Rousseau and Weber

J.G. Merguior

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135032258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Max Weber, central thinkers to the discussion of political legitimacy, represent two very different stages and forms of social theory: early modern political philosophy and classical sociology. In these studies, Dr Merquior describes and assesses their individual contributions to the understanding of the concept of political legitimacy.

Dr Merquior compares Rousseau and Weber to a handful of other major theorists and highlights the contemporary prospects of the alternatives between democratic participation and bureaucratizm.

This book was first published in 1980.

Part One

Rousseau’s Political Philosophy

1 Rousseau’s Theory of Political Legitimacy: The General will

If we take the deepening and expansion of the critical reflection on legitimacy issues as criteria for gauging the strength with which social theory, in the modern sense, faced the subject (and, to a large extent, identified itself with this task), then the greatest individual thinker to emerge, until at least the mid-nineteenth century, is Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). No other social theorist of his time at once sharpened and unfolded the critical perspective on the forms and dimensions of validity in society; in none was the social criticism which animated the Enlightenment at the same time more radical and more comprehensive.

Rousseau is at the root of deep changes in western ideas about standards of legitimacy in at least four areas: political thought, religious sentiment, education and literature. But we shall refer only in passing to his tremendous importance in religion, pedagogy and letters; for lack of space and for the sake of cogency, we shall concentrate on his redefinition of the basis of political legitimacy.

However, the best known among the premises of his political theory is an assumption clearly central to his views in education and ‘natural religion’ as much as in politics: the postulate of the natural goodness of man. The idea most usually associated with the name of Rousseau is his epoch-making claim that so much of what had been regarded, in the worst side of man’s predicament, as inherently human was in reality but the product of society.

For Rousseau, evil was not a native blemish in man; it had sprung from the degeneration of social life. Moralists had relentlessly stated that unhappiness was a consequence of vice. Rousseau wanted to show that vice is a consequence of unhappiness, and that unhappiness has social causes.¹ Plato held that contact with the body stains the soul; Rousseau, who significantly cites the Platonic myth of the soul’s fall from purity in the preface of the Discourse on Inequality, replaces ‘body’ by ‘society’. The ‘great principle’ of all his writings, said he at the outset of Emile ou de l’éducation, was just this: that nature made man good and happy, yet society depraved him and made him wretched.

Rousseau’s real concern was not so much the assertion of man’s congenital goodness as the denial of his intrinsic perversity. As such, it amounted, as is well known, to a rejection of Hobbes’s view of the human condition.² Not that eighteenth-century social theory waited for Rousseau to refute the gloomy anthropology of Leviathan: the first book of The Spirit of the Laws (an influential work, like Hobbes’s, with which Rousseau was more than conversant) already discarded the idea of man’s natural aggressiveness and endeavoured to show that it was a social, rather than human, phenomenon.

But Rousseau went far beyond Montesquieu’s sober qualifications. Using his outstanding rhetorical skill, he built an impressive array of sweeping indictments of civilization, accusing the whole course of history of having betrayed justice and happiness. As he saw it, equality among men had been destroyed by the very pristine forms of the division of labour and private property. Since time immemorial, mastery of nature had been paid for with the bitter seeds of disquiet and oppression.

‘It was iron and corn which first civilized men, and ruined humanity.’ What was until so recently – until the coming of rabid conservationism – celebrated as ‘the neolithic revolution’ – Rousseau cursed as the original sin. So, the same man who removed the problem of evil from religion into politics³ also drew a powerful interpretation of history as a kind of lay Fall.

Rousseau was no crude primitivist.⁴ The idea of the ‘noble savage’ living in an utterly blissful ‘state of nature’ was a fable convenue of his time, but he took pains to warn that natural man, although not a bad fellow, was not a full moral being. Morality, as language, presupposes for Rousseau life in society. Rousseau’s Arcadia, his image of mankind’s golden age, did not coincide, for that matter, with any natural state, but rather with ‘the youth of the world’, the first stage in the evolution of society. At any rate, as the preface to the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality peremptorily asserts, the state of nature is only a ‘hypothesis’, a conceptual device, a foil and yardstick which enables us ‘to form a proper judgment of our present state’ and measure the extent of mankind’s depravation.

In this hypothetical Rousseauian state of nature man is neither moral nor immoral, but rather amoral (provided we cleanse the term of its original Wildean flippancy). It was Locke, and not Rousseau, who fancied that natural man lived in a perfect moral condition, and thought man capable of achieving humanity before entering social relationships. It was the Lockean Condillac who stressed that biological (as distinct from social) man already contains within himself all of his species’ perfectibility. For Rousseau, perfectibility, besides not being, as the Enlightenment was inclined to believe, automatic, is indissolubly linked to sociability. Thus the Rousseauian politicization of the problem of theodicy goes hand in hand with a veritable socialization of the idea of morality.

He therefore regarded justice, as much as evil, as something essentially social. And that is why Rousseau, always keen on paradoxes, found himself facing a very big one: he had held society responsible for inequality and injustice, and yet he also stated that only by social means could man ever get rid of such evils. In short, he contended that society alone can undo what society did.

Rousseau in fact set out to wrestle with a thorny problem: how can civilized man recover the goodness and happiness of natural man, given that a return to the innocence and happiness of natural life is not only inconceivable but, from the viewpoint of morality, even undesirable, since only social man possesses, despite his present profligacy, the privilege of moral sense?

His solution was two-fold: it lay in the call of the inner voice, and in the reliance on the general will. The inner voice was a kind of higher instinct, an instinctive ethicity springing pure and uncorrupted from the heart of man. As stated by the Savoyard Vicar, whose celebrated ‘profession of faith’ is inbuilt in Emile, ‘conscience is an innate principle of justice and virtue, whereby we judge our own or other men’s actions good or evil’. Heeding the commandments of this spontaneous moral sense, man in society can overcome the faults of history. Such a concept looms as large in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality as in Emile, but it also plays a role, as will be seen, in his political writings. ‘The idea that man must be perfected by reason in accordance with his nature runs through all of Rousseau’s work.’⁵

Listening to his inner voice, man can reprieve himself from the wicked oppression of society. Nevertheless, men, as a whole, cannot. Societies, or at least some societies, can only be put right by acting in accordance with a collective voice of reason, which is political and not just moral. It is this inner voice writ large, and politicized, that Rousseau calls, in the Social Contract, the ‘general will’.

The aim of the Social Contract is to show what can lend legitimacy to the social order (bk I, ch. I). ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.’ ‘How did such a change happen?’ asks Rousseau at once. Then, after quickly saying that he does not know (in point of fact, the explanation had been precisely the subject matter of the Discourse on Inequality), he faces to the central issue of the book: ‘what can make such a change legitimate?’ What can legitimize this fateful deviance from the state of nature? This question he believes he can answer, by means of a new theory of the social contract.

But why must it be a social contract theory? Because, explains Rousseau (in ch. V of the first draft of Du Contrat social, the so- called Geneva manuscript; and in bk I, chs II-IV of the final version of the same treatise), all other current explanations of the social bond rest on ‘false notions’. Such unsatisfactory explanations attribute the origin of the social order, and hence of political compliance, to one of four things: either they see political rule as an extension of ‘natural’, i.e. parental, authority, or as a rightful claim of the wealthy, or as the product of conquest (might is right), or as the result of legitimation of usurpation by time (‘prescription’ derived from lengthy ‘tacit consent’). Now, in the eyes of Rousseau, none of these claims proves able to justify political obedience. Neither time nor nature, force nor economic power engenders a genuine right and a lawful obligation. Therefore the source of all legitimate authority must be elsewhere – it must reside in a free covenant, for only this can have been dictated, not by fear merely disguised as voluntary compliance, but by the sense of ‘common interest’.

The goal could not be stated more clearly: it is the justification of a political order, the reasoned establishment of a principle of legitimacy. Which amounts to nothing less than ‘to found the state upon its basis’ (bk IV, ch. IX).

Rousseau’s position in the history of ideas about legitimacy stems exactly from his particular way of outlining such foundations. Its rationale comes down to the following. The just society, thought Rousseau, must be so built that its members may dispense with any resorting to ‘natural rights’ against the iniquity of positive law. In other words, its actual law itself ought to conform with the dictates of justice. Now laws in the elaboration of which all citizens would take part could in principle merge positive with rational legislation, since the product of such free and egalitarian law-making would most likely embody the common interest, which is justice. The ‘general will’ is precisely the common interest ascertained in free and egalitarian law-making. That makes it the legitimate aim, as well as the result, of a social contract. The general will is the natural telos of the social covenant.

Note the parallel between the general will and the inner voice of freedom and morality. The inner voice of natural reason called for liberty. In bridging the gap between positive law and natural right, the social contract as general will also works for freedom and equality – a state which in Rousseau is always the equivalent of freedom from dependence and oppression.

But there is also a more down-to-earth bent in Rousseau’s reasoning. Every past or extant political rule, he thinks, presupposes a previous social pact. ‘If, as Grotius said, a people may give itself to a king, then it was already a people before it gave itself.’ Consequently, before examining any act of submission, one must scrutinize ‘the act whereby a people is a people’. Such a bond, prior to any other, harbours the ‘true foundations of society’ (bk I, ch. V).

