Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2)

by John Morley

It is time to come to the central conception of the Social Contract, the dogma which made of it for a time the gospel of a nation, the memorable doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples. Of this doctrine Rousseau was assuredly not the inventor, though the exaggerated language of some popular writers in France leads us to suppose that they think of him as nothing less. Even in the thirteenth century the constitution of the Orders, and the contests of the friars with the clergy, had engendered faintly democratic ways of thinking.[211] Among others the great Aquinas had protested against the juristic doctrine that the law is the pleasure of the prince. The will of the prince, he says, to be a law, must be directed by reason; law is appointed for the common good, and not for a special or private good: it follows from this that only the reason of the multitude, or of a prince representing the multitude, can make a law.[212] A still more remarkable approach to later views was made by Marsilio of Padua, physician to Lewis of Bavaria, who wrote a strong book on his master's side, in the great contest between him and the pope (1324). Marsilio in the first part of his work not only lays down very elaborately the proposition that laws ought to be made by the "universitas civium"; he places this sovereignty of the people on the true basis (which Rousseau only took for a secondary support to his original compact), namely, the greater likelihood of laws being obeyed in the first place, and being good laws in the second, when they are made by the body of the persons affected. "No one knowingly does hurt to himself, or deliberately asks what is unjust, and on that account all or a great majority must wish such law as best suits the common interest of the citizens."[213] Turning from this to the Social Contract, or to Locke's essay on Government, the identity in doctrine and correspondence in dialect may teach us how little true originality there can he among thinkers who are in the same stage; how a metaphysician of the thirteenth century and a metaphysician of the eighteenth hit on the same doctrine; and how the true classification of thinkers does not follow intervals of time, but is fixed by differences of method. It is impossible that in the constant play of circumstances and ideas in the minds of different thinkers, the same combinations of form and colour in a philosophic arrangement of such circumstances and ideas should not recur. Signal novelties in thought are as limited as signal inventions in architectural construction. It is only one of the great changes in method, that can remove the limits of the old combinations, by bringing new material and fundamentally altering the point of view.

In the sixteenth century there were numerous writers who declared the right of subjects to depose a bad sovereign, but this position is to be distinguished from Rousseau's doctrine. Thus, if we turn to the great historic event of 1581, the rejection of the yoke of Spain by the Dutch, we find the Declaration of Independence running, "that if a prince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from harm, even as a shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The subjects are not appointed by God for the behoof of the prince, but the prince for his subjects, without whom he is no prince." This is obviously divine right, fundamentally modified by a popular principle, accepted to meet the exigencies of the occasion, and to justify after the event a measure which was dictated by urgent need for practical relief. Such a notion of the social compact was still emphatically in the semi-patriarchal stage, and is distinct as can be from the dogma of popular sovereignty as Rousseau understood it. But it plainly marked a step on the way. It was the development of Protestant principles which produced and necessarily involved the extreme democratic conclusion. Time was needed for their full expansion in this sense, but the result could only have been avoided by a suppression of the Reformation, and we therefore count it inevitable. Bodin (1577) had defined sovereignty as residing in the supreme legislative authority, without further inquiry as to the source or seat of that authority, though he admits the vague position which even Lewis XIV. did not deny, that the object of political society is the greatest good of every citizen or the whole state. In 1603 a Protestant professor of law in Germany, Althusen by name, published a treatise of Politics, in which the doctrine of the sovereignty of peoples was clearly formulated, to the profound indignation both of Jesuits and of Protestant jurists.[214] Rousseau mentions his name;[215] it does not appear that he read Althusen's rather uncommon treatise, but its teaching would probably have a place in the traditions of political theorising current at Geneva, to the spirit of whose government it was so congenial. Hooker, vindicating episcopacy against the democratic principles of the Puritans, had still been led, apparently by way of the ever dominant idea of a law natural, to base civil government on the assent of the governed, and had laid down such propositions as these: "Laws they are not, which public approbation hath not made so. Laws therefore human, of what kind soever, are available by consent," and so on.[216] The views of the Ecclesiastical Polity were adopted by Locke, and became the foundation of the famous essay on Civil Government, from which popular leaders in our own country drew all their weapons down to the outbreak of the French Revolution. Grotius (1625) starting from the principle that the law of nature enjoins that we should stand by our agreements, then proceeded to assume either an express, or at any rate a tacit and implied, promise on the part of all who become members of a community, to obey the majority of the body, or a majority of those to whom authority has been delegated.[217] This is a unilateral view of the social contract, and omits the element of reciprocity which in Rousseau's idea was cardinal.

