JeanJacques Rousseau

1
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• The Social Contract

2
The Social Contract

• Radical Critique of Liberal Ideology
• History
• The Question of Sociability
• The Social Production of Liberty
• The Social Contract
• Rousseauean Democracy

3
Radical Critique of Liberal Ideology History

• Liberals like Locke are correct in making liberty
  important indeed in making it the overriding
  concern but they woefully misunderstand the
  nature of society
• Society is not an object of choice
• Implications of that view
• Responsibility for success/failure rests squarely
  on the individual

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Radical Critique of Liberal Ideology History

• Rousseau argues
• It is society, not nature or individuals, which
  creates a system of rewards or punishments
• For example Aristotle on slavery
• Question Rousseau raises is what is true of us by
  virtue of being human and not merely being a part
  of a particular society?
• For the radical tradition, history becomes
  important because human societies have a life in
  time

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Radical Critique of Liberal Ideology History

• With a sense of history, we can see how different
  attributes emerge in us as different institutions
  rise and fall
• Very little thats permanent in human nature

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Radical Critique of Liberal Ideology Sociability

• For Rousseau, and the radical tradition, human
  beings are radically social creatures
• We have become heavily dependent on the wills of
  other people

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Radical Critique of Liberal Ideology Sociability

• Rousseau recognized that in moving from natural
  to modern man, we gain some skills/attributes but
  lose others
• For us, we have no choice but to be members of a
  society
• But this necessary dependence on other people is
  what makes oppression possible
• The division of labor makes us dependent on
  others, and thus creates the logical possibility
  for inequality.

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The Social Production of Liberty

• Implications?
• Recall Lockes State of Nature
• Everyone improves only in the sense of the
  institutionalized values in a particular
  dimension of society, in this case the economy
  and the availability of market transactions
  through social institution of money

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The Social Production of Liberty

• Social contract, then, stabilizes the inequality
• For Rousseau, this is simply ideology used to
  justify the new inequality
• That is, ideas of those benefiting most from the
  inequality (2nd Discourse)
• Locke on democracy
• Why is democracy a good idea?

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The Social Production of Liberty

• Thieves in alley example
• Note, it is to my advantage to vote, but Ill
  lose the vote every time I run into these guys
• What makes democracy a good idea under these
  conditions?

11
The Social Production of Liberty

• Good if we forget the original coercion baseline
  of the alley
• Is Lockes social contract a good idea?
• Likewise, its good only if we forget that we are
  treating social inequalities as natural
  inequalities
• Note that if we recognize the social basis of the
  inequality, we can change the social arrangements
  and eliminate the inequality

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The Social Production of Liberty

• The social contract in Locke is contaminated by
  ideological considerations
• Inequalities Locke sees are social, not natural
• Therefore any liberal society which claimed
  natural rights existing prior to government is
  merely propagating ideology
• No such rights exist, since rights themselves are
  a convention and thus subject to change or
  amendment

13
The Social Production of Liberty

• Lockes formulation is wrong on 2 counts
• It misconceives the true nature of man
• As we saw in the Second Discourse, man in the
  state of nature is unrecognizable as a human
  being
• It misconceives the social contract

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The Social Production of Liberty

• Man is/was born free, and everywhere he is in
  chains

Human history
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The Social Production of Liberty

• Man is/was born free, and everywhere he is in
  chains

Human history
Primeval slime
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The Social Production of Liberty

• Man is/was born free, and everywhere he is in
  chains

Human history
Modern society
Primeval slime
17
The Social Production of Liberty

• Man is/was born free, and everywhere he is in
  chains

No natural differences could conceivably put
people in dependent position
Human history
Modern society
Primeval slime
18
The Social Production of Liberty

• Man is/was born free, and everywhere he is in
  chains

No natural differences could conceivably put
people in dependent position
Human history
Modern society
Primeval slime
Yet today, vast majority of worlds population is
being brutally oppressed
19
The Social Production of Liberty

• The question Rousseau is raising, is how could
  naturally equal creatures get themselves in the
  position of allowing the convention that
  inequality is permissible?
• How do we get out of this situation?
• Not by nature (Book I, chapter 2)
• Not by justice (Book 2, chapter 3)

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The Social Production of Liberty

• Note the trajectory of history
• Rousseau is not going to suggest that we can go
  backwards
• We can choose specific states or conditions of
  our society, but we cannot decide whether or not
  to be members of society

Human history
21
The Social Production of Liberty

• Need to find a way to build on the nature that we
  have and fashion institutions and social
  arrangements to foster liberty
• Why liberty?

