Carl examines the purpose behind Rousseau's Social Contract and explores the philosophy and assumptions which underpin liberalism as it was developed through the Enlightenment. What was Rousseau attempting to achieve by returning man to his hypothetical savage state whilst also living within a society?

In The Social Contract, Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau lays out a method by which a man could be perfectly free, as he imagined the savages in the New World to be, and yet still live in a society. I wish to explore whether this would be a good thing, and whether or not this is a project that is simply doomed to failure.

In the 15th Century, European sailing technology had advanced to the point where extended journeys across the open ocean had become possible. Improvements in the size of ships and a reduction in the required crew, combined with the adoption of the magnetic compass, allowed European vessels to explore hitherto unknown and impenetrable lands across the entire world. This time period has become loosely known as the Age of Discovery or Enlightenment, and with it, the parochial nature of traditional European civilisation found itself shaken by the discovery of humans living in completely different social circumstances as unknown in Europe and the Middle East. Many of these were less developed, but a continuous thread united them; as conservative philosopher Roger Scruton describes it, there were commonalities which are shared by all humans, and the philosophers of the succeeding centuries set their minds to the task of understanding them.

Following from and parallel to this intellectual development was the emergence of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes’ attempts to create a universal scientific technique that could unlock the secrets of how man could use reason for the “relief of man’s estate.” The emergence of the assumed ‘supremacy of reason’ shifted the burden of justification from tradition to rationality and set the stage for what Whig politician Edmund Burke described as the “geometric” politics of the French Revolution. It is in this environment that philosophers found themselves struggling to explain just how it was that society had been saddled with the cloying hand of an outdated and apparently unjustifiable feudal tradition which set definitive hierarchical positions for each person within society, underpinned by divine authority.

The discovery of primitive peoples elsewhere in the world, combined with the quest to use reason to uncover the foundations of our inherited wisdom, led philosophers to begin enquiring exactly what kind of condition man must have found himself in when first created by God, and what man must have been like in this “state of nature.” The apogee of this line of thought can be found in Rousseau’s The Social Contract, a theoretical method to return us to the state of nature while still living within society.

In this essay, I intend to show that Rousseau’s attempt to return society to the state of nature is not only doomed to failure, but even if it could be achieved, it would be highly undesirable on its own merits. This is due to Rousseau’s absolute concept of freedom, and what he believes to be the fundamental origin of unfreedom: society itself.

Many Enlightenment thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries considered the origins of not just the state but the origin of society itself; they felt that even the very act of living amongst one another needed to be explained and rationally justified. The concept of mankind living a pre-social existence gave rise to the term the state of nature, that is, a state in which each man lived in the wilderness without associating with his fellow man. Some argue that the state of nature is dominated by the law of nature, understood to be the rules laid down by God for that which is within man’s natural power, without any assistance rendered by others or technology. Different philosophers have their own views on the state of nature, and the law of nature, as I will cover shortly, but there are common threads that run through them; they all agree that a man’s right to self-defence is a primary law of nature and that he was ultimately free to go where he wanted and do whatever was within his power due to his physical capacity. They also generally agree that this is a state of equality, used in the social sense, rather than the physical sense; while each man’s natural aptitudes differ, none differ so much as to render each man unequal in status.

One of the earliest to touch on the subject was Dutch theologian Hugo Grotius in his 1625 work On the Right of War and Peace. Grotius observes that all animals are condemned to the immutable law of nature because of their lack of reasoning capacity, and while men lived under the law of nature they too were ‘brutes’. In this state:

“...everyone had a right to the use of whatever he found unoccupied; and, before laws were enacted, to avenge his personal injuries by force.” (Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, 1901, p. 23)

It was only when they came together to form societies that they could “appropriate” a different law to themselves, which Grotius calls the Law of Nations. This requires rational consideration and is therefore beyond brutes and animals, but is available to man as he entered into society because he was capable of claiming something unavailable in the state of nature; he was capable of justice, “the best gift bestowed upon men.” In Grotius’s opinion, under the law of nature, “there is no injustice”; men and beasts live under the direction of the law that God has laid down, and if justice as a concept is ever applied to brutes, it is done so “improperly” and “from some shadow and trace of reason they may possess.”

