Abstract
For Rousseau, social contract is a hypothetical one; the paper claims that it is, in contemporary terms, a political thought-experiment (TE). The abductive way of thinking, looking for the best normative pattern in the data, finds its counterpart in the historical abduction in the Second Discourse; the analogy between the two secures the methodological unity of Rousseau’s political philosophy. The proposed reading of the work as a TE shows that it fulfills the necessary requirements put by (hopefully) intuitively acceptable definition of a TE, and fits in the contractarian tradition that has been experimenting with hypothetical arrangements since its start. The reading of The Social Contract as a TE has helped to systematize some of its shortcomings from the wider perspective of methodology of political philosophy. Finally, the political thought experiment (PTE) reading of Rousseau places his central work where it belongs: in the tradition started by Plato’s Republic, continuing with Renaissance and early modern philosophical utopias, culminating in the contractarian social contract TE, and going all the way to the work of Rawls and his present day continuators. We hope that this can contribute to a more positive picture of Rousseau’s work, despite criticism concerning his brusque manner of thought-experimenting.
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Notes
The paper’s ancestors were also presented at conferences in Dubrovnik and Graz, and at Philosophy Department in York. Thanks go to Friderik Klampfer, Udo Thiel, DeAngelis, Lukas Mayer, Pranay Sankecha, Christian Piller, Tom Baldwin, J.R. Brown, Danilo Šuster, Alastair Norcross, Boran Berčić, Adam Hossein, Amber L. Griffioen and Momo Matulović.
I develop the parallel in more detail in (Miscevic, forthcoming a), presented at a Rousseau Conference in Zagreb in 2012.
Here is a quote from Niiniluoto:
Hanson (1961) proposed that Peircean abduction gives reasons for suggesting a hypothesis, as distinguished from reasons for accepting a hypothesis. According to Isaac Levi (1979; 1995, 85), the task of abduction is to establish the "ultimate partition“ of potential answers to a cognitive problem. A similar point has been made by saying that the conclusion of abduction states that there are reasons for pursuing a hypothesis (…) or finding a hypothesis testworthy. The ability of a hypothesis to give at least a potentially correct answer to a question, or to give a potential explanation of the facts known so far, is an important part of the before-trial evaluation of a hypothesis. (1999, 94)
For a discussion of genealogical TEs in social science, see (Reiss 2013).
Hobbes is the most serious competitor for the discoverer of the hypothetical nature of social contrast. Still, he presents his own story about the contract as a theory about how authority emerged historically from an actual state of nature. As David Boucher and Paul Kelly write:
Hobbes’s theory, however, is more a theory of the origin and legitimacy of political obligation and sovereignty than an attempt to ground morality in mutual consent. (1994, 2)
This understanding is echoed by authors like Lucien Jaume (2007) and by J. S. McClelland, who discusses the similarities between the paradigmatic creation of sovereignty by Institution, and the more historically plausible Acquisition of sovereignty (1996, 190). In contrast, Rawls brings Hobbes closer to a hypothetical understanding of the contract, and offers three possible readings of his proposal (2007, 30–35). Pettit also notes ambivalences.
The contract described in the generation of the commonwealth by institution need not have occurred in history, he thinks, so it does not figure as a legitimating historical event. But neither does it figure primarily as an ethical heuristic, (…). Its first job in Hobbes is to reveal to us the true nature of the commonwealth and demonstrate that any commonwealth worthy of the name will have certain characteristics. (2008, 118)
A similar view is taken by Alan Ryan (1996, 227):
It is, of course, absurd to imagine that we could literally make the sort of covenant that Hobbes describes as a "Covenant of every man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man. . . ." It is far from absurd to imagine that we could in effect indicate to others that we proposed to accept such-and-such a person or body of persons as an authority until it was proved to be more dangerous to do so than to continue in the state of nature. In a manner of speaking, we do it the entire time inside existing political societies.
For non-philosophical reasons for Hobbes’s changes of mind, see (Kinch Hoekstra 2004).
