We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata slogan of the day Rousseau’s reputation during his lifetime, and his influence after his death, raise disturbing questions about human gullibility, and indeed about the human propensity to reject evidence it does not wish to admit.
– Paul Johnson
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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One of my developing pet theories on why the work of such idiotollectuals like Rousseau (or Marx for that matter) are as influential as they are is because their work is presented to us at an early age. If you’re wondering if I mean that 18- or 20-year olds are considered too young, you’re right!
In my junior year in college, I read the works of and about Marx, Weber, Locke, Althusser, and Rousseau, among others. Now, I was intelligent enough to have understood how linear algebra worked. However, my critical thinking wasn’t such that I could specifically state how Rousseau’s work was deficient compared to Locke, and so forth. And I don’t think I was much different than my peers. Now that I have, uh, matured some, I can read Mark, Rousseau, Barthes and others for the intellectual manure that it is. Plus, I’m more successful in separating my emotion from my analysis when reading such work. Unless properly taught to do otherwise, most 18- to 20-year olds just can’t do that.
Is this Sanizdata-club thing? That we all should know why Rousseau is a bad guy?
I consider absurd his theories about education, and the “Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” at best a nice try to find a basis for Christian morality. His personal life was aweful, perhaps even by his own standards.
BUT — his rebuttal to utilitarian thought still stands as the best I’ve read, and somewhat convincing.
Also, he did pretty much invent the romance novel. That should count for something!
That anyone ever took Paul Johnson seriously at any stage of his career is much more worrying evidence of human gullibility. Still, it is a safe bet that no-one will be reading him 250 years from now! I’m finishing my Rousseau book this w/e, but I’ll blog next week about what’s great about him. (Yes he was crazy, but so was Van Gogh!) Meanwhile, a word of advice to libertarians: dismissing your most challenging opponents – Rousseau, Marx – as idiots may give you a warm glow, but it won’t help you sharpen up you own ideas one bit. On the other hand, trying to understand their ideas and their appeal (and I don’t just mean their psychological appeal) might lead to you making a better case for libertarianism than you sometime do. On a related matter, read an excellent recent post by Eve Tushnet.
Paul Johnson is to history what Bryan Sewell is to art.
Rousseau provided the intellectual underpinning for later Marxist successes in destroying the very idea of civil society, replacing it with a total state. We was a vain, parasitical, paranoid, delusional liar and his views of the world reflect his mental state extremely well. He advocated totalitarian collectivism based on preposterous ideas about nature which prefigured the primitivist Nazi nature cult. The frenzied slaughter of the Commune sprung from the very pages of The Social Contract, justified and legitimised by ‘The General Will’. Later Communism and Fascism were not distortions of his views, just implementations of them as they were only a tiny step from Rousseau’s collectivist civil theism, with state-as-god. In 1762 in ‘Emile’ we see the idea of citizen-as-child, state-as-father overtly. He wanted to violently revolutionize society, but once that was in place:
His ideas were the product of a deranged mind. A truly evil man.
Chris Bertram: I understand their ideas just fine. I suspect it is only their psychological appeal that has any prolonged interest to educated libertarians/classical liberals as only from that can anything useful be extracted… the ideas themselves are as ludicrous as flat-earth theory and the vast forests which died to propagate them for centuries does not change that one iota.
Thanks for clearing that up, Perry. Now I understand why Kant called him “The Newton of the moral sciences”!
Well I am not a fan of Kant either Chris!
I see Rousseau as the intellectual font from which the megadeaths of the Industrial era sprang, quite apart from the fact he was personally quite evil in the way he acted. Even many of his contemporaries accurately saw where his ideas could lead, so how is heaping scorn upon such a man a bad thing? He is in fact the high priest of force based imposed anti-morality masquerading as ‘morality’, in which some mythical ‘General Will’ replaces objective truth itself.
We shouldn’t carry this on indefinitely Perry, but I think you’ve got him dead wrong (too much reading history backwards). Rousseau would have rejected the idea that the content of the general will could be decided independently of the deliberation of the whole people. He explicitly rejects the notion that anyone other than the people can make law on their behalf, so he would certainly have rejected the claims of any vanguard party to incarnate the general will. The guy you should have in your sights for these abominations is the Abbe de Sieyes, who makes all the relevant substitutionist moves. Rousseau would have laughed at the idea that a country as large, diverse and unequal as 18C France could even have a general will! Sure, we can find things in his writings that sound horrendous. Some of them really are horrendous, others, like the infamous “forced to be free” sentence turn out to be much less so on further inspection. Still, I promised a lengthy post on Junius next week….
