"Everywhere in Chains"

"Everywhere in Chains"

By Joel Bowman

“Man is born free,” Rousseau reminds us, “and everywhere he is in chains.” The exiled Genevan’s point, if we grasp it correctly, is that our natural state is one of liberty... of rights unalienable... of freedom. It is the world we make, held he, that makes us unfree.

How does Rousseau, himself a scalawag of the highest order, resolve this conundrum? By supposing a “social contract,” of course, the deus ex machina of the Gordian philosophical knot, in which everyone is beholden to everyone else because of something Rousseau calls the “general will.” “Each of us puts his person... under the supreme direction of the general will.” Rousseau posits the body politic as a single entity, composed of each participating individual, in which the “common good” outweighs the rights of the component parts. Collectivism, in other words.

“Let us set equal terms for the truce” Rousseau begins his treatise (quoting from Virgil’s epic poem, "Aeneid"). Departing from Hobbes’s cynical assertion that, without the civilizing agent of government, man would be left in a state in which existed “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” Rousseau holds that force alone (such as exerted by the State) does not itself create right.

Allow us to preempt your next question, dear and incisive reader: “Then why create a state in the first place?” Perhaps it is useful here to consider the State not as a civilizing agent, as Hobbes had it, but as an expression of the many, varied and reliable ways in which man is uncivilized. This would be the inverse of what the much overpraised eugenics enthusiast, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, argued: “Taxation is the price we pay for civilization.” Properly considered, civilization is the price we surrender when permitting the gang of thieves calling itself the State to rob, coerce and enslave us, to deny us our individual sovereignty."

- https://joelbowman.substack.com/