ROUSSEAU AND THE IDYLLIC IMAGINATION
The period that extends from the Renaissance to the eighteenth
century was, as I have indicated in my first chapter, marked by the
progressive emancipation of the individual from outer authority and
the supernatural beliefs that this authority sought to impose. The
individual did not use his new liberty to work out some critical
equivalent of traditional religion; on the contrary he became
increasingly naturalistic. At the same time he often indulged in
theories of government that were at the opposite pole from those of
Machiavelli, the typical political naturalist. This is because certain
virtues were associated more and more with “nature,” virtues that the
past had deemed the hard-won fruit not merely of humanistic but of
religious discipline. If the legitimacy of this association could be
established, the Aristotelian generalization with which I started as
to the necessary relation between ethos and government would evidently
have to be abandoned. Before deserting Aristotle, however, we may do
well to consider whether some sophistry does not lurk in what came to
be the popular interpretation of the “state of nature.”
The notion of a state of nature and of a law of nature antecedent
to positive law and organized society is, as we have seen, nothing
new. It emerges in classical antiquity, especially among the Stoics,
and survives throughout the Middle Ages, largely as a result of the
infiltration of the Stoical influence into Roman law. It is reinforced
again, as I have said, by the direct return of the Renaissance to
the Stoical[21] and other ancient sources. Moreover, one may find as
early as the Church Fathers a tendency to identify the supposed state
of nature with the state of man before the Fall and then to give to
this state a communistic coloring, and at the same time to associate
with man’s lapse from innocence the rise of private property.[22]
Though the law of nature was conceived to be in its own way divine,
its authority was after all not to be compared with that of the divine
law of which one secured knowledge through revelation. As long as one
held to this positive form of God’s law, one’s assertion of a state of
nature was sure to be tempered by a lively conviction of the survival
in man of the “old Adam.” Hooker, for example, whose “Ecclesiastical
Polity” appeared in 1592, looks forward in many of his ideas about
natural law to Locke. But though asserting this law he declares:
“Laws politic, ordained for external order and regimen among men, are
never framed as they should be, unless presuming the will of man to
be obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience to the sacred
laws of his nature; in a word, unless presuming man to be in regard
of his depraved mind, little better than a wild beast.” In the period
between Hooker and Locke, the conviction of man’s depravity undergoes
a notable diminution. Grotius already affirms that, even if there
were no God and no positive revelation, man might be guided aright in
matters political by the law of nature conceived as a law of right
reason. Along with this glorification of reason, one should note
as far back as the sixteenth century an incipient glorification of
instinct that was later to culminate, in one of its most characteristic
expressions, in the cult of the noble savage. It is only, however,
with the early eighteenth century that the glorification of instinct
takes on so distinctly emotional a cast as to affect the very basis of
ethics. Shaftesbury’s doctrine of the “moral sense” and the instinctive
goodness it implies had wide and immediate popularity. For example,
Sir John Hawkins says in his “Life of Johnson”: “His [Fielding’s]
morality, in respect that it resolves virtue into good affections,
in contradiction to moral obligation and a sense of duty, is that of
Lord Shaftesbury vulgarized. He was the inventor of that cant-phrase,
‘goodness of heart,’ which is every day used as a substitute for
probity, and means little more than the virtue of a horse or a dog.”
Not only Shaftesbury, the optimistic naturalist, but the naturalistic
cynic, Mandeville, prepared the way, as I have already said, for the
emotional ethics of Rousseau. According to Rousseau, the state of
nature is not a state of reason. On the contrary, the man who thinks
is already highly sophisticated, or, in Rousseau’s phrase, “a depraved
animal.” According to him, man in the state of nature is isolated and
at the same time dominated by instinct. These isolated units will
not, however, as Hobbes averred, be so dominated by the instinct of
self-love as to make war on one another. Natural man has another
instinct, namely, an instinctive dislike of seeing his fellow creatures
suffer, which is alone a sufficient counterpoise to the love of self.
