Cardinal McElroy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and The Social Contract

On September 26, Cardinal Robert McElroy delivered a speech titled “A Social Contract for the Digital Age” at St. Anselm’s Abbey School in Washington, D.C. The talk summarized how the concept of social contract needs to be expanded and applied to Artificial Intelligence, based on Catholic Social Teaching.

I am not objecting to the document in its general thrust, but there is a serious problem near the conclusion, when McIlroy touches on the operative concept of “the social contract.” We read the following:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw the concept of the social contract as a reflection on the need to root the governance of society in the general will of the people as a whole. It was a challenge to the divine rights of kings, to the belief that the right to govern belonged to elites, and to the assertion that the power of governance belonged in an unfiltered and undifferentiated way to the masses as a whole. [] Immanuel Kant spoke to the importance of this social contract specifically concerning the dominance of a scientific elite in determining the future of our world. “I myself am a researcher by inclination. I feel the entire thirst for cognition and the eager restlessness to proceed further in it, as well as the satisfaction of every acquisition. There was a time when I believed this alone could constitute the honor of humankind, and I despised the rabble who knows nothing. Rousseau has set me right. ¹

As a Catholic political philosopher, this passage leapt off the page when I read it. Before presenting my critique, I do wish to emphasize that this is only a small part of the lecture. Nonetheless, considering that Cardinal McIlroy has a doctorate in political science, in addition to a doctorate in theology from the Jesuit Gregorian University in Rome, I did not think it unfair to emphasize the seriousness of the error here from a Catholic standpoint.

The development of contractual theories of government, which place inherent limits on the powers of government and recognize the God-given dignity of each person through rights, is one of the most important developments in the history of political thinking. We especially owe the development of these theories to Catholic thinkers.

Although the Greeks first spoke of democracy, they never really developed a theory of government emphasizing two important elements: a government with limited powers and one recognizing inherent rights. Constitutional government, with a contractual basis, was developed in theory and practice in the Middle Ages. Two key notions were the notion of an implied contract between ruler and subject. The second was the limitation placed on the ruler by the higher laws, natural and divine.²

In fact, virtually every concept we associate with democratic government was developed in the pre-modern, Catholic context: the notion of a higher law, limited kingship, popular sovereignty, contractual government, and the right of resistance.³  Unfortunately, these truths remain widely unrecognized in the political theory world, where credit is normally given to Locke in the Anglo-Saxon world and Rousseau in the French.

In terms of a more specific philosophical development, this was occasioned by the divine right of kings theory, a totalitarian theory most associated with King James I of England, who wrote The True Law of Free Monarchies in 1598 to defend the theory. It was totalitarianism dressed up in biblical and religious garb.

It was the Jesuits—most notably Robert Bellarmine in De Laicis (1586) and Francisco Suárez, in De Legibus, ac Deo Legislatore (1612)—who developed a full theory of contractual government rooted in popular sovereignty. God does not give political authority directly to kings or regimes. The people are the original repository of political authority, and they transmit that authority normally to a regime. The regime is of human law, and, most notably, always under the higher laws, the natural and the divine.

It is a marvelous philosophical doctrine because it roots political authority in human nature itself. Human authority is real and should normally be obeyed—but it is never without limits. Unfortunately, one would be very hard-pressed to find a political philosophy textbook with references to these important works, which continually bolsters the myth that popular sovereignty and everything to do with democracy are Enlightenment concepts that come from Locke and Rousseau (although with significantly different interpretations).

Now on to Rousseau, writing almost 200 years after Bellarmine and 150 years after Suárez. This is an Enlightenment theory that makes no reference to the prior social contract theories. Briefly, the theory has enormous problems, which come from two sources. Consider Rousseau’s own words:

The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.⁴

This is indeed quite a problem, and one which Rousseau never solved. Rousseau, following previously constructed theories of the state of nature, rejected the Catholic and medieval notions that political authority was a direct outgrowth of the social nature of human beings. For him, there is no authority at all prior to the creation of civil government. He wanted to create a theory of government in which a person loses none of his allegedly original and limitless freedom. Many have concluded that you simply cannot do it, on the commonsense supposition that political authority must place some limits on individual liberty.

Yet, at the same time, Rousseau’s theory is equally adamant about the authority of government. In his formulation, people freely unite to create a “general will,” which is an abstruse theoretical formulation not easily defined. It is essentially what everyone wills so long as they are not corrupted by evil passions or bad education. Many have wondered how such a notion would be translated into practice via political institutions. We then get the following formulation: “Just as nature gives each man absolute power over all his members, the social compact gives the body politic absolute power over all its members.”⁵

What we have is an internally contradictory theory, which is, on one side, anarchism and on the other absolutism. But for our purposes, the point is that this government “by the people” is essentially without limits. Lurking in the background is the rejection of original sin. Rousseau thought all the problems could be solved by good education. Unlike the Jesuit theories and the wisdom of the long-developing contractual tradition, Rousseau did not see fit to build any limits on the power of the people.

We can dispute how much Rousseau is to blame for subsequent developments, but this is the thinking that leads to the Reign of Terror and all subsequent Marxist totalitarianism, which always claims to be acting in the name of “the people.” Clearly, Rousseau’s social contract theory is the least Catholic of any possible formulation. There is no natural or divine law to limit it, and in practice means the rule of the people by whoever holds the reins of power.

This is what is so baffling about Cardinal McIlroy’s formulation.

He is aware that there was a divine right of kings theory, but when he goes for a counter-theory, he bypasses all Catholic thought, much of its practice, and ignores the great Jesuit treatises on the subject. It was sad because it would have been a perfect time to instruct the audience about the Catholic Jesuit contractual theories, which were, in fact, the greatest opponents of divine right theory. Particularly today, many younger Catholics have an inadequate intellectual formation and so distance themselves from their Church. They are taught to be ashamed of their Church, especially when the conversation turns to politics, where they are taught that Catholicism did nothing but resist democratic ideas.

It is shocking to see a Catholic cardinal appealing to Rousseau’s theory of the social contract as apparently some sort of model for Catholic thought today. A wonderful opportunity was, sadly, lost. Worse, the Cardinal makes the suggestion that Catholic social teaching is somehow compatible with Rousseau’s ideas.

To add insult to injury, the Catholic world is supposed to get excited about Rousseau on the authority of Immanuel Kant, who in the account given converted Kant from his elitism. This is the same Kant who made a career rejecting the entire tradition of metaphysics from Augustine through Aquinas and the great Spanish scholastics, preparing the way for the standardization of anti-metaphysical philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, effectively sidelining Catholic thought.

Endnotes: