Chapter II · ROUSSEAU AND THE IDYLLIC IMAGINATION

The period that extends from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century was, as I have indicated in my first chapter, marked by the progressive emancipation of the individual from outer authority and the supernatural beliefs that this authority sought to impose. The individual did not use his new liberty to work out some critical equivalent of traditional religion; on the contrary he became increasingly naturalistic. At the same time he often indulged in theories of government that were at the opposite pole from those of Machiavelli, the typical political naturalist. This is because certain virtues were associated more and more with “nature,” virtues that the past had deemed the hard-won fruit not merely of humanistic but of religious discipline. If the legitimacy of this association could be established, the Aristotelian generalization with which I started as to the necessary relation between ethos and government would evidently have to be abandoned. Before deserting Aristotle, however, we may do well to consider whether some sophistry does not lurk in what came to be the popular interpretation of the “state of nature.”

The notion of a state of nature and of a law of nature antecedent to positive law and organized society is, as we have seen, nothing new. It emerges in classical antiquity, especially among the Stoics, and survives throughout the Middle Ages, largely as a result of the infiltration of the Stoical influence into Roman law. It is reinforced again, as I have said, by the direct return of the Renaissance to the Stoical⁠[21] and other ancient sources. Moreover, one may find as early as the Church Fathers a tendency to identify the supposed state of nature with the state of man before the Fall and then to give to this state a communistic coloring, and at the same time to associate with man’s lapse from innocence the rise of private property.⁠[22] Though the law of nature was conceived to be in its own way divine, its authority was after all not to be compared with that of the divine law of which one secured knowledge through revelation. As long as one held to this positive form of God’s law, one’s assertion of a state of nature was sure to be tempered by a lively conviction of the survival in man of the “old Adam.” Hooker, for example, whose “Ecclesiastical Polity” appeared in 1592, looks forward in many of his ideas about natural law to Locke. But though asserting this law he declares: “Laws politic, ordained for external order and regimen among men, are never framed as they should be, unless presuming the will of man to be obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience to the sacred laws of his nature; in a word, unless presuming man to be in regard of his depraved mind, little better than a wild beast.” In the period between Hooker and Locke, the conviction of man’s depravity undergoes a notable diminution. Grotius already affirms that, even if there were no God and no positive revelation, man might be guided aright in matters political by the law of nature conceived as a law of right reason. Along with this glorification of reason, one should note as far back as the sixteenth century an incipient glorification of instinct that was later to culminate, in one of its most characteristic expressions, in the cult of the noble savage. It is only, however, with the early eighteenth century that the glorification of instinct takes on so distinctly emotional a cast as to affect the very basis of ethics. Shaftesbury’s doctrine of the “moral sense” and the instinctive goodness it implies had wide and immediate popularity. For example, Sir John Hawkins says in his “Life of Johnson”: “His [Fielding’s] morality, in respect that it resolves virtue into good affections, in contradiction to moral obligation and a sense of duty, is that of Lord Shaftesbury vulgarized. He was the inventor of that cant-phrase, ‘goodness of heart,’ which is every day used as a substitute for probity, and means little more than the virtue of a horse or a dog.”

