Professor Steven Smith:
Good morning. My name is Borat. Anyone see the movie yet?
Yeah, I saw it over the weekend. Had to cheer myself up a little
bit after Saturday afternoon but there's still another week to
go. Still time.
Good morning. I want to talk today about my
favorite part of the Second Discourse,
a book that never grows old, that never fails to produce.
Last time, in talking about Rousseau's account of the
origins of inequality, I focused on a famous passage
in which Rousseau claims it was the establishment of private
property that was the true formation of civil society and
the beginnings of inequality and all of the subsequent miseries
of the human race that he wants to describe.
But in fact, that's not really true.
Rousseau himself knows it's not quite true.
If Rousseau were only interested in issues of class
and economic inequality, there would be very little
difference between him and materialist theorists of society
like Karl Marx although Marx was in fact a very appreciative
reader of Rousseau and got most of his best lines against
capitalist society from him. Nevertheless,
Rousseau understands that even for institutions like property
and civil society to be possible there must be huge and important
developments that go on or take place even prior to this,
moral and psychological transformations of human beings.
And it is for Rousseau far more what we might call "the moral
and psychological injuries of inequality" than the material
aspects of the phenomenon that is of concern to him.
Rousseau very much takes the side of the poor and the
dispossessed but it isn't property,
or it isn't poverty rather, that really rouses Rousseau's
anger as it is the attitudes and beliefs shaped by inequalities
and of wealth and power. It is Rousseau the moral
psychologist where his voice truly comes out.
In many ways, Rousseau like Plato finds his
voice when discussing the various complexities of the
human soul. So what is the chief villain in
Rousseau's Second Discourse and his account of
the beginnings in development of inequality?
Real inequality begins in a faculty or a disposition that is
in fact in most editions of the book rendered simply by the
French term because it is really untranslatable into English.
It is amour-propre, the first term I put on the
board, which is the first and most durable cause of inequality
for Rousseau. Amour-propre,
again, is an untranslatable word but in many ways is related
to a range of psychological characteristics such as pride,
vanity, conceit. In the translation that you
have, I believe, the translator refers to it as
egocentrism, a kind of ugly modern
psychologistic term I think but better and more accurately,
evocatively translated by terms like vanity and conceit or
pride. Amour-propre for
Rousseau only arises in society and is the true cause,
he believes, for our discontents.
And in a lengthy footnote that I hope you checked--in a lengthy
footnote, he distinguishes amour-propre from another
disposition that he calls amour de soi-meme,
a sort of self-love. How are these distinguished?
He says in that note: "We must not confuse
amour-propre with love of oneself.
These are two passions very different by virtue of their
nature and their effects." Love of oneself,
amour de soi-meme, "Love of oneself is a natural
sentiment," he writes, "which moves every
animal to be vigilant in its own preservation and which directed
in many by reason and modified by pity produces humanity and
virtue." So there is a kind of
self-love, he says, that is at the root of our
desire to preserve ourself, to be strong in our
self-preservation, and to resist the invasion or
encroachment by others. But then, he goes on to say
amour-propre is an entirely different kind of
passion or sentiment. "Amour-propre is merely
a sentiment that is relative," he says, "artificial and born in
society which moves each individual to value himself more
than anyone else, which inspired in men all the
evils they cause one another and which is the true source of
honor." Listen to that last expression.
"Amour-propre," he says, "is what moves every individual
to value" him--or herself--"more than any other,
which inspires all of the evils in society and," he says,
"is the true source of honor, both evil and honor,
the desire to be recognized and esteemed by others."
How can this passion of amour-propre be
responsible for these two very different sort of competing
effects? How did this sentiment arise
first of all? How did it come about and I
suppose fundamentally and more importantly, what can or should
be done about it? For Hobbes, recall,
and this idea of pride, vanity, what Hobbes called
vainglory, you remember,
a very important part of Hobbes' political and moral
psychology in Leviathan, pride is seen as something
natural to us, Hobbes writes,
you remember, it is part of our
natural--pride is part of our natural desire to dominate over
others, but for Rousseau by contrast
amour-propre is something that could only come about after
the state of nature, a state that Hobbes,
you remember, had called solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish,
and short, after the state of nature had already begun to give
way to society. Hobbes' account for Rousseau is
incoherent. If the natural state is truly
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
and short, what would it mean in such a state to feel pride or
vanity that requires human sociability and requires the
esteem of others and somehow the gaze or the look of others?
