The Social Contract

Dull AF is a term that is often used to describe something that is extremely boring or uninteresting. It can refer to a variety of things, such as a movie, a book, a job, or a conversation. When something is dull AF, it lacks excitement, energy, and engagement. It can make you feel tired, unmotivated, and even frustrated.

There are many reasons why something might be dull AF. It could be because the subject matter is too dry or technical, the presentation is lackluster, or there is no clear purpose or direction. Sometimes, it can also be due to personal preferences or expectations. For example, if you are interested in action movies and you watch a slow-paced drama, you might find it dull AF.

However, just because something is dull AF doesn't mean it's not valuable or important. Some things that are initially dull AF can become more interesting and engaging as you learn more about them or approach them from a different perspective. It's important to keep an open mind and be willing to give things a chance, even if they seem dull AF at first.

The courage of the author in writing such a book in that time when the royal rule and aristocratic control prevailed in various aspects of life in France must be emphasized.

The French Revolution made this book like its Bible. It laid the principles of human rights and governance systems not only in France but throughout Europe.

Criticizing absolute rule, the control of a certain class over affairs, and slavery, all these ideas make this thinker visionary and ahead of his time.

Also, his criticism of the exploitation of religion in controlling governance. Religion should be a national religion to govern, not for a particular country, but rather comprehensive for all countries that follow this religion. And it should be a spiritual religion for the people only and not used to control governance and people.

It is a wonderful book.

"The Social Contract" is part of that red thread of original texts of political philosophy that I keep reading: I was and remain convinced that it can be an important tool for developing a mature idea also of contemporary politics.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau has never convinced me, not even when I studied him at school. I have never found in this figure either the cold and effective lucidity of Montesquieu or Montaigne, nor the amused sarcasm in the service of the civic sense typical of Voltaire. Rousseau I have always seen as an idealist, a blind man who does not want to see, an exalted, a romantic in the pejorative sense of the term, in short. The reading of his most important work in recent years has confirmed this youthful impression of mine: Rousseau marks the passage point from enlightened despotism to democracy without being up to it. The result will be the Terror.

At the end of the fair, what is wrong? Tito Magri explains it very well in his introduction, but Albert Camus explains it even better in his "The Rebel" (in my opinion, "The Rebel" is the first book that any reader should read to approach political philosophy): the social contract that gives birth to the state cannot be thought of as a超越 of a state of nature in which the conflict of man against man makes survival impossible. This is because such a state could not be either egalitarian or democratic. How could those who come out victorious from the conflicts of the state of nature be convinced to totally alienate the advantages of their victory to give birth to an egalitarian state? It is a question without an answer, exactly as insoluble is the ambivalence between Liberty and equality (fraternity in politics is a fairy tale for children that no one has ever believed in), between which the French Revolution oscillated and from which the great evils of contemporary Europe, liberalism and communism, were born.

Among other things, from here it is also understood why instead Hobbes felt perfectly at ease within the contractualist theory. The Hobbesian social state is a powerful Leviathan that imposes itself out of necessity given the perverse human nature, and does not care about either equality or even less about liberty. If enlightened despotism still finds room for manoeuvre within this loop, democracy marks the end of contractualism.

The contradiction between contractualism and democracy (which is translated into the contradiction between liberty and equality) is so crushing that in fact Rousseau throughout "The Social Contract" struggles to find a way out without finding it. At the moment when he begins to define the organisms of the state, the conflict situations of the state of nature seem to cease to exist, replaced by a not well-defined "Situation of need" that only with collaboration can man overcome. Dreams. All of history shows that the situations of anarchy and material need that always precede the birth of new forms of state never prescind from the conflict situation, which excludes the coexistence of equality and liberty (the winners must be FORCED to be equal, as the communists will well understand).

The very governing institutions that hold power in the Rousseauian state suffer terribly from this unresolved dichotomy. The sovereign power in the democratic republic is made of nothing. One speaks of a hypothetical "general will" that should arise from the conjunction of the individual wills of the citizens, and that guarantees the univocity of its action simply by dealing not with specific questions but only with general principles, leaving the power of management in the hands of the executive power. What hypothetical bulwark could protect at this point the citizens from the tyranny of a corrupt executive power (power corrupts and gives habituation, as has always been known), Rousseau does not explain. The consequence? The right that Maximilien Robespierre will arrogate to himself of being the only interpreter of the general will in the Jacobin dictatorship that will embody Rousseau's "democratic" state, and that will roll the heads of those who dissent and break the social contract. In the effort to be totally egalitarian, the Jacobin dictatorship will shed rivers of blood. And a century and a half later the communist regimes will do the same.

Albert Camus has explained it well: the conflict between equality and liberty is total, and he who hypothesizes contracts that give birth to democratic states lies to himself. "All political regimes are oligarchic," the socialist parliamentarian Lelio Basso will say in the middle of the twentieth century. A general will that does not submit to an institution that regulates it by the hand of a ruling class is condemned to bow its head before a tyrant. Moreover, it is one of the reasons why I distrust the Five Star Movement and its idea of one man one vote in politics. It is a thought that leads to tyranny, and I'm not even entirely sure that Casaleggio doesn't know it (I challenge that many nostalgics of fascism like this political movement).

It is paradoxical that precisely the difficulties and distortions of a political idea constitute the greatness of the book that exposes it. Reading Rousseau's "The Social Contract" makes a huge step forward in understanding the crisis and the end of contractualism (the end of the feudal system gives birth to the desire for democracy, but democracies are not born from contracts), in understanding the nightmare of the Jacobin Terror and its guillotines, in understanding how a ruling class anyway corrupt (even if as little as possible) is in reality a necessary evil. Rousseau's unforgivable mistake lies perhaps only in confirming after Hobbes that the use of violence and state murder are legitimate tools of government. We have already said the use that Robespierre will make of this beautiful idea, with the aggravating circumstance that already in those years Cesare Beccaria and many others were beginning to deny the death penalty.

In the end, it is an obligatory book, but not only in a negative sense. Jean-Jacques Rousseau shows to have an awareness of the functioning of democracies that is impressive for the nineteenth century (a century in which democracies did not exist). The need for the separation of powers and the superiority of parliament over the government; the tension between liberal right and egalitarian left, the warning not to try to regulate all of civil life through laws for fear of the birth of a suffocating bureaucracy, the distinction in war between states and war between peoples, in "The Social Contract" we find them all. And many Italian governors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have done better to read these things twice, if the good of Italy interested them at all.

In conclusion, "The Social Contract" puts in black and white the end of an era (Contractualism and enlightened despotism) and the birth of another (the revolution and democracy); and all its difficulties only explain this fracture. The real drama is that Western politics has never been able to completely overcome that fracture, as the blood of the Jacobin Terror but also of the communist and fascist dictatorships, but also of the horrors of the liberal peripheries, is there to prove. Reading books like this would be important at least to make an attempt.