Page 15 - GALIET ILLUSION: Rousseau IV

all are born free to will what is best.38 If having entered into a Social Contract, a member’s rights were violated, he loses his civil freedom, and is empowered to revert to his original natural state of freedom where he regains his rights again judges for himself.39 Or were he to refuse the General Will, he is constrained or forced to be free.40
In this citizen-preserving Social Pact commonly willed in a state of civility, no member renounces his liberty, but gains more because right belongs not to a mighty few, as in suzerain covenants, but to all members equally. In this civil state, members are all equally free, equally protected by the state, equally preserved from harm,41 because the General Will’s right makes might. In Rousseau’s utopian state, man was born free, and remains genuinely free, no longer everywhere in chains.
However, Rousseau’s ideals are so very frail. Rousseau’s lofty solution to humans attaining civil liberties by ceding their rights to a General Will poses some lurking dangers and mightier chains for its members, chains more onerous and Sisyphean. A General Will is never exempt from impartiality and wielding power. It can turn tyrannical and will to exercise all powers and rights against their Minority’s Will in ways that, paradoxically, blur boundaries between a Sovereign and a Master, a Social Contract and a Suzerain Covenant, and absolute liberty and absolute dominion. Can a Sovereign, in practice, genuinely abide by Rousseau’s utopian maxim, “each be [is] to all and
38 Ibid., Book II. Chapter 4.
39 Ibid., Book I. Chapter 6.
40 Ibid., Book I. Chapter 7.
41 Ibid., Book II. Chapter 4. The Sovereign is to preserve everyone by defending
member-individuals and their assets “with the collective force of all, and under which each individual, while uniting himself with the others, obeys no one but himself, and remains free as before.” Ibid., Book I. Chapter 6.
—15—