Charles E. Butterworth, ed.: Averroës’ Three Short Commentaries on Aristotle’s “Topics,” “Rhetoric,” and “Poetics.” Albany: University of New York Press, 1977. Charles E. Butterworth translation.

 

Averroës’ name, synonymous with skepticism, might better be associated with coherent skepticism’s only basis: a rigorous standard for the establishment of certainty. These commentaries form part of a series of commentaries on Aristotelian treatises, the majority of which concern logic. In them, Averroës measures not only the Koran’s teachings in accordance to a logical hierarchy; he measures Aristotle’s teachings, as well.

Butterworth recalls that Averroës was considered “the commentator on Aristotle” by medieval scholars, not only by Muslims but by Jews and Christians (vii). These scholars esteemed commentary as a philosophic genre far more than most do today; “with the spread of the assumption that all things evolve through time, inventiveness has come to be acclaimed the mark of excellent thought and commentary condemned as imitative or servile” (vii). But on the contrary, “the art of the commentary was completely transformed” by Averroës, as he presented “a unique interpretation of Aristotle’s ideas under the guise of a commentary” (viii). With a succession of deft omissions and additions to Aristotle’s actual arguments, Averroës makes a “consideration of the logical arts” into “little more than a veil behind which [he] evoked the problematic relation between philosophic thought, religious belief, and political conviction” (ix). “Starting with the particular perspective of Islam, Averroës was able to raise the universal question of the relation between philosophy, politics, and religion” (ix). We are likely intended to notice that in his second formulation of these three topics, Butterworth has shifted politics to the central position. And indeed all three commentaries are concerned with assent, a problem at or near the core of politics. Each treatise presents “ways of imitating or abridging correct reason in order to influence other human beings,” especially as regards their “political decisions and religious beliefs” (19). “His thought about this problem was based on specific ideas about the logical character of different kinds of speech, their proximity to certain knowledge, and the investigative or practical purposes to which each might be put” (21). “These treatises contain the fullest statement of the grounds for Averroës’ abiding disagreement with those who considered themselves the defenders of the faith” (21).

Averroës ranks the “logical arts” in a hierarchy, with demonstration at the apex, followed by dialectic, sophistry, rhetoric, and poetics. He does so in order to study other arts, which turn out to include dialectical theology, traditional theology, and traditional jurisprudence.

Aristotle’s Topics concerns dialectic. Whereas Aristotle regards dialectic as a means of bringing the man partial opinions up to the standard of truth, and even as a means of examining “the ultimate bases or grounds of each science” [Topics 101a25-101b2], Averroës regards dialectic’s materials (opinions) too weak to support philosophic certainty. As Butterworth explains, “the crucial difference” between demonstrative and dialectical argumentation “is that dialectical premises may be false”—chosen for their “renown”—”whereas demonstrative premises are always certain and true” (25). In particular, induction cannot yield such certainty because the necessity of the universal cannot be proven by collecting some or even all the particulars; induction cannot demonstrate because it cannot set forth what Averroës calls the essentially necessary predicate of the argument. His example of this is a critique of an argument by Muslim dialectical theologians as a proof that the world was created, although Averroës carefully avoids mentioning those theologians in the course of his discussion. Tellingly, Averroës relegates his explicit discussion of dialectical theologians to his commentary on the Rhetoric. Dialectical training, he writes, “seems unnecessary for the perfection of the demonstrative arts” (55). He is silent on Aristotle’s contention that dialectic is useful in conversation, in the philosophic sciences, and even in demonstration itself because it examines “the ultimate bases or grounds of each science” (Topics 101a25-101b2).

Rhetoric ranks still lower than dialectic in the hierarchy, as it does for Aristotle. Averroës considers rhetoric, not dialectic, to be (in Butterworth’s words) “the proper art for instructing the general public or addressing it about any matter” because it “permits the speaker to pass over difficult matters or even to be deceptive regarding them, whereas such practices cannot be admitted in dialectic argument” (29). But Aristotle regards rhetoric based on enthymeme as at least partly reasonable, not merely useful; this may coincide with his well-known advice that one should seek “as much clearness as the subject matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts” (Nicomachean Ethics 1094b3). Averroës tolerates imprecision less, perhaps because in his day the dialectical theologians defended Islam with enthymemes, which he calls “unexamined opinion previously existing among all or most people” (63-64). Averroës also goes so far as to cast doubt on rhetoric’s “most powerful” non-syllogistic technique, testimony (74)–the basis of most theologies, dialectic or otherwise. As Averroës wryly puts it, “As for imagining that something is impossible when it is possible, there are many things whose existence is not difficult when the beliefs of the multitude about them are considered” (70). He singles out Aristotle’s short treatise On Prophecy in Sleep, which casts doubt on prophecy as delivered in dreams, which happens to be the means by which Mohammad perceived prophecies. He ranks religious testimony, tradition or community consensus, and the performance of miracles below enthymemes (77), just before he makes his first mention of the social and political nature of man.

Poetry ranks below rhetoric. “[S]peeches [that] cause something to be imagined are not speeches [that] make its essence understood” (83). What poetic imagery really does is to “move the soul to flee from the thing [imagined], or to long for it, or simply to wonder because of the delightfulness” of the imagery itself (83). Poetic metaphor can be deceptive if taken literally, especially if the thing or person described is difficult to conceive (like God, Butterworth observes, in a note). He goes on to note that Muslims often regard the Koran as “the best example of poetic excellence in Arabic” (38-39).

Averroës’ emphasis on demonstrative certainty in establishing the truth might be thought to be a response to the very high stakes the Koran puts on its own presentation of the truth, and on fidelity to that truth. Butterworth’s candid, astute introduction, along with his notes, serve to illuminate these texts in their entirety, or very close to their entirety. In addition, he provides careful English translations, the Arabic texts themselves, and three indices (of names, of titles, and of technical words): all the assistance contemporary readers will need to renew Averroës thought in their own minds.

Plato: Phaedo. David Gallop translation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

Kenneth Dorter: Plato’s Phaedo: An Interpretation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982.

Ronna Burger: The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

 

The most dramatic and therefore memorable Platonic dialogue consists of an account of Socrates’ last hours of life, after the death sentence meted out by the Athenian jury as punishment for allegedly teaching impious doctrines to the youth of the city. The narrator, Phaedo of Elis, an eyewitness to Socrates’ death, meets Echecrates, a Pythagorean, at Phlius, a small town on the Peloponnese and a center of Pythagoreanism. Pythagoreans divided into two camps: those who emphasized their teacher’s mathematical thought and the ones called the “Listeners,” who emphasized cult-like ritual and passive acceptance of doctrine. In this dialogue, Echecrates acts the part of a listener, interrupting Phaedo’s narrative only once. But the questions he asks initially balance an interest in argument and action. What did Socrates say? And “how did he meet his end?” (575a) As Gallop remarks, the Greek word Plato gives Echecrates means ‘end’ not merely in the sense of termination but of completion.  How did Socrates ’round out’ his life? Did his actions fit his arguments, not only on this occasion but on the many dialogic occasions preceding it?  Echecrates also wants to know something about the circumstances of the death: Why was Socrates’ punishment delayed?

Phaedo answers the last question first. The delay in Socrates’ punishment came about merely by chance. The day before the trial was the day the Athenians put a wreath on the stern of a ship they send to Delos every year in honor of Theseus, the founder of their polis, who (according to legend) sailed to Crete on a mission to rescue seven men and seven women from the Minotaur; every ninth year, in accordance with the command of King Minos, the monster was entitled to his payment of human sacrifices. Before leaving Athens, the citizens vowed to honor the god Apollo if he granted success to Theseus; hence the wreathed ship. The mission succeeded because Ariadne, King Minos’ daughter, gave the hero a ball of threat which he could use to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinthine lair, bringing the prisoners with him. While the ship is away from Athens, the polis must be kept pure of bloodshed, so there may be no executions of prisoners. Purification will remain a theme throughout the dialogue, and the Pythagoreans made much of it in their own rituals. This will give Phaedo’s account an added dimension of interest for the Echecrates, the listener.

Like Athens itself, Socrates is described as Apollonian. One question that needs answering is: Who is the real Apollonian, the philosopher or the polis? Or are both Apollonian, albeit in different ways? Who is undergoing the true rite of purification? Moreover, Phaedo prefaces his reply by saying “it’s always the greatest of pleasures for me to recall Socrates, whether speaking myself or listening to someone else” (585d); anamnesis—literally, not-forgetting—or keeping some one or some thing present in one’s mind was another Pythagorean motif, and also figures in the dialogue, later on.

Just as Theseus and the rescued hostages add up to fifteen persons, at Socrates’ death there were fifteen named witnesses. If Phaedo plays the role of Theseus, bringing the story back alive, as it were, what role does Socrates play? Pointing to the description of Socrates as looking up at his jailer “from under his brows,” like a bull, at the moment before he drinks the poison, Burger slyly suggests that he is the Minotaur, “the mythical monster symbolizing the fear of death”; “perhaps Socrates succumbs to the fear of death, or at least… presents that appearance to his audience,” for one and only one instant (213). Then again, if Socrates represents philosophy and the jailer represents the polis, Athens, it may be that the monster, philosophy, does indeed threaten the polis and its myths. Does Socrates eye the polis as his next meal? Does the polis justly dispatch the menacing monster? Like all myths, this story also opens itself for interpretation.

Both Dorter and Burger take the Ariadnean role in interpreting this “Platonic labyrinth” of a dialogue. Neither takes the role of historian, claiming that the dialogue expresses the time-spirit of ancient Athens; rather, they insist on the philosophic seriousness of the dialogue as an effort to climb out of the ‘cave’ of its time and place. Dorter writes, “This book is an attempt to understand and explore the philosophy of Plato generally, by means of what I consider the most satisfactory way of approaching his thought: the careful reading of a particular dialogue,” one which “displays a greater range of subjects” than any dialogue of similar length (ix). He combines what he calls “analytic” method (discussing the logical merits and demerits of the arguments Socrates and his interlocutors make) with the “dramatic” method (a consideration of the setting of the dialogue, the characters of the interlocutors, and their actions) (ix).

