The Social Contract - 4 - State Religion
Book Four
Quote
The common good is obvious everywhere, and all that's required to see it is good sense.
Notes
🔥 When people are united, they have a unified will. When they're divided, decisions are made to benefit a part of the people only, not the common good.
🔥 The way the general will works itself out in practice isn't totally precise or concrete. With voting for example, you rarely ever get unanimous consent. Majority rules and typically comes to represent the general will.
🔥 Having elections by lot (randomly selecting from the people to be the government representatives) may be more democratic than having people try to earn votes in an election campaign. Holding office is an onerous duty, not a benefit.
🔥 Election by choice is good when you need someone with a certain set of skills. Otherwise, common sense should be enough, and in a good society everyone should have a decent enough education to be able to handle it.
🔥 There are situations where appointing someone to bypass normal legislative guardrails can be necessary. This is the office of the dictator. Such cases, says Rousseau, are "rare and easily recognizable."
🔥 Rome had a practice like this and they were sure to keep it limited.
🔥 "Put men's opinions to rights and their behaviour will improve spontaneously. Men always prize what is beautiful or what they find beautiful; but it is in their judgement of beauty that they err; therefore it is their judgements that have to be guided. In judging behaviour we judge honour, and in judging honour we take public opinion for law."
🔥 "Originally men had no kings except their gods, and no government except theocracy."
🔥 Different nations all had their own gods and conversions only ever happened by force when one nation conquered another. This changed when Rome decided to allow/adopt the gods of the people they conquered. Then Christianity disrupted that system once they became dominant.
🔥 "Then everything took on a new look; the humble Christians changed their tone, and soon the supposed kingdom of the other world was seen in this one to have become, under a visible ruler, the most violent despotism."
🔥 "Christian law is more harmful than useful in strengthening the constitution of the state." This is because, in Rousseau's view, Christianity represents a separate authority within a state that divides people's loyalties.
🔥 There are three kinds of religion: an individual one, a civil one, and one that puts religion in competition with state rulers, dividing it.
🔥 The second one — civil relgion, or theocracy — is good for unity, but puts the state in a constant state of war with everyone else (because everyone else is practicing a false religion) and can become tyrannical.
🔥 The individual one detaches man from the state. Christians are not primarily concerned with this world, says Rousseau. They're too stoic, not concerned with outcomes or with death. That attitude is not a good one for soldiers in a war, for example, since it effectively means they don't care if they lose.
🔥 You can't have a religion preach exclusivity in a society. It's incompatible with the unity of a state.