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Samenvatting Eindtentamen History of Political Philosophy
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Uitgebreide samenvatting van het tweede deel van het vak: Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Marx en Mill.
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Paula Witlox 2019Samenvatting Eindtentamen History of Political
Philosophy
Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Marx and Mill
Rousseau
On the Social Contract, Book II
Social contract
Key question: how is a legitimate political order even conceivable?
Rousseau is very cynical to how people can be free in society. The question of legitimacy can be understood as
the question of how freedom and authority are reconcilable.
The solution to this question: The Social Contract.
Essentially, the social contract is an act of self-transformation. Signing up to political authority does something
to your identity. Two main transformations:
- The individual becomes both a citizen (a member of the sovereign) and a subject (because he’s owing
obedience to the law).
- The multitude becomes a “people”. As a community, we have a collective “self” with a single will.
But how does the “total alienation of each associate together with all of his rights to the entire community”
make us free?
Liberty
Natural liberty: unbound by the will of anyone else, independent, master of oneself. This is the kind of liberty
we give up when we sign the social contract. Instead, we get two new kinds of liberty:
1. Civil liberty: not bound by the particular will of others; space to move within legal bounds
2. Moral liberty: autonomy; setting yourself the law. You are the author of your binding laws. Only this
“makes man truly the master of himself. For to be driven by appetite alone is slavery and obedience to
the law one has prescribed for oneself is liberty.”
Freedom, law and rationality
Moral liberty does relate us to others. It is closely connected to the law and to rationality.
This is because acting freely is not a matter of doing whatever you want; your actions must be lawful, i.e. rule-
governed, in accord with general norms. Rather a rational mode of action, than driven by appetite.
Those norms must be an expression of your own will. reason does not merely give access to the norms, but
it prescribes them. The norms must be rational.
Law (if self-authored!) is the constitutive of freedom. Obeying the laws that you prescribe for yourself is what
freedom is.
How does this relate to Locke?
For Locke, acting freely also is not just doing whatever you want. This does not mean Locke and Rousseau
endorse the same notion of liberty. In Locke’s view, acting freely is acting reasonably, acting reasonably is
acting according to natural laws that are created by God. Our capacity to reason gives us insight in natural laws.
Rousseau is taking the first point; that acting freely is acting rationally, but he radicalizes it. He says reason
prescribes laws (moral rules) and does not just give insight in natural laws. So, there’s a difference in the origin
of the rules.
Freedom and democracy
So, in a community we are always related to others. Why should we say that obedience to laws in a society is
not subjection? Why are you free when obeying to the laws?
,Paula Witlox 2019
Because; we make the laws together. If we make the laws together, each is involved and we are all co-authors
of the law. If you can see yourself as co-author of the law, then you can see yourself as free (collective self-
legislation).
Two fundamental questions about this idea:
1. Why should I see the laws as an expression of my own will, even if I disagree with them? (This will
occur sometimes, because we (all people) will never be unanimous).
Rousseau’s answer: that’s part of what it means to be a citizen. Suppose we’ve made the laws together and
everyone had a voice in the process, sometimes you just don’t get what you want, but you did have a role in
the deciding process. Your will as a citizen is the general will.
2. Under what condition can one see the laws as an expression of the general will? How to identify the
“will of the people”?
You can’t speak of the will of the people, unless the people can actually have a voice. Everyone must have a say
in the determinations. Participation is key.
Sovereignty in Rousseau
Hobbes and Rousseau are on the same page: the sovereign is the supreme authority.
For Rousseau, this is primarily the legislative power (the power to make laws). Hobbes says that laws are the
will of the sovereign. Rousseau, in contrast to Hobbes, contrasts the legislative power to the power of
government. The power of government belongs to magistrates, in a way that is consistent with the will of the
sovereign, but these magistrates are not the sovereign, they’re deputies.
Rousseau can be characterized as a defender of popular sovereignty. The idea that sovereignty is supposed to
be in the hands of the people. For Hobbes it might be vested in a certain person, or group of people, but for
Rousseau it can only be vested in the people.
