How to Think Politically

by James Bernard Murphy

  The history of our species, both before and since the eighteenth century, provides depressingly little evidence to contradict Hume’s sceptical view of reason. Nor, for that matter, is there much evidence of natural human sympathy and benevolence or of the humanizing and civilizing effects of trade and commerce. On these matters, Hume’s scepticism seems to have abandoned him. He appears to have had a faith in the inherent moderation and decency of human nature that is difficult to sustain against the impressive record of human folly and cruelty. But Hume’s general outlook of healthy scepticism and intellectual humility may help to steer us away from some of the worst follies to which politics is too often prone.

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  Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Citizen

  When Rousseau arrived in Paris in 1742, he was a poor, unknown, unpublished, 30-year-old Genevan with little formal education (although he was well read), whose mother had died in childbirth and whose watchmaker father had abandoned him when he was just ten years old. By the time he died, 36 years later, Rousseau was a best-selling novelist, a very successful opera composer, the author of numerous books and essays on education, ethics, music, religion, language, politics, economics and even botany, the rival of Voltaire and one of the most famous men in Europe, with a cult following. It was a truly remarkable ascent. Before the end of the century, Rousseau’s body lay in the Pantheon in Paris, where it had been placed by the Jacobins, the most radical of the revolutionaries, as a ‘father of the French Revolution’ (immediately opposite his old nemesis Voltaire, ensuring that neither would ever rest in peace). By the twentieth century, Rousseau had been blamed for influencing (if not actually causing) Romanticism, anarchism, nationalism and even totalitarianism. He remains one of the most important, influential, divisive and widely read thinkers in the history of ideas.

  Rousseau once described himself as a ‘man of paradoxes’, which is not surprising for someone who famously claimed that it is sometimes necessary to force men to be free. He wrote a philosophical dialogue between two characters, called Rousseau and Jean-Jacques, who cannot agree about anything. His treatise on child-rearing praises maternal breast-feeding and paternal involvement with children, yet he put all five of his infant children into a foundling hospital (where most of them probably died). He claimed to have ‘the greatest aversion to revolutions’, yet he inspired the leaders of the French Revolution, such as Robespierre and Saint-Just, who hailed him as their hero. He is commonly included among the leading philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and contributed to their great project, the Encyclopédie, yet he praised ignorance and argued that the cultivation of the arts and sciences was detrimental to morality. Many of Rousseau’s most fervent and devoted admirers in the eighteenth century were women and aristocrats, yet he was deeply sexist and professed to dislike and disapprove of wealthy ‘grandees’. (‘I hate their rank, their hardness, their prejudices, their pettiness, and all their vices’, he thundered.) He was one of the most admired and mesmerizingly eloquent writers of his age, yet he had very little formal education and married an illiterate seamstress. He championed censorship, especially targeting the dramas of Molière, yet he admitted, ‘I never miss one of his performances’. Rousseau was a popular author and musician but admired ancient Sparta, which tolerated neither writing nor music. He was the most famous writer of his age, who said ‘I hate books’ and claimed that they are ‘good for nothing’.

  Rousseau, a Calvinist Protestant by birth, like Locke, and a deist by conviction, was an enemy of Catholic Christianity, yet he modelled his autobiography on the Confessions of St Augustine. Like Augustine, Rousseau’s influence on modern culture extends far beyond his political ideas. He created a whole new modern sensibility, a new way of thinking and feeling. Largely because of him, we value sincerity and authenticity more than any classical set of virtues. His doctrine of natural human goodness, which was interpreted as anti-Christian by his contemporaries because it denied original sin, led Rousseau to see social corruption as the root of all evil. As the founder of progressive education, he argued that children should be educated by nature, not spoiled by men. Instead of conforming to corrupting social conventions, he ate when he was hungry, slept when he was tired and dressed in unconventional clothes, which led many refined Parisians to denounce him as a barbarian. He spurned wealth, which he believed corrupted morals, and lived very simply. And he was the first person to climb the Alps just to enjoy the views, to the astonishment of his enlightened contemporaries in Paris, who saw it as further evidence of his lunacy.

  Rousseau’s most famous political work, The Social Contract, was immediately condemned by the Paris parlement and placed on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books, next to works by Maimonides, Hobbes, Locke and Hume. No one was surprised by this, least of all Rousseau. But he was shocked and dismayed when the book was banned in his native Geneva, which ordered it to be burned and its author arrested if he ever dared to set foot in the city again. This wounded Rousseau deeply, since he had always been a proud citizen of Geneva (he signed his books ‘Citizen of Geneva’, at least until the city authorities banned them) and claimed that he took the city’s constitution as his model. He blamed the anti-clerical Voltaire, then resident near Geneva, for whipping up opposition to him in an unholy alliance with the religious bigots who dominated the city. The Social Contract was even proscribed in relatively liberal, tolerant Amsterdam. It seemed as though all of Europe had united against Rousseau, who was forced to flee from one country to another and even considered suicide. His desperation was so great that he actually moved to England, a nation he despised. ‘I have never liked England or the English’, he wrote. Even so, the English gave Rousseau sanctuary when few others would, as they later would for Marx, for which both displayed absolutely no gratitude. Rousseau even spurned the offer of a pension from King George III, which Hume had negotiated, just as he had refused a pension from King Louis XV. He had a remarkable talent for making enemies.

  The Social Contract is Rousseau’s most enduringly popular, widely read and influential book today, although it was not so in his own lifetime. It has been continuously in print for two and a half centuries, inspiring generations of democrats and radicals as much as it has infuriated and provoked traditionalists and conservatives such as Edmund Burke, as we shall see. It is an original blend of ancient and modern elements that is difficult to classify and has vexed its interpreters since it was published in the eighteenth century. In it Rousseau sets out the general ‘principles of political right’ on which regimes should be based.

  Rousseau begins his political theory in the same place as Hobbes and Locke, with naturally selfish individuals in the hypothetical state of nature. In this he was fully modern. But like Machiavelli, whom he admired, he took his political models from antiquity because they understood best how to foster a powerful sense of public spirit in individuals who are naturally lacking it, something that Hobbes and Locke thought unnecessary to hold a polity together. They thought that rational self-interest alone would be a sufficient bond, whereas Rousseau believed that society would become a war of all against all unless its members could be made to identify their own interests with the public interest, as in ancient Sparta and republican Rome, regimes he admired above all others. Rousseau was a ‘modern with the soul of an ancient’ who half-accepted and half-rejected modernity.

  In the first chapter of The Social Contract he famously declares that ‘Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains’. Contrary to the claims of many writers (such as Voltaire), it was never Rousseau’s intention to break the bonds of political life and return us to some idyllic, pre-political state of nature. Rather, he shows how these bonds can be made legitimate so that sovereign and subject are not alienated from each other. Such alienation is the essence of despotic rule, where power is imposed by might rather than right. Rousseau gave the name ‘citizen’ to those who make the laws they are subject to, in what he regarded as the only legitimate form of politics. That is the only
way to reconcile freedom with subjection to the law, where each individual ‘obeys no one but himself, and remains as free as before’. The American Founding Fathers, such as James Madison, fundamentally mistrusted government and therefore designed a political system that was deliberately weak and limited by checks and balances. Whereas Thomas Jefferson believed that ‘the government that governs least governs best’, Rousseau set out to legitimize strong government rather than to limit it. Indeed, to limit a legitimate government would be to limit political right itself, which is contrary to justice. His objection to Thomas Hobbes is not, like Locke’s, that he defended an absolute sovereign; it is that Hobbes defended an illegitimate sovereign. That is why Locke was more congenial to the leaders of the American Revolution than was Rousseau, the inspiration of the more radical French revolutionaries.

