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Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
DAV I D JAMES
University of Warwick
M CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
978-I-107-03785-4 Hardback
Contents
Acknowledgements
List ofabbreviations
page vii
Vlll
Introduction
1
18
18
Second Discourse
26
39
45
Rechtslehre
91
91
96
102
109
II9
130
138
143
143
I 56
!63
1 72
Contents
v1
The limits of subjective freedom
The existence of the general will
Bibliography
Index
179
187
1 94
194
1 98
202
207
211
223
227
Acknowledgements
I have benefited from discussions that I have had with Raymond G euss and
Frederick Neuhouser concerning some of this book's main themes. Fred
also provided a set of valuable comments on the book itself. I would also
like to thank an ano nymous reader fo r Cambridge University Press who
provided some other helpful suggestions as to how I might improve the
book. Work on this book was greatly facilitated by a visiting fellowship at
CRASS H (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities)
and Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, and by a short stay as
visiting scholar at the Forschungszentrum Laboratorium Aufk.larung at
the Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena, for which I would like to thank
Alexander Schmidt especially. I would also like to thank Professor G eorg
Schmidt for inviting me during my stay to present part of my work on
Fichte's theo ry of property in his seminar on early modern theories of the
state.
Parts of the book contain material that appears in the following
articles: 'Ro usseau on Dependence and the Formation of Political So ciety',
European journal ofPhilosophy (forthcoming) , 'The Role of Evil in Kant's
Liberalism', Inquiry 55(3) (2012), and 'Subjective Freedom and Necessity
in Hegel's Philosophy of Right' , Theoria: A journal of Social and Political
Theory 131 (2012).
VII
Abbreviations
Works of Rousseau
C
CC
E
LM
OC
OW
List ofabbreviations
PF
PW1
PW2
RSW
lX
Works of Kant
AA
AHE
LE
PP
RRT
Works of Fichte
EPW
x
FNR
GA
SE
List ofabbreviations
Foundations ofNatural Right, ed. Frederick Neuhouser, trans.
Michael Baur (Cambridge University Press, 2000. Cited by
page number.
J G. Fichte- Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften, ed. Reinhard Lauth, Erich Fuchs and Hans
Gliwitzky (Stuttgart and Bad Canstatt: Frommann- Holzboog,
1962ff.) Cited by series, volume and page number.
The System ofEthics, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale and
GUnter Zoller (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Cited by
page number.
Works of Hegel
EL
LPH I
PR
VPW
List ofabbreviations
VRP1
VRP2
Xl
Introduction
Even when certain connections between Rousseau's writings and the philosophies of Kant, Fichte
or Hegel are explored in some depth, the tendency has been to focus on Rousseau's relation to one
particular ph ilosopher among them. On Rousseau and Kant, see Cassirer, Rousseau, Ka.nt, Goethe,
Henrich, 'The Moral Image of the World', 10ff. and Velkley, Freedom and the End ofReason. On
Rousseau and Hegel, see Fulda and Horstmann, Rousseau, die Revolution und derjunge Hegel. There
are some older accounts that consider Rousseau's writings in relation to more than one of the
philosophers in question. Yet they amount to little more than brief summaries of various apparent
connections that are not, however, analysed in any great detail. Cf. Fester, Rousseau und die deutsche
Geschichtsphilosophie and Gurwitsch, 'Kant und Fichte als Rousseau-lnterpreten'.
1 Cf. Franco, Hegel's Philosophy ofFreedom, 30ff.
Introduction
Introduction
4
5
Cf. Pettit, Republicanism, f., 31fT. and 63f.; Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 39ff.
Cf. Pettit, Republicanism, 5, 35ff. and 65f.
See, for example, the statement that 'classical republican writers have never claimed that true political
liberty consists of the absence of interference, since they believed that restraint or interference which
the law imposes on individual choice was not a restraint on liberty but a brake, an essential limitation
intrinsic to republican liberty'. Viroli, Republicanism, 47
As when it is said that the need exists 'to ensure all citizens the social, economic, and cultural
conditions to allow them to live with dignity and self-respect'. Viroli, Republicanism, 66. Viroli
locates Rousseau's distinctive contribution in the idea of social equality as expressed in the principle
that no one in a republic should be so poor as to be forced to sell himself or so rich as to be able to
purchase the obedience of other citizens. According to Viroli, this requires ensuring that 'everyone
has the right to work and the social rights that will keep him or her from hitting bottom when
misfortune strikes' (67) . See also Pettit's account of the importance of personal socio-economic
independence in Republicanism, 158fT. This raises the question as to what it really means to guarantee
the rights that Viroli mentions and the kind of socio-economic independence envisaged by Pettit. I
explore this issue in Chapter 3 in connection with Rousseau's and Fichte's views on property rights.
Pettit, Republicanism, 53
Introduction
Necessity
Necessity
Introduction
Necessity
change, even when the force or process in question may, in fact, have
arisen through various arbitrary acts or through the concatenation of
other contingent facto rs and could, therefore, be otherwise than it is.
This type of necessity need not, therefore, be regarded as fully objec
tive, though it may strike individuals as being so because it constrains
them to act in certain ways. One example of this type of necessity is
provided by law in general, which as a system of positive laws con
fronts individuals as something given which constrains their actions.
Yet law is equally the product of human consciousness and will, and
in this respect it is subject to change and amenable to reform. Another
example is provided by the law-like regularities governing relations of
production and exchange in a condition of human interdependence.
In this case, individuals will be confronted with something given
which appears to have arisen spontaneously and which determines
their thoughts and actions. At the same time, however, these relations
can be thought to be contingent in the sense that they are the cumula
tive, but unintended, results of co untless conscious acts, so that they
co uld, in principle, be o ther than they are. Also , altho ugh some of
these relations will be based on the natural necessity associated with
material needs, many of them may be based on artificial needs which,
as we shall see, may exhibit a subjective necessity while not being
objectively necessary.
(4) Necessity in the fo rm of the practical constraints that natural neces
sity, that is, necessity in sense (I) , or the kind of impersonal force or
process associated with necessity in sense (3) may generate. This form
of necessity concerns, in short, the particular practical constraints to
which human beings are subject as opposed to the general sources of
these particular constraints. For example, people are not directly sub
ject to law in general but to particular positive laws; physical survival
may demand that human beings accept a particular set of mutual con
straints on their actions; getting the object that one wants in order to
satisfy a particular need may require co operating with others in spe
cific ways, and this cooperation will have certain implications with
respect to one's actual ability to do as one wants to do; one's choice of
livelihood may be severely constrained by the economic conditions
brought abo ut by market fo rces.
As I show in Chapter I, Rousseau was well aware of the problems
faced by his own attempt to bring the necessity at work in society under
conscious human control, so as to overcome the threats to freedom that he
associates with dependence on o ther human beings. Bro adly speaking, these
10
Introduction
Perfectibility
II
12
Introduction
Perfectibility
13
(OC III: 141-2; PW1: 141) . Since they are not tied to any natural order by
instinct and by a merely mechanical response to external stimuli, human
beings are essentially undetermined with respect to what they are. It is, in
short, possible for human beings to be different from what they happen to
be, for various possibilities remain open to them, even if the choices that
they have already made in response to the conditions and circumstances
in which they find themselves determine what they happen to be at any
given moment in time. This idea finds radical expression in the following
passage from Fichte's Foundations ofNatural Right:
Every animal is what it is: only the human being is originally nothing at all.
He must become what he is to be: and, since he is to be a being for himself,
he must become this through himself. Nature completed all of her works;
only from the human being did she withdraw her hand, and precisely by
doing so, she gave him over to himself. Formability [Bildsamkeit], as such,
is the character of humanity. (GA I/3: 379 ; FNR: 74)
The extent to which the human being becomes 'what he is to be' only
'through himself' is debatable given the practical constraints imposed on
human beings both by nature and by their relations with other human
beings. We shall see, in fact, that Kant and Hegel treat natural necessity
and some other practical forms of necessity as playing an essential role
in the formation of human beings as free and rational agents, so that in
this respect necessity appears to be a condition of freedom and rationality,
at least in terms of their full development. Nevertheless, they agree with
Fichte that human beings can become other than what they happen to
be at any given moment in time and that they may in this way become
what they ought to be. This idea is certainly central to Hegel's philosophy
of history, because for him the faculty of being able to perfect oneself
distinguishes spiritual phenomena from natural phenomena. While the
latter are determined in accordance with unchanging natural laws and as a
result of this, exhibit no genuine capacity for change, human beings possess
a drive of perfectibility (ein Trieb der Perfoktibilitat) , and it is this capacity
that allows them to progress towards a more perfect condition (VPW:
149; LPHI: 124f.). Yet even here the idea of necessity can be detected,
since the talk of a drive suggests something that must eventually manifest
itself.
Rousseau also asso ciates the capacity to become something other than
what one happens to be with 'the faculty of perfecting oneself', a faculty
which pertains to the human species as a whole as well as to the individual
human being (OC III: 142; PW1: 141) . This perfectibility (perfectibilite)
14
Introduction
Thus it can be said that existing conditions and the human corruption that characterizes them are
'the cumulative and unforeseen result of a series of free cho ices (conjoined with contingent natural
occurrences) that, in contrast to the Christian narrative, do not involve the conscious willing of
evil' . Neuhauser, Rousseau 's Theodicy oJSe/fLove, 4f.
Perfectibility
15
these same capacities are treated as being anything but inevitable.12 Despite
this contingency, the dependence-generating process which arises on the
basis of the concatenation of various causes assumes the shape of an imper
sonal force in relation to the individuals caught up in it, so that both it and
the particular practical constraints that it generates assume the appearance
of necessity, in the sense of a force confronting individuals as something
given that they are powerless to change and to which they must, therefore,
simply conform. Even if the human will guided by reason attempts to
assert itself in the face of this apparent necessity - and the contingency
that underlies this appearance of necessity implies that such an act of will
is not, in principle, an essentially futile one - Rousseau identifies a series
of difficulties regarding the relation of the human will to necessity. In this
way, he makes genuine human redemption in the form of the perfectibility
of humankind look very uncertain indeed. This problem becomes espe
cially evident in Chapter 2, in which I show that Kant is unable to offer
an acco unt of human progress that accords with his interpretation of the
significance of Ro usseau's writings, and that this failure can be explained
in terms of certain ideas concerning the nature of human society found in
these writings when viewed in conjunction with Kant's theory of radical
evil.
Rousseau, Kant, Fichte and Hegel all associate perfectibility in some
way with the moral freedom which consists in subjecting oneself to laws
(or, more generally, to constraints) that can nevertheless be viewed as self
imposed ones. This moral freedom promises to provide a richer acco unt
of freedom than the one offered by neo-republicanism, which, as we have
seen, treats with some suspicion the positive model of freedom with which
Rousseau, Kant, Fichte and Hegel are associated. A central feature of all of
these philosophers' attempts to reconcile the idea of necessity with that of
freedom is the wish to explain how various practical constraints on human
agency can be viewed as constraints with which free and rational individuals
can in some sense identify themselves. The idea of moral freedom or
autonomy complicates the task of securing freedom in a condition of
human interdependence and in the face of the necessity that this co ndition
generates. Indeed, Ro usseau suggests that some insurmountable obstacles
to human progress must be thought to exist once this progress is conceived
in terms of the idea of moral freedom. The limitations of the neo-republican
11
This absence of necessity helps to explain one important respect in which Rousseau's position can
be said to differ from the one adopted by Hegel, if the latter is taken to view the realization of a
providential plan as being guaranteed by means of a dialectically determined h istorical process. Cf.
Neuhauser, Rousseau s Theodiry ofSelfLove, 4
Introduction
16
Perfectibility
certain tensions between the idea of necessity and that of human will are
also shown to exist in Hegel's account of the relation of civil society to the
political state. The issue of the relation of necessity to human will, and its
implications with respect to the idea of human perfectibility, also feature in
my discussion of Fichte's early critique of Ro usseau in Chapter 5 Although
this critique represents the most sustained single account of Rousseau's
writings offered by any of the philoso phers whom I discuss, I have chosen
to discuss it last because it can be best understood in connection with some
of the themes discussed earlier in the book.
From what has been said above, it is probably already dear that I do not
intend to argue, in line with the idea of a secularized theodicy, that the
problems concerning the relation between the human will and necessity
identified by Rousseau are solved by Kant, Fichte or Hegel. Rather, these
philosophers' own failures are instructive because they help us to under
stand what is at stake, and what difficulties are involved, when it comes to
a problem that can hardly be said to have been solved today: the problem
of the extent to which human beings can effectively exercise either indi
vidual or collective conscio us control over the economic and social forces
generated by a condition of interdependence, and to do so, moreover, in a
way that accords with such ideas as equality, freedom and perfectibility in
so far as they inform a conception of the common good.
CHAPTER ONE
19
he does not think that being subject only to this form of dependence
is a real option for modern human beings. Rousseau proceeds to give
us a sense of the nexus of relations in which dependence on things and
dependence on other human beings become bound up with each other in
the state of nature, so that what we have is, in effect, dependence on other
human beings as mediated by dependence on things. This is not to say
that Rousseau is making any historical claims. He himself wished to avoid
any misunderstanding concerning the historical status of his reflections on
the state of nature by stating that they 'o ught not be taken for historical
truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings; better suited
to elucidate the Nature of things than to show their genuine origin, and
comparable to those our Physicists daily make regarding the formation of
the World' (OC m: 132f. ; PWI: 132) . In o ther words, Rousseau is offering
one possible reco nstruction of how modern social and political conditions,
which are largely characterized by dependence on other human beings as
mediated by dependence on things, arose. '
Rousseau clearly saw the idea of a legitimate social pact as providing
a solution to some of the main threats posed to freedom by dependence
on other human beings. In Emile, having drawn the distinction between
dependence on things and dependence on men mentioned above, Rousseau
introduces the following solution to the evils associated with the second
form of dependence: 'to substitute law for man and to arm the general wills
with a real strength superio r to the action of every particular will' (OC IV:
3n; E: 8 5) . He claims that these measures would produce a condition in
which the laws approximate to natural laws by having 'an inflexibility that
no human force co uld ever conquer', so that 'dependence on men wo uld
then become dependence on things again' (OC IV: 3n; E: 85).
Broadly speaking, the idea appears to be that the establishment of the
right set of laws would remove all arbitrariness from the social relations
existing between human beings in a condition of interdependence, because
1
The issue of the hypothetical or conjectural, as opposed to factual, status of Rousseau's account of
the state of nature becomes more complex if one accepts that a distinction should be made between
the 'pure' state of nature, which is free of all human artifice and convention, and the state of nature
more broadly conceived, because whereas the latter can be said to be based on fact in so far as it
has some reference to the observations of savage peoples made in Rousseau's own time, the former
is purely conjectural, and is to be seen as a statement of the principles or causes which the facts
instantiate or in the light of which they ought to be understood. These principles are said to include
self-sufficiency. Cf. Gourevitch, 'Rousseau's "Pure" State of Nature'. My account of the earliest stages
of Rousseau's portrayal of the state of nature is compatible with such a claim, and even supports it,
in so far as it shows how the principle of self-sufficiency, in the form of dependence on things alone,
is a defining feature of this condition, and that this self-sufficiency is lost in the later stages of the
state of nature and in the transition to political society.
20
all individuals would be equally subject to the laws of the collective body
of which they are members, with these laws determining the legitimacy
(or lack of legitimacy) of each individual's actions in relation to the other
members of this collective body. This absence of arbitrariness turns depen
dence on other human beings into a form of dependence on things alone
in the sense that, as we shall see, the second form of dependence consists in
subjection to something which, by its very nature, operates with necessity
and is not, therefore, something that human beings can change at will.
This analogy between the relations that exist between human beings in a
law-governed condition and dependence on things alone is, of course, an
imperfect one, since the laws in question are created by human beings.
Nevertheless, once these laws are in place they might be thought to operate
with a kind of necessity, in the sense that they must simply be obeyed and,
if they are not obeyed, one knows that any violations of them will almost
certainly be punished. In other words, the laws serve as practical constraints
on human agency, and in order to do so, they ultimately require the use or
the threat of force, which, as we already know, for Rousseau represents a
form of necessity.
Ro usseau's claim that the legitimate social pact removes the kind of
dependence that involves being subject to unequal conditions, as when an
individual is forced to suffer various injustices because of the inferior status
or power which he or she enjoys in relation to others, explains why he thinks
that this social pact produces moral equality between human beings. On
entering into the social pact, each individual agrees to subject him- or herself
to co nditions that apply equally to all (that is, to the conditions stipulated
by the laws, which are universally valid). Consequently, no member of the
legal and political community established in this way has an interest in
making conditions burdensome to others, since these conditions would be
equally burdensome for him or her. Thus when Rousseau claims that each
person 'by giving himself to all, gives himself to no one' (OC m: 36of. ;
PW2: 50) , I take him to mean that although each individual makes him- or
herself dependent on the collective body established by means of the social
pact and on the laws that issue from this co llective body, of which he or
she is a co-legislating member, he or she at the same time avoids becoming
dependent on the arbitrary will of any particular individual or group of
1 This interpretation of what Rousseau means i s entirely different from taking h i m t o b e claiming that
in the civil state 'for each man, other men will no longer be distinguished from things'. Todorov,
Frail Happiness, 23. Rousseau is talking about the laws in their relations to human beings having a
thing-like character, rather than human beings having this character in relation to each other.
21
individuals within society. This is why Ro usseau claims that the citizen's
membership of this collective body 'guarantees him against all personal
dependence' (OC m : 364; PW2: 53) .
Inasmuch as it depends on the existence of legal guarantees against arbi
trary, unjust interference on the part of others, freedom involves more than
the absence of direct, typically coercive forms of interference. Rather, in line
with the republican idea of freedom, independence of the arbitrary wills
of other human beings, which includes freedom from po tential as well as
actual interference, represents another fundamental condition of genuine
human freedom. This independence of the arbitrary wills of others is free
dom of a negative kind. For Ro usseau, however, it does not constitute full
human freedom, even though it forms one essential element of an account
of such freedom, so that to this extent his conception of freedom can most
certainly be identified with the idea of republican liberty understood as
the freedom 'which individuals enjoy under the law and by virtue of a just
political constitution which frees them from a narrow dependence on the
individual will of others'.3
One reason that independence of the arbitrary wills of others do es not
by itself constitute full human freedom is that this independence depends
on democratic freedom, which consists in the collective power of the
members of a political community to determine the laws to which they
are all subject. This in turn means that democratic freedom and the civil
freedom which consists in protection against arbitrary, unjust interference
on the part of others are essentially related in Rousseau's political solution
to the evils to which he thinks dependence on other human beings tends
to give rise. In spite of the suspicion that some neo-republicans have of the
positive model of freedom and of Ro usseau's adoption of such a mo del of
freedom in particular, the idea of republican freedom cannot, therefore,
be completely disassociated from this positive model of freedom once
it is taken to involve 'obedience to laws which have been sanctioned by
individual men', even if at the same time it consists in the negative freedom
that concerns the way in which 'the sovereignty of the law pro tects each
and every one from the wrongs, the affronts and the wilful infringements
of their rights perpetrated by others, whether they be private individuals or
magistrates' . 4 The positive aspect of republican freedom especially relates to
the ideas of moral and demo cratic freedom, for both these forms of freedom
involve acts of self-legislation and thus obedience to laws sanctioned by
) Viroli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the 'Well-Ordered Society ; 11.
Viroli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the 'Well-Ordered Society ; 11.
22
individual human beings, in the first case as a rational being as such, and
in the second case as part of a larger, collective body. Rousseau's account
of dependence can, in fact, be related to four distinct types of freedom,
namely, natural freedom, civil freedom, democratic freedom and moral
freedom.
I have just mentioned how civil freedom and demo cratic freedom form
essential elements in Ro usseau's solution to the problem of the way in
which dependence on other human beings threatens to make one person
subject to the arbitrary will of another person or group of persons. Natural
freedom is the form of freedom which primitive man enjoys in the earliest
stages of the state of nature, in which, as we shall see, he is dependent on
things alone. It 'has no other bounds than the individual's forces', and it is
lost on entering the civil condition because it is 'limited by the general will'
(OC m : 365; PW2: 54) . Rousseau here has in mind a form of freedom that
consists in encountering no obstacles when it comes to acting on the basis
of one's desires except the limits of one's own physical and mental powers.
I shall shortly describe this natural freedom in more detail, and we shall
see that it largely depends on the physical and psychological isolation that
primitive man allegedly enjoys in the earliest stages of the state of nature.
The loss of independence that accompanies an individual's entry into the
civil condition is compensated by the civil freedom that is thereby gained,
and which consists in the state's protection of one's own person and one's
property, whose protection previously depended on the absence of other
human beings or on the amount of force that one co uld exercise in relation
to them . Living in a law-governed condition in turn teaches individuals to
restrain their appetites and to act in accordance with universally valid rules
that prescribe their duties to them, thus enabling them to consult their
reason before following their inclinations. This self-mastery constitutes
moral freedom. As Ro usseau himself puts it, 'the impulsion of mere appetite
is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself is freedom'
(OC m : 365; PW2: 54).
The fact that Rousseau does not identify democratic freedom as a specific
form of freedom can be explained in terms of the way in which it represents
an expression of moral freedom in the specific political form of obeying laws
that one has prescribed to oneself as a co-legislating member of the sovereign
assembly which is established by means of the social pact. The act of
entering into the social pact itself presupposes this same moral freedom, for
this act requires that each individual subjects him- or herself to conditions
that apply equally to all. Only in this way can the constraints to which
one is subject be conceived as self-imposed ones rather than constraints
23
that stem from the will of another person . The capacity for moral freedom
is, therefore, a condition of democratic freedom as Rousseau understands
it both conceptually, since democratic freedom would be unthinkable in
the absence of the capacity to impose constraints on oneself as well as on
others, and existentially, since the sovereign legislative body in which each
citizen exercises moral freedom as a co-legislating member could otherwise
never have come into being in a way that furnishes it with the legitimacy
which derives from having its basis in consent. Rather, political authority
wo uld be based on force alone and it would, therefore, simply consist
in the domination of the weaker party by a stronger one. At the same
time, democratic freedom provides a specific example of the actual exercise
of moral freedom, with the laws agreed upon by the members of the
sovereign assembly determining the bounds of the civil freedom that they
enjoy.
Rousseau's account of moral freedom shows that in his view freedom
is not coextensive with non-interference, even when the absence of inter
ference is taken to include the idea of freedom as independence of the
arbitrary wills of others. Rather, these two negative conceptions of free
dom, both of which appeal to the idea of the absence of something that
is considered to be an evil for human beings, depend on the capacity
for moral freedom, which is presupposed not only by the idea of the
social pact itself but also by civil and democratic freedom, since it is the
exercise of this capacity for moral freedom as the co-legislating mem
ber of the sovereign legislative body that determines the bounds of civil
freedom. To this extent, Ro usseau himself presupposes the existence of
the capacity for moral freedom which he appears to treat as a conse
quence of political society when he claims that this capacity develops sub
sequent to the establishment of the civil condition by means of the social
pact.5
As we shall see, both Kant and Hegel attempt to avoid this apparent cir
cle by treating moral freedom as something that develops in the course of a
spontaneous educative process which takes place in a condition of human
5
This tension in Rousseau's account of freedom is reproduced in the claims that, on the one hand,
the social pact itself 'is an instance of self-legislation', while, on the other hand, human beings
enter into the social pact on prudential grounds based on the desire to preserve themselves, so that
moral freedom, as well as civic and democratic freedom, must be considered to be 'a kind of happy
consequence of the terms of the social pact; but they are neither the citizens' motivation for entering
the contract nor the purpose of the contract itself'. Simpson, Rousseau 's Theory ofFreedom, 96 and
uof. The second claim appeals to a practical necessity which sits uncomfortably with the idea of an
act of moral freedom, while the first claim presupposes the existence of the moral freedom which in
the second claim is treated as an unintended consequence of the formation of political society.
24
25
evolved, 6 this does not mean that Rousseau was not equally concerned
with the issue of how the principles of a just social and political order
could be put into practice, that is, how his republican solution to the
threats posed to freedom by dependence on other human beings could be
realized. Rousseau's concern with this issue is evident from his discussion
of the relation of the human will to necessity in connection with the for
mation of political society which forms the main theme of the final section
of this chapter.
As regards this relation of will to necessity, Rousseau's recognition of
a spontaneous process in which dependence on other human beings is
mediated by dependence on things makes it especially difficult for him
to explain how the principles of a just social and political order could
be put into practice given certain unintended outcomes of this process.
Rousseau's po rtrayal of these outcomes implies that he is not co ncerned
simply with the problem of direct, interpersonal forms of dependence
that make one person susceptible to domination by others. Instead he
recognizes that there is a more complex, impersonal form of dependence at
work. This form of dependence consists in being subject to an apparently
blind, spontaneous dependence-generating process which, on account of
the practical constraints that it generates, leaves little room, if any, for
genuine acts of self-legislation, whether as an isolated moral agent or as
the member of a community of co-legislating citizens, by means of which
control over one's own life can be gained. Rather, the material inequality
that this kind of process generates makes some people dependent on the
arbitrary wills of other, more powerful individuals, even though these
individuals may not have intended such an outcome.
I shall now give an acco unt of the essential features of this blind, sponta
neo us dependence-generating process with its freedom-endangering con
sequences as described by Rousseau in the Second Discourse. Yet it is not
only in this work that we enco unter the idea of a spontaneous dependence
generating process in Rousseau's writings. In his later Reveries ofthe Solitary
Walker, Ro usseau unintentionally provides us with the means of regarding
this type of process as a largely blind, spontaneous one which generates an
indirect form of dependence, that is to say, dependence on other human
beings as mediated by dependence on things. At the same time, he demon
strates a yearning for the independence allegedly enjoyed by primitive man
in the earliest stages of the state of nature.
6
Cf. Viroli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the 'Well-ordered Society ; I:tl. In Chapter 3 I highlight the
normative aspects of the Social Contract together with the problems that they raise in connection
with the kind of blind, spontaneous dependence-generating process described in the Second Discourse.
26
In the Second Discourse, Rousseau offers an acco unt of the transition from
a natural or physical form of inequality (one based on greater strength,
for example) to moral or political inequality; which depends on some
kind of convention. He begins by showing what the situation of human
beings might have been like in the absence of all social relations and
when they lacked certain capacities, dispositions and ways of thinking that
presuppose such relations. The transition from the 'pure' state of nature
to a more civilized, social condition marks the transition from dependence
on things alone to ever greater dependence on other human beings. In
large part, however, this transition should be more properly understo od as
the transition from dependence on things alone to dependence on other
human beings as mediated by dependence on thing.r.
A central feature of Rousseau's characterization of primitive man in the
earliest stages of the state of nature is that his needs can be easily satis
fied. This is because these needs are limited natural ones and primitive
man possesses the physical strength and other capabilities that allow him
to satisfy such needs by means of his own activity. Primitive man's needs
and the means at his disposal for satisfying them are, in short, fully com
mensurate. Primitive man is, therefore, in the position to satisfy his needs
witho ut the help of other human beings, which is just as well, since he
hardly ever encounters o thers of his kind and when he do es so it is only
for short periods of time.? Primitive man's independence and isolation in
the earliest stages of the state of nature already point to one reason that
Rousseau has for claiming that dependence on things is not detrimental to
freedom, namely, that primitive man remains self-sufficient. For although
primitive man depends on natural objects for the satisfaction of his basic
needs, 8 he remains self-sufficient in the sense that he can satisfy these needs
thro ugh the use of his own powers. In this respect, primitive man remains
free in the purely negative sense that he is not subject to any constraints
apart from the limits set by his own physical and mental powers and by
the natural environment confronting him. These other constraints would
7
Rousseau describes human beings in the pure state of nature as beings which 'having neither a fixed
Dwelling nor any need of one another, m ight perhaps meet no more than twice in their life, without
recognizing and speaking with one another' (OC III: 146; PW1: 144) .
This appears to be true even with respect to sexual needs, since the sexual act is described by Rousseau
in terms that suggest that the partners treat each other as natural objects that they use only to satisfy
sexual desire, and that they do not, therefore, even need to communicate with each other by means
of speech (OC I I I : 147; PW1: 145).
27
29
30
This passage marks a turning point, for it shows that the problem in
question is not simply that human beings become less physically robust
than before, a defect that could, in any case, be remedied by their ability to
unite against a common enemy or other challenge facing the community
to which each of them belongs. The main point is that the leisure they
enjoy leads to the generation of new, artificial needs and to the creation
of new commodities that both satisfy these needs and help to produce
them. Such commodities are luxury items because they are not necessary
to human survival. Yet they can be classed as needs rather than as wants
because habit makes them appear indispensable, even when the pleasure
that these items bring diminishes in proportion to the degree that human
beings become habituated to them. In other words, the commo dities in
question appear to be necessary, giving rise to a subjective form of necessity
which is produced and reinforced by so cial forces and pressures. In this
way, human beings become subject to an artificial, or conventional, form
of necessity, of which they themselves are the unintentional creators, in
addition to natural necessity.
Ro usseau nevertheless views increased leisure as being in itself essentially
harmless, as long as the conveniences that an individual enjoys are ones
that he himself pro duces. He suggests that making musical instruments
represents a case in point. This is an interesting example, for even if a
person is able to make the musical instrument which he or she plays,
he or she may come to depend on others if it is the kind of instrument
that can be most effectively employed when accompanied by other instru
ments. While making music in association with others can in this respect
be viewed as a form of dependence on o ther human beings which demands
a certain level of cooperation, it also suggests that dependence on other
human beings does no t necessarily result in the domination of one per
son by another person, even when artificial needs are involved and this
dependence is incompatible with natural freedom, which consists in the
absence of any conventional constraints. Moreover, the activity of mak
ing music in asso ciation with others shows that human interdependence
and the constraints that it generates are not necessarily incompatible with
31
32
(GA I/5: 65ff. ; SE: 56ff.) .10 This act of subjecting oneself to law is, so to
speak, performed on the basis of one's own authority rather than on the
basis of some external authority. For Fichte, individuals cannot, therefore,
be compelled to be moral, whether this compulsion exists in the form
of threats or the promise of rewards, or in an attempt to fo rce someone
to hold a theoretical conviction, which in this case presumably means a
conviction concerning whether something is or is not a duty (GA I/ 5: 277ff. ;
SE: 299ff.) .
