Can society make us free again?

If society creates dependence and inequality, can political association also make us free? In the second episode of our Rousseau series, Samuel Woodall and Jack Thomson move from the Discourse on Inequality (1755) to The Social Contract (1762).

We distinguish natural differences from inequalities sustained by convention and institutions, consider pity and perfectibility, and explore the tension between amour de soi and amour-propre. From agriculture and property to the general will, the conversation asks how citizens might replace dependence on other people with laws they prescribe together.

Along the way, we revisit Hobbes, Diderot and Rousseau's attachment to Geneva, consider Jack's comparison with Kant, and debate the troubling claim that a citizen can be "forced to be free". Episode 3 turns to education, Émile and Julie.

Hosted by Samuel Woodall and Jack Thomson.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Welcome and introduction
00:28 Recap: dependence and Geneva
00:53 Can society make us free again?
01:09 Two contracts and the key dates
02:39 Natural and moral inequality
06:53 Compassion, pity and Hobbes
10:23 Perfectibility
11:51 Amour de soi and amour-propre
12:54 Agriculture, metallurgy and property
15:20 Born free, everywhere in chains
16:03 Diderot at Vincennes
17:06 The general will
19:01 Geneva and the dignity of man
20:06 Rousseau and Kant
21:11 Forced to be free?
24:15 Next episode and farewell

READ AND DISCUSS
Beyond the Text: https://beyondthetext.co.uk
The Intellectual Historian: https://theintellectualhistorian.com
Join the discussion: https://thehistoryofideasclub.co.uk

FREE READING
Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, translated by G. D. H. Cole:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46333
Read the Discourse on Inequality, especially Part II, and The Social Contract, Book I, chapters 1, 6, 7 and 8.

EPISODE 1
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_F2u40m6vQ
Listen: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2238237/episodes/19951622

MUSIC
Red Planet, "Queens Arrival" (TakeTones), the programme's original theme.

ARTWORK
Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762), Bibliothèque nationale de France / Gallica. Public domain.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Du_contrat_social_Rousseau_Jean-Jacques.jpg

Transcript

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Welcome and introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome back to Beyond the Text. Jack is back. Hello, Jack. Hello, Sam. Are you feeling okay?

SPEAKER_01 0:11

I am, I'm feeling okay. I I pick up a cold from from my return flight from London to Leiden, so but I'm I'm I'm been yeah, rescued.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Recovered, recovered and recuperated is what we would like to hear. So

Recap: dependence and Geneva

SPEAKER_00 0:28

without you, in your absence in the first episode, I followed Russo from Geneva through his wandering youth into the world of the Parisian philosophs. The recurring problem was dependence. We become less free when our survival, status, and sense of worth are controlled by other people. Today Jack is back with me, and we are moving from Russo's life into his politics. The question

Can society make us free again?

SPEAKER_00 0:53

is deliberately difficult. Can society make us free again? Russo's answer begins with a history of how society made us unfree in the first place. It then asks whether political association can be reconstructed on legitimate terms. So

Two contracts and the key dates

SPEAKER_00 1:09

we need to keep two contracts separate. In the discourse on inequality, the rich create a fraudulent settlement that protects unequal property. In the social contract, equal citizens create a legitimate political body. So the dates help here. Rousseau drafted the second discourse for another competition set by the Academy of Dijon, and Jack and I were just discussing before we started the call the first discourse, which he submits to the Academy of Dijon, the discourse on the arts and sciences that we'll probably mention in passing as well. But unlike that work, it did not win. It was published in 1755 as a book. Then seven years later, in 1762, the social contract appeared. The first text diagnoses the disease, whereas the social contract asks what a cure would have to look like. So Jack, before we begin the argument, is that distinction between a false contract and a legitimate contract a useful way of understanding Rousseau's political project? This idea that Rousseau is kind of diagnosing the problem and sort of looking at inequality and how society is unfair, and then maybe in in the discourse on inequality, and then in the social contract, he's trying to sort of find a way to get through those problems to try and rectify the ills of society. What do you think, having encountered these texts, not for the first time, but I guess more first time, deeper reading these texts?

SPEAKER_01 2:37

Yes.

