Jacques Maritain and Natural Law: Historical Excursus on Human Rights

HUMAN RIGHTS HAVE A FOUNDATION, a foundation that their most rabid advocates, or perhaps better, those ideologues who have captured the concept of human rights so as to exploit it, seem to want to hide, forget, or suppress. The ideologues--advocates of abortion rights, homosexual rights, to name but two of such groups--want to take the notion of human rights, put a chain around its neck, and treat it as a beast of burden, goading it to do things it has no business doing, parading it around in a cage, like Tamerlane did to the captured Sultan Bajazet. But to a philosopher such as Jacques Maritain, the philosophical or rational foundation of human rights is of great interest. It is of great interest because it is what explains the importance, even immutability of human rights. At the same time, it delineates their limits. Were the foundations of human rights properly understood, the liberals, the libertines, the radical progressives, the positivists would find themselves without warrant to be spouting their "rights talk." Why? Because, "[t]he philosophical foundation of the Rights of man is Natural Law." Maritain, 53. Not, however, the "natural law" of the Jacobins and French philosophes or of Kant and Hegel, but the "natural law" of Cicero, of St. Paul, of St. Augustine, and of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Like the term "human rights," the term "natural law" was captured and misused by ideologues, ideologues of both conservative and revolutionary leanings, so much so that Maritain exclaims in frustration: "Sorry that we cannot find another word!" Maritain, 53. But we ought not to yield the word, just like we ought not to yield on the word Madonna because of its capture and exploitation by the aging, yet ever-confused, Madonna Louise Ciccone.* We ought to recapture it from those who seek to appropriate it, and learn what it is and what it is not. We must learn to distinguish between the doctrine and theories of the natural law--some of which are truer than others, and some of which may be plain false--and the natural law itself which is immutable.

As we discussed in earlier postings on Maritain, there was a change in the concept of natural law beginning in the 17th century, though it had earlier roots, wherein God and the eternal law were separated from the natural law, except perhaps being a sort of distant, Deistic guarantor of last resort. The natural law, thus, appeared shorn from its moorings, the nature of man and his reason, bobbed up and down on the waves to look fallible, fickle indeed. Ironically, the notion of nature and of human reason became to be thought of as "Nature with a capital N and Reason with a capital R," as if they were "abstract divinities sitting in a Platonic heaven." Maritain, 55. The result of putting Nature and Reason in an independent, idealistic throne, in raising them to the Pantheon as if they were gods, was an unrealistic, untenable, doctrine:

As a result the consonance of a human act with reason was to mean that that act was traced from a ready-made, pre-existing pattern which infallible Reason had instructed to lay down by infallible Nature, and which, consequently, should be immutably and universally recognized in all placed of the earth and at all moments of time.

Maritain, 55. Worse, these wannabe Euclids of morality believed that moral calculation could be done with mathematical or geometric precision. Calculating morality was no different that calculating the circumference of a circle given its radius. Read the fantasies of Condorcet in his Observations de Condorcet sur le vingt-neuvième livre de l'Esprit de Lois:

Since truth, reason, justice, the rights of men, and the interests of property, liberty, and security are the same everywhere, it is difficult to understand why all provinces of a state, and for that matter all states, should not have the same criminal laws, the same civil laws, the same laws regulating trade, etc. A good law must be good for all men, in the same way that a true proposition is correct for everybody.

Comme la vérité, la raison, la justice, les droits des hommes, l’intérêt de la propriété, de la liberté, de la sûreté, sont les mêmes partout, on ne voit pas pourquoi toutes les provinces d’un État, ou même tous les États, n’auraient pas les mêmes lois criminelles, les mêmes lois civiles, les mêmes lois de commerce, etc. Une bonne loi doit être bonne pour tous, comme une proposition vraie est vraie pour tous.

Cf. Maritain, 55 (who quotes Condorcet partially without reference). It is quite apparent that Condorcet forgot the fundamental Aristotelian principle so trenchantly express by William Blake in his "Marriage of Heaven and Hell": "One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression". It is inconceivable, and an untenable principle, that law should be the same "for man of the age of cave-dwellers as well as for man of the age of the steam engine, for nomadic tribes as well as for agricultural peoples." Maritain, 55. This sort of Procrustean view of law is, in a word, stupid.

