Reflection: On the Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in On the Social Contract, writes on the nature of freedom, oppression, humanity, and government, outlining the “social compact” as a means to measure and attain what he values most in polity—independence. Rousseau critiques his contemporaries, particularly Hugo Grotius, for sophist justifications of slavery, criticizing their understanding of power and politics, and contending that the ultimate sovereign authority for any state lies in the collectivized will of its people.
Rousseau begins his work with a brief, poetic description of the human condition regarding independence—“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”—an eloquent phrase outlining the nature of social existence: only in one’s infancy is the individual unshackled from their social obligations (141). At face value, law and order would seem to be the enemy of autonomous agency in light of this observation. This extends beyond the level of the individual. Society is as shackled in its growing into maturity as the persons who constitute it, according to the philosopher. This imprisonment is avertable, though, and the author resolves to construct a mechanism by which a state may orient itself according to the united will of its people, referred to as the “social compact.” To more fully understand this, an examination of Rousseau’s ethic of force is requisite.
Interstitial to On the Social Contract is a striking critique of unexamined Machiavellian notions of force and power. Rousseau targets the work of Hugo Grotius, in particular, as an example of the philosophical inadequacies of such a base understanding of social order. The first four chapters of Book I (Subject of the First Book, Of the First Societies, On the Right of the Strongest, and On Slavery) are dedicated to dismantling such naturalist positions that justify the “right to rule” on the basis of force alone. He writes, “Grotius denies that all human power is established for the benefit of the governed, citing slavery as an example. His usual method of reasoning is always to present fact as a proof of right. A more logical method could be used, but not one more favorable to tyrants” (142). This reveals a few of Rousseau’s primary complaints: that his contemporaries 1) confuse status quo for status potissimus, making out the current state of affairs to be equivalent to a perfect (or at least reasonable state), and 2) do so in favor of their own self-interest, as a political action that substitutes a conscientious desire for good with a cowardly craving for security, acting much like the tyrants who they tacitly support. Rousseau asserts his aversion to this framework, noting that inequality does not stem from innate qualities of persons, but rather that “force has produced the first slaves.” [1]
Grotius’s position seems to follow a misguided line of reasoning about just acts in war, which Grotius uses to construct an understanding of compliance and obligation that makes the two synonymous. He concludes that, in war, one man has a right to kill another, and exercises that right through force. Grotius then notes that a more “legitimate” act, in such conditions, is the enslavement of the overpowered adversary, because it allows for more “profit” to both parties. [2] Further, he derives from this so-called legitimate act in war a privatized right of those in power to dictate the actions of those who fall prey to them, and considers the impulse to obey such commands to be the slave’s moral duty. Rousseau finds this argument to be ill-devised, in large part because war is divorced from the individual’s moral capacity—it stems from the state; a state cannot enslave a people since it is, by nature, composed of those people. Rather, should a people be oppressed under a state’s authority, that state is ruled by private opinion, by the minority, and is no longer a legitimate extension of such oppressed peoples’ moral power. Rousseau asserts that this state is not sovereign, or even a nation in any real sense: regarding this, he argues, “I see nothing but a master and slaves; I do not see a people and its leader. It is, if you will, an aggregation, but not an association. There is neither a public good nor a body politic there” (147). Persons under this condition have been robbed of their right to autonomy and cannot, as such, possess a duty to their masters. Still, Grotius’s standpoint contends that slaves have donated their right to life and must adhere to the mandates of their oppressors independently (i.e. as moral agents), as a pseudo-indemnification to repay their captors for their continued vital state.
Grotius’s rationale is ironic, since it posits a “donation” of rights that nevertheless indebts the donor to their charitable recipient. Moreover, in a state of war, the principle right at stake for the citizen is their life, and autonomy by extension, yet Grotius does not consider the ethical liability relinquished alongside its source. Again, he confuses the prima facie state of things (that a slave apparently has a duty to obey a master) with the correct state of things (that a slave is obligated, through force).
This, of course, is a shallow argument, and fails to consider the relative moral weight of obedience compared to duty. The former, Rousseau contends, is morally empty; in On Slavery, he writes, “Removing all liberty from [a person]’s will is tantamount to removing all morality from his actions” (145). One cannot consider themselves to be a complete moral agent if they’ve surrendered their agency. Since liberty is necessary for any person to consider their thoughts, actions, and duties to be rational, sound, and binding, such a person, in Rousseau’s eyes, has surrendered not only their agency, but their own moral burden as well.
