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Being Alone in the Age of the Social Contract
Eric Slauter
| WHAT special problems did being alone pose for an age obsessed by the social contract, by the public sphere, by sociability itself? On October 4, 1787, an essayist writing under the pseudonym "Social Compact" offered readers of Josiah Meigs's New-Haven Gazette a wholehearted endorsement of the proposed Federal Constitution. Social Compact might have been an unusually abstract pseudonym for an individual, yet the choice of name and theme of the essay exemplified the ways in which readers and writers in the age of the American Revolution routinely conflated written constitutions and social compacts, as if society was not itself a distinct mediator between government and the mythical state of nature described by political philosophers.1 Ten months later, Meigs's paper reported the narrow ratification of the Constitution by the New York Convention, the crucial cementing vote in the document's adoption as a national social compact. |
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In the same issue, Meigs printed a short literary sketch titled "The Hermit's Soliloquy," a text contemporary readers might have regarded as an "unsocial" or (employing a word emerging at this moment) an "antisocial" compact. Here is the pledge the hermit made to himself:
Under the brow of this little hill I have built my little hut: Here I live in lonely silence, secluded from every human eye. The awful stillness of the wilderness gives me opportunity to ruminate upon the follies and vices of my fellow mortals, with whom I formerly lived—Today I will contemplate the human heart in the hermitage and in the social circle; I will draw up a judgment concerning its operations in those two different situations. To-day I will live justly; to-day virtue shall be my theme—And though I have nothing but roots and bark to eat, yet I will not complain; for what is vicious man, that he should be supported by infinite benevolence! I intend to spend one hour every day in correcting my faults, in regulating my passions and desires. I have no person with whom I can converse, yet I receive pleasure from speaking loud. Sociability is far from me; but truth I will embrace; gratitude to the Source of all existence shall fill my heart.
Taking readers inside the hermit's hut, this short text showcased the public penetration of private space, modeling for its audience the conflict between the hermit's fantasies of privacy, on the one hand, and corresponding fantasies of the violation and public appropriation of that privacy, on the other. Original readers, in groups or individually, perhaps discovered an extreme example of moral reform embedded in the hermit's joy to exchange sociability for postsocial privation. This sketch was, after all, a voluntary analogue to Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush's prescription of forced solitude "as a mechanical means of promoting virtue" for the chronically vicious in 1786 and as a substitute for capital punishment in 1787: "The life of a hermit," as Rush described it, was "a life of passive virtue."2 Readers might have simply laughed at the hermit's Franklinian hour-a-day scheme for self-improvement, confident that virtue was meaningless outside of its active exercise in a social context. Whatever they made of the hermit, readers would almost certainly have recognized the hermit's retreat as the antithesis of the social compact itself. |
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