Well, now, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to modern college and this afternoon's inaugural George Russo lecture,
which has been organised by the college in collaboration with the Voltaire Institute,
and we're very pleased that this is the inaugural George Russo lecture,
and many of you will know that this series has been endowed by Professor George Russo,
who is known to many of you and well-known to members of the college.
Just to give you some idea of how George Russo's academic career led to this distinguished high point in kicking off this lecture series,
George began his academic career by studying at Amherst and Princeton.
He was on a faculty member for a number of years at Harvard before spending many years at UCLA.
And for many of us, actually, we first came to know George when he came to Melvin College as a visiting fellow in 1993,
and he spent a year here as a visiting fellow and also gave the weekly lecture that year before moving on to the Regents Chair in English Literature,
University of Aberdeen. My own recollection of George in that time in 1993 1994 was not just for his distinction as a cultural historian,
but also for his extremely distinguished piano playing.
I think the only time I've seen the antique shuffle so full for piano recitals as it was
then was on an occasion when Busby more appeared one day to give an impromptu recital.
But George impressed us with his own quite incredible knowledge of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, I think.
And another thing Right after his tenure of the richest professorship in Aberdeen,
George came back to Oxford, partly as co-director of the Institute for the History of Childhood,
and he's had a very long and fruitful collaboration with our distinguished historians
that than my own field in the sciences is completely different from that.
But one of the things that is a hallmark of George's interest is just how interdisciplinary they are.
He's it's barely adequate to describe him as a historian of the 18th century.
His interests span cultural intellectual history, the history of childhood history of gender, and also the history of science and medicine.
And he's written prolifically on these themes.
So it's really a great honour to have George here for this to be the first lecture in what will become an annual series.
And I'm now going to hand over to Harvey, who will say a few words by way of specifically introducing today's distinguished speaker.
Well, I I can only add to my gratitude to George for handling this series of lecture,
which will be dedicated to enlightened studies from a very interdisciplinary perspective.
And yeah, we would now like to introduce our speaker who kindly agreed to inaugurate this series.
Done. Austin is professor of French literature and history at Stanford University in California.
Is an expert on 18th century France with very interdisciplinary interests as well, so this is quite suitable for a George Russell lecture.
His research expertise ranges from literature, history and political thought all the way to digital humanities.
He has just published a book about 18th century discussions of natural rights, human rights and entitled On the Spirit of Rights,
which was the subject of a fascinating afternoon colloquium just right now here at modelling.
And in the previous decade, he published The Terror of Natural Rights 2009 and the Enlightenment Genealogy in 2010,
which explored how the narrative of Enlightenment of the Enlightenment emerged in French academic circles around the early 18th century.
Gun is also the editor of six different volumes of essays, including two published by our own Voltaire Foundation here,
the Oxford University studies in the Enlightenment series. The first one was called the Super Enlightenment 2010.
You can't really beat that title, and there is the forthcoming volume called Networks of Enlightenment,
which is due to be published, I think, at the end of 2019 or no, and some or maybe beginning of next year.
So Dan's talk today, the first George Rousseau lecture at Modern College is entitled Liberty is Equality.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Roman Constitutionalism Done. Well, thank you.
Obviously, introduction, it's a great honour to have been invited to give the inaugural George lecture.
I'm really delighted to be here, thanks also to Nicholas Cronk in the room with the Voltaire Foundation for coordinating this.
I will be speaking about a different research note, but we'll try to emulate Professor as well,
well-regarded along an interdisciplinary approach in my own methods, in my own remarks.
So we'll start with a touch of benevolence here, which is that this is the very first time I will be presenting this research.
So it's very new and I will may come to regret the decision that the that make US president.
But this is a project that was inspired by Benjamin Strongman's recent book Price to Constitutionalism,
which goes back to mostly about Roman political thought,
but has this insightful argument that we spent too too long thinking about classical republicanism as this sort of
monolithic thing that exists and that really what we ought to be doing is this aggregated classical political parties,
which is really political thought and and studying the various trajectories of specific ideas.
