Jean Jacques Rousseau's essay on what constitutes legitimate political authority is a key milestone in the history of Western political philosophy, and an essential one for me on my grand quest to understand the world around me and how it got this way. Volumes have been composed about the influence this book has had in history - both in the abstract history of ideas and in the more tangible one of human lives and nations - so I have nothing to add to them. I will merely comment on my reaction to this 18th century book as a reader in the 21st century, a citizen of one democracy and a resident of another.
Rousseau's main concern is to find "a form of association" whereby each associate is protected and by means of which "each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before.”
This is complicated by a conundrum surrounding the legitimacy of the majority vote. "The vote of the majority always obligates all the others," says Rousseau. "How can a man be both free and forced to conform to wills that are not his own?" And elsewhere, "Unless the vote were unanimous," he asks, "What would become of the minority’s obligation to submit to the majority’s choice? Where do one hundred who want a master get the right to vote for ten who do not?" And biggest paradox of all: how can all men be equal if they can be clearly seen to have varying physical abilities?
Rousseau waltzes his way around these philosophical pitfalls with nimble surefootedness. His partner in this dance is the Social Contract, unwritten pact, abstract concept, but essential construct in the circumvention of his paradoxes.
Rousseau's Social Contract binds ALL the people of the political entity together, substituting a moral and legitimate equality to compensate for physical inequality imposed on by nature. Each person places himself under the "supreme direction of the general will" and "receives each member as an indivisible part of the whole". The discovery of the general will is by majority vote - but crucially for the validity of the vote is the notion that when a law is proposed, what is asked is "not whether the voters approve or reject, but whether or not it conforms to the general will." In other words, each voter is merely asked to state his opinion on what the majority of voters would want - not on what he himself would prefer. By this simple strategem, Rousseau resolves the thorny issue of freedom of the minority: "When therefore the opinion contrary to mine prevails, this proves merely that I was in error, and that what I took to be the general will was not so."
The questions that Rousseau examines in detail are most striking in that they seldom preoccupy people of our times. Not that they have lost relevance - quite the contrary - but it is almost as if they have tacit answers that have passed into our culture as shared beliefs and conventional 'truths', and so to question them now may almost be a subversive act.
By meditating on the fundamental realities of the model, Rousseau is able to arrive at surprisingly perceptive and prescient conclusions about the system. He is able to observe, for instance, that the moral and legal equality that covers all citizens, is only as good as the government itself.
"Under bad governments this equality is only apparent and illusory," he warns. "It serves merely to maintain the poor man in his misery and the rich man in his usurpation. In actuality, laws are always useful to those who have possessions and harmful to those who have nothing. Whence it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only insofar as they all have something and none of them has too much."
In saying this, he is echoed by Adam Smith, barely a decade later, who says, in the Wealth of Nations: "Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."
But what the government gets away with depends on the people themselves. "Where right and liberty are everything," Rousseau warns, "inconveniences are nothing." More pertinently, where the people value convenience above all else and are most intent on avoiding misery, rights and liberty are usually at peril. He seems to be describing modern democratic society when he talks of a strange and eerie social harmony that is caused "when the citizens, having fallen into servitude, no longer have either liberty or will. Then fear and flattery turn voting into acclamations. People no longer deliberate; either they adore or they curse."
Little wonder, perhaps, that governments around the world would rather not have its citizens meditate too much on Rousseau's fundamental questions. It reminded me of Marshall McLuhan's narration of the following anecdote in his collection of essays, Understanding Media.
After the Second World War, an ad-conscious American army officer in Italy noted with misgiving that Italians could tell you the names of cabinet ministers, but not the names of commodities preferred by Italian celebrities. Furthermore, he said, the wall space of Italian cities was given over to political, rather than commercial slogans. He predicted that there was small hope that Italians would ever achieve any sort of domestic prosperity or calm until they began to worry about the rival claims of cornflakes and cigarettes, rather than the capacities of public men. In fact, he went so far as to say that democratic freedom very largely consists in ignoring politics and worrying, instead, about the threat of scaly scalp, hairy legs, sluggish bowels, saggy breasts, receding gums, excess weight and tired blood.