Rousseau’s introductory statement is further developed in this—one shackled under the yoke of society is free from some moral burden beneath it, as their ethical instrumentality is limited. To exemplify this, one may consider that a person who does not belong to a collective justice system may have a proper burden to seek retribution should another commit a crime against them. However in a body politic, this otherwise just act is criminalized as vigilantism and substituted with a systemic means of seeking restitution limited by a right to due process, afforded by some sovereign body. We will discuss this example at greater length later, as it gives additional insight into the nature of Rousseau’s argument. For now, it serves to illustrate that the subject in question emancipates themselves from their burden of retribution by their collaboration with their body politic.
Grotius has a response to this—he notes that a people can choose subjugation in giving themselves over to a particular sovereign. From this, Rousseau dissolves his opponent’s claims as, he points out, in order for a people to choose to collectively become subjects, they must be a collective in the first place. This is implicit in Grotius’s claim, and Rousseau finds common ground here to establish a “true foundation of society” (147). From this, Rousseau begins a positive construction of his social compact wherein the state of nature’s limitations on humanity’s maintained existence are overcome through an “alter[ed] mode of existence” (147). Of course, this mode of existence ought to preserve the goods inherent to the state of nature, in particular, freedom. To accomplish this, Rousseau composes the following basis for a proper, reasonable society: treating each person’s will as a variable which is optimized summarily with their peers, a society exists when this sum maximizes, positing a basis for sovereignty contingent on a sort-of “Pareto Optimality” of freedom. The philosopher refers to this maximal state as the “general will." Put in simpler terms, “true” society arises when each person acts in their greatest free capacity, insofar as that capacity does not, on the whole, inhibit the will of another, and limits on peoples’ will are agreeable if each person’s most possible free state is actualized by those limitations. [3]
Returning to the previous example, the person who forgoes their right to retribution in exchange for a right to due process has not given up much freedom on the whole but ensures that, by their sacrifice (and the sacrifice of each member of their state), the whole of society affords greater freedom by means of a fair justice system, where revenge and retribution are not as readily confused. Further, by unshackling that person from the duty to enact retribution, moral culpability for the action is the whole of that society's, motivating it and empowering it to construct systems that should be more capable of fulfilling those moral obligations bestowed upon it by the surrendered agency of its constituents.
Rousseau does not consider the general will to be a guiding moral principle. It is, at most, a means to test the validity of governance. This is clear in Book II, Chapter VIII, entitled On the People, where Rousseau considers that a people may freely choose vice, even collectively, and still act according to the general will, citing King Minos in Crete as a good lawmaker who “disciplined nothing but a vice-ridden people.” Of course, Rousseau considers this to be the exception, rather than the rule. Rousseau regresses in his argument when evaluating this case, proclaiming that a nation where the general will covets evil and has already undergone violent reform, needs a “master,” since “liberty can be acquired, but it can never be recovered” (166).
This notion is applied by Rousseau axiomatically, and (unsurprisingly) stirs up controversy. For one, astute readers will point to many nations which have undergone successive revolutions, such as France, China, Germany, etc.. This is an understandable misconstruction. The nations, at each of those revolutionary junctures, take on the same name as their predecessor, giving the illusion of continuity. Should the peoples’ general will allow it, they may even take on some of the same laws and customs. Yet each nation is born anew through these changes, and one cannot reasonably assert that the nations in question are constituted in the same way—the body of law discharged at these moments of change is altered too significantly to consider the nation to be the same, and indeed the context of the nation changes just as much with the passage of time. Were nations men and time a flowing river, Heraclitus’s famous words would come to mind, that, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” At every point, the changing of a nation’s general will necessitates a new understanding of what that nation is.
The former notion of Rousseau’s is the more suspect of the two, though—that a state which revolts unsuccessfully against a corruption of morality or authority requires a master, rather than a liberator. His analysis of Peter the Great will assist us here. He notes that, in response to the Russian citizenry’s “barbarousness,” the monarch attempted to civilize his people prematurely (166). The philosopher’s assertion here is not that Peter was wrong in attempting to follow the general will of his people, but that in his imitations of Europe, he failed to allow his peoples to form a collective will of their own. As such, Rousseau seems to believe it would have been better for the Russians to have remained "un-westernized" until they’d established their cultural identity by forming a social order without the prompting of the monarch. This allows for a more true expression of the general will, in Rousseau’s eyes. In lieu of political turmoil, Rousseau seems to share this sentiment—that it is better for an infantile nation to constitute itself, and that a “master” acts as some necessary evil, a holdover until such a nation reaches the vigor of its youth.
Rousseau's critique of Grotius and his contemporaries can be seen as a call to reject the naturalistic justifications for oppression and to instead embrace a more collectivist understanding of the social contract. By emphasizing the importance of the social compact and the need for a legitimate and moral authority to oversee it, Rousseau seeks to provide a framework for creating a society that is both free and just. While his ideas may not have been fully realized in his own time, they remain relevant today as philosophers continue to grapple with questions of freedom, power, and oppression in contemporary societies.