1
Introduction
It seems appropriate to begin by analyzing a person who was of central inspiration to the entire ideology that is about to be examined. He may indeed be a paradigmatic figure for democratism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau “set the world in flame,” Lord Byron said.1 Referring to him as the “apostle of affliction,” Byron joins many others who have seen fit to use religious language to describe the philosopher who has become more of a prophet. The sociologist Robert Nisbet calls Rousseau “the man of the hour” and “the saint of saints” and says, “He offers absolute power in the form of divine grace, of the community of the elect.”2 Along these same lines, Jacob Talmon criticizes Rousseau’s “Discourse on Inequality,” calling it “that Gospel of Revolution.”3 Robespierre, however, was sincere in calling Rousseau “divine.”4 Ernst Cassirer, also an admirer, summarizes Rousseau’s political project along these lines: “The hour of salvation will strike when the present coercive form of society is destroyed and is replaced by the free form of political and ethical community—a community in which everyone obeys only the general will, which he recognizes and acknowledges as his own will. . . . But it is futile to hope that this salvation will be accomplished through outside help. No God can grant it to us; man must become his own savior.”5
Rousseau’s ostensibly secular philosophy of democracy has led many to conceive of his project in religious terms and has inspired a corresponding quasi-religious faith in the type of democracy he envisions. At the heart of Rousseau’s political philosophy and no doubt informing the ersatz religion of democracy that he arguably founded is the concept of the general will. This was surely on the mind of Nisbet when he referred to the “absolute power” Rousseau offers. Cassirer specifically mentions the general will as the vehicle for our political salvation. Rousseau suggests as much. This chapter examines the ways in which Rousseau’s understanding of the general will, perhaps the concept orienting his philosophy of democracy, guides the democratist interpretation of democracy in general and the popular will in particular.
In this chapter, I highlight those aspects of Rousseau’s political thought that are reflected in the modern, conflicted understanding of democracy that I identify with democratism. This book takes seriously Rousseau’s assertion that a singular “great principle” guides all of his works.6 “All that is challenging in the Social Contract had previously appeared in the Essay on Inequality; all that is challenging in Émile was previously in Julie,” Rousseau insists. I draw on these and other works and find that in them is indeed a guiding principle, the same that guides democratism. To demonstrate that Rousseau’s political philosophy is paradigmatic of what I here identify as a comprehensive political ideology, I must paint with somewhat broad brush strokes. To go into great detail and to analyze the many nuances of any one aspect of Rousseau’s thought will ultimately detract from the major purpose of this book. Like other chapters, this chapter has the limited aim of establishing a particular thinker’s connection to democratism. I touch on the concepts of the legislator and Rousseau’s understanding of education as they fit within his political philosophy, but the concept on which this chapter focuses most attention is the general will.
My interpretation of Rousseau’s general will is certainly not the only one. Many would agree, though, that for Rousseau the general will is the voice of the people and is the source of political legitimacy. Precisely how it is to be elevated and discerned is a matter of debate—and one of the subjects of this book. Rousseau offers hints about how to tease the general will from the merely aggregated, historical desires of the people, but he does not offer many details.7 According to Judith Shklar, the general will is “ineluctably the property of one man, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He did not invent it, but he made its history.”8 Rousseau seems to have given expression to an idea already in currency and one that would outlast many of the particulars of The Social Contract. “By turns celebrated and condemned, the general will in its history after Rousseau stirred passions as few ideas, concepts, words, or metaphors have,” write James Farr and David Lay Williams.9 Farr and Williams mention Rousseau’s influence on some of the French revolutionaries, such as Abbé Sieyès, who invoked the general will “to elevate the Third Estate from ‘nothing’ to sovereign,” as well as the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which proclaims the law to be “an expression of the general will.”10 They note his influence on many thinkers, including Kant, Fichte, and Rawls. This book seeks, among other things, to illustrate that his influence extends well beyond the narrow realm of political philosophy and can be detected in myriad and unexpected ways in modern interpretations of democracy and politics in the broad sense.
Rousseau and the Social Contract Tradition
To illuminate the connection between Rousseau’s political philosophy and democratism, it will be helpful to place Rousseau in the context of the social contract tradition that preceded him. Rousseau emerged in the wake of a new brand of humanism—very different from humanism of a more classical type—which set the tone for Enlightenment and later thinking about life and politics. This new humanism revolutionized the West’s philosophical anthropology and transformed its understanding of self, family, and community. Modern humanism proposed that the person be understood first as an individual, apart from the traditional social and spiritual nexus that for so long had been at the foundation of Western political philosophy. In the first book of Aristotle’s Politics, he says that every polis is a species of association, composed not of individuals but of smaller associations, the smallest being the household.11 It was not until a new humanism followed by the Enlightenment that political philosophers began to imagine political society composed of individuals as the primary building blocks. This new understanding of personhood and its relationship to politics harbored the seeds of political revolution and found concrete expression in strains of thought derivative of the Reformation, which had stressed a direct relationship between God and the individual. Church authority, especially that of Roman Catholicism, represented the antithesis of individual autonomy as humanism now understood it. As might be expected, the doctrine of the divine right of kings was challenged. The ultimate culmination of this new political role of the individual was the French Revolution in 1789.