From the concourse and combination of these two principles--love of
self and instinctive pity--Rousseau seeks to derive all the rules of
natural right. “Even the most outrageous detractor of human virtue”
(that is, Mandeville), says Rousseau, “was forced to admit natural
pity, though he did not see that from this quality alone derive all
the social virtues--generosity, clemency, humanity, benevolence, and
friendship itself--that he seeks to deny men.” Indeed, if one considers
unsophisticated man, man subject, that is, only to the primordial
instincts of pity and love of self, one must conclude that he is “the
most virtuous who offers the least resistance to the simple impulses of
nature.” According to Schopenhauer,[23] it was the glorious achievement
of Rousseau to transform morality by thus basing it upon pity. A
result of this achievement that should be noted is the modification,
apparent in the sentence I have just quoted, in the meaning of such
words as virtue. The more, indeed, one studies the eighteenth century,
the plainer it becomes that all other modern revolutions were preceded
at about that time by a revolution in the dictionary. For a fuller
understanding of Rousseau’s recoining of the word virtue, one needs
to turn back for a moment to the “First Discourse” (1750). He there
asserts the incompatibility between virtue and the refinement and
luxury that seem to him to result necessarily from a cultivation of
the arts and sciences. In his account of the undermining of Rome and
other great states by the invasion of luxury, he uses by actual count
the word virtue forty-three times. But one is not to suppose that in
his solution of the problem of luxury that so preoccupied his age he is
really seeking to recover the virtue of a Fabricius or a Lycurgus or a
Calvin. What he opposes to luxury is rather a return to nature and the
simple life--and the simple life, as he conceives it, is to be very
simple indeed.[24] His virtue is a glorification of the instinctive
and the subrational. So that Joubert was justified from his own point
of view in saying that Rousseau had destroyed wisdom in men’s souls by
talking to them about virtue.
Though the virtue of the “First Discourse” is distinctly primitivistic,
it received an essential addition in the “Second Discourse” by being
associated with the idea of pity. The state of nature for Hobbes, as
we have seen, meant liberty, equality, and war; for Locke, liberty,
equality, and reason. On the contrary, says Rousseau, both war and
reason are the result of social sophistication. The true state of
nature is liberty, equality, and fraternal pity. By his refutation of
Hobbes, and his substitution of fraternity for reason, Rousseau gave to
naturalism the driving power it still lacked. It thus became possible
to develop it into a new evangel that seemed to culminate, like the
old Evangel, in love. This conception of love in terms of expansive
emotion is, as I have already said, a sort of parody of Christian
charity.
In the state of nature all men are, it would seem, equally capable of
pity. But in actual society the emphasis on pity leads to the setting
up of a sort of inverted hierarchy. Just as in Christianity a man’s
spiritual rank is determined by his nearness to God, which is revealed
in turn by the ardor of his charity, so in the new evangel man is to
be rated by his nearness to nature, which is revealed in turn by the
warmth of his commiseration. Now it is in the man of the plain people
that the lively native impulse is least sicklied o’er by the pale cast
of thought. “Love had he found in huts where poor men lie.” As one
ascends in the social scale, love diminishes, and as one approaches the
top, it gives way to its opposite. As for the rich, Rousseau compares
them to “ravening wolves, who having once tasted human flesh, refuse
every other food, and henceforth desire to devour only men.”
Rousseau is, as a matter of fact, busy in creating a new set of myths
that have, in their control of the human imagination, succeeded in
no small measure to the old theology. Just as in the old theology
everything hinged on man’s fall from God, so in Rousseau everything
hinges on man’s fall from nature. The first and decisive step in this
fall and the source of social evils was, according to Rousseau’s
familiar account, the invention of private property in the form
of property in land. With the invention of property, “equality
disappeared.” “Work became necessary, and the vast forests were
changed to smiling fields that had to be watered with the sweat of
men, in which slavery and wretchedness were soon seen to spring up and
grow with the crops.” Misery, in short, is the result of industry.
What evidently underlies the mythology that Rousseau is thus creating
is a new dualism. The old dualism put the conflict between good and
evil in the breast of the individual, with evil so predominant since
the Fall that it behooves man to be humble; with Rousseau this conflict
is transferred from the individual to society. That there is some
survival of the older dualism in Rousseau is beyond question; but it
is equally beyond question that the actual influence of his work has
been almost entirely associated with the new dualism. He himself saw in
this new dualism the essence of the apocalyptic vision that came to him
under the tree by the roadside on his walk to Vincennes. The guiding
principle of his writings, he says, is to show that vice and error,
strangers to man’s constitution, are introduced from without, that they
are due in short to his institutions. Now institutions mean in practice
those who administer them. A small group at the top of the artificial
hierarchy, kings and priests and capitalists, sit on the lid, as it
were, and keep man’s native goodness (as in Shelley’s “Prometheus
Unbound”) from gushing forth torrentially. The fault in any case is not
“Nature’s”;
Nature! No!
Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower
Even in its tender bud; their influence darts
Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins
Of desolate society.
Whence this strange dualism arose, “how George III and Paley and Lord
Eldon came to possess an existence independent of Nature, and acquired
the power of turning all her good purposes to nought,” is, as Leslie
Stephen remarks of Shelley, “one of those questions which we can hardly
refrain from asking.” A similar question arises regarding the dualism
of Rousseau. Most people, however, have not been inclined to subject
the myth of natural goodness to any such indiscreet scrutiny. It is not
only very flattering in itself; it seems to offer a convenient avenue
of escape from the theological nightmare. Above all it flattered those
at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Christianity at its best has
sought to make the rich man humble, whereas the inevitable effect of
the Rousseauistic evangel is to make the poor man proud, and at the
same time to make him feel that he is the victim of a conspiracy. The
establishment of society and laws made it possible to change “an adroit
usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few
ambitious persons subjected henceforth the whole of human kind to toil,
servitude, and wretchedness.” One need scarcely be surprised that this
and similar passages of the “Second Discourse” should still be a direct
source of inspiration to the bomb-throwing anarchist.[25] What one
hears throughout this treatise, as elsewhere in Rousseau, is the voice
of the angry and envious plebeian, who in the name of love is actually
fomenting hatred and class warfare. “What was hardest to destroy in
me,” we read in “Emile,” “was a proud misanthropy, a certain acrimony
against the rich and happy of the world as though they were so at my
expense, as though their alleged happiness had been usurped from mine.”
The crusader against social inequalities on Rousseauistic lines may
easily become not merely an enthusiast but a fanatic. This emancipation
of feeling seems at first sight the essential aspect of Rousseau’s
interpretation of nature. Instead of the rationalistic and mechanical
nature of the Cartesian, nature is spontaneity, in the sense of
an expansive and even an explosive emotionalism. “I threw reason
overboard,” says Rousseau himself, “and consulted nature, that is to
say the inner sentiment which directs my belief independently of my
reason.” But on closer examination one discovers that there is in
Rousseau something even more fundamental than his emotionalism, and
that is his special quality of imagination. In order to make this
point clear, we need to consider with some care the contrast between
the natural and the artificial that he establishes in his “Second
Discourse.” His method in reaching this contrast is similar in some
respects to that of the modern evolutionist. Instead of having us look
forward to ends, as Aristotle urges, if we are to understand man’s
nature, he would, like the evolutionist, have us grope our way back to
beginnings. The change from primitive to civilized man is presented
as a slow development with certain intermediary stages, each one of
which Rousseau supposes to have consumed “thousands of centuries.”
This portrayal of the evolution of mankind as a whole through various
stages aided, one may note in passing, the efflorescence in Germany
of numerous philosophies of history.[26] Rousseau’s nature, however,
is in one particular violently at variance with the nature of most of
the philosophers of history and with that of all the evolutionists.
Though the evolutionist is only too prone to whisk us off into some
prehistoric period where he is free to indulge in airy hypothesis,
he does not see in nature at any stage of the evolutionary process a
source of pity. By his attribution of pity to the state of nature,
Rousseau has indeed gone far to justify the sentence with which he
opens his discussion of this state in the “Second Discourse”: “Let
us begin by setting aside all the facts.” The key to Rousseau’s
nature, and also to what has passed for the ideal with innumerable
Rousseauists, is found in his declaration that, not being able to
discover men to his liking in the real world, he built up for himself
a “golden age of phantasy.”[27] His nature is in short what I have
described elsewhere as a projection of the idyllic imagination.
