Citizen Jury or Referendum? A Rousseauian Perspective
Keith Sutherland
Abstract: Daniela Cammack’s rejoinder to my claim that lawmaking juries would not contravene Rousseauian strictures on popular sovereignty argued that all citizens should register their ‘willingness’. This short response focuses on the inherent Cartesianism in the notion of volunté in contemporary social philosophy, and contrasts it with the contingent/situated/biological perspective of cognitive science and philosophy of mind. This has important implications for democratic decision making.
In the Social Contract (1762), Rousseau argued that the only way for mankind to regain the freedom that is its natural right is for every citizen to personally authorise the rules they are obliged to live by. This led him to propose a system of direct popular sovereignty (‘the day you elect representatives is the day you lose your freedom’ SC, III:15) that was ideally suited for small political communities like Geneva or Corsica. Although some scholars have argued that the Roman Republic was a variant of popular sovereignty (Rousselière, 2024), Rousseau was pessimistic regarding the possibility of popular sovereignty in large modern states: ‘The message is quite clear for those willing to listen: there will be no general will in Europe’ (McLendon, 2024, p. 101).
In Deliberation and Representation: The Rousseauian Case for Sortition in the first issue of the Journal of Sortition, I argued that legislative decision making by a large randomly-selected citizens’ jury would not contravene Rousseauian strictures on popular sovereignty, as the ‘collective being’ of the sovereign would be represented [albeit in microcosm] ‘by himself’ (SC, II:1). To ensure representative fidelity, the jury would need to be several hundred strong, participation would be quasi-mandatory. and its mandate would be limited to voting in secret. Consistency could be verified by convening multiple concurrent samples – if they came to the same conclusion (given an agreed margin of error) then the outcome would be the ‘general will’, irrespective of which empirical citizens were involved.
Not so, argued Daniela Cammack in Rousseauian Sovereignty: The Willingness of All, as popular sovereignty presupposes that the ‘willingness’ of every citizen be respected and this requires personal participation. Referendums are the only way to ensure the legitimate authorisation of fundamental laws in large modern states.
An interesting development in contemporary thought is the divergence between philosophy of mind and ‘social’ philosophy (including feminism and its more radical offshoot, trans philosophy). The majority of philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists view ‘willing’ as little more than an emergent property of contingent/situated/biological factors (Libet, Freeman and Sutherland, 2000; Sapolsky, 2023). While feminists agree that gender is a social construct, trans philosophy presupposes a detached self (not dissimilar to the dualist notion of the ‘soul’) whose free choices are unconstrained by biology, culture and personal biography. Cognitive science, however, views this as a ‘user illusion’ – a ‘homunculus’ in the Cartesian theatre. (Dennett, 2021)
Rousseau was a Cartesian dualist (Westmorland, 2012) who drew a sharp distinction between the mental/moral and physical domains. Daniela shares Rousseau’s emphasis on volunté and the overriding moral imperative to respect ‘something that you in fact want’ (p. 184, original emphasis). But, irrespective of its metaphysical underpinnings (dualist or otherwise), how does that ideal shape up in practice?
As an extreme example of the importance of volunté, the case of Gisèle Pelicot (raped by 50 men), and Only Fans actors competing over who can have sex with the most men in 12 hours (current champion Bonnie Blue @ 1,057) are clearly poles apart. However they are the opposite poles of a single continuum of ‘willingness’ – Gisèle was drugged unconscious whereas Bonnie viewed her marathon as ‘enjoyable’ and ‘educational’. Bonnie’s rival, Lily Phillips, has justified her Only Fans career using the language of female empowerment (she ‘loves being a slut’). But are these actors free agents, doing what they want with their own bodies, or are they as much victims of exploitation as Gisèle Pelicot? And what is the role of social and cultural factors in determining what individuals ‘want’?
Although this analysis might appear to be somewhat removed from political freedom and popular sovereignty, similar considerations come into play. To what extent is human decision-making in general the result of individual choice and to what extent the product of socio-economic and cultural forces? Émile Durkheim’s Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897) viewed suicide as a ‘social fact’, as the suicide rates in different societies can be predicted without reference to the ‘willingness’ of the individuals who take their own lives.
From a social-facts perspective, the majority of our volitional acts are the product of cultural and socio-economic contingencies. If the explanatory power of methodological individualism is limited -- even in the examples of personal sexual preferences or taking one’s own life – then so much more for democratic decision making, where the (collective) subject is the plethos. If so, then the distinction between ‘my’ free choices and those of my peers (assuming a representative sample) is purely analytic. Presupposing majoritarianism, and given the aforementioned constraints on the composition and mandate of the decision-making jury (which are a close match to Rousseau’s views on civic obligation) my own freedom would be protected, irrespective of whether or not I participated directly in the jury (as the outcome would be the same). Rousseau referred to the sovereign as a singular entity, a ‘collective being’ (rather than an aggregation of individuals), which can only be represented ‘by himself’. The large citizens’ juries posited in my paper are representative in the ‘synecdochical’ (Ankersmit, 2019) or ‘holographic’ sense. In the words of one of Daniela’s earlier papers:
Synecdochical representatives are undifferentiated parts of the wholes they represent and serve as representatives in virtue of their essential similarity to the represented rather than any perceived or actual difference from them. In the performance of political roles, synecdochical representatives and those they represent are actually interchangeable. (Cammack, 2021, p. 575, my emphasis).
If this is the case, then the choice between referenda and citizens’ juries would depend on purely epistemic considerations, that are orthogonal to this argument (and already covered in the political science literature).
References
Ankersmit, F. (2019) Synecdochical and metaphorical political representation: Then and now, in Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Democratic Representation, ed. D. Castiglione and J. Pollak, Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 231-53.
Cammack, D. (2021) Representation in ancient Greek democracy, History of Political Thought, XLII (4).
Dennett, D. (2021) The User-Illusion of Consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28 (11-12), pp. 167-177.
Libet, B., Freeman, A., and Sutherland, K. (2000) The Volitional Brain: Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will. Exeter: Imprint Academic.
McLendon, M.L. (2024) Rousseau’s negative liberty: Themes of domination and scepticism in The Social Contract, in Williams, D.L. & Maguire, M.W. (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau’s Social Contract, pp. 293–320, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rousselière. G. (2024) On the possibility of a modern republic: Rousseau and the puzzle of the Roman republic, in Williams, D.L. & Maguire, M.W. (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau’s Social Contract, pp. 223–251, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sapolsky, R. (2023) Determined: The Science of Life Without Free Will. London: Vintage.
Westmoreland, P. (2012) Rousseau’s Descartes: The rejection of theoretical philosophy as first philosophy, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 20, pp. 1–20.
Wheelwell, D. (1998) And the meme raths outgrabe, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 5 (3), pp. 362-374
Responses (1)
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I am not an expert in Rousseau’s thought, and there are many studies about the “general will” and its “fuzzy mathematics” (as was said). Here is my understanding: In the mind of every member of a civic community (assuming such a community truly exists) lies the "general will," aiming to the proper rules and institutions for that community. However, each citizen's individual political will is influenced by his own self-interested material and moral concerns — factors that, in statistical terms, introduce "errors" that cause deviation from the "true value" represented by the “general will”. Equal-vote majority rule (the "will of all") provides an approximation of the "general will," insofar as individual errors tend to cancel each other out. Yet this balancing effect fails if the errors are not merely individual but stem from entrenched collective interests or mass psychological impulses — hence the idea that citizens should form their opinions as individual consciences, free from the sway of collective passion. If the majority choice can be deemed to approximate the general will, the citizen who obeys it is free, as he does not obey an external authority, but the general will which lies inside his mind. If we follow this understanding, a mini-populus as the one you describe will be efficient to ascertain through majority vote the general will. Rousseau could not have the idea because he did not possess the concept of representative sample. But note that Rousseau favored direct popular rule only about legislative power, establishing general rules and institutions. He did not favor it for “government”, for executive and judicial functions, even for peace and war. He wrote that generalized popular rule (democracy) would be good only for a “people of gods”. Such a radical distinction between legislative sovereignty and government might have made sense in a pre-modern society, but not for a modern society – an intensely dynamic society where the rules have to be continuously adapted to the policy choices.
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