In order to appreciate what Rousseau meant to the revolutionary
movement, it is necessary to consider the effect of style upon men.
Men are influenced by the word. Spoken or written, the _word_ is the
organ of persuasion and, therefore, of moral government.
Now, degraded as that term has become in our time, there is no proper
term to express the exact use of words save the term “style.”
What words we use, and in what order we put them, is the whole matter of
style; and a man desiring to influence his fellow men has therefore not
one, but two co-related instruments at his disposal. He cannot use one
without the other. The weakness of the one will ruin the other. These
two instruments are his idea and his style.
However powerful, native, sympathetic to his hearers’ mood or cogently
provable by reference to new things may be a man’s idea, he cannot
persuade his fellow men to it if he have not words that express it. And
he will persuade them more and more in proportion as his words are well
chosen and in the right order, such order being determined by the genius
of the language whence they are drawn.
Whether the idea of which Rousseau made himself the exponent in his
famous tract be true or false, need not further concern us in this
little book. We all know that the difficult attempt to realise political
freedom has attracted various communities of men at various times and
repelled others. What English readers rarely hear is that the triumph of
Rousseau depended not only on the first element in persuasion, which is
vision, but also upon the second of the two co-related instruments by
which a man may influence his fellows--to wit, style. It was his choice
of French words and the order in which he arranged them, that gave him
his enormous ascendancy over the generation which was young when he was
old.
I have alluded to his famous tract, the _Contrat Social_, and here a
second point concerning it may be introduced. This book which gave a
text for the Revolution, the document to which its political theory
could refer, was by no means (as foreign observers have sometimes
imagined) the whole body of writing for which Rousseau was responsible.
To imagine that is to make the very common error of confusing a man with
his books.
Rousseau wrote on many things: his character was of an exalted, nervous
and diseased sort. Its excessive sensibility degenerated with advancing
years into something not distinguishable from mania. He wrote upon
education, and the glory of his style carried conviction both where he
was right and where the short experience of a hundred years has proved
him to have been wholly wrong. He wrote upon love, and half the lessons
to be drawn from his writing will be condemned by the sane. He wrote
upon botany at vast length; he wrote also upon music--with what success
in either department I am incompetent to determine. He wrote upon human
inequality: and though the sentences were beautiful and the sentiment
just, the analysis was very insufficient and the historical conception
bad. He wrote upon a project for perpetual peace, which was rubbish; and
he wrote upon the government of Poland an essay which was a perfect
masterpiece.
But when a great writer writes, each of his great writings has a life of
its own, and it was not any of these other writings of Rousseau, on
love or botany, which were the text of the Revolution. The text of the
Revolution was his _Contrat Social_.
Now it is not too much to say that never in the history of political
theory has a political theory been put forward so lucidly, so
convincingly, so tersely or so accurately as in this short and wonderful
book. The modern publisher in this country would be ashamed to print it:
not for its views (which would now seem commonplace), nor for its
excellence, which would ensure it a failure, but for its brevity. It is
as short as a gospel, and would cover but a hundred pages of one of our
serious reviews. A modern publisher in this city would not know what
price to set upon such a work, and the modern reader in this country
would be puzzled to understand how a great thing could be got within so
narrow a compass. A debate in Parliament or the libretto of a long
pantomime is of greater volume.
Nevertheless, if it be closely read the _Contrat Social_ will be
discovered to say all that can be said of the moral basis of democracy.
Our ignorance of the historical basis of the State is presumed in the
very opening lines of it. The logical priority of the family to the
State is the next statement. The ridiculous and shameful argument that
strength is the basis of authority--which has never had standing save
among the uninstructed or the superficial--is contemptuously dismissed
in a very simple proof which forms the third chapter, and that chapter
is not a page of a book in length. It is with the fifth chapter that the
powerful argument begins, and the logical precedence of _human
association_ to any particular form of government is the foundation
stone of that analysis. It is this indeed which gives its title to the
book: the moral authority of men in community arises from _conscious
association_; or, as an exact phraseology would have it, a “social
contract.” All the business of democracy as based upon the only moral
authority in a State follows from this first principle, and is developed
in Rousseau’s extraordinary achievement which, much more than any other
writing not religious, has affected the destiny of mankind.
