Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes in his seminal discourses on the Origin of Society that “the origin of society and of law... gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich [and] irretrievably destroyed natural liberty.” Is he right? Perhaps following through his own arguments to its logical conclusion, he is wrong: the origin of society and law gave new fetters to both the rich and the poor, and destroyed natural liberty for all.
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| Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
If Rousseau says that natural liberty was destroyed, then by implication, Rousseau is saying that man had natural freedom even before the establishment of society and law. In other words, at the state of nature, man (or savage man as Rousseau calls him) is naturally free. The reason why savage man possesses natural freedom is because savage man began with two fundamental faculties: pity and self-preservation. According to Hobbes, self-preservation alone makes man inherently evil as man will not mind interfering with another man’s attempt for self-preservation. However, Rousseau’s addition of pity prevents man from doing just that. These two fundamental faculties work together to make man naturally good whilst still enabling him to be concerned with his self-preservation. Self-preservation ensures his survival. Pity ensures the survival of others. In the state of nature, pity is the only law that is needed for men to coexist: “it is this pity which, in a state of nature, takes the place of laws, manners, virtue…” (Rousseau, p.108) This means that in this state of nature, no other law needs to be established by man for man to coexist. Therefore, man is naturally free. In fact, all man is naturally free according to Rousseau. The weak is as free as the strong because natural inequality is not significant in Rousseau’s state of nature.
But, as Rousseau adds, this natural freedom does not last – man will transition from the state of nature to the state of society and in the process will lose natural freedom. A third fundamental faculty that Rousseau defines, which is the faculty of perfectibility (the faculty for improvement), gives rise to this transition. Initially, man began with only three basic needs: hunger, rest, and sex. When man experiences new pleasures, his faculty of perfectibility aggrandizes his basic needs. He discovers new pleasures so now he becomes dependent on them and therefore obtains new needs or passions. These new passions engender reason because now man has needs that require thinking to satisfy them. Rousseau suggests that external factors, such as natural disasters or what Rousseau calls “difficulties”, draw men together, forcing them to communicate and work together for self-preservation. It is at this moment, this division of labor which comes from the collaboration of man, that people become dependent on each other, and men begins to see the presence of natural inequalities when they see one outperforming another in this social environment: “naturally inequality unfolds itself with that arising from men’s combining.” (Rousseau p.122) And it is at this moment that the next stage of the transition from the state of nature to the state of society takes place with the advent of amour propre.
This proximity of man when combined with their ability to reason creates the concept of amour propre, a kind of self-awareness where one defines oneself in relation to others so that one’s public appearance is the definition of oneself, or in Rousseau’s terms, “the petulant activity of egoism (amour propre) ” (Rousseau, p.271). Amour propre tips the balance between self-preservation and pity. It burgeons self-preservation by amassing more needs, and degenerates pity by emphasizing self-love. Before amour propre came into prominence, self-preservation was only confined to man’s desire to meet his three basic needs, but with the presence of amour propre, man has significantly more needs, all of which have to do with being better than someone else. What amour propre ultimately does is make it necessary for one man to exert his superiority over another. In the state of nature, that is a state without amour propre, for a man to preserve himself, it is not necessary for one man to interfere with another man’s attempt for self-preservation. But with amour propre, superiority over another is part of self-preservation so it is necessary for such an interference to occur. (Let it be clear that this does not mean that one man must murder another to survive; it simply means that one man must cause the misery of another in order to satisfy his self-love, his newly acquired need.) Natural freedom is therefore destroyed because man is not free to do as he pleases as he is bounded by the exertion of superiority by others.
Even up until now, the transition from state of nature to state of society is still rudimentary. It is only complete with the introduction of property, which Rousseau defines as the thing that man believes he has the right to because he applied his labor to it. The concept of property means that there is another source of inequality other than natural inequality. Hence the beginning of moral inequality. It is not that it is unfair that one gets more property when one works hard; Rousseau argues that the growth of inequality is mainly derived from the methodology of property distribution (e.g. property inheritance). Inequality, the thing that creates the rich and the poor, will not exist if the concept of property did not exist.
With property comes the birth of society. The impact of amour propre in a premature society is that men feel compelled to dominate other men. The irony is, as Rousseau pointed out, that the master is bound to the slave just the same as slave to master. It all comes back to Rousseau’s concept of mutual dependence. Rousseau describes the slave and master in society as being the rich and weak (or poor). He also illustrates that the rich’s attempt in domination can result in a conflict. This conflict is not like that between men in the state of nature. In the state of nature, any conflict was to do with self-preservation. In the state of society, conflict is more to do with property and social status.
This potential conflict is the harbinger of the transition from an early society to a political society. Rousseau states that a contract proposed by the rich to form political societies would be introduced in order to prevent this conflict. This so-called agreement between the rich and the weak is actually a trick played by the rich to legitimize power over the poor. In other words, the poor agrees to the creation of political society because they believe that it will ensure their self-preservation and liberty. This is the moment where Rousseau is correct to assert that the “origin of society and law… gave new fetters to the weak”.
But it also gave new fetters to the rich. Rousseau says that the rich created the laws to trick the poor into submission, but why wouldn’t the poor expect the rich to follow the laws as well? After all, Rousseau did argue that man does not have a natural disposition for servitude as it is “an offense against both nature and reason” (Rousseau, p.130). Yes, he did assert that they gave up their freedom because they lost their understanding of freedom: “[Politicians] attribute to men a natural inclination to slavery… [without] reflecting it is with liberty… the taste for which is lost when they are lost.” (Rousseau, p.128) But this assumes the worst from man. Furthermore, Rousseau goes to great lengths to show that “it would be hard matter to prove the validity of a contract which was only binding on one side” (Rousseau, p.129), which in this context means that the rich gets everything and the weak gets nothing. This only serves to show that some “fetters” have to be applied to the rich as well as the weak. What is left in Rousseau’s argument is one point negating another.
To give Rousseau the benefit of the doubt, suppose that he is right, that the weak simply gave up their freedom, that the laws established by the rich only applied to the weak, that these laws legitimized the rich’s power over the weak and thereby giving the rich “new forces”. Even then, to say that the origin of society and laws gave new forces to the rich without giving them any fetters is contradictory to Rousseau’s very own notion of mutual dependence between slave and master. Rousseau says that the continuous release of laws is a way to stabilize the inequality between the rich and weak. Now they have to continually attempt to stabilize the inequality through the passing of laws. Hence, the rich have a new fear, the fear of a revolution. This new fear is the source of their new fetters. The origin of society and law created these new fetters for the rich just as it did for the poor.
Rousseau writes that “the origin of society and of law... gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich [and] irretrievably destroyed natural liberty.” He should have written that “the origin of society and law gave new fetters to both the rich and the poor.” It all comes back to his assertion that there is a mutual dependence between slave and master, strong and weak, rich and poor.
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