The reasoning of Caligula agrees with that of Hobbes and Grotius. Aristotle, before any of them, had said that men are by no means equal naturally, but that some are born for slavery, and others for dominion.
Aristotle was right; but he took the effect for the cause. Nothing can be more certain than that every man born in slavery is born for slavery. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them: they love their servitude, as the comrades of Ulysses loved their brutish condition. If then there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves, and their cowardice perpetuated the condition.-- JJ. Rousseau Social Contract, 1.2
In this paragraph, Rousseau presupposes natural equality. All exhibited inequality is a consequence of society and socialization. While Alan Ryan is probably wrong to claim that Rousseau was the "first to see human beings as clay in the hands of society and accussing society of making us self-destructive" (arguably Mencius predates him), it is true that Rousseau is thoroughgoing about the point.
In fact, all non-natural societies/political orders generate serious inequalities (due to use of force). He uses that assumption to describes an instance of adaptive preferences. Yes, some slaves exhibit servility. (I use 'some' where Rousseau claims 'every'' because his argument does not require the stronger claim. But he may well have believed the stronger claim, alas.) But their servility is a consequence of their environment. You can't infer their servility as intrinsic to their character/nature; in different contexts these same people may not be servile at all.
I think the real, underlying target here is Hobbes--after all, Aristotle is explicitly said to anticipate Hobbes and others. I think so for because throughout the book, it's Hobbes' (proto-Homo Economicus) conception of freedom -- to simplify: want satisfaction in the absence of constraints -- which is Rousseau's target and which is treated as an instance of slavery. (And it is Hobbes which is, as is well known, extremely vulnerable to criticism in light of the argument about adaptive preferences and sour grapes.)
But is notable that Rousseau's criticism of Aristotle's embrace of natural hierarchy is treated as a confusion of effects and causes. For, that style of argument is really at heart of Spinoza's argument against final causes: "that which is really a cause it considers as an effect, and vice versa:" (Ethics, Appendix 1). It is distinctly Spinozistic. In his recent book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, Dennetts calls the exploitation of this observation 'a strange inversion of reasoning.' (He attributes it to Darwin, Turing, and Hume.)
I am not denying that Plato and Machiavelli (and Hobbes/Mandeville/Locke, and various Republican and Stoic authors) may be more important to Rouseau's political writings, but I think the influence of Spinoza on the Social Contract is marked (since Jonathan Israel and Wim Klever few will be shocked by this suggestion). (To say this is not to genuine differences pertaining to state of nature, property, and social contract!) Consider this eminently quotable line: “[A] mere impulse of appetite is slavery, [B] while obedience to the law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty” (SC 1.8) It's pretty clear that something like [A] is the Hobbesian view (even if uncharitable).
[B] really consists of two claims: (i) liberty is obedience to the right sort of law; (ii) when we are (properly) autonomous we can be free. (I am using freedom and liberty interchangeable; I am also switching between individual and political freedom because I believe Rousseau and Spinoza does so, too.) Now, to be sure Spinoza's does not have the proto-Kantian characterization of autonomy we find in Rousseau. (I think the puppet image in Plato's Laws is really the ultimate source here.) But I also think (i-ii) are Spinozistic and mutually entailed (?) in Spinoza's system.
For, Spinoza to be free (a real agent) just is to act from knowledge/reason/virtue/adequate causes. I tend to treat this as a slogan: to be free is to act from reason. But as we all know, Spinoza denies that our agency can be separate from natural/physical law (the chain of efficient causes). So, even when are free we obey necessity or natural law in Spinoza. (Students dislike this.) I could say this more precisely (in terms of an essence who's nature is expressed in lawlike fashion; see also E3Def.2: "we are active...when from our nature there follows in us or externally to us something which can be clearly and distinctly understood through our nature alone" (or when are its adequate cause). That is And "true virtue is nothing other than to live only by the guidance of reason.").
But it's also quite natural [sic] to treat Spinoza's form of freedom as a species of substantive autonomy. See, for example, a lovely (2003) paper by Doug den Uyl who once argued that Spinoza clearly embraces a form of autonomy; the point was made more carefully and thoroughly by Matt Kisner in his fine (2011) book (which shows that Spinoza can be interpreted in terms of self-legislating because 'being autonomous...requires us to act in accord with universal laws.'
My contribution here is to call attention to significance of Spinoza's criticism of something like a Hobbesian view on agency:
“Men think themselves free, because they are conscious of their volitions and their appetite, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to wanting and willing, because they are ignorant of [those causes]” (Spinoza, Ethics, Appendix 1).
(I love the point about 'even in their dreams'!) For Spinoza -- anticipating as much Freud as Dennett -- our sense or experience of freedom rests on a kind of user-illusion in which many if not most of the real causes of our behavior are hidden from us. And so we think we act (freely) when we really are not in control over ourselves. I think that Spinoza here links self-knowledge and self-command. When we know ourselves we can act for real in accord with reason, that is, law.
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