ROUSSEAU'S POLITICAL WRITINGS.
In passing from the study of the Philosophers to that of Rousseau, we
turn from talent to genius, from system to impulse. The theories of the
great Genevan were drawn from his own strange nature, with little regard
for consistency. They belong together much as the features of a
distorted and changeful countenance may do; their unity is personal
rather than systematic. And while Rousseau was, from certain aspects and
chiefly in respect to his conduct, the most contemptible of the great
thinkers of his day, he surpassed most of the others in constant
literary sincerity, and in occasional elevation of thought and feeling.
Voltaire, although never swerving long from his own general
philosophical scheme, would lie without hesitation for any purpose.
Diderot would quote from non-existent books to establish his theories.
But no one can read Rousseau without being convinced that he believed
what he wrote, at least at the moment of writing it. Truthfulness of
this kind is quite consistent with inaccuracy, and it is probable that
some incidents in Rousseau's autobiographical writings have been wrongly
remembered, colored by prejudice, or embellished by vanity. Some of them
may even be completely fictitious; the author caring little for facts
except as the ornaments and illustrations of ideas. But what he thought
in the abstract Rousseau was quite ready to write down, caring little
for the feelings or the opinions of any sect or party; or even of that
great public whose thought was as law to the Philosophers. He deserved
to profit by his sincerity, and he has done so. His many and great
faults were well known to his contemporaries; they are told in his
posthumous "Confessions" in a way to show them more dark than any
contemporary could have imagined; yet such is the evident frankness of
those evil and repugnant volumes that many decent men have got from them
a sneaking kindness for Rousseau, and an inclination to take him at his
own estimate, as one no worse than other people.
This estimate of himself is never to be forgotten in reading his books.
"You see what I am," he seems to say at every turn; "now, I am a good
man." In the belief in his own comparative goodness he was firmly fixed.
His theories of life were largely founded on it. For Rousseau was an
introspective thinker, and thus in seeming opposition to the
intellectual tendency of his age. Voltaire and Diderot were interested
chiefly in the world around them. Locke had viewed his own mind
objectively; he had attempted the feat of getting outside of it, in
order to take a good look at it; and in so doing he had missed seeing
some important parts of it, because they were internal. Rousseau studied
himself and the world within himself. Thus while he was as immoral in
his actions as any of the Philosophers, he was more religious than any
of them. Voltaire's theism was little more than a remnant of early
habit, strengthened by a notion that some sort of religion was necessary
for purposes of police. To Rousseau, a world without a God would have
been truly empty. But as his religion was theistic, and not orthodox;
as, with characteristic meanness, he was ready to profess Catholicism or
Calvinism as he might find it convenient, he has been classed among
atheists by churchmen. In so far as this is mere vituperation it is
perhaps deserved, for Rousseau's life deserved almost any conceivable
vituperation; but as an historical fact, Rousseau's faith was quite as
living as that of many of his revilers.[Footnote: Rousseau looked on
Catholicism and Calvinism rather as civil systems than as ideas, and
accepted them in the same way in which a man may live under a foreign
government, of whose principles he does not approve.]
Every thinking human being has a philosophy and a theology,--a
metaphysical foundation for his beliefs, and an opinion concerning the
Deity. The only escape from having these is to think of nothing
outside of the daily routine of life. The attempt to be without them
on any other terms generally ends in having but crude and
contradictory opinions on the most important subjects of human
interest. The theology of Rousseau will be considered later.
Philosophical systems were his especial bugbear, and it is only
incidentally that he formulates his metaphysical ideas. His general
tendency of belief was toward intuition. Justice and virtue he
believed to be written in the hearts of men, disturbed rather than
elucidated by the observation of the learned and the reflection of the
ingenious. As to the ground of our actions he was less at one with
himself. Sometimes, in agreement with the prevalent philosophy of his
day, he assumed that men are moved only by their own interest. At
times, however, he recognized two principles of human action anterior
to reason; the first of which is care for our own well-being; the
second, a natural repugnance to see others suffer. In making this
distinction he separated from the school of thinkers to whom pity and
affection are but refined forms of self-love. This is characteristic
of Rousseau, who was free from that craving for system which is the
snare of those minds in which logic and pure reason prevail over
acuteness of self-observation.
The society of the eighteenth century had grown very rigid and
artificial. The struggle of the Philosophers was to bring men back in
one way and another to a life founded rationally on a few simple laws
derived from the nature of things. Of these laws the leaders themselves
had not always a true perception, nor did they always derive the right
rules from such laws as they perceived. But their struggle was ever for
reason, as they understood it, and generally for simplicity. In this
work Rousseau was a leader. He was constantly preaching the merits and
the charms of a simple life. In his denunciations of elaborateness, of
luxury, and even of civilization, he was often mistaken, sometimes
absurd. But his authority was great. He set a fashion of simplicity, and
he exerted an influence which went far beyond fashion, and has helped to
modify the world to this day.
There was another quality beside introspection in which Rousseau was the
precursor of the literary men of the nineteenth century, and that is the
love of nature. To say that he was the first great writer to enjoy and
describe natural scenery would be a gross exaggeration. But most of
Rousseau's predecessors valued the world out of doors principally for
its usefulness, and in proportion to its fertility. Rousseau is perhaps
the first great writer who fairly reveled in country life; for whom lake
and mountain, rock and cloud, tree and flower, had a constant joy and
meaning. The true enjoyment of natural scenery, generally affected
nowadays, is not given in a high degree to most people; in a very few it
may be as intense as the enjoyment of music is in many more; but most
people can get from scenery, as from other beautiful things, a
reasonable and modest enjoyment, if the object for their admiration be
well pointed out to them. Rousseau needed no such instruction. To some
extent he furnished it to the modern world. The genuineness of his love
of nature is partly shown by the fact that she was as dear to him in her
simpler as in her grander aspects. The grass filled him with delight as
truly as the mountain-peak; indeed, he felt contempt for those who look
afar for the beauty that is all about us, and his admiration was not
reserved for the unusual. Nor did he fill his pages with description. It
is in his autobiographical writings and in reference to its effect on
himself that he most often mentions natural scenery. Recognizing
instinctively that the principal subjects of language are thought and
action, as the chief interests of painting are form and color, this
writer so keenly alive to natural beauty is guiltless of word painting.
Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva on the 28th of June, 1712. His
mother, the daughter of a Protestant minister, died at his birth. His
father, a clockmaker by trade, a man of eccentric disposition, had
little real control over the boy, and, moreover, soon moved away from
the city on account of a quarrel with its government, leaving his son
behind him. Jean Jacques was first put under the care of a minister in a
neighboring village; then passed two or three years with an uncle in the
town. At the age of eleven he was sent to a notary's office, whence he
was dismissed for dullness and inaptitude. He was next apprenticed to an
engraver, a man of violent temper, who by his cruelty brought out the
meanness inherent in the boy's weak nature. Rousseau had not been
incapable of generosity; perhaps he never quite became so. But, with a
cowardly temperament, he especially needed firm kindness and judicious
reproof, and these he did not receive. He took to pilfering from his
master, who, in return, used to beat him. Rousseau's thefts were, in
fact, not very considerable,--apples from the larder, graving tools from
the closet. His worst offenses at this time were not such as would make
us condemn very harshly a lad of spirit. But Jean Jacques was not such a
lad. The last of his scrapes as an apprentice was important only from
its consequences. One afternoon he had gone with some comrades on an
expedition beyond the city gates. "Half a league from the town," say the
"Confessions," "I hear the retreat sounded, and hasten my steps; I hear
the drum beat, and run with all my might; I arrive out of breath, all in
a sweat; my heart beats; I see from a distance the soldiers at their
posts; I rush on; I cry with a failing voice. It was too late. When
twenty yards from the outpost I see the first drawbridge going up. I
tremble as I see in the air those terrible horns, sinister and fatal
augury of that terrible fate which was at that moment beginning for me.
"In the first violence of my grief I threw myself on the glacis and bit
the earth. My comrades laughed at their misfortune and made the best of
it at once. I also made up my mind, but in another way. On the very spot
I swore that I would never go back to my master, and on the morrow, when
the gates were opened and they returned to town, I bade them adieu
forever."
Thus did Rousseau become a wanderer at the age of sixteen. The duchy of
Savoy, into which he first passed, adjoined the republic of Geneva, and
was a country as fervently Catholic as the other was ardently
Calvinistic. The young runaway soon fell in with a proselytizing priest,
who gave him a good dinner and dispatched him, for the furtherance of
his conversion, to a singular lady, living not far off, at Annecy. This
lady, named Madame de Warens, about twelve years older than Rousseau,
was not long after to occupy a large place in his life. She belonged to
a Protestant family of Vevay, on the north side of the Lake of Geneva.
She, like him, had fled from her country, and apparently for no more
serious reason. In her flight she had left her husband and abjured her
religion. In morals she had a system of her own, and gave herself to
many men, without interested motives, but with little passion. She was a
sentimental, active-minded woman, of small judgment; pleasing rather
than beautiful, short of stature, thickset, but with a fine head and
arms. Madame de Warens received the boy kindly, and on this first
occasion of their meeting did little more than speed him on his way to
Turin, where he entered a monastery for the express purpose of being
converted to Catholicism. In nine days the farce was completed, and the
new Catholic turned out into the town, with about twenty francs of small
change in his pocket, charitably contributed by the witnesses of the
ceremony of his abjuration. It is needless to dwell on his adventures at
this time. He was a servant in two different families. After something
more than a year he left Turin on foot, and wandered back to Annecy and
to Madame de Warens.
The period of Rousseau's life in which that lady was the ruling
influence lasted ten or twelve years. The situation was one from which
any man of manly instincts would have shrunk, a condition of dependence
on a mistress, and on a mistress who made no pretense of fidelity. In a
desultory way Rousseau learned something of music at this time, and made
some long journeys on foot, one of them taking him as far as Paris. This
man, morally of soft fibre, was able to endure and enjoy moderate
physical hardship; and from early education felt most at home in simple
houses and amid rude surroundings. At last, disgusted with the
appearance of a new rival in Madame de Warens's changeable household,
Rousseau left that lady and drifted off to Lyons; then, after once
trying the experiment of returning to his mistress and finding it a
failure, to Paris.
For more than eight years after his final separation from Madame de
Warens, Rousseau did nothing to make any one suppose him to be a man of
genius. He obtained and threw up the position of secretary to the French
ambassador at Venice; he supported himself as a musician and as a
private secretary; he lived from hand to mouth, having as a companion
one Therese Levasseur, a grotesquely illiterate maid servant, picked up
at an inn. Their five children he successively took to the Foundling,
losing sight of them forever. To the mother he was faithful for the most
part, although not without some amorous wanderings, for many years.
Up to 1749, then, when Rousseau was thirty-seven years old, he had
published nothing of importance. He had, however, some acquaintance
with literary men, being known merely as one of those adventurers
without any settled means of existence, who may always be found in
cities, and with whom Paris at this time appears to have been
over-furnished. In features he was plain, in manners awkward; much
given to making compliments to women, but generally displeasing to
them, although at times interesting when roused to excitement. The
Swiss Jean Jacques had little of the sparkling wit which the Frenchmen
of his day rated very high, but he had much subtlety of observation
and many ideas. He constantly applauded himself in his writings on
being sensible rather than witty. In fact he was neither, but very
ingenious and eloquent. In character he was self-indulgent but not
luxurious, sensitive, vain, and sentimental. To this man,--if we may
believe his own account, and I think in the main we may do so,--there
came by a sudden flash an idea which altered his whole life, and which
has materially affected millions of lives since he died. The idea was
an evil seed, and it found an evil soil to grow in.
