The history of political philosophy is really the history of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The two most important creation myths of the modern West were told by Locke and Rousseau. They are in constant battle with each other to this very day, and as of this writing, Rousseau is winning.
In fact, for years I’ve argued that almost every political argument boils down to Locke versus Rousseau. It’s a staple riff of mine when I talk to college students. It goes something like this: Locke believed in the sovereignty of the individual and that we are “captains of ourselves.” Rousseau argued that the group was more important than the individual and the “general will” was superior to the solitary conscience. Man is sinful according to Locke, a noble savage according to Rousseau. Our rights come from God, not from government, declares Locke. No, we surrender our individual rights to the judgment of the sovereign, replies Rousseau. Locke says that the right to property and to the fruits of our labors is the keystone of a free and just order. Rousseau says property is the original sin of civilization and, in a just society, property must be managed by the sovereign for the good of the whole community. Locke believes in equality before the law, but tolerates or celebrates inequality of wealth, merit, and virtue in civil society.1 Rousseau believes economic inequality is the source of all social ills, and that “one of the most important tasks of government [is] to prevent extreme inequality of fortunes.”2 Locke sees the formation of liberal governance as the greatest advance for mankind. Rousseau, in the words of Michael Locke McLendon, sees the opposite: “For Rousseau, Lockean freedoms secured through the social contract are nothing more than a ruse, a confidence trick the rich play on the poor to consolidate their power. Thus, modern humans are enslaved socially, economically, and politically.”3
Look at almost any contemporary debate between the left and the right and you will find echoes of this divide. Progressives take after Rousseau. Leftists insist, with varying degrees of intensity, that the rules of the game are nothing more than a rigged system of exploitative capitalism: “white privilege,” “the patriarchy,” etc. A unifying idea across the left is the Rousseauian idea that income inequality is a great evil, the “defining challenge of our time,” in the words of Barack Obama.4
The right argues for the other side of the coin. Donald Trump, and some of a Randian bent, cartoonishly insist that great wealth is a virtue unto itself. Conventional conservatives make a more sophisticated argument, emphasizing that freedom and merit will inevitably lead to economic inequality and there’s nothing wrong with that. The job of government, Speaker Paul Ryan likes to say, is to create opportunity for upward mobility, not to tell people you’re stuck in your station, so here’s a check to make life a little less miserable.
I think this Locke-versus-Rousseau comparison illuminates a great deal. But it should be gripped lightly. There is a temptation, common among intellectual historians and others who believe in the power of ideas, to play a game of connect-the-dots (a tendency I definitely suffer from). A philosopher says X in 1800. Then in 1900 a writer says something very similar to X. Ergo, the intellectuals conclude the philosopher’s influence spanned a century. This obviously does happen—a lot—but almost surely not nearly as much as intellectuals would like to believe.5
But the relationship between ideas, culture, and politics isn’t incremental or linear but catalytic and interactive. Westerners have wanted the Middle East to become, variously, Christian or liberal or democratic for centuries. If ideas alone had the power we sometimes ascribe to them, we could have just air-dropped copies of the Federalist Papers—or the Bible—over Baghdad and Riyadh and waited for them to have the desired effect. The two most popular and closely related metaphors for ideas and their role in the world are “light” and “flame.” The Enlightenment, that great awakening of liberal political philosophy and scientific exploration, “shed light” on the world. Sometimes an idea is a spark that ignites some great fire or sets off a bomb. That’s all fine. But no great fire can endure without the right fuel. No bomb can detonate if it’s not made from the right materials. Ideas take root (another metaphor) only when the soil is right. And the nature of the soil changes the way an idea grows.
Rousseau’s psychological response to the Enlightenment led him to articulate a certain argument. But what links Rousseau to Bernie Sanders or Occupy Wall Street isn’t primarily an intellectual lineage but a psychological tendency. How many members of Occupy Wall Street or MSNBC pundits have read Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality? Of the fraction who read it, probably in college, how many of them can attribute their opposition to tax cuts or the Koch brothers to that text? The answer must be very close to zero. Likewise, how many Tea Partiers or Fox News contributors consult John Locke for their positions? The answer is the same.
We tend to give too much credit to intellectuals for creating ideas. More often, they give voice to ideas or impulses that already exist as pre-rational commitments or attitudes. Other times they distill opinions, sentiments, aspirations, and passions that already exist on the ground, and the distilled spirit is fed back to the people and they become intoxicated by it. Revolutions die in the crib when the people are not inclined to be revolutionary.
So, just as the state is a myth agreed upon, most civilizational creation stories are just that: stories. That doesn’t mean they are untrue. But the truth’s significance is on a separate track from the significance of the story itself.
It would be fair to say that John Locke was a storyteller who, more than anyone, created the Miracle. But a more accurate way of saying it would be “the story we tell about Locke” helped create the Miracle.
