What has been described in abstract terms in the preceding chapter can be made more vivid and telling by a brief examination of the theory of sovereignty as it develops from Bodin, through Hobbes, to Rousseau.1 Each of these influential minds represents a distinct stage in the history of Western political power. Each is a kind of mirror reflecting the massive changes that took place between 1500 and 1800 in the principal spheres of authority and allegiance.
The theory of each man holds, successively, ever greater implications of destruction to the intermediate authorities of society, ever greater implications of centralized political power, and ever greater implications of cultural and social leveling of the population.
In Bodin we observe the emergence of the sovereign from the whole network of restrictions imposed by medieval custom and religious authority. But, for all of Bodin's ascribing to the sovereign unconditional and imprescriptible powers, the sovereign remains weak—weak because first the sovereign is made identical with the monarchy alone; and second because Bodin is unwilling to accept the consequences to other associations in society of his own definition of sovereignty.
In the writings of Hobbes, in the seventeenth century, the sovereign becomes much stronger. In formal terms the sovereign has the same attributes ascribed by Bodin, but the locus of sovereignty is shifted from the king to the legal State. Now the sovereign is made into a kind of atmosphere of duties and obligations shared by everyone. Each individual, apart from his natural state, exists only in the contemplation of the sovereign. All customs, traditions, and relationships not founded by the State itself become objects of suspicion. In Bodin's thought society and State were distinct logically and historically. But in Hobbes, State and society are one and the same.
With Rousseau, in the eighteenth century, comes the most formidable and revolutionary of all theories of sovereignty. It is conceived as nothing less than the exalted will of the people, omnipotent and omnipresent. All other forms of relationship are abolished, leaving only the State itself as the community of man's interests and aspirations. Only in the State can the individual find tranquillity and relief from discord and unhappiness. Sovereignty, for Rousseau, is not a mere legal thing; it is the sum total of all virtues and even freedoms.
Two
Of Bodin2 it has been well said that he had ceased to be medieval without becoming modern. But so had France itself. The age of Bodin was the age of the military triumph of the monarchy over the competing powers of the nobility and the Church. But the triumph was a bare one, and it was set in a scene that was, socially at least, not too different from the France of two centuries earlier. Despite the military might of the monarchy that had grown out of the Hundred Years’ War, such associations as the guilds, monasteries, the feudal classes, the communes, and the Church continued to exert vast influence in human lives. Numerous systems of law existed at all levels; traditions and customs hemmed in monarchical power at every turn, and the diversity of culture in France was matched by the diversity of allegiance and authority.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, chiefly in Paris, there arose a group of men who called themselves the Politiques— men who were dedicated to action in behalf of the central power of the monarch at the expense of all other social and moral authorities in France. In their opinion, the disorder of France could be checked only by the clear supremacy of a morally and religiously neutral power, vested in the king himself, extending over every other associative relationship in France. Already there were clear indications that the royal power, through its control of the newer modes of warfare and its growing, if still slight, appeal to the people, was the only power in France capable of checking the divisive tendencies in the population. Among other needs, however, was that of a systematic theory to give it rationality and universal acceptance. This Bodin attempted to supply.
His work is indeed a curious amalgamation of ideas which would have been perfectly suited to the intellectual atmosphere of the thirteenth century and of ideas which logically belong to the century following his own. As a moral philosopher he tended to remain rooted to the soil of medieval pluralism and autonomy of groups. As a practical politician his impulses place him with Hobbes in the next century or with some even more devoted Erastian. The latter impulses dominate his work, but the confusions and contradictions which so many of his commentators have written about make plain the underlying conflict in his own thought. He could not easily relinquish his belief in the ethical priority of all those relationships founded upon kinship and religion and occupation.
Yet as one of the Politiques Bodin was deeply aware of problems that could be solved only by a strong political limitation of the rights and powers claimed by the various corporations and groups in France. The conflicting jurisdictions of various spheres of law, the excessive duplication, the divisive influences of customs and allegiances that were either local or stemmed from authorities outside France, the bitter religious conflicts of power, the economic disunities—all of these, he felt, could be checked or terminated by raising the power of the king above all other powers in the realm.
“Majesty or sovereignty,” he declares, “is the most high, absolute and perpetual power over the subjects and citizens in a Commonweale.” This absolute and perpetual power belongs to the monarch. His power is inalienable and imprescriptible. It cannot be limited by custom within the realm or by edict from without. The king is not below the law, as medieval lawyers like Bracton had declared, but always above the law. The law of the land is simply the command of the sovereign.
Despite some bitter remarks in Bodin concerning the Roman law and the lawyers of his own day who were proclaiming its superiorities, it is plain that behind Bodin's own conception of the sovereign lies the model afforded by the Corpus Juris. The Roman emphasis upon legal centralization, upon the superiority of the ruler to all other forms of authority, including custom, and the general political perspective of Roman law could not but have had strong appeal to one of the Politiques.
The basic attribute of sovereignty is the power to give laws to citizens collectively and severally without the consent of a superior, an equal, or an inferior. For the France of the sixteenth century this attribute could be translated into reality only by declaring all powers, that of the Church included, all customs, however ancient and sacred, and all persons, however exalted in economic, social, or religious eminence, subject to the will of the king.
More specifically, it meant a challenge to those associations and corporations which lay intermediate to the individual and the king. Here too the influence of Roman law is manifest. “Every corporation or college,” Bodin declares, “is a lawful community or consociation under sovereign power.” That sovereign control of all intermediate associations is to be exacting and detailed is attested by the following injunction. “Where the word lawful importeth the authority of the sovereign, without whose permission there can be no college: and is referred not only unto the power of meeting together: but unto the place also where it ought to meet, unto the time and manner of meeting, and to what things ought to be entreated of, in their assembly.”
This is the aspect that is, above all others, the most revealing of Bodin's problems and his perspectives: the sovereign's relation to corporate bodies. The history of the preceding two centuries in France had been characterized by growing assertion of monarchical rights of chartering, approving, and regulating the activities of associations. But even in the late sixteenth century the powers possessed by these bodies were formidable. And it was one of Bodin's prime objectives to limit their collective rights and subordinate them one and all to the power of the king.
