Abstract
Joshua Cohen Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffman (eds) Rousseau and Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 Ethan Putterman Rousseau, Law and the Sovereignty of the People, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009
I
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often dismissed as a starry-eyed utopian, serviceable enough as a moral philosopher, perhaps, but someone whose practical sense of politics leaves much to be desired. At worst, critics have accused him of being hypocritical, ingenuous and politically irresponsible – inspiring everything from the excesses of the French Revolution to the rise of nationalism and totalitarianism. At best, he has been grudgingly credited for his affirmation of participatory democracy, patriotism and citizenship. And yet if Rousseau’s ‘republican’ defence of citizenship, patriotism and wholehearted dedication to the general will are his paramount contributions to the history of western political thought, what relevance does his political theory hold in an avowedly cosmopolitan age?
Over the past decade contemporary political theory has become increasingly preoccupied with questions of international justice; the moral legitimacy of national borders; and new configurations of citizenship, deliberation and state sovereignty. Seyla Benhabib has recently argued that traditional doctrines of national citizenship, the territorial sovereignty of nation states, and closed borders look increasingly anachronistic in the 21st century. They are no longer up to the task of addressing complex global challenges such as financial crises, climate change, migration or international terrorism. 1 In a similar vein, Martha Nussbaum, Charles Beitz, Joseph Carens and other cosmopolitans have challenged the nation state’s moral underpinnings and questioned our partiality toward co-nationals. 2 According to cosmopolitans, the patriotic sentiment that we owe more to our fellow citizens than to other members of humanity looks like an atavistic prejudice, more akin to chauvinism or racism than a political virtue.
Cosmopolitan objections to patriotism and national citizenship raise serious questions about the history of western political thought. For if the concept of the political has vanished, or at least has been so transformed as to render the foundations of national citizenship unrecognizable, then what use do we have for a consummate defender of patriotism and citizenship such as Rousseau? What can be said on behalf of his claims for the decisive role of the political community as a source of moral and civic solidarity? Must he now be relegated to the dustbin of intellectual history alongside divine right absolutists, medieval scholastics and other curiosities?
Of course not everyone would concede that Rousseau’s philosophy is so inimical to cosmopolitanism. For example, Ernst Cassirer glimpsed an imminent universalism in Rousseau’s political philosophy that prefigures Kant’s emphasis on reason, self-determination and moral autonomy. 3 Notwithstanding the First Discourse’s paean to republican citizenship, and the rhetorical attack on corrupting reason in the Second Discourse, the cultivation of a distinctively human faculty of reason is arguably the Genevan’s central preoccupation. Moreover, Rousseau’s romantic sentimentalism may also lead in cosmopolitan directions. Pity or compassion allows us to sympathize across the various differences and inequalities that separate us, imaginatively identifying with other semblables.
Without denying Rousseau’s flirtations with cosmopolitanism, his political theory seems inexorably wedded to an unambiguously political conception of morality and citizenship. For better or worse, Rousseau stands against today’s cosmopolitan tide. This does not necessarily condemn his political thought to irrelevance, however. Indeed several recent books have made an excellent case for Rousseau’s enduring importance to some of the central questions of our day: most notably, the relationship between moral equality and political legitimacy; the tension between direct participatory democracy and specialized expertise; and the preconditions for ‘freedom’ in the 21st century.
II
Arguably the centerpiece of Rousseau’s political theory is his concept of the ‘general will’. For all of the attention devoted to it over the years, the precise nature of the general will remains elusive. One of the most systematic and illuminating efforts to unpack the terms of the Rousseauean social contract is Joshua Cohen’s Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals. As Cohen notes in the introduction, his own interest in Rousseau may be traced back to courses he took as a student of the late John Rawls (pp. 1–2). Not surprisingly, his rendition of Rousseau is heavily structured by Rawlsian assumptions about the basic priority of liberty in Rousseau’s system, about the institutional and motivational prerequisites for public deliberation and, maybe most fundamentally, the assumption that the kind of society with which we are dealing is a political community. While Cohen discounts what he describes as Rousseau’s ‘most exaggerated statements about [the need for] ethno-political solidarity’, he readily acknowledges the degree to which some such narrative of civic solidarity is an absolute prerequisite for any ‘political philosophy that deserves the name “political”’ (p. 22).
