Evaluation Of The Claim Rousseaus Social Contract Philosophy Essay

Evaluation Of The Claim Rousseaus Social Contract Philosophy Essay This essay will begin from the premise that, far from advocating a collectivist contract of society and sacrificing the individual to such state, Rousseaus Social Contract establishes protective measures for the individual through the conception of the general will. Firstly, an exploration of the content and main features of Rousseaus Social Contract will be undertaken, before a critical evaluation of its relation to the protection of the individual in society will be offered, principally through the notion of the general will. This essay will then reject opponents claims that this inevitably leads to individual freedom being sacrificed to the community, as will it reject the argument that Rousseaus contractarianism is either illiberal or totalitarian. It will conclude by defending the perception of Rousseaus Social Contract as an advocate an egalitarian liberal society. The will of the General Will The evaluation at hand presupposes that Rousseaus Social Contract champions collectivism, or communitarianism, and in doing so rejects liberalism which places at its heart the autonomy of the individual. The thesis of such an argument is that through various measures, society as a collective usurps the ability for an individual to maintain independence or free will in the social contract. Yet this examination disregards both the historical context of Rousseau and the underlying purpose of Rousseaus work, which was to provide an explanation of the conditions in which, man being individualist by nature and simultaneously wanting the protection and advantages of living in a civil society, both of these can be achieved without the need for a loss of liberty. Rejecting this collectivist position, which will be countered in greater depth later on in this essay, it is important to explore the content and main features of Rousseaus Social Contract, to remind us that a liberal political theory needs to concern itself not only with the identity of liberty, but also with identifying the conditions under which that liberty can be sustained (Hampsher-Monk 1995: 275). Thus, the Social Contracts central concern is to create a climate in which popular sovereignty is realisable, and Rousseaus lineage of work therein is logically concerned with strengthening the case for and to counter any potential challenges to it (V. Gourevitch 2003: xxiii). Popular sovereignty, for Rousseau, was the very basis for the protection of individuals: the Sovereign, being formed wholly of the individuals who compose it, neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs. (Social Contract I: 7.5) Inherent in Rousseaus conception of sovereignty is the general will, which governs the relations of all men, enforcing popular sovereignty and forming the foundation of Rousseaus theory: Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole. (Social Contract I: 6.9) Simply put, the general will is the common good of all men, and yet this concept is precisely what provides protection of the individual, since Rousseaus conception is such that the individual and the collective are so entwined that they cannot be separated without returning to the state of nature. Yet, Rousseau does concede that particular (or private) wills of the individual do exist in so far that each individual, as a man, may have a particular will contrary or dissimilar to the general will which he has as a citizen (SC I: 7.7). This presents a quandary: natural liberty and particular wills are one and the same by definition, but the very purpose of the Social Contract, to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, united himself all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before (SC I: 6.4) proposes that a solution to reconcile the two must necessarily be presented. This is presented two-fold: firstly, Rousseau claims that the general will be naturally discoverable, by taking away the pluses and minuses of particular wills, which innately cancel each other out, leaving only the general will as the sum of the differences (SC 2: 3.2); secondly, for whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence. (SC I: 7.8) The latter account has frequently been the origin of the so-called totalitarian thesis, a popular assessment of Rousseau but which has been convincingly rejected by recent study and will be similarly critiqued later in this essay. Thus, Rousseau acknowledges, by virtue of admitting that particular wills do exist, that in the social compact, man does sacrifice his natural, absolute liberty. Yet, as will be argued, rather than sacrificing individual freedom altogether, the social compact offers something that cannot be attained in the state of nature civil liberty; ultimately, this is far more favourable, and a truer, more secure, representation of individual autonomy. Rousseau outlines that self-love (amour de soi), reason and freedom are all fundamental features of human nature, and we have a basic interest in ensuring protection of our person and the goods we need to survive and live well (Cohen 2010: 11). Similar to other social contract theorists such as Hobbes and Locke, Rousseaus state of nature, that is to say the natural state of things before the social contract is conceived, offers absolute