prior probability

I will resume (and conclude) my series on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the paradox of politics next week. In the meantime, I want to share some thoughts on the rule of law. In my recent talk on Friday, 21 November, at the St Thomas University Law School in Minneapolis, I identified two deep puzzles about the “rule of law” ideal. One of my puzzles is historical; the other, theoretical or definitional.

Let’s begin with my historical puzzle first by comparing and contasting the Magna Carta (1215) with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789). By all accounts, the Magna Carta was extorted by force. King John agreed to the Great Charter at the point of a dagger! (See, for example, the artistic rendering of the signing of the Magna Carta below.)

The French Declaration of Rights, by contrast, was adopted democratically when the Three Estates met in Paris in 1789. Yet unlike the Magna Carta, the ill-fated French Declaration of Rights proved to be an ineffectual legal document, one that failed to curb the violence of the Reign of Terror (1792-94) or prevent Napoleon’s consolidation of power in 1799.

In short, why did the “MAGNA CARTA STRATEGY” of carefully limiting royal power on such mundane matters as weights and measures succeed while the “FRENCH DECLARATION STRATEGY” of identifying supposedly-inviolable and fundamental individual rights fail? (To be continued …)

Last week (see here), we saw how a young Adam Smith singled out and transcribed three lengthy philosophical fragments from Rousseau’s famed Second Discourse in his (Smith’s) 1756 letter to the Edinburgh Review, and we then took a closer look at the first two of these eloquent extracts (here and here). Now, let’s turn to Smith’s translation of the third and last passage. [1] To begin, my most pressing question for Adam Smith is this: what does this third selection, which consists of nine sentences in all, add to the previous two passages?

For starters, the first two sentences of Smith’s translation of Passage #3 paint an idealized or romantic picture of Rousseau’s noble savage:

SENTENCE 1 & 2: “Man in his savage, and man in his civilized state, differ so essentially in their passions and inclinations, that what makes the supreme happiness of the one, would reduce the other to despair. The savage breathes nothing but liberty and repose; he desires only to live and to be at leisure; and the ataraxia of the Stoic does not approach to his profound indifference for every other object.”

The next two sentences of Smith’s translation describes “civilized man” or “the citizen” as trapped in a perpetual and pointless treadmill:

SENTENCES 3 & 4: “The citizen, on the contrary, toils, bestirs and torments himself without end, to obtain employments which are still more laborious; he labours on till his death, he even hastens it, in order to put himself in a condition to live, or renounces life to acquire immortality. He makes his court to the great whom he hates, and to the rich whom he despises; he spares nothing to obtain the honour of serving them; he vainly boasts of his own meanness and their protection, and, proud of his slavery, speaks with disdain of those who have not the honour to share it.”

Moving on, the next two sentences of Smith’s translation of Passage #3 (sentences 5 & 6) compare and contrast a simple Caribbean native with a harried European political figure:

SENTENCES 5 & 6: “What a spectacle to a Caraib would be the painful and envied labours of a European minister of state? How many cruel deaths would not that indolent savage prefer to the horror of such a life, which is often not even sweetened by the pleasure of doing well?”

The next two sentences of Smith’s translation (sentences 7 & 8) pinpoint the source of this difference between savage man and civilized man. For Rousseau, the savage lives within himself; the civilized man lives outside himself. That is, the savage’s sense of self comes from his own experience, while the civilized person depends on the opinions of others to feel like he matters:

SENTENCES 7 & 8: “But to see the end of so many cares, it is necessary that the words, power and reputation, should have an intelligible meaning in his understanding; that he should be made to comprehend that there is a species of men who count for something the looks of the rest of the universe; who can be happy and contented with themselves upon the testimony of another, rather than upon their own. For such in reality is the true cause of all those differences: the savage lives in himself; the man of society, always out of himself; cannot live but in the opinion of others, and it is, if I may say so, from their judgment alone that he derives the sentiment of his own existence.”

And the last sentence of Smith’s translation of this lengthy passage (sentence #9) concludes with this blistering indictment:

LAST SENTENCE: “It belongs not to my subject to show, how from such a disposition arises so much real indifference for good and evil, with so many fine discourses of morality; how every thing being reduced to appearances, every thing becomes factitious and acted; honour, friendship, virtue, and often even vice itself, of which we have at last found out the secret of being vain; how in one word always demanding of others what we are, and never daring to ask ourselves the question, in the midst of so much philosophy, so much humanity, so much politeness, and so many sublime maxims we have nothing but a deceitful and frivolous exterior; honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.”

In other words, this passage is not just a critique of civilized man; it is a scathing indictment of modern morality. For Rousseau, our morality is bullshit, a veil designed to hide our scheming and conniving ways. I therefore read Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as a direct reply to Rousseau’s indictment and a ringing defense of modern man. But let’s forget about Smith for the moment. What is Rousseau’s solution to this conundrum? (To be continued …)

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog; and nobody knows when you’re feeling under the weather either! But I am, so I will share my thoughts on the rule or law (see my previous post) and resume my series on Smith and Rousseau on Monday …

I will resume my series on Smith and Rousseau in the next day or two because I will be speaking at a symposium on the rule of law at the University of St Thomas Law School today.

I have too much going on today, so I will resume my series on J.-J. Rousseau in my next post; in the meantime, enjoy …

In summary, if Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the Second Discourse (1755) to explain how men lost their natural liberty in the remote past, he wrote yet another book, Du Contrat social (1762), to explain how they might recover their freedom in the future. Suffice it to say, we will begin exploring the main ideas in both great works in the next day or two …