  According to Rousseau, sovereignty should reside with the people, in the form of a ‘general will’, which ought to be the source of the law’s legitimacy. The general will is not a mere aggregation of the wills of selfish individuals. It is only formed when citizens ask themselves what is in the common good rather than their own particular, selfish good. However, Rousseau believed that, because such public-spiritedness is wholly unnatural, it must be cultivated artificially by institutions and practices that ‘turn men into citizens’. The most notorious of these is the civil religion, a religion of the state, which makes each individual ‘love his duty’ to the polity more than to himself, an idea he took from fellow republican Machiavelli. Both men believed that Christianity is completely unsuited to this, since it preaches ‘only servitude and submission’. In fact, Rousseau says that he knows ‘nothing more contrary to the social spirit’ than Christianity, and nothing so ‘favourable to tyranny’. Little wonder that The Social Contract was banned in both Calvinist Geneva and Catholic Paris.

  Another device that Rousseau says is necessary to induce naturally selfish individuals to think only of the public good is what he calls ‘the legislator’, a concept he again shared with Machiavelli. Such rare individuals invoke God to persuade people to subordinate their particular interests to the common interest. Rousseau mentions Moses as an example: he formed the divided ancient Jews into a cohesive nation with laws he claimed were derived from God.

  Despite his reputation as a naïve idealist with his head in the clouds, Rousseau was very well aware of just how unlikely it was that the political principles he set out in The Social Contract would ever be adopted under modern conditions. They are only applicable in relatively small, cohesive city-states of the kind commonly found in ancient Greece, and not the large, sophisticated nation-states of modern Europe, which he considered corrupt beyond redemption. In fact, he said the island of Corsica was the only place in modern Europe where his political doctrines might work. That is why it is very unlikely Rousseau would have endorsed the French revolutionary attempt to implement his theories, had he lived to see it, even though he correctly predicted that an ‘age of revolutions’ would soon engulf Europe.

  The alienation that Rousseau experienced from the enlightened civilization in which he was immersed appears to have become complete in the last decade of his life. So he sought to escape from the company of men entirely in an apparent effort to preserve his own integrity and virtue in an age of utter corruption. He finally concluded that there is ‘no hope of remedies’. He ended his days in total political resignation and pessimism, although he found some amount of personal contentment in communing with nature. His last work, the unfinished Reveries of a Solitary Walker, suggests that he may have come to the final conclusion that escape from civilization into rustic isolation is the only real option for the man of virtue. His identification with Socrates is best understood in terms of his own self-conception as a good man living in a wicked age, attacked and vilified because his contemporaries were blinded to his goodness by their own vice. This image is a significant part of his lasting appeal as a gadfly and social critic in the tradition of Socrates.

  It is a very grave mistake to dismiss Rousseau’s ideas as the ravings of a lunatic, as so many of his enemies and detractors have done over the centuries. He was undoubtedly an eccentric and often very difficult character, prone to bouts of paranoia, although he did have many powerful enemies who actively persecuted him. While his alienation from the world he inhabited was deeply personal, it was far more than simply a reaction to the times. The power and eloquence of his writing have inspired many generations of rebels, malcontents, misfits and outsiders who share his profound disquiet about the place of the individual in the modern age on so many levels.

  One of Rousseau’s most profound influences on modern thought was to replace the ancient vocabulary of the virtues and vices with the modern ideas of sincerity and authenticity. If we now strive to be true to ourselves, to act with integrity rather than to emulate ancient role models, then we are followers of Rousseau, for better or worse. Another of his great influences has been his very powerful and eloquent defence of the idea of popular sovereignty, that the people are the ultimate source of political legitimacy, whose will should guide the state without qualification. This populist message resonated very powerfully with ordinary people disenchanted with corrupt and self-serving elites across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, starting in the French Revolution. The recent return of populist politics and the growing anger at a system that favours the rich and powerful at the expense of the majority in an increasingly unequal society has made Rousseau a thinker whose time has come again.