Born in 1632 in the small English village of Wrington, Locke spent his childhood in the nearby market town of Pensford.6 His father (also John), a former soldier in the English Civil War, worked as a lawyer and clerk to a justice of the peace in a nearby village. The Lockes, devout Puritans, were prosperous but not particularly prominent. Thanks to his father’s former commander, who was a member of Parliament, John received a scholarship to the Westminster school in London, where he excelled, winning placement at Christ Church in Oxford. He studied scholastic philosophy there but was not particularly enamored with it. He spent more time studying medicine and science (then called “natural philosophy”). He stayed at Oxford for fifteen years, from 1652 to 1667, in various administrative and teaching positions. In 1667 he moved to London, where he worked as a tutor and physician in the household of Anthony Ashley Cooper, who would become the first Earl of Shaftesbury. Cooper was a member of the “Cabal” that largely governed in England at the time for King Charles II.* Through Shaftesbury, Locke procured several important administrative jobs in His Majesty’s government.
Shaftesbury, a leader of the Whigs, was one of the central political figures of his time, first siding with Royalists in the English Civil War but later switching to the Parliamentary side. Whigs were united by three ideas: Parliament was supreme, Protestant minorities should be respected, and Catholicism was a threat to English liberty and sovereignty. (The Whigs’ anti-Catholicism, while regrettable, should not be viewed through the prism of the present day. In the 1600s—and well after, in some quarters—Catholicism was deeply enmeshed with the power politics of the age.)
If Locke was a tutor to Shaftesbury’s son, Shaftesbury was a father-like tutor to Locke in the realm of politics. (It was during this time that Locke probably cowrote with Shaftesbury the Fundamental Constitution of Carolina, the charter for colonial lands consisting of most of the territory between Virginia and Florida, of which Shaftesbury was one of the proprietors.)
In 1675, Locke moved to France for several years. When he returned, the politics of England were very different. Shaftesbury was now persona non grata with the crown, a leader in the effort to bar Catholics from the throne. This is relevant because Charles II, while not Catholic, was sympathetic to Catholicism. Indeed, Charles had once secretly promised the king of France to convert in exchange for support in his war against the Dutch. Worse, Charles’s brother, James, was Catholic, and because the king had no legitimate sons (though plenty of illegitimate ones), James was next in line to the throne. That fact, combined with rumors of his dealings with the French, aroused a fierce backlash in Parliament amidst something of a national anti-Catholic panic in England, prompting the Exclusion Crisis from 1679 to 1681. Lord Shaftesbury led the “Country Party” (later called the Whigs) in the fight to legally ban a Catholic from wearing the crown. Charles repeatedly dissolved Parliament to fend off the effort. In 1681, Charles dissolved Parliament permanently until his death four years later. While Charles was still alive, however, Shaftesbury had been arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London for high treason. Shaftesbury was acquitted by a grand jury, thanks to a weak case by the government and a jury handpicked by a Whig sheriff. He tried, unsuccessfully, to organize an outright rebellion against the crown, but when that failed, he fled to exile in the Netherlands in the fall of 1682, lest he not be so lucky a second time. In January 1683, he died in Amsterdam.
It was against this backdrop that Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government. But he would not dare publish them for nearly a decade, lest he be put to death. In 1683, Locke also fled to the Netherlands. He did not return until after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Recounting the story of the Glorious Revolution in detail would take us too far afield for our purposes. But a very brief summary is necessary.7 When Charles II died, his Catholic brother James inherited the throne. Again, English Protestants were convinced that Catholicism was a tyrannical creed that put the interests of foreign powers ahead of the interests of the English people. James set out to lift all of the legal prohibitions on Catholics in government. Worse, he attempted to transform Parliament—the seat of popular sovereignty—into a body of lackeys, lickspittles, and yes-men, reversing the progress of liberty in England and seeming to confirm the worst fears about Catholic absolutism. After all, France’s king, Louis XIV, had spent much of the 1680s persecuting French Protestants, dismantling popular assemblies, and attempting to expand Catholic hegemony on the Continent. There’s a rough parallel between the 1680s and the 1930s in that during both periods it seemed tyranny (by whatever label you want to put on it) was the wave of the future, not just in France but in the Hapsburg Empire and throughout much of Europe.8
Things came to a boil when James had a son with his second, Catholic wife. This meant that the heir to throne was no longer James’s Protestant older daughter, Mary, but another Catholic. Mary’s husband William of Orange, the stadtholder (or chief magistrate) of the Netherlands—and James’s nephew—organized an invasion for the purpose of regime change. He orchestrated an invitation from seven English Lords to come to England. William put together an army of 25,000 men and an armada of five hundred ships. His agents disseminated some 50,000 copies of a pamphlet vowing to seek a “free Parliament”—i.e., one properly elected, and not a tool of the king, the Catholics, or the French. After a daunting November channel crossing, William’s forces landed in Torbay, in southwest England.
