Democracy and the Ethical Life: A Philosophy of Politics and Community (Second Edition, Expanded)

VIII. Utopian Dreams and Harsh Realities

Utopian Dreams and Harsh Realities VIII It has not been my purpose to deny that Rousseau's concept of the general will has features which connect it with the real, transcendent standard of morality of which most men have some awareness. I have only tried to show that in its central inspiration this concept owes more to Rousseau's utopian-romantic imagination. What is genuine ethical insight in his thought, for such there is too, is subordinated to and vitiated by the spurious, subjectively inspired tendency of his philosophy as a whole. To a degree, subjective bias enters into all intellectual undertakings. The point is that, although offered under the pretentions of objective philosophical inquiry, Rousseau's thought has in it too much of that element to provide a strong link between moral philosophy and democratic theory. It is difficult to dispel the suspicion that in large part the general will is a projection of Rousseau's unfailing belief in the superior goodness of his own heart onto the people. He views the will of the sovereign in the light of what he perceives to be his own divinely inspired spontaneity. During his life Rousseau became ever more convinced of his own moral innocence and the vice and deceit of other men. He regarded himself as always inclined towards the good and thwarted only by various outer restraints from achieving his worthy 146 UTOPIAN DREAMS AND HARSH REALITIES 147 goals. "Never has the moral instinct deceived me," he writes. Late in his life he talks of giving back to his Author "a host of good but frustrated intentions." 1 It is not surprising that Rousseau would like to see released in political society the collective counterpart of the spontaneous goodness which he believes to have been denied expression in his personal life. That he likes to substitute for the imperfect world around him the more appealing creations of his own imagination, he freely admits. Into nature especially, where he does not have to contend with the depravity and conceit of society, he finds it easy to project his dreams and emotions. His worship of nature , it may be argued, is in no small part worship of his own elevated sentiments. What is it, he asks in a revealing passage , which always brings him back to the "inanimate objects " of nature? "What secret charm brings me back constantly into your midst? Unfeeling and dead things, this charm is not in you; it could not be there. It is in my own heart which wishes to refer back everything to itself." 2 This, let it be suggested, is the central inspiration also of the concept of the general will. Rousseau is reading into it the imagined morality of his own largely subjective and historically conditioned preferences regarding the organization and goal of the state. He is assuming that he has full knowledge of man's true nature and that the heart of all men craves the same political arrangements as does his own. It should be remembered in this context that Rousseau does not start from, but emphatically rejects, the notion of man as a social being. To him, civil society is, in the literal meaning of the word, artifiCial. The sociopolitical nature of I Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries ofa Solitary, trans. John Gould Fletcher (New York: Lennox Hill, 1971), Bk. IV, 85; Bk. 11,46. 2 Quoted in P. M. Masson, La Religion de j.-j. Rousseau (3 VoIs.; Paris: Lennox Hill, 1916), II, 228. Translated in Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., Meridian Books, 1964), 233. 148 DEMOCRACY AND THE ETHICAL LIFE man has to be created. As he writes in The Social Contract, "The constitution of a man is the work of nature; that of the state is the work of artifice [de l'art]." 3 We may regard Rousseau as himself the ultimate artist, the philosopher with the remedy for all the ills of existing society. His general will is a product of his "creative imagination" rather than an acceptable conceptual rendering of the real principle of morality. Regardless of the extent to which Rousseau's temperament influences his thinking, it is evident that the general will is not to be mistaken for the transcendent will of ethical conscience . His concept arbitrarily elevates a particularistic, national will, moral only by allegation and with strong totalitarian implications, to a position of absolute authority...