We never agreed to this, or, just because we’re hanging out doesn’t mean we have to boss each other around.
A small group of people saw a naked boy run on all fours through a forest in France. According to the French Republican calendar, it was “Year V.” For those who don’t think the French First Republic marked the dawn of a new era, it was 1797. The boy was spotted again a year later, but this time, captured and briefly put on display before escaping. In the summer of “Year VII,” better known as 1799, he was caught again. He spoke no words, and seemed so indifferent to anything anyone said to him that he was declared deaf. But when someone cracked a walnut behind him, he spun around in excitement. So he could hear, but was selective about what sounds were worthy of attention. A letter describing him at this time states that “It is certain that he lives only on potatoes and nuts. If given some bread, he smells it, bites it, then spits it out and throws it away. It is the same for all other foods. These facts leave little doubt that the child has lived in the woods for a long time.”[1] He would live in the woods a little longer, because after eight days in captivity, he escaped again, this time fleeing to the mountains of Aveyron.
He was captured one last time in the winter of 1800, and transferred to a school for the deaf in Paris, where a young doctor, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, attempted to teach the so-called “Wild Boy of Aveyron” how to be a normal person in Napoleonic France—something not even Napoleon could do. At first, according to Itard, “except for the occasions when hunger took him to the kitchen, he was always to be found squatting in a corner of the garden or hiding in the attic behind some builder’s rubbish.”[2] Itard eventually named the Wild Boy “Victor,” got him to wear clothes, use forks, understand French, and even write some simple sentences. But Victor never managed to speak more than a few syllables, as he may have missed some important developmental stages in speech acquisition.
Three years before Victor was first seen running naked through the forest, the remains of composer, engraver, memoirist, and philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau were moved from the rural burial plot he had requested to the Panthéon in Paris. By the end of his life, Rousseau had grown to loathe Paris, so he probably would have been rolling over in his grave if they hadn’t just dug him out of it. Rousseau was not even French. As the title page of the essay that first brought him fame states, it was written “by a citizen of Geneva.” He submitted it to an essay contest on “Whether the restoration of the Sciences and Arts has contributed to the purification of morals.” Rousseau answered with a “no” and won.
Because “Discourse that won the Prize of The Academy of Dijon In the year 1750 On this Question proposed by the Academy: Whether the restoration of the Sciences and the Arts has contributed to the purification of morals” is quite a few words, that essay is usually just called “The First Discourse.” Rousseau followed “The First Discourse” with “The Second Discourse,” or the “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men” for long. He also submitted it to an Academy of Dijon essay contest, but this time, he did not win.
While “The First Discourse” made Rousseau famous, “The Second Discourse” made him legendary. In it, Rousseau tries to imagine how humans behaved before cities, states, and social hierarchies. He noticed that Hobbes and others who had previously tried to describe humans in a state of nature attribute wants, needs, and desires to their imagined “natural” humans that would only arise in later political orders. To remedy this, Rousseau attempts to describe people uncorrupted by education or socialization. What he ends up imagining is a world of Victors of Aveyron—everyone running naked through the forest, eating roots from the ground, and talking to no one. Rousseau admits it is difficult “to know a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never did exist.”[3] It’s unclear if he adds this warning because he thinks his speculations are probably inaccurate, or if he just wanted a defense built into his text in case any authorities noticed how different his history of early humans is from the biblical account.
Throughout the essay, Rousseau refuses to even consider that early humans might have hung out with each other or even kept track of their children. He writes that “as soon as they had the strength to forage on their own, they left even the Mother; And since almost the only way to find one another again was not to lose sight of one another in the first place, they soon were at the point of not even recognizing each other.”[4] He has trouble imagining how such solitary humans might have ever invented languages, stating that “Men having no relations with one another and no need of any, this invention is inconceivable unless it was unavoidable.”[5]
At some point, although Rousseau is not entirely certain why this change took place, these solitary people settled down, started to talk, developed agriculture and metallurgy, and also began mistreating each other. “Nascent society gave way to the most horrible state of war.”[6] This era was no fun for anyone. Eventually, someone suggested that “instead of turning our forces against one another, let us gather them into a supreme power that might govern us according to wise Laws, protect and defend all the members of the association, repulse common enemies, and preserve us in everlasting concord.”[7]
This attempt to create and preserve everlasting concord did not work out well for them or any subsequent people, and is, according to Rousseau, the source of political inequality. “All ran toward their chains in the belief that they were securing their freedom; for while they had enough reason to sense the advantages of a political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers.”[8] By creating a social contract to alleviate the suffering they were causing each other, they accidentally subjugated the many to the few, and forced most people to live lives of misery and servitude.