What was the "fatal mistake" of these thinkers in Maritain's view?

Natural law--which is within the being of things as their very essence is, and which precedes all formulation, and is even known to human reason not in terms of conceptual and rational knowledge . . . [was improperly] conceived after the pattern of a written code, applicable to all, of which any just law should be a transcription, and which would determine a priori and in all its aspects the norms of human behaviour through ordinances supposedly prescribed by Nature and Reason, but in reality arbitrarily and artificially formulated.

Maritain, 56.

It was this "fatal mistake" that caused this absurd doctrine as espoused by Condorcet and his ilk, and caused every man's reason and every man's nature to be promulgated as law. Thus:

As Warnkoenig has shown, eight or more new systems of natural law made their appearance at every Leipzig booksellers' fair since 1780. Thus Jean Paul Richter's ironical remark contained no exaggeration: Every fair and every war brings forth a new natural law.

Maritain, 56 (quoting Heinrich A. Rommen's The Natural Law).

These doctrines of natural law--and, like the Gerasenes demon, their name is legion--so attacked by positivists are but straw men. No wonder they burned up in a conflagration once the flames of Hume's skepticism and Austin's positivism touched them.

But the problem got even worse. Instead of re-attaching this emancipated-and-then-divinized human reason and human nature to their eternal source to remedy the problem wrought by the thinkers of the earlier century, thinkers such as Leibniz and Kant tried to solve the problem by emancipating and then divinizing the human will. Typical of liberal thinking: to liberalize still further as a solution to the problems that their initial liberalization caused. "So that finally the human Will or human Freedom" was "also raised to Platonic self-subsistence in that intelligible, though unreachable, empyreal world . . . which was to replace God in actual fact as supreme source and origin of Natural Law." Maritain, 56-57. After these thinkers, "Natural Law was to be deduced from the so-called autonomy of the Will." Maritain, 57. So we have such inanities spouted by even such thinkers as Kant and Rousseau:

"A person," Kant wrote, "is subject to no other laws than those which he (either alone or jointly with others) gives to himself." In other words, man must "obey only himself," as Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, because every measure or regulation springing from the world of nature (and finally from creative wisdom) would destroy at one and the same time his autonomy and his supreme dignity.

Maritain, 57.**

Such a doctrine is fatal to law, and is fatal to the notion of right. "The rights of the human person," under these notions, "were to be based on the claim that man is subject to no law other than that of his own will and freedom." Maritain, 57. This is self-law, which is no law at all. And so, Maritain appropriately ends his quick historical analysis with this conclusion, which, though lengthy, merits being quoted in full:

This philosophy built no solid foundations for the rights of the human person, because nothing can be founded on illusion: it compromised and squandered these rights, because it led men to conceive them as rights in themselves divine, hence infinite, escaping every objective measure, denying every limitation imposed upon the claim of the ego, and ultimately expressing the absolute independence of the human subject and a so-called absolute right--which supposedly pertains to everything in the human subject by the mere fact that it is in him--to unfold one's cherished possibilities at the expense of all other beings. When men thus instructed clashed on all sides with the impossible, they came to believe in the bankruptcy of the rights of the human person. Some have turned against these rights with an enslaver's fury; some have continued to invoke them, while in their inmost conscience they are weighed down to scepticism which is one of the most alarming symptoms of the crisis of our civilization.

Maritain, 57-58.

To which I can only say, "Amen, Brother Maritain!"


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*Google "Madonna," especially under an image search, and see when you first get a hit on Our Lady, and not the notorious pop singer.
*Maritain quotes Kant's Introduction to the Metaphysicas of Morals, IV.24 and Rousseau's The Social Contract, I.6. The entirety of Kant's quote is:

A person is a subject whose actions can be imputed to him. Moral personality is therefore nothing other than the freedom of a rational being under moral laws (whereas psychological personality is merely the ability to be conscious of one's identity in different conditions of one's existence). From this it follows that a person is subject to no other laws than those he gives to himself (either alone or at least along with others). (Mary J. Gregor, trans.)