And that's really what I want to do in my talk tonight, and I'll be focussing on this concept of legal equality.
And what also spurred me to look at me with equality was this observation that it plays a very important central role even in the research,
political thought and in particularly in the way he defines liberty.
And what was the what.
What made me curious about this story ends up coming up with a very different
defence for what is often referred to as Republican or neo Roman liberty,
a different kind of way of justifying how we can guarantee this than most current scholars working on.
You're going to have to think about it.
Well, let me first say a word about what they think. So this is a concept that is closely associated with Quentin Skinner and so had it in particular.
And they they identified this what Skinner called the third class of the Liberty as being more than simply the lack of interference to do something.
So I might have the liberty to go through the street and go to the market and come back.
There would be no one interfering with with that. But their point is, look, I'm a Roman slave.
I might have to go out and do the job for the forum, and no one is interfering with me.
However, I am a slave, and therefore I do have a master who at any point could interfere with me.
And so there still are not really free clusters of risk of domination, which therefore impedes my freedom.
So it's really the key definition here is what is freedom is non domination.
How does that differ from, let's say, as I Berlin defined just as as pure negative liberty.
Now, Rousseau fits very nicely into this concept of Republican freedom, and the fact here observed it.
It did take some of the Anglophone writer a while to admit Rousseau into this pantheon.
He had originally put into Rousseau with a full populist,
and he has since come around to the position that Rousseau did keep faith with the Republican conception of freedom as non domination,
and anything to done was also here has really produced, I think, to date,
the most rigorous defence of Rousseau as a theorist of Republican liberty, arguing that it was for him the most important political value.
So my goal tonight isn't to challenge his place as a theorist of Republican liberty,
but rather to point out that he guarantees Republican liberty in a somewhat surprising way.
So for most theorists, the Republican liberty.
The way in which we can be guaranteed not to be subject to domination is through active participation in the legislative process.
So here's a quote from. Forgive me before liberalism.
But it's really if you have an equal right in the purchase of participation in the making of the law.
That is what guarantees that you will not become dominated by another pet.
It has a very similar view. You have to be a franchise member of the committee.
Sorry, a voting community, and it's all about love.
You could say that this is an argument that a few say no the you have to be yourself, the laws that you live by.
And I'll call this the democratic solution to the problem of guaranteeing freedom is not domination.
And what I want to show tonight is that Rousseau gives us a different solution
to this one that does not rest on having an equal rights in the making of laws.
And instead, he repeatedly insists that the way to guarantee freedom outside of the nation is for no one to be above the law or conversely,
for everyone to be equally subject to the same law. And therefore, I call this the equality solution.
Now, it's a little murky because I don't want to suggest that Rousseau overtly rejects a democratic solution.
But I do feel that the equality solution plays a much bigger role in his political thought,
and that there are moments when it does kind of overshadow and even replace the democratic solution.
But generally, I am would. I would not suggest that this is a complete alternative.
They are very they are further complementary. What I will will try to do, though, is show that this is an idea that does not come out of nowhere,
but actually that he is getting this idea from rather than political theorist Louis Cicero particular.
And and that the way it is perhaps most helpful to think about Rousseau through this lens, wrote Constitutional.
And others like John McCormick involved in the arena have also been pushing this line of argument.
So I'm going to start with one of the Russo's sort of more minor works in political thought.
The dedication to the second discourse,
which many have quipped is actually better suited as a dedication for the project and the idea of these days later.
So I start off this. This tax is dedicated to the Republican leader, and you started off by having his bail hearing argument say, Well,
if I were to choose where I want to live in order to be free in conditions I am to,
one of the conditions is indeed that he would live in a democratic government that is well tempered.
And I think that's a really key point here of what does it mean to have a well tempered democratic government?
