Man, Economy, and Liberty

15

Particular Liberties Against the General Will

Antony Flew

In one of the most valuable and most characteristic chapters of a work in which he was not always at his best Bertrand Russell described Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) as “the father of the romantic movement,… the inventor of the political philosophy of pseudodemocratic dictatorships.… Ever since his time … reformers have been divided into two groups, those who followed him and those who followed Locke.”1 Since the author of For a New Liberty and The Ethics of Liberty has devoted his life to defending, strengthening, and expanding the Lockean tradition of individual rights and limited, responsible government, I can think of no way of contributing to the present project either more appropriate or more likely to appeal to Murray Rothbard himself than by developing a critique of Rousseau’s peculiar, distinctive, and catastrophically collectivist concept of the general will.

I

The true implications of the political thought of that founding father of the opposing tradition, and in particular the factitious justificatory possibilities of this grandiose yet elusive fiction, appear to have emerged only slowly. To this day they are often not adequately appreciated by the friends of liberty. For this there are various reasons.

In the period between its first publication and the beginnings of the great French Revolution The Social Contract seems to have been the least read of Rousseau’s major works. And, although the entire revolutionary generation appears to have practiced a cult of Rousseau, at least in the earlier years, this devotion rarely if ever involved either acceptance or even much knowledge of his distinctive political ideas.2 It was only with the rise of the Jacobins that would-be despots and apologists for despotism began to recognize the conveniences of an inherently all-overriding collective General Will; the particular content of which might from time to time be discovered without reference—or even contrary—to the findings of vulgar and pedestrian countings of individual heads.3

When we do turn to The Social Contract it is easy to be misled, either by studying the work out of context, or by its stylistic adornments, or even by its title. For a start, that title is bound—one is tempted to say calculated—to suggest limited and responsible government. For how could there be contracts without reciprocal undertakings and acceptances of some limitations upon future behavior?

Then again, this is a quite extraordinarily flashy book, replete with epigram and paradox. Its opening sentence is as typical as it has been unforgettable: “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains” (I[i], 17).4 Then, on the following page, Grotius, once a respected establishment figure, is seen off in three short, decisive sentences: “Grotius denies that all human power is established for the benefit of the governed, citing slavery as an example. His usual method of reasoning is always to present fact as a proof of right. A more logical method could be used, but not one more favorable to tyrants” (I[ii], 18).5 So how can the reader—especially the reader knowing something of the author’s vagrant, feckless and dissident life-style—believe that he was anything but devoted to liberty, and a hater of despotism? (Perhaps indeed he was, but, like so many others later, he failed to grasp the concrete consequences of his own high abstractions and paradoxical sleights of mind.)

A third source of error is the failure to read The Social Contract as what it was, the climactic expression of Rousseau’s political and social thinking. It is significant that, in both the editions most frequently employed in the English-speaking world, The Social Contract (1762) is placed before whatever Discourses are included in the same volume. But, in fact, all three of the Discourses were composed and published first: the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences in 1750; the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in 1754; and the Discourse on Political Economy in 1765 (as an article in Volume V of the Encyclopédie). Certainly the last two Discourses provide valuable clues to the interpretation of The Social Contract.

(a) What, for instance, the former has to say concerning property in general and riches in particular is about as remote as could be from Locke. Thus Part II of the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality begins: “The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!” (p. 140)6

Earlier, in distinguishing “natural or physical” from “moral or political inequality,” Rousseau asserted: “This latter type … consists in the different privileges enjoyed by some at the expense of others, such as being richer, more honored, more powerful than they, or even causing themselves to be obeyed by them” (p. 118). The contention that one person’s riches must always and necessarily be possessed “at the expense of,” and hence through the exploitation of another has since, of course, become a fundamental, forever uncriticized, false assumption of all socialist thought.7

(b) The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality also warns us how the later talk of social contracts is to be construed: “Let us therefore begin by putting aside all the facts, for they have no bearing on the question. The investigations that may be undertaken concerning this subject should not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better suited to shedding light on the nature of things than to pointing out their true origin.…” (pp. 118-19).