22
The Social Production of Liberty

• To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man,
  to surrender the rights of humanity and even its
  duties. For him who renounces everything no
  indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is
  incompatible with man's nature to remove all
  liberty from his will is to remove all morality
  from his acts.
• -- Social Contract, Book I, chapter IV

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The Social Production of Liberty

• What are the moral implications of selling or
  otherwise alienating our liberty?
• If we could do something like that, we would be
  providing ourselves with the means of avoiding
  morality
• To renounce liberty is like ceding our moral
  sense as we can claim our action was the result
  of slavery

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The Social Production of Liberty

• We can ask ourselves, what if everybody did that?
• What if everybody was able to escape moral
  responsibilities by claiming that their actions
  were not authentically theirs?
• Holding people accountable for their actions is
  part of what being free entails

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The Social Production of Liberty

• Liberty becomes integral to my conception of
  myself to our definition of what a human being
  is what is implied in saying this life is my
  life.
• Personal life plans demands liberty
• Liberty then means being in a position where I am
  not dependent on the will of any other person
• Rousseaus social contract (Book I, chp. vi)

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The Social Contract

• But what kind of liberty are we talking about?
• Natural liberty vs civil liberty (Book I, chp. 8)
• Natural liberty is self defeating (recall PD)
• Civil liberty
• Not having to obey any laws except those which
  are in some sense an expression of my own will
• Civil liberty is a human creation

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The Social Contract

• It is only with this type of liberty with civil
  liberty that we can say that we are free
• And thus only with this type of liberty that we
  can be fully human
• If we follow only those laws which are an
  expression of my will, then my life really is my
  life every action will be an action I choose to
  do

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The Social Contract

• What do we say about a person who did not value
  this kind of liberty?
• They are not being all that they could be, they
  are not fully human in that they are not
  participating in moral discourse
• Rousseau is saying our humanity stems from the
  fact that we can reflect on the status of our
  affairs

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The Social Contract

• We can ask questions like
• How should I live?
• What is justice?
• What would be a good life for me? For you? For
  us?
• Animals cant do this

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The Social Contract

• Problem is, how do we realize this in society?
• For example the more elaborate our social
  interdependence becomes, the more we have a
  division of labor
• Each of us performs ever more exact functions
• The more the specialization progresses, the
  greater the likelihood that some people will
  occupy strategically important positions
• These people will be able to exploit their
  position to exercise power over others

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The Social Contract
32
The Social Contract

• How do we organize our social lives so that we
  can enjoy civil liberty?
• How do we create a set of social institutions so
  that we trade natural liberty for civil liberty
• Rousseau astutely builds his theory by using our
  dependence as the means of securing our liberty
• Only way civil liberty will work is if it is a
  product of social cooperation

33
The Social Contract

• One who dares to undertake the founding of a
  people should feel that he is capable of changing
  human nature, so to speak of transforming each
  individual, who by himself is a perfect and
  solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole
  from which this individual receives, in a sense,
  his life and his being of altering mans
  constitution in order to strengthen it of
  substituting a partial and moral existence for
  the physical and independent existence we have
  received from nature (Book 2, chp. vii).

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The Social Contract

• The only way civil liberty will work is if it is
  a product of social cooperation
• Contrast with Lockes view
• Locke mistakenly postulates a liberty not
  predicated on the necessity of our social ties
• The liberty Locke describes is the freedom to be
  unencumbered by societal considerations, each of
  us decides for ourselves whether or not to be
  part of the society

35
The Social Contract

• Rousseau argues that Locke is wrong
• Society is not a club, not a voluntary
  organization
• Locke errs by treating people in socially
  advantageous slots as if they were naturally
  advantaged and thus free to pack up and go home
  if the social arrangements are not to their
  liking

36
The Social Contract

• Locke erroneously assumes property rights are
  natural rights and thus those who have property
  are free to defect from society when property is
  threatened
• Rousseau is arguing that this is wrong since the
  property these individuals possess is secured by
  a system of social cooperation.

