In Book I of the Social Contract, Rousseau argues that political authority must be established by convention, and that this is possible iff citizens in political society obey only themselves and remain as free as before. I will defend this argument from two objections: First, that he doesn’t consider all the potential means of legitimating authority; and second, that he fails to prove that people are as free in political society as they were in nature.
I. We are born free
Liberty is the freedom to obey oneself. If I have it, I have the natural right to obey my will, and the natural duty to preserve my interests (3). However, in civil society, people are also constrained by the commands of political authority (i.e., the laws).This raises the following question: What justifies the obligation to obey political authority?
Rousseau begins with two common answers: That political authority originates naturally, and that it originates by force (3–6). Proponents of the first answer argue that it is in the nature of some persons to rule and others to be ruled. For example, Aristotle justifies the arbitrary power of a slave driver by reference to natural differences. But Rousseau argues that slaves are not slavish by nature, they are slavish because they have been enslaved: All people must be born free, and enslaved by force.
But stable political authority cannot be established by force because it would always belong to whoever is strongest; people are always obliged to obey the next stronger force against them, as to do otherwise would be to misjudge their own interest. For example, if I am confronted at gun point for my purse, I am naturally obliged to hand it to the assailant. However, as soon as the assailant leaves, I return to obeying myself.[1] Thus, since neither justification guarantees stable political authority, Rousseau concludes: “Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow man, and since force does not give rise to any right, agreements alone therefore remain as the basis of all legitimate authority among men” (6).
First Objection:
Rousseau’s discussion doesn’t appear to be exhaustive of the ways that political authority could be legitimated: He has argued that a person’s liberty cannot be subjected by nature or by force, but the only other possibility he considers is convention, and it is not apparent that convention is the sole alternative. If it isn’t, his conclusion hasn’t been demonstrated. I will show that convention is in fact the only possible basis for political authority.
Firstly, Hobbes and Locke argued along these lines: Political authority could be legitimated by a contract (i.e., a particular conventional agreement) stipulating the authorization of power from each natural person to an anticipated figure of political authority. Prior to this contract, they said, humans outside of civil society are either in a state inadequate for their survival or for the preservation of property. They therefore agreed that humans could be liberated from this state if each could abandon their natural liberty; that is, if they could contract to assign the right that enabled their preservation in nature to a sovereign person, or assembly, who could guarantee their survival and property in civil society. If the contract is consensual, each person thereby agrees to alienate some of their natural liberty to establish political authority. And so, left with a restricted version of their original liberty, each person lives under the sovereign power. I’ll refer to this as H&L’s opinion: Political authority is established when each person contracts to alienate some of their natural liberty to a sovereign person(s).[2]
H&L are right to think that authority can only be established by a contract. They are also right to think that such a contract would require that liberty be alienated. Authority is the right to control a thing or possession, and ‘authorization’ is the transfer of that right. Specifically, political authority is the right to control a person’s liberty, or to be obeyed by them. Consider: if a person possesses a thing, they have either always possessed it (thus, they have authority by nature) or it has at some time been transferred to them (meaning they have been authorized to possess it). Finally, a possession can only be transferred legitimately if it can be consensually ‘alienated’ (i.e., given or sold [7]). Therefore, If a person, J, wants the authority to control another person’s possession, R’s, then two conditions are necessary:
- R had the right to control the possession before a time, t
- The right was alienated to J at t
After t, J has authority over R’s possession.
If liberty is the possession, then any notion of natural authority fails 1: t is at or after R’s birth; R cannot be born without their own liberty. Moreover, any notion of forced authority fails 2, because something taken by force is neither given nor sold. In fact, giving and selling are only possible where there exists conventions about gratuity and transaction; conventions about property. Nothing can be authorized prior to the existence of proprietary conventions. So, Rousseau must be right: All political authority presupposes convention. The very idea of a social contract presupposes conventions which are necessary and prior to it.
But even if conventions did exist at the time of H&L’s contract, there is still a problem: For a thing to be alienated, it is necessary that conventions exist, but it is both necessary and sufficient that the act of alienating conforms to them. For example, I live in a society with such conventions, but I can’t give someone my roommate’s car, and I can’t sell the nutrition I gained from my breakfast from this morning. The former violates conventions about giving and selling since they are about transactions of property and my roommate’s car is not my property. The latter is ontologically incompatible with them: Although I ‘have’ the nutrition in a sense, I do not ‘possess’ it in the relevant one, because it simply does not count as property.
According to Rousseau, no attempt to alienate liberty can be sufficient in these respects.[3] He thinks that ordinary notions of Liberty equivocate both freedom and duty: The first is the power to will an action (i.e., to reason or deliberate in favour of a course of action), and the second is the power to constrain it (i.e., to deliberate in accordance with one’s interests). Both powers are contained by liberty as such, and its object, or goal, is to fulfill one’s interests. So, liberty also cannot be alienated because of 1: All are born with the power to control themselves, and it is never in one’s interest to give up this control; under no circumstances can a person agree to subject themselves to the will of another. The will is also ontologically similar to my nutrition because it is a possession, but it is not property. It is both an abstract moral power, and the very mechanism that allows an individual to do everything from eating breakfast to taking a shower. The will has absolute authority over all of a person’s actions, and therefore it is inalienable.