One of Rousseau’s predecessors in the social contract tradition, Thomas Hobbes, was among the first major political philosophers to reimagine political order as an expression of the desires and consent of the individual.12 Hobbes witnessed the political instability that unfolded in the wake of crumbling Church authority and corresponding royal authority and responded with a philosophy of the Leviathan state. Meaningful association and political order are possible only under the rule of an absolute sovereign, Hobbes insisted, a conclusion he drew from his belief that human existence is bellum omnium contra omnes. Driven by fear of violent death and a corresponding desire for power over others—a libido dominandi—the sole hope for a stable political order must lie in an all-powerful state. Yet Hobbes lays the groundwork for Rousseau’s understanding of a general will. The people, Hobbes says,
reduce all their wills by plurality of voices unto one will; which is as much as to say, to appoint one man or assembly of men to bear their person; and every one to own and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall act or cause to be acted in those things which concern the common peace and safety; and therein to submit their wills, every one to his will, and their judgements to his judgement. This is more than consent or concord; it is a real unity of them all in one and the same person.13
While Hobbes states that an all-powerful sovereign is the only way to ensure stability and security in the polis, his understanding of a commonwealth as an “artificial man” or organic body united in spirit and will suggests that he imagines each individual’s will to be commensurate, in the end, with the will of the sovereign. Like Rousseau’s general will, as we will see, unity in the Hobbesian commonwealth derives from a shared identification of the people with the sovereign, which is their multitude of wills united not just in practice but also in a metaphysical sense. Hobbes calls the Leviathan a “mortal god,” whose great and terrible power is able “to conform the wills of [the people of the commonwealth] all to peace at home and mutual aid against their enemies abroad.” In this sovereign “consisteth the essence of the commonwealth,” and each individual must consider himself also the author of the sovereign’s actions.14 In many ways this anticipates Rousseau’s understanding of the general will as the complete and perfect expression of the people’s highest will, such that each citizen can identify completely with the general will if he or she reflects on the true general interest of the society.
John Locke further oriented Western political philosophy away from the associational basis that had earlier informed its thought and toward the individual as the basic unit of social organization. The Lockean understanding of liberty, central to modern political thought in the West and especially in the Anglophone world, is based on his belief that the individual is primary. For Locke, concepts of property and ownership guide much of his thinking about politics. Liberty, according to Locke, is the ability to dispose of one’s person and property as he or she sees fit, so long as this exercise of freedom does not infringe on the same right of others.15 The individual’s primary source of rights is his or her right to self-ownership. Liberty in this sense, for Locke, is the natural state, interrupted by perverse social institutions and hierarchies such as the Church and monarchy. The beneficiaries of these traditional institutions rely not on their own productive labor, the source of social and economic value, according to Locke, but on socially constructed power dynamics founded on inherited wealth, birth, and superstition. For Locke, productive labor is an expression of human freedom and also conducive to it. The universal impulse to mix one’s labor and generate property confers a certain spiritual equality among persons and implies individual sovereignty. The desire to protect the fruits of one’s labor is, according to Locke, a major impetus behind the social contract. “The chief end [of civil society],” Locke says, “is the preservation of property.”16 The commonwealth has the power to punish transgressions, make laws, and make war and peace, “and all this for the preservation of the property of all the members of that society.”17 Locke develops this image of human nature through a hypothetical “state of nature,” in which the primary characteristics of human nature are freedom, equality, and rationality.
Rousseau follows the Hobbesian and Lockean social contract traditions, imagining the individual as the metaphysical cornerstone of a new political order.18 Hobbes’s Leviathan state is not entirely compatible with the later Enlightenment’s quest for radical personal autonomy, while Locke’s social contract supposes material conditions that would facilitate social hierarchy, seeming to perpetuate many of the old ways that had been institutionalized with the help of a system of inherited wealth.19 Rousseau’s novel contribution was to propose a political philosophy that would provide the protection and order promised by the Leviathan state while preserving individual freedom and also equality. The problem of political theory, according to Rousseau, is to “[f]ind a form of association that defends and protects with all common forces the person and goods of each associate, and, by means of which, each one, while uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before.”20 Rousseau hopes to satisfy the Enlightenment demand for emancipation from the bonds of tradition and political hierarchy and also the establishment of perpetually peaceful life in community. As the Romantic movement unfolded, the Enlightenment epistemology and language of reason gave way to a new vocabulary of authenticity and freedom and stressed the importance of an undifferentiated political system. Political order was to be neither an organic, historically evolved kind of order nor a deliberate rational construct, but had to be, if it was to be legitimate, a product of wholly free choice.
While Rousseau challenges many of the Enlightenment’s assumptions, he ultimately shares its fundamental epistemology. His emphasis on radical autonomy supported by a socially atomistic anthropology is largely consistent with Enlightenment voluntarism and rationalism. Cassirer is correct in saying that “Rousseau belongs, in spirit, with the rationalist individualists whom he is supposed to have overcome and denied.”21 Rousseau adopts an ahistorical approach to political philosophy, employing a theoretical “state of nature” framework to imagine what is politically normative while also preferring the individual as the primary political unit. At the same time, he inspires and taps into a growing desire for communal existence based in an idea of equality and freedom rather than traditional social distinctions. The Social Contract, according to Rousseau, outlines a political theory that resolves the tension between radical individual autonomy and meaningful community:
Since the alienation is made without reservation, the union is as perfect as possible, and no associate has anything further to demand. For if some rights remained with private individuals, in the absence of any common superior who could decide between them and the public, each person would eventually claim to be his own judge in all things, since he is on some particular point his own judge. The state of nature would subsist and the association would necessarily become tyrannical or hollow.
Finally, in giving himself to all, each person gives himself to no one. And since there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right that he would grant others over himself, he gains the equivalent of everything he loses, along with a greater amount of force to preserve what he has.22
While the ghost of Hobbes’s Leviathan lingers, Rousseau also points toward a new understanding of sovereignty that emphasizes its popular source. Individual autonomy is preserved at the same time as absolute community is established because all individuals willingly unite in the social compact; none gains over anyone else, and liberty and equality are preserved. All are supposed to benefit by joining. The entire community forms a new “common superior” that is commensurate with the will of each individual: “each person gives himself to no one.”
