first present in man's heart; but that this instinct should develop into a conscious sense of duty is, humanly speaking, impossible save under the fostering guidance of the State. The first half of this argument secures the continuity of the process from the natural to the civil state; 1 the secondwhich, for us, is manifestly the more important-sums up what, when all is said and done, is the main issue between Rousseau and the individualists. To the individualist, everything achieved by mankind, good and bad alike, comes from the individual, who gives everything to society and, except in so far as he wins a safeguard against the interference of others, takes nothing from it. It is true that he is made for society, and that, without society, he could neither support his physical life in tolerable comfort, nor find any outlet for his moral energies. But, beyond supplying the necessary field for his moral and, in a less degree, for his physical-activities, society can do nothing for him except leave him alone. His will, his sense of duty, his code of right and wrong -all that makes him a moral being, all that constitutes his personality-are wholly and exclusively his own. No other man has the least share in moulding them; no other man has any right to question the sanctity of their bidding, or, save in so far as may be absolutely necessary for the protection of society, to interfere with the acts which his conscience dictates to him, or which it conveniently allows him to commit. Even this saving clause, it must be observed, is thrown in rather from necessity than conviction, in obedience rather to circumstances than to logic. On individualist principles, in fact, it is hard to see how any form of social coercion is to be justified at all. This, reduced to its simplest form, is the theory which Rousseau had before him. And this is the theory which, from foundation to coping-stone, he relentlessly assails. It is not true, he urges, that man owes nothing positive to 1 Émile, iv. (Œuvres, ii. pp. 205-6); compare Œuvres, i. pp. 98-100. society. It is not true that his will, his conscience, his sense of right and wrong, are purely his own creation, that they spring solely from the depth of his own being. The germ, the possibility, of those things is doubtless born with him. So much must come from the individual, or it could never come at all. But, until this germ is developed, until this possibility receives specific form, the working of a blind instinct, at perpetual war with passions stronger than itself, must necessarily be weak and fitful, its effect upon the conduct of the individual inevitably be little or nothing. And, as we have seen, it was Rousseau's belief that the conditions essential for growth, for the formation of a specific code of right and wrong, however rudimentary, are to be found only in that ordered development of society which we call the State. In this belief there is nothing startling; still less, anything overstrained, perverse, or fantastic. On the contrary, it is the belief upon which civilised men of all ages have, consciously or unconsciously, acted. It is the doctrine which, in the dawn of philosophy, was proclaimed as self-evident by Plato and Aristotle; which, until the close of the Middle Ages, was accepted by all save a small minority of thinkers; which was not effectively questioned, until it became the first task of Europe to break up the outworn fabric of faith and government handed down from a remote past; and which, when once that task was accomplished, when the work of reconstruction —and that, after all, is the normal work of man-was once more taken in hand, was again recognised as the foundation of all truth in these matters by a long line of thinkers, at the head of whom stand Rousseau and, by a strange irony, his bitter assailant, Burke. He who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue willed also the necessary means of its perfection. He willed therefore the State - without which man could not by any possibility arrive at the perfection of which his nature is capable, nor even make a remote 1 1 an and faint approach to it. These are the words of Burke.1 And, with an added appeal to the religious sanction addition itself anticipated in the closing chapter of the Contrat social-what are they but an unconscious echo of what Rousseau had said before him? Thus, alike on moral and on purely natural grounds-and the former, as those which alone can yield the basis for an ideal of Right, are by far the more important-Rousseau was led to reject both the fundamental assumptions of the individualists and the whole fabric which Locke and others had raised upon them. The State, in his view, is not something external to the individual, but of the very essence of his being. So far from imposing restrictions on his liberty, it is the condition without which liberty would be only another name for bondage to his most selfish and most destructive passions. And, entering as it does into the very tissue of his moral being, it has the right to control his acts and to inflict punishment for such as the 'general will' shall have pronounced unlawful: that is, injurious to the welfare of the community as a whole.2 That this right, like all others, is liable to abuse, is no argument against its validity. It is an argument for caution in its exercise; an argument for taking each case upon its own merits, for testing each application of the right by its own circumstances and its probable consequences-in one word, by expediency and it is nothing more. : Such, in Rousseau's view, are the ends for which the State exists; and such are some of the consequences which flow from their acceptance. All, however, is not yet said. And, unless the doctrine of absolute surrender' were supplemented by that of the corporate self' and the 'general will,' it would, as Rousseau himself insists, be 'subject to the most enormous abuses.' It might be used to cover a truculent despotism, such as Hobbes had preached in 1 Works, i. p. 418 (Reflections); ib. pp. 522-5 (Appeal). 2 Comp. Plato's Crito, chap. xii. 3 C.S. I. vii. Leviathan. It might be used to justify that enslavement of a whole nation to an irresponsible bureaucracy which we see in Prussia. It is only when every member of the community has a voice in the government of the State, only when the 'sovereignty of the people' is established as a living reality, that these abuses are barred out. There is all the difference in the world between the subjection of a herd of men to an absolute Government and the surrender of each individual to the community as a whole. In the former case, there is nothing to prevent the Government from treating them as slaves, as sheep to be driven wherever the shepherd is minded they should go on the contrary, there is everything to encourage it. In the latter case, every individual has an equal voice in determining the course that shall be taken. In the former case, the governed remain a mere herd, without cohesion, without corporate life, without a will, individual or collective, of their own. In the latter, they become in the strictest sense a community, with a common life to which every member contributes, with a common will in the moulding of which every individual has his share. That is the practical bearing of the 'corporate self' and the 'general will,' in Rousseau's system. They are designed as checks. upon the perversions to which the doctrine of absolute surrender,' if taken by itself, almost inevitably leads. And it is because this design has not seldom escaped notice that the rea meaning of Rousseau's theory has so often been misunderstood. Of no less importance are these two conceptions—but, in fact, they are one and indivisible as speculative ideas. They embody Rousseau's conviction that the community, the State, is something essentially different from the sum of the individuals who compose it; that it has a being, a life, of its own which is not identical with that of its members, taken severally; that it is not an aggregate, but a corporate unity; in one word, that it is an organism, to the life of which every member contributes, unconsciously as well as con - 1 C.S. I. vii., II. i.-ii. L sciously, according to his capacity and which, in its turn, gives to every member a character wholly different from that which would belong to him as an individual, from that which would be his if he had never formed part of it, or if, having once done so, he were now cut off from it, either to join another community, or to live, if that be conceivable, in complete isolation from his kind. There is often a wide difference between the general will and the will of all'; or, as it stands in the earlier version, the general will is seldom identical with the will of all' that is one of the ways in which Rousseau strives to express the distinction which he had in mind. The phrase may not be adequate. But it is none the less significant of the importance and novelty of the conception which he was struggling to make clear. The idea of the State, as an organism, dominates the whole of the Contrat social; but the word itself is never used, and the analogy between the State and an organised body is never explicitly brought forward.2 Both omissions are made good in the Économie politique, where the analogy is drawn out to the minutest detail. In truth, however, no analogy could be more misleading. Unless used with the utmost caution, it infallibly suggests an absorption of the individual members in the collective life of the whole body, a denial therefore of their separate existence, of their power of independent action, which is contrary to the facts and which, if enforced in practice, could only end in tyranny and enslavement. That Rousseau himself was aware of this appears plainly from a few sentences which occur in an early fragment: 'However much the citizens may call themselves members of the State, they can never be united with it as the natural member is united with the body. No art can prevent each one of them from having an individual and separate existence, in virtue of which he is able to provide unaided for his own 1 C.S. II. iii.; Geneva MS. I. iv. (Political Writings, i. p. 462). 2 Unless we are to reckon the vague references in C.S. II. iv. and III. xi. |