introduction - files.meetup.com body politic … · web viewmy focus on metaphor is also inspired...
TRANSCRIPT
The Anatomy of Democracy: Rousseau’s Body Politic and the General Will
Jeffery Zavadil, Ph.D.Arizona State University
February 2006
Abstract: I interpret the general will via Rousseau’s metaphor of the body politic. Older
examples of this metaphor were hierarchic due to crude anatomy, with the “head” of state
commanding the social body. Modern medical sophistication, e.g. discovery of the circulatory
and nervous systems, emphasized bodily interconnection and interdependence. This conceptual
shift transferred to Rousseau’s democratic body politic: in a healthy body politic the political
nervous system communicates with the administrative brain, conveying the general will of the
sovereign political body to the administration. The general will is a democratic diagnostic with
egalitarian social health as its substantive content.
Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 meeting of
the Northeastern Political Science Association in Boston, MA. I am grateful for the critical
comments of Terence Ball, Richard Dagger, David Guston, Timothy Ruback, Scott Roulier,
Efrat Waksman, and Ian Andrew MacRae Ward, which have improved this paper.
Rousseau’s general will still attracts attention after two-and-a-half centuries because it
seems to tap into something important: most of us, at times, think and talk about polities as if
they were persons with wills. It is also a complex, paradoxical, and controversial concept, and
some scholars have wisely warned that no single interpretation is likely to pin it down (e.g.
Thakurdas 1976, vii). In this paper I attempt to clarify the general will by using Rousseau’s
metaphor of the body politic as an interpretive guide. This seems a good place to seek
clarification, for the general will is the will of a political body just as an individual will is the will
of a natural body (Allen 1961, 264, 265; Kelly 1986, 17-18; Saccaro-Battisti 1983, 39).
Furthermore, a focus on bodily imagery seems appropriate, since Rousseau so clearly and
frequently availed himself of the vocabulary and logic of the body to describe his ideal republic.
The body politic appears prominently throughout Rousseau’s wider political philosophy and
gives it structure and form. An analysis of Rousseau’s distinctive use of it should interest both
democratic theorists and conceptual historians: wheras earlier political philosophers had usually
applied the body politic in elitist or authoritarian ways, Rousseau turned it in a more democratic
direction. While Rousseau was not a pure or unqualified democrat (his political thought might
best be characterized as democratic-republican; see OC 3.403-405; CW 4.173-4),1 I will argue
that his body politic is one of the more democratic features of his thought. Given Rousseau’s
influence on modern democratic theory and practice, his body metaphor is of considerable
theoretical and historical importance. 2
My focus on metaphor is also inspired and informed by new metaphor theories in
philosophy, cognitive science, and linguistics (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). In recent
decades, the conventional wisdom that metaphor is only epiphenomenal or heuristic has
undergone much critical scrutiny, and consequently metaphor is increasingly understood as
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fundamental to the generation and construction of meaning.3 The human body, in particular,
frequently serves as a metaphoric resource for understanding complex phenomena such as states
and societies, something that Rousseau recognized: he once declared that humans “are for the
most part veritable anthropomorphites” in that we export our own self-image into the world
(Emile OC 4.552; Bloom trans., 256). Rousseau used other metaphors too, of course, but he
turned to the body politic often and it is especially pertinent to the general will, and so a
methodical analysis of Rousseau’s organic metaphors ought to help refine our interpretations of
it. Methodologically, I combine metaphor analysis with contextualist interpretive approaches in
order to keep in mind an historically sound idea of “body”: discourses about the body were
different in Rousseau’s time than in our own, and this affects his body politic.
Let me preface my analysis by challenging a common interpretation of the general will,
one which has, it seems to me, run into something of a dead end. Many readers of Rousseau
conceive of the general will in formal mathematical and/or procedural terms, as though it were a
problem in social choice theory rather than of moral philosophy. In this view, the general will is
thought to be the result of a special voting procedure that Rousseau unfortunately never
articulated satisfactorily, and so the main difficulty now is to formulate that procedure correctly.
Focusing excessively on Rousseau’s comment that the general will is the sum of the differences
of individual wills, “take away from those same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel each
other out,” interpreters keep looking for the right formula to quantify the general will as though it
were an economist’s preference function (OC 3.371; CW 4.147). The “Condorcetian
perspective” is one example of many (Grofman and Feld 1988, 567; see also Runciman and Sen
1965; Sreenivasan 2000, 554ff). Despite much effort, this abstract approach has yet to discover
what the “correct” voting procedure for the general will might be, if such a procedure even
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exists. This failure has caused some to abandon the concept as irrational (Shapiro 2003, 10-15,
21, 146) – an injudicious conclusion, in my view. Other efforts to somehow tabulate votes into a
recognizable general will have misled some into treating it as a mere aggregation of particular
wills, despite Rousseau’s vigorous distinction between the general will and the will of all. One
interpreter observed that “Rousseau is particularly vague in discussing how the general will is to
be discovered,” and concluded that “It is a formal principle quite without material content” with
which Rousseau was trying to calculate the “greatest good of the greatest number” (Allen 1961,
264, 265, 272, 274). Formalism here has led to a utilitarian reading that Rousseau would
undoubtedly have rejected as a version of the will of all. The procedural approach is abetted by
the continuing temptation in some circles of political theory to engage in decontextualized
analysis. Without placing the general will in context, interpreters must resort to excess
abstraction and become absorbed in process, because without content all that is left is procedure.
The general will cannot, I think, be reduced to a formal process, for it involves much
more than quantification. Formal rules for voting can at best illuminate only part of the general
will’s meaning. To be sure, Rousseau had to discuss the counting of votes vis-à-vis collective
decision-making, but this does not mean that formal process is the central matter addressed by
the general will. Counting votes is, if you will, the punctuation mark at the end of the general
will, and while an exclamation or question mark can tell you something about the meaning of a
sentence, looking at punctuation alone is an exercise in futility. One must first understand the
content of the sentence. So it is with the general will: Rousseau had a definite content in mind for
it, which must be understood before quantifying votes. Since so much has been said in the
secondary literature about vote-counting without clarifying matters, I will take a different tack
and focus on the content of the general will rather than on procedures. 4 Accordingly, I will
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attempt to reconstruct the general will in a qualitative rather than quantitative way using
Rousseau’s metaphor of the body politic as the main template for his reasoning. 5
Unfortunately, proceduralists have resisted using Rousseau’s organic metaphors to guide
their interpretations. One scholar wrote that “We fall into misunderstanding of Rousseau if we
attempt to identify the general will… if, for instance, we press his analogy of the body politic
and the human body too far…” (Allen 1961, 272). Another acknowledged Rousseau’s use of the
body politic and its relation to the general will but summarily dismissed it: “Whatever else it is,
the general will is the will of this moral body, that is, of the associates’ common self. I do not
take this to be especially informative…” (Sreenivasan 2000, 550). Yet since Rousseau himself
thought the body politic relevant enough to inform his theory, we ought not ignore it (c.f. Conroy
1979, 4,12). By tracing out the metaphoric mapping of the human body onto political society as
Rousseau himself would have understood it – and Rousseau had a sophisticated understanding of
anatomy – we will find some content for the general will that, I believe, is a prerequisite to
proper comprehension of it. We will also gain insight into how the general will can best be
discovered – whether through voting or perhaps some alternate method – that might help bypass
the aporia of proceduralist interpretations.
The Body Politic: Medical and Political
The metaphor of the body politic is arguably the West’s oldest and most ubiquitous
political metaphor. Bodily metaphors inform and organize entire schools of political theory, from
classical republicanism to medieval monarchism to modern realist international theory. Organic
language is also part and parcel of common political speech: consider terms such as head of
state, member of society, armed forces, organization, corporation, constitution, social disease,
economic growth, invisible hand, and so on, all of which have etymological roots in the body.
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In the body politic, typically, different parts of society correspond to different parts of the
human body, and a healthy political body properly integrates these interdependent parts into a
hierarchy that mimics the anatomy of the body natural. These themes of hierarchy and
interdependence have usually been combined: the parts of both a body natural and a body politic
are interconnected and must cooperate together if the whole is to survive (Ball 1988, 27-32), yet
this interconnection traditionally implied that a healthy and unified body politic be governed by a
single head, just as a body natural is. This combination is clear in medieval political thought, as
can be seen in John of Salisbury’s picturesque body politic ([1159] 1990, V.2 and passim; c.f.
Christine de Pizan [1406] 1994; Kantorowicz [1957] 1997). For John, the prince was the head of
state who commanded from the top of the political body, while the senate was the heart;
provincial governors were the eyes, ears, and mouth; soldiers were the weapon-bearing hands
and arms; clerks and scribes were the stomach and intestines; and peasants were the feet. All the
parts of John’s social body depended upon one another, because disease or injury in any part
afflicted the whole. To John’s medieval mind, however, interdependence led not to equality
between the parts but only to the moral exhortation that kings should take care to rule in the
interest of all, while lower orders should obey and be content with their appointed stations. Thus
John’s body politic combined interdependence and hierarchy to justify a feudal monarch ruling
from the top just as a head rules a body.
