2.1 Happiness and Political Transformation: An Interpretive Puzzle

There are some initially plausible reasons to hold that the passages concerning happiness are out of sync with the conceptual aims of the contract itself. Social Autonomy's distinction between Rousseau's autonomy-based account of legitimacy and his happiness-based account of stability might thus be read as charitable reconstruction aimed at elucidating the underlying structure of Rousseau's argument. In this section I consider this possibility and argue against it.

To better appreciate why there might appear to be a conflict between happiness and autonomy, we must examine in some detail Rousseau's conception of political freedom and its relation to obligation. In the Social Contract Rousseau locates the source of political obligation in the free commitment of individual wills. He assumes that the parties to the contract have (a) an interest in independence and (b) the capacity for instrumental reason.Footnote ²³ Condition (a) is an interest in not being subject to the will of another. During the precontractual stage this manifests itself as a desire for self-sufficiency, where self-sufficiency can be understood as a life that is essentially noncooperative (albeit also nonhostile). Condition (b) assumes that the precontractual parties can figure out what is required to meet their own basic needs in such a way as to minimize dependence on other wills.Footnote ²⁴ As I suggested above, the essential claim of Rousseau's political philosophy is that under circumstances of necessary social cooperation or interdependence condition (a) must take the form of freedom as self-subjection to universal law. Let us call this condition (a₁). Rousseau often treats (a) as constituting man's essential independence, Footnote ²⁵ and (a₁) as his freedom.Footnote ²⁶

Rousseau argues that under circumstances of necessary social dependence, and the concomitant threat of the loss of independence, the contracting parties will agree to a form of political organization in which authority is based solely on the consent of each individual to be ruled by all. But if the danger is that social conditions have created a situation in which the capacity of each individual to remain master of his own forces is under threat, how can it be a solution for each to give them up entirely? Wouldn't it be better to retain the little one has left so as to fortify oneself in the war of all against all?

Rousseau's answer to these questions is as follows: since the goal is to retain the individual's nondependence on the will of another under circumstances of necessary (inter)dependence, the freedom-engendering dependence produced by the creation of a collective ruling body must be different in kind from the freedom-threatening dependence that set the need for political society in motion. By way of a first pass on an elusive concept, let us say that the capacity to govern oneself by a conception of rational, reciprocal, and freedom-engendering dependence is what it means for an individual to have or participate in the general will.

If it is conditions (a) and (b) that have led us to erect the power of the state, this power is legitimate only insofar as it does not express the arbitrary dependence of any individual will on the will of another (or group of others). As we have already seen, collective power can thus only take the form of law, a mode of authority which is nonarbitrary because impersonal.Footnote ²⁷ In short, the way to remain independent under circumstances of necessary dependence is to be ruled by self-willed, universal laws: to move from independence to genuine freedom.

We now have the resources to see why, elegant as this argument may be, it gives rise to a textual and philosophical puzzle. Given all that has been said thus far, the institution of freedom as law seems to be nothing more than a solution to a problem of aggregated individual self-interest.Footnote ²⁸ That is, the general will looks like an instrument that enables each individual to satisfy his own interest in maintaining independence under unavoidable circumstances of cooperation. But as Rousseau notes in the Discourse on Inequality, even prepolitical man had a way to manage the problem of independence within situations of social dependence. He could join in coordinative tasks when needed (e.g., hunting in groups if the only available animals were hard to kill on one's own), while avoiding situations that render him enduringly dependent on others (e.g., organizing lasting hunting associations with relations of rank). In other words, natural man's bare capacity for instrumental or prudential reasoning (condition b) could have led him to appreciate the necessity of a minimal sociality.Footnote ²⁹ One might then reason as follows: now that circumstances have changed, that is, now that meeting the material conditions of life is a task so complex that the only way to survive is to form durable forms of association, the very same capacity for instrumental reasoning could lead agents to realize that they have no choice but to be subject to the laws that are the premise of this association. But if this is all that grounds the social contract, then there is no order of collectively realized freedom, let alone a communal sense of happiness, only an aggregation of essentially self-interested reasons for signing on to the rule of law.