For Rousseau, political inequality emerged from a mistake our ancestors made. It did not emerge from violence, coercion, or force. He writes that “Peoples gave themselves Chiefs to defend their freedom, and not to enslave them,”[9] and that “Arbitrary Power, being by its Nature illegitimate, cannot have served as the foundations for the Rights of Society, nor, consequently, for instituted inequality.”[10]
Do We Have To Agree?
Eight years after “The Second Discourse,” Rousseau published Emile, or on Education. A section of that book is called “The Creed of a Savoyard Priest,” and it angered enough authorities that warrants went out for his arrest all across the European continent. His books were burnt. Rousseau eventually accepted fellow philosopher David Hume’s offer of exile in England, but less than a year later, Rousseau was leaving England and reentering France under a fake name after a bitter argument with Hume. It had little to do with philosophical differences, and much more to do with an anonymously published personal attack that Rousseau decided Hume must have at least helped write.
Although their friendship ended over personal differences, they also had philosophical differences they could have fought over if they wanted. In “The Second Discourse,” Rousseau insists that our ancestors must have submitted to authority voluntarily, since neither violence, coercion, or force could function as the foundations for government. In his essay “Of The Original Contract,” Hume argues for the opposite. He writes that “Almost all governments, which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally, either on usurpation, conquest, or both, without any pretence of a fair consent, or voluntary subjection of the people.”[11] In a justifiably famous passage later in the essay, Hume points out that the poor are generally incapable of leaving the places they find themselves, comparing them to kidnapped sailors, stating that “We may as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.”[12]
Hume acts as if his arguments annihilate all social contract theories. His points are certainly good ones. Sometimes, and maybe always, the best way to establish a state is to find a group of people and beat them into submission. Although Hume’s essay certainly makes Rousseau’s account of creating governments appear fundamentally flawed, other proponents of social contract theory actually agree with Hume. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, thought legitimate sovereign power could emerge from either voluntary contract or violent conquest. The end result will be identical in both cases—we agree to obey.
Hobbes published his most famous work, the Leviathan, just a few years after Charles I lost his head to an executioner’s sword, an event that signaled the end of the British monarchy and the start of the Commonwealth of England. Charles’ beheading occurred near the Westminster School, where yet another social contract theorist, John Locke, was then a student. Locke heard the collective groan from the crowd when the sword came down and the King’s head came off. Hobbes, however, was not close enough to hear what Locke heard. He was in France, quite possibly tutoring Charles II at that very moment.
The fact that Hobbes wrote the Leviathan during the English Civil War may help explain why he decided we can only choose between total obedience to an absolute sovereign or a chaotic war of all against all. Hobbes claims that without a sovereign authority providing and enforcing laws, we return to a state of nature and total freedom. While this might sound nice, Hobbes insists it’s horrific. Anyone could kill us at any time, which is why we left the state of nature and accepted limitations on our freedom in exchange for safety. Importantly, this may happen peacefully, as “when men agree among themselves, to submit to some man, or assembly of men, voluntarily.” But he also agrees with Hume that states can emerge without “the voluntary subjection of the people.” Hobbes writes that sovereign power can also arise when someone “by war subdueth his enemies to his will.”[13] Hume’s critique of social contract theory is thus inapplicable to Hobbes, and his argument does not destroy the entire field as well as he seems to think it does.
But there are other, more damaging, critiques of social contract theory. Although Rousseau and Hobbes had very different accounts of the state of nature, both agree that it probably never existed. So their arguments are best understood, not as explaining the actual historical origins of states, but as philosophical justifications for our political obligations in the present. These are thought experiments to help us understand why we live like we do. But these thought experiments are based on flawed conceptions of human beings and how we create our collective powers.
For both thinkers, individuals precede society and constitute the unit from which we construct political structures. In an often-quoted passage in the Leviathan, Hobbes describes life in a state of nature as “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.”[14] It’s noteworthy that solitary is first on the list. Like Rousseau’s imagined early humans who live in total solitude and speak to no one, Hobbes attempts to strip all socialization away from us to better imagine what sort of society we would like to make. If Victor of Aveyron is any indication, we would all hide from each other, stockpile walnuts, and say nothing to anyone. There would never be cities, kings, metallurgy, or the need to make a social contract.
