We’ve finally reached the conclusion of this mess of a book, and guess what? It gets even worse right at the end. Book 4, Chapter 8 is about “Civil Religion” and while you might be unsurprised that religion clashes with Rousseau’s concept of a State, it actually gets much worse.
Written show notes here.
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This little book contains some of the most important economic and political essays written in the 20th century, and many of these ideas still need more defense in the 21st.
It just keeps getting worse… This week we’re looking at Book 4, Chs. 5-7. In these chapters, Rousseau introduces three new, weird, dangerous institutions to… “help.”
This week, we’re covering one long chapter. Book 4, Chapter 4, is titled “The Roman Comitia,” and it’s Rousseau’s breakdown of the ways that early Roman government worked. I’d even say, coming as it does near the end of the book, that it’s unnecessarily long, because many of the points Rousseau is using this historical analysis to support have already been fervently argued against by Rousseau earlier in the book.
Full show notes here.
I did not expect Book 4 to start with a bunch of weird contradictions, but it did. This week we’re covering the first three chapters of that Book.
Full show notes here.
This week we’re finishing Book 3, taking a look at Chapters 16-18. Rousseau spends a lot of time building up these weird word games that give the same thing multiple names in order to give it a veneer of legitimacy, but he doesn’t retract any of his previous ideas about the unlimited power of the State or the duty of a State’s people to preserve it, both of which lead to major negative incentives which Rousseau conveniently ignores.
Full notes here.
Recently, a voice actor named SungWon Cho, a.k.a. ProZD, made a big deal about leaving Twitter because he was taking a lot of heat for accepting a role that violates his earlier position in favor of “authentic casting,” i.e. the restriction of voice acting roles to actors who share the same ethnicity or protected group status as the character.
Everyone and his dog is calling ProZD a hypocrite. But, as far as I’ve seen, only Eric July has grabbed onto the very important point that hypocrite isn’t an insult to someone whose ideology is hypocritical at its base.
This week we’re cramming in four chapters, looking at Book 3, Chapters 12-15. Chapters 12, 13, and 14 are all about “How the Sovereign Authority Maintains Itself,” organized much the same way as the three “The People” chapters back in Book 2. However, those three chapters, even all together, are very short and it’s a little surprising to me that Rousseau decided to split them up.
Full show notes here.
In any case, those first three chapters make a few strange and rather self-destructive claims about the need to frequently assemble the whole people. One of the problems with his totalitarian framework is that it assumes more input from the people makes things better, when in fact a frequent assembly of a mob with the power to enact any law by simple majority will mean many laws written in the heat of the moment, and constant changes to how people will have to do business.
It also means people will spend a lot more time thinking about how to rule others, as opposed to being productive and paying attention to the interpersonal connections that are important to them (the voluntary ones)! Even worse, it gives the worst people plenty of opportunities to skim off the top.
Rousseau makes some vague statements about how States should not extend much further than a city, but he doesn’t put any weight behind it, making it a vague recommendation rather than a meaningful rule or argument.
Finally, Rousseau makes some bizarre statements about profit and representation, mis-characterizing both of them and ending up caught in his own web of words. His collection of odd definitions and his inability to write clearly lead to him using “law” in multiple meanings, “strong” in the vaguest sense, and to find commercial “profit” abhorrent while encouraging parasites to gain by government action. He even forgets his old Legislator concept and I try to salvage things, but it’s still extremely confusing.
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Intro quote by Frederic Bastiat, from the 1874 Stirling translation
https://mises.org/mises-daily/law-stirling-translation-1874
Intro music by INPLUSMUSIC, courtesy Pixabay
https://pixabay.com/users/lnplusmusic-47631836/
Thumbnail image uses a photo by Nicole Bomar, courtesy Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/@nicolebomar
I hope this conclusion isn’t too obvious.
I was inspired by a few recent episodes of The Path to Liberty and I wanted to distill a short logical argument about State charters (like the Constitution) and their interpretations.
Full write-up here.
In this part, we’re covering Book 3, Chapters 9, 10, and 11.
Full show notes here.