Myths are for children, first and foremost. One of Socrates’ critics accused him of childishness, but Dorter suggests that the children here are Socrates’ friends, whose fear of death needs calming not only with reasoned arguments but comforting stories. This, Dorter thinks, accounts for the absence of Plato, no unphilosophic child. More accurately, Socrates’ friends are like adolescents, emerging from childish faith in myths but therefore inclined both to reject them skeptically and to long for them romantically. For his part, narrator Phaedo has stopped at Phlius on his way home to Elis, where he will found a school of philosophy. “If… we think of Phaedo not merely in terms of his historical personality but also in terms of the significance of his life then it is possible to see him as a symbol of the subject-matter of the dialogue, for his life was characterized by liberation from bondage” to the opinions, including the myths, of the polis. It may be that his school will generate a real philosopher or two, even as the ‘school’ of Socrates did (10). Near the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates announces that he has written a hymn to Apollo, following a command he received in a dream to make art and practice it. Previously, he had thought that in philosophizing he had obeyed the command, “since philosophy is a very high art form” (61a), but since his trial and sentencing he decided (he says) that the safer course is to take the command more literally. He does not recite the hymn, but it is based on one of Aesop’s fables—that is, upon a decidedly didactic myth. If education means ‘leading out,’ Socrates is as much his own Ariadne as his own Minotaur.

Socrates’ two dialogic partners are Cebes and Simmias, both of them Pythagoreans. They display no remarkable interest in mathematics, but neither are they passive listeners; this suggests that Socrates has already accustomed them to his own way of philosophizing, for which he offers an account, midway through. He will need to give such an account because his friends put him on trial for a second time. Why should philosophers “die lightly,” as Socrates seems willing to do? (62c10)  Is Socrates not in the service of the gods? And if so, why should a wise man want to escape the service of his betters, the gods—”good rulers by your own admission” (63a9)? Socrates could answer, ‘Because the gods have signaled, through the Athenian jury’s sentence of death, that they no longer have any use for my services,’ but he steers the conversation away from personal gods, toward a defense of the philosophic way of life. Death is the separation of the soul from the body; the philosopher “differs from other men” because in this life he has undertaken an activity that “releas[es] his soul, as far as possible, from its communion with the body” (64e5-65a2). The body, with its senses, hinders philosopher inasmuch as the soul reasons best when unhindered by bodily pains and pleasures. Such ideas as the just, the beautiful, and the good cannot be perceived sensually, only by thought. “If we’re ever to know anything purely, we must be rid of [the body], and must view the objects themselves with the soul by itself; it’s then, apparently, that the thing we desire and whose lovers we claim to be, wisdom, will be ours” (66d9-66e3). In this sense, Dorter remarks, “death is generally preferable to life” (18); Socrates agrees that we are in the service of the gods but he defines the gods as ideas, as impersonal entities. Death is more ‘liberating’ than life if “we take the ‘other gods’ of Hades as symbolic of some philosophically conceived source of truth rather than as the traditional gods of the underworld” (22). One notices that this makes philosophy as Socrates conceives it similar to a Pythagorean ritual of purification, except that the action of the philosopher isn’t ritualistic but rather a way of life, a way of living one’s whole life, and not a rite ‘abstracted’ from the rest of life.

The man who resents death betrays himself a “lover of the body” (68c2). Bravery and moderation as conventionally understood are valorized precisely because most men love their bodies more than they love their souls. But the love of the honors the polis bestows upon its brave and moderate citizens merely overcomes one set of pleasures for another; in this Socrates also answers in advance the Epicurean defense of philosophy as the highest form of pleasure. This is not to say that Socrates lived ascetically, for as Dorter remarks, Socrates earlier had asked that his wife and infant son be removed from the jail; “Socrates had not given up sex even at seventy” (27). He defends the philosophic life with a teacher’s tactic: exaggeration for heuristic effect. The philosopher will not forego the senses or sensual pleasure but subordinate them to his quest for wisdom.

But then, why not just cut to the proverbial chase and commit suicide?  Why hang on to life for seventy years, only to die at the command of Athens? Dorter offers, “It seems that devoting one’s life to the ‘practicing of death’ is not merely an attempt to approximate suicide without technically committing the offense,” although it is that. “It is in fact the resolution of the tension between our selfish fulfilment in death and our duty to life; for it not only accords with that fulfilment in that it is a practicing of it, but it is also equivalent to virtue or excellence, the highest manifestation of life,” the “conversion of our concern from the corporeal to the intelligible” (31-32). The philosophic life “resolves the antagonism between form and corporeality by placing them in an ordered relationship where form is the essential truth of corporeality” (32). It might be added that the Platonic dialogue itself effectively resurrects or reincarnates Socrates, transforming him from Socrates in the flesh to Socrates in writing, whereby he ‘comes alive’ for readers with ‘live minds.’

This satisfies Simmias, but Cebes is not so easily convinced. How do we know that the soul does not perish, too, if not along with the body then after having been reincarnated in several bodies? Socrates offers to “speculate” (70b6), quietly eschewing the certainty that the Pythagorean mind with its mathematical inclinations so often craves. Opposites, he says, are generated from opposites—smaller to larger to smaller, stronger to weaker to stronger. There is a coming-to-be via ‘progress’ and a coming-to-be from ‘return.’ Arguing by analogy (and therefore imprecisely), we see sleeping and wakefulness coming-to-be ‘from’ each other. Why not then dying and living?  Further, if everything that died stayed dead, everything eventually would be dead. The latter claim amounts to the claim scientists make today, that the laws of physics put the cosmos on an entropic course, although some of those scientists posit a return to life after a collapse into primeval chaos. Dorter replies that the opposite of life is not necessarily death but non-living. Life and death may be contrary, but they are not mutually exclusive. An entropic cosmos would be neither alive nor dead but simply non-living (36-40). Dorter further suggests that Socrates’ argument actually “presents the most basic conception of soul” as “motive force, which dates back at least to Thales’ claim that the magnet’s power of moving iron is proof that it possesses soul” (41). Soul as a “principle of motion” or energy, a “world-soul,” amounts to a “non-religious conception of the soul” (44).

If so, how can the soul understood this way possess the wisdom that Socratic philosophers seek? This leads to the next step of the argument, the argument for the immortality of the soul founded upon ‘recollection’ or anamnesis. Cebes first mentions the notion that we learn readily because we are reminded of what we’d learned in a former life, as suggested by the way that well-stated questions elicit truthful answers. This time, Simmias is the skeptic. Socrates observes that we do learn by associations, as when the sight of a boy’s lyre reminds his lover of the boy himself (73d 5-10). He then raises the nontrivial point that to be ‘reminded’ in this way points us to the idea of identity—the ‘What is?’ question, the characteristic ‘Socratic’ question. To ask ‘What is?’ is to ask a person to (as we would say) abstract the general from the particulars, the idea from the facts. Things that are “equal” are not the same as “the equal itself” (74c5). Socrates then plays along with Cebes’ reincarnation argument, saying that we “previously” know “the equal,” and that such intellectual perception of what things are is superior to the sensual perception of things. Why, “we must have been born knowing” (75d8); learning is reminding ourselves of what we once knew but forgot at birth. Dorter calls this “noetic recollection,” as distinguished from “dianoetic recollection,” which is learning based on “relationships among things at the same level such as in mathematics and logic” (50); dianoetic recollection is the topic of the Meno. “Socrates is trying to show that the knowledge of equality itself cannot have been derived entirely from the knowledge of sensible equals that we acquire empirically” (56).

Dorter further remarks that human nature consists of “the composite of soul and body”: “Thus, to prove that our souls are immortal would not be equivalent to proving that ‘we’ are immortal” because ‘I’ am such a composite, one part of which surely perishes at some point. He summarizes that the doctrine of purification means that the soul strives to ‘be with’ the forms, strives to perceive them, whereas the doctrine of recollection means that the soul has the ‘memory’ of the ‘forms’ or ideas latently within it, which amounts to saying that the nature of the soul is to perceive ideas. The Phaedo is the only Platonic dialogue in which both of these claims are presented, neither of which is to be taken literally. It’s more literally the case that opinion, appetite, and spiritedness work together to “provide the initial impetus of the embodied soul toward truth” (68).

When Simmias and Cebes persist in wanting to know if the soul survives after death, Socrates illustrates the intellectual method of ‘abstraction’ by observing that if we lived lives in the past, we are at least likely to do so in the future, given the concession that our current lives were in the future when we were living our previous lives. He chides them for conceiving of the soul as if it might disperse, after several lives, like dust in the wind, and Cebes admits that this is exactly what “the child inside us” fears (77d5). Socrates rejoins that things liable to dispersion are composite. The ideas—the ‘whats’ sought when we ask ‘What is?’—do not change. (One might add that things change but the idea of change itself does not). Further, the unchanging ideas are invisible and ‘divine,’ whereas the changeable things are visible and mortal; the invisible and divine soul rightly rules the divisible, changeable, mortal body. Since the invisible is constant, the soul is invisible, and the invisible rules the visible, then the soul must have the power to be constant, immortal!  Understandably, Socrates quickly away from this spurious argument to get to his real point, which is the defense of the philosophic life. “True philosophers” firmly resist “bodily desires,” abstaining from them not “through dread of dishonor or ill-repute attaching to wickedness, like lovers of powers and prestige”—the sort of men who accused Socrates before the Athenian jury, one recalls—but as escapees from the prison of the body and of mere opinion or convention (82c). Philosophy shows the soul that inquiry through the senses is deceiving, that the soul must trust its own resources, its own reasoning powers, rather than succumbing to bodily demands and allurements. “Securing rest from these feelings, by following reasoning and being ever within it, and by beholding what is true and divine and not the object of opinion, and being nurtured by it, [the soul] believes that it must live thus for as long as it lives, and that when it has died, it will enter that which is akin and of like nature to itself, and be rid of human ills” (84a-b).

At a minimum, one must observe that the soul is brought to believe or trust, not actually to know, that it will “enter” what is not even precisely a realm but a compatible (and impersonal) nature. More ambitiously, as Burger observes, the “true philosophers” described here are called lovers of knowledge, not lovers of wisdom—the latter being the Socratic philosophers. Are the “true philosophers” rather more like the Pythagoreans and the others we now call ‘pre-Socratics’? Burger will make much of this.

Dorter calls Socrates’ argument about the ‘What is?’ question regarding the soul the central argument of the dialogue. “When investigating what is not knowable intrinsically, three natural avenues of inference are, first, the processes of nature (which include recollection as well as the workings of nature)”—the “cosmological” proof—”second, the implications of our concepts”—the ‘ontological’ proof—”and third, reasoning by analogy from the known to the unknown”—the ‘analogical’ proof, in this case an ‘argument from design’ (72). “What is most remarkable is that the argument from design despite its lack of rigor seems ultimately the most persuasive of the arguments, to judge from the reasons most people actually give for affirming God’s existence” (72). “Nothing is rigorously demonstrated but our inner conviction is encouraged and articulated,” and this “incantation” is “effective… because it explores and develops the source of the belief rather than producing arguments that may be clear and impressive but somehow leave us untouched” (76). “Once one abstracts from the misleading connotations of popular religion conveyed by Plato’s unconventional use of ‘Hades’ and ‘the gods,’ one can see the Phaedo‘s arguments as furnishing us with a sense of immortality closer to the discovery of eternity within ourselves than to unending individual perpetuity in time,” the “consciousness of the eternal present” (77-78). The imagery of the Platonic Socrates’ religious language “bring[s] home to us the implications of our choice of a way of life, and of the kind of persons we are” here and now (81). One dimension of a regime is the way of life of the citizens; Socrates invites his dialogic partners to a regime that puts its ‘citizens’ at odds with the ways of life upheld by the poleis.

