 Editor's Note:
In the November issue of The Ukrainian Observer,
the UO's former chief editor and current editor-at-large Glen Willard contributed an article, "Jean-Jacques Rousseau - an Idiot." Willard, as is often the case, was attempting to spark
a discussion, this one in regard to property rights. As evidenced by the response below, he was successful.
I would like to accept columnist Glen Willard's invitation to spar concerning the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to whom he attributes the decline of Western Civilization in his unfortunately titled essay, "Jean-Jacques Rousseau - an Idiot."
This essay is so misconceived, I scarcely know where to begin my response, though I feel one is necessary on the chance that it may be some reader's introduction to the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
First, it is fairly self-evident that Rousseau was no idiot in the normal sense of the word. Anyone who can simultaneously be among Europe's most celebrated political thinkers, opera composers, music essayists, novelists, autobiographers, and pedagogues hardly qualifies as an idiot. He was not lacking in intellectual sophistication, fit for institutionalization. I do not think this what Mr. Willard meant (and he says so himself), so I will not dwell any further on the obvious.
Second, Mr. Willard is not offering a terribly sophisticated reading of Rousseau. He draws from one of Rousseau's most polemical essays, and takes out of context at that. Here is the quote: "THE first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody'."
From this Mr. Willard draws a direct line to the Terror of the French Revolution and forward on to an Orwellian nightmare of mass executions of millions for their unwillingness to abide by an extreme inequality of conditions. This is patently silly and represents a combination of logical fallacies that would constitute excellent shredding material for a freshman logic seminar.
How to begin? First, Rousseau is taken radically out of context.
While he is harsh on this 'historical' figure who first appropriated property, this person is of a particular nature in his admittedly fictional account of the origins of society. This is someone who takes property and is not satisfied until he and others of his ilk have deprive all other deserving people of what they need to lead respectable - i.e., non-slavish - existences. This is the monster who Rousseau subsequently describes in the essay as using trickery, deceit, and coercion to rob the poor of what remaining possessions they might cling to. These are not morally respectable people. This is why Rousseau is so harsh with him at this moment in his story.
Second, it follows that Rousseau is not railing against property ownership generally. Read Marx on Rousseau. He is not a fan.
Rousseau is part of the problem, as Marx sees it. Consider this excerpt from Rousseau's essay on "Political Economy" (1755), published only one year after the essay Mr. Willard cites: "It is certain that the right of property is the most sacred of all the rights of citizenship, and even more important in some respects than liberty itself; either because it more nearly affects the preservation of life, or because, property being more easily usurped and more difficult to defend than life, the law ought to pay a greater attention to what is most easily taken away; or finally, because property is the true foundation of civil society, and the real guarantee of the undertakings of citizens: for if property were not answerable for personal actions, nothing would be easier than to evade duties and laugh at the laws." This is hardly the person Willard paints as hostile to property. This is someone deeply committed to protecting the institution.
Hardly anything beyond this quote needs to be said to refute Willard's thesis.
We must make a distinction in reading Rousseau. While he for the just ownership of property, he is not for the theft of property. This is a distinction,
I think, that most respectable capitalists can live with.
Finally, Willard makes the overhasty generalization that Rousseau's belief in the principle of equality automatically leads him to an equality of possessions (something not even Marx argues for!). In making his case, Willard contrasts Rousseau's supposed support of radical equality of holdings with Jefferson's more temperate equality of rights. Again, I direct Mr. Willard to Rousseau's text.
In this case, I appeal to Rousseau's most famous political work, The Social Contract. Here is Rousseau's principle of equality: "From whatever side one traces one's way back to the principle, one always reaches the same conclusion: namely, that the social pact establishes among the Citizens an equality such that all commit themselves under the same conditions and must enjoy all the same rights." This scarcely seems radical to most contemporary liberals. In fact, it would not seem radical to anyone who believes in the rule of law.
None of this is to say that Rousseau did not prefer that possessions should not tend in the direction of equality for the purposes of limiting vices and promoting political stability (after all, there are disadvantages to living in places like Mexico - consider recent events in Oaxaca, for example). For this reason, he recommends progressive and luxury taxes. But this is far from the radical portrait Mr. Willard paints of the modest eighteenth-century Genevan.
There is a far greater threat to Western Civilization than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is the sloppy and willfully careless reading of great texts for rhetorical and inflammatory purposes. Rousseau has much to offer us in this day and age of mindless materialism and pleasures.
All one has to do is read him. Carefully.
David Lay Williams, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Philosophy & Political Science, University of Wisconsin -Stevens Point. He is the author of a forthcoming book, Rousseau's Platonic Enlightenment, the Pennsylvania State University Press.
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