Not only Shaftesbury, the optimistic naturalist, but the naturalistic cynic, Mandeville, prepared the way, as I have already said, for the emotional ethics of Rousseau. According to Rousseau, the state of nature is not a state of reason. On the contrary, the man who thinks is already highly sophisticated, or, in Rousseau’s phrase, “a depraved animal.” According to him, man in the state of nature is isolated and at the same time dominated by instinct. These isolated units will not, however, as Hobbes averred, be so dominated by the instinct of self-love as to make war on one another. Natural man has another instinct, namely, an instinctive dislike of seeing his fellow creatures suffer, which is alone a sufficient counterpoise to the love of self. From the concourse and combination of these two principles—love of self and instinctive pity—Rousseau seeks to derive all the rules of natural right. “Even the most outrageous detractor of human virtue” (that is, Mandeville), says Rousseau, “was forced to admit natural pity, though he did not see that from this quality alone derive all the social virtues—generosity, clemency, humanity, benevolence, and friendship itself—that he seeks to deny men.” Indeed, if one considers unsophisticated man, man subject, that is, only to the primordial instincts of pity and love of self, one must conclude that he is “the most virtuous who offers the least resistance to the simple impulses of nature.” According to Schopenhauer,⁠[23] it was the glorious achievement of Rousseau to transform morality by thus basing it upon pity. A result of this achievement that should be noted is the modification, apparent in the sentence I have just quoted, in the meaning of such words as virtue. The more, indeed, one studies the eighteenth century, the plainer it becomes that all other modern revolutions were preceded at about that time by a revolution in the dictionary. For a fuller understanding of Rousseau’s recoining of the word virtue, one needs to turn back for a moment to the “First Discourse” (1750). He there asserts the incompatibility between virtue and the refinement and luxury that seem to him to result necessarily from a cultivation of the arts and sciences. In his account of the undermining of Rome and other great states by the invasion of luxury, he uses by actual count the word virtue forty-three times. But one is not to suppose that in his solution of the problem of luxury that so preoccupied his age he is really seeking to recover the virtue of a Fabricius or a Lycurgus or a Calvin. What he opposes to luxury is rather a return to nature and the simple life—and the simple life, as he conceives it, is to be very simple indeed.⁠[24] His virtue is a glorification of the instinctive and the subrational. So that Joubert was justified from his own point of view in saying that Rousseau had destroyed wisdom in men’s souls by talking to them about virtue.

Though the virtue of the “First Discourse” is distinctly primitivistic, it received an essential addition in the “Second Discourse” by being associated with the idea of pity. The state of nature for Hobbes, as we have seen, meant liberty, equality, and war; for Locke, liberty, equality, and reason. On the contrary, says Rousseau, both war and reason are the result of social sophistication. The true state of nature is liberty, equality, and fraternal pity. By his refutation of Hobbes, and his substitution of fraternity for reason, Rousseau gave to naturalism the driving power it still lacked. It thus became possible to develop it into a new evangel that seemed to culminate, like the old Evangel, in love. This conception of love in terms of expansive emotion is, as I have already said, a sort of parody of Christian charity.

In the state of nature all men are, it would seem, equally capable of pity. But in actual society the emphasis on pity leads to the setting up of a sort of inverted hierarchy. Just as in Christianity a man’s spiritual rank is determined by his nearness to God, which is revealed in turn by the ardor of his charity, so in the new evangel man is to be rated by his nearness to nature, which is revealed in turn by the warmth of his commiseration. Now it is in the man of the plain people that the lively native impulse is least sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought. “Love had he found in huts where poor men lie.” As one ascends in the social scale, love diminishes, and as one approaches the top, it gives way to its opposite. As for the rich, Rousseau compares them to “ravening wolves, who having once tasted human flesh, refuse every other food, and henceforth desire to devour only men.”

Rousseau is, as a matter of fact, busy in creating a new set of myths that have, in their control of the human imagination, succeeded in no small measure to the old theology. Just as in the old theology everything hinged on man’s fall from God, so in Rousseau everything hinges on man’s fall from nature. The first and decisive step in this fall and the source of social evils was, according to Rousseau’s familiar account, the invention of private property in the form of property in land. With the invention of property, “equality disappeared.” “Work became necessary, and the vast forests were changed to smiling fields that had to be watered with the sweat of men, in which slavery and wretchedness were soon seen to spring up and grow with the crops.” Misery, in short, is the result of industry.

What evidently underlies the mythology that Rousseau is thus creating is a new dualism. The old dualism put the conflict between good and evil in the breast of the individual, with evil so predominant since the Fall that it behooves man to be humble; with Rousseau this conflict is transferred from the individual to society. That there is some survival of the older dualism in Rousseau is beyond question; but it is equally beyond question that the actual influence of his work has been almost entirely associated with the new dualism. He himself saw in this new dualism the essence of the apocalyptic vision that came to him under the tree by the roadside on his walk to Vincennes. The guiding principle of his writings, he says, is to show that vice and error, strangers to man’s constitution, are introduced from without, that they are due in short to his institutions. Now institutions mean in practice those who administer them. A small group at the top of the artificial hierarchy, kings and priests and capitalists, sit on the lid, as it were, and keep man’s native goodness (as in Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”) from gushing forth torrentially. The fault in any case is not “Nature’s”;