Locke was Rousseau's most immediate inspirer, and the latter affirmed himself to have treated the same matters exactly on Locke's principles. Rousseau, however, exaggerated Locke's politics as greatly as Condillac exaggerated his metaphysics. There was the important difference that Locke's essay on Civil Government was the justification in theory of a revolution which had already been accomplished in practice, while the Social Contract, tinged as it was by silent reference in the mind of the writer to Geneva, was yet a speculation in the air. The circumstances under which it was written gave to the propositions of Locke's piece a reserve and moderation which savour of a practical origin and a special case. They have not the wide scope and dogmatic air and literary precision of the corresponding propositions in Rousseau. We find in Locke none of those concise phrases which make fanatics. But the essential doctrine is there. The philosopher of the Revolution of 1688 probably carried its principles further than most of those who helped in the Revolution had any intention to carry them, when he said that "the legislature being only a fiduciary power to act for certain ends, there remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative."[218] It may be questioned how many of the peers of that day would have assented to the proposition that the people—and did Locke mean by the people the electors of the House of Commons, or all males over twenty-one, or all householders paying rates?—could by any expression of their will abolish the legislative power of the upper chamber, or put an end to the legislative and executive powers of the crown. But Locke's statements are direct enough, though he does not use so terse a label for his doctrine as Rousseau affixed to it.

Again, besides the principle of popular sovereignty, Locke most likely gave to Rousseau the idea of the origin of this sovereignty in the civil state in a pact or contract, which was represented as the foundation and first condition of the civil state. From this naturally flowed the connected theory, of a perpetual consent being implied as given by the people to each new law. We need not quote passages from Locke to demonstrate the substantial correspondence of assumption between him and the author of the Social Contract. They are found in every chapter.[219] Such principles were indispensable for the defence of a Revolution like that of 1688, which was always carefully marked out by its promoters, as well as by its eloquent apologist and expositor a hundred years later, the great Burke, as above all things a revolution within the pale of the law or the constitution. They represented the philosophic adjustment of popular ideas to the political changes wrought by shifting circumstances, as distinguished from the biblical or Hebraic method of adjusting such ideas, which had prevailed in the contests of the previous generation.

Yet there was in the midst of those contests one thinker of the first rank in intellectual power, who had constructed a genuine philosophy of government. Hobbes's speculations did not fit in with the theory of either of the two bodies of combatants in the Civil War. They were each in the theological order of ideas, and neither of them sought or was able to comprehend the application of philosophic principles to their own case or to that of their adversaries.[220] Hebrew precedents and bible texts, on the one hand; prerogative of use and high church doctrine, on the other. Between these was no space for the acceptance of a secular and rationalistic theory, covering the whole field of a social constitution. Now the influence of Hobbes upon Rousseau was very marked, and very singular. There were numerous differences between the philosopher of Geneva and his predecessor of Malmesbury. The one looked on men as good, the other looked on them as bad. The one described the state of nature as a state of peace, the other as a state of war. The one believed that laws and institutions had depraved man, the other that they had improved him.[221] But these differences did not prevent the action of Hobbes on Rousseau. It resulted in a curious fusion between the premisses and the temper of Hobbes and the conclusions of Locke. This fusion produced that popular absolutism of which the Social Contract was the theoretical expression, and Jacobin supremacy the practical manifestation. Rousseau borrowed from Hobbes the true conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the true conception of the ultimate seat and original of authority, and of the two together he made the great image of the sovereign people. Strike the crowned head from that monstrous figure which is the frontispiece of the Leviathan, and you have a frontispiece that will do excellently well for the Social Contract. Apart from a multitude of other obligations, good and bad, which Rousseau owed to Hobbes, as we shall point out, we may here mention that of the superior accuracy of the notion of law in the Social Contract over the notion of law in Montesquieu's work. The latter begins, as everybody knows, with a definition inextricably confused: "Laws are necessary relations flowing from the nature of things, and in this sense all beings have their laws, divinity has its laws, the material world has its laws, the intelligences superior to men have their laws, the beasts have their laws, man has his laws.... There is a primitive reason, and laws are the relations to be found between that and the different beings, and the relations of these different beings among one another."[222] Rousseau at once put aside these divergent meanings, made the proper distinction between a law of nature and the imperative law of a state, and justly asserted that the one could teach us nothing worth knowing about the other.[223] Hobbes's phraseology is much less definite than this, and shows that he had not himself wholly shaken off the same confusion as reigned in Montesquieu's account a century later. But then Hobbes's account of the true meaning of sovereignty was so clear, firm, and comprehensive, as easily to lead any fairly perspicuous student who followed him, to apply it to the true meaning of law. And on this head of law not so much fault is to be found with Rousseau, as on the head of larger constitutional theory. He did not look long enough at given laws, and hence failed to seize all their distinctive qualities; above all he only half saw, if he saw at all, that a law is a command and not a contract, and his eyes were closed to this, because the true view was incompatible with his fundamental assumption of contract as the base of the social union.[224] But he did at all events grasp the quality of generality as belonging to laws proper, and separated them justly from what he calls decrees, which we are now taught to name occasional or particular commands.[225] This is worth mentioning, because it shows that, in spite of his habits of intellectual laxity, Rousseau was capable, where he had a clear-headed master before him, of a very considerable degree of precision of thought, however liable it was to fall into error or deficiency for want of abundant comparison with bodies of external fact. Let us now proceed to some of the central propositions of the Social Contract.

