“Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains”
Of all the thinkers I’ve read over the past year, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the one that most vexingly escapes a pithy description. Ironically, that’s all that I can remember learning about him in high school: he was the guy who believed that human beings all possessed natural civility in nature, while Thomas Hobbes believed that humans were savages that required societal order - or something like that. No mention of Rousseau’s pivotal role in the founding of Romanticism. No detail on his iconoclastic life - colored with public spats with luminaries like Voltaire; mind-boggling displays of cognitive dissonance (e.g., abandoning his five children, as he assembled a landmark treatise on education theory); the constant need to flee the jurisdictions of those he pissed off. No discussion of the important complexities - and potential dangers - inherent in his political exposition.
It is difficult to pick a representative slice of Rousseau’s works, when attempting to unpack his motivations; his 18th century writing on human nature, political philosophy, education, and his literary works are all enmeshed, to a degree. But, America in 2021 draws his views on the tension between individual freedom and societal authority into sharp view. Namely, Rousseau’s preconditions for a functioning society still feel sensible to modern eyes - and provoke questions about whether or not the government we have is actually suited for the society we have.
The Perils of Awareness
In both his Discourse on Political Economy and The Social Contract, Rousseau charts a history that intertwines the emergence of formal society with the emergence of widespread tyranny. He describes primal human living as largely solitary, with an overwhelming focus on basic needs, and limited interaction with humans outside of one’s tribe. Rousseau points to two capabilities that distinguish humans from other species, even in primitive settings: freedom, or the ability to resist appetites; and perfectibility, or the capacity to learn and engineer better methods for solving specific problems. When considered together, these capabilities enabled a continuous evolution in man’s technological capacity and methods of living.
Rousseau then provides two principles that he believes are inherent to the human mind, independent of sociability: self-preservation and pity. Self-preservation is common to all animals, in some capacity; with humans, though, it influences how we act or resist or appetites, and also motivates the development of technology. Pity, he believes, is unique to humans; it’s borne of our capacity for imagination and empathy, and weighs against impulses that are rooted in fear and agitation. In the natural world, pity serves as a regulatory mechanism that can foster loose community and social equilibrium - without the need for overtly rational or civic elements.
Rousseau believes that these natural capabilities and principles are manageable when living with limited social interaction. The problems arise with scale. In our own history, this inflection point was when tribal communities began to congeal into formal agrarian settlements. In these complex and rational social environments, Rousseau contends that the human psyche is forced into a very different shape. Intense socialization awakens a set of previously dormant passions within the mind, mutating the values (and behaviors) that served us well in the state of nature.
Among the cocktail of passions, the chief culprit is what Rousseau dubs amour propre: the sense of self-worth that is derived from external recognition and validation. In tribal and natural settings, he posits that the impulse for recognition is constrained - simply due to the limited number of other people around us, and the relatively simple design of our communities. When we’re placed in the soup of a bonafide society, amour propre goes haywire - causing men to be taken over by their interpersonal passions. The yearning for recognition and romance becomes a relentless and principal motivation; the lust for revenge and retribution takes on a depth that isn’t conceivable in primitive environments.
As impassioned as his diagnosis is, Rousseau does not advocate for modern society to turn back to simpler times. The genie is out of the bottle, and perhaps our proclivity for perfectibility - building, scaling, and increasing relying on our rational faculties - makes this condition inevitable. So what should we do? In his estimation, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the mechanics that govern the civic paradigm.
Rousseau then details the double-edged sword that is reason and rational thinking. Yes, these faculties can be used to propel passion-fueled actions: deception, oppression, and generally selfish and status-oriented behaviors. But they also grant us the ability to reckon with justice and morality as articulated concepts - and to build theories of action around them. Moreover, a rationally-minded society also requires us to consider sovereignty as a real and personal imperative; freedom must be concertedly protected from the dangers of amour propre.
The General Will
Given that pernicious passions are always lurking throughout formal society, Rousseau asserts that we need to be hyper-diligent in designing our systems of power. He points to the bloody tapestry of history, as evidence of what happens when vigilance is abdicated: selfishness of all stripes will run amok, and plunge societies either into sustained tyranny or a cycle of unending war. In general, Rousseau rejects any Hobbesian implementation of sovereignty that has any group or individual rule over a population - equating the prospect with elaborated slavery.