It would, therefore, be inept to fault Rousseau’s account of the origin of private property by objecting that the words in which “this impostor” made his claim could not have been understood unless his society already possessed both an institution of private property and the vocabulary necessary for its operation.

(c) The spirits of libertarians may rise when they read that “it is a fundamental maxim of all political right, that peoples have given themselves leaders in order to defend their liberty and not to enslave themselves” (p. 152). Yet our spirits must surely fall again once account has been taken of the sentence immediately following: “If we have a prince, Pliny said to Trajan, it is so that he may preserve us from having a master” (p. 152; emphasis added). The difference, which for Rousseau was crucial, is explained earlier in the same paragraph: “… in the relations between men, the worst that can happen to someone is for him to see himself at the discretion of someone else …” (p. 152). It was, presumably, the peculiarities and the limitations of his own vagabond experience which led Rousseau thus to rate as crucial the difference: between being compelled by a private person; and being compelled by agents of the state.

It is this obsessional and blinkering emphasis upon the supposedly supreme evil of private dependency which leads him to a perverse redefinition of “liberty.” In the “Letter to the Republic of Geneva,” prefacing the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau considers where he would have chosen to be born, had he been offered such a choice. In answering this question he says: “I would have wanted to live and die free, that is to say, subject to the laws in such wise that neither I nor anyone else could shake off their honourable yoke …” (p. 106, emphasis added).

This redefinitional manoeuvre is in large part to be explained, although certainly not by the same token to be excused, by the fact that these particular laws are supposed to be both in the best interests of, and somehow self-imposed by, every individual subject to them. That Rousseau is indeed appealing to these claims is made clear by the previous paragraph. His ideal birthplace would be “a country where the sovereign and the people could have but one and the same interest, so that all the movements of the machine always tended to the common happiness. Since this could not have come about unless the people and the sovereign were one and the same person, it follows that I would have wished to be born under a democratic government, wisely tempered” (p. 106).

Even where both these two claims were correct it ought to be obvious that those subject to the resulting laws, regulations and administrative orders would not, in respect of whatever was thereby mandated or forbidden, be free. If there is a law against it, with a penalty attached for disobedience, then I am precisely not free to disobey.8 Russell was, therefore, entirely correct to condemn Rousseau’s “misuse of the word ‘freedom.’ ” For by thus making it mean “the right to obey the police, or something not very different” Rousseau was not offering something which might properly be called an alternative concept of freedom. Instead he was proposing to attach that honourable label to what is not freedom but its diametric opposite, constraint.9

In order to make out that in his ideal state the laws would be both in the interests of, or for the good of, and somehow self-imposed by, all those subject to them Rousseau employed another definitional manoeuvre. The immediately more relevant element in this exercise is to be seen most clearly in the Discourse on Political Economy. “The first and most important maxim of legitimate or popular government, that is to say, of a government that has the good of the populace for its object, is therefore, as I have said, to follow the general will in all things” (p. 168; emphasis added). It is no wonder that in March 1756, in a letter to Madame d’Epinay, Rousseau wrote: “Learn my dictionary, my good friend, if you want to have us understand one another. Believe me, my terms rarely have the ordinary sense.”

The sinister significance of the passage emphasized in that quotation from the Discourse on Political Economy comes out clear and cruel when it is put in parallel with two statements made on behalf of contemporary “People’s Democratic” regimes. The first of these statements was made by Janos Kadar, addressing the Hungarian National Assembly in 1957, the year after the ever-ready tanks of imperial normalization had first installed him in office: “The task of the leaders is not to put into effect the wishes and will of the masses.… The task of the leaders is to accomplish the interests of the masses. Why do I differentiate between the will and the interests of the masses? In the recent past we have encountered the phenomenon of certain categories of workers acting against their interests.”10 The second illustrative statement comes from a Vice-President of Tanzania: “Our government is democratic, because it makes its decisions in the interests of, and for the benefit of, the people. I wonder why men who are unemployed are surprised and resentful at the government… sending them back to the land for their own advantage.”

II

There are signs in the two later Discourses that some notion of general will is moving to the centre of Rousseau’s political thought. Thus, in the last sentence previously quoted, he reiterates that “the first and most important maxim of legitimate or popular government … is … to follow the general will in all things.” In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality he speaks of “the establishment of the body politic as a true contract between the populace and the leaders it chooses for itself”; and of how, “with respect to social relations, the populace has united all its wills into a single one” (p. 155). But later, in the Discourse on Political Economy, he speaks of a general will as attached to a kind of organism—something which must grow up naturally rather than be produced by contractual artifice: “The body politic … can be considered to be like a body that is organized, living and similar to that of a man.” It is, therefore, “also a moral being which possesses a will …” (p. 166).

Before coming to grips with that notion as fully and finally deployed in The Social Contract we need to press two sharp points about these anticipations. First, that the organic analogy is downright incompatible with any idea of a contract. That idea, as was said before, is what must appeal to those who want only limited and responsible government, with heavy emphasis upon the rights of the individual against all comers—whether individual or collective. But in any organism organs are necessarily subordinate. They are not—unlike us humans—autonomous agents able to decide whether or not to serve and obey. It is a truth which—not very consistently—Rousseau himself stresses in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (p. 126). Nor, as Leninists so love to say, is it any accident that this organic analogy has become the traditional favourite of authoritarians advocating total and unconditional obedience. Consider, for instance, how in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Menenius Agrippa labours to subdue the “mutinous citizens” (I[i]).

Second, notice that in the Discourse on Political Economy, Rousseau explains that all societies and corporations develop general wills distinct from, and sometimes contrary to, the private wills of their individual members: “Every political society is composed of other smaller and different societies, each of which has its interests and maxims.… The will of these particular societies always has two relations: for the members of the association it is the general will; for the large society it is a particular will …” (p. 166-67). This, as has often been remarked, is a sound sociological observation; notwithstanding that to make it here scarcely consists with the undertaking to put “aside all the facts, for they have no bearing on the question.” Certainly all organization persons have abundant occasion to contrast corporate interests and policies with the private interests and policies of officers and members.

But Rousseau takes a further, more precarious step. Presumably because general wills are wills to promote the interests—and in that understanding—the good of the collectivities of which they are the general wills, he maintains that, at least in respect of those collectivities, they must be morally good. “The body politic … is also a moral being which possesses a will; and this general will, which always tends towards the conservation and well-being of the whole and each part, … is for all the members of the state, in their relations both to one another and to the state, the rule of what is just and what is unjust” (p. 166).11 Suppose that we waive possible objections about the meaning of “morally good, at least in respect of these collectivities.” Still we have to protest that here Rousseau seems himself to be arguing in the fashion so fiercely faulted in Grotius: “His … method of reasoning is … to present fact as a proof of right. A more logical method could be used, but not one more favourable to tyrants.”

(a) The first sentence of The Social Contract, in a sort of preface to Book I, announces the object of the exercise: “I want to inquire whether there can be some legitimate and sure rule of administration in the civil order, taking men as they are and laws as they might be” (I, 17). Fair enough; and note it well. For we shall need to recall this splendidly forthright statement when it begins to emerge that the rule proposed—Submit always to the most general will—achieves inexpugnable sureness and legitimacy only at the cost of raising apparently insuperable difficulties for the determination, in particular cases, of what its concrete content is, and of how in actual practice revelations of that content are to be correctly applied.

Given the project propounded in that first sentence, the problem, as Rousseau sees it, is to “find a form of association which 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 obeys himself alone and remains as free as before.” This, he continues, “is the fundamental problem for which the social contract provides the solution” (I[vi], 24).

If we are ever to understand the rest of this book we have to begin by recognizing that and why the problem which Rousseau has here set himself must be insoluble. It cannot but be so. For contracts always and essentially involve mutual give and take. This is indeed a truth upon which in one particular case Rousseau himself has just been insisting. Thus, against Grotius, he has argued that no one could sell themselves into slavery. For that would be an “exchange” involving for one party all give and no take: “Do subjects then give their persons on the condition that their estate will also be taken? I fail to see what remains for them to preserve” (I[iv], 20).

