Abstract
This chapter offers a distinct interpretation of Rousseau with an emphasis on the epistemic significance he attributed to political disagreement. It is this insight which connects his political philosophy with the conciliatory conception of democracy put forward in this book. The chapter elucidates the background assumptions of Rousseau’s views and his famous notion of the general will. It then goes on to explain the complex relations between the general will, citizens’ judgements, and democratic decision procedures. Finally, the chapter interprets the Rousseauian conception of sovereignty as grounded in the equal epistemic and normative authority of citizens.
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Notes
- 1.
During the French Revolution, the Jacobin leaders Marat, Saint-Just, and Robespierre publicly extolled Rousseau’s teachings or, more to the point, a radically distorted version of them.
- 2.
Fortunately, a number of excellent books discussing these issues in more detail and broader scope have been published recently. In particular, I refer the reader to Cohen (2010) and Neuhouser (2008). These authors have rehabilitated and explored Rousseau at unprecedented depth for the English-speaking world. For the German-speaking context, see the equally excellent Fetscher (1975) and Herb (1989).
- 3.
The objective to tease out what connects rather than what disconnects Rousseau from contemporary political thought might serve as a justification for not engaging with the indeed radical criticisms, misunderstandings, and misappropriations to which Rousseau’s oeuvre has so often been subjected. See Cassirer (1963), Durkheim (1960), and Bloom (1997) and the critique of their views in Cohen (2010): pp. 34ff.
- 4.
Freeman (2007): p. 22.
- 5.
- 6.
Cf. Waldron (1987).
- 7.
- 8.
Cf. Rawls (1996): pp. 29ff.
- 9.
This does not preclude any public acknowledgment of differences. The state can very well reward citizens for their merit. However, the attainment of these public honors must be possible for all. Furthermore, the relevant type of merit must be such that it strengthens the state and hence promotes the shared interests of all citizens. Rousseau is adamant, though, that a certain type of privileges cannot be awarded to anyone, namely those which place a person or group above the law (PE, 20).
- 10.
Quoted after Cohen (2010): p. 42.
- 11.
However, Rousseau states elsewhere that “[f]or a will to be general, it is not always necessary that it be unanimous, but it is necessary that all votes be counted; any formal exclusion destroys generality” (SC, II.2.1, fn). We shall later see, however, that his reasons for believing thus are different from the ones presently under discussion.
- 12.
In addition, Rousseau argues that the existence of enforceable rules is a necessary precondition for any rule, including the law of nature, to become morally binding. His reasoning is that the demand to comply with rules is justified if and only if the expectation is justified that compliance does not bring about disadvantages that are owed to the non-compliance of others. The public proclamation of rules by the state and a state capable of enforcing them are thus preconditions for citizens to justifiably be subject to any such demand. In this sense, the existence of laws and the state is prior to morality.
- 13.
This is owed to the fact that law applies to all and does not attend to particulars. These formal characteristics of law can only secure justice, however, when there is a sufficient degree of equality of circumstances so that law, in spite of its generality, cannot serve the interests of a class of privileged citizens who tailor the laws to their particular interests. If the condition of sufficient equality of circumstances is not met, legal equality “is only apparent and illusory; it serves only to maintain the poor in his misery and the rich in his usurpation” (SC, I.9.8 fn.; see also PE, 34–35). This demand of a more substantive equality among citizens is based on their interest to preserve their freedom defined as independence from the will of others. Hence, freedom is the basic value and a sufficient degree of equality of circumstances a means to secure it.
- 14.
In more abstract terms, reciprocity of advantage denotes the idea that social institutions advance the interests of citizens according to an appropriate benchmark of equality.
- 15.
In a typical move, Rousseau first seemingly grants religious premises only to then refute them decisively.
- 16.
Rousseau would use the word republican instead of democratic (SC, II.6.9).
- 17.
Some have interpreted Rousseau as advocating a Condorcet-type theory which holds that if the reliability of individual reasoners surpasses the value of 0.5, the aggregation of their votes according to majority rule when given a binary choice results in a result which is almost certainly correct; cf. Grofman and Feld (1988). Jeremy Waldron, on the other hand, suggests that it is unlikely that Condorcet influenced Rousseau’s thinking on this point; cf. Waldron et al. (1989).
- 18.
Rousseau’s cognitive conception of voting stands therefore in opposition to minimal conceptions of democracy which conceive voting as the expression of the interests of individuals (see, e.g., Schumpeter ([1943] 2003)) and Downs (1957) both of whom I discuss in Chap. 5). If they were to vote according to their private interests, the outcome would reflect what Rousseau calls the will of all (la volonté de tous), which contrasts sharply with the general will (la volonté générale).
- 19.
I will come back to the epistemic significance of the fact that citizens arrived at judgments that figure in political disagreement independently in Chap. 3 where I discuss what I call the independent reasoning condition. This is a different sense in which a no faction condition holds for democratic procedures to unfold their epistemic potential.
- 20.
Recall James Madison’s definition of a faction: “By a faction I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community” (The Federalist Papers No. 10, in: Hamilton et al. 2003: p. 123). Madison thought the only way to solve the problem of factions is to mitigate their influence on the political order of society. Rousseau took a different path and stressed homogeneity and equality of circumstance to eradicate the causes of the formation of factions.
- 21.
Rousseau criticizes the influence of demagogues who are not sincere in their public opinions: “Thus do the most corrupt men invariably render some sort of homage to the public faith; this […] is how even brigands, the enemies of virtue in the large society, worship its semblance in their dens” (PE, 17).
- 22.
My interpretation expands on Iring Fetscher’s; cf. Fetscher (1975): p. 128f.
- 23.
This reasoning, which draws on the precarious epistemic status of moral reasoners, furthermore reappears in the arguments leading up to the conciliatory conception of democracy (see Chap. 3). It is another important link between Rousseau’s democratic theory and the arguments I shall make in these chapters.
- 24.
Thus interpreted, the procedure would display a tendency to avoid false positives at the cost of a correlated tendency to produce false negatives; cf. Gaus (2008).
- 25.
- 26.
Apparently, Rousseau thought that false negatives, that is, proposals which are expressions of the general will but are not passed into law, do not interfere with the freedom of citizens, or that this is at least less worrysome.
- 27.
This epistemic constraint provides a further reason for the form of the general will. Although, this reason certainly does not feature prominently in Rousseau’s arguments.
- 28.
I might only note here that I believe that Rousseau is mistaken in his criticism of representative institutions even according to his own assumptions. We have already learned that the general will is the constant will of the people, that is, what they would will if they had an enlightened understanding of their fundamental, shared interests and the means to promote them. If we assume that representative institutions have epistemic advantages over the belief-forming process of individual citizens would lack, we can see that the counterfactual test for the will of the people, their general will, leads us to endorse these institutions. Representatives might have a better understanding of the means to promote the fundamental, shared interests of citizens than they do themselves. Epistemic benefits of representative institutions arise from the discussions in legislative assemblies among representatives of different groups or by the manifold ways in which political parties take expert knowledge into account in their formulation of proposals of public policy and institutional reform (see Chap. 3; The Argument from Institutional Expertise; also Chap. 6; The Fundamental Role of Political Parties).
- 29.
Charles Beitz (1989) employs the term “complex legitimacy” to describe such conceptions of legitimacy.
- 30.
This thought already points to Habermas’s thesis of the co-originality of human rights and the rights of citizens to exercise their political autonomy. Habermas describes the former as enabling conditions for the exercise of political autonomy through the medium of law; cf. Habermas (1996): Chap. 3.1 and Habermas (1998): Chap. 10.
- 31.
The lawgiver, it should be noted, enters the picture not only as an external source of authority. Rousseau was deeply pessimistic about the prospect of reaching the harmonious social and political circumstances outlined in his various works. He thought that the corruption of the human mind in the societies of his time was an almost insurmountable obstacle on the way to a social world in which everybody could live according to their true nature and unfold their potential for virtue. He was thus forced to look for an outside force of intervention, a deus ex machina, to turn the ship around and set humankind on the path to an existence in harmony with its true nature. This figure is the lawgiver. It is the rare wise statesman who has gained deeper insights into these matters and who, when circumstances are right, takes the opportunity to reform the social and political institutions of their society (SC, II.7.1). This top-down transformation of society affects the psyche of citizens, making them more virtuous, capable of recognizing their true interests and reliably acting on them, and providing the motivational reinforcements of love of fatherland and a civil religion (SC, II.7.3). This is the political function of the lawgiver.
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Ebeling, M. (2017). Rousseau’s Insight. In: Conciliatory Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57743-6_1
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