Nationalism and Culture (30 page)

. . . the social contract served the purposes of the contractors. Who wills the end wills also the means, and these means are inseparable from some danger, indeed, even from some loss. He who wishes to preserve his life at the expense of others must also be willing to sacrifice it for them when that becomes necessary. The citizen of a state is therefore no longer the judge concerning the danger to which he must expose himself at the demand of the law, and when the prince (state) says to him, "Thy death is necessary for the state," he must die, since it is only upon this condition that he has thus far lived in security, and his life is no longer merely a gift of nature, but is a conditional grant from the state.-

What Rousseau calls freedom is the freedom to do that which the state, the guardian of the common will, prescribes for the citizen. It is the tuning of all human feeling to one note, the rejection of the rich diversity of life, the mechanical fitting of all effort to a designated pattern. To achieve this is the high task of the legislator, who with Rousseau plays the part of a political high priest, a part vouchsafed to him by the sanctity of his calling. It is his duty to correct nature, to trans-

' Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, or, The Principles of State Right. Bk. I, Chap. VII.

2 The Social Contract. Bk. II, Chap. V.

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form man into a peculiar political creature no longer having anything in common with his original status.

He who possesses the courage to give a people institutions must be ready, as it were, to change human nature, to transform every individual, who by himself is a complete and separate whole, into a part of a greater whole from which this individual in a certain sense receives his life and character; to change the constitution of man in order to strengthen it, and to substitute for the corporeal and independent existence which we all have received from nature a merely partial and moral existence. In short, he must take from man his native individual powers and equip him with others foreign to his nature, which he cannot understand or use without the assistance of others. The more completely these natural powers are annihilated and destroyed and the greater and more enduring are the ones acquired, the more secure and the more perfect is also the constitution.^

These words not only reveal the whole misanthropic character of this doctrine, but bring out more sharply the unbridgeable antithesis between the original doctrines of liberalism and the democracy of Rousseau and his successors. Liberalism, which emanates from the individual and sees in the organic development of all man's natural capacities and powers the essence of freedom, strives for a condition that does not hinder this natural course but leaves to the individual in greatest possible measure his individual life. To this thought Rousseau opposed the equality principle of democracy, which proclaims the equality of all citizens before the law. And since he quite correctly saw in the manifold and diverse factors in human nature a danger to the smooth functioning of his political machine, he strove to supplant man's natural being by an artificial substitute which was to endow the citizen with the capacity of functioning in rhythm with the machine.

This uncanny idea, aiming not merely at the complete destruction of the personality but really including also the complete abjuration of all true humanity, became the first assumption of a new reason of state, which found its moral justification in the concept of the communal will. Everything living congeals into a dead scheme; all organic function is replaced by the routine of the machine; political technique devours all individual life—just as the technique of modern economics devours the soul of the producer. The most frightful fact is that we are not here dealing with the unforeseen results of a doctrine whose effects the inventor himself could not anticipate. With Rousseau everything happened consciously and with inherent logical sequence. He speaks about these things with the assurance of a mathematician. The natural man existed for him only until the conclusion of the social contract. With that his time was

^ The Social Contract. Book II, Chap. VII.

fulfilled. What has developed since then is but the product of society become the state—the political man. "The natural man is a whole in himself; he is the numerical unit, the absolute whole, which has relationship only to itself and to its equals. Man, the citizen, is only a partial unit, whose worth lies in its relation to the whole which constitutes the social body." *

It is one of the most curious phenomena that the same man who professed to despise culture and preached the "return to nature," the man who for reasons of sentiment declined to accept the thought-structure of the Encyclopaedists and whose writings released among his contemporaries such a deep longing for the simple natural life—it is curious that this same man, as a state theoretician, violated human nature far more cruelly than the crudest despot and staked everything on making it yield itself to the technique of the law.

