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A case can be made that the two French philosophers who have had the greatest impact on contemporary politics are Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859). While Rousseau can be credited with being the philosopher most revered by the founders of the French Revolution – he was practically deified by Robespierre, who used his theory of the General Will to justify the imposition of his Reign of Terror on France – he did not survive to see his ideas put into practice. Tocqueville, on the other hand, in his Democracy in America (1835 – 1840) became an enthusiast of the American Revolution and system of government after the fact, when he visited America in the 1830s. Both Tocqueville and Burke, the father of modern conservatism, wrote accounts critical of the French Revolution: Tocqueville wrote The Ancient Regime and the French Revolution (1856) sixteen years after his work on American Democracy, while Burke wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790. But Tocqueville was not an uncritical booster of American democracy as he also warned of the dangers inherently posed to individual liberty by the American tendencies towards egalitarianism and the aggrandizement of the state. These same concerns informed his later work on the French Revolution. Still it could be said that while the French Revolution was essentially egalitarian, the American Revolution tended to be more libertarian. This was perhaps inevitable considering the differences in the social structures and political heritages of the two countries: France had a rigid class system with no real tradition of individual liberty, while American society was essentially egalitarian, with very little difference between rich and poor, as well as the fact that Americans had a deep desire to preserve traditional English liberties without the British class structure. Tocqueville maintained that in America “it is freedom that is old” and “equality is of comparatively modern date,” whereas in Europe the opposite was true, “where equality, introduced by absolute power and under the rule of kings, was already infused into the habits of nations long before freedom had entered into their thoughts” (Democracy in America, Vol. 2, p. 315). As a result, and the fact that the Revolution had swept away the “intermediate powers” exercised by the aristocracy and clergy, “the state alone seem[ed] capable of taking upon itself all the details of government, and centralization [became], as it were, the unavoidable state of the country” (Ibid.)  Thus he argued that there was an inevitable thrust on the part of democracies, particularly those that had been established by violent revolution against the traditional order, towards the centralization of power in the hands of the state. Also, as I’ve previously written (The Conservative-Libertarian Debate: An Historical View), Tocqueville believed that liberty was more fragile and less loved by the populace than equality. In other words, to destroy equality, once it’s institutionalized, is quite a laborious process, as Tocqueville recognized – “Its social conditions must be modified, its laws abolished, its opinions superseded, its habits changed” – “political liberty is more easily lost” (p. 101). And once lost, liberty was not so easily recovered.

While Tocqueville can most accurately be defined as a classical liberal, Rousseau has great appeal to all those on the left, from progressive liberals to socialists, who value egalitarianism as their primary value. Certainly, no thinker on the left except perhaps Marx, has been more influential. But Rousseau has an appeal that is broader than Marx’s scientific materialism because in his elevation of the Noble Savage and his belief that human nature is basically good until corrupted by civilization, he has a Romantic allure for contemporary environmentalists, back to nature devotees, and multiculturalists as well.

Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men was written in 1754 for a competition sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. In that discourse, Rousseau quite inaccurately according to contemporary anthropology describes man’s original condition as that of a solitary creature, in a natural state of isolation and freedom. Even procreation didn’t lead primitive man to form families, as it was merely an affair in the night that didn’t interrupt his solitude. Aristotle was more accurate in his description of man as the political animal (bios politicos), as the study of primates and tribal cultures indicate very close knit societies as a necessity of survival for those living close to the earth, and ostracism from the tribe or polis meant almost certain death. But Rousseau’s theory is not one based on empirical evidence. Alexander Gray in “Rousseau’s Form of Socialism” (Mises Daily, 9/22/09) articulates the absurdity of Rousseau’s position when he inquires about these solitary original humans: “how could a language arise, or be regarded as necessary among men who had no communication with each other, nor any occasion to have such communication?”

In the second part of his discourse, Rousseau traces the fall of man from his solitary state of natural happiness to a state of inequality. Greed and selfishness, of course, reared their ugly heads and led to the institution of private property, and lo and behold, instead of sleeping under the trees, man built shelters and formed families. Oddly enough, Rousseau traces inequality to man’s pleasures of singing and dancing around the collective campfire. Some men are better singers and dancers than others, and hence arises the first steps towards inequality:

Each one began to consider the rest, and to wish to be considered in turn; and thus a value came to be attached to public esteem. Whoever sang or danced best, whoever was the handsomest, the strongest, the most dexterous, or the most eloquent, came to be of most consideration; and this was the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice.

Gray summarizes Rousseau’s thesis in the Discourse as follows:

Men may be equal and happy, so long as they never meet, so long as no one needs the assistance of another; but from the moment when they cease to be solitaire, from the moment when they begin to live together, help each other, do things together, inequality enters, and from Rousseau’s point of view the rest of history is a hastening descent.

But, as Gray continues, it is only “possible to speak of the equality of men, if there is no possibility of comparison”:

[T]he whole doctrine of equality in the literal sense breaks down the moment you bring men together and inevitably are forced to compare them, not merely in their capabilities for singing and dancing, as in Rousseau’s rather puerile example, but up and down the whole range of human equipment. . . .