But then, immediately, Rousseau goes on to promise an account of a “social contract” which is, allegedly, for all of us, all get and no give. To specify the problem in a manner making it necessarily insoluble is to guarantee that nothing offered as a solution can truly be such. We should, therefore, expect to find that any pseudo-solution generates grotesque paradox. And so we do!

(b) “The clauses of this contract,” Rousseau assures us, “though perhaps they have never been formally promulgated,… are everywhere the same, everywhere tacitly accepted and acknowledged.” Properly understood, they “are all reducible to a single one, namely the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the entire community.” Every individual is supposed willingly to make, or to have made, this total and unconditional surrender to the totalitarian collective: “For … since each person gives himself whole and entire, the situation is equal for everyone; and, since the situation is equal for everyone, no one has an interest in making it burdensome for the others.… Finally, in giving himself to all, each person gives himself to no one. And since there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right that he should grant others over himself, he gains the equivalent of everything he loses, along with a greater amount of force to preserve what he has.” The social compact is supposed in consequence to be “reducible to the following terms. Each of us places his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and as one we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole” (I[vi], 24; emphasis added).12

It is very easy to see that we are here being deceived by pieces of ultra-swift sleight of mind. But it is not nearly so easy to spot how these quick tricks are taken. Soon however, as we reread the key paragraphs slowly, carefully, and calmly, objections do begin to make themselves felt. For a start, this whole superlatively fast-moving virtuoso performance of intellectual prestigiation proceeds at an excruciatingly aetherial level of abstraction. The moment we push down towards the everyday, pedestrian plane, populated by flesh and blood human beings, we have to notice that real people, though necessarily equal in their common humanity and consequent universal rights, are by nature rather rarely equal in anything else. We are also born into, or else in some other way acquire, all manner of different social relations, any of which may give rise to what we are so often asked to believe is an /or the most/ infamous thing, social inequality.13 In particular, the universal and therefore equal human right to acquire and hold property is certainly not a right to be given “equal shares” by an all-taking and all-providing state.

In this somewhat more this-worldly perspective what becomes of the contention that, “since each person gives himself whole and entire, the situation is equal for everyone; and, since the situation is equal for everyone, no one has an interest in making it burdensome for the others”? For all persons having holdings which are below the local average—to say nothing of conspicuously underdeprived “liberal” (i.e., socialist) ideologues and other paid-up members of the New Class have an obvious interest (a class-interest) in Procrustean redistribution (from and to others).14 So, remembering too that commitments made to other more particular associations are almost always partial, whyever should our commitment to the most fundamental and comprehensive association have to be thus total and unconditional? Whyever should we give ourselves “whole and entire” to an all-embracing and all-demanding collective rather than—more prudently and more modestly—agree to join with others in defending our and their rights by force of law?

The most central and the most fundamental objection, however, appeals to that greatest principle of practical wisdom, TANSTAFL—There Are No Such Things As Free Lunches! Allowed that, formally and superficially at any rate, Rousseau satisfies the requirement that any contract, to be a contract at all, must involve both parties in both giving and taking. For, “since there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right that he would grant others over himself, he gains the equivalent of everything he loses.…” Nevertheless there is no doubt but that the TANSTAFL principle is violated by the final clause in that sentence: “along with a greater amount of force to preserve what he has.” The support of that “greater amount of force” neither is nor can be costless. Someone has to be compensated for the time and effort devoted to judicial and police work.

(c) “Each of us,” it is alleged, “places his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and as one we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” This hypothetical, not to say fictitious, theoretical transaction is supposed then to generate a sort of instant Superman—remotely reminiscent of the more solid and visible figure constituting the original Frontespiece of Leviathan: “At once, in place of the individual person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body composed of as many members as there are voices in the assembly, which receives from this same act its unity, its common self, its life and its will” (I[vi], 24).

So now, what is the content of this general will and how is it to be identified? For, as we have seen, unless that content can be reliably determined the general will cannot serve as the promised “legitimate and sure rule of administration in the civil order.” But, as is recognized rather rarely, Rousseau’s claim to be operating with a genuinely applicable notion has to be—to put it no stronger—seriously prejudiced, unless this putative reality can be, at least in principle, confidently and positively identified. Rousseau himself, before attempting to offer directions on where some tolerably specific answer to these questions might be found, makes a stipulation which, though indispensable if he is to fulfill his project, is bound to make the problems of specification and identification even more intractable.