Faguet complains that the image Rousseau has left on the mind of the
public is that of a gentleman up in a cherry tree tossing down cherries
to two maidens below (incident of Mesdemoiselles Galley and Graffenried
in the “Confessions”). Perhaps the public is not so far wrong after
all as to Rousseau’s essential attitude. One can scarcely go through
Rousseau’s writings without being struck by the number of variants he
has given of the pastoral theme. Let no one suppose that it is a small
matter to be, like Rousseau, richly and spontaneously imaginative in
this idyllic fashion. Perhaps no human trait is more universal than the
longing for some golden age or land of heart’s desire. This longing has
not only inspired a large proportion of the art and literature of the
world, but has found its way into philosophy and religion. The idyllic
element is unmistakably present in the story of the Garden of Eden;
the Song of Solomon is described by Milton as a “divine pastoral”; the
millennial yearnings of the early Christians are not unrelated to the
same type of imagination. The Krishna of the Bhagavadgîtâ is not in the
least pastoral, but in the picture that often serves as frontispiece to
Indian editions of this poem, Krishna appears with the pastoral flute
and kine, surrounded by the _gopis_ or shepherdesses.
What concerns us here is the relation of this type of imagination to
modern political idealism. The agitator makes his chief appeal to it
when he stirs the multitude by his pictures of the felicity that is
to supervene upon the destruction of the existing social order. The
English painter, Edward Lear, relates that in the year of revolution,
1848, he was staying in a Sicilian town. He left the town for some
weeks and locked up his pictures and other things in a room, leaving
the key with the hotel-keeper. A revolution had just broken out when
he returned, and he found the waiters full of Chianti and patriotic
fervor. He ventured to ask one of them for the key of his room that
he might get his clothes. The waiter utterly refused to be led from
his dreams of a golden age to such details of daily life. “There isn’t
any longer any key or room or clothes,” he exclaimed indignantly.
“Everything is love and liberty. _O che bella rivoluzione!_”[28]
Unfortunately when the real refuses to vanish in favor of the ideal, it
is easy to persuade the simple-minded that the failure is due not to
the ideal itself, but to some conspiracy. In speaking of one of these
childlike disciples of Rousseau, Anatole France says that it was his
misfortune to have carried into the profession of cook to which fate
had condemned him an Elysian soul intended for the golden age. He had
been led to the most savage ferocity by the tenderest optimism. As
Anatole France adds, when one starts with the supposition that men are
naturally good and virtuous, one inevitably ends by wishing to kill
them all. What is remarkable about the period since the eighteenth
century is the extent to which not merely the rank and file, but
the leaders have followed the lure of the idyllic imagination. Thus
Schiller exalts the idyll to the first places in literature, and
associates it with the ideal. Elsewhere I have tried to show that the
idyll does not deserve any such rank in literature. It would seem even
more open to suspicion as a basis for political action. Lincoln writes
to his friend Speed: “I have no doubt it is the peculiar misfortune
of both you and me to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that
anything earthly can realize.” Lincoln was in these Elysian yearnings,
as in other respects, very human. He was not, however, Elysian in his
actual statesmanship.
Later in this book we shall study more in detail various persons who,
unlike Lincoln, have carried over the idyllic type of “vision” into
the field of politics and economics. All that I wish to show now
is that, in the case of Rousseau himself, even his sensibility is
subject to his imagination, inasmuch as this imagination conjures up
the Arcadian state that he terms “nature,” towards which his emotions
expand so freely. But to present Rousseau merely as an idyllic and
emotional dreamer, it may be urged, is to forget that part of his
writings, the “Social Contract,” for instance, in which he shows
himself severely and coldly logical. The occasional severity of
Rousseau’s logic one may grant, but its coldness is another matter.
Starting from the premise of a fictitious state of nature, it leads
to conclusions that justify emotional revolt against everything
established, that are indeed enough to make “the very stones of Rome
to rise and mutiny.” If the subjects of a despot, for example (every
king in Europe was a despot according to the logic of the “Social
Contract”), seem to enjoy domestic tranquillity, it is merely, says
Rousseau, the tranquillity of the companions of Ulysses in the den of
the Cyclops, waiting their turn to be devoured. Rousseau’s logic has
been compared in its relation to his emotions to a henpecked husband,
who keeps up a brave outer show of independence while actually doing
his wife’s bidding. Moreover, another end is accomplished by Rousseau’s
display of logical rigor. The man at the bottom of the existing social
order is flattered by being told that he is more virtuous, more fully
possessed, in other words, of the spontaneous goodness of the state
of nature than the man at the top. But, however ready he may be to
believe that he is superior in feeling, he does not after all like
to look upon himself as incapable of thought. The multitude, says
Aristotle, cannot make distinctions. Rousseau’s logic is so contrived
as to give to the multitude at least the illusion that it _can_ make
distinctions. He owes no small part of his amazing influence to his
flattery of the popular head as well as of the popular heart. As Taine
writes in a letter to W. S. Lilly: “What gives extraordinary power to
the ideas of Rousseau is above all the simplicity of the conception. As
a matter of fact, the political reasoning that it produces is as easy
as the rule of three. How are you to prove to this man that he does not
understand, that the notion of the State is one of the most difficult
to form, that political reasoning is beyond his grasp? You would insult
him. He cannot admit even as possible a thing so preposterous: and his
self-love is sufficient to blind his good sense.”
