Born Free, and Everywhere in Chains

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Rousseau opened The Social Contract with that in 1762, and almost everybody who can quote it thinks the book is an argument for removing the chains. It is not. It is an attempt to work out which chains are legitimate, and the answer is considerably stranger than the sentence suggests.

The problem he sets himself is genuine and it is not obviously soluble.

Any collective decision binds people who voted against it. That looks like some people ruling others, which is exactly what a theory of legitimate authority is supposed to avoid. So Rousseau asks: is there a form of association in which each person unites with everybody else and yet obeys only himself?

His answer is the general will.

This is not the majority vote, and the distinction is the whole thing. The general will is what the citizen body wills as a body, considered as a body: what the community genuinely wills for the community. The will of all, by contrast, is just the sum of private preferences, and a majority of people voting for what suits each of them individually can produce something the community does not will at all.

If you follow the general will, you are following something you are a part of, so you are obeying yourself. That is the move.

And then the sentence.

Anybody who refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.

It is the most criticised sentence in political philosophy, and the criticism is deserved. Once you accept that a person can be wrong about their own will, and that somebody else can identify what they really want better than they can, you have built a machine that will be used. It has been used, repeatedly, by people claiming to speak for what the nation really wants against the nation's actual objections.

Here is where I want to resist both easy readings, because both are available and both are lazy.

Rousseau is not a proto-totalitarian who happened to write well. The problem he identified is real, and nobody has solved it. Collective decisions do bind dissenters. Any democracy you have ever lived in does this to somebody every week, and the question of how that can be legitimate rather than merely powerful does not go away because the machinery is dangerous.

And he is not innocent either. The distinction between the general will and what a powerful person says the general will is cannot be drawn from outside. That is not a misuse of his idea; it is a property of it, and he did not supply a test.

Hold both. The danger and the point come from the same place, which is true of a great many ideas worth understanding, and picking one half is how you end up with a caricature you can dismiss.

What Rousseau adds to this book is the recognition that consent, in Locke's sense, is not enough. Agreeing to be ruled does not make you free; it makes you a willing subject. Whether anything can do better is still open.