“This public person,” Rousseau continues, “takes the name … sovereign when it is active” (I[vi], 265). This “sovereign, by the mere fact that it exists, is always what it should be” (I[vii], 26). Its will, therefore, being “the general will, is always right and always tends towards the public utility” (II[iii], 31).15 The supporting argument runs thus: “since the sovereign is formed entirely from the private individuals who make it up, it neither has nor could have any interest contrary to theirs. Hence, the sovereign power has no need to offer a guarantee to its subjects, since it is impossible for a body to want to harm all its members, and, as we will see later, it cannot harm any one of them in particular” (I[vii], 26).

Of course we cannot see anything of the such, either later or at any other time. Maybe “it is impossible for a body to want to harm all its members.” Yet everyone who has ever been actively involved in the affairs of any association must be able to cite plenty of instances in which the good of the organization called for heavy sacrifices of the private interests of some members. To deny, and to try to disprove, so manifest a truth is, and ought to be recognized as, the trademark of an utterly infatuated theoretician.

Furthermore, even if the sense of the general will necessarily “tends towards the public utility”—towards, that is to say, the public interest and hence in that understanding the public good—it will not be always and by the same token moral. For the public interest, and in this understanding the public good, may not only demand overridings of particular private interests and private goods within the collective in question. It may also urge both overridings of interests, and even violations of rights which are external to that collective.16 Most dramatically, the national interest of one state may require harm without limit to another state and its citizens. Any argument from facts about interests to conclusions about morality also provides occasion to reiterate Rousseau’s objection to Grotius: “A more logical method could be used, but not one more favourable to tyrants.”

Obnoxious though it is to contend that “the sovereign power has no need to offer a guarantee to its subjects,” this initial outrage is almost innocuous by comparison with the same chapter’s concluding claim: “Thus, in order for the social compact to avoid being an empty formula, it tacitly entails the commitment… that whoever refuses to obey the general will be forced to do so by the entire body. This means that he will be forced to be free” (I[vii], 25, emphasis added).

That most notorious contention is sometimes glossed by reference to a later footnote: “In Genoa, the word libertas [liberty] can be read on the front of prisons and on the chains of galley-slaves. … In a country where all such people were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed” (IV[ii], 82). Certainly Rousseau had a fair and true point there, albeit one obscured and distorted by his provocative and sensationalized form of expression. For the rights and liberties of citizens can be effectively guaranteed by law only where would-be violators are deterred by the threat of punishment, and where actual violations are regularly punished. Perhaps too it is just worth remarking that by forcing a child to study subjects which are initially uncongenial you really are ensuring that, in the future, that child will have a wider range of career possibilities to choose between. But the persistent defender does no justice either to Rousseau’s honesty, or to his competence as a writer, if he suggests that he really meant something equally harmless when he said that the dissident “will be forced to be free.” On what he actually said and therefore, presumably, meant the best comment is modelled on some famous words of a modern and funnier Marx: “It sounds absurd. But don’t be misled. It is absurd.”17

(d) Our final task is to review Rousseau’s ruinously unsuccessful attempts to specify how in any particular case his general will is to be identified and its sense determined. At first it seems as if it is going to be the unanimous will of an assembly of all citizens, and that—as so often—Rousseau is thinking of some Classical city-state: “For either the will is general, or it is not. It is the will of either the people as a whole, or of only a part. … In the second case, it is merely a private will …” (II[ii], 30). This clear conclusion, however, is forthwith contradicted in a footnote: “For a will to be general, it need not always be unanimous.…”