Even a very charitable reading of Locke, offered by Jeremy Waldron, admits that Locke saw the model of free consent as being de facto present in human history:
…Locke’s claim, …, is not that we should have government by consent just because our ancestors did, but rather that the history of human politics represents a framework and a continuum of consent given freely, though perhaps implicitly, down the ages by the members of succeeding generations, and broken only by occasional violations of consensual principles on the part of governments. Since an overlapping history of consensual government would retain direct moral significance for our practice today, it is important to find out what actually happened. (Waldron 1994, 61)
It has been noted that Newton’s solar system worked as a kind of paradigm for Rousseau’s picture of political system (Carter 2006).
Here is the text:
Moreover, the alienation being without reserve, the union is as perfect as it can be, and no associate has anything more to demand: for, if the individuals retained certain rights, as there would be no common superior to decide between them and the public, each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature would thus continue, and the association would necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical.
Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he has. (Ibid.)
More precision might be needed. Does any act of imagining count? The proposal is to distinguish a wide and a narrow conception. On the wide conception, even small imaginative experiments, like those involved in finding out a categorical imperative concerning some given action (token and type), i.e. imagining everyone performing the action, and considering the consequences, count as TEs. On the narrow conception, only systematic, worked-out counterfactual scenarios count as TEs.
The ambiguity is not peculiar to TEs, but rather comes from the very wide application of the term “experiment”. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary offers as its first example sentences that depict scientific practice, talking about “simple laboratory experiments” and “some experiments with magnets”. But then it passes to “an experiment in living more frugally”, and concludes with “the city's experiment with a longer school year”. These last two are not the province of philosophy of science for sure; and we have no problem distinguishing full scientific meaning of “experiment” from its less demanding relatives. For us, the most relevant distinction is one between rudimentary experiments or quasi-experiments (available even to children) and full-fledged scientific ones. We might draw the parallel: rudimentary (quasi-) experiments vs. full-fledged scientific ones on the scientific side, and rudimentary (quasi-) TEs vs. full-fledged philosophical ones on the scientific side. The rough-and-ready tests, like for instance Hare’s put-yourself-in-the-other-person’s-shoes test are rudimentary in this sense. The golden-rule test is the most famous rudimentary (quasi-) TE in ethics. Kant’s universalizability test in its simplest form is certainly rudimentary, but in the (recent) Kantian literature it has been developed into a more complex strategy.
Or “null and void”, as Gurevich has it (Rousseau 1997, 50).
One possible line for further investigation would be to compare Rousseau’s PTE in detail with the contemporary PTEs in the work of J. Rawls (1971), R. Dworkin (2002) and G. A. Cohen (e.g. 2009) and with contemporary debates on political TEs, with names such as G. Gaus (2011) in the forefront; see also Miscevic (forthcoming b).
Let me mention two lines of discussion dealing with these or very similar issues but under different headings, and most often not mentioning PTEs explicitly. The first is the long and well-known Rawls-inspired debate on ideal vs. non-ideal theory [see a useful summary in Stemplowska and Swift (2012), and a fine classification of options in Hamlin and Stemplowska (2012)]. The other is the more recent debate about “utopophobia” and aspirational theory, centered around the work of David Estlund (2008, 2011), and partly available in Political Studies Review vol. 10/2012. I am trying to link these debates explicitly to the PTE problematic in Miscevic (in preparation).
I am quoting Proudhon, since I find his early, mid-nineteenth century reaction interesting and pointing basically in the right direction. See also Jeremy Jennings “Rousseau, social contract and the modern Leviathan“ in (Boucher and Kelley 1994, 130)
Hannah Arendt famously took a different tack. She noted correctly that the presence of enemy, internal or external, creates the kind of solidarity needed for creation of a unanimous “general will“, and then simply projected upon Rousseau the idea of unifying the nation in a constant fight against such enemies; the idea that naturally leads into totalitarianism (1963/1990, 79 ff).
Jameson, writing about Rousseau’s contradictions, gets enthusiastic about the “process, in which confidence in reasoning leads the thinker on fearlessly into a cul-de-sac.” He extols Rousseau’s readiness to “follow his own thinking into the unthinkable” (2005, 696).
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Miscevic, N. In Search of the Reason and the Right—Rousseau’s Social Contract as a Thought Experiment. Acta Anal 28, 509–526 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-013-0200-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-013-0200-x