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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 July 2016
Recent interpretations of Rousseau suggest that autonomy is the master concept by which to understand his justification of the state. The Rousseauian state is legitimate insofar as it enables individuals to obey only their own wills and thus to be free. Autonomy-based interpretations cannot adequately account for Rousseau's remarks on the role of the state in securing a collective form of happiness through political community. These interpretations incorrectly construe collective happiness as pertaining only to how civic-minded citizens might be psychologically motivated to obey the state's dictates, rather than to what makes the state legitimate. By contrast, I offer a new interpretation according to which the Rousseauian state is justified because it enables a mutually constitutive relationship between the autonomy of individuals and the happiness that stems from participation in political community.
1 For contemporary expressions of this idea, see Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Charles Taylor, “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 11–14, 193–98. For historical antecedents, see G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ¶258, and Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Early Writings, trans. Livingstone, Benton, and Colleti (New York: Penguin Books, 1992).
2 Here is a list of the works by Rousseau I will cite, along with the abbreviations I will use:
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings.
Discourse on Political Economy, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Emile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
Julie, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997).
Geneva Manuscript, in On the Social Contract, ed. Roger Masters, trans. Judith Masters (New York: St. Martin's, 1978).
Letter to d'Alembert, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Politics and the Arts, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960).
Letters Written from the Mountain, in The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 9, ed. Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001).
Moral Letters, in Rousseau on Philosophy, Morality, and Religion, ed. Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2007).
Œuvres Complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, , 1959–1969).
Plan for a Constitution for Corsica, in The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 11, ed. Christopher Kelly and Roger Masters (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005).
“Political Fragments,” in The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 4, ed. Kelly and Masters (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994).
The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, in The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 8, ed. Kelly and Masters (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000).
Of the Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings.
The State of War, in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings.
3 The characterization of the view I call the “social autonomy” interpretation stems from Cohen, Joshua, “Reflections on Rousseau: Autonomy and Democracy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 15, no. 3 (1986): 279Google Scholar. Neither Neuhouser nor Rawls explicitly identifies himself with this label, but there are enough similarities between all three authors to make the categorization apt. I explore the nuances of Social Autonomy in greater detail in my “Rousseau on the Ground of Obligation: Reconsidering the Social Autonomy Interpretation,” European Journal of Political Theory (forthcoming). The other principal works of Social Autonomy are Joshua Cohen, Rousseau: A Free Community of Equals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau's Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). I also treat Nicholas Dent, Rousseau: An Introduction to His Psychological, Social and Political Theory (London: Blackwell, 1989) and Maurizio Viroli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the “Well-Ordered Society,” trans. Derek Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) as anticipations of Social Autonomy, and Anna Stilz, Liberal Loyalty: Freedom, Obligation, and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009) as pursuing a contemporaneous parallel project. Ernst Cassirer is undoubtedly the pioneer behind all of these readings. See Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) and Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau, Kant and Goethe, trans. J. Gutman, P. O. Kristeller, and J. H. Randall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945). The relation between the Social Autonomy reading and Cassirer's Kantian reading, as well as Kant's own remarks on Rousseau, is a large question that cannot be addressed here. Suffice it to say that some of the commentators associated with Social Autonomy are closer to Cassirer's Kantian reading (e.g., Cohen) than others (e.g., Neuhouser and Dent).
4 Cohen, Free Community, 57 (emphasis mine).
5 Neuhouser, Foundations, 191. Though Neuhouser concedes that “Rousseau … posits affective, substantive attachments to particular others as necessary and desirable,” he argues that with respect to the foundations of the state, “Rousseau accords supreme normative weight to a perspective … that recognizes only the interests of unattached individuals” (ibid., 196). For a similar bifurcation of a normative, freedom-based principle of legitimacy from a psychological, happiness-based account of motivation or stability see Rawls, Lectures, 193, 206–7, 214–15, 237–41; Viroli, Well-Ordered Society, 13, 212–13; Stilz, Liberal Loyalty, 130–35; and Matthew Simpson, Rousseau's Theory of Freedom (New York: Continuum, 2006). For skepticism about separating legitimacy from stability see David James, Rousseau and German Idealism: Freedom, Dependence, Necessity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 111; Joseph Reisert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of Virtue (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 124; Richard Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason: On the Moral Foundations of Kant's Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 34; and Scott, John, “Rousseau and the Melodious Language of Freedom,” Journal of Politics 59, no. 3 (1997): 818–27Google Scholar.