At this, Simmias and Cebes whisper to one another while Socrates falls silent. When he asks what they are conferring about, Simmias replies that they continue to “have difficulties” with the argument (and rightly so), but hesitate to “make trouble, in case you should find it unwelcome in your present misfortune” (84d7-8). Socrates chuckles at their over-courteous misinterpretation of his silence, giving them the example of another misinterpretation founded upon ‘projecting’ conventional human thoughts on a wiser being. Swans are said to sing before they die, but human beings have assumed that they are singing a dirge, when they actually “sing more fully and sweetly than they’ve ever sung before for joy that they are departing into the presence of the god whose servants they are” (85a1-3). Their all-too-human listeners (again, the Pythagorean motif) “don’t reflect that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or suffering any other distress” (85a5-6). Socrates immediately follows this nature-based observation with a pious one: “belonging as they do to Apollo, they are prophetic birds with foreknowledge of the blessings of Hades,” and I, Socrates, “am a fellow-servant of the swans, consecrated to the same god,” “possess[ing] prophetic power from my master no less than theirs” (85b2-7). One must admire that phrase “no less than theirs.” Socrates then admits that there is no certainty in this prophecy, as certain knowledge in such matters is difficult, as indeed it is.

Simmias protests that a lyre is visible, its attunement invisible, yet if the lyre is destroyed the invisible attunement disintegrates with it. Cebes returns with his objection that the soul may survive several bodily lives but nonetheless perish eventually. At this point, Echecrates interrupts Phaedo’s narration with an even more damaging worry. The whole argument so far inclines him to mistrust argumentation itself, inasmuch as even Socrates seems incapable of formulating an argument that isn’t open to objection. How did he respond? “Well, Echecrates, often as I’ve admired Socrates, I never found him more wonderful than when with him then” (88e4-5), responding to his friends’ objections with “pleasure, kindliness, and approval,” noticing “how their speeches had affected [the rest of] us” present, and “finally his success in treating us”—the medical language is noteworthy—”rallying us as if we were fleeing in defeat”—the military language equally so—”and encouraging us to follow him in examining the argument together” (89a1-6). Socrates turned to Phaedo himself first, making not an argument but requesting an action: Do not cut your long hair in mourning, even if the argument dies. Phaedo replies with his own worry, not in terms of cutting hair on a head but in terms of cutting heads themselves: the argument, he says, resembles the Hydra Hercules confronted, a multi-headed monster which generated a new head for every one the hero cut off. Here, at the center of the dialogue, Socrates warns Phaedo (not Simmias or Cebes) against “misology” or hatred and distrust of rational argument, of logos. “There’s no greater evil that could befall anyone” (89d1-2). Misanthropy arises when you trust someone who betrays you; misology arises when you put too much trust in an argument that betrays you—both instances, one should notice, of generalization or ‘ideation’ gone awry, misapplied. The very human capacity to experience noetic perception may mislead us, but if we succumb either to misanthropy or misology we should blame ourselves. Hence Socrates’ own cautious refusal to claim certain for his arguments. Distrust of rational argumentation itself will lead to the deployment of arguments not as means of arriving at some notion of the truth, the ideas, however provisional, but at their deployments as weapons in struggles for victory—the practice of sophists and many rhetoricians ancient, modern, and indeed ‘postmodern.’ Do not argue like a sophist, ad hominem (even if you intend your argument kindly): “If you take my advice, you’ll care little for Socrates but much more for the truth” (91c1).

Dorter observes that the allusion to Hercules and the Hydra makes sense mythologically, inasmuch as the Theseus story with which the dialogue nearly began was modeled on it; in both cases, we see what in Christian terms would be considered a sort of harrowing of Hell. The arguments of Simmias and Cebes both rest “on the assumption that the relationship between soul and body is to be conceived as a cause and effect relationship on the model of observable phenomena” (86), but “as long as the relationship between body and soul is conceived on the model of perceived relationships in the physical world, no convincing model can be found to support claims of immortality” (87). We rest some of our most intense hopes on an analogical argument that may well be false, as analogical arguments often are. If the objections of Simmias and Cebes spring up like Hydra heads, misology resembles the giant crab which attacked Hercules during his fight with the Hydra. In this unique Platonic dialogue, the only one named for the narrator, Phaedo represents liberation from bondage, the “bondage to the physical” and to misconceived arguments founded on analogies to the physical, which must be overcome to some considerable degree if he, or anyone, is to follow the philosophic way of life. Socrates first will counter this anti-philosophic inclination with what Dorter calls the method of hypothesis, which includes the recognition that we cannot overcome all logical impasses, along with a certain attitude toward logical conclusions—cautious, undogmatic, ready to admit revision if a better argument comes along. Dorter recalls the Republic, in which Socrates discusses four dimensions of human thinking: eikasia, the naïve apprehension of the world infused by custom, habits, and expectation hopeful or fearful; pistis, one’s conviction that he has discovered the true chain of causation; dianoia, the method of mathematics and logic; and noesis, the intuition of the ideas, of pure intelligibility. At the center of his own book, Dorter suggests that, mindful of the characters of his interlocutors, Socrates will appeal to eikasia, a respect for the likelihood that personal immortality is a morally beneficial belief for almost all men. Sophistry? No: “Plato escapes the charge of sophistry… by virtue of his distinction among types of cognition: although sophistic techniques may be employed at the level of eikasia, they are vindicated by their prior grounding of their doctrines in the noetic or dianoetic realm (97).

Socrates now re-addresses Simmias and his argument about the lyre and its attunement. If the soul is like the attunement of a lyre, then it’s composite, but they have already agreed that the soul isn’t composite, so the analogy fails. Playfully called by Socrates “my Theban guest” (an allusion to the Theban goddess Harmonia), Simmias concedes this, and Socrates goes on to say that the soul itself can be attuned well or badly, be rightly ordered or wrongly ordered. Ignoring the possibility that this implies that the soul is composite (and therefore mortal?), Socrates observes that the soul can rule the body, and therefore cannot be ‘of’ the body, perishable. Dorter comments, “the incorporeal divine attunement (the paradigmatic form) does survive the lyre’s breakage, although the corporeal attunement within the lyre does not,” by which he means that the lyre was built for an attunement that was conceived independently of the lyre itself, prior to the construction of the lyre (112). “To speak of corporeal elements predictably organizing themselves into a body whose attunement gives rise to the soul is unintelligible without some conception of a purposive motive force, a ‘weaver,’ and thus already presupposes soul” (112).

Having placated the goddess Harmonia, Socrates turns to “Cadmus,” Cebes. Cadmus, husband of Harmonia and founder-king of Thebes, was credited with introducing the alphabet to the Greeks and also made a reputation as a monster-slayer before Hercules; Socrates jocularly alludes to the relationship between his two interlocutors. But he also invites Cebes to join with him in monster-slaying, and also in a form of bringing an ‘alphabet’ to philosophy. Letters are to verbal argument or logos what numbers are to mathematics; re-centering philosophy on words instead of Pythagorean numbers and ‘pre-Socratic’ nature-study generally will turn out to be Socrates’ next move.

Cebes continues to doubt that the soul is really immortal rather than merely long-lived. This problem “calls for a thorough inquiry into the whole question of the reason for coming-to-be and destruction” (95e10-96a1). One expects a nature-study type of inquiry but Socrates instead tells another story or mythos, this time about himself as a young man, seeking “the kind of wisdom known as natural science” (96a7). Such inquiries left the young Socrates “blinded” because the results were so uncertain (96c5). Both Cartesian mathematics and Baconian experimental science were intended to overcome the uncertain or speculative character of ‘ancient’ natural science, but it remains an open question whether they have done so, despite their impressive achievements, in the sense Socrates has in mind. For example, mathematics can’t say why, if 1 + 1 = 2, they were not ‘two’ before the addition. Pythagorean mathematics cannot give an adequate account of even its simplest operations. As for the materialists, Socrates finds them inconsistent. Anaxagoras, for example, cannot explain the ruling Intelligence that he posits as the first cause of matter. Neither mathematical nor physical science can account for what would later be called ‘metaphysical,’ ‘beyond-the-physical’ questions: first and final causes. (See also Dorter, 122).

For this reason Socrates undertook what he called his “second sailing” (99d1). He decided that the direct approach to studying nature resembled an attempt to study the sun during an eclipse; you will ruin your eyes, that way. He turned from direct observation to consideration of hypotheses. “Hypothesizing on each occasion the theory I judge strongest, I put down as true whatever things seem to me to accord with it, both about a reason and about everything else; and whatever do not, put down as not true” (100a). He proposes to illustrate this somewhat vague description of his philosophic method with a proof of the immortality of the soul, a proposal Cebes applauds. Very well then, Socrates begins, “It seems to me that if anything else is beautiful besides the beautiful itself, it is beautiful for no reason at all other than that it participates in that beautiful” (100c4-6). Dorter explicates: “If something beautiful is to be explained in terms of its coming to be, it must be said to come to be ultimately from elements that were not beautiful, otherwise the beauty is never explained; but it is not satisfactory to say that elements that are not beautiful give rise to beauty merely by being put together (efficient causality) or that beauty is beauty because of the non-beautiful (material causality). Primitive qualities like beauty no less than relations, cannot be satisfactorily understood without the introduction of formal considerations as well as efficient and material ones.” (130-131) Socrates concludes the point by saying that we “know no other way in which each thing comes to be, except by participating in the peculiar Being of any given thing in which it does participate”; in the mathematical example given earlier, 1 + 1 = 2 because they “participate in twoness” (101c), in the form of idea of ‘two.’ Socrates thus explains and justifies Pythagoreanism to Pythagoreans by providing it with a meta-mathematical account of itself.

So, forms or ideas must be added to any account of nature. Conversely, hypotheses concerning ideas cannot account for natural generation, for ‘becoming’ as distinct from ‘being,’ the ‘how’ as distinct from the ‘why.’ The physical sciences are weak where the method of hypothesis is strong, and vice-versa. Socrates needs a new formulation which will unify the virtues of these two approaches. Here is where teleology comes in. Efficient, material, and formal causes all point to a final cause, namely, ‘the Good.’ To understand any natural object requires knowledge of how it came to be, what stuff it’s made of, its structure, but also its purpose, what it (speaking anthropomorphically) ‘strives’ to be.

