| Rousseau's General Will and his humanistic doctrine |
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| Written by Ianko Stoianov |
| Sunday, 28 September 2008 00:14 |
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Rousseau?s General Will1. Rousseau?s humanistic doctrine
In the history of the creators of modern humanism there was another great man of genius, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, for whom it could be said with confidence that he was Marx?s equal; he lived before Marx and made a colossal contribution to the rise and development of modern humanism. Yet, Marx did not notice him. The reason is simple and it is precisely because of it that Marx failed to go beyond his utopia of humanist society: it fell to him to express the secret of the exploiting capitalist society and to reveal it to the then proletariat so as to point out to the proletarians the road to humanism, to prepare and inspire them to fight against their political oppressors and economic exploiters. Marx did his deed in a magnificent way; he actually roused the proletariat to defend its sacred interests. However, never did he have the time nor the interest to examine profoundly the question of the state of the humanist society with all the respect, which this question demanded. Unlike Marx, Rousseau did it. Sure enough, Rousseau?s great teaching of humanism, which still awaits its realisation and deserves to be in the centre of attention of the Humanists, was revealed to the world more than 240 years ago in his famous book ?The Social Contract.? What makes Rousseau great is his fearless will for true, just and free humanism; he raised free rational will to the rank of a fundamental principle of the state. Hegel expresses that fact in a magnificent way saying that Rousseau investigates the question about the absolute justification of the state and raises free will as the principle of this justification: ?The principle of freedom emerged in Rousseau, and gave to man, who apprehends himself as infinite, this infinite strength.?1 Rousseau?s teaching of humanist freedom initiates the march of this type of freedom in the newest history of the world. This courageous thinker did more than his contemporaries to prepare the intellects of the thinking classes to start and complete the French revolution. The weapon of the critique of the existing social contract had to be found and it was found; this violent contract gave the usurper-king absolute power, which demands unlimited and unquestioning obedience from the people. It was unbearable. The will for freedom had to emerge and begin its revolutionising work in order to humanise the world, to humanise the economic, legal and political order of the state as a completely concrete realisation and actuality of freedom. Rousseau expressed that; he begins his work with a critique of slavery: ?To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts. Finally, it is an empty and contradictory convention that sets up, on the one side, absolute authority, and, on the other, unlimited obedience.?2 This genius inspired his nation and raised it to the highest political standpoint of his time ? a standpoint unknown and unheard before him: that all are free in the community and all have equal rights and equal duties as far as the common good, res publica, is concerned. He raised his nation to the idea of freedom based on the sovereignty of the people and the rule of the universal will, i.e. to the idea of the rule of law, based on total equality of all in the eye of the law; a law, whose acts are passed by the direct vote of the people of the country in plebiscites initiated by the voters. Rousseau speaks about the ends of the constituting itself into a state sovereign ? the people, who is the only one who has the absolute and unconditional right to create directly the most vital laws which, beyond any doubt, are absolutely essential to the life of the whole nation. For him the goal of the state, the goal of political power is not to ensure the defence of the property (the life, freedom and possession) of the citizens only as Locke claims but res publica. Willing the public good, only the Universal Will has the right and the duty to act as a legislative power. The Universal Will is actual and ruling only when it acts through legislative acts. The subject of the Universal Will willing the public good is only the people. In point of fact, the rule of law is a rule through which the state is ruled by acts passed directly by the whole people. The rule of the whole people, the exercise of legislative power by the people-sovereign is an absolutely necessary and a perpetual sine qua non for each state based on the rule of law; a state, in which all people are members of res publica and possess absolutely equal rights. Rousseau?s social contract demands a total concrete unity of the subjective will of every human being with the universal will; a unity, in which ?Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.?3 Rousseau is aware of the fact that ?To be general, a will need not always be unanimous; but every vote must be counted: any exclusion is a breach of generality.?4 Thus, ?at once, in place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly contains votes, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life and its will.?5 The power of this ethical collective body, which is ruled by the general will, Rousseau calls sovereignty. This is Rousseau?s definition of the sovereign; its will is the will of a political organism that has a life of its own. The whole power belongs to the sovereign ? the people is the true ethical community; it passes the laws. There cannot be any other sources of law but the general will; it and only it can be a guarantee of freedom. The universal will is thoroughly humanistic; it is the infinitely powerful source of humanism in action. Sovereignty of the people is inalienable and indivisible; inalienable because it exists only as actual exercising of the general will, ?the general will alone can direct the State according to the object for which it was instituted, i.e., the common good?; indivisible because as a collective being the sovereign can be represented by itself only: ?the power indeed may be transmitted, but not the will.?6 The common good, the common interest that unites all members of the political community makes their will general; the power of this collective ethical person led by the general will is sovereign and therefore inalienable; it ?cannot be represented; it lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same, or other; there is no intermediate possibility. The deputies of the people, therefore, are not and cannot be its representatives: they are merely its stewards, and can carry through no definitive acts. Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void ? is, in fact, not a law.?7 This is the most certain criterion for the legitimacy of power; no class can represent the people better than the very people. A more just criterion has neither been invented nor can be invented. Power is legitimate then and only then when the people have real force to exercise their sovereignty and actually express their universal rational will. Rousseau wants the principle of the absolute universality of rational will to be universally applied; then and only then can be created a just society in which everyone possesses the right to participate genuinely and actively in the decision making process concerning all affairs and deeds of the political community and therefore his political life as well. Non-participation of the people in the decision making process concerning the common affairs and deeds means slavery, lack of real political freedom; this is precisely the case with the only simulated political freedom in the contemporary capitalist state, in which still everything belongs to the rich and is for the rich, and in which the people possess so little. Here is the famous Rousseau?s definition of the task of the universal will: ?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. This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution.?8 This definition deservedly had an enormous influence on the development of the world; it presents Rousseau?s solution of the humanist riddle of history, about which Marx wrote in his Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. We want to develop this definition and be victorious with the power of common will. Today?s humanism continues developing the determinations of the universal will; not only has it introduced the fruitful notion of public property but it is also a continuation of Rousseau?s doctrine of universal will. The eternal task of Man is not only to alienate his natural rights to the community, but also to enter in possession of the public good. Free co-ownership of the public good is the condition sine qua non for a truly ethical community and this condition is the same for all, ?the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.?9 Rousseau?s common will is still not immaculately defined. As Hegel rightly claims in his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences: ?The distinction between what is merely in common, and what is truly universal, is strikingly expressed by Rousseau in his famous Contract social, when he says that the laws of a state must spring from the universal will (volonte generale), but need not on that account be the will of all (volonte de tous). Rousseau would have made a sounder contribution towards a theory of the state, if he had always kept this distinction in sight. The general will is the notion of the will: and the laws are the special clauses of this will and based upon the notion of it.?10 Yet, bearing in mind the fact that not only was Rousseau the first to found modern Politovolia on the revolutionising notion of universal will but also the first to point out its organisation and realisation as practical will, we cannot but admire the power of his genius. Rousseau expresses the great difference between the will of all and the universal will in a magnificent way. He claims that ?the general will considers only the common interest, while the will of all takes private interest into account, and is no more than a sum of particular wills: but take away from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel one another, and the general will remains as the sum of the differences.?11 Only after a proper humanisation of the egoistical instincts of the individual will, the universal will is a rational will. Rousseau laid the beginning of the positive solving of the contradiction between ?volonte generale? and ?volonte de tous.? True, he attains the standpoint that the universal and rational character of the will is as much a result of the arithmetic majority of individuals as it is a result of the principles of the universal will, by which the individuals are guided. Unfortunately, he fails to point out the principles of this true Universal Will because ? without question, ? it is of absolute importance for humanity to cognise the principles of humanism of the Universal Will in their concrete form. Today we prefer to found the universal will on the notion of public property. We want to examine the latter profoundly and cognise its supreme importance in a thorough and comprehensive way for it is public property that is the source of