I'll get back to that a bit later. But the point is it's not just a pure democratic government.
So that's the first point. If you want to live in a free state, there does have to be this well tempered democratic government.
But when it comes to defining the freedom, you moved away from this democratic solution instead.
You're right, I would have chosen to live and die free that day.
So subject to the laws that neither I nor anyone else could throw off their horrible yoke.
And what's noticeable about this claim is that he's not saying anything about the source of the laws doesn't say who gets to make the laws.
He's only saying something about who is subject to the rules.
And you could argue that while the evidence you hear about why certain laws were said, you wanted a democratic government,
but I don't believe that is sufficient cause, and I think we need to take seriously this idea that there are two separate requirements for freedom.
One is that there's some kind of, well, no democracy, but also a legal regime where no one is above the law.
And later on in the in the dedication, it's very clear that mere democracy is insufficient.
Since he writes, I would not allow anyone to see this claim that they were above the law for,
regardless of whether it's constitution and one person who is not subject to the law and everyone else is at their mercy.
So there are two important ideas in the idea here.
The first is that populists are using these here because it's regardless of the piece at the Constitution.
So even in a democracy, there could be individuals who are above the law and indeed many of our own.
And today, with legal impunity for a certain chief executives who cannot in fact be indicted,
according to certain Justice Department, so he has a point.
But I also want to draw attention to this phrase, perhaps in the later Presidio,
who does too good a lot because I think this very clearly echoes an important passage
in the room and digest which he would have known because it's super famous passage.
This concept that the prince is not bound by the laws.
This was central to early modern constitutional thinking, especially monarchic thinking,
because the idea was, well, how could the king change the law if you found the body?
So you mean, and it doesn't stop the fact that you need someone who is not bound by the law so that they can be changed where necessary?
There was a more sort of absolutist version of that argument, which you find, say in Filmer,
where the king is not only not bound by laws but is completely free to do whatever whatever he wants to do, what he please.
This, too, is sort of an interpretation of a passage in that address that whatever pleases the press has the force of the law.
But I think what's what's important here is that Rousseau is taking.
So of course, this comes from the digest. Imperial codification of Roman law done under Justinian and Rousseau is to say, Well,
if you want a republic, you have to reverse this imperial concept and nobody can be above the law.
Instead, you need to have legal equality. So that's the first point.
But moreover, it's very interesting how throughout the rededication,
Rousseau repeatedly conceptualised as the very in a way that is distinct from a colony or democratic legislation.
And this is a really important passage. Sorry for that long rule.
This is the longest climb ever seen. I'll just read you a translation. If your French is rusty.
So it goes. Even the Roman people.
That model of all free peoples was not prepared to govern itself after overthrowing the targets to the last days of Rome.
At first, they were no longer needed to build the sagacity so that little by little period customers did really salutary their liberty, their souls.
They by read more austerity that made them into the most respectable of peoples.
Now what's striking here is that you're saying that they were already breathing the salutary air of liberty before they would govern themselves.
And this is, of course, under a Republican, but they are not living apart because they are.
These are others. So this already gives us something very important in the Roman law, namely one more room in political file.
That freedom is less defined in terms of participation in law making than it is in the universal obedience to the law.
And we'll see more examples of that later. And I think this is important because it changes how we define freedom in a republic and
means that more people can be considered free even if they are not necessarily in French.
So another example comes from also from the dedication concerns women to Rousseau has this interesting passage in the occasion where he refers to the
situation so giving value or political will to the female citizens of Geneva and says that they are the guarantors of political liberty in Geneva.
It is. So that actually comes a little bit earlier. I didn't give you that quote here, he explains why they guarantee liberty.
And it is because they preserve by their loving, innocent rule,
as well as by their inspiration, a love of the laws in the sea and harmony for all citizens.
This is a simple thing guaranteed the free flow of the law is, I think,
borrowed from Morticia and the idea too small the opening of the spirit of the laws where this is how he defines political virtue.
