In life, he was a rather despicable man, a conman, a fraud, a dirty rotten scoundrel, but without the charm of Michael Caine’s rogue hero in the hilarious movie. All this under the wily guise of an incorrigible romantic, which was bought even by the sensible Hume, who was of two minds about him, writing these two letters at the same time to two different addressees, and surely not disingenuously, but meaning what he says in each of them:
“He is surely the blackest and most atrocious villain, beyond comparison, that now exists in the world; and I am heartily ashamed of anything I ever wrote in his favor.” (To Hugh Blair, written on July 1, 1766.)
And now look at this one, written to Rousseau himself, oddly, on the very next day, that is, on July 2, 1766:
“Of all men of letters in Europe since the death of Montesquieu, you are the person whom I most revere, both for the force of your genius and the greatness of your mind.”
Nietzsche, too, expresses conflicting opinions of Rousseau, but, like Hume, even in reprobation, Rousseau to him, is an extraordinary man, and, certainly, a genius, even in his “passionate idiocies and half-truths.” He picks him as one of the eight geniuses on his journey to Hades, in (#408) of his Vermischte Meiningen und Sprüche: “I too have been in the underworld to speak with a few of the dead. Four pairs did not deny themselves to my sacrifice --- Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. On these eight I fix my eyes and see their eyes fixed on me. May the living forgive me that occasionally they appear to me as shades, while those men seem so alive to me.”
Well, I was not there to judge him as a person, which is perhaps for the best, as I would have probably been terribly biased against him, anyway. But now, well over two centuries after his death, his personal life does not make as much difference as his intellectual legacy, and it is the latter which we are going to judge. Hopefully, I will have other special entries on Rousseau in my Magnificent Shadows section, but this place is for his political theory, that is, for his wishful thinking.
The starting point of his political thinking is contained in one short sentence from his Émile: “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.” For Rousseau, the original state of man is God’s state, and it is good, which makes him sound a lot like John Locke, but only on this first encounter. Rousseau associates human civilization with the original sin of man meddling with God’s work, which has little connection with the "liberties" to which Locke was prepared to go.
Rousseau's magnum opus on political philosophy, Le Contrat Social, starts with the famous phrase: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” This may suggest that he, like Locke, is a friend of liberty, but this is not so. There is yet another precious thing, which Rousseau values much higher than liberty, and it is equality (arguably, an antipode of liberty!), and it is here that he and Locke, with the latter’s obsession with the sanctity of private property, definitely part their ways for good.
And here we come to Rousseau’s elaboration of the concept of general will, which makes him… have you guessed it?… a dyed-in-the-wool totalitarian! The essence of his Social Contract is “the total alienation of each associate together with all his rights to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each member gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.” (Now, absolute is absolute!) “If individuals retained certain rights, as there would be no common superior to decide between them and the public, each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature (here he uses the term state of nature in Hobbes’s sense, and by no means in Locke’s!) would thus continue, and the association would necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical.” Needless to say, there is no liberty anywhere here, and the doctrine of the rights of man has been cancelled. In fact, none of them are even needed anymore, as the role of the Sovereign in this Commonwealth is played by the whole community, of which each member is a part. “All for one, one for all,” so to speak.
And now, regarding this culmination of Rousseau’s political doctrine, his concept of the general will. This will is not at all identical with the majority will or any minority will for that matter. It would be best described as the collective will of the community, or to put it in more familiar terms, the Will of the State. Rousseau is not exceptionally clear with this explanation: “If when the people, being furnished with adequate information, held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication one with another, the grand total of their small differences would always give the general will and the decision would always be good.” In illustrating the meaning of the general will, I much prefer Bertrand Russell’s comparison to terrestrial gravitation: Every particle in the earth attracts every other particle in the universe toward itself; the air above us attracts us upward, while the ground beneath us attracts us downward. But all these ‘selfish’ attractions cancel each other out, insofar as they are divergent, and what remains is the resultant attraction towards the center of the earth. This might be fancifully conceived as the act of the earth as a community and as the expression of its general will.
…Having been intimately familiar with the Soviet system’s self justification, in its golden days, I maintain that the Soviet totalitarian rationale closely resembles Rousseau’s reasoning, but I painfully guess that no established Western politician has ever tried to rationalize totalitarianism away from the propaganda's gross and coarse simplification, putting it under the magnifying lens of the curious reason and judging its merits and demerits with the advantage of a cool sensible head, or, even more preferably, as an advocatus diaboli. Had they desired to do that, or, more accurately, had they been capable of doing so, Jean Jacque Rousseau would have been a priceless asset for their endeavor…
“He is surely the blackest and most atrocious villain, beyond comparison, that now exists in the world; and I am heartily ashamed of anything I ever wrote in his favor.” (To Hugh Blair, written on July 1, 1766.)
