the themes they pursue form prominent features of both his philosophy of human nature and his theory of the foundations of the state, and I have come to see some of his principal arguments as quite centrally designed to challenge Pufendorf’s natural jurisprudence, to the extent that it gave warrant to what Rousseau judged was the miserable history of human society and the despotic establishment of state power. In the rest of my essay I mean to elaborate these propositions and to show how Rousseau sought to confront an author he so seldom mentions.
From the direct references to Pufendorf in his works, perhaps two points are most striking. The first of these is Rousseau’s perception of Pufendorf, joined by Cumberland and Montesquieu, as supposing, quite contrary to Hobbes, that man in his natural condition is weak, timid and helpless.29 ‘We are continually told that nothing could be so miserable as man in this state’, Rousseau remarks in the Discours,30 alluding at once to Hobbes and Pufendorf, but quite the opposite is true. Savage man, according to Rousseau, was strong, vigorous and largely self-reliant, even if less fleet of foot and powerful than certain animals. Pufendorf had been entirely mistaken to suppose that men and women without laws were feeble and thus in need of mutual assistance;31 they had not been drawn, on account of any infirmities of their solitary condition, to seek each other’s company and thus, through society, to satisfy their needs. Second, Rousseau refers sharply in several passages of both the Discours sur l’inégalité and the Contrat social to Pufendorf’s (as well as Grotius’s and Hobbes’s) misconceived idea of voluntary servitude. The political bond of association through which citizens form the state is not a pact of submission, for in surrendering their liberty to a king subjects renounce their humanity and make themselves slaves. Such is the unfortunate history of mankind, whose members have been deprived of their freedom by their own acts of will, in headlong pursuit of their chains. I will develop these themes in my next three sections, as follows: first, in my remarks on anterior natural law, I will assess the critique Rousseau puts forward of Pufendorf’s idea of socialitas, or sociability; second, in my comments on generative natural law I will discuss Rousseau’s rejection of the claim that men’s feeble constitutions and infinite needs impel them to cooperate, to seek each other’s company and form the bonds of commercial society; and third, in addressing Rousseau’s views on representation, I will consider his denunciation of all political authority established from a people’s self-imposed subjection to its ruler.
Rousseau’s central complaint against jurisprudential authors is that in their accounts of the state of nature they do not strip away those human qualities and institutions which could only have arisen in society. Though they seek to establish the philosophical foundations of our civil state, they characteristically assume what they need to prove and do not go far enough back in their accounts of mankind’s origins. Rousseau believed this to be true of Pufendorf’s conception of natural sociability, as it was of Locke’s idea of a natural right of property and Hobbes’s notion of a natural state of war, as well as of these and other thinkers’ suppositions about our faculty of reason, our conventions of language and our sense of duty and obligation. None of his precursors had perceived that primitive men are more like animals than like civilized persons. ‘They spoke of the savage and depicted civil man’, he contends in the Discours sur l’inégalité.32 In Book I, chapter two of the Esprit des lois, Montesquieu had made much the same charge against Hobbes in particular.
Rousseau’s idea of natural right in the Discours sur l’inégalité is established from a combination of amour de soi and pitié alone, rather than from any notion of natural sociability.33 He there rejects the idea of socialitas, or the sociability of man in the state of nature, conceived as a desire, or as a need, or as a tendency, for social life, on the grounds that it is not their sociability but their liberty and perfectibility, above all the misapplication and abuse of these natural faculties, which draw men into the cooperative ventures that mark their passage from the state of nature into society.
