The idea of representation is modern; it comes to us from feudal government, from that iniquitous and absurd system which degrades humanity and dishonours the name of man. In ancient republics and even in monarchies, the people never had representatives; the word itself was unknown. It is very singular that in Rome, where the tribunes were so sacrosanct, it was never even imagined that they could usurp the functions of the people, and that in the midst of so great a multitude they never attempted to pass on their own authority a single plebiscitum. We can, however, form an idea of the difficulties caused sometimes by the people being so numerous, from what happened in the time of the Gracchi, when some of the citizens had to cast their votes from the roofs of buildings.

I think it is an ambiguous legacy, and I used “dreamy” advisedly. Even Rousseau is somewhat dubious that his State can exist and he notes that it both must consume the daily existence of all citizens ( ask Oscar Wilde also noted, more wittily), won’t scale and is not always appropriate.

Lands where the surplus of product over labour is only middling are suitable for free peoples; those in which the soil is abundant and fertile and gives a great product for a little labour call for monarchical government, in order that the surplus of superfluities among the subjects may be consumed by the luxury of the prince: for it is better for this excess to be absorbed by the government than dissipated among the individuals. I am aware that there are exceptions; but these exceptions themselves confirm the rule, in that sooner or later they produce revolutions which restore things to the natural order.

I prefer Voltaire’s skepticism of such theories.

There are lots and lots of good books about Rousseau, I wouldn’t just stop at Bakunin, who really doesn’t even mention Rousseau in the essay you quote from, except in the title. A very recent one is a compilation of the writings on Rousseau by Robert Wokler, Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment and Their Legacies (2012), reviewed very interestingly by our own Chris Bertram, an expert on the subject, in the August 10, 2012 issue of The Times [of London] Literary Supplement.

Rousseau favored the city state (such as Geneva) and direct democracy by male (not female) citizens. According to Wokler, during the French Revolution this was revised by the Abbé Sieyès, a self-proclaimed follower of Rousseau, who hailed the Third Estate as the embodiment of the nation. During the Terror, the Committee of Public Safety declared its acts “representative” of the General Will. All this would have been abhorrent to Rousseau. Bertram writes:
“The French Revolution would not have been possible without a rejection of some of Rousseau’s central doctrines. In The Social Contract, Rousseau had argued that popular sovereignty must be directly exercised and cannot be exercised via representatives. The Abbé Sieyès, by contrast – the first theoretician of the Revolution – repudiated this: the representatives of the Third Estate incarnated and represented the nation. Later, the Jacobins would claim that the edicts of the Committee of Public Safety were expressions of the general will, but for Rousseau, the people must always speak for themselves. For this reason, he favoured small republics, where life was simple and face-to-face communication possible. True, when asked by Corsican and Polish patriots to suggest political principles for their countries, Rousseau made some concessions to practicability, but he would surely have contemplated the modern nation state, the source of so much killing and oppression, with horror.”

I believe you’re somewhat new here as a commenter, rootless, which is why you don’t know that W. Ladd, though he may on fairly regular occasion sound like a right-wing economist, is not a right-wing economist. He belongs to an organization whose name is escaping me, for which I blame the Scotch-on-the-rocks I consumed a couple of hours ago. However, if you click on his name you will arrive at their site.

But that fable does not correspond to the development of human society.

Free Market Economists opinions about the workings of the market are much like phrenologists ideas about the working of the mind.

Watson’s comment illustrates a way of looking at the world – as the remorseless working out of a small set of very big assumptions. Has Watson ever looked at a company report? Did he see the details of the many ideas which were considered, tried and failed? Did he see detailed consideration of the various financial, legal, technical, policy, perhaps even ethical, considerations that went into each decision? I have read quite a few, and somehow all these bits were missing. The point is that the bottom line is an impossibly simple metric even within companies, let alone for shareholders.

As for government, do his ideas notice that treasury departments are dedicated to NOT spending money? That all major initiatives have to pass treasury approval? That most initiatives come from bureaucrats, and have to pass a series of tests that ensure only very few make it to cabinet, and then are subject to political scrutiny and external audit. The point is that organisations develop all sorts of ways of checking out ideas, and many of these ways work well. There’s no single path to organisational paradise.

To relate this to expertise – the challenge is not so much in developing expertise, it’s in developing organisational cultures that listen to it.

Peter, Tim: you are missing the core of the distinction here. If the private executive is wrong, he has wasted his shareholders’ money. His shareholders can leave the firm at any time by selling the shares, so really no one is getting it who doesn’t deserve it.
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Ha ha ha. Like many right wing economists, you have no idea how firms and markets, especially financial markets, work.

The state machinery of capitalism, by means of which value is extracted from workers and given to elites, is not private.

“What about idolizing Frederick “the Great” and belittling universal education and democracy has stood the test of time?”

But of course that’s a peculiar summary of Voltaire’s work.

“The State, therefore, is the most flagrant, the most cynical, and the most complete negation of humanity. It shatters the universal solidarity of all men on the earth, and brings some of them into association only for the purpose of destroying, conquering, and enslaving all the rest. It protects its own citizens only; it recognises human rights, humanity, civilisation within its own confines alone. Since it recognises no rights outside itself, it logically arrogates to itself the right to exercise the most ferocious inhumanity toward all foreign populations, which it can plunder, exterminate, or enslave at will. If it does show itself generous and humane toward them, it is never through a sense of duty, for it has no duties except to itself in the first place, and then to those of its members who have freely formed it, who freely continue to constitute it or even, as always happens in the long run, those who have become its subjects.” – post by Mike B.

“Work then without disputing,” said Martin; “it is the only way to render life supportable.” – Voltaire

“his conclusion is not that everything hangs from economics, but that everything hangs from politics.”

And, for my part, these are both false totalizations. Society is neither economics nor politics and human beings are not reducible to subjects or economic atoms without violence.