Whence this strange dualism arose, “how George III and Paley and Lord Eldon came to possess an existence independent of Nature, and acquired the power of turning all her good purposes to nought,” is, as Leslie Stephen remarks of Shelley, “one of those questions which we can hardly refrain from asking.” A similar question arises regarding the dualism of Rousseau. Most people, however, have not been inclined to subject the myth of natural goodness to any such indiscreet scrutiny. It is not only very flattering in itself; it seems to offer a convenient avenue of escape from the theological nightmare. Above all it flattered those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Christianity at its best has sought to make the rich man humble, whereas the inevitable effect of the Rousseauistic evangel is to make the poor man proud, and at the same time to make him feel that he is the victim of a conspiracy. The establishment of society and laws made it possible to change “an adroit usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious persons subjected henceforth the whole of human kind to toil, servitude, and wretchedness.” One need scarcely be surprised that this and similar passages of the “Second Discourse” should still be a direct source of inspiration to the bomb-throwing anarchist.⁠[25] What one hears throughout this treatise, as elsewhere in Rousseau, is the voice of the angry and envious plebeian, who in the name of love is actually fomenting hatred and class warfare. “What was hardest to destroy in me,” we read in “Emile,” “was a proud misanthropy, a certain acrimony against the rich and happy of the world as though they were so at my expense, as though their alleged happiness had been usurped from mine.”

The crusader against social inequalities on Rousseauistic lines may easily become not merely an enthusiast but a fanatic. This emancipation of feeling seems at first sight the essential aspect of Rousseau’s interpretation of nature. Instead of the rationalistic and mechanical nature of the Cartesian, nature is spontaneity, in the sense of an expansive and even an explosive emotionalism. “I threw reason overboard,” says Rousseau himself, “and consulted nature, that is to say the inner sentiment which directs my belief independently of my reason.” But on closer examination one discovers that there is in Rousseau something even more fundamental than his emotionalism, and that is his special quality of imagination. In order to make this point clear, we need to consider with some care the contrast between the natural and the artificial that he establishes in his “Second Discourse.” His method in reaching this contrast is similar in some respects to that of the modern evolutionist. Instead of having us look forward to ends, as Aristotle urges, if we are to understand man’s nature, he would, like the evolutionist, have us grope our way back to beginnings. The change from primitive to civilized man is presented as a slow development with certain intermediary stages, each one of which Rousseau supposes to have consumed “thousands of centuries.” This portrayal of the evolution of mankind as a whole through various stages aided, one may note in passing, the efflorescence in Germany of numerous philosophies of history.⁠[26] Rousseau’s nature, however, is in one particular violently at variance with the nature of most of the philosophers of history and with that of all the evolutionists. Though the evolutionist is only too prone to whisk us off into some prehistoric period where he is free to indulge in airy hypothesis, he does not see in nature at any stage of the evolutionary process a source of pity. By his attribution of pity to the state of nature, Rousseau has indeed gone far to justify the sentence with which he opens his discussion of this state in the “Second Discourse”: “Let us begin by setting aside all the facts.” The key to Rousseau’s nature, and also to what has passed for the ideal with innumerable Rousseauists, is found in his declaration that, not being able to discover men to his liking in the real world, he built up for himself a “golden age of phantasy.”⁠[27] His nature is in short what I have described elsewhere as a projection of the idyllic imagination.

Faguet complains that the image Rousseau has left on the mind of the public is that of a gentleman up in a cherry tree tossing down cherries to two maidens below (incident of Mesdemoiselles Galley and Graffenried in the “Confessions”). Perhaps the public is not so far wrong after all as to Rousseau’s essential attitude. One can scarcely go through Rousseau’s writings without being struck by the number of variants he has given of the pastoral theme. Let no one suppose that it is a small matter to be, like Rousseau, richly and spontaneously imaginative in this idyllic fashion. Perhaps no human trait is more universal than the longing for some golden age or land of heart’s desire. This longing has not only inspired a large proportion of the art and literature of the world, but has found its way into philosophy and religion. The idyllic element is unmistakably present in the story of the Garden of Eden; the Song of Solomon is described by Milton as a “divine pastoral”; the millennial yearnings of the early Christians are not unrelated to the same type of imagination. The Krishna of the Bhagavadgîtâ is not in the least pastoral, but in the picture that often serves as frontispiece to Indian editions of this poem, Krishna appears with the pastoral flute and kine, surrounded by the gopis or shepherdesses.