It follows that no association within the commonwealth can be allowed to enjoy an independent existence in the sphere of public law. Merchant law, canon law, guild law, all of these reflections of corporate association are subordinate to the law of the king. Whatever compulsion any association can exert over its members has its origin in the authorization of the sovereign. Associations do not even possess the right to own property. Nor can they be said to possess the right of collective legal responsibility. With Innocent IV, Bodin declares these associations persona ficta.
What we see, then, in the pages of Bodin's great political treatise, is the unfolding of a view of society that possesses distinctly modern implications. The political, rather than the religious or the economic power, is made foremost. Legal pluralism is replaced by legal monism. Only that authority is legally binding which stems from, or is countenanced by, the king. Gone is the doctrine of the two swords, gone also the conviction that only through religious mediation can the power of the State be made morally right. For Bodin the State has its own justification directly from God. Like the Protestants whom Bodin detested in most respects, he makes the State ethically autonomous. In all these respects Bodin belongs logically with the moderns.
But there is another side to Bodin's theory that places him much more securely among social philosophers of earlier centuries. And this is, first of all, his sharp distinction between State and society, and, second, his devotion to the moral and social qualities of all intermediate associations ranging from family to corporation. Only in the philosophy of Althusius in the century following Bodin do we find an appreciation of intermediate association that matches Bodin's. And Althusius was scarcely recognized. For, as we shall see, the whole tendency of social thought down to the time of Burke in the late eighteenth century was to deprecate, even dissolve, all forms of association that could not be rationalized by natural law or by the will of the State.
But in Bodin's thought there is a keen and frequently brilliant insight into the sociological aspects of human association—status, membership, custom, and moral control. His impatience with legal diversity and his profound devotion to the king did not cause him to lose sight either of the moral or the historical properties of the society in which he lived. We see this in his meticulous distinction between legal and social authority.
The family, the civil associations, the corporations and fraternities are all, in his mind, logically and historically antecedent to the state. It is impossible to read the long discussion which Bodin offers on social groups without realizing the value he ascribes to them as agencies of solidarity and control. The associations, for purposes of trade, religious worship, security and fellowship, were the bonds of human society before any political ties were established, and they have continued to perform functions indispensable to social life. It is this distinction between social and political relationships that marks Bodin as a transitional figure.
Unlike the State, which rests upon force, the social groups in society rest upon the reciprocal principle of friendship (amicitia). The principle of mutual responsibility is the very structure of these associations. Man is a social being by nature and these associations are but manifestations of his instinct for sociability. “Whereby it is plainly to be seen, the societies of men among themselves, to have been at first sought out for the leading of their lives in more safety and quiet: and them first of all to have sprung from the love which was betwixt man and wife: from them to have flowed the mutual love betwixt parents and their children: then the love of brothers and sisters one towards another: and after them the friendship between cousins and other kinsmen: and last of all the love and good will which is betwixt men joined in alliance: which had all at length grown cold, and been utterly extinguished, had it not been nourished, maintained, and kept by societies, communities, corporations and colleges: the union of whom hath for long time in safety maintained many people, without any form of a commonwealth, or sovereign power over them.”
It is folly to wonder whether the commonwealth could exist without these groups. “To demand whether communities and colleges be necessary in a commonweale is as much as to demand, whether that a commonweale can be maintained and upholden without love and amity, without which the world itself cannot long stand.” He is scornful of those who argue “that all corporations and colleges are out of a commonweale to be excluded and banished; not considering that a family and the very commonweale itself are nothing else but communities.”
It is true that some corporations involve a risk of disorder; but to advocate the elimination of all corporations on that account is sophistical in logic and dangerous in practice. The suppression of all corporations would be a distinct act of tyranny, not to be countenanced by wise rulers. “Whereby it appeareth, tyrants always to have hated the corporations and communities of the people, and by all means endeavoured to have them utterly extinguished.” The best-constituted, the most prosperous of kingdoms are those in which there is a flourishing diversity of associations and groups. From these the State draws powers of order that give reinforcement to its own legal nature, and from them the citizens derive protection that would be wanting in the absence of the collegia and corpora. Particularly does Bodin praise the guilds. In their collective operations lie both economic stability and prosperity.
But of all forms of associative life it is the family that Bodin most venerates. It is his devotion to the economic and legal solidarity of this group that forms the high point of the medievalism which persists in his thinking, and, as more than one student has observed, this same devotion destroys the very foundations of the political sovereignty that he has been so careful to build up and make supreme.
Bodin will not tolerate the thought that the political sovereign should be supreme over the individual members of the family and over its customs and property. Sovereignty he has defined as absolute, imprescriptible, and perpetual. But when he comes to deal with the family these qualities of sovereignty become sharply restricted. The public law must not cross the threshold. The children, the wife, the dependents and servants, together with all property, are solely in the custodianship of the father. He grants the law of the commonwealth no rights of preemption, eminent domain, or discipline over the possessions and persons of the family. The family, rather than the individual, is the real unit of Bodin's State, as it is the unit from which, historically, all society stems. Even the father's right of life and death over members of the family must be restored or upheld. “It is needful in a well-ordered commonweale to restore unto parents the power of life and death over the children, which by the law of God and Nature is given them.” Similarly, in all matters of education, training, religious worship, and political participation, the will of the father shall be supreme, shall not be abridged by even the most absolute of sovereignties.
It is chiefly the family ownership of property that Bodin defends, for, only in its economic solidarity can the social and moral virtues of the family remain intact. If the State were given the power to alienate property, through interference with customs of inheritance, there would then be no limit to the State's capacity for the enslavement of man. The moral structure of the family would dissolve. The State itself would become weak.
