Rousseau's Social Contract—Book 2
Sovereignty
Book 1 of the Social Contract was about “right” and therefore the “general will.” The general will is the conventional method of combining the right of nature with right as defined positively by man. Under legitimate conventions (i.e., under the general will), men pursue their self-interest, and others are bound to respect this self-interest even if they could violate or ignore it.
Book 2 is about sovereignty and law. My essay covers the first 3 chapters, which are the first part of the book and relate to sovereignty. Sovereignty is ultimately about honesty and courage. Men must have the courage to recognize their situation: acquisition of safety only comes through virtue rather than obedience. This recognition, often horrible, must be openly (honestly) admitted so that the regime can be legitimate and maintain itself.
Sovereignty is Inalienable
“If the people promises simply to obey, it dissolves itself by this very act, it loses its quality of being a people; as soon as there is a master, there is no more sovereign, and the body politic is destroyed forthwith” (2.1.3).
There can be no relation of mastery where there is sovereignty, because the sovereign must be the master. Any attempt to locate sovereignty outside of mastery asks for what is by definition impossible.
“Indeed, while it is not impossible that a particular will agree with the general will on some point, it is in any event impossible for this agreement to be lasting and constant. … It is even more impossible to have a guarantee of this agreement, even if it always obtained; it would be an effect not of art, but of chance” (2.1.3).
How one thing can be “more impossible” than something else? Rousseau has given us an absurd statement. But we can make a good inference: the first impossibility is really an unlikelihood. The second impossibility is an absurdity in speech, i.e., impossible simply.
The sovereign body (you) cannot renounce its Will; it cannot become obedient to another will. There can be no obedience because it is unlikely that the other will agrees with the sovereign’s will at all times. And even if this were to happen, as if by magic or just as a thought experiment, this would be by chance because there can be no guarantee. If someone else has power over you, then by definition you cannot guarantee anything—otherwise they wouldn’t have power over you. There is no safety to be found in obedience. Only in independence—which is the opposite of alienation—is there any “safety,” and even when you have independence you have to forever maintain and justify it. This is almost what Nietzsche called “Life,” and it is what he loved. When he derides Rousseau, he does so because here we see Rousseau has seemingly recognized this fact about life, and as we will see he is going to betray it (if you are Nietzsche) or approximate it (if you are a humble liberal political scientist).
I add briefly here, because it is a question under dispute, that Rousseau states quite clearly that this inalienable will must also be Wise. “No will can consent to anything contrary to the good of the being that wills” (2.1.3). This sentence is an absurd statement unless it is assumed that one can only consent to wise choices; consent, in this sentence, must mean “acknowledgement of wisdom.” This is of course necessary for any real independence, as I mentioned above. A will that does not wish to alienate itself must be wise, because otherwise there is neither acquisition nor maintenance. Only wisdom can justify independence, because men who cannot make good choices cannot enjoy themselves and they will be forced by nature to change.
Indivisible
People sometimes seek safety through obedience. Chapter 1 is about why they are mistaken. Chapter 2 is about the typically English way of seeking safety: just pretend Sovereignty can have a built in failsafe system. Neither virtue nor obedience is necessary any longer. Pretend what James Madison calls “auxiliary precautions,” are actually all you need whatsoever. Rousseau calls this mechanistic view of politics the attempt to “divide the sovereign.” It is what Carl Schmitt spent much of his time thinking about, though he was concerned with obedience rather than virtue.
When you wish for this sort of dispensation—a mechanism to solve your problems—you cannot speak consistently. You have to make what is one into more than one. Rousseau says explicitly, if you can “adopt true principles” you can speak “consistently.” The writers who chop the sovereign up like this were forced to adopt false principles because they wanted something that could be gained only by flattery: ambassadorships, professorships, pensions. Rousseau however will flatter no man, because when you speak the Truth you pay Court to The People. In other words, Rousseau is going to flatter the people, and his principles forthwith will lead him to speak inconsistently. And he openly admits this new inability in the footnote in chapter 4 “I have not been able to avoid it [an inconsistency] verbally, in view of the poverty of language.”
Rousseau is going to flatter the people by not talking about the need for virtue or wisdom, which is the proper answer to the sovereignty-chopping theoreticians, who all think you can avoid the need for good men by institutional arrangements. Instead of saying this, Rousseau begins to talk about law.
“The act of declaring war and that of making peace have been regarded as acts of sovereignty, which they are not; for neither of these acts is a law but only an application of the law, a particular act which decides a case, as will clearly be seen once the idea that attaches to the word law has been fixed” (2.2.3).
This statement is almost nonsensical. A declaration of war is merely the application of law. What kind of law would that be? The sovereign makes a law declaring war and this is not a “declaration of war”? I think what it means is this: the sovereign declares that it is and this is law. Declarations of war are just the result of this fundamental law. All declarations of a people presupposes there is a people and therefore, all sovereignty is in the people. It’s a flattery in the sense of … if you say “A king always has a people” or “an aristocracy always governs a people” and presuppose that, therefore, “a people had to exist in order to set up a king or aristocracy,” you flatter the people by considering them always citizens rather than subjects or worse, serfs or slaves that have been put upon by more powerful and/or cunning men. Rousseau abstracts from the character of the people to make them always “first” in time: they came first, sovereignty starts there. And this presupposes some virtue in them, insofar as them “coming first” implies that the present system is a result of their power not the power of the King or Aristocrats.