If we leap ahead to Rousseau’s century, we find bodies politic that look very different
from this. Older versions like John’s had a relatively uncomplicated political anatomy of head,
hands, torso, and feet. Later versions needed a more sophisticated conceptual apparatus in order
to describe an increasingly complex modern society.6 Conceptual change generally occurs hand-
in-hand with “large-scale, and often gradual and unconscious, shifts in the models and metaphors
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that dominate our discourse,” and for the body politic this has been especially true at the
intersection of medical and political discourse (Ball 1988, 23-26; q.v. Saccaro-Battisti 1983, 31
n.2, 33; Kelly 1986, 9, 22ff.). Bodies politic became more sophisticated in tandem with modern
anatomy, and advances in modern medical science were reflected in organic political
conceptions. Political thinkers began talking about flows of money as akin to blood circulation,
or of legal rewards and penalties as nerves which gave the body politic motion (OC 3.244; CW
3.142-3; Hobbes [1651] 1996, 9, 166-176, Chs. 23 and 24). These changes altered the balance of
hierarchy and interdependence in the body politic. Discovery of the circulatory and nervous
systems meant that life depended on systems stretching throughout the natural body and
connecting all its limbs and organs, a re-conceptualization that, when metaphorically transferred
to politics, led to a greater emphasis on interdependence over hierarchy. This change is essential
to understanding Rousseau’s body politic.
The medical advances in the centuries preceding Rousseau were immense. Western
medicine had, by Rousseau’s time, long overcome the prohibition against dissection that had
mired it in the mistaken theory of the four humors since antiquity (Lonrigg 1997, 35-37;
McVaugh 1997, 62-63). Vesalius’ highly influential sixteenth century treatise on anatomy, De
humani corporis fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body), had contained detailed illustrations of
human anatomy sketched from countless dissections of human bodies (Vesalius, [1543] 1967).
Anatomy was further advanced by William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood in
1628, and around the same time the followers of Paracelsus incorporated chemistry into
medicine. Anatomical knowledge was not only becoming more sophisticated but was reaching
wider audiences: numerous medical colleges and hospitals built dissection theaters to train
physicians, and the general populace was able to view public dissections of executed criminals –
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Bologna even held dissections at its regular carnival (Cook 1997, 84-85). These dissections
demonstrated to the public the wonders of God’s craftsmanship in the human body, for they
believed his handiwork as the great artificer of nature to be on display. This vision of Deo
fabricator facilitated the introduction of mechanical metaphors to explain the physiology of the
natural body, which spread rapidly. Galileo’s follower Giovanni Borelli, for example, described
bodily functions with mechanical analogies, and Hermann Boerhaave’s 1703 lecture De usu
ratiocinii mechanici in medicina at the University of Leyden further promoted the metaphor of
man-as-machine (Borelli 1680-1681; Boerhaave 1703). This metaphor was common among
Rousseau’s contemporaries: it was, for example, the title and topic of La Mettrie’s L’homme
machine (La Mettrie [1748] 1996; see also Kelly 1986, 9-12; Cook 1997, 85). The introduction
of the metaphor of the machine to describe organic bodies was an important development which
rapidly transferred to the metaphor of the body politic. The first great sophisticated version of the
body politic to appear during this wave of modern medical advances was that of Thomas
Hobbes, who mixed anatomical complexity with the new mechanism in a recipe that supported
the absolute rule of a sovereign monarch. Rousseau’s later body politic contrasted with Hobbes’
in that it was mostly unmechanical and mainly democratic, and therefore it will be helpful to
proceed via comparison of the two. I will not offer a complete analysis of Hobbes’ complex
organic imagery here but will only touch on relevant points.
Hobbes was fully aware of the anatomical science of his day, and imported it into his
political theory. As a well-educated tutor of noble sons, Hobbes was scientifically literate and his
curriculum vitae included the study of anatomy. He knew William Harvey personally and
praised his work in print (Skinner 1996, 215-216). Furthermore, Hobbes read Vesalius’ treatise,
took a course in chemistry, and in fact personally participated in dissections with William Petty,
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who later became Professor of Anatomy at Oxford and who eventually penned a book entitled
The Political Anatomy of Ireland (Skinner 1996, 328; Saccaro-Battisti 1983 40; Petty [1691]
1970). Hobbes’ mixture of body and machine is clear on the very first page of Leviathan, where
he famously depicted the commonwealth as an artificial automaton that emulated the shape and
form of a human body, with the sovereign as the head:
For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts,
but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the
Artificer. Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of
Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or
STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and
strength than the Naturall…in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life
and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and
Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment… are the Nerves…the Wealth and
Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength; Salus Populi (the people’s safety)
its Businesse; Counsellors… are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and
Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill war, Death (Hobbes [1651] 1996,
9).
This description is complemented by the image on the frontispiece: the Leviathan towers over
the commonwealth like a colossus, a gigantic social body made up of all the citizens that
combines their strength under a single sovereign will. This awe-inspiring, even terrifying, image
is perhaps the most memorable feature of Hobbes’ political thought, and was designed to impress
upon the reader a framework for understanding the political: the sovereign is the singular head of
the commonwealth, and social union will be compelled through fear of his unsurpassed political
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power. Hobbes’ sophisticated political anatomy did not lead him to democratic conclusions, as
would later be the case for Rousseau.
Rousseau too was anatomically literate. While Hobbes’ medical sophistication was a
result of his superior education, by the eighteenth century medical science had been popularized
enough that even an autodidact like Rousseau could familiarize himself with human anatomy
(Park 1997, 71-78; Cook 1997, 82-86). Printed medical texts were widely available, many in the
vernacular, and short courses in anatomy or chemistry were not uncommon (Cook 1997, 84, 86).
Rousseau first used the body politic in his 1755 contribution to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the
Discours sur l’économie politique, and we know that he had acquired a familiarity with medicine
and anatomy before then. This knowledge was acquired partly as a result of the maladies, both
real and imagined, that he suffered throughout his life (OC 3.244-45; CW 3.142-3; Janata 2001).
His most significant illness was a chronic urinary tract infection that made urination difficult and
caused him constant and often intense pain until his death. This disorder prevented Rousseau
from completely emptying his bladder, and after 1751 he often used catheters to do so (Janata
2001, 431ff.). In addition to this very real illness, Rousseau was a hypochondriac who obsessed
about his health and who used imaginary ailments to win the sympathy of others.
What degree of medical knowledge did Rousseau possess? As a young man, his lover
Françoise-Louise de Warens suggested that he pursue a career in medicine, an idea he rejected;
nonetheless he experimented in chemistry and read books of physiology and anatomy as a
layman (OC 1.218; CW 5.183; Cranston 1982, 122-123). The year 1737 appears seminal. In that
year, Rousseau attempted a chemistry experiment that blew up in his face; he was blinded for
more than six weeks and so frightened that he drew up a will (OC 1.218; CW 5.183; Cranston
1982, 123). Besides learning chemistry, Rousseau also recounts in Les confessions that in 1737
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an illness drove him to undertake a study of medical texts (OC 1. 247-8; CW 5.207-208;
Cranston 1982, 127). This new knowledge of the body, however, only fueled his hypochondria
as he discovered more diseases that he might be afflicted with: “To finish me off, having made a
little physiology enter into my readings, I began to study anatomy, and passing in review the
multitude and the action of the pieces that made up my machine, I expected to feel all of it
become unhinged twenty times a day…” (OC 1.247-8; CW 5.207-208). Furthermore, more than
once before writing l’économie politique Rousseau was attended by professional physicians
(which was not the ordinary experience then that it is today), and he likely acquired some
medical knowledge that way (Cranston 1982,130).7 The long and the short of it: Rousseau was
exposed to enough modern medical knowledge to understand the complexity of the body and the
interdependence of its parts, and this set the stage for an anatomically sophisticated version of
the body politic.
Rousseau’s Body Politic
While the body politic permeates Rousseau’s entire political philosophy, his clearest and
most concise statement appears in l’économie politique. The image is then repeated and
developed in Du contrat social. In l’économie politique, Rousseau prefaces his remarks with a
straightforward acknowledgement that he is using a metaphor: “Allow me to use for a moment a
common comparison, imprecise in many ways, but suited to making myself better understood”
(OC 3.244; CW 3.142). He then describes his political body in vivid detail:
The body politic, taken individually, can be considered to be like a body that is
organized, living, and similar to that of a man. The sovereign power represents the head;
the laws and customs are the brain, source of the nerves and seat of the understanding,
will and senses, of which the judges and magistrates are the organs; commerce, industry,
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and agriculture are the mouth and stomach that prepare the common subsistence; public
finances are the blood that a wise economy, performing the functions of the heart, sends
out to distribute nourishment and life throughout the body; the citizens are the body and
members that make the machine move, live, and work, and that cannot be harmed in
any part without promptly sending a painful response to the brain if the animal is in
a state of health.
