Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2)

by John Morley

It would have been odd in any writer less firmly possessed with the infallibility of his own dreams than Rousseau was, that he should not have seen the impossibility in anything like the existing conditions of human nature, of limiting the profession of civil faith to the three or four articles which happened to constitute his own belief. Having once granted the general position that a citizen may be required to profess some religious faith, there is no speculative principle, and there is no force in the world, which can fix any bound to the amount or kind of religious faith which the state has the right thus to exact. Rousseau said that a man was dangerous to the city who did not believe in God, a future state, and divine reward and retribution. But then Calvin thought a man dangerous who did not believe both that there is only one God, and also that there are three Gods. And so Chaumette went to the scaffold, and Servetus to the stake, on the one common principle that the civil magistrate is concerned with heresy. And Hébert was only following out the same doctrine in a mild and equitable manner, when he insisted on preventing the publication of a book in which the author professed his belief in a God. A single step in the path of civil interference with opinion leads you the whole way.

The history of the Protestant churches is enough to show the pitiable futility of the proviso for religious tolerance with which Rousseau closed his exposition. "If there is no longer an exclusive national religion, then every creed ought to be tolerated which tolerates other creeds, so long as it contains nothing contrary to the duties of the citizen. But whoever dares to say, Out of the church, no salvation, ought to be banished from the state." The reason for which Henry IV. embraced the Roman religion—namely, that in that he might be saved, in the opinion alike of Protestants and Catholics, whereas in the reformed faith, though he was saved according to Protestants, yet according to Catholics he was necessarily damned,—ought to have made every honest man, and especially every prince, reject it. It was the more curious that Rousseau did not see the futility of drawing the line of tolerance at any given set of dogmas, however simple and slight and acceptable to himself they might be, because he invited special admiration for D'Argenson's excellent maxim that "in the republic everybody is perfectly free in what does not hurt others."[258] Surely this maxim has very little significance or value, unless we interpret it as giving entire liberty of opinion, because no opinion whatever can hurt others, until it manifests itself in act, including of course speech, which is a kind of act. Rousseau admitted that over and above the profession of civil faith, a citizen might hold what opinions he pleased, in entire freedom from the sovereign's cognisance or jurisdiction; "for as the sovereign has no competence in the other world, the fate of subjects in that other world is not his affair, provided they are good citizens in this." But good citizenship consists in doing or forbearing from certain actions, and to punish men on the inference that forbidden action is likely to follow from the rejection of a set of opinions, or to exact a test oath of adherence to such opinions on the same principle, is to concede the whole theory of civil intolerance, however little Rousseau may have realised the perfectly legitimate applications of his doctrine. It was an unconscious compromise. He was thinking of Calvin in practice and Hobbes in theory, and he was at the same time influenced by the moderate spirit of his time, and the comparatively reasonable character of his personal belief. He praised Hobbes as the only author who had seen the right remedy for the conflict of the spiritual and temporal jurisdictions, by proposing to unite the two heads of the eagle, and reducing all to political unity, without which never will either state or government be duly constituted. But Hobbes was consistent without flinching. He refused to set limits to the religious prescriptions which a sovereign might impose, for "even when the civil sovereign is an infidel, every one of his own subjects that resisteth him, sinneth against the laws of God (for such are the laws of nature), and rejecteth the counsel of the apostles, that admonisheth all Christians to obey their princes.... And for their faith, it is internal and invisible: they have the licence that Naaman had, and need not put themselves into danger for it; but if they do, they ought to expect their reward in heaven, and not complain of their lawful sovereign."[259] All this flowed from the very idea and definition of sovereignty, which Rousseau accepted from Hobbes, as we have already seen. Such consequences, however, stated in these bold terms, must have been highly revolting to Rousseau; he could not assent to an exercise of sovereignty which might be atheistic, Mahometan, or anything else unqualifiedly monstrous. He failed to see the folly of trying to unite the old notions of a Christian commonwealth with what was fundamentally his own notion of a commonwealth after the ancient type. He stripped the pagan republics, which he took for his model, of their national and official polytheism, and he put on in its stead a scanty remnant of theism slightly tinged with Christianity.

Then he practically accepted Hobbes's audacious bidding to the man who should not be able to accept the state creed, to go courageously to martyrdom, and leave the land in peace. For the modern principle, which was contained in D'Argenson's saying previously quoted, that the civil power does best absolutely and unreservedly to ignore spirituals, he was not prepared either by his emancipation from the theological ideas of his youth, or by his observation of the working and tendencies of systems, which involved the state in some more or less close relations with the church, either as superior, equal, or subordinate. Every test is sure to insist on mental independence ending exactly where the speculative curiosity of the time is most intent to begin.