That political virtue is probably you accept love laws of the country, but it's quite fascinating.
The results apply if the winner in the second discourse and and not dispute had in fact also claimed that in republics,
women are free according to the laws of our laws, allow great either morals, keep them captive.
But I think that this is there's something interesting here in how these authors
consider that women can be free even if they are not participating in voting.
And I did find a passage in Libya that you have a similar after.
This is where Coriolanus, his mother, comes to berate him for making war on his own country and says,
You know, if I if I had not given birth to you, I would have died. Libra, you were a patriot.
I would have died free in a free land. So it definitely there seems to be a conception of liberty that is available
to women who clearly are not able to participate in the legislative process.
And I think Russo is picking up on that here now.
It could be objective and you it is operating kind of for a week and that maybe the dissident Republican liberty, after all,
maybe this is closer to Hobbs critique of Republican Liberty,
but we're Hobbs had argued that freedom is the same whether you're in a monarchy or we're part of the government.
I think it is important to remember that this is only possible in certain kinds of states that only in these well-tempered democracies.
So it's definitely not the Hobbesian position that anyone who follows the law.
It has the same degree of freedom.
So I want next to say a few words about where this idea comes from and and why it might play such an important role in Russia's thinking.
And this is what takes me back to the Roman sources for this.
So when Sarah Palin put forward his ideas about the past year or so, he had the other way around.
Oh yeah, Skinner, like any other Republican that they do.
Traces back to certain passages in especially the digestive definition of a free man played at the centre of the closed passage.
Really? But they're really focuses on the recovery of this in the early modern times, mostly beginning with Machiavelli.
Now, more recently, classicists have gone back to Roman sources and looked for the original links as well.
Maybe, maybe this was not just new, and maybe this is really how the Romans thought about it as well, sort of balancing arena of the public.
I said yes. In fact, Roman politicians quote shared the idea of liberty as a state characterised by the absence of a condition of domination,
the very much in dialogue with with Skinner and Pettit and Judge Atkins also in his in his book on Roman Fort Architecture The Romans.
Liberty is fundamentally understood the absence of slavery.
But at this point, something else, which is that there was also this tight connexion to equality in the Roman reflections on liberty.
So he reminded us about this famous passage, which which many refer to.
This is after the twins are exposed to the beginning of the early Roman Republic and the there is a
conspiracy that occurs with some of the young patrician to rise to the target as friends of the princes.
And this is Libby who is voicing their complaints,
and the complaint is that all are now equal before the law and the law allows
actually right here and not just read the sword of the law is the thing that can,
and you cannot catch the ear of the law like you could with the king.
So here again, freedom is not indexed to autonomy, but rather to this equality, having all laws be the same for everyone.
So the problem isn't that they are not interested in making the law, but they have to follow the same Panopto.
Everybody else is now in the monarchy, and this is a theme that comes back repeatedly in Libya's history.
So, for instance, during the second secession of the Pleiades,
the castle of the various operations are set the committees, the Pleiades, not the secret.
Seven years ago. And their argument is that, well, rather than seeking retribution, killing them,
you should just enjoy living in a state under equal laws, and that is enough for for liberty.
One of these two seven years appears by this crisis who tried to force Virginia to marry him.
He's confronted in the forum and his answer is, Well, look, I resigned the council in order to give you equal love for all.
And actually, I offended the patricians. And then, you know, just give one more example from a much later in the history.
This is where you are, and this is a huge state divide and rule whether we should teach the hero of the second even worse.
And so they well, you know, it is good in a republic that even the most powerful people should have to defend themselves.
And this is this inequality of freedom that comes back.
So in almost all of these examples, we see this similar trend, which is that liberty is really about forcing the powerful to obey the law.
And I think that's a really fundamental idea which we kind of lost track of in a lot of the histories of non domination.