Person ist dasjenige Subject, dessen Handlungen einer Zurechnung fähig sind. Die moralische Persönlichkeit ist also nichts anders, als die Freiheit eines vernünftigen Wesens unter moralischen Gesetzen (die psychologische aber bloß das Vermögen, sich der Identität seiner selbst in den verschiedenen Zuständen seines Daseins bewußt zu werden), woraus dann folgt, daß eine Person keinen anderen Gesetzen als denen, die sie (entweder allein, oder wenigstens zugleich mit anderen) sich selbst giebt, unterworfen ist.

The full cite to Rousseau is:

"The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution. (G.D.H. Cole, trans.)

Cette difficulté ramenée à mon sujet peut s'énoncer en ces termes: "Trouver une forme d'association qui défende et protège de toute la force commune la personne et les biens de chaque associé, et par laquelle chacun s'unissant à tous n'obéisse pourtant qu'à lui-même et reste aussi libre qu'auparavant." Tel est le problème fondamental dont le contrat social donne la solution.

Leo Strauss and Natural Law: Rousseau and Freedom

FREEDOM IS A WORD THAT IS SUBJECT TO ABUSE. It is, like many other fundamental yet multivalent concepts--justice, right, fairness, equality, to name other examples--a notably easy term to hijack. So we hear popular song lyrics include such inanities as, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to loose (lose?). . . ." When freedom is hijacked by radical individualists who pose as would-be philosophers such as Rousseau, it is deviated from its proper route and proper destination to some other undesired route and destination. In emptying the notion of the "state of nature" from any meaning, both social and rational (what Strauss calls the "depreciation or ex-inanition of the state of nature"), there was an inversely proportional emphasis on independence and freedom. Thus, Rousseau's concept of freedom, like Rousseau's life itself, is unbalanced, unhinged as it is from the cardinal guidance of any human nature. Freedom becomes a tyrannical principle because it tends toward arbitrariness:

According to Rousseau . . . freedom is a higher good than life. In fact, he tends to identify freedom with virtue or with goodness. He says that freedom is obedience to the law which one has given to one's self. This means, in the place, that not merely obedience to the law but legislation itself must originate in the individual. It means, secondly, that freedom is not so much either the condition or the consequence of virtue as virtue itself. What is true of virtue can also be said of goodness, which Rousseau distinguished from virtue: freedom is identical with goodness; to be free, or to be one's self, is to be good--this is one meaning of his thesis that man is by nature good. Above all, he suggests that the traditional definition of man be replaced by a new definition according to which not rationality but freedom is the specific distinction of man.

Strauss, 278. La distinction spécifique de l’homme que sa qualité d’agent libre. The notion that the distinction specific to man, as compared to the brute animals, is that he is a free agent, without regard to his social nature or to his rational nature, is what makes Rousseau's thought relatively novel, though it is really nothing but an extension and transformation and perhaps modernization of the old saws of Epicureanism. Nevertheless, at least for us moderns, "Rousseau may be said to have originated 'the philosophy of freedom.'" Strauss, 279. Torn from any moorings in man's social, moral, and rational nature, however, this Rousseauian freedom of the individual becomes socially, morally, and rationally noxious. The "rights" that it posits in the name of freedom become progressively less and less human.* The fruit that they eventually bear is a new tyranny, the tyranny of liberalism or relativism.

There is no such thing as law in Rousseau, at least not law as it has been universally understood. In Rousseau, law is a thing a man gives to himself. All law for Rousseau is derived from the individual, and even "legislation itself must originate in the individual." Strauss, 278. Law was released from any social, even any natural foundation or underpinning. Hobbes had already released law's norm, that is natural law, from any social duty and from any end or telos in nature. The result of this Hobbesian innovation was to lead to "conditional duties and to mercenary virtue." Strauss, 280. That is, everything related back to the fundamental desire of self-preservation. Rousseau accepted these Hobbesian assumptions, but sought somehow "graft the notion of unconditional duties and nonmercenary virtue." Strauss, 280. This, of course, meant he had to find a source of those duties somewhere other than the Hobbesian right of self-preservation. For Rousseau, the notion of self-preservation could not do this because man shared the desire for self-preservation with the brutes. Rousseau therefore tried to base duty and virtue on freedom. What Hobbes had effected between science and nature, Rousseau effected between morality (and, derivatively, law and politics) and nature.