Though he does not state it outright, Grotius seems to imply that men came together to form societies out of a desire for justice derived from the law of nations and to secure property. From this arises the state, which he describes as:

“...a perfect body of free men, united together in order to enjoy common rights and advantages.” (Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, 1901, p. 26)

Implicit in Grotius’s formulation is that man was in a form of social equality with the beasts while he existed as a brute, and that nothing was gained except what could be rapaciously taken from his fellows or from nature itself.

This dark view of humanity’s theoretical pre-social past is also present in Thomas Hobbes’s famous 1651 work Leviathan. In this great treatise, Hobbes lays out the long aeons in which man grimly struggled for his daily existence against the merciless forces of nature and the violence of his fellow man. Utterly insecure at all times, with nothing for his assistance save his strength and wits, pre-social man existed in a ruthless equality which Hobbes described as the state of war. This was not so much each individual battle that pre-social man would fight, but in the existence of the “known disposition” of every man as an enemy against every other man; at no point is there security of person or property, and so there is no opportunity to develop arts, cultivation, navigation, construction, literacy or any other feature possessed by civilised man. There was only:

“...continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (Hobbes, Leviathan, I., 1651, p. 9)

In Hobbes’s opinion, all of man’s history is a history of the state of war. Peace only and exclusively exists when man finally enters into society, and his reason for doing so is to escape the raging conflict of all against all in nature. Hobbes takes for his proof that man’s nature is naturally vicious because even in a state of peace in civilised society, people still lock their doors and guard themselves and their property against thieves and assailants. If, even with the guarantee of laws and justice, men still do such things, man’s true nature must have been particularly brutish indeed, and civilisation is therefore a project to keep his evil nature at bay and civilise him into the ways of peace.

For Hobbes, the law of nature is red in tooth and claw. Every man has a right to every other man so far as he can get him into his power and so every man has a right to do what he perceives as necessary to best preserve himself. This made men naturally equal, though one man may be stronger or swifter than others, none is so powerful that they can claim any particular benefit that would create a position of status. Out of this unforgiving equality, Hobbes places the struggle for peace above the other laws of nature, such as self-defence, as most important for his own preservation.

In order to attain a state of peace, man “divests himself of liberty” and enters into a social contract with his fellow man that Hobbes believed should be guaranteed by a sovereign to which all obey. This sovereign becomes a “mortal god” and has absolute power over all beneath him, to dispose of as he wishes and enforces those laws he sees fit. This seemed to him to be the best way of avoiding the degradation and breakdown of society which would mark the transition from the state of peace into the state of war; reason therefore commanded all mankind to come to any terms necessary to avoid this fate. It is plausible that Hobbes’s experience of the horrors of the English Civil War informed his perspective as to the true nature of man as a brutish savage, and this informed his view that any government—even a tyrannical and oppressive one—would justify itself purely on the basis that it guarantees the state of peace.

This is not entirely shared by the thinkers who came after him. John Locke lived through the English Civil War as a youth and in his later years came to a different conclusion about the nature of man. I find it characteristic of Locke’s thinking that he often has a foot in both camps, probably due to his time spent in exile in Europe, where he was likely exposed to adherents of Spinoza’s “religion of reason” and their views on the nature of man.

In his 1689 work Two Treatises of Government, Locke rebuts the absolutist argument put forward by Sir Robert Filmer in his Patriarcha and presents his own views on man in the state of nature and how society arose, and the subsequent requirements of government and legitimacy. In Locke’s view, the state of nature in which men originally find themselves is one of perfect freedom to do as they please “within the bounds of the law of nature”; that is, to do what they can do as they choose, without consideration to other men. Locke also agrees that this puts them in a condition of social equality, as none has any rank whatsoever, each man born basically the same and suffering the same depredations of nature.

However, in contrast to Hobbes, Locke has a much softer view of man’s existence in the state of nature. Locke draws on English theologian Richard Hooker’s reasoning of the natural need for man to love his fellow man in order to expect any form of kind reciprocity in exchange.

“...my desire therefore to be loved of my equals in nature as much as possible may be, imposeth upon me a natural duty of bearing to themward fully the like affection.” (Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1689, chap. II, sect. V.)

Locke’s view, therefore, is that the state of nature is governed by the law of nature, and the law of nature is actually the law of reason, which creates normative codes of behaviour under which, according to reason, can be called “properly the state of nature.”