Even Judge Atkins ends up concluding that in Leviticus,
the quote anyone who attacks equal liberty generally means equality before the law, rather than the people put it over the division.
And Cicero has pretty much the same idea. He also pairs liberties with a turn of events can tough.
He writes that inequality is the most essential property of justice and the features,
and it is what defines life for a free people having equal rights before laws.
This is also a focus of the recovery that obviously we should remember.
So far, it's only the former rediscovered low quality fall in the 19th century.
But again, Scipio, who Cicero, its mouthpiece in this defines liberty again in terms of equality,
if it is not the same for all Acra est, it is not liberty.
And I want to hear her point on what kind of equality are we talking about because of this is very good.
This is not social inequality. There is nothing about material equality.
In fact, Scipio even writes that the problem with democracies is that they create inequality that is itself inequitable.
And so and this is not really political in the sense of we would understand there is this interesting middle ground in
which I think it kind of comes close to Russo's idea of a well-tempered democracy where Cicero has this also famous line,
which actually does get picked up in the guts of Rousseau, probably didn't know it,
that the rest of the car should be addressed properly, that the Republic should be the property of the people.
And it doesn't mean that in a democracy, the rule that out.
But in some way, the people still have to have a kind of sovereignty so that it can remain a free state.
But it is only in the Free State that to skip this, that we will have the legal right and the equality of legal rights will be found.
You got one last side on this. You got the idea. But but he's constantly correcting freedom that the equality of equal rights.
So for both movie and Cicero, the greatest threat to a republic seems not so much to come from a new king, but from.
Well, there are two great threats to revolve. One of them can come from the individual powerful ubermensch who try to be a part of the monarchy.
But there is legal representation, which comes from the powerful, no longer being yoked to the laws.
And I think that this is a I've been teaching a class on the floor of the Republic for the future,
and it's exciting how much of foreign key politics is about this problem and what
to do with these damn elite families and just go about doing whatever they want.
Berkeley people are mad with impunity. And so it seems like this is sort of a specific challenge.
The challenge that they're syndicates throws down the Socrates of the Republic.
Well, why is it my right is haunting all of these worries about about liberty and its connexion to inequality?
So the Romans have two ways of dealing with how do you create a sea that would retain equal rights for all?
They did have some rights provisions to use our contemporary language that would guarantee
that everybody had the same equal rights to the most famous images of the year,
which was the right to appeal that something is passed by and any official who could appeal it to a popular tribunal.
And this is what actually makes Cicero in trouble when he's console.
But they also have legal provisions that prevented new laws from introducing inequalities,
the most famous being the law that's in the twelve tables that prevents bills of attainder.
So privilege I was probably involved in was a law that targeted a specific.
The individual which were not allowed, according to the law.
So the basic idea here is that the laws are to the General Hospital,
and I will use that to the Segway back to reserve this time to the social contract where we will find that same idea.
So I do think that it's in the social contract that Russo works out many of the more theoretical problems with this idea of like,
how can you really guarantee free of you and your father? And how can you do that without also relying on for democratic rule?
And Russo also adds this additional question, which is, I think,
at the heart of the social contract, how do we get the idea of liberty in the first place?
Why should we? Why should we want these equal rights?
Where does that come from? And then finally, this issue of how can you do it with our full democracy?
How is it possible to maintain Republican liberty, if not everybody is voting?
So those are the the three questions that I will be looking at in the social contract.
So. When Russia thinks about liberty, he does so in a kind of anthropological perspective of,
well, how do we if we want to become free, how do we first even discover the law?
If you believe that freedom is dependent on equal rights in us, follow existing laws.
That does mean that you have to have an understanding of the law before you.
This was a problem that, again, you already find in Roman law.
This idea that the law, how do you make the law something that everybody feels they should obey and the right to be a wonderful the new law?
His story has drawn a very interesting parallel between this concern and roadmap to what recovery period is a little period.
So where we are committed to follow the law on what grounds that it needs the normative sense.
