Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

The Spongebob of social contract theory

Who was Rousseau?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher from 18th century Geneva, with a name that is irritating to type. The son of a clockmaker, originally apprenticed to an engraver, a bit of a prankster, Rousseau had an interesting, somewhat itinerant life, which I’m not going to recount here because if you wanted a biography of Rousseau you’d go to Wikipedia. The lucky bastard did have a couple of sugar mommies along the way, though, which must have given him the time to sit down and muse and write essays on political philosophy. Presumably he did this between bouts of mooning random women in the street, an odd behaviour stemmed from his desire to be spanked. If you’ve ever seen some prat post an image macro and the text “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains” – he’s quoting Rousseau, specifically The Social Contract.

He also seems to have been one of the big proponents of the ‘noble savage’, and so we have him to thank for Melville’s Queequeg. That’s relevant because Rousseau was far more optimistic than Hobbes about man in the ‘state of nature’. For Rousseau, man in the state of nature was not the brutal savage shanking other blokes in the ribs for half a pear, as Hobbes would have described it.

What does Rousseau think man in the state of nature is like?

He was far more generous than Hobbes regarding the fundamental state of man. To Rousseau, humans unburdened by society, are peaceful and solitary. They want to nail down the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and, having achieved that, they want to have a celebratory wank. Or a spank, depending on inclination… They would have been driven by survival instinct and an innate sense of empathy. This is your noble savage. 

How does Rousseau think about The Social Contract?

Society is a corrupting influence of sorts. Man develops society and gains a whole set of comparison points, which in turn drive a set of vices – greed, envy, pride, etc. They want what others have. They want to be above others. They are hold others in contempt. This is driven by competition, which results in the aforementioned comparisons, because competition creates inequality. 

We’ve got natural freedom, the freedom of man in a state of nature, and ‘civil freedom’. Civil freedom is an interesting one. This is where the ‘of sorts’ qualifier comes in. In a state of nature, the noble savage doesn’t have to be concerned with morality, because there’s no common good to consider there. Once the noble savages give up the state of nature and join together in a community, then they have to start considering each other. In turn, this emphasis on altruism and helping others is effectively a demonstration of an individual putting the greater good above their own private desires.  

By extension, he thought, political power derived from the consent of the people. A government can only be legitimate if the people it rules agree to be ruled – from their co-operation comes the concept of ‘right’ to rule. By extension, he admired Roman and Spartan voting systems. 

“The system of voting used by the Romans was as simple as were their manners and morals, if less simple than that of Sparta. Each man gave his vote by word of mouth, and a clerk recorded it; the majority of individual votes in each tribe determined the decision of that tribe, the majority of tribal votes the decision of the people; and the same thing was done in the curiae and centuriae. This was a good method so long as honesty prevailed among the citizens and everyone was shamed to give his vote in public to an unjust cause or an unworthy candidate. But when the people grew corrupt and votes were bought, it became expedient for the ballot to be cast in secret, so that the buyers of votes might be restrained by mistrust of the sellers, and scoundrels given the chance of not being traitors also.”

He does note find rule by force to be legitimate. The right of the strongest does not translate to society and rulers, he argues: “it can only produce a tissue of bewildering nonsense.” Effectively, he invokes the concept of ‘duty’ being a precondition of obedience in relation to ‘rights’ – i.e.: that if an incumbent has a right to be obeyed, they do not need to exert force, because their subjects would act in accordance with their right to obedience. If they must force a population into subservience, then the matter of whether they have the right to that subservience is irrelevant. If they can’t force a population into subservience, then the matter of whether they have the right to that subservience is irrelevant.

“Since no man has any natural authority over his fellows, and since force alone bestows no right, all legitimate authority among men must be based on covenants.”

What is the ‘general will’?

The general will seems to have some parallel to utilitarianism, which is probably an easier concept these days. Take that with a bunch of salt. Nonetheless the gist seems to be ‘don’t be a dick, play nice with others, and everybody benefits’. If we have a dispute or need a new law, we have a vote, the idea with the most votes wins. The more people who are working for the common good, the more people benefit from the common good.

By extension, a government’s laws should be constructed with the ideas of fairness and equality in mind. But at the same time, Rousseau seems to completely disregard anybody who does not adhere to the ‘general will’, which seems to indicate a desire for a sort of herd mind? That’s wildly simplified and the comparison to utilitarianism is going to have someone frothing at the mouth. Jeremy Bentham, for instance, was far from a fan of the contracts and natural laws that Rousseau’s ideas revolved around.

“The indestructible prerogatives of mankind,” he wrote, “have no need to be supported upon the sandy foundation of a fiction.” The justification of government is pragmatic, its aim improvement and the release of the free choice of individuals and the play of market forces that will create prosperity.”

What is the fundamental compact?