The critique of sociability in Rousseau’s Manuscrit de Genève is still more striking. His argument in the (ultimately deleted) Book I, chapter two of this work is essentially that the notion of a moral natural law is a chimera because it depends upon the self-contradictory idea of a natural society of mankind. If his final title for the chapter—‘Of the general society of the human race’—puts the question, his original title—‘That there is no natural society among men’—settles it most plainly. The whole of Book I, chapter two of the Manuscrit de Genève in fact comprises a critique of Diderot’s article ‘Droit naturel’ for the Encyclopédie.34 That article, in turn, was essentially a refutation of Hobbes’s conception of the state of nature (ascribed, as Diderot put it, to a ‘violent interlocutor’), by way of a defence of natural sociability. It introduced Diderot’s own conception of the volonté générale which, according to its author, is in every individual an act of pure understanding, operating in the silence of the passions with respect to what each person may demand of another like himself, and what that other has a right to demand of him.35 Rousseau, in his one and only political contribution to the Encyclopédie, the article ‘Economie politique’, had developed his idea of the volonté générale for the first time by way of an elaboration of Diderot’s idea in the ‘Droit naturel’.36 But it must be emphasized that Diderot’s article was largely inspired by his reading of Pufendorf, as indeed were many of his other contributions on political and economic subjects to the early tomes of the Encyclopédie, such as ‘Agriculture’, ‘Autorité politique’, ‘Cité’ and ‘Citoyen’. In ‘Citoyen’ Diderot drew attention to two passages from Les devoirs de l’homme et du citoyen, that is, Barbeyrac’s translation of Pufendorf’s De officio hominis et civis, while in his Encyclopédie article ‘Hobbisme’, drawn almost entirely from Jacob Brucker’s own Pufendorfian reading of Hobbes in his Historia critica philosophiae, he added a few concluding paragraphs of his own, contrasting Hobbes and Rousseau, in which he argued that Rousseau’s philosophy was the opposite of that of Hobbes. The one imagines human nature good, claimed Diderot, the other evil; the one believes the state of nature is a state of peace, the other supposes it to be a state of war.37
His article ‘Droit naturel’ was thus designed to criticize both authors: Hobbes because he conceived an idea of right which no person was under any obligation to respect and which, therefore, as Diderot incorrectly inferred, prompted vice and immorality in nature; and Rousseau, because he imagined that the formation of society and the establishment of laws depraved mankind. ‘Both men were extreme’, he observed in ‘Hobbisme’.38 Between them there is another idea which was closer to the truth—the idea that while mankind may be subject to perpetual turmoil, its goodness and evil are the same, each circumscribed by limits which cannot be breached. All artificial advantages have harmful effects, Diderot concluded; all natural evils are matched by consequences which are good. Diderot’s view, in the ‘Droit naturel’ and ‘Hobbisme’ taken together, was that virtue and vice are at once natural and social; it was equally false to suppose, with Hobbes, that man is naturally vicious and, with Rousseau, that he always becomes so in society. In his essay ‘Droit naturel’, following Pufendorf, he thus put forward a view of natural right, allied to his conception of a general society of mankind, which was designed to refute Hobbes while at the same time excluding Rousseau’s contrary conception of human nature and society.
The deleted chapter of the Manuscrit de Genève forms Rousseau’s direct response to Diderot, itself by way of a double refutation of the Hobbesian position and that of Pufendorf which Diderot had adopted as an alternative. The violent interlocutor, that is, Hobbes, had been correct, claims Rousseau, in supposing that outside civil society there can be no conception of, or agreements about, a common good. Hobbes had rightly identified droit naturel not with moral duty but with perfect licence, excluding men’s realization of any shared objectives. A true volonté générale, he contends, could only be established when political authority is already recognized by a community; only in a properly constituted state can the conception of a moral right for all men have any application. Yet if Diderot had misconceived the meaning of droit naturel, Hobbes had equally failed to grasp the manner in which natural rights could be exercised or enjoyed. For Hobbes had imagined that liberty itself engendered conflict and that the pursuit of natural rights produced a state of war. But according to Rousseau it is a mistake to suppose that the hostilities of corrupt society were a universal feature of mankind. Hobbes had attributed human conflict and misery to vices which are in reality the effect of war, since in the state of nature, the passions of men could lead only to their disregard of, or pity for, one another.
Rousseau’s contention is therefore that neither duty nor conflict can be found in nature, since both arise in society alone.39 Diderot’s droit naturel was a chimerical concept because it ascribed a moral rule to a state from which all authority is absent, while Hobbes’s theory is founded upon the no less erroneous supposition that the exercise of natural rights gives rise to war. Each author derived his account of the droit naturel from his understanding of the social rather than the natural attributes of men. We only conceive the general society of mankind from the point of view of a particular society, Rousseau asserts: ‘Those professed cosmopolitans who justify their love for their country by way of their love for humanity boast of loving the world so as to have the right to love no one at all’.40 Moral rights could only be established in specific communities formed by the agreement of their members, he concludes; they were never to be found in any natural society of mankind. To the extent that a conception of such a society, in which natural law could be seen to operate, was drawn by Diderot from Pufendorf, Rousseau’s argument forms a critique of Pufendorf by way of Diderot, as well as a response to Hobbes.