Natural and moral inequality

SPEAKER_01 2:39

So we're sort of keen to emphasize a difference between natural and moral inequality. That's the primary subject of the discourse on inequality, to understand why why there is natural inequality, to understand that this is natural. And to try and figure out so where does it go wrong? When did it cease to be an inequality that serves a common interest? Bind us together in mutual reciprocal relationships where we aid one where we aid one another, complementing for the deficiencies of our fellow men. And when did it cease to be yeah, when did it cease to be reciprocal and stu and become instead some something self-serving? And then we have a moral inequality. My interests are now my own. And so I can see the social contract later on addressing the addressing this problem, how do you find a constitutional republic which will keep the the mutual sentiment in form?

SPEAKER_00 3:41

Yeah, yeah, remedy the ills. What I think uh helps us here is to see that Russo is not simply anti-social, and this was something I was kind of trying to grapple with in the first episode. He is asking what kind of social relationship is compatible with freedom, with this kind of this this new polity we've moved out of out of the natural state and into a more organized form of community. So, how can it be compatible with freedom? The discourse that we're talking about here, the discourse on inequality, it begins by distinguishing two forms of inequality, natural or physical inequality, which includes, and these are things that we remember from discussing, because we we we said it almost word for word about Hobbes in terms of talking about some of these natural sort of differences that mean that we have an equal ability to threaten each other, sort of thing. Things like age, health, bodily strength, qualities of mind, moral or political inequality depend depends on conventions, though. It includes being richer, more honored, more powerful, or able to make others obey. That distinction matters because Rousseau is not claiming that human beings are naturally identical in every respect. His question is how limited differences become durable relations of command. At what point is one person's greater strength, skill, or good become an institution that determines another person's life? So when do these things, I guess, that when we come out of the pre-social state, because he has these sort of compared to Hobbes and also compared to a very sort of reductive form of reading Rousseau, Rousseau doesn't just say there's kind of pre-social society and then society. He kind of says there's sort of natural state, pre-social state, and an in-social state. And I guess for him, I don't I don't know if you agree with me, Jack, but for him, I suppose we realise these more natural inequalities when we're in the pre-social state in the sense that we're starting to work with other people. This could be the kind of noble savage idea, the tribes. They're starting to realize that someone's good at hunting, someone's good at building houses, and that's when we notice the natural differences, but then it's in the proper social state, which is when those inequalities are institutionalized, that certain people are worth more, better, have more, therefore, than other people. What do you think?

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Yes, indeed. So it seems to tolerate that a national inequality accrues by virtue of different tasks that become necessary to build a functioning tribal society or pre-pre-society, whatever you want to call it. So you have the people who will be going and doing woodwork, people who will be uh doing agriculture, and perhaps strength accrues. The strength of the population accrues to select jobs, and and maybe a certain ingenuity accrues elsewhere. He talks a lot about perfectibility, which is interesting. Perfectibility is the one thing that for him distinguishes us from the animals.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

He even thinks the animals have some kind of imagination, which is interesting, like sort of the ability to grasp ideas in a very and and and

Compassion, pity and Hobbes

SPEAKER_00 6:53

one of my favourite lines from the discourse on inequality is the bit about the do you remember the bit about the horse where the horse a horse will never pass over a dead body of its own kind, it will rear its legs. It's got a sort of sense of of remorse, a sense of compassion for its fellow creature. And I I don't know, it's not directly related to what we're talking about, but it always sticks with me, this idea that naturally us as beings are compassionate souls.

SPEAKER_01 7:22

Yes, this was this is I think that's worth pointing out before we continue the argument. I think it's a very important departure from Hobbes and ends up directing something very important which is lacking in Hobbes, which is like that the content of law matters. Yeah. And the way that Rousseau proposes to safeguard this is that yes, he has his sort of primary natural law of self-relation. His second one is what we might call sympathy or pity. The idea that I am moved by this this the recognition of the other in in their suffering, a move to help them, as there's a foundation for community. And so somehow we've got to keep that.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

So which is a thing we've we've I've mentioned it before, and we've done seminars and podcasts in the past on Rousseau. But I think I think if if we were to put that into context today, it would be the sort of idea that there's a small child or a baby that's you know fallen in front of a bus or something like that. And the natural inclination, I think, of most rational, compassionate human beings would be to obviously immediately go and try and get that child out of Home's way.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Well, what's interesting about Rousseau is that this is actually pre-rational. And if I understand correctly, reason grows and matures, sort of lagging behind passion, but eventually becomes more powerful and then comes to govern passion.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

I I was using rational in the sense of someone.