any legitimate power and, therefore, the source of a truly social contract based on the common will of the people. Rousseau belongs to those ideologues who were able to attain the idea of class fight. The time for discovering and elaborating upon the principles of political will engaged in class fight had come and many philosophers worked in this field of the absolute rational will. Rousseau was definitely one of them; however, Marx was the hero whose efforts to accomplish this great deed were crowned by success. Rousseau is aware of the fact that in class societies the dominating class is above the truly legitimate law of the universal will for it successfully presents its class will as the universal will, that in such societies the slaves-masters relationship is alive and kicking, that in a society in which one class dominates the social, economic and political life of the nation juridical equality is impossible and, therefore, not actual, that such illusory and sham equality ?serves only to-keep the pauper in his poverty and the rich man in the position he has usurped. In fact, laws are always of use to those who possess and harmful to those who have nothing: from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all have something and none too much.?12 Rousseau wants to prevent his state from all these deficiencies. He discovered that only the people organised as a body politic, as a political community ? only the sovereign, ? can create the conditions, which are necessary in order the universal will to express itself freely. Only a great humanist as Rousseau could bring up the question how to develop the state order so that man is not forced to alienate all his rights on behalf of only one greedy class as it is the case in all oppressive societies so far. The Big Bourgeoisie - the class of Big Capital - is the oppressive class of our time. In an ethical state, however, as the citizen of Geneva claims, the law can only be an expression of the universal will represented by the common will of the people for equality and freedom: ?If we ask in what precisely consists the greatest good of all, which should be the end of every system of legislation, we shall find it reduce itself to two main objects, liberty and equality ? liberty, because all particular dependence means so much force taken from the body of the State and equality, because liberty cannot exist without it.?13 We have to say categorically that ? both then and now ? will inequality amongst the members of an political community is illegitimate. What today?s official propaganda still presents as universal will is nothing else but its class will; what today?s Humanists want the modern proletariat to realise is that never has any class will genuinely represented the will of the majority because by nature it is selfish, predatory and greedy for infinite economic wealth and political power. The modern proletariat has also to have the courage to face the unpleasant truth and realise that the class will of the Big Bourgeoisie dominates today's ruling will totally. It is unacceptable. Never is a class will a true, legitimate and unbiased representative of the general will. The question about the legitimacy of power is of exceptional importance and every generation has to check the legitimacy of the ruling government. All members of the community have to participate under equal conditions and on a basis of total equality ? this and only this makes a state a truly ethical humanist state; it is a sine qua non for a humanist state of justice, liberty and equality. What Jean-Jacque Rousseau said more than 240 years ago still superbly characterises today?s political proletariat as it used to describe his contemporaries: ?you sacrifice more for profit than for liberty, and fear slavery less than poverty... As for you, modern peoples, you have no slaves, but you are slaves yourselves; you pay for their liberty with your own. It is in vain that you boast of this preference; I find in it more cowardice than humanity.? These are the reasons why ?modern peoples, believing themselves to be free, have representatives, while ancient peoples had none. In any case, the moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no long free: it no longer exists.?14 What Jean-Jacque Rousseau knew already at the time must be well-known to each and every one of the contemporary slaves, who for the peace of their minds beautify and justify their slavery with countless formulas repeating them like mantras, such as the one about the peaceful use of individual independence and a large number of other manifestations of slavish will. For decades the modern servile proletariat has been subjected to tremendous brainwashing and ideological manipulation in order to serve its oppressors uncomplainingly and accept their economic and political ends. Beyond all question, the fathers of neo-liberalism can rest peacefully in their graves. For the time being. For neo-liberalism is not the end of history. No! In no way! It is fated to see its end in history. It is remarkable that not only does Rousseau develop the idea of political and judicial equality, but he also thinks that it is absolutely essential to point out its connection with economic equality. He is not in favour of abolition of private property yet; however, he supports its fair distribution among the members of the society. For Rousseau the category of equality does not mean that ? the degrees of power and riches are to be absolutely identical for everybody; but that power shall never be great enough for violence, and shall always be exercised by virtue of rank and law; and that, in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself: which implies, on the part of the great, moderation in goods and position, and, on the side of the common sort, moderation in avarice and covetousness.?15 This is a remarkable statement made by a man who wants to bring together the extreme degrees as equally pernicious for the public good. If ? like Rousseau, ? Marx and all communist theoreticians before and after him had been searching for the golden mean and had attained a higher standpoint allowing them to take into consideration Rousseau?s teaching, they undoubtedly would have developed the doctrine of communism far better and would have been less utopian. Without question, Rousseau?s contribution to revealing the importance of the problem of power in the doctrine of people?s sovereignty is remarkable. He was right to see the power of the people?s sovereignty as an expression of the people?s common will; nonetheless, he failed to attain the idea of state as public property. And despite the fact that he bases his theory on the idea of freedom of the human being, he does not examine freedom as the highest property of man yet. Unlike Marks, Rousseau still does not rejects decisively the principle of private property of exploiting type as the highest state-organising principle. Yet, he wants neither more nor less than destroying the state based on the domination of the principle of private property and establishing a state led by the common will of the people-sovereign. And that is precisely the reason why Rousseau ? one of the great fathers of good, i.e. rational communism, ? is forgotten. His humanist ideas were simply not suitable for both the dictatorship of the Big Bourgeoisie over the proletariat since the Great French Revolution and the bad unreasonable communism, which realised Marx?s idea about the dictatorship of the proletariat as a dictatorship and power of the Stalinist Red Bourgeoisie over the proletariat. And that exactly is the reason that Rousseau?s ideas are amongst the absolute principles of rational will worthy of being developed and carried out into practice. All the more so that Rousseau?s book ? he is not a representative of the bad utopian communism ? is totally communist for it is totally humanist. It is one of the summits of the so called good communism, in which nothing else but the universal will rules, and towards which humanity eternally aims at and eternally realises, and which we want to present in this manifesto. An answer of the question ?What is the concrete way in which the universal will rules?? has to be given and will be given further in this manifesto. This is the great question about which principles of the universal will have to be the leading ethical principles of the individuals-politicians when they take part in forming the common will. Not only does the general will have to be directed to the public interest, but it also has to be determined by the universal rational will, by the common will of all people ? this is the way we have to follow if we want to create a doctrine of true and good communism having in itself the immanent power to realise itself. Despite the fact that we live in an era of globalisation, Rousseau?s teaching about the people?s sovereignty is not outdated; this humanist teaching is yet to begin its practical realisation. In the era of globalisation the humanists want to create a new global ethics based on the priority of the common for all people interest over the private interest of each state, on the priority of the universal will embracing the whole of humanity over the private will of each nation. The highest end of this ethics is the common for all people good ? a category, which stands far higher than the common good of each nation, as it is treated in the works of previous ethical thinkers. Now we still live in states whose aim is to legitimate the will inequality amongst the members of the political community. Political freedom and wealth are important moments of the biggest for all people common good; however, in the conditions of a modern capitalist society the common good is still truly actual only for some, and certainly not for all. The universal will objectifies itself in a law only when the sovereign freely and under truly equal conditions makes decisions about the common affairs and deeds. True, Rousseau fails to show the relationship between the Common Will (Volonte Generale) and the Universal Will. Furthermore, Rousseau does not say yet that the common interest must be determined by the absolute universal ? common for all people ? will. Today we know that the standpoint of universal will is absolutely essential for every teaching of humanism worthy of notice and we want to attain it. We know that not only is it to be thoroughly examined and brilliantly expressed but completely introduced into the practice of contemporary politics; it will make the existence of modern states with imperialistic aspirations such is the USA impossible. As a matter of fact, up to our time practical bourgeois politovolia does not seem to care much about the difference between the common good and common for all people good, the truly universal good of the human species. The common good is always grasped narrow-mindedly and egoistically ? i.e. narrow-nationalistically ? as the good of this particular nation, my nation, and never as the common for all people good, in other words, as the truly universal good of humanity. Marx would have said that the culture of private property has made us so stupid and one-sided, and so narrow-minded is our understanding of the great humanist category of common good that all modern states ? a supreme realisation of the principle of private property of exploiting capitalist type ? run a mad rat race for the common good of their nations measured in the increase of the Gross Domestic Product, but never in the incredible devastation of the planet Earth. The aim justifies the means. Never more! Capitalists, for whom there is nothing sacred, speak with great passion about the sanctity of private property. But never would it occurred to their minds to proclaim the sanctity of public good and its natural defender ? the sovereign people. Only when the political power actually belongs to the sovereign can there exist true freedom for only the universal and equal for all power of the sovereign can efficiently protect res publica and the personal rights of all sovereign members of the political community. Only the omnipotent sovereign people have the absolute right to be an owner of res publica and take part in the ruling of the global good; only the sovereign can efficiently resist the absolutism of today?s Big Bourgeoisie imposed by its absolute power and abolished it. Rousseau speaks about the General Will superbly well. This great humanist knows that the social contract ?sets up among the citizens an equality of such a kind, that they all bind themselves to observe the same conditions and should therefore all enjoy the same rights.?16 Absolutely right! This is the sine qua non for creating a just humanist community. Today we say that the General Will expresses the absolute ends of man as man, which are common to all men; it is their common, public property. The point, however, is that even today the members of the public still do not participate under equal conditions in forming the General (Common) Will for the simple reason that the bourgeoisie use its totalitarian control over its very own media and the journalists ? the street traders of its ideas ? to brainwash the members of the society and control the public will. For this reason, the so manipulated ?common? will does not fuse together with the will of a truly sovereign people. Knowing utterly well that the wealthy keep the law in their wallets, Rousseau wants all votes to be counted and defends the right of the sovereign people to free manifestation and expression of its will. As for Hegel?s critique ? quoted above, ? the problem with it is that his very own theory of Universal (General) Will is to certain degree not concrete enough. Whereas Rousseau expresses clearly the fact that he is in favour of just equality and just freedom, Hegel fails to bear in mind the existence of classes and how just the class state is; the fact that the ruling exploiting class presents its will as an authentic representation and expression of the common will and, consequently, the total public property is fully in the private possession of Big Bourgeoisie, is not of significant importance for him. It is precisely for this reason that never does Hegel examine the power of bourgeois oligarchy nor is he aware of the fact that the sovereign people expresses the general (the universal) will better than any oligarchy, i.e. that the will of all is still far more magnificent than the will of the greedy and selfish ruling class of the exploiters. Being a revolutionary philosopher, one of those philosophers who in perfect accordance with Marx?s criterion not only wanted to explain the world but to change it as well, Rousseau expressed these ideas superbly. The teaching of the great humanist has been victorious, it has been changing the world for more than 240 years for he succeeded in expressing the absolute ends of the rational world will. Today it is the Humanists who are men and women of destiny; their historical mission is to develop Rousseau?s ideas and continue the search for ever higher determinations of the absolute ends of the world will. Ever since the end of primitive tribal communism when the institution of private property of exploiting type was invented together with the unjust state it needed in order to defend the greedy and exploiting ruling class, the state has been a way of enslaving, a way of depriving the not-haves of their right to participate in the government and be active owners of the public good. We have inherited the knowledge that theft of private-property leads to theft of the common good, that only true participation of the members of the sovereign people in making decisions about the common affairs is a truly actual means of achieving the highest end of humanity ? creating a just and free society. What is more, the Humanists of our time have attained the consciousness that private property of humanist type is a sine qua non for creating the humanist states of the future and they have the will to make it happen. Rousseau expresses his powerful political will in support of res publica ruled by the general will, which is the source of humanist law: ?I therefore give the name "Republic" to every State that is governed by laws ... for only in such a case does the public interest govern, and the res publica rank as a reality. Every legitimate government is republican,?17 and goes on to say that ?To be legitimate, the government must be, not one with the Sovereign, but its minister.?18 It is the Humanists that will implement thoroughly his teaching: The legislative power belongs to the sovereign people, and can belong to it alone; its sovereign authority is one and inalienable, and cannot be divided without being destroyed ? so did the great citizen of Geneva teach the human species. There is no social slavery in states ruled by the general will and its humanist laws. Fortunately, he is right; the riddle of history can be solved and will be solved. The name of its solution is Humanism. NOTES:
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