At 10:48 AM 05/17/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>Second, the claim that forcing people to be free is OK does not follow
>from malleability, if if Marx held the malleability thesis.
Rousseau used the seemingly sinister saying about forcing people to be
free. But one of his points, I believe, is that _any_ society involves
forcing people to be free. It's not a matter of assuming the total
malleability of individuals' characters. For example, Locke's social
contract -- the theoretical basis of thinkers such as Adam Smith --
involves forcing people to be free even though he seems to assume that
preferences are exogenously given: people must be forced by the state to
accept individual property rights and the property system that preserves
those rights. This in turn creates the freedom of property-owners to use
their property as they wish (as long as they don't violate others' property
rights). The property system is what economists call a pure public good,
which cannot exist without coercion by the state. As long as there is a
state, people are being "forced to be free."
Rousseau's point is that society creates freedom, since there is no such
thing as "natural" freedom. Without a society "forcing people to free," a
totally uncivilized and inhuman "state of nature" results. In some ways,
Rousseau's hypothetical state of nature (stateless society) is worse than
that of Hobbes, which involves perpetual war. As with Aristotle, Rousseau
thought that without society people are mere beasts, slaves to instinct and
necessity.
Contrary to popular opinion, Rousseau did not believe in the "noble savage"
before or outside society's strictures; rather, he saw small-town
democracy, as in his idealized visions of his contemporary Geneva and
ancient Greek city-states, as what to strive for. "Savages" are not moral
or immoral in his view. They are amoral, since morality arises with society.
Rousseau did assume that people were malleable (his word was
"perfectible"). Beyond the two instincts he posits (that of survival and
that of empathy with others), people seem to be mere empty vessels that are
filled by society. They don't even have bodies, as in Butler's ideas as
Doug presents them. (It's preminiscent of modern "structuralist" or
sociological-determinist thinking, which is what Mine seems to believe in.)
Rousseau's solution is to have people democratically decide how they are to
be molded by society (via education, censorship, a civic religion, etc.),
so that even though people are forced to be free, they are the ones who
decide what they are forced to do. That his solution doesn't really work
is well known. I also talk about its problems in a soon-to-be-published
article in POLITICS & SOCIETY.
To Marx, people are molded by society, but that society is also created by
people. (To Marx, people are more complicated than for Rousseau, as Justin
points out.) This two-way interaction occurs not as some sort of
hypothetical social contract (as seen in Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau) but
as an historical process. (See Marx & Engels' discussion of the Social
Contract in THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY.) In the end, Marx looked for a situation
where people created a society which produced cooperation so that people no
longer had to live under a state, so that the difference between state and
society disappeared. This is what Rousseau was hoping for, but never achieved.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine
