Political Philosophy
Just living somewhere is not enough to have property for Locke. So if I go to America and start taking land, there is really no taking from anyone because the americans don’t actually improve their land.
But if immigrants come here in a lockean view, we cannot say that they are stealing anything from us, because rightful possessions do not come from tradition, but from imbuing your labour into it.
When I mix my labour with something that god gave to me, it becomes mine temporarily. If I make bread, and someone steals it, that is really theft right there.
States internationally are in the state of nature against each other, but even in the state of nature there is property. Belgium is in the state of nature with France, but this doesn’t mean that Belgium can take from France, only if Belgium enmeshes its labour with French land. Often property can be had over things, but also with the land. Belgium has to respect the property rights of the citizens of France then. But Belgium, once it moves from state of nature to civil society, one can not by themselves determine anything, but rather the civil society as a whole.
The labour-theory of value.
Most of the value of something depends on the labour put into it, 99% for him.
The 2 lockean provisos
There must be enough. Locke operates on the assumption that so much of the earth is currently not owned, that there is enough for everyone.
Property rights are held over things, and this property can only be as much as anyone can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils. Nothing was made by God for man to poil or destroy. We can only take what we can use out of the common pool.
At some point money arrives. It is a smart invention because it doesn’t rot. What can I do with my billions of apples? Almost nothing, most of them will rot. But if I can sell them on a market for money, I can then buy something else with my apples. Locke believes this is consistent with the will of God. God is not against money.
When money arrives I can also do other things. Perhaps I am not interested in making chairs or bread, and some of us may want to be labourers. Then those of us can be paid so that the one who pays doesn’t have to do the work. This makes it so that society can specialise; not everyone has to know everything. And God wants us to be efficient, so this is good.
Everyone has a right to those things necessary for their preservation, and this has priority over property rights, since the right to land is deduced from the right of self-preservation.
When it comes to the indigenous populations of america, he believes they also have property rights. But Locke understands them basically as hunter-gatherers, and so they don’t mix their labour with the land. As such, they don’t actually make the land their own.
”A king of a large and fruitful territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day labourer in England”. So he believes that because it is the case that through money we can employ day-labourers, and they don’t have money, so we must have private property rights unlike the americas. Society is more organised this way, and so it is in line with the will of God.
So in Locke consent is not the basis of property. Property rights are pre-societal. But consent is necessary to bring about a state. It does not matter for private property rights.
In Hobbes there cannot be specific rights to anything except the sovereign.
This whole argument is against first occupancy theories. Just because you came first means nothing.
Locke wants to justify the glorious revolution, and this is quite important for understanding his argument. If the king is doing the wrong thing and not ruling in accordance with natural law we should abandon the king. Especially if he also doesn’t have the consent of the people.
Locke assumes that all of these three usually come together. So if they actually are not all gone at one point, we don’t really know whether Locke thinks this is something problematic. It seems more that if there is no consent it is just a sign that something is wrong.
Parliment is basically the place where we collectively figure out what the natural law is.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The last of the three social contract theorists.
We had political absolutism with Hobbes, and then political liberalism in Locke. Locke may not have reasoned similarly today as he did then. Contemporary liberal state libertarians usually reason through many of his principles in arguing for undressing the tasks of the state.
Rousseau comes one century later. At this time, things are getting closer to our time. We can very easily read Rousseau today. Many consider him a dangerous figure. Already in his writings we see the sinister beginnings of the reign of terror. In him we have the main inspiration of the French revolution. There is much that is strange about him. He had a life-long partner, with whom he fathered five children, which he admits to have given to orphanages in Paris. He strongly regrets this in his Confessions. He was in many ways a man of pure emotions. And his theme on the state is that men are inclined to be of pure emotions, whilst the state perverts them and makes them have unnatural emotions. He tries to explain to himself why he did this. One reason he gives is that he didn’t want to bring the children under the influence of the family of his partner. And in Plato it is written it is better for children to be raised in common, so you know it’s not so bad. He also says that he wanted time for himself.
Many read Rousseau as a rationalist who thinks he has understood society, and as such all the laws can be brought about from that. We know what is needed so we need to actually make it possible.
However many also read him as a romantic. Who thinks that everything is driven by my innermost feelings. My feelings are a blue-print for how society as such should function. The very opposite of the french enlightenement. And in a way both those readings are there for Rousseau.
His premise is that men are born free but everywhere are in chains. The point is to take the chains away. To make sure that people can live a free life.
- Freedom:
for Rousseau, people are no longer free in contemporary society. The Freedom they will gain is perfect, nothing is lost compared to in Locke and Hobbes. We do not lose freedom compared to the state of nature. In Hobbes we lost freedom but gain stability. In Locke we give up the right to apply the laws ourselves. But legal freedom remains. For them the social contract establishes civil society. In Rousseau this changes. There is a three step argument. State of nature, civil society, and later the social contract.