It might be objected that liberalism likewise rests on a fictitious assumption, since it is difficult to reconcile personal freedom with the existing economic system. Without doubt the present inequality of economic interests and the resulting class conflicts in society are a continued danger to the freedom of the individual and lead inevitably to a steadily increasing enslavement of the working masses. However, the same is also true for the famous "equality before the law," on which democracy is based. Quite apart from the fact that the possessing classes have alwax's found ways and means to corrupt the administration of justice and make it subservient to their ends, it is the rich and the privileged who make the laws today in all lands. But this is not the point: if liberalism fails to function practically in an economic system based on monopoly and class distinction, it is not because it has been mistaken in the correctness of its fundamental point of view, but because the undisturbed natural development of human personality is impossible in a system which has its root in the shameless exploitation of the great mass of the members of society. One cannot be free either politically or personally so long as one is in the economic servitude of another and cannot escape from this condition. This was recognized long ago by men like Godwin, Warren, Proudhon, Bakunin, and many others who subsequently reached the conviction that the dominion of man over man will not disappear until there is an end of the exploitation of man by man.

An "ideal state," however, such as Rousseau strove to achieve, would never make men free, even if they enjoyed the largest possible degree of equality of economic conditions. One creates no freedom by seeking to take from man his natural characteristics and to replace these by foreign ones in order that he may function as the automaton of the common will.

* Rousseau, Emile. First Book.

From the equality of the barracks no breath of freedom will ever blow. Rousseau's error—if one can, indeed, speak of error—lies in the starting point of his social theory. His idea of a fictitious common will was the Moloch which swallowed men.

While the political liberalism of Locke and Montesquieu strove for a separation of the functions of the state in order to limit the power of government and to protect the citizen from encroachment, Rousseau, on principle, rejected this idea and scoffed at philosophers who, considering the sovereignty of the state, "cannot divide it in principle, but wish to divide it in relation to its object." The Jacobins, consequently, acted quite in accordance with his views when they abolished the partition of powers laid down in the constitution and transferred to the Convention, besides the legislative, also the judicial function, thus facilitating the transition to the dictatorship of Robespierre and his adherents.

Likewise, the attitude of liberalism toward "the native and inalienable rights of men," as Locke states them and as they later on found expression in "the declaration of human rights," differs fundamentally from Rousseau's democratic concept. To the advocates of liberalism these rights constituted a separate sphere which no government could invade; it was the realm of man, which was to be protected from any regimentation by the state. Thus, they emphasized that there existed something apart from the state, and that this other was the most valuable and permanent part of life.

Ouite different was Rousseau's position and that of the democratic movement in Europe founded on his doctrine, except as it was softened by ideal liberal views—especially in Spain and among the South German democrats of 1848-49. Even Rousseau spoke of "man's natural rights"j but in his view these rights had their root entirely in the state, and were prescribed for man by government. "One admits that by the social contract one gives up only that part of his power, his fortune and his freedom which the community needs, but one must also admit that only the sovereign can determine the necessity of the part to be yielded." ^

Hence, according to Rousseau, natural right is by no means a domain of man which lies outside the state's sphere of function; but rather this right exists only In the measure that the state finds it unobjectionable, and Its limits are at all times subject to revision by the head of the state. Consequently, a personal right does not really exist. Whatever of private freedom the individual possesses he has, so to speak, as a loan from the state, which can at any time be renounced as void and withdrawn. It does not mean much when Rousseau tries to sweeten this bitter pill for the good citizen by stating:

= The Social Contract. Bk. II, Chap. IV.

All services which the citizen can render to the state he owes to it as soon as the state demands them. On the other hand, the sovereign cannot load the citizen with chains useless to the community. Indeed, the sovereign cannot even desire this, for according to the laws of reason, just as according to the laws of nature, nothing happens without a cause.