6 Neuhouser, Foundations, 56–57. Similarly, many decades earlier Ernst Cassirer remarked that the Social Contract opens the “path of freedom” for subsequent developments in the philosophy of the state (Cassirer, Question, 54, emphasis in original).
7 SC, 1.6.4 (emphasis mine). Ultimately, this account of political freedom is undergirded by a philosophical anthropology in which freedom defines the nature of man: “every man being born free and master of himself, no one may on any pretext whatsoever subject him without his consent” (SC, 4.2.5; see also 1.4.6). And this anthropology is itself an expression of a metaphysical thesis according to which only the human will can consciously resist or question the bare deliverances of animal instinct (DOI, 140). For a helpful account of the forms or levels of freedom in Rousseau's thought see Matthew Simpson, Rousseau's Theory of Freedom.
8 DOI, 159.
9 SC, 1.8.3, and OC, 3:365 (translation modified). Rousseau also suggests that because obligations are grounded in autonomy they must be freely self-legislated. Obligation can have no “more certain foundation … than the free engagement of the one who obliges himself” (LM, 231).
10 See here Neuhouser's justly influential “Freedom, Dependence, and the General Will,” reprinted in Foundations, 55–81, as well as Foundations, 184–88.
11 SC, 2.4.5 and 3.15.3.
12 GM, 160, and OC, 3:284.
13 SC, 4.1.1.
14 GM, 163.
15 GM, 158. Given that one of the purposes of this paper is to uncover a very abstract understanding of Rousseau's theory of legitimacy, I necessarily put aside many specific differences between the major political writings, especially SC, GM, and DPE.
16 DPE, 5 (emphasis mine).
17 PF, 40. Cf. “it is only the state's force that makes for its members’ freedom” (SC, 2.12.3).
18 PF, 40 (emphasis mine). The French mentions only “rules” (règles) rather than “rules of right,” but the latter is warranted by the overall sense of the passage (see OC, 3:509).
19 Many commentators understand Rousseau's notion of happiness to be a largely formal, psychological sentiment with subjectively variable content. For example, see Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau's Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 38–46, 64–68; Laurence Cooper, Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 19–29; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 291–93; and Joseph Reisert, Friend of Virtue, 114–15. Although such readings may have merits for Rousseau's more autobiographical texts such as the Reveries of the Solitary Walker (though see footnote 53), I show below that the conception of happiness in Emile and Social Contract has an importantly objective component, on which happiness depends on the proper expression of our human nature and so is a moralized concept. In this sense my account is closer to Stephen Salkever, for whom Rousseau, like Plato, seeks to show the interrelation of happiness, virtue, and man's natural constitution. See Salkever, Stephen, “Rousseau and the Concept of Happiness,” Polity 11 (1978–1979): 27–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Reading happiness in this way does not, however, preclude the possibility that for Rousseau there may be forms of happiness that are domestic, intimate, or solitary rather than political in any standard sense.
20 GM, 159.
21 SC, 1.8.1.
22 For this reading see Sergio Cotta, “La position du probème de la politique chez Rousseau,” in Études sur le Contrat Social de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Dijon: L'Université de Dijon, 1964); Robert Derathé, “L'homme selon Rousseau,” in Études sur le Contrat Social de Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and Emile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960).
23 One might add (c) an interest in maintaining their goods. But Rousseau's views on property, or as he calls it domaine Réel, and its relation to the state are extraordinarily complex and need not detain us here. For our purposes the interest in holding on to one's goods can be folded into an interest in independence.
24 SC, 1.2.2. See also DPE, 9.
25 For example, see SC, 1.2.1, 1.4.7, 2.4.10, and passim.
26 For example, see SC, 1.8.3. This conceptual distinction does not track Rousseau's actual usage of liberté and indépendance. At times liberté simply characterizes the core idea of nonsubjection to the will of another, and so is neutral between freedom as self-sufficiency and freedom as autonomy (e.g., Emile, 84). Frederick Neuhouser's “Freedom, Dependence, and the General Will” in Foundations, 55–81, offers a helpful account of the distinction between independence and freedom.
27 For example, see SC, 1.7, 2.6; DPE, 9–10.
28 Cf. Gauthier, David, “The Social Contract as Ideology,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6 (1977): 130–64Google Scholar. Gauthier argues that in principle this is all the social contract could possibly be. See also John Charvet, “Rousseau, the Problem of Sovereignty, and the Limits of Political Obligation,” in Rousseau and Liberty, ed. Robert Wolker (New York: St. Martin's, 1995), 148–49.
