94 Chapter V
1763, when he held that government should favor the common man against the
Bohemian landlords.
It is in his discussion of representative institutions that Rousseau seems most
absurd.^15 Not that he is lacking here in realistic observation. His world was full of
bodies allegedly representative and elective—the third chambers in the estates of
Languedoc and Brittany, the House of Commons, the Dutch estates, certain
houses in the east- European diets, the ruling councils at Geneva and other
towns—which almost without exception had acquired strong features of cooption
and self- perpetuation, and which claimed to exercise, not a delegated power, but a
power of their own. When a people is willing thus to abdicate its own powers and
responsibilities, says Rousseau, it is on the brink of ruin. The English people are free
only at the moment of electing members of Parliament, after which they become
enslaved; had he known more of elections in England he would scarcely have made
even this concession. A people that turns over its military affairs to mercenaries,
and its political affairs to a closed political class, the better to enjoy its own ease or
pursue private business, cannot be free. In a good state men will have little private
interest or private business; they will be constantly busy as citizens, attending as-
semblies, watching over officials, ratifying laws. They cannot delegate the lawmak-
ing power, because this power is a power of sovereignty itself. He therefore de-
nounces representative assemblies as a benighted invention of the feudal ages, and
favors in effect a direct democracy of popular assemblies en permanence. This was to
become an important idea in time of revolution. But there is no denying that the
growth of an effective representative government has owed more to the aristocratic
liberal than to the Rousseauist and popular democratic schools.
Much has been made of the theory of civil religion appended at the end of the
Social Contract, and here again Rousseau can be easily misrepresented.^16 It was pre-
cisely because he proposed to grant freedom of religion, precisely because he would
not associate his state with any church membership or doctrine, and because he
thought that a community must nevertheless agree upon something, that he sug-
gested in his final chapter “a purely civil profession of faith,” a few simple “dogmas”
of civil religion, having to do with the existence of God and the after- life, “without
explanation or commentaries,” and including a declaration against religious intol-
erance. Anyone who accepted these doctrines, or rather attitudes, and then went
against them, declares our author, “should be punished with death”—a “truth”
which Robespierre was to observe should best be left in the writings of Rousseau.
It does not seem that these ideas of Rousseau had as much influence as has been
pretended; when Robespierre tried in 1794 to institutionalize something of the
sort, his own colleagues laughed behind his back; and it seems exaggerated to look
here, of all possible places, for the origins of later totalitarian regimentation of the
mind.
Withal, the Social Contract is full of conservative admonitions. Like the Ameri-
can Declaration of Independence, it asserts that government should not be
changed for light and transient causes. “Changes are always dangerous, and estab-
15 Bk. III, Chap. XVI.
16 Bk. IV, Chap. VIII, Ibid., 240 –41.