II. Everywhere we are in chains
The conclusion just established contradicts 2, meaning Rousseau must explain how political authority can be established given that liberty can’t be authorized. He is constrained by the following desiderata:
“Find 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 [D1] obeys only himself and [D2] remains as free as before. This is the fundamental problem for which the social contract provides the solution.”
Therefore, each person must submit to political authority while maintaining their liberty: Their freedoms (D2), and their duties (D1).
Interest motivates action insofar as the will is constrained to promote it: In the hierarchy of moral decision-making, the will commands all moral action, reason commands what is willed, and interests constrain reason. This means that, if political authority commands the will of individuals by legislation, the laws must be in the interest of individuals. Therefore, the only plausible candidate for sovereignty must be the people themselves.
Sovereignty consists in the general will, whose exercise is an instance of public deliberation toward a common interest (i.e., a public vote), and whose output is a general law (19). The fundamental political agreement is thus not a transaction of property, but rather the embodied commitment each person makes to substitute their natural interest for a common one, which is by equal measures their own. And this idea is intuitive: We each have a private interest as individual humans, and a common interest as members of the human race. It is also in our nature, for what else could maintain the original association of families? But common interest can only gather the force to bind a whole society if each member agrees to associate as such. This is what Rousseau means when he says that each person alienates their entire self (12): By submitting to the authority of general will, each submits their entire self, both as an individual and as a mereological part of the whole, to an authority none other than their own. So much for D1.
Second Objection:
Rousseau sometimes suggests that the authority of the general will is totalitarian, but it seems unlikely that any totalitarian view of political authority could satisfy D2. He argues that the general will is expressed by the excess majority of the vote and that, if the majority decides against what a particular individual believed to be in the common interest, they should nevertheless be forced to obey. He writes: “Whoever refuses to obey the general will, will be forced to do so by the entire body. This means merely that he will be forced to be free” (15).
But, the standard of D2 is “as free as before,” and thus it will be sufficient to show that we are sometimes forced to act contrary to interest in nature. This idea is intuitive if one accepts something like the Socratic opinion about the conflict belief reason and desire. In nature, our private interests are the only constraint on our freedom, but not all interests are rational (i.e., not all are said to be moral). For example, some private interests include the desire to eat excess amounts of cheesecake, or the desire to cheat on one’s partner. We might describe actions which proceed from these desires as voluntary, but there is a sense in which they are not free, because such interests are not, as a matter of objective fact, conducive to our interests. But, Socrates says in the Protagoras that it would be absurd for desire to be capable of enslaving reason.[4] Therefore, people must only act on passion contrary to reason if they are ignorant. Rousseau agrees:
The general will is always right and always tends toward the public utility. However, it does not follow that the deliberations of the people always have the same degree of rectitude. We always want what is good for us, but we do not always see what it is. The people are never corrupted, but they are often tricked, and only then do they appear to want what is bad.
Let us then return to this notion of being “forced to be free.” If a person behaves incontinently, or is akratic as the Greeks would say,they are technically said to have suffered from some sort of epistemic dysfunction which prevents them from successfully completing an instance of moral deliberation. Thus, they must be ignorant of moral knowledge proper. The citizen who expresses an interest contrary to the general one must also be suffering from this sort of dysfunction. However, the collective nature of the general will acts as a safeguard from error; it exercises a pure, uninhibited reason of the sort that the akratic person is incapable of exercising as a lone individual. It is in this sense that a citizen can be forced to be free: The general will, in its output, corrects their particular incontinence. Rousseau therefore exceeds D2: Citizens of civil society, by obeying only themselves, are constrained such that they are more free than they were before. They have acquired la liberte conventionelle, and with it, morality per se, “for to be driven by appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is liberty” (16).
Lastly, one may worry that this runs into the same problem as H&L, namely: How can an agreement be formed prior to an authority that can enforce it? But, since Rousseau’s political authority is nothing but the unity of natural authorities, it is not ‘created’ by the social compact, and thus authority is prior. I have also explained that each person’s liberty in nature is subject to both rational and irrational desire. So, just as the irrational nature of a child engenders a dependency which obligates them to their parents, and as the love of a parent obligates them to care for their child, the compassion every human has for each other gives rise to the force of the common interest. It is a contract between each person’s private and public self, between each human and humanity: “Each individual, contracting, as it were, with himself, finds himself under a twofold commitment, namely, as a member of the sovereign toward private individuals, and as a member of the state toward the sovereign” (13). And, since all are born free, all are bound by nature to themselves.[5]
Read:
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Hackett Publishing Company, 2019.
Plato. Protagoras. Hackett Publishing, 1992.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract (1762). Hackett, 2019.
[1] “If one must obey because of force, one need not do so out of duty; and if one is no longer forced to obey, one is no longer obliged” (6).
[2] For Hobbes, the sovereign is an artificial person (Leviathan, [16.1–2]). For Locke, it is the government (Second treatise, XI, 136)
[3] “Renouncing one’s liberty is renouncing one’s dignity as a man, the rights of humanity, and even its duties. There is no possible compensation for anyone who renounces everything. Such a renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man. Taking away all liberty from his will is tantamount to removing all morality from his actions.” (7)
[4] “Now, no one goes willingly toward the bad or what he believes to be; neither is it in human nature, so it seems, to want to go toward what one believes to bad instead of to the good. (Plato’s Protagoras, 358c6-d2).” See also Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII on akrasia.
[5] Not all of Rousseau’s equivocations can be made sense of. “Man,” unfortunately being one of them.
Nadia Miller 