29 DOI, 163.
30 SC, 1.8.1 and OC, 3:364.
31 SC, 3.15.3.
32 For the language of rational prudence see Viroli, Well-Ordered Society, 130.
33 Neuhouser, Foundations, 190–91 (emphasis in original).
34 Ibid., 320.
35 The first two quotations are from Cohen, Free Community, 57, the second from Neuhouser, Foundations, 192. Neuhouser goes on to argue that the constitution of a political community is a merely accidental good, because “a concern for the fundamental interests of individuals as such is itself sufficient to generate a complete account of the ends of the rational state.” See Neuhouser, Foundations, 196 (emphasis in original).
36 See also Stilz, Liberal Loyalty, 132.
37 Neuhouser, Foundations, 189; Cohen, Free Community, 88–94.
38 SC, 1.1.1; OC, 3:351.
39 SC, 1.1.1.
40 E, 62.
41 SC, 1.8.1.
42 Rousseau articulates an ethical aspiration as old as Plato, the possibility of what Rawls has called “congruence” between justice and the human good. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 567–77. For a reading of Rousseau as advocating a Platonic picture of moral justification see Salkever, “Rousseau and the Concept of Happiness.”
43 SC, 2.6.2.
44 GM, 162.
45 As St. Preux puts it in Julie, this is why in vindicating the virtuous life one ought to give “no other definition of virtues than a tableau of virtuous people” (J, 48). Judith Shklar is thus correct to foreground the centrality of Rousseau's moral psychology to his account of the foundations of moral authority. Shklar writes that Rousseau's moral arguments ground any possible constellation of duties in “generally shared psychic proclivities,” or “psychic needs.” See Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau's Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 58 and 5. Similarly, Timothy O'Hagan writes, “Rousseau, unlike Kant, is not concerned to keep ethical questions about our duties strictly quarantined from psychological questions about drives of the heart.” See O'Hagan, Rousseau (New York: Routledge, 1999), 31.
46 E, 314.
47 E, 293.
48 It is worth noting that just as Emile must learn the doctrine of the social contract in order to become a subject who can be happy in practicing his duties, so also Rousseau complains that a leader who does not prepare the people to see the laws as an expression of their collective customs is like a French tutor who fails to properly raise his child (SC, 2.9.3). Hints like this make it no surprise that Rousseau suggests in his correspondence that E and SC “together make a single whole” (letter to Duschesne, May 23, 1762, cited in Roger Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968], xiii).
49 E, 287.
50 See Salkever, “Rousseau and the Concept of Happiness,” 36. As a reviewer for this paper, John Scott remarks that I am insufficiently attentive to fact that the Vicar's statement is expressed in a conditional (“if moral goodness is in conformity with our nature…”). On his reading, Rousseau himself might not endorse congruence between morality and nature. In turn, such a negative reading of the passage might support a “more subjectivist and individualist” (correspondence) understanding of Rousseauian happiness. To this objection I reply that I need not deny that in some of his many moods Rousseau expresses despair over the possibility of a free and happy life lived in community with others. Thankfully, however, this is neither the only nor the most promising strand in his thought. Here, one should productively read Rousseau against Rousseau.
51 E, 282. Rousseau also counts the “happiness of the just” among the dogmas of the civil religion that every citizen must affirm (SC, 4.8.33).
52 E, 287. Similarly, in The State of War, Rousseau writes that if we were not naturally attuned to our social good, “a sensitive and pitying human being would be a monster” (SW, 164).
53 ML, 79. See also ML, 91 and R, 49, where Rousseau writes, “I know and feel that to do good is the truest happiness the human heart can savor.” For more on happiness or flourishing as encompassing moral relations see DOI, 187; LD, 16; E, 177, 288; J, 185, 433; ML, 79, 99; and PF, 40–42. One might think that the Reveries clearly supports a private conception of happiness, since in that text Rousseau is trying to understand how best to live in withdrawal from a corrupt and depraved society that has actively shunned him. Although I do not have the space here to enter into a discussion of this enigmatic text, I think it is quite clear that Rousseau portrays the highly individual form of happiness available to him as second best. For example, he writes, “As long as men were my brothers, I made plans of earthly felicity for myself. These plans always being relative to the whole, I could be happy only through public felicity; and the idea of private happiness never touched my heart until I saw my brothers seeking theirs only in my misery” (R, 61) (emphasis mine).
