Rousseau on Economic Liberty
and Human Flourishing
BY JOHN T. SCOTT
University of California, Davis
This essay is the third in a series from the book Economic Freedom and Human Flourishing: Perspectives from Political Philosophy, edited by AEI’s Michael R. Strain and Stan A. Veuger. Check back in every week for additional essays in the series.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) is perhaps best known today as a theorist of democracy, indeed as the first major thinker in the Western philosophical tradition to argue that democracy is the only legitimate form of political association. According to Rousseau, only a state in which the people make laws for themselves as citizens can solve what he terms the “fundamental problem” of politics: “How to find a form of association that defends and protects the person and goods of each associate with all the common force, and by means of which each, uniting with all, nonetheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before.”1Rousseau is centrally concerned with freedom, and almost all readers and interpreters — sympathetic or critical — focus on what he means by “freedom” and how the natural freedom of the individual can be reconciled with collective self-government in which the citizen who refuses to obey the law must be, in his notorious phrase, “forced to be free.”2 Less often noticed about Rousseau’s formulation of the “fundamental problem” of politics, and about his political theory in general, is the central importance of property, or of the “goods” of each associate as he phrases it when articulating this “fundamental problem.” The right to acquire property is part of the natural freedom of the individual, and the protection of this property is a purpose of the political association on par with the protection of liberty itself.
What, then, is the role of economic liberty in Rousseau’s political thought?
In order to address this question, it is necessary to take a step back and first gain a general understanding of the aims of Rousseau’s philosophy as a whole, including his political thought. The Citizen of Geneva offers an important answer in the very first lines of the work that made him famous, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1751), the prize essay he wrote for the Academy of Dijon on the question of whether the advancement of the sciences and arts seen in the age of Enlightenment had purified morals. “Here is one of the greatest and noblest questions ever debated,” he begins the essay: “This discourse is not concerned with those metaphysical subtleties that have spread to all fields of literature and from which the announcements of academies are not always exempt. Rather, it is concerned with one of those truths that pertain to the happiness of the human race.”3 Happiness, or we might say human flourishing, is the central concern of Rousseau’s thought. Schematically speaking, then, we can see his early philosophical works as diagnosing the problem of human flourishing and his later works, including the Social Contract, as offering possible remedies. Thus, in the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1751) he argues that the advancement of the sciences and the arts, and more generally what we might term the “civilizing” process, has in fact led to less happiness and virtue, to stunted souls and false societies. He continues this theme even more emphatically in the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1755) by telling the story of the development of human nature through history as a tale of general decline in terms of freedom and happiness, a story in which economic developments including the division of labor and the establishment of property play a central role. In his later works, in turn, he might be said to put forward various proposals for promoting human flourishing and freedom, whether through the pedagogical project of Emile, or On Education (1762), through his own retreat from society to attain something like the freedom of natural man as recounted in the Reveries of the Solitary Walker (1776–78), or through the political project of the Social Contract (1762) and his other political writings.
What, then, is human flourishing for Rousseau, and what threatens it? All too briefly, the answer to the first question is that human flourishing has two dimensions: unity of soul and the “size” of the soul, or its energy or expansive quality. Since the issue of the role of economic liberty in Rousseau’s thought pertains largely to the second question, namely the ways in which the economic activities of the individual and society threaten human flourishing, let me briefly sketch Rousseau’s view of human flourishing before turning to his concerns about the threat economic activities can pose to human happiness.
As for the first dimension, unity of the soul, numerous interpreters have in various ways noted the importance of psychic unity or wholeness for Rousseau’s account of human happiness.4 Alternatively, to put the issue negatively and thus anticipate the answer to the question of what threatens human flourishing, numerous interpreters have focused on dividedness of soul as a concern that runs throughout Rousseau’s thought. His concern with psychic division as a threat to happiness and virtue first appears in his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts in a subtle manner, with his remarks about how the sort of “civility” prized by modern societies in Europe is actually a form of falseness that pits how we appear to others against how we actually are, thus dividing us:
Before art had fashioned our manners and taught our passions to speak a borrowed language, our morals were rustic but natural, and differences in conduct announced those of character at first glance. Human nature, at bottom, was not better. But men found their security in the ease of seeing through one another, and that advantage, of which we no longer sense the value, spared them many vices.5
Rousseau’s concern with psychic unity and division is much more prominent in the Discourse on Inequality. In his portrait of natural man in the state of nature, Rousseau emphasizes the independence, and thus freedom in that sense, that comes from natural man’s lack of dependence on anyone — whether psychological, physical, or otherwise. Contrasting natural man to “civil man,” therefore, he speaks of “the advantage of constantly having all one’s strength at one’s disposal, of always being ready for any eventuality, and of always carrying oneself, so to speak, wholly with oneself.”6 Natural man is a “whole” unto himself. That said, to anticipate the second dimension of “size” of soul, it must be admitted that natural man is a limited animal whose soul is necessarily “small,” even if it has the advantage of being unified. Contrary to the common notion that Rousseau praises such a “noble savage” (for in fact he never uses this phrase), natural man is not a model for human beings or human happiness beyond the merely formal sense in that his soul is unified.
