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Benjamin Franklin: When we left off, Jean Jacques, you had conceded that reason might have a point, and then spent the rest of the evening trying to take the concession back. Tonight I want to ask you something larger. If the American arrangement actually does produce more liberty than what came before it, should other nations be permitted to try it too, or is that asking for trouble.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: It is asking for the single most dangerous idea in modern political history, Franklin, and I say that as a man who has thought carefully about dangerous ideas. The notion that one nation’s accidental success can be extracted from its particular soil, its particular history, its particular accumulated luck, and transplanted wholesale into a different people with a different general will, is not idealism. It is a kind of violence wearing the costume of a gift.
Benjamin Franklin: A kind of violence. I built a fire department, Jean Jacques. I did not invade anyone.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: You personally did not, no. But the idea you embody has been used as justification for a great deal of invading since your death, and I do not think you can claim the inheritance of the idea while disowning everything that was built on top of it.
Benjamin Franklin: That is an old trick, holding a man responsible for what other men did in his name a century after he died. I could just as easily blame you for the Terror, since half of Paris quoted your general will on their way to the guillotine, and I notice you do not enjoy that comparison nearly as much when it points back at you.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: That comparison is beneath you, and you know it is beneath you, which is precisely why you reached for it.
Benjamin Franklin: I reached for it because it is accurate, not because it is comfortable. You want the credit for every gentle reading of your philosophy and none of the responsibility for the violent ones. I am asking you to extend me the same courtesy you are demanding for yourself.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: Fine. Then let us set aside the misuses on both sides and examine the idea itself, stripped bare. You believe reason is portable. I believe a people’s freedom can only emerge authentically from their own general will, discovered through their own particular history, and cannot be installed from outside like a new constitution shipped in a crate.
Benjamin Franklin: I do not believe reason is portable in the sense of a crate, Jean Jacques. I believe certain structural questions are universal regardless of culture. Does a government answer to the people or does it not. Can a man be imprisoned for his religion or can he not. Those are not American questions wearing a costume. They are human questions that America happened to answer first, in writing, in a way other nations could examine and adapt to their own circumstances.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: Adapt. There is the word doing a great deal of quiet work. Every nation that has tried to adapt the American model has discovered that the parts which transplant easiest are the markets and the weapons, while the parts that actually protected ordinary people, the slow accumulated trust, the genuine civic virtue, do not transplant at all. You export the skeleton and call it the whole body.
Benjamin Franklin: That is a fair criticism of how it has sometimes been done. It is not a fair criticism of whether it can be done well.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: Can it though. Tell me honestly, Franklin, since honesty seems to be the theme of this evening whether either of us enjoys it or not. Is America, even now, even in your own afterlife of observing it, actually living up to the universal claims it makes for itself, or has it simply gotten extremely skilled at narrating its own exceptionalism while the substance erodes underneath the narration.
Benjamin Franklin: That is a harder question than your usual ones, and I will give it the respect of an honest answer instead of a clever one. I think the substance has eroded in places I find genuinely troubling. I think there are men running that country now who treat the Constitution as an obstacle to be managed rather than a structure to be honored, and I think a people who stop teaching their children why the structure exists in the first place should not be shocked when the structure stops protecting them.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: I did not expect you to grant me that much.
Benjamin Franklin: I am not granting it to you. I am granting it to the truth, which I notice we are both supposed to be in service of, although you treat that service rather more performatively than I do.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: There it is. I knew the honesty would not last past a single paragraph before you needed to make it about my performance again.
Benjamin Franklin: I bring it up because it matters to the actual argument, not merely to irritate you, though I confess the irritation is a pleasant byproduct. You keep insisting that civilization corrupts as a universal law, the way gravity is a universal law. But a universal law does not have exceptions, and you yourself just heard me admit that this particular civilization has genuine self correcting mechanisms, however imperfectly used lately. A system that can recognize its own erosion and argue about how to fix it is not the same as a system with no capacity for liberty at all.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: Recognizing erosion is not the same as reversing it, Franklin. A man can watch himself drown and narrate the drowning with great clarity. That does not make him a swimmer.
Benjamin Franklin: No. But it makes him something more than a man who never believed swimming was possible in the first place, and threw away the only boat ever built on the theory that all boats eventually sink.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: That is not what I have argued, and you are flattening my position because the flattened version is easier for you to defeat than the actual one.
Benjamin Franklin: Then tell me the actual one, plainly, without the velvet, and I will address that instead.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: The actual position is this. I do not believe all effort toward freedom is futile. I believe freedom that is designed, engineered, written into a document by a small number of men however well intentioned, and then handed downward to a population that did not author it themselves, is freedom of a thinner and more fragile kind than freedom that arises organically from a people’s own collective will. America did not ask its people what kind of nation they wanted. A relatively small number of educated men decided, and then persuaded, and in places coerced, the rest into agreement.
Benjamin Franklin: That is true of every founding document in human history, Jean Jacques, including, I will point out, your own Social Contract, which a great many ordinary French citizens never read, never voted on, and never consented to in any way you would accept as legitimate if America had done the same thing to them.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: I did not write the Social Contract as a constitution to be imposed. I wrote it as a description of how legitimate authority could be understood, which is a fundamentally different undertaking than drafting binding law for millions who never signed it.
Benjamin Franklin: A distinction I think is considerably less clean than you are presenting it, but I am willing to let it stand for tonight, because I suspect we are circling the same canyon from opposite rims and neither of us is going to convince the other to jump across.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: Then let me ask you the question underneath all of this, the one I think you have been avoiding since we began. Do you actually believe America has a destiny, Franklin. A mission, ordained by something larger than itself, to remake the world in its image. Because if you believe that, then we are not having a philosophical disagreement anymore. We are having a theological one, and I would like to know which conversation I am actually in.
Benjamin Franklin: I do not believe in destiny in the sense you mean it, ordained by God to conquer or convert. I believe a nation that demonstrates something true about human liberty has an obligation to let that demonstration be visible, the way a man who finds a cure does not have a destiny to force feed it to the sick, but does have an obligation not to hide it either.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: An obligation not to hide it has historically translated, with remarkable consistency, into an obligation to invade, occupy, or economically strangle anyone who declines the cure.
Benjamin Franklin: Sometimes. Not always. And I notice you are once again judging the entire idea by its worst executions rather than its best ones, which is a method of argument I would find more persuasive if you applied it evenly to every philosophy, including your own.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: I apply it evenly. I simply find that some philosophies produce worse executions more reliably than others, and I do not think that is an accident, Franklin. I think a philosophy that begins by declaring itself exceptional is more prone to justifying cruelty in its own name than a philosophy that begins by acknowledging the universal corruption all men share.
Benjamin Franklin: And I think a philosophy that begins by declaring all civilization a trap gives a man no working tools to actually build something better, only the satisfaction of having correctly diagnosed the wound while everyone around him continues to bleed.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: We are not going to settle this tonight either, are we.
Benjamin Franklin: No, Jean Jacques. I do not believe we are. But I think we have at least found the actual disagreement underneath all the cleverness, which is more than most conversations manage.
Jean Jacques Rousseau: A small mercy. I will take it, though I suspect tomorrow we will simply have to fight over it again.