Thus despite his clear sense of the need for political unity in the State, despite his insistence upon the legal supremacy of the king over every custom, corporation, and association, the actual conception of society which unfolds before our eyes is not very different from what existed in the minds of medieval philosophers. The society Bodin offers us is not one of abstract, legally discrete individuals, each individual attached directly to the sovereign. It is a society, instead, composed of families, each of which exists under the imprescriptible authority of the father, each of which is held to be immune to the authority of the sovereign in all matters. It is a society articulated in numerous and varied associations, colleges, and sodalities. It is a society founded, for all of Bodin's leanings to Roman law, upon the primacy of custom and kinship and association.
To observe the logical confusions in Bodin's theory of sovereignty is not, however, the point of the present discussion. What is of greater interest is simply the presence of the two strands of thought, unreconciled, conflicting, but reflecting clearly the issues foremost in the history of modern sovereignty.
Three
In the political writings of Thomas Hobbes3 most of these conflicts of sentiment and confusions of logic are absent. Few writers have had more influence upon the development of the modern centralized State than Hobbes. The modern State, someone has observed, is an inverted pyramid, its apex resting upon the 1651 folio edition of Hobbes's Leviathan. Even those contemporaries and later writers who were most sharply opposed to his conclusions were yet unable to remain aloof from the political principles and perspectives that lay behind the conclusions.
The Leviathan made its appearance exactly seventy-five years after the publication of Bodin's great work. It is considerably beyond that span of time in clarity of idea and rigor of logic. Like Bodin, Hobbes takes his theoretical departure from the problem of order and from the assumption that the political State is necessarily the determining environment of human conduct. But beyond this point of departure the two political theorists have little in common. In Hobbes's conception of the State and its law, in his treatment of the foundations of social order, and in his theory of internal associations there are few if any remaining evidences of the medieval image of society that Bodin had been unable to shake free of.
Gone, in Hobbes, is the troubled affection for associations based upon locality, interest, and faith. Gone also is the profound veneration for kinship, for the inviolable household, for the imprescriptible authority of the house-father. Neither the family, the church, nor any other system of authority is allowed by Hobbes to intervene in any significant way between the individual and the absolute power of the State. Where Bodin, like all the medieval lawyers and theorists before him, had rested his political edifice upon the foundations of social custom and historical use and wont, Hobbes relentlessly eradicated every element of social purpose and loyalty that did not proceed directly and logically from the presumed nature of the individual or from the explicit command of the sovereign. For Hobbes there are but two essential elements of civil society: the individual and the sovereign. All else is expunged in the interests of practical order and theoretical simplicity.
Hobbes's philosophy of government has to be seen not merely in terms of the political and constitutional struggles that dominated the England of his time but also in the brilliant light of seventeenth-century doctrines of natural law. No longer were philosophers content to rest their principles of man and society upon either the revealed wisdom of the church or upon historical precedent. Everything had to be derived from the pure resources of reason, from the rigorous development, in theoretical terms, of potentialities that reason taught lay everywhere in the nature of man. No relationship among men, no right, no authority could be admitted into political systems that did not proceed clearly from what was held to be the fundamental law of nature.
In the social thought of the seventeenth century all relationships were suspect. Man was the solid fact; all else was ephemeral. As the physical scientists of the day dealt with physical atoms in space and relegated to secondary or subjective status all of those qualities and essences medieval philosophers had accepted as fundamental, so the social philosophers sought to build theoretical systems upon human atoms alone. Relationships of tradition and inherited morality were either expelled from theory or were rationalized into relationships proceeding ineluctably from man's presocial nature.
Given originally a prepolitical state of nature, a social vacuum, as it were, in which the individual was isolated and free, the problem chosen by almost every natural-law theorist was: how did man emerge from this socially empty state of nature and by what means? The answer invariably lay in appeal to some form of contract. Contract, conceived as free agreement among self-interested individuals, became the seventeenth-century rationalist's prime response to problems of social cohesion that had commonly been answered in terms of Christian morality or historically derived status by medieval philosophers.
Ernest Barker has perceptively suggested that the seventeenth-century philosophy of natural law was in certain significant respects a kind of subtle rationalization of the principles of Roman law. It adhered to the same conception of the primacy of the individual and individual will in legal matters. It made relationships of contract fundamental in the constitution of society. And, as in the Roman codes, natural-law philosophy in the seventeenth century gave the political State the position of absolute supremacy over all other forms of human association. Roman lawyers ascribed an essentially derivative role to social groups in the State, and natural-law philosophers similarly ascribed a derivative role to all forms of association lying intermediate to the individual and the sovereign. All the symmetry of design and centralization of function and authority to be seen in Roman law are clearly apparent in seventeenth-century natural law.
All of this is fundamental in Hobbes's approach to a scientific explanation of society. The method of geometry never ceased to fascinate his mind, and his conceptual arrangement of individuals, both in the state of nature and in civil society, looks like nothing so much as it does the geometer's arrangement of lines and angles in a geometrical demonstration. For Hobbes, the abstract individual, contract, and the power of the State are fundamental. All else is to be derived rigorously from these assumptions or else discarded.
The intellectual advance of Hobbes beyond Bodin, in the construction of a theory of the absolute State, is apparent in the enormous increase in functional significance that Hobbes gives to the relationship of the State to man. For Bodin, the State did not create order; it merely reinforced the stability that already lay in the nonpolitical associations of men. But Hobbes denies that any form of social order ever existed or can exist apart from the sovereign structure of the State. Before the advent of the State there was only the condition of nature. “In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain…no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
It was the emergence of the political State, through the instrumentality of contract among all of these miserable creatures, that first brought upon the earth any form of society whatsoever. And it is the theoretical reinforcement of this redemptive State that engages all of Hobbes's efforts through out his Leviathan. He does not shrink from making the State's power absolute over man because, first, the contract made it absolute, and, second, apart from its absoluteness, there could be no protective society, and man would sink once again into the dismal condition of fear and brutishness that had characterized his beginnings.
