Rousseau's fulfillment of the natural public law tradition and his contribution to its demise

Abstract

The recent research of Helena Rosenblatt, Hilail Gildin, Arthur Meltzer, and John Scott calls for a reconsideration of Rousseau's stance towards and effect on the natural public law tradition. This reconsideration is especially called for given the persuasive evidence and arguments that these scholars marshal to demonstrate the positive contribution of Rousseau to that tradition and to suggest that his pre-Kantian rational law teaching in the Social Contract is rooted in his post-Hobbesian stance towards natural law, especially in the Second Discourse. The work of these scholars builds upon others, especially on Leo Strauss, Victor Gourevitch, Jean Starobinski, Marc Plattner, Roger Masters and John Charvet, as well as Asher Horowitz, R. A. Leigh, Franz Haymann, and Robert Derathe, and completes the full range of alternative answers to our question. Their contributions are an invaluable scaffolding for fully grasping the issue and for proposing theses that could resolve it. Given the great debt owed to these scholars, the present inquiry begins with an overview and general assessment of their opinions on the issue, which is then followed by a close analysis of the relevant texts of Rousseau, especially the “Preface” to the Second Discourse.

Acknowledgment

I thank the Earhart Foundation for its generous support.

Notes

 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelin and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1951); Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 2nd edn, trans. and ed. Peter Gay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Marc F. Plattner, Rousseau's State of Nature (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1979); Asher Horowitz, Rousseau, Nature and History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987); Carole Pateman, The Problem of Political Obligation: A Critique of Liberal Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

 Jean Starobinski, “The Political Thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau,” in Rousseau's Political Writings, eds. Ritter and Bondanella (New York: Norton, 1988), 221–31.

 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract: With Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, trans. Judith R. Masters, ed. Roger D. Masters (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978); John Charvet, The Social Problem in the Philosophy of Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

 Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 186–8; R. A. Leigh, “Liberty and Authority in On Social Contract,” in, Rousseau's Political Writings, eds. Ritter and Bondanella; Franz Haymann, “The Law of Nature in the Political Philosophy of J. J. Rousseau,” Annals XXX (1943–45); Robert Derathe, The Rationalism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris: University of France, 1948).

 Leo Strauss, “On the Intention of Rousseau,” Social Research 14 (1947): 455–87; Hilail Gildin, Rousseau's Social Contract: The Design of the Argument (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Arthur M. Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); John C. Scott, “The Theodicy of the Second Discourse: The Pure State of Nature and Rousseau's Political Thought,” American Political Science Review 81 (1992): 696–711; John C. Scott, “Politics as the Imitation of the Divine in Rousseau's Social Contract,” Polity 26 (1994): 473–501.

 Plattner, Rousseau's State of Nature, 74.

 Ibid., 105–14. Gourevitch makes the best case for the conclusion that the prehistorical, original, “pure” state of natural man can be no more than conjectural [“Rousseau's pure state of nature” Interpretation 16 (1988): 23–59]. If so, then all that is founded upon the identification of the good, the natural and the original—equality, self-sufficiency, unity of soul, etc.—is also conjectural. It would then follow that the non-conjectural identification of the good and the natural may be inequality that is natural but only actual in the non-original condition, which includes natural inequality in intellect. See note 33.

 Starobinski, “The Political Thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau,” 223–4; Charvet, The Social Problem in the Philosophy of Rousseau, 77; Masters, On the Social Contract, 141–6.

 Masters correctly concludes, on the basis of the relevant passages, that the actions of original man, whatever their cause, produced a “result” or “effect,” namely, the natural law (142, 146). Gildin agrees with Masters: the “conduct” that “formally sprang” from original impulses constitutes the natural law for Rousseau (42–3).

 See especially Starobinski for this conclusion in “The Political Thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau” (223–4). Yet also see his apparent qualification of this conclusion (305–7).

 Plattner and Melzer correctly sketch these arguments: Plattner, Rousseau's State of Nature, 78–9, 87, 95, 98, 114; and Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man, 90, 94, 120–46.

