Excerpt from General Will 2.0 -
Rousseau, Freud, Google by Hiroki Azuma
CHAPTER TWO
First published in
Hon January 2010 issue
Rousseau was a philosopher who called for the freedom of the individual.
Yet, at the same time he was also a philosopher who argued for the absolute
integration of the individual and the state. These two characteristics seem
incompatible with each other.
There have been many explorations of this contradiction through the
history of philosophy, and I do not intend to deny this legacy. But as I hinted
at in the previous chapter, in this book I would like to read Rousseau from
another angle. When viewed through the lens of the contemporary information
environment, this “contradiction” of his appears not as a contradiction, but
instead as a policy problem that must simply be overcome via technological
means. In speaking of a dream of a future society, what I want to indicate is
the possibility of such a change in perspective.
Let us begin by reading the text.
The Social Contract is not a lengthy book. The Iwanami Paperbacks edition of the Japanese
translation contains less than 200 pages. The work is divided into four books,
and the first three cover the social contract, the general will, and forms of
government, respectively. The fourth book functions much like a supplement and
is thus slightly disorganized. But as a whole it is a highly readable book.
It is not uncommon for the tables of contents of such books to embody
their content. The Social Contract is no exception to this, as the
progression of the book proceeding from the theory of the social contract in
Book I to the theory of the general will in Book II and then to the theory of
forms of government in Book III masterfully expresses the logic at the core of
Rousseau’s social contract theory.
What does this mean?
Let us proceed by first going over the very basics. People were born as
free and solitary beings. Yet, at some point, the natural state could not be
maintained, and people began to live in groups, eventually being compelled to
build a society. And so people enter into a “social contract.” This is the
general outline of the social contract theory of Rousseau, or rather that of
thinkers spanning from Hobbes and Locke to Rawls and Nozick in the 20th
century.
For Rousseau, a social contract means “the total alienation of each
associate with all of his rights to the whole community.”1
The social contract creates a society (community). What is born as a result is
the will of the community as the aggregate of individual wills, in other words,
the “general will.” According to Rousseau, the sovereign of this community is
this general will, and as such, citizens must absolutely submit to the general
will. I have already pointed out in the previous chapter that this idea brings
to mind totalitarianism.
The important point here is that Rousseau’s social contract is by no
means a contract between kings or aristocrats and their subjects, or in other
words between a government (ruler) and its subjects (ruled).
The social contract that Rousseau imagined was not something that
prescribed the relation between those who rule and those who are ruled, but
rather, on a level prior to that, something that gives birth to a community in
which both ruler and ruled reside. The general will stands for the will of this
entire community. Hence, the question of who shoulders this will and carries
out governance, in other words the choice of who ought to possess power
belongs to the next stage. For this reason, The Social Contract is
written in an order that demonstrates that there is first a social contract,
which results in a general will being born, which in turn leads to the erection
of an institution of governance.
For Rousseau, this order of formation, or in other words the difference
between the “general will” and the “system of governance,” or the difference
between sovereignty and government, was a particularly important one. In The
Social Contract he repeatedly emphasizes this importance. For example, he
writes the following: “Government [is] improperly confused with the Sovereign,
of which it is merely the minister … What, then, is Government? An
intermediate body (un corps intermédiaire) established between subjects
and Sovereign so that they might conform to one another, and charged with the
execution of the laws and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and
political.”2
The government is merely the instrument of the general will. This means
that there are many forms of governance for realizing the general will. For
this reason, contrary to the generally held image, The Social Contract
in fact does not in any way advocate “democracy” in the sense of citizens
operating the government. For example, in Book III Rousseau quite plainly
states that depending on the geographical or demographic conditions in which
the state is placed, a monarchical system is more appropriate than a democratic
one in executing the general will. For Rousseau, the formation of one will by
all the people (general will) does not necessarily imply the operation of the
government by all of the people (democracy). What is important for him is
simply that the collective will of the populace constitutes sovereignty
(popular sovereignty), while the particular agent that shoulders this
sovereignty can be a king or the aristocracy or anyone else, if the populace so
wishes.
Why was this distinction between sovereignty and government so important
to Rousseau?
It was because this distinction is what guarantees for the people the
right to overthrow the existing government—the so-called “right of revolution.”