The summer of 1749 was a hot one. Diderot, just rising into notice as a
man of letters, had been imprisoned in the Castle of Vincennes, for his
"Letter on the Blind," and his friends were allowed to come and see him.
Rousseau used to visit him every other afternoon, walking the four or
five miles which lie between the centre of Paris and the castle. The
trees along the road were trimmed after the dreary French fashion, and
gave little shade. From time to time Rousseau would stop, lie down on
the grass and rest, and he had got into the habit of taking a book or a
newspaper in his pocket. It was in this way that his eye happened to
fall on a paragraph in the "Mercure de France," announcing that the
Academy of Dijon would give a prize the next year for the best essay on
the following subject: "Whether the Progress of the Arts and Sciences
has tended to corrupt or to improve Morals."
From that moment, according to Rousseau, a complete change came over
him. Struck with sudden giddiness, he was like a drunken man. His heart
palpitated and he could hardly walk or draw breath. Throwing himself at
the foot of a tree, he spent half an hour in such agitation that when he
arose he found the whole front of his waistcoat wet with tears, although
he had not known that he was shedding any. Thus did his great theory of
the degeneracy of man under civilization burst upon him.[Footnote:
Rousseau, xviii. 135 (Confessions, Part. ii. liv. viii); xix. 358
(Seconde Lettre à M. de Malesherbes). Exaggerated as the above story
probably is, we may reasonably believe that it comes nearer the truth
than that told by Diderot in after years, when he and Rousseau had
quarreled. In that version, Rousseau, desiring to compete for the prize,
consulted Diderot as to which side he should take, and was advised to
assume that which other people would avoid. Diderot, Oeuvres, xi. 148.
Rousseau's thoughts had been wandering into subjects akin to that of the
prize essay before he had seen the announcement in the Mercure de
France. Musset-Pathay, ii. 363. Moreover, if Rousseau was imaginative,
and not always to be believed about facts, Diderot was a tremendous
liar.]
The very question asked by the academy suggests the possibility of an
answer unfavorable to civilization, but Rousseau's treatment of it was
such as to form the beginning of an epoch in the history of thought. It
is under the rough coat of the laborer, he says, and not under the
tinsel of the courtier, that strength and vigor of body will be found.
Before art had shaped our manners, they were rustic but natural, and
men's actions freely expressed their feelings. Human nature was no
better, at bottom, than now, but men were safer because they could more
easily read each other's minds, and thus they avoided many vices. The
advance of civilization brings increase of corruption. Constantinople,
where learning was preserved during the dark ages, was full of murder,
debauchery, and crime. Contrast with its inhabitants those primitive
nations which have been kept from the contagion of vain knowledge: the
early Persians, the Germans described by Tacitus, the modern Swiss, the
American Indians, whose simple institutions Montaigne prefers to all the
laws of Plato. These nations know well that in other lands idle men
spend their time in disputing about vice and virtue, but they have
considered the morals of these argumentative persons and have learned to
despise their doctrine.
"Astronomy is born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred,
flattery, and lying; geometry of avarice; physics of a vain curiosity;
all, and morals themselves, of human pride. The arts and sciences,
therefore, owe their birth in our vices; we should have less doubt of
the advantage to be derived from them if they sprang from our virtues."
... "Answer me, illustrious philosophers, you from whom we know why
bodies attract each other in a vacuum; what are the relations of areas
traversed in equal times in the revolutions of the planets; what curves
have conjugate points, points of inflection and reflection; how man sees
all things in God; how the soul and body correspond without
communication, as two clocks would do; what stars maybe inhabited; what
insects reproduce their kind in extraordinary ways,--tell me, I say, you
to whom we owe so much sublime knowledge--if you had taught us none of
these things, should we be less numerous, less well-governed, less
redoubtable, less flourishing, or more perverse?"
This is the theme of the First Discourse, a theme most congenial to the
nature of Rousseau. His ill-health, his dreamy habit of mind, his
vanity, all made him long for a state of things as different as possible
from that about him.
"Among us," he says, "it is true that Socrates would not have drunk the
hemlock; but he would have drunk from a more bitter cup of insulting
mockery and of contempt a hundred times worse than death." Such
sensitiveness as this belongs to Rousseau himself. With what disdain
would the healthy-minded Socrates have laughed at the suggestion that he
was troubled by the contempt or the mockery of those about him. How
gayly would he have turned the weapons of the mockers on themselves.
Rousseau had neither the sense of humor nor the joy of living, which
added so much to the greatness of the Atheman. His theories are
especially pleasing to the disappointed and the weak, and therein lies
their danger; for they tend, not to manly effort, for the improvement of
individual circumstances or of mankind, but to vain dreaming of
impossible ideals. There is a luxury that softens, but there is also a
luxury that causes labor. A nation without astronomy, or geography, or
physics, is generally less numerous, less redoubtable, less flourishing,
and sometimes less well governed than a civilized nation. It is true
that in the arts and sciences, in the deeds and in the condition of men,
there is an admixture of what is base; but there is no baser nor more
dangerous habit of mind than that which for every action seeks out the
worst motive, for every state the most selfish reason.[Footnote: Long
after the publication of the First Discourse, Rousseau insisted that he
had never intended to plunge civilized states into barbarism, but only
to arrest the decay of primitive ones, and perhaps to retard that of the
more advanced, by changing their ideals. Oeuvres, xx. 275 (II.
Dialogue); xxi. 34 (III. Dialogue). Rousseau's writings generally must
be taken as expressions of feeling, quite as much as attempts to change
the world. They are growls or sighs, rather than sermons.]
While Rousseau's First Discourse is pernicious in its general teaching,
it is rich in eloquent passages, and it contains some of those sensible
remarks which we seldom fail to find in its author's works. At the time
of writing it, as later, he was interested in education,--the subject on
which his influence has been, on the whole, most useful.
"I see on every side," he says, "enormous establishments where youth is
brought up at great expense to learn everything but its duties. Your
children will be ignorant of their own language, but will speak others
which are not in use anywhere; they will know how to make verses which
they will hardly be able to understand themselves; without knowing how
to distinguish truth from falsehood, they will possess the art of
disguising both from others by specious arguments; but those words,
magnanimity, equity, temperance, humanity, courage, will be unknown to
them; that sweet name of country[Footnote: Patrie,--a word seemingly
necessary, but which the English language manages to do without.] will
never strike their ears; and if they hear of God, it will be less to
fear Him than to be afraid of Him. `I would as lief,' said a sage, `that
my schoolboy had spent his time in a tennis-court; at least his body
would be more active.' I know that children must be kept busy, and that
idleness is the danger most to be feared for them. What, then, should
they learn? A fine question surely! Let them learn what they must do
when they are men, and not what they must forget."[Footnote: Compare
Montaigne, i. 135 (liv. i. chap. xxv.).]
The First Discourse not only took the prize at Dijon, but attracted a
great deal of notice in Paris, and immediately gave Rousseau a
distinguished place among men of letters. Controversy was excited,
refutations attempted. In 1753 the Academy of Dijon again offered a
prize for an essay on a subject evidently connected with the former one:
"What is the Origin of Inequality among Men, and whether it is
authorized by Natural Law." Again Rousseau competed, and this time the
prize was given to some one else, but Rousseau's essay was published,
and takes rank among the important writings of its author and of its
time. In the Second Discourse we see the development of the ideas of the
First. Rousseau composed an imaginary history of mankind, starting from
that being of his own creation, the happy savage. He thinks that man in
the primitive condition, having no moral relations nor known duties,
could be neither good nor bad; unless these words are taken in a purely
physical sense, and those things are called vices in the individual
which may interfere with his own preservation, and those are called
virtues which may contribute to it. In this case, Rousseau believes that
he must be called the most virtuous who least resists the simple
impulses of nature; a mistake surely, for what natural impulses are more
simple than those which turn a man aside from all sustained exertion,
and what impulses tend more than these to the destruction of the
individual and of the species?
Rousseau's savage has but few desires, and those of the simplest, and he
is dependent on no one for their satisfaction. In him natural pity is
awake, although obscure, while in civilized man it is developed, but
weak. The Philosopher will not leave his bed although his fellow-beings
be slaughtered under his window, but will clap his hands to his ears and
quiet himself with arguments. The savage is not so tranquil, and gives
way to the first impulse. In street fights the populace assembles and
prudent folk get out of the way. It is the rabble and the fishwives who
separate the combatants, and prevent respectable people from cutting
each other's throats.[Footnote: Rousseau says in his Confessions
(Oeuvres, xviii. 205 n. Part. ii. liv. viii.), that this heartless
philosopher was suggested to him by Diderot, who abused his confidence,
and gave his writings at this time a hard tone and a black appearance.
The abuse of confidence is nonsense, but the comic picture of the
philosopher, with his hands on his ears, may well have come from
Diderot. Rousseau was always in deadly earnest.]
Love, he says, is physical and moral. The physical side is that general
desire which leads to the union of the sexes. The moral side is that
which fixes that desire on one exclusive object, or at least that which
gives the exclusive desire a greater energy. Now it is easy to see that
this moral side of love is a factitious feeling, born of the usage of
society, and vaunted by women with much skill and care in order to
establish their empire, and to give dominion to the sex which ought to
obey. This feeling is dull in the savage, who has no abstract ideas of
regularity or beauty; he is not troubled with imagination, which causes
so many woes to civilized man. "Let us conclude that the savage man,
wandering in forests, without manufactures, without language, without a
home, without war, and without connections, with no need of his kind,
and no desire to injure it, perhaps never recognizing one person
individually, subject to few passions, and sufficient to himself, had
only the feeling and the intelligence proper to his state; that he felt
only his real needs; he looked only at those things which he thought it
was for his interest to see, and his intelligence made no more progress
than his vanity. If, by chance, he made some discovery, he could not
communicate it, not recognizing even his own children. The art perished
with the inventor. There was neither education nor progress; the
generations multiplied uselessly; and, as all started from the same
point, the centuries went by with all the rudeness of the first age; the
species was already old, and man still remained a child."
Inequalities among savage men would be small. Those which are physical
are often caused by a hardening or an effeminate life; those of the
mind, by education, which not only divides men into the rude and the
cultivated, but increases the natural differences which nature has
allowed among the latter; for if a giant and a dwarf walk in the same
road, every step they take will separate them more widely. And if there
are no relations among men, their inequalities will trouble them very
little. Where there is no love, what is the use of beauty? What
advantage can people who do not speak derive from wit; or those who have
no dealings from craft? "I constantly hear it said," cries Rousseau,
"that the strong will oppress the weak. But explain to me what is meant
by the word "oppression." Some men will rule with violence, others will
groan in their service, obeying all their caprices. This is exactly what
I observe among us; but I do not see how it could be said of savage men,
who could hardly be made to understand the meaning of servitude and
domination. One man may well take away the fruit that another has
picked, the game he has killed, the cave that was his shelter; but how
will he ever succeed in making him obey? And what can be the chains of
dependence among men that possess nothing? If I am driven from one tree,
I need only go to another; if I am tormented in any place, who will
prevent my moving elsewhere? Is there a man so much stronger than I, and
moreover so depraved, so lazy, and so fierce as to compel me to provide
for his maintenance while he remains idle? He must make up his mind not
to lose sight of me for a single moment, to have me tied up with great
care while he is asleep, for fear I should escape or kill him; that is
to say, he is obliged to expose himself willingly to much greater
trouble than that which he wishes to avoid, and than that which he gives
me. And after all, if his vigilance is relaxed for a moment, if he turns
his head at a sudden noise, I take twenty steps through the forest, my
chains are broken, and he never sees me again as long as he lives."
Rousseau recognized that his state of nature was not like anything that
had existed on our planet.[Footnote: This concession probably took the
form it did, partly to satisfy the censor, or the Academy of Dijon,
jealous for Genesis. "Religion commands us to believe that God himself
having removed men from the state of nature, immediately after the
creation, they are unequal because he has willed that they should be
so." Such remarks as this are common in all the writings of the time,
although less so in those of Rousseau than in those of most of his
contemporaries. They are evidently intended to satisfy the authorities,
and to be simply over looked by the intelligent reader.] But that
consideration troubled him not at all. Let us begin, he says, by putting
aside all facts; they do not touch the question. This is the constant
practice of the philosophers of certain schools, but few of them
acknowledge it as frankly as Rousseau. Had the facts of human nature and
human history been seriously considered, we should have no Republic of
Plato, no Utopia of More; the world would be a very different place from
what it is; for these cloudy cities, the laws of whose architecture seem
contrary to all the teachings of physics, yet gild with their glory and
darken with their shadows the solid temples and streets beneath them.
In the second part of his essay, Rousseau follows the development of
human society. "The first man," he says, "who, having enclosed a piece
of ground, undertook to say, `This is mine,' and found people simple
enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many
crimes, wars, murders, how much misery and horror would not he have
spared the human race, who, pulling up the stakes or filling the ditch,
should have cried to his fellows, `Beware of listening to that impostor.
You are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all, and the land
to none.'"
But this benefactor did not make his appearance. Soon all the land was
divided among a certain number of occupiers. Those whose weakness or
indolence had prevented their getting a share were obliged to sink into
slavery, or to rob their richer neighbors. Then followed civil wars,
tumult and rapine. At last those who had the land conceived the most
deliberate plot that ever entered into the human mind. They persuaded
the poorer people to join with them in establishing an association which
should defend all its members and ensure to each one the peaceful
possession of his property. "Such was the origin of society and laws,
which gave new bonds to the weak, new strength to the rich, irrevocably
destroyed natural liberty, established forever the laws of property and
inequality, turned adroit usurpation into settled right, and, for the
profit of a few ambitious men, subjected thenceforth all the human race
to labor, servitude, and misery."
But on the whole the stage of development which seemed to Rousseau the
happiest was not the state of complete isolation. He supposes that at
one time mankind had assembled in herds, and had made some simple
inventions. A rude language had been formed, huts were built. Men had
become more fierce and cruel than at first. The condition was
intermediate between the indolence of the primitive state, and the
petulant activity of self-love now seen in the world. This, he thought,
was the stage reached by most savages known to Europeans; it was the
most desirable; and he remarks that no savage has yet adopted
civilization, whereas many Frenchmen have joined Indian tribes, and
taken up a savage mode of life.
In closing the Second Discourse, Rousseau thus sums up his conclusions.
"It follows from this exposition that inequality, being almost nothing
in the state of nature, draws its force and growth from the development
of our faculties and from the progress of the human spirit, and becomes
at last stable and legal by the establishment of property and the laws.
It follows also that moral inequality, authorized by positive law only,
is contrary to natural law whenever it does not coincide in the same
proportion with physical inequality; a distinction which shows
sufficiently what should be thought in this respect of the kind of
inequality which reigns among all civilized nations, since it is
manifestly contrary to the law of nature, however defined, that a child
should command an old man, a fool lead a wise man, and a handful of
people be glutted with superfluity, while the hungry multitude is in
want of necessaries."
The Discourse on Inequality was sent by Rousseau to Voltaire, and drew
forth a characteristic letter from the pontiff of the Philosophers. "I
have received, sir, your new book against the human race. I thank you
for it. You will please the men to whom you tell disagreeable truths,
but you will not correct them. It is impossible to paint in stronger
colors the horrors of human society, from which our ignorance and
weakness promise themselves so many consolations. No one ever spent so
much wit in trying to make us stupid; when we read your book we feel
like going on all fours. Nevertheless, as it is more than sixty years
since I lost the habit, I am conscious that it is impossible for me to
take it up again, and I leave this natural attitude to those who are
more worthy of it than you and I. Nor can I take ship to go out and join
the savages in Canada; first, because the diseases which bear me down
oblige me to stay near the greatest physician in Europe, and because I
should not find the same relief among the Missouris; secondly, because
there is war in those regions, and the example of our nations has made
the savages almost as cruel as we are." Voltaire then goes on to
complain of his own sufferings as an author, but to vaunt the influence
of letters. It is not Petrarch and Boccaccio, he says, that made the
wars of Italy; the pleasantries of Marot did not cause the massacre of
Saint Bartholomew's Day; nor the tragedy of the Cid produce the riots of
the Fronde. Great crimes have generally been committed by ignorant great
men. It is the insatiable cupidity, the indomitable pride of mankind,
which have made this world a vale of tears; from Thamas Kouli-Kan, who
could not read, to the custom-house clerk, who only knows how to cipher.
[Footnote: August 30, 1755. Voltaire, lvi. 714.]
