A Discourse on Political Economy

Summary

A Discourse on Political Economy is Rousseau's article 'Économie (Morale et Politique)', written for the fifth volume of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie (1755). Rousseau uses 'economy' in its older sense of household management extended to the state: the subject is public administration and finance, not the study of markets. He opens by separating the state from the family. A father's authority rests on nature and his natural affection guides him; a ruler's authority rests only on convention and law, and his natural inclinations are precisely what corrupt him. Against Filmer's Patriarcha he concludes that the rules of the household cannot govern the commonwealth. He then distinguishes sovereignty, which makes law, from government, which executes it, and introduces the idea that will organize his later Social Contract: the body politic is a moral being with a general will, which always tends to the preservation of the whole and of each part and is the rule of justice for its members. Partial associations within the state have wills of their own, general for their members but particular toward the whole, and a man may be a good priest or soldier and a bad citizen. From this Rousseau derives three rules of legitimate government. First, follow the general will in everything; this requires government by law, which alone makes men free while subject, and rulers who obey the laws they enforce. Mild, respected law accomplishes more than harsh penalties, and the true statesman prevents crimes rather than punishing them. Second, bring particular wills into conformity with the general will, which is to establish the reign of virtue. Rousseau argues that patriotism is the most effective school of virtue, that the state owes protection to every member and may never sacrifice an innocent man for the many, that government must prevent extreme inequality of fortune, and that citizens must be formed from childhood through public education, as in Crete, Sparta and ancient Persia. Third, provide for public needs. Here he defends property as the most sacred right of citizenship, prefers a public domain to taxation, warns that the need for ever greater revenue is a symptom of disorder, and praises Geneva's public granaries. Taxes are lawful only by the people's consent; they should spare those who have only necessities, fall heavily on superfluities and luxuries, and avoid burdening the farmer. The essay is compact and sometimes contradictory, but it sets out in plain form the tension between liberty and the formation of citizens that runs through all of Rousseau's political writing.

Plot or Argument

• The household is not the commonwealth

  Rousseau defines political economy as the government of the 'great family' and argues that paternal and civil authority differ in origin, extent and motive; the magistrate must distrust his own heart and follow the public reason, which is the law. Filmer's derivation of royal power from the authority of fathers is rejected.

• Sovereignty, government and the general will

  Government (executive administration) is distinguished from sovereignty (legislation). The body politic is compared to a living organism and described as a moral being whose general will is the rule of justice for its members; partial societies within it have particular wills that may oppose the common good.

• First rule: government by law

  Legitimate government follows the general will, which requires distinguishing it from one's own particular will. Law makes men free in obedience; rulers must be bound by it, grant honours but never exemptions from the law, prefer respect to severity, and act justly where the law is silent, as the Chinese emperor is said to side with the people against his officers.

• Second rule: the reign of virtue

  Virtue is the conformity of particular wills to the general will. Rousseau argues for patriotism as virtue's strongest motive, for the protection owed to every citizen, against sacrificing the innocent for the many, for preventing extreme inequality rather than relieving it, and for public education of children by honoured magistrates.

• Third rule: public needs and taxation

  Property is sacred, yet the state must be supported. Rousseau prefers a public domain, insists on honest administrators over accounting systems, warns against conquest and mercenary armies as causes of rising expense, requires popular consent to taxes, and proposes a graduated tax that spares necessities and falls on luxuries rather than on land and corn.

Characters

• Sir Robert Filmer, opponent

  Author of Patriarcha, whose theory that royal authority derives from paternal authority Rousseau calls detestable.

• Aristotle, authority

  Cited for having already distinguished household rule from political rule in Book I of the Politics.

• Cato the Younger and Socrates, contrasting exemplars

  Rousseau sets the citizen Cato above the philosopher Socrates as a model for peoples, since a nation can be made happy but not made into philosophers.

• Montesquieu, interlocutor

  The Spirit of the Laws is quoted on capitation and real taxes; Rousseau qualifies its claim.

• Jean Bodin and Samuel Pufendorf, authorities

  Bodin is cited in favour of the public domain and of consent to taxation; Pufendorf on property ending at death.