Yet this picture is not in keeping with what Rousseau says about the significance of the contract. He writes:

Importantly, it is only after describing this transformation that Rousseau begins to speak of the collective happiness of life in the just polity, whereby

Putting these two passages together, we are faced with two interrelated questions: (1) If the point of the contract is simply to preserve the individual's interest in remaining free from dependence on others, why should the possibility that the state realizes collective happiness bear any rational weight in the individual's decision to endorse its coercive power? (2) If the contract is merely an outcome of rational prudence, why do individuals require such a wholesale transformation in their motivational makeup in order to fully accept it?Footnote ³² Why do we need to be transformed in order to conform to our own long-term prudential self-interest?

The following two interpretive commitments make it very hard to see how either of these questions could be coherently answered:

1. (1) Qua rational, the parties to the contract seek to satisfy their fundamental interests.

2. (2) The only purpose and result of the contract is to secure for each individual the protection of the fundamental interests that he had prior to the contract.

If we accept both 1 and 2, it would have been more perspicuous for Rousseau to discuss political life as a move from short- to long-term prudence (rather than to justice or duty), and from individual independence to shared security (rather than to self-legislative freedom and collective happiness). In sum, the puzzle concerns why Rousseau seems to think that an association aimed at protecting my own interest in independence demands that I become a being who wills the common good for its own sake and not simply for the protections it affords me as an individual.

2.2 Social Autonomy's Solution to the Puzzle

Of all the adherents of Social Autonomy, Neuhouser most clearly acknowledges the way in which, given the two interpretive commitments just outlined above, the coherence of Rousseau's suggestion that political life must be fundamentally transformative becomes deeply suspect. Neuhouser writes:

An astute reader, Neuhouser notices the connection between Rousseau's discussions of transformation, whereby we come to understand reasons of the common good as overriding reasons of private interest, and the Social Contract's remarks on happiness, writing that the theme of transformation is “implied by Rousseau's talk of ‘shared felicity.’”Footnote ³⁴

Neuhouser and other adherents of Social Autonomy attempt to solve this interpretive puzzle by claiming that Rousseau's remarks on happiness elide the difference between two domains of inquiry that ought to be kept distinct. The first set of concerns pertains to the content and normative basis of the requirements enjoined by a society that protects the freedom of each contracting agent (i.e., legitimacy). The second set of concerns pertains to the psychological and educational measures needed to ensure that agents regulate their own behavior in light of these requirements (i.e., stability). By separating out “conditions of the stability of a legitimate order” from “the conception of legitimacy itself,” Social Autonomy locates collective happiness on the side of the “affective bond” citizens must have toward one another and not on the side of the rational justification of political principles.Footnote ³⁵

According to Social Autonomy, Rousseau's view is that although the general will exists simply to secure individual rights, individuals can only appreciate the general will as anything other than an alien imposition on their private wills if they attribute to other political agents intrinsic rather than instrumental value.Footnote ³⁶ This is a complicated point and so should be stated with care. Both Neuhouser and Cohen adamantly deny that their interpretation reduces to one in which Rousseau thinks that the general will has only the instrumental value of securing one's rights.Footnote ³⁷ By contrast, their claim is that through the general will individuals come to see that the only way for their own rights to be protected is to afford other political agents equal intrinsic value and thus to see the general will as itself expressive of freedom. The claim seems to be that there is an instrumental, individualistic reason to arrive at a noninstrumental conception of others. Nevertheless, any more robust sense of community, such as one in which I understand the civic project as intrinsically valuable precisely because it is pursued with others, merely functions as a reminder of our need to overcome psychological alienation from the state and its laws so as to motivate ourselves to obey it. Against Social Autonomy, in the next sections I argue that the role of happiness in Rousseau's political theory is not merely a reminder about stability, a simple concession to the realities of human nature. Rather, happiness is central rather than peripheral to the “conception of legitimacy itself.”