How could pride have arisen in a state of nature which on
Hobbes' own account is solitary? Rousseau uses Hobbes in a way
to prove his own point, that amour-propre,
vanity, is not a natural sentiment but,
as he says in that passage I just read,
a sentiment that is relative and artificial,
could only have come into being once we enter society in some
ways. But how did that happen?
Rousseau speculates about this and, again, this is part of his
hypothetical or conjectural history.
He speculates that amour-propre began to
arise and develop as soon as people began to gather around a
hut or a tree and to look at one another,
as soon as we became conscious of the gaze of another,
and it is from that gaze, from the look or gaze of
another, that the passion of vanity was born.
Listen to the way in which he speculates how this arose.
"Each one," he says, "began to look at the others
and to want to be looked at himself and public esteem had a
value. The one who sang or danced the
best, the handsomest, the strongest,
the most adroit or the most eloquent became the most highly
regarded and this was the first step toward inequality and at
the same time toward vice. From these first preferences
were born vanity and contempt on the one hand and shame and envy
on the other and the fermentation caused by this new
leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and
innocence." So the rise of this passion to
be seen, to be seen to be best at something,
produced in many--for many people again,
as he puts it, pride and vanity from some
shame and envy on the part of others and from this fatal
compound grew tendencies that were,
as he says, fatal to our happiness and innocence,
and Rousseau, I think is very much onto
something here. Amour-propre is
presented in the passage I just read and throughout much of the
Second Discourse in largely negative terms but it is
also related to something positive,
in many ways, for the development of humanity
in society, the desire felt by all people once we enter
society, to be accorded some kind of
recognition or respect by those around us.
That too is a part of amour-propre,
the desire to be seen and recognized and respected.
The desire for recognition, he says, is at the root of our
sense of justice and underlying this,
I think, is the intuition powerful and in many ways I
think deeply true, that our feelings,
beliefs, opinions and attitudes be acknowledged and respected by
others around us, that we matter in some way.
When we feel that our opinions are slighted,
when others do not recognize our worth,
we feel angry about this and this need for recognition,
which is part of this passion of amour-propre,
is for Rousseau also a cornerstone of justice but it is
also, as he says, at the same time the demand for
recognition can easily become cruel and violent as we demand
this from others. Consider again just the
following. I want to read one other
passage from the same part of the text.
He writes: "As soon as men had begun mutually to value one
another and the idea of esteem was formed in their minds,
each one claimed to have a right to it, each one claimed to
have a right to esteem or recognition,
and it no longer possible," he writes, "for anyone to be
lacking it with impunity. From this came the first duties
of civility even among savages and from this every voluntary
wrong became an outrage. Every time someone was harmed
or injured, it became an outrage because along with the harm that
resulted from the injury," he says, "the offended party
saw in it contempt for his person, which often was more
insufferable than the harm itself."
Think about the psychology, the moral psychology that
Rousseau is invoking here in his talk about harm and injury.
It's not the physical aspect of the harm that bothers him.
It is the sort of contempt that is implied or entailed in the
act of injury. Hence, he goes on to say,
"each man punished the contempt shown him in a matter
proportionate to the esteem in which he held himself.
Acts of revenge became terrible and men became bloodthirsty and
cruel." That is to say,
amour-propre and society gave rise to the state of war.
Does this sound familiar? I think it should.
I was trying to think of some example that might fit this and
one I came up with when I was thinking about this
earlier--consider a story that was much in the news.
I forget if it was last spring or last summer sometime.