My remarks in this section are much indebted to recent scholarship on Pufendorf’s jurisprudence, especially the work of Fiammetta Palladini and Istvan Hont. In her study of Pufendorf’s seventeenth-century commentators (Discussioni seicentesche su Samuel Pufendorf), and even more in her Samuel Pufendorf discepolo di Hobbes,41 Palladini has sought to correct a number of misinterpretations of Pufendorf’s meaning. His fundamental concept of socialitas, she contends, was not designed to portray our original tendency towards society, still less our naturally benevolent disposition, but only a moral imperative necessary for human survival. Unlike Grotius, who had conceived the state of nature as marked by an appetitus societatis, Pufendorf followed Hobbes in supposing that man was motivated merely by self-love and the desire to ensure his preservation. In his central chapter devoted to the fundamental law of nature he described the human race as malicious, petulant and easily irritated—a form of animal exposed to want and unable to exist without the assistance of his fellow creatures.42 For an animal of this kind to preserve itself, it was necessary that it should be sociable, God having assigned to man a nature such that he is unable to survive except by leading a social life.43 Society is thus seen to have been generated out of the needs, irascibility and weakness of the individual, rather than any communal attraction. This Hobbesian, indeed originally Epicurean, notion of mankind led Pufendorf at first to suffer much the same criticism of his apparent moral indifference—that is, to be accused of heterodoxy or even atheism—as had been charged against Hobbes, and in her writings Palladini attempts to show how, in order to meet such challenges, Pufendorf at first defended Hobbes and subsequently came to redefine his own idea of sociability so as to endow it with less objectionable attributes in the manner of the Stoics and Grotius.44
Hont, in a number of essays in print or progress, pursues a similar reading of Pufendorf in order to show how he attempted to reconstruct the natural history of society out of this conception of self-interested need. Pufendorf, he remarks, began his account of society’s origins from the premise that God gave the world to men in common, a donation yielding an indefinite right of all persons to appropriate the fruits of the earth. This right of everyone to everything excludes all private dominion over the land, since in the state of nature men can have no obligations; they therefore have common rights but lack reciprocal duties to respect them and live in a condition which Hont, following Pufendorf, describes as one of ‘negative community’.45 Against such a background of primeval communality defined by the absence of specific rights, Pufendorf is shown to have projected the establishment of a positive right of private property, by stages, through a conception of need that serves as a principle of individuation and distribution. Because human needs, unlike those of animals, are neither uniform nor finite—because, as Pufendorf observed, men have an endless desire after things superfluous46—the history of mankind’s development from negative community to private property must have been a history of the transformation of abundance into scarcity as our forebears, in ever-growing numbers, sought to fulfil their insatiable needs through continual appropriation of the land. With this condition becoming progressively more unstable, private property rights would have been introduced as a remedy against the increasing threat of internecine war, in an attempt to regulate and ensure the political tranquility of mankind.
According to Hont, Pufendorf perceived that ‘the peace of society would be better preserved if communally organized artificial beneficence gave way to the mutual sociability of selfish agents’. Such a society depended on the extension of the market, and the introduction of both money and foreign trade thus followed logically and inevitably from the stage of simple barter which prevailed earlier. This is what Hont terms Pufendorf’s theory of ‘commercial sociability’. The formation of the modern state in its various historical categories was conceived according to such a scheme, Hont claims, as ‘part and parcel of [Pufendorf’s] solution to the problems of disintegrating negative community, completing the transition into a system of individual property rights’.47 From the need to regulate men’s endless desires there arose both rights of private property and the social organization of economic life. In the eighteenth century this theory of society’s development was pursued further by Turgot, Smith and many other political economists, in terms of the stages of mankind’s passage from barbarism to civilization through advancing forms of economic sustenance, while in the nineteenth century it came to be developed, above all by Marx, around a notion of progressive historical epochs, distinguished from one another in terms of their prevailing modes of economic production.
In the absence of any detailed treatments in his own writings, it may seem difficult to establish whether Rousseau interpreted Pufendorf’s philosophy of history in anything like the manner set forth by Palladini and Hont. No doubt the Discours sur l’inégalité appears to recapitulate many of the themes of the De jure naturae et gentium highlighted by Hont in particular, since Rousseau’s description there of mankind’s passage from the state of nature to the civil state also incorporates the idea of a res nullium gifted by God to men in common, and hence the lack of private dominion in the state of nature, followed by population growth, increasing scarcity, an incipient state of war, the establishment of private property and the institution of different forms of government appropriate to distinct distributions of property and power in diverse circumstances. We ought not to put too much stress on such parallels, however, since Rousseau could have drawn these ideas from many other sources which he cited more frequently, in some instances from roughly contemporary thinkers who were themselves perhaps influenced by their reading of Pufendorf, and in others from writers who clearly were not. Rousseau’s own conception of a propertyless, unregulated and uncultivated state of nature could, apart from Scriptural sources and commentaries, have been inspired by Lucretius, Horace or Diodorus Siculus (not to mention Locke); and allowing that these authors all happen to be cited by Pufendorf in his text, Rousseau could still have turned for guidance instead to the Essais of Montaigne,48 for instance, to which he owed, and acknowledged, a greater debt than to the De jure naturae et gentium. Even with the helpful guidance of Palladini and Hont, I believe that Rousseau’s connection with what I have here termed the generative theory of natural law, exposited by Pufendorf, may be better established in a different way.