And he points in particular to Hans Kelson and Hermann Kontorovich, who I don't think was related to Ernst.
And it's interesting to compare Rizzo's answer to these 20th century jurists,
because both counsel and conformists agree that you can only grow a little more activity outside of the legal system.
So President Bush, in his first year of Rule of Law, found a law that all other laws will revert back to and contribute.
Ultimately, the law depends on some kind of external naturalistic moral principle in order to derive its authority.
Rousseau develops this really fascinating, rational argument that manages the ground legal normative within the law itself,
and he does it on the basis of the argument that it comes from the equality of all before the law.
So I'm going to unpack all of that for you now. So Rousseau is in agreement with with us that we don't really have just that.
They do look like justice in the state of nature and and therefore he's rejecting the available argument of the law in law,
which is that you are actually making a kind of a judicial overall as as a contract where you have natural law,
but written on the subject because Hobbes will say that once you enter into civil society and you have a Leviathan,
that in fact natural law does apply and can become a source of Norman tivity.
Whereas for Rousseau, he almost thought was really in the middle of this and say,
you have no legal relativity to the lawfulness of the law or I was in the same boat as a blue state.
And then they happened to join, and they're made possible by this transformative experience of legal equality.
Indeed, it is the equal terms of the social contract that are what make this all begin.
It's everybody gives themselves entirely. The condition is equal for all.
That is how we enter into a society that is status created.
And this is also our law and our law and liberty come about.
And it's the very moment that life with Cicero is only with the equality task of equality and rights that we can become a free people.
And he says so as much here or all systems must enjoy such an equality that they all enjoy the same rights.
So it's in this recognition that by joining a social contract,
we are all doing it on equal terms and we will therefore all have the same rights that justice and law comes up for.
The very foundation of your activity comes from the fact that we are agreeing to this sort of shared system of equal rights.
So it is the equality of rights and the notion of justice that is produced.
So there was no idea of justice until we experienced this idea that, well, it's going to be the same for all.
So equality is this structural feature that gives the law its force and makes it something we ought to obey in the first place.
And it's quite fascinating how there's nothing to be optimistic about, you know, the results are very.
But he's not relying even on his own arguments about the natural principles that we have to say in nature and for self-preservation.
Or pity? This is a completely different way of going about the foundation of a legal norm activity.
You could even say legal equality. I should mention this is also how we acquire freedom.
It's only once we have recognised this law that we all share that we can then be free because it's only a piece of the law that gives us through it.
So we go. The party played a huge role in this is supporting the creation of the state,
the concept of lawfulness in itself and the source of liberty all at once.
So I think this is the beginning of understanding why it's so important for research and why it can,
you know, replace or at least nudge over democratic legislation.
Now this does raise a question of where these laws come from and what is this law, even if we're all chipping in equal?
So many scholars will read this.
This line that the law that we have given ourselves as saying last time you give yourself the laws and therefore you are being autonomous.
But I think there's an important difference here between making the laws for ourselves
and simply choosing to accept laws that might come from a completely different source.
And we know that in the case of the first laws that created a social they created,
little say, you know, we come from somewhere else because there's a culture.
They come from the Legislature and we are therefore not making the laws for ourselves.
And indeed, it would be in the rules of logic impossible for us to give ourselves our first laws because we don't yet have the concept of law.
We only get it by pooling all of our [INAUDIBLE] together, equally accepting the law at the same time.
And I think that's the meaning of that famous line, which is God's laws,
because he kind of does have that the chicken and egg problem that it solves by
this sort of divine legislator figure who was able to see the importance of logic.
So I want to get to sort of, I think, the most contentious point in a minute,
which is what happens afterwards once you enter into political society and what happens to the future legislative process.
But I just want to make two points about why I think it is.
It would be surprising if Russo made legislation or the participation in legislation to be central to the defence of Liberty.