[Rousseau] tended to conceive of the fundamental freedom, or of the fundamental right, as such a creative act that issues in the establishment of unconditional duties and in nothing else: freedom is essentially self-legislation. The ultimate outcome of this attempt was the substitution of freedom for virtue or the view that it is not virtue which makes man free but freedom which makes man virtuous.

Strauss, 281. This self-legislation is what Rousseau denominates as "true freedom" or "moral freedom," and though he distinguishes it from "civil freedom" and "natural freedom," yet he "blurs these distinctions." Strauss, 281. "The blurring of the distinctions between natural freedom, civil freedom, and moral freedom is no accidental error." Strauss, 281-82. Indeed not. For Rousseau, "the primary moral phenomenon is the freedom of the state of nature," which, grafted unto the "exploded notion of the state of nature" of Hobbes, gives the the "state of nature a new lease on life." Strauss, 282. But of course the notion of "state of nature," bound now with the fasces of of equality and of freedom instead of natural law, now means something completely different. Here in germ is obviously the source of political liberalism. Liberalism is the musings of Rousseau writ large.

Rousseau viewed the "state of nature" largely in positive light, at least when compared to his Lockean and Hobbesian counterparts. It was what defined the good life, and what was to be used in judging the adequacy of the social contract. How did the social contract advance the foundational "state of nature" underpinnings of equality and freedom? Man in his origins had a sense of "compassion," but as pride and vanity grew, inequality grew with it, and the cloth of freedom began to fray. So the social contract was an "artificial substitute" for the natural freedom and natural equality that was lost as man became corrupt. The social contract thus justifies itself the closer it approximates the original freedom and equality in the Rousseauian "state of nature." Similarly, law--that is, legislation--is "the conventional substitute for natural compassion" which respected natural freedom and equality. Strauss, 285. We have an odd exchange, a loss of natural compassion leads to a loss of freedom and equality which is exchanged for an artificial compassion which leads to an increase in freedom and equality. This is the Rousseauian bargain.

And yet the artificial compassion that is found in legislation becomes warped if man follows his private judgment, as distinguished from his public judgment. The private will in legislation infects the artificial compassion--and hence the gain in freedom and equality derived by it--if private will, instead of general or public will, is behind it. This requires, in Rousseau's view, a sort of collectivization of man. It is the only means that man may be both equal and free in a state of civil society, apart from a "state of nature." For Rousseau:

Freedom in society is possible only be virtue of the complete surrender of everyone (and in particular of the government) to the will of a free society. By surrendering all his rights to society, man loses the right to appeal from the verdicts of society."

Strauss, 286. Thus, to be free and equal, man must chain himself to positive law. "Free society rests and depends upon the absorption of natural right by positive law [of a properly qualified democracy]. The general will takes the place of the natural law." Strauss, 286. This is tantamount to deification of the general will: "By the very fact that he is, the sovereign is always what he ought to be." Man's will, what Rousseau would have called "democracy," has become god. The general will is Rousseau's new god. It is an unforgiving, jealous, inerrant, infallible god from whom there is no appeal.

And so the legislator as well as civil society itself must put before itself the task of constructing the rites of the citizen, that is its forced devotee's, worship. The society must construct for itself a civil religion. "Only the civil religion will engender the sentiments required of the citizen." Strauss, 288. The legislator should ascribe a divine origin to his code and a divine origin to his legislative mission. Hence, the nearly divine sanction given to the Constitution by Americans and the virtual apotheosis or deification given to the Father of our Constitution, George Washington, and the even more bizarre apotheosis of Lincoln and Washington found in some popular depictions. "Precisely a free society cannot exist," in the eyes of Rousseau, "if he who doubts the fundamental dogma of the civil religion does not outwardly conform." Strauss, 289.