SPEAKER_01 8:52

What about what about a sadomasochist or someone who's like oh I like to but on the on the whole, 90% of the time, those who have their faculties if I just thought it would then I was sort of stealing the moment to talk about some of the metaphysics, to be frank with you. But uh please I just had this realization today, and I was really struck by it that yeah it reason has to mature in line with in in in order in in relation to the heart. And you actually come to a place with I think in Rousseau's view where now you are capable of making a purely rational choice, and that's the moment where you really do have the freedom to choose for the first time for yourself or for your fellow men. And so he seems to connect this. So when we we come to the the limit of our perfection in our different domains, now the only source of advantage over one another is pretense. That's what he he argues.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:54

Now I have to seem like I'm the strongest in order to get advantage. I have to seem like I'm the most intelligent, I have to seem that I have the most wealth. So this is now where reason is being used in service of self-interest, and it's now disconnected from the heart, and it's disingenuous, and it's and it's no longer a reflection of who we are.

SPEAKER_00 10:22

He

Perfectibility

SPEAKER_00 10:23

has an interest in this idea of perfectibility as well. Perfectibility sounds optimistic, but for Russo it makes but Russo makes it dangerously ambiguous. It makes language, cooperation, and culture possible. It also makes vanity, domination, and misery, as we've been saying, possible. Humanity can leave its original condition, but it cannot control every consequence of what it learns. It is the faculty which makes him at length a tyrant, both over himself and over nature. So that's from part one of the discourse on inequality. This idea of perfectibility, then, Jack, in Rousseau's version of progress, is it a warning that human development has no built-in moral direction?

SPEAKER_01 11:09

That's a good question. It seems that so long as the the the passion comes first, which is intrinsically ordered to fellow men, in Rousseau's view, it's rather radical, by the way, compared to the traditional view of passions or disorders and reason rights the passions. Now it seems that passion guides reason, and the moment reason is fully matured and sort of possesses itself, now there's a danger that I will no longer serve the interests of the heart, which is the interests of all of us, I will now serve my own interests. And it and a betrayal.

SPEAKER_00 11:50

And

Amour de soi and amour-propre

SPEAKER_00 11:51

does this come on to this idea of sort of again, forgive me for my bad French, but is it like amour soir versus amalprop? The kind of like the actual love, love in itself sort of thing. Amour soir, sort of love, or love for the s for the self in the sense of what I can do, what I can contribute, what my faculties are, etc. What I can actually achieve. And amal prop, what I am being judged to have achieved, what I am being judged to be. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

So amul amo toamen is love in itself, as you say. So it's like the later the Hegelian fierzik, amik und fysique. So it it's it's it's sort of authentic love, which seeks to serve the other, and rooted always reciprocal. Amop proper means like it's like reflexive, like myself, love of one's own. Yep. And so this is disordered, and it's for Russo, it can only come about because of a rational choice.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Yeah, exactly.