This moral autonomy recalls Ro usseau's description o f moral freedom
as obedience to the law that one has prescribed to oneself. For Ro usseau,
it is precisely this type of freedom that cannot be renounced witho ut
renouncing one's humanity. Such renunciation would be incompatible with
the nature of the human being because 'to deprive one's will of all freedom
is to deprive one's actions of all morality' (OC m: 3 56; PW2: 45). Although
Fichte identifies autonomy with the specific act of imposing unconditional
moral laws on oneself, the notion of autonomy can be thought to admit of
vario us degrees once it is identified more generally with the act of imposing
any kind of rational principle of action or other constraint upon oneself.
The idea of autonomy understood in these broader terms can be related to
the example of the interdependence and cooperation involved in making
music in association with o thers.
The individual who remains self-sufficient by making his or her own
musical instrument, but then decides to make music with others so as
to realize this instrument's full potential together with his or her own
potential as a musician, becomes subject to the constraints that cooperation
with o thers imposes upon individual human beings. As well as purely
musical constraints, such as having to play pieces of music that allow
the o ther instruments and the other musicians' talent to shine as well
as one's own instrument and musical talent, agreement will have to be
reached concerning such matters as rehearsal times. These constraints can
nevertheless be viewed by the agents concerned as self-imposed ones, in
the sense that they recognize that these constraints are necessary conditions
of their own flourishing as instrument-makers and as musicians. For this
reason, they can freely endorse these constraints as opposed to experiencing
them as purely alien, external ones. Moreover, the individuals concerned
are not compelled to accept these constraints. Each of them could, for
example, decide to avoid the imposition of such constraints by switching
to another instrument which lends itself more to solo performances or
10
33
34
As we shall see, Kant, Fichte and Hegel also seek to explain in their
own ways the compatibility of freedom as autonomy with the reality of
human interdependence. Rousseau, however, recognizes that explaining
this compatibility is much more difficult than the example of making
music in association with o thers suggests. For while this example of a
voluntary form of association allows some obvio us scope for free choice,
a condition of interdependence that has its basis both in natural necessity
and in artificial needs generates various constraints that are far less easy to
avoid and that consequently may assume the form of an external necessity.
This brings me back to Rousseau's account of the genesis of moral or
political inequality in the Second Discourse.
The development of new, artificial needs increases the degree of depen
dence on other human beings, because each individual becomes unable
to produce the means of satisfying his or her needs by means of his or
her own activity. We begin, therefore, to move ever further away from the
independence enjoyed by primitive man in the earliest stages of the state
of nature. Rousseau clearly thinks that this loss of independence involves
the transformation of dependence on things alone into dependence on
other human beings. However, as the role played by objects of need already
shows, this second form of dependence is itself mediated by dependence
on things, that is, by dependence on objects that are taken to represent the
means of satisfying natural needs or the artificial needs that have taken on
the appearance of needs that must be satisfied, even if objectively they lack
the status of true needs. An increasing dependence on other human beings
does not, therefore, replace dependence on things. Rather, both types of
dependence come to form parts of a single, dependence-generating process.
This process turns out also to be an inequality-generating one, as becomes
evident when we turn to Rousseau's account of the consequences of the
introduction of the arts of agriculture and metallurgy.
The intro duction of these arts leads to a clear and permanent division
of labour, with some men melting and forging iron while others provide
the means of feeding these workers. At the same time, the introduction
of iron and the invention of tools made of it compensate for the fact that
fewer hands are available to provide the means of common subsistence
because these developments make agriculture mo re productive. Natural
more than this merely negative condition of freedom, since it involves subjection to constraints with
which one identifies oneself by means of some kind of reflective act. It is, perhaps, no coincidence
that the last claim appears in one of Rousseau's late autobiographical writings and not in a work
such as the Social Contract, for, as we shall see in Chapter 5, in these writings he appears to renounce
the positive model of freedom which he elsewhere extols.
35
37
appear to be better than their nearest rivals in the eyes of significant others
whose good opinion they seek. The upshot of this phenomenon is that it
is also true of the rich man that 'sociable man, always outside himself, is
capable of living only in the opinio n of others and, so to speak, derives
the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment', whereas
primitive man 'lives within himself' (OC 1 1 1 : 193; PWI: 187). Unlike human
beings in the unequal, competitive so ciety described above, primitive man
lives within himself because, as we have seen, his sentiment of his own
existence does not depend on relations to others of his kind. In other
words, primitive man's self-awareness reflects his self-sufficiency.
Of particular significance in the present context is the way in which
Rousseau points to some other ways in which even the rich man's thoughts,
beliefs and actions will be determined by the social system in which he
himself is caught up, and in such a way, moreover, that existing material
inequalities will have a significant role to play in explaining this phe
nomenon. In the fragmentary Discourse on Wealth, Rousseau attempts to
convince a yo ung man, who intends to become rich in order to put himself
in a better position to help the poor, of the hopelessness of such a plan,
by drawing attention to the following problem: how can this young man
expect to retain his ability to feel compassion for the unfortunate and to
give them money once he himself has become hardened by the competitive
world which he must enter so as to become rich, and when his ideas and
maxims will, unknown to him, change with his social situation? (OC v:
469ff. ; OW: 6ff.) Thus altho ugh it may be wrong to claim that dependence
on other human beings in the form of opinion arises only in a society char
acterized by material inequality and competition with respect to material
goods, 1 2 it is still possible to think of such a society as producing its own
distinctive forms of dependence on other human beings in the shape of
opinion, and that this form of dependence on other human beings may, at
a certain level, be determined by dependence on things, in the sense that
material inequality leads opinion to assume a specific character.
The account given above of the forms that dependence on other human
beings as mediated by dependence on things may assume in a competitive
society that is characterized by a high degree of interdependence when it
1 1 Rousseau himself suggests that opinion has a role to play in the state of nature even prior to the
emergence of material inequality when he speaks of an earlier form of society that is characterized
only by natural inequalities as already marking a step in the direction of moral or political inequality,
because of the public esteem earned by the person who sang or danced the best, or was the
handsomest, the strongest or most eloquent individual, and the vices of vanity and contempt, and
shame and envy to which this inequality gives rise (OC m: 169f.; PWr: r66) .
39
41
42
The guiding idea here is that, given the unintelligibility of their actions,
Rousseau feels entitled to deprive his tormentors of any volition and other
human attributes, treating both them and their actions as phenomena
that obey quasi-natural laws operating with mechanical necessity. This
strategy allows Rousseau to regard himself as powerless in the face of his
tormentors' actions and to think of them as something that his own actions
are incapable of changing. Consequently it makes no sense for him to resist
them or to complain that they are unjust. It also allows him to imagine that
he is alone in the world and, in his dependence on things alone, subject to
natural laws only. Thus although opinion clearly involves dependence on
other human beings, Rousseau treats it as ifit were a case of dependence
on things alone.
In effect, Ro usseau engages in an imaginative act which aims to change
dependence on other human beings in the form of public opinion, with
all its detrimental emotional and psychological consequences, into depen
dence on things alone, enabling him to adopt the following attitude,
irrespective of whether or not it accurately reflects objective conditions: to
'regard all the details of my fate as the workings of pure necessity [fotalite] ,
i n which I should not seek t o fi n d any intention, purpose, or moral cause,
that I must submit to it without argument or resistance since these were
useless' (OC r: 1079; RSW: 128f. ; translation modified) . One may doubt
the effectiveness of this imaginative act, by means of which all volition is
denied to others and both they and their actions are completely reified so
as to turn an emotional and psychological form of dependence on other
human beings into dependence on things alone. This act is nevertheless
highly significant because it captures something distinctive about the way
in which the blind, spontaneous dependence-generating process described
in the Second Discourse, which is to be understood largely in terms of
dependence on other human beings as mediated by dependence on things,
can be conceived.
As we have seen, in Reveries ofthe Solitary Walker Rousseau turns depen
dence on men into dependence on things by depriving his tormentors
and their actions of any volition or other human attributes. At the same
time, there is no reference to the material and social factors that he identifies
in the Second Discourse. Ro usseau nevertheless unwittingly presents us with
the means of reintroducing this more complex form of dependence in a way
43
that anticipates the full development of a market economy and the kind of
blind, spontaneous dependence-generating process that can be associated
with it, and which has material inequality as one of its main outcomes.
This is because Ro usseau's attempt in the Eighth Walk of Reveries of the
Solitary Walker to deprive his tormentors and their actions of any vo lition
anticipates a move made in defence of free market capitalism, even though
his intentions are obviously completely different ones. This time it is not
people's opinions but the set of economic and social relations that emerges
through the choices that they make with respect to particular acts of eco
nomic and financial exchange that is treated as if it were simply a matter
of the behaviour of things. Here, in the same way as Rousseau deprives the
actions of o ther human beings of all intentionality so as to be able to regard
them purely in terms of the movements ofbodies in space subject to certain
laws of motion, human intentionality is suppressed so as to conceive of the
free market and its particular outcomes as an example of a spontaneously
generated order which has not been intentionally produced by any one
person or gro up of persons. This means, or so it is claimed, that it makes
no sense to call the unintended consequences of such an order, among
which we may include material inequality, as unjust.
One proponent of this view, F. A. Hayek, argues that the term 'unjust'
can only be applied to the actions of individuals or to the concerted
actions of the members of a collective body that are consciously designed
to bring about a particular effect, whereas no one can be held responsible
for the unintended consequences of the spontaneous order generated by the
operations of a free market. '3 However, while Ro usseau deprives opinion
of its unjust character by treating it as the unintended, cumulative result
of the behaviour of vario us individual entities that are deprived of all
volition, Hayek treats a condition of material inequality as the unintended
outcome and the cumulative result of many particular acts that may have
been a matter of individual free will. The difference is, then, that Ro usseau
attempts to reconcile himself to his tormentors' actions by conceiving
their actions in terms of the behaviour of purely material objects obeying
fixed laws, whereas H ayek downplays, but does not altogether deny, the
significance of people's intentions with the aim of showing that the material
inequalities generated by a free market cannot be regarded as unjust. In
short, Hayek treats the spontaneously generated order that he has in mind
as the result of countless individual actions that are determined by the
particular purposes that agents have and by the particular choices that
'l
Cf. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume II: The Mirage ofSocialjustice.
44
they make in the light of these purposes, while maintaining that this
spontaneously generated order itself cannot be viewed as the result of
any conscious intention. In this way, Hayek implies that this order is the
unintended outcome of an impersonal force subject to its own laws of
development. The order in question can be conceived, moreover, as one in
which relations between human beings are typically mediated by material
objects that form the immediate objects of acts of exchange, and thus as
one in which unequal relations of dependence on other human beings
as mediated by dependence on things arise. In this respect, it recalls the
blind, spontaneo us dependence-generating process that we enco unter in
Rousseau's account of the rise of moral or political inequality in the Second
Discourse.
The way in which the particular outcomes of this spontaneous order and
this order itself are treated as if they were not ultimately the consciously
intended products of human will recalls Ro usseau's idea that dependence
on other humans beings might, for certain purposes, be understo od in
terms of dependence on things alone and as subjection to a quasi-natural
necessity. Rousseau's resignation in the face of such necessity reflects a wish
on his part to recreate the condition of primitive man, in the sense that the
most appropriate attitude to adopt in the circumstances would be to submit
oneself to the necessity to which one is subject, rather than engaging in a
futile attempt to change things. In a similar vein, Hayek argues that people
should simply accept and accommodate themselves to the impersonal forces
of the market. He goes so far as to suggest that subjection to market forces
is not detrimental to freedom, even though it involves subjecting ourselves
to the constraints generated by these impersonal forces, when he claims
that 'Freedom means that in some measure we entrust o ur fate to forces
which we do not control. ''4
This claim recalls the idea that primitive man in the earliest stages of the
state of nature remains essentially independent in the face of the natural
necessity to which he is subject. Yet the conditions are surely completely
different, since the free market involves a form of dependence on other
human beings as mediated by dependence on things that, despite the
appearance of necessity that its relations may assume, rests on contingency
to the extent that these relations are ultimately the o utcomes, albeit the
unintended ones, of certain conscious choices that individuals have made.
This element of contingency means that reform of existing conditions is, in
principle, possible, either by enco uraging people to make different choices
14
Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume II: The Mirage ofSocialJustice, 30.
45
Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty. Volume I I : The Mirage ofSocialjustice, 63.
47
his defenders, to instill in them other maxims and to give them different
institutions, as favorable to himself as natural Right was contrary to him.
(OC I I I : I??; PWI: I72f.)
In other words, the successful formation of a po lity with laws that accord
with the general will is only really possible when its members already
have the right kind of disposition and share the same essential values. Yet
it is precisely by living in a polity with such laws that this disposition
and these shared values are produced in a people. This idea looks even
more problematic when the process described in the Second Discourse is
assumed to have already run its co urse, even tho ugh it might be possible
for people with simpler and more wholesome mores, who belong to an
earlier stage of human society, to institute a polity based on the principles
set out in the Social Contract. These tensions in Rousseau's republican
solutio n to the threats posed to freedom by dependence on other human
beings lend force to the argument that the principles o utlined in the Social
Contract could not, in his view, be realized in a modern state such as the
France of his own day but only in a nation such as Corsica, in which the
process of corruption described in the Second Discourse had yet to run its
full course. 1 6
Ro usseau suggests, in fact, that the difficulties that arise in connection
with the first solution mentioned above, which treats the so cial pact as
a result of necessity, are what lead him to consider the implausible sec
ond solution of a Go d-like legislator, when he claims that 'What makes
the work of legislation difficult is not so much what has to be estab
lished as what has to be destroyed; and what makes success so rare is the
impossibility of finding the simplicity of nature linked with the needs
of society' (OC m: 391; PW2: 78) . In o ther words, the corruption of
a society may be so advanced that there is no real option b ut to start
from scratch. Among other things this means beginning with a society
'6
49
that has not begun to suffer the artificial inequalities and other evils that
Rousseau describes as consequences of an increasing dependence on other
human beings as mediated by dependence on things. Yet the idea of such
a new beginning appears almost fantastic in the face of the blind, spon
taneous dependence-generating process that Ro usseau so skilfully po rtrays
in the Second Discourse. The most that we can seemingly hope for is,
therefore, to bring this process under some form of collective control,
without, however, being able to free ourselves completely from the moral
corruption in our ways of thinking and acting, and in our relations to
others, produced by this pro cess, and of which we ourselves may be barely
consctous.
Although it may be doubted that Rousseau offers a fully convincing
solution to the problem as to how the capacity of the human will to shape
existing conditions can be reconciled with the idea of necessity in the form
of the impersonal, spontaneously generated forces that shape society, his
recognition of the difficulties faced by the task that he sets himself in the
Social Contract is in itself highly significant. This is because it draws atten
tion to the inherent difficulties involved in explaining the transition from
a condition marked by one-sided forms of dependence on other human
beings based on material inequality to a condition in which this form of
dependence together with the threat of domination that it contains have
been removed, even when a set of principles has been identified that pur
port to explain how this new condition must be constituted if it is to count
as a truly just one. It also helps us to understand why Rousseau, for who m
'in the relations between man and man the worst that can happen to one
is to find himself at the other's discretion' (OC III: 181; PW1: 176) , was so
fascinated by the independence, or, rather, the dependence on things alone,
that he describes primitive man as enjoying in the earliest stages of the state
of nature.17 This dependence on things alone appears to have fascinated
Rousseau so much that he felt obliged to produce a work, the Social Con
tract, that seeks to explain how the renunciation of one's natural freedom
might be justified, even when the possibility of a return to a condition
of independence in which human beings are dependent on things alone
no longer exists for modern individuals. In this respect, the loss of natural
freedom is treated as a potential misfortune that every subsequent human
being, in so far as he or she is capable of imagining such a condition of
'7
There is a highly personal dimension to Rousseau's concern with the problem of dependence on
other human beings, as opposed to dependence on things alone, that is signalled by the following
claim about himself in one of his autobiographical writings: 'He bears the yoke of the necessity of
things witho ut difficulty, but not so the yoke of the will of men' (OC 1 : 845; D : 143).
Ro usseau here implies that the civil condition plays an essential role in
the process whereby individual human beings and the human race more
generally achieve perfection, with the full development of the capacity for
moral freedom being held to depend on entry into this condition. As we
shall see in the next chapter, this is a point that Kant was keen to develop, by
turning Rousseau's suggestion that the human being's cultural and moral
development depends on his or her membership of a legal and political
community into a full-blown moral teleology. Yet it is equally possible
that in a society marked by great material inequality and the potential for
domination that it generates, the independence enjoyed by primitive man
will appear more appealing to some people than do the alleged advantages of
living in a law-governed society. We sho uld not forget, then, the important
qualification that Ro usseau adds concerning the advantages of leaving the
state of nature to enter the civil state in the passage quoted above. This
qualification suggests that the threats to freedom posed by dependence
on other human beings, especially when it is mediated by dependence on
things, may, in fact, constitute an insurmountable obstacle to collective
51
human perfectibility. I shall argue in the next chapter that Kant fails to do
full justice to this aspect of Rousseau's thought.
Kant, Fichte and Hegel all grapple with the question of the possibility
of both individual and collective human perfectibility in ways that concern
the problem of the relation of will to necessity described by Rousseau,
even tho ugh it is only in Hegel's acco unt of civil society that the concept
of necessity is explicitly invoked. The relation of the will to necessity
nevertheless represents a theme that is implicit in Kant's philosophy of
history and in Fichte's theory of right. In the former case, necessity is viewed
as something that produces certain beneficial, unintended consequences
with respect to human perfectibility, which in its highest form consists in
moral freedom. In the latter case, the will is accorded the role of imposing
order on the blind, spontaneous forces shaping society, because these forces
cannot be trusted to produce the right outcomes unless they are subjected
to conscious human control. Hegel's position, I argue, ultimately represents
an unstable synthesis of these two positions. Certain aspects of Rousseau's
writings will be used both to highlight and to call into question the positions
that Kant, Fichte and Hegel adopt.
CHAPTER TWO
Kant claims that in his earlier works Rousseau presents a conflict between
culture, which is the work of freedo m, and nature, especially in so far
as the human race is a physical species, whereas in Emile and the Social
Contract he seeks to show the course that culture should take, even if it
has not in fact done so, in order to bring about the proper development
of the human race as a moral species and its eventual harmony with itself
as a natural species. Culture is not, therefore, something intrinsically bad.
Rather, when it assumes the proper form, it may lead to the improvement
of the human race measured in terms of its moral destiny. Kant describes in
providential terms the process whereby human beings transcend the moral
corruption for which they themselves are responsible, and which manifests
itself in their social relations with each other. Human beings are said to
leave a state of innocence to enter a state of evil, only to transcend this state
of evil and to achieve moral perfection by means of education (Erziehung)
(M vu: 326f. ; AHE 422f., M vm: n6ff. ; AHE: 169ff.) .
Kant's interpretation of the significance o f Rousseau's writings i n this
way forms part of a narrative that treats human history as a kind of theodicy,
with the transition first being made fro m natural freedom to civil freedom
and then from the latter to a fully moral form of freedom. Rousseau's
writings are also understood in terms of the idea of human perfectibility,
with the possibility that human beings will transcend the moral corruption
brought about by the rise of culture, together with the conflict between
freedom and nature brought about by their departure from a purely natural
order, being seriously entertained. Kant here stresses the idea already hinted
at by Ro usseau himself that the full development of moral freedom depends
on human beings leaving a purely natural condition, in which their needs
and the means of satisfying them are in harmony with each other, to enter
the civil condition.
52
53
Cf. Wood, Kant 's Ethical Thought, 286ff. The view that Kant understands evil to be a social product
is also found in Anderson-Gold, Unnecessary Evil, 36ff.
1 For criticisms of Wood's position along these lines, see Grimm, 'Kant's Argument for Radical Evil',
and Jeanine M . Grenberg, 'Social Dimensions of Kant's Conception of Radical Evil', in Anderson
Gold and Muchnik, Kant 's Anatomy of Evil. For Wood's response to some of the criticisms made
of his position, see Allen W Wood, 'Kant and the Intelligibility of Evil', in Anderson-Gold and
Muchnik, Kant's Anatomy ofEvil, 144ff.
J Cf. Allen W Wood, 'Kant's Fourth Proposition: The Unsociable Sociability of Human Nature', in
Rorty and Schmidt, Kant 's Idea for a Univmal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, 127f.
54
it assumes the existence of moral evil in human beings. In this respect, Kant
can be said to develop an account of a liberal society which is firmly based
on the anthropological assumption that human beings are by nature evil,
with this assumption imposing limits on how we are to conceive of the state
and its basic functions in relation to society, in which the radical evil fo und
in human nature manifests itself while being subject to certain constraints.
Thus the notion that human beings are in some sense evil independently
of any social relations in which they stand with others of their kind must
be thought to possess explanatory priority, even if the radical evil in human
nature can fully manifest itself only in society. In this way, human beings
are held to require the legal and political arrangements that are best suited
to their radically evil nature.
Kant's assumption that human beings are by nature evil sits uncom
fortably with his interpretation of the significance of Rousseau's writings,
for it appears to render even more difficult, if not impossible, the task of
explaining the transition to a condition in which human beings fulfil their
moral destiny. Kant attempts to explain this transition in terms of a sponta
neous, quasi-natural process that is characterized by some degree of human
interdependence, and which is held to generate certain unintended, but
allegedly beneficial, outcomes. Kant gives an account of this transition after
having treated the formation of political society as a matter of necessity in
the same way as Ro usseau does when he locates the source of the so cial pact
in individuals' recognition of the fact that they are no longer in the posi
tion to preserve themselves by means of their own powers. Kant likewise
treats the formation of political society as a matter of natural necessity in
the shape of the conditions of individual self-preservation. Yet as we have
seen, Rousseau worries that a just legal and political order could not be
established when people lack the right moral disposition and mores. Kant,
by contrast, appears to dismiss this particular concern when he claims that
'The problem of establishing a state, no matter how hard it may sound,
is soluble even for a nation of devils (if only they have understanding)'
(AA vm: 366; PP: 33 5) . The idea that a nation of devils could agree among
themselves to establish a state implies that even a set of individuals who
possess evil dispositions could agree to establish a just legal and political
order.
As already mentioned, Kant at the same time sees the civil condition
and culture as forming parts of a teleological process, with genuine moral
freedom representing the final outcome of this process. In this way, the
civil freedom of which even a nation of devils is capable is to be succeeded
by a higher, truly ethical form of freedom, suggesting that history can be
55
For the view that Kant can be viewed as a liberal, albeit a liberal in the context of the Germany of
his own time, see Williams, Kant 's Political Philosophy, 125ff.
Schmitt, The Concept ofthe Political, 6of.
57
In order to justify the assertion that we must presuppose that the sub
jective gro und of all maxims has been corrupted by the human propensity
to evil, Kant appeals to experience, claiming that 'We can spare ourselves
the formal proof that there must be such a corrupt propensity roo ted in
the human being, in view of the multitude of woeful examples that the
experience of human deeds parades before us' (AA VI: 32f.; RRT: 8o) . Yet
Kant himself casts doubt on this same appeal to experience when he claims
that the judgement that the agent is an evil human being canno t be reli
ably based on experience, since we cannot observe with sufficient clarity
59
our own maxims, let alone the maxims of others (AA VI: 20; RRT: 70). 8
Although Kant's theory of radical evil in this way raises some thorny issues
concerning whether or not the claims that he makes regarding human evil
are of an a priori or merely inductive nature, and whether they are of a cor
respondingly necessary or contingent kind, such issues need not concern
us here. For even if Kant's claim that human beings are by nature evil rests
on certain inductive generalizations,9 whose validity may be questioned,
when discussing the relation of his theory of radical evil to his political phi
losophy it is possible to work with the weaker claim that human beings may
be evil by nature, and that this is a possibility which any serious political
philosophy must consider. In other words, the claim that the human being
is by nature evil would have the status of a metho dological assumption,
similar in kind to the one found in Machiavelli's Discorsi, in which it is
said that who ever wants to establish a commo nwealth and provide it with
laws must presuppose that all men are evil, and that they will vent the
malignancy that is in them whenever the opportunity to do so presents
itself.10
Having developed a theory of the radical evil in human nature, Kant
certainly needs to operate with such an assumption in his political writings,
for this theory implies that human evil is a sufficiently general phenomenon
to render any reliance on an individual's morality foolhardy, and that a set of
legal and institutional constraints on human agency are therefore necessary.
In order to understand how this methodological assumption operates in
Kant's political writings, we first need to address the issue of what it means
8
On the one hand, Kant speaks of the dishonesty involved 'in not screening incentives (even those of
well-intentioned actions) in accordance with the moral guide' (AA VI : 37; RRT: 84) . The notion of
screening suggests that if we were sufficiently honest with ourselves, we could tell which incentives
had determined us to act in a certain way. On the other hand, when discussing what it means to
have the disposition of a good human being, which requires adopting as the basic maxim of our
actions the maxim always to make respect for the moral law into the incentive of these actions,
Kant claims that any assurance of having done so 'cannot of course be atta ined by the human being
naturally, neither via immediate consciousness nor via the evidence of the life he has hitherto led,
for the depths of his own heart (the subjective first ground of his maxims) are to him inscrutable'
(AA VI : 51; RRT: 95).
9 Kant's appeal to experience seems to fall short of meeting the following stringent condition that he
himself claims must be met to call a human being by nature evil: 'to infer a priori from a number
of consciously evil actions, or even from a single one, an underlying evil maxim, and, from this, the
presence in the subject of a common gro und, itself a maxim, of all particular morally evil maxims'
(AA VI: 20; RRT: 70) . This is not to say, however, that observations made on the basis of experience
cannot result in certain generalizations that can themselves be given a systematic form. Kant himself
claims that deciding whether the human being is by nature good or evil will depend on the results
of anthropological research (AA VI: 25; RRT: 74) . Yet the problem remains as to how we can make
any rel iable generalizations of this kind, given the opacity that he himself suggests prevents us from
knowing what our own maxims really are, let alone those of other people.
10 Machiavelli, The Discourses, nrf.
6o
to fail to make respect for the moral law into the basic principle of one's
actions. This requires offering an explanation of Kant's claim that 'the
statement, "The human being is evil," cannot mean anything else than
that he is conscious of the mo ral law and yet has incorporated into his
maxim the (occasional) deviation from it' (AA VI: 32; RRT: 79) .
Kant identifies various forms o f moral evil. These forms o f moral evil
are as follows: weakness of will when it comes to acting from the incentive
of duty in the face of other powerful incentives; impurity of the will, which
consists in a propensity to adulterate moral incentives with non-moral ones;
and, finally, the depravity or corruption of the human heart, which con
sists in actually subordinating moral incentives to non-moral ones. Kant
appears to identify moral evil specifically with depravity (that is, the actual
subordination of moral incentives to non-moral ones) when he states that
'the human being (even the best) is evil only because he reverses the moral
order of his incentives in incorporating them into his maxims' (AA VI:
36; RRT: 83). The methodological assumption that human beings are by
nature evil, however, requires only that individuals are generally disposed
to subordinate moral incentives to non-moral ones, and that the threat
consequently always exists of their actually doing so. What does it mean,
though, to say that this reversal of the moral order of incentives is char
acterized both by a consciousness of the moral law and by an act whereby
an agent incorporates into his or her maxim the occasional deviation from
this moral order?
Kant appears here to be talking abo ut an agent's propensity to permit
him- or herself to make an exceptio n in his or her own case to the demand
to act from the incentive of duty, even tho ugh he or she otherwise rec
ognizes the validity of the moral law. The basic maxim that characterizes
the agent's disposition would accordingly be something like the following
one: 'Whenever it suits me to do so, I shall not act on the basis of maxims
that I nevertheless recognize to be in accordance with the moral law; or
I shall act on the basis of maxims that I recognize to be contrary to the
moral law whenever I believe that my self-love would be better served by
doing so.' To make an exception for oneself in such cases means being
determined by incentives of self-love either not to act on a maxim that one
recognizes as being commanded by the moral law or to adopt a maxim that
one recognizes to be immoral. The agent concerned could still be thought
to acknowledge the general validity of the moral law, which is a law that we
cannot help but recognize as rational beings and which, therefore, consti
tutes an ever-present incentive within us. Yet in making compliance with
the demands of the moral law conditional on the absence of any powerful
61
non-moral incentives that lead one to exempt oneself from this law, the
agent concerned 'makes the incentives of self-love [Selbstliebe] and their
inclinations the condition of compliance with the moral law - whereas it
is this latter that, as the supreme condition of the satisfaction of the former,
should have been incorporated into the universal maxim of the power of
choice [ Willkur] as the sole incentive' (AA VI: 36; RRT: 83) . Self-love dic
tates, moreover, that the individual, while exempting him- or herself from
the moral law, would want others to recognize this law and to act in accor
dance with it. This is what Kant appears to be saying when he states that
If we now attend to ourselves in any transgression of a duty, we find that we
do not really will that our maxim should become a universal law, since that is
impossible for us, but that the opposite of our maxim should instead remain
a universal law, only we take the liberty of making an exception [Ausnahme]
to it for ourselves (or just for this once) to the advantage of our inclination.
