The Anatomy of Democracy: Rousseau S Body Politic and the General Will

The Anatomy of Democracy: Rousseau’s Body Politic and the General Will

Jeffery Zavadil, Ph.D.

Arizona State University

February 2006

Abstract: I interpret the general will via Rousseau’s metaphor of the body politic. Older examples of this metaphor were hierarchic due to crude anatomy, with the “head” of state commanding the social body. Modern medical sophistication, e.g. discovery of the circulatory and nervous systems, emphasized bodily interconnection and interdependence. This conceptual shift transferred to Rousseau’s democratic body politic: in a healthy body politic the political nervous system communicates with the administrative brain, conveying the general will of the sovereign political body to the administration. The general will is a democratic diagnostic with egalitarian social health as its substantive content.

Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2004 meeting of the Northeastern Political Science Association in Boston, MA. I am grateful for the critical comments of Terence Ball, Richard Dagger, David Guston, Timothy Ruback, Scott Roulier, Efrat Waksman, and Ian Andrew MacRae Ward, which have improved this paper.

Rousseau’s general will still attracts attention after two-and-a-half centuries because it seems to tap into something important: most of us, at times, think and talk about polities as if they were persons with wills. It is also a complex, paradoxical, and controversial concept, and some scholars have wisely warned that no single interpretation is likely to pin it down (e.g. Thakurdas 1976, vii). In this paper I attempt to clarify the general will by using Rousseau’s metaphor of the body politic as an interpretive guide. This seems a good place to seek clarification, for the general will is the will of a political body just as an individual will is the will of a natural body (Allen 1961, 264, 265; Kelly 1986, 17-18; Saccaro-Battisti 1983, 39). Furthermore, a focus on bodily imagery seems appropriate, since Rousseau so clearly and frequently availed himself of the vocabulary and logic of the body to describe his ideal republic. The body politic appears prominently throughout Rousseau’s wider political philosophy and gives it structure and form. An analysis of Rousseau’s distinctive use of it should interest both democratic theorists and conceptual historians: wheras earlier political philosophers had usually applied the body politic in elitist or authoritarian ways, Rousseau turned it in a more democratic direction. While Rousseau was not a pure or unqualified democrat (his political thought might best be characterized as democratic-republican; see OC 3.403-405; CW 4.173-4),1 I will argue that his body politic is one of the more democratic features of his thought. Given Rousseau’s influence on modern democratic theory and practice, his body metaphor is of considerable theoretical and historical importance. 2

My focus on metaphor is also inspired and informed by new metaphor theories in philosophy, cognitive science, and linguistics (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). In recent decades, the conventional wisdom that metaphor is only epiphenomenal or heuristic has undergone much critical scrutiny, and consequently metaphor is increasingly understood as fundamental to the generation and construction of meaning.3 The human body, in particular, frequently serves as a metaphoric resource for understanding complex phenomena such as states and societies, something that Rousseau recognized: he once declared that humans “are for the most part veritable anthropomorphites” in that we export our own self-image into the world (Emile OC 4.552; Bloom trans., 256). Rousseau used other metaphors too, of course, but he turned to the body politic often and it is especially pertinent to the general will, and so a methodical analysis of Rousseau’s organic metaphors ought to help refine our interpretations of it. Methodologically, I combine metaphor analysis with contextualist interpretive approaches in order to keep in mind an historically sound idea of “body”: discourses about the body were different in Rousseau’s time than in our own, and this affects his body politic.

