On Politics by Alan Ryan

Author:Alan Ryan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Published: 2012-09-25T20:00:00+00:00

Rousseauian Liberty

So we must ask what Rousseau meant by freedom. The argument of the Social Contract is that it must be possible to combine freedom and law; contra Hobbes and others, he insisted that if we gave away our freedom, we had given away our humanity. He argued that “obedience to a law we prescribe to ourselves is freedom,” but left it less than clear how this prescribing happens, and how many kinds of freedom there are. On the face of it, the view he should have held would have distinguished three sorts of freedom. All would meet the requirement that we are not told what to do by other people, and that we are not subject to other people’s arbitrary whims. They also, more contentiously, satisfy the requirement that we are not governed by our own arbitrary whims, and are governed reasonably, if not by Reason, or by reasons if not always by our own reason. Thus natural man is free and happy, and enjoys natural freedom. He is free from domination. He does not prescribe laws to himself, because the idea of prescribing is beyond him. He follows the laws that nature prescribes to him—which are such as he would prescribe for a creature like himself, if he had the conceptual apparatus to do so. Because nature prompts him to the pursuit of harmless good and away from self-destruction, he is not governed by whim, even if he enjoys harmless play; in short, he acts reasonably without being rational and follows the dictates of the reason embodied in nature, though he is not conscious of it. His obedience to appetite is not slavery, for he has in himself nothing to oppose to appetite; only the person for whom acting on principle is a possibility can be a slave to his appetites.

The man whose character is healthy, and whose moral attachments are correct, enjoys moral freedom and may with luck enjoy a lot of natural freedom if the state is unoppressive. He truly prescribes rules to himself, the rules of a rational morality. His will is governed by reason, not whim, and to make that freedom secure he requires—here Rousseau’s liking for Stoic ideas appears—the ability to stand up to public opinion, to go his own way rather than behave badly in popularly approved ways, and so on. He need not be a philosopher; it is better for him if he is not. The heart is often a better guide to the dictates of duty than the head, even though a philosopher of sound views can explain why the heart prompts him as it does. Finally, the man who finds himself in a lawful republic can enjoy a third sort of freedom—civic freedom—as well as moral freedom and whatever natural freedom local conditions allow. Rousseau appears to have two kinds of civic freedom in mind, one Montesquieuan, the other more nearly Machiavellian; the first says that a state violates my freedom if it forces me to do what I

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