The first is that instead of emphasising the law and the Equal Rights Commission and Law Centre law,
instead of emphasising that as a senator to to be a free, he instead puts massive limits on what what counts as good law.
And so he's constricted rather than reinforcing law.
Maybe we see this in particular in how he thinks about what makes a law valid.
So when he talks about the general will and how it must recognise what our good laws, we see that if the law is no longer general,
then it is actually nullifying the very principle that had created lawfulness in the beginning.
And that's a thought. So we're losing the force of the law of if its object does not matter to everyone.
The law cannot have a particularity or an individual.
So you are back to the Roman precept against your religion.
If the law is targeting particular people, then that becomes one of the greatest sources of the greatest risk to the public.
And again, how would you remedy that?
Well, you always go back towards equality so that not your particular will tend naturally towards preferences and the general will towards equality.
So it remains the sort of central concept in how to ensure that the laws are not
destroying the freedom that that are only possible if we have legal equality.
So this leads me to my third and sort of final point about liberty, equality in lawmaking and the social contract.
And I think it is the most contentious one. So we now have a political state.
We gain the knowledge of what laws we have.
People write as well as us who goes to the.
What could it be that, yeah, that's sort of the origin story in which Russo has legal equality to do all of this magical stuff.
But then if the movie for freedom actually becomes related to our access,
it is in our and we as sovereign clarity declaring the law every, every so often.
So there are two, at least two, possibly more two general camps on how to be Russo on the law making once the process has already begun.
So some and I put Joshua Cohen and I think anyone is in this camp, but she can.
She can tell me if I'm wrong. Reid Russo is defending really the democratic solution to this, that if you want to be free,
then the people have to actively participate in making laws for themselves.
The other half, which include college through freelance operators in Nigeria.
Also read more for this Rover Lands and say well,
if the legislative process and the social contract looks a lot like the legislative process that the were true, it wasn't a Democrat.
So there were there were votes and the people had a role to play, but it wasn't anything like we would think of in terms of law making.
The people were excluded from law lawmaking it. So I am going to throw my chips in with with that with that camp,
although I'm not going to draw so much on these parallels between the Roman legislative process.
And so it's a good lesson. Very well done.
But I don't think I want to sort of gather internal evidence from Russo's own staff about why I don't think it makes sense to
look to good for the legislative powers of citizens as a very free up and said that it is more about this legal equality.
So what is this internal evidence? But we just saw that for Russo, the goal of lawmaking is to always tend towards equality in general.
So I think that there is room there for, say, if you want that, but you cannot just have a small group of petitions, decide the law.
And here I would agree with the Democratic camp. There's a kind of a critical mass question that you need to.
The thing has to be the property of the people. It has to be addressed properly.
Otherwise, it's no longer a free state. But do you need all this?
Do you need every all the people to be participating in the legislative process for all the people to be free now?
It's interesting how in Russo, every time you add somebody else going to vote,
you're kind of inserting more problems because each of us in order to vote,
we have to raise all the leverage distinguish between, you know, a particular role as I think our senior citizens are here.
So I'm going to vote this one. And then the vote is just to confirm that I made a minimal tabulation of the popular vote.
But every time you ask somebody else, there's one more person wakes you up the some,
which, you know, ultimately we're all supposed to see that they exist.
And so it's not a kind of Madisonian or, you know, modern democratic idea that, well, you need to we the red states and forces that are wrong.
It's a much more Cicerone interview, really,
that you know you're supposed to always be carrying for the good of the entire rest public and not just for one particular interest.
So that's one reason why, on its own terms, you should be able to do this, even if not everybody is actively participating in the vote.
You should be able to preserve liberty that way.
And by extension, maybe you're a woman and you don't have the right to vote anyway in this, but you could feel proud of yourself.
Three. I should say I'm not endorsing this. You reconstruct his argument,
but let me give a few rapid fire reasons why I think race does not make sense of the five trillion in reserves for energy policy.
