from without, but also, and far more, in the ply given by a long series of historical struggles and the long pressure of historical tradition. 'It is certain,' he says in an early writing, 'that, in the long run, nations are what their Governments make them : warriors, citizens, men, when the ruler so wills it; populace and rabble when it pleases him.' So again, in his last writing, he pleads thus with the Poles: In thinking of what you desire to gain by reform, never forget what you may lose. Correct, if it be possible, the abuses of your old constitution; but never despise that which has made you what you are. I do not say that you ought to leave things as they are. I do say that you should not touch them save with the utmost caution. At this moment you are more struck by the defects of the old system than by its advantages. The time will come, I fear, when you are more alive to its advantages; and, unhappily, that will be when you have lost them.' 2 It would be difficult to find in Montesquieu anything that goes so deep as this. It would also be difficult to find anything more unlike the familiar picture of the French aeronaut,' the champion of abstract rights at all costs, which Burke painted, and which, for most Englishmen, still remains the sole authentic portrait of Rousseau. In estimating the exact value of the discrepancy between the opening and the close of the Contrat social, it is, no doubt, necessary to make some allowance for the oratorical method which was habitual to Rousseau. It was always his instinct to arrest the attention of the reader by a sweeping assertion on the very threshold: an assertion which, in the very act of making it, he was well aware would need subsequent qualification. The method has its advantages. It has also the drawback of preparing the reader for conclusions differing more or less pointedly from those which he actually gets. In this instance, however, it is probable that the 2 Gouv. de Pologne, chap. i. 1 Éc. pol. (Œuvres, iii. p. 285). discrepancy is due not so much to any method of statement, whether deliberate or instinctive, as to a real change, perhaps not more than half conscious, in the writer's way of thought. So far from being a man of fixed ideas, he was in fact singularly open to new lights: singularly liable, therefore, to recast his conclusions, more or less completely, in the very act of shaping them. Of all his works, the Contrat social was that over which he brooded the longest. He must have taken at least five or six years-as some have thought, considerably more-to write it. Of all his works, therefore, not even excepting Émile, it is that which bears the strongest marks of the successive changes-all of them tending to greater depth and fullness-through which his mind passed as he wrote it. Half an individualist when he wrote the opening chapter, through the bulk of the treatise he is a fiery champion of the corporate being and the corporate rights of the State. An abstract theorist after the fashion of Hobbes or Locke in the earlier part of the argument, he is as concrete as Montesquieu, and in ways often more subtle than Montesquieu's, at the close. To trace the successive stages of this progress is one of the tasks, and certainly not the least interesting of them, to which the student of the Contrat social is called. V It now only remains to consider the closing chapter, that on Civil Religion, and the various problems it involves. The chapter itself was not written until the final revision of the book for the press (1761); and it is doubtful whether it formed part of the author's original design. The opinions 1 See above, p. xi. M. Schinz considers that the most important chapter (I. ii.) of the first draft was written before the Discours sur l'inégalité, i.e. in or before 1753. M. Beaulavon, on grounds with which I am constrained to agree, differs from this view. Their articles appeared in the Revue d'hist. litt. de la France (1912, 1913). Both writers throw much incidental light on the growth of Rousseau's political thought. set forth in it, however, had long been held by Rousseau ; with one exception, that of the death penalty for 'relapsed atheists, they had been stated in a well-known letter to Voltaire as early as 1756.1 They must therefore be regarded not as a passing caprice, but as the settled convictions of the writer. 'As soon as men come to live in civil society, they must have a religion to keep them there. No nation has ever endured, or ever will endure, without religion. If no religion were given to it, it would make one for itself, or speedily perish.' Such are the opening words of the chapter in the original draft,2 and they strike the key-note of the whole argument that follows. It is not enough, the argument continues, that a nation should have a religion. That religion must have a direct bearing upon the national life, or it is useless, perhaps worse than useless, for the purpose. It must be such as to make good men, no doubt. It must also be such as to make good citizens. It must be directed not only to moral, but also to civic, ends. How do the religions known to us from history and experience satisfy this double requirement? Roughly speaking, they may be classed under three heads the old ethnic religions, Jewish or pagan, which sacrificed everything to the State; the religion of the Gospel, which confines itself to the individual and takes no account of the State; and the sacerdotal religions-Catholicism is the supreme example of them which place the State at the mercy of the Church. : Of these, the ethnic religions fulfil the second, the civic, requirement completely, but give very imperfect satisfaction to the first. The sacerdotal religions fulfil, or may be charitably assumed to fulfil, the first, but run violently counter to the second. The religion of the Gospel fulfils the first to admiration, but entirely neglects the second. 1 Euvres, x. pp. 132-33. 2 Political Writings, i. p. 499. The same thought appears in the final version (‘On prouverait au premier—Bayle—que jamais État ne fut fondé que la religion ne lui servît de base '), but in a less conspicuous place. : For our purpose, the ethnic religions may be left out of the reckoning the conscience of mankind has pronounced against them, largely on account of their ruthless cruelty, and the verdict is little likely to be reversed. We are left with the sacerdotal religions and the Christianity of the Gospel; and neither of them gives what we require. The former must at once be rejected, and their adherents debarred from all rights of citizenship. Their intolerance inevitably sets citizen against citizen; their priestcraft, creating as it does an imperium in imperio, runs directly athwart the sovereignty of the State. In other words, they are doubly anti-civic they sow discord between one individual and another; they destroy the unity which binds together the community as a whole. Even the Christianity of the Gospel, ennobling as it is for the individual, is for the citizen manifestly insufficient. It needs to be supplemented by a 'civil' religion, which shall bind every citizen to the sacred duty of maintaining the Social Contract, and of upholding the law of the land—that is, the sovereign will of the community -to the utmost limit of his powers. The argument strikes, and is intended to strike, against two distinct classes of men-against atheists (and agnostics) on the one side, against at least the more bigoted sort of Catholics upon the other against the former, because, having no religion, they can have no binding sense of duty; against the latter, because their religion makes them the enemies. both of their fellow-citizens and of the State. Thus Rousseau arms himself with a two-edged sword of persecution, equally ready to smite those whose religion is anti-civic on the one hand, and those who have no religion at all upon the other. To this doctrine there are at least two fatal objections. It is cruel in its effects, and, so far as 'unbelievers' are concerned, it does not even serve the purpose which it is intended to attain. Over the first objection it would be idle to linger. That Rousseau should have stooped to persecute for opinion and even, in certain circumstances, to punish it with death would be incredible, were it not remembered that the very fathers of free thought, Milton and Locke not excepted, had argued, though more vaguely, in the same spirit and come to much the same practical conclusions.1 This, however, though it may palliate, in no way excuses his delinquency. For, during his own lifetime, Voltaire and others, to their eternal honour, had wakened the conscience of the world by their passionate protests. And it is lamentable that, at the moment when one form of bigotry was at last yielding to shame and reason, Rousseau, by nature the most tolerant and humane of men, should have revived it in another. It may be perfectly true that, as Governor of his ideal State, he would have shrunk with horror from applying his theory in practice.2 But then where was the use, to say nothing about the humanity, of framing it? The second objection cuts even deeper than the first. Religion is a thing of the heart, or it is nothing; and no man knew this better than Rousseau. But no oath, civic or otherwise, can give security for the heart. It may be taken by an unprincipled atheist, more concerned to save his place or his skin than to obey his conscience. It may be taken by a man who is intellectually convinced both of the being of God and of those other attributes assigned to Him by the official creed of Rousseau, but on whose heart and life such beliefs, or half-beliefs, have no practical influence whatever. In either case the whole purpose of Rousseau is brought to nought. The only person shut out by his fine-spun scheme is the conscientious atheist : that is, the very man who, on Rousseau's 's own showing, ought to be admitted and welcomed. 1 See Areopagitica (Prose Writings, p. 118) and Letters on Toleration (Works, ii. p. 251). Instances might be multiplied out of the political philosophers, e.g. Spinoza (Tract. theologico-pol. xix. §§ 21-49), Pufendorf, Burlamaqui-the last of whom wrote as late as 1747. 26 'Si j'étais magistrat, et que la loi portât peine de mort contre les athées, je commencerais par faire brûler comme tel quiconque viendrait dénoncer un autre' (Nouvelle Héloïse, v., Lettre v. (note)). |