[lbo-talk] Calling the plumber

[Chuck Grimes]

I want to just write as a way of thinking on Sand. He mentions Rousseau as 
the first to define national sovereign as belonging to the citizens of a 
state. This was in contradistintion to Hobbes idea that a people belong to 
or except state power over them to protect them from each other and 
outsiders. There are several different concepts at work here that are also 
effected by this distinction of national sovereignity. The first more 
obvious is that in the abstract, Rousseau's idea inverts Hobbes. The second, 
gets to the two different ideas about human nature. For Rousseau, human 
nature is based on the principle assumption that people are good at heart 
but corrupted by civilization. This is in contrast to Hobbes assumption that 
people are by nature rotten beasts who need the firm hand of the state to 
control their base instincts. So the point is that in the geneology of 
ideas, if you start with the world of Rousseau you will probably end up 
trusting the people to be in control of the state and state power. If you 
are in the Hobbes camp, you will not trust ordinary people to be in control.


>From the wiki on Rousseau:

``Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.[1]

The Sovereign, having no force other than the legislative power, acts only 
by means of the laws; and the laws being solely the authentic acts of the 
general will, the Sovereign cannot act save when the people is assembled.[2]

Every law the people have not ratified in person is null and void - is, in 
fact, not a law.[3]

The legislative power belongs to the people, and can belong to it 
alone.[4]''

In some dark humor gallery of history, Louis XVI called for an assembly of 
Estates General in 1789 to solve the financial problems of the monarchy. 
These estates were a tiered assembly (Third Estate) that represented the 
people or commoner (later to become the national assembly), the aristocracy 
of large land owners and urban rich a competing power to the central 
monarchy (Second Estate), and the Catholic clergy another competing power of 
moral authority and law (First Estate). So we have the church, the nobility, 
and the acceptible classes predominately petite bourgeois of small towns and 
the urban haute bourgeois of society. The non-acceptable and unrepresented, 
who probably the mass, were urban early industrial revolution workers and 
landless peasants of the countryside.

In other worlds Louis XVI was something of a liberalizing reformer. His plan 
blew up into the French Revolution. I think this is historically correct, 
but please change anything found wrong. Again from a wiki on Estates 
General:

``Necker [Jacques Necker, Louis's finance minister] sympathized with the 
Third Estate in this matter, but the astute financier lacked equal 
astuteness as a politician. He decided to let the impasse play out to the 
point of stalemate before he would enter the fray. As a result, by the time 
the King yielded to the demand of the Third Estate  {to form a national 
assembly, voting by head count], it seemed to all as a concession wrung from 
the monarchy, rather than a magnanimous gift that would have convinced the 
populace of the king's good will.[1]''

In other words, Louis, like Murbark got Taquir. The Egyptians are going to 
have to sort their revolution out and hopefully not repeat the French 
example of the terror, citoyenne guillotine (justice by AK-47) and the 
empire to follow. I am praying to my secular gods of history and philosophy, 
the Egyptians know enough not to follow the wrong part of the French 
historical example. But as Shlomo Sand says, utopia should drive politics, 
not the other way around.

The tyrants of the earth of which I count the US and Israeli governments, 
should be praying to their stone heart big monied gods tonight that the 
people of the earth have not noticed a wave of revolutionary transformation 
getting near the 1660s, 1790s, 1840s, 1870s, and 1920s, provisionally 1960s. 
Like John Ross said, revolutions are a constant leakage, where you can't 
call a plumber to fix it.

CG