 Masters, On the Social Contract, 76–7; 88, 146, 313–8; Charvet, The Social Problem in the Philosophy of Rousseau, 76–7; see also Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man, 146–9.

 Scott, “The Theodicy of the Second Discourse,” 207–8; Scott, “Politics as the Imitation of the Divine,” 486. To make his case fully persuasive, Scott must account for the following facts which he does not see or ignores: original man, as opposed to animals, has the “choice of flight or combat”, “will” constitutes the “first” original “operation of his soul”, in the primitive state man is “lower than the beast himself ” with respect to instincts; that natural impulses or instincts do not entail their natural objects and must be directed by imitation of animals: all of which render problematic the claim that original man was “embedded unproblematically” in the natural whole characterized as natural necessity. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, trans. Judith R. Masters, ed. Roger D. Masters (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964), 108, 115, 105–6.

 Scott agrees with Melzer that freedom or independence is both an end in itself and a means to preservation (481). Gildin disagrees: freedom “result[s] from men's concern with their self-preservation” (Rousseau's Social Contract, 44). Gildin is correct, as will be shown below, note 30. For a more precise account than Scott's of the derivation of conventional independence from natural independence, total alienation by subjects from conventional independence, and comprehensive sovereignty from total alienation, see Leonard R. Sorenson, “Rousseau's Liberalism,” History of Political Thought, 11 (1990): 452–5.

 Scott, “The Theodicy of the Second Discourse,” 708–9; Scott, “Politics as an Imitation of the Divine,” 487.

 Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man, 94–108; Gildin, Rousseau's Social Contract, 84, 44.

 Scott, “Politics as the Imitation of the Divine,” 496–8.

 John C. Scott, “Rousseau and the Melodious Language of Freedom” (1995) (conference paper); Clifford Orwin, “Rousseau and the Problem of Political Compassion” (1995) (conference paper); Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, 21, 40–1, n. 37. As noted by Masters, Rousseau does not explicitly address the Christian Natural Law Tradition. One reason proposed is that Rousseau need not do so precisely because the depth of his critique of the Romans, the Moderns, and Hobbes entails that critique (On the Social Contract, 79n. 201–2, 329n.). See also Scott's critique of Strauss and Masters on the relation between divine and natural law in Rousseau's political philosophy (“The Theodicy of the Second Discourse”). Cf. Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, 177. Rosenblatt proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Rousseau appealed to pride to direct it to citizen virtue (82–7, 159, 167, 198, 214).

 On the positive contribution of pride to Rousseau's proper political society, see also Masters, On the Social Contract, 42. On the extent of the new foundations requisite to support the rational law, see Starobinski, “The Political Thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau,” 305. Rosenblatt generally follows Ramon M. Lemos, Rousseau's Political Philosophy: An Exposition and Interpretation (University of Georgia Press, 1977) and Ulrich Allers, “Rousseau's Second Discourse,” The Review of Politics 20 (1958): 91–120, who consider Rousseau a Christian natural law teacher. Rosenblatt's most important contribution is to show by “historical” study aspects of that which can be grasped by a careful reading of Rousseau's published works alone and hence confirms the latter: namely, that Rousseau was well aware of and personally engaged in the debates over natural law and its use and abuse in the context of Geneva.

 Masters, The First and Second Discourses, 94–5.

 Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, 264.

 I say that these “rules of natural right” are rational “rules” because they exist in the “mind.” “Rules,” in context, means “definitions.” They are later referred to as the “belated lessons of wisdom.” The synonyms for the “rules of natural right” employed by Rousseau are “rational natural right” or the “rules of rational natural right” (Masters, The First and Second Discourses, 96, 95, 94, 96; Masters, On the Social Contract, 272–3, 65 n. 112, 141–6).

 Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, 244.

 Masters, On the Social Contract, 181–97; Gildin, Rousseau's Social Contract, 42–3, Gildin correctly defines the rational “rules of natural right” in the Second Discourse as the “law of reason” and its dictates in the Social Contract, yet he does not explore this link.