Thus far I have been dealing with the Rousseau who has actually moved
the world--the Rousseau whose feelings fly out towards the vision
conjured up by his imagination, and whose logic is in turn pressed
into the service of his feelings. One must, however, grant that there
is alongside of this Rousseau a very different Rousseau. It is related
that when he was in Strassburg a father told him that he was educating
his son strictly on the principles of “Emile.” He replied: “So much the
worse for him.” Even if not strictly true, this anecdote has a certain
symbolical value. It is to be associated with his saying that his heart
and his head did not seem to belong to the same individual. If his
heart (to which, as I have tried to show, his logic is subservient) is
revolutionary, his head is cautious. His replies to those who sought
counsel of him, as any one who has been through his correspondence will
testify, were frequently very shrewd and sensible. As M. Lanson says,
he applies his boldest doctrines in a way to reassure conservatives and
satisfy opportunists.
The contrast between the two Rousseaus is indeed so marked as to raise
the question of his sincerity. As a preliminary to a discussion of
this point, one needs to note that a special type of sincerity which
seems to be much in request these days is itself an outcome of the
Rousseauistic movement. It seems to be assumed in certain quarters that
almost any opinion is justified provided it be held with sufficient
emotional vehemence. One cannot help reflecting that perhaps the
best examples of sincerity in this sense are to be found in insane
asylums; and that much of Rousseau’s sincerity, his conviction for
instance during his later years that he was the victim of a universal
conspiracy, was of this order. Sincerity is indeed only one of a whole
class of virtues that are often taken to be primary when they are in
fact only virtues with reference to something more fundamental. Thus
many of our “liberals” conceive that it is in itself a virtue to be
forward-looking, whereas it may be a vice, if what one is looking
forward to should turn out to be pernicious or chimerical. A similar
remark applies to those who pique themselves on their open-mindedness.
It is well to open one’s mind, but only as a preliminary to closing
it, only as a preparation, in short, for the supreme act of judgment
and selection. In much the same way, the value of sincerity can be
estimated only with reference to the previous question of truth or
error. What makes the Socratic group at Athens and the scientific
investigator to-day seem so respectable, when compared with the
emotionalist, is that they ask, first of all, not whether a man is
sincere, but whether he is right or wrong. If one is right, it is of
course important, at least in the domain of moral values, that he
should be sincerely right.
It is hard to deny Rousseau the type of emotional sincerity that I have
just been discussing--a type that in its milder form reminds one of
what would be known nowadays as the will to believe, and in its extreme
form, is not far removed from madness. At the same time, Rousseau’s
head could on occasion stand aloof and deal rather Socratically with
his heart. For example, he said to Hume who had complimented him on
the style and eloquence of his books: “To tell the truth, I am not
displeased with myself in that particular: at the same time I dread
lest my writings are good for nothing at bottom, and that all my
theories are full of extravagance.”[29]
It is not, however, the self-critical Rousseau of this passage that
need concern us, for the simple reason that it is not this Rousseau who
has moved the world. The side of Rousseau that has moved the world,
as M. Lanson continues, is the side that “exasperates and inspires
revolt ...; it is the mother of violence, the source of all that is
uncompromising. It launches the simple souls who give themselves up
to its strange virtue upon the desperate quest of the absolute, an
absolute to be realized to-day by anarchy and to-morrow by social
despotism.”[30]
Though the Rousseau who has been influential is always Rousseau the
extremist, he oscillates, as M. Lanson says, between opposite extremes.
From the unflinching individualism of the “Second Discourse,” where man
is conceived as a sort of isolated and unrelated particle, he passes
to the no less unflinching collectivism of the “Social Contract.” He
fluctuates between extremes even in his collectivistic ideal. Thus he
writes to the Marquis de Mirabeau that he does not see “any endurable
mean between the most austere democracy and the most perfect Hobbism.”
You must choose, he says, between making a man and making a citizen.
You cannot hope to make both. Hitherto, I have been speaking for the
most part of the virtue of man in the state of nature as depicted in
the “Second Discourse.” It remains to speak of the “Social Contract,”
and of the method there outlined for divesting man as completely as
possible of his natural virtue in order that he may acquire the virtue
of the citizen. In what I have to say about the “Social Contract,”
I shall confine myself to the uncompromising main argument. That
there are other elements in the “Social Contract” is beyond question.
Rousseau affirms at times that the principles of government are not
absolute but relative; that they are subject in their application to
historical circumstances and physical environment, notably climate.
But this relativistic Rousseau who reveals at times the influence of
Montesquieu is, as I have said, unimportant compared to the Rousseau
who is straining out towards the absolute and the unlimited. This
absolutism of Rousseau appears, as is well known, most strikingly in
his doctrine of popular sovereignty. This doctrine he reasons out from
first principles with almost geometrical rigor. The first effect of
this reasoning is to make all existing governments seem illegitimate.
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The only free and
legitimate government is that founded upon a true social compact. On
this basis, it is possible to combine the advantages of organized
government with the liberty, equality, and fraternity that man enjoys,
not as the result of moral effort, but as a free gift, in the state
of nature. Only, under the social contract, these virtues no longer
reside in the individual, but in the general will. All the clauses of
the social contract “reduce themselves to one: the total alienation
of every associate with all his rights” (including his rights to
property) “to the whole community.” What guarantee is the individual
to have that the community will not abuse this unlimited control that
he has granted it over his person and property? Though the State is
for Rousseau as for Hobbes not natural but artificial, he proceeds
to develop the analogy between this artificial body and the body of
an actual person. One of the most important sources of this tendency
to set up an elaborate parallel between the individual and the State
is Plato’s “Republic.” In Plato, however, the parallel is used to
establish a severe hierarchy in the State, in much the same way that
the powers and faculties of the individual must work in due order
and subordination; whereas the informing spirit of the Rousseauistic
conception is the idea of equality. The use that Rousseau makes of the
parallel is to argue that the community cannot will the harm of any
of the individuals that compose it any more than the single person
can will the harm of one of his own members. On the side of theory,
however, Rousseau’s chief argument in favor of the disinterestedness
of the general will is that it has had transferred to it by the social
contract the spontaneous goodness that belongs to the will of the
individual in the state of nature. At this point, however, Rousseau’s
good sense intervenes. Granted that the multitude from whom the general
will emanates wishes the right thing, it does not always see it. The
people, after all, needs guidance. Hence arises the necessity of
the Lawgiver; and Rousseau goes on to imagine some person of almost
superhuman sagacity, set apart from other men, and under no suspicion
of self-seeking, who draws up an ideal code that is to direct the
general will, a code which actually enjoys credit with the people
because it seems to have religious sanction, in other words, because
the Lawgiver seems to speak not for himself, but only as a channel
of divine wisdom. One might suppose that the general will would be
limited by the Law thus imposed; that the Law would become a permanent
principle of control in the State, its higher self, as it were, in
opposition to its mere passing desires. But at bottom, Rousseau does
not want any effective check on the reaching out of his logic and
emotions towards the unlimited; and so he finally transfers to the
general will the anarchical impressionism he has asserted for the
individual. The only clear result of his speculations about the need
of a Law and a Lawgiver was to encourage the conceit of followers like
Robespierre, who felt that they had within them the making of a modern
Lycurgus. Practically the general will is lawless; it cannot bind
itself to obey its rulers, whom it regards as mere executive officers,
the people’s hired men as it were, revocable at pleasure. It cannot
bind itself to anything it has willed in the past, or obligate itself
in any way for the future. An assembly of the sovereign people should
invariably begin by voting separately on the two following questions:
“first, whether it pleases the sovereign to preserve the present form
of government; second, whether it pleases the people to leave the
administration of it to those who are now in charge.” The sovereign
people cannot be represented by a parliament, as in England. “At the
moment a State gives itself representatives it no longer exists.”