What concerns us here is the relation of this type of imagination to modern political idealism. The agitator makes his chief appeal to it when he stirs the multitude by his pictures of the felicity that is to supervene upon the destruction of the existing social order. The English painter, Edward Lear, relates that in the year of revolution, 1848, he was staying in a Sicilian town. He left the town for some weeks and locked up his pictures and other things in a room, leaving the key with the hotel-keeper. A revolution had just broken out when he returned, and he found the waiters full of Chianti and patriotic fervor. He ventured to ask one of them for the key of his room that he might get his clothes. The waiter utterly refused to be led from his dreams of a golden age to such details of daily life. “There isn’t any longer any key or room or clothes,” he exclaimed indignantly. “Everything is love and liberty. O che bella rivoluzione!”⁠[28] Unfortunately when the real refuses to vanish in favor of the ideal, it is easy to persuade the simple-minded that the failure is due not to the ideal itself, but to some conspiracy. In speaking of one of these childlike disciples of Rousseau, Anatole France says that it was his misfortune to have carried into the profession of cook to which fate had condemned him an Elysian soul intended for the golden age. He had been led to the most savage ferocity by the tenderest optimism. As Anatole France adds, when one starts with the supposition that men are naturally good and virtuous, one inevitably ends by wishing to kill them all. What is remarkable about the period since the eighteenth century is the extent to which not merely the rank and file, but the leaders have followed the lure of the idyllic imagination. Thus Schiller exalts the idyll to the first places in literature, and associates it with the ideal. Elsewhere I have tried to show that the idyll does not deserve any such rank in literature. It would seem even more open to suspicion as a basis for political action. Lincoln writes to his friend Speed: “I have no doubt it is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can realize.” Lincoln was in these Elysian yearnings, as in other respects, very human. He was not, however, Elysian in his actual statesmanship.

Later in this book we shall study more in detail various persons who, unlike Lincoln, have carried over the idyllic type of “vision” into the field of politics and economics. All that I wish to show now is that, in the case of Rousseau himself, even his sensibility is subject to his imagination, inasmuch as this imagination conjures up the Arcadian state that he terms “nature,” towards which his emotions expand so freely. But to present Rousseau merely as an idyllic and emotional dreamer, it may be urged, is to forget that part of his writings, the “Social Contract,” for instance, in which he shows himself severely and coldly logical. The occasional severity of Rousseau’s logic one may grant, but its coldness is another matter. Starting from the premise of a fictitious state of nature, it leads to conclusions that justify emotional revolt against everything established, that are indeed enough to make “the very stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.” If the subjects of a despot, for example (every king in Europe was a despot according to the logic of the “Social Contract”), seem to enjoy domestic tranquillity, it is merely, says Rousseau, the tranquillity of the companions of Ulysses in the den of the Cyclops, waiting their turn to be devoured. Rousseau’s logic has been compared in its relation to his emotions to a henpecked husband, who keeps up a brave outer show of independence while actually doing his wife’s bidding. Moreover, another end is accomplished by Rousseau’s display of logical rigor. The man at the bottom of the existing social order is flattered by being told that he is more virtuous, more fully possessed, in other words, of the spontaneous goodness of the state of nature than the man at the top. But, however ready he may be to believe that he is superior in feeling, he does not after all like to look upon himself as incapable of thought. The multitude, says Aristotle, cannot make distinctions. Rousseau’s logic is so contrived as to give to the multitude at least the illusion that it can make distinctions. He owes no small part of his amazing influence to his flattery of the popular head as well as of the popular heart. As Taine writes in a letter to W. S. Lilly: “What gives extraordinary power to the ideas of Rousseau is above all the simplicity of the conception. As a matter of fact, the political reasoning that it produces is as easy as the rule of three. How are you to prove to this man that he does not understand, that the notion of the State is one of the most difficult to form, that political reasoning is beyond his grasp? You would insult him. He cannot admit even as possible a thing so preposterous: and his self-love is sufficient to blind his good sense.”