2.3 The Justificatory Role of Happiness

To put pressure on Social Autonomy's claim that one can distinguish normative legitimacy from psychological motivation or stability, let us look to the opening paragraph of the Social Contract. Here, Rousseau indicates that the work will provide an account of the just polity that closely connects formal legitimacy with motivational possibility. In seeking to “combine [allier] what right permits with what interest prescribes,”Footnote ³⁸ Rousseau suggests that no abstract political principle can be legitimate if it is impossible to imagine human beings with a psychological makeup roughly like our own obeying such a norm. Of course, to take “men as they are, and the laws as they can be”Footnote ³⁹ implies neither that human nature is static nor that a practical norm can never enjoin us to alter some aspect of our nature. Rousseau clearly denies both claims. Against the first consider statements such as “we do not yet know what our nature permits us to be,”Footnote ⁴⁰ which can be read as an extension of the Second Discourse's doctrine of man's “perfectibility.” Against the second, recall Rousseau's claim, discussed above, that the demands of political life transform our nature from a “stupid and bounded animal” into “an intelligent being and a man.”Footnote ⁴¹ Nevertheless, “combining” right with interest does entail that political norms cannot float entirely free from human nature, however provisional or revisable our understanding of that nature may be. Thus, in ascertaining whether any set of fundamental political norms is worthy of our rational allegiance we must simultaneously engage two questions: (1) Do these norms solve the “fundamental problem” for which political life is needed (roughly: necessary cooperation without dependence on the will of another)? (2) Are the norms that claim to solve the fundamental problem consonant with human nature and motivational possibility?Footnote ⁴²

There is simply no place in Rousseau's political thought for a “pure ought” that binds independently of our motivational makeup. For further supporting evidence of this claim, consider Rousseau's argument that although one may be able to imagine “a universal justice emanating from reason alone,” such justice is not binding because it is motivationally inert; without an account of the reasons for following such abstract norms that make reference to our psychological tendencies, universal justice cannot “be admitted among us.”Footnote ⁴³ Similarly, in the Geneva Manuscript Rousseau argues that it is rational to prefer the constraints of political society to the unhindered pursuit of self-interest only if political society secures “the sweet harmony of justice and happiness.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Moving from the political to the moral writings, Rousseau's Emile also tightly anchors what makes obligation legitimate to how obligation might answer to our natural motivational psychology. Emile is an extended meditation on what a morally free life ought to look like that proceeds by way of a painstaking attempt to show that such a life would be psychologically enriching and motivationally plausible for the individual living it.Footnote ⁴⁵ This is why in order to vindicate the demands of duty the tutor must show Emile his “true interest in being good,” an interest that is only secured when the young adult appreciates “the enjoyment of that durable happiness” brought about by the “repose of a good conscience.”Footnote ⁴⁶ If obligations are derived from freedom in the manner outlined in section 2.1, then surely Rousseau means to show the interdependence of freedom-based principles of legitimacy and happiness-based principles of motivation when he argues that the key to being free, i.e., to “remaining masters of ourselves,” and thus to being genuinely obligated, is “to make ourselves happy in practicing our duties.”Footnote ⁴⁷

From this brief comparison of Emile and the Social Contract, we can conclude that in both the moral and political cases, obligations are justified by demonstrating that for each agent it can be shown to the agent that adhering to one's obligations conforms to one's nature and so conduces to happiness. Although I do not have space here to enter into interpretive debate on the continuity between the moral and political writings, this at least suggests that there is no fundamental difference in these two texts’ metaethical orientation. Whether or not the ideals of man and citizen are fully compatible or irreconcilably opposed, both ideals are articulated around the same ethical goal: securing a unity of freedom and happiness.Footnote ⁴⁸

2.4 Happiness as a Moralized Concept

We have established that happiness plays a role in the justification of obligation. This should lead us to cast doubt on Social Autonomy's way of solving the puzzle by distinguishing freedom-based legitimacy from happiness-based motivation. But leaving Social Autonomy aside, in order to grasp the relation between these ideals we must understand better the nature of Rousseauian happiness. Specifically, we must ask whether Rousseau has a moralized conception of happiness as the expression and development of powers and relations proper to or fitting for man. Or is happiness a morally neutral psychological state having to do with pleasure or feelings of psychic harmony? Ascertaining which of these possibilities is correct is clearly crucial for comprehending how Rousseau justifies the state by showing a mutually constitutive relationship between autonomy and happiness. Although whether or not Rousseau has a unified conception of happiness across his major texts is clearly a subject for another paper, in this section I argue that in both Emile and the Social Contract there is a core notion of happiness that is clearly moral. Moreover, it is this moral conception of happiness that plays a role in the justification of moral and political obligation.