Lessons

• Why a king is not a father

  Rousseau's opening argument denies that political rule can be modelled on paternal rule: a father sees his household directly and loves his children by nature, while a ruler sees through others' eyes and has interests opposed to his subjects'. The father may follow his heart; the magistrate who follows his becomes a traitor. Students can weigh this against older traditions, biblical and classical, that describe good kings as fathers of their people.

  • List Rousseau's differences between the family and the state. Which is strongest?
  • If natural affection guides a father well, why does Rousseau think it misleads a ruler?
  • Is there any sense in which a good ruler should still be like a father? What does Rousseau's argument leave out?

• The general will and the partial group

  Rousseau's first sketch of the general will includes a sharp observation: every association, from a guild to a religious order, has a will that is general for its members and particular toward the state. A man can be loyal, brave and devout within his group and still harm the commonwealth. The idea is powerful and also open to abuse, since it can be used to treat every lesser loyalty as a rival to the state.

  • Give an example of a group whose good might conflict with the good of the larger community.
  • Rousseau says the duty of a citizen comes before that of a senator, and a man's duty before a citizen's. How does that ranking limit the state's claims?
  • What dangers arise if a government claims to know the general will better than the people do?

• Law that makes free and law that is merely feared

  Rousseau argues that law, not a master's will, is what allows obedience without servitude, that rulers who exempt themselves destroy it, and that the first of all laws is to respect the laws. Harsh penalties, he notes, are a sign of weak law, and the best statesman prevents crimes by forming citizens who love the laws. The argument links political order to the moral formation of those who live under it.

  • What does Rousseau mean by saying law can make men 'free by making them subject'?
  • Why does he think severe punishments are a sign of failure?
  • Is it the government's task to make people love the law, or only to enforce it?

• Forming citizens: education and its limits

  In the second rule Rousseau proposes public education, in common and under honoured magistrates, so that children learn early to identify themselves with their country. He admits that a man without passions would be a bad citizen but argues that loves must be directed. Readers should notice how far this claim reaches: it places the state above fathers in the upbringing of children, a position his own Emile, written later for private education, does not repeat.

  • Why does Rousseau think the education of children matters more to the state than to their fathers? Do you agree?
  • Compare his praise of Spartan and Persian education with what you know of those systems from Plutarch or Xenophon.
  • What would be lost if the family's role in education were transferred to public magistrates?

• Taxing superfluity, sparing necessity

  Rousseau's tax principles are concrete: consent of the people, proportion to property, no tax on mere necessities, heavy duties on luxuries, and caution about taxes on land and corn that fall on the farmer. He grounds them in an account of how social advantages already favour the rich, and in the conviction that preventing poverty is better than relieving it. His proposals can be compared with those of Smith two decades later.

  • Why does Rousseau insist that a grandee's 'necessaries' are not necessary? Is his argument fair?
  • Rousseau says it is better to prevent poverty than to build hospitals for the poor. What policies follow from that view?
  • Which of Rousseau's tax rules would Adam Smith accept, and which would he reject?

Context

The article appeared in November 1755 in volume V of the Encyclopédie, the same volume that carried Diderot's article 'Droit naturel', which also used the phrase 'general will'. Rousseau was then a contributor and friend of Diderot, recently returned to Genevan citizenship (1754), and he holds up Geneva's granaries and administration as a model. The essay engages the natural-law tradition of Grotius, Pufendorf and Bodin, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748), and the long English debate over Filmer's Patriarcha (published 1680), which Locke and Algernon Sidney had answered, the 'two celebrated writers' Rousseau mentions.

Composition

The date of composition is uncertain. Cole's introduction notes that it is unclear whether the article was written before or after the Discourse on Inequality, published the same year, although it reads like the later Social Contract. It was reprinted separately at Geneva in 1758 as Discours sur l'économie politique. The library's text is G. D. H. Cole's translation in The Social Contract and Discourses (Everyman's Library, 1913).

Reception

The article is read chiefly as the first statement of the theory of the general will, later developed in The Social Contract (1762). Its sections on public education and patriotism were taken up during the French Revolution, and its account of graduated taxation and consent influenced later republican writers. Rousseau's sense of 'political economy' was soon overtaken by the new science of the Physiocrats and of Adam Smith, which used the term for the study of production and exchange.