There were two minor skirmishes, but James was inadequate to the task of rallying popular support, particularly at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment in England was so high. His foremost general, John Churchill—an ancestor of the twentieth-century prime minister—switched sides, at enormous risk. Isolated and inept, James ordered his troops not to fight the invading army. He fled to France instead. But first he did something remarkable and hugely significant. He took a sheaf of writs establishing a new Parliament and burnt them. He then took the king’s seal and hurled it into the Thames. This was not simply an act of spite. James believed, with some good reason, that if the official documents authorizing a Parliament, and the seal which legitimized that authority, were disposed of, then no new government could be formed.
“We may think of official documents as readily fungible; if there is an original somewhere, of an act of Congress or a Supreme Court decision, it is readily replicable, and its validity is not expunged if, by some unhappy accident, the original is consumed by fire or vermin. But in the seventeenth century the document was the law,” writes Michael Barone in Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America’s Founding Fathers.9 To the modern mind, this may seem almost comical. One can imagine the plot of some action movie in which the dastardly villains endeavor to find and destroy all the original copies of the U.S. Constitution, thus in one fell swoop eliminating the Bill of Rights and our system of government. But that’s not how it works. That wasn’t clear to James at the time.
William marched into and occupied London. But he did not declare himself king. Rather, he called for new parliamentary elections and theatrically made no effort to sway them. The new Parliament debated whether James was still king, decided that he was not, and named William and Mary the king and queen. The immediate political significance was obvious. There would never again be a Catholic on the throne. French influence on England was thwarted. A new Anglo-Dutch alliance was formed.
But the lasting significance was far greater. Parliament—not God—had made William king. Moreover, it had established that Parliament was the ultimate authority in England and that the king was not above the law. This was a watershed moment. The idea of parliamentary supremacy—and hence the ultimate sovereignty of the people—had been around in some form since at least the days of the Magna Carta. Now the idea was manifested in the real world. The new Parliament passed the English Bill of Rights, which cemented for all time the rights of Parliament (never to be permanently dissolved again), the English people, and the limits on royal authority. No longer could the king (or queen) suspend laws, levy taxes, raise standing armies, and the like without the consent of Parliament. The right to free speech in Parliament was now beyond the power of the king to abrogate as well.
It’s crucial to understand how ideas and culture were intertwined in the Glorious Revolution. The new order was understood and ratified not as a radical departure from tradition and custom but as a reassertion of it. In the text of the Bill of Rights itself, Parliament insisted that it was merely asserting and vindicating the “ancient rights and liberties” of the English people. In William’s “Declaration of Reasons” for the invasion, he hammered the point that he was merely trying to restore the English tradition of liberty and defeat the forces of tyranny and absolutism. He claimed to be unable to “excuse ourself from espousing their interest in a matter of so high consequence, and from contributing all that lies in us for the maintaining both the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of these Kingdoms, and for the securing to them the continual employment of all their right” and to come “for no other design, but to have a free and lawful parliament assembled as soon as possible.” He was “appearing upon this occasion in arms” to rescue the Church of England and the “ancient constitution.”10 In other words, the English culled from their past a story of themselves and ratified it in a legal principle. The story, not the principle, was what mattered most. But, once committed to the story, new principles—or ideas—emerged that would eventually drive the story in new directions.
Historians debate how sincere William was. To be sure, William had his own ambitions in mind, as did all of those Whigs and other members of Parliament piously invoking the ancient customs of liberty as validation for a coup. Similarly, there was no end of realpolitik motivating the Dutch to pull off one of the greatest regime changes in human history.
But what stuck was the story. Just as the Magna Carta became something more than a fairly mercenary, even grubby truce between the king and the nobles, the relatively bloodless Glorious Revolution reinforced the story the English told themselves about themselves. As Edmund Burke would put it a century later, “The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty.”11 The Glorious Revolution simultaneously severed England from its feudal past while at the same time grounding its new embryonic democratic society, not in grand abstractions, but in a nationalistic, essentially tribal story of Englishness. The abstractions came later. And that is where John Locke came in.
John Locke’s Second Treatise, published in 1689, provided a philosophical binding for the pages of the story of English liberty. But it also contained within it a radical departure from English particularism. In tone and ambition, it spoke to the English heart and mind, but within it lay a universal worldview. I will offer a brief and somewhat selective summary, even though—spoiler alert—I will go on to argue that the precise details do not matter as much as some like to think.