(AA I V : 424; PP: 75f.)
Kant clearly views his association of radical evil with the subordination
of moral incentives to non-moral ones, together with his understanding
of this phenomenon in terms of a propensity in human beings to exempt
themselves from a law whose validity they otherwise recognize, while hop
ing that others obey this law, as relevant to his political philosophy. This is
shown by the following description that he gives of the problem of setting
up a state, which is a problem that allegedly even a nation of devils can
solve:
G iven a multitude of rational beings all of whom need universal laws for
their preservation but each of whom is inclined covertly to exempt himself
from them [ingeheim sich davon auszunehmen geneigt ist] , so to order this
multitude and establish their constitution [ Verfassung] that, although in
their private dispositions they strive against one another, these yet so check
one another that in their public conduct the result is the same as if they had
no such evil dispositions. (AA VIII : 366; PP: 335)
The fact that Kant discusses the problem which even a nation of devils
could solve in terms of the tendency to exempt oneself from universal law
takes care of the claim that the 'intelligent devil' belongs to an essentially
different species to the human species.u This claim is based on Kant's defi
nition of 'devilishness' as the complete elimination of any moral incentive,
and his denial of the possibility of such an absolute elimination of moral
incentives in the case of human beings. Presumably this is a reference to
11
In the next section, I look at how nature allegedly comes to the aid of
the general will and makes possible a republican constitution, by getting
individuals' private dispositions somehow to cancel each other o ut, thereby
A connection between the idea that the human being is by nature evil and
Kant's political philosophy is already apparent in the Idea for a Universal
History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, which was published in 1784, making it
'4 For an attempt to argue that Kant advocates the strong thesis that human beings are duty-bound to
institute civil society, to collaborate in it, and to obey and support a certain rule of law, see Pippin,
'On the :'vloral Foundations of Kant's Rechtslehri. Kant may well say things that suggest such a
position. However, his theory of radical evil makes a duty-based account as to why human beings
would choose to institute a state highly problematic, since it is far from clear how naturally evil
human beings could be morally motivated to institute a law-governed condition when they have
the propensity to exempt themselves from universal moral principles.
Another objection to the approach that I adopt m ight be to claim that Kant is keen to stress the
normative foundations of right. These foundations lie in providing a solution to a problem which
appears not to rely on any anthropological assumptions concerning the question as to whether
human beings are good or evil by nature. This problem is that even if we imagine human beings
to be well disposed and law-abiding (rechtliebend), everyone in the state of nature has the right
to do what seems to him or her to be right and good. Human beings in such a condition would,
therefore, still not be secure against acts of violence from one another. In short, each individual
remains judge in his own cause when it comes to the issue of how best to protect his or her own
interests (AA VI : 312; PP: 455f.). Nevertheless, as we might have expected given his theory of radical
evil, Kant takes seriously the task of explaining how a nation of rational devils could agree among
themselves to enter a law-governed condition; and in so far as he does so, he reveals the extent to
which his liberalism is shaped by his views on the radical evil in human nature.
66
significantly earlier than Kant's other main political writings. In this essay,
Kant states that the 'greatest problem for the human species, to which nature
compels him, is the achievement of a civil society universally administering
right [das Recht verwaltenden burgerlichen Gesellschaft]' (AA v m : 22; AH E:
112) . The difficulty of the task of establishing a civil society is said to lie in
the human being's need for a master. This need for a master stems from
the fact that the human being
certainly misuses his freedom in regard to others of his kind; and although
as a rational creature he wishes a law that sets limits to the freedom of all, his
selfish animal inclination still misleads him into excepting himself [sich selbst
auszunehmen] from it where he may. Thus he needs a master, who breaks his
stubborn will and necessitates him [ihn nothige] to obey a universally valid
will with which everyone can be free. (AA VIII : 23; AH E: 113)
68
70
71
reasons or incentives to act for a free agent; rather, they become so only
through a free agent making it his or her rule to act on a given inclination
in certain circumstances.'7 The inclinations connected with self-love are,
therefore, mo rally indifferent, that is, 'good' in the negative sense of not
being reprehensible. In the case of the first type of self-love, the inclinations
can even be regarded as positively good in the sense that they have been
implanted in us by nature for our own benefit as members of an animal
species, while the second type of self-love can be considered goo d in so far
as it is the means whereby culture develops as if in accordance with some
plan of nature (AA vm: n6ff. ; AHE: 169ff.) . These two forms of self-love
nevertheless generate vices when they are wilfully pursued beyond a certain
limit. The 'mechanical' form of self-love may result in gluttony, lust and
wild lawlessness in relation to other human beings (AA VI: 26f ; RRT: 75) ,
while the seco nd form of self-love may produce what Kant calls the 'vices
of culture' (Laster der Cultur), including envy and joy in other people's
misfortunes, when it extends beyond the inclination to gain equal wo rth
in the opinions of others (AA VI: 27; RRT: 75).
The claim that the second form of self-love is harmful only when it
extends beyond the inclination to gain equal worth in the eyes of others
is said to show how 'Kant is the best interpreter of Rousseau', because
he helps shed light on Ro usseau's account of amour-propre by drawing a
firm distinction between its natural form, which consists in the desire to
secure 'equal standing along with others', and its perverted, unnatural form,
which consists in wanting to be superior to others.' 8 Kant implies, then,
that the second form of self-love, which appears to correspond to amour
propre, need not assume a pernicious form, even if it tends to assume such
a form in human society. The idea that it is only in society that self-love
tends to assume a pernicious form allows Kant's acco unt of the connection
between self-love and human evil to be related to one of the main ways in
which Ro usseau regards human beings as by nature good. Altho ugh Kant's
acco unt of this connection in this respect also appears to support the claim
that he, like Rousseau, sees evil as a product of society, it also invites the
question as to how society can be reconstituted so as to avoid the evils
associated with the second form of self-love and in this way to promote
human perfectibility.
For Rousseau, primitive man in the 'pure' state of nature is good in the
negative sense that his isolation means that his interests seldom come into
.
'7
'8
72
conflict with the interests of others. There may well be occasions when
his self-love, in the form of the desire for self-preservation, leads him to
harm others. Yet at this stage of the state of nature even the desire fo r self
preservation is tempered by the natural sentiment of pity (OC III: 125f. ;
PWr : 127) . '9 Such occasio ns would in any case be so rare that primitive man
could not develop a habitual, rather than merely momentary and fleeting,
desire to harm others. This form of natural goodness consists in an absence
of the disposition to harm others which itself depends on the absence of
social relations. Such relations appear, in fact, to be necessary conditions of
human evil for Rousseau, who claims that 'it is in fact impossible that a man
who is and who wants to be alone could or would wish to harm anyone,
and consequently that he could be a wicked person [un mechant]' (OC r:
455; C: 445; translation modified) . The idea of someone who 'wants to be'
alone suggests, moreover, the possibility of regaining one's natural goodness
by withdrawing from society, so that once again Rousseau's account of the
human being's natural goodness turns out to be of a purely negative kind.
The message is clear: a habitual desire to harm others can arise only in a
society characterized by a high degree of human interdependence brought
about by the increased number and complexity of needs, including the
psychological need for recognition from others associated with amour
propre, that must be satisfied, together with a corresponding increase in
the number and the complexity of the available means of satisfying these
needs.
The purely negative character of this natural goodness is compatible with
Kant's interpretation of Ro usseau's claim that human beings are by nature
go od; for according to Kant, Ro usseau means that the human being is 'good
in a negative way; that is, he is not evil of his own accord and on purpose,
but only in danger of being infected and ruined by evil or inept leaders and
examples' (AA vu: 327; AHE 422) . Although Kant is here fairly specific
about the possible causes of evil, he suggests that evil may be viewed more
generally as the result of the influence exercised by one human being on
another human being. In this way, he links Rousseau's views on the natural
go odness of humanity to the idea that it is only in society that evil arises.
Rousseau, however, doubts whether it makes any real sense at all to speak of
someone who lacks any abiding social relations to o thers of his kind and the
reasoning capacities presupposed by the concept of duty as being naturally
'9 This is one of the main reasons that Rousseau claims aga inst Hobbes that 'since the state of Nature
is the state in which the care for our own preservation is least prejudicial to the self-preservation of
others, it follows that this state was the most conducive to Peace and the best suited to Mankind'
(OC m : 153; PW1: 151).
73
good, when he claims that human beings co uld have been neither good
nor wicked in the state of nature (OC III: 152; PW1: 150) . In a condition
of human interdependence, by contrast, plenty of opportunities exist for
people's interests to clash. In such an environment human beings can easily
develop the disposition to harm others. Rousseau appears to claim, in fact,
that people will necessarily develop such a disposition in society, at the same
time as he asserts the idea of humanity's natural goo dness in the face of
the constant experience which, he concedes, teaches us that human beings
are wicked. He states, for example, that society 'necessarily moves men to
hate one another in proportion as their interests clash' (OC III: 202; PW1:
197f.) .20 I return to the idea that a disposition to harm others because their
interests run counter to our own is an inevitable product of society when
I look at Kant's attempt to apply his interpretation of the significance of
Rousseau's writings to his own account of human perfectibility as measured
in terms of moral progress. The differences between Kant's and Rousseau's
views concerning the so urce of human evil will then become more evident,
and Rousseau's account of how individuals in society develop an inclination
to harm the interests of others will serve to highlight certain tensions that
exist in Kant's acco unt of human perfectibility, in so far as it proclaims
the possibility of a transition from culture to a genuinely ethical form of
community.
Kant mentions the concept of culture in connection with the form
of self-love that corresponds to Ro usseau's notion of amour-propre when
he remarks that 'nature itself wanted to use the idea of such a com
petitiveness (which in itself does not exclude reciprocal love) as only
an incentive to culture' (AA VI: 27; RRT: 75). This claim is compat
ible with the roles played by antagonism and such vices of culture as
ambition, tyranny and greed in nature's plan as described in Idea for
a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim. It also concerns the issue
of the type of environment in which individuals who are characterized
by their unsociable sociability and motivated by self-love enter into com
petition with each other and exhibit the vices of culture while, uninten
tionally, advancing culture, as if in accordance with some hidden plan of
nature. Certain features of a commercial or 'civil' society, in which there
is competition between individuals and laws exist protecting people from
10 Rousseau appears to have been so struck by the idea that in a condition of human interdependence
furthering one's interests dictates harming others, even when one cares for and esteems these others,
that he made it into his personal maxim to avoid any situation in which the pursuit of his own
advantage would require damaging someone else's interests, thereby placing his own interests in
opposition to duty (OC 1: 56; C: 54.) .
74
75
self-worth may be satisfied by the equal status that he or she enjoys before
the law and as the citizen of a particular state. This recognition does not
those members of t h e society who are unable t o maintain themselves' (AA VI : 326; PP: 468) . This
claim does not imply any acceptance of the redistribution of wealth except in extreme cases and for
anything more than instrumental reasons, as when, for example, widespread poverty threatens to
bring about the dissolution of the state because of the social unrest that it causes. A passage from
Kant's lectures on eth ics concerning the duty of beneficence has nevertheless been cited as evidence
of his view that material inequality constitutes an injustice. Cf. Wood, Kant's Ethical Thought, 7
The passage in question reads as follows:
But since respect for rights is a result of principles, whereas men are deficient in principles,
providence has implanted in us another source, namely the instinct of benevolence, whereby
we make reparation for what we have unjustly obtained. We thus have an instinct for
benevolence, but not for justice. By this impulse men take pity on another, and render back
the benefits they have previously snatched away, though they are not aware of any injustice;
the reason being, that they do not rightly exam ine the matter. One may take a share in the
general injustice, even though one does nobody any wrong by civil laws and practices. So if
we now do a kindness to an unfortunate, we have not made a free gift to him, but repaid
him what we were helping to take away through a general injustice. For if none m ight
appropriate more of this world's goods than his neighbour, there would be no rich folk, bur
also no poor. Thus even acts of kindness are acts of duty and indebtedness, arising from the
rights of others. (AA XXVII : 415 ; LE: 179; emphasis added)
As the passage in question makes clear, Kant treats this injustice as a moral matter rather than a
matter of right, by claiming that one may participate in the general injustice without committing
an injustice according to civil laws and institutions.
Although it may be possible to develop an interpretation that sees Kant as allowing more room
for state intervention with respect to welfare provision than at first appears to be the case, such
attempts are instructive when it comes to ascertaining the l imits of such intervention. I shall here
focus on one such argument against attributing to Kant a min imalist interpretation of the role of
the state. This argument rests on the claim that the state itself has the moral duty of benevolence
towards its members in the shape of the moral responsibility to ensure their material well-being,
which is, of course, compatible with the claim that benevolence is a moral matter rather than a
matter of right in a strict sense. On this basis, it is argued that the state is obliged, first of all, to
protect individual rights and then to promote the happiness of its members. While the state's first
function takes precedence over the second one, these functions do not inevitably conflict with each
other. Cf. Rosen, Kant's Theory offustice, 173ff.
In relation to the topics discussed in this chapter, I would respond by claiming that even if Kant's
acceptance of such state intervention is granted, he still leaves room for the vices of culture to have
free play, which is something he considers to be necessary for the development of culture, since the
kind of state intervention argued for here is entirely different from the kind of state intervention
which seeks to eradicate such vices (for example, through education). Kant can therefore still be
said to be hostile to state intervention at least in this second sense. More significantly, even if the
state's obl igation to protect individual rights is not necessarily incompatible with the obl igation to
promote the happiness of its members by means of certain redistributive measures, it would be
when the welfare of all its members, or even just a majority of them, could only be guaranteed
by a radical redistribution of resources that some people would argue violates the individual right
to property. In other words, there is a limit beyond which the task of promoting happiness in the
shape of material well-being and access to resources ought not to be pursued given the primacy of
individual rights, including the right to property. The presumption seems to be, then, that state
intervention should be avoided as much as possible, so as to prevent any potential breach of this
limitation on the obligation to promote happiness. In this respect, we may again speak of hostility
to state intervention, although one that is tempered by recognition of the moral (and not merely
political) necessity of state intervention with respect to welfare provision.
77
The role that the vices of culture play both in society and in the develop
ment of culture is highly relevant to Kant's understanding of the transition
from the kind of law-governed civil society which even a nation of devils
could endorse to an ethical community, because it leads to a major dif
ficulty in explaining this same transition. Kant adopts a positive attitude
to the vices of culture, among which he includes the vice of vanity, when
he proclaims, 'Thanks be to nature, therefore, for the incompatibility, for
the spiteful competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess or even
to dominate! For without them all the excellent natural predispositions in
humanity would eternally slumber undeveloped' (AA VIII: 21; AH E: 112) .
This statement implies that the vices of culture are to be welcomed in so
far as they serve to heighten the antagonisms that characterize civil society
and, in so doing, promo te the development of culture. It appears, then,
that these vices could only be condemned from a moral standpoint once
they had fulfilled their function in nature's plan.
Although this plan consists in the eventual formation of society into a
moral whole, the idea of an ethical community made up of rational beings
who exercise full autonomy by willing in accordance with the moral law
from the motive of respect for this law is clearly essentially different from the
kind oflegal and political community described by Kant. It could be argued
that Kant thinks of the latter as constituting a preliminary stage in the
establishment of a truly ethical community, because right involves the legal
enforcement of certain moral ends that derive from the status of persons as
ends in themselves (for example, the duty not to murder) when the good
will to obey these duties is lacking, and it also helps to create the conditions
for the exercise of a good will by removing factors, such as fear, that may
lead individuals to act immorally. 24 Their membership of political society
also gets human beings used to living under laws of which they themselves
are the authors in so far as they are able to recognize the rationality of the
laws that their representatives have made on their behalf. Yet despite the
instrumental role that right may be thought to play in relation to morality,
the inevitability of the transition from the civil condition to a truly ethical
form of community, in which the perfection of humankind understood in
terms of its moral destiny is achieved, remains far from obvio us.
Kant himself states that the transformation of a naturally evil human
being, whose actions nevertheless conform to legal norms, into a morally
14 Cf. Riley, Kant 's Political Philosophy, 15.
79
good human being requires not simply reform but 'a revolution in the
disposition [ Gesinnung] of the human being', a revolution of which the
human being must be supposed to be capable but whose possibility it is
difficult to comprehend (AA VI: 47; RRT: 92) . If the possibility of such
a revolution in the disposition of an individual human being is difficult
to comprehend, how much more difficult must it be to comprehend how
this revolution can take place at a collective level. Consequently there
appears to be some tension between the optimism of the earlier Idea for a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, with its emphasis on human
progress as the result of a largely blind, spontaneous process, and the later
Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason with its more pessimistic
view of human nature. In the later work, Kant makes clear that an ethical
community, as an association of human beings under laws of virtue as
opposed to coercive laws, is essentially different in kind from any existing
legal and po litical community (AA VI: 9 5f. ; RRT: 130f.).
When Kant's civil society is viewed in relation to his acco unt of the
transition from a society based on a pathologically conditioned form of
agreement to a moral whole, it must be tho ught to belong firmly to the type
of so ciety based on a pathologically conditioned form of agreement. Civil
society looks, in fact, very much like a place that has been abandoned to the
radically evil tendencies in human nature, while the mutually destructive
po tential of these tendencies is kept in check by means of law and a
coercive state, whose powers must be clearly defined and limited so as to
preserve civil freedom. It is difficult, therefore, to know how civil society, as
a condition in which the antagonisms that exist between partly unsociable,
partly social beings and the vices of culture to a large extent have free play,
could in time lead to the establishment of a truly ethical condition. After
all, it would make just as much sense, if not more, to claim that these
antagonisms and vices would lead to the moral corruption of the whole
human race at the same time as they promote culture. Indeed, Kant's use
of the term 'culture' is itself a potential source of confusion.
On the one hand, culture can mean simply the arts and the sciences.
Kant might then be seen to argue that although the development of culture
is accompanied by moral corruption, this is the price that needs to be
paid for human progress, in which case he would be according culture a
value which is determined independently of its relation to morality. This
type of interpretation is not ruled out by Kant's claim that :All culture
and art that adorn humanity, and the most beautiful social order, are
the fruits of unsociability, through which it is necessitated by itself to
discipline itself, and so by an art extorted from it, to develop completely
8o
the germs of nature' (AA VIII: 22; AHE: II3). The discipline in question
can be thought to arise from the practical constraints generated by a
system of interdependence in which individuals must to some extent limit
their self-love and activiry, so as to be able to live peaceably alongside
others and to cooperate with them in so far as it proves necessary in
relation to the effective pursuit of their own interests. Yet this type of
interpretation sits uncomfortably with some of the central features of
Kant's ethical tho ught, and the following claim in particular speaks against
it: 'everything good that is not grafted onto a morally go od disposition, is
nothing but mere semblance and glittering misery' (AA VIII: 26; AHE: n6) .
This suggests a moralized concept of culture, which, rather than treating
culture as possessing any value independently of morality, considers it to
be dependent on moraliry for its worth. On this basis, Kant distinguishes
between having become moral (moralisirt) and being civilized (civilisirt) or
cultivated (cultivirt) (AA VIII: 26; AHE: n6) . Thus, in order for the arts
and the sciences to become the true fruits of culture as well as civilization,
they would have to conform to the demands of moraliry.
This distinction simply brings us back to the problem of explaining the
transition from civil sociery, as characterized by the civilized and cultivated
manners of its members, to a truly ethical condition characterized by its
members' moraliry.25 The full force of this problem can be illustrated
with reference to the following passage in which Rousseau stresses the
moral corruption that manifests itself in the vario us means that individuals
employ to further their own interests at the expense of the interests of
others:
What a wonderful thing, then, to have put men in a position where they
can only live together by obstructing, supplanting, deceiving, betraying,
destroying one another! From now on we must take care never to let ourselves
be seen as we are: because for every two men whose interests coincide,
perhaps a hundred thousand oppose them, and the only way to succeed
is either to deceive or to ruin all those people. This is the fatal source of
the violence, the betrayals, the treacheries and all the horrors necessarily
required by a state of affairs in which everyone pretends to be working for
the profit or reputation of the rest, while only seeking to raise his own above
theirs and at their expense. (OC n : 968f. ; PW1 : 100)
This passage captures in more radical form the kind of antagonism that
Kant describes as being characteristic of social relations. This time, however,
>5
Kant appears to concede that the inability to explain the transition from a condition in which
human beings are only civilized and cultivated to one in which they are also moral would serve
largely to justifY Rousseau's seeming preference for a state of savagery (AA vm: 26; AHE: n6).
81
the emphasis is placed very much on the pernicious effects of this antago
nism with the aim of suggesting that this antagonism cannot be justified
in terms of the way in which it helps to realize some higher end. Rather,
Rousseau operates with a very different assumption concerning a society
in which individuals are brought together through their needs, whether it
has to do with their material needs or with the need to receive recognition
from others so as to construct and reinforce their own conceptions of their
self-worth.
The assumption in question is that these individuals' selfish interests will,
more often than not, dictate harming the interests of their competitors for
material goods and recognition, though in order to further their interests,
people may have to conceal their real intentions. Self-interest and morality
are here made to appear incompatible in society, so that a society in which
self-interest is given a high degree offree play, as it is in Kant's civil society,
will be one in which genuine morality becomes virtually impossible. The
inclination to harm others is not, however, the result of the evil rooted in
human nature; rather, it is the result of the experience of finding that one's
own interests cannot be effectively pursued in harmony with the interests
of others. Yet this do es not mean that the inclination to harm o thers will
not in time become habitual and, therefore, a constant feature of human
society. Rousseau suggests, in fact, that the propensity to harm others to
which self-love gives rise in connection with certain economic and social
relations represents some kind of cosmic principle in the following passage:
The constitution of this universe does not allow for all the sentient beings
that make it up to concur all at once in their mutual happiness [;] but since
one sentient being's well-being makes for the other's evil, each, by the law
of nature, gives preference to itself, regardless of whether it is working to its
own advantage or to another's prejudice. (OC m: 1902; PW2: 173)
This is not to say that this conflict of interests cannot take place against the background of certain
shared interests, such as the need for security. Rousseau himself states that 'while the opposition of
particular interests made the establishment of societies necessary, it is the agreement of these same
interests which made it possible. What these different interests have in common is what forms the
social bond, and if there were not some point on which all interests agree, no society could exist.
Now it is solely in terms of this common interest that society ought to be governed' (OC m: 368;
PW2: 57) . Rousseau implies, however, that correctly identifying this common interest itself depends
on the existence of a genuine social bond, when he claims that 'when the social bond is broken in all
hearts, when the basest interest brazenly assumes the sacred name of public good; then the general
will grows mute, everyone, prompted by secret motives, no more states opinions as a Citizen than
if the State had never existed, and iniquitous decrees with no other goal than particular interest are
falsely passed under the name of Laws' (OC 1 1 1 : 438; PW2: 122) .
This is why Rousseau, despite the way in which he himself often invokes the sanctity of the laws,
views education as the means of creating the right kind of disposition in people at the same time as
he exhibits a distrust of laws. This distrust can be explained in terms of the problem identified in
the Second Discourse that law may serve as the instrument of self-interest by securing the property
rights of those who already happen to possess property and wealth in the face of the demands of
the increasingly restive poor. Rousseau's scepticism with regard to the possibility of preventing law
from becoming an instrument of self-interest is evident from the following statement: 'Putting the
law above man is a problem in politics which I l iken to that of squaring the circle in geometry' (OC
III: 955, PW2: 179). He also speaks of the futil ity of expecting people to obey the law when they
lack the disposition to do so: 'Prohibiting the things people ought not to do is a clumsy and vain
thing to do unless one begins by making these things hated and scorned, and the law's disapproval
is only effective when it confirms one's own judgment. Whoever goes about instituting a people
has to be able to rule men's opinions and through them to govern their passions' (OC III: 965f.;
PW2: 189). His advice to the Poles is, therefore, to introduce an education which forms individuals
in such a way that they 'will be patriotic by inclination, passion, necessity' (OC III: 966; PW2: 189).
A patriotic education must, in other words, produce individuals who are already disposed to scorn
objects that are contrary to the public and national good and are consequently forbidden by law.
They will then 'obey the laws and not elude them because they will suit them and will have the
inward assent of their wills' (OC m: 961; PW2: 184) .
86
88
The full force of this problem is not sufficiently appreciated by Kantian interpretations of Rousseau
that seek to show that he is the proponent of the idea of some kind of Rechtsstaat. Ernst Cassiter, in
his The Question offean-facques Rousseau, maintains that material inequality in the form of property
rights is of minor importance for Rousseau, because ir is, like physical inequal ity, unavoidable, so
that here 'ends the realm of freedom, and the real m of fate begins', while the state is 'exclusively
concerned with securing an equal measure of rights and duties' (6o) . Yet Cassirer also allows that
the state may interfere with property rights 'insofar as the inequality of property endangers the
moral equality of the subjects under the law - for instance, when such inequality condemns specific
classes of citizens to complete economic dependence and threatens to make them a plaything in the
hands of the wealthy and the powerful. In such a situation, the state may and must interfere' (6o).
The problem here is that Cassirer's recogn ition of the need for state intervention in such a situation
implies not only that material inequality is significant for Rousseau but also that the task of securing
people's moral equality, in the sense of making them independent of the arbitrary wills of others
by means of state intervention, may, in fact, be incompatible with the kind of property rights that
a Kantian Rechtsstaat is meant to protect. I suggest in the next chapter that such incompatibility
must indeed be thought to exist given the model of property rights which Rousseau could have
consistently developed, even if he did not in fact do so.
CHAPTER THREE
Imposing order
Imposing order
92
they cannot without the help of a very able Architect, be compiled, into any
other than a crasie building, such as hardly lasting out their own time, must
assuredly fall upon the heads of their posterity.
I
Hobbes's doubts concerning the success of even 'a very able Architect'
relate to what for Ro usseau amounts to an inflamed form of amour-propre,
which consists in resistance to having one's high opinion of oneself, whether
real or pretended, undermined by being made to recognize one's equal
status with others. This status implies that their interests count as much as
one's own interests and that one ought, therefore, to pursue one's interests
in a way that is compatible with the interests of others. The prevalence of
this moral failing suggests that the successful performance of the political
architect's task will require imposing order on a potentially recalcitrant
material. Yet this approach invites a problem which Adam Smith describes
in co nnection with what he calls 'the man of system' .
The man of system develops a n ideal plan, and h e cannot suffer the
slightest deviation from this plan when it comes to its implementation.
This requires thinking of the members of society as akin to different pieces
on a chessboard that he can arrange at will according to the details of
his plan; whereas in reality these individuals have their own principles
of motion, in the form of their interests and prejudices, and these principles
of motio n may differ fro m the ones that the man of system wishes to impart
to them. 2 The man of system may therefore have to impose principles on the
individual members of society that are essentially different from the ones
actually motivating them, and these principles will accordingly assume an
alien appearance. In such circumstances, individuals may become subject
to necessity in the sense that they are constrained to act in certain ways
by means of force, which can be taken to mean either the threat or the
actual use of force. The success of the man of system's plan will in this
way depend not only on some very uncertain means, namely his (or the
state's) ability to coerce people into behaving in certain ways when they are
not disposed to do so, b ut also on ignoring these agents' moral autonomy,
which consists in being subject to co nstraints that they in some sense
impose upon themselves, as opposed to these constraints being externally
imposed on them.
We have seen that Rousseau expresses a similar concern by suggesting
that the formation of a polity with laws that accord with the general will
is only really possible when the members of this polity already have the
I Hobbes, Leviathan, 221.
93
right dispositions and share the same essential values. In the light of this
problem, and the role that Rousseau accords to moral freedom in ensuring
that individuals remain as free as before when they enter the civil condition,
we can see why Ro usseau's political architect must take into consideration
the material to which he seeks to apply any plan . Yet in relatio n to the
right of property, there are, I shall argue, some definite limits to the extent
to which Ro usseau could consistently advocate a pragmatic approach.
Rather, he must consider the political architect to be charged with the task
of introducing a set of fundamental laws and institutions that are subject
to certain normative constraints in so far as they aim to prevent the rise of
forms of domination that have their basis in unequal relations of depen
dence on other human beings that are themselves generated by material
inequality.
Rousseau has been accused of expressing contradictory views concerning
property) I argue that the apparent inconsistencies in his views on property
can be explained in terms of a failure to distinguish more carefully between
the conceptual and the temporal priority of property rights in relation to
the state. Rousseau does draw such a distinction but he does not at the same
time fully develop its implications. In the case of temporal priority, property
rights are understood to exist prior to the state, if only provisionally. In
the case of conceptual priority, property rights have a normative status
which determines some of the main functions of the state and what may or
may not count as a legitimate claim to a property right, irrespective of any
appeals to some notion of temporal prio rity. By drawing this distinction
more clearly than Rousseau does, it becomes possible to make sense of
his views concerning both the fo undational nature of property and the
idea that the state becomes the master of all its members' goods once the
social pact has been concluded.4 The consistency of Ro usseau's position,
however, becomes evident only when it is considered in the light of the
theory of property developed by Fichte, who in his own way appeals to the
idea of a political architect.
Given the need for a political architect, and the way in which a theo ry
of property may act as a constraint on this political architect's attempt to
1
1
This assessment of Rousseau's views on property is offered in MacAdam, 'Rousseau: The Moral
Dimensions of Property'.
As regards the foundational nature of property, it is claimed that 'Rousseau's statement that property
is the foundation of civil society, law and the system of justice is, or is meant to be, a statement
of fact. It is not a favourable value judgment.' MacAdam, 'Rousseau: The Moral Dimensions of
Property', 191. I suggest that Rousseau thinks that property can be the foundation of civil society
in a positive way, but only when it assumes a certain form and when the measures that this form
demands have been put in place.
