Rousseau, Natural Law and Rational Freedom

Natural Law and Rational Freedom

"The crisis is approaching, and we are on the edge of a revolution. Who can answer for your fate? What man has made, man may destroy. . . . This farmer of the taxes, who can live only on gold, what will he do in poverty? This haughty fool who cannot use his own hands, who prides himself on what is not really his, what will he do when he is stripped of all? But he who loses his crown and lives without it, is more than a king; from the rank of a king, which may be held by a coward, a villain, or a madman, he rises to the rank of a man, a position few can fill."

- Rousseau – Emile

Rousseau!! Freedom and chains! Rousseau is not just about throwing off "chains". Social life is all about interconnection. How to make the ties that bind and obligate us legitimate in terms of freedom is Rousseau's concern. How to forge legitimate bonds or “constraints” is the problem Rousseau seeks to unravel.

I'm reacquainting myself with Rousseau, preparing to write on this incendiary thinker. It's unfinished business from years ago, when the fine Kantian philosopher Gary Banham advised me to write further on Rousseau, as an important, misunderstood and somewhat neglected but timely figure. I’m planning a big book on Rousseau, bridging natural law and rational freedom, leading in the direction of critical realism (Marx). This is a massive undertaking… It would be so much easier to write something short on Rousseau’s ‘moral ecology of the heart.’ I already have the ideas and materials in place, key themes connected to the collapse of industrial civilisation and defining a nicely scaled Ecopolis as the end in view. I shall flag up Rousseau’s writings on small republics at home with his emphasis on communion with the natural world and the way he values the mores, customs and practices of people in place. Let’s call it oikophilia, the love of place. Rousseau’s affirmation of the life of the patrie fits this reading very easily indeed. But why not write the big book anyway and finally, once and for all, spell out the ethical foundations of my own view. My view isn’t quite Rousseau’s view, and departs markedly in many respects. But Rousseau is a superb interlocutor, an ancient amongst the moderns, a modern amongst the ancients, pertinent, sharp and original in the way he addresses all the questions that matter. And he just might be right, too, in the very strange way he reworks natural law. I think I can safely say that whereas natural law theorists write in a manner that is … well, boring, to be blunt, thereby reducing their appeal and dulling the force of their points, Rousseau’s writings are alive. And for that, we should be grateful. A philosopher should be readable if he wants to be read. And Rousseau wanted to be read by the great public. I like his democratic spirit.

As I said, returning to Rousseau is unfinished business for me. Back in 2001, having completed my PhD on ‘Rational Freedom’ (tracing the unity of each and all through the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle in the ancient world to the recovery of their key themes by Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx), I was advised by great Kantian philosopher Gary Banham to specialise in Rousseau. He liked what I had written on Rousseau, he was appreciative of Rousseau’s influence upon Kant, and he considered Rousseau to be an important and neglected figure.

Has Rousseau fallen into neglect? He’s a familiar thinker to me, and he is so good that I presume that his importance and his influence is taken for granted. And yet I note how often, if mentioned at all, he is discussed as the philosopher of feeling and emotion, in contrast to great rationalists of the Enlightenment such as Voltaire. This is a travesty. Considered as thinkers and as philosophers, the philosophes of the Enlightenment are not remotely in Rousseau’s class. Not even close. Of his contemporaries, only Hume and, a little later, Kant, are his peers, and both of these philosophical titans recognised the force of Rousseau’s genius.

I think a strong argument can be made that Rousseau’s ideas shaped the modern world, for good or, through their difficulty, through Rousseau’s ambiguities, or through their being misunderstood, for ill. But genius he was. His political ideas were appropriated by and made to serve the democratic revolutions that launched the modern world in 1789, continuing throughout the nineteenth century. The French Revolution has been called “the most important event in western history.” Rousseau’s influence was all over it. I doubt Rousseau would have been enamoured either of revolution or of the centralised nation state – in fact he openly stated his repugnance at revolution and political violence, and his political ideal was modelled on small scale city republics. But there it is. Rousseau has been (however paradoxically) influential in other respects. I think it was Hirst who criticised for Marxist conceptions of democracy for never having advanced beyond Rousseau. That could read as a backhanded tribute to Rousseau’s prescience and modernity. In my own thesis, I presented Rousseau as offering a ‘viable anarchism’ for the modern world, a view based on his democratic constitution of authority. I’ll stand by that view. Of course, others have claimed his words inspired the totalitarianisms of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Hitler was the outcome of Rousseau, declared Bertrand Russell, proving to me just how clueless the liberal mind is with respect to the idea of bonds, ties or chains as enabling a deeper freedom. Rousseau was a critic of the atomistic conception of individual freedom, and his justification of collective legitimate constraints is sufficient to condemn him as a totalitarian for individualist liberals. In this respect, it is worth emphasising the extent to which Rousseau exposes liberalism as a false philosophy based on a false anthropology and sociology. Rousseau has also been considered to have inspired ideas of direct and participatory democracy. His writings display a profound and subtle understanding of psychology, he demonstrated a deep love of nature, he wrote a pioneering and influential tract on education, I believe he coined the word ‘bourgeois’ to describe the vain, self-important, shallow and selfish society of the moderns, he criticised the exploitative system that deprived us of our commons, and he rejected notions of progress through science and technology allied to industrialisation, economic growth and inequality (not just economic). I’ll put it this way, if I was to describe the modern economic system as a global heat engine that on the point of kicking the biosphere over the cliff, and the rest of us with it, beyond the point of recall, Rousseau would not have been remotely surprised. He knew well the distinction that the moderns have obliterated, the distinction between technical progress and moral freedom.

I’ll state my own view clearly – critics and commentators may well be right to describe Rousseau as the least intellectual and least technical of philosophers but, in my view, he is the most brilliant, the most pertinent and the most wise of all the modern philosophers. There is no happy ending written into his philosophy, no invocation of extra-human forces bringing about a necessary good – just a stern and fundamentally correct emphasis on responsibility and will in seeking the truth and recognising the good. He was a truthseeker, something more important than being sharp with words and logic. Rousseau emphasised something much more important than knowing and possessing truth, and he refused the title of philosopher, expressing disdain for the vain peddlers of words he came across in intellectual circles. He preferred “being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices,” and he saw men with prejudices in all kinds of places. He saw the battle between atheist materialists and religious authorities as one conducted between rival dogmatisms and fanaticisms. He cared for neither side. He was a member of no schools, preferring to follow his train of thought wherever it led. He was since in his concern for truth, and distinguished truthseeking from the vain word spinning of “intellectuals” with their abstract, overly-complex jargon. When his educational novel Emile was published, it was condemned and burned by religious zealots, with Rousseau being accused of blasphemy and hounded from place to place. In my view, people of religious faith should thank Rousseau from the depth of their souls, because his brilliant reconciliation of faith and reason saved Christianity from the direct onslaught of materialism and atheism launched by the Enlightenment philosophes. Rousseau, even alone and isolated, was more than their measure, and they knew it. I have a quote somewhere in my notes, from Holbach or Helvetius, identifying Rousseau as an enemy in their midst, whom they can no longer tolerate but must destroy. Rousseau took up the defence of God, the soul and free-will against their mechanistic materialist determinism – they didn’t like it, but I do.

We owe Rousseau a debt. He tried to keep the moderns sane and within bounds. In a journal entry of 1934, reproduced in Culture and Value, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that ‘philosophy should really be written only as one would write poetry.’ (CV 28) I’ll make a strong statement here, but I think I can justify it: Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the most poetic, the most beautiful and the most animated philosophic words since Plato. He kept philosophy alive as something more than an annual house cleaning, something concerned with the grand themes of life and its living and how human beings are to live well together. I would hope that people would one day come to engage with one of the most subtle, complicated and yet simple and eminently readable philosophers there has ever been. Frankly, Rousseau cuts past the pretensions of knowledge and the rationalisations of power, as well as the pretensions of supposedly sophisticated people, the dross we are daily fed in the modern world to get to the root of the matter. He cuts to the core. Oddly, for someone who sparked such controversy and revulsion, Rousseau was a reconciler and harmoniser, seeking to deflate the rival dogmatisms of the day and put an end to strong religious (for and against) feelings as well as bitter political partisanship. We need to revisit Rousseau and give him a fair hearing this time, because this world is divided for fall and, without a peace with justice, is doomed to implode in a universal hatred. Rousseau sought the genuine unity of each and all, overcoming the tendencies to fracture into discrete interests and wills. If we cannot achieve that unity, we will succumb to a mutual self-cancellation leading to a mutual self-annihilation. No doubt.

I should have specialised in Rousseau in 2001, making good all of these points. My work took other directions. I return to pay Rousseau the respect he is owed.

We are being told that the Enlightenment is under threat and that we should rally to its defence. In these articles, the name of Rousseau continually crops up as the Enlightenment’s fiercest critic, a proto-fascist collectivist who would bring an end to the liberal order. Well maybe you should consider that Rousseau was right from the first, and that liberalism is a false philosophy full of false antinomies and crude fallacies. Rousseau’s Enlightenment is much richer.

I just find it interesting that David Hume is generally acknowledged to be the greatest British philosopher – and therefore the greatest the world has ever seen ... Hume has massively positive reputation in philosophical circles; his scepticism stands without refutation, it is claimed. At the same time, Rousseau is still considered a philosopher of feeling, a collectivist and a proto-fascist crank. Yet Hume was fulsome in his praise of Rousseau, writing to him: 'there is no man in Europe of whom I have maintained a higher idea, and who I would be prouder to serve', and 'you are the person whom I most revere both for the Force of your Genius and the Greatness of your mind. . . .'

A few years later, Immanuel Kant described Rousseau as the ‘Newton of the moral world.’

This is high praise indeed from two of the greatest philosophers the modern world has produced. It’s interesting to explore just what it was about Rousseau that Hume and Kant appreciated so much. Rousseau is clearly important. He is often spoken of as a philosopher of feeling over reason. This is a lazy judgment. Rousseau was highly rational. Read his Social Contract, read how rigorous his logic is when defining freedom as the legitimate constraint of all. Individuals are forced to be free through having to conform their particular wills – the will of all – to the will that embodies the greater good – the general will – whether it makes them feel good or not in their immediate existence. Kant, the greatest absolute moralist of the Enlightenment, understood the point perfectly. Rousseau argues for a rational and moral freedom which raises the individual to his or her true good, whereas following desires and inclinations leaves the individual chained to empirical necessity. Rousseau puts reason above wants. What he didn’t do was divorce reason from emotions. He stands in line of descent of Plato and seeks the unity of the human faculties. That doesn’t make him a Romantic irrationalist who asserted feelings over reason. The biographer of Denis Diderot claims that Rousseau offered merely ‘a vague morality of the heart.’ With respect, that is manifest rubbish and cannot withstand the slightest examination. Kant, the greatest ethical absolutist of the century, understood this clearly. The materialist philosophes of the Enlightenment were not remotely in Rousseau’s class. He split with them, and he split with them for stronger reasons than personal character. Rousseau put reason and emotion together in a highly sophisticated form, he was anything but vague. He just saw the 'scandal of reason' long before Kant discovered it, and his philosophy was rounder and richer for it.

So I intend to write a book that explores the relations between natural law and what I call ‘rational freedom’, the idea that human beings come together to define a legitimate constraint as against the illegitimate constraint of external forces (unmastered practice/’the economy’/climate change/irresponsible power etc). Natural law affirms the existence of certain transcendent norms, values and truths that are in no way created or conventional, existing as objective standards by which to evaluate and criticize the institutions, laws and practices of particular societies. The tradition of ‘rational freedom’ (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx) places the emphasis upon human creative agency, rational will and labour, a self-creative, self-legislating reason. Set against each other in such terms, the two positions seem clearly antithetical, and that is how many on either side of the divide see the relation. I don’t think the separation is as clear as that division makes it appear. David Lay Williams has detailed Rousseau’s affirmation of transcendent norms in his book Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment. Rousseau’s relation to natural law remains ambiguous to say the least. He denies the idea that human beings are naturally sociable and rational, which frankly contradicts the natural law view. But the reasons why he did so have nothing to do with repudiating natural law and everything to do with challenging the materialism of Thomas Hobbes, the Hobbesian view of the state of nature as competitive, individualistic bourgeois relations read back into nature. Outside of that debate, Rousseau can be found time and again resting his views on natural law positions. Similarly, the influence of Plato and of natural law can be found in Kant, Aristotle and Aristotelian essentialism in Hegel and Marx. That doesn’t make ‘rational freedom’ part of the natural law tradition, of course. There are key differences which identify Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx with a new position beyond natural law. But not against. They transcend that tradition. But they are not the historicists, relativists, voluntarists and positivists or out and out self-creationists they are frequently said to be. In truth, they transcend attempts to squeeze their positions into existing philosophical categories. They are between and beyond natural law and positivism/historicism/relativism, those old categories do not contain their innovative aspects of their thought.

I shall read Rousseau in light of Williams and the affirmation of transcendent norms. I am very sympathetic, hence a chapter on why truth and goodness matter. But there is no point repeating work that has already been done. And there is also a danger of a Platonist Rousseau becoming a restatement of Plato to the neglect of Rousseau’s originality. The same with respect to Rousseau’s use of conventional idioms of political philosophy, as well as his relation to Hobbes and Locke.

Many of the bare, conventional idioms of political philosophy, especially those of his contemporaries, are mis­leading: state of nature, social contract, natural law or natural right, state, constitution, law, general will, republic, education and government are examples. Every interpretation of Rous­seau's thought should heed his advice to Mme d'Epinay: "Learn my vocabulary better, my good friend, if you want us to understand each other. Believe me, my terms rarely have their usual meaning."

Aspects of Rousseau's thought are apt to become more obscure if one merely catalogues the similarities and dissimilarities between Rousseau and other theorists, for Burke's observation about Emile is no less true of Rousseau's other writings: "To know what the received notions are upon any subject, is to know with certainty what those of Rousseau are not." And yet, when read carefully – which is how we should read thinkers of any depth – Rousseau and Burke share many commonalities (David Cameron, The Social Thought of Rousseau and Burke A Comparative Study 1973).

Rousseau's understanding of citizenship and common life, unique in modern thought until the advent of socialist and socialist-anarchist theorists, suggest ancient phi­losophy. A second quite different approach traces Rousseau's intel­lectual debts, especially to ancient theorists. Even though this approach notes both similarities and dissimilarities between Rousseau and ancient theorists, it still fails to establish the coherent meaning of Rousseau's own ideas, the integrity of single writings and his entire political theory.

I have about a million ideas for this book at the moment. Rousseau is a fascinating figure. He attempts to reconcile good government/right political regime and self-government, combining the modern emphasis on natural rights with the classical concern with natural duties. The "good" is not just given, it has to be willed. Is this a compromise of the good? A dilution in order to make it comprehensible? If politics is about truth, then philosopher rulers are the order of the day. Rousseau didn't care for Enlightened Despots much. It's significant, I think, that other Enlightenment figures were happy to cosy up to such figures. Rousseau's Lawgiver is more in the manner of Platonic transcendent norms, standing outside of legislative power. How to bridge the ideal and the real is the key problem of politics, if we are ever to achieve the "common good" as anything other than a pious wish/political abstraction. Rousseau is excellent on this, affirming transcendent norms and seeing how they could be embodied and articulated in practice. So I see this in terms of the rule of philosophy rather than the philosopher ruler, a democratisation of the good. But that standard remains as something more than conventional. I think Rousseau was the first to see the looming crisis in modern conceptions of political empiricism/hedonism/conventionalism stemming from Hobbes and Locke, as well as a materialism and rationalism that would disenchant the world and leave us with an expansion of means and a diminution of meaning. Rousseau saw the philosophes as peddling a philosophy of the "fortunate", he turned against their atheism. He explicitly referred to atheism as the ‘philosophy of the fortunate’, a way of life embraced by those comfortably off within the inequalities of the existing world, depriving those less well-off of their sources of comfort, meaning and hope. Rousseau’s belief in natural goodness, however, undercut the central tenet of Christianity in original sin, and so he lacked friends and allies amongst people of faith. I take Rousseau to be a religious thinker, albeit of a very peculiar kind. He does seem to point to Deism and a natural theology. I think he requires a natural law foundation, but I also think he's alive to the ways in which modernity cut us from that grounding. He takes us back to the idea of a good creator God who creates a good world for us to live in. He openly states that everything is good as it comes from the hand of the Creator, and turns bad in human hands. How to overcome that corruption is Rousseau’s problematic.

We are living in the aftermath of a non-teleological understanding of the universe in light of the advances of natural science. Rousseau rejects the traditional natural law arguments and thereby loses the possibility of grounding his arguments in teleology, the understanding that we are living in a good, meaningful and purposeful world. I think he did it because he lacked the philosophical tools to challenge the materialism of the day and the way it drew on advances in the natural sciences. We can do better now. And we should, in noting this deficiency in Rousseau, emphasise that his instincts were right here. And that points to a deep and true faith – the fact that – with the best resources of the latest science and philosophy ranged against him – he could still choose in favour of God, the immortal soul and free-will.

Rousseau is ... quite a figure indeed. An ancient among the moderns, a man out of his time, pointing to a future time when nature, culture and reason have been reconciled. He suspected that the Enlightenment would not turn out to be quite the liberation progressives may have thought. Yes, he emphasised will and consent, contract and consensus, and so seems clearly part of that modern world mastery of nature. I just think Rousseau saw that, divorced from common ground, we may end up as masters of a nowhere land of our own creation. He certainly appreciated the distinction between technical power and moral power. All the advance made in the former could never compensate or substitute for a deficiency in the latter. Rousseau would clearly express a disdain for those who would dream of means so perfect that no-one would need to concern themselves with ends. No amount of perfection in the mechanical means would ever extinguish the moral imperative which holds that human beings need to learn how to be good.

Freedom, for Rousseau, is a moral freedom, not an endless accumulation of material quantities and technical powers. He is often portrayed as someone who rejected modern civilisation in favour of the ‘noble savage’. This is simplistic. And wrong. It misunderstands the nature of Rousseau’s critique and attempts at reconstruction. At no point did Rousseau ever argue for a return to a lost innocence. On the contrary, he explicitly ruled it out. He argues for the exchange of natural liberty for a civil liberty. The central concern of his writings is how human beings could come to address the predicament of civilisation as an enchainment. He wants human beings to deal with the question of what kind of chains would bind them now that they live in the social state. He saw clearly what we were losing but rather than go "back to nature" (and back to the natural law too, for that matter), his embrace of antiquity was on (post)modern grounds.

I'll put it this way: it was very interesting visiting St Thomas Aquinas College last year in in Santa Paula, Ventura County, California. I like their approach in teaching the "Great Books". It's very significant that in justifying their teaching of the "bad books" that Rousseau takes pride of place among those books. I can see their reasoning. Rousseau raises all the important questions and issues. If he is wrong, then he is wrong on the right issues, and enables us to restate the right way, and do so in ways that recognise the achievements, as well as the problems, of modernity. For now, the problem of politics is one of putting fact and value, reason and emotion, short-term individual self-interest and long-term common good together.

For me, scientist Ken Caldeira hits the nail smack on the head when talking of the political challenge that the crisis in the climate system puts before us:

"The central question facing us is how to transform societies composed of self-interested people into societies composed of people who act to further the public good."

Hey .... hello Rousseau, your time has come! I'll not be indulging liberal criticisms of "totalitarianism" too much. They are based on a false philosophy and a false social anthropology, the idea that human beings are discrete, self-maximising atoms cuts off from each other, with rights as claims the individual holds against society. They show the limitations of liberalism, limitations that are being exposed in the contemporary age. That individualistic conception I take to be an inhumanism, subjecting human society to the ‘totalitarianism’ of a collective constraint that is imposed upon each and all from the outside. The part that does make me uneasy is Rousseau’s detachment from the natural law tradition. He stands in ambiguous relation to this tradition. He incorporates many key natural law themes. Yes explicitly repudiates the idea that human beings are naturally rational and sociable and hence possess a certain innate character and dignity that is pre-political. We are charged with the responsibility of creating political and civil order, an idea that Kant developed further in terms of a self-legislating reason. It is a radical idea, taking morality into our own hands, but begs the question of by what standards do we do the (self)creating. There is no pre-given morality, therefore we ought to create a morality - Rousseau's just society as a result of self-assumed obligation - is an argument that contradicts itself.

As I make clear, however, there is more to Rousseau than self-creation. Rousseau's great insight with the 'general will' was to see that the truth cannot just be given in some passive sense by a philosopher-king but actively willed on the part of active, informed citizens. Again, Rousseau's position is so subtle and nuanced that it needs to be spelled out in detail. In outline, it can only be distorted. The best way to misunderstand Rousseau is to read him in parts and in bite-sized chunks. On closer analysis, I can show that Rousseau is attempting here to uproot the false image of human beings in the individualist liberal conception, a conception that presents human nature in abstraction from society and history, a view of human nature that naturalizes key characteristics of liberal society, rather than sees them as the products of specific social relations. And on that point, I am 100% in agreement Rousseau.

I am, however, squeamish about losing a natural law foundation for a entirely self-created grounds. Without that foundation, there is a danger that individual rights are entirely conditional upon positive law. The idea of self-assumed obligation sounds good, human beings in association in public community living by laws they give themselves. But ... Freedom in society is possible only by virtue of the complete surrender of each and all to the free society. This total alienation of rights implies that we lose the right to appeal from natural right. All rights become social rights subject to positive law. I don't care for that aspect of the idea at all, and Rousseau’s references to God and ‘eternal truths’ indicates that he would recoil from the implications. I don’t believe Rousseau is a conventionalist at all. I think he was challenging not so much natural law as the naturalization of specific social relations and identities in the hands of certain liberal philosophers. He was challenging the limited, distorted or false conceptions of natural law in the hands of bourgeois philosophers who, since Hobbes and Locke, had been emphasizing rights as the possession of discrete individuals seeking to secure their life, liberty and property.

We need natural law independent of time and place and particular societies in order to provide norms and standards capable of holding government, law and rulers to account. The general will is Rousseau's attempt to fill the gap. The general will is a seemingly contradictory notion, combining the "general", the objective norms and standards, and the "will" that properly belongs to individuals. Rousseau was seeking a novel solution to real the impasse of natural right - the truth cannot just be given, it must be willed, the truth cannot just be legislated, it must be self-legislated - we make the transition from contemplation to action.

There's lots of complicated ideas to unpack here. That said, it's a worthwhile endeavour. The creation of a common force in politics, one that is legitimate in being determined by each and all as a matter of will, is a pressing need at a time of social, political and environmental crises, the result of collective forces impacting on society from the outside, lacking the collective means and mechanisms for their resolution (institutional, moral and psychological). When we look at the problems facing the world we are staring massive political and institutional (and moral and psychological) failure in the face. The obstacles placed in front of common association and action for common ends have resulted in uncoordinated incremental actions on the part of individuals, particular groups and sectional interests accumulating to have us being subject to the greatest collective force in history - climate change and global warming. Rousseau is all about determining the nature of constraint.

This is the key question if freedom is to have any meaning other than ideological assertion and rationalisation of autonomy-denying structures, practices and relations: we have this choice: internal moral/social constraint determined by ends we choose ourselves as a community of co-legislators or external constraint ("the economy" or climate change). I can certainly show why Rousseau matters, the way he bridges antiquity and modernity, the way he draws on Plato's key themes, the way he integrates all the human faculties, has them working in tandem, the way he emphasizes the formation of character and not just the information of disembodied heads, the way he brings us back to our senses and our ethical and political as well as physical commons.

That’s work to come for me. For now, let's ponder the frequent calls for action in politics and note that, without an appropriate social identity that connects individual good and social good directly, such calls imply a degree of self-sacrifice which, given prevailing social relations, is irrational. When Rousseau stated the creation of a social order in which each would work for others when working for themselves, he was taking us to the social identity we need to crack the problems of collective action.

I’d much prefer to set everything up in natural law terms. It makes things so much easier to begin with the notion of human beings as sociable and rational. But there it is. There is a reason why Rousseau took the original approach he took. He wasn’t engaged in an academic exercise in an ivory tower, but reacting against a specific problem. He was surveying the rise of modern mechanical materialism, which had reduced the modern natural law tradition to ruins. Rather than attempt to rebuild the ruins, Rousseau took his task to be that of meeting the challenge in its own terms and on its own terrain. And he did a good job too. He proceeded from Thomas Hobbes’ materialist and individualist premises, challenged them and turned them against themselves. Hobbes had read qualities of the emerging bourgeois society back into the state of nature and concluded that life in such a state was ‘nasty, brutish and short.’ Rousseau’s own version of the state of nature saw human beings as asocial, without morality, reason, language, all of these things were acquired rather than innate. I don’t agree with this approach and would go with classic natural law teachings on this. But it is possible to show why Rousseau took this approach. Rather than say he was wrong, it is more profitable to understand why Rousseau chose this way of presenting his argument. In challenging Hobbes, Rousseau is involved in all manner of difficulties. So why would he do it? Let’s not, as too many do, accuse Rousseau of confusion or intellectual deficiency here. Rousseau was not a professional philosopher, it is said, and so got himself into unnecessary problems. Actually, Rousseau was doing what philosophers do. He brought philosophy back to its original and, still, its most important question, that of how human beings are to live well and, as social beings, are to live well together. Rousseau was very far from being a fool. On the contrary, he is far sharper intellectually than critics of his ‘paradoxical’ philosophy and personal character. And his Social Contract, for good or ill, is impeccably logical, a place where reason rules over feeling to generate a freedom under law binding upon all equally. Freedom as a legitimate - and self-made, self-assumed - constraint.

In Rousseau, the modern tradition of natural right is forced to face the inadequacies of its position as a result of coming to shed its grounding in the classical tradition. If the state of nature is amoral, if human beings are without reason and morality and sociability in that state, then it becomes impossible to refer to such a state in discerning the norm for the good life for human beings. In light of scientific advance and modern materialism, Hobbes had denied the natural law idea that there is a natural end for human beings. He thought he could find a natural basis of right in the state if nature and in the fear of death and concern for self-preservation. Rousseau showed the state of nature to lack all human traits. Responding to the need to reject Hobbes's premises, Rousseau took a fateful turn away from the natural law tradition, from the attempt to find the basis of right in nature, in human nature.

And yet, for all of the very modern emphasis on self-creation and will, firing the democratic revolution in thought and politics, Rousseau still drew on Plato, transcendent norms and the appeal to God, the moral law engraved on the human heart. His Platonism is not coldly rational or intellectual, but of the heart. Rousseau grounds freedom in the ecology of the human heart.

Rousseau needs these things indeed to make good his claims. Rousseau opened an appealing path beyond the old traditions, one in which new foundations for right were grounded in self-legislating reason. This follows from the view that what is characteristically human is not the gift of nature but is product of human self-creation, of what human beings came to do in order to overcome or transform the natural state: humanity is thus the product of the historical process. But that question begging notion – upon what is self-legislating reason grounded? – couldn’t satisfy Rousseau. If the historical process is accidental – there is no natural end driving human transformation out of an amoral, asocial state of nature – then there can be no standard to guide and orient human life. The historical process requires a transhistorical standard. (The Lawgiver in the Social Contract is surely such a transcendent norm). So Rousseau lies somewhere between and beyond the old natural law and modern positivism and historicism. To be meaningful, the historical process of human (self)creation has to be more than a self-willed project aimed over against nature, it has to have some grounding in the natural end or purpose of the process, culminating in the perfect knowledge of the true natural right/right regime/public happiness. It needs a teleology.

Without these things, human beings are not so much masters of their fate as masters of nowhere. And the universal constraint of self-assumed obligation is not, therefore, the realization of freedom, but collapses into a universal self-hatred. It is not, therefore, a self-created meaning on the part of wilful subjects in the historical process that is key to freedom/happiness; it is knowledge of the true natural right which supplies such creative agency with the true standard. I'll simplify hugely just to stop writing here and get back to reading for this forthcoming book - Rousseau points to certain slumbering powers in the state of nature, something innate, and bears unwitting testimony to the superiority of the classical teachings over those of Hobbes and Locke. He rejects teleology but, in my view, he needs it to make good his very good claims indeed.

I find Rousseau's connection of freedom to the "commons" cogent. And we see that Rousseau is all about constituting a political and ethical commons. We can debate his views on this, but he has the question right. And that makes him pertinent. He is saying a lot more than those who are content to remain on a disenchanted or demoralised terrain, with morality reduced to value judgements/irreducible subjective opinion, each individual free to pursue the good as they see fit so long as it does non-harm (directly - indirectly, of course, we end up with economic crisis and climate change ... ) and the state as a neutral instrument imposing the civil peace, agnostic on the good. That is the existential view that has us charged with the responsibility for making meaning in an objectively valueless and meaningless world. That's the Weberian world we are still in. Which begs the question of upon what subjective choices themselves can be made. It is an arbitrary, contingent world, incapable of giving us good reasons to choose and act beyond power and self- or sectional interest. For Rousseau, that is sophism, a Hobbesian world of the endless circulation of power, and he said so. Rousseau is someone who, like all the thinkers I like, believes that "the good" is something available to us.

I'm just kicking a lot of ideas around at the moment. What I have in mind is not the philosophical quibbles above, trying to fit Rousseau into some philosophically consistent position, with respect to the natural law or Plato etc, but his key message and why it matters, the crisis in the Enlightenment and how Rousseau was both in and against the Enlightenment, how he had a rounded view of life, how we've lost that and what we need to do to get it back. Something like that. With a few of Rousseau's incredible words (was there a better writer who was a philosopher? Nietzsche? Anyone else? Kant was "agony" to read, said Wittgenstein - who was also some kind of agony). Any of Rousseau's supposed "ambiguities" could take an entire session in itself to unravel, so that's for the written stuff. To the point - I take this as an opportunity to tell people why Rousseau - and political philosophy/ethics - matters. Rousseau has the capacity to inspire and mislead in equal measure. He sets off with these dramatic, eloquent passages and then proceeds to qualify them. People would be surprised to learn that much of what he says is not that dissimilar from Edmund Burke, the great conservative critic of the French Revolution. At times, Burke makes Rousseau's own points, even when attacking Rousseau! As I say, Rousseau is a very awkward man to place in the French Enlightenment. But, for Rousseau, it was the Enlightenment as a potential unmooring that rendered human life somewhat awkward.

I'm approaching Rousseau as one of the moderns who takes on the materialists and the sophists, who argues for transcendent norms and eternal truths - and whose own problems and misadventures in life and thought allow us to get back in touch with true realities - an outlook in which human life is indeed seen to possess meaning and purpose. I have a soft spot for Rousseau because, among the Enlightenment philosophes, he held firm against materialism and relativism, even if he struggled to offer sound philosophical or moral reasons for ontological grounding. Sound, that is, in terms of modern epistemological preoccupations under the sway of the advances in the natural sciences. I think we can appeal to a source of objectivity in ethics, (if not certainty) and I think we can do so rationally, (recognizing an anarchic excess that always escapes reason and totalizing reason - there is a need here to highlight Rousseau's character as anarchist capable of envisaging the democratic constitution of law, authority and government), something more than an ethical naturalism in which we look at what is functional for human flourishing (which is my stock Aristotelian position - which neglects the fact that Aristotle's virtue ethics is based upon a cosmological outlook - we need that outlook to avoid making ethics conventional and relativist.) The philosopher Bernard Williams, who supervised the thesis of my old colleague Gary Banham, taught that "The first and hardest lesson of Darwinism, that there is no such teleology at all, and that there is no orchestral score provided from anywhere according to which human beings have a special part to play, still has to find its way fully into ethical thought." That's a lesson that Rousseau contested before Darwin was even born, he supported the idea of intelligent design against Diderot, but admitted that he couldn't rationally defend it, not with philosophical tools. He emphasized the expansion of being through unity with something larger than the ego - Society, God and Nature. None of this is capable of being demonstrated by natural science and logic. But Wittgenstein himself is much misunderstood here, criticizing philosophers for trying to saying what cannot be said, but not, thereby, condemning them - what can be said at all is contained in the propositions of natural science, logic and common sense, said Wittgenstein, but these were not the most important things in life. The most important things were things we could not speak of in our limited reason. Wittgenstein said little about good and bad, how we ought to behave, God, beauty. He urged silence with respect to those things we cannot know. But they remained the most important things, not mere nonsense.

I think Rousseau's instincts were right here, and I think we can do more than offer a quietist approach (presenting our beliefs whilst giving up supporting them by ontological grounding). And I think that it is to Rousseau’s credit that, with the weight of intellectual and scientific reason against him, he held true to eternal ideas, God, the immortal soul and free-will. As Kant later emphasized, these are the conditions of moral thought and action. But Kant made it clear that natural science can offer no objective grounds for these things. Rousseau knew, and he took on the liveliest minds of the age in their defence.

I like Rousseau because - for all of the provocative ways in which he sets out his stall - he gives us a bridgehead into the crucial debates within the modern moral terrain - he allows people like me to show that the "tragic cosmic" view of moderns like Bernard Williams - who, on naturalist-Darwinist terms, points to human life as a "mess" and human beings as a "mixed bag" of conflicting natural tendencies to go beyond naturalism and description to a normative account of natural tendencies and capacities, identifying those that represent what is “noblest and best” about us as human beings. I think there are problems with Rousseau's account of natural goodness, a tendency to shift blame for evil elsewhere, risking an evasion that blames institutions and practices but not agents, but at least he raises the right questions, and allows us to get back to an ethics that is based on a normative ideal of what is noblest and best within us, as against some mere naturalist functionalism (the dangers of the Aristotelian account I am inclined to give).

In short, I say we need to move from merely descriptive accounts of human nature and life to a normative account in which we identify what is the most properly human form of life that we ought to realize. I'll say this in Rousseau’s favour, he hung on to theism, in however peculiar a form, a theism that is personalistic—holding that the ultimate nature of reality is personal rather than impersonal— the personal God of Love and of human relationships, something more than the God of physical Creation (the God of the scientists and the philosophers), and so he could interpret any evolutionary process we care to examine in terms of the goal of interpersonal communion.

What does this imply? That there is a directionality inherent in evolution whereby life arises and then conscious intelligence, which leads to the emergence of beings who are capable of interpersonal communion and have a natural tendency toward it. Love is indeed “Creation’s final law” as the poet Tennyson put it. Such a view provides a purposeful framework by which we can identify our natural tendencies toward communion as part of what is noblest and best about us and thus to be cultivated as part of higher, more worthwhile, more meaningful mode of life. I'm not saying that this was Rousseau's view as such, because a lot of it isn’t. He had a very odd way of expressing himself: there is an explicit repudiation of natural law and teleology in his presentation, and an implicit natural law and teleology running through his philosophy. His views on God and religion were unorthodox to say the least, certainly inimical to traditional religious authorities. He was trying to deal with age-old questions in an age when natural science seemed to have cut the ontological grounds from under their traditional answers. Hence he reconstitutes what he calls "eternal truths" through a self-legislating reason. Kant took this further. The dangers with this is that it can make those truths merely conventional and hence susceptible to relativism. Rousseau would have loathed that view. He wasn’t a sophist. He openly accuses Hobbes and all such conventionalists and materialists of being sophists.

So I'm saying ... Rousseau expresses all of the hopes and the errors and the fallacies and the dangers and the possibilities of ethics in the modern world. He showed the problem of the radical contingency of ethics and how we need to provide a home for the life of virtue wherein the virtues can be seen as part of a normatively higher, nobler, more fulfilling mode of life - a normative account of human life and human nature (yes, there is such a thing - been involved in a slight altercation with folk who are big on self-identity and self-identification ... all the way down to a convulsive and irrelevant self-importance).

I'm not saying Rousseau has the solutions to our problems, he doesn't, but his failures and paradoxes allow us to step in here and show what he needs to make good his claims. At St Thomas Aquinas College over there in California they teach "the Great Books". And they explain "why we teach the bad books" - Rousseau is amongst the bad, and I know what they are getting at. In raising all the right issues, Rousseau is one of the baddest of them all. Did he misdirect us? I'm ambivalent. My thesis specialism was in German philosophy, and I took Kant and Hegel to be much superior philosophers than Rousseau, and I took Marx to go beyond them all in the realisation/abolition of philosophy. I'm now of the view that Rousseau was the wisest of all of them, in that he saw reason not as the great liberator but as complicit in our social fall, in taking us away from eternal truths, in giving us a world of abstractors and detractors, sceptics and sophists who denigrated religion and patriotism – a force that took the world beyond our comprehension and control. There is no presentation of ‘progress’ as the new religion in Rousseau as there is in the moderns. And I am sure he would have been horrified at the association of his name with the abstraction of the modern centralised nation state and its false bureaucratic collectivity administering the public good from the top downwards. I take that to be the very thing he warned against, surrogate communities resulting from the atomising of real ties and connections. I take his model to have been the small scaled city-republic of his home town of Geneva. A model which integrates autonomy, authenticity and authority.

Rousseau knew well that technical advance, knowledge and know how do not resolve the key existential questions of being good human beings and living well. There is such a thing as moral freedom, and that involves us becoming aware of the choices we make between good and bad (he knew that there are such standards too, something more than irreducible existential choices in an objectively meaningless and valueless world, mere subjective tastes, likes and wants in an atomistic moral marketplace). He gave us ethics as the 'sublime science of simple souls,' and that refers to all of us. It may sound simple, but we’ve lost touch with a lot of things in the modern world (and gained a lot besides, lest we fall into the snare of nostalgia - hence my concern to integrate modern freedom with the ancient concern with happiness as flourishing).

Rousseau is a many layered, highly nuanced writer standing in ambiguous relation to many different strands of thinking, reducible to none. The main thing to say about Rousseau is that he believed in freedom as consisting in so much more than the individualist liberal principle of non-interference. People read his statement that "Man was born free but is everywhere in chains" as Rousseau demanding an end to all chains. This is a complete misreading. Rousseau was seeking to exchange the illegitimate chains or constraints which entail the personal dependence of some on others for the legitimate constraints we place on ourselves through conscious agreement on the form of the common life. A moral freedom - reason in control of desires that enchain us to empirical necessity - that translates into a rational freedom of the social contract. And a point worth emphasizing, in my view, is that Rousseau's concept of 'the general will' is an attempt to integrate the two principal traditions of western philosophy - reason and nature on the one hand (Plato, natural law, the rationalists, Leibniz etc) and artifice and will (modern praxis philosophy, leading to Kant and Marx and notions of human beings governing themselves as colegislators through a self-legislative reason). And, something frequently overlooked, is that he was a deeply religious thinker. Highly unorthodox, and his views on civil religion are not ones I would support - he was seeking peace and unity overcoming rival dogmatisms and fanaticisms - and he achieved a unity of sorts, in that deists, theists, atheists, rationalists, humanists, Protestants, Catholics, philosophes, seemingly everyone united against him! Poor Rousseau! Defending himself against the criticisms of Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris, Rousseau wrote: "I shall state my Religion, because I have one, and I shall state it loudly, because I have the courage to state it ... Monseigneur, I am a Christian, and sincerely a Christian, according to the doctrine of the Gospels. I am a Christian, not as a disciple of Priests, but as a disciple of Jesus Christ." (LdeB 960) That's not a view that endeared him to either the Enlightenment philosophes or the religious authorities. But it is a view that made him quite a unique figure in the midst of the Enlightenment.

Which side is he on? Either side or none? He was an original, a very fertile mind and thinker, and he takes us to the heart of the real problems. Such people are discomforting. Like all true prophets, poor Rousseau found himself without a home. I always liked him for this. He can't be reduced to any school. The Romantics claimed him as a philosopher of feeling over reason, but that is just plain wrong. Rousseau was a great rationalist. Kant called him the Newton of the moral world for this very reason. Rousseau actually does what Plato taught us to do: he sought the true, the good and the beautiful together, and not apart. We need all our human faculties working in tandem, and to set them against each other, as in this phony science vs religion 'debate', will lead us astray. I think Rousseau stands between the ancients and the moderns and beyond both - somewhere between and beyond natural law and positivism/historicism. Rousseau's work stands as an original and bold attempt to reconcile the two greatest traditions in political philosophy – will and artifice (imposure, praxis) and reason and nature (disclosure) – making the transition from contemplation to action (upon which Plato stalled), combining objectivism and subjectivism, innatism and culturism. He gives us a nature via nurture, not returning to some lost natural state but moving forwards to the realization of human nature. And the thing to say about the general will is that it combines notions of objective reality and transcendent truths with notions of subjective will - the true and the good are not just given, they must be willed, and in coming to recognise and will the true and the good, and come together in agreement to live by laws in which we have had a hand in making, conforming ourselves to the true and the good, we come to be free. Rousseau is an incredibly rich and fertile thinker. I rate him very highly indeed as the greatest of the moderns.

An excellent book to investigate in David Lay Williams' Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment, which makes it crystal clear, as I had long thought, that Rousseau affirms transcendent norms as against the conventionalism and relativism of the moderns raised on Hobbes' materialism and the way they thought natural science had rendered such norms without ontological grounding - it remains a live issue, one I'm constantly fencing with. I think we can show that ethics is transcendent, and that we need an ethic, an account and a justification of things that stands outside of those things. The value of truthseeking requires a transcendent justification. Just a few thoughts off the top of my head. It's time for some plain truths on the planet.