Not a whit discomfited, it seems, Rousseau proceeds in the next chapter to insist that even unanimity would not be a sufficient criterion: “There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will” (II[iii], 31). This distinction is highly praised by Hegel (1770-1831): “Rousseau would have made a sounder contribution towards a theory of the State, if he had always kept this distinction in sight.”18 It was, surely, unfair so to suggest that Rousseau regularly failed to do this; although there are two opinions—Mine right and the other wrong!—about the soundness of what results from his success. Certainly persons seeing themselves as members of “parties of the vanguard” had, long before Hegel started to construct his Logic, become seized of the possibility that they were themselves privileged to discover the authentic sense of the general will; and that these revelations might be vouchsafed to them regardless of, or even contrary to, the verdicts of actual majority votes.19

Nevertheless, although even unanimity would not be a sufficient criterion, there is supposed to be—sometimes—magic in a mere majority: “There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will. The latter considers private interest and is merely the sum of private wills. But remove from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel each other out, and what remains as the sum of the differences is the general will” (II[iii], 31-2). What magic there seems to be is the mystery of mathematics. As so often now, in the age of computers, the only defense against deception is another acronymic principle—GIGO; which, being interpreted, is Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Rousseau also thinks to improve any electoral process which is admitted with various devices, none of which he even pretends to believe could be completely relied upon to yield the results desired, and most of which presuppose assumptions inconsistent with something previously asserted. Thus “The periodic assemblies I have spoken of earlier … which have as their sole object the preservation of the social treaty should always take place through two propositions … which are voted on separately:

“The first: Does it please the sovereign to preserve the present form of government?

“The second: Does it please the people to leave its administration to those who are now in charge of it?” (II[xviii], 78-9; manifestly these are, as teachers of the Latin language were wont to say, questions expecting the answer “Yes”!)

Once corruption has set in “the general will is no longer the will of all.” Yet even the venal citizen “in selling his vote for money … does not extinguish the general will in himself; he evades it. The error he commits is that of… answering a different question from the one he was asked. Thus, instead of saying through his vote it is advantageous to the state, he says it is advantageous to this man or that party …” (IV[i], 80). But this is to assume, what before was sensibly denied, that, if only the responses are responses to the appropriate question, then they are bound to be correct. This same assumption is again, and rightly, rejected when, in the chapter immediately subsequent, Rousseau writes: “When a law is proposed … what is asked … is … whether or not it conforms to the general will.… Each man, in giving his vote, states his opinion on this matter, and the declaration of the general will is drawn from the counting of votes. When, therefore, the opinion contrary to mine prevails, this proves merely that I was in error, and that what 1 took to be the general will was not so” (IV[ii], 82; emphasis added).

Rousseau’s last resort was to introduce the Legislator, summoned to fulfill in the supposedly ideal state of The Social Contract a function somewhat similar to that which, in the politics of France during the first two or three decades after World War II, General de Gaulle found for himself. “The Legislator,” we are told, “is in every respect an extraordinary man in the state. If he ought to be so by his genius, he is no less so by his office, which is neither magistracy nor sovereignty. This office, which constitutes the republic, does not enter into its constitution” (II[vii], 39; emphasis supplied).20

It is, as was said a moment ago, the putative magic of mathematics which is conscripted to induce us to accept that, somehow, “the pluses and minuses” will “cancel each other out and what remains as the sum of the differences” must be—Hey Presto “the general will.” Now, finally, we have a deus ex machina providentially wheeled out onto the stage in order to work the unfortunately essential miracle. Like “the fathers of nations,” Rousseau, as the dramatist of political theory, is forced “to have recourse to the intervention of heaven” in order to provide the criterial wisdom which he cannot himself supply: “It is this sublime reason, which transcends the grasp of ordinary men, whose decisions the Legislator puts into the mouth of the immortals in order to compel by divine authority those whom human providence could not move. But not everybody is capable of making the gods speak or of being believed when he proclaims himself their interpreter. The great soul of the legislator is the miracle that should prove his mission” (II[vii], 61).

Notes

1. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London, and New York: Allen and Unwin, and Simon Schuster, 1965), chap. XIX, pp. 684-85.

2. See Joan McDonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution: 1762-1791 (London: Athlone, 1965), chapter V, passim.