The idea of ‘participating’ in a form or idea provides the basis for the principle of non-contradiction. You can say ‘1 + 1 = 2,’ but you can’t say ‘1 = 2’ without contradicting yourself. Similarly, “largeness itself [is] never willing to be large and small at the same time”; “it is not willing… to abide, and admit smallness, and thus be other than what it [is]” (102d-e). “Nor will any other of the opposites, while still being what it was, at the same time come to be, and be its own opposite. If that befalls it, either it goes away or it perishes” (102e-103a). In the Republic, Socrates states the principle of non-contradiction more fully: the same thing will not do or suffer opposites, at the same time and with respect to the same part. Black and white can exist side by side and remain what they are, as on a zebra, or they can mix and become something other than what they are, as in a shade of gray, but there is no ‘blackwhite.’

What has any of this to do with the question regarding the immortality of the soul? An onlooker reminds Socrates that earlier in the discussion he had said that opposites generate opposites—the large becoming small, and so on. Socrates could simply point to his own formulation, that large cannot be small at the same time, in relation to the same thing, but he evidently wants to emphasize the ‘ideational’ quality of the question and downplay ‘things’ or empireia. “You don’t realize the difference between what’s being said now and what was said then. It was said then that one opposite thing comes to comes to be from another opposite thing; what we’re saying now is that the opposite itself could never come to be opposite to itself, whether it be the opposite in us or the opposite in nature” (103b). He then offers a syllogism about the soul. The body is mortal; the soul gives it life. As the ‘life-principle,’ the soul cannot “admit” its opposite, death. Ergo, the soul is immortal. In Dorter’s words, the soul is “the bearer of the form of life” (147), the sufficient and necessary condition of life. Socrates thus explains and justifies Anaxagoreanism, the stance of the young or ‘pre-Socratic’ Socrates, to himself and to his interlocutors. As the materialist Anaxagoras self-contradictorily said, “Mind is the arranger of and cause of all things’; “since for Anaxagoras as for Plato mind was a function of soul,” this suggests that the cosmos itself somehow consists of mind,” (158), at least in the sense that it is rational or non-self-contradictory. Dorter calls this the “world-soul,” saying that its presence “in our particular body… is the cause of our body’s being alive and our personal individual soul may be considered the manifestation of this union—the body being the principle of individuation” (160).

Socrates has argued for the existence of an immortal soul defined in a decidedly unconventional way, while convincing his two interlocutors of the existence of an immortal soul defined in the conventional way—as a disembodied person. He now arrives at the moral lesson he has intended to impart. If the soul is immortal, “then it needs care” (107c3). A prudent individual will not want to go through eternity with a soul rendered defective by habitual abuse. He devises a story or myth about the afterlife in which souls “must submit to judgment” (107d9), after being guided to Hades through what is “probably” and many-forked path (108a4). “The wise and well-ordered soul” will follows its guide, “but the soul in a state of desire for the body… flutters around for a long time, around the region of the visible” (108a-b).  Both the path to Hades and Hades itself are parts of the natural cosmos, as is “the true heaven” (109e7), where the good souls will dwell.

Ever-practical Crito, seeing that the hour is late, asks if Socrates has instructions about his children or “anything else” (115b1-3). Socrates replies that the best service to him and to his family is for Crito and all his friends to “take care of yourselves” (115b6), to live as if their souls are immortal. Socrates is no respecter of promises, and therefore not obsessed with a ‘last will and testament’ or any executor thereof—although a little later, when his three sons and the women of his household are brought in and he says his farewell, he did give “certain directions as to his wishes” with Crito as his witness. His philosophic way of life is his real legacy. He cautions against worry about bodily things, as he isn’t his body; “you can be sure, my dear Crito, that misuse of words is not only troublesome in itself, but actually has a bad effect on the soul” (115e5-6). To confuse ‘Socrates’ with the living body now before them is to misuse words, a habit that can lead to misology when the words we have misused betray us. He calms his weeping friends after drinking the poison, and finally reminds Crito to pay a debt to the god of healing. Dorter interprets this (following Nietzsche) that Socrates regards the poison as a welcome means of purging his soul from the sickness of life.

If Socrates doesn’t believe that the soul survives death as a disembodied individual but rather as a well- or ill-formed pattern of energy reintegrated with the cosmos, why would the philosopher care about caring for his soul? Dorter suggests that “for a philosopher, the prospect of his identity’s becoming once and for all time inseparable from evil would be deterrent enough” from living badly (162). He elaborates: “it is possible to infer that what happens to the soul in this mythical earth” that Socrates sketches “may be a metaphor for what happens to the soul within the living body and that the rewards and punishments may be symbolic portraits of the rewards and punishments we experience during life as the concomitant of our behavior” (166). Good or bad, deeds in this life are “reflexive”; “they react upon us as well as acting upon others” (168). The Socrates who receives the cup of poison from his jailer and playfully asks if he might pour a portion of it on the ground as a libation to the gods gives every evidence of having a well-ordered soul, far removed from the anguish of guilt for the conventional crimes the polis has convicted him of. I once knew a man who said of Socrates’ punishment after his last speech to the jury, “If he had talked to me that way, I would have killed him, too!” He was less happy in the prime of his life than was old Socrates facing death.

Dorter concludes with some remarks on the character of the philosophic life. “Reason in its purest form has its interest not in its subject, the person thinking, but in its object, that which is being thought about, while passion expresses an egocentric motivation, a need or desire of the subject himself. Reason in its pure form concerns itself with what is true regardless of how it affects us.” (182). This notwithstanding, the philosopher never loses sight of his own embodiment. The soul’s tendency to reason and the body’s tendency to unreason reside together in his nature, as in every human being. Each part of our nature has a tendency, an energy, and this understanding of human nature contrasts with that of such modern philosophers as Leibniz, Kant, and Schopenhauer, who argue that the physical world “has no reality in itself but is merely the mind’s representation of the in-itself in the forms of space and time” (184). But “for Plato… the corporeal world, and therefore energy has intrinsic existence independent of a perceiving consciousness” (184). “One can impute reason to the natural order without conceiving this reason as personality or consciousness” (186). Morally, this requires human beings to align their souls as much as possible with the rational order seen in the cosmos, itself an all-encompassing pattern of rational energy ruling matter given form by that energy. This is ‘natural right.’

 

Victor Gourevitch, ed.: Rousseau: The Social Contract and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 [1997].

Hilail Gildin: Rousseau’s Social Contract: The Design of the Argument. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.

 

Rousseau’s taste for the glittering paradox (“Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains”) has fascinated and frustrated his readers from the beginning. In seeking “the design of the argument” of what Rousseau calls his “small treatise,” Hilail Gildin quotes the philosopher’s reply to the complaints: “There are still more readers who ought to learn how to read than authors who ought to learn how to be consistent” (112). Gildin shows his own readers how to find the way through Of the Social Contract. His six chapters exhibit all due concision: “I sometimes found that the same point arose more than once in the course of the argument,” he writes. “The repetition has been permitted to remain when it serves to clarify the point” (vii). Some of these near-circular paths lead to the center while other near-circular paths lead to dead ends. Gildin keeps his readers on their way to the center while noting the dead ends.

One of Rousseau’s shortest paths leads to the blank wall of modern ‘radicalism.’ According to those who camp in its shade, Rousseau celebrates ‘nature’ and calls for the unimpeded expression (speech alone would be too restrictive) of the ‘general will,’ that is, the uninhibited desires of ‘the people.’ Gildin discards this bean sprout of a sentiment in his first chapter; in doing so, he follows the beginning of Rousseau’s book itself. In his frontispiece, Rousseau quotes a line from Vergil’s Aeneid. The Romans have conquered the Latiums, and Latinus, their king, hopes for a settlement: “Let us declare the fair laws of a compact” (Aeneid XI, ll. 321 ff.). The Trojan general, Aeneus, wants none of that, and goes on to found Rome. As Gildin observes, Latinus claims that his people have been “living righteously without coercion or laws”—a condition reminiscent of “one of the happiest periods in the state of nature, as Rousseau speaks of it in the Discourse on Inequality” (4). Although Rousseau claims “I do not know” how human inequality arose, only how to “make it legitimate,” he does have some idea of how it might have happened, and the vaporings of subsequent mis-readers of Rousseau have ignored his concerns to their peril. Gildin pulls sharply on the leash Rousseau has placed around the stiff necks of readers who don’t know how to read: “Rousseau does not promise to show men how to win release from their political bonds and regain their original freedom. He promises to show them how their chains can be made legitimate. Whether men are rulers or ruled, legitimate slavery is the best that political society has to offer them.” (9)

Gildin provides an outline of the design of Rousseau’s argument. The Social Contract consists of four books, and Gildin finds it to be divided into two main parts consisting of two books each. Each of those parts has three sections, although these do not correspond precisely to the chapter divisions. The first part (Books I and II) addresses the question of ‘Who rules?’—the Sovereign. There is an a section on false accounts of political sovereignty (I. ii-v), one on what the sovereign is and must be (I. vi-II. 6), and one on “the Legislator” or lawgiver, who founds the political community (II. 7-12). False accounts of sovereignty pretend to establish human inequality; the true account of sovereignty establishes human freedom and equality on a new, non-natural basis; the account of the Legislator describes the one person ‘in but not of’ the state, a person who therefore is not below the sovereign. This first part moves from inequality to equality to inequality. The second part (Books III and IV) addresses the matter of governing institutions. There is a section on “government,” which is beneath the Sovereign (III. 1-9), one on popular assemblies, which are “what the sovereign is and must be” (III. 10-IV. 4), and one on (in Gildin’s somewhat vague and tantalizing phrase) “what the Sovereign cannot be and is not above.” Again, the movement is from inequality to equality to inequality. (Gildin, op. cit., 16-17, 174)

Rousseau states his intention at the outset of Book I, before beginning the first of its nine chapters. “I want to inquire, whether in the civil order there can be some legitimate and sure rule of administration, taking men as they are, and the laws as they can be: In this inquiry I shall try always to combine what right permits with what interest prescribes, so that justice and utility not be disjoined” (I. 41). He will then need to explain what the “civil order” is, what a “legitimate and sure rule of administration” might be, what “men as they are” are, and how all of this relates to laws “as they can be.” Although he seems prepared to distinguish human nature from administration and law, he will not go so far as Kant and sever justice from utility. On the contrary, as Gildin observes, Rousseau wants to find not only how political rule may be made legitimate, but how it can be made dependable (op. cit., 5). Whereas in Plato and Aristotle human beings are deemed to be political animals, naturally inclined to citizenship and equipped with a certain sense of and deference to “the best way of life” (ibid., 196, n. 10), Rousseau regards human beings as naturally apolitical.  For him, republican virtue comes harder.