Thus far I have been dealing with the Rousseau who has actually moved the world—the Rousseau whose feelings fly out towards the vision conjured up by his imagination, and whose logic is in turn pressed into the service of his feelings. One must, however, grant that there is alongside of this Rousseau a very different Rousseau. It is related that when he was in Strassburg a father told him that he was educating his son strictly on the principles of “Emile.” He replied: “So much the worse for him.” Even if not strictly true, this anecdote has a certain symbolical value. It is to be associated with his saying that his heart and his head did not seem to belong to the same individual. If his heart (to which, as I have tried to show, his logic is subservient) is revolutionary, his head is cautious. His replies to those who sought counsel of him, as any one who has been through his correspondence will testify, were frequently very shrewd and sensible. As M. Lanson says, he applies his boldest doctrines in a way to reassure conservatives and satisfy opportunists.

The contrast between the two Rousseaus is indeed so marked as to raise the question of his sincerity. As a preliminary to a discussion of this point, one needs to note that a special type of sincerity which seems to be much in request these days is itself an outcome of the Rousseauistic movement. It seems to be assumed in certain quarters that almost any opinion is justified provided it be held with sufficient emotional vehemence. One cannot help reflecting that perhaps the best examples of sincerity in this sense are to be found in insane asylums; and that much of Rousseau’s sincerity, his conviction for instance during his later years that he was the victim of a universal conspiracy, was of this order. Sincerity is indeed only one of a whole class of virtues that are often taken to be primary when they are in fact only virtues with reference to something more fundamental. Thus many of our “liberals” conceive that it is in itself a virtue to be forward-looking, whereas it may be a vice, if what one is looking forward to should turn out to be pernicious or chimerical. A similar remark applies to those who pique themselves on their open-mindedness. It is well to open one’s mind, but only as a preliminary to closing it, only as a preparation, in short, for the supreme act of judgment and selection. In much the same way, the value of sincerity can be estimated only with reference to the previous question of truth or error. What makes the Socratic group at Athens and the scientific investigator to-day seem so respectable, when compared with the emotionalist, is that they ask, first of all, not whether a man is sincere, but whether he is right or wrong. If one is right, it is of course important, at least in the domain of moral values, that he should be sincerely right.

It is hard to deny Rousseau the type of emotional sincerity that I have just been discussing—a type that in its milder form reminds one of what would be known nowadays as the will to believe, and in its extreme form, is not far removed from madness. At the same time, Rousseau’s head could on occasion stand aloof and deal rather Socratically with his heart. For example, he said to Hume who had complimented him on the style and eloquence of his books: “To tell the truth, I am not displeased with myself in that particular: at the same time I dread lest my writings are good for nothing at bottom, and that all my theories are full of extravagance.”⁠[29]⁠

It is not, however, the self-critical Rousseau of this passage that need concern us, for the simple reason that it is not this Rousseau who has moved the world. The side of Rousseau that has moved the world, as M. Lanson continues, is the side that “exasperates and inspires revolt ...; it is the mother of violence, the source of all that is uncompromising. It launches the simple souls who give themselves up to its strange virtue upon the desperate quest of the absolute, an absolute to be realized to-day by anarchy and to-morrow by social despotism.”⁠[30]⁠