Comparisons

• The Social Contract

  The Social Contract develops the general will, the distinction of sovereign and government, and civil religion into a full theory. The earlier article is more practical, devoting a third of its length to finance, and treats the general will almost as a commonplace rather than a discovery; compare its three rules with Books II and III.

• Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

  Published the same year, the Discourse on Inequality tells a conjectural history of how property and society corrupted natural man. The Political Economy accepts property as 'the most sacred of all the rights of citizenship' and asks how a legitimate state should protect and tax it, showing Rousseau's constructive side beside his critical one.

• Politics

  Rousseau cites Book I of Aristotle's Politics as the first refutation of the claim that political rule is household rule writ large. Aristotle grounds the polis in nature, Rousseau the state in convention, so they agree on the distinction but differ on its basis.

• The Spirit of the Laws

  Rousseau quotes Montesquieu's claim that a head tax suits slavery and a tax on goods suits liberty, then qualifies it: a capitation exactly proportioned to circumstances would be the fairest of all. Both writers relate laws to climate, extent and manners, but Rousseau places the general will above Montesquieu's balance of institutions.

• The Wealth of Nations

  Smith's maxims of taxation in Book V (equality, certainty, convenience, economy) overlap with Rousseau's demand for proportion and consent, but Smith treats markets as self-ordering where Rousseau wants the state to steer commerce and restrain luxury. The two works mark the shift of 'political economy' from public administration to economic science.

• Second Treatise of Government

  Locke's Second Treatise is one of the two refutations of Filmer that Rousseau mentions. Both hold that taxes require the consent of the people or their representatives and that government exists to secure property; Rousseau adds a moral and educational ambition for the state that Locke does not share.

• Laws

  Rousseau borrows from the Laws the idea that statutes should open with preambles explaining their justice, so that citizens obey from understanding rather than fear. Plato's legislator also gives the city a central role in education, a precedent for Rousseau's second rule.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The essay is not about medicine, but it uses the physiology of its day as a political model: the body politic has a head, brain and nerves, a stomach for agriculture and commerce, and public revenue as blood circulated by the heart of a prudent administration, an image that reflects the post-Harvey circulation of the blood. In the section on finance Rousseau argues that heavy taxes on land and corn impoverish farmers and can leave people to die of hunger even while grain is cheap, and he praises Geneva's public granaries as protection against scarcity. These passages are useful for the history of famine policy and of organic metaphors for the state, not for clinical medicine.

• Opening section, after the distinction of sovereignty and government

  Extended comparison of the body politic to a living human body, with revenue as blood and a 'reciprocal sensibility' of parts whose loss means death or dissolution.
• Third rule (public needs)

  Geneva's public granaries as a reserve in bad years; the argument that provision for subsistence should keep labour necessary but never useless.

  Starvation Nutrition
• Third rule (taxes on land and corn)

  Argument that taxes on corn paid by the cultivator depopulate the country and can cause death by hunger despite low grain prices; image of veins without arteries.

  Starvation Nutrition

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between Rousseau and Sir Robert Filmer on whether a king is the father of his people. Let each use the strongest argument available to him.

• Essay

  Rousseau says a man may be 'a devout priest, a brave soldier, or a zealous senator, and yet a bad citizen.' Choose an example from history or literature and argue whether Rousseau's account of partial wills explains it.

• Classroom

  Give students Rousseau's three rules of public economy and ask small groups to draft a one-page constitution for a small city that follows them. Then discuss which rule was hardest to put into law and why.

• Essay

  Compare Rousseau's principles of taxation with Adam Smith's four maxims in The Wealth of Nations, Book V. Which set better protects the poor, and which better protects liberty?

• Fiction

  Tell the story of a Genevan magistrate in charge of the public granaries during a bad harvest, using Rousseau's account of honest administration as the measure of his choices.

Further Reading

• The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  The full development of the general will.

• Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Published the same year as the Political Economy.

• Patriarcha, Sir Robert Filmer

  Filmer's defence of royal power as fatherly authority, which Rousseau rejects.

• Jean-Jacques: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Maurice Cranston

• The General Will before Rousseau, Patrick Riley

  Traces the theological origins of the concept.