The “social order” (as distinguished from the “civil order”?) “is a sacred right,” derived not from nature but “founded on conventions” (I. i. 41). Aristotle finds the fundamental practices of political regimes in the family, which he understands as nature: two forms of ‘one-way’ or ‘ruler-ruled’ rule, the father-child relationship and the master-slave relationship, issue in kingship and tyranny, respectively—that is, good or bad monarchy; the husband-wife relationship, which entails ruling and being ruled, a shared and reciprocal rule, issues in what Aristotle calls “political” rule, and it underlies the two other good regimes, namely, aristocracy or the rule of the few who are good and the mixed regime, in which the few who are bad and the many who are bad share rule and are forced to produce laws that serve the interests of both, bringing good laws out of bad constituents. Political life is natural to human beings in part because it derives from the embryonically political features of family life. Rousseau rejects this analysis. The family is the only natural form of society, and its naturalness persists only so long as the children need the father for their preservation. Insofar as the family serves as the model of political societies, it substitutes “the pleasure of commanding” for paternal love (I. ii. 42). This sounds very much like Machiavelli, who also claims that “men as they are” seek rule for ‘its own sake,’ that is, for the sake of the pleasure of commanding. But Rousseau denies that Machiavelli really means it; he rejects the rule of princes, even to the point of alleging that Machiavelli intended The Prince as a satire on that rule, and such rulers. Instead, Rousseau targets Grotius (somewhat unfairly) and Hobbes (fairly enough) as advocates of the claim that might makes right. On the contrary, “force made the first slaves; their cowardice perpetuated them” (I. ii. 43). Again contra Aristotle, there can be no natural slavery in the sense of just slavery (I. iv. 44).

Here is where legitimating the chains comes in. “The stronger is never strong enough to be forever master, unless he transforms his force into right, and obedience into duty” (43). Otherwise, rulers and ruled alike are trapped in an endless, self-contradictory cycle of rule and rebellion, fleeting success the only standard of right, but if all power comes from God, so does all illness: “Does this mean it is forbidden to call the doctor?” (I. iii. 44). If so, then what could make the ruling power legitimate and stable? The despot’s claim, that “guarantees civil tranquility” and thus self-preservation “for his subjects” will never do, for the same reason John Locke adduces: He who would take away my liberty will have it in his power to take my life and property, too, in a foreign war for his own aggrandizement or simply out of bloodlust or greed; as Rousseau rather more colorfully puts it, “The Greeks imprisoned in the Cyclops’s cave lived their tranquilly, while awaiting their turn to be devoured” (I. iv. 45). But Hobbes is wrong. “Men are not naturally enemies” (I. iv. 46)., although not because they are naturally social or political, as Aristotle contends. As the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality argued, men originally lived more or less solitary lives, experiencing little contact, let alone conflict, with their fellows (I. iv. 46). It takes organized states to produce the condition of war among men.

In the central chapter of Book I, Rousseau begins his turn away from the false accounts of political authority by putting first things first. “Before examining the act by which a people elects a king, it would be well to examine the act by which a people is a people” (I. v. 49). If human beings are not social by nature, how is society itself founded? Even if one could imagine solitary beings somehow getting together long enough to vote to form a legitimate society, a mere majority vote would not suffice to make that legitimate, inasmuch as such a vote, if imposed on the minority, would effectively mean the rule of force by the many rather than by one or a few. Because Aristotle regards married human beings living in families as ‘pre-politically’ or potentially political, his version of the transition from the family to the polis comes fairly easily. Families, even extended families, lack self-sufficiency; to achieve it, to satisfy their natural wants, they form tribes and then poleis. Given his own premises, Rousseau needs to posit a somewhat harsher origin for the state, even the small ‘city-state’ of antiquity. At some point in their semi-solitary existence, men “reached the point where the obstacles that interfere[d] with their preservation in the state of nature prevailed” over the feeble resources that human individuals could muster (I. vi. 49). “They are left with no other means of self-preservation than to form, by aggregation, a sum of forces that might prevail” over the powerful natural forces that threaten them (I. vi. 49). This agreement to aggregate in order to resist these massive, utterly indifferent, uncaring, inhuman forces amounts to “the social contract”—which, despite the term, not only need not have been written down but “may never have been formally stated” at all (I. vi. 50). “Rightly understood” (it very often isn’t), this contract requires “the total alienation of each associate with all his rights to the whole community”; this alienation of one’s natural but recently indefensible rights to self-preservation and freedom to the community is “equal for all, and since the condition is equal for all, no one has any interest in making it burdensome to the rest” (I. vi. 50). This total alienation of natural rights to the non-natural, tacitly or explicitly agreed-upon community is absolutely necessary; otherwise, people would hold some of their original rights in reserve, giving them ungovernable claims upon all the others. You give up everything in nature to secure everything civilly. Rousseau italicizes: “Each of us puts his person and his full power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole” (I. vi. 50). If one recalls the illustration on the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, with a ‘body politic’ represented by a sword-wielding monarch, ‘himself’ composed of molecules of individual human beings, in Rousseau we have another man-made or artificial body politic composed of individuals, but no longer compounded into or imagined as a monarchic regime. “In place of the private person of each contracting party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body made up of as many members as the assembly has voices, and which receives by this same act its unity, its common self, its life and its will” (I. vi. 50). That is, the aggregation of individuals who band together against the common enemy, external nature, can and should continue their popular or ‘republican’ gathering-together into civil society, needing no absolute monarch or favored few to lord it over them. In ancient times, this “public person formed by the union of all” was called a city or polis, but it’s now called a republic or body politic. The body politic is called “the State” when passive, “Sovereign” when active, and a “Power” when compared to other such bodies. The people comprising the body politic call themselves a “people” when thinking of themselves collectively, “citizens” when thinking of themselves as individuals, and “subjects” in terms of their relationship with the laws of the State (I. vi. 51).

Obviously, it is the body politic when active, in its capacity as “Sovereign,” that will worry the contractors. Designed to protect, might it not also injure? It should not, but Rousseau also wants to argue that it “can never obligate itself, even toward another, to anything that detracts from that original act, such as to alienate any part of itself or to subject itself to another Sovereign” (I. vii. 52); here one can see why Charles de Gaulle, that uncompromising defender of French independence, called the Social Contract, “despite its reputation, a powerful book.” The alienation of the natural rights of individuals to the body politic means that “one cannot injure one of the members without attacking the body, and still less can one injure the body without the members being affected. Thus duty and interest alike obligate the contracting parties to help one another, and the same men must strive to combine in this two-fold relation all the advantages attendant on it” (I. vii. 52). Might doesn’t make right, but might and right coalesce. “The Sovereign, by the mere fact that it is, is always everything it ought to be.” (I. vii. 52). Gildin very acutely remarks that the two political philosophers Rousseau never criticizes are Plato and Machiavelli (op. cit., 2), and here one sees why: Rousseau finds in the Sovereign both the solution to the problems found in men “as they are” according to Machiavelli and men as they should be, the question raised by Plato’s Socrates in his quest for justice. To combine something from these disparate, indeed rival philosophers could be to solve the political problem of coordinating might with right in practice, not only in theory. In Gildin’s estimation, “the ineradicability of self-love is the basis for Rousseau’s confidence that once true equality had been seured, the general will simply could not oppress the entire citizen body,” inasmuch as “their interest always keeps the commands of the sovereign within moderate bounds” (Ibid. 59-60). Yes, of course, Rousseau concedes, “the individual may, as a man, have a particular will contrary to or different from the general will he has as a Citizen,” but if he acts on his contrary will he will be constrained to obey the general will “by the entire body”; this is to say, in one of Rousseau’s most famous paradoxes, “he shall be forced to be free” (I. vii. 53). He will be “free” in the sense that he will be required to obey the terms of the social contract to which he consented, which saved him from being victimized not only by the impersonal natural forces which drove him to accept the contract in the first place, but by powerful human beings who might offer or even coerce him into the despotic ‘protection racket’ Rousseau warns against at the outset in his quotation of poor King Latinus. Dependence upon the impersonal State, “the political machine,” guards individuals against dependence upon impersonal nature and also against despotic persons, “personal dependence” (I. vii. 53). And that is what makes the chains of civil society legitimate and, in certain crucial aspects liberating.

“The transition from the state of nature to the civil state produces a most remarkable change in man” (I. viii. 53). Scholars who describe Rousseauian human nature as malleable are thinking of the way in which this semi-solitary, free but vulnerable being thus substitutes justice for instinct, “endowing his actions with the morality they previously lacked” by committing themselves to duties to his fellows instead of obeying only “physical impulsion,” and also giving himself rights instead of appetites, hereinafter “consult[ing] his reason before listening to his inclinations” (I. viii. 53). He gains much more than he loses, although Rousseau never forgets that he does lose. He loses his natural freedom from other persons. He gains “great advantages in return,” however, such as the exercise and development of natural faculties he had only potentially in the state of nature: the enlargement of his ideas, the ennoblement of his sentiments (he is now capable of, indeed obligated to, risk his life for his fellows). Harsh necessities imposed upon him by nature “wrested him from [nature] forever, and out of a stupid and bounded animal made an intelligent being and a man” (I. viii. 53). Once bound by natural forces, he is now limited by the general will. In this sense, Rousseau continues the modern project, the conquest of chance or Fortuna (Machiavelli), and more specifically the conquest of nature for the relief of “man’s estate” (Bacon). The nature he conquers includes his own nature, inasmuch as “moral freedom” in civil society “alone makes man truly the master of himself, for the impulsion of mere appetite is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself is freedom” (I. viii. 54). That is the claim that Kant will soon radicalize into the categorical imperative.

In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Rousseau had described the founding of property as the seed of personal dependency in the state of nature itself. Under the social contract, however, “the State is master of all [individuals’] goods”; it exercises its mastery not be abolishing private property but by securing it; “having received his share, [the individual] must be bound by it, and he has no further right to the community [of goods]” (I. ix. 54). The first individual to occupy a piece of land has the right to it, so long as it was uninhabited by others, so long as the occupant “occup[ies] only as much of it as one needs to subsist,” and so long as the individual takes possession of it “not by a vain ceremony, but by labor and cultivation”—Locke’s well-known critique of Amerindian claims to vast portions of North America (I. ix. 55). The social contract doesn’t obliterate property; it secures it by legitimating it, as it does with all other natural rights. “The fundamental pact, rather than destroying natural equality, on the contrary substitutes a moral and legitimate equality for whatever physical inequality nature may have placed between men, and that while they may be unequal in force or in genius, they all become equal by convention and by right” (I. ix. 56).