The Hobbesian reading of the concept of sociability, as presented by Palladini, seems to have been clearly evident to Rousseau himself, whose allusions in his second Discours to the notion that natural man is miserable, timid and helpless, as I have tried to show here, all appear to pertain to specific passages from the De jure naturae et gentium. Rousseau of course contends that this doctrine is false, for the same reason that Hobbes was mistaken to suppose man naturally aggressive—that is, because both timidity and belligerence are social traits. In rejecting the doctrine of man’s original feebleness, and hence the supposition that we need society to survive, Rousseau in fact puts an objection which correlates with his rebuttal of Hobbes, in so far as he judged Pufendorf to be mistaken about man’s need for society, and found Hobbes in error about the consequences of solitude. Both authors, he believed, had wrongly supposed that man’s natural condition required social remedy. To that extent he understood the idea of socialitas in precisely the manner now rendered plain by Palladini; his critique of this notion indeed forms one of the principal themes of his Discours sur l’inégalité, in its endeavour to show how ‘little Nature contrived to bring men together through mutual needs’, and how ‘little it gave rise to their sociability’.49
With the assistance of Hont, moreover, I believe we may now form a better idea of Pufendorf’s conception of the generation of society out of the continual pursuit of superfluous needs, whose organization and distribution come progressively to require the introduction of money and the development of a commercial market. However much his view of sociability may reflect a Hobbesian notion of self-love, Pufendorf seems rather more illuminating than Hobbes with respect to the origins of society, since like La Rochefoucauld, Pascal and Bayle among his near contemporaries, or Mandeville among his successors, he explains how selfish men may both require assistance from and then come to depend upon one another, whereas Hobbes rather suggests that we are able to keep company only through sufferance and continual self-restraint. Rousseau’s portrait of attractively robust savage self-reliance may have been designed to contradict each of these authors, but his account of the miserable dependence on others of l’homme sociable, always obliged to live outside himself,50 confronts Pufendorf and Mandeville rather more directly than Hobbes. The pursuit of superfluous needs which would have progressively bound men to one another does indeed seem a feature of the history of society, he claims, but our original nature gave rise only to a capacity, and not a tendency, for such endeavour.
To my mind, however, the principal rejoinder of Rousseau to Pufendorf’s theory of ‘commercial sociability’ may have been less his Discours sur l’inégalité than the Essai sur l’origine des langues, even though Pufendorf’s name is nowhere mentioned there. In this work—which forms the most notable contribution of Rousseau himself to the stadial theory of our economic development and modes of sustenance—he attempts to show that primeval society was bred from our natural passions and not our factitious needs.51 Our first languages, our most primitive common vocabulary of signs, he insists, must have articulated our love, pity or anger rather than expressed our needs, with our initial passionate encounters having been progressively transformed into fixed settlements merely by chance, as volcanic eruptions and other natural catastrophes would have dispersed savages from one region and driven them into closer proximity elsewhere.52 We are not naturally united but divided by needs and by the self-interested means we pursue to satisfy them. Languages in their earliest seductive form, ‘daughters of pleasure and not need’, Rousseau observes, came to be effaced with the ebullient sentiments from which they had sprung, only when ‘new needs that were introduced among men forced each person to think of no one but himself and to draw his heart back within him’.53 How could it possibly be such fractious needs which originally brought men together? ‘It would be absurd’ to suppose ‘that the very cause which drives men apart should also be the means that unites them’, he concludes, here contradicting not only Hobbes and Pufendorf but also Mandeville.54 Pufendorf’s concept of socialitas, enjoining selfish and feeble men to form a collective crutch for one another so that they might reinforce their misery, only marked the corruption of human society, and not its joyous origins, as Rousseau portrays them in the Essai sur l’origine des langues. Thereafter could be witnessed the progressive decadence of the savage, barbarian and civil man, respectively, in advancing through the hunting, pastoral and agrarian stages of his development, which Pufendorf and others took as evidence of humanity’s ingenuity in passing out of its wretched and unstable original condition. No less than Pufendorf or Mandeville, Rousseau, in his ninth chapter of the Essai sur l’origine des langues, sketches an economic theory of our species’ history which plots the metamorphoses of civilization that herald the advent of commercial society.55
Of course the driving force of man’s commercial sociability was all too evident in the contemporary world, according to Rousseau. It was just because of the interconnections between commerce and civilization—the tyranny of finance, the corruption of cities, the depravity of riches and poverty alike—that he could find Pufendorf’s philosophy at once manifestly powerful and morally perverse, in so far as the acquisition of wealth was a measure of the decline of morality, he suggests in his Constitution pour la Corse.56 Where commerce reigns, as he notes in the Contrat social,57 freedom is always traded, degrading buyer and seller alike. It was not only Hobbes who, in anticipation of Pufendorf, recognized that in modern society ‘all things obey money’;58 Rousseau too remarks, in Book IV of Emile,59 that money has become ‘the real bond of society’. Sole measure of value, but valueless in itself, it forms the secret currency of thieves and traitors when they put the public good and liberty up for auction. Having originally chanted aimez-moi to one another in our savage state, and then finding ourselves forced through need, in barbarous conditions, to cry out aidez-moi in order to survive, now in societies which have assumed their ‘final form’ around the contemporary institutions of commerce, all that we can say is donnez de l’argent.60 If, following Hont, it is right to read Pufendorf’s De jure naturae et gentium as an account of the divinely sanctioned political economy of progress, then Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité and Essai sur l’origine des langues together should be read as a rebuttal which offers a secular account of man’s fall.