But who is this ‘whole people’ who will be ‘deliberating’? No, I think I have Rousseau exactly right. Yes, I have the ‘advantage’ of seeing him back though history but even some of his contemporaries, such as Hume and Voltaire, came to see him for what he was.
Rousseau said ‘Everything is at root dependent on politics’…
…and politics is force. For Rousseau everything is dependent on force. He was a leading contender for anti-christ as far as I am concerned.
“Whole people” here just means all the citizens of a state – and since they have to be physically assembled together, that pretty much rules out states of any size. Yes, he did say that everthing depends on politics, but “politics is force” is your addition Perry: he’d have said that to enter the civil state is to replace force with law. Yes, he had a paranoid breakdown and experienced delusions about Hume. Voltaire, OTOH seems genuinely to have been out to get him (the maxim sometime attributed to V, :‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ does not seem to have applied in Rousseau’s case). For Voltaire’s perfidy see Maurice Cranston, The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1997) p. 102.
It is my addition because politics is force. I have yet to see any law, which is the product of politics, for which compliance is not backed by force. Unlike a contract, I cannot elect to not participate.
Thus to say “everthing depends on politics” is the same as “everthing depends on force”.
Although Rousseau did intend his views to revolve around politics and force, they can be interpreted in a libertarian manner.
If we remove politics from the equation and replace it with the Hayekian idea of spontaneous order, the concept of the “general will” begins to make much more sense. For example, the common law, having developed out of the customs of civil society, seems to validate the concept quite well.
“It is my addition because politics is force. I have yet to see any law, which is the product of politics, for which compliance is not backed by force. Unlike a contract, I cannot elect to not participate.
Thus to say “everthing depends on politics” is the same as “everthing depends on force.””
Non-totalitarians recognize that laws are also backed by NORMS. Most liberals (classical or otherwise) recognize that the reciprocal normative recognition of the legitimacy of laws are necessary for their stability. I would say that norms often work a whole lot better for supporting laws than force does. Anytime someone thinks that he or she could benefit from a crime and could probably away with it, but decides not to do so because it “would be wrong” is an example of the stabilizing force of norms in action. Societies whose laws are supported only by force are in the long run untenable, as we see with many totalitarian states.
Rousseau definitely recognized this. That’s why he puts such a great emphasis on education and morality in his examination of democratic politics. Democratic politics succeeds in great part, as he recognized, because citizens tend to willingly obey communal laws they don’t personally agree with, as long as they know that their voice and vote have been fairly and equally considered in their legislation.
Oh, wait, there is one major canon thinker who could be interpreted as saying that all laws must be backed by force because norms are completely inadequate to the task. His names is Hobbes…wonder if this says something about your true intellectual tendencies, Perry…
P.S.: Russ–your labelling of Rousseau and Marx “idiotolectuals” doesn’t give me great faith that your intellectual and critical capacities have matured to the extent that you would be able to cogently “state how Rousseau’s work was deficient compared to Locke.”
Eric: the fatal flaw in your comments is that Rousseau’s ideas on ‘education’ are what we would call ‘brainwashing’ today. He wanted to replace the very idea of parental (i.e. social ‘norms’) education of children with mandatory (i.e. force backed) state education to indoctrinate citizens in order to make them ‘good’ (by which me clearly means compliant). Rousseau recognized the importance of education in the same sense that Marx, Lenin and Pol Pot did… to make the ‘new man’ he must receive all his education from the state, as only then can he be trusted to act in accordance with the ‘General Will’. Rousseau did not see attending state education as elective. He claimed to want everyone to be happy but that happiness would come about because ‘state experts’ had made it the only psychological possibility.
I take the typical libertarian position that social norms are vastly more effective than just force in underpining sound social behaviour… but unlike Rousseau, I do not want those ‘social’ norms conditioned into people at bayonet point by some Ministry of Love.
Eric, I fear that you have taken Rousseau at his own word as to the benign implications of his views rather than thinking them through for yourself.
Perry, I’m curious about you assertions concerning Rousseau on education. Where exactly does he say what you say he says? I’m guessing Considerations on the Government of Poland, if anywhere.