Rousseau, to a greater degree than Hobbes or Locke, stresses a nonrational or transcendent aspect of the social contract, but his understanding of political order as a deliberate contract belies a similar epistemological commitment to Enlightenment rationalism. Robert Derathé says that “Rousseau is a rationalist aware of the limits of reason.”23 Rousseau relies on both rationality and the primitive voice of nature or the conscience as the forces that will move the people to join the social contract. His own imaginative conception of civic life under the general will illustrates, for example, the importance of the nonrational in his political theory. To believe that the general will is possible and ought to serve as a normative guide to politics is to have a certain faith about what is ultimately possible. Politics, and specifically democracy, according to Rousseau, cannot be reduced to something so banal as the rational calculations of self-interested actors but is a moral and transcendent experience. Exiting the state of nature “produces quite a remarkable change in man,” Rousseau says. “It substitutes justice for instinct in his behavior and gives his actions a moral quality they previously lacked.”24 Rousseau’s understanding of the general will, so central to his thought on democracy, helps further illustrate this tension between rationality and intuition or spirituality in his thinking.
Origins of the “General Will”
Rousseau differentiates between the will of all, an aggregate of the will of all persons, and the general will, which reflects the people’s highest collective will in an ideal sense. Unfortunately, he never gives a clear definition of the general will, despite the concept’s centrality to his political theory. There are two dominant interpretations of the general will: those who view it as a procedure for generating a political will and those who view it as “an expression of a prior commitment to substantive values.”25 Those who view it as procedure look to Rousseau’s guidelines for eliciting the general will. Those who advance the substantive interpretation of the general will, Williams says, look to Rousseau’s remark that “[w]hat is good and conformable to order is so by the nature of things and independently of human convention,” for example.26 While I agree with Williams that the general will represents an ideal, or is “derived from Rousseau’s commitment to metaphysically prior values,” it seems a false dichotomy.27 As I argue in this book, procedures play no small part in shaping outcomes and already imply substantive commitments. This idea will be important in chapter 4, which analyzes deliberative democracy and the role of “procedural norms.” Rousseau asserts that the deliberation of “a sufficiently informed populace” under the right circumstances (that citizens “have no communication among themselves,” for example) will result in the general will.28 In Rousseau’s mind, these procedures are part of the ideal of the general will and are, in some ways, inseparable from its substance. “[T]he general will is always right,” Rousseau says, “and always tends toward the public utility,” so long as the procedures are followed.29 In the absence of proper procedure, the general will is impossible.
The notion of an ideal political will—rational or mystical—over and above the people’s apparent will lies at the heart of a dominant Western conception of democracy, here termed “democratism,” and I argue that such a bifurcated understanding of the people’s will can be traced back to Rousseau’s articulation of the general will. One of the underlying, if silent, assumptions of democratism is the idea that the people’s will, properly expressed, is a normative ideal toward which historical democracies must strive.
The concept of the general will, however, predates Rousseau, and tracing its conceptual origins, which reside in theology, will help shed light on this complex and significant concept. Patrick Riley points out that the seventeenth-century French priest and rationalist Nicolas Malebranche contrasts the “general will” with the “particular will” in a way that anticipates Rousseau’s conception. In Traité de la nature et de la grâce (1680) Malebranche says that it is in the capacity of “him whose wisdom has no limits” to discern the most fruitful general laws. On the other hand, “to act by volontés particulières shows a limited intelligence which cannot judge the consequences or the effects of less fruitful causes.”30 To intuit or interpret the general will is to possess a “broad and penetrating mind.”31 Pascal, too, says the particular will “involves disorder and self-love,” and “not to ‘incline’ toward le général is ‘unjust’ and ‘depraved.’ ”32 For Malebranche and others, a general will is a godly will for its ability to see the whole and to anticipate the abiding needs of humanity over and above narrow, fleeting passions. For Rousseau and thinkers such as Diderot, the general will retains its original theological connotation of wholeness and perfection, but instead of being attributed to an infinite and omniscient God, it becomes a rational and ahistorical ideal.33 Rousseau and others substitute for the will of God an abstract will of humanity universally accessible through reason.
The parallel between an ostensibly secularized concept of the general will and its original theological meaning is striking. Many later thinkers who invoke the concept retain its original normative connotation that the general is to be preferred to the particular. It is around the time of Malebranche that the term “transforms from the divine into the civic.”34 Riley says that Malebranche’s use of these terms is “not very different from Rousseau’s characterizations of volonté général particulière in Du Contrat Social (above all when Rousseau argues that volonté général, in the form of general laws, never deals with particular cases).”35 For Malebranche, God must legislate through His general will “ ‘and thus establish a constant and regulated order’ by ‘the simplest means.’ ”36 The Italian scholar Alberto Postigliola, in “De Malebranche à Rousseau: Les Apories de la Volonté Générale et la Revanche du ‘Raisonner Violent’ ” draws an interesting comparison between Rousseau’s notion of the general will and Malebranche’s. In Malebranche is “the universal and sovereign divine reason, which acts through general wills . . . that conform to general laws which it establishes itself”; in Rousseau is “the sovereignty of the moi commun which is exercised through general wills . . . which yield a [system of] legislation.”37 For Postigliola, Rousseau, “having appropriated Malebranche’s notion of justice (understood as a rationalist and ‘geometrizing’ generality’)[,] committed the ‘unforgivable’ error of forgetting that the ‘general will’ of a people lacks ‘the divine attribute of infinity.’ ” Rousseau’s error “consisted precisely in using the epistemological categories of Malebranche . . . while continuing to speak of a generality of the will which could not exist in reality as ‘unalterable and pure’ unless it were the will of an infinite being. . . . In the Rousseauean city, generality cannot fail to be finite, since it can be no more than a sort of finite whole, if not a heterogeneous sum.”38 Postigliola’s criticism might similarly apply to kings claiming divine right. God’s will as mediated through the king will necessarily become finite, as the king himself is. Rousseau’s concept of the general will, which also requires mediation, would seem not immune to the charge that his system is another variant of divine right, with the concept of Humanity divinized and the legislator coronated.
