“Streams of Consciousness” is a regular series of articles written by David Meagher. In the December edition of “Streams of Consciousness” Dave writes about Rousseau and the “appropriate” form of the state. In relation to this, Dave discusses poverty, currency, and state provision of necessities, arguing, as he has before, for the direct provision of means to the poor.

On the Price of French Bread

by David Meagher

‘Toutes mes idées se tiennent, mais je ne saurois les exposer toutes à la fois.’

(Rousseau)

This month, I would like to present some issues arising from a consideration of Rousseau’s Social Contract.  Like some of the other authors I have considered so far, Rousseau lived much of his life in a state of relative impoverishment.  His mother died when he was a child, and his father was forced to flee his home in Geneva before Rousseau reached maturity.  Rousseau tells of his life in the Confessions, so we know how he came to serve as a kind of secretary in the homes of some French aristocratic ladies before moving to Paris to begin his adult life.  His real ambition was to develop a new system of musical notation, but he was also a great reader of history and the arts, and would come to be regarded as one of Europe’s great political theorists, influencing the destinies of France and America by contributing to the ideological foundations of their revolutions and their constitutions.  His reconsideration of the contract theories found in Grotius and Hobbes emphasizes the consensual nature of the social contract, the notion of popular sovereignty, and its foundation in the notion of a general will.

In Book III of the Social Contract, Rousseau considers the various forms of government: democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, and what he calls mixed forms.  Given that such a variety exists, Rousseau considers the conditions in which one or other of these would be likely to occur in order to determine the surest sign of the preservation and prosperity of the members of a political association, which he takes to be the true end of such an association.

Quelle est la fin de l’association politique?  C’est la conservation et la prospérité de ses membres.  Et quel est le signe le plus sûr qu’ils se conservent et prospèrent?  C’est leur nombre et leur population.

What is the end of political association?  It is the preservation and the prosperity of its members.  And what is the surest sign that they are preserved and prosper?  It is their number and their population. – III. 9.

All things being equal, says Rousseau, the more the natural population of a state increases, the better it is; where the population diminishes and perishes, it is worse off.  This seems sensible enough as it is, though one might want to give further attention to its consequences, especially considering Rousseau’s own principles of the size of government.  Bearing in mind that for Rousseau, the more a state grows, the more its government must be concentrated (‘plus l’État s’aggrandit, plus le Gouvernement doit se resserrer’ – III. 2.), it follows that if a state is best which is growing in size, it is tending towards perfectibility the more it is approaching monarchy, the form of government suited to the largest human population, and the most prevalent form found in Europe as Rousseau is writing.  It should not be forgotten that democracy, where the population is smallest, is that which would be governed by gods, if they were to be a people.  Such a perfect government, says Rousseau, is not suited to men.

S’il y avoit un people de Dieux, il se gouverneroit démocratiquement.  Un Gouvernement si parfait ne convient pas à des hommes. – III. 4.

It is fair to say that the best form of government, for Rousseau, is relative to its size; and that the healthier it is, the more its natural population will grow.  Much as romantics emphasize Rousseau’s image of human government as a small group of individuals gathered under an oak tree, and despite the tendency towards representative democracy in the time since the writing of the Social Contract, it should be remembered that Rousseau does not present a view which especially prefers democracy to aristocracy, or aristocracy to monarchy, nor the other way around.  The best form of government, for Rousseau, is the one in which those who govern and those who are sovereign, or who assign them that right, are in a proper arithmetical relation.  It should never be forgotten that Rousseau’s sovereign is the people as a whole, from which is determined the general will, and that executive and legislative power is distinctly separated and alienated to those who are encharged with the right and power to govern, legislate, and enforce laws, but only following, and as a reflection of, the general will.  He says somewhere that the number of governors should be the square root of the size of the population.  But he is not being completely serious when he says so.  In the case of monarchy, one can see how this law of the square root of the population would lead to a contradiction with the law of inverse proportion, since the king or queen would not rule over the largest number, as Rousseau would like, but over only one individual, i.e., the monarch’s own self.

For the purpose of this month’s essay, the reason I take this chapter of Book III into consideration, the chapter entitled: ‘Of the Signs of Good Government’, is to draw attention to a debateable truism found there.  Once again, this is not a central thesis of the text, but a marginal comment, and my interest is to try to understand it in terms of the concerns of this site on poverty.  In a litany of conflicting opinions concerning the signs of good government, Rousseau says that some are content when money circulates, while others insist that the people have bread:

l’un est content quand l’argent circule, l’autre exige que le people ait du pain.

It is worth noting a comment of Voltaire on this passage, which asks how the people could have bread without the circulation of money:

Comment le people peut-il avoir du pain sans que l’argent circule?