The Second Treatise on Government contains its own creation myth: “Thus in the beginning,” Locke declared, “all the world was America…” What Locke meant is that in our original tribal state everyone lived like the Indians across the Atlantic. Why? Because “no such thing as money was any where known.”12
What Locke means by money here is property. And Locke’s understanding of property is the key to his entire political worldview. Locke argues that, in the state of nature, men exist in “a State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the Law of Nature, without asking leave, or depending Upon the Will of any other man…”13 Locke’s state of nature is remarkably similar to Rousseau’s in many respects. Locke says in the state of nature is “a State also of Equality, wherein all the Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that Creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all should, by any manifest Declaration of his Will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted right to Dominion and Sovereignty.”14
For Locke, the problem with the state of nature is that it is unstable. It invites a “state of war” in which one man—or group of men—may use force to impose their will on another. Because the state of nature lacks “a common judge with authority”15 to settle disputes, disputes are therefore settled by force. The loser of such contests, if he survives but remains involuntarily under the control of the “conqueror,” is now in “the perfect condition of slavery.”16 This is an illegitimate, or arbitrary, use of force, for no man has the right to exert his will against another’s will.
That is because the first property right is the right to own yourself—and all other rights derive from this one. Thus, government is a necessary tool, created collectively to protect property, which is another way of saying protecting life. Men, according to Locke, voluntarily combine to create government to do limited and specific things, because our rights are prior to government. As we’ve seen, Locke was wrong about this in terms of history or anthropology. But Locke recognized what Mancur Olson meant when he said that order is “the first blessing of the invisible hand.”17
Long before Marx, Locke offered his own labor theory of value—or, in Locke’s case, a labor theory of property. For every man, Locke writes, “the Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”18 God gives us trees, but when a person chops down a tree and turns it into a table, it becomes property.
Locke believed that property was the route to improvement; it was literally the vehicle of progress. The tribes of America might be exotic and fascinating but it was nonetheless the case that a “King of a large and fruitful territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day labourer in England.”19 In other words, Locke understood that human ingenuity creates wealth.
For Locke, our inalienable rights were life, liberty, and property. The Declaration of Independence changed this to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, but there is no insurmountable contradiction here, because Locke believed that property was the route to happiness. When the first man put a fence around a piece of land to cultivate it, he was beginning the process of human advancement, of culture. As we will see, this is the exact opposite of Rousseau’s vision.
Locke was interested not in material equality but in equality in the eyes of God, and therefore in the eyes of government. People may have different perspectives and opinions, but that is because they have different experiences. And therefore tolerance for differences should be maximized.
This is where Locke’s doctrine of the “blank slate” (or in his case blank paper) proved so useful:
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of all characters, without any ideas. How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from EXPERIENCE.20
This idea, which comes from Locke’s work as one of the founders of empiricism, arguably did more to transform the world than anything he wrote on government and politics. As a matter of science, Locke was wrong. Obviously, experience informs and shapes how we see and understand the world, but we also come preloaded with all manner of genetic software that processes the data in various ways. But as a matter of politics and philosophy, Locke’s rejection of original sin, innate ideas, and the natural—i.e., divine—authority of kings moved politics from a God-centered universe to a man-centered universe. God was the only master of mankind, according to Locke, and no man could appropriate God’s power. This meant that, in this world, each man was the master of himself and just power had to be rooted in his consent.
As Steven Pinker notes, one of Locke’s targets was the then dominant medieval understanding of human nature. “Locke opposed dogmatic justifications for the political status quo, such as the authority of the church and the divine right of kings, which had been touted as self-evident truths,” Pinker writes. The blank slate “also undermined a hereditary royalty and aristocracy, whose members could claim no innate wisdom or merit if their minds had started out as blank as everyone else’s. It also spoke against the institution of slavery, because slaves could no longer be thought of as innately inferior or subservient.”21 Locke’s blank slate, in other words, was a part of a larger argument for pluralism, meritocracy, and tolerance.
Locke elevated reason above revelation. He believed that man could reason his way through this world and create political structures based upon universal equality and consent. Since every person is “furnished with like Faculties,” he wrote, and “shar[ed] all in one Community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such Subordination among us, that may Authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of Creatures are for ours.”22 This idea was essentially a time bomb, placed at the foundations of hereditary aristocracy, slavery, and the divine right of kings. “Locke explicitly challenged the fixed hierarchical arrangements taken for granted almost everywhere seventeenth-century Europeans lived,” writes James T. Kloppenberg.23
Locke wanted the same rules applied to everyone: “promulgated, establish’d Laws, not to be varied in particular Cases, but to have one Rule for Rich and Poor, for the Favourite at Court, and the Country Man at Plough.”24 The rule of law that pays no heed to notions of inherited superiority was the ideal means to achieve “the Peace, Safety, and publick good of the People.”25 This idea is the whole ball game. We cannot police what is in the human heart, but only how people act on it. “But Freedom of Men under Government is having a standing Rule to live by, common to every one in the Society in question, and made by the legislative power erected in it….” Locke writes. “A Liberty to follow my own Will in all things, where the Rule prescribes not; and not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another man…”26
Many historians once argued that Locke’s Second Treatise is less a stand-alone work of political philosophy and more a political document intended to justify the Glorious Revolution. But it’s clear that Locke wrote most of it well before the Glorious Revolution unfolded, and when doing so was an act of high treason. “In the 1680s, even entertaining the idea that sovereign power resided in the English people rather than the king-in-Parliament put dissidents’ lives in danger,” writes Kloppenberg.27 Again, the causality here is important. The facts on the ground changed before the idea that legitimized the facts. The debate over whether the Second Treatise was primarily a political document or a philosophical one misses the key point: It was a cultural document, reflecting an idea whose time had come.