94
Imposing order
institute a just legal and political order, I am led to ask whether the theory
of property which Fichte explicitly develops, and which Ro usseau could
have develo ped, ultimately demands an authoritarian solution which is
more in line with Hobbes's employment of an architectural image than
with the more pragmatic approach signalled by Rousseau's use of the
image of a political architect. By inviting the idea of imposing order on
a potentially recalcitrant material, this type of solution suggests that the
moral freedom of at least some individuals will be compromised, since they
will be constrained to act in accordance with principles with which they
themselves do not identify. One way of avoiding such a conclusion might
be to differentiate between what individuals actually will and what they
ought to will, in which case subjecting them to principles that they ought
to will, but do not in fact will, would not in itself constitute a violation of
their moral freedom.
This distinction between what individuals happen to will and what
they ought to will can be discerned in Rousseau's account of the problem
presented by a situation in which an individual's will happens to be contrary
to the general will which he or she should have as a citizen, in the sense
that his or her particular interests diverge from the common interest,
leading him or her to act in opposition to the general will. In such cases,
the individual concerned must be constrained to obey the general will
should he or she refuse to do so. This need for coercion, Rousseau claims,
means no thing other than that he or she 'shall be forced to be free',
because obedience to the general will is the guarantee against all personal
dependence (OC III: 364; PW2: 53) . In other wo rds, in willing something
opposed to the general will, an individual acts contrary to his or her
own fundamental interest in ensuring that the conditions of his or her
independence of the arbitrary wills of o thers are secured. Consequently,
in constraining an individual to obey the general will, the state guarantees
this same individual's freedom in the negative sense of the absence of any
actual or potential domination by others.
Rousseau returns to this issue when he considers the question as to how
a person can be both free and subject to laws to which he or she has not
personally consented, as may happen in the sovereign assembly when a law
is passed which the person in question has opposed. Ro usseau implies that
this person must have been simply mistaken abo ut the general will and that
his or her error is shown by the fact that a majority of citizens approved the
law. If this person's particular opinion had nevertheless prevailed, he or she
would, in fact, have ended up doing something other than what he or she
had intended, and he or she would not, therefore, have been free (OC m :
95
440f. ; PW2: 124) . I n other words, this person would have either subjected
him- or herself to a potentially freedom-endangering law or failed to ensure
the safe passage of a law designed to guarantee his or her own freedom as
well as that of others. On this view of the matter, in consenting to the terms
of the social pact when these terms include a commitment to recognize the
authority of majority decisio ns, one becomes subject to laws that can be
viewed as self-imposed ones in accordance with the idea of moral freedom
even when one in actual fact opposes such laws. One remains morally free
because one had originally consented to certain procedures by means of
which the content of the general will can most reliably be determined.
However, in connection with this particular explanation of how indi
viduals may remain free even when they are subject to laws to which they
themselves did not directly consent, Rousseau once again raises the issue of
the dispositions and mores of the individuals concerned. This time the issue
has to do with the dispositions and mores on which the effectiveness of
the procedure for determining the general will itself depends, for Ro usseau
states that this procedure 'presupposes . . . that all the characteristics of the
general will are still in the majority: once they no longer are, then regard
less of which side one takes there no longer is any freedom' (OC m: 441;
PW2: 124) . This statement brings us back to the issue of whether or not
the act of subjecting individuals to principles, or to their legal and institu
tional embodiments, is compatible with their moral autonomy when these
individuals themselves do not directly endorse such principles or laws and
institutions. Among these principles we may include the ones governing
the institution of property.
In claiming that individuals can be forced to be free, Ro usseau suggests
that in certain cases the constraints to which individuals are legitimately
subjected may indeed be experienced as alien, external ones, because they
are simply compelled to obey them, turning their acceptance of these
constraints into a matter of necessity rather than freedom. Moreover, in
the absence of the right dispositions and mores, even the majority of citizens
may be incapable of recognizing the general will, so that any attempt to
subject people to principles or laws and institutions that are genuinely
expressive of the general will must be liable to encounter resistance or,
at best, they will be only grudgingly accepted. In contrast, the optimal
situation would surely be one in which subjection to objectively valid
constraints was accompanied by a corresponding subjective element, which
consists in not experiencing these constraints as alien, external ones. Thus
in certain circumstances the lawgiver appears to be faced with the difficult
choice of adopting a pragmatic approach, which may require compromising
Imposing order
principles that are genuinely expressive of the general will, or a more
autho ritarian approach, which is nevertheless meant to be compatible with
the idea of moral freedom.
The notion of a lawgiver is itself problematic in relation to the idea of
moral freedom because, as we have seen, the kind of democratic freedom
which Ro usseau endorses represents a subspecies of this form of freedom.
Moreover, it is as members of a sovereign assembly that individuals actually
exercise the capacity for moral freedom and thereby develop themselves as
autonomous beings. In this respect, the kind of authoritarian solution sug
gested by Hobbes's use of an architectural image poses a twin threat to the
idea of autonomy. Consequently, if there are any good reasons for thinking
that Rousseau is ultimately committed to this type of solution - and I
shall argue that there are such reasons - the idea of human perfectibility
will once again appear to be subject to certain potentially insurmountable
obstacles. Since Fichte's theory of property represents a plausible acco unt
of how an institution may embody the principles of the general will, it pro
vides the perfect basis for exploring this issue in more depth. At the same
time, it gives us a good idea of what a fully developed Ro usseauian theory
of property might look like. I shall therefore begin with an acco unt of
Rousseau's views on property and then turn to Fichte's theory of property.
Rousseau o n property
Rousseau on property
97
pro perty rights is even held to constitute the essential difference between
legitimacy and tyranny with respect to the exercise of political power, and
between obligation based on consent and conformity achieved by means
of force:
For since all civil rights are founded on that of property, as soon as that is
abolished, none other can exist. Justice would no longer be anything but a
chimera, and government, a tyranny; and since the public authority would
not have any legitimate basis, no one would be bound to acknowledge it,
except insofar as he would be constrained to do so by force. (OC III: 483 ;
PF: 22)
In the Social Contract, however, Rousseau claims that 'with regard to its
members, the State is master of all their goods by the social contract which
serves as the basis of all rights within the State' (OC III: 365; PW2: 54) . Prop
erty rights here appear to be completely dependent on the state which must
be assumed to possess the right and the power to decide how property is
allo cated, irrespective of what people happen to possess at any point in time
prior to the social pact. Rousseau even treats this dependency on the state
as a useful means of political control: 'For since private property is so weak
and so dependent, the G overnment needs only a little force and, so to speak,
leads the people with a movement of its finger' (OC III: 949 ; CC: 164) .
These apparently conflicting statements concerning property, some of
which suggest that property rights are prior to , and independent of, the
state, while o thers suggest that the state has absolute control over its citizens'
property and is the source of property rights, can be reconciled when a firm
distinction is made between temporal and conceptual forms of prio rity with
respect to property rights as guaranteed by the state. As regards temporal
priority, Ro usseau's statements concerning the right of the first occupant
are especially relevant, since an appeal to this right represents an obvious
means of justifying property rights that are held to be temporally prior to,
and independent of, the state. Ro usseau claims that this right is only 'weak
in the state of nature' but 'respected by everyone living in civil so ciety'
(OC III: 365; PW2: 55) . This claim indicates that the state's task will be
to guarantee a right of pro perty which already exists in the state of nature
but is rendered highly uncertain because of the general insecurity that
characterizes this condition.
In relation to this apparent temporal priority of property rights in
relation to the state, Rousseau speaks of the 'positive' act that makes a man
the proprietor of some goods while excluding him from all the others. He
identifies this positive act with the act by means of which the right of the
Imposing order
first occupant becomes a 'true right' only after the right of property has been
established (OC III: 365; PW2: 54) . The context implies that this act is to be
associated with the institution of a power capable of judging any disputes
concerning property rights and of enforcing its decisions. In this respect
property rights themselves depend on the existence of such a power and are,
therefore, first established along with it. Although this interpretation of the
act in question does not rule out the possibility of a seamless transition from
the right of the first occupant and all that an individual possesses in virtue of
this right to the right of property, the idea of a power that determines what
can rightfully be considered to be a person's property implies that some
claims based on an appeal to the right of the first occupant can be treated
as spurious ones. This raises the question as to how the body charged with
determining this issue is to distinguish between legitimate and spurious
claims concerning property rights based on an alleged right of the first
occupant.
Ro usseau stipulates three conditions to which the right of the first
occupant is subject. These conditions must all be satisfied if any claim based
on an appeal to this right is to be regarded as a valid one. First of all, any
land occupied should not already be inhabited. This condition is essentially
uninformative, for the demand that it expresses is analytically contained in
the idea of the right of the first occupant. It does, however, provide evidence
of an orientation on Rousseau's part towards understanding the right of
property in terms of a right to land. The second condition is that one
should occupy only as much land as one needs to subsist. This condition
implies that others also have a right to the means of subsistence and that
one ought, therefore, to take this right into consideration when claiming
the right to a piece of land, even if one were the first person to occupy and
to work upon this piece of land.
Ro usseau here imposes a strong constraint on property rights. This
constraint can be traced back to his claim that man's 'first law is to attend
to his own preservation, his first cares are those he owes himself', and the
claim that, since they are all born equal and free, human beings 'alienate
their freedom only for the sake of their utility' (OC III: 3 52; PW2: 42) . The
second claim shows the extent to which Rousseau's thoughts on property
are shaped by his identification of equality and freedom as the principal
ends of every system of legislation which aims at the greatest good of all
(OC III: 391; PW2: 78) . It also shows that freedom (that is, natural freedom)
can be legitimately renounced only when it is in an individual's interest to
do so. Taken together, these two features of the second claim imply that no
one could be reasonably expected to reno unce his or her natural freedom,
Rousseau on property
99
which consists in the right to everything that one's own physical powers
can command, in the absence of any guarantee of being able to preserve
oneself, which means being able to attain the means of subsistence. I argue
below that this constraint on the alienation of one's natural freedom and
the right to everything asso ciated with it is so strong that it has some major
implications when it comes to interpreting Rousseau's theory of property
in the light of the idea that the social pact aims to remove unequal relations
of dependence.
The third condition to which the right of the first occupant is subject is
that one sho uld take possession ofland 'not by a vain ceremony, but by labor
and cultivation' (OC m : 366; PW2: 55) . By Rousseau's own admission, this
condition is highly problematic in so far as deciding whether or not it has
been met is concerned. As we have seen, in the Second Discourse Ro usseau
points out that although the cultivatio n of land may have initially been
based on a more or less equal division of land, some people could in time
come to claim a greater share of the land than others because the stronger
person could do more work, the naturally skilful individual co uld work
more effectively than o thers could, and the more ingenious individual
could find ways of reducing his share of the labo ur. These three sources
of inequality explain why the second condition that one should occupy
only as much land as one needs to subsist must be invoked. The third
example of how someone may claim a greater share of the land is especially
significant because it points to a particular problem with the right of the
first occupant.
The ingenuity of the individual who finds ways of reducing his share of
the labour co uld be identified with the ability and the willingness to develop
methods or tools that allow a piece of land to be cultivated with less effort
and with greater speed. In this respect, material inequality co uld be justified
in terms of just deserts. Yet this ingenuity could also be identified with the
ability to reduce one's share of the labour by duping others into working
more to one's advantage than to their own advantage. For example, the
individual who manages to reduce his share of the labo ur merely supplies
crude, ready-formed tools that he has chanced to encounter, b ut which
other people lack, either because they have failed to recognize the potential
that these objects have as tools or because they have simply not encountered
the objects in question. Here luck might be thought to play a much greater
role than industry or talent. Then, as a condition of using these tools, the
individual in question gets others to agree to award him a disproportionate
portion of the land which has been cultivated by means of these tools,
basing this right to a greater share of the land on the spurious claim that
100
Imposing order
In Book Two of Emile, the tutor seeks t o make his pupil grasp the idea of property b y going back to
the origin of property. This is done by encouraging the pupil to plant some beans and to tend them
carefully. The right of the first occupant appears to be explicitly invoked when the gardener comes
along and justifies his destruction of the plants that have grown as a result of the pupil's labour on
the grounds that the pupil has thereby destroyed the melons that the gardener himself had planted
and that had already begun to grow on the same plot of land, which had previously been cultivated
not only by the gardener himself but also by his father before him. Rousseau here ignores any worries
about the legitimacy of the right of the first occupant, possibly because consideration of them lies
beyond the reasoning powers that the pupil currently possesses. This particular means of making the
idea of property more concrete also raises certain questions given some other features of Emile. For
example, is the plot of land really the gardener's legal property, even if both he and his father before
him have cultivated it? After all, in Book One Rousseau suggests that it would be better if the pupil
were of noble birth, and the plot of land may therefore legally belong to the pupil's father, or even
to the pupil himself if, as Rousseau claims, he ought also to be an orphan.
Rousseau on property
101
102
Imposing order
grounds. Moreover, property rights are for him most certainly not based
on any kind of temporal priority. They do, however, exhibit a conceptual
priority, in the sense that property rights determine some of the main func
tions, and thus the essential structure, of any rightfully constituted state. In
this respect, Fichte supplies a clearer and more rigo rous, but nevertheless
recognizably Rousseauian, theory of property, which explains how prop
erty rights may count as genuine expressions of the general will and how
property itself may form an institutional embodiment of the principles
of equality and freedom. At the same time, Fichte's theory of property
allows us to think of property as playing a fo undational role in the state,
as Rousseau claims it does.
Fichte develops his theory of property in the Foundations of Natu
ral Right, and he seeks to develop its implications further in The Closed
Commercial State. Although the concept of right (Recht) forms the central
concept of the Foundations ofNatural Right, the concept of property comes
to play an increasingly explicit role in this wo rk because Fichte treats the
concept of property as a further determination of the concept of right.
In order to understand Fichte's theory of property and its compatibility
with Rousseau's commitment to the principles of equality and freedom ,
w e must, therefore, first look a t how the concept o f property develops out
of the concept of right, and at how it embodies the principles of equality
and freedom.
Equality and freedo m i n Fichte's theory of right
103
While the requirement that the world be divided into separate spheres
of freedom so as to prevent conflict between human beings entails the
existence of some constraints on freedom, these constraints must in some
sense be self-imposed ones, fo r otherwise the individuals subject to them
wo uld not be able to think of themselves as free. In other words, their
moral freedom, broadly construed, would be compromised. As Fichte puts
it:
since these beings are posited as free, such a limit could not lie outside
freedom , for freedom would thereby be nullified rather than limited as
freedom; rather, all would have to posit this limit for themselves through
freedom itself, i.e. all would have to have made it a law for themselves not to
disturb the freedom of those with whom they stand in mu tual interaction.
(GA l/3: 320; FNR: ro)
Although at this stage in the Foundations of Natural Right Fichte speaks of 'right' and only later
introduces the term 'property', he already uses the term 'property' to describe the sphere in question
in his Rechtslehre from r8r2 (GA Illr3: 204) .
104
Imposing order
105
one's freedom on entering the civil condition, is evident from the following
passage:
I am not subjecting myself to the changeable, arbitrary will [ Willkuhr] of a
human being, but rather to a will that is immutab le and fixed. In fact, since
the law is exactly as I myself would have to prescribe it, in accordance with
the rule of right, I am subjecting myself to my own immutable will, a will
I would necessarily have to possess if I am acting rightfully and therefore if
I am to have any rights at all. I am subjecting myself to my will, a will that
is the condition of my capacity for having rights at all. (GA I/3: 398; FNR:
9 5f.)
In this passage, Fichte is claiming that a person does not lose his or
her freedom on becoming subject to the kind of 'immutable and fixed'
will mentioned above, and to the laws that give concrete expression to
this will, because he or she gains the freedom which consists in being
guaranteed a determinate sphere in which to exercise free choice effectively
without unj ust interference by others. Guaranteeing oneself such a sphere
is an end that each and every rational being can be expected to adopt,
since such a being has a fundamental interest in being able not only to
form its own ends but also to seek to realize them in the material world
confronting it. An individual does not, therefore, subject him- or herself
to an alien will in becoming subject to universally valid laws. He or she
instead becomes subject to his or her own rational will, thereby remaining
free, tho ugh not in the same sense as before, that is to say, naturally free
with the right to everything. This act of subjecting oneself to a universally
valid will which is not alien to one's own will corresponds to the transition
from natural freedom to civil freedom fo und in Ro usseau's theory of the
social pact, a transition which Rousseau himself describes as follows: 'What
man loses by the social contract is his natural freedom and an unlimited
right to everything that tempts him and he can reach; what he gains is
civil freedom and property in everything he possesses' (OC m : 364; PW2:
53f. ) . This passage brings us back to the issue of the precise nature of
the property which is gained in the transition from natural freedo m to
civil freedom. Fichte's theory of right represents a concerted and original
attempt to address this issue.
In Fichte's theory of right, the concept of property is introduced in
connection with the co ncept of original rights ( Urrechte) . These original
rights are contained 'in the mere concept of the person as such' (GA
l/3: 390; FNR: 87) . In other words, original rights have to do with the
conditions of rational agency in general taken together with the assumption
106
Imposing order
that finite rational beings do not exist in isolation from each other. In
his acco unt of original rights, Fichte introduces the right of property in
connection with the need for the world to exhibit regularity and order
if a rational being is effectively to realize its freely formed ends within
it. He does not deny that the world and the objects within it undergo
change in accordance with natural laws. A rational being can, and ought
to , anticipate such changes when forming its ends and seeking to realize
them. What Fichte has in mind are preventable changes brought about by
human interference (GA 1/3: 406f. ; FNR: 105f.) . Consequently, respecting
the property rights of others will consist in restricting the exercise of one's
own freedom so that it does not interfere with the exercise of their freedom
in so far as it depends on having control of parts of the external world and
of certain objects within this world.
In effect, Fichte's initial statement concerning property rights amounts
to a reiteration of his conception of right as a relation which allows finite
rational beings to coexist in such a way that each of them is guaranteed
a personal sphere in which to exercise free choice. This time, however,
the relation in question is taken to involve an explicit relation to material
objects. It is therefore of a more complex kind than any purely direct,
interpersonal relation between finite rational beings. Yet the idea that
property rights are conditio ns of an agent's causality in the sensible world
does not by itself explain how far each individual's property rights may
legitimately extend. As Fichte recognizes, his theory of right demands an
account of the limits to property rights because right aims to prevent
conflict between human beings, and as he himself had pointed out earlier,
it is only 'if another person is related to the same thing at the same time
that I am does there arise the question of a right to the thing, which is
an abbreviated way of talking about - and this is what it sho uld really be
called a right in relation to the other person, i.e. a right to exclude him
from using the thing' (GA I/3: 360; FNR: 51) .
Fichte is here stating that it only makes sense to talk of rights when a
relation to other human beings with whom one can come into conflict is
assumed to exist, whereas one can have power over a thing b ut not a right
to it, because right implies the existence of an obligation and it makes no
sense at all to speak of a thing as being obliged to respect one's claim to
be the owner of it. As we shall see, in developing the implications of the
idea that right essentially concerns relations between human beings that
are typically mediated by material objects, Fichte is led to question the
possibility of original rights, the idea of which requires abstracting from
the actual, determinate material relations that exist between human beings.
-
107
108
Imposing order
of nature, beyond that of simply desiring to preserve his or her own life. In
this way, equality and freedo m turn out to be the primary objects of right.
The primacy of freedom as a legal and political principle can be brought
out with reference to Fichte's views on the status of self-preservatio n. Fichte
claims that there
is no separate right to self-preservation; for it is merely contingent that, in
a particular instance, we happen to be using our body as a tool, or things
as a means, for the end of securing the continued existence of our body
as such. Even if our end were more modest than self-preservation, other
persons would still not be permitted to disturb our freedom, for they are
not permitted to disturb it at all. (GA 1/3: 409 ; FNR: 108)
The idea behind this claim is that we will the existence of our own body
ultimately because the latter constitutes the immediate instrument by
means of which we interact with others and with the material world with
the intention of realizing our freely formed ends, whatever they happen to
be. What we are really willing is, therefore, the realization of these ends,
whereas securing the continued existence of our own body is something that
is willed o nly on account of this more fundamental end. Self-preservation
is willed, in other words, only as 'the condition of all other actions and
of every expression of freedom' (GA l/3: 408f.; FNR: 107) . It does not,
therefore, count by itself as a sufficient reason for renouncing the right to
everything that one enjoys in the state of nature, at least not in so far as
one conceives of oneself as a free agent which seeks to realize its ends in
the material world confronting it. After all, securing one's own life could
be achieved by renouncing one's freedom, as when an individual agrees to
become the slave of someone who has the power to kill him or her.
In making equality and freedom central to his theory of right, Fichte
incorporates into this theory the two objects that Ro usseau identifies as the
principal ends of every system of legislation which aims at the greatest good
of all. Fichte, however, develops more forcefully than Rousseau does the
implications of this claim in relatio n to the right of property. His theory
of property in this regard provides a mo del of how Rousseau might have
developed a more thorough account of property rights that are taken to be
founded on the principles of equality and freedom, thereby making prop
erty into a prime example of an institution which embodies the principles
that determine what does or does not count as a genuine expression of the
general will. It remains to show how exactly Fichte's theory of property
explains the way in which the institution of property, as he conceives it,
embodies the principles of equality and freedom.
Fichte on property
109
Fichte on property
Fichte implies that there must be some kind of agreement between human
beings if they are to coexist peaceably when he states that ll property is
grounded in reciprocal recognition, and such recognition is conditioned by
mutual declaration' (GA I/3: 418; FNR: 117) . This claim is not, as it stands,
incompatible with the idea of a right of the first occupant as the ground of
property rights, for the recognition in question co uld be based either on
declaring what one already possesses as one's rightful property and on o thers
accepting this declaratio n, or, if there is any disagreement, on all the parties
concerned modifying their claims until general agreement concerning their
respective property rights is reached. Indeed, Fichte himself goes on to speak
of temporal priority as having the potential to ground property rights, as
long as this means of determining such rights has been agreed upon (GA
l/3: 420; FNR: 120). Yet the context in which this claim is made needs to
be borne in mind.
The section on the concept of an original right is followed by a section
on what Fichte calls 'the right of coercion' (das Zwangsrecht) . Here the issue
concerning how and to what extent coercion may be justifiably exercised in
relation to individuals who have violated 'the law of right' (das Rechtsgesez)
is raised. Fichte invokes the problem of being the judge in one's own cause
in such matters. Given the problematic nature of any rightful exercise
of coercion in the absence of an independent power entrusted with the
task of judging impartially and with the authority to enforce its decisions,
Fichte argues for the necessity of a third party which is not a particular
individual but is instead the commonwealth that results from the union
of all individual wills. Thus the concept of an original right thus turns out
to presuppose other elements of right, leading Fichte to call the idea of an
original right 'a mere fiction', and to claim that there 'is no condition in
which original rights exist; and no original rights of human beings' (GA
I/3: 403f. ; FNR: 102) . The possibility of rights at all in the absence of
state authority is, in short, denied. As Fichte puts it: 'there is no natural
right [Natu"echt] at all in the sense often given to that term, i.e. there can
be no rightful [rechtliches] relation between human beings except within a
commonwealth and under positive laws' (GA I/3: 432; FNR: 132). Although
the claim is clearly that all rights, including the right of property, depend
on the existence of state authority, this claim does not by itself rule out
the possibility of basing property rights on a right of the first occupant,
or a modified version of this right. The state co uld, for example, simply
play the role of deciding whether or not an appeal to this right is valid in
no
Imposing order
a particular case. We shall see in due course, however, that Fichte adopts
the position that the state determines the distribution of property rights
in a way that makes no appeal whatsoever to what individuals happen to
possess at any given point in time.
By explaining the necessity of the commonwealth in terms of the prob
lem of individuals becoming judges in their own cause, Fichte's theory
of right once again resembles Rousseau's theory of the social pact. This
time the connection has to do with Rousseau's explanation as to why the
alienation of each individual's rights on entering into the social pact must
be of an absolute kind:
since the alienation is made without reservation, the union is as perfect as
it can be, and no associate has anything further to claim : For if individuals
were left some rights, then, since there would be no common superior who
m ight adjudicate between them and the public, each, being judge in his
own case on some issue, would soon claim to be so on all, the state of nature
would subsist and the association necessarily become tyrannical or empty.
(OC III: 361; PW2: 50)
Clearly, Rousseau sees the alienation of all of one's rights as being inti
mately bound up with the creation of a condition in which no individual
is subject to obligations that do not apply equally to others; whereas if
one person were to become one-sidedly dependent on other individuals,
whose greater wealth derives from property rights based on the right of the
first occupant, he or she would find him- or herself in a position in which
Fichte on property
Ill
these others could arbitrarily impose upon him or her obligations to which
they themselves are not subject. Hence Rousseau's stipulation that 'as for
weal th, no citizen be so very rich that he can buy another, and none so
poor that he is compelled to sell himself' (OC m : 391f. ; PW2: 78) .? Such
obligations might include, to give but one example, the obligation to pro
vide the means of satisfying the needs of others at the minimum cost and
inconvenience to themselves , i rrespective of the costs and inconveniences
suffered by the person who is made to fulfil this obligation on the basis
of the unequal relations of power that his or her dependence on others
generates.
The task of preventing unequal relations of dependence from arising
renders the idea of the right of the first occupant problematic because in
the Second Discourse Rousseau paints a picture of a large degree of material
inequality based on this right prior to the fraudulent social contract that
he introduces in this work. A fundamental problem with this contract
is, therefore, that it sanctions and helps to sustain a condition in which
one-sided forms of dependence exist on the basis of material inequal ity.
This shows that Rousseau does not think that the amount of land and
goods possessed by individuals will, almost miraculously, correspond to that
which is required to establish mutual , as opposed to one-sided, relations
of dependence between h uman beings, so that possession simply needs to
be transformed into property rights by means of legal sanctions backed
by the threat or the actual use of force. Thus even apart from the worry
that the right of the fi rst occupant may be based on spurious claims,
there is the problem that recognizing the validity of this right threatens to
subvert the main purpose of a genuine social pact, which is to overcome
the disadvantages of the state of nature in such a way that no individual
loses h is or her independence by becoming dependent on the arbitrary wills
7
This passage and ot hers l i ke it that sel limits 10 permissible degrees of material i neq uali ty have been
i n terpreted i n such a way as to make these limi LS appear essen tially disti nct from the normative
elemenLS of Ro ussea u's theo ty of the general wi ll, because they are allegedly 'fixed not by the content
of the general will i tself. . . but by an acco u n t of the condi tions req u i red for the stability of the
society of the general will'. Cohen, Rousuau, 53 For Cohen, such conditions of social stabi lity are
not cons t i tutive elements of a legitimate social and poli tical order. Rather, they form elements of
'a political sociology' as opposed to 'the phi losophical conception of poli tical legi ti macy' (57). This
disti nction stri kes me as i m possible 10 mai ntain i n the face o f Rousseau's clear concern about the way
i n which material i neq uali ty generates u neq ual relations of depende nce, and his view that one of the
cen t ral aims o f the social pact itself will be 10 prevent or to overcome such relations of dependence i n
accordance w i th t h e pri nciples of equal i ty a n d freedom. I n other words, l i m i ts on perm issible degrees
of material inequa l i ty belong 10 the con tent of the general will, whereas viewing them as condi ti ons
of social stabi l i ty alone i mplies that they are esse n t i ally conti ngent co nditions of freedom, in the
sense that they could be dispensed w i th i f i t turned out that social stabi l i ty could be guaran teed
without them.
112
Imposing order
8 Cf. Neuhouser, 'Fichte a n d the Relationship between Right a n d :'vi oral ity' .
9 I discuss this issue more fully in Chapter 5 in relation to Fichte's ethical activism and his later theory
of property.
Fichte on property
113
Rousseau und Fichte) mit einem Beitrag zum Problem der Gewaltenteilung bei Rousseau und Fichte,
343ff.
114
Imposing order
in general, by claiming that the acts of forming ends and seeking to realize
them in the material world are essentially future-oriented ones that depend
on a person's ability to preserve him- or herself as a living organism. The
essential connection between human agency and the human body finds
immediate expression in a physical feeling, namely, the pain caused by
hunger or thirst (GA I/ 4: 21; FNR: 185) . It is in the light of this essential
connection between human agency and the human body that we are to
understand Fichte's claim that to be able to live is 'the absolute, inalienable
property of all human beings' (GA l/4: 22; FNR: 185).
Given the way in which this form of property is derived from the
conditions of human agency in general, it provides a more determinate
expression of that which Fichte calls property 'in the broadest sense of the
word', which is 'a person's rights to free action in the sensible world in
general' (GA 1/4: 8; FNR: 168) . Since Fichte is speaking of free but finite
ratio nal beings, this right ought not to be guaranteed in simply any possible
way; rather, it should be guaranteed in such a way that it depends on an
individual's own activity.12 Fichte accordingly asserts that a principle of any
rational state constitution is that 'everyone ought to be able to live from
his labor' (GA 1/4: 22; FNR: 185). He here incorporates into his theory of
property the strong condition to which Rousseau subjects the right of the
first o ccupant: the condition that one should occupy only as much land
as one needs to subsist. Fichte expresses this requirement in more general
terms, however, by linking it to the right to be able to live from one's
labour, rather than to the specific right to land upon which one may labo ur
to gain the means of subsistence.
The right to be able to live from one's labour is clearly a right whose
protection Ro usseau co uld regard as a genuine demand of the general will,
for the guarantee of being able to live from one's labour represents one
way of preventing individuals from becoming dependent on the arbitrary
wills of other individuals or groups. It would, for example, prevent people
from having to depend on the charity of others. It would also make them
independent of changing government policy regarding welfare provision,
provided that the right to work was supplemented by other economic rights,
such as the right to earn a decent wage and the right to protection from
exploitative labo ur practices. Since it is the state that guarantees this right,
1 1 Fichte admittedly speaks of having to 'subsidize' (beisteuem) the person who is unable to live from
his or her labour (GA 1/4: 23; FNR: r86). Although this particular claim suggests that he has in
mind some form of welfare provision, given what I have said above concerning his commitment
to freedom as self-activity, welfare provision dearly represents a less desirable option than work, an
option that is appropriate only when people are unable to work through no fault of their own.
Fichte on property
115
This appeal to an equal right to enjoy as agreeable a life as possible within the state in which one
l ives m ight be thought to represent a significant departure from Rousseau's views on equality, given
his condemnation ofluxury as a sign of moral corruption and political decay. See, for example, OC
m : 19ff.; PWx: x8ff., OC m : 206; PWx: 201f., OC m : 516ff.; PF: 45f. It is not clear, however, that
this is really the case. In The Cloud Commercial State, Fichte states that the production of luxury
goods may begin only when the means of satisfying the essential needs of life have been universally
secured, and he also expresses unreservedly the view that it is unjust for someone to be in the
position to buy luxury goods when his or her fellow citizens lack more essential goods (GA I/7: 61).
Luxury is, therefore, subject to strict limits, and it is condemned in so far as it is associated with
a significant degree of material inequality. :'vforeover, Fichte assumes that such material inequality
n6
Imposing order
Fichte on property
117
Fichte does, however, speak of an 'absolute' form of propercy. This form of propercy consists in the
money left over when an i ndividual has di scharged his or her com m i tments to the state (e.g. by
selling what he or she has produced or manufactu red and by paying taXes so that everyone's right
to be able to l ive can be guaran teed by the state), toget her with the personal belongi ngs that can
be bough t with this money (GA
GNR: 209) . Yet Fichte i m poses strict l i m i tations on this
l/4: 43 ;
absolute form of proper!)' in accordance w i th his concern t hat everyone ought to be able to live. A
person m ust be in a position to usc the proper!)' that he or she h as bought and must actually use
it, and a person may not freely dispose of his or her property i f doing so deprives him or her of the
means to l ive, thus making him or her i nto a burden on the state (GA
Proud hon, What is Propmy!,
35
1/4: 5 6;
FNR: 223).
n8
Imposing order
In The Closed Commercial State, Fichte makes clear that although we may call the object of a free
activity the property of the person who is entitled to engage in this activity, it is only figuratively
or in a derivative sense that we may do so, for strictly speaking only the person's exclusive right
to engage in the activity in question in relation to this object is the individual's property (GA I/7:
85f.). Moreover, Fichte later refers to tools and objects as contingent property (zufollige Eigenthum),
because they could simply be lent to the worker (GA l/7: 88).
Imposing order
119
120
Imposing order
from what Rousseau has to say about such an economy in the writings
occasioned by the invitations that he received to draft constitutions for
Corsica and Poland. In these writings, Rousseau can be seen to play the
role of a political architect who must take into consideration the conditions
and the nature of the people which forms the object of his plans. In both
cases he appears to view these conditions and the nature of the people as
largely favourable ones.
Ro usseau claims that the 'advantageous situation of the island of Corsica
and the fortunate natural disposition of its inhabitants seem to offer them
a reasonable hope of being able to become a flo urishing people' (OC III:
902; CC: 124) . Then there is his claim in the Social Contract that Corsica
is the 'one country left in Europe capable of receiving legislation', and a
nation that by the courage it has shown in recovering and defending its
freedom 'would amply deserve that some wise man teach it to preserve it'
(OC III: 391; PW2: 78). While with respect to Poland, Rousseau believes
himself to be speaking to a people that is not altogether free of vices,
but which nevertheless has 'some resilience and virtues' (OC III: 1022;
PW2: 242) . We may assume, then, that in these constitutional writings
Rousseau is in large part seeking to show how laws and institutions that
are 'good in themselves' (that is, laws and institutions that embody the
principles of equality and freedom) can be borne by a people fit to bear
them.
When discussing the kind of economic system that Poland should have,
Rousseau maintains that settling this issue will depend on the end which the
Poles have in mind in correcting their existing constitution. If they wish
Poland to become 'noisy, brilliant, fearsome, and to influence the other
peoples of Europe', they should, above all else, develop 'a good financial
system which makes money circulate well, which thereby multiplies it,
which provides you with a lot of it', and strive to make money 'very
necessary, in order to keep the people in great dependence' (OC m: 1003 ;
PW2: 224) . Money is here identified as an instrument of subjugation
because it fosters relations of dependence.'7 Ro usseau's hostility to a money
based economy turns out, then, to be connected with his fear of the great
human evil of dependence. This hostility goes deeper, therefore, than the
mere dislike of the effects that money has on a person's moral character
signalled by such passages as the following one: 'Financial systems make
venal souls, and as soon as all one wants is to profit, one invariably profits
'7
See also the following claim made in the Social Contract: 'The word finance is a slave's word; it is
unknown in the C ity. In a truly free State the citizens do everything with their hands and nothing
with money' (OC 111: 429; PW2: 113).
Imposing order
121
more by being a knave than by being an honest man' (OC III: 1005; PW2:
226) . Rather, moral corruption is an effect of the dependence generated by
a money-based economy, or, to be more precise, it is an effect of the way in
which this kind of economy serves to undermine the legal and institutional
structures that are needed to prevent one-sided forms of dependence and
the relations of domination that they make possible from arising, or to
remove such relations of dependence and domination if they already exist.
The precise nature of the threat that a money-based economy poses to
equality and freedom can be bro ught out with reference to some of the
things that Ro usseau has to say about the elusiveness of money, as opposed
to the tangibility of material goods and the human body.
In his draft constitution for Poland, Ro usseau implies that money has
an elusive character when he recommends that taxes be paid in the form
of services performed for the benefit of the state rather than in the form
of money, because 'money disappears in leaving the hands that pay it, but
everyone sees what men do' (OC III: 1009; PW2: 229). The same tho ught
is expressed in his reflections on a constitution for Corsica: 'Not being able
to hide itself, the use of men's arms always reaches the public destination,
it is not the same for the use of money; it slips away and melts into private
destinations; one heaps it up for one purpose, one gives it o ut for another'
(OC III: 904; CC: 125) . Here physical labo ur and other palpable services
that citizens can perform for the state are compared with the elusiveness of
money, which may easily be turned by those individuals who get their hands
on it into a purely private reso urce, even when it is originally destined for
public use. '8 To be sure, money itself takes the form of a material object. Yet
as the merely abstract sign of something other than itself (that is, the value
of the goods or services that can be purchased by means of it) , money enjoys
a shadowy existence. In the following passage, Rousseau states the extent
to which he thinks mo ney lends itself to being hidden away, siphoned off
and put to use for all kinds of nefarious purposes, because it changes hands
'8
The increased potential fo r inj ustice brought about by the establ ishment of a money-based economy
on account of money's el usive nature was already a theme in Monresquieu's The Spirit ofthe Laws:
Bur among a people who have established the use of money. one is subject to the injustices
char come from trickery, and these injustices can be exercised in a thousand ways. Therefore,
one is forced to have good civil laws there; these arise along with the new means and the
various ways of being wicked.
In countries where there is no money, rhe plunderer carries away only things, and things
are never alike. In countries where there is money, rhe plunderer carries away signs, and
signs are always alike. In the former countries nothing can be hidden, because the plunderer
always carries with him proofs for his conviction; it is nor the same in the latter countries.
(293)
122
Imposing order
Imposing order
123
Fichte's The Closed Commercial State, in which we have not only the
public administration of goods but also that of people with respect to
their occupations. Fichte clearly wants to impose order on society.'9 This is
because, unlike Kant, he does not trust at all in the idea of a spontaneous
process which generates its own order and alleged harmony of interests.
This distrust is evident from the following passage which concerns the
consequences of a free market in goods:
There arises an endless war of all against all among the trading public, in the
shape of war between buyers and sellers; and this war becomes more violent,
more unjust, and more dangerous in its consequences, the more populated
the world becomes, the larger the commercial state becomes through the
acquisitions it makes, the more production and the arts increase, and the
amount of goods that thereby come into circulation and with them the needs
of everyone m ultiply, and become ever more particularized. What went on
without much inj ustice [ Ungerechtigkeit] and oppression when the nations'
way of life was simple, transforms itself in accordance with increased needs
into the most glaring wrong [ Unrecht] , and into a source of the greatest
misery. (GA I/7 : 98)
124
Imposing order
efficiency and with the minimum waste of time. The state oversees the
whole process of production and exchange with the aim of ensuring that
the various estates honour the agreements that they have made with each
other and that there are enough natural products and finished articles avail
able to satisfy the needs of all the citizens of the state, including soldiers,
teachers and those individuals who perform administrative and political
functions within the state. The measures undertaken by the state to guar
antee the right of property, understood as the right to engage in an activity
which enables one to live from one's labo ur, include fixing prices and
making sure that the amount of money in circulation and its value are
determined strictly in accordance with the amount of goods in circulation
and their value. This value is measured in terms of the amount of time
within which a certain amo unt of grain can nourish a person while he or
she works. Thus although a money-based economy exists, it is tied to a
palpable object. These details by themselves show that Fichte is opposed
to allowing the economic sphere to become autonomous and to develop
its own spontaneous order in the hope that everything will turn out well.
To the latter approach he offers the following objection: 'To say that it will
all work out of its own accord [von selbst] , that everyone will always find
work, and bread, and simply leaving it to depend on this good fortune,
is not appropriate with regard to a completely rightful constitution'
(GA I/7: 90) .
Given Fichte's wish to introduce and to preserve order with the aim
of guaranteeing equality and freedom, it is not surprising that the term
'equilibrium' (Gleichgewicht) appears rather frequently in The Closed Com
mercial State, as when Fichte states that 'equilibrium must be continually
maintained' (GA 1/7: 61) . This equilibrium is exemplified by the trading
relations established between the three estates of producers, artists and
merchants. These relations are organized in such a way that each and every
person within the state is able to live from his or her labour, and that
enough goods are in circulation to satisfy every person's reasonable expec
tations concerning his or her material needs. Since any unforeseen factors
would threaten to destroy this equilibrium, the state must be able to predict
what will in fact happen. Fichte claims that it m ust, therefore, close itself
off economically from other states, whose citizens are not subject to the
same controls and restrictions as its own citizens, because the commercial
activities of the latter co uld not be effectively supervised and controlled
were they to engage in acts of economic exchange with foreigners.
Fichte's attempt to explain how the basic conditions of free agency can
be universally guaranteed results in such a high degree of state control and
Imposing order
125
126
Imposing order
We shall see in Chapter 5 that Fichte came to recognize this problem and that he modified his
theory of property in the light of it.
Imposing order
127
I28
Imposing order
of any legitimate political order, and his opposition to such forms of popular
initiative as the right to propose laws and to nominate candidates for public
office. These functions are instead entrusted to the government, to which
the sovereign people delegate the responsibility fo r the execution of the laws,
and which is therefore meant to be only the instrument of the people's will.
This tension is said to result from Rousseau's ambivalent attitude towards
the political capacities of ordinary citizens, with, in particular, his suspicion
of their capacity to determine on their own initiative the content of the
general will leading him to qualify his enthusiasm for direct, active citizen
participation. 24 Even if Rousseau does allow more room for active citizen
participation in determining the content of the general will than is claimed
here, 25 the way in which Fichte's theory of property consistently develops
the implications of Ro usseau's commitment to the principles of equality
and freedom provides one good reason that Rousseau has for worrying
about ordinary citizens' capacity to determine the content of the general
will by means of direct, active participation in the legislative process. For
as Rousseau himself recognizes, such participation in the legislative process
may fail to generate decisions that conform to the general will because the
laws agreed upon do not reflect a genuine commitment to the principles
of equality and freedom.
This type of failure is all the more likely when the following factors apply:
(I) individuals cast their votes against the backgro und of an ongoing blind,
spontaneous dependence-generating process which has material inequality
as one of its unintended consequences; (2) some (perhaps the majority) of
these individuals have an interest in maintaining and perpetuating existing
conditions, which are the product of such a process, because they them
selves benefit from these conditions; (3) something like Fichte's theory of
property represents an adequate institutional embodiment of the principles
of equality and freedom as conceived by Rousseau; and (4) guaranteeing
property rights as determined by such a theory of property wo uld require
a radical redistribution of resources that overrides many existing claims
concerning property rights, together with a high degree of state regulation
and supervision. Conditions (I) and (2) are compatible with Rousseau's
1 4 Cf. Fralin, Rousseau and Representation.
>5 For an attempt to defend Rousseau against the accusation that he limits genuine democratic activity,
see Cohen, Rousseau, 166ff. While Cohen makes a strong case for thinking that Rousseau does not
allow the executive to dominate the legislative body by appealing to particular aspects of his
constitutional thinking, this still leaves us with the broader question as to whether the normative
aspects of Rousseau's political thought might not be in tension with his commitment to popular
sovereignty and democratic rule, with this tension manifesting itself in some of Rousseau's own
statements concerning the process by means of which the content of the general will is determined.
Imposing order
129
130
Imposing order
As we have seen, Fichte deduces a civil contract, law and state authority as
conditions of right in the Foundations ofNatural Right. He then discusses
18
131
the form of government in the third chapter of the doctrine of right, which
is entitled 'On Political Right, or Right within a Commonwealth' ( Vom
Staatsrechte, oder dem Rechte in einem gemeinen Wesen) . In the do ctrine of
right, Fichte speaks of 'the common will' (der gemeinsame Wille) . The idea
of such a will invites co mparisons with Rousseau's idea of the general will,
and I shall now highlight a feature of Fichte's acco unt of how the common
will is to be interpreted that recalls some things that Rousseau has to
say concerning how the content of the general will is to be determined.
At the same time, I identify an important difference between Rousseau's
and Fichte's thoughts on this issue. This difference becomes evident in
connection with Fichte's views on the question as to who should exercise
political authority and why they sho uld do so. To understand both the
differences and the similarities between the positions that Ro usseau and
Fichte adopt on the issue of how the content of the general (or common)
will is to be discovered, we first need to turn to Fichte's account of the
constitution of the state.
Fichte rejects the idea of a true democratic constitution which wo uld
involve the populace as a whole administering executive power. In this
respect he agrees with Rousseau, who insists that executive power must
be delegated by the sovereign people to the government. The reason that
Rousseau gives for the need to delegate executive power rests on the distinc
tion which he draws between the universality of law, which is the province
of the sovereign people as legislator, and particular acts that consist in
the application of the laws, which ought to be the province of the exec
utive power (OC III: 39 5f. ; PW2: 82) . When discussing a direct fo rm of
democracy in which the people executes the laws that it makes, Ro usseau
concedes that who ever makes the laws knows better than anyone else how
these laws should be interpreted and executed. He nevertheless argues that
this constitutes a bad arrangement, because attention, in being focused
on particular objects, is turned away from the general considerations that
ought to form the object of the people's deliberations.
Rousseau's real fear, however, is revealed by his statement that such an
arrangement is dangerous because it allows private interests to influence
public affairs (OC III: 404; PW2: 90f.) . In o ther words, when citizens have
a role in interpreting and executing the laws, they may come to employ the
laws as a means of pursuing their own private interests. This would happen
at the executive level when, for example, individuals or groups interpret
and seek to execute the laws that they have themselves made as members
of the sovereign legislative body in such a way as to eliminate or discredit
others, such as any political rivals that they may have. At the legislative
132
Imposing order
level, knowing that they are in the position to execute the laws that they
themselves help formulate could encourage some individuals to seek to
introduce laws that apply disproportionately to other individuals whom
they wish to harm in some way, so that their attention focuses on how
they might get others to accept the need for such laws. Essentially what is
needed is the independent exercise of executive power in accordance with
the laws. 29 For Rousseau, the alternative would be that 'disorder replaces
rule, force and will no longer act in concert, and the dissolved State thus
falls into despotism or anarchy' (OC III: 397; PW2: 83) . Although Fichte
does not advocate a strict separation of the legislative and executive powers,
he advocates the existence of a power that is independent of the sovereign
people and is charged by them with executing the laws fo r a similar reason.
This power is, however, also charged with the task of determining the
content of law, which means, in effect, that it, rather than the sovereign
people, interprets the general (or common) will.
As regards the independence of the executive power, Fichte rests his
case on the problems raised by the absence of any other power capable
of forcing the populace as a whole to administer the laws properly. In
a direct democracy, this problem manifests itself in the way in which the
populace becomes judge in its own cause. Fichte argues that such a situation
would have highly undesirable consequences in the shape of a condition
of insecurity and terror (das Schrecken), 'since one would have to fear not
only the violent acts of all the others just as he would outside the state, but
also , from time to time, the blind fury of an enraged mob that acts unjustly
in the name of the law' (GA 1!3: 439; FNR: 140) . Like Ro usseau, then, his
main fear appears to be that people will pursue their own private interests
while claiming that they are executing laws which express the general will.
By identifying these problems, Fichte believes that he has succeeded in
demonstrating the necessity of representation within a commonwealth.
He goes even further than Ro usseau, however, by depriving the sovereign
people of the task of legislation, which is delegated to the government,
whereas Rousseau insists on the inalienability of the sovereignty that resides
in determining the laws to which one is subject. Fichte accordingly claims
that the executive power 'includes the entire public power [die gesammte
19 Rousseau describes the problem that he has in mind when the sovereign legislative power also
exercises executive power in more general terms as the confusion brought about by failing to
separate right from fact, so that it is no longer clear what is law and what is not law (OC 111: 432;
PW2: n6). Perhaps, though, it is better to speak of a failure to maintain a firm enough distinction
between judgements concerning right, that is, judgements concerning which laws embody the
general will, and judgements concerning the application of these laws to particular cases.
133
ii./fentliche Gewalt] in all its branches' (GA l/3: 441; FNR: 142f.). In other
words, it comprises the legislative, executive and judicial powers.
Fichte views the legislative process as a matter of interpreting the com
mon will which is generated by the civil contract so as to arrive at a particular
set of laws. These laws are, therefore, 'not really new laws, but only more
determinate applications of the one fundamental law, which states: these
particular human beings are to live alongside one another in accordance
with right' (GA 1!3: 441; FNR: 142). Consequently, in so far as their duties
as legislators are concerned, the individuals vested with political authority
by the sovereign people must, above all else, act as reliable interpreters
of the common will embodied in this one fundamental law. This implies
that they must be capable of gaining insight into the true nature of this
fundamental law and the particular laws that can be derived from it. Given
the possibility that individuals may lack the reasoning powers or probity
needed to discover such a fundamental law and to derive a determinate set
of laws from it, the individuals whom the sovereign people invests with
political authority should be carefully chosen. Fichte himself states that the
'wisest among the people ought to be elected as magistrates' (GA l/3 : 451;
FNR: 154) . Thus Fichte's account of political authority is oriented towards
the idea that rational insight into the very nature of things, together with
the capacity to apply the particular laws that have been identified by means
of such insight to existing conditions, are the most important qualities
that individuals directly involved in political affairs will need to possess.
Fichte's account of the magistrate's function as interpreter of the common
will, and thus as legislator of particular laws, is nevertheless not so far
removed from Rousseau's position as it at first appears to be on account of
Rousseau's insistence on the primacy of popular sovereignty and the fact
that the executive power is merely an instrument of the sovereign people.
It can, in fact, be related to some things that Rousseau himself has to say
about how the content of the general will is to be determined.
In his Discourse on Political Economy, Ro usseau uses the term 'public
reaso n' when speaking of the magistrate's duty to 'follow no other rule
than the public reason [la raison publique], which is the law' (OC III: 243;
PW2: 5) . Since public reason is here identified with the law itself, it might
be interpreted as a principle, akin to natural law, which, altho ugh it needs
to be discovered by the magistrate, is valid independently of the process
by means of which it is discovered, including any deliberative democratic
pro cess. In this respect, Rousseau's use of the term 'public reason' do es
not entail the idea of public deliberation. Admittedly, the idea of public
deliberation can be detected in his claim that the magistrate sho uld be
134
Imposing order
wary even of his own reaso n (OC m : 243 ; PW2: 5), for this claim suggests
that the magistrate would to do well to pay attention to the opinions of
others. Yet Rousseau also speaks of the law as a 'celestial voice that dictates
the precepts of public reason to every citizen ', which invites an altogether
different interpretation when it is taken together with the emphasis that he
later places on the notion of duty as something that speaks to men's hearts
and depends on the morals of the citizens (OC m: 248ff. ; PW2: 10ff.) .
This interpretation wo uld be that individual judgement is sacrosanct,
and that what is required to determine the content of the general will
is simply an act of introspection by means of which a person seeks to
interpret the general will by heeding his or her own innate sense of justice.
This act will invariably yield the right result, Ro usseau suggests, if the
citizens' mores are wholesome enough. This interpretation is supported by
his claim in the Social Contract that the result must always be the general
will 'when an adequately informed people deliberates [delibere]' and the
citizens 'had no communication among themselves' (OC I I I : 371f. ; PW2:
6o). For these claims imply that ideally there should not be any need
for the citizens to deliberate among themselves and that deliberation here
means something like the act of reaching a final judgement on a matter
which allows for a definitive answer because the general will provides a
standard that is ultimately independent of human opinion and will; hence
Rousseau's claim that it cannot be destroyed or corrupted but remains
'constant, unalterable, and pure' (OC m: 438; PW2: 122) . Deliberation in
this sense does not require engaging in debate with others whose views
may differ from one's own and which one must take into consideration, so
that in this respect the attempt to assimilate Ro usseau's views on how the
content of the general will is to be determined to modern-day conceptions
of 'public reason' is misleading.30 Indeed, in the Social Contract Rousseau
appears to treat the existence of debate as a sign of decline in the morals
of a people and in the health of the body politic, when he makes the
following statement: 'The more concord reigns in assemblies, that is to
say the closer opinions co me to unanimity, the more the general will also
predominates; whereas long debates, dissensions, disturbances, signal the
ascendency of particular interests and the decline of the State' (OC I I I : 439 ;
PW2: 123).
3o
John Rawls claims that the idea o f 'deliberative reason' which h e attributes t o Rousseau anticipates
what he himself calls 'public reason'. Cf. Rawls, Lectures on the History ofPolitical Philosophy, 231. See
also Neuhauser, Rousseau s Theodicy ofSe/fLove, 195ff. For some doubts concern ing the validity of
this approach on grounds other than the ones given here, see James, 'Rousseau on Needs, Language
and Pity: The Limits of "Public Reason"'.
135
" In Fichte's case, the absence of any need for public deliberation, despite the way in which he invokes
the idea of consent as the basis of any legitimate legal and political order, is evident from the
following statement concerning the law that determines the limits of the rights and of the freedom
of the members of a commun ity of free beings: 'Now they need not articulate the will of this
law explicitly, nor do they have to collect votes concerning it (which would result only in a very
impure expression of that will). Anyone who knows their number, their involvements, their entire
situation, can tell them what they all agree on. Their law is given to them by the rule of right and
by their particular physical situation, just as a mathematical product is given by the two factors
being multiplied; any intelligent being can attempt to find this law' (GA 1/3: 401; FNR: 99). This
statement concerning the task of determining the content of right is arguably compatible with some
form of technocratic authoritarianism.
Imposing order
a state and for the state as a whole.31 In the Foundations ofNatural Right,
this tendency is partially offset, however, by the introduction of what looks
like a radically democratic element.
Fichte's rejection of the idea of a separation of the powers results in a form
of government that, as he himself concedes, threatens to become despotic,
because all public power is concentrated in the hands of a single gro up
of people. The persons entrusted with executive power must, therefore,
somehow remain accountable to the populace. Although Fichte's position
on this issue differs from Rousseau's position in that it denies the separation
of the legislative body and the executive body, the particular problem that
he has in mind is similar to the kind of problem that Rousseau thinks
explains the inevitability of the decline of the political bo dy, namely, the
government's tendency to seek to oppress the sovereign:
Just as the particular will incessantly acts against the general will, so the
Government makes a constant effort against Sovereignty. The greater this
effort grows, the more adulterated does the constitution get, and si nce there
is here no other corporate will to resist the will of the Prince and so to
balance it, it must sooner or later come to pass that the Prince ends up
oppressing the Sovereign and breaking the Social treaty. (OC III: 421 ; PW2:
106)
137
or hand down a verdict in any particular case. They nevertheless can, and
should, suspend all exercise of executive power by means of a state interdict
(Staatsinterdikt) and summon the populace to constitute itself as a whole,
that is, as the people (das Volk) , once they become convinced that this
power is not being administered properly.33 A people's tribunal, in which
the assembled people consider the evidence presented to them both by the
ephors and by the members of the government regarding the claim that the
executive power is not being administered properly, must then take place.
Finally, the people must decide which party is in the right, with the losing
party being judged to be guilty of high treason.34
Whatever one makes of its general plausibility, Fichte's account of the
constitutional role of the ephorate implies an act of genuine popular
sovereignty at the same time as it introduces an explicitly democratic
element into his theory of the constitution of the state. Indeed, although
Fichte argues for the need for representation on the grounds of the dangers
posed by a direct form of democracy, he ends up introducing what looks
very much like a direct form of democracy, albeit only in certain exceptional
circumstances that end once the members of the government, whether it
be the exonerated members of the current government or the members of
a new one, are seen to fulfil properly the functions of interpreting the com
mon will, executing what it demands and passing judgement in particular
cases whenever the laws have been violated. For during the period when all
exercise of public power is suspended and the assembled people consider
the claims made by the members of the ephorate, on the one hand, and
JJ
l4
The idea that all public power is suspended during this assembly of the people finds an echo in
Rousseau's statement that 'The instant the People is legitimately assembled as a Sovereign body, all
jurisdiction of the Government ceases, the executive power is suspended, and the person of the last
Citizen is as sacred and inviolable as that of the lim Magistrate' (OC 1 1 1 : 427f. ; PW2: 112).
The process by means of which the people constitutes itself as a whole, and makes its decision
known after having heard the evidence presented to it by both sides, remains obscure. Fichte
restricts himself to stating that although in small states, particularly republican ones, constitutional
law could prescribe that the people assemble on a regular basis and at specified times so that the
magistrates can give them an account of how the state is being administered, in a large state this
arrangement might not be feasible, and the populace should, therefore, be convened only when
it is absolutely necessary (GA 1/3: 447f.; FNR: 150) . The idea of regular popular assemblies is
also proposed by Rousseau: 'In addition to extraordinary assemblies which may be required by
unforeseen circumstances, there must be fixed and periodic assembl ies which nothing can abol ish
or prorogue, so that on the appointed day the people is legitimately summoned by law, without
need of any further formal convocation' (OC 111: 426; PW2: 111). Fichte also suggests that instead
of the whole populace gathering together in a single place, an investigation and discussion of the
issues raised in connection with the ephors' state interdict could be conducted and voted upon in
every ciry and village, though he goes on to claim that arranging matters in such a way that the
final result truly reflects the common will is ultimately not a question for the doctrine of right but
is instead a matter for politics (GA I/3: 450; FNR: 152).
Imposing order
those made by the members of the government, on the other, and must
decide between these rival claims, space exists for a democratic process
which introduces an element of considerable uncertainty into the political
life of the state. This is because various standpoints concerning the issues
at stake could develop amo ng the people, leading to the formation of dif
ferent groups arguing for potentially incompatible positions, with the final
outcome of such a process being unpred ictable. Yet this space for direct
democracy, and th us for uncertainty, is firmly closed down in Fichte's later
presentation ofhis theory of right, mainly because of his doubts concerning
the effectiveness of the institution of the ephorate and his declining faith
in the judgement of the people.
Political authority in Fichte's later Rechtslehre
1 39
what j ustice demands, and who is most morally j ust as well, so that this
insight will not be ignored or distorted for the sake of private interest. The
second quality can even be viewed as a condition of the fi rst one, although
Fichte does not expl icitly make this point, in the sense that the ability to
interpret the common will correctly may be held to depend on a person's
moral character. As we have seen , this is a view that Rousseau sometimes
appears to hold. The second solution is that the private will of the person
who happens to rule becomes truly j ust or as close as possible thereto. Fichte
expresses this solution in terms of the demand that the ruler ought to be
the best (Der Herrscher soli der Beste seyn) .
Fichte mentions various problems in relation to both of these solutions.
To begin with, there is the infinite regress which results from the idea that
the will of the ruler, like the will of every private person , must be subj ect
to a law of coercion (ein Zwangrgesez) so as to ensure that it itself wills in
accordance with the demands of j ustice. This requirement presupposes the
existence of another will capable of applying the law of coercion. Yet is there
any guarantee that it will always act in accordance with the demands of
j ustice, apart from the existence of another will capable of applying the law
of coercion and so on ad infinitum? This leads Fichte to argue that we must
simply accept the existence of a sovereign will that coerces others but is not
itself coerced; an assumption that appears to confirm the need for a ruler of
exceptional mo ral probity who possesses gen uine insight into the essential
nature of the common will. Fichte also considers placing the sovereign
person or persons in such a position that there exists no temptation for
them to be unjust, while they may have an incentive to be just in the form
of such motives as a sense of honour, the desire for fame or love of their
subjects . He points out, however, that these considerations fail to show how
insight i nto that which is j ust can be guaranteed . While in response to the
suggestion that the ruler could be given an excellent education (Erziehung) ,
Fichte asks who would educate the educator himself along with those
individuals who are to choose an educato r for the future ruler. Once again,
an infinite regress arises . Then, after reasserting his rej ection of the idea
of a separation of powers, Fichte exercises some explicit self-criticism by
expressing some doubts concerning the feasibility of his theory of the
ephorate.
