Rousseau’s concept of the state of nature is quite different from that of the other political philosophers—notably Hobbes and Locke—who had written on the subject. Rousseau sees no reason to agree with Hobbes that life in the state of nature was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” nor with Locke that natural man lived in a condition of constant terror of everything that surrounded him. On the contrary, says Rousseau, why should not primitive man in his natural state be considered to have been happy? He had everything he desired—“food, a female, and sleep”—and knew nothing of the further pleasures of life that are the result of progress and man’s perfectibility. And in this happiness, or rather contentment, how could he have been counted unequal to anyone else? Were not all in that condition the same? Apart, of course, from natural differences in strength, size, speed, and the like, which are quite different from “moral or political inequality”; the latter is artificial, that is, manmade and man-maintained. And yet how different is the present condition of mankind!
How did this change come about? Again, says Rousseau, it is because of, and a bitter fruit of, progress and man’s perfectibility.
From the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow up with the crops.
Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts which produced this great revolution. The poets tell us it was gold and silver, but, for the philosophers, it was iron and corn, which first civilized men, and ruined humanity.
How characteristic of Rousseau are those famous sentences! No one could write with such boldness and speed. Their substance is also typical. Rousseau was a deep believer in a Golden Age that was long past. The present, in his view, was—as John Donne had said a century before—“iron, and rusty too!”
Rousseau did not create the cult of the Noble Savage, but he did much to promote and perpetuate it. He was also the leading spokesman of his era for the position that progress is a disaster for mankind. He did not entirely believe that; The Social Contract is in some respects his own answer to the gloomy conclusions of the Discourse on Inequality. But as with everything he wrote, the latter work, within the compass of its few pages, sets forth an extreme position with incomparable force and eloquence. If you disagree with Rousseau about progress you had better start marshaling your arguments, for he is hard to beat. If you agree, you will be amused and delighted to find your own ideas set forth with such ironic brilliance.
Rousseau wrote The Social Contract during the early 1760s, when he was living at Montlouis, near Paris; he had moved there after quarreling, as was his wont, with friends who had provided him with a much more comfortable place to work at the Hermitage. The book was condemned by the parliament of Paris and attacked by Voltaire, who was himself a rebel but not a political one, and its publication led to Rousseau’s exile from France for several years. The book, which is short, like most of his works, was published in 1762. Its brevity is, however, misleading. No one wrote with greater swiftness than did Rousseau. He is able to cover in fifty pages what others had required volumes to treat.
With his accustomed directness, Rousseau tells us in his first sentence what his book is about and what he intends to do in it. “I mean to inquire if,” he says, “in the civil order, there can be any sure and legitimate rule of administration, men being taken as they are and laws as they might be.” Or, to put it another way, as Rousseau does a few lines later, in some of the most famous words ever written in the field of political thought:
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.
Simply as an example of good prose, how could that be improved upon?
One does not read The Social Contract only for its prose style. Rousseau is concerned to ask the great question of political theory and to give a most interesting answer to it. He supposes mankind at a point in its development when the primitive state of nature is no longer sufficient—if, indeed, it ever was—for the satisfaction of its needs. What is required, now, is some kind of aggregated action; men can do together what none can do alone. The problem, however, is to attain the goods of association without giving up all other goods. As Rousseau states it:
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, he adds, is the fundamental problem of which The Social Contract provides the solution.
For Rousseau, the solution lies in the totality of the gift, on the part of all members of the community—all without exception—of their individual power and liberty. The clauses of this contract, he writes, “may be reduced to one—the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community.” This concept is essential because “each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody.” He gains as much as he loses; indeed he gains more, for now he enjoys the combined power of the community, where before he was limited by the narrow extent of his own strength.
HENRY FIELDING
1707–1754
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding suffered much in his life and lived among persons who suffered even more than he. But he hardly ever lost his composure and his cheerfulness, and he spent all of his free time, money, and strength in helping others. The poor of London thought of him as a saint. He was also a great novelist.
Born in 1707 into a noble family tracing its lineage to the Hapsburgs, Fielding spent his youth as such a young man should, attending Eton—where he first learned to love literature—and chasing after pretty girls. When he was twenty-one, however, he learned the melancholy news that his father was no longer able to pay him an allowance. From then on, Fielding was entirely dependent on his own resources.
He resolved to become a writer and in a period of some ten years produced twenty-five mocking comedies for the stage, which gave him a very modest income. But the last of these plays mercilessly satirized the then prime minister, a Whig, who pushed a law through Parliament—in 1737—requiring the licensing of plays. Fielding’s dramatic career thus came to an end. He studied law and tried to make a living as a barrister, but without much success. In 1742 he reached the nadir. His daughter was dying, his wife was very ill, he himself was suffering acutely from gout, and he had no money. In despair, he tried his hand at still another kind of writing and produced Joseph Andrews.