Rousseau & liberalism

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>> *Chomsky Reader*p48 [an excellent interview.] "What is interesting, in
the present connection, is the path Rousseau follows to reach these
conclusions "by the light of reason alone,"  beginning with his ideas of
human nature. He wants to see man "as nature  formed him" It is from human
nature that the principles of natural right and the foundations of social
existence must be  DEDUCED."  Ibid 142<

Ricardo writes: > This passage  reveals well the fundamental problem
with  the whole  classical liberal tradition on 'natural rights':  if our
rights  are given to us naturally, how can they be derived by  "the light
of reason alone". Saying that they are "deduced" by reason acknowledges the
role of reason but only in the passive sense of discovering something
already given to us.  Nature has not  given us any rights; rights social
constructs. It is only at a certain point in our history that we came to
think of ourselves as 'rights-bearers'.<

Rousseau wasn't a natural-rights thinker. He's a critic of such
natural-rights thinkers as Locke, who somehow finds capitalist property
rights in the state of nature (a stateless society). For R, following
Hobbes, rights were creation of the state, which itself was a human
creation. (So Ricardo and Rousseau agree.)

It is correct to see Rousseau as believing that there was some "natural
human being" (or "human nature"), which is rock-bottom minimal. People in
his state of nature are not really very human, since he saw society as
humanizing homo sapiens. (Absent society, in his view, people don't have
families, industry, war, speech, or even identifying names. Hardly "noble
savages"!) For R, human nature involved only the desire to survive and a
sense of pity or empathy for other living creatures. It's sort of like the
investigations that Freud and Freudians did later, trying to isolate "human
nature" absent society.

His "social contract" was derived logically (deduced) from this and more
importantly from R's desire for the government to be legitimate, to rest
only on the consent of the governed, and to bring out the best of humanity
(sort of like in Plato or Aristotle's ideal city-states). Seeing the
governments and societies of his day as illegitimate and de-humanizing, he
hoped for something better. Of course, all we needed was an all-seeing
benevolent Legislator to set up a version of R's contract. He didn't trust
people to do it for themselves, because they had been corrupted by society.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/JDevine.html