Page 38 - GALIET ILLUSION: Rousseau IV

in Milton’s days had a despotic license to freeze and turn upside down, says Milton, “whole commonwealths of men as if they were a nation of pismires.”97 K’s magistrates believe themselves superior to citizens. The King and Magistrate, says Milton, are inferiors and not equal to the people, and their role is to serve citizens and not abuse their powers.98 Notably, Milton argued what Rousseau came to argue in the following century.
Rousseau’s Social Contract, unable to solve the problem of might abuses right, can eerily worsen it by overpowering victimized citizens, leaving them absolutely powerless, dispossessed and stripped of rights, just as Suzerain treatises do. Yet more. There is nothing more torturing for citizens to know they have voluntarily joined and willed a pact that, in the vicissitudes of time, it can potentially will their harm. In so doing, they have indirectly participated in willing their own demise by dangerously ceding their rights to an overreaching Sovereign or State.
Unable to liberate individuals, The Social Contract imprisons them at best, and exterminates them at worst in the hands of an irrational Sovereign. Citizens can be enslaved to the tyranny of the prevailing General Will’s majority, and suffer the catastrophe of a partial, self- serving ideology wearing the mask of the common good. That these theatrics of delusion occurred in Job’s Trial, in Illium, in Milton’s England, in Kafka’s The Trial, and in Nazi Germany might give us pause as to our all-too-human tendencies to scapegoat, and to abuse social oaths and contracts over millennia. In this metaphysical chasm, a self, torn between mastery and slavery of his own passions, projects
97 Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. by Merritt Y. Hughes. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957. 771
98 Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. by Merritt Y. Hughes. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957. 771
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