This line of argument seems more down-to-earth than the rationale of justice and freedom above in that it does not resort to any visible ethical imperative, but only to a ‘logical’ one. I do not mean these approaches are in any way contradictory one with the other; I just want to stress – for reasons that will be manifest later on – that they are quite distinct, and that Rousseau uses the second, or logical, kind of justification as often as the first.

As a matter of fact, in most of the Social Contract, one may even say that the prevalent approach, despite dramatized moral connotations such as the famous hyperbolic antithesis (‘l’homme est né libre …’) at the overture of its first chapter, tends to avoid downright metaphysical flights.

A good instance of this propensity can be found in the crucial chapter on the social pact proper (bk I, ch. VI), where the social contract is defined by the concept of general will. The strength and freedom of the individual, says Rousseau, are the prime instruments of his ability to survive. How can he, as he becomes a member of an all-demanding social covenant, surrender them to society without doing harm to himself?

The answer to this question lies in the idea of ‘a form of association that will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and the goods of each associate, and in which everyone, while uniting himself with all, still obeys himself alone and remains as free as before’ (bk I, ch. VI). Have we not indeed seen that the prime cause of the social bond was the general realization by men of their ‘common interest’? To a quite utilitarian question, a perfectly utilitarian answer.

The social pact as general will constitutes such a form of useful association. As for sovereignty, it is but the exercise of the general will so conceived (bk II, ch. I). Hence the collective nature of the sovereign, ‘the people’, that is, the assembly of all the members of the social bond; and hence the inalienable character of sovereignty, which, being a will in action, cannot possibly be transferred.

Still more important, here also lies the reason why the popular sovereignty has limits, as expressly stated in bk II, ch. IV. No act of sovereignty can lawfully command anything harmful to the essential equality of rights and duties in which the members of the social contract united; no particular interest may ever be legitimized as such by the general will. All the sovereign people’s acts are to be performed, not in the spirit of a convention between superiors and inferiors, but in the spirit of an agreement between the body and each of its members.

In book III, Rousseau brings his theory of popular sovereignty to bear upon the problem of government. Sovereignty and government are to the body politic what will and strength are to the physical body. Sovereignty is the law-making will; government, the force that executes its commands. As such, government is for Rousseau something definitely far from sacred. Not deriving, unlike sovereignty, from the social contract (bk III, ch. XVI), it can and must be legitimate, but can never, by definition, be a genuine source of legitimacy.

But Rousseau freely acknowledges the need for government. Why? Because he admits the practical impossibility of assigning to the entire body politic (even in his small favourite political model, the city-state) the performance of acts of necessity geared to particulars, and not, as laws must be, to the establishing of general norms. Moreover, combining his awareness of the indispensability of governmental mediation with a Montesquieu-like concern with the effects of social volume, Rousseau draws a very interesting picture of the relationship between the respective power of sovereignty and government – or, as we would say, of people and state (bk III, ch. II). His main conclusion is that the larger the population, the more concentrated should be the power of the government, if it is to carry out its tasks. Large societies make the controlling exercise of the general will in popular assemblies normally difficult; on the other hand, increase in the number of magistrates weakens the government by excessively dividing it. As less participant citizens tend to behave as less docile subjects, governments in big societies are prompted to use repression, which in turn implies greater centralization of power. As a result, sovereignty – the general will – falls a prey to increasing usurpation.

Rousseau traces a dialectic between sovereignty and government, or better still, between legitimacy and power – the weaker the government, the closer is the state to the general will. He is very careful to make clear that what he says about the logic of power concentration has nothing to do with the problem of legitimacy.⁶ That is why, in his Letters from the Mountain (I, 6) he asserts that ‘the best kind of government is aristocratic’, whereas ‘the worst kind of sovereignty is aristocratic’ too. There is no paradox here, since sovereignty and government are quite different things, and the first alone embodies legitimacy. As far as the latter is concerned, Rousseau lays down a very transparent rule: the stronger the government, the more often must the sovereign convene (bk III, ch. XIII).

As we consider his classification of political regimes, we find further evidence of this tendency – a basic thrust in the Social Contract – to make political legitimacy denote democratic rule. Unlike Montesquieu’s, Rousseau’s three types of government do not depart from the Aristotelian tradition: he sticks to democracy, aristocracy and monarchy (bk III, ch. II...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: the problem of legitimacy in social theory
• Part one: Rousseau’s political Philosophy
• Part two: Weber’s Sociology of Legitimacy
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of subjects
• Index of authorities