This letter is neither very complimentary nor very conclusive in its
treatment of Rousseau's position, but it may be said to mark his
official reception into the guild of literary men. He was presently
engaged in new work. He wrote an article on Political Economy for the
great "Encyclopaedia," in which, reversing the teaching of the Second
Discourse, he maintains that "it is certain that the right of property
is the most sacred of all the rights of citizens, and more important in
some respects than liberty itself; either because it more closely
concerns the preservation of life, or because, property being easier to
take away and harder to defend than persons, that should be most
respected which is most easily ravished; or again, because property is
the true foundation of civil society, and the true guarantee of the
engagements of the citizens; for if property did not answer for
persons, nothing would be so easy as to elude duties and to laugh at
the laws."[Footnote: Rousseau, _Oeuvres_, xii. 41.] And further
on, in the same article, he calls property the foundation of the social
compact, whose first condition is that every one be maintained in the
peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him. We must not wonder at seeing
Rousseau thus change sides from day to day. A dreamer and not a
philosophic thinker, he perceived some truths and uttered many
sophistries, speaking always with the fire of conviction and a fatal
eloquence.
It is needless to enter into the detail of Rousseau's life at this
time, the time when his most remarkable work was done. Labor was
always painful and irritating to him, and it was perhaps the
irksomeness of his tasks that drove him into something not unlike
madness.[Footnote: There is little doubt that Rousseau was at one time
really insane, subject to the delusion that he was being persecuted.
His insanity did not become very marked until the time of the real
persecutions undergone after the publication of _Émile_. See his
Biographies and _Le Docteur Châtelain, La folie de J. J. Rousseau_,
Paris, 1890. He was, of course, always eccentric and ill balanced; and
was often rendered irritable by a painful disease, caused by a
malformation of the bladder. Morley, _Rousseau_, i. 277, etc.
_Oeuvres_, xviii. 155 (_Conf._ Part. ii. liv. viii.).]
Yet he kept on writing with enthusiasm. He speaks of himself as moved in
these years by the contemplation of great objects; ridiculously hoping
to bring about the triumph of reason and truth over prejudice and lies,
and to make men wiser by showing them their true interests. He learned
at this time, he says, to meditate profoundly, and for a moment
astonished Europe by productions in which vulgar souls saw only
eloquence and wit, but in which those persons who inhabit ethereal
regions joyfully recognized one of their own kind.[Footnote: Rousseau,
_Oeuvres_, xx. 275 (II. Dialogue).]
The best known and probably the most important of Rousseau's political
writings is the "Contrat Social," or "Social Compact," which followed
the Second Discourse after an interval of eight years, thus coming out
near the end of the period of its author's greatest literary activity.
In this essay, which is intended to be but a fragment of a larger work
on government, Rousseau lays down the conditions which should, as he
thinks, govern the lives of men united to form a true state. Indeed, he
believes that any government not founded on these principles is
illegitimate, resting merely on force and not on right. A nation thus
wrongly governed is but an aggregation, not an association. It is
without public weal or body politic.
There was nothing original with Rousseau in the idea of a social
compact. That idea may be traced in the writings of Plato, who speaks of
it as one already familiar. But it did not become a leading doctrine
with writers on politics until the publication of Hooker's
"Ecclesiastical Polity" in 1594. In that book it was contended that
there is no escape from the anarchy which exists before the
establishment of law, but by men "growing into composition and agreement
amongst themselves, by ordaining some kind of government public, and
yielding themselves subject thereunto." Through the seventeenth century
the theory grew and flourished. It was treated as the foundation of
absolute government by Hobbes, of free government by Locke; it was
recognized by Grotius. It received its embodiment in the cabin of the
Mayflower, when the Pilgrims did solemnly and mutually, in the presence
of God and one another, covenant and combine themselves together into a
civil body politic. By the time of Rousseau the social compact had
become one of the commonplaces of political thought.[Footnote: See a
history of the social compact in A. Lawrence Lowell, _Essays on
Government_. Plato, ii. 229 (_The Republic_, Book ii.). Hooker,
i. 241. Hobbes, _Leviathan, passim._ Locke, v. 388 (_Of Civil
Government_, Section 87). Morion's _New England's Memorial_,
37.] Men recognized, more or less vaguely, that in the case of most
countries no definite solemn agreement could actually be shown to have
been made, but in their inability to find the record of such a contract
writers were willing to assume one, express or implied. What, then, were
the exact conditions of the compact? Rousseau put the question as
follows: "To find a form of association which shall protect with all the
common strength the person and property of each associate, and by which
each one, uniting himself to all, may yet obey only himself and remain
as free as before." And he undertook to solve the problem by proposing
"the total alienation of every associate, with all his rights, to the
whole community," which he supported by saying that, as every one gave
himself up entirely, the condition was equal for all; and that as the
condition was equal for all, no one was interested in making it onerous
for others.
It will be noticed that there is a variation between the thing sought
and the thing found. Rousseau, having promised that each man shall obey
only himself, presently puts us off with a condition equal for all. That
is to say, instead of liberty we are given equality. The difference is
one generally recognized by Anglo-Saxons and often invisible to
Continentals. It was seldom seen by Frenchmen in the eighteenth century.
This confusion of thought was a cause of many of the troubles of the
French Revolution. We shall see that Rousseau, who had been carried by
the love of liberty beyond the verge of the ridiculous in his
Discourses, was brought back, in his "Social Compact," by his love of
equality, so far as to become the advocate of an intolerable tyranny,
yet was quite unaware that he was inconsistent. He composed, in fact, a
description of liberty strangely compounded of truth and falsehood. He
reckoned that man to be free who was not under the control of any
person, but only of the law, and then he provided for the most arbitrary
and capricious kind of law-making.