I shall take a thematic rather than a chronological approach (although the chronology of Rousseau’s writings does handily fit a thematic approach), proceeding from the critique of current society (the loss of the commons) to the construction of the new society with communion and cultivation in between as the bridge between real and ideal, practice and theory.

1. Critique of liberal antinomies and fallacies - the demoralised liberal terrain

2. Plato’s Cave and Weber’s Cage – living in the shadows

3. Why truth and goodness matter – need for genuine enlightenment

4. Beauty – aesthetics and ethics

5. God and the divine order – the soul of the world – Good God

6. Nature – place in the universal system

7. Politics – rational freedom – the republican view of freedom

8. Patriotism – oikophilia – context and place - the rapports and moeurs of a determinate common life.

9. MacIntyre, morality and modernity – communities of practice and character

And I shall be revisiting my old idea of 'rational freedom,' acknowledging certain pitfalls:

“Rational Freedom is so architectonic that it's borderline boring to read about it, just like proofs of the truth of God--let's just live in God, in so many ways! RF is your foundation and will perspire through every reading you make of other texts. You're great at commenting, rendering, putting to life, interpreting, seeing to what extent, small or great, each writer has approached its ultimate goal, often secret and incomplete to himself.” (said my good friend Helene Domon).

I agreed with this comment, but smiled too. My old Director of Studies Jules Townshed also felt a little worn down by my harping on about ‘rational freedom.’ ‘One idea can go an awful long way’ he said (after having to read another of my progress reports, poor soul). I actually like the architectonic. I find it exciting. And it gives me a connection with Immanuel Kant. The architectonic is Kant's favourite expression, denoting something that allowed him to structure his philosophy from firm foundations upwards. Kant organised and articulated his philosophy in architectonic terms: 'there is yet another consideration which is more philosophical and architectonic in character; namely to grasp the idea of the whole correctly and thence to view all parts in their mutual relations' (Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason). That approach has clear affinities with Plato’s view that in order to discover the true nature of political and social justice we must ‘first look for its quality in states, and then only examine it also in the individual, looking for the likeness of the greater in the form of the less’ (Plato, Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in Hamilton and Cairns, eds., Collected Dialogues, 368e-369a). Another of my favourite writers, Lewis Mumford, set up his work in architectonic terms. The idea running though my work is to bring modern conceptions of (subjective, individualistic) freedom within the fold of the older architectonic conception of politics and away from the atomistic liberal conception. And in my work I located the idea in Marx too. In Theories of Surplus Value, vol II, Marx argues that the 'architectonics' of a theory is 'not accidental’ but ‘rather .. is the result of... and . . . expresses the scientific deficiencies of the method of investigation itself’ (Marx Theories of Surplus Value, 3 vols. Moscow, 1968: 166,167). This view suggests a clear connection between Marx and Kant in the modern world, leading back to Plato in the ancient world. In a clear Platonic manner, Marx affirms that a true theory is compelled by the very force of its 'deep insight' to develop an elegant conceptual structure. In light of this, we are entitled to speculate that Marx is in fundamental agreement with Plato in affirming the unity of the true and the beautiful, thus endorsing the Platonic and the natural law belief in a rational universe based on the unity of the true, the good and the beautiful. But there is a difference, and it is a difference which explains what distinguishes modern rational freedom from the classical natural law. Rather than ‘goodness’, Marx – and Rousseau, Kant and Hegel before him – refers to ‘freedom.’ And that change in terminology is highly significant. More than architectonics, Marx proposes the idea of human beings as architects. This is the idea that the world is the product of creative human agency. The view follows Kant’s praxis based philosophy and the idea that the cognitive apparatus of the human mind creates the world that the intellect comes to know. There is a switch here, one that takes us from disclosure to imposure, from the idea that value inheres in the world for us to discover to the idea that we impose that value upon the world. The connections to Plato’s harmony of the true, the good and the beautiful exist, but the relations are changed. For Kant, the Platonic idea now exists as the projected totality of reason. And this has implications for God. Kant’s symbolischer anthropomorphismus commits us to the view that we, the human agents, create God rather than God creating us. This symbolical projectionism testifies to the power of human self-creation, and Marx was not slow in drawing the conclusion – emancipatory to some, dangerous and deluded to others – that human beings created God as an ideal projection of the best human qualities which, through social transformation, human beings should come to realise and embody in themselves. ‘Men as gods’ living in a heaven realized on earth. It follows from this that, for Marx, human beings are the architects of the self-made social world as a world which conforms to the true, the good and the beautiful. The question is: is this freedom as self-determination or is this notion of self-determination a self-delusion? I once argued strongly for the former. I now argue for the latter. The simplest way to express my criticism is this – such self-determination is self-defeating in that it is based on the delusion that we can have our cake – transcendent norms, truths and values (justice etc) – and eat it too. Once the cake is eaten, it is gone, and we no longer have the objective standards by which to evaluate and orient our practical activity. In this symbolical anthropomorphism, we come to see God as a human invention, a powerful symbol we create to serve our own ends. The result is to relativize the absolute and absolutize the relative. We end up not with freedom but with the loss of the architectonic. The parts will no longer cohere.

The architectonic is crucial to discerning the right relations between the whole and the parts and determining right relationships between human beings in society and between society and the environment. So, apologies for labouring a single theme, but ‘rational freedom’ is essential to balance, harmony, happiness and freedom, defined appropriately, all the things we need on account of being social beings. And I find that examining the ins and outs of the architectonic to be exciting. But here’s the problem, ‘rational freedom’, in establishing the conditions of the unity between each individual and all individuals, connecting individual short term good with long term common good, is indeed ‘boring’, and certainly is ‘boring’ in comparison with the antithetical conception of ‘libertarian freedom’. But it is the excitement of the libertarian conception and its appeal to the passions – individual desires free of inhibitions – that generates collective consequences outside of our comprehension and control, which subject us to external constraints, and enchain us to empirical necessity - the passions, individual short term immediacy and desire. Libertarians are great at throwing off inhibitions - rules, laws, government etc - in favour of what they call "natural order", with the result we end up constrained by external force - economics, markets, climate change, externalities. Rational Freedom remains key in checking this idea of freedom with the realisation of all things without constraint. Rational Freedom is absolutely key if human beings are to get out of the mess their uncoordinated incremental choices and actions have put them in.

‘But to prove rational freedom without applications is what you were trying to do in this humongous Being and Place. I just think that one day a philosopher will read through your work like dozens of blooms, and write a book called "Peter Critchley and Rational Freedom." You? Like Van Gogh you will have produced the paintings, not the theory.’ (Helene Domon).

I rather like the idea that another future philosopher will do the boring work of identifying the parts, the whole and their relations. It gives me the freedom to do the applications. Marx himself didn’t spend much time on the methodology. That allowed him to actually say something worth saying. Instead of endlessly polishing his glasses, he actually looked through them to say something worth saying. The capacity of philosophy to become self-absorbed is something that worried Hegel. Commenting on Kant’s acute concerned that philosophical tools should be fit for the job of analyzing reality, Hegel laments the withdrawal of philosophizing into a reflection upon itself rather than upon the world. Our tools may deceive us, indeed. But how could we ever know if these tools are adequate to the job if we remain walled up in our own conceptual world? In my own work, I have continually applied the idea of rational freedom in writings on politics, the environment and climate change. Read those works, and you will see ‘rational freedom’ being applied.

Rousseau does this very well indeed. He makes ‘rational freedom’ very familiar and very human indeed. People don't realize how much in the Social Contract is not just about the principles and clauses of contract and obligation in the political community, but is about customs, cultures and mores. He is a lot like Montesquieu, and points towards Tocqueville in this respect. Rousseau has a wealth of things going on in his work, and it does form a unity. Kant systematises Rousseau’s themes. There is a need to enthuse and excite people, rather than bore them with the concepts. But here’s the interesting point, poor Rousseau ends up being condemned as an irrationalist and a totalitarian offering a ‘vague morality of the heart’ (as a book on Diderot dismisses Rousseau’s philosophy), whilst Kant is hailed as the greatest genius of modern philosophy. Rousseau’s writing is exciting and literary, Kant’s is pedantic and boring, a kind of agony, as Wittgenstein says. In truth, no Rousseau, no Kant. Rousseau is a genius and anything but ‘vague’. He leaves Diderot and the other philosophes of the French Enlightenment well behind. He answers Hobbes and Locke, inspires Kant, Hegel and Marx. Of contemporaries, only Hume is in his class, and Hume openly acknowledged Rousseau’s genius. When asked by a third party to help Rousseau, Hume declared that 'there is no man in Europe of whom I have maintained a higher idea, and who I would be prouder to serve'. Hume wrote to Rousseau: 'you are the person whom I most revere both for the Force of your Genius and the Greatness of your mind. . . .' Hume’s scepticism woke Kant from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’. Rousseau’s philosophy gave Kant the arguments and the inspiration to answer Hume.

More than ever, I am convinced that that Rational Freedom I set out to establish is correct - but that it needs to be buttressed by a much greater social and emotional infrastructure, and it needs a much more secure foundation that self-legislative reason, creative agency and self-determination. It needs to be grounded in the transcendent norms, truths and values of natural law, a bedrock objective standard that is not a human creation or convention. And that involves me putting natural law and rational freedom together, to produce who knows what.

I will develop a lot of these ideas in the forthcoming Rousseau book. I love how Rousseau grounds "big" thinking in small scale reasoning, in the mores and customs of the folk, in patrie and in place. He humanises the potentially stern morality and lawful nature of Rational Freedom, and brings it to human scale and dimensions. I’m still rather suspicious about Rousseau’s break with the natural law view that reason and sociability are natural to human beings, and I do think this and other aspects of the severance of culture from nature opens up dangers of a culturalist and political creation and recreation of a ‘new man’, human beings as clay in the hands of political elites. But it also fits an evolutionary argument. These things are not given but evolve, involving us in a creative evolution. I shall iron these issues out in the writing. Either way, we are clearly facing an imploding modern civilisation, and Rousseau showed the fault lines from the first.

I'm reassured that I’ve been on the right lines all along – remember that I started at a time when poststructuralism and postmodernism and deconstruction were sweeping through academia, and that I felt as though I was swimming against the intellectual tide. Reassured, but also slightly disappointed, to find the philosopher Maurice Cranston using this term ‘rational freedom’ with respect to Rousseau back in the 1970s. I don't think anyone has gone to town on the idea like I have though. Where did this term come from, asked my DOS Jules Townshend. 'Did Marx use it?' he asked. No, I said, but Hegel did. Well that’s Hegel, he replied. The idea is in Hegel, the idea is in Kant and Rousseau too. And Marx affirmed it too. In his younger days, Marx adhered to the principle of the Hegelian state as an ethical agency embodying and articulating universality and commonality, and employed this principle as a critical standard by with which to evaluate existing politics according to the extent to which they corresponded to or contradicted the ideal: ‘A state which is not the realization of rational freedom is a bad state’ (Marx and Engels Historische Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Frankfurt, Berlin and Moscow 1927, vol. I, i (i), p. 247). If Marx went on the critique the abstraction of the modern state, and demand its abolition, he nevertheless seeks to realize the principle of the state as a rational unity and universality in which the freedom of each is conditional upon and coexistent with the freedom of all.

So that’s what I went with – the commitment to the principle of rational freedom and the construction of whatever institutions, laws, structures and relations embodied that principle. And I remain committed to that view. It’s just that that principle is something I see grounded in more than a self-legislating reason, something that draws in some way upon transcendent norms and natural law if it is to be anything more than a delusion of self-determination. The principle needs to be rationalized and not merely self-rationalized.

Rousseau breaks with the natural law ideas of an innate rationality and sociability. Does it matter? Yes, it does, actually. It's a big deal indeed. For it means that we are in danger of being delivered into the hands of an unanchored culture detached from, and riding roughshod over, nature. The idea of cultural self-creation sounds good, liberatory even, until we are introduced to the figure of the Stalinist "new man" and other such culturalist abominations. This is the area where the likes of Jacques Maritain come to express a loathing of Rousseau. I think the harsh assessments are unfair. I will show that Rousseau is concerned with an education and transformation that yields not the ‘new man’, but the natural man, a wiser and a nobler ‘savage’, capable of living in association with others in a civil state. The textual evidence clearly shows this, and I have every intention of fully showing it to put an end to accusations that Rousseau either leads us 'back to nature' or forward to a totalitarian state in which human beings are clay to be moulded into new shapes by governing elites. That this is a travesty of Rousseau’s views indicates that Rousseau has a closer connection to natural law ideas than is appreciated. Rousseau is liberating, certainly, but he also risks becoming unmoored if that nuanced relation to natural law is lost. David Lay Williams’ Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment is a great help, too, in showing the very great extent to which Rousseau drew upon transcendent norms. I would prefer sociability and rationality to be innate and to be integral parts of a grounding of ethics, as in the natural law tradition, and not an unmoored self-creation, as they seem to be in Rousseau, things that are acquired (and therefore as parts of the fall of man rather than being crucial to a humanisation.) The plus side of Rousseau’s way of putting things is that, as Kant appreciated, our ethics really are a product of our reason. Ethical positions cannot be read off from instinct, biology, nature or social interests, involving ideas of the idea of the state as an alliance or pact which protects private property and promotes individual material happiness. Nope, it’s pure ethics for Rousseau and Kant. Something is right because it is right, and ethics stands independently of all it commands. The sanction of natural science facts (or divine proof) is not required.

The interesting thing is that Rousseau does give us the principles of a viable political community, but doesn’t give us those great rationalist deductive systems in philosophy and theology when it comes to ethics. He seeks to create a social and moral infrastructure which cultivates our natural goodness, equipping us to find and proceed in the right direction, once we clear out deviations and mediations of culture and society. Rousseau seeks to put us on the ‘good road.’ As he wrote in the Social Contract:

‘The general will is always right, but the judgment which guides it is not always enlightened. It has to be to made to see objects as they are, sometimes as they ought to appear to it, to show it the good road it is looking for and to protect it from the seduction of particular wills.’

I certainly agree with this. Human beings don't need to know all the precepts of natural law in order to be good and to do good. Rousseau gives us that very valuable lesson in his education as a cultivation of natural goodness. Hence there is an advantage in writing on Rousseau here rather than Hegel and Kant and their impressive but somewhat intimidating philosophical systems, (Rational Freedom) and Aquinas and his towering edifice of thought (natural law). Of course, I’d recommend reading them all. But Rousseau really does make ethics ‘the sublime science of simple souls’. We all have this implicit philosophy that St Thomas Aquinas wrote of, and Rousseau shows how we can go direct. We all in some way know the difference between right and wrong. We don't actually need the towering ethical edifice in order to be good.

That’s not to devalue that edifice. I love Plato, Aquinas and Kant, and I’ve written here of my love of the architectonic. My point here, though, is that we need to embed that architectonic in social practices and institutions - what Alasdair MacIntyre calls 'communities of practice,' Stanley Hauerwas calls ‘communities of character’, and John Finnis calls the form/s of the common life. These are all examples of natural law in practice. Get the practice right, and arrange and order society around the right relations, and we'll be fine, whether or not people even know the precepts of natural law. Those precepts exist innately, giving us the right direction even without intellectual instruction and consciousness.

Such is my line on Rousseau. I think it will bring the concept of Rational Freedom down to human size, within reach of all.

Marx and class struggle? I think there was a point to Marx’s emphasis on class struggle and his concern that the working class should triumph. In my PhD work I called it the ‘principle of the proletariat’, meaning that there is a principle of universal value at stake in the victory of the working class. I'm just getting suspicious of an ethics of material or class interest. I think economics offers the most ephemeral of ties. We need more than material self-interest, whether individual or collective, and no matter how rational. So I pull back slightly from notions of class struggle. Why, I ask, do we support one side against another? I want to hear principles that transcend material self-interest. Marx had the right principles but his mechanisms were dodgy and transitory. I seek to identify those principles and put them on a more enduring and universal basis than class interest. Hence ‘rational freedom’ and its relation to a philosophical anthropology going back to Plato and Aristotle. Such was my PhD thesis. I now realise I had missed the importance of natural law and the non-material theistic metaphysics of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Enter Aquinas.

Natural law is a distinct body of thought which holds reason and sociability amongst other things to be innate, a standard by which to evaluate any society. Rousseau doesn't argue this, and this raises all manner of issues. He sees reason as acquired, he sees human beings in the state of nature as presocial. That amounts to a radical break with natural law. And yet it is clear that he draws on other key themes of the natural law tradition. That makes him an awkward and ambiguous figure, and many critics do the obvious and easy thing and conclude that he is ‘contradictory’ and ‘paradoxical’, even confused. I’ve read him in depth and I think he knows what he's doing. He affirmed the fundamental unity of his thought, and we should believe him. He has a unity of purpose, and he is very original. He's showing the inadequacy of political and moral theories that presume the existence of the very things that are in question - and he does depart from ideas that state and law are based on pre-political interests, instincts, happiness etc. But he does so for a specific purpose, and he knows what he is doing. He uses these arguments brilliantly against Thomas Hobbes and political empiricists and sensualist materialists in general, those liberals and utilitarians who assert that human beings are naturally aggressive, acquisitive, competitive and are motivated by self-interest. In other words, Rousseau had seen how political empiricists/liberals/utilitarians had demolished the natural law theorists (seventeenth and eighteenth century but not that classical) - the people who believed in unity and purpose and goodness - with views of nature as a mechanicism of individual self-maximising atoms, human beings as greedy self-interested individuals at war with each other. He knew the empiricists and materialists were wrong, but rather than take them on with a restatement of natural law, and open himself to defeat, he took them on on their own ground, and turned them over decisively. It was a great victory, and a victory that gives us a reworked rather than a restated natural law. Rousseau had seen clearly that natural law had proven inadequate to defeat the libertarians. So he fashioned new philosophical and moral tools. So those natural law theorists who condemn Rousseau at this safe distance would, in the first instance, do well to remember that it is Rousseau who offered the most effective defence of natural law and transcendent values – including God, free will and the immortal soul – against the materialists and sensualists of the age. Credit where credit is due.

Here’s the key point - the philosophes of the French enlightenment had rediscovered Hobbes and his mechanical materialism. Rousseau split with them precisely on this materialism, and he beat them on their own ground. In other words, he didn't take a stand on a moribund natural law, and so broke with its precepts on sociability and reason in order to take the materialists on, turn their own weapons against them, and show how natural law values are enduring and permanent. He knew what he was doing. And he had the nerve and the nous to do it.

Feeling and compassion are our natural gifts, they are innate, hence Rousseau’s constant emphasis upon ‘eternal truths’ that are engraved on the human heart. Reason is acquired later, through contact in society and in social development. When Rousseau challenged natural sociability, what he was doing was challenging the idea that human beings are merely biological or social beings with truths bound up with those natures, interested beings, interests that the state, law and politics are brought into being to protect and promote. For Rousseau, human beings were also spiritual beings, pointing to an eternal law that lay beyond positive law. Rousseau’s apparent break with natural law on this issue of rationality and sociability was necessary to take on the materialists of the Enlightenment who were following Hobbes in rejecting transcendent norms, collapsing human nature into no more than self-interested, self-maximising machines.

I have my Rousseau book already written in my head. I know the man. I know his complexities and supposed ambiguities for what they are - a brilliant, passionate, original mind who draws on a number of influences but can never be reduced to them. He is a man dealing with real philosophical questions. He is not the contradictory and incoherent mind his critics say he is. They are not up to his level, it’s as simple as that. They want Rousseau to be a neat and tidy philosopher who fits the existing grooves and categories. He doesn’t. If you want to destroy Rousseau, pervert his message and meaning, then study him only in parts, and through pre-defined filters. He’s an individualist, he’s a totalitarian, he’s both … he’s neither. He’s Rousseau! Deal with him in his own terms. That’s all he asked for, and it’s what he deserves.

MacIntyre says go back to Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas is brilliant. And Aristotle. But this begs the question - if Aristotle and Aquinas are so good - why did Hobbes and the materialists and the liberals and the utilitarians win out over against them? Why did their arguments come to sound so plausible as against metaphysical speculation? Rousseau knows why. It’s why the sceptic David Hume could rate Rousseau so highly. What needs to be emphasised is that ending metaphysical speculation is not to express a scepticism about living. The philosophical scepticism that grew up on the basis of Hume completely misses the point, as far as I’m concerned. If nothing can be said either way, then nothing should be said. Wittgenstein’s silence seems most appropriate. But only on the understanding that it was the supposed ‘non-sense’ we should be silent about that constituted the most important thing of all for Wittgenstein. This is my positive reading of Hume’s lesson. And there is no philosopher who expresses this philosophy for living better than Rousseau. He doesn’t waste time in idle philosophising over things that can neither be proven nor disproven. He shows what is involved in living well with the wholeness of being.