Agriculture, metallurgy and property

SPEAKER_00 12:54

And I think now we're moving on to the social contract, but I'd kind of like to just link it here because one of my favorite passages from the first discourse is this that Russo traits a sequence, a settled life, comparison, division of labor, agriculture, metallurgy, and property. These are not separate inventions in a neutral list, each increases independence. So, as we simply got the natural state, pre-social state, social state. We're building up to it here. At the same time, as this builds up, the human being identifies himself as quite content in nature. He moves into the pre-social state, he wants to be secure, moves into the social state, I want to be preferred. And there's a passage in the Discourse on Inequality where Russo says, the first man, I love this because it does sound sort of proto-Marxist, and I'm not saying that I'm a Marxist, but there is an element of it because there's also the line mankind ran willingly towards his change. But the the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying this is mine, was the real founder of civil society. And yes, for Russo, that's the moment we went wrong. We when we put the picket fence in the ground and said, This territory is mine, it's not yours, it's not our or not ours. That is when society went wrong, that we started to say this is mine, I need to protect it, and I want it because it asserts me to you. It asserts who I am to you, and we started to envisage ourselves through the mind of the other. I'll persevere just quickly because we need to get to the social contract. So this property passage is often made to sound like a single moment when everything goes wrong, but maybe Rousseau's argument's subtler, offence becomes politically decisive only when enough people recognise the claim and when institutions protect it. Property is therefore not merely an object held by an individual, it is a social relation. The rich then propose government to protect everyone from insecurity. What we're seeing here is a thinker that we've missed, but who we've slightly derided, John Locke, in terms of between Hobbes and Rousseau, perhaps this is something we can come back to in a future series about about ideas around property. But yet the settlement converts possession into legal right and makes inequality permanent. So when we get to the social state, inequality is now permanent. So is Rousseau blaming property itself or the political institutions that turn unequal holdings into unequal power? And this is where we can delve into with this question,

Born free, everywhere in chains

SPEAKER_00 15:20

Jack, that man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains. The opening of the social contract. So what is it? Is it property? Is it the political institutions of society? What does the social contract reveal about mankind?

SPEAKER_01 15:36

Great question. You reference the slavery, there, happy slaves. They you call it happy slaves because there's something unconscious about it.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

You're happy and because you're ignorant of your pre-condition. The same sentiment here, man is born free, everywhere is in chain. You'd think we would be aware of this quite scary situation we're in, but we're not. What do they mean?

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Which is

Diderot at Vincennes

SPEAKER_00 16:03

what he realized. He realized, and I said I said this in the first episode, but he realized this when he was on his way to visit his friend at the time, Denis Diderot, the encyclopedie philosoph who was composing with Delonbert, the encyclopedie, at the time, and he'd been imprisoned by the state. And as he was taking the walk out of Paris to the prison, he suddenly had this moment of realisation, and he said, or in his mind, he said, and who knows whether the confessions are accurate, but it is not Denis who is in prison, it is the rest of society that is in prison.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

Which is a fascinating thought to to have, and presumably because Diogo is free in the sense that his his will is free. It's free. I think Epicurus had a similar notion that you can you can you can chain me physically, but not my will. So it's if the will is somehow compromised by society, this is a deeper form of slavery. And for Rousseau, I guess you see that in the forms of institutions which drive us to serve ourselves

The general will

SPEAKER_01 17:06

in our own interests independently of this more common project. And you can see that in light, I think, of the developing industrial revolution. I guess Rousseau predates that slightly, but I think there is definitely much more of an emphasis on commerce, trade, primitive financial institutions, banks, stock markets. But I I guess you must also be referring to, in some fundamental sense, the the legal structure, the constitution, perhaps a criticism of certain powers invested in our our rulers, which a specific strata, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:42

A specific strata that of course he would criticize because it's not part of the general will. This is how society can solve the problems if we all operate under this general will that we all come together and deliberate and create a general will for society. Does it sound a bit Stalinist, Jack? Well, it actually sounds very Kantian. Oh, very much, yeah, very, very much. And obviously it can have an impact on Kant. And next week you will be able to hear about Kant from my fine learned friend Kant. Yes, I think indeed.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

I think it's very fitting. I was very struck by the parallels to Kant. Maybe it's worth pointing out a bit about sort of what's at stake in the social contract with regards law and duty. Yeah. He had a he had a criticism of Hobbes by recourse to force, and you could then say this about many of our societies, and especially one of the society that Russo is a contemporary of, aside from his beloved Geneva, that they they have recourse to force.

Geneva and the dignity of man

SPEAKER_00 19:01

The Geneva that has rejected him. Yes, indeed. The Geneva that burns his book.