Rousseau continues his discussion of sovereignty in Book II, explaining first why sovereignty is “inalienable.” The general will reflected by the social contract “alone can direct the forces of the State” toward its purpose, “the common good” because the general will means those elements among the particular, self-interested wills of the contractors which they share with all the other contractors. Since the State is the instantiation of the general will of the contractors, and since sovereignty is the State in action, by definition those actions aim at the common good of the society; without some point of common good, the society wouldn’t exist in the first place because no one would have agreed to it. What is more, the general will cannot be alienated, transferred to anyone else, inasmuch as it is a will; “power can be transferred, but not will,” which “can only be represented by itself” (II. I. 57). No rule of the one or of the few is possible fundamentally because this would mean that the people had promised “simply to obey” a particular will; the general will being the foundation of the contract, to try to establish a civil society on an act of obedience to a particular will would be to “dissolve [the people’s] quality of being a people,” to destroy the body politic (II. I. 57). “Chiefs” may indeed exist legitimately, but only “so long as the sovereign is free to oppose them and does not do so” (II. I. 57).

The sovereign is not only inalienable but indivisible. “Either the will is general or it is not” (II. ii. 58). Further, the general will is not only inalienable and indivisible but inerrant, again by definition. As general, it aims at the common good. This doesn’t mean that the deliberations of the people in assembly are inerrant; “one always wants one’s good, but one does not always see it” (II. iii. 59). The will of all isn’t necessarily the general will, any than the will of the majority is. Factions will arise, and if one predominates it will destroy the general will. But to say the sovereign is inalienable, indivisible, and animated by an inerrant will is not to say it is unlimited. Rousseau has not forgotten the danger of empowering the State, necessary though it is for securing rights. Even though the Sovereign “alone” may judge which portion of each man’s power, goods, and freedom “it is important for the community to be able to use,” the Sovereign in turn “cannot burden the subjects with any shackles that are useless to the community,” for “under the law of reason nothing is done without cause, any more than under the law of nature” (II. iv. 61). Equality of right produces the notion of justice; this equality “follows from each one’s preference for himself and hence from the nature of man”; in exchanging this natural preference for oneself for the general will in civil society, each citizen understands that that general will “loses its natural rectitude when it tends toward some individual and determinate object” (II. iv. 62). The general will cancels its own existence insofar as it is turned toward any interests other than those which all the contractors hold in common. “Every act of sovereignty,” that is, “every genuine act of the general will, either obligates or favors all Citizens equally, so that the Sovereign knows only the body of the nation and does not single out any one of those who make it up” (II. iv. 63) (italics added).

Hume’s challenge to the idea of natural right looms up here. How does the natural preference of each individual for himself get to be a “right” that somehow follows him into the civil society he freely joins? It is easy to see how it becomes a right upon entering civil society, but in what sense is it a natural right? We may be free by nature in the sense that we have no immediate need to make ourselves dependent upon other individuals, but why does that make freedom a right? Preliminarily, one might suggest that self-preference and freedom in nature are potential rights, in the same way that man in the state of nature may be said to have reason in an undeveloped state. This is a problem for Rousseau in a way that it is not for Aristotle, because Aristotle understands human nature as ‘teleological’ or purpose-driven in a way that Rousseau does not. For his part, Gildin suggests: “The fairness of the general will, where that fairness is understood as derivative from its equal directedness to the preservation, security, and freedom of each citizen, and the perception of that fairness by the members of the city, are at the center of Rousseau’s teaching regarding the sound political order” (op. cit. 156).

Leaving this question aside, Rousseau does show why the State has the right to put the citizen-contractors at physical risk on the battlefield, or even to exact capital punishment on certain criminals. If you will the end, you will the means, and if the means to preserve the civil society in which you live, which protects your life, entails going to battle to defend it against hostile States, then that’s that. Your “life is no longer only a bounty of nature, but a conditional gift of the State” (II. v. 64). Similarly, a criminal is an enemy of the State and may rightly be put to death if his life “cannot be preserved without danger” (II. v. 65).

Criminals are law-breakers, and in concluding the second section of what Gildin identifies as the first part of The Social Contract, Rousseau considers law. The social contract gives “existence and life” to the body politic; legislation gives it “motion and will” (II. vi. 66). After acknowledging God as the source of all justice, he denies that we can receive it from him. Similarly, justice “emanating from reason alone” exists but “for want of natural sanction” its laws are “vain among men,” bringing “good to the wicked and evil to the just when [the just man] observes them toward everyone while no one observes them toward him” (II. vi. 66). We can combine rights with duties only within civil society, by means of conventions and laws. A law is exactly such an “enacting will,” one always aimed at society in general and never at any particular individual or individual action. This does not preclude laws establishing different classes of citizens, only the nomination of a particular citizen for admission to a class so established.

In this sense, “every legitimate”—legal—”Government is republican” in that it is ruled by laws that are true laws, which are general, not particular, part of the res publica (II. vi. 67). Democracies, aristocracies, and even monarchies can be “republics” in that they are so ruled; they are ‘owned’ by the public in the sense that the people have limited its rulers (themselves, if it’s democracy) by laws they enacted. This raises the question of political wisdom, the capacity to enact laws that are well-designed to secure justice, whatever the regime may be. “Who will give [the body politic] the foresight necessary to form its acts and to publish them in advance, or how will it declare them in time of need?” (II. vi. 68)  The people “wills the good, but by itself it does no always see it”; “the general will is always upright, but the judgment that guides it is not always enlightened” (II. vi. 68). The people needs a Lawgiver, a Legislator, to which topic Rousseau now turns as he begins the third section of Gildin’s outline of the first part of the Social Contract, which takes us to the end of Book II.

As Gildin has observed, the Legislator brings us back to inequality, following the egalitarian core of the first half of the treatise. “It would take gods to give men laws,” but a very great man will do (II. vii. 69). “Anyone who dares to institute a people must feel capable of, so to speak, changing human nature; of transforming each individual who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole into part of a larger whole from which that individual would as it were receive his life and being; of weakening man’s constitution in order to strengthen it; of substituting a partial and moral existence for the independent and physical existence w have all received from nature” (II. vii. 69). His aim is to make man even freer by designing the laws in such a way that “the force acquired by the whole is equal or superior to the sum of the natural forces of all the individuals” (II. vii. 69). The Legislator is above not only the magistrates who will rule according to the laws he sets down but above sovereignty itself, inasmuch as he designs the laws the State will be formed because duly ratified by “the free suffrage of the people” (II. vii. 70).  Reciprocally, he will be limited because restrained from ruling, after his founding is done. He faces a difficult task, to put it gently, inasmuch as he wields no force and can employ no reasoning with a people unlikely yet to have developed their rational capacities. He therefore    “resort[s] to the intervention of Heaven and to honor the Gods with their own wisdom” in order to induce the people to “freely obey the yoke of public felicity, and bear it with docility” (II. vii. 71). His “sublime reason which rises beyond the reach of vulgar men,” which “the Lawgiver places in the mouth of the immortals, in order to rally by divine authority those whom human prudence could not move,” may remind some readers the genius of the Machiavellian ‘Founder,’ and in case it doesn’t, Rousseau quotes the Florentine himself in footnote, avowing that “there has never been in any country a lawgiver who has not invoked the deity” in order to win acceptance for his laws (II. vii. 71). With Machiavelli, he points to Moses as a successful Legislator, given the fact that “the Jewish law… still endures,” along with the name of Moses. True religion is civil religion.

Another limit on the power of the Legislator is the character of the people for whom he legislates. As an architect must test the ground to see if it will support the weight of the building he has designed, so the “wise institutor” of laws will examine “whether the people for whom he intends them is fit to bear them” (II. viii. 72). A people without longstanding customs prove the easiest material for the Legislator, although violent revolutions may make an old people new again, “recover[ing] the vigor of youth as it escapes death’s embrace” (II. viii. 72). Even this cannot happen more than once, as “freedom can be gained” but “is never recovered” (II. viii. 73).

Size also limits the Legislator’s power, as “the more the social bond stretches, the looser it grows” (II. ix. 74). Large states are difficult to administer from the central capital and consequently feature too many levels of government. But if the Legislator attempts to centralize it, the administration will become costly and top-heavy, breeding discontent. Distant “chiefs” and fellow-citizens inspire little love, and “clerks govern the state” (II. ix. 74-75). Different climates incline the people to different ways of life; if the laws are uniform they won’t fit everyone, and if they are diverse they will foster confusion. On balance, “one should rely more on the vigor of a good government, than on resources provided by a large territory” (II. ix. 75). The ratio of territory to population should be whatever amount of territory suffices to feed the population; otherwise, the people will lack self-sufficiency, depending upon commerce and war for their prosperity.

The Legislator should aim at “two principal objects, freedom and equality. Freedom, because any individual independence is that much force taken away from the State; equality, because freedom cannot subsist without it” (II. xi. 78). A feudal serf serves his lord, not the State; the degree of inequality whereby one man is reduced to serfdom precludes civic freedom. The existence of “very rich people or beggars” is “fatal to the common good” and an instigation to tyranny no matter which faction eventually dominates (II. xi. 78n.). With Aristotle, then, Rousseau commends “moderation in goods and influence” among “the great, “”moderation in avarice and covetousness” among the “the lowly” (II. xi. 78). The laws needed to achieve this will vary from geographical circumstance to the next, and from one people to the next. The Legislator must coordinate the laws with nature.

The Legislator also need to remain mindful of the several kinds of laws. Fundamental or “political” law—political in that it determines the “the relation of he whole to the whole,” “the action of the entire body acting upon itself”—establishes the form of government, the State’s regime or constitution (II. xii. 80). Civil laws address the relation of the citizens with each other or with the entire body, making them independent of one another but dependent upon the whole (“for it is only the State’s force that makes for its members’ freedom”) (II. xii. 80). Criminal laws govern the relationship of disobedience to the laws to penalties for such disobedience. “The most important of all laws”—more important, even, than the constitutional law—are the moral laws, the morals, customs, and above all the opinions of the people (II. xii. 81). Moral law “imperceptibly substitutes the force of habit for that of authority,” thereby strengthening popular consent and allowing rulers to rule with a lighter and less resented hand (II. xii. 81). Rousseau announces that the second half of the Social Contract will address political laws, only, although that will not turn out to be the whole truth.