Here, then, in his identification of the State with all association and culture, lies the foundation of the political edifice which Hobbes builds. Unlike Bodin, he does not recognize any prepolitical order of society based upon kinship, religion, and other associations within which the sociability of man is nourished. For Hobbes there is no middle ground between man as a helpless, isolated creature of fear and man as the citizen of the absolute State. And, unlike Bodin, Hobbes manifests little sympathy for the customs, traditions, and moralities that exist outside the framework of sovereign law. Law, writes Hobbes, is “to every Subject, those Rules which the Commonwealth hath Commanded him, by Word, Writing, or other sufficient Sign of the Will, to make use of, for the Distinction of Right and Wrong.” For the rigorous mind of Hobbes law was not in any way dependent upon the social institutions of a people. Law was the command of the sovereign, nothing else. Among the diseases of the State, he declares, one of the greatest is the belief “that every private man is judge of Good and Evill actions.” This was true in the fearful state of nature, “but otherwise it is manifest, that the measure of Good and Evill actions, is the Civill Law.”
Nor was there any question in Hobbes's mind about the need to centralize all authority in the State. Division and multiplicity of authority can have no place in a stable order. “For what is it to divide the Power of the Common-wealth, but to Dissolve it; for Powers divided mutually destroy each other.” He treats with contempt those writers who hold that since “there be three Soules in man; so there also…may be more Soules (that is, more Sovereigns) than one, in a Common-wealth.” Authority in a society is unitary and indivisible, or else it is nothing. And, finally, Hobbes gives the death blow to that most cherished of all medieval legal doctrines, the doctrine that the political ruler is below the law. It is, he declares, “repugnant to the nature of the Common-wealth…that he that hath the Sovereign Power, is subject to the Civill Lawes.” Bodin had stated the same principle, but his own essentially medieval conception of a nonpolitical society had made it impossible for him to develop the principle fully. No such limitations are to be found in the Leviathan.
With the monolith of power that Hobbes creates in the State, there is little room left for associations and groups. Hobbes does not see in these the multifold sources of sociability and order that Bodin had found in them. They are breeding areas of dissension, of conflict with the requirements of the unitary State, not reinforcements of order and justice. He compares associations within the State “which are as it were many lesser Common-wealths in the bowels of a greater” to “wormes in the entrayles of a naturall man.” Economic monopolies of any kind, he detests. In the body of the commonwealth these associations “breedeth there an Inflammation, accompanied with a Fever, and painfull stitches.”
He is suspicious of the universities, for these teaching bodies, he declared, have ever tended toward the support of ideas and actions that are not in the best interests of the State's unity. All teaching establishments should give their first devotion to, and be instruments of, the commonwealth. Large associations founded upon mutual aid and protection, especially those in the upper classes, similarly arouse his distrust. “Leagues of subjects (because Leagues are commonly made for mutual defence), are in a Common-wealth (which is no more than a League of all the Subjects together) for the most part unnecessary, and savour of unlawfull designe.” Guilds, even those of beggars, not to mention the more powerful ones, are regarded by Hobbes as potential infringements upon the autonomy of the individual as well as upon the majesty of the sovereign. All such associations seek to represent their members in matters of protection and security. But in the State, correctly formed, the sovereign himself is the absolute and sufficient representative of his subjects. Therefore “no other can be representative of any part of them, but so forth as he shall give leave.” And this leave is to be given sparingly, grudgingly.
The meager treatment of the family that Hobbes gives us is in marked contrast to the extensive discussion that Bodin had offered. For Bodin, one of the chief reasons for family solidarity was the protection of the right of property. But Hobbes specifically declares that all property derives in law from the permission of the sovereign. And the kind of parental authority that Bodin had claimed, together with legal inviolability of the household, is, for Hobbes, unthinkable. The parent, Hobbes declares, “obligeth his Children and Servants as farre as the Law permitteth, though not further, because none of them are bound to obedience in those actions, which the Law hath forbidden to be done.” But Hobbes is not content to place the family's authority under the strict regulation of the State. He must also do to the family what earlier legal theorists had done to ecclesiastical and economic corporations: that is, individualize them through the fiction of perpetual contract. In discussing the nature of “Dominion Paternall,” he insists that it “is not so derived from the Generation, as if therefore the Parent had Dominion over his Child because he begat him; but from the Child's Consent, either expresse, or by other sufficient arguments declared.” In short, contract is, in Hobbes's rigorous terms, the cement of even the family itself. Not from custom, or from divine law itself, does the solidarity of the family proceed. It proceeds from, and can be justified by, voluntary agreement, either express or implied.
The conclusion is inescapable that for Hobbes the sole purpose of the family is that of procreation. He does not conceive it, as did Bodin, as the true source of man's moral nature, as the model of all forms of association. In Hobbes's system of thought everything proceeds from atomistic individuals, their instincts and reason, and from contractual agreements among them. There is no place for relationships of ascribed, historically given, status.
But of all associations, it is the Church that Hobbes fears the most. By reason of its tenacious hold upon men's spiritual allegiances, the Church will always be a divisive force within the commonwealth unless it is made strictly subordinate to the political power. It is unthinkable that an autonomous spiritual authority should exist. To grant corporate freedom to the Church would be to set up “Supremacy against the Soveraignty; Canons against Lawes, and a Ghostly Authority against the Civill.” An autonomous Church would mean nothing less than a divided sovereignty within the State, and this, as we have seen, is for Hobbes the most deadly of all diseases afflicting the body politic. “For seeing the Ghostly Power challengeth the Right to declare what is Sinne it challengeth by consequence to declare what is Law, (Sinne being nothing but the transgression of the Law).”
How far Hobbes measured himself as a Christian is debatable. Whether he was, as many of his contemporaries bitterly denounced him, an atheist, or whether he was a believer at heart and opposed only to the authoritarian aspects of institutional Christianity is a matter we need not consider here. What alone is of importance in this connection is to mark the heavy blows Hobbes gave to the medieval idea of an autonomous Church. The religious life of the people must always be governed by the head of the State. A Church Hobbes defined as “a company of men professing Christian Religion, united in the person of one Sovereign; at whose command they ought to assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble.” From this it follows that any supposition or claim of a universal Church is fallacious and evil. “There is on Earth, no such universall Church, as all Christians are bound to obey; because there is no power on Earth, to which all other Common-wealths are subject…. There is therefore no other Government in this life, neither of State, nor Religion, but Temporall; nor teaching of any doctrine, lawfull to any Subject, which the Governour both of the State, and of the Religion, forbiddeth to be taught: And that Governor must be one; or else there must needs follow Faction, and Civil war in the Common-wealth between the Church and State.”