SPEAKER_01 19:08

Right. I can't believe I just I just read yesterday the letter he wrote to preface.

unknown 19:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

I think the discourse with inequality, whichever was addressed.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

Dedicated to yeah, dedicated to Geneva. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:20

It's popping with this affection. It's like you can't believe how how much a man can idolise a state. I couldn't I I I found it quite palpable.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

I know, and you must have found it by you you must have found it quite weird in the past when I was banging on so much about how he idolized Jenny. But now you see it.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Now I see, like, wow, he this guy really yeah, spawned. So it's quite shocking. But it's because he feels that Geneva have achieved something which no other society had, which is that they really have put this general will at the forefront. What does this achieve? It actually achieves duty, it actually achieves

Rousseau and Kant

SPEAKER_01 20:06

the dignity of man. Because if you have mere force, according to Rousseau, it was Hobbes' mistake. This is also what what Kant views, I think, as the mistake of his predecessors. Yeah. The focus only on force affects only the body out of necessity, but never touches the will, never moves the will. His project is to incorporate the will, which is the heart, but then it also is is to let reason be guided by the heart. So the general will is like like the common humanity amongst us, which is directing us to reason for a collective flourishment. Flourishing. Exactly very similar to Kant's categorical imperative, which yeah, has a much more rational formulation, but really is all about a self-legislating will that can be in harmony with all the others.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

Exactly. It's still ultimately an iteration of the when it when I read the groundwork to the metaphysics and morals, I thought it was very much a kind of metaphysical iteration of the general will, and and Kant is very moved by Rousseau. There

Forced to be free?

SPEAKER_00 21:11

is an element though, and I guess this is what critics of the Enlightenment project as a whole, whether it be a critic of Kant and his kind of tribunal of reason or critic of Rousseau would be, which is that it does have slight sort of overtones of authoritarianism. You've got the line, whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. He will be forced to be free. And obviously, you know, that does have I would hate considering I've got a portrait of Rousseau on my wall, I would hate to link him to the Nazis, but obviously forced to be free. The the line above Auschwitz was work will set you free. This kind of idea of being forced to be free does have a kind of slightly dark tinge to it, but sort of like this this enlightenment project was it kind of trying to mechanize and and segment and dictate society too much. What do you think, Jack?

SPEAKER_01 22:09

Indeed, so they've always struggled with this the tolerance and democracy, the these ideals that start to proliferate are so precious that that the kind of treatment that their enemies receive in the you know in the hand of the writers is quite severe. Because yeah, it makes sense if you if you if you really do believe that the this sort of common humanity is so transparent to each other than that we experience it the same way, that there is a kind of common affection which should dictate policy.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:45

Um, you know, I mean in in I think that's correct in one sense, you know, we call in the Christian tradition we call that conscience. Of course, people are sensitive more or less to that, and the relationship between moral problems and problems of policy is not always clear. There's definitely some overlap, but when I'm trying to evaluate logistics, is that always a matter of the heart? Maybe it may well be. It may be more than we give credit for. But there is a perhaps a naive simplicity in in this formulation in the general way.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

Yeah, trying to trying to sort of bring Evelyn, prescribe it, and prescribe the law. It's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 23:28

I'm sorry. Perhaps who would benefit from a kind of tribunal where the centers can try and explain sort of how their affection would sign the cloud.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

I think Jack, we need to explore this, and it could be our first bonus episode because there is a new idea coming with Beyond the Text, which you will be able to look into if you're interested, which is that you can sign up to become a Beyond the Text Club member. So if you'd like to hear a bonus episode, and if you'd like to hear Rousseau's a bonus episode, then you can let us know by dropping us a message or an email on the site. But but more of that to come. But I realise the time that we should be getting on to other topics, which you will hear on Friday. So

Next episode and farewell

SPEAKER_00 24:15

we've seen that the second discourse shows social development producing unequal dependence. The social contract tries to replace dependence on persons with obedience to a law citizens prescribe together. But a solution works only if people can will as citizens rather than as clients, consumers, or factional partisans. That gives us our next question. Before a people can govern itself, who teaches its members how to want freedom? In episode three, we will turn to Rousseau's education, and that will encompass ideas we've seen in the social contract, in the discourse on inequality, but also integrating his works in Emile and Julie, where Rousseau tries to form free human beings through education, sentiment, and domestic community. So for now, thank you, Jack. Thank you, Sam. And we will see you on Friday. Thank you very much indeed.