The primacy of the individual is also evident in Emile, the book that got Rousseau in enough trouble that he had to go hide at Hume’s house. In it, Rousseau describes the education of a fictional boy named Emile from the perspective of his brilliant tutor Jean-Jacques. At one point, Jean-Jacques says that “Since we absolutely must have books, there exists one which, to my taste, provides the most felicitous treatise on natural education. This book will be the first that my Emile will read. For a long time it will alone compose his whole library.”[15] This book is Robinson Crusoe.
Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, making it one of the earliest novels in English. The title character is the sole survivor of a shipwreck who spends twenty-eight years on an island, and most of that time as the only human inhabitant. His experience has an almost Hobbesian movement from fear and uncertainty in a state of nature to safety and security through sovereignty. Immediately after the shipwreck, unsure what dangerous creatures might be around, Robinson decides his only option “was, to get up into a thick bushy tree like a firr, but thorny, which grew near me, and where I resolved to set all night, and consider the next day what death I should dye, for as yet I saw no prospect of life.”[16] Several decades later, having established a goat farm and sufficient crops to bake bread, Robinson befriends a man who escapes cannibals. Rather than ask this man his name, Robinson decides to call him “Friday,” and tells Friday to call him “Master.” Later, Robinson and Friday save Friday’s father and a Spanish sailor from a cannibalistic sacrifice similar to the one Friday had escaped. Robinson muses that he had become king of his island. “The whole country had become my meer property; so that I had undoubted right of dominion.”[17]
Rousseau writes that Emile will learn from Robinson Crusoe that “The surest means of raising oneself above prejudices and ordering one’s judgements about the true relations of things is to put oneself in the place of an isolated man and to judge everything as this man himself ought to judge of it with respect to his own utility.”[18] As this passage illustrates, for Rousseau, imagining oneself as an isolated individual is the ideal starting point for all inquiries, and imparting this wisdom is a central part of any good education.
Although Robinson Crusoe is fiction, Daniel Defoe modeled his title character from a composite of several very real shipwrecked sailors who survived to tell their tales. The most well-known of these was Alexander Selkirk. He was kicked off a ship for annoying his captain and then left on an uninhabited island for over four years. Selkirk had a Bible and a few other books, and attempted to maintain his use of words and language, but when he was finally rescued, he spoke haltingly, pausing awkwardly in the middle of words, as if he had almost lost the power of speech.
Considering Selkirk and Victor of Aveyron, it seems that isolation hinders our ability to speak or communicate. This makes sense. Our thoughts are embedded in, and take shape through, shared languages and interactions. Languages exist socially and historically, changing and developing over time through collective use. As languages and the words within them shift and change meaning, the realm of possible thoughts also shifts and changes. But in the intellectual milieu in which Hobbes and Rousseau operated, there is not just an emphasis on analyzing individuals in isolation, but an assumption that these individuals possess an internal theater of the mind where they can watch their reason produce propositions—propositions that just need to take shape in a language.
For most Enlightenment-era philosophers, propositions are mental entities with a life of their own, and putting them into words is a secondary act. However, propositions cannot preexist our interactions with one another, because they are generated by and through our interactions. It is through associating that we learn how to think. So without one another, we cannot become ourselves. This does not mean that groups are more important than individuals or that we should all subsume our wills to some collective. But true individuation does not happen in isolation. The power to become ourselves is a collective one, and we cannot actualize ourselves without each other.
Social contract theory imagines isolated individuals, and then tries to imagine how they might choose to interact. Even as a thought experiment, social contract theory misunderstands how people with the collective power to charter future interactions could ever come into being. We are always already interacting, and can choose, in the languages and practices we have, how we could do better or differently in the future. From isolation, with no common language, this is impossible. We cannot generate a social order from isolated individuals. Social orders generate individuals, who can then refine or reconfigure those social orders, and in turn, reconfigure themselves to fit that new social order, on and on, into whatever world their actions are helping them generate.
Beaten Into Submission
It is here that Hume’s critique returns, only slightly transformed and refocused. In our small sampling of social contract theorists, only half of them actually thought we have to agree to be governed to make a government legitimate—Rousseau thought we had to agree, but Hobbes figured it didn’t really matter. The real problem with social contract theory—and Hume’s critique leaves this unchallenged—is the assumption we need to figure out why individuals choose to be governed. A better question is, how does our collectively generated power become estranged from us? How is it that we, as groups, come to be governed? In Hume’s metaphor of poor people as sailors involuntarily impressed into service on a ship, he is still treating the individual as the primary unit of politics. But Hume’s point that almost all governments are founded on usurpation or conquest is still an important one when analyzing state formation and how power gets hoarded.