First of all, Fichte points to the lack of any power capable of ensu ring
that the ephorate will begin a revolution, by which he presumably means
the act of suspending all exercise of executive power and summoning the
people, only when a violation of right has occurred. Secondly, there is the
problem that the govern ment, since it has all coercive power at its disposal,
Imposing order
could simply use this power to suppress the ephorate from the very begin
ning. In the Foundations ofNatural Right, Fichte suggests that the solution
to this problem consists in meeting the following requirement: 'the power
of the people must exceed beyond all measure the power that the executive
officials possess' (GA l/3: 453 ; FNR: 156) . In other words, the government
ought not to have the monopoly of the legitimate use of force. Rather, the
people must have more coercive means at its disposal than the government
has. Yet as we shall soon see, Fichte's Rechtslehre from 1812 betrays a suspi
cion of the people, which we may assume includes their capacity to employ
force legitimately. Thirdly, there is the question as to how can it be known
that the content of the people's verdict regarding whether the claims of the
ephorate or those of the executive power are valid is itself just when there
is no higher judge with the authority to determine this fact. In contrast
to his earlier faith in the people's ability to judge this matter correctly, as
expressed in such bold statements as the one that ' [n]o peo ple have ever
risen up in unison like a single man - nor ever will - unless the injustice [die
Ungerechtigkeit] has reached an extreme' (GA 1!3: 457; FNR: 160) , Fichte
now claims that a select gro up of the wisest people in society can always be
more trusted than any majority which has somehow arisen. This statement
indicates that he regards the existence of such a majority as an essentially
contingent matter, which is the result of blind, spontaneous forces, and that
the judgement of a majority that has arisen in this way is simply not to be
trusted.
Fichte also considers the institution of the ephorate to be impracticable
because human beings are, on the whole, simply too bad in a moral sense.
Shortly thereafter he identifies one consequence of this lack of morality
as the way in which it will not be the advice of those who are the wisest
and most morally go od in society, but the advice of the ignorant that will
be accepted by the majority of people. Although Fichte allows that this
state of affairs could be remedied by people becoming more cultivated and
more moral, the uncertain nature of such a transformation leads him to
assert that the 'true solution' is for the person whose will is the most just
to rule (GA I III3: 285). Yet even here Fichte identifies certain problems:
the existing rulers, even if they recognize the superiority of such a perso n,
would not give up their power to this person; the masses wo uld not elect
such a person, because only the good are able to recognize others of their
kind; and it may happen that even among an assembly of the best people,
each would want to be ruler, trusting himself more than others. In the face
of such problems, Fichte concludes that
Imposing order
of human perfectibility. Although Hegel associates this perfectibility with
the capacity for freedom, he also makes explicit the ro le played by necessity
in perfecting humankind. At the same time, Hegel's commitment to the
idea of freedom means that he must explain how freedom is preserved in
the face of this necessity, especially when he himself rejects the notions
of popular sovereignty and democratic self-rule in such statements as that
to 'know what one wills, and even more, to know what the will which
has being in and for itself - i.e. reason - wills, is the fruit of profo und
cognition and insight [Eimicht] , and this is not the business of the people
[die Sache des Volkes]' (PR 3orA; translation modified) . This type of
statement recalls Fichte's conclusion that political authority ought to be
granted to individuals who are capable of achieving insight into the true
nature of a just social and political order, as opposed to this order being
determined from below, as it were, by the views and the decisions of the
people. Given his rejection of popular sovereignty and democratic self-rule,
it is not clear that Hegel can avoid altogether the idea of imposing order on
a potentially recalcitrant material in his attempt to explain the possibility of
a genuine general will. As we shall see, his position begins, in fact, to look
like an unstable synthesis of the position represented by Kant's philosophy
of history, on the one hand, and the position represented by Fichte's theory
of right, on the other. Thus in its own way Hegel's Philosophy of Right
reflects the tensions between the idea of will and the idea of necessity
already identified by Rousseau.
CHAPTER FOUR
Hegel praises Rousseau for making the will into the principle of the state,
a principle that has thought not only as its 'form' but also as its 'content'.
Yet immediately afterwards he claims that
Rousseau considered the will only in the determinate form of the individual
will (as Fichte subsequently also did) and regarded the universal will [den
allgemeinen Willen] not as the will's rationality in and for itself, but only
as the common element arising out of this individual will as a conscious will.
The union of individuals within the state thus becomes a contract, which
is accordingly based on their arbitrary will [ Willkur] and opinions, and on
their express consent given at their own discretion. (PR 258A)
144
on the arbitrary will, that is, on a will which co uld have chosen differently
from what it in fact chose.
Hegel surely exaggerates the degree to which contract theories of the
state are based on contingency and are a matter of arbitrariness. After all,
we have seen how both Fichte's and Rousseau's versions of this type of the
ory are shaped by a concern to secure certain fundamental interests that all
individuals are assumed to share, most notably an interest in securing their
equal status and their freedom in relation to others. Moreover, Hegel's the
ory of the modern form of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) can itself be interpreted
in such a way as to make it appear much closer to social contract theory
and to Rousseau's version of it in particular - than his own comments con
cerning this type of theory suggest. This is done by showing how Hegel's
theory of the modern fo rm of ethical life involves a co nception of the good
of individuals in the shape of their fundamental interests taken together
as a whole that determines what laws and institutions are to be viewed as
rational_ In what follows, I offer an acco unt of how Hegel's theo ry of civil
society in some important respects supports this kind of interpretation,
because of the way in which this sphere of the modern form of ethical life
is held to accommodate and to help realize that which Hegel himself calls
'subjective freedom'.
In praising Rousseau for making the will into the principle of the state,
Hegel already signals that his Philosophy ofRight in some sense represents
a continuation of the approach adopted by such social contract theorists
as Rousseau and Fichte. As we shall see, by making the will into the prin
ciple of the state, Hegel is led to incorporate the type of individualistic
standpoint which he associates with contract theories of the state into
his account of the modern form of ethical life. He sho uld not, there
fore, be seen as claiming that this type of theory is completely wrong.
In Hegel's view, the individualistic standpoint which he associates with
contract theories of the state nevertheless cannot explain the nature of a
genuine general will. In order to understand why Hegel thinks this, and
how he himself reformulates the idea of the general will, we first need to
look at what he means by 'the will's rationality in and fo r itself', for it is in
terms of this conception of the will that he thinks Rousseau should have
regarded the universal (or general) will, instead of treating it as a 'common
element'.
In the same section of the Philosophy ofRight in which Hegel both praises
and criticizes Rousseau, we encounter the following statement:
1 C Neuhouser, Foundations ofHegel's Social Theory, 175fT.
145
146
147
Hegel does not consider the type of negative freedom described above
on its own to constitute true freedom, even if it represents the possibility
of the act of free choice on which all acts of freedom depend. It is instead
only 'the will's abstract certainty of its freedom', because the will 'do es
not yet have itself as its content and end, so that the subjective side is
still something other than the objective' (PR 15A) . Thus although this
negative freedom is a condition of all other forms of freedom, the problem
remains that the self is confronted with a given content (for example,
its immediate desires, drives and inclinations or some external authority)
which it cannot, as it stands, recognize as a product of its own free will. It
can only begin to recognize this content as truly its own by resolving on
one determinate end in opposition to other possible ends. This represents
the second moment of the will, which Hegel describes as 'the absolute
moment of the finitude or particularization of the "I'" (PR 6) . Since the
first and second moments of the will are equally essential with respect to
what it means to will freely, Hegel identifies the concept of the will with
the unity of these two moments. In this unity the will remains with itself
(bei sich) in the particular content that it wills in the sense of remaining
essentially independent of this particular content, because it retains the
capacity to conceive of itself in abstraction from any such content and to
adopt one particular end rather than another one (PR 7).
The ends that form the determinate content of the will can be either
subjective in kind, in the shape of the representation of an end which the
agent makes its own, or objective in kind, in the shape of an end which has
also been realized in the external wo rld (PR 9). In so far as the content
of the will (that is, its end) remains a representation, it is merely formal
and, as such, is confronted with an external world which is itself something
merely given (PR 8). Thus there are various levels at which the form
content distinction operates. This distinction first presents itself as the
opposition between the will in its abstraction from any given content and
the particular content of the will. Next it presents itself as the opposition
between the content of the will as something merely formal, in the sense
of being purely subjective, and this content as actualized in the external
world, enabling the subjective will to experience the objectification of its
own free agency. As we shall see, the notion that the will objectifies itself is
integral to Hegel's theory of right.
We are now in a better position to understand one of the main ways in
which Hegel attempts to reformulate Rousseau's notion of the general will.
He does this by conceiving of the general will as the concept of the will
148
instantiated in each and every individual will, and by making the concept of
the will into the principle of his Philosophy ofRight. 2 In a student transcript
of Hegel's lectures on his Encyclopaedia ofthe Philosophical Sciences, Hegel
is recorded as explicitly acknowledging this move by claiming that the
universal (or general) will (der allgemeine Wille) is the concept of the will
(der Begriffdes Willens) (EL 163Z1). Significantly, this claim is made in
connection with Ro usseau's alleged failure to observe the distinction that
he himself draws between the will of all (Ia volonte de tous) and the general
will (Ia volonte genera/e) . For Rousseau, the general will pays attention only
to the common interest, while the will of all is no more than a sum total
of particular wills whose union is based on self-interest (OC m: 371; PW2:
6o). Thus the will of all amounts only to 'the common element arising
out of this individual will as a conscious will' that Hegel mentions when
criticizing contract theories of the state. Hegel is suggesting, then, that
Rousseau confuses the general will with the type of collective will which
is generated on the basis of certain interests that all particular individuals
are held to share and that in this respect represent a 'common element'.
These individuals may then reach an agreement concerning the best means
of securing these shared interests. This turns the basis of the state into a
contingent one in the sense that some individuals may come to renounce
the interests that they have in common with others or they may develop
different views concerning the best means of securing these interests.
Hegel's reformulation of Rousseau's idea of the general will turns on
identifying the general will with the essential conceptual structure of the
will, that is, with the will conceived in terms of those features which each
and every individual will must be thought to possess when it is considered
in abstraction from the particular, contingent content that distinguishes
the will of one person from that of another person . The general will in
this sense does not need to be produced by means of a contract or any
other aggregative act. This type of act can in any case generate only a
sum total of particular wills that have certain interests in common and
thus possess some basis for agreement, while securing these shared interests
will almost certainly require the subordination or renunciation of some
of the particular interests that these individuals happen to have. Such an
understanding of the general will provides one possible interpretation of
Rousseau's vague claim that the general will is what is left as the sum of
differences when 'one takes away the pluses and the minuses which cancel
>
149
each other' from the particular wills that, when viewed in aggregative terms,
consti tute the will of all (OC m : 3 7 1 ; PW2 : 6o) . For Hegel, this type of
universali ty is essentially different from the higher form of universality
at wh ich his speculative philosophy aims to arrive. Hegel himself alludes
to th is essential difference when he claims that a condition of general
well-being (allgemeine Wohl) would not yet constitute the state, because
we would have only a collection of individuals (ein KoUektivum) but not
universality (die Allgemeinheit) (VRP2: IV: 338) .
By re-conceptualizing the idea of the general will in the way that he
does, Hegel implies that, as in social contract theory, there is a conception
of the good of individuals that places constraints on how rational laws and
institutions may be organized. Since the will is held to be general in the
sense of being the basic conceptual structure which receives its instantiation
in each and every individual will, all free and rational agents must be
assumed to possess a will with the relevant structu re. The actualization of
the general will must, therefore, aim at the common interest understood
as the fundamental interest in securing the conditions of thei r free and
effective agency in the world which all individ uals can be thought to share.
This is one of the main ways in which Hegel can be said to adopt a position
very close to the one adopted by Rousseau, for whom rational laws and
institutions secure the necessary conditions of the freedom of individual
social members.3
The demand to overcome the merely formal character of the concept
of the will raises the question as to how this concept can be adequately
objectified while retaining the general character that it possesses in virtue
of the way in which it expresses the structure common to each and every
individual will. In other words, it is not simply a matter of explaining the
nature or essence of the general will; rather, an account of the existence of
such a will must also be provided. This issue bri ngs us back to the content
of the will. As it stands, the will is, for Hegel , 'free only in itselfor for us, or
it is in general the will in its concept' , whereas only 'when the will has itself
as its obj ect is it for itselfwhat it is in itself' (PR 10) . The concept of the
will must, in short, be obj ectified in some way, and th is objectification of
the concept of the will must realize the fundamental interest in securing
the conditions of their own free and effective agency in the world that all
individuals must be thought to share.
J Cf. Neuhauser, Foundations
Neuhauser's boo k .
150
For Hegel, the content of the will can be merely particular, as in the
case of immediate desires, drives and inclinations, or it can be more or less
universal. The idea of happiness represents a combination of particularity
and universality. On the one hand, it is a general representation which
requires the subordination of some desires, drives and inclinations to others,
thereby giving rise to a certain degree of systematic unity. On the other
hand, the idea of happiness differs from person to person with respect to its
determinate content, so that the universality in question is a merely formal
one, whose content may vary and in this respect remains indeterminate.
Hegel goes on to speak, however, of the will that 'has universality, or itself as
infinite form, as its content, object, and end, it is free not only in itselfb ut
also for itself' (PR 21) . From what has been said above, this can be taken
to mean that the concept of the will, which is wholly universal (or general)
in kind, becomes 'for itself' by being objectified in the sense that the
conditions of its own realization are present in the external world. In other
words, this will is general not only in terms of its form but also in terms
of its content, which here means the objectification of the will, because
this content aims at the general good of all by securing the conditions of
free agency in the world. The status of right as the objectification of the
concept of the will leads Hegel to describe it as 'any existence in general
which is the existence of the free will' (PR 29) .
Thus despite the way i n which Hegel re-conceptualizes the idea o f the
general will, his theory of right involves some typically Rousseauian themes,
especially a concern with equality and freedom. The notion of equality is
implied by the idea that the will which achieves existence in the form
of right is general in the sense of being instantiated in each and every
individual will . In order to constitute the genuine existence of the free will,
right itself must be sufficiently general in the sense of not favouring the
interests of particular individuals or groups of individuals at the expense
of the interests of other individuals or groups within society; altho ugh,
as we shall see, this concern does not prevent Hegel from allowing the
conditions of free agency in the world to generate material inequality. The
notion of equality with which he operates is in this respect much thinner
than the one with which Rousseau operates. As regards freedom, Hegel's
conception of right as the objectification of the general will, understood
as the concept of the will instantiated in each and every individual will,
implies the 'positive' model of freedom which is taken to involve some
form of self-determination thro ugh which an individual realizes him- or
herself, as opposed to the 'negative' freedom which consists in freedom
from external interference, especially of a coercive, intentional kind.
151
152
of human conscio usness and willing in the sense that individuals have an
interest in establishing or maintaining it thro ugh their actions. At the same
time, this world confronts individuals as something given and it must,
therefore, be regarded as the product of a historical pro cess.
Given the way in which the laws and institutions of the modern form
of ethical life represent conditions of free agency, individuals are able to
identify themselves with these objective conditions of their own freedom
in such a way that the practical constraints that these laws and institutions
generate need not be experienced as purely external, arbitrary constraints.
In this respect, practical necessity is held to be compatible with the self
determining nature of the will, even tho ugh the notion of constraint appears
to conflict with the idea of freedom when the latter is understood in purely
negative terms. Hegel himself describes this compatibility in connection
with the ethical obligations to which the institutions of the modern form
of ethical life give rise as follows:
A binding duty can appear as a limitation only in relation to indeterminate
subjectivity or abstract freedom, and to the drives of the natural will or
of the moral will which arbitrarily [aus seiner Wz'llkur] determines its own
indeterminate good. The individual, however, finds his liberation [Btfreiung]
in duty. (PR 149)
153
154
that I would like to highlight with respect to this type of claim since they
will figure later in this chapter.
To begin with, in seeking to assimilate subjective freedom, which relates
to the interests of individuals as such, to the positive model of freedom
in his account of civil society, Hegel treats the latter as the sphere of the
modern form of ethical life in which moral freedom is to some extent
realized at the same time as the interests of individuals as such remain the
ultimate end for which they are united. In this respect, he seems to want
to incorporate an integral feature of social contract theory into his acco unt
of a distinctively modern form of ethical life, while also seeking to explain
how the practical constraints encountered by individuals in civil society
need not be experienced as purely external constraints on their arbitrary
wills. At the same time, Hegel views civil society as a sphere of mutual
dependence and influence in which human beings are educated towards
a more universalistic standpoint by means of the practical constraints to
which they are subject, tho ugh without their necessarily being conscious
of this fact. To this extent, he shares with Kant the view that the pursuit
of self-interest in society is ultimately beneficial as long as it is subject to
certain legal and institutional constraints, because it helps to generate a
more universal form of consciousness and will.
In his theory of civil society, Hegel draws particular attention to the
economic and social forms of necessity that determine human thought and
actio n even in the case of the modern subject, with its heightened con
sciousness of itself as free. Necessity is here taken to perform an educative
function which consists in the develo pment of a universal consciousness
and will. The fo rmative process which individuals undergo in civil society
represents one example of why one might be tempted to claim that Hegel
offers a defence of civil society as against Rousseau's 'anti-commercial'
critique of it, by showing how in helping to educate the individual to uni
versality, civil society is not merely a place of selfish individualism opposed
to the universality of the state.5 Rather, civil society has an essential role
a will that autonomy consists. As I suggested in the last chapter, there may indeed be a problem with
respect to the idea of moral freedom when individuals are subjected to constraints with which they
themselves do not identify, and that this may even be the case when the constraints in question can
be justified from a normative standpoint. This raises the question of how individuals may come to
have a general will when they cannot simply be assumed to have such a will. As we shall see, Hegel
seeks to address this issue by means of an institutional account of how a more universal form of
consciousness and will can be generated in a condition in which individuals are in itially motivated
by self-interest and how, more generally, individuals need not experience the constraints to which
they are subject as purely external ones.
5 Cf. Franco, Hegel's Philosophy ofFreedom, 254
155
156
Hegel stresses the historical nature of subjective freedom, that is, its emer
gence within a distinct form of ethical life. Broadly speaking, ethical life
is the totality of cultural, legal, social, political and religious relations that
define a particular shared form of life. Hegel lists 'love, the romantic,
the eternal salvation of the individual as an end . . . morality [Moralitat]
and co nscience' as specific shapes that the right of subjective freedom has
assumed in the course of history (PR 124A). As these examples show,
subjective freedom is both the product and a defining feature of the form
of ethical life that emerged in Western Europe on fo undations provided by
the Christian religion. Hegel identifies the principle of subjective freedom
with the 'principle of the self-sufficient and inherently infinite personality of
the individual', and he claims that this principle arose in an 'inward' form
in the Christian religion and in an 'external' form in the Roman world (PR
18 5A) .
The principle of subjective freedom arose in an external form in the
Roman Empire because the personality of the individual achieved recog
nition in the equal legal status accorded to each person to whom the status
of Roman citizen was granted. This recognition came at the price of the
atomization and privatization of so ciety, because the universal (that is, state
power as embodied in the person of the emperor) became detached from
the society of property-owning Roman citizens with their equal legal sta
tus and formal rights (PR 357). Here we encounter the emergence of a
universal that appears in the shape of an external, if necessary, constraint
on human agency. The principle of subjective freedom arose in an inward
form in the Christian religion in the sense that the sanctity of the indi
vidual's own inner world achieved recognition. The external and internal
forms that the principle of subjective freedom has assumed invite the ques
tion as to whether the universal which has achieved an objective form can
be united with the inwardness characteristic of the Christian religion, so
as to remove the alien, merely external appearance that legal and institu
tional constraints on human agency have come to assume. In other words,
how can moral freedom, broadly construed, be made compatible with the
Subjective .freedom
157
158
Subjective .freedom
159
merely subjective. Rather, one of the main aims of his Philosophy ofRight
is to bring subjective freedom into an appropriate relation to that which
possesses objective ethical validity. This is evident from Hegel's following
descriptio n of that which the rational insight provided by philosophy is
able to achieve:
[T] his rational insight [Einsicht] is the reconciliation with actuality which
philosophy grants to those who have received the inner call to comprehend,
to preserve their subjective freedom in the realm of the substantial, and at
the same time to stand with their subjective freedom not in a particular and
contingent situation, but in what has being in and for itself. (PR Preface,
27[22])
6 The central role played b y an 'insight grounded on reasons' i n Hegel's Philosophy of Right that I
highlight supports the claim that Hegel is describing a hierarchy of increasingly reflective stages. Cf.
Siep, 'The "Aufhebung" of Morality in Ethical Life'. See also Neuhauser, Foundations ofHegel's Social
Theory, 112f. and Wood, Hegel's Ethical Thought, 217f. This type of interpretation has been criticized
on the grounds that it exaggerates the role of subjective reflection in ethical life and underestimates the
degree to which 'Hegel identifies the ethical with an unreflective attitude'. Franco, Hegel's Philosophy
ofFreedom, 226f. Yet the idea of an insight grounded on reasons fully accords with Hegel's account
of subjective freedom and with his views on the reflective nature of the modern subject, together
with the greater demands to which this notion of the subject gives rise in relation to the question of
what counts as an adequate justification of a law, practice or institution. This does not mean that
all individuals do, let alone must, adopt a reflective attitude towards the laws and institutions of
the modern form of ethical life. Indeed, one of the virtues of Hegel's position is that it recognizes
the possibility of various ethical attitudes. Hegel nevertheless appears committed to the idea that
it is better, in the sense of more commensurate with their free and rational nature, if individuals
possess some form of rational insight into the modern form of ethical life. After all, he is recorded
as claiming that in the modern world whatever achieves recogn ition 'no longer achieves it by force,
and only to a small extent through habit and custom, but mainly through insight and reasons [durch
Einsicht und G..Unde]' (PR 316Z; translation modified) .
Subjective .freedom
fully achieved in this sphere of the modern form of ethical life. This is
because at the level of civil society the universal as such does not form the
direct object of the subjective will, as is demanded by the higher ethical
standpoint represented by the idea of the 'true' conscience, which is 'the
disposition [ Gesinnung] to will what is go od in and for itself' (PR 137) .
Rather, the state is conceived a s a n 'external' one in the sense that the
relation of the subjective will to the universal will embodied in the state
appears merely as the means by which an individual is able to satisfy his
or her needs (VRP2: IV: 416) . The universal will threatens, moreover, to
assume the appearance of an external, if necessary, constraint on human
agency, as Hegel thinks it ultimately does in social contract theory. The
type of rational insight described above nevertheless enables individuals
to identify themselves with these constraints to the extent that they can
be considered to be conditions of these individuals' own agency, so that
even at the level of civil society the externality of these constraints is
in large part already overcome. The form of reasoning associated with
this external conceptio n of the state co unts as a form of insight into
the rationality of modern ethical life because rather than resting on an
unthinking acceptance of one's social world, it presupposes that individuals
have reached the stage of having developed a clear understanding of certain
demands that need to be met if their social world is to co unt as a good one,
including the demands associated with the principle of subjective freedom.
By comprehending how the modern state meets these demands in their own
particular cases, individuals become able to identify themselves with the
laws, social practices and institutions of modern ethical life, by regarding
them as conditions of their own freedom, leading to a strengthening of the
state itself. I take this to be the main idea behind the following claim that
Hegel makes:
The principle of modern states has enormous strength and depth because it
allows the principle of subjectivity to attain fulfilment in the self-sufficient
extreme of personal particularity, while at the same time bringing it back to
substantial unity and so preserving this unity in the principle of subjectivity
itself. (PR 26o)
Note here that this way of working the positive model of freedom into his theory of right does not
imply a wish on Hegel's part to accord the state the role of imposing a particular vision of the good
on people. Rather, by means of its laws and institutions, the state provides the conditions that allow
individuals to pursue their own conceptions of the good, as long as they do not thereby violate the
right of other individuals to do the same. I n this respect, it is misleading of Isaiah Berlin to claim
that all political theories of self-realization equate what x would choose if he were something he is
not, or least is not yet, with what x actually seeks and chooses. Cf. Berlin, Two Concepts ofLiberty,
18. Unless, that is, we deny that individuals seek and choose to pursue their own conceptions of the
good and that they would, therefore, also seek and choose the conditions of being able to pursue
these conceptions of the good.
Hegel's theory of the modern form of ethical life has a tripartite structure,
beginning with a section on the family, followed by a section on civil
164
society and, finally, a section on the political state. The section on civil
society itself has a tripartite structure. It begins with the sphere of modern
ethical life which Hegel terms the 'system of needs'. This system concerns
the economic life of society, and it represents a co ndition of interdepen
dence characterized by a division of labour that 'makes the dependence and
reciprocity of human beings in the satisfaction of their . . . needs complete
and entirely necessary' (PR 198) . Given this division of labour, no indi
vidual can be entirely self-sufficient when it comes to the satisfaction of his
or her needs. Each individual's welfare therefore becomes bound up with
the welfare of others, with one individual helping to provide the means of
satisfying one particular need within society, while another person helps to
provide the means of satisfying a different need. Individual welfare becomes
so inextricably linked with the welfare of all that Hegel describes the system
of needs as a condition in which no one can promote his or her own welfare
witho ut at the same time promoting the welfare of others, with the result
that in
this dependence and reciprocity of work and the satisfaction of needs,
This passage indicates that the system of needs is the sphere of the
modern form of ethical life in which the ideas of individual welfare and the
welfare of all, which at the level of morality remain mere abstractions, begin
to find their realization, making civil society integral to Hegel's acco unt
of subjective freedom in so far as it demands being able to experience the
satisfaction of one's particularity in the form of welfare. The demand for
rational insight is also met in civil society to the extent that the satisfaction
of one's particularity in the form of welfare provides the contented member
of civil society or, to use Hegel's terminology, the bourgeois, 8 with some good
reasons for accepting his place within society and for acting in conformity
with its norms.
Despite the importance of civil society for his account of subjective
freedom, Hegel appeals on several occasions to the idea of necessity, as when
he refers to the system of needs itself and to civil society more generally as
8
Hegel associates the citizen (Burger) as bourgeois with civil society in particular (PR 190A) . He
describes the bourgeois as a private person (VRPI: 150), that is, someone who is concerned with the
satisfaction of his needs and, unlike the citoyen, lacks a political relation to the state (VRP2: IV: 472) .
166
of non-human animals are limited and fixed in scope, as are the means of
satisfying them, because they are a matter of instinct alone. Human beings
are, moreover, able to particularize their needs through a process of what
Hegel himself calls 'refinement' (die Verfeinerung) (PR 191). For example,
human beings may share a basic need for clothing. This basic need can
then be particularized in the sense that a person believes that he or she
needs a particular set of clothes for working in, a particular set of clothes
to wear on his or her day off, and a particular set of clothes in which
to attend dinner parties. This particularization of need based on opinion
may itself be explained in social terms, since the set of beliefs on which
it rests are determined both by general opinions concerning what is the
appropriate thing to do in certain particular circumstances and by fear of
failing to act in ways that accord with these opinions. Hegel himself uses
fashion as an example no t only of such social pressures but also of how even
attempts to distinguish oneself from others may have social conformity as
their unintended o utcome: 'One imitates others, and this is the origin of
fashion. One wants to have what others have, but once one has achieved
this, one is then not satisfied; one wants to have something special. Then
others copy this and thus it goes on endlessly' (VRP2: IV: 491) .
Despite this social form of necessity, Hegel thinks that the way in
which the generation and the particularization of needs, together with
the means of satisfying them, depend on opinion represents a type ofliber
ation because human beings are thereby able to transcend the natural form
of dependence that they have in common with other animals and thus
demonstrate their 'universality' (PR 190, including Z) . This universality
consists in being able to conceive of oneself in abstraction from any purely
natural, merely given features, that is, as a person. The liberation mentioned
in the passage quoted earlier is, therefore, to be understood as liberation
from the immediacy of nature and from the instinctive behaviour which
characterizes it. It is liberation from a necessity that is 'external' because
such purely instinctive behavio ur does not, for Hegel, conform to the
human being's essentially free and rational nature. Yet this is not the only
way in which opinion takes on a universal aspect in civil society.
The other universal aspect concerns the social recognition on which
opinions regarding one's needs and the means of satisfying them ultimately
depend. Particular needs and the means of satisfying them take on a social
dimension also because an individual, through being dependent on others
for the satisfaction of his or her needs, must take into consideration both
the needs and the opinions of others (PR 192Z) . An example of this
phenomenon would be when an individual is constrained to produce
go ods for which there is sufficient demand, while this demand itself will
!68
first principle of civil society, universality is its second one (PR 182) /0
Civil society must in this respect be held to play an essential part in Hegel's
account of human perfectibility.
Hegel's recognition of this educative function within a condition of
interdependence amounts to a rejection of Rousseau's apparent preference
for the natural freedom enjoyed by primitive man in the earliest stages of
the state of nature when compared to the unequal relations of dependence
and the potential for domination that exist in a spontaneo usly generated
social order. Hegel even rejects the idea that natural independence itself
constitutes a form of freedom, on the grounds that it lacks the moment of
reflection essential to willing:
The notion that, in relation to his needs, man lived in freedom in a so-called
state of nature in which he had only so-called natural needs of a simple kind
and in which, to satis fy these, he employed only those means with which a
contingent nature immediately provided him - this notion . . . is mistaken.
For a condition in which natural needs as such were immediately satisfied
would merely be one in which spirituality was immersed in nature, and
hence a condition of savagery and unfreedom; whereas freedom consists
solely in the reflection of the spiritual into itself, i ts distinction from the
natural, and its reflection upon the latter. (PR 19 4A.) 11
10
11
The institution of the family also plays an important educative role in Hegel's theory of eth ical life.
C Neuhouser, Foundations ofHegel's Social Theory, 149ff.