Above all other religions it was Roman Catholicism that Hobbes feared and hated the most. For it was this Church, and most especially its militant Jesuits, that in Hobbes's time provided the strongest challenge to the development of national Christianity. But Hobbes can be severe toward Protestants as well. He denounces “Factions for government of religion, as papists, protestants, etc…. as being contrary to the peace and safety of the people, and a taking of the Sword out of the hand of the Sovereign.” In truth Hobbes was agreeable to the existence of any religion, irrespective of its dogma, provided it placed itself unquestioningly under the State. And, conversely, he opposed any religion, Catholic or Protestant, that did not so place itself.
Despite the severity of Hobbes's attitude toward all associations, despite the centering of all authority in the State, it yet remains true that for him the power of the State was not an end in itself. Too many students of Hobbes have read him through the pages of his enemies, rather than through his own statements. Despite the rigorousness of the theory, when compared with that of Bodin, despite the powerful animus against autonomous associations and the limitations put upon religion and all other autonomous systems of morality, it is the individual whom Hobbes has in his mind as the embodiment of virtue. Hobbes did not seek the extermination of individual rights but their fulfillment. This could be accomplished only by removing social barriers to individual autonomy. In his eyes the greatest claim of the absolute State lay in its power to create an environment for the individual's pursuit of his natural ends.
Too often the eighteenth-century emphasis on the natural order and the natural rights of individuals has been described as a reaction to the seventeenth-century political system of Hobbes. Locke is made the philosophical source of this other contemplation of nature. Actually, although Locke, by virtue of his later position with respect to Hobbes, could give more explicit emphasis to individual rights, the fact remains that it was Hobbes's own brilliant sketching of the political environment of individualism that made the later system possible. In many senses Locke is a derivative thinker. Hobbes was his master in all important respects.
However extreme the Leviathan may be, however savage its rejection of pluralism, localism, sectionalism, what Hobbes always has in mind is the creation of an impersonal environment of law within which individuals may pursue rationally their proper interests. It is not the totalitarian State that Hobbes gives us but the necessary political environment of the natural system of liberty which was to become identified later with the Enlightenment in France and England. Later theorists such as Locke could give more space to the rights themselves. But Hobbes, with the spectacle of a still potent residue of medievalism before him, had to give the greater part of his attention to the political environment itself.
Nor can Hobbes be described simply as the voice of the “middle class.” That his theory of the State was a powerful factor in bringing into existence the new entrepreneur and the new system of economic relationships is a good deal less an indication of his affection for the middle class than it is of his hatred for the economic groups that were hindrances both to the new middle class and to the attainment of a unified and impersonal political order. Hobbes could write bitterly about the representatives of the new economic order and condemn sharply their treatment of the poor. He was no more concerned with deliberately furthering their interests than he was with furthering consciously the interests of the Protestants. What gives continuity to the political theory of Hobbes and both economic rationalism and Protestant individualism is the Hobbesian environment of impersonal law in which both could flourish. We may add also the common dislike of intermediate social and moral associations.
Only the invincible economic determinist would see in the pages of the Leviathan, with their brilliant and eloquent portrayal of the impersonal, absolute, and imprescriptible State, a piece of ideology reflecting the alleged interests of the middle class. In light of Hobbes's plain distrust of the market place, and of his preference for the rural countryside, in light of his explicit condemnation of the political practices of the merchants and manufacturers of his day, of his ascribing to them the blame for the civil war, and of his general hatred for their acquisitive and exploitative proclivities, and above all in the light of the relentless political direction of his writings, it is difficult to understand interpretations that relegate his beliefs to the vague categories of economic determinism. If there is any element of reluctant praise in Hobbes for a class of men whose activities he despised, it is because he could see that this class, by reason of the very tenuousness of its internal social relationships and by the absence of any sense of noblesse oblige, could never become, as the older aristocracy had been, a threat to the unity of the political State. Hobbes's early affection was for the aristocracy, but through the iron logic of his political thought he cast this affection aside. The landed aristocracy, with its large retinues and its rooted allegiances, must constitute a perennial threat to political unity. Hence the notable shift in his thinking regarding such matters as honor. But it is nonsense to suppose that his affection for the landed aristocracy was transferred to a middle class. It went, ruthlessly and rigorously, to the State itself. It would be far more correct to say that Hobbes's appreciation of the middle class—thin and reluctant as it was—came from the logic of his politics rather than to say that his politics came from a middle-class orientation of thinking.
The State that Hobbes gives us is an aggregate of individuals, each free to pursue his proper interests through contract and intellectual agreement, each free from the artificial constraints of class, church, guild, or any other form of intermediate association. And in view of the still ascendant authorities cast over the lives of individuals by such bodies as the legal corporations, the boroughs, the monopolies in trade, not to mention the whole tissue of traditional relationships of church, family, and local community, Hobbes felt, not without some justification, that only with an absolute sovereign could any effective environment of individualism be possible.
Four
By far the most rigorous and revolutionary theory of sovereignty is that of Rousseau.4 Like Bodin and Hobbes, Rousseau takes his departure from perceptions of social disorder. Where Bodin had defined the role of the State as that of a referee among competing groups and associations, and where Hobbes had described the major purpose of the State as that of providing an impersonal environment for the release of individuals from the confinements of class and religion and for the creation of a morality based upon individual virtue, Rousseau sees the State as the most exalted of all forms of moral community. For Rousseau there is no morality, no freedom, no community outside the structure of the State. Apart from his life in the State, man's actions are wanting in even the minimal conditions of morality and freedom. The State and the people are basically one. Only the State can provide the environment of equality, freedom, and tranquillity for which man's nature calls.