As humans emerge from the state of nature and form societies, however, the psychic unity tied to independence is lost due to the emergence of personal dependence. As humans develop, they come to have various forms of sustained interactions with one another, and these interactions ultimately lead to psychic and social divisions. In Rousseau’s account this process happens very gradually, over the course of multitudes of centuries. At the point where human nature has, he states, reached nearly the stage of development of which it is capable, the corrupt fruits of this development become fully manifest. “For one’s advantage, it was necessary to appear to be different from what one in fact was. To be and to appear to be became two entirely different things, and from this distinction came ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vice that follow in their wake.”7
Contrary to Marx, for example, the psychological effects of dependence are not secondary or epiphenomenal to the underlying explanatory variable of the means of production, but economic concerns are nonetheless important aspects of Rousseau’s account. The term Rousseau uses for what I have termed “interactions” above in speaking of how humans come to have sustained interactions with one another in Rousseau’s account is “commerce” in French.8 This terminology is revealing in two ways. First, since the term can mean “interactions” in general or commercial relations in particular, in Rousseau’s account commercial or economic relations are a particular extension of human interactions in general, and so the threats to human flourishing associated with economic relations are part and parcel of a more general problem related to personal dependence and interdependence. Second, his use of the term and his diagnosis of the problems associated with “commerce” in either the broad or specific sense puts him into dialogue with other thinkers of his time who argue for the beneficial effects of “commerce,” as we shall see below.
As for the role of “commerce” in the narrower sense of economic relations in Rousseau’s account of our loss of psychic unity, its effects are seen even prior to the establishment of property in the form of proto-property and a primitive division of labor. For example, with what he terms “the epoch of a first revolution” occurring with the establishment and differentiation of families, Rousseau writes that “a sort of property” was introduced, both in the form of huts and other lodgings and in the form of family members themselves (“my” wife). Likewise, this revolutionary development led to a primitive division of labor and the consequent increase in production, though not a happy development in Rousseau’s telling:
And this was the first yoke they imposed on themselves without thinking about it and the first source of the evils they prepared for their descendants. . . . Since [these new needs] had degenerated into true needs, being deprived of them became much more cruel than their possession was sweet, and they were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them.9
But the eventual establishment of property with the dual discovery of agriculture and metallurgy is the decisive moment in Rousseau’s story. Notably, the statement quoted just above about the internal division we experience between the requirements of being and appearing occurs within his discussion of the establishment of property. Since natural talents are unequal, he argues, property is bound to become unequal, and this inequality becomes institutionalized and no longer tied to natural inequalities when property becomes a social or political convention and is transferable and heritable. With rich and poor comes dependence on each side, and thus both psychological and economic dependence. The passage quoted just above concerning the gap between being and appearing therefore continues with Rousseau looking at the new situation from a different angle: “From another point of view, having previously been free and independent, here is man, subjected, so to speak, by a multitude of new needs to all of nature and especially to his fellow humans, whose slave he in a sense becomes even in becoming their master.”10
The establishment of property is the key turning point in Rousseau’s account of human history and the psychic costs it exacts. He signals the critical importance of this development at the outset of the Second Part of his Discourse:
The first person who, having enclosed a plot of ground, thought of saying “this is mine” and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors, would the human race have been spared by someone who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his fellow humans: “Beware of listening to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits are everyone’s and the earth is no one’s!”11
Nonetheless, Rousseau pours some cold water on this hot rhetoric by continuing: “in all likelihood things had already reached a point where they could no longer remain as they were.”12 Rather than advocate the abolition of private property, for example, Rousseau will accept property, the division of labor, and commerce, but all with a view to their costs in terms of psychic unity and therefore human flourishing.