“...and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions.” (Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1689, chap. II, sect. VI.)

This bifurcates Locke's view of man in the state of nature: on one hand, there are those Hobbesian brutes who do not “consult” the law of reason and operate as beasts, and those nobler savages who do consult it and act kindly to their fellow man. When a man transgresses the law of nature (Locke’s law of reason), it is a “trespass against the whole species” and the “peace and safety of it” which is provided for by this law of reason. Locke considers the state of nature to be a separate and peaceful place to the state of war, which is when one man attempts by force to subjugate another to his will. He rebukes those who confound the two, and considers the proper state of nature peaceful and is broken upon the advent of force, creating the state of war until the violence is ended.

Locke’s assumptions about the law of nature and the law of reason are somewhat confused and he frequently confounds the normative law of reason with the descriptive physical laws of nature. He also seems to consider the state of nature something that is constructed; it is only when man is consulting and following the reasoning laid out by Hooker that he is actually in a state of nature, but Locke has no term for the pre-war state if man were not following that reasoning and when men are not also actively engaging in force against one another. This is what I mean when I say that Locke appears to have a foot in both camps; he wants to believe in an idealistic state of nature in which all men are kind to one another but is forced to accept that many others are not, as they have no such capacity for kindness at all.

It is to deny these men the opportunity for violence and to avoid the state of war that Locke considers to be a “great reason” that men enter into society and leave the state of nature. By putting a temporal power above themselves, they avoid the state of war by putting decisions of justice into the hands of a government and accepting the truncated liberty this arrangement provides in exchange for security. It is from this consensual framing of this arrangement that Locke avoids Hobbes’s absolute government and frames the limited state as having a responsibility to enforce a uniform code of law for all members, provide protection for person and property and imbues the citizens with a right to revolt. Those people born into such a social contract give their tacit consent through their passivity.

It is important to remember that many of these authors did consider the state of nature to be a thought experiment of a kind, with many of them accepting that the state of nature did not really exist as described. Hobbes and Locke, however, did consider the state of nature to be something mankind really had existed in at some point, with Locke and Rousseau going as far as to assert that contemporary rulers existed in a state of nature as there was no greater power above them. Scottish philosopher David Hume, in his 1739 work A Treatise of Human Nature accurately notes that man never existed in an isolated, atomised state of nature; man is and always has been a social creature, as modern archaeology seems to attest. He considers it:

“...utterly impossible for men to remain any considerable time in that savage condition, which precedes society; but that his very first state and situation may justly be esteemed social.” (Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature. III, 1739, pt. II, sect. II.)

Worthy observations were made on this subject by Charles Louis, Baron of Montesquieu in his 1748 work The Spirit of the Laws. He points out Hobbes’ assumptions about the nature of man based on the kind of man he envisages as existing within society as it is presented to him; why, after all, would a savage ever need to consider locking a door to protect himself or his property when he has no property or door to lock in the first place? Surely the state of nature would create a different kind of man with different priorities to one who would respond to the world through the lens of present concerns when thrust into the insecurity created by the state of war. Montesquieu also views the state of nature as a state of equality, but believed man in it would be both impotent and weak:

“Such a man would feel nothing in himself at first but impotency and weakness; his fears and apprehensions would be excessive; as appears from instances (were there any necessity of proving it) of savages found in forests, trembling at the motion of a leaf, and flying from every shadow.” (Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, I., 1748, sect. II.)

Montesquieu’s state of nature, therefore, is also a state of peace, where each man is too afraid to attack the other. From this, society would be created from a combination primarily of men’s need to subdue this fear, followed by their desire for intimacy between one another, and then their need for nourishment. In this process, they also acquire knowledge, which provides another motivation for the construction of a society.

Locke’s tranquil-but-inconsistent view of man in the state of nature and Montesquieu’s fearful savage are the bridge and synthesis to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idealistic view of humanity in its pre-social state, which we shall interrogate next.

Rousseau accepts the major assumptions of the social contract theorists covered in the previous section in his thought experiment about man’s pre-social existence. He spends a great deal of time and employs significant finesse in developing his savage man, and the result is a beguiling vision of an Eden-like paradise in which one begins to wonder why the savage man might have bothered civilising himself at all.