Though the Rousseau who has been influential is always Rousseau the extremist, he oscillates, as M. Lanson says, between opposite extremes. From the unflinching individualism of the “Second Discourse,” where man is conceived as a sort of isolated and unrelated particle, he passes to the no less unflinching collectivism of the “Social Contract.” He fluctuates between extremes even in his collectivistic ideal. Thus he writes to the Marquis de Mirabeau that he does not see “any endurable mean between the most austere democracy and the most perfect Hobbism.” You must choose, he says, between making a man and making a citizen. You cannot hope to make both. Hitherto, I have been speaking for the most part of the virtue of man in the state of nature as depicted in the “Second Discourse.” It remains to speak of the “Social Contract,” and of the method there outlined for divesting man as completely as possible of his natural virtue in order that he may acquire the virtue of the citizen. In what I have to say about the “Social Contract,” I shall confine myself to the uncompromising main argument. That there are other elements in the “Social Contract” is beyond question. Rousseau affirms at times that the principles of government are not absolute but relative; that they are subject in their application to historical circumstances and physical environment, notably climate. But this relativistic Rousseau who reveals at times the influence of Montesquieu is, as I have said, unimportant compared to the Rousseau who is straining out towards the absolute and the unlimited. This absolutism of Rousseau appears, as is well known, most strikingly in his doctrine of popular sovereignty. This doctrine he reasons out from first principles with almost geometrical rigor. The first effect of this reasoning is to make all existing governments seem illegitimate. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The only free and legitimate government is that founded upon a true social compact. On this basis, it is possible to combine the advantages of organized government with the liberty, equality, and fraternity that man enjoys, not as the result of moral effort, but as a free gift, in the state of nature. Only, under the social contract, these virtues no longer reside in the individual, but in the general will. All the clauses of the social contract “reduce themselves to one: the total alienation of every associate with all his rights” (including his rights to property) “to the whole community.” What guarantee is the individual to have that the community will not abuse this unlimited control that he has granted it over his person and property? Though the State is for Rousseau as for Hobbes not natural but artificial, he proceeds to develop the analogy between this artificial body and the body of an actual person. One of the most important sources of this tendency to set up an elaborate parallel between the individual and the State is Plato’s “Republic.” In Plato, however, the parallel is used to establish a severe hierarchy in the State, in much the same way that the powers and faculties of the individual must work in due order and subordination; whereas the informing spirit of the Rousseauistic conception is the idea of equality. The use that Rousseau makes of the parallel is to argue that the community cannot will the harm of any of the individuals that compose it any more than the single person can will the harm of one of his own members. On the side of theory, however, Rousseau’s chief argument in favor of the disinterestedness of the general will is that it has had transferred to it by the social contract the spontaneous goodness that belongs to the will of the individual in the state of nature. At this point, however, Rousseau’s good sense intervenes. Granted that the multitude from whom the general will emanates wishes the right thing, it does not always see it. The people, after all, needs guidance. Hence arises the necessity of the Lawgiver; and Rousseau goes on to imagine some person of almost superhuman sagacity, set apart from other men, and under no suspicion of self-seeking, who draws up an ideal code that is to direct the general will, a code which actually enjoys credit with the people because it seems to have religious sanction, in other words, because the Lawgiver seems to speak not for himself, but only as a channel of divine wisdom. One might suppose that the general will would be limited by the Law thus imposed; that the Law would become a permanent principle of control in the State, its higher self, as it were, in opposition to its mere passing desires. But at bottom, Rousseau does not want any effective check on the reaching out of his logic and emotions towards the unlimited; and so he finally transfers to the general will the anarchical impressionism he has asserted for the individual. The only clear result of his speculations about the need of a Law and a Lawgiver was to encourage the conceit of followers like Robespierre, who felt that they had within them the making of a modern Lycurgus. Practically the general will is lawless; it cannot bind itself to obey its rulers, whom it regards as mere executive officers, the people’s hired men as it were, revocable at pleasure. It cannot bind itself to anything it has willed in the past, or obligate itself in any way for the future. An assembly of the sovereign people should invariably begin by voting separately on the two following questions: “first, whether it pleases the sovereign to preserve the present form of government; second, whether it pleases the people to leave the administration of it to those who are now in charge.” The sovereign people cannot be represented by a parliament, as in England. “At the moment a State gives itself representatives it no longer exists.” Sovereignty is absolute and indivisible. “To limit it is to destroy it.” “The sovereign people, by the very fact that it is, is always all that it should be.” It has often been pointed out that Rousseau transfers to the people the doctrine that the king can do no wrong. But he does more than that. The king, if not responsible to what is below him, is at least responsible to what is above him—to God. But the sovereign people is responsible to no one. It is God. The contract that it makes is with itself, like that which, according to the old theologians, was made in the council chamber of the Trinity. “By the mere pleasure of God,” says Jonathan Edwards, “I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation,” etc. The popular will is the successor of the divine will, from which everything finally derived in the mediæval theocracy.