In this concluding section I turn to Book III, chapter fifteen of the Contrat social, entitled ‘Of deputies or representatives’, which, to my mind, occupies a central place in that work and forms probably the most important point of departure for locating it in the context of Rousseau’s other writings. He there puts forward two theses about the corruption of modern society. The first is that finance is a slavish term, unknown to the citizens of free states in the ancient world. Through the hustle of commerce and the arts, he writes, through the greedy self-interest of profit, personal services are replaced by money payments. ‘Make gifts of money, and you will not be long without chains’, he concludes. In a country that is truly free, citizens do everything with their own arms, and nothing by means of money. In a free state everyone flies to the assemblies, drawn by an attachment to the common good which is far more absorbing than the pursuit of private interest. In the modern world, by contrast, domestic cares absorb all our attention. ‘I hold enforced labour to be less opposed to liberty than taxes’, he claims, for once taxed, we entrust affairs of state to the masters of our public revenue. What does it matter to me, we say, as we turn in upon ourselves, leaving the regulation of the political domain to our appointed governors?61
This is a familiar and recurrent theme in Rousseau’s writings, and it can be found, as well, in La Nouvelle Héloïse, the Lettre à d’Alembert on the theatre, and the Essai sur l’origine des langues. In both his Constitution pour la Corse and Gouvernement de Pologne, moreover, he uses words almost identical with those employed in this chapter of the Contrat social. The system of finance, he repeats, is a modern invention. In the ancient world, public revenue was comprised not of money but of produce and commodities (denrées). Even the citizens of the richest republic of antiquity, that is Rome, were not taxed. The grandeur of that state was achieved with little revenue. The less that money is necessary, the more does virtue become possible as a spur for action in its stead.62 Of course these tributes to antiquity are somewhat disingenuous, since, as Rousseau observes elsewhere, the liberty of citizens in the ancient world depended, in large measure, on their possession of slaves, so that the virtuous freedom enjoyed by some was obtained only by others being deprived of it.63 But I draw attention to this passage of the Contrat social just to recapitulate, in a slightly different idiom, the points I have already made with reference to the factitious and superfluous needs of men and women, according to Rousseau, as they passed from their natural condition of self-sufficiency into the commercial entrapments of civil society, where they are drawn outside themselves to find new identities only in the eyes of others, pursuing insatiable wants which are continually frustrated in their relations of mutual dependence.
Rousseau’s remarks about the modernity of finance in the Contrat social thus rather resemble the points I have already ascribed to his critique of the generative conception of natural law, which I have here associated mainly with Pufendorf. His characteristically extravagant claims about the modernity of finance in the Contrat social cannot be said to follow strictly from the main themes of the Discours sur l’inégalité, because that work deals with mankind’s progression from a solitary state of nature into civil society, and not its passage from ancient civic virtue into modern private vice. But the themes are, to my mind, entirely compatible. Their connection with the Essai sur l’origine des langues is even stronger.
In Book III, chapter fifteen of the Contrat social there is, however, a second and related claim about the corruption of civilization, to which I will devote my concluding remarks. This is what Rousseau states:
The idea of representation is modern; it comes to us from feudal government, from that iniquitous and absurd system which degrades humanity and dishonours the nature of man. In ancient republics and even in monarchies, the people never had representatives; the word itself was unknown.64
Modern peoples, believing themselves to be free, have representatives, whereas ancient peoples had none. The moment a people allows itself to be represented, he concludes, it is no longer free; it no longer exists.
Perhaps the most illuminating way of pursuing this critique of representation, whose modernity Rousseau holds to be no less striking than that of finance, is by connecting it with the passage in Book I, chapter four of the Contrat social, in which he claims that ‘To renounce one’s liberty is to renounce one’s human quality as a person, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties’.65 Why does Rousseau hold the very idea of representation to be incompatible with freedom? It is clear from the Contrat social and other related passages in the Discours sur l’inégalité and elsewhere that the principal focus of Rousseau’s criticism there is once again the philosophy of natural law and, in this context, especially that of Grotius who, in his De jure belli ac pacis, had claimed that a people may dispose of its freedom (in Rousseau’s transcription, ‘may alienate its liberty’) and freely render itself subject to a king.66 In transferring its liberty to one who represents its will, a people may submit itself to a condition of voluntary servitude, passing over its freedom to a person who acts on its behalf, Grotius had claimed. Such a renunciation, says Rousseau, is incompatible with the nature of man, destroying all the morality of his actions and his freedom of will. For Rousseau, there could be no right of slavery stemming from a subject’s willing submission to his king, since the words right and slave exclude one another and are mutually inconsistent.67 Liberty, he insists, can never be represented. In contemplating a people’s surrender of its freedom to a king, Grotius neglects the far more important question, according to Rousseau,68 of how it comes to constitute a people, since it is the formation of a people and not its subjection to a king which marks the establishment of a civil society.