To make this case, consider first the following passage from the Savoyard Vicar's “Profession of Faith”: “If moral goodness is in conformity with our nature, man could be healthy of spirit or well constituted only to the extent that he is good.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Although the Vicar does not use the specific term “happiness,” here he clearly conceives of human flourishing as a concept involving objective assessments of moral goodness.Footnote ⁵⁰ A few pages earlier the Vicar suggests that God writes the words “Be just and you will be happy” into the soul of all morally upstanding people.Footnote ⁵¹ Or consider the following complex statement: “if man were made to do harm to his kind … a humane man would be an animal as depraved as a pitying wolf, and only virtue would leave us with remorse.”Footnote ⁵² In other words, if “humane,” i.e., virtuous, behavior with respect to others expresses a natural human potential, the callous, self-seeking man is as unnatural as the “pitying wolf.” Thus, if I take my good to be a narrowly egoistic one, I have simply gotten wrong the kind of being that I am and so what it is for me to properly express my essential nature. Although the relation between the Vicar's views and Emile as a whole is unresolved, Rousseau puts forth very similar statements in his own voice in the Moral Letters. For example, Rousseau writes that he has no interest in promoting the “barbarous happiness that one feels only at the expense of others.”Footnote ⁵³ This clearly indicates that he does not conceive of happiness in narrowly egoistic terms, or as mere pleasure through preference satisfaction.Footnote ⁵⁴

My claim that happiness is a moral concept might appear to cut against certain passages from Emile which suggest instead that it is a formal concept having to do with felt harmony between one's desires and faculties. For example, Rousseau writes:

Taken out of the larger context of the work, the claim that what is at issue for happiness is the capacity to “enjoy” one's whole being might give the impression that happiness is to be located in the subject's feelings about himself. But interpreting Rousseau as suggesting that one will be happy just so long as one can achieve whatever it is that one wants and one wants only what one can achieve cuts against his concern for flourishing through moral goodness, as well as against his disgust at “barbarous happiness.” It is therefore more consonant with the project of Emile as a whole to think that it is only problematic that our “faculties … remain idle” if those are faculties which we ought to have, i.e., which properly express our nature. It would, for example, not be a problem if happiness failed to adequately express our capacity to aggrandize ourselves “at the expense of others,”Footnote ⁵⁶ or to be “callous [and] self-seeking.”Footnote ⁵⁷

At the same time, this passage's discussion of desire and enjoyment clearly suggests that even though one is only truly happy when one is moral, happiness also has an importantly subjective component. For Rousseau human flourishing is not defined solely in terms of what befits a man as such, independently of his attitudes and feelings. Rather, happiness is dynamic accordance between what one can do and what one wants to do, where what one can do refers not to what one as a matter of fact tends to do, but to essential human faculties (i.e., to what is in one's nature to do), and where what one wants refers both to subjective states and to a normative conception of the person (i.e., to what one ought to want). We cannot be happy if we set the bar of our aspirations so low that our projects and plans do not express all that we could be, but at the same time we cannot be happy if our aspirations are so high that struggling to live out our best nature is affectively unsatisfying. Expressing our natural faculties could not be happiness if we took no pleasure in doing so.

Even if one accepts my claim that both the moral and political writings share the same metaethical view, according to which a practical norm is justified only if it both expresses our freedom and conduces to our happiness, one might still think that the conception of happiness differs in the two cases. Perhaps a moralized conception of happiness pertains only to the moral life, with its universalistic demands to treat all people a certain way, whereas in political life individuals are fundamentally aiming at their own interests, and thus at what makes them happy independently of how this bears on other people? But even in the political writings a moralized conception of happiness is in play. For example, in the passage on the transformation of man into citizen discussed above, coming to stand in rights-based community with others is described as “the happy moment” which “wrested” man from the state of nature.Footnote ⁵⁸

In this section I have shown that in both the moral and political domains Rousseau's understanding of happiness represents human nature as a set of moral powers or capacities that can be properly enabled or improperly inhibited.Footnote ⁵⁹ Rousseau is thus clearly operating with a picture of human flourishing quite far from modern subjectivist accounts of happiness as mere pleasure or preference satisfaction and closer to ancient accounts of eudaimonia.

Having gathered evidence from Rousseau's texts to show why one should reject Social Autonomy's bifurcation of normative legitimacy and psychological motivation, in the next section I return to the puzzle discussed in 2.1 and 2.2. My aim is to more adequately account for Rousseau's remarks on the transformative character of the state and the justificatory role of collective happiness. My strategy is to give up what I called the second interpretive commitment: the claim that the only purpose and result of the contract is to secure for each individual the protection of his fundamental interests.

