more on the enlightenment

content/post/hobbes-and-the-sovereign.md

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+---
+title: "Hobbes and the Sovereign"
+date: 2020-05-29T22:47:29Z
+tags: ["hobbes","sovereign","leviathan"]
+topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
+image: /img/hobbes.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+In the Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes posits the creation of a commonwealth by means of a social contract, and as part of that contract, Hobbes theorizes the creation of the office of a sovereign authority, the occupant of which is to act as the representative of the constituted wills of the individual parties of the contract. Hobbes insists that it is not possible for this sovereign authority to commit an injustice against those who have granted him his privileged position. This essay will briefly sketch the reasons Hobbes offers in defense of his position, and critically evaluate his arguments in light of some common objections.
+
+To begin with, an understanding of the sovereign’s authority and its legitimacy is necessary. From whence does an assembly derive the power to contract with each other, and how is that power transferred to a sovereign? This is essential to Hobbes’ claim, because it is the basis for all his defenses of the claim. Hobbes believes that the individual has a kind of ‘natural’ right to the pursuit of his own interests, as a simple matter of fact in his state of nature: if you desire it, and can achieve it, it is yours for the taking. Being cognizant of their own self-interest, however, Hobbes believes that men would naturally recognize the danger in such a state of affairs. Individual bereft of any rules for their actions would of course spend their days pilfering from each other. So, in that fear, they would come together to contract with each other to protect themselves from each other. The authority of the contract, then, rests in the consent of the parties to the contract, and in their own mutual desire to be protected from each other.
+
+To facilitate this protection, the signatories surrender their own individual right to self-protection, in exchange for a right to pursue self-interest unmolested. But to make this agreement work, some one person must be conscripted to act as the unilateral protector of all. His self-interest would reside in the effective protection of his subjects, who have granted him this privilege as a consequence of the contract made with each other.
+
+Hobbes argues that, in order to effectively execute his duties, the sovereign must have absolute authority to both set and enforce the rules by which the contracted subjects must behave. He says this is to ensure that there is no impediment to executing his duty to provide uniform protection for all. Naturally, the specter of despotic tyranny arises when considering the scope of such an office. Hobbes offers three reasons why, in spite of this concern, he thinks the sovereign would not be capable of committing an injustice against his subjects.
+
+First, he can do no injustice because it is he who determines what constitutes a just or unjust law. The law just is what the sovereign commands it to be, and as such, his acts and decrees would be just by fiat, if not by definition. While this may be logically the case, this defense does not allay the fear of despotism as such. In fact, it practically gives the sovereign a license to commit despotism. But what’s more, even Hobbes himself admits that, while the sovereign can do no injustice, he can certainly be guilty of ‘iniquities’. In other words, all laws are just, but not all laws are good. Hobbes says a good law is one that is needful for the people governed by the sovereign, and that it would conduce to facilitating the subjects as they “go on their way”. However, he does not explain how needfulness would be adjudicated independently of the sovereign, and even worse, does not explain how a law can be simultaneously just but bad (what would a non-needful law look like).
+
+Second, he says that subjects attempting to depose their appointed sovereign for ostensible injustices, would themselves be committing an injustice on the grounds that they are already bound by contract to submit to him, and because they would be denying the sovereign his right to rule. But it is quite unclear why the parties to the contract could, by consensus vote, consent to be ruled, and yet not vote to revoke that consent (or build an escape clause into the contract)? What’s more, despite the sovereign’s absolute authority emanating from the contract, it is not clear from where any right to rule apart from that contract could derive. So, it seems that the contract is not in fact irrevocable. Hobbes hints at this in various places in Leviathan, as well.
+
+Lastly, Hobbes defense the impunity of the sovereign by arguing that the sovereign could not properly forfeit his position once granted, because he (despite not being party to the contract) cannot act unjustly toward those who have already authorized him to act in any way he sees fit to satisfy their desire for protection. No matter how he acts, he is doing the will of those who authorized him, which cannot be unjust by a matter of fact. This is a subtly different defense than the first, in that it is about the relation between the contract parties and the sovereign, not the laws that he enacts. But, still, this is another logical sleight of hand that turns legitimacy into a tautological double-bind, and again leaves the moral question unanswered.
+
+None of Hobbes’ arguments, therefore, are very convincing in defense of the sovereign’s freedom from judgments of justice. Given the mandate Hobbes gives this authority, to control the apparatus of education, print, and spiritual life, and the unfettered domain Hobbes grants him over the legislative, judicial, and executive duties of the state, and the crystal clear lessons of modern history, it is obvious to anyone with a little common sense that Hobbes’ sovereign would not only be capable of injustice, he would perhaps be the most unjust authority the earth had ever seen.
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 28 November 2021]```
+

content/post/potpie-for-dinner.md

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 [JERRY] ”Aw, jeesuz, Jerry! He ain’t comin’ home! He ALWAYS eats out! An’ tonight - so are we!“
 
-[BRADLEY] ”Alright, Jerry. You’re boss... “ [a feint noise] ”Argh! Ouch!“
+[BRADLEY] ”Alright, Jerry. You’re boss... “ [a f noise] ”Argh! Ouch!“
 