If sovereignty is equated with the government, the theory of social
contract cannot justify overthrowing a government. The clearest example of this
is Hobbes. In his famous Leviathan, he argued that the state
(commonwealth) is only established when the people entrust all of their rights
to a particular individual (king) or an “assembly.”3
In other words, for Hobbes, the individual and the government exist separately,
and a social contract is subsequently established between them. Thus, according
to his theory, as a matter of principle, the people cannot change the form of
government. This is because here the people already know who the ruler is and
what he will do, and agree to submit themselves to his protection for the sake
of a peaceful life; the social contract is understood according to this order.
To put it bluntly, it means that since you entrusted all of your rights knowing
that this man was king, you have no right to complain.
Meanwhile, Rousseau’s framework leads to a different outcome since what
the people produce through the social contract is only the general will and not
a particular government. The government is nothing more than a provisional
institution for the execution of the general will. And so the people may always
replace it. Rousseau clearly writes: “Thus when it happens that the People
institutes a hereditary Government, either monarchical in one family, or
aristocratic in one order of Citizens, this is not an engagement it enters
into; it is a provisional form it gives to the administration, until such time
as it pleases to order it differently.”4
This argument prepared the French Revolution.
The social contract is only something that is entered between individuals
and not between an individual and a government. Sovereignty lies in the general
will of the people and not in the will of the government/ruler. This is the
logic at the core of The Social Contract.
Now, I wonder how my readers felt about these distinctions between
sovereignty and government, the social contract and forms of government, and
the general will and its institutions. Perhaps you thought it was
comprehensible in theory, but rather abstract.
In reality, we live under a particular government, take on duties, pay
taxes, and receive protection. It is certainly easy to understand this relation
as a “contract,” and precisely because we in fact feel this way, the theory of
social contract has attracted interest for many centuries. Hasn’t the country
taken care of you? Then perform your duties as a citizen—even today we often
encounter such “vulgarized” versions of the social contract.
However, as it is clear from our discussion so far, the social contract
that Rousseau elaborates is far removed from such a stance. His social contract
is a peculiar one that cannot be understood according to correlations of right
and duty or merit and demerit. According to his thinking, the social contract
refers to “the making of society” itself. Without even realizing it, and in a
manner that is at first unrelated to governments and institutions, we exchange
an abstract contract, form a community, and generate something called the
general will. That is what Rousseau envisioned. The general will is a highly
idealized construct, and precisely because it is an idealized construct, it
provides real grounds for correcting the depravity of existing institutions.
What Rousseau developed was this rather intricate logic.
As such, we could also draw the conclusion that Rousseau’s concepts of
the social contract and the general will are in the end no more than fictions
meant to change reality, namely, that they’re “ideals” in the Kantian sense.5
In other words, the general will does not exist and is merely an expedience for
enacting a revolution. Academically speaking, this is likely the most common
view.
However, as I have repeated many times, in this book I would like to
venture to read Rousseau’s text straightforwardly and unassumingly.
Rousseau remarked that the general will exists apart from all the
actual systems of governance and that the state should always be conscious of
it. In the case of present-day Japan, for example, the “general will of Japan”
would, most certainly, exist apart from the Diet, government offices,
political parties, bureaucracies, and other such massive organizations.
Then where does it exist? What kind of thing is the general will in the
first place?
Let us think about the definition of the general will.
What is the general will? It is the collective will of the people. Such
is the common understanding.
Following this definition, what probably comes to mind for many readers
is what is vaguely called “public opinion.” In fact, Rousseau positions the
general will alongside public opinion in a certain passage in The Social
Contract.6
Thus, if one takes the general will as something that refers to public opinion,
it would not be a bad place to start in understanding Rousseau.
When we actually read Rousseau’s writing, however, we notice that what he
stipulates is something quite different from what we imagine through words such
as “collective will” or “public opinion.”
For example, Rousseau insists that “the general will is always in the
right, and always tends to the public welfare.”7
Rousseau does not say this because he has an overly abundant faith in the
goodness of the masses. According to his theory, the general will itself
creates the standards for good and for the public sphere, so erring in this
regard is by definition impossible; this is how his logic is
constructed. Meanwhile, if someone told us that public opinion “is always in
the right, and always tends to the public welfare,” it would confuse us. It
seems that what Rousseau calls the general will is more abstract than what
people call “public opinion.”
So once again, what is the general will?
The fact that The Social Contract does not introduce the concept
of the general will on its own provides us with a clue. In Book II, Rousseau
delineates the particular characteristics of the general will through a
comparison with the “will of all (volonté de tous),” a concept that is
similar to the general will, yet decisively different. If we translate this
French phrase literally, it would be “everyone’s will.”
According to Rousseau, the general will and the will of all (everyone’s
will) are no different in terms of being a collection of wills of multiple
individuals, or in his words the collection of “particular wills (volonté
particulière).” Yet, while the general will (generalized will) never errs,
the will of all (everyone’s will) does err at times. This is the case that he
makes. The distinction between the general will and the will of all is the
keystone of The Social Contract and appears throughout the book. For
example, though I will only briefly mention it here, Rousseau writes that a
“Lawgiver” must embody the general will and guide towards a correct direction
those citizens who lapse into a false will of all. Speaking in terms of this
distinction, what is often called “public opinion” would be the will of all,
and not the general will.
In what way, then, are these two different? Rousseau puts it thus: the
general will consistently relates to shared interests, while the will of all is
only the aggregate of private interests.
Yet, this is also a very abstract definition. With only such a definition
at our disposal, we cannot seem to get past the understanding that the general
will is nothing more than an “ideal” and an unachievable target, and the only
thing that exists in reality is the will of all (everyone’s will). Can there
not be a different definition?
In fact, there is.
And this is what provides us with the first steppingstone for the vision
of this book.
Apart from the conceptual stipulations that I referred to earlier,
Rousseau in fact speaks about the difference between the general will and the
will of all using mathematical expressions.
The will of all is a collection of particular wills. Rousseau defines it
as being the “aggregate/sum (somme)” of particular wills. This word
itself brings to mind arithmetic, but it does not end at being a simple
metaphor. That is to say, Rousseau goes on to define the general will as the
following. “[B]ut if, from these same wills, one takes away the pluses and the
minuses which cancel each other out (ôtez […] les plus et les moins
qui s’entre-détruisent), what is left as the sum of the differences is the
general will.”8
The will of all is nothing more than the sum of particular wills. Yet the
general will is defined as the “sum of differences (somme des differences)”
that remains after those that “cancel each other out” are removed from the
simple sum.
What does this mean? Rousseau wrote this text more than two centuries ago
in the mid-18th century when many concepts of modern mathematics had not yet
emerged. As such, this passage is written intuitively and is hence difficult to
understand. Yet, if we look at it through the lens of present-day common sense,
we can rephrase what Rousseau tried to say in a clearer way, even if we only
possess a high school-level knowledge of mathematics.
For example, we are familiar with the concept of vectors, unlike Rousseau
(the concept of vectors was formulated in the 19th century). As many people
learn in high school, vectors refer to a mass that bears magnitude and
direction. For example, since there is direction to velocity and acceleration,
this would mean that they are vectors. Adding 50 km/h to 50 km/h would only
appear as zero velocity to an external onlooker if we moved southward at 50
km/h on a plane that is moving northward at 50 km/h. On the other hand, there
is no direction to volume or weight. Such things are called scalars. If we
brought together two people who each weigh 50 kg, the total weight would simply
be 100 kg. I believe that this distinction between vectors and scalars provides
a significant clue in understanding the distinction between the general will
and the will of all.
Particular wills possess direction. In other words, they are vectors. Yet
the will of all is nothing more than the sum of scalars. Is this not what
Rousseau is trying to say? If the will of all is something that effaces
direction, even if a pair of particular wills were facing in completely
opposite directions—to offer a clear example from present-day Japan, if one
constituent desired the bolstering of welfare for the elderly (reform of the
healthcare system for the aged) and another desired the bolstering of welfare
for the youth strata (establishment of a child allowance policy)—this
difference in direction would not be considered. In other words, if both
desires were included in policy commitments without consideration of how to
design the shape of the country, social security costs would simply balloon. On
the contrary, Rousseau tried to grasp the general will as a different sort of
sum that faithfully cancelled out such differences in direction. If we
understand the “sum of differences” as the sum of vectors instead of a sum of
scalars, there is nothing ambiguous or mystical about Rousseau’s description.
It goes without saying that I am not attempting to argue that Rousseau
discovered a clear formula for computing the general will, nor that he
anticipated the history of mathematics. Rousseau was not a mathematician and my
interpretation is nothing more than the idea of an amateur.