Let us now shortly confront Rousseau's ideas with some of the propositions belonging to another method of approaching the philosophy of government, that have for their key-note the conception of expediency or convenience, and are tested by their conformity to the observed and recorded experience of mankind. According to this method, the ground and origin of society is not a compact; that never existed in any known case, and never was a condition of obligation either in primitive or developed societies, either between subjects and sovereign, or between the equal members of a sovereign body. The true ground is an acceptance of conditions which came into existence by the sociability inherent in man, and were developed by man's spontaneous search after convenience. The statement that while the constitution of man is the work of nature, that of the state is the work of art,[260] is as misleading as the opposite statement that governments are not made but grow.[261] The truth lies between them, in such propositions as that institutions owe their existence and development to deliberate human effort, working in accordance with circumstances naturally fixed both in human character and in the external field of its activity. The obedience of the subject to the sovereign has its root not in contract but in force,—the force of the sovereign to punish disobedience. A man does not consent to be put to death if he shall commit a murder, for the reason alleged by Rousseau, namely, as a means of protecting his own life against murder.[262] There is no consent in the transaction. Some person or persons, possessed of sovereign authority, promulgated a command that the subject should not commit murder, and appointed penalties for such commission and it was not a fictitious assent to these penalties, but the fact that the sovereign was strong enough to enforce them, which made the command valid.

Supposing a law to be passed in an assembly of the sovereign people by a majority; what binds a member of the minority to obedience? Rousseau's answer is this:—When the law is proposed, the question put is not whether they approve or reject the proposition, but whether it is conformable to the general will: the general will appears from the votes: if the opinion contrary to my own wins the day, that only proves that I was mistaken, and that what I took for the general will was not really so.[263] We can scarcely imagine more nonsensical sophistry than this. The proper answer evidently is, that either experience or calculation has taught the citizens in a popular government that in the long run it is most expedient for the majority of votes to decide the law. In other words, the inconvenience to the minority of submitting to a law which they dislike, is less than the inconvenience of fighting to have their own way, or retiring to form a separate community. The minority submit to obey laws which were made against their will, because they cannot avoid the necessity of undergoing worse inconveniences than are involved in this submission. The same explanation partially covers what is unfortunately the more frequent case in the history of the race, the submission of the majority to the laws imposed by a minority of one or more. In both these cases, however, as in the general question of the source of our obedience to the laws, deliberate and conscious sense of convenience is as slight in its effect upon conduct here, as it is in the rest of the field of our moral motives. It is covered too thickly over and constantly neutralised by the multitudinous growths of use, by the many forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by physical apathy of race, and all other conditions that interpose to narrow or abrogate the authority of pure reason over human conduct. Rousseau, expounding his conception of a normal political state, was no doubt warranted in leaving these complicating conditions out of account, though to do so is to rob any treatise on government of much of its possible value. The same excuse cannot warrant him in basing his political institutions upon a figment, instead of upon the substantial ground of propositions about human nature, which the average of experience in given races and at given stages of advancement has shown to be true within those limits. There are places in his writings where he reluctantly admits that men are only moved by their interests, and he does not even take care to qualify this sufficiently.[264] But throughout the Social Contract we seem to be contemplating the erection of a machine which is to work without reference to the only forces that can possibly impart movement to it.

The consequence of this is that Rousseau gives us not the least help towards the solution of any of the problems of actual government, because these are naturally both suggested and guided by considerations of expediency and improvement. It is as if he had never really settled the ends for which government exists, beyond the construction of the symmetrical machine of government itself. He is a geometer, not a mechanician; or shall we say that he is a mechanician, and not a biologist concerned with the conditions of a living organism. The analogy of the body politic to the body natural was as present to him as it had been to all other writers on society, but he failed to seize the only useful lessons which such an analogy might have taught him—diversity of structure, difference of function, development of strength by exercise, growth by nutrition—all of which might have been serviceably translated into the dialect of political science, and might have bestowed on his conception of political society more of the features of reality. We see no room for the free play of divergent forces, the active rivalry of hostile interests, the regulated conflict of multifarious personal aims, which can never be extinguished, except in moments of driving crisis, by the most sincere attachment to the common causes of the land. Thus the modern question which is of such vital interest for all the foremost human societies, of the union of collective energy with the encouragement of individual freedom, is, if not wholly untouched, at least wholly unillumined by anything that Rousseau says. To tell us that a man on entering a society exchanges his natural liberty for civil liberty which is limited by the general will,[265] is to give us a phrase, where we seek a solution. To say that if it is the opposition of private interests which made the establishment of societies necessary, it is the accord of those interests which makes them possible,[266] is to utter a truth which feeds no practical curiosity. The opposition of private interests remains, in spite of the yoke which their accord has imposed upon it, but which only controls and does not suppress such an opposition. What sort of control? What degree? What bounds?