I intend to take the discussion round to Alasdair MacIntyre’s writings concerning the predicament of morality on a diremptive modern terrain. For reasons I shall express through Rousseau, a restatement of natural law will not suffice. Reason is innate is the natural law tradition, and there is a good reason why this is so. This is why Rousseau is controversial. Once we embrace a position in which innate qualities – reason, sociability etc – are seen as acquired, then we have moved away from innatism – the idea of permanent qualities independent of time and place – to a culturalism, which opens up the route to a positivism, historicism and relativism – the idea that truth, beauty, goodness and justice are merely human constructions, merely conventional. This matters because, divorced from transcendent norms, there is no resisting Thrasymachus’ assertion to Plato that justice is merely the interests of the strongest. David Lay Williams has demonstrated in the clearest terms that Rousseau is with Plato in affirming transcendent norms against Hobbes and the conventionalist and constructivist view.

So why does Rousseau reject the natural law view of reason and sociability as innate? He does so to challenge Hobbes and the materialists on their own ground. Once we understand this, we can see why he took the somewhat unusual position he did. It would have been so much easier to have stated natural law. But Rousseau saw the natural rights doctrines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as inadequate. He was right. Locke’s tepid natural right doctrine was not strong enough to resist materialist criticisms. Rousseau did not, therefore, go down the line of natural rights and liberties, he dug deeper and looked further, and was much more original in his examination of eternal truths.

Taking this approach makes it possible to see that Rousseau was doing three things here:

1. rejecting traditional justifications of authority, for the way they were bound up with illegitimate claims (Aristotle’s idea that some people were natural slaves, the paternalist idea that the political order mirrored the rule of the father);

2. rejecting a state of nature which is no more than conceptions of human nature drawn from prevailing competitive, individualistic societies and read back into nature;

3. challenging the modern mechanicist materialists for their determinism and denial of free will, immortal soul and God, something that amounted to the extinction of the moral and spiritual nature of human beings.

Rousseau took his stand on natural goodness and wholeness of being, including the spiritual dimension, and sought to reconcile divisions and bring harmony. He found that he managed to alienate just about everyone. This should not be surprising. That problem and those divisions remain with us. So it is well worth revisiting Rousseau and stating openly his opposition to rival dogmatisms and fanaticisms.

I have defined my own philosophical position in terms of a concept of ‘rational freedom’, the idea that the freedom/happiness of each individual is coexistent with and conditional upon the freedom/happiness of all individuals. That idea can be expressed in legal and moral terms, through the law and through obedience to ethical imperatives given by the moral law. With Marx, I explored the idea of a relational freedom in which that ‘rational’ unity is embodied in and practised through social relationships. Kant very much takes the legalistic route, affirming a stern morality of duty and virtue. Rousseau does this too, but with this difference. Rousseau makes it clear that laws are no substitute for right character, and that duty and virtue are very much a second best ‘rational freedom’ in order to regulate human relations in a condition of social war. The ideal is to so arrange society in the first place that natural goodness comes to be directly expressed, so that there is less need to resort to institutional frameworks and supports.

The relation between natural law and ‘rational freedom’ is a live issue in my own work. A couple of years ago I wrote on Thomas Aquinas, criticising the tradition of rational freedom for its attempt to piece back together the common good and common ground that had been fractured on the modern terrain. The likes of Kant, Hegel and Marx, Habermas in the contemporary age, were using the very tools that had been instrumental in fragmenting commonality and universality in the first place. They were attempting the impossible. It is testimony to their genius that they nearly succeeded. But Nietzsche gave voice to the failure of this project. And Max Weber was explicit in stating that we live in a rationalised modernity divorced from objective values and possibilities of substantive meaning and justice. We live in the shadow of Weber. I shall therefore connect Rousseau’s Platonism with a critique of rationalised modernity, drawing an analogy between Plato’s cave, where the inhabitants are chained to illusion, mistaking the shadows on the wall as the one and only reality, and Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of modernity, a confinement so total that it embraces the very subjectivities of its members as prisoners, so much so that they cannot see the bars on the cage. ‘Man was born free but everywhere is in chains’, wrote Rousseau. Rousseau is very much about enlightenment. But, like Plato, he knew that a genuine enlightenment pertains to the whole being entailing a commitment to the true, the good and the beautiful together. This is an integral approach that speaks to more than a rationality concerned with empirical facts and instrumental concerns. Rousseau’s break with the materialism of the Enlightenment philosophes came precisely on this point. Rousseau was not against Enlightenment at all. On the contrary, he was all for Enlightenment. His case against the philosophes was not that they were Enlightened, but that they were not Enlightened enough. Their concerns were blinkered and one-sided, speaking only to one part of life and human nature, not the whole. Their approach would produce only the kind of enlightenment that blinds, the blinkered rationalisation that Max Weber would come later to characterise as ‘the disenchantment of the world.’ That’s a world in which scientific rationality removes epistemology from ontological questions and ontological nature, states the world to be objectively valueless and reduces questions of value to subjective states, likes and judgments – a demoralised terrain in which human beings become unmoored and adrift, ignorant armies endlessly clashing in the dark, forever shadow boxing, incapable of resolving differences and finding meaning.

It's not an either/or for me. I need to avoid a position of having to choose between ancient and modern, natural law and rational freedom. The common enemy is a purposeless materialism, determinism, relativism and the nihilism of emotivism. Rousseau identified the real enemy from the first. His view, and the view I take, combines both natural law and rational freedom but, most importantly, takes us to a new position that is between and beyond both, a position that gives us all that these traditions give us but which is much more besides. The problems always come when philosophers want to tidy things up and put things in nice little neatly labelled boxes. Life isn't like that, and Rousseau's pages ooze with that life. So I shall write of his relations to these ideas, and the original ways in which he expressed them, and to what end, without making the error of reducing him or fitting him to them. He's ... awkward, but he's original. He’s a thinker. He’s a thinker with a real purpose and with a real concern. He isn't quite anything – ancient or modern, natural law or positivist – he’s so much bigger than that. His thought cannot be contained by schools and positions. He’s been considered a precursor of the Romantics, exalting feeling over reason. Yet this is the man who made the biggest claims for reason, a man that the great rationalist Immanuel Kant called ‘the Newton of the moral world.’ But it would also be wrong to say that Kant encapsulates Rousseau’s morality in systematic form. We could say that Rousseau is a precursor to Kant. Kant could say that Rousseau taught him all that he knew – but Rousseau could still say that what Kant knew was not all that Rousseau knew. There’s more to Rousseau. Rousseau retains a connection of morals to psychology, of reason to feeling, that Kant extirpated.

David Lay Williams’ book Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment makes it clear that Rousseau is a Platonist. He is. And Williams documents it at length, and shows why it matters in the struggle to affirm transcendent norms against conventionalism and relativism. But Rousseau’s Platonism goes to the heart and not only to the rational head. It’s a Platonism that is innate and which comes out in the expression of our natural goodness. It does not, in fine, require an intricate and complicated rational system of deductive metaphysics.

I'd sum him up in terms of nature via nurture: not looking to go back to nature – Rousseau explicitly declares this to be impossible – but forwards to the realisation of nature. Once human beings enter society, they are charged with the task of determining their relationships so that the freedom of each and all is mutually enhancing rather than annihilating. Hence, an enlightenment which leaves behind Plato’s cave and Weber’s cage is not simply about discarding ‘chains’ as such – it is about throwing off illegitimate chains based on personal domination and dependence and coming together to choose the constraints by which individuals are legitimately bound together for the greater good. Dispelling shadows is all about discarded illusory notions of individual freedom. A situation in which individuals pursue a natural liberty in a social context generates a mutual self-cancellation that results in social conflict and destruction. In such a situation, individuals are unable to see the common good that benefits each and all together and instead pursue a selfish good that serves to bring long term collective unfreedom and ruination.

A great deal of Rousseau’s politics is not so much prescriptive and instructive as educative and transformative. This is a point that his more dull-witted liberal critics, stuck in their false antinomies of individual-society, private-public, are simply unable to see. Starting with their premise of methodological individualism, seeing human beings as self-interested, self-maximising atoms, and viewing any kind of collective endeavour as an interference in individual liberty, liberal critics quickly conclude that Rousseau is a ‘totalitarian’ thinker. That criticism can be found in any number of books and is hardly worth engaging with. It’s plain wrong and a waste of precious time to deal with. So I shall start clearly and vigorously by taking apart liberal antinomies and fallacies, revealing liberalism to be a false philosophy and social pathology. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we will finally get to recovering our physical, political and ethical commons. You cannot resolve global environmental problems on a demoralised liberal terrain. All that can be done on this diremptive terrain is an institutional technocratic tinkering and techno-fixing that preserves the socially and ecological destructive drives in place. A politics of hope requires that we establish the conditions of politics in social, moral and psychic terms, putting things that have been separated back together. Rousseau’s discourses are all critiques of the alienating divisions that have separated human beings from their common ground and from each other. There can be no unity and common good on that fractured ground. In the Grundrisse, Marx wrote of ‘the alienation of the individual from himself and from others’ in modern social relations. This dualism of individual and society, private and public, sets the parameters of liberal philosophy: ‘The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.’ (Marx GR 1973: 163). I agree, except that the end will be anything but blessed. If it wasn’t so serious in its social and environmental consequences, it would be comical, the extent to which liberals with their cultural and ethical relativism come to naturalise their own principles and beliefs and give them an eternal existence. It’s the ersatz Platonism of convulsively self-important people (to borrow from Weber’s closing passages in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.) They think the liberal world is here for all time, and when challenged and checked by dissenters – the victims and communities on the receiving end of their progressivism – their sense of historical entitlement is given expression in the forms of howls of ‘post-truth’ lamentation. It denotes a fake Platonic eternity, and such impotent howls are no more than pathetic expressions of the delusions that will accompany the bourgeois to their blessed end. The unthinking way in which ‘post-truth’ and ‘post-fact’ are equated as one and the same thing is significant, for it reveals that the perspectives and protests are launched from within a liberal philosophy that has separated us from ontological nature in the first place, thus denying us the possibility of truth as such. This approach to rationality reveals the world to be objectively valueless, distinguishing scientific reason from ethics, detached fact and value, reduced morality to no more than value judgements, with the result that the objective statements concerning scientific knowledge lack meaning – and human motivation – whilst moral statements are mere subjective preferences and likes that can command no assent with respect to a common, shared and binding good. The moderns have been post-truth, post-good and post-beauty since its birth, and their predicament is that they cannot see it. Theirs is the enlightenment that blinds. But to give an idea of what this predicament entails, I shall say only this. With the split between fact and value comes a split between science and ethics (and religion, which is where this phoney war of atheism and theism comes from). With scientific reason exalted to being the paradigmatic form of rationality and with morality reduced to mere value judgements, we lose the idea of moral knowledge. There is such a thing as scientific knowledge and scientific truth, it is claimed, but not moral knowledge and truth. Hence in ‘debates’ involving both fact and value, those asserting a scientific materialism will demand to know ‘where’s the evidence?’ That’s the quickest way to end the ‘debate’ with a victory for the side armed with facts. In moral debates, the quickest way to silence opponents is to state ‘that’s just your opinion.’ As Weber pointed out, without objective standards and criteria distinguishing right and wrong, good and bad, there is nothing but irreducible subjective opinion, endless debates incapable of resolution. Our ‘post-truth’ society, in other words, involves much more than a denial of facts – it involves a denial of values. And the two are directly related. For once scientific reason is exalted as the only (fact-based) form of reason, and morality becomes mere subjective opinion, then there is no rational way of justifying the value of science and truthseeking. Morality has been reduced to a non-rational form. In undermining the notion of moral knowledge and truth, the exaltation of scientific reason undercuts its own ground. I shall be writing at length on this. When Keith Breen writes of living Under Weber's Shadow, it is precisely this demoralisation that is involved, what Weber calls 'disenchantment,' and it is a threat not merely to ethics but to truthseeking as such. If Weber is right and that natural science has shown the world to be objectively valueless, then there can be no such thing as objective truth, not one that is grounded in nature outside of the human valuers. If this is so, then the ethic of responsibility that Weber offers as giving meaning to life through existential choice is likewise empty – the choices we make can have no content. If the choices do indeed matter, then they can only matter by reference to some objective standard of right and wrong, good and evil independent of human valuers and subjective human values – in which case liberal relativism and its rejection of objective standards fails. Either way, liberalism fails, and the existential predicament is tragic. It matters a great deal, then, that Rousseau’s grounding in transcendent norms is established. If that case can be made – and David Lay Williams makes precisely that case – then Rousseau can be pulled clear of the wreckage of modern subjectivism, relativism and nihilism. He gives us the possibility of an existential meaning and freedom that escapes the impossibility of finding and making meaning in a meaningless world.

It is not difficult to go through Rousseau and identify a whole series of natural law statements. Remove them, and Rousseau becomes very much the relativist and culturalist and positivist critics claim him to be. Rousseau is controversial for the way he uses natural law arguments. There are those like Derathe - whose books I can only get in the French - who argues that Rousseau is the apotheosis of the natural law tradition, bringing it to its fruition. There are those who see him as destroying that tradition, signalling its dissolution into historicism and modern notions of human self-creation, seen most clearly in Hegel and Marx and in those praxis-based philosophies which have human beings imposing truth and value, rather than disclosing truth and value. This is where careful reading pays dividends, because Rousseau is subtle and cannot be easily defined without caricature and distortion. He combines objectivity and subjectivity and cannot be reduced to an either/or. Rousseau takes us beyond rationalist deductive systems to their actual living and embeddedness, so there is nowhere else to go for natural law. And that's the direction of my own work, coming out of abstract debates and systems to access, activate and cultivate the grammar and forms of common living, express transcendent norms through communities of practice. This approach emphasises character formation and social formation, the whole person within right relationships, as opposed to the mere information of heads with facts. But I would add this crucial rider – this does not involve realisation as abolition. Marx wrote of the transcendence of philosophy as its abolition, philosophy becomes worldly as the world becomes philosophical. I supported this view for a long time in my work. It sounds so appealing. We don’t just state truths in the ideal, we translate them into the real and live up to them. Here’s how I now qualify that view. We cannot have our cake and eat it too. Transcendent norms, truths and values are precisely that – transcendent. They are not for abolition through realisation. Once eaten, they are gone for good, and we end up losing the objective standards and criteria we need to guide and orient and criticise our lives and actions in time and place. That is the value of Williams’ book and the way it emphasises Rousseau’s adherence to Platonism and transcendent norms and, I would add, God and Nature. These are things which are permanent and eternal, not human creations and conventions.

Matt Ridley has a couple of interesting books here, The Origins of Virtue and Nature via Nurture. He is a biologist and a libertarian in politics. He is very much in favour of free markets and free trade. But he makes some telling points on the relation of biology to reason and ethics. Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds is also worth reading along these lines. These books point to an innate and universal moral grammar among human beings. I just find it odd how they read this argument for a moral grammar against rational systems of ethics and moral codes. They are right - I think - about the innatism but they misunderstand when they dismiss ethical systems as putting things the wrong way around. I see those moral codes and systems as rationalisations, as part of an education that is intended to activate that innate moral grammar, and give guidance and direction as it is drawn out. It’s not an either/or. In Romans, St Paul writes of the moral law that is written on the heart. Rousseau says precisely the same thing. It is very much an assertion of an innate and universal moral grammar.

Against the innatists are the likes Jesse Prinze, who claims that human beings are "wired for culture." Such views point to John Locke's notion of a "tabula rasa," human beings as blank sheets to be developed in relation to the environment this way or that.

Rousseau stands in between such either/or’s; human beings have potentialities which are innate, and these become actual through cultural creation. Rousseau’s idea that human life is relative and collective takes us onto the terrain of the social and embedded brain involved in a mind, gene, environment co-evolution.

Ridley is interesting because he makes hay with those ecologists who romanticise past cultures and tribes - the only difference between them and us is their technological reach. In other words, the problems we face need to be solved in their own terms, not by going back to some romanticized past or arguments which commit naturalist fallacies or make unwarranted appeal to nature. He's blunt, and I've put it blunter here. But I agree with him. Here’s a pertinent passage from Nature via Nurture, rejecting notions of cultural plasticity and affirming the existence of a universal human nature.

'Far from proving the plasticity of human nature, Boas's very argument for the equality of cultures depends upon accepting an unchanging, universal nature. Culture can determine itself, but it can­not determine human nature. Ironically, it was Margaret Mead who proved this most clearly. To find a society in which young girls were sexually uninhibited, she had to visit a land of the imagination. Like Rousseau before her, she sought something 'primitive' about human nature in the South Seas. But there is no primitive human nature. Her failure to discover the cultural determinism of human nature is the dog that failed to bark.

So turn the determinism around and ask why human nature seems to be universally capable of producing culture - of generating cumula­tive, technological, heritable traditions. Equipped with just snow, dogs and dead seals, human beings will gradually invent a lifestyle complete with songs and gods as well as sledges and igloos. What is it inside the human brain that enables it to achieve this feat, and when did this talent appear?

Notice, first, that the generation of culture is a social activity. A solitary human mind cannot secrete culture. It was the precocious Russian anthropologist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky who pointed out in the 19205 that to describe an isolated human mind is to miss the point. Human minds are never isolated. More than those of any other species, they swim in a sea called culture. They learn languages, they use technologies, they observe rituals, they share beliefs, they acquire skills. They have a collective as well as an individual experience; they even share collective intentionality.'

Ridley 2003 ch 8

Ridley doesn’t go so far as to accuse Rousseau of being a ‘back to nature’ theorist, an accusation which started with Voltaire, but comes close in associating him with Mead’s view. This is to miss Rousseau’s concern in his examination of human beings in the state of nature. Taking Rousseau’s words out of context is the surest way of getting him wrong. The fact is that Rousseau would agree with the bulk of this passage, he possessed a dynamic and developmental conception of human nature, referring to the acquisition of language and reason in society, the creation of culture beyond the state of ‘primitive’ individuals and their isolation. But such acquisition is always based upon a conception of human nature that is innate or comes with certain innate potentialities.

But I read, and I respond to the biology. I don't want an ethic that is read against the grain of nature and human nature, and I don't want an unmoored culture based on human self-creation alone. Hence this tradition of natural law is important. Natural law is not a law of physical nature but is nature seen through the eyes of critical (and indeed creative) reason, ‘agent intellect’ as Aquinas put it. And those who think it medieval mumbo jumbo should look again. There is nothing in the intellect that wasn't in the senses first, wrote Aquinas. A lot of the clever moderns are actually debating non-problems, mired in problems of their own making: the disembodied Cartesian mind cut adrift from the senses. I take Rousseau as someone who is concerned to show what is necessary to bring human beings back to their senses. In relation to transcendent norms, Rousseau points to a sensible transcendence.

In one way or another - the necessity of unsocial sociability as the accidental spring for action - we are dealing with a social ‘Fall’, and are charged with the task of getting out of it. It is our responsibility. As architects of our own predicament, we are our own saviours. That is a highly contentious point in religious terms and expresses a faith in human nature and its possibilities that may well seem inadvisable given all that we have come to know. The idea of natural goodness as against original sin certainly sounds liberating. The problems in which we are mired are of our own making and can therefore be unmade. The corollary of this is that we are self-made beings in a self-made world – the species and its universe as a self-creation. That’s a world that knows no bounds and no limits, that has no end and fulfilment, that lies in constant danger of eating itself up. That’s precisely how I see the environmental crisis afflicting the planet, the arrogant human denial of planetary boundaries, seduced by the idea of freedom as self-realisation. The problem with self-realisation as an ideal is that it lacks a principle of fulfilment. It is an ideal that can never end but must continue to feed on itself.

And there is another worry I have here. Rousseau's premise of reason as something that is acquired and hence complicit in the social fall can never give us the happy ending we seek. There can never be a social redemption on these terms. And it can never give us the beatitude that natural law does. We seem stuck with making the best kind of peace in a state of war. Rousseau openly admits this. He entertains no great hopes for anything more. That makes him a remarkably honest and sincere revolutionary indeed. He is making no false promises at all. He doesn’t try to sell us a false prospectus, which makes him a breath of fresh air. I shall enjoy debating these issues with him. There is the possibility of a genuine engagement with such a spirit. I think he goes wrong here, but he gives us the resources to get back in tune with the rhythm of life. And he has the merit of knowing what the key issues are. He could well be right. If there's no God, then there is no happy ending. He does seem somewhat pessimistic about the prospects of civilization. He would find the notion of ‘men as gods’ in a heaven of their own making to be utterly vomitable. There's little evidence he thought human beings likely to act on his proposals.

