I've re-read book one of the Social Contract by Rousseau as a sort of refresher, misremembering it as having advocated the protection of people in a "state of nature". Or in other words, based on the Hobbesian definition that Rousseau uses, Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
While my memory apparently doesn't serve me well, it was interesting re-reading this after going through a number of primary documents related to the Former Natives Protection Act as there were other points which are directly relevant. Mainly, partly because of the intense wartime fascist propaganda, there's a tendency in academia to look at Japanese Nihonjinron discourses of the "family state" as something far-right and uniquely Japanese. It's interesting to see Rousseau draw the same analogy of the sovereign as the head, the people as the body, and whatnot, more than a century earlier. What's more interesting, however, is Rousseau's assertion that unlike the father in an actual family, the sovereign cannot but look dispassionately about his subjects. This is interesting because of characterizations of the love and empathy that the Emperor has for his subjects. The Ainu are characterized as his "babies" (akago) which he must protect as members of the nation-state. As Rousseau put it himself, the "father may, in their name, make certain rules for their protection and their welfare, but" -- and this is where things deviate a little -- "cannot give away their liberty irrevocably and unconditionally, for such a gift would be contrary to the ends of nature and an abuse of paternal right." I suspect that part of the reason for this deviation from European conceptualizations of the family state is that this metaphor is rooted in both Confucianist or European political thought. However, we might remember Agamben's discussion of jus vitae ac necis, the Roman law which gives a father the power over life and death over his children, as one of the foundations of European sovereign discourse.
We might also consider, however, Rousseau's understanding of man in a state of nature as having a certain shelf life that civilized man does not. Without saying how or why, he states "the primitive condition cannot endure, for then the human race will perish if it does not change its mode of existence". And here, perhaps, Rousseau is much closer to Hobbes view of "Americans" than he's usually characterized as being. Hobbes view of the lives of those in a state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" and that of later supporters of the Former Natives Protection Act like John Batchelor viewing the drop in the Ainu population as being due to disease and infighting are perfectly compatible with Rousseau's conception of the natural evanescence of savages.
Rousseau, more than Hobbes, argues against Grotius, the Dutch jurist who defined the limits of the sovereign state in the context of Dutch colonial expansion into southeast Asia whereby sovereign kingdoms were invaded and annexed (though, mind you, without abolishing the full title of local kings). Despite arguing against Grotius' seeming despotism, colonialism forms the explicit backdrop of his own argument. Specifically, how an individual or a state and own private or public property.
One such example, just after criticizing Grotius' views on slavery, is the use of Robinson Crusoe, the "sole inhabitant of his island" as a metaphor, equivalent to "King Adam" or "Emperor Noah" in showing that the subjective position of the sovereign is not simply related to sovereignty over the land, but in relation to the sovereign's subjects over which they have power. Interestingly in this, Crusue was not the "sole occupant", but had Friday, who he had made a slave, and had rescued from cannibals. It's certainly possible Rousseau hadn't read the novel he was referencing, but it's also possible that in this equation, as with the inability of "stupid, limited animal[s]" in a state of nature to make war, the presence of Indigenous people does not count to Rousseau as actual inhabitation in any real sense. Or he simply forgot about them.
And while Rousseau gives an interesting analysis to "right" and "might" as it were, similar to Benjamin's discussion of law-making violence. But it's interesting how easily the "right of the strongest" becomes the "survival of the fittest", historically. And while Rousseau is, much to his credit, careful not to equate force with morality, he does see morality as something simply not possessed by man in a state of nature. Or, in other words, Rousseau sees a social evolution based on man's unequal elevation out of a state of nature and into civil society where the most civilized segments have both, it would seem, the strength of arms as well as the most developed morality. It would be worth looking into social evolutionism in liberal thought as related to social Darwinism and biological racism. It seems in many ways to be more of a redefinition of terms than a radical shift in ideology.
It's also important to consider Rousseau, and those who were inspired by him, as progenitors of the liberal movement as it existed in countries including Japan in the late 19th century. How much were people like Fukuzawa influenced by Rousseau? Would he have been commonly read by all liberals, or simply those particularly interested in Euro-American thought?
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