Christ as Judge by Fra Angelico (ca. 1447)

Apotheosis of Washington (Capitol Rotunda, by Constantini Brumidi, 1865)

The comparison of, say, Fra Angelico's Christ in Judgment with the Apotheosis of Washington found in the Capitol's Rotunda would suggest that Washington, though a bit more smug and less compassionate than his divine counterpart, has become the New Christ of Republican Democracy. Washington is now the city planted on a hillside, the light of the world. Christ's role has been usurped by man, the follower of Rousseauian civil religion.

Holy Trinity by Pieter Coecke Van Aelst

Apotheosis of Lincoln by S. J. Ferris

In another equally revealing comparison, the Trinity of Pieter Coecke Van Aelst can be compared to the popular depiction of Washington's welcome of Lincoln by S. J. Ferris. Lincoln was the Great Redeemer of Republican Democracy, welcomed by its Father Washington, just as Christ the Redeemer of Mankind was welcomed by God the Father in traditional iconography. Comparing iconographies is too eerily telling. Rousseau saw himself competing with Christ. It is apparent that in the eyes of some at least, the Democracy of the United States, informed by Rousseau's theories, competes with Christianity.

But the very basis of Rousseauian political philosophy--its radical individualism--is infirm. It is infirm because it is indefinite.

The notion of a return to the state of nature on the level of humanity was the ideal basis for claiming a freedom from society which is not a freedom from something. It was the ideal basis for an appeal from society to something indefinite and undefinable, to an ultimate sanctity of the individual as individual, unredeemed and unjustified. This was precisely what freedom came to mean for a considerable number of men. Every freedom which is freedom for something, every freedom which is justified by reference to something higher than the individual or than man as mere man, necessarily restricts freedom or, which is the same thing, establishes as a tenable distinction between freedom and license. It makes freedom conditional on the purpose for which it is claimed.

Strauss, 294. Rousseau, it is true, still drank from the pagan dregs of Plutarch. He ceased reading the lives of the Saints. Nevertheless, he tasted through the insipid paganism of Plutarch the glimmer of the "disproportion between this undefined and undefinable freedom and the requirements of civil society." Strauss, 294. But his followers no longer would read Plutarch. These tomes would be shelved along with Suarez and St. Thomas Aquinas, there to gather dust. But our reader of Plutarch had given birth to the monster of liberalism, which joined to the monster of deified democracy, and together these political titans gave birth the birth of the modern liberal state, a state which, in the name of freedom and liberty entirely undefined and entirely unmeaning, seems to breathe above us, not with the Spirit of God in whom is perfect freedom, but with the stifling breath of a lustful tyrant which is simply biding his time until it has us all in chains that bear the words F-R-E-E-D-O-M.
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*Strauss calls them "anti-socialistic systems of natural right," but they could also be called "anti-rationalistic, anti-socialistic, anti-moralistic" systems of natural right. All of them (and their name is Legion) seem to flow out of the poisoned well of Rousseau's narcissism and irresponsible thought. Rousseau's thought was not responsible to man's social, rational, and moral nature.

Leo Strauss and Natural Law: Rousseau's Doctrine of Natural Right

ROUSSEAU'S UNDISCIPLINED AND WOBBLY GENIUS addressed the "history" of man in his Second Discourse (Discourse on the Origin of the Inequality of Man). It purports to be an exploration of man's "history" using techniques of modern natural and social science, and starts with Cartesian presuppositions. The Second Discourse is "identical with a study of the basis of natural right and therewith of morality." Strauss, 266. Rousseau's aim to reveal for us what political order accords with natural right. In so doing he seems to dethrone God, and certainly to disennoble man.

Rousseau . . . tells us the story of man in order to discovery that political order which is in accordance with natural right. . . . [H]e follows Descartes . . . [and] assumes that animals are machines and that man transcends the general mechanism, or the dimension of (mechanical) necessity, only by virtue of the spirituality of his soul. . . . Rousseau questions not only the creation of matter but likewise the traditional definition of man. Accepting the view that brutes are machines, he suggests that there is only a difference of degree [and not of kind] between men and the brutes in regard to understanding . . . . It is man's power to choose and his consciousness of this freedom . . . which proves the spirituality of his soul.