Rousseau’s critical works expose the individualistic reduction of the common interest to be complicit in the loss of the common ground. Oddly, Rousseau is accused of an individualism in premises and problems that involves him in proposing collectivist solutions. In my thesis, I made some such accusation. I take that view to be mistaken. It pays insufficient attention to the distinct and original ways that Rousseau argues for will and for contract, not merely subjectivist (the general will combines objective standards and subjective character – individuals coming to will the general good) and atomistic and mechanical. This is to escape the narrow and narrowing constraints of typical liberal antitheses - individualism and collectivism. Liberal philosophers think they are being clever when they point to the ‘paradox’ of Rousseau the individualist who prescribes the greatest collectivism. When I read of Rousseau’s ambiguities and confusions and paradoxes, I know I am more than likely in the presence of a critic who is too lazy or too dull-witted to treat Rousseau’s arguments with the close consideration and intellectual respect that they deserve. In truth, Rousseau is clear that individuality and sociality go together. His view of freedom as a rational freedom through law challenges directly the liberal notion of freedom as non-interference, a notion which presumes the very thing at issue, the dualism of individual and social good.

Reason and sociability are acquired in Rousseau. These things do not exist in the state of nature. This is key to his position, and it makes for a very uneasy relation to the natural law tradition, which makes reason innate and a gift of nature/God. Rousseau clearly reads human beings in the state of nature to exist in an animal state, without reason, language, sociability. This is something which could be designed to have natural law theorists apoplectic with horror and rage. It makes me very uncomfortable too. We need, however, to understand Rousseau’s immediate purposes here, specifically the need he feels to challenge the likes of Hobbes and individualist natural rights theorists, and authoritarian and absolutist arguments for a ‘natural’ rule of some over others. What we do have in the state of nature, Rousseau argues, is feeling or compassion, and these are indeed innate, potentialities that develop as we expand our being in relation to others. Here is the seed of sociability and rationality, which Rousseau brings to fruition in the notion of rational and moral freedom in the civil state of legitimate, self-imposed constraint.

There are scholars who do argue that Rousseau does hold there must have been a potential for reason. His view, in truth, fits wonderfully well with evolutionary theory. He sounds very modern on this. Unless we can find a God who gave us all these things as part of our birthright. Rousseau urges us to be truthseekers in this sense, through our lives and our quest for meaning, rather than through intellectualising and devising complex, sophisticated systems of metaphysics. It's not in the naming and framing of essential being that the truth lies, but in its experiencing through living in accordance with our natural gifts. I’m very sympathetic here. Aquinas’ five proofs for the existence of God bore me to tears. Every now and then I read them and try to remember them, but always end up forgetting how they go. I’m willing to bet that most Catholics have never been able to state these proofs. Does that cut them off from God and truth? Hardly. The mediations of metaphysics gets in the way of the expression of the truth written on the human heart. At the same time, having read and appreciated Aquinas at length, I wouldn’t want to discard the metaphysics. It can clarify complex issues and give intellectual guidance. That is precisely how doctrine is supposed to be used – not as dogma that takes the place of faith, and not as an instruction manual that gets in the way of living.

I wouldn't argue things the way that Rousseau does. It does invite a lot of misunderstanding and confusion. But his views make complete sense once you realize he was challenging Hobbes in particular, the philosopher who theorised that human beings are self-interested, aggressive, acquisitive beings and that life in the state of nature is "nasty, brutish and short." Hobbes used this argument to justify the complete transfer of human rights to liberty to the absolute state. This is illegitimate and wrong, Rousseau argues, not least because to give up freedom is to renounce one’s innate human dignity and quality. It is not only a moral error, but an historical error too. Rousseau thus argues that Hobbes has read the characteristics of emerging bourgeois civilization back into the state of nature in order to read forwards and justify the absolute state. Hobbes was the materialist determinism philosopher who was becoming more and more influential, destroying the old natural law tradition, and Rousseau saw the immediate necessity of challenging and checking his pernicious doctrines. Why pernicious? Because should Hobbes triumph, then there would be no way of resisting the view that truth and goodness and justice were mere human conventions, subordinate to power and power relations, in complete denial of all transcendent standards. Rousseau’s defence of God, free will and the immortal soul may sound like so much old-fashioned and unsupported and unsupportable metaphysics, but there is a reason why Rousseau was prepared to make himself such an isolated and unliked and abused figure – he saw clearly that to lose these transcendent norms would be to open up a society of purposeless and meaningless materialism in which the rich and powerful predated upon the poor and the weak. And in this I take Rousseau to be correct. Whatever the controversies of the reasoning – and Rousseau always distinguished reason, as dealing with eternal truths from reasoning, as complicit in human vanity – his intuition and instinct were right. So, in this instance, Rousseau is deliberately turning the new materialism against itself - and he trounces the materialists to good effect. Could he have done it as effectively with a straight natural law argument? If we answer this question in the affirmative, we would then need to answer the awkward question as to why no natural law theorist had proven capable of resisting the descent into materialism. Condemned for dissolving natural law into positivism and historicism, Rousseau should actually be thanked for affirming transcendent norms against the materialists, determinists and relativists of the Enlightenment. Rousseau called Hobbes and his ilk ‘sophists.’ That should tell you which side Rousseau was on here – the side of eternal truths, as he called them, truths engraved on the human heart, against those who dissolved all standards into culture and the play of power relations. Rousseau was not a sophist.

His great revolutionary and innovatory claim is that human nature has a history. We take this for granted now. But Rousseau was a pioneer here and is superb in defining this dynamic conception of human nature as against all the static models, whether of natural law, the new natural rights theorists, or the mechanical materialists.

Natural law, for all it sounds archaic, and for all that it involves me in seemingly arcane issues that it would seem better for me to leave well alone, is actually hugely important. Modern liberalism took natural law over in claims of "self-evident truths" – affirming the moral ultimacy of the individual – but shed the metaphysical baggage/God. Liberalism in this sense is a secular form of natural law, affirming rights and liberties of the individual which are independent of a particular political society in a particular time. This is a classic case of the delusion that we can have our cake and eat it too. Liberals thought that they could have their cake – the transcendent norms which point to individual rights, liberty and dignity – and eat it too – resting those claims on political institutions, human-made convention and positive law. When protestors demand ‘rights’ and ‘justice’, upon who or what are those demands made and drawn? If existing political society and no more, a society which has a public system of law and popular expression, and no more, then you already have all the freedom and justice that the temporal sphere can give. So why do you complain? And to whom or what? Justice is the interests of the strongest, asserted the sophist Thrasymachus. Power is its own justification. There it is. Liberalism thought it could take over natural law claims and principles and shed the metaphysics and God in the confident belief that there would be no problem. There is. What Rousseau calls ‘eternal truths’ are independent of time and place, and never fully realized. Rights have to be based on something more than assertion. In his Birmingham address against racial discrimination, demanding the equality of all persons, Martin Luther King quoted St Augustine: ‘An unjust law is no law at all’. He went on to cite St Thomas Aquinas to the effect that the eternal law is something that sets standards by which to hold the positive law of political society to account. The argument is decisive in a way that assertions of rights based on power and convention can never be. Those assertions have to be grounded in something more than cultural self-creation. It is for this reason that in Aquinas, Morality and Modernity (2012) I criticised Kant's self-legislative reason in favour of Aquinas and the natural law. But that doesn't settle the question at all. If only it could. I could just restate natural law and seek the forms of its embodiment at the level of character-construction, right relationships, social practices and forms of the common life. That is a very large part of the answer, I would say. I would strongly recommend everyone to read the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas and John Finnis very closely and deeply indeed. But I have a feeling that the achievements of modernity, like its problems, run deep indeed, and cannot simply be turned around. They have to be incorporated by moving forwards to another stage in history. If there is hope, then it lies not in notions of nostalgia for past forms of common identity and shared values, but in existing lines of development that are immanent but repressed within modern society. A restatement of natural law won't cut it. I could tell people to trust in God and everything will be fine. And I wouldn’t be wrong. After all, things that are equal to One thing are equal to each other. That is basic natural law, which Martin Luther King jr accented to such great effect – discrimination cannot survive the affirmation of the unity and equality of all souls.

It can be that simple. But I doubt that moderns, brought up on will and critical reflection, can find the simplicity and sincerity required. But I like Rousseau for the way he was prepared to break with his associates on the question of God. Rousseau knew what was at stake if God was lost. And he took an increasingly isolated and lonely stance on this. He saw himself as persecuted. He wasn’t treated as badly as others, such as Diderot and Voltaire, who did suffer imprisonment. But he was certainly isolated and, as a sensitive soul, without a sense of humour, felt the pressure acutely.

Rousseau strikes me as being in some way similar to Wittgenstein. There is a God. You just can't say anything meaningful about it though, not with intellectual tools, so we must remain silent in reverential thanksgiving awe. Meanwhile, as social beings, we need to govern ourselves by constructing the political order. We are thus left looking to ourselves in order to supply ‘objective’ foundations. This idea was given systematic expression in Kant and his self-legislating reason. The fact that reason is universal gives it an ‘objective’ character through the intersubjectivity of human co-legislators in the realm of ends.

Are these the only options? Well, there is Marx, who doesn't get much of a look in these days. For Marx, "God", "Nature", "Reason" and "Humanity" are all idle abstractions when considered apart from the social relations and practices through which human beings, in determinate conditions, mediate their exchange and interchange with each other and with their social, cultural and natural environment. That, to me, sounds like a very fruitful and eminently practical path to take. We can certainly live the Gospel in this way. But it's a road on which we take certain innate potentialities. It is not, in other words, a wholly self-created journey, however much Marx pointed in that direction of human beings as sovereigns of circumstances, revolving around their own sun. (I have written at length on this aspect of Marx elsewhere, and will be looking to publish soon).

In the very, very least, we can act ‘as if’ life has meaning and purpose and ‘as if’ there is a God above and a God within, because no rational argument will prove anything one way or the other, as Rousseau wrote over and again to Diderot and Voltaire and others. Rousseau gave an argument for intelligent design, he says that no reason can prove it, or disprove it, so it's pointless to debate it at length. But it feels right. We should always remember that Rousseau was concerned with the whole being, his particular words in particular contexts are always set in a context of the need to satisfy whole being. A belief in God makes sense and feels right, in other than the intellectual and rational terms in which Rousseau debates it. Hence Wittgenstein's view, of those things of which we can say nothing, we should remain silent. But that does not mean that those things are nonsense and unimportant or cannot be expressed in other than rational ways. The logical positivists took Wittgenstein to mean he was one of them. They asserted that the only meaningful statements and truth claims are those that are based on fact and sense data or logic, empirical facts and self-evident truths, and that God, metaphysics, religion is plain nonsense. A view that would condemn art, music, poetry, literature, dance etc as likewise nonsense with nothing to say. It is non-sense, Wittgenstein agreed, but it is also the most important part of a life lived with meaning. And so it is with music, poetry etc. Why on earth do those who think truth is merely factual and logical think that human beings invented symbols and a symbolic universe, express themselves through song and dance and words and rhyme? These are the very things that make human beings human, that humanise a physical existence. Wittgenstein knew this, even if the logical positivists who claimed him as one of their own didn’t. When invited to speak to them, he read the poetry of Tagore. And the great minds of analytical philosophy still didn't get it.

Rousseau is an important philosopher indeed. He had the originality to see that the Natural Law theory, interpreted in the traditional way, would no longer suffice in the modern world, and he had the nerve to seek a new foundation of rights. That said, for all that he rests political right and obligation on convention, for all that he inspired the notion of a democratic community governing itself through a self-legislating reason, I see his commitments anchored elsewhere, in something more enduring than contract and consent. When pressed, he says as much himself, and we see an assertion of natural law and transcendent norms. (What else is the Lawgiver? Why use a seemingly self-contradictory term like "the general will" if it doesn't imply a voluntarism that wills "the good?" The opening of the fifth Lettre—"the whole morality of human life is in the intention of man" — may seem to be a voluntarist claim, anticipating Kant's view that a "good will" is the only "unqualifiedly" good thing on earth. However, this intention refers not to the will but to conscience, which Rousseau defines as a "divine instinct" and an "immortal and heavenly voice." Rousseau writes a stirring passage on moral feelings - "if one sees. .. some act of violence or injustice, a movement of anger and indignation arises at once in our heart" - and proceeds to speak of feelings of "remorse" that "punish hidden crimes in secret". He calls this "importunate voice" an "involuntary feeling" ("sentiment involontaire") that "torments" us. Rousseau's choice of words is deliberate and precise:

"Thus there is, at the bottom of all souls, an innate principle of justice and of moral truth [which is] prior to all national prejudices, to all maxims of education. This principle is the involuntary rule ['la regie involon­taire'] by which, despite our own maxims, we judge our actions, and those of others, as good or bad; and it is to this principle that I give the name conscience."

Conscience, then, is an involuntary moral feeling—not surprisingly, given Rousseau's view that "our feeling is incontestably prior to our reason itself."

Rousseau, I say, gave us a way of combining natural law, transcendent norms and modern voluntarism and self-legislating reason. I'm reading numerous books on him. So many see one aspect, stick to their own meanings and definitions and conclude that Rousseau is a philosopher of feelings, muddled and contradictory and "totalitarian" (utterly failing to see the transformations that political society effected for Rousseau). So all praise to Immanuel Kant, who saw Rousseau right from the very first. He saw Rousseau as driven by ethical imperatives.

But we can press the Rousseau-Kant connection too far. Kant was the more systematic philosopher, but Rousseau has more to offer. It's far too simple to see Rousseau as a predecessor of Kant. Whilst Rousseau argues in a Kantian way that "to deprive your will of all freedom is to deprive your actions of all morality," he also argues that conscience is a moral feeling that is involuntary. Rousseau's "morale sensitive" is not easy to reconcile with rational self-determination. But that that is precisely what he does. Rather than a superficial reading which always seem to end up concluding that Rousseau is full of anomalies and paradoxes, I take Rousseau at his word when he claims that his work expresses a unity of thought. If you think Rousseau contradicts himself, you've probably missed something. He's nuanced. And he does seem to draw on more than contract and convention and self-legislating reason - he wants us to will the good as a moral a priori.

“If man is at once active and free. he acts of his own accord; what he does freely is no part of the system marked out by Providence and it cannot be imputed to Providence. Providence does not will the evil that man does when he misuses the freedom given to him; neither does Providence prevent him doing it, either because the wrong done by so feeble a creature is as nothing in its eyes, or because it could not prevent it without doing a greater wrong and degrading his nature. Providence has made him free that he may choose the good and refuse the evil. It has made him capable of this choice if he uses rightly the faculties bestowed upon him, but it has so strictly limited his powers that the misuse of his freedom cannot disturb the general order. The evil that man does reacts upon himself without affecting the system of the world, without preventing the preservation of the human species in spite of itself. To complain that God does not prevent us from doing wrong is to complain because he has made man of so excellent a nature, that he has endowed his actions with that morality by which they are ennobled, that he has made virtue man's birthright. Supreme happiness consists in self-content: that we may gain this self-content we are placed upon this earth and endowed with freedom, we are tempted by our passions and restrained by conscience. What more could divine power itself have done on our behalf? Could it have made our nature a contradiction, and have given the prize of welldoing to one who was incapable of evil? To prevent a man from wickedness, should Providence have restricted him to instinct and made him a fool? Not so, O God of my soul, I will never reproach thee that thou hast created me in thine own image, that I may be free and good and happy like my Maker!”

Rousseau, from Emile, The Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar

Caused or determined volition is not, therefore, a necessity of true theology. In contradistinction to Hobbes' view of the will as determined - leaving Hobbes mired in problems of reconciling his ethics and psychology - Rousseau was able to conceive will as a moral causality with the power to produce moral effects. He could thus be confident in his view that he had derived political obligation and rightful political authority from the power of willing, human beings as free in living by a law they had set themselves together: "civil association is the most voluntary act in the world; since every individual is born free and his own master, no-one is able, on any pretext whatsoever, to subject him without his consent." This understands consent in an active and a political way of giving organised expression in a civil state to natural freedom and equality.

Rousseau uproots the old foundations of political authority and obligation. In the first four chapters of the Social Contract, Rousseau criticises and refutes the dominant theories of obligation and right: paternal authority, the "right of the strongest," and obligation derived from slavery. "Since no man has natural authority over his fellow men, and since might in no sense makes right, convention remains as the basis of legitimate authority among men."

However, for reasons given here, I see Rousseau as drawing on more than contract and convention. His use of contract theory seems more of a critical tool for him, a way of recognising modern subjectivity and voluntarism destroying erroneous theories of obligation and authority, and that more than this is required when constructing a comprehensive view of political right, authority and obligation. The principle of self-assumed obligation is certainly prominent in Rousseau - the idea that human beings are obligated only by those laws they have had a hand themselves in making, but obligation by consent is not the whole story for Rousseau, it doesn't give us a a complete political theory. Any political system that "confines itself to mere obedience will find difficulty in getting itself obeyed. If it is good to know how to deal with men as they are, it is much better to make them what they ought to be."

Rousseau is thus a profound critic of contractarianism. He criticises contract theory for dealing too much the form of obligation, with will as it is, to the neglect of the content supplied by the notion of what human beings ought to be obligated to and with will as it might be.

Rousseau thus challenges Hobbes, who had also rejected obligation based on natural or divine law to rest law and therefore morality on the command of an artificial "representative person" to whom subjects were "formerly obliged" through transfer of natural rights by consent. "Let it be asked", challenges Rousseau, why morality is corrupted in proportion as minds are enlight­ened." Hobbes' view of obligation may well have been enlightened in being based on consent, but Hobbes changes nothing about the moral corruption caused by private interest and individual will in the modern world. The result, as Rousseau points out, is that whilst Hobbes knew "quite well what a bourgeois of London or of Paris is like," he never saw a natural man.

Such an argument works well with "barbarous" men who are "easily seduced": "all ran headlong to their chains, in hopes of securing their liberty."

In the first version of the Social Contract, Rousseau wrote this scathing condemnation of contractarianism: "This pretended social treaty dictated by nature is a veritable chimera," he wrote, "since the conditions of it are always unknown or impracticable." The social contract "only gives new power to him who already has too much," while the weak party to the agreement "finds no asylum where he can take refuge, no support for his weakness, and finally perishes as a victim of this deceitful union from which he had expected his happiness."

In chapter 5 of the First Version, Rousseau writes that it is the "utility commune" rather than contract that is "the foundation of civil society." He uses the contractarian idea to demolish the contract form and take us beyond mechanistic, atomistic conceptions of human society.

Rousseau sought to enlarge and deepen contractarianism, arguing, in the first version of the Social Contract, that "there is a great deal of difference between remaining faithful to the state solely because one has sworn to do it, or because one takes it to be divine and indestructible."

But "sound political principles" cannot merely be given by the Lawgiver, they must be willed: the legislator must help human beings to "bring their wills into conformity with their reason," and the bringing together of the legislator's genius with the people's inalienable right to consent will "effect a union of understanding and will within the social body."

The only paradox of note in Rousseau is this - the paradox of cause and effect: human beings have to will a good society or perfect order that presupposes the transcendence of individual will to attain the freedom of a morality of the common good.

Rousseau has a view of the good as something more than individual will, consent and convention. And politics and law to him have an educative purpose with respect to bringing us to the good. We can put notions of "good" and "common good" in inverted commas til the cows come home (do they ever?) But if we want to resolve the key problems of politics and human society, if we want to see long-term common good of each and all prevail over its continuous trumping by short term private interests, we'd better start treating the issue with more depth. I'm pretty tired of reading dismissive comments on "totalising meta-narratives" of the "common good" as inherently repressive of "others", with the "common good" destined forever to be placed in inverted commas. Which common good? Constituted how? In relation to what? Within what social relations and what form/s of the common life? As capitalism went big and global the liberal left started to think and act small, just as the need for concerted, comprehensive action with respect to "global" forces became more pressing. It's a failure and a diminution of the public imagination. We will all go down with a decaying liberalism, the cultural and political degeneration of a philosophy that is parasitic upon a decaying liberal capitalism. If you want to defend Enlightenment, you'd better open up to the radical democratic version leading from Rousseau. And find your way back to transcendent norms, truths and values while you are at it. It's what E.F. Schumacher called "metaphysical construction." Everyone loves Schumacher's work on scale and appropriate technology in Small is Beautiful. They miss his call for metaphysical reconstruction, which he insisted upon as the most important thing we need. He even wrote another book, Guide for the Perplexed, to make that clear. Too many remain perplexed.