1. The origin of society dates from the moment when the obstacles which impede the preservation of men in a state of nature are too strong for such forces as each individual can employ in order to keep himself in that state. At this point they can only save themselves by aggregation. Problem: to find a form of association which defends and protects with the whole common force the person and property of each associate, and by which, each uniting himself to all, still only obeys himself, and remains as free as he was before. Solution: a social compact reducible to these words, "Each of us places in common his person and his whole power under the supreme direction of the general will; and we further receive each member as indivisible part of the whole." This act of association constitutes a moral and collective body, a public person.

The practical importance and the mischief of thus suffering society to repose on conventions which the human will had made, lay in the corollary that the human will is competent at any time to unmake them, and also therefore to devise all possible changes that fell short of unmaking them. This was the root of the fatal hypothesis of the dictator, or divinely commissioned lawgiver. External circumstance and human nature alike were passive and infinitely pliable; they were the material out of which the legislator was to devise conventions at pleasure, without apprehension as to their suitableness either to the conditions of society among which they were to work, or to the passions and interests of those by whom they were to be carried out, and who were supposed to have given assent to them. It would be unjust to say that Rousseau actually faced this position and took the consequences. He expressly says in more places than one that the science of Government is only a science of combinations, applications, and exceptions, according to time, place, and circumstance.[226] But to base society on conventions is to impute an element of arbitrariness to these combinations and applications, and to make them independent, as they can never be, of the limits inexorably fixed by the nature of things. The notion of compact is the main source of all the worst vagaries in Rousseau's political speculation.

It is worth remarking in the history of opinion, that there was at this time in France a little knot of thinkers who were nearly in full possession of the true view of the limits set by the natural ordering of societies to the power of convention and the function of the legislators. Five years after the publication of the Social Contract, a remarkable book was written by one of the economic sect of the Physiocrats, the later of whom, though specially concerned with the material interests of communities, very properly felt the necessity of connecting the discussion of wealth with the assumption of certain fundamental political conditions. They felt this, because it is impossible to settle any question about wages or profits, for instance, until you have first settled whether you are assuming the principles of liberty and property. This writer with great consistency found the first essential of all social order in conformity of positive law and institution to those qualities of human nature, and their relations with those material instruments of life, which, and not convention, were the true origin, as they are the actual grounds, of the perpetuation of our societies.[227] This was wiser than Rousseau's conception of the lawgiver as one who should change human nature, and take away from man the forces that are naturally his own, to replace them by others comparatively foreign to him.[228] Rousseau once wrote, in a letter about Rivière's book, that the great problem in politics, which might be compared with the quadrature of the circle in geometry, is to find a form of government which shall place law above man.[229] A more important problem, and not any less difficult for the political theoriser, is to mark the bounds at which the authority of the law is powerless or mischievous in attempting to control the egoistic or non-social parts of man. This problem Rousseau ignored, and that he should do so was only natural in one who believed that man had bound himself by a convention, strictly to suppress his egoistic and non-social parts, and who based all his speculation on this pact as against the force, or the paternal authority, or the will of a Supreme Being, in which other writers founded the social union.

2. The body thus constituted by convention is the sovereign. Each citizen is a member of the sovereign, standing in a definite relation to individuals qua individuals; he is also as an individual a member of the state and subject to the sovereign, of which from the first point of view he is a component element. The sovereign and the body politic are one and the same thing.[230]