Rousseau is the first of the modern philosophers to see in the State a means of resolving the conflicts, not merely among institutions, but within the individual himself. The State becomes the means of freeing man from the spiritual uncertainties and hypocrisies of traditional society. It is a spiritual refuge even as the Church was a refuge from life's uncertainties in earlier ages of Europe. We cannot understand the structure of Rousseau's ideal State, or the immense appeal his political vision has continued to exert in subsequent decades, except by recognizing the moral and social conditions that Rousseau took for his point of departure. And these he epitomized under the word uncertainty.
“What a train of vices must attend this uncertainty!” he wrote in his early Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. “Sincere friendship, real esteem, and perfect confidence are banished from among men. Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate and fraud lie constantly concealed under that uniform and deceitful veil of politeness; that boasted candour and urbanity, for which we are indebted to the light and leading of this age.” His loathing for the vices of the society around him in Paris, expressed so passionately in the first discourse, was expressed more skillfully and with no diminution of intensity in his second discourse, The Origin of Inequality. Here the hatred of cultural stratification, and of all the psychological traits that go with it, matches the earlier expression of hatred for hypocrisy and the fear of uncertainty. The kind of uncertainties that had emerged in intellectual society as the result of modern changes in economy and religion excited his opposition in exactly the same measure that similar changes had excited the opposition of Plato two thousand years earlier in Athens. Like Plato, Rousseau made the emancipation of the individual from the tyrannies and uncertainties of ordinary society the major theme of all his endeavors. And like Plato too he found in the structure of the absolute State the perfect conditions for the reconciliation of freedom and order.
Two entities dominate Rousseau's thought: the individual and the State. In his mind they are simultaneously sovereign and, together, the only basis of a just human order. The result is the confluence of a radical individualism on the one hand and an uncompromising authoritarianism on the other. The parallel existence of these strands of thought in Rousseau's works has been the basis of numerous charges of inconsistency, charges which are, however, not true. The ideas of Rousseau, contradictory though they may appear to be at first sight, compose one of the most logically articulate systems of thought in the history of political theory. The authoritarian strain so plain in the Political Economy is the perfect complement of the individualism so manifest in his discourse on The Origin of Inequality. Both strains come together in the Social Contract and make of that work a manifesto which served with equal adequacy the libertarian principles of ‘89 and the authoritarian principles of ‘93. The harmony of the two strains of thought becomes apparent when we realize what each is directed against.
The individualism of Rousseau's thought is not the individualism of a William Godwin; it is not the libertarian assertion of absolute rights against the State. Rousseau's passionate defense of the individual arises out of his opposition to the forms and observances of society. “What excites Rousseau's hatred,” Professor Vaughan has commented, “is not the state, but society of any sort, quite apart from the civic ties by which in fact it is held together. His ideal alike in the discourses and in Émile, is no doubt individual freedom: freedom, however, not in the sense of immunity from control of the state but in that of withdrawal from the oppressions and corruptions of society.” It is this ideal which animates the educational philosophy of Émile— the belief in the goodness and perfectibility of the individual when he is protected from the corruption of society. It is, perhaps above all others, the basic theme of the Confessions. The splendidness of isolation from society is a leitmotif which recurs again and again in the passages of that work. The ideal lies implicit in The Origin of Inequality where each stage of advancement that removes the individual from the isolation which was his existence in the condition of nature is marked as a point on the way to degeneration. It is not the political state which inspires Rousseau's hostility but the harshness, inequalities, and dissensions of civil society. In a letter to Mirabeau, he writes: “It is of the essence of society to breed a ceaseless war among its members; and the only way to combat this is to find a form of government which shall set the law above them all.”
The traditional bonds of society, the relationships we generally speak of as social, are the ties that to Rousseau symbolize the chains of existence. It is from these he desires to emancipate the individual; their gross inequalities he desires to replace with a condition of equality approximating as nearly as possible the state of nature. “Each citizen would then be completely independent of all his fellow men, and absolutely dependent upon the state: which operation is always brought by the same means; for it is only by the force of the state that the liberty of its members can be secured.” There is no other single statement in all Rousseau's writings that better serves as the theme of his political philosophy than this. In it is incorporated the essential argument of the discourses and the Social Contract. His ideal is independence for the individual, but independence, it will be observed, not from the State but from fellow members of society.
The function of the State is made apparent by the same statement. Its mission is to effectuate the independence of the individual from society by securing the individual's dependence upon itself. The State is the means by which the individual can be freed of the restrictive tyrannies that compose society. It is the agency of emancipation that permits the individual to develop the latent germs of goodness heretofore frustrated by a hostile society. By entering into the pure state, Rousseau declares, “Man's actions receive a moral character which was wanting to them before,” and “from a stupid and limited animal he now for the first time becomes a reasoning being and a man.” The State is thus of the essence of man's potential being, and far from being a check upon his development, it is the sole means of that development. Through the power of the State, man is spared the strife and tyranny that arise out of his selfish and destructive passions. But in order to emerge from the dissensions of society, and to abide in the spiritual peace of the state, there must be “an absolute surrender of the individual, with all of his rights and all of his powers, to the community as a whole.”
Rousseau's emphasis upon the community has been too often interpreted in a sense foreign to his own aim. Commentators have occasionally written of his “community” as the revival of a concept that had disappeared with the Middle Ages. The mystic solidarity that Rousseau preaches is not, however, the solidarity of the community existing by custom and unwritten law. The social community, as it existed in the thought of Thomas Aquinas or, later, in the theory of Althusius, is a community of communities, an assemblage of morally integrated minor groups. The solidarity of this community arises out of the moral and social observances of the minor groups. Its unity does not result from being permeated with sovereign law, extending from the top through all individual components of the structure. Rousseau's community, however, is a political community, one indistinguishable from the State and sharing all the uniformitarian qualities of the State. It is, in his mind, a moral unity, but it is a unity conferred by the sovereign will of the State and directed by the political government. Thus the familiar organic analogy is used to indicate the unitary structure of his political community. The same centralization of control existing in the human body must dominate the structure of the community; unity is conferred by the brain, which in Rousseau's analogy represents the sovereign power. The General Will is the analogue of the human mind, and as such must remain as unified and undiversified as the mind itself. The volunté généralez, as he is careful to indicate, is not synonymous with the volunté de tous, the will of all. It is the will of the political organism, an entity with a life of its own quite apart from that of the individual members of which it is built.