Rousseau had another objection to the contractarian form, one that he payed little attention to in the Social Contract - the view that a social contract might simply be a fraud imposed on the poor by the rich with a view to legitimizing an inequality that is ruinous of society and of the human essence. In the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau suggests that the rich man, "destitute of valid reasons" that he can use in order to justify his unequal possessions and fearful of being plundered by the many, "conceived at length the profoundest plan that ever entered the mind of man: this was to employ in his favor the forces of those who attacked him and to give them other institutions as favorable to himself as the law of nature was unfavorable." He goes on to say:

"'Let us join,' he said, 'to guard the weak from oppression, to restrain the ambitious, and secure to every man the til what belongs to him: let us institute rules of justice and peace, to which all without exception may be obliged to uniform; rules that may in some measure make amends for the caprices of fortune, by subjecting equally the powerful and the weak to the observance of reciprocal obligations.'"

Rousseau's social contract was democratic and egalitarian and was concerned to bring a transformation in the human character, social relations and political order - it had a self-educative purpose bringing about what ought to be.

Rousseau opened up a new age with his view that the kind of society we live in is one we choose, for which we are responsible, and it is one we choose in association with each other. He'd seen that the old naturalist (Aristotelian) and supernaturalist natural law arguments were no longer compelling in the emerging modern world, and set out to find new foundations in the liberty and rights of each and all in democratic community. I think that this self-legislating reason is question begging and requires some form of the discarded foundations to buttress its claims. The natural law is open to modification - as nature seen through the eyes of reason, it involves the activity of agent intellect, and offers a way of reconciling Rousseau's morality of the senses and his assumption of transcendent norms (e.g. the figure of the Lawgiver). There's nothing in the intellect that wasn't first in the senses, says Thomas Aquinas.

But it's best not to pigeon-hole Rousseau according to philosophical systems and modes of thought, that's not the way to understand him (that ways lies dreary observations about his contradictions and paradoxes as well as his dangers). Rousseau's words express the concern to be rid of all oppressive argumentation, to throw off the weight of oppressive knowledge, and thereby access the natural and simple forms of life. Knowledge as such is not Rousseau's target, least of all self-knowledge. I'll put it this way, if the examined life is not worth living, the over-examined life is unlivable. The insight that Rousseau came to is that knowledge is good so long as it serves the order of life, and is harmful when it comes to be detached from and raised above life. When abstracted from the human context of being, knowledge degenerates into ‘vain science’ and ‘futile curiosity’ (iii.9-14). To the true, the good and the beautiful, Rousseau added the useful. Of anything, we should ask, "what good is it?", "what use is it?", "what's it fit for?" At that point, he ends idle intellectualising over problems without rational resolution, and serving no worthy purpose in terms of happiness.

The key to Rousseau lies in this expression of his fundamental concern:

"O Virtue! Sublime science of simple souls, are such labor and preparation necessary before we can know you? Are not your principles engraved on every heart? To learn your laws, is it not enough to return to ourselves and to listen to the voice of our conscience in the silence of the passions? This is the true philosophy; we must know enough to be content with it, without envying the fame of the celebrated men who have become immortals in the republic of letters."

'Knowledge must claim no absolute primacy, for in the realm of spiritual values it is the ethical will that deserves primacy. In the ordering of the human community, too, the firm and clear formation of the world of the will must precede the construction of the world of knowledge. Man must first find within himself the clear and established law before he can inquire into and search for the laws of the world, the laws of external things. Once this first and most urgent problem has been mastered, once the spirit has achieved true freedom in the order of the political and social world—then man may safely give himself up to the freedom of inquiry. Knowledge will no longer fall victim to mere refinement; it will not soften or enervate man. It was only a false ethical order of things which had diverted knowledge into this direction and which had reduced it to a mere intellectual refinement, a kind of spiritual luxury. It will return to the right path by itself once this impediment has been removed. Spiritual liberty profits man nothing without ethical liberty, but ethical liberty cannot be achieved without a radical transformation of the social order, a transformation that will wipe out all arbitrariness and that alone can help the inner necessity of law to victory.' (Cassirer 1967 1).

Anyhow, I'm fleshing out ideas on how Rousseau sought to 'extend our being' through expansive communion with someone and something greater than we are: communion with Nature (Reveries), with God (Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar), and with Humanity (Social Contract). In the Discourse on the arts and sciences, Rousseau wrote that morality is the ‘sublime science of simple souls.’ ( DAS , iii:30; ii:22). It's a science that is within the reach of each and all. It's written on the heart. And we all have one.

Rousseau offers much more than a vague morality of the good heart, though. In transitioning from the state of nature to the civil state of freedom, human beings come to recognise objective truth and obey the moral law, thereby achieving self-determination, determining to live by ends consciously chosen together. The one philosopher who really understood the extent to which Rousseau was driven by an ethical imperative was Kant, who proceeded to define the realm of ends as a free community of co-legislators. Before the will, as the objective truth of general will, the license of individual subjective want and desire comes to a halt, and relinquishes all claims before the right of the whole. At this point, special interests, subjective inclinations, desires, feelings, cease. Those who read Rousseau as an irrationalist philosopher of feeling misread him completely. He extolled virtue over feeling, at the same time freeing us from the domination of intellectualism and pointless argumentation.

Throughout his work Rousseau sought the ways through which individuals could come to identify themselves with totalities greater than they, and to find in that identification a healing of the contradictions which tear them apart, in their societies and in themselves. Society, nature and the divine order are three such totalities, and communion with each extends our being. And there are many ways to commune, reach out, expand our being.

Immanuel Kant was particularly struck by Rousseau's moral vision of simplicity and integrity. He wrote:

"I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless desire to advance in it, as well as a satisfaction in every step I take. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the honor of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This pretended superiority vanished and I learned to respect humanity."

At a time when people, abandoned by their societies, are abandoning 'elites' and 'experts' of all kinds, we need this humility - we need a philosophy of living that touches people. Rousseau gives us this.

Kant went on to devise an ethical system which centred upon the common moral reason. And a system that put the worlds of fact and value together.

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

Kant was referring to scientific truth and moral truth, and the need to unite them both. Newton exemplified the former, Rousseau the latter. If facts are more than opinions, morality is more than value judgments ....

The moral - being as attunement. The integration of all our faculties together, a communion which extends our being, and a respect for common humanity.

If a return to the innocence and simple happiness of the state of nature is not available to us, and the path of freedom lies in front of us, then it is a path we can take. Rousseau’s criticism of the rationalism of the age of Enlightenment does not imply that Rousseau’s thought is guilty of or encourages irrationalism. Rousseau criticised Enlightenment rationalism for not being rational enough: Rousseau sought an integral conception of human nature realised through the harmonious cooperation of the human capacities, with reason functioning in harmony with sensibility. This harmonious development issuing in the authentic personality, however, required the rediscovery and revaluation of the conditions of authentic experience within the shell of subtlety, artificiality, and corruption encasing contemporary civilization. By recovering simplicity and innocence, we move on to the plenitude of new experience. In coming to achieve fulfillment in this manner, the human being would be like ‘a new being recently come forth from nature’s hands’. Rousseau rules out the possibility of going back to the lost paradise of primitive innocence; instead he urges that human beings go forward to discover happiness in the rediscovery of goodness and the realization of all the potentialities of human nature.

Seduced by the image of the good and innocent natural being lost in a corrupt and artificial world, many thinkers, friend and foe alike, exaggerated both Rousseau’s individualism and his naturalism to the neglect of Rousseau’s continued emphasis upon the complete realization of human nature in the rational and just civil association. Also neglected is Rousseau’s consistent emphasis upon order, human happiness and freedom as achieved through the ordering of every level of human existence. Rousseau affirmed the possibility of going beyond the limitations of solitude to achieve an integral personality through the harmonious relationship between human nature and the universal system of which it formed an essential part.

It is not that much of what the likes of Hume and Burke say is wrong, but that it is incomplete, referring to human nature in a largely underdeveloped condition, reduced to its most immediate empirical condition. The dangers of inflating reason beyond human predispositions and activities is acknowledged is something known to French thinkers like Montesquieu and Rousseau. Indeed, David Cameron argues at length that Rousseau and Burke share more in common than is appreciated on precisely this point (1973). In fine, the errors of an abstracted rationalism committed by French revolutionaries are not to be read back into French Enlightenment thinkers, which is simply a crude intellectual determinism.

There is something else at work in this tendency to denigrate Continental rationalism in light of the British Enlightenment. The rejection of the claimed superiority, on rational grounds, for the universalist secular ethic of the French Enlightenment, implies that there are multiple intellectual and cultural sources of such ideas. This means that no matter how deep the passions may be embedded in within a given cultural-ideological background, involving all kinds of hierarchy and forms of obedience which deny individual liberty, the ‘rational’ tradition affirms a moral universalism based on equality, democracy, and personal liberty which is ultimately superior to social and cultural differences. The main point is that this rational concept is not opposed to the social context from the outside but can be rendered compatible with this context via the universal element intrinsic to human nature, societies being transformed in light of these universal values. What Bernard Williams refers to as the 'intellectual irreversibility of the Enlightenment' refers precisely to the universal relevance of ‘rational’ values, common to all humanity, bringing intellectual cohesion and cogency to moral and social ideals (Williams 2002:254).

The strength of the contemporary reaction against the universal values of the ‘rational’ Enlightenment in the form of Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Postcolonialism, nationalism, or individualism is not in itself proof of the moral or political ‘failure of the Enlightenment project', as Maclntyre puts it (1983:62). On the contrary, the crisis of morality within capitalist modernity derives from opposition to Enlightenment values, a continuing and quite deliberate resistance to the equality as well as to the democracy of the ‘Rational’ Enlightenment’s universal ethic and common good, an opposition which began in the late seventeenth century in the reaction against Leibniz, Descartes and Spinoza. However ‘common sensical’ the idea of reason being slave to the passions may sound, the price of such ‘sober’ empiricism against wild eyed rationalism is paid by broad sections of humanity suffering unjust and iniquitous and exploitative relations. The bitter irony is that Postmodernist thinkers insisting on the moral and political 'failure of the Enlightenment project', equating reason with a totalitarian politics (Laclau 1990), engage in a species of Counter-Enlightenment which is little different from the reactionary critics of Enlightenment. Without the universal standard of reason there is merely an irreducible subjectivism with no possibility of adjudicating between different values. If all values are equally valid in these post-Enlightenment times, then there is no reason to argue against injustice in favour of justice. Without reason and its universal component, politics and ethics have nothing to offer the poor, the excluded, the oppressed and the exploited. That is the price of rendering reason the slave of the passions. This is precisely what Plato understood when he came to order human nature, putting appetite and desire in their appropriate place beneath reason. The subtitle of Plato’s Republic is ‘Concerning Justice’. The passions do not and can never deliver justice. Reason, with its ethical component and universal reach, should rule.

Habermas has been alive to this Counter-Enlightenment from the first, calling the French poststructuralists ‘young conservatives’. The problem with poststructuralism and postmodernism is not just the view that all values are equally valid – whether equally true or untrue doesn’t matter since adjudication is not possible – but that it easily becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy'. The democratic, egalitarian, and libertarian aspirations of the Rational Enlightenment were resisted from the start. The charges made against an abstracted reason detached from society and history were made then. Which is why there is a need to be clear from the first that any criticism of the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ is motivated not by a rejection of Enlightenment values but by a criticism of those institutions and processes which block their realisation and of those approaches – yes, too abstract – which make it impossible to embody those values. The ‘failure’ in the modern world is not that of the Enlightenment or of Enlightenment thinkers but of contemporary thought and politics in occluding the foundation of 'modern' ideas of individual freedom, democracy, equality, and the universalist morality based on justice. Far from ‘the passions’ being the foundation of modern freedom, they are the forces blocking its true and full realisation, vices of avarice, egoism, competition, jealousy, anger being encouraged and inflated within the institutions of market society.

What makes Rousseau’s philosophy so vibrant and meaningful is its grounding in the most profound questions of being. Rousseau valued rational understanding as much as any philosopher. He also felt that this reason was thin and misleading if it is concerned with pure intellect detached from human being. Hence Rousseau’s view that true philosophy rests upon an inner determination which makes it clear that the philosopher loves the truth rather than merely wants to identify it. Philosophy needed to rest on something more profound in the human ontology. For Rousseau, the philosophical enterprise is inextricably connected with a consideration of being as a whole. Limited to intellectual activity alone, philosophy is not a genuine search for truth and is certain to leave the most important questions unanswered to the extent that it fails to engage with humanity’s whole existence. Philosophers need to penetrate beyond the intellect to identify the principles which were ‘engraved in the human heart in indelible characters’ (i.1021) and so find truth in the comprehension of the depths of being. This exploration of the inner landscape is genuine philosophy. In coming to understand essential being, the philosopher would come to comprehend the fundamental features of human society, thus reaching the level of universal principle. The moral ought-to-be of philosophy is thus grounded in something real, in human nature and its potentialities, not in something impossibly ideal, some abstract standard. Rousseau purported to give human beings a vision of the ideal human society that they would all, by nature, create and flourish in if they were to become truly human beings. For Rousseau, this concern with the problem of the ‘nature of man’ was incompatible with the more abstract concerns of traditional metaphysics (ii.699).

The most striking thing about Rousseau is his rationalism. Frequently considered as a ‘back to nature’ philosopher who values the ‘primitive’ and the simple, Rousseau believes above all that human beings are rational animals. Rousseau is part of that rational tradition which extends from Plato to Spinoza and after, which believes that the more human beings are rational, the more they are free. The reason that Rousseau embraces reason so firmly as an instrument of knowledge is on account of its essentially natural character. Human beings are rational by nature; they have a rational nature which they use in order to realise their potentialities. In affirming the natural goodness of all genuine human capacities, Rousseau identifies reason to be one of the most striking and effective of them all. Further, reason is a powerful safeguard against tyranny, whether the tyranny of passion or human will. The development of the rational capacity enables human beings to protect against the tyranny of others through the ability to distinguish the universal truths available to personal inspection from any irrational opinions which human authority may attempt to impose. There may well be many truths which are beyond reason, but it is impossible that any known truth could ever be against reason.

Whilst feeling enables human beings to love the good, only reason makes it possible to know the good. Certainly, reason will degenerate into error when it is abstracted from the other human powers. However, the activity of reason will certainly be beneficial when it is properly related to the fundamental needs of the self.

One of Rousseau’s most significant arguments is that reason makes it possible for human beings to identify meaningful relations between themselves and their environment; reason, that is, enables human beings to organise their inner lives in connection with the outside world. ‘Reason is the faculty of ordering all the faculties of our soul in accordance with the nature of things and their relations with us’ (iv.1010).

Rousseau’s rationalism, therefore, is predicated upon the connection between human nature within and without, extending the relation between each individual and all individuals within human society to a relation between society and nature. Ontology and ecology are thus united as different aspects of one and the same nature. The active quality of reason enables human beings to transcend the mere ‘sensation’ of empiricism. Through this active rational quality human beings are able to go beyond the realm of ‘images’, which are merely the mental expressions of the objects of sense, to the realm of ‘ideas’, which are the ‘notions of objects determined by relationships’ (iv.344).

For Rousseau, then, philosophy does not concern truth or knowledge or intellect as values in themselves but only in relation to a profound examination of and reflection upon all of the many aspects of human nature and how this nature is expressed and embodied in relation to the world.

Rousseau’s work is thus separated into two parts – the early works of criticism and the later works of construction. In the early writings, Rousseau purports to reveal the evils of modern civilisation, ‘destroying the illusory prestige which gives us a stupid admiration for the instruments of our misfortune’. Having identified the problems in the early writings, Rousseau in the later writings proposes an effective remedy (i.934/5).

‘Back to nature’ to Rousseau would have meant the repudiation of the civic bond uniting each and all in favour of an isolated existence of warring monads. Rousseau’s position is far too complicated to be grasped in terms of ‘back to nature’ slogans. Rousseau rejects both the possibility and the desirability of returning to the happiness of the past. That happiness is lost and lost for good. Rousseau’s critical rejection of the corrupt present is focused on going forward to nature, to the full and free realisation of human nature within physical nature. Rousseau is clear on this point: ‘Human nature does not regress and one can never go back to the times of innocence and equality when one has once left them’ (i.935). Thus Rousseau follows his criticism of contemporary corruption with constructive arguments for a civilisation beyond corruption. As against notions of going ‘back to nature’, Rousseau argues in favour of going forwards to the realisation of human nature.

Rousseau sought to give a rational account not merely of the existence of society but specifically of the good society. The good society is the constituent part of human happiness and well-being and rests upon the creation and maintenance of a social bond that is capable of bringing individuals together whilst leaving them as free as they were in the state of nature. The unity of the social bond makes possible a greater, richer freedom for individuals.

Both Rousseau and Hobbes argue that the coercive force of the state ends the state of nature by creating a political body based upon the will of the sovereign power. The difference is that Rousseau’s sovereign is not external to the people, as in Hobbes, but actually is the people. And given that the people are united by the general will the common force of politics is not coercion, but the reason of citizens. Human beings create a form of association in which each associate realises autonomy under the general will. The state does not disappear for Rousseau, but would indeed pass away as an apparatus based upon coercion as opposed to an association of citizens as moral agents. Thus a political association which organises human beings under a coercive apparatus would be transformed into an association of autonomous moral agents who coordinate themselves through the internal compulsion of reason.

Rousseau’s political philosophy can therefore be conceived in terms of the problem of securing and ensuring the freedom of human beings in the necessary transition of individuals from the asocial natural to the social civil world. Rousseau is concerned fundamentally with the problem of how the freedom of the individual and of the whole community can be reconciled so as to make the one consistent with the other. Rousseau is searching for the principles which would make such a reconciliation of each individual and all individuals a morally valid and legitimate act constituting political order. Rousseau’s critique of contemporary society and politics is fundamentally moral and his recommendation of the social contract rests upon an underlying philosophy of human freedom as both rational and reciprocal. Reason must be placed in control if freedom is to be realised. But Rousseau’s reason is quite distinct from that of the philosophes. Rousseau is not directing an intellectual criticism against identifiable ills and superstitions that accompany contemporary society, which can be isolated and remedied by piecemeal administrative tinkering or simply by the exchange of error for ‘truth’. Rather, Rousseau’s critique rests upon the ground that existing society is based upon premises which deny the freedom of the individual and is therefore inimical to the moral dignity of human beings as free and rational beings. The task is to conceive that kind of political and social order which corresponds to such principles and thus secures the freedom of the individual.

The division of society into rich and poor is an obvious obstacle to the de jure state envisaged by Rousseau. Rousseau is aware of this and argues that in such a state ‘no citizen should be rich enough to be able to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself’ (SC II.II). Thus the de jure state tolerates ‘neither rich people nor beggars’. From riches and poverty only tyranny results:

"These two conditions, naturally inseparable, are equally fatal to the general welfare; from the one class springs tyrants, from the other, the supporters of tyranny; it is always between these that the traffic in public liberty is carried on; the one buys and the other sells."

Rousseau, Social Contract II.II

"We must illuminate his reason with new ideas, and warm his heart with new feelings, so that he will learn that he can best expand his being and multiply his happiness by sharing them with his fellow men"

Rousseau, Social Contract, original version

Rousseau’s educational reforms would raise a new generation to be psychologically independent, possessing a sense of self that was not linked to performance in a competitive social system. Rousseau sought to create educational enclaves that would protect children from environing social pressures. Free from external conventions and constraints, the children would be brought up to discover and to trust themselves, in the process developing authentic identities of their own. ‘All wickedness comes from wickedness. Make man strong and he will be good’ (Émile, I 33). For Rousseau, growing up amounted to individuals growing into their own true selves; and the true self would be strong enough to be good in the world. Security here rests on each individual having a sense of their own self, knowing who they were, and thus not having to prove their self in competition in which victory is earned at one another’s expense. Such realised selves would be able to enter into human relationships based on sharing and giving, on reciprocity and mutuality based on a plenitude that stemmed from the fullness of self. Such cooperating beings would generate and sustain a public life based upon the active participation of all and which would be a medium of self-realisation and self-expression. Such a society implies an extensive public sphere based on the extension of public spaces for the interaction and intercourse of citizens. Rousseau could conceive of the enlargement of the state power precisely because it was constituted by the full and active participation not simply of the people but of the authentic, autonomous, outward looking, other regarding citizens who constituted the people. The state would be dynamically powered from below, its policies and actions being directly and strictly controlled from by the people. Rousseau’s portrayal of the communal festival defined an ideal in which private and public happiness united to show how the path to individuality and communality was one and the same.