The life of both [body and brain] is the self common to the whole, the reciprocal
sensitivity and the internal correlation of all the parts. What happens if this
communication ceases, if formal unity disappears and contiguous parts are related to one
another only by their proximity? The man is dead or the state is dissolved.
The body politic is thus also a moral being that has a will; and this general will, which
always tends towards the preservation and welfare of the whole and of each part, and
which is the source of the laws, is – for all the members of the state in their relations to
themselves and to it – the rule of what is just and what is unjust (OC 3.244-45; CW 3,
142-3; italic emphasis Rousseau’s, bold emphasis added).
The clarity and detail of this passage shed light on Rousseau’s political thought. Rousseau
displayed his anatomical sophistication when he described the political economy of the social
body as sensorimotor, digestive, and circulatory systems that extended throughout the body:
commerce, industry, agriculture, and finance were systems of interconnection, a point also
evident in his comments on “the reciprocal sensibility and internal coordination of all the parts”
and on communication via the nervous system, which I have emphasized in bold. Keep in mind
that the “life” and “self” of the body politic depend on this intercommunication. The emphasis on
systems indicates that interdependence, not hierarchy, was the most important feature of the
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organic image for Rousseau: it was the characteristic common to bodies and republican
communities, served as the common ground of the bodily and the political, and set the reader up
for the democratic conclusions that were to follow. Also noteworthy is the fact that this was the
first explicit statement of the general will in any of Rousseau’s political works.8 This indicates
his conceptual association of it with the body politic, a point further supported by the rapidity
with which Rousseau moved from one concept to the other in the same sentence (“The body
politic is thus also a moral being that has a will; and this general will… always tends towards the
preservation and welfare of the whole and of each part…”). This rapid-fire association confirms
that Rousseau thought the general will was to a society, analogically if not literally, what the
individual will was to a body.
While Rousseau’s body politic was anatomically sophisticated, this alone does not
explain why it supports democratic sovereignty rather than hierarchy, because Hobbes’
authoritarian body politic was also complex. It is conspicuous that Rousseau emphasized the life-
functions of the political body rather than its mechanical aspects to a far greater degree than
Hobbes (above, p. 10-11). Mechanical imagery thoroughly permeated Hobbes’ image but not
Rousseau’s, who seldom resorted to the vocabulary of the machine to describe the political body.
Admittedly, he did describe the body natural mechanically in the Discours sur l’inegalité (OC
3.178; CW 3.44) and in Les confessions (above, p. 10). As for the body politic, he referred to it as
a machine only once in the organic-laden excerpt from l’économie politique (above, p. 10-11),
and the vocabulary of the machine appears in Du contrat social only seven times (OC 3. 364,
381, 385, 408, 421, 446, 459; CW 4.141, 155, 158, 176, 187, 205, 215). In contrast, organic
references – body, strength, illness, birth, death – appear over one hundred times (OC 3.354,
359, 360-4, 368, 372-3, 378, 385, 386, 388, 395-400, 408, 414, 420, 424, 427, 432, 434, 437;
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CW 4.134, 137, 139-41, 145, 148, 152, 157-8, 159, 160, 166-9, 176, 181, 186, 188, 191, 194,
195, 198, and passim).9 Aside from this vast numerical disparity, the richness and sophistication
of Rousseau’s organic imagery leaves little doubt that he wished to emphasize the organic in the
political organism. Note that I say this is a matter of emphasis, not opposition; we are not talking
about mutually exclusive logical categories, but about metaphors, which have indeterminate
boundaries and are often mixed. Rousseau’s organic emphasis did lead, however, in a direction
not taken by Hobbes: while Hobbes maintained a hierarchy in his body politic by concentrating
sovereignty in the head, Rousseau used organic systems of interconnection, especially the
nervous system, to disperse sovereignty throughout the whole of the body, thereby facilitating
his democratic stance. It was this political nervous system that turned Rousseau’s body politic in
a democratic and egalitarian direction, more fully carrying out the political implications of
modern anatomy’s stress on interdependent bodily systems.
Hobbes’ complex body politic had contained a primitive nervous system of sorts,
consisting of strings and cords, but it did not lead to democratic conclusions; quite the contrary.
In the long quotation from Leviathan above (p. 8), Hobbes called the sovereign the soul of the
body politic: “the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul….” (Hobbes [1651] 1996, 9). But this
sovereign soul was located in the head and did not permeate the whole of the body. Early in
Leviathan, Hobbes acknowledged that the operations of the nervous system were reciprocal:
sense organs cause a “pressure” which “by the mediation of Nerves, and other strings, and
membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain, and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or
counter-pressure” which stimulated the organism to take action to meet its desires (Hobbes
[1651] 1996, 13). Indeed, “the motion from the brain to the inner parts, and from the inner parts
to the Brain being reciprocall,” body and brain were interconnected (Hobbes [1651] 1996, 17).
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However, Hobbes’ understanding of reciprocity was limited to the transfer of stimuli, and so did
not analogize to anything resembling mutually respectful discourse between citizens. Body parts
(the people, officials, etc.) sent sensory stimuli to the brain (the sovereign), providing
information for its consideration, but then the brain decided and simply issued commands back
to the parts. Reciprocity did not involve the body as a united whole in sovereign decision-
making, but was only a two-way transfer of information: stimulus and command.
Social unity for Hobbes thus meant conformity to one will. A body politic governed by
more than one head would suffer the convulsions of civil disunion, because the parts would no
longer act interdependently but independently of the rest of the body. Therefore factional conflict
was akin to an epileptic seizure:
And this is a Disease which not unfitly may be compared to the Epilepsie, or Falling-
sicknesse (which the Jewes took to be one kind of possession by Spirits), in the body
naturall. For as in this Disease, there is an unnaturall spirit, or wind in the head that
obstructeth the roots of the Nerves, and moving them violently, taketh away the motion
which naturally they should have from the power of the Soule in the Brain, and thereby
causeth violent, and irregular motions (which men call Convulsions) in the parts… so
also in the Body Politique… [factionalism] must needs thereby Distract the people, and
either Overwhelm the Common-wealth with Oppression, or cast it into the Fire of a civill
warre (Hobbes [1651] 1996, 227-228).
Crisis could be prevented only by uniting under the will of a single sovereign. Although it might
be argued that the initial joint act of the social contract gave Hobbes’ sovereign a democratic
basis of legitimacy, from thence forward the wills of all are united under the single actual will of
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a sovereign ruler; in order to prevent the convulsions of civil division, everyone must submit
their individual wills to the single will of the head of state: 10
The only way to erect such a Common Power… is to conferre all their power and
strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, to beare their Person… and
therein to submit their Wills, everyone to his Will, and their Judgments, to his Judgment.
This is more than Consent, or Concord; it is a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the
same Person made by Covenant of every man with every man… (Hobbes [1651] 1996,
120).
Hobbes preferred monarchy because he believed that organic unity required that the political will
of the body politic be identical to the will of an actual person; he did not develop anything like
the concept of a general will. His mechanism doubtless played a role in this authoritarian stance:
it was as if the king were sitting inside the tin head of the political body, receiving messages via
some nerve-strings from the parts, and then pulling other nerve-strings to make the whole works
run. Thus, Hobbes perpetuated the old medieval hierarchy in which the royal sovereignty was
situated in the head of the body politic, commanding the rest of the body to follow its will alone.
Rousseau, in contrast, had no central overseer operating the machinery of state, for his
emphasis on organic interconnection dispersed sovereignty throughout the body. In Du contrat
social, Rousseau (like Hobbes before him) mixed organic and contractual metaphors: “Through
the social compact we have given the body politic existence and life…” (OC 3.378; CW 4.152).11
The figurative signing of the social contract united individuals into political society by
establishing the moral person of the republic: “in place of the private person of each contracting
party, this act of association produces a moral and collective body, composed of as many
members as there are voices in the assembly, which receives from this same act its unity, its
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common self, its life, and its will. This public person… formerly took the name City, now takes
that of Republic or body politic…” (OC 3.361-2; CW 4.139). Sovereignty in this republic was
only represented in the head, which was no longer a sovereign king. The brain was imagined not
as a command center, but as the nexus of a nervous system linked to the common people who
made up the body. In the long passage from l’économie politique quoted above (p. 10-11),
consider how the nerves of the body politic are communication conduits that transmit pain (and
presumably pleasure) from the body of the people to the head: “the citizens are the body and
members that make the machine move, live, and work, and that cannot be harmed in any part
without a painful impression immediately being transmitted to the brain, if the animal is in a
good state of health” (OC 3.245; CW 3.143; above, p. 11). Interdependence implies
intercommunication, and the body’s internal communication system was the key democratic
feature in Rousseau’s metaphor. “As soon as this multitude is thus united in a body, one cannot
harm one of the members without attacking the body, and it is even less possible to harm the
body without the members feeling the effects” (OC 3.363; CW 4.140). That Rousseau based his
conception of collective moral personhood on the political equivalent of the body’s nervous
system is more explicit in comments in the Geneva Manuscript that did not make it into the final
version of Du contrat social: “There would be a kind of central nervous system which would
connect all the parts. The public good or ill would not merely be the sum of private goods and
ills as in a simple aggregation, but would lie in the liaison uniting them” (OC 3.284; CW 4.78).