Rousseau’s conception of the general will bears a close resemblance to Malebranche’s characterization of God’s will. “It is not difficult to see in Malebranche’s theological formulation a foundation for Rousseau’s secularized discourse, with the question of salvation replaced by the common good,” Williams observes.39 The theological origins of the general will help to explain the trappings of religion that accompany many modern philosophies of democracy, including Rousseau’s. A civil religion is essential to Rousseau’s theory of democracy with the legislator playing the role formerly reserved for a king enjoying divine right. This is perhaps why many of the democratists examined in this book find spiritual meaning in the cause of democracy and why the Catholic thinker Jacques Maritain, for example, unites the things of God and Caesar in a way that would not have occurred to earlier Christian thinkers.
The so-called democratists that I identify in this book often do not acknowledge the metaphysical assumptions behind their conceptions of the popular will. Their theories of democracy rely to a greater degree than is acknowledged on faith—faith that the general will as imagined may be realized, even in the face of seemingly great historical obstacles. These thinkers often assume that the people are capable of transcending personal perspectives, historical circumstances, and human shortcomings such as selfishness and the desire for power in a way not unlike the divine. Vox populi, vox Dei. That the general will has its conceptual origins in metaphysics and theology complicates some of the later democratic theories that rely, consciously or otherwise, on this paradigm.
Scholars who have drawn a connection between Rousseau’s general will and earlier theological ideas of the concept do not address the political and practical implications stemming from its secularization. Riley, to be sure, draws attention to Postigliola’s concerns. And while Williams recounts Riley’s analysis of the general will’s theological origins and sees clearly a connection between Rousseau’s general will and the general will that Malebranche attributes to God, Williams does not suggest how this might complicate our understanding of Rousseau as a political thinker. If, despite Rousseau’s secularization of the concept, the general will is mystical and ultimately spiritual rather than political and historical, then we have reason to doubt that the general will can serve as a valuable guide to politics. There is no reason to believe that the collective will of the people can act in the way that we would imagine a divinity ought to act. Democratists, however, are adamant that, as Joshua Cohen states, a “free community of equals . . . is not an unrealistic utopia beyond human reach, but a genuine human possibility, compatible with our human complexities, and with the demands of social cooperation.”40 Cohen puts this idea to work in his philosophy of deliberative democracy. He mentions the general will’s conceptual origins only in a footnote, but there he contends, “The theological background of the notion of a general will in the idea of universal grace underscores the need for a non-utilitarian, aggregative interpretation of the common good.”41 For Cohen, as for others, the theological roots of the general will are not a hindrance to its political conceptualization or implementation, and perhaps are even an asset. I argue, however, that the secularization of a spiritual and theological concept may be deeply problematic as a normative guide for politics. It also may help explain why aspirations for democracy that rest on a Rousseauean conception of the general will are so often hypothetical and unattainable in practice.
Rousseau’s General Will
The formal procedures that are to guide the emergence of the general will help reveal its substance. Rousseau describes few specific measures when he introduces the concept in The Social Contract, and so those he mentions must be treated as significant. “If, when a sufficiently informed populace deliberates,” Rousseau says, “the citizens were to have no communication among themselves, the general will would always result from the large number of small differences, and the deliberation would always be good.”42 The two criteria, that the populace be “sufficiently informed” and that citizens abstain from communication, constitute what might be considered the republican and democratic elements in Rousseau’s philosophy of the general will. Yet they are frustratingly vague. The meaning of an informed populace is debatable, but it would seem that Rousseau has in mind at least some basic knowledge of the subjects of deliberation and also that citizens be “informed” in the moral sense of heeding one’s individual conscience—the reason that citizens must have no communication among themselves. Any influence on the individual other than his or her own intuition or reasoning would result in la volonté de tous, “the will of all,” merely the sum of individual interests and private opinions.
Partial associations fostering communication promote inequality and stifle freedom, Rousseau believes: “For the general will to be well articulated, it is . . . important that there should be no partial society in the state and that each citizen make up his own mind.”43 The general will must apply equally to all citizens and be in the best interest of the whole of society. Rousseau seems to borrow this idea from the earlier, theological conception of the general will. God establishes “laws which are very simple and very general,” Malebranche had said.44 For Rousseau, all human beings, especially those of “simple morals,” are able to discern the general will. It is a universal. Rousseau is not clear about precisely how citizens access the general will, but it seems to be through something like the conscience, as Williams suggests.45 It is this law written on the heart that enables citizens to intuit or reason the general will. Williams claims that “an objective or even transcendent conception of justice is part of the core meaning of the general will.”46 In order to access this universal, Rousseau indicates that it is necessary to shed the accumulations of history and culture and listen to an inner voice. One of the reasons that Rousseau distrusts “learned men and orators” is their tendency to lead us away from this inner voice through refined language and sophistry.47 “Man’s first language, the most universal, the most energetic, and the only language he needed before it was necessary to persuade men assembled together, is the cry of nature,” Rousseau says in the “Discourse on Inequality.”48
Preventing communication is important to the formation of the general will because, according to Rousseau, it encourages citizens to heed the voice of nature or reason rather than social prejudices. To consult one another or to consult social norms for guidance would result in a fracturing of the body politic into so many divided interests and loyalties. It is in this criterion that we gain a better understanding of Rousseau’s definition of freedom. That citizens exercise a free will is essential to the unfolding of the general will. But this freedom is precarious: “Myriad obstacles threaten it [free will] from all imaginable angles.”49 The corrupting forces of ambition, money, and seeking public approval represent “a constant threat hovering over Rousseau’s republic and the governance of the general will.”50