In his 1755 work Discourse on Inequality, he frames his discussion around a human race that lived isolated from one another in the wilderness, only happening across one another by chance or for mating purposes. Nature, he considers, provided savage man with everything that he needed for his own sustenance and so, other than procreation, there was little need for humans to bother with other humans. For Rousseau, the state of nature was as much a state of peace as it was a state of indifference; there was simply no need for the savage man to interact with his fellow savages, save for carnal desire.

Following in Montesquieu’s steps, he picks up the critique of Hobbes and applies it to others, that what man’s opinions and desires must have been are simply the considerations of modern men applied backwards, instead of establishing the mindset of the savage man and what his considerations would have been, and bringing them forwards. These authors “talk of savage man and they depict civilised man,” whereas Rousseau begins from an abstracted, generalised human being who does not carry the mental framework of modern civilisation, and attempts to build a picture of his worldview from the ground-up.

Rousseau begins by rebuking Locke’s view on the savage when he ascribes to the savage advanced reasoning in which he would treat his fellow man, and that man’s property, with kindness. There would be no property for the savage, so this is a non-issue, but also Locke is also attributing to the savage a degree of intellectualism that Rousseau believes would be absent:

“...we shall not be obliged to make man a philosopher before he is a man. His duties toward others are not dictated to him only by the later lessons of wisdom; and, so long as he does not resist the internal impulse of compassion, he will never hurt any other man, nor even any sentient being, except on those lawful occasions on which his own preservation is concerned and he is obliged to give himself the preference.” (Rousseau, Discourse on Equality, 1755, p. 8.)

In agreement with others, Rousseau believes that man in the state of nature is in a state of equality. However, this equality can be divided into two categories: physical and moral equality. Physical equality being the differences in body, and moral equality being differences in social status. Physical equality is sanctioned by nature and is inconsequential. Moral equality is sanctioned by other men, and therefore is a social consequence; the savage, not living in a society, cannot help but enjoy moral equality because he is totally ignorant of the concept of social status.

This is the core defining feature of Rousseau’s view of inequality and from where he believes inequality first arose. He begins part II of the Discourse with the following passage:

“The true founder of civil society was the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, ‘This is mine’, and came across people simple enough to believe him. How many crimes, wars, murders and how much misery and horror the human race might have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the ditch, and cried out to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this charlatan. You are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth itself belongs to no one!” (Rousseau, Discourse on Equality, 1755, p. 23.)

This paragraph encapsulates Rousseau’s entire perspective on the savage man as opposed to the civilised man. He believes that all of man’s vices and virtues are the products of civilisation itself. Rousseau’s savage has no “moral duties” to his fellow man and has neither virtues nor vices because he is ignorant of morality altogether. This is a total rebuke of the Hobbesian position that man is innately wicked; Rousseau reasons that they cannot be wicked because they do not know what it is to be good. The entire frame of reference is alien to the savage, who has no envy of the possessions of his fellow man and therefore no designs on them, for good or ill. Rousseau credits the savage man with a single virtue, however: pity upon seeing the corpse of another savage, in the same way Rousseau believes animals do. This appears to be the source of the view that man is innately good, as he possesses this one innate virtue and does not possess a single innate vice.

For Rousseau, it is civilisation itself that afflicts mankind with illnesses and disabilities, because, in the state of nature, any of these would be fatal. The savage would simply die, unnoticed by his fellows and “almost without noticing it themselves.” Nature is merciless to the weak and they simply perish without a thought, but to those who survive, Rousseau assigns a strength and constitution that ensures they have no physical need of their fellow man. Rousseau’s savage is, therefore, the very peak of human excellence, cavorting in the woods, eating acorns, sleeping beneath trees, and competently fighting off wild animals with sticks and rocks until they respect his prowess.

There are many immediate criticisms of Rousseau’s view of savage life, which I shall outline briefly for the sake of my word count. Rousseau completely glosses over the human suffering and depredation that might cause one savage to attack another for the food he possesses, or the woman with whom he cavorts. Hobbes’s vision is one of a suffering man, whereas Rousseau’s is one of a blessed man, and I feel that Hobbes is probably going to be closer to the mark if man is left to live in the woods on his own. He also provides little motivation for man to actually civilise himself; if nature provides all man’s wants, why did he begin agriculture? This is, of course, because man would have been hungry for most of the time, which is not something Rousseau adequately considers. He also never considers the effects of cold or heat: the weather in Rousseau’s Eden is always clement, and upon man first making mud huts (for reasons unspecified), he distinguishes between the weak and the strong, but from where did the weak come in the state of nature, if man shares a basic physical equality in excellence?