Here the general good is not found in a procedure, but in the structure of communication within
the body politic.
This scheme of interconnected body and brain maps neatly onto Rousseau’s distinction
between the sovereign and the government in Du contrat social (OC 3 & CW 4, Bk. III, Ch.1).
16
The sovereign is no king but consists of all the people assembled, who express their will in law.
The government is merely an administrative department that executes the law as the people’s
agent, but sovereignty always resides in the whole body of the people. The administration should
always remain subordinate to the sovereign, morally speaking, for it gives the body politic only
motion but not life (c.f. Coker 1967, 16):
The principle of political life lies in the sovereign authority. The legislative power is the
heart of the state; the executive power is its brain, giving movement to all its parts. The
brain can become paralyzed yet the individual is still alive. A man may remain an
imbecile and live. But as soon as the heart has ceased to function, the animal is dead (OC
3.424; CW 4.188).
Here it is the assembly of the people, symbolized as the heart, that is sovereign. The self for
Rousseau is not a rational self located in the thinking head, but a self that must encompass all the
body’s feelings, desires, aches, pains, emotional and sensual impulses, etc. The self consists of
the body and brain together: “The life of both is the self common to the whole…” (OC 3.245;
CW 3.143; above, p. 11). For Rousseau, bodily interconnection analogously led to real
communicative reciprocity in the civil state, not just stimulus and command and from there to a
conception of governing officials as serving and preserving the rest of the body rather than ruling
over it. The brain must feel and respond to the pains of the body.
Communication between the sovereign body and administrative brain occurs when the
assembly gathers. In a properly constituted republic, distress among the people will be
transmitted to the government, just as pain in a healthy body is transmitted to the brain. That
Rousseau used pain as the analogue of democratic communication is perhaps the most intriguing
aspect of his body politic. Pain is the way that the body communicates to the brain when
17
something is wrong – those rare persons who cannot feel pain (analgia) have difficulty
remaining whole and healthy, as they do not recoil from injury and do not know when to treat
illness. Thus the general will is a sort of diagnostic for a healthy body politic, as pain is for a
healthy body natural. This also means that pain is the analogue of the voting or decision-making
procedure. The citizens’ first concern when assembled is to communicate to the government any
ailment or pain in the political body, just as the parts of a natural body communicate pain when
afflicted by an illness. But in a natural body pain is not only communicative. Since pain hurts, it
also commands the attention and action of the organism – it makes the body recoil from harm.
Transfer this dispersed power of command throughout a body politic, and now no king rules: in
the assembly, the lower orders of common people command the attention and action of the
administration in order to keep the political body healthy. The people must be able to
communicate effectively with the administration, but stimulus-and-response alone will not
suffice as it did for Hobbes; instead, the people must also have the power of command. Hence
the questions that Rousseau specifies to open the assembly: should we keep this form of
government? Should we keep the current governors? (OC 3.436; CW 4.197). The power to
determine these matters amounts to sovereignty: the administrative head is ultimately
accountable to the lower, democratic orders of the body on pain of removal, and therefore must
respond to their pain. Thus Rousseau prioritized interdependence over hierarchy in the metaphor.
Using pain as the analogue of democratic communication, Rousseau dispersed sovereignty
throughout the political body, standing Hobbes’ monarchical body politic on its head.
Aim of the General Will: Health as Equality
Bodily interdependence had long entailed the belief that, in politics as in nature, the parts
of a body must cooperate if the organism is to survive. The concept of the general will freed
18
Rousseau from having to unify his republic under the will of a single monarch, but he still saw
disunity as a threat, to the point of stressing unity over what many later theorists would consider
to be healthy pluralism. This comes out clearly when he speaks of the governing administration
or intermediary associations as small bodies that inhabit the larger political body and that
sometimes exert wills contrary to its general will (OC 3.372, 395-400; CW 4.147-8, 166-70). The
danger was that partial wills can lead to tyranny, either through usurpation by an ambitious
administration or through the chronic disease of factional corruption. Partial associations had
wills partial to themselves, and their presence could mislead deliberations about the general will
– it was the danger of collusion by factions that worried Rousseau about some, but not all, kinds
of political deliberation (OC 3.372, 399, 439; CW 4.147-8, 169, 199). Thus, predating the French
Revolution and the reactions of Burke, Tocqueville, and other early theorists of civil society,
Rousseau distrusted secondary associations; they were factions that divided and destroyed the
body politic, not healthy deliberative organs that inhibited tyranny (see Ball 1988).12 Rousseau
sought to specially mark out the general will as the will of the entire political community, a
community which must treat its individual members as equals, and he saw partial associations as
a threat to this equality (OC 3.372; CW 4.147-8). The conceptual problem – of which Rousseau
was fully aware – is that the body metaphor is not exact: while bodies natural are unified
naturally, bodies politic must be unified artificially, for the members of a political body are
themselves conscious, while the members of a natural body are not. “What [the citizen] ought to
want is the common good; what he ought to avoid is the public ill. But since the State has only
an ideal and conventional existence, its members have no natural, common sensitivity of which
they are promptly alerted to receive a pleasant impression from what is useful to it and a painful
impression as soon as it is harmed” (OC 3.309; CW 4.98). Hence the will of a political person
19
was not a precise replica of the will of a natural person, for the political equivalent of the natural
body’s nervous system was absent and had to be created artificially.
This problem is what compels Rousseau to adopt the conceptual apparatus of the general
will. The solution may have had its seed in an illuminating passage from Pascal’s Pensées, which
Rousseau may have read during an immersion in Jansenist readings (again in 1737; Rousseau
OC 1. 232; CW 5.194 n. 14; Cranston 1982 120; Riley 1986, 18). Pascal envisaged a body in
which the parts became conscious, overcame narcissism, and yielded their particular wills to that
of the whole: “Imagine a body full of thinking members…If the feet and the hands had a volonté
particulière, they would never be in order except by submitting this volonté particulière to the
volonté première which governs the whole body. Outside of it, they are in disorder and
unhappiness, but in willing the good of the body, they will their own good…” (quoted in Riley
1986, 487). Much of Rousseau’s political theory – the social contract, being “forced to be free,”
and particularly the distinction between the will of all and the general will – can be said to be
attempts to surmount this tension: bodies natural do not have conscious parts that work against
the will of the whole (at least not when the body is healthy), but bodies politic do.
The will of all, the mere sum of individual wills acting from self-partiality, did not satisfy
Rousseau because it lacked the organic unity found in an intact, healthy body. In the body
metaphor, an aggregate of self-interested individual wills would imply that the appendages acted
independently rather than interdependently, flailing about as though the body suffered from
Hobbes’ political epilepsy. For Rousseau, as for Hobbes, such partiality led to the dissolution of
the body politic:
Indeed, each individual can, as a man, have a private will contrary to or differing from
the general will he has as a Citizen. His private interest can speak to him quite differently
20
from the common interest. His absolute and naturally independent existence can bring
him to view what he owes the common cause as a [gratuitous] contribution, the loss of
which will harm others less than its payment burdens him. And considering the moral
person of the State as a being produced by reason because it is not a man, he might wish
to enjoy the rights of a citizen without wanting to fulfill the duties of a subject, an
injustice whose spread would cause the ruin of the body politic (OC 3.363; CW 4. 140-
1).13
Such disconnectedness is not the mark of a healthy body natural, and so Rousseau concluded,
with Hobbes, that independent, self-interested action by the members of the state was
symptomatic of an ailing body politic. The unity and integrity of the association were definitive
of its health.
Here we can begin to see some of the content that the general will must have, content that
makes it more than a formal procedure, content which flows from the metaphor. Because the
body politic is prone to corrupting and potentially fatal diseases, the general will must seek the
health of the political body. Rousseau states that the general will is concerned in its content with
the “preservation and welfare of the whole and of each part” of the body, and he also states that
“so long as several men together consider themselves to be a single body, they have but a single
will, which relates to their common preservation and the general welfare” (OC 3.244-45; CW
3.142-3; OC 3.437; CW 4.198). But what is the preservation and welfare of a body, if not its
health? What body does not desire to be healthy, vital, and vigorous? The general will, as pain, is
analogous to the natural body’s aversion to illness and injury and its desire for overall health. It
therefore seeks the political health of the body politic, looking to preserve it and its members
from political illness and injury. The general will must discover and express to the government
21
any illness in the civil body, i.e. the people must convey whether the structure of society fails to
function beneficially for all members. Therefore, in order to sustain the unity and integrity of
their association, the interdependent body of citizens should always seek just, harmonious
relations in the civil state: “The engagements that bind us to the social body are obligatory only
because they are mutual, and their nature is such that in fulfilling them one cannot work for
someone else without also working for oneself” (OC 3.373; CW 4.148-9). “A healthy, strong
constitution is the first thing that must be sought…” because an ill-constituted body politic – a
monarchy or oligarchy – will ignore the pains of its citizens, as would a diseased and corrupted
republic (OC 3.388; CW 4.160).