This argument for indivisibility, that the people come first and act generally (as one), is not as good an argument as the one he made about the inalienability of sovereignty, although he says sovereignty is indivisible “for the same reason that it is inalienable.” That statement is how he opens the 2nd chapter, but nowhere do you find the argument from chapter 1: by definition, you cannot be sovereign and also promise to obey the will of another. Such a definitive argument is lacking in chapter 2. Rousseau instead says either the will is general or it is particular. Either the will is from the whole or it is from a mere part. And yet this whole need not be “unanimous.” A mere formal unity—letting everyone vote—is required. The formal unity has a reality insofar as the fundamental society, the society preceding government, is not only first in time but first in importance. So long as that is the case, acts of government are not acts of law but merely particular instances of the general law: preserve and cultivate the society. The executors and decision makers can then be multiplied however the society wishes, but this isn’t a division of sovereignty. “The rights which one takes for parts of this sovereignty are all subordinate to it, and always presupposes supreme wills which these rights implement.”
This so-called supremacy of the society (the people) is drawn into question in the last paragraph of the chapter, where Rousseau sides with the people but says those who side with the monarchs and oligarchs get more for their flattery. In any event, you can imagine how locating sovereignty in any specific place is easy theoretically, but difficult in practice; so Rousseau tries his hand at wisdom, locating sovereignty in a single inalienable and indivisible place, then muddying the waters as to who holds what. In order to muddy the waters you have to condescend and leave theory behind. As I said, the 1st chapter is definitive in its argumentation style—Rousseau could do this because he was much more willing than most to strike out at piety—but the 2nd chapter is where he begins to condescend to the people more clearly. This condescension relies on an image of sovereignty more than the definition of sovereignty. Rousseau’s “argument” in chapter 2 relies on the image of a primal society that predates whatever hoary institutions exist here or there, and he mentions specific examples. His condescension did not go unrewarded. The rulers, to give Rousseau and the moderns their credit, who figured out how to unleash that primal power conquered the world. The West conquered the world, not the East. It doesn’t matter if modern philosophy caused this or was caused by it. Only a nerd would concern himself with which comes first because he cares less about Life and more about recognition, less about Vitality and more about Free-Will. The point is these two things went together in those great nations and peoples.
The third chapter, which is the final chapter in the first part of book 2, has the flavor of the first two but the subject has changed: Sovereignty cannot be alienated. Sovereignty cannot be divided. “Whether the General Will Can Err.” It’s as if Rousseau is battling mightily to hold onto his high approximation, his great teaching, but is being forced by circumstances—his need to flatter the people—to condescend to more confused language, language which will grow less consistent and more poetic until it hits a crescendo in chapter 7.
The General Will Cannot Err
Rousseau announces a break. He has to leave the idealism of philosophy behind, and therefore the consistency in speech that is possible only through idealism.
“From the preceding it follows that the general will is always upright and always tends to the public utility: but it does not follow from it that the people’s deliberations are always equally upright.”
The people are not always wise. Therefore there are two kinds of deliberations. There is the deliberation of the general will and the deliberation of private, unwise, wills. The general will cannot sustain itself. The citizens, to produce the general will, would need to be wise. Rousseau abstracts from this need and says instead they would have to be “citizens,” “adequately informed,” and “isolated” from each other. With these three scientific-mathematical variables in place, their deliberations will produce the general will. Rousseau is mimicking the perfection of Socrates’ “city in speech.” He says there can be no “partial societies” in the state—but instead of suggesting the Socratic forms of communism, he just leaves what is necessary as something abstract, something for a thought experiment: “suppose you can get everyone well informed and then keep them from talking to each other before they vote.” The evils of faction are overcome in thought, purely useless thought, or, a useful thought which must express itself in this useless way in order to flatter the people.
In the end, as a result of Rousseau’s condescension to the people, the general will is rests on this “mathematical” premise (and it has nothing to do with wisdom): the more particular wills you have the more differences in particular wills there will be. When you take the sum of these differences you get the general will. The general will, which is supposed to be an ideal, actually admits of more and less. The greatest general will is in the idealized thought experiment explained above. Factions cause fewer differences because the people have these allegiances. The fewer differences you have, the less general the result of your summation. The general will is only eradicated once there is only a single faction and a single difference. So there is a sliding scale between the idealized general will, where there is no faction in your city and the ultimate factionalism of one private opinion prevailing over society. It’s mathematical tyranny!
Now this sliding scale is interesting because it means the general will is now flexible enough to admit of better and worse, but in becoming flexible in this way it would seem to legitimate all sorts of governments. “It is important, then, that in order to have the general will expressed well there be no partial society in the State.” That is, the general can be expressed poorly—it is less a standard than a descriptive tool. Therefore Rousseau can claim that his theory of the general will can explain the excellence of a variety of lawgivers (Lycurgus, Solon, Numa, and Servius).
But we have been told all along that the general will is good simply. Rousseau will “solve” this problem in through his discussion of Law.
Conclusion
In the next essay, I will explain the rest of Book 2, covering chapters 4 through 12. Rousseau is going to produce a teaching about government very similar in appearance to Hobbes and Locke, but through different means. Instead of relying on obedience (Hobbes) or sovereignty-chopping (Locke), Rousseau is going to give us a repackaged old idea, namely, good Law. This law will have a concern for morals but will also view them as relative—because Rousseau is supposedly a scientist-mathematician first, and a Legislator second.