Rousseau’s idea of sovereignty, being as it is naturalistic, is of course in its ultimate essence neither mediæval nor theocratic. His idea of a contract that the people makes with itself, by which it arrogates to itself full power, without any reciprocal obligation, is in important respects original with Rousseau. “We are entering,” he wrote in “Emile,” “on the era of crises and the age of revolutions.” He not only made the prophecy, but did more than any other one man to bring about its fulfilment. By asserting a general will that is at once absolute and shifting, he achieved the paradox of basing government on permanent revolution. Perhaps he is more closely related to Hobbes than to any previous political thinker, especially if it be true, as Sainte-Beuve says, that nothing resembles a hollow so much as a swelling. His state of nature and his sovereignty are merely the state of nature and the sovereignty of Hobbes reversed. In Rousseau the people can do anything it pleases with its ruler, in Hobbes the ruler can do anything he pleases with the people. But though the State of Hobbes has no higher self—the very idea of a higher self is foreign to his materialistic philosophy—it has at least a permanent self. The contract by which the people divests itself of its power in favor of its ruler is definitive. But Rousseau, as we have seen, will have no such element of permanency. If he had conceived of the general will as the permanent will of the people that might on occasion be in conflict with its ordinary will, his distinction⁠[31] between a disinterested volonté générale and a volonté de tous, which may stand for nothing more than the egoistic wills of individuals or groups, might have a serious meaning. As it is, this distinction melts away under close scrutiny. It is mystical in the bad sense.

On all ordinary occasions the general will means a numerical majority at any particular moment. An individual or a minority of individuals has no appeal from the decision of this majority in its interpretation of the general will. This is logical, inasmuch as the individual has transferred to the general will the unlimited liberty that he enjoyed in the state of nature. If any one is outvoted, he can console himself by the reflection that he was mistaken, that what he took to be the general will was not this will. If his private opinion had won, he would have been doing something contrary to his true will and his true liberty. In exercising constraint upon him, therefore, the majority is simply “forcing him to be free.” By this device Rousseau gets rid of the problem that has chiefly preoccupied political thinkers in the English tradition—how, namely, to safeguard the freedom of the individual or of minorities against a triumphant and despotic majority.

This solution of the problem involves the setting up of a new dualism—that between the individual in his ordinary self and the individual as a citizen and member of the sovereign people conceived as his true self. But though the first term of this dualism, the individual in his ordinary self, may be subject to rigid control, the second term of the dualism, the State as embodied in the general will, is, let me repeat, subject to no control at all. The liberty of the general will, like that of the individual in the state of nature, can be limited, if at all, as Rousseau says significantly, only by force.

Any one who traces the subject historically will acquire the conviction, as I have already said, that the Christian religion founded something of which not even a Plato or an Aristotle had any adequate notion—personal liberty. By its separation of the things of God and the things of Cæsar, it established a domain of free conscience, in which the individual might take refuge from the encroachments of the omnipotent State. It is plain that Rousseau does not propose to leave the individual any such refuge. The last chapter of the “Social Contract” is devoted to Civil Religion. This chapter abounds in remarks of extraordinary shrewdness and penetration (as, for instance, where he observes that the Crusades were not truly Christian in spirit) and at the same time, so far as its general conclusions are concerned, may be described in Rousseau’s own phrase as a “sea of sophisms.” Rousseau distinguishes three types of religion: first, organized and traditional Christianity, especially the Christianity of the Catholic Church. This type of religion is so evidently bad as scarcely to merit serious refutation. “All institutions that put man in contradiction with himself are worthless.” The obvious reply of the older type of dualist would be that man is in contradiction with himself, and that the Church merely reflects a primordial fact of human nature. One can no more grant that institutions per se are capable of any such effect than one can admit Rousseau’s counter-assertion that, merely as a result of institutions, all the members of a community may possess good sense, justice, and integrity.⁠[32]⁠

