Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Scholarly attention to equality has been widespread, but only recently has there been a rise in interest in genealogical analysis of natural equality. This interest has come partially in response to Jeremy Waldron’s work on Locke, but Rousseau’s ideas about natural equality have not yet received the attention they warrant. Rousseauian natural equality is significant in part because of its role in shaping Kant’s influential account of human dignity and in part because of its connection to decidedly illiberal ideas about political freedom. Rousseau joins Hobbes in building natural equality on an extreme version of the Deus absconditus. God has not spoken clearly enough to human reason, Rousseau thinks, for Pufendorf’s project to be workable. Therefore Rousseau joins Hobbes in holding that humans are naturally equal in complete moral-legal freedom. But Hobbes’s natural equality is postlapsarian, a condition to be redeemed from. Rousseau’s natural equality is prelapsarian, an ideal to be recovered in a new form in the way Eden is to be recovered as New Jerusalem. For Rousseau, humans are naturally fully autonomous creatures, and they are fulfilled in this condition. Rousseau’s political project is designed to help humans to realize the New-Jerusalem-version of natural equality by making the divine voice audible. Rousseau’s natural man is a pre-linguistic animal; once humans fall upward from this state they cannot return to it. The only hope is to complete the journey away from Eden, to become completely socialized. In Rousseau’s social contract, then, individual autonomy is traded for collective autonomy. Rousseau’s sovereign not only speaks on God’s behalf and rules in his place through volontés générales as God himself does, it is the object of love that purifies and elevates. Hobbes’s Leviathan is a type of Moses; Rousseau’s popular sovereign is a type of Christ. When the general will speaks, citizens on earth need no more reservoir of freedom from it than saints in heaven need from the will of God. Just as for Locke, so also for Rousseau the freedom that matters is freedom to follow God’s will. But unlike Lockean natural equality, Rousseauian natural equality leads to valuation of complete autonomy and then also to a politics meant to redeem.