Sovereignty is absolute and indivisible. “To limit it is to destroy
it.” “The sovereign people, by the very fact that it is, is always
all that it should be.” It has often been pointed out that Rousseau
transfers to the people the doctrine that the king can do no wrong. But
he does more than that. The king, if not responsible to what is below
him, is at least responsible to what is above him--to God. But the
sovereign people is responsible to no one. It _is_ God. The contract
that it makes is with itself, like that which, according to the old
theologians, was made in the council chamber of the Trinity. “By the
mere pleasure of God,” says Jonathan Edwards, “I mean his sovereign
pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation,” etc. The
popular will is the successor of the divine will, from which everything
finally derived in the mediæval theocracy.
Rousseau’s idea of sovereignty, being as it is naturalistic, is of
course in its ultimate essence neither mediæval nor theocratic. His
idea of a contract that the people makes with itself, by which it
arrogates to itself full power, without any reciprocal obligation, is
in important respects original with Rousseau. “We are entering,” he
wrote in “Emile,” “on the era of crises and the age of revolutions.”
He not only made the prophecy, but did more than any other one man to
bring about its fulfilment. By asserting a general will that is at once
absolute and shifting, he achieved the paradox of basing government
on permanent revolution. Perhaps he is more closely related to Hobbes
than to any previous political thinker, especially if it be true,
as Sainte-Beuve says, that nothing resembles a hollow so much as a
swelling. His state of nature and his sovereignty are merely the state
of nature and the sovereignty of Hobbes reversed. In Rousseau the
people can do anything it pleases with its ruler, in Hobbes the ruler
can do anything he pleases with the people. But though the State of
Hobbes has no higher self--the very idea of a higher self is foreign
to his materialistic philosophy--it has at least a permanent self. The
contract by which the people divests itself of its power in favor of
its ruler is definitive. But Rousseau, as we have seen, will have no
such element of permanency. If he had conceived of the general will as
the permanent will of the people that might on occasion be in conflict
with its ordinary will, his distinction[31] between a disinterested
_volonté générale_ and a _volonté de tous_, which may stand for nothing
more than the egoistic wills of individuals or groups, might have a
serious meaning. As it is, this distinction melts away under close
scrutiny. It is mystical in the bad sense.
On all ordinary occasions the general will means a numerical majority
at any particular moment. An individual or a minority of individuals
has no appeal from the decision of this majority in its interpretation
of the general will. This is logical, inasmuch as the individual has
transferred to the general will the unlimited liberty that he enjoyed
in the state of nature. If any one is outvoted, he can console himself
by the reflection that he was mistaken, that what he took to be the
general will was not this will. If his private opinion had won, he
would have been doing something contrary to his true will and his true
liberty. In exercising constraint upon him, therefore, the majority
is simply “forcing him to be free.” By this device Rousseau gets rid
of the problem that has chiefly preoccupied political thinkers in
the English tradition--how, namely, to safeguard the freedom of the
individual or of minorities against a triumphant and despotic majority.
This solution of the problem involves the setting up of a new
dualism--that between the individual in his ordinary self and the
individual as a citizen and member of the sovereign people conceived
as his true self. But though the first term of this dualism, the
individual in his ordinary self, may be subject to rigid control, the
second term of the dualism, the State as embodied in the general will,
is, let me repeat, subject to no control at all. The liberty of the
general will, like that of the individual in the state of nature, can
be limited, if at all, as Rousseau says significantly, only by force.
Any one who traces the subject historically will acquire the
conviction, as I have already said, that the Christian religion founded
something of which not even a Plato or an Aristotle had any adequate
notion--personal liberty. By its separation of the things of God and
the things of Cæsar, it established a domain of free conscience, in
which the individual might take refuge from the encroachments of
the omnipotent State. It is plain that Rousseau does not propose to
leave the individual any such refuge. The last chapter of the “Social
Contract” is devoted to Civil Religion. This chapter abounds in remarks
of extraordinary shrewdness and penetration (as, for instance, where
he observes that the Crusades were not truly Christian in spirit) and
at the same time, so far as its general conclusions are concerned,
may be described in Rousseau’s own phrase as a “sea of sophisms.”
