A Critique of Rousseau’s A Social Contract

     Rousseau’s The Social Contract deals directly with the issue of individual autonomy and freedom. Specifically, he examines the individual’s position, their rights and duties, in regards to the state. Positively, The Social Contract promotes direct participatory democracy, the autonomy of the individual and radical egalitarianism. However, the work also has its more negative aspects: Rousseau’s seeming intolerance of dissent, his totalitarian tendency and the promotion of a form of social engineering. Rousseau’s famous work leaves an ambiguous legacy in regards to the development of democratic ideals. While the positive elements promote the freedom and autonomy of the individual, the negative elements severely undermine any such possibility of individual freedom, as Rousseau appears to promote an increasingly rational and totalitarian state power.

     The autonomy of the individual is central to Rousseau’s theory. Rousseau promotes the idea that “everyman being born free and his own master, no one, under any circumstances whatsoever, can make any man subject without his consent”. Rousseau goes on to condemn the forced subjugation of people to a ruler through the use or threat of violence. Here, he basically condemns European ancien regimes of the 18th century as illegitimate because they were based on the might of ancient warrior castes and not on the free will of the people.

     Rousseau further upholds individual autonomy by linking morality to liberty. For Rousseau, a subjugated individual can have no morality of his own. “To remove all liberty from his will, is to remove all morality from his acts”. Therefore, only a free human can be truly moral. Indeed, morality presupposes a free conscience, which is basically the freedom to choose and the freedom to act. Those subjected to totalitarian power cannot act morally. They are devoid of all moral responsibility. Such a person’s actions or thoughts are not their own and are only what they are compelled to judge or act out. Thus morality and freedom are tied together, the only truly moral person being he or she who can act and think freely without the threat of violence or subjection.

     Rousseau encourages a kind of radical, direct and participatory democracy. The essence of the social contract is that it is a voluntary association of individuals who bind together to form laws beneficial to the protection of their liberty. The people as a whole are sovereign and no laws can be passed without their consent, thus promoting the direct participation of all citizens in political life. Rousseau further states that the people can have no representatives or king as this is to forfeit popular sovereignty, the basic condition of the social contract. Power should merely be a reflection of the popular will. Such power cannot be despotic as the people “cannot impose upon its subjects [themselves] any fetters that are useless to the community”. Instead of power being a repressive force, the political arena is a place where individual autonomy is both safeguarded and exercised. Individuals make their political world. They define the freedoms and limits of individual and collective action through participatory democracy. The type of society that Rousseau envisions is one based on a strong political individualism.

     Rousseau has a conception of democracy as fundamentally egalitarian. Liberty, for Rousseau, is dependent upon equality. All members of the social compact must have enough to ensure their inalienable political autonomy. “No citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself”. As with Rousseau’s concept of direct democracy, equality ensures the liberty of the individual, protects them from debt bondage, slavery, and the loss of their essential political autonomy. Accordingly, for Rousseau, property rights should allow a citizen to possess only so much as they can cultivate, so as to avoid massive, unequal concentrations of wealth. Such inequality only encourages the emergence of the rulers and slaves. Possession of material equality, therefore, guarantees political equality.

     For Rousseau, the acquisition of wealth and money, in general, are anti-democratic pursuits. They undermine his essentially political understanding of citizenship by diverting attention away from political brotherhood, or co-operation, towards private gain. “The word finance is a slavish word unknown in a city state. In a country that is truly free, the citizens do everything with their own arms and nothing by means of money”. Rousseau’s concept of the modern self is thus not a capitalistic acquisitive economic “animal”, but rather a civil, political “animal”. For Rousseau, the goal of social activity is to serve the betterment of the commonwealth rather than the individual’s wealth. Equality underpins the civic community. This is because it is only through equality, that individual autonomy is protected against the dangers of wealth inequality. The uninhibited pursuit of wealth can quickly lead to the rise of dominant interest groups based on positions of wealth and privilege, who may then dictate to the disinherited majority. This is, of course, monarchy and feudalism.

     However, not all elements of Rousseau’s work are so easy to accept. For example, his theory is in places intolerant; indeed, leans towards totalitarianism. One of Rousseau’s more notorious quotes is that those who dissent from the “general will” of the majority must be “forced to be free”. Essentially, for Rousseau, if a disagreement occurs between the general and the individual will, then the individual must be brought back into line. The dissenting individual must be forced to recognize and conform to the civic liberty laid out by the social contract. Rousseau states there are two kinds of liberty. One is natural liberty, in which man in a state of nature is free of all social obligation. But in natural liberty, man is threatened by a survival of the fittest scenario, in which the strong and the cunning are free to dominate the weak. The implication is that this is not real liberty as humans are slaves to biology and instinct. Under civic liberty, on the other hand, humanity is truly free, as each citizen pledges to protect the rights and liberties of all by submitting to the laws laid down by the general will. Humanity trades natural liberty, impulse and brute force, for rational, civic liberty, a more guaranteed and secure kind of freedom. According to Rousseau, the latter form of liberty is where humanity’s true interests lie. Thus, those who try to assert their natural liberty, their individual will, against the general will must be forced back on the “civilized” path, forced to be free. There is little room or tolerance in Rousseau’s theory for dissent or alternatives to the dominance of the general will.