And now look at this one, written to Rousseau himself, oddly, on the very next day, that is, on July 2, 1766:
“Of all men of letters in Europe since the death of Montesquieu, you are the person whom I most revere, both for the force of your genius and the greatness of your mind.”
Nietzsche, too, expresses conflicting opinions of Rousseau, but, like Hume, even in reprobation, Rousseau to him, is an extraordinary man, and, certainly, a genius, even in his “passionate idiocies and half-truths.” He picks him as one of the eight geniuses on his journey to Hades, in (#408) of his Vermischte Meiningen und Sprüche: “I too have been in the underworld to speak with a few of the dead. Four pairs did not deny themselves to my sacrifice --- Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. On these eight I fix my eyes and see their eyes fixed on me. May the living forgive me that occasionally they appear to me as shades, while those men seem so alive to me.”
Well, I was not there to judge him as a person, which is perhaps for the best, as I would have probably been terribly biased against him, anyway. But now, well over two centuries after his death, his personal life does not make as much difference as his intellectual legacy, and it is the latter which we are going to judge. Hopefully, I will have other special entries on Rousseau in my Magnificent Shadows section, but this place is for his political theory, that is, for his wishful thinking.
The starting point of his political thinking is contained in one short sentence from his Émile: “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.” For Rousseau, the original state of man is God’s state, and it is good, which makes him sound a lot like John Locke, but only on this first encounter. Rousseau associates human civilization with the original sin of man meddling with God’s work, which has little connection with the "liberties" to which Locke was prepared to go.
Rousseau's magnum opus on political philosophy, Le Contrat Social, starts with the famous phrase: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” This may suggest that he, like Locke, is a friend of liberty, but this is not so. There is yet another precious thing, which Rousseau values much higher than liberty, and it is equality (arguably, an antipode of liberty!), and it is here that he and Locke, with the latter’s obsession with the sanctity of private property, definitely part their ways for good.
And here we come to Rousseau’s elaboration of the concept of general will, which makes him… have you guessed it?… a dyed-in-the-wool totalitarian! The essence of his Social Contract is “the total alienation of each associate together with all his rights to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each member gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.” (Now, absolute is absolute!) “If individuals retained certain rights, as there would be no common superior to decide between them and the public, each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature (here he uses the term state of nature in Hobbes’s sense, and by no means in Locke’s!) would thus continue, and the association would necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical.” Needless to say, there is no liberty anywhere here, and the doctrine of the rights of man has been cancelled. In fact, none of them are even needed anymore, as the role of the Sovereign in this Commonwealth is played by the whole community, of which each member is a part. “All for one, one for all,” so to speak.
And now, regarding this culmination of Rousseau’s political doctrine, his concept of the general will. This will is not at all identical with the majority will or any minority will for that matter. It would be best described as the collective will of the community, or to put it in more familiar terms, the Will of the State. Rousseau is not exceptionally clear with this explanation: “If when the people, being furnished with adequate information, held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication one with another, the grand total of their small differences would always give the general will and the decision would always be good.” In illustrating the meaning of the general will, I much prefer Bertrand Russell’s comparison to terrestrial gravitation: Every particle in the earth attracts every other particle in the universe toward itself; the air above us attracts us upward, while the ground beneath us attracts us downward. But all these ‘selfish’ attractions cancel each other out, insofar as they are divergent, and what remains is the resultant attraction towards the center of the earth. This might be fancifully conceived as the act of the earth as a community and as the expression of its general will.
…Having been intimately familiar with the Soviet system’s self justification, in its golden days, I maintain that the Soviet totalitarian rationale closely resembles Rousseau’s reasoning, but I painfully guess that no established Western politician has ever tried to rationalize totalitarianism away from the propaganda's gross and coarse simplification, putting it under the magnifying lens of the curious reason and judging its merits and demerits with the advantage of a cool sensible head, or, even more preferably, as an advocatus diaboli. Had they desired to do that, or, more accurately, had they been capable of doing so, Jean Jacque Rousseau would have been a priceless asset for their endeavor…
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