The second dimension of human flourishing is the “size” of soul, or its energy or expansiveness, a dimension that has received far less attention from interpreters than the first dimension of unity.13 The connection between these two dimensions can be glimpsed in the beginning of Rousseau’s educational treatise, Emile. Rousseau explains there that, given the contradictions between nature and social institutions in terms of human psychology, “one must choose between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time.” Both “man” and “citizen” possess psychic unity, but psychic unity of very different kinds:
Natural man is entirely for himself. He is numerical unity, the absolute whole which is relative only to itself or its kind. Civil man is only a fractional unity dependent on the denominator; his value is determined by his relation to the whole, which is the social body. Good social institutions are those that best know how to denture man, to take his absolute existence from him in order to give him a relative one and transport the I into the common unity, with the result that each individual believes himself no longer one but a part of the unity and no longer feels except within the whole.14
This passage in Emile should be compared to what Rousseau writes in the Social Contractabout the task of the “Lawgiver”: “He who dares to undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel that he is capable of changing, so to speak, human nature; of transforming each individual, who by himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a greater whole from which that individual receives as it were his life and his being.”15 How freedom is consistent with such denaturing or being “forced to be free” is, of course, an important issue, and Rousseau might even be said to value psychic unity over freedom.
To return to the opening of Emile, Rousseau’s concern is that trying to make an individual simultaneously good for himself (a “man”) and good for others (a “citizen”) leads to psychic disunity as well as a “smaller” or weaker soul, in large part because it is divided.
He who in the civil order wants to preserve the primacy of the sentiments of nature does not know what he wants. Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be either man or citizen. He will be good neither for himself nor for others. He will be one of these men of our days: a Frenchman, an Englishman, a bourgeois. He will be nothing.16
The psychic disunity Rousseau describes also makes this neither-man-nor-citizen small-souled. The contradiction he experiences within himself absorbs the strength of the soul, making him “smaller,” even “nothing.” Later in the same work, Rousseau diagnoses what makes us unhappy is “the disproportion between our desires and our faculties. A being endowed with senses whose faculties equaled his desires would be an absolutely happy being.” In such a condition, we “enjoy our whole being,” he says.17 Rousseau’s conception of the second dimension of the “size” of the soul when superadded to the first dimension of psychic unity can thus be seen as an actualization of our nature, and thus to some extent similar to what Aristotle means by human flourishing, or eudaimonia, though on a very different understanding of human nature. In sum, Rousseau’s project, or rather projects, in making a “man” (Emile, perhaps the Reveries) or making a “citizen” (Social Contract) can therefore be seen as attempting to maximize the two dimensions of psychic unity and “size” of soul that provide the necessary conditions for human flourishing.
Rousseau’s use of the term “bourgeois” to denote the small-souled product of modern society — arguably the first recorded usage of the term in the sense in which we now understand it — provides a convenient opportunity to turn to the relationship between economics and human flourishing in his thought by way of contrasting his position on these issues to that of his contemporaries. As noted above, Rousseau uses the term “commerce” in the broad sense of human interactions and the narrow sense of economic relations, and in doing so he enters into a debate with his contemporaries over the effects of “commerce” in both senses.18 A number of prominent thinkers, mostly in what we would term the tradition of liberal political thought and including Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith, among others, argued that “commerce” had positive effects on the manners and mores of peoples. Among other things, they argued that “commerce” “softened” morals and manners, hence what is known as the theory of “doux commerce.”19 In arguing for such “commerce” these liberal thinkers were contesting classical republican theories that tended rather to emphasize “harder” or more martial virtues and to see commercial relations as threatening to those virtues.
Rousseau taps into this republican tradition in condemning the “softening” effects of modern commercial societies. This condemnation is particularly evident in the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts with his laments over the loss of martial virtues in modern societies.20 Although he draws on such republican rhetoric, Rousseau’s own concern with the effects of “commerce” is nonetheless based on his particular conception of human nature and human flourishing. His more general case against his opponents in liberal tradition can be seen in a defense of the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts in what he calls the “most arresting and most cruel” truth he has put forward there:
All our writers regard the crowning achievement of our century’s politics to be the sciences, the arts, luxury, commerce, laws, and all the other bonds which, by tightening the social ties among men through self-interest, place them all in a position of mutual dependence, impose on them mutual needs and common interest, and oblige everyone to contribute to everyone else’s happiness in order to secure his own. These are certainly fine ideas, and they are presented in an attractive light. But when they are examined carefully and impartially, the advantages which they seem at first to hold out prove to be subject to a good many reservations.21
Having made this pronouncement, Rousseau turns to his familiar laments over the division between being and appearance this mutual dependence creates and their corrupting effects on virtue and happiness.22 If Rousseau follows progenitors of the theory of “doux commerce” such as Hobbes and Locke, as well as these liberal thinkers themselves, by arguing that humans are driven first and foremost by self-love or self-interest, he is much less sanguine than they are about relying on unrestrained, or even somewhat restrained, self-interest. For Rousseau, self-interest or self-love is simply too strong and likely to degenerate into corrupt forms of pride, vanity, and petty self-interest. Combined with the deleterious effects of mutual dependence, this corrupted form of self-love is a toxic recipe for human flourishing.
