Rousseau's Legislator, Religion, Magnanimity and the Problem of Evil

There is a further difficulty that deserves attention. Wise men, if they try to speak their language to the common herd instead of its own, cannot possibly make themselves understood. There are a thousand kinds of ideas which it is impossible to translate into popular language. Conceptions that are too general and objects that are too remote are equally out of its range: each individual, having no taste for any other plan of government than that which suits his particular interest, finds it difficult to realise the advantages he might hope to draw from the continual privations good laws impose. For a young people to be able to relish sound principles of political theory and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be created by these institutions, would have to preside over their very foundation; and men would have to be before law what they should become by means of law. The legislator therefore, being unable to appeal to either force or reason, must have recourse to an authority of a different order, capable of constraining without violence and persuading without convincing.

This is what has, in all ages, compelled the fathers of nations to have recourse to divine intervention and credit the gods with their own wisdom, in order that the peoples, submitting to the laws of the State as to those of nature, and recognising the same power in the formation of the city as in that of man, might obey freely, and bear with docility the yoke of the public happiness.

This sublime reason, far above the range of the common herd, is that whose decisions the legislator puts into the mouth of the immortals, in order to constrain by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move.¹⁴ But it is not anybody who can make the gods speak, or get himself believed when he proclaims himself their interpreter. The great soul of the legislator is the only miracle that can prove his mission. Any man may grave tablets of stone, or buy an oracle, or feign secret intercourse with some divinity, or train a bird to whisper in his ear, or find other vulgar ways of imposing on the people. He whose knowledge goes no further may perhaps gather round him a band of fools; but he will never found an empire, and his extravagances will quickly perish with him. Idle tricks form a passing tie; only wisdom can make it lasting. The Judaic law, which still subsists, and that of the child of Ishmael, which, for ten centuries, has ruled half the world, still proclaim the great men who laid them down; and, while the pride of philosophy or the blind spirit of faction sees in them no more than lucky impostures, the true political theorist admires, in the institutions they set up, the great and powerful genius which presides over things made to endure.'--J.J. Rousseau The Social Contract, 2.8

In the quoted passage, Rousseau addresses an instance of the transition problem, that is (recall; recall here and here] how from any status quo to create a normatively desirable or ideal political future with a population raised under bad institutions (or worse, bad breeding). Rousseau's version of the problem is something like, under what conditions can we expect a people capable of exercising the general will to form? And, in fact, Rousseau's answer is rather dramatic, and shows that he recognizes the full nature of the transition problem, namely that people need to be transformed: the legislator must "feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual...of altering man's constitution for the purpose of strengthening it (etc.)" In this instance the transition program is turned into (to echo my homage to L.A. Paul) a Political Transformative experience (PTE see Helen de Cruz; P. Allen; or me). Such a PTE can only succeed with a multitude that already has ‘some unity of origin, interest, or convention’ (SC 2.10).

Rousseau proposes that the agent of transformation (the Legislator) is somebody (not unlike the legislators of Plato's Laws and Moses) who remains outside the new social order (in order to prevent corruption of his preferences/aims) he is bringing into being. For this agent religion (and this echoes Al-Farabi's version of Platonic political theory) becomes a tool for political union. Religion here plays three distinct roles: first its symbols and language are more accessible than philosophy/science and so it is a good vehicle to convey the insights of political philosophy to the lesser educated (and educatable); second, it provides an incentive for people to move beyond their personal interests (that is otherwise absent); third, the political project can piggy back on the authority that is accorded to the divine.

The two intermediate aims (the full one is to create a people capable of exercising a general will), of this transformative process are 1.`’liberty and equality’ (SC 2.11;  and 2. the formation of 'social spirit,' that is a form of civic religion. About both of these more is to be said, but I want to wrap up and point out a feature of the origins of magnanimous legislators.

A magnanimous or great soul is not possible in the state of nature, according to Rousseau, because there we are (as Hobbes thought) roughly equal. Against Plato and Aristotle, Rousseau rejects (recall yesterday) natural hierarchy. (The one nice thing about embracing natural hierarchy is that the existence of great souled people is to be expected in any natural population; these show up on a regular basis.) For Rousseau hierarchies that seem natural are the product of society.  So, a great soul is only possible after (bad societies) have generated (with force) ‘natural seeming’ hierarchies in human nature. That is to say, the fact of historical inequality and injustice is a condition of possibility for the production of magnanimous legislators!

It is sometimes said (correctly) that Rousseau did not accept the gospel of progress. And in the Social Contract religion clearly has an instrumental role to play. This allows him (echoing Machiavelli) to see in Moses and Muhammad successful political legislators. But what seems to have been less noticed is that he does embrace a form of theodicy, a kind of cunning of history, which is (perhaps indirectly) also a (proto-Nietzschean) response to the problem of evil. Past suffering makes possible higher types who will transform us into beings that can be free and equal (and generate legitimate government).

 

 

 

Comments

[Aaron Lercher]

A beautiful post about Rousseau. I needed this.

Rousseau definitely is proposing a secular theodicy, in which he denies original sin but recognizes evil as the cumulative result of history, such that a radical departure is required to escape it.

Kant's Religion might be taken to develop this by arguing that it is inexplicable how one can manage to adhere to reason, which then leads to a rationalistic form of religion. (I now feel compelled to build a shrine to Rawls.) But maybe any form of radical social critique is a different way of developing Rousseau's basic idea, and some are more naturalistic than others.

Susan Niemann's Evil in Modern Thought highlights this theodicy.
I'm no Rousseau or Kant scholar, but I'd expect this to be well recognized.

[Aaron Lercher]

Maybe the difference between Spinozistic self-legislation and that of Rousseau or Kant is whether one is capable of achieving freedom on one's own. I would have thought Spinoza says yes, while Kant and Rousseau feel the need to call on something like God, a legislator, or revolution, because they are dealing with historically cumulative or ingrained evil. But I guess I need to read Kiser's book.

[Andrew Corsa]

This was a very fun, interesting post. Thank you!

My comment here is really just an aside - a fun tangent.

Your remarks about magnanimous legislators emerging out of historical inequality and injustice reminded me of Thoreau's famous example, from "Slavery in Massachusetts," of a beautiful white water-lily emerging out of the muck - the metaphorical muck of a society permitting slavery:

"Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that, in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate."

I don't think it is a coincidence that, in "A Plea For Captain John Brown," Thoreau compares John Brown and other heroes to fruit-bearing plants that can arise without "watering and cultivating." Thoreau repeatedly implies that John Brown is a magnanimous man and, in the passage below, I take it that Thoreau is implying that magnanimous heroes like him can emerge, like flowering, fruit-bearing plants, out of the muck societies that endorse inequality and injustice:

:Such do not know that like the seed is the fruit, and that, in the moral world, when good seed is planted, good fruit is inevitable, and does not depend on our watering and cultivating; that when you plant, or bury, a hero in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality, that it does not ask our leave to germinate."

In any event, I thought this minor comparison between your post and Thoreau was fun enough to share.

[Eric Schliesser]

That's a nice observation, Andrew. You remind me that I have been meaning to read Melissa Lane on the two of them.