BORN FREE, YET EVERYWHERE IN CHAINS

Rousseau’s political philosophy comes out of his ethics and theology, and it can be somehow gleaned from the fact that he prefers Sparta to Athens.

His 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, whereas this is not so. There is yet another precious thing, which Rousseau values much higher than liberty, and it is equality. It is right here that he and Locke, with the latter’s obsession with the sanctity of private property, definitely part their ways for good.

Rousseau is a total totalitarian in his political philosophy. The chains on man are the chains of a bourgeois civilization, so to speak. “The problem is 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, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone and remain as free as before. This is the fundamental problem, which the Social Contract provides the solution of.” The secret here is that the personal will of every citizen is in complete harmony with, in fact, an integral part of, the total will of the community, that is, the general will.

There is no doubt that man’s return into his natural state, his liberation from the chains of a class society, where the rich and powerful oppress and exploit the poor and powerless, thus denying them freedom, can only be achieved in a totalitarian paradise, where the general will of one and all is the sole master.

And now, the 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, in so far 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."

Rousseau’s elaboration of the concept of general will 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 of 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 now played by the whole community, of which each member is a part. “All for one, one for all,” so to speak.

…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.