Autor: Manent, Pierre

Buch: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Titel: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Stichwort: Hobbes 4; Individuum als Grundlage politischer Legitimität - Absolutismus (Hobbes -> Rousseau); R.: Indentifikation: individueller - politischer Wille; der allgemeine Wille; Neuinterpretation: Vernunft (Autonomie), Mensch (als Schöpfer seiner selbst)

Kurzinhalt: Rousseau ... understood very well that if one starts seriously from the individual, it is supremely difficult, if not impossible, to avoid absolutism... Therefore each person's will must be identified with the will of the body politic ...

Textausschnitt: 27b The importance of this question for the problem of democracy is not difficult to see. Democracy, whether direct or representative, implies that the action of the body politic has its motivating force in each person's will, or in a will representing each person's will. Hobbes strongly "identifies" "each subject" and the sovereign, but excludes will from this identification or identity. What is desired (willed) by "each subject" is the existence of absolute sovereignty, or, more precisely, it is the peace for which absolute sovereignty is the necessary instrument. As for the sovereign's wishes, they are his own. In other words, Hobbes decisively prepares the democratic idea, but remains no less decisively short of it. (Fs)

28a The democratic idea, to which we are accustomed from childhood, makes Hobbes's conception seem quite absurd. What does it mean to recognize as one's own actions those one has not willed, actions that can be contrary to everything one wants? Hobbes's absolutism shuttles uncomfortably between identity and difference. But we get the feeling that identity must be the stronger of the two and that it will triumph naturally in the democratic idea, according to which the will of the representative aims at fulfilling the people's will. On the other hand, perhaps the difficulties in Hobbes's position suggest difficulties in the democratic idea that we would not otherwise see. (Fs)

28b The strength of the Hobbesian position is that it retains the integrity of the individual. The individual wants what he wants, no one else can want it for him. If then the individual and his will are the unique foundation for political legitimacy, it is clear that the political order, which makes a unity from the plurality of individuals, can come to him only from the outside. Every "community of will," whether with other individuals, or between the individual and the sovereign, would encroach on the individual's will, infringe on his integrity. He could no longer be what he alone can be: the source and foundation of political legitimacy. One is tempted to say that Hobbes is absolutist in spite of his individualism. But, on the contrary, Hobbes is absolutist because he is so rigorously individualistic. (Fs)

28c If we find it hard to admit such an idea, it is because we have only a very faint idea of what it means to take the individual seriously, to make the individual, and the individual alone, the foundation of all political legitimacy. The individual of whom we speak nowadays is always already implicitly "acculturated," "socialized," determined by "roles"; he is domesticated. We no longer have a clear notion of the man who is, according to us, the source of all legitimacy, and whose particularities and demands continue to affect the social, political, and spiritual evolution of our societies. Hobbes makes us aware that, if there must be something like an individual, a being whose will belongs by right only to himself, then this will can find a rule only in another will that has the force and right to impose obedience on him. (Fs)

28d An eloquent proof that Hobbes's individualism is certainly at the source of his absolutism is found in Rousseau's approach, so contrary to Hobbes's and yet so akin to it. Rousseau was the one who best understood Hobbes and who criticized him most profoundly. He understood very well that if one starts seriously from the individual, it is supremely difficult, if not impossible, to avoid absolutism. But since Rousseau was trying to avoid absolutism, while himself starting from the individual, he had to proceed to reinterpret not only political legitimacy but also human nature itself. Everybody knows what a prodigious influence this reinterpretation has had on our ideas, feelings, and mores. Since I shall be speaking about Rousseau in his chronological place, I shall confine myself here to one remark.1 (Fs)

29a Rousseau shares Hobbes's basic conviction: the will is an individual thing, it cannot be represented. On the other hand, he rejects absolutism: the unified order to be established among individual wills must not come from the outside. Therefore each person's will must be identified with the will of the body politic, or the body politic's will with each person's will, without third-party representation. In addition, every action of an individual will on another must be excluded. From these conditions comes the "general will." In other words, since the individual must not obey another individual, or an absolute sovereign, or a representative, he has only himself to obey. To resolve the political problem induced by seeking political unity among radically independent individuals, Rousseau is led to invent a new definition of man and reason. Man is the being who is capable of obeying a law that he has imposed on himself, and reason is the faculty of commanding oneself, that is, autonomy or self-legislation. One is led to say, using Hobbes's terms, that with Rousseau man becomes the "author" and "artificer" or "maker" of his own humanity, and no longer simply of the body politic. This is not the place to examine the meaning and consequences of such a conclusion. The perplexity into which it throws us, a perplexity that was and remains the motivating force of modern philosophy's evolution since Rousseau, suggests that we ought to consider Hobbes's sober absolutism more sympathetically than we commonly do. (Fs) (notabene)