In the century between Hobbes and Rousseau, the panic over civil war has totally disappeared. A different reading of the state of nature is then created. Rousseau thinks that we have read back contemporary corruption into the state of nature. His state of nature is true, says Rousseau, but not for humanity in nature, but rather for humanity without civil security. Rousseau says this is wrong. Rousseau thinks that all people are corrupt in the current society. His alternative is that the state of nature was a state in which man was free and independent. People would live isolated but happy lives. There was no cause for quarrel. In reality he just makes a kind of guess. We were basically only driven by the need for sleep, food and sexual gratification. And nature is abundant enough for everyone. Humans are driven here by self-preservation and pity. Self preservation is the natural sentiment to keep oneself alive for Rousseau. But pity is the fact that I really don’t like to see others suffer. It is not nice to commit violence. Human beings have an innate tendency not to make others suffer. Rousseau thinks this is not the result of moral calculus, but of natural inclinations. Very importantly comes a lot closer to Hobbes, in terms of understanding this description of what people do and act, this is more descriptive. Rousseau is not talking about duties, just doing what is necessary for survival. This is just what people can do. There is no justice or injustice in the state of nature. However, this is a peaceful state of nature. He doesn’t think anyone has any reason to take from another. Human beings are very solitary creatures by nature. Society comes much later, together with language and so on. We leave the state of nature due to necessity: rising population, fraudulent behaviour by a few bad apples, and similar events.
”The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ’do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!’.” There is no longer just taking from nature what you need, but now there is stealing and property. Rousseau worries about social inequality; between those with more and those with less. What is stressed in contemporary society is to be the richest. The transformation from 1 to 2 could have been one without corruption; we could have had freedom and humanity by trading in natural liberty for civil liberty. But we have not done this. We could have directly gone from stage 1-3, ie. to a social contract, but it didn’t end up being the case.
The essence of the current situation is one in which private interests began ruling on earth. Now we join the Hobbesian state of nature. We start to constantly compare and apply reason. So now we have self-preservation, pity, and reason. Reason is able to bring us into the condition of civil liberty. It is the type of liberty in which we are all equally proportioned what we need for survival. Rousseau essentially worries about the alienated self. Alienation matter for him. All of us feel the pity and compassion, and know in our hearts that we often do not do the right thing. Contemporary people know that there is an alternative reality possible, but we silence this voice of pity, because then we will be taken advantage of. Alienation is knowing that I know what I would love to do but doing it would make me lose out in society. So I actively unteach myself what I naturally want, in order to fit better into survival in contemporary society. He uses the concept amour propre, self love, which is different from amour de soi, this is self-preservation in the state of nature. Amour propre is me loving myself in the society where there are many others. It becomes more like envy. It’s the ability to see myself and my own interests through the eyes of others. But it can lead to people acting inappropriately, because we want to take more than our fair share of the cake. Intrinsically amour propre is not a bad thing, but it causes in our conditions to do bad things. Constantly I feel like when I see something, I am afraid that if I don’t take it, someone else will take it, because I know everyone will want to maximalise the value for themselves as much as possibly. We teach children to be greedy. When he writes Emile, he is trying to teach Emile to become a citizen who can see his fair share along with the fair share of others and not to take more than he is entitled to. We all teach our children not to be too kind, because they will be taken advantage of, so he wants us to snap out of this mindset. He wants to naturalise amour propre. The result is that we have contemporary societies of people taking as much as they can through force and coercion. We need to change human nature then! We need to change how we educate children. For Rousseau, the solution is the general will. We are leaving both the state of nature and civil society.
- Role of the social contract
Volonté Generale is not the will of all, this is just the absolute wills of all individuals together. Rather we need to submit to one shared will of society. We need to bring our self-interest in line with the general will. The amour propre has to be purified. Ideally we will submit to it through self-choice. Obediance to the general will is a kind of freedom. No freedom is fundamentally lost in Rousseau’s solution. It is possible to force people who do not want to submit to be free. You can force others to do this.
The forcing to obey of the general will legitimises civil commitments. There is a difference between me as a citizen and me as an individual person.
John Rawls talks about public reason: there are public reasons and non-public reasons. A non-public reason is a reason for a certain thing to be done which is not in the interest of everyone. Public reasons are things everyone agrees on, like equality. I may have personal belief to believe that this is not the case, this would be a private reason. Rawls wants society to be conducted only through public reasons. Every decision of the state must be by public reason. Ie. things that everyone in theory can endorse. Rawls wants us to think about the laws in a state that all of us could have reason to stand behind. They must appeal to all of us.
Rousseau is after a similar conclusion. Rosseau says that it is possible that what I want for the laws is not what the general will says. When this happens I will come to the conclusion that my initial assessment of the general will is wrong. I could be wrongly interpreting the general will. Either you answer a question about what to do in terms of the group interest or from personal interest.
Rousseau is actually looking at small communities in which everyone can determine the general will of the small community. Representation becomes quite problematic, because it can create sub-collective interests. Then we have different factions that want different things. There will be factions that need different things to stay happy, and so there can be no good for everybody.
When the people assembles, we have the moment of equality, this is when the general will is revealed.
The moment of the social contract comes at the very end for Rousseau. You only have it in the last stage, it is when we put each of us under the supreme direction of the general will. We gain self-mastery through this.
You could ask Rousseau whether the general will is something exists independently of all of us. Is there no general will that we could arrive at objectively through thinking for a while? There is no need to ask a popular assembly what the deal is. Rousseau wants to deny this. He wants to say that the moment of equality happens when we come together in proto-democratic assemblies. Some things in Rousseau can not be thought of before the actually assembly itself then.
Many people worry about totalitarianism in Rousseau, everyone from Constin, Hegel, Berlin etc. because we leave the Lockean negative liberty and enter into the positive liberty of how to have an identity. For Berlin Rousseau theorises positively which brings the reign of terror in the french revolution, because we can force people to free. Forcing people to be free, as is done in revolution, we are actually breaking people’s negative liberties.
Could not all citizens of society be misled? Could not the general will be wrong?