Introduction to Political Thought

Rousseau (Part 3)

Democracy and Participation: Rousseau,

Social Contract, I-II

Social Contract and the General Will

1. General will is the answer to the problems of civilization or the political

problem of the Second Discourse the problems of inequality, the problem
of amour-propre, the problem of our general discontent.
2. Social contract is his answer to the problem of natural freedom. This is
so, in a way, because for Rousseau nature provides no standards or
guidelines for determining who should rule.
3. Unlike Aristotle, man is not here a political animal.
4. When Rousseau speaks of the social contract in the general will as the
foundation of all legitimate authority, he means, literally, that all
standards of justice and right have their origins in the unique human
property of the will or free agency.
5. It is this liberation of the will from all transcendent sources or
standards, whether those be found in nature, in custom, in revelation, in
any other source.
6. The liberation of the will from all of these sources that is the centre of
gravity of Rousseau’s philosophy.
7. It is a world that begins to emphasize the primacy and the priority of the
will.
8. The problem, to which the formula of the general will is the answer, is
stated succinctly by Rousseau in Book I, chapter 6 of the Social Contract.
He writes “Find a form of association which defends and protects with all
the common force, the person and goods of each associate and by means

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of which each one while uniting with all obeys only himself and remains
as free as before.”
9. This, he calls, the fundamental problem for which the social contract is
the solution.
10. The first part of that clause says that the aim of the contract is to
protect and defend with the common force the goods and person of
each member. So far this is entirely consistent with Locke’s claim or
even Hobbes’s claim that the purpose of society is to protect the security
or the life, liberty, and estate of each of its members.
11. Rousseau adds to this Lockean or liberal clause a second and more
distinctly Rousseauian claim, namely, that the contract must ensure not
only the conditions for mutual protection and the preservation of self and
property, but rather also that in uniting with one another; each person
obeys only himself and then remains as free as they were before.”
12. Isn’t the essence of the social contract that we give up some part of our
natural freedom to guarantee mutual peace and security? How can we
remain as free as we were before, and as he says, obey only our
decisions--that the participant obeys only himself.
13. That is the paradox, in many ways, or the fundamental problem, as he
calls it, to which his contract is a solution.

II

14. Rousseau provides an answer as follows; he says, “Properly understood

these clauses are all reducible to one. Namely the total alienation of
each associate together with all of his rights to the entire
community.” The total alienation of each associate with all of his rights
to the entire community. And those two phrases, “total alienation” and
“entire community” are obviously central here.

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15. In the first place, all persons must give themselves entirely over to the
social contract to ensure that the terms of the agreement are equal for all.
16. The total alienation clause as it were, is Rousseau’s manner of ensuring
that the terms of the contract are the same for everyone. But secondly,
when we alienate ourselves, it is crucial, he says, that this be done or
given to the entire community, for only then he wants to argue, is the
individual beholden not to any private will or any private association, or
to some other person but to the general will, the will of the entire
community.
17. The social contract is the foundation of the general will which is the
only legitimate sovereign. Not kings, not parliaments, not representative
assemblies, not presidents, but the general will of the entire community
is the only general sovereign, the doctrine of what we call the
sovereignty of the people or popular sovereignty.
18. Sovereign, in other words, is not some distinct third party that is created
by the contract, but rather the sovereign is simply the people as a whole
acting in its collective capacity.
19. There is something deeply amiss here. That is to say, from a highly
individualistic set of premises where each person is concerned only in
the state of nature, or in the pre-contract tradition, only with the
protection of their lives, persons and property, Rousseau seems to be
leading us to a highly regimented and collectivized conclusion, where
the individual has given over virtually his or her entire being to the will
of the community.

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III

20. In what way does this render us as free as we were before? In what way
do we remain free and obey only ourselves? That seems to be the
problem. Is Rousseau’s formula for the general will, a recipe or a formula
for freedom, or is it a recipe for the tyranny of the majority.
21. Rousseau wants to say, paradoxically, only through this total alienation
do we remain free.
22. Because he wants to argue no one is dependent upon the will of another.
The people established through their act a new kind of sovereign, the
general will is not strictly speaking the sum total, the additive total of
the individual wills or the individual parts, but is more like the general
interest or the rational will, if you want to use that kind of Kantian
formulation, the rational will of a community.
23. Since we all contribute to the shaping of this general will, when we obey
its laws we do no more than obey ourselves.
24. Rousseau describes this new kind of freedom that we achieve under the
general will. He wants to say that this brings about a radical
transformation of human nature in itself.
25. Freedom of the citizen under the general will is not the freedom of the
state of nature, it is not the freedom to do anything we like, anything that
our will and power allows us to do, but it is a new kind of freedom that
he calls moral freedom, a freedom to do what the law commands.
26. The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a
remarkable change in man.
27. The passage from the state of nature, he writes, to the civil state,
produces a remarkable change in man. For it substitutes justice for
instinct in his behavior and gives his actions a moral quality that they
previously lacked.

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28. “What man loses through the social contract is his natural liberty and
unmitigated right to everything that tempts him and he can acquire.
What he gains is civil liberty and proprietary ownership of all he
possesses but to the preceding acquisitions could be added the acquisition
of moral liberty which alone makes man truly the master of himself. For
it to be driven by appetite alone is slavery and obedience to the law one
has prescribed for oneself is freedom.”
29. Obedience to the law that one prescribes for oneself is freedom. That is
moral liberty, which is only created and possible through the social
contract, and the implications of this, the moral and political implications
of that statement are massive. It is here Rousseau departs most
powerfully, most dramatically from his early modern predecessors.

