Page 41 - GALIET ILLUSION: Rousseau IV

Under the tyranny of the majority, the Egalitarian Social Contract can tragically revert to a Master-Slave Covenant. So vague and fragile is, indeed, the line between law and lawlessness, good and poor government, liberty and tyrannism. In this abyss, there is no reversal for the dissenting minorities to a natural state. There is no exit 3⁄4 only constrain or exile, imprisonment or forced suicide, or execution.
While it is true that humanity must progressive strive towards ideals, or to Hegel’s absolute idea by the progressive unfolding of truth,106 it is equally necessary, as Kant posits in his Copernican Revolution, to ensure that theory conforms to experience, and not experience to theory. In Judeo-Christianity, man was born free, but sinned, fell, only to be redeemed in Christ and to gain his liberty or paradise lost through divine grace; in Rousseau’s utopia, man was born free, but cedes his rights to a Sovereign plagued, at times, with more irrational, ill Will drones than rational ones, and in so doing, the Minority Will remains “everywhere in chains.” Indeed, the Social Contract is not a Contract suited for ignoble savages, power-loving mortals, or anthropomorphic deities, or Minotaurs driven by Nietzsche’s or Hobbes’ will to power, or by Gilgamesh’s drive for immortality, but is best suited for saints whose incorruptible wills can genuinely sustain a licit pact where “each [is] to all and all to each.”107 In Rousseau’s civil state, no one is really equally free, equally protected by the state, equally preserved from harm, 108 because the General Will tends to might that makes right. In Rousseau’s utopian state, man was born
106 Hegel. Phenomenology ofMind. Trans. by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
107 Book II. Chapter 4. 77. Rousseau alludes to this saintly aspect in his chapter on Democracy.
108 Book II. Chapter 4. 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.” Book I. Chapter 6.
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