John Locke saw the past as a pit humanity must labor to escape from. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the other hand, believed it was a shame we built the ladder at all. Whereas Locke saw the emergence of modern society as a story of liberation, not just of people but of the mind, Rousseau saw modernity as a form of oppression.
Rousseau was born in Geneva, Switzerland, the only society that rivaled ancient Sparta in Rousseau’s mind as an ideal form of political organization. Rousseau’s mother died shortly after giving birth to him. His father, Isaac, a grandiose and overeducated watchmaker who had married above his station, raised Jean-Jacques in Geneva until trouble with the law prompted the father to abandon his son, leaving Jean-Jacques to be raised by relatives who treated him poorly.
At sixteen, the precocious Rousseau left for a life of adventure. In Savoy, Rousseau was taken in as steward to a rich, eccentric woman, the Baroness de Warens. The fairly young baroness had left her husband, taking much of his money with her, and became a kind of eccentric adventurer herself. One of her vocations was as a Catholic missionary of sorts, specializing in converting young Protestant men. She served as Rousseau’s patron and, eventually, his lover. By the time he left her employ, Rousseau—who had never been formally educated—was a full-blown man of letters and burgeoning philosopher. Eventually he set off for Paris to make his mark, expecting to be recognized as a unique talent.
When Rousseau arrived in Paris at the age of thirty, the city was the intellectual capital of the world. He met Denis Diderot, another ambitious young intellectual, who would go on to cofound and edit the Encyclopédie—the great compendium of the arts and sciences, and the most important publication of the French Enlightenment. The two were the most prominent of the philosophes, the radical, anticlerical, democratic intellectuals who laid much of the groundwork for the Age of Reason.
Rousseau would go on to become more famous than Diderot and all the other philosophes. He was a true celebrity intellectual, admired by the royal court (for a time) as much for his brilliant writing as for his musical compositions and operas. “Yet he never seemed at home in Paris and eventually succumbed to severe feelings of alienation and self-loathing,” writes Michael Locke McLendon.28
There’s a reason for that. Rousseau was, to put a fine point on it, a miserable bastard. Rousseau was a cad, a showman, and a staggering and often heartless hypocrite. If you’ve seen the film Amadeus, he was surely less of a fool than Tom Hulce’s Mozart, but he was just as contemptuous of social mores. He had numerous mistresses. In his own Confessions, he admits that he had multiple children with one of them, a former scullery maid named Thérèse Levasseur. The man who said “I know nothing which exercises a more powerful influence upon my heart than an act of courage, performed at an opportune moment, on behalf of the weak who are unjustly oppressed”29 nevertheless forced his mistress to give each of the children to an orphanage immediately upon birth. The man who wrote some of the most influential and famous work on how to raise children properly abandoned his own children.30
Rousseau seems a familiar type today. Indeed, he created the type: a celebrity intellectual who simultaneously yearned for ever more fame and controversy while heaping scorn on other intellectuals for their lack of integrity and concern with petty things. It should be no wonder that he was very much despised by many of the other leading thinkers of his age. “I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it,” Voltaire wrote to him about Rousseau’s Social Contract. “[N]o one has ever been so witty as you are in trying to turn us into brutes,” he said. “To read your book makes one long to go on all fours.”31 Rousseau’s feud with the English philosopher David Hume became an international drama. (Hume had endeavored to help Rousseau find safety in exile in England; Rousseau repaid the kindness with bizarre accusations that Hume was the ringleader of some kind of elaborate plot against him.)32 In a letter to his friend Adam Smith, Hume wrote of Rousseau:
Thus you see, he is a Composition of Whim, Affectation, Wickedness, Vanity, and Inquietude, with a very small, if any Ingredient of Madness….The ruling Qualities abovementioned, together with Ingratitude, Ferocity, and Lying, I need not mention, Eloquence and Invention, form the whole of the Composition.33
Rousseau had such a gift for personal ingratitude and public score settling that his life was a kind of literary reality show. In fact, that was probably the point. Rousseau, not constrained by conventional notions of honesty or integrity, would simply invent scandals and conflicts to stay in the public eye, a fact Denis Diderot had warned Hume about. Meanwhile, Diderot never took Rousseau’s bait. In a letter to a friend seeking guidance about how to handle public scandal, Diderot wrote: “I am in control of my own happiness and I challenge all the ingrates, scandalmongers, slanderers, envy-ridden scoundrels of the world to try taking it away from me.”34 He was almost surely referring to Rousseau. In another letter, Diderot said of Rousseau:
I despise and I pity him. He is remorseful and shame pursues him. He is alone with himself….I am loved, esteemed, I’ll even say honored, by my fellow-citizens and by strangers….The benefits held out by the great empress extend far and wide her renown, the praise of her actions and of my own. The news come to the traitor’s ears: he bites his tongue with rage. His days are filled with sadness; his nights are restless. I sleep peacefully, while he grieves, perhaps he cries, tortures himself and wastes away.35
In the debates about Rousseau, it is somewhat standard to reply that this amounts to argumentum ad hominem, an attempt to discredit an argument by attacking the person making it. But that’s not my aim here. Rather, I think there is a deep connection between Rousseau’s immoral behavior and his philosophy. I am not saying that his philosophy is simply a rationalization of his morality (though there is much of that in his Confessions). Rather, I think Rousseau’s feelings of alienation from society—both fashionable and bourgeois—gave him a powerful visitor-from-Mars insight into the hypocrisies of the age.
They also opened a hole in his soul, a hunger of the spirit. He believed that a disordered society created disordered souls. This disorder required a new society that harmonized the inner life of the soul with all social arrangements. It’s as if Rousseau rejected the chastity and uprightness of his youthful Puritanism but retained many of its theological assumptions: The world as we know it is corrupt. All “middlemen” between the individual and God distract us from the truth and the divine.
Fittingly, Rousseau’s conversion story to the new faith rivals Paul’s story about finding God on the road to Damascus. At the age of thirty-seven, while walking to Vincennes to visit Diderot, in prison for criticizing the government—he couldn’t afford the fare for a carriage—Rousseau stumbled upon a flier for an essay competition sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. The topic: “Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them?”
“The moment I had read this,” he later recalled, “I seemed to behold another world and became another man.” The romantic spirit inhabited Rousseau. “I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights….I felt my head seized by a dizziness that resembled intoxication.” Rousseau claimed that he crumpled to the ground and fell into a kind of transcendent state. He awoke to find his coat drenched in tears.
“The reason for this effusion,” writes Tim Blanning, “was Rousseau’s sudden insight that the Dijon Academy’s question was not rhetorical.”36 I suspect the rectors of the academy would have disagreed. The question almost surely was intended to be rhetorical in the same way the organizers of an essay competition at Oberlin asking “Has diversity made us stronger?” would simply assume the contest was over who would most creatively—or loyally—answer “Yes.”
Rousseau’s essay, A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences—which won the contest!—is the keystone for the entire cathedral of his thought. Rousseau turned the story of civilization on its head. All progress was really decay. All refinement was just a pleasant coat of paint hiding the corruption underneath. Civilization didn’t liberate; it enslaved. “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains,” as he would famously put it in The Social Contract.37 But the idea was already there in his Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences:
So long as government and law provide for the security and well-being of men in their common life, the arts, literature and the sciences, less despotic though perhaps more powerful, fling garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh them down. They stifle in men’s breasts that sense of original liberty, for which they seem to have been born; cause them to love their own slavery, and so make of them what is called a civilised people.38
The writings of Rousseau were all, in a sense, variations on the first sentence of his novel Emile, or On Education: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man.”39 Emile, he insisted, was “nothing but a treatise on the original goodness of mankind.”40
Like Locke, Rousseau bases his entire political philosophy on a fictional origin story of mankind, grounded in his doctrine of the noble savage (even though he never used the term), which we’ve already discussed. Man is good. Man is solitary. (Rousseau makes little mention of women.) Man’s biggest mistake was leaving the world of solitary self-sufficiency (and selfishness) and forming a society, because society is corrupt and takes us away from nature and man’s natural state.
Locke had complicated views on original sin, rejecting the view that Adam’s fall carried to all mankind for all time. Like Rousseau, he believed that there was no sin in a state of nature. But that was because the state of nature was lawless in the broadest conception possible. First with the Jews and then Christians, man was blessed to receive moral laws from God, and thus defiance of those laws constituted sin. Rousseau sees it exactly the other way around. Recall what he wrote in Emile: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Locke sees man’s ability to apply reason and labor to create artificial things—i.e., wealth and property—with his own hands as the heart of human progress; Rousseau sees all artificiality as corrupting. Locke sees God’s moral instruction as a blessing; Rousseau sees it as a corrupting curse. Indeed, Rousseau held that the moment man started down this path, the process of corruption had begun. In the most famous passage from the Discourse on Equality, Rousseau writes:
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this imposter, you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”41
“All subsequent advances have been apparently so many steps towards the perfection of the individual,” Rousseau wrote, “but in reality so many steps towards the decrepitude of the species.”42 He brilliantly identifies that private property and the division of labor are among the chief drivers of civilizational and economic advance. He just hates them:
In a word, so long as [men] undertook only what a single person could accomplish, and confined themselves to such arts as did not require the joint labour of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest and happy lives, so long as their nature allowed, and as they continued to enjoy the pleasures of mutual and independent intercourse. But from the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops. Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts which produced this great revolution. The poets tell us it was gold and silver, but, for the philosophers, it was iron and corn, which first civilised men, and ruined humanity…43
I am quite hard on Rousseau here, but I must confess that I’ve grown to have a greater appreciation of his writings. His personal behavior was repugnant. His inconsistencies and conclusions are often infuriating. But his eye for the false pieties, hypocrisies, and corruptions of others was as remarkable as his skill at describing them. Long before neuroscience confirmed it, Rousseau recognized that we all crave social recognition as special, unique, or important. Rousseau calls this amour-propre—or self-love—which is often translated into English as “vanity” or “pride” or “esteem.” He contrasts it with amour de soi, which, annoyingly, also means self-love. Amour de soi, according to Rousseau, is the natural self-interestedness primitive man shared with the animals before he was corrupted by society. Amour de soi is always noble and good, because in Rousseau’s state of nature, man’s self-interest never came at the expense of another. This is, of course, nonsense. Animals, particularly predators, pursue their self-interest in ways that harm others—and primitive humans are certainly no exception.
Rousseau even recognized that amour-propre has its roots in sexual competition and status seeking in small tribes or bands. Rousseau believed that the social ills of modernity stemmed from an inflammation of amour-propre, in part because the market system enthrones wealth as the measure of social status. In other words, by Rousseau’s own often brilliant analysis, ideology is secondary to what he calls passions—and he’s right.
As the author of the first modern autobiography, Rousseau was honest about his quest to find his real self and stay true to it. He was more dishonest about his contempt for the concerns of polite society. He loved its attention. He may have believed that the desire for status and the respect of others—amore-propre—was the source of so much evil in the world, but he craved status and recognition himself. There was a Trumpian quality to Rousseau in that he seemed to believe it was better to be talked about negatively than not at all.
Near the end of his Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, Rousseau makes a prediction. Mankind will one day recognize the horrible mistake he has made and offer up a prayer to the Lord: “Almighty God! thou who holdest in Thy hand the minds of men, deliver us from the fatal arts and sciences of our forefathers; give us back ignorance, innocence and poverty, which alone can make us happy and are precious in Thy sight.”44 (You can’t get less Lockean than that!)
Rousseau is called the father of romanticism for a reason. The romantic eye sees the modern world as alien and alienating, amputating the soul and at war with nature. “The system is rigged”—as so many people say today—is, in its most intense forms, a romantic battle cry.
Indeed, radicalism in all its forms is fundamentally romantic whether it comes from the right or the left. The ambition to “tear it all down” should be seen first as a psychological response to the status quo. Different ideologies color that ambition in different ways, but the substance beneath is not ideological but instinctual. Lenin, Hitler, and all of their petty imitators begin with the assumption that the current edifice of civilization is corrupt and must be torn down. Radicalism is romanticism taken to its extreme. Get rid of it all and start over!
Another way to look at Rousseau, however, is that he was the father of the modern idea of alienation. People no doubt felt alienated prior to the Enlightenment, but, like so many other passions and ideas, such feelings were seen through the prism of religion. One solved feelings of alienation (never mind undeserved status) by getting right with God.
But the Enlightenment had dethroned God and made man the measure of man. And it was Rousseau who first argued for getting right with yourself, because you, your conscience, your inner lantern of truth, lit the path in this world. He believed there was, or had been, an authentic, real noble savage deep down inside every one of us and that civilization had corrupted it by making us care more about status, wealth, respect, fame, and other artificial concerns.
In pre-Enlightenment society, according to Rousseau, the Church was a kind of corrupt guild, using its power for its own benefit and not for the needs of the faithful or the citizens in general. He said the new princes of the Enlightenment were no better than the princes and priests they had dethroned. The same ambitious intellectuals casting themselves as freethinkers and philosophers, Rousseau wrote, “would have been for the very same reason nothing more than a fanatic” of the Church in an earlier era.45
Rousseau was prescient about the role intellectuals would play in modern societies and how ideologues—not just intellectuals, but also artists, educators, and every other profession that works with ideas and concepts—have replaced priests as the definers of meaning. For Rousseau, the so-called Age of Reason was simply a new age of oppression by another name. The Enlightenment theories of democracy and limited government as developed by Locke, Montesquieu, and the Founders were, to him, no better than what they sought to replace.