Rousseau’s understanding of freedom is a complicated one. At one point in The Social Contract he states, “[T]he philosophical meaning of the word liberty is not part of my subject here.”51 But in an important way it is part of his subject. Rousseau takes for granted a particular understanding of liberty that is sharply at odds with other, earlier conceptions of the term, and this is important for understanding the revolutionary implications of his political philosophy. For Rousseau, traditional social custom and norms, religion, and even family life represent obstacles to liberty as he interprets it. Such norms are based in illegitimate power relationships. “Since no man has a natural authority over his fellowman,” Rousseau says, “agreements alone therefore remain as the basis of all legitimate authority among men.”52 Instead, “obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is liberty,” Rousseau says in The Social Contract.53 This amounts to emancipation from the “slavery” of all-consuming appetites. Paradoxically, it is through obedience to one’s own law that one also participates in the general will and there finds a virtuous life. Virtue, Rousseau says, is “merely [the] conformity of the private to the general will.” Yet despite his belief that traditional social mores and taboos are illegitimate sources of moral authority, Rousseau still believes that civil society tempers the instincts and passions that otherwise constitute freedom in his state of nature. Indeed “sublime virtue” is required to distinguish the general will from the private will, Rousseau says.54 While all persons are capable of discerning the general will—“it is necessary simply to be just to be assured of following the general will”—presumably not all possess the exquisite virtue required to do so. Thus, Rousseau devises an elaborate substitute for the old society, complete with the civilizing forces of a public censor, civil religion, and legislator, all of which must help “make virtue reign.”55
The General Will and the Legislator
Rousseau observes that for the general will to be realized, the people must already be what they are to become through it: “the effect would have to become the cause.”56 The general will requires virtuous people for its discernment and instantiation, but the general will is also supposed to help create a good body politic. To resolve this paradox, Rousseau introduces the legislator, who is to institute the new system that will enable the people to realize their highest moral potential. Rousseau gives the legislator divine qualities: “He who dares to undertake the establishment of a people should feel that he is, so to speak, in a position to alter man’s constitution in order to strengthen it. . . . [H]e must deny man his own forces in order to give him forces that are alien to him.”57 The legislator is all-powerful and all-knowing. He is “in every respect an extraordinary man in the state.”58 This calls to mind the description Hobbes gives of “that great Leviathan, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal god,” the sovereign.59 According to Rousseau, ordinary citizens lack the ability to see the general and abstract good, which exists apart from partial and personal interest, and it is the duty of the legislator to supply this virtue to the people. To effect this change in the people, who cannot understand what is ultimately in their interest, Rousseau says that the legislator must persuade them by nonrational means. Rousseau’s legislator is to perform a sleight of hand similar to Plato’s “noble lie” that helped to establish his famous republic.60 With “recourse to an authority of a different order, which can compel without violence and persuade without convincing,” the legislator will deceive the people into adopting the social contract.61 He will put “in the mouth of the immortals” his decrees, Rousseau says, because like the bronze- and iron-natured citizens in Plato’s ideal republic, ordinary citizens would otherwise be unable to accept what might seem to them to be nothing other than a change of power.62 As if to prepare the way for the legislator in The Social Contract, Rousseau draws the reader’s attention in the “Discourse on Inequality” to the Roman people’s emancipation from the Tarquins: “[A]t first it was but a stupid rabble that needed to be managed and governed with the greatest wisdom, so that as it gradually became accustomed to breathe the salutary air of liberty, these souls, enervated or rather brutalized under tyranny, acquired by degrees that severity of mores and that high-spirited courage that eventually made them, of all the peoples, most worthy of respect.”63
Many democratist interpretations of democracy incorporate some aspect of the Rousseauean idea of a legislator without using the same language. Woodrow Wilson abstractly names this figure a “leader of men.” Jacques Maritain conceives of a global senate of nationless legislators. But others, such as the deliberative democracy theorists, assume the function of a legislator in their theories of democracy without indicating a particular person or group. The procedures that guide discussion or thinking about politics are meant to encourage from the people the right ideas, effectively playing the part of an impersonal legislator. In general, democratism assumes that a legislator, in whatever form it takes, will set up a new system. Citizens, recognizing the superiority of the new system over the old, are expected to maintain it freely—albeit with the hefty support of elaborate institutional mechanisms. All of the thinkers examined in this book share a fundamental assumption about the need for a legislator of one sort or another to bring about the ideas of the philosopher—who represents the primary architect or “legislator.” The philosopher’s legislators, in the form of persons or impersonal procedures, are imagined to be able to bring forth abstract and objective justice in a way reminiscent of Malebranche’s God. Precisely how the legislators are to bring the new system into being is often left vague. Rousseau describes the “recourse to heaven” that the legislator must have, but democratism generally has little to say about the impetus behind the people adopting the new system.64 It is difficult to imagine a “noble lie” borne out in practice, especially in a political system claiming to be democratic. For democratists, therefore, the focus tends to be on the new procedures rather than altering psychology. The presence of the legislator—primary and secondary—is a source of tension within Rousseau’s theory of democracy. The legislator is a decidedly undemocratic presence in what is to be a political system dependent upon the wholly free will and choice of the citizens. Paradoxically, democracy, according to those who advance this theory, requires undemocratic means for its institutionalization, revealing one of the central paradoxes of democratism.
The Idea of Education
Rousseau believes citizens must be prepared for the type of political order he envisions. His lengthy exposition on education, the Émile—which he considered his “greatest and best book”—relates to his Social Contract in the way that Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics relates to the Politics.65 It describes the type of character and instruction necessary for a person to be fit for the type of political order that Rousseau envisages. Rousseau describes in great detail the measures that the tutor is to take to ensure Émile’s proper upbringing and his eventual fitness for participation in democracy, and the book culminates with Émile being introduced into political society.66 Like a creature in a pre-civil state “given over to the single feeling of his own present existence, without any idea of the future,” the child represents for Rousseau a blank slate, though one in whom nature reigns.67 Émile is meant to be a “general” child in this sense. Rousseau does not take into account the ways in which nationality, religion, culture, custom, temperament, and personality might affect the child’s disposition and ultimately formation as a man and a citizen. Rousseau operates ahistorically in the Émile as he does in The Social Contract. Setting his treatise on education and his treatise on politics essentially outside of history eliminates the obstacles that would arise if one were to consider the impact of particular experience and identity on one’s political beliefs and worldview. Hence Rousseau says in The Social Contract, “What makes the work of legislation trying is not so much what must be established as what must be destroyed.”68 Education, broadly understood, functions similarly to the legislator. F. C. Green points out that “state education in citizenship beginning at childhood” is important for the emergence of the general will. This rather than the mystical legislator is Rousseau’s “real solution” to the challenge of implementing the general will, Green says. “[H]ow the private will of the individual citizen should conform to the general will,” according to Green, is the great issue of education for Rousseau.69 The purpose of education, like the legislator, is to elevate citizens toward realization of the general will, a task that citizens alone are not up to.