III

30. Hobbes and Locke, liberty meant that sphere of human conduct which is
unregulated by the law. In chapter 21 of Leviathan Hobbes says, “where
the law is silent the citizen is free to do whatever he or she chooses to
do.” Freedom begins from where the law is silent.
31. But for Rousseau, law is the very beginning of our freedom. Where the
law is silent, we may have a kind of natural freedom, but our moral
freedom, we are free to the extent that we are participants in the laws that
we in turn obey. Freedom means acting in conformity with self-imposed
law.
32. Hobbes and Locke on the one side, and Rousseau on the other; it is a
difference between two very different conceptions of liberty. Kind of
liberal and republican respectively, democratic and republican.
33. For liberals, following in the tradition of Hobbes and Locke, again,
freedom has always meant a sphere of privacy where the law does not
intrude or where other people do not intrude. This is why the

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separation of the public and the private sphere has always been so sacred
to liberals, because only in the private sphere, only in that area of civil
society where the state does not intrude is the individual really and truly
free.
34. But for the republican theory of liberty of which Rousseau is a most
powerful modern exponent, this separation of public and private is only
an exercise in what might be thought of as private selfishness.
35. The task is rather to create a community where the individual and the
public interest are not in conflict with one another, where the individual
does not think of him or herself as a being apart from the social body.
This is the freedom of the citizen who takes an active role in the
determination of the laws of one’s own community.
36. Rousseau’s purpose in saying this and in writing this seems to be to
bring back to life a concept that he believes has been dormant; the
concept is the citizen.
37. The last people who really knew what a citizen meant, he says, were the
Romans. In a footnote, again to Book I, chapter 6, he indicates to what
degree the true meaning of citizen has been lost on modern subjects.
“Most modern men,” he writes, “mistake a town for a city, and a
bourgeois for a citizen.”
38. The modern world furnishes almost no examples of what a citizen is, and
this is why it is necessary for Rousseau to return to the histories of
antiquity, especially Rome and Sparta to find models of citizenship. Only
in these societies can one find the spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion to
the common good, a kind of patriotic devotion upon which citizenship is
founded.
39. Rousseau’s most memorable example of the true citizen it comes from an
example he lifts from the Roman writer, Plutarch that he uses in the
opening pages of his book, The émile.
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40. In Émile he writes, “A Spartan woman had five sons in the army and was
awaiting news of the battle. A helot, slave arrives trembling she asks him
for news. ‘Your five sons were killed,’ the helot replies. “Base slave, did
I ask you this? We won the victory,” he says. The mother runs to the
temple and gives thanks to the gods.”
41. Here, for Rousseau, was the ancient citizen. An example that is both
terrible and sublime, which of course he wants it to be, he intends it to be.
There is the example of what the true citizen is.
42. The question, when you consider this possibility, is whether Rousseau’s
idea of the freedom of the citizen, freedom to live under self-imposed
law, leads to a higher form of nobility, higher than the kind of low
minded pursuit of one’s self-interest as Rousseau wants.
43. The despotism of obedience to the general will and of course underlying
that sinister reading of Rousseau is the famous or maybe infamous
statement that not only that the general will is the source of freedom,
but that anyone who obeys, who refuses to obey, the general will may
be in his famous formulation, may be forced to be free.
44. In Rousseau’s utopia, those who disagree with the General Will are simply
in error, expressing selfish, ‘‘particular’’ interests that perversely thwart
the common good of all. Even the majority of citizens can be in error, for
Rousseau explicitly wrote that often there can be a great difference between
the will of all and the General Will. In any case, there can be no role for
minority opinion. Neither dissenting individuals nor groups, political
parties, or factions can be tolerated by the cohesive whole.
45. A view, which, and again in a slightly paradoxical way, was given, a very
powerful formulation by Hobbes.

IV

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46. “The Athenians and the Romans were free, that is, they were free
commonwealths. Not that any particular men had liberty to resist their
own representatives, but their representatives had the liberty to resist or
invade other people.”
47. Hobbes clearly says that the ancient freedom was the freedom of the
collective; it was not the freedom of the individual. “The freedom of the
authorities to resist or invade other people no man can thence infer that a
particular man has more liberty or immunity from service to the
commonwealth.”
48. Hobbes’s view of freedom is immunity from service, Rousseau’s view
is that freedom consists only in service.
49. Our freedom starts where the law begins. Again, at the basis of this are
two radically different views of the role of political participation in
lawmaking.
50. For Rousseau, again, laws are legitimate only if everyone has a direct
share in making them. It does not mean we all agree with the outcome
but only if we have some kind of share or voice in making them.
51. For Hobbes and Locke, for the authors of the federalist papers, on the
other hand, the direct involvement of the citizen in lawmaking is
clearly a subordinate or a secondary good. Legislation is better
handled by persons chosen from the electorate who are, so to speak,
the agents or representatives of the people.
52. Hobbes and that tradition is that laws be generally known, that they be
applied by impartial judges, rather than they be the direct expression of
the general will.
53. In many ways underlying the, again, liberal conception of law is a certain
distrust of the collective wisdom or the collective sovereignty of the
people. It is too cumbersome, in many ways, and also too dangerous a

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mechanism to call people together to decide on matters over public

concern.