Let me preface my analysis by challenging a common interpretation of the general will, one which has, it seems to me, run into something of a dead end. Many readers of Rousseau conceive of the general will in formal mathematical and/or procedural terms, as though it were a problem in social choice theory rather than of moral philosophy. In this view, the general will is thought to be the result of a special voting procedure that Rousseau unfortunately never articulated satisfactorily, and so the main difficulty now is to formulate that procedure correctly. Focusing excessively on Rousseau’s comment that the general will is the sum of the differences of individual wills, “take away from those same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel each other out,” interpreters keep looking for the right formula to quantify the general will as though it were an economist’s preference function (OC 3.371; CW 4.147). The “Condorcetian perspective” is one example of many (Grofman and Feld 1988, 567; see also Runciman and Sen 1965; Sreenivasan 2000, 554ff). Despite much effort, this abstract approach has yet to discover what the “correct” voting procedure for the general will might be, if such a procedure even exists. This failure has caused some to abandon the concept as irrational (Shapiro 2003, 10-15, 21, 146) – an injudicious conclusion, in my view. Other efforts to somehow tabulate votes into a recognizable general will have misled some into treating it as a mere aggregation of particular wills, despite Rousseau’s vigorous distinction between the general will and the will of all. One interpreter observed that “Rousseau is particularly vague in discussing how the general will is to be discovered,” and concluded that “It is a formal principle quite without material content” with which Rousseau was trying to calculate the “greatest good of the greatest number” (Allen 1961, 264, 265, 272, 274). Formalism here has led to a utilitarian reading that Rousseau would undoubtedly have rejected as a version of the will of all. The procedural approach is abetted by the continuing temptation in some circles of political theory to engage in decontextualized analysis. Without placing the general will in context, interpreters must resort to excess abstraction and become absorbed in process, because without content all that is left is procedure.

The general will cannot, I think, be reduced to a formal process, for it involves much more than quantification. Formal rules for voting can at best illuminate only part of the general will’s meaning. To be sure, Rousseau had to discuss the counting of votes vis-à-vis collective decision-making, but this does not mean that formal process is the central matter addressed by the general will. Counting votes is, if you will, the punctuation mark at the end of the general will, and while an exclamation or question mark can tell you something about the meaning of a sentence, looking at punctuation alone is an exercise in futility. One must first understand the content of the sentence. So it is with the general will: Rousseau had a definite content in mind for it, which must be understood before quantifying votes. Since so much has been said in the secondary literature about vote-counting without clarifying matters, I will take a different tack and focus on the content of the general will rather than on procedures. 4 Accordingly, I will attempt to reconstruct the general will in a qualitative rather than quantitative way using Rousseau’s metaphor of the body politic as the main template for his reasoning. 5

Unfortunately, proceduralists have resisted using Rousseau’s organic metaphors to guide their interpretations. One scholar wrote that “We fall into misunderstanding of Rousseau if we attempt to identify the general will… if, for instance, we press his analogy of the body politic and the human body too far…” (Allen 1961, 272). Another acknowledged Rousseau’s use of the body politic and its relation to the general will but summarily dismissed it: “Whatever else it is, the general will is the will of this moral body, that is, of the associates’ common self. I do not take this to be especially informative…” (Sreenivasan 2000, 550). Yet since Rousseau himself thought the body politic relevant enough to inform his theory, we ought not ignore it (c.f. Conroy 1979, 4,12). By tracing out the metaphoric mapping of the human body onto political society as Rousseau himself would have understood it – and Rousseau had a sophisticated understanding of anatomy – we will find some content for the general will that, I believe, is a prerequisite to proper comprehension of it. We will also gain insight into how the general will can best be discovered – whether through voting or perhaps some alternate method – that might help bypass the aporia of proceduralist interpretations.

The Body Politic: Medical and Political

The metaphor of the body politic is arguably the West’s oldest and most ubiquitous political metaphor. Bodily metaphors inform and organize entire schools of political theory, from classical republicanism to medieval monarchism to modern realist international theory. Organic language is also part and parcel of common political speech: consider terms such as head of state, member of society, armed forces, organization, corporation, constitution, social disease, economic growth, invisible hand, and so on, all of which have etymological roots in the body.

In the body politic, typically, different parts of society correspond to different parts of the human body, and a healthy political body properly integrates these interdependent parts into a hierarchy that mimics the anatomy of the body natural. These themes of hierarchy and interdependence have usually been combined: the parts of both a body natural and a body politic are interconnected and must cooperate together if the whole is to survive (Ball 1988, 27-32), yet this interconnection traditionally implied that a healthy and unified body politic be governed by a single head, just as a body natural is. This combination is clear in medieval political thought, as can be seen in John of Salisbury’s picturesque body politic ([1159] 1990, V.2 and passim; c.f. Christine de Pizan [1406] 1994; Kantorowicz [1957] 1997). For John, the prince was the head of state who commanded from the top of the political body, while the senate was the heart; provincial governors were the eyes, ears, and mouth; soldiers were the weapon-bearing hands and arms; clerks and scribes were the stomach and intestines; and peasants were the feet. All the parts of John’s social body depended upon one another, because disease or injury in any part afflicted the whole. To John’s medieval mind, however, interdependence led not to equality between the parts but only to the moral exhortation that kings should take care to rule in the interest of all, while lower orders should obey and be content with their appointed stations. Thus John’s body politic combined interdependence and hierarchy to justify a feudal monarch ruling from the top just as a head rules a body.