That the tutor must guide and cultivate the child’s supposed natural inclination toward spontaneity and authenticity is one of the tensions within the Émile that reflects one of the overall tensions within democratism. To have a tutor elicit what ought to come naturally suggests that whatever behavior may emerge is a learned behavior. Rousseau is so detailed in his treatment of the child’s education that he even stipulates the proper bath temperature for the boy, believing such minute details to impact the child’s final proclivities. The “guided spontaneity” of the Émile reflects the “natural” emergence of the general will in The Social Contract. A tutor or legislator is tasked with overseeing the psychological and moral transformation of another. “Education” as an abstract concept does not have the antidemocratic appearance of the legislator and instead suggests self-transformation, but behind the Rousseauean understanding of this concept a hierarchy is nonetheless present.
The mystical and omniscient legislator presents a stumbling block to those looking to Rousseau’s philosophy for a model of democracy, which is perhaps why thinkers such as Green focus on the role of education more broadly and play down the legislator as extraneous to Rousseau’s central purpose. The devices of education and the legislator are reminders that the people, on their own, are unable to discern the general will and require institutional guidance of one sort or another. Concrete examples will make this clear in the following chapters. Thomas Jefferson, for example, assumes that education of a certain type can enlighten citizens and turn them away from “monkish ignorance” and superstition.70 Woodrow Wilson compares the work of a “leader of men” to that of a mechanic: in order to shape the public’s will he “must know what his tools can do and what they will stand.”71
Rousseau’s Philosophical Anthropology
Rousseau tells of a road-to-Damascus conversion in which “suddenly I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights; crowds of lively ideas presented themselves at the same time with a strength and a confusion that threw me into an inexpressible perturbation.” It was at this moment, Rousseau recalls, that he realized the key to his political philosophy: “that man is naturally good and that it is from [our] institutions alone that men become wicked.”72 It is because of our underlying natural goodness, he believes, that we are all capable of participating in the general will. This denial of Christian Original Sin, which prompted Archbishop Beaumont of Paris to ban Rousseau’s works, is the “fundamental principle of all morality,” Rousseau says in a response to the archbishop. If “there is no original perversity in the human heart,” then manipulating or altering institutions and external circumstances can ameliorate what has seemed to be an intractable problem of human existence.73 In The Social Contract Rousseau writes, “Men are not naturally enemies, for the simple reason that men living in their original state of independence do not have sufficiently constant relationships among themselves to bring about either a state of peace or a state of war. It is the relationship between things and not that between men that brings about war. And . . . this state of war cannot come into existence from simple personal relations, but only from real relations.”74 In this sense, Rousseau anticipates Marx’s philosophy of historical materialism by nearly a century. External—that is, material—conditions drive the acquisitive and self-centered impulse. In the Second Discourse Rousseau says, “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say, ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.”75 It is “by accident” that natural human goodness degenerates.76 Historical circumstances and social institutions, however, need not affect human flourishing. Altering the way in which human beings assemble in community can to a great extent restore our original goodness, Rousseau believes, and then perpetuate it through the new political order. This is the idea of the general will.
Just as happy families are all alike, “truth has but one mode of being,” Rousseau avers.77 To exhibit civic virtue, recall, is to follow the general will and to distinguish it from the private will.78 The best society seems to be the one in which the private and public wills are indistinguishable. Society must be politically and morally homogeneous, Rousseau assumes. The criterion that human beings must dissociate from one another in order to discern the general will indicates Rousseau’s belief in a shared Good, true for all people and each political community. While perhaps some diversity of expression is permitted, in order for citizens to find the “point of agreement among all [of their] interests” it is necessary that in each person is a fundamental inclination toward the universal Good. According to this logic, desires that incline away from the general and toward the particular will are rooted in amour propre. This harkens to Malebranche’s assessment of God’s will, which is wholly good and general, as opposed to the limited and selfish wills of individuals. Ultimately for Rousseau, human beings cannot be motivated by different aspirations, values, and creeds and still come together in a shared conception of what is normative. Such expressions of particularity, he believes, necessarily detract from recognition of the general, shared good that is true for all persons. “Either the will is general,” Rousseau says, “or it is not.”79
Rousseau anticipates the potential problem for freedom that his philosophy implies and assures readers that to diverge from the general will is to act irrationally and against one’s true self-interest: “We always want what is good for us, but we do not always see what it is.”80 To be free, he insists, is to conform to the general will. It is impossible to genuinely will anything contrary. The general will is ultimately identical with the will of each individual, if only deep down. Rousseau explains using an analogy to the body: “As soon as this multitude is thus united in a body, one cannot harm one of the members without attacking the whole body.” Individuals united into a body politic become a single sovereign in a mystical sense, and “since the sovereign is formed entirely from the private individuals who make it up, it neither has nor could have an interest contrary to theirs.”81 To desire what is contrary to the general will is, effectively, to enslave oneself to base passions, to amour propre. Rousseau’s body metaphor is reminiscent of that of St. Paul, who reminds the Corinthians that “there are many parts, yet one body.”82 However, according to Christianity, this unity is spiritual and transcendent in the mystical body of Christ. Rousseau imagines that this type of mystical unity is possible immanently and politically, an idea that Hobbes had articulated the century before. For Rousseau, to be free is to partake in this unity and submit to the general will.