In affirming human capacities for improvement, Rousseau is able to critically assess modern political and social institutions on account of their obstructing human growth and development, indeed on account of their perverting human nature and preventing human beings from becoming what they potentially are.

Rousseau thus emerges as a democratic philosopher who not only criticises tyranny as inimical to human freedom but demands that form of state which would facilitate human freedom in terms of the full development of the individual personality in an appropriate environment.

"The politicians of the ancient world were always talking of morals and virtue; ours speaking of nothing but commerce and money. One of them will tell you that in such a country a man is worth just as much as he will sell for at Algiers; another, pursuing the same mode of calculation, finds that in some countries a man is worth nothing; and in others still less than nothing; they value men as they do droves of oxen."

DAS 1973:16

"Let our politicians condescend to lay aside their calculations for a moment, to reflect on these examples, let them learn for once that money, though it buys everything else cannot buy morals and citizens."

DAS 1973:17

Rousseau argues that in a society split between haves and have-nots, it is ‘vain and chimerical’ for the state to guarantee every man equal protection of ‘whatever he has’. Legal and political equality is merely abstract in conditions in which economic inequality ensures that some live their lives in a state of dependence upon others. Given the unity of the state and civil society, the state will ‘take the part of the strong against the weak, and of him who has against him who has not…’ (Émile IV 198). Since ‘laws are always useful to those who have, and harmful to those who have nothing’, political and legal equality can be a force for autonomy only in a social system in which ‘all have something and no one has too much’ (Contract, I.9 367). Thus Rousseau was not concerned with ensuring a strict equality of wealth, a precise distribution in which all received equal amounts. Rousseau’s point is along the lines that it is not power that corrupts but its absence. If all have some power to be autonomous then they would be free from the domination and exploitation of others, even if they should have more power. All individuals would have power enough to be autonomous. Inequality is a destructive force when it compels individuals to depend on others in order to exist. In this manner Rousseau argued that wealth should be distributed so that ‘no citizen should be rich enough to be able to buy another, and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself’ (II.11 392).

"It is not enough to say to the citizen, be good; they must be taught to be so; and even example, which is in this respect the first lesson, is not the sole means to be employed; patriotism is the most efficacious: for .. every man is virtuous when his particular will is in all things comfortable to the general will, and we voluntarily will what is willed by those whom we love."

"Do we wish man to be virtuous? Then let us begin by making them love their country: but how can they love it, if their country be nothing more to them than to strangers and afford them nothing but what it can refuse nobody?"

Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy 1973:130 131

Rousseau thus raises the question of political alienation. How is it that human beings feel that their country is something foreign to them? How can human beings come to be at home in the world? Patriotism is possible only if human beings can identify themselves, in their essential being or will, with their country.

"Let our country then show itself the common mother of her citizens; let the advantages they enjoy in their country endear it to them; let the government leave them enough share in the public administration to make them feel that they are at home; and let the laws be in their eyes only the guarantee of the common liberty. These rights, great as they are, belong to all men: but without seeming to attack them directly, the ill will of rulers may in fact easily reduce their effect to nothing. The law, which may thus abuse, serves the powerful at once as a weapon of offence, and as a shield against the weak; and the pretext of the public good is always the most dangerous scourge of the people. What is perhaps most necessary, and perhaps most difficult, in government, is rigid integrity in doing strict justice to all, and above all in protecting the poor against the tyranny of the rich. The greatest evil has already come about, when there are poor men to be defended and rich men to be restrained."

PE 1973:133/4

Rousseau makes some very incisive comments on social inequality, going beyond redistributive measures to overcome the division between rich and poor to address the social mechanisms generating that social inequality in the first place. In terms that recall Plato, Rousseau defines the security of citizenship.

"It is, therefore, one of the most important functions of government to prevent extreme inequality of fortunes; not by taking away wealth from its possessors, but by depriving all men of means to accumulate it; not by building hospitals for the poor, but by securing the citizens from becoming poor."

PE 1973:134

The crucial question, as Rousseau understood, concerns not wealth and its division but the means to accumulate wealth and the mechanisms of increasing division between rich and poor. Rousseau’s concern with the question was motivated by his concern that all human beings should become citizens.

"There can be no patriotism without liberty, no liberty without virtue, no virtue without citizens; create citizens and you have everything you need; without them, you will have nothing but debased slaves, from the rulers of the state downwards."

PE 1973:135

Rousseau is quick to note the irony of a modern society which claims superiority over the ancients over its absence of slaves is a society which is subjected to more subtle and intrinsic forms of dependence. ‘Civil man lives and dies in enslavement’ (Social Contract iv.253). This tendency of modern civilization to pass off its sophisticated systems of bondage as freedom is the central theme running throughout Rousseau’s writing. The original purpose of existence is given in the act of being ‘born free’; nevertheless, the modern individual is everywhere ‘in chains’. These chains are not merely those of authoritarian political institutions and laws but are of social conventions, customs, systems, ultimately embracing the very subjectivities of people. The modern individual is in bondage to external things and can only live in a condition of dependence upon these things. In the process, the individual is denuded of moral strength, coming to consider the false wants of the artificial environment to be real needs necessary to existence. The endless pursuit of false goals results in a perversion and a progressive abatement of personal life.

Living an inauthentic existence, human beings become strangers to themselves, in time coming to lose all sense of being, of having an inner core which is capable of conferring unity and order on their existence.

And with alienation from being comes alienation from place.

Rousseau identifies the pernicious influence of urban life as one of the principal causes of this alienation. Rousseau slams towns as the ‘abyss of the human race’, diverting individuals away from what their nature indicates they ought to be and infusing them with the false values of artificial being.

"Men are not meant to be heaped up in ant-hills but to be scattered over the earth they cultivate. The more they gather together, the more they corrupt one another. The infirmities of the body as well as the vices of the soul are the inevitable effect of this excessive concourse. Of all the animals, man is the one who can least live in herds. Men heaped together like sheep would soon perish. Man’s breath is fatal to his fellows." (iv.276/7).

Civilisation is a process which estranges human beings from their selves, from their being, from others but also from place, from an external world that has become an alienated environment. The alienation of the outer world is accompanied by a condition of internal conflict. In having to live as other than his or her true self, the individual is incapable of satisfying the ontological need for personal unity and is constantly at war with himself; internally restless and tormented, the individual is compelled to pursue happiness in external things and activities which can never bring true fulfilment. Therefore, in contrast to primitive people, who lived peaceful, harmonious lives, the modern individual is exists permanently ‘in contradiction with himself’.

The condition of inner contradiction which afflicts the modern person is expressed as a persistent anxiety. In living outside himself or herself, detached from inner being, the individual is subject to a permanent restlessness and insecurity, striving to achieve aims which are false in corresponding to the imperatives of artificial society rather than to the human ontology. The attainment of external goals can achieve a superficial ‘happiness’ but never the real contentment that comes from a genuine happiness. Rousseau draws the conclusion that, in being driven by an insatiable appetite for personal advantage, the myriad activities and ambitions of modern civilisation simply express the modern individual’s estrangement from and inability to realise his/her true nature.

Rousseau’s argument is premised on the assumption that the real pleasures of an individual ‘derive from his nature and spring from his labours, relationships and needs’.

The emphasis that Rousseau places upon the virtue and wisdom of Jesus corresponds with his fundamental assumptions concerning the inherent goodness of the natural order. Jesus’ role in living a life of example is to encourage individuals to understand their own nature and hence find their proper place in the universal order of life.

Rousseau’s crucial point – emphasised throughout the whole body of his work – is that the order of the universe is the ultimate reality towards which all individuals should direct their aspirations, above and beyond calculations of their own private, selfish advantage. Human beings attain happiness, freedom, fulfilment only in finding their proper place in the universal order of things.

Rousseau is concerned with the perfect experience of our own being. Only then will human beings know a condition of ‘happiness, strength, and freedom’, and the ‘supreme felicity’ of being themselves. In the contemplation of God’s natural universal order, human beings will attain a correspondingly powerful sense of their own reality. The contemplation of God’s creation is thus the source of the earthly satisfaction of human beings. ‘I acquiesce in the order He establishes, certain that I myself shall enjoy this order one day and find my felicity in it, for what sweeter felicity can there be than to find myself part of a system in which everything is good’ (iv.603)’.

For Rousseau, the glory of virtue and the consciousness of one’s own essential being form the highest degree of happiness. As he puts it: ‘Supreme enjoyment is in contentment with oneself; is to earn this satisfaction that we are placed on earth and endowed with freedom, tempted by the passions, and restrained by conscience’ (iv.587). Rousseau goes on to write of the ‘pure pleasure’ which ‘springs from contentment with oneself’ (iv.591). The good man therefore finds ultimate happiness in the enjoyment of his own nature and in living in accordance with the principle which makes him what he is. This is the case at every level of human experience.

Anyway, I feel an affinity for Rousseau from within, always have done. Even where I think he goes wrong – which is in many places, but that may be me going wrong – I feel he has the root of the matter in him, and that makes me try to work out why he would make things so difficult for himself. He knew that the world was good, and he knew human beings to be good. He affirmed natural goodness, which was part of his belief in a Good God. And that made him keenly aware that the world we were living in had gone badly wrong in some way. He sought to know why, and what could be done to get back on the good road, as he puts it in the Social Contract. I’m not sure whether Rousseau ever or never knew love and goodness and compassion and friendship, but he affirmed them to be real and true, and he sought them in the here and now; in reporting on his own personal searches he told us we could have such things, so long as we were prepared to be truthseekers ourselves. He affirmed that there is an order of justice and that, however wrong we may well go in our directions and actions, it is always within our power to find our way back to that right order. For all the intricacies of the arguments, and they can be complicated, his concerns stem from this innate feeling for justice, and the thirst for meaning that comes from that. I've gone through all the philosophers. I’ve just been re-reading my work on Spinoza's rather brilliant but bloodless intellectual ethics. I go with this tradition I'm in – natural law and rational freedom and a bit of everything that fits, that feels right, what can be reasoned, a commitment to the bedrock principles and a cool support for, but scepticism of, the symbols which represent them.

Rousseau is open in his approach. We can trust our feelings, they are our surest guide, our innately good guide to a Good God. Of course, Rousseau doesn't leave it there. He separates these feelings from misleading passions and gives us ethical imperatives. This is the aspect that Kant, the greatest and sternest moralist of the eighteenth century, saw immediately as being of cardinal importance in Rousseau. But Rousseau doesn't sever reason and emotion as Kant does. He gives us all that Kant gives us, and so much more besides.

I have a title in mind for the book "Rousseau's Ecology of the Heart." I may put "Moral Ecology" in there to make it clear that Rousseau is a ‘proper’ philosopher. And thereby put people off. I want to emphasize the 'common moral reason' that Kant took from Rousseau. There is a book on Diderot in which the author dismisses Rousseau as an advocate of ‘a vague morality of the heart.’ That dismissal is utterly idiotic. Those materialist philosophes loathed Rousseau when he lived, and their epigones still give the poor man’s ghost grief. In terms of ethical imperatives and intellect and the construction of arguments and presentation of visions, values and virtues, he is classes above them all. Hume knew it and Kant knew it. And they are the real intellectual heavyweights of the period, not the idle scribblers and intellectualisers of the world of letters.

The thing about ‘choosing’ justice and injustice is this, though - with an order of justice as ‘pre-ordained’ (Leibniz), what Rousseau calls ‘eternal truths’, you can always find your way back home. The good thing about Rousseau is the way that he doesn’t just state truth and goodness but emphasises that these have to be willed. There is a choice involved, and Rousseau makes it clear that it is in choosing that human beings come to will and know the good and the true, and come to love these things to as moral beings. These things cannot just be given, they need to be willed. Rousseau is impressive. I am heartily fed up with climate activists/communicators/scientists who put themselves in the position of environmental philosopher-kings in order to give us the truth and demand action on the part of governments and citizens, as if mere passive agents obeying the dictates of the enlightened few. That’s not the way human life operates. It never has and it never will. That approach will ensure the failure of any cause, however just (and I certainly agree with the need for climate action and social justice). That, I take, to be a form of moral bullying and blackmailing – here is the truth, do as we say, or else. They keep screaming the obvious and remain on the top soil of scientific fact and lamentations about stupid greedy humans. I try to treat this with real moral depth. The truth cannot just be given, it has to be willed - hence Rousseau's general will. I take Marx to have grasped Rousseau's point here:

'Nothing prevents us, therefore, from lining our criticism with a criticism of politics, from taking sides in politics, i.e. from entering into real struggles and identifying ourselves with them. This does not mean that we shall confront the world with new doctrin­aire principles and proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means that we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world. We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with the true campaign-slogans. Instead we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes or not.'

Marx Early Writings, Letters 1975

This involves much more than reason. Knowledge has to be affective as well as cognitive - it has to move people in the way that Dante describes himself as being turned at the end of The Comedy. As Rousseau writes in Emile: ‘Though reason enables us to know the truth, only conscience can make us love it, i.e. regard it as an end in itself.’ (Emile, 1, 48.) It is thus conscience, rather than reason alone, that motivates and sustains truth-seeking action on the part of human agents: 'Too often reason deceives us... but the conscience never deceives; it is man's true guide.' (Emile, IV, 348). The lesson is clear: separate reason from the motivational economy of human beings, and it will be impotent and unacted upon. ‘Take away the sentiment interieur, and I defy all the modern philosophers together to prove to Berkley the existence of [physical] bodies.' ('Lettre a Franquieres', C.G. xix, 54.) It takes more than the presentation of facts and evidence to persuade human beings of their truth; they have to feel the within, if they are to act on it. Rousseau remains impeccably rational in arguing that the outer fact is confirmed by the inner certitude, but note the important switch that Rousseau has effected here. The judgment is not more geometrico but moral, what Rousseau often refers to as 'useful' in terms of human needs and concerns. Rousseau thus shows what is required to effect the transition of truths from the realm of theoretical reason to the realm of practical reason, the social world, the world of ethics and politics, the world of human choices and actions. Truth remains objectively grounded, but the human subject must come to 'love' it in order to appreciate its significance and act in light of it. That is precisely what Rousseau charges the philosophers with not doing. In that respect, Rousseau enlarges and enriches the enlightenment. For Rousseau, the philosophers, with their furor systemicus, seek to instruct others, but not themselves. (Emile, IV, 285).

Rousseau is concerned that science not be destructive to sagesse. This does not mean that he rejects scientific truth and rationality in favour of wisdom, but that the two go together. Above all, Rousseau, in the manner of Plato, seeks the integration and balancing of all the human faculties. Imbalance here will issue in an imbalance in the external world, separating human beings from that world, from each other and from their powers, with destructive results.

Rousseau seeks to take human beings out of the social cave of rival dogmatisms and fanaticisms, and put them in touch with truths and values that yield a true general interest. In line with the free-thinking philoso­phers, Rousseau’s targets are indeed the church authorities. But Rousseau also makes it clear that the philosophes are in his sights too, for being every bit as absolutist and doctrinaire as the religious authorities they reject. Indeed, Rousseau even considered the two rival fanaticisms as capable of joining together to form the one single fanaticism determined to storm and capture the inner citadel of the con­sciences of each and all. (Confessions, IX, O.C. i, 435; XI, O.C. I, 567). Rousseau refuses to take sides in the war between the theists and atheists, between dogmatic religious authorities and equally dogmatic materialists. He sees these rival camps as partners in peddling unwarranted certainties, each determined to wipe the other out in the war to claim the consciences of men and women.

How Rousseau was ever considered to be a part of the modernist cult of ‘progress’ is a mystery. He peddles no false prospectus and instead mounts a critical rear-guard action against rival dogmatisms and fanaticisms. He offers no certainties. What he does do is argue that human beings have been corrupted by their own actions in history and are confined in a social cave of their own making. If evil is a matter of human self-construction it can be remedied by a reconstruction. Human salvation can only come through history. But this does not mean that salvation is immanent in the historical process. Rousseau is frequently criticised for presenting a historicism of this type, but it is a complete misreading of Rousseau’s position. It is easy to understand how that misinterpretation could come to be made. It was the German thinkers whom Rousseau inspired – Kant, Fichte, Hegel in the first instance – who took Rousseau’s social resolution of theodicy, the problem of evil, and attached it history, in order to recover reason and civilisation from Rousseau’s condemnation and direct them in a direction leading to a happy ending. We may or may not agree with the views of Kant, Fichte, Hegel or, later, Marx here, and evaluate the forces immanent in history and driving it to a necessary salvation. I’d be concerned to argue that even this position does not amount to a historicism that sees truth and value as things which are historically created and recreated, with no greater standing. But with respect to Rousseau, there is not the merest hint of any such historicism in any case. That’s a controversy for the German wing of the ‘rational freedom’ I argue for. Any salvation for Rousseau would amount to a profoundly human act against any history that is found to be in violation of human dignity. There is no hint of Hegel’s ‘slaughter-bench’ in Rousseau. Rousseau is not a historicist of any kind. He states his position very clearly in Emile: 'Man is very strong when he is content to be what he is.' Rousseau’s principal concern is not with the realisation through stages of a historical process of an ideal form of being, but with actual be-ing. In place of the corruption of the natural goodness of human beings through history, Rousseau seeks a recovery of health by human beings simply being what they are. This would be to supplant the social pattern of corruption in history by the natural pattern of birth, growth and decline. The possibility of immanent salvation, therefore, lies not in the historical process but in recovering a life that is lived in accordance with the beat of the human heart. The rhythm of the human heart is the rhythm of life. That’s the only historical pattern that Rousseau recognises.

Here is something on "the path" that is pertinent. In the Social Contract Rousseau cautioned:

“The general will is always right, but the judgment which guides it is not always enlightened. It has to be to made to see objects as they are, sometimes as they ought to appear to it, to show it the good road it is looking for and to protect it from the seduction of particular wills.” Rousseau intended this as an invitation to an education in civic virtue and fraternal love among citizens, where “one cannot offend against one of its members without attacking the body.”

Politics and the law are (self-)educative.

Voltaire called Rousseau a "tramp": a “tramp who would like to see the rich robbed by the poor, the better to establish the fraternal unity of man.”

Actually, although Rousseau does identify inequality as an evil, the idea that he valued government as an instrument of redistribution of redistribution is mere caricature – as also is Voltaire’s view that Rousseau wants us all back in nature crawling on all fours. Voltaire, the darling of the liberal Enlightenment, gets plenty wrong. But his errors have an appeal to some who think bourgeois society the best of all possible worlds. (Yes, he got Leibniz wrong as well, he didn't have the intellect capable of understanding Leibniz, as Lewis Mumford pointed out). Rousseau is all about moving forwards to a collective morality which would realize our nature, exchanging the individualism of a natural liberty for the richer social freedom of a civil liberty. He sought a social identity in which ‘no citizen should be rich enough to be able to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself’ (SC II.II). Thus the de jure state tolerates ‘neither rich people nor beggars’. From riches and poverty only tyranny results:

"These two conditions, naturally inseparable, are equally fatal to the general welfare; from the one class springs tyrants, from the other, the supporters of tyranny; it is always between these that the traffic in public liberty is carried on; the one buys and the other sells."

Rousseau, Social Contract II.II

Equality would be achieved in the social contract, human beings being bound and obligated only by those laws that they themselves have had a hand in making. That’s the radical egalitarian enlightenment, I say, as against the self-interested cosmopolitan liberals - that elitist enlightenment is at the end of its tether, and Rousseau could have shown us why from the first.

Voltaire, in common with most of the philosophes, was not very democratic. Not many people were in the eighteenth century. There is a suggestion that the enlightenment commitment to the truth that trumps all involves a fairly dismissive, not to say contemptuous, attitude to the people, the ‘canaille’ as Voltaire referred to them. The canaille will always remain the canaille, Voltaire observed. Shoemakers and servants could never become philosophers! In his fine book on Voltaire, Peter Gay does his level best to rescue the liberal hero of rationalism from his somewhat embarrassing attitude towards the common folk, but can dredge up only the odd scattered pro-democratic remark to put against the very many statements against democracy. It makes sense. The world was to be saved by reason, and reason was the possession of the philosophical few, the vanguard of enlightenment. Given sufficient time, and education from above, maybe everyone would come to be enlightened. In the meantime, the masses would remain ignorant allies of the priests. There is a moral and intellectual absolutism in such views that is every bit as reprehensible as the one being contested, one that is certainly hostile to democracy. Not the will of the people but the enthronement of reason was the primary objective, as if the two were mutually exclusive. It is to Rousseau’s credit that he sought to bring the two into active, dynamic relation in a self-educative politics, so that we are not left having to choose between the dictatorship of Reason and the democracy of ignorance. And it is to Kant's credit that he learned to appeal to the 'common moral reason' as a result of lessons taught by Rousseau.