Strauss, 264-65. The uniqueness in man relative to the brute animals, at least to Rousseau, was not in his reason, but in his freedom of the will. But it was not the freedom of man which was the foundation upon which Rousseau built his theory. Seeking to avoid the arguments that accompanied the notion of human freedom, Rousseau (controversially) sought to build his argument on something less controversial: on the perfectibility of man. This foundational decisions was "mean to be neutral with regard to the conflict between materialism and antimaterialism, or to be 'scientific' in the present-day sense of the term." Strauss, 266.

The general tack that Rousseau takes in his Second Discourse is interesting. Essentially, he accepts the Hobbesian premises, but then forgoes the Hobbesian conclusions, instead extending the Hobbesian premises to more extreme conclusions, thereby undercutting the Hobbesian premises. Strauss identifies two of these Rousseauian extensions of Hobbesian premises. The first such extension has to do with the Hobbesian "state of nature" premise, which Rousseau washes clean of any social nature whatsoever. The second such extension relates to the foundation of natural right on passion, and not reason, Rousseau essentially robs man of any reason in his "state of nature," reason being something acquired as a result of language which is conventional. The result is an entire disassembly of any notion of natural law or natural right. The last remnants of any kind of classical or Christian stain of natural law or natural right remaining in Hobbes were bleached out by Rousseau. Both the baby and the bathwater were now thrown out.

In any event, Rousseau clearly rejects any traditional teaching of natural law, and in exchange adopts the Hobbesian premise that natural law can be found only be going to the "state of nature." "Hobbes," Rousseau says, "has seen very well the defect of all modern traditions of natural right."[1] Hobbes a très bien vu le défaut de toutes les définitions modernes du droit naturel. Rousseau clearly rejects any definition of natural law that placed predominance upon man's use of reason or put man under some natural duty, under some natural law. Likewise, he clearly intended to reject any scriptural influences, being "fully aware of the antibiblical implications of the concept of the state of nature." Strauss, 267 n. 32. Any foundation of natural law must not be based upon reason (or a fortiori must not be based upon scripture), but upon something that is prior and preeminent to reason (or scripture), namely, passion, and most specifically, the impulse to self-preservation, which, of course, is an impulse that is self-regarding, not other-regarding:

[Rousseau] agrees, then, with Hobbes's attack on the traditional natural law teaching: natural law must have its roots in principles which are anterior to reason. i.e., in passions which need not be specifically human. He further agrees with Hobbes in finding the principle of natural law in the right of self-preservation, which implies the right of each to be the sole judgment of what are the proper means for his self-preservation.

Strauss, 266. Such a view of man's nature immediately jettisons the formulations of traditional natural moral law, most notably perhaps, the "Golden Rule." For Rousseau, like Hobbes, the "Golden Rule" is not a principle of natural law.

Rousseau expresses his loyalty to the spirit of Hobbes's reform of the natural law teaching by substituting for "that sublime maxim of reasoned justice 'Do unto others as you would have them to do unto you' . . . this much less perfect, but perhaps more useful maxim 'Do good to yourself with as little evil as possible to others.'"[2]

Strauss, 266-67 (quoting Rousseau's Second Discourse).

While Rousseau accepts the Hobbesian premise that one must go back to the "statute of nature," it does not lead him to where Hobbes ends up. Hobbes, like all others that have resorted to a "state of nature" analysis, "felt the necessity to go back to the statute of nature, but not one of them has arrived there." Les philosophes qui ont examiné les fondements de la société ont tous senti la nécessité de remonter jusqu’à l’état de nature, mais aucun d’eux n’y est arrivé. No, none but our narcissistic Rousseau, with his remarkable genius, foresight, and light was able to "arrive." Like a good Trekkie, Rousseau was the only one who was able "to boldly go where no other man has gone before." (Had Rousseau lived in the era of Star Trek, would he have dressed himself up as Captain Kirk like he dressed himself up like an Armenian?) Rousseau (who was buffeted by passion) alone can figure out which one of men's passions are conventional, arising as they do from man's decision to leave the "state of nature" and bind himself in conventional society, and which are to be found only in a "state of nature." Rousseau found the "method," the "physical" investigation, that could overcome all others' failures:

The method which he uses is a "meditation on the first and most simple operations of the human soul"; those mental acts which presuppose society cannot belong to man's natural constitution, since man is by nature solitary.

