It is easy to see why Rousseau has been accused of contradicting himself. The position which he has presented in the Social Contract appears to completely remove one’s freedom by subsuming each person within the corporate body politic, thus annihilating individual liberties. However, he believes that civil society, if founded in this way on a social contract between all its citizens, will afford more freedom than the state of nature, albeit of a different kind. To understand this, it is necessary to understand the biological model of civil society which Rousseau is using, which has already been hinted at in the use of the term body politic.
Rousseau believes that when the social contract is formed between people, they become essentially members of a body. This body is conceived of by Rousseau as possessing its own will. This will is referred to as the general will, and it by this general will that the body politic is able to exercise sovereignty. The thing of note here is that the general will is not the same, necessarily, as the will of the majority within the body politic. Neither is it the sum of all the individual wills. Indeed, Rousseau himself states that “there is often a great difference between the will of all and the general will”. This is because the general will, according to Rousseau, is what the body politic would desire if it knew what was best for it as a whole. The general will, for Rousseau, is always right, because the body politic would never do anything to harm itself (he appears to hold the belief of Socrates that “no-one willingly errs”).
The general will is arrived at, according to Rousseau, by concentrating on the “’point on which all interests’ are in agreement” He believes that there must be such a point, because if there were not the individual human beings concerned would never have been able to enter into the social contract in the first place. The point of this is to show that in the social contract model sovereignty is never given up by the people, nor is it ever delegated by them. This does not mean that they cannot appoint government officials, but it does mean that any officials appointed in this way are limited in what they can do by the will of the body politic.
It is clear that Rousseau is talking about a radically different interpretation of freedom than that which he assumes to have existed in the state of nature. He is trying to show, in his own words, that “to be driven by our appetites alone is slavery, while to obey a law that we have imposed on ourselves is freedom”. One might ask whether this is the case but Rousseau does not want to enter into a philosophical debate on the meaning of the word freedom. It is enough for him that a legitimate regime has been established, where each person can be said to be free because each person has surrendered all of their powers and rights to the body politic, of which they are part. Although they are then constrained by the general will and must act in accordance with it, this does not diminish their freedom for two reasons. Firstly, they themselves are members of the body politic, and therefore the general will will always be directed towards their good as members of that body. Secondly, they themselves have agreed to this constraint freely, on the grounds that it is to their advantage to do so.
John Stuart Mill presents an alternative to this approach, specifically rejecting the idea of a social pact or contract which he believes provides a better way of governing a people and yet still leaving them free. His basic premise is that all human activity can be assigned to one of two spheres: the private and the public. Under his model, society is able to interfere in any of the actions of a person which fall within the public sphere, but must leave the individual to be totally free to pursue whatever activities he so wishes within the private sphere. Thus the person is governed in so far as his actions are considered public, but free in so far as his actions are considered private.
Most western liberal democracies are based on systems which would have fit with Mill’s model as explained thus far. For example, in America the first amendment guarantees that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” This is essentially defining a sphere of private life within which the government of the United States is not permitted to exercise any influence.
It is clear that this system, unlike that of Rousseau, does not purport to make the individual more free than he would be in the absence of civil society. Rather, it accept that the creation of civil society necessarily places limits on the freedom of citizens, and simply attempts to achieve a balance between liberty and government. The constitution of the United States attempts to define what is private, and therefore sacrosanct as far as government is concerned, and what is public, and therefore open to government interference. In this way, the writers of the American Bill of Rights hoped to set out the limits of freedom and the limits of government.
Mill attempts to do the same thing, but the balance which he strikes is considerably more biased toward freedom and away from government. He states that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”. Thus Mill explicitly places within the public sphere only such actions as are likely to cause harm to others. All other actions which a person may wish to undertake, including those which may hurt the person concerned but not any other people, are placed within the private sphere, and so government is not permitted to interfere in any way with them.