The first task of Rousseau, after settling the conditions of his
compact, is to provide a sovereign power in the state. This he finds in
the association of the citizens united, as above described, in a body
politic. This sovereign cannot be bound by its own actions or resolves,
except in case of an agreement with strangers, for none can make a
contract with himself. By the original compact the action of the
individual citizens as independent agents was exhausted. They can act
henceforth only as parts of the whole. There is no contract possible
between one or several of them and the community of which they form a
part.[Footnote: In an epitome of the _Social Compact_, inserted by
Rousseau in the fifth book of _Émile_, he thus defines the terms of
that compact. "Each of us puts into a common stock his property, his
person, his life and all his power, under the supreme direction of the
general will, and we receive as a body each member as an indivisible
part of the whole." _Oeuvres_, v. 254.] The sovereign must not,
however, act directly on individuals, for in so doing it would represent
a part only of the community acting on another part, and it would thus
lose its moral right. It must act in general matters exclusively, by
means of general decrees, which only can properly be called laws. "Now
the sovereign, being made up only of the individuals which compose it,
has and can have no interest opposed to theirs; therefore the sovereign
power need not provide its subject with any guarantee, because it is
impossible that the body should wish to injure its members," and as the
nature of its action is general and not particular, it cannot injure one
individual without doing harm to all the others at the same time. "The
sovereign, by the very fact of its existence, is always what it ought to
be."
The general will is always right and always tends to public utility,
says Rousseau, but it does not follow that the decisions of the people
are always equally correct. Man always wills his own good, but does not
always see it. The people is never corrupt, but often deceived, and in
the latter case only does it seem to will what is evil. If there were no
parties in the state, the people, if sufficiently informed, would always
vote rightly, for the little differences in private interests would
balance each other, and the resulting average would be the general will.
But through parties and associations this result is prevented. A nation
may change its laws when it pleases, even the best of them; for if it
likes to hurt itself, who has the right to say it nay?
Sovereignty is inalienable, for power is transmissible, but not will.
Sovereignty consists essentially in the general will, and the general
will cannot be represented. It is the same, or it is other; there is no
intermediate point. The deputies of the people cannot be its
representatives; they can only be its agents; they can conclude nothing
definitely. Any law that the people has not ratified in its assembly is
null; it is not a law. The English nation thinks itself free. It is much
mistaken. It is free only during the election of members of Parliament.
As soon as these are elected the nation is enslaved; it is nothing.
Sovereignty is indivisible, its powers being legislative only, and the
executive function of the state being but its emanation.
Such being the essential conditions of the social compact, what are the
states to which it may be applied? Although Rousseau gives many
directions for the government of larger countries, we see that his
system is truly applicable only to nations so small that the whole body
of voters can be united in one meeting. These popular assemblies, he
says, should be held frequently, at times fixed by law and independent
of any summons, and also at irregular times when needed. Let no one
object that such frequent meetings would take up too much time. He
answers that "as soon as the public service ceases to be the principal
business of the citizens, and they prefer to serve with their purses
rather than with their persons, the state is already near to ruin. If it
be necessary to march to battle, they pay soldiers and stay at home; if
it be necessary to attend the council, they choose deputies and stay at
home. By laziness and money they have at last got troops to enslave
their country and representatives to betray her."
The only law that requires unanimity is the social compact itself. When
that is once formed, each citizen consents to every law, even to those
which are passed in spite of him. When a law is proposed in the assembly
of the people, the question is not exactly whether the proposal is
approved or rejected, but whether it is in accordance with the general
will, which is the will of the people. Every man by his vote declares
his opinion on that point, and by counting the votes the declaration of
the general will is ascertained. When, therefore, the opinion which is
opposed to mine prevails, it proves nothing more than that I was
mistaken, and that what I took to be the general will was not so. If my
private opinion had carried the day against the general will, I should
have done what I did not wish; and then I should not have been free.
It has been said that the sovereign must not act in particular cases. To
do so would be to confound law and fact, and the body politic would soon
be a prey to violence. It is, therefore, necessary to institute an
executive branch, which Rousseau calls indifferently _government_
or _prince_, explaining that the latter word may be used
collectively. But, differing in this from older writers, he denies that
the establishment of an executive power gives rise to any contract
between the body of the people and the persons appointed to govern. He
considers these persons to be intermediate between the nation considered
as sovereign, and the people considered as subject, and to hold but a
delegated power. In this opinion, Rousseau has been followed by most
liberal governments instituted since his day. But he carries this theory
much farther than it is safe to do in practice. The sovereign, he says,
may at any moment revoke the powers of its agents, and the first act of
every public assembly should be to answer these two questions: first,
whether it pleases the sovereign to maintain the present form of
government; and second, whether it pleases the people to leave the
administration to those persons who now exercise it.