This seems to be, in effect, another term for the social contract. When forming a society, everyone comes together and agrees a set of rules and conditions by which rulers promote the good of the people and the people don’t devolve into self-serving narcissists. This subsequent collective group is the sovereign who, together, enact the general will.

The lawgiver becomes the dominant figure in the social contract. Rousseau thinks he is needed because “men left alone will be led by their own passions and folly into disaster; they need someone to save them from themselves.” But he also doesn’t want to go as far as Hobbes and restrict people’s individual liberty. So, he has this roundabout attempt to argue simultaneously that a sovereign must have absolute power, but that a sovereign with absolute power does not inherently negate the possibility of freedom. Which just sounds like he’s trying to have his cake and eat it. Which is about as French as it gets…

Contrivance

I can’t really shake the impression that Rousseau was strangely naïve. Is this accurate? To some extent. As mentioned at the top, he’s basically responsible for the ‘noble savage’ phrase. His idea of man in a state of nature is that we are basically just giant children. Which, honestly, might just have been an extension of his own vaguely incestuous sexual proclivities – he had a whole ‘mamma’ thing, it seems. Look it up, it’s not really worth going into here. And yet he also seems to admit that, left to our own devices, most of us will Darwin Award ourselves. Which seems pretty accurate. On the other hand, the idea of individuals roaming around in a state of nature being otherwise harmless… doesn’t really track. Not least because it doesn’t fit with his own life and times, let alone with what we know about humans. As one article on the Encyclopaedia Britannica website observes: 

“Rousseau was a romantic, given to weeping under the willows on Lake Geneva, and his political works are hypnotically readable, flaming protests by one who found the hard rationality of the 18th century too exacting. But people are not, as Rousseau claims, born free. They are born into society, which imposes restraints on them. Casting about to reconcile his artificial antithesis between humanity’s purported natural state of freedom and its condition in society, Rousseau utilizes the old theories of contract and transforms them into the concept of the ‘general will’.”

Definitions and writing

Maybe this is just due to subsequent interpretations and so on, but so many of the key ideas attributed to Rousseau aren’t really their own thing in The Social Contract. He does reference and return to things like the concept of the general will. It’s clearly important to him, but the way these things get talked about, you’d think they’d be their own subheadings or chapters. They’re not. They’re broadly ideas that he flags up while trying to discuss other ideas. He’s far more concerned with defining things like the types of governments, how they interact with their citizens, and the problems that are likely to prove fatal to them. 

And so, as with a lot of philosophy, if you want to get a basic understanding of some the terms that get referenced when other people talk about him – like the general will and state of nature and so on – in a manner that doesn’t require a bunch of re-reads and extrapolation, then you’re probably better off just googling it. Because otherwise, there’s no specific ‘here’s what I think the general will is’ or ‘here’s what I mean before I start yapping on about the ‘fundamental compact’. The ‘state of nature’ is a topic Rousseau is central to, and he directly responds to Hobbes’ Leviathan, but there’s no point at which he outright states ‘here is what I interpret the state of nature as being’. That may just be a personal gripe but was a tad frustrating. On the other hand, that might indicate a problem that arises more from an individual’s focus on what they want out of Rousseau’s essays, more than it is a problem with his writing.

It’s hard to figure out whether this is just a result of their time, and there was no real impetus to define terms before constructing and argument, or whether these concepts just weren’t that important to his overall argument. And whether subsequent commenters have latched onto these terms, when they weren’t that central to him. Also, to be fair, concepts like the ‘general will’ aren’t actually particularly complicated ideas, it’s more just his particular name for a generic ‘don’t be a prick’ clause, promoting social unity, which people seem to have latched onto. 

Maybe it’s a modern expectation that one expects a writer to pre-define terms and I’m just filtering it in a way that isn’t ‘native’ to it. Then again, French continental philosophy was 90% obscurantist bullshit throughout the 20th century, so maybe they just never felt like they had to explain anything. Indeed, Foucault apparently told John Searle, “In France, you gotta have ten percent incomprehensible, otherwise people won’t think it’s deep–they won’t think you’re a profound thinker.” Which, if true, is honestly just pathetic. And that’s from Foucault, whose writing is relatively straightforward. This type of bollocks is why everybody hates the French.

Also, to be fair to Rousseau, the writing itself is perfectly straightforward and fine. It seems a bit up in the air and vague in some places, but I never found myself needing to re-read a line 17 times because he’d pulled a Deleuze and switched the metaphor from one sentence to the next. But, having said that, be prepared for some page-long run-on sentences. As was the style at the time. 

Conclusion

As with all philosophy and so on, I’ve probably got this all hysterically wrong, but now more than ever the concept of the social contract seems worth trying to understand. So, what the hell, here I am. I expect this will be one of the easier texts to remember as I dive into other books, and draw links between points and so on. It’s an easy enough read and it’s pretty short. It’s difficult to say whether or not I learned anything definitive from it, but I don’t feel it was a waste of time, so I’ll chalk it up as a positive.