The Danish cartoon controversy. Do you remember that,
about the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad and the outrage
and the protests, often violent,
that occurred about that? To some degree,
Rousseau might argue, the protests were about
disrespectful cartoons of the prophet but he would argue,
I suspect, that the deeper cause seemed to be that the
protesters believed was disrespect being shown to them,
to their beliefs, to what it is they held sacred
in some sense. It is their beliefs that were
being disrespected and were the cause of the protests.
Amour-propre, as Rousseau I think himself
recognizes, is this very volatile passion.
It contains the desire to be respected again and acknowledged
that is at the root of justice and virtue and yet at the same
time this passion, as we know, is easily
manipulable by those who wish to convince others that their basic
entitlements or views are not being respected.
To some degree, I think, Rousseau would believe
the protesters over those cartoons had a point.
Their views were not being respected and to which you might
say a Lockean or a liberal formulation of the problem or
response would be, "Well, so what?"
The task of government, according to Locke or the
liberal view, is to ensure the security of
person and property, to protect you from harm and of
course to provide you the freedom to practice what
religion you like, consistent with the freedom of
others to do so too. It is not the business of
government to ensure that your beliefs are being respected.
This was clearly the view, for example,
of the Danish newspaper editors that published the cartoon as
well as the Danish prime minister who refused to
apologize for this on the ground again that the government's job
is not to impose a gag order on what can and cannot be said on
the grounds that some people might find it offensive.
This is a respectable, sort of liberal line of thought
going from Locke to John Stuart Mill,
and yet, while I am inclined to agree very much with that point
of view, there is something powerful and true about what
Rousseau has to say about it, about this kind of issue.
Lockean liberal thought was addressed in many ways to people
who had experienced the crucible of civil war,
a century of religious conflict and were looking for a way to
settle their religious and political differences.
Toleration in many ways is a liberal virtue because it
requires us to distinguish between beliefs that we may take
with the utmost seriousness in private life and yet
nevertheless bracket them in some way once we enter the
public world. This, in many ways,
is the peculiar liberal virtue of self-restraint or
self-denial, that we refuse to allow our own
moral point of view to, in many ways,
dominate in the public space. But it is one thing,
you might say, to tolerate other views and
another thing to accord them respect and esteem.
That seems to be something very different from what Locke talked
about. To tolerate simply means not to
persecute, to leave alone, while respect for something
requires that we esteem it. You might ask yourself,
"Must we esteem and respect values and points of view that
we do not share?" This seems very different,
again, from the sort of liberal understanding of toleration that
means only extending acceptance to views again that are very
different from our own. It doesn't require us to,
as it were, censor, self-censor,
our own views on the ground that they may be--our views may
be in some ways disrespectful or hurtful to others.
This is a vast topic. I've sort of used the
opportunity to sort of move away from Rousseau a little bit but
his point is I think that amour-propre,
the desire to be esteemed, recognized, and to have your
values and points of view esteemed by those around you is
in fact a violent and uncontrollable passion.
It is the passion very much like Plato's thumos,
spiritedness, back in the Republic.
It is a passion that makes us burn with anger over perceived
slights and makes us also risk our lives and endanger the lives
of others to rectify what we believe to be acts of injustice.
Like Plato, in many ways, Rousseau wants to know whether
amour-propre is purely a negative passion or disposition
or whether, like thumos,
whether it can be redirected, in some way,
to achieve social goods and social benefits.
All of this is entailed in that short discussion of
amour-propre in the Second Discourse.
So much of Rousseau's subsequent account of
civilization and its discontents grows out of this peculiar
psychological disposition and passion.
So let's talk a little bit more about civilization and its
discontents. In Woody Allen's movie,
Annie Hall, you might recall a scene in
which he says there are two kinds of people.
They're the horrible and the miserable.
The horrible are those who have suffered some kind of personal
tragedy, a disfigurement of some kind, who are facing a terminal
illness. The miserable is everybody else. Rousseau wants us to be
miserable. He wants us to feel just how
bad things are, how bad we are,
how bad off we are. The only exception to this
general human misery is, as he tells us at one point,
kind of early primitive society.
These societies described by him, not quite the state of
nature to be sure, maintained a kind of middling
position between the pure state of nature and the development of
modern conditions. He says these were the happiest
and most durable societies and the best for man.
It was primitive man, not the pure savage of the
state of nature, where Rousseau finds a happy
equilibrium between our powers and our needs that he says is
the recipe for happiness, bringing our powers and our
needs into equilibrium, but the end of that happy state
came with two inventions, two discoveries:
agriculture and metallurgy. With agriculture came,
here we see the division of land, the division of property,
and the subsequent inequalities that came with it.
With metallurgy came the art of war and conquest.
With these two developments, he tells us,
humanity entered a new stage, one where laws and political
institutions became necessary to adjudicate conflicts over
rights, and the establishment of
governments that this entailed rather than bringing peace,
as it would for Hobbes or Locke, the establishment of
governments had the effect simply of sanctioning the
existing inequalities that had begun to develop.
For Rousseau, there is something deeply
shocking and deeply troubling about the assertion that men who
were once free and equal are so easily,
as it were, led to consent to the inequalities of property and
to rule by the stronger, which government brings into
being. The social contract,
as he presents it in the Second Discourse,
is really a kind of swindle. The establishment of government
is a kind of swindle that the rich and the powerful use to
control the poor and the dispossessed.
Again, rather than instituting justice, this compact merely
legitimizes past usurpations. Government is a con game that
the rich play upon the poor. Political power simply helps to
legitimize economic inequalities.
Governments, he tells us,
may operate by consent but the consent they are granted is
based on falsehoods and lies. How else can one explain why
the rich live lives that are so much freer, so much easier,
so much more open to enjoyment, than the poor?
That is Rousseau's real critique and real question.
And it is the establishment of government that is the last link
in the chain of Rousseau's conjectural history,
the last and most painful, in many ways,
legitimation of the inequalities that have been
created after our emergence from the natural condition.
But what, again, is most painful to Rousseau is
the emergence of a new kind of human being that this stage of
civilization has been brought into--that this state of
civilization has brought into being.
And Rousseau is the first, I think, to use that term so
powerfully, which became used very much in the next two
centuries, the bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie is Rousseau's invention and most
striking about this human type for him is the necessity to
appear to be one thing where actually being something else.
Go back again to think of the way in which Plato or Socrates
uses that distinction between seeming and being when he talks
about the just man in Book II of the Republic,
someone who seems to be and someone who is just.
It is this tension between the two that is so central to
Rousseau's account of what he calls the bourgeoisie.
"Being something and appearing to be something," he says,
"become two different things and from this distinction there
arose grand ostentation, deceptive cunning,
and all the vices that follow in their wake."
And in the penultimate paragraph of the Second
Discourse Rousseau describes the dilemma of the
bourgeoisie in the following way.
He says, "The savage lives within himself.
The man accustomed to the ways of society, the bourgeoisie,
is always outside of himself and knows only how to live in
the opinions of others and it is,
as it were, from their judgment alone that he draws the
sentiment of his own existence." Think of that sentence.
It comes from the next to the last paragraph of the book,
that in society we only live through the opinions of others,
through the gaze of others, through what others think of
us. We are constantly our own
sentiment of existence, he says.
Our own sentiment of self and existent comes entirely from the
judgment, as he puts it, of those around us.
The bourgeoisie, in other words,
is someone who lives in and through the opinions,
the good opinions, of others, who thinks only of
himself when he is with other people and only of other people
when he is by himself. Such a person is duplicitous,
hypocritical, and false.
This is why this is the true, you might say,
discontent of civilization. This is what our perpetual
restlessness and reflectiveness have made of us.
Goaded on perpetually by amour-propre,
this is the particular misery that civilization has bequeathed
us. So the question at the end of
the book is what to do about this and here,
in many ways, one has to say the Second
Discourse falls short. The book ends on a note of
utmost despair. It offers no positive answer to
cure the problem of civilization but only hints at best at two
possible solutions. One is suggested,
you will recall, by the letter to the City of
Geneva which, in a sense, prefaces the book.