In its suprahuman reality it is always right, and while the volunté de tous may be often misled, the General Will never deviates from the strictest rectitude. The General Will is indivisible, inalienable, and illimitable. It demands the unqualified obedience of every individual in the community and implies the obligation of each citizen to render to the State all that the State sees fit to demand. This preeminence of the State in the life of the individual is not, however, despotism; it is the necessary basis of true individual freedom. “In order that the social contract shall be no empty formula it tacitly implies that obligation which alone can give force to all the others: namely that anyone who refuses obedience to the General Will is forced to it by the whole body. This merely means that he is being compelled to be free.” In this last phrase is revealed, clearly, the relation between individualism and authoritarianism in the thought of Rousseau. The same rationale of values that leads him to restrict morality to life within the State compels him similarly to regard the State as the sphere of freedom. The individual lives a free life only within his complete surrender to the omnipotent State. The State is the liberator of the individual from the toils of society.
The totalitarian implications of Rousseau's thought do not arise merely out of the severity of his theory of sovereignty. The most common form of criticism—that the theory sets up an illimitable power—is applicable to all monistic theories of sovereignty. In any social theory where the sovereign State exists as a concept there is implicit at least the idea of potentially unrestricted power. What gives uniqueness to Rousseau's doctrine is not so much its severity as its subtle but explicit identification with freedom. What has connoted bondage to the minds of most men is exalted as freedom by Rousseau. To regard the power structure of the State as a device by which the individual is only being compelled to be free is a process of reasoning that sets Rousseau apart from the tradition of liberalism. The phraseology of liberalism in this case merely intensifies the authoritarianism which underlies it. What Rousseau calls freedom is at bottom no more than the freedom to do what the State in its omniscience determines. Freedom for Rousseau is the synchronization of all social existence to the will of the State, the replacement of cultural diversity by a mechanical equalitarianism. Other writers have idealized such an order in the interests perhaps of justice or of stability, but Rousseau is the first to invest it with the value of freedom. Therein lies the real distinctiveness of his theory of sovereignty.
It is in the bearing of Rousseau's General Will upon traditional society, however, that the full sweep of its totalitarian significance becomes manifest. It has been made clear that the object of Rousseau's dislike is society, and the special merit of the State lies in its power to emancipate the individual from traditional society. The relationship among individuals that forms the General Will and is the true State is obviously an exceedingly delicate one. It must be unitary and indivisible for its nature fully to unfold. In short, it must be protected from the operations of extraneous channels of constraint. “For the same reasons that sovereignty is inalienable, it is indivisible,” he writes; “the Will is general or else it is nothing.” To achieve a pure sovereignty, one which will be untrammeled by social influences, one which will encompass the whole of man's personality, it is necessary that the traditional social loyalties be abrogated. A unified General Will is incompatible with the existence of minor associations; hence they must be banished. “When the people, having been adequately informed, hold its deliberation, and the citizens have had no communication among themselves, the whole number of individual opinions will always result in the General Will, and the decision will always be just. But when factions arise, and partial associations are created at the expense of the great association, the will of each of these associations becomes general so far as its members are concerned, and particular in its relation to the state: it may then be said that it is no longer a number of votes equal to the number of men, but equal only to the number of associations…. It is therefore essential, if the General Will is to be able to express itself, that there should be no partial society within the state, and that each citizen should think only his own thoughts.”
The proscription of all forms of association except what is identical with the whole being of the State—this is Rousseau's drastic proposal. It is not to be regarded as one of these hasty, ill-considered remarks for which Rousseau is famous. Nor is it true that his banishment of associations is out of harmony with the rest of his thought. We have seen that Rousseau's animus is against society, against the ties that make individuals dependent on one another. We have seen, further, that his conception of sovereignty demands the attributes of unity and indivisibility; the General Will is general or else it is nothing. Is it not then logical that the right of nonpolitical association should be sharply restricted? In his earlier Political Economy, Rousseau, in almost the same words, had presented this analysis of the effect of associations on the State. There is to be no bond of loyalty, no social affiliation, no interdependence save what is symbolized by the General Will. Society is to be an aggregate of atoms held rigidly together by the sovereign will of the State alone.
The practical implication of this doctrine is made strikingly evident by Rousseau's consideration of religion. A socially independent Church, like any form of nonpolitical loyalty, would constitute an interference with the functioning of the General Will. It would represent a flaw in the spiritual unity Rousseau prized so highly in his political order. Yet it would not do to repress the religious propensities of man, for “as soon as men come to live in civil society they must have a religion to keep them there. No nation has ever endured or ever will endure without religion.” But, argues Rousseau, it is not enough that a nation should have a religion. The religion must be identified, in the minds of the people, with the values of national life, else it will create disunity and violate the General Will. It is not enough that a religion should make good men; it must make good citizens. Religion has a responsibility toward civic or political ends before any others. It must reflect, above all, the essential unity of the State and find its justification in the measures it takes to promote that unity.