This passage ties in with Hegel's rejection of the kind of natural goodness characteristic of primitive
man in the first stages of the state of nature. With respect to the issue of whether or not human
beings are by nature evil or by nature good, Hegel associates the latter statement with the claim
that 'the determinations of the immediate will' (that is, drives, desires, inclinations etc.) are good
as they stand, while the former statement is associated with the claim that, as merely natural, these
determinations are opposed to the idea of freedom and must, therefore, be eradicated (PR r8) .
Although Hegel views both of these statements as arbitrary ones when stated in this form, he
agrees with the idea that the human being's status as an essentially free being requires overcoming
the immediacy of nature. In this idea, he claims, lies the superiority of the Christian doctrine
that the human being is by nature evil when it is interpreted ph ilosophically (PR r8Z). Hence
Hegel's rejection of the idea associated with Rousseau that a condition in which human beings have
simple needs and can satisfY these needs easily by means of that which nature immediately provides
constitutes a condition of freedom. Rather, freedom demands leaving such a natural condition to
enter into a society that allows for the development of more complex, non-natural needs and the
means of satisfYing them, for it is only by means of the practical constraints which dependence on
others generates that individuals learn to restrain their immediate desires, drives and inclinations.
This process of learning to restrain one's immediate desires, drives and inclinations gives rise to a
reflective relation between the self and these desires, drives and inclinations and, or so Hegel claims,
evil presupposes such a relation because it involves conscious choice, specifically the conscious
choice to subordinate the universal to the 'arbitrariness' ( Willkiir) of one's own 'particularity' and to
seek to realize the latter through one's actions in opposition to the universal (PR 139). Rousseau's
primitive man in the earliest stages of the state of nature is, therefore, not good in any positive sense,
for he simply lacks the capacity to recognize the good and thus to act in conscious opposition to it.
Given the practical constraints that are spontaneo usly generated in civil
society, it might be asked whether an individual could experience an essen
tially illusory sense of absence of constraint, because the social form of
necessity to which he or she is subject simply remains concealed from him
or her? After all, Hegel's acco unt of the educative function which civil
society performs largely rests on the idea that individuals are not conscious
of the constraints to which they are objectively subject. If it is possible to
conceive of such a case, we would have a subjective freedom that is merely
subjective in kind.
Hegel alludes to a freedom that is subjective in this sense when he
speaks of individuals who think of themselves as living in a state only as
a matter of necessity (als Sache der Noth) , so that the universal appears as
170
171
172
In a remark added to the first section of his acco unt of civil so ciety,
the section concerning the system of needs, Hegel credits the recently
developed science of political economy (Staatsokonomie) with explaining
the relations that govern civil society in so far as the latter constitutes 'the
sphere of needs'.12 Once again the notion of necessity presents itself, for
what Hegel admires in the theories developed by this science are their ability
'to explain mass relationships and mass movements in their qualitative and
quantitative determinacy and complexity', by extracting principles from
the endless multitude of details with which the observer of the economic
life of society is initially confronted (PR 189A) . In other words, political
economy discovers the general laws to which all economic activity is subject,
thereby comprehending this activity itself as something more than a mass of
contingent details. The necessity in question involves certain phenomena,
which here means relations of productio n and exchange, being determined
by fixed laws, and it generates a practical necessity in so far as these laws
constrain human agency. However, to avoid practical necessity collapsing
into causal necessity, as Hegel surely needs to do if his theory of right is
genuinely to be based on the assumption that the will is free, these laws
cannot completely determine this agency. In short, Hegel needs to explain
the compatibility of freedom and necessity.
As we have already seen, the practical forms of necessity described in
Hegel's account of civil society are held to be compatible with the idea of
freedom because they derive from certain objective conditions of freedom
itself. Independently of this claim, these practical forms of necessity can
be regarded as being, in principle, compatible with the idea of freedom
because we can, at the very least, imagine individuals choosing to engage
11
For an account of the importance of Hegel's reading of political economy for his development, see
Charnley, Economie politique et philosophic chez Steuert et Hegel, Charnley, 'Les origins de Ia pensee
econornique de Hegel', Riedel, Between Tradition and Revolution, 107ff., and Waszek, The Scottish
Economic necessity
173
174
57f.
Economic necessity
175
176
Hegel has good reason for being wary of state intervention, for the way
in which civil society allows particularity free play constitutes an important
part of its function as the sphere of the modern form of ethical life that
accommodates the principle of subjective freedom understood as the right
to experience the satisfaction of one's particularity. Moreover, Hegel wants
to leave room for 'subjective particularity' to develo p in such a way as to
fulfil its creative po tential and to bring about certain other benefits, such as
'the development of intellectual activity, merit, and honour', which it can
only do, he claims, 'if it is supported by the objective order, conforming to
the latter and at the same time retaining its rights' (PR 206A) . In other
words, civil society's role of accommodating the principle of subjective
freedom represents one particular way in which the modern state consti
tutes a conditio n of human perfectibility. In the absence of state regulation,
which implies conscious human control over the economic forces at play
in society, all that appears to be left is the idea that economic laws can
be comprehended as exhibiting a 'rational' necessity, not only in virtue
of having the form of laws but also because experience shows that their
normal operation is beneficial because it tends to result in the welfare of the
majority of people and in human progress more generally. Although Hegel
appears to accept this view of the beneficial effects of a market economy, it
ultimately rests on what is little more than an assumption on his part.
Hegel's views on how freedom can be maintained in the face of economic
necessity, and is even promoted by this form of necessity, can be discerned
in his account of the corporation. The corporation is an institution made
up of people who perform the same trade or pursue the same occupation.
This is why Hegel describes it as characteristic of the estate of trade and
industry (PR 250) . It is also why he makes membership of a corporation
depend on the possession of a particular skill (PR 251) . It is, in fact,
the corporation which sets the standards that determine whether or not
an individual is skilled or able enough to practise a trade or occupation
in the first place, as well as providing the educational resources aimed at
producing new members (PR 252, 254). The corporation in this way
constitutes a source of official recognition, which is in turn an important
source of self-identity and self-respect, or honour, as Hegel himself calls it
(PR 253) . The corporation also seeks to pro tect its individual members'
particular and universal interests. Their universal interests are protected by
the way in which the corporation elects representatives to form part of the
legislature of the political state, in which these representatives seek to further
the common interest of the corporation (PR 3o8-3n). Their particular
interests are protected by the way in which the corporation guarantees its
177
Economic necessity
Smith, 7k
2.2. 3 f.
178
179
a form of necessity that does not at the same time allow for the sense of
absence of constraint which Hegel asso ciates with subjective freedom or
experiencing an unjustified sense of absence of constraint, which represents
a merely subjective form of freedom. The second problem concerns the
change of consciousness that is meant to characterize the transitio n from
civil so ciety to the political state. This change of consciousness consists
in the transformation of a universal co nsciousness that remains tied to
particularity into a universal conscio usness that has freed itself from any
particular interests, and is thereby able to make matters of general concern
and import into the direct object of its will. In each case Hegel fails to offer
a sufficient explanation of the compatibility of necessity and freedom. I
deal with the first problem in the next section and with the second problem
in the last section of this chapter.
The limits of subjective freedom
Since the social bonds that unite the members of a corporation depend
on these members' shared interests and the common identity that these
interests generate, Hegel is led to exclude some members of civil society
from this institution, namely, the poor and the very rich . The fate of
unskilled workers is very uncertain indeed in the face of the economic laws
that determine the workings of the market economy, since Hegel assigns
to the corporation the function of supporting individuals when they are
unable to work, while making membership of a corporation depend on the
possession of a skill or the pursuit of a trade. The group of people that fall
under the heading of 'the poor' can, therefore, be taken to include both the
unemployed and unskilled workers. The example of increased unemploy
ment caused by the problem of overproduction is especially relevant to the
relation of freedom to necessity in civil society because Hegel cites the right
to choose the occupation or profession into which one enters as an impor
tant example of how the principle of subjective freedom makes its presence
felt in the modern world. Choice of occupation is in fact presented as one
of the main ways in which freedom is reco nciled with necessity in civil
society. This time necessity assumes the form of the practical constraints
generated by such natural factors as the talents with which one happens
to have been born and the given circumstances into which one happens to
have been born.
The impression of having chosen one's occupation is important because
it means that what happens 'through inner necessity is at the same time
mediated by the arbitrary will, and for the subjective consciousness, it has
180
the shape of being the product of its own will' (PR 206). In other words,
the sense of having chosen one's occupation serves to offset the various
factors that, in reality, constrain one's freedom of choice in such matters.
In times of economic crisis caused by overproduction, many people's choice
of occupation will be especially limited. '5 We may assume, then, that in the
face of the constraints imposed on them by their situation, such people will
have only a weak sense of being subjectively free understoo d as experiencing
a sense of absence of constraint. These people will instead experience a
strong sense of being subject to necessity, a necessity which has its basis
in objective conditions. Yet even in better economic times, Hegel suggests
that necessity will be at work when he acknowledges how both natural and
non-natural conditions determine the limits of freedom of choice.
In another example of his preference for a spontaneously generated
order as opposed to an order that has been externally imposed on the
forces governing society, Hegel acknowledges that the possibility of shar
ing in the general resources of society depends on such factors as skill
and on the natural differences that characterize mental and physical apti
tudes. He even views the possession of a skill as being conditioned by
the basic assets in the form of capital that one has at one's disposal (PR
2oo). One possible explanation of what Hegel means by this claim is pro
vided by the example of how access to certain educational reso urces may
depend on the ability to pay. This type of situation allows us to conceive
of a situation in which there are two individuals who are roughly equal
with respect to their naturally given mental and physical aptitudes. Yet
one of these individuals happens to have parents who are wealthy enough
to pay for a certain type of education while the other individual's par
ents simply lack the financial reso urces needed to pay for the same type
of education. Here unequal outcomes can be thought to be determined
by conventional (that is, non-natural) factors. In the present case, the
'5
One important aspect of Hegel's account of the freedom that individuals enjoy as members of the
modern form of ethical life is said to be that they realize their own identities through the social roles
that they perform, in the sense that occupying these social roles is a substantial source of their own
sense of self as based on the recognition accorded to them by others when they perform these roles
well. These individuals' social roles are, in short, constitutive of what they conceive themselves to
be, while this sense of self is not something that individuals could have independently of their social
participation. Cf. Neuhouser. Foundations ofHegel's Social Theory, 1o8ff. Given the importance of
social roles that are connected with work in Hegel's Philosophy ofRight and the fact that these social
roles may not be freely chosen but are instead adopted as a matter of necessity, it may be asked how
individuals remain subjectively free when these social roles are, so to speak, forced upon them? In
such cases, it seems possible to think of individuals as having some good reasons for not allowing
their sense of self to be constituted through social roles with which they cannot truly identifY
themselves.
182
184
within this state, even though it is precisely the availability of such insight
that defines Hegel's attempt to demonstrate the compatibility of freedom
and necessity in his theory of civil society.
While the case of the members of the class of people described above
implies an absence of subjective freedom, I now turn to a less clear-cut
case in which subjective freedom is certainly present but in such a way
that it might be considered to be excessive. This is because the economic
necessity which underlies civil so ciety has become concealed as a result of
the powerful position that an individual enjoys, leading the individual in
question to experience a disproportionate sense of absence of constraint in
the face of such necessity. This case is to be fo und at the opposite end of the
spectrum to that of the class of people described above. It is that of the rich
man, the capitalist, who, according to Hegel, comes to regard everything
as something that can be bought, because he 'knows himself as the power
of the particularity of self-consciousness' (VRP1: 196). Hegel is referring to
the way in which the rich man, in virtue of his wealth and the power that it
brings him, comes to think of himself as free of the constraints imposed on
others by the condition of interdependence that characterizes civil so ciety.
Instead his wealth appears to allow him to do anything that he wants to
do and to dominate others, who are compelled to act in accordance with
his ends and interests. Given the independence that he enjoys in virtue
of his wealth and his power over others, the rich individual also does not
need to become the member of a corporatio n. He is, therefore, free of the
constraints that membership of this form of association would impose on
his actions. When these claims are viewed in conj unction with what Hegel
says about the class that suffers dependence and want, he appears to be
implying that the extent to which one experiences an absence of constraint
in modern so ciety will largely depend on the amount of economic power
that one enjoys.
Yet is the rich capitalist really as free of the practical constraints generated
by the condition of interdependence that characterizes civil society as
he senses himself to be, when the wealth and power that he enjoys are
themselves the results of the workings of the economic laws governing
the market relations that develop on the basis of such a condition of
interdependence? On the one hand, the power enjoyed by the capitalist
is certainly something real and it may, therefore, adequately explain his
sense of absence of constraint. On the other hand, it is possible to think
of him as someone from whom the necessity that underlies civil society
nevertheless remains concealed. After all, altho ugh he is the beneficiary
of the economic system that operates in civil society, he can only act in
accordance with this system's laws or, at most, seek to make sure that they
Although the concept of contingency, which involves the idea of that which could be otherwise
than it is, represents the opposite of the concept of necessity, these concepts are essentially related in
Hegel's dialectical thought. For a discussion of their relation to each other in Hegel's speculative logic,
see Taylor, Hegel, 262ff. and 282fT. The relation of necessity to contingency in Hegel's philosophy
more generally is discussed in Henrich, 'Hegels Theorie iiber den Zufall'.
186
The relation between civil society and the political state in Hegel's Phi
losophy of Right can be characterized in such a way as to suggest that the
state imposes order on the forces that determine society, as when the aim
of Hegel's mature political philosophy is said to be to demonstrate the
necessity of a universal (that is, the state) that has power over the merely
particular and prevents civil society from being destroyed by its own princi
ple, which is the principle of particularity.'9 It is even said that civil society
in this way generates an autho ritarian political system.20 The last claim
is almost certainly too strong because it fails to acknowledge the extent
to which the members of civil society are able to conceive of the general
interest which the state pro tects and realizes as something that is not alien
to their own wills, because it includes the fundamental interests that they
share with others. Individuals are, moreover, educated to a more universal
standpoint by means of the practical constraints to which they are subject
in civil society, even if the universal as such, in the shape of the common
interest, does not form the direct object of their activity. As we have seen,
the universal conscio usness and will that develop in this way find their
highest institutional embodiment in the corporation.
18
Hegel's hostility to the ideas of popular sovereignty and democratic self-rule is clearly connected
with his views on the need for mediating institutions, such as the corporation, that even at the level
of civil sociery generate a uniry which ought not to be dissolved at the level of the political state,
since, if it were, political life would be left 'hanging . . . in the air' with 'the abstract individualiry
of arbitrary will [ Willkur) and opinion' as its basis, so that it is 'grounded only on contingency
rather than on a foundation which is stable and legitimate in and for itself'. Political life would
then correspond ro the following notion of 'the people': ' The many as single individuals' who 'do
indeed live together, but only as a crowd, i.e. a formless mass whose movement and acriviry can
consequently only be elemental, irrational, barbarous, and terrifying' (PR 3o3A) . These statements
imply a strong connection in Hegel's mind between Rousseau's contractualism and his commitment
to rhe idea of popular sovereignry as exercised democratically in a legislative assembly.
1 9 Cf. Horstmann, 'The Role of Civil Society in Hegel's Pol itical Philosophy'.
1 Cf. .Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, 174 and 2.02..
!88
On the other hand, as the last clause of this passage already implies, the
universal that forms the object and end of the corporation is a 'limited and
finite' one (PR 256) .
There is not, then, a seamless transition from civil society to the political
state that is explicable in terms of the transformation of self-interest into a
conscious concern fo r, and identification with, the good of the ethical and
political community of which one is a member. Admittedly, Hegel claims
that the end of the corporation 'has its truth in the end which is universal
in and for itself and in the absolute actuality of this end . . . The sphere of
civil society thus passes over [geht . . . uber] into the state' (PR 256) , and
that although the state is 'an external necessity' in relation to civil so ciety,
it is also the latter's 'immanent end' (PR 261) . Such claims suggest that
Hegel wants to argue that a change in conscio usness with respect to the
Yet it is far from clear how the transition from civil society to the
political state can be explained purely in terms of a change in the type
of universal form of consciousness and will that individuals possess. This
is especially the case when the change in question is understood to occur
partly spontaneously, as suggested by the idea that the family and civil
society pass over of 'their own accord ' into the universal interest which
is the concern of the state, and partly as the result of knowledge and
will. For however consciously the spontaneously generated general interest
which the corporation embodies is subsequently willed by its members,
the consciousness and will of its members can still be regarded as particular
ones from the standpoint of the un iversal consciousness and will that
Hegel wants to claim manifest themselves at the level of the political state.
This problem relates to the worry expressed by Ro usseau in the Social
Contract concerning factionalism, which can be generalized to incl ude any
corporate will, namely, that although a corporate will may be general in
relation to the particular wills of its individual members, it nevertheless
remains particular in relation to the general will of the state (OC m: 371;
PW2: 6o) . As Rousseau points out in connection with the government
to which the sovereign people delegates executive power, this is because a
corporate will can be viewed as a self that, like any other individual, aims
to employ its forces to preserve itself, inviting the question as to how it can
be subordi nated with in the political whole in such a way as to ensure that
it employs its forces for the benefit of th is whole (OC m : 399; PW2: 86) .
Hegel could argue that the members of the corporation cannot help
but recognize that employing their forces for the benefit of the whole
represented by the state is to employ these forces for the benefit of the
corporation to which they belong. Yet this move simply assumes an iden
tity of interest between the various corporations and the political state,
together with a consciousness of this identity of interest on the part of the
190
191
To this extent, alienation may indeed result from the lack of any conscious
identification on the part of individuals with the general will of the political
state.
This tension in Hegel's Philosophy of Right reveals itself in his identi
fication of different estates with different moments of his theory of the
modern form of ethical life. While civil society is associated with the estate
of trade and industry, the political state is identified with the universal
estate (der allgemeine Stand) , which 'has the universal interests of society as
its business' (PR 205) . Hegel here appears to assume that the members of
civil society cannot be fully trusted to will the universal interests of society
as a whole as their object, whereas other individuals, namely the high
ranking state officials who belong to the universal estate, can be trusted to
do so. It is, therefore, only the members of this second group of people
who can be relied on to exhibit the 'political virtue' which Hegel describes
as 'the willing of that tho ught end which has being in and for itself' (PR
257A) .
This division helps to explain how the particular interests of civil society
only in part spontaneously pass over into the universal interest of the state
and must therefore in part also knowingly and willingly do so. In other
words, at the level of civil society a universal consciousness and will are
generated as the largely unintended o utcomes of the pursuit of self-interest.
Yet this universal consciousness and will remain particular in relation to the
universal consciousness and will of the political state. They must, therefore,
be subjected to the conscio us control exercised by the political state, which
'knows what it wills, and knows it in its universality as something thought'
(PR 270) .21 Hegel himself says as much in the statement that the confused
situation which arises in civil society when particularity remains unchecked
'can be restored to harmony only through the forcible intervention of the
state' (PR 185Z). While with respect to the corporation, he is recorded
as claiming that it 'must come under the higher supervision of the state,
for it would otherwise become ossified and set in its ways, and decline
into a miserable guild system' (PR 255Z) . The decline in question can be
identified with the formation and the assertion of a corporate will which
employs its forces to make sure that its interests are best served, even
" Since it is, more properly, a matter of individuals willing what they know to be universally valid ends
in the name of the state, the realization of the universal interest is made to depend on contingency,
in the sense that there is no guarantee that the members of the universal estate will in fact possess
political virtue and the other qualities that they need; for, as Hegel himself acknowledges, there is
no natural link between the functions performed at the level of the political state and particular
individuals (PR 2.77, 2.91).
192
when they conflict with the more general interests of society as a whole.22
The idea of imposing order on society is not, therefore, entirely absent in
Hegel's Philosophy ofRight, despite his reluctance to advocate state control
and regulation of the economy.
Hegel consequently appears unable to explain the necessity of the tran
sition from civil society to the state in a way that makes this transition
immanent to his Philosophy ofRight. 23 This failure has something in com
mon with Kant's failure to explain the transition from civil society to a
truly ethical form of community. Once again, the limitations of a form
of explanation which relies heavily on the spontaneous generation of cer
tain outcomes that were not consciously intended by the agents concerned
become apparent in connection with an ethically conceived teleology. The
gap that has opened up between civil society and the political state raises
the question of how the universal interest which is the object and end of
the political state can be imposed upon the spontaneously generated forces
governing society.24 In Chapter 1, I related this issue to the concepts of will
Hegel outlines some institutional arrangements whereby the interests of civil society might be given
proper consideration within the political state, so that it is not simply a matter of imposing order on
a potentially recalcitrant material. These arrangements concern the assembly of the Estates which
is divided into two ho uses and forms part of the state legislature (PR 312). One house is made up
of deputies elected by each corporation (PR 308-311), whereas the other house consists of the
landed nobility (PR 305-307). Hegel often seems, however, to downplay the significance of the
deliberations of the assembly of the Estates in relation to the executive power, as in the following
claim: ' [1]he highest officials within the state necessarily have a more profound and comprehensive
insight [Einsicht] into the nature of the state's institutions and needs, and are more familiar with
its functions and more skilled in dealing with them, so that they are able to do what is best even
without the Estates, just as they must continue to do what is best when the Estates are in session'
(PR 3oiA).
>J Hegel may think that this transition ultimately needs to be explained in terms of his speculative
logic. Indeed, in a remark to the section of the Philosophy ofRight in which he identifies the will with
the various moments of the logical concept (that is, the concepts of un iversality and particularity,
and their unity in the concept of individuality), he states that the 'ultimate source of all activity,
life, and consciousness . . . belongs to logic as purely speculative philosophy' (PR 7A) . Then in
his account of the pol itical state, he claims that the various powers of the state 'are determined
by the nature of the concepl (PR 269) and that the constitution of the state 'is rational in so far
as the state differentiates and determines its activity within itself in accordance with the nature of
the concept' (PR 272) . While such statements imply that the Philosophy ofRight can only be fully
understood with reference to Hegel's speculative logic, making the transition from civil society to
the political state into a logical one would be to treat the change of consciousness and will that is
meant to accompany this transition as a matter of logical necessity, rather than a matter of practical
necessity. The latter form of necessity is, however, surely of far more interest and relevance to social
and political philosophy.
14 It is not only at the level of civil society that Hegel suggests the need for some form of constraint
aimed at making sure that the universal is not sacrificed to particular interests. On the one hand, he
wants to suggest that the state official finds satisfaction in the performance of his duties alone, with
his relationship to his work being 'the main interest of his spiritual and particular existence' (PR
29) . Yet the state official still has ordinary human needs. In relation to this point, Hegel claims
that the state must provide the state official with the resources needed to guarantee 'the satisfaction of
193
CHAPTER FIVE
The fifth and final lecture of Fich te's series of lectures known collectively as
Some Lectures concerning the Scholar's Vocation is entitled 'An Examination
of Ro usseau's Claims concerning the Infl uence on Human Welfare of the
Arts and Sciences'. This title suggests that Fichte's criticisms of Rousseau
are directed against the view associated with the Discourse on the Sciences
and Arts or First Discourse in particular that the advance of the arts and the
sciences has resulted in the corruption of the h uman race, as exemplified by
Rousseau's statement that 'our souls have become corrupted in proportion
as our Sciences and our Arts have advanced toward perfection' (OC m : 9 ;
PW1 : 9 ) . Fichte's hostility to such a view of the arts and the sciences comes
as no surprise given the lofty conception of the scholar's vocation which he
articulates in the same series of lectures, and which he s ummarizes in the
fifth lecture itsel f as follows:
I have said that man's vocation [die Bestimmung der Menschheit) consists in
the constan t advancemen t o f culture and i n the equal and continuous devel
opmen t of all of m an's talen ts and needs. I have assigned a very honorable
place within human sociery to the class which is to supervise the progress
and u n i formity of this developmen t. (GA I/3 : 6o; EPW: 1 77f.)
195
A s Fichte p u ts i t : 'He tho ught that if he lived in t he state of nature he would not have al l of these
needs and would thus be spared the many pains caused by lening them go unsatisfied as well as the
many even more biner pains caused by satisfying them dishonourably, and he would then rema in at
peace with hinulf (GA l/3: 64; EPW: t 8 t ) .The idea that Rousseau advocated a return to the s tate of
nature is suggested i n the Fint Discoun by such passages as the following one: 'One cannot reflect
on morals, w i thout taking delight i n recalling the image of the simp licity o f t he fi rst ti mes. I t i s a fai r
shore, adorned by the hands of nature alone, toward which one forever t u rns one's eyes, and from
which one feels oneself moving away with regret ' (OC 1 1 1 : 11; PWt: 20). It has never theless been
denied that Rousseau advocated some fo rm of primitivism, that is to say, the idea that the cond i tion
of primitive man in the state of nature represents an ideal to which human bei ngs would do well to
return. Objec tions to amibu ting such an idea to Ro usseau include the claim that it ignores the fact
that he u nderstands the state of nat u re to consist of distinct stages, and that i t is only with respect
to a much later, more culturally advanced, though still pre- poli tical , stage that he express es regret at
the fact t hat hu man kind had not remai ned i n this state. Cf. Lovejoy, 'The Supposed Pri mit ivism of
Rousse a u's Discouru 011 bzrqualiry' . Other objections i nclude the following ones: (t) Rousseau thinks
that the solution to the present evils affl i cting h u manki nd lies in the fu ture not in the past, namely,
in the condi tions outli ned in such later works as the Social Con"act and Emik; (2) the notion of the
state of nature i s in any case a mental const ruct, not a fact, so that it is misleading 10 think of it in
terms of a past to which human beings could ever re turn; and (3) even if the state of nature had once
existed, there i s no possibi l i ty of returning to i t once the t ransition has bee n made to the social state
Fichte speaks of Rousseau's 'unnoticed fau lty i n ference', which implies that an error of reasoning is
to blame, when he accuses him of the following inconsistency. Roussea u desires the peace that the
state of nature promises to bri ng because it would enable h i m 'to reflect on his vocation and his
duties' and 'thereby to improve himself and h i s fellowmen '. Yet the possibil ity of such reflection and
the notions o f d u ty and human perfectibility are themselves the prod ucts of an education which
can only be undertaken by leaving the state of nature. The correct conclusion to have drawn would
therefore have been that human beings should seek to transcend the present state of thi ngs by means
of culture, which con sists i n transforming nature, both nature in onesel f (for example, one's natural
needs) and nature more generally, i n to something that bears the character of the product o f free and
rational bei ngs (GA 1!3= 64f.; EPW: 1 8 2 f. ) .
197
he has in mind acting upon nature, including our own animal nature,
by transforming it in accordance with principles of reason, which must
themselves be progressively developed and strengthened within human
beings, making them into truly autonomous beings.3
From what has been said above, Fichte's critique of Rousseau is clearly
based on a particular view of the self and on the idea that human per
fectibility is possible in a condition of human interdependence. The theme
of human perfectibility in society can already be detected in the way in
which Fichte attributes to Ro usseau the alleged contradiction of appeal
ing to an ideal past in the shape of the state of nature while proclaiming
the advance to an enlightened future based on the perfectibility of the
human race. Fichte seeks to resolve this contradiction by demonstrating
that nature and history, understood as the process whereby the human race
achieves perfection, are compatible.4 The state of nature is here conceived
as a golden age that lies in the future, that is, in a future in which nature has
been transformed by means of human art and reason. This transformation
includes turning nature into a place of 'free leisure and a social life without
cares'. 5 As we shall see, in speaking of 'free leisure' this particular in terpre
tation of Fichte's critique of Rousseau points beyond Fichte's early lectures
on the scholar's vocation to his later attempt to establish the conditions of
moral freedom within a law-governed condition, in which human beings
are dependent both on each o ther and on the state with respect to their
material needs. I show that Fichte, like Rousseau, nevertheless came to
exhibit a growing scepticism concerning the capacity of human laws and
institutions by themselves to result in true freedom and to lead to genuine
human fulfilment. This scepticism leads both Rousseau and Fichte to offer
their own unique accounts of an inviolable sphere of human existence
which is free of the practical, freedom-endangering constraints that living
in society with others generates.
At the same time there are some major differences between Rousseau's
attempt to explain the possibility of such a sphere of human existence and
Fichte's attempt to do something similar. In order to understand what these
' A similar activist view of the self is suggested by Hegel's claim that an . . . has his actual substantial
life in the state, in learning, etc., and otherwise in work and struggle with the external world and with
h imself, so that it is only through his division [Entzweiung] that he fights his way to self-sufficient
un iry with himself' (PR 166). This claim points to the idea of a un ified self whose un iry must
nevertheless be established by means of a struggle with nature and also with oneself in so far as one
contains conflicting aims or tendencies within oneself.
4 Cf. Janke, 'Zuriick zur Natur? Fichtes Umwendung des Rousseauischen Naturstandes'.
5 Janke, 'Zuriick zur Natur? Fichtes Umwendung des Rousseauischen Naturstandes', 21.
199
ethical principle or goal providing the self with unity in the face of the
multitude of given desires and inclinations that an individual happens to
have. In this respect, the positive model of freedom points to a certain view
of the self, namely, that of a self whose unity is constituted by means of
the principles according to which it acts and which it imposes upon itself.