Perhaps the closest approximation to the early state
of primitive society lauded by Rousseau are the small,
isolated rural republics like Geneva in its own way where a
kind of simple patriotism and love of country have not been
completely overwhelmed by the agitations of
amour-propre. Only, he says,
in a well-tempered democracy like Geneva is it possible for
citizens still to enjoy some of the equality of the natural man.
Democracy for him, this kind of simple rural
democracy like that of Geneva, is the social condition that
most closely approximates the equality of the state of nature
and that of course is a theme that Rousseau will take up
powerfully in his book the Social Contract.
But Rousseau offers another hint to the solution of the
problem of civilization, what to do about it.
How can we restore happiness in the midst of society?
The Second Discourse leaves us to believe that all
society is a state of bondage and alienation from nature,
from our true being. We have lost our true humanity
that he describes in the state of nature, our state of--our
capacities for pity and compassion and the like,
and the answer to the problem of society is,
in many ways, to return to the root of
society and this root of society is not just the need for
self-preservation but a kind of primordial,
as he calls it in that passage I read a minute ago,
sentiment of existence, the sentiment of our own
existence. By giving oneself over to this
feeling of existence without a thought for the future,
without care or fear, the individual somehow
psychologically returns to the natural state.
Only a very few people, Rousseau writes,
he being one of them of course--only a very few people
are capable of finding their way back to nature.
The type of human being who can find their way back to the sort
of pure sentiment of existence is not going to be a
philosopher, is not going to be a person of
high order reflection like Socrates, but will more likely
be an artist or a poet. He is one of those rare
aristocrats of nature, you might say.
His claim to superiority is not based on a higher understanding
but a superior sensitivity, less on wisdom than on
compassion. Rousseau believed himself to be
one of these people. Maybe you also are one of them.
Yes? But it requires you,
in some way, to distance yourself severely
and psychologically from all of the possibilities of society,
to return inward, and it was that inward journey
that Rousseau took and that he writes about so powerfully in
his Confessions and his final book,
The Reveries, where you find the Rousseau,
founder of the romantic disposition that you get again
in writers in America like Thoreau and others who look
inward and return to nature in some way,
their natural self as opposed to society.
But the Second Discourse leaves us, to be sure,
with a paradox. The progress of civilization is
responsible for all of our miseries.
Yes, it is society's fault. It's not your fault.
It's society's, he wants to tell us,
and yet he also leaves us with no real apparent way out.
He denies that we can, as a practical solution,
return to simpler, more natural forms of political
association but how then do we resolve the problem that he
leaves us with? And his answer to it,
his political answer to it, his most famous political
answer to it is contained in his book,
yes, called the Social Contract,
Du Contrat Social, published in 1762,
seven years after the Second Discourse.
Here he attempts to give one such answer, and I mentioned one
such answer because it is not his only or final answer,
but one such answer to the problems of inequality and,
again, the injuries of amour-propre.
The Social Contract begins with one of the most
famous sentences in all of the history of political philosophy,
"man is born free and is everywhere in chains."
Always begin your essays with a good, strong sentence like that.
Rousseau knew this. He knew something about how to
write. The phrase seems to be
perfectly in keeping with the Second Discourse.
In the state of nature, we are born free,
equal and independent. Only in society do we become
weak, dependent, and enslaved.
It is what follows after that sentence in a way that is the
shocker. How did this take--how did this
change take place, Rousseau asks.
I do not know. What can render it legitimate?
I believe I can answer this question.
What can render it legitimate and by the "it" I take it he
means the chains as in--that states man is born free and is
everywhere in chains. In the Second Discourse,
he had attempted to completely delegitimize the bonds of
society, saying how the Social
Contract and the creation of government was nothing but,
in many ways, a sophisticated swindle.
Now in the Social Contract,
he asks the question, "What can give these chains or
bonds moral legitimacy?" He says I believe I can answer
that. Has Rousseau simply undergone a
massive change of heart in the seven years between these two
books? I don't think so but I think
these are--this is part of his--one of his answers to this
fundamental question. But before going into the
details of this, let's consider some of the
differences between these two very powerful books.
Right? The Second Discourse,
the discourse on inequality, presents itself as a
hypothetical or conjectural history of human development
from the state of nature to the civil condition.
It is written in a vivid language, which is why it is
always- it is often considered one of Rousseau's most powerful
pieces of writing, a vivid language drawing on in
many ways the biological sciences of his day and newly
discovered knowledge of animal species like orangutans and
other kinds of anthropological investigations of the Caribs and
North American peoples, a very vivid work.
The Social Contract, by contrast,
is written in a dry, even a kind of bloodless
language of a lawyer. It is very much written in the
genre of a legal document. Its subtitle is The
Principles of Political Right.
It is a work of considerable philosophical abstraction whose
leading concepts are abstractions like the social
contract, the general will,
and so on. The book, he tells us in short
preface, was originally part of a longer investigation of
politics which has since been--which he says has since
been lost. Also, the Social
Contract presents itself in many ways as a utopia,
an ideal city, in some respects an answer to
the Calipolis of Plato's Republic and yet this is
also--this seems to be not quite true.
The work begins, even before the famous sentence
about man being born free, the work is prefaced with a
statement that could have come directly out of Machiavelli's
Prince. "Taking men as they are and
laws as they might be," Rousseau says, "I will try in this
inquiry to bring together what right permits with what interest
prescribes." Taking men as they are… You
remember the fifteenth chapter of The Prince.
Let us look at the effectual truth of things,
not what is imagined to be but the way people actually are.
Let us take men as they are, Rousseau says,
following Machiavelli. He will not begin,
he tells us, by making any heroic
assumptions about human nature, no metaphysical flights of
fancy, but rather stay on the low but solid ground of
recognized fact. What does he mean by this and
what are these facts of human nature, men as they are,
he says, that Rousseau claims to describe in the Social
Contract? And here we get to the basic
premise of the book. The basic premise,
I think, from which the entire Social Contract unfolds
is the claim that man is born free.
All subsequent relations of hierarchy, obligation and
authority are the result not of nature but of agreement or
convention. Society and the moral ties that
constitute it are conventional, you might say,
by agreement, all the way down.
There is nothing natural about any of the social contract.
And from this basis of man as a free agent, that we are born
free, Rousseau attempts to work out a system of justice.
The Principles of Political Right, again is the
subtitle, suggests that are appropriate to human beings
conceived as free agents responsible to themselves alone.
But how do you do that? How can you do that?
Rousseau's political philosophy begins, at least he believes I
think, with the realistic or even empirical assumption that
each individual has a deep rooted interest in securing the
conditions of their own liberty. The state of nature and the
social contract presuppose individuals who are in
competition with others and each attempting,
as it were, to secure the conditions for their own
liberty. He does not presuppose altruism
on the part of any human being or any other kind of self-other
regarding characteristics, what I called a moment ago
heroic assumptions. He doesn't make the assumption
that we act for the interests of others.
We are selfishly concerned with our own freedom and the best
means of preserving it and protecting it.
Each of us has a desire to preserve his or her own freedom
and that social order will be rational or just,
that allows us to preserve that freedom.
The problem, of course, is that in the state
of nature the desire to preserve my freedom comes into conflict
with the selfish desire of everybody else to preserve their
freedom. The state of nature quickly
becomes a state of war based on conflicting desires and
conflicting again means of liberty preservation.
So how do we preserve our liberty without lapsing into
anarchy, that is the state of war?
This is the question that the Social Contract sets out
to answer and to which his formulation,
his famous formulation of what he calls the general will,
is the solution. I'm going to end on that note
today and Wednesday I want to talk about the general will and
how Rousseau sees it as a sort of collective answer to the
problem of the securing of individual liberty.
So meditate on that if you like for the next day.