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  Edmund Burke: The Counter-Revolutionary

  By the time the French Revolution erupted in the summer of 1789, Edmund Burke was 60 years old and had been a Member of the British Parliament for a quarter of a century. He had lost his previous seat in the city of Bristol after championing a number of unpopular causes that eroded his support with the small electorate there. Burke had opposed Britain’s treatment of its American colonies, had advocated a free market in corn, free trade with Ireland and Catholic emancipation (he was born, raised and educated in Ireland, the son of a Catholic mother), had campaigned for the impeachment of the corrupt governor-general of Bengal, had condemned capital punishment and had argued against unrestrained royal power and for the abolition of slavery. Obviously, Burke was no stubborn reactionary, so when the French Revolution began, his initial reaction seemed consistent with his principled advocacy of ‘liberal’ causes throughout his parliamentary career to that point. He first wrote that the events in Paris were a ‘wonderful spectacle’ whose spirit is ‘impossible not to admire’. However, it wasn’t long before Burke turned against the Revolution, and soon his opinion developed into a passionate rage against it which animates his famous denunciation in Reflections on the Revolution in France, the book for which he is still best known. At the time, most members of his own party (the Whigs) disapproved of his attack on the French Revolution, and many of his contemporaries were shocked by the vehemence of Burke’s opposition, given his long career defending unpopular liberal causes. Thomas Jefferson saw Burke’s Reflections as evidence of the ‘rottenness of his mind’. But the liberals who celebrated the events in France now look rather naïve next to Burke’s pessimism. At a remarkably early stage of the upheaval, when the Revolution was still controlled by moderates, he foresaw its eventual descent into terrorism, regicide, mass murder, anarchy and, finally, dictatorship.

  Burke was a deeply complex and even paradoxical thinker. He was an Irishman who defended English constitutionalism, a liberal who developed the most influential attack on the French Revolution, a bourgeois who defended aristocratic privilege, a harsh critic of corrupt colonial administration in India who sat in Parliament for two different ‘rotten boroughs’ in the gift of his political patrons and a Protestant defender of the historic privileges of the established Church of England who sought to rally support for the beleaguered Catholic Church in France.

  Although Burke’s Reflections is focused on the French Revolution, it als
o transcends immediate events to present and defend a more general conception of politics and society, making it one of the most important and eloquent statements of the conservative point of view ever penned. He claims that he was ‘alarmed into reflection’ by the recent upheaval in France, which had prompted him reluctantly to think about the fundamental principles that should govern political life. Philosophizing about politics is not a naturally conservative impulse, since one of its key tenets, as Burke presents it, is that general abstract principles are politically dangerous. When theory and practice mix, trouble is rarely far behind, he believed, as recent events across the English Channel showed. Since the art of government is practical rather than theoretical, it is better to be governed by traditional customs and practices that evolve gradually over time than to adjust them to ‘wild, visionary theories’ supposedly derived from reason. Political prescriptions should be assessed for their likelihood of promoting good or evil, not for their conformity to truth or falsehood, which is an appropriate standard for philosophy but not for practical politics. ‘Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or political subject’, Burke preached, but didn’t quite practise and didn’t really believe either.

  Burke did affirm some universal principles of natural justice and equity. These were the basis of his harsh condemnations of British policy in Ireland, India and America. But he rejected the idea that one could reason simply and directly from the abstract rights of man to an ideal political constitution of universal applicability, as his friend and critic Thomas Paine would do. Human knowledge of the principles of justice is always tentative and fallible, which is why we must rely on our particular customs and traditions to interpret the meaning of these abstract ideals and to guide our practices. Every society will have its own interpretations of the meaning of justice, liberty and equality. For example, Burke argued that the rights of man are already incarnated in the customary and legal rights of Englishmen dating back to Magna Carta (1215), which is why he considered the grievances of the American colonists to be legitimate, as he believed that they were based on ancient customary rights that the centralizing British king did not respect. He championed gradual and piecemeal political evolution as the best way to prevent violent revolution. ‘A state without the means to change’, he counselled, ‘is without the means of its own conservation.’ By change, Burke meant small incremental steps that tweak, refine and improve the established structure of historical practices while preserving their essential core.