If we leap ahead to Rousseau’s century, we find bodies politic that look very different from this. Older versions like John’s had a relatively uncomplicated political anatomy of head, hands, torso, and feet. Later versions needed a more sophisticated conceptual apparatus in order to describe an increasingly complex modern society.6 Conceptual change generally occurs hand-in-hand with “large-scale, and often gradual and unconscious, shifts in the models and metaphors that dominate our discourse,” and for the body politic this has been especially true at the intersection of medical and political discourse (Ball 1988, 23-26; q.v. Saccaro-Battisti 1983, 31 n.2, 33; Kelly 1986, 9, 22ff.). Bodies politic became more sophisticated in tandem with modern anatomy, and advances in modern medical science were reflected in organic political conceptions. Political thinkers began talking about flows of money as akin to blood circulation, or of legal rewards and penalties as nerves which gave the body politic motion (OC 3.244; CW 3.142-3; Hobbes [1651] 1996, 9, 166-176, Chs. 23 and 24). These changes altered the balance of hierarchy and interdependence in the body politic. Discovery of the circulatory and nervous systems meant that life depended on systems stretching throughout the natural body and connecting all its limbs and organs, a re-conceptualization that, when metaphorically transferred to politics, led to a greater emphasis on interdependence over hierarchy. This change is essential to understanding Rousseau’s body politic.

The medical advances in the centuries preceding Rousseau were immense. Western medicine had, by Rousseau’s time, long overcome the prohibition against dissection that had mired it in the mistaken theory of the four humors since antiquity (Lonrigg 1997, 35-37; McVaugh 1997, 62-63). Vesalius’ highly influential sixteenth century treatise on anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body), had contained detailed illustrations of human anatomy sketched from countless dissections of human bodies (Vesalius, [1543] 1967). Anatomy was further advanced by William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood in 1628, and around the same time the followers of Paracelsus incorporated chemistry into medicine. Anatomical knowledge was not only becoming more sophisticated but was reaching wider audiences: numerous medical colleges and hospitals built dissection theaters to train physicians, and the general populace was able to view public dissections of executed criminals – Bologna even held dissections at its regular carnival (Cook 1997, 84-85). These dissections demonstrated to the public the wonders of God’s craftsmanship in the human body, for they believed his handiwork as the great artificer of nature to be on display. This vision of Deo fabricator facilitated the introduction of mechanical metaphors to explain the physiology of the natural body, which spread rapidly. Galileo’s follower Giovanni Borelli, for example, described bodily functions with mechanical analogies, and Hermann Boerhaave’s 1703 lecture De usu ratiocinii mechanici in medicina at the University of Leyden further promoted the metaphor of man-as-machine (Borelli 1680-1681; Boerhaave 1703). This metaphor was common among Rousseau’s contemporaries: it was, for example, the title and topic of La Mettrie’s L’homme machine (La Mettrie [1748] 1996; see also Kelly 1986, 9-12; Cook 1997, 85). The introduction of the metaphor of the machine to describe organic bodies was an important development which rapidly transferred to the metaphor of the body politic. The first great sophisticated version of the body politic to appear during this wave of modern medical advances was that of Thomas Hobbes, who mixed anatomical complexity with the new mechanism in a recipe that supported the absolute rule of a sovereign monarch. Rousseau’s later body politic contrasted with Hobbes’ in that it was mostly unmechanical and mainly democratic, and therefore it will be helpful to proceed via comparison of the two. I will not offer a complete analysis of Hobbes’ complex organic imagery here but will only touch on relevant points.