Rousseau distinguishes three types of religion: first, organized and
traditional Christianity, especially the Christianity of the Catholic
Church. This type of religion is so evidently bad as scarcely to merit
serious refutation. “All institutions that put man in contradiction
with himself are worthless.” The obvious reply of the older type of
dualist would be that man _is_ in contradiction with himself, and that
the Church merely reflects a primordial fact of human nature. One can
no more grant that institutions _per se_ are capable of any such effect
than one can admit Rousseau’s counter-assertion that, merely as a
result of institutions, all the members of a community may possess good
sense, justice, and integrity.[32]
The second religion that Rousseau recognizes is true Christianity,
a religion entirely of the heart, without rites and ceremonies, and
having much in common, as he conceives it, with the fluid emotionalism
of the sentimental deist. True Christians are like those great
cosmopolitan spirits of whom Rousseau speaks in the “Second Discourse,”
who “transcend the imaginary barriers that separate peoples, and like
the sovereign being who has created them, embrace the whole human race
in their benevolence.” The person, however, in whom natural pity has
thus blossomed into universal benevolence is not necessarily either
otherworldly or humble, and Rousseau is shrewd enough to see that the
true Christian is both. He, therefore, proceeds to attack not merely
institutional Christianity but true Christianity. It also divides man
against himself, and by giving him a celestial fatherland weakens his
allegiance to the _civitas terrena_. Rousseau brings up questions
of extraordinary complexity regarding the distinction between a
spiritual and a secular order, and the actual political results of this
distinction as worked out in Christianity, questions that for their
proper elucidation would require a volume. The main point that concerns
us here is his attack on humility, the underlying Christian virtue, on
the ground that it is incompatible with the full virtue of the citizen.
To be humble is to be submissive; so that “true Christians are meant
to be slaves.” One should, therefore, discard humility in favor of
patriotic pride, of the kind that flourished in the great days of Rome
and Sparta.
Here again in his dealings with the relations of Church and State,
Rousseau reminds us of Hobbes. “Of all Christian authors,” he himself
says, “the philosopher Hobbes is the only one who saw clearly the
evil and the remedy and ventured to propose bringing together the
two heads of the eagle,” thus subordinating everything to political
unity. But before Hobbes, Machiavelli, as I have already remarked,
had sought to discredit the idea of a separate spiritual order, and
also of Christian humility itself, so that the State might be all
in all. Quite apart from Rousseau’s admiration for Machiavelli and
from any conscious discipleship, his view of the State has more in
common with the Machiavellian view than one might at first suppose.
Machiavelli is not, of course, like Rousseau, an emotionalist, but
is, in his main trend, utilitarian. It is no accident that Francis
Bacon, the prophet of utilitarianism, should be, as Lord Acton points
out, his most distinguished English disciple. But Rousseau too has a
strongly utilitarian side. Indeed one finds in him, as in the whole of
our modern age, an endless interplay of sentimental and utilitarian
elements.
This utilitarian side of Rousseau appears in the third form of
religion he discusses in the “Social Contract.” After rejecting both
institutional Christianity and true Christianity, on the ground
that they are anti-national, he proposes as worthy of approval a
religion which, properly speaking, is not a religion at all, but a
social utility. The articles of its creed, which are determined by the
sovereign, are to be imposed not precisely as dogmas, but as promoting
sentiments of sociability. The positive dogmas of this civil creed
are, as Rousseau states them, fairly substantial (e.g., the existence
of God, the future life, the happiness of the just and the punishment
of the wicked). If any one does not believe them he may be banished
from the State, not as impious but as unsociable. “If any one, after
having recognized publicly these same dogmas, conducts himself as
though he did not believe them, let him be punished with death.” The
civil religion is to have only one negative dogma--the condemnation
of intolerance. This is directed especially against institutional
Christians, but it is hard to see how any one can escape this
condemnation who holds in matters religious to a definite standard of
right and wrong, quite apart from the omnipotent State and its supposed
utility.
Rousseau’s “civil religion” evidently looks forward to such an event
as Robespierre’s Festival of the Supreme Being. Unfortunately, it
also looks forward to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and to
the guillotining as “fanatics” of many of the priests who refused to
forswear their allegiance to Rome. It is fair to add that the “Social
Contract” is only one source[33] of the strife between clericals
and anti-clericals that has been so prominent in France since the
Revolution as to amount at times almost to civil war. In general we
should recollect that Rousseau was less an originator of the ideas we
have been discussing than the most important single figure in a vast
movement that had been gaining head for generations. In the words of
Madame de Staël he invented nothing, but set everything on fire. Burke,
the chief antagonist of Rousseau, took serious cognizance of this
movement and of the enthusiasm it inspired only when they had begun to
translate themselves into great historical events. It was Rousseau and
all he typified that he attacked in the French Revolution.