“Health” in the political sense, for Rousseau, thus refers to the general welfare, but more
specifically it entails egalitarian rather than partial political, economic, and social arrangements.
The most dangerous political disease is that of selfish partiality, “For the private will tends by its
nature toward preferences, and the general will toward equality,” so sustaining the health and
integrity of the body requires citizens to set aside self-preference for the equal consideration of
all the members of the body generally (OC 3.368; CW 4.145). This equal consideration is what
rules out pluralism, because pluralism is predicated on partiality and preference towards sub-
groups smaller than the whole. A healthy constitution must involve the effective democratic
communication of all members of the political body equally to the governing head: “every act of
sovereignty… obligates or favors all Citizens equally, so that the Sovereign knows only the
nation as a body and makes no distinctions between any of those who compose it. What really is
an act of sovereignty then? It is not a convention between a superior and an inferior, but a
convention between the body and each of its members” (OC 3.374; CW 4.149-50). Making “no
distinctions” between individuals means that the general will is not partial to any of them in its
22
legislation. One is reminded of Dewey’s contention that equality is “the inapplicability of
considerations of greater and less, superior and inferior” and is therefore a qualitative and not
quantitative concept: “In moral and social matters, equality does not mean mathematical
equivalence” (Dewey [1919] 1998, 77). Rousseau’s concern with equality is evident in much of
his social critique. He argued against slavery and privilege and for limits on wealth inequality:
“no citizen should be so opulent that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is constrained
to sell himself” (OC 3.358, 365-7, 349-80, 391-2; CW 4.137, 142-3, 153, 162).14 Political health
therefore means that partiality is set aside in favor of equality for all members, any of whom may
feel pains that afflict the whole. Decisions by the assembly must ideally be consistent with this
egalitarian political health, ruling out, for example, policies that permit slavery or wealth
concentration.
Thus, the metaphor of the body politic provides content for the general will that
constrains any collective decision procedure. The mental imagery supplies a logic, a pattern for
drawing inferences, according to which Rousseau configured the general will, which is not
merely a formal procedure but has substantive content: whatever else citizens discuss, whatever
laws that they might choose to adopt for their common good, their decisions must be consistent
with just and equal civic relationships in order to maintain the health of the republic. The content
of the general will is not simply and only whatever may result from the “correct” voting
procedure, if such a procedure could be found. Every proposal before the assembly, ideally, must
be constrained by the requirements of equality, lest partiality corrupt and dissolve the political
body, the existence of which is itself a condition for self-government. This content for the
general will is only loosely determined, however, because Rousseau leaves the specifics of
maintaining health for the people to decide: “Through the social compact we have given the
23
body politic existence and life; the issue now is to give it movement and will through legislation.
For the original act which forms and unites this body does not thereby determine anything about
what it should do to preserve itself” (OC 3.378; CW 4.152). But preserve itself it must, and so
equality must be the aim, because partiality is a potentially fatal political illness.
These constraints limit the assembly such that it cannot decide whatever it wishes;
Rousseau constructs a republic that is democratic, but not absolutely so. The assembly will not
always get things right: “the people always wants the good, but by itself does not always see it.
The general will is always right, but the judgment that guides it is not always enlightened” (OC
3.371-2, 380; CW 4.147-8, 154). That is, sometimes citizens will fail to understand what social
health entails, or they will succumb to partiality – just as patients sometimes ignore the advice of
their doctors to eat well or to quit smoking. The assembly needs advice and guidance, which
leads us to Rousseau’s concept of the “legislator,” the exceptional civic founder and sage
statesman – whom Rousseau sometimes describes as a civic physician (OC 3 & CW 4, Bk. II.
Chs. VI, VII, VIII, esp. OC 3.385; CW 4.157-8).
The Legislator as Civic Physician
The metaphor of statesman-as-physician goes hand-in-hand with the metaphor of state-
as-body, and has a history going back to Plato’s use of techne metaphors for his philosopher-
king; these included carpenter, shoemaker, and ship captain, but the physician was one of his
favorites. Rousseau too drew on expertise in the arts as a source domain for his ideal statesman:
he described his legislator as an expert trail-guide who led the sovereign on the right path, as an
architect who designed an upright constitution, as an engineer who constructed it, and as a
physician (OC 3.379-80, 384; CW 4.153-4, 157).15 For instance, Rousseau observed that it is
nearly impossible for a founder to establish good laws where bad habits had become entrenched,
24
for then “The people cannot even tolerate having their ills touched for the purpose of destroying
them, like those stupid and cowardly patients who tremble at the sight of a doctor” (OC 3.385;
CW 4.157). He then states that the legislator can best do his work during (certain kinds of )
political revolution, which are akin to the crisis period of an illness: only when fever erases a
people’s memory of their old ways can a state avoid death and experience rebirth, delivered and
nurtured by the legislator (OC 3.385; CW 4.157-8).
Rousseau’s legislator and the related concept of civil religion are often thought to be
illiberal and/or undemocratic elements in his thought: the legislator is superior to the people, and
his political medicine involves secrecy and deceit, especially at the birth of the republic when he
institutes a mandatory state religion. The similarity of the legislator’s methods to propaganda and
manipulation alarms liberal critics, and Rousseau’s civil religion has also caused much
interpretive perplexity among conceptual historians because of its incongruity with the wider
democratic tendencies of his thought (Ball 1995, 112 ff.). These ideas do genuinely show
Rousseau’s illiberal and undemocratic side, at least in the sense that they seem to reflect a
perceptibly republican desire to reign in a sometimes ignorant and impulsive demos. My view is
that these features of Rousseau’s political thought reflect an implicit split in his constitutional
design into two levels. At the first level, recognizably democratic practices are the order of the
day: this is where the assembly meets, where laws are made, and where the general will is
specified in reference to particular problems and issues. This is the level of the organs and
systems of the body politic, and it is the level that I have discussed so far. The second level exists
outside and above this level, and does admittedly involve illiberal features – but they are features
intended to sustain democracy in the first level by creating the conditions for it (cf. Kelly 1987,
333). From this level, the legislator constructs the body politic and maintains its health, first
25
instituting the constitution and advising the assembly thereafter. All the activities that occur in
this level are necessary to maintain the conditions for democracy in the first level. In short, for
Rousseau the legislator and civil religion were not violations of democratic-republican self-
government but were necessary conditions for it. Let us examine these issues in more detail.
Medico-political metaphors are sometimes suspected of harboring anti-democratic
implications: civic physicians have an expertise not possessed by all, and policy-wise their social
surgery can be coldly authoritarian as they purge, cut, and cauterize the political body. But we
must avoid letting contemporary medical experiences vilify earlier metaphors through
anachronism. The prototypical image of the doctor-as-surgeon is a relatively recent metonymy
that does not correspond well to the kind of medical practice familiar to Rousseau. Before the
discovery of antisepsis and anesthesia in the nineteenth century surgery was a last resort, for
obvious reasons, and doctors emphasized other forms of medicine: a typical doctor’s visit, then
as now, involved discussion, a back-and-forth about the patient’s symptoms, with the doctor then
prescribing a therapeutic regimen of rest, baths, diet, and medication (if available), with surgery
performed only if absolutely necessary. The kind of physician that Rousseau evoked as a model
for the legislator was not the surgeon but what we would today call the general practitioner, a
kind of family doctor charged with the regular care of the civic body’s health.
