Besides the terminology of the historical fiction this curious passage shows in the strongest light the struggle by which Rousseau passed from the position of the “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” to that of the “Contrat Social.” The “hedging” of the sentence, “Although he deprives himself,” etc., represents a loathing of the decadent society of his day, which was deep-seated in Rousseau’s mind, and which his life enables us thoroughly to understand. The son of a Genevese artisan, with a touch of vagabond impulses, and more than a touch of Wordsworthian genius, he was the first, perhaps, of great modern writers to feel the true democratic passion, [1] and to see his artificial age as Plato or as Ruskin might {99} have seen it. It was no small feat of insight to subdue his just repugnance so far as to estimate, in the language of the chapter before us, the use, as distinct from the abuse, of law and society.
[1] Note the sentence in Émile, “C’est le peuple qui compose le genre humain; ce qui n’est pas peuple est si peu de chose que ce n’est pas la peine de le compter.” (Bk. iv., 3rd maxim.)
As a feature of this conflict of ideas, we may observe more especially the notion of original individual right, ascribed to a condition of man in which, according to the previous paragraph, right could not exist. The phrase is merely taken up from previous writers, as is also the so-called “right of the first occupant.” And the antithesis with true right and property, recognised by the social mind, in which this chapter presents them, has the effect of a destructive analysis of these uncritical conceptions. [1]
[1] Rousseau’s brilliant criticism, bk. I., ch. iii., has finally destroyed the conception of a right, whether natural or social, founded merely on force.
True right, then, begins with that social unity “by which a people is a people,” figured by Rousseau under the image of the social compact. This unity is one aspect of the rule of reason, the sense of duty, and the essence of humanity. The quality of man is liberty, [1] and we here see that this fundamental principle which Rousseau has above laid down in an undetermined sense, must, in the course of his reasoning, take on the higher meaning demanded by the conceptions of this chapter.
[1] Bk. i., ch. iv.
And the import of the term “liberty” in this chapter is a measure of the modification of ideas which has been brought about in the process of “justifying” the “bondage” of man. [1] The famous {100} sentence, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” now turns out to mean, “Man is born in natural liberty (which, if it refers to any actual condition at all, implies, in animal isolation), and by subservience to social law, he attains the civil liberty through which alone he becomes truly man.” Of course, however, the phrase “born free” has the under current of meaning, “is born for the truest freedom,” but in order that this import may be elicited the rhetorical antithesis, “and everywhere is in chains,” must be abandoned.
[1] See bk. i., ch. i.
The final paragraph of chapter viii. makes it clear that Rousseau considers the civil state as an embodiment of moral liberty, while he is rightly anxious not to seem to cut the knot of his problem by appealing to the merely ethical or philosophical sense of the term freedom. For this latter conception, taken by itself, is apt to be understood as the establishment of unity in the self by the path of renunciation. Now, the freedom of the true civil state is, on the one hand, only a stage in the ascent towards perfect ethical freedom or unity, for it involves rather the recognition of such freedom as the imperative end of social law, than the actual attainment of it; and, on the other hand, it is something broader and more substantial than ethical freedom is apt to be conceived as implying, because of that outgrowth of the self into an organised social content which the civil condition involves. The distinction between the civil state and ethical freedom is therefore a sound one, but yet does not prevent their juxta-position in this passage from throwing {101} important light on Rousseau’s conception of the former.
The expansion of old conceptions in Rousseau’s hands, and the direction in which his views are advancing, are well illustrated by the paragraph before us in comparison with Locke’s idea of consent. A recent editor of the Contrat [1] cites in illustration of the words, “Obedience to the law which we have prescribed to ourselves is liberty” Locke’s sentence, “The liberty of man in society is to be under no other legislative power but that established by consent in the commonwealth.” [2] But Locke is speaking, according to his theory, of the actual or tacit consent of individuals to the establishment of a governing power; a consent which, for him, is conditional and revocable, and therefore fails to meet the full difficulty of self-government. Rousseau, borrowing very likely his actual phrases from Locke, is speaking of something quite different, viz., the recognition of a law and a will, with which one’s everyday self may be at odds, as nevertheless one’s truer and fuller self, and imperative as against the commonplace trivial moods which constitute one’s inferior existence.