Rousseau and statism

Once the degradation was completely swept away, the project of building a moral society could begin. Naturally, the good building to be erected must start from a good foundation. The primitive state of nature was good, but unfortunately we can not return to it. The reason, once awakened, cannot be completely covered. But neither can we tolerate anything that will bring us back to contemporary advanced civilization. Fortunately, history provides us with good models to look back on most tribal cultures, and find that their societies,

who maintained an intermediate position between the indolence of our primitive state and the petulant activity of our egocentrism, must have been the happiest and most enduring time. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least susceptible to uprisings, and the best for man. (Rousseau 1755, 50)

The best thing we can do, therefore, is to try to recreate, in a modern way, a society on that model.

Such a recreation should begin with an appropriate understanding of human nature. Contrary to the affirmations of the philosophers of the Enlightenment, man is by nature a passionate animal, not a rational one, the deepest passions of man must set the course of his life, and reason must always yield to them.

Passions are an appropriate foundation for society, since one of the deepest desires is to believe in religion, and — Rousseau believes — religion is essential for social stability. This desire to believe can and must replace all the objections of the Enlightenment. “I believe that the world is governed by a wise and powerful will. I see it or, rather, I'm sorry.” Rousseau's feeling of God's existence, however, did not give him very detailed information about God's nature. God is “equally hidden from my senses and understanding,” so his feeling gave him only the feeling that a powerful and good intelligence has created the world. The philosophers' arguments about God not only did not clarify the subject, but also made things worse: “The more I think about this,” Rousseau wrote, “the more confused I am.” So he decided to ignore the philosophers — “impregnated with the sense of my inadequacy, I should never reason about God's nature” — and let his feelings guide his religious beliefs, arguing that his feelings are a more reliable guide than reason. “I took another guide, and I said to myself: 'Let us consult the inner light, it will lead me less astray than they, who lead me astray.” Rousseau's inner light reveals to him an unshakable feeling that God's existence is the basis of all explanations, and that feeling was for him immune to review and counterargument: “Someone very well will be able to argue with me about this, but it is what I feel, and this feeling that speaks to me is stronger than the reason that combat ".

This feeling did not become simply one of Rousseau's personal whims. At the base of all civil societies, Rousseau said, one finds a religious legitimation for what their leaders do. The founding leaders of society may not always truly believe in the religious legitimations they invoke, but that invocation is nonetheless essential. If people believe that their leaders are acting according to the will of the gods, they obey more easily and “docilessly carry the yoke of the public good.” Illustrated reason, by contrast, leads to unbelief, unbelief leads to disobedience, and disobedience leads to anarchy. This is one more reason why, according to Rousseau, “the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature and the man who meditates is a depraved animal”. Reason, therefore, is destructive of society, and should be limited and replaced by natural passion.

So important is religion for a society, Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract, that the state cannot be indifferent to religious matters. It cannot pursue a policy of tolerance towards non-believers, nor even see religion as a matter of individual consciousness. It is therefore absolutely necessary to reject the dangerous notions of the Enlightenment about religious tolerance and separation of Church and State. Moreover, religion is so fundamentally important that the maximum penalty is appropriate for unbelievers:

"Without being able to force anyone to believe them, it can banish those who do not believe them, not as ungodly, but as being antisocial, unable to truly love laws and justice, and to sacrifice, if necessary, their lives to duty. If, after publicly acknowledging these dogmas, a person acts as if he did not believe them, he should be sentenced to death. " (Rousseau 1762b, 4:8.)

A society duly founded on natural passion and religion will overcome the egocentric individualism to which reason leads, making it possible for individuals to form a new way of life, a social and collectivized organism. When individuals unite to form the new society, “the individual particularity of each contracting party is surrendered to a new moral and collective body that has its own self, life, body, and will.” The will of each individual is no longer his own, but becomes common or general, under the leadership of the spokesperson of the whole. In moral society, “one merges with the whole, in which each of us shares his person and all his power, under the supreme direction of the leaders of society.”

In the new society, leadership expresses the “general will” and exercises policies that are the best for the whole, allowing all individuals to achieve their true interests and their true freedom. The requirements of the “general will” are above any other consideration, so a citizen “must render to the state all the services he can as soon as the sovereign demands them.”

Yet there is something in human nature, corrupt as it is now by reason and individualism, that is and always will be against the common will. Individuals rarely see their individual wills in harmony with the general will, and consequently “private will always act against the general will.” And then to counter these socially destructive individualistic tendencies, the state is justified to use compulsion: “Whoever refuses to obey the general will will will be forced to do so by the total body; this simply means that he will be forced to be free.” The power of the general will over the individual will is total. “The state... must have a universal compulsive force to move and dispose each part in the form most asdecuated to the whole.” And if state leaders say to the citizen, “'it is convenient for the state that you should die', he must die.”

Thus we find in Rousseau an explicit set of postures Contra-Enlightenment, directed against the topics of Enlightenment: reason, arts, sciences, ethical and political individualism and liberalism. Rousseau was a contemporary of the American revolutionaries of the 1770"s, and there is an illustrative contrast between Locke "s positions on life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness in the United States Declaration of Independence and Rousseau's Social Contract oath for his draft Constitution for Corsica : “I join in body, goods, will and all my powers to the Corsican nation, giving it ownership over me, myself, and all those who depend on me.”

The Lockean politics of the Enlightenment and Rousseau's counter-illustration policy will lead to opposite practical applications.

Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism , Chapter 4, translation Walter Jerusalem