ABSTRACT
We return now to the conflicting judgments passed on the Social Contract in 1794 and 1814. According to the first, it is a document of liberation, according to the second, it is one of totalitarian enslavement. We now test those judgments in the light of Rousseau’s conception of the law, encapsulated in two rhetorical questions and their rhetorical answers:
[How to] reconcile things that are almost incompatible…the empire of the Laws and the power of men?…There is no liberty where there are no Laws or where someone is above the Laws… A free people obeys, but it does not serve; it has leaders [chefs] and not masters. It obeys the Laws, but it obeys only the Laws, and it is by the force of the Laws that it does not obey men…Any condition imposed on each by all can be burdensome to no one, and the worst of Laws is worth more than the best master; for every master has preferences, whereas the Law never has any. (LMt 8.838, 842-3)
How can it be that (men) obey and no one commands, that they serve and have no master, and are all the freer, in fact, because under what appears as subjugation, no one loses any of his freedom except what would harm the freedom of another? These marvels are the work of the law. It is to law alone that men owe justice and freedom. It is this healthy instrument of the will of all that reestablishes, as a matter of legal right [dans le droit], the natural equality between men. It is this celestial voice that tells each citizen the precepts of public reason, and teaches him to act according to the maxims of his own judgment and not to be in contradiction with himself. (3D 248-9/146)1
The rhetoric of the ‘celestial voice’ reminds us of the voice of conscience, ‘divine instinct, immortal celestial voice, the sure guide for a creature who is ignorant and limited, but intelligent and free, infallible judge of good and bad, sublime emanation of the immortal substance’ (Lmor 5.1111).2 The celestial voices of conscience and of the law command and guide, the one within the individual, the other within the state. Under correct conditions, the guidance of each is infallible. The problem is to specify those conditions.