But what is important here is the following fact, even if his expression
was ambiguous and instinctive: Rousseau believed that the general will is
something that is mathematically computable.
In fact, Rousseau uses different mathematical expressions in various key
passages in The Social Contract. For example, he employs the words
“relation” and “proportion” to express the relationship among sovereignty,
government, and people.
As I stressed earlier, sovereignty and government are strictly
distinguished in Rousseau’s theory. The people give birth to the
sovereign/general will through the social contract, and under its stipulations,
a government is founded as an executive institution, creating a state. What is,
then, the optimal size of a government? Interestingly, Rousseau presents a
simple formula.
According to him, what is important is the ratio of “power” among
sovereign, ruler, and people. He argues that since the government is something
that adjusts the power relation between particular wills (people) and the
general will (sovereign), the proportion between the people and the ruler and
the proportion between the ruler and sovereign should be as close to equivalent
as possible. For example, in a state consisting of ten thousand citizens, the
sovereign exists as a single body (as the general will) and therefore reigns as
a giant existence that gathers the power of ten thousand people. At the same
time, because people (as particular wills) exist separately, the ratio between
the power of the sovereign and that of the people would be ten thousand to one.
The ruler stands between them. As such, wouldn’t the square root of the number
of citizens, one hundred, be the most adequate number of governors?9
Rousseau presents such a formula and proceeds with his sections on forms of
governance based on this principle.
As Rousseau himself admits, population serves only as an example to grasp
the “power” of the sovereign and the people, and his formula is nothing more
than something based upon intuition. “[T]he ratios about which I am speaking
are measured not only by numbers of men, but more generally by the amount of
activity, which is the combined result of a great many causes.”10
To repeat, what is important is not whether Rousseau’s formula is useful for
the realization of actual policies or not, but the fact that he believed that
the general will, or rather the relation between the general will and the power
of the people, could to some extent be formulated mathematically.
The general will is not just a pretext. It was formulated as something
that could be mathematically derived from the will of people, or the power
relations of people.
Rousseau’s The Social Contract, in other words the text at the
basis of modern democracy, allows for such an interpretation.
The general will is not the will of the government. Nor is it the sum of
individual wills. And it is not simply an ideal either. The general will is
a mathematical entity.
If we may interpret Rousseau’s text in this manner, we can use it as a
point of departure in fundamentally rethinking the nature of democracy.
To think about the social contract of the future while taking as our
premise the information technology of the 21st century. As I wrote in Chapter
1, this is the purpose of this book. For many readers, this probably
brought to mind ideas related to the reform of government, for example the
adoption of electronic voting, making policy debates more transparent, or
implementing collective intelligence in budget proposals. This is not
necessarily wrong. As I write this I do have such individual reforms in mind as
well.
However, as it is apparent from the discussion thus far, what is really
important here may in fact not be reforming government. This is because as long
as we faithfully read Rousseau, the general will is something that ought to
exist outside of the government. It is something that ought to be outside of
what we usually imagine to be “political.”
The dream of this book begins there.
1
The Social Contract, Book I Chapter 6, 50.
2
Ibid, Book III Chapter 1, 82-83.
3
Leviathan, Chapter 18.
4
The Social Contract, Book III Chapter 18, 118-19.
5
See “The Conjectural Beginning of Human History.” There, Kant touches upon both
Emile and The Social Contract and offers a response to what
Cassirer would later call “The Question of Rousseau.” In a word, it’s an
attempt to understand the general will (though he does not refer to the concept
itself in the piece) as the “ultimate moral end” for the purpose of “end(ing)
the conflict between the natural and the moral species.” Immanuel Kant, On
History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Library of Liberal
Arts, 2001), 60-63.
6
The Social Contract, Book II Chapter 12, 89-90. Here Rousseau
differentiates law into four categories: “political law” or “fundamental law”
that regulates the relation between the sovereign authority and the state;
civil law that regulates the relation between members; criminal law that
regulates the relation between members and the state; and lastly, “moral
standards, custom, and above all public opinion,” which are the “most important
of all laws,” and those which are “graven […] in citizens’ hearts.”
7
Ibid, Book II Chapter 3, 66.
8
Ibid, Book II Chapter 3, 60.
9
Ibid, Book III Chapter 1, 84.
10
Ibid, Book III Chapter 1, 85.