The sovereign in Rousseau is not a representative of the people (as in Hobbes), it is the people. For Rousseau,
sovereignty can per definition not be representative.
Rousseau as a Hobbesian?
What may the community do? In Hobbes, the sovereign can do anything he pleases. It is unconstraint.
The sovereign has “absolute power over all his members” II.4 – a phrase from Rousseau, but could easily be
from Hobbes.
The sovereign cannot bind himself, that would be inconsistent (because the will of the sovereign is law).
Natural law poses no constrains on what the sovereign may do (Locke’s view). “There neither is, nor can be any
type of fundamental law that is obligatory for the people as a body, not even the social contract.”
Why not even the social contract? – because the social contract is what institutes sovereignty in the first place.
There is no higher law (like natural law for Locke). God has not prescribed a set of moral laws that tell us what
we may do.
Does this mean that subjects have no rights? Are they completely at the mercy of the community as a whole? –
no that is not what Rousseau is trying to say.
For example, rights that regulate property, freedom of speech, freedom of religion etc. those basic rights that
we have, must be determined by the community as a whole. This is the only legitimate source where the rules
can come from. Rights must be determined by the community as a whole; there is no independent standpoint
from which they can be determined.
"We grant that each person alienates, by the social compact, only that portion of his power, his goods, and
liberty whose use is of consequence to the community; but we must also grant that only the sovereign is the
judge of what is of consequence."
Does that mean that there are no constraints on what the community may do to its citizens?
There are certain conditions internal to what it means to be sovereign, rather that external (natural law).
There are conditions on what it means for something to count as an expression of the “general will”. These are
formal rather than substantive constraints on what can count as the will of the people. These conditions are
expressed in the notion of the “general will”.
, Paula Witlox 2019
But; who is to say what the “will of the people” is? How do we settle the conflicting claims of the struggling
parties? Anyone can claim that something is the will of the people.
General will
The “general will” is the technical term for the will of the people. The people can only act through laws that
take a specific form: they must be general. What does that mean?
The general will is general in two respects (“in its object as well as in its essence”), what comes in has to be
general and what comes out has to be general as well.
- It is the will of the whole and thereby of each of the members. Generality requires participation as
equals
- It issues general laws, not particular decisions of judgments.
Law
II.6 "But when the entire populace enacts a statute concerning the entire populace, it considers only itself, and if
in that case a relationship is formed, it is between the entire object seen from one perspective and the entire
object seen from another, without any division of the whole. Then the subject matter about which a statute is
enacted is general like the will that enacts it. It is this act that I call a law."
Laws concern “subjects as a body and actions in the abstract, never a man as an individual or a particular
action.”
II.4: “As a result, it is never right for the sovereign to burden one subject more than another, because in that
case, since the matter becomes particular its power is no longer competent.”
There are constraints on sovereignty but they are internal to what sovereignty means.
What is the general will?
The “general will” is what we, together, genuinely (rationally) want. Per definition, it is oriented toward the
common good. You can’t rationally want what is bad for you.
There’s a couple of things that contrast to the general will.
- you want do distinguish the general will with the individual will, because this will be concentrated on
private interest, opinion of the common good.
- Also, the general will must be distinguished from the will of all as an aggregate of individual wills. This
might diverse from what we genuinely want.
- Lastly, the objective common good is not equivalent to the general will.
“The constant will of all the members of the state is the general will; through it they are citizens and free. When
a law is proposed in the people’s assembly, what is asked of them is not precisely whether they approve or
reject, but whether or not it conforms to the general will that is theirs. 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 I took to
be the general will was not so. If my private opinion had prevailed, I would have done something other than
what I had wanted. In that case I would not have been free.” (IV.2)
The most convincing interpretation of the general will, by Screenivasan (2000): “the totality of unrescinded
decisions made by a community-- that is, of an association of individuals contractually constituted as a “moral
and collective body” –when its deliberation is subject to certain constraints.”
Which constraints are meant here?
- The subject matter of the deliberation is perfectly general
- The conclusions of the deliberation apply equally to all the members of the community
- All the members of the community participate in the deliberation
- All parties to the deliberation think for themselves
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