Having discussed Rousseau’s conception of human flourishing and the threat to it posed by the process of socialization in general and by modern commercial societies in particular, we can now turn to his thoughts on the role of economic liberty in his political thought and how the economic realm, including economic liberty, might be arranged to minimize the treat it poses.
We have already seen at the outset that Rousseau makes property, or the “goods” of each associate, along with liberty itself, central to the “the fundamental problem” of politics as he frames it in the Social Contract. Somewhat later in the same work, in the often neglected chapter “On Real Property” (Book I, Chapter 9), Rousseau explains that by entering into the social compact the “possessions” of each associate become “property” fully speaking. Following Locke, Rousseau argues that property begins through possession by what he terms in this context “private individuals,”23 and elsewhere he presents an even more Lockean theory of property by arguing that it originates by the admixture of labor and is justified by that fact.24 Yet he argues that property “becomes a true right only after the right of property has been established,” and that this only happens with the institution of the social contract. Within the political association, then, it is the sovereign that determines “mine” and “thine,” and so there is no absolute individual right to property for Rousseau (and nor is there for Locke either, contrary to what is usually thought). While many readers might see this sovereign authority over property as a threat to individual liberty and well-being, Rousseau emphasizes the gain in the transaction: “What is extraordinary about this alienation [of property] is that the community, far from despoiling private individuals of their goods by accepting them, merely assures them of their legitimate possession and transforms usurpation into a genuine right and use into property.”25
The importance of property in Rousseau’s conception of the purpose of the social contract is more prominent in a lesser-known work predating the Social Contract by a few years, his essay “On Political Economy” (“Economie politique”) first published in 1755 as an article in the Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and d’Alembert. Those who turn to the essay “On Political Economy” to learn about Rousseau’s views on political economy — or economics generally — as they are usually conceived will be largely disappointed, for Rousseau’s article focuses mainly on the formation of citizen virtue to ensure the smooth running of the state. This is a perfectly legitimate way in which to understand the “economy” of politics given the sense of the word “economy” during this period as meaning the operation of a complex system, such as the “economy of the solar system” or “economy of nature.” (Nonetheless, apparently the editors of the Encyclopédie were dissatisfied with Rousseau’s effort and therefore took advantage of the alternate spelling of the word, etymologically derived from the Greek oikos, and commissioned another article under the title “Oeconomie politique.”) Although Rousseau only turns to the subject of the economic policies of the state at the end of his article, almost as an afterthought, property nonetheless is central to the political theory he outlines in the work.
Rousseau begins the essay “On Political Economy” by establishing some basic principles about the legitimate state, and in fact this essay is the occasion for his first use of the term “general will,” although his elaboration of the concept will have to await the Social Contract. His focus in the essay is on how the institution of law solves what he will call the “fundamental problem” of politics in his later political treatise. He writes: “By what inconceivable art could the means have been found to subjugate men in order to make them free; to use the goods, the labor, even the life of its members in the service of the state without forcing and without consulting them; to bind their will with their own consent . . . These marvels are the work of the law.”26 The rule of law, then, is the source of freedom within political societies.
But once again, according to Rousseau, humans are naturally self-interested and also short-sighted in pursuing their self-interest; they do not see that obeying the law is the source of their freedom, or they believe they can enjoy the benefits of the state without shouldering its burdens. Given the incongruity of human nature and the necessities of citizenship, therefore, Rousseau gives most of his attention in the essay to how citizens must be educated in such a way to learn to love their fatherland and thereby to learn to identify their own self-interest with the common interest. “Do you want the general will to be fulfilled? Make sure that all private wills are related to it; and since virtue is only this conformity of the private will to the general, to say the same thing briefly, make virtue reign.”27 Rousseau therefore turns to a lengthy discussion of civic education associated more with ancient political theory and practice, such as Plato’s Republic or Spartan and Roman practices. This focus is not unique to this early essay, for the longest chapter of the Social Contract (Book IV, Chapter 8) is on the subject of civil religion, and Rousseau likewise appeals to civic education in his late Considerations on the Government of Poland (1772). The primacy of politics and political liberty over economics and economic liberty in Rousseau’s thought is clear here as elsewhere.