Also, of course, the admitted inequality of man does not really affect that deeper question as to whether the differences in human endowment furnish grounds for existing differences in rights and rewards.

Unlike Rousseau, Tocqueville viewed equality as problematic at best, as he believed that equality unchecked would inevitably lead to despotism:

The foremost or indeed the sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle. (Democracy in America, Vol. 2, p. 319 – 20)

Tocqueville concluded that free institutions were the best curative for the evils of excessive equality: “But I contend that in order to combat the evils which equality may produce, there is only one effectual remedy: namely, political freedom” (Ibid., pp. 112 – 13). Rousseau, however, had a quite different conception of freedom and liberty, in which freedom is defined as acquiescence to the General Will, a view that is reminiscent of contemporary leftist liberation theory, in which the individual is only free when he submits to the will of the people. But the General Will was not merely a consensus or majority opinion of the demos. Rather it was believed to be the enlightened view of the revolutionary vanguard, represented by men such as Rousseau and his follower Robespierre, whose thinking was most in-line with egalitarian philosophy. As such, Robespierre could claim that the masses needed to be tutored by the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety until they too had been transformed into enlightened citizens whose personal wills coincided with the general will. And as J. L. Talmon has written, “To become a reality [the General Will] must be willed by the people. If the people does not will it, it must be made to will it, for the general will is latent in the people’s will” (The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, 1952, p. 43). Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract (Book I, Chapter VII, “The Sovereign”):

In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal dependence. (p. 22)

The citizen in Rousseau’s ideal republic “will be forced to be free.” Thus, Rousseau’s thought can be understood as leading inevitably to the egalitarian despotism (or totalitarian democracy, in Talmon’s terms) that Tocqueville warned of.

One of the most essential differences between Rousseau and Tocqueville was their stance towards the individual, society, and the state. Unlike modern libertarians, Tocqueville was as skeptical of individualism as he was of equality, mostly because he believed that in the former case it would leave the individual vulnerable and isolated from public life. In criticizing American “individualism,” Tocqueville wrote: “individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life,” until eventually “it attacks and destroys all others, and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness” (Democracy in America, Vol. 2, p. 104). He believed that individualism would lead “each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows, and to draw apart with his family and his friends,” and thus, leaving “society at large to itself” (Ibid.). The remedy for social isolation was, according to Tocqueville, the American tendency to form “voluntary associations.” These are what conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet has called “intermediate associations,” which could act as buffers of local authority between the individual and the nation state: these associations included family, church, neighborhood groups, clubs, and professional associations, amongst others. Because of the rigid class structure in ancient regime France, the intermediate structures provided by church and aristocracy were not trusted by the revolutionaries, and once empowered, all power tended to coalesce in the hands of the state. For Rousseau and his followers, society (the old regime) was corrupt and evil, whereas the state, representing the General Will of the people, embodied all that was good and virtuous. They believed that intermediate associations were divisive, and would dilute the unanimity of allegiance they believed should reside in the state. But freed of all allegiances to traditional identities and associations, the individual has no recourse to the absolute tyranny of the state. (And unlike the United States, France did not have a federalist system, which tends to decentralize and diffuse political power.) Rousseau and his fellow travelers were entirely too optimistic about human nature and political power, exemplified by their belief that virtue could ever be embodied in the latter, as well as their assumption that the state could and should be entrusted with remolding society and human nature to correspond with their vision of the virtuous society and individual. The problem with Rousseau’s conception of human nature is that he leaves no room for human frailty or freedom, and for the autonomous self-directed evolution of individuals and societies. He wants to play god and design the perfect society and human being, as is abundantly clear in the following quote from The Social Contract (Book II, Chapter VII, “The Legislator”):

He who dares to undertake the making of a people’s institutions ought to feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it; and of substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence nature has conferred on us all. He must, in a word, take away from man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him, and incapable of being made use of without the help of other men. The more completely these natural resources are annihilated, the greater and the more lasting are those which he acquires, and the more stable and perfect the new institutions; so that if each citizen is nothing and can do nothing without the rest, and the resources acquired by the whole are equal or superior to the aggregate of the resources of all the individuals, it may be said that legislation is at the highest possible point of perfection. (p. 42)

Unfortunately, there are many parallels between Rousseau’s philosophy and the politics of the Obama administration. Like Rousseau, Obama feels that he has the right and the intelligence to transform American society into his own ideal. And like Rousseau, it appears that Obama’s strategy is also to annihilate the natural resources of the American people, so that they too will be dependent upon “the resources acquired by the whole,” that is the resources acquired by the state and then redistributed to a dependent citizenry in our new Chicago-style spoils system. This is the change “we the people” are supposed to believe in!

Possibly Related Posts:

• Libertarianism: Left or Right?
• Commentary: The Culture of Corruption
• George Orwell’s “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”

Tags: Egalitarianism, Obama, Political philosophy, Rousseau, Tocqueville

This entry was posted by Mark Amagi on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 5:00 PM and is filed under Political philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.