Book III begins with an admonition to read the first chapter carefully, as “I lack the art of being clear to those who are not willing to be attentive” (I. I. 82).  Rousseau very clearly distinguishes “Government”—by which he means what we would call the executive—from the Sovereign or legislative capacity of the people; Government must never be thought to be anything more than subordinate to sovereignty. The Government is to the Sovereign what bodily force is to the will. Conversely, the Sovereign never acts but only wills; “all of the Sovereign’s acts can only be laws” (III. I. 82). The Government not only executes the laws but also maintains freedom within the body politic and against foreign enemies. There is no social contract between the people and its governors, only the commissioning of the office staffed by persons who derive their power from the office they hold, and thus from the Sovereign, which established the office. “The Government receives from the Sovereign the orders which it gives the people, and for the State to be well balanced it is necessary that, all other things being equal, the product or power of the Government taken by itself by equal to the product or power of the citizens who are sovereign on the one hand, and subjects on the other” (III. I. 83). Otherwise, you will have what’s now called a ‘failed state,’ quite apart from the question of whether its regime has been changed.

Sovereignty being undivided, the more citizens there are the smaller percentage of the Sovereignty each citizen possesses. The bigger the population of the State, the less freedom in the Rousseauian sense of political power wielded by the individual citizen. If the Government expands in order to govern an increased population, the Sovereign will need commensurately more power “in order to contain the Government” (III. I. 84). But the ratio involves more than mere population or raw numbers; if the citizens are active, if their moral qualities are strong or weak, that too effects the ratio because it means the citizens exercise their ‘containment’ power more or less vigorously. “Geometric precision does not obtain in moral quantities” (III. I. 85). Political difficulties “consist in ordering this subordinate whole [the Government] within the whole” (III. I. 86). As Gildin puts it, “the people must be too weak distributively to disobey the government and too strong collectively to be disobeyed by it” (op. cit., 96).

Rousseau also distinguishes between the Government and “the Prince.” The Prince or Magistrate consists of one, few, or many persons charged with administration. “The more numerous the Magistrates, the weaker the Government” (III. ii. 87) because, obviously, the rule of one is more coherent than the rule of few or of many. This implies that “the ratio of magistrates to Government should be the inverse of the ratio of subjects to Sovereign: That is to say that the more the State [the body politic] grows, the more should the Government shrink,” so that the Government will be able to exercise the more coherent rule needed to give order to a large people. “The art of the Lawgiver consists in knowing how to determine the point at which the force and the will of the Government which are always inversely proportional, can be combined in the relation[or ratio] most advantageous to the State” (III. ii. 89). The Legislator may establish a democracy, or government/executive consisting of the whole people or the majority of them, an aristocracy, wherein the government/executive is in the hand of the few, or a monarchy, with its single magistrate. These forms of Government admit of degrees and mixtures. Generally, democratic Government suits small States, aristocracies medium-sized States, monarchies large States.

Because Governments, as distinguished from Sovereigns or legislatures, take particular rather than general actions, democratic Governments are inadvisable: “Nothing is more dangerous than the influence of private interests on public affairs” (III. iv. 91). It is also impractical, considering that to give executive power to the bulk of the citizens would require them to remain assembled more or less perpetually. “If there were a people of God, they would govern themselves democratically. So perfect a Government is not suited to men” (III. iv. 92)—as that people of God, the Puritans, who according to Tocqueville introduced democracy to America, had found out in the century before Rousseau lived. The fifth, central chapter of Book III describes what can be either the best or the worst practicable form of government, aristocracy. After natural forces drove the natural families into the first social-contract societies, the governments consisted of the family patriarchs “deliberat[ing] among themselves about the public business,” a form of government still well-used by “the savages of northern America” (III. v. 92). But the very institution of such inequality led to less and less natural versions of aristocracy: initially elective aristocracies, then hereditary. Patriarchal aristocracy works for “simple peoples”; hereditary aristocracy is “the worst of all Governments”; but elective aristocracy is the best of all governmental forms—”Aristocracy properly so called” (III. v. 93). “The best and most natural order is to have the wisest govern the multitude, so long as it is certain that they will govern it for its advantage and not for their own,” and that’s what elections are for, as they can keep the aristocrats tolerably close to the general will (III. v. 93).

Monarchy provides the most vigorous form of governmental/executive power, but also the one most linked to the “particular will” of the Magistrate instead of the general will. Here is where Rousseau assures his readers that Machiavelli didn’t really mean his praise of monarchy in The Prince, that he was “forced during the oppression of his fatherland [by the Medici] to disguise his love of freedom” (III. vi. 95n.). It is safer to say that a preference for ‘republicanism’ in Government over monarchy is Rousseau’s own view. Monarchs may be vigorous, but vigor poorly limited by popular constraints runs to bungling, knavery, scheming, and pettiness. Although succession is a problem for any form of government, while elections are rife with intrigue and corruption, hereditary successions corrupt the character of the heir, whose misgovernment is justified as divine punishment by pontificating priests.

Rousseau briefly and somewhat unenthusiastically describes the regime Aristotle preferred as the best practicable one, the mixed regime. When executive power has been allowed to escape strict subordination  to the legislative power, dividing the Government may prove a necessary stopgap. In so arguing, Rousseau illustrates the title of the next chapter, “That Not Every Form of Government Is Suited to Every Country.” Governmental forms should match potential revenues, themselves determined not only by tax rates but by climate, which determines the natural wealth of the State. Southern countries, rich in resources, support despotism; hardscrabble northern climates support little more than barbarism; moderate climates can produce “good polity” (III. viii. 102). On the moral side of things, the best sign of good polity is population increase without resort to immigration or colonization. In addition, Rousseau endorses Machiavelli’s claim that “a little agitation energizes souls” (III. ix. 106n.); republican disputation exercises citizen virtue in a way the quiescence of despotism can never do. This praise of republicanism concludes the first section of what Gildin identifies as the second part of the Social Contract and serves as an introduction to the second section. Having established the moral importance of subordinating Government to Sovereignty, the executive to the legislative, Rousseau turns (as he did in the first part) to freedom and equality in the second section, comprised by chapters III. x to IV. iv. This means a turn from the executive to the legislative assembly.

But not immediately. The crucial conflict in political life is the conflict between the particular will and the general will, the Government against the Sovereign. III. x and III. xi form a counterpart to III. ix: “the abuse of Government and its tendency to degenerate” followed by “the death of Government.” These are caused by the particular will or wills’ increasingly successful subversion of the general will. Gildin puts this with his usual concision: “The very waywardness of the particular will that makes government necessary reappears within government itself” (op. cit. 130). This may occur if the Government contracts, moving from democracy (“the only form of government that can be brought into being by a simple act of the general will,” as Gildin observes [op. cit. 140]) to aristocracy, aristocracy to kingship (III. x. 106) and thereby distancing itself from the expression of the general will, or if it dissolves altogether, either by princely lawlessness or by factionalism within the Government itself. This account enables to Rousseau to restore, in a noticeably altered way, Aristotle’s distinction between good and bad regimes of the one, the few, and the many. Political degeneration occurs when democracy degenerates into ochlocracy or mob rule, aristocracy into oligarchy, and kingship into tyranny.  In Aristotle, of course, the mixed regime is superior to democracy and tyranny means the one who governs citizens as if they were slaves, whereas Rousseau defines tyranny simply as usurpation of lawful rule. Nonetheless, as readers will see when Rousseau discusses the Roman republic, Rousseau shares Aristotle’s esteem for the mixed regime. In Rousseau, however, the legislative part of any regime enjoys pride of place in a good regime. The body politic dies when its life-giving, legislative heart fails.

This remark leads to a consideration of how sovereign authority, the lawmaking power, may be attained, which is tantamount to considering how the assembly can be maintained against usurpation by the executive. This can only occur if the people must meet in fixed, periodic assemblies “which nothing can abolish or prorogue” (III. xiii. 111). If the Government is strong, this popular assembly should occur more frequently, and every time it does the activities of the Government must be suspended. To meet the problem of how to assemble the people in larger States, Rousseau recommends moving the capital around the country, so that the people of no one region can dominate every such popular assembly. This more than suggests that States should not be allowed to become very large.

It also means that citizens must be fully citizens. “As soon as public service ceases to be the Citizens’ principal business, and they prefer to serve with their purse rather than with their person, the State is already close to ruin” (III. xv. 113). Absorption in household concerns indicates a bad Government. Accordingly, elected representatives should not enact laws but only propose them for popular ratification. “The idea of Representatives is modern: it comes to us from feudal Government, that iniquitous and absurd Government in which the human species is degraded, and the name of man dishonored” (III. xv. 114). Given the treatment of Christianity to be presented in Book IV, “modern” here means “Christian,” and the dilution of direct citizen participation in Government betokens the inclination of Christians to prefer the spiritual City of God to the here-and-now cities of men. And when the spirituality of Christians weakens, the pursuit of individual and family self-interest leads to the ‘bourgeois’ inclination to leave Government to others, to abandon self-government in the strong sense in which it prevailed in some regimes of antiquity. “The instant a People gives itself Representatives, it ceases to be free; it ceases to be” (III. xv. 115). Given this, however, a new problem arises: freedom is the privilege of small States, self-defense the privilege of large States. Small States thus lose their freedom to unfree large States. Rousseau will not address the problem of foreign policy in the Social Contract, and says so in its concluding chapter.

Thinking in terms of the internal workings of the body politic, then, Rousseau does say how one should think about the relationship between the Sovereign and the Government. It is imperative for citizens to understand that the social contract is social, not governmental. All citizens are “equal by the social contract” (III. xvi. 116). The citizens do not contract with the Government, since the Sovereign cannot diminish its own power and the establishment of the Government is a particular act, not one that encompasses all citizens equally. To establish a Government means to establish some body, however large, that is superior in its relation to individuals, inferior in relation to the citizenry as a whole. The Sovereign establishes the Government, including its form, first by forming a provisional Government which is democratic. In framing the law forming the permanent Government, the provisional democracy may choose to retain that form, or it may form another, narrower form of the few or of one.

Rousseau recommends that the permanent Government feature an assembly to prevent usurpations by the executive; the assembly will have “no other purpose than to maintain the social treaty” (III. xviii. 119). It will open every session by determining if the Sovereign (itself) will retain the present form of Government, and whether the people choose to leave the current officeholders in office. Only the general will is “indestructible,” and the people will usually find it out. Rousseau endorses in advance the maxim of W. C. Fields, “You can’t cheat an honest man.” As he rather more formally puts it, “Peace, union, equality are enemies of political subtleties. Upright and simple men are difficult to deceive because of their simplicity [italics added], they are not taken in by sham and special pleading; they are not even clever enough to be dupes.” (IV. I. 121) It is only when “the social knot begins to loosen” that factions form, “the general will is no longer the will of all,” and “the best opinion no longer carries the day unchallenged” (IV. I. 121-122).