Here we can see why I think Rousseau’s personal character informs his philosophy. The Scottish writer James Boswell recounted a conversation he had with Rousseau. “Sir, I have no liking for the world,” Rousseau told him. “I live here in a world of fantasies and I cannot tolerate the world as it is….Mankind disgusts me. And my housekeeper tells me that I am in far better humors on a day when I have been alone than on those I have been in company.”46
This dual indictment of the Enlightenment and the old system of absolutism might sound a bit like anarchism or libertarianism: The system is rigged, the rulers are in it for themselves, don’t trust the Man. But Rousseau’s solution wasn’t to reject statist coercion and manipulation. It was to employ them for ostensibly purer ends.
For Rousseau, man and society alike were disordered, unnatural, broken—alienated. Individuals were out of harmony with their nature, and that meant society was too. The only way to fix people was to create a new society empowered to fill the holes in our souls. Salvation was a collective endeavor. Mankind could not go back to being a solitary noble savage; mankind must find new meaning in the group, governed by the “general will,” a kind of collective consciousness that outranked the individual conscience.
This was a brilliant intellectual updating of the tribal instinct. Every citizen in Rousseau’s ideal society would have meaning through the group and only through the group. The group itself would be the object of a new religious faith that defined one’s purpose in relation to service to the whole. Tellingly, Rousseau looked to the militarized state of Sparta for a new model of social organization in which social planners would apply the ancient Roman and Greek concept of a civil religion to a modern society. This civil religion would emotionally bind the citizen to the general will and the community.
Rousseau’s civil religion is a thoroughly totalitarian affair. If you refuse to subscribe to the dogmas of the new civil religion, you should be banished. He who publicly accepts the law of the general will and then violates it, “let him be punished with death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.”47 Rousseau explains: “Those who distinguish civil from theological intolerance are, to my mind, mistaken. The two forms are inseparable. It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned; to love them would be to hate God who punishes them: we positively must either claim or torment them.”48 To this end, public “censors” and other magistrates would mold and define public opinion and identify “unbelievers” in need of extermination. The state, in other words, had complete authority to improve men’s souls for the greater good. Thus Rousseau sought to eliminate the original division of labor that Christianity had introduced into the West through Saint Augustine. He wanted a new theocracy that closed the space between the religious and the secular. This idea amounts to what the great sociologist Robert Nisbet called, with perhaps only modest exaggeration, “the most powerful state to be found anywhere in political philosophy.”49
Nationalism served as the framework for this new imagined community. The most obvious illustration of Rousseau’s ideas at work can be found in the horrors of the Reign of Terror at the end of the French Revolution, in which the Committee of Public Safety became a real-world example of Rousseau’s boards of censors, sentencing unbelievers to death in the name of the great new French nation they were building. The Revolutionaries believed they were creating a nation from scratch in Year Zero. Rousseau’s social contract was hailed as ‘‘the beacon of legislators.’’50
Maximilien Robespierre, the chief architect of the Jacobin Reign of Terror, and thus the first modern totalitarian mass murderer, reportedly read Rousseau every day like a daily devotional.51 Robespierre used Rousseau’s ideas to justify his authority in a higher ideal. ‘‘For us, we are not of any party, we serve no faction, you know it, brothers and friends, our will is the General Will,’’ he proclaimed in a 1792 address to leaders of the various French départements.52
Even after the Thermidorian Reaction, when Robespierre was killed in a coup by a faction appalled by his excesses, the French Revolutionaries did not abandon Rousseau. They believed that Robespierre had betrayed the true spirit of Rousseau. In 1794 the revolutionary government called for Rousseau’s remains to be exhumed and brought to Paris to be reinterred at the Panthéon. A copy of the Social Contract was carried on a velvet cushion while a twelve-horse carriage pulled a statue of Rousseau.53
The stories Rousseau and Locke told, as well as the stories we tell of Rousseau and Locke, represent the two main currents in Western civilization and, increasingly, in modernity itself. It is a fight between the idea that our escape from the past has been a glorious improvement over mankind’s natural state and the idea that the world we have created is corrupting because it is artificial. One side says that external moral codes and representative government are a liberating blessing. The other says that the truth is found not outside of ourselves in the form of universal rules and tolerance for others but in our own feelings and the meaning we get from belonging to a group.
Locke and Rousseau may stand as useful markers between the left and the right, but the divide is more fundamental than that, for it runs straight through the human heart. There are people of the left who are more Lockean than they realize, and there are people of the right who are far more Rousseauian than they would care to admit. Locke represents the idea that we can conquer not just nature but human nature. Rousseau is a stand-in for the notion that such conquest is oppressive. This tension is not permanently resolvable because the Lockean world is an imposition on human nature, and human nature doesn’t change. Each of us starts our journey as an ignoble savage. Nobility must be taught—and earned. It is not inherited.
* The term “cabal” has special meaning here. Normally, the king selected a single “favorite” counselor to advise and manage his rule. The so-called Cabal ministry, instead, was made up of five privy counselors whose names (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley-Cooper, and Lauderdale) spelled out the acronym “CABAL.”