54 Salkever makes the helpful comment that “a central feature of Rousseau's moral analysis” is “to show that happiness and pleasure are separate psychic phenomena” (“Rousseau and the Concept of Happiness,” 34).
55 E, 80; OC, 4:304 (translation modified).
56 ML, 79.
57 E, 387.
58 SC, 1.8.1.
59 Cf. “Rousseau's formal conception of happiness … does not specify what one needs to do in order to be happy, it says that, whatever one chooses to do, it must be done with one's whole body, heart, mind, and soul” (Reisert, Friend of Virtue, 115).
60 SC, 2.7.9.
61 SC, 2.4.5.
62 SC, 2.4.7.
63 Cohen, Free Community, 42.
64 After all, the passage just cited does not say that individuals cannot appreciate that the institution of the state addresses their antecedent interests. Rather, it says exactly the opposite. What these individuals cannot see is the necessity to undergo the privation of the laws for the sake of some larger social spirit.
65 SC, 3.15.3.
66 Whether or not it answers the first question I raised in that section, how considerations of collective happiness can exert any ex ante motivational pull on the contracting parties, is a topic I cannot pursue here.
67 To appreciate that this second form of obligation is most likely noncoercible one needs to consider yet another figure not discussed by Social Autonomy: the censor. The job of the censorship is to police affective attachment to the law by regulating judgments of honor. While this certainly removes the Rousseauian state from traditional liberalism, Rousseau does not discuss the regulation of honor as coercible.
68 DPE, 13.
69 SC, 4.1.5.
70 For the role that both considerations play in the state's legitimacy see Sonenscher, Michael, “Sociability, Perfectibility, and the Intellectual Legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” History of European Ideas 41, no. 5 (2015): 1–16Google Scholar, as well as Abizadeh, Arash, “Banishing the Particular: Rousseau on Rhetoric, Patrie, and the Passions,” Political Theory 29, no. 4 (2001): 556–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
71 SC, 4.2.5.
72 For other versions of this distinction see Andrew Levine, The Politics of Autonomy: A Kantian Reading of the Social Contract (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 35; Hilail Gildin, Rousseau's “Social Contract”: The Design of the Argument (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 28; Samuel Freeman, “Reason and Agreement in Social Contract Views,” in Justice and the Social Contract (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 33; Neuhouser, Rousseau's Theodicy, 206–8; Anthony Laden, Reasonably Radical: Deliberative Liberalism and the Politics of Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 34–35; Louis Althusser, Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 2007), 131; Rawls, Lectures, 216; and Schwartzberg, Melissa, “Voting the General Will: Rousseau on Decision Rules,” Political Theory 36, no. 3 (2008): 406–9Google Scholar.
73 SC, 4.2.5.
74 SC, 1.6.5.
75 SC, 2.6, 4.2.5; DOI, 180.
76 GM, 163–64; see also SC, 2.6.1.
77 For example, see SC, 2.4.8, 4.2.5.
78 For example, see SC, 1.5.2.
79 SC, 1.9.8. See here the helpful discussion of this point in Mandle, Jon, “Rousseauian Constructivism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 35, no. 4 (1997): 553Google Scholar.
80 This need not entail that a well-ordered society mandate an actual contract whereby individuals swear their allegiance to the state. Although in certain cases this is exactly what Rousseau recommends (e.g., PCC, 138).
81 For example, see SC, 2.4.1.
82 These two stages should not be understood temporally but rather as two distinct conceptual moments of one and the same historical act. However, I do not have space here to argue for this point.
83 PCC, 133.
84 SC, 1.7.8.
85 Simpson, Rousseau's Theory of Freedom, 56.
86 Other commentators interested in the connection between freedom and happiness also treat freedom as a means and happiness as the end. See Reisert, Friend of Virtue, 121 and Salkever, “Rousseau and the Concept of Happiness,” 28, 37–38. Cooper also misses the difference between valuing morality or rights as a part of happiness and valuing it as a means to happiness. See Cooper, Rousseau, Nature and the Problem of the Good Life, 19–29.
87 E, 87.
88 E, 85.
89 E, 84.
90 GM, 172.
91 E, 280.
92 Showing this is arguably the central task of the sections of the Philosophy of Right devoted to morality and ethical life.
93 John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2005), 13.