Mill and Rousseau are clearly presenting very different arguments here. Mill, unlike Rousseau, does not attempt to put forward a model of civil society which allows the individual to be as free as he would be in the absence of civil society. Rather, he attempts to show that a large amount of individual freedom can be maintained if government is limited to the public sphere, which he defines as any action which harms another. However, Mill recognises that certain liberties which a person might possess outside of civil society, in Rousseau’s state of nature, must be ceded to the state in order to allow civil society to function. Rousseau’s model, then, is far more ambitious than Mill’s, but this leads to the question of whether it is a realistic possibility.
The main criticism that has been levelled against Rousseau is that the concept of the general will is very difficult to define. As Masters says, “since the majority will of the citizen body need not be equitable or just, critics have asked how one can know that a given act of sovereignty is in accordance with the general will” In other words, since the general will can never be equated to the will of any group of individuals, be they the majority or some other group, how is anyone to know what the general will is? Rousseau answers this criticism by saying that the general will is always rational, and that it is always the will of the entire body politic for the entire body politic. He argues that since this is the case, any act of sovereignty will be an act of the general will because everyone who has an input into the decision (that is, every member of the body politic or every citizen) will know that the decision will apply equally to all - therefore, an equitable and just decision will be arrived at.
However, this appears to assume some sort of referendum which must take place prior to any act of sovereignty. It is very difficult to see how Rousseau would put this idea into practice. The general will is easy to think of as “what everyone would want for everyone if they were thinking rationally and without self-interest”, but it is much more difficult to see how this general will would be discovered in political reality.
It has also been objected that the notion of the general will is open to abuse. Rousseau himself, recognising that there is no way to consult the entirety of the body politic regarding each governmental decision that must be made, says that “this is not to say that a chief’s orders cannot pass for acts of the general will, so long as the sovereign authority (that is, the people), while free to reject them, refrains from doing so”. Again, this is fine philosophical theory, but it is quite possible that a dictator might use this to legitimise his own rule. Certainly it is unlikely that a dictator would leave the sovereign authority free to reject his orders, but it very likely that he would claim that the people were free, and by their silence were making his orders acts of the general will.
However, there is a more basic problem with Rousseau’s theory, which is his conception of freedom. He appears to say that the social contract results in citizens exchanging the freedom of the state of nature, which I will call natural freedom, for the freedom of civil society, which I will refer to as civil freedom. The central question, I think, hanging over Rousseau’s work is whether these two are as interchangeable as he appears to believe they are, and whether two things which are so different can both be considered to be freedom.
Rousseau himself neatly sidesteps this issue by stating that “the philosophical sense of the word freedom is not (his) subject here”. But in actual fact, the philosophical meaning of the word “freedom” is absolutely central to everything that Rousseau says. If “man is born free” as Rousseau says, meaning that man in the state of nature is free, how can man in civil society also be considered to be free, since it is quite clear that the two states are largely dissimilar. The main difference between the two is that civil freedom involves one’s will being subjected to the general will, with the net result that a person can be “forced to be free”. This idea of being forced to be free has led Bertrand Russell to describe Rousseau as a “sophistical policeman” It is difficult to see how the idea of being forced can have fit with the notion of freedom, since the two are generally considered to be contradictory.
In conclusion, then, it appears that it is not possible to be wholly free and yet wholly governed, as Rousseau believes it is. Rather, in entering civil society one accepts the necessity of giving up perfect freedom, in exchange for a certain amount of freedom and a certain amount of compulsion on the part of government. How much freedom one must surrender is debatable. For Mill, very little freedom is surrendered and the government has very little influence over individual citizens. In the United States, the balance is set slightly further towards being governed by the constitution, but many rights are still retained by the individual. It appears that this is the model that must be followed.
he Political Philosophy of Rousseau, Roger Masters, p 327
This reminds me of Mackie and his paradox of omnipotence/paradox of sovereignty - can a person or body which possesses omnipotence lay down restrictions as to what it itself can do? Can a person or body that is sovereign define limits to its own sovereignty without causing a contradiction? Can a person who is free (as mankind is in the state of nature) impose a law on himself limiting his freedom, without destroying his freedom?
“society is not founded on a contract, and...no good purpose is answered by inventing a contract in order to deduce social obligations from it” - J.S. Mill, On Liberty
The Political Philosophy of Rousseau, Roger Masters, p 325
History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell, Routledge, p 671
