Compassion without charity, freedom without liberty: the political fantasies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

• Author: Hocutt, Max

Socialists, progressives, and similar denizens of the political left love to boast about their compassion. They think it distinguishes them from "unfeeling" politicians on the right and gives them the moral high ground in all political debates. The socialist wants to feed the poor children; the capitalist would let them starve. Progressive politicians want to comfort the sick; their reactionary counterparts would watch them suffer. Leftists want to fight oppression; their foes on the right are agents of oppression. And so on. You have heard it all before; it is a familiar refrain--an attempt to win the argument not on the grounds that the leftists' programs are better, but on the grounds that their motives are purer.

We owe the theme of this self-righteous litany, as we owe almost all themes of leftist radicalism, to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century enfant terrible and author of Social Contract, A Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, and other rhetorically brilliant but politically unsound works. Compassion was at once the virtue that Rousseau believed he possessed in greatest measure and the virtue he thought lacking from the unregenerate souls of his benighted fellows, who, he claimed, had been made greedy and unfeeling by society. It should be instructive therefore to discover how he understood compassion and what role he envisaged for it in an ideal political order. As we shall see, Rousseau's compassion was an insubstantial shadow of the real thing, for which he wished to substitute state coercion wrongly called freedom.

My discussion is in two parts. Part 1 relates to compassion, part 2 to freedom. The unifying theme is equality, which Rousseau believed to be essential to both compassion and liberty, although in fact it cannot be reconciled with either. A subtheme is the narcissistic quality of Rousseau's thought, which makes scant appeal to either fact or logic. What passes for argument is usually little more than clever word play. Instead of impersonal evidence, we are offered personal sentiment; in place of considered policy, rank fantasy. (1) The end result is a combination of an intemperate jeremiad, the Origins of Inequality, with a work of political pornography, the Social Contract. Not surprisingly, therefore, Rousseau's influence has been both considerable and disastrous.

Part 1: Compassion Without Charity

The "boy president" William Jefferson Clinton expressed Rousseau's notion of compassion very precisely, if somewhat colloquially, whenever he assured us, as he did frequently, that "I feel your pain." Notice that Clinton's emphasis in these declarations was on his feelings. I know of no evidence that he was ever led to act in ways that entailed his own sacrifice or inconvenience. Not incidentally, however, publicly professing his feelings did get Clinton elected to government offices, where he could wield power in imposing burdens on others, then retire to enrich himself by peripatetic boasting about his efforts to do so. This behavior illustrates two of the main features of leftist compassion--lack of any conceptual connection to personal charity and a belief that special reward is owed to those who express their compassion politically by giving away other people's money.

The prototype for this self-serving form of compassion was Rousseau. As he unwittingly reveals in his Confessions ([1765] 1953), his vaunted fellow feelings were so far from inspiring acts of charity as not even to ensure elementary decency. In one incident, he abandoned a traveling companion who was having an epileptic seizure on a street of an Italian town at which the two of them had recently arrived. On another occasion, he betrayed the trust of an employer who had befriended him by accusing a fellow servant girl of stealing an expensive ribbon that he himself had filched intending to make her a gift of it. When the older lover of his maman died, Rousseau's first thought was pleasure that he would take from getting the man's clothes. The day each of his four children was born, he took it to a foundling home, never to see it again. (2) Rousseau acknowledges that these actions were less than admirable, but he always takes pains to assure us of the compassion he felt for their victims, and he is often moved to declare that people who thought ill of him would realize what a good person he was if only they could see past his feckless conduct into his tender heart. He could act irresponsibly, even viciously, but, as he frequently and proudly tells us, he would cry copious tears about it.

