"Occupy Rousseau" and Challenge Inequality in America

300 years ago, a watchmaker in Geneva, Switzerland, fathered a son who became the first powerful voice against inequality in an urbanizing Europe in which the costs of capitalism and private property were already clear. Jean-Jacques Rousseau proclaimed in his Social Contract that men, though born free, were everywhere in chains. In time, he became an inspiration to the French revolutionaries.

Astonishingly, three centuries later, inequality continues to dog capitalism and taint democracy's legitimacy -- worse now even than back then. Equality and equality's advocates continue to take a beating in an America whose democracy counts dollars rather than votes, and in which the disparities between rich and middle and middle and poor deepen day by day. Take, for example, these harsh realities:

• Congressman Dennis Kucinich, one of equality's last great champions, lost his seat on Super Tuesday, his district eliminated in a move that set two liberals against each other in the primary;


• American Latinos and African-Americans, their wealth mainly invested in their homes, have lost 65% or more of their net worth during the housing crisis;


• Social mobility, the historical remedy to America's inequality problems (you may be poor, but you can move up the economic ladder), is freezing up, with more than a few of those European countries labeled "socialist" here ahead of us on the upward mobility list;


• Mega-billionaires like Home Depot founder Ken Langone and Warren Buffet say they would gladly pay higher taxes, but tax increases have become a taboo subject for Democrats and Republicans alike;


• One of four American children live under the poverty line;


• While congresspersons are being elected with the help of big bucks, 300 ex-congresspersons work as full-time lobbyists.

What would Rousseau say to all this? Hypocritical advocates of democracy "throw garlands of flowers over our chains," is what he said. "The first source of evil is inequality," is what he wrote. "The words liberty and empire are incompatible," is what he believed. "Great needs spring from great wealth," is what he insisted on. To the protesters at Occupy Wall Street he would recall that democracy's a "law we give to ourselves" that requires participation and direct engagement in the making of a common will.

If we care about democracy, it is time to "occupy Rousseau," take his deep critique of property and empire and representative institutions seriously. That is what we will be doing tonight, Friday, March 9th at the New York Public Library in New York at 7:00 PM when I will ask scholars like Simon Schama, Guillaume Chenevière, and Nannerl Keohane and politicians like former Governors Eliot Spitzer and Thomas Kean and former Swiss President Pascal Couchepin, and journalist Laura Flanders as well as Schomburg Center director Khalil Gibran Mohammad and OWS veteran Amin Husain to help bring Rousseau to Zuccotti and allow him to help us expose inequality and address the peril in which it is putting our nation. If you want to participate, visit LIVE at the NYPL and grab a ticket, and OCCUPY ROUSSEAU with us!

 

 

Follow Benjamin R. Barber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/BenjaminRBarber

Comments

[Shelly Bernal]

09:43 AM on 03/09/2012

Thank you for bringing the Occupy Rousseau topic at tonight's event to our attention. Indeed, the inequality in our society is unacceptable and intolerable. Thankfully we do live under the laws that we give to ourselves and this is exactly where our efforts for improvement should be directed. I agree that with participation and engagement we can change the future of our great nation.

[martman1]

07:01 AM on 03/09/2012

Let's face it, our government is pretty much controlled by big corporate money. Higher corporate profits and thus higher stock prices and dividend payouts are the end goal of those that control our politicians. This goal is best achieved if wages and taxes (for themselves) can be kept as low as possible. The top 1% hold 50% of all stock and the top 10% hold 90%. Thus when 83% of GDP growth goes to corporate profits it eventually (mostly) flows to shareholders who are wealthy already - thus the increase in income and wealth inequality.

[DiogenesOfAlaska]

03:06 AM on 03/09/2012

"more than a few of those European countries labeled "socialist" here ahead of us on the upward mobility list"

This is key. And if the GOP doesn't realize that they cannot lie away this fact, they will disappear. Simple as that.

[MassWG]

12:53 AM on 03/09/2012

"What would Rousseau say to all this?"

Maybe something like, why are your starving masses so obese?

Anyway, I know what another French philosopher would say:

"The foremost or indeed the sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle." (Democracy in America, Vol. 2, p. 319 – 20)