I remark upon Rousseau’s reading of Grotius here, because it is specifically the doctrine of Grotius which Rousseau addresses in chapters four and five of the Contrat social. But in both the Discours sur l’inégalité and elsewhere in the Contrat social Rousseau makes it abundantly plain that he has in mind a general theory of the formation of the state which is not only that of Grotius, but also of Hobbes and Pufendorf as well, according to which every legitimate political association is established by the willing subjection of a people to its ruler. This idea, essentially that of voluntary servitude, is rejected by Rousseau time and again in his political writings. In the Discours sur l’inégalité, in particular, he pursues the same point not only against Grotius, as in the Contrat social, but specifically against Pufendorf, who had claimed that just as a person may contract to transfer his property to another, so may one agree to relinquish his freedom in the same way.69 That contention, says Rousseau, in the only passage of the Discours which won the approval of Voltaire, is ‘un fort mauvais raisonnement’ (that is, ‘a thoroughly rotten argument’), for slavery is always contrary to human nature.70 Rousseau notes (in a passage of the 1782 edition of the Discours based on his original manuscript) that it had already been shown, by Locke, that one could not dispose of one’s liberty by submitting it to the control of an arbitrary power in the same way that one might sell one’s estate; although the concepts of liberty and property are closely linked by Locke in his political theory, they do not have the same meaning, since liberty is not a transferrable good, and no man has a right to make himself a slave.71 As Locke himself puts this point in his fourth chapter of the Second Treatise of Government: ‘A man, not having the power of his own life, cannot by compact or consent enslave himself to anyone, nor put himself under the absolute arbitrary power of another to take away his life when he pleases’.
Roussseau’s immediate source for this claim is the commentary, provided by Barbeyrac, who cites Locke at length and with approval, in his notes to Book VII, chapter eight of his own translation of Pufendorf’s De jure naturae et gentium.72 In discussing the author’s assertion that a people might subject itself to slavery Barbeyrac had observed, following Locke, ‘that no man may so part with his liberty as to give himself up wholly to an arbitrary power, for this would be to dispose of his own life, of which he is not master’. Much less can a whole people have such a right, he concludes, when every single person who forms a part of that people lacks it himself. On this point Rousseau subscribes entirely to Locke’s and Barbeyrac’s criticisms of the legitimacy of any voluntary subjection of a people, and in the Discours sur l’inégalité he takes issue, above all, not so much with Grotius or Hobbes, as with Pufendorf. More than once in the Contrat social, moreover, he alludes disdainfully to any notion of a people’s deliberate submission to their ruler following the establishment of the state.73 There is, he observes, only one contract in the state, which excludes all others.74 There can be no pact of submission following a pact of association, for the institution of government is not a contract,75 and the indivisible sovereignty of a people may never be delegated to or represented by a king. In the Contrat social Rousseau remarks that Grotius, in dedicating De jure belli ac pacis to King Louis XIII, had spared no pain in robbing the people of all their rights, and even the otherwise admirable Barbeyrac, who had dedicated his translation of Grotius (Le droit de la guerre et de la paix, dating from 1724) to King George I, had scarcely hesitated to tie himself up in his own sophistry.76 Truth does not point the way to riches, Rousseau concludes, and the people never make anyone an ambassador, nor a professor, nor hand out any pensions.
If we now return to my point of departure in Book III, chapter fifteen, we find in these remarks of Rousseau an elaboration of his earlier claims that liberty may never be renounced, that sovereignty may never be represented and that, in confusing a particular form of government with the general notion of sovereignty, Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf had all laid the modern foundations of political slavery. In each of their philosophies, the absolute power of monarchy was masqueraded behind the shroud of consent. Immediately before his critique of representation in Book III, chapter fifteen of the Contrat social, moreover, Rousseau puts the same point as I have just made about absolute monarchy with respect to the supposed sovereignty of Parliament. As we shall recollect, he writes, in one of the most memorable passages of the work, that ‘the people of England regards itself as free, but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of Parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing. The use it makes of the short moments of liberty it enjoys shows indeed that it deserves to lose them’.
The philosophical legerdemain, as Rousseau conceived it, by which one person’s will may articulate the liberty of many others is, I suppose, best known to contemporary students of political thought from chapter sixteen of Hobbes’s Leviathan, entitled ‘Of persons, authors and things personated’. According to Hobbes, the authority of the sovereign, who is an artificial person, is granted to him by commission or licence from his subjects. They are the authors of his actions, and he is no more than the actor personating them. He is his own subjects’ lieutenant, vicar, attorney, deputy or representative. In authorizing him to act on their behalf they entrust him with their liberty and are bound by his word and his will because they are subject to the consequences of their own agreement. The sovereign representative of his people has an absolute and unlimited right to all things, because, as Hobbes writes in chapter twenty-one of Leviathan, ‘Every subject is author of every act the sovereign does’. If I may employ Rousseau’s terminology here once again, this is ‘un fort mauvais raisonnement’, not least because Hobbes’s idea of sovereign power as at once unconditionally binding and wilfully delegated neglects his earlier distinction between obligation and liberty (in chapter fourteen of the Leviathan) by making the act of submission of authors to their representative one which embraces both concepts together, when in fact the liberty of subjects passes from them to their representative in their establishment of the state. For Rousseau, no expression of liberty could embrace its renunciation.
I say that the argument is best known to contemporary students of political thought through this chapter of Leviathan, but it was perhaps most familiar to Rousseau from his reading of sections twelve and thirteen of Book I, chapter one of the De jure naturae et gentium of Pufendorf, entitled, in English, ‘Of the Origin and Variety of Moral Entities’. According to Pufendorf, compound moral persons which are invested with the power of natural persons, or individuals, sustain their character and may thus be termed their representatives.77 Political societies, such as republics (the example is missing from Kennet’s translation), comprise moral persons of just this kind, he remarks, constituted when separate persons so unite that by reason of their union whatever they want is considered as one will. This takes place when several individuals subordinate their will to the will of one person or to that of a council, Pufendorf claims, such that they acknowledge that whatever that person or council has decreed or done is the action of them all. No less than Hobbes, Pufendorf thus contends that by submitting themselves to the absolute authority of their king, subjects are the authors of his power and he, through his office, is the agent and personator of their will.
Of course the theory of representation encapsulated in a people’s submission to the authority of their ruler does not originate with Hobbes and Pufendorf, however modern Rousseau supposes it to be. It can be found in the political thought of Marsilius, for instance, in his conjunction of the notion of popular rule with the idea of delegated conciliar power, through which the authority of the whole body of citizens is expressed, ‘auctoritatem universitatis civium representantes’.78 There are no doubt numerous other precedents for this claim before the seventeenth century, of which Rousseau may have been as ignorant as I am. But the main point I wish to stress about his critique of the idea of representation is his insistence that through this institution—through the representation of sovereignty—the people who are said to be agents of their state’s legislative power invariably find themselves confronted by an authority which does not express their will but instead deprives them of their freedom. In taking on the public persona of popular sovereignty, modern governments impersonate the only legitimate authority in each state, which is the whole body of citizens taken collectively. In coming to stand in for the people, governments deprive citizens of the right to govern themselves. The public personification of the people by the modern state, Rousseau believed, was a mask, a counterfeit, a disguise. In subscribing to what we might term the metonymic theory of the state, modern man, no less than his savage forebears who had suffered a like delusion in their creation of civil society, has run headlong into his chains, believing himself to be free. Legislators acting on behalf of the people do not articulate the will of citizens but only the interests they ascribe to them, that is to say, what citizens ought to will, now that they have forfeited their freedom to determine that choice for themselves.
As Rousseau understood the matter, modern states, in their replacement of equality with thraldom, had no citizens at all, but only subjects. If the development of commerce in his philosophy of history may be described as a fundamental misrepresentation of need, so may the development of a public power in the modern world which substitutes government for sovereignty be described as a misrepresentation of freedom. In both cases individuals come to live outside themselves, establishing a false identity in their dependence on others. Having delegated his public persona to his representative, the allegedly free subject of a modern state finds himself depoliticized, his moral liberty eviscerated, so to speak, as he is now forced to seek a new identity only in his domestic life, retaining such meagre liberties that are left to him only as a private person, in the pursuit of ambitions which drive him to exploit his neighbours rather than seek fraternity and common cause with them. Whereas in the republics of antiquity our interests were openly shared and inscribed in our hearts, now they are in conflict, Rousseau laments in Book III, chapter fifteen of the Contrat social (his epiphany of equality), secreted away in the linings of our purses. As we have come to serve the state with our purses rather than our persons, our collective voice has been stilled, our public identity lost, our liberty freely forsaken. Such are the consequences that stem from the modern idea of voluntary subjection, which Rousseau ascribes to the theory of natural law, and to the jurisprudential doctrines of Grotius, Hobbes and, above all, Pufendorf.