3.1 The Lawgiver: Taking Transformation Seriously

Rousseau's discussion of the lawgiver is difficult to square with Social Autonomy's basic interpretive vision. Explaining the necessity of this otherworldly figure who sets in motion the possibility of a just society, Rousseau writes:

If the Rousseauian state aims only at the protection of individuals’ fundamental interests, it is unclear why such individuals would need to be transformed to the extent suggested in this passage. In accounting for the role of the lawgiver, all Social Autonomy can offer is that Rousseau means to indicate that the demands of regulating one's actions by the rule of law—even laws explicitly designed to protect one's own (and everyone else's) fundamental interests—are so at odds with our natural tendencies to self-interest that as a matter of descriptive fact legal authority can only function if individuals acquire strong civic attachments.

This reading sits uneasily with the fact that earlier in the text Rousseau had already discussed rule by the general will as grounded in each individual's concern for his own fundamental interests.Footnote ⁶¹ Rule by the general will was said to provide “an admirable agreement between interest and justice.”Footnote ⁶² This indicates that if the general will is properly set up so as to display norms of reciprocity, individuals would not have much difficulty perceiving how the sacrifices of political life “bear directly on [their] particular interests.”

Either Rousseau is conceptually confused, sometimes arguing that rational prudence is all that is needed to appreciate the requirements of political obligation, at other times arguing that we will be blind to those requirements without strong civic attachments, or in this passage he is referring to a set of “advantages” that demand of the individual a greater degree of civic engagement than the simple recognition that he can only satisfy his interest in freedom if he affords others equal standing. If one wishes for a consistent Rousseau—surely a wise interpretive orientation for a text as intricate as the Social Contract—it becomes highly doubtful that the text aims only at “the idea of according equal consideration to the individual members of the political society, each of whom is assumed to take an interest in advancing his/her own interests,” and not also to any more “substantive idea of the common good.”Footnote ⁶³

In the next two sections I explore the possibility that the “constant privations required by good laws” entail a form of political organization that is aimed at something more than the protection of each individual's fundamental interests.Footnote ⁶⁴ This would explain why prior to their political transformation individuals would have such difficulty “appreciating” such a scheme. In a condition in which “public business takes precedence over private business in the minds of citizens,”Footnote ⁶⁵ citizens are such that their happiness is deeply shared and communal, not merely expressed by the satisfaction of their own fundamental interests. The institution of an order of right that protects these fundamental interests is but a steppingstone to a more robustly solidaristic conception of civic life. Recall that in 2.1 we asked, if the contract is merely an outcome of rational prudence, why do individuals require such a wholesale transformation in their motivational makeup in order to fully accept it? The answer my interpretation provides is simple: we need a wholesale transformation to accept the contract because it demands more of us than rational prudence.Footnote ⁶⁶

On this interpretation, what emerges from juxtaposing Rousseau's account of the basic problem and solution of political life with his account of the lawgiver and political transformation are two distinct sets of obligations. First, there is the legally coercible obligation to respect the fundamental interests of one's fellow citizens. Second, there is an obligation—most likely a weaker, noncoercible obligation—to become the sort of person who conceives of his happiness as located in the happiness of the whole.Footnote ⁶⁷ As my formulation suggests, this obligation has a psychological and characterological component, but it also has an institutional one as well. It is an injunction not just to take an affirmative attitude towards the political community but also to participate in institutions and activities that express a common bond and so justify that affirmative attitude.

But the mere fact that this obligation has a psychological component does not thereby render it simply a matter of motivation or stability, external to the issue of the state's legitimacy. As Rousseau makes abundantly clear throughout his political writings, a political community in which individuals merely follow the laws without an emotional attachment to the social good is not truly legitimate. For example, he writes: “the mainspring of public authority is in the hearts of its citizens,”Footnote ⁶⁸ and “when the social bond is broken in all hearts … the general will grows mute.”Footnote ⁶⁹ So the state is legitimate insofar as it satisfies both my rational considerations of its legitimacy and my affective attachment to it.Footnote ⁷⁰

3.2 Compact and Contract

What exactly is the content and ground of this more robustly civic obligation? Some indication of Rousseau's views can be gleaned by attending to the conceptual contrast between the social compact, what Rousseau calls “the social pact,”Footnote ⁷¹ and a social contract. Although Rousseau does not always articulate this distinction with the requisite terminological or conceptual clarity, in this section I argue that it is key to understanding his account of the state's legitimacy as well as the scope and basis of our civic obligations.