Aside from these, there are several absurdities in Rousseau’s account: he believes that man doesn’t need other men any more than wolves or monkeys need one another, but these are both social animals who do live and hunt together, so this argument fails to justify itself. He expects that children would be the originators of language, which science has shown not to be true. If a child is raised without language it fails to develop the necessary areas of the brain that allow it to master language. He also believes there is no evidence that savage man’s lifespan would be noticeably shorter than civilised man’s, but then questions why civilised man is the only animal that goes senile. Peculiarly, he also believes that Europe was more fertile and had more mineral resources than other places, which is obviously not true. Also, I very much doubt any man armed with a “stout stick” can defeat a bear in single combat.

To return to Rousseau’s view: savage man is vastly different to civilised man, who is a domesticated slave that suffers from physical maladies and is riddled with many different vices. However, it is in the moral realm in which the savage man and civilised man differ most, and this is, in my opinion, Rousseau’s most important observation.

Rousseau identifies that it is from dependence upon one another from which social status arises, and inequality is formed. Reliance upon one another for resources makes us intimately attached to one another through something that did not exist before: relationships. After coming together in settled communities, relations between man and woman form families, and relations between families form society. Dependence and contracts arise, as well as the idea of status and rank. In addition, aesthetic notions come into being, such as beauty and love, as well as long-term sentimental relationships such as marriage. As good as these things may seem to be, Rousseau warns, they are also the source of vices such as envy, gluttony, rage, and revenge.

It is in the realm of social status and rank in which inequality is most marked; resources are allocated to those of higher rank, and labour to provide those resources becomes mandatory. Moral bonds impose themselves between these classes of people and fix them rigidly in a social hierarchy which binds the entire society together.

“Each person began to gaze on the others and to want to be gazed upon himself, and what came to be prized was public esteem.” (Rousseau, Discourse on Equality, 1755, p. 42.)

The modern world, then, makes man’s own self-esteem dependent on the opinions of his fellow man, and his life a commitment to his social relationships. When a man’s reputation is slighted or one of his relationships is intruded upon, it provokes the man to terrible revenge and makes him “bloodthirsty and cruel.” From these social distinctions arise political distinctions, and those who wear these chains seek to impose them on others, as civilised man compares his lot to the lot of others. It is in man’s relationships, his “burning desire to be talked about,” that his virtues and vices are exhibited. The savage man, however, can exhibit none of these qualities. As Rousseau puts it:

“...the savage lives within himself; the social man, outside himself, lives only in the opinion of others and it is, so to speak, from their judgement alone that he gets the sense of his own existence.” (Rousseau, Discourse on Equality, 1755, p. 37.)

Rousseau’s savage is so absolutely free that he cannot conceive of civilisation and would reject the “shackles” these relationships would place upon him as a form of slavery. Civilised man, however is so inured to his bonds that to deprive him of them is an act traditionally used as the penultimate punishment. Being a lover of freedom and an opponent of these social hierarchies, Rousseau concludes then that this situation must be reversed, and this is the purpose of his social contract.

In his revolutionary 1762 work The Social Contract, Rousseau expands on a view of governance that he briefly touches upon in the Discourse, which is markedly different to that of Hobbes and Locke. Whereas Hobbes’ is attempting to justify why civilisation exists to prevent a descent into anarchy, and Locke is abstracting away from English political practices of his time to create a fair and just government to facilitate a harmonious society, Rousseau is attempting to create a state that would return man to his hypothetical state of nature whilst still living within society. I do not have the space here to explore Rousseau’s social contract in the proper detail it deserves, but there are some salient points to extract for the purpose of my argument.

One important aspect of the difference between Rousseau and the classical liberal tradition of rights is in the distinction between positive and negative rights. Whereas Locke is attempting to construct a system of non-interference where it is not warranted (and this, to him, is freedom), Rousseau begins unknowingly from a position of positive freedom that requires the state to construct a series of artificial “civil rights” which cumulate in a totalising system of coercion in order to make each component work theoretically with the rest to achieve his goals.

Rousseau explains clearly what he is attempting to achieve with this work:

“The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.” (Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762, p. 6.)