Cohen may be right that the importance of pre-political or ethnic sentiments of ‘civic solidarity’ has been exaggerated, by Rousseau and others. But if not these pre-political attachments, then what gives rise to the distinctive sense of obligation that citizens feel toward one another? One way of answering this question is to see this sense of civic unity as essentially political – the product of the terms of the social contract and structured by the general will. As Cohen points out, however, in order for the general will to make an actual political community whose laws the citizens regard as legitimate, certain basic structural conditions must be met. Affirming moral equality in the face of ‘inevitable differences in the social and economic circumstances of different citizens’, citizenship obviously has to mean something rather than being just an empty formality (pp. 117, 127). Yet these institutional and motivational conditions also have to be realistic enough that citizens can actually satisfy them (p. 98). Among these requirements are that citizens begin with at least some concept of a private interest (modern citizens are not Spartans!); that, notwithstanding these particular interests, there is a recognizable conception of the common good that citizens share with one another; that in sifting through the plurality of reasons advanced in public deliberations, considerations of the common good should take priority over citizens’ various other interests (which presupposes that human beings have multiple reasons for choosing and acting); and that citizens have reasonable confidence that public institutions reflect their shared conception of the public good (pp. 34–59). Taken together, Cohen suggests, these four conditions ‘explicate the notion’ of a political community – a kind of ‘ideal’, ‘we’ or ‘people’, unified by a ‘shared conception of the good’ and a willingness to abide by this in their relationships with one another (pp. 58–9).
As an idealized statement of the contractual conditions for political community, Cohen’s reading is helpful and generally persuasive. But it seems to neglect at least two problematics suggested by Rousseau’s Social Contract and other political writings. First, we might wonder about the relationship between Cohen’s ideal or stipulated ‘conditions’ for the general will and various pre-political sources of civic solidarity that this contractarian account presupposes. Can we really assume that a political contract between citizens – however structured, and whatever its terms – will be sufficient to generate civic unity, moral solidarity and a sense of the public good? Is such a political agreement even possible in the absence of some antecedent sense on the part of a people that they share a common ancestry, ethnicity, religion, language, territory, historical experience or destiny? Cohen seems to think (and, more importantly, suggests that Rousseau thinks) that a shared conception of the good is mainly an artefact of political institutions. Operating within an appropriate set of political institutions that satisfy the various Rousseauian conditions of generality, equality, priority, unanimity, reciprocity and deliberation, reasonable citizens will arrive at a shared conception of justice and a willingness to submit to the public good (esp. pp. 66–96, 131–44). But while these formal or procedural conditions may be necessary for the emergence of a shared conception of justice, one may still doubt (as Rousseau himself did) that political institutions alone are sufficient to transform a ‘multitude’ or ‘populace’ into a ‘people’ capable of concerted political action. Political institutions must either presuppose an antecedent sense of civic solidarity (where present) or actively work to cultivate it in the hearts of citizens (where absent), sometimes by appealing to ‘communitarian’ narratives of civic solidarity that are difficult to square with political liberalism.
More fundamentally, as cosmopolitans would be quick to point out, Cohen’s contractarian model has an exclusionary flip-side of its own. The civic equality and freedom that the general will make possible among citizens presuppose a more basic inequality between citizens and non-citizens. Or, put in Rousseau’s terms, what is general with respect to a given political community – taking into account the well-being of this whole political community, emanating from the will of all of its citizens and touching all of them (but not others) equally and in precisely the same fashion – will necessarily be particular, ‘foreign’ and partial with respect to non-members. 4 As Rousseau clarifies in the Discourse on Political Economy, the general will treats non-members differently from members. The general will is ‘defective’ or partial to non-members because, as non-citizens, they have not participated in willing or affirming it. It cannot afford them freedom because it is not a rule that they have imposed upon themselves. 5 Participatory democracy may, as Cohen rightly suggests, help us to ‘extend compassion’ to our fellow citizens, but on Rousseau’s account even this ‘generalization of compassion’ is limited to those with whom we share a political relationship (p. 127). The general will and the kind of civic solidarity that underpins it are premised on the cultivation of special moral bonds of affection, care and concern. Nations must be conditioned to think of themselves as akin to families – the bonds of citizenship equated with those of kinship. 6 Insofar as human sympathy naturally ‘evaporates and weakens’ as it is extended outwards, it must be ‘confined and compressed’ at the borders of the nation state. 7 Rousseau famously evinces only contempt for those ‘supposed cosmopolites’ who find in their purported love of humanity a convenient excuse for ignoring the claims of their fellow citizens. 8