The Social Contract, instead, presents an ideal: a social order in which the term “subject” and “sovereign” are identical correlatives. Rousseau believes that this can occur through the manifestation of a General Will: a composite ethos that harmonizes a group’s individual wills into a mutually-amenable, mutually-accountable animating force. In such a paradigm, legitimacy is derived from the participatory nature of the social order; each citizen is freely choosing, through their own willpower, to validate the General Will and the laws and actions undertaken in its name.
Rousseau then proceeds to detail the core praxis of a society that abides by the General Will. Interestingly, he does not provide a uniform prescription for the type of government that must be enacted: democracies are described as fit for smaller populations; aristocratic representation for medium-sized populations; and monarchies for larger ones. In each case, the specific form of the government is a separate consideration from whether it is properly channeling the will of its people. He admits that princely rule can more quickly descend into tyranny - but in kind warns against the farce of a democracy that is run by corrupt, self-interested factions.
Naturally, the nebulous and quasi-spiritual nature of the General Will has provoked a lot of questions since Rousseau put pen to paper. Chiefly, how can anyone know whether a given society is actually operating in accordance with the shared will of its people, or not? One can take a democratic perspective, and simply determine whether the majority of its citizens are in agreement with the enacted form of government. (Though in that case, it almost feels like you would need a real-time ticker, given that individual wills are in constant flux.) Others have taken a transcendental perspective, arguing that the General Will isn’t something that can be validated through quantitative measures; it is instead a more fundamental question of core alignment, between a social order and its people.
The democratic interpretation is commonly conveyed in academic snippets; Rousseau’s articulation of the sovereign individual served as a cornerstone for the political philosophy of the Enlightenment that would follow - crystalized perhaps most famously in the writings of the American Founding Fathers. The transcendental interpretation, in its own right, is credited with both powering an explosion of Romantic art and writing - and indirectly, with bolstering the case for charismatic leadership in the 20th century. Scholars like Bertrand Russell draw a line between Rousseau’s impassioned depictions of a shared will, and the polemics that would power the rise of Hitler and other fascist movements in the aftermath of World War I.
As I read through his political works, it seemed clear that Rousseau did not harbor illusions about the perils of pursuing a General Will. A harmonious, representative, well-functioning society could very quickly descend into one that was overtaken by the desires of a warped individual or corrupt cabal; there are no guarantees, when attempting to toe the line between freedom and authority. For all of the gusto in his prose, I was also struck by the subtle ripples of pessimism and pragmatism: to strive for and preserve the General Will is a task fraught with dangers and potential pitfalls.
Even so, with all options placed before us, as sovereign individuals trying to do the best with our current conditions and intrinsic passions: what’s the alternative?
E Pluribus Unum
Google any combination of the words “America”, “Divided”, and “Politics” and you’ll be treated an endless deluge of commentary about the ever-worsening cultural balkanization of these United States. It’s difficult to read Jean-Jacques Rousseau and not immediately wonder about what his diagnostic would conclude about 21st century America. The organs of our democracy, at every concentric level - from the local municipality to the national legislature - are still chugging along in (relatively) uninterrupted fashion. There’s no shortage of observable “kinematics”; the performance of budgets being assembled, the machinations of international relations, and countless dollars being allocated to programs of all shapes and sizes.
But there is a relentless cynicism from all political camps that, in its most essential distillation, seems to provoke the question: is there still a there there? Or is this electoral-legislative machine just lumbering forward - largely without aim, and without any meaningful reflection of the wills of its constituents? Rousseau repeatedly asserts that every government is ultimately provisional; every structure must be true to its people - lest it be hollow. The most dangerous opportunity for subversion and tyranny is when “the incumbent system degenerates before the eyes of its people, permitting them to avert their gaze, and creating a void for naked ruin”.
I’ll leave it to more inventive minds to ponder what systemic reform (or reset) could look like for a country that is only becoming more culturally diverse, and more economically stratified; there is no shortage of challenges for the rising generation of Americans. At the heart of his colorful and wide-spanning volumes, Rousseau leaves us with a timeless imperative: it is incumbent upon every sovereign individual to contribute their will to the continuous development and rejuvenation of the social order - if it is to stand any chance at all.
“Respect your fellow-citizens, and you will render yourselves respectable; respect freedom and your power will increase daily: never exceed your rights and soon they will be boundless.” - Discourse on Political Economy, p. 19