liberty on one hand, but no protection for rights on the other. Protection of rights offered in civil society, including the protection of property, is non-existent in this state; the social contract is Rousseaus response to those calling for the reconciliation of liberty and the protection of rights without sacrificing liberty of the individual, and here Rousseau differs from his contemporaries in that he advocates a different conception of sovereignty. Liberty in the social contract is exchanged, but this is not to say it is sacrificed, as Rawls states: We gain the same rights over others as they gain over us, and this we have done by agreeing to an exchange of rights for reasons rooted in our fundamental interests, including the interest in our freedom. (Rawls 2008: 221) Thus, the general will, being the will the community, appears at first to be antithetical to the interests of individuals. It is an abstract theory, but nevertheless exudes clarity of purpose, even if Rousseau does not definitively express how the general will is found. As has been touched upon, society, being inescapable without returning man back to his origins as a primitive being, is such that the community and the individual are permanently coexisting and interdependent. The general will the will of the community is thus to Rousseau a reflection of the common good, since all rational persons have in their very nature a concern for their self-preservation and freedom; they would thus be harming themselves to will something for the community (in which they are inextricably linked) that is distinctly separate from their own particular will. Consequently, the common good reflects an equal concern with the well-being of each person, and as a result an equal concern for individual a utonomy, since all people share the very same conception of the common good (Cohen 2010: 15); the public interest and common liberty are synonymous withpersonal interest and liberty.'(Boucher 2009: 278) The Legislator The Social Contract offers various measures through which the general will is made discoverable, or else enforced, as briefly mentioned above. Whilst forcing man to be free seems adversative to liberal political theory (which this essay argues that Rousseau follows), the institutions that Rousseau describes within The Social Contract are analogous to popular sovereignty and hence compatible with individual autonomy as we have seen. These include the institutions of a legislator, or law-giver, civil religion and censorship. Rousseau acknowledges that man does not necessarily know what he wants, or is best for him and so needs the guidance of wisdom and experience in the form of these institutions to aid the formation of the social contract. In particular, there is a need for a legislator to [lead] to the union of understanding and will in the social body (SC 2: 6.10). This legislator would do so by reason of his genius, [and]à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦ no less by reason his office, which is neith er magistracy, nor Sovereignty (SC 2: 7.4). Thus Rousseau depicts a figure who is distinct from the sovereignty of the people and hence neither superior (a master) nor inferior to the community: he works in the interest of discovering the general will (by means of persuasion), and thus by deduction solely motivated by the protection of liberty and freedom of the individual. Of course, by separating the legislator from the people, Rousseau is opening himself to claims of elitism, which are potentially at odds with the egalitarian free community of equals (Cohen 2010: 10) that is the outcome of his conception of the general will. However, he counters these criticisms by making clear that he who holds command over laws ought notà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦to have it over men; or else his laws would be the ministers of his passions and would often merely serve to perpetuate his injustices. (SC 2: 7.4) This Montesquieu-esque separation of powers (who, along with Diderot, preceded Rousseau in coining the term general will and who evidently influenced Rousseaus thought) safeguards the sovereignty of the people, and whilst the legislator is applicable to the community at large, Rousseau expresses its worth to individual autonomy rather than the collective authority: If we ask in what precisely consists the greatest good of all, which should be the end of every system of legislation, we shall find it reduce itself to two main objects, liberty and equality (SC 2: 11.1) Rousseaus civil concept of liberty It has been established that the social contract contrasts two necessities of human nature: the need for security and political authority (embodied in the social contract as the need for a political community) and the need for individual autonomy and liberty. Yet there must inevitably be a concession. One of the towering liberal philosophers of the twentieth century, Isaiah Berlin, famously drew a distinction between two concepts of liberty, those of positive and negative liberty (Berlin 1958), and this is pertinent in its applicability in Rousseaus Social Contract. Whilst negative (absolute) liberty allows the individual full autonomy in the absence of external forces (coercive or otherwise), Rousseau concedes that to reconcile the two necessities a different conception of liberty is needed, and