So again let us consider the statement that the instant the government usurps the sovereignty, then the social pact is broken, and all the citizens, restored by right to their natural liberty, are forced but not morally obliged to obey.[267] He began by telling his readers that man, though born free, is now everywhere in chains; and therefore it would appear that in all existing cases the social pact has been broken, and the citizens living under the reign of force, are free to resume their natural liberty, if they are only strong enough to do so. This declaration of the general duty of rebellion no doubt had its share in generating that fervid eagerness that all other peoples should rise and throw off the yoke, which was one of the most astonishing anxieties of the French during their revolution. That was not the worst quality of such a doctrine. It made government impossible, by basing the right or duty of resistance on a question that could not be reached by positive evidence, but must always be decided by an arbitrary interpretation of an arbitrarily imagined document. The moderate proposition that resistance is lawful if a government is a bad one, and if the people are strong enough to overthrow it, and if their leaders have reason to suppose they can provide a less bad one in its place, supplies tests that are capable of application. Our own writers in favour of the doctrine of resistance partly based their arguments upon the historic instances of the Old Testament, and it is one of the most striking contributions of Protestantism to the cause of freedom, that it sent people in an admiring spirit to the history of the most rebellious nation that ever existed, and so provided them in Hebrew insurgency with a corrective for the too submissive political teaching of the Gospel. But these writers have throughout a tacit appeal to expediency, as writers might always be expected to have, who were really meditating on the possibility of their principles being brought to the test of practice. There can be no evidence possible, with a test so vague as the fact of the rupture of a compact whose terms are authentically known to nobody concerned. Speak of bad laws and good, wise administration or unwise, just government or unjust, extravagant or economical, civically elevating or demoralising; all these are questions which men may apply themselves to settle with knowledge, and with a more or less definite degree of assurance. But who can tell how he is to find out whether sovereignty has been usurped, and the social compact broken? Was there a usurpation of sovereignty in France not many years ago, when the assumption of power by the prince was ratified by many millions of votes?

The same case, we are told, namely, breach of the social compact and restoration of natural liberty, occurs when the members of the government usurp separately the power which they ought only to exercise in a body.[268] Now this description applies very fairly to the famous episode in our constitutional history, connected with George the Third's first attack of madness in 1788. Parliament cannot lawfully begin business without a declaration of the cause of summons from the crown. On this occasion parliament both met and deliberated without communication from the crown. What was still more important was a vote of the parliament itself, authorising the passing of letters patent under the great seal for opening parliament by commission, and for giving assent to a Regency Bill. This was a distinct usurpation of regal authority. Two members of the government (in Rousseau's sense of the term), namely the houses of parliament, usurped the power which they ought only to have exercised along with the crown.[269] The Whigs denounced the proceeding as a fiction, a forgery, a phantom, but if they had been readers of the Social Contract, and if they had been bitten by its dogmatic temper, they would have declared the compact of union violated, and all British citizens free to resume their natural rights. Not even the bitter virulence of faction at that time could tempt any politician to take up such a line, though within half a dozen years each of the democratic factions in France had worked at the overthrow of every other in turn, on the very principle which Rousseau had formulated and Robespierre had made familiar, that usurped authority is a valid reason for annihilating a government, no matter under what circumstances, nor how small the chance of replacing it by a better, nor how enormous the peril to the national well-being in the process. The true opposite to so anarchic a doctrine is assuredly not that of passive obedience either to chamber or monarch, but the right and duty of throwing off any government which inflicts more disadvantages than it confers advantages. Rousseau's whole theory tends inevitably to substitute a long series of struggles after phrases and shadows in the new era, for the equally futile and equally bloody wars of dynastic succession which have been the great curse of the old. Men die for a phrase as they used to die for a family. The other theory, which all English politicians accept in their hearts, and so many commanding French politicians have seemed in their hearts to reject, was first expounded in direct view of Rousseau's teaching by Paley.[270] Of course the greatest, widest, and loftiest exposition of the bearings of expediency on government and its conditions, is to be found in the magnificent and immortal pieces of Burke, some of them suggested by absolutist violations of the doctrine in our own affairs, and some of them by anarchic violation of it in the affairs of France, after the seed sown by Rousseau had brought forth fruit.

We should, however, be false to our critical principle, if we did not recognise the historical effect of a speculation scientifically valueless. There has been no attempt to palliate either the shallowness or the practical mischievousness of the Social Contract. But there is another side to its influence. It was the match which kindled revolutionary fire in generous breasts throughout Europe. Not in France merely, but in Germany as well, its phrases became the language of all who aspired after freedom. Schiller spoke of Rousseau as one who "converted Christians into human beings," and the Robbers (1778) is as if it had been directly inspired by the doctrine that usurped sovereignty restores men to their natural rights. Smaller men in the violent movement which seized all the youth of Germany at that time, followed the same lead, if they happened to have any feeling about the political condition of their enslaved countries.

There was alike in France and Germany a craving for a return to nature among the whole of the young generation.[271] The Social Contract supplied a dialect for this longing on one side, just as the Emilius supplied it on another. Such parts in it as people did not understand or did not like, they left out. They did not perceive its direction towards that "perfect Hobbism," which the author declared to be the only practical alternative to a democracy so austere as to be intolerable. They grasped phrases about the sovereignty of the people, the freedom for which nature had destined man, the slavery to which tyrants and oppressors had brought him. Above all they were struck by the patriotism which shines so brightly in every page, like the fire on the altar of one of those ancient cities which had inspired the writer's ideal.