"Rousseau" said DiLorenzo "thought that society should be guided by the "general will," but what exactly that concept entailed has perplexed later commentators. It cannot be equated with what the majority of a certain society wishes: it is only when the people's decisions properly reflect the common good, untrammeled by faction, that the general will operates. But if the general will need not result from straightforward voting, how is to be determined? One answer, for which there is some textual support in Rousseau, is that a wise legislator will guide the people toward what they really want. Those who dissent will "be forced to be free."
The problem is that Rousseau is confusing freedom with government provision. As the legislator provides what he really knows is the general will, he is offering freedom, even if it is freedom at the point of the sword.
Such has also been a familiar theme within American political discourse. The confusion of freedom with provision may have been inevitable once the Declaration made the pursuit of happiness a self-evident universal right. Franklin Roosevelt built on the tendency to confuse freedom with provision in his 1944 State of the Union address when he justified what he called a “second Bill of Rights” on the grounds that “Necessitous men are not free men”. The state, he went on to argue, must provide a “new basis of security and prosperity” which included “The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.”
Of course, the corollary of believing that “necessitous men are not free” is that any measure of government control, provided it relieves necessity, is a sacrifice we should be willing to make for the sake of “freedom” or, as Rousseau would say, for the sake of the general will.
When freedom is confused with provision and when intervention is necessary in order for that provision to be delivered (as it inevitably must be, since the government can only give what it first takes away), those individuals who resist intervention become the enemies of freedom. Like those in Rousseau’s utopia, they be forced to be free. Put another way, the state must force citizens to surrender those liberties which hinder government from optimizing its provision potential.
It is not hard to see the implications that Rousseau's categories have for the current health care debate. Notice the Rousseau-like tones with which Faith Fitzgerald (professor at the University of California at Davis Medical Center) described the health conscious state in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Both health care providers and the commonweal now have a vested interest in certain forms of behavior, previously considered a person’s private business, if the behavior impairs a person’s ‘health.’ Certain failures of self-care have become, in a sense, crimes against society, because society has to pay for their consequences.
Fitzgerald is onto something. In the health conscious state, where freedom is confused with provision and where all of our health is connected in the economic web of limited resources (a point I have argued HERE), choosing to be unhealthy is a crime against the "general will."
Comments
There appear to be some glaring inaccuracies in this article:
1). The article cited at the beginning appears to be by David Gordon, not Thomas DiLorenzo. It is a review of a book by DiLorenzo. Consquently, the quotes attributed to DiLorenzo are actually Gordon's.
2). "The Social Contract," Book III, Chapter 12 seems to contradict the "wise legislator" interpretation presented above when it says "THE Sovereign, having no force other than the legislative power, acts only by means of the laws; and the laws being solely the authentic acts of the general will, the Sovereign cannot act save when the people is assembled." The general will seems to be pretty clearly linked to the assembly of the people here.
3). It's rather ironic that the author of this article links the "confusion of freedom with provision" to the inclusion of the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson. Were both Jefferson AND Hamilton wrong?! I'm confused . . .
do you know about Obama's science adviser saying we should have stuff put in the water to sterolize us? In his book in the 70's he also advocates for forced abortions as a way to control the overpopulation. It was all on Alex Jones' website.
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