What makes the strictly political vision of civic solidarity so attractive – to Cohen, Rawlsian political liberals and Habermasian deliberative democrats – is that it manages to explain our special moral relationship to fellow citizens without appealing to unsavoury narratives of nationalism, militarism or xenophobia that have proven morally objectionable and politically dangerous. But regardless of its affinity to egalitarian political liberalism, is the purely civic view empirically tenable? Can there ever be such a thing as an exclusively ‘civic nation’ held together solely by constitutional patriotism? More salient is whether this is an accurate reading of Rousseau. As Rousseau summarizes in the Social Contract, ‘through the social compact [alone?] we have given the body politic existence and life’, but one wonders if the ‘body politic’ is really tantamount to a ‘people’? In fairness, Cohen never denies that ‘communitarian’ narratives play some role in generating civic solidarity (cf. pp. 22, 35–9, 124); he only wants to correct ‘exaggerated’ renditions of Rousseau as some kind of raving ethno-nationalist or totalitarian. Yet the irony is that, while this reading pushes Rousseau uncomfortably far in the opposite direction, even Cohen’s ‘civic Rousseau’ fails to pass muster with cosmopolitans, for whom any partiality for co-nationals – whether its sources are political or pre-political – remains anathema.
III
The origins of liberal democracy are deeply intertwined with the advent of the modern European nation state. If it is more than just a coincidence that liberal conceptions of citizenship and participatory democracy grew up in a national framework, as one might suspect, then this raises acute questions about the applicability of traditional concepts of citizenship, rights, sovereignty and democratic participation to a global context. For his part, Rousseau was famously dubious about the prospects for self-government in a political community much larger than a city-state or small, homogeneous nation like Corsica – let alone across an entire continent, hemisphere or planet. Some form of representation is the only practical way of enlarging the sphere of politics beyond the local community. And yet as Rousseau understood as well as anyone, representation apparently comes at the cost of direct, participatory democracy. One of the central paradoxes of democratic theory, dramatized in Roberto Michels’s celebrated ‘iron law of oligarchy’, is that the larger the political organization in question, the greater the power assumed by elites. Cosmopolitanism only exacerbates this Rousseauian conundrum. As Michael Walzer has cautioned, one of the ironies of cosmopolitanism is that while global citizenship may be maximally inclusive, it may also end up being minimally democratic. 9
In a challenging new book, Rousseau on Law, Legislation, and Freedom, Ethan Putterman explores this key tension between representation and democratic self-government. Unlike many who blithely disregard the technicalities of the Social Contract, Putterman makes the bold interpretive move of taking Rousseau seriously as a political scientist. Given Rousseau’s credentials as a proponent of direct, face-to-face democracy, it has always puzzled interpreters why he grants elites and representatives such a conspicuous role in drafting specialized legislation and shaping the decision-making process. The usual explanation is that Rousseau tolerates representation as a necessary evil – a grudging concession to the scale and complexity of modern government. Taking issue with this view, Putterman contends that Rousseau’s view of representation has been misunderstood and his antipathy overstated. In point of fact, as Putterman shows, legislators, magistrates, princes, judges and even censors all play a role in drafting laws and setting agendas. Whereas many interpreters have assumed that Rousseau expects laws to arise directly from the people – and thus the role of experts and representatives ought to be minimized – Putterman mounts an ingenious case that Rousseau sees no contradiction whatsoever in allowing experts a prominent role in what he calls ‘agenda-setting’, which entails a ‘joint effort between citizens and their appointed elite’. Despite the conspicuous role of legislators or censors in controlling the initial stage of law-making, this is not a violation of majority rule because ‘final decisionmaking power’ remains firmly in the hands of the people (p. 56). Elites are actively involved throughout the entire legislative process, but the will of the people – which is ultimately sovereign – only manifests at the ‘very moment of the ratifying vote’ (p. 59). The democratic essence of sovereignty is nonetheless upheld by the fact that ‘a single and undivided majority’ ends up being ‘final arbiter over every law that is put before it’ (p. 60). Ostensibly there is no sacrifice of democratic legitimacy or agency by reducing the majority’s role to that of an ‘exclusively acclamatory body’ (p. 66).