This applies to voting. “Every man being born free and master of himself,” the individual’s consent is necessary when “the social pact” is proposed. This includes slaves, for “to decide that the son of a slave is born a slave is to decide that he is not born a man” (IV. ii. 123). If some reject the social contract when it’s proposed, “their opposition does not invalidate the contract, it only keeps them from being included in it”; they become resident foreigners, if they choose not to move away (IV. ii. 123). But if they do stay, they consent to submit to the newly-established sovereignty, as non-citizens, non-sharers in that sovereignty. In subsequent votes, whether for laws or for candidates for office, citizen unanimity is neither practical nor morally necessary. Having agreed to the social contract, I must abide by majority rule. “When a law is proposed in the People’s assembly, what they are being asked is not exactly whether they approve the proposal or reject it but whether it does or does not conform to the general will, which is theirs”; if I am in the minority, “it proves nothing more than that I made a mistake and that what I took to be the general will was not” (IV. ii. 124). Rousseau hastens to add that this presupposes “that all the characteristics of the general will are still in the majority; once they no longer are, then regardless of which side one takes there no longer is any freedom” (IV. ii. 124). As described in the previous chapter, corruption has carried the day.

When it comes to Government, as distinguished from lawgiving, “there is no genuine democracy” (IV. iii. 126). Rousseau devotes the longest chapter of Book IV, and the three subsequent chapters, to a discussion of the governing institutions of ancient Rome. He begins with an account of Rome’s Comitia or tribal assemblies, established by the founding monarch, Romulus, the first of which being the Comitia of three (but eventually 35) tribes. The original tribes “were at first entirely military,” and this military (as opposed to commercial) spirit “led the little city of Rome to assume in advance an administration suited to the capital of the world” (IV. iv. 127-128). Rousseau’s republicanism sharply differs from the commercial republicanism of Great Britain and, in the near future, the United States; it is on this point among others that General de Gaulle came to distrust the ‘Anglo-Americans,’ as he called them.

By the time of Rome’s sixth king, Servius Tullius, the increase in population of one of the three tribes threatened to unbalance the monarchy. He substituted a geographic division, really redefinition of the tribes for the original division by bloodlines and added a fourth tribe. In addition to these four urban tribes, Servius ordained fifteen rural tribes. Rousseau regards the addition of these rural tribes as having been indispensable to the success of the republican regime that came after Servius’ assassins were overthrown. “Rome owed to [the distinction between the urban and the rural tribes] both the preservation of its morals and the growth of its empire, because rural life preponderated over the “arts, crafts, intrigue, fortune and slavery” of the city (IV. iv. 128-129). Rome’s aristocrats maintained country estates; “the Villagers’ simple and hardworking life was preferred to the idle and loose life of the Roman Bourgeois,” and “the Village [became] the nursery of those robust and valiant men who defended them in time of war and fed them in time of peace” (IV. iv. 129). Rousseau contrasts the way of life of Roman republicanism with “the modern people,” characterized by “devouring greed, unsettled spirit, intrigue, constant comings and goings, [and] perpetual revolutions of fortune” (IV. iv. 131). Despite the vast expansion of the franchise under Servius, precursor to the change of regime from monarchy to republicanism, the advantages given by Romulus to the aristocratic class (primarily via the patron-client relationship, “a masterpiece of politics and humanity” [IV. iv. 133]) lent Rome its last combination of warrior-virtue and prudence. “The whole majesty of the Roman People resided only” in the aristocratic Senate, “as long as honesty reigned among the Citizens” (IV. iv. 135).

On occasion, even honest citizens may take several steps too far. Here the final section of Gildin’s outline begins. The central chapter of Book IV concerns the Tribunate, an institution common to the Roman Republic but also to Sparta and to the modern Venetian Republic. The sole purpose of the Tribunate in Rome, the Ephors in Sparta, and the Committee of Ten in Venice is to restore balanced relations between the Prince and the People, or the Prince and the Sovereign and to preserve the laws. In Rome, the Tribunes protected the Sovereign against the Government; in Venice, the Committee of Ten protects the Government against the People, and in Sparta the Ephors supported one side against the other, by turns. Roughly analogous to the United States Supreme Court, the Tribunate under whatever name in operates has no share of executive or legislative power; “while it can do nothing, it can prevent everything” (IV. v. 137). There is of course a danger: “A wisely tempered Tribunate is the firmest bulwark of a good constitution; but if it has even a little too much force it overthrows everything,” “degenerate[ing] into tyranny when it usurps the executive power of which it is but the moderator, and tries to administer the laws which it ought only to protect” (IV. v. 137).

Equally necessary and dangerous was the office of the Dictatorship. The “inflexibility of the laws” can prove a barrier against arbitrary rule, but this very strength will prove a weakness in a crisis, when extralegal powers are necessary to defend the nation and the regime (including the system of laws itself) (IV vi. 138). In such times, for the sake of “the salvation of the fatherland,” a stronger hand will be indispensable. Stronger, but not limitlessly strong: the Dictator “can do anything, except make laws” (IV. vi. 139). He served for a fixed, brief term—six months—making his official lifespan bound by the laws themselves. In framing the constitution of the Fifth Republic, de Gaulle took care to place the power of emergency dictatorship in the hands of the President of the Republic, and it came in handy when the Algerian colonists rebelled against the regime.

Just as the laws may require extralegal support, so may the informal laws of public opinion. The office of Censor amounts of the governmental office intended not to serve as an arbiter of public opinion but as its articulator. If it departs from public opinion “its decisions [become] vain and without effect” (IV. vii. 141). “Among all the peoples of the world, not nature but opinion determines the choice of their pleasures. Reform men’s opinions and their morals will be purified of themselves.” (IV. vii. 141). The natural locus of opinion is honor. By honoring and dishonoring citizens and their actions, the Censor fortifies public opinion, preserving its republican chastity as long as possible. He can preserve morals for a time, but not restore them once they decline.

Religion serves as the most important guide of morality; not for Rousseau the Voltairean hope that atheism (which is what Deism amounted to, civically) could support the civic life of a regime. At the same time, Rousseau gives nothing to Rousseau or their common mentor, Machiavelli, as a critic of Christianity. Under paganism there were no wars of religion because each State had its own gods and “the God of one people had no right over the other peoples”; “the Gods of the Pagans were not jealous Gods” (IV. viii. 143). Rousseau goes so far as to claim that “even Moses and the Hebrew People sometimes countenanced this idea in speaking of the God of Israel,” although his one example may be described as weakly persuasive, and when the insisted otherwise they “brought down upon themselves the persecution we read about in their history,” a persecution shared by the early Christians, as well (IV. viii. 143-144). In Homer, by contrast, and in pagan antiquity generally, men didn’t fight for the gods but the gods fought for men, who showed their gratitude by building altars to their gods after victory was obtained.

The Roman empire under both its republican and later monarchic regimes “welcomed into their Pantheon the gods of the defeated,” as André Malraux would write, two centuries after Rousseau. The spiritual kingdom founded on earth by Jesus “led to the State’s ceasing to be one, and caused the intestine divisions which have never ceased to convulse Christian peoples” (IV. viii. 144). Their persecution occurred because the Romans saw them as rebels, and “what the pagans had feared came to pass,” as “this supposedly other-worldly kingdom was seen to become under a visible chief the most violent despotism in this world,” a despotism that “has made any good polity impossible in Christian States” (IV. viii. 145). This brings Rousseau to praise Muhammad, a man of “very sound views” who “tied his political system together well,” although it has subsequently fallen into decadence (IV. viii. 145). Among Christian authors, “Hobbes is the only one who clearly saw the evil and the remedy… dar[ing] to propose reuniting the two heads of the eagle,” although “he must have seen that the domineering spirit of Christianity was inconsistent with his system, and that the interest of the Priest would always be stronger than that of the State” (IV. viii. 146).

In view of these considerations, Rousseau becomes one of the first critics of existing Christian belief and practice to turn to a supposed ‘early’ Christianity or Christianity of the Gospels. He begins by identifying two, then three kinds of relationships between religion and society. The first, with no visible institutions, consists of “the purely internal cult of the Supreme God and the eternal duties of morality,” “the pure and simple Religion of the Gospel, true Theism, and what may be called divine natural right” (IV. viii. 146). Rousseau will soon call this “the Religion of man or Christianity,” a formulation deserving close scrutiny (IV. viii. 147). The second kind of religio-political system is paganism, which extends “the rights and duties of man only so far as its altars,” observing what Rousseau calls “divine civil or positive right” (IV. viii. 146). The third, “more bizarre sort of Religion,” exemplified by “Roman Christianity” and “the Religion of the Lamas,” puts forward the rule of the Priest and “results in a mixed and unsociable right” to which Rousseau declines to give so much as a name (IV. viii. 146-147). It is “so manifestly bad that it is a waste of time to amuse oneself demonstrating that it is,” inasmuch as “everything which destroys social unity” and “put[s] man in contradiction with himself” is “worthless,” “detaching [Citizens] from all earthly things” (IV. viii. 147). “Christian Republic” is a contradiction in terms (IV. viii. 149). All of this (Machiavellian) teaching being so, in Rousseau’s opinion, the thing to do now is for each State to set down its own “purely civil profession of faith,” a catechism establishing the “sentiments of sociality without which it is impossible to be either a good Citizen or a loyal subject” (IV. viii. 150). Those who reject refuse the civic profession shall be exiled (“not as impious but as unsociable, as incapable of sincerely loving the laws, justice, and, if need be of sacrificing his life to his duties”) or punished with death, if actively defiant (IV. viii. 150). These “dogmas” will include a prohibition against religious intolerance—establishing Rousseau as a source of the now-familiar phrase, ‘We tolerate everything but intolerance,’ although in latter days this has been extended to moral laws themselves, very much in contradiction to Rousseau’s intention.

In his brief concluding chapter, Rousseau looks back at the work as a whole and announces that these are “the true principles of political right” (IV. ix. 152). Gildin ends his own book by remarking that the first word of the Social Contract is “I,” and the last word is “me.” Rousseau himself is “in some sense even higher in dignity than the social order or than his activity as a legislator” (op. cit., 191). Gildin therefore refers his readers to “the writings of Rousseau the subject of which is Rousseau himself” (191). There one learns more about the philosopher whose thoughts provide clear and legitimate boundaries for civil societies.