3. See J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1952; reprint, New York: Praeger, 1960). For Lenin’s recognition of the Jacobins as proto-Bolsheviks see, for instance, his article “Enemies of the People,” first published in Pravda in June 1917 and reprinted in R. C. Tucker, ed. The Lenin Anthology (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 305-06. For an account of Russian Jacobinism before Lenin, see Tucker’s Introduction, pp. xxvi-xxxxiii.

4. All references will be given, as here, by book and chapter followed by the page number from D. A. Cress, ed. and trans., On the Social Contract: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: Discourse on Political Economy (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1983).

5. See note 4, and compare the Everyman edition by G. D. H. Cole (London, and New York: J. M. Dent, and E. P. Dutton, 1913). Although after World War II this Everyman edition was reissued in a fresh format with a different pagination this costless opportunity to replace Rousseau’s works into the order of their first publication was, regrettably, not taken.

6. References to this second Discourse, and to the third, will be to the page number in the edition described in note 4, above.

7. It is at this time the almost universal presupposition in the discussion of poverty in the “Third World.” See P. T. Bauer, Dissent on Development, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), or any of his later writings; and compare Antony Flew, Thinking about Social Thinking (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 120-22. To those truly concerned for the relief of man’s estate, rather than with either the expiation of some perceived private guilt, or the retention of a reputation for anti-conservative compassion, it is a peculiarly obnoxious misconception. It obstructs the application of the vastly productive insights of that first and greatest masterpiece of development economics, Adam Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

8. Aficionados of Raymond Chandler’s writing may recall an exchange in The Big Sleep between Anne O’Riordan and Philip Marlowe:

“I had a gun. I wasn’t afraid. There’s no law against it.”

“Uh huh. Only the law of self-preservation.”

9. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, p. 697. We must, therefore, fault Sir Isaiah Berlin for an excess of liberal charity, betraying liberalism, in entitling his Inaugural Lecture “Two Concepts of Liberty.” This is reprinted in his Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).

10. For fuller references to the sources of both this and the following quotation, and for a discussion of “Wants or Needs: Choice or Command?”, see Antony Flew, The Politics of Procrustes (London, and Buffalo: Temple Smith, and Prometheus, 1981).

11. I must not finish with this third Discourse without sharing and commending the apothegm: “Imposing a fine for work is a rather unusual way of abolishing idleness” (p. 187). It could serve as a motto for those urging, in the name of economic growth, the replacement of income by expenditure taxes.

12. Cress actually renders “la condition” as “the condition.” I have changed this to “the situation”; which is, surely, at least equally faithful while fitting more smoothly into the present argument.

13. Compare “Sociology and Equality” in Antony Flew, Sociology, Equality and Education (London: Macmillan, 1976).

14. Here we have a welcome opportunity to recommend Robert Nisbet’s superb critique of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, an essay which recognizes Rawls as a new Rousseau, a philosophe rather than a philosopher. This appeared first in the Public Interest 35 (1976), but has since been reprinted in W. Letwin, ed., Against Equality (London: Macmillan, 1983). Compare also the critique of Rawls in The Politics of Procrustes, chaps. III-IV.

15. The original is “toujours droit.” A better yet still not perfect translation would be “always upright.” For Rousseau’s point is that, although it may be mistaken on some point of act, the general will is always directed “towards the public utility.”

16. This is something which in part and in his own way Rousseau recognizes when he notices that “… when … partial associations come into being … the will of each of these associations becomes general in relation to the state” (II[iii], 32).

17. For a properly cruel critique of one contemporary attempt to defend a similarly “positive” redefinition of “freedom” see “Freedom is Slavery: a Slogan for Our New Philosopher Kings,” in A. P. Griffiths, ed., Of Liberty (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

18. See Hegel, The Science of Logic, section 163.

19. Compare again, Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. They ignored the remainder of that contradictory footnote, and much else: “… however, it is necessary for all the votes to be counted. Any formal exclusion is a breach of generality” (II[ii], 30).

20. The story is told that someone studying the frequency of the occurrence of the first person singular in the speeches of political leaders was puzzled by the low score achieved by the General. This perplexity was only resolved when the student noticed the extremely numerous employments of the expression “La France,” and realized that this subject identified himself absolutely with his country.