Civic engagement may be active – when the majority gives its final approval to laws – but as Putterman observes, the public’s involvement is tacit or implicit as well. Most notably, public opinion acts as a constant watchdog and steady guide on the behaviour of magistrates, legislators, judges, councils, dictators and other palpably non-democratic representatives. We have grown cynical about public opinion’s role as an instrument for manipulating the ignorant masses into doing exactly what elites want them to do (or, more charitably, what the democratic majority ought to do if they truly understood their general interests). Putterman describes this dynamic of elite manipulation and will formation as ‘vote-rigging’ (pp. 72–95). But more optimistically, Rousseau also saw public opinion as functioning in the opposite way. The very capriciousness of public opinion serves as a check or limitation on the influence of representatives and elites (pp. 87–90). Taking this logic to the extreme, Putterman advances the bold claim that even the judiciary – notoriously the least democratic branch – operates ‘before the public eye’, gaining authority and legitimacy only by means of the people’s acquiescence (p. 154).
This reading is as ingenious as it is well-supported by textual evidence. However, it also leads to a curious rendition of Rousseau and a potentially tautological understanding of democratic theory. For if every political institution – no matter how patently undemocratic – ultimately draws legitimacy from the will of the people, even indirectly via the gaze of public opinion, then just about anything legislators or representatives do is by definition ‘democratic’. What institutional arrangements (including that of a dictator!) would not pass muster as ‘popular’ in this expansive sense (cf. pp. 163–8)? This sounds an awful lot like plebiscitary dictatorship, in which manipulated acclamation by the public to the acts of its leaders hardly qualifies as democratic self-government. 10 Even beyond public opinion’s notorious fickleness, do representatives really have no role – as Rousseau seems clearly to envision – in guiding or shaping opinion? And what if public opinion is legitimately divided by certain laws or public rulings?
As with the problem of representation more generally, this tension is only magnified when the political community we are dealing with is no longer a nation state but some new form of cosmopolitan world order. In this case, citizens are even further removed – practically and existentially – from the activity of law-making; representatives gain additional power and influence by virtue of their distance from the ‘public eye’ of those they are entrusted to represent; and legislation is not affirmed by the will of a single unified ‘public’ but by a global opinion exponentially more divided, heterogeneous and polarized than even the most diverse political community Rousseau could imagine. Putterman’s claim that representation and public opinion are harmonized with democracy in Rousseau’s ideal political community is already a stretch, but this accommodation – fraught with difficulties – is even more tenuous when we move beyond the context of the nation state.
IV
Whereas cosmopolitanism’s calls for ‘world citizenship’ usually elicit raised eyebrows, one of the more useful ideas to emerge from recent discussions of international justice is a more stringent understanding of ‘freedom’. Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and others have argued that living a flourishing human life – being free in a substantive rather than merely formal sense – entails deeper functions or ‘capabilities’ that philosophers and policy-makers need to take seriously. 11 In this view, the minimalist liberal account of freedom as the absence of physical or legal restraint (à la Hobbes or Isaiah Berlin) is inadequate; the ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ it affords is empty, formalistic. Accordingly, one of the great puzzles of Rousseau’s political theory is what he means by ‘freedom’, and thus on which side of the ‘positive’ versus ‘negative’ freedom divide he deserves to be located. Despite his rhetorical commitment to the natural freedom and autonomy of the state of nature – understood mainly as independence from any power outside of ourselves – the broader thrust of Rousseau’s discussion of ‘moral liberty’ posits a deeply substantive view of freedom that is simultaneously political (being self-governing and subject only to laws one has made for one’s self); moral (choosing virtuously according to a cultivated faculty of reason); and existential (being liberated from various forms of psychological dependency, other-directedness and inauthenticity).
Rousseau’s multi-layered engagement with the concept of freedom is the subject of an outstanding recent collection of essays entitled Rousseau and Freedom, edited by Christie McDonald and Stanley Hoffmann. While the main focus of this collection is the philosophical meaning of the concept of liberty, this is obviously related to the question of what kind of political community is best calculated to help individuals achieve this liberty. Is freedom something that is metaphysical or political? Does freedom require merely a Hobbesian or Berlinean ‘absence of restraint’, which would seem to imply freedom’s accessibility under a wide range of political and institutional arrangements? Or, rather, do the unique and stringent conditions that Rousseau attributes to his concept of ‘moral liberty’ imply that freedom’s preconditions are politically contingent, fragile and subject to tragic disappointment under all but the most ideal political circumstances?
