In his Second Discourse, Rousseau imposes a narrative structure on the human condition—a “myth,” which he grants is ahistorical.[1] He does so to help us appreciate what is conceivable concerning our nature. It is something like a fairy tale, and it would not change the meaning if he began by saying, “Once upon a time...” The point of his myth is that it was possible for human beings to be independent and free, content and self-sufficient.[2] Yet he also speculates how such independent, free, content, and self-sufficient individuals could have ended up like us: bound and chained, discontent and utterly dependent.[3]
Unlike his predecessors, Rousseau doesn’t imagine that communities arose through covenant;[4] rather, he supposes they arose accidentally. Individuals in a state of nature wouldn’t need other people to be fully human, nor would they necessarily require solitude. However, upon finding themselves in proximity, they would not object, any more than they would not (and do not) object to living alongside other animals, so long as their interests don’t conflict. Hence, the earliest societies may have formed simply because there was no reason to prevent them from forming. But once they do arise, human nature changes.[5] As individuals amuse themselves and commune, he imagines that they begin to experience, and then to desire, social esteem. “From [this] were born vanity and contempt… and shame and envy…”[6]
This is, in an important sense, Rousseau’s version of the forbidden fruit from the biblical Edenic narrative.[7] Esteem becomes something more than a mere desire; it becomes a need: “it was no longer possible for anyone to be lacking it with impunity.”[8] As in the biblical narrative, this causes a change in self-awareness: we transition into moral beings. This change is so radical that we cannot go back: our very being does not permit return. In the state of nature, we would (or could) have been individual animals, where our relationality remained merely accidental. In society, we are persons, or essentially relational beings.
Rousseau’s myth supplies us with some understanding of how we might have ended up as we are, which is to say, feeling torn between being both individual and person. However, he also ultimately wants to reveal how the social order could be justified. The answer may seem at odds with the Romanticism that is otherwise characteristic of Rousseau: it is simply beyond our ability to return to a state of nature. We are no longer individual animals (if we ever truly were) and we can only imagine what it would’ve been like to be so. We are thoroughly moral beings and as such, our social condition is inescapable, even if sociability feels constraining and inauthentic.[9]
I have been alluding to a feature of Rousseau’s narrative, which Robert Bellah has identified: namely, that it mirrors Christian narratives.[10] We were innocent in the Edenic state of nature, but now we feel corrupted. As with the theological narrative, the story doesn’t end there. Salvation is possible.[11]
Rousseau’s soteriology is secular and humanistic. On the theological account, redemption involves becoming bodily incorporated, via the sacramental death and rebirth of baptism, into the Church—the Body of Christ. On Rousseau’s view, civilized and thus corrupted human beings find redemption by becoming full-fledged persons, i.e., by becoming members of a body politic. This isn’t a return to a state of nature, just as entering into the Body of Christ is not a return to Eden; it is, redemption, given what we’ve become, not return.
This is made clear in The Social Contract where Rousseau explains that we need a specific kind of social arrangement. While we cannot recover our natural liberty, it is possible, given a certain kind of social order, to join together to create a collective body in which we enjoy civil freedom. Specifically, he wants to identify a kind of collective life in which one “obey[s] no-one but their own will.”[12]
This is allegedly possible given a unique form of incorporation. To understand it, the analogy to baptism is key. On this interpretation, he envisions that every person must die to their individuality—much as the baptized die to their flesh—and undergo an existential reorientation, becoming self-aware persons who identify with the “public person”[13] of which they are members—much as the baptized are, upon coming up from the water, to recognize that they now share in Christ’s resurrectional life. Rousseau writes, “each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody…” And later, “in place of the individual personality of each contracting part, this act of association creates a moral and collective body.”[14]
Rousseau’s conception of what it is to be an active participant within the body politic is much different than our own. Rather than speaking as an individual and committing oneself to the pursuit of self-interest, the incorporated person speaks on behalf of the body politic (the community as a whole)—with whom they identify—and commits oneself to the pursuit of the community’s interests. What emerges from all persons voicing what they take to be in the interest of the community itself is “the general will,” and in virtue of the self-identification with the body politic, this is, simultaneously, each citizen’s personal will.
While Rousseau’s theory of “salvation” remains thoroughly humanistic, recognizing the parallels to theological soteriology helps clarify his political philosophy. Specifically, the analogy to redemption and baptism, understood in terms of incorporation, connects his myth of origins to his argument from The Social Contract.
Footnotes
[1] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract: & Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (New York, NY: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1920), 175.
[2] Ibid., 203.
[3] Ibid., 205.