Strauss, 269.

Rousseau also erases any role of reason in natural law or right, and he does this, again, on Hobbesian premises. Hobbes is right, Rousseau insists, on founding natural right on passions, but he goes wrong in drawing out of this premise any sort of rules or duties, or even conclusions or theorems, using reason. For Rousseau, if the natural law is going to speak to man, it must be in his "state of nature," and that means it must be "rooted directly in passion," "it must be prerational." Strauss, 269.

The fact that the "state of nature" is presocial and prerational results in Rousseau concluding that "man is by nature good." Strauss, 269. In a "state of nature," there can be no such thing as pride or vanity, because these are social vices, and man, prior to society in his "state of nature" cannot suffer from these vices. The same is true mutatis mutandis for all vices, pride being the basis for all of them. For Rousseau, then, "[n]atural man is therefore free from all viciousness." Strauss, 269-70. Moreover, "natural man is compassionate." Strauss, 270. And it is compassion which is the "passion from which all social virtues derive." Strauss, 270. Similarly, man in a "state of nature" lacks reason. Reason requires language for Rousseau, and language is conventional, presupposing society. "Since language is not natural, reason is not natural." Strauss, 270. This thought process of Rousseau naturally leads to an entirely revolutionary concept of man. Man in his "state of nature" is no longer a "rational animal," nor a "social animal." He is a "stupid animal." Strauss, 276. In the Rousseauian view, therefore, natural law understood in its classical, traditional sense does not exist:

[S]ince natural man is prerational, he is utterly incapable of any knowledge of the law of nature which is the law of reason . . . . Natural man is premoral in every respect: he has no heart. Natural man is subhuman. . . . There is no natural constitution of man to speak of: everything specifically human is acquired or ultimately depends on artifice or convention. . . . Man is by nature almost infinitely malleable. . . . Man's humanity or rationality is acquired

Strauss, 270-71, 272. All this has significant importance in the history of natural law. As Strauss observes:

By thinking through [Hobbes's] teaching, Rousseau was brought face to face with the necessity of abandoning it completely. If the state of nature is subhuman, it is absurd to go back to a state of nature in order to find in its the norm of man. Hobbes had denied that man has a natural end. He had believed that he could fin a natural or nonarbitrary basis of right in man's beginnings. Rousseau showed that man's beginnings lack all human traits. On the basis of Hobbes's premise, therefore, it became necessary to abandon altogether the attempt to find the basis of right in nature, in human nature.

Strauss, 274. All law, all right, all justice then was conventional. This was the upshot of the Hobbesian premises. Humanity had no end to provide guidance. This was Hobbes's marvelous contribution to human thought. Humanity had no beginning that could provide guidance. This was Rousseau's marvelous clarification of Hobbesian thought. There was hence no natural foundation for law, for right, for justice. All of these--law, right, justice--were arbitrary, standardless. The only law is that which the infinite malleable man gives to himself. Rousseau "says that freedom is obedience to the law which one has given to one's self." Strauss, 278.

Accordingly, we shall next look at Rousseau's concept of human "freedom."

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[1]By "modern" he means "contemporary," that is to say, "the traditional definitions which still predominated in the academic teaching of his time." Strauss, 266.
[2]"c’est elle qui, au lieu de cette maxime sublime de justice raisonnée : Fais à autrui comme tu veux qu’on te fasse, inspire à tous les hommes cette autre maxime de bonté naturelle bien moins parfaite, mais plus utile peut-être que la précédente : Fais ton bien avec le moindre mal d’autrui qu’il est possible." For a discussion of Hobbes's treatment of the "Golden Rule," see our prior posting, Golden Rule in Thomas Hobbes.