Rousseau and other democratists assume that all rational or reasonable persons are, in theory, universally able to access and appreciate this general will and that those who choose not to must “be forced to be free.”83 Implicit is that all persons ultimately share in the same basic social and political desires, in the same way that all Christians share in the same eternal goal. God composed the body, Paul says, so that “if one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.”84 Rousseau’s understanding of the civic body and the general will are in many ways the secularization of Christian concepts. If the general will is indeed a theological and metaphysical concept rather than a political one, then finite human beings are not equipped to discern it, as Postigliola had pointed out. And not only might human beings be ill-equipped rationally to comprehend a general will, but their interests might not overlap in such a way that a general will would be possible even theoretically. A “general will” in Christ is possible for Christians because, as Bertrand de Jouvenel points out, they are part of a mystical body, not a social body.85 One of the beliefs of democratism is that a mystical union in a general will of some sort is possible, either through rational agreement about an a priori conception of the common good or through “overlapping consensus” about that which is normative.86
Democratism comes down to the fundamental belief, in agreement with Rousseau, that human beings are naturally inclined toward Christian love for one another. De Jouvenel’s critique of socialism sheds light on this aspect of democratism. Monastic communities work, he says, because “the members of the community are not anxious to increase their individual well-being at the expense of one another,” unlike communities that are not foremost oriented toward God.87 For Rousseau and other democratists, human beings are capable of this kind of infinite and self-denying love, and they are, moreover, capable of directing it toward political ends and, finally, the state. But is it possible to channel infinite, Christian love toward finite, political goals? Or is the nature of public policy such that it is always a mix of good and evil, depending on context, whom it impacts when and in what unforeseen ways—all phenomena that stem from the perspectival and limited nature of human activity? Rousseau admits that “falsity is susceptible to an infinity of combinations” but seems not to consider that truth may also be of this quality.88 The general will is presumed to be an unmixed good, but it is, in the end, a political ideal, not a divinity.
Rousseau and Gnostic Thinking in Democratism
Rousseau’s portrayal of humanity as essentially good eliminates from it those qualities that would make the prospect of radically changing political existence seem hopeless. This skewed characterization is one of the prominent features of what the philosopher Eric Voegelin identified as a form of gnosticism (from the Greek word gnosis, “knowledge”), which he regarded as one of the preeminent ideological forces in the modern Western world. A primary ingredient of this modern gnosticism is an abiding dissatisfaction with existing social and political reality, which is combined with a belief that human effort can permanently change existence. Voegelin says that the gnostic intellectual assumes the role of prophet. This person claims to have the ideological formula for altering “the structure of the world, which is perceived as inadequate.”89 In order to make such an undertaking appear possible, Voegelin contends, the gnostic presents a vision that excludes essential features of reality and the human condition, to the point of distortion.90 Rousseau reimagines the history of human social relations and unveils what to him has been a hidden truth. “O man, whatever country you may be from, whatever your opinions may be, listen: here is your history,” he begins the First Discourse.91 Assuming the role of the legislator and pedagogue for his reader, Rousseau points to material conditions as the wellspring of social ills and believes that by reuniting persons in community in a way that is “natural,” man can recover his lost freedom and equality. Rousseau presents asocial and prepolitical man as good, full of pity and compassion. “[N]othing is so gentle as man in his primitive state,” he says.92 At the same time, in society “each finds his profit in the misfortune of another,” and “we find our advantage in the setbacks of our fellowmen.”93 One extreme is a product of man’s unadulterated “nature”; the other, civil society. Having presented these opposite extremes of human behavior as products of material circumstances, Rousseau makes plausible the idea that social reorganization could return human beings to their “natural” state of goodness. His idea of the general will provides the solution. Rousseau gives the formula for correction: “Remove from [private] wills the pluses and minuses that cancel each other out, and what remains as the sum of the differences is the general will.”94 Attributing his notion of the human condition to nature, “which never lies,” Rousseau presumes knowledge that has heretofore been kept secret. By adopting his political arrangements, it is assumed, human beings can dramatically alter social and political life.95
This “gnostic” element in Rousseau’s political philosophy seems to reflect something of his own dissatisfaction with life and his desire for people and circumstances to change. He had a tendency in many of his autobiographical writings to blame those around him, friends and strangers alike, for his loneliness, bouts of paranoia, and unhappiness.96 “[M]y ills and my vices came to me very much more from my situation than from myself,” Rousseau writes in a letter to Malesherbes.97 He finds greatest peace when he is alone on the island of St. Pierre, for example. Considering himself “the most sociable and loving of men . . . cast out by all the rest,” Rousseau blames his enemies—real or imagined—for his misanthropy and failures.98 The “long train of miseries and misfortunes” in his life, Rousseau believes, are caused by machinations of his fellow human beings.99 He accuses faceless rogues of being “false and perfidious,” “iniquity,” “vanity,” and “animosity,” and he finds their company “tedious and even burdensome.”100 Rousseau’s lengthy apologia, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, reveals the extent to which he feels victimized. “At least I am not to blame,” he concludes after self-examination.101 His encounter with a humanity he found so disagreeable may have informed his belief that, in the end, a legislator must transform and perfect it, which would mean awakening humanity’s essential goodness. On the one hand, Rousseau sees great evil in particular human beings with whom he comes in contact. On the other hand, he finds in humanity’s nature general goodness. The feeling that “men are wicked” alongside the belief that, “nevertheless, man is naturally good” is characteristic of a side of the romantic sensibility which democratism in general exemplifies.102
A New Rousseauean Worldview
Carl Schmitt sees continuity between Malebranche, Rousseau, and modern liberalism, and believes that liberalism’s fundamental defect is the “banishment” of the particular. Schmitt says that this defect can be explained with reference to Rousseau’s embrace of the general at the expense of the particular.103 It is paradoxical that liberalism should banish the particular, to borrow Schmitt’s phrase, since the central claim of liberalism is that it allows individuality and authenticity. Democratism shares many of the features of liberalism as a worldview and condones its “banishment” of the particular.104 Along with Malebranche, democratism holds that laws of a state driven by “mere experience of need, rather than wise foresight” are characteristic of the volontés particulières and are associated with “self-love” and “ignorance.”105 In various ways, the thinkers examined in this book uphold the view that politics must comprehend a general good and that the art of politics is devising, in one way or another, a system that will enable the general will to become manifest once and for all. Democratism presents the general will as something that actually exists or might exist and that ought to guide politics. However, if the concept is at heart theological or metaphysical, it raises doubts about its practicability, even normativity. It also suggests that its underlying framework is not democratic in the way that it claims, relying as it does on the authority and designs of a political architect or philosopher.