The second religion that Rousseau recognizes is true Christianity, a religion entirely of the heart, without rites and ceremonies, and having much in common, as he conceives it, with the fluid emotionalism of the sentimental deist. True Christians are like those great cosmopolitan spirits of whom Rousseau speaks in the “Second Discourse,” who “transcend the imaginary barriers that separate peoples, and like the sovereign being who has created them, embrace the whole human race in their benevolence.” The person, however, in whom natural pity has thus blossomed into universal benevolence is not necessarily either otherworldly or humble, and Rousseau is shrewd enough to see that the true Christian is both. He, therefore, proceeds to attack not merely institutional Christianity but true Christianity. It also divides man against himself, and by giving him a celestial fatherland weakens his allegiance to the civitas terrena. Rousseau brings up questions of extraordinary complexity regarding the distinction between a spiritual and a secular order, and the actual political results of this distinction as worked out in Christianity, questions that for their proper elucidation would require a volume. The main point that concerns us here is his attack on humility, the underlying Christian virtue, on the ground that it is incompatible with the full virtue of the citizen. To be humble is to be submissive; so that “true Christians are meant to be slaves.” One should, therefore, discard humility in favor of patriotic pride, of the kind that flourished in the great days of Rome and Sparta.

Here again in his dealings with the relations of Church and State, Rousseau reminds us of Hobbes. “Of all Christian authors,” he himself says, “the philosopher Hobbes is the only one who saw clearly the evil and the remedy and ventured to propose bringing together the two heads of the eagle,” thus subordinating everything to political unity. But before Hobbes, Machiavelli, as I have already remarked, had sought to discredit the idea of a separate spiritual order, and also of Christian humility itself, so that the State might be all in all. Quite apart from Rousseau’s admiration for Machiavelli and from any conscious discipleship, his view of the State has more in common with the Machiavellian view than one might at first suppose. Machiavelli is not, of course, like Rousseau, an emotionalist, but is, in his main trend, utilitarian. It is no accident that Francis Bacon, the prophet of utilitarianism, should be, as Lord Acton points out, his most distinguished English disciple. But Rousseau too has a strongly utilitarian side. Indeed one finds in him, as in the whole of our modern age, an endless interplay of sentimental and utilitarian elements.

This utilitarian side of Rousseau appears in the third form of religion he discusses in the “Social Contract.” After rejecting both institutional Christianity and true Christianity, on the ground that they are anti-national, he proposes as worthy of approval a religion which, properly speaking, is not a religion at all, but a social utility. The articles of its creed, which are determined by the sovereign, are to be imposed not precisely as dogmas, but as promoting sentiments of sociability. The positive dogmas of this civil creed are, as Rousseau states them, fairly substantial (e.g., the existence of God, the future life, the happiness of the just and the punishment of the wicked). If any one does not believe them he may be banished from the State, not as impious but as unsociable. “If any one, after having recognized publicly these same dogmas, conducts himself as though he did not believe them, let him be punished with death.” The civil religion is to have only one negative dogma—the condemnation of intolerance. This is directed especially against institutional Christians, but it is hard to see how any one can escape this condemnation who holds in matters religious to a definite standard of right and wrong, quite apart from the omnipotent State and its supposed utility.

Rousseau’s “civil religion” evidently looks forward to such an event as Robespierre’s Festival of the Supreme Being. Unfortunately, it also looks forward to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and to the guillotining as “fanatics” of many of the priests who refused to forswear their allegiance to Rome. It is fair to add that the “Social Contract” is only one source⁠[33] of the strife between clericals and anti-clericals that has been so prominent in France since the Revolution as to amount at times almost to civil war. In general we should recollect that Rousseau was less an originator of the ideas we have been discussing than the most important single figure in a vast movement that had been gaining head for generations. In the words of Madame de Staël he invented nothing, but set everything on fire. Burke, the chief antagonist of Rousseau, took serious cognizance of this movement and of the enthusiasm it inspired only when they had begun to translate themselves into great historical events. It was Rousseau and all he typified that he attacked in the French Revolution.