Compassion in Rousseau's State of Nature

A reader who did not know better might regard Rousseau's lachrymose substitute for practical virtue as merely a character flaw having no significance for political philosophy, but in Rousseau political philosophy is autobiography. Thus, his personal sense of compassion is transmogrified into high moral principle in one of his earliest and most influential works, A Discourse on the Origins of Inequality ([1754/1762] 1997). (3) In that revolutionary tract, natural man--man as Rousseau imagines him to be in a mythical state of nature--is said to be innately compassionate. As Rousseau explains, however, this condition most emphatically does not mean that natural man is actively inclined to relieve the miseries of his fellows, much less do them positive acts of kindness. It means only that he is "bound to do no injury" (378). He is good in the highly restricted sense that he is not evil, benevolent in the sense that he is not malevolent. In Rousseau's account, the sole function of natural man's compassion is to constrain him from giving another creature pain, lest his own equanimity be upset by his victim's plaints. Like everything else in Rousseau, compassion is entirely self-referential. As he himself explains, he disliked the suffering of others because contemplating it caused him to suffer, too. He regarded himself as typical in this respect. We have, he said, "a natural repugnance at seeing any other sensible being, and particularly any of our own species, suffer pain or death" (378).

Such narcissistic compassion was the only kind that existed in Rousseau's state of nature because it was the only kind that, according to him, was needed there. As Rousseau envisaged primitive men, they lived--as ethologists now tell us that orangutans live--in more or less solitary isolation from each other, needing neither companionship nor assistance because everything they wanted was ready to hand. "I see [natural man] satisfying his hunger at the first oak, and slaking his thirst at the nearest brook; finding his bed at the foot of the tree which afforded him a repast ... all his wants supplied [by] the natural fertility" of the earth (381). Accordingly, "nature has taken little care to unite mankind by mutual wants" and "contributed little to make [man] sociable" (390). Because "it is impossible to conceive why, in a state of nature, one man should stand more in need of the assistance of another than a monkey or a wolf of the assistance of another of its kind; or granting that he did, what motives could induce that other to assist him" (390), men "maintained no kind of intercourse with one another" (393). Even love between man and woman was unknown. Natural man being interested only in coupling, "every woman equally answers his purpose," and a man "did not know even his own children" (395).

Rousseau's conception of "compassion" contrasts markedly with David Hume's contemporaneous belief in "natural sympathy," a more robust emotion. According to Hume, we are innately endowed with a disposition to share not just the sufferings and pains but also the joys and laughs of our fellows. Moreover, this emotion is not just felt; it also usually manifests itself in other-regarding behavior. It is, in fact, the basis of social morality--active consideration for others. Hume's natural sympathy is, it is true, more limited in scope than Rousseau's compassion. It is felt most strongly for our families and friends and is weakest with regard to strangers and distant foreigners ([1751] 1957, 18). Rousseau's passive and self-regarding "compassion" would have been what we feel for the sufferings of beasts, with whom, according to Hume, we can have no real community (21).

Rousseau's "compassion" and Hume's "natural sympathy" also served different explanatory functions in their philosophies. Like Rousseau's other principles, his postulation of natural compassion appears to have been an inference from introspection. Although he saw little evidence of compassion in other persons, he appears to have reasoned that because he felt compassion himself, others also would have felt it if, like him, they had not been corrupted by society. By contrast, Hume believed in natural sympathy because it seemed to him to explain why people frequently behave unselfishly toward others and because he could not understand how society could hang together on Thomas Hobbes's pessimistic assumption that human beings are naturally so selfish as to be antisocial ([1751] 1957, 43). No doubt, Hume would have made a similar appraisal of Rousseau's self-referential idea that human beings are so self-centered as to be asocial. In either Hobbes's view or Rousseau's, it is difficult to understand how human beings ever managed to form that complicated pattern of cooperation and mutual assistance that we call society. Hume's theory, in contrast, has no such problem.

Property as the Supposed Cause of Inequality

In Rousseau's story, natural man's attenuated sympathy for his fellows is so far from serving as the basis for society as to become even thinner after its formation. "From the moment one man began to stand in need of the help of another," says Rousseau (401), "the strong came to submit to serve the weak" (380), "every man [found] his profit in the misfortune of another" (414), and "insatiable ambition" (403) and "the pleasure of command"...