 The citizen must come to “act on other principles” that are a “substitute(ing)” for “instinct,” “physical impulse,” “appetite,” and “inclinations,” principles that cause a concern for “justice,” “duty,” and “right,” as dictated by reason (Masters, On the Social Contract, 55–6). Note that in this most famous pre-Kantian paragraph Rousseau is speaking only of internal changes in the cause of action not necessarily of different actions or the effect of actions. He is comparing the internal state of original man, a “stupid, limited animal,” with the internal state of the “soul” and intellect of a citizen in a proper “civil state.”

 If it is true that Rousseau's modern predecessors, in response to classical and Christian political thought, proposed to lower the goals of political life in order to make their actualization more likely, then it could certainly be concluded that Rousseau radicalized that project.

 Political societies, in turn, given the Hobbesian last stage of Rousseau's state of nature, also contribute to the preservation of the species (Masters, On the Social Contract, 52; Masters, The First and Second Discourses, 216).

 Cf. Gildin, Rousseau's Social Contract, 84, 44; Scott, “Politics as the Imitation of the Divine,” 481–2.

 See also Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 259, 262, 263, 255, 291.

 Scott, “Politics as the Imitation of the Divine,” 497. Gildin's general formula is as follows: the purposes of political society are “preservation, prosperity, and flourishing population.” “Freedom and equality” as well as “virtue and religion” or “piety” are means. Yet these means cannot be understood or experienced as means, “as being in the service of self-preservation without losing the ability to serve it.” Even “natural freedom and equality” are a “result(ing)” of “men's concern with their self- preservation” (Rousseau's Social Contract, 84, 44). Gildin employs this idea to explain why Rousseau presented political freedom as an end in itself in the Social Contract, when in truth, according to Gildin's argument it is only a means to preservation. Gildin's error is that he fails to extend his correct line of reasoning to explain Rousseau's silence in the Social Contract on its dependence on the natural law teaching of the Second Discourse.

 See Rousseau's critique of Diderot presented by Scott (“Politics as the Imitation of the Divine,” 486–8). Scott's error in his account of Diderot is his failure to see that the equivalent of the good of the species—rooted by Diderot in the premises of natural sociality and the rational or general law or will extended to the species—actually occurred, according to Rousseau, in the original condition but without either of Diderot's premises.

 See Orwin's critique of the Universal General Will in “Rousseau and the Problem of Political Compassion,” 21–2; cf. Masters, On the Social Contract, 219.

 Masters, The First and Second Discourses, 179; Masters, On the Social Contract, 95–6. On the thesis of a natural post- as well as pre-historic purpose of man, the former constituted by the soul's experience of its own present existence, the latter by philosophizing, see Sorenson, “Rousseau's Liberalism”; L. R. Sorenson, “Natural Inequality and Rousseau's Political Philosophy in His Discourse on Inequality,” The Western Political Quarterly (1990): 763–88; L. R. Sorenson, “Rousseau's Socratism,” Interpretation, 20 (1992–93): 135–55.

 This explains why Rousseau in the Social Contract presents political freedom as an end in itself as well as a means to preservation.

 Masters, On the Social Contract, 42.

 Ibid., 161.

 See also Rousseau's account and defense of distributive justice in proper political society (Masters, The First and Second Discourses, notes 227–8); and Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, 82–7, 159, 167, 198, 214.

 Melzer, Gildin, and Scott (as well as Masters, Plattner, and Orwin) attempt in their research to understand and build upon the ground-breaking work of Leo Strauss (“On the Intention of Rousseau,” 252–94). As for the latter see the following pages on the following themes: Rousseau's redefinition-not rejection-of natural law (269–71, 275–7); the general relation of natural and rational law (264 n. 26, 267 n. 32); nature as a “model” for rational law, of which the latter is an “approximation” (281–2); that “approximation” of nature requires “artificial” or “conventional substitute(s)” (283–5); that impersonal rational law “absorb(s)” natural law (286); and that the artificial must come to attain the “force, of the natural” (287).