Autor: Manent, Pierre

Buch: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Titel: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Stichwort: Rousseau 4; Gesellschaftsvertrag (Social Contract): Vertrag von Eigentümern -> Änderung d. menschl. Natur (Einsamer -> zum "Ganzen". d. Gesellschaft), allg. Wille ggn. Privatinteresse: R. -> Robespierre; Liberalismus -> offene Zukunft allg. Willens

Kurzinhalt: The general will thus becomes the principle and locus of identification of all particular wills ... All Rousseau's analyses concerning rights and wills have a single end: to show how this unity, this identity can be established.

Textausschnitt: 74a It will probably be objected that I make Rousseau more confused than he was. After all, his Social Contract is a quite precise analysis of the conditions of a legitimate political regime. Thus he himself proposed a positive substitute for liberalism. But what is the motivating spirit of the Social Contract? We have already seen that society is corrupt and man is unhappy when the individual is divided; man in nature is happy and good because he is whole, because he is self-sufficient. The good polity ought to preserve this individual unity, integrity, and self-sufficiency. It is obviously impossible to do that. What might be done, however, is to succeed in identifying each individual with the polity itself: in that way, no member of the body politic will any longer distinguish his own being from the common being. He will be whole because he will become one with the body politic. According to a phrase that is not found in the Social Contract but that summarizes its project admirably: everyone will have for a state so constructed "that delicate sentiment that any isolated man feels only for himself."1 The general will thus becomes the principle and locus of identification of all particular wills. It gives existence as well as legitimacy to the new artificial individual with whom all natural individuals identify. All Rousseau's analyses concerning rights and wills have a single end: to show how this unity, this identity can be established. (Fs)

74b Such a state can be said to conform to man's nature only insofar as it is whole, just as the natural individual is whole. But it can also be called artificial, and even unnatural, since it must "be capable of changing human nature, so to speak; of transforming each individual, who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole from which this individual receives, in a sense, his life and his being; of altering man's constitution in order to strengthen it."2 Thus, the principal difficulty in the doctrine of the Social Contract lies in the contradiction between the state's nature and its origin. According to its nature, as we have just seen, the state realizes the identity between the individual and the social body, the identity between the individual's instinct for preservation and that of the social body. Now, the origin of the state lies in the instinct for individual preservation. On this matter, Rousseau's point of view closely resembles Locke's. Rousseau remarks that at a certain stage in the state of nature, individuals are no longer capable of protecting their lives and goods all alone; thus they join forces, under the sovereign direction of a general will, to protect their lives and goods. The goods, transformed from the precarious possessions that they were, now become true property, guaranteed by authorities responsible for public order. The social contract is a contract of proprietors. But at that very instant, Rousseau specifies, the aforementioned proprietor, until then engaged only in self-preservation, literally changes nature and his own self comes to identify with the common self of the new public person. This individual who was as solidly proprietor, as completely bourgeois as the Lockean man, becomes more rigorously citizen than the most hardened Spartan. All the contradictions that the reader finds in the Social Contract have their source in this change. (Fs)

75a Consequently, the Social Contract cannot possibly contain a political program. On the one hand, it covers and repeats Locke's teaching and can be placed under the liberal heading; on the other, it opens up a radically indeterminate future, in which the only guide will be the idea of social unity, of the identification of each individual's interest and will with those of all. The only way to be certain that this will is realized, that the public interest does not merge with any particular interest, is to place the public interest in contradiction with all private interests and to measure the realization of the public interest by the contradiction it poses to all private interests. The unity of all will be made perceptible by the oppression of all. In this sense, it is not absurd that Robespierre thought he had fulfilled Rousseau's idea. Must it be said then that Rousseau's thought is both liberal and Robespierrist? In fact, it can seem to be one and the other only because it is neither. To see this we must look more closely at his interpretation of property. (Fs)