“The People” and the person
Paul GoodellWhat do the American People want?
This is a question that’s seldom asked, but often answered, by politicians and pundits in the US. In any kind of discussion of national policy, we often hear our presidents, senators, and news analysts claim that “The American People want X.” or “I don’t think X is what the American People want.”
We are so often told what the American People want or don’t want that we may forget a simple but important truth: the American People don’t exist. “The People” is an abstraction. It can’t want anything. We might as well ask what the number 7 wants.
People (that is, individuals) exist and have desires that can be respected and acted upon, but The People does not. We should be very careful about asking what The People want. The People is nearly always a mask for our own desires.
The idea of The People as a concrete entity flows from the writings of the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who envisioned a just society as one that conformed to the “general will”. The general will — the spirit of the People — is the wellspring of all justice, for Rousseau. People who conform to the general will are good and free; people who don’t conform to it are bad and in a state of slavery.
In his most famous meditation on society, The Social Contract, Rousseau saw it as society’s duty to “force [such] men to be free.” To force them to conform to what The People want. Rulers who can divine what the general will is are justified in acting on it. Rousseau’s ideas animated the French Revolution — most notably in the Reign of Terror of Robespierre, who insisted that he knew the general will and was justified in guillotining anyone who disagreed with him, for the good of The People.
Unsurprisingly, Rousseau’s philosophy also served as the foundation for nearly all political oppression in the the past 100 years. Communism relies heavily on Rousseau’s ideas of the person being subject to The People, as do Fascist ideologies (which are little more than nationalized Communism). The Bolsheviks, Stalin’s purges, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Communist China, Castro’s Cuba (with Che Guevara’s death squads), Pol Pot, Ceausescu’s Romania, the countless Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia: all of them served The People but had a hard time doing well by individual persons, slaughtering over 100 million of them.
In contrast to Rousseau, the British philosopher John Locke believed that the person — the individual — was the fundamental unit of society. For Locke, safeguarding the liberty of individuals is the only legitimate purpose of government. Only insofar as a government was concerned with the welfare of individuals as such would he call it just. The foundational liberty that a person has, Locke argued, is the freedom to secure his own person and his own legitimate property. All other liberties flowed from this one, and if the government does nothing more than safeguard this liberty, it creates a just society.
The only countries in history built on a Lockean vision of liberty were England and the US. Unsurprisingly, throughout modern history, they were the countries in which a person was most free. (The existence of slavery in both countries didn’t make them less free in the Lockean sense. Slavery is unconscionable, but throughout history people have thought it legitimate to keep other humans as property. This moral error lead to a category error — black Africans were placed in the category of property, not persons. Once enough people in both countries regarded blacks as persons, they considered slavery an intolerable institution.)
To the extent that The People have become more important than the person in both countries, however, the freedom of their citizens is less secure.
In Britain, for example, the right to safeguard one’s life has long ceased to exist, because a person’s right to self-defense cannot trump The People’s monopoly on force. (This situation was only partially remedied in 2008.) Video cameras at nearly ever street corner in many towns strip persons of their right to privacy in favor of The People’s right to be informed of others’ actions. Speech codes limit individuals’ ability to speak without fear of retribution in favor of The People’s ability to stamp out unpleasant thoughts.
For many years now, Americans have heard calls for several such laws to be passed over here. “People cannot manage their affairs in this-or-that area,” we are told, “so The People must help them.” The financial sector, the health care industry, the agricultural sector, and several other areas of our society have been increasingly brought under the care of The People. As that has happened, the freedom of individuals to make their own choices in those areas has been severely hampered, if not removed altogether.
These developments serve as a warning to us: beware the will of The People. Beware anyone who claims to know what”the American People” want or don’t want. America as a society was founded on respecting the will of the person, not that of The People.
September 9th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
Good observation. I would hypothesize that this is so because, as an abstract, the “People” don’t have a will. The person who assumes the right to speak for the People necessarily spouts the opinions of, not the People, but a person, most likely himself. But, instead of the honesty of opinion, the statement is imbued with what democratic states have come to equate with the divine rights of kings–except there is no king to hold accountable.
September 10th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
I imagine this device of is used by people who reject the existence of objective morality, but who cannot even in their own minds or speech reconcile this with an innate perception of purpose and will “behind the cosmos” (which I would contend most if not all men have, though they may fight against and try to disprove this sense). The highest power this group may assent to while maintaining some intellectual consistency is the will of The People - the amassed preferences of all the people surely has more significance than the preference of any one person.
September 12th, 2009 at 10:58 am
I think you’re right in part, Benjamin. I agree with you that this reverence for The People’s opinion is a rejection of the consequences of accepting the nihilistic view of the universe that atheism or materialism necessarily entails.
I think you misspeak, though, when you call the will of The People “the amassed preferences of all the people”. The collected preferences of persons exists, though it’s virtually impossible to actually ascertain what it is with any degree of certainty. My Electoral Politics professor’s response to questions about things like “the amassed preferences of all the people” was “There’s an answer to that. I don’t know how we’d find it out, but I know there’s an answer.”
The will of The People, though, is often viewed as a gestalt-type of phenomenon that exists in an almost supra-personal state. This is why it’s so dangerous. Just as The People is a nonexistent supra-personal abstraction, so The People’s will is something that goes beyond mere persons. If people thought about The People’s will as something concrete, like the combined opinions of all the persons in a nation, there wouldn’t be as much of a problem; those opinions would largely tend to cancel each other out, and even when they didn’t there would often be a large enough dissenting bloc of persons that collective action on the scale of socialist ideologies would be much less likely to materialize.
But The People never disagree with each other, because The People are an abstraction from the real. They are like a fictional hive mind, only lacking a Queen to tell them what thoughts to things to do. When a person steps in to try to become that Queen — Robespierre, Mussolini, FDR, Hitler, etc. — they seek to impose their will on a will-less collective that doesn’t exist.