     Rousseau creates a very black and white scenario in which you are either with the general will and thus civilised and reasonable, or against it and thus an enemy, a terrorist. He goes so far as to propose that those who oppose the state may be killed. “He must be removed by exile as a violator of the compact, or by death as a public enemy”. Although Rousseau proposes this fate only for those who attack the state, he is vague on what exactly constitutes an attack. Is dissidence an attack worthy of exile or death? At a later point in the Social Contract, Rousseau is more specific on what constitutes an intolerable crime against the state and the general will. He claims that those who do not share the dominant views of the state or the general will are outside the social compact and, thus, must be persecuted. “It is impossible to live at peace with those we regard as damned…we positively must reclaim or torment them”. Phrases like this create an ideological and political paradigm of “us and them”. This is a kind of mentality that is hard to reconcile with a democratic society based on liberty for everyone. Indeed, it undermines his other arguments in favour of individual liberty and tolerance. Such persecution and intolerance of pluralism and dissent means it would be difficult to know what truly is the general will and what is mere fearful or pragmatic conformity.

     In addition to these strains of intolerance and totalitarianism in Rousseau’s thesis, are references to state directed social engineering and indoctrination of the masses. Rousseau’s theory seems to sanction the right of governments to manipulate or coerce the individual into an ideal, conforming citizen. One such attempt at social engineering concerns Rousseau’s idea of the legislator. The legislator is tasked with creating the new republic, of writing up its founding constitution, but also of moulding a citizen body out of a “raw” people. “He who dares to undertake the making of a people’s institutions ought to feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of changing each individual who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole”. The legislator thus engineers citizens in the image he sees most fitting. But such engineering carries with it a danger of coercion, of suppression of diversity in favor of a homogeneous, subservient whole. There is a strong possibility that a society fashioned from above like this, would merely conform to the legislator’s own whim as a dictator and tyrant.

     Rousseau further encourages social engineering by proposing a state ideology to control the masses. He proposes a divinely sanctioned state based on God-given principles and immutable ideology. In order to ensure the legitimacy of the new state, the sanctity of its rules and the people’s reverence and obedience to authority, Rousseau promotes a civic religion in place of traditional religions. “The existence of an intelligent and beneficent divinity, possessed of…the sanctity of the social contract and the laws”. Here, an ideological superstructure underpins Rousseau’s social contract. The individual is admonished to be obedient to immutable, sacred laws, indeed, to submit to a civic “profession of faith”. The social contract and the laws, which citizens are meant to be the sole possessors and creators of, instead take on an immutable and sacred aura. They become, in a sense, unquestionable, untouchable, and therefore susceptible to blind obedience and totalitarian control. Social engineering is here proposed through a civic ideology that seems to set limits upon the autonomy of individual conscience, thought and action.

     To conclude, the individual is strongly morally directed in Rousseau’s theory of the social contract. Moral, not in the old Christian sense, but as a modern citizen shaped by the three values of liberty, fraternity and equality. Liberty ensures that the individual remains a core unit of democracy. The individual’s moral choice and autonomy to vote and to voice political opinion counts. However, liberty is not understood by Rousseau as individualistic, but more in a collective sense. Liberty places certain obligations on individuals, to serve and sacrifice to the community, to the general will, to the state. Indeed, the individual forms an organic part of a greater whole. Thus, civic liberty demands a collective morality, a fraternity, an obligation to fellow citizens. Equality also ties the individual to the political community, as this value, instilled in each citizen, ensures individual political autonomy. Equality protects their role as essential democratic actors by preventing bondage or slavery under a purely acquisitive economic system. Rousseau’s individual is thus a highly political actor in an almost purely civic and political world, which the individual himself, along with his peers, has created.

     However, Rousseau’s focus on the idea of the general will as inviolable, and on a very narrow concept of liberty as civic and collective contains the seeds of a possible tyranny. Rousseau insists that true liberty exists only in civic life and in civic obligations to the community and the state. Furthermore, he argues that those who dissent from the one “true” will of the majority should be forced to be free, or exiled or killed. These arguments, in a serious way, undermine the concept of liberty. Rousseau’s civic liberty, potentially at least, does not respect other forms of liberty. For example, if homosexuality were considered against the will of the majority, it would therefore be legitimate to suppress it, even though this is suppressing the natural or private liberty of some citizens. This could hold for any number of diverse forms of personal liberty that contradict the will of the majority. A fair civic liberty would not impose any one form of freedom on all its members regardless of whether they agreed or not. The social contract is designed to protect our common liberties from the threat of arbitrary force. Thus, it does its job well if it ensures our physical safety, our individual equality and security. When it goes beyond this, to impose a single morality, a single ideology, a single way of life, even if dictated by the majority, then even democracy can become a tyranny.