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2 Society as a Basic Fact T here is no doubt that human beings can imagine a humanly livable state of nature. But it cannot be the sort of nature that is the negative of society. Rousseau’s characterization of the state of nature as a realm of necessity that excludes all that being human requires envisions only nonhuman creatures—“stupid and limited” (1978b, 56)—unable to reach beyond their biological urges and incapable of forming ideas about their own situation and about the possibility of society that can support an intention to enter into a selftransforming association with other such creatures. Indeed, there could be an issue only for social beings able to imagine a substantial existence associated with their own negation. Since that is beyond their capacity, the notion of such an existence cannot be intelligible to them. If the claim that the social contract arises from within a state of nature is crucial to Rousseau’s argument, it is difficult to see how the argument can be sustained. It seems that questions about the existence and value of society, like those about the existence and value of the universe, cannot be answered, which suggests that they are questions only in the purely grammatical sense of the term. We might conclude, then, that the narrative of the social contract, which begins with what society cannot be, can persuade but cannot convince. In this sense, it may be a rhetorically “useful fiction,” but that is not enough to show why it might have been a necessary part of Rousseau’s argument. If its usefulness is aimed at doing no more than persuading readers that the hypothesis of the social contract is true even though they are given no logical or fact-based account of its possibility, then we can dismiss The Social Contract as ideological or merely one point of view among others. I believe that those who think of the narrative as a “useful fiction” miss what is overwhelming about this crucial 34 Chapter 2 part of the text, what it does to the reader—namely by way of producing an irresistible sense of a social reality that knows no exception. Because of this, they are liable to fall victim to the fallacy of interpreting the idea of the general will as essentially totalitarian. I try to show that it is through the exercise of reason, and not merely by the use of persuasive language, that Rousseau produces a sense of the absolute certainty of the social contract and the general will: but he does this through that aspect of practical reason that is necessarily allegorical in a way that I describe in Chapter 4. The idea is that Rousseau’s account of the state of nature as the negation of society is designed to show that the former is inconceivable from the human point of view and that, therefore, when we think of human affairs, including our personal affairs, we are already thinking, as it were, sociologically. To demonstrate this requires further work on how he proceeds and how we might read him, as it were, proceeding. Let us go back to the problem posed by the fact that the narrative cannot be true; and let us dismiss the idea that it is a fiction merely intended to persuade. Why, then, should we take seriously the questions Rousseau addresses about the origin and moral significance of society? Perhaps his theory can be saved by simply dismissing the narrative altogether. In that case, we might treat the book as a standard instance of political/social theory and summarize his descriptions of the social contract in relation to other concepts, such as the body politic and the general will. We might then conclude (1) that The Social Contract restates an ancient and still valued republican idea—namely, that a peaceful and just society is one in which people understand their obligations to one another and are able to suppress their self-interest sufficiently to guarantee the rule of law—and (2) that it presents a plausible brief for the superiority of Rousseau’s version of the social contract to what he takes to be Hobbes’s solution to the problem of social order. However, this version of the republican idea supposes that society can be organized in the same way in which individuals organize their domestic and local affairs, engaging in projects that require others to be taken into account. In that case, the idea of a social contract...

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