If I have to come to these conclusions by a route which, to my mind, is too seldom pursued by Rousseau’s interpreters, I trust that they will nevertheless be familiar to all his readers, for these are indeed some of the most central themes of both his philosophy of history and his political theory. One point that may be thought to follow from his critique of the idea of representation here is that what is most central to his conception of sovereignty is not so much that it should be absolute—for, as a matter of fact, Rousseau’s sovereign has no force to implement its own will; nor even that it should be unitary and indivisible—since the general will can only be formulated in opposition to each citizen’s particular will; but rather that the sovereign must always be direct, the unmuffled voice of the people who constitute the state, in articulate exercise of their own authority, unmediated and unrefracted by any delegated powers. ‘Wherever the represented are present, there can be no representation’, he claims in Book III, chapter fourteen of the Contrat social.79 Although I can hardly begin here to pursue that theme in all its permutations, let me just note that the idea of the misrepresentation of freedom in the modern state is but a single, albeit major, aspect of what Rousseau perceived to be the general corruption of civilization in the passage of humanity out of a world of simplicity, spontaneity and immediacy into a complex world of calculated selfishness, which even persons who recoil in horror from what they take to be his sinister conception of the state may find all too familiar. As Jean Starobinski puts this thesis in a variety of forms and with respect to a wide range of works in his splendid study of Rousseau’s thought, La transparence et l’obstacle, mankind’s passage from nature to culture has rendered obscure, opaque and devious what it is suggested must once have been transparent, direct and pure.80
I have here focused on Rousseau’s view of misrepresented freedom, but of course the idea of representation has a far wider currency than in the political sphere alone. Impersonating actors are to be found not only on thrones or in parliamentary chambers but also in pulpits and confessionals, and equally on the stage, where Rousseau finds that they render their audience no less passive and inert than are the subjects of the crown. The artificial contrivance of harmony in music, he thought, similarly distorts the natural fluency of melody; the loss of inflection in language renders our speech monotonous, our prose thus made prosaic; and the representation of speech in writing disengages meaning from utterance and deforms the exuberant intonations through which we would once have expressed our passions and our pleasures.81 The representation of liberty in the modern state, conceived in terms of voluntary subjection, stands to citizens as writing does to speech. It does not render plain but distorts; in impersonating their purported authors, governments only render them subject to their own control, binding electors under terms and conditions which leave them unfree to express their will. I can hardly think of a broader or more pervasive theme in the whole of Rousseau’s philosophy.
One not insignificant implication of these matters for students of political thought is the sense in which it would appear that Vaughan may after all have been much closer to the truth than Derathé in his identification of the moral dimension of Rousseau’s conception of liberty with the public domain—in placing emphasis on what would today perhaps be termed participatory democracy. If I have a single overriding reason for regarding Derathé’s solidly contextual reading of Rousseau as unconvincing and Vaughan’s wildly anachronistic folly as perhaps more faithful to his subject’s meaning, it is that the images of a natural law constraint upon state power which are so central to Derathé’s defence of Rousseau against the imputations of collectivism seem not to accord with Rousseau’s bolder and more radical vision of the politically engaged character of liberty. Rousseau does situate his moral conception of liberty within the state, and he seeks to protect the liberty of citizens less by safeguarding a sphere of privacy which state power must not infringe than by ensuring that membership of the state becomes a matter of the greatest devotion—political engagement assuming, for those who partake of collective self-rule, the most active and direct form.
This bolder and more radical vision of liberty is, of course, according to Rousseau’s critics also more dangerous. For a great many readers, the mobilization of a publicly spirited sense of fraternity smacks of collectivism or even totalitarianism82—charges which inspired Derathé to adopt a very different perspective on Rousseau’s idea of natural law from that of Vaughan. But I think that in defending his political philosophy from the misinterpretations which Robespierre and the Jacobins placed upon it, commentators should first acknowledge that there are many resonances in Rousseau which do indeed anticipate the radical fervour of Jacobin political ideals, and they should then look for the at least equally striking differences elsewhere than in his doctrine of natural law. These differences should not prove hard to find. Readers who are persuaded that Rousseau’s zealous political philosophy found its cutting edge in the guillotine and thereby achieved a benighted unity of theory and practice might bear in mind how much he himself recoiled from violence and proclaimed that even the liberty of the whole of humanity did not justify shedding the blood of a single man;83 terror was a word almost entirely absent from his political vocabulary, and he employed it only to condemn such governments as acted in defiance of the law it was their duty to uphold. In the light of my main theme in this section, we should of course recall, moreover, that Rousseau conceived his idea of popular sovereignty as the only safeguard of citizens against the tyranny of government—tyranny of a kind which would join the Committee of Public Safety, whose rise he did not anticipate, to those ancient despotisms that he knew. The Jacobin doctrine of revolutionary government as the supreme representative of the people’s will directly contradicts the idea of indivisible popular sovereignty which Rousseau had put forward, and to which Robespierre may have subscribed in theory but never in fact.
Most important of all, perhaps, the fundamental truth about Rousseau’s meaning which redeems Vaughan’s misbegotten reading from the learned corrections of Derathé—in effect, that our political institutions shape human nature and morality, for better or worse—points to a vision of human redemption from corrupt society which was largely ignored by both scholars. Having declined equally from our state of natural innocence and also the fraternal republics of antiquity, it was not now politically possible, according to Rousseau, for us to efface the harmful stains of human history and restore our primeval ignorance or ancient virtue. Only in fantasy could he make a personal escape from the benighted civilization which in his day was already termed commercial society, through reverie casting himself adrift in the cleansing waters of oblivion. Just in his dreams could he relish the ‘sublime delirium’ and ‘noble distraction’ of perfect freedom,84 in imagination alone overcoming the real barriers confronting vivre entre soi under the infinitely soothing attractions of vivre en soi. However much the citizen of Geneva regretted the loss of his political patrimony, and the corruption of humanity from a fanciful past, the only tranquil joy which he savoured in his own life Rousseau found in blissful communion, not with other citizens, but in solitude with Nature.85