In order to understand this difference, we should consider theoretical as well as historical factors.  Neither Rousseau nor Voltaire would live to see the irony of a deceptive Western media reporting food shortages in the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, even as the gap widened between rich and poor at the global level.  If it were not for the economically devastating effects of nuclear proliferation on both sides, we might have more objective conditions to provide an account of the opposition of a society in the greedy pursuit of wealth on one hand, with one in direct pursuit of the means of existence on the other.  One cannot be certain what past or existing societies Rousseau might have had in mind when he spoke of those who would prefer to provide bread rather than the means to purchase it.  Voltaire had neither the knowledge nor the imagination to conceive of such a society.  But as long as political theory was accompanied with political economy, especially when the notion of a state of nature was being considered, one can find the inclusion of an account of the earliest origins of the monetary system in barter economies.  In Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, for instance, we find the development of a theory of the origin of money where the farmer of milk and cows might exchange with the farmer of eggs and chickens to the satisfaction of both parties, or where the farmer of grain might exchange with the farmer of eggs and the farmer of milk, so that all exchanges are considered fair, i.e., where a given quantity of grain is equivalent to a given number of eggs, chickens, cows, and/or a given quantity of milk.  Some say that money arises to represent the exchange because one cannot sell half an egg; but Locke points out that a more likely reason for the origin of the use of metals to represent the exchange is that while grain is a perishable good, metals are not perishable and can be accumulated in a greater supply than the agricultural commodity thus represented.  On this account, a farmer can always have more money than he can the goods it represents, because money will not perish when stored.  This prehistory of money can be found in most political economy through Smith, Marx, Keynes, and others.  We know from the Confessions that Rousseau was probably influenced by this theory of Locke’s, since he speaks of a French edition of the Second Treatise circulating in France in his day.  So when Rousseau speaks of some societies which would prefer to provide people with bread while others would prefer to have money circulate, one might want to consider it in terms of a reaction to the modern money economy itself.  Though its origins have been historically and anthropologically accounted for, there is no objective reason why currency is needed for the exchange of goods; but it is a convention which, to the mind of Voltaire for instance, is seen as an inescapable reality.  As Marx would have it, surplus value, which is the product of the use of money to record transactions, remains a spectral value, which to strict materialists, needs to be demystified and laid bare as the false illusion of an interested class, or as the profits of capitalist oppression.  The digital accounting of transactions comes to further ignore any reference to a stock or reserve of metal, leading to more sophisticated theories of the spectrality of money, while the promise for a view which returns to material needs continues to be transcended by those exploiting the spectral representations of prosperity.

In the present context, we are often reminded that the food bank system arose as a temporary measure to deal with the effects of drastic cuts to social assistance during the last recession.  It was thought that once adequate incomes were restored, food banks would simply disappear as the need for them declined.  So we can see how the opposition that Rousseau considers is very relevant to the current situation.  The incomes of individuals on social assistance have not returned to the level they were at fifteen years ago, when these cuts were introduced – not even close; and while the demand for food banks has seen a predictable increase, private funding has decreased during the presently lagging recession, while public funding remains inadequate to make up the loss.  This leaves food banks in the unenviable position of having to turn clients away even when their need is evident, and clients with less and less alternatives, as incomes remain unable to meet basic needs.  We will remember that for Rousseau, the opposition between earlier forms of exchange and monetary exchange ignores the real signs of good government, which remain the number and demographics of the population, and the tendency of the population to be well-preserved and prosperous.  While food banks are better organized to solicit funding, individuals continue to despair of being able to provide for ourselves month after month.  Despite a strong sympathy with a view that would see the disillusionment of the monetary system, I continue to maintain that the best solution to the problem of poverty is the direct provision of means to the poor through a substantial increase to social assistance.  Meanwhile, the continued existence of food banks and other non-profit community services may come to be seen as signs of good government only when funding begins to reflect a responsible public policy reflecting the ends of the preservation and prosperity of the population.  One might be inclined to argue with Voltaire, and against Rousseau, that this would still mean the circulation of money; but the less corruption in the system, the more bread the poor will enjoy, and the less money will pay the costs of its administration.  Analogous to the views of Rousseau on the size of government, we must remember that the best social services are those where the correct proportion is determined between those who provide and those who benefit, that the former are meant to serve the interests of the latter, and that the more beneficiaries of the system are directly provided with the means to spend money themselves, the more service providers will be free to contribute to other forms of industry.

I would like to conclude by thanking Cheryl once again for the opportunity and the honour to contribute to this site, and to acknowledge the efforts of all who have made possible the new format and administration.  It is a privilege to play a part and to do what I can to bring it into being once again.  It continues to astonish me month after month what talent and dedication can be found among us.

Last Month’s Edition of Streams of Consciousness

Next Month’s Edition of Streams of Consciousness

David Meagher was born in Montreal in 1966. He studied philosophy at Champlain College; McGill University; and Lonergan College, Concordia University. Receiving his BA in philosophy from McGill University in 1991, he has been living in poverty for twenty years, pursuing independent studies in political science, philosophy, psychiatry, and criminology. Dave’s articles have been published in a variety of minor newspapers and magazines. His current interests include contemporary thought, the sources of the hermeneutics of suspicion, and re-reading Derrida, and he is currently working on a three-volume study entitled Schizophrenia. Dave is a contributing editor at Neighbours and a regular contributor to PeacockPoverty. He has been living in Toronto since 2006.

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