In light of these criteria, the possibility of Christianity's being the religion of the true State must be rejected. “For Christianity, as a religion, is entirely spiritual, occupied solely with heavenly things; the country of the Christians is not of this world.” There are even greater objections to Christianity. “Christian charity does not readily allow a man to think hardly of his neighbors…. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favourable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know this and do not much mind: this short life counts for too little in their eyes.” It cannot be overlooked that it is the essential humanity in the Christian faith that Rousseau despises. Its very virtues, he tells us, are its vices, for a society of Christians with all its perfections would be neither the strongest nor the most lasting. The very fact that it was perfect would rob it of its bond of union. The disregard of the Christian mind for secular law, for the values of the nation, would be the undoing of that unity indispensable to the true State. The spirit of subserviency which Christianity embodies would prevent any real flowering of the martial spirit. “Set over against Christians those generous peoples who were devoured by ardent love of glory and of their country; imagine your Christian republic face to face with Sparta or Rome; the pious Christians will be beaten, crushed, and destroyed before they know where they are.” The ancient Romans were possessed of military valor until Christianity was accepted, “but when the Cross had driven out the eagle, Roman valour wholly disappeared.” Christianity, then, because of its pacifism, its depreciation of the State, and because of its concentration upon men rather than citizens, must be replaced by another religion, one which will perfectly embody the measure of nationalist ardor necessary to the State.
There must be instituted a purely civil religion, for which the sovereign should fix the articles of faith. “While it can compel no one to believe them, it can banish from the state whoever does not believe them…. [I]f anyone after publicly recognizing these dogmas behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished by death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law.” Other faiths will be permitted to exist alongside of the civil religion providing there is nothing in their articles deemed by the sovereign to be inimical to the development of citizenship. “Tolerance should be given to all religions that tolerate others, so long as their dogmas contain nothing contrary to the duties of citizenship.” It will be remembered, however, that the criteria of good citizenship are far reaching. Rousseau's prior criticism of Christianity on the ground of its intrinsic irreconcilability with good citizenship should serve as the grain of salt with which to take the protestations of tolerance. The articles of faith of the civil religion as fixed by the sovereign have as their fundamental objective the cementing of the social contract. We have already seen that the most basic values of Christianity at least are not regarded as compatible with the State. We may therefore perhaps speculate on the extent to which tolerance as a practical policy would be deemed commensurate with civil religion.
It is political religion Rousseau extols, one which in essence is indistinguishable from the law of the land. Like his forerunner Hobbes, Rousseau holds sin to be no more than a transgression of civil law, and in that fact lies the inspiriting aim of la religion civile. Respect for the sovereign, allegiance to the State alone, and subordination of all interests to the law of the realm—these are the primary attributes of the civil religion proposed by Rousseau. The symbol of patrie is uppermost; religion and patriotism will be but two aspects of the same thing.
Hardly less than religion the family itself, as a corporate entity, must be radically adjusted to meet the demands of the General Will. Morality is essentially a civic condition, and without citizens there can be no virtue. “Create citizens, and you have everything you need.” To form these citizens is not the work of a day, nor is it a responsibility that can be left idly to the influences of traditional society. The unitary state calls for a remodeling of human nature so that there shall be no irritants to the body politic. “He who possesses the courage to give a people institutions, must be ready to change human nature, to transform every individual, who by himself is a complete and separate whole, into a part of a greater whole from which this individual in a certain sense receives his life and character; to change the constitution of man in order to strengthen it, and to substitute for the corporeal and independent existence which we all have received from nature a merely partial and moral existence. In short, he must take from man his native individual powers and equip him with others foreign to his nature, which he cannot understand or use without the assistance of others. The more completely these natural powers are annihilated and destroyed and the greater and more enduring are the ones acquired, the more secure and the more perfect is also the constitution.”
It is necessary to inculcate in the minds of the people from infancy the surpassing claim of the State to their loyalty. “If, for example,” Rousseau writes, “the people were early accustomed to conceive their individuality only in its connection with the body of the state, and to be aware of their own existence merely as parts of that of the state, they might in time come to identify themselves in some degree with the greater whole.” The family should not be granted the all-important duty of education, for too great a responsibility hangs in the balance. The traditional educative function should be transferred from the family to the State, so that, as Rousseau states it, the “prejudices” of the father may not interfere with the development of citizens. However, the disintegration of this age-old basis of the family should in no wise create alarm. “Should the public authority, in assuming the place of father and charging itself with this important function, acquire his rights in the discharge of his duties, he should have little cause to protest; for he would only be altering his title, and would have in common, under the name citizen, the same authority over his children, that he was exercising separately under the name of father, and would be no less obeyed when speaking in the name of the law than when he spoke in that nature. “In this almost incredible statement is to be observed what is surely the ultimate in the totalitarian absorption of society. Family relationship is transmuted subtly into political relationship; the molecule of the family is broken into the atoms of its individuals, who are coalesced afresh into the single unity of the state. “If the children are reared in common in the bosom of equality, if they are imbued with the laws of the state and the precepts of the General Will, if they are taught to respect these above all other things, if they are surrounded by examples and objects which perpetually remind them of the tender mother who nourishes them, of the love she bears them, of the inestimable benefits they receive from her, and of the return they owe her, we cannot doubt that they will learn to cherish one another mutually as brothers.”
It would be difficult to find anywhere in the history of politics a more powerful and potentially revolutionary doctrine than Rousseau's theory of the General Will. Power is freedom and freedom is power. True freedom consists in the willing subordination of the individual to the whole of the State. If this is not forthcoming, compulsion is necessary; but this merely means that the individual “will be forced to be free.” There is no necessity, once the right State is created, for carving out autonomous spheres of right and liberty for individuals and associations. Because the individual is himself a member of the larger association, despotism is impossible. By accepting the power of the State one is but participating in the General Will.
Not without reason has the theory of the General Will been called a theory of permanent revolution. It was Rousseau's subtle achievement to clothe the being of the absolute State in the garments of the terminology of freedom. By his paeans to the individual he has been known as the apostle of liberty. By his insistence upon popular sovereignty he has become classified as one of the minds who have helped free the civilized world from despotism. The state is, in Rousseau's mind, the only sphere of liberation from the tyrannies of society. Here the individual may achieve a higher morality and freedom. The individual renounces the social loyalties of traditional society, surrenders to the state the rights of association which are the fundament of religion, family, and community, and by so doing becomes free for the first time. Herein lies the lure of Rousseau's philosophy for absolutists and here too is the essence of the confusion of freedom and authority that underlies contemporary totalitarian philosophies.