The chapters on the form of government are far less important than those
on sovereignty. Rousseau recognized democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy
as applicable respectively to small, middle-sized, and large states. He
says that democracy is the most difficult form to manage, requiring for
its perfect working a state so small that every citizen can know every
other personally, and also great simplicity of manners, great equality
of ranks and fortunes, and little luxury. This applies, of course, only
to democracy in its extreme form, in which the people exercises all the
functions of government without delegating any of them. Rousseau's
preference was for what he calls aristocracy, a government of the most
wise and experienced. The first societies, he says, were thus governed,
and the American Indians are so governed still. It is noticeable that
the Indians take in the works of Rousseau a place similar to that taken
by the Chinese in those of Voltaire; they are distant people, living in
an ideal condition. The freedom of the savage, the literary civilization
of the Oriental, were held up to admiration by these two writers,
diametrically opposed in their way of looking at life, but similar in
their utter want of comprehension of all that was not European and
contemporary. Next after the government of the sages and the elders
Rousseau placed elective government, which, in common with some other
abstract writers, he classes as aristocratic. An hereditary aristocracy
he calls the worst of all governments. He intimated that his remedy for
the weakness of small countries, as against foreign enemies, would be
found in federation, but he postponed the discussion of this subject to
a larger treatise, which was never written.[Footnote: Rousseau has
himself given two summaries of the Social Compact; one very short, in
the Sixth Letter from the Mountain (_Oeuvres_, vii. 378). This was
written after the condemnation of the book by the authorities of Geneva,
and he points out in his remonstrance that he has taken Geneva as the
model state, in the Social Compact. The other summary, much fuller, is
in the fifth book of _Émile_ (_Oeuvres_, v. 248). Here we find
the following growl at the whole social order: "Nous examinerons si l'on
n'a pas fait trop ou trop peu dans l'institution sociale. Si les
individus soumis aux loix et aux hommes, tandis que les societes gardent
entre elles l'independance de la nature, ne restent pas exposes aux maux
des deux états sans en avoir les avantages, et s'il ne vaudrait pas
mieux qu'il n'y eut point de societe civile au monde que d'y en avoir
plusieurs."]
Rousseau pointed out very forcibly the incompatibility with civil
government of a religion depending on a priesthood whose organization
extends beyond the territory of the country itself and forms a body
politic. Yet he did not propose to apply the only true remedy for this
condition of things, which is the complete separation of church and
state, combined with liberty of speech both for the clergy and the
laity. He recognized as possible only three sorts of religion, of which
the first, without temples, altars, or rites, confined inwardly to the
worship of God and externally to the moral duties, was, as he thought,
the pure and simple religion of the Gospels, the true theism, and might
be called the natural divine law. The next is a national religion,
belonging to one country. It has its gods, its rites, its altars, all
within its own land, outside of which everything is infidel, strange,
and barbarian. Man's duties extend no farther than the boundaries of his
own country. Such were the religions of the early nations. The third
kind gives to its votaries two systems of legislation, two chiefs, two
homes, makes them submit to contradictory duties, prevents their being
at once devout worshipers and good citizens. Such a religion is the
Roman Catholic.
The Roman clergy, he says, is united, not by its formal assemblies, but
by communion and excommunication, which are its social compact, and by
means of which it will always retain the mastery over kings and nations.
All the priests who are in communion are citizens, although at the ends
of the earth. This invention is a masterpiece of politics.
On some religion our author believes that the state has a right to
insist. There is a purely civil profession of faith, whose articles the
sovereign may fix, not exactly as dogmas of religion, but as principles
of sociability. These must be few, simple and clear, and announced
without explanation or commentary. The existence of a deity, powerful,
intelligent, beneficent, foreseeing, and providing; the life to come,
with the happiness of the good and the punishment of the wicked; the
sacredness of the Social Compact and of the laws,--these are the
positive dogmas. Of things forbidden there should be but one:
intolerance. Whosoever says that there is no salvation but in the church
should be driven from the state; for such teaching is dangerous to the
sovereign, except, indeed, in a theocracy. Any one who does not hold to
the simple creed above described may properly be banished, not as
impious but as unsociable, incapable of loving justice and the laws
sincerely, or of sacrificing his life to his duty. And if any one, after
having publicly accepted these dogmas, behaves as if he did not believe
them, let him be put to death; he has committed the greatest of crimes;
he has lied before the laws.
In the short essay on the Social Compact, Rousseau has brought
together, as we have seen, several of the most dangerous errors which
have afflicted modern society. The people, according to him, is not
only all powerful, but always righteous; sometimes deceived, but never
corrupt. Why the whole community should be better or wiser than the
best of the persons who compose it; why our errors should balance or
counteract each other and our virtues not do so, Rousseau probably
never asked himself; or if the question occurred to his mind, he
dismissed it with a merely specious answer. There is hardly a limit to
the tyranny which he allows to the multitude. The individual citizen
is made free from the interference of a single master only that he may
be the more dependent on that corporate despot who is to control his
every action and his very thoughts. Manners, customs, above all public
opinion, are declared to be the most important of laws. Individuality
is, therefore, to be absolutely banished. Nor is security provided
for. It is the advantage of a stationary system that a man may know
this year what the world will expect of him ten years hence and may
lay his plans accordingly. Human laws may sometimes be pardoned for
being as inflexible as the laws of physics if they are as surely to be
relied on. But Rousseau, while hoping that his state will change very
little, carefully reserves for his tyrant the right to be
capricious. And lest that right should ever be forgotten he takes care
that the whole form of government shall be brought in question at
every public meeting. What the multitude has to-day decided it may
reverse to-morrow. The unfortunate citizen is not left even the right
to protest. The general will, when once proved by the popular vote, is
his own will. The very desires of his heart must loyally follow the
changing caprices of his many-headed master.
Yet here as elsewhere Rousseau has joined a noble conception to a base
one. The law, once promulgated by the sovereign power, is to be
universal throughout the state and superior to all human rulers. The
idea was not novel, but it was well that it should again be distinctly
formulated.
It is quite in accordance with the general spirit of the essay that
while intolerance is said to be the only religious crime, it is in fact
the foundation of the whole ecclesiastical system of the republic.
Whoever dares to say that there is no salvation outside of the church is
to be driven from the state. By this means Rousseau would have exiled
nearly every Christian of the eighteenth century. On the other hand,
whoever doubts the existence of God, His providence, and His rewards and
punishments, is to be treated in the same manner. Some of the
Philosophers of the age are thus excluded. Verily, few are the just that
remain, and Rousseau is quite right in his opinion that those who
distinguish between civil and theological intolerance are mistaken. In
his system, at least, the two are closely connected.