As shown previously, this is Rousseau’s attempt to construct a condition within civil society for man to live as his savage might have lived; he views himself to be “tracing lost and forgotten paths” in order to arrive at the view that man is only truly free when he has no obligation to any other person. This view is firmly founded in the assumed supremacy of reason; all must be rationally justified as no man has an inherent natural authority over any other man. If people are to come together from the state of nature in order to form a society, the state that governs such an entity is obliged to attempt to preserve their savage freedom even whilst they do not live as savages.

To achieve this idyllic, and fictional, state of affairs, Rousseau constructs a novel and complex metaphysic to explain the desired relations between the sovereign power, the state, the government, the people, the individual, and the famous “general will,” the animating force of political life. Once this is in place, he makes some concrete demands and predictions of the consequences of this state of affairs. As he says, the clauses of his social contract when “properly understood, may be reduced to one—the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all.” (Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762, p. 7.)

The general will, being an incorporated abstraction of all of the individual wills of a society, must predominate over any particular wills of any individual, which must ideally be sublimated into and harmonised with it as the citizens give themselves over to the whole. However, even if one doesn’t choose to abandon one’s particular will, they must obey the general will whether you like it or not:

“...whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body; which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free; for such a condition which, uniting every citizen to his native land, guarantees him from all personal dependence…without it, would be absurd and tyrannical, and subject to the most enormous abuses.” (Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762, p. 9.)

To be “forced to be free,” in Rousseau’s view, means the mandatory sundering of all social bonds between individuals in order to put the state as the direct mediator between each person as the representative of the totality of society. The abstract sovereign, represented in the government of the state, has no limits to its power as it is inconceivable to Rousseau that it should wish to attack the entire body politic at once, and targeting any portion of the body politic would be a particular attack from the government, which definitionally would not be an act of the sovereign and therefore not an expression of the general will. The sovereign is always perfect as it always follows the general will, which is never wrong. Any citizens who would oppose the interest of the sovereign are essentially seceding from the body politic, and this ensures that the sovereign never has to face the question of injuring any of its members; anyone who opposes the sovereign is automatically rendered a foreigner.

The sovereign is an abstract entity and is in some way represented by the government, but is also charged to “restrain the government” by some kind of relative use of force owned by different parts of the state. How this is done, precisely, is left indeterminate by Rousseau and he seems to dodge the demands for exacting information by simply saying “there is no unique and absolute constitution of government” and there may be many governments different in nature.

“The state, with regard to its members, is owner of all their property by the social contract, which, in the state, serves as the basis of all rights.” (Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762, p. 10.)

After coming into association as the body politic, the individual sacrifices their natural rights, which are treated in a negative fashion by the Lockean school of thought and demands limited government, for civil rights, a positive construct which regards the individual as completely under the power of the state, and the state is the originator of any rights they might possess. This imposes a “moral and lawful equality” on each individual citizen, attached to which are various obligations. To ensure that the general will is never subverted by a particular will, the citizens must also be forbidden from engaging in any kind of private association.

“It is important, then, in order to have a clear declaration of the general will, that there should be no partial association in the state, and that every citizen should express only his own opinion.” (Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762, p. 50.)

Since the state is also the originator of all rights, has complete control over the property, is the director of the will and behaviour of its members, and each citizen has devoted their life to the state, it makes sense that the state should have absolute power of life and death over its wards, on the whim of the government.

“...when the prince has said to him: ‘it is expedient for the state that you should die’, he ought to die, since it is only on this condition that he has lived in security up to that time, since his life is no longer merely a gift of nature, but a conditional gift of the state.” (Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762, p. 17.)

There is much more to be said about the nature of Rousseau’s social contract, but this should suffice for the purposes of the following section.

It seems remarkable how finely-tuned Rousseau’s proposed web of interlacing and certain clauses must be for the system to function as intended. As he puts it, if “the slightest modification” is made to them, the entire project is rendered “vain and ineffectual” and dissolves. Rousseau accepts that the interplay between the sovereign, the state, the government and the people and each individual is so brittle as to easily be shattered; any amount of particular will exercised in each domain could result in either a complete despotism or the total failure of the entire system. Given this fragility, it seems hardly conceivable that people should all be of such a like mind as to keep such a system functional for any length of time. However, there are deeper issues than these practical surface ones.