So first of all,
there is the argument that actually you're not supposed to believe in the idea of this state of a well govern state need very few rules.
And in a way, if you start to make laws, that's a really bad sign.
It's a sign that you're starting to head more and more towards corruption.
But this doesn't mean that law making could be a really minor feature.
In your life as a citizen, because it is two years of passing you off,
so it's hard to know how you become a lawmaker so central to the definition of liberty.
Moreover, when you do make the law, it's a kind of objective thing.
The first person who proposed the laws only says what everybody else already felt.
The result is trivial warmed up.
And of course, we need to realise after the fight office that we are subversive is always operating on the basis of consensus,
which also makes it seem like in a modern way of defending liberty. Now this is, I think, the more we're getting to the more contentious part,
which is that the citizens are really kept at arm's distance from the legislative process.
So as I just mentioned, they don't do things right.
He is to have them silently enter into a hall like this.
There is a motion on the floor and the of the national conversation in the business is to think that all factions are created.
So again, that's a you know, it's bizarre to think that your freedom is in this law making when you're not even really saying anything about it.
But and oh, and then get better, which is that sometimes laws just happen.
So if if your government passes a decree that the orders of the government chiefs, you know, sometimes they maybe they are a general rule.
And as long as there's the free sovereign doesn't oppose them, then it's become the law.
So you're not necessarily even making or partaking in the legislative process.
In Russo's model. And then finally, there's I think, the biggest point,
which is probably the most of which is that we've still got say in this sort of abbreviated way that, you know, I would have lots of more time.
I had more reflections that the simple right to vote on the simple right to vote in every act of sovereignty,
and no one can take away this right from citizens. But then here's the caveat.
But I also have something to say on the right to give your opinion, to propose legislation,
to divide and to discuss, and the government should always keep that only to its members.
So basically, and this is a very, you know, thinking about it,
only officials should have the right to propose legislation and the people just have the right to consult.
But it's a very limited understanding of law making.
And he does end by saying, you know, this is an important topic that I would have to discuss elsewhere.
I'm not aware of another treaty where he does that. But I will note that already in the dedication with which I served, he made the same idea.
He made the same point. I would have liked that to prevent a sort of self-interested projects that are poorly conceived of.
Various recent referenda come to mind and dangerous the dangerous innovations that lost the Athenians.
Each citizen would not have the power to propose new laws as they wished.
I'll leave that there. All right. So I have a very short conclusion.
And it is sort of about why I think this is important beyond the various arguments amongst research scholars.
My hope in excavating the sort of equality solution to the problem of guaranteeing that we resolve
issue issues that I think it can help us sort of rethink how our history of the literally.
Mostly, we think of this as a story of human, archaic and Republican ideologies that really focus on things like despotism,
Republican exclusive ism and political slavery.
But to get back to something I mentioned earlier, your monarchy, you've got the elite right, the Republicans.
And for many republics, whether it was the Roman Republic or the foreign to the Republic or, frankly, the Republic of Cuba at the time,
so was really the very first university challenge, one of the only from the decline in Florence or the patrician family in Geneva.
And this aristocratic oligarchy of danger tends to present itself very differently than the monarchy.
It tends to be that these power military families don't want to obey the same laws.
And to defend yourself against the threat of these elites and powerful families, it's not an issue of passing the laws.
It's an issue of enforcing existing laws and making sure that everybody is following them.
And that was the goal. I think that was the at least the gist of what you read out in the talk about equality of rights.
It was very it before the Republicans tried to do what it raises as the powers of the policy and create ideas.
You go to the office, the Bonfire of the Vanities, the standard bearer of justice who would literally carry the flag of morals to the front door of
the misbehaving elite families in order to bring the law to them since they tried to escape it.
And I think it's also as you saw, and hopefully I convince you of it was a central concern of reserves and maybe in our own plutocratic age,
this is a history that we would do well to recover. Thank you.