If, as Rousseau asserts, “undoubtedly there is a universal justice emanating from reason alone,” then disagreement could arise only from a conspiracy against justice itself.106 A person whose loyalty lies outside the general will poses a threat to communal harmony. The one who reverts to “his own forces” over those of the general will and the legislator is, according to Rousseau, “a rebel and a traitor to the homeland”; he “is not a moral person [personne morale], but a man,” and may be put to death “as a public enemy.”107 It is along similar lines that Rousseau reasons in the Reveries that those participating in the conspiracy against him “ceas[e] to be human.”108 The Rousseauean anthropology bifurcates good and evil in such a way that particular individuals who defer to their own will over the abstract general will fall decidedly on the side of evil and cede even the right to life. Understanding Rousseau’s use of the general will in light of its theological origins helps to explain, for example, the religious fanaticism with which the Jacobin revolutionaries persecuted skeptics of the Revolution. The general will, like the will of a perfect and benevolent God, appears sacred and inviolable. If truth has but one mode of being, then to dissent is to align with evil itself. Negotiation, compromise, and acceptance of a working agreement suggest a bargain with the devil. Upholding this quasi-religious view of the general will, democratists tend to couch political issues in spiritual language and treat military missions as crusades. This theme is analyzed in the chapters that follow. Wilson and Maritain are two figures who often invoked spiritual and specifically Christian language to describe earthly missions. Wilson’s conflation of the secular and the spiritual, at times, seemed to motivate his more repressive domestic measures during the war and also his desire for “force without limit” in America’s mission abroad.109
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the general will, conceptually, suffers the fate that Rousseau says befalls natural-law thinking: “Writers begin by seeking the rules on which, for the common utility, it would be appropriate for men to agree among themselves; and then they give the name natural law to the collection of these rules, with no other proof than the good that presumably would result from their universal observance.”110 One of the major differences, however, between Rousseau’s general will and Christian natural law is that traditional and orthodox Christians tend not to believe that natural law ought to be translated into a specific political order.111 For Rousseau, a legislator can help midwife the general will into existence. This poses a problem, however, for democracy in the concrete. The legitimacy of the general will derives from its separation from government. “And yet,” Bryan Garsten points out, “the generality of the sovereign, its distance from actual politics, was precisely what allowed it to be . . . or even insured that it would be, usurped” by politicians.112 One of the persistent elements of democratist thinking is the belief that the people’s will exists as an ideal that supersedes the people’s actual, historically manifest will and that the philosopher can discern the true will and devise a way to implement it politically. Those claiming to work in service of the general will seem only to “have powers all the more formidable,” Benjamin Constant avers, “in that they call themselves mere pliant instruments of this alleged will.”113
Most political philosophers would concede Rousseau’s influence on the West, but many do not or do not fully acknowledge the importance of features of his thought to which attention is being drawn here. Some have considered Rousseau a proto-totalitarian for his conception of the general will and the frightening prospect of being “forced to be free,” but few locate the general will’s potential for social harm in the secularization of the theological concept.114 Too many thinkers fail to engage central themes in Rousseau’s thought that not only pervade his work but ultimately hold it together. Nelson Lund writes in an introductory statement in Rousseau’s Rejuvenation of Political Philosophy: A New Introduction, “Rousseau’s presentation of his thought is deliberately paradoxical, frequently outlandish on its face, and packed with subtleties that invite careful thought.”115 It is common for interpreters of Rousseau to refer in a dismissive way to aspects of Rousseau’s political philosophy that are difficult to reconcile with traditional notions of democracy as something that respects differences and divisions and eschews elitism. The legislator, the “noble lie,” and the mystical general will—aspects of Rousseau’s political philosophy that this book takes very seriously—are often glossed over as intentionally “outlandish” and “paradoxical.” But these elements of thought actually make sense to Rousseau and are some of his most original contributions to political philosophy. This is the reason these elements have been chosen over others for careful examination and analysis. These themes give Rousseau’s theory a special impact and coherence and help explain the meaning and great appeal of democratism and why so many political theorists, democratic theorists, and others have—knowingly or not—adopted these same elements into their own thinking.
The profound influence that Rousseau has had on a great many political, intellectual, and religious figures in the West is not always obvious. The idea of giving oneself “to no one” has inspired a vision that goes far beyond politics in the ordinary sense. Life, in its entirety, Rousseau suggests, can be transformed. His theory brings comfort and hope to those who wish to escape from the everyday, from the reality of divisions and inequalities in society and the messiness of actual politics. The Social Contract is much more than a political treatise. Its vivid account of a new society based on the hypothetical origins of humanity promises radical social and political change that would entirely transform human existence. If Rousseau’s political philosophy is convincing, it is because it fits within an entire worldview, a reimagining of the basic terms of human existence.
Whether under Rousseau’s direct or indirect influence or on their own, a great many thinkers and other figures have contributed to what is here called democratism and to the patterns of thought and imagination from which it is indistinguishable. Just how much influence Rousseau has exerted can never be ascertained, and it is not the purpose of this book to attempt such an assessment. The purpose is to identify the elements and enormous influence of an ideology that, if not unnoticed, has not been systematically analyzed and defined. It is high time for such an endeavor. Rousseau is playing a central role in this work because he is an early and paradigmatic representative of this mighty historical force. Going deeply into Rousseau is to come close to the heartbeat of democratism.