Is what Rousseau proposes really freedom, though, and freedom in what way? Given how he conceived of the savage’s absolute natural freedom, to give over one’s particular will—and natural rights—to the general will, and the state that legislates and executes in its name, seems to be the opposite of freedom. What choice does Rousseau’s civilised savage actually have? The choice to endorse anything the state commands them to do, even up until the point of “voluntarily” dying upon command. In what meaningful way can the individual be said to be free? All elements of the system will be geared towards, at best, discouraging any acts of particular will on the part of the individual.

The issue lies in Rousseau’s very thin definition of freedom, which he seems to define only as having no social bonds with other people, so that we might be able to follow our inclinations at a whim. As an inheritor of the dense feudal systems of rank and relations, this may have been an appropriate definition in the 18th Century, from Rousseau’s perspective, but things have changed and we should change with them. Marx and Engels observed in The Manifesto of the Communist Party:

“...the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.” (Marx/Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848, p. 33.)

Rousseau is attacking these bonds of “Philistine sentimentalism,” which Marx and Engels felt left only a “mere money relation” in their wake. Burke strongly opposes Rousseau’s assault in his Reflections:, and in the 21st Century, I believe it becomes apparent that defining “freedom” in such a thin way is not reasonable at all. It seems that our increasing isolation through social media, working from home, and alienation from uncontrolled immigration is contributing to loneliness, depression, and the decay of our societies; it is not good or natural for human beings to be totally isolated from one another, and this is why I feel Hume is correct when he assumes that man was always a social being and an individualistic state of nature never occurred, and why Hobbes has the most realistic picture of the hungry, desperate and short-lived man that such a state would produce. Freedom to exercise our particular wills is indeed a good, but the kind of absolute freedom that Rousseau is advocating seems to be little different to being punished with ostracism; banning people from engaging in “particular associations” seems like cruelty, not liberation.

This monodimensional view leads Rousseau to some disturbing places, too. When speaking of the relation “of the members with one another, or with the body as a whole,” he states outright:

“...this relation should, in respect of the first, be as small, and in respect of the second, as great as possible; so that every citizen may be perfectly independent of all the rest and in absolute dependence on the state.” (Rousseau, The Social Contract, II., 1762, chap. XII.)

Unfreedom is not only found in our obligations to one another; total dependence on the state also creates a demonstrable lack of freedom. Worse, is that Rousseau seems to be presaging, if not outright laying the groundwork for, the fascist movements that came after him. Consider these quotes from The Doctrine of Fascism:

“...Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State.”

“No individuals or groups (political parties, cultural associations, economic unions, social classes) outside the State.”

“The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims…The Fascist State is wide awake and has a will of its own. For this reason it can be described as ‘ethical’.”

“The Fascist State organises the nation, but it leaves the individual adequate elbow room. It has curtailed useless or harmful liberties while preserving those which are essential. In such matters, the individual cannot be the judge, but the State only.” (Mussolini/Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism, 1932.)

It seems impossible for Rousseau to object to any of these statements as, in each one, he has already endorsed it; he wishes all to be dependent on the state, to sublimate their particular wills into the general will, to have no personal activities, for the state to be a “moral person,” and is the only judge of that which the individual might say or do.
There are yet other, more far-reaching concerns, which Burke raises in his Reflections, with which Rousseau appears to concur. Burke describes civilisation as a different kind of contract, a relationship between all strata of society, that also includes a partnership between the dead and those yet to be born. Without this continuity of tradition, the cumulative wisdom built up by many hands over many generations would be lost and this would have a degenerative effect on the human species. Rousseau admits that the savage has no traditions of his own, and that these traditions also contain a kind of value:

“There was no education or progress; the generations multiplied unproductively, and because each began anew from the same point, centuries passed by in all the crudeness of the earliest ages; the species was already old and man remained ever a child.” (Rousseau, Discourse on Equality, 1755, pt. I.)

Burke also observed that this same phenomenon would occur:

“No generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than flies of a summer.” (Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, p. 195.)