A worse sophistry—inherently insincere, as is apparent at the first glance—designed to endow self-evident despotism with the halo of freedom can hardly be conceived. That according to the law of reason nothing happens without a cause is very comfortingj but it is most unfortunate that it is not the citizen, but the head of the state, who determines this cause. When Robespierre delivered crowds of victims to the executioner for treatment he surely did not do so to give the good patriots practical instruction concerning the invention of Dr. Guillotine. Another cause animated him. He had as the goal of all statecraft the ideal structure of "the citizen of Geneva" in view. And since republican virtue did not spring up of itself among the light-hearted Parisians, he tried to help it on with Master Sanson's knife. If virtue will not appear voluntarily, one must hasten it by terror. The lawyer of Arras, therefore, had a motive worthy of his goal, and to reach this goal he took from man, in obedience to the mandate of the common will, the first and most important right, which includes all others—the right to live.

Rousseau, who revered Calvin as a great statesman and who retained so much of his doctrinaire spirit, in the construction of his "social contract" undoubtedly had in view his native city, Geneva. Only in a small community of the type of the Swiss canton was it possible for the people to vote for all the laws in original assemblies and to regard the administration merely as the executive organ of the state. Rousseau recognized very clearly that a form of government such as he desired was not practical for larger states. He even intended to follow The Social Contract with another work which was to deal with this question, but he never got to it. In his work, Considerations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, he therefore admits delegates as representatives of the popular will, but he assigns to them only the role of functionaries in purely technical matters. Apart from the common will they can make effective no separate expression of their own will. Besides, he strove to mitigate the evils of representation by frequent changes of the representative body.

When Rousseau, in his discussions of the representative system, which contained many good ideas, mentions with approval the republican communities of antiquity, one must by no means infer from this that the ancient democracy was related to his own views. Even the civil law of the Romans recognized a whole series of personal liberties untouched by the guardianship of the state. In the Greek city-republics, moreover, such a

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monstrous idea as the theory of the communal will could not possibly have been understood. The doctrine that it is the task of the lawgiver to deprive man of his natural characteristics and replace them by alien ones would have appeared to them as the monstrous offspring of a disordered brain. The extraordinary diversity of their culture is principally traceable to the fact that the individual was offered the widest opportunity to develop his natural powers and to make them creatively effective. No. This monstrous thought, which later found its way to other lands through the influence of French Jacobinism, is the entirely original creation of "the citizen of Geneva." In this sense modern democracy is—in contrast to liberalism—a positive force supporting the state.

This is also the reason why from democracy a number of roads lead to dictatorship} from liberalism, none. Hence Rousseau has advocated dictatorship under certain conditions and approved of it in the interest of the common will. Hence, also, his warning against the too unbending power of the law, which under certain circumstances could prove disastrous to the state. He who declares the common will to be the absolute sovereign and yields to it unlimited power over all members of the community, sees in freedom nothing more than the duty to obey the law and to submit to the common will. For him the thought of dictatorship has lost its terror. He has long ago in his own mind sacrificed man to a phantom that has no understanding whatever of individual freedom. Where this condition exists, the fruits of tyranny flourish.

But the eager students took the master at his word. Dry pedants like Robespierre and narrow-minded fanatics like Saint-Just, Couthon and their like, set themselves at the task of "remodeling" men according to their pattern and creating the powerful state machine which smothered every feeling of independence at its birth, and in the name of freedom bent men under a new yoke. In fact, the Jacobin idea of freedom was never anything else but a mechanical enrollment of the individual in the abstract concept of the nation, the unqualified subjection of all personal will to the mandate of the new state. Never before had there existed in France such a law-loving time as the epoch of the great revolution. The law became the holy icon of the nation, became a fetish which held the spirit prisoner, became a miraculous agency by which every wish concept was to be fulfilled. The "spirit of the law" had actually overcome the nation. The men of the Convention felt themselves utterly intoxicated by their role as the lawgivers of the land. "The lawgiver commands the future"—thus Saint-Just once orated in the Convention, in accordance with Rousseau's idea: "his affair it is to will the good, his task it is so to transform men that they are fitted to that will."