It is indeed astonishing to one who is well acquainted not only with the
matter, but with the manner of the _Contrat Social_, to remark what
criticisms have been passed upon it by those who either have not read
the work or, having read it, did so with an imperfect knowledge of the
meaning of French words. The two great counter arguments, the one
theoretic the other practical, which democracy has to meet, stand
luminously exposed in these pages, though in so short a treatise the
author might have been excused from considering them. The theoretical
argument against democracy is, of course, that man being prone to evil,
something external to him and indifferent to his passions must be put up
to govern him; the people will corrupt themselves, but a despot or an
oligarchy, when it has satisfied its corrupt desires, still has a wide
margin over which it may rule well because it is indifferent. You
cannot bribe the despot or the oligarch beyond the limit of his desires,
but a whole people can follow its own corrupt desires to the full, and
they will infect all government.
The full practice of democracy, therefore, says Rousseau, is better
suited to angels than to men.
As to the practical argument that men are not sufficiently conscious of
the State to practise democracy, save in small communities, that plea
also is recognised and stated better than any one else has stated it.
For there is not in this book an apology for democracy as a method of
government, but a statement of why and how democracy is right.
The silly confusion which regards a representative method as essentially
democratic has never been more contemptuously dealt with, nor more
thoroughly, than in the few words in which the _Contrat Social_
dismisses it for ever; though it was left to our own time to discover,
in the school of unpleasant experience, how right was Rousseau in this
particular condemnation.
Exiguous as are the limits within which the great writer has finally
decided the theory of democracy, he finds space for side issues which
nowhere else but in this book had been orderly considered, and which,
when once one has heard them mentioned, one sees to be of the most
excellent wisdom: that the fundamental laws, or original and particular
bonds, of a new democracy must come from a source external to itself;
that to the nature of the people for whom one is legislating, however
democratic the form of the State, we must conform the particulars of
law; that a democracy cannot live without “tribunes”; that no utterly
inflexible law can be permitted in the State--and hence the necessity
for dictatorship in exceptional times; that no code can foresee future
details--and so forth.
It would be a legitimate and entertaining task to challenge any man who
had not read the _Contrat Social_ (and this would include most academic
writers upon the treatise) to challenge any such one, I say, to put down
an argument against democratic theory which could not be found within
those few pages, or to suggest a limitation of it which Rousseau had not
touched on.
If proof were needed of what particular merits this pamphlet displayed,
it would be sufficient to point out that in a time when the problem
represented by religion was least comprehended, when the practice of
religion was at its lowest, and when the meaning, almost, of religion
had left men’s minds, Rousseau was capable of writing his final chapter.
That the great religious revival of the nineteenth century should have
proved Rousseau’s view of religion in the State to be insufficient is in
no way remarkable, for when Rousseau wrote, that revival was undreamt
of; what is remarkable is that he should have allowed as he did for the
religious sentiment, and above all, that he should have seen how
impossible it is for a selection of Christian dogma to be accepted as a
civic religion.
It is further amazing that at such a time a man could be found who
should appreciate that for the State, to have unity, it must possess a
religion, and Rousseau’s attempt to define that minimum or substratum of
religion without which unity could not exist in the State unfortunately
became the commonplace of the politicians, and particularly of the
English politicians who succeeded him. Who might not think, for
instance, that he was reading--though better expressed, of course, than
a politician could put it--some “Liberal” politician at Westminster, if
he were to come on such phrases as these with regard to what should be
taught in the schools of the country?
“The doctrines taught by the State should be simple, few in number,
expressed with precision and without explanation or commentary. The
existence of a powerful God, beneficent, providential and good; the
future life; the happiness of the good and the punishment of evil; the
sanctity of the agreements which bind society together and of laws;
while as for negative doctrines, one is sufficient, and that one is the
wickedness of intolerance.”
Rousseau’s hundred pages are the direct source of the theory of the
modern State; their lucidity and unmatched economy of diction; their
rigid analysis, their epigrammatic judgment and wisdom--these are the
reservoirs from whence modern democracy has flowed; what are now proved
to be the errors of democracy are errors against which the _Contrat
Social_ warned men; the moral apology of democracy is the moral apology
written by Rousseau; and if in this one point of religion he struck a
more confused and a less determined note than in the rest, it must be
remembered that in his time no other man understood what part religion
played in human affairs; for in his days the few who studied religion
and observed it could not connect it in any way with the political
nature of man, and of those who counted in the intellect of Europe, by
far the greater number thought political problems better solved if
religion (which they had lost) were treated as negligible. They were
wrong--and Rousseau, in his generalities upon the soul, was
insufficient; both were beneath the height of a final theory of man, but
Rousseau came much nearer to comprehension, even in this point of
religion, than did any of his contemporaries.