Why should this not also happen for Rousseau’s civilised savage? If each person considers themselves an original individual who has no relationship with other people in the past, present, or future, how could they think of themselves as inheriting traditions and passing them along? Why should they not be reduced to being “ever a child”? How is depriving people of the opportunity to mature into adults and adopting responsibilities to others beneficial for anyone? It seems that Rousseau’s view of freedom means depriving people of demonstrable human goods—as philosopher John Mackie observed in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong:

“The taking over and passing on—with perhaps some changes—of a cultural inheritance is itself a part of the good life, and this too is a social relation to which there belong appropriate sorts of conflict as well as cooperation.” (Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, 1977, p. 169-172.)

It could be argued that Rousseau’s savage would be denied a great number of positive human experiences that makes life rich and worthwhile. The savage, not being the inheritor of a tradition nor a continuation of a civilisation, seems to have nothing other than himself to live for. He is incapable of heroism, love, self-sacrifice, reciprocal kindness, any of the virtues of which we esteem, and he would not understand the depth of feeling man can have towards his fellow man; he does not know what it is to cherish another person. In fact, any concepts that are dependent on our relations would become outmoded; these are well-outlined in Bernard Williams’ work Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. He discusses “thick ethical concepts,” which are words which contain within themselves both a description of events and a moral judgement about said event which cannot be distinguished from one another without liquidating the word itself. For example, betrayal describes at once an intimate relationship between two people that contains an expectation of mutual consideration, and the act of one person maliciously acting against the other’s interests in a way that they would reasonably be expected to know would constitute a high moral offence. If people have no relations to one another, these concepts become obsolete, and the moral knowledge contained therein dies with them.

What Rousseau also appears to be heralding is the total end of human diversity, too. If every person is to be “forced to be free” and remain in a childlike state of selfishness and subservience to the state, in what way would they be different? No dissenting opinions or activities from his paradigm would be tolerated as they all contain an existential threat to the existing order; no independent culture could be said to exist nor would it be able to flourish and produce something new. Rousseau’s plan would herald the end of the different societies as natural and autonomous things, and result in the homogeneity of every individual in their “freedom”; each one is different in superficial ways, yet exactly the same in their rank and essence.

Rousseau’s social contract is a brilliantly-constructed pipe dream that seems destined to inevitably fail and create not freedom, but tyranny and abject human suffering, as it is fundamentally attempting to restore to mankind a state of being that never existed in the first place. He himself admits that this thought experiment was probably not man’s original state, but after describing it, he seems to have enchanted himself into believing it might once have been and that it would be desirable to create it, whether it was authentic or not.

I consider it a testament to the incisiveness of Rousseau’s valid observations, and criticisms of the intrinsically self-regarding nature of “social man,” that such a project as The Social Contract could be advanced and incorporated into political thought. Rousseau managed to expertly describe the nature of the relationships of the people within his society, and his time these doubtless contributed to oppression in some manner; I feel that he took his criticisms too far, however.

The fundamental problem with Rousseau is that he does not view freedom as a social principle and therefore it is society itself that inhibits freedom, which allowed him to harmonise the notion of personal relationships with unfreedom, and it is this that facilitates the ascension of his project into the realms of totalitarianism, homogeneity, and isolation. The result of his work towards egocentric liberation would be even more despotic than the vain society he wished to escape in the first place.

Rousseau does not seem to consider those things of value that would be lost in his pursuit of his absolute, idealised concept of “true freedom,” and that for people to achieve this, they would have to abandon almost all the things that give the human condition its quality and texture; Rousseau would have us sacrifice those things that make life worth living. It seems that the price of perfect freedom is complete autonomy, so that we are deprived of our ability to form personal associations and clubs, our ability to participate in traditions, our ability to form friendships and even the obliteration of the family unit.

Abandoning these bonds of sentiment seems to be a path only to a worse place than where we started. Destroying those things that make the world warm and appealing, and provide comfort, in order to fulfil the need to achieve a cold and theoretical conception of perfect freedom seems, to me at least, that it creates many more problems than it solves because it begins from a deeply flawed conception of human nature and would deprive us of many human goods that I feel are necessary for the health and wellbeing of people in general; I do not think it would be a good idea to willingly become Rousseau’s savage as Rousseau’s concept of freedom is fundamentally flawed.

Grotius, On the Right of War and Peace (1625)

Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689)

Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

Charles Louis, Baron of Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748)

Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (1755)

Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762)

Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Marx/Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

Mussolini/Gentile, The Doctrine of Fascism (1927)

Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (1962)

Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1991)

Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (2006)

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