Book Review: "The Social Contract" by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Now that I have been able to properly enjoy the summer, having essentially finished my PhD work, I've recently read the book The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (translated from French to English by Willmoore Kendall); this was a book that I got from a friend who moved away a few years ago, but never got around to reading until now. This is one of the classic texts of political philosophy from the European Enlightenment era, and came before many of the seminal events of world history, including the American & French Revolutions and the European colonization & subsequent independence of much of Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America. The author provides his own refutations of many of the arguments for hereditary monarchy and instead forcefully argues for a legislature, separate from the executive, that is conducted as a direct democracy, even while acknowledging that different circumstances for different states may suggest different forms & sizes for the executive. The book includes many examples from ancient & medieval European history, and while much of the discussion of cultures outside of Europe seems antiquated or racist to modern eyes, I imagine it was typical of its time & place.

It was really interesting to see such broad imagination of democratic & republican societies before they came to be in Europe & North America. However, the book itself is not an easy read: it basically feels like a polemical political treatise written in the terse style of the textbooks by the physicists Landau & Lifshitz, in which every definition and proposition must be carefully parsed & understood individually and also as part of a broader whole. The arguments are built up slowly, so patience is required too; frequently, I found myself wondering how the author could fail to acknowledge certain seemingly-elementary rebuttals to his arguments, only to find such acknowledgments after several pages. Originally, I thought the translator's introduction about how to read the book were basically excuses meant to cover for bad writing, but as I read through more of the book, I came to appreciate it more.

There are a few comments that I have about the contents. The first is that it isn't clear to me how citizens, in the author's view, are supposed to resume the exercise of natural rights, which have been pooled into the sovereign & redistributed as civil rights, when the social contract is thought to be violated, especially as it also isn't clear to me how to distinguish a violation of the social contract from an individual's unhappiness with the general will going against that individual's private will. Related to this, it isn't clear to me how a citizen, acting to debate & make laws for the sovereign to further the general will, is supposed to act completely separately, as a sort of Jekyll/Hyde situation, from that person's thoughts as an individual, because the execution of laws furthering the general will may affect that individual and others perhaps not particularly naming those people but naming a certain group affiliation, and it becomes hard then to define the general will in that context. The second is that so many of the author's arguments regarding the formation of a new state seem to depend on their being a full vacuum of power beforehand, with only the barest acknowledgment that new societies & nations don't emerge from a vacuum; to be fair, many of the great upheavals that figure prominently in my imagination regarding this point came after the publication of this book, but enough had happened which the author mentioned that this sparing treatment of the issue seems odd. I also have some more minor comments, namely that I'm not sure if the author's specific claims about the intertwined nature of politics & religion in ancient societies would be validated by modern scholarship, and the author's claims about there being no "true" Christian soldiers seems to rely too much on a no-true-Scotsman fallacy.

I would certainly need to reread this book carefully to better appreciate it, and perhaps that could address at least some of my comments. In any case, I'd only recommend this book to people with a serious deeply-rooted interest in political philosophy, who can appreciate the book and the context of its time & place, as opposed to novices like myself.

Book Reviews: "An Introduction to the Thought of Karl Popper" by Roberta Corvi & "Philosophy and the Real World" by Bryan Magee

I've recently read two books about the life and philosophy of Karl Popper. One is An Introduction to the Thought of Karl Popper by Roberta Corvi (translated from Italian to English by Patrick Camiller, while the other is Philosophy and the Real World by Bryan Magee. Both have some similarities in form and structure. They are both relatively shorter books (under 200 pages, each in hardback form). They both devote a single chapter as an overview to Karl Popper's life, and then devote subsequent chapters to his philosophy of science, philosophy of politics, and the broader themes of his philosophy. Furthermore, they were both written during Popper's life, with some level of consultation with him.

As a layperson when it comes to philosophy, I found Corvi's book, which I read first, to be a bit of a struggle to understand. The prose used in the book is often unclear, and I especially found the first 30 pages to be so densely packed with jargon and assumed background on philosophy that I was tempted to put the book down at that point; thankfully, my persistence paid off, as I found the rest of the book to be progressively clearer. Additionally, there are some tonal shifts throughout the book that I found a bit odd; Corvi does not uniformly praise nor criticize Popper's philosophy, but while her criticism is generally clear, her praise merely restates his philosophy as if it were self-evident fact. I'm not sure if the abstruseness of Corvi's book is due to her own writing style and assumption of a more philosophically-educated audience, due to issues with the translation, or due to the translator's own deliberate choices in tackling the subject of Karl Popper. The book claims to be an accessible introduction to Popper's philosophy, but I'm not sure if that really means accessibility for lay readers (as opposed to philosophy students early in their careers).

By contrast, Magee's book, which I read second, has much more clear and accessible prose. In particular, there were a few misconceptions that I had about Popper's beliefs from Corvi's book that I felt Magee's book cleared up, such as the extent of Popper's rejection of Marxism and disdain for socialism as a political practice versus his belief in essentially social democratic ideals. This book is also shorter, and because Magee was a student of Popper, the narration of this book seems more self-consistent and intimate, reflecting Magee's emotional and ideological closeness to Popper, and it even includes a few points where he makes explicit mention of discussions with Popper; Corvi's book, in comparison, is much more dispassionate and disinterested. However, that intimacy in turn raises questions about the impartiality of Magee's narration. For example, Corvi spends a little time questioning the philosophical foundation of Popper's belief in indeterminism, while Magee completely sweeps this under the rug; this appears to be a broader trend, as Corvi does generally do a better job formulating her own and addressing other people's criticisms of Popper's philosophies.

Both of these books were written before or around the time of the end of the Cold War. This makes the political views espoused in the book somewhat dated; of course hindsight is 20/20, but that throws into especially stark relief the rather inductive nature of the arguments positing ever-increasing rationality and liberal democracy around the world. The arguments that the development of ideas, logic, technology, structures, and so on are indicative of human evolution seem similarly inductive, especially considering that these changes have happened over such shorter time scales compared to typical evolutionary changes observed in humans (over tens of thousands of years and more), and this may also be because understanding of evolution was less sophisticated at that time than it is now, though I'm not entirely sure of that considering that I'm not in the field of evolution. In any case, these books' ages show, and it isn't clear how much of the description of evolution and politics comes in each book from Popper himself versus each respective author's interpolation & interpretation; I'd be curious to see more modern books that address these recent issues. With these issues aside, overall, I think Corvi's book gives a fuller picture, but Magee's book is the clearer introduction for a philosophical layperson like myself.

Arguments Symptomatic of Occasional Linux Community Dysfunction

This latest argument (Brian Proffitt, IT World) is part of a larger problem within the Linux community: members of the community get too caught up and too angry about the little details - GNOME vs. KDE vs. Xfce, Firefox vs. Konqueror, DEB vs. RPM, GRUB vs. LILO, etc.
This particular argument is even worse in terms of pettiness. It has to do with the fact that while before the window buttons (maximize, minimize, close) were on the right side of the top window bar, now in Ubuntu 10.04 (though (former) Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth insists that the change may not carry over to the production release) the window buttons are moved to the left (à la Mac OS X). It started out as a minor discussion before morphing into a vicious online war of words. Finally, Mark Shuttleworth had to end the argument, but not before saying, "This is not a democracy."
Follow the jump for my take.