Any assertion that the legislator poses a threat to Rousseau’s democratic republic must
therefore be properly qualified. The legislator admittedly does know better than the assembly
what is good for it (at least on constitutional questions), just as a doctor knows better than a
patient how to treat illness. To some, this smacks of paternalism. Rousseau is explicit and clear,
however, that the legislator cannot have any formal power but must rely on words alone to
educate and inform the people’s morals, customs, and opinion (OC, 3.1394; CW 4.164-5): “it is
26
not magistracy, it is not sovereignty. This function, which constitutes the republic, does not enter
into its constitution. It is a particular and superior activity that has nothing in common with
human dominion. For if one who commands men should not command laws, one who commands
laws should also not command men” (Rousseau OC 3.316, 3.382-3; CW 4.103, 4.155-6). Just as
a doctor’s prescriptions are advice and guidance to the patient, so the legislator advises and
guides the assembly. Compliance in both cases depends on deference to expert authority, not
coercion; we should think of Socrates the gadfly of Athens here, not Dionysius the tyrant of
Syracuse. Rousseau’s own example was Lycurgus, who abdicated the throne before crafting
Sparta’s constitution (OC, 3.382; CW 4.155). The civic physician can prescribe cures, can
propose laws, but cannot force the patient to follow them: “He who drafts the laws, therefore,
does not or should not have any legislative right” (OC, 3.156; CW 3.382). Only the sovereign
assembly, expressing its general will, can create law, and to become law the legislator’s
proposals must be “submitted to the free vote of the people” (OC 3.156; CW 3.382). The
expertise of the legislator, when carefully limited in power in this way, does not seem
inconsistent with democracy. Given that not everyone can be an expert in political things, why
should the assembly not avail itself of the advice of the community’s historians, philosophers,
etc.? Is it paternalism for the wise to have a voice? By excluding the legislator from political
power (metaphorically setting him outside the body politic, just as doctors are literally outside
the bodies for which they care), Rousseau treats all members of the republic as political equals,
even though they are not equals in knowledge and virtue. Thus Rousseau paints a deliberative or
educative picture of his legislator, not a tyrannical one.
This still leaves two difficulties, according to Rousseau (OC, 3.382; CW 4.156). First, the
legislator is in an impossible position: he is responsible for founding and preserving the republic,
27
but has no power to do so. Furthermore, the superior reasoning capacity of the legislator leads to
communication problems: “Wise men who want to use their own language, rather than that of the
common people, cannot be understood by the people” (OC 3.382; CW 4.156). Christopher Kelly
argues that the legislator is the chief moral educator of the republic, but must educate with means
other than reason (Kelly 1987). The legislator must “persuade without convincing” the people
with his normal tools of abstract, rational argument, because “overly general views and overly
remote objects are beyond its grasp” (OC 3.382; CW 4.156). The people’s sentiments must be
turned away from their self-interest and towards the general good by a means other than reason.
The legislator’s difficulties force him to use rhetorical manipulation that takes the form of the
myths and narratives of a contrived civil religion.
Civil Religion
Rousseau’s proposal for a civil religion has always been one of his most controversial,
coming under fire from secular and religious critics alike (Ball 1995, 101-118). It has been
particularly susceptible to accusations of totalitarianism, such that even Rousseau’s defenders
find themselves conceding the point: this is propaganda and indoctrination, and so is patently
illiberal and tyrannical (for a summary of critical views, see Ball 1995, 108-112). Others criticize
it from the other direction, pointing out that Rousseau’s “watered-down quasi-religion” was so
insipid as to be useless to both tyrants and republicans (Beiner 1993, 620-21). Even sympathetic
readers find its inclusion at the end of Du contrat social puzzling: the chapter on civil religion is
tacked on as an apparent afterthought and is so incongruous with the democratic thrust of the rest
of the work that many interpreters cannot accept the totalitarian thesis, but as of yet they have
been able to do little but throw up their hands and accept the seeming paradox or resort to
circumstantial evidence and conjecture to explain it (Ball 1995). Rousseau’s translators have
28
rightly reminded us to be careful to look at the issue from “Rousseau’s frame of reference,”
noting that other political thinkers, including Rousseau’s republican influences Machiavelli and
Montesquieu, had commented on the political uses of religion (Kelly’s and Master’s notes to
Rousseau (1995), 264 n. 130). This admonition should remind us that our interpretations of
Rousseau’s civil religion have surely been colored by two-and-a-half centuries of liberal
argument that church-state separation is essential to liberty (a position with which I agree). But
as a matter of interpretive practice we cannot assume that Rousseau started from this premise,
and I believe that he framed the issues very differently in his own mind.
Rousseau’s body politic metaphor can help clarify this matter too, albeit only indirectly.
Rousseau referred to the body politic a few times in his discussion of civil religion, but only in
passing. Organic metaphors do not directly constitute the concept: if they did, we would expect
Rousseau to refer to civil religion as the medicine of the body politic, or as the sinews which
hold it together, or something similar, but nowhere does he do so. On the other hand, as I have
argued, Rousseau did think that organic integrity was essential to the health and survival of the
political body. The function of civil religion was to maintain the organic unity and integrity of
the body politic, preventing its dissolution and death from factional infighting.
If we start with this “unity imperative” in mind, then closely follow Rousseau’s argument
about civil religion (Bk. IV Ch. VIII of Du contrat social), and finally add a bit of historical
context, we can arrive at a reasonable explanation. This section of my interpretation will require
many readers to set aside, for analytical purposes, their own mindsets about freedom and
religion. Rousseau, in essence, argues that it is not a separation of religion and politics that
brings an end to religious factionalism, but a unity of the two – exactly the opposite of the liberal
position. In Bk. IV Ch. VIII, he begins by observing that religious wars did not occur under the
29
polytheistic paganism of antiquity (OC 3.460-62; CW 4.216-17). Rousseau offers varied
explanations which I will not repeat, but the crux is that pagans did not separate religion from
government but maintained a unity of civic and religious authority in each city. Rousseau then
observes that Christianity brought an end to this, dividing the spiritual from the earthly and
thereby causing religious conflict: “By separating the theological system from the political
system, this brought about the end of the unity of the State, and caused the internal divisions that
have never ceased to stir up christian peoples” (OC 3.462; CW 4.217-18). We must recall that the
religious struggles of the Middle Ages were between priests and princes over who should have
political authority. The Investiture Controversy of the eleventh century saw kings remove popes
and popes excommunicate kings; the conflict between King Henry II and Thomas á Becket,
Archbishop of Canterbury, infamously led to latter’s assassination; the Thirty Years War, fought
by princes supporting a politically ambitious papacy against other princes jealously guarding
their power – these seemed to be uppermost in Rousseau’s mind. Priests and popes, asserting a
“plenitude of power,” had made claims to supreme political control (Marsilius of Padua [1324]
1956, I.XIX), but Rousseau says that “since there has always been a Prince and civil laws, this
double power has resulted in a perpetual conflict of jurisdiction that has made any good polity
impossible in Christian States, and no people has ever been able to figure out whom it was
obligated to obey, the master or the priest” (OC 3.462; CW 4.218; emphasis added). The body
politic could not be governed by two heads, one religious, one secular (the metaphor of the body
politic was widely used by both sides during these medieval debates; see Barkan 1975, 74-75).
The key to understanding Rousseau here is to realize that he did not frame the problem as later
liberals did, as a conflict between a multitude of religious sects; rather, he framed it as a conflict
between two sets of elite authorities, one religious and the other secular. Hence his solution has
30
nothing to do with freedom of conscience or separation of church and state and everything to do
with resolving this “conflict of jurisdiction.” In other words, the problem that Rousseau was
trying to solve was this: the Christian separation of religion and politics had led to war and
despotism, which were conditions detrimental to republican self-government.
The solution, for Rousseau, was therefore not separation of church and state, but their
reunification. If we turn back to the chapter on civil religion, we see that after Rousseau laid this
out as his problem (OC 3.460-464; CW 4.216-219), the middle of the chapter is devoted to an
examination and rejection of several potential religious solutions (OC 3.462-467; CW 4.218-222;
I will not detail them, but see Beiner 1993, 617-19, 631-2 for a summary). At the very end of the
chapter, Rousseau then settles on the solution of a “civil religion” which performs this
reunification. This religion is not doctrinaire and all-encompassing, but a limited religion of
limited purposes. Because “The right that the social compact gives the Sovereign over subjects
does not exceed, as I have said, the limits of public utility,” most theological controversies were
beyond the purview of the state (OC 3.467; CW 4.222). But when it comes to religious beliefs
that served a public purpose (or rather, that Rousseau thought self-evidently served a public
purpose) the republic could exert the force of law:
Now it matters greatly to the State that each Citizen have a Religion that causes him to
love his duties; but the dogmas of that Religion are of no interest either to the State or to
its members; except insofar as these dogmas relate to morality, and to the duties that
anyone who professes it is obliged to fulfill towards others. Everyone can have whatever
opinions he pleases beyond that, without the Sovereign having to know what they are.
For since the Sovereign has no competence in the other world, whatever the fate of
31
subjects in the life hereafter, it is none of its business, as long as they are good citizens in
this one (OC 3.468; CW 4.222).
Hence for Rousseau most religious beliefs were beyond the legitimate reach of civic authority,
but there were some of public concern (the real inconsistency here is that Rousseau relies on
Christian dualism to divide these spheres while having earlier criticized it). For example,
Rousseau believed that a person could be neither moral nor civic-spirited without believing in
god, the hereafter, and the threat of eternal punishment (Kelly 1997, 1238, 1242).16 He said that
the dogmas of the civil religion should include “The existence of a powerful, intelligent,
beneficent, foresighted, and providential Divinity; the afterlife; the happiness of the just; the
punishment of the wicked; the sanctity of the social Contract and the Laws” (OC 3.468; CW
4.223). It is also noteworthy that he forbade intolerance: “one should tolerate all those religions
that tolerate others insofar as their dogmas are in no way contrary to the duties of the Citizen”
(OC 3.469; CW 4.223). These beliefs, Rousseau said, were the minimum needed to be a good
citizen. They were not, however, to be understood as rigid, doctrinaire tenets: “There is,
therefore, a purely civil profession of faith, the articles of which are for the Sovereign to
establish, not exactly as Religious dogmas, but as sentiments of sociability without which it is
impossible to be a good Citizen or faithful subject” (OC 3.462; CW 4.218). Rousseau suggested
that these sentiments could be inculcated mainly through public ritual (Kelly 1995, 1241), but as
a public matter they did fall under the purview of the assembly and were enforceable by law –
and for Rousseau the punishments could be severe, to include banishment for disbelief and
execution for apostasy (OC 3.468; CW 4.223). But these harsh penalties were invoked because
Rousseau saw civil religion as preventing the death of the body politic, a catastrophe that would,
to his mind, provide a rationale for strict discipline. Rousseau’s argument that the civil religion
32
would inspire military courage underscores his desire to use it in defense of the political body
(OC 3.467-8; CW 4.221-23).
And so for Rousseau a healthy political constitution must include a civil religion as a
social bonding agent, one capable of overcoming self-preference and inducing self-sacrifice and
thereby preventing fatal division in the body politic. If what I have said is correct, then the
chapter on civil religion is no longer a curiosity but makes perfect sense: Rousseau included civil
religion not out of muddled or totalitarian thinking, not out of intentional paradox, but because
he thought that a civil religion helped provide the necessary conditions for liberty in the body
politic. The legislator’s civil religion creates and maintains the civic spirit of the common people
by using religious myth as a substitute for the rational argument that was beyond their grasp,
thereby preserving popular self-government. The legislator and civil religion are not
authoritarian (much less totalitarian) ideas that Rousseau smuggled into his political philosophy,
but were intended to establish the conditions for the existence of the democratic general will.
Therefore the legislator and civil religion might be un-democratic themselves, but they cannot
rightly be called anti-democratic. Liberals today might find these aspects of Rousseau’s political
thought to be wrong-headed, and I would agree; but at worst they were well-intentioned mistakes
by a political philosopher creatively experimenting to solve the conflicts of his day.
The Mortality of the Body Politic
The claim that the general will must be committed to egalitarian social relations is further
supported by Rousseau’s statements regarding the political death of the civic body, which must
be delayed as long as possible. Whereas broken parts in a machine can be repaired and the
machine be made as good as new, Rousseau’s republic is as mortal as any organism:
33
The body politic, like the human body, begins to die from the very moment of its birth,
and carries within itself the causes of its destruction…The constitution of a man is the
work of nature; the constitution of the state is a work of art. It is not within men’s power
to prolong their lives; it is within their power to prolong the life of the state as far as
possible, by giving it the best constitution it can have (OC 3.424; CW 4.188).
The life-prolonging health of a republic is a moral health, and so the death of the body politic is a
moral death – a death that occurs when popular sovereignty is lost. Rousseau believed that any
non-democratic condition ceased to be a true political society, because a body politic lacking
communication between the head and the body was a body divided against itself: “if the people
promises simply to obey, it dissolves itself by that act; it loses the status of a people. The
moment there is a master, there is no longer a Sovereign, and from then on the body politic is
destroyed” (OC 3.369; CW 4.145). A government may persist after it no longer consults the
people, but the republic is dead as a self-governing moral community:
The dissolution of the State can come about… when the Prince no longer administers the
State in accordance with the laws and usurps the sovereign power… the large State
dissolves and another is formed within it that is composed solely of the members of the
Government and is no longer anything for the rest of the People except its master and
tyrant (OC 3.422, CW 4.187).
Thus Rousseau defined tyranny as the appropriation of sovereign power by the administrative
brain. It would cease to serve the body, and instead make the body serve it. Hence, a true civil
state disintegrated and died when the political nervous system reciprocally linking the people and
the government was badly impaired or severed. 17
34
The emphasis on interdependence and equality in Rousseau’s body politic also undercuts
the idea that he was a supporter of totalitarianism, democratic or otherwise (e.g. Nisbet 1943, 93-
114; Berlin [1958] 2002, 179-180, 187, 194, 204-205, 208-209). Isaiah Berlin, for example,
complained that Rousseau and others who used organic imagery were unwitting advocates of the
tyranny of the majority: “the sovereignty of the people could easily destroy the sovereignty of
individuals” (Berlin [1958] 2002, 208). But this fails to understand the degree to which all the
parts of the social body were organically, that is mutually, interdependent, for Rousseau:
It is not credible that an arm can be harmed or cut off without pain being transmitted to
the head. And it is no more credible that the general will would allow any member of the
state, whoever he might be, to injure or destroy another, than it is that the fingers of a
man using his reason would put out his own eyes. Private safety is so closely connected
to the public confederation that were it not for the consideration owed to human
weakness, this convention would be dissolved by right if a single citizen perished who
could not be saved; if a single one were wrongly held in prison; and if a single suit were
lost due to evident injustice. For when the fundamental conventions are violated, one can
no longer see what right or what interest could maintain the people in the social union,
unless it is restrained by force alone, in which case the civil state is dissolved.
Indeed, isn’t the body of a nation under an engagement to provide for the
preservation of the humblest of its members with as much care as for all the others? And
is the safety of a citizen any less the common cause than that of the whole state? (OC
3.255-6; CW 3.152).
Rousseau did not think that part of a healthy social body could harm another any more than a
person could willingly amputate an limb, an act which is possible only when life itself is
35
threatened, “as a wounded man has his arm cut off to save the rest of his Body” (OC 3.178; CW
3.54). Thus a nation might draft and sacrifice some of its members only when its existence was
threatened by war, but such a policy would be illegitimate under less dire circumstances: “the
Sovereign, for its part, cannot impose on the subjects any burden that is useless to the
community. It cannot even will to do so…” (OC 3.373; CW 4.148). In a healthy democratic
republic, the people will not will their own oppression or destruction, except in error. Given
Rousseau’s emphasis on interconnected bodily systems, interdependence integrates the political
body and morally forecloses the dominance of any one part; as Conroy stresses, harmony and not
tyranny is the operative feature of Rousseau’s organic imagery (Conroy 1979, 6). It is only when
the democratic nervous system fails that the republic dies and tyranny arises. Rousseau did not
advocate the disease of tyranny; he sought to prevent it.
In sum, democratic interdependence, for Rousseau, does require a political unity
analogous to the unity of a body natural, that is, healthy integration of the interdependent parts;
this does not imply tyranny but the equal valuation of all citizens, since all members of the
political body can transmit pain that afflicts the whole. Social division, whether from corruption
or design, is like a misshapen, diseased monstrosity, “a fantastic being formed of bits and
pieces… a man [made] out of several bodies, one of which would have eyes, another arms,
another feet, and nothing more. Japanese charlatans are said to cut up a child right in front of the
audience; then, tossing all the parts into the air one after another, they make the child come back
down alive and in one piece” (OC 3.369; CW 4.146). In his depiction of the body politic in
l’économie politique (above, p. 10-11), Rousseau wrote that a constitutional failure of the
democratic nervous system, that is, the loss of healthy connections between the people and the
government, was the death of the body politic: “What happens if this communication ceases, if
36
formal unity disappears and contiguous parts are related to one another only by their proximity?
The man is dead or the state is dissolved” (OC 3.245; CW 3.143).
Conclusion: Examining the Patient
Let us now return to the topic with which we began: how do we determine the general
will? The general will, a product of the political nervous system, is concerned with the self-
preservation of the political body, and so must maintain healthy egalitarian relations between
members of the body politic and between members and the whole. Only after this qualitative
premise is understood can we begin to think about procedures for quantifying votes. Rousseau
hints at this: “what generalizes the will is not so much the number of votes as the common
interest that unites them…” (OC 3.374; CW 4.149). So when we talk about voting procedures,
we must remember the aim of the general will: the democratic health of the republic.
Still, a point is reached where the question must be asked, just how are the votes to be
counted? – and this is precisely the point where both Rousseau and his interpreters break down.
Allen had a sense of this: “Rousseau’s failure lay in his neglecting to work out clearly the means
whereby the formal principle of the general will acquired content” (Allen 1961, 272). I have
argued that the general will does have content, of at least a broad and indeterminate kind. But the
point still has some force: in politics, determining collective decisions normally requires the
quantification of a vote. Yet here we might pause. Since this is repeatedly where interpreters get
into trouble, it might be best to finally conclude that the general will is resistant to quantification:
it is at root a qualitative entity, found metaphorically in the health of a body. Quantifying it is as
difficult as quantifying “health” in a natural organism. Shall we measure health by pulse?