Nonetheless, the reader of “On Political Economy” who is accustomed to the view of Rousseau as a proponent of the “liberty of the ancients” over the “liberty of the moderns,” to use Constant’s terms, is in for something of a surprise. When he finally turns in the essay to matters of political economy in the ordinary sense, he introduces the subject with a seemingly very un-Rousseauan statement: “It is certain that the right of property is the most sacred of all the rights of citizens, and more important in certain respects than freedom itself,” and he argues that “property is the true basis of civil society and the true guarantee of the citizens’ engagements.” What exactly Rousseau means here is not entirely clear, but he seems to be arguing that property is the “true basis” of society because the protection of their goods is perhaps even the primary reason the parties to the social contract agree to form the state and that property is the “true guarantee” of the citizens’ engagements because it makes them “answerable” to the law, as he phrases it, in a way that not having property to protect would not.28 Part of this responsibility rooted in the protection of property furthermore obliges the citizens to use their property to support the expenses incurred in the administration of the state through taxation.
Whatever the “sanctity” of the right of property and its role as the “true basis” of civil society, for Rousseau economics must be subordinated to the overarching goals of politics. Rousseau’s emphasis in “On Political Economy,” as in the Social Contract and elsewhere, is therefore less on economic liberty than on the regulation of economics and property. In this light, then, equality is as important in Rousseau’s conception of a proper system of legislation as freedom. In the Social Contract he therefore writes:
If one investigates in what precisely consists the greatest good of all — which should be the end of every system of legislation — one will find that it comes down to the following two principal objects: freedom and equality. Freedom, because any particular dependence is that much force taken away from the body of the state. Equality, because freedom cannot endure without it.29
As for freedom, note Rousseau’s concern with the problem of personal dependence, which we saw above was the primary threat to human flourishing through the way in which it divides and enervates the soul. As for equality, Rousseau explains that the citizens need not be absolutely equal, including in terms of property, but he does argue that there should be limitations to inequality: “with regard to wealth, no citizen should be so extremely rich that the can buy another and none so poor that he is constrained to sell himself.”30 If we recall his discussion in the Discourse on Inequality of the establishment of property and the psychic and social effects it has due to the mutual dependence of the rich and the poor, we can understand the thrust of Rousseau’s concern here.
While Rousseau recognizes that individuals — and the state — must eat, and therefore offers proposals to foster economic development, largely in the realm of agriculture, his vision is rather Spartan, so to speak. As opposed to his contemporaries in the tradition of “doux commerce,” who see the creation and satisfaction of new needs as an engine of economic growth and prosperity, among other things, Rousseau views these novel necessities as dangerous, as we have already seen in his discussion in the Discourse on Inequality of the superfluities made possible by the primitive division of labor. In “On Political Economy” he writes: “If one examines how the needs of a state grow, this will often be found to happen in about the same way as it does for private individuals, less by true necessity than by an expansion of frivolous desires, and often expenses are increased solely to provide a pretext for increasing revenue.”31 He therefore concludes that the “most important maxim of the administration of finances is to work much more carefully to prevent needs than to increase revenues.”32 As for taxation, Rousseau agrees with Locke that the state only has the right to tax its citizens with their consent. However, in addition to trying to prevent the economic conditions that produce inequality in the first place, Rousseau advocates “equitable and truly proportional” taxation that has the effect of decreasing inequality.33
In conclusion, then, for Rousseau economics and economic liberty are in the service of politics and political liberty, as he conceives of it, and he assesses both the possibilities and dangers of both politics and economics from the vantage point of his understanding of the requirements of human flourishing. Earlier, when discussing his conception of human flourishing, I noted that his desire to realize the two dimensions of which human flourishing is comprised, psychic unity and “size” of soul, could be compared to Aristotle’s eudaimonia. Nonetheless, there is a critical difference between their understandings of human nature: for Rousseau humans are not the “political animal” of Aristotle and, in fact, are naturally asocial. Natural asociality is in fact what enables Rousseau’s natural man to exist without any form of dependence on his fellow humans and is thus the basis for his psychic unity or wholeness. Any form of social connection is, at least in principle, contrary to human nature for Rousseau, and thus poses a threat to human flourishing or at least needs to be carefully managed to limit that threat. Economic activity and economic liberty are one such form of social connection, and Rousseau’s counsel to impose limits on this activity and liberty stems from his concern with the delicate and urgent matter of human happiness.
Check back in every week for additional essays in the series