The contributors to this volume approach these questions in a variety of illuminating ways. For example, freedom is understood not simply as a substantive condition of fulfilment (the ‘moral liberty’ of the Social Contract which consists in being subject to no rules other than those one has imposed by reason upon one’s self) so much as the removal of various impediments hampering in some way our freedom. Thus one can productively envision Rousseau as engaged in the process of maximizing freedom by theorizing a world purged of the last traces of original sin or ennobled by a new version of Christianity stripped of intermediation, revelation and dogma (Ioannis Evrigenis, Jason Neidleman); the subject’s imprisonment by the theatre’s tyranny of verisimilitude (Jérôme Brillaud); the boundaries imposed upon women by the fate of gender (Phillip Stewart); the paradox of an education in liberty requiring a hermetically closed pedagogical space (Diane Berrett Brown); the constraints to self-realization imposed by the liberal conception of self-ownership (Matthieu Brunet and Bertrand Guillarme); the anxieties and travails of psychological paranoia (Leo Damrosch); the Dionysian discovery of a form of pre-rational, emotive understanding made possible by music (Tracy Strong); and even laziness as a potential source of freedom from the vita activa! In most of these chapters, ‘freedom’ is postulated as requiring the removal of some moral, biological, theological, pedagogical or structural boundary that is something other than strictly ‘political’.
Theorizing freedom so expansively – as requiring both more and less than political liberty – is a useful complement to Rousseau’s ordinary preoccupations with political freedom and the life of the citoyen. While the Genevan clearly saw the (right kind of) political community as an instrument for liberating us from a wide range of dependencies or unfreedoms whose fundamental causes were economic, sociological, psychological or existential, there are limits to what the political community can accomplish. The lesson of this volume is that the political may be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for achieving these other kinds of moral, metaphysical and structural liberations.
The danger with expanding the Rousseauian conception of freedom, of course, is that construing Rousseau as deeply concerned with moral, religious, existential or metaphysical freedom risks losing sight of the centrality of the political to virtually all of his writings. And yet affirming the political brings a different set of challenges. If there is a problem in not placing enough emphasis on the political community as a source of moral freedom, it may be dangerous to rely too heavily on the transformational model of politics. As Stanley Hoffman warns, the tangible political threat is that the vision of perfect freedom and autonomy offered in the Social Contract may function as a ‘mirage’, representing an ‘apparent perfection, which seduces human beings lost in the disappointing, imperfect landscapes’ of actual political life (p. 137). By immersing one’s self in a transformative general will one effectively ‘mutilates liberty instead of realizing it’ (p. 136). Marie-Hélène Huet likewise cautions that Rousseauian freedom may be less about being free to do exactly as one likes than the far humbler ‘negative freedom’ of abstention, of not being required to do something one doesn’t want to do (pp. 263, 271). As Marius Hentea reminds us, ‘non-politics’ can be attractive in so far as politics itself may be a ‘yoke’ from which the truly emancipated human being would wish to escape (pp. 179–83). So how can we affirm the centrality – indeed naturalness – of the political without at the same time falling prey to the dangers that the political brings along with it? This is the challenge of our day.
V
There are obviously significant tensions within and between all three of these books, but there is also a broad consensus about Rousseau’s commitments to freedom (however understood), moral equality and participatory democracy. This takes us back to the question with which we began: namely, what configurations of political community does Rousseau think will facilitate freedom so understood? And from the standpoint of various forms of cosmopolitanism, does a political solution to the problems, say, of economic inequality, religious pluralism or psychological dependency only serve to displace our condition of dividedness and dependency to a higher level? As Marx complained in ‘On the Jewish Question’, a merely political emancipation from religion, status, psychological dependency or social inequality only substitutes an equally divisive ‘national one-sidedness’ for pre-existing inequalities and differences. 12
Regardless of these dilemmas, what emerges from all three of these new books is an affirmation of Rousseau’s decisive importance for the contemporary political landscape. Rather than being anachronistic or irrelevant, his political theory contains many rich insights that can illuminate discussions of deliberative democracy, citizenship and global justice. Even so, any case for his continuing relevance has to reckon with the difficulty – if not impossibility – of translating Rousseau’s ideas about democracy and freedom into a cosmopolitan framework. As we have seen, his political theory presents a wide range of formidable challenges to precisely those cosmopolitan aspirations.