 [JERRY] ”What the hell, Jerry?“
 

content/post/what-problem-is-rousseau-trying-to-solve.md

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+---
+title: "What Problem Is Rousseau Trying to Solve?"
+date: 2019-11-07T22:52:12Z
+tags: ["the social contract","communism","general will","state of nature","enlightenment"]
+topics: ["philosophy","politics"]
+image: /img/rousseau-wide.jpg
+draft: false
+---
+
+A core problem in political philosophy is the relation between the individual and the society in which he is a member. How does the political order, in the form of the state, legitimize itself and how are its impositions upon the individual, in apparent opposition to his freedom, justified? Jean-Jacques Rousseau attempted to solve this problem in his famous essay *The Social Contract*. To quote Rousseau from The Social Contract, his project is *“…to find a form of association that will defend and protect the person and goods of each associate with the full and common force, and by means of which each uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as he was [in the state of nature]…”*. What Rousseau found, was a theory known as the ‘general will’. Specifically, Rousseau exclaimed it to be the solution to the problem of preserving an individual’s natural freedom in a state of conventional justice (i.e. a body politic). This essay describes this theory in summary, explains how Rousseau intended for it to solve the problem of individual freedom in a political order, and in the final assessment, his solution is found wanting for three fairly damning reasons.
+
+Rousseau’s general will is a notion that is notoriously hard to pin down, despite the centrality to his larger theory of a social contract. Put simply, the general will is an abstract model of a “being of reason” with which the individual is supposed to identify, and by which, is supposed to govern his own actions. Rousseau provides some rough outlines that can help us see this a bit more clearly. Firstly, he points to its silhouette, in asserting that a democratic majority will is not, and could not be, the general will itself. This is because majority rule is something established by a social convention which first requires unanimity prior to its establishment. In other words, any given group of individuals must first unanimously agree that a democratic vote is an acceptable means by which to determine the future of the group as a whole. That act of agreement thus legitimises the authority of votes taken subsequently, and provides the minority with a motivation to abide by the outcome. The legitimacy derived from the unanimous act is the seed bed of the ‘general will’. But what motivates that initial unanimous act?
+
+According to Rousseau, the act of coming together as a group, and the choice one makes to see oneself in a relationship with that group, creates a ‘public person’ within oneself. The ‘public person’, created in the will to take the interests of others as equal to self-interest, joins with other public persons in the group, and produces a ‘general will’ in its first unanimous act. The public person is thus aligned with the common interest of the group as a whole. At that point, the individual is expected to be in a state of constant negotiation between his private, self-interested ‘natural’ self, and his public, common-interested, conventional self. The public self identifies directly with the general will as an essential and equal part of this abstract collective ‘being of reason’.
+
+The public self, then, as part of the ‘general will’, wills the good of the private self by participating in lawmaking activities for the good of the whole. The private self is subject to those laws and must conform for its own good. If the private self rejects this rule, the individual whose private self is refusing to obey will be compelled to do so by the body politic. This is thought to be proper ‘moral’ freedom, by Rousseau, because personal interest is driven by private instinct and natural appetite, and to be driven by those things is to be enslaved by them. The general will, then, is an abstract model of the ideal rational person, who is motivated to look after his entire self, in the same way that private individuals do, except that it is governed by reason, while the private individual is governed by natural passions.
+
+Does this elaborate abstraction solve the problem of preserving natural freedom in a state of conventional justice? No, it does not — and Rousseau effectively concedes as much in book one. Firstly, he redefines his own conception of natural freedom, in order to rescue it for the general will. At the beginning of the book, he explains natural freedom as an unlimited right, by means of physical powers and intellect, to all the goods necessary for the maintenance of life. But near the end of the book, he says that natural freedom is actually slavery, because we are thus subject to the tyranny of our instincts and appetites. First, natural freedom is a good to be preserved, and then it is an evil to be discouraged. Which view of this freedom is correct? He doesn’t answer this question of course, but it’s clear that he makes this switch, because he wants to make the *alienation* of natural freedom into a kind of freedom itself, in order to give the ‘general will’ a purpose for existing.
+
+Which gets us to the second failure. Even if we throw out the first objection, it is still the case that his conventional liberty is a substitute for natural freedom. Rousseau argues that the substitution is preferable. But this is not the same as preserving actual natural freedom. In arguing for a substitute he has conceded his position, and has therefore failed to preserve natural freedom. Rousseau seems confused about whether this natural state of freedom is a good or not, and one cannot help but wonder if this is because he was too wedded to his theory of ‘general will’ to provide a satisfactory reconciliation.
+
+In some sense, Rousseau seems to have recognized this, because his last pitch is to shift the goal-posts entirely. No longer are we discussing the preservation of natural freedom, but instituting a conventional form of equality, as a remedy for the natural inequalities of “genius” and “powers” present in man in his natural state. In this instance, he doesn’t even argue for the preferability of conventional equality. He simply asserts it, expecting the reader to infer numerous assumptions from the earlier discussion of the private, self-interested individual.
+
+In the end, the ‘general will’ is a solution in search of a problem. Rousseau wants to craft an account of the collective behaviour of humans in large groups, before he really understands the behaviour and motivations of individual humans. This is hardly surprising, given the fact that Rousseau was himself a deeply confused and corrupt man. Concepts like ‘general will’ (and, for example, Mill’s ‘general welfare’) reify communities, and superimpose psychological projections supplied by the theoretician himself. In effect, painting a picture of the ‘body politic’ that looks like the ideal portrait of themselves. I think this is why Rousseau’s work (and for example, Marx’s later work) is so appealing to the narcissistic psychoses of men like Robespierre and Lenin. When the whole of society is identified with oneself through the mechanism of an abstraction like the ‘body politic’ or the ‘general will’, it’s not much further a step to suggest that one can do what one wishes, with the whole of society. Such as, for example, forcing them to be free…
+
+```[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 28 November 2021]```