this Berlin called positive liberty: the freedom to, as opposed to freedom from, act with individual autonomy, protected by certain measures acting as safeguards. This, to Rousseau, was civi l liberty: What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses. à ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦we must clearly distinguish natural liberty, which is bounded only by the strength of the individual, from civil liberty, which is limited by the general will; and possession, which is merely the effect of force or the right of the first occupier, from property, which can be founded only on a positive title. (SC 1: 8.2) This is an important distinction to make, but not one that this essay believes forces a dilution of liberty. Berlin (1958) draws these two distinct concepts to further his argument that the only true form of liberty is that in a negative sense. Nonetheless, liberalism to a modern scholar associates itself with the protection of individual rights, such as those of proprietorship; this has been engrained in liberal theory, which arguably finds its origin in Rousseaus Social Contract. To Rousseau, the liberty that is afforded to man in the state of nature (being the liberty that Berlin favours) is detrimental to the human condition. On the other hand, under the social contract, man gains an equivalent for everything he loses (SC 1: 6.8). From this we might take that liberty under the social contract is a zero-sum gain; liberty is exchanged, but not lost. However, the benefit of civil liberty is that man gains an increase in force for the preservation of what he has. (SC 1: 6.8). Roussea u develops upon this by commenting that the right of first occupier, which in the state of nature is so weak (SC 1: 9.2), is respected by individuals and the community alike: possessors, being regarded as depositaries of public property, and having their rights respected by all the members of the Stateà ¢Ã¢â€š ¬Ã‚ ¦, have, by a cession which benefits both the public and still more themselves, acquired, so to speak, all that they gave up. (SC 1: 9.6) We might, over and above all this add, to what man acquires in the civil state, moral liberty, which alone makes him truly the master of himself; for the mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty (SC 1: 8.3). This is a striking statement, and of course not one that Berlin, among others, accepts. Berlin states that to coerce a man is to deprive him of freedom (Berlin 1958: 6). Yet Rousseaus social contract is not coercive in this sense. Man does not accept the general will through the persuasion of authority, but because it is rational to do so as the general will is equally a manifestation of ones own true will. Rousseau does not deprive the individual of free will: far from it, he expects that in the social contract man will choose the general will with this very same free will of the individual. By man developing his moral faculties through the conception of the civil state, Rousseau claims that justice triumphs over in stinct, intelligence over stupidity and irrationality (SC 1: 8.1). Thus, in forming a civil community (state), man develops an appreciation of the liberty of other individuals within that community, which is mutually protective; the moral intelligence that man formulates is of greater benefit to individual freedom and autonomy than his very same (absolute) liberty in the state of nature. Communitarianism and illiberalism It is clear to see that myriad critics, among them Berlin, reject Rousseaus contracts protection of liberty, instead arguing that his strong conception of political community intrinsically works to oppose this. Berlins extraordinary claim that Rousseau was one of the most sinister and formidable enemies of liberty in the whole history of modern thought (Berlin 2002: 4) certainly has great impact, a surprisingly ferocious attack on a theorist who had at his heart a desire to protect the freedom of human condition in society. Thus it is necessary to delve into Berlins criticism further to understand his reasoning. Berlin saw Rousseaus conjecture being particularly dangerous to liberty. In Berlins view, Rousseau had associated freedom with self-determination, yet self-determination with obedience to the general will. The notion of the general will, being quite separate from individual (particular) wills, went against Berlins conception of liberalism, for it alleged the existence of a common interest encompassing the interests of all men: an absolute, single set of rules for all, which Berlin saw as being a divergence from the pluralist tradition of liberalism. Rousseau also went some way to disguising mans true nature, as Berlin saw it, by conceiving man as a citizen being, rather than a lone, individual creature an unrealistic transformation of human interest. Furthermore, Rousseau was said to have changed the concept of mans will from what he actually desires empirically, to a will that he ought, or should, desire, but may not through the nature of the human condition (Berlin 2002). Emphasis ed by his strong Calvinist influence, we could also add to this Rousseaus deeply-rooted sense of morality, a sense of right and wrong, and what it means to live a good (and bad) life, which we can take Berlin to object to on the basis of its limitation on individual choice and self-determination.