Rousseau is the perfect foil to Voltaire, his radical egalitarian enlightenment forming a complete contrast to the intellectuals’ idea of enlightenment as a progress of an abstract idea, ‘truth’, ‘rationality’, ‘universality’ and all such other abstractions that empty the enlightenment of its practical, critical purchase.

The liberal Voltaire, educated, sophisticated, acidic, corrosive of customs and mores, enriching himself on the back of international trade, doyen of a social order which affirms that the self-interest of each promotes the welfare of all … is this is the enlightenment we are now being called on to defend? I say the failures of this top down modernising show why we need the larger, deeper, richer enlightenment of Rousseau - the radical egalitarian and in many ways organic enlightenment, one rooted in place, mores, folk wisdom.

Rousseau writes that he was 'struck by the sight of this poor man [Voltaire] prostrated, so to speak, by riches and glory for constantly declaiming bitterly against the miseries of this life and always finding that all was bad' (Conf IX.429/360). It was then that Rousseau "formed the crazy project of bringing him back to his senses and proving that all was well. Voltaire, while always appearing to believe in God, has always only really believed in the Devil, since his so-called God is just a malefactor who, according to him, takes pleasure only in harming us."

Bringing the world to its senses pretty much sums Rousseau up. A sensible transcendence.

Lewis Mumford hits the nail square on the head. The libertarian philosophes courted despots in the name of freedom, because truth trumped all for them. Rousseau’s spirit was much more generous, his approach much more rounded – the truth is not merely to be given, it must be willed.

‘Rousseau's role was a quite different one from that of the corrosive Hume. In breaking with the existing habits and conventions of society, he even broke with its typical product, the sensationist philosophy itself. Though Rousseau was at one with Hume in giving a fresh sanction to impulse, he sought to bestow even on his most singular beliefs the force of a social prescription. This radical belief in man sprang out of Rousseau's capacity for love, and it is what made his influence so much more fecund, so much more rejuvenating, than that of his great rival Voltaire.

Voltaire, the petted Lucifer of the salons, satirized, criticized, and condemned the more obvious abuses of his society, in particular those associated with the Christian Churches: he did this on one condition, namely, that their correction should not deplete his income or reform his habits of life. The most unsparing of critics, the one institution Voltaire regarded as sacrosanct was himself. Voltaire laughed at Leibnitz, whom he was incapable of understanding, because he had said that this was the best of all possible worlds, in that it provided the maximum amount of order compatible with the maximum amount of variety. But Voltaire demanded that for himself this should, in fact, be the best world possible, and he scrupled at no dodge that would make it so.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was far more conservative than either Hume or Voltaire: what he rejected lay on the surface; what he valued and clung to were the humble things that a sophisticated age either took lightly or altogether despised: the wisdom of Jesus, the wealth of the lowly. Rousseau knew that the outer structure of society was rotten and was about to collapse.

Rousseau, with all his frailties and minor vanities, was a much larger figure than any of his contemporaries: he was the Lao-tse of an age that gave its homage to a Machiavellian Confucius.

To Voltaire, Rousseau once wrote: "You enjoy, but I hope; and hope embellishes all."

In Rousseau the revolt against despotism, regimentation, exploitation, slavery, polite conformity, callous mechanization, stifling luxury, life-denying custom, received both its formulation and its incarnation. His words rang all over Europe and America, and his visible presence reinforced them. He not merely threw the ornate rococo costume off the figure of contemporary man: he demolished the elegant automaton he found beneath it.’

Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man, 272-273.

The only thing that worries me is the idea of entering a self-made world that is the product of wilful projects, the secularisation and socialisation of theodicy, the idea of a social sin and redemption through social action - the divinisation of the individual, the recasting of justice as social justice, and the resulting divinisation of political society or the state. We are facing the deleterious consequences of what Max Weber called the 'disenchantment of the world.' The stripping of the world of its inherent worth, a despiritualisation.

I'd caution against tendencies to anthropocentric humanism by underlining that Rousseau retains a commitment to transcendent norms. His general will is his version of the natural law.

Defend the Enlightenment? Read Rousseau, and you'll realize it's a project that misfired for its lack of faith in the truth-seeking capacities of 'ordinary' folk - Rousseau's enlightenment stands in need of realization. And calls for a truth that is in touch with the common moral reason

Private interest trumps the common good, wrote the Pope in Laudato Si. We should not expect appeals to the common good to override private interest within prevailing social relations – the social identity connecting the individual good and social good does not exist. The problem is not that the common good is impossible but that it is unavailable in anything other than abstract forms in these conditions. Political ideology has proven stronger than scientific and moral appeal. The only surprise is that we are surprised. We live in a world of social relations and interests, and the views expressed articulate social positions in the world. How to achieve the universal good in a world of particular interests? How to reconcile short-term particular interests to the long-term common good? How to rig social relations so that universality and commonality is forced at the everyday level, forming the social content of the state as the ethical agency of the common good.

‘Make each one love and see himself in the others, so that all may be the better united (d’Alembert 1948:169). By achieving a unity of existence, individuals are returned to the ‘peace, freedom, equity and innocence’ which are the preconditions of ‘solid happiness’.

Rousseau harmonizes the ideal of individuality and the ideal of community so as to show that the good person and the good citizen are one and the same being.’

‘The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.’

Rousseau SC I.VI

Rousseau thus justifies political obligation through the reciprocal act and relation upon which political society is based. Rousseau returns to the relation between each individual and all individuals.

‘The undertakings which bind us to the social body are obligatory only because they are mutual; and their nature is such that in fulfilling them we cannot work for others without working for ourselves.’

Rousseau, SC II.iv

Here’s to public life, happiness as a common endeavour, and a recovery of the true meaning of politics – polites – those concerned with public affairs. And here's to setting public life within a sense of the sacred - 'a will moves the universe and animates nature' (Em IV.576/273).

I have an affinity for Rousseau. Poor Rousseau! After Hume, no one but Kant seems to have taken a shine to him! Which isn’t bad company at all. In the History of Western Philosophy, written during the Second World War, Bertrand Russell wrote this: ‘At the present time, Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke.’ Which merely goes to prove how very great philosophers can speak a great pile of clueless drivel. I cut my philosophical teeth on Russell and found him very sane and sober. But the more I revisit him, the more he seems … well, not just dull, but pompous, po-faced and often so incredibly wrong and not very deep at all. Dry and intellectual, which may explain the shrill and hysterical tone he brought to his political campaigning. A liberal living far too long after the death of any social content and relevance that liberalism may once have had. But I should take great delight in taking the eminent Russell to task here, for a careful reading of Rousseau – the very thing one has a right to expect of a philosopher – would indicate plainly that Rousseau would be highly critical of these very ‘totalitarian’ leaders he is supposed to have inspired. The idea that Rousseau’s general will is a blank checque for demagogic leaders to draw upon the public realm is the very antithesis of Rousseau’s own definition. He got himself into difficulties with this seemingly self-contradictory notion – a will is personal, so how can it be individual? – precisely because he needed to bind subjective willing within the context of objective standards. Rousseau argued that ultimate political authority rested with the people and that, therefore, sovereignty could neither be alienated nor represented. Whatever the institutional difficulties of that notion, it certainly rules out the idea of demagogic and totalitarian leaders. And it doesn’t mean that Rousseau argued that the people were always right. Rousseau is at pains to show that whilst the general will is always right, individuals may not see it.

As he writes in the Social Contract: ‘The general will is always right, but the judgment which guides it is not always enlightened. It has to be to made to see objects as they are, sometimes as they ought to appear to it, to show it the good road it is looking for and to protect it from the seduction of particular wills.’

In the Discourse on Political Economy, Rousseau cautioned us to beware of those ambitious politicians who would seek power by claiming to represent the general will, but who did not embody its principles. He warned people not to be ‘seduced by private interests which some few skilful men succeed by their reputation and eloquence to substitute for the people’s own interest. Then the public deliberation will be one thing, and the general will another thing entirely.’

Rousseau argues for a moral freedom in which individuals learn to see their self-interest as bound up with the common interest, warning against sacrificing that true interest through the immediacy of selfish desires and through succumbing to persuasive arguments of those pursuing their own particular ends under the cloak of the common interest. Properly understood, Rousseau would lead to neither Churchill nor Roosevelt nor Hitler, and to reduce political philosophy and ethics to those narrow options says a great deal for the liberal mind. Rousseau’s argument is all about cultivating civic virtue and fostering fraternal love amongst virtuous citizens, creating a social identity and political community where ‘one cannot offend against one of its members without attacking the body.’ If all a liberal like Russell can see in that is Nazism, then that says all we need to know about the blinkers of liberalism as a false philosophy forever floundering on its false antinomies – individual and society – and forever defining individual liberty in the negative terms of non-interference. I shall be wasting few words on those sterile ‘debates’, focusing instead on the quality of Rousseau’s argument, which raises him well above Hobbes and Locke and those that followed in that tradition.

As a philosopher, Rousseau is not the greatest technically, there are many philosophers who are better than him. But they don't see as much or say as much as he does. Rousseau refused the title of philosopher frequently. But I think he rightfully claims it, for bringing philosophy back to its original purpose and its central question of living well and how human beings can come to live well together. It is interesting to consider Rousseau in light of something that the philosopher John Searle says:

‘Now, I admire the history of philosophy, but not for the right reasons. I don’t think I learnt a lot of truths from reading Leibniz or Kant. I think Leibniz was probably the most intelligent person who ever lived, but I think his philosophical views are probably pretty much mistaken. I mean, the bit about the monads and so on. Kant was probably the greatest philosopher that ever lived and he is an obsession, but I think the whole thing is based on a mistake – that you can’t have a direct knowledge of things in themselves. You can. I’m looking at a desk and I see a thing in itself.’

Searle: it upsets me when I read the nonsense written by my contemporaries

I don’t doubt that both Leibniz and Kant are much superior to Rousseau as technical philosophers. But I am absolutely certain that I have learned a lot more truths from Rousseau than I have from Leibniz, Kant, Descartes, Spinoza combined. Technically, these are very great philosophers. But Rousseau has the root of the matter burning in his big and very tetchy, sensitive old heart. Technicalities aside, he sees what philosophy is really for. If it's technicalities people want, go for A.C. Grayling. He's competent and clear and cogent. In the aftermath of logical positivism, philosophy doesn’t generate new knowledge, just has a clearing out of accumulated rubbish every now and then. Philosophy as house cleaning and tidying. There’s a place for it. My room could do with it. But there would seem to be no place for a Derrida or a Foucault in such a world. Or me either, come to think of it. Philosophers reared in an empirical and analytical tradition are naturally blind and deaf to words that offer more than facts and self-evident logic. It’s just that within those parameters, there isn’t much to be said. They have given up their birthright to dwell in the house of language. If that’s all that there is to philosophy, I will happily look elsewhere, to art, music, poetry, literature, dance, religion, to life itself. Because there is little of any appeal to fact and logic. It’s a ‘so what?’ moment. Wittgenstein's silence is really the silence of philosophy on the really important questions.

I have plenty of writing lined up for publication. I’m not sure how clear and cogent it is at all. But I have things on ecology and ethics, on disclosure/imposure, transcendent truths and praxis-based truths, on Leibniz, Kant, Wittgenstein, the fabric of the universe, God, physics, Dante, music - and a very odd thing which examines the work of feminists who condemn philosophy as male projection, this endless search for proofs. Irigaray is very interesting. I think she's wrong, and say so, but only after a lengthy analysis. Because she is right in so many other ways. I’m not at all sure what people would make of it. I have several "introductions" which are actually self-contained philosophical essays. I shall clean them up, add source notes, take out the bad tempered polemic – if only people could read me letting fly! I’d lose some friends, certainly, and probably gain a lot of followers. I just need to polish and publish. And sail my own ship. That’s always been my ideal. Beholden to no-one and nothing, but the truth that is innate in the world. I have to row my own boat, no one else could do it. The work is waaaaaayyyy too much for others to digest and condense. There are odd things that would make no sense to anyone but me, I have to order them. My idea is this – momentum.

Vico is another great philosopher. My lecturer always claimed his case for God was only there to avoid the Inquisition, so I believed that for years. I now come to read Vico again, especially the distinction between things human beings have created and therefore can no - verum ipsum factum if memory serves - and nature - which God only know, actually does preserve a space outside of human self-creation and seems a very sage and sober viewpoint. My lecturers were hell bent on pressing on to Hegel and Marx and to the idea of human beings as self-conscious masters of the self-created universe. Instead of encouraging us to think critically for ourselves, they were giving us a story, historical reconstruction that lead in a very certain direction, one that they approved of.

Kant takes us so far, but he gives us a restrictive morality for modern market identities in which there is no direct connection between the individual good and the social good. It’s a regulative morality, a legalism, for a social state of war. Rousseau offers more, although he expresses doubts as to whether any more than a stern morality of duty and virtue along Kantian lines will be achieved.

Kant does himself no favours, he's not as attractive as Rousseau in his writing, and he is rather formal. He does express regret that he can never be a ‘vulgarizer’, that is, come to communicate his ethics in terms that people could understand directly. He saw the need to do this, but that was not his particular gift. Kant could never be a popularizer. But he's no fool. And I rather regret challenging him so directly via Aquinas now in 2012. That work Aquinas, Morality and Modernity has opened up a massive contradiction in my own work. I shall reconcile it all in this new (master)piece. I have been doing some heavy reading and I have a very sharp thesis in mind. I did rather argue that Kant didn’t engage directly with Aquinas and so is vulnerable to Thomist criticism. That remains true, I shall stand by that. But Kant’s strictures against metaphysical speculation on the basis of the limits of reason deserve much greater recognition and response than I gave there. If Kant didn’t engage at length with Aquinas, it would be because he wouldn’t have seen the need to. That point needs establishing. And when I write that Aquinas grounds the good in ontological nature, I need to show why Kant argued that such a notion is problematic. I do think that Kant is ultimately agnostic on the good and does sever reason from nature, thereby losing the grounds of the highest good we are charged with finding. But I need to argue the points a lot closer than I did.

Nietzsche criticized our ‘hyperbolic naïveté’, referring to the way in which human beings unduly project ideas into totalitarianisms. Marx is good on this, showing how the commonality and universality we deny in our social relations comes to be projected upwards and outwards to the level of the alienated state as ‘illusory’ community and general interest. That projection is a problem, but it’s the thwarted needs and concerns that activate that projection that needs to be addressed most of all.

The problem is one of socialisation and mediation, and how to create forms of the common life so as to extend the affections so that we treat all others equally, the same way we treat those with whom we are in close relation. Hence we need both love and justice. It's about extending loyalties, treating distant others with the equal respect and dignity with we treat those closest to us – the one coolly through law and principles, the other warmly through affection. We can do this on the basis of ‘little platoons.’ Rousseau doesn't use that phrase, that belongs to his critic Burke. But Burke didn't realise that Rousseau was writing for small scale republics grounded in place and patrie, not for the large centralised machine of atomistic parts

Resolving these issues in practice depends on the constitution through the little platoons, the intermediary associations that engage us directly, command our loyalties and create solidarities, and then network/federate us upwards and outwards to greater realms of human association and action. If all we have is the abstract public realm, then politics will collapse because it will lack any motivational purchase, commanding only allegiance to surrogates and simulated collectivities. I shall be writing on all of this. This is not a case against a public realm, the very opposite - it is a case against the way that social atomism below and political centralisation above go hand in hand as the abstraction of human beings from the forms of the common life. This is to make a strong case for a reinvigorated public, hence my criticisms of those who advocate local resisilience/communities/tribal cultures as against ‘alien’ forms of civilisation. That contrast is the easy part, but it is all based on the false antithesis between empty real and romantic alternative that Marx referred to in the Grundrisse. I'm not offering fake publics.

According to Nietzsche, nihilism arises when 'the highest values devaluate themselves'. He was onto something. He's far from being my favourite philosopher, but he has the nerve to point out emptiness when he sees it, and he sees it at the heart of liberal modernity. ‘Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?’ (Nietzsche) Nietzsche deserves an answer. Because in answering, we will shed our illusions. You will find the answer in Weberian disenchantment and Marxist commodification, the driving of value, meaning and purpose out of the world and its subjection to instrumental and scientific reason. That’s not the liberal self-image, of course. But as Rousseau himself argued, we should never mistake the mask for the real face.

The ‘rational freedom’ of Rousseau and Kant can do more than attempt a moral regulation of a diremptive social terrain on this, but it is vain, as Rousseau himself seemed to know, since the identity of power for the sake of power, limitless power with no end outside of it, are in place and need to be uprooted at the level of social identity and form of life. That latter would be Marx’s concern.

Quotes from Weber on disenchantment and the “dis-godding” of the world, the shedding of value from the world. As a result of modern rationalisation, we live in an objectively valueless world. And it shows in our culture and politics and the collapse of morality into arbitrary subjective choices:

‘The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.’

‘Who — aside from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences - still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world? If there is any such 'meaning', along what road could one come upon its tracks? If these natural sciences lead to anything in this way, they are apt to make the belief that there is such a thing as the 'meaning' of the universe die out at its very roots.’

‘Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but the proletarian has lost his rights.’

That is a pretty emphatic statement of the hollowness at the heart of liberal modernity, a world in which there is no good and evil, right or wrong any more. Those liberals who are only now complaining about a ‘post-truth’ have been the ones wearing the blinkers all along. We have been in this world for a long time now, and the fact they are only now coming to show some awareness reveals an awful lot about our predicament. We are living under the shadow of a Weberian modernity, trapped within the confines of the cage of rationalised capitalist modernity.

Rousseau was a theist, affirming a natural religion, without any metaphysical claims. He argued with Diderot over intelligent design, and cut the engagement short with the view that reason can say little and decide nothing here. That may sound like a copout. But it isn't. Kant was more systematic in putting metaphysics on another footing, this ending speculation on an ultimate reality that is inaccessible to reason. Rousseau's theism is rooted more in feeling and from there in communion and custom and mores and feeling and place and patrie. The idea is that that's the best we can hope for. All the rationalist deductive systems are neither here nor there.

As for patrie and rapports and mores, these allow me to link Rousseau’s commons to oikophilia, and the view that large scale ambitious projects (climate change etc) will fail unless grounded in love of place and small scale reasoning. The point is important because liberal critics continue to denounce Rousseau as a political rationalist propounding a ‘quasi-mathematical’ political reason which is imposed via the central state. That is a gross liberal misrepresentation that needs to be firmly checked, exposing some liberal antinomies and fallacies in the process. Rousseau gives many arguments which make it clear that he thought a large central state to be a 'machine' abstracted from the social organism, a false collectivity corresponding to individuals as no more than self-seeking atoms. If liberal critics shout totalitarianism here, and do so so consistently, then we need to ask what it is about their own philosophy that would lead them to such conclusions. What is it about their conception of the individual and of individual freedom that would lead them to see any attempt at a collective constraint, including that of law and self-assumed obligation, as an infringement on liberty? Above all, Rousseau sought to overcome the way in which the lives of individuals were made subject to the arbitrary will of others. He saw personal dependence as the greatest interference upon individual liberty, rendering a person subject to the arbitrary will of another. He sought to overcome this by the total surrender of each to all through an impersonal dependence of all upon law. Here we come to the false antithesis between individual and society and the notion of individual liberty as non-interference and the idea of government and law as alien and external rather than as things human beings constitute as social beings. Either way, there is constraint, a constraint that is internally given and voluntarily and collectively accepted or a constraint that is externally imposed. The price of liberal individual liberty is the external constraint of all – individual freedom in liberal terms is realised as a collective unfreedom, an unconscious and external totalitarianism as against Rousseau’s self-assumed, self-given collective constraint.

Tocqueville claimed to read Rousseau every day, and the influence shows in Tocqueville’s notion of the ‘habits of the heart.’ These are the things that knit society together and keep it together, giving a sense of identity and belonging. That comes straight from Rousseau. We have grounding, we have a home folks, there is meaning and there is purpose, we can come out of this age of purposeless materialism.

Physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson writes: “I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine this universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.” (Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (New York NY: Basic Books, 1979: 250).

There's a place for all of us: "Grant us, for endless length of days, In our true native land to be." (St. Thomas Aquinas).

What am I saying? I am saying that we are now in a position to buttress Rousseau’s defence of God, the immortal soul and free-will and make good his claims for ‘eternal truths’ in more than a self-legislating reason. Work in progress.