Hume is not the only philosopher to point out that it takes violence to rule over others. In the Republic, Plato describes his ideal guardians descending on a city they plan to rule. “Let’s arm these earthborn scions of ours and lead them out, with the rulers at their head. When they arrive at the city, let them look and see what the best location will be for them to pitch their camp, one that would make it easiest for them both to keep those inside the city in check, should anyone refuse to obey the laws, and to fight off those outside the city.”[19] And writing almost a century after Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche defined a “state” as “a herd of blonde beasts of prey, a master race, a race of conquerors which, aggressive, powerful and organized, pounces with its most horrid claws on an unsuspecting population, one which in numbers may be tremendously superior, but is still undisciplined and nomadic. Such is the origin of the ‘state’ (I think we have disposed of the notion, one held enthusiastically by many, according to which the ‘state’ originates with a sort of contract).”[20]
Sadly, establishing and maintaining governments through violence doesn’t just happen on the pages of philosophy books. It also happens in reality. As the Chinese Empire expanded, groups uninterested in assimilating repeatedly migrated beyond its reach. Initially, settling away from navigable rivers and passable roads leading to centers of state power proved sufficient, but eventually, maintaining self-rule required moving upwards into the mountains, since altitude can allow autonomy. These various groups, collectively referred to as the Miao by the Chinese, were finally forced to accept the peaks of the southern mountains as the only remaining way to evade state control.
The Miao who assimilated were called “cooked,” while those who insisted on going to the mountains to govern themselves were referred to as “raw.” When the “raw” Miao rebelled against further attempts at forced assimilation in 1795, the Chinese waged a war. The Qianlong Emperor, who was also responsible for the Dzungar genocide in the north, wrote a poem celebrating his victory against the Miao in the south, stating that “The mountains of the conquered countries, full of dangerous rocks and frightful precipices, are all levelled,” and “The news, which formerly was ten days arriving through the difficult passes, is now brought in eight.”[21] Sometimes, obliterating the safety of altitude is the only way to bring the unwilling under control.
More than a century and a half later, descendants of these same Miao found themselves no longer living in communal villages on the periphery of the Chinese Empire, but in communal villages on the periphery of the Thai state. Borders, being arbitrary, tend to move around. In 1967, Thai officials attempted to tax poppy cultivation, which the mountain dwellers rejected. The Royal Thai Army used napalm and artillery against them, treating an unwillingness to assimilate like a full-scale insurgency. Once again, it became clear that the best way to make or expand a state is to beat the unwilling into submission.
Such attacks on smaller, usually more egalitarian, groups are not the only way centralized governments appear or expand. In some of the earliest cities, such as Uruk in Mesopotamia, archeological evidence suggests that several centuries passed without kings, palaces, or certain people getting buried in special ways. This points to a high level of equality that lasted for many centuries, which means that many generations lived and died in Uruk free from the hierarchical control of a ruling clique. At some point, certain person or persons took authority away from the group and turned it against them, just like Plato’s guardians or Nietzsche’s blonde beasts of prey. Oligarchy or monarchy didn’t make Uruk possible. It was the other way around.
Centralized governments take the power that people generate collectively, and then use that power to control the people that initially generated the power the governments appropriate. It is not, as Hobbes and Rousseau assumed, that governments are created to bring people together in order to then generate collective capacities and accomplish goals. Our collective capacities don’t just pre-exist any kind of formal government, but make governments possible in the first place. The people united can get by on their own. The same can’t be said for rulers and oligarchs.
[1] Harlan Lane, The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976), 10.
[2] Ibid., 100.
[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 127.
[4] Ibid., 149.
[5] Ibid., 148.
[6] Ibid., 176.
[7] Ibid., 177.
[8] Ibid., 178.
[9] Ibid., 181.
[10] Ibid., 184.
[11] David Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” in Political Writings, eds. Stuart Warner and Donald Livingston (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1994), 168.
[12] Ibid., 172.
[13] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 115.
[14] Ibid., 84.
[15] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education (1763: New York: Basic Books, 1979), 184.
[16] Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719: New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 39.
[17] Ibid., 190.
[18] Rousseau, Emile, 185.
[19] Plato, Republic (c. 380 BCE: New York: Penguin Classics, 2012), 119.
[20] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887: New York: Penguin Classics, 2013), 72.
[21] The Conquest of the Miao-Tse: An Imperial Poem by Kien-lung (London: C & R Baldwin, 1810), 34.