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The Social Contract

• So if Lockes version of the social contract is
  incorrect, what type of social contract would be
  adopted?
• Book 1, chp. vi
• Rousseaus contract presupposes that the only
  morally acceptable contract is one which insures
  that each person is at the same time governor and
  governed

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The Social Contract

• We should recognize that neither Hobbes nor
  Lockes contract would be chosen by individuals
  ontologically structured such that they have
  liberty and liberty is the essence of humanity
• Hobbes is easy to see, but what about Locke?
• Recall thieves in alley example
• Locke merely provides a peaceful way to make
  coercion regular

39
The Social Contract

• For example, look at modern U.S.
• How are laws passed?
• Hold elections where most people dont vote
• Where winners go through all this deal making to
  get laws passed in their own private interest
• How are losers not at the mercy of the majority?
• In what sense am I obeying only myself?

40
The Social Contract

• The system is good insofar as it is better to
  count heads than to break them
• But because the system stabilizes a situation
  does not make it just
• Look at the contract Rousseau proposes
• Create a process in which everything is
  alienated, but unlike Hobbes, were not giving it
  to any particular person or institution

41
The Social Contract

• In other words, we need to develop a social
  decision making process whereby we can all submit
  to and become dependent on no one in particular
• Need some sort of democracy where each person
  counts equally

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Rousseauean Democracy

• Is this the case in the U.S.?
• Compromises reached are built on the inequalities
  which pervade the process at the start
• In the US, we have dependency relations, and
  weve stabilized a bad social system, but

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Rousseauean Democracy

• All that means is that when you have better or
  worse masters, you dont have freedom, and we
  have no moral reason for not bolting from the
  master when we can
• In US, we have a fairly stable, institutionalized
  way of making decisions, but it doesnt make
  people free
• What would it take to make people free?

44
Rousseauean Democracy

• The only social decision process which would make
  people free or, more exactly, secure their
  freedom would be one where no one had more
  power or input than anyone else
• How do we do that?

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Rousseauean Democracy

• Roots are democratic, since, equality is the
  basis of freedom and democracy is the only system
  which incorporates an egalitarian premise
• But, instilling democratic institutions alone is
  insufficient for a morally acceptable democracy

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Rousseauean Democracy

• Three steps
• Need to insure that the decision process is not
  based on prior social conditions that reflect
  power relations
• Redistribute to insure that no socially strategic
  positions exist

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Rousseauean Democracy

• I have already defined civil liberty by
  equality, we should understand, not that the
  degrees of power and riches are to be absolutely
  identical for everybody but that power shall
  never be great enough for violence, and shall
  always be exercised by virtue of rank and law
  and that, in respect of riches, no citizen shall
  ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none
  poor enough to be forced to sell himself which
  implies, on the part of the great, moderation in
  goods and position, and, on the side of the
  common sort, moderation in avarice and
  covetousness. -- Book 2, chapter 11

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Rousseauean Democracy

• Three steps
• Need to insure that the decision process is not
  based on prior social conditions that reflect
  power relations
• Redistribute to insure that no socially strategic
  positions exist
• People dont vote on private interests
• Note if weve done Steps 1 and 2 correctly, we
  will have no difficulty with this step
• Two kinds of will
• Particular Will
• General Will

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Rousseauean Democracy

• Particular will
• Private considerations
• Ask what would be good for me
• Basis is narrow self interest

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Rousseauean Democracy

• General Will
• Public considerations/collective interest
• Ask what would be good for us?
• General will is general in essence and object
• Think of the Prisoners Dilemma matrix
• The GW is like voting based on cooperative outcome

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Rousseauean Democracy

• Compare Rousseaus democracy with modern U.S.
• In US, need to vote on particular will or you
  will get hammered
• Dependence? In US, the winners impose power on
  the losers
• In Rousseau? Who are we dependent upon?
• Since vote is on general will, we are not
  dependent on anybody