Here is a first pass at glossing this distinction: the compact elucidates minimal norms of noninterference for a plurality of rational wills. It does so by establishing the freedom and equality of each, and so also the protection of fundamental liberties. The contract, however, is aimed at incorporating these boundary-setting or regulatory norms into a broader framework of a flourishing community. Through the contract the individual constitutes himself as a being who can only realize himself when viewed as a partner in the cooperative enterprise of determining the common good.Footnote ⁷²

Before discussing the distinction in more detail, we must first establish why Rousseau needs it. Consider the following conceptual problem that Rousseau's theory must address: why should the minority be bound by the decisions of the majority? Clearly, to answer that majority rule should decide on the legitimacy of majority rule is question begging. Similarly, when there is disagreement as to what the community should do, what determines that those who disagree with the majority are still part of the community? What is the difference between citizens who disagree and those who are excluded from the community by that very disagreement? The key to answering these questions is to distinguish a fundamental basic agreement, one that constitutes any political community as a community, from specific agreements made by that community. This foundational agreement is conceptually prior to decision to be bound by majority rule, and it ensures that all who adhere to the conceptually prior agreement are still part of the community, even if they subsequently dissent regarding its particular decisions.

The social compact is the name for the prior, unanimous agreement to be bound by majority rule. As Rousseau writes, “there is only one law which by its nature requires unanimous consent. That is the social pact.”Footnote ⁷³ The compact assumes rational individuals with an interest in protecting their own freedom. And what it establishes is a transcendental presupposition—“never … formally stated, [but] everywhere the same, everywhere tacitly admitted and recognized”Footnote ⁷⁴—about what must be the case for such individuals to live together in a way that preserves the independence of each: namely, that each must agree to rule by law. But this amounts only to a formal principle of legitimacy. It shows that if there is to be legitimate authority, it must express itself in a form that applies to all and is from all.Footnote ⁷⁵ As Rousseau puts it, as “the most primitive act of confederation,” the compact establishes the “formal unity” of the political body;Footnote ⁷⁶ it makes clear that the equality presupposed by any order of right is dependent on the consent of all as the basis for legitimacy.Footnote ⁷⁷ The compact is thus the foundational act that institutes the very idea of a “people” as a collective agent that can subsequently be instantiated or expressed in particular legal decisions,Footnote ⁷⁸ and it also ensures that the collective figure of the “people” does not efface each individual voice. It does so by establishing basic protections that cannot be revoked through democratic decision-making.

Since each individual is contracting (or, more accurately, “compacting”) in order to meet his essentially self-interested needs under conditions of extreme instability, uncertainty, and generalized precariousness regarding how his natural strength stacks up against others, it is rational for him to compact into the cooperative scheme only if the terms of such association are not based on knowledge of strength differentials. As Rousseau writes, the general will “substitutes a moral and legitimate equality for whatever physical inequality nature may have placed between men.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In introducing the idea of the rationality of binding oneself to norms of cooperation constructed in ignorance of one's antecedent bargaining advantage, the compact lays the groundwork for what will eventually become the concern for living in a community of shared ends. But by itself it simply enjoins an individual to respect the basic rights of others. Under the compact an individual is represented simply as having an essential interest in not being dominated, an interest which can only be secured by affording to all others equal standing.

We have certainly moved some distance from the Second Discourse's discussion of natural man's quasi-“obligation” to his hunting association, in that what is demanded of the compacting individual is that he reason about what he ought to do not knowing whether he is physically weak on his own (and so has little reason to defect), or if he is strong and agile and so likely to be dragged down by the group. A hypothetical hunting association made up of compactors would govern itself by norms of protection, coordination, and desert that make no reference to the particularity of each member. Yet while a member of such an association might come to regard other members of the group as equal, and so see his own defection as in some sense wronging those others, it is not the group per se that is valuable. Rather, the value of the group can be analytically decomposed into the value of the goods that it confers on each individual (in this case, food). Moving from these primitive forms of association back to the concerns of the Social Contract, the compactor sees norms of equality as the expression of his own freedom, but he does not yet understand membership in a political community of free equals to be an intrinsically valuable good.

This is why, in accounting for Rousseau's complete picture of the state, the social compact needs to be completed by the social contract.Footnote ⁸⁰ While the compact models the kind of reasoning that secures the basic, formal principle of legitimacy, the contract models the forms of reason-governed commitment to one's fellow man that follow from the instantiation of this formal principle into the actual life of the political community. Through the contract we both make determinate decisions and come to see the collective nature of that decision making as in itself valuable. In the first moment the “social pact” (i.e., the compact) institutes the bare form of the “body politic,” which has “absolute power over all of its members.”Footnote ⁸¹ In the second moment this abstract power is channeled through the contract, materializing as a concrete figure of sovereignty directed by the community's general will.Footnote ⁸²

By attending to the compact/contract distinction, we can now better appreciate the Social Contract's way of fleshing out the interdependence of the ideals of autonomy and flourishing. The first component of obligation, instituted by the social compact, simply follows from consideration of a plurality of rational wills, free qua independent and interacting under conditions of interdependence. And what it establishes is largely negative: that everyone ought to abide by laws that mandate equal treatment because doing so is the only way to preserve one's own civil freedom. But, in turn, the contract brings about a more robust, positive attachment to one's fellow citizens. Here one's duty is not simply to obey the laws. Rather, it is to foster the polity as a shared end. The specific content of this obligation will involve a variety of solidaristic projects undertaken with one's fellow citizens. Rousseau gives the example of taking part in communal assemblies, but one might broaden this to include any project aimed at uniting the citizenry and overcoming the forces of political fragmentation. As a contractor and not a compactor, the citizen ought to obey the laws not just because it protects his own liberty, but also because it realizes irreducibly social goods.

Understanding Rousseau's account of the state's legitimacy through the compact/contract distinction leads to very different results from Social Autonomy. Recall that Social Autonomy argues that for Rousseau the state is legitimate because it renders it rational for each individual to grant that all other individuals are equal, independent sources of value and are thus owed the same legal rights-protections. Any more robust forms of political attachment pertain only to the affective bonds needed to sustain that appreciation. By contrast, on my account, the results of the compact refer to benefits that devolve only on the individual. The appreciation of the independent value of community emerges through the contract and its formation of solidaristic bonds. This is why for Rousseau abstract principles of political right must always be expressed through patriotic attachment to a determinate community. It is thus no accident that Rousseau's writings on how to institute a legitimate political community are filled with advice like the following: “Every people has, or ought to have, a national character, and if it lacks one it would be necessary to begin by giving it one.”Footnote ⁸³

3.3 Autonomy and Happiness: Internal Not External

The account of the state's legitimacy that I have attributed to Rousseau raises familiar worries about Rousseau's antiliberalism. For Rousseau, being coerced (or at least heavily incentivized) by the state to act in ways that foster the expression of our shared ends—e.g., being compelled to take part in civic activities—does not count as a threat to freedom but rather as its ultimate realization. So allowing collective happiness into the normative foundations of the state seems to license some well-known and ominous Rousseauian ideas, such as the claim that one can be “forced to be free.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Although I do not have space to consider whether a more liberal version of Rousseauianism is either possible or desirable, we can at least see how the formal model of justification I have outlined in the preceding sections attempts to address this criticism.

It has turned out from our discussion of the relation between compact and contract that the state must protect individual rights for the sake of the collective flourishing they enable. In this sense, happiness looks primary. But genuine flourishing depends on the protection of the rights of individuals secured through the compact. In this sense, no conception of collective happiness that does not already protect individual rights can be a legitimate end of the state.

If the relation between autonomy and happiness is mutually constitutive rather than instrumental, then the rights of autonomy are not aimed at securing the end of happiness defined in nonmoral terms. Rather, one component of a collectively happy life includes the protection of rights for their own sake. This is very different from a Millian, utilitarian reading of Rousseau, according to which freedom is important because it furthers “the pursuit of truth about how to live well and be happy.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Such a view treats autonomy as a means to happiness, rather than as an irreducible component in any legitimate conception of happiness.Footnote ⁸⁶ On Rousseau's ultimate view of the state's legitimacy, the rights it protects have overriding (i.e., noninstrumental) value, but this value stems from the way they enable a human life lived in accordance with our collective, political nature.