Cholesterol level? Blood pressure? Or in some other way? Of course, individually none of these
adequately assesses the health of a natural body, and they probably do not do so even together.
37
But determining the general will by voting is asking to do exactly that, to quantify the health of
the body politic by some single measure. The analogue that Rousseau wanted to measure was
pain, which itself is not quantifiable beyond “more” or “less,” and furthermore pains differ in
quality as well as intensity: a burn feels different than a toothache. Attempting to measure the
quality of the general will by counting votes is therefore confusing, misleading, and problematic
– Rousseau’s own comments on the intricacies of the voting procedure are infamously
contradictory (Thakurdas 1976, 83-84). The metaphor is stretched here to its breaking point.
I will therefore suggest that Rousseau and his interpreters may have been better off trying
to avoid quantification altogether – better to diagnose the patient directly, by observing
symptoms and asking the patient where it hurts, just like the family doctor; that is, perhaps the
emphasis should be on discourse, not counting. I can only suggest here that my reconstruction of
the general will as diagnostic seems to support deliberative conceptions of democracy over
formal proceduralism, despite Rousseau’s own reservations about deliberation (Manin 1987,
338-368, 345ff.).18 Qualitative states of being such as health and sickness are best expressed in
words, not numbers. Rousseau’s political anatomy, with its democratic nervous system,
emphasizes communication, so perhaps anything that might look like the general will must be
arrived at in practice by consensus-building deliberation rather than through voting procedures.
Devising complicated mathematical formulae for voting procedures will likely not get us
closer to understanding the general will, for proceduralist approaches neglect its qualitative
content: the general will is concerned with maintaining an egalitarian political society, a point
that becomes clear when we understand the general will as the workings of the political nervous
system extending throughout Rousseau’s body politic. I do not claim that this interpretation of
the general will as democratic diagnostic is the last word on the matter, for it is a complex
38
concept that resists interpretive closure. But an awareness of Rousseau’s metaphor of the body
politic, properly placed in context, adds content to the general will that enhances our
understanding of it and prevents us from becoming mired in quantitative analysis over something
that is qualitative in character, the health of political society. One thing seems clear: Rousseau
had a significant influence on the politics of the eighteenth century and after, and if his general
will is based on a body metaphor, then his body politic is an image of historical importance to
modern democracy.
__________________________________________________________________________
1 Note on citation: unless otherwise indicated, references to Rousseau’s writings are to the
Ouvres complètes (abbreviated OC) followed by the Collected Writings (abbreviated CW), in
both cases cited by volume and page.
2 For a discussion of Rousseau’s later influence, see (Coker 1967, 27, 28, 29).
3 New metaphor theories observe that metaphors are normal and ubiquitous in language, that
so-called “dead” metaphors teem with living meaning, and that metaphors are cognitive and not
only linguistic. While there are differences over specifics, the general thrust of these theories is
that metaphors involve using one part of experience to understand another, and so supply
patterns of inference by which human beings routinely constitute meaning. These quick
assertions about metaphor may go against conventional wisdom, but to try and prove them would
be far beyond the scope of this paper as would any attempt to summarize the extensive, multi-
disciplinary literature on metaphor (for relevant discussions see Nietzsche [1873] 1971; Pepper
1928, 1935; Richards 1936; Black [1962] 1976; and Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). Currently,
the leading metaphor scholar within linguistics and cognitive science is George Lakoff, whose
39
recent work on political metaphor has received empirical support from within political science
(Barker and Tinnick 2006).
4 Some scholars have recognized that the general will is not merely formal; e.g. Robert Paul
Wolff (Wolff 1971, 48). But Wolff only makes the vague claim that the general will must aim
for the common good, which merely agrees with Rousseau’s explicit statement to that effect (OC
3.368; CW 4.145). I will attempt to further specify the general will’s content as we proceed.
5 Although I will discuss discourses which resort heavily to the vocabulary of the body, readers
should not confuse my analysis with feminist and postmodern scholarship that focuses on the
interplay of the bodily and the political (e.g. Bordo 1993; Foucault [1977] 1995). I agree with
those who argue that political and other forms of power dispose and constitute human bodies and
identities, and/or that differences between bodies, gender-based or otherwise, are worthy of
recognition. These important issues are not my concern here, however. Feminists and
postmodernists are concerned with political effects on actual, natural bodies; I am studying how
images of the natural body have historically served as structural models for conceptions of the
polity, which is quite a different matter.
Unfortunately, it is safe to say that throughout Western history the body politic was almost
universally imagined to be that of a war-fighting male – even when women authors such as
Christine de Pizan used the imagery (Pizan [1406] 1994). The degree to which historical
conceptions of the body politic were feminine is an interesting question that I cannot explore
here, except to say that there is little to indicate that Rousseau – who was no feminist – thought
of his body politic as female.
6 I am indebted to Andreas Musolff for this point, which he raised at the Reasearching and
Applying Metaphor 6 conference, 2006, University of Leeds, UK.
40
7 For example, Rousseau’s illness in 1737 drove him to seek treatment from one Dr. Fizes in
Montpellier, where he spent time or perhaps even lodged in the home of an Irish doctor named
Fitzmorris (OC 1.248; CW 5.208). Fitzmorris provided room and board to medical students, who
gave Rousseau free medical advice (Cranston 1982, 127-132).
8 Rousseau alludes to but does not name the general will in the Discours sur l’inegalité, where
he discusses the unification of individual wills under a social compact: “The people having, on
the subject of Social relations, united all their wills into a single one…” (OC 3.184-5; CW 3.60).
9 I thus concur with both Peter Conroy and George Armstrong Kelly (Conroy 1979, 2-3, 10-12;
Kelly 1986, 16). Kelly argued that the “traces of mechanistic imagery in Rousseau… are
generally decorative” and secondary to organic processes of “birth, growth, decrepitude and
death” (Kelly 1986, 16). In the first chapter of an early version of Du contrat social, Rousseau
mixed the metaphors of machine and body, but this was omitted from the final, published version
(OC 3.282; CW 4.76).
10 Hobbes allows for government either by a monarch or a small council, but his clear
preference is for monarchy rather than oligarchy, and certainly not democracy (see Hobbes
[1651] 1996, 131). For simplicity, I use the word “sovereign” to refer to the head of state,
whether a single man or council.
11Rousseau originally considered subtitling Du contrat social as the Essai sur la formation du
corps politique, suggesting the close association of contract and body metaphors in his political
thought (Masters & Kelly’s notes to the Complete Writings, CW 4.233 n. 1).
12 Rousseau did say that if factions could not be eliminated then they ought to be multiplied and
made equal (OC 3.372; CW 4.147-8; Cf. Boyd 2001).
41
13 The Collected Works translates the word “gratuite” [sic] from the Ouvres complètes as
“free.”
14 I call Rousseau egalitarian only in regards to economic and political class; like most men of
his age, his commitment to equality did not extend to matters of gender.
15 One of Rousseau’s few significant mechanistic images (see p. 12) describes the legislator’s
role in giving birth to the republic (and so is mixed with an organic natal metaphor): “But if it is
true that a great Prince is a rare man, what about a great Legislator? The former only has to
follow the model that the latter should propose. The latter is the mechanic who invents the
machine; the former is only the workman who puts it together and starts it running. At the birth
of societies, says Montesquieu, the leaders of republics create the institutions; thereafter, it is the
institutions that form the leaders of republics” (OC 3.381; CW 4.154-5).
16 To clarify: the assertion that religion is necessary for civic spirit is Rousseau’s, not mine.
17 See also (Conroy 1979, 7) for a discussion of the mortality of the body politic.
18 One question that puzzles deliberative democrats involves Rousseau’s declaration in Book II,
Ch. 3 of Du contrat social that deliberations about public matters must forbid discussions
between citizens before the vote – a declaration that seems at odds with the democratic tenor of
Rousseau’s thought (Rousseau OC 3.371-2; CW 4.147-8). My interpretation of the general will
helps to explain this curiosity: the nervous system that serves as the pattern for Rousseau’s
model of democratic communication consists of interconnections between the body’s
appendages and the brain, but not between the appendages. Rousseau says that the administration
or government is like a small body inside the larger body, mediating the “mutual
communication” of the citizens (Rousseau 3.397-400; CW 4.167-70). That is, body parts
communicate pain to the brain, but not to each other; a pain in one hand is felt in the brain, but
42
not in the other hand or in the feet, etc. This particular anatomical model would explain why
Rousseau channeled communication to the administration (as head) and prohibited it between the
parts. The constraints on voting, communication amongst different parts, etc. that Rousseau
imposes thus all seem to simulate the organic action of a natural body in which the parts
communicate to the brain via a nervous system (Rousseau OC 3.371-2; CW 4.147-8).
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Jeffery Zavadil is a faculty associate at Arizona State University.
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