Indeed, some of the examples of positive freedom that Taylor himself gives,
such as some passing comfort being less important than the fulfilment of
a life-time vocation and our amour-propre being less important than a love
relationship, imply the idea of a self whose ethical (if not metaphysical)
unity over time is constituted by means of the self-imposed principles or
goals that provide its actions with consistency. This consistency wo uld
arguably be lacking if an individual were simply to act on the basis of
the desires or impulses that he or she just happens to have at a particular
point in time, rather than heeding the long-term goals that he or she has
developed, goals that are themselves shaped by what the person in question
considers to be of value and significance in life. In this way such goals can
be thought to define a person's ethical identity.7
Rousseau is said to invoke the idea of a unified self with a fully integrated
personality on the basis of such passages as the following one: 'What
causes human misery is the contradiction between our condition and
our desires, between our duties and our inclinations . . . Make man united
[rendez l'homme un] and yo u will make him as happy as he can be' (OC m:
510; PF: 41) . 8 This passage suggests that becoming a unified self is a matter
of having desires that are capable of being satisfied given the conditions
in which we find ourselves and that also accord with the notion of duty.
Moreover, the following passage from Emile, which describes what might
be called 'the man of principle', evokes the idea of a person whose identity
over time is in large part constituted by certain principles of action that
he values above all others, lending both what he says and what he does
consistency: 'To be something, to be oneself and always one, a man must
act as he speaks; he must always be decisive concerning the choice he ought
7
As Taylor puts it: 'The whole notion of our identity, whereby we recognize that some goals, desires,
allegiances are central to what we are, while others are not or are less so, can make sense only against
a background of desires and feelings which are not brute, bur what I shall call import-attributing, to
invent a term of art for the occasion.' Taylor, 'What's Wro ng with Negative Liberty', 224.
This attribution of such a model of rhe self to Rousseau is found in Melzer, The Natural Goodness of
Man, 63ff. The parts of this passage that Melzer leaves out read as follows: 'between nature and social
institutions, between the man and the citizen . . . G ive him entirely to the state or leave him entirely
to himself; bur if you divide his heart, you tear him to p ieces.' From these lines we can see that the
problem of disunity is linked to the problem of the incompatibility between the individualism of a
human being living independently and the collectivism connected with membership of. and a deep
identification with, the state.
200
201
202
When describing in his Confessions his plans to go and live on the small,
almost uninhabited I le de Saint-Pierre in the middle of Lac de Bienne
in Switzerland to escape persecution, Ro usseau speaks of this particular
choice as 'so compatible with my peaceable temperament and my soli
tary and indolent disposition [a mon humeur solitaire et paresseuse] that
I count it as one of those sweet reveries which have inspired in me the
most intense delight' (OC I: 638; C: 624) . In his critique of Ro usseau,
Fichte describes Rousseau's character in a way that fully accords with the
description of it given here, for Rousseau is said to have a passive sen
sibility which favours suffering rather than acting (GA I/3: 66f; EPW:
I83f. ) . Rousseau also speaks of the sense of anticipation caused by being
abandoned in his isolation to 'the joys of idleness [destruvrement]' (OC I:
638; C: 625). Reading these two passages from Ro usseau's Confessions in
the light of each other, it is evident that Rousseau regards reverie as one
of these joys of idleness and that idleness itself constitutes a condition of
revene.
11
Rousseau on idleness
203
This is not to say that Rousseau regarded himself as never acting according to principles. The
idleness that he describes seems, in fact, to be at odds with what he has to say in the Third Walk of
his Reveries ofthe Solitary Walker concern ing his earlier decision to adopt a set of principles that he
felt to be right in the face of the objections that others had made in relation to these principles. He
describes the principles in question as 'the constant rule of my belief and conduct', and he claims
they are more or less the ones we find in the Savoyard Vicar's profession offairh in Emile (OC 1: 1018;
RSW: 55). Even here, though, a major difference between Rousseau's adoption of such principles
and Fichre's activist standpo int can be detected. For Rousseau's decision never to re-examine these
principles, bur merely to accept them as rules for all future conduct, provides an example of the
kind of passivity for which Fichre criticizes him.
204
Rousseau on idleness
205
t:
64}; C: 628.
206
which the sense of liberation that idleness and reverie make possible is
largely a matter of Rousseau's own personal experience of an absence of
constraint, for the objective conditions of this experience remain beyond
his own control.
This dependence on others relates to what might be described as the
occluded background to Ro usseau's reflections of the kind ofliberation that
idleness and reverie make possible. A society characterized by dependence
on others and by a division of labour must still be thought to exist at the
same time as Ro usseau enjoys the idleness which allows him to engage in
reverie and to achieve a full, seemingly timeless sense of his own existence.
Rousseau's own recognition of this fact is evident from the worry that he
himself expresses about what would happen if everyone were to do the
same as he does, when human society continues to produce a whole set
of needs that can only be satisfied by means of an active life. Rousseau
expresses this worry in the following passage, in which he discusses the
failure of most human beings to appreciate the delights of reverie:
Nor would it be desirable in our present state of affairs that the avid desire
for these sweet ecstasies should give people a distaste for the active life
which their constantly recurring needs i mpose upon them as a duty. But an
unfortunate man who has been excluded from human society, and can do
nothing more in this world to serve or benefit himself or others, may be
allowed to seek in this state a compensation for human joys, a compensation
which neither fortune nor mankind can take away from him. (OC 1: 1047;
RSW: 89; translation modified)
Fichte on leisure
207
on
leisure
208
do with the way in wh ich the state's function as guarantor of the terms
of the property contract means that each person is obliged to contribute
towards the maintenance of the state and its officials. Consequently every
person must labour not only to provide themselves with the means to live
but also to be able to fulfil this obligation.
In this way, human freedom becomes subject both to natural necessity
and to a conventional, legal form of necessity. In the fi rst case, necessity
consists in having to satisfy the basic conditions of hu man survival, while
in the second case it consists in the practical necessity of having to do
someth ing (that is, contribute towards the maintenance of the state and
its officials th rough the payment of taxes) so as to avoid certain sanctions,
though individuals may subject themselves to this second form of necessity
also because they recognize that the maintenance of the state and its
officials represents a condition of their own agency. In both cases, work
is the means by which the demands in question are met. Work turns out,
then, to be a form of practical necessity to which the two specific forms
of necessity described above can be reduced. Given this subjection to
necessity, Fichte claims that 'The human being has no freedom at all under
these conditions' (GA lll13: 223) . The essential problem is stated as follows.
The property contract is meant to guarantee each and every person a
determinate sphere for the exercise of his or her freedom. Yet the conditions
of guaranteeing this sphere turn out to incl ude being compelled to work,
even though individuals accept the terms of the property contract and
enter into a condition of right (Rechtszustand} solely for the sake of their
freedom (GA l ll13: 224) . In what sense, then, can they really be said to be
free when they are subj ect to this necessity? In raising this question, Fichte
introd uces more stringent conditions with respect to what it means to be
free than those found in the Foundations ofNatural Right, in wh ich it was
held to be enough if individuals could recognize the constraints to which
they are subject as self-imposed ones, in the sense of being able to endorse
these constrai nts as conditions of the effective exercise of their own free and
rational agency. It now turns out that even these self-imposed constraints
fall short of what is required by gen uine freedom because of the element
of necessitation that they involve.
For Fichte, the only solution to the problem of how genuine freedom
is possible in such a condition is for al l persons to be left some freedom
for thei r freely formed ends (Freiheit for frei zu entwerfende Zweke} once
they have gained the necessities of life by means of their own labour and
they have fulfilled their duties as citizens, which include contributing
towards the maintenance of the state and its officials (GA lll13: 224) .
Fichte on leisure
209
Rechtszustand Bedingung der sittl. Freiheit. Diese [hat] einen Zwek der durchaus nicht in der
Natur, und Fakticitat liegt, sondern in einer hohern Welt. Dies sonach [ist] die wahre Freiheit: das
Vermogen iibersinnlicher Zweke.
210
Hence Fichte's statement that 'the moral law directs itself only at the will that has been freed
of all external ends, the will that is, so to speak, naturally idle and pronounced free by nature
[den . . . gleichsam von der Natur mussigen, u. von ihr losgesprochnen Willen]' (GA IIII3: 214) .
211
should always be kept in view when it comes to the amount of work which
people can be expected to undertake in a society that claims to honour the
principles of equality and freedom. The second issue concerns the effects
of the division of labour on the moral freedom which an increase in the
amount of leisure available is meant to make possible. I suggest that in
certain cases these effects constitute po tentially insurmountable limits to
human perfectibility as Fichte understands it.
Ethical activism and the modern division of labour
Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes ofthe Wealth ofNations, vol . 1, 19.
212
213
214
215
restricted, mechanical forms of labour that do not appear to allow for the
full development and exercise of human powers. 25 A second issue concerns
the possible effects of the modern division of labo ur on the moral freedom
of which state-guaranteed leisure is held to be the condition.
As regards the first issue, Fichte suggests that work can be freely under
taken if it is performed in accordance with the higher standpoint repre
sented by moral freedom and by the kind of self that he associates with
this freedom, when he offers the following vision of a society characterized
by interdependence, and in which the ends of reason are promoted by
individuals performing determinate forms of work:
Reason's end is furthered in each estate, beginning with that estate that
wrests from the soil its fruits, which is a condition for the preservation of
our species in the sensible world, through the scholar, who thinks of future
ages and works for them, and including the legislator and the wise ruler,
who establishes institutions that embody the thoughts of the researcher for
the well-being of the most remote generations. (GA 1/5: 244; SE: 261)
'5
This dichotomy might be said to arise in Marx's case because of his firm distinction between the
realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. This distinction suggests that certain forms of labour
are inescapably alienating and unfree, not least because Marx himself in his early writings treats
work that one is compelled to perform as a matter of necessity as alienated labour. For a discussion
of this issue which attempts to show that Marx continued to hold the view that even 'necessary'
labour (that is, labour that aims at meeting material needs) can be a free and self-realizing activity,
see Sayers, 'Freedom and the "Realm of Necessity"'. Here it is argued that human practical activity
involves degrees of freedom and that simply working on an object already manifests some degree
of freedom compared to the act of merely consuming an object. However, although Marx was
certainly keen to distinguish human labour from the instinctual behaviour of non-human animals,
the difference is, perhaps, not so great in the case of certain mechanical forms of labour as to
warrant speaking of degrees of freedom rather than degrees of necessity. At the same time, there can
be said to be an element of freedom even in the realm of necessity when production is rationally
regulated by the associated producers. This is because the producers exercise control over nature
and the forces of production as opposed to being dominated by them, and thereby exercise some
self-direction. Yet this does not amount to viewing certain activities that aim at meeting material
needs as being essentially other than a matter of necessity, for it could be that human beings would
simply choose not to perform such activities if it somehow became possible for them to satisfy their
material needs without having to undertake these activities.
Many individuals in communist society would have to work to provide for the material needs
of society, even though they may also find this work intrinsically rewarding. I ndeed, Marx himself
describes such labour aimed at meeting material needs as a feature of all societies, leading him to
call it 'an eternal natural necessity'. Marx, Capita vol. 1, I33 Thus even in communist society
the sphere of material production 'remains a realm of necessity' in the sense that natural necessity
continues to form a constraint on human agency, though this necessity no longer constitutes the
only reason that individuals perform forms of labour aimed at meeting material needs. Once it is
accepted that natural necessity will in many cases continue to be one of the main factors, if not the
only one, determining an individual's actions in the realm of material production, it seems that this
realm will, by definition, continue to be one of necessity, even if not to the same degree as it was in
capitalist society.
216
217
sense that there is no guarantee that individuals will view the work that they
perfo rm in terms of its greater ethical significance. Thus the dichotomy
between work and freedom remains, leaving us with the idea that the
amount of time spent working must be minimized so as to increase the
amount of leisure available to each person. As we have seen, this aim of
increasing the amount of leisure available is something that Fichte thinks
can be fulfilled by means of a social division of labour.
This brings me to the second issue which concerns the problem that
securing more leisure by means of a social division of labo ur may, in fact,
undermine the moral freedom which the existence of more leisure is meant
to make possible. As we have seen, Fichte associates the capacity for moral
freedom with a certain type of self-activity and self-sufficiency, namely, that
of seeking ethical truth within oneself, rather than its being imposed by
some external authority. The essential role played by this self-activity and
self-sufficiency in moral freedom means that:
No one is convinced who does not delve into himself and feel inwardly the
consent of his own self to the truth that has been presented, a consent that
is an affect of the heart and by no means a conclusion of the understanding.
Such attentiveness to ourselves depends upon our freedom, and the consent
itself is therefore freely given and never forced. (GA 1/5: 278f.; SE: 30of.)
It may be, however, that the performance of certain tasks within the
social division of labour turns out to be inimical to the development
of the capacities needed to identify ethical truth. These capacities can be
thought to include the willingness and the energy to identify all the relevant
possibilities and to reflect upon them in cases in which what one ought
to do in the circumstances is far from obvious, and also, as suggested by
Fichte himself in the passage quoted above, the ability to experience certain
sentiments. Such a concern regarding the potentially harmful moral effects
of the modern division of labour is expressed by Adam Smith when he
claims that
In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater
part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes
to be confined to a few very simple operations; frequently to one or two. But
the u nderstandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their
ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing
a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the
same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or
to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties
which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion,
218
Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth ofNations, vol. 1 1 , 781f. See also the
following description that Marx gives of the effects of factory work under the conditions of capitalist
production: 'Factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does
away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in
bodily and in intellectual activity. Even the lighten ing of the labour becomes an instrument of
torture, since the machine does not free the worker from the work, but rather deprives the work
itself of all content. ' Marx, Capita vol. 1, 548.
219
(Anstaltenfor die Bildung aller zur Freiheit) (GA III 13: 22 7) . Education is, in
short, presented as the means of ensuring that individuals spend their leisure
time in ways that promote their capacity for moral freedom. Yet in order
to preserve mo ral freedom, these same individuals cannot be compelled to
attend these institutions, and even if they could be legitimately compelled
to attend them, they certainly could not be legitimately compelled to
accept what they were taught in these institutions purely on the authority
of their teachers, since this would itself constitute a violation of their moral
freedom, which demands self-activity and self-sufficiency.
With regard to the idea of restructuring society so as to prevent the
pernicio us effects of the division of labour from arising in the first place,
various means of doing so are compatible with Marx's idea of the associated
producers' rational regulation of their interaction with nature. Some indi
viduals could, for example, continue to be tied to restricted, mechanical
forms of labour while also having some control over how the productive
pro cess in which they are engaged is organized, giving them the opportunity
to exercise some degree of self-direction and thus to develop the capacities
associated with moral freedom. At the same time, such self-direction itself
involves the actual exercise of moral freedom, in the sense that it consists in
acting in accordance with an end of reason which is defined in social terms.
Yet this is not a solution that Fichte himself proposes, for although in The
Closed Commercial State he advocates conscious collective control over all
production and exchange in society, he assigns the function of exercising
such control to the state as opposed to the individuals who engage in par
ticular acts of production and exchange. Another possibility wo uld be to
organize production in such a way that the division of labour is overcome
by allowing individuals within society to perform a variety of tasks.27 This
solution is, once again, one that Fichte appears unable to endorse. This
time it is because he treats the realization of the end of reason as requiring
a strict division of labour which ensures that the activity of one individual
17
This type of scenario is suggested by Marx's description of commun ist society as one in which 'no
one has an exclusive sphere of activity which is imposed upon him' and 'society regulates the general
production and in doing so makes it possible for me to do this today, and that tomorrow' . .\1arx,
Early Political Writings, 132. Doubts have been expressed, however, regarding the extent to which the
passage in question represents Marx's own ideas concerning communist society and the abolition
of the division of labour. Cf. Carver, 'Communism for Critical Critics? The German Ideology and
the Problem of Technology'. Still, Marx elsewhere makes claims regarding communist society that
do suggest the idea of overcoming a strict division of labour through individuals performing both
material and intellectual forms of labour so as to develop themselves more fully, as when he speaks of
a higher form of communist society in which not only the division of labour but also the antithesis
between mental and physical labour has disappeared. Cf. Marx, Later Political Writings, 214.
220
does not interfere with the activity of another individual, thereby reducing
the chances of realizing this end (GA I/5: 243; SE: 259f.).
Fichte's theory of right in this way points to the existence of some
potentially insurmountable obstacles to human perfectibility. First of all,
he accepts that work may in certain cases be a matter of mere necessity, even
though individuals could, in principle, regard the occupations that they
perform as having an ethical significance. Some individuals will, therefore,
be condemned to spending a significant portion of their lives engaged in
a type of activity that secures the possibility of their highest end, which
is moral freedom, but need not itself involve the actual exercise of this
freedom or the development of the powers on which the effective exercise
of such freedom depends. Indeed, engagement in such forms of work may
even hinder or prevent the development of these powers. Thus, in treating
a social divisio n of labour as a condition of moral freedom in the sense
that it promises to make more leisure available to the citizens of a state
than would otherwise be the case, Fichte is faced with the problem of
explaining how this same division of labour will not serve to undermine
the moral freedom of which it is meant to be a condition, by depriving
individuals of the capacities that the exercise of this freedom demands of
them.
Ro usseau's account of how idleness is favo urable to reverie and how
the latter gives rise to a liberating sense of self, which does not appear to
depend on one's relations to o ther human beings but only on one's rela
tions to things in the natural world, provides one possible alternative to
the freedom-endangering conditions of modern society with its division of
labour and high levels of interdependence. Yet the merely subjective nature
of this freedom and self-sufficiency must be regarded as deficient when
compared to the moral freedom which Rousseau himself praises. Rousseau
implies that this moral freedom becomes possible only in a rightfully con
stituted state in which there are relations of dependence between human
beings, including the type of dependence that I have identified as depen
dence on other human beings as mediated by dependence on things, but
in which these relations of dependence are nevertheless regulated in such a
way as to remove or to prevent the evils, especially that of domination, to
which they tend to give rise. In this way, a sense of absence of constraint
reflects objective conditions, as opposed to its having to be won despite
objective conditions by means of solitude, idleness and reverie. Thus, if the
subjective freedom that Ro usseau associates with idleness and reverie is con
ceived as an alternative to a moral freedom which is anchored in objective
conditions, it must also be tho ught to imply a scepticism on Rousseau's
221
222
ongoing, potentially unrealizable, task, rather than a goal which has already
been achieved, whether in theory or in practice. The notion of such a task
implies the need for further reflection and for social and political change, as
opposed to an acceptance of existing conditions which can be of a willing or
fatalistic kind, depending on whether or not these conditions favour one's
own interests. In other words, when left unexamined, appeals to necessity
threaten to perform the ideological function of convincing people that they
are powerless to change conditions that benefit o thers while disadvantaging
them, even when these conditions may not, in fact, be objectively necessary
ones.
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225
I,
tragstheorie im 17. und 18. ]ahrhundert (Hobbes - Locke - Rousseau und Fichte)
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Index
consti[u[ion 6 1-61., 86
civil 68
democra[ic 131
Christianity 1 5 6, 158
ci tizenship 111.
prmection 113
social i !J-1.4. 3 1 , n . 45 6 1., ')0, 93 9 5-97 101,
105, 118, 178, 190, 193, 1.07
and equality 101
fea[ures shared by Fich[e's [heory of righ[
and Rousseau's version of 104-105,
11o-1 1 1.
fraudulen [ 39, 46-48, 100, 1 1 1 , 11.9
as maner of necess i ty 46, 48, 54
founder of 1 00
and freedom 74-76
and poli [ical s[a[e 153, 179, 18 6-191., 1.1.1
as sta[e of necessity 165
Th Closd Commrcia/ Stilt (Fich[e) 1 01., 104.
1 1.3-1 1.5, 1.07, 1.19
coercion 3 . 16, 76, 94. 141, 18 3, 1.09
law of 139
need for 61., 11.9
as prescribed by reason 68
righ[ of 109
Cohen, Joshua 1 1 1 , 11.8
coloniza[ion 173
commonweal [h 59, IO!J-110,
13 1-131.
comm unity
ethical 6 s, 67, n-8o, 87
unifica[ion 113
Contribution towards Ccting th Public 's
judgmmt oft Frt:nch Rvolution
(Fich[e) 1 1 3
corporation 176-179, 1 8 4 , 1 87-1 91
Corsica 48, 1 1 9-1 1.1.
cul[ure 10, 51., 54-55, 67, 71, 73, 78-80, 1 41 , 194.
1.00, 1.07
and morali cy 79
vices of 71, 73. 76-78, 84-8 5
democracy
direc[ 1)1-1)1., 137-138
dependence 1.-7, 14-16, 1 1.o-1 1.1, 1 8 1.
o n civil society 1 8 5
and freedom 1.-7, 18, 33, 1 5 1.
conscience
[rue 1 61
indirec[ form of 1. 5
infi n i [e i ncrease i n 1 8 1.
227
228
Index
dependence (cont.)
natural form of t66
and needs 1 6 4
obedience to general will guarantee against
personal 94
on opinions of others 36-37, 42
on other h uman bein as mediated by
dependence on things 4. 24-26, 33,
3 5-36, 44. 46, 49, 8 5 , 8 7-90, u6 , 1 82,
220
on things 1 8-20, 26-29, 34. 37-3 8 , 40-42,
44-45 49. 55
unequal relations of 5, 44, 46, 8 5-86, 1 1 1 , u6,
1 2 2, t68
Discount on tht Origin and Fowularions of
lntquality among Mm (Rousseau) su
Stcond Discourst
Discount on Political Economy (Rousseau) 133
Discount on tht Scimcts andAns (Rousseau)
194
Discou= on Wtaith (Rousseau) 37
domination 4-7, 16, 25, 30, 45-46 , 49-50, 8 5 --8 6,
88--89. 121, t68, 220
economic 76-77, 83
freedom as absence of 4
duty 31-32, 6o-6t, 72, 134, 1 5 2, 196, 1 9 9 , 206
conflict with sensuousness 196
Fichte's theory of social 200 , 207, 21 6
to further the end of reason 216
incen tive of 64
102, 105
Index
negative 3, 4, 2.6, 94. II2., 146-147 1 50, 1 52.,
2.09
objective 145, 1 5 1
political t o
positive I, 3 , 1 5 , 2.1-2.2., I I :Z., I So-l SI , 1 53-1 54
1 6 1 , 170, 186, 198-199, 2.03 , 2.09
as principal end of legislation 98
rational laws and institutions as conditions of
149
republican 3-5, 7-8, 1 5-16, 2.1
and reverie 2.05
righ t to 107
subjective 144-145, 1 5 1 , 1 54-1 56, 1 58-1 59
1 6 1-162., 1 6 4. 1 69-172., 179 183-1 87, 2.02.,
w s. 2. 2.0
pri nciple of 1 5 6-1s8, 16o-163, 176--177, 179,
1 8 1 , 186
right of 1 56 , 1 58, 176
of trade 74. 175
as truth of necess i ty 1 83-186
wild 68
God 12., 40
goodness
natural 53 ss. 57 63, 71-73
maxim o f 1 9 6
negative nature of 71-73
and the state ss-s 6
governmen t s 6, 97 II8, 1 3 1 , 136. 1 8 9
g ood 138
as i nstrument of the people's will 12.8, 133
people must have more power than 139-140
republican form of s6
small 170
tendency to oppress sovereign 1 3 6
happiness 5 6 , 1 45-146, I SO
Hayek, F. A. 43-45
histo ry 47, 54, 87, 90, 141, 1 56 , 1 58
Christian view of II
Kant's philosophy of 10, 51, 82.
Hegel's philosophy of 13
and nature 197
as theodicy 52.-53
Hobbes, Thomas ss. 91-92., 94
229
Index
leisure 29-30, 197, 207, ZO?-ZIZ, li4-ZIS, no
as objec1 of absolu1e righ t of property zoz,
209
liberalism 3 n. 126
hostil ity to state in tervention ss-s 6
Kant's 53-54- 5 6-57. 65, 76-77, S45
luxury 1 S 1
Machiavelli, Niccol<'J 55, 5 9
market economy S, 43-45, 173-174, 179
Marx, Karl Z 1 2-215, 219
money 16, 124
exchange of goods wi thout 122
as threat to equality and fi-eedom 1 1 9-1 22
Momesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron
de 1 21
morality 1o-1 1, 32, 59, 64, So, 112, 140, 1 56- sS,
1 64, 200
and culture 79
Fichte's separation from right 64
incompatibility with self-interest S1
principle of zoo
nature 6, 11-13, 4S, 52, 63, 71, 73, 7S, So, 16S, 197,
zoo-z01, zos, 207, 209, zn-214. 219
conflict with freedom 52
and history 197
immed iacy of 166
laws of 27, 174-175
plan of 71, 73. 7S, Sz, S7
second 171
state of 18-19, n, 25-29, 35, 4o-41 , 44, 46,
4 9-50, 69-73, 97, 10S, 11o-m , 16S, 1 97,
zos
return to 39, 195-197. zo6
necessity s. 1 5 , zS, 41-42, 44, 46 , 7 6 , S z, 9 2, 95,
113, 141-142, ss. lSI, 20], 216, no, lll
artificial 3S
causal 17 :Z.. 1Sz, 204
economic form of S-9, 155, 163, 171-173 176,
JS3-I S S
educative function of 1 5 4
external 165-166, 170, 1 S S
and freedom z, 9-10, 15, 1 6 3 , 1 6 5 , 1 6 9 , 1 7 2 ,
175-176, 179-1 So, 1S3-1 S6, zo8-zo9, 211,
213-214
and law 9, 20, zoS
logical i S z
natural S-9, 13, l]-28 , 30, 34, 3 S , 41 , 44-46,
50, 54, 63, 6S, 126, 141, 1 65-1 67, 174-175,
20]-ZOS, 213
practical z, 7-9, 13, 6S, 77 126, 152, 163,
172-173 . 182, zoS
pressure of 46
rational 176, 1S3
and social bonds 177
(Kant) 64
opinion 1 65-1 66
as form of dependence 36-3S
general will standard independen t of 134
and needs 1 66-1 67
public 41-42
patriotism
modern 1 62-163
perfectibility 1 1-1 5, 17, s -sz. ss. 65, 71, n 9 6,
4 -142, ss -1 56, 16S, 176, 1 93 . 197-19S,
zoz, 207, uo-211, z s-u6, no-zu
impulse of t3
and the state 57
perfection
as complete harmony with oneself zoo
moral so, S :Z.. 7S
of sciences and arJS 1 94
personality 1 5 6-157, 199
Pettit, Philip 5
philosophy
Hegel's speculative 149
and reconciliation with actuality 15S
Philosophy ofRight (Hegel) 142, 144-145. 14S, I SI,
ss. 1 57-1 59. 174, IS7, I 91-I9z
pity ]Z, I96
Poland 1 1 9-1 21
political economy I72-I74 I S S
poverty I 7 3 I77
progress 1o-11, IS, 79, Sz, S4o I95. 201
Index
property 22, 47 74. 95, 182
in broadest sense of the word 114
as condition of active citizenship S 6
concept of 106
con tract 113, n s. 20S
Fichte's theory of 10, 57, S 9-90, 1 1 2-1 1 9
as foundation of civil society 9 6
as foundation o f social pact 9 6
grounded in reciprocal recognition 109
leisure as object of absolute right of 202,
209
liberal theory of 57. S9, 117
as means to equality and freedom 1 1 6-1 1 7
private 3 5 . 3S, 96--97, 1 00
righ t o f 3 5. S9, I03-104. 1 0 6 , 1o8-1 19, 1 24. 1 27,
1 57
to be able to live absolute, inalienable 114
Rousseau's t heory of 93, 96-IOI, 112
and the state 93, 96--\) S , 101, 1 1 3 , 1 17-I IS, 1 53 ,
170, 20 9
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 117
Rawls, John 134
reason, rationali ty 1 1-13, 1 5 , 2S, 64, 6S-69, 142,
196-197 201
end of 215-21 6, 219
duty to further 21 6
idea of S6
immanent 1 5 2
public 133-134
pure practical 31, 76
self-legislating nature of 1 1
stunting o f 21 S
as unity of universality and individuality
145
of wi11 1 43. 144
Ruhnkhrr (Fich te) 130, 13S, 14o-141, 202, 207,
209
231
2 32
Index
Viroli, Maurizio s
virtue I96
political I9J
vocation
of scholar I94 197, loo-lot
wealt h
nalion's 21 1-11 2
Wraith ofNations {Smith) 111
welfare 8 5, I S8-J S9. t 6l-t 6s, 170, I76-177
wickedness
as opposi tion between private will and public
will 61
wiii 8-IO, 14-I S, 44, 90, 105, 1 41 , 167, 178, 181,
188-I 89, lO<J, 113
of all I07, 148-149
arbi trary 143-I44o 183
right as limitation on I Sl-1 53
of child 146
concept of I47-150, 1 5 5, 1 57
right as objectification of 1 50
conscious I43
conten t of I 47. 1 49- S 153
corporate 189, 191
ethical 146
existence of I S S
a n d force 1 3 1
free 4 3 , 147, I?l, 1 8 1
right a s existence o f 1 50, 174
general {common, universal) 11, 48, 63, 91,
94-96. IOl, 107-108, I l l, 114> I l?-130,
I36. I38-I39 14l-I44. 178. t86-I87.
t89-191
Hegel's re-conceptualiution of I4S.
147-1 50
interpretation of 1 28 , 1 3 1-136, I37
impurity of 6o
as object 1 53 , ss
and particular will t 6o
standard independen t of human wi11 134
versus will of all 148
Hegel's theory of 1 45-147
233
Index
i ndividual 1 43
laws product of 17 4-175
moral 1 51
natural 1 5 1
a n d necess i ty 17, 15, 45-5 1 , 174. 178-179,
191-193
objective 1 46, 1 60
opposition between private and public 61-63
paniculac as opposed to general 1 3 6
as principle of th e Slate 1 43-145
rarional 1 51
rationality of 143-144
of ruler 139
of slave 146
subjective 1 47, 1 58, 1 6o-161
subjectivity of t6o
supersti tious 1 46
union